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Today on the nFX podcast, partner Morgan Beller, host Andy Lapsa, co founder and CEO of Stokes based Technologies, a company building technology to seamlessly connect Earth and Morgan founded in 2019 and based in Renton, Washington, Stoke has been focused on rock reusability to make space travel more accessible and frequent in our future lives. Andy now joins Morgan to uncover how they met his founder journey and why space is such an important industry to be in. Let's jump in.
Alright, Andy. How do we meet? Why am I first, we got points to Cornell, but not the same time, but there'll be grid. That was a good coincidence. Yeah. We met through a mutual investor. I guess we were introduced to Morgan and started talking. I ignored you for a while. She did ignore me for a while. That's right. I was getting moved up to the new job, but, yeah, I did I did ignore you. So when Mike and Morgan first sent me an email about you and what you were working on.
I thought this is awesome. I wanna meet this guy, but I've absolutely no business being a business with him because I'm not a rocket sign. Scientist. I don't know anything about space. What are the network effects? And then as you know, I couldn't stop thinking about it. And I was like, okay. I'd love to talk to you, but I'm not sure this is relevant to what we do at all. And back forward Pete we are my first ever board seat.
The calls I look forward to the most and what I oftentimes find myself waking up excited about. So we're here to talk about stoke. We're here to talk about space. I focus most of my time on crypto, and I joke, but mean seriously that you're the only thing that's gotten me excited other than crypto in 5 years. So here we are.
And I think it would be helpful to start with the zoom out version of kind of where we are as a space industry and where it's going because You blew my mind when you painted a picture of what the future looks like, and that future includes the piece that you're building. So, of course, there will be shameless plugs throughout, but when a pause shut up. So just rewind zoom out, take it from the top. Where are we going? Thanks, Morgan.
I think when you zoom out, when you look at the space industry, and really try to extract yourself from it. You realize that today is very clearly a Renaissance period in space. Right? We had the sixties, which must have been an incredible part and to be a part of finally, I think, in a place where we have the technology building blocks to make our presence in space permanent, diverse, and very importantly, almost most importantly profitable.
If you don't have profitable economy in space, then it will be temporary, and it will dial back. And that's what happened in sixties, right, the sixties, all of the projects in the sixties were very government centric, and they were full stop there ahead of their time. But I think that's no longer true. Right now, you have miniaturization of electronics that make the actual construction of satellites much lower cost.
It's faster and easier to create satellites very powerful assets can be built in very small packages now and that has not always been true. And so, really, in the last 5 years, start seeing this proliferation of ideas start to manifest his hardware and make it to space.
So we're at this really, really exciting inflection point in this Renaissance period in space where, you know, imaginations are running wild, and we will develop space in many, many different ways such that it helps our life on earth be more sustainable, more vibrant, more equitable, and that's what we're all about. Our mission in space is to make our life on earth way more exciting. Thanks for painting that 1960s pictures.
I think a lot of people who don't know as much about this world as you do are like, okay. We landed on the moon in the sixties and then, you know, kind of since then, we have the internet and Uber and Facebook and like, the hell are we doing in space? Doesn't seem like things are moving as quickly as you would expect without knowing anything. So you're saying that it's been building up and Shits about to go down.
Yeah. In the sixties, we did these amazing things, and we did them with the motivation of you know, kind of impending World War 3. Right? That was the fear, and it was incumbent on us to when the race to space, when the race to the higher ground, once you can do that, then presumably, you know, you have this, like, insured mutual destruction. And, okay, we've accomplished that goal. And everybody kinda checked back and said, alright. Well, actually, we we don't wanna destroy ourselves.
You know, those entire national efforts, hundreds of thousands of people involved in doing those projects. Is clearly not sustainable. There's no commercial outlet for those things to happen. And so once we got to the moon and started question. Okay. Well, that's great. You know, it's kind of a military project with a commercial front or guys to it. Right? So, again, you know, I've kind of hit a lull in that period where Yeah. We definitely wanna develop space.
It's a very important for science technology development. It's inspirational. And that was all important, but the the fact of the matter is it was government driven there was no commercial outlet for it.
