Spaceplanes Are Upon Us - EP 24 Stefan Powell

What is the Paris Air Show like? I've always wanted to go.

Uh, yeah, really good. Kind of like a, definitely a bit of a mashup between space and, and, um, you know, aircraft industry. Um, pretty exciting to just see like super high performance aircraft, like F-35s and Rafales and like all these jets just doing crazy shit in front of people.

So they've, they just do, it's part air show in the middle, like they're flying stuff around. And then I guess there's probably a lot of people selling things and it's like a trade show too, isn't it? Or it's just an air show.

Yeah, no, no, it's totally a trade show. Like, like there's thousands of like actual industry people there and just about everyone from industry attends. But then it's also like you're definitely an air show. Like kids show up as well. Like the last 3 days of it is kind of like the industry stuff winds down and the kids show up. But the whole time, like literally through every day of the show, like F-35s are flying, A350s are flying, like everyone's just doing the craziest shit, like helicopters doing loops. Like, like you're literally in a meeting with, with some people and the F-35s flying overhead and the whole table's just shaking and you're like, I can't hear anymore. You kind of have to like postpone your meeting for 5 minutes.

Yeah. Well, okay.

Well, that happens.

I would like to see that one day. Um, and they do it in, I mean, Toulouse is, is kind of the aviation capital of France, isn't it?

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah. Totally. Like that's where all the aircraft manufacturing and stuff is like Airbus is centered there and tons of the space industries there. But Paris, for whatever reason, is like where the actual air show is.

It's probably easier. All right. Um, all right. I'm going to do a proper intro now.

Yeah, cool. All right.

Stefan Powell, thank you for joining us.

Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for being here.

You are the co-founder and CEO, and I think also CTO of Dawn Aerospace. There's many, many titles.

Yeah, yeah, way too many, way too many hats, that's for sure.

If you guys are based in New Zealand, we're going to talk all about that. I've been following the company for a few years now. Um, you make— I'll just do it quickly and then we'll get into it— but you make propulsion systems for satellites, and then you also make this very cool space plane. It's It's totally unique. There's nothing else like it. We're going to talk all about it. I think we're going to get to show a mockup of it as well. And, and I, you know, you and I have known each other for a bit. I wanted a chance to talk about you, Aerospace in New Zealand, and then, and what you guys, what you guys are doing. So thank you for trekking to the studio.

Yeah. Yeah. We can, we can do all of that and lots more.

Okay. Fantastic. And as always, this episode is Brought to you by E1 Ventures. No cap table is complete without E1 Ventures. Um, very kind people who helped make this podcast go. Um, all right, here we go. Let's jump in. Do you, we're gonna, let's do the newsy bit. No, let's not. Let's not. Let's set up. Let's do a little background first. Um, as I mentioned, you, you hail from New Zealand. Were you born in New Zealand?

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Born in Wellington.

And your parents are Kiwis?

Yep.

Yeah.

They're both born in New Zealand, although my mums from like Dutch— her parents immigrated from Europe in the '50s.

Okay, and it's entirely possible that I, I think I may have badgered you when I was working on my book about Rocket Lab as I hunted through LinkedIn for anyone who had worked at Rocket Lab. And you did, you did like a 6-month internship?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I did an internship there while I was doing my master's at TU Delft. So it was like doing an internship, like an internship abroad at home.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

Okay. And, and what stage was Rocket Lab at when you did that?

Uh, that was pre-calling it Electron. Back then it was called Orbital. Oh, so this is pretty early.

Yeah.

Yeah. This is 2013. I think, I think there was like 20-ish people at the company. Pretty, pretty damn early. Like before we had fired the Rutherford at all.

Yeah. Yeah. To set the stage for people who don't know, I mean, Rocket Lab is really, when it comes to rockets, is the second most successful commercial space player after SpaceX. I think I just saw them. I can't even keep up with how many times they've flown now because they just flew two in a row in the last couple of weeks. And I think they're up to about 60, 64, 65 launches.

Something like that. They did like 4 this month. Which is pretty wild.

Yeah. So they're starting to like hit this kind of SpaceX-ish type cadence. But the bigger story is, is just like really no aerospace industry of significance in New Zealand until this, this company comes around. And, and so you're— what was it like in the early days of working at Rocket Lab and this maniac Peter Beck telling everyone you're going to fire a rocket off from, from the— oh, from the North Island? Yeah, yeah, well, it was meant to be the South Island.

I think at that point it was pretty undefined. It was like, somewhere, we'll figure it out, don't worry about it. Like, um, yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I'd call him a maniac, and, but, uh, he, he definitely, um, he knew what he wanted and he knew how to get it, that's for sure. Like, never seen anyone with that sort of dedication and, and conviction in what they believed in. And, um, just the way that he inspired people to work was pretty, pretty awesome. And, and like I mean, you've probably studied more than anyone else. Like, you see the results. Like, like it's, it's just hard to argue with that level of execution, right?

He's very, very driven. Um, absolutely. But even, I mean, unlikely odds.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally, totally. But, um, like I do remember having some, like, like I, I was working on the Rutherford, um, test stand at that time. It was out at Auckland Airport. So like, pretty boring stuff really, like drilling holes in concrete and putting in like 1-inch stainless tubing and then setting up like all the rigs to mount Rutherford. And we did eventually get to firing it. So we were— I was involved in about the first dozen or so firings. Um, but we had like NASA folks come by and you could see it in their eyes of like, holy crap, like this is happening and this is happening in a completely unexpected part of the world. And they were just so Yeah, like, you know, they got that like twinkle in their eyes sort of thing of like, oh wow, this is happening here. They just didn't expect it.

Yeah, I mean, and I wrote about this in the book, and so this will be old news to anyone who's read that, but that was what I heard all the time was there were so many rocket startups and then everyone kept saying, but this guy Peter Beck, he's more real than the other ones. And I was so skeptical. I think the first time I went out was 2016 or 2015, 2016. And Um, just, I think I'd been burned a few times by rocket startups telling, you know, with their website and then you go visit them and there's nothing. And so, so I was so— the, the idea that this guy who didn't go to college in New Zealand was doing it seemed pretty far-fetched to me. And then I got there and then, and he was 100% very much doing it, was ahead of everybody else I'd been looking at in the States.

Yeah, yeah, but I feel like aerospace is starting to get used to these underdog stories now. Like it's almost becoming like if the company hasn't had some real harsh forcing function that's like made them make tough decisions early on, then they're actually more likely to fail even if they had 10 times the resource. Yeah. Like, like it's almost like hardship is a prerequisite for success in aerospace.

So I'm so curious about that because I was following Rocket Lab, I was following similar companies in the US who had SpaceX veterans. They had access to all this history, all the industry, by all rights should have outpaced Rocket Lab. And then Rocket Lab was full of Kiwis and Aussies all in their 20s who had never launched a rocket before. Peter, you know, had been making dishwashers before, uh, started Rocket Lab. And so I've always wondered, maybe you're right, maybe it is that, like, because SpaceX had that They almost failed too, right? They almost failed. And they had that, even though people think Elon was rich, they had the desperation that—

He wasn't back then.

Right. He was not that rich. They had to fly, which is why I always think they've gone faster than Blue Origin because Blue Origin had Daddy Warbucks. By the time Jeff started that company, he was already one of the richest people in the world. Whereas Elon was rich, but he was not like space rich by any stretch of the imagination.

Yeah. And like aerospace is a great way to sink hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars and get nowhere.

Disaster.

If you don't know what you're doing. Yeah, for sure.

Okay. So when you were there with those 20 people, so you're saying you got a sense of Peter, but like, what else did you discover about this? This is the thing I've always wondered is like, how does a group of 20-year-olds who have never done this before, uh, what, like, what did they figure out in their culture that worked?

