Joe Yaffe, COO at Cowboy Space, on Whether Data Centers in Space Are Cheaper

Speaker A: The difference between failure and success means catastrophic meltdown and explosion, or it launches every kilogram to orbit as efficiently as possible. It doesn't set us back for the same period of time because we've only got one customer, which is ourselves. So we can iterate. Iterate with speed, in other words. And the current wait time for a large data center, for example, in Northern Virginia, where a lot of these things are, is, you know, seven years. The thing that's at the very tippy top of my list right now is talent. It's hiring, it's the labor market. And that's before you get into what we're not really doing, which is interplanetary travel and getting human beings on the surface of Mars and building retirement homes on the moon.

Speaker B: Welcome back to between two COOs. This is part two with Joe Yaffe, COO and Chief Legal Officer at Cowboy Space. Last time, Joe walked us through the leap. Three decades as a top Silicon Valley lawyer, and then he jumps out of the plan plane and helps build data centers that run in orbit. If you missed it, go back and listen. We'll drop a show note because it's one of my favorite episodes to date. Today we go up to orbit and ask the harder questions. Can this actually work, not as a science project, but as a business? Joe, welcome back.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me. Nice to see you again.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Now, before we get into the money, let me set the table for anyone joining us here. Here's where I've landed in terms of the whole category of data centers in space. A year ago, it was kind of filed as impossible. Now it's filed under potentially no longer crazy. And that's enormous progress in a short amount of time. But let me just say out uh, loud what has to be true for this to actually work. It's something that you took us through last time, and I think it's worth kind of reiterating here, because it's a list. So you have to get the data center into orbit, which means you have to get the cost of throwing a kilogram into orbit to drop by about 10 times. You have to build your own rockets to do that, because Space Cowboy is vertically integrated, and that's from scratch, which normally takes a company a decade and a couple billion dollars. And you have to put the most advanced chips we make into the most hostile place we know of, letting them get hammered by radiation for years with nobody to go up and fix them. You have to get rid of all of the heat from a megawatt of computers using basically nothing but Glowing into the dark, no air, no water, just physics. Then you have to get all of that data back down to Earth and you've got to do it all in a timetable to rival that of SpaceX, who has a 15, 20 year head start and deep pockets. So Joe, that's my list you're pushing on the actual laws of physics here. Is that the whole list? Did I leave anything off?

Speaker A: That's a pretty good list. I mean there are probably other complexities there and to be honest, that rendition kind of makes me just want to go back to work. So maybe we should sign off now. One one minor clarification. So the operating principle for the company is that if you look at what we're providing, which is AI compute, it only makes sense because the M, the end M compute user, needs to be indifferent as to whether that compute comes from outer space or whether it comes from a terrestrial data center, you know, down the street or 500 miles away. And, and they need to be, they, they need to be agnostic, primarily from a cost perspective. So uh, a ground in principle for everything we're doing is that this only makes sense if we can provide AI compute on a cost basis which you measure as an hourly GPU hourly rate. So how much it would cost to actually generate compute on a GPU for an hour that is less than at or less than what the comparable tret rate is. And so that's what we're oriented orienting towards. And I say that because a lot of other folks were talking about orbital data centers are focused on the cost of energy in space and focusing on dollars per kilowatt hour. Our thesis a little bit different and a lot of it derived from the fact that Beijing was very much a, ah, business driven entrepreneur as AM M I. And so we're focusing on that and we're confident that our architecture gets us to an hourly GP cost that is competitive with the cheapest form of AI compute on the ground.

Speaker B: Um, why are you looking at this differently than the other competitors out there?