Where that's starting to change today is, again, with this miniaturization of electronics, we can now do global connectivity through, you know, there's low bandwidth applications for IoT, or we can track all kinds of things as they move around the globe, you know, tracking the flow through pipelines that cross 1000 and 1000 of miles through very remote eight places is one example. Right? Is a pipeline breaking down or getting clogged?
You can Pete the flows in pipelines with IoT devices that talk to satellites on orbit. You can do the same thing. Let's say you're shipping something across the ocean and you wanna track the health of whatever that thing is. Through that journey where you can now see your shipment with an IoT device. A lot of people don't realize that aircraft go off the grid a lot of times and you know, that's gonna change as we start to have positioning and telecommunications globally accessible.
Global Internet is another thing. You know, one of the reasons for disparity across the world in terms of quality of life is access to information. And the infrastructure to build the internet is a lot. It's very expensive and slow. And so you have to have a pretty well developed country in order to start to put those things in place. But that's starting to change. Right? We have global internet that's accessible to everybody. So those are just a couple examples. Right?
You have positioning of IoT. You have telecom. Think about climate change. Right? Climate change is happening accelerating. I think climate change is one symptom, and that's part of a much bigger problem that we have to really get smart on very, very quickly or else a tough spot. The thing that I would draw to your attention is that, you know, it took us 1000000 years, literally 1000000 years to reach a population of about a half a billion people. We are now at about 8 Beller people.
That took 200 years. That's it. Right? It coincides with industrial We increased our population by just an unimaginable amount. It's like a vertical line if you plot it. We have no idea what the impact changes. We just don't. We have to get really smart on it. So Earth observation is very important for that. Right? Earth observation, both in terms of understanding the impact on our landmass, the impact on our atmosphere, the impact on our oceans. This is a really important topic.
And as a humanity, we've gotta get really smart on it. So Earth observation, there's all kinds of applications happening very quickly in Earth observation. And then, look, we're now eight billion Pete. 100 years ago or a half a Beller Pete. What are we gonna be tomorrow? What are we gonna be in 50 years? None of us dream of a future where we're gonna correct the issues that we're seeing on earth by, like, having our population. Nobody wants to do that.
Nobody wants to give up the ability fly around the world. Nobody wants to give up the ability to have a smartphone. Nobody wants to give up the ability to talking to this microphone and have a video conference. Right? So how are we gonna be able to do that in a way that we can not only sustain our population, but grow it, scale it in a way that's equally vibrant to our life today and and even better. My proposition is that we must go to space to do that. Why must we go to space to do that?
We must go to space for the earth observation part. We must go to space to outsource. The first thing we need to do in space, well, there's a couple of things that we just mentioned, right, giving access to information globally. Is a way to make the world more equitable. That helps it brings up. And just to clarify for the audience, you mean giving access to information globally Beller internet. What you can do.
Yeah. So there's undeveloped parts of the world that cannot access the internet and cannot access the information on the internet, and it makes it very hard for them to know, learn about the world and develop their country. Right? So that's one thing. The next thing I would say is, you know, I guess the question you asked was why do we have to go to space to do these things we simply have limited resources on Earth. Right?
So how are we going to sustainably generate all of the energy to keep us happy, you know, to keep us going at a population of 8,000,000,000, but what about 15,000,000,000 or 20,000,000,000 or more? We need a way to harness and use energy. I think space has unlimited, unfiltered solar power that we can start to use. You know, we're thinking very big right now. We're thinking decades into the future, but we have start building this stuff now, which is why it's important to talk about today.
So unlimited unfiltered solar power to power all kinds of things. Manufacturing and space is starting to become real for a very certain number of applications. For example, it's a great spot to grow proteins. Proteins love to grow in microgravity. So you can start to think very credibly about certain high value applications of growing protein James organ transplants. Right? Circrowing organs in space and then, bringing that back down to Earth.
All of those things are hard to do when it's very call and very expensive to go to and from space. And that's what we wanna solve. We wanna make it easy. We wanna make it low cost on demand. We wanna pinpoint accuracy in terms of where we can go in space. Wanna do all those things in order to enable that next wave of manufacturing in the space and more and more applications. So when you paint this future world, I'm with you, and that didn't require much imagination for me.
