The Space Technology That Could Change History Forever

But the journey from there to what would become Cowboy Space was much longer. So about two and a half years ago, I started this company with a vision of building the first American energy company in space. And why do that? Well, let's actually take a look at the mission of the company, which is powering humanity from the high frontier. here. The thought process behind this was looking at the commercial applications for outer space and thinking to myself, if humanity was going to be the space-faring civilization that I think all of us want it to be, it wasn't going to get there on the path that it was. The space industry, through the majority of our lifetimes before the last 15 years or so, has been for the government, by the government at government pricing.

Every mission is driven by the government. And what that means is as political winds change, any of these things change, the space industry is one of the first ones to go. Now, to kind of contrast that with the commercial world, right? The world I want to live in and the world I want this company to help us create is one where there's a new generation of young people that are pursuing careers in this industry so you know last time we were together i think was about a year year and a half ago and you were building satellites in space to beam solar energy into earth and now you've got a little more to talk about today yeah a lot more to talk about today. So what was it that shifted focus? What was the main thing that shifted focus into this?

Yeah. Well, let's take a look at what we've done over the last two and a half years. It's been a quick one. Companies started out with the idea of building a power grid in space and an old NASA idea called space-based solar power. Had you ever heard of that before we talked about it no yeah um it was actually born of the last energy crisis and the thought process that i had when starting the company was let's take this old science fiction idea and see if you can make it science reality like why hasn't anybody actually tried this in earnest like i you know there's got to be a way to bring this idea to life and um a couple of weeks ago We put our first satellite in space.

So far, it's up there. It's talking to us. We're testing a lot of the functionality on it, and we're getting pretty close to actually showing off what it can do. But that might be another one of these events that we do together, which I think would be really cool. But more to come on that later. The company started in a tiny little garage in El Granada. Not a garage, actually. It was more like an apartment place. It actually was maybe just an apartment. Like, I actually don't think it was an office space. And from there, built our first satellite, put it up in space, like I said, relatively recently.

And it was this past spring that when we announced our Series B fundraise, We both changed the name of the company and announced this bigger plan that we had around building data centers in orbit. And this even bigger idea that we were going to build a rocket to get those data centers to space. And I think a lot of people thought that that was kind of crazy. But I don't think they're going to think that it's that crazy after this. So can I show you something? I'd love to see it. We've been cooking. oh we've been cooking saw this earlier today can you describe what we're looking at here yeah this is uh the first bit of our engine turning on so for those of you that don't know we announced um in the spring that we were going to build a rocket to put data centers in space and the reason we had this thesis was because we knew that if we wanted to actually make something cost competitive here we need to control the economics of it now people said oh beiju you're gonna build a rocket like you you and what army well this army um actually some of them are here um uh a little i don't know if you want to do this now but we have our head of rocket propulsion here, Mr. Warren Lamont.

Lord knows that man will give a speech if I give him a chance to, so we'll save that for the end. What you're looking at here is five months of work, and it's what I would call turning hardware into data, because we blew part of the engine here. You built this from nothing to that in five months. About, yeah. Less than five months. Yeah. It's been a quick one. The goal, and we're going to talk a lot more about what this is, just so you guys know what we're looking at here, this is at NASA Stennis, and it's a testing facility for rocket engines. This is the gas generator. It's what drives one of the fundamental parts of the rocket engine called the turbo pumps.

we'll talk a lot more about what the rockets do how they work what the different parts of them are but I think this I mean this is about as real as real gets right we're doing it we're building the engines and we think that this is going to be one of the critical pieces of technology that's going to let us get to orbit relatively quickly so why sorry why have you decided to to not only transition to data centers, which we'll get into later, but I'm curious, why are you building the rockets themselves to deliver the data centers to space? Why have you decided to do that? Great question. And I think that there's a few aspects to this, but I think fundamentally is a lack of commercial access to orbit right now, right? We know that there's one major company that controls the majority of access to space and they've said publicly that they're going to be pretty focused on their own missions to orbit. We want to build a company that builds an independent data center in space, an energy grid in space. And to do this, because the energy industry and all these industries are so commoditized, the economics really matter and controlling the economics really matter. And so this is like one of the critical parts of this

And we want to do a lot of it. We want to build a lot of data centers in space because I think that's what the problem calls for. But rather than actually talking about it a little bit, why don't we show people what that means?

Let's talk a little bit more about how big this thing is. I think you know a little bit about this state. That would be my state. Yeah. So we're contemplating building a power grid in space that's about the size of the power grid of Tennessee. Wow. 20.6 gigawatts. And when you look at numbers this big, I think it should become pretty clear that this amount of energy is just not available on Earth. Like, we would have to fundamentally rethink the way the entire electrical grid works.

