From Living Room Satellite to Democratizing Space: Raunak Kumar Mantri’s Take Me to Space Journey

Speaker A: I mean, it's not often that you get to talk to a founder of a company called Take Me to Space.

Speaker B: As humans, we are meant to become interplanetary species, right? We can't be restricted to a micro.in the entire universe.

Speaker A: You know, when you talk about space, I mean, the first thing that comes to anyone's mind is Elon Musk and colonizing Mars. According to him, we will probably get there by 2030.

Speaker B: There is India trying to go to Venus. NASA trying to focus a lot on Moon. There's a new era we live in where at least there's a push to look and go beyond Earth, which last up in 1960s.

Speaker A: So will we get to Mars by 2030? Why do you think there was a lull? You know, I mean, I think you mentioned the 60s, right? I mean we had Rakesh Sharma, we had of course Neil Armstrong and so on. After that there was a huge lull. I mean, man, from everything I see of Mars, it doesn't look as alluring. So how are we going to get from those red dust bowls to something resembling, let's say, Bangalore, Right?

Speaker B: So Mars is a great testing ground. Moon is a great testing ground from where the actual journey beyond Saba Situ will begin.

Speaker A: I mean, it's crazy, right? Come to think of it, it's like a reset on Civilization 101.

Speaker B: India's space policy is one of the best space policies in the world. Indian space policy today allows you to build a space product, sell it to any customer, no government approval required.

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Startup Operator podcast. I'm Roshan Kariyappa. On this episode we speak with Raunak Kumar Samanthre, the founder of Take Me to Space. Raunak has had a successful exit. Earlier he was the co founder of Now Floats, which was acquired by Reliance. Uh, and since he has been working on this idea of democratizing access to space to everyone. Uh, in this conversation I speak to Ronak about the industry at large, about some of the foundational shifts that are underway in the space domain, um, what it will take to commercialize ideas here. And uh, really if you or I were to go about building in the space, uh, what should we do? How do we start? So this was a fun conversation. Raunak is a fascinating person. You can see his passion. Uh, and um, you know, we go down many different rabbit holes really. Ah, interesting ones at that. I hope you like this conversation. If you do, don't forget to subscribe to this channel and also share this content with your Friends and perhaps family. So without much ado, here is Ranak of Take Me to Space. Hey Ronak, welcome to the Startup Operator podcast. Thank you so much for making the time.

Speaker B: Thank you so much Roshan, uh, for inviting me.

Speaker A: I mean it's not often that you get to talk to a founder of a company called Take Me to Space, right? So I mean, I'm really looking forward to uh, this conversation. Uh, you know, when you talk about space, I mean the first thing that comes to anyone's mind is Elon Musk and colonizing Mars. Uh, he's been talking about it from I think as early as 2007, 2008. Uh, and according to him we will probably get there by 2030. Uh, but I guess you are way more qualified to comment on this than any of us. So will we get to Mars by 2030?

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. I think that's definitely going to happen. Right. Um, the point is, are we going to take six months? Are we going to take 60 days? Like uh, if you look at Russia recently built this plasma engine which can cut short into 60 days travel time. Right? So as humans, see, as humans, we are meant to become interplanetary species, right. We can't be restricted to a micro.in the entire universe. Uh, it's just not who we are. Right. We are explorers, we got to explore the technology. Thing is, can we make it more efficient? Can we go beyond the limitation of uh, the speed that which can travel as of now. Right. And Musk is of course like if you look at Elon, Musk is for sure building that massive rocket which is a starship, which makes it more affordable and at least feasible to get there. Uh, there is India trying to go to Venus, uh, NASA trying to focus a lot on moon. So I think already there's a new era we live in where at least there's a push to look and go beyond Earth, which last happened in 1960s. I'm glad that has happened. So yeah, the uh, point is how far can we go? And that's what makes me more very excited, uh, about humans where we can reach. Voyager has already crossed our solar system. Isn't it the Voyager 1, Voyager 2.

Speaker A: Why do you think there was a lull? You know, I mean I think you mentioned the 60s, right? I mean we had Rakesh Sharma, we had of course Neil Armstrong and so on. Right. And uh, after that there was a huge lull. I mean everything we heard about space was some dude going into the space station and like, you know, whatever, some arcane orbit Experiments being conducted. I mean again people from the industry might pan me in the comments but that's basically what a layman m heard about up until let's say the last 10 or 12 years. Whether it is Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Richard Branson and so on. We have a new thrust into space right now. So why the lull and what happened differently in the last 10, 15 years?

Speaker B: Sure. See if you look at uh, back in the day when it started it was literally a space war between the US and the USSR and um, it's. And space again historically speaking has always been a government thing right. Uh now taking a step back. So the government used to spend ton of money right on this. And then there are a lot of questions around what's the benefit of it beyond the geopolitical affair of it, what's benefit of just doing the space exploration right now if you look at NASA's organization or ISO's organization, they kept attempting space but it was not human travel anymore. It was more of deep space exploration. Uh, they would create crazy technologies, right? Like from air foil to that whole, the spawns that can absorb stuff. So yeah, crazy technologies came out of it but the need for humans sort of lulled down because there wasn't, there was no need to invest money to send people out there. Now if you look at um, there's a fundamental shift that has happened right now. Automobile industry, the defense industry has, has been growing fundamentally uh, huge. Right? And guess what, um, today the electronic components, the computers, the computing power which is needed to solve the algorithms to ensure the safety of a human to go to space, that has fundamentally changed and it has become more feasible and viable to reattempt what we attempted in 1960s. So it is more of the automobile and the industrial revolution. The IOT thing, the industrial agent. Every country administration, Right, right. Every country today has access to the, the uh, electronic components, the industrial components, the precision manufacturing uh, thing right, which was back in the day which is very very rare right now. Like look at India, right? We have with the drdos of the world and stuff. Every, I mean wherever the DRDO is present you have vendor network who are, who are very well versed with precision manufacturing. So building asset which is reliable and safe is no more that of a technical challenge. It's all about hey, can you now take what is available in the industry and build on top of it. Earlier NASA had to build everything from scratch. Today there's already a level uh playing field for anybody to come in and build on Top of it. And I think that's what Musk sort of leveraged on. Um, like for the example, the first problem statement he gave to his team when space was started, build me the cheapest engine. Right? And that was a brief, I want to make this affordable. Uh, because uh, NASA back in the day, uh, rocket now cost a billion dollar. It used to cost a million dollars per kilogram to send anything up there. So he said, hey, build me the cheapest engine. And he literally didn't innovate in the engine cycle or the way the engine worked. It was just a extremely, uh, I mean very well known engine technology which they built out in house completely, of course. Right. And that's how the Falcon 1 sort of worked. It was more of a build me the thing that is affordable and I can use it again and again, of course. And the reusability came much later. But that was a brief, right?

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean if I understand correctly, in the 60s, I think it was a binary question whether we can do it or not. And we did it, right. And then after that, I mean it was more of like, is it worth it?

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: I mean, do we need to actually send someone up there? Uh, and so all of this foundational work happened in the 30 or 40 years and finally in the last 10, 15 years, what we are seeing is a leveraging of that foundational tech, um, and efficiencies of uh, new tech and so on and so forth that makes it feasible for us to go do new things there up there.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Um, coming back to Mars, man, from everything I see of Mars, it doesn't look as alluring. You know, I understand, I get it, that we have to be interplanetary, right. To hedge on humanity as such. Uh, and man's ambition is always in infinite, right? It's always exploring. That's the core of us. But when I look at pictures of those red dust bowls as such, I mean it looks far, far, far from anything like remotely like, um, inhabitable, you know, by humans. So how are we going to get from those red dust bowls to something resembling, let's say Bangalore or Delhi, for instance?

Speaker B: Okay. I think the fact that we say colonization, uh, that's a very misunderstood term according to me, because it's not that we're going to build cities and countries on Mars, but I think it's a stepping stone. Right. Eventually as humans we want to go to a space, ah, object or a planet which is habitable. Right. Humans don't want to look like jokers. Right. We don't want to be all the time wearing the spacesuit and walking around. It's very restrictive.

