Conversation · 10
Football Field Size Solar Arrays That Fold Into a Rocket | Pele Collins, Beyond Reach Labs (YC W26)
Transcript
What could go wrong? How could that fail? Like, you know that, OK, what is the systems mechanisms behind this? If you're ready, then we can today talk about first who you are as a human being, and then moving to your story with Mitch to Beyond Reach Labs, and then take it where it goes. afterwards, we collect all community questions together with Cameron. Yeah?
Awesome. we have a pretty technical audience, but at the same time, we have curious minds. So therefore we try to strike a balance between technical or like the high level at the same time, like zooming in, zooming out. Feel free to go as technical as you want. And also you are a first on our podcast ever, a CTO. I'm so excited to have a CTO.
Yeah, sure thing. As a human being, I was born in South Africa. I grew up there. I came to United States for university. So I went to the U.S. Pennsylvania. I've always been into mechanical engineering. I loved building things growing up. so mechanical engineering was a natural thing for me to want to study. I love taking ideas and then making a physical part that you can hold in your hands at the end and be like, oh, look, this is something I thought of and now it's in my hands. ⁓ so I studied mechanical engineering. I, I guess it's me as a human being. also love playing sports. So I played like some soccer in college as well. I went to school in Philadelphia at University of Pennsylvania. And then from there, my journey sort of, I stayed in America. I went to Los Angeles and I worked for SpaceX for about five years out there. where I was responsible engineer for the parachutes on Dragon, which is, which understandably like a pretty like stressful, high stress position, but learned a lot about space flight, about parachutes, and really sort of like fell in love again with this idea of like, here's a big problem, go find a solution to that problem. So I worked there for five years and then wanted to do something sort of clean energy related and focused. So moved to Boston and worked for a nuclear fusion startup. I wanted something sort of completely different from parachutes. And I think nuclear fusion is basically the other side of the spectrum. But sort of worked on that for a couple of years, led the plasma facing components team out of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. And then actually went back to SpaceX for a few years because they were setting up an entire sort of parachute manufacturing facility. So ran that operation with a group of engineers and a whole production team. So building parachutes and other soft goods for SpaceX. ⁓ and then went back to sort of my roots and, ⁓ joined one of my best friends from university, Mitchell Fogelson in building sort of beyond reach labs together. And that's, guess where we are today. because of me as a human, I have a beautiful wife who I love. ⁓ and yeah. Yeah. Exactly. no, yeah. And I live in New York city and yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, this, is going to be so, so typical for anyone who's heard of mechanical genius speak, but I feel like for me it was Legos. It was, it was always Legos where it was just like, we, I was always into space. So like, I remember like getting so space, Lego sets and sort of taking the blocks, building them, doing, having to be able, the ability to sort of convert ideas and creativity into a thing.
So yeah, I think starting off with Lego and then doing like some robotics things with the Legos as well. And then I think that there's like some, there's like modules that you could sort of do on Legos where you can like add motors and you can start playing around with stuff like that. And that's sort of like the next level of like Legos up. But then it makes sense for me to sort of go to university, study mechanical engineering. I've always loved physics and had some great science teachers growing up.
Do you have a moment in your life that you realized I love physics and this person made me love even more? Because in my case it was my high school teacher. I loved it but at school I had a terrible physics teacher but I was like but I love physics and then I started tutoring like additional tutoring and she made me totally fall in love with physics like
Yeah. Yep. No, absolutely. think, I mean, it's again, uh, I think we're the exact same path. I, this is back in South Africa. And I mean, maybe there's a small chance my teachers are watching this, this podcast right now. But, uh, Mr. Thompson was the first physics teacher I had who really like blew my mind. And then, um, there was another one, Mr. Bradley. So shout out to Mr. Thompson, Mr. Bradley, if they're watching this. Um, but yeah, they just made physics fun. They just like, they took. They said like, hey, if you throw a ball, you can actually calculate exactly where it's going to land. And it's just like, it just like.
Yeah, exactly. And as someone who's trying to understand, you just take for granted the world just works around you, but as soon as you can sort put numbers and equations and formulas to the world, no, and they made it exciting. We're doing experiments. were like, it didn't feel like school when I was in physics class. And Mr. Bradley was the first person who told me I should study mechanical engineering, which has obviously set off my entire life from there.
Aha, once my husband told me that it's a little bit cultural with you because in Turkey we have so much respect for teachers and I realized it's not the same the more countries I jumped around but then in my opinion there isn't any like other than your parents your household your teachers are actually the very fundamental block of your life when you're growing up right and even they put the seeds of being mechanical engineering like engineer for you and then you you pull it here or it clicked immediately
Yeah, honestly, I remember when he told me and I never thought about what I was going to study at that point. I feel like I was just messing around and I didn't even know what mechanical engineering was. But then he said that I looked into it I'm like, yeah, this does seem like the path for me. ⁓ So yeah, mean, teachers have massive influence on everyone's lives because they impact so many kids every single year. They just pass through.
Uh, I definitely, I mean, sports, love basically every sport I can imagine for me. It's like, it's as much of like having friends and building friends in sports field as it is like, I'm the very competitive guy. So, uh, like, I mean, I'm named after a professional, the professional soccer player, the Brazilian soccer player. So I had to play, uh, soccer growing up. Um,
Yeah, it was, I was never going to be as good as Pele, but I still loved it. So I played soccer. played, ⁓ my, my, my mom claims that she's, she's named me and my siblings. I love my name. It's a, it's a unique one. I've never met another Pele in my life. but no, so soccer was the main sport, but I played a lot of rugby, basketball, tennis, squash. I love sports. I just love being active. And, ⁓ again, I'm a very competitive person.
