#140 | Mining Asteroids | Daynan Crull, Karman+

Five, four, three, two, one, zero. All engine running. Liftoff. We have a liftoff. Asteroid mining. It's so back. This may sound very futuristic, but some startups believe there's now a viable and economic path to making this happen. And they're getting funded too. One Such company is CommonPlus and co founder Danan Krall is my guest this week. Enjoy. My name is Rafael Ratkin. I'm the founding partner of e2mc, IRV2Mars Capital, a venture capital investor in dozens of space startups worldwide. Among other roles I have, such as being a part time podcast host. Just as a reminder, this podcast is for informational purposes only. It does not reflect any any view by E2MC and nothing should be taken as investment advice. Before we start, a quick favor. If you do enjoy this podcast, please leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast app such as Apple or Spotify. It does help other people find a podcast. Now on to today's episode. Hey space enthusiasts, welcome back to another episode. Very exciting episode today. We're going to be talking about space resources and their applications. So really exciting topic. And my guest is Damon Kral. He's the co founder and mission architect at CommonPlus. Welcome, welcome.

Thank you. Great to be here.

Yeah. So let's dive in as usual. Could you give us the elevator pitch on CommonPlus? What are you guys up to?

Yes. So we're a private company and we're looking to mine asteroids, particularly near Earth asteroids. And we're looking to get resources that we believe are abundant and sustainable for use in space as well as on Earth. And so in our first phase here, we see the space economy itself as driving that need. And we're looking at asteroids that will provide water and other consumables that can be used for propellant and for other needs in space. So in space resource utilization or isru, is a domain that we think is a very important one. And as we develop the scaled mining operations to do that, to bring back asteroid regolith to be able to process it and turn it into products that we're selling to customers in space, we certainly see the potential eventually to find minerals and materials that would be useful here on Earth and bring those back as well. So that's down the road in terms of our business roadmap. But we see areas like refueling for geoservicing as being one of the immediate markets. Of course, the geoservicing market is a well known market, a need there. And we see that Asteroid Regolith could be useful to provide propellant in order to support servicing in that industry. And we see it growing from there. There's a lot of industry research and manufacturing that, that we see potentially taking hold in space. And all of this will need resources. We don't believe the paradigm of bringing these resources from Earth is sustainable no matter what launch costs do, even if they go down and they haven't yet. We believe that that drive for resources is what's going to power the need in the space economy itself. And of course we'll need to be able to prove out our operations in order to support that. And, and like I said, eventually bring things to Earth. So long term it's a resources play through and through. But we really see the space economy as the driving factor for us. And that is a bit of a distinction with other discussions of asteroid mining in the past that have gone for maybe the headline grabbing platinum or you know, other metals that may be available. We really think that the, the more immediate use case here is, is resources for space.

I got so many questions. In a good way. Great, let me try to remember them. We'll start somewhere. So maybe from what you were saying, you were laying out near term geo reviewing use case and you were talking about natural resources in the long term. So I guess like every other startup, you guys, part of the entrepreneurial challenge is to attract really good people to what you're doing. Because this is not easy stuff. I think everyone will agree on that, right? You need really smart people to make this happen and so you need to sell them on something. Right. And so simplistically speaking, the SpaceX, right. The way I understand the company is sort of like the big sell is sort of like we're going to Mars, right? And we're working on the satellite communications thing. It also has some beneficial use cases. Is there some similar way you guys are looking at common plus sort of like we're going to mine asteroids, we're going to do some geo or how do you guys think about this?

Yeah, well, I think there's probably three parts to that. And the first part actually, which I, which I didn't even get into as much in the elevator pitch, but our long term vision obviously is getting resources. But we believe that can bring about, you know, heav manufacturing and certainly mining in space. So at some point to get materials from asteroids similar to the Bezos garden planet concept, that we could actually be producing resources in space and not on Earth at all, and have an incredible new value or supply chain for these resources. That vision is something that has resonated with a lot of people we've spoken to in terms of that big picture idea, certainly down the roadways. But you know, the paradigm of doing that kind of infrastructure in space is only possible with, with resources and asteroids are a great source of that. So that's one thing. The second thing, and this kind of goes to the, I guess sort of the origin story of myself and my business partner Tone Vendingries, who's a Dutch and we met at a company that he'd started before and I'm a data scientist by training and I'd worked and helped build his team out at that company. Now it wasn't space related so I was working with, you know, quantitative modeling of all different kinds. But we learned how to grow a business. I was employee number 30 and was there until about 150 people or so. So we saw, you know, a lot of really important checkpoints in the growth there and learned what it takes to build, you know, teams of specialists. And I think one of the, you know, one of the things we took away is being able to find not just talented people that's critical but talented people who also share the vision and are able to attract and build teams on their own and really have that focus from the beginning. So you know, having that big picture vis is the first thing. The second thing is being able to have team building and attract team building people. The third thing, and kind of to your point about SpaceX, I've actually talked to a number of engineers from SpaceX and yes the, the big picture vision was valuable there but as you can imagine, engineers love to build things. So what they found attractive at SpaceX and some of these other companies and what we were certainly offering is the ability to work a lot more quickly and the ability to work on a mission that could happen in the next two or three years as opposed to 10 or 15 years that you might see in, in a more public domain. So the time frame is a lot different. The ability to then iterate and try new things is something that has a real attractive power to people who are, you know, incredible problem solvers. We've attracted a few people from very reputable companies here in Colorado and elsewhere and they were able to, they were willing to leave the, the security financially and other otherwise of the company they were at because they were attracted to the idea of working on a hard problem, being able to actually think about and design systems for a mission and then be able to put that into space within a couple of years and actually see what would happen from that. And that has been a very valuable recruitment tool for us, as you can imagine. And I think it will continue to be for any company that's sort of doing something interesting. You have to have the credibility there. You have to have the ability to say, we have a vision, we have a roadmap. Yes, there's risk involved, but if you also share our vision and are willing to take that risk, then this is a place where you can have fun and innovate and do some really interesting things.

