00:07:11 · Nato Saichek, Jonathan Brebner
[00:07:11] S1: It was a way to keep everyone involved. It was also sort of an ambitious goal of like, we are gonna make so much progress so fast, we're gonna grow so fast that there will always be new people, and he'll never get a chance to fire it. Unfortunately, he ended up, you know, in in... I think it was in early twenty twenty five. He had to he had to push the button. No one else... We didn't have any... Anybody who we could invite over as a visitor or something, you know, to to push the button unfortunately. [00:07:35] S0: Okay, well I volunteer. Okay. Is a problem again. All right, so there's like a history to this idea, right? So you just go back at least to Jules Verne, right? 1865 novel around this exact concept except putting people in it. That probably won't work. [00:07:50] S1: Very similar, yeah yeah. [00:07:51] S0: Germans tried to turn it into a weapon in World War II. There was a project in the 60s called Harp. Harp. And there was a project in the 80s and the 90s called Sharp. [00:08:02] S1: Right, Super Harp. [00:08:03] S0: Yeah. Super Harp. Yeah. So I guess the question is, at each of those steps people were conceptualizing it or testing various stages of it. What changed that made you think, oh now actually we can go back to this particular idea that was abandoned at various points.
00:08:03 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:08:03] S0: Yeah. Super Harp. Yeah. So I guess the question is, at each of those steps people were conceptualizing it or testing various stages of it. What changed that made you think, oh now actually we can go back to this particular idea that was abandoned at various points. [00:08:19] S1: Yeah, story with HARP is HARP worked. They were firing projectiles, Gerald Bull in the 60s and 70s was firing projectiles to orbital altitudes for $5,000 a shot, and he was getting cube sat sized masses to orbital altitudes. He had a whole system called a Martlet, which was a three stage solid rocket motor designed to put a cubesat sized object into low earth orbit. The problem was in the sixties and seventies, there was no such thing as a cubesat. In fact, there was no such thing as a commercial space industry at all. No one at that point cared a lick for the marginal cost of space launch. The only thing space launch was good for at that point was either, like, massive national prestige projects, where cost doesn't matter, or nuking somebody else. Where again, if you're ending the Earth, it doesn't matter. The marginal cost of launch doesn't matter. Know? We're gonna wipe all life out on the planet. How many times do we need to do that? I'm on a budget here. Like, nobody cares. Know? So the idea that, you know, in in... Basically, in the last, say, fifteen, twenty years [00:09:33] S0: SpaceX happens. [00:09:34] S1: SpaceX happens. [00:09:34] S0: That's big part of
00:09:34 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:09:34] S0: That's big part of [00:09:35] S1: it. A commercial, the idea that it is commercially viable to be operating stuff in space, and that cost per launch, cost per kilogram matters. And so if you were looking at the fundamental physics, like rockets are not the best way to get things into space cheap, but they are a portable way to move nukes around and be unblockable. So we invested cumulatively as a civilization, The US and the Russians, something like $4,000,000,000,000 in rocket development. And so we we, as a society, plowed a lot of resources into developing this technology. And once you're in a local optimum there, it's really hard to to get your way out of it. But basically, my co founder Mike got a lot of conviction around it, and he yelled at me a lot, and we talked about it a lot, and fought about it, and eventually we sort of hashed out this, our sort of like current architectural design, and we think that it is a plausible path to get, you know, I don't know, he quotes $10 a kilogram, but I'm like the, you know, he's the guy who keeps our eyes on the sky, and I try and keep our feet on the ground. So I'll say, you know, less than $100 a kilogram. I'll be a little bit more conservative. I think [00:10:49] S0: it What is the current cost for chemical rockets?
00:10:49 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:10:49] S0: it What is the current cost for chemical rockets? [00:10:51] S1: Falcon Nine is something like, if you wanna go buy a Falcon Nine, you'll pay 5,000 or $7,000 a kilogram. And internally, their costs are something like $3,000 a kilogram. When Starship is operational, they'll be charging something like $1,000 a kilogram, with internal costs less than that. But it's hard to [00:11:10] S0: say because it's not operational yet. So you're targeting orders of reduction At in [00:11:15] S1: least one full order of magnitude better than that. Yeah, that's the goal. [00:11:20] S0: So the interesting thing about companies like this, and we've had a chance to work with a few recently at SPC, building space tech or hard tech sorts of companies is so often the mechanics of the company, they're physics problems. More than, oh what is my go to market? Comes down to just literally can you solve for the physics? And here it seems to be that if you can in fact accelerate something to that speed, right, to 8.7 whatever it is, kilometers per second, you can get something into orbit. And then from there the question becomes what are the sorts of things that you can do that to such that they survive and are economically valuable in orbit? So it seems like a big part of the question here is around G forces, or the actual physical effect on how do you think about that as an element? Because I know that's also part of the reason for the engineering here.
00:11:20 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:11:20] S0: So the interesting thing about companies like this, and we've had a chance to work with a few recently at SPC, building space tech or hard tech sorts of companies is so often the mechanics of the company, they're physics problems. More than, oh what is my go to market? Comes down to just literally can you solve for the physics? And here it seems to be that if you can in fact accelerate something to that speed, right, to 8.7 whatever it is, kilometers per second, you can get something into orbit. And then from there the question becomes what are the sorts of things that you can do that to such that they survive and are economically valuable in orbit? So it seems like a big part of the question here is around G forces, or the actual physical effect on how do you think about that as an element? Because I know that's also part of the reason for the engineering here. [00:12:18] S1: So in some ways we're really fortunate that Spinlaunch exists. They sort of pioneered the Kinetic Launch market segment, and proved, at least they proved to some people that you can raise money doing a kinetic launch company, which made it possible for us. [00:12:35] S0: Their version is a centrifuge, Yeah,
00:12:35 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:12:35] S0: Their version is a centrifuge, Yeah, [00:12:37] S1: they're sort of like the difference is, we invest the energy over distance, and they invest it over time. So they spin up the centrifuge over a couple of hours. Our shots, you know, a full full scale system shot would take about two seconds to go down the length of the barrel, and then, you know, another ten, fifteen seconds to transit the atmosphere, and you're in orbit in less than a minute. Oh, yeah. So Spinlaunch, they they built a centrifuge, and they spun cubesats up to 10,000 g's and demonstrated that they work fine. And they they demonstrated a... I think it was either a control moment gyro or a momentum wheel. Basically, a bit of kit that you put on a satellite that is used for orienting a satellite, and they they spun that thing up on their centrifuge and demonstrated that it can handle 10,000 gs. And so it... They sort of demonstrated it's totally possible to design and build hardware that handles, frankly, like we think that's insane g loading. We're aiming to have our g loads be much much less than that. You know, if you take your cell phone, and you know, I I drop it onto the ground right there, know, that was four or 500 g's that that cell phone experienced right there just just... Maybe not... This is sort of soft carpet. But if that if that was concrete, you know, that'd be 500 g's easy. [00:13:46] S0: I I admire the commitment to the... To making the point. I assume you've done that before.