YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim Ellis

lines on the record: 75
first: 2023-09-22
most recent: 2023-09-22
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

“And it wasn't until two inventions where the whole thing kind of consolidated. And those two inventions were the jet engine and the pressurized cabin. That's what made commercial aircraft possible. And when that happened, you saw massive consolidation and that's when really the aerospace prime started to really take shape and form into what they are today. I think that's where we are. We're in the 1930s and 40s for space. We have a lot of different ideas that are being tested, and in my opinion, mastering the first stage reuse are the two ingredients that are going to lead to mega consolidation and then also a healthy and thriving economy.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't even think we're like in the exponential growth phase yet. I think it's at the very beginning of that. And I think what needs to happen is the full reusability problem needs to be solved and then that unlocks the real growth. Here's another good historical example. If you look at the trajectory of aircraft, commercial aircraft, in the 1930s and 40s was obviously very war-driven at that point. But what you had is a ton of different companies attacking this problem, airplanes looked very different. You had triplanes, you had biplanes, you had the spruce goose, you had very weird aircraft being developed.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think a lot of these hard tech things, even look at computers and things like that, there's decades of very early kind of proof of physics, let's say, that happens. Something happens, whatever that is, and the flywheel really starts going, and you get that exponential growth. We've had those decades of kind of marination period in our industry. The physics demonstrations.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feels like we're so early. It's interesting because I don't know if when you have been in the industry for a decade, you feel like, oh, this industry really started decades ago and it's been here for so long or if you feel like we're just at the tipping point or the very beginning, but I guess both can still be true.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Massive things. And so just from a surface area perspective, they have a higher probability of hitting other things. So it's a little bit self serving, but an obvious thing is don't dump your second stage on orbit in a dead orbit and have it sit up there for decades You're starting to see some regulation when you deploy a satellite. It used to have a de orbit plan, has to come out of orbit over 20 years. That number is now five years. Again, there's very limited way that you can force that, but that's now the guidance. So we talked about earlier if you're deploying new constellations on a period of three to five years, is there like a picket tree planted tree type model where you can deploy a new satellite and then bring the old ones down? Maybe so maybe you have to start thinking about that.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a really good question in many ways. It is the Wild West in space. There's regulation to get up there, but once you're up there, there's very little regulation. And even more so, there's almost no means to enforce whatever regulation there would be, right? And so listen, I think the industry and the regulatory bodies need to move together, as always, for new industry. I think the first step is think very critically about do no harm, right? So that's the first step that businesses should think about from the get-go. As an example, so do no harm would mean don't leave junk in space. Surprisingly, most of the conjunctions or collisions as they're called conjunctions, most of those happen to be with dead second stages that are out floating around, believe it or not, from the earlier days. And the reason why those are more prevalent is the stages are huge.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if they don't, they're stuck with spreadsheets that are imperfect, never up to date, never coordinated, and they just try to deal with it imperfectly. And so we bought this on, and after a very early discussion, it's something that we decided, hey, you know what? Like, we need it. We know everybody else needs it. Let's build this in a way that is sellable and can be shared with everybody. So we built this product called Fusion by Stoke, and it tries to connect those dots. And we just did a general release for that. And something that we're finding a lot of traction with. So that's cool. It's also not your question. I think there's a word of possibility in space. But before we started the company, we were thinking about different world problems that need to be solved. And there's two of them that have stuck with me that I still think about. One of them is kind of desalination.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's something that has not been solved well by the industry. It's something that I knew had not been solved well by the industry. We, in fact, one of the reasons that we did Y Combinator was to get a ground floor view of the different SaaS products being born. But we wound up making a decision to, hey, we need to build this software for ourselves. It's something that the same decision that many hardware companies make.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I think it's so empowering to take the founder view of the world, which I didn't always have. But with the founder view of the world, you start asking yourself questions. What are the important problems that need to be solved and how can I go and do this in a way that's a sustainable business? I will say one of the problems that I knew had to be solved is, let's say, the idea of software for hardware purposes, the idea of organizing work and tracing partigree, part history from inception to deployment, and then through operations all the way to retirement. This is the idea of part pedigree.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You mentioned other founders out there, and I think when you're this early to an industry, there are just endless opportunities that you spot along the way, but you have your hands tied as you're building this reusable rocket company. And so any opportunities, gaps, things that you're seeing that you're like, you know what, if I could clone myself and maybe, you know, maybe that's eventually on the horizon, I would attack this problem or this problem or, you know, maybe Stoke would benefit from a founder attacking things that, you know, you can't pursue on your own. Anything come to mind there?”