Ep. 89: Lux Aeterna

Speaker A: In early days of satellites, launch was so expensive and so rare that you had to optimize the mass as much as possible. That makes sense to do a disposable satellite that at its end of life, you know, will burn up in the atmosphere, go to a parking orbit and Neon Geo. But with launch much more plentiful than it was 10, 20, 50 years ago and much lower cost, you can kind of turn the dial on that mass optimization a little bit to get some other features like re entry and reusability.

Speaker B: Thousands of companies show up their technology to the U.S. department of Defense each year. But so few will transition from proof of concept to true production across the valley of death. The select few who do, their stories are rarely told. Until now. I'm Noah Sheinbaum and this is Crossing the Valley. All right, Brian Taylor, CEO, uh, founder of Lux Aeterna. Welcome to Crossing the Valley. From man, it looks like we're right on the, right on the floor with you there, Brian. Where are you. Where are you joining us from today?

Speaker A: Yeah, thanks for having me. We are based in Denver, Colorado. But yeah, this is our production floor. You can see I'm, um, in what looks like a sauna that is actually a sauna. We chose those were a little more cost efficient than kind of the fancy pods that, you know, Google puts all over their office. But yeah, we've got a couple of these that serve as kind of single meeting rooms and things like that. So. But yeah, that's where I'm coming in from. And you know, we're in the middle of building our first satellite on the floor behind me.

Speaker B: That's so cool. And I love the investors will love to hear the cost of it or the, the dollar efficiency you got going on there. It's an engineer's mind, right? Like what's it. What's a similar form function? I don't need the, I don't need the Gucci model. We can just take something that protects sound. That's. Hey man, that seems like straight out of your of uh, a perhaps a fast past company's playbook. Maybe the idiot index on that sauna is, is better than some of those, some of those Gucci Gucci cubes. Brian, tell us, let's start just with, with the core of this thing. What is Lux Aeterna all about? What's the why behind this company?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So there's a couple of reasons that we'll get into in a second of kind of why I do this now, but generally, you know, I saw a lot of Issues with how difficult it was to get more things to space faster. And so I looked at a couple of different areas, aviation as well as what Falcon 9 did on reusable rockets, and said, you know, if we can make the satellite reusable, we can actually solve a lot of the manufacturing bottlenecks, supply chain cadence, hardware reliability issues on the satellite if we make the entire satellite fully reusable. And so that is, that's kind of what we did. We do that via re entry. So we are a reentry company, but really our ambitions are much larger than that, which is to solve kind of a lot of the speed to space issues that, that currently exist in the satellite market with a, uh, with a very different approach, you know, kind of based on my experience that I had with satellites previously. So yeah, that's what we're doing. Our goal is to get a fleet of satellites that are moving up and down on a regular basis that are doing various, you know, durations of missions from one day or one week to three years to five years right now. Focus on low earth orbit. But absolutely, you can go to higher orbits and CIS lunar and things like that.

Speaker B: It's very interesting. I think that, you know, when people talk about the space economy. Yeah, I don't. On one hand we know we've got a multitrillion dollar company that's there. Uh, it seems like space economy is doing really well. On the other hand, like we're really early days and so I think I know which camp you're probably in there. Brian. Why is maybe now the time for this company? Whereas it's not a company that could have existed 10 years ago?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean the big thing is that we add uh, features to our satellite to make it reentry capable and reusable, but still be able to perform kind of traditional satellite missions as well as some, some new types of missions as well. And to do that we take a mass hit. So if you've got the optimization of a system model for a satellite, you know, you, in early days of satellites, launch was so expensive and so rare that you had to optimize the mass as much as possible. That makes sense to do a disposable satellite that at uh, its end of life, you know, will burn up in the atmosphere, go to a parking orbit and neon Geo. But with launch much more plentiful than it was 10, 20, 50 years ago and much lower cost, you can kind of turn the dial on that mass optimization a little bit to get some other features like re Entry and reusability. And so really the advent of rideshare and Falcon 9 reusability as well as reusability with other launch providers is, you know, the why now this makes sense when it's compared to kind of why couldn't you do this 10, 20, 50 years ago, things like that.