Speaker A: We are not, I mean we don't even want to wear those N95 masks and walk around spot on or those

Speaker B: crazy big, uh, hollow lens and keep walking around. There are so many this VR glasses that have failed. Right. So we just, we want to always be natural in a natural habitat and explorer, right. I think Mars or moon are stepping stone towards it. Like if as humans we can't even go to a neighboring space object, what makes us believe that we can actually go to an exoplanet? If you look at end of the day, uh, I think my hypothesis is that it's all about going beyond our solar system, finding that another exoplanet. But that requires us to first ensure that we are able to reach within our solar system itself. So it's not that a crazy number of humans are going to go and settle there, but it'll be the pioneers who went beyond Earth and sort of had a first definition of establishment. Right. When humans go there, it's not just the technology, uh, or the environment. It's also the psychology of humans.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Imagine you send uh, 20 people who are supposed to live on Mars. Imagine the psychological effect, it will happen on your brain, okay. Initially it'll be very happy and blah, blah, blah, eventually it's going to get to you. So how is the human dynamics going to play out there? What were the rules and regulations you need to form? Because the jurisdiction is back on Earth. You can't sue somebody and get him back to Earth. How will the healthcare system work? How will the agriculture, the food, the biology system work? So these are the testing grounds for us. So Mars is a great testing ground. Moon is a great testing ground from where the actual journey beyond our solar system will begin.

Speaker A: I mean it's crazy, right? Come to think of it, it's like a reset on civilization 101, right? And then getting back to if we had to do this all over again, how would we do it? How would we do it? With the knowledge of everything that we've learned over the last like, you know, thousands of years.

Speaker B: You're uh, right, it started with the caveman. M nobody's a caveman anymore. Yeah, but we all started living caveman because that sort of gave a definition of a shelter.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Now this is the shelter, like a concrete building, right? So yeah. So maybe when we go to Mars we'll have this dome shaped. About the videos we see those cave looking structures which give you the protection, but that is not going to be.

Speaker A: Right. So Mars is kind of like a stepping stone on the onward space exploration. And also perhaps, I mean we could, you know, extract a few resources and maybe understand the uh, nature of physics and so on, so forth to a greater extent perhaps. Right.

Speaker B: The uh, human psychology, how do humans

Speaker A: behave all of those things. Right. Now all of this sounds like a billionaire's hobby. Okay. Uh, in the sense that yes, uh, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk are, you know, Richard Branson can, um, uh, sort of indulge in this because they have all of those billions or tens of billions lying around and they can put it to use in these ways. Right. But when you think about actual governments that have to decide between, let's say spending on infrastructure or healthcare or some space exploration and so on, people often talk about how this is not productive and this could be wasteful and especially in a country like India, right, Where you know, per capita is nearing 3,000 now, um, is it really worth it? Right. So what would you say to that?

Speaker B: I disagree to the fact that it's a billionaire's dream. Uh, but what I think it's a mad person's dream, right? Because you have to be mad enough to attempt. It doesn't matter whether you have billion dollars or billion rupees or 10 rupees. Right. End of the day, what did Alexander have to go and freaking go out in the oceans, which I had no clue where he's going towards. Right. That mad personality is important more than the money in the bank, right? A lot of people are money in the bank. They don't pursue wild dreams. It's about the person who is mad enough to believe in a dream like that and go pursue it. And it's a step by step journey. Again, I'll take the example. SpaceX, uh, SpaceX did not start with Starship the new. I mean this guy knew that I don't have money to Starship though. He was talking about going to Mars right from the beginning. He did Falcon 1, which is just get a rocket to orbit, start putting satellites in orbit. Second step, make the booster come back so it's reusability. And Today he does 114 launches a year. And now insane, right?

Speaker A: I mean just maybe 10 years back, how many launches did we used to have a year? Right. A few tens, maybe not even that. Right. All put together and now we're talking about 114 launches.

Speaker B: SpaceX does 114, India, we do four. Yeah, right, exactly. Look at the disparity, right? Look at uh, the SpaceX valuation versus the second biggest Rocket Labs valuation. Right? Like, it's a huge display because again, it was a mad person's dream. And it's always that few outliers that when they decide to do something, they fund m. Yeah, they become billionaires. That's a different story. But they are the ones who become the torch bearers. And of course they get the benefit of it, right out of the 10, one person gets the benefit of. But then 10 people attempt it, right?

Speaker A: Yeah, but I mean, of course I was trying to draw a caricature there of, you know, uh, all of these folks, um, and their space endeavors. But come to think of it, right, I mean, 2007, 2008, Musk was not, I don't think he was even a billionaire at that time. Right. I mean, yeah, he was probably like a centi millionaire.

Speaker B: My best guess, $100 million he had made out of PayPal.

Speaker A: And, um, he was starting SpaceX and Tesla and all of those things at that time. Uh, so, yeah, I mean your thesis kind of checks out, right? I mean it's a mad person's ambition and dream to go beyond what is convention, per se, right. Now, how did you find your way into all of this? So if you can talk about your journey to this crazy mad person's dream.

Speaker B: Oh, wow. Um, yeah, it's funny story, right? So literally started with my surgery, right? Um, due to Covid November 2020, uh, at now for adjustment and exit. Great experience at Reliance. Um, I had gone through an ACL surgery. I was just chilling on the bed, had nothing to with do. Right. Um, and uh, there's a friend of mine who runs Healthy Family called Tushar. Uh, and he's like, you know, space Mukuch Karthi. So we keep catching up and we are very passionate about space as a domain because it's at least personally speaking on behalf of him as well. It's like the ultimate human imagination, right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Space is something.

Speaker A: It's the last frontier in some sense.

Speaker B: It's something we have never touched. We've never seen what it is. We have seen pictures and we have used some maths to figure it out. But it's all an imagination of your brain and the tools you have developed. Right? Right. It's not tangible, like what we call tangible. It's not a tangible thing. You can't touch and feel space. Uh, so, yeah, so he said space, right? And uh, I started looking at it. Now, luckily I'm, uh, an engineer. I had made some money with an Exit. And, uh, then I said, okay, let's look at space, right? Um, by the way, it was not just space, it was four topics, right? If I may say so, it was a space. It was crispr, it was quantum, it was humanoids.

Speaker A: Okay? So it was not like space or sass.

Speaker B: No, see, okay, Just on that because it brought up sass. So I have been a coder since age 10 and that's the only thing I know in life, right? How to write code. For me, humans are code. I think the world is. We'll get into that. The world is a simulation theory. We parked the topic. But yeah, for me, I've been a coder throughout. And, uh, one thing was clear, that I'm not going to do a software startup in India anymore, right? Because I've done that. There's no point repeating what you scratch the ditch, basically. Yeah. Uh, and hence I want to do something fundamentally different, right? So fundamentally different. But it had to be code because of passion. But then I had a bias of a coder, right? So, yeah, so I wanted to look at crispr, because CRISPR is like writing code in the human body. Like, it's literally bio programming, uh, quantum. It's. It's so crazy, right, that Alan Turing sort of defined what algorithm is what can be computed, what cannot be computed. Quantum computing is a new definition. We don't even know what can be computed, what cannot be computed, right. The definition of algorithms don't exist. Huge fundamental research. But then it's still in the research days. There's no, like a, ah, low IQ person like me cannot get into quantum. So I, like, backed out of it. Then there comes humanoids, obviously fan of robotics. Like, seeing a machine that runs on code walk in front of you is like a crazy thing to do, right? Humanoids. I was like, yeah, but too much robotics, so much assessor. Uh, space was fascinating, right? Because one data point, exactly what you was talking about that back in the day, NASA was charging a million dollars per kilogram. Suddenly with Falcon, when it came to $45,000 per kilogram with Falcon 9 during COVID right, it was $6,600 per kilogram. And that was a fundamental shift. I was like, dude, if something that takes an object to space is becoming that affordable, they exist because of an object which has to go to space. So there has to be a disruption in the. What these objects, when they go up there, what they can do, right? Then I started looking at the satellite industry, right? Uh, and to my surprise, it was Earth observation, where you have Cameras in the sky, eyes in the sky. Then you had the communication, which is like mouth in the sky or ears in the sky. And then you have other experimental payloads, right? And Musk again started the Internet thing, right? And that's what the entire industry is 100% this. Um, I was like, okay, it can't be, uh, has to be on this. And guess what? I looked at things like, okay, what if you could do plastic dumping in space? Today we dump in the interesting in countries which are. You get the point, right? We pay a dollar per ton. Uh, or a dollar package is. Pardon my exact, uh, maths. But you pay a dollar for that. So that means tomorrow, if the launch cost to space can be brought down that much. The point is you can put plastic which can outgas, which can convert to molecules and disseminate. Right. In such a large environment. Uh, of course, don't catch me on the fact that hey, you're spreading pollution in space, but then it's a large environment.

