From Bahard where Innovation, money and power Collie in Silicon Vallet, NBN.
This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed loved Love.
Welcome to a special edition of Bloomberg Technology.
We are live from Rocket Lab in Long Beach.
Coming up this hour, we'll bring you conversations with some of the biggest names in.
The space and defense technology industry.
And I want to be honest with you, guys. We're here because we've been on the road in socaw but this is where the industry has happened. What's started with a single name has boomed into thousands of startups, many here in Southern California and in commercial space. This is how it started. SpaceX has become synonymous with commercial space. Elon Musk's company is a prolific launch provider, with around three hundred and eighty launches of the Falcon nine family
of reusable rockets to date. The competition is starting to catch up, whether abroad or at home in Southern California.
When you look at sort of the companies that are coming out of this defense tech movement, a lot of them have been trained at places like SpaceX, or they got their start there and then they're building new startups and deciding to build where there's a concentration of talent, which is in southern California.
Toam Mueller, one of the early founders at SpaceX, who actually brought rocket technology at Eli Musk because he likes to say, you can't really throw a rock and also going to know, I've hitting as SpaceX alum working on another company.
Others have a home in Socau. Take rocket Lab. It's an end to end space company providing launch services, which designs and manufactures small and medium class rockets. It's had eleven launch missions so far this year. Elsewhere, another launch competitor is United Launch Alliance, which is transitioning from its previous rockets to the next generation Vulcan family. The Pentagon has brought several Vulcan launches to fly before the end of this year, but delays have put pressure on the company.
It has launched two Vulcan rockets so far, neither has cracked reusability. Bezos's Blue Origin also has new Glen, a heavy lift orbital rocket, but it has yet to launch to space. Meanwhile, in Europe, delays and malfunctions left the continent unable to get to orbit. With its own rockets for quite some time. The Arian six rocket, operated by the European consortium Arianne Space, which lifted off early in July,
was Europe's first Arian rocket launch in a year. Arian Space launched the final mission of its smaller Vega rocket on September fourth. In the age of commercial space, space X is still the most reliable way to hitch a ride to Earth's orbit.
And talking of SpaceX, a California state commission voted against a request by the US military to approve more SpaceX launches now.
Commissioner is expressed.
Concern about why SpaceX was not applying for a permit itself, and some also voice concern over working conditions at SpaceX. Elil Musk's increasing role in US politics, as well a.
New story that came out early this morning. We're going to dig deep into SpaceX throughout the show, but right now we're going to talk about one of SpaceX's competitors, rocket Lab, which is a rocket company and much more. It's a launch provider and it's where we're at. We're in the Long Beach headquarters. Also a focus on a company that has a home in southern California and in New Zealand. The company's CFO, Adam Spice, is with us. Thank you very much for hosting us.
Thanks for that.
Let's start with the basics for the audience that might just be tuning in for the first time wondering where we are. Rocket Lab is an end to end space provider, space launch services, systems provider. Bring us up to speed on what that means.
Yeah, you know, we think that there's the space companies of the future are ones that aren't just a launch company or just a satellite company, or just an opera or satellites. It's really all about providing an end d service. So you're seeing here in Long Beach is really our headquarters. We make a lot of the rocket components here at
Rocket Engines, the avionics and so forth. So we have a pretty big footprint here in southern California, but we since expanded that and of course the company got started in New Zealand, but then expanded to the US and started to expand further throughout the United States, including locations in places like Denver and Albuquerque and Stennis, Mississippi, and Silfur Springs, Maryland, and of course a launch site in Wallaps Island. Virginia and a facility in Toronto, Canada as well.
So we've established ourselves a very broad footprint doing much more than just launch.
An hqu here in SOCO, which fits exactly what we're talking about. Two launch systems. What are they and what are the differences?
Right? So, the vehicle you see behind you is Electron, and Electron is the second most frequently launched vehicle in the United States. It's launched fifty three times. So we've got a very say significant lead in the small dedicated launch market, and we're developing a second vehicle, which is called Neutron, which will address the larger medium class launch market.
Go, we dig into the practicalities and how difficult space engineering is. Where are we with Neutron and what are some of the issues in the steps of getting it up and running.
Yeah, well we're quite a ways along the path of Neutron, you know. So we've been at it now for a little over three years. We announced the program when we became public in August of twenty twenty one. You know, it's amazing to see a rocket program come together. You know, I hadn't come from a space background. For joining the company about six and a half years ago, and just to see what it takes to pull together and pull
off a rocket development program is absolutely staggering. The complexity, you know, not just.
