Episode 559: York Space CEO Dirk Wallinger on Scaling Satellites and the Next Space Race

Dirk Wallinger (0:00)

When I started this company a decade and a half ago, it was literally a multi-billion dollar, 10 year programs. Now we're down to seven months. And I think that's a lot of, you know, kind of why you're seeing all this excitement about what's happening in space is, it's finally becoming an industry.

SPEAKER_2 (0:18)

Dirk, thanks so much for joining us. Happy to have you here.

Dirk Wallinger (0:21)

Appreciate it, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_2 (0:22)

So let's start with where you sit every single day, the view from where you sit every single day. Space industry obviously has no shortage of opportunities, but there are bottlenecks that are currently, I wouldn't say necessarily stopping those opportunities from being taken advantage of, but at least slowing down the pace of those opportunities and the ability to accomplish certain things.

They need solving. We're talking about things like supply chains, scale, the sheer complexity of getting hardware into orbit. Where does York see itself solving either these problems or others that would allow the industry to continue to move forward, potentially at an even faster pace than it currently is?

Dirk Wallinger (1:04)

Yeah, sure. No, I appreciate it. I mean, that's one of the areas I think that space has really suffered for, for probably five or six decades since its initial founding, was it was very, very bespoke. So it was basically like kind of the car industry at the turn of the century, where you had wealthy people, and this analogy would be wealthy countries who had national needs that were kind of pursuing interests one at a time with very large budgets to do that. And it's been that way for five or six decades. So the United States government has been historically the number one customer, and they kind of buy in steps, right? They'll buy in bulk, and then they don't buy for a while, and then they buy again, or we want to do the shuttle. So it's kind of this starts and stops that have been kind of challenging, and quite frankly have prevented the industry from being industrialized. And that's the main challenge. And one of the things that we're seeing change now, and quite frankly, it's what York was meant to address.

And so the high customization for the high dollar kind of ticket items meant that there wasn't a lot of standardization in the industry. So suppliers, traditional aerospace manufacturers would kind of hang around and they'd get a contract and say, great, we'll go custom build this for you. And so York was founded around the principles of that really wasn't going to be sustainable going forward. What we needed to do was be far less risk averse, right? Things like Hubble, JWST, billion dollar things that take a decade. When something's a billion dollars, you're going to be risk averse, which means you don't want to take risks, which actually makes the problem worse. It makes it more expensive. It makes the schedule go out longer. So York was founded around what we need to do is develop platforms that can do 70, 80 percent of the missions out there, standardize them and produce them at scale. And so really the problem which is solving supply chain is, if you're an auto manufacturer, if you bought and made 10 cars at a time and then stopped, and then went and made another 50 and stopped and then made another 10, yeah, you're going to have supply chain issues.

But that's not what automakers do. They say this is the market demand that we think is there. This is how many cars we're going to make this year. We're going to bulk buy them and we're going to make them.

And so that's very much in the vein of where York fits. So we have three different platforms ranging from like 100 kilograms to over 2,000 kilograms. So you can think like size of your car, right? And those are standardized platforms that when the customer comes with something that they need, we can basically take that standard platform, make minor modifications to it, and we can field satellites in things like seven months, right? So we're talking about, you know, where the industry was when I started this company a decade and a half ago, it was literally a multi-billion dollar 10 year programs. Now we're down to seven months. And I think that's a lot of, you know, kind of why you're seeing all this excitement about what's happening in spaces. It's finally becoming an industry.

SPEAKER_2 (3:45)

Yeah. And because of the increased speed that I would think also allows for increased demand.

Dirk Wallinger (3:53)

Yeah. Yes. I mean, you know, when you're, you know, storing away half a billion dollars for a satellite and it takes a long time, it makes you not really want to do it again.