Speaker A: Well, I think one is, and this is something I've observed in my time working in the space industry, is that the space industry, other than a few very large players and some legacy prime contractors, is a relatively nascent industry in terms of a lot of the newer. There are a lot of new entrants in the business and to be candid, I think not a lot of them have the same experience, whether it's 31 years in large law firms or building a company like Robinhood. And what it actually takes to build a sustainable business. And that's not a criticism because there's an awful lot of new technology development that has to happen. There's a lot of hard science. A lot of folks who are getting. A lot of newer companies are started and run by folks who are brilliant technologists, but maybe they're not as focused on is this going to work as a business? And that's actually a positive thing in some respects because you need to have those folks in the industry in order to propel the technology forward, to try new things, to develop new things. I would also say that a lot of the space business has been and currently is driven by government demand. There are a lot of missions that go into space based on the government. That's a somewhat different business model, just the way government contracts work. And I think a lot of players are focused on that. We're focused on servicing government mission needs. But primarily I would say we see the demand arising in the private sector. And so on that basis we necessarily have to focus on what the economic cycle looks like for private sector consumers, private sector customers.

Speaker B: So what's enabling your ability to be cost competitive with terrestrial GPU hour, GPU per hour prices?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's kind of, I would call it the magic of the architecture and what we've, what we have, have realized. Let me start from kind of a basic, another basic observation, which is that if you look at how commercial space has evolved and really the space launch business as a whole, whether private sector or government, it's evolved. So you have a first stage of a rocket and a second stage which carries payloads which are usually, you know, the vast majority of the time, smaller flat satellites that are packaged inside that second stage of the rocket. And then when that second stage is lifted into orbit, those satellites are dispensed from the second stage and spread out over low earth orbit in a constellation of a large number of smaller satellites. That makes a lot of sense. Based on the preliminary. The primary use cases for government and commercial launch over the last two to three decades. Namely, if you look at what's dominated the commercial sector, it's been telecom satellites, Earth observation satellites and government satellites doing other various things you know, on behalf of our government. Those models are best served by having a, uh, lot by having large constellations of smaller satellites that provide many to many coverage. If you think Starlink, if you think, you know, cable television being communicated through or telephone signals being communicated through satellite, it makes sense to have as much coverage across m, as much of the world as you possibly can. But if you're starting from the premise that, well, what we want to do is build an orbital data center, you would approach, uh, it differently, which is how we approached it. And you would say that what matters most is actually to get as many densely, highly densely compacted, highly interconnected GPUs into orbit in one package. At the same time, when you look at it through that lens, uh, having GPUs on a large number of smaller satellites packed inside a second stage and then getting dispensed isn't necessarily the way you would start. Which is why our architecture contemplates that the second stage of the rocket is the data center. So there is no, there's no dispensing of smaller satellites. That packaging efficiency by itself actually impacts the economic model significantly. When you couple it with the fact that as we talked about before and as you just alluded to, one of the bigger challenges of operating GPUs in orbit, or any silicon in orbit, is cooling the chips because they run hot and when there's no atmosphere, you can't cool them through convection. And so you necessarily need large metal radiators. By using the entire second stage of the rocket as one large radiator, we further improve the packaging efficiency because we're taking every kilogram of metal that we're taking into orbit. Really every kilogram of mass is itself being used in the service of providing this GPU compute. And then finally, when you're able to get more highly interconnected GPUs into one package, into the second stage at one time, you're putting the revenue producing part of the vehicle you're building into orbit with more revenue producing parts in one package per launch in a single time. So you put all those things together, um, what you get is an efficiency which allows you to bring the cost of our GP compute down. I should add one thing, the only other thing that is required for that really to be the case is you got to control your own launch. Which is why we made a decision to build our own launch vehicle. It's a unique kind of launch vehicle because it's being purpose built for the sole purpose of delivering orbital data centers into orbit. It's not being built for missions to the moon or missions to the Mars, or interplanetary travel, or carrying humans or, or packing a large number of smaller flat satellites so we don't have to engineer the second stage or the first stage lifting the second stage for the purpose of ensuring that large numbers of other customers with third party payloads can integrate into that Second stage that streamlines a lot of the construction, a lot of the manufacturing, a lot of the design, and further makes this more cost effective.

