Episode 10: Watching the Watcher (Sats), or UAPs are Boring w/ HEO CEO Dr. Will Crowe

Yeah, so fortunately we were pitching what we were doing in front of people with uniforms at the back of rooms and some of them said, "Hey, what are you doing for Asteroids? You should think about doing that for satellites." We are back with our latest episode of Just Another Space Podcast. I'm Tom Culligan here as always with Clayton Swope. We have a great episode today joined by Dr. Wilkrow, the co-founder and CEO of Heo. An exciting company based out of Australia, but globally doing really interesting work that we're excited to get into today. So Wilk, welcome and thanks for being on the show. Really appreciate being here guys. Excites just chat. Yeah, and Wil, I think you get the prize so far as maybe our ninth or tenth guest is being the furthest around the world, time zone-wise, to join us. So, we appreciate you doing this from tomorrow to be on our podcast today. I don't know if there could be a more inconvenient time difference between Australia and Washington DC. We could find it a little earlier later. Australia? So maybe that's it. So you're based out of Sydney, is that right Wil? Yeah, that's right. So as close to you guys as possible in this country, sir. Yeah. Would you say, is Sydney the space capital of Australia these days? Cool. So that's contentious. So I think Sydney wants to be the space capital, but I think Adelaide really wants to as well and Perth on the West Coast also wants to be able to. I'd heard Adelaide, but what's Perth have? Is it have a space port or concentration of companies? It really has, it has none of the above, but I think actually, strands are a lot of ex-Nazaferk move there, and they move there for the oil and gas and mining industries, because there's a lot of automation there. Like, it's just huge areas, very small population, huge need for automation. And so it's out in Nasaferk, some of the best in the world at automating those industries. And they get massive sums of money from these oil and gas companies in Western Australia. So yeah, huge up for that. No, okay. So you didn't want to go the space mining route when you founded this company. You decided we're going to set up a different industry for Sydney in the space sector through imaging. Like, I'm not sure if you know, we started as an asteroid mining company. Oh my God, I did not know you started as a. That's a good segue. This is a great place to start. I knew you started with imaging asteroids. I did not know you started as a mining. Sorry, I told my phone that was a softball. No, no. No, no. But now we want to know, this would be the second episode that has been about asteroid mining then. Oh, gosh, okay. Wait, Clayton, you didn't know this either, right? No. Okay, all right. I feel a little vindicated. So yeah, tell us the origin story. How'd you get to start from there to here? Yeah, so actually it started. It started. So this company started from some work I did during my PhD days. So in 2015, I wrote a paper about imaging asteroids that come closer than the marine. At the time, there was something like 200 every year that come at least that close. There's a bunch more that we don't even know about, but probably come just as close or closer as well. But yeah, like the paper was, how do you image these asteroids and the idea behind that was, how do you prospect these asteroids and that infer the properties of other asteroids that are further afield and might be suitable for mining. So for the first two years of his life from 2016 to 2018, we were as an asteroid mining company doing the prospection stage of the mining off. But we quickly found out they're one in the customers. So is heo, is that an acronym? Will or is that have another meaning? It is an acronym and it stands for high Earth orbit rather than highly elliptical orbits are taking more than NASA approach. We didn't realize that it also took for highly elliptical orbit at the time. But yeah, like the idea was to have spacecraft waiting out at higher orbit until these asteroids came and then just intercepting the asteroids and taking lots of great imagery and potentially impacting them and taking samples as well, that kind of thing. Did you want to do the mining yourself or you were just doing the imaging piece and what someone else would do the mining? Well, really, sir, I mean, this is going deep, but really I saw Star Wars when I was 12 and I haven't lost the space box. And so yeah, the idea was to like really my life is about how do we create that beautiful Star Wars like future. And so I thought that was something that we could do and we could be a big part of the mining industry by doing that perception and doing it at scale and we had an idea that was very cost efficient. But yeah, I think if no other company would do the mining, we would have probably done it. But that right now I think we're kind of not quite at the place where there's enough ecosystem to make it happen. But really looking forward to that future. We had one of the astrophorge co-founders on that was our second success. Yeah, yeah. So you have not abandoned the future mining part of the business case. This is this. Okay, that's that's good enough. Well, I have so many so many questions to start with. But the first one is like we and we talked a little bit about this with astrophorge. They started I want to say in like 2020 is timeframe. You started earlier and you were that in between like planetary resources and deep space industries and a couple of the others that were going to come on and were you going to disrupt those guys? Was that kind of the business model? Well, actually, I started my PhD because they like I think planetary resources came out in 2012 that made themselves public. And at that time I was like holy moly like I didn't I didn't know that it was possible to start a company and get finance in order to make this future possible. And that company really excited about startups actually. So that's one of the reasons I'm here. And yeah, like I was like, okay, first of all to a PhD to help research. So I'll need lots of research to do astrophining. And then I got a bit frustrated and then we're like let's start this company so we can help give them data so they can do the mining. But then we found out they didn't have any customers. So like our customers don't have customers therefore, we're going to go to Provo. Like a domino effect when that happens. That is not an economy. So you pivoted? Yeah. So fortunately we were pitching what we were doing in front of people with uniforms at the back of rooms. And some of them said, hey, what are you doing for asteroids? You should think about doing that for satellites. And so we did. Because I mean in asteroid exploration doing fly by imaging of asteroids, I like the primary way to investigate asteroids because typically on the way to Jupiter or Saturn or wherever you want to go past the asteroid belt. And then NASA had this mandate to fly past an asteroid whenever they were doing that. So that was like the primary way. So where I come from, this non-ethymidium or it needs to be sat squared, that was how you did things. If you had things that you were interested in, but you didn't have enough fuel or the economics didn't make sense, you just slow down and run the brew. So really that's where they came from. So NASA was doing the sat squared for decades. But they called it asteroid flybyes. And then it turns out that we learned a lot later that the national security establishment was also doing this fly by imaging of other satellites. They call the sat squared and it was a highly classified and regulated industry. But we didn't know that. We just accidentally, I guess, recreated this technology without understanding that it was already a thing. And key is though, you're taking pictures of other objects in space. But you're also not slowing down and you're not specifically maneuvering doing a rendezvous proximity operation around the other object. You are just on your normal trajectory with the camera, snapping pictures as you go by. