YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Rogowsky

lines on the record: 36
first: 2026-02-04
most recent: 2026-02-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Excellent. Really appreciate the time with you here and appreciate the great questions and looking forward to the future as well”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've said it. Yeah, exactly right. And so credit to SDA for having kind of the rapid maturation of their constellation and the excitement about not just what the initial service is, but the sustainability and maintainability of that constellation going forward. Other constellation operators are reaching that similar point where they're thinking about that longevity of their service, not just the initial bring into use. And so that's where Starfish really gets to shine. And that's where we get to share that we've turned a corner as an industry here.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's exactly right. And I think that that's such a key element of what this contract is and why we are so excited to share the news is because this contract is structured in a way that it's about a service. And this is something that we have tried to profess in the industry and wanted to turn the ship of the industry. The industry was all about sell you an otter and we're selling a service. And SDA agreed. SDA said that's exactly right. We need to buy this as a service. Let's set up a contracting vehicle that not only can we use for this first otter, but for many otters later. Like SDA could just continue to follow this model indefinitely. Other customers in the government or even commercial could follow this model indefinitely.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's only matched as we've seen with actual customer traction or customer engagement there because that's what venture's really betting on. They're betting on that this is a business in the future. And so what these contracts represent is that there is a real business here. There is real value to be had. And so this exciting announcement for us with SDA and as you look back to some of the other ones where we've engaged with Space Force and commercial customers and been able to share that involvement, what it's signaling is that customers are willing to pay for this model and that we should go do that. And that's exactly what we want to do as a business. And we'll bring on Venture to help us do what Venture does best, which is go take more bets or scale and bring on the contracts to say this is what the contracts do best, which is the business.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say it's neither than that of those. Like, really, what our goal is let's go build a business. Let's go build something of value and to build something of value, that means having real contracts with real customers. Venture capital is super helpful in that process because they help bridge gaps, right? They make sure we get to continue to take the bets and try to build that scale and double down or triple down on the philosophy that we have.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so at that price point, right? If it continues to come down, like all the better, let's keep utilizing and going, yeah, more stuff to space, indeed. What has also changed is just availability. And I would highlight that even more so than cost for us and the missions that we launched with Romora, with OtterPop, with Otters, we can actually look forward and say, oh, a transporter mission is coming every three months. And so we'll pick the one that's like, we'll catch that bus and we'll plan for that time. And I think that's a good shift in the industry as well because now it becomes not these discrete moments that just the launch field just slips until the vehicle, like the spacecraft is ready. You're on the bus or you're not on the bus. Like make sure that you're ready and hitting that cadence. And that's a good thing. And hopefully additional launch providers will just continue to add to the availability and driving that change.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question, and one that we should definitely acknowledge, like launch costs have come way down and folks like SpaceX and hopefully Blue and others will be major drivers in continuing that trend here. We have taken a major step function as an industry. I think over the last 10 years, because that major step function down in cost has happened, there's room to grow still, even without further reduction in cost.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a third thing that's really happening, and we can acknowledge, is that it's shifting away the access to space and the utilization of space is shifting away from just a couple of large superpowers maintaining persistence and moving towards commercial access, many countries having a vested interest, seeing it as a strategic value to the nation and also a strategic resource. And so trying to claim some use there. And so these three trends, I think, are some of the more dominant ones. And they're really pulling the industry in a variety of interesting ways.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another change that's happening is we're expanding the number of use cases for space, right? You look at the Vardas or the others that are thinking, okay, we'll do some manufacturing in these capsules and downmass it. Talk about Leo commercial destinations. Let's try to bring people and science up there a little bit more. We think about new cloud computing and structures and AI, right? Like there are more use cases there, exactly, right? What has been a mainstay for a long time is communications. That's not going away. It's only increasing as a species. We are hungry for data. And so finding ways to get more data is always going to be a win. But now we're seeing there's an expansion of other opportunities that could exist there, resources and other things that we'll see and broadly the distant future, but on the horizon, those are the kind of this growing types of businesses that can exist.