Speaker B: The vertical integration here is key. So let's start with the money you raised. $365 million. Baiju, uh, seeded it. Real investors came in. Um, you know, you're building these four companies at once. SpaceX has this giant lead blue, uh, Origin has been out there for quite some time, I think Rocket Labs, um, it's a rocket that's smaller than yours, it's costing the hundreds of millions and counting. And then on top of it you have each one of the satellites carrying roughly 800 of the most advanced Nvidia chips out there. So the payload alone has to be tens of millions per bird. Um, the 365 million that you've raised, I'm assuming buys the demo at this stage and it seems like you're going to need billions more to enact the vision. Aside from the successful demo, what has to go right for you to raise the much bigger round that this is going to need?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean it's going to cost more than that, just to be blunt. Space is expensive. In order to stand up, uh, you know, our various physical and infrastructure facilities that we need, whether it's our rocket design and satellite design and light manufacturing facility which we're standing up in Seattle, or a large scale manufacturing facility which will stand up somewhere outside of California, you know that that is going to require additional capital infusion. Um, a couple of things. For one thing, the, the industry as a whole is enjoying a period of time where there's a great deal of interest. I think, you know, one can look to the, the, the interest in the SpaceX IPO was a pretty clear indicator of that, number one. Number two, did, if you take a look at what we're building, which is effectively a heavy lift launch vehicle, where another critical part of the business model is that we're intending this to launch at Cadence, meaning launch frequently to get more GPUs up more quickly, to provide more AI compute to people on the ground. Ground there really is only one current US at least. Heavy lift, really worldwide heavy lift launch operator operating at cadence. And that's SpaceX. And so I guess you could phrase it as the one thing that needs to go right, or the way we look at it is, uh, it's hard for us to imagine a world in which there will only be a single launch provider operating heavy lift launch at Cates. There are other launch providers that are great companies you mentioned Rocket Lab Stoke Space is another one. Impulse Space is doing super interesting stuff for a company. Um, the others have very strong developed programs, but the history has shown they're not really launching at the cadence that we think is required to take this economy, this industrial segment into the next generation, which is part of what we're doing. That's a challenge that requires expanded launch infrastructure across the country, more launch pads, um, and it's going to require greater capital once we, but once we're up and running, and once we, once we have our first launch, we're highly confident that the economics work out such that financing this is not going to be the issue. I tell people I've got, and I probably use this line with you, I have a thousand most important things on my plate to deal with. Um, I would say that attracting and raising capital is really, really important to us. Um, but not the top 10 of my list of things to worry about. And that has a lot to do with the fact the company was founded by Bot. And he's got an incredible track record. Investors know that. He's, you know, to be candid, just generated a lot of great returns for folks who bet on him and Robin Hood. And, uh, we've assembled an incredible technical team. And when we roll out the folks who have joined us, you know, over the course of a relatively short period of time, they're, you know, without exaggeration, the world's best rocket engineers and the world's best side of satellite designers. And, and that's the type of folks we're attracting because there aren't that many opportunities out there like this. To start with a company to build something from a blank sheet of paper, that's their program, where the whole purpose is to do it quickly and to rely only on ourselves for our payloads. We're not out there trying to sell space to a bunch of satellite manufacturers.

Speaker B: Yeah. So interesting. And, um, you know, I can't help but think back to all the videos of the failed launches that SpaceX had. Um, there was this, uh, to your point, this fast cadence of iterating, learning from the failures, things like that. How do you plan for that and how do you think because SpaceX is carrying payloads up, whereas your payload is built into the rocket. Um, how do you think about those learning moments where, you know, things may not go according to plan?

