For folks here, um, on, on the East Coast, we woke up to a beautiful SpaceX jellyfish, uh, but that has gotta be a, a great sight to you because that means your science is being delivered to the International Space Station, right? Tell us a bit a- about what's on board and why this is so important.

They're called commercial resupply services missions, and for us, they're effectively our Super Bowl.

So we get about, you know, between five to seven, maybe eight every year.

And so on this mission, there's a lot of biomedical research that's gonna be going to the orbiting laboratory.

We, along with NASA's Biological and Physical Sciences Division, help to fund what we call the Igniting Innovation Challenge, which was focused specifically looking at cancer therapeutics to create more effective therapeutics for us here on this planet.

There's two projects that are flying on this mission that are associated with that.

One is from Cedars-Sinai.

How do the astronauts play into all of this stuff that, that you've got going up there? They've gotta actually do the experiments, right?

What were some of the, some of those first successes that really helped to build that reputation that, hey, this is a National Lab and this is something that you can utilize, uh, for research and finding out very cool things in the scientific community?

So one of the areas I think that we've seen a lot of interest in over the years, uh, is in, you know, biomedical research, pharmaceutical research, uh- With that, we, we've seen a lot of the major pharmaceutical companies like a Merck or an Eli Lilly or a GlaxoSmithKline, a Bristol Myers Squibb, uh, they became very early adapters, if you will, to leveraging the space station.

And I think that that also helps to provide some level of, "Well, if they're doing it, then why wouldn't we do that?" If they see the value of sending multiple investigations, and it seemed as though a lot of these companies were focused on protein crystallization early on.

Uh, protein crystal growth is something that has been, uh, in normal laboratory settings and also has been something that's been worked on, on the shuttle program, as well as early origins of the space station program before there was that National Lab concept.

So this was an area where they all wanted to try to, uh, dive into, if you will, and attack so that they could create more effective therapeutics for patients here on the ground, as well as astronauts living and working off our planet.

And so I would use Merck as a great example because they really did kind of set the foundation for a lot of other companies that, from a pharmaceutical standpoint, that wanted to do R&D on station.

Now, that's what I would call more traditional research.

How, how, how has that, uh, influenced in the expansion of CASIS?

So in a market where there's so many rapidly expanding commercial options, what does sovereignty mean today? And how is that definition evolving from owning satellites to also including software, AI, and data architectures?

Yeah, so this has been a very significant shift in the way that customers are thinking about where they get their intelligence, how they satisfy their intelligence needs.

Historically, satellites have been incredibly expensive.

Hundreds of millions of dollars launch of those satellites has been incredibly expensive.

So the way that defense users around the world would acquire that imagery is is by buying data from vendors who have launched their own satellites and been able to put up that kind of capital to launch those satellites that cost hundreds of millions, approaching billion-dollar satellites.

However, now, there's been some pretty significant shifts.

For one, the cost of satellites has dropped significantly.

And I know that Black Sky has really been at the forefront of AI for both satellite operations and how satellite imagery is processed and used So how is AI changing expectations around latency, revisit, and actionable insights for defense and intelligence customers?

I don't

know why, but I do.

Hey, sir.

Yeah, I just learned about bison meat and that it's the only meat that's not injected with any hormones or anything.

Okay.

Okay.

But, but.

Where are you? What state are you in, Patrick? I'm in

What is this all about?

Well, as many livestock producers would know, we've got, particularly in Western Australia, a fairly constrained red meat processing system, and particularly for those producers that require a service kill offering.

And that's where a producer can take an animal to an abattoir, get it slaughtered, but retain ownership of that carcass and get it back, get it butchered and sell it to their consumers directly, which is, that's a business model that my wife and I use with Tingle Ridge Farm and there's many others like us dotted around the state.

And the access for producers like myself and many like us is that we just cannot get access to those services and that really constrains our options in terms of diversifying our businesses.

At the moment, I think there's three or four, depending on whether a particular one's open or not, in Western Australia where you can take them.

For producers on the south coast, it's even worse because we've got a very long way to get to either Bunbury or to Corrigan.

They're our nearest two options for a custom kill service.

And talking to producers, you know, recently, Patrick, what's the kind of reaction that you're getting to the possibility, fingers crossed, of this opening?

Pat, could you give me a little background on you as an academic and what led you to be so interested in this space to dedicate yourself to it?

Yeah, absolutely.

Whenever I think about this and think about how I ended up here, I always come back to this idea.

I ended up here on accident.

It's certainly not the avenue or the area of research that I planned to go down when I first started my research career in undergrad.

So in undergrad and in my master's program, I'm a clinical psychologist by initial training.

And in my undergrad, I went to the University of New Haven University.

Research agendas are an expression of power, and it's an interesting topic.