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. I think there are several trends that are emerging, and I'll try to touch on those quickly and we can dive in where the interest lies. One trend is that, and one thing that we're trying to push is that space can be its own economy and ecosystem, that no longer you just go to space to serve a ground-based customer. You can go to space to serve a space-based customer. And we're maybe like a direct correlation there. Like our business model is not serving a consumer watching the F1 race. We are servicing the satellite that broadcasts the F1 race. And so we are a space-to-space business.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moving faster in orbit because we have more confidence in the way it works. Or we can take more mass out of the system because there's less uncertainty in our next iteration. And so those are the things that actually get to play. And that's really the value of doing demo missions and real flight experiences is we get to go and improve the ground-based models. Same reason why F1 does track days, right? They go put a bunch of sensors on it and then it's all about the racing for the season.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One civil care. And so let's now talk about that a little bit too because there are properties of the camera that change in space, like just the heat that's applied might change the lens shape or the way the light is bouncing off the lens might change the color and contrast. And so those are all the things that we have to learn about in space and actually test in the real environment. We could do some modeling on the ground. You talk about digital twinning. We've gotten clever about predicting what that thermal effect might look like or that sunlight reflection might look like. There's some knobs that we still turn every time we go to space, and that's those are the knobs that we get to turn now and actually get to improve the way our software works. And sometimes that translates to more performance.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. And you're right on many fronts that we've gotten a lot better at things like CAD models. We have an actual model there. There are effects that we have on the ground that we are in space that we don't have on the ground. For example, without a rich atmosphere, sunlight bounces off of objects differently in space than it does on the ground, right? And so that's just one of those things where if you look at it on the ground, you get this nice blue sky in space. It's harsh black, right? And so we have to pretend like we can see that and we can't see that from the ground either, right?”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is so valuable for the things that we do on the ground, in a couple of ways, that's really valuable. One is there's not a lot of imagery in space of other spacecraft. And so we have to artificially create what it might look like so that we can build our algorithms. And that artificial creation is like, let's take a game dev engine and let's go pretend like we can see another spacecraft on our own computer and then let's design our algorithm against that. When we get real spacecraft imagery, we get to slot that in and actually do a lot more like enriched development and actually change our models on the ground.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anything that has accelerated the ability to do the commercial launch rotter, yeah, which is what you would hope for in a demo mission, right? So it's easy to say some of the cool things that have happened from Memorian Otter Pup. One is taking a picture of another spacecraft.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe it's a quick sidebar here. You know, the space industry is notorious for making promises and not delivering on them. And one of the things that we really want to make sure we do well at Starfish is actually talk about the successes that we have, but also manage expectations there and be clear that space is hard, right? And it's an easy thing to say, but what that really translates into is there's always unpredictable steps. There could be an issue on the spacecraft or issues on the ground or development timelines or compete priorities. And those things can shift the timeline. And I would rather tell people like, hey, we're actually going and flying through the core mission set and we'll share all of the technical detail and data as we as that unfolds instead of saying, well, it's definitely going to happen in February and like keep the eyes out, right?”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Otter Pup 2 is still in space. It's still performing its core mission set here. And that mission is going to go further than Ramor and actually go and attempt to dock with another craft.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. You're spot on. Let's go make the personal computers for space. Let's make this proliferated where it's where everybody can go and use this service and it becomes, yeah, the norm.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we could just go strap an iPhone camera on and go do this mission. And that really is what allows us to go and do this in a whole new way.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We believe that this is really the first time it's done this way, yeah, and you're talking about the camera being simple. That was the goal. Our goal was to make it hardware simple and put the complexity and the software and put the complexity in other parts of it. And that allows what allows scale, right? And if we're talking about trying to build many of these, what we were trying to prove out is the core thesis for ourselves, which was with a single camera and some clever software, you could do what was seemingly a complex mission that previously was required a lot of extra hardware and a lot of extra sensing. And so maybe again, like try to anchor that in some touch points here to do what the space shuttle did to go docker than a spacecraft. It was the size of an oven or a really large microwave in sensors to go do the docking. That's been true for even commercial companies today. They use really heavy exquisite packages for this.