Probably haven't thought about this enough to like really comment on it, but I feel like it's almost as simple as just, you just put one step in front of the other. Like you figure out, okay, this is the goal and this is kind of the next step in that direction. So let's do it and let's do it as fast as we can and we're going to get there and then we're going to learn some more and then we're going to figure out the next step. And like, it really is that elementary, if you like. And I mean, looking back, lots of like, we made tons of mistakes even in those 6 months that I was there. Like the timelines are all bananas. Like, you know, we thought we were going to qualify engines in whatever, a quarter of the time that it ended up actually taking. You know, it was, it was the classic, um, times your, uh, your budget by 2 and your time by pi or whatever. So like that all roughly worked out. But, um, the, I guess the common denominator here is just the like relentless drive and clarity of vision that they had. And everyone had that, like Pete obviously had it, but everyone in their own individual roles had it as well. And they like, no one wanted to believe that it wasn't possible. And I guess to some extent it was just like raw naivety that nobody actually understood how hard it was, what they were doing. You know, it's the old adage there as well. Like if you knew how hard it was at the start, you wouldn't have done it. So maybe, maybe that naivety is just a bit of a benefit.

100%. Yeah. So maybe just being remote and away from some of the bullshit that comes with all this, let you focus a little bit.

Yeah.

Yeah. And you studied aeronautics?

Yep. Yep. I did a bachelor's of aerospace and a master's in space systems engineering.

Okay. All right. Well, I know you were at Rocket Lab for a little bit, then I think you were at Hyperion.

Yep. Yep. It was like a little startup in Delft.

And then pretty quickly started your own company.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It was pretty— and I mean, I kind of started that company while I was working at Hyperion. So there was a Hyperion, or actually early shareholders in Dawn, and that was kind of like a trade of I'm going to be spending more and more of my time on my own thing and you're going to support me while I do it. And some of the technology that we were working on was related to prior projects with Hyperion. So that was kind of the deal that we worked out there. So, so they were really, they were great in supporting us early on.

And so, so what year did Dawn start and what was the original mission?

Oh, um, like the original mission was, um, we had been working together for 7 years or something at that point. Um, in a student society, and we just realized we were really great at building stuff. You know, we built these big hybrid rockets and broke some European records and stuff, and that was cool. Um, but we realized like, shit, we're really good at this. Like, we're a scrappy team, you know, with tiny amounts of money we develop new technology. We should make a business out of this. And so I think the original email I sent was actually, it was, um, the, the, the subject line was Badass Rocket Company. That was the original name. Um, But yeah, that must have been 2015.

Okay.

And then we won some like small startup prize things in like 2016 or '17 or something. So that forced us to like open a company and a bank account and whatnot. But then like the moment where we all quit our jobs and did this full time was, was like September 2018.

2018. And did you think you were going to be a rocket company initially or that was, that was just—

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we originally actually tried to commercialize the technology that we developed as students, like these big hybrid rockets. Then we realized, no, we really, really don't I don't like hybrid rockets. So I know there's lots of companies building hybrid rockets now, and I'm sorry, but, um, I know enough about hybrids and I never want to build another one in my life.

Yeah. Yeah. And for people who don't know what a hybrid rocket is, what is it?

Oh, it's like a, you use a liquid propellant for, for your oxidizer usually. And, and then like a solid fuel. So in theory, you get the best of both worlds out of like a controllability of a liquid, but it's quite safe because it's very hard to accidentally mix those two things and blow them up. But you also get a lot of the bad sides of both. Like you get grain cracking from it being a hybrid, but then if you want it to be really high performance, you still want to use cryogenic liquids, which you really need for hybrids because otherwise their performance is pretty bad.

Yeah.

So you still have a cryogenic liquid. It's a long story.

It's a mess. So, and the solids give you sort of simplicity, a bit cheaper. The liquids let you start and stop. You have way more nuance and, and, and The world has tilted towards liquids.

Yeah.

But there's still this desire to do both at the same time.

Especially when you start talking about reusability, because like a reusable— well, we can talk about reusability like that. That was what we landed on as Dawn as like the key element. Like we tried to market this hybrid rocket and we just realized it's just way too expensive and it's just, it's maybe an iterative improvement over the status quo. Yeah. But it's not a revolution. Yeah. And we need to go for a revolution. Okay. So like in 2015, the way that you cause a revolution in spaceflight is reusability. Like, SpaceX was already talking about it at that point, kind of had ideas about it. No one was really talking much about in-space refueling all that much. It was, was kind of like a crazy notion. It was like, well, I think we can figure out all these things. Like, the, the far from physically impossible. And, um, and this is where my brother actually came into the story, where he had been working in, in proper aerospace, like he was doing helicopter modifications, designing and building them in New Zealand and then exporting them around the world. And there's like really well set up mechanisms for doing that sort of R&D and exporting it at scale. And, um, and I actually did an internship, um, at the business he was working at as well and then saw this for myself and we kind of put our heads together and said, hey, you know, these high performance rockets that we're building as students, um, I think we can do that, but in a truly like aerospace context, like of, of like airline style where we, we build these parts as aircraft and then we like license them as aircraft and we fly them out of airports and we get the reusability and the scalability of aircraft, but still with the performance of a rocket.

Yeah.

Like we can actually mash these two worlds together and get something that's truly the best of both worlds.

Right. Okay. And then, and as I mentioned, I mean, you, your business has a couple elements to it, but let's, let's start with the space plane. For a second, which is a bit of what you're talking about. Okay, so let's describe it to people. Actually, should we? Let's show and tell them for a second.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's one I prepared earlier.

Stefan is grabbing the space plane.

Ungodly huge thing.

It's large on our table, but if you're viewing at home or on YouTube, I suppose you can see it. So how big is this in real life?

Yeah, so the real one, like this is, we call it Aurora. The real one's about 5 meters long, 2.4 meter wingspan. In various configurations, it weighs between 200 kilograms and 450 kilograms.

Okay.

So the one we're flying right now is about 200, 250 kilograms or so.

And how much can it hold in payload?

Like not very much, 5 kilograms. But like the point of this vehicle was really a technology demonstrator for like putting the performance of a rocket in something that's truly an aircraft. And by that I mean, you know, it's not just reusable like an aircraft, but it also flies from common infrastructure, like from airports, like an aircraft. And it's also regulated as an aircraft. And those three elements are really key. Otherwise you lose the business model of it, of being an aircraft.

Yeah. Okay. Well, I have lots of questions about that, but the payload goes up top.

Yep. Yeah, the payload here. And actually the— so the next generation version has between 6 and 10 kilograms, so upgraded that a little bit. But yeah, it just goes in the back here.

So for people who are just listening, kind of in the cockpit-ish area or near-ish where you would imagine a cockpit, I suppose.

Yeah, near the front. Yeah, exactly. Pretty much, pretty much the cockpit area.

Okay. And does it, does it eject the payload in space or you're carrying it up?

And it totally depends what they want to do, like, like aircraft. Like there's so many applications for this vehicle, but most want to actually just contain it. Like they want to test some avionics or Scout Space is one customer that is— that they've got a space domain awareness payload. So that's a camera that they want to fly up really high above the atmosphere and then be able to take photos of satellites in low Earth orbit.

And would they attach that somewhere on the exterior of this? No.

Yeah, yeah. Well, like in that sort of like cockpit position, they've got cameras looking up and out.

Oh, okay. Okay.

Of the aircraft. So it's like an array of 3, 3 cameras in there.

Okay. Okay.

Yep.

All right. Um, let's see, before we put this away, um, okay, before we put this away, let's talk about it more. The, and the engine is what?

Yeah, the, the engine is a liquid bipropellant engine. So, um, electric pump fed. So it uses hydrogen peroxide and kerosene. So these are nice storable propellants, still pretty high performance though, very dense. They, they lend themselves very well to aircraft because you can, like, you can pack that propellant into lots of tiny little spaces in it. So we put propellant all through the wings like aircraft do, you know, about 70% of the length of the body is all propellant as well. But yeah, being non-cryogenic, you can fill it up and then you could leave it there for a day if you wanted, you know, you can roll it out onto the runway and, you know, we integrate with other traffic. So you wait for an aircraft to go past and then you can fly in behind it. Cryogenic systems can't do that so well. Like, they're very time sensitive. So yeah, try to stay away from that.

