Hey, Ben, welcome to the show. Why don't you tell us a little
Yeah, glad to be here. We are putting reflector satellites in space to shine
sunlight onto solar farms after dark. It's
kind of like the quick pitch. The longer version is where the
whole world is gearing up to solve clean energy on a global scale. And
there aren't really a lot of great solutions to do that. You
know, we're still burning an awful lot of fossil fuels, and there isn't really anything stepping up
to come in and bridge that gap. Nuclear power is a bit too
expensive and a bit too slow to scale. Fusion is way
off in the future, and we can definitely get into talking more about that. And
wind and solar are just variable loads. So because of
the variability, you have to come in with batteries in order to solve that
problem, and batteries are pretty expensive. So we come in with this
new solution, and we're like, why use batteries if you could just have more power all the
time? Why not shine sunlight on solar farms and power them up after
dark so that they can be our only supply of energy? And
that's basically what we're doing here today. And, you know, in
the future, we're just building a bunch of reflector satellites and
putting them in the right orbit and shining them down onto solar farms,
you know, right after sunrise and before, right
after sunset, sorry, and before sunrise. So we can be
in a sun-synchronous polar orbit over the Terminator. And that means we're
always flying over new solar farms at that most valuable time of day
when peak demand goes up. and everybody gets home from work, they
plug in their electric car, they start using the stove, that's when
we're in the sky, we'll fly over, shine sunlight down, and convert
I love it. So you guys, because you used to work at SpaceX, right? So you heard the, you
heard the concerns about Starlink, like it was shining too much light down.
But let's get it in exactly the right spots. Yeah. So that's the whole thing
is doing it very precisely. So you have to make sure that the mirrors are super flat. So
you hit a really small spot from orbit. And yeah. Our
satellites, we're able to aim them very well. So if we're flying over
a place that doesn't want to receive sunlight, we just point the other way and shine sunlight right back
Or if you have an enemy that you really want to annoy, you could really just make
Yeah, you could light them up. Yeah, we
get that question a lot. Is this going to be a death laser? The answer
is no. It's very difficult to actually get enough power on the ground where you could do any
damage. We're going to be significantly dimmer than sunlight for a
very long time. I think that's
a very easy concern to have, but it's
Um, cool. Well, let's, let's take a step back. I think that if people are just hearing that for the
first time, they're like, I just heard a lot of words that I have no idea what they mean. So,
uh, that's the, that's the joy of this podcast. So that we get to dive deep into them. So,
um, I, people might know, I actually work at a satellite company, so I
work at Astronis. We build communication satellites. Um,
you know, before I joined, I really knew nothing about this, but the, when
I, when I got to Astronis, I had to learn about it. I had to learn about. how
do you build a satellite? How do you keep it in space? What are orbits? All those things. So I
think let's dive into basically all of them. I
mean, maybe as a frame, I'll tell people generally in space,
we think of things as buses and payloads. Like
those are the two parts of a satellite. The payload of
a satellite is what it's doing. So in my case, the payload is
a communications radio. It's just a thing that passes communications that go
up to it, down to a new spot on earth. But for you, the payload
is different. The payload is the big gigantic mirror, which is
focusing sunlight and pointing at a particular spot on the ground. There's
also a bus. So the bus of the satellite is basically everything
that's needed to support that payload. So it's everything from like thrusters, if
you're going to move around, but I don't think you have those. So we'll talk about that in
a second. It's things like a flight computer. There
has to be something that tells everything else what to do. It's the way that you
point the satellite. It's the physical box that the satellite is contained within.
All that counts is the bus. So I think for the sake of this conversation, let's divide
it into payload and bus just to begin, make it simple. And so let's talk about
the payload first. Tell us about this super cool, gigantic mirror.
Yeah, so we can start out with a 10 meter by 10 meter
reflector. And it's basically just a piece of mylar that
we launch into space, you know, the thing deploys out, and then it's just a very large
reflector. So you can see here is a little piece of it, and
it's pretty shiny. We're just doing a really large version of this.
And the Russians actually did this in the 1990s with
this thing called Zenamiya. It was like a 20 meter by 20 meter reflector. That
thing deployed out, you know, it was super wrinkly, but it did do a reflection from orbit, and
that worked out quite well. We also see solar sailing vehicles using these
kind of reflectors. NASA's launching this mission called ACS-3 pretty
soon, which is, you know, a 10 meter by 10 meter reflector. It's going to deploy out,
and they're going to actually use that to solar sail around and actually raise
their orbit. We're making them a little bit more reflective, pulling
them a little bit tighter, and that allows us to, you know, shine
sunlight down and convert it into energy. Um, and yeah, that's, it's
kind of like the simplest payload that you could use. I think it's a lot simpler than
a telecommunications radio, for example. Um, so, you know, Starlink or
Astronosis system, you're, you're sending a lot of data down. Um, so you need very, very
good antennas and you need a lot of processing in order to send that data down. We are
just using a very simple structure. Um, and I think that's a huge feature
of this is it's, it's kind of like the simplest thing that we could possibly launch into space. Um,
and yeah, that, that just makes the entire system so much cheaper, um,
and you know, able to scale up a lot, a lot faster. Um, and you
know, we're going to be able to make a lot of these. And then the other piece of that, the
satellite bus itself is also going to be very simple, um,
because we're a very small vehicle and it basically just has to point pretty accurately,
um, and be able to move around. It's, it's one of the simplest satellite buses you could have. Um,
we're able to use very simple satellite buses, very lightweight, um,
And yeah, that's a huge component of why this is going to work. You know, you don't want
energy equipment to be very expensive. You want to be able to make something that's
going to scale very well. You want to be able to fill up an entire rocket with these vehicles
and have that not cost too much money. So yeah, that's what we're able
So tell me about the reflectivity, basically, of this thing.
So is it just literally, so what is mylar? Start
Yeah, yeah. Mylar is just a thin plastic. And you can use polyamide,
you can use any other material. And then what you do is you aluminize it
in a vacuum chamber. It's basically the same
exact thing that potato chip bags are made out of. You know, you
can kind of think of it like that, like the inside is very shiny. And
you know, it's just a very thin plastic. Now, a lot of people are
really worried about the reflectivity of our satellites. They're like, oh, I see those, the solar sail
vehicles. They look terrible. They don't look super shiny. It doesn't look like a very good
mirror at all. And I think there's a lot of, you know, kind of concern about
that. Like Zenamiya was super, super rough. Um, the
interesting thing is it's, it's actually not that hard to make a really good mirror with Mylar. We
I have a 45 degree Mylar mirror rigged up and yeah, we're actually looking through
Wow. That is the coolest demo. If people are not watching on
YouTube, you have to go check that out. Literally this whole time. I did no idea.
Yeah. So that's Mylar. That's brilliant. Yeah.
It's like 90% reflective. You lose almost nothing in it. And you
can make it very flat when you're able to pull it tight enough. So that's all we do. We
That is awesome. Well, well played. What's the, so
talk to me about, so I think that at one point you were doing collimators instead
of just like a sheet or something. Is that true? And why did
you decide to go with just a mirror instead of like a fancier, like
Yeah, so the original thought behind collimators, it was really based
in analysis. So I was doing a bunch of Monte Carlo simulations on
how many solar farms are out there and with different configurations of satellites, how
much power is getting to the ground, how much money are you making with them and all
of that. And in the data, there's a lot more small solar farms than
there are very large solar farms. I mean, you do the optimization curve
out, you can make more money if you can serve a 500 meter
solar farm or smaller without spilling light into the environment. And
yeah, so I went about designing a system that's actually
able to achieve that. So this is basically a bunch of small telescopes
in parallel that takes in sunlight and then outputs
collimated light. And then you can reflect this down to the ground and you
get a smaller, sharper sunlight spot on the
ground. Now, that is in the very deep
future. That's definitely the way to do things when you need to serve a
very large number of solar farms and you're kind of like maxing out the market. It
turns out early on, you actually don't need this. And it's kind of
interesting. So this made a ton of sense over just like a very large flat
mirror, which is kind of like the traditional way that people have looked at space solar. They're like, oh,
you know, you put like a mile wide reflector up there in low Earth orbit or whatever.
And then because of the angular size of the sun, it spreads out on the ground. And, you
know, you have to make it really big, get any power to the ground. So then this came
in and fixed that. So you can get a lot more power to the ground in a very small
area. But in doing the math for this, you know, we basically had a
bunch of flat mirrors behind it. And when you reflect off the
flat mirrors behind it, you know, you get the collimated thing. But then at that point, you're able
to delete this from the math and you just have an array of smaller flat
mirrors, which is essentially approximating a parabola. And if you just look
at that, it's actually way better than even the collimators. So
it's kind of this like third stage of design that
we discovered in doing the math for this and looking at this. where it's like,
actually, you don't want a big flat mirror. That's stupid. We knew that from the beginning, that scaling
is terrible. With the collimators, the scaling is a lot better. But
if you then delete the collimator and have all the small mirrors behind it that are
doing the focusing, then you end up with this other curve that gets
way better performance than the flat mirror, but is actually a lot cheaper than launching these
things up. And you still have a very large market because
there's so many giant solar farms out there. So you're able to serve them, make
tons of money, and until the point where you're making like tens of, you know, tens,
hundreds of billions of dollars a year, you don't need collimators for
a while. They're definitely something that we're going to be adding in the future, so it's
a piece of technology that we're going to continue to develop, but it's not something
that's required for our initial constellation, which is great because
it makes the lift a lot easier, it's a lot easier system to build when you're just making large
Very cool. So tell us, just take like the one step more
beginner on what both of those things are really quick. So talk about, you know,
what is a parabola or like, why does a parabola have the cool special property
of being able to focus things? But then also like, you know, is a
collimator just basically a laser? Like, is that the simple way to think like purely parallel light
Yeah, yeah, collimated is just laser light. So it's just like,
you know, taking some light that would spread out like this and making it more like a beam. So
that's essentially all we're doing with this. A parabola is very good at that. If
you think of like an antenna, like a Wi Fi antenna or something like that, where it has the
big, the big grid, you know, your root You
hit your source is kind of like a circle that's coming out and then it hits
the parabola Perfectly so that you know everywhere it hits here
converts into just you know a straight beam so you're kind of taking this
thing that would spread out and converting into this straight beam that goes across and
with this it's it's essentially taking the
sunlight which is coming in at this big angle and And it's blowing
that out and converting it into light that goes more straight. The
problem with doing that is you lose a lot of
the area. So there's very small inlet holes and very large outlet
holes. So you're essentially blocking a lot of the light that would
be going right through in order to collimate it. So, you know, a
laser starts off very small and then you have like a big telescope. or it
should direct in one direction, you kind of have to pay the same toll with
the collimator tile. So you're losing a little bit of light there. And
you know, you make up for it by transmitting over a very long distance. It's kind of like
high voltage transmission lines for electricity. But
you know, it is... It is expensive to
do that, you know, it's expensive to have that high voltage transformer there. So a
parabola is really interesting because it's kind of like the perfect curve.
