Sure

...like what you're actually selling from space, as possible, and you need to do it as at high dollar as you possibly can.

So, like each one of those bits counts for so much more.

Um, and so, you know, my thoughts around that a- are, like point one, if you need to eke out more bits how are you going to do that? You need higher utilization.

That means like more seconds in contact with whatever that end customer is on Earth, making sure you can actually transact for as many seconds as possible.

And then how do you send as many bits as you can per second.

So like y- you get as, as much... as many bits out of each of those seconds as you possibly can.

Mm.

So why didn't the US build out ground stations for this?

I guess it depends on the customer segment.

So for a government customer segment, they tend to procure their spacecraft and their ground systems separately.

So space systems were the major focus for a long time.

And ground segment was kind of just the afterthought.

People think about, what's the thing that you're putting up in space? And for a number of programs, the ground was just not really contemplated.

And so they started running into issues for that.

What does this scale out look like for you and the space industry?

So for each of you, is our current space infrastructure up to the challenge of the growing space economy? And Bridget, I can start with you on that.

I mean our our company would say that it's not and I guess like when it comes to the networking infrastructure that connects earth and space specifically.

You can think of spaces having gone through a couple of different generations like there was the era of space, where communication between earth and space was very simple.

were just a handful of spacecraft and tended to be pretty static.

So there's, you know, the orbit in space called geosynchronous orbit, where a satellite basically, you know, matches the orbit of Earth.

And so it's... appears to be stationary over a certain location.

So you can imagine from a networking perspective that makes things really simple and straightforward, where you can have a single networking link on Earth connected to that satellite.

Brigid, are there things that you think government should be doing to help in this area? Are there policies that need to be undertaken, investments that should be undertaken? What do you think government should be doing in this area?

Like how did it all happen? What year was it? Talk to me about that.

We started talking about it, like the three of us in 2023.

And Griffin had been the one who'd been building the technical prototypes.

I'd been thinking more on the operational side of the business and Char was bringing the industry expertise, having worked in the ground segment specifically across his career.

Combining those three things together, We really were recognizing the same problem that I mentioned, that networking for the space economy is really what drives its value.

And there's a significant bottleneck, and that bottleneck actually is not in space.

It's actually on Earth.

And this is like where this approach makes more sense.

Yeah.

The problem that we're solving is for every satellite, it requires a connection point back to Earth so that they can control the spacecraft.

It is kind of like a remote control car, where it needs some mechanism to make sure that it's going where it's supposed to go, and a way to actually bring that data back to the users on Earth.'Cause that's where the users are.

So that point of contact on Earth is called the ground infrastructure, and super basically, if you don't have it, you don't have a space mission.

It literally is just like a rock in space you're doing nothing with.

So ground infrastructure, it's completely fundamental.

And for us, we were observing the space industry, how launch cadence was increasing.

Please

Mm.

So we handle from the moment that there's a contact made with the spacecraft, all the way to, uh, the, the point of presence somewhere around the world that a spacecraft operator has themselves hosted, uh, that, that entire chain.

So that includes hardware, that in- includes modem, that includes network backhaul, that includes, uh, software interfaces, APIs, um, and the actual control plane for moving that data.

Um, that's kind of a, a, a stack end-to-end on ground that hasn't been managed by a, a third-party ground provider before.

And so that's what gets us excited, because when we take on that big, that big chunk of the pie-

-is kind of what I'm getting at in terms of like more mass to orbit?

Yes, big time.

Uh, we do get a lot of customer inbound, and I think, like, that's a large part of our raise for us.