Okay. All right. Maybe we should— let's fly it away for a second. It's gone to space. Okay. So when you talk about— would you talk about that having the performance of The rocket world with the planes, I mean, how would that be different in terms of performance to a fighter jet or, you know, that, that if we think of the most kind of propulsive planes?

When you compare it to aircraft, it very quickly gets embarrassing for the aircraft world. So like even this, you know, we're not even at the full performance prototype stage. We're like sort of a quarter of the way there. I feel like we're flying—

Of where you want to go.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, like the Aurora that we're flying right now. That flies up to 25 kilometers altitude. Um, you know, it's like 80-ish, 85,000 feet-ish. Um, that has already beaten the, like, world record ever for flying off a runway to 20 kilometers altitude. Um, that was set by an F-15 that they had totally stripped out, like, stripped all the paint off, stripped the radars out of it, obviously no armaments, minimum fuel It got to 20 kilometers altitude in 122 seconds or something. Okay. And we did it in 118.

Okay.

With our like quite low performance version of our aircraft.

Okay.

So the next version will be able to do it in like probably under 110 seconds.

So the fastest thing to get, how many miles, how high up is that?

Yeah, 25 kilometers is 82,000 feet.

Okay.

Which is, I don't know, in miles.

Yeah. No, no.

Times by 0.6.

We can work with kilometers.

That helps.

But the, so, so just like the fastest we've ever been able to get that high in.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's in terms of climb rate. It'll— I think the highest an aircraft has ever flown is 125,000 feet. You know, we've done 80 so far. We're going to fly to over 330,000 feet. So, you know, we'll more than 2x that record. And the other one is speed. So the fastest thing to ever fly off a runway is SR-71 Blackbird, does Mach 3.3. Um, we should crack 3.5, maybe something closer to 3.8. Now we only do that in bursts, so there's a little bit of a, a little bit of a difference there, you know. Okay, that, that's like a, that's our peak velocity while it could cruise at 3.3. So yeah.

Okay, and the, the, the, these first records that we were talking about were in the craft that you were just discussing the dimensions of, but that, so you're saying that's, that's, this is just like early version.

Yeah, yeah, that's like the first stage. That's like the— that vehicle was originally envisioned as a technology demonstrator for like, this is the performance of a rocket in an airplane. That basically means it has enough performance to replicate what like a Falcon 9 first stage would do. Okay, right. So it's small, so it doesn't have much payload, but if you took this exact same craft and you scaled it up so that it would have a bunch more payload, then you could put a second stage on it, and you'd have a two-stage-to-orbit vehicle, okay, where that first stage is truly an aircraft in every way. That was the point of, of that technology.

I see. So the plane will come back and then the, the rocket part will keep going?

Yeah, exactly, would go off into orbit.

Okay. And when, when, what is the schedule and plans for that? How big will that be?

Well, yeah, so that, that's a vehicle we've always had on our website as the Mark 3.

Yeah.

And we've always talked about it as that. But the funny thing is, is that, um, we've actually realized there's just way more value in these very reusable vehicles than we ever thought. So, you know, we have a customer now, you know, we've got a partnership with the state of Oklahoma to bring this vehicle to Oklahoma so that they can fly microgravity payloads, they can do all kinds of national security research with it. There's just tons of uses for this vehicle that we originally thought was a technology demonstrator. It's like, shit, there's actually a real technology pull here. People want this.

So it flies to the edge of space. Yes, like slightly suborbital.

Yep. Yep.

And where, like you say, so you can, you can test scientific instruments, you can do defense tests, you can do imaging tests, comms tests, all kinds of things in this environment that you just cannot get on Earth. We do sounding rockets and everything all the time. So it's in this sweet spot of, of like science, defense, and what else?

Yeah, yeah, like science, but that's massively broad, as in like pharma, like life sciences, growing proteins in microgravity, semiconductor, growing like high-quality crystals for like ultra-performance electronics. Yeah, national security, like missile presentation is a huge one there, or like target simulation, like, you know, projects like Golden Dome, $180 billion of expenditure on missile defense, like how do you effectively test that? How do you train your troops? How do you essentially simulate what these missiles are doing. Like, yeah, you can launch a $100 million missile to do that, but what if, what if you can fly a vehicle around that basically does the same thing for $100 grand? Yeah, like, now you can do it very frequently and in many different situations. And, you know, like, the, the, the possibilities just go so wide. Um, like, the business models just completely change when it goes from being a multi-million dollar exercise to a $100,000 exercise.

So the— you were talking about pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. There is this fascinating thing where if you're outside of the bounds of gravity, the molecules arrange themselves in these very clean, different ways than you can do on Earth. And so, yes, for years people have been doing chemical and pharmaceutical experiments on the International Space Station. Varda has created a whole business of sending these capsules into orbit for a period of time. So if people want to run experiments like that, how long can they be suborbital in, in the Dawn craft?

Yeah, so you get about 3 minutes of microgravity. Okay, so like in lots of cases, yeah, that's not going to do what you want. Like you need to go to orbit for that thing. But, um, like if we look at semiconductors, um, they've done about 300-odd tests in space of different, like trying to manufacture different types of semiconductors. But in almost every case, it's literally just taking the same on-Earth process and trying to show that it's better in space. There's like no tweaking of the variables and there's a lot of variables that go into that manufacturing process. So maybe the answer is yes, we want to manufacture them in orbit. But if the question is exactly what settings do we want to have on that device, if you have to go to orbit every time you want to change the settings and make that investigation, like that's a, that's like a 2-year cycle at least to get up there and do that. It's just way too slow. Like you've got 10 different parameters with 50 different settings on each. So if you can investigate these in a suborbital context, you only need to grow like a few micron of, of semiconductor to figure out whether that's a better setting or not. And you could do, you know, a dozen tests in a week.

Okay.

That just completely changes the velocity of science. And like maybe that means, yeah, okay, you figure out the settings in a suborbital context and then you do it for real in the orbital domain. But, um, I think what we're actually really excited about is discovering that maybe we don't have to go to orbit for a bunch of these things. Maybe we can actually get way more value out of sub-orbit by growing what's called seed crystals, like lots of like pharmaceuticals, semiconductor. You can actually just, if you just grow that first bit of crystal perfectly, you know, the first few microns, then you can actually grow it in gravity on top of that perfect crystal and keep propagating a perfect crystal. Right.

You bring back this, this, um, foundational chunk.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And like, this has crazy implications for, like, just picking on semiconductor again, you know, that's a multi-trillion dollar industry. The entire yield of all of their chips is defined by the quality of the silicon ingot that they grow to start with. So like, um, if you improve the quality of that ingot, then all the chips coming out the end are just going to be higher quality and better. Did you know, um, you know, like Intel's i3, i5, i7, i9 chip, um, you know, they're all exactly the same chip. The only difference is, is that an i3 has way more defects than an i9.

Okay.

And it's actually like, if you have a perfect crystal at the start of your process, then all the chips coming out the end are going to be i9s.

So, you know, you're going to put their branding person out of, out of business.

Yeah. Yeah. All right.

I have so many questions now. Okay. So like, to put some of this in perspective, I think on this, this Oklahoma deal. This is— I love the world we live in. I mean, we are living inside— we've got a New Zealand aerospace company flying out of a spaceport in Oklahoma. Where, where is the spaceport?

Uh, it's Burns Flat, so it's like, it's way in the, in the west of Oklahoma.