Maybe I've written up sci fi. Maybe I just spend enough I'm thinking about this, but what really clicked for me was, okay, that future state seems obvious. I admittedly I never really thought about how We get from here to that world where we're doing all these things in space easily, affordably. And this is your opportunity to plug stokes. So how is still the answer to get us from today to that tomorrow that you're talking about.
As an industry, we have demonstrated reusable rockets reusable vehicles at a prototype level. And what I mean by that is we've demonstrated that the technology exists. We can reuse space vehicles, but we have not gotten to the point where we can reuse them rapidly in the same way that we fly on airplanes and turn around airplanes. Right. I think SpaceX is plowing ahead in the industry, and it's incredible. They're transforming the game.
But even SpaceX reuses only part of the rocket, the first stage, a handful of James, the record is 10 at the time of this recording. And the turnaround time is just under 1 month. So while that's amazing, it is in the context of history. It's really just scratching the tip of the iceberg in terms of reusability.
So what Stokes is all about is building on top of the fundamental building blocks that exist today in terms of technology and taking it to the next level that we call operational reusability where we can now fly these vehicles, essentially on demand with 24 hour turnaround, and we can fly them a lot. They have long life with quick turn. And then the other thing that should be mentioned is that it's a 100% reusable. Everything on the rocket stack is reusable.
So, you know, that's the next step that the industry needs to take in order to take orders of magnitude out of the cost structure of lunch, and that's what we're building. A lot of people will say, you know, okay. Well, what about SpaceX? They're also building starships which is an amazing engineering feat, and it is. And I'm a huge fan of it. What I posit is that Starship is very, very big. It's too big for much of the commercial sector right now.
The commercial sector is driving towards smaller and lower cost satellites, whereas Starship is designed for absolutely massive you know, transport to orbit and then ultimately to colonize Mars. And so it will absolutely be an important part of this equation. I would call it the freight train to space. And what we would need as well to complement that capability is the sprinter van to space so that we have again on demand low cost. On demand low cost. Direct to final destination.
Direct to final destination. Who doesn't want that? Why did you decide to dedicate your life to space in the first place? It's a young kid, elementary school kid. I wanted to be an astronaut and was very excited about space. In middle school and high school, and even early college, I kind of took a you know, a winding road away from space.
And as I went through my college courses, just followed my interests, whatever, you know, came to me and and was interesting in the things that I wanted to study and almost accidentally wound up back doing space and rockets and engines and things like that. I mean, a lot of people wanted to be astronauts growing up and didn't actually become rocket scientists, but we'll crack why. So increasingly clear why you spent the last 10 years of your life in this world.
It's we'll become more clear as we get into more of the silk story why you're dead set on the next 10 plus years of your life in this world. But at what point Did you say or know, like, should I have to do stoke? Because you're at Blue Origin. You were happy. Blue Origin's great, but Yeah. Something clicked Honestly, it's a surprising outcome for me. I got very excited about the commercial sector.
And the reason I got very excited about commercial sector was first of all, I absolutely love Jeff's vision for blue. I love Elon's vision for SpaceX, and I think they're very important. They're necessary pieces of the puzzle. But what I think is the most important piece of the puzzle is a thriving, diverse, healthy, economy, commercial economy in space. We can go colonize Mars on the current wave of interest that we have that Elon has done a magnificent job generating.
But if we don't have the sustainable commercial economy that fills in behind that, then that too will be a temporary endeavor, and it'll fade same is true is if we go and colonize Mars, we must have the commercial sector following and filling in in the wake behind that to make either of those efforts permanent and sustainable. So I got really passionate about the commercial sector. Right?
Small satellites is the thing that's happening now, and somebody's gotta cater to that so that they are the future. And there are a lot of very important problems that have to be solved to make that happen. The most fundamental one of those is getting things to and from space. Right, that is still very difficult. You talk to small satellite customers. They are craving lower cost. They're craving more availability they're craving the ability to go in a much faster way to their final orbit.
And these very large vehicles just are not designed to do that. And that's okay. Right? They're designed to do other things, but we need that low cost on demand solution. So when I got passionate about this and I started thinking about, and talking to satellite customers and, starting thinking about this space, my thought process was to go say, okay. Let me go. There's a lot of other rocket companies out there forming I'm gonna go pick the winner.