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The nautical theme is rich with us here. Yeah, so we have cephalopod and cetacean. Cephalopod does the guidance planning, which is the path planning. So you like kind of your Google Maps, if you will. It plots the course. And then cetacean is our relative navigation suite, which is the camera part. And to help provide a little bit of context why we call those cephalopod is the smart creature brain. And cetacean from like echocolocation of these creatures, right? It's kind of that range finding, if you will. And so those are kind of easy ways to remember how those map to some of the cortec that we have. Yeah.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, your intuition is right on, and that's the goal of what we call rendezvous. Rendezvous is actually to try to match those speeds. And as we get closer and closer, we get more information as to how to correct that. What the problem is, is in general, if you don't know the difference in your speeds, then you can't make that correction. That's really what our software does is it tries to appreciate the difference in speed. And then the maneuvering is that thruster firing is actually to get closer and closer to matching the speed. And so that's exactly what a rendezvous is.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yeah, yeah. Sense of scale here and how difficult this is. In the time it takes you to blink your eye, we've traveled a mile. That's how fast these satellites are moving. And when we actually go and do this maneuver, it's almost like traveling that mile after blinking your eye and trying to high five your friend on the highway at the same time out the window.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Takes an image in, figures out where the two satellites are based off of that image, and then passes that off to another part of our software that then plans a maneuver, which says, okay, we want to get another 100 meters closer, fire the thruster at this time in this direction, and we'll start marching ourselves in. And then we could just do that over and over and over again and march ourselves all the way in from pretty far out.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and we can dive into what that actually means. Yeah, please. Essentially, what it is is imagine having. What we call a main flight computer, which is the fail safe. If anything goes wrong, that has just the critical functions on it. Outside of that, we want extra processing to do things like cloud computing or extra camera and imagery processing or extra comms payloads. All of those things become peripheral computers. And essentially, you just kind of plug it in like you would plug a normal computer, an extra keyboard, or something into this main computer. And then you get extra capability. Those are the peripherals. And so for us, what we were doing was actually separating out two parts of it. One, which is just the ability to make sure that the vehicle just stayed healthy and safe. And then our software, which then did all the guidance planning and the image processing and made sure that we could both use what our camera was becomes the eyes.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, credit to like Falcon 9 and other launch vehicles for actually having enough capacity, but I think also really a credit to kind of the Arc system architecture that we've driven towards, which is 300 kilograms-ish is actually a rather small vehicle for how capable this is. And you can put a number of 300 kilogram vehicles on the same launch vehicle.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many. And that's part of the goal. Okay. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so there's really kind of two cool models here. One of the challenges that the industry is also facing is servicing vehicles that have been really large. And so they get a dedicated launch. It was just the servicing vehicle that gets the right of space. We want to challenge that paradigm and actually recognize like if you're launching a constellation, one of the slots rather than being the actual vehicle that's going to go provide the service, you could just put another in there. And now Otter is going up with the constellation and can provide value for the rest of that part of the constellation. That's kind of a rideshare model. But you could also imagine if we want to go launch hundreds, we could just buy every slot on the Falcon 9 and launch tens of otters at a time.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Second thing that's useful for us at Starfish is by us operating and maintaining this whole fleet of otters, we actually get to continue to improve the entire stack the entire time. And so one of the things that we'll potentially get to here is that Starfish has really leaned in on the software side and the autonomy side. And so these spacecraft fly themselves. And if we continue to practice across an entire fleet and continue to maintain that, that just gets easier and easier and easier for everybody. And so that scale that we're trying to get to as an industry, we can go faster by making sure that that is a service model rather than individual owners having to learn how to fly their respective satellite and having a bunch of archaic systems that are just designed for them. We can take that on and it's actually beneficial for us too.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the industry has argued it either way, where starfish has really landed, is on the service side. And so otters are going to be owned and operated by Starfish as much as we can. And the real reason for doing that is really twofold. One is on the customer side, what they really care about is the service that they're getting. They want a disposal. They want a life extension. They want to, you know, repair. That's not buying an otter. That's buying what the actual interface that we do with them and provide the disposal. And so that's just beneficial for both parties now because we're transacting on the thing that actually provides value to both.