How Lonestar went from Moonshot to Moon Landing with Chris Stott

Work with people who will challenge you. If you walk into a room and you find— this is something we're taught in the space program. If you walk into that room and you are the most intelligent person in that room, you have fundamentally failed. You must always surround yourselves with people more intelligent and more experienced than you.

Hello everyone, and welcome to our How to Build a Moonshot event featuring Chris Stott, the CEO of Lone Star Lunar, which is a company that was part of the recent US moon landing on February 22nd. My name is Ryan Michaeletti. I'm head of global operations for the Founder Institute, and I'm a general partner at the Veteran Fund. I'm excited to host the event today and speak with one of the top space entrepreneurs of our time. And as most of you know, Founder Institute is one of the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerators. Since 2009, we've launched over 7,000 startups across 100 countries, with the largest mentor network in the world of 35,000 mentors. And if you're an early-stage founder looking to be backed by one of the top startup accelerators, please go to fi.co/apply where you can take our Entrepreneurship DNA assessment and apply to one of our local accelerator programs. We have an international audience today, so please say hello in the chat. Tell us where you're joining us from. And if you're working on a company or a technology, you know, feel free to share it in the chat. You can also share your LinkedIn profiles as well so you can connect with other people from the audience. The goal of the event today is really to talk about building a moonshot startup and make this as interactive as possible. So if at any point you have questions, please put it in the chat. We'll filter them on the back end, and then I'll ask Chris when we get to those points. But some of the topics we'll be covering include: How did Lone Star go from moonshot to moon landing? What does the new lunar economy mean for humanity? And what advice and fundraising insights can Chris share about building a moonshot? So please share your questions and thoughts in the chat. We'd love to see it. Without further ado, Chris, it's my pleasure to introduce you. Not only are you a friend and CEO of Lone Star, you're also a portfolio company of the Founder Institute. So would you like to say a few words and introduce yourself?

No, well, thank you very much, Ryan. Thank you everyone for listening in today and for having us. And it's an honor and a privilege to be here. This is not something we normally do. This is something we're doing especially for the Founder Institute and for the Veteran Fund. And please come find me on LinkedIn, Lone Star Data Holdings. You'll find us there. And come find me on LinkedIn. I'll look forward to hitting those invitation requests. And please, you know, ask questions. And so my name is Chris Stott. I'm the founder and chair and CEO of Lone Star, the first company to put data centers on the moon. It's meant to raise questions. Questions, trust me. Right. And we would do this, as Ryan said, we were part— we're one of the 6 commercial payloads on board America's first return to the moon since Apollo 17 with Intuitive Machines on their NASA CLPS mission, our lunar access provider. Intuitive Machines, fantastic. Launched on the 15th of February, Shackleton's birthday, headed down to the South Lunar Pole, very appropriate. And we were doing some testing on the 19th of February on President's Day, and we'll talk about that as we go forward. And then when we landed on the moon on the 22nd. Wow, think of that. We live in an age where entrepreneurs can do amazing things. As Peter Diamandis says, humanity's greatest problems are also its greatest business opportunities, where entrepreneurs can solve global problems. And that's what we're trying to do at Lone Star. And so we landed on the 22nd, working with Intuitive Machines, also a startup company. The first ever private company to land on the moon, a successful landing. Amazing. So think of that, a private company in this third decade of the 21st century successfully lands at the South Lunar Pole, something that no superpower in all of human history had ever done the first time. Amazing. And so, and then we ran our tests again. We tested our virtual data center on this, in our Independence payload on the 27th, just as the lunar lander was running out of power. It was very dramatic. But we got our test done, 100% success. It was a wonderful moment. And then we're getting ready for our next mission again this year with Intuitive Machines and our Freedom payload. And then on from there. So, Brian, please bring the questions.

I got to ask, right? And like, you know, we might have talked about this previously, but, you know, data centers on the moon, right? Whenever I say that or whenever, you know, people hear about it, they say, what? Data centers on the moon. So I got to ask, what was the genesis story behind this? So you and Mark are hanging out drinking coffee and you just decided to put data centers on the moon. Like, tell me a little bit about how the idea came to light.

