The small satellite revolution

Hi everyone and welcome to Space Cowboys without Herbert. Herbert is on vacation for the first time. A well-deserved vacation. Yes, but I'm not alone. That voice you just heard, it's Joeri. Hey Joeri. Hi there. So you've been upgraded to co-host now. Ah, great. Yeah, awesome, awesome. And there's another person in the studio. Jeroen Rotterveil. I would like to anglify that. How would you say it? Well, that's a hard thing to do. Jeroen is probably the most common name in the Netherlands and the most impossible to pronounce abroad. So I go by the name of Jerome. Jerome, Jerome Rotterveil. Is that a good one? Jerome Rotterveil. I'll listen to that. Yeah, exactly. And you're with ISIS. Can you please explain yourself? Yes. The good ISIS. We founded a space company in 2006, well before this name was associated to anything else than the Egyptian goddess of the sky and a techno DJ from the Netherlands. Aha, yeah, that's true. Yeah. It's actually an acronym. It stands for Innovative Solutions in Space. But yeah, we have a fellow name bearer that has a slightly less positive connotation. Yeah, that's true. And the thing is, especially in the Netherlands. ISIS is ISIS. I think the Islamic State was in English. You're a little bit safer in English, I would assume. I think that ISIS relation in English is already sort of like eroding, maybe. We have a subsidiary doing satellite launches called ISIL. Oh, yeah. What, really? Yes, yes, yes. You're kidding. No. Well, if you're unlucky, then you're very unlucky. We're going to talk about all the amazing things you do in space and how you help people get up. Get up. How you help companies get up there. But have you ever considered changing that name over the past 10 years? We have considered it. But I always say we don't give in to terrorism. We're not changing the name because of a connotation that's, well, negative, but not in our field. However, we run four or five brands. So we are trying to consolidate our brands into one. But ISIS is likely to survive. In our name, as part of the space company brand. Yeah. And you always introduce it as ISIS, not as ISIS Space Solutions or something. I don't. Other people that introduce me, depending on where you are, US market is an interesting one where they struggle a bit with that. Oh, yeah. Or ISIS. ISIS. It is technically an acronym. Hey, ISIS is pretty good. Nobody will think of it. Well, problem solved. We're going to talk about your CubeSat business and all these things. But first, we're going to do our story of the week. And the story of the very moment is that, Juri, I have a very hard time looking Jeroen in the eyes. Could you maybe adjust your microphone stand for me? Yeah, just lower it. People at home will listen. Yeah, listen to it. Oh, yeah, beautiful. Perfect. Beautiful science, right? Thank you. Thank you. Juri. Yeah. Would you like to kick off the story of the week? Well, the big story of this week is, of course, Artemis. Artemis is the new name for the lunar. Program from the United States. Oh, it has a name now. It has a name, Artemis. So Apollo was the original program from the 60s. But Apollo had a sister, the Greek goddess of the moon called Artemis. So it's a very good name for a lunar mission. Okay. So the background is that Trump. The big lunar mission by the United States. Yeah. So Trump said that he would add 1.6 billion US dollars to the. Already 21 billion US dollars budget for 2020 for NASA. So this is a big increase to help NASA get back to the moon in 2024. It'll probably help them a bit. But it is a new phase in the lunar exploration program of the US. And it's going to be very interesting to see how this is going to play out. And I think one of the main stories regarding this news is that NASA has actually said that. That they would go into business with commercial launch providers. So this is. Have they confirmed that now? Yeah. This is a quote from Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator. Yeah. So he said. To. To make sure that we are able to go to the moon to enable NASA to being supported in the development of commercial lunar landing systems three years earlier than previously envisioned. This acquisition strategy will allow NASA to purchase. An integrated commercial lunar lander that will transport astronauts from lunar orbit to lunar surface and back. Yeah. So the big news is it's going to be a commercial program. They're going to buy a commercial lunar lander. Yeah. They're not going to develop their own lander. They wouldn't even have the time, I think, to be able to do that. No. There's of course, they're aiming for SLS and the Orion capsule and making sure that the lunar gateway is up and running through that time. But. They will focus on a commercial lunar lander. I happen to know somebody who's who's working on that. Yeah. What a coincidence. What a coincidence. I think there was a bit of news regarding commercial lunar landers last week. Jeff Bezos. Yeah. Jeff Bezos. Yeah. Head of Amazon, but also head of Blue Origin. Came out with this big lunar plans. New Glenn, the gigantic rockets, but also this this moon lander. It's really becoming this sort of like battle of the. It's almost like a celebrity. So it's sort of like Game of Thrones in space without dead babies. That's that's what it's becoming right now. Yeah. Right. It's the battle of the Titans in in all of this. You know, Jerome, how is that for you as a smaller company that's all that? Well, for years I've been saying that space is not the place to become rich. It's a great place to start as a billionaire and end up as a millionaire because it's an expensive activity. And you've seen that a lot of the the tech billionaires are still attracted by by the space domain and are able to cut through a lot of red tape by just boning up the money themselves. And I think it's a it's an interesting way of of pushing development forward. And you've seen that with Elon Musk, with Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, who sadly passed away last year, who was also doing that. Richard Branson with Virgin. There's a couple of people that are willing to push that. And I think they do that from a similar background as smaller startups and scale ups in the aerospace and particularly the space business, just with much larger budgets. That's the rate of innovation within the space sector is now too slow. Right now it still is. Yes, we were ahead of the curve, the space program in the 60s. Nothing existed. So we had to invent everything from scratch. And we made great strides in innovation. Now it's become mainly the government market, a largely conservative, risk averse market. And in order to give that the boost, startups, scale ups and wealthy individuals can help boost that the whole space sector back into rapid innovation mode. Yeah, I think that's very positive. So how do you look at Blue