Brad King (8:26)

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Maria Varmazis (9:19)

Our guest today is Brad King, CEO and co Founder of Orbion Space Technology, and I started off by asking Brad about how he got involved in space.

Unknown Guest (9:31)

I knew from a little kid what I wanted to do, so that guided every decision and made it pretty easy. I went to University of Michigan and got a bachelor's, master's and PhD in aerospace engineering. And coming into my PhD program in the early 90s, the Soviet Union had just recently collapsed and they were looking to capitalize on all the technologies they had. One of the technologies they had was a Hall Effect Thruster and it was a spacecraft propulsion device and the Western Hemisphere didn't really know about it. But it was curious enough that NASA and DOD sent A team over to now Russia to poke at this thing with a stick. Turns out it was pretty impressive. So they brought a couple of them back to the US and that's where I entered the story. As a new PhD student, I happened to inherit one of these devices and did my doctoral work on it. So that kind of started my journey working on space propulsion before anybody really cared. And then fast Forward to the mid 2015s. All of a sudden, this weird technology that I happened to be an expert in was going to have its moment in the market. So I took a swing at it, and here we are.

Maria Varmazis (10:41)

Okay, that's awesome. I, I love that. And hall effect thrusters are something that I am vaguely, vaguely familiar with. Can you give me sort of the. If one can on your. Well, a big part of your life's work? Give me sort of a. What is that and what is. How does it work? If one can summarize.

Unknown Guest (10:59)

Yeah, sure. They're pretty simple. They're a rocket engine. And by a rocket engine, what that means is you throw mass in one direction to make the rocket move in the up or the satellite move in the opposite direction. So there's, there's nothing magic about them. What is great about them is they're very fuel efficient. They can do a lot of thrusting for a small amount of propellant, and then that leaves more room on the spacecraft for things that make you money. If you have a giant fuel tank on your spacecraft, that's not great. So hall effect thrusters are a fuel efficient rocket engine, and they have nothing to do with launching the spacecraft. The satellite's got to get into orbit on a Falcon 9 or something like that. But once it's in orbit, it's got maneuvering to do. It needs to raise its orbit, needs to dodge collisions, it needs to deorbit. And that's what the hall effect thruster is used for.

Maria Varmazis (11:47)

Right. And now that we're in this, this phase of things in space where we're having much more maneuverability, we're talking about isam, I imagine. I mean, I hear hall effect, hall effect thrusters talked about quite a bit. And again, I'm not a propulsion person, but it makes a lot of sense where they fit into sort of the bigger picture here.

Unknown Guest (12:06)

They're really attractive. So there are kind of two families of propulsion. There's traditional chemical propulsion, and it's called chemical because you burn something, you take a fuel, you burn it, you release its chemical energy, it shoots a flame out the back and makes thrust. Those systems can make Very high thrust, but they're not very fuel efficient. On the other hand, our electric propulsion systems, they are very fuel efficient but very low thrust. And you can't have both. Isaac Newton has a sense of humor. So you can either have higher fuel efficiency or high thrust. Now, among the low thrust but fuel efficient devices, the hall effect thruster has the highest thrust. So it kind of distinguishes itself there. So it's got a really good balance of thrust, of decent thrust and high efficiency.

Maria Varmazis (12:58)

So I'm wondering, how does that bring us to where you are at today? I'm curious. Tell me a bit about your company.

Unknown Guest (13:04)

Yeah, it was, like I said, early 2010s or so and we heard all these stories about OneWeb and Starlink and all these companies planning to launch hundreds or thousands of spacecraft, which at the time sounded fantastical. And here we are having exceeded that. And what I was able to realize, having this weird expertise in hall effect thrusters, is that all of these satellites were going to need hall effect thrusters. They probably didn't know it yet. And worse, they didn't know there was nowhere in the world to buy these things for small satellites. So I thought, oh, holy cow, this thing I happen to know how to do is going to have a demand. So we, with my co founder, formed Orbion and said we need to have small satellite hall effect thrusters ready to buy in about five years. So it was all hands on deck, let's go as fast as we can. And that's what we did. We merged with the demand.

Maria Varmazis (13:56)

Yeah. So what has that been like? Tell me a bit about. Have there been supply chain challenges? I mean, how have you been able to scale with the market as it's been growing?

Unknown Guest (14:07)

It's been incredibly hard. And I tell people if I had known it was going to be this hard when I started, I might not have started. But now that we're in it, we keep going. And so my background being technical in university laboratories, we built tens of hall effect thrusters with PhD students. And it's not that hard to build one in the lab. What's really, really hard is to build one that can fly in orbit and then build hundreds of them that are exactly the same. That has been a challenge of Orbion. The rocket science was rather straightforward, but the manufacturing has been a huge challenge. So we're there now, but, but it was really hard to get here.

Maria Varmazis (14:50)

I'd love to hear more about that, to be honest, because I think that's, that's really interesting because again, we, many times we Think maybe the older model of how, how space or manufacturing for space has worked. It's been very boutique. We're beyond that now. We're well beyond that. So I think that the maturity of the market meeting you, where you are at right now, is a really fascinating place to be. And I mean, are we at the point now where people can just go, yes, I want that. I'm going to go pick that off the shelf. I mean, is that where we're at?

Unknown Guest (15:16)

We're pretty close. There's always timelines involved and it's supply chain. But for instance, with our product, yeah, we've got a spec sheet, it's an off the shelf item. We tell you what its performance is and if you want one, we can deliver it to you in maybe as soon as four or five months if you want low quantities. But if you want more than that, it's more like 10 or 12 months to get the supply chain wet. But yeah, it's essentially buy off the shelf now.

