Building The New Silk Road in Space with CisLunar Joe Pawelski

Before we can build a base on the Moon, we need something even more important than astronauts: a supply chain. In this episode of Everything is Logistics, we're exploring the "New Silk Road in Space" with Joe Pawelski, CTO and co-founder of CisLunar Industries. 

Joe breaks down how his company is developing the infrastructure to support in-space manufacturing, power systems, and debris recycling—all to make lunar logistics a reality. From turning orbital junk into usable fuel and metal to enabling sustainable lunar operations, this conversation connects the dots between space innovation and real-world logistics strategy. 

We cover: 

• How the Space Foundry and Power Processing Units (PPUs) enable space-based supply chains 
• What it takes to build and power a Moon base 
• Why orbital recycling is more than space cleanup—it’s a new source of fuel and materials 
• The METAL framework and what it means for lunar logistics infrastructure 
• What logistics pros on Earth can learn from solving supply chain challenges 240,000 miles away 

Whether you move freight by truck, ship, or spacecraft—this episode delivers.

Listen in and imagine the future where cargo routes don’t stop at the atmosphere.

LINKS:

• Joe's LinkedIn
• CisLunar Industries LinkedIn
• CisLunar Industries Website

WATCH THE FULL EPISODE HERE

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Chapters

• 4:55 From Philosophy to Physics
• 14:57 What CisLunar Industries Is Building
• 23:20 Solving the Space Logistics Problem
• 32:04 Government and Academic Partnerships
• 40:46 Closing the Resource Loop in Space
• 48:22 What the Next 10 Years Might Look Like

Transcript

Joe Pawelski: 0:42

When I was first in this industry, I was, like, humans in space, like, I'm focused on the science and building, like logistics. I'm not too, you know, humans in space is a whole other logistics nightmare. But what's interesting about this is that I've kind of, I've come around full circle and realized that, hey, you know,

Unknown: 0:58

that could be the best thing. You know, there's enough people that are interested in going to space or, you know, being buried in space, all these, all these different things, but, but ultimately, we need is a reason to be up there persistently

Blythe Milligan: 1:10

before we can build a base on the moon. We need something most people overlook a supply chain, just like the original Silk Road connected civilizations, the New Silk Road in space will connect Earth orbit and the lunar surface through transportation, power and material infrastructure. This isn't sci fi. It's the next great logistics challenge, and the companies solving it today are laying the foundation for a sustainable space economy tomorrow. Welcome into another episode of everything. Is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers and afraid. We are proudly presented by SPI logistics, and I'm your host. Blythe Milligan, I'm happy to welcome in Joe Pawelski. He is the CTO at CisLunar Industries, and we're going to be talking about how to build that New Silk Road in space. So Joe, welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here. Thank you. And just right when we started recording, you had mentioned that you had read the box, which is a book that's in my background over here. And so that's a perfect jumping off place of where we want to have this conversation, because we've been doing regular space logistics episodes for about a year now, and it's a topic that is not slowing down anytime soon. And I was going through your LinkedIn bio, and I noticed that you have on there that you're a plasma propulsion enthusiast. And I think that that's just the perfect way to kick this conversation off. So how do you become a plasma propulsion enthusiast? Well, it started out playing a game called Red Alert, Command and Conquer years ago, probably in mid 90s. So this is a strategic

