If you think rocket science sounds difficult. Just wait until I tell you about this company,
SpaceRyde. Instead of just launching rockets from the ground, they use balloons to carry
rockets into the upper atmosphere before launching them. And surprisingly, it actually works! At the
center of the project is this guy: “My name is Sohrab Haghighat and I’m the co-founder and CEO
of SpaceRyde” He’s a super talented engineer based in Canada and he’s been building this company for
the past five years. Recently, we’ve seen a bit of an arms race to build bigger and bigger rockets.
Starship usually gets all the attention, and for good reason. It can deliver a payload of a hundred
metric tons to low earth orbit. SpaceRyde on the other hand, can only deliver about a hundred
kilos. That’s a thousand times less. But there’s actually a very good reason for this approach.
“What I want to do is enable small satellites and small payloads that are going to space
so they can achieve their mission” 1:34 See, the space industry is growing so quickly now that
there are needs at both ends of the payload spectrum. Starship and bigger rockets will
obviously be incredibly important for huge payloads, but the high price can lock out
smaller projects. Ridesharing on SpaceX rockets will work for some companies, but you’ll still
need to deal with narrow launch schedules. If SpaceX is building a massive eighteen wheeler,
SpaceRyde is building a taxi service. It’s highly customizable and incredibly affordable. So let’s
dig into how this all works. SpaceRyde combines three main technologies to deliver payloads to low
earth orbit. The first is the balloon and this is by far the easiest part. But before we talk
about how the balloon works, we need to answer the obvious question of why you would even want to use
a balloon in the first place. Well, even though we don’t notice it when we’re just walking around.
The atmosphere is actually pretty thick down here on earth. All the air creates an incredible amount
of drag on a rocket while it’s taking off. If you want to counteract this drag, you just need
more power, which means a bigger rocket. That, of course, means even more drag. This isn’t a
problem for big rockets with big payloads, but if you're trying to deliver smaller payloads,
you’ll wind up wasting lots of energy just plowing through the first layer of Earth’s
atmosphere. “You need a cheat and the balloon is our cheat, since it gives you a free ride to the
edge of the atmosphere” - 2:55 There’s another benefit though. During every rocket launch,
at some point you’ll hear the ground crew say “we’ve reached MaxQ”. What that means
is that the rocket has just reached the air pressure limits due to the atmosphere,
and it needs to throttle back. When you launch a balloon 30 kilometers above the ground, MaxQ isn’t
an issue, so you can design a completely different rocket. Sohrab and his team have done just that,
but before we dive into their rocket design, let’s talk about the history of space balloons. Now, I
don’t know anyone who would watch a balloon launch over a rocket launch, but they’re actually an
incredibly important part of modern science. NASA alone launches a new mission every month through
their Scientific Balloon Program. And balloons are so simple to make that even high-school
students can launch stuff into space using them. Balloons are incredibly reliable at this point,
but more importantly, they are incredibly cheap. “So the balloon as far as we care about it is a
commodity. So we buy our balloon.” The balloons they use are made out of simple plastic materials,
not unlike a shopping bag. And they fill it with hydrogen gas, which provides plenty of
lift capacity and is extremely affordable. If you’re ever looking at prices of anything
in the space industry, you’ll be shocked to find anything selling for less than a million dollars.
Even small parts on big rockets can be extremely expensive, and those costs get passed through
directly to launch costs. This is why, even though the cost of delivery payloads to space is falling
significantly on a per kilo basis, individual launches are still millions of dollars. In fact,
the cheapest rocket on a per-launch basis right now is provided by Astra, and it’s still around $3
million dollars. But SpaceRyde will offer launches for one third that cost and has plans to quickly
push the price below a million dollars per launch. This could be really disrupting at scale and it’s
incredibly impressive for such a small company. After all, Astra has raised hundreds of millions
of dollars and is a public company. SpaceRyde has raised less than $5 million dollars so far.
Leveraging existing and reliable technology is key to so many startup success stories, but the only
reason balloons are so widely accepted in the aerospace industry is because they’ve been in
use for over a hundred years now. All the way back in 1912, an Austrian physicist named Victor Hess
used a hot air balloon to measure radiation levels in the atmosphere. At the time, people believed
that radiation came from the earth, so the higher you went, the lower the radiation would be, but
his measurements showed that the radiation levels actually increased at high altitudes, suggesting
that the radiation was coming from space. He had essentially discovered cosmic rays and he won the
Nobel Prize in Physics for his work. Flash forward to 1949, and balloons again played a critical role
in atmospheric research. A group of American naval scientists attached a rocket to a balloon
and launched it off of the U.S.S Norton Sound. They called this rocket-balloon a “rockoon” and
even though it did successfully launch the rocket, the fact that they couldn’t steer the contraption
really limited its usefulness. But SpaceRyde has solved this problem with their second key piece
of technology: the rocket carrier. “Rocket Carrier is the key ingredient of this business” No one is
going to pay SpaceRyde to launch their satellite into orbit if they can’t guarantee where it will
wind up orbiting. A big part of the SpaceRyde value proposition is that small satellite
companies can not only choose when to launch, but they can decide the exact orbit that they want for
their satellite. That type of customizability is largely unattainable via larger launch companies,
unless of course you’re willing to fork over the millions of dollars it costs to cover the entire
launch. The SpaceRyde rocket carrier attaches the rocket to the balloon and, more importantly,
makes sure that the rocket is pointing in the right direction when it launches. The carrier
itself looks kind of like a quadrotor drone, but there are some really important calculations
going on to make subtle corrections and make sure the rocket is aligned properly at launch.