Speaker A: It's a great question. And one of the things that actually, the head of our rocket program, you know, he and I were chatting a couple weeks ago and he said something kind of which I hadn't thought of, but it makes sense, which is that the perfect rocket engine is designed to operate right on the balance point of failure and success because you want to get as much efficiency out of that rocket as possible. And now the difference between failure and success means catastrophic meltdown and explosion, or it launches every kilogram to or orbit as efficiently, as efficiently as possible. And so the business and the engineering, you know, in and of itself is always going to be right on that precipice of, uh, potential catastrophe. Catastrophe. That being said, one thing that's interesting about what we're doing is that when you're not designing a rocket to take for example, government payloads, sensitive government satellites or third party payloads, where they've invested a ton of their own capital into designing their satellites for whatever purpose they are, and they've got their own customers to whom they're going to be selling services from. Those satellites you need to meet, you need to be very, very sure that you're not going to blow their stuff up. Our dynamic is fundamentally different in that we don't want to blow up our own payload for sure, but frankly, assuming continued voracious demand for AI compute, we have a different risk spectrum. If we make this work one time, then we can replicate that and make it work multiple times. If along the way accidents happen or there's a failure along the way, it's not the same. It doesn't set us back for the same period of time because we've only got one customer, which is ourselves in terms of actually getting those GPUs into orbit. And so we can continue to work at cadence and not abandon the project because we've either run out of capital or run out of faith that we're going to be able to continue to develop the rocket program. Well, let's talk about iterated with speed.

Speaker B: In other words, let's talk about the assumption that you just named, which is the continued voracious demand for compute, for AI. Um, you know, people in the space who are close to it, hands down, are saying, listen, there's, there will be no let up in this demand, it will grow. Obviously you all are long on this. So how do you think about that?

Speaker A: Internally, the expected capital expenditure for AI infrastructure is the largest infrastructure build out in the history of the human, of humankind. Right? So we're talking about 6, $7 trillion, uh, much of which you can't pick up the paper without reading about, you know, large scale, gigawatt scale terrestrial data centers that are five, seven, ten years out from even being online. And folks are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in developing that. So that, that's a pretty clear signal that this demand is going to be continuing for a while because those are long term deals that are being inked right now. Number one, um, number two is that, you know, one of the ways that we, that we think about this as well is that in comparison to the cost of developing a terrestrial data center, let's say $100 billion gigawatt data center that you're going to build somewhere and worry about connecting to the grid and having to potentially power yourself and uh, paying for large turbines. In our particular case, the capital investment in order to get the rocket program and the satellite designed and built, the rocket program up and running and launched is actually quite small in comparison, which is one of the reasons and a compelling reason for why we're attracting capital the way we've been able to attract capital. I think. Is that as crazy as it sounds, placing a $2 billion debt in the context of the current infrastructure expense that's going on across the globe is a relatively small bet. Now, I don't think I would have ever said that five, 10 years ago for sure. Uh, but that's just the world we live in.

Speaker B: That's, that's very well said. And now after talking to you, I am a believer.

Speaker A: Oh, good, you got one.

Speaker B: I mean, I came into this, just fascinated. I continue to be fascinated by this. Um, here's one of the things that's been nagging me though since we talked. Uh, a top AI chip run hard, lasts maybe two to three years on Earth where you can walk into the building and swap it. And there's a trick with the big data centers that when a chip gets old, they cascade it down to cheaper, lighter work instead of throwing it out. Now you're putting those chips somewhere you can't reach. So in a sense the satellite will outlive the silicon inside it. I'd, uh, love to understand how you all think about that gap between how long the hardware is really valuable and how long the thing you launch stays up there. Is the answer that you launch often enough that it just stops mattering?

Speaker A: Yes, that's a very succinct way of putting it. All of our economic modeling assumes a six year useful life of the GPUs. Um, and you're right, I mean the performance will degrade over time. And so the unit cost economics that we analyze take into consideration the fact that the power of the GPU or the ability to run high performance Compute jobs in Orgo is going to change and degrade over time and it's still, you know, immensely profitable to be handed, um, even on that basis. But the answer to this is in exchange for having satellites, that will be demise. Meaning they will either burn up upon reentry into the atmosphere together with all these chips that have outlived their useful life six to ten years after launch, or be blasted into the sun or otherwise deorbited in some other way. In exchange, what we're able to do is get Frontier GPUs off of the assembly line, integrated and into orbit on a much faster scale. Right. Because in order to get those same GPUs up and running in a terrestrial data center requires the construction and the permitting and overcoming regulatory hurdles of building large scale terrestrial data centers, which, yes, you can swap racks in and out of, um, them, but only after they're built in the current timeline. The current wait time for, you know, a large data center, for example, in Northern Virginia, where a lot of these things are, you know, seven years, it's even longer overseas to get something up and running. And the current political climate, which I don't think should be understated, is running the other direction against, you know, the, the, the development of new large scale AI data centers. So in a perfect world we would recover those GPUs, we could bring them back to Earth. Um, there are a lot of great reasons why I would love to be able to do that. But again, sort of the trade off is we're able to get them and give compute users access to frontier GPUs at scale much more quickly, effectively turning a terrestrial real estate and permitting and development process into an industrial manufacturing process.