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And by the way, what I'll say is that the way that we originally tested our software stack is with Landsat. Because Landsat's just lazily imaging every part of the Earth, the Mediterranean as well. It turns off during the sea, the ocean, which is most of the Earth, so it doesn't image any satellites. But that, but Landsat is accidentally image hundreds of satellites that show up in different frames. So it's kind of like when you see aircraft, making you off in Google Maps. That's true in Landsat. For like the ISS, we tested on to begin with. This was like machine learning. Is that like you if you use machine learning to train it to look for this object or it's a person? But you just marry up. It's kind of like you can just pull the historical TLEs. Here it's going to be. You know, yeah, you know where it is. I get it. Yeah, you just said, oh, hey, there it is. You knew it because that was what the TLE said it was going to be. And it's beautiful. And it's like that's what it is in like 11 bands. So you get like this track and it's landscape. So you have this track of like international space stations across the. You should tell your customers though that it's machine learning algorithm that you have painstakingly cramped. Well, yeah, you guys are machine learning. Hey, I know it's all well. Everything's conflated. Everything's I've got. I mean, you need blockchain enabled and we have three compatible. Yeah, it's the best of the best. Yeah, essentially, we do use that now. - Oh, it's just like, yeah, it's just, it's what you should do if you want a great kind of software stacker head. So yeah. - And you, so you had the investors that were investing in an asteroid mining company, didn't work out. And then you just went to the same investor to say, "Hey, we got a better idea." Is that kind of how it evolved into where you are now? - We did not even have investors. So like the Australian ecosystem is a bit different. We have this thing called Total Poppy Syndrome where we don't like each other kind of becoming too interesting and having amazing ideas. Like we like to cut them down. So we cut down the Total Popgies. - Oh, sorry. - In Australia, it's kind of like, yeah, we're not investing in that. Like unless you do like a copy of some, you know, American kind of SaaS app, I think even SaaS might have been a bit early then. But yeah, so it was interesting. We went a long time without any funding. And actually the only way we got funding was from our customers. So our customers were like, "Wow, that's a good way to get funding though, people who are paying you for your product." That's not bad. - It wasn't much. It was like, "Yeah, we're giving you $10,000." We got a budget to our report. So his $10,000 to our report. And by the way, write a report on how you take the images. So it's like, that's how they paid for images. So it's very small amounts of money. But our cost was so low that we were able to kind of get started that way. - Wait, so your initial imaging technology, you mentioned ISS. Were you on ISS as a test bed? - Sir, Nore, so we were on other platforms and then were we typically just using the ISS as a target because it's well-saved and huge. That's well-saved, easy to guess. - And I guess, Gland, I actually don't know the altitude of Landsat, but well above the ISM. - I love that. - Yeah, that's right. - Yeah. And what was like the biggest then, I guess? Okay, so that's, you didn't start with much funding and you got funded by your customer. So if you look back, and we asked another founder this question, if you look back, was it a technical challenge really that was the hardest thing to get you where you are now or was it the business side? Do you think that took most of your time to like, cogitate on to come up with a solution to get you here? - Yeah, it's definitely the business side. 'Cause I think, you know, as space people, we're always so surprised at how easy things can be. Like it's very hard to get right into it scalably and that's actually the hard part. It's kind of like manufacturing as well, building a prototype, it's easy, scaling it up's hard. So that's actually the hard part of the business. But really, our biggest challenge was, like the customers did not want us to know they existed and what their problem was. - Interesting. - When they did make themselves know, and they were like, oh, you can't know what we want to toss you to do. We're like, that's kind of the whole thing. It's like, you gotta let us know. So we could take the images, but they're like, well, that's all classified. That's sort of an interesting start. - I mean, that's a hard environment to sell anything then when your customer's not really clear about what they're doing behind. But what are you doing is interesting. Sorry about that. - I guess one more like foundational question, just for listeners, you don't fly satellites. Your cameras are on other satellites, is that right? - Yeah, so there's two ways that we work today. So either it's just elsewhere on existing satellites. So for example, we work with Black Sky and Satellite, and what we do there is we really, we go through their tasking system, but we're giving them like a really interesting set of data points. So we will rent the satellite for like a 30 second period of time, it'll be like, slew this way, image this many times, do these things during in-between, and then go back to normal operations after that. So it kind of starts off with there's like a corn in which they operate normally for Earth observation. They'll go off an idea. And then we say, well, if you want more money, we should be turning it up as well, because then you can get other interesting objects and you get different lighting and all this stuff. And getting the lighting right is actually some of the hardest stuff that we do. So it's kind of like, it becomes a dollar question. And it's over the ocean of these Earth observations satellites aren't used at all. So it's kind of like, if you want to monetize your satellite, then we got to play ball here and figure out how to work together. The other thing that we were successful doing is building APIs with our suppliers. So I think a lot of our suppliers, when we started working with them, were still using like forms that you would have to download and sign manually. It's kind of like, and then you would submit the PDF. And they would be like, cool, we're going to toss the satellite now. That was not sustainable. So it's kind of like, we need to build an API. So our computer, your computer, and none of us should need to be in the loop during that decision. So that's one way that we work with-- That's-- So you're basically couch surfing satellites. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like you're-- Like this idea of renting for like 30 seconds of time is fascinating. Or like a noob or-- Tom, too. Yeah, or I think about it. I think that's right. You are paying for it, but it's like such a limited quantity, right? I mean, I imagine it opens up-- you have so many assets you can rent from, or at least from, or whatever the term is. In this case, that's amazing. If they're over the ocean, they're not being used. Yeah. That is really-- that is really interesting. And I never thought about the underutilized capacity over the oceans. I mean, that's just-- You kind of just blew my mind, that's, yeah. A satellite's so expensive and valuable. So it must be 100% capacity utilization. But that's not true. Like a subset of satellites are like constrained in some way, like some are constrained because the data they download so huge, they can't get down enough. And others are kind of constrained by power, but not really. And typically, over a lifetime, they'll be constrained by different things at different times. But I think probably the headline here is that most satellites are underutilized because they're designed for the worst case scenario, which rarely happens. So it needs