The Space Technology That Could Change History Forever

When I had Erin Brockovich on the Shawn Ryan Show, we took a deep dive into data centers and their impact on our water supply, power grid, and ecosystems. After watching that conversation, Baiju Bhatt, my guest on episode #223, reached out with a potential solution. What if we don’t need to build data centers on Earth at all? I joined Baiju for a live conversation about his latest venture, Cowboy Space, and his plan to put AI data centers in orbit. We explored the technology behind that vision, the challenges of making it a reality, and how moving computing infrastructure into space could help meet growing demand without putting more strain on the resources we depend on here at home. Baiju Bhatt Links: Website - https://www.cowboyspace.com/ X - https://x.com/BaijuBhatt IG - https://www.instagram.com/realbaijubhatt Robinhood - https://robinhood.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:27Speaker 02

  Couple of months ago, I did an episode with Aaron Brockovich, all about data centers, how bad they are for the environment, how much of our energy they're sucking up, and how concerned we all need to be about them. Well, a couple of weeks later, my friend Beju Bot called me and said he had a solution. So I flew out to San Francisco yesterday, getting ready to leave here, heading back to Tennessee, and interviewed him all about it.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  I think this is a real viable solution, taking these data centers off the earth. So, enjoy the interview, enjoy the unveil. Let me know what you guys think. See you soon.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  How's everybody doing tonight? Just want to say, uh, thank you all for coming. I had an awesome day with Beju today, looking at all the new stuff that he's developing, and, um, been really looking forward to tonight, so it's gonna be a good night. Beju, thanks for having me.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Shall we, big guy?

• 4:03Speaker 02

  So Beju, I know we got some big news, you have some big, big news to go over tonight, but before we get into that, could you tell me a little bit about you and how you came to the conclusion to found this new company?

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Yes, uh, so, first of all, thank you all for coming. Welcome to the, this first ever event that we're doing with the Cowboy Space Corporation called Big Sky Rising, and we're excited to show you guys what we've been working on. But the journey here has been about two and a half years of working on the company full-time, but as my family knows, it's been a lifelong passion of mine. I grew up with my, my parents were sitting right there, with my dad working as a contract research scientist at NASA through my childhood. So I kind of grew up around the aerospace world, and, um, I think one of the biggest

• 5:04Speaker 03

  observations of that from childhood was that it felt like the good stuff happened before, you know? Like it felt like all the interesting stuff happened, and that a lot of what NASA was when I was a kid, it felt kind of like a museum, right? And you'd be like, oh, here's an important part in human history. And it just never really made sense to me why it wasn't still happening. But, uh, the journey from there to what would become Cowboy Space was much longer. So about two and a half years ago, started this company with a vision of building the first American energy company in space. And, and why do that? Well, let's actually take a look at the mission of the company, which is powering humanity from the high frontier.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  The thought process behind this was, um, looking at the commercial applications for outer space, and, and thinking to myself, if humanity was going to be the spacefaring civilization that I think all of us want it to be, it wasn't going to get there on the path that it was. The space industry through the majority of our lifetimes before the last 15 years or so has been for the government, by the government, at government pricing. Every mission is driven by the government. And what that means is, is as political winds change, any of these things change, the space industry is one of the first ones to go.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  Now, I'm going to kind of contrast that with the commercial world, right? The world I want to live in, and the world I want this company to help us create is one where there's a new generation of young people that are pursuing careers in this industry, so.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  You know, last time we were together, I think it was about a year, year and a half ago, and you were building satellites in space to beam solar energy into Earth, and now you've...

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Got a little more to talk about today.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot more to talk about today. So, what, what was it that shifted focus? What was the main thing that shifted focus into this?

• 7:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, let's take a look at what we've done over the last two and a half years.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  It's been a quick one. Company started out with the idea of building a power grid in space and an old NASA idea called space-based solar power. Had you ever heard of that before we talked about it?

• 7:36Speaker 02

  No.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Never.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  It was actually born of the last energy crisis, and the thought process that I had when starting the company was, let's take this old science fiction idea and see if you can make it science reality. Like, why hasn't anybody actually tried this in earnest? Like, I, you know, there's got to be a way to bring this idea to life, and, um, a couple of weeks ago, we put our first satellite in space, so...

