#71 - Blue Flame Thinkers: Russell Hannigan

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In space, the companies are being asked to basically build a railroad every time they go to space.

That is Russell Hannigan, space executive and entrepreneur.

Yeah, right. They rip it up and they build another one in place. That's traditionally what has happened. And so we need to get to a place where to try and build that true railroad to space to benefit everybody.

You know, you have to go to the Wild West.

And— You know that voice. That is Mike Collins, co-founder and CEO at Alumni Ventures.

You know, space is that for me. It's kind of unlimited upside and potential. Really, really hard problems.

Yeah.

It is also worth noting some historical costs of space innovation. So— and that's me. My name is Samantha Herrick, and I'm the guide and editor for this podcast. NASA spent approximately $10.6 billion in the 1970s, so the 1970s dollars, to develop the Space Shuttle program. And by the end of the Space Shuttle program, each flight cost roughly $766 million. All right, so we're going to do a quick little intro to this episode. Um, this is our second installment of the Blue Flame Thinkers type of episode for The Tech Optimist. Um, and with these, I kind of take a back seat. I tend to like the conversation, uh, kind of just have it be natural, uh, so I won't be butting in too much today. Um, but I wanted to provide a few words on our guest, Russell Hannigan. He's got quite a career, and I want to share some aspects of it with you. So if you haven't gathered as of now, Russell Hannigan is a very notable figure in the commercial space industry. Um, he was the founder and CEO of EarthNow, a satellite imaging startup that emerged from stealth mode in 2018. EarthNow aimed to deploy a large constellation of advanced imaging satellites to deliver real-time continuous video of almost anywhere on Earth. So the company secured investments from high-profile backers including Bill Gates. And just like so many others, EarthNow planned to use an upgraded version of the satellite platform developed for OneWeb's communications service. And the goal is to provide real-time video with delays as short as 1 second, a significant improvement over existing Earth observation systems. So he's provided countless insights on the emerging commercial space industry. You'll hear a lot of them today in the conversation. He's noted that hyperspectral imagery is still in its infancy in the commercial space domain, suggesting significant potential for growth and innovation. Now, his career demonstrates a focus on advancing Earth observation technologies and bringing innovative space-based services to both commercial and government customers. His work spans from real-time video imaging to hyperspectral sensing, positioning him as a significant figure in the evolving commercial space industry. But for now, we're going to hop into an ad and then we're going to jump right into the interview. So hang tight, sit back, and enjoy. I'll talk to you in a few seconds.

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So welcome to this episode of the Tech Optimist podcast. This is our Blue Flame Thinkers program, and I'm really honored to be joined by Russell Hannigan today. And we're going to talk a little bit about space. Obviously, a lot of us have watched, you know, kind of Elon Musk had a big week and a big kind of, oh my God, moment just in the last few days. And I think it's— the timing is perfect for us to get kind of state of play of what's going on in space technology. So Russell, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here. Thank you for the introduction.

Yeah, Russell, tell us, you know, again, here we are in kind of the fall of 2024. It seems like a very exciting time in space. What do you think are the 3 or 4 big things going on right now?

Well, that's a great question because there's a lot more than 3 or 4, I suppose. I mean, clearly yesterday was an incredible moment. I would argue that it was one of the most impressive, if not the most impressive engineering accomplishments ever.

Yeah.

And not just because it's an accomplishment, but because of what it's trying to achieve. And that is the first fully reusable space transportation system. So that is head and shoulders above everything else.

Here, if you haven't picked up on it already, Russell is talking about the Starship Flight 5, which is featured in episode 69 of this podcast.

So in addition to that, of course, there are so many different ventures, everything from direct-to-cell communications— it's a big topic right now— to mining helium-3 on the moon. I mean, think of anything really, and someone, some entrepreneur or some innovator out there is trying to figure out how can I make a business in this particular area. And, uh, you know, space is incredibly cool, um, but it's also got to make money. And that's where I see things, is I— and I try and look at things, try and separate the cool factor from the fact that I want a good return from this. I want a great return from this. And that's where a lot of the challenges are coming today, is there's some great, fantastic stuff, but how are they going to make money?

Yeah, right.

No, and it's a transition point right now in many ways.