From just the naturally rocket science out of it, it.
Is literally rocket science. I'm grateful every day that there's people who have dedicated their lives to developing these complex systems that are absolutely amazing. So's it's a very you know, it's a very detailed, very arduous task to get there. And I think that's what's so exciting from a business perspective is the fact that if you can do it, you know, you're one of a few numbers of organizations
in the history we've actually pulled it off. And so it creates a very defensible position because again space is very, very hard, and you know, we have the you know, the I would say, the challenge of wake it up every morning and doing battle with physics, but also doing battle with some of the most fierce competitors on the plan,
including SpaceX. And so we look around our industry and we see bodies everywhere that we have to step over, and you know, it kind of makes you wake up every morning and kind of like, Okay, this is a serious business. We got to make sure that we make all the right decisions, be very efficient with our capital, and very very focused on execution.
I mean, you are the numbers guy.
Let's just talk about capital efficiency. You have to spend in extraordinary amount of money. You took this company public. You're having to answer to a whole host of retail investors and more increasing the institution investors.
What's a revenue run rate and where is the money coming from?
Yeah, we're very fortunate that we've been able to get now to a scale. So Q two we generated over one hundred million dollars in revenue, so we really kind of now cross that threshold of scalability. We've shown that a model can scale. I think it's very important that we've done it. Not just on launch, because launch represents about thirty percent of our revenues. Space systems actually represent seventy percent.
And just on that, when you say space systems is seventy percent of revenue, just in Layman's terms, what are you talking about.
So we sell a variety of solutions. So we sell subsystems that into the merchant market. So we sell things like you know, solar solutions for spacecraft. We sell radios and battery systems and composites and so forth. So we really are a very serious in materials merchant subsystem market. But then we also build full spacecraft solutions. So for example, we built full spacecraft for NASA, then the Action. In fact, we built a couple of spacecraft. They're gonna be orbiting
Mars and then not two distant. Y.
Yes, this is big news for you recently, very big because you originally you weren't on that list and now you are.
Well, that's actually from the marge sample return. Okay, sound forward sow return. Yeah, that's and you're right. We were not included in the first but we were ultimately added to that program. So that's very exciting. But when you look at all the different programs that were across again not just subsystems, but we're actually making full satellites for including the Defense Department and their Space Development Agency. We want a contract to be the prime contractor for over
five hundred million dollar contract. So it's actually the one thing that's most exciting for me is how quickly we've come from a very organic base to now building a very significant size revenue and getting again past that one hundred million dollar thresholder quarter.
And you talk about the electron behind us fifty three already put into space. How many launches are we looking at in terms of the next year, what sort of cadence you're trying to.
Live up to.
Well, you know, we've indicated fifteen to eighteen launches this year. We've watched eleven times so far, so we've got a big Q four coming up. And then when you look at the kind of the rate going to next year, we see growth off of that, and a lot of it's really not depending on how many rockets we can build. We can build a lot of rockets we could build. You know, we've kind of sized.
Ourselves three D printing a whole lot.
We're three D printing a lot of stuff here. We could build.
What is the limiting factor?
It's really the market at this point. It's really the market. We can build as many rockets as the market demands. But it's a new market, it's a nascent market, and I think, you know, it just takes time for these markets.
I want to get into this, the business of space, and just bear with me. Carry elon, musk, I'm bear with you. A lot has a big gap right over you a big sort of lead with SpaceX, and he talks about this idea that the business of sending payload to or pit tops out for them at three billion dollars. Now, that's a scale that you're not near yet, but it makes it seem like there's a cap, there's a ceiling on how much money you can ever make in this business. What do you make of that?
I think it depends on how you define this business, right, I think, yeah, even as we've seen the SpaceX, I don't think they stopped. They just launch. So launch is a very critical part of the ecosystem, but it's not the biggest piece of the ecosystem. So the applications and creating that ongoing revenue stream from applications and having a constation on orbit, that is really what people are shooting for as far as where the real scale for this
industry comes from. And that's exactly what we're oriented around.
We're all about being an end to end space company where we can design the spacecraft, we can build the spacecraft in a very vertically integrated way with our own subsystems, we can launch them on a variety of rockets, then we can operate those in orbit so it's a very very important thing to think about yourself as an end end player, because again, if you're a bespoke kind of one solution provider, it's probably not the path to survivability for.
