Los Angeles-based Startup Apex Is Tapping Into the Small Satellite Market by Making Buses for Spacecraft

Speaker A: JPL here in the LA area, for example, does a lot of NASA's work. They bid on it, they know how to win it, etc. They do great work. Recently though, more and more of these private companies have raised their hand and said, hey, NASA needs this done. Um, NASA needs a new rover for the moon. NASA needs this. Instead of going to the traditional defense industrial base, you know, your typical primes, and there's nothing wrong with them, but they now have more competition, right? These new companies are raising their hand and saying we'll go do that. Instead of it being the same traditional players building the rockets. What if a commercial company came about and did that?

Speaker B: This is office hours and um, I'm your host, Spencer Raskoff. I co founded Zillow and ran it for a decade. And in early 2020 I co founded LA, the preeminent news service covering the tech scene in my hometown of Los Angeles. On this show you'll hear from founders, CEOs and thought leaders from around the world with a focus on the innovators in.

Speaker A: Ian Cinnamon is the CEO and co

Speaker B: founder of Apex, the world's first spacecraft manufacturer to uh, offer productized configurable satellite buses.

Speaker A: With a focus on meeting the needs

Speaker B: of the rapidly expanding space industry, Ian leads a team dedicated to providing scalable solutions to both the commercial and government sectors. Prior to his work with Apex, Ian founded synapse, which built AI systems for security and the defense industry, which Ian grew before it was acquired by Palantir. Ian received his BS from MIT and his MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Speaker A: 75 and sunny. My venture fund is an investor in Apex.

Speaker B: Ian, welcome to office hours. Thanks for letting me talk with you here.

Speaker A: Excited to be here, thank you.

Speaker B: So we're recording this today here at Apex Global Headquarters. Why don't you tell listeners where are we? Tell us about this location.

Speaker A: So we are in Culver City, strategically located in la, the center of what we think is the aerospace capital of the world. So even in rush hour traffic, 10 minutes from LAX, which makes it really easy for vendors, customers, visitors, whoever needs to come here to be here. Uh, Space Force headquarters is located 10 minutes away as well. So very conveniently located because we do dual use work.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: We work with both commercial and government sectors.

Speaker B: I don't think listeners even knew there really was a Space Force. I thought that was just something that Trump floated as a joke. I did not know that.

Speaker A: No, it is recently uh, established and uh, Space Force is effectively in charge of uh, all of the space assets that the US government run. So if you think about how do we ensure that we are staying safe from not just threats of, you know, on the ground or physical threats, how are we tracking other countries, satellites, how are we ensuring that our own satellites that we rely on every day, gps, so many other types of sensors that we don't even realize have to do with space are safe, not going to go through cyber attacks. What if something gets shot down? How do we put a new satellite up to replace it? All of those kinds of things the Space Force gets to handle.

Speaker B: I did not know that listeners are going to learn a lot today about space and learn a lot of things we didn't know. Let's just stay for a second on the LA Conversation. It's a layup question, but you teed it up. So why is Los Angeles and Southern California, uh, the nation's headquarters and hotbed for innovation in the space industry?

Speaker A: You know, I would like to say it's all because I grew up in LA and uh, happened to be here and love LA and so happy that it happens to be the headquarters here. But it really comes down to the caliber of the talent and the companies that have been established in this area. So strategically, right, we're very close to Vandenberg Air Force Base where we have a launch facility. So driving distance to a great strategic launch facility means that years and years ago, a lot of these defense companies opened up shop in the LA area to be able to serve those needs. Now, years later, as that's evolved, a lot of the great talent from those companies went out to say, okay, what do I want to go do next? If I'm not working for one of these primes and companies like SpaceX or Relativity Space or Virgin Orbit, and uh, all of these other new space companies started to emerge out of a lot of that great talent pool and stayed in the same ecosystem.

Speaker B: So Apex is a startup that is in the bus manufacturing industry. Describe for listeners what that means.