Origin? Is that a scale up or is that a startup? I don't know. To me, this is basically, it's very interesting. It's a one man show. It's a one man show. It's literally a show. If I would be able to put a billion dollars a year into anything for a decade and tell your entire organization, don't worry, you only have to justify yourself to me. But the first five years, I don't expect any results. That's a very interesting environment to develop new things. No monthly budget reviews. And things like that. So, yes, definitely not. Well, it's still a bit of a startup. They don't have any revenues yet. It's a mega startup. And that's why they can go after the big game changers. What we're doing on the micro scale, a niche market where we try to be disruptive. They can do that at, for instance, human transportation to space and really change the paradigm there. So it's quite an interesting way forward. Yeah. Yeah. Because I heard Jeff Bezos. Yeah. Jeff Bezos mentioning a moon village where people from all countries could join and do research on the moon. And Blue Origin would be responsible for making sure that the moon village is actually well stocked with food and propellant and anything like that. So fresh veggies, fresh veggies, things like that. So he has big plans for this. Yeah. And so he presented not only as moon lander, but more. He wanted to just have a big show last week. So. To basically announce all this. So I think they're great in lockstep with the American government. Yeah. It's perfectly timed, right? Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So from what I understood, NASA is now looking into all different kinds of initiatives for going back to the moon. And the idea is that they'll announce something like a commercial resupply contract after the summer. And they'll select a few or maybe one launch provider to help them go back to the moon. So we have to wait a bit. Yeah. But then we'll know who's going to bring back the United States back to the moon. Yeah. Well, I guess that technically it would still be possible to have a SpaceX rocket with a Blue Origin lander. Is that something you would be able to arrange, Jeroen? Could you do this? That's again a more traditional institutional space program approach. That's how they did the original program where you cut up the big project in smaller and smaller projects. Yeah. And then you cut up the bigger pieces and hand it out to all these aerospace corporations that are conveniently distributed through political districts and whatnot. I don't think it will happen this time. Okay. Why not? Well, that's SLS. That's how SLS has been built. With Boeing and the United Lands. And all different sites. It's such a huge program. And both Blue Origin, SpaceX, and us as a scale-up here in the Netherlands as well, we've went to vertical integration. You control the entire program. All the risks. You can go much faster. A lot less money is spent on contract managers and lawyers, but more on manufacturing equipment and doing development. So I don't think you'll see that to a large extent. I think the entire delivery system, if you want a cost-effective way, it's probably better to single source that and then to buy it as a whole. And then maybe operate two. Yeah. Two different service providers, just as they've done with commercial space station supply. Yeah, because that's how the ISS is being resupplied now, right? At the moment as well. You still have the Russians and the Japanese that do that on the traditional way, but the American commercial resupply, it's two chains. One is SpaceX. The other one is Northrop Grumman at the moment. It was Orbital Sciences, but that's consolidated. But that's one system run. And the whole supply chain is run by the contractor. There is no government split in that. And I don't think either Elon or Jeff Bezos would, well, willingly break up their own idea in order to placate some wishes. Yeah, exactly. Government mandated and that's guaranteed for delays. Yeah, for delays and higher costs and everything. Yeah. Julie, could you put his microphone? We're doing another microphone round. A little bit closer to his mouth. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks. Jeroen, do you also have a story of the week by any chance? Did you see something that you... Well, I think the moon program is definitely one that's part of the... It's basically the new space race. And that's very interesting to me is that in the last 15 years that we've been working on small satellites disrupting the field, the last place we had to... Yeah. Look for smart buyers and innovative procurement was the government. And I think there's two things happening now which are sort of the... Well, they're bringing the government back in the fold of innovative things. One is this more innovative way of approaching the new space race, the moon program. The other one is the Space Force and defense. Yeah. And that's the other big topic, especially in the US, where there's a lot of talk about the moon program. They try to create a new Space Force and it basically shows that they're willing to do things differently as well. And again, that comes from more a, well, service level agreement, smart procurement approach to space, saying the governments now have well-defined needs. They know what they want, but they also start to realize that it's probably better to just procure the solutions rather than developing it themselves. And for me... That's very interesting. You have on the one hand this new space commercial that's sort of maturing in terms of dynamic at least, but the government is trying to catch up. That's a very interesting development that you see becoming more and more concrete, for instance, these weeks that there are more opportunities to do things in a smart way. Yeah. Great. Yeah. It's very cool. But for to me, this moon race, suddenly sort of came out of nowhere. People... I mean, Elon Musk was sort of trying to do a Mars thing. And now the American government has said, we'd like to go to the moon in 2024, which is four years earlier than they originally anticipated. Exactly. Exactly. I think you need to check the Chinese plans for the first manned landing to the moon. And then you'll probably see why. Because this is now a China-US space race. There you go. Because I haven't heard a response from the Chinese based on this. So I'm really interested in how they're going to react to this. Where did Russia go in all of this? Bankrupt. Yeah. Yeah. Now I would guess. Do they have a date? 2025, 2030? That's what Wikipedia says. I'm just... That's a race. The race is on. That explains why it's been put before 2025 now. If the Chinese program for manned presence on the moon starts from 2025, in a race you position yourself to be earlier. And I'm really curious if Trump does not get reelected. Like if he gets reelected, it would be... He would love the idea