← GovDiscovery AI Podcast with Mike Shanley
GovDiscovery AI Podcast with Mike Shanley
Ep 80: Lee Rosen, CEO, ThinkOrbital - GovDiscovery AI Podcast with Mike Shanley
00:40:50
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Gov Discovery AI podcast. I'm your host, Mike Shanley. Our guest today is Lee Rosen. Lee is the co founder and CEO of thinkOrbital. He's here today to talk about Thinkorbital's capabilities, the work they're doing, how he got to this stage, and space war fighting. Lee, thank you for being on the podcast today.
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B
Mike, it's a honor and a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. It's been great getting to know you and look forward to having a great discussion today.
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C
Excellent.
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A
Well, I'm very interested. You've already told me this. A short version of this. I want to hear the long version. Tell me the story of the day you decided to retire from the Air Force.
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B
Oh, my goodness. Well, after a long career, 23 years serving as an engineer, acquisition officer and space operator in the United States Air Force. What's really the Space Force? Part of the Air Force, before there was a Space Force, had a long career. Multiple assignments in Los Angeles where at the Space Systems center where the Air Force now Space Force buys all of their space hardware. Multiple assignments at the National Reconnaissance Office. The folks at Buy and fly our fleet of spy satellites got to command at both launch sites at Vandenberg Space Force Base and Cape Canaveral and had a wonderful career. And my final assignment in the Air Force, I was the commander down at Cape Canaveral for the launch group, the folks that actually did the Alice and Delt and those type of launches.
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C
And it was midway through my tour or so, and I got a call from the big four star boss, General Bob Kaler, who said, hey, President Obama wants to come down to the Cape to announce this commercial space initiative and we're actually gonna launch stuff to the International Space Station on commercial rockets using commercial vehicles. I'm like, wow, that will really change the game, sir. Fantastic. What can I do to help? He's like, well, I want you to escort the President around and I want to know where we should take him. I'm like, absolutely, sir. Be honored to do that. And I said, let's take him over to the brand new Atlas launch pad. It's beautiful. You know, they're launching maybe one or two commercial launches a year, so, you know, that's our biggest commercial capability we have in the US That'll be a great place for them to go see. And the big boss said, yeah, that'd be interesting. But how about we take him over to see Those new guys, SpaceX that you helped get set up and get a launch site and I'm like, oh, boy, sir, they might blow something up. The President could fall in a hole. That would be career limiting for both of us. I'm not sure we want to do that. And he's like, oh, it'll be fine. They'll fix it up. It'll be good. So obviously the four star beat the Colonel and we set up a visit for SpaceX while we were waiting for the President to show up. And you have to be in place for a certain amount of time, and Secret Service comes and checks everything out and things like that. It was just me and this guy named Elon in a hangar that they had kind of thrown up for the event. And there was a fake rocket on the pad and all of the things that I was worried about. The Secret Service said, do not let the President go beyond this point, and all of those kind of things. And we're like, great, we can do all those things. And so, waiting for him to show up, Elon starts quizzing. Mia. The first question I think was, why the hell are you here and who are you? I'm like, yeah, we've been helping you get this launch pad. We've talked on the phone several times. And I'm kind of the commander of all the launch stuff. I'm kind of a big deal, you know. And he's like, this is my launch pad. So right then and there, you kind of knew that things were a little bit different. Like when I would walk onto the Atlas launch pad, it was like you were, oh, my God, there was a, you know, a kernel coming onto our launch pad. We'll feed them milk and cookies, you know, that kind of stuff.
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A
So it was a deferential to you.
