Valley of Depth

This episode is brought to you by Nightwing, a U.S. national security and intelligence services company that specializes in cybersecurity, electronic warfare, systems integration, and software modernization. When the longtime director of the National Reconnaissance Office was asked what kept him up at night, his answer wasn’t anti-satellite missiles or lasers. It was cyber. And his worry wasn’t so...

How do you test hypersonics from orbit, build drones at the front lines, and map the seafloor with robots? The Space & Defense Update is LIVE from the New York Stock Exchange with Mo Islam and Jack Kuhr, exploring in-space manufacturing, battlefield factories, and the autonomous tech mapping the ocean. Want to learn more about the business of space? Sign up for Payload's free newsletter: https...

Stoke Space’s approach to full reuse is easiest to understand when you can actually see the hardware. During an exclusive post-Series E tour of the company’s 168,000-square-foot headquarters outside Seattle, CEO Andy Lapsa walks us through the evolution of Nova—from the Hopper demonstrator that first proved Stoke’s second-stage architecture to the flight hardware now being prepared for orbital tes...

Stoke Space was founded around a simple but radical belief: launch is not solved until rockets are fully and rapidly reusable. That thesis is now getting much bigger. Stoke has raised another $1 billion, bringing total capital raised to $2.3 billion, and is unveiling a new 15-ton-class version of Nova designed to be fully reusable.  In his first sit-down interview following the announcement,...

Skyways has spent nearly a decade working on a problem most of the drone industry largely ignored: logistics. While billions poured into drones built to see targets or strike them, Skyways focused on something less flashy but arguably just as important: moving critical supplies without putting people in harm’s way. That bet is starting to look increasingly prescient. The company has worked with th...

This month, Mo and Jack host a live Space & Defense Update from the NYSE, featuring leading investors and executives: • Erik Kriessmann, Partner at Altimeter Capital • Zach Shore, CEO of Hermeus • Dan Wright, CEO of Armada We discuss the latest developments across space, defense technology, AI infrastructure, hypersonic aviation, edge computing, private-market investment, and the emerging companie...

Antares just closed a massive $470M Series C, was welcomed to the Oval Office by President Trump to celebrate becoming the first startup to achieve reactor criticality under the Department of Energy's reactor pilot program, and is now racing toward delivering the first commercial microreactors to the U.S. military. Just three years after being founded, the company expects to surpass $1B in defense...

Ian Cinnamon didn’t set out to build a satellite company. After selling his first startup to Palantir, he became convinced the real bottleneck in space wasn’t launch or payloads, but the spacecraft itself. While rockets were getting cheaper and payloads more capable, satellite buses were still being built like bespoke engineering projects. Apex’s answer was simple in theory and incredibly difficul...

Soren Monroe-Anderson grew up racing FPV drones before turning that obsession into Neros, a defense startup building low-cost, high-volume drone systems for the United States and its allies. What began with prototypes in a basement has become a 200-person company producing roughly 1,000 drones a week, with plans to build a factory capable of making one million annually. The timing is difficult to...

Eric Romo spent his early career as employee #13 at SpaceX, left for nearly two decades, and came back to one of the hardest unsolved problems in the space economy: what happens after launch. Getting things to orbit is largely figured out. Moving them once they're there is not. Impulse is now over $1B raised, embedded in the Golden Dome architecture, and with a GEO rideshare program booked out bef...

Bridgit Mendler took an unconventional path to founding a space infrastructure company, but it led her to one of the industry’s most overlooked bottlenecks: the ground systems connecting satellites to Earth. Now, she’s building Northwood to modernize that critical layer of the space economy, the part that doesn’t get the headlines but matters as much as anything happening above it.  Northwood rece...

This month, Mo and Jack host a live show on the SpaceX IPO, featuring investors and analysts breaking down the company’s valuation, business lines, and long-term growth story: Howard Morgan (B Capital) Shaun Maguire (Sequoia Capital) Liz Stein (USIT) Dan Ives (Wedbush Securities) We discuss SpaceX’s IPO valuation, Starship’s progress, Starlink and Direct-to-Cell, orbital data centers, AI infrastru...

On this week's episode of Valley of Depth, we sit down with Ross Fubini, Managing Partner at XYZ Venture Capital, for a conversation about what it actually means to be early in a market nobody believed in. Ross wrote the first check into Anduril in 2016, alongside Founders Fund, before defense tech was a category, before the term sheet wars, and before the word "primes" became a punchline on X. He...