And it was a surprising result that I did not find the company out there that I thought was gonna be the winner or the one that would pivot naturally into this final thesis. So from there on, it was, you know, I have to do it. Now is it time? Actually because you and I have talked about how and why you believe it's difficult for existing companies in this industry to do what Stoke is trying to do So that's the pivot naturally part, but you even think it'll be hard to pivot unnaturally.
I think it's a very hard pivot to go from a disposable vehicle model to one that's what we call operationally reasonable or you're turning around a vehicle very quickly. Try to explain why for those of us who don't have degrees in this? Yeah. I think, you know, there's a couple elements to it. The first one is the way you design your business. If you're designing a company that makes styrofoam cups, and then you wanna pivot into yetis, then it's a very different product. Right?
I think if you started with disposable rockets and you are at a position then where you want to scale. And we've seen this both with SpaceX, and now we're seeing it with RocketLab as well. You get to this point where you're doing maybe 10 to 15 missions per year, and it's just very hard to scale up the flight cadence unless you're going to double down on factory space or triple down. Right? You have to build all of this additional infrastructure in order to scale your cadence.
If you're a small rocket and you're flying ten times a year, those are only 10 revenue generating events that you get to sustain your company. And if it's a small rocket, they're not carrying a ton of payload. Right? So you've got to now take that product that you did and figure out how to turn into reasonable vehicle. You have to add landing gear. You have to reserve propellant. You have to do whatever you're gonna do to make it reasonable. While you do that, you are sacrificing payload.
And if you start small, then all of a sudden you're out of payload. So you're looking at a bottoms up redesign. You're looking at a bottoms up kind of change in mentality where on the previous day, you're trying to think about how to make this thing as absolute cheap as possible.
Now all of a sudden, you're starting to think about you know, things that are very hard engineering problems to make things a long life reusable, like fracture control and higher margins and whatever it takes to make it reusable. It's just a different design. It's a 100% new, and you're trying to do it at a time when you're trying to scale the business. It's difficult. I think it's a difficult pivot.
Their analogies to what's audience might be more familiar with software, legacy technology companies, trying to do things different ways, whether pivot to mobile, which some did better than others or pivot to crypto, which some will do better than others. It's just everything is different. Here's a good example. You have an entire, you have car companies who have been doing internal combustion engines for a long time. And now we have amazing electric technology.
It's very hard for those companies to pivot from internal combustion engines to electric cars. And the question is why? Right? They're naturally going to try to reuse as much of the old car as possible, recycle that technology. But everything's different. The drivetrain is different. The, you know, everything in that car is different because the entire engine, entire kind of the vehicle infrastructure is different. And that creates an opening for a company like Tesla to say, you know what?
It's actually easier to design this from the ground up for the purpose of electric vehicles, and Tesla's done great. Right? That's actually a really good analogy. Right? The companies that are gonna try to pivot are gonna try to adapt their old technologies, which were never designed to be reusable and try to kind of forced their way into this reusable solution. It's difficult. You're listening to the NFX podcast.
If you're enjoying this episode, feel free to rate and review our channel and share this conversation with someone you think would benefit from these insights. Follow us on social at nfx and visit nfx.com for more content. And now back to the show. Another one of your analogies that I love and will butcher and you will correct me is the tall ships analogy, which I know isn't perfect.
The tall ships analogy is if you go back a few minutes when we were talking about, you know, building off earth infrastructure, you know, thinking about manufacturing things in space is it's pretty out there, you know, for a lot of people, will it ever be, you know, feasible to manufacture something in space? That's kind of a wild proposition. And what I like to think about is it's not long. You don't have to go back very far in history. 100, 150 years.
At that time, the only way we had to cross an ocean was with a all sales ship. In that world, you would never think about outsourcing production overseas. Right? It just wouldn't do There's not enough ships. They're too expensive. They're unreliable. You would just never do mass production overseas. Fast forward now, we have you know, supertankers. We have next day air.
We have other different means where we can do now this overseas production and other economic factors are actually more significant than the shipping cost, right, the cost of labor, the cost of setting up the factories, etcetera. And it makes a whole lot of sense to outsource overseas And I think we're at the same place in space. It's very hard for us to imagine a world where we're manufacturing things in space.