Speaker B: You've had a pretty interesting ride in the space industry. Uh, you know, this is not a, you're not a Johnny come lately to this, to this world. Maybe talk to us about kind of your path to this point and to getting to the point where you're like okay, I'm ready to found my own company because you've been on quite a journey.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So I always knew that I wanted to be an engineer. I love hardware, I love making things, I love testing them, seeing what works, iterating on things like that. But you know, honestly when I was in you know, kind of high school, college, I was not a space nerd. Like it actually really bugged me that you'd work so hard on something that's going to go to space. And unless you're an astronaut, which is like very small subset human spaceflight, I would consider you're never going to see that hardware again. And so you don't get to iterate on it, you don't get to enjoy the fruits of your labor. I guess I would say so Again, not really a space nerd. I went to school for mechanical engineering and kind of had some jobs in aviation and aerospace places where uh, we got the hardware, we tested it in flight and then we brought it back, we iterated on it, things like that. So I worked in aviation, in aerospace for a little while there and got the opportunity to work at SpaceX again. Was, was really excited about the way SpaceX operated, how quickly they did. And I got this very different view of satellites and how fast you can move and what you can do and, and how low cost you can move and, and kind of the idiot index and all those types of things really changes how you operate in space compared to kind of defense primes and things like that. So I worked there and got a whole different kind of view of space and, and how exciting it uh, where we are in the space industry and, and kind of being it very just, just beginning there. So, so I worked at Starlink on Starlink satellites. I did development, qualification and testing for those satellites, did a little bit of time on Starlink Aviation so putting WI fi on planes and then worked at Amazon Kuiper some more high rate production of satellites and Then most recently I was at Loft Orbital, and you know, those three companies have, you know, create a large kind of subsection of experience in the space ecosystem of, uh, how to get more things to space faster. And what I saw was there were still these issues with being able to do that. You know, like you can kind of follow the, the SpaceX model where they designed the Starlink system, the Starlink stack, to match up with the system that they owned, which was the, uh, the rocket. Right. And so when we designed Starlink, the only way that you could do a, of 60 satellites like that was because they own the launch vehicle and they could go to the GNC team and say, hey, do you want to do something crazy? And then Elon would say, yeah, like, let's do something crazy. I approve of all that craziness, but you could never kind of go do that with another launch provider when, when you're an outside company. On the flip side, when I was at Loft Orbital, we were a customer of Rideshare, so absolutely, that enabled a lot of these satellite companies that have come up. But you don't have the same leverage to design the entire system as a whole like we did at Space X. You also don't have the leverage of kind of a supply chain behemoth that can go, you know, kind of change supply chains based on the amount of vehicles that they're going to build and the amount of capital that they have behind them to kind of in house anything that doesn't exist, you know, there. And so kind of having those experiences really led me to looking at, like, how do we solve issues in the rest of the industry that SpaceX was able to solve because of their kind of unique positioning and unique kind of capabilities there. And so that really led me to kind of looking at reentry, reusability, fleet operations, things like that. Realized the timing that I talked about earlier of like now really does make sense for that and really wanted other people to be doing it, looked into those and kind of didn't find anybody doing that at the pace that I think it needed to be done. And so started the company and, you know, we're off to the races. So, you know, we're at about 18, 20 people now. We've been around for about a year and a half and we've got our first launch coming up here inside of about, uh, nine, ten months in Q1 of 2027. So that is, you know, our team is laser focused on that, which will demonstrate our capability to go up, um, stay up and then Come back down safely without burning up. So yeah, that's kind of the original founding story for us.

Speaker B: What's it been like hopping into that founder's chair for the first time? You've seen a lot of growing enterprises, you've been early at a lot of these things. What's been, I don't know, what's exceeded your expectations? What's been different than what you expected? Kind of give us a founder's check in here.

