Madison C. Feehan - Space Copy

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom podcast. We have Madison Sefian with us today. She's a founder and CEO at Spacecopy. It's a rapidly deployable 3D printer that turns local material, soil, sand, scrap into critical infrastructure. It's super impressive. At first, when I talked with you, Madison, I was like, yeah, I can understand that and I can potentially back that as an investor. You're a former NASA— that was also impressive— advisor to UN COPUOS, or whatever that is. You can explain it. And G100 Woman in Aerospace and Aviation. So welcome to PodMad. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're up to.

Thanks, Charles. I'm really happy to be here. So yeah, UN COPUOS, let me dive into that first. United Nations Committee on Peaceful Use of Outer Space. It is one of many long acronyms for organizations that I've worked for, volunteered with, It's right at the section of interoperability. So trying to figure out business, academia, government, cross-border, how those all work together internationally. I mean, current geopolitical ties make that very fun. And I don't mean to take humor in that. It's actually a really fun thing to do. And it's almost, almost as fun as my actual job, which is putting 3D printers on the moon and other crazy environments, both on Earth and off Earth.

It's fun because it's complicated, right? And folks like you love complicated stuff.

Kind of.

Is that the one-liner?

Yeah, definitely. I started my career very, very early in like astrophysics and planetary science at NASA, which not a lot of people can say that that's where they started and that's a subject matter that they even want to dive into. I never even knew that I wanted to do it until I really got started. So I feel really privileged for the opportunity, but at the same time, it's tough stuff.

But atoms are easier to move than humans, right? So that's the part that I get less. It's like, fun shirt. Okay, for how long have you been doing that? Because humans in politics is hard to crack and is very frustrating.

It is. You gotta be able to sway people with the mission and the vision. So I guess actually, you know what? Let me put it this way, we're both moving atoms and we're actually moving people because we have to move people to build a business like this. And it takes a lot for people to understand and connect the dots of what we do. But once they do, then they're able to like dive into it headfirst.

Interesting. Tell me about your full background. So the time at NASA and the time you decided to start that company, what prompted you to be like, yeah, I need to take this in my your own hands because NASA is not gonna have it go forward.

So I started at NASA when I was 16 years old and didn't have a lot of field experience. I knew the basics, but I wasn't classically trained, was not an engineer. Um, started there working with people that were 2, 3 times my age, got great experience, like the absolute top-tier mentorship, and I was working through various different program offices as a non-civil servant, which basically means, you know, I'm Canadian by nature and I was working remotely for the most part, but consulting for Kennedy Space Center, Marshall Space Flight Center, Goddard Space Flight Center. I got to be one of the early contributors to the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is about to fly, I think, in the next year or so. So it's a really exciting full circle moment for me. I was part of a program office that was responsible for funding the small businesses and the university student ideas that were coming in and out of the doors at NASA. So anything that was like leading edge, deciding whether it gets funded this fiscal year or not, was kind of my role. I did that for 6 years. About halfway through, I got the opportunity to start Space Copy. The concept for 3D printing in space was something that I was working on back in 2017. It was for 3D printing on Mars, which seemed completely out there, but maybe not after the SpaceX IPO. Now, looking back at it, there's so many cool things that I wish I would've known back then, but I'm really glad of the journey that I took. So I started Space Copy 4 years ago. The prompt was, Somebody from Techstars actually saw what I was working on. I was trying to push this whole 3D printing in space initiative through some NASA projects and some open source funding opportunities, some student challenges, like competitions and things, and had the opportunity to demonstrate on a more international platform online. And somebody had just headhunted us and said, you know what, That looks awesome. Why don't you move to Saudi Arabia and then like go and try and do this? And I was like, what do you mean? And then they said, you know what, it's the Accelerator program. We're gonna run you through program for a few months. You're gonna go out there for just a little bit. You're gonna go demo this in front of investors. And if it takes, we're gonna give you a little bit of funding to get this incorporated. And that is the wild journey that brought us to Space Copy.

But you were always entrepreneurial, right? Like you had this homeschooling business and this jewelry business before that.