a majority of the time. They've got heaps of capacity that one can use. So yeah, it's interesting. You're not really burning any propulsion, right? In this case, it's not like it's using fuel. It's really just a camera adjustment. At the moment, yeah, it's just turning it around. So you're just using reaction wheels to turn the thing around. What I will say is that a lot of our customers are interested in maneuverable imaging. So maneuvering slightly to get it better imaging quality. But we'll be charging for that. So it's kind of like, I think this is the other thing not done much by space companies. A lot of them are cutting costs by doing weird things. They're like, OK, well, we won't take that ground station pass, for example. We won't download during that time. But the monetization potential for some of those cost savings is actually huge. And I think the business people in the organizations don't typically like they think they can't talk to these rocket scientists. They're like, they're so smart. They must know these things. And there must be an actual reason why that's not done. And these poor engineers are like, I just want to save this company money. That's what I'm doing. So I think there's all these-- you would believe the amount of stupid crap that we find out that people are doing in space. And we're just like, look, if you can not do that, while we use you at least, you will get much more money. So please don't do that, at least during these times. So I think it's been a really interesting experience. And it's taken-- I guess it took someone with luck. I guess I've got the hubris of someone with a PhD, right? So it takes someone with that kind of hubris to kind of come and be like, well, maybe we could do this other way. [LAUGHTER] That is such an interesting business model. And what I love about is the business model found you. It's not what you set out to do. But based on that customer feedback, you're like, oh, yeah, we can-- we got all this underutilized capacity. We can figure out how to monetize. And that's brilliant. That's pretty cool. So what's-- Yeah. I say, maybe the reason we don't see this with US company is actually is that the US government is incentivizing people to literally build satellites. Like, that is what it knows how to buy. And it's like, great. We don't even need the thing to work initially. Like, we will just pay you innovation dollars to build satellites. Let's tell them more. Tell me more. I want to hear more about that. Yeah. In what ways? You think it's DOD or is this NASA? Or is it both of them? Or the commercial market? Yeah, is that intended on the commercial side? It's mainly the government customer. Because the government customer-- yeah, they're used to buying hardware. And I think things are still based on World War II style. Things sort of buying software for governments is really hard. They're not very good at it. They're even worse at buying data. So typically, they're trying to buy hardware. I think the intelligence community and NASA are trying hard to buy data because I know there's cost savings. But I think it's just-- it's really difficult for them to sell that to their stakeholders. Because it's easy to sell a mission. It's cool. There's this space mission. And it's going to be a satellite. And we need to rock it for it. It's this one-shot thing. It's easy to sell that where it's hard to say, yeah, we're going to buy data when we need it. And we might not need it as well. But maybe we'll do it at these times. It just sounds fluffy immediately. And so I think they find that really difficult to sell that. Sites are analysis. I think that's kind of an extension of data. So instead of just buying data, you buy an insight. And I don't know. I'd have to think about how that would apply, particularly to your product. But I think it could. And that's even further removed from what it seems like sometimes the government knows how to buy. How do you price an insight or an analytic insight? It seemed very difficult. It's certainly not as hands-on. And you can't look as much to the history of how the government has bought something as hardware. and there's really no good thing you could point to say this is how it's done now by government. Even though I think from business to business, that's commercial. You can usually find evidence of this happening, but from a government standpoint. At least my observation, that's really hard. And I think it's such an interesting question, but I think the US starts from particularly the DOD, but probably NASA too, a presumption of needing a sure to access. You know, so I've got to build a thing, or at least pay someone to build a thing. So I've got a thing that can go do that mission because what if I don't have, you know, your assets available? And so everything backs up from, but it's kind of a, it's kind of a luxury to a certain degree to say, do I always need that asset just so that I have the assured, there might be categories of things where you go, well, I've got enough assured assets that can do that. So there's a large swathe of things that I can truly afford to safely buys the service, even if it might be some, I don't know, some inconsistencies or availability gaps or things like that. I mean, launch, I mean, the government doesn't operate its own launcher. It buys that all as a service. And somehow it got comfortable with that notion, even though I think will, your point is still this like, hulking piece of metal that a government person can put their hands on and say, my satellites on that. So I think it is a little different than data. And they still spend a lot of money to make sure there is a launch capability to buy. Yes, that's the yeah, yeah, yeah, from a hardware perspective. But yeah, that's really, really interesting. So as you rolled out this, so what you make the pivot from asteroid mining to to the decision new market, and then that's been what the last seven, eight years, how many years has that been now? Yeah, roughly seven years, but I'd say like originally we thought we'd need to launch our satellites because of what like that's a dumb thing. So actually, it took some of these constraints to be like, well, maybe we can just test our software on existing satellites. And it turned out that that was just this huge, unrealized opportunity. So we started doing that. The other thing I'll say is that we're running out of satellite companies that have satellites. Could that just sound that many? Like there's more and probably on the blocks of streets that you're sitting in. That's probably more cameras than all of space. So I think the other thing that we're doing is building cameras here in Australia from kind of the chip up. And we've deployed literally like, well, a dozen in this room. I'm sitting in it right now if I really think about it. Camera. Yeah, probably three on a phone, one each on the laptop, the one above my computer. I've got a couple iPads in here. Just imagine if you could monetize that, Clayton, or just Lisa. I'm sure that's the interesting things happening in my office. Yeah, that's right. And the, I guess, lack of all the underuse of spacecraft in space kind of, really, it's true in the majority of cases, like the majority of satellites aren't used most of the time. So yeah, like being able to use that downtime to take images of things. And really, yeah, the missing piece was the camera. So we're just building the camera. There's enough satellites going up to the right orbits that we care about, that putting a camera on these satellites makes sense. And really, yeah, it's kind of interesting right. So now we've got good coverage and our competitors do in the, in the zone where a observation camera is typically sit. But in place like Gio, place like High Lear, there's not capabilities to getting cameras up there. It was important that we built those. The other thing I'll say is that the industrial capacity to build space cameras right now is really bad. Like, yeah, it's not great. There's huge lead times, huge expense, et