of having a moon landing in his last year, you know? But if he is not reelected, one should also ask if a Democrat will continue this program in the same way. Maybe... Maybe... I wonder how broadly... How broadly this is agreed, this supported, this thing actually is. Is it something from the Trump administration or something that NASA is now also really on board with? Well, it's a matter of political priorities, I think. And I think that's going to be tough. I mean, you've seen that in the first two years, NASA spending on climate monitoring went down. Repaired by Congress and the Senate somewhat. But some of these topics are, yeah. Political. Political topics. And that's the major downside of governments getting more involved again, that some topics become, yeah, politically influenced. If there's a finite amount of money and you have to choose between climate or putting people on the moon, different, yeah, governments make different decisions. On the other hand, you could... Being self-sufficient on the lunar base long term, you could say that will... Definitely push recycling, power efficiency, et cetera, for terrestrial use into the right direction as well. You have to do it on the moon. Recycle all your water, all your waste. Otherwise, you have to fly it in all the time. So there's nothing there. It's a great way to get a real closed loop recycling going on by placing humans in a location where you'll have to be as sustainable as possible. So I see it as... As complementary to each other. But yeah, priorities and thus speed and implementation speed will depend on the political focus. And so about your company. You do so, so many things. You have almost like a web shop online where I can order any sort of like CubeSat element and you can help me build this and not only that, but also get it up into space. You do turnkey missions. You do turnkey missions. You do turnkey missions. You do turnkey missions. You can help from concept to launch. Well, I would say we only do one thing. And that one thing is very small satellites. Satellites from one kilogram to 30 kilograms. And within that market vertical, we do everything. As long as it's small, you do everything. It's a way of approaching the problem. We are really endeared by this concept of nanosatellites using... Highly miniaturized satellites in large numbers to add value to all kinds of problems, whether it be scientific, commercial, societal, climate, security. And in order to be effective there and to be responsive, we said, then we have to control basically the entire value chain. So yeah, we have our own research and development. We literally have a web shop where you can buy the parts. So if you have a decent credit card... If you have a decent credit card limit, you know where to go. And buy yourself some presents. Buy your own satellite in parts to build it yourself. But we can take that away for you and even run the entire system. It's basically a customer can come in with an idea of what they want to do in space. And 12 to 15 months later, we can have that space infrastructure in place and operating on behalf of the customer. So it's basically a solutions provider. And what is the biggest innovation that made your company possible? At this day and age? I think that microelectronics, so the electronics used in laptops, smartphones, and that drive towards more powerful components in a smaller form factor that required less power, was the real breakthrough. The rise of these nanosatellites, coincided with the rise of smartphones and tablets, etc. And it's really those components that are now small enough to pack real functionality in something smaller than a crate of beer at an affordable price. That's really what has made the breakthrough. The other element was that since the larger satellites were slowly getting smaller as well, there was some space available on the rockets. So we could... Also actually get into space. It was cheap to get into space. Well, still not cheap, but it's at least possible. And that's a major step forward because, yeah, the risk associated with bringing an additional payload, often built by students or inexperienced companies, next to a multi-billion dollar science instrument, that's a bit of a mindset we had to change in the beginning. But since there was this much, much excess capacity and we managed to find a way to convince all the major stakeholders that we could get the small satellites into space safe, that was the key. And this was in 2007? Yeah. The CubeSat concept was invented in California at Stanford and in San Luis Obispo, two universities that teamed together. That was in 1999. Oh, so it's a very recent concept. Yes. It was really because students could no longer get hands-on practice in space engineering before their professional career. So they came up with the cheapest possible concept to build space hardware during your studies and during your graduation. That's where the concept came from. For students, basically. For students. Wow. It was to get hands-on experience as future space engineers. Yeah. And to get them to be space professionals. Yeah. The first launch was in 2001, I believe. And in 2003, it became a standard. And from that moment on, a lot of universities adopted this as part of their curriculum. We started in the Netherlands in November 2004. At Delft? In Delft. Where you studied as well? Indeed. I joined January 2005 on the Delphi C3 CubeSat. Yeah. And we were the first CubeSat project, the fourth satellite in the Netherlands ever to be built. The very first student-built satellites, 2.5 kilos. And from that moment, yeah, 2005, 2006, it really took off. Then it was sort of the second generation of these CubeSats. And then research institutes and companies started to show an interest. And we were almost done with our masters. We were almost done with our masters. And then we basically had two choices. Either do a PhD at the university or start something yourself. Because there were no companies focused on this particular niche market yet. And we didn't have the patience for a PhD. No. So it became starting our own company. Cool. And you said that a lot of companies are now showing interest in CubeSat. Why do you think that this whole idea of CubeSats has become so popular? I think two key things. One is the threshold to get something functional in space has been dramatically lowered by it. You can't do everything that the 500-kilogram satellite can do. But you can do something for, and not for 200 million, but for half a million. So it really lowered the entry of new services, new applications. Not the best quality, but it dramatically lowered the proof of concept of an early business model. Okay. So that's one. The other thing is the scalability. By sort of going towards a networked architecture, it became scalable. So a lot of the venture-backed companies that are doing CubeSat-based space