Speaker B: So I actually was thinking even further beyond this and it comes back to the original mission of this company, which was to actually use the solar array and the structure and the optical system to um, you know, pass that energy back to Earth. Now we talked previously about the evolution of that and how it wasn't really a, uh, feasible thing to do at an efficient way. And then I was thinking about, you know, you're going to have this asset that's up there that still has some life in it. Is there a way to repurpose it and perhaps, I don't know, beam power to other things in orbit.

Speaker A: Yeah, and it's actually since you and I spoke, I think there's been a little bit of change in the, the environment in terms of that. I think the interest in our original space based power beaming program has rekindled a bit, um, across different domains, a lot of them, the government. And so there is a very real world in which the larger scale vision that we always dreamed of when we started the company, which is to have combined power and compute so that at scale you could provide AI computer empowered data stations on data centers on the ground to receive that compute, ground receivers to receive that compute, you know, all in one package to completely change the relationship that we have between Earth and energy. Now that's looking like that. It may be more in the art of the possible on a shorter time frame. It was always kind of still the long term goal. Because just to correct what you said, power, space based power being is inefficient on a one off basis. You have so much loss of efficiency by beaming power to the atmosphere at scale. At scale with a very large constellation, you can actually accomplish quite a bit. It's just that that's a much more challenging business because by at scale I mean, you know, billions of dollars of space infrastructure in order to have a constellation large enough to provide power on demand continuously across different parts of the globe is a challenging thing to do. And how to be cost effective with terrestrial power, because solar power, even on the ground is still the cheapest source of energy there is.

Speaker B: Right? Thank you for correcting me. Um, I do have a question about redundancy. So anyone who's ever run on servers knows that stuff fails constantly. And I've run a couple of data centers, the big AI clusters on earth lose a chip every few hours and the fix is beautifully boring. A technician walks in and swaps it out. You don't have that technician. How does redundancy actually work up there? If, if part one. Excuse me, if a part of one of the satellites dies in the middle of a customer's job, what happens? Whoa. Does the work jump to another satellite? Does it fall back to earth? I'm just thinking about, you know, all of the possible catastrophes that could happen in space that are very different. Like how do you think about that?

Speaker A: Well, I think we worry about them, we try to identify them, we're hard at work on trying to address some of them. I mean, a couple of simplistic things off the top. Um, a lot of those problems have software based solutions, you know, routing traffic to other GPUs on the system. I think more physically we actually have the ability to over provision each of these satellites. So okay, when we talk about each of our, our vehicles having a megawatt of compute power, that's the power available based on the solar arrays being flown into space that I know. We have plenty of space to pack multiple, you know, many other, many additional GPUs onto the same vehicle. And so not necessarily hot swapping a rack, you know, but rerouting to GPUs that aren't impacted by whatever's affecting the redundancy. The resilience issues in orbit, you know, is something that we're engineering around right now.

Speaker B: You mentioned regulatory and permitting. You're the lawyer in the room. An orbital data center. It's kind of a strange animal here. It's not really a launch. It's not really a communication satell. It's not really an Earth imaging satellite. So who actually regulates it?