Speaker A: Yeah, totally. I mean, there's a whole bunch of stuff. One thing that I would say was most surprising is when you're in engineering for kind of 15 years, like I was, and you hire a lot of engineers, you come up with a process of how to do that, you know, how to hire engineers. And I mean, it even starts with, you know, you're hiring a mechanical engineer. Did they go to school for mechanical engineering? Did they have a job as a mechanical engineer? What was the thing that they built? Did it work when you go to these other roles that you need in a startup? Uh, I found it actually really hard to hire for those roles using kind of the same process of, uh, you know, somebody that works in sales. There's quantitatives that go along with that, but there's a lot more kind of non quantitative parts about sales and, you know, marketing and PR and things like that and everything to kind of business operations of like, how well can you run that process? So, you know, we've gotten pretty good at that. We've got an amazing team that is not part of the, uh, kind of core engineering. But I would say that was definitely like a surprising learning that I had coming from engineering and then having to kind of build the company from scratch. There was, there was all the other functions outside of engineering. And so I'd say that's one, the other one is just kind of the pace at which things move. You know, it is, it's, you know, I get to set that and then kind of set the balance of that. And I have had a lot of kind of roles other than SpaceX, where I always wanted to move much, much faster, but was kind of limited by something outside of my control. When you're in the driver's seat for that, like you're setting that and for sure you can go too fast and you can kind of, you know, we're not necessarily careening off a cliff or whatever, but you have to remain in control of kind of what you're building and balance all of that together with culture and work life, balance of the team and motivation as well as getting things done to kind of the timeline you set. So that's another like really fun challenge that I've really appreciated kind of learning and growing into.

Speaker B: Yeah. So speaking of like, you know, you go early stage, obviously the goal with a lot of these companies is there with every company, is to bend the arc of, bend the arc of history, make an impact in the world, hopefully get a nice financial exit as well. Obviously last few weeks has been a pretty exciting one for SpaceX alums, let alone, you know, the folks inside the company. I'm actually kind of curious, like, give us a window in, if you're willing to the SpaceX community. As this thing went public, I think some were like, will this ever happen? Will Elon ever take, you know, his companies public? Are they always going to stay? What's the last few weeks been like? What's the conversation among the alumni groups? Is everyone lining up to come work with you? Is everyone going to start companies? Are people going to, you know, getting houses in Barbados? Like what, what do you think? What's, what's kind of, what are we going to see now as a result of this?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I would say there's a lot of people that had, uh, you know, worked a long time and really put a lot of blood, sweat and tears and got this financial payoff, which is great, or this access. I, you know, I know some people still inside of SpaceX and it's straight business as usual, right? Like the, the Monday after the ipo, it didn't feel any real different kind of inside the office to a couple people that I talked to. But I think, you know, what we're seeing is, you know, the SpaceX engineers in the startup world, the hard tech, especially in space, you know, are very high value and can get a lot of work done and, and can work really quickly. They're very smart engineers and their motivations, you know, changed and they now care much more, kind of more purely about the mission and kind of what their impact is on that mission rather than kind of that linked to the financial gains that come from joining a, uh, very early stage startup and the risk that goes along with that. And that really just kind of changes the incentives there. And you know, that, that involves for us and for me, you know, more detailed conversations on the mission and the drive and what we're doing, what we're building, what the impact of the world will be on that we're building and how that's kind of, you can have like a, uh, uh, seat kind of in that vehicle or however you would say that. I would also say like among a lot of the alum groups there's a lot of people taking time off and just going sailing, you know, and just going to do whatever they want for a little while. So I think there's going to be this little bit of a delayed response. People and maybe are no longer at SpaceX or have left their current role, are kind of doing whatever they want, but they're not necessarily jumping in to like work really hard on something. I, you know, knowing that the ethos and the style of those people that will come again. But a lot of them are taking breaks. So I think a year, two years from now there's going to be a lot of those folks kind of coming back in way of being very mission driven and doing some really interesting things. In some cases don't even need to raise venture capital and kind of do what they want to do without having to kind of go, you know, take the strings that are attached to that. So yeah, it's definitely an interesting time for us. It really affects like the labor market and kind of hiring, you know, top talent that we work for. Obviously we don't just source purely from SpaceX, but it just has kind of these knockdown effects across the market.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's kind of remarkable actually that you know, venture capital has been a constraint for a lot of these big, you know, capital intensive things and we are uh, literally in a, in a place because of the size of some of these transactions where that may not be possible. It's really cool. So I, a few things that you said that have kind of, that kind of resonate with me is like one, you know, I'm a big believer in balance is a, is a uh, macro question, not a micro question. Your day may not be balanced. You're not every day, every day going to do all of the things and spend the right amount of time at the gym with your kids, you know, taking care of yourself and working, not necessarily gonna happen every day, but if you zoom out over the course of a life, you gotta kind of like take care of each of those different parts. And so if people have been heads down and been grinding for you know, 1, 3, 5, 10, 15 years, taking a year or two and kind of stepping back, totally a reasonable thing to do. Maybe for our venture capital friends who are trying to develop some relationships here, maybe the thing to do is not be sending term sheets right now. Maybe you need to be sending some group escapades out to you know, safaris in Africa or beaches in Greece or something. You know, make, make, make use of the time to kind of help these folks recharge. And who knows what you might see on the other side of that. Because I think you're right. Mission centric people don't walk away from the mission for good. It's a, it's a pause, not, not a break.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. For sure.