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C
Little different attitude, shall we say? And then, then he started asking me about, you know, well, how quickly can you turn one of these launches that you're so proud of? I'm like, well, you know, we can, we can turn a launch in probably 45 days, you know. And he's like, that's terrible. Can you imagine if you had an airliner that you could only fly every 45 days? How terrible that would be? I'm like, yeah, I didn't really think of it that way. But it's not really an airliner. It's like, well, you know, how would you land a rocket? I'm like, excuse me, land a rocket? Like the space shuttle? He's like, no, make the whole first stage reusable. And how would you get it down? I'm like, well, I guess you could do it like The Space shuttle put arrow structures on it or something like that. And he's like, ah, that would weigh too much. And then we started talking about propulsive landing and all this kind of crazy stuff that at that time seemed like total science fiction. But you kind of started thinking about all of those things. And then he's like, well, I'm like, what about parachutes? He's like, well, they won't work on Mars. I'm like, oh boy, this guy is way out there. But in context of the time, right, Boeing and Lockheed Martin had combined into a single entity. United Launch Alliance. Prices had gone kind of quite steep in the wake of that monopoly that happened. So our warfighters were getting less capability on orbit. And that's about bad thing without competition. And this seemed to be an opportunity for some competition. And I was kind of struck by Elon's vision and just the type of questions he was asking were really smart questions. And I had some other buddies that had gone to SpaceX and it seemed like this would have been an opportune time to take some risk and think about moving on and going into that. Well, the President ended up showing up. He didn't fall in a hole. We didn't kill him. He did like walk right up, took his jacket off, walked right up to the edge of the hole and all the Secret Service guys are like running toward him, you know, it was kind of a fun experience and getting to meet the President was obviously awesome. But it was one of those seminal days in your life that you think back on and go, wow, that really turned my career from what I thought was going to be a longer military career and things like that, into this. Seems like it's really important for me to go do plus kind of the wild, wild west of new rocket launches and you know, went through the process, which is very rigorous at SpaceX and was lucky enough to get hired. Elon was always the last interview, at least back then. And I don't even think he remembered me from that time we met the President. But it certainly left a marked impression on, on me and in our life. So question on process.
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A
So people have been through that. CEO has the last interview. It's all right. Everyone approves it.
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C
Yep.
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A
Okay, you're a real person. Check the box. Was that what it was or was that. Was it an actual interview for that final conversation?
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B
Hell no. It was.
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A
It wasn't. You weren't. You weren't already in and it was checking the box?
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B
Oh, no, sir. It was. It was a very rigorous technical and philosophical question, I think they predisposed not to hire like former military people mostly because, you know, you, you get in this, I've got like five support staff that's helping me. I haven't had, you know, in the military you kind of become a technical program manager versus, you know, you lose
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C
some of your technical skills because you're
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B
not doing hands on design work or anything like that. So they're a bit reticent to hire him. So he wanted to make sure that I could still kind of cut the mustard from those different perspectives.
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C
So
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B
I didn't know if I was going to make it, frankly when I walked in. And luckily I got selected and got to go help stand up. The first launch pad on the west coast at Vandenberg, an old Titan 4 launch pad that I had worked on as a captain in the Air Force. And we turned it into a Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch site in about 13 months. From getting the keys to actually launching and did it for about $12.98 it
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C
felt like, you know, so it was an amazing adventure.
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A
Sudley, I want to come back to the SpaceX, but quick side question. So you mentioned kind of there was sure the vision brought by Elon and SpaceX, but there was also market opportunity at the time. How would you contrast the space market today compared to when you, Obama and Elon were having that conversation?
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B
Yeah, it's, it is markedly different. I mean back then we had kind of offshored all of our commerc space capability from a launch perspective and even from a satellite perspective to our really close friends the Russians and the French.
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C
And
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B
as I said, we maybe did one or two commercial launches a year. And yeah, Boeing and Lockheed Martin were building satellites, but man, companies like Airbus and Thales were very, very competitive building satellites as well. And there wasn't the Bev that are out there that I think SpaceX has enabled companies like Thinkorbital because of the decrease in the launch costs, the availability for rideshare launches and all of that kind of stuff just wasn't there in the 2010-2015 timeframe. And SpaceX changed all that dramatically to the point where now for a couple hundred K you can launch a fairly significant size satellite to multiple different orbital regimes and have the opportunity to be a real space company and get something on orbit very, very quickly.
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A
So let's go to your SpaceX experience. What did you learn while you were there?
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B
Yeah, a tremendous amount. And I'll be forever grateful to Elon and Gwen and the whole team at SpaceX. But you know, I think the fundamental piece that stuck with me the most was the only law that you can't violate is physics.
