Katherine Boyle

It can take three years to get a satellite bus, which is just, you know, it's not the payload.

It's not the thing that you're sending to space.

It's the thing that, you know, has the energy.

It has the comms equipment.

And really, every satellite can operate with the same bus.

Like, you don't need... The way that, again, going back to how the Primes do work is the government will say, well, we're sending up this payload, and this is how we want it designed.

And so they'll design a brand-new bus,

Every time they do new non-recurring engineering for the product, and then they'll send the payload up, and it's like, it can take three years to get a satellite bus.

So this company is building satellite buses in 30 days.

Why should it take so long to build the same bus over and over again?

They went from clean sheet design to their first mission in 13 months.

like first working mission with payloads in space in low Earth orbit.

And it's like if a brand new company that at that time had only 30 employees and had raised tens of millions of dollars, but isn't SpaceX, right?

But if a brand new company can go from forming a company to putting something in space with important primes in 13 months,

you should be able to do the Henry Ford manufacturing line of satellite buses and be able to build thousands and thousands of satellite buses a year for the DoD.

And that's what China's doing.

I mean, China is maniacally focused on space and they are maniacally focused on how do we build as many buses as possible so that we can own the satellite infrastructure and lower the orbit.

And it's something that we're going to have to very much worry about because right now we're in the lead in space.

I actually think that's the theater where we should feel the most confidence because Elon and SpaceX have done an incredible service for this country in terms of what they're doing with Star Shield and Starlink.

But the other companies coming up, they want to be able to build as quickly as possible and as fast as possible.