Okay. And, and it so happens, I think the United States actually has like 12 licensed spaceports.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which boggles my mind. The US is great if you have a plane because we have like so many airports, but we actually have just like tons of spaceports apparently. Yeah, as well. And, and they haven't had a lot of stuff to fly, um, from these spaceports. And, and then I was reading about you guys' deal. I mean, usually when I see these things announced, it's like one rocket, you know, and, and some test thing, and many years are gonna pass between the second flight.

But Oklahoma bought like 100, like, yeah, yeah, we're supplying it with a, with parts, service, and maintenance for 100 flights.

100 flights. Okay. And you guys are are like, there's people from Oklahoma who are going to fly to New Zealand to get trained up and then they're going to come back. So tell me how this works. I mean, how many of these planes— will they have one plane that they're flying 100 times or they have multiple or?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They'll have one plane and they fly 100 times, which is like not, that's not special for aircraft, right? Like in the context of aircraft, that's not even, that's not impressive.

Yeah. That might be like, what, like a year's worth of flights or?

Well, not even like, you know, most aircraft would do multiple flights a day.

Yeah. So, well, okay. So sorry. Yeah. I kind of got ahead of myself. I mean, you could fly. How much, how much prep does it take to get your plane ready to reuse again?

So in an R&D context, we've turned around aircraft in like 6 hours.

6 hours.

That's totally doable. Okay. So multiple flights a day is not hard.

So it's just like however often they want to fly it to get to those 100.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But like, if you kind of like zoom out a little bit, what we're really doing here is we're actually just trying to completely change the business model of space. Like space has always been a, you buy a service, like I'm a taxi ride. You want to come to suborbital space or orbital space or whatever. You want to go to the moon, like you can pay me for that service and I'll do it for you once. If you want it again, you have to come back and buy it again.

Yeah.

Like, and I won't sell you the capability. I definitely won't sell you a rocket factory so that you can have like an ongoing ability. Um, but that's not how the airline industry works. Like it's totally untenable for a company like a Boeing or a Lockheed Martin. To be an airline for every country around the world. Like, that's just a ridiculous notion. It's way too complicated. The scale is way too big. There is no way Boeing is ever going to understand the local market dynamics in Thailand or whatever to understand how to best run an airline. So if we change that, like, and we are changing that with Oklahoma, you know, the, the whole point of that partnership is that yes, we provide the vehicle and we provide local, like, training for the people and there's clauses in the contract that they can completely take over the operation of that vehicle at the, at the end of the first year of operation. So they can take it in whatever direction they want. It's their vehicle. That's the point. And we can move on to the next people and enable them, you know, the next ecosystem to spool up. Yeah.

It's what you're saying is, I mean, Oklahoma becomes a spacefaring state, you know, under their own control. And, and even to your point about the rockets, even when we have reusable rockets, you know, it's like SpaceX is flying the reusable rockets, and there is still an immense amount of infrastructure involved to have this, a pad that's running at that sort of efficiency. You're not just handing it over to Florida or wherever.

Yeah, exactly. And like, there's very good reasons why SpaceX doesn't employ this business model, but like, it, it does limit how far it's going to go. Yeah.

Are you guys— I know there's ITAR restrictions around Rocket Lab. So you do— you're nodding that you also have ITAR restrictions on these types of— are you limited on who you can sell these planes to?

Not quite ITAR because it's all made outside of the US. So there's no— there's no American knowledge, if you like, in the vehicle. But there are other restrictions like EAR. And of course, New Zealand has all kinds of export restrictions. You know, this is not going to get sent to North Korea.

Okay. Okay. So the— yeah, sorry, I messed up. I just— the ITAR stuff. I always associate it just because Rocket Lab ended up putting their headquarters in the US and, and yeah, I mean, but they're set up super complicated in that respect since they're making missiles and the US wanted to keep an eye on all that. Okay, so this is in how many? Okay, so if how many of these planes, like what if, what if 100 cities want to do? How many of these planes do you have?

Well, then we'll build 100 planes. And like in that respect, actually, Like, I think we're really well set up. So, um, we haven't talked at all about the InSpace propulsion stuff, but like, you know, we're already producing hundreds of thrusters for, for satellites. We've got 150 in orbit. We'll build about 50 prop systems for satellites this year. So like, we understand pretty well complex manufacturing. I would accept like propulsion systems is not the same as aircraft, but in the end it's all high-tech manufacturing and it's same same but different, if you like.

Um, you guys started in Christchurch, uh, technically in Delft, I suppose. In Delft. Okay.

Yeah. In the Netherlands.

When, but, and now you're in Auckland.

Yeah. Well, now we're headquartered in Christchurch.

Oh, you are in Christchurch. Yeah.

Again.

Okay. And is that where the engine manufacturing takes place?

Yeah. So, so like everything on the component level happens in Christchurch and then we send all those components over to the Netherlands and they get, uh, integrated there. So yeah, about 40% of the company's in Delft.

Okay. I underestimated the Netherlands aspect.

Yeah, I know, it's a huge part of it.

Okay.

Like on our own space propulsion side, European customers are about 70% of the business.

Is that— yeah, like why split things up? Is it to help with the European side of the business or why not just do everything in Christchurch?

Europe has a lot of expertise in aerospace in particular, like not just on the aircraft side, but the space side as well. And being close to your customer is super important. So that was really important for us, especially in the early days. Like lots of our, like our best first customers were all in Europe. Yeah, like I say, 70% of our business is there. Just being close to customers just makes life so much easier.

Okay, so you're putting these thrusters on European satellites?

Yeah, yeah, mostly. Yeah.

Okay, and again, sorry, just for people who are not from the space industry, I mean, these thrusters help, they go on the satellites, they help move the satellites around. Avoid collisions, change their orbits for whatever they're trying to do. There's a bunch of, obviously there's companies historically that have made these sorts of thrusters, but there's a huge, right? There's a, like what's going on in the thruster land right now? Because there's, there's a bunch of startups in the US that, that are doing thrusters. And then there's you guys. There's, um, this is stuff that's been around for a while. Obviously we have a ton more satellites coming.

We're all, yeah, exactly. We're all just scrambling to meet that demand. Like, like when Dawn started in 2000, Um, like when it really got off the ground in 2018, I think there was like 4,000 operational satellites or less.

And now there's probably about— well, in low Earth orbit there's probably about 2,500, and then yeah, whatever else was, was further out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now there's like 12,000. Yeah, now given like most of that's Starlink for sure. Yeah, yeah. But like a lot of other stuff is coming. Like Starlink is just Earth— uh, is just comms. But, um, there's about 3 different flavors of Earth observation that are coming. There's probably 4 or 5 at least major strategic, like, areas that want their own independent system. So, you know, you're talking multiples of these 2 numbers, you know, it's going to be at least 20 megaconstellations of various flavors.

Yeah.

Um, they're all going to need at least thousands of satellites, if not tens of thousands.

Yeah.

So like what's happening in the propulsion world, everyone's scrambling to meet this scale, man. Yeah. Like, like it's a real challenge.

And, and so like Tom Mueller, who was one of the co-founders of SpaceX, he left to do Impulse Space. Their whole mission is things like this and then moving bigger objects around. Um, what is the advantage of your propulsion systems over some of these others?

Well, like, um, so Tom, like that, they're all about bringing stuff out to geo, like direct geo insertion, right?

They're doing these like throughout the solar system missions too.

And yeah., and, and, and one of their big selling points they talk about is, um, is being fast. Like, you know, typically it takes 3 months or more to get your thing from a geotransfer orbit out to actual geo, and 3 months of time for, for one of these satellites is worth at least $10 million. Like, they earn $40 million a year. So time is money. We're kind of the same in that we, we're bringing, we're bringing back chemical propulsion to low Earth orbit. Lots of them went to electric propulsion because it was cheaper and easier, but it is very slow. Now, especially as the price of getting to orbit comes down, the cost of, if you like, of getting a less efficient chemical system to space goes down. But the value of that time is still very high. The value of space is very high. So instead of having a propulsion system on for months every time you want to change the orbit, you know, you can just do a maneuver in seconds. Yeah.