Air launches have been tried before, but they’ve never really made much economic sense. The most
well-known air-launched rocket is the Northrop Grumman Pegasus, which has been in operation since
1990. Even though Pegasus has had a solid track record over the last thirty years. It still costs
$40 million dollars per launch and has a host of other problems. Back in 2012, Elon Musk actually
addressed the Pegasus vehicle directly: “When you drop the rocket, you have a slight problem
because you're not going in the right direction. If you see what Orbital Sciences did with Pegasus,
they had the delta wing to do the turning maneuver. And then you added this wing which
is added mass. And the net is that it’s not great. They started out with the Pegasus air
launch vehicle and subsequently they haven’t done any air launch vehicles.” Simply put: That delta
wing on top of the Pegasus rocket is inefficient. But SpaceRyde doesn’t need one of those on their
rocket because the rocket carrier can position the rocket automatically before it launches.
It’s an interesting situation, where advances in software lead to simpler hardware solutions.
Similar to how self-driving cars have been able to move away from complicated lidar systems and just
use normal cameras because of advances in machine learning. This is always a great place to be in as
a startup. Software is getting better at a much faster rate than hardware, so anytime you can
leverage the cutting edge of software development, you’ll have an advantage. And Sohrab knows this
intimately. Before he founded SpaceRyde, he actually worked on self-driving cars at Cruise
Automation. While there, he worked on Planning and Controls, which has a remarkable amount of
overlap with the work he’s doing now at SpaceRyde. See every autonomous vehicle has to do two things.
First, it had to perceive the world, which basically means stitching together all the
camera and sensor data into a 3d representation. Kind of like a video game. Then, the system has to
decide what to do with that data, where to actually drive the car safely, which means
planning out a safe path and then sending inputs to the steering wheel and gas pedal accordingly.
Sohrab worked on that second part at Cruise, and it’s a perfect fit for SpaceRyde. The perception
problem is a lot simpler in a balloon, since there are no pedestrians to deal with up in
the sky. But controlling the rocket carrier is remarkably similar to controlling a car. When
the team goes to launch a balloon, they know the general trajectory and can plan out a basic course
of action. But once everything lifts off, the autonomous systems have to take over. Being able
to reliably steer the carrier without a pilot is really tricky, but doing this with software
means it’s ultimately more reliable and more affordable. So once the balloon is up there, and
the rocket carrier is in the right position. What happens? Well, they have to launch the rocket.
But SpaceRyde rockets are custom made to take advantage of the high altitude. “When you look
at rockets they are often tall and sender. There is a reason. Because you are minimizing drag.
There is no drag concern when you are launching at 30 kilometer altitude. So your rocket can be
short and chubby. And a fat rocket is actually a good rocket.” This “fat” rocket design is more
than just funny though. It actually serves a very specific purpose. Although the design
is unorthodox, these SpaceRyde “fat” rockets find the perfect balance between structural integrity,
fuel efficiency, and payload capacity. This is super critical, because SpaceRyde is all about
unlocking the small payload delivery market, which is actually growing incredibly quickly. Pretty
much everyone knows about StarLink at this point, but global internet is far from the only useful
application for small satellites. Increasingly, satellites are getting smaller and smaller, all
while being more versatile and useful. This can be hard to visualize, because when most of us think
about satellites we imagine the hubble telescope or the international space station. You know, the
type of space stuff that’s big enough to point a camera at. But satellites are getting small, like,
really small. Traditionally, a small satellite is defined as anything under one thousand kilograms.
But SpaceRyde is only planning on carrying between 80 and 150 kilograms. That’s not a problem though
because micro satellites or “cubesats” typically weigh less than 100 kilograms, with some as light
as just 10 kilos. There are also “nanosatellites” now that weigh under 10 kilos, “picosatellites”
that weigh less than one kilo, and people are even prototyping “femto-satellites” that weigh less
than 100 grams. At that point, it’s basically just a simple chip floating around up there,
but as we’ve seen with smartphones, you can fit a lot on a single chip these days. So, we have a few
technology trends all accelerating and converging at the same time to make this a reality. Demand
for satellites is increasing exponentially, satellites are getting smaller and smaller,
and autonomous control software is getting better. All of these trends point to an easy
win for SpaceRyde right? Well, not so fast. Sohrab has been working on this for the past five years
and I could tell from my conversation with him that it hasn’t all been easy. First off, he’s
doing all of this in Canada, which hasn’t had an active launch program in the country for decades.
Canada does have astronauts, but they partner with the United States and European Space Agency
for actual launch capabilities. Fortunately, Sohrab has an amazing partner in his wife and
co-founder Saharnaz. She has an MBA and serves as SpaceRyde’s chief operating officer, so when
it was time to work with the Canadian government to get regulatory approval, she stepped up and got
it done in record time. Often the best founding teams have different but complementary skill sets.
After all, it doesn’t matter how well designed your rocket is, if no one will let you launch it.
But there’s one more key takeaway that I love from this story, and it’s about determination. Sohrab
probably could have coasted as an engineer in Silicon Valley for his entire career. Cruise was
a massive success and he was there early, but he wanted to pursue something bigger. “We are running
out of resources on the planet” He clearly cares deeply about space and what it can unlock for
humanity broadly. Lots of people aspire to work in amazing industries and have an impact when they're
young, but then they get caught on a particular treadmill and lose sight of their original goal.
Sorhab took a lot of risk by switching industries after leaving Cruise. He probably could have
worked at any self-driving company, but he chose to pursue something bigger. And he
didn’t just risk a few resume bullet points. He actually took out a second mortgage just to
pay for SpaceRyde’s rocket testing facility. No one would rent him land to test rockets,
which is honestly kind of understandable, so he just did it himself. I love that attitude. When
you’re working at a big company, enjoying free lunches, it can be hard to take a leap of faith
and go build something in a garage. But I’m certain that when Sohrab looks back on his
time building rockets in his garage, he won’t regret one minute of it. Thanks for watching.