So you agreed on all of those. You started talking about, you started mentioning the origin story, but I don't think you really went into it. And of course, that's fascinating. So what I kind of gathered there a couple of very smart guys, obviously data scientists, and from what I understood, a serial entrepreneur. Right. And space sector is, you know, I'm biased, right. But I think it's a very interesting moment, arguably inflection point. But it doesn't sound like you guys came sort of super biased from like, oh, you were working at some aerospace company. Exactly on this and it wasn't done in the right way. We're going to make better. You guys probably had a pick to some extent of what you want to do in the space sector. How do you guys end up with this, you know, easiest. I'm joking, the easiest of problems.

Well, I think that's a great point. And yeah, I think that's, you know, something that I think is actually a value of for both Tone and myself is there's a healthy level of skepticism in terms of how we are approaching this business. We've, we've been space enthusiasts and we've talked about doing big picture ideas like this as the next move after he sold the company that he was at previously. So, you know, literally in the origin story, that's how this happened, is he was looking to sell the company. He gave me a call and said, hey, next venture, what do you think about asteroid mining? And so we had a series of sort of conversations and I think true to our nature, we did research and we, we called everyone that we could would answer the phone. People who wrote papers, people have been involved in this. Certainly, you know, previous companies before have, have gone through this. We, we, we both spoke to people at Planetary Resources at Deep Space Industries and tried to understand this. And, and we realized, you know, for us the value was doing something that had an impact. This is, for me, part of the origin here is that I have a lot of friends who are artists and they kind of understand this Better. No one came and asked us, hey, can you guys start an asteroid mining company? And there wasn't necessarily a very clear, immediate, urgent case for it. This is something that we saw as being a generational problem. I think it's very clear that as we are looking at, we, meaning humans, are looking at using more electronics and renewable energy and anything that's going to require resources, we are going to have to solve some very hard problems in terms of where those resources come from. And that's pretty well known. And that's certainly become part of the political rhetoric lately. But there's also the idea of a new frontier and something that as humans, we're always looking to explore. When these things came together for Ton and I, it became clear that there was an opportunity to look at asteroid mining not as some far off next generation problem to solve, but as one that we actually need to solve right now. Because there are difficult steps that need to be taken, whether it's by private industry or public agencies, or both rather. And if no one's going to start doing that, why couldn't it be us? And that's where I kind of equate it with the sort of, you know, I mentioned that, the sort of artistry before. It said, when you see that the world is missing something and there's nobody there to do it, perhaps it's on you to create that. And I think that is motivation for us to start that. We found that that has resonated with the team we've built. We've had about, I think we have about 20 people full time currently, and we're hiring several more here in the next couple months. And they similarly see that, hey, there is a path here. And we're sort of pioneering that path. And we see the importance of it, even if it's not as clear to other people why the urgency is. Now we see that urgency. So yeah, when we were thinking about how this would work, we initially did look at precious metals and resources because that was certainly a common topic. We found that the prevalence in asteroids that we knew about was pretty low. The ability to get and extract that to us felt like too much of a complicated long term roadmap initially. And we thought, okay, we know there's needs for water and other consumables in space that will allow us to build the sort of flywheel, if you will, of low cost missions. We're looking at less than $10 billion missions to an asteroid, which is, which is quite an ambitious number. But we believe we can achieve it and scale out missions to, to bring back mass. So our metric will be cost per kilogram that we can really lower of material from an asteroid back to Earth orbit. If we can get that, that scaled system down, then we can start looking at all kinds of resources, like I said, including platinum and other things. So what drove us as an, as an origin here was just this is a hard problem. There's a lot of technical challenges that are exciting and interesting, but there is a pathway here and someone has to jump start it. And I think that's where similar to, to, you know, the SpaceX Vision and I think Elon has even said this before, you know, if we just sit around and wait for something to happen, it won't. This isn't necessarily inevitable. We have to make some steps, bring something about. And then in our case, we believe that's true for resources from asteroids.