Yeah. I mean, one way I've thought about it too is a lot of times there's a big investment in other technologies. You've seen the kind of government go through kind of wave 1, and then you see the private sector, public sector partnerships with building infrastructure, you know, whether this was the internet, whether this was the railroads. And then those infrastructure plays really then unleash the garage entrepreneurs. And it seems to me that space is such a huge opportunity, but we're transitioning now from deep science, government-funded R&D to we're starting to see applications and infrastructure and some backbone now where entrepreneurs can really be unleashed. How would you build on that?

Yeah, they definitely can, but they still have one very, very big hurdle, and that is the cost to get to and from space. It is simply enormous. You mentioned the transcontinental railroads, and it's really interesting that in today's dollars, the 2 companies that built the railroads were paid about $1.5 million per mile.

Yep.

Do that, right?

Yeah.

You weren't told what kind of rails to build and how far, you know, it's standards. But they were said, here's $1.5 million for every mile you build, in, in this case, mountainous, difficult, difficult areas, right? And oh, by the way, we're going to give you this land grant that's equivalent to the size of Texas, right? Right. So that paved the way to allow, like, California to exist and all the commerce that happens today. In space, the companies are being asked to basically build a railroad every time they go to space.

Yeah.

Right? They rip it up and they build another one in place. That's traditionally what has happened. And so we need to get to a place where— and that's why yesterday was so significant and everything that's been happening in the reusable spaces to try and build that true railroad to space to benefit everybody. And so that's still taking its time, but it's coming finally.

Yeah, no. And again, there was promise yesterday with just that. And I think people have seen, oh, these things have landed in the ocean before. I've kind of seen these landings. But I think, I believe yesterday was, I don't know, 30 times as big or something. It was one big-ass rocket that took off and landed yesterday, right? Well,

It was, but physics is physics, engineering is engineering. If the numbers add up, they add up, right?

Yeah.

So SpaceX has successfully landed a Falcon 9 booster more than 350 times. They know how to do it, right? And so it just extrapolates to something a little bit bigger, a little heavier. Yes, incredibly impressive, incredibly energetic, right? But it's not like it's the first time they've done that. And that's the beauty of any reusable transportation system is that it's done it before, we've learned from it, we can do it again. And space has been— and this has been a bit of a hobby horse for me for the last 30, 40 years is, boy, I'm throwing away this massive capital investment every time I go to space. That's right. And how do I know it's going to work? Well, I know it's going to work because I spend a lot of time and effort to make sure it works. Yeah. It just leads to something very expensive. And so, this industry, as fantastic and dynamic and diverse as it is, I believe is just the tip of the iceberg because it's got this massive roadblock, this incredibly expensive first cost you have to pay. And the impacts of that going forward are even more enormous. So, you know, that's how I'm looking at the world is who are the players out there that are going down that path? Right. And it has to be more of the space, you know, we're all capitalists, we want competition, we want the best we can get. The other side of the space industry, for all the incredible numbers and pick your consultant and, you know, choose your number and how big it is. But with the exception of communications, almost all of it is government is the customer.

Yep.

Right? That's true in Earth observation. It's true of everything else you can think of, human infrastructure and so on. There are things that are happening on the margins that suggest that there's demand there, but it's still government-funded. We need to get away— I mean, that's great. As a company, government as your customer, absolutely nothing wrong with that. But if we really want the space industry that we want, then we need commercial applications and customers. We need it to grow. We need it to be vibrant. We need to be self-supporting. You know, 90-plus percent of your revenue comes from the government.

Yeah.

I don't believe that's a sustainable position long-term. You're not going to get multiples of return if that's what it's going to be. I mean, again, you can create a create a good business and do great things for everybody. There's nothing wrong with that. But again, if you want the kind of multiples we see on Earth, so to speak, then you need that dynamic customer base, the commercial trajectory.

Communications is an obvious area where I think there's been Starlink, there's been some incredible businesses being created. What do you think are the pockets of kind of commercial opportunity beyond, you know, clearly there's infrastructure. You know, how do we crack the biggest problem, which is how do we get there safely, repeatedly, affordably, more and more? That would be one, I guess, right? Communications would be two. What other areas do you think are on the, on the list of potential here?

There's a few. One that I, I wrote about recently is in the area of materials processing, basically stuff in space.

Yeah.

Whether that's pharmaceuticals or fiber optic cables, there are things you can do when gravity is taken out of the equation, right?

Yeah.