cetera. So building those in house in hindsight, very good decision. I think China's got at least four EO electro optical satellites in Gio. So maybe they'll let you put yourself around that. That'd be great. I said, I'm sorry, but it's a malware onto that too. He would pay a handsome way for the malware. Yeah. So have you have you, I know, obviously, your name is Hio. Have you thought about beyond Hio into Sys Lunar or as kind of you see more activity moving that way? Is that in the product pipeline? Yeah, definitely. I think when you get beyond Lear, it gets a lot more difficult to, I guess, get highly resolved imagery. So you need to probably go back to the old NASA asteroid fly by example to kind of learn from them. So I definitely something we're really interested in. So Gio, we're booked for Gio next year and also in 2027. And yet getting up there is really critical and we'll already need to do a bit of maneuvering in Gio. But in in Sys Lunar, super interesting space as well, getting resolved imagery is going to be really tough. I think a lot of people are interested in the tracking. And we're saying, yeah, that's fine. But another company should do that. And really, we want to focus on getting resolved images, understanding what the thing is, just not where the thing is. Other people. Yeah. Where would you go in this lunar? Is it like like an orbit around a Lagrange point? Is that, I mean, it just feels like such a different environment. Totally. So I think, I mean, for this lunar, I think it really makes sense to have highly maneuverable vehicles. I think as well, you'd use the kind of fuzzy nature of the overall dynamics to your advantage. Sure. I think it would be in my mind, the best way to do this would be a touring spacecraft. We haven't spoken about this in the only of the company, by the way. So some of my employees might be like, oh, that's interesting. Well, I'm afraid, yeah, I think it's like not wearing a touring satellite that goes around different interesting kind of stable points, which is where the majority of these satellites are anyway. In my mind, that's the that's the interesting way to run this mission. And then the other thing is actually the lunar surface itself. So I think we're seeing a huge increase in activity. We saw Firefly just announced that kind of imaging system in lunar. I think that's really interesting place to be as well. So and of course, there's a lot of asteroids flying around those regions. So we're very interested in using satellites kind of in that system in a zone to look at other objects like asteroids as well. So given that you operate in kind of the commercial space, what surprised you the most of the things you've observed, you know, when you're tasking for customers are the things that you go, gosh, I did not expect to see that sort of behavior or activity or that type of satellite where it is has that come across your desk. Yeah. Yeah. I guess maybe you can't talk about it, but to me, I would love to hear. Did you, were you imaging this satellite? Then I'll be like, oh, it's got a grabber arm. Didn't expect that. Probably can't tell us, but things like that, I would be curious. Did I guess a few at Tom, but I was thinking like unusual thing on satellites that you didn't expect. Oh, like that. This is a, this is emotion. This is. Oh, yeah. Or that, um, that octopus thing that they're testing on the International Space Station. I don't know if you saw that. It's a robot with like octopus arms. Yeah, that would be pretty cool. They just image that you didn't expect to see. Yeah. Okay. How about I list out a few and if you want to talk about one of them, then we can kind of dig in. Yeah. Let's do it. So the first one that really shocked me is the amount of people lying about which satellite belongs to them. And it's just like you get it. It's not that. Wow. Yeah. This one typically happens when the operator doesn't actually know which satellites there. So they tell a white light to the regulator. Well, they think it's white light. Um, you know what it's like. Cool. Well, it's this one. So we're just going to get on with our lives now. But in reality, oh, medication, they don't know which freakable one it is. Um, sir. If you could see Clayton's face right now, I think he's. And this is Leo. Well, this is Leo. We're talking about this. Leo. Yeah. Wow. Well, you know, once we get to G.O. I'll show you other weird things. But yeah, this is so that's amazing. Oh, this one, this one I think is pretty cool. Okay. So we've seen explosion exploded objects in space. One or some of due to any satellite weapons and some of due to just the thing exploding. So when the thing explodes by, or what we've, we haven't had that many examples. So the examples we've seen when it explodes by itself, it's like in like two chunks like it, it's really exploded apart. And then there's a lot smaller debris as well. So two big pieces with a smaller debris field? Exactly. And it like, I think the way to think about it is like either the battery compartments exploded or the like the fuel cells still had fuel in it. And then that exploded. It's like quite a lot of energy, but from like a point inside the satellite. So it's I guess the thing, yeah, we'll explode from like a critical point. When it's an anti satellite weapon, we normally see some degradation on the side of it. So I think probably the, yeah, probably the most likely example when an anti satellite weapon hits a satellite is that a solar panel is blowing off because the majority of the, I guess, area that the things going, going essentially hit is solar panel. So it's, it's, like, a solar panel is blowing off. So that kind of blew my, I was like, oh, this thing's mostly in text. - Wow. - Just blow off the side kind of thing. And it makes sense when you think about it, you're like, okay, you got like an area, and then you're gonna hit some point in that area. It's most likely that it's gonna be off to the side of the center of the thing. I don't know, maybe it like glances off a little bit as well. So yeah. - I still have thunder on this. This one, research P1, the Russian satellite. - Yeah, so that was, you gave us pictures to use in my day jobs space threat assessment for 2025. So thank you, Will. It was your US team that helped with that. And I, you described it on my, it's gotta be that satellite. - Yeah. - Yacht, sir. - So sorry, I know the, if you wanna see that one, you can read the, - Yeah. - In international studies, aerospace security projects, annual space threat assessment for 2025 to get more details. - That will be in the確. - And see the pictures, right? - Exactly, right? - Yeah, cool. - Yeah, cool. - Yeah, it'll be, I know it's, yeah. - Oh, yeah, it'll be in the show right now. - Exactly, exactly. - In a link. - This is how Clayton Boosts report downloads on the CSIS website. - I haven't done that yet, Tom. I haven't done that. - No, I haven't. - I haven't. - I, they job. - No, no, and you, as you should, 'cause they're all excellent. - Excellent. - But I would say that all three of those facts are fast standing. You kinda blew my mind in various ways with all three. I think the first one is Clayton, and I come out of the policy world where there's supposed to be this reporting and disclosure with various FCC and FA authorities fascinating. - Yeah. - A lot of misreported, items in space. And then the last one, I never thought about. You do, you always hear about these anti-satellite tests and you assume it's just a massive field of small debris. And the fact that it just hits the largest thing and knocks it off and. - Yeah. - I mean, this is a huge, - That's great as well. - Yeah, there could be a lot of breetown. You know, like with some of these, we're talking thousands of pieces of debris. They're just very tiny. - But not the majority of the asset is still, maybe-- - But this is what is still a thing. Like maybe it's rattle the lot, but it's still a thing. Like seeing a bit of, like a tank that go up, learn up, right? It's like maybe there's a hole in this