And there's definitely people out there that are doing it, but as we get further along in this, we'll talk about why we think that not only does this solve the sort of macro of the problem, but it also makes it fundamentally more economical. So, we believe that space is inevitable. It's a natural place for collecting electricity. There's an abundance of space to do it in. the method of heat transfer is actually well-established. And then the real challenge becomes how you do it and what exactly you're doing to make this happen. So you guys want to see what our satellites look like? I would love to see what they look like.

So there's 20,000 of these things that are going to go into space. Each one is pretty big. 20,000? 3, 2, 1 Introducing today for the very first time, the big iron. it's a fundamentally novel approach to to computing in the or to to rocketry in the modern era in our opinion because rather than using the satellite the rocket as a cargo vehicle to taking a payload to space our approach is fundamentally different the cargo vehicle is the payload in space and We'll explain exactly why we did it this way and why it really matters. So the cargo payload is actually going to transform into the satellite that collects the power.

So the idea is that you have a two-stage rocket where the upper stage of the rocket itself transforms into the satellite. And this is to differentiate from other space companies that will pack the top of a rocket with a stack of satellites, imperial-class satellites, whereas what we're doing is actually using the whole vehicle as a satellite. And so it's a little hard to tell from this, so let's kind of show you a little bit about what is going into one of these things.

There's another company out there that's also building these. And when we take a look at that architecture from the Empire, you see the Imperial-class satellites. They're just way smaller than ours. Those are smaller than yours. Tiny. Each one of them packs about one rack. Ours tracks five. And so whether you're taking a starship or a star destroyer to orbit, we think Big Iron actually delivers more interconnected compute per satellite than what the Empire is working on. And if you kind of think about what this thing is, and we'll talk more about how this thing Works and what it does this is not the like the performance and of The of the whole vehicle and the way that we get it to space is Oriented around speed to market so probably talk about that next Right how are you going to get something that big into space Yeah well it's got some big specs So a little bit on the rocket architecture.

It's about 86 meters tall, 4.7 meter diameter. We're sort of pushing the boundaries of what's road transportable. That's kind of how we selected it. We'll talk a little bit more about our engine architecture in a minute. It's called Clydesdale. The booster stage has nine engines on it. The upper stage has a single Clydesdale engine on it. From a rocket architecture perspective, we're going to where we think the results, where kind of the end goal is. And so from that perspective, we're starting out with liquid oxygen and liquid methane as the propellant, stainless steel rocket, and its size to take, as we talked earlier, about 15 metric tons to orbit.

So you can kind of think of it as sort of pushing the boundaries of what would be a road transportable rocket. And as we will get further along into this, we'll talk about the logistics of bringing these things to life. But if we started out the discussion by articulating what the problem to solve is, which is that we have to put up a ton of compute and we have to power it in a somewhat novel way, If that's the why, like, this is how you do it. A little bit more on the engine. And this is the brainchild of Warren, who, again, is sitting right there. There we go.

And so we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. What I want to come back to here, and I think the most important thing about all of this,

So, I have made the point a couple of times now that none of this matters unless it's economical. And that's what we're going to do. It's going to get cheaper every time. Yeah. Again, these are estimates. But as we see the cost of terrestrial compute actually increasing, our estimates have orbital compute actually getting cheaper. By 2031, for those of you that know me, I will be pushing to make that happen a little bit sooner. But this is what our team put on the deck. So but there's a little Easter egg buried here.

We're going to try to launch this thing in 2028. You're going to launch this in 2028? Yes. Our boy Warren's got his gork cut out for him. Nervous laughter. Yeah, so what does that mean? If we want to do this, we've got to get to it. And I have left the team with this mantra many a time, which is that the best way to get good at building rockets is by building rockets. and so we're going to start doing that our goal is to design a system that does a couple of things number one gets to cost parity or cheaper with terrestrial economics that was the alpha and the omega of the design prompt right it's like how do we get there what is the technical path to making that happen? Secondarily, was how do we down select the technologies to ones that are mature enough that we feel confident we can bring them online in record time? And that's what we're talking about doing here. That involves getting to a hot fire of the whole engine sometime in the middle of next year, getting something close to a booster testing between now and then as well, and then before the end of 2028, our target is a first flight.

Now, a lot of things have to go right for that to happen, and it's not a guarantee, but this is the kind of ambitious goal that I think is like a truth serum. It's like, if you actually want to do this, then how do you do it, right? Cut out all the noise. Like, what is the bare minimum path? What is the path that actually captures the outcome that you want without all the other stuff? And I think it's ambitious, but if it wasn't ambitious, I wouldn't be an entrepreneur. So let's show you a little bit more. Transcription by CastingWords Giddy up, giddy up. So next part of this, we're going to talk about how we do this, right?