Like if you look at it on a graph, it's like, you know, it starts in one spot and then like all the little light
rays that hit it, like go exactly straight up, which is a really cool thing. And
a lot of people ask us like, why don't you use a parabola to focus the light onto
the ground? And it's actually, it's not what you want because there's a problem with using a
parabola. which is if you're trying to hit a spot over here from
the sun that's over here and your mirror is moving, you always need a different shape
parabola in order to reflect the light and get it collected over
here. So the curvature of the parabola is always changing.
It's very hard to make a parabola that changes. The James Webb
Telescope parabola, they're able to change those, but you don't want
Yeah, yeah. And all the time. But
what you can do is you can use a bunch of small mirrors. And if
they're all working in parallel and you're able to aim each one individually, you
can approximate a parabola with a bunch of these small mirrors. And that's
what we're able to do with our constellation. So if the sun's over
here or it's over here, we have a bunch of little parabolas that are all in
sections. And as they all move around, they're able to all rotate at exactly the
right rate in order to approximate a parabola as a whole constellation.
But not as an individual satellite, right. So
each individual satellite is just one sheet. It's not many
smaller sheets like the James Webb. You're saying that the system as
a whole is approximating, with many satellites, it's approximating a
Yep, yeah, and you should add a little just a flat piece of that. Yeah, and
it's really like a condensed solar farm. So if you see these solar farms out in the desert, where
they have all the mirrors in the field, and the salt tower up there, it's, you know, it's a bunch of
little flat mirror, and they're all kind of approximating a virtual parabola. You
know, as the sun moves around, they're all moving at different amounts, and they're all focusing
light onto a central point. So they are approximating a parabola. you
know, just a lot of small flat mirrors and kind of an interesting configuration.
Like the parabola is like, you know, scaling constantly and like wherever it touches one of
So I think people would be interested to hear about how small it gets. Like
they might see, they might hear 10 meter by 10 meter thing, like, oh
my God, this is the biggest satellite that's ever launched. Like, oh,
how do you even get that up there? How do you fit that in a rocket? But I
think people would be surprised to learn that it's not just that way when it gets up there, it
actually has to deploy. So do you want to talk about how the deployment happens and
Yeah, you can pack a 10 meter by 10 meter reflector into something
that's about this size. So this is, yeah. And it's
not even just us that's doing that. It's like NASA ACS-3 solar sail vehicles will
be 10 meters by 10 meters or 9.9 by 9.9. But
yeah, they pack into the 12U CubeSat, which is this big. So, you know, we can go to
like a 16U CubeSat and, you know, we'll have no problem launching,
you know, thicker material, thicker booms, all of that for a
little bit extra mass. So it's, yeah, very much like, you know, you do kind of the tape measure
trick where the boom is deploying out and then, you know, it brings the reflector
with it. And yeah, that thing can cover a large area.
We do have a couple tricks to keep the mirror a lot more reflective.
Usually when solar sails are packed up, they're folded in two dimensions. And
when you do that, you get creases because you have to bend it over a very sharp radius. You
know, you get super high stress there and it plastically deforms. And then even when you expand it out, you
still have those plastic deformations present. So what we
do is we can do tricks where we basically unroll the thing so we don't
have to fold it. And that's very helpful. And
That's very cool. I saw the one that, because Bill Nye made
Yeah, I saw that one, and it had all the little creases in the side. He
had this really great image that he gave, which is like, it packs into
the size of a loaf of bread, and when it expands, it's
the size of a boxing ring. Those were his two benchmarks. So you got
to come up with your benchmarks. I don't know what the, that thing's like a, I don't know, a small heater
or something. And then it gets massive. How big is 10 by 10 meters? It's like, what's
Yeah, totally. Um, so talk about it. The
only way that that's possible though, is because the Mylar is so ridiculously thin, right?
It's a, it's 0.001 millimeters. Um,
yeah. You can go a little bit thinner. We're still playing with that
Yeah, don't let it deform. So a heavier thing would be better
to resist deformation, I guess. You probably also want
to... Is this a thing? So solar sails, we'll talk
about that in a little bit, about how you're actually using the sun's photons, basically,
to fly. But is it true that it would
like buckle or like bend out in the same way that like a
ship's sails would when it's getting pushed on? Like you have to worry about that
Yeah, you get a little bit of billowing. The way you solve that is with extra tension. So
yeah, usually solar sail vehicles don't have very much tension in
the sail. We're going to be putting a bit more tension in our sail in order to keep it reflective. And
as long as you have enough tension pulling this way, it's not going to billow too far this
way. We do also have a couple of tricks that we can do to move
the end point of the arms, and that'll allow
us to basically So you can preload it in one direction so
when the radiation pressure pushes on it, it doesn't move it around.
It stays flat. And there is a tolerance on the flatness. So we want to
stay within like a 5.4 kilometer spot on the ground. So it's
not like it has to be perfectly flat as long as it doesn't move so far that the
Totally. How do you think about the size? How did you determine that
Yeah, the size is driven a lot by what's possible to manufacture, and
what you're able to get to the ground. So you don't want
too big of a reflector, because then it's, you're
basically getting light from each side of the reflector on
the ground, and it makes it that much further apart. So you know, when other people look at this,
they're like, Oh, yeah, we want a kilometer diameter reflector. that actually makes your spot
size on the ground a kilometer larger. So you're losing a lot of
irradiance when you do that. So you want it to be small enough that the
light from each edge of the mirror is pretty close together. But
then you have to balance that out with a fixed cost of the satellite. So you
have to have a flight computer, all the avionics, like the actual satellite bus,
you have to pay for that. So it's really the balance of making
the mirror performance like the smaller the mirror the better balance
with how small can you make a satellite bus before the thing starts
getting too expensive and you do get a lot of you get a lot better
scaling with the area because it's area
squared you know and satellite buses is one unit so
you have this like you know, there's a couple of terms together in the optimization. But
it works out pretty simply with just like, you know, these are the fixed costs of the vehicles, these
are the, you know, the cost of making the thing larger, this is how much power you get to the ground, you
just kind of do that math out, you know, plot a curve, pick the best point. Yeah,
the, the ideal, like, like end state kind of scenarios,
like 54 meters by 54 meters, you never really need
to go much bigger than that, which is pretty cool to see. And Yeah,
it's pretty big. Yeah, that that's very large. That's, you know, that's
like the, you know, similar to the size of the International Space Station
or something like that. You know, we haven't built anything like that. But
the 10 meter by 10 meters, like half the size of, you
know, what the Russians launched in the 1990s. So,
you know, we're pretty confident that we can we can pull something off that's a lot
So one final question about the mirror before we go on to other parts of
the satellite bus and talking about the vision of the company and things like that. Tell me
about meteoroids or micrometeoroids. Like, are you worried that
with this huge area, you might get poked to death
Yeah, I mean, micrometeoroids are definitely present in the orbit that
we're going to be sitting in. Um, you know, you can look up, there's, there's a couple
of books on an orbital debris and there's some great graphs in these books.
Um, you know, so I, I just got to calculating like exactly what the risk is. Um,
you know, how often do you micrometer it's of what size, you know, hit
your, your vehicle. Um, you know, and I just kind of like did the calculation, like
per square meter, like what's the actual area of that. And
then once it spreads out, how much damage are you going to actually
be accruing from these micrometeorites that hit your vehicle? So the
thing that I learned is interesting. If you basically, if the, and
you can see this has like some damage in it, just from poking the
hole. As long as you're able to arrest the
hole and stop it from spreading, it's not too big. There's
not very much area that's actually being hit by micrometeorites. It's
more like if it hits it and then rips, then you're losing all of that area. So
you want to make sure that that doesn't happen. So using materials that don't
continue to rip once some damage has started is a really big part
of that. But yeah, the other thing is you don't
want the micrometeorites to hit and damage the center vehicle. So
the satellite bus itself, if that gets hit by a micrometeorite, that can take it out. So
making sure that that size isn't too big that it's going to get hit and damaged is
also pretty important. But as far as the mirror itself, as long as the damage just
goes right through and doesn't make a larger hole, it seems like it's not going to be
too much of a problem in the kind of satellite lifetimes that we're looking at. It would
take on the order of like 50 or more years to really have too big
of an impact on the mirror. which is pretty cool to see.
And yeah, some of these, some of the mirrors that we actually use in hot air balloon testing,
you know, saw a ton of damage. So like, you know, they were getting bumped around, they
were getting sticks through them, they were getting covered in dust. They were, we
really beat the hell out of these things. And the, all
the holes didn't really, didn't affect the tension. You know, it
was still a great mirror and, you know, what we ended up using for the test. So we
used, we used the same mirrors for all seven tests. And yeah,
Do you want to talk about those tests? So maybe take us a step back, talk about
the vision of the company and then how you got started with that, with that demo.
Yeah. Yeah. Um, I
guess, yeah, the vision of the company, it really. I've
been thinking about energy for my whole life, you know, I built the fusion reactor in high school,
I kind of realized that like fusion is probably not the thing that's going to save the world. You
know, just because the sun is so much better at it than we are. It's kind of this like, it's very stable
system that the sun has, where as soon as something starts going wrong, it just gets fixed. And
whenever we do fusion on Earth, we're using, you know, confinement methods or something where
it's very unstable. So as soon as something starts going wrong, it goes very wrong. Um,
you know, we're kind of at the point where we're still solving physics problems and then we're going to start
solving the science problems. And then we're going to start solving engineering problems. And
then we're going to figure out how to, you know, get banks to back it or to actually scale
it up. Um, and it, you know, it's kind of a very long way away from working like
solar worked pretty well in the 1950s and it took until, you know, the late two thousands
for it to start getting really cheap. Um, So, you know,
that's a big, a big part of this is like, you know, I think, I think
we have a long way to go on, on other energy technologies and we really need something new.