Oh, no. Well, thank you. I'm right. Mentioning Dr. Mark Matosian, our chief operating officer, former head of data centers at Google, former US CEO of iSci, synthetic aperture radar company, and former Teledesic and many other things. An astounding gentleman. And Always about team, right? Always about the team. Actually, with us, it was customer-driven. This is the most astounding thing, right? And this is to all my fellow entrepreneurs. There's two types of companies, right? Those who have an idea for a new technology or a new service, and they push that into the market— technology push or demand pull, very Adam Smith, you know, the market speaks. And a group of customers came to see us on— gosh, it was April 2018, 6 months after the NotPetya cyber weapon got loose, uh, in Ukraine. One of the first mass weapons, weapons of mass destruction, cyber weapons to get out to the world, did tremendous damage. And they said, hey, we've got a problem, we need help. You're something to do with space, right, Chris? And I've been an entrepreneur in the space industry before it was trendy. My other company, uh, River Advisors, is the world's largest commercial provider of satellite spectrum. And prior to that, I worked at Lockheed Martin running Deep Space Network and TDRS and other things. And prior to that, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, launching rockets back when Boeing was Boeing. Too soon? No. So, all right. So these customers said, look, we have a problem. And oh my goodness, my fellow entrepreneurs, we have one of these and we have two of these. And when a customer speaks to you, It's activate both your antennas, right? And you know, when a customer says I need help, it is the most wonderful thing to hear from a customer because it means you're meeting a market demand. And that's what we did. They said we need somewhere where we can keep our data safe, secure, accessible, and legally held under data sovereignty rules. And they were working all over the world and they said we're having these issues and please help us solve them. But You know, we took these requirements and we went and looked at everything in the world first, right? Because people needed to back up their data somewhere safe, secure, accessible, and so on. And we looked at underwater data centers, we did jungles, mountains, deserts, underneath mountains, on top of mountains. And the same thing pops up all the time. Great place, this planet Earth that we live on. It's a wonderful place, you know, all 8 billion plus of us, right? And every day the human race creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of new information, more than yesterday. That's an exabyte a day, 1,000 petabytes a day. That's a million MacBook Pros every 24 hours. And that clock hits midnight and one second, boof, open another million boxes of MacBook Pros. And this data rate of creation is doubling every two years. It's called labeled data. It's regulated data. You have to keep it. You legally need to keep it to run your business, run your society, to run your technological civilization. And I can go on for hours, and I won't, I promise. But one last final thing on this. Look, imagine if we lost that data. Our societies, our civilization would cease to exist. We would go back to the 1800s or worse. I mean, we're talking loss of power stations, power, energy, comms, everything from your iPhone, iPhone pictures, all the way through to what runs your government. We have suffered a data loss like that before in human history, one that happened over 2,000 years ago, one that was so painful 2,000 years ago before we had the internet and electricity and everything else. And that was the burning of the Library of Alexandria. If you want to see an academic flinch, ask them, oh, that was an awful thing. What happened? Burnt to the ground by Julius Caesar's troops in the Roman Civil War. And there we are, the Ukrainians and Russians doing their thing. And guess what? That cyber weapon got out and did billions of damage. So times may change, but people don't. So what we're trying to do at Lone Star is protect global backup, global refresh, global restore by using Earth's largest satellite. But that's— but Ryan, that's where it came from.

Chris, thanks. Thank you for sharing that, that background. You know, um, someone in the audience asked You know, what is the utility of data centers on the moon? Maybe you could talk a little bit about, so obviously there's disaster recovery as a service, right? Could you talk a little bit more about like data centers on the moon versus orbit versus like, you know, low Earth orbit as some other companies might have? Talk a little bit more about the utility aspect.

Oh, absolutely. And for what we're doing, which is, you know, global backup, like a living, breathing digital twin of the planet every 24 hours. Constant connectivity. Earth's largest satellite is immensely good for us because the distance helps us on encryption, delay-tolerant networks. We have access to free solar power, free cooling. You know, the major operational OPEX costs of running a data center on the planet are the power to cool it, the power to run it, and the power to communicate. We got all that in essence outside of capital costs for free up there. But what we're doing is disaster recovery as a service. So we're, we're like a whole new tier of service beyond old, old-school archival, and we need that distance. But when we're on the moon, we can actually do a lot of edge processing for people who are building up the new lunar economy as well and putting digital infrastructure on and around the moon. And we're on the moon right now. So I still get tickled pink saying that, right? We're on the moon right now. Amazing, right? We were the first company in human history to provide a commercial service from the moon. So proud of that. I mean, I'm proud of the team that put it together. So we're going to be on the moon, around the moon, later in the moon. But when you're looking at data transport by satellite communications for regular data centers, regular data centers in space, look at the amazing Starlink. Each satellite has 40 Linux servers on board. You're looking at a distributed data center in low Earth orbit. Amazon's Kuiper program, even more so. Telesat's Lightspeed, and congrats to Telesat, they just got a major chunk of funding from the Canadian government today, right? This is just this natural progression of our digital renaissance. The last renaissance, printing presses, how knowledge exploded throughout the human race that led to the Reformation, the Renaissance that led to our industrial society. This next digital renaissance, there is so much data that needs moving around and processing close to Earth for latency issues. And those are the guys in low Earth orbit. Amazing. Yes, more please. And geostationary orbit shooting data around the planet. We look at Earth as this beautiful place where people create data. It's also the place where all the war, strife, accidents, climate change, weather events, volcanoes, everything goes wrong. And all we are doing is evolved tool-using apes is taking that step back and saying, okay, let's use the largest satellite in our sky, the moon. Great stable location. We get an orbit of the Earth every 24 hours. We can see all of our customers. And the most important thing is our customers were happy with this. So our first test mission was sold out and the state of Florida was our first customer. Amazing people to work with. So avant-garde and forward-looking. I mean, you think, well, why Florida? Well, it's one of the fastest growing states in America. Population-wise, economy-wise. It is embracing startups and the startup culture everywhere from Tampa and St. Pete where we are to Miami to Orlando to Jacksonville. And yet we're surrounded by water, we have hurricanes, we have all sorts of other issues. And so they wanted to take a step and say, okay, let's protect our data. They're on our next mission, Freedom, as are many others, and that's sold out. Demand is a wonderful thing, right? But that's why the moon, that's why data centers on the moon versus— I mean, I can get into everything from anti-satellite weapons testing and also other reasons why we're not in low Earth orbit and geo.

