Tim Ellis0:03
There's an augmentation of terrestrial telco in space, and it's happening through low Earth orbit constellations. These are very much like what Starlink is doing. Folks like Amazon have announced constellations in low Earth orbit, and our vehicle Terran R is geared to serving primarily constellations that are trying to put up thousands of satellites in orbit, generally anywhere from 500 kg to something like a ton or a ton and a half in terms of weight and the associated volume. Now, you have several mega constellations in development, with additional customers each year coming up with new concepts for direct-to-cell phone constellations, broadband constellations, additional Earth observation constellations, all leading to very rapid growth. Really, what we're seeing is the market over the next several years is growing several fold. Terran R has been designed to carry 20,000 kg to low Earth orbit. That's really what we've identified as the sweet spot within the constellation market. It's large enough to provide great economics on a dollar per satellite basis, but small enough to ensure that we're able to fill it full with each launch. Some other launch vehicles are much larger, but they run into the challenge of not being able to fill the launch vehicles. They're flying half empty or even more. Some vehicles are much smaller and end up with a much higher cost per satellite to space and require many more launches to deploy the same constellation. It's really from the beginning been this trade of optimizing the size of the vehicle to meet the constellations that we see coming to market. I've always been a firm believer that you need to work with customers from day one to make sure that the product you're developing actually solves their needs. From the very inception of Terran R, we've been out engaging with the largest commercial operators around the globe early, often every quarter meeting with them to make sure that each design choice that we're making was servicing the market that's growing today. Customers are looking for several things. First, they're looking for the company that can offer the best economics, so the lowest dollar per satellite to space. Second, most of these customers don't just need one launch, they need many launches. And so, they're looking for a company that's developing a full launch system with a higher rate operations in mind. They also look at: are you developing a launch system that can operate with enough capacity to actually matter to the market? The market's growing very quickly, and you need to be able to ramp your launch cadence quickly as well to have a meaningful impact in the market and justify them betting on a single company. And finally, they're looking for a partner that they can rely on, that's got a team that they can trust, and that's got a business model that is incentivized to support them, not compete with them. The feedback that we've gotten from our customers over the last couple years is that we have built tremendous amounts of trust based on being very transparent about what we're building, why we're building it, and then delivering on our promises, which is again why we've created the $2.9 billion backlog that we've signed today. It's really important that they have a partner and a vehicle that can service their needs in a narrow window, or that window and the market opportunity candidly won't exist. Reuse is absolutely critical to the economics, but reuse is also absolutely critical to ramp rate because in order to launch dozens of times a year, if you've got to build first stages with the number of engines and the complexity of a first stage dozens of times, you're just not going to physically be able to do it. What we're seeing today is demand that is growing faster than any one supplier can possibly serve. In addition, we're also hearing from customers a very strong desire to ensure that they have multiple options to get to space. Really, what we're seeing is the market over the next several years is growing several fold.
