Valley of Depth

In today’s episode of the Pathfinder podcast, we’re talking all about a gentler type of suborbital space tourism. In Pathfinder #0026, we sit down with Jane Poynter, the co-CEO and cofounder of Space Perspective. Today’s episode is brought to you by Altek Space (https://www.altek-inc.com/space). Jane was a member of the Biosphere 2 experiment, spending two years inside a closed ecosystem. She also...

Welcome to Pathfinder #0025, brought to you by Spaced Ventures, the planet’s first public space investment portal. Today, we’ll be talking about what in the world Amazon is up to in space, with someone who can speak to this probably better than almost anyone else on the planet. Clint Crosier served in the US Air Force and Space Force for 33 years, and helped stand up the latter branch. After retir...

Today’s guest is Bill Perkins, a hedge fund manager, film producer, high-stakes poker player, and author of Die with Zero . If he wasn’t in those lines of work, Bill tells Ryan he’d be a farmer. More importantly for our purposes, Bill is the founder of SkyFi. The startup doesn’t fly its own satellites, and is instead tackling what it sees as a software problem. SkyFi is developing a clean, consume...

  Today’s episode takes us to the bleeding edge of Earth observation, where one startup aims to bring what it claims is a step change in multispectral data to the commercial markets. Our guest, Awais Ahmed, is the CEO and cofounder of Pixxel. The Indian-American startup, which is building a health monitor for Earth, has raised $32M+ to build a 36-satellite constellation of hyperspectral imaging sa...

Andy is the CEO and cofounder of Stoke Space, a startup that aims to build 100% reusable rockets. The startup raised a $9.1M seed round in 2020, graduated from Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch, and then announced a $65M Series A in December. All the while, Stoke has been moving quickly to build a completely new kind of rocket. Today’s episode is sponsored by Spaced Ventures, which recently launche...

Today is Opposite Day at Pathfinder. Rather than interview someone, Ryan himself is sitting down in the hot seat to take an hour’s worth of questions. Our guest host is cofounder Mo Islam. Though he’s Ryan’s coworker, he’s also his boss and a fair, unsparing interviewer. Pathfinder #0021 is brought to you by Spaced Ventures , the planet’s first space investment portal. Spaced Ventures recently lau...

About Epsilon3: The startup has developed an operating system (OS) for space missions. The streamlined software tool helps space companies keep tabs on complex engineering, testing, and operational procedures. Epsilon3’s customers include Inversion, Orbit Fab, Virgin Galactic, Firefly, Stoke, Stratolaunch, and Privateer, among other companies. And more about our guest : Laura began her space caree...

Astra's first launch of NASA’s TROPICS satellites ended in failure this summer. Shortly thereafter, Astra scrapped all flights for 2022 and accelerated its pivot to a larger, more capable launcher. As it moves customer payloads to the Rocket 4.0 manifest, Astra says it will launch scientific spacecraft for NASA that are comparable to TROPICS payloads. All the while, shares of Astra have been in fr...

The startup is promising the world, and then some, with two products to its name: Spacetime & Tightbeam. We bring Aalyria CTO Brian Barritt on the show this week to dig into the startup's vision. *CHAPTERS* 0:00 — Live intro 0:34 — Aalyria has just emerged from stealth 4:17 — Brian's background 9:03 — Spacetime & Tightbeam 14:00 — Demoing the laser 18:41 — Air to ground, space to ground, ground to...

In this week's episode, and our second dispatch from back-to-back space conferences in Paris, Ryan sits down with Redwire CEO and Chairman Peter Cannito, followed by an interview with Al Tadros, Redwire's chief technology officer. Redwire is a full-stack space infrastructure company based in Jacksonville, Florida, and publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange ($RDW). The first half of the pod...

Today's episode of Pathfinder is brought to you by SpiderOak Mission Systems, an industry leader in cybersecurity. Check out SpiderOak’s space cyber whitepaper at spacecyber.com *CHAPTERS* 00:00 — Intro 01:46 — The pre-Quilty Analytics days ... Caleb's winding journey from political science and astronomy to space reporting 08:27 — What do space analysts do for a living? 12:01 — SpaceX and T-Mobile...

Today's episode is brought to you by SpiderOak Mission Systems, an industry leader in space cybersecurity. Check them out at https://spideroak-ms.com/ and download the new NSR/SpiderOak sponsored whitepaper, titled “Space Cybersecurity – Current State and Future Needs,” at www.spacecyber.com *SNEAK PEEK* For starters, we get a status report on what Aquarian’s been up to over the last six months. B...

