Welcome to Insco Insights where we take you behind the headlines into the cutting edge world of space exploration. Join us now as we talk to the people who are making it happen. Hi, I'm your host Brooke Brown. What does it take to start a successful space business? Elon Musk says it's having a clear and compelling vision as well as speed and agility in decision-making. Jeff Bezos says you have to do everything from the beginning to build infrastructure that enables future generations to thrive in space exploration. Our next guest runs a successful space startup. She says to be successful it is important to keep an open mind. You may think you know what your business is and where you want to go, but you may end up turning down the best opportunities because you have tunnel vision, or you may think something is too big for you. Carol Craig is a notable figure in the aerospace and technology industries. She is the founder and CEO of Sidus Space, a company focused on satellite manufacturing and space-based solutions. Before Sidus Space, she founded Craig Technologies which has grown into an industry leader in engineering, manufacturing, and technical services. She has been recognized for her achievements including being named this year to the Forbes 50 over 50. She has also been recognized as the Small Business Administration's Small Business Person of the Year for Florida in 2015. Joining us now is Carol Craig who is not only a trailblazer in both the military and the tech industry, she is a former Navy pilot, an accomplished software engineer, and is now leading the charge in space exploration with Sidus Space. Welcome, Carol.
Thank you very much, Brooke. I appreciate the invite and I'm excited to be here.
You had Craig Technologies going, but you decided to start Sidus Space. Why?
Well, I saw a need in some ways for manufacturing and kind of marrying up engineering and manufacturing. So Craig Technologies was primarily focused on engineering and technical solutions, just like you mentioned, but there's also the other side of it. There's the manufacturing side, the prototyping side, and I had somebody come to me and suggest that maybe I start a small manufacturing division. It was just supposed to be a small little prototype shop to support the bigger engineering services kind of the side of things, and it took on a life of its own.
So many companies are manufacturing and operating satellites. What makes Sidus Space stand out from its competitors?
Well, we started with very little money. That's probably one thing. And you mentioned some of these big billionaires and what their thoughts on space and, you know, what does it take. Well, it takes a lot of money with some people. In our case, we did not have a lot of money. We also took our company public when we decided to start moving toward, you know, satellite constellations and manufacturing. So again, going back to that, when we went public, we raised money. We raised a small amount, so that makes us different. Why is that a good thing? It's because we operate very leanly. So I mean, we're looking at being cost efficient. So that's one thing.
The other thing is that when we looked at building our satellite constellation, we kind of did it backwards. Whereas some of these companies said, I've got a technology and I'm going to build a constellation around that technology, we did it the opposite. We looked at the idea of building sort of infrastructure or a platform that could integrate multiple technologies and the latest and greatest technology. Because technology growth, they talk about Moore's Law, you know, like every 18 months you've got new technology. So you're continually turning over, there's new opportunities, new technologies that apply to different industries. And we wanted to build a constellation or satellite that allowed us to evolve and grow with an evolving and growing ecosystem.
Currently you are preparing for the launch of LizzieSat 2. What is the primary mission, and what data and insights do you hope LizzieSat 2 will provide?
We've got a couple different missions. Again, that's the beauty of our platform. Our LizzieSat satellite, you can have multiple customers, multiple missions, multiple technologies. So a couple examples that we have on LizzieSat 2, which my team just delivered LizzieSat to Vandenberg and mated it with the rocket, so they're very exciting. It's now we sit and we wait. One of the technologies is space situational awareness. So we have a customer that came to us with an imager that basically looks up instead of looking down. So it's looking up for that space situational awareness and being able to detect objects and things like that. So we integrated their technology into LizzieSat 2.
There's a cost to that, but then at the end of the day we will provide them the data, a monthly subscription kind of data over the next several years of the satellite, so that they can detect and provide their customers with the solutions that they're looking for. So that's one type. We also have our own sensors on there, one of those being methane detection. So we have a little more of a broader look toward methane gas. There are some methane detectors on satellites out there that are very specialized and, you know, detailed, high fidelity. We were looking at it a little more broadly, wouldn't be able to detect on a more general kind of scale, because then that applies to a lot more industries and it's a lot less expensive.
And then we combine that with another thing that we have on our satellite, and that's our AI software and our hardware. And now software fixes everything. You mentioned I'm a software engineer, right? So I'm convinced software fixes everything. And so that was one of the things that we looked at. We're like, well, having this solution means that we can take all of these inputs and these sensors and we can really provide actionable intelligence as opposed to just raw data. So those are kind of some of the things that are on LizzieSat 2.
How do you plan to leverage your satellites and data services?
That's interesting. So again, I think our biggest, the way that we look at what we're doing, our biggest thing is that we're saying, what are the unmet needs as we look at all these different industries that can benefit from space and they don't even know that they can benefit from space yet. We try to understand what are the unmet needs, what are you looking for, and then we can integrate technologies into our satellite. So it isn't being stuck with the same type of sensor, you know, for the entire life of a constellation.
We're able to really say, okay, here's another use case over here that I can use. Somebody wants some persistent surveillance but they want to combine a couple types of sensors, we can do that on our satellite. So really we talk about leveraging that. I think it's just kind of making sure that we're thinking and we're having conversations with the industries and knowing what they want and not trying to sell them something that they don't need.
What kind of infrastructure are you building to support satellite manufacturing, launch services, and in-orbit servicing?
Yeah, so we have a facility already. We're in Cape Canaveral. We've been there for about 13 plus years. So we're building on that. So we already had that infrastructure in place, but we're continuing to, I guess, expand in the areas of, you know, better machinery, 3D printers, those kinds of things. We're also looking at expanding because we've got some international partnerships. We just signed a recent one with a company in Germany. And so we're expanding with some international partnerships. So we're looking at additional space kind of in the Cape Canaveral area, maybe further in Titusville, so that we can grow that manufacturing and the partners.
And then we also have our mission operations center that is in Merritt Island. That's the infrastructure, and that's what we've got, and we're continuing to grow in that area.