Speaker A: So to take a step back for a second, if we think about the overall space economy and the space club ecosystem and so on, humans are moving beyond Earth up into space. And I don't just mean us as people like we're going up into space, but we're putting more and more sensors, more and more technology up there, right? To give you some examples, we are able to understand the weather because we have weather satellites in space. We understand how to get from my house over to our office here in Culver City because I plug in the GPS coordinates and there's a satellite Telling me exactly where I am on the road and how to move around. We are able to understand how to communicate with one another. We're able to communicate with one another thanks to companies like SpaceX and their Starlink network, OneWeb, and so many more. So space is critical, and it's only becoming more and more critical over time. Now, to get something up into space, whether it's, again, a human or just some sort of, you know, hardware that you're using for one of the applications I mentioned, you launch it on a rocket, right? Relativity. SpaceX rocket lab. So many companies are doing that. The question then becomes, okay, how do you get that sensor that we just described functioning in space? You put it on the rocket. But if the rocket just, for example, deploys some camera up into the atmosphere, you know, orbiting Earth, that camera needs power. It needs to go be able to know where it is. It needs to be able to point at certain things on Earth that needs to be able to transmit data down. So in order for that camera or that sensor or that human life support module, whatever we call those payloads, for those payloads to actually function in space, you attach it to what's called the satellite bus, right? So if you close your eyes for a second and think about what, you know, you'd imagine a satellite to look like, you probably think of this metal structure, these solar panels, maybe some sort of engine. All of that is actually the bus, not the rest of the satellite like the payload. So you take your payload, like that camera, your sensor, you attach it to the bus, and together you have a functioning satellite, also known as a spacecraft. You put that on the rocket, you launch it up into space, and you're in business, right? You have exactly what you need. So at Apex, we manufacture the bus, which is the core component of that satellite that lets the payload actually survive and thrive in space.

Speaker B: Okay, so let me just make sure I understand. You've got a rocket which is giant. I mean, we've all seen pictures of rockets. And in the nose cone or somewhere in that rocket lives a bus which is about the size of a small refrigerator. And you, uh, guys are manufacturing that. And on that bus is a payload.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: That a customer of Apex builds on their own. That payload might be a satellite, it might be a telescope, it might be a sensor. And when the rocket launches into orbit, the bus detaches from the nose cone and that orbits the sun or the Earth.

Speaker A: The Earth. Earth.

Speaker B: Uh, during that five years, it's the bus that is basically the home for that payload, the Home for that satellite, and it provides power and propulsion and

Speaker A: communications for the payload. Exactly.

Speaker B: When you sat back and decided to start this company, why did you choose the bus manufacturing as the place in this space value chain to address?

Speaker A: It's a great question, so take a step back for a second. And my prior job, I had the opportunity to be effectively working with all of the data from these different satellite space companies, right? So these companies would launch their payload up into space, all the data would come down to Earth, and I would be able to work with all these companies and process a lot of that, uh, data. And in all of my conversations with these different companies that were launching their payloads into space, they would complain constantly about the satellite bus. Right. They would say, we're able to manufacture our payloads really quickly, we're able to sell all the data. But the biggest bottleneck for us is the bus is delayed. The bus didn't work. We recorded this and we got this. There were problems nonstop with the satellite bus. So Max and I, Max is my incredible co founder, the CTO of this. We started talking about this and we said, out of all of the issues, like, it's crazy that dozens of these different companies are all complaining about the exact same thing. So we should dig in there and really understand why and figure out one, what the problem is, and then two, can we go solve that problem? And three, if we can, let's go do it. And that's Apex.

Speaker B: So you touched on a little bit. But if you have any data, it'd be super helpful to explain to listeners why demand for launches and also demand for the buses that go in those launch rockets is exploding.

Speaker A: There's a couple different reasons. So the first one is the cost of launch has dropped significantly and the frequency of launch has increased significantly.

Speaker B: And why is the cost of launch dropped so much?

Speaker A: Thanks to all of these new companies coming online. Space X, you know, uh, Rocket Lab, Relativity, and so many more. It means that instead of, you know, one launch every three months or six months or a year even, there's now more options to get the space when there's more supply in the market. And, you know, demand is rising, but not rising as fast as the supply, the costs are going to come down significantly.

Speaker B: And isn't one of the major innovations that's true driven down the cost of launch with the fact that many of these companies are now using reusable rockets, whereas they used to be single use?