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Move at and do it for the cost that you predict, right? You can't outsource those dependencies to some supplier who may or may not care about your success. In terms of unexpected challenge, I think, and this is maybe to the other founders out there, is fundraising, even in a good fundraising cycle, you see these headlines go out, whatever, XYZ raises a gajillion dollars and all you see is the headline. You're like, oh, like. That got funded. How hard could that be? And it is not easy, right? And so that's something that I, as I found it, had no idea about and have the network and have the understanding of how to do it.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think we've benefited a lot from being in the industry for a little while, understanding and being able to think critically about what works and what doesn't work, and being able to design a company that just iterates on all of those things. So you mentioned supply chains. We very firmly believe that vertical integration is extremely important, especially for the R&D phase. You have to control your dependencies and have the ability to iterate very quickly if you're going to move at a pace that you want to.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely, you know, you are one of the few people who not only believed that reusable rockets could work, but also decided to be the one to pursue that together with your company. And so given the ambition, the optimism you had, could you speak to any challenges that even surprised you coming in that you faced along the way where you're like, wow, I still want to do this, but this is surprisingly hard.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've demonstrated that kind of full operational window on the ground. We've demonstrated it up to very close to what we expect the reentry heat loads are going to be on the heat shield. We've demonstrated control authority of the engine, which is kind of done in a new and different way on our system. We've demonstrated really the whole end-to-end loop of really the technology basis, but also things like software and avionics and power systems and guidance navigation and control and that whole control loop of systems that has to be live and on board to make this thing work. We're moving out on the first stage. We're working very aggressively to put this system on orbit toward the end of 2025. And then I think in fairness, probably multiple missions to figure out how to prove and figure out and make it efficient to make the whole reusable cycle.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think this is the decade to figure that out. And I think we talked about the cost economics at 20x factor that's still out there to be had. I think the first small number of companies to demonstrate those economics, those are the ones that win. And so, yeah, I think that happens this decade. And that's pretty exciting because it's 2023. And yeah, I think it's going to happen. Where Stoke is in that journey is this is the lens that we've founded the company on. And I think that, first of all, you have to think about it from day one. It has to be engineered from the ground up in order for it to work at all. And so you have to understand what that second stage looks like. And so that's where we focused our early time. We have developed, I think, the biggest question marks we had in terms of will this work and can we create a system that is robust and reasonable enough?”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“High net worth asteroid, let's say. And I think if you're willing to think long term enough, then that. Becomes important that maybe even dominates the rest of these in terms of the economic scope. And if you think about it, it is critical for us moving off planet as a species, right?”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd be surprised. All right, maybe at the beginning, but after a week, that's going to get old. Yeah. So, how do you have a fresh and regular supply of goods and services to those stations? You're probably going to want weekly or multiple times per week supply of fresh food or raw material supply waste. And I think those things are something that are smaller than what Starship offers. By the way, tourism is another one. And I think if you're willing to think long enough. Is decades in the future, but I think mining and resource development is another one, whether that's on the moon or asteroids. There's actually a prospecting mission going up by NASA to go look at a”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. So there's that aspect. I think tourism is another big one. I think a lot of people do want to go to space. I would love to go to space if it's safe and it's interesting and there's places to go. I think Starship is actually going to unlock that. So massive, massive structures in space. Starship absolutely unlocks that. To me, then the question is, okay, let's say you have the Space Hotel. How does that get serviced? Is Starship the right thing to be servicing it on a weekly basis? I'm pretty sure, especially early, the clientele that can't afford to go to space aren't going to love eating astronaut ice cream for...”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manufacturing of space, I think, if you give it enough time and if you solve a mobility problem, that's going to be a very big sector in ways that I don't think we can predict. This goes back to our transcontinental shipping, right?”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't let it get super hot, right? You have to, you know, think about keeping a mouse or a person alive through this process. So that's another one that just the conditions to do any experimentation at all are not there. There's a company that is trying to grow replacement retina on orbit. So that's very interesting. Growing replacement organs or organ transplant on orbit is another one. Protein growth. So think about our meat supply. you know, it's a huge environmental impact in the grand scheme of efficiency, not very good growing entire animals, right? Basically, that's what we're doing. So can you do that efficiently in space? Okay, so that's kind of like the manufacturing side. Fiber optics is another classic example that can be drawn very long, perfect crystalline fiber optics on orbit and microgravity. It's hard to do on Earth.