Um, you know, like we, we
don't have energy figured out and we really need to find a solution that
that isn't fossil fuels. Um, every solution we have, you know, it seems
to end up burning more fossil fuels than we were originally. And, uh, yeah, we
need, we need to get away from doing that. Um, the other thing that.
that I kind of realized when I was working at SpaceX is we have rockets figured out very, very
well. Um, what we don't have figured out is what we're, the rockets are actually launching. So,
you know, one whole thing is like, yeah, we're going to go to Mars. It's going to be super awesome. And
like, yeah, Mars would be really cool, but like, you know, it's not solving problems here on earth. Like
what are, what are we doing here on earth to actually like,
you know, what are we using rockets for here on earth? That's actually solving problems in a real
measurable way. Um, I think that's, that's kind of been like. a
sticking point for a lot of people. Um, and you know, when I was at
SpaceX, I definitely felt it like, wow, like these, these rockets are really awesome, but
like, wait, man, we really got to find a better use for them. Um, didn't have the better use
back then, but I think we really found it here where we can use to
use rockets to launch things into space, you know, get that as
cheap as possible and then use that to actually solve a real problem here.
Um, you know, create energy at night, um, create energy
Totally. Yeah, I think that people might be surprised to
know that most satellites fall into one of two categories. It's either
communications or it's imaging. That's like 95% of
all the satellites that have ever been launched. Yeah, or just research. Yeah.
Or science, yes, science is the third category. But that's like the only
really like NASA is doing those sorts of things and they'll send a probe every once
in a while to some distant planet. But like all the commercial activity in space
is basically just either you're taking pictures
of the Earth or and then you're trying to sell that to people that can use it in some
way or you're trying to connect people on Earth. Be a like
to the Internet, but this is cool. This is like in the third category This
is in the the rest of the satellites and we do need to find more uses for
these things like I think it's and so maybe
Maybe the next place to go is just how you got moving like
I'm curious to hear it So when this sounds like a big engineering challenge, you
know, obviously like trying to create this cool deployable mirror, trying
to figure out how to operate it in space. It's a huge problem. So you
had to probably break it down into steps and do them one by one and de-risk
the company. I think that the way you did that first was by building this
Yeah. Yeah. So I think initially there was a lot of
concern that, you know, reflecting sunlight from orbit, it wasn't really going to power solar
panels. Um, so what we did is we went out to the desert and
we put an eight foot by eight foot mirror on the bottom of a hot air balloon and
reflected sunlight onto some solar panels really early in the morning and measured the
power. Um, and you know, it went from like 58 Watts to well over
200. So it was, you know, around four X the power. that
we were getting down to these panels. And that's a car that would not be there otherwise. Now,
obviously, a hot air balloon is a lot lower than a satellite. So
it's just kind of like the smaller scale version, but basically everything else is
the same. It's a reflector, we use the Mylar mirror, and
we're pulling off the reflection. It's a very moving, dynamic system.
It's in the real world. It's actually in the sky. So we had to figure out
how to aim it in real time, which was a huge challenge. And we ended up
building three separate control systems for that, which was a great learning experience. Some
of them are behind me now. Yeah, and it was just like a great,
a great like small scale demonstration of what we're actually going to be
doing with satellites in the future. So yeah, that
like, it was a lot of fun going out to the desert to you know, there were a lot of a lot of times
where it was like two or three days in a row where we didn't didn't sleep, pulling
these things together. And, you know, actually getting these things operational is was pretty cool.
Yeah, so That was, that was a great experience. Um,
and you know, it really showed us exactly what we're going to need in order to, to pull this off
from orbit. Um, kind of the control system that we ended up coming up with, um,
is going to be perfect for, for satellites. Um, you know, it's something that
you can, you can kind of do just with a single camera, um, instead
of some kind of other complicated imaging system. And it's, you know, it's not relying on GPS, it's
not relying on like internal IMUs or anything like that. We learned very
quickly that those do not work, um, nearly as well as you'd expect them to. It's,
you know, it's kind of like, oh yeah, we'll just use IMUs and like GPS and that'll, that'll solve the
whole problem. We'll know exactly where we are and we'll point right at the thing." It's like,
no, no, no. That's not how it works. You need
much better feedback algorithms and much better information in
order to actually pull off a reflection like this. So yeah,
it taught us that. You can only get that kind of learning by
actually going out and testing, like it's testing like that. It teaches you
all the things that you, you don't know already. Um, so like you can sit
down and you can design something like from start to finish and you can be like, okay, we know all of these
things. We're going to design something that's going to solve all of these problems. Then you go out and test it. And
you're like, oh, there's this whole new problem that we didn't think about at the beginning. Um,
you know, that's the real value of testing. And we definitely, you know, found some of those new
And it's hard to test for space on the ground. I mean, that might sound obvious, but
it may not be obvious the exact ways that it's true for people that aren't space
people. Like we have convection down here, so you don't have to worry about thermal things
the same way that you do up in space. We have gravity.
down here. So it's like, I don't know, it's hard to test a control algorithm for
a satellite that's going to be operating 0G in 1G. I mean, did you
have to do anything cool to figure out how to, you know, like, how did you
turn the satellite? Did you test that on the ground before setting
We didn't for the hot air balloon test. We actually built up
a different prototype. What we did for attitude control
was we basically, you know, built a little, all of control moment
gyros and then stuck them in an hamster ball and put
it in a fish tank. It's floating. There's,
you know, it's essentially a simulating zero gravity of it's able to move around only,
only by what's in here. Um, and yeah, so that's
Um, so this, yeah, this was just the classic NASA designed hamster
Yeah. With control moment gyros. Another,
another test that we've done is, you know, just having like a bunch of fans that are blowing up
simulating solar radiation pressure. I'm then having a vehicle that can float on
those. I can send over a little video of that as well. That's cool. Yeah.
Yeah, I remember there was a time at Astronis when we were trying to test our,
because we, we built a three year CubeSat. That was the first thing that Astronis built. And
when they were testing the gyros, they were trying to figure out the right way to do it. Like, how do you figure
out if you can de-tumble with, with that, when you're on earth, it's kind of hard. We
didn't think of the hamster ball and the fish tank, but we hung
it from a string basically. And then we just, you know, and then you just like, you
Yeah, it was really surprising how quickly they
saturate as well. We developed a really good intuition for
how fast these things saturate and how to desaturate them. Yeah, it's
kind of like, you never know until you build something and start playing with it. You
can just learn so much from that. And yeah, so we try
to do that as much as possible. So me and Tristan are very much of the realm
of build first and then figure it out after. Obviously, we
throw together prototypes very, very quickly. A
lot of what's behind me is just like, I wonder, I wonder how this works. You know, like, let's just
I feel like that's how you've been. I saw your old YouTube channel. I feel like that's how you've
been ever since you were in high school. Like literally you built a fusion reactor
Yeah. It's it's yeah. I don't know. I think it's the best way to learn, you know, it's like
you're curious about something you want to figure out how it works. Like go find one, go take it
apart. Um, you're curious how something gets made, like go, go build it
yourself and really see what all the sticking points are. I think it's, it's
more useful than you think to actually just build something yourself. And
I don't know, I've always just been curious how absolutely everything works. So if
I can't find a video on how it's made, I'll try to reproduce it myself in
my home shop. And just after years of doing that, you kind of develop this
knowledge, where you're able to take on anything. And each project that
you do, it builds your confidence, so you want to do more. And
yeah, I just think it's a great way to go forward. It's kind of like, it's
something that's better to have done in the past. It's like people are always like, oh, it's better to have bought a
house in the past. It's like, oh, it's better to have built a bunch of stuff in the past.
So I'd always be like, Oh, what am I going to wish I did in the past now?
And then I'll like look to the future. I'll be like, okay, like I should build now. So
that'll be happy. Um, when I look back on it, um, and
it's just kind of like that thinking that, that, uh, yeah, it,
Totally. Talk about how you decided on this
architecture for beaming energy from space versus choosing other
things. There are other models. People have talked about
the mirrors that shine light onto something in the satellite and you just beam
it down via laser or microwave or something. Why did you
choose just to reflect light as opposed to beam down
Yeah, I actually got here in a completely different way. I was
not thinking about space solar at all. I was watching
a video on the problem with solar power in Africa. In the
video it was like, you know, you put a little square in the Sahara Desert and it can
power the whole earth, right? Like everybody's seen that. But this video was
interesting because it said Europe was going to spend $42 billion
to build a bunch of power lines to bring solar power from
the Sahara Desert to Europe. And they're going to power Germany. Because they were like, the
Sahara Desert gets three times more sunlight than you get in Germany. So it
makes sense to do this. And the economics actually work out. And I was like, holy crap. That's completely
crazy. $40 billion. I bet there's a better way
to do it than spending $40 billion on a bunch of copper cables. So
I started looking into actually turning the sunlight into beams of
sunlight. and then reflecting it off of mirrors to get around the curvature of
the Earth, and then converting it that way. Because the thinking was, you know, light moving
in a vacuum is the most efficient way to transport things in the solar system. Like,
light from 13 billion years ago still makes it to us and we're able to see
it when we look really deep into the stars. And, you
know, a little bit of stainless steel around the edge of a vacuum tube is more
efficient at scale than, you know, a bunch of copper that's carrying high voltage. You
know, at least that's what I was calculating out. And, you know, it was kind of crazy, but,
you know, it got me thinking about this problem. And I
actually started building up some hardware for it. This is
like a giant mirror. That was one of the things that would focus it in and bring
it into a beam. And there's some problems with that. I was, you
know, I was a little bit like naive, you know, just kind of doing like high level
calculations, looking into things. But, you know, what I ended up
learning when I started to talk to people about it is, you know, why are you doing
this? Like, photovoltaic solar is just going to absolutely crush you. You
know, you can buy solar panels, you know, it's less than a dollar a watt. It's like 20 cents
per watt now, you know, where it's gone down like... 34x
and since the 1990s, like it's just so cheap. And there's 2000x more
solar farms out there today than there were, you know, just 30 years
ago. So it's just like, it's just absolutely ripping. And the big thing is
banks back solar farms, and they're very comfortable with it. And banks will not
back your idea for a very long time. So long that
you're never going to beat solar and it's just going to continue to beat you. So
I was like, oh man, like, you know, this, this is like a very big thing in my brain. And
another really big thing in my brain then was, you know, SpaceX Starship
and how that vehicle is super cool. And, you know, I had kind of made the choice
to go and work at a bunch of startups, you know, to build my skills instead of working on
Starship. Cause I was like, you know, Starship is very cool, but like, I feel like there's something
there's something else to be working on. So every, every time I saw Starship working
really well, I was like, oh man, like. Yeah, no, maybe I could have gotten to work on that thing. So
I had these kind of like two very negative things. I was like, oh, man, like Photovoltaic is
just winning everywhere. They're so good. Like, man, that's crazy. And then
also Starship was like also working out very well. And I feel like, you
know, it's this kind of thing where negatives in your brain are always stronger than positives. You
know, because humans are designed to avoid things that are dangerous, but we're
not designed to like, you know, just just hang out. It says, you know,
this kind of innate human thing in our in our brain chemistry. So I had these two negatives.