Speaker A: We'll worry about it later.

Speaker B: Later. So yeah, I went through all this crazy set of ideas like hey, what if launch costs are coming down? What new thing can you build or use case can you solve out of this, uh, satellite as an object, right? And typically as an engineer, I'm a very hands on engineer. I love uh, building things or solving things and especially which is challenging, right? So yeah, as an engineer I thought, okay, let me build a satellite as a. Right. So at the home, literally I started buying stuff as in 3D printer and stuff like that. Started building like baby satellites. Um, so yes, literally my home today, uh, is that's where the satellite is built. I have a clean room in my house. That's where the satellite assembly happens, right? So uh, yeah, that's what the journey. I started working on a satellite, um, and rest was this history, right? Like, and I never had an idea what I'm going to do. I was very clear that it has to be satellite. Something crazy has to be there. But let me attempt, let me get started and we'll figure it out. And it's always been like that. Like when I left Microsoft, when I did now offloads, I just left without an idea, right? I had 13 ideas I noted down. So yeah, satellite was a thing. And um, over the few years, um, as I was building the satellite, what it looked to me was like it is a computer, right? Like end of the day it's an electronic object.

Speaker A: Okay, so this sounds like an amazing story except for the fact that you have absolutely no background in space, right? Uh, uh, not even in hard tech, I would say, right. I mean, it's not like you did robotics or hardware or something of that sort. Now this seems like a crazy thing for someone to just think of doing, you know, uh, I'm sure that people listening to this would have an idea or two about their favorite app lens, which could be a little better. But obviously it's a daunting task to even go in that direction as well, because one thinks that you need to be fairly qualified to tinker with this kind of stuff. And space is at least a couple of orders of magnitude away from common, uh, conception in that sense. Yeah. Having no background as such. Right. How did it help you? How did it hurt you?

Speaker B: I don't mean it made it super fun. I'm still, uh, every day when I go to office, it's super fun because half the things I have no clue about, honestly. So it is super fun. Uh, and life is about finding the unknown, isn't it? Like, there's no point dealing with the known. It's not fun at all. So life is all about attempting the unknown. Attempting the fact that I love that statement when somebody says, uh. So, yeah, so I think, see, when I was growing up, of course I wanted to become an astronaut and stuff like that, right? Space is. Who would say no to space? But what happens is that somehow again, education system, I owe everything. But then our education system ensures, especially exams, man, the ranking system. We were first Ayah classmate, second Ayah classmate and all that, right? Um, it sort of ensures that we lose our dreams and we sort of. I don't know which path we go to that destroyed it. But yes. Um, uh, when I was looking at it, I was like, okay, let's. Let's build it and let's see what happens. Worst case, what happened? I lose all my money. So the fact that I had the cushion, I have made some little bit of money. And then I thought, okay, let's build it and let's see what comes out of it. It's sheer thing of exploration. I was saying, let's figure it out, may we'll figure something else. So yeah, so that is how we attempted it. What really worked for me is the fact that I'm not from the space background. And that really helped, trust me. Um, I remember, uh, it's usually what I do, right? I would, um, whenever I'm looking at a new topic, I would go to Google Scholar, type the topic, uh, search for papers, and by year, like, what are the latest? What are People thinking. So Google Scholar is the best way for me to even understand what's happening in the industry. Right. Uh, because articles and all that, especially the poster papers, the two page papers, I don't have patience to read.

Speaker A: But I'm curious, right? I mean let's say you want to build a satellite. Is it as simple as just going to ChatGPT or like one of ChatGPT

Speaker B: didn't exist in 2020.

Speaker A: Oh yeah, correct. Um, so how do you go about it?

Speaker B: The first paper, how do you start

Speaker A: like learning in the first place?

Speaker B: Good. The first paper that I still remember, it was on inter satellite communication. I was like Whoa. But 80% of it didn't make sense to me. But then I got some idea, right? So you have to start somewhere. So exactly what I told you. I go to Google Scholar, type the topic satellites and then you reverse by the uh, descending order of dates and then whatever the paper comes out first, you click on it, reading it just for the heck of it, right. 90% of words you do not know, you pick up word, go back to Google Scholar and search again. It's an iterative process. You just keep at it. It's like being blindly in love with the idea, right? Being blindly in love, right. You don't need a reason to do it, you're just stupid enough to just keep doing it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, so yeah, I think. And that is how I select ideas, right. So when I say I had four ideas, I would read up on all four of them. What happens is the other three fizzled out somewhere down the line. Like I told you, quantum computing, I somewhere honestly felt that m, this is too much of a thing. I can't do this. But space sort of continued. It just rabbit hole, it just got in and in and in and in. So yeah, it started with inter satellite communication. Then I've read about cameras and earth and uh, how subsystems work. How does a computing work? Right. While I was reading this, most of the paper if you look at it was all around electronics. I'm not from electronics, I'm a computer science guy.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And yeah, so that seemed fun uh, because I was a computer person and satellite looked to me like a computer. And hence the idea of take me to space emerged which is what we tend to do like building data centers and the compute infrastructure in orbit. Right. So yeah, uh, it just serendipity, I don't know what to call it but uh, you just discover. You, you discover what you want to do in life types.

Speaker A: Amazing. I mean this is like um, Some of my favorite stories are when someone who is totally, you know, like an outsider into a space goes into it with complete first principles, thinking. Right. I mean I think in many ways Musk was that. Right. With electric cars and with all of this rocketry as well. Right. I mean it's not like the guy had a background in that. So it can be like a super powerful thing. Ah. As well for sure. Right. I mean not always like a handicap in some sense. Uh, okay, you said, you know, you want to build a satellite satellite at home, right. Could you talk us through the process? Like how did you um, um, how did you begin and like where, what was the status of it? Like after six months, after a year and so on.

Speaker B: Wow. Um, a year down the line we got selected by cubesat, ah, Developer Workshop where NASA was also presenting.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: So yeah, that CDW Conference 2021. And that was an opening like okay, we are on to something. Okay, we're building something. Just select work. NASA conference. Right. That was mind blowing. The cubesat Developer workshop is like one of the, it's by Cal Poly. Cal Poly sort of is the university which defined what cubesats define the protocol of cubesats.

Speaker A: You'll have to explain what cubesats.

Speaker B: So if you look at satellites, when we say satellites, right. People imagine over a room size object, massive objects and stuff. But guess what? A satellite is as big as this, right. It's a 10 centimeter square and a height of 10 centimeters. Literally size of this. This is called A1U. Right. So for the first time, what I realized is in the satellite world there has standardization that has come in. Right. Uh, a protocol has been built around what should the form factor be. Right. Uh, and uh, the, the hardware inside it also follows certain standards. The way you design. Okay, that, that. See the moment an industry goes to standardization, it's like creating a level playing field. Now you could innovate on top of it, right? When there's no standardization, you run helter skelter. You don't know which is the right answer, which is the wrong answer. So that really helped. And hence I thought, okay, nanosatellite is a segment that I have to focus on. I was not trying to build a room size satellite anymore. So that sort of helped me uh, get started. I discovered the whole cubesat world was uh, the nanosatellite world started building a nanosatellite basic 1U satellite. Now while building like it had solar panels, it had a Raspberry PI based obc, it had a uh, very basic uh, Power system. So yeah, it's more of getting those thing from Amazon. That time I did not even know Robo exists. Uh, so it was all Amazon pay whatever I could find on robotics, gather them and build electronic object. I was literally in my head building an electronic object and I would just visualize in my head that you know, okay, the satellite's going to go up, it's open wings and do this. That it was all like imagination. But then, yeah, it was very baby satellite that I built. Um, now during that journey, interesting thing happened that I wanted to get access to a satellite myself.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Right. Uh, because I come from a computer science background. I uh, remember the first time I wrote that hello World code and the computer said hello World. I was like whoa, this is so cool.

