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.
00:13:46 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:13:46] S0: I I admire the commitment to the... To making the point. I assume you've done that before. [00:13:53] S1: All the time. Yeah. No. Like, your your phones are really robust. Like, you know... He's like, I've [00:13:57] S0: gone through, like, 14 different phones.
00:13:57 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:13:57] S0: gone through, like, 14 different phones. [00:14:01] S1: This is... It's... It was a little bit risky. This is a relatively new phone. I don't have a case on it. But my my old phone, I've done it. I don't... I can't even say how many times. But but the... But I also I would hold it six feet up and drop it on the concrete. Like cell phones are are pretty robust. They're designed to handle hundreds of g's repeatedly, and the worst that often happens is like your screen gets chipped. Right? The electronics inside that thing, it's never the case that like, I dropped my phone and the the CPU popped off the board or something, right? We're designing the system to keep the g loading less than a thousand g's, and so we think that basically at that g loading, the electronics will have no problem surviving. That's that's, I would say, non controversial. The things that would be challenging is if you've got some geo sat might have giant solar panel wings on it that extend out. The largest geo sets, their wings extend out larger than a seven forty seven. So if you're gonna have these like, colossal deployables that are weight optimized and, you know, ephemeral things, like, yeah, those, you're probably gonna have to put some gussets on that. Or like, you know, make it out of steel instead of aluminum or something like that. But the thing is if you have to bump up the mass of your mechanisms by 10 or 15%, and in exchange you can launch for an order
00:15:15 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:15:15] S0: of 80 Right, plus it's a trade off. Like if you were driving down the cost of launch, there is a marginal cost to make it launchable, right, again, the economics become physics problems. [00:15:25] S1: We have a dream that like if you wanted to do a moon lander, instead of like going and designing a moon lander, you take a John Deere tractor, rip out the gas motor, stick in an electric motor, and replace the rubber wheels with aluminum wheels or something, stick in a shipping container, and send it to the moon. Like, because that would be so much cheaper than, like, custom designing a specialized aluminum moon landing. No, when it's $50 a kilogram, who cares? It's twice as expensive to send it to space as it is to it to Europe. Who cares? Presumably, [00:16:03] S0: use in environments like the moon is also one of the advantages here, right? Where you can do even more with this sort of a concept and probably drive down the cost even more. [00:16:13] S1: Oh, if we put one of these things on the moon? [00:16:16] S0: Yeah, mean is that something you're considering?