Speaker B: So, yeah, very cool, Very cool. So Brian, for, for you guys, as you've thought about, you know, taking the, the product development process that you're undergoing right now at Luxy Terna and bringing that into the world, taking it to market, I would love to hear your thought process on, um, because there's a lot of different ways, you know, even in space, to, to get started, what part of the market you're going to focus on, how you're going to price, you know, or you go to one customer, you go to multiple customers, all that kind of stuff. Would love to hear what you're willing to share about those early conversations and what those early. What, uh, what maybe your first customer touch point actually looked like. How'd that conversation go?

Speaker A: Yeah. Oh man. Like first customer touchpoint? Yeah, I'd have to think about that. That was actually before I found out the company and was talking to one of our current customers, commercial customer, about their specific application in space manufacturing. And I was asking all these kind of questions around the specifics of, of uh, that, you know, manufacturing process and, and they kind of look at me and they're like, you should not care about this at all. Like I, you know, I did, you know, spent seven years or five years or whatever doing PhD on this. And I cannot explain it. I don't know satellites and you need to do that. And I need a partner that can get me up and in space and operating in space and back down. And that is very core to what I am not going to do. And you are not going to learn kind of the intricacies of this in space manufacturing process, you know, kind of spooling up or anything. And so really that was about learning a little bit of kind of matching, you know, the skill sets that can be built in one building versus others. And for sure there's conversations about vertical integration and things like that. But at the beginning of the company, you know, we focus on satellites and operating things in space, many of those that need to come back, but not necessarily all of those. And our customers get to focus on kind of what they do with that space and with that environment in space manufacturing. And it's the case that you know, really like the thermal microgravity and kind of other aspects of it. So that's been one on the uh, on uh, kind of the other side of the table there on the defense applications, you know, we are building a dual use platform that can be used for both of those. You know, we are actually opening up this possibility for, for short term duration missions to actually make sense economically. And that has been kind of an education process of like a uh, thing that people didn't necessarily ask for. There's not a requirements written, there's not an RFP that says we want a short duration mission. But when we start opening up those conversations and saying, you know, what if you could get to space a lot faster and there would be like well yeah, usually if we want to get to space pretty fast, the thing that we're going to do, we're going to be done in kind of a uh, shorter amount of time too. So if you think about the timeline on one with launch in the middle and you've got lead time on one side and kind of mission duration on the other side, when you want a really short read time, whether it's prototyping a develop a testing of a prototype or kind of a mission specific operation for the Department of War, usually when you have a short lead time or you need a short lead time, you have a short duration necessarily mission need. For sure, you leave that satellite up there and it can just kind of sit there and be a target for one of our adversaries to go inspect and check out or whatever like that. But you're kind of done with it and that really makes a lot of sense to match up the fleet operations that we offer with kind of these shorter duration missions kind of sub three year and previously it never made sense to do that. So again the Department of War wasn't asking for it. But the more we have conversations about that, the more they say oh no, this is like a new class of mission architecture that can do new types of missions. And absolutely we are interested in that, but we didn't know that that was possible. And I think that is a really interesting and unique and great place to be as a startup to kind of defining a new market in that sense versus kind of, you know, Department of War said they have a need, nobody's doing it really that well. Uh, you know, we're going to go do it, you know, better, faster, cheaper versus really opening up new capabilities that, that they didn't know were possible but absolutely know that, you know, they Want to do those things?