infrastructure at the moment, they start with one or two to show that it works. And they go to a minimum viable product. So they need maybe 10 or 20 satellites. And then they can scale by just adding more satellites. So it's a very scalable system. Unlike, for instance, GPS or Galileo. You need all 24 or 30 satellites to have the service available worldwide. And then it's there. So it's also a constellation. But the minimum viable business case is also immediately the final. So it's not scalable. You need to commit to the infrastructure in one go all the way. Okay. And this one, you can start really low due to the entry barrier. And by designing a space infrastructure that's scalable, if there are customers, you can quickly accelerate your business. Yeah. At this point, I would like to – well, last week, we spoke to Christopher Hoeven, an old teacher of yours, I believe. Yes, he was one of the professors that were our supervisors during this Delphi C3 project. And he was talking about swarm robotics. That's what we talked about last week. And so you have some sort of redundancy when you work with a swarm that, well, the individual CubeSat itself is almost intelligent and knows what it needs to do. Well, now he explained the swarm is intelligent. The individual CubeSat can be pretty dumb. Yes. And that's indeed sort of a – I think that's still a little bit in the future, self-organizing swarms. Yeah. And here it's still – we engineers are control freaks. We'd like to be able to predict what the system is going to do. So I think for now, the constellations that are implemented, they're not that self-organizing yet. There's some automation – clever automation and machine learning implemented on the ground. Yeah. But the machines are still basically state machines with limited autonomy. Yeah. And that will change. If we just talk about the types of CubeSats that you launch, just walk me through some of the applications. Or what's like the craziest machine you've built so far? That we've built? Yeah. There's a lot of crazy ideas. I mean, it lowers the barrier to actually do something in space. So that does mean that it increases the amount of crazy ideas that become in theory possible. Okay. Yeah. So that's a very interesting dynamic. Or one that you're proud of. Stuff that we've done is – well, our very first satellite of the company was a ship tracking satellite. It was a four-kilogram satellite that could track ship movements across the ocean. That's an interesting one. And it's up and running? Well, it's back up and running. Oh. After a few years, it died. And we designed these satellites for a relatively short lifetime. Using commercial-grade or industrial-grade electronics and not space-grade electronics. So they're not rated for a very long life in the space environment. Okay. Yeah. But this one miraculously came back alive. So we – Ooh. The zombie satellite. Yeah. There's a specific situation where it receives about 50% more power than previous. And that was enough to revive it. Yeah. So that's nice. It's sort of a – yeah. Ship tracking. Ship tracking. Yeah. So we're helping a company here from Amsterdam operate their two Internet of Things satellites that we've designed and built for them. We're building the first Dutch military satellites. Oh. For the Royal Dutch Air Force, we're building their first satellites. Ooh, that sounds interesting. Indeed. Even for a small country like the Netherlands, we don't have a space force. We will never be able to afford that in the way the U.S. or France or the United States will be able to afford. Absolutely. We don't have a space force for that kind of stuff. And also, the international community has not been able to afford it. And so it's not like the U.S. or France or Germany have it. But due to this miniaturized space infrastructure development, our government can now afford to have its own niche satellite infrastructure. So that's a – Wow. Everything's small and cute in the Netherlands. But it's an interesting thing. We used to have no customers in the Netherlands. Mm-hmm. And now we have commercial customers here from Amsterdam. We've got the Dutch government buying satellites from us. So that's a big change. Crazy ideas. Yeah. We've had some problems with the satellite. I think one of the big things in the Netherlands is that we have a very large number of satellites. Yeah. Crazy ideas, yeah, we've had some. Interesting ones is, for instance, where the space station turned out to be too slow for innovation. And the space station, you always know, that's for microgravity research. Yeah, yeah. We have a customer where we're building a second satellite for that is doing that, but then in a nine-month implementation time rather than a five-year implementation time for pharmaceutical research, fluidics, et cetera. So we basically built a satellite around a small microgravity lab with measurement equipment and samples, and that's going to be launched for specific research. So that's medical, pharmaceutical materials research in a three-kilogram satellite rather than in a $100 billion costing space station just because we can do it so much faster. But from what I understand, that cube cells can do almost anything. Is there anything that they can't do? I think cube cells can do almost anything, but there's only very few things they can do really, really well. And I think if you're looking for absolute accuracy, that's typically limited by the laws of physics. If you want to host a very big telescope, it just doesn't fit. You can't generate the power for a high-power radar. But we could distribute a satellite. So a satellite that could map the entire Earth every 24 hours would be a very big satellite with a big instrument. But one of our customers, Planet, they basically said, well, rather than taking one big spacecraft, we take 150 small satellites that can also map the entire Earth in 24 hours. But then you get scaling effects, you get redundancy, you get... In certain areas, much better revisit times. And if something goes wrong with one satellite, you still have 149 left. So if you're looking for absolute performance, counting cars on a parking lot or discovering a black hole, no. But if you can use small satellites in large numbers, you can get to certain applications. You can get good performance again. And the key thing, yeah, you can easily cover the entire world in sort of a real-time infrastructure rather than a single satellite. Yeah. And do you think CubeShots could also play a role in exploring the Moon or exploring the rest of our solar system? Very much so, yes. I think the various domains of space have slowly started to adopt these higher-risk, low-risk, lower-cost missions like CubeShots. It started with technology. The military was quick. Earth observation and telecom are now there. And the last bastions of conservatism are science and exploration. But I think