• 8:10Speaker 03

  So far, it's up there, it's, it's talking to us, we're testing a lot of the functionality on it, and we're getting, getting pretty close to actually, uh, showing off what it can do, but that might be another one of these events that we do together, which I think will be really cool. But more to come on that later. The company started in tiny little garage in El Granada, not a garage, actually, it was more like an apartment place. It actually was maybe just an apartment, like I don't actually don't think it was an office space. And from there, built our first satellite, put it up in space, like I said, relatively recently, and it was this past, um, spring that when we announced our Series B fundraise,

• 8:53Speaker 03

  we both changed the name of the company and announced this bigger plan that we had around building, uh, data centers in orbit. And this even bigger idea that we were going to build a rocket to get those data centers to space. And I think a lot of people thought that that was kind of crazy, um, but I don't think they're going to think that, that it's that crazy after this. So can I show you something?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  I'd love to see it.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  We've been cooking. Oh, we've been cooking.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Saw this earlier today. Can you describe what we're looking at here?

• 9:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is, uh, the first bit of our engine turning on. So, for those of you that don't know, we announced, um, in the spring that we were going to build a rocket to put data centers in space. And the reason we had this thesis was because we knew that if we wanted to actually make something cost competitive here, we'd need to control the economics of it. Now, people said, oh, Beju, you're going to build a rocket? Like, you, you and what army? Well, this army. Um, actually, some of them are here. Um, a little, I don't know if you want to do this now, but we have our head of rocket propulsion here, Mr. Warren Lamont.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Lord knows that man will give a speech if I give him a chance to, so we'll save that for the end. What you're looking at here is five months of work. And it's what I would call turning hardware into data. Or, because we blew, blew, blew part of the engineer.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  You built this from nothing to that in five months.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  About, yeah.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Less than five months.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's been a quick one. The goal, and we're going to talk a lot more about what this is. Just, just so you guys know what we're looking at here. This is at NASA's tennis and it's a testing facility for rocket engines. This is the gas generator. It is what drives one of the fundamental parts of the rocket engine called the turbo pumps. We'll talk a lot more about what the rockets do, how they work, what the different parts of them are. But I think this, I mean, this is about as real as real gets, right? We're doing it. We're building the engines and we think that this is going to be one of the critical pieces of technology that's going to let us get to orbit relatively quickly, so.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Why, sorry.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  No, go ahead.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Why have you decided to not only transition to data centers, which we'll get into later, but I'm curious, why are you building the rockets themselves to deliver the data centers to space? Why have you decided to do that?

• 11:49Speaker 03

  Great question. And I think that there, there's a few aspects to this, but I think fundamentally is a lack of commercial access to orbit right now, right? We, we know that there's one major company that controls the majority of access to space. And they've said publicly that they're going to be pretty focused on their own missions to orbit. We want to build a company that builds an independent data center in space, an energy grid in space. And to do this, because the energy industry and all these industries are so commoditized, the economics really matter and controlling the economics really matter. And so this is like one of the critical parts of this. And we want to do a lot of it.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  We want to build a lot of data centers in space because I think that's what the problem calls for. But rather than actually talking about a little bit, why don't we show people what that means?

• 13:24Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, let's talk about why. Like, why on earth are we talking about building data centers in orbit? Like, like, why on earth is this even remotely a good idea or worth talking about? Well, there's a bunch of reasons why. And I, I hope that by the end of the day to day, most people in this audience would agree with my viewpoint that it's actually a pretty good idea to do.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, a lot of, I just did an interview with Aaron Brockovich, who is a lot of Americans, I think a lot of people in the world are really concerned with the amount of energy that the data centers are consuming. They're concerned about the water supply. There hasn't been a lot of talk about putting these things in space. I think, I mean, I think it's a, it's a big problem you're tackling here.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. There's a few advantages of doing this stuff in space and you hit on a couple of them. And I'll just kind of go over this quickly so people know what we're talking about. What you're looking at here on the screen, little orange lines represent where the satellites would be in orbit. And you can see the way that the satellites are positioned, they're illuminated by the sun nearly continuously. So we put our satellites in these, these polar orbits. They're called sun synchronous orbits. Some people call them the terminator orbit, which I think is pretty cool. But in these orbits, your satellites are illuminated nearly continuously. And so what we're talking about doing here is taking what was already