Speaker A: Absolutely. So if we think about the transition over time, it started out there just weren't that many rockets to get you to space. Then there were a lot more, but they were not reusable. Right. They were still single use and that dropped the price quite a bit. And that's where you saw a lot of these new space companies like Planet, uh, Capella and so many more come online. But then in the last few years there's been a even more rapid decrease in cost thanks to the reusability, driving down those price points even more. So it hasn't just been one inflection point, it's been a series of them

Speaker B: coming down more about, uh, how much does it cost to launch payload into space and what did it used to cost? Like what's the price change?

Speaker A: Yeah, so typically it's measured in the space in dollars per kilogram to low Earth orbit. So you asked before, where are you going? Is it around the Earth or the sun or the moon or wherever it may be? Simplest way to measure it is how much to get to 500 km above us right now. So that's what we call low Earth orbit. That used to cost, if we rewind all the way to the beginning of the space program, um, tens of millions of dollars per kilogram. Then as more of these launch vehicles started coming online, but before reusability, we were looking at somewhere around, call it, you know, 10 to $50,000 a kilogram and we are now down to 5 to $6,000 per kilogram.

Speaker B: Okay, so you could see those order

Speaker A: of magnitude decreases over time.

Speaker B: And about how many kil is a satellite?

Speaker A: So it depends, right? You could have a satellite that's literally the size of a little printed circuit board that you know, weighs 0.1 kilograms. Or you could have a satellite literally the size of a like 18 wheeler van. Right. There's a huge range of um, different sizes of satellites.

Speaker B: The price for launch has come way down, way down. That has stimulated a bunch of new demand. Then there are also other demand drivers from the growth of communication and Internet and all sorts of other technologies that are driving more demand than ever for launch. On the uh, supply side, somebody told me that a huge portion of SpaceX's launch capacity is now being used for Starlink, which is their own direct to consumer Internet business. And so that means that the lower price point has stimulated all this demand. But so much the supply is now being taken offline by SpaceX own vertical integration use. That's this huge opportunity for launch businesses and for buses. Can you just elaborate on that? Am I, do I have that right first, Paul?

Speaker A: Spot on. Right, so in general Right now, if you, let's say you want to fly a spacecraft, right? You have a satellite, you want to get that into orbit. If you paid enough money, you could go fly and call it six weeks, right? That's pretty much the time it would take to go, you know, book your own launch with a launch company and if they moved really quickly, six weeks later, if you get that thing in orbit. But that would be paying, call it way more than five or six thousand dollars per kilogram, because you effectively are reprioritizing away from, you know, maybe some Starling launches or something else. There is a huge opportunity to be able to say, let us create more inventory in terms of the launch side of the market. Because right now, if you're not willing to pay a huge premium to accelerate things, and let's say you went to a Space X, for example, and said, I want to ride on your next open slot, the earliest you could fly right now is mid-2025. Keep uh, in mind soccer don't have launches until then. They have launches almost every, like every other day. But the first availability is mid-2025. We need more launch.

Speaker B: And is it one bus per, per launch or there are multiple bus.

Speaker A: So it depends on the size of the bus, right? So if you're launching something, for example, like the James Webb Telescope that took up an entire launch, right, that was just that one telescope because it was humongous.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: It's the size of like a school bus. For example. Our satellites are designed to fit multiple. For example, SpaceX Falcon 9 launch, right? We want our customers not to launch a single satellite, but to be able to launch constellations of satellites, which means that it was designed from the beginning to be able to pack as many of them as possible in that launch vehicle. So to give you a, uh, just very tactical example, like right now we're able to fit a couple dozen in a single launch of our size. But SpaceX, when they're figuring out, okay, great, like who's going to fit on this rocket versus that one, they have all different sizes and shapes of satellites that are being put into the fairing or the nose cone of the rocket to fly. So they might have for example, 20, uh, what you call cubesats, like the size of a loaf of bread. They might have 20 more that are double that size and then they might have something like 10 that are in our size class, which is the size of, call it a, uh, somewhere between a mini fridge and a full size refrigerator.

Speaker B: So just so I understand the value chain of uh, work where customers fit in is Apex and other bus manufacturers that you compete with. Are they booking the time on the launch rockets and then you're turning around and selling it to customers? Or the customers are booking the time on the launch rockets and then you're providing the bus to them for that.