science is difficult because the low-hanging fruit in science has sort of been done already. So we need to go to either large networks to do something very complicated or still use very big... spacecraft. But exploration, to me, it's very... Well, we've been very lucky that we've sent a multi-billion dollar probe to an asteroid and managed to land on it. Even though halfway the implementation program, we had to choose a different asteroid or comet to land on. Or the Pluto mission. Why not do like we've done in the 60s and the 70s, build a range of scouts, explorers, standardized spacecrafts, smaller spacecraft with more redundancy. Big Star Wars fan. If you want to find the rebel base, you're not sending all the star destroyers to every system. You send the probes. And once they find something, then you send the high-value mission. So exploring all the moons in the solar system, looking at the dwarf planets in the asteroid belt, things like that. Small satellites with standardized instrument suites should be the scouts to figure out whether it's... useful to send the more expensive, more sophisticated spacecraft. Do you also have small propulsion solutions then? Yes, that's definitely necessary for that. Can you deliver that as well? Can I order? Yes, you can. We don't develop that in-house yet, but we have partners that we can deliver that. And in fact, we are working on a number of technologies for interplanetary communication. So we have a lot of CubeSats indeed. We have the... Well... We have the... The nice thing that we have a payload on board the Chinese data relay satellite on the far side of the Moon. That's basically a lot of CubeSat hardware that we've made Moon-compatible for a radio astronomy experiment from Radboud University. JPL launched two CubeSats along with their InSight lander towards Mars. Okay. So interplanetary CubeSats are there. We need to upgrade... What are they doing? I did not hear about these. I think they're called the Marco CubeSats. Yeah, I think they were just sent along to validate technology, but also to take pictures of the Moon and help with relaying landing information. Mm-hmm. Okay, cool. As a co-passenger to the larger spacecraft, it's definitely interesting, of course. If you're sending a big probe to an asteroid already and you have a bit of space left, why not fly some co-passengers with you that have a bit more higher risk experiments or can amplify your measurements or act as data relay satellites? You see that in the landers as well. The landers from Rosetta, from the Japanese missions, they're basically nanosatellites that don't fly. They just fall onto a rock and do their things. Those kind of co-passengers are very valuable as well. Then you don't need to think about the long-range propulsion or the long-range communication because you have the main probe for that. And you're just like an aircraft carrier. Yeah. The big ship brings the aircraft close to where they need to operate, and then the smaller aircraft take off and do their thing. A bit of a mother ship kind of mission with dedicated probes is definitely something for exploration. Very cool. And if we're going to settle on the Moon, on Mars, we'll need navigation systems, telecommunication systems, remote sensing systems as well. So why not deploy larger CubeSat constellations to provide navigation on the Moon? And we can't use GPS there because that signal doesn't really reach the moon. So you'll build a new network that way. Why not? Yeah. How busy is it getting up there? Increasingly busy. Is there traffic? Police? That's the big problem, I think, that unlike airspace, there's no space traffic management system yet. Okay. We've regulated space in the 60s and 70s with international treaties where there were only four or five countries that were considering going into space. Yeah. And two real contenders, the Soviet Union, that doesn't exist anymore, and the United States. And... Now anyone can put stuff into space. Yeah. And we really need a regime change in general because you can now own a satellite as a person. Nice. And operate that in space. But the international legal framework is not prepared for that. That assumes that countries operate that. So that's a problem. And that's also the problem for space debris or space junk. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So countries signed international treaties, but now companies, institutes or individuals are doing activities. And we sort of need a space traffic management and some sort of a mandatory insurance regime to make sure we can maintain it, well, safe to operate in the long term. Yeah. It's a bit like your, well, your car. You need to make sure that your car is up to spec, that it doesn't break down on the highway. You don't need to have a MOT or, you know, you need to make sure your car is certified to be safe on the road. Yeah. But if it breaks down, you have your AAA card and you can call a tow truck if something goes wrong. Yeah. A regime like that where it's mandatory to act responsibly in space and insure yourself in case something goes wrong is something we would need sooner than later to ensure that space remains sustainable. Yeah. So how does it work with CubeSats? Because you said that CubeSats are not that long living, that after a while they fail or that somehow something breaks down. Yeah. Doesn't that create a lot of small space junk that might be overlooked by the tracking systems that we have? Well, the good thing about CubeSats, especially if they don't carry any propellant, is that they're highly predictable. All the satellites we operate, I can quite accurately predict where they're going to be the next decade. They don't maneuver because we don't have any propellant, so they don't make any weird... Okay. Yeah. They slowly spiral inwards. Yeah. And then burn up in the atmosphere. Yeah, the atmosphere is dragged, atmosphere is dragged just like anything. And there's not enough energy content in those satellites to have explode and fragment into a lot of pieces. Okay. Yes, we launched about, in the world now, around 300. CubeSats a year. That's more than any other satellites together at the moment until the mega constellations really start going up. It's still a lot. 300 a year. I think that's... Yes, but at 300 very predictable dots. Okay. Yeah. If there's an upper stage from an old Soviet missile that explodes, we get 100,000 parts that are fully uncontrollable. Yeah, exactly. Which tends to happen from time to time. Yes. And those were not designed to... Because the problem wasn't known 50 years ago. And that's the biggest problem. It's the stuff that's already there before we knew that it was a problem. Yeah. We've demonstrated some debris removal techniques with harpoons and nets in the last year, together with the British and the French and the Germans in a mission where we had the task to create a debris piece, an artificial piece of debris in a controlled way, and we would capture it. So the technology is there to remove part of this problem, but there's no business model. Half of the dangerous objects are launched into space by a state that no longer exists. Yeah. So who do you charge? Yeah, exactly. 