• 15:00Speaker 03

  one of the cheapest forms of energy production, which is traditional solar, and putting it in an environment where it produces even more power per unit solar panel. So there's clearly something there that if we can harness it in the right way, is a driver of much more energy and ideally much more economically. So that's the first one. The second one is, as we look at data center build outs, it's fundamentally a real estate problem. It's, it's real estate development. It's procuring the natural resources to power the data centers, whether it's energy, water, land use rights.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  We are not using anybody's land in outer space, in case anybody like didn't get that part of this. And the last part about this is, is we, this, this is, I mean, again, should not be a huge surprise to anybody, but there's not literal power plugs coming down from the satellite into the power grid in your local neighborhood. This has no effect on your power grid. And so the idea here is, is that we as a country, I think, can have our cake and eat it too, right? We can both lead and frontier AI and not have, you know, these negative effects on American houses that I think is pretty universal in 2026.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it seems a lot of strain is going to come off the power grid. I mean, I think the power grid is something anybody who's educated on it is concerned about it.

• 16:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  And so, I mean, is, is one of these satellites going to be able to produce enough energy with just solar to, to power these? What's inside of the satellite, the data center?

• 16:53Speaker 03

  It's a great question and we're going to talk about how we get it to the size that matters. Let's actually go there now. So earlier this year, we announced to the world that we're building a constellation of these things in outer space. So it's 20,000 satellites. Each one produces about a megawatt of peak power. It's a constellation in orbit that produces about 20 gigawatts of power. It's a lot of power.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  For the audience that doesn't know what 20 gigawatts of power is, could you, can you give me a comparison of how much power that actually is?

• 17:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think we can do that.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  This is what data centers use.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  What am I looking at here? What is this graph?

• 17:53Speaker 03

  So what we're looking at here is power drawn gigawatts by data centers per year. And you can see here, it's exploding, right? The amount of energy that data centers are going to use. I mean, in 28 and 29, it's, I mean, you can look at the numbers of how much power data centers are using even in 2023. And the effects that it's having on people's water bills, people's electric bills. I know you've had a lot of firsthand experience with this stuff and talked to people that have lived with it. It's real and we see it in American politics. Data centers are pretty unpopular. But they don't have to be because we can build them in outer space.

• 18:38Speaker 03

  So this is roughly the scale of what we're contemplating with our constellation build. It's building a power grid in orbit that generates the same amount of power that all data centers in the US used just three years ago.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Wow. How are you going to cool these things? I mean, a lot of people, a lot of people are concerned about the water. The data centers pollute the water, they use all the water, worried about the depletion of our aquifers. I mean, it's, it's a massive concern.

• 19:14Speaker 03

  Luckily, water's not very good at cooling stuff in space. And so there, we'll, we'll talk a little bit more about how we keep these things cool in space. The physics of it are pretty interesting. It, it involves actually using the coldness of outer space and the temperature differential to emit heat in outer space. So just a little reminder, the way that we all on earth experience heat transfer totally different than in outer space, right? On earth, you experience heat transfer through conduction, meaning heat transfer through convection, fans blowing, and through radiative,

• 19:59Speaker 03

  like in the case of something getting so hot that it glows. In space, there's no air and you're kind of not really touching very much. And so that radiative heat transfer is your main method of dissipating heat from the system. And it's not this, like, it's kind of interesting because when people talk about data centers in space, this concept of how do you dissipate the heat that they generate is front and center. But when you talk to people that actually work in the space industry, it's like every single spacecraft has a thermal budget. Like, you can't put stuff in space and not think about how it dissipates heat for this very reason. And so we can get to a little bit more of that in a little bit.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  Let's talk a little bit more about how big this thing is.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  I think you know a little bit about this state.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  That would be my state.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  So we're contemplating building a power grid in space that's about the size of the power grid of Tennessee.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  20.6 gigawatts.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  And when you look at numbers this big, I think it should become pretty clear that this amount of energy is just not available on Earth. Like, we would have to fundamentally rethink the way the entire electrical grid works. And there's definitely people out there that are doing it. But as we get further along in this, we'll talk about why we think that not only does this solve the sort of macro of the problem, but it also makes it fundamentally more economical.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  So...

• 21:49Speaker 03

  We believe that space is inevitable.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  It's a natural place for collecting electricity. There's an abundance of space to do it in. The method of heat transfer is actually well-established.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  And then the real challenge becomes how you do it.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  And what exactly you're doing to make this happen. So... You guys want to see what our satellites look like?