Speaker A: And now you're getting to one of the thousand things that are the most important things on my plate. Um, yes. No, it's a very complex and not very wieldy to be blunt, uh, regulatory environment. So right now there are a, there's a kind of a loosely aggregated collection of agencies responsible for regulating activities including space. The FCC is a critical piece of that. They're responsible for regulating communication between Earth and the satellite. Um, the FAA is responsible for, you know, getting you your launch permit and getting your, your ability to clear the space from the ground to the upper atmosphere. They don't have jurisdiction, you know, once they're out of the atmosphere. The fda, interestingly enough, currently has some regulatory authority over, over laser devices, things like LASIK and other things, you know, that the FDA's medical devices, the FDA's historically been responsible for. You've got the governmental agencies that run and control the launch sites. So you've got NASA and the Space Force together with some state municipalities like Space Florida and others who are responsible for, you know, managing and administering those locations. And then you've got a whole bunch of a host of other folks who are very interested in making sure that commercial space activity doesn't conflict with governmental space activity. So an organization called the ntia, which kind of works as the, the overseer of, of interaction between satellite communication with, you know, government satellites in orbit and other activities. You got a whole bunch of folks who are interested about, interested on the government side and the use of lasers, you know, either in space or from space to ground to make sure that you're deconflicting with operations on the ground. And that's just sort of the tip of the iceberg. You've got environmental folks. You have to, you know, so you've got the NOAA interested in making sure that you're not interfering with their own sensors. So part of what I do, I'm doing is both navigating that immense regulatory landscape and frankly working actively. And it's been very promising with senior folks at all of those agencies to come up with a more streamlined approach for commercial space at large. And there's been the FCC's, the head of the Space Bureau there, guy named Jay Schwartz, is terrific. The current chairman of the fcc, Brendan Carr, is terrific. They kind of see the need to catch up on the regulatory front. And given their very large role in the regulatory framework overall they've introduced space modernization proposals which we commented on and assisted with, um, which we're fully supportive of. So I think that, Michael, I think it's going to change, but that's a big rock to be moving, um, to get people, you know, because a lot of people are concerned and there are a whole bunch of unknowns when it comes to operating data centers in space that deal with data privacy and historical rules that are, you know, very well developed to govern data privacy rights for data that's moving or is in place on the ground but not necessarily in orbit. You've got export control issues. So yeah, that part is a. There's a reason why I think, um, Beijing, I decided that it'd be helpful to have a lawyer in one of the senior spots here.

Speaker B: Well, that's what I was going to say. This is why you put a lawyer as a COO of this company you mentioned. That is one of the 1,000 things on your list. What are some of the others that you know, what does your priority list look like? I can't even imagine at this point.

Speaker A: So you know, interestingly the thing that's at the very tippy top of my list right now is tax talent. It's hiring, it's the labor market. Because this is a very, it's an incredibly robust part of the overall economy right now. Whether you call it deep tech or aerospace space, um, AI, there are a lot of opportunities, you know, up and down the chain from entry level all the way through to very senior folks. It's also a relatively small slice of the overall labor pool and folks with the experience that we need, um, and who have kind of what it takes to come into a, you know, a two year old startup and what really is around the clock job that requires a lot of passion, you know, finding those people is a full time job. So I spending everything from a ton of my time just behind trying to hire more in house recruiters to, you know, streamlining our recruiting process to working the referral system. And it just takes time. And there's no, there's nothing fancy about any of that. It's just. But hiring, because we're on a roadmap to hire, you know, hundreds of people over the next very, very short period of time. By the way, little shout out for younger, for entry level people. It's an incredible career path right now. Like people who are worried about the economy. If I could go back in time and tell my kids, go be an aerospace engineer, you know, uh, m. I probably would. They're well paying jobs that are fascinating and they're fun and you get to do cool stuff. You know, you're not sitting in a cubicle, you know, working on somebody else's bookkeeping ledger. It's um, it's a. And I think that's only going to grow, which gets me super excited and I'm. It's actually gratifying to be kind of part of that uh, development of those opportunities for the next generation of folks getting into this space business.

Speaker B: That's incredible. And uh, so we've got hiring, we've got the regulatory aspects to this. Um, you know, with such an intricate operation, with so many different moving parts of this, you know, what does the sort of operating cadence of a business look like? How are you actually operating this thing? What's the uh, operating system?