Definitely played some computer games as well. I feel like, this is dating myself a bit. remember like hours and hours going into like rollercoaster tycoon, again, maybe like the building thing, like zoo tycoon, Sims. ⁓ Yeah. Making myself feel old. But no, I think, yeah, any sort of, and maybe it's the same thing as like sports and like playing on a soccer field. It's the same thing of like.
trying to find the solution to a problem. Like you have the ball at your feet, where you going to go now? What's the best options? Evaluate, make a move. Maybe that's why I enjoyed that so much. And also just like collaboration, like being a part of a team. Everywhere I go in the world, I still, I find a soccer team and I play with them. I'm in New York now, I just joined a few teams here. For me, it's a great way to sort of make friends as well and get your mind off of work a bit.
Mm. When you have such competitive soul and mind at the same time there is this urge to be creative and you love physics, maths, it's like I can't imagine any other way than one day you would come out and say hey guys I'm doing my own thing now I always wanted to tackle this and now is a good time. when you are an international person, you first want to settle in the country that you landed. I don't know you, but for me it was like that. but for me it was like secure my roof, secure my food, secure my residency and then once I feel okay if anything ever goes wrong from now on I can you know I have a safe internet for myself that I view. Did that play a role do you think? Did little bits?
Mm-hmm. Oh, I think absolutely. think again, maybe we can call it like an immigrant mentality a little bit that I definitely brought when I moved from South Africa to America. And I mean, again, luckily I'm fortunate enough that when I moved here, I already had some family who'd also moved to America. So like having like a support base made my life a lot easier. Most of my mom's family lives in the United States already. So that helped a lot. Obviously like coming into university.
a big adjustment of like American cultures and everything else. But the school I went to, University of Pennsylvania, number one was like very welcoming to international students. So you have people from all over the world who are all going through the same sort of like learning process with you. And I also love American people in general. So America is also a super diverse place. So you can find people who sort of are the same as you and think the same way. ⁓ like Mitch, I mean, my co-founder, ⁓ I mean, he's American. We were like friends on like day one of university studying mechanical engineering together. And we just like became great friends. but certainly like I, when I was thinking about what to do right after university, I think what you're talking about is true where I think you want more of like, ⁓ yeah, like a stable job, but like, like, let's just get a salary. Exactly. I wanted to learn. and I think I had.
opportunity of a lifetime for both of those at a place like SpaceX, which I knew I was going to learn a lot as a mechanical engineer, but also I thought at the time had the potential to grow as a company significantly. I think in hindsight, it's easy to say that like, yeah, now SpaceX is like the biggest, one of the biggest companies in the world. But I think that was like, for sure, not a sure thing when I joined.
Yeah. Yeah. I remember that. I remember that photo that was like in our like robotics lab. had like just like completed this project that we'd been working on all night and we were like deliriously tired, but it was like finally working and it was like, it's just, yeah, Hey, we happy moment. made it work exactly.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think maybe the fair way to say it is like, so Mitch was doing his PhD at Carnegie Mellon in robotics. And while he was doing that, he was working with NASA on sort of kilometer scale deployable structures. And so while doing that, he developed some new technologies and he was the first one that had the idea to go and try and commercialize some of those ideas into a business. So he started the business.
And from the time he started, basically reached out to me at the time I was, uh, I actually working at Commonwealth Fusion Systems and said, Tepele, I've got this idea. It sounds, it might be kind of crazy, but let's this business together. And I think, I mean, I think it's fair to say that I didn't say yes immediately. I actually went back to SpaceX for another year and a half, um, because I had an opportunity there. But.
And then it's just been a, like a wild ride since then, because we like, ⁓ we applied to Y Combinator soon after, like a few weeks after I joined and got into the Y Combinator program in San Francisco. Yeah. And then it was like, this is okay. This is real. And then it's basically felt like we've been on the treadmill running. Just trying to keep up since then, but it's been fun.
How can we start in a very simple way? I'll let you lead that. Because I also got to understand it's not only solar panels, but also you're working on thermal radiators too, right? Like, I don't know your prioritization, but then perhaps let's start on a very simple, basic concept that you're working on. And then I'm gonna start digging into the broken down structure.
Yep. Absolutely. mean, so I think starting at the most basic level, mean, thanks to companies like SpaceX, what we're seeing is like, is an explosion of the space economy. We can say that SpaceX has mostly solved the launch problem of it used to be so expensive to get anything in space that it didn't make sense to put anything in space. now SpaceX has really solved that problem and it's way cheaper. And so it's really unlocked the space economy, let's say. ⁓ and so so many new businesses are starting up in space. mean, telecommunications is a big one that like SpaceX obviously with Starlink is doing amazing things. but I mean, you could just like in the last like 10 years, all these space startups that are, that are starting with ideas of we want to build this thing in space, this thing in space, this thing in space. And, and so I think maybe what me and Mitch we're seeing as the, the gap is like people are building more and more complex things in space.