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C
Right? We tend to really over constrain every
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problem that we think about, you know, whether it's, oh, there's this, this, this rule, this regulation, this precedence that's been
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C
set by 15 years of doing it this way and things like that. And you know, if you can't make the math and physics work, then you should stop right there, right? But if you can make it work, all of that other stuff is just kind of made up, frankly. Right? And maybe there was a good reason at the time it was made up and maybe there's still a good reason, but don't let that stop you from solving your technical difficulties first. And that first principles type of thinking was something that we employed a lot. And then, you know, Elon had this, you know, this five step process that took them a while to develop, but parts of it were consistent from the time I joined SpaceX and it was really more codified by the time I left in 2022 was, you know, this question, every single requirement, right? That was the fundamental first step. And again, you can over constrain yourself if you just blindly accept all of these, all of these kind of made up requirements. And I think that's something that you have to do, especially when you're doing things like we're doing at Think Orbital, kind of on the edge of the math and physics. If I start worrying about the regulatory environment and all of that kind of stuff, I will never solve this problem.
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B
But you gotta solve the first principles first.
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A
So what? And then I want to get into Think Orbital and as a co founder, what you've brought into there, getting to see something from the, or build something from the start. But what have you decided to do differently than, than, than at SpaceX?
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C
Yeah, you know, at SpaceX, one of the hallmarks, and it's still true today,
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is they, they hire amazing people, right? I mean really, everybody says they've got top 1%. I gotta tell you, they're, they're really top 1% and they've got a line out the door of folks that want
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to work there for good reason.
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And, and some of the folks I met there are the best and smartest engineers.
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So that's something I definitely pulled over here is trying to find those really, really brilliant people. And you just never hire a warm body, right? You really want to try to find the best investor and that's even tougher in startup world. Because you don't have the money to pay them.
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And one of the other things I
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took is that if you give people skin in the game, like make them owners of your company, then they will work a little bit harder because it's
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their dollar, their spending and their opportunity
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to be financially successful, if the company is financially successful. So those are some things I did take. There were things at SpaceX that made
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it really, really hard.
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Elon's philosophy was If I work 80 hours a week, I'm working twice as I get twice as much done as everybody else. I think Certainly a regular 40 hour week is not going to cut it in startup world. But there are in my estimation a point of diminishing returns for people as well. And we smoked a lot of folks at SpaceX. Right. But you got to set the bar high and he certainly did that and Gwen certainly did that, and we still set the bar high, but perhaps not to an impossible hurdle. How's that?
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A
So let's go to Think Orbital. So you have this experience with Air Force than this experience at SpaceX. Now you basically have a blank page within the space industry. Why did you decide this is where you want to focus and then where is thinkorbital at? Well, let's talk about the founding story. Where did you found or what did you found Thinkorbital to solve or deliver?
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C
Sure.
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So when we were at SpaceX, we
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always talked about different constraints.
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And if you think about outer space.
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Right. The first constraint you have to overcome is getting there.
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It's a very difficult environment to get to.
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But thanks to SpaceX and some of
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these other companies that are starting to
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come into fruition, launch is now everything that I had always wanted when I was in the military.
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It's reliable, it's affordable, it's super high
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cadence, all of those kinds of things. And today just happens to be the first attempt of the Artemis II launch.
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Right.