Speaker A: Mind blowing.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Like for the first time I'm uh, a very introvert guy. Right. Like for the first time I could tell something and he would behave back the same exactly what I told the person, the machine to behave. Right. That changed my life. And I fell in love with computers forever after that. Look, back in the day, logo was a programming language. With the Turtle you say FD20, it goes up RT90 commands. RT90 turns right. So yeah, we won the contest. Uh, we got selected in 2021. Now it's taking a step back. Right. Uh, one thing that interesting happened while building this thing was that I wanted to get us access to a satellite myself. Right. Now when I was growing up, if you look at uh, we used to go to the lab and wrote that hello World program. And the computer says hello to you. Right. That is so cool with the logos and stuff. Now in this industry, I'm an engineer who knows how to write code. I know I want to click a picture, just a picture, right. I want to write a code in my satellite and which can make click picture of Aurora or something. Right. But guess what? You just cannot.

Speaker A: Why?

Speaker B: Because the government controls it. Um, any satellite operator is such a harsher, it's such a restricted asset. A satellite is either owned by the large startups or large companies, um, or the government. You get access to the data captured by the satellite. You never really get access to the satellite unless you're a super high acuperson in astrophysics department where you get access to the jwst, the James Webb Space Telescope or you write a proposal to NASA, hey, this is the unique idea I have and allow me to launch a small satellite or a payload through rocket. And that is my problem, right? Why should a person be qualified enough to access an to access an object. That is not how industry should be. When we were growing up today we literally carry a computer in our hand. That did not happen because somebody had an interview to give us access to a computer today. Look at the SaaS industry, look at Ecom, everything. Like look at the quick commerce industry. Right? Who expected computer science, sorry, computers would enable us to order things in 10 minutes. But today, because you let uh, adit, uh, and young children, sorry, I'm old. That shows my age. Young kids, they could imagine this because nobody said no for them to access to technology. And that was a fundamental issue with the space industry, especially satellites people. You have to be smart enough, you have to give an exam or you have to be part of the NASA to get access to a satellite.

Speaker A: That kind of makes sense. I mean because if you, if you had to ask for permissions every time you want to ship an app, however shitty that is. I mean.

Speaker B: Or to write an app.

Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, that's crazy, right? So, so is the idea would take me to space. Kind of like democratizing access for everyone. Right?

Speaker B: That's where the name was born. The whole thing was born. We will build an asset that everybody should have access to. No questions asked, no exams to be given, no proposals to be written. You want to do the same exact thing? Please do the same exact thing.

Speaker A: So how are you doing that?

Speaker B: So the first app. Again, I'm a coder, so first app we build a school Orbit View. Uh, which is what we sort of presented a paper in the conference that hey, we should have an app. Um, and we should have a satellite with a basic camera. Back in the day my idea was to put an audio cam, you uh, know, a 64 megapixel audio cam with like a 300 meter per pixel resolution, uh, audiocam and just build an app where people could say hey, uh, the satellite is currently passing through Indian Ocean. Click a picture for me. And if you click a picture and give it to you, that's what we started. Like hey, this is how we can get people excited about space today. Of course we use gps. Of course we use Internet satellite, um, a uh, lot of technology. Right. But you really don't access a satellite in the use case. Satellite doesn't exist. It's the output of a satellite that we experience. We don't experience a satellite. And that is why the whole name, I think, uh, Neeraj, who was my co founder of. He was very crucial. He is RCXO Chief Experience Officer. So we're just talking, we're chilling and Says, hey, you want to take all ideas to space, why don't you call it take me to space? And then I First Googled, okay, is tm2takemetospace.com is available. That's what the name was literally born. Because the point was never build up. We want to build products that is open for all, accessible to all.

Speaker A: Right, so what you're saying is the previous paradigm was I define the scope of the outcome that I want, right? Let's say like satellite imaging of some, I don't know, some crop, some cluster, whatever it is, uh, and uh, the process of the satellite and all of that stuff is not in my control. Right now I am making use of literally an infrastructure in space to do anything I want. Basically true.

Speaker B: That's our aim. Like why can't a child from Kerala or from Antarctica use a satellite to click pictures of Aurora live Aurora.

Speaker A: Won't it throw up all kinds of questions on privacy and security and stuff like that?

Speaker B: Absolutely. Right, right. So and that's, that comes first. Like safety is the first thing. And if you look at, that's why our first set of satellites that are going up, they don't have propulsion, uh, they do not have camera. That hinders privacy rules of any country globally. Right. So we operate at a 8 meter per pixel and it doesn't propulsion. What meat means is that let's say somebody hacks our satellite or has mal intent to sort of misuse the satellite. They hack through the software and the firewalls. Um, and security is a myth. Even if they do that because they don't have propulsion, you can't reprogram a set and go and hit somebody else. Even if you get access to the camera, unauthorized access to the camera, you can't click a picture that is hindering privacy of anybody. Right. So we are ensuring that safety is first because accessibility comes with affordability and some accountability. Right. You can't let random stuff happen just because you made things accessible. Right. So we want to be ensure that we are very accountable on what access do we give. But it has to be affordable, it should be fun, it should be affordable and it should be no questions asked.

Speaker A: So what is the typical use case that you're expecting for this?

Speaker B: Interesting. Um, so if you look at how we started was the two apps we had called Orbit View and Orbit Lab. Uh, Orbit View is to have fun. It's just if you're a photography enthusiast, you hear that, hey, there's a storm happening today. You get weather reports. Right? But what if you want to Click the eye of the storm from a particular angle. You could use a satellite to do that. What if there's a volcano, uh, eruption happening and you want to capture that? So I, uh, build this app and I posted on Reddit. It went viral. Right. And I got crazy number of use cases, right from the fact that, which is of course not possible. There's a guy who lives in Mount Sierra Mountain and he said, uh, in the website had a form, hey, if you had access to Orbit View, what would you click? What's the first, uh, 70% people, guess what, Want to click picture of their home. Yeah, that's the first thing I thought of exactly. They want to click the picture of Hyderabad. You want to click picture of Bangalore. And that's the first thing. And the interesting use case as well. Uh, this guy writes, every time I go out, I don't know how much snow is there on the road because Google Earth doesn't show you the real time data. I want to use the SAT before I go. I want to use a satellite to just give picture of the road and so that I can see what is the status of the snow cover on the road. That was so cool. There is a, uh, I, uh, remember an astronomy club teacher who signed up. Uh, he said, I want, when I'm teaching children about astronomy, I want people to click pictures of Earth so that after my session, people actually use a satellite to click picture of their personal pictures of Earth. Right. There's a school, uh, teacher from India who signed up. Uh, she said, I want to uh, gather all my children in the, that, what do you call the open area. And I want to ask the seller to come and click a picture from the top.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: That's privacy. I mean that research we can't click. But then that's the imagination we want to unlock. Right. And that was like, okay, we are onto something.

Speaker A: So is the idea then that you'll have a hoard of satellites orbiting the Earth? Right. And people will have access to their position, uh, and so on. Um, and basically they can, they can key in whatever they want, basically.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So let's say satellite number one to one is, uh, you know. Right. It's going to be above Bangalore at a certain point in the day. Uh, so can you click a picture of, you know, lat long, whatever that is.

Speaker B: You should join me as a product manager.

Speaker A: This is like a wide canvas. So this is just like totally exactly the point for imagination.

Speaker B: That's the point behind Orbit View and Orbit Lab is for people like me who love to write code and for example, I would like to have fun. Uh, uh, imagine you have written an AI model to a new AI model to look at the cloud patterns and predict weather. Today you cannot prove it. All you have to do is use a simulation like Ansys or Matlab and stuff like that on our satellite. You can. Orbit Lab enables a user to upload, uh, inferencing model. Not like, uh, you can't do AI training on it, but you can upload an inferencing, uh, model, uh, you can train it with ground data.

Speaker A: Sorry, you'll have to back up and explain what Orbit Lab does.