Like pressure or temperature or whatever, it's another parameter. And there's been a lot of really incredible research been done. That's pretty much all they do on the space station, right, is microgravity research. And so, wouldn't that be great if we could actually make stuff in space that you can't make on the ground? The challenge is, again, as I described, is it's just so expensive. Yeah. So, as an example, the cheapest way to get 200 kilograms into space is on a Falcon 9 rideshare. It is by far and away the least expensive way, and it's $1.2 million. The cost of the spacecraft on top of that is going to be at least $1.2 million for reasons I can talk about later. So right there you have a bogey of $2.5 million. But of that 200 kilograms that I've just flown, a tiny fraction of that is the actual thing I'm making in space, right?

Right.

Because I need solar panels, I need a heat shield, I need, you know, electronics, all this stuff. Tiny. So at the end of the day, I'm adding about, you know, half a million dollars per kilogram to the cost of the product I'm making.

Yep.

There's almost nothing.

Nothing.

That needs to be made in space. There are things that are that expensive, but there's nothing, right, that needs to be made in space. And also, there's almost nothing, and there's always exceptions. And so you have this fundamental problem is, yes, I can do it, and yes, there's a lot of research out there and some, some just tremendous work, But if I want to make something that I can sell to a customer, I cannot do it at half a million. And that, that's really optimistic. It's usually much, much higher than that.

Okay. With this topic, I want to provide a little bit more context on how expensive is expensive, right? Russell's talking about how Russell and Mike are talking about how this, these ventures for some entrepreneurs and some innovators can be upwards of millions and billions of dollars, right? So I'm going to provide a few examples and a few price tags to sort of help all of us gauge how expensive this field is. So traditional launches, they used to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket now offers launches for around $62 million. Still insane, like, you know, just $62 million. But, um, Whereas larger rockets like SpaceX's Falcon Heavy can cost upwards of $90 million per launch, and NASA's Space Launch System, or SLS, is still extremely expensive, estimated at over $2 billion per launch. And as far as, uh, you know, launch vehicles like reusable launch vehicles, using a reusable rocket can be up to 65% cheaper than traditional single-use rockets. Clearly, um, companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Rocket Lab are leading the way in reusable rocket technology. Reusability spreads development and manufacturing costs across multiple missions, similar to commercial airplanes. Now, as far as satellite technology, this is a whole nother venture. Um, the advent of CubeSats and small satellites has made space missions more accessible to startups and universities. Miniaturization of satellites has significantly reduced costs. As far as just investment trends in this field, in 2023, space tech drew $12.5 billion in investment, and the global space economy expanded to— okay, this is a real number— to $546 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $1 trillion by 2040. Those numbers just don't feel real. Right? It's really hard to contextualize that. But it is also worth noting some historical costs of space innovation. So NASA spent approximately $10.6 billion in the 1970s, so the 1970s dollars, to develop the Space Shuttle program. And by the end of the Space Shuttle program, each flight cost roughly $766 million when accounting for overhead costs. Wow. While innovation in space travel remains expensive, several factors are making it more accessible, like decreasing operational costs due to technological advancements. We can thank, you know, SpaceX for a lot of that. Expanding market potential and projections of significant growth. Strategic importance of space technology in defense. And in conclusion, you know, while innovating in space travel still requires substantial investment, the costs are decreasing and the potential returns are increasing. The combination of technological advancements, private sector involvement, Mm-hmm. and growing market opportunities is making space innovation more accessible than it ever has been before. But, um, I really liked Russell's point here where he sort of talked about how this could be an obstacle for some innovators, some entrepreneurs in the space. So just imagine if in a few years' time or a few months' time, when all of this technology and innovation gets more and more accessible, How many more people and how many more geniuses are going to have access to this technology and then therefore innovate themselves? So it's just something really cool to think about. And yeah, let's get back into the show.

And I think, again, once that cost to launch comes down by a factor of 10, factor of 25, maybe a factor of 50, then that's when you're going to see things flourish. And it's going to be— I think it's just— I'm very excited about what can happen in space.