Those institution investors sat watching and indeed retail investors who are excited about putting money into rocketing very excited. What tell us about how the market scale up? What is needed? You're saying you can get these, you can build these as quickly as a market wants. Well, what gets the market to the next iteration to the size that you want to be able to serve it?
That?
I think the most exciting thing about what's going on in this market right now is that, you know, you think about what typically drives the hockey stick growth kind of characteristic of an industry, and it's usually commercial. But I think we're in a really interesting period where we're actually seeing the hockey stick being derived building from commercial opportunities. So everyone seeing what SpaceX is doing with startlinks, that's
kind of old news to a certain extent. But then you see Amazon Kuiper, you see Teleside light Speed, you see the SDA constllation, So you're actually seeing a combination of government and commercial all presenting hockey stick opportunities. And that's really you're not just not a one bet kind of situation right now. There's lots of different hiers you can be your fired.
To, Adam. There's so much more to come, as you know in this hour. But before we let you go, a word for SpaceX. What they enabled your company to do, particularly here in California.
Well, I think you have to give them, you know, amazing credit for what they've accomplished. They really kind of are a I would say, kind of a an inspiration and aspirational target as well. Like we've seen, we've that we could be done right. I think that's the one thing is we wake up every morning understanding the challenge
that faces us, but we're not intimidated by it. Never that's one thing that this company does not ever get is intimidated by competition, whether it's SpaceX or anybody else. So we're up for the challenge. It's exciting and there's a tremendous amount of opportunity, and I think we're in a great position to exploit it.
You were up early for us. We give you great thanks for it, Adam. It's wonderful to have us here and you here with us. Adam Spice, CFO of Rocket Lab coming up, as Ed says, so much more to come. We're actually going to dig into what Ela Musque's also been up to. Tesla's Robotaxi revealed and the company debuts is first fully autonomous vehicle, but shares a lower because
let's investor skepticism. We're going to be speaking with a key investor who is there and getting the demos, Nazi Tangla of Lafetangla Investments.
This is breen big technology.
We expect to be in production with the cybercap which is really big, highly optimized for autonomous transport in probably well, I don't be a little optimist with the time frames, but.
In twenty twenty six.
A little optimistic with timeframes as ever. Tesla CEO Elon Musk and bailing rough production timeline should we call it about its new autonomous cyber cab shares a test. They're lower this morning, the announcement lower and it's because of cynicism, skepticism, right, a lack of detail.
We are down nine percent over the last two training days.
Nazi Tangler is a holder of this stock was there at the event of Laffa Tangler Investments, and you too have a little bit of element of more questions than answers right.
Now, and it's based on experience. I just want to say, you got in cyber Cab, go from there.
Yeah, well it's awesome.
I mean, you know, Elon said the future should look like the future, and it does look like the future.
We just don't know when the future is.
I mean there were no details except the site cab will cost you know, less than thirty grand, that you'll it'll cost twenty to thirty cents a mile, but if you add in regulations forty and that just felt a little bit like this to me because there was no substantive backup to that. And so if you were there to be wowed, it was it was filled with wow. I mean, Optimus stole the show for me. There were
you know, the Robovan it's super interesting. But when and we heard nothing about the ride sharing app.
We heard nothing about Can I just.
Jump in on that point, because so we've done a lot of reporting on this business model, and the piece of news that immediately jumps out is that cyber Cab is going to be available to buy and that adds another facet or dimension to the master plan. Do you understand the proprietary ride hailing app that Tesla will one day day offer us?
No, because we don't. We don't know what it's going to look like. I mean, he said a lot of things. There was a comment about Uber drivers are going to be the shepherds of the flow, But what does that mean. We're going to do away with parking lots because these cars are just going to keep going so you can get you know, lend your car back, and the parking lots are going to be replaced by parks.
It sounds sound like he was running for office.
You know, which might be a criticism of what's been happening at the moment, because look, you are an investor. We see the pop in the shares of Uber of Lift today because we thought there would.
Be more of a let's bring up let's bring up Uber and left because it.
Is now. It depends on when you got in.
But we just added Uber to our twelve best Ideas portfolio about two months ago. It was just lucky time timing because it was right before they announced their partnerships that that was the winner last night, Uber was the winner of the event, and I think enjoyed it very much.
That well, I mean because.
Now they were worried at the IPO that Tesla would replace them and this is proof positive pos Yeah, maybe a decade and so WHATLCK can happen between now and then? And I think that was the disappointment that we didn't hear anything about the model too. There was no specificity on things that investors care about.
Now.