So that's interesting. I mean it's great and frankly it's audacious and I admire it. But you did mention, and some of the listeners will be familiar with this, that I think about 15 years ago you had some guys who basically started a couple of companies that you mentioned there, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries who wanted to go mine asteroids. I think I forget exactly, somewhere around 20, 16, 17, 18, basically both of them, well, if you're very generous, you say got sold, but really they went bust, they got sold for scrap. So if I put on my most optimistic hat, I'd say, well, maybe that's similar to. Look how incredibly well Starlink is doing right now and look at the people who tried to do LEO broadband in the late 1990s. Some of our listeners are probably too young to remember this, but there are people who tried to do LEO broadband Satell constellations in the 1990s and they basically all went bankrupt. And there's reasons for that that we know. Always smarter after the fact. Right. Monday morning quarterbacking, basically most of the stuff was still too expensive. Is there something similar or parallels, you're saying with something like stuff that for DEI and Planetary Resources there were just certain things that were, it was too early, but now you think it's the right time. I mean, clearly you do, but could you just elaborate a little bit?

Yeah, no, I think that's important too. I think timing is a huge part of this, you know, and when you talk to, you know, people who worked in those companies, you'll hear a lot of different stories for where they could have done things differently, how things changed. But you know, ultimately, you know, it might have been just Too early. And we can say that in hindsight, are we too early? Well, certainly we don't think so, but that's the bet we're making. Right? What, what things have changed for us is that you do have more of a mature launch market. SpaceX still dominates the commercial launch market. But there are other options that are coming online, including higher energy orbits. That is something that pretty important if you're planning multi missions. There is more attention focused on things like the geoservicing market that I referenced. But you know, if you think about several hundred geosynchronous satellites right now, or satellites in geosynchronous orbit, mostly telecoms assets, you know, those have a life several years to a decade perhaps. And then they degrade in their orbit and they become essentially useless unless they're moved back into a usable orbit which can extend their life by a few years. This is a market that could be potentially a multi billion dollar market. There are a number. I know you've spoken to Astroscale, there's a number of other companies that are looking at this problem for this very reason. And I think as the overall maturity of the space industry has come into into play in the last several years, it's not only more clear on the cost side that we have a path to do this in a cheaper way than probably was possible several years ago. Perhaps more importantly, we have a clearer path to customers than planetary resources or deep space industries probably had. We're actually looking at refueling our own, call it a space tug that would be in service to do orbital maneuvering for these geosats. And if we were able to refuel our own space tug with asteroid regolith, even if it's a proof of concept, you know, that puts that R and D in our timeframe. That allows us to test that technology out. That's something we believe we can do within the next few years, years here. And if we can do that, open the door to other use cases. And this of course is leaning on the idea that there is current geoservicing industry that would, that would require, you know, a space tug or something like that. So the ability for us to have a contract admission where we might go and maneuver geosat like that. With our end goal being to refuel our own space tug and demonstrate ISRU for us is a bit of a different angle on this that I think will help us bridge the ability to sustain ourselves as a company now versus what we see as being a huge market for asteroid resources in the future. That may be the different that may be one of the differences between now and several years ago.

And clearly that vision seems to be shared by investors. So, I mean, you guys got funded recently. Congratulations on that.

Thank you.

Other companies, like we had astroforge, Madonna about a year ago, I think on this podcast he got funded again. So I suppose clearly in your discussions with investors, this resonated or was there sort of other interesting feedback from investors? Both positive or sort of skeptical?