Okay. And so, so, and that's you get this, this higher volume of energy by doing chemical propulsion.

Yep, yep, exactly.

And what's—

there's, there's—

this is a bit of space where I'm bad, um, because it hasn't historically— some of the chemical propulsion been these like hypergolics that are—

yeah, exactly—

super horrible things.

Yeah, that was such a big reason to go away from it because it's just super toxic, super nasty. Like, you don't want to put this on hundreds of satellites at a time because if anyone leaks, like, it's a, it's a major deal. And You know, statistically speaking, all systems leak at some point. So, yep, great reason to go to electric where you're just dealing with xenon or krypton. It's like you have a small leak, it's not a big deal. That system won't work, but it won't, you know, be an issue for everyone else. We use nitrous oxide and propylene, which, like nitrous oxide, you literally can breathe. It's not toxic.

Everybody loves it.

Yeah. And the other one's pretty much barbecue gas, so I wouldn't recommend breathing it, but it's not going to kill you that quickly. So, um, yeah, super accessible, super easy, still very high performance. We actually get better ISP performance than, uh, hydrazine monopropellant systems, which is what's typical in these smaller systems.

Okay. Um, so what, like, cause I just always hear, so what, what is a hypergolic? What, what does that mean?

It just means as soon as you put them together, they'll ignite.

Okay.

Like you don't need to light it.

So, so like, why are you, it's, it, it was, this was always presented to me before as like a, You had to do that or you did electric and there was no, like, the people—

Yeah, yeah, there really wasn't any other option.

But you guys figured, you figured out some recipe that people had missed or?

Well, like, nitrous wasn't new. Like, students had been using nitrous for ages. It's just that, man, the aerospace industry is so antiquated at its core.

Okay.

Like, everything's just so old school. Like, hypergolics have been used since the '60s and no one had done particularly new propellants actually in space for ages.

Okay.

So like, yeah, we, there were students playing around with nitrous decades ago. We were the first to just say, hey, we can actually do this properly.

You're like, let's take it from the party.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Let's get serious about this. Um, we, we can use this, um, be really effective, um, prove that spark ignition like works in cars millions of times without changing spark plugs. We can do that in space too. Like there's definitely a bit of working that out and making it appropriate for satellites, if you like.

Okay.

And proving that it works in space. But like, you know, in 2018, when we had this massive dream of like, we need to reinvent all of space transportation because there's 50,000 satellites that have got to get launched and the current methods just don't work. Like, that was like a dream that required billions of dollars of investment. We couldn't start there, but it was like, hey, there's this smaller problem of replacing hydrazine with nitrous. That's probably like a million dollars of investment. And then there's real, like, we can make a real tangible single step towards this grander goal.

Okay. And so, so that was the starting point, you know, and all the, the hydrazine, I think, as I understand it, like all comes from Russia and China.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tons of it comes from China. I think, I think that there are US suppliers working to establish that now because yeah, that's like a major strategic non-dependence issue.

Yeah. Like, like so many things.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Just put it on the list.

Yeah, just keep doing this. Okay. Oh, and so, so that business has been up and running as you sold dozens upon dozens of these. So I mean, I don't know, like which one becomes the bigger business over time or you just hope they both— is like one more of the focus than the other.

I would say we're very opportunistic about both of them. Like, both of them have big macro tailwinds. Like when SpaceX started the Transporter flights, that was just like flicked a switch. Suddenly everyone needed responsive, low-cost propulsion because everyone was going to get dumped out in these orbits. Like, you know, they were the bus to space.

Yeah.

And then they needed to go where they actually wanted to go. And we could deliver low-cost systems with a low lead time., that actually worked. Like, we had good, um, flight heritage at that point. And so, yeah, like, we, like, sales just turned on. And, and if Starship becomes a thing, then that's going to get 10x'd. Like, the, the price is going to go down even more. People are going to need even more propulsion. Um, so yeah, like, like, that's going to be huge for us. Um, on, on, on the flip side, the space plane is fucking cool. It's pretty, it's pretty cool. It's not hard to sell, that's for sure. Um, you know, like we went from that being a, okay, this is a technology demonstrator for an even more scalable way to get to space, um, like to, to orbit. Um, and now we've had this incredible like technology pull of not just people wanting to use the vehicle, but people wanting to buy the vehicle. And it's like, oh crap, we have to commercialize this. Um, the other huge macro tailwind there is, um, is like US defense spending in hypersonics has gone from like $200 million in 2018 to like $7 billion today. Like that's just such a crazy change that we definitely didn't predict that. And that's part of why the underlying demand for, you know, a highly reusable, high-performance aircraft essentially is now useful. So it's, it's pretty trivial to upgrade this vehicle from Mach 3.5 to Mach 5.5 or whatever is actually attractive for them.

And so context there, and correct me if I'm wrong, please. Turns out China's been doing all this hypersonic research, appears to be years ahead of the United States. So the Defense Department has been spending gobs and gobs of money to suddenly run a bunch of hypersonic tests. And so you have this vehicle that flies very fast into the edge of space and can help us test things.

Exactly. It's pretty useful for that. Like pretty, pretty useful for like, especially on the research side, like just giving you unfettered access to these domains where you can actually like in a, basically fly like a— it's a flying wind tunnel, essentially.

Okay.

Like if you had some avionics or some materials or an engine component or whatever you want to get to this domain, like you can kind of do that in a wind tunnel on the ground or you can do it in simulation, but it's not the same as doing it for real. So you actually need these, these three things to have a really effective, like, design capability.

Okay. I don't want to put you on the spot, but I kind of do want to put you on the spot. Yeah, go for it. Okay. Because we're like, hinting around this bigger version of the plate, or you're saying it's possible, but yep, the other one is doing a lot of business. I mean, the tea leaves I'm reading are either that, like, you kind of don't want to announce something specific in terms of like what it would look like or timing, or, um, maybe you have some big surprise coming, or you need some big pocket of money to like make that happen.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Um, Surprisingly, you don't need big pockets of money because this is such attractive stuff for customers that they'll mostly pay for development. Like, that's, that's a really important part. Like, if you, if what we're doing is not attractive enough that customers will pay for it, don't do it.

Okay.

Um, but yeah, like, there definitely will be a vehicle between Aurora and like a two-stage-to-orbit concept.

Okay. And it's just, it's just you guys are just not telling us exactly. What it will look like or when yet.

Yeah, I think once we have that properly defined, so it's not shifting around every 6 months, then we'll tell the world about it.

Well, and I, I, I don't mean to, um, I don't mean this to sound as, uh, puffy as, as it is, but you guys have like always really impressed me because it's, it's like you were a company again founded by really young people in New Zealand. You've done like nothing but kind of deliver on the things that you set out to do, like you said, with the engines. I mean, you've actually built them, flown them, they're in space. Um, the— I can't remember the exact timeline you had for the plane, but I just remember clicking on the internet every now and then. I'm always like, oh, they did it.

Yeah.

So like, how big is the company now?

Uh, you're about 120 people.

120 people. So they're, they're— I don't know, at least you are, uh, You're keeping the New Zealand track record of like people doing what they say they're gonna do, uh, in aerospace, like, on— yeah, good, good stead.

I mean, it's big shoes to fill.

Yeah, but, um, but this like never happens in aerospace though now.

Well, like, maybe it— like, come on, I mean, maybe you should be telling us why. Actually, you're the one that studied this a whole bunch.

Well, I mean, I think it's just— it's like, uh, there's so many factors. I, I think once, once you any sort of startup-y commercial part of space. I think part of, part of it's like kind of like lying and then part of it's optimism and everyone's just, they get really excited and it's like, oh, we can do that. You know, that it always just takes longer than you thought. And then, and then I saw it happen with the rocket companies every time, which was that you get 90% of the way there in like a year. And then, and then you think, you think you're 6 months from flying and then it turns out that last 10% takes like 2 to 4 years.

