The hop: vertical takeoff, ballistic arc, re-entry and landing

what that means is if you can cut down the I guess time and the space between the the last mile and the mid mile, if you can effectively eliminate it, that would be a very good thing. Same goes for the first mile. If I'm like

again shipping out my things, I I will go and hand it over to the courier, they're gonna drive in in a van or a truck to the nearest airport and you know. So if we can do a fully point to point solution, that's kind of the holy grail in what you're doing, that you're going straight from the the sender to the receiver. and so one of the the implications of that is that you can't just have a runway. You can't have like a massive airport and air traffic control and all that kind of stuff. You need something much closer to a helipad. Helipads are obviously like

much less footprint, smaller footprint you can kind of take off and land vertically. And so we we really looked at the helicopter model for kind of what is the the precedent for what we're trying to build. And so with all of that in mind, the way we look at it is we have our vehicle where the payload bay is on the on the lower part of the vehicle. That's very intentional because we want to be able to come in with existing equipment, so things like forklifts, and other kind of tools

Yeah.

and equipment that are available today to actually load

things onto the the vehicle much faster. be able to take off vertically with our rocket, the same way that every rocket takes off. And then we follow what we call a hop curves, that's why or hop arrow. So we fly this kind of ballistic trajectory. and that's actually the fastest way of going, especially at long distance. It's the fastest way of going anywhere on Earth. faster than any supersonic plane, faster than anything, 'cause you're literally leaving the atmosphere and you're kind of suborbitaling the s kind

suborbital.

of made up that word,

But like you're not orbiting the earth, but you're going through a part of it, and then you're re entering. So there's a lot of engineering challenges there. Like there's you know, I could I could like talk about that for

Is it like the Karman

line? Can we call it the Karman line? Like kind of a little bit above the Karman line, right?

Yeah, so it's it's a function of how far you're traveling. in in some cases you're definitely going past the the Carmen line. the benefit of that is that you don't go through the atmosphere. So when when you're going through the atmosphere, you're just inherently pushing against a lot of air. that becomes more and more difficult the faster you fly. So if there was just no atmosphere, your problem is not solved, but y you definitely can can design your mission in a different way. So we we fly in that kind of curve.