20, 30 million to remove an old rocket stage? That is a risk. So that's why you're saying we need a regime change. I mean, basically anything like this needs to be updated. It's a bit like the whole climate change discussions here on Earth. If you don't really impose a whole new regime, it's very difficult to call individuals on being that responsible. Because there's no incentive at the moment to be so sustainable, other than maybe public opinion, that you would be willing to maybe add 15, 20% cost to your space mission. Well, others don't have to do that. Yeah, if somebody has to clean it up. You price yourself out of the market, potentially. So we need a top-down new regime, because the technology, well, can be mature to a point that we can make a working system. That's okay. And so to get a CubeSat up in the space. Yeah, you triggered me at the remark that everyone can have a CubeSat, even us. So what if we want to have a CubeSat that transmits the latest episode of Space Cowboys from space? Yeah, you can do that. We can contact you. Could you walk us through the whole process? How does this process work? Where do we start? Because we know nothing. I'll give you my bank account number, and that's where we start. Let's just imagine that we have infinite amount of money. You don't even need that. We first go to the webshop. Maybe that's an interesting question. How much does it cost? It really depends on a number of the requirements, how fast this message needs to be broadcast, do you need to be able to receive it with a handheld or a dish or things like that. May I give an example? I would love to have a live shot, just camera, of the Earth, available for all the world to see, so that the news can sort of like flip to it. I think there's actually a value system, a value created there so you can sell it. That's one of these ideas that I have. A live shot of the Earth. Continuously. Continuously. So what do you send up? You send up a digital camera. You send up something to transmit that signal with in 1080p. And I want the episode of Space Goblins to be broadcast. So these two things. Okay. We contact you with this idea. Where do we start? How does this process go? We do a, well, we'll test whether you are, what your real requirements are, because typically our customers say that they want something with a few more questions. Typically something else similar, but in the technical implementation quite different. So we'll refine your requirements, your objectives to something that's technically feasible. I work in IT. This sounds very, very recognizable. User requirements discovery is sort of the most important thing, especially with all these new players. If anyone can do it, it's usually the majority of new customers have no experience. So it's a process. Oh, yeah. From there, we use our standard building blocks to build. So we sort of build a standard satellite, plus all the special customized elements, the software, the instrument, et cetera, specify that, verify that by analysis, then start building it, test it on ground. We buy a slot on a rocket. You buy a slot on a rocket? Yeah. We have a travel agency for satellites since 2007. You have a travel agency for satellites? Yeah. Why not? That sounds very interesting. How does that work? We basically, just like a travel agency, books rows of seats on various planes. We book space on various rockets, and there we can place customers on. Yeah. Back in the day, when I worked for broadcast television, you would just book space broadcast time on satellites. I would assume it's not that much different. No. There's a schedule, and you just put it up there. We block by capacity, and then we sell bits of capacity to users. And do then these, the capacity, these rockets, do they sell volume, or do they sell like, hey, we have space for like one big one, and they call up you and like, hey, you got some CubeSats left that we need to throw up there? It's not that trivial to launch them. Oh, okay. So it's relatively expensive to do that one satellite at the time. To fly to Russia or to the US 20 times for one little satellite, then it becomes, then you need the infinite amount of money pretty soon. Ah, yeah. Yeah. So we block, do that in big blocks. We go there once and spread these fixed costs over a large number of customers to keep the price low. And we get some volume discounts in buying in the capacity as well. So that's basically, it works to do that in volume. Yeah. We do that, make sure you get into space, and then we- You said about 12 to 15 months? Yes. That's what you said earlier? That's sort of the nominal throughput time. Then it's in space. We either use our communication antennas in Delft, or we deploy them at the customer site, and then you can start operating the spacecraft. Ah, yeah. And depending on the complexity of what you want- Yeah, I haven't found a camera yet on your website. I'm clicking through your- Stay there. Not on our website. Oh. We have the actual web shop is cubesatshop.com. That's where the cameras are. You're kidding. No, we operate that since 2009. We literally have a web shop called cubesatshop.com. Cubesatshop.com. Okay, great. This is so awesome. Oh, wow. And there you find the cameras. That is, yeah, camera and payloads. Okay, great. Yeah, okay, awesome. So we can piece that together, and for a number of specific things, the products are not that standard that it's easy to put it on a web shop, but we can customize whatever you- Is it the Chameleon Imager? Well, that's one of the things you could use. Yeah, it has a nice video signal. Yeah. It's only 144,000 euros. Indeed. Which is a lot actually more expensive than the Gecko Imager right next to it, which is only 23,000. Yeah. It's all about- Which one do I need? Price performance, the expensive one. Okay, I need the expensive one. Damn it. I need it. I need a lot of money. This is the trick. What people want is A, what they can afford is B, and typically you end up somewhere- Customer expectations and budgets. Yes, exactly. And you can do something very simple. We've built from around the world. 