Speaker B: So, yeah, so Orbit View is for space, uh, photography enthusiasts. Orbit Lab is for coders who are space enthusiasts. Now there can be a GIS engineer, it can be a researcher, it can be uh, a company which uses satellite data for some use case for change detection, crop detection, oil spread detection. Today they all have to pay money to buy the satellite images and they pay X dollars per square kilometers depending on the kind of data they do. And then they have the inferencing pipeline on the ground. Orbit Lab enables you to upload your application directly onto our satellite. And you configure that, hey, when the satellite is passing over Indian Ocean, wake up. Application, capture this, run the compute and download only the inferences, right? Because see, there are enough Earth association companies for you to go download the data, right? We want you to run your application on a satellite itself.

Speaker A: Okay, that's amazing. Like we start out with, you're giving access to the infrastructure basically, right? So uh, I don't have to define like a very tight bounded scope outcome, et cetera. Uh, I basically have those, uh, you know, uh, um, I basically have those servers running and I can choose to fire the application at a particular point in time and run the application and get data real time from that.

Speaker B: Absolutely. It's a programmable satellite. It is your satellite for that 90 minutes that you buy the time for. It's a programmable satellite. Now from a technology point of view, programmable satellite existed ages before ISRO satellite. They constantly keep reprogramming. But guess who reprograms it? The ISRO scientists. M Our aim is that every user should be able to reprogram a satellite. Why do you have to be a scientist?

Speaker A: What is the typical reaction from the folks within the industry, like when you talk to your ISRO guys, or let's say the NASA guys and so on? I mean, what do they think about all this?

Speaker B: So before I met Inspace, right, Uh, I Met a lot of ISRO guys, ISRO people over LinkedIn. I would write them the first thing, ask what's your background? Uh, how big is your team? I was like one member team, like don't do this. Not happening. I met a lot of founders and I love that feedback. Um, I love the fact that when you pitch initial days, when you pitch a rider to 10 people, nine people say no. I love it because that is the idea you have to go after. There's no point going after idea where everybody says, oh yes, you should do it, that's the right thing to do. Then you're not.

Speaker A: That's uh, like the contrary advice that people have gotten about startups, uh, you know, in general. But yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

Speaker B: Sorry, I'm. Yeah, I'm weird that way. Like now floats. I'll give you a story. Right when we were building now floats, I remember meeting people, they said, hey, location based maps. India is a roll down your window country. When you get one of your directions, you roll down, even ask for directions. Google, nobody's going to use Google Maps. That's kind of feedback we used to get.

Speaker A: This was back in 2011.

Speaker B: 2011, yeah. Uh, then the smartphone pendation is very minimal. Uh, iPhone had just happened. Uh, everybody was on feature phones, hence Video Smith. So yeah, long story short, so, uh, here I saw the same phenomena and I loved it. Yes, this is, I'm definitely trying to do something which is not so common, right? M. But I have a mad belief that yeah, this is how the world should be, right? And it's good that people don't like it today, but maybe when you give that experience to people, they would love it, right? Uh, who liked it? When I would ask children, they would say, oh, I can control a satellite, I can click picture. They used to be so excited. I was like, yeah, this is it. If the.

Speaker A: They don't have that baggage, right? I mean, you and I have that baggage. I mean you less so now. Uh, but um, all of us have a certain expectation of uh, uh, you know, how things are.

Speaker B: How things are, right.

Speaker A: Um, in fact, I mean, weirdly on a tangent, right? I mean this is why they say you need to have kids. Because through the kids you see a world in a new light, right? Because you've had this food, you've seen this table, you've seen the, the ocean. I mean you've seen the hills and you've seen the vehicles and whatnot. But a kid who's seeing all of these for the first time gets you to Sort of secondhand experience. All of these things, right? Revisit all of these things from first principles in that sense. Um, yeah. Um, so who is the adult supervision at Take uh, me to space? I mean do you have like someone who is like hey, how do we make money in uh, you know, next quarter? Right. So what are the targets and uh, where is the pipeline and who is our ideal customer Persona? Is someone asking you those questions?

Speaker B: Not the ideal customer Persona? Rest of the things I ask.

Speaker A: So you switch hats? Basically, yeah.

Speaker B: So because I have been entrepreneurs since 2011, running a startup is a sine wave and there are times when you go down when you don't have money. It's always like money in the bank is super important. Right. I was very clear that whatever you do has to make money. Right. You can't just do a frivolous thing and it doesn't work. Right. And making money is interesting. Right. End of the day you're convincing somebody to part way with the hard earned money. And this learning came from now floats. I'll tell you how. Um, we used to, we were discussing the pricing. We saw a very interesting behavior. Whenever we gave a product for free, the usage used to drop after 15 days. Whenever we took money for our product back in the day it was just 2000 rupees per year subscription. Okay?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: This usage was very high and that was a big insight because if somebody's parting ways with their capital, they hold you accountable for the product they have sold. Right. So I rather take that account and build a great product for my users rather than just being a by the way thing. Right. Like install, uh, that is not scalable. So I was very clear that whatever we do has to make money. And I had a, I remember my first Excel sheet was called hello World Excel. Um, and yeah it had so many business models and so many ways of making money.

Speaker A: Come to think of it right now, floats was, I mean I won't say equally but no less a crazy idea than take me to space at that time. Right. Because I mean, ah, now you can think about small and medium businesses interacting with the Internet countless different ways but in 2010, 2011 with Internet penetration, what it was at that point of time, uh, right. I think people had wholly resigned to the fact that you know, maybe about 50 to 70 million users is what we'll have. Right. And everyone was going after those people, uh, right. To say that okay, you can primarily like interact by sms, right. And have a Internet uh, uh, presence and transact.

Speaker B: That was at the face of It But I'll tell you what, challenging the status quo, right. Everybody said our model is not going to work because we expected our uh, customers in our floats. We expect our customers to create updates, business updates every day. Right, Right, we. Guess who was our competition? Google was our competition. They had this program back in the day called Gibo Get India Business Online. Uh, which sort of shut down in a year.

Speaker A: Oh yeah, that was a major thrust as well. Right.

Speaker B: I remember that 2000 rupees they had go at events going.

Speaker A: They had uh, all these uh, um, ads as well, you know. Yeah. Address at small business.

Speaker B: And guess what? There it was this website with somebody who can't design it. This website never got updated right on our platform because we're SMS based and we used to keep nudging our users. Hey, what's new in your business? What we actually created a new behavior around. And sorry, I might say this, uh, if you look at Google, my business later came at gmb. Right. They have an updates tab.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Uh so yeah, anyway, let's not take the credit for it but yeah. So we were the first one to say that our website is not about one time content. Our website should be updated every single day. Uh the milestone we achieved was four updates per user per week. Uh, that much we could achieve. Behind the scene. Watch Noob. Everybody thought we were a website making company. But behind the scene the magic algorithm was. How do you take that area of updates? Because uh, our first customer was Zeba Woodworks. A woodworks guy, like literally Temple Banatha Hai and all that stuff. Uh, uh. And when you used to look at the website, uh, the content, he was sms. Right. It all made sense. I was like dude, if you can just extract.

Speaker A: So he's basically updating his product catalog.

Speaker B: No, he's just talking about today I made a uh, wooden temple. Sorry a temple out of wood. Today I made a chair out of wood. It's just text sms. There's no, there's no product, there's no definition of it. It's just like a micro blogging or writing a tweet on sms. Right. So that is what. Because we made the user. I mean we didn't make it. SMS is simple because SMS is so simple to use. People have very interesting content about the business and what's new in your business. And when as humans we used to read it, we said okay dude, this is actually the product catalogue is hidden in the text. What the business intends to is also in the text. What we did is wrote a very back in the day NLP was not sexy. Now the NLP is back, Natural language processing is back. But we wrote a very basic NLP natural language processing algorithm. It's called a POS tag part of parts of speech, staggering parts of speech, verb hair, noun hair and all that. So we had a POS tagger which would take a statement, do a POS tagging, extract the nouns, extract the pronouns. Those are the topics that the person talks about. And then those things became a click key keyword. When you click on it, that leads to another page which aggregates all other content around the same topic. Um, so the more content you create, the website structure keeps evolving. Now M that is very relevant for the crawler. So when a Google crawler is coming and crawling to a site, it's like, oh wow, this is like a zomato where information is categorized, the search quiz and all that, right? So they start ranking higher in Google search.