Unknown: 2:49

game where you try to battle different folks, but you win by logistics. So you win by capturing ore and building bases and building a war factory, and you have to have to have a certain number of things to the attributes, to build the fancier tanks, or build them faster and more power plants and all that sort of thing. You could be the former Soviet Union countries in this game, and they had for base defense, they had Tesla coils. And at the time, I was like, wow, this is really neat. You can zap people with lightning. And that's I learned quickly that that was a real thing that not the part. It turns out it's they're actually not very harmful to people. You can shock yourself with it. But I learned all about Tesla coils when I was 1312, 13, something like that. I grew up in Richmond. There was a group called the Tesla, or the Tesla builders of Richmond. And this was Richard Hall, who went on to be the first, first garage fuser builder. So he built a fusor in his garage. And anyway, it turned out that I was hanging out with a bunch of folks from Navy research lab and a bunch of other national labs at this age, and they were all into trying to recreate a bunch of the things that Tesla had built. So Tesla coils. But not just that, obviously, they gradually got into building fusers and all kinds of really exotic induction drivers and directed energy type devices eventually got into. So that's really what kicked the seed, and that's how I started to meet these people and started to get these mentors that helped me build my own high energy type experiments. And then I started to meet other folks that were, you know, similar ages in the community. One of those is Steve ward. He's he's got a bunch of YouTube stuff out there, but he invented the dual resonant tesla coil, which makes music you guys have probably seen playing AWOL nation sale or some other electronic sounds like on the steps of University of Chicago and in places like this, a lot of folks have made those at this point. He also invented the quasi continuous waves Hessel coil. I have one of them over here. I might fire it up here in a second, but it makes lightning bolts that look like swords. I'll show you. Yeah. So this thing right here is quite a continuous wave tesla coil, and makes a little spark when we plug it in. But why? Yeah, oh yeah, it makes pretty big bolts of lightning. Here, you can actually stock yourself. We kind of do this as a hobby at cislunar. We Yeah, any new hires, they get to play with the tougher done and a little bit of an onboarding that's different, exactly for anyone watching that's that's seen me at some of the events, like Space Symposium, we hosted a party, and I was running around with that thing. So, yeah, I. Yeah, so anyway, that's, that's how I got into the whole plasma and enlightening sort of thing. It's kind of been a lifelong thing. And so I had this idea probably a decade or two ago. I was like, Wouldn't it be neat if I could get, you know, these, these folks that are really, that I really look up to, that build these things to get together and start a company, and, you know, I bet we could do all kinds of cool stuff in space with, you know, building off of those types of technologies. And sure enough, quickly. So when we started cislinar, we actually started to build metal foundries in space, and this was to solve the problem of space debris, but also in order for us to build off world. So, you know, something that I'm really interested I used to be in heavy industry, building, making plastic bottles and cans at 1000s of minutes. So I really wanted to, you know, to give back and figure out a way to to give us abundant resources, abundant energy, but, but not, you know, destroy the Earth in the process. I figured, well, okay, we got to get off the Earth. We got it. We got to get this critical mass. But a certain point, there's a bunch of, I mean, the Earth is made of the same, sorry, the moon is made of the same thing as the Earth. So we have all these resources that we have on the earth, except the moon has no biology happening. You know, there's, there's a lot of, it's covered in, you know, meter, 10s of meters of just dust, that is, that is metal and oxygen. So it's like, this is a great resource. So anyway, I started looking into that, and with the NASA project, it was to use metal for metal foundries. So in order to do that, we found out that induction furnaces worked really well, and the folks that an induction furnace for electronics folks works a lot like a Tesla boil circuit. So I ended up hiring some of these folks that I had known from the Tesla building community as some of my first engineers to help build this induction driver. And then eventually we ended up realizing that, hey, one of the cool things about metal foundries we were looking at, okay, let's start with metal debris. And the problem is getting to the metal debris. Because you use propellant to get there, there's this whole Newton's law. It's a real pain in the ass. Rocket equation, you have to, like, get rid of mass in order to move anywhere. Just force equals mass times acceleration. So no matter where you're going, you're, you're burning out of propellant, you're, you know, but force equals mass times acceleration. So rocket fuel is, can be anything with mass, especially if you're using electric propulsion. I learned about plasma thrusters. Like, wow, this is neat. Anything that's you know that can you can be conductive, whether it's a gas that you can ionize and make conductive, or just metal which is already conductive, you can use that as rocket fuel. And as like, hey, wait a minute. These satellites and things are these. There's 13 most derelict upper stages that if they run into each other, you get to Kessler syndrome, and then you can't launch things for several years. It's like, man, if we could, we could go over there. We could eat these things. We could, like, poop out metal propellant, and we could use that to get to the next thing, and we could use it for station keeping and all kinds of things. So, so So originally, you know, we're focused on this foundry and making this metal propellant, but that introduced us to everyone in the plasma thruster community, and we started to realize that, hey, the very near term problem is actually logistics, like, how do you get there, just in the first place, so that you could use that those resources? And we realized that a plasma thruster. The one of the one of the hardest things about this is actually building the power supply to operate it. And it got even cooler then we realized that the things that we had been making for our induction furnace, and some of the hard problems we've been solving to, you know, this thing, literally, it's like part of it's like a tractor beam. It grabs metal from space that's floating, and then it directs it in with these magnetic coils and everything, and then it feeds into the furnace. And we're like, the plasma thruster folks that we started meeting were like this part, this part that takes the thing and directs it like, and then the circuit that that you did that with, that's what we want to learn more about. Like, we think you might have solved some major problems for plasma propulsion. And so, what the heck is plasma propulsion? I got to learn all about it. But essentially, plasma, plasma propulsion, it's all these things are similar to what we were doing with with Tesla stuff. It's all about, you know, controlling, you know, you have a controlled spark or controlled discharge, an arc. You know, a lot of times in microelectronics you don't want arcs. That's what destroys your electronics. You're really trying to prevent that. But if you're doing a plasma thruster or an arc jet, or any of these sorts of things, you're trying to create an arc, and you're trying to sustain that for a really long time. So it turned out all that experience was like exactly what we needed to do. And so that ended up getting us working with all these other research institutions that we work with. Everyone that I any research institution the United States and I know of is doing plasma thrusters. We've been we've been, we've been working with in one capacity or another. So anyway, it was like, Oh, wow. We can take this stuff and put it on steroids and just do all kinds of wacky stuff with it. So, so anyway, that's, that's what we've been focusing on a lot, is, how do you take, take something now, plasma thrusters are really interesting because you can get much higher specific impulse. Yes. And so what that comes down to is, again, you know, Newton's law, you gotta, you gotta throw mass out. The faster, the harder you throw it, the better. But also, the more massive it is, the better. So electric collagen allows us to use electromagnets. And basically our, you know, the speed of light is a factor that we're up against, but we can accelerate things many times faster than you can with a chemical reaction, which means that if you're accelerated, that number mass times acceleration is if acceleration is very high, then you can get much more force. And in this case, what ends up happening is you get much better