This startup launched one of the highest-powered spacecraft ever built

Speaker 0:03 Was there a point where either of you thought this might not work?

Karan Kunjur 0:09 You're asking us this question 11 days before we launch our first satellite. This is an incredibly important mission.

Neel Kunjur 0:19 I think we're gonna learn how hard it is to operate in space.

0:23 We know that this is possible. That's why we're doing it. We wouldn't do it otherwise.

Karan Kunjur 0:48 So there's a sci-fi concept called the Kardashev scale. Um, it measures the sophistication of a civilization. A K1 civilization, a Kardashev type I civilization, is one that can harness the power that reaches the planet. So we're pretty close to 0.8 to one. A K2 civilization, or one that can harness the power of a solar system, has the ability to build really large structures that can harness, like, unlimited renewable energy from the sun.

Host 1:13 And yet what the Earth receives is only a minute fraction of the whole. Only one part in two billion of the total solar energy. The rest of the 500,000 billion billion horsepower goes out into space.

Karan Kunjur 1:27 The hallmark of a K2 civilization is what's called a Dyson sphere, massive rings around the sun. That's actually our logo. We started K2 'cause we wanna build really large, high-power structures in space. We wanna be laying the foundation for making humanity a type II Kardashev civilization.

Neel Kunjur 1:44 And I think part of K2 is figuring out how to make the sci-fi practical, right? I think we have this vision for what we think the future's gonna look like, and we didn't see anybody else out there building the infrastructure necessary to achieve that vision. So a lot of the technology that we're building here, the high-power satellites, the huge scale, is really designed to capture that next step in becoming a K2 civilization.

Karan Kunjur 2:13 It's almost four years ago to the date, Neel and I were looking at a famous study called the NASA Decadal that lays out the scientific priorities for the next decade. We were looking at these really cool science missions and wondering why only one or two of them might happen over the next 10 years.

Neel Kunjur 2:30 No one was going out and venturing out and building the spacecraft we thought were necessary to both do those scientific missions and allow us to expand our presence beyond low Earth orbit. There wasn't as much chatter about what we could do in medium Earth orbit, what we could do in geo, what we could do in cislunar space.

Karan Kunjur 2:43 Everyone was going smaller to drive down the cost of operating in space. The problem is, every application in space ties back to power, and power scales with size.

Neel Kunjur 2:53 And as an engineer, right, physics tells us that we actually want bigger systems. We want more throughput out of our satellites. We want higher resolution imagery. We asked ourselves the question, "Well, why aren't people building satellites that achieve this? Uh, is it a physics reason, or is it just engineering?" And what we've done at K2 is we've solved hundreds, if not thousands, of those engineering problems along the way to achieve what physics tells us is ideal.

3:16 The conventional large satellite industry is old, set in its ways, slow, over-expensive.

Karan Kunjur 3:28 When we said we can do a 20kW satellite, which is typically, like, $500 million to a billion dollars per satellite, and we said, "We're gonna do that, and we're gonna do it at $15 million per satellite," half the people we talked to told us we were crazy. The other half told us, uh, it's not possible.

Neel Kunjur 3:42 So where most conventional satellites will operate at maybe a low voltage bus of about 28 volts, ours operates north of 150 volts. Now, not only is that hard from designing systems that can even operate at that voltage, when you're flying in space, you're flying through plasma. You have a high risk of arcing, of damage.

4:00 The solar arrays fundamentally provide all of the power for the satellite. They're what keep us alive in space. The most difficult thing about them is that they need to be massive to provide the power we need to do everything we wanna do, uh, on orbit.

Karan Kunjur 4:12 I remember for, like, a while, a top five existential threat for the company was solar arrays. And, uh, Neel Karan moved quickly on it. We brought a lot of that in-house.

Neel Kunjur 4:23 We took probably three, four months just modifying the designs.

4:26 We knew it was feasible. We knew it was possible.

4:29 A big part of it is really choosing to do a lot of things ourselves.

Karan Kunjur 4:33 That has allowed us to move from a concept to a fully fledged and flight-ready vehicle in three years.

Karan Kunjur 4:40 We first built this platform saying, "If we could build a platform that has a lot of power and you can deploy in any orbit, who would be interested?" You know, to date, we've announced about $500 million in signed contracts. We've got a number of government and commercial customers that are incredibly excited, um, about what we're building. On the government side, it's applications ranging from missile warning, missile tracking, to tactical communications, to a number of classified mission areas.

