Hand-carrying propulsion hardware on a 23-hour round trip

It's it's known for being very unreliable. but also it it happened that when they were trying to respond, that they had a lot of birds that were downed, they had pilots that were getting fatigued, obviously the weather didn't help. And so they were just not able to, at any given time, there's just so many vehicles that were not operational at that point, also just missing parts, things like that. and so the amount of help that they could provide was limited compared to what they they could have done. And so that's where for Jacob the kind of earliest ideas of

There has to be a better way of doing something like this started forming in in his head. he went on to work at SpaceX then, literally building reusable rockets and working on the the very first Falcon Heavy, kind of when they Elon's car into space and landed the two boosters at the same time. He launched over twenty Falcon 9s during his time there and Falcon Heavies. and so that's where he really started putting like two and two together in his head.

And so my my story was obviously like no no lives were lost in in my story. mine mine was more from the commercial angle, which is when I was building my last company, as you mentioned, we we were given very little notice that it was in the middle of COVID and they were like, Hey, we need your propulsion system like tomorrow, basically. otherwise we would have to miss that launch and wait for the the next one. And for context, we were like we were like students

that were living off of like pot noodle effectively. just like

you know, being very, I guess, determined to make sure that we we got the propulsion system into into our integrators' hands, we were like, okay, we're we're gonna do whatever it takes. So I I the first c step is obviously you contact FedEx, DHL, UPS, and you try and figure out, you know, can anybody guarantee me like delivery in less than twenty-four hours? I don't care what the money what the cost is, I just need somebody to like give me a guarantee on paper that it'll come. that did not exist. They were willing to charge us

couple of thousand to ship something like really, really small. but nobody could could guarantee that. So in the I ended up boarding a flight, just transporting

speed.

it myself. and so that was a twenty-three hour round trip. and I remember on the flights home just being really tired and cranky, I started thinking about, you know, how how else could this be done? Like I started reading, I remember on the flight back, I was reading about Introduction to hypersonic flight. I was reading about some of the

Hahaha

rocketry work that was done like in the sixties about like

transportation here on earth. So it was just you know, I w wh whenever I get really pissed off, my first reaction is usually to try and like build a pro b build a solution around that problem. and so that's when I started thinking about it first. And I put that idea in the back of my head. I didn't really think about it for a couple of years. until un one thing that did stick in my head though is that especially when I met Jacob and we started talking, I realized that we had this problem where we needed something delivered