Speaker A: Amazing.

Speaker B: M like we had things. I never knew. What is a pattu saree by the way? We used to look at the search queries. I was like, uh, pattu sarees in Hyderabad, vanilla ice cream in Gachiboli, uh, in Pune. Nokia was a customer as well. Nokia phone on credit card emi we never knew back in the day EMI was not that common on credit card, right? Like oh wow, people want to buy credit card EMI phone back in the day. So yeah, it was super fun seeing the kind of long tail search queries that used to land on our merchant and that is where the ROI came from. We uh, did not see anybody coming and transacting on our website. India is a call me country, right? Every consumer thinks, I found the merchant, I'll call the person and then figure out a good discount. So our entire um, what do you call, renewal happened based on the number of calls generated. And yeah, that's history. But yeah, that was a behavior we created which nobody believed in.

Speaker A: Yeah. Truly amazing. Seriously. Uh, yeah, uh, you know, coming back from the tangent right now, this whole commercial aspect of space and um, so on, the industry is kind of evolving right now. Uh, and as you said, I mean the per kg cost of sending things up in space has reduced and so it opens up all these kind of use cases. You mentioned some of these satellite imaging, for instance. Um, like what is a core use case? Like how do you think about commercialization for Take Me to Space? And also what are the VCAs or investors backing you for? Or what are you pitching to investors?

Speaker B: Uh, I'll tell you my short term revenue, um, uh, goals Right. So uh, our pitch is very clear on Orbit Lab. That's a good thing. Um, that hey, if you are a customer which is looking for a change detection, which is looking for object um detection like or what has changed or how many objects are there in that your area of interest, write an AI model because everybody wants to do AI these days. Write an AI model, upload the AI model to satellite and only down the inferences do not have. And what happens because it's a satellite uh, passing through that entities that uh, let's say India. Right. It's 3,000 kilometers.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: You do not have to capture like thousand pictures. Uh, you just scan once, pass it through the onboard compute and only download the inference. You want the change that you figured. So that is what attracts our customers because that makes it very affordable. Today our pricing is like instead of charging for square kilometer, we charge for $2 per minute. That means India, which is 3,000 kilometers from north to south. A satellite takes eight minutes. So that means you can run an inferencing model for $16.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: Instead of paying for imagine the number of pictures you have to click for India.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: For due to change detection that fundamentally reduces affordable for people. Right, right. So we are sort of trying to create a ah SaaS like you call it satellite as a service software. I come from the cloud background, so I think time is done. Where we treat satellite as an on premise asset or it's my asset and I'll serve you like that.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: You build an open infrastructure, give access to everybody and we charge for the time. Neither we own the data nor we own the application. What we own is the infrastructure. What we own is an infrastructure that is safe, that is sandbox. And of course it has to work Touchwood. Uh, that works. And yeah, you use it for whatever you want. It's your satellite.

Speaker A: Amazing. Like an AWS for it is an AWS first space.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Okay, so how do you find the first 10 customers and any anecdotes that we can talk about? Oh wow.

Speaker B: That's what the geeks are. Yeah, it was uh, uh, and guess what, like uh, there was a university in Malaysia who signed up. Uh, those are engineering there with some astronomy club they had. Second uh, one was a group of students from Chandigarh. Right. Uh, and all these uh, users they flew in MOITD which was a tech demonstration of India's first AI in space. There like this class and that's excitement excites me the most. Uh Class 9 students from Chandigarh. They wrote a code, they uploaded to the satellite and we had convinced Istro to do it. Right after it goes up, uh, a user's code is going to get uploaded to the satellite and users own it. We don't own it. We don't even know what the code does. What that code did was to capture just how much UV is hitting that lower earth orbit. And they would of course put a uh, uh, uh, sensor on the ground to see how much UV actually receiving. Right. That means you know how much UV is getting filtered by a ozone layer.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Of course you can. But experimentally finding it out for a class nine is uh, yeah, fantastic. I don't have words to describe it. That is what got uh, excited and it was all Reddit.

Speaker A: I come back to the VC question because in anything hard tech, uh, core engineering as such, I mean we feel like the amount of investments, uh, upfront, uh, is usually a lot. Physical things, you're not talking about bits and bytes so to speak. Uh, and also the payoff as well takes a long time. You have to a use case. You're literally building the industry together with your fellow peers and whatnot. Uh, and so for it to develop to a point where it is as Conventional as another SaaS company that runs and has money coming in every month, it takes a long time. So how do you get the VCs to sort of back you?

Speaker B: You game them, isn't it, uh, you know how the ecosystem works. So I literally attempt to game it. Officially, sorry, unofficially I've been working on this for the last four years. Officially I'm not even 12 months old. Like the company got registered in June 2024. But um, I was very clear that I had some money. I would put all into it, build that. Because first thing was it has to be affordable and accessible. Right. For it to be affordable. I did the maths. If I buy satellite components from outside, it's going to like cause me crazy money. So before even going to the venture, like the whole money ecosystem, we had built all the satellite subsystems. We did one space mission with ISRO and then we went in the market to raise capital. So the first space mission was rscm which was a, which I uh, became Material science guy for one year, uh, where we developed a new coating because uh, we wanted to carry terrestrial compute. Right. So there's a lot of radiation. You would have heard about solar flares and stuff like that? Uh, I think so. People use something called radiation, uh, like electronics chips which can withstand radiation. But that makes it very costly because it is only useful in space or a nuclear reactor. So my thing was if I use that, the cost is going to go up. I have to use normal data center grid or industrial grid chips. Now how do you protect it? So what we did is instead of buying chips uh, that are um, radiation tolerant or radiation hardened, we developed a coating which you put around the satellite and that ensures that the radiation doesn't come in. So that was RACM radiation shielding module. And a um. Lot of learning, man. Like that was mentioned in space. So I think so. Cool. Uh, like um, I didn't know what

Speaker A: space is, what exactly.

Speaker B: It's like a arm, um, by the government of India, like part of isro.

Speaker A: Is that uh, the Indian Space uh, Association or something of that sort?

Speaker B: No, in space is a ARM which is a liaison between ISRO and the industry.

Speaker A: Oh, okay. I was just going to ask you. How has the uh, how have the ISRO folks helped you and so on.

Speaker B: That's what in the beginning not. But when I. Because in the beginning you are talking to any store guy that comes across. Right. So. And you will get a mix of feedback versus oh wow, a cool idea. You should definitely pursue it in space because of the industry facing this. Everybody is so cool. Right. Like I remember Nikhil. Right. Like uh, first, uh, payload, we are building RSCM. Right. I had no clue what is RS 485. There's a protocol we use to communicate between the rocket and. I had no clue. This guy literally made m us sit down, helped us understand how to program it on STM 32. Uh, they are so. Because they maybe meet nobodies like us regularly. And he's so passionate about teaching this uh, guy the kill.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So yeah, uh, that sort of helped us learn and grab faster. And of course uh, we haven't always been open about what we build. Right. So um, uh, and that helped us get trust from the scientists. Okay. These guys are talking some sense and we are trying to Cool. So yeah, Inspace is very crucial for our for success. Uh, and even for the moitd, they have been very crucial. Um, so yeah, we went into them back to the uh, whole investor story. We sort of did our space mission, we built all the satellite hardware and then went to the market to raise capital. So that sort of, I mean still I got a lot of flack. Um, like crazy amount of stories, but we'll park that aside. Uh, got a lot of flack. But then yeah, there were people who also believed in it. People who at least maybe not believe, but at least they said, hey, this looks something worth it. Let's attempt. Yeah, so yeah, got some hacking.