But yeah, yeah, that's a great overview. And another person in the audience was asking around, like, you know, how is energy and power generated for these data centers on the moon?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No, for us, it's fantastic. Good old— actually, well, technically it's fusion power if you think about it. I'm being a bit— it's that massive ball of fusion up in the sky. And so it's fantastic. We get solar energy. So almost everything that we've ever— almost everything we've ever flown in space is solar powered. And so everything from space stations to satellites to probes, occasionally people will use little nuclear reactors, radiothermal electric generators, and like on Voyager and Viking and on the Mars Science Lab and others now. But no, but it's all solar powered. And naturally cooled as well. Space, when you're in the sunlight, is very hot, plus 250 degrees Celsius. And when you're in the shade and shadow, it's minus— depending where you are, minus 200, even on the surface of the Moon, about minus 140. So you get a wonderful dichotomy on this. And it's something that we've been doing for 60 years. Even as we talk today, right, the Voyager probes are out beyond the heliosphere, billions of miles out. Even at light speed, takes us days to communicate backwards and forwards. And then we have helicopters flying on Mars using Snapdragon chips, off-the-shelf storage, Android phones, and more running Linux. I mean, it's changed. The world and technology is accelerating at such a pace that we're able to leverage these things. 60 years of space and leverage 60 years of Silicon Valley.

Chris, could we talk a little bit about the road to that? And what the roadmap looks like. So you have the first successful test mission actually on the lunar surface, and then there's another mission that's scheduled for later this year. What are the building blocks to actually having a more robust economy on the lunar surface? Not just for humanity in general.

Well, yeah, no, and Ryan, I think that's what you're seeing at the moment too. It's a sea change. It is a generational shift. You know, the first time humanity went for the moon back in the Cold War days, I mean, science was always the goal. However, flags and footprints, national, international politics, the Cold War, you know, Soviet Union versus the United States of America and its allies. And it was like what they call flags and footprints. This time around, it's very different because we're looking at space very differently. You have a whole new generation of people coming through. Who don't see it in terms of geopolitics. And there is geopolitics still involved, but they're seeing it in terms of energy and resources. Space is a place that we can use to better serve Earth, all 8 billion of us. Everything we do up there is to make life better down here. Everything. This is one of these great secrets, open secrets that are out there. People complain endlessly about billionaires in space. Why? Right? If you want to be a billionaire in space, this is America, go form a company, do it yourself. Right? I mean, this is the most amazing thing about the United States of America. And you've got two of the wealthiest human beings in all of human history dedicated their lives and fortunes to improving the human race by getting us into space. Because up there, we have incredible access to energy and resources. And when it comes to something like the moon going back this time around, I mean, there's over 130 missions scheduled from 18 different nations. And here in the United States, we have our Artemis program, Artemis being the sister of Apollo. It's a $98 billion program which is already in motion. And as part of that, we have CLPS, Commercial Lunar Payload Services, where you have startup companies building things like a FedEx to the moon for NASA, like Intuitive Machines, Astrobotic, Firefly, iSpace, and others. It's an incredible time because the technology has matured. The price of launch has come down so much. Many years ago when I worked in McDonnell Douglas on programs of the long gone, we thought we were doing really well at $100,000 per kilogram to orbit. So $100,000 per kilogram. SpaceX came around with the Falcon 9 and got it down to $10,000 or less. Now Starship, and they're getting ready for another test flight, Starship can get it down to maybe $100 a kilogram. We must never forget we're living in the third decade of the 21st century, right? We now have computers that we can regularly talk to. We can do this, right? And by the way, these signals are bouncing off satellites. Every day that passes, our technological capabilities because of Moore's Law's impact on computing, nanotech, biotech, material sciences, space— oh my goodness, it's an incredible future. And that's what we're embracing with the moon going back. On the moon, you've got energy, resources. When I say resources, I'm talking about actual rare earth minerals. Why tear up the Amazon where people are living and where we need those lungs to help us breathe on the planet? We can actually do the same thing on the lunar surface where there are no people, right? Where we can actually get the resources we need. Helium-3 for the new fusion reactors. Oh my goodness. Guys, ladies and gentlemen, the world, the future is an amazing place. And I'm going to tangent here in a second. All we have to watch out for are these crazed boomers who keep trying to start World War III for no apparent reason. For the first time, we have a technological civilization that can feed itself in all of human history. We can educate ourselves. We can medicate ourselves, good medicine for everybody if we want to. Famine is a political construct. War is bizarrely unnecessary. Though, how do we know there's such a thing called peace? As Dr. Jerry Cornell used to say, we count the gaps in between wars. Now, the idea about going to space is it opens up so much more to us. It changes that equation. By the way, the Institute of Space Commerce, change.space, go check it out. The idea being that going up there for the economy, for every man, woman, and child on the planet, it solves every problem that we have. Even the UN is thinking about making an additional sustainable development goal for space because they sat down and realized every single one of the UN SDGs is met by space and enhanced by space, improved by space, by us tool-using apes sending amazing machines into space with antennas and cameras on them that can do things that we're doing, which is backing up all of humanity's data.

That's pretty incredible. Chris, there are some questions here that are a little bit more technical. And so let me just kind of start with one here, which is, you know, how is maintenance handled on the moon? And then how do you deal with things like regolith or like the moon dust that could clog up computers and create issues? Like, how do you— how does your team think about those things?

