Matt Gialich

So our big dish, the 32-meter dish we used, was owned by ISRO, which is the Indian Space Agency.

And we had to license it through a provider and then talk with them.

We had a dish in the Azores that was owned by a totally different company that we had to independently contract with, with a different receiver stack and a different dish.

And that dish actually caught on fire two days before launch, so we couldn't use it.

We had one in the US that we could only use to receive, but not to transmit with the spacecraft.

We had one in Australia where we had a configuration issue with it early on, but it was too small.

It would only work for the first day.

Like it was just such a disparate thing trying to work across all these different independent organizations to figure out how to talk with the spacecraft.

It's one of the biggest challenges we have is

how do we get access to these large dishes?

And one of the changes we made on Vestry is we actually added more gain on the spacecraft so that the dishes on the ground could be smaller so we could have access to more of them.

And it's this kind of like never ending cycle.

To give you a sense here,

Most spacecraft you hear about, like Starlink or anything in low Earth orbit, right?

It's about a million times more power needed to communicate at the same data rate you would with Starlink to something that's at the moon.

And we want to go 30 times farther than the moon.

So the dish size has to just be so much bigger than a little tiny dish that you can communicate with Starlink.

That's why you can have something in your backpack that communicates with it, right?

Or when we launch rockets, we usually use two to three meter little dishes that sits on top of your roof.

Those are easy.