On this week's episode of Valley of Depth, our first recorded in person, we sit down with Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace, in the company's historic Blue Ghost mission control room in Cedar Park, Texas — the same room where 60 engineers watched their lander touch down at one meter per second last year.    From there, the conversation opens into how Jason actually thinks: about the Moon, about...

This month, Mo and Jack host a live show on the future of Commercial LEO Destinations, featuring leaders building the next generation of space stations: Marshall Smith (Voyager Technologies / Starlab) Jonathan Cirtain (Axiom Space)   We discuss station development progress, business models, NASA's role, private astronaut missions, station economics, the transition from the ISS, and what it will ta...

The United States hasn't flown a Mach 3-plus reusable aircraft since the SR-71 was retired in 1990. Hermeus wants to change that and they want to do it faster, cheaper, and with a fraction of the capital. This week we sit down with Zach Shore, newly appointed CEO, at the moment the company's bet is starting to pay off. Zach walks us through his evolution from VP of Growth to CEO, the company's rec...

Commercial geospatial intelligence has moved from nice-to-have imagery to core national security infrastructure. And Vantor is trying to reposition itself for that new era. On this week’s episode of Valley of Depth, we sit down with Dan Smoot, CEO of Vantor, to unpack the company’s transformation from a legacy satellite imagery provider into a space-based intelligence platform serving defense, int...

This month, Mo and Jack host a two-hour live show featuring six leaders from the space industry: Ian Cinnamon (Apex) 05:18 • Philip Johnston (Starcloud) 20:18 • Eric Romo (Impulse) 35:11 • Karan Kunjur (K2 Space) 50:26 • Shahin Farshchi (Lux Capital) 1:05:28 • Delian Asparouhov (Varda / Founders Fund) 1:22:00 • Molly O'Shea (Sourcery) 1:41:25   We discuss satellite manufacturing, orbital data cent...

The U.S. military doesn’t have enough pilots—and automation may be the only way to scale airpower. At the same time, Skyryse is formally launching its new defense unit, bringing its software-defined flight system, SkyOS, into military applications. On this week’s episode of Valley of Depth, we sit down with Mark Groden, CEO of Skyryse, to unpack how the company is building a universal operating sy...

Yesterday we launched our first-ever live show from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) called “The Space & Defense Market Update.” We brought together investors and analysts operating at every stage of the capital stack to stress-test what's real and what’s priced in. Capital markets are moving faster than anyone has clean answers for. Data centers in space are attracting serious money and serious...

Scott Sanders has seen the defense tech industry from just about every angle. As a Marine officer, he watched promising capability stall somewhere between a program office and the field. As an early employee at Anduril, he helped build one of the companies that bet it could do better.   Now, as Chief Growth Officer at Forterra, he's making that same bet on autonomous ground systems, a market that'...

In this episode of Valley of Depth, we sit down with Mark Boggett, CEO of Seraphim Space, to break down one of the biggest questions in the industry right now: are we still early in the space economy, or has the easy money already been made? Mark has built one of the first dedicated space-focused venture firms, before the category became institutional. We discuss how the market has evolved from un...

In this episode of Valley of Depth, we dive into Aalyria’s newly announced $100 million raise at a $1.3 billion valuation with cofounder and CTO Brian Barritt and unpack why investors are betting big on the future of networks that don’t sit still. Aalyria is building two core technologies born inside Google: Spacetime, a software orchestration layer designed to manage networks in motion, and Tight...

In this episode of Valley of Depth, we sit down with David Tearse, co-founder and CEO of Karman Industries, to explore a piece of the AI boom that rarely gets attention: thermal infrastructure. As hyperscale data centers grow into multi-gigawatt “AI factories,” the limiting factor is no longer just chips or capital — it’s how efficiently we can move and reject heat. David explains how Karman’s Hea...

In this episode of Valley of Depth , we sit down with Jack Kuhr, Payload Pro’s Research Director, to unpack what SpaceX has become on the eve of what could be the largest IPO in history. What began as a launch company has evolved into a vertically integrated platform spanning launch, satellites, global connectivity, and potentially AI and compute in space. This is the first in a series of conversa...