00:31:03 · Eric Romo
[00:31:03] S1: It's probably useful to start by just framing up what space defense is historically. For for for most of the the existence of Space Force and our our nation's opportunities in space, it's it's been assets in space that help the warfighter on the ground. A really good example of this is GPS constellation. So GPS provides, you know, position, navigation, and timing to warfighters. It's how the air force drops precision munitions and things like that. It's also become a social good, for for the world. It's a amazing thing for, for each of us. Think I've seen estimates where it's something like a trillion dollars in economic value every year, really rely on GPS. So GPS is like the one canonical example of these assets in space that provide benefits to the warfighter underground, but we also have things the missile warning tracking layer. So if anybody shoots off an ICBM somewhere, we find out. Things like secure communications. So how do you tell somebody else that somebody shot an ICBM? So historically, we've invested, you know, tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars in these assets in space, light value on the ground. They've traditionally mostly been in medium earth orbit and geostationary orbit, so not really in LEO. The thing that's happened recently is I think we've been able to rely on the fact that we didn't really need to defend those assets. So Russia was the only other country that had consistent access to space, and we had an understanding with them. Don't come near our stuff and we'll come near your stuff. That understanding may be breaking down, depending on what you read in the public news. And then China now has physicist access to space and has a massive program to essentially duplicate our launch capacity. They've got, you know, five different companies trying to be SpaceX over there that they're throwing lots and lots of money at. And that's not just for commercial purposes. It's for a lot for defense. So now and we we I think Space Force knew this this was coming when it got started, but there's this real need to actually defend those assets for the first time. And this is part of why you see Space Force's budget going from $17,000,000,000 a few years ago to now the request is for $71,000,000,000 And how you defend those assets depends on where they are.
00:33:16 · Eric Romo
So right now, a lot of action is deploying new assets in low earth orbit to where STARLINK and STARSHILD are. And the strategy for defending the assets at LEO is proliferation. So you have hundreds, if not thousands of targets for the enemy to need to take out if they're gonna cripple your capacity. And so you solve defending it by just having more things for them too. They can't take them out all of them, so just put more. The problem is that when you look at the volume of LEO compared to the volume between LEO and GEO, MEO and GEO are a million times bigger, literally a million times bigger than LEO. So if you're gonna have that same strategy of proliferation of, hey, there's always an asset somewhere around here, you'd need a million times more assets, which is just impractical. So instead you solve the defensive problem in NEO and GEO with a spacecraft that can move really rapidly from one part of that orbit to another. Okay? And so MIRROR spacecraft is really good at this at going from one part of GEO to another, because as it's really, really big, and so the in order to cover all that ground, you need to move fast. You still have those same assets that provide value to the warfighters, but now you need patrols to vend them. You need bodyguard satellites that stick around them. And what those missions typically start with is characterization of understanding what is that foreign actor asset that's out there. Because space is so big, you'll see these pictures of assets from the ground. Like a telescope will take a picture of something in space, and the picture of the thing in LEO will be this kind of like blurry thing that you can sort of mix out as a box and maybe those are solar panels. And the picture of the thing in GEO is literally like one pixel, is a dot. You just don't, I have no idea what the heck that thing And so when you see in the news, you'll see China launches X, Y, Z thing. It's headed towards geo. The reality is from the ground, we don't know what that thing is. Like, does it have robot arms? Does it have machine guns? Like, we don't know. And so the way that you figure out what is that thing and what should I do about it is you actually have to get quite close to it. And in any kind of contested environment, you probably wanna get close to it pretty quickly. And so you wanna move very rapidly from one part of TO to another.
00:35:33 · Eric Romo
So this is the part of it we we work on. And and Space Force is investing across the whole gamut. Right? They're investing in proliferating and having more and more stuff going on in LEO, and then they're investing in these defensive capabilities, in MEO and GEO.
00:35:48 · Molly O'Shea
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00:37:33 · Molly O'Shea, Eric Romo
[00:37:33] S0: So I wanna talk more about the product development cycle. You were the thirteenth employee at SpaceX. Tom Mueller was the second. So I would assume this might be crazy that there might be some SpaceX DNA within the company. [00:37:46] S1: A little. Tom was officially in the payroll system the first. Really? He was one. [00:37:53] S0: So Elon's not even an employee? [00:37:55] S1: I don't know how that works, but it's a yeah. In payroll system, I mean, I think, you know, he he found Tom, and I think that was really the impetus for saying, okay. I actually think I could make a company around this, because, you know, the engines are the thing that that failed. They're the thing that's the hardest to build. They're the thing that's is always the critical path in the schedule. And so I think without Tom, I don't I don't think that company goes in the first days. And so I think, I don't know if that was part of the calculus for making an employee one of the payroll system or whatever, but, but that's that's officially the case. [00:38:27] S0: What was the hardest lesson that you learned at SpaceX in the very early days that has kept with you through this time and through the build of Impulse?
00:38:36 · Eric Romo
[00:38:36] S1: One of the really, really biggest things that I think we learned there that I watched happen that is definitely part of our DNA now is really about the iteration speed or the reduction of cycle time for development. So how quickly can you learn about this thing you're trying to build? And so I was there in the early days and I was an analyst on the propulsion team. So what that means is that I'm not real good at hardware or using machines or building anything. I kinda spend all my time in simulation land and Excel spreadsheets, which is funny because Tom is like super hands on, right? And when I first met him, he asked me all these questions about, you know, when's the last time you used a lathe and a drill press and, you know, how do you expect tubing on this thing? And I'm just like, dude, I have no idea. Like, I excel real good. And like, you want that? Like, I'm your guy. And so I was pretty sure he was not gonna hire me, but then luckily he did. So I was an analyst on the team, but the team was so small that I basically just had to like stay attached to Tom no matter where he went. And it was right around the time when I joined in early two thousand and three, the team started going down to the test site in McGregor in Texas for the first time. And at the time, the team in McGregor, there was one full time employee there and the rest of us would fly in and spend ten days there and, you know, work for ten days. And then we come back to LA for four days and we do that over and over and over again. And I did that for like nine, twelve months, something like that. I'm done that for years until the team finally stood up there and was built out. And what we were doing is we would bring hardware there to test. So was like, hey, we've got this new version of the engine, you know, build it up there. We're gonna test it there because testing it, you know, in LA, these things blow up. So, you know, you can't test them around here. And, you know, we would go down there and we'd bring our new hardware and then we'd get everybody to, you know, McGregor, which is, you know, well west of Waco, give you an idea of kind of where it is in the middle of Texas. And we would have brought the wrong part.