We Built A Spacecraft

Chap and Jack give an update on Roid Rage.

Matt, Robyn, Chap, and Jack sit down to lay out the full picture. Why deep space is so hard, why it's finally possible to go cheap, and the four strategic domains AstroForge is targeting: planetary defense, national security, science, and mining. Plus: why DeepSpace-2 is either a rewriting of the future or nothing at all, and why predicting what happens next isn't the point.

Matt and Robyn join Jack to talk about the milestone nobody's allowed to celebrate: DeepSpace-2's flight hardware is fully assembled for the first time. Plus: the New Glenn static fire explosion, Starship Flight 12, an honest conversation about why rockets are still hard even when your media team is great, and why AstroForge wants to build spacecraft at the $10 million price point instead of the $1 billion one.

Matt and Kieran, one of AstroForge's flight software engineers, join Jack to talk about how you actually write software that can't fail millions of miles from help. They walk through real missions killed by software, why testing is never finished, and where you draw the line between rigor and paralysis. Bonus: Matt's Pokémon card tax scheme, a lost drone, and why redirecting asteroids to Earth is a worse idea than you think.

Nathan, AstroForge's flight software manager, joins Jack and Matt to break down how DeepSpace-2's power management software actually works; from solar panel physics and buck converters to what happens when you're firing a thruster and the math gets tight. Plus: Matt's case for Cowboy Space, Jack's laundry crisis, and a compelling pivot proposal involving Pluto.

Julia, AstroForge's Thermal Engineer, joins Jack and Robyn to talk about what it actually takes to keep a spacecraft alive from the launchpad to deep space. How the thermal model gets built, why which direction you're pointing matters more than you'd think, and what happens when you get to an asteroid and the thermal environment isn't what you planned for.

Robyn and Ashton join Jack to break down the hot fire test of Deep Space 2's Hall-effect thruster: what went wrong the first time, what they changed, and why firing on flight avionics power instead of ground power actually made things better. Plus: Psyche's Mars flyby, why AstroForge is building its own vacuum chamber, and whether an $80 million dedicated launch full of spacecraft is in the cards.

Matt and Robyn join Jack for a Q&A episode covering New Glenn's landing (and its payload problem), Isaacman floating an asteroid mining prize competition, the hot fire test nobody will elaborate on, ground station upgrades for Deep Space 2, and who actually buys the first kilogram of asteroid material. Plus: hiring advice, black and white film discourse, and orange soda.

Chap, now COO, joins Jack to pull back the curtain on what happens when a 30-person startup becomes a 65-person startup and things stop fitting in people's heads. How much process is just enough, what breaks when you grow, and why the best ops people are fundamentally lazy.

Jack is joined by Eric Foster, Senior Mechanical Engineer at AstroForge, and Chris Hearn, Head of Avionics to discuss the design and function of DeepSpace-2's avionics boxes, what it's like working in legacy space vs "new space", and how they felt seeing hardware they worked on fly on Artemis II.