The Exchanges

Q really, really simple terms, like maybe like I'm a venture capitalist or something. Um, something like, uh, how do we communicate with the Hubble telescope? Is this like a big satellite dish, like what I saw in contact with Jodie Foster? Is that how we communicate with the Hubble, or is there a different network of ground stations? What, what, what was kind of the gold standard 1020 years ago?

A Yeah. Um, I have to just say like us ground nerds in space, we do not often get asked these questions. So thank you very much. Like the ground is just generally like the not sexy part of space. Um, so it's very fun. So yeah, I mean, what you're doing is, uh, you know, generally using RF to contact a satellite that is like hundreds of kilometers away. Um, you need to concentrate enough power to be able to do that. So that's why you see like the big parabolic dishes. It's concentrating power. Got it. Um, and so when you're, you know, further away, that requires more tower, more power. So actually, um, if you're, you know, in the Palo Alto area, you go by the, um, the Stanford dish is kind of a well-known one. I imagine like some folks, uh, if they're watching might know of that. Um, it's massive, uh, a giant dish that's used to make that contact. And so it's interesting because like the legacy of space, it's more exploratory. It's more research-based where like, Booking a Nintendo is kind of more like booking a telescope, you know, where it's like a, an individual piece of equipment where, um, you know, they're located at these different locations around the world. You book the time, you're kind of in control of how that functions and how it operates. Uh, but as the space industry has been scaling, um, it's not really a sustainable model to think of, like, as you're needing to co…

AI assessment note: “That's why you see like the big parabolic dishes. It's concentrating power.”

Q Uh, question. For now, I think there's an obvious opportunity to serve existing space companies. What kind of companies do you think, ah, are potentially enabled by your technology and network that, ah, may not have been smart to start five years ago if you didn't have, kind of, the resources of, of SpaceX?

A Yeah. Uh, there's a company that we were recently talking to that I get really excited about. Um, you know, in LA, we had the wildfires a couple of months ago and, uh, absolutely devastating. Um, you know, really difficult to figure out where to route resources with a really fast moving fire. Uh, if you're trying to get a sense of like the scale and, and the direction of that fire with a helis, uh, a helicopter, um, it's often like not safe or not even permitted to go into those regions because there's just so much debris. Um, and so satellites are a really interesting application where, um, if you're able to have, uh, enough revisit rate, which is what, you know, in the space industry call like being able to go over a region again, if you're like a low earth orbit satellite, where you basically just need to have like a bunch of satellites that pass over and take turns because it takes time to orbit the earth. Um, so having enough revisit rate to where you can actually like regularly track the movement of a fire is pretty revolutionary. You can, you could stop fires much more rapidly and be able to, um, detect the movement. Um, the challenge with that is if you don't have, um, your, your latency down low enough to, um, to be able to give the information, it's pretty much useless, right? Like if you deliver information like an hour later, then you can't, um, you can't deliver an…

AI assessment note: “having enough revisit rate to where you can actually like regularly track the movement”

Q wrong, but do you need to build equipment from scratch? Is this a project where you're going to be building, like, A, a gigafactory like what we've seen for the Starlink units at some point, or is it more about, um, assembling different components and then being really strategic about placing them and then building a network on top of that and really like the services side of the business?

A Great question. Something that our head of manufacturing Thomas thinks about a lot. Um, we're definitely going to be leveraging outsourcing in early days. We, we are a vertically integrated company. Like we, we design all of the different, uh, components. Um, we have those outsourced and then, um, you know, brought in. We're not, we're not, um, you know, like making our own circuit boards at this point in time. Um, there's certain things that are like more efficient, uh, efficient to insource versus outsource. Um, so largely, um, leveraging outsourcing. Um, initially I think, you know, we're really focusing on modular units and making our, our units designed for manufacturing. So, um, making sure that we can parallelize development, making sure that, um, we can have things ready to be integrated at like kind of the final hour is, is the thought process just to accelerate our manufacturing, uh, capability. And then gradually over time, when we figure out like what is actually cost efficient, um, and time efficient, we bring it in house entirely.

AI assessment note: “we're definitely going to be leveraging outsourcing in early days”

Q trajectory with Varda. He was talking about ZB Land at one point, then it was Pharma. Now there's some DoD mixed in there, some government contracting. It feels like a lot of these companies that are doing stuff in space or doing stuff in hard tech, it's dual use. Um, is there a government angle here at some point, or is that just something you're thinking about in the future?