I mean, I think the other side of that equation is we have to get it cheaper to get stuff up there, and then we have to have more leverage when we're there. Meaning, I think we're going to have to count on some technologies that can kind of Automate self, you know, robots making robots kind of thing. You know, it's robots and AI getting orders of magnitude better, um, as well, that could potentially be on the other side of this equation too, right? Right. If there's an— if there's an asteroid asset and if we can create a package that can go up and basically Do what is necessary to build a factory there. But these are really tough, thorny problems that are going to take time. But I tell 20-somethings that are interested in building a career over the next 50, 70 years in investing, you have to go to the Wild West. And space is that for me. It's kind of unlimited upside and potential, but really, really hard problems. But if you can crack— hard things are hard but create enormous value when you figure them out. And I think space is almost the ultimate example of that for humans.

It really is. You know, it is very, very hard. Right. But so was the jet engine, you know, 100 years ago, the internal combustion 200 years before that. Right. And I wish there was the equivalent of the Wild West and the Conestoga wagons. I really wish there was a way to get to space with those kinds of dollars. But what we're seeing is, you know, the Wild West, the frontier people, Having to take a Learjet, right, effectively to do something. I'm actually a really strong believer in human spaceflight. I think we're the best robots out there, so to speak, right? We have the ability, the intuition, the creativity to do things. But, you know, only 700 people have ever been above the Kármán line.

Yeah.

You know, we've been in— so if you really want to think about the metric of where we actually are in space, Or where we are in any business, it's how many humans are actually in the loop.

Yeah.

And, uh, and, and that's— that'll happen. I, I just— I'm interested in the companies that are pursuing those kinds of— Vast, for example, is a company. They showed their Vast 2 space station today.

Yeah.

And, uh, that's definitely a step along the road to, you know, just these incredible facilities that we want to give a lot of people I don't want 700. I want 7,000, 70,000, 7 million people in space. And what they can do and what we're doing today are night and day. I mean, it will be extraordinary.

I mean, I think that's one thing from the last week that I think we all have to just take a step back and objectively acknowledge, you know, you can like, hate, despise, adore Elon Musk. But he had a hell of a week and he thinks big. And the human species needs people who are willing to think big, take on big, audacious, hairy problems, and fail a lot. But I do think it is I think it's always worth reflecting on dreaming big, thinking big, taking on really hard problems that could take a decade or 20 years to solve. And so, I do think we have to tip our cap to those people who are at least trying to solve big, big problems.

No, it's extraordinary. And to carry the people with you in that shared vision. The vision has always been there. For SpaceX, they want to be multi-planetary, right? To be multi-planetary, you cannot just be multi-planetary on day one. You got to do the steps to get there.

Yeah, the steps.

And the first step to there is the path towards reusability in space transportation system, as well as applications like Starlink that generate revenue that allow you to be a going concern, right? There's no point in having a big vision if you can't pay the bills. So you got to do both. Simultaneously and keep both of those in focus. And there are other companies out there that will, hopefully will challenge. They're a long, long way behind. But, you know, in my backyard with Blue Origin, the rocket will hopefully fly in the next few months. That is an enormous rocket. Yes. If you ever see it side by side with a Saturn V, it's not a lot smaller. It's smaller than Starship. But it is enormous. First stage reusable, again, a step on that path. Right.

And again, it points to the fact of, too, we do need competition. We do need people trying different approaches, different technologies, different platforms. That's just going to— we've seen that in so many other sectors that it really takes that competitive spirit to, you know, to move everybody forward.

He really does. And I see it every— almost every day another space venture of some sort is launched or financed or whatever. And that's super exciting. So everybody wants that to happen. And yeah, we're seeing that now.

So tell me about what are you working on? What are your Where's your heart and passion these days, Russell?

My heart and passion has always been what we do in space and trying to make it self-supporting, to be honest. I took a little bit of a sabbatical. I haven't worked for almost 40 years. I'm advising some companies, one company in particular I'm very excited about that addresses some of these challenges. So, I have a lot of experience spending— I started as a physicist by education, became an engineer. I worked on geostationary satellites. I worked on reusable launch systems, small launch vehicles. I had my own Earth observation company. I was lucky enough to help create and incubate a number of startup companies that have gone on and been super, super successful. So, I'm just, you know, any way that I can help pull the— push the ball forward a little bit, um, I hope my experience might be useful in that regard. Um, I do look at things, you know, very— now critically is the wrong word, but it's how am I going to make money out of this? You know, who are the— Yeah, clear-eyed. How do I differentiate? How do I beat the competition that's coming? All those kind of things. How does the business plan support? And there are a lot of great businesses out there. There's some that it just blows my mind that they've been able to get investment. And yet they have. So I'm not the smartest person in the class, right?