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And you think about all that power and I've got two friends that are sitting on top of that rocket that I'm thinking about very much today. And obviously the entire crew, bringing them back safely to their families is job one for Artemis. But in any case, the constraints of outer space are tough. And getting there is that first step. For 100 bucks a month, you can have data pretty much anywhere on the planet. So getting data via the Starlink system, and that's another constraint that SpaceX has been able to really knocked down. And in my estimation, one of the other great constraints we have to go after is the size of things in outer space. Because compared to any terrestrial application, everything in space is tiny, right? And they say, you know, economies are built on infrastructure. And yet we have very, very little infrastructure in outer space. And the infrastructure we do have is tiny. You'd never build a factory on Earth that's 80ft long and 30ft wide, yet that's about the biggest thing that you can get into outer space, right? So until we figure out how to build big infrastructure in space, I don't know how you can truly have a viable new space economy at scale. And that's really what we founded the company to go do. And you're like, wait a second, I thought you guys were doing X rays. Well, we are, and it's a bit of a story to get there. So we thought about this, building in situ large structures in space. And we've really never built anything in outer space even to this day. In fact, we've never even really joined two pieces of metal together in outer space until we did it in 2024 at Think Orbital. So the ability to do basic construction kind of is fundamentally dependent on having the tools to be able to go do that. So we started with the development of the tools. And the first tool that we developed was an in space welding capability, the ability to join two pieces of metal. And back at SpaceX we worked with a technology called electron beam welding. Sounds like it's from the future. Been around since the 1960s. You know, used extensively in the nuclear industry. You can weld like single pass steel that's 12 inches thick. But its biggest drawback is it has to be done inside of a vacuum chamber. And we all know where there's a great vacuum chamber. It's 100 kilometers from everywhere. And we thought that would be a great opportunity to build an in space welding capability using this electron beam technology. Except everything in electron beam technology is huge, right? I mean, the machines weigh hundreds and hundreds of pounds. They're the size of your desk. It's not conducive to actually doing in outer space. I also didn't need to weld 12 inch steel in outer space. I mean, even the International Space Station is kind of a veritable coke can. Really thin metal that aluminum that, you know, you don't have to really have a deep penetrating welding capability. So we sized our welder to be able to get through about half inch of metal. And you can kind of see some melt runs here for our ability to do that. And the welder itself, not the size of a desk, but the size of about a Coffee cup. So this, this welding capability turns out. And let me show you some welds that we can have done here in our lab in Boulder and have done on two launches and got samples back for NASA and the International Space Station. And you can see some of those nice welds there. But anyway, that capability turns out to be kind of a Swiss army knife. And not only can you do welding like I just showed you, you can also do some interesting cutting. So this was a flat piece of metal. By electronically steering the beam from side to side, you can basically push metal away from the center line without generating debris or generating thrust on the object that you're cutting. So if you piss me off, I will cut your solar panels off and you'll never know it until the lights go out. No. So there's some interesting capabilities there. You can put a metal wire down the center of the electron beam and 3D print with it. But one of the interesting itinerant effects of the electron beam is when you hit a dense metal, you generate radiation. And conveniently, that radiation comes in the form of X rays. And we were idiots and didn't know that. And our technology development partners are like, you guys are being careful with that electron being like, yeah, we are. It's high voltage, arcing risk, all that kind of stuff. They're like, no, you dummies, you're probably generating X rays and nuking yourselves. We're like, oh, we should probably look into that. So we did, and turns out that our little electron beam welder came could do that, generate X rays by striking a dense metal like tungsten. And it turns out that's how most X ray machines work. We're just too dumb to know that that's how they work. That thing, that tube that the dentist points at your mouth is really a mini electron beam welder inside of a vacuum tube striking a piece of tungsten to generate X rays. Right. So that technology is what we were
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able to kind of adapt here. And, you know, we did some experimentation
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because the standard way you inspect welds on Earth is using X ray. Like when we were building launch pads at SpaceX, we had to inspect like 10% of the high pressure piping that
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we welded together per code using X ray.