gas mileage, is how you can think of it. They're still working on getting the energy level so that we can get really high thrust. This power is limited in space. It's not the same as, you know, a chemical rocket. You burn this, you can get hundreds of mega joules, or, you know, billions of billions of watts generated at a time. And right now with solar cells or even a nuclear you know, you're limited somewhat, but it turns out that we can get very efficient. So it's the way I actually kind of explain is, like the difference between a fighter jet and a train. If you need to get somewhere really fast, you're going to use a fighter jet, but guess what? You're going to have to refuel that thing. Like, if you're going to fly a jet from here to somewhere, a fighter jet, especially at Mach two or something, you're going to have to refuel that thing all the time. You could take a train, and you're going to use a fraction of the gas to get there, and you're going to be able to pull, like, a whole train load worth of stuff at the same time. So, you know, so this really gets down to logistics thing. And hopefully that wasn't too much of a deep dive on propulsion systems. But basically, you have chemical propulsion, you have electric propulsion, and right now, because we can't generate billions of watts on orbit, like a, you know, that's the equivalent of what a, you know, like a falcon nine is when it lifts off billions of watts generated. So anyway, what we have is we basically have, like, your air cargo for logistics, and you have your train. And so we have to build those logistics nodes. Anyway, I've been really fascinated by the plasma side. And of course, too, I'm really interested eventually we can get power levels up to the point where we might be able to get chemical like thrust. So So you might have the best of both worlds, like a fighter jet that can go around the Earth many, many times you go into space and not run out of fuel, and also have the same kind of thrust. So that's we're going for. But yeah, I call myself a plasma enthusiastic, plasma repulsion enthusiast, because I love all kinds of plasma. And as the folks that build the power supplies, they call them power processing units, we have to understand how all these different systems work at a pretty deep level. And it sounds like, just based on our previous conversations, that you know, one of the, you know, I guess, when we back it up and talk about sort of space logistics as a whole, one of the bigger game changing moments was getting that rocket reusability, and now that we have that rocket reusability where, you know, I live in Florida, and, you know, I've told the story before, but we used to have, you know, maybe a few launches every year. Now there's a few launches every every day, and and then there's, you know, we had a conversation, really, with recently, with Kelly from the Space Foundation, and she's talking about how there's, very soon, it could be multiple launches every single hour. And so as we're launching more, we're starting to find out these different issues and different problems that we need to be solving. And it sounds like what you're talking about with the the plasma propulsion is that we that's sort of the fuel for the rockets that needs to be solved as well and in some of our inner greater energy problems that exist here on Earth, but will also follow us into space. Did I summarize that? Okay, yeah. So one differentiator I want to make is that right now, because we don't have chemical like energy levels. So, you know, just get, if you could put a billion Watts into a plasma thruster and have it be the same size as the Falcon nine, you would get chemical like thrust out of out of plasma propulsion. But to generate billions of watts, you know, you're talking like a nuclear power plant. That's, that's many buildings large, so, you know, we don't have that yet. So right now, chemical propulsion, or chemical propulsion, is how we get off the Earth. It's the only thing that has enough thrust, you know, to get you so that's like force over time. So you need, you need a lot of force over a very short time to break free of the drag of the atmosphere. But then, once you're out of the atmosphere, now you can use something like electric propulsion to maneuver very efficiently. So, and if you're operating from the moon, you can actually, you can get off the surface of the moon with with it's one sticks the gravity, so it takes a lot less to get into orbit, the orbital velocity where you're orbiting, and now you can use electric propulsion system. So what's really interesting about the moon is that the the Delta, the the velocity it takes to get off, is actually low enough that, like spin launch, has a launcher that's just a momentum launcher, kinetic launcher. Earth, and it actually has enough velocity. The one that they have in New Mexico has enough velocity, I believe, to get off the surface of the moon. Now it's it's here on Earth, so it can't launch things up off the surface of the Earth, here on Earth, but, but that's kind of interesting, because now you could actually launch something without using any chemical propellant. You just using electricity from converted into kinetic energy, and then you could intercept that with something that's using, perhaps, electric propulsion, that's orbiting the moon. And now you have something that's that's all EP we're all, you know, not using your traditional hydrogen and oxygen propellants to maneuver. So, so right now, though, we're limited. We can't we have to rely on, on all of the traditional, you know, rocket technology has been around since Apollo and that era, chemical propellant to get off the surface of the earth and into Leo. At that point, though, we can, we can do our transfers. So probably what's gonna end up happening is that you'll end up having your your like your trains, your your trucks, things like that, that that don't need to move super fast, carrying like cargo. You'll also have, of course, like your Falcon nine here, sorry, your starships and your new Glenns, and things that can carry a lot of payload for less going to nodes. And then you might have, kind of your regional jets, regional carriers that go in between might be electric propulsion starting out. So that's, that's kind of where that, that that goes. So for humans, of course, you know, we have humans need, probably are going to need chemical prop for quite a while, because we need, you know, life support every day you're out there. That's another whole cost that you have to think about. But, but equipment and satellites and all these other things, and again, like moving the propellant to another depot, where a human spacecraft might be able to refuel. Keeping that, keeping that in orbit, is another really interesting thing, because in space, it's a lot like trying to have a boat in the middle of the ocean. You know, if you have a ship in the middle of the ocean, you're not, you're not putting an anchor down because it's too deep your current. So you got to rely on your motors to stay in the same position. It's the same thing in space. There's, you know, there aren't currents, but there's other things. There's, there's, there's a little bit of drag. If you're near the earth, you need station keeping. And then if you go further out, there's always gravity from other things that you have to deal with. So So EP is very efficient at keeping something that, you know. So if you have a gas station or a supply node that's going to need something to keep it in the same spot. And EP is very good for that. Yeah. In a very similar vein, one of the the episodes that I was listening to to prep for this conversation that made a bunch of analogies, and I have it on on my little notes here, they said the Gateway Station is sort of acting as a port, or like a lunar outpost. Rockets are essentially the ocean carriers. Landers are the delivery trucks. And rovers slash drones are handling the last mile. And then one other piece of that, which you have a ton of experience in, is the manufacturing side of things, and how, you know, maybe 3d printers are playing a role. And so you're that, I mean, to give every you know, give this audience, you know, it's sort of those, those space analogies to the on Earth transportation systems, some of what the lessons that you've learned, especially from from manufacturing, are being taken into space. And I'm curious as to what manufacturing looks like in space. Is it just a, you know, a bunch of 3d printers you also mentioned, you know, some recycling efforts as well. I think you mentioned that the phrase of, like, taking the machine parts poop and turning that into something that's sustainable. Can you kind of break that down for us? Sure? Absolutely. So, you know, right now in space, manufacturing is more modules. It's like modular architectures, and that's, that's probably what we're going to see first, I've been, you know, in our ecosystems, we talk a lot about a modular, open source interfaces, but we also talk about making satellites that you could reconfigure in orbit, because, like, the propulsion system is a module, the solar array