But if you remove the barrier of getting to and from space and say, let's just soon we can do that. In that world, space is a great place to manufacture a lot of things. Right? We talked about organs before. Metallic alloys are, you know, just the lack of gravity helps them mix and form perfect alloys much better, growing fiber optics, pulling fiber optic strands. Another excellent example.
There's a whole bunch of reasons why people want to do things in microgravity, and they want to do things in vacuum. And if you remove the barrier of getting to and from space, then, you know, it's a whole lot more viable. So that's our position. You know, I think we've only just begun to figure out how to get to and from space.
I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit that we can go attack using today's technology to do it for orders and magnitude lower costs and with order magnitude, higher frequency, and we should do that. And when we do that, we're gonna start to see these things proliferate a lot more. That was a big unlock moment for me. Realizing that not so long ago, the idea of going on vacation overseas was it just wasn't you to think about it.
And who knows what is possible if transportation gets cheap enough and easy enough. And instead of having to book a flight a year in advance for $2,000,000, you can book 24 hours in advance for much less than $2,000,000. I don't wanna say a number to get in trouble. And who knows what's possible? So it's a bit of a bet on a bet that if transportation gets easy and cheap enough, then who knows what happens next? Who knows being a lot of things, though? That's true. I have a couple of things.
First of all, the first thing to say is on your note of Transcontinental travel, the Titanic was just this enormous production. Right? So it's such a novel concept for Well, what year was the Titanic? 1911. It's only a 110 years That's it. Right? It's absolutely crazy. So that's number 1. Right? Things change quick. And when you develop these infrastructure technologies, they do unlock all kinds of things that are unseen. The second thing I would say, you talked about the Beller on the bed.
And when you start talking about manufacturing space, I think it is a bed on the But what's beautiful about today and was not true even 5 years ago is that there's enormous pent up demand for small satellite launch to space now that is not being met by the very large rackets. It's very hard for the small disposable rackets to scale to the price points and the flight cadence where it's a meaningful part of the the fraction of the market. And that's why today specifically is so exciting. Right?
Today, there is that market that can sustain the business and start to grow it organically. So you don't have to make the bet on the bet. You can actually just make the bet on today's emerging technologies. It's it's a single bet. So you kindly put me in touch with general quest as a reference. General quest. I'm not gonna do him justice Pete serve for over 30 years in the air Morgan, and he's just so smart.
And in addition to his laundry list of job titles and accolades he considers himself a history. And he described you in a way that will make you blush or cringe, but I'm curious for your response. But you said that you were, like, the right brothers in that in the early 1900 getting the exact Pete. The cover of the New York Times said billionaires willing to pay 1,000,000,000 of dollars butchering, but effectively this to figure out air travel.
And basically billions of today's dollars had been spent trying to figure out air travel. And the issue was massively oversimplifying it was you took people with existing mental models trying to figure out this new problem. And what you got was a lot of James landing in the potomac because people thought you had to take a big metal thing and sail it in a straight line from point a to point b. And it took 2 bicycle mechanics from Ohio to be like, hey.
Again, massively oversimplifying this before anyone tries to critique me. I get it. There are these things called birds. And if you watch birds, like, you don't need to go in a straight line and you can mimic wings and you can do it a bit differently. And they didn't necessarily invent any new technology. They've approached the same problem with fresh eyes.
And he used it to describe you because He said Stokes is doing amazing things, but there is surprisingly less technical risk than I had thought because it's not that you're inventing a brand new technical piece that you're approaching it with a new mindset. And, well, first, I'll let you reply. Is that completely off base? What I would say is this was central to before starting the company, I needed to convince myself that this is executable. So when Tom and I That was my co founder.
When we started thinking about this, we took a leap of faith. Right? We left our old job, and that's when we started to dig in and think about the market and what the inevitable future was. And to us, it was, you know, low cost high availability, high cadence, launch to and from space. I said, okay. Well, that's inevitable. That's where the market's gonna go. What does that solution look like? How do we build that?