Speaker 5:05 We're working with NASA Science Center, and they were working on a telescope design. And the chief scientist was like, "You know, the s- the, the telescope is actually physically very large. Uh, um, you know, it might be too big for your satellite bus." A couple days later, we had a follow-up call, and, uh, that scientist, as soon as he saw how large our satellite bus was and how small the telescope was, he left the room and got another sc- scientist to come back and was like, "We could fly two telescopes with the same bus," which is very rare. Talking to scientists and seeing them get excited about what they can do with our bus, that to me, like, completely validates our company thesis, company ethos.

Neel Kunjur 5:44 What makes this company successful is the fact that we've been able to attract and retain some of the most talented engineers that have ever worked in space.

5:51 23 years experience.

Host 5:52 SpaceX and Lockheed Martin and things like that.

Neel Kunjur 5:55 I had many years at SpaceX.

Karan Kunjur 5:57 Uh, before this, I had spent a couple years at NASA JPL.

6:00 I was at JPL.

Neel Kunjur 6:01 Once I had my first opportunity to actually see real satellites, see them be launched into orbit, it was in my blood.

Guest 6:10 You know, it's not just another like nine-to-five job. You have to be in it. You have to be very hungry.

Guest 6:16 You need to love this just like we do. Um, if you don't, then, um, I think you should do some more soul-searching. [laughs]

Karan Kunjur 6:28 At the end of this month, we're launching our first 20kW satellite.

Guest 6:32 Gravitas.

Neel Kunjur 6:32 Gravitas.

Karan Kunjur 6:33 Gravitas.

Neel Kunjur 6:34 Gravitas.

Guest 6:34 Gravitas.

Karan Kunjur 6:35 Yeah, so this is Gravitas. It's the full-size satellite with the full-size capability. It's flying 12 different payloads for customers, a mix of government and commercial. We've done all of our testing, environmental testing. We've done HIL testing. We've dug into failure modes. But there's always lingering risk 'cause space is hard.

Guest 6:56 We're solving an autonomy problem that is like we can only recreate this in space truly.

Karan Kunjur 7:01 So we've got four shifts of operators trained up for specific parts of the mission.

Neel Kunjur 7:06 We need to be prepared for any types of failures or faults and understand how we can recover it with imperfect information and imperfect control of the satellite.

Karan Kunjur 7:14 I mean, we, we do our best to simulate it, but there's something in that like emotional component that you, you don't really get until the clock is ticking down. It's, it's getting really low.

Neel Kunjur 7:23 I don't think there's really nerves. Uh-

Guest 7:25 It, it's incredibly nerve-wracking.

Guest 7:27 Yeah, definitely terrifying.

Karan Kunjur 7:28 Nerves is definitely one of those most common things you're gonna see.

Guest 7:33 I'm excited. I'm anxious. You know, this is a culmination of years of work, seeing the company grow from 10 to 200 something, and seeing all the blood, sweat, and tears that have gone into the hardware.

Karan Kunjur 7:51 I mean, we were seven people in a conference room talking about really big ideas. We've come so far from there. And it's been unreal.

Guest 8:03 I think with such a small team, you just feel that much more connected with the vehicle, the mission, and just those around you.

Guest 8:13 We all built this. We didn't see something come down an assembly line. We all laid hands on it.

Neel Kunjur 8:19 It was just an idea, and then I got to one day touch it in real life, and then that thing that I touched in real life is going to space. [laughs]

Neel Kunjur 8:35 Tonight is the launch of Gravitas. The rocket launch is at 4:00 AM this morning, and we're just hanging out, having a really great time, drinking some wine, spending some quality time together. And after a year and a half of hard work, it's really out of our hands right now, and we're all just hoping that it'll go well.

Guest 8:54 What's going through my head? Um, [laughs] I've seen a, a number of space failures, and so my first thought is just a single bolt can take a rocket down. [upbeat music]

Neel Kunjur 9:44 We won't be popping bottles of champagne at launch. Launch is where our mission begins. So after launch is when our satellite separates, when it deploys its solar arrays, when it tries to orient itself to make comms with the ground.

Karan Kunjur 9:55 It has to deploy on its own with no human intervention, no data. It's just you, your flight computer's spat off from the rocket. Uh, and if it doesn't deploy, you're a brick. Establishing comms, getting power positivity. If you do that, you can learn no matter what. And then it's off to the races.

Neel Kunjur 10:23 There's a core reason why I'm doing this, why I want the satellite to be up there, why I want to prove to people that this is, in fact, possible. As a civilization, we're vastly underestimating our own capabilities of what we can do in space. We need to think bigger, not smaller. We need to think about how we can venture out there, do more in deep space, and I think our satellite is the first step in expanding our belief in what we can do. [upbeat music]