bluShift Aerospace

Great question Marlon. Besides the fact that we use a fuel that's completely non-toxic and easily derived from agricultural sources across the world, our biggest differentiator is that we provide a dedicated launch service to nanosatellite customers who, on these larger rockets, are secondary or worse class customers in the payload. In our customer discovery interviews we found that nanosatellite customers we're incredible frustrated by the lack of control and influence they had on launch because the larger satellite customers (the 'primary payloads') dictated the when and where they go. We heard nightmare stories of customers having to wait so long for the launch to actually occur that they have to lay off their staff as they wait, or in the case of academics the students or even professors have moved on before they ever get to see their science launched. In short, in the nanosatellite market customers are currently given the option to fly "hobo" in freight trains (SpaceX, ULA, etc), buses (RocketLab, Virgin Galactic) but no one is currently given the option to fly in a taxi/Uber/Lyft to space. That's what we will do - provide them with a launch service that's dedicated to just one, two or three customer nanosatellite payloads at once to space. And what we learned from customers is that they would pay more for this service in many cases. It's just like how we pay more per mile to use Lyft/Uber than we do to take a train across the country per mile. But the problem with the train is quite often doesn't go when and where we ultimately want to go. Please let me know if you need further clarification.

Hi Christopher, Great question. Our minimum goal was $500k, which we hit several weeks ago. This amount was the minimum amount that we need to proceed with MAREVL engine build and testing. Fortunately, we blew past that goal. Hitting the full $1.07M means we would be able to begin to move forward in the design and build-out of the rest of Starless Rogue (e.g. telemetry systems, fuselage, composite tanks, etc). So, while we definitely would like to hit the full campaign amount we're delighted that we hit the goal that enables us to now begin building the full-sized test engine. This is the last time Wefunder investors will be able to invest at the max cap so low ($18M). We planning to start a 2nd crowd equity funding campaign once the MAREVL engine testing has begun with a higher max. cap evaluation.

Hey Craig, sorry for the confusion. The campaign has be unpaused so we can work out any issues and hasn't been promoted just yet but clearly you picked up on it! We decided recently that we are going to do a friends round at this more attractive terms for up to $1M where the valuation stays the same and then will be increased.

Hi Miguel, I can't get into the details of our proprietary non-toxic fuel blend. But I can say that it can be sourced from farms across the world. I can say that one can even eat it with no ill effects - I wouldn't put manure, for instance, in that category (since so many people usually ask that question next ;). Figuring out the optimal fuel blend took us about 4 years. It took about a year and a half to develop the MAREVL™ engine that would combust it stably and to the performance levels we need to achieve space launch. It isn't a fuel which can be used in the most common type of rocket engine - the liquid fuel rocket engine that typically combusts a refined version of kerosene called RP-1. It is possible that down the road we will sell the MAREVL™ engines with our biofuel to other launch companies that want a more environmentally responsible form of powering their launch vehicles. Let me know if you have any other questions. kind regards, Sascha

Hey Nicholas, our minimum goal was $500k which enables our team to fully build out and begin testing & tuning our full-sized MAREVL engine. So our team is thrilled we busted through that number. Everything we raised beyond that allows us to work on parallel efforts such as telemetry systems, fuselage, FAA licensing and ground systems. We expect our team to grow to 12-15 FT individuals next year and 50 individuals within 4 years.

Hi Paul, Thanks for your questions. Ok, let's jump right in... The $69B market is a forecast from Frost & Sullivan from a few years ago. What the reporting of that report said was that then through 2030 the total revenue for small satellite launch is expected to be a total of $69B. This number is often getting misunderstood as $69B in 2030 alone. Now that said, we just found out that Frost&Sullivan's market report is now quoting $28B as the total revenue up through 2030 (frost.com/news/press…-28-billion-by-2030), still an incredible market for launching tiny satellites, though down from what was being quoted 2 years ago. For bluShift our target market is small satellite payloads going to polar orbit (taking advantage of Maine's coast line that enable that trajectory). A private studied performed by the research firm Aerocapture, paid for by the Maine Space Grant Consortium, determined that just slightly over 50% of these satellites need a polar orbit. As such we believe our TAM is roughly half of the total market for launching nanosatellites. In terms of funding for our customers, it depends on which customers base we're talking about. If we talk about our beachhead (initial) customer base for both sub-orbital and orbital small payload launch then it is government grants (e.g. NASA Flight Opportunities program for sub-orbital and NASA CSLI program for orbital). But if we're talking about our long-term orbital plans then our target customer base will largely be commercial satellite operators, who are funded from private capital and their own revenue. There are indeed regulatory barriers. :) For us the most significant is both the one to make our future launch site in Maine licensed with the FAA (faa.gov/space/licenses/spaceport_license), perform expensive (1 time) environmental studies for our rockets. And similarly challenging is getting the launch license itself from the FAA (see faa.gov/space/stream…d_licensing_process). We will also seek a license from the FCC to operate temporarily on certain bands to provide our rockets with telemetry. We will be working with the US Guard to coordinate the clearing of the downrange area on the ocean. It is possible that we will also need to get permissions from state or federal wildlife preserves in order to operate but that is dependent on the finalization of our launch location to some level. Ok, I hope that gets you pointed in the right direction. And feel free to ask more questions. Since the campaign ends in about 24 hours I'm going to be more vigilant on any questions that come through to answer asap!

Great question. The answer gets to the heart of bluShift's advantage with MAREVL hybrid engine. Most rocket companies focus on building a race car engine that costs a lot to R&D and manufacturer, while we are focused on developing a good-enough-to-get-payloads-to-space engine that performs solidly and costs significantly less to develop and manufacturer (in car terms, think Toyota Camry or Ford Escort of days past). While it will likely never have the same performance as a traditional liquid fuel rocket engine (such as Rocket Lab's), it has nearly half the complexity, plumbing and no turbo-pump (very expensive) which greatly reduces our costs for R&D and ultimately production. Additionally, our engines are safer with a solid fuel and liquid oxidizer and we currently don't use a cryogenic oxidizer which also reduces our infrastructure and logistical investment. The $1M needed to finish off testing and development of the MAREVL engine is for it's use within the Starless Rogue. We fully anticipate and are already planning additional modifications and improvements starting sometime in 2022 to make it ready for Red Dwarf. And, of course, the plan is to use any improved versions within Starless Rogue too.

Love Mythbusters :). We may have to look at adding a few Gummies to our biofuel blend. ;)

Hi Douglas, great question and I don't think we obviously state the answer to your question anywhere. The answer is yes we very much indeed intend to reuse each MAREVL engine for our sub-orbital launches (Starless Rogue). And for LEO (Red Dwarf) our intention is to at least recover and reuse the first stage cluster of engines. We expect there will be a small amount of checkout and refurbishment that will need to be performed prior to reloading the engine with a new fuel core (grain) in preparation for the next launch. Our oxidizer is loaded just prior to flight as you might imagine.

Hi Aaron, a lot of good questions! A little background on some of our history. To develop our business plan and launch service strategy we performed over 40 customer and industry stakeholder interviews. From those we gained many insights as to what