is a module, the comms is several modules, so, you know, something new, some new frequencies, some bandwidth that you want to use comes out. You swap out the comms module with a new one, and now you have an upgraded satellite, a new propulsion that's, you know, twice as efficient and uses half as you know, have as much propellant per delta V or whatever comes along. You swap out that propellant system with a new one. So, so you so, you know, you can, right now, we have satellites that are designed to deorbit in five years. That's, that's requirement if you're in Leo. So, you know, these, these are meant to be, like, disposable, throwaway type things. And that's, that's really, if you think about terrestrial life, like, that's, that's how a lot of things are designed. They're, you know, fast fashion and everything else. It's not meant to last. Previously, we had designed satellites to last 20 years because they'd be in some orbit where they couldn't deorbit them and now, but of course, designing something last 20 years, an exquisite satellite, is very expensive, so we have this interesting spot where we have, we're able to make satellites that that are like, you know, will last forever. You. And then we're able to make satellites that are designed to deorbit and fall apart in five years. So so there's this hybrid in between, where you design a satellite to basically just be immortal, because eventually it might not have any of the same DNA. Eventually you replace all the modules, and now it's, it's an immortal satellite. And so this gets around the problem of, like, you know, if you had, I had a my first phone was, was even before flip phones, but it was like, you know, that phone is useless. Now you can't upgrade that. There's no way to, you know, you can't refuel it and make it better. It's just it's dead. So, so you don't want to, you know, you have to be very cautious that you don't design something that that is going to just prevent you from innovating. So that's, that's why I think this modular approach is pretty innovative. As far as near term in space, assembly and manufacturing is that, you know, you might still manufacture these modules on Earth. I'd love to see where we manufacture those modules. On the surface of the moon, having some gravity really helps. There are, there are a lot of concepts for making stations with their own gravity, like big, rotating stations, like you've seen in Space Odyssey and newer films. But of course, you still have to get a lot of the materials in orbit. And you know, ISS cost billions of dollars and took decades to build. So you know, you can assume that's the largest, by far, the largest ISAM project to date, is ISS, which is phenomenal, phenomenal learning from that and so, and also, we've done it, you know, we did it with ISS, and it was awesome. The next step is to derive those resources off world and build something and show that we can build something without relying on research from Earth. But, but again, I think the first steps are going to be module type satellites. So, you know, just like the space station. Space Station is pretty a pretty good example of a modular approach. There to trusses. All the ways they connected were pretty similar, so now we need to start building satellites that way, so they don't deorbit in five years. But, and you'll probably see this with GEO satellites and satellites that are further out, because it makes a lot more sense to do that. And then beyond that, I think you'll start seeing, you know, a lunar assembly and manufacturing where you're still, you know, doing, doing the three printing and things like that would happen on the surface of something, but then they'd be be launched up, because generating power all those sorts of things. The logistics of how you would manufacture are, you know, once you get to the moon, which is not easy, but once you get there, getting things from the surface of the Moon back to Leo is actually less energy than getting something from the service the earth to Leo. Kind of crazy to think of, just because the gravity well of the Earth is so big versus the moon. So anyway, there's a very good economic reason to manufacture on the moon, but, but, but I that's where I see it going is that probably, you know, 3d printing makes a lot of sense. We've worked with a lot of companies that have developed really cool technologies for 3d printing that that could work on the moon today. In fact, one of the things that I just walked past, I'm hoping it shifts soon, but it's an extruder that we met, that we built for NASA as part of the Artemis program. So the idea is, is that they'll run an end to end demo where they take the dirt on the moon is called regolith, and it's a very fine, dusty, gray powder, but it contains a bunch of different metals that are oxidized, so you have to take the oxygen out. Great, because right now, starship and all the other types of rockets that can go to the moon, other than than the artist program or SLS, they have to be refueled to get there. The main thing that they need to refuel with that this makes sense, is oxygen, because it has the most mass. So what a convenient thing that once you extract the oxygen from from the regolith, you end up with metal as the waste product. So now you have all this metal that you can use to build things. And so anyway, the idea was to take the metal, extrude it into wire, and then 3d print out of this out of this wire. Now, near what I expect would be the first things that we would do is to build replacement parts. So they call this ground interfacing tooling in the mining industry. But you can imagine there's, there's going to be a lot of heavy equipment, or, you know, smaller equipment on the moon. It doesn't weigh as much, but because of the gravity. But anyway, you know, you're going to be digging through this very abrasive regolith, so you're going to get a lot of wear on those surfaces. And you know, this is heavy metal teeth, like tractor teeth and stuff like that, wheels and whatnot. So when we did our DARPA work, we identified that the wheels on these rovers, the blades, you know, the things that actually are interacting with this really abrasive regolith, that's what's going to wear out. And that's where, you know, right now, it's a million dollars a kilogram to get something that serves the moon. So like, why would you send a bunch of metal teeth that you could make there, if you could just make them there for a marginal cost versus what it costs to make on Earth and ship it there? Because, because everything costs a million dollars a kilogram doesn't matter whether it's water or steel, it's all, you know, the cost of getting it there. So that's where. Sure we we thought that that that kind of makes, as far as you know, beyond the modular approach. Now that you know, in space manufacturing, if you're launching modules and assembling, we have that tech today, north of Grumman, starting to do stuff like this, ASTRA scale, like, you know, they're showing that we can actually service, we can remove something, put a new one on. So that's that started happening today. But where we actually make things in space, that's where I think it's really the larger scale stuff where the economics makes sense. It's going to be building things like wheels, like blades, dumb, we call it dumb mass stuff that would be dumb to launch, because you can make it pretty easily there. But yeah, like the wire extruder we make. We made some wire. That's, we can make it out of most alloys, 6061, is the most common. So, you know, we looked at that for like ISS. Could we? Could we take scraps off ISS that are 6061, turn them into wire and then make new parts. So that's, that's one way to do it. Same thing on the moon. You have silicon is one of the number one materials. So you have a lot of aluminum, you have a lot of silicon. Aluminum. Silicon turns out to be a really great wire to use for aluminum threed printing. So, you know, so like that makes a lot of sense. You're gonna have a lot of aluminum silicon. We can make an alloy out of that. We can make it into wire. We can threed print those, those metal parts. Steel is another thing is another thing is kind of interesting. We haven't started extruding steel, but there's quite a bit of iron on the moon, because, again, the moon is made of the same stuff as Earth. There isn't any carbon on the moon because there's no biological activity. But guess what? All the rovers, a lot of half the half the landers and rovers are made in a carbon fiber, and a lot of the ones that land initially are not going to be reused. So carbon fibers matter of carbon, and we realized that you only need, like, less than 1% to make steel. So this is a really interesting, you know, value chain where steel is super useful. You could, you could make full on, you know, all kinds of things, if you can make steel and aluminum. So anyway, lunar surface kind of interesting, but then I think that we would start to build things in space. Gitai is one of the companies that's starting to do some pretty interesting things. So I don't know when we'll actually be 3d printing and manufacturing wild things