And the important conclusion to make was that we could do it with today's technology In other words, it's an engineering problem and it's not a science problem. And if we decided it was a science problem, we would not have started the company. But our conclusion is said was Hey, actually, all the fundamental building blocks already exist. We can put those together in a new and novel way and actually get to that end state through engineering and not science. That was very important.
So that's all we're doing. That's all we're doing. That's it. James it seem so easy. It's not gonna be that easy. There will be bad days. And, of course, there will be bad days, but that makes you appreciate the good days. So something you said earlier was about how in the six 60s, you know, the space race. It was a national phenomenon. Like, everyone was on board for the country to be united about getting someone on the moon. And a lot of the development and Currier energy was public sector.
And now beyond space, but in a lot of sectors, but to talk about space today, there's a shift to a lot of the innovation happening in the private sector, yes, you're working hand in hand with the government in some ways But it appears that a lot of the talent is now outside of those walls. Is that an accurate read? I think so. I think there's definitely a shift. And what do you attribute the shift to? I think speed and focus are very important.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of the government programs lack both of those 2 ingredients If you look at the NASA mission, it's me entered a number of times and it makes it very difficult to the things that we're building are built on a timescale of certainly 5 years 10 years would be kind of more accurate to get to a mature level. But the NASA mission seems to change on a frequency that's higher than that.
And so if you can't focus and actually get something across the hump, it's very difficult to something done. There's a whole lot of ingredients that go into that, and there's a whole lot of ingredients that go, you know, factor into the speed of execution. And I think that's a really big, an important one. Yeah. So I think speed and focus. And then, I guess the 3rd ingredient is the willingness to fail.
If you're willing to fail, then you're willing to try new things and you're willing to move a little bit faster, you have to be willing to fail. It's a key part. You know, if you go talk to any tinkerer or any engineer who, you know, builds things in the garage, or whatever. Right? The natural engineering process is to design something very quickly and start testing it out and learn by doing such an important ingredient. Right?
It can't possibly predict all of the outcomes that are gonna happen, especially for a complex machine. And so the ability to break these things down and do something. Start working with things with your hands, with physical artifacts as quickly as possible is so important, but you have to be willing to fill along that road and then learn from So if you have not set yourself up where you're to a place where you're willing to fail, then things are gonna take a lot longer.
Things are gonna be more bureaucratic. That shift from public to private is happening in other industries. Cryptographers go to place to work was government organizations and now Not as much. And the reasons you highlighted are, I think, pinpoint. Why? I'm curious how talent and the fervor and the drive evolves and funding. And because in the sixties, as mentioned, it was very nationalistic.
And now it feels like one of the main drivers to explore space, get this space, develop space is climate, changes you mentioned, which is an international phenomenon. And I'm currently reading Hail Mary by Andy Weir, the guy who the Martian and the premise is that there's this stuff called astrophage, which is this algae in the sky, and it's soaking up the sun's energy and the risk is that it's gonna make the earth really cold, really fast, and everyone's kinda joining forces.
So you've got someone from China. You've got someone from Russia and you've got someone from the United States and everyone's pouring their money and their resources to solve this global problem. Climate change is clearly quite analogous to what's going on today. So do you see collaboration happening at that level, or do you see because on one hand, the reason to get the space is international, the world's burning for all of us.
On the other hand, the reason to get the space is National, you know, the Space Force and domestic raising. There's something called the overview effect, which is, you know, just to encapsulate it, I guess, or to summarize it. If you talk to almost any astronaut goes into space, it transforms them forever. And the reason is because you look down on the earth and there's no borders. It doesn't look like a map that you see where you have countries outlined. Right? It's just one earth.
So that's a very powerful thing to see with the, you know, physically with your eye. And then the other thing that they talk always about is just the incredibly thin layer of air that is there to protect us. Right? It's just extremely thin when you look at the you know, the crescent of the earth as you fly around it. And on the other side of that ridiculously thin layer is just this expansive infinite void of blackness.
And it hammers home how small we are in some ways how insignificant we are, and it makes you realize that you are citizen of earth and not necessarily just one country. So when you start talking about the problems that you discussed, yeah, we have to think about that globally. It must be a global use of a problem that we solve together as a human race. So, yes, it's absolutely an international problem.
