02:05:44 · Bridgit Mendler
[02:05:44] S5: Yes. Great question. Overall, North with thesis was more things are going up into space and they need to be able to control the spacecraft. They need networking to control the spacecraft and to be able to sell more bits. That has definitely proven out. I think, you know, government and commercial demand for space, it's never been higher. Every operator needs those functions. And so for us, you know, moving to a new factory is about how can we ramp up the production on that hardware to support that. Mhmm. I think, you know, when when you think of the product lines on the portal side, which is the one I just showed you, think of missions that need to do complicated in space maneuvers, kinda like a Star Wars moving in space. So there's more customers trying to do that. And so that's driving expansion of that product line. The other one, the Prism product is really about how do you do, like, scalable highly scalable, highly reliable networking for Constellation. So kind of like the Mhmm. The folks that you're mentioning there. A lot of demand. I I you you guys mentioned a fair amount of it. I think it's been a crazy year for space. Right? I mean, we had the the SpaceX IPO. Huge amount of, like, enthusiasm and appetite. I like, one of the things I I was kinda curious to talk about with you guys because I imagine you're you're hearing it and seeing it too. It's like we're in this weird dichotomy where it's like appetite for space has never been higher. At the same time, there's like all of this concern around launch being constrained. Sure. It's a wild time. It's a wild time for the ecosystem I think. And, you know, I have my own soapbox on on like what that means and how the industry is gonna respond as a result. But
02:07:19 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[02:07:19] S1: Well, yeah view as a I I wish that we had more more alpha to share to you share with you on launch bottlenecks but you're the one buying launch capacity like No. How how much [02:07:30] S0: It doesn't need to. Well, so so Downstream of it. [02:07:32] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Down You're you're you're sort of limited limited by it Yeah. Potentially in the future where you a a good scenario is you get to the point where you're like, we are generating as much revenue as we can based on what is currently Going up. Space. And Yep. New revenue will be dependent on that. But how much of the how how you know, we had the the founder of what's his name? The space Philip from Star Cloud? Yeah. So Philip from Star Cloud was on. He said part of the reason to raise their they raised another 250,000,000 Oh, yeah. [02:08:03] S0: They're buying already. [02:08:06] S1: Yeah. And 2029. Yeah. But when you talk to different space, you know, teams, is that like really like super top of mind for them or do they have is that like problem number five after making sure that their satellites and spacecraft actually work and all those other things?
02:08:26 · Bridgit Mendler
[02:08:26] S5: I think it depends on kind of the maturity of the company, you know, for a lot of companies or, you know, things like that. They they've already had their established plans, so it's not an immediate impact or concern, but something more down the road. You know, government operators have their ways to to get what they need even under those conditions. But I I I think, like, self self servingly, what I think is interesting, you know, we like you guys said, we serve objects that are already in space. So we get to, you know, continue to have market there and then into the future. But I think what's gonna be really interesting is if you do have constrained launch, you actually need to eke out as many bits, like what you're actually selling from space as possible, and you need to do it as at high dollar as you possibly can. So, like, each one of those bits counts for so much more. And so, you know, my thoughts around that are, like, point one, if you need to eke out more bits, how are you gonna do that? You need higher utilization. That means, like, more seconds in contact with whatever that end customer is on earth, making sure you can actually transact for as many seconds as possible. And then how do you send as many bits as you can per second? So, like, you you get as as much as many bits out of each of those seconds as you possibly can. So that's, like, throughput and utilization, really. So that's one piece. And then the other piece is like how do you get customers to pay higher dollar for those bits? Like, let's imagine there's some kind of winter where you're limited in the number of satellites that you can launch into space. You want all of them, like, maximized. You want all of them monetizing those bits as much as they possibly can. And I think that's where it comes back to, you know, reliability. Right? Like, that's something that US government pays for. Mhmm. That's something that more enterprise use cases really pay for and prioritize. And so I think, like, you know, bear case scenario, that's what happens where all those operators are are treating their assets differently in a sense where they're really prioritizing that utilization and and high value, which, like, I think we've kind of been designing to serve for. So selfishly, I think that that works out well.
02:10:29 · Bridgit Mendler, Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Carina Hong
But, you know, bull case, we we figure it out and there's some other launch provider that swoops in and saves the day. [02:10:36] S1: Similar kind of like at this point, sort of like intellectual debate on what happens with compute on earth. Like, does compute aggregate towards, you know, certain model providers that are at the frontier that can get more economic value out of out of a Exactly. [02:10:53] S5: Out of [02:10:53] S1: a data center or a single GPU. I'm curious about, like, how does it how does the launch [02:11:02] S0: do you know about launch? Netflix in space to free up the ground compute for AI? [02:11:07] S5: I mean [02:11:08] S0: Might be easier. Yeah. [02:11:09] S1: How does the how does the is there a secondary market for launch? Like, if you like, I'm thinking about, like, people that are buying launch capacity today or or preordering it and then they get to twenty twenty nine and they're like, wait, this is not the most economically [02:11:23] S0: Oh, like sure. Sure. Sure. [02:11:24] S1: Yeah. Use case of this Resell. Capacity. I imagine Elon would be like, cool. We're gonna be the one reselling that. It's hard to imagine. Who knows? [02:11:33] S5: Right. Yeah. [02:11:34] S6: Depends on [02:11:34] S1: the rider. [02:11:34] S5: I would imagine that. You're not the first person to float that idea though.
02:11:34 · Bridgit Mendler, John Coogan
[02:11:34] S5: I would imagine that. You're not the first person to float that idea though. [02:11:37] S0: What about your I don't know if they're KPIs, but your benchmarks. Yeah. Like, you mentioned sort of like the the throughput and availability of a connection. And it Yep. And that feels like we're almost in, like, the pre like, with if I just think about WiFi connectivity, I think about throughput and latency. Availability is almost more of a bottleneck now. But hopefully, we get to a place where availability is universal. And then does latency matter? What are the other Yeah. Kind of selling points and, like, benchmarks that you're using to understand the performance of your system versus the status quo?
02:12:18 · Bridgit Mendler, John Coogan
[02:12:18] S5: Yeah. I think I think throughput definitely matters. And then I also think there's an interesting kind of like, you know, I I I I've mentioned the word, like, industrializing before, which I know is, like, it's it's a buzzy word and all that. But I think, like, what I mean for space with that is, like, as more and more use cases go to space, then you start applying those KPIs that might have applied to terrestrial market terrestrial networks to space. And so one of the ones that, like or some of the ones that we've been thinking about, yes, I think throughput really matters. What's interesting is that's actually about not just a single direction of throughput. People may sometimes not think about that, but, throughput is actually a bidirectional thing. So you need to be able to both send traffic and receive traffic, and some systems are set up to do that in an asymmetric way versus ones that are set up to do that symmetrically. So, you know, just like one thing that we think about is is, like, yes, throughput and which direction is it going, and that's actually really relevant when you think about different markets. And then the other one is, the reliability piece that I said. So you think about I was chatting with somebody from, you know, Cloud flare recently and and hearing about their kind of reliability metrics. Like, people tend to measure it in terms of the number of nines Yeah. That you can support. [02:13:26] S0: Yeah. What is space? Does space have any nines? [02:13:30] S5: Been pitiful nines. [02:13:31] S0: Yeah. Can imagine it's like