Sure, yeah. And I think, yeah, Matt did an excellent job fundraising and I think that's proof that there are people who are interested out there in the idea of asteroid mining and that this is perhaps something whose time has come. Our, our investors, the way we've approached it is we were actually very careful with our, our initial seed round investors and looking for folks that were, you know, not just willing to cut checks in this first round, but willing to do a long term relationship or willing to think about what this takes. Of course that's, that's necessary for anything in this business, so that, that made it harder for us. But, you know, we were able to successfully find people that were willing to do that. Our, our investors have diverse backgrounds. You know, some of them come from, you know, software and technology of other sorts. I would say that the one common thread is a lot of the funds are founders or have a strong founder culture. And so they had a lot of emphasis, our investors have had a lot of emphasis on our ability to build and lead a team and understand the challenges of our business and be able to say there are long term milestones here. You know, we're not just producing a software product that we can test in the market here in a matter of a few months. We're planning a mission that could take a couple, couple years to, to actually see through. How well are we able to set up our own internal milestones and execute against our program? So when our investors, you know, when we spoke to potential investors, you know, both positively and negatively, you know, obviously the positive sides of it where they believe that that's what we're doing. You know, the negative responses were probably as expected. They, they thought this was just too ambitious or too early. You know, one of the common, I think, challenges for investors in this space is you see companies that are trying to do a very specific technology, maybe they're developing some component of a mission. And that is, you know, I think, an easier thing to focus on when you're looking at, you know, going and getting material from an asteroid and bringing it back. There are several technical challenges we have to Address. And so that's a lot to take on. But what we found is if we can do that more holistically by building a team that's building the majority of our spacecraft in house, for example, that builds the capacity that we think long term will benefit us. Not every investor is going to see it that way, but the ones that do see our ability to build that internal capacity as being a great advantage in our ability to change and learn from failure. So, yeah, I think, you know, if we even got the conversation with an investor, they were at least somewhat, somewhat on board with the idea that asteroid mining is not just something in the far future, but this is something that could happen now. And then it was just a matter of walking through our roadmap. And, you know, yeah, I've been pleasantly surprised with the number of people that, that, that really saw what we're doing and we're able to actually recruit other investors to the, to the community here. So, you know, that's an important part of it, is trying to raise awareness around companies doing this.

So how about yourselves? When you as a team think about executing this? Is there one area you are sort of relatively more, I don't want to say losing sleep over, because you're entrepreneurs, you got to be optimistic on everything. Right. But you get my point, right? Sort of like between, I guess the big areas would be sort of like technology risk, market risk, and timing and then plain execution. Right.

Well, I think that, yeah, I lose sleep over something different every night. Right. You know, the things that I, I think are probably the most challenging are the things that, you know, not surprisingly, are out of our control. So there's a couple of major aspects there for us. One is there's not a lot of data on the asteroids. You know, we've gathered through the astronomical community, certainly a lot of data from, from what's out there. We have the locations of a lot of these near Earth asteroids, but we don't have a lot of intelligence in terms of the composition or the surface conditions. And so designing a spacecraft that's going to land on a surface, you know, osiris Rex and Hayabusa2 are examples that have done this successfully. They did so at great cost and time. You know, Osiris re, I think in current dollars, somewhere around $1.2 billion or something on the, you know, so the fact that we're claiming we can go to an asteroid for orders of magnitude less is a very bold claim. But one of the ways that we're doing that is looking at some simple but robust approaches and the unknowns of the asteroid for us are a big risk. So there's a lot we can do on the design side, but there's not much we can do about not knowing more information. The other aspect of this is, you know, problems that I think any company in space is going to deal with. And, and we've seen this with recent too. But the communications infrastructure, how you communicate from the ground to spacecraft is a big challenge. You know, the deep space network is not available for commercial missions and it's oversubscribed anyway. And so looking for, you know, ground stations that have the capability to communicate with your spacecraft and the ability to have, you know, anything that has heritage has been tested to some degree. You know, there's a lot that can go wrong in a mission, but if you lose your communications, you don't really know what went wrong. You lose a lot of different. You, you lose the ability to learn. And so that is a challenge too. That is, you know, we're, we're, we're hoping to see some more maturity in, in the services and capabilities and, and that is moving along as commercial providers are, do, are developing capacity. But the infrastructure around supporting a space mission is something that, that is a big challenge too.

Yeah. Okay, I gotta, so I'm listening to that or parts of what you just sort of very transparently laid out and like lack of data and technological challenges of mining an asteroid like you know, low gravity and all of this. And you know, there's obviously a relatively much better known celestial body with natural resources where commercial companies have started landing. In fact there's one going to try in about one hour which of course is to the Earth. Moon. Yeah. What was. Why did you guys not just decide to go to the moon?

Yeah.

You must have thought about it, right?