Yeah, so I was personally homeschooled throughout the, like, junior high, high school part of my life, and that's what really got me to, like, hone in on science as a subject because it was something I was interested in. But I don't think, you know, a classic public school situation would have really permitted me to dive into it as deep as I did. But during that time and shortly thereafter, I tried to take all the knowledge and resources that I'd collected to form a small business called Learn Resources for homeschooling, and then another one that was called Madison Carolyn Fine Art, where I was creating jewelry, custom art pieces. And originally I thought that was the career I was going to go down, is get a business degree and stick to the fine arts industry. But I was really fortunate again, like, having that opportunity to go work at NASA completely changed my perspective and I do kind of like a mental review in my head once a year of kind of where everything has brought me and the crazy butterfly effect of it. And I wouldn't have predicted it. If you would've told me 5 years ago that I'd be running a space company, I would've said absolutely not.

Who are your parents and how was homeschooling for you? Was it a good ROI? Sure, on the brain side, what about the social side? And I'm asking this as a guy that had a daughter launching his AI school.

That's awesome. Um, so yeah, mom's a nurse, dad's a lawyer. Mom was my primary kind of like teacher and guide for homeschooling. I still had to follow a standardized curriculum that was like province-based. It's still the same textbooks that you'd learn with in a school. I still had to do biannual reports with accredited teachers from the province that would get assigned to me to make sure that I was learning and that I was up to speed with the rest of my peers. But it all worked out and I got to learn so many different things. I got to take more courses than I probably should have, but at the same time, that's what kept me honed in on the subjects I was most interested in. And then as for the social aspect of it, yeah, homeschooling is a different ecosystem. You have to make a deliberate effort to get out there and maintain social interaction, but there's ways to do that outside the classroom. And then beyond that, when I launched Space Copy, I went on this absolute road show where I was out at a trade show, out at a conference, because I started the company when I was 19. So it was shortly after the whole homeschooling days. And when you're at 50+ conferences a year, pushing yourself to just get up on a stage for the first time and talk about some wild concept like 3D printing in space. You get to figure out your social skills pretty quickly. So that was the rough concept of it.

Were your friends like intimidated by your presence? Like, holy shit, how am I ever gonna catch up to her?

Oh yeah, that still happens. So I'm a month away from graduating my bachelor's degree, which has been dragging on in the background during this whole thing. And I talk to people, um, who are my peers in age about what I'm working on, and they're just like, what? What did you just say?

Because you're like 23, right? Like today or something like that.

Yeah, I am. Yes.

Props, man. Like, good job, good start.

Thank you. Yeah, I love what I do. And it really pivoted too. It's like we started with Mars, then we went to the Moon. Like, we start from the most ambitious thing and then worked backwards into practicality. And now it's dual-use extreme environments on Earth and off Earth. So it opens me up to the chance to work on on so many cool things and the people that I've met, like not just the actual work, but the people is really what I pride myself on.

Yeah, 'cause the frontend, you need entertainment, you need like a bold mission, right? Like Elon style. What I like about you is that it's very rational and we've seen like people throw stuff that doesn't make any fucking sense to my brain. My brain operates also in science and atoms and rationality and just making good decisions, right? And I see some of these space moon companies nowadays, I'm like, yeah, no, how could that make sense? Too much entertainment, not enough rationality. And you're like, oh, I'm gonna build stuff from nothing basically on the moon. And that makes sense to me. It's like, okay, that's how we can scale civilization on the moon, which is close. And then eventually Mars, who knows? I haven't studied Mars that much. It seems to make sense, the moon. Is close. It's like, and distance is very costly in space, right? So, um, hey, before I get to that, like, curious about, uh, the space data centers. I've studied the, the equation. Do you think that most data centers will be in space from a physical standpoint? Does that make sense, or is this just an IPO boosting initiative?

I think right now, and this is like, I hate to call it a bullshit topic, but there's so much inflation around that subject matter. And I think like I talked about SpaceX IPO already, like just hinting at it. And it's kind of the same thing, like they're riding on the backs of each other. But I went down to NASA JPL a couple months ago and I talked to some guys there and I was like, what's going on with these data centers? Is this important? And When I got to really understand some of the perspective about long-duration space travel and the amount of data that scientists or companies that are spending millions and millions of dollars trying to send equipment to space, like they want to have live-streamed cameras and sensors and they need to be sending that feedback back to Earth so that they can do a maneuver, they can manipulate their system in order to prevent collision with something or just straight up extend the lifespan. Of the mission and achieve what they're trying to do. And for the Curiosity rover that was on Mars, the problem that NASA was running into is that Curiosity would take like 10,000 photos every single day, but it only had the data uplink to send like less than 100 of those photos per day.