Speaker A: No, I do feel like, um, you know, a lot of the capital which conventionally went into software or like some kind of consumer tech is going to go into, you know, core engineering, hard tech and so on. Because those are the new frontiers for us, right? I mean, um, so we've been focused on having deep ah, tech startups over the last like three months. I would, I would say we've had triple S, we've had Ethereal, we've had uh, um, who else? Uh, Sandler J Aerospace and so on. And these are phenomenal stories, you know. And uh, there is a lot of optimism as well that, you know, the, the industry is finally starting to look at hard tech a little more kindly. Uh, right. From an investor lens. Uh, uh, more so. So what is NEP next on the horizon for you? I mean, so you've proven the use case, right? You've developed the tech, um, you have capital. What is next on the horizon for

Speaker B: you to prove our GTM strategy. Right. Like end of the day, the Orbit Lab and Orbit, they have to make money for us, right? So we have proven the product, we make revenue by selling the hardware because as a company we have built everything that a satellite needs except for a solar cell camera and propulsion. Right. Everything is built in house. So there are other people who buy our satellite hardware. So that's how we make money out of it. Uh, but yeah, the capital we raise is primarily to now prove out the product experience that what we promised to our users through Orbit Lab, it actually works. B people who, uh, users who use Orbit Lab, they also come back and use it again. The renewal. Because I do not know any renewal user engagement metrics yet. I have to discover that what is user metrics looks like for a product like Orbit Lab and Orbit Vue. Right. So I think that is what we are trying to discover now and of course make money out of it as well. Um, because that is important. People have to pay for them to take it seriously. But it will be $2 per minute which is very affordable. So the aim is to ensure that the GTM is proven and we discover our gtm.

Speaker A: You mentioned it's a very regulated industry as well, right. I mean there's a lot of interacting with the government or the policymakers and so on. I'm sure that some of these industry bodies make it slightly easier on that front. But what has your experience been like in know, interacting with these regulators and also if you had a wish list of Two or three things that you know, the government or these pol policy makers can do magically that would make it, you know, order of magnitude easier for you to operate. What would those be?

Speaker B: I think the government has done this job, right? Like India Space policy is one of the best space policies in the world, right? Uh, like and when it came out in 2020, uh, it's a two page document, right? And you had business edits written on it. Like you could literally pick the document and you had abcd, uh, that these are the ideas that. Like an example that showcase, right? You could literally build a business around each of the ideas. Indian Space policy today allows you to build a space product, sell it to any customer. No government approval required. Amazing. Indian space policy allows you to hire any people from any country, uh, uh, which even US Space policy doesn't. And uh, yeah, you can make them part of your organization. So access to talent, access to market, access to. No authorization required. The only place you require authorization is when you are trying to. When you are a satellite operator yourself. I'm an Indian company, Indian satellite in orbit. That's the only place we require authorization. And that's where I think uh, entities like Inspace again um, become super helpful because imagine uh, talking to the Ministry of Internal affairs or um, sorry Home affairs and uh, MHA m or the Department of Space talking to Ministers. Of course I would not be able to do that. But Inspace, like for example the fact that we don't own the data nor the application. It's a very first time in India. Right? So Inspace has helped us uh, like define what is your uh, security protocol. What is the data retention policy if things go wrong? What is your retention policy so that they can sort of look back and at least get their access to the data. Right. Uh, what are the security stands we have taken that the hardware level may m. If we get hacked, um, how do we uh, how do we ensure that nothing malicious can be done about it? Now we have thought about it, but when you're talking to the government, when you're filling up the form, we have no knowledge. Like at least I don't have any logos. What is the right way to fill the form. And that's where in space really becomes handy. So yeah, uh, it, it is the uh, this inspector organization that has been created which makes it easy compared to policy. I think as long as our prime minister keeps talking about space, that's good enough, right? Because today if you go on the road, a uh, random person on the road will tell you that is all we need.

Speaker A: I think Chandrayaan was an inflection.

Speaker B: Absolutely. The fact that our prime minister talks about it in every. They have this thousand crore fund and uh, whatever crore fund, that is good enough. But that is not. They should just keep talking about it.

Speaker A: I mean, you know, I was at a pub, uh, I was going to meet a few friends from work at, um, on that particular day. I'll never forget it, you know, I mean they had the Chandrayaan, uh, uh, screening up on the screen, right. And people were glued to the screen and they actually clapped.

Speaker B: Oh, wow.

Speaker A: You know, it was a phenomenal moment. You know, I mean, uh, um, and you can't, you know, underestimate the value of these things. You know, along with all of the hard stuff like, okay, putting money and like building infrastructure and all of that stuff. I think you had first change people's minds. Right. And once you think something is possible, it's a lot more easier to achieve these things than otherwise.

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker A: I'm constantly blown away by how much more confident like kids are these days compared to when, you know, even like a generation back, uh, you know, people were right. I mean it's, it's. Yeah.

Speaker B: And the second thing the government is doing is again in space again. They have these two contests called the Cansat contest and the model rocketry contest. Now what has happened because of that is that the engineering students are just passing out like say in third year, fourth year, they are getting exposed to the satellite as a concept, rocket as a concept. So that creates an automatic pool of uh, it's a talent pool you have access to who are at least aware of the terms. They know the things. So it's very easy to sort of get even talent accessible.

Speaker A: Okay. The team, or rather I should say Thiru, has put together some uh, uh, what do you call rapid fire questions because apparently they do well on YouTube. So we're going to ask you a bunch of these questions. And uh, uh, I know some of these you can't really like answer with one word, but try to limit it, make it snappy and stuff. Right. So, okay, here goes. Um, will reusable rockets make space tourism as common as airline travel? Or is that just hype?

Speaker B: It is an important variable, but it is not the only variable which will make space tourism, um, affordable. There has to be many more things that have to come together.

Speaker A: Okay, if you could very quickly name like two or three of them, like

Speaker B: for example, the um, how do you call the rocket fuel? Right. Today the cost is high because so much of rocket fuel is expended right now. The type of fuel views. Imagine you had electric rockets. Electric propulsion. Sorry, you had electric propulsion which could escape. Get to the escape velocity. Imagine we had air breathing, which Isro is working on, the air breathing rockets which requires you to carry less weight. You don't have to carry the fuel and the oxidizer. You can extract the uh, oxygen from the atmosphere itself. Um, that's second, third, uh, will be, uh. There's a startup working on a hot air balloon kind of concept which is layered with all solar panels. So you go to the edge of the space. Right. So there are different ways of also looking at it. Right. It doesn't have to be just a rocket, it has to be reusable. Yes. So that the cost is low. It has to be new ways of propulsion and it has to be, I think uh, m. It can't be $250,000 for a trip. It has to be $2,000 for a trip. That's when it becomes affordable. And that's going to be not just usable as a variable. A lot of other variables that are coming.

Speaker A: Right. I mean, might be a dumb question, but I never understand why rockets have to go at that crazy momentum from down here. Right. I mean is there something that can probably get them to the edge of the um, orbit at whatever kind of speed and then something snaps and it takes off? I mean wouldn't that consume a lot less energy as well or.

Speaker B: People have tried it. Right. You take a Boeing aircraft and you attach a rocket to its thing, you take it to a certain height and then eject. Then it goes. So there have been multiple attempts. I think we are still discovering there is a startup in us which does Spintronics, which spins it very fast, gets rid of a particular velocity and then leaves it. So you literally don't use fuel to go up to a certain height and then you sort of charge and go. So multiple attempts have been made. Uh, space, uh, planes. Right. I think Virgin is doing a space plane. Right. So there are space planes coming up. Uh, we are still trying to figure. I don't think we have cracked the answer as humans to what is going to make affordable. It is 10 years away, but I really hope my daughter one day goes to for the date on the moon. For real.

Speaker A: Amazing. Off to a good start. Uh, what is a uh, space innovation that other industries, let's say cars, shipping, what have you should steal.

Speaker B: Sorry, can I skip that?

Speaker A: Where do you even begin? Okay, um. Okay, yeah. Cool. What is the one Thing you hope will be different about humans in space versus humans on Earth?

Speaker B: Oh, I think humans are going to be humans. We are like okay, let me not stand on humans. Yeah, humans are going to be humans. Um, it'll be interesting to see what new behavior evolves when you, when you take humans, more than five people. ISS houses, five to six people. Right. More than that. More than just the scientists and the astronauts. You take like what Virgin Galactic is trying to do. Um, sorry, Blue Origin, my bad. Blue Origin is trying to do. They have this normal, but then they go for 10 minutes and come back. It'll be very interesting to see when you take humans and keep them in a space environment. M what's a behavior that evolves? Uh, it'll be super interesting to sort of uh, see that.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, yeah, that will be particularly um, interesting. Right? I mean how will the dynamics change of social interaction and so on considering let's say there are limited um, set of rules and it will be back to uh, survival in some sense.