that orbit. There's been some demonstrations where they make antennas, and, you know, wide after arrays, but mostly that's using polymers. There's been years ago, there was this thing called the Grumman beam maker, which was meant to go up on challenger. Of course, we all know what happened there. That got mothballed, unfortunately, but that was to it could make beams and trusses that were unlimited, you know, kilometers long. So you could build these big, rotating, you know, space, space, you know, science fiction type stations and things like that. So, so again, though, it's really kind of a, you know, are we going to actually end up on the moon in the next few years, like everyone's talking about, or, you know, are we going to focus more on, on space? I hope we do both. And that'll really determine, you know, we're, you know, follow the money wherever that research goes, wherever that that, that, you know, demand for, whether it's military or whatever else drives it, that that's, that's where it'll happen first. So now a tangent from here. Interesting panel I was on earlier this week about human spaceflight. When I was first in this industry, I was like, humans in space, like, I'm focused on the science and building, like logistics. I'm not too you know, humans in space is a whole other logistics nightmare. But what's interesting about this is that I've kind of, I've come around full circle and realized that, hey, you know, that could be the best thing it you know, there's enough people that are interested in going to space or, you know, being buried in space, all these, all these different things, but, but ultimately, we need is a reason to be up there persistently. It's not just defense. You know, obviously there's a lot going on with environmental science, a lot with communications and things like that. But we realized from from the human spaceflight program before, like, you know, Apollo, 13 people kind of lost interest, and all sudden, there is this drama. And everyone's like, whoa, holy cow. Like space really matters. You know, nobody really cares. When the Mars Rover gets stuck in a ditch, it's, you know, it made a Freaks and Geeks episode at one point, but like beyond that, it's not super exciting news, but when people are involved, all of a sudden, there's, there's, like, a lot of excitement around this. So for me, as someone that's looking at logistics of this, I'm thinking, Well, hey, like you think about like a hotel, and I tell my kids this all the time, when you look at a hotel, how many buildings do you think it takes to support that hotel? How many cars and trucks. Does it take to resupply that hotel there? And you start to realize there's a whole ecosystem built around this one hotel. So, you know, a hotel in space, you know, in Leo even, or you know somewhere, you know, in lunar orbit, or, who knows, you could put it in all kinds of places all of a sudden, in order to support that, you have all these. These logistics and these highways that have to be created, and now you as long as somebody is there, you're gonna have a constant cycle of resupply in order to do that. So, you know, that's one way that we might end up spurring this type of development, which would lead really force. You know, if you're, if you're just thinking about machines like threed printing something in orbit. Like, you may as well, the time frame isn't really that urgent, so you might just launch it, and it's fine to slow boat it. But like, if there's people there now a sudden, like, Oh, you're leaking. Like, now we gotta, we gotta fix this, like, now. And so the urgency of doing that is a lot sooner. So I think, I think there's a lot of merits to that, to helping really, really get things going and creating I'd love to see, just like we have highway systems on Earth, something like that in cislunar space. For us, cislunar is the Earth and the Moon. It's the whole earth Moon environment. So we're talking about going from Earth to the Moon and everywhere in between, and creating logistics nodes every step of the way, just like the highway system. Yeah, and what you're saying makes a ton of sense, because, you know, I think back to Elon Musk said, you know, a couple years ago, or maybe even a year ago, that going to the moon was, you know, a giant waste of time. We need to be focused on Mars, and we need to go to Mars. But having these different outposts and having these different spots closer to the earth. It makes a whole heck of a lot of sense to in order to, you know, get those goals, like what you're saying with, with refueling, retooling, resupply, it sounds like there's, you know, there's lots of ways besides reusable rockets, and, you know, a few more efficient fueling that needs to take place as well, such as that, that manufacturing in space. And I always wondered, you know, well, why? Why ignore, like the the ISS or, why are they, you know, just going to, I think they're decommissioning the ISS in a couple of years, and they're just going to send it straight into the ocean. With what you're saying, it sounds like there's a tremendous amount of opportunity that we could save and salvage the ISS into something that that's more sustainable and something that, you know, is actually useful in space. Yeah, absolutely. And I, you know, I've got a ton of respect for Elon. I think we wouldn't be here without SpaceX and Falcon nine being so successful. I really hope that starship is equally successful, and soon, I think that, you know, Elon's, I think one of these folks that gets laser focused on, you know, he's focused on Mars. We should focus on Mars. But you know that that doesn't, I think people kind of read between lines like, Oh, we're going to skip the moon. Well, you can't get to Mars very effectively without the moon. I mean, and as far, I mean, I haven't had the pleasure of sitting down with Elon and asking him directly about this. But as far as I understand, like the moon is always part of this. In order to get starship to Mars, it's really important that we get oxygen from the moon. So, you know, it's kind of the way I look at it is, if we, you know, what we're good at is like pushing or we should do whatever we can motivate ourselves to do if we want to say, let's go to Mars. We're going to learn so much along the way. We're going to end up developing these resupply nodes on, you know, that go to the moon and before we ever get to Mars, and that's going to be huge, like we might not even get to Mars in my lifetime. I think we will, but, but, you know, if we didn't, and we just developed all these logistics notes the moon on our way there, that would be huge. But anyway, I don't think that his elads plans to go to Mars preclude the moon. I actually think that that they are very much symbiotic. They you really need the moon and those logistics to get to Mars. And it's just just the way things go. People focus on, on the other things, and for, you know, that just gets lost so well, I think that's the opportunity of what, what space kind of gives us, is that you can have the folks that are thinking about a lot of different things, and then you have somebody like you that that's thinking about, well, maybe we can, you know, reuse some of these things that we've already paid a lot of money to send up, and a lot of time and energy to send up into space. And so I am curious as to, you know, why haven't we started building this infrastructure on the moon? Yet, it feels like, oh, you know, the last you know, since the 60s. However, much of that math is, I can't do math right now, but it feels like we could have been building there the entire time and already had some of this stuff, this infrastructure set up. So what does that, I guess, what was the reasoning for? Maybe not a building changed. Great. You know, if folks that know me know that I've had a lot to do with ISS and talking about ways we could use it more effectively, and, you know, and continue its life and mission. And I think a lot of that, you know, for the spacecraft program we've, we've had, you know, our best and brightest engineers for decades have created phenomenal amounts of things, and a lot of them have just been put on the shelf. So, you know, I fully believe in the 80s, we could have had icing, you know, and then I talked to engineers all the time, they're like, oh. I'm glad you're picking up on, you know, I was working on this 20 years ago. And then you find, early on, I find people that would be a little crushed, because they'd be like, Oh, I had this idea 20 years ago. And I'm like, oh, man, I guess maybe. And it's like, no, no, there's some other person 20 years before me. And then I find something where, like, some, some guy in Russia wrote about this in the 40s, and someone else in, like, the teens, you know, it's like, what's How did people conceive this thing? You know, 100 years ago? It's crazy to think, but anyway, the ideas have been around. We got close in the 70s, of course, but then, you know, funding changed, I think with ISS too. You know, I've, I've talked to all kinds of levels of folks about ISS and reusing it. And really, what I gathered is that, you know, these