side, but the tank's still a tank. - Yeah. - And the carbon space, or yeah. - Wow. All right. - That is really an explosion, just to point that out to it 'cause there are no explosions in the traditional sense. There's no blast in space. So if you think about what that would mean for the effects that might create different types of effects that then, I think, to Will's point, you would see, you could potentially see in an image. But it doesn't like-- - It's really a point. - It's not like a mushroom cloud. - So Clayton, I was just thinking like the one where it's internal. Would you call that an explosion or not? - I should say no blast. Let me change what I meant by that. Yeah. No blast. - Because you need air for the blast. Sorry, yeah, explosion. - It's not explosion. - I shouldn't have said no blast. - Yeah. - Even though people could say, "What's the difference?" Why would say you need an atmosphere to have a blast? But maybe someone's gonna disagree. I hope someone is listening to this podcast and will disagree and we will have a lively debate somewhere where we post this podcast. - Hey, unless there's a picture of it from Will, it didn't happen. So I gotta see a picture of an explosion. Otherwise it's all speculation. It's a three-phone in the forest. - This kind of win, right? 'Cause you kind of don't want this to happen, but I would love to catch something mid-breakup. Like that would be-- - Yeah. - Yeah. Have you ever caught anything action-wise like that or has it all been post-- - Yeah, yeah, sir. - Really? - Yeah, probably the coolest one. This was a few years ago now. It was when the Chinese Space Station was being constructed and we caught the mid-construction. That was pretty cool. - Sorry. - They'd taken a unit of one kind of docking port and then brought it around and put it in another docking port. But probably the coolest thing about that was, I mean, you could assume this anyway, but it was over Montana when we caught this image and there weren't any type of lots of board either. So it's kind of like, I guess there's two potential conclusions. One is that they've got a good inter-subalite relay and they're doing a kind of semi-real time. Or it's totally automated, which is my kind of more favorite theory. But I think that was good confirmation about the technological progress of China, which when you think about, you're like, well, duh, of course they're doing that. But it's still interesting, I think. - That's interesting with no comms, though. I hadn't thought about that piece. So when they talk about the International Lunar Research Station and Cheng-U-8 being an automated establishment of the base where people will end up being, I guess in my mind, I just assumed, though they say automated, I thought that meant kind of human control. But I think they're talking kind of a similar approach to Mars, which has a significant delay in comms. That's kind of a very different way to do it. I would think then how the US would typically do some activity in space. But I even think back time, we've had some conversations about Apollo and the difference between how Apollo works and saw used. And it sounds like Apollo is most of it was just people, it was people were driving it. It was all up to people. It wasn't even remote control. It was people in that capsule in the spacecraft. So it feels like kind of the, if you look at the history of the US and space, a lot of it is human control. So even recently, it's just how NASA approaches it. Having full automation feels very different. And to think that a country that's a late developing space-faring nation has developed a different model for in space assembly. Or it's just a fascinating, yeah. Yeah. I don't know what's wrong. We're right or wrong. It's just weird to think you could evolve in a different way to solve the same problem. So-- Wow. When I asked a question, I thought you'd have one kind of joky answer. But you kind of blew our minds with four very interesting observations. Why? So the company or the satellite's not being the ones that the regulator expected. So in this case, would it be satellite is listed in, let's say, the US government's space track? It says it's something. You look at the picture like, oh, that's not what it's supposed to be. Exactly. Who else is it then? Who's out like, is it a non-US satellite that's misidentified as a US satellite? Or is it just another of that same company? I could think of one company that has thousands of satellites right now. Well, actually, I think that company-- I think this is some of the thing that annoys me, because I think that company is an easy target. And that company actually helps-- helps spaceful, sorry, when there's mischaracterized objects. So I think about one example at least, that company is probably a good actor. But these other companies, I would say, they're typically more cowboy-like, they're typically trying to save costs by not tracking their own satellites. They have typically gone up in a match with a lot of other satellites, also of which have not turned on. And so really, they're trying to do a very quick analysis. And they know that the regulator doesn't care, and until now, has not had a way to do fun. We need to get some mission authorization up under this time. Well, you know what? I was going to say, you have a perfect opportunity. Look, and once you buy our services, we're going to have to tell the regulator that you misreported the satellite. So I would hate for the FAA to learn about that. I got-- OK, how are you? Sorry, I know we're-- we've taken a long time, because I don't know if you agree, Thomas. Is it fascinating? I wanted to get up before we're done was like, how are you regulated? And how are you regulated in Australia? How are you regulated in the US? Are you-- I'm assuming you're selling in other countries, too. I was wondering, is it the same? And just like, what's the regulatory landscape look like for what you're trying to do? Are you like the trailblazer? No one else had done this before, and you had to figure it out? Well, someone did do this before. So Max, I was doing commercial monothed injury well before we did. They were just doing it for a classified customer. So they had special dispensation to do this kind of thing. So yeah, long question and really long answers, sorry, to the question. Sorry, I'm a long answer, too. Sorry. I'm just too much sometimes. Sorry, well. Me too. Same affliction. So yeah, I guess first part is that in Australia, we actually have very relaxed regulations. So in Australia, we've launched a lot of rockets. So most of our regulation is towards rockets. And then we've got a bunch of satellites, typically in geo, more recently in Leo as well. So there's also regulation around payloads, specifically those that are launch overseas, because that's where essentially every payload bar one has been launched from. Bletched the one. Actually, that's what? Yeah, the one is called reset. So Australia was, I think, the third country in the world to launch a satellite from its own software. So this is a while ago. This was in like two years ago. Yeah, this was in the '60s. So it's kind of like we had this merger, and then we lost it immediately. OK. All right. But it was pretty cool. Yeah, it was called reset, which is like with the W. So it's like the worst name ever. But it was named after an organization, which I think it was weapons research something. We sat WE? - You are a reset. - Reset. - Where are you set? (laughing) - What are you set? - That's the end. - Whatever. - The silent W. - I just I want to do an episode on it. Why Australia stopped going to space in the 60s after a successful satellite launch. So we'll come back to that nerve. - I think we know. I don't think we know. Like a lot of, yeah. Anyway, it's interesting. So yeah, we had good regulations around those two things, but essentially no regulation outside of that. So yeah, when it came to imaging of the satellites, we told the regular, we're like, we're pretty sure we shouldn't be able to image spy