#8: Ben Nowack - Selling Sunlight to Solar Farms After Dark

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.