SpaceX's "Full Stack:" From Satellites & Starlink to xAI

0:00So, joining us now to discuss more broadly what we're seeing from the industry at large, and now let's welcome in Ross Fazy, co-founder and CTO of K-Han Space. Thank you, first and foremost, for joining us today. Wanted to really get your thoughts on what sticks out to you, what you're watching as far as innovation, and of course, these individual names that have been, I mean, truly going to the moon, no pun intended as of late. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. This is an exciting time, not just for space industry, not for SpaceX fans, but also for broader markets. If you just look at the other public companies, space companies, you notice that a lot of them had over 10% growth earlier today, just on the news that SpaceX may go public or start filing in next few weeks. When we look at SpaceX in general, I mean, it's not a launch company, right? You're not just investing in a launch company. It's a satellite company. They do a great job of building

1:03satellite very liable satellites. They're an internet company. They are an AI company. They are social media company. They are building space data centers. So, it is a very interesting and sophisticated case. So, I think there's just a lot of enthusiasm in the market in general, including this space industry. Whereas, I mean, this would be, if not the biggest IPO, certainly one of them. I mean, we're talking, I think, somewhere in the trillion dollar plus, or, you know, well above that in terms of value. And what I thought is interesting in that information article that sort of broke this news, is it sounds like the AI component of this, the X AI component, isn't even a big part of the institutional pitch. Does that surprise you, given that, you know, for many, that might be seen as sort of the long-term upside? It does not surprise me because X AI is a part of this vertically integrated conglomerate that you're looking at.

2:04When we are looking at, you know, the filing with FCC that will, you know, potentially launch, you know, company may potentially launch over a million satellites into orbit as the orbital data centers. That is one part of the stack. You have the tariff app news that coming out that, you know, that is as another level to this infrastructure in space. You have the launch component, the satellite operations, the connectivity, communication. You know, let's not forget a lot of satellites are starting to communicate in space with the infrastructure that SpaceX has built, Starlink, to communicate data up to the satellites and down from the satellite that has been a bottleneck for a long time. So, again, this is a full stack and X AI is just one piece of that stack. So, I'm not really surprised that it was not mentioned that much because, again, it's a part of a much larger vision and much larger system. Okay, and as, of course, we do focus on a lot of these individual stories and individual stocks. I mean, what metrics right now, though, are you focused on to find what is working right now

3:05in the broader space economy, what is not working? I mean, like, the perceived winners and losers, how do you go about identifying them? Because this is a high growth space, yes, but also then does have some risk to it. Absolutely. Space has always been a risky industry to be in, but let's look at some numbers. Right now, SpaceX alone is operating more than 10,000 satellites. As humanity, we had launched less than a fraction of that just 10 years ago combined. And over the last decade, we have launched more than 10 times more satellites than we had launched prior to that altogether. We have hundreds of commercial companies now that are launching satellites. And if you look at the number of objects that were launched to space, also if you look at the mass, total mass launched to space, it is a hockey stick, breath that we're looking at. So, everything about space costs coming down, costs are going to orbit coming down reliability of satellites, use cases, more use cases that were not feasible,

4:08just a few years ago and not art feasible. Everything, all of these are very exciting signals that are just showing that space is going to be a lot more attractive market for everybody. There's definitely commercial use case now. We have households using commercial internet coming from space very easily. We have companies that use to only have customers in the government realm. Now they're selling to commercial industry. It is a very growing, it's an industry that's growing really rapidly. And it looks very healthy in my opinion. And it definitely helps. And SpaceX has given visibility to the entire sector. Not that they're the only one, but obviously expected to make that public debut. That will be, I think, huge, especially given some of the eye-watering valuations that the street is expecting at least, but so appreciate it. Really great conversation today, Araz Faisi, co-founder and CTO of K-Han Space.