• 22:19Speaker 02

  I would love to see what they look like.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  So there's 20,000 of these things that are going to go into space. Each one is pretty big.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  20,000?

• 23:24Speaker 03

  Introducing today for the very first time, the big iron.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  It's a fundamentally novel approach to rocketry in the modern era, in our opinion. Because rather than using the satellite, the rocket as a cargo vehicle to taking a payload to space, our approach is fundamentally different. The cargo vehicle is the payload in space. And we'll explain exactly why we did it this way and why it really matters.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  So the cargo payload is actually going to transform into the satellite that collects the power?

• 24:12Speaker 03

  So the idea is, is that you have the two-stage rocket, where the upper stage of the rocket itself transforms into the satellite. And this is to differentiate from other space companies that will pack the top of a rocket with a stack of satellites. Imperial-class satellites.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  Whereas what we're doing is actually using the whole vehicle as the satellite. And so it's a little hard to tell from this, so let's kind of show you a little bit about what is going into one of these things.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  So there's the big iron.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  So you can see here, it gets to space. This is the whole upper stage of the rocket. We deploy out the solar panels. And then the shell of the rocket, the fairing, folds out and becomes the method of heat transfer.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  It's pretty big.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  How big is it?

• 25:26Speaker 03

  It's bigger than a football field. It's 15,000 kilograms, roughly.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  It produces enough power to power about 800 homes. Like, it's a big old thing. And when we talk about power in the data center world, I think sometimes we lose sight of just how much power we're actually talking about here. This is a mega watt of power. It's like a pretty significant amount of power. We generate it with pretty traditional solar panels.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  Each one of our big irons additionally has six laser links on it to be able to transmit data to neighboring big irons or to transmit data down. We're targeting very high bandwidth laser links. Our team has been working on laser and optic development for the better part of two and a half years now. And the big relevant bit here is the amount of compute that we're able to put into the satellite. So each one of these things, we're budgeting about five racks of, for example, Nvidia, NVL 72 racks, per spacecraft.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  But it's kind of hard to tell how big this is. So maybe this will help.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  The American football field.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, and a big iron. Which is obviously why we need a big space to build the big iron. But let's just kind of articulate what we're doing here. In kind of the simplest terms, right? If you look at what our approach is, it's building a rocket that is just big enough to build, to put this payload into space. And this basic approach is driven by the idea that when you're talking about compute, more interconnectivity is inherently better than less, right? And so rather than building a vehicle that can take many different satellites to space, that could do AI compute, you'd actually rather have one big one.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  You'd actually rather have one big iron.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  Oh, good.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  But as we all know, Cowboy Space is not the only space company in the world.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  There's another company out there that's also building these.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  And when we take a look at that architecture from the Empire, you see the Imperial-class satellites.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  They're just way smaller than ours.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Those are smaller than yours.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  Tiny. Each one of them packs about one rack. Ours packs five. And so whether you're taking a starship or a star destroyer to orbit, we think big iron actually delivers more interconnected compute per satellite than what the Empire's working on.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  And if you kind of think about what this thing is, and we'll talk more about how this thing works and what it does,

• 28:59Speaker 03

  this is not the... Like, the performance of the whole vehicle and the way that we get it to space is oriented around speed to market.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  So, probably talk about that next, right?

• 29:12Speaker 02

  How are you going to get something that big into space?

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, it's got some big specs.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  So a little bit on the rocket architecture.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  It's about 86 meters tall, 4.7 meter diameter. We're sort of pushing the boundaries of what's road transportable.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  That's kind of how we selected it. We'll talk a little bit more about our engine architecture in a minute. It's called Clydesdale. The booster stage has nine engines on it. The upper stage has a single Clydesdale engine on it.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  From a rocket architecture perspective, we're going to where we think the results, where kind of the end goal is. And so from that perspective, we're starting out with liquid oxygen and liquid methane as the propellant, stainless steel rocket.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  And it's sized to take, as we talked earlier, about 15 metric tons durable. So it's, you can kind of think of it as

• 30:24Speaker 03

  sort of pushing the boundaries of what would be a road transportable rocket. And as we will get further along into this, we'll talk about the logistics of bringing these things to life. But if we started out the discussion by articulating what the problem to solve is, which is that we have to put up a ton of compute and we have to power it in a somewhat novel way, if that's the why,