I mean, That's like standard 80/20 rule, right? Like 20% of the effort gets you 80% of the way there and the other 80% gets you 20% of the way there.

But it was funny to watch people who had like been through this before still talk themselves. So I don't think it's lying. I think it's like some kind of self-delusion of hope.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like to some extent, like a little bit of that is necessary, but like at some point it also becomes hubris, right? And, and you get burnt eventually by hubris.

Well, cause you start running into the thing where the money. It's, it's, it's, yeah, it's, if, if you've, if you've also fooled yourself, um, then you're in trouble. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and like the money side of this is important, right? Because if you run out of money, it doesn't matter how much dedication you have, like it'll, it'll fall over.

Yeah. Um, well, tell, and like, okay, so I found this really interesting because I, when I was working on the book and the movie, I got to go to New Zealand a bunch of times and So Rocket Lab was— I mean, Peter's from the South Island, but for all intents and purposes, it's always been an Auckland affair. And but most of the aerospace startups that I was running to were based in Christchurch on the South Island. If you've never been to Christchurch, it's a beautiful city. It seems like a wonderful place to, like, raise a family. I mean, it's smallish, but it has like It's got everything we need. Yeah, it's got this cool vibe to it. It's got good restaurants. It's like, um, I don't know, it just, I really enjoyed it there. How I tell people this all the time, and now maybe I'm about to like call myself a liar, but I mean, there does seem to be a legitimate aerospace scene in and around Christchurch and in New Zealand more broadly. Is this true? Yes.

Yes. I can attest to it. Yeah. Um, Yeah, and I don't— hard to say exactly what it is, like what draws people in, but like I feel like it is a really nice-sized city, like that really helps, just easy to get across and easy to do stuff. Yeah, but, um, there's something about the mentality of the people as well, like there's just a real pioneering spirit. Like I feel like it kind of just comes from us not being a particularly mature country, you know, like everyone just barely came to the country within the last 150 years. So, um, we're all like migrants to some extent. Um, but, um, of course, with the exception of the, the like local tribes, but even there, um, they're very entrepreneurial, they're very engaged with, um, you know, even, um, even specifically with aerospace, you know, like the place that we're flying out of now, um, Tāwhaki is a joint venture between the local iwi, the local tribe, and the New Zealand government. So like even they're super plugged into what's going on.

Yeah.

Where is that?

Is that on the South Island?

Is it near Christchurch? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like just an hour south of our headquarters.

How many aerospace companies do you think there are in New Zealand? Like a handful or are we up to like a dozen?

Oh, um, companies over 10 people is probably still only a handful. Yeah, yeah, that's still pretty small.

Yeah, but I, you know, I, I don't think I'm fully wrong. I think if you go United States, if we're talking like space startups, especially of consequence, I mean, Europe will have a few. Yeah, um, okay, on the satellite side, you know, it gets slimmer pickings, um, as you get into rockets, things that fly. Like, I would, I would kind of put New Zealand after the United States, I think, with like most interesting, at least like kind of bigger, different ideas, I think.

Yeah. I mean, I'll reserve judgment. I'll take the compliment.

But I, you know, it's definitely close. And, and, and we're talking about a country with like, what, I mean, how many million people?

5 million.

5 million.

Small.

You know, and, and, okay. And I forget China. China's its own thing. They, they, they definitely have a lot going on as well.

But like, I, I do have to give the Dutch arm of Dawn Aerospace a lot of credit though, because like this wouldn't have happened if it was just a New Zealand company.

Yeah.

And like, I think that really speaks to the, like, like we've been able to be so scrappy and so forward leaning into our customer base because we have been close to customers. Like that's one of the real challenges in New Zealand. Like we, there's a ton of good reasons to be there, like the open airspace. Sees, you know, entrepreneurial spirit and whatnot. Although there's a bunch of that too in Europe if you find the right people. But there's not the same scale in New Zealand. Like, space is still a capital-intensive business. Like, you do need customers early on to verify that your product actually works.

Yeah.

It's also like a highly strategic business. Like, New Zealand doesn't have a whole lot of actual space operations itself, so there's not a whole lot you can do there with with the New Zealand government directly as a customer. But Europe, man, Europe is turning on the taps now. You know, NATO just recently announced increasing defense spending from 2.5% to 5% of GDP, which is massive.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, they, they should because, uh, yeah, they got problems. They've got problems. And, and Arjen Spaass, God bless them, um, could use some help, um, from, from some newcomers. Um, the And then the Dutch, oddly, yes, like good at space. There's, there's a company, at least I don't know if they've changed the name, was unfortunately named ISIS, I think that did that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, but were quite good at integrating satellites.

They have leaned into that. Yeah, yeah, we do a bunch of work with them. Um, another great—

They've like, they've, how did they lean into the ISIS, the ISIS brand? They just fully—

Oh, they, um, Like, I remember when that happened and, like, well, this must have been like 2015 or '16 or something.

Yeah, maybe a little later. I can't remember.

Yeah. Yeah. But it was like, ooh, that's awkward. And then they just kind of rolled with it. And then they're like, look, any marketing's good marketing. No one's going to forget us now. It's like, yeah, I guess those are right.

What are they? I remember running into them in India. So they just help build satellites or put them on the rocket?

They've actually got a bunch of different businesses, but their main ones is, like, selling, like, like they will sell you launch slots on other vehicles. So I think they originally did it. I hope I'm not misquoting or misrepresenting, but on PSLV, the Indian launch vehicle.

That's where I met them in Sriharikota on a PSLV launch. Yeah.

Yeah. So they make like tons of CubeSat deployers. That's, that's big business for them. And then actually selling like that. Then they did a bunch of components like radios and whatnot, and now they do full satellites as well.

Okay. Okay. How much so? And obviously there, this aerospace activity and I mean, this has to be some knock-on effect from Rocket Lab.

Like Dawn is a knock-on effect or?

Well, I mean, it's just Rocket Lab doing well. I mean, must have helped spur on.

It's helping everyone. Yeah. But yeah, like, like I think it's really just indicative of just this massive macro tailwind for, for space. Like, people would just— it's still really early days in the space industry in general, and people are just starting to click on what the, the actual core, um, like, that there is a ton of value there. And we're starting to get huge amounts of value out of some particular things, like, you know, Starlink is huge value out of, out of broadband internet from space. But there's tons of other things that could be it's kind of like the internet in the early days, like in the '90s, could, like, everyone knew it was a big thing, but no one could quite put their finger on what was going to be the big thing. Like, do you know, is it going to be data centers or is it going to be asteroid mining?

I was about to ask you because everything is, it's always, it's always communications and imaging and then some weird defense-related stuff. Right. But then this is, I mean, this is a question I ask myself and that I get asked all the time. Right. Because We're about to put up all these thousands upon thousands of satellites, but a lot of that is, as you outline, is just to like sort of almost just have a level communications playing field. And then, and then some of it imaging. And then it's always, it's always like, wow, this is the internet. What's the, what's the next big giant thing?

But you know, I don't, I don't want, I don't even want to speculate on that. The, the only thing I really hold conviction is that it's going to be a big deal. It's going to be a bigger deal next year than it is this year. And that's going to continue., and I know they're going to need to get to space and I know they're going to need to move around in space. So, hey, we're building rocket motors.

Well, I like to be able to pick some picks and shovels. Part of this I think is this is the good spot to be at some point, especially for the rocket companies. You know, the money has to keep, keep going. Yeah.

But, but the next realization is that the scale that we're talking about is not like 2x or 5x of where we are. It's probably not even 10x. It's probably closer to 100x. Yeah. So like everything needs, everything kind of breaks like, you if you've ever built businesses, you know, everything breaks at like 3 and 5x or 3 and 10x, depending on who you ask. So we see that everything is going to break as, as we scale up, but like we need this scale. What precedes scale is reusability. And what precedes reusability is reliability. Like as in you, your thing will not be reusable if it breaks one in every 100 times. You know, you're never going to get beyond 100 reuses. You're never going to get to scale if it's not a truly reusable system. Like just mass manufacturing shit doesn't work.