The retail crowd that was there, you know, we're shouting out, we love you, Elon, and you know, it felt like a party.
What was it like being.
There for the first time at one of these events, surrounded by the retail Pretty cool.
I actually that was the most fun for me talking to retail investors why they own the stock, why they own the cars.
But these are devotees.
It felt like a concert, like a mosh pit of groupies right in front of the stage.
Yeah, Marguerite, who's running the show out the control room in New York, bring up some video of the cyber cab. I want to make a point here and ask questions and Nancy, just by looking at it, if you're going to do that and offer to sell it for thirty thousand US dollars. Why not just stick a steering wheel on it and some pedals and sell it for twenty five thousand dollars like a normal car.
I know.
And he even said, you know, there's no steering wheels and pedals, and we hope that goes well.
I mean it gets crossed it.
This is the van as well. So the Robovan again, you know, one of his skills is keeping investors looking to the horizon, right, Is that something you then redo your whole Tesla model on when you see something like that?
Yeah?
No, because when I mean, we haven't seen the model to you, we're supposed to see it first half of next year. This would have been a good time to kind of give investors a sense of what's going on. I think across the board institutional investors were disappointed, and we're seeing it in the stock price, but even in the reporting afterwards, and I expected stock to trade down
even though you know, optimist is super cool. I'm going to stay in the name as committed in the name as you all, yes, because we got in at one hundred, one hundred and eight when he was selling off in January of twenty twenty three, We've sold back some as it rose to two seventy and so forth. But I think you want to own it for the next three to five years. You may just not want to own it for the next one to two years.
Elon Musque is always late, but he does often get there in the end. Nancy Tanglo of Laffer and Tannglar Investments, who was there last night, thank you very much. AMD saw its biggest stock decline in more than a month after the company unveiled new artificial intelligence chips, but did not provide info on new customers or kind of financial performance in the near term. I spoke with CEO Lisa Sue and here's what she said about the company's latest AI accelerators.
This is an incredibly fast growing market. I mean, if you think about you know what we've done just over the last twelve months or so, We've seen three hundred demand increase from when we started the year too. In our most recent earnings we actually said we would be over four and a half billion dollars in this important AI accelerator market.
Okay, we caught up with Jared Isaacman, who is mission commander of Polaris Dawn, the first crew to test Starlink laser based communications in deep deep space. Looking ahead, ask him when he's going to fly on starship listen to this.
I leave that to the experts at SpaceX and Elon to kind of determine the timeline on it. We'll fly it as soon as it's ready. But right now, there's a lot we can do with Dragon, and that's why the first two playist missions were designed for Dragon.
Jared, what we.
Want to do with this is help our bloomleg Technology audience around the world understand what is really happening inside of SpaceX. Explain it, what it's like working with the engineers, and how important you feel this company is not just to an industry, but I suppose, as you put it, humankind's future outside of Earth's atmosphere.
I wanted an ask some question, right Look, SpaceX is an extraordinary organization. You know, since I've been sixteen, Since I was sixteen years old, I've been in business and have worked with literally like thousands of companies, you know, across a lot of verticals, including defense aerospace. I was the CEO of a defense aerospace company I started for you know, almost twelve years, and I've never seen an
organization like SpaceX. You know, there's a a lot of companies that have a mission and vision statement on their website that no one cares about. I can tell you there's fourteen thousand people who show up for work every day at SpaceX, and they believe that there is no greater impact they can make in the world than trying to make life multiplanetary, because the world is a more
interesting place when you can journey among the stars. All that aside, I do want to say that, like SpaceX isn't solving all of the world's problems clearly in even going to Mars, Like they may develop the optimal vehicle and to take us there and back, but there are still you know, like who knows how many potential challenges that will exist on that journey. They're making it a
self sustaining city and coming back. So I think so cool about SpaceX is they inspire so many other engineers, you know, scientists, researchers who start up different companies that follow SpaceX philosophies like it. It will take so many SpaceX like companies to make this to make the world a much better place. And they're just a great beacon that is like inspiring many others to do the same.
Jared Isaacman, Polaristorn mission commander, and who's talking about the ecosystem with which SpaceX goes on, And let's talk about that because a great example of SpaceX alums branching out on their.
Own is Interlagos.
It's a new VC firm actually started by former senior SpaceX leaders. It's raising five hundred and fifty million dollars for its first venture fund.
That was a lot of money.
It's been reported by tech Crunch citing regulatory filings and confidential decks and to prospective LP but it's a massive fund target to just spread across up to thirty two companies. Real capital needed for these sorts of startups.