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you need to kind of lock it up, ship it metaphorically the next day, have it do its thing before it dies, and then in a lot of cases comes back, should come back in a nice soft landing. So if you're growing tissues, for example, you can't slam it with 20 Gs on the return, right?”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ripe for a disruption if you can get to and from space with relativies. But that's obviously something where a lot of mass has to go up to Earth or up to orbit and then come back down. Another one is biopharma. So biopharma proteins, for example, grow very well in microgravity. There's a lot of use cases for 0G in biopharma space. The problem, though, historically has been twofold. In a lot of use cases, that biopharma experiment will die in that process, right?”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alloy creation. Alloys. On Earth gets molten metal that then gets mixed up. And as it cools, there's buoyancy effects, there's cooling effects that are imperfect. And as a result, you get imperfect mixing and you get kind of what are called inclusions or imperfect crystal formation. In microgravity, those go away and you can get perfect crystal in structures. This has been demonstrated with alloys that won't mix on Earth but will mix in space. And so you can get really cool. I think material science is, you know.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One experiment up, and it'll be small because it's expensive and it takes that long. And what we want to do is to be able to get down to low enough costs and high enough availability where that typical student can do three to five things. I think that's a kind of a good mindset. What does it unlock? We talked a lot about sensors, right? So one experimental sensor is another environmental kind of example. But think about plastics and microplastics in the ocean. Where are they and where do they come from? Well, there's a sensor. It's an experimental one going up to try to detect microplastics in oceans detected from space so we can see where they're consolidating. And then that's obviously the first step into going and cleaning them up. So that's one example. But you think about maybe a little bit longer term, there's certain technologies or applications where the combination one or the other and then the combination of microgravity, so zero G and pure vacuum of space are very helpful, right? One example would be”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what gets me excited is the breadth of totally different things that Kang be unlocked. I think a good place to start would be to think about innovation itself. What are the conditions that make rapid innovation possible? And an example would be take your typical PhD student. It's about a five-year study window. What you would like to be able to do is for that student to do, let's say, three to five iterations on some technology or a thing that they're doing. And that's pretty typical for ground-based experimentation and development. But if you were to say, hey, typical PhD student with typical PhD funding, can you do three to five experiments on orbit, iterate three to five times, and really develop a new sensor or a new alloy or a new whatever it is technology? The answer is no. The average PhD student, there's no way they can, like maybe you'll get.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Typically, those have relatively small amounts of maneuverability built into them. And it's a whole different type of an asset. And what we're proposing is you can do this with the deployment asset that has to come back anyway, right? So it's kind of a natural byproduct of your average everyday mission. But yeah, so capsules are the way we do it. That requires an additional system, a whole separate vehicle in order to do it. And what we want to do is take that away and just make it part of every single mission we ever fly.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is the way that satellites come back down. There are perhaps other ways, the typical way to get something back down is through a capsule. So we do do this. We go to the space station, for example. We deliver people or cargo or whatever. And then we bring things back down. And the way you bring things back down is with a capsule.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One way to think about it is think about conflict on Earth, terrestrial conflict, and the way we deal with those things. When things, when we have a brush up or some event, typically a country will deploy assets to a border or to a location so we can move aircraft carrier into a location or we can deploy troops. We can do those things in a peaceful way. We don't have to engage, but there's a deterrent, right? And then we negotiate and then you can pull away that deterrent, right? We can't do that in space. We don't have that ability.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More and more, what's interesting and something that we're seeing a lot of use cases for both commercially and from the government is being able to take things from orbit and return them back to Earth. So now if you have kind of the mobility triangle complete where you can go to orbit from one orbit to the next and then from orbit to Earth, now you can deploy an asset more or less on demand to perform a function. It can be a high value asset that maybe it wants to do something, but then you want to retract it and bring it back. You can now all of a sudden do that. We really don't have that capacity right now.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are like RVs. If you were to buy an RV and go on vacation, but you only ever got one tank of gas. What would you do? You would think really hard every single time you turned it on and moved it, right? And that's the way they have to think with these assets. And so what he's looking at and the entire DOD is starting to think about is how do you move from that world to a world where you can do kind of on-demand dynamic space operations, where you can move to a new orbit on demand or you can go to a new orbit on demand where you can move from one orbit to the next on demand.