Yeah.

Like it's just not, it's, it's not a way to scale the industry 100x. Once you get to scale though, you start getting statistical significance in what's going on. Like obviously if you've reused a thing, you've now proven that it works. If you've reused it 100 times, you now understand where all the like niche failures happen. Like the, the stuff that's kind of unlikely to happen but does get you every now and then, you start addressing those problems and then you get even more reliable. And this, this actually becomes a flywheel, you know, reliability, reusability, scalability. And that's really the common thread through everything that we're doing, like whether it's on the in-space propulsion side or the space plane side, that drive, like that cycle drives every bit of Dawn.

So like, well, okay, on that point, I mean, you know, we had the space shuttle, which was supposed to be our reusable way to space. And then we had this huge gap until SpaceX figured out how to land these rockets. Why, like, why didn't, why didn't somebody try what you guys have figured out before?

Um, yeah, really good question. Like, I, I asked myself, why didn't somebody try to do SpaceX in, in like the '70s?

Yeah.

Like, you know, vertical landing is like arguably Apollo technology, and open cycle LOX-Kero engines and aluminum structures are also not particularly fancy.

The US military did try. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, but I'm I guess the answer is mostly market conditions and like incentive structures within these large like aerospace primes.

Yeah.

Like they're just not incentivized to innovate like that. And in lots of cases, people have sort of said that they've actually been anti-innovation, like they have intentionally low bid on or like taken DARPA projects or whatever, gone 3 years into them and then they just scuttle them because like frankly they've got a good business. So why would you risk that?

So in what is— when we're talking about the performance on the space plane versus a jet, um, like, why is it that you're able to go so much faster? Is it— it's the engine?

And yeah, yeah, it's just the raw physics of rocket engines because you're using the liquids that we would use. Oh, just, just rocket engines are like, you know, um, A decent rocket engine is at least a thrust-to-weight ratio of 50. A really good one is like 150. Like the best jet engines are like 8 or 9.

Okay.

Like that's just, jet engines are just huge.

Yeah.

Right. The, and they're not that powerful and they get even less powerful as soon as you, you know, gain some altitude while a rocket engine gets more efficient as you gain altitude.

What else did you guys have to figure out to make this work? Um, like is, I'm sure there were a million hard parts, but what did you figure out that other people had not really looked at to put a jet engine on a plane and make it, a rocket engine on a plane and make this work?

Like a ton of technical stuff and actually figuring out how to certify it. Like we always talk about the whole innovation as 4 parts now. We used to think it was 3, now we realize it's 4. It's the technology, like the reusability. It's the infrastructure that you use, it's how you regulate it, and it's actually the business model as well. But if you kind of dive into the technology bit, to understand how to do that properly, you have to understand where you're going to be flying this from, airports, not necessarily spaceports, how you're going to license it, not necessarily as a rocket, probably as an aircraft if you can, and then how you're actually going to, like, what's the business model? We're not going to be operating it. Somebody else is going to be operating it. So every element of this is like, the answer is like an aircraft, you know, it's got to be designed like an aircraft engine. It's got to have safe failure modes like an aircraft engine so that you can certify it. It's got to be super reusable and maintainable and whatnot. So you can operate it from an airport and have somebody else do that maintenance. Like it's like these four things factor into every other bit, like they're all interrelated.

Does it have a, like a parachute or anything? What happens if something goes wrong?

No, I mean, if you have an engine failure, just like an aircraft, what do you do if you have an engine failure in an aircraft?

You're gonna—

You glide back home and land.

Yeah. Hopefully.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like we've had things go wrong. We've had plenty of stuff go wrong. Like we've had engine failures and, um, and come back down and landed. We've had brake failures on the ground. We've had it go through a fence. We've had it like, you know, we've smashed the plane up a bit, but you fix it up and fly it again. And That's kind of, um, normal for aircraft development, right? Like, that's kind of a fast iterative development of aircraft. And that's, that's where like these, um, many, many layers of safety save you so often. Cause like once, once you establish, um, uh, like a base level of capability of being able to fly this thing, then you can start pushing the limits. And then, you know, you maybe push a limit and you break a thing, but you fall back to that basic level of capability, which is like at least gliding back home. Like even if you have an engine failure, you can at least get it back on the ground and it's not going to end up in the drink or something.

How many times can you run the engine?

Oh, uh, like it's basically infinitely restartable.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you really are, Oklahoma will probably, if things go right, just be reusing the one plane over and over and over.

Yeah. I mean, like there's parts in it that you swap out, like there's seals and there's catalyst packs and whatnot that are like life items. So like you'll be refurbishing parts of the engine every 5 or 10 flights or so. But like, you know, it's a couple of hours to do that work. It's not a big deal.

And then what, they get some software package that you guys make to, to launch it?

Like they'll have a pilot, like we'll train a pilot. Like there's a lot of automation there.

But yeah, so the whole thing is not automated. There's a pilot that is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like walk me through the flight process.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So currently, like, we have everything at our HQ in Christchurch. We pack it all up into some trailers. We drive out to our launch site about an hour south. We unpack everything. We'd usually take 6 hours or so to unpack everything. We could fly that day, but mostly we'd just come back and fly the next day. We do basic vehicle checkouts. It's about an hour or so to do those checkouts, and we do propellant loading. Takes a couple of hours. Yeah, you'd normally then like roll it out onto the runway and then you'd do all your like regular traffic calls and whatnot and coordinate with air traffic control. And then like one time we've been waiting on the runway and we had to wait for like a Jetstar flight to actually go overhead and then we pulled in behind them. But yeah, then you kind of like get the go, you count down from 10 and then light it up. And Iago, our pilot, flies it. Um, yeah, you know, it rips down the runway, takes off, pulls up into about a 30 or 40 degree climb, and then it just kind of like pulls up and away into about 85 degree climb. Wow. Through 50,000 feet or so, we get supersonic. And then on this particular aircraft, um, burnouts at about 60-odd thousand feet, and then we coast up to 80,000 feet. On the full performance vehicle, we'll have way more propellant on board and high thrust engine, burnout will be more like about 120,000 or 130,000 feet, and then we'll coast up to over 300,000 feet, like 100 kilometers.

I should have asked you this sooner. This is cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's pretty exciting. But the funny part is, I mean, like once you're above 120,000 feet or about 30-ish kilometers, you're kind of above the effective atmosphere. Like there's not enough air, like even though you're doing Mach 3, there's just not enough air flowing over the wings for you to have substantial control anymore. So you, you know, you're, for all intents and purposes, you're kind of in space at that point in terms of your aerodynamics, and you have to start controlling the vehicle with what's called a reaction control system. So it's like little rocket motors in the, um, in the extremities of the vehicles, on the nose and the wingtips and whatnot. Oh, so that's how you control your attitude, we call it, or like direction.

They must be pretty small.

Yeah, yeah. Tiny, tiny. Only like, uh, about 80mm long.

Oh wow. Okay. Okay, cool. And then in the pilot, like how much of this is automated or the, or, and when is the pilot controlling things?

So through, through our R&D testing, like it's totally, um, call it manually piloted with computer assist. Like there's computers doing all kinds of like dampening of, of like wind and whatnot.

Okay.

But longer term, this can be pretty much fully autonomous.

You would think so, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Like, this is all automatable.

But in Oklahoma, they will have— they'll have a trained pilot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so for certification reasons, like, that's pretty important to have a pilot. Like, it's way— it's just way harder to certify a fully automated vehicle. But that doesn't mean we don't want to automate stuff because it does make the life way easier, like life way easier for the pilot, right? You're just going to have a more reliable aircraft if more is automated.

