Alice Carruth (7:17)

There's just one additional link in there today. It covers a brief social media announcement that Space Kinetic Corp. Has raised over $12 million from private investors, which they say they'll use to build a new paradigm for space superiority and missile defense. I'll be honest, I'm not completely sure what they're aiming to do with that vague statement, but hopefully with the new investment, they'll be able to communicate communicate their future mission a little clearer.

Maria Varmazes (7:37)

Well, less jargon is always better. And please remind us where else our listeners can find those links.

Alice Carruth (7:44)

Maria we also have an episode page on our website, space.n2k.com scroll down to find today's episode title. And included on that page is the Selected Reading section with hyperlinks to all the stories covered in today's podcast.

Maria Varmazes (7:56)

Hey T minus crew. If your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership, or recruit talent, T minus can help. We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email@space2k.com or send us a note through our website so we can connect about building a program to meet your goals.

Ben Yellen (8:24)

I'm Ben Yellen, co host of the Caveat Podcast. Each Thursday we sit down and talk about the biggest legal and policy developments affecting technology that are shaping our world. Whether it be sitting down with experts or government officials, or breaking down the latest political developments, we talk about the stories that will have tangible impacts on businesses and people around the world. If you are looking to stay informed on what is happening and how it could impact you, make sure to listen to the Caveat Podcast.

Maria Varmazes (8:59)

Today's guest is Luis Torres, founder of Torres Orbital Mining, also known as Tom. And I started our chat by asking Luis to tell me about how he came up with the idea to start Tom.

Luis Torres (9:13)

There's a methodology that I use a lot to solve problems. I think it's called the generation of absurd ideas. So you get into this problem and you try to come up with the craziest really absurd idea and then you start shipping away what makes it a crazy idea. Right. So while reviewing my career aspirations throughout my mba, we were really thinking of entrepreneurship. Right. And create something for by yourselves and get, and get to experience this challenge. And I started thinking, where's my experience in how could I leverage to create something? Right. So when I started doing my research, okay, maybe let's take a look into what the companies are doing just out of curiosity. And that's when I saw that we're relying on hoppers, we're relying on conveyors, and there's a lot of material transition points that I'm thinking, okay, all of these areas are just going to be issues. And let me give you a hard data.

Maria Varmazes (10:16)

Yeah.

Luis Torres (10:17)

So to run a mine 50%, somewhere between 50 to 60% of the cost to run it is human labor in the maintenance, the mobile center, a conveyor, take a look at a machine. That means that if we were to replicate all of the Earth methodologies on orbital bodies, we're going to have to think on how we're going to replace this 50% of human labor.

Maria Varmazes (10:41)

Right? Right. Yeah.

Luis Torres (10:42)

AI software or robotics. And all of this just keeps adding on layers of complexity. So now something that could be feasible, it becomes incredibly hard. So while talking with the idea, that's when we assign ourselves some objectives. Right. Okay. So we need to design something that has less transition points, that has a good manage of dust, even more after learning how sharp regolith is. So that's how we come out with our design. And in a very simple terms, it's nothing but a drill with some inside transitions of the materials. And from there we started moving on by giving me their point of view from space research. Right. Having some collaborators that have been participating at their Frick in Luxembourg with their point of view from space resources. I think that for the past eight months that we've been working and analyzing, first we have a good idea, second, is it feasible? And then how can we attach it? How can we create this good mix in between the experience between Earth mining and the issues that I can see that we could, that are going to translate them exponentially and how to understand this material Right.

Maria Varmazes (12:02)

I was looking on your website and it's fascinating looking. And is this what you're testing right now?

Luis Torres (12:09)

Yeah, absolutely. So our first design, it was the moon autonomous extractor lander. That's the first thing that we work on and the idea for me was that in order for us to be able to think of co are we going to utilize the space resources on Earth or are we going to mine asteroids? I think we need to prove that we can actually mine good amounts of space resources. The first machine that we designed is it's designed to carry or to excavate around 1200 kilograms of lunar soil. So after a few conversations with very smart space people, they told me, okay iterate, let's scale it down. If you're telling me that your technology is scalable, scale it down and let's start testing the prototype. Right. So that's how we ended up with Toshly, which is our first medium class prototype capable of extracting 25kg of regolith.

Maria Varmazes (13:10)

I was thinking it's so interesting to me to hear scaling it down. It makes sense for space because we have to get things smaller. But I often think of scaling as scaling up. In this case it needs to be scaled down.

Luis Torres (13:19)

But yeah, absolutely, online. And this is something that I've been experiencing during the past couple of months while designing this. I'm used to design very heavy duty equipment and now I'm trying to design very lightweight, I don't know, even the legs for the rubber and I'm dealing with millimeters and something. It's just amazing for me. So just to give you a little context on this name Dushli comes from the nahual word rabbit. So it goes with the, I guess you can call it legend. One of the gets a call. One of the gods who saw a humble rabbit that was offered him, took him and decided to imprint his silhouette on the manta. I have always thought of that story.

Maria Varmazes (14:06)

I love that, that's such a. I love that tribute and I love that. That's wonderful.