satellites from all those spacecrafts. And they said, oh, sorry. Like when they actually answer now emails, they're like, sorry, this, we didn't, are you gonna launch this out of it? (laughing) And we're like, this, okay. - We're so far away from the box. - Yeah, the box beneath Jackane. You weren't even on the forum. - So you approved, approved, approved. Next, get out of here. - Totally. So that was the Australian government. And I think the US government was very surprised when we started showing them images. And they were like, how did you get these? Like, when did you steal these from? But yeah, so I think the story kind of locked down in the end and they're like, oh, these guys were two guys in a garage in Australia and they replicated our national security establishments. Well, we thought it was very hot to replicate. - With no hardware. - With ownership of no hardware. (laughing) - Or no hardware in space. No hardware in space. - Exactly. Now like, surely a company would need at least $100 million to do this. Oh, they did a 10,000 to write a report. Okay. (laughing) So that's how it started. But yeah, so they invested in us pretty soon after that three ink tell. And then the US government started buying from us as well. So for those that don't know, like the US government has been doing this for five decades. I think the initial reports have started to declassify. So you can go back to the reports from the 70s that talk about this. This was still when I think the canisters were coming out of the satellite to make a call by helicopters. So like actually really amazing that this technology was done at this time. And they were capturing images of Russian satellites primarily at that time. So really great technology was developed over many decades and was from what I understand. I haven't seen these images. From what I understand that beautiful. The images that it take from US spy satellites. But they couldn't take many images. So everything was still highly analog, I guess, like humans were in the loop doing all these calculations. And it took a while to get an image of an object. So China knew this and just launched a proliferated constellation. It said, well, good luck. So I think in order to triage those satellites in order to really get a sense of what these things are doing at scale, like what are they doing during the vulnerability periods, which went most of the time until we came along. That was really interesting to our customers. So yeah, that's why I think first I was scared. And then they were excited by the possibilities. Is it like being-- No, I know you have a US subsidiary. But being a company that was started in Australia trying to do business with the US government. We often talk about the importance of allies and partners and then an ecosystem that includes companies, not just government to government. You're definitely on the front lines of that. How has that been? Have you felt that there's opportunities for you? It sounds like there's opportunities for you in the United States. But what did it take up out there? Yeah, so I think-- I mean, we had a head start. And part of that was the regulatory thing. I think part of it as well was just the way that a company needed to be built in Australia. Just meant that it would be distributed and at high availability from day one. So I think those two things kind of contributed. But yeah, it's been interesting. So I think first we felt like we were brought in. And especially with the talk of Orcas. I think then there was a tariff put on our penguin island. So that was a bit of a blow to the nuts. But yeah, so I think it's been interesting. I think there was a one. Well, we'll surprise because we have five kind of island territories, all of which were tariff separately from Australia itself. OK. One of them had a high tariff as well. Well, like, what the hell could they even be exporting? And so they-- it's like they don't produce-- they don't export to mainland Australia. They don't produce anything. Well, we're buying a bunch of stuff there. You don't even know. You're missing out. You're missing out. It's all the good stuff, yeah. We got all the good stuff in the US. So Australia, it didn't get any. Yeah, like penguin belts or something. I don't know. Very soft. It's very soft for-- Anyway, so it's been interesting. I think there is a willingness to work together. I think Australia loves being an ally of the US. We see this critical. So I'll survival. So we're here to contribute. I think the interesting thing that I've seen recently in the US-- and I think part of this is the story of why SpaceX and Blue Origin and Kuiper, I think, set up a factory across the road from the Boeing factory and now all the young engineers are working this. So I think what that is, what that sure is, is that there's actually close to 100% employment of aerospace professionals in the US, which is great. It means wages are going up really close. Well, it means cost are going up, the cost of us. So I think we really do need to start exploring allied supply chains. And then workforce. At workforce? Yeah. Interesting. It's kind of interesting. Like Australia has maybe one-fourteenth the workforce. But still, that means you can get some really important companies to explore some really important goods. So I think just seeing how much-- especially if the gold and the RM-- we can't build that just with the workforce in the US. We need an allied workforce to build that system. There's just enough units. Sir, yeah, I think that's the message I want to hear from. It's kind of like we need allies because that's-- we just can't. That's just not enough people. Other way. And I think it's a force multiplier from a financial standpoint, too. If you have other governments that chip in to do something really big, gold and domes a good example, I don't know how that will work out. But with the allies and partners-- no, not gold and domes at large, but just the notion of saying, this is how much gold and domes would cost if the US did it alone. But if we had allies and partners chip in financially or in some way, barter system, it could be this big. It could be 50% bigger. So if you could do that with allies and partners, maybe that's worth considering a way that you get a better system in the end. You could tell me that it's more value. You know what really scares me is that I think the gold and domes price put out there is the price when allies and partners are included because what they haven't included is the massive inflation in wages that's going to have to happen. Because everyone's going to have to try to approach from each other. There's nowhere else to get these-- It's a fine-earned gold. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, so I think the rights will inflate dramatically unless allies and partners are brought in pretty quickly. All right, so I got to ask maybe-- I don't know if it's a silly one or whatever. But we have this perception in the US that there's a little rivalry between Australia and New Zealand. And so we started our podcast series with a representative from RocketLab, a Sir Peter Beck's company out of New Zealand on-- so is there a space, sort of friendly rivalry between Australia and New Zealand? And if so, who's winning? New Zealand's winning. So-- and actually, going off my previous comment, so New Zealand also has 100% employment of their workforce. Because if you think about kind of like it, assume that the same number of-- or the same proportion of people are going to be really good at building kind of rockets in New Zealand as the US, like they've hit that limit. And then they've imported a bunch of immigrants. And now the only way for them to grow is to snap up kind of companies in the US. And that's what we're seeing RocketLab doing a big way now. So it's really interesting. I think they hit the peak employment already. So I wouldn't want to be any other company building out of New Zealand. I think there's just no humans left. They're cutting down their puppies. Are they