• 30:50Speaker 03

  like, this is how you do it.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  A little bit more on the engine.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  And this is the brainchild of Warren, who, again, is sitting right there.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  There we go.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  There she is, Clyde's engine. That's what you saw us testing, at least a part of, earlier in the video. And this is a gas generator cycle engine. This is not a racehorse. It's meant to be reliable and fast to build. Okay? There's definitely more performance in this engine. We can solve that problem at a later point in time. The goal with this program is to bring this capability online as quickly as possible. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. But each engine produces about 300,000 pounds of thrust, which is kind of difficult to even

• 31:59Speaker 03

  wrap your head around.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  How close are you to this? I mean, this is what we saw. This was one of the first videos we watched.

• 32:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  And then being at your facility today, talking to Warren, I mean, from hiring him to getting that, was that the first test?

• 32:20Speaker 03

  We did some testing a little bit before that this week, but I think that's in turn as the first test.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  And that was today?

• 32:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  And the next test is tomorrow morning?

• 32:32Speaker 03

  At 7:00 AM, right?

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. How are you moving that fast?

• 32:38Speaker 03

  We are very motivated. We really, really care about making this happen. And you just can't fake that, you know? Like, the most interesting things go to the people in my thought are the most motivated, in my experience. But rather than waxing poetic, let's talk about rocket engines. Yeah, so this one is, I mean, these things are crazy how powerful they are. It's like, kind of difficult to wrap your head around it. And I asked the team to kind of try to articulate some way to explain what this thing does. And I think the best they came up with is, one of these little engines here has enough thrust to hurl 50 F-150s to orbit.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, we were talking, we were having this whole conversation about, you know, it's like, well, we're brainstorming all the different stuff we can do to test the engines, test the vehicles, and there was a discussion at some point. By the way, there's very opinionated people at this company, and if you have an idea about something, there will almost certainly be somebody in the corner being like, terrible idea, never do it. But this terrible idea was doing the hopping, like, building a small rocket and doing little hops and staying under a certain height limit. And the point I was told was that these engines are so powerful, and you're just like, straight to orbit. So it'd be a different engine. But that being said, this is the engine that's, the single architecture that actually works

• 34:08Speaker 03

  for both the upper and lower stage of the rocket. And so we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. What I want to come back to here, and I think the most important thing about all of this, is how do you make this economical? Meaning, we could do all of these things. Sure, we could build data centers in space, but if it's wildly expensive, it's a little economic utility. And so the question that I've had from the beginning of starting this company is, what is the path to cost-competitive economics? Like, how do you get the cost of producing the output service, in this case, a GPU hour, to be on cost parity with what it costs to build a terrestrial?

• 34:53Speaker 03

  And if you really think about it, this is fundamentally an apples-to-orange comparison, right? Because on the one hand, if you want to power a GPU on the ground, you need a building, you need a power plug, you need some cooling, and you need to, like, do real estate stuff, right? In the case of powering that thing in orbit, you're talking about putting methane in an engine and, like, building a structure and, like, leaving it up there for a decade or five years or whatever. All this to say, the physics of how you produce the same thing are very different, but that does not, that has not prevented us from asking the question and really answering, what does it cost and how low can we go?

• 35:38Speaker 03

  And going real low means being creative. And this is hopefully going to put a little bit more color on the idea earlier of the entire vehicle, the entire rocket is the data center. Why would we do that? Like, why, what's the point of that? Well, let me show you. It's so that we have parts on our rocket that do two jobs, so that we don't need two parts. And I think this is going to be pretty cool. So I want you to think about a rocket in two forms. One, on the way to space, and two, when it's already in space. So on the left side, you'll see pictures of different parts of the rocket on ascent, when it's a rocket.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  And the second one will show you what that looks like when it's in orbit and it's a satellite. So, first things first. The outer shell of the rocket, the nose cone, the aerodynamic shell of the rocket, has a specific purpose on ascent. It's for aerodynamics, right? In our design, when we get to orbit, the actual fairing folds out, and it starts working as a radiator. And so that extra metal, the metal that we would have taken up anyways as a part of the rocket itself, does a part of the satellite's job when it's there.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  And in turn, less stuff you have to take up. Similarly, propellant. Our design calls for a two-stage rocket that gets to a parking orbit, and then from there, it uses a different method of propulsion to get to its destination. In this case, it's electric propulsion, and the propulsion that, the propellant that we're using is ammonia. Now, the interesting thing about ammonia is that it also works well as a coolant. And so the same working fluid that we use as a propellant on ascent, when we're in orbit,