And then one day I was just on a run. I was like, wait, what if these negatives were actually positives? And
I could use them together. And I was like, what if I use like, you know, cheap launch to
launch things into space that could make photovoltaic solar better? That
would just be a mirror so that I could actually put reflectors in space, shine
sunlight onto the solar farms after dark, solve the biggest problem with solar, which
is actually not that it's cheap or not that you have to
bring the power lines places. It's that the sun goes down every single
night and all the solar farms around the world stop producing electricity. It's
like a coal power plant that can't buy coal after 7 p.m. For
every solar farm, no matter how big of a solar farm you build, it stops working
at night. So yeah, I just kind of combined this
thinking together and I was like, wait, I could use the cheap rockets to launch a bunch of mirrors
into space and shine sunlight onto solar farms. And you know, the biggest thing about
that was instead of going from here to here on earth, you could just go from right above the
atmosphere to right below the atmosphere. Um, so this was kind of just like a
huge breakthrough that I just had when I was on a run and I was like, oh yeah, this is, this,
this might make a lot of sense. Um, and you know, the more, the more I looked into it,
the more math I did. the more it started coming together and it was like, oh,
this is actually competitive with every other energy technology out
there. Even with rockets that are working right
now, we can make this cheaper than batteries. And it's just like,
holy crap, this is amazing. This is an amazing new energy technology.
Why is nobody looking into this? And then after that, then I started looking into power
beaming and stuff. Um, you know, cause people have thought about this before, you
know, NASA thought about it in the 1970s. Um, Oberth wrote a paper about
it in 1929. Um, and then, you know, there's been a couple of companies along
the way, um, that have been thinking about this and, you know, the, the traditional approach right now
for, for like large institutions, um, and Caltech just launched
a vehicle is doing this is you have solar panels in space, you convert it into microwaves,
and then you beam the microwave to the ground, to a bunch of antennas on the ground. Now
there's a couple of problems with doing that. The first one is the antennas are
really expensive. So you need like, you know, an 80 DBI antenna. or
something like that, which is like, you know, the 500 meter diameter aperture,
like our SIBO, like these radio communication, like these things
that listen to aliens and stuff like the very big
antennas are kind of like on the scale that you need for this. And
Ronald Berger did a study on the European Space Agency's design, and
they said it was going to be nine billion dollars just for the steel alone for one of these antenna farms on
the ground. That's just the one farm. And you kind of need a lot in
order for the idea to start working out, you know, because the satellite's always moving. So
you need to like, you know, always be sending it to a new place. It's kind
of crazy. And then you actually do the calculation, and it turns out that just
the solar panels are similar to our entire cost. So
solar is a certain dollars per watt, a solar panel going into space
is even more expensive per watt, and a piece
of mylar going into space is very cheap, and
it's very light, so it's super easy to get out there. Um,
so it turns out like just the solar panels are basically more expensive than our entire system.
Um, and then that's not including the thing that you're using to transmit to the ground, whether it's
a microwave antenna or a laser. Um, also it turns out
usually that thing gets very warm. So you need a giant radiator, which can
be as big as the solar panels. Um, and then you need all these ground stations,
which we don't have to build because people have already built solar
farms all around the world and they work really, really well and they
pay themselves off. And, you know, everybody's happy with that
kind of investment, and they're just growing extremely rapidly. It's, you know,
the fastest growing new energy source. Like, most new energy projects
are solar projects. And they got extremely cheap over
the last decade, when a bunch of other energy technologies have gotten more expensive. So
kind of looking into all these things, it's like, wow, why is nobody working on this? And
people have been working on this. The Russians launched the vehicle in the
1990s. That was basically doing the same thing. It's just there
weren't a bunch of solar farms built around back then. So there weren't any
customers to send the power to. And people have looked into
this in the 1970s. And it just looked very expensive back then, because the
cost of launch was ridiculously expensive back then. And only NASA did
it. But nowadays, there's commercial spaceflight. And
that really makes this whole thing work is, you know, there's these vehicles that are that are
launching up. And, you know, I don't have to worry about them. I don't have to worry about building a
rocket. I don't have to run a business like SpaceX, which is great, because,
you know, the rocket business, they're really hard businesses, you know, rockets blow up.
It's actually kind of funny, like satellites. were able to make a lot of
money before SpaceX even existed. Like they were able to launch on like $400 million
ULA launches or something like that because the economics make so much sense. But
the actual rocket itself is a very difficult business to run. I'm
very glad we don't have to do that. I'm glad that there's people making great
rockets and that we can just purchase them and use them and get our stuff
That's, yeah. I think it's so interesting. It's like both
a super cutting edge technology that is, you know, launching this
massive object into space, like something that people haven't seen before, but
then at the end of the day, it's just connecting to like a solar farm or which
I have on the roof of my house, you know, like it could literally shine
light onto my house and it would produce energy for me. I think it's a cool dichotomy
or it's a cool mashup of those two, like old and new.
I think one thing that I, one question that I have is, How
much more solar are you getting than normal farm? Do
you think about it in hours? Do you think about it in watts? How do you think
about how much more productive you're making the average solar farm that would be
Yeah, we have a lot of flexibility on if we want more power or more hours.
You know, we're doing a little bit of a blend right now. So it's like, you know, two hours at night, two
hours in the morning, and then you know, a couple hundred watts per
square meter. So at the point where it's like, you know, 200 watts per square meter for
two hours, it's it's like 20 or so percent more
energy for the solar farms that are out there. But theoretically,
you can quadruple the output of an existing solar panel.
This is this thing that I like to say a lot where it's the sun only shines 25% of
the time on average in the US. If you put a
solar panel outside, you put a hundred watt solar panel outside, it
only makes 25 watts typically. We can bring that up to
Because you're reflecting more sunlight, you're getting double
sun basically. If you were a perfect reflector and there was no atmospheric loss, you would have
Um, well, you can, you just add enough satellites that you get that part of
So you can just overloading a normal solar panel, basically like
letting it, you're letting it see more than it would normally see just from
Yeah. And I think we do have to be a little careful about overloading. Cause
we're not, we're not bringing more light down than the sun. Like
it's not, it's not brighter than the sun. It's just for longer. So usually,
you know, the sun is up in the day and then it's gone at night. Um,
we just, you know, keep it going later, later in the night. Um,
Um, so it's, it's not, we're not like making double power sunlight. We're,
we're just like keeping it going for a lot longer, um, at
that time when, when it would normally be off. And those are the most useful times of day to like
at night, you know, you kind of get like the peak demand thing on the duck curve. Uh,
we should definitely show a picture of the duck curve here in California, where there's an awful
lot of solar on the grid already. Um, you know, you get like the demand
curve and then you subtract solar's output from that. Um, and you get this.
And then when you do that, you get this huge spike in demand late at night, um,
as the sun is going down and you get this other demand. Um, you know, right before the sun
rises when, you know, when people are waking up, they're doing things. Um, but the sun
isn't, isn't providing a lot of, uh, solar electricity. Um, we
come in right at those hours, um, and provide that extra power.
So it's, it's not only like adding more power, but it's adding power exactly when
solar farms need it most. Um, and exactly when energy consumers need,
need that power most. Um, so yeah, that's, that's pretty cool. And,
uh, yeah, the way we do that is just with like a sun synchronous polar orbit. Um. So
it's like a fairly standard orbit. Usually you use this
orbit to take a picture of the Earth when there's no shadows on the ground. And
we just do that 90 degrees offset. And we stay in this orbit. We're
locked to the sun all the time. The cool thing about that is the satellites are always in the sun.
We're never competing with the sun during the day. And we're not shaded by the
Earth at night. Yeah, so it's a great place
to put your satellites and you get an awful lot of output out of your satellites as well. Because, you know,
the thing is, when you launch these satellites, you want them to make money back. And,
you know, we, you know, when you do the math out, they kind of at scale, like I like talking
about the numbers, you know, kind of at maximum scale. on
the economic side. So, you know, we expect to be able to make these satellites for like around
$100,000. Um, you know, if you're launching that on Falcon nine
ride shares, you know, it would cost like $150,000 or
so per, per vehicle. But if you kind of do the economics out with, with
starships launch costs, um, you're, you're down that like
$30,000 per, per vehicle range, um, which is, which is really crazy. And
then with each of those satellites, you're, you're basically able to make like $175,000 per
year, um, over, you know, over the lifetime of the vehicle.
Um, so, you know, for, at first we're going to be like 10 year life vehicles. And
then in the end, we're going to, we expect to want to get up to like 20 year lifespan vehicles. Um,
we don't have the same thing where version two is going to be a ton better than version one.