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we kind of touched on this before, and this is a great time to bring some more light to it. The historical world is we put up these massive and exquisite assets to specific locations typically pretty high orbits, and they're very, very expensive and massive, and they're not made to move around. This was okay for the last 30 years for US and its allies because we were really the only ones to have capability to put that kind of mess that high. That's no longer the case. And what used to be, again, these exquisite assets sitting on their own performing their function, those now have company. They have company with ambiguous intent, trailing them, watching them, and whatnot. And we really have very little ability to move. So General Shaw has been one of the more vocal people kind of talking about this dynamic in space. And the analogy that he draws is these things.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's talk about government specifically because I feel like the first space race was very, very government related, government funded, and we're now seeing, you could say, this next iteration of the space race be more privatized, but at the same time, the government is likely a large buyer. And so what is the government looking for when they're participating in this economy?”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What you're going to see more, and you're already seeing is you as a person can go buy imagery. Let's say a hurricane comes, you got displaced and you don't have access back to your home yet. You can buy an image, and I think you can do that today of your house, your specific location, a day or two or whatever the lag is, of your house location after a hurricane that you can't get to. There's a number of different retail use cases like that. I think that you're going to see Certainly the University of Governments, you're going to see policy being informed. I think that's huge to use data to inform policy decisions, right? Especially as we think environmentally, what makes sense, what doesn't make sense. A lot of times we get locked in rhetoric that's not really anchored in data. And what this allows us to do is anchor in data. Hedge funds, another one that I kind of mentioned, you know, you can use imagery to do various.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we can now supplement imagery with some AI and various algorithms, and you can do some really interesting, powerful things. I think that you'll see more and more as data goes to space, you're going to see more and more on-orbit compute become more important because it's relatively expensive and there's a physics-based choke point to get that data from orbit back to ground. And I think you're going to see more and more compute go on orbit so that we can take massive amount of imagery. And I, as a user, can go request whatever insight I want. And that compute is actually done on orbit and then only the final answer is shipped down.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Forces across allied countries, coordinating, communicating, being able to do positioning, missile detection, guided weapons, all of these things take massive amount of coordination. And those comms all go through space. So that's another big area. We can instead of using or at least to supplement the exquisite assets we have, you can now look at much lower cost and distributed assets in lower Earth orbit to do those things. So that's called PNT, position navigation timing. We mentioned and touched on Earth observation. It's another huge one. There are the environmental elements that we talked about. There's also things, you know, like you can do agricultural futures through Satellite based imagery. You can count cars and parking lots to understand how good the shopping season is. You can do all kinds of things of this nature.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a number of different types of telecom, but telecom is definitely a big one. You also have position navigation and timing is a big area. So as we go to this world of automated cars, as we look at automated agriculture, improving the efficiency on agriculture, as we mentioned, geopolitics, obviously position navigation and timing is very important for.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that has completely shifted for the reasons we talked about earlier electronics are cheap and powerful, they're small, they're lightweight, satellites are much, much cheaper now. And so you now have it inverted where the asset is, let's call it a million dollars, but the launch is $100 million. Now all you care about is the cost of launch. So that has completely flipped in the last decade.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there's that aspect to it too. The other thing that really switched in the economics of space and launch is you mentioned these assets going on orbit and being alive for 20 decades, literal decades, right? The other factor is those things are exquisite assets cost multiple billions of dollars to make a satellite. All right. In that world, the customer does not care what the launch cost is. It could cost $100 million, $200 million, $300 million. They don't care because if the asset is $3 billion, the only thing they care about is that it gets from the ground to orbit safely. That's it. And that's the right thing to care about when your payload is $3 billion, right?”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and maybe just as some background context, satellites in the past maybe this wasn't as much of an issue because they'd be in orbit for what, 10 years, 20 years, several decades, right? So that nine months was less significant versus to your point, if the cycles are accelerating and you want to stay competitive and your satellite needs to be up in three years, your next one, then it really is cutting into like what, a third of its life cycle that's pretty significant.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's very real money. How do you get that to be more efficient? And I would claim that part of the virtuous cycle that reusable rockets creates is you can do smaller batches directly to final orbit, cut nine months down to two months. And deployers constellation are much more efficient manner.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That takes a couple months, and then you launch, they all get dropped off, and now they need to go from that drop off location, the metaphorical train station, to their final location. And that also takes several months. So you're looking at a deployment phase or period of, you know, eight, nine months to get all those satellites from the time they leave the factory to the time when they're making revenue. That's a long time in a grand scheme of a three to five year useful lifespan.