• 37:48Speaker 03

  we can use that same tank and the residual ammonia in it as a cooling loop for the GPUs. So imagine the tank of propellant that basically pushes this thing up to orbit, when it's there, will then take that same tank and start running it through the GPUs and extracting heat out from them and running it out to those big wings and bringing them all out to an even temperature so they can then dissipate the heat out.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Genius.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Double duty. Oh, this one is my favorite. So, cold gas thrusters. Rockets have cold gas thrusters. And unlike the Empire, we've actually found a practical use for cold gas thrusters that does not involve kickflips. The cold gas thrusters on our upper stage help orient the vehicle. When the thing is actually in orbit, we use the pressurized tanks to push the solar booms out.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  Didn't even need to do a kickflip, and it's actually useful. Now, we will be building a reusable rocket. So the booster gets reused, and we talked about this a moment ago. Because it's one engine architecture between the two stages of the rocket, when we get to an engine that is approaching end of life, we'll take that engine and we'll put it on the upper stage. Because that engine, when it's done with its orbit ascent, actually gets de-orbited along with the tank.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  So the last use an engine has is to take the second stage to orbit.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  So literally, every part of this rocket will be reused?

• 39:50Speaker 03

  We're trying. We're trying. And the reason this matters is because the more efficient we can get with what we take to space. So here's basically the thing. The rocket produces thrust, right? Every bit of thing that you're taking to space that makes money creates the equivalency between thrust and revenue, right? And so, said differently, what we want to do is we want to be spending our thrust on things that generate revenue, not on other stuff. So that means cutting out redundant parts because we're spending valuable thrust to get that stuff to orbit.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  So, for example, if every satellite needs a radiator, well, you could pack a rocket full of individual satellites that carries its own radiator, or you could reuse a part of the actual rocket as the radiator. Does that make sense?

• 40:49Speaker 02

  It does make sense.

• 40:50Speaker 03

  Are people following this? Does this make sense? Yeah. All right, cool. So, I have made the point a couple of times now that none of this matters unless it's economical. And that's what we're going to do.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  It's going to get cheaper every time.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. Again, these are estimates, but as we see the cost of terrestrial compute actually increasing, our estimates have orbital compute actually getting cheaper. By 2031, for those of you that know me, I will be pushing to make that happen a little bit sooner, but this is what our team put on the deck, so. But there's a little Easter egg buried here. We're going to try to launch this thing in 2028.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  You're going to launch this in 2028?

• 41:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  Our boy Warren's got his squirt cut out for him.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  Nervous laughter.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, so what does that mean? If we want to do this, we gotta, we gotta get to it. And I have left the team with this mantra many a time, which is that the best way to get good at building rockets is by building rockets.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  And so we're gonna start doing that. Our goal is to design a system that does a couple of things. Number one, gets to cost parity or cheaper with terrestrial economics. That was the Alpha and the Omega of the design prompt, right? It's like, how do we get there? What is the technical path to making that happen?

• 42:46Speaker 03

  Secondarily, was how do we down-select the technologies to ones that are mature enough that we feel confident we can bring them online in record time?

• 42:59Speaker 03

  And that's what we're talking about doing here. That involves getting to a hot fire of the whole engine sometime in the middle of next year.

• 43:12Speaker 03

  Getting something close to a booster, testing

• 43:17Speaker 03

  between now and then as well. And then, before the end of 2028, our target is a first flight. Now, a lot of things have to go right for that to happen, and it's not a guarantee. But this is the kind of ambitious goal that I think is like a, is like a truth serum. It's like, if you actually want to do this, then how do you do it, right? Cut out all the noise. Like, what is the bare minimum path? What is the path that actually captures the outcome that you want without all the other stuff?

• 43:52Speaker 03

  And I think it's ambitious, but if it wasn't ambitious, I wouldn't be an entrepreneur. So, let's show you a little bit more.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  Giddy up.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Giddy up.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  So, next part of this, we're gonna talk about how we do this, right? Start out talking about why we should do it. Big Iron is what we're doing, and this is, this is the how.