And it's a funny timing on a big piece of news because that's why we're here in southern California. Elsegindo very nearby, and the irony is with everyone giving kudos to SpaceX. I think you caught up with Elsegindo's man, and what did he tell you? Because SpaceX has mixed feelings about this part of the world.
Might well be moving and he's concerned significantly about that. Let's just get his take actually and on the worry about SpaceX remaining committed to SOCA.
We're working on incentives to keep people here. SpaceX is, you know, has so much capital invested in Hapdorm started in El Segondo, then moved down to Hawthorn, So we'll do everything we can to keep the industry here. We're working with government officials at a DoD.
And look with five hundred and fifty million dollar VISI fund, you can see that that's going to keep talent wanting.
To come to this part of the world.
I'm supposed to live too.
True.
Welcome back to a very special edition of BlueBag Technology. We are here at Rocket Lab in Long Beach where we're taking such a deep dive into space and the defense tech industry more probably.
Yeah, and Anderill is one of the most prominent defense tech companies in Southern California in the United States, and it's quickly made a name for itself with how quickly it's managed to win contracts with the US government. Now, we caught up with Catherine Boyle, a bench capitalists at Andresen Horowitz to talk about exactly that. Listen to this.
Andrewl is a perfect example of a company where you know, I think ANDREL always points to how long it took SpaceX and how long it took Pallanteer to get those first contracts from the US government. It took them a very long time. And of course Andreil did this at a historic pace, you know, founded in twenty seventeen, by
twenty twenty they had their first program of record. And I think if we take a step back, it actually showed us that the government has woken up to the need to work with startups, which was not the case and the you know, the early twenty tens, it was not the case when sort of the Defense one point zero generation was really building. So ANDREL has shown that
you can move much faster. And the thing that I think is really interesting is that the success of ANDROL has begetting success for startups that were founded in the last few years. You know, the program that we always loved to point to is Replicator, which was, you know, a program focused on working with startups and we're and focusing on production that the Defense Department needs. That has become a core initiative out of the DoD under this administration.
Previous administrations really focused on the Defense Innovation Unit, where it was building, you know, building ties to Silicon Valley, understanding that the best engineers in the world are in Silicon Valley and that the d D has to work with them. So I think that you know, the we always look at the private industry side, which is that there's now a talent density, there's momentum, there's capital that has really met this movement so that we can build startups.
But that would mean nothing if there wasn't an buyer. And the d D has become an extraordinarily eager buyer, supportive of working with startups, understanding that you know, they need to be a lot more thoughtful about procurement. They need to make it possible for earlier stage companies to
be able to sell into the Department of Defense. And that also these large legacy primes which have had no competition for you know, in many cases fifty to one hundred years, now have to start working with startups and they have to integrate the technologies that these startups built if they want to be the chosen supplier to the DoD. So we have seen this extraordinary change in how the DoD views startups as a possible supplier for the for the requirements that.
They have.
Great conversation with Katherin Boyle, General Ponnard, Andresen Horrowitz. Of course Andreil's work, Well, it's not just Hay on Earth at the moment, is it that we're going to go straight to what they're now doing in space? Senior Vice president Cokosa Romanian is with us. You are in charge of the space side as well as a software side.
I mean your.
Focus at the business is broad. What impact do you want to make in space? I know you've got a new deal to announce.
Yeah, yeah, well, Ed, Carolyn, thank you so much for having me. It's so exciting to be here at Rocket Lab and you can just kind of feel the energy not just at ANDROL, but in the whole space ecosystem rit large. So I mean for us, our focus in space is really around space domain awareness and ultimately ensuring that as space gets more contested and congested with so many assets going up there, that we can defend and
protect US assets in space. And you know, the space domain is so critical to everything, not just ANDROL does, but the US government does right from things like GPS positioning, how our soldiers know where they are, to communications, it's never been more important to protect that space domain in order for ANDROL to do what it needs to do on the ground and to support our US war fighters and allies.
So the case study through the news that is out just in the last hour is a deal with Impulse. What are the specifics of that, and based on what you've just seen, explain to us what does a deal like that allow How does a deal like that allow you to do it?
Yeah, I mean, we're so thrilled to be working with Impulse, with Tomuller and his team out there and the innovations that they're bringing to the space domain.
What we got really excited.
About with Impulse is their propulsion technology and the ability to access higher orbits, geo and neo orbits.