Yeah, no, it's, it's a good question and I think, you know, because we, from the beginning we're really thinking about the, the long term resources. You know, you mentioned the like, hey, we're going to Mars. Well, our vision really is about resources that are used in space. I. We know we'll find more resources on the moon, but know it's very clear to us that the abundance and the diversity of resources and asteroids is, is on another scale. You know, I think there's still a lot of open questions about how much we'll find water on the moon or where or how easy it'll be to get to. But we know from the samples gathered from asteroids that you know that we're reasonably sure that Many of these asteroids contain quite a bit of hydrated minerals. So the, if, if our goal is resources, we thought, well, we want to see what it takes to get there. This is a, this is an anecdote that I think is important. Is the, the Hayabusa team, the, the JAXA mission to an asteroid, you know, they were building a space program out and they wanted to do something that would get them on the map, so to speak, a fairly large mission. They chose to go to an asteroid instead of the moon because they actually felt that it was more feasible. And that to me is an indication of the fact that I think there's a, I think we need to demystify that. Going to asteroids is so much more complicated. They're farther away, so you have to contend with that. But the gravity itself is a major factor, as we've seen with recent missions to the Moon. The ability to safely land on even an object with one sixth the gravity of Earth is a massive technical feat. So many things can go wrong. Even if the Moon is very well known and you're in close range and there's a lot of communication capability there. Hopefully, you know, that is a pretty massive challenge to get around. And so when we're designing our, our, you know, our approach and our integration and our descent and our touch and go maneuver or tag maneuver that we'll perform on the asteroid, there's a lot of technical challenges there. But the fact that we're going to be doing this very slowly, similar to, you know, RPO maneuver with a spacecraft, in some ways makes this a lot less challenging than trying to contend with that gravity. So when we thought about a business that was going at resources, we thought, well, we know that the majority, the resources we'll eventually need here in asteroids, we believe they're actually a lot more accessible than people realize. I would say even just geopolitically, the Moon is, is a highly contested and challenging space. And, and I, and I also think, you know, at least in the U.S. here, you know, a lot of momentum has been pushing towards the Moon through, you know, political channels and through administrations. Is that shifting now and is that going to impact things there in terms of direct investment? And we'll see. I mean, these things don't turn on, on a, on a dime. Of course we just saw the commercial use case for asteroids as being the long term driver here. We weren't able to see what that was with the Moon just yet. There may be helium. I know Interlude is making a play for that. There may be some other ways to try to find commercial markets for activity and resources on the moon. But to us, it just wasn't a pathway that was clear to us, whereas getting asteroid material to us was clear, even if it was a path less taken, if you will.

Gotcha. And so actually, let me pick up on a point you made there in the middle there, which is sort of the geopolitics and everything, but closely related to geopolitics is sort of laws and regulations, which is also something you guys must have looked at, right? Which for our listeners, benefits. You just want to spend one minute elaborating. I guess you guys feel legally comfortable that you're allowed to go to some random asteroid, take stuff and bring it back, right?

Yeah. So, you know, this, a lot of this goes back to the Outer space treaty of 1967 and sort of interpretations the Artemis accords that the US developed. You know, for us, the interpretation that's critical is the ability for a private company that a sovereign nation like the US would not like lay claim to, say, asteroid material, but that, that as a private company we could do so. The legal and the ethical framework of space is an interesting one. We want to make sure we're as transparent as possible. But as we look at the Artemis Accords and we look at the precedents that are being set there, we believe that going to an asteroid and claiming that material, not to oversimplify, but it's similar to, you know, fishing in international waters. You know, as long as they're sort of agreed upon boundaries there, we're going after objects that number in the billions in the near Earth population even. I'm not even talking about the main belt. So there's a lot of resources there. I think it's a matter of how are we planning our missions and how are we working with other organizations. You know, I think more of the risks other than just getting material from an asteroid will be what are we doing with it, where are we going to have it, where are we processing it? You know, those are things we're going to be very careful about. And I think those are things that raise important questions in terms of jurisdiction, perhaps more so than just can you claim material from an asteroid? And I think that's all things that need to be sorted out. But we do feel confident that, you know, our approach, as, you know, certainly as a US Company to go get material from an asteroid and bring it back safely and securely and have a value chain that maps that to willing customers, is, is certainly feasible and we believe could happen in the next few Years.

Okay, so let's just dive a little bit deeper on a couple of the aspects on the, on broadly speaking, the tech side. So speaking of the resources you guys want to go after, I think at the beginning, the elevator pitch, you mentioned water. That obviously makes eminent sense. There's a number of people working on water propulsion systems. I think, in fact, DSI at the end also was working on a water system, if I remember correctly. But you also did mention, like, asteroid, like regolith, as you called it. Like, what would you use that for?

Yeah, so Ryugu is the asteroid that Hayabusa2 captured a sample from as an example. It's maybe on the drier side of a carbonaceous asteroid, but they found, I think, something like 5 to 6% water by volume. This water is, is not water in the liquid form, of course. It's not even ice. It's. It's sort of hydrated minerals that's being held by what's called a phyllosilicate material. Essentially this is clay. So these carbonaceous asteroids have what amounts to wet clay. And in this wet clay you have, you know, obviously water and other resources. But the clay itself is actually kind of fascinating to us for a number of reasons. First of all, by volume, it's about 80% of the sample from Ryugu. And we believe that seems consistent with what we would find in asteroid regolith other places. So if we were to bring 100 kg of material back, and even if it was, you know, on the wetter side, 20% water by volume, and we're able to get, or by mass and we're able to get up to 20 liters of water from that sample, we would want to be able to exploit the rest of that sample. And if we were able to use this phylosilicate material, this clay like substance, and, you know, bake it in order to extract the water, but also in so doing, create a ceramic module. That ceramic could be useful for, you know, any number of things, insulation, of course, but perhaps even construction of basic materials and things that could be used for in space assembly. So we're actually working with a number of different researchers here in the US as well as in Europe for processes to actually either sinter or look at other processes for creating sort of ceramics from these. From the space clay, you might say. Now, space clay is not as sexy as platinum, but. But I think there's something kind of interesting about how clay has played a part throughout civilization as we've progressed. And it's a basic building material and if that's something that could be used in space to create larger structures and save that up mass from being brought from Earth, you're now looking at potentially having space based solar power or other large structures that you could make from this sort of ceramic material. So this is for us, interesting because again by mass it's the bulk of the asteroid regolith and also could have a lot of vital uses there. And then we don't need to worry about processing at the asteroid yet until we learn more about the material. I mean that's certainly a fascinating concept, but until you know more about the material, it's hard to develop processes that you could send to an asteroid to make products from. But if we're bringing back this regolith and we know that a good portion of it is going to contain this sort of phyllosilicate material that could be useful, you know, that's a fascinating concept for us as well. And you know, and in so doing, again, if we were able to find magnesium or other noble gases or elements that, that could be useful in other, in other use cases, extracting those is sort of a byproduct of this process. You know, then we're sort of using as I would say the whole buffalo. We're not just picking out pieces of the asteroid that we want, we're using everything. And that, that is appeal to us and at least in these early stages until we learn more about what products we can make from it. Gotcha.