But if we think of like, I mean, I think we were both very inspired by the James Webb telescope. If you saw the James Webb telescope go up a few years ago, that was this like amazing, ambitious project where they were, they wanted this giant telescope in space that would open up sort of new understanding of how the universe formed. But to get that giant thing in space, they had to fold it up. They like folded it up and they did all these crazy contraptions to like fit it in a rocket and then go to space.
and then unfolded and it was this incredible thing. But the problem with James Webb is that it costs like, it took 10 years to do, it costs tens of billions of dollars. It was just like a very expensive way to do it. But I think it showed us like, Hey, if you can get good at this technology of like sort of like, let's call them mechanisms, like how do you make things big in space? You can unlock new possibilities. And I think the gap we were seeing is people. weren't really thinking about bigger in space. And they were thinking like, it'd be cool if we could do this, it'd be cool if could do this, but no one's thinking about the sort of bigger, like physically bigger scales. And when Mitch was doing his PhD, again, he was working with NASA on a kilometer scale space structure. So that's 10 times bigger than the ISS. And the sort of motivation for that was a centripetal gravity space station. So if humans are gonna be in space for extended periods, We basically have to somehow solve the gravity problem. Like humans, our bodies just break down when we're in space. And so we need some sort of artificial gravity. An idea for that is a giant spinning space station, but to make that work and to go at the speeds that you can't spin too fast. Otherwise we get sick anyway. So you have to spin pretty slow, which means you need something basically like 2001, a space Odyssey, but a kilometer big. And that is 10 times bigger than the ISS and just to think about like the ISS is still the most expensive thing that humans have ever built. But like, and part of the reason why it was so expensive is it had to go up in 80 different launches. We sent up a piece to space. We set up another piece of space. I think it was, I think it was about 80 separate launches of like shuttle and all the, all the pieces. And then they all got assembled together and all the servicing missions. So
If you want a big thing in space, you end up send up piece by piece and then assemble them in space. Or you do like James Webb, where you send up one thing that you've built on earth and like fold it down. Exactly. And then it gets big in space. And I think that's like the mind shift that we, we, we just haven't seen that like James Webb did it. And we're like, we expected more things like James Webb and we just haven't really seen that happen. And so maybe that's like,
the highest level sort of goal and mission that we're working on is we want to be the big builders in space because we think if you can go bigger, you could do amazing things. You can do things like the ISS. You build giant structures in space. People are trying to mine asteroids. They need big things. Think about like the lunar habitats. Similar problem there, where you can either try to build stuff when you get there.
Or you could build stuff here, send it there and have it like pop up, just like a pop up tent. You know, like, I guess when you go camping, you can either go like forage for wood and like build your own tent when you're there, or you can just bring your REI tent and just assemble it, you know, like pop it up. So that's the like, maybe like the highest level motivation is we wanted to get very good at doing sort of these deployable structures. And I can sort of show you like one of those, one of these things that Mitch worked on during his PhD. So this is something that he actually invented and got a patent on. But it's sort of packs flat like this. And then when it extends, it's a single degree of freedom mechanism. It actually extends out of plane, which solves a big problem because you don't just need things to get big. They have to actually be, from technical standpoint, like very stiff and strong to take structural loads. Exactly.
This solves a big problem because it expands out of plane. So you get that bending stiffness and it packs flat. So that's part of the problem. You have to rethink how are we designing structures for the volume constraints on a rocket. No matter how powerful your rocket is, it's only got this little volume on the top and you have to pack everything you want into that, no matter how heavy it is with us.
Mm. And just to give context, actually, you guys are aiming for up to 20 to 50 times bigger than the original size of what you're launching. Isn't that like crazy ambitious? well, you need to be crazy ambitious to pull this off. help me understand a little bit, how this is going to be because the bigger it gets, or maybe one step back, you're talking about solar.
Solar arrays, right? Like let's stick to solar arrays in space. And at the moment, why would I need solar arrays in space? That maybe the question could pop up in people's minds too, right? But because you are trying to use this energy in space, because if you try to bring it to Earth, like you're going to lose 90 % of it. Actually, which brings me back to the idea of star class initial explorations. Like they were exploring ideas and then they were like,
Yeah. Yeah. No, no, we're, sorry, yeah, small deviation. No, we've been chatting with the Star Cloud guys, Philip and Ezra and the whole team there. A lot of respect for everything they do. Yeah, and they also went through the Y Combinator program I think a year before us. So no, think we have a great relationship with them as well, which is good.
So to my understanding, the reason why we need more energy over there is because as you just mentioned, space economy is allowing us to launch things up there. And then hopefully we are going to be planetary species. Like we will have some establishments and data centers. If we had asked people one year ago, they would be still skeptical. But today we can establish that it is the future, And all those things, all those things need energy.
And to my understanding, even today as is picture, they are not even leveraging the maximum energy they could leverage. And it also ends up with having some sort of like malfunctioning because of any peak times on the satellite that they are working on whatever the structure. And also the moment the energy is not sufficient anymore, as some reason, you kind of... decrease the life of the thing you put up there. Is that a good way of why we need energy up there?
Yep. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a great summary. The, exactly at a high level, more and more industries are moving to space and it's different to like on earth where you can just, you have electricity in your house, you can just plug in and get power. When you're something just like floating in space, you have to make your own power. so basically the, the default way everyone's done this for, since the beginning is a big solar ray, because you just have, you have a sun. So you have a solar ray, you have a battery that you can charge and that becomes your energy source.
And as you said, more and more industries are moving to space and they all need power. And I think there is like, I just talked about like the data centers. Data centers can either be on earth and are using sort of earth generated power, water, all these other resources, or they can be put in, if that economy, that industry can be moved to space, they need to generate their own power. So they need giant solar arrays.
So what we're, what we're seeing is like, had this idea of we want to build bigger. We want to build these huge things. And the most immediate need that we saw right now in talking to people across the space industry is the need for either. think there's two things really more power is definitely one, ⁓ where they just need bigger solar arrays. And I think the, from a technical standpoint, problem with just going bigger and bigger on the solar arrays is.