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to get your satellites from factory to orbit to revenue, not just in space, to revenue. So final place in orbit as fast as possible. So like today's world, you are aggregating many satellites on an individual rocket, and Starship is going to amplify this as well because it's so big. You can fill it and get those cost economics that they advertise, you've got to fill the mass. Okay, so in that world, you've got to aggregate enough satellites on the ground to make it fill up the rocket.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you should expect the same out of satellite technologies. But what that means is that if you're a global telecom in orbit, you're going to have to upgrade your satellite constellation every three to five years because you are in a healthy competition. And if you don't, you're going to die. So that's the useful life of these satellites, in my opinion, in a mature competitive environment. And what you care about is the time from factory to revenue for each of those satellites. I think a lot of satellite business cases, a number to put in your head is probably something like 500,000 to a million dollars per satellite per month of revenue.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's unquestionably a flywheel that begins to, you know, it's a virtuous cycle that begins to self reinforce. The most obvious use case for space today and the highest revenue is telecom, constellations of telecom satellites. Okay, so if you are starting your own telecom constellation, first of all, I think the way this industry shakes out is going to be somewhat terrestrial telecom. You're going to have three, four, five major companies that all compete but dominate global telecom. Okay, so in this world, think about your cell phone. Think about download speeds for your cell phone. You've gone from 3G to 4G to 5G to LTE, whatever. And those things increase, let's say, on a, let's say three to five year cycle, right? Something like”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and something else that maybe is less obvious is that if you start launching more often and you actually have a frequent regular schedule, that perhaps unlocks folks on the side of actually buying the service or actually participating in the business, wanting to ship satellites more frequently, having the option, if it is fully reasonable of bringing those back down, adjusting them. And so let's talk about that, this real business of satellites, this satellite economy.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know a handful of times a year And it's only a small number of revenue generating events that you can use to quote unquote amortize or distribute across the rest of the cost of the business. And those are real cost drivers that you have to pay attention to. You can't just look at marginal cost. Okay, so flight frequency then is the thing that you can go after to really solve that part of the equation. And that's where the rest of that factor of 20 comes from is by flying frequently and being able to share the cost of the business across many, many revenue generating events a year.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of the buzz and a lot of the new space ecosystem, the space economy that's now beginning to take off. But I would claim that there's another factor of 20 in improvements that are available in terms. If you do knock down full reusability. And that benefit comes from kind of a twofold effect. The first one we talked about, obviously you are amortizing the cost of the production of the vehicle across many, many missions. But the second one is maybe less obvious and less talked about. And that is that, you know, this enterprise that we're doing to manufacture rockets on the scale, to operate them, to develop them requires a standing army. It requires capital infrastructure. If you look holistically at the cost of the business, those are all very real costs. And so if all you ever did was amortize the cost of the vehicle and made a reasonable vehicle, but only flew it.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in terms of payload to orbit costs, 10 years ago, Atlas was probably the best vehicle for commercial use cases, and they were about $15,000 per kilogram. Falcon 9 has disrupted that, obviously. They charge $6,500 per kilogram for rideshare missions. I believe the latest pricing, if you want to buy an entire Falcon 9 for yourself, I believe that's something like $67 or $70 million. And if, which is a big if, if you fill up every single kilogram of capacity to the lowest Earth orbit, it's about $22,000. So that's $3,000 per kilogram. So what SpaceX has done is provided, I would say, gains in availability and also, let's say, a three to five X improvement in cost, which is huge. And that's what's created.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is a little surprising, I think, from everything I can tell. They're trying to solve the same problem. They're doing it in a different way. And I know very early on, and it's publicly available, that they did pursue non-ceramic tile-based solutions early on. I'm not really privy to the details of why they pivoted, but I can make some extrapolations that I think would explain why they pivoted. And it's also explains why we've gone with very certain architecture that we've gone with. One of the enabling factors for us is using liquid hydrogen, which is different. And SpaceX has chosen a different fuel methane or liquid natural gas for their upper stage. But we found we needed to use hydrogen in order to cool and protect the vehicle in this way. And at the scale that we're building”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seems a little surprising in a way that given your description of the ceramic tiles, how many they are, the amount of refurbishing or checking that they need, is it just that SpaceX is solving a different problem with Starship in that they aren't tackling or even trying to tackle a daily use rocket and they're really using their system for a different purpose walk us through how maybe others haven't pursued a different path because it seems yeah a little surprising that this would be the engineering solution that has been developed.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source