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So knew there was some good inspection technology there. We started using it to inspect the welds that we were doing. And lo and behold, not only could we see through the weld, we had the X ray detector panel on the outside of the chamber. We could see well into the vacuum chamber and that's where my kind of military experience kicked in and said, man, if I could use this thing to look inside someone else's satellite, that's something that solves one of the space force's most difficult problems. And that's called space domain awareness. And in the space domain awareness world, you know, it's relatively straightforward to track something in outer space. We've got a series of ground radars, optical telescopes, things like that, that can watch a satellite drift across the sky. We can sometimes identify, we know what those space objects are. We can correlate the time they passed over from the giant space catalog that we keep and things like that. If it maneuvers, it's a little bit harder to keep what we call track custody of that observation and things like that. But what you don't know is what the true purpose and intent is. Once in a while you can get a fuzzy picture from the ground. Even more rarely you can get a space to space electro optical picture. But that still doesn't tell you the whole story. And you don't go to the doctor and have them take a picture of the outside of your knee. If you got a bum knee, you get an X ray. And this really has been the holy grail of space domain awareness for a long, long time. So a couple of years ago there was a news article that talked about the Russians potentially hiding nuclear weapons inside satellites. If they indeed are doing that and they were to explode one of those nuclear weapons in low earth orbit, they would take out a substantive amount of U.S. capability. And we have this asymmetric advantage in outer space. It would be a very, very bad day for everybody, including them. But with our advantage it would be worse for us. So knowing where those satellites are, what their capability is, is a problem that a lot of the US government is thinking about and working on. And I got called up to the National Space Council and got to brief a little bit about this X ray technology and what we're doing. And they're like, well that's great. I'd love to be able to look inside satellites to figure that out. How far away do you have to be? I'm like, well with our little welder, you know, meters away, that's a bit of a provocative act to get up close and personal to a nuclear armed satell. How far away could you be? And I didn't know the answer at the time, but brought it back. My co founder is a brilliant PhD electrical engineer, physics guy, software guy. We did a lot of analysis, a lot of experimentation and things like that and it turns out that the math and the physics close to be able to resolve an image about the size of a baseball at about 10km away. And why, why 10km? Well that's our kind of normal operating distance that we don't like to get inside of. And why the size of a baseball? Well, that's about the size of the smallest nuclear core ever built. So those two driving requirements kind of had us come up with this system for actually trying to go figure out how to go do this in outer space. And that's been the focus of Think Orbital because while, while the long term vision is still to go build big stuff in outer space, you have this entrepreneur's dilemma of either have a paying customer or die. So we tried to choose the don't die route for now and that's how we kind of got onto this X ray thing. And I've been talking forever, Mike. I'm sure you have other questions here, but hopefully it's all made.
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A
Well, I got a lot more that are along these lines. Let's get in a little more about the adversaries in the open source. What is known about them or how little is known. Again, I think you got into why this is important. Yeah, but yeah, I think that would be interesting. Is it a black box, so to speak, out there or is, you know, 5% mapped? I don't, you know, however you want to frame it. What, what is, what is the what, what are the limited knowns and what is the scope of the unknowns?
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B
Yeah, so first of all, the Russians and the Chinese have on the order of three and a half thousand satellites up there. Of those satellites we probably know for sure what 5% of them are. You know, they say they're comm satellites, they say they're imaging satellites and things like that. But do we really know? The answer is no. So effectively at that kind of percentages, you're flying blind in outer space.
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Right.
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And that's hugely problematic, not only from a space domain awareness perspective, but just trying to understand what their intent is
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in outer space is really hard to know.
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I don't know if they've got 20
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nuclear armed satellites or zero nuclear armed satellites. I don't know if the Chinese, who. We have seen observations of a single blip flying across the sky and then on the next pass there's three blips in proximity, all maneuvering in relative motion to each other. How did they get there? Were they inside the satellite? Did they do some high thrust maneuvers to get them there? Oh, wait a Sec. Now there's only two, and it looks like the one could be, you know, glommed on to the other. Are they refueling? What do they do? We have essentially no idea.
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So it is a terrific problem that the military is really set a high
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priority to go figure out. And there we do have satellites like in geostationary orbit.
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This is all obviously unclass called the
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Geostationary Space Situational Awareness Program, or GSAP
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program that I had the honor of working on when I was in the
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military that can take pictures of other satellites at geostationary orbit. And there are other systems that are out there that help solve this problem. And I'm not saying that X ray is going to be the only way you solve this problem, but it is a great way to really figure out what they're up to and whether they're hiding stuff or even generally what their capabilities are.
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Because even knowing the size of their
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propulsion system or how much fuel they have on board gives you a pretty good clue as to what the capabilities of the satellites are. And then if you make the operational decision, you see something and you want to get close and personal, you know, you can get imagery, at least we do in the lab now, and we're about to prove in outer space, you know, down to the board level, to really see what they're doing and figure out kind of what those capabilities and intents might be.
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A
So we touched on this, or you touched on this already. But I want to get into a little bit, one layer deep, of why is this important? So, say a substantial amount of the satellites are taken out, the GPS is shut down for, you know, a portion of satellite to shut down.
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C
Sure.
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A
That just means my Google Maps doesn't work. Right. Or Lee, it's a leading question. We've already talked this through. But like what? Really, I don't think I fully comprehended. What are all the implications of that. It's not just I can't figure out how to get up to the ski resort, for example.
