Customer prototypes and a first flight of their own
From Football Field Size Solar Arrays That Fold Into a Rocket on Deeptech Decoded, with Pele Collins.
Transcript
Mm. Hmm.
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.
Mm-hmm.
Like I said, 88%, potentially 88 % cheaper, which is huge for everyone.
Right now, where are you guys in terms of your milestones? you get started you set your goals for the next year, till the end of next year. And where are we now? Like in a way that you can confidently say, yes, like what we expected versus reality.
Mm-hmm.
is getting closer, but it's going to be more defined in 2027, but still.
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
Mm-hmm.
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,
Mm.
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.