If you imagine like a ruler or a stick, the longer it is, the more floppy it becomes. It literally is like, so the technical term is it's natural frequency mode. It is a very low first natural frequency mode, which means any sort of movement on the satellite, you can get resonance on the solar ray. So it basically limits how fast you can move the whole satellite. ⁓
Mitch likes to say this thing where I think when people think of satellites in space, they think of like Star Wars and like things are like zipping around. But that's just like, that is just not how it works. Like things are moving very slowly in space. And almost always the speed at which a satellite can move is dictated by that first natural frequency mode.
So people want more power, but more power means you're more floppy, which means your first natural frequency motors means you can move, you have to move slower. And there's some things that don't necessarily want to move. Like a telecommunication satellite, sometimes it's pointing at the same spot on earth. So doesn't need to move around. But also as we're more more stuff up there, things need to move to avoid each other. We're like getting sort of satellite collision risks. And if you get bigger, you'll start bigger risks. So got to move around.
So it's becoming this challenge of, okay, we don't just want more power and bigger solar arrays, but we also want stiffer solar arrays. So we want to, and that's like kind of the perfect problem for something like this, where it gets big, but as it gets bigger, it's actually getting stiffer. It's like going out of plane. So you don't just end up with this floppy thing. You end up with like a nice stiff structure. And that also has benefits even for smaller satellites. Some smaller satellites might just want to move around faster.
⁓ for whatever reason, and there's a benefit there for them as well. So I think we saw this need of like the solar ray problem specifically, and that's kind of where our focus is right now. But radiators is a similar story. A lot of these uses of more power in space also generate a lot of heat. Like the Orbital Data Center is a classic example where there is going to be a amount of heat generated. And so we're also thinking about, yeah, thermal radiators also need to get bigger.
And fundamentally, they're all fighting the same problem of, okay, we had to pack more things. Yeah, we to pack more things in a smaller space. So we have to get a lot smarter about how we're packing those things. And in general, like stuff that moves is hard. Like, I think it's always easier to analyze things that are like, if you have a box, that's pretty easy to analyze and say it's not gonna break.
As soon as your box is unfolding and moving, and that's why James Webb was so scary, right? They always said there were hundreds of different single point failure modes. If something moves, it can jam. And if it jams, you fail. So in general, the mentality has been, we call these deployables, sort of things that move in space. They say the best deployable is no deployable. So ideally, the easiest thing to do is just a solid brick that never moves.
it's I think always it's always whenever you have this hard constraints then you come up with the most creative way of solving the problem because in this situation our constraint is volume because it's very volume constraint driven sector and if I try to visualize we started falcon right falcon 9 is 71 meter high
Even if we, like, let's say, try to launch as much as we can, it's gonna be more regular like the airports, but in the end of the day, it's one thing to launch thing up there and another thing to make it work up there. So that will bring me to my question to, so how are you guys like breaking it down? I normally don't have my nuts, like literally.
I'm like where should I take it from? Maybe let's start with somebody kept like 10 times more powerful energy you provide and the size can get up to 20 to 50 times which is super check check and then somebody might ask okay how about the cost and then you on top you say oh I don't know why I have now this
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of ways that we can provide something so much cheaper. Because again, think space is also moving away from, let's say the old school space model, was make something super bespoke and fancy and it has to work once. It doesn't matter what it costs. space flight used to be so expensive, but now again, space has had this mentality of...
Well, why is it different to every other industry? Let's just like make it as cheap as possible anyway. And like, like, I mean, look at Starship, like Starship is like from the ground up designed and then it's like a very hard challenge they're trying to solve, but they're doing it so quickly because they're iterating through testing as opposed to like trying to have like a perfect product, but it launches the first time it's like, it'll get there. ⁓ so I think the mentality around all these space startups is
way more cost sensitive. And so I think we're, from the beginning as well, trying to be cognizant of that. No one's going to buy our giant solar arrays if they're more expensive than the current solutions out there. So it has to be better and it has to be cheaper. And so from the outset, there's a couple of ways we're trying to keep it as cheap as possible and why we can be, in some cases, 90 % cheaper. Like this structure is...
It looks simple and that's by design. In some ways, I think you can always overcomplicate a problem and make it super expensive to make and basically unnecessarily. Like this is basically as simple as it gets. These are like flat. These are like stamped pieces of metal with rivets. So it's basically like the cheapest, simplest thing you can make. And the challenge is still how do you make something super simple and cheap still reliable, right? So that's like obviously a challenge we're going to face. But from the outset, we're thinking.
when I got my first production assignment, we were supposed to do an optimization for a production line. And like, and then of course, this was one of the biggest brands in the world. And then I was like, they are so expensive. But look at the t-shirt. Like how much would that cost? Like the, or the color or the things. then it brought me years later when I read Elon Musk biography, this idiot index. was like, yep, that was what I was looking for for years.