Speaker A: So usually the way that it works is a customer will say, hey, I have a launch secured. Uh, the customer will then say, I'm building my payload. And they'll say the last part of the equation that's missing is the bus, right? So they'll take our bus, integrate their payload, attach that to the launch vehicle, and then their business. But of course, there are some customers who say, will you help us secure a launch, given the relationships we have with SpaceX or Rocket Lab or Relativity and so on.

Speaker B: Like getting at, uh, a hot reservation at a cool restaurant.

Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. And I will say on that note, right, it's crazy. There are some companies that are buying up the slots and then reselling them because they know it's just like, hey, I have this reservation.

Speaker B: It's like concert tickets.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: What are the downsides of this? You say constellations of satellites. I immediately go to issues of space junk. Is there all sorts of stuff up there that we don't really want there? How about, can you no longer enjoy stars at night?

Speaker A: Yes. I think you actually hit on the two major downsides, right? One is it's starting to get a little bit crowded up there. And then the second is, okay, great, like, you know, astronomers on Earth are trying to understand the galaxy without having to send something up in space. If we're now cluttering, you know, the view of the sky with satellites all the time, how do we take that into account? So there are two things. So let's first talk about just it getting pretty crowded up in low Earth orbit. So the first thing to keep in mind is these satellites are typically that are flying in low Earth orbit in our size class, so called the size of a mini fridge. Now there's tens of thousands up there flying around right now. But if you think of tens of thousands, that's probably far less than the number of cars that are going on the 405, you know, between the valley and the west side in LA on a given day on the freeway. So I just keep that in mind that while there are a lot of satellites flying around up there, they're very spread out. There's a lot of space in space. Now, that doesn't mean there are not problems and that we shouldn't be concerned about it. The other major issue that we have besides just a high volume of satellites going up, is there are some near peer adversaries that have tried what they call ASATs, right. Which are anti near peer adversaries. So countries that we hope we would not have to enter into war with but are, you know, call it not on the best terms with right rivals.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Russia, China, some others who have recently done what they call ASATs, right, which are anti satellite, um, missiles, effectively. So they've shot missiles and blown up their own satellite, not someone else's. But the problem is when you have an explosion in space like that, a single satellite can create tens of thousands of pieces of debris. And each of these pieces of debris, think of them as like one little centimeter or uh, like a ball bearing flying around at thousands of miles per hour could hit another satellite, could hit the International Space Station. And those are very hard to track. It's very hard to tell where there is are. So it's a very scary situation to be in once you have all that debris and you can't track it.

Speaker B: By the way, is was the plot point in For All Mankind, which is a great TV show basically. I don't want to ruin it for listeners that haven't seen it, but let's just say this issue of space junk was a real issue in that serious issue.

Speaker A: So I will say at apex, the way that we think about that is we want to be responsible citizens of space because if we are not, not only is it bad for humanity, but frankly it's bad for us because suddenly you can't put anything up in space because it's too crowded and everything will get hit and bad things will happen. So right now the FCC has rules and regulations in place and they're the governing body. By the way, if you put something up in space and it communicates down to Earth, everything goes through the US

Speaker B: FCC from every country or just so

Speaker A: if you want to have your satellite talk to a ground station in the US it goes through the fcc. If it doesn't touch the US you don't have to go through the fcc. So if you're a foreign country launching a satellite but wanted to communicate to a ground station in the US you have to go through fcc. But you could be a US Company and say, I'm only going to communicate with ground stations in Europe and avoid the fcc.

Speaker B: So there's no international organization that tracks what's up there.

Speaker A: So there's a lot of companies that track what's up There. Space Force. One of the major things the Space Force does is track everything that's up there. We call that space domain awareness. Right. Like what's up there. But the important thing for Apex and what we are doing here that is so critical is even though the FCC mandates that once a satellite is no longer needed, you want to effectively have it remove itself by burning up in the atmosphere within five years. Right. You don't want that thing lingering up there for a decade. You want to remove that as quickly as possible. In every satellite we design and sell, we are preemptively ensuring that not only do we meet those FCC regulations, but we do our best to far exceed them. To make sure we're not adding more to this kind of junk up there in space. It's very important for us to minimize the amount that's actually up there.

Speaker B: Your bus orbits the Earth for five years, and at the end of five years, you pointed to Earth, you do a little propulsion, and so now it starts to come closer to Earth and then gravity pulls it to Earth and it burns up as it enters our atmosphere. And then that poses no risk to people on Earth.

