Joining us now is Dirk Wallinger, CEO of York Space Systems, which just went public in January here at the New York Stock Exchange in a $630 million IPO.
I remember that day.
The company is positioning itself as a new kind of defense prime focused on building satellite constellations at speed and scale.
Dirk, welcome to taking stock.
Yeah, thank you for having, having me.
I appreciate it and uh yeah, I remember that day very well too.
Yes, I remember seeing you up there on the podium.
What makes space systems different from traditional aerospace players?
Yeah, what York is doing is really disrupt disrupting the traditional uh kind of play and and approach to aerospace.
What we're doing is we're able to execute at significantly lower, schedules, uh, much faster to delivery at half the cost.
Uh, and so we were, this company was always built around breaking up the multi-billion dollar satellites that took decades and proliferating them.
And so we build lots of satellites, uh, with similar capabilities, but in the hundreds and thousands.
What are the capabilities of the satellites you're building?
Yeah, today with the more advanced chips, uh, and the acceleration of production and supply chain in the US what you're able to do is, uh, you know, kind of much like your iPhone where it used to be a very large camera and a complicated camera to get a good picture.
Now you're able to break that up and do, uh, you know, hundreds and thousands of different pictures that are amalgamated together to make a better picture.
And that's kind Kind of what you're doing with satellites.
So instead of one gigantic satellite that kind of does everything, you're able to break up that capability into lots of different satellites that are smaller, uh, that can accomplish the same mission, and that could be communications, that can be earth observation, synthetic aperture radar, uh, and then a lot of the secure communications needs that we need in places like Iran and, uh, and Ukraine that we're seeing today.
And I understand you have a backlog.
What does that tell us about demand right now?
Yeah, really, uh, you know, we have a really strong backlog across a multitude of customers, uh, and capabilities for the United States.
The challenge now is just that there's no argument that the people are gonna need lots of more satellites and lots more capability.
What we need to do, uh, is the government, uh, and commercial. needs to issue out the funds to be able to deploy this stuff quickly.
Uh, and the government is getting very serious about that now.
We're starting to see lots of movement on issuing contracts so that we can get these supply chains rolling, uh, and get assets fielded.
It's, it's not the kind of supply chain that fires up in, in, uh, one month, you know, it takes, it takes a while to do that.
Uh, companies like York and, and SpaceX and other companies like that are well positioned to take advantage of that.
And can you tell us about your $187 million deal and what is proliferated space and why is it going mainstream?
Yeah, so we're really excited.
We, we recently signed a new commercial contract, uh, for a 20 plus constellation.
This is the first of many constellations for this customer, and the exciting thing is it's real commercial demand for space capabilities, uh, and that, you know, so it's a really exciting opportunity for us.
We'll be deploying that quickly.
Uh, proliferation, what it really means is, you know, when, when, uh, the United States was the only.
Uh, country really deploying, uh, satellites in space at scale, you know, we were the only ones up there.
And so what that meant was these platforms got very exquisite and very, very large.
The challenge with that is that now the US is in a contested environment with lots of other countries and adversaries like China and Russia, etc.
Uh, and really what happens is these large, very exquisite, uh, platforms in space become targets.
And what you could do is you can take down a $10 billion asset, uh, you know, with a $20 you know, with a, you know, $2 million missile.
Uh, and so by proliferating the systems and doing them in hundreds and thousands, it makes it so that you can't fully take down the capability.
You might be able to deter some of the capability, uh, you might be able to take down a few, but you can't take it all down at once.
And so, that's why we see this movement from national defense, but then also from commercial companies moving to proliferation.
All right, Dirk Wallinger, CEO of York Space Systems, thank you so much for joining us on taking stock.