And if people just tuning him right now, the basics of their technologies, we're talking about a small SATs essentially, but they can move them at those different orbits, they.
Can move them for long durations. They're building what's called an orbit transfer vehicle, so they can move from one orbit to another orbit at a price point and a
resiliency that wasn't available before. And the reason that's so important at is because the US's most critical systems are located in those higher orbits, and those orbits are extraordinarily expensive to reach, and so with our partnership with Impulse, we'll be able to put assets in those orbits to do the kinds of missions that we've been talking about. And when it comes to ANDROL, we are a mission
stems provider, right. We provide end to end systems that answer a DoD mission, whether that's observing things in space or doing other things, and so we take we are really really excited to work with partners like Impulse to bring together their systems and ultimately missionize them for a DoD use case.
You articulated the threat there, the idea that these assets need protecting overseeing how quickly are we seeing other countries doing what ANDREL is doing. How quickly we understanding that their assets are being protected or indeed that they're going to be able to target us.
Yeah, I mean, we've heard the US government say openly space is now becoming a war fighting domain, just like
every other domain. Protecting space is critically important. The stat I like to say is over the next ten years, our adversaries will launch more systems into space than the last seventy years combined, right, And so whether that's malicious or not, there is just so much going on up there that we need to have eyes and ears on everything that's going on and ensuring that our bill to conduct operations remains undeterred.
And the pivot the move into space. For you, what's that meant? More talent, more investment. What does ANDROL need to do to get to the size of scale you want to be at?
Yeah?
Look, I mean if you think about what we've done in every domain, right, So if you think about the air domain with our CCA aircraft or Loyal Wingman, to the underwater domain with the submarine that's about the size of.
A school bus.
There's one through line that connects all of it, which is that fundamentally, what ANDROL does is we go from traditional systems which are high cost, low volume, and we invert that to low cost, high volume systems, right. And the way to do that is through two things. One is a focus on software and autonomy. If you want to be high volume, you've got to get away from one operator commanding one system to one operator being able
to control many systems. And two is a focus on manufacturing and be able to manufacture at scale and fundamentally we see that same need in space. If you think about the challenges that we were just talking about, we need to move to more autonomous systems, more high volumes that are able to do these kinds of missions as space gets more and more contested.
Throughout the year, we've covered Andreil, Tray Stevens, the executive chairman, has come on the show, Palmer Lucky has come on the show, one of the co founders, and it's been in that context that portfolio of products. But also I want to come back to space. I think it's probably a smaller or newer area of the business. Is that fair? That's definitely, and so let's look forward. How are you growing it? You know, Caroline talk's about talent. From a
product perspective, will you offer many things? Do you feel that it's an area of growth for and Reil.
We see it as an area of tremendous growth for Androl and it's really the demand signal that we're seeing from our customers and a big part of that actually is the partnerships. The analogy I use is we want to bring a team of super friends to this market. All these companies in this area, many startups, that you're going to talk to today. Where we're really special as our ability to understand the government mission and put together a solution.
And with the government, the demand signal we're seeing loud and clear. Captain Boyle talked about it earlier, is wanting to work with many startups, each of which provide a unique capability, but they need to be put together to solve one of those problems. So if you go back to the analogy of the super Friends, every super friend does a unique thing, they have a superpower, but you put them all together and they're unstoppable. And that's what
I think Androl wants to do. We want to bring together a team of companies to go and provide optionality to the government to say you don't just have to answer these missions.
In a traditional way.
We can bring a non traditional team to answer these missions at a higher quality, a lower price point, all of those things.
What's it about Southern California and the space industry. It's crazy here.
I mean it's just so exciting.
You walk into Rocket Lab and you walk past mission control, and I mean just the talent density here that is amazing. And I think that again, we're all partners in this. When it comes to defense, there's only one team that's Team America, and so it's really exciting to be able to work with all of these companies here and you kind of run into the same folks over and over again.
So we're super thrilled about that.
Goes Manian and Aerial Senior vice president here with us at Rocket Lab. Thank you very much for your time. There is so much more to come up on this special show. One company's hope to revolutionize some other key space architecture which honestly has not been touched since the nineteen sixties. We're going to speak with Northward CEO Bridget Mendler. That's coming up next. This is Bloomberg Technology.
Northwood.
It's a space startup that wants to build ground stations the talk to satellites.
Look, you know the.
Big circular dish antennae, but ones that can actually be scaled and scaled, fast, built and installed in.
Just a couple of days.