Speaker A: No risk to people on Earth. Right. So we ensure that everything we build fully burns up in the atmosphere. Not only that, like, there's tremendous number of studies that we go through to ensure that. Like, what materials are we putting on the bus? Are we sure everything will burn up in the atmosphere? And what doesn't run the risk of hitting anybody, etc.

Speaker B: That, uh, cause any environmental issues around the ozone or anything related to climate change? No.

Speaker A: So these are all incredibly small relative to, you know, kind of the, the impacts that you're talking about. So these are very, very, very minimal impacts on the atmosphere in that sense.

Speaker B: You know, when I was a kid, all of the innovation in this space seemed to be driven by NASA.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Today it mostly seems to be driven by the private sector. Like what happened over the last 25 years that, uh, changed all that? When was that, that, that transition happened?

Speaker A: It's a great question. I will say NASA's still, in our minds, a huge contributor to the. NASA will have certain initiatives and certain projects, and NASA will go bid those out and say, who wants to go do it? So JPL here in the LA area, for example, does a lot of NASA's work. They bid on it, they know how to win it, et cetera. They do great work. Recently though, more and more of these private companies have raised their hand and said, hey, NASA needs this done. Um, NASA needs a new rover for the moon, NASA needs this. Instead of going to the traditional defense industrial base, you know, your typical primes, and there's nothing wrong with them, but they now want competition, right? These new companies are raising their hand and saying, we'll go do that. And this is really all pioneered by SpaceX coming online and saying, hey, instead of it being the same traditional players building the rockets, what if a commercial company came about and did that? And the government's response, and I give a lot of credit to, you know, NASA and our government for this, didn't say, oh, no, you know, you're not how we're used to doing it. They said, great, we'll embrace that. We'll go fly in your rockets all the time. This sounds wonderful. More capacity, it's better for everybody.

Speaker B: When was that, that that transition happened?

Speaker A: So it really was somewhere around 2015 or so when SpaceX really started flying a lot more regularly. I believe the first in flight anomaly of Falcon 9 was around 2015. And that's when, for example, my co founder Max, joined SpaceX and really helped them redesign certain elements to ensure that much higher reliability. And that high reliability is something that, uh, for example, NASA and the government cares a lot about.

Speaker B: Why is Mars so important?

Speaker A: I would argue that it's not just Mars that's important, but in general, interplanetary travel is very important. And I think it's important for a couple reasons. So the first one is we as a society, right now, it feels like, at least I'm curious to get your take. But to my take, it feels like there's just constant tension and conflict and fighting and having something to unite humanity. Not just the us, not just a couple countries, but all of humankind towards and say, we have a bigger goal that we're aiming for here. Let's have the world come together. Incredibly important. And there's nothing more motivating and inspirational than saying, what if we could have humans living on a planet that's not just our own? I think there's something incredibly special about that. So that's the first one. The second issue really comes down to resources. And on Earth, we have a limited number of resources. And frankly, as a species, we haven't done the best job of saying, let's be smart about our resource usage and make sure that we're being responsible. So unfortunately, that leads us to this situation of saying, okay, great, what are the other planets? What are the other areas where we could, uh, habitate and, you know, create a society on. And Mars is one of those. So I Think it goes far beyond Mars, right? I think even seeing rocket lab, uh, send missions to Venus. Obviously Elon and SpaceX are very focused on Mars. Those are all amazing, but I think it's not one or the other. It's all of them are uh, exciting endeavors. We should be pushing towards Mars.

Speaker B: Takes about six months for us to get to. Is that right?

Speaker A: I don't remember the exact numbers. And it sounds about right, something like that.

Speaker B: I don't think humans have been on

Speaker A: the moon since the 60s, been a long time.

Speaker B: What happened to the moon? Why is the moon so, uh, so out of favor?