Oh, shit.

The amount of backlog is madness. And that's one rover. When we're talking about like lunar civilization, we're gonna have hundreds of rovers and astronauts with body cams and like, no kidding, thousands and thousands of different things are gonna be recording and live streaming and sending feedback over to Earth. You're gonna need some data centers. So it opened my opinion to it. And my answer is, yeah, hell yeah, we're gonna need data centers in space.

At first, my brain was like, the cost of building shit in space is so high. And that's the case for what you're building, right? Let's build some fucking chips on the moon rather than on Earth, because building them and repairing them also is very costly. And just making it happen because it's the first time ever, obviously Elon's great at making happening, wild stuff happening for the first time ever. And then yeah, it's close to the sun, obviously, for energy, from an energy perspective. And then I guess it's easy to stream back on Earth from a satellite, right? Like easier than— could be easier potentially from Wi-Fi towers. It could make sense. But yeah, like you said, it's mostly— I think it's IPO circus nowadays. I want to double or triple or 10x click on what you mentioned, your vision of having people in space. It's exciting, obviously, like you generated serotonin in my brain just now. But how can that happen as quick as possible? It's super costly to bring humans to space, right? We haven't— crack the rocket part. Seems like if someone's gonna crack, it's gonna be SpaceX. But what is your vision to contribute to that and make it happen theoretically in the next 10 years?

Yeah, okay, so let me start this with numbers and then bring it back to actual strategy here. So right now, launch costs from Earth to the surface of the moon are $1.2 million US per kilogram.

Context.

Interesting. Yeah, it's madness. It's a lot less if you're just trying to get to low Earth orbit. It's eventually gonna work its way down to $10,000 per kilogram or maybe even less. But right now to the moon, it's one—

SpaceX says $100, right? Is that their numbers? $100 per kilogram? Is that what they're searching for?

Yeah, that's the eventual goal. That's the eventual goal, but it's not there yet. Like Starship is a baby. Like it's doing good, but we're not anywheres near that capacity for reusable rockets that are gonna be going up and down that frequently with high success rate. Success rates. So, um, context: 22,000 kilograms of supplies is what it takes to keep 4 astronauts alive in space for a year. Estimate.

That's a lot.

Times $1.2 million per kilogram. Okay, enter $6+ billion just to keep 4 people alive, and that's taxpayer dollars. No, absolutely not. You are not going to do that.

Instead, this is what my brain tells me: bots don't need food.

And that's like, yeah, but bots can break. And then whatever money that you're sending to try and do a maintenance or you're trying to like send out new bots and then you're creating all this space debris and junk on the moon. It's just plain stupid for lack of better term. There's no logic around the method in which you go from point A to point B without having some kind of local manufacturing source. So that's the vision is just the sheer cost. The other side of that cost on Earth is it costs, and this varies by location, but like take the Arctic or a remote desert climate or a combat zone, like something, a food truck breaks down the middle of the night and it's going to take you 6 weeks to get a repair part out to that remote site because the manufacturer is on a different continent and they've got to make the part and then it's got to get on a plane, it's got to drop to the near site and it's going to be driven out and then it's got to be installed, repaired. How many people are dying in the background while all this time is going by? How about we just have a 3D printer that fixes that problem in 6 hours or less instead of 6 weeks? And $10,000 per kilogram on Earth, $1.2 million in space, and the sheer amount of time and risk that it carries to not have local manufacturing, it just doesn't make sense to not do it. So that was the precipice on where we said at Space Copy, Hey, let's actually do something about this, but not— let's not be the kind of people that need to, you know, ship a feedstock or have this really certain material blend in order to be able to work in those environments, because that's just as bad. Like, if you have to ship out a specific material, that doesn't make sense either. So we built 3D printers that are rugged, and I mean rugged to work in the Arctic or rugged enough to work in zero gravity and can take whatever scrap landfill waste, space debris, lunar soil, whatever, and turn that to infrastructure.

Is the building in very tough condition a good wedge? It is from a PR standpoint. It is from, uh, you can prove it on Earth before the Moon. But from a time and like financial perspective, I mean, by nature dealing with governments to pay for these people or to these people wouldn't have the cash mostly to buy your stuff. Like that, it seems that this wedge is not the best, right? Like if you'd like to convince investors, what do you have to say about that?