6,000, 700,000 euros all in up to something very, very complicated that will still cost tens of millions of euros, which is still cheap in space terms, but that's sort of the range. And a typical range for a satellite with a camera and the ability to broadcast something is in the order of one and a half million. What? From you walking in with a piece of paper and two sentences up to two years, the satellite in space. Oh, okay. It's a typical in price. Okay. Wow. Yeah, it's more than I have. It's a typical price and it varies on price performance, quality level, etc. Do you remember the cheapest one you ever sent up in space? That we've sent up in space? Well, if universities tend to have no labor costs, that's students, so that's effectively free labor or forced labor, depending on how you see it. So the parts. If you browse our website or the CubeSat shop, the parts are never more than 25% of the cost. The majority is still in time. The launch is expensive. That doesn't really scale. That's still about a quarter to a third of the price. It's just the price you pay for the ticket into space. The parts are a little bit and the rest is hours. So if you don't have to pay the hours, it can go really, really cheap. If you then take a satellite that can't do very much, a little one kilogram range, a radio repeater, you're looking at 80,000 euros for the bits and pieces, 90,000 for the launch. And if you do all the stuff yourself, then that's sort of it. For less than 250,000 euros, you could build a spacecraft. Wow. And so if we would compare this to, say, the 80s, do the same thing in the 80s, you're talking about tens of millions to be able to do this? More or less, yes. So that's how fast. That is an extreme revolution, of course, that you jumped into, but most people are not aware of. It's the same revolution that's happened with phones, computers, all those things. We basically piggyback on the terrestrial miniaturization. And we're good at selecting parts that are in laptops and phones, but do work in space. So by now you already start to understand which parts work better than other ones. Yes. So which one, were you surprised that works a lot better than yours? I think that what we see is that the processors that are in phones are actually quite robust in the space environment. I mean, vacuum, this doesn't really matter for a processor. It's basically a chip, but there's radiation. We're not protected by the Earth's atmosphere. But we do see that the processors that are just... The Qualcomm ones? For instance, microprocessor chips. Do tend to survive. Maybe they fall over and get a reset because the charged particle hits them and you get a reset, but they don't really break that easily. But still, if I buy a camera here, I pay 200, 300 euros. And I saw these cameras. They're not that big, but they're 100,000 euros. What makes them so incredibly more expensive than the cameras we can buy on Earth? One is that this is a market. It's designed to work from space. And there's a world market of maybe 100 a year, not 100 million. So it's also economies of scale that come into it. And then if you look at the parts, plastic containing water in vacuum, that will deposit on the lens. Plastic lenses, like the camera chips in your phone with plastic lenses, that won't work. Thermal. Temperature variations. Optical systems are quite sensitive to that. If you go circles around the Earth in sunlight, your telescope may become 90 degrees centigrade. In the shadow, it may become minus 40. So making sure it survives in space for three to five years makes it expensive. It's different. You have to swap out a lot of components. Maybe the core, the detector and the chip to read out the detector may be the same. But the telescope is usually heavily modified. And a lot of parts have been replaced by parts that do work in space. And then it's again, it's ours. That's sort of a manual development that you need to do time and time again. And it all seemed so easy. It is. It's not rocket science. Well, sort of it is. Yes. I'm a rocket scientist by training. It's not that. You are a rocket scientist. Well, aerospace engineer. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So and launching it into space. You use Russian rockets, Indian rockets, anything else? American rockets. Have you been on SpaceX rockets also? Yes. Last year, November, we were on SpaceX. Which mission was that? SSOA mission. That was an aggregate mission where 60 small satellites were all together on one large Falcon 9. Okay. Oh, yeah. That's where the hybrid satellite was on. For instance, one of the hybrid satellites. Yeah. India, we use a lot. What else do we use? Well, the Russians, indeed. Soyuz. Soyuz. Yeah. And so where to go from here? Because you have a, you found this niche that is a growth market like no other almost. Sky's the limit. Definitely not. We go way beyond the sky, of course. But yeah, we'd like to grow. We've been able to grow in the last decade with more than 30% per year without outside investment, which is pretty remarkable for a startup company. But now we need to make the next step to really scale with our customers. And there we're in the middle of building a growth plan to be able to scale up to serve these constellations where we go from series of 10 or 20 a year to series of 100 a year. That's where we need to make a transition. Also there, it becomes interesting to invest in automation. We're doing series or mass production for space, but that's still tens of maximum 100 identical units a year. It's not real mass production yet. So that's a next step on the inside. And then for markets, yeah, interplanetary. And we want to be able to build satellites that go to the moon and the stars. And we want to build satellites that go to the moon and Mars. That's really exciting. And like we said at the beginning of this show, like you said, it's well, you go to space to become from a million former billionaires to become a millionaire. There must be competitors out there that are trying to steal your bread. Yes, you see, that's the if you don't have competitors, there's no market. Fair point. Fair point. And we're not the dinosaurs of the new space era. We're one of the dinosaurs already. We've been around since 2006. So we are together with three or four others that have been around for more than 10 years. We're the guys to beat in this market. And that keeps us sharp. That's good. There's still plenty of market left. So there's space for more competitors. But yeah, we do need to maintain an edge. Well, also because you said you do CubeSats, you do small satellites and then you do everything. It could be that at a certain point you might not do everything anymore. Because the market is too big. That's one of the considerations in this to maybe specialize a bit more. On the other hand. Your heart would be with the hardware. We're problem solvers. Okay. That's where the core of the company, the founders, management, we're engineers. We like to solve complex problems together. We like to solve problems together with our customers. We're not really in it for the money. We're not doing this to become rich. We need to be able to do what we like and what we think is important for the sector we love, the space sector. And we need to be able to pay our bills. So it needs to pay well. But we don't have to become billionaires. We're not going to roll out a