things are, are designed for a certain mission, and they're so far, we don't design things in space to have multi missions. So, you know, for whether it's a satellite, you know, satellite runs out of fuel, that's the end of its mission. You know, it's the end of its life. ISS, you know, we built it. We proved that we were a superpower and so much better than everyone else in the world, and we were able to collaborate with everyone else in the world and all that soft power we we showed everyone we had soft power. And, you know, been there, done that. So now, you know, as far as governments concerned and funding, that it's like, well, we, we met our objective. The mission was, was met like, it was totally worth it. We did it. So I to me, that's the biggest headwind against, you know, that I've learned now so, but that being said, I do think that ISS is still a great has. There's, there's still plenty of life in ISS, and we can use it. One of the things, you know, we talked about recycling, ISS, there's, there's, there's concerns to doing that, like, there's safety concerns, there's also policy concerns, you know, like, how do you get I mean, a lot of it comes down to like, Hey, who's going to call Ross cosmos and explain to them how we're going to determinate and remove their module? Because, you know, even if we all, if we are all good friends and everything else, it's like, well, what if you drop a bolt and it comes back around at orbital velocities and destroy something, or like, you know, what if? What if you determinate, you push this off and then it gets, you know, somehow it ends up coming back and hitting us. There's all kinds of things that can go horribly wrong, right? And who takes responsibility and ownership for it, between, when you have, like, all these different nations involved. So, so really, I think it's a lot more of a we call these, like, policy requirements, or, you know, they're not hard engineering requirements. They're really, you know, diplomatic State Department type things that you know someone else that's not me deals with. So now, if you could get beyond that, though, I think that there are. We've talked about using ISS as a propulsion test platform. There's the guy behind vasimir has proposed this, like, years ago, and it was going to be very expensive. I talked to a bunch of folks that worked on that program, and I said, Hey, you know what if we were to look at this again and do it when there wasn't any crew on ISS. And it turns out that when you don't have crew on the ISS, it's a lot cheaper to do. It's potentially 1/10 of the cost, because now you're not worried about killing a bunch of people if something goes wrong. But also, what's intriguing about ISS is it is the largest generator power on orbit right now. There's, I think, over 200,000 watts of power capability on ISS. Now, you can't get all that power at the same time. It's distributed. It depends on where is there's, you know, but, but by far, you know, there's, there's some other satellites that might be in the 10s of kilowatts as the next best thing. So, like, you know, this is an order of magnitude more than anything that had been an orbit yet. So for somebody like us that's doing a lot of plasma propulsion, we're like, man, there's all these labs that are that can't, you know, nobody's, nobody's thrown a hall thruster that's more than a few 1000 watts on orbit. So like, what if we could fly a bunch of 10,000 watt thrusters, or 100,000 watt thruster or something like that? Like, there aren't vacuum chambers on earth that can test up to that level, because, not for any duration, because generating a vacuum, you know, you're trying to fire a rocket into a vacuum chamber. You know, a certain point, it's, it's hard to pump that fast once you get to a certain scale. So, so ISS is really ideal for that. And we've even proposed things like, I've talked to folks at SpaceX, you know, see, like, hey, high level is this crazy? Or, like, you know, and they're like, man, we could, we could sell another Falcon nine. That'd be awesome. And, like, you know, we could attach it to the orbit vehicle. And, like, you know, just got to come up with, you know, 100 million dollars or something, and then we'll be set. But 100 million is 1/10 of a billion. So, so Anyway, the thing is, is, there's, there's things that we can do on ISS, but it everything does cost money. I do think, though, that you know that that's the gambit is, does it? Is it? Would it be more effective? More cost effective to to use ISS, to reconfigure it so it could be used as a test platform for some of these more advanced cargoes, higher power cargoes, more you. The other thing would be obvious is, there's companies like spaceforge that are making chips. They're making very high band gap mediums for chips, which is awesome, but they need to deorbit their vehicle. So like, they have the same problem, you know, keeping having something, a free flyer that's going to have the power level that's easy to use for them is, is a big gap. So if you could attach to ISS and use ISS as power, and then deorbit off of ISS, and then there's companies like Florida, same, same thing, you know, there's, there's, there's a number of companies that that are, you know, making these the orbiting vehicles that could be powered, you know, through an umbilical on ISS. And then as ISS is deorbiting, all these guys jump off and do it themselves. We could run thruster experiments. So anyway, this, this to me, you know, we've, we've come from low let's reconfigure ISS and send it to a higher orbit to, hey, let's just use it while it's uncrewed. Demonstrate, you know, get the TRL up, improve some of these technologies. De risk them, so that we could actually use, like, you know, a plasma you could turn a space station into a highly dynamic spacecraft with a big enough some of these thruster systems are working on, but until someone actually demonstrates that, it's a big risk to spending the money to do it. So, so anyway, I think, I think that would be the most effective way. But, I mean, it sounds like there's so much more opportunity besides just decommissioning it and just sending it into the ocean. It sounds like there maybe are some conversations that are happening in order to salvage it, to salvage the ISS, and keep it in orbit. For all of these, you know, additional benefits, like you just mentioned, is there a slight chance that maybe that conversation is kind of shifting? I think it's, I don't know. I've been involved in a lot of these conversations that at levels that I'm surprised I was able to be involved in. But it's I think that that the ship has sailed figuratively for issb, it will get deorbited at some point. I'm pretty sure that, I think that there is opportunity to to eke, to squeeze more out of ISS that is very valuable, that would Springboard other innovations. But I think that, you know, there's using it for human life support is definitely problematic. A lot of a lot of the things are start, you know, starting to leak. So, so the safety for human rated things. So to use it, and then, you know, to push it into a higher orbit, there's a lot of question whether the dynamics of it, or, you know, could break apart and cause a bunch of debris, which would be a problem. And just like, you know, the way that was built at the time it was built, it's not, it's not new space, it's, it's very much old space, and most of the folks that built it are retired and doing awesome stuff, doing other stuff. So, you know, to find the group of people that would be able to say assuredly that this will be safe. And, you know, there's the whole geopolitical problem that's that's really kind of the big elephant in the room. So I, I think that the best thing to do is like, you know, can we get it? Would it would cost, you know, 10 different Falcon nine flights and all this up mass to big free flying satellites that could do the same thing that ISS could do in the next five to 10 years. If we, you know, can extend this life a little bit longer, you know, we can get a 10x benefit from it, from from these test payloads. And I think ICM like rendezvous, proximity operations, all the stuff that Northrop Grumman and astroscale and starfish and all these guys are doing, like using ISS, especially once it's on crude as your platform for doing, you know, replacing things, doing, trying, proving out. ICM makes a phenomenal platform for that. So I think that's the best opportunity for it. Well, keeping in line with that same, I guess, sort of the circular economy. And we briefly talked about this before, but I wanted to dig a little deeper into into that aspect, because you mentioned a couple of different interesting things, of, you know, going to the moon, and, you know, having, you know, mining oxygen and having the byproduct be metal. What other, I guess, methods of a circular economy, or, you know, circular supply chain of what we talk about here on Earth can be applied into space? Well, yeah, so, so, so again, like getting back to just, just thinking about the lunar environment, there oxygen to refuel starships makes. I mean, that there's our there's companies