No, absolutely. And again, this is the great thing about space. We've been doing incredibly hard things in the space industry, usually so well that no one even notices we're there. Right. We've been putting out these incredible technological machines, these massive satellites, geostationary orbit, for example, things bigger than houses that live and work in the worst radiation environments known to humanity and do so for 15 to 20 years. We normally decommission them when they run out of maneuvering fuel, not because they failed on the electronics. So we're used to setting things up. Once you send them up, you can't go change them. And so unlike a data center on the ground, everything we do up there is lights out. It's following that great pattern, that great established technology readiness level that allows us to go out and— yeah, maintenance is done down here in mission control, usually software-defined.

Yeah. What about any other technological issues that you might come across?

Yeah, so like radiation and things. So like launch used to be the big risk. Not jinxing anything, right? But launch was always a big risk, and that has now drastically declined. Still a risk, something to keep track of, but over the last 60-odd years, we've gotten pretty good at launching things into space. We've also got really good at operating things in space. A lot of 60 years of lessons learned. We buy things commercially off the shelf now for ourselves. And so things like regolith, it's ensuring that your equipment is sealed, it's high off the ground, it's good for anti-static, everything in a good science textbook that can provide for that. And then our next set of missions are going to be after the test flights this year are going to be in lunar orbit too, which, by the way, was so much fun. We tested en route to the moon as well. So we actually tested digital storage, refresh, restore a virtual data center by using equipment on Intuitive Machines, Nova-C lander Odysseus. And so we transmitted the first ever document off planet for storage in all of human history. And we did the digital storage and pulled back the first ever document en route to the moon. And we did it again from the surface too. But those documents refresh and restore that we did on the 19th. The way the universe worked was President's Day, and the first ever document sent off planet was the Declaration of Independence, the US Declaration of Independence. Shine a light in the darkness. The world's going a little crazy at the moment, and it's just reminding everyone why freedom exists, what the idea is of a republic and certain rights. And the document we pulled back was the document that enshrined those rights, the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. Highly recommend everyone, no matter where you are in the world, read those documents.

When we, uh, when we first heard and worked with you to figure out like what that process looked like. I mean, the thing that stood out to us is you can't separate innovation and freedom and liberty, right? Innovation is deeply, deeply rooted in the ability for someone to go out and put in the work to unlock their potential and discover new things and having those freedoms and rights to do it. So, you know, as you think about— and this was something that I learned— as you think about like expansion on the moon, there's actually a set of laws that govern the moon, an international body. I don't think most people know that, but can you talk briefly about what that set of rules and laws look like and give a little history lesson there?

Yeah, of course. Absolutely. So the hardest thing about getting to space is getting permission. Space is the most regulated of all human activities because it takes all other human activities to make space work. So when you go out to the moon or any other celestial body, Uh, anything you do in space falls under something called the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Great reading, incredibly short. You can get that from the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs for free on the websites. Uh, occasionally when I behave myself, they actually let me teach postgraduate space law and continuing legal education, and this is what I teach about it. And so when you look at the moon, no one owns the moon or Mars or Venus or Jupiter. They are considered the common heritage and province of all mankind. The idea that, well, go back to the Cold War. The Soviets landed first on the moon. Never forget that. They put robots on the moon, like we're doing robots on Mars at the moment. Maybe not a good thing for a bunch of Texans, and I've got my citizenship in Texas, hence Lone Star, to look up at the night and go, oh my gosh, commies on the moon. Could have triggered World War III, right? America was the first to put people on the moon. And so the international community got together, actually led by the United States and by the UN and by the Soviet Union and others. Said, look, we need to establish some rules of the road. So when you send something into space, it's incredibly heavily regulated from the spectrum side at the ITU, International Telecommunications Union, the most powerful international organization that Dan Brown has yet to write a book about. Come on, Dan, get going, right? And then you've got the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs, reports to the Secretary General. All the nations have signed this. Every nation in the world has signed this treaty, bar Costa Rica. And it governs what you do and how you work up there. But also it's incredibly helpful for what we do. Because I saw, I saw one of the comments in one of the chats, someone was saying, well, why not just put data centers and connect them around the world? Yeah, right. Data sovereignty. Data now has a passport. If you are a regulated entity in your nation, and 104 countries now have this, and states within states now have this, it's illegal for you to keep your data outside your own country. Right? So that's why and network issues and network intrusion issues over the planet, issues with cable fiber. Just put— just Google cable fiber disaster issue network intrusion and just watch the feed come through, from Houthi rebels in the Red Sea to people mysteriously cutting cable fiber in France, Britain, Svalbard Island, even here at home in the States, right? So it's just a network issue and everything else. But on the moon, you land on the moon, you land in a spacecraft or space, astronauts, anything on the moon, you are under the Outer Space Treaty. You can't claim sovereignty. You can't say the moon is mine. What you are is under the continuing regulation, jurisdiction, and supervision of your launching state, your licensing state. So if you land an American lander, as we just did in February on the surface of the moon— so cool, that's like landing Washington, D.C. on the moon. With embassies on board for the payloads and equipment owned and licensed by other countries. And that's how it works. It's really very cool. It's very elegant, and it allows us to do amazing things in data backup and disaster recovery from that little blue marble that we see down below us.

Great view, by the way. Along those lines, right, someone asked earlier in the chat, like, you know, what's the physical security plan in place, uh, if China decides to go to the South Pole and they put up lunar data centers right next to you. I assume the body of law governs those types of interactions, but how do you think about physical security from other nation states to, as someone in the chat put, aliens and other things that could potentially damage the data centers?