factory that makes any type of satellite. As long as it's black. We're not going to standardize this. We're going to look at those engineering challenges, business challenges where we can create a solution together with the customer. Until somebody shows up with a large bag of money, I would assume. Everybody has its price. But I'm 37. I don't like gardening that much to do that for the rest of my life. So bags of money are always welcome. But we have enough ideas to do that. So we can do something with the money rather than to quit and retire. What would be your favorite idea for the next five years? Five years. That's good. I would love to work on a constellation and get that in place and operate it from Delft, from our office. That really solves one of these societal challenges. Whether it's food security or climate change or sea level rise. Yeah, I would love to work on that. I think we have the ability to provide a global monitoring system, for instance, for air quality. Oh yeah? Where we could not only determine here in the Western world how it is with air quality, but also in India and in Africa and in the US where maybe they don't want to measure it anymore. Well, as it turns out here in Amsterdam, we need it too. It's one of the dirtiest areas in the world. Things like that. Yeah. So it's a really good idea. I think it's a good idea. I think it's a good idea. It's been a long time since we've done this. Yeah. But it's a good idea. We're on the right track. So we're on the right track. Yeah. And it's a very good idea. It's been a really good idea. And I think it's a good idea. And I think it's a really good idea. Yeah. Well, that's five years to build, to really prove that these small satellites are not fancy toys and technology demonstrators, but can provide a real value. So climate change and air quality and environmental effects is a key one. And the other one, I think, is food security. So making sure that there's no famine, that we use satellite data and constellations to do precision farming much better. That would also mean that you get to create your own satellites, also manage your own satellites, manage the data. Yes. Okay. And we want to play a role in that. We tried doing all that with the ship tracking business and technically it was a great success. Commercially, that's not our strong suit. We are an engineering company and we've realized that. So what we do for these kind of things is that we team up. We do the space infrastructure. Yeah. And then we team up with people for the markets and the infrastructure. And the data processing. So there we form more alliances of like-minded small companies to still move fast. So companies with ideas can join with you. Yeah. We will always do it on a contract basis, a project basis. If you come with a crazy idea, a BNR satellite will build it. But if we really believe in it, we may make a joint venture. That's five years out. Ten years out. Yeah. We would love to have a satellite network operational around the moon or Mars or something like that and add services there. That's a longer term ambition. Wow. Yeah. And then eventually do it all interstellar. Lee? I'm not young enough to reap the rewards of that. That's too bad. 37 going interstellar. I'm not sure. Back to the very short term. When is your next launch? When? We're now finalizing three satellites for a launch in August. And that's a wide variety of things. One is a climate monitoring satellite for the Belgian government, the Belgian Met Office, the KMI, the Koninklijk Meteorologisch Instituut in Belgium. They're doing basically global warming science experiments where we've built their entire satellite for. Awesome. And then we have one coming up that's basically done. We're building a small Earth observation satellite for a customer in Thailand and another one of these microgravity satellites. So those three need to be ready at the end of the summer. Wow. And when is the Dutch military satellite going to be launched? Beginning of 2020. Okay. I'm still interested. What is it going to do? What I can say. Ah, there we go. I was already thinking. Like, where's the non-disclosure thing? It's a technology demonstration. It's the first one. So it's a learning exercise on how to procure, operate and task their own satellites. And the key payload is about electronic intelligence. So it's signals monitoring. So basically. Spice that. Something like that. Electronic monitoring. Yeah. Yeah. Listening to radio signals and triangulating sources. Yeah. Great. So is your company going to grow? We've been growing. Also our staff with about 25% per year for 13 years now. How many people now? We're about 100 people. Yeah. I hope we can. And that's part of our internal goals is to be able to keep growing without having to grow in the amount of stuff in a similar amount. So do more with. Yeah. With the same. With the same amount of information, et cetera. So we'll grow to around 150 people, I think. Yeah. Very cool. Cool. We're going to wrap it up. Thank you so much. No problem. For this whole. It's really great. I'm going to just in my own time, just browse around and dream on that web shop. We're going to launch a B&R set, right? Yes. Yes. You mentioned my name for a special 5% discount. Oh, we got the coupon. It's going to be so cool. Yeah. Okay. We're going for the B&R set. Awesome. Hey. Thank you for listening and thank you, Jeroen, for being here. And Juri. Great having you. Yeah. Thank you for being my co-host. Yeah. Thank you. It was great to do. Yeah, absolutely. And next week, Herbert is back and we're going to see you in a month or so. Probably. Yeah. We're going to. And everybody stay tuned. And. Oh, who's going to be the guest next week? Next week, we're going to have Edwin Vermeulen. He's from APP or app. They do everything about it's a niche within a niche. It's just the ignition of rockets. But they're a big player in that market, right? And they're a huge player in that. And that's very, very specific market. They do the ignition parts for the new Ariane 6 rocket, right? I see you saying no. This is a question for next week. The Vega rocket, yes. Yeah. And the Ariane 5. I don't think they're doing the Ariane 6. I think they went to Norway. So we lost out. Thank you for those questions. I will definitely ask them next week. Thank you all for listening. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank. You know, they're not asking questions right. They're just talking to one another and asking questions. And this is checking in on myah. Let me ask you. Today is Monday the 24th. I got the weather forecast. Good for you and Digital Tech today, because it's so good. We're very excited about tomorrow. We are all happy about what's happening here. We're glad it Weg momentize. These expectations are done. Thank you. Thanks. I appreciate it. You, too. Thanks, Edwin. No. Thank you, mate. Eddie alright?