And can you talk us? I mean there's so many things you guys got to do. Oh my God. Can you talk us a little bit through like the timeline here? Because I guess there's things like you have to test God knows how many like subsystems. Right. Then I guess like you said, there's like not that much data available. So does that mean you have to maybe just have prospecting missions even without getting any material? And then I guess you have the first missions where you will get material. Like what are sort of the major, I guess, milestones over the next, I don't know, the right time frame, five to 10 years.

Well, we have a mission, we've booked our launch. The launch is in February of 2027. And we're going to a near Earth asteroid. We have several that we're looking at. We're staying flexible there, but we hope to complete that mission probably around the end of the year, early 2028. And when I say complete that mission, we're going to send a spacecraft to an asteroid rendezvous with it. So it Won't just be a flyby. We're going to actually station, keep outside the asteroid, do some mapping, find a site on the asteroid that we believe we can go. And, and, and we'll say landing, although without gravity, landing is a bit of a strong word, where we'll, we'll touch, capture kilograms of material, right? Not just grams, but kilogram scale material, and secure it on our spacecraft and then transmit data about, you know, the mass that we've been able to collect and that we've done the successful. That for us would be a successful mission. 1. So we're not bringing anything back to Earth in this first mission, but this proves out a few things that are critical. First of all, our ability to build a spacecraft and send it into deep space. There's no small feat. So that's something that we're hoping to do and do with a price point that will be, you know, well under $20 million. Which will again prove to our investors that there is a future in terms of unit costs here. Our ability to rendezvous with this asteroid and get to the surface and capture material Involves a lot of technology in terms of guidance, nav control, as well as the excavation assembly itself. All of which are technologies we're developing in house, which we're developing with people that have worked on asteroid missions before. So that's a big advantage. A lot of the technology we're using in optical navigation, for example, we're developing in house, but using expertise from people that have done this in other deep space missions. So while we don't have a lot of data on the surface of the asteroid, we do know that there's a high likelihood that we'll be going to a carbonaceous asteroid. And even if we go to a stony type asteroid, Our technology would still function. And we'll learn, you know, again, assuming we get to the asteroid, we'll learn a tremendous amount from that. We emphasize this over a prospecting mission because we realized that there's. If you're going to be an asteroid mining company, you have to understand the materials that you're going to be getting. And remote sensing will only get you so far. And we realized that really the best, the, the proof point, the roadmap for us to the maturity that we needed as a company was getting material from the asteroid and spending, you know, the cost for a prospecting mission Would help gather a tremendous amount of data remotely. In terms of a survey. Perhaps you might be able to see several different asteroids and get some spectral analysis from them. But that would still, at best Tell you what the surface reflectance is. You can infer some things from that. But it just wouldn't be enough information for our mind to tell you what the material is like. And if you look at the output from the samples that we got from Ryugu and Bennu, there were, you know, there were some surprises or there were things that we learned from the sample we just didn't know even from remote sensing at the asteroid. So when we were planning our missions, we thought the, the capital costs that were the most important for us were the ability to leverage technology to get material and bring it back back. And we were there for, willing to trade the unknowns. And that, that is a distinction with us. And say, you know, astrophorges, we're not saying we're going after platinum and we need to find it. We're saying we, we're a little bit more agnostic as to the material because we don't know what's out there. But we do want to know that we can develop technology that can secure it and bring that back. And, and that we believe that milestone will allow us the ability to get further capital for, you know, follow on missions. And more data is being collected. The Rubin Observatory in Chile should be online soon. That is anticipated to capture 10 times the asteroid observations that we're currently getting. So we're seeing about 200 asteroids a month. That will go obviously up to 2,000amonth. That's a pretty big leap. In the next couple years, as that data comes in, we'll be able to take a lot more closer look at the targets of the asteroids that we believe are more interesting to us for water or for other consumables.

