What Hop Aero builds: hypersonic point-to-point cargo rockets

It's a great pleasure to have you here today. And I'm so excited to dive deep into what you're building if you just go straight to what you're building and then understand why we need this maybe as a starting point?

Definitely, yeah. So we're building rockets that deliver cargo to contested environments. so we fly suborbitally point to point at hypersonic speed to very distant locations and we deliver very time sensitive and critical goods.

You mentioned that you had your own experience and also your co-founder had a situation maybe to take a step back and to go back to the origin story. What was the moment, how did your paths cross and then led to build this?

Yeah, for sure. so my background is in engineering. I I I started my first company that was building satellite propulsion systems and I started that pretty much six months after starting my masters. and so that kind of began as a sort of a series of happy accidents. So we we were trying to get internships, nobody would give us any internships, and so we decided to do this summer project. and through doing that we ended up building a prototype of our

Propulsion system. It was it was very, very basic. But we realized that in building that that we had a lot of potential to actually turn that into a company. And so we just kept pursuing it. And so that turned into my my first startup that was called Pork Chop Space, where we ended up after about two years launching a propulsion system onto the third ever rideshare mission with SpaceX that was on Transporter 3. And through that company is where I got my experience with raising venture capital and