Start out talking about why we should do it, Big Iron is what we're doing, and this is the how. And a big part of the how is actually the who. It's these folks. So I'd actually like to welcome all of our team members that are here to actually stand up. Give them a round of applause. extra special shout out to my homie joe this company would not have happened without him Although he didn't wear a bolo hat, a bolo tie or a cowboy hat today. Lawyer's going to lawyer. Lawyer's going to lawyer. One of the best parts of doing something like this is working with a group of people that wants to believe that they can do things that other people think are just freaking crazy.

and watching those people find it in themselves to do it is a magical thing so who are these people so talked about joe uh spent a career in law um was most recently at scadden arps for 16 years is that right um we've got chithra who's our cfo uh she was at avarta more recently and amazon working on data centers for a long time where is chithra there she is uh warren although I think his head's big enough right now. We don't need to give him any more love. No, it really can't be big enough. We've got Reggie, Mr. Lazer's over here. We've got Ross, somewhere in the back. Tyler. Where's that Tyler at?

There he is. There's that cowboy hat. Tyler and David are the two folks that joined us at the beginning of this year, and we're pretty instrumental for putting this plan together. My dear, dear friend, Tom Linford. See you back there, big guy. John Sarkis. And Andrew Yarmola, who is not here. And I actually asked to put a cowboy hat on his head because he's not here. Andrew is actually one of my oldest friends and was my classmate at Stanford. Once upon a time, three of us were working on a little company together that would go on to be a slightly bigger company called Robinhood. And that original crew of three people that worked on the company before all this stuff was me, Mr. Andy Yarmola, and a guy named Vlad.

Wow. Yeah. And 2027 is the year of Goblin Mode. This is our facility in Kent, Washington. It doesn't look quite this nice right now. This is more future aspirational state. The rocket's not there yet. But look, we're going to, we've got 260,000 square feet there. The point of this facility is this is our first production shop. And what we're going to do here is we're going to live, breathe, and eat the pain of making one of these things on a day-to-day basis. so it's next year is a full-on live with the pain figure out all the things that you don't know that you wouldn't have known unless you just did the thing it's yeah goblin mode what's it gonna look like to get this what you're building in there in space it's gonna involve building a lot of tents in the parking lot yeah so we can we can talk a little bit more about that in a second but first we we've talked about kind of how we get to that first launch this this facility is going to be where that happens but i also want to give um a view towards how we get to that 20 000 constellation size because fundamentally like the logistics and the operations of how we do it But these are still a couple of years out from us actioning them.

But we're at the point now where we're starting to design them and think through what that would be. And so we wanted to share some of that with you guys.

So let's wrap this up.

3, 2, 1 Oh, my God. Transcribed by ESO, translated by — i'm curious you know i mean like i said we met for the first time about a year and a half ago and it was power plants in space now it's data spinners in space plus delivering the payload what do you find in is the most challenging part right now um is it satellite communication is it the rockets the hardest part about this is is building something that works at scale figuring out how you marshal the resources how you stair step the deployment of resources because we're you know we're still a startup which means that we have to be very judicious about what the right proof points are, right?

How do we get to mature, how do we mature the right technologies at the right time and that actually show the world the progress that's behind what we're doing? I don't know if that's a great answer to it, but it's just the amount of complexity and different moving parts of the business, the different timelines that pieces of technology you're finished on, and kind of keeping a variety of different things moving simultaneously. I mean, we are a data center company. We're a rocket company. We're a lasers and optics company. We're a photovoltaics company. And with the amount of capital that we're going to end up deploying doing this, we're like a financial company as well.

So it... And a power company. And also a power company. And it sounds complicated when you say it like that. Yeah. But the way that I think about it is actually, it's just going to take a long time to put all the pieces together. Like, you can have a vision for something, and if you can kind of imagine how you put it all together in a year, it's not that big of an idea. like usually the big idea is you're like holy shit how do any of these pieces ever fit together and it's kind of the magic in in doing that but there's a big but i told you guys i'd have a surprise for you and there is one Introducing the Big Iron Express, we're going to fly a third party payload to space.

It's a beautiful rocket. It's a big rocket. It can take big and beautiful payloads to space. It's about 18 tons to low-Earth orbit, and we encourage anybody interested in this capability to go to CowboySpace.com and sign up. We're going to be offering access to orbit at a time when it's sorely missing. And we think it's actually critical to the success of our business. It's also critical to the core thesis. Behind this, which is commercial and economic abundance in outer space. That doesn't happen if one company does this. So you're a logistics company as well? Yeah, probably. Yeah. And that's all she wrote. Thank you so much.

That was pretty good on time, too. Yeah. Yeah. You