When we do anything internationally or whenever we do anything even domestically, there has to be some rules of the game. Right? There have to be some set of rules that we use to follow, and there have to be a way to enforce those rules.
And that's why it's so important right now for the space force, the US space force, maybe other space force, but this it's very important for the space Morgan us to move out into space, like you said, have the higher ground and be able to set and enforce, rules of play so that we can work together and move solutions along together effectively rather than, you know, in a way that's not good for the collective good. Does that make sense? It does make sense.
I'm a bit of a China freak, so I had to bring up China at some point in this call. I think part of my investment thesis was definitely the climate Components and part of my investment thesis was definitely the China components. Do you see more collaboration with China in this world, then perhaps we see with them in other technology sectors, whether it's cryptomining the semiconductors to vaccines. I'm curious what that looks like. I'm by no means an expert in this area.
So I will just tell you the way I think about things, but this could be way off I think that there's something like a land grab going on, right, where we are globally and as different nations starting to appreciate the significance of space and what it means to be 1st. I also think that there's some level of existential threat that happens. Right?
This is kind of like the nuclear arms race where it's very important that we develop this capacity because if we don't and the other person does That's a really bad situation to be in. The really scary situation to be in. That's right. And, you know, but there's this existential threat associated with it where we now have mutually assured destruction. And the same thing to some extent is true in space. Right? There's definitely an existential threat there by everybody going out there.
And so that's why it's so important to have rules to play by. And I think, you know, the same way in nuclear proliferation, people start to respect the danger that we have developed. But in in developing this, you know, the ability to deter other countries from making certain activities is equally important as being able to you know, go and actually destroy other parties. Right?
So deterrence is very Morgan, and that's something that will be enhanced if you can deploy assets to, say, to space and then bring them home again, for example. Now think about the way that that we, when we enter conflicts or approach conflicts, we deploy aircraft Currier to a certain region or deploy, you know, fighters and aircraft and troops and, you know, people line up on the border. And, you know, that's a deterrent mechanism.
That's intended to create a an outcome or a behavior or a change of behavior without actually entering conflict. And then when you get that outcome, you can draw back. Right? You can pull down can go back and take the troops away from the border. We're not able to do that in space right now. We can't deploy assets to space and then take them back, all of which points to the fact that Morgan to be able to go to and from space for low cost and on demand.
And it's also equally important to be able to move around space and maneuver in space and go to different orbits, go to higher ground, go to lower ground, you know, it's important to be able to maneuver. So all of those things are very important components as we develop this space infrastructure. That's a stoke. The future that you painted is happening fast forward 10 years. We get it. What's the lowest hanging fruit for demand for what stokes building.
Well, it's a small satellite market for sure. So earth observation, telecoms, all of these folks want to deploy constellations, and it's the ability to deploy those constellations very quickly. Once they deploy Gen 1, they'll wanna deploy Gen 2. It's one of the things that makes today's market. So exciting is there are a bunch of verticals emerging. We talked about a bunch of them, but within every one of those verticals, there's competition.
There's more than one player who are trying to do these things, which is good. We want that healthy competition. Right? That means the economy is healthy, and that means that there's gonna be a drive for more and more innovation. And that means that we're such a C satellite deployments, the assets on space have much lower lifetimes. So for example, typical satellites 10 years ago, had a lifespan of 20 years or even more.
These enormous, you know, kind of mega satellites, like, to calm death stars, enormous death stars, you know, multibillion dollar satellites that last for 20 plus years. We're not gonna see that anymore because, you know, the competition is going to leapfrog, and then the first guy is gonna upgrade their thing over and over again. This is all healthy. This is good.
And I think in 10 years, you're gonna start to see this where you're gonna have gen 2 yard starting to Gen 2 and Gen 3 constellations. You're gonna see that start to proliferate even more. How would you describe the economy of space right now tied into stoke, of course, but, like, the costs and the profits Morgan the lack. It's a nascent economy. There's no question. But it's enough of a seedling to show that, hey, these applications are actually quite viable and they're scalable.
And you're starting to see that with today's launch market, but there's definitely paints throughout, you know, any nascent industry, there's pains throughout. And our job is to start to streamline that economy and start to address those pains from a very customer centric perspective as opposed to developing infrastructure with some other purpose in mind and then assuming that the industry is gonna go and fill One more from our friend general quest.
