The Ledger, every show

“I think no question within 10 years, most compute will be putting in space, which, to give you a sense, is a lot of money, like trillions, and will be bigger than any of the other space businesses today, comms, earth imaging, this is why we're getting into thi…”

“On the current trajectory with Starship in particular, I would expect it, the launch costs come down there in two to three years.”

“The rockets have, in fact, got cheaper. Just the last five or so years, they've gone down about fourfold, and mainly because of SpaceX. SpaceX, with its reusable rockets, has brought the price down”

“So we have very clear line of sight now on a growth path, you know, going just over 40% a year for the next five years we project. And that gets us to profitability in the next couple of years.”

“Typically before our mission, you could only get a new image of the Earth maybe once every month or sometimes every year, depending on the resolution you needed.”

“It's about 300 K, or just slightly less than that, two or 300 K.”

“Most NASA satellites average, average about a billion.”

“That is why we've launched all of the now 460 or something satellites that we've launched on 33 rockets for less than the cost of a typical satellite. A lot less, actually, still.”

“Rocket costs have come down about four or five X over the last 10 years, which has helped tremendously.”

“And the phones worked just fine in space, and we had amateur radio astronomers around the world get these little Yagi antennas, these little handheld antennas, to follow the satellite, the little pictures it had been taking with the Phone camera. And email the…”

“But now, the billions and billions of dollars that would be going on in the consumer electronics industry, like Apple and Samsung and Google and all these companies, was far outpacing what NASA could spend on the development of electronics.”

“We built a test one at Rainbow this community house in the garage. We added a camera system, then we added all the other systems, radios and so on to make it a working satellite. Leveraging consumer electronics, not exactly a phone like we'd use in phone sat, …”

“We did just over a hundred million in revenue last year, and that's a mature business at some level.”

“So we supply data to Google for their maps. They do huge numbers of requests to us.”

“Yeah, no, actually, but it wasn't just NASA people. We had Students who are at Stanford, people that worked at Apple, people that worked at Google, all these places, and that created a fervor of intellectual dizziness that was always fun for us. So it was a mi…”

“We had planned them to be six months apart so that we could take the results from the first one, and if something went wrong, iterate the satellite and try and fix that before the second one, except because you can't control the launch date, and they ended up …”