Episodes
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Chap and Jack give an update on Roid Rage.
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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.
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Missing episodes?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Jack, Matt, and Chap (Chief of Mining now-turned Chief Operations Officer) dig into the mining stock crash; why gold tanked when it should've surged, what tools producers actually have to survive price swings, and why none of them fix the real problem. Plus: Artemis proximity ops reactions, whether it's time to start robbing mines, and mailbag.
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Sasha, AstroForge's Principal Mechanical Engineer, spent 29 years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) working on some of the most ambitious missions ever built. He joins Jack and Matt to talk about why he left, what surprised him (and what didn't), and how you build spacecraft when the rulebook doesn't exist yet.
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Jack and Robyn bring on Yuri, our xenon supplier, to talk about where spacecraft propellant actually comes from. Turns out xenon is a byproduct of steel production, there's no stock exchange for it, and when SpaceX tried to buy enough for Starlink they basically broke the market and had to switch to krypton. Also: Robyn brought a prop.
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NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission went to asteroid Bennu expecting sandy soil and found a rock quarry instead. In this episode, AstroForge senior payload scientist and former Lead Scientist on OSIRIS-REx's sample physical and thermal analysis working group, Andy Ryan, joins Jack to discuss what the team actually found, why it was so radically different from what was expected, and what it might mean for mining a metallic asteroid. Plus; planetary defense, porosity, and lock-in thermography!
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Jack sits down with Max and Chris to talk through the end-to-end RF test we just ran: what worked, what didn't, and why the test plan and the test outcomes were not the same. They also get into why we built an anechoic chamber in-house and what it's like to work two feet away from something that would cook you if the walls weren't there.
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Jack is joined by Matt and Chap to talk through the Artemis shakeup, why Jared Isaacman airing NASA's dirty laundry is actually a good thing, and how Lunar Trailblazer failed a year ago and nobody said anything until now. Chap walks through why the mining industry is fundamentally broken: it's a hand-crank engine being asked to power an energy transition. We roast a market report that claims asteroid mining is a $2 billion industry in 2025 - Matt would like to have a word with whoever wrote that.
Medium article: https://medium.com/cathay-innovation/redefining-the-mining-value-chain-3d029e5906db
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Jack is joined by Matt and Robyn to break down the Artemis 2 wet dress rehearsal*, why Starliner is what happens when you build a jobs program instead of a spacecraft, and a full rundown of Deep Space 2's recent testing gauntlet.
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Matt, Chap, and Jack discuss Artemis II's second wet dress rehearsal, the volatility of metals markets, and Jack's car getting stolen.
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Jack is joined by Demyan (Senior Mission Ops Engineer) and Armand (Head of GNC, Flight Software) to talk about how AstroForge plans deep space missions.We talk about why the traditional approach of "throw more humans at it" doesn't scale when you're trying to mine asteroids.
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Jack sits down with Chap (Chief of Mining) and Matt to unveil AstroForge's new laser testing facility, though Matt has strong opinions about the beige walls. Between debates over whether the podcast should even continue, Jay and Silent Bob references, and explicit instructions to NOT like and subscribe, the team breaks down why bringing laser capabilities in-house accelerates iteration, protects IP, and proves asteroid mining can hit industrial scale in under 15 years.
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