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C
Sure, sure.
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Well, we have so much capability that we bank on for outer space. And what we're seeing with the war
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in Iran today, the ability to track missiles and shoot them down is highly dependent on satellites that we have in
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space to basically see that thermal signature,
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track those satellites, pinpoint or track those launches, pinpoint them, and allow us the opportunity to get a vector to systems on the ground that can take them out.
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Right.
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So there's like the first layer and then there's the whole strategic warning system that if you, if Russia decides To take a shot with a nuke and we don't know where it's going to land, or even that one was shot
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at us, that would be a very, very bad day as well. GPS obviously does a whole heck of
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a lot more than just get you
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to the ski area.
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C
Pretty much every point of sale, every credit card transaction, every timing on just about every satellite relies on gps. Precision guided munitions, all rely on GPS drone flying, all of that kind of stuff. And while we're starting to learn how to operate in a GPS denied environment with jamming and things like that, it still would be a significant loss not only to the military capability, but to the economic viability of the US and our allies.
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A
Let's look into the future now for space. What do th, what is thing, what do things look like in five to 10 years? Maybe take the International Space Station for example. I'd like if you could touch on first, what is the size of it again? Until one of our recent conversations, I don't think I ever like thought what is the square footage? What's it like to live there? And then moving forward, think orbitals roll, all that? What's the spectrum of what space could look like in that, that five to ten year time frame?
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C
Sure.
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B
So the size of the International Space Station, depending on who you talk to, is anywhere between a two to three and a half bedroom house.
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C
Relatively small.
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B
I think it's about a thousand cubic meters. You can do the math onto how many potential square foot that is. I think it's on the order 2000 square feet or something like that. It's pretty small, about the size of a payload you get inside a Falcon 9 fairing really. So not, not very big at all. And you know, the International Space Station has been an amazing capability for our country for, you know, decades now. It took, I want to say like 42 launches to get everything up there, decades to get all the capability assembled and things like that. And it's been a great platform. But you've got some competing problems on that platform.
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C
Right.
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I want to do very delicate science and I got humans that want to run on treadmills.
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C
Right.
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B
So that can be an interesting dichotomy of how you want to use this scientific capability along with the human habitation, along with just having a human presence in space. All of those kinds of things are a little bit competing. So the ability to actually build in situ and build big things in outer
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C
space and do it relatively quickly and
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cheaply is something that I see as part of that relatively near term future in the next decade because it's such an imperative. And if you look at the replacements for the International Space Station, and I was in D.C. last week when Administrator Jared Isaacman for NASA announced kind of the new plan for outer space. And it changed drastically. And huge kudos to Jared and the team at NASA. And I will say I had the opportunity to get to know him quite well. And we trained Jared and his crew during the Inspiration4 mission that he flew into space.
- [32:50]
C
So got to work with him closely, even got to fly in a jet with him, which was very cool. So what they're doing there for the replacement to the International Space Station was we're going to deorbit the space station and rely on commercial companies to make commercially viable space stations. I personally never thought that was a great plan because right now there are no commercially viable space stations and it's going to take a lot to develop those. So right now what they're saying is we're going to basically rent nodes on the International Space Station where you can come and bring a segment and get some practice before you go figure out how to do this and make it commercially viable and use the International Space Station essentially as the base camp, if you will, for building nodes, which I think is a brilliant way to do it. And kind of what we were hoping would happen because, you know, it's way easier for me to go build a node onto the International Space Station that's almost as big as the International Space Station than it is for me to build a free flying platform that I have to supply my own power and thermal and the whole nine yards of capabilities that you need in order to do a free flying capability. So this kind of more incremental approach I think is brilliant. And we'll see that in the next five years or so people will start flying modules to the International Space Station. There are several companies that are working on that. We hope to partner with some of them to be able to do that and build it actually in outer space versus trying to cram it inside the fairing of a rocket the way we've been doing it the same way for 70 years. So I'm hoping that that future starts to come to fruition. And then the other kind of darker side I guess you could call it is space has become a war fighting medium. There's, there's just no question about it. It's the primary purview of the U.S. space Force and U.S. space Command. And we have to learn how to operate in that medium. And it's not A static medium, it's a dynamic medium. We have to understand maneuver, we have to understand refueling, we have to understand surveillance, reconnaissance, space domain awareness, all of those fundamental capabilities. The, the, you know, I, I think the, I mentioned there's like 3,500 Russian and Chinese satellites on orbit. They're launching 30% more a year. Right. So this problem only gets worse the longer it goes out in time. So I, I, I see a very hopeful future for experimentation and you know, a permanent base on the moon, which is another new announcement that came out of administrator Isaacman's talk last week. All of those kind of things are super hopeful. And I think it's imperative we beat the Chinese back to the moon and start establishing a permanent base there so that we can get to Mars and beyond relatively quickly and hopefully all that in my lifetime. And I'm an old dude, so I want to see that come to fruition.