So I guess if I. Well, we could talk for hours here. Unfortunately not the time. But if I just briefly want to touch upon the economic side of things. Right, Because I mean, the reason people like Astroforge are going after like really expensive, well, at least for the moment on Earth stuff like platinum is because I guess the way you look, one way you can look at all of this economically is what matters here to some extent, unless I'm mistaken, is the, the sort of combination of the cost of the total delta V you need and then how much mass. And then on the other side, sort of like, you know, what is something, the stuff you extract, how much is that worth? Like on a mass basis, right? So water obviously is worth less than platinum. And then I guess I would only.

Count you that to say it's worth less than platinum. On Earth.

On Earth. On Earth.

In Space, I would say water is potentially worth more.

Yeah, yes. So I was just going to self self caveat myself there. Okay, let's stay with water then. I guess the comparison is, you know, okay, so the Delta V from Earth is obviously. I guess that's the point. The Delta V going from Earth into even lower orbit is, let alone GEO is higher than. I guess you would say that the Delta V you need for a round trip to the asteroid if you start from orbit. And then I guess the other comparison would again be with the moon. But you guys must have been through those numbers obviously and concluded that.

There'S a plot that I've shown. It's hard to describe for listeners of course, but if you look at the gravity wells, obviously as you can picture a very steep sort of curve coming from the Earth's surface even just to get to Leo, that is a tremendous amount of energy just to get off the planet to orbit it. And then that flattens out pretty rapidly. The Moon has a much smaller gravitational force, of course, is a smaller mass, but it has still a decent gravity well. If you were to spend the energy needed to go to the surface of the Moon and back, that's a decent amount of Delta V. There's been a number of papers in past several years of people who've looked at asteroids that have a smaller Delta V profile than going to the surface of the moon and back. And that's given asteroids we know about and as I mentioned, we're going to be seeing thousands more of them them. So we believe there are many, many more asteroids that would fit that lower Delta V profile. Because you're absolutely right. The thing that we need to worry about as a company is, you know, cost. And that amounts to energy. And energy comes from largely the change in velocity needed. But that is actually that's precisely one of the reasons we are looking at resources we could get from asteroids because in addition to the Delta V, you know, there's the processing. So we, there might be a handful, two or three metallic asteroids and it's pretty hand wavy whether they're really metallic or not, to send missions to them to find out whether they are or not is a pretty expensive venture. And so our bet is that going to asteroids that are a lot closer that we have a lot more information on that may not have metal, but will have material that will be useful, that we can sell, will help us prove out the technology that we can then use as we improve processes. I mean the thruster technology and a lot of things that will help make that Delta V curve not cheaper. You know, they're improving, you know, month to month, year, year to year here. So if we're able to leverage that, that technology curve, as we're getting more and more ambitious with the type of material we're going after, we believe that, that to us felt like the better path to get to the high value resources, including platinum. If it was a lot more prevalent, sure, we would, we would certainly be taking a look at it, but. Or at least accessible, maybe I'll use that word. There's just not a lot we know about that in terms of the asteroid data, whereas the other resources we do. But yeah, we think that, you know, the Delta V profile of a lot of these near Earth asteroids is comparable, in some cases more favorable than, you know, getting to the surface of the moon and back. And especially if you're looking at, you know, in space operations and you, and you can eliminate the Earth's gravity well, I mean, that's a huge savings in terms of Delta V right there. So, you know, that's one of the reasons ISRU becomes an interesting prospect.

And if the mission in the first mission goes well in 2027, what happens after?

So we will plan that geo servicing mission I mentioned and we're starting to have conversations, conversations with telecoms operators who have assets that are in need of moving. So the second mission we would plan would be using essentially a very similar design to the spacecraft we're currently designing, of course, with adjustments in terms of its payload to be equipped to be able to maneuver a geosat. That would be our second mission. I think concurrently, we're also looking at our second asteroid mission. So the sequence of this would be our first mission we're calling High Frontier Launches. It's going out to an asteroid. As it's doing that, we're developing our second mission, a geo servicing mission here that we would launch probably within the next year. After that, if not sooner, that would be a paid or commissioned mission. We would provide some maneuvering services for that. That space tug, if you will, will have a lifespan, we believe of three to four years. So it'll still be in geo orbit then. Meanwhile, we'll send out our second asteroid mission, High Frontier 2, if you will, to an asteroid. This one will bring back material. We will be extracting water. This will be a carbonaceous asteroid. We want to extract water from it. We're looking at various approaches right now, ranging from just water based reaction control systems. You know, pressure water, as you mentioned, is a common popular idea. You know, Electrolysis can turn that into hydrogen and oxygen. If you're looking at more of a chemical approach, we would keep it simple. We're interested in hydrogen peroxide and what processes might be possible from what we would get in an asteroid. There's a lot of advantages to that propellant, so there's some R and D to do for sure. But if we're successful, this, this, this second asteroid mission would come back and refuel our space tug and then give it at least some proof of concept to say, hey, we can actually do this. Even if this doesn't extend the life of our space tug, you know, you know, a number of years. To be able to prove that this is something that can be done for us is the, is the key. We've spoken to a number of people who believe this idea is possible. They're just sort of waiting to see someone do it, right. So if we're able to do this and we're placing ourselves as our first customer, we put, we believe this puts us in a very strong position to, to make this proof of concept, you know, challenging enough where it actually matters, but something that's on our terms and allows us to work with the flexibility of changing what, depending on what we find at the asteroid. So those would be the three missions, and then we're looking to scale out. You know, as you can imagine, as investors are really keen on, you know, they're less daunted by the total capital cost. I'm not saying not daunted, but less daunted if they see that clear path for that unit cost coming down. Our ability to build the spacecraft and run a mission for the, the price point we're talking about, you know, 10 to $15 million and eventually under $10 million is a pretty massive inflection point for having multiple spacecraft that we can launch at once.