These are mirrors. They're going to be like 90% reflective. Um, they're,
they're pretty good. Like version version one is going to be very, very good. Version two is
going to be very slightly better. Um, we're not going to find aluminum, you know,
5.0 and make this a lot better. It's already really good. Um, so yeah,
we can make the vehicles last a long time. That's great for energy. Um, because we
have this very fixed revenue that we get over a long time. Um, that's
pretty cool. And I think like the scale that I, that I'm most excited about is
when you have like 250,000 of those satellites, you
know, you're talking like, you know, $22 billion in CapEx, right? You're
serving all the solar farms around the world. So you're able to use the satellites like, you know, 20% of
the time or so. Um, and you
make $70 billion a year for 20 years. So you end up netting like
$1.4 trillion. Um, so that's kind of the economics that like that
Those numbers mean nothing to
me. Like you said all those numbers and I just don't even know it. It's like, Oh my
Yeah. Yeah. It's very large and it's, it's, it's
pretty impressive too. Cause it's like, that's revenue that you're, you know, you're going to
be getting as well. It's not like an oil rig. Like, you know, you spend $2 billion building
an offshore oil rig and you're not really sure how big that
oil reserve is until you actually tap it and get a drill down there. With
this, we know how much sunlight's out here. It's all just missing the Earth. It's
actually crazy. In most of the solar system, there is
sunlight. There's only a very few places in the solar system that
are shaded. Right behind the Earth, right behind all the planets, there's a
tiny bit of shade. That's a tiny, tiny percentage of the solar system. So
we just need to get things out in places in the solar system where it's always
sunny, forever, never shaded. Yeah, that's
The sun's angle from Earth is like half of a degree in
the sky or something. So it's like, yeah, so that gives you a set, then
multiply that. It's not even just a one circle either. It's like the, you
know, it's obviously multi-dimensional. It's not one single dimension. Yeah.
yeah so yeah there's a cool wasting almost all the energy we
are currently no it's crazy so the sunlight that hits the earth
in one hour is enough to power all of humanity for an entire year right
i think people have heard that but it's also all the sunlight that
doesn't hit the earth it's 2.1 quadrillion times more than
than hit the surface of the earth because we're like a tiny little sliver like
where the sun is a half a degree in the sky but The earth from
the sun is way smaller than that. I did the, it was like 10 to the minus. I
actually forget. Um, but it ends up being 2.1 quadrillion times when you do
Again, I have no idea how many zeros are in the number, but it sounds
big. Um, very cool. So talk
about the scale of the constellation you need to start. So
like, if you have one satellite up there that is one reflector, you
can, and normally that Sun-Sargonis orbit goes around every 90 minutes
or so, depending on your altitude. But I assume, what altitude are you
at actually? Oh, we're at a 600 kilometer orbit. 600 kilometer orbit.
So yeah, that's like a fairly standard low earth orbit altitude. You're
orbiting roughly every 90 minutes. And so what that means is that any given
spot on the ground, any given solar farm will only see
you for like two or three minutes per rotation around
the earth. So how many, so how many satellites do you need in
your cool sun synchronous orbit to be
Yeah, if you want to fill out an entire ring, you need 57 satellites, you
know, because you basically just have one pickup or the last one left off.
That guarantees service anywhere on Earth for about a half an hour,
So, you know, you do this ring half an hour on either side of the day. So 15 minutes
Okay. Yeah. And that, and yeah, so that, that
works quite well in the, in the sun synchronous polar orbit, but if you're, and that serves
any solar farm on earth for that time. So like, you know, a solar farm in
the U like on the East coast goes through it. And then three hours later,
a solar farm on the West coast goes through it. Um, so like everybody goes
through that ring. But if you want to serve just a single location and
you want to get as much power as possible down to that, you can do another
like kind of special helix orbit. So like, you know, in the early days
when we were just serving a small number of solar farms, they're all kind of localized together. You
know, like say Southern California or something like that. There's a lot of solar farms close together. We
can do kind of a helix orbit. And with that, you only need about 20 satellites
to have the same service duration. So you can get like
a little bit better gains when you're when you're optimizing for just a couple single locations instead
of the whole Earth. Um, so we'll be doing that a little bit early on. Um,
the other thing that we can do is we can serve other customers
early on. So serving energy customers is kind of like the end state, you
know, that, that makes sense when you're launching like, you know, full Falcon heavies full of full of
vehicles. Um, you know, and you, and you're getting a lot of power to the ground. Like,
you know, the economics start working really well when, when you sort of do that, when you, when you spend like, you
know, around $150 million or so, the energy case makes a lot of sense. Um,
when you're launching kind of that, that first full Falcon heavy full vehicles. But
even before that, this can make sense because it's 13,000 times
easier to compete with streetlights than it is to compete with the sun. So
streetlights are actually a lot less bright than the sun than you realize. The
human eye is so dynamic, they look about the same, but
they're way, way dimmer. So we can actually
use smaller constellations of just single vehicles to
light up cities at night. Um, you know, so in places where, where
they're industrializing, um, where, you know, you don't currently have
streetlights built that you can just, you know, go onto our website,
you know, Think about where you want the thing to point. We can send
down like a five kilometer spot of light that's just as bright as
streetlights. So that works really well if you don't want to put
in streetlights, if you don't want to have the light bulbs, you don't want to have all the maintenance, you don't want to have the electricity. If
we're almost as cheap as just the electricity, all the other stuff is extra. So
we're actually a lot cheaper than other options there. And you
can also use that for just like very flexible lighting. So if you're doing construction in
the Yukon, You know, in this dark point, two hours out of the day, you're, you're filling
up diesel generators, um, to run lights, to, you know, light everything up.
You're like, you know, we make a lot of sense for, for those kinds of applications, um,
just lighting, lighting up the region. Um, so that, that's one of the earlier things we
make a little bit more margin on that. Um, obviously it's a smaller market than energy. Energy
is just like this gargantuan market that we can scale into forever. Um,
but in the early days that that is a big portion of the revenue, um, of the smaller constellations.
So what is the order or what's the quantity that you want to
launch these things in? Like first launch, two-ish satellites, I
think you said when we talked earlier. In the future, you
want to launch bigger batches, presumably, and then eventually you have to get up to 57. Is the
goal to actually do the energy case? So what's your walk to get there?
Yeah, so I mean, right now we're raising our seed round to
launch two satellites. So two of those 12U CubeSats with the 10 meter
by 10 meter reflectors. After that, we want to launch 60 vehicles. So
we're going to raise the Series A, launch 60 satellites, and that's kind of
the full constellation. You know, we can serve energy customers, we can we
can serve lighting customers, we can serve a couple of other customers that we can talk about
later. Um, and yeah, that, that basically just like gets the ball rolling. We know the
constellation works. Um, we're going to use that even, even
the first two satellites that we launched, we're going to, you know, do a world tour, go to solar farms
everywhere, you know, have the satellite flying by in the sky, click space bar, boom,
here comes the power. Um, you know, you can see it on a, on a
gauge and be like, oh yeah, we're getting some power through this thing. Like, you know, you launch more
of these things. We're going to be getting a lot more money. The scaling from there is also
really simple. If you want twice the power, two satellites combined
together. If you want twice the duration, add two more behind them. It's
very simple scaling after you have that one vehicle. Even after we
have that one vehicle, we know exactly how much power we're going to get with more vehicles. And
then, yeah, we raise more money, launch 60 of them. You
know, that gets a lot more power to the ground. Be like, yeah, look, everything is great. Like
we're getting a reasonable amount of power to our customers. And,
you know, that's going to allow us to build a lot more customers. The
cool thing that happens then is we can go to banks or
we can go to You know, we can basically take
that to the economic analysis and then go to other investors or
banks and basically take out debt in order to finance
kind of the later rounds of this. So, you know, around that stage, it's
you really want to get to the point where you can raise debt and pay
back loans like that. That's the thing that. that isn't really present
in space right now. A lot of times it doesn't make sense, but it does make sense
for things that are a lot more trustable. And it definitely makes sense for energy. Like if you're going
to build a solar farm at your house or on your farm, like a
giant solar farm, you're going to take out debt for that because you know you're going to get paid
back on that solar farm. Especially these days, banks are very comfortable
backing solar farm bets. So we want to get to the point where we
can do that as well. And I think we have this kind of
unique opportunity where once we have all these customers around the world,
once we're serving them sunlight, at night. They know how much
power they're getting. We have dozens of them. We know exactly who they
are. We know that we can put more solar farms up there and get sunlight in
places that it's not shining. It's going to be very easy to
make the argument that this makes sense to keep scaling up. And it's going to be very
easy to make the argument that we can pay back loans when we have a good track
record of performing exactly as expected. So this is
this kind of like credit worthiness that we're going to be building up over time, which
is going to allow us to scale so much more down the road. You know,
you don't fund a two billion dollar offshore oil rig with all equity.
You fund it with a lot of debt because you know that that reserve is going to is
going to pay back and you know that people are going to be buying that oil. we're kind of like it's
this whole thing and you know i know you mentioned this on one of your videos it's like
there's no market risk or very minimal market risk like we're selling electricity
we know what the cost of that is um it's a commodity you know as long as they're cheaper
than the other options you're going to have a lot of customers and
we're really just selling electricity to keep the lights on at a time when it's most valuable And
as soon as the cost makes sense and it's cheap and we can
continue to support that and it all works out on paper, we're going
to be able to build a lot of these and we're going to be able to take out debt in order to do that.
And that's just going to be amazing. We're going to
I mean, it seems there's no reason why a solar farm would say no to this. I literally can't
Yeah, I mean, it's the reason you build a solar farm in this valley instead of
this valley, because you're gonna get slightly more sunlight here. You know, people
don't build solar farms in Alaska because there's no sun up there. It's
kind of the same thing with this. You know, you build a solar farm where the sun is, but now you're actually able
to bring the sun to where the solar farm is. I kind of see it like
irrigation. I kind of like explaining it like that. Like right
now we put solar farms out there and we just kind of wait for it to rain on
the solar farm. You know, we just kind of like sit around like, oh man, I hope it's sunny
tomorrow. You know, like, oh man, it'd be great if it was sunny tomorrow. We're
giving these owners the option to be like, it's going to be sunny tomorrow. I'm
going to pay for it. Like we need it to be sunny tomorrow in order to pay back our bank.
Um, you know, so they can cut us a check, we can send them
some sunlight and they're, you know, they're going to be able to sell it for more money than they buy the sunlight for.