Speaker A: I mean, no, it's a great question. So I will say it's very expensive to get to the moon or to Mars, right? No matter where you want to go, Even getting up to low Earth orbit or GEO orbit, any of those, it's not cheap, right? It costs a good amount of money to get all the way up there. NASA did a great job stimulating all of this industry to get us to the moon. Right. It was one of the major missions that our country in the world is really united on saying, I mean, for all mankind goes into this. It created a little bit of competition, but it also united all these different countries together. And Mars similarly, very expensive, hard to get to, etc. So it takes some companies to say, hey, look, it may not be profitable in the beginning to get to Mars and to do this, but we are going to figure out ways to fund ourselves to get there because that is what we need to do as a species.

Speaker B: Let me push back a little bit on why space exploration is important. So I heard two explanations. One is, let's call it the unify the world argument, which, you know, we could do that with the Olympics, we can do that with the World Cup. Are there other ways any less expensive ways that we could all try to get behind something, rally behind it as a species? The other is resources. I mean it's like, okay, let's go find another planet to go and take all their stuff because we've already screwed up our own so much. What do you say to the argument that there are so many pressing issues here on Earth that we have to address and if we focus our uh, resources and intellect and capital towards those problems, that would be time and money better spent than all this stuff in space.

Speaker A: The way that I at least think about this, it's not. The right answer here is not we should ignore all the problems at home and go focus only on space. And another wrong answer is let's ignore space and focus everything on home. It's important to look at both. You cannot ignore either one. Both are incredibly important. And what I would argue is on the quest to get to being able to launch more into space, do more in space, and then move beyond Earth to other planets, there's been so much innovation that has occurred that has made the world better here on Earth. So just some very tactical examples, right? All of the satellites that our buses enable and other satellite buses enable allow us to better map and understand climate change. And if we can't measure it, we can't fix it because we don't know if what we're doing is actually working. But if we had never invested beyond, for example, you know, the Moon program decades ago, and we just said, oh, space doesn't matter, let's focus on Earth, we wouldn't have the ability to measure our ozone lane or understand the change in climate change. Almost all of the data that comes from measuring climate change is done from in space. The second thing I would argue is, for example, let's take Mars, because you just asked about it, right? Like SpaceX is very focused on, hey, how do we get humans to inhabit Mars? That's expensive to do. And one of the major ways they are able to fund that is by creating starlink. Starlink has given more connectivity to people. Not, you know, look, we're here in Los Angeles. Everyone here in LA can go to Spectrum or Comcast or one of the providers and get Internet. That's not a problem. But what about all of those people who are living more on the edge or in countries where frankly it doesn't have what the US has and it doesn't have all of this infrastructure in place. Anybody around the world now can be connected to a high bandwidth connection. They could go watch educational videos on YouTube, they could go learn to program, they could do all of these things. And that's only because SpaceX had a focus on getting to Mars. So I'd argue the downstream and side effects of it are, well, uh, worth the fact that all of those resources are not dedicated 100% to Earth, but the byproducts help Earth so much that we should not change course.

Speaker B: And also Velcro and astronaut ice cream

Speaker A: and all those other absolutely can't go wrong.

Speaker B: Last question on Mars, and I don't mean to make you have to be an apologist for all space exploration, but you know, in our lifetime, will there be people living on Mars?

Speaker A: Mars, Will they be permanently on Mars? Maybe, maybe not.

Speaker B: Maybe, maybe not.

Speaker A: Yes. Uh, don't at least get there. Yes, 100%. There's enough volunteers to take even a one way trip that people will get to Mars in, in our lifetime. But.

Speaker B: But they'll be 612 months at a time. And you think that time range is about 10 years out or early 2000-30s?

Speaker A: Optimistically, I would love to see it that soon. I think it's going to be longer. I think space is incredibly difficult. Space is incredibly, incredibly hard. And there's a number of great companies that are focused on moving as quickly as possible in order to go there. But being able to even get, for example to Mars is a huge feat. Being able to get to Mars with humans, where now the safety measures are orders of magnitude higher, is even harder. I think it's going to be a few decades, but I do think it'll be in our lifetime.

Speaker B: If you're interested in this topic listeners, I read a great book called the Case for Mars which was super interesting. If you don't want to read the whole thing and ask ChatGPT to summarize it for you and then discuss it with GPT. And you've done a great job of articulating the importance of space exploration and that book particularly lays out the case for Mars, as the title suggests. Okay, let's bring it back to APAC before we wrap up. You're one of the hottest LA startups at the early stage focused on space. What is the pitch to VCs or to investors or to employees for the company? Just describe the company succinctly and give you your best pitch for it.