Another analogy he made is SpaceX And Blue Origin who are making history for space travel for the people are the locomotives of space in that they're big expensive, but they are successfully moving people from Flint a to point b. Whereas Stoke is building the model t for space, which in that your space for everyday Pete, that makes it sound like there's a future vision for consumers? Do you see a consumer phase coming at any point?
I think the analogy is is something like what what we've started to talk about. The freight train to space is exactly what, you know, these very large rocket SpaceX Blue Originergen are building. And there's a role. The freight train delivers massive quantities of things to space. And that's great. It's gonna play a role. It's gonna play a huge role. It's basically the lead blocker.
They're gonna pull the industry forward but there's also this very, very important role for the sprinter van, the low cost on demand high speed option to get you wherever you wanna go whenever you wanna go. And the freight train not gonna be able to answer that. And that's okay. Right? It just means that there's other solutions that are there to compliment it. Your question about, I guess, being available to the general consumer is very interesting.
What I think is that if you have something that you've invented or you want to invent or even just an observation you wanna make, you'll be able to deploy that thing to space. No problem. Right? The barrier is very low. Today, you have to build your own satellite. You have to find your own launch. You have to, you know, it's like, multimillion Beller proposition. But in the future, you're gonna say, hey. I have this question. I built this little widget.
I wanna get it to space, and you'll be able to do that for tens of 1000 of Beller, maybe, maybe less. Right? So now all of a sudden, you have schools and universities. They're already building these things, but all of this access. You have garage tinkerers who are willing to Pete, you know, let's say, you know, there's a lot of people who build hobby cars from scratch, right, or model cars.
With that level of investment, you'll be able to start doing meaningful things in space, which is pretty cool. You're gonna see all kinds of invention come out of that. Gonna be so cool. You mentioned, Tom, Tom deserves a quick shout out. I mean, more than a quick shout out. Tom deserves to have his name set out loud a few more times. What's the story of how you Pete Tom and I worked on a program at Blue Morgan, actually, together, I was kind of shifting roles at the time.
This was, well, I guess it's, like, 9 years ago now. So we met way back then at our old job, and I handed off what I was working on to him and, you know, on day 1 is immediately clear that this guy was he's gonna be able to take what I did and fix all my mistakes and get that thing over the hump.
And He's I think proven that through and through as we've, you know, kind of worked together alongside sometimes more afar, but, we've always definitely stayed in touch And then, yeah, when we started to look out and think about the market more, turns out we were just in lockstep with our thinking and the rest is history. You know? History's first being made. What's a big milestone you're working towards at Stoke right now? We have a couple, but I don't know if I wanna actually dive into those.
You'll see those come out pretty quick. Can you tease us with anything? We're working very hard. We have a very small team of what I think is elite talent that have built things from a completely blank page all the way up through development test and Flint. Just about everybody we have has gone through that process at least once and a lot of times more than that.
One of the things that I don't like to talk about things I don't like, but one of the things I don't like in the industry right now is there's just a huge number of what we call power Flint rockets. And I don't wanna be another one of them. So when we have more to show, we're gonna show more with real hardware.
And from that point on, I think it's great to have a, you know, good dialogue and a story and kinda share our story and our path, which will not always be straight as we go and develop this thing. We will be coming back to get that story. We're inviting ourselves to Moses Lake where you've set up your mad science laboratory to show versus tell people what you're doing up there. Last question because you've got the earth to save. What keeps you up at night? Fully transparent.
I think the industry is at a very important inflection Flint. And it's got an amazing momentum right now. It's not a cell phone app, and it's gonna need some time to mature. And so my hope is that funding and the appetite for development in space is deep enough and persists long enough so that some of these technologies can actually get across the hump and get into use. I think if you have the interest that we have right now and if it's sustained, then it's gonna happen. I'm ready to go.
Andy, I'm at things stoked about stoked. Thank you for taking the time and wait to show. Alright, Morgan. Thanks so much. It's always a pleasure At NFX, we believe creating something of true significance starts with seeing what other do not. Send this episode to any friends that may need these insights and frameworks, and feel free to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening to the NFX podcast.