And most of them won't turn out, but occasionally, and this comes from my own life experience of humility, sometimes I'm shocked. This is like, there are companies that I go like, that's wacky. How did that ever get funded? Or, that team does not have the backgrounds and sense. And, you wake up 7 years later and they've really surprised you. So—

Yeah. Don't underestimate the ability of entrepreneurs to innovate.

Yeah, right, including their original businesses, right, or ideas. So—

The beauty of what we do on Earth, it's a weird way of saying it, is that we try stuff.

Yeah.

And we can change directions quickly, right? If it doesn't quite work, we can modify it. With space, you're kind of on this 5-year, $100 million—

Yeah, it's a card.

You can't just change directions. You're kind of stuck with what you've got. I want space to move in the other direction. I want it to be that if I'm an engineer building a new kind of mirror or a new kind of sensor or a new kind of antenna, I want that person to be able to take it to space next Thursday. Yeah. I know that's a big leap and I know we're nowhere near doing that today. But that future is coming one way or the other. It's coming. And yesterday was an example of, boy, that time really is coming. It's not just something we're talking about. Science fiction authors write about. We will get to the place where we're flying people to and from space every day.

Yeah.

That is coming.

And that's when we really see the geometric stuff. When we can get this into the garage with 2 people with a good idea, can actually do something that's new and innovative and special. We're not quite there yet, but it's promising. the path we're on for sure. What do you think, you know, what are a few of the things that, again, just our educated but curious audience should be looking for over the next year? What, what, what should they be— keep your eyes open for this?

Well, I would keep my eyes open for a few of the launch companies. Stoke is a company that, you know, I advised right at the very beginning when they were starting, not advise them today, but right at the beginning, they're building a smaller version, a much smaller version of what you see with Starship, right? It's designed to take a few hundred kilograms. But what they've done is they've figured out how to do a 2-stage fully reusable rocket. So the first stage comes back and then the second stage comes back after a while, a proper space transportation system. So keep an eye on that. But Radian is an interesting company. They're building a winged, fully reusable vehicle that takes off on a sled. And goes to orbit, drops its payload, comes back. Airliner-style operations. Those are 2 companies that I'm especially excited about. There are other companies who are doing similar things. On the spacecraft side, there are a number of companies trying to build standardized platforms or buses, as we call it. And buses is where you put your sensors on your communications payload. Right. There's one company called K2 Space, for example, that said, hey, And when Starship becomes operational, I don't have to build these highly integrated spacecraft anymore. I can actually not worry about mass, not really worry about volume that much, and build a very large platform inexpensively that can do incredible things. One thing to sort of keep in mind, I guess, you see a lot of work on CubeSats, and CubeSats are great and so on. In fact, But the revenue-generating ability is sort of proportional to its size. Right. A little 3U CubeSat can do some things, but it's not going to be generating tens of millions, hundreds of millions of revenue in itself. You need to be bigger. You need more power, you need bigger apertures, you need to do those things that generate the customer access that you need. I'd be looking at much bigger— it sounds strange to talk about space as bigger, but bigger is sometimes less expensive. And it's certainly less expensive in a Starship kind of environment if I don't have to worry about making things miniaturized. The analogy I like to use is, and it's not a good analogy, so I apologize. Imagine if you had to build an SUV. Right, for a family of 4 and a cat and a dog, but you only had 100 kilograms to play with.

Right.

You could do that.

Yeah.

You would have to use advanced composites and materials.

All kinds of compromises.

You definitely could do that.

Yeah.

But you wouldn't because it'd be outrageously expensive. But that's what the space industry is. It's building these things because it's so expensive to get to space. And so when you loosen that, when that goes away, that, that, that, that those shackles of mass and volume and cost, then you're going to start seeing these, these tremendous platforms, um, happen. And, and that's great. So if I want to do, you know, a lot of talk about direct-to-device communications, direct to cell phone.

Yep.

To do that, I need a big aperture. I need a big antenna because the signal is incredibly weak from my cell phone, right? And so, that's great. We build big platforms and we can do a whole lot more. If I want to use my cell phone and be able to use it indoors, I need even a bigger antenna because I need to somehow figure out how to get the signal to bounce around and so on. Again, big apertures. So, I'm very much on the CubeSats showed us the way.

Yeah.