Speaker B: Yeah, this is kind of that old saying in, in the business development or in fed go to market space, which is like, if you're responding to a proposal and you haven't shaped it well, someone else has.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So you're probably a little bit late. So I think the conversations you're explaining of, hey, you know, how do we help kind of spark curiosity around different kinds of missions, what might be possible makes a lot of sense. Brian, did you, you know, for you, given you were really focused on some hard engineering problems in some of your previous roles, what's this learning the sales process been like? Was that something you were exposed to previously or is that, are you doing this for the first time and kind of learning on the fly here?

Speaker A: Yeah, from like the CEO seat, I'm doing that for the first time. You know, we've been fortunate to hire like a really amazing team, couple people that have a lot of experience in that realm. You know, for sure, it's my job to fill this company with people that are much smarter than me in every respect. Not for me to be the best salesperson, uh, you know, or, or even the best engineer in the room at all. And so again, kind of going back to hiring those right people, finding those right people, convincing them to kind of hop on to this, you know, train that's going through a forest and we get here with the trees every now and then, like convincing them to do that is kind of, you know, primary role there. And, but obviously kind of I have to have a hand in all of those things. So it's been a really good kind of learning process. The, the way I've looked at it is that they're kind of the, the idea of the sales process pipeline for funnel deal stages, things like that, like that, that's actually applicable to kind of a lot of respects. So, you know, sales recruiting, you know, kind of interacting with our partners, whether they're people that we're going to pay or people that are going to kind of pay us on partnerships and things like that, like applying that same process and understanding that process. And it's relatively simple. You can kind of get it on a, on a, on a one pager pretty easily. You know, that really helped to kind of learn that thing once and then be able to apply that to you, uh, know, government, bd, commercial BD recruiting, things like that, and obviously make the tweaks that we need to in between each one and kind of remain flexible in that process between each of those respects.

Speaker B: I think it's a really profound point actually that it's, what you're talking about is sort of a process engineering problem and it's being able to run, not about, hey, we have one superstar who can go do this, but it's not documented, walks away or it falls apart. It's how do I set up kind of the, the architecture to be able to do this repeatedly, to be able to monitor, measure and evaluate the quality of that process and then to be able to plug in not replacement level players and sir, but plug in high quality people with the right incentives to produce the right outcomes. Whether that's sales, I mean recruiting is obviously a sales process and you know, what have you in other, in other functions as well, whether it's product development and procurement or elsewhere. So I really like that framing. I think that's, I think it's a really good way to say people who say, well, I don't have experience, you don't have experience with this function and that function. It's like, well, you can have great experience building processes, setting up incentive structures and then managing to good outcomes and that's actually very transferable. So I uh, like that framing a lot.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think a lot of startups are adverse to process and they're like, we don't want to become a big giant prime. And you know, the way that we look at it is if you can fit it into a couple of bullets or kind of a one pager or something like that, not even a one pager, like a half pager. And it simply gets written down and you think about it just like, how would I teach myself to do this six months from now? Not necessarily saying this is a very rigid process that everybody needs to, to follow, but just kind of getting it down again, just in, in kind of bullet form is enough to say that you don't have to relearn or reteach yourself like that process again. And, and that is the right amount of process. And then you, you add obviously, you know, QMS gets, gets much more, you know, detailed on, on manufacturing and quality and all those kinds of things. And that's a different thing. But to us process is just, you know, make your life inside six months a little bit easier. When you have to do this and you haven't done it in, in six months.

