00:00:48 · S1, Brian Taylor
[00:00:48] S1: Of course. Looking forward to the conversation. Let's go ahead and just talk about the industry as a whole a little bit. Tell us about what's going on in the the satellite industry. [00:00:55] S0: Yeah. So the space economy, as I kind of call it very broadly, covers a lot of things. So that covers everything from GPS signals that you use for your Uber to kind of the latest technology and in space manufacturing to make drugs in space, and then satellite communications, Earth observation, Google Maps, things like that. So those are the things that touch normal people on a regular basis, but there's this big infrastructure and industrial layer behind that that includes rockets, satellite manufacturing, component manufacturing, things like that. And so, obviously, a big part of that is kind of the SpaceX IPO, the SpaceX launch machine, I would call it. They've become a behemoth and have a large effect on the market as a whole. We are a customer of theirs. I used to work there above SpaceX. So they're a big player. There's a lot of other companies. I can't necessarily list them all, but that's kind of the space industry as a whole. And so we fit inside that and hopefully are disrupting it on the satellite and the reentry and down mass kind of front, and happy to dive into that. [00:01:57] S1: Yeah. Let's dive in. For you, was this the obvious path to go down, or were there a lot of different paths? Were you thinking, okay, here's this problem, this problem, this problem. How'd you end up choosing the problem that you wanted to go after?
00:02:09 · Brian Taylor
[00:02:09] S0: Yeah. So I was really fortunate to work at some awesome companies. I worked at a couple... I worked at a nuclear company. I worked at a human spaceflight company, and, you know, worked in general aviation doing kind of emergency breaks for 787s, and then worked at SpaceX and a couple other space places, and really loved the place that the space industry is in compared to the maturity level that a lot of other industries are in. I would say it's still very early days and is Wild West in some ways. But it's also not Wild West when you go to fly humans in space and bring them back and things like that. So, yeah, a couple of highlights. I worked at SpaceX. I worked at Amazon's Project Kuiper, and I worked at Loft Orbital. And those things gave me this really good picture of where the satellite industry, kind of the sub industry within that large space economy was sitting and what the problems and pain points were for that. And kind of that combined with the macro situation of launch where launch compared to twenty, thirty, seventy years ago is 20x cheaper today than it was then. And I didn't see people designing a fundamentally different satellite. And so I saw this opportunity to have a contrarian view that says satellites should be designed and flown and brought back totally differently than they are today. There's a couple companies right on the edge of those. And I looked at kind of joining those organizations and and realized it wasn't quite exactly the way that I thought the problem needed to be solved. And so I started a company. I think I had that in the back of my mind for a very long time. A lot of people say like, I never thought I would become a founder or something like that. I think every founder needs to jump into it head first, and there's a lot of risk. And so you know what you're getting into, and you've probably thought about it for a while. So I was definitely in that boat.
00:03:57 · S1
[00:03:57] S1: For you, what did the first three to six months look like for you?
00:04:01 · Brian Taylor
[00:04:01] S0: Yeah. It was actually me alone in my basement designing a satellite that I would then send bits of it to previous colleagues and coworkers and have them throw rocks at it. And I was like, hey. Do you think this is a good enough idea that you wanna join me and do this? And they're like, no. But I'll give you some feedback on that thing. And really, is what the first six months were. I gave myself kind of six months of runway to get funding and stop paying my own salary and went to work in my basements every day, eight to five and then again, eight to midnight most nights, and designing this new type of satellite. That's originally what I was, mechanical engineer, systems engineer, And so did that and put together pitch materials and talked to customers and did all that really early work. And then got to this point where a couple of those people that I was talking to said, hey. What you had originally was, like, dumb and crazy. This is actually, like, a really good idea and could solve problems that I'm also familiar with, and I'm gonna join you. And built the very first early team from that. And then got our first investor check and was able to kind of get a facility, be on-site, collaborate, get all the infrastructure kind of going for what you need to start a company, and and it was kind of off to the races there. But one thing I've said to everybody that we've hired so far is that, like, I designed a satellite in my basement, and I hired you to tell me what I did wrong. Not to say that I'm a great designer or I did wonderful or anything like that. Like, find the problems that I did wrong based on your area of expertise, and then you get to go fix them. And then we'll build the right satellite together. And that's been my experience over the two years of the team that we built has been amazing. Each one of those people that joins on the technical side jumps in and really loves that and really takes ownership of that section of the satellite. So
00:05:53 · S1
[00:05:53] S1: You mentioned you had a contrarian view there. Can you expand on that and maybe explain that to our audience who don't come from this space, what that contrarian view was?
00:06:01 · Brian Taylor
[00:06:01] S0: Totally. So right now, all satellites, generally what you think of as a satellite in low Earth orbit, at the end of their life, they burn up in the atmosphere. And you have to prove to regulating bodies that it will demise, that it will successfully burn up to be such a small piece that it won't cause a problem when it hits the ocean or the ground. And in middle Earth orbit and and geosynchronous orbit, which are higher, they go to parking orbits, and they just kind of sit there. But it's a lot bigger, but they create orbital debrief. And that is all because launch is so expensive that you optimize the mass as much as possible, and you get as much power and communications and camera out of every ounce of mass that you can versus cost. So the contrary view that I had was why don't we optimize the mass a little bit less? And that's okay because launch is cheaper now. And we get a whole new kind of value proposition out of it, which is reentry and reusability. And so it's definitely a trade off. We are heavier, so launch costs more. The launch is much more reasonable now. And part of our thesis is that it will continue to get more and more reasonable on cost. And so you sacrifice some mass and some of that cost in order to get, in my opinion, this massively new capability, which is reusability via reentry. And so that's definitely the contrarian idea, especially coming from Starlink. That was the first time somebody built a constellation that was more than a 100 satellites. I don't even think they had constellations more than kind of 50 satellites at the time, and the initial Starlink constellation was 3,000. Right? Like, that's just this massive scale of building for disposability. And it works when you can match up certain parts of the system of the payload and and the satellite and the rocket and things like that. But it doesn't necessarily make sense for a lot of other parts of the market. And so why aren't you doing the exact same thing SpaceX did is question to my contrary view that I got plenty and still get to this day.