Like it's asymptotically approaches to the job material cost, right? If you think about an ideal setup, like the perfect infrastructure I have, the most efficient and effective way of manufacturing things. And still, if I try to see how good I'm going to get, did you guys also went through the same calculations and then realize in by 2027, if I want to launch 100, which is your target, then how am I going to reach this in a like not only
Absolutely. No, mean, the idiot index was something that was drilled into me during my time at SpaceX, which was like, yeah, we have to change how we're thinking about not just what the pod looks like, but material selection. You're approaching the cost of the material. They're definitely expensive materials, and they're cheap materials. So there's. We're doing that as well. again, coming up with like not just like things like composites like there, if you look at how the new solar arrays on the ISS were deployed, they have these composite roll up tubes. And that is like, so you take a composite tube, you roll it up, also the energy and then like a tape measure, it sort of deploys out. And that's like a way to like have this big deployable in space. And that's how the roses on the ice has been made. But those are super expensive, super complicated to make, super sensitive during production. So your yield is actually very low. It's like a very complicated, expensive way to solve that problem. And we're trying to go back to like,
No, it's like the production of these tubes takes such a long lead time. It's super sensitive. if you drop a hammer on this thing while it's getting made, you've got to scrap the whole thing and start again. And it's like one single continuous piece. in some ways like this, if something happened to one of these pieces, we could just swap it out for a new one. And it's like you don't have to scrap the entire production. ⁓
So, and it's like from a chemistry standpoint, from a material science standpoint, just like a super over complicated for what it's trying to do. and before I forget, sorry, the other thing I was going to say about like how we can also get cheaper. So like the mechanism comparing this, for example, to the composite tube by itself is like 90 % cheaper. And you can, you can Google what the, ones in the ISS costs. I think they were like a hundred million dollars, something crazy. but. The other thing is because our mechanism allows you to get bigger, space, if you think of like solar panels on your roof of your house, like the cost of solar on earth energy, solar powers and panels on earth has dropped dramatically in the last like 20 or 30 years. And it's all because of like lot of production stuff, but like silicon is basically what everyone uses. It's silicon with glass. That's like the cheapest way to do solar.
Almost no one in space today uses silicon based solar cells. use, and the reason is like, it's not that efficient. It's like about 17 % efficiency in terms of how much energy converts from the sun. So that's fine for your roof. We have a lot of space, but if you're trying to keep your solar panels in space as small as possible, again, because you want to be maneuverable, they use higher efficiency cells. So they use something like, for example, like triple junction is more like 30 % efficient.
So it means your solar panel can be half the size, but still generate the same amount of power. The nice thing, again, if we just get comfortable with these giant solar arrays, which is what we're trying to do here, you then are less scared about having a big solar panel. So you can switch over to the way cheaper silicon cells versus triple junction. you can also, your cost of the mechanism is cheaper and your cost of the solar panels themselves is a lot cheaper. So it's like that combination is like really making the whole architecture.
Yeah. Yeah. So we're at right now is we're working with several customers on prototypes, essentially. taking this idea and turn that into a flight ready prototype that we can go and run full scale tests on. And I asked earlier about sort of reliability of these things. How do you, how are you sure that it's going to work in space every single time? And the, I think it's really like at least two pronged approach. One is from
the analysis side, so you can have, we're working on our own, and this is coming out of the PhD work as well, ⁓ our own dynamic simulation tools to basically, in a model, say, this is how we expect it to behave. Because it's, again, things behave very differently in zero gravity versus on Earth. And so,
we have to have a model that we truly believe and trust is going to be accurate. So we're working on the modeling side and we're working on the physical prototyping side. And then there's going to be a testing, obviously a big testing portion where we're correlating the real results with what we have in the model. It's going to this feedback loop of update the model, make it more accurate, look at the test results and sort of refine the design over time. So we're ready right now. We're building these prototypes for customers. We'll be hopefully testing them later this year. we're almost certainly going to have our own product launch to space. So some customers have said, hey, this looks amazing. We want to see it work in space first. And so we're going to have our own launch to space where we build our own unit, send it to space, deploy it out to show that it works, and it's actually getting the performance that we expect. So we're working on that as well. And that's hopefully going to be in early 2027.
Um, yeah, fortunately I can't name them, but, uh, what is, think very cool is it's all across the space industry. So there's like space manufacturing companies as communication companies. Um, I get out of country again in specifics, but, uh, there are a lot of companies trying to do cool things in space. Um, and sort of anyone, anyone who has a satellite and solar panels in space is a potential customer of ours. Uh, and we talked to all of them. So we have some, have some great customers that we like.
Like not fully fully robotics, but in a way that it's like you're taking the best of everything that could get in the simplest form ever. But it's one thing to run it on simulations and leveraging digital twins and everything. And it's another thing to really push the limits. And you can only push the limits if you put it out there in life. Like how do you make sure that you're, I think you also use Monte Carlo simulation too, right?
Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah. And I think this is where like my background with the parachutes is helpful because parachutes were a similar problem at SpaceX where number one, it's very hard to test. It's, it's yeah. Yeah. If it fails, people die. That kept me up at night a lot. But
It's one of those things where it's not a strut, like a strut you can test by like putting on a machine, pushing it and seeing if it breaks. Parachutes, these parachutes are hundreds of feet in diameter. And so to test them, you have to test them at full scale. You have to test them in realistic conditions. So we had to get very creative with how we ran our whole parachute testing campaign. We had to get planes, we had to get helicopters, we had to get giant balloons. We did over a hundred drop tests at SpaceX to qualify these parachutes in all corners of the box. And then took that, fed that into a model, ran the Monte Carlo and then said, Hey, even in like the three sigma case, this thing still works. ⁓
But honestly, until we like actually flew into space the first time, there was always the question of, hey, maybe there's something we didn't think of, maybe some corner of the box we weren't able to test. We were super confident at that point. But yeah, and the parachutes have, as you know, they've worked every time with the Dragon missions, which is a great thing. Just all to say that this is like my background. It's like, you have to come up with very creative ways how to test these things, how to gain confidence, the feedback loop with the models, testing. a mechanism like this in zero gravity is a challenge in itself. There are gravity offloading devices where you can try and rig up a crane around it and basically simulate no gravity, but it's never going to be perfect. We did a... Yeah, yeah, we have to. Yeah. Another pretty crazy thing that we actually did for the first time last year is a zero gravity flight, which is like the...
the plane that goes up and down, call it the vomit comet, where you can sort of simulate zero gravity by being like coming down and you're falling and you can do a bunch of experiments. So we took, we took this in the zero gravity environment, deployed it. And the reason actually that there are a bunch of these tracking dots is because we're like, we have cameras that are tracking it and seeing exactly how things are moving and how it's performing. So that's like, also another way you have to get very creative to like test these things in a flight like way.