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes. What's really driving the size is just how much we can manipulate it and control it. The actual manipulator itself, which we like to call Nautilus because we like to keep a lot of nautical themes going on here at Starfish. Nautilus actually can capture any type of spacecraft geometry. And that's actually unique in the industry right now because it doesn't require any change to the satellite. Size is not the only challenge that satellite servicing is faced. It's also faced that these satellites were built sometimes five or 20 years ago and servicing was not a thing. And so if you have these satellites that are up there and have never thought like, oh gosh, how am I going to get a service in the near future, then that's where Starfish has built this kind of custom piece of hardware to go and interface with it so we can meet them where they are today and actually go have it adopted today rather than waiting another 20 years before we can provide value.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Higher than much higher up there, right? Something like a Starlink satellite, right? That's on par with where we are. Maybe they're a little bit bigger than us at times too. And so that's, you know, a small car is probably something how these cars work. So that's kind of the range that the large customer base might be. It could also go down as small as a microwave oven to still be useful for us. And so that's kind of the range that we go and service.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, a great question. Where otter is, otter is the size of like an oven that you have in your house, and it's a few hundred kilograms, like 300 kilograms, which is double that, 600 pounds, right? So that's kind of where we sit, which is rather small for spacecraft that are so capable. You think of maybe some sense of some data points here. Some of our customers, which are up in Geo for life extension with Otter, are the size of a school bus, you know, huge solar panels.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think it definitely scales with the number of satellites that go up there. The major users are the big constellations, and each one of those constellations are flying anywhere between a couple hundred to 20,000, 40,000 satellites. And so there's a potential that hopefully not every single one of them needs to be deorbited by us, this little tow truck that comes and provides that extra service. But a fair number of them might, right? And that's where we can go and scale the business here. So what that number looks like in the next couple of years, that looks like 10, 20 otters that go to space in the kind of midterm over the next kind of 10 years. Maybe that's hundreds of otters that are up there flying and providing these missions.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a sometimes a yeah, retroactive way of thinking there where we actually slow it down to come down and speed up to go up. And that's definitely how the orbits workforce debt deorbiting and disposing is actually part of an end of a life cycle for satellites. Historically, this has been where we just leave satellites in orbit or individual operators can go and deorbit it. hundreds of thousands of satellites are in orbit and going to continue to drive in that way. And so this now is a resource and a shared real estate where everybody is trying to maintain not only the capability that they have with their specific satellites, but making sure that that stays a place that everybody can continue to fly. And so that's what disposal does. It helps kind of keep those areas clean at the end of life. And in some places, actually, let's satellites continue to operate much past their original design life, which we'll talk about here in a bit.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Day part of the job and something that is no longer a unique or challenging capability, it just is ubiquitous. It's just an everyday life for space assets. And that's what Otter is designed to do, designed to go and fly up to other satellites, dock with them, provide maneuvering, allowing it to fly into new orbits, provide station keeping, which is where it keeps it in the same place and fights against all these different forces that tug on spacecraft as they go. And in some cases, and kind of where we're going next is the ability to do satellite servicing and recycling and manufacturing in orbit. And if you can have a satellite that can go dock with other satellites, that's definitely the first step along the way.”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So, Starfish, we're designing and building what we call the otter spacecraft. Otter is a spacecraft capable flying around and docking with other spacecraft in orbit, which is not something historically done on a commercial scale in the space industry. And it's also not done where you can have hundreds of otters flying in space. So we've seen some incredible missions over time where we've service satellites in orbit. We've taken the space shuttle up and provided new mirrors and new cameras for Hubble. We've consistently flown things to and from space station. We have actually gone and done demonstration missions where two satellites can dock in orbit and you have Gemini missions where people were able to dock it. The problem has been over time that it has been one-off or high value or high dollar missions only that get that kind of attention and capability. And what we're trying to do and rightly put maybe the blue collar nature in us here is let's make docking just an every”
2026-02-04 · This Week in Startups · Savvy is HQ Trivia + Wordle (feat. Scott Rogowsky) | E2245 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source