ethos, our path, a few others that are, that's their whole business plan. We're going to going to land on the moon, we're going to extract oxygen, and we're going to launch it back to resupply starships. That's, that's what we're going to do. So, so I think that's the most obvious that I mean that one's starship is happening. New Glenn is happening. They both need to resupply with oxygen. So I think that's the first step in the circular economy. And then again, like I, like I outlaid like the equipment that harvest the converts the lunar dust, regolith into oxygen. And. And metal slag, they're going to have wear parts. So, so that's kind of the first, you know, sustaining those, and logistics of keeping those going. And, you know, so logistic, keeping the things that produce the oxygen going, and then the logistics of getting the oxygen to the rockets, and then hydrogen will probably still come from Earth for a while. So that's, that's step one, phase one. And then, and then, yeah, I think you know beyond, beyond that it's going to be trying to get data centers probably would be a next pretty obvious resource to to use on orbit. Data centers are very quickly, you know, they don't, they don't use a ton of energy right now, but as we know, with AI and everything else compute, compute is gonna outpace everything else as energy goes so there are advantages to doing compute on on orbit, especially, you know, you have a lot more solar density. So, so getting energy is good. Cooling is a little bit of a problem, but I'm sure we'll figure that out. So I could see, you know, building these data centers, and you start to see some of that in logistics and servicing those data centers, getting those things on orbit. And, of course, you know, all the comms satellites are going to keep expanding. So that's kind of near term stuff. I think that if we get people on orbit, then that's going to be total game changer, because now you have to bring cargo and food and all the things for life support, and depending on how adventurous people want to be, that could get really interesting. We could, you know, that that becomes a lot more like surface logistics, but, but same thing you're gonna have starship. It's probably gonna start out wherever starship and new Glenn refuel. These will become the nodes that you know, your your your ports, if you will, where you're going to get all your new stuff and resupply from that. Now it sounds super interesting, because, from everything that we discussed, from what my my understanding is, is that cislunar does is kind of dabbling in each one of these different sort of supply chain segments. Is that accurate, or where, I guess, because it's taken us what, like 4046, to get to the recording, to get to to what you actually do, what your company does. Can you, can you break down? I guess you know what, what? What? I don't want to say tentacles, but you know the all of the different lines doing well, again, it's a lot like that game I talked about Red Alert Command and Conquer, where it's like a very, very much of a multi layer strategy game, where, you know, you have to think about, well, what? Okay, we solve this problem, it's gonna open up this other gap, like, you know, if so. So that's, I think that's, that's, that's the way to look at it. So we, we are very much focused commercially on power management and distribution, and specifically a higher power level. So 1000 watts and above is where we start to become very effective. There's, there's, there's somewhat of a proliferation. I mean, it's, it's hardly a terrestrial version of that. But for Leo, low Earth orbit satellites, CubeSats. The CubeSat market is, is pretty well, you know, there's, there's, you can go online and you can get parts for CubeSats pretty easily. What's a CubeSat? So that a CubeSat is 111, unit is a, is a, is a smallest CubeSat, typically, and a one unit is basically the volume of one liter of water, which is 1010 centimeters cubed. So 10 centimeters by 10 centimeter by 10 centimeters is one you happens to be the same thing as one liter of water. Way that works out and typically to like, the density of a CubeSat is similar to the density of water. So at 1u is maybe around one kilogram. Six you might be six kilograms. It all scales from there. So but anyway, there's Aerospace Corporation and a few others Taryn like these guys kind of really commercialized and made CubeSats pretty accessible. Now, CubeSats are not designed to last very long. You know, they go up. They usually don't have their own propulsion systems. Some of the bigger ones might, but they're kind of like a disposable, lowest cost of entry type of satellite. Then once you go beyond that, you get into your microsats and your small fats. Happens to be a small set conference coming up here in two weeks or a few weeks in Utah. But anyway, so these are anything that's like, not like a, you know, exquisite type of satellite is, typically, at this stage, is called a small sat. And those get into, like, you know, maybe 10 you up to, like a ESPA, which is, which is, which is just, I forgot what ESPA stands for, but it's, it's like a ring. And it used to be, you know, you inside the fairing. This ring is what would attach your satellite to the to the to the structural part of the rocket, and then, and then the Esper ring usually has a bunch of smaller ports. So, so there'd be, like, one big, you know, defense type satellite on the or weather satellite in the top. And then, and then you might have a bunch. Smaller sets, small sets located around it. And then someone is like, Man, this Esper ring, we could just use that as the basis for a satellite. So anyway, they're like a meter across, usually, you know, maybe 100 to 500 kilograms is kind of in that range. And so that's where a lot of these satellites for like SDA, the Space Development Agency, the ones that are, you know, looking for, they're doing a lot of, you know, communications, also space situation awareness. Those are kind of in that class. And right now, most of them are around, like 200 watts to maybe 600 watts for their their propulsion, overall, they might, you know, somewhere less than, less than 1000 watts. The next versions that are coming out, though, are going to be a lot more power than that. So that's what we anticipated, and now we're starting to see that happening. So we've really been focusing on the larger hall thruster power systems, and then beyond that, just realizing that, you know, a power processing unit for hall thruster has to manage a bunch of other power sources. It's a power management distribution system and satellites. All, you know, we're like, Well, hey, the used to be like communications and some of these other payloads would be the biggest power consumer. But now that Space Force and commercial space, they want dynamic maneuver capability. So they want to, you know, used to be just get something to orbit. You might use your thruster to get you to that orbit, but, and then you you turn it on occasionally, just to keep you in the same spot. Now they want to get to orbit, and then they want to move around and move one place to another, and then move back. And so it's dynamic space operation. So you need so now a sudden, like your your communications hardware, whatever that payload is your instruments. That's not your biggest power consumer. Now it's your your thrusters. So that's, that's an interesting spot. So now it's like, well, if you're going to be if your biggest source is your thruster, then then why isn't this later doing our power management? Because you know, the biggest demand is this thing. So and we're already managing power at lower power levels for the rest of the satellite so, so that's the kind of thing that we started to get into commercially. We've also, there's, there's a lot of development on directed energy and power beaming. I've, I stumbled into this concept called dual use directed energy. So the idea there is that you can use energy for, like communications. You can use it to power your satellite. So that's that's pretty interesting, because now you might have a satellite that's, you know, 10 kilowatts, but if you can get directed energy over your solar panels, you might be able to get up to 100 kilowatts or something. So get a lot more energy with the same size solar panel, and again, with more energy, now you can move a lot faster, do all that sort of thing. So it turns out that receiving energy is a similar problem to what we run into with some plasma thrusters, where you got to take, take energy that comes in one packet, and then distribute that at a lesser energy level, or, you know, receive, store up a bunch of energy and then send it out a pulse. So just, you know, I jokingly, to put it layman's terms, like we basically build doors and do crowd control for electrons. You know, sometimes you're, you know, you're trying to empty a stadium really fast. You need a certain type of door for that. That's kind of, kind of what a power management system does, or power processing system does, but in simple terms. So power management, that's commercially, that's, that's where a lot of our money comes