Speaker A: Now keep in mind this is supposed to be my retirement, right? I retired from scatter. So if you're looking at a spectrum of whatever you would think of as retirement, what I'm doing now, there are two completely different ends. Um, yeah, look, the cadence is kind of around the clock. Uh, and a lot of that is because it's clock driven. You know, I told somebody the other day that If I had 25 years to get done what we're getting done, this would be a very luxurious job. It would feel like retirement. But uh, we don't. We're trying to get all this done in two and a half years. So we want our. We are on a roadmap, on a timeline to launch our, what we call Mega, our 1 megawatt compute data center in December of 2028. To get there means we have to run, you know, full speed ahead, which is why hiring is at the top of the pyramid. Bringing people in, bringing talented folks in, getting them organized, all rowing in the same direct. And a lot of things in this business have hard deadlines. Um, you know, the legal business has some hard deadlines when you're working on an M and a transaction but the truth of the matter is there are relatively fewer hard deadlines. Like, you know, if you don't hit this 30 day clock, everything falls apart and things slip all the time here. You know, you got launch windows, you've got, you know, a, uh, set period of time which, within which you can test different components or test the integrated satellite. And if you miss that test, they're going to be pushed back another week because they're simply not going to be able to do it. So all of those things require that folks put in an ungodly amount of time, um, which is part of what we kind of scan for when we're looking for people to come on board. The payoff is that it's mission driven. So once you get to the end, like mission accomplished, you see it. What I haven't told them is that the next day they get to come back home, work on the next mission, but we're all driving towards the first mission.

Speaker B: That's fantastic. I mean, Joe, I really appreciate your time we have. I feel like I have a better understanding. I hope listeners also have a better understanding of, of what? That the, the fact that this can actually work and that this is actually, you know, physically possible.

Speaker A: So it's inevitable. I mean it really is inevitable. There's no chance that humanity is going to restrain itself to operating simply on the planet's surface. Um, I think people are starting to see that it's been brought into the public consciousness and AI I think is the catalyst for this business for sure. I think it's only just going to grow from there.

Speaker B: I recently, uh, published a podcast with Rick Marini, who is the former COO of Grindr, uh, current COO of Rails. Um, Rick, uh, was experienced as a CEO and then realized he's a really great COO instead of, he described the difference as a CEO looks on the 10 year time horizon, whereas a COO looks on the two year time horizon. I'm wondering because as you mentioned, Baiju is a visionary in so many different ways. What's he thinking in 10 year, 20 year time horizon here?

Speaker A: I mean, I don't want to put myself in Beiju's head, but I will tell you, we have thought about what the 10 and 20 year horizon looks like. And I think it means a very robust commercial economy in space, spurred in large part by the power of capitalism, which we want to be a part of. I think longer term you're talking, you are talking about, you know, actual permanent activity, including commercial activity on the lunar surface. I think you're talking probably more practically about quantum computing in space. Space is the right place to do large scale quantum computing. Um, m. I think quantum computing, which, you know, almost nobody actually understands is a very real thing, um, that is going to be, you know, become a much bigger and bigger topic of conversation. We see ourselves being heavily involved in that. As time goes by, there's a whole world of people actually constructing and manufacturing things in orbit through what they call ISAM in space, autonomous manufacturing. And so, you know, I think that's a world that we could see developing over the next 10 to 20 years. All that stuff is on the horizon. And that's before you get into what we're not really doing, which is interplanetary travel and getting human beings on the surface of Mars and, you know, building, you know, retirement homes on the moon.

Speaker B: So cool. And building that in house knowledge of how to actually launch things into space. It seems like you all are positioned perfectly for what the next stage of the space economy will be. Well, Joe, thanks, uh, so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. And a, uh, big thank you to you all, uh, for listening. I hope you learned something. Space is here. It's amazing. And get excited about it. Uh, check out Cowboy Space. We'll leave a link in the show notes and make sure you keep up with Joe and the incredible work he's doing. That's it. Uh, thanks, Simon. Folks,