You might recognize Bridget Mendler of course from her acting roles. Now Northward CEO, Bridget, welcome to bring bag technology and tell us about the sheer infrastructure and technological feat you are trying to take on here.
Yeah, yeah, thank you guys very much for having me really excited to be here.
Yeah.
I think you know, for space companies, you're running a business that is completely reliant upon connectivity, but connectivity with space is stuck in a different era where you anticipate outages or you find very expensive and cumbersome solutions for outages in a way that would be completely unacceptable in
other industrialized sectors. We were actually talking to a space company yesterday that had their contact time just slipped out from under them at the last minute, and so it's really hard to think of how to deliver a reliable business to your customers under those conditions. And so we're excited to really change the expectations for space companies where you have this always on, reliable and frankly dynamic satellite connectivity that you would expect of your power grade or
of your cell phones. And so we think that this is a huge opportunity space and our first contribution into it is through shared infrastructure through phase or antennas, which offer a ten x improvement on availability for satellite operators, along with a lot of other exciting features of Phase raise.
We explained earlier in the program like antenna arrays have not really been touched in since the nineteen sixties, but you know what they are. I mean, if you're ever lucky enough to drive past one and you kind of marvel still at the romance of space infrastructure. But I guess the point is is that for all of the expansion of constellation that's happening above our heads, you've got to have it. What is different about your antenna, Like, what is different about what you're offering?
Yeah, I mean the model that we are aiming for is something that is scalable, as you all said, that can be deployed swiftly, that can be really responsive to changing needs, that can be placed in more dynamic locations. So you know, we're envisioning a system where you could be on a rooftop, or it could be in a parking lot, or it could be you know, in some austere location. This first demo that we did, it was deployed in six hours. That was our very first time
bringing it out into the field. So we're excited to bring that time down even further. We built our very first system in four months, so we're looking to you know, bring that time frame down even further.
As well.
And so you know, when you think about cell tower infrastructure and that expansion globally of infrastructure that enables the cellular industry, that's the kind of scale that we need for Space to accomplish all of these super exciting missions that have been talked about today and that we're seeing pop up day after day.
Can you give us a sense of time frames how long it took from standing start to demo and how quickly from demo to getting it out there into the world.
Yeah, So for North would we really prioritize bringing on the right people, the right parts, and the right processes. So we've focused on building a team of people that are exceptionally experienced in their respective field. We've sourced parts from different corners of different industries that are traditionally used within the aerospace sector, so we have kind of those
timeline and cost advantages. And then in terms of processes, we're really focusing on a design for manufacturer methodology so that we can you know, build things swiftly, have things really consolidated into modular units, and just approach that differently. So for us, in our first iteration, you know, this was from the very beginnings of the design phase all the way through you know, sourcing those parts, assembling those parts, testing it, and then getting deployed. That was that four
months timeframe. And frankly, if there weren't some personakeity board vendors, we could have been a lot faster.
Okay, so we've got the hold up.
Is it regularly you come from having experienced the government side before building the private side.
What are some of the bug bez? Yeah?
I mean I think uh, I think it's really the stuff that we're just trying to systematically embed in what we're doing, which is the method of engineering of being designed for manufacturer. We already had a ten x improvement on our assembly times based off of that first iteration that we've built. We already are able to improve that
by tenx. And the parts that we're sourcing from, you know, our supply chain you know to date fully us and it's a supply chain that is actually able to be really flexible in timeframes.
And so your customers will be SpaceX and Amazon for defense.
Well. The cool thing.
About the ground segment, I would say, is kind of like the S and P five hundred of the space industry. If the market's going up like ground is going up because every satellite, every different spacecraft mission requires ground connectivity.
So you know, whether it's a launch operator who's needing to have more flexible and responsive times or you know, different pad locations, or whether it's the satellite operators that are on board that are wanting to make sure that if there's you know, a schedule slip in a launch, that they can still make all of their contacts with this satellite that they've invested their blood, sweat and tears in and a lot of money for a lot of
years to get up there. But I think you know, the responsive and dynamic space missions like you know, go col was just speaking about a moment ago in terms of going to different orbits, that's a really exciting space. I think comms use cases are a similarly very exciting applications, especially when you're wanting to have lower latency, greater availability and resiliency. So, I mean, I know that's kind of avoiding the answer, but it's kind of across the board.
Well, you can be find back when you're ready with a big name customer. It's really good to see Bridget Menla Northward CEO, Thank you very much. Okay, how do I say this. Varda Space is a company which builds little spacecrafts that process pharmaceutical materials in orbit and then bring them back down to Earth. But it needs rockets to get them there and then get them back. Let's try and work out how it works with the company's CEO and co founder, Will Brewie. That's a pretty good summary.