And they're, yeah, they're going to make some money on it. Um, so they can confidently say
it's going to be sunny tomorrow and actually it's going to be sunny tonight. Um, so
It's going to be sunny tonight. That's a sick motto for you guys. Sunlight
after dark. Sunlight after dark. Hell yeah. OK, we
still haven't talked about what I think is maybe the coolest piece of technology, which
is the solar sailing. We haven't talked about solar sailing and what it is. So
Yeah, so with these vehicles that have gigantic reflectors for providing energy,
we can also use them to reflect sunlight and get a little bit
of a push from it. So photons don't have mass, but
they do have momentum. If you look at, you know, kind of Einstein's like
longer, longer form of equals MC squared with the momentum included, they
have momentum. So we can actually use that to get a
little bit of a push to keep our satellites in the air. Um, and this is
not something new, you know, the Japanese Jackson mission went by
Venus in, in the 2010s. Um, and that worked, that was super cool. It
had like little, little LCD screens to actually steer it as well. Um,
you know, to change the amount of reflection that you're getting from the sunlight. Um,
you know, and they, they flew by Venus where they got a little bit of Delta V from it. Um, and there's been
a bunch of NASA missions, you know, getting a little bit of extra Delta V from solar sailing. So
we can do the same thing. This has always been a component of our energy solution. Like,
you know, if you want to keep something in the air for a long time, You don't want to have to burn
propellant. You want to, you know, you want to do something else if possible. Propellant
on satellites is kind of what's limiting them. You know, it's usually why
you have a short lifespan in low Earth orbit, because you have to fight atmospheric
drag the entire time. And, you know, burning fuel to fight atmospheric drag really,
really takes a lot out of your satellite. And you know,
it's hard to bring enough fuel because it's super expensive to launch that on a rocket. Um,
it's also this constant thing that you have to fight and you cannot refuel satellites
that, you know, at least not right now, there's, there's some people working on that. Um, but it's very hard
to refuel satellites. So like you launched this thing up, it's just slowly running
out and bringing more is very expensive. So typically you just are like, okay, we'll
just leave the vehicle up there for a very short amount of time. Um, we don't want to
do that. So we want to actually use the satellites to solar sail to
give us a little bit of a boost so we don't have to burn propellant. So what
we can do is we can just aim in the right way so that when the sunlight reflects off
that force vector lines up with our velocity vector and
we get a little bit of a push. Um, and when you do the calculation out, you can
sustain an orbit. Um, it should be above like 530 kilometers. You
know, you should be good after that, but because of the atmosphere, like, you
know, sunlight hits it, it grows a little bit. There's some variability there. You don't
want to leave some margin. Um, So we're going to be leaving some margin. But
basically, yeah, we can we can use solar radiation pressure to push our vehicle
along and maintain our orbit instead of bringing propellant. Now,
this this is obviously great for our energy case
because we can launch satellites that don't have rocket engines, that
don't have fuel, that just have electrically actuated motors
to steer around. But it's also potentially
a very great business early on as well, because what we can do is
we can bring people on with us. And instead of just serving energy
customers and making money over a number of years, we can make money right
off the bat by bringing sensor packages around for people. And
this kind of doesn't stop with Low Earth Orbit as well. We started
looking into it. Um, and we should be able to get a Falcon
9 ride share, you know, it launches us into low Earth orbit, um, you know, just like
a normal CubeSat, but then, you know, deploy our solar sail and we start solar sailing around
the Earth and we can actually bring that payload to other places. So
we can bring a payload from the Earth to the moon in a little over a year. um
from the earth to mars you know and also a little over a year and we can we can go to
like saturn in like eight years um so we can kind of fly anywhere on
earth you know as long as the as long as the electronics last long enough you do need radiation hard electronics
to go this far um and it does take a while you know and we can't bring a
ton of mass but we can bring some mass um and this is kind
of an option that Previously, you'd have to make yourself. You'd
have to have an insanely custom satellite, gigantic prop
tanks, gigantic rocket engines. But now it's just one
vehicle with a little solar sail. It's the same vehicle. You can go to
all these different destinations. You don't have to change the shape of the vehicle in
order to go to a different destination. And yeah, so
originally, we were a little bit worried that this would be, you know, kind of a super different vehicle. But
the more we look into it, the more the more parts commonality it has, like, it's
basically the same satellite that we have for our energy use case, which
is really cool to see. So you know, we kind of just make this one vehicle. And
initially, you know, it can serve like the kind of solar sailing customers who can pay money
up front. You know, then obviously, you know, we also serve
lighting customers on the ones that stay around the earth. And then we can also serve the
energy customers. So yeah, right now, it's like, you know, we want to launch two vehicles, we
want one of them to kind of go go on some really cool mission. of our
system and we want the other one to stay here on earth and do demonstrations here. So
that's kind of what we're converging on now. And it's this one vehicle that
can do all these different things. Yeah. One thing that's always bothered me about satellites is
they're always built for one specific use case and you can't do anything
else with it. You know, you build a satellite, it's going to go to the moon. You're not going to use that in the earth orbit. Like
you want, you build a satellite for an asteroid. It has exactly enough fuel to get to
that asteroid and not really for anything else. Um, so you never
change your mind when you're going to a destination. Like that, that would be completely impossible, completely
ridiculous. Um, you know, and this has always kind of bothered me. Like
that, that's not like the most useful vehicle, like design, like building one
thing for. Each use case is not efficient. Like what if you could
build one thing for all of it? So I've always been kind of obsessed with this
idea of like, you know, the drill for space where you just build one tool
that's really, really good. And you can use it for anything, you know, you can use it to drill holes, you can use
it to put screws into wood, you can do kind of anything with this with this one
very useful thing. And if you just focus on making the tool really good,
you can use it for everything. And I think solar sailing is kind of the way to do that. Like you build
one really good solar sailing vehicle that gets a lot of performance out of the sunlight that
hits it, and you're able to get to any destination very, very quickly. And then
you just build, you know, if you want to bring heavier stuff, you just build like a larger screw
gun. Like, you know, if you want to drill something with a bigger drill bit, you build a bigger one. But
it's basically like this, this kind of like tool, this useful thing, it's like this one
unit that that is like kind of the perfect form of the thing that you're trying
to do. And I see solar sailing vehicles as that for space, you know, it's
like, it solves the fuel problem, you don't need to bring different size prop tanks, you
don't need to bring different amounts of fuel, you don't need to sit there worrying, like if you have enough propellant
to make a certain maneuver, like, you know, it's this huge issue.
And like, we kind of get away from it with with solar sailing, and I think
it's only going to improve and, you know, solar sailing has been proposed, you know, to do a
flyby of the sun and then shoot off to other star systems and, and
stuff like that, you can do some really amazing things with solar sailing vehicles as
we make them lighter and larger. Um, and nobody's really
commercialized this yet. I think it's, you know, it's always been something that NASA has done.
Um, but I think it's, it's just starting and it's kind of ripe for commercialization. Um,
I think the thing it's always kind of been missing is, is a really big market. It's
like, ah, solar sailing is really cool, but the market's too small. I think because
we're making this one vehicle that we can use for solar sailing, that we can also use for
energy. We kind of have this great entry point to this, this
humongous market. You know, so we make this, this one vehicle, um,
you know, we use it to serve energy customers. We use it to serve our solar sailing customers. And
then, you know, we just kind of grow it. And as the solar sailing market kind of saturates out,
um, you know, we can still justify having a really large team working on
this problem because we're able to serve this energy market. And
that energy market is just massive. Um, you know, we really
are prototyping a new form of energy here. Like, you know, it's, it's,
it's, it's like building a new nuclear reactor or something like that. And even
just one satellite is going to show us exactly how that performs. Um.
So yeah, that just gets me really excited. It's like, there's this new form
of energy that nobody's really thinking about enough, that
we're going to be able to make work. And it's like, you know, we build one satellite, it
kind of like, you know, unlock satellites, so they're able to fly anywhere.
We're able to bring people anywhere. I've always had this dream of beating NASA to Europa. And
like, maybe this is the way to do that. And like, yeah,
and then, you know, you just keep building them better and better. And then, you know,
it turns out you can have this gigantic market. You
could actually use them to solve the climate crisis, potentially. Like you, we
build enough of them. We don't need to burn as many fossil fuels, you know? That's,
Very cool. I'm curious. So the reason why I think I
am personally like, I don't know how useful like
solar sailing is for all these applications is it's such a tiny amount of force
like I looked it up before this just because I was curious and one square
meter sees nine micro Newtons
of force. Yeah, it's like,
I was like, what, I had to do some Googling to figure out what is actually that
small. And it turns out that it's roughly equivalent to a single
red blood cell dropping onto your hand at Earth gravity at 1G. So
it's like very, very, very small amounts of force that are being imparted by those
photons from the sun. So can
you actually like carry an appreciable payload? Like
how big could the payload be with something that's your size, like a 10 by 10 meter
Yeah, you can bring just like a, like a kilogram or two, basically, not
very much. Yeah. Most satellites are a lot of satellites, like 300 kilograms
or something like that. Um, there are a large number of smaller CubeSats and
that that's our market, you know, like just like the, the one you CubeSats,
the two CubeSats, um, you know, the super, super small payloads or
even less than you. Um, and the other thing is, yeah, because it's such a
small force, it takes a long time for it to add up to a lot of Delta V.
So that's, that's, you know, that's why it takes so long. That's why some of these missions are like a year or
more years. So it's like that very tiny force, but it is a
constant force that keeps pushing. And over a very long
Yeah, a few people have been looking into blasting it
with a huge laser. Yeah, I don't I
don't think we're going to be going that quite that crazy, but it is definitely
something to look into. I think one cool thing is the orbit that
we're in is actually really good for solar sailing because we're in this orbit
where we're always in the sun. We can always kind of get this little push from
solar radiation pressure and we can always use that to the counter atmospheric
drag. So that's pretty great. So instead, a lot of times like solar
sailing vehicles have been kind of going this way where you only get like a little push when you're
on the side and you have to rotate this way to go through this way. When
you're actually in this orbit, you can get a push all the time. It
pushes you this way a little bit. That ends up just working out to being a little bit of extra
potential energy. But you do get this constant push
Here's the thing that conceptually doesn't make sense to me about that. There, it
sounds like there's two different things that you want to do for pointing like there's one
piece of pointing that is, let's maintain our altitude, pointing,
basically let's counteract atmospheric drag let's keep our altitude high let's make
sure we don't fall into the atmosphere. And there's another piece of
pointing which is you want to point to a specific place on the ground for
a solar panel for like for a solar farm so do you have to like. cycle
the satellite in between maintain altitude pointing and
point at solar farm pointing, or those
Um, you do cycle between them. So, you know, we spend a lot of time over the Pacific ocean
or the Atlantic ocean or something like that. So in those times you're like, you
know, full blown solar sail mode. Um, we
can do a little bit of pointing, like when we're flying over a specific solar farm,
we can kind of like bias a little bit. So we get like a little bit of extra solar
sailing. Like it's not ideal for solar sailing. Um, but it,
you know, it's nearly ideal for, for the solar farm. Um, so we can get that little bit
of a push most of the time. Um, but yeah, we do most
of the time in our orbit, actually we're not over solar farms. Um, like
it's, it's only like, you know, 10 to 20% of the time you're, you're over a solar farm
that you could even serve. Um, so yeah, the rest of the time you're, you're just, uh,
Yeah. One piece of this, obviously, I mean, how do you
actually do that pointing? Like, I think you have a, most people will
use something like a reaction wheel, which is just like a, you know, a flywheel that
takes momentum or like, you know, uh, What's the simplest way
to describe a reaction wheel? It's like, it's like a thing that countered, you can turn, you can
spin up, and then it imparts rotational momentum in the other direction of
So Howard? Yeah, I like as like dirt bikers, when they speed up or slow down
their back wheel in the air, and they can like change, like
they go off a jump, and they can like change their angle of attack by speeding up or slowing
down their back wheel. Yeah, that's the reaction wheel analogy I like.
