Roid Rage

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.