Oh, absolutely. And by the way, People's Republic of China, thank you very much. You're the greatest market confirmation we ever had as a startup. They actually filed a patent for lunar data centers in opposition to us, which is great. We loved it. Our patent actually kind of trounces this, but let's just say that. But imagine that, right? The People's Republic of China are doing exactly what a tiny startup is doing. And we are protected and governed by those laws. 100% of the money spent in space— big secret— it isn't. It's spent down here. This is where we build the rockets, have the jobs, employ the people. Do the transactions. So you're protected under law and diplomacy, and the Outer Space Treaty and the ITU radio regulations, they really protect you on harmful interference and all these different things. There's laws and regulations about how close you can get to other people's equipment, anti-plume impingement. It's really rather complicated, but in a good way, very protective. The whole goal of those treaties is to prevent conflict starting down here by something that happens up there. And good lines of open communication, et cetera. Now, we do have anti-tamper on board. Of course we do. But with the greatest will in the world, I would suggest that we don't talk publicly about all our anti-tamper measures and everything else because it might make them less anti-tamperable. Say that 3 times.

Let's do that. Let's go back to the Intuitive Machines I Am One mission. I remember watching that, and it was like the countdown, and then they landed, and then obviously there's like this pause where everyone's waiting for the signal to come through. What was going through your head at that moment? Like, how did it feel to kind of be that CEO, be in the CEO cockpit, you know, at that moment in time?

No, thank you. I was surrounded by my team, and team is everything, right? We were all there in our mission control in St. Petersburg, Florida, at Maritime Defense Hub, and then connected by video to our team in California, our team in New York, our team in Washington. And it was a moment. I mean, it's one of those things, right? It's almost— you have to be very zen about this. I've been fortunate for the last 30 years to be doing space missions my whole life, launching things and operating them for other people and getting involved in all sorts of— and there is that moment of launch and then spacecraft acquisition in orbit, right? Turning on and telemetry and then landing. And yeah, it was a moment. It was out of our hands. We were intently watching. We were on the link to mission control in Houston, intuitive machines there, watching our friends and colleagues who we've gotten to know incredibly well, an amazing team of people. And by the way, we were not watching CNN or any of these other things because we were actually in mission control with headsets watching their mission control, looking at their expressions, what was happening, and seeing the feeds. And so we had no idea about this other stuff that was happening. If we had, I probably would have gone and screamed in the room. Because, you know, it was very touch and go, but they did it. And that's one of the great things about entrepreneurs and the great thing about Intuitive Machines. We looked at their team and we looked at their mission operations experience. They all came from the heart of NASA Johnson Space Center mission ops. And we knew there would be— in every space mission, there's something that happens on the way that is unanticipated. And something happened here that was unanticipated. They didn't have access to landing altimetry from the lasers as planned, but they were able to code on the fly send those patches up to the lander as it was circling the backside, coming through the backside of the moon to land on the moon. And they still pulled it off. Now, when they landed, they came down maybe a little harder with a lateral drift, and, and the actual one of the legs broken, it fell over. However, counted. It also continued to transmit and receive. It was powered, and it was able to conduct our experiment as one of their commercial payloads on board, or independence payload. But sitting there, Ryan, and yeah, but it's a weird thing, all right? It's not, it's, it's not one of those moments. It's, it's one of those, okay, right, good signal acquisition, good, okay, that dish down here, and we knew the dishes they were using on the ground, like, okay, they've acquired it, good, what's happening? Boom. And then your mind, it's almost as if you get, uh, it's the adrenaline rush, but it stays with you in spaceflight. 'Cause then it just kicks in and you get incredibly calm. It's like, now it's time to get to work. It's like everything you've done, it's like climbing Mount Everest. Okay, now we made it to the top, now what? Oh, another Everest, let's go. And that's when you got really good people around you, experienced people, and you realize that the moment of celebration is fleeting because that's when the work hits. And, but I love that. I love that rush.

[Speaker] What about the days that came after that, right? So obviously there's multiple different companies involved. You have to manage your team. You're also, you know, talking to Intuitive Machines, you know, very, very frequently. So we talked about the landing, that moment, sharing it with your team. What about the days after? Like, did you sleep at all? I mean, were you just like— tell us a little bit more about that.

I wish I could say I slept like a baby, but no, we were like all figuring out, you know, what had happened with the mission, what we were hearing from Intuitive Machines, who's our lunar access provider. Learning a lot, you know, learning everything from how did we handle launch, how did we handle mission control, writing down those lessons learned as they happened so we could learn from them afterwards, doing our own red team reviews and everything else, all the way through to working with the incredible team over there at Intuitive Machines saying, hey, okay, can you run our test a second time? We tested on the way to the moon, which cleared our path for going forward to our next set of missions, but can you test from the moon We were at the end of the list of things to do, what should have been a much longer mission. But again, this is the unique thing in spaceflight, very operations orientated. It was like, right, pow, pow, pow, right? Can we do this? Can we do that? And then boom, we got the confirmation, worked with the team, got the confirmation through just at 1:05 PM on the 27th, just as the lander was heading into its first series of lunar night, just as they, you know, a couple of hours before they did that, but we were one of the last commercial things they did, which is fantastic. So it made our entire mission a commercial success. It also made Intuitive Machines' mission a commercial success and fed right into the— and in the United States to the National Cislunar Policy, which actually requires data centers on the moon. And so we fulfilled that as well.