I think if you're talking about just the Moon, then yeah, you don't have a really defensible moat because we're still probably a good 5 years out from having recurring revenue that's coming from a good, healthy space market. And NASA launched the Moon Base Program They're talking about all this different funding opportunities for going to the Moon. That's great. Like, we needed that a decade ago. But if you're trying to convince a venture capitalist that they're going to get an ROI in 5 to 7 years, you need to have a dual-use application here on Earth. So I think of that as saying, you know, Earth is a testbed for the Moon, but at the same time, scoping that outwards. Besides aerospace, there's defense, there's natural disaster sites, there's mining, there's remote construction. Those 4 elements alone in the United States, we're gonna call that expeditionary manufacturing. The money spent on the supply chains, the logistics, trying to get parts from point A to point B every time something breaks or there's a fire or a flood and you have to rebuild a house in some remote area, that's $79 billion a year that the United States government and small to medium-sized businesses are spending every single year on trying to solve that problem.

Nice. Now my brain is like, okay, the economics of that. I think we talked about it last time. Was it $30K that you charge per machine? And is there a way for you to Nespresso this model? That's how I would invest in you.

Yeah, so there's, um, we do different sized machines and then we do kind of like a plug and play with the customers because we do material processing, we do 3D printing, and then we have this robotic arm post-processing system that's fully automated. So it's a sit down with the customer and figure out, hey, what do you want? The fully worked, like, 1 cubic meter print system with all the fixings and all the automation, that retails for $1.5 million. And then if you want— Oh, nice.

So that's pretty far away.

If you want something that's like a desktop, we could do that for around $100 grand. And then if you're wanting to break that down into smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and just like, just brassboard printing with multiple different materials, like 60+ in 12 different climates, can do that for less money than that. Obviously, it's like, that's where you get to the $60K or less pricing.

Okay, pretty attractive price tag. And then is— would there be like a monthly thing that you can have in there so that there's like an RR component and When could you have a rover that brings material to the machine so that there's no need for human intervention whatsoever?

Uh, answer the second question first is we've got a couple of those contracts in place and hopefully some things that will launch in 2031. Um, and in the meantime, how we're generating revenue is, is on Earth again, like remote construction and working in combat zones and remote communities. But like come 2031, we've got a couple contracts with some of the more famous companies that produce rovers for the lunar surface. So you'll probably see us hopping on one of their payload spots. And then, yeah, touch on the first point. We do 3D as a service. I call it 3DAS. So it's like SaaS, but for hardware. We do monthly rates that are based off of usage of materials. So it's great for people that are just starting to figure this out. Maybe they're working with injection molding or CNC machining, and they want to transition into something that offers more flexibility. Or they have a smaller operating budget, so they're not sure they want to do a whole purchase commitment to a smaller system. So we start that at $10,000 a month, and then it scales from there.

$10,000 a month, huh? I like it. Who would be your clients for that? You mentioned a couple of ICPs, right? Would it be defense first in the current geopolitical climate? And tell me if— yeah, I think defense would be your best buyers. Am I right?

Yeah. One of our early adopters is a company that produces battery casings for deployed combat and produces them for military vehicles and things like that. Aviation, as almost a requisite to space, there's a lot of companies that are kind of like aviation/space. So we get to test on things that would eventually go into airplanes and then satellites and then the moon. And then on top of that, pilot projects are something that kind of helps us as a requisite. So we're going into some mining sites in Northern Canada, we're going into the Arctic and just working in some remote construction sites and trying to get a sense of, hey, what do people want? What breaks down the most often? Weirdly, a customer came to us like 6 months ago and says, you know, I work in the Arctic and door hinges keep breaking off our doors. So I need you to 3D print us a bunch of door hinges in the Arctic. So— Yeah. It's very randomized right now, and I think that's kind of natural when we're prepping to launch a product in like 7 weeks. So it's a good mix of things, but that's— it's also really healthy because it gives us a lot of opportunity to experiment.

What is the state of the Arctic? Is like, uh, and Canada's taking it? I mean, we've sort of heard like, uh, what the orange man said, uh, and, uh, try to claim, uh, but is it like, oh, let's just stay there and just have a presence? Is that like the strategy?