Control moment gyros are super weird because they're more like you have your
front wheel of your bike going and you turn it like this and it ends up moving
the bike forward or backward. So nobody's ever used to control moment gyros.
We've made a few models. I think this is the one to look at. I
have a video I can send you of this hanging from a string and you basically spin
this up, rotate it like this, and then the whole thing
tries to spin very quickly in this direction. Yeah, so
it's it's kind of not intuitive, but it's really just like adding up. You
have this angular momentum that's going in this direction. And when you rotate the angular momentum vector,
you get another vector that's coming off in another direction, like, you know, per the right hand rule.
And yeah, these are really great because they get more
wrote, you get more torque. from the same mass, which
is fantastic for a satellite when you're trying to get a lot of torque. We want to move our
satellites very, very quickly between solar farms. So we want that
high torque. So we're able to really crank this thing around. A
lot of satellites are pretty anemic in the way that they move around. They're super slow.
We don't have five minutes to make this rotation. We want to do it in 10 or
20 seconds. So we really need this high torque. Um, and
yeah, what you're able to do is instead of, you know, just having the thing speed up and slow
down, you're, you're rotating the entire wheel around. Um, and it's staying
at its maximum RPM the whole time. Um, so you're getting
Interesting. So do you have to, do you have to, um, do you have
Yeah, yeah, you do. Because if when you rotate it, like you'll you
run out of rotation at a certain point, and you're not able to put any more energy
back into it. So the thing that we're able to do is we're able to desaturate
our CMGs by using either atmospheric drag or solar radiation
pressure. We can do that a little pro psych. You
can basically use little flaps on the corners. If
this is your solar sail vehicle, you just
have these little things on the ends, and you can basically rotate it like this to
have no drag. You slip right through, you rotate it like this, and you get a little bit of a pushback as
you're flying through. If you have four of these, you're able to create any
direction that you need. You can also do it by changing the
center of mass of your vehicle, so like, you know, have these servos, so you can change
where the center of mass is. Turns out, like, this
is a little bit more annoying to build than just these little flaps in the
corners. So, yeah, pretty confident that we're going to end up going with
these. But yeah, there's a couple of options to desaturate your
CMGs. Changing the center of mass changes where the
center of pressure is going to be. So when you have more pressure on
one side of your center of mass, you get a rotation from that. So you can
use that to desaturate your CMGs. But you still can't desaturate
roll by changing your center of mass. So that's where
Very cool. Yeah, I think just to like take a step back and explain what
we're talking about, like basically when you're spinning up this thing,
eventually you get to the point where you just can't get that momentum anymore.
You have completely maxed out the ability for you to go in a particular direction. So
what you need to do is you need to have some other way, something that is not that
wheel, that is moving you in a direction that allows you
to sort of Do you like turn down the amount that
Yeah, and usually satellites use rocket engines for this right
usually use thrusters, but you know if you do that you're eventually
going to use up all your fuel. And then you know that's that's where a lot of station keeping.
coming from is you've moved this thing too far and you want
to be able to move it back so you can keep using it. And
instead of burning thrusters for doing that, we're able to use this other system, which
is using a very small force. And it's like the force that acts on that is over many,
many days in a row. And this thing moves very quickly, like within a
couple of seconds. So there's kind of like the slow thing to
desaturate and the very fast thing to do the rapid motion, which
is like a pretty cool configuration to actually have in the vehicle. And we're pretty happy
That's cool. It's kind of the opposite, actually, of what a reaction wheel
normally is, because normally they don't move that fast and then you are desaturating them
quite quickly as you're like blasting with your thrusters. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
When you're designing the constellation, figuring out, you know, where to position all
the satellites within the orbit, trying to figure out how many of them
you need, all that kind of stuff, I imagine you had to do a ton of simulation. So can
you just talk about how you did that and the joys of Monte
Yeah, yeah, the the initial like problem
statement is how much power can you get to the ground per satellite? You
know, because you kind of want to maximize the power delivered per satellite, right? So I
started with a data set of 30,000 solar farms all around the world, how
big they are, and their actual geographic location and
then I basically was able to plug that into a Monte Carlo simulation where I
would pick satellite locations like potential satellite locations within a distribution and
then I would figure out like if I'm going to serve that solar farm what angle am I
going to have to be pointed at when I am at that angle how much
light am I losing coming through the atmosphere how much light am I losing at the
solar farm itself either because of cosine losses where the light isn't
quite aligned with the panel or if there's not panels there And
I can basically add up all these losses, add up the amount the atmosphere absorbs, add
up if there's clouds in the way, there's a probability that there's a cloud in the way. So you
have to add that up over time as well. Also, when the mirror is
at an angle, it's a little bit smaller in the
sky. And this one is really fun to figure out. So if a mirror is like
this, it's very large. But when it goes over an angle, now it's much smaller
in this dimension. So if the camera is the sunlight, there's
a lot less sunlight hitting this now. So you're going to get less power to the ground. So you also need
to optimize for what Like where you're pointing and
how you're pointing there because you're gonna get less mirror area So yeah,
it includes all of that and it basically adds up all those numbers for each
satellite location And then you know, you just do that for billions
of satellite locations around the around the earth at all the different angles
like, you know, essentially throughout the year and then you're able to add up the amount
of sunlight that gets to the ground per satellite and we actually calculated out
in the amount of sunlight that gets to the ground per solar
farm customer per square meter of area. And then
when we do it like that, we're able to calculate it with different size vehicles.
So you can optimize the scale of the vehicles on
its own. And you can also optimize like different curves of
customer saturation, you know, so Like initially, you're not going
to have as many customers excited to buy, you know, a couple minutes of sunlight. That's
not very bright, but later down the line, you're going to have a lot of people who are very interested
in buying a lot of sunlight. Um, you know, at the kind of point where we're, you
know, a couple hundred Watts per square meter for, for quite a while. Um, you know,
we expect a lot more people to be buying sunlight then. Um, so,
you know, you can kind of like do all this analysis with, with this input, um,
that we get from the Monte Carlo simulation and we, we get a couple of
interesting things out of that. So the, the first thing that's interesting is, is just
utilization. So. You launch the satellite into space,
it's flying over the Earth, picture us as a satellite. How
often is there a solar farm under you that you can serve? That's
a pretty big question, and the Monte Carlo simulation just spits out
a result for that. With all the solar farms that are out there, it's like 13% of
the time you're over a solar farm that you can just serve. And then you
assume a customer adoption curve, and it's like, okay, it's about 6% of
the ones that are large that are likely to buy it. So you can get these numbers pretty easily from
that. And you also just get the number of like, how many
megawatts do you get to the ground per per hour per customer, you know, you
can get all these these interesting numbers out of this simulation, which is really
useful. And yeah, so like, I don't know, I just I had the idea
to do this, like pretty early on, I was pretty excited about it, because it's a lot easier to
do a Monte Carlo simulation of all the satellite positions that it is to simulate orbits. And
when you do that, like you have this time component, so you end up having like, iterate
the thing over time, and the simulation would take months to solve, but if you do it
as a Monte Carlo simulation, you don't have to have all of that. All time
is kind of the same, so you're able to make the sim work a lot faster,
and we actually, we had somebody who's an orbital analysis
expert do this with a tool that is fully time-based, and they got a very
similar result a lot later with a bit more effort. So
I was pretty proud of that Monte Carlo simulation that I made really early on in the design
phase. We ended up getting really good results from it, and
it was a very simple thing to approach. Yeah, Monte Carlo simulations are super
cool. It's, it's kind of this like one
really crazy thing about it is like, say, say you have like a billion samples, right? Um,
you can just, because it's randomly sampled, you can just take like a
thousand of those samples and you'll be getting basically the same number
just with less, like less certainty. Um, so you basically just
get more samples and you end up with the same number, which is more and more certainty. The more
you add. which is pretty cool. So you can just like combine multiple files
together. So one thing that I do with this is I'll run it on multiple computers
and they all just like output these text files in parallel. And
then I can just like copy paste all the text files together. And I just get a
more certain answer, which is really cool. So it's like the
most parallelizable computer program you can, you can basically write as
Oh, a Monte Carlo simulation is the idea of just sampling points
and then figuring out the answer from
that sampled point. So my favorite thing is, if
you want to show the image, calculating pi with a Monte Carlo simulation.
A great way to do that is you have a square that is this
kind of background and you have a circle in the middle of that and you want to calculate pi. So
what you do is you just randomly sample locations within that circle
and square and then you can divide the area in the circle by the
area outside the circle and it's like pi divided by four or something like
that. I don't remember if that's the exact answer. Yeah,
it's something like that, where it's like you're kind of randomly sampling this space. And
because of some rule, you're able to determine if it's
within or without. And then you end up just with this division problem, where you're dividing one
large number by another large number, and you get a very clear answer out
of that thing. So Monte Carlo simulations are great when you have
a lot of variables that are all kind of working together that are
tricky to simulate. So you use Monte Carlos a lot of times with fluid simulations. Or
things where there's like a lot of a lot of crazy complicated interactions. Um,
and in this case, you know, it's the interaction of like the earth rotating under satellites that are, that
are going in this other dimension. Um, you know, you, you kind of want to pull time
out of that. Like you don't want to have to. No, this is like
one second before this time, this is one second before this time. Um, it would
be better if you can just like sample thousands of points and not worry about
which one happened at which time. Um, because that actually doesn't matter. in
the simulation. When you make that simplification, it becomes
a lot easier to calculate. One saying that I really like is,
all simulation is wrong and some is useful. And when
you're able to find a simulation that is not very wrong,
but very useful, That's when you know you're really kind of onto something.