And let us walk us through the product. from day one, like I'm your customer and I want to know every single detail how you put it up there and then once it's up there what's gonna happen, how long it's gonna last, like let's start from zero. Okay Mitch and Pele came up with the product and went to their SpaceX, give us some volume, like and then we are watching now it's going, rocket launched, okay now what's happening.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep. well, can I go day one, which is when we come to you, we ask you what your requirements are. So you might say, want a hundred kilowatts of power. Yep. Like what's, what's kind of nice about this is, it's scale and material agnostic. So some customers might be more weight sense, more mass sensitive. And so you can use lighter materials like carbon fiber as opposed to aluminum.
Some of the customers might be more cost sensitive. And so you can use aluminum as opposed to carbon fiber. So we can make it out of any material. We can also scale it up, scale it down any length, any packaging dimensions. So it is somewhat bespoke, at least for now, the first few. And so I'll come to you and I'll say, how much power do you need? And where does it need a package? Like where does this go on your satellite? How much volume do we have to work with? From that. we can go and then basically do our own optimization, say, OK, this is the perfect design for you. It's got this many legs. It'll have this much power. It'll be this stiff. And it's always a trade-off and conversation with the customer back and forth as we're developing that. ⁓
What is the maximum ranges there? Like what could be the minimum energy requirement versus maximum? Because you have a very general purpose mechanism that you guys build, but yet it's very customizable at the same time. it's like you're not going into service sector, like you're still in the product, but I would like to understand how extreme our cook demands could be.
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I mean, we've looked at versions that are 100 meters long. So they pack down to like 2 and 1 meters. And 50 times longer, they deploy out to 100 meters. And depending on your solar cells, that can give you like 150 kilowatts of power on both sides. Again, it's always like a packaging problem. But so.
And like what type of solar cell you use, are those going to fold out more? But I think the easy way to think about it is how long you can go. So like for us, we can go like easily a hundred meters long. And then it's a question of at that length with this stiffness, does that still meet your requirements of how maneuverable your satellite is? Cause again, as you get longer, things still get floppier. So you're finding that as a requirement as well.
But we think we can make a 100-meter version work. We haven't built a 100-meter version. That's sort of coming up, hopefully, soon. But at least optimization-wise, there's no reason we know that it shouldn't work. And it could be small as well. For a smaller satellite, they might want one kilowatt of power. And so your deployable is only a few meters, like two, three meters long. But also, you can have a nice, stiff structure. So that's kind of the ranges, I sizes. But I think... I don't know. think maybe take it a step back a little bit. What me and Mitch like to say is we don't want to be a solution in search of a problem. Like I think this is like an example. There may be, there almost certainly is better design deployables out there. And we just want to be the company that is specifically focused on this problem. We're in love with the problem, which is, hey, how do you get big things in space? And there are sure many different...
form factors, what they look like, whatever. We just want to become the best at that because we want to ultimately be the big builders of space. want to build, it's nice thing about space. There's no gravity. So you can like, you can build as big as you want. We want to be the big builder space. But yeah, so.
Sorry. So we get the requirements from the customer. It's a conversation back and forth. That'll turn into a prototype. We'll turn it to testing, show that it works at least confidently. And it's the same with like SpaceX. The first time it goes to space, you've done whatever tests you can do on the ground, analysis you can do to be like, I'm pretty sure this is going to work. Like I said, for example, the parachutes, we had to be 99.99 % sure that it was going to work.
first time into space and you do whatever test you can to get that confidence. And then you send it to space. then if you're a satellite that wants power, you'll go to space, you'll deploy it out and it'll start generating power for you. What's kind of cool about the specific design is it could also be retracted. So if, for example, you want to move around faster.
retractability is there are a couple different reasons you might want to there's some vehicles that want to re-enter so if you're like a re-entry vehicle You can't just have these giant solar rays or you can, they'll spurn up. So you suck them back in, then you re-enter. Or if you want to move around faster. So like, mean, maybe the classic example is if you think of like an ice skater, like a figure skater who like can spin slowly and then she pulls in her arms, she could spin way faster. And that's the same idea. So it's like your inertia. So you can bring in those satellite, bring in the solar rays, move around fast if you have to, and then extend back out for more power.
You can get like, there's so many different things you could do if you have this modularity. Like you can also think about like solar panels do degrade when you're in space, they lose some amount of percentage over their lifetime, a few percent per year. But if you have a design that can keep extending out further and further, you can just pull out new solar panels and make more power as your thing is decreasing over time. it unlocks a new way of thinking. I think until for now, people deploy solar arrays and they just sit there. And no one's really thought about, ⁓ what would happen if we had the ability to pull them back? The original solar arrays in the space station
It's always like, ⁓ if it was so easy, somebody would be already working on it right now too. Because whenever two founders like you and me comes and say, hey, now we will make this work. And it's the moment like, okay, whereas it happened because with a simple Google that you get the references, but then you always get into this, okay, this is the challenge, this is the challenge, that's the challenge that you can't put them all together. But at the same time, if this was-
Yeah, I think it would, it's like a massive unlock for the whole space industry, right? It's just like, if all of a sudden, I need a beam that's this big. mean, if you go to like, everything's made out of big beams, right? Your house is made up of a bunch of beams. And like, if you could take together a bunch of those beams, what could you build in space? It kind of just unlocks like everything. Same on like the moon, same on Mars, if we're going to be interplanetary.