And, and you know, I speak as an investor myself, it's also, it sounds like a sensible step by step approach, right? It's not like you're not going out there and saying like, oh, we need $300 million.

No, no, definitely not. You know, and the truth is, you know, as you can imagine, scaling is not as simple as just getting more money. Like you need to have a team and the, the ability to scale operation in a, in a, that, in a good manner. And that's one of the things that my business partner and I learned as well is you can scale teams too quickly and run into some trouble there. So for us, the ability to prove out on this mission that we can build A spacecraft that we can assemble, a team that can do this, that we're developing novel technology in house, and that this will then be what we leverage to scale and build multiple spacecraft simultaneously. You know, that's a critical first step. You don't just jump right into that. So that is part of our, our process for sure.

Sadly, we do have to come sort of towards the close of this episode. So our last two questions are always the same. One is if you weren't doing commonplace and I guess going back to the point that you and your partner may have looked at other stuff that's going on in commercial space, is there something else in commercial space that you think is just really interesting to look at?

Yeah, well, as a data scientist who worked mostly with remote sensing, I'd done work with Earth observation before. So I find that area incredibly fascinating. Not just vis the visible spectrum, but you know, synthetic aperture radar. You know, companies like Capella, Space Ice, you know, there, there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of really fascinating aspects of Earth observation that are really interesting. I mentioned the challenge we're facing with comms. I think there's a lot to be said for perhaps laser communication or just thinking about comms in space differently. So, you know, that's another area. If we weren't doing asteroid mining, I think would be a particularly interesting piece. It all kind of gravitates to the sort of bigger picture infrastructure building ideas. That's kind of where I keep coming back to personally, but that those are some other things that I think are interesting to keep an eye on.

And the last question is always the same. It's about science fiction, if you like science fiction and favorite science fiction, I guess there's of course like natural resources are mentioned in a number of science fiction.

Absolutely.

You know, like the Expanse, Star Trek keeps coming back to dilithium minds once in a while.

Yeah.

Any favorites?

I've always been a Trekkie since, since early days for me. Big fan of the Star Trek series. Just personally we've used the Expanse, I think as a good example of sort of our long term vision. And I think, you know, that series of books or if you've seen the TV show, I think does a pretty accurate job of kind of showing the positive and the negative aspect of humans developing in space. And I think certainly oneills book High Frontier is obviously an inspiration for us. We named our first mission after that. And I think the sort of concept of not just exploration but development in space, this is something that drives us yeah, there's, I mean, the Dune series is obviously, I think, a great storytelling series. I love that paints the picture of resources and geology. You have a planetary scale scientist there that's kind of fascinating. We're dealing with that and just very small bodies with asteroids. But there's sort of a tie in there that I think is kind of fascinating. But yeah, I, I think if I had to pick one, for me, it's, it's Star Trek. Just for personal reasons. I, I just think it's an incredible story that balances the realism but also optimism of humans in space.

Certainly won't disagree with you there, Daniel. It's been a pleasure. It's so exciting what you guys are doing. We'll keep following it. Maybe we'll do another episode in a couple of years or so, see where you guys got to. Best of luck in the meantime.

Would love to. It's been my pleasure. Well, great talking with you.

And that's it for another nominal episode of the Space Business Podcast. And once more, if you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a five star rating on your favorite podcast platform such as Apple or Spotify. You can follow us on Twitter odcastspace. We're also on LinkedIn under the SpaceBusiness Podcast. Lastly, if you have any feedback, including ideas for guests and that may even include yourself. If you have an exciting space story to tell or interested in becoming a sponsor or really. For any other suggestions, you can drop us an email@sparebusinesspodcastmail.com thanks so much for listening and see you for the next episode.