A No, it's, it's very near term. It's very real term. Um, very real term. Um, very, very real. Yeah. Across a number of different applications. I mean, they're dealing with the same challenges, like if not even more so, um, where like they have aging assets that, um, are kind of infrequent. Like there's, you know, certain networks that just don't have a lot of assets and they're old and they're vulnerable to outages, whether it's like an intentional outage. You know, by somebody targeting that site or not. Um, and so there's been a lot of interest in how that they can leverage commercial to get, um, sites deployed quickly. Like for us in the conversations we're having, we're really emphasizing like we can deploy capability quickly, um, and we can serve up capability that's like quite scalable. So if one of those outages happens, you'll have that, that backup and that resiliency. Um, and so as you know, government use cases, Um, like so much of our world runs on space in a way that I think people don't really realize. And so, um, it was, you know, that's been a refrain that you're hearing more and more through government stakeholders where there's this concern on, you know, if anything goes down in space or, or through the ground connectivity, it has ripple effects through like a lot, a lot of our critical infrastructure. Um, and so for us to be able to, uh, you know, deploy capab…

AI assessment note: “No, it's, it's very near term. It's very real term.”

Q Yeah. People get stressed out when Slack's down for like five minutes and imagine having like, you know, this hundred million dollar, billion dollar device that you don't have contact with. What, what is, I'm curious, what does scale look like for Northwood? You know, how many different, you know, ground stations, Uh, you know, do you hope to kind of get to within the next, call it decade?

A Ooh, decade. That's a long horizon, but that's fun. Uh, we are looking at scale, both from like a network level and a site level. So when you think about like, why do you need to have a global network to begin with, with space? Like the reason why you need to have a global network is because satellites orbit the earth. And so maintaining contact with them, um, requires having, uh, you know, locations all over the earth to make sure that you can be in contact all the time. So think of it kind of like when you're using a cell phone and you're driving on the freeway and you're passing different cell towers. You need to maintain contact with cell towers in order to maintain connection. Same with space. Um, and so for us, there's like two verticals. One is coverage. So you want to have enough coverage. So basically like a cell tower, like you're always in contact no matter where you are. And then the, the other one is throughput. That's like density. And so kind of gold standard for this is SpaceX, where they have hundreds of ground stations to, um, not just have global coverage, but to be able to serve Millions of users in different regions. So when they're wanting to like service a region that has a lot of customers, they need to put a lot of ground stations in that region in order to support that much capacity. And so we want to be able to offer that to other folks so that they c…

AI assessment note: “we are looking at scale, both from like a network level and a site level.”

Q um, or is it on federal land? Like, how do you think about placing these? Do we need them to be equidistant across the United States and beyond? Uh, are there other countries? Are you placing them in allied countries? Like, how do you think about the, the coverage map? I want to see the Verizon map with all the different coverage points, right? How does that grow over time?

A Yeah, no, it's, it's real. Uh, we do that modeling in house. So, um, yeah, we, we think in terms of like the coverage mapping and Um, the metrics that we're prioritizing hitting for customers. Um, also shout out to Christian at Astronis who has his own amateur radios. Uh, we had a fun time talking about that. Um, yeah, but in terms of where you put sites, it's a great question. Basically comes down to three things, land, fiber, power. Um, so you just need to optimally be able to, um, make your sites, uh, you know, we, we prioritize making our sites. As, uh, generic as possible really so that like we have the most optionality possible. Um, we are also prioritizing like really high throughput backhaul. So, um, data centers honestly become like a good spot to, to put them at because they have the power in the backhaul, um, already, uh, set up. Um, and, you know, generally try to just make sure that the land is like easy to deploy. Uh, one advantage of the way that we're building our systems is we don't need to lay like a concrete pad, which can add Weeks to months to your, uh, timeframe, especially when you need to like do permitting and all that. So our goal is to make it so that, you know, the, uh, the tech bros of the world can just, you know, have one in their, in their backyard very, uh, easily deployed easily. Um, and yes, it is, it is a global effort that we're.

AI assessment note: “Basically comes down to three things, land, fiber, power.”