Speaker B: Right? Yeah, it's, it's process like, you know, bureaucracy. It's like bad words that don't have to be bad. It's. We just gotta, we're taking it back. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Process can be liberating if it's not, uh, enslaving, you know. So I think that's, that's right. It gives you confidence that if you follow the cookbook, like, you will get to the right outcome.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay. So, Brian, you're marching towards this big Q1 launch.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Where, where do things stand right now? Behind you on the, on the floor. And then on the customer side, you're, you're sold out. So what, what's, what is the, what are the key things that you gotta, you gotta do between now and Q1?

Speaker A: Yeah. So earlier this year we announced that we sold out our payload capability on, on kind of mass and volume that we could do on this first vehicle. We've got a really great cross section of customers from civil defense, commercial, small companies, big companies, and kind of hardware and software as well. And so that really sets us up well for the kind of future of, you know, like we were talking about earlier, of like, nobody really kind of asked exactly for this. So. So the onus is on us to prove that this is a useful thing and not be kind of a build it and may well come kind of situation. And so having been able to do that across this cross section of customers is extremely helpful validation for us internally that we are building the right thing that matters to these customers. So obviously, you know, kind of building the satellite, the building for rideshare and building for first launch is the thing that me and my team has done multiple times. There's a pretty like, set way to do that, you know, before transporter launches. You know, kind of at the two and a half, three month mark, all of the vibration testing labs in the country get really, really busy because everybody has to do vibe testing. That is kind of the biggest milestone in when you're flying on rideshare, at least. And so we are marching towards vehicle build and, you know, vibration testing and then the other tests that go along with that in terms of, you know, emi t back things like that. So that is a very, you know, fun campaign. It's definitely like an um, an Ironman kind of thing versus just a marathon or a Sprint. And you, you have to kind of plan accordingly to that. But we are kind of deep in that process right now, getting ready for that Q1 launch and then really starting the planning process for, for kind of what comes after that. So the moment that that vehicle comes down and we get hands on the hardware again, what are all the things that we're going to inspect that we're going to learn from? What are our predictions for Everything, you know, we, we have this unique capability both for our customers, but also our internal development is that we are not iterating just based on telemetry. Right. Which is the data that you get back from vehicle that's in space. We will get the telemetry plus we will get the hardware back and then you can disassemble it, you can take it apart and look at everything. You can, you know, do non destructive testing, you can do destructive testing and if you want you can do a whole bunch of test campaigns to kind of see how those things perform. So kind of our eyes next are on that learning process and how that'll impact the design and kind of features or total system architecture of our next generation vehicle.

Speaker B: It's a lot. And yet at the same time it seems like the team has such confidence in the ability to kind of like we talked about, pras does move through. It's like these are known things, it's not unknown kind of variables. Of course there'll be unexpected twists and turns, but it seems always are those

Speaker A: are the fun ones that make it interesting. If it was boring, yeah, I wouldn't be doing this.

Speaker B: You'd be doing something else.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So Brian, when that, when you guys inevitably crush the uh, first launch, what happens then?

Speaker A: Yeah, so like I said, the first immediate thing is kind of inspecting the vehicle and kind of making design changes based on that. And that will feed into the design of uh, our next generation vehicle. And that's really the production workhorse that will build that first. We'll build the fleet, uh, out of that'll be moving satellites up and down on a regular basis. And so you know, then there'll be uh, another set of demonstration. We'll do the first reusability flight or the first reuse flight of that first flight vehicle. We've got plans for a couple more in the works kind of in between those and then we upgrade to the larger next generation vehicle. And then from there it's really getting into fleet operations and scaling. So that's both scaling on the production side as well as on the fleet operations. The refurbishment, the reflight, things like that and really getting the cadence up, you know. And so long term this company looks much closer to a fleet operator than it does a, uh, kind of new vehicle development or, or a new vehicle build kind of company. And much more of our energy will be in kind of optimizing this fleet operations for our customers and what that gives them as opposed to, you know, uh, let's, let's build the new Kind of cool widget that we can add to the satellite to make it, you know, a little bit better. It'll really be about optimizing that fleet.