Okay. Okay. Do people come out and watch your flights?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have, I mean, for now, friends and family mostly.

Yeah.

But yeah, a person comes out.

Like, is Peter back? Does the average New Zealander know him at this point?

I would say so. It'd be getting pretty close to like household name too. Yeah.

Do you think he'd get recognized on the street?

Oh yeah, for sure. He's pretty Pretty, pretty characteristic. Yeah.

Yeah. Because the last time I was there, even when I was like in Invercargill where he's from, you know, people are like, I know Russell Beck, his dad. I was like, Jesus, man, the guy's, you know, sent a lot of stuff to space. It's pretty good.

Oh, maybe people in Auckland know more. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah.

And so, and what is the next, what does the next like year look like for you guys? What are your hopes and dreams?

Yeah. So we're basically redesigning the vehicle, like not to make it bigger or anything, but just to to make now the optimal version. Like, that first version was literally the first ground-up vehicle design we had done. So now it's about making an optimal version of Aurora. So yeah, it's going to go from a maximum takeoff weight of about 250 kilograms up to 400-ish. Um, high thrust engine, and that, you know, takes us from 25 kilometers altitude up to over 100.

Okay.

Yeah.

Are there any— you know, we're in this phase where there seem to be It's like from the first batch of rocket, rocket startups, some went by the wayside and the survivors went on. And then we actually have kind of like the second wave of some people trying to do things a little bit differently. I don't know, when you look out into both kinetic launch and rocket startup land, does anyone catch your attention as having sort of like an interesting approach? Doesn't mean it has to like totally work. Just as like caught your eye.

I feel like we're just like, I'm paying less and less attention to that world because I feel like we're more and more in the aircraft world.

Yeah.

Like the, like the, the, I'm, I guess I'm paying more attention to like the strato launchers and the, um, like Hermeus and, and, um, Venus is an interesting company in lots of ways too.

Um, which one's Venus? Hermeus?

Yeah. Venus has been building like a rotation detonation engine. For— okay, yeah, use on hypersonic vehicles and whatnot. Um, because like, I just feel like there's, there's so much energy momentum in that particular industry, even, even more so than space specifically. Yeah, like, like, did you hear about all these, um, EOs that came out from, um, from Trump, uh, about, uh, like abolishing the ban on supersonic flight over land?

Yes.

And, and the EO on, uh, Um, like drone dominance as well, like about, um, bringing through a whole bunch of like new licensing for eVTOL aircraft and, and like unmanned aerial systems. Um, like getting that stuff pushed through FAA, like that's way more important for my world. Like that's huge because like with so much of that is what we have done in New Zealand already. That's about bringing rockets to a truly aircraft world. And that totally speaks to that. It's like, It was like when that, well then all that stuff came out, it was like, shit, we've done all that. And this is a clear signal that, you know, there's a need for this in the US. So we can bring all this to the US now.

So you mean when you say we've done all that, you mean, are you saying like the New Zealand regulatory bodies have already paved the way for all?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But because of you guys and because of some other.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I think we're one of the only companies in the world to have of, uh, like a UAV that's licensed to fly beyond line of sight, above 60,000 feet at supersonic speeds. There's actually no limit to speed under our certification. So like, yeah, we've pushed the boat way out, and we've already done all this stuff. Like, we've shown that we can integrate with other airspace users. Like, we don't have danger zones and whatnot. Yeah, where we're flying, like, we've done this in uncontrolled airspace. So, you know, like I said, the story where there was a Jetstar flight flying overhead and we had to like wait for them to clear and then we took off and flew and like we cut through the airspace where they just were at like 500 knots of ascent speed.

And that was all fine. Yeah. Yeah, everyone knew what was going on. Does Oklahoma have to do anything special still to—

Yeah, so we'll have to license in the States, obviously, to be able to fly there. So it's still, you know, we still have to figure out exactly how this is going to be licensed in the States. But so much of what we've done in New Zealand has proven like that path and like lots of the certification basis, like lots of the methods for establishing that, that what we're doing is safe are FAA standard methods for, for assessing that. So, you know, it won't be a 1-to-1 translation, but having set a lot of precedent in New Zealand should help us. Okay. And, you know, these EOs certainly help a whole bunch as well.

Yeah, it seemed like Boom kind of talked Trump into pushing the Supersonic. Yeah, thanks, Blake. Yeah, Blake was quick. I think Trump was in office for like a couple hours. He was on top of that. And then the eVTOL stuff, I mean, it's pretty crazy because if you look at like Joby and Archer, I think they're going to fly even though they're all made here.

Yep.

They're gonna fly in Dubai before they fly in the United States. And, and then, you know, we just did a piece on Zipline, which is like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Designed, actually manufactured in San Francisco, you know, and then mostly flown in Rwanda or something.

Well, they used to fly in Rwanda and then now in the States.

Yeah.

You know, they're doing tests in Arkansas and Dallas and like, we can't fly them in California. And, um, California, God bless, we really are getting self-defeating at some point when, when you have a company manufacturing stuff in South San Francisco. I mean, I went there and saw it with my own eyes and we still, you can't even fly here. And then, you know, the eVTOL stuff, um, God, we've spent, you know, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars of US capital all these years of innovation. And then, and then I'm sure it's going to fly first in Dubai.

Yeah, that's true. But I'm pretty positive about the outlook there. Like I think I think once these technologies demonstrate that they truly are transformational and way, way better, then usually the world finds a way to make it happen in the places where you can extract the most value out of those things, like where there is the most good to be done. Like, we'll figure out a way. Like, Oklahoma might be the first, but they definitely won't be the last to have one of our rocket-powered aircraft in the States.

Okay. Stefan, I feel like you're meant to be here because the— I— your first name, I had to— I watched like 12 interviews just to make sure I said it right, to find you introducing yourself, because everybody else seems to get your first name wrong. But we have Stephen Curry.

You got it. Yeah. Nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. True.

Yeah. So this is— this— you've come to the right place. Thank you so much for coming and spending time with us. And do we— did we have two elements of show and tell? No, it was the two parts of the plane. There was the bottom and the top. Okay. Yeah, you guys wanted to make sure we, uh, we got to everything. Um, thank you so much. It's so fascinating what you guys are doing, and I'm so glad to see it's all going so well. And, and I know we've been talking for a long time now. I mean, I'm going to come out, we're going to do a New Zealand— it's been— so New Zealand was the We shot a pilot of Hello World in Sweden, and then New Zealand was our first episode that we shot, kind of like once we'd committed to doing this TV series. And that was like 8 years ago.

Yeah, I was going to say, that's ages, right?

Yeah. And then since then, there's so many fascinating startups. And then also, we didn't even talk about, but New Zealand is like, it's like the test place for both software and hardware. All these, these internet companies.

Yeah, yeah.

Because you have this contained English-speaking population. If like LinkedIn or Google has a new feature, they'll like test it.

We're like becoming the world's sandbox. Yeah.

And then I see every time somebody has a flying car or something.

Yeah, Whisker's out there.

Yeah. I guess on the hardware part, it's just because you can be a little more remote and—

Yeah. So specifically for us, like it's, yeah, it's having a range. It's like essentially a hypersonic test range an hour south of where we, build them. Like, that's, you know, the US goes to like Guam or Australia mostly, or like, you know, flies basically in rocket ranges like off Vandenberg or whatnot. Yeah. So like, that's way harder than we have it.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I have to, I want to get out there. I, I miss Christchurch and, all right. And then we'll, we'll, so we'll come out and we'll do an episode of the show and then so we could come, we could come see a flight.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Okay. All right. Well, we'll do it. Thank you so much for coming in the studio. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, no, thanks for having me on. It's been good.

Core Memory is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance. The show is produced by David Nicholson and me. Our theme music is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited by the John Sortland. Thank you all for listening. As mentioned, the show is sponsored by E1 Ventures. Thanks.