cutting down their puppies there, too? Or is that just a nice, really, employment on? Actually, I'd like to turn. Yeah, my partner and my children are kind of like pop Maori. But I should also-- Yeah, but we learned a new expression today from that. So that's-- Yeah, no, it's a good one. That's good. That's good. Well, I mean, I think clearly Australia is winning in the satellite observation in imaging categories. So waiting at that. That's true. But it's important. Yeah, mostly, definitely. Before we move, Tom, I don't think we told well we do this day in space history, 10 to 10. And we also do some rapid fire questions. And maybe we can get to that, too. I know we're running a little late, because this is so interesting. So you're doing this anonymous imaging thing. Australia are making a name for yourself there. Well, do you have people that are trying to copy this? Are there other companies that are seeing what-- you can do and I hate to say this way, but how cheaply it could be done. And trying to do the exact same thing. And is that-- Of course, that's right. Do you see that happening? Yeah, definitely. So I guess there's two types of copying happening. So first is that just trying to copy the business model, I think that's pretty thick. And we're also starting to see people cut-paced code, at least about our public-facing website. So that's been interesting. So they're mainly getting the design. So the design looks very similar. There's some conversion thinking there as well. So I don't think it's an old cut pace, but we do know that there's certain companies with people logging onto our website. And they are taking out curts. Sir, yeah. There are companies. Are there companies in China doing this too, or seeing what you're doing to say we should do that? Or we don't really have the visibility to know? Yes, we don't really. From our understanding, not really. And they're trying to really improve in other dimensions. I will say that people with Chinese emails kind of asking you this question saying, hey, where research is, and we want to buy some images? That's on a daily occurrence at this point. So I think they've started to wake up, but it's been very recent. What I do know is that we've seen examples of non-ethymetry from Chinese satellites previously. My understanding is that it's just not being taken up wholesale by the Chinese government yet. And my way of thinking about it is just they've got so many things to do. And I think correctly, they've identified that there are probably other regions that they are the areas they should focus on first to get dominance in space. And so they're doing those things. And one of those ways is just highly proliferated constellations. And I think with SpaceX, they're filling a bit behind with that. So I think they're really working on that in a big way. This is all my opinion, by the way. I don't-- It's the same for us. Yeah, OK. Yeah. Yeah, essentially, because our last episode that we had guests on, we had an episode about kind of using AI and commercially procuring Earth observation. And this episode, you're on talking about above Earth observation as a service. And it's so fascinating to hear the nice book and episodes in a lot of ways, because you see what technology and affordability is doing to enable broad access in a way that just-- I think what's really interesting about what you're doing in particular is the prior episode, they were talking about using Earth observing satellites kind of to buy the data off that or task it. And yours, it's really-- it's not a standing data set. It's really this selective micro-targeting of what assets do we have available that we can buy for a very limited amount of time to capture this discrete thing? It's such a different approach. It's really fascinating. I don't know. It's kind of-- it makes you think what other assets do we have in space that we just don't think about how we fully utilize? If I take nothing else away from this episode, besides learning how to cut down tall poppies, it's that kind of frame of mind. It really has changed my way of thinking about some of this. So that's really fascinating. Actually, tonight-- Yeah, go ahead, sir. No, please. I was just going to say I really want to-- I think that's a really interesting point on. And the way I think about it is going back to the Chinese approach to, I guess, docking commercial and building out commercial, non-commercial space agent. Sorry. I think that same approach that takes you into remote sensing. And I think a lot of the interesting remote sensing work that we're seeing coming out of China is actually due to software updates to their satellites. And I think weirdly in the US, even though the US is a leader in software, it's allowing China to win the space software game weirdly. And I think a lot of that is historical and legacy, and just the way we did things. Like we had humans controlling things. I think still today we have some weird obsession with control centers. And having 20 people in a dark room with a huge screen, that is a trope. My laptop is my control center. That should be the control center. And in China, yeah, that's just how we do stuff. And so this obsession, I think, is-- because it's kind of like those 20 people could be doing something way more important. Being in a room together, being unproductive. So I think that says something. It's like we've got to get away from that. We've got to remember that we in the West are good at software, and we've got to start applying it. Because yeah, I think probably the place to look first with remote sensing is doing the earth observation. It's like, well, what other imaging modes can we be doing? Like the stupid-- I've seen some stupid stuff. Actually, I don't think my supply is well-guined. Like the stupidest thing I saw in a satellite is that a satellite had this-- they had a certain resolution of the grounds. And we were-- I don't know. We were working with them for three years before someone realized that this was true. It's like, why are we-- we're getting four pixels, and we're combining them into one on board. And then we're downloading it. Now, apparently, that was just a conservative download cost. It's going to like-- so you guys had twice the resolution you thought. And it's because you were saving costs, download. So there's all this crazy stuff going along on. And I mean, I don't know if that's a great example, but I think it's an example of like, we're just not thinking through this. Like a problem with hackiness. Yeah. You were making the doughnuts like we always do. And not thinking about-- Yeah, it's an underutilized capacity. Like, we always think to your point, we've got to go build something new or better. And you think with this offer and able to platforms, you can actually make your current thing new. Right. Right. Always more optimized or more productive. I mean, that's what Apple does with the iPhone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and even more to your point, like, Apple has the up store. I think where a lot of innovation happens. Right. Great. Yeah. Optimizing the crap out of this phone to do certain things that Apple would never have thought of. So I think it's kind of like-- I think there's a trope of up store for space. But the up store for space is so simple. And it's like, people should be doing it right now, immediately. Yeah. It's not something that we then have to create the hardware for. We should be thinking about today. Yeah. Hot. Good. All right. I get it. Yeah. It's cool. We just bent some metal. And I know-- I don't even-- we don't even know if we need to do the rapid fire. But Tom, I actually had one more thought just-- Yeah, go for it. Do you like it? I think this is my opinion. What you will be challenged with is some of the most interesting dare I use the word targets. TLEs aren't going to work anymore, because they're going to be very maneuverable. And you're going to look at the TLE. And you're going to be like, oh, we got it. And then you're going to look at your picture