Luis Torres (14:09)

Yeah, thank you. So yeah, we tested Toshly pretty much on mobility and some excavation analysis Jet and right now we're trying to run in this better agile methodology like create a list of what we want, select what we can do and try to work and iterate faster. And that's how from the lessons learned from this prototype we have, we are creating right now or a smaller robot. So we're even scaling down once more. So this one is, it's assigned around 9kg of regolate. So less than Half of the big one. But I think this is going to let us iterate faster and with the lessons from Toshly we're, we're going to be able to produce faster results and something that's easy to carry to conferences.

Maria Varmazes (14:59)

Yeah, that's a nice bonus as well for you and your team. So that's wonderful. It is so fascinating to me to think of just as you said with mining, you do think of these extremely heavy duty equipment. And now we're talking about things that are so refined and almost delicate but still have to be rugged enough to be dealing with regolith and all the arduousness of mining. I mean that sounds like a really fascinating technical and engineering problem to be working out. But also I imagine it also taps into your imagination of what's possible and what mining on the moon will look like. Because right now we're all still trying to figure that out. But you are doing that work right now to help shape that future.

Luis Torres (15:42)

Absolutely. And let me tell you something. When I first was bouncing the idea with my wife, one of the first things that she told me was don't blow up the moon. We need it.

Maria Varmazes (15:54)

Fair. That's fair enough.

Luis Torres (15:58)

And having to deal with a lot of environmental permits and issues and circumstances here on earth mining. Yeah. One take to look into. Okay. What's on the moon, what are we writing about, what are the standards? And mostly around mind planning, what can and when cannot we do. And it was also surprising to see that like we're pretty young in that regard. There's some agencies that are starting to work on these space policies. I kept seeing a lot of space lawyers starting these very important conversations. So I'm seeing a lot of experts on Earth mining starting to give their feedback into mine planning, into what geology needs to look like before we actually start thinking of big commercial mining for in city research. Right. And that's what I keep thinking, what I keep telling to my team, like that's the goal. Right. That's the vision to be able to be to supply with these raw resources or pre processed resources to different companies or even governments that are trying to labor rush the resources while on orbit or on average on return missions.

Maria Varmazes (17:11)

Yeah.

Luis Torres (17:12)

But I think before all that happens we really need to be able to or to know how to make a hole in a very safe manner of how to do it and mostly around dust and of course how we're going to take care of the hole afterwards. Right.

Maria Varmazes (17:26)

Yeah. I'm so curious. I guess this is the engineering part of me. How you do testing of your prototypes given can't really easily get to the moon to test this. What's your analog for doing all this testing that you're working on?

Luis Torres (17:44)

Right now we're using just basalt in a half inch crusher run with a lot of vines. So I think right now our goal for the prototype is to test first that the idea works, right?

Maria Varmazes (17:56)

Yeah, yeah.

Luis Torres (17:57)

To get a rough estimate of how much progress are the Morse consuming and stuff and trying to create a good mathematical model to be able to base on the new prototypes and new designs. Right now our next goal is to actually start producing some even smaller scale tests so that we can actually start using some symbol lens, trying to design the correct profile for the drill head, make sure that we have all of the mechanisms. Well understand that how they're going to work together, right?

Maria Varmazes (18:29)

Yep.

Luis Torres (18:29)

It's mostly our first prototype is something that can work here on Earth, but now we need to make sure sure that it's going to work on the moon and it's going to work in in the most efficient way that it can.

Maria Varmazes (18:55)

We'll be right back.

Monisha Ravacetti (18:59)

Martha listens to her favorite band all the time. In the car, gym, even sleeping. So when they finally went on tour, Martha bundled her flight and hotel on Expedia to see them live. She saved so much she got her seat close enough to actually see and hear them sort of. You were made to scream from the front row. We were made to quietly save you More Expedia made to travel savings vary and subject to availability. Flight inclusive packages are atoll protected.

Maria Varmazes (19:32)

Welcome back. A tip of the hat to Monisha Ravacetti, astronomy editor@space.com for a great article that combined two of my favorite things, astronomy and classic nerdery in the form of Lord of the Rings. You can't pretend you're surprised by that. Just put a pin in that information for a sec though. The article covers new information and a striking picture of a plasma jet in the Blazar PKS 1424/240 which okay, maybe doesn't sound interesting perhaps, but it definitely is both scientifically and visually. It took 15 years for astronomers to complete this picture of this object. And those years of study did pay off, say Yuri Kovalev, who is the principal investigator of the multi messenger Studies of Extra Galactic Super Colliders project at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. And he says this when we reconstructed the image, it looked absolutely stunning. We we have never seen anything quite like it. A near perfect toroidal magnetic field with a jet pointing straight at us. Now the object, as I said earlier, is a blazar and not a jacket. But imagine a quasar with its distinctively super bright central jet cone. And now imagine that jet pointing directly at us. And when a quasar juts the sky like a big evil eye, it's a blazar. And Monisha ravi saidi@space.com makes honestly a perfect comparison. This infernally hot red streaky circular ish formation with an incredibly bright center. It is just like the eye of Sauron in space. And honestly, it really does look like something that would give any creature, hobbit or otherwise quite a fright. Link in the show Notes for you so you can see for yourself Foreign that's T minus Brought to you by N2K CyberWire we'd love to know what you think of our podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like our show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space2k.com we are proud that N2K Cyberwire is part of the daily routine 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 helps space and cybersecurity professionals grow, learn and stay informed. As the nexus for discovery and connection, we bring you the people, the technology and the ideas shaping the future of secure innovation. Learn how@n2k.com 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 am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

Luis Torres (22:43)

T minus It.