Speaker B: In some sense. No jurisdiction.

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, I am particularly interested in what are some ingenious ways we'll come up with to sort of create the same shit that we did in on the Earth there, right? I mean societies and structures and whatnot. Yeah, I mean it's going to be an interesting time for sure. What is a sci fi movie or book that kind of gets space exploration, right? And um, you know, conversely, I mean what are some, some things that books and films get like terribly wrong about space?

Speaker B: I mean my favorite has been Distiller Man. Like it's so crazy, uh, they got the black hole, right. And, but I don't know. In the same movie, right. They say uh, we are our own ghosts. That still stays with me. Like the fact that his father was to give the daughter the signal from. From because he went to the black hole, he could traverse time. Not sure that possible. But then I don't know. Right. Unless we really either prove it or disprove it, we really don't know.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Uh, now for me see the fumes like Armageddon and stuff where they blew up the whole asteroid with a thing or sound they hear and stuff which is not feasible. But then what if. Right? The point is what if uh. So space is not about questioning whether uh, it's imagination. It is just somebody's imagination, right? So we should not in where I come from, I don't like to challenge it because end of this, some of the imagination. So what if that is true? Or what would it take for it to be true is what I usually envisage. I'm always blown. Again, sorry I'm repeating it, but I really am blown over the line that we are our own ghosts. Because I myself have those deja vu moments many times. And uh, the whole serendipity angle, the deja vu, the Matrix. Yeah. I don't know, uh, maybe interested is true. Maybe that we have already been like up. Sorry, I'm practicing. We have already gone to the dimension where we are our own selves giving signals to us. Hey, don't do this stupid thing.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Don't become an entrepreneur.

Speaker A: Uh, I like gravity. Gravity also was a pretty good, good movie I would say. Right. Um, all right. Uh, with all of what you've learned, I mean this is not a rapid fire, but yeah, um, good job on the rapid fire. We try to keep it as rapid as possible. But um, with everything that you've learned in this industry, uh, right. Or working on it over the last two, three, four years, um, what would your three point advice be for someone who wants to build in space?

Speaker B: Don't take no for an answer. Um, I think that is true for anybody. Right. Uh, because in this, in this domain, especially people who work in space, they have a lot of opinions around how things should be or how things should not be.

Speaker A: It's very expert led.

Speaker B: It is very self declared expert led. Right. Because uh, nobody's true an expert, isn't it? The definition of expert is always self declared or you know, group of people declared. Nobody is truly an expert because if you're an expert then your learning has stopped. That means you have no more an expert. Right. So it's counterintuitive, but yeah. So don't take no for an answer. Be. Pick something that pick the. It doesn't have to. The best solution. Don't wait for the best solution. Right. Like uh, for example, when we are trying to solve a subsystem or the maths behind something, there's so many research papers, man. There's no end to the amount of research paper that hasn't published around this domain. Right. So if you keep looking for the perfect Mona Lisa to come out, it ain't going to happen. You have to stop somewhere, pick the best, you have to move with it. Um, so that's second, third, um, usually in the industry why things are slow because they plan, plan, plan, simulate and then build and test, I believe. Build, test, fail. Build, test, fail, build, test, fail. So in our Take Me to Space we don't have a research department. We have development. There's no R, there's only D. Right. We don't believe in. No disrespect, but yes, research is important for the industry. But our philosophy is just develop, build the hell out of it. It fails. It fails, man.

Speaker A: But isn't there a drawback in terms of safety and uh, those kind of things?

Speaker B: We have to be accountable for our failures. Who said we should not be? But it is okay to fail as long as we are accountable for yes, we did a mistake, we should own the accountability. It's not that I put fire to the proper land. Right. That is wrong. Right. Because that is not being accountable about your failures. Right. Uh, be accountable for things. Of course. Uh, so that uh, the failures you do are, ah, educated decision. Failures. I don't know what's the right word? It should be an educated decision you took which failed. Which is okay. It can't be just a wild guess, it should be some thesis behind it. Whatever you're doing, have a thesis, but have a quick thesis. Don't have to go in the rabbit hole of research and simulation.

Speaker A: Right. So what you're saying is it shouldn't necessarily be some hacky thing that you just did to meet some arbit timeline or something of that sort. Right?

Speaker B: Adapt the agile model of the SaaS world.

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean if it is some genuine innovation that kind of failed because of something that you didn't know earlier, then that's fine. You're failing.

Speaker B: Yes, you're failing. And failures are fine in this industry. Right.

Speaker A: Um, apart from Google Scholar, is there like a book or a resource that really helps people get started in this industry?

Speaker B: Well now you have GPT, of course. So you have all the LLMs, which are so cool. Right? Yeah, but nothing beats Google Scholar, man. Nothing beats Google Scholar. Like um, I'm. There are GPTs in the world which gives you reference of scholar articles. But you need to go through a research paper. I don't, sorry, Um, I don't think there's alternative to it because that also teaches you grit, perseverance. Right. A research paper is hard to read. Right. You need to know how to sit for that one hour and go through the paper even if you don't understand half the things around it. And because if you can't do it, you can't attempt an unknown problem because many times in especially within space, like me, I don't know what I'm solving. Right, but then you have to be just at it. It is unknown, but you have to just keep at it.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Keep at it, keep it and it happens. So yeah, so I think research, reading research paper is super important. Like you'll always find some paper in my bag, right? All the time. And Google Scholar has been, I think this I discovered in my college days back and I got lucky in college days I got hooked onto Google Scholar and that has been my uh, source of knowledge and source of this thing. The second thing I do is I optimize. Okay. I'm a computer science guy, right. I know how the personalization algorithm works on the phone. So I, when I decide on the field, I optimize. I use an Android phone. I, when you swipe the Google News pops up, I optimize the feed to my area of interest. I game the feed because I know how the algorithm works, right. So I would explicitly go and say I'm not interested or then I'll place a hat I can. I love this. I would click on an article, even if I'm not doing it, I'll just crawl it because I want Google to think that, oh, this guy is so interested in this article. So, yeah, stuff like that. So I game Google Scholar, knowledge source, Google News, game, uh, Google News to ensure that I get like, I want the world around me to become space. Right. Whatever topic I'm looking around is a blindly in love, right. When you're blinding love, you are thinking about, you see your partner all the way all around you, right. Everybody seems like your partner. So yeah, you make the content that you consume has to be all around the passion you have.

Speaker A: Fantastic. Um, are there people or channels that one, uh, should follow to understand more

Speaker B: about this, about space? Yeah, um, Google Scholar and Google News.

Speaker A: Um, hey, this has been a fascinating conversation. Um, you know, a lot of points. I had no idea where we were headed. But that's the amazing thing about the podcast, right? I mean, which is that we explore any rabbit holes that come up and you know, with all that we have to do in India, I mean, the reason I'm just like so optimistic is, you know, I meet people like yourself, right. The rare few who are push the boundaries of what is possible. Uh, right. And who are moving us forward.

Speaker B: Uh, trying to.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm trying to valiantly. Right. And uh, you know, that. That's fantastic, man. I mean I, I make this about the billionaires also that you know, rather than buying another yacht or another newspaper or another like, you know, whatever else kind of building, I mean they're actually investing in, in science and in um, you know, moving humanity forward, which is like a huge net positive, in my opinion. Not just for the what the money can do, but also for inspiring others to think along those lines. Right. Um, and yeah, thanks so much for being part of this.

Speaker B: Thank you so much for coming.

Speaker A: Growing space community here, and I hope you inspire many, many, many more people, um, you know, to take up the send over.

Speaker B: Thank you so much for this opportunity. Thank you so much.

Speaker A: Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much, Ronan.

Speaker B: Thanks, Roshan.

Speaker A: All right, folks, uh, that's it for now. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the Startup Operator podcast. We'll be back again soon.