and say, oh, there's nothing there. Where did it go? And I don't know. I mean, I don't know if then we do need to bring out the AIML scanning bath swats to figure out where that thing went. Because I don't think it's going to be-- space, I don't think it's going to be as predictable as it is today. Can I throw one more? Side pull. Do it. Yeah, let's throw it. One more. Sir, oh, yeah, no, I'm going to say this. OK, sir. I'm going to give away something. Is it an F bomb? Is it an F bomb, too, if you want? Absolutely. I appreciate that. And hopefully you let me drop a C bomb. That's what I'm going to use today, sir. Anyway, I want to do that. Sir, what I'm waiting for is the day when we see a one-dimensional satellite. So what I mean is just like radars, like radars, there's going to be essentially a shield over satellites. Such that it's like, you won't know where the hell is pointing. And you won't know where the hell is pointing. Et cetera. Maybe it's transparent to some-- I don't know, like some wavelengths, but it will be like opaque to worse. And I think that day is coming soon. And the other thing I'll say is that if you search-- and maybe this is like an element of classification. But if you search in the academic logs for camouflage for satellites, all of them are Chinese. It's kind of like the day has probably already come. But we have a bunch of-- we think we're seeing things that way not. But I think the one-dimensional satellite that's coming. So you're going to-- I've seen the expanse. I know how the Martians hit their strategic nuclear missiles on still satellites. But we found them. Just so you know, we found them. Never doubt you, man. This isn't a satellite. This is an asteroid. But your satellite would be that it fools an optical sensor or a variety of phenomenologies of different sensors. So today we just do an optical be out. We're going to have to do a variety of phenomenologies. And our customers are actually starting to pass to kind import other types of data. Or your one-dimensional satellite, though. That would be fooling an optical sensor. So then it couldn't figure out what it is. Is that what you mean by that? You wouldn't know what it is. It's like, what is that? Yeah, it will definitely for an optical sensor. Yeah, I think it's interesting like multiple phenomenologies will help that. But for how long, right? It's kind of-- Right, and it's a cat and mouse game. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Which means business for us. So that's great. But it's not great necessarily. I need to start a non-erb business. This is too exciting. Yeah, go on to the rockets. It's too much to the rocket. Well, hiring. I get a couple rapid fight. We'll be real fast. I think I have to ask since you brought up the Martians and nukes and things like that, I assume you have in all your observation of space. I think you brought up the Martians. I couldn't brought up the Martians. That's the Martians. And my analogy, Tom, just say it. Other humans just to point that out. Oh, okay. All right. Well, I guess I'm talking about not human activity. So given all the buzz of the last couple years about UAPs and all your observations, I imagine you would have led with a UAP observation, if you'd seen one. I mean, we do have them, but it's typically like some guy somewhere, not like registering what that man made object actually is. Sir, it's usually boring. Does that make sense? It's actually not very exciting stuff that we see. The most boring version of a UAP. Yeah. I think that's going to be the episode title you are using for Dr. Will Crow. All right. That's really interesting. And the other question I had for you, and I think we asked this about everybody. So you spend your time observing space. Would you ever go to space? Is that something you grew up wanting to do to do some mining or? It's too dangerous. We need robots up there, I think. I would love to go, but I'd love someone to figure out all the bugs first. Yeah. Sir, we're going to 100,000 people need to go before me. That makes sense. That makes sense. Well, speaking of safety, I do want to, because we're going to get to this day in history Clayton before you wrap up, I want to give a plug for a phenomenal book I'm reading. I'm about a year behind schedule here, but Adam Hagen bought them. I think his name Challenger, the new book that came out on Challenger last year is phenomenal. I'm about halfway through it. And for the listeners that listen to our podcast for the space history, I have to say I'm probably much like you all. I have a hard time watching space fiction and movies and reading about it because so much of it's so bad. Once you spend your days living and breathing this stuff, this book is so well written and it's by the author of Midnight and Chernobyl, if you saw the HBO Chernobyl series, phenomenal. So anyway, that's my unsolicited unpaid for a plug for this book. No, we should start doing book racks. That impressive. Yeah. And Clayton, I'm going to throw it over to you for our space history of the week. Yeah. I thought this was interesting. So on July 29th, 1958, NASA was created, but it really just superseded NACA, which was the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. I think we all know who NASA is. Well, and what I like about this fact, Clayton, is this is the day that the bill was signed in the law, but the agency didn't start it, I think until the new fiscal year on October 1. Oh, I guess that makes sense. Yeah. I didn't think about it. Yeah. Yep. And then another one I just thought this was interesting too. And we talked a little bit about China on this particular episode. But July 30th, 2001, the European Space Agency and the China National Space Administration were allegedly reached an agreement to collaborate on the ISS, which obviously didn't happen, but it's interesting to think that's not that long ago, almost 25 years ago, where ESA thought, and China thought, hey, let's do this. We can make this work. And that just feels very distant today to imagine. ISS partners or what could come after that or even our partners saying, hey, let's collaborate on that next big thing we're doing with China. I don't know what they mean. I'm not making a little judgment, just an observation. Little did ESA imagine that Will would observe China's space station being robotically built without any tank knots in the loop there. So, right. And would China have even thought in 2001, because I will, when was that have been Will, like 2021 or 2020, I forgot when they started launching tying on three somewhere around there. But it was before that. I think they started launching. Yeah, it was before that. I think we observed in 20 late 2020, I think. Okay. So, but like 19 years later, when I would say probably China was like, I don't know, bagging is too strong of a word, but like really wanted to hitch the wagon to ISS. Here they are 19 years later, constructing their own modular space station. That's quite a feat. And then to your point, we'll potentially do it in autonomously. That's just crazy. Keep that. That's going to keep me up at night. Those are good history facts. I feel like we've had a strong record in recent weeks of fascinating history. Yeah. What was that one that we had that it was again, the extra 4. That was the year. The year was on. The show came close to the mirror. It wasn't like it. For the first time. I came close. It was like approached it and left. Yeah. That was the news. That was the news that year for space. It was made a great picture from anybody who was watching and documenting. But hey, I think with that, we have, we've gone over, but will this is the fascinating. Thank you so much for. I think blowing both of our minds a little bit here and really starting with the fact that you started as an asteroid mining company right out of the gate, we've sort of been learning learning all the way through. So we appreciate it. Look forward to following your success in the years to come. That was super fun. Thanks so much, guys. That's cool.