Let's talk a little bit about more of like the business and like startup side of this and what founders can do as they think about, you know, as they build their own moonshots. You've said this multiple times today, you know, it's all about the team. And that's something we see a lot, especially with deep tech startups. It's you're really betting on the team to be able to go out and accomplish this really grandiose and almost impossible mission. You know, what would you— what advice do you have for founders that are maybe building a real moonshot, not necessarily space, but something that's like really hard, that's deep tech versus just the normal like B2B or B2C startup? How do those founders have to think differently?

Yeah, no, you know, and it's educate yourself straight off the bat. There's so many resources out there from the Founders Institute. Get into those. I've been a mentor over at Techstars. Hope it's okay to mention that, but get into, learn, right? And there's so many different sources of information. I mean, it's gonna sound a weird thing to say, people are gonna look at me funny, but that TV show Silicon Valley, right? There is, it's actually pretty well done. Yeah. And it's a bit like watching Veep or Yes Minister. There's a lot of truth in those things. So educate yourself, but also at the same time, work with people who will challenge you. If you walk into a room and you find— this is something we're taught in the space program— if you walk into that room and you are the most intelligent person in that room, you have fundamentally failed. You must always surround yourselves with people more intelligent and more experienced than you. Set a clear goal with clear milestones for success or failure, and then back away and let them get on with it. Let them achieve it. You have to give them that goal and then delegate, delegate, delegate. Make coffee, open the mail, make sure everything else is working. But surround yourselves with, again, people who are fundamentally different from each other. If you're in the room and everyone's looking at you and you all look the same, you've made a mistake. Right? Get men and women. Trust me, you know, we just pulled off the first ever lunar commercial success, partly amazingly because of Carol Goldstein, our CFO, former head of satellite financing at Morgan Stanley, ING, and global— all global telecoms investing in ABN AMRO. Qualified lawyer, a qualified accountant, way overqualified to be working with us, and she's wonderful, right? And she's passionate about what we're doing. And that's the last thing Passion. If you've got people who are showing up at your company to claim a paycheck, at your— this entrepreneurial level, thank them and have them move on. You want people with passion because there's going to be bumps in the road. And if you've got a really good team of people who are firing off each other— that they can argue, of course they should be challenging things, getting things done, keep them moving forward always— but you will hit bumps in the road. There will be these things we call pivots. Right? And that's when the team comes to play. And that's when these two things come to play, right? Always talk to your customer base. Always listen to the customer. All right, listen to your investors. Surround yourselves with amazing investors. We've been so fortunate to have the Veteran Fund with us. And it sounds like I'm pandering, but not really, because Ryan and the team have done amazing things for us. There are a lot of VCs out there, but very few of them will truly understand your mission and what you're trying to achieve. And that's when they come to play because they are doing something harder than what you're doing. You might be going for a literal moonshot. They're funding your moonshot, right? They have to go raise that money to be able to fund you, and they have to make a decision on you, which meets their criteria to proceed. That's the hardest thing, right? I often look at VCs in amazement. I'm like, how do you guys even do that? We just landed on the moon compared to what— But how do you do that? Right. So that's it. Team. A team of investors, a team of your team, your executives, a team of people around you and team of customer.

You're being, you're being very humble and it's appreciated. But let's talk about two parts, right? So as you started to build out your team, so, you know, you, these customers came to you, you started thinking about like what a solution could be and you're going out on this expedition. And you need to make sure you have one of the best teams with you if you want to survive. How did you think about building out your team, whether it's like the different types of roles and functions they would fit, or if it's just the type of people that you wanted to have alongside you?

Both. Absolutely. I mean, I mean, any company when you go forward, the first person I always, I always seek to find is my chief financial officer. Right? No bucks, no Buck Rogers, as Buzz Aldrin quite rightly says. So space is capital intensive. There's high risk reward. They don't call satellites cash machines in the sky for no reason, though. It's also an incredibly profitable business. So how am I going to handle the financing of this? There was Carol. How are we going to do the regulatory work? There was Dr. Del Smith, who was now our chief space policy analyst, our first general counsel. So I looked at the— I looked at the financial, the regulatory, and I said, who do I know who's the very best in those areas globally? Never hold back. I literally said, who do I know is the very best? You don't find a cheap doctor. You don't buy cheap meat, right? You don't skimp on the people around you. And then on the technical side as well, I remember talking to Dr. Mark Matosian, and he was— he just left Google. He was doing some other work at iSci, the synthetic aperture radar company. Satellite flying. And I thought, Mark, here's what the customers are telling me. You've been one of these people before. What do you think? Are they— and he was like, oh my gosh, this is Holy Grail stuff. If you can pull this off. I said, so right. And when he left that other company, I said, what are you doing now? Come on in. And people who will constantly challenge you as well. Steve Eiseley is our new president and chief revenue officer. He came to us from Virgin Orbit, an incredible company. He was with them from startup to listed company and over $3 billion in backlog. An amazing gentleman, really experienced in the space world. And he's come back in and absolutely challenged every assumption that we had on the market, talking with our customers about this and everything to make sure we've gotten it right. And really, sometimes you've got to— I use a Star Trek analogy, forgive me everybody, I'm a sci-fi nerd. We're sci-fi nerds, we put things in space, it's part of the thing, right? And there's many different styles of management. They talk about the Kirk, you know, charge ahead or the Picard, we get a group consensus. And you've got to do a bit of both, right? I mean, right, you know that. I mean, you've got to, you've got to sometimes you've got to listen to the team and they're going to have amazing ideas and you credit them, you go forward. And sometimes you say, no, I know this is the right way to go. And trust me, team, I trusted you on this. You've got to trust me on this. Right. So that, but that's how.