Speaker B: So lots to, lots to come as you think about. So those are the technical pieces of how do we design the product and then what do we do with it? Give us some sense of like, because, because for those of us, and I put myself in this bucket, I'm not in the space economy, I'm not deep in this market. You're talking about reasonable satellites. What does that market actually look like at any kind of scale? Like, who needs that? And then what's order of magnitude? What are we talking here?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I think like the order of magnitude question is really good one to look at. So just like as a point of comparison, you know, China, Starlink, OneWeb, Kuiper, like kind of all these big constellations and everybody else probably make on the order of like 10,000 satellites this year, you know, and for comparison, we make about 200 million automobiles and we make about 2 billion consumer electronics. Right? So that's a big order magnitude change and like difference in zeros there between what we're doing in the space industry versus what we're doing in other industries. And so, you know, our view is that getting to these much larger massive scales is kind of like, hey, can we get to 200, you know, million cars if they all last 20,000 miles? And as soon as you need new tires or new brakes, the entire vehicle gets, you know, scrapped. And that just like doesn't make sense when you get to these very large scales, uh, of vehicles. And so that really gives us leverage to get more value out of low Earth orbit. Neo Geo, others as well, you know, without as much of a production footprint.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Is not as much of a capex, you know, footprint that's needed to get to those massive scales. And so we really see the kind of step change in the scale that folks are talking about these days in orbital data centers and on orbit servicing and kind of other applications that that really needs, you know, reusability on the satellite level. You know, I don't necessarily believe that every single satellite in the world is going to be, you know, fully reusable. And you know, I definitely think it's going to be a very large portion of them. But I think getting to that scale that we're talking about makes a lot more sense when you don't have to build every single satellite from scratch. Right. Like the lowest cost you can possibly get to at those economies of Scale is the material cost of everything that goes into the satellite. Right. And the only way to get below that is if you uh, are able to reuse it. So and then you kind of talk about the footprint for production and capex and everything goes along with that. But that's really kind of how we see the scale getting to, you know, people say, you know, how many satellites are you going to build? And we say, you know, when. What are you talking about? 20, 30, 2035, 2050. Like those are very different kind of numbers and scale that we will have. And I think where the space industry will be at that time,

Speaker B: It's kind of a, I mean it's a bold vision. What of that. So total market size or total number of satellites unclear when time horizons matter. Do you have a thesis on how much of that market is commercial versus government or is that kind of unclear as well?

Speaker A: I mean, I think. How much of that market is that? Like I've got kind of projections of what I think like we'll do. We'll probably end up generally being kind of a 60, 40 split where 60% is defense. But kind of the, the volume, more volume of satellites and missions ends up being commercial because they're more cost competitive. I mean, I think it really depends on, on if we figure out the. They're not trivial at all, but they're definitely problems with, that can be figured out. On the physics side for orbital data centers, you know, that has this massive implication of scale that will kind of change the space industry as a whole. And so if that's the case and you kind of consider all of that commercial, I think that will kind of dwarf the uh, defense side and, or government and civil side. When you talk about more traditional missions of you know, kind of isr, RF and, and Earth Observation and Communications and things like that, I think it'll probably be kind of similar to the split that we have now, which is kind of on our own, you know, is probably kind of closer to that 6040 split across the market.

Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense. Um, and as you. So, so if you project forward, if we're living in this world where this market is growing, reusable satellites are a thing. I'm always really curious because, you know, we all get the, the Y combinator call from startups. That happens. But, but you're out there building the thing and you see the partners that you have and the partners that you wish you had and you probably have a list of other ideas and companies that if you weren't doing this one you might be doing. And I'm kind of curious for, for kind of Brian's call for, for startups. If like as you look out at the ecosystem and you see who you've got to work with and what's the, still really hard for folks who maybe want to find themselves in this, in the space economy or otherwise. What are some thorny problems or some pinch choke points in the supply chain that you're still dealing with that you wish someone would kind of hop in and solve?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great question. Um, you know, we, you know, most of the problems that we have, we kind of say like, can we, can we fix that ourself? Can we vertically integrate or not? And then we talk about it a lot and if it's not, then it's just kind of an environmental constraint that we have to deal with. And um, kind of don't necessarily worry about that. You know, I'm really excited about in space propulsion and kind of the new technologies that are being developed there. You know, when I talk about a satellite platform being relatively static and the payload being the one that we want to change out on a regular basis, you know, I kind of talk about, you know, solar arrays are going to be the same for the next 15 years, structure is going to be the same, you know, mostly aluminum for the next, you know, whatever, 50 years, you know, flight computers are kind of done, batteries maybe get a little bit efficient, you know, but in space, propulsion is somewhere that we need a lot more capability and there's a lot of kind of new technologies there. So I think there's a, there's, there's definitely a lot of people looking into that. So it's not, you know, it's not absent of good ideas, but we definitely need that world to change. Whether it's, you know, things like, you know, nuclear propulsion and kind of nuclear power in order to, to do kind of better electric propulsion or whether it's, you know, chemical propulsion and things like that or you know, doing the water based fuels and things like that. So that's one that um, I'm probably really excited about. And the other one is kind of the, the rest of the industry that's not satellite hardware and operating satellites themselves. So you know, we rely on ground stations, we rely on networks, and we rely on kind of spectrum bandwidth and things like that. And so there's a lot of pain points that we have there that don't necessarily kill us as a company, like we can figure them out, but there's definitely much more efficient Ways that that can be done as the industry grows. When the industry is smaller and more bespoke, it's not justified to optimize things like kind of new types of ground stations and new operating models and business models there. But as the industry grows as it is right now, I think those will also be really interesting of, of kind of how those take closer shape to industrials and infrastructure here on Earth. I love it.

Speaker B: That's a uh, that's a, that is a guide to future entrepreneurs right there. If you're interested in building this space, I think you'd be wise to heed Brian's perspective. He knows more than most. No, I love it. Brian. As we, as we start to wrap here, I think like if you project forward a year, I'm always curious to kind of create a little time capsule for folks who come on the program and help hold ourselves accountable. Like how do you want to be held held accountable for the next 12 months at uh, Lux Eterna? Uh, you know, by people who maybe haven't invested money in you but are investing emotionally in your journey now?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think we like one of the biggest things is being able to set a target and then be able to achieve that. Right. Like in the space industry it's often how fast can you go and did you make the right scope reductions or requirements reductions in order to do that? And so yeah, but by all means, you know, by this time next year we expect to have, you know, our satellite back and on the ground. First missions are always a nail biter and lots of things that are unrelated, you know, outside of our control can kind of affect that. But we can't lean on that as an excuse. Right. Like by all means, I want to be held accountable to having our first mission complete and successful by this time, you know, next year. And I think the other one is really filling up the manifest for future missions. So we would expect to have multiple missions planned and kind of underway on that build process and be well under underway on understanding kind of what that first flight to second flight reuse, uh, actually really looks like. So that probably won't necessarily be shared and public by this time next year, but I think we will absolutely be kind of on our way there for sure. So yeah, let's check in in a year and see where we're at on that or being held accountable to things like that.

Speaker B: Sounds great. We will, we will hold you to it, Brian. If ah, folks are walking away from this conversation, inspired, excited, maybe want to be a part of what you're building?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Where should they go to learn more? And are you hiring?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So our website's luxaterna.com we've got a little bit more information about kind of what we're building and why and stuff like that. But definitely our careers page has our open roles. You know, we are looking for amazing engineers that can kind of come in and solve the problem in front of them. And so it's not necessarily solving the problem that you did before, but what we look for is kind of high slope. Um, were you able to take on a new problem and solve that problem in a new, quick, efficient way? You know, uh, as opposed to solving it the same way you did before? Right. And so if that excites you, we would love to talk. We've got, I don't know, five or six or seven open roles right now. We will be opening a bunch more a little bit later this year based on some announcements that are coming. And yeah, we would love to have you if you're excited about what we're building.

Speaker B: Amazing. Brian, thanks for joining us. Excited for what you're doing at Lux Eterna. We'll be watching closely for more news and excited for the countdown to the launch. Wish you all the best of luck and hope to have you back on soon. Great.

Speaker A: Thanks a lot. Appreciate the time. It was a great chat.