- [36:04]
A
Well, and great, you're doing it in Boulder along with the thriving space industry here in Colorado all along the Front Range, I continue to find new, very interesting companies, new visions that are going to be part of solving this. As we get close to wrapping up here, Lee, talk a little bit more about what we can see next that you're comfortable sharing from Think Orbital. What do you guys have lined up?
- [36:34]
C
Well, it's a super busy year for us. We've got two launches on the books, one in July and one in late December, early January, where we will launch our capability on board a host satellite. Those two host satellites from those two different launches will meet in low Earth orbit separated by about a kilometer. And we will get an image of the interior of a space object early next year, which is super exciting and hopefully leads to bigger and better things for the company and for our United States military capability in outer space. So that's a big deal. We're working hard. We've built a 10 meter long vacuum cham. Wish I could have built a 10 kilometer long vacuum chamber, but not super practical. And we're doing a bunch of testing on different components and things like that. We're teamed up with several different Colorado companies like CIS Lunar Industries, our friends up in Loveland, that are building part of our high voltage power supply and things like that. So a lot of development, a lot of testing. The other piece of it is the not orbital piece of what we're doing. And that's an announcement that we are getting ready to roll out a new capability and that's a terrestrial capability using much the same X ray type of technology that We've developed in outer space. We had to make it small and lightweight and ruggedize and all the things to survive the environment in space. And we are mounting it on drones and surface vehicles, autonomous vehicles to be able to look inside objects on the battlefield for law enforcement, inside wind turbine blades, to inspect them for cracks and delamination or breaks in the lightning protection system, water intrusion, those kinds of things. So energy infrastructure inspection and doing that with a small lightweight X ray system as opposed to the huge machines that are not very portable, can't get to hard places, and usually have to put people in harm's way. Putting it on these more mobile platforms is something that we have pioneered. We made our first sale, can't say to who yet, but it's a law enforcement agency. We're super excited about that. We had eight army guys here yesterday evaluating the capability. We're playing in a big capstone army exercise at Fort Irwin, California this summer with the capability fully autonomous drone to drone X ray capability, where a soldier will pick a target on the battlefield, basically identify that target and press one button. The drones go off, do the X ray imaging and fly home completely, completely autonomously. So all that capability is already working, which is super cool. And we're doing more and more testing and refining that right now. And you know, we're quickly becoming a dual, dual use capability. Right. So we're doing the military and the commercial and we're doing space and terrestrial, which is a whole new thing. And the drones actually provide an awesome test bed for the space stuff. It's, it's pretty much the same kit that we have to use and very, very similar software as well. So it's been a really, really great test bed for us for our space capability too.
- [39:58]
A
Well, how can those in our network that want to partner with you or just connect to learn more, how can they follow up?
- [40:05]
C
You bet we are on all the socials, thinkorbital and one word and then we've got a great website at www.thinkorbital.com and love to hear from folks. There's a reach out page on there, there's all the news and all that kind of stuff and we're always happy to entertain questions and things like that.
- [40:26]
A
That's Lee Rosen, co founder and CEO of thinkOrbital. Lee, great to have you on the podcast today. Thanks for taking some time to share your expertise in the critical work you and the team at thinkorbital are doing every day.
- [40:38]
C
Thanks, Mike. I can't believe 45 minutes flew by. Like that and really appreciate the insightful questions and look forward to hanging out in the near future.
- [40:47]
A
Excellent, Lee. Thank you very much. Have a great day.