from. But we also do a lot with ICM still. So we have the extruder that's going to NASA, and we're going to be involved in a new group that's, you know, that a lot of the funding for that type of science, for NASA is, is is being I don't think it's being cut. I think it's being moved around. We're not sure where it's going to be moved to. But in the meantime, there's some private groups that were worth and also things like cosmic and there's, there's a handful of these other groups. They're they're doing, they're still keeping the keeping the burners on, on on ice. We're still involved in that a lot, and as funding as we figure out where that's going to be, we very much want to keep pursuing that sort of thing. And then, I guess the last thing that we've been involved in a lot is the logistics and interfacing. So we've worked with several of these companies that are they're looking at refueling and rendezvous, proximity operations. A lot of our skill set, you know, our skill set is, is high power electronics and mechatronics. We find that folks that automation type engineers really work well for us. But we developed and one of our first Space Force contracts, a way to kind of have cartridges. So it's the idea of having a Line Replaceable unit, as opposed to refueling, you just swap your whole thruster and propellant tank all together. And we realized doing this with we were looking at metal propellant at the time, we realized that, hey, you know, the thing that holds the metal propellant rods is we're. Be negligible mass fraction compared to the propellant itself. And, and, you know, and a lot of times it, it erodes, or there's, there's other things that kind of cause it to not be reliable over time. So we kind of want to replace it anyway. So, so, so we kind of the other analogy for this is the Propane Exchange. So if you've ever been to a, you know, the grocery store, or if you have propane grill, you swap out the whole tank. You know, you don't have a propane tank. You know, if you live out in the middle of nowhere, you don't have a propane truck. Come to your house, you bring it to the grocery store, you swap it out in a little cage, and you get a new tank. That's, you know, it's not necessarily new. It's, oftentimes it refurbished, but it might have a new valve, so, you know, it's not going to leak on you. That's pretty convenient. If you're dealing with propane gas, it's a similar thing that we noticed in space. So that's we've been also focused on, you know, how do we develop that's the reason I read the box, you know. How do we develop a sea container, if you will? And all the interfaces on the sea container, the mechanical interfaces that allow it to latch to the ship or whatever, you know, how do you build a sea container so that it can fit the most different types of systems we've been looking at, propulsion and energy. So it's like, hey, it turns out the six kilowatt thruster can fit in this box. And so, so can a six kilowatt solar array. Hey, that's that's pretty convenient. That's a good universal size to maybe start with, and start building these so and of course, the idea is to build those into modular satellites that I was talking about earlier, the modular, open source type of assembly you can, you know, propulsion systems, power systems, whatever it is, calm systems. And so we, we've been very, you know, very involved in various capacities on, on what those interfaces might look like. How do you, how you make them blast, right? You know what's the thermal is? Thermal is a big thing in space. How do you how do you move heat? And, of course, how do you move power through those interfaces? Yeah, I mean, everything that you've been talking about in this conversation has has felt like building the fundamentals, or everything that we've learned, you know, going back to the box book, you know, all the fundamentals and systematizing certain aspects here on earth absolutely apply in space. And then one extra bonus to that, I think that you really harp on a lot, and I love this aspect of, you know, what we learned in grade school, you know, reduce, reuse, recycle, and being able to reduce some of those costs and recycle some of these goods and reuse some of these goods. I mean, these are all things that we should be thinking about, if we could, kind of, you know, be able to start our infrastructure and our logistics plan over in a new realm, what does that look like? And so you've done a really great job of breaking that down for us and how people right now are working on these complex problems. And I thank you so much for your time today. Is there anything else that you feel is important to mention that we haven't already talked about, outside of the fact that I could probably continue this conversation for another few hours? Oh, I guess I always have to give a plug for for NASA and the folks that helped us get here. I do think that at least the Small Business SBIR program, innovative small business, innovative research program. I mean, we wouldn't be here without that, getting getting our legs under us with NASA through our phase one, phase two and phase two extension, and then tech flights. The tech flights have really helped. So we've done two, sorry, we've done three parabolic flights, and then we have an orbital flight with momentous that that NASA helped pay for. And then we should have an ISS flight actually coming up as well. So, so all of this, you know, we, we started out focusing on this metal thing and that, and that's still happening. And we spun off this commercial product that everyone needs now, which is awesome. So like that. I mean, it really did exactly what it was supposed to do, as far as we were concerned. I also, you know, Space Force has been phenomenal. I don't know how we didn't have a Space Force all this time. I do think that Space Forces is critical, and seeing it grow, we, you know, we had a number of SBIR Through Space Force, and just the type of folks that we get to work with at Space Force are really awesome. Definitely, some of the leadership there is, is thinking the same way I'm talking. I mean, a lot of this is from, from talking to these guys, and just, you know, I call it, I describe it like Hogwarts. My job is like Hogwarts. I get to go with, hang out with all the other magicians and come up with ways to save the world and promote, you know, our human an abundant human future. So that's, that's, that's the best thing I can say right now, I guess, well, amazing conversation. And I can't wait to do this again, because there's plenty of more quite I didn't even really look at my notes of what I had, and I probably have, you know, at least 40 questions in that document. So that's the testament, you know, of how good this conversation was. So, so Joe, where can I send folks? Where can I direct them to follow you on social media, you know, all that good stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you're a power. Electronics engineer, or, you know, somebody that's a big builder of Tesla stuff and high energy we are hiring right now. So please find me on LinkedIn, or reach out to, you know, our cislunar industries.com. Is our website. That's the best way to get ahold of us. We are very active on LinkedIn. We are at pretty much every conference. You'll see a cislunar person. We try to be very accessible. We love to talk to everybody. We're not, you know, we I know that I don't know everything. That's that's probably one of my the secrets that I don't mind sharing is that I always ask, I try to find the people that I want to be like, and I surround myself with those people, the people that are really doing it. And that's, that's how you get here, and that's how you keep moving things forward. So absolutely, if you see me, come talk to me. I'd love to hear it and reach out to us absolutely. I'll put all of that in the show notes. And I echoed that statement. I try to use this podcast to be able to talk to people that are way smarter than me, and you absolutely fit that bill. So thank you so much for joining us and sharing your perspective and helping us understand more of what's going on in the logistics of space and building that New Silk Road. So thank you again, Joe. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of everything was logistics, where we talk all things supply chain for the thinkers in freight, if you liked this episode, there's plenty more where that came from. Be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you never miss a conversation. The show is also available in video format over on YouTube, just by searching everything is logistics. And if you're working in freight logistics or supply chain marketing, check out my company, digital dispatch. We help you build smarter websites and marketing systems that actually drive results, not just vanity metrics. Additionally, if you're trying to find the right freight tech tools or partners without getting buried in buzzwords, head on over to cargorex.io where we're building the largest database of logistics services and solutions. All the links you need are in the show notes. I'll catch you in the Next episode and Go jags. You.