And you always kind of want to look for those opportunities to do something that's
very simple, very useful, and very minimally wrong. And
in this case, removing the time component was very
Cool. I'm curious. I mean, so that's most of my questions about
y'all. I'm curious for your other thoughts about what else is happening in the energy world, you
know, as a person who's literally built a fusion reactor and
a dabble, I'm sure other stuff as well. Like what sorts of
Yeah, I think I mean, solar is ridiculously exciting.
I think everybody kind of gave up on solar a while back because
of the variability problem. You know, it's like solar. Solar is this
thing that you can just put a panel outside and it's going to produce electricity.
It almost feels like free electricity. Like I lived in a van for a while and I had no
solar panels on the roof. And if you're not using the energy, it's just kind of
going to waste in a way. Like you have, you know, a couple hundred
watts that you could be using to do literally anything. And if you're not using it, it's, you
know, there's going to be more tomorrow. It doesn't matter. So it's this kind of
like completely different thinking than you get with fossil fuels. With
fossil fuels, it's like, you know, you burn the gallon of gas, you don't have a gallon of gas anymore. Now you gotta
go buy another one. And you know, we're kind of operating at that on
a human level is like everybody's burning these fossil fuels and it's, you know,
they're not renewable, you know, they're going to run out eventually, right. And,
you know, it's, you know, there's a lot of issues with like burning a lot of fossil fuels. And
it's, there's a ton of fossil fuels out there, like we're
going to be able to use them for a very long time. But I think the argument I
like to make is like, we don't want to have to use them for a very long time. Like even
just, you know, driving in your car and running out of gas, it's pretty expensive. Wouldn't
it be better if you didn't have to worry about that so much? Wouldn't it be better if it was a lot cheaper? There's
this kind of like freedom to having more resource and
not worrying about using it. And I think sunlight is going
to give people that. I think like when you have energy that
you might as well use because it's so cheap, It's going
to be a completely different feeling than having fuels where it's like you kind
of feel bad about using it. You know, like sitting in traffic in an electric car
feels very different than sitting in traffic in a gas car. That's what
I hear. And yeah, I
kind of think we need to move to that as a species. I
think also, You know, solar, since
the 2010s, solar in 2010 was $359 per megawatt. And you
know, today, it's like $45 per megawatt, which is just
like this unbelievable curve. And I'll you know, there's a couple graphs on
this that I can send you of how fast it's gotten cheap. Oh,
yeah. And you know, everything else has kind of gotten more expensive in that same amount of
time, like natural gas, peaker plants, you know, get a little bit more expensive. Nuclear
power plants get quite a bit more expensive, you know, $155 per megawatt hour these
days. The price goes up because people keep
finding new ways that we need to make them safer. They're
pretty hard to make as well. The cost of capital goes up a little bit and it gets
very expensive to make a nuclear reactor. On average, it takes 17 to
22 years to go from project inception to actually producing
electricity for a nuclear power plant. It takes decades
to build these things. pay that money up
front. So you have to take out a loan and that loan has to last for like, you know, 10 or
20 years before you start paying this thing back. And loans like that are really expensive.
You know, you're paying a lot of interest in that time, but also it means like
a lot of developing nations that don't have access to those kinds of loans just can't
do it at all. Um, so France is able to make lots of nuclear reactors that are,
you know, France has an extremely high nuclear percentage on their power on their grid. Um,
but that doesn't work in a lot of countries. You know, it's, it's only something that you can do if you're kind of a richer country
that has access to this really cheap capital. Um, I
think, you know, in a, in a similar way, fusion
is gonna have a lot of problems moving forward. Even if
fusion was going to work, I think that you're still gonna have those issues where you're building
this very expensive plant, it takes a long time to do it, cost of capital's gonna be
very high and it's gonna take a long time to pay that off. And then solar comes in and it's like,
it takes like half a year to a year to build a power plant that
can make solar energy. The bigger ones take longer, but
you hire more people, it's very parallelizable. It's this very fast, very easy
thing to do. And China has absolutely turned on their economic engine, Cranking
out so many solar panels at so much cheaper costs. It's
really just this amazing, amazing technology that's going
to change the world. It just has this problem where the sun goes down every night and they stop working, you
know, everybody says like, yeah, they're really great until the sun stops working. We
can fix that. And yeah, I'm super excited
about fixing that. And I think like, You know, there's all these other
issues that solar is running into as we add more and more of it. You know, California has
this problem with variability, like the grid is actually pretty expensive to operate and
pretty expensive to smooth out. Germany had a huge issue with this as well. You
know, when the Ukraine war broke out. It became
very clear how dependent Germany was on natural gas. And Germany
was like 20 to 30% wind and solar. So they,
you know, most of a lot of their grid was was wind and solar powered, and you know, super variable
when you do that. And they got there pretty quickly. You know, they turned off all the coal power
plants, they turn off all the nuclear power plants, they just went wind and solar. The
problem with that is they ended up burning more natural gas doing that than they did before they
installed all the wind and solar. That's because the kind
of natural gas power plants that you use when you have stable energy are called combined
cycle natural gas. You know, where you're kind of burning something and then you're using it
to spin steam turbines, which are super efficient. If
you have a very variable load and you need something that's very fast to
respond to that, you need to burn a natural gas peaker plant, which is
essentially just an airplane turbine engine that's powering a
power plant. So those are way less efficient than combined cycle gas.
So instead of being $56 per megawatt hour, they're like $170 per megawatt hour.
So Germany ended up needing more of the peaker plant style ones
because of all the wind and solar variation. And batteries are
kind of around that price point too. They're also very expensive. So it's just like, There's
this kind of like ceiling where you can't do more than 20 or 30% wind and
solar because it's variable. But with us,
you know, we can kind of come in and we can provide sunlight at night
and make that solar more like baseload power. So it becomes a
lot more similar to like a nuclear power plant or combined cycle gas. And
it's not just like more like baseload power, it's like specific
baseload power at exactly the times that you need it. Like we can design
our satellite constellation to provide sunlight exactly when
people need it on the grid to really help balance out these
problems that we're seeing with all these other resources. And
I think like, um, another big thing is another question that we
get asked a lot is why not just put more solar in and batteries? Like,
why not just add more solar and more batteries? Um, you know, if you build
twice as much, as many solar farms as you had before, um, you know, that's twice expensive,
twice as expensive to do. Um, and now you just have more solar panels
that are doing absolutely nothing as soon as the sun goes down. So it doesn't matter how many solar panels
you have, it does nothing once the sun goes down. And you
know, in the summer, you get two and a half times more sunlight than you
get in the winter. So if you want your solar farm to last all winter, you
have to, you know, basically double the amount of power that's going there. You also have
to, you know, essentially double the amount of batteries that are being installed there as
well. Because now you have to make it through like an 18 hour night instead of like a 14 hour night.
Um, so you need way more batteries, way more solar to make it through the winter. And then the summer comes
around and now you have all this extra resources doing absolutely nothing. Um,
and you basically just have to turn off or you get charged money for curtailment. Um,
you know, and there's this, this kind of huge imbalance, you know, because of, because of the way, um,
you know, the, the, the seasons work, um, because of the earth still, and
because of the way the earth rotates, like you end up with these huge imbalances. Um,
and you know, one analogy that I really liked, um, that Paul Jaffe said, um,
at a talk at, at a conference is. batteries are like a
bank account. And we're just like, extra
income. And I think that's just like a great analogy for this is like, you know, you
can solve some of your problems with a bank account if you have like some cash flow issue or something like
that. But what's better is just like having more income all the time that you can rely
on, it costs a lot of money to have that bank account, it costs a lot
of money to have batteries, it costs a lot of They're very
expensive to build. It's a lot of CapEx. It's another project that you have to
take on. It's another loan that you have to take on. There's all this risk associated with building
that infrastructure. And we can just get away from all of that.
You can purchase some sunlight at night. You can see how it works. If you don't like it,
you don't have to buy it again. But we can be pretty sure that you're going to be making power
with us. If it costs $50 to buy us and
you're able to sell it for $80, it's pretty
obvious value. And then we know on our side that we're making money at those
kind of prices. Yeah, that's the future we're going for. It's
similar to... You
know, kind of like what, what AWS credits did for, for servers, you
know, like you don't have to build a server farm for, you know, any
inordinate number of customers. You can just build, you know, you
just buy an AWS credit and that scales with the size of your online business.
Um, so this was this huge thing is like now companies didn't have to invest in
their own server infrastructure and try to figure out what size it needed to be. They just
buy AWS credits and they would scale to whatever they need. Um, so in that
same way, we're able to help our customers because we're able to scale to whatever they need, you know, say
it's. say one of their farms is underperforming, they
can buy a little bit more sunlight, get it back into the realm where they're not
gonna get a fine for underperformance. And yeah,
just give people that flexibility. So there's, yeah, when we hop
on the phone to Solar Farms, there's a lot of new uses that
Sunlight as a service, that's what you're offering. The new
Oh man. There's so many. Okay. I
love it. Cool. Well, thank you so much for joining. If there was one place that
you could send people, where would you want them to go to learn, either learn more or
Easy. Awesome. And who do you want to hear from? Do you want to hear from investors? Do you want to hear from people
Yeah, investors and engineers hit the head on the head.
There we go. We're raising money for our seed round right
now to launch two satellites into orbit to prototype a new form of energy. And
we need a team to build that. So yeah. Um,
yeah, we, I mean, this is like, we, we want to be mass producing these satellites at
extremely large numbers and we want to scale as quickly as possible. Um, and
we need capital and a team to do that. So that is, that
I love it. Awesome, man. Well, thanks so much for joining. This is great. All right. Thanks.