Door-to-door speed versus cargo stored in orbit

From Rocket Cargo Anywhere In 15 Minutes. The U.S. Air Force Is In. on Deeptech Decoded, with Matija Milenovic.

Transcript

Nihal Kurth
Nihal Kurth

I remember in the family, we used to say a lot, soldier mode, when anything, let's say, you're not in your mood or you're sick, but there's something super important that you need to deliver. That's why it comes from, I think this discipline with the military background people is a different level that I can confirm from my own experience. No, no, no, no, soldier mode, you push through. And actually you feel very proud afterwards. I didn't know I had that energy already.

Nihal Kurth
Nihal Kurth

Really cool to have such a mindset in place in where you're building. Speaking of the faster, because faster rocket means, okay, velocity is higher, but then immediately that drinks up the fuel.

Nihal Kurth
Nihal Kurth

Can maybe little bit tell us how you fine tune those balances? Because sky is the limit when it comes to setting higher targets. you also mentioned, also guys publicly said that you completed your tethered testings, there was sort of things came to your mind that.

Nihal Kurth
Nihal Kurth

those were the trade-offs versus perhaps speed or perhaps how much load I can bring in.

Matija Milenovic
Matija Milenovic· Hop Aero

Yeah, so we very much optimized for what we call door to door speed. So

Nihal Kurth
Nihal Kurth

Mm.

Matija Milenovic
Matija Milenovic· Hop Aero

if you think about like this is when the the user wants to send something and this is when the other user wants to receive it. the flight is actually a relatively small piece of that entire puzzle. so what the military has saying, for example, everything to the left of launch, meaning how do you get the the cargo that you need to be into the rocket in the first place? Like is it already in the rocket? Is it at the same kind of storage facility, the warehouse? Is it

Matija Milenovic
Matija Milenovic· Hop Aero

somewhere else. So how how do you figure all of that stuff out? and there's

Nihal Kurth
Nihal Kurth

Mm.

Matija Milenovic
Matija Milenovic· Hop Aero

there's a lot of work and there's a lot of really smart people in the in the DOW looking at that. And then same as when you land, if you don't land right where the the end user is, the recipient is, how do you then get it to them? And that's a lot of what we're focusing on is how do we make sure again with like landing vertically, can we get as close as humanly possible to them? So that that's like this kind of door to door metric is the the the kind of main KPI that of Hoparrow if you want to look at it that way.

Matija Milenovic
Matija Milenovic· Hop Aero

the

Nihal Kurth
Nihal Kurth

Okay.

Matija Milenovic
Matija Milenovic· Hop Aero

the speed of the rocket is like governed by orbital mechanics. So when when you fly suborbital, it is governed by just you know, Newtonian physics, it's just known that like this is how long it's gonna take, and then you have some like extra time from drag and and so on. when you look at other companies in in the space, they do like they do fly fast in the sense of like I'll give like a really common example. there's a bunch of companies that the idea is to store

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