100%. Let's talk a little bit about the fundraising piece. Because fundraising for a moonshot and for deep tech is fundamentally different than, let's say, a B2B startup that maybe has, you know, tens of thousands of dollars in revenue and can point to, you know, specific, like, you know, user acquisition costs. What advice do you have for founders that are thinking about fundraising for their deep tech or moonshot idea?

Get to revenue as quickly as you humanly can.

So figuring out the path to revenue and then executing on that.

Yes. And the reason I say that is the era of cheap money is gone. Right? I mean, I grew up in the '70s and '80s— '60s, '70s, and '80s— where we had sometimes 20% interest rates. And life continued. But that has changed a little bit. And people that we're talking to, they say, right, how soon are you going to break even? Where's your break-even point? Where's your return on investment? These classic old ideas that we grew up with, right? That we, the old people, grew up with, right? And they're now back in vogue, you know, when you're looking at 5 to 7%, 8% interest rates in the bank. And it's like, yeah, okay, project financing. Think about your financial needs as a company and the various stages of growth, whether it's, you know, angel, seed, Series A, B, C, IPO. But think about project financing. Think about how soon can I get to that first revenue coming in, to that market confirmation? Because revenue is a wonderful thing. That is the market singing your praises. That's someone buying your service. And then listen to those people and work with them. Never let them, never lose sight of them. Love them, cherish them. Those are your customers. Without them, there is no company. Same way without your team, there is no company, right? It's a delicate balance, but listen to the customers, fulfill their needs, not what you think their needs are, but the needs they're telling you, and get to revenue, show revenue. That's what we did with our test flights.

There has been a fundamental shift where we're seeing a lot more companies be more conscious about their spend. They're being conscious about, you know, what their next fundraising rounds look like. How do you think about your future fundraising for Lone Star?

No, thank you. Well, we're heading into a Series A right now. We were very fortunate to be oversubscribed at our seed, and we did that great Tech Tank thing with CEO.org, part of YPO, and that really helped us. And it's a balance between constant fundraising and constant selling of the, you know, to the customers, and then constant grooming of the team and constant— it's just, right? But that's what startups are. I was— someone said, was it once, like, like jumping off a cliff and building a plane before you hit the bottom, right? Something similar to that effect. Uh, but with ourselves going forward, the Series A, and then we're looking at project financing because we can. We're learning from others, you know. You can— and that's the great thing. We're looking at, you know, how are satellites— you know, because we're a space company— how are satellites funded? Understand your industry, what you're going into, whether you're disrupting or not. Understand how that industry works. For example, people think of show business, right? And they think of the stars and the glamour and everything else. I don't. I think of the— I forget the show. And I look at the business, the profit and loss. When I'm watching the movie, I wait till the credits at the end, and I see which company was formed to do that and how the— who the funders were and how it all came together. That to me is fascinating. And any business that you're going into, whether it be pharmaceuticals, whether it be drones, whether it be power, whether it be space, whether it be software, anything, there's probably so many lessons learned because you're going to make your own mistakes. I mean, you might as well be unique, make your own ones. Don't repeat the mistakes of others, right? That's, that's just like, oh, come on, guys, you know, guys and girls, we're better than that. We're entrepreneurs, right? And so understanding the funding landscape is crucial because trust me, you're looking at Angel Seed, Series A, on Forgive me, but it's not all VC. At some point, the VCs graduate to something else, and then you're looking at IPOs, and then you're looking at merchant banks and banking relationships. And banks are a whole different thing. Not just your local credit union. There are merchant banks. There are different types of banks. There are different banks within merchant banks. Understand that. Pick up a copy of the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal and start reading every day. As a funder, founder looking for funders, read, learn, see what's happening. Look what's happening with the AI companies at the moment. Astounding valuations, astounding funding. And I look at that and I go, oh, look, there is still capital in the world. What's it up to? Where's it going? I was reading the Financial Times just before coming on our call today, and it would be good for me, but I was actually reading a restaurant review in London. But it still counts, right? Educate yourself. We live in this digital renaissance for a reason. As long as you're watching this, you have access to every piece of human information that's ever been.

Yeah, the amount of information out there is incredible. I think we could probably fill up a whole other hour just talking about that and AI. But let's talk a little bit about the future, right? So Carlos in the chat here mentioned that now that you've literally achieved your moonshot, what's the vision now? Like, what does Lone Star look like 5 years from now?

Oh no, thank you. Now we've done it. Now we've tested. Now we've gone from science fiction to science fact. But it's one thing, our team, we always knew we could do this. I mean, really, right? But now we've done it and we can prove it to others. We're hitting the accelerator. We are growing out our sales channels. We are growing out of our book. We're growing out our backlog and going for it. It's sell, sell, sell, meet market demand, and then provision that market demand through a capital equipment launch and flow in the space. Yeah, we're at that unique pivot point right now. If that mission hadn't worked, I'd say wait for our second mission coming up this year, and that'll— hey, we took a risk, right? Boom, roll those dice. So that second mission going up is also sold out. It's the first ever physical data center off planet, our Freedom mission. Yeah, it's 8 terabytes and a Polify chip built for us by a great company called SkyCorp in Santa Clara, California. And, uh, we're flying all sorts of things for all sorts of people— edge processing, data storage, But it's sold out. And at the beginning of the call, Ryan, you said, tell us about Luna Data Centers, right? Why data centers on the moon? And that sums it up in one thing for me. Our customers are happy, truly happy with us. We're meeting their pain points in a unique way, and we're fulfilling their needs. It is like choirs singing behind me, like, ah, I love it. And that's the noise. That's the pitch of noise I always want to hear behind me, the ah of happy customers. And that's what we're doing. Yeah, that's right. That's for us. It's hit the accelerator and go.