• 44:59Speaker 03

  And a big part of the how is actually the who. It's these folks. So I'd actually like to welcome

• 45:06Speaker 03

  all of our team members that are here to actually stand up.

• 45:10Speaker 03

  Give them a round of applause.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  Extra special shout out to my homie Joe. This company would not have happened without him.

• 45:44Speaker 03

  Although he didn't wear a bolo hat, a bolo hat, a bolo tie or a cowboy hat today. Lawyer's gonna lawyer. Lawyer's gonna lawyer.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  One of the best parts of doing something like this is working with a group of people that, that wants to believe that they can do things that other people think are just freaking crazy. And watching those people find it in themselves to do it is a magical thing. So who are these people? So talked about Joe.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  Spent a career in law. Was most recently at Skadden Arps for 16 years, is that right? We've got Chithra, who's our CFO. She was at Varda more recently and Amazon, working on data centers for a long time. Where is Chithra?

• 46:34Speaker 03

  There she is. Warren, although I think his head's big enough right now, we don't need to give him any more love.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  No, it's, it really can't be big enough. We've got Reggie, Mr. Laser's over here.

• 46:47Speaker 03

  We've got Ross, somewhere in the back.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  Tyler.

• 46:54Speaker 03

  Where's that Tyler hat? There he is, there's that cowboy hat. Tyler and David are, are the two, are the two folks that joined us at the beginning of this year, and were pretty instrumental for putting this plan together. My dear, dear friend, Tom Linford. See you back there, big guy.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  John Sarkis.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  And Andrew Armola, who is not here. And I actually asked to put a cowboy hat on his head because he's not here. Andrew is actually one of my oldest friends and was my classmate at Stanford. Once upon a time,

• 47:33Speaker 03

  three of us were working on a little company together that would go on to be a slightly bigger company called Robinhood. And that original, that original crew of three people that worked on the company before all this stuff was me, Mr. Andrew Armola, and a guy named Vlad.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 47:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  And 2027 is the year of Goblin Mode.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  This is our facility in Kent, Washington. It doesn't look quite this nice right now. This is more future aspirational state. The rocket's not there yet. But look, we're gonna, we've got 260,000 square feet there. The point of this facility is this is our first production shop. And what we're gonna do here is we're going to live, breathe, and eat the pain of making one of these things on a day-to-day basis. So it's, next year is a full-on, live with the pain. Figure out all the things that you don't know, that you wouldn't have known unless you just did the thing.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  It's, yeah, Goblin Mode.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  What's it gonna look like to get this, what you're building in there in space?

• 48:50Speaker 03

  It's gonna involve building a lot of tents in the parking lot. Yeah. So, we can, we can talk a little bit more about that in a second. But first, we, we've talked about kind of how we get to that first launch. This, this facility is gonna be where that happens. But I also want to give a view towards how we get to that 20,000 constellation size. Because fundamentally, like the logistics and the operations of how we do it, these are still a couple of years out from us actioning them. But we're at the point now where we're starting to design them and think through what that would be. And so we wanted to share some of that with you guys.

• 49:35Speaker 03

  So, Mast Orbit.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  You can kind of summarize what our approach to building rocketry here is, is that rather than building one gigantic rocket, we actually think it's more economical to build a slightly smaller rocket and make more of them. And launch those. And so, our design for our launch facility, which we call the Trailhead, is rapid deployment of multiple rockets at a time. One of the things that we talked about in the beginning was the fact that we're putting our satellites in this like Terminator orbit, right? Well, the thing about it is, is it's the same orbit every time.

• 50:21Speaker 03

  And so you're launching rockets in the same trajectory, meaning that every time you're putting a data center satellite in space, your booster's landing basically the same spot. Right? And so you design the launch operations around this. So rather than having a single launch mount per launch facility, we contemplate having four that are active at a time. And you launch rockets two minutes apart when you see a clear windowing, clear window opening to get stuff to space.