Maria Varmazis (15:44)

Wow. I mean, that's incredible to me, just thinking of how things used to be many, many years, just to talk about things in a matter of months. It's quite amazing that we are at that place now. So in sort of a bit of inside baseball for the listeners here, part of the pitch, I think for our conversation today was talking a bit about vertical integration. And I'm curious, I wanted to hear your thoughts on what your thoughts are on that. Specifically, where are you going with thoughts on vertical integration for the satellite?

Unknown Guest (16:13)

Yeah, that's a good question. I would start with nobody wants to go vertical. If you can buy something on the market and it can show up on time and it has a good price, that's what you want to do. That's much easier. I always with tongue in cheek talk about the CEO Serenity Prayer. And it says, please God, give me the money to buy what I can't build, the engineers to build what I can't buy, and the wisdom to know the difference. But we end up getting pushed into vertical generally because we've been hurt by a supplier somewhere. We've identified a buy decision that we made and it didn't work out. And we thought, oh my God, we can't do this anymore. So we are largely vertical right now. We do everything except printed circuit boards. And we do that not because it was our choice, but sort of because of necessity. So I think a lot of other companies have been driven there as well. When the supply chain is not very mature, you don't want to rely on them. Now, we might not be better than our suppliers, but at least we can control it. And the knowledge is as important as the convenience.

Maria Varmazis (17:29)

Do you see the supply chain domestically reaching a greater point of maturity where maybe you can de verticalize at some point, or is it just having that control just so crucial to you that maybe it's secondary?

Unknown Guest (17:46)

That's a good question. My opinion, in the space industry, our volumes are always pretty small. We're not making iPhones or F150s. Even though the space market is growing fantastically, we're talking about thousands of units a year, not millions. So within that, for instance, if we have a key widget in our supply chain, there's never going to be 10 suppliers for that widget that we can compete or rotate through. So I think there's always going to be a decent amount of vertical integration just because of lack of supplier diversity.

Maria Varmazis (18:21)

And what does that mean for workforce too? I mean, you have to have, and this is a challenge. I've talked to many people about having the, you know, the expertise in house to understand, you know, are the raw materials coming in, are they of the grade that you need for these, these certain components that you're building? I mean, that's very specialized expertise. Given the space industry. Are you finding that or is there a pipeline issue?

Unknown Guest (18:42)

The expertise is out there all the time, but it, there's an inertia factor to spooling up. As a for instance, early in our development, there was a specialized valve that we needed and we didn't have any interest in making them, but after two years of searching, we found there was no reliable source for them. And then we kind of rubbed our hands and went, oh my God, this valve is really complicated. What are we going to do? And One of our VPs actually looked at me, said, brad, you're making plasma thrusters and you're afraid of a damn valve. And I said, you know, you're right. It's always yes, you know, you're right. So why don't we get smart enough to do this ourselves? So there was an inertia factor we had to learn and that was kind of time spent on the treadmill. But now that that's behind us, we're really happy we brought it in house. The expertise required to design the valve was nothing special. We just had to put the team together and bring it in house.

Maria Varmazis (19:38)

That makes sense. Okay, I could totally see that. I'm very curious about sort of your long term vision for your company. Again, we're at a fantastic time in terms of happening in the space market. A lot of exciting developments. I'm very curious about your thoughts maybe five, ten years from now?

Unknown Guest (19:53)

Yeah, I mean, our ambitions are pretty simple. We simply plan to take over the solar system, starting with this planet. So that's what we get up and pledge ourselves to every day. So right now we're working on propulsion systems because that is a crucial bottleneck in the supply chain.

Maria Varmazis (20:26)

I'll be right back.

Brad King (20:32)

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Maria Varmazis (21:17)

Welcome back. I wanted to give a shout out today to a great piece in the Space Review by Dennis O'Brien called Atlac and the Early Emergence of Lunar Governance. It's a really comprehensive article about legal governance of the Moon. Highly recommend you give it a read and the link is in the show notes for you Now. ATLAC is the Action Team on Lunar Activities Consultation, which if you haven't heard of it, don't fret, it's new on the scene. It was just created by the United Nations Committee on Peaceful Uses of outer space, or COPUAs, this past February, and Atlac's goal is to try and fill the moon sized hole in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Who could have imagined in 67 the reality of what we're looking at for the Moon and cislunar activities today? And well, they couldn't. So a lot was basically left to imagination for future generations to figure out. And that time is now. And perhaps one could argue that time was yesterday. Among the topics that ATLAC is taking a look at is avoidance of harmful interference, information sharing, protecting the lunar heritage, and special interest sites like the first footprints on the Moon, and general standards and operational procedures on the moon like debris mitigation safety, that kind of thing. There is a lot of work, overdue work, needing to be done here, but the Action Team is a step in the right direction, at least working with the Space Resources Working Group. Atlac has until 2027 to chart a way forward here and create either a new cooperative lunar agency or governance agreement, and we look forward to seeing what happens foreign that's it for T minus for March 18, 2025, brought to you by N2K CyberWire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes@space.n2k.com we're privileged that N2K and podcasts like T minus are part of the daily routine of many of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector, from the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. N2K Senior Producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ivan. Peter Kilpe is our publisher and I'm your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. T minus.

Brad King (24:02)

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