I think there's a few factors to it. Um, I won't go into details about kind of like the competing sovereignty of who owns the Arctic, with Russia having a stake and Canada having a stake and America wanting to have a stake, and, and everybody kind of fighting over that sovereignty. But there are active infrastructure projects that are going on up there. Like even on the space side, there's a small analog astronaut base where people that are eventually training to go become NASA astronauts have to go spend a few months of their time up in the Arctic for like environmental awareness and, and safety testing in extreme climates. And there's an asteroid base called the Houghton Impact Crater And it is like way up on one of the islands in the Arctic, on the Canadian side, actually, which I'm super proud of. And there's a little moon base, so to speak, that's simulating what it's like to live and work in space. So we're going to deploy up there. Some Indigenous communities, you know, just put our footprint there and say that we have community involvement and we're trying to be sustainable and create a circular economy and all this. And then eventually just use those data outputs to train people, to make them aware, and then to actually go do cool shit in space.

Nice. We have a question from the audience. Is your printing materials mined in the same as the Regolith Polymer envisioned and patented at NASA?

I love that question because I literally got to see that and work on some of it too when I was there. Sort of is the answer. So we do kind of two different processes. We do laser powder bed fusion, which is like taking high temperature lasers and melting the lunar regolith down. But there's no binding agents, it's just raw material compacting on top of each other, but it's really high on the energy intensiveness and you can really only create like small precise parts with it. For the larger infrastructure, like that 1 cubic meter print system that I was talking about earlier that we're going to be launching in 7 weeks at NASA Marshall, which I'm psyched about, that is a regolith polymer blend. It is not the same as what was patented at NASA. We hold original patents to that tech. But a lot of the state-of-the-art concepts have things that fall on top of each other that are similar. So I'll go as far as to say that what you're imagining in your mind is similar to what we're developing, just with a little bit of extra secret sauce.

Last one. Let me read that. Since spacecraft operate in a highly closed-loop environment, do you see a future where additive manufacturing systems incorporate MOF-enhanced 3D-printed shielding that simultaneously provides structural support and active gas capture for contaminant control. It's a long one.

Sounds like fun, actually. And the answer is yes, yes, with limitations. So we're working very loosely on a project that's coming out of Warsaw with one of our joint ventures that has to do with 3D printing shielding and control of oxygen in the 3D printing chambers, because on Earth Usually what you do is you isolate air out of the 3D printers because that can just create porosity in your prints and then you have all these little air bubbles in between whatever your structural piece is and that would suck. So we've developed out this process where like on Earth you use inert gas like argon or nitrogen, like, like you can't do that in space. You can't be shipping up tanks of gas. So we're working on a vacuum enclosure. And then oxygen capture mechanism. So as regolith and a few other like naturally found ceramic materials like sand, like they contain these oxides inside of them. As you're heating it up and it gets to a certain temperature, it's just automatically releasing these oxide molecules into the print chamber. And if you don't have a vacuum system that's sucking it out in some kind of filtration system like HEPA filters, and the ability to capture that, then you're going to end up with really bad prints. So to answer the question is yes, to some degree we're looking at that.

And this one's too good to be skipped as well. Like, it's energy extensive. So would you rely on nuclear power plants or is solar energy enough?

I think for the extrusion where we are using a binder, definitely solar energy is enough. Something I'm personally fascinated in is the Thorium-Belkovich crater on the dark side of the moon and the nuclear energy that can come from that. There's a couple partner companies in Canada and the US that are really working on nuclear energy for the moon. And I'm a, I'm a believe it when I see it kind of person, but that would definitely solve a lot of the hurdles in us trying to execute powder bed fusion on the moon. Right now, that's more of a concept than it is a reality. What we're building out right now that would be, you know, like requires a binding agent, is less energy intensive. That makes sense for an early demonstration. But long-term, we're going to have to have some kind of nuclear energy for sure.

Thank you for showing up, Madison. Where can people find out more about you and the company?

Absolutely. So spacecopy.com is the website. We often post job opportunities, internship programs, newsletters. You can stay up to date with where we're going. I'm a traveling roadshow myself, so you'll see me a little bit everywhere. You can follow @spacecopy on LinkedIn or @spacecopyinc on Instagram, and you will see me pop up from time to time talking about cool stuff. We're prepping for product demos, 7 weeks at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. So some really exciting stuff to come, and I hope you guys follow along for more.

Was Madison and Charles