Speaker A: Space is the future of society, of all of humankind, of us as a species. And right now the largest bottleneck in the space industry is the satellite bus, which is the core component of satellites. We believe in a future where there will be millions of spacecraft lying around, not just the Earth, but moon, Mars, deep space and so on. And right now the state of the art to manufacture a spacecraft is handmade, artisanal, new non recurring engineering. Every single time that does not scale, it scales to a couple thousand. Spacecraft doesn't scale to millions. So we were the first company to productize the satellite bus, which again the core component of a satellite and be able to manufacture them at scale to meet the ever growing demand for more and more assets in space.

Speaker B: Awesome.

Speaker A: Uh, how'd I do you in?

Speaker B: Well, I already am in disclosure. I'm an investor and a happy investor. Why is your team the right team to go after this opportunity?

Speaker A: We really believe that we have the only team that is capable of being able to produce these productized satellite buses at scale. And that really is a core differentiator. Right. We're not building a new one every time. It's a set product line and we just roll them off the assembly line. And what that requires is a mix of three different, very distinct skill sets. So the first is traditional aerospace expertise. Reliability and quality is the most important thing we have as a company. So for example, our lead thermal Engineer, Chuck, spent 25 years at JPL as one of their top thermal engineers. Our director of spacecraft, Thomas, he was at the Boeing subsidiary Millennium, where he worked on clean sheet designs for numerous spacecraft before coming to us. The second core skill is that new space experience. You know, our employees will think about things a little differently and push the limits, but you need to marry that with attention of the traditional aerospace expertise to get to the right outcome. You don't want just one or the other. So you have some great employees who come from Relativity and rocket lab and SpaceX and others. But then finally, the secret sauce of everything that we do is the mass manufacturing mindset. And that's where my co founder, Max comes in. Right. Max spent his the bulk of his career at SpaceX, where he was given a certain sub assembly or component and said, hey, we just made one of these. Go figure out how to make one a month or one a week or one a day, depending on the part. And having that mindset of, uh, how do we not just build one, but how do we build these at scale? How do we design it for manufacturing? How do we bring in that software expertise to be able to make sure that as we swap things out, we don't need to reprogram it. That is the secret sauce. So we are very lucky to have a team that brings together those three skill sets to allow us to actually move quickly.

Speaker B: Ian, last question. You're a repeat founder. What have you learned from your prior entrepreneurial experience that has informed how you approach the creation of this company?

Speaker A: There's a tremendous amount that I learned, but I'll drill it down into a couple of things because I could be here all day talking to you about lessons learned. I would say the most important thing is you don't want to build a nice to have, you want to build a need to have. Right? You want to build something where the customers are saying, my business is failing because I cannot get this part, or as a country, we were at risk because we do not have the ability to produce what you guys are making. So you want something where it's a non optional question of whether or not they need what you are building. The second thing is you want to be able to build a product that fundamentally has great margins and is a real business. There's amazing amount of R and D and kind of more science project ideas that are out there that are the perfect project for research lab or academia. And we're so lucky that we have people focused on those when it comes to this kind of company. And in general for entrepreneurs who might be listening, building something with real unit economics that is able to be self sustaining if it wants to be. And that's not our goal. Right. We're going to go turn this into $100 billion company. But knowing that we have the ability to make money on every sale is very different than saying oh my God, we need to go rely on more venture funding to stay afloat and stay alive and so on.

Speaker B: Awesome. Congrats on what you've achieved so far. When is first flight?

Speaker A: So first flight is January 2024. That is coming up very, very quickly. So uh, we uh, could excited and I'm sure you saw earlier we have that countdown, uh, timer, uh, looming over all of our desks to remind us on a every second basis that uh, literally time is of the essence.

Speaker B: Well, congrats and good luck. I'll be rooting for you.

Speaker A: Thank you so much.

Speaker B: That's it for this episode of Office Hours. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm your host, Spencer Rascoff.

Speaker A: If you could leave a rating or

Speaker B: review for the podcast, I'd greatly appreciate it. And always feel free to tweet at me on Twitter. That's at at Spencer Rascoff. You can hear more Office Hours by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was edited by George Macharko, the podcast editor.

Speaker A: See you next time and thanks for watching.