Matt Gialich

That's what we cap it at.

Why do you think it takes, why three months?

Why does it take three months?

So anytime you're going to build a system like this, I got to give the team constraints.

I got to say, it's really easy.

When we're talking about a laser-based mining system, it's a linear trade between time and power.

So when I say we have three kilowatts on the spacecraft,

and we have three months, you now know how much material you have to remove.

It's really easy to say, oh, we have three kilowatts.

Well, I could use known techniques that work really well and just sit there for 10 years.

But then I gotta build a spacecraft that can last in space for 10 plus years.

That's actually really hard to do.

So I've given the team the constraint of three kilowatts, three months.

It's a pretty arbitrary constraint, Sean.

I'm not going to say, like, there's a whole bunch of science that goes into it.

What there is science that goes into is the two years or less.

And that has to do with radiation tolerance of the spacecraft, right?

The electronics on board can only handle so much radiation before they will start to fail at high rates.

And that high-rate failure in our spacecraft will start to happen around the three-year mark with what we use today.

So I want to make sure in two years we're back on Earth and safe, and then all the components can fail once we're back on the ground.