Our guest is Barry Matsumori, a space industry veteran who’s held exec roles at SpaceX, Virgin Orbit, and most recently, was CEO of BridgeComm. Barry’s now the COO of Impulse Space, which was started by SpaceX founding team member Tom Mueller. Impulse is just a year old and it has only ~40 employees, making it all the more surprising when Impulse and Relativity said they’d partner to launch the fi...

Giuseppe is president at Red Cat Holdings ($RCAT) and founder of Skypersonic, which builds drones that can inspect and survey sites in high-risk, confined, or GPS-denied locations. Skypersonic's product enables remote operators to fly drones indoors 100% remotely and over the internet. Previously, Giuseppe was responsible for the development of projects on behalf of the European Space Agency at Th...

By the end of 2023, Satellogic hopes to have 60+ satellites in orbit (and 200+ by 2025). The company made $4.2 million in 2021, the year it began selling and delivering imagery to customers. Today’s Pathfinder is brought to you by SpiderOak Mission Systems (https://spideroak-ms.com/), an industry leader in cybersecurity. Check out the company’s space cyber whitepaper at spacecyber.com *CHAPTERS* 0...

On today's episode of the Pathfinder podcast, we’re tackling the topic of space junk. We’re very fortunate to have Dr. Moriba Jah, one of the world’s foremost authorities on this topic, joining us this week. Moriba is an astrodynamicist, space environmentalist, and associate professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at UT Austin (obligatory 'hook em' from Ryan). Moriba is also t...

Today’s guest is Jordan Noone, the cofounder and founding CTO of Relativity Space. Noone now holds the same titles at Embedded Ventures, a self-described deeptech VC “skunkworks” that Noone runs with cofounder Jenna Bryant. Embedded Ventures has partnered with the US Space Force on R&D, and backed early-stage startups like Slingshot Aerospace and Inversion. Jordan is also the cofounder and CEO of...

On today’s episode of Pathfinder, we’re joined by Tim Ellis, the CEO and cofounder of Relativity Space. Tim was in his twenties when he started Relativity Space with cofounder Jordan Noone six and a half years ago. Fast forward to today. Relativity’s 3D-printed Terran 1 rocket is at the pad in Cape Canaveral and an orbital launch is “weeks away,” Tim tells us. Relativity also recently announced th...

Kevin joined Planet last April to accelerate software and data product development (or help the company move “up the stack”). Before he worked in commercial space, Kevin held leadership roles at Silicon Valley mainstays that have become household names, like Twitter and Instagram. He managed products with hundreds of millions of daily active users. Pathfinder is brought to you by SpiderOak Mission...

Pathfinder is brought to you by SpiderOak Mission Systems — www.spideroak-ms.com — an industry leader in space cybersecurity. Check out the company’s space cybersecurity white paper at spacecyber.com *SNEAK PEEK* Tom's resume. He spent a few decades rising through the ranks and eventually served as president of Northrop Grumman’s aerospace unit before he moved into startupland. What he can talk ab...

A Payload on Payload interview? It’s like the Spiderman pointing at another Spiderman meme. Jokes aside, Ryan invited Mo on to discuss a presentation he prepared for the Payload team at their recent off-site meeting. This week’s episode focuses on an adapted version of the deck and what’s happening within the macroeconomy. Pathfinder is brought to you by SpiderOak Mission Systems — www.spideroak-m...

Welcome to the fifth episode of Pathfinder, a weekly show where Payload managing editor and host Ryan Duffy sits down with the top shot-callers in space. Per Escaping Gravity’s cover description, “from inside the space agency, Garver collaborated with key players such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and President Obama to usher in a more peaceful, inclusive and meaningful space age.” Lori led the NASA t...

Welcome to the fourth episode of Pathfinder, a weekly show where Payload managing editor and host Ryan Duffy sits down with the top shot-callers in space. Katherine is a prolific writer and deep thinker on aerospace and defense, the US national interest, dual-use technology, and the relationship between Silicon Valley and Washington. As you can see below, we had a wide-ranging conversation on Path...

Welcome to the third episode of Pathfinder, a weekly show where Payload managing editor and host Ryan Duffy sits down with the top shot-callers in space. Joining us this week is Lauren Lyons, a space industry consultant, startup advisor, and STEM evangelist. Lauren is working on a new venture, but most recently, was COO of Firefly Aerospace. Before that, Lauren held senior engineering roles at Blu...

Welcome to Pathfinder, a new weekly show where Payload Managing Editor Ryan Duffy sits down with the shot-callers in space to discuss all the top news and trends beyond Earth.  In Pathfinder #0002, Ryan sits down with Rob Meyerson, the founder and CEO of Delalune Space and former president of Blue Origin. Pathfinder is brought to you by SpiderOak Mission Systems , an industry leader in space cyber...