• 51:00Speaker 03

  And as we said before, when we get to space,

• 51:05Speaker 03

  the booster comes right back and we get to reuse it. The goal with this approach is speed and economics. Those are kind of the two through lines of this.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  And what we hope to achieve with each Trailhead

• 51:24Speaker 03

  is

• 51:30Speaker 03

  producing about 660 megawatts of compute per year per site.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  Initial cost is each one of these sites can be stood up relatively inexpensively. We think we can stand up the production site and the launch pads for about a billion dollars per facility. You'll have five pads, or sorry, five launch mounts on the launch complex. Four will be active at a time while we refurbish one of them.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  And the idea is rinse and repeat.

• 52:06Speaker 03

  Like, you can produce these things all around, at least the coastal US, other spots abroad as well.

• 52:20Speaker 03

  And I think there's one thing that's very important here, kind of in the big scheme of things, which is where we started this conversation out, which is the idea of commercialization of outer space. I don't want to live in a world where it's entirely driven by government activities. We also don't want to live in a world where it's driven entirely by one or two companies. We need access to orbit, and we need access to orbit for broad commercial activity. The bold, ambitious vision for the world we want to live in is that humanity has meaningful applications for outer space. And it's not tourism, it's not just looking down at the earth, but that there's reasons that people

• 53:05Speaker 03

  are building this infrastructure, in the most American of senses, in pursuit of their own self-betterment, for the fruits of their own labor. We just don't have that in space right now. Like, you can't do that and make a living in the way that we see the opportunity. And, again, this is kind of like zooming out a little bit and talking about what we want to actually have happen here. But even in the context of developing the trailheads, right, I think this is an interesting point that I wanted to just articulate towards the end of this, which is that if you think about the future of the space industry as being

• 53:48Speaker 03

  one that's heavily commercial, you start looking at launch complexes a lot more like you look at airports. And there's an entire industry there that I think is going to exist in the years to come, free markets and capitalism of financial services providing the capital to build, you know, these pieces of American infrastructure, launch complexes, right? And when we look out into the future, space should be a place about economic opportunity, not for just the government, not for just one company, but for humanity as a whole. And to do that, we need more people going to space, and we need more people that have

• 54:31Speaker 03

  figured out how to make money in space. And at the end of the day, that's what we care about. So...

• 54:44Speaker 03

  Let's wrap this up.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  That's incredible. I'm curious, you know, I mean, like I said, we met for the first time about a year and a half ago, and it was power plants in space. Now it's data spinners in space, plus delivering the payload. What do you find is the most challenging part right now?

• 56:55Speaker 02

  Is it satellite communication? Is it the rockets?

• 57:00Speaker 03

  The hardest part about this is building something that works at scale. Figuring out how you marshal the resources, how you stair-step the deployment of resources. Because we're, you know, we're still a startup, which means that we have to be very judicious about what the right proof points are, right? How do we get to mature, how do we mature the right technologies at the right time, and that actually show the world the progress that's behind what we're doing? I don't know if that's a great answer to it, but it's just the amount of complexity and different moving parts of the business, the different

• 57:40Speaker 03

  timelines that pieces of technology are finished on, kind of keeping a variety of different things moving simultaneously. I mean, we are a data center company, we're a rocket company, we're a lasers and optics company, we're a photovoltaics company, and with the amount of capital that we're going to end up deploying doing this, we're like a financial company as well. So it...

• 58:02Speaker 02

  And a power company.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  And also a power company. And it sounds complicated when you say it like that.

• 58:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:14Speaker 03

  But the way that I think about it is actually, it's just going to take a long time to put all the pieces together. Like, you can have a vision for something, and if you can kind of imagine how you put it all together in a year, it's not that big of an idea. Like, usually the big idea is you're like, holy shit, how do any of these pieces ever fit together? And it's kind of the magic in doing that. But, there's a big but. I told you guys I'd have a surprise for you.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  And there is one.

• 59:16Speaker 03

  Introducing the Big Iron Express. We're going to fly third-party payloads to space. It's a beautiful rocket. It's a big rocket. It can take big and beautiful payloads to space. It's about 18 tons to low earth orbit. And we encourage anybody interested in this capability to go to cowboyspace.com and sign up. We're going to be offering access to orbit at a time when it's sorely missing. And we think it's actually critical to the

• 59:55Speaker 03

  success of our business. It's also critical to the core thesis behind this, which is commercial and economic abundance in outer space. That doesn't happen if one company does this.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  So you're a logistics company as well?

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, probably. Yeah.

• 1:00:23Speaker 03

  And that's all she wrote. Thank you so much.

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  That was pretty good on time, too.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.