Not bad, actually almost as good as I would have said. Yeah, absolutely love it.
One thing real quick, you are a customer of rocket Lab where we are. If it's actually not right forward, is that because they are not your launch provider.
Correct?
But take it from there please and explain what it is that you do, not on Earth but in space.
Sure, So we make pharmaceuticals in orbit because the lack of gravity allows you to make new drug formulations that wouldn't otherwise be possible on Earth in Earth's gravity. So we build the manufacturing systems to make those pharmaceuticals and the re entry vehicles to bring them from space to home to the patient.
I failed chemistry in high school, and Caroline did very well. But the basic point is that it won't be stable on Earth, it will be stable in microgravity exactly.
So I think of it as part of the manufacturing process. Just like temperature is part of the manufacturing process. Even though you change the temperature, the product remains the same. We use gravity to affect the manufacturing process in the same way.
So many questions from there. Yeah, please, but firstly like how do you get them back?
So we build our own re entry vehicle.
So we are now the third company ever to produce a re entry vehicle to go from space to Earth. There's SpaceX, Boeing, and now little old Varda one hundred and three people the third to ever do it. Yeah, so we build those vehicles, they come and hit the atmosphere mark twenty five.
But it's not.
For example, when we watch the re entry of SpaceX, they land in a specific place. You need a broad land mass to be able to put it back in exactly.
So in the near term we have a unguided vehicle, which means the area that we need is much larger. But we want to bring those dispersion areas closer and closer to eventually get to a football field size.
Well, this is very exciting, and you're very nice. I think it's probably very difficult what you're trying to do. Could you explain the complexity the re entry vehicle getting it even into this area. I think that you guys are trying to land in certain area the size of Maryland or something like that.
Oh, a little bit smaller than Maryland. But yeah, it's actually relatively simple. It's not trivial though. Re Entering the Earth's atmosphere has been done before. We're just doing it in a new way for the specific use case of bringing pharmaceuticals home to patients. So it's a technology we've developed over the last few years.
Where in the world are you managing to find the space to land it? Like, are you doing it here in America or there? The size that you need to be able to put the re entry is that we're broad.
So our first re entry earlier this year, that occurred in Utah, so there's a nice open area there, and the next one's occurring in Australia. We're looking at opening up a landing site in New Mexico. So you'll see that re entry is going to become as common as launch. And so we're laying the infrastructure and building the systems for that.
Okay, the capsules over my right shoulder, okay, and so let's go to the relationship with rocket Lab. Rocket Lab is a launch provider, but actually the majority of its revenues come from other services, So explain the work you do with them, because they don't actually take you to all bit that's right.
So you heard much as I say it earlier, there's applications once you get to space. That's really just opening up the tip of the iceberg of what you can do once you get to space. So you can see this whole ecosystem developing, and you get an exponential growth right now because easier access to space means more demand for space, and that's the definition of an exponential growth function.
So if you think about someone like Varda, who is only possible now because access to space is cheaper and easier, we're demanding more access to space, and so you can see the whole ecosystem come together to make these pharmaceuticals in orbit. So SpaceX is our launch provider. Rocket Lab sells us a bus to do power comms and things like that, and then Varda is the re entry vehicle
that has both a pharmaceutical manufacturing equipment inside. So we did a drug called ratanavier on our first mission, and then we do the re entry of that vehicle.
So it's team sport.
We've got sixty seconds. That team sport depends on regulation. Approval for companies like SpaceX and they've just had a knock back.
Is that an issue regulation?
So what I tell the team is, anytime you're doing something that's never been done before, like we've never done this before. Humans have never done this before, So of course you're going to need to push regulations along the way.
They're not going.
Regulators are not the tip of the iceberg from technology perspective, so as the industry matures, so will regulation. So I wrote an op ed last week about very pacific standards that we can start to put in the FA review process to make it cheaper and easier for without reducing safety for FA analysts to check work.
All eyes on the FAA and SpaceX today. In terms of the news, Will Bruy great to have some time with you, co founder and CEO of Vada Space Now. Can't believe it yea flew by part. What an amazing show for Bloomberg Technology to be here at rocket Lab.
This one is you do want to recap find the podcast. It is prime for lift off on Apple, Spotify, and iHeart from Long Beach, California, and All the Part is a special edition in Space and Defense of Bloomberg Technology