What about the phase after that? Right. So you've got this second launch later this year. But what happens after that?

Like, yeah, after that, we're putting up a series of lunar orbiters so we can get good sunlight 24/7. And then once Starship is ready, we want to head right back to the lunar surface and actually down inside the moon into these incredible lava tubes that are up there. Uh, when you look at the moon tonight— I know we're waning a little bit at the moment— when you look at the moon tonight, you see those dark patches, the mare. Those are the seas. They look like the metro systems in, in everywhere from Mumbai to London to New York to Tokyo. NASA, JAXA, the Japanese space agency, ESA, the European space agency, have found over 2,700 tubes, massive things. One we're looking at is 93 kilometers long, 80 meters deep, 1,000 meters wide. There's one of 2,700, always Earth-facing. And we grow, we go into that, and we grow in and we build out, and we take it up from there. So that's where we want to be. Well, 5 years from now, we want people to look up the moon and go, well, of course you keep your data up there. Of course you keep your data in the cloud. Of course you use a computer, right? We want it to be a natural, normal thing where people can look up no matter what's happening down here and go, oh, thank goodness. My data is safe up there. I can physically see it. It's perfectly safe.

What about, what about your vision for the future of humanity in space? You know, earlier you were talking about all the resources that are out there. You're obviously like, you know, managing the data infrastructure is extremely important to achieve that vision. But, you know, 20 years from now, I mean, what does not only Lone Star look like, but what does humans in space look like?

No, thank you. Well, for us, we're so focused on digital infrastructure, about expanding out that digital infrastructure quite naturally from geostationary orbit out to lunar orbit, which we've just done and tested and proved, which is great. So it's like a golden flashing fishing net of economic activity around the world in low Earth orbit and geo, and now out to the moon. Just an expansion of Earth's economic activity. Incredible. It'll be Mars by then too. We fundamentally want to be supporting Mars missions and going on beyond. One of our investors very kindly, you might guess who, called us Men in Black meets Swiss bankers. Right, we want to be the World Bank. We want to be protecting that data for the entire planet. 8 billion plus, probably about 9 billion by the time we get to 5 years from now. Every man, woman, child, and machine on the planet should be backing up their data somewhere safe. We're not saying don't do it on the ground. Of course you should here. Do it somewhere up there as well. Because for the first time ever, In all of human history, we can, right? We can actually put our most precious valuable asset, our data that runs our technological civilization somewhere outside of storms, war, conflict, and more.

Chris, you've given a lot of really great advice for founders here. And just in the last kind of 10 minutes, what are some final pieces of advice for founders that you have? Like, you know, what were some of the pain points on your journey that where you had like maybe an aha moment and you'd like to share that with founders?

No, thank you. I mean, first of all, choose a great team of people with you, and if it's not working, change the team, right? Maintain your own personal health, meditate, sleep, right? And then also understand that the only limitations you have are the ones you choose to place upon yourself. I'm not talking about regulation and following the law. Of course you should do that, but sometimes you'll get a whole host of people who will say, oh, that'll never work, That'll never work. Those are the same people in the cave telling one of our great ancestors not to go outside and get more food. Well, that'll never work. Don't listen to those people. They're everywhere. We call them professional negatives. There's always someone who will find a reason why something won't work. What you need to do is find the people and surround yourselves with the people who tell you how it can work. As Jay Hunnicutt, former center director of Kennedy Space Center, president Lockheed Martin Space Ops, on our board, and amazing Presidential Medal of Freedom winner for saving Apollo 13, part of the team that did that. He always says, don't tell me what you can't do. Tell me what we can do. Subtle inflection there. That's my advice. And go for it.

Chris, thank you so much. I know we have limited time here. I want to make sure we end this on time. So I want to thank not only you for joining us, but I mean, just sharing the vision of what you're doing. I think our goal at the Veteran Fund for backing you and also for supporting the company through Founder Institute is how do we inspire that next generation of founders and kids who are thinking about, you know, either just like space in general or what the future holds for humanity? I think there's a lot of bad news in the world, but when you hear things like this, it really does inspire people. And so hopefully we'll have a really exciting announcement later this year to help inspire that next generation. We can't talk about it here, but Make sure you follow Lone Star, go, go to LinkedIn, follow the company. They put out some great updates. We'll be sure to check back in. Maybe we'll do this again at your second mission later this year. And for the founders who joined us today, thank you for joining us and asking your questions. Hopefully it was illuminating but also enjoyable for you. We will send out a recording of this event in the next 48 hours, so look for that email. Chris will be sure to send it to you and the team. Thank you to everyone, and I wish everyone a great journey on your startups ahead. Chris, take good care.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you, everyone at the Founders Institute. Thank you all. Thank you, Mike.