But the future are in CubeSat-priced Large spacecraft that have immense capability. And then once you have big spacecraft, then things like servicing. So companies like Starfish, for example, want to service spacecraft. It's very hard to service a CubeSat. In fact, I would say it makes no sense economically, or even a small satellite to do that. But a multi-tonne, something in the 2 to 10 tonnes, these bigger spacecraft. Then it makes sense to make those serviceable.

All right, we're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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Yep.

Um, and then that, that allows you to change things and adapt things and move forward on a more dynamic basis with the market. So that's a long-winded answer of saying vigor is better, especially—

no, no, that's,

that's counterintuitive, uh, to the world that we've lived in. But it very much reflects the reality that we face, we live with every day on the ground.

Yeah. Last question, Russell, which is, where does— just as the United States, we're not the only country eyeing the potential here. How are we doing? Where's the competition from a country standpoint? What's the whole geopolitics? What's the political landscape for space these days? What's the quick update there?

Yeah, that's a great question. So the world spends about $175 billion on— government spend is about $175 billion. The US is about half of that or more than half of that. So between NASA, Space Force, and various 3-letter government agencies, the US government spends about $75 billion, if not more, on space every year. So you can see there's a lot of, you know, feeding for that. That's a very, very nice trough, I guess, is probably not the right word. So the US is probably about half the space economy. There are— so that doesn't mean we can be complacent, right? That doesn't mean that, you know, so there are other countries. And what I found in my prior research, there are other countries that have companies that specialize in certain areas.

Okay.

Right. And you can usually buy parts for spacecraft lower cost in other countries than you can in the US for reasons I won't bother going into. So there are areas where specialty that you need to go outside the US because it doesn't make sense to do it here because there are other businesses you can benefit from. But honestly, you can't be complacent. There's always going to be competition. But the US represents about half of the global space economy, at least half. And it depends what you include in that, of course.

And it seems we still have—

We're doing great.

We're doing great. And it seems like, and importantly, we're doing great because this is obviously an important frontier. And, you know, I do think we do best when we can unleash the entrepreneurial, academic capital system to do things. And it seems like we're at least in the game, right? In the game. Continuing to do that with a lot of these new startups. Again, I'm waiting for the day when you go to Y Combinator and 50% of the pitches are teams of 5 with a space idea.

Yes.

It's still— we're not there yet, but the day that that happens, look out because I think that's a really exciting future.

I mean, it'd be interesting to know what percentage of businesses require GPS, right? Right. I mean, the ring laser gyros 25 years ago were like tens of thousands of dollars. Now, I have the equivalent in my phone for like $5 or whatever it is right now.

Yeah.

And so we rely on space every day for everything, whether it's hurricane and weather forecasting or just, you know, where's the nearest Starbucks, right? Yeah. This is what it's about. And it's incredible how successful it's been given how expensive it is. I keep marveling at that. I'm a bit of a broken record when it comes to that because I can't imagine That when I can have my Conestoga wagon to space, my railroad to space—

Your truck, whatever it is. My truck to space. How

much I want to be able to do and try and see what sticks and what doesn't stick. And we're so far away from that today. We're headed in that direction. And so, again, for what it's worth, my guidance for people looking to get into space businesses, What are the technologies? What are the services? What are the kinds of companies that are on that roadmap, on that path towards capitalizing on that future? Yeah. Are those companies on a path of what I call a fully expendable system, like a small launch vehicle? I would run away from those personally, unless they have some special relationship with customers that guarantee revenues or whatever it is. And I would just be Looking at how does this technology, this service, this capability, this customer benefit in the reusable future? The kind of future we saw a glimpse of yesterday when the booster was caught. Because I want to go to space. I want to do stuff in space. Maybe you do. Millions of other people want to do. Let's get it done. Let's go and let's create some amazing businesses.

Well, Russell, thank you for your time today. It was a great brief Our community appreciates it. Let's catch up again, 6, 12 months and see the continued progress. This is a journey that our community is super excited about. We're investing in it. We're passionate about it. And again, appreciate your update. Thank you.

Well, thank you. Pleasure to talk about. I've been in this business 40 years. It's my, it's my profession. It's my hobby. Uh, I just want to be successful. So thank you again for your questions and, um, we'll talk

again.

All right.

Excellent, Russell. Thank you. Appreciate it. All right. Bye-bye.

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