In your case, you set your own bar. It's not like in a typical software development. You talk to your power users, you talk to your early adapters, and then you try to... You are very well-schooled at SpaceX with respect to that. But what was the eye-opening moment for you? Either it came from a customer in a way, or it made you think differently all of a sudden. What was your biggest aha moment? since you guys launched.
Yeah, I mean, I think. Yeah, I mean, honestly, when we first applied to iCombinator, we actually applied with a pretty different idea, which is, think, pretty classic of everyone. We were more focused on the software, the simulation side of things, because it is a big problem. There's no good way to analyze these deployable mechanisms and gain confidence. So we were focused on just that part of it. And we went out to customers, started talking to them, and we said, hey, we have this cool software tool that you can use to analyze your deployable mechanisms. And I remember it was like one, and then two, and then three of our customers were just like, they said to us, said, well, this tool looks great, but can you just design and build the thing for us? Because.
It was like, this is such a big problem and we don't want to just learn this new tool. you just, this is like, and it's been like our engineering teams are constrained. They work in other problems. We have no one to work on this right now. And for us, it was great because Fundamentally Mitch and I are both hardware people. We're the mechanical engineers. We actually like the hardware side of things and that's what I did my whole career. So that was a moment of like, oh yeah, we should just like own the whole, not just like one piece, but we should own the entire part of it. So it's like, we're now doing the design. We're keeping our tools internally for ourselves for analysis. And we're actually building and delivering the best products to the customers that we're confident are gonna work.
Yeah. Yeah, think, I mean, patents are there for a reason. I think if you invent something unique and that has a business case, you should go and get a patent on it. And we're happy that we do have patents, but we do know that ultimately... more important than our patent is just how we execute. I think the idea is like we want to go as quickly as possible. We want to execute as well as possible so there's no reason for anyone to copy us. If you are delivering a great product that your customers have and you're delivering it on time at a good cost, there's no reason for anyone to copy you because why invest that time and effort to develop it yourself when you can get something sort of already done.
We are thinking about sort of the next steps of what does it look like when we think beyond just solar panels, like redesigning what a whole satellite looks like. I think we have this idea in our heads of what a satellite looks like right now. Tackling some of the specific problems of, hey, we're now great at building these big things. What can we build with this? And I think if we're building the biggest structures in space, and we build the biggest structures on the moon and Mars, I mean, this could be. billions and billions of dollars. could be a trillion dollars. How big could it be? We're talking about the biggest structures in the world. It could be huge.
Taken in, this is a compliment in that I was taken in by the simplicity of it all. Like I think, especially when you showed the structure the first thing that came to my mind as you were talking about Lego is at the very start. And I'm not sure if you ever graduated to Meccano, probably did on your journey. But that's exactly what that reminded me of. And I was just blown away that I was just like, this is so cool. It's just this idea that.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love, and this is our little like, it's a little desktop version that we can carry around and like show people easily. But I love, yeah, showing it to like mechanical engineers, like people I used to work with at SpaceX, our customers we go and they put it in their hands and they have the, they all have this moment of just like, oh, oh, that's good. Oh, that's, that's really good. Cause again, I think, and like, this is like obviously the simplest version you can make of this is the final version to be a little more complex, but.
In some ways, the simple solution is the best one when it's just like, can always over-optimize something. Elon has this classic thing of like, don't optimize something that shouldn't exist. You can have a bunch of extra complications, but then you just start chasing your tail there. Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, just failure points really. Yeah, I think the beauty is in the simplicity. It's very easy. We've had the opportunity through these AMAs to speak to number of incredible people solving very complex challenges in fields that are quite difficult to technically understand. And I think it was just so refreshing to be like, look at this. And then immediately be able to.
Yeah. It's like, yeah, 100%. Even if like, even if you're not a mechanical engineer, you can look at a bridge and be like, you do everyone has a fundamental understanding, whether they know it or not, why that bridge is standing up, like why that bridge is letting car is strong enough to let cars drive over it. And it's because they have these trust structures, or they have ropes and stuff. And it's like, like,
Absolutely. And then add on that, you know, the A level design technology, the material science nerded me, it's ticking all the boxes. yeah, just a incredibly cool after that little deviation from the questions. So we had Josh ask, who is a assistant professor at Gonzaga, what one technical breakthrough would most motivate your success?
Hmm. Like a better, and this is what we're going to work on for sure. Like, uh, like analysis models are always like, I mean, Mitch likes to say they're doomed to succeed. Like you can always, you can always tweak analysis model to say it'll fail or say it's going to work. Um, I think we're going to focus a lot of effort in making, as far as building it from the ground up, our own physics engine, our own like our own tools. because we want to build models that we have 100 % confidence in and like how they're performing it because ultimately this is, it's such a hard thing to do to build this on the ground and know it's going to work every time and space. so yeah, technical breakthrough would be some better physics engine or like some better modeling tool that we could use. There's always like material science breakthroughs where it's like, hey, if someone came up with a... super lightweight, stiff, cheap material. That'd be awesome. But like maybe on like the technology side, analysis tools would be a breakthrough for us.
That kind of ties back to what you're saying towards the end there and that the original pitch that you went to YC with was effectively, if I was listening appropriately to that kind of tool, then it was actually, can you just solve the problem without that doing that? But it's your own kind of accelerator, I guess.
Hey, exactly. Yeah, completely like SpaceX for some of our most complex. deployment mechanisms, moving parts, dynamic simulations, we would use tools that were developed in the 70s and 80s that just haven't been updated really since then. And it's kind of funny how far that side has lagged behind the rest of technology. And it's just because it's a pretty niche problem, if we're being honest. Like there, if you think of like the SpaceX rocket. There are thousands and thousands of parts on that rocket that don't move. And then I'd be like three or four that move. So a lot of work has gone into making the tools for static structures very good, but dynamic simulations have always lagged behind just because there isn't that big of a need. ⁓
Yeah, I think again, from my perspective, it's a super interesting conversation. Ticks on my books as a nerd and quietly as a Southern Hemisphere guy, I like that you're a sefer. All right. And then it's been a pleasure. I will hand over to Nahal and yeah, can't wait to hear more about your success.
There are very few ⁓ companies that make me read PhD level papers. Congrats to you. Like I ended up browsing. I didn't read it line by line because at some parts my technicality was not sufficient even to judge whether this makes sense or not. But before the conversation I was already texting Cameron and Nika.
my god, I'm holding myself not to read the PhD papers because then I will deviate from my old product driven conversation. what... I would like to do, before we close, we experimented a new concept. Perhaps next time, Cameron would like to fire those questions, but today I will take them over. I'm gonna ask you five questions. You don't need to overthink, just tell us what comes to your mind first. Ready? Bring it on.
not really technical, but technical spices are in there, some of them. Okay, let's go. First one is about cognitive dissonance. So what are two beliefs you hold to be true that actually contradict each other? If it has, I can give my go-to example for this. I love animals, I believe we should not give harm or...
⁓ sure. That's a good one. I agree with those. I maybe for me, it's that I think aliens must exist. But maybe it's like the paradox that we haven't seen any aliens freaks me out because it's hard for to like move my brain to accept that humans are the only and the earth is only place where life exists in the universe. As someone who's like always thinking about like exploring like interplanetary
back to that. I'll come back. I'll come back. I'll think about it because that my god this. Okay, maybe I'll just say like, I was pretty. I really love the movie. Inside out. And so let me say this is an animated movie. Disney one. ⁓ That's all to say joy as a character because she I try and like
be a positive person and have a positive view on the world. And I think that's very tough when the world's a tough place to be in and there is sadness and real, don't, Connell will be happy the whole time, but just remaining positive. And I think that's kind of her whole thing. So let's go with that.
I have hard time with the concept of favorites even if I ask a question like favorite concept is really difficult for me but I loved Jetsons, you know the Jetsons I was amazed yeah exactly that you know you go on thing and it's actually then it was ironic I also enjoyed Flintstones a lot like I loved it
Yeah, I even had a tattoo of the pebble. Like it was an interim one though at my back when I was teenager. I'm glad it was interim tattoo not like... No, I don't want to have it anymore. So that was... They kind of like both one is super feature, feature the other is like Stone Age. But both were family driven. Maybe that was the common denominator. I don't know. So what is a misconception?
I think when you're introvert probably you're very introvert to charge your batteries and then you're social, you're too social and then you again kind of like... It's so cool. It's balance. Okay, the next one. If I travel to the future with you, let's say 50 years from now on, this is not so hard. How much would you be surprised if we pass type one?
50 years. 50 years is a long time. If I think of what's happened in the last 20 years. Yeah, I think we passed type one, 50 years. I just like, yeah, I think of how, so I'm 30 now, so I would be 80 by then. And if I think what the world must have looked like for 80 year olds now when they were 30 versus now, it's like, you can't even imagine. So yeah, I totally believe that, 50 years, for sure.
Okay, and as always we have a tradition. We have the previous guest leaving a question for the next one and previously we had Skylar Chan from Groo's Face and he left a question for you. The question is, this is my final question I promise, would you take a one-way ticket to Mars? And I'm adding why in the end or why not.
Sure. Sure. would I take one or would you take it to Mars? I mean, this is a question I had to think about every day we worked at SpaceX because that's ultimately the goal of what we're working on. I would. My wife would kill me for sure before I was allowed to leave. ⁓ Yeah, she would not come and she would kill me if I wanted to go. But I would, I think like I've, I don't know, there's this,
I feel like once humans are on the moon and once they're on Mars, I think we as a civilization, wherever we go from there, we'll look back at those moments as such a inflection point in the history of humanity. Like let's think like 10,000 years from now. They won't really talk about what war we had on Earth. They'll talk about the moment that humans started living on Mars because look at us, we're like in the solar system, we're doing these amazing things. So to be a part of that, and that's why ultimately I wanted to work at SpaceX. Like that mission excites me. Like let's be a part of that incredible moment in time.
No. I like that answer actually. Pele, all of my guests are special but with you I had a very good moment. It happened with Filip as well because the conversation with Filip all kicked off the bit technical. Like literally it was more like hey hey like before you get famous can I get you because I was following you since 2024 and I always want to pair this like AMAs and it was really literally nothing was existing.
And then he was so generous with this time and came. And it kind of like reminded me of what I genuinely really enjoyed doing. And then when we had the conversation that you said that, ⁓ you found your calling. And I was like, there is some, a piece is missing there because you looked at me with your eyes like smiling and with those shiny eyes, like I found my calling and I'm so ready to go. And I was like.
no, I'm yeah, I think it's a super exciting time, not just for me and Mitch and his company. I think it's just a super, it's an exciting time in the world with everything changing very fast. So I don't know. I, it was a, I think a big leap to like go out of comfort and like try to do my own thing. But if, if you're considering it, I just, and you're listening, like do that leap and I'm happy to chat with you through it, but.
Perfect ending for a conversation. So good. Thank you so much Pele. I appreciate every second of your conversation. Thank you.
Yeah, I was just going to pop up and say thank you. And then we just had someone say, Algo VC wants to ask, why is Pele so cool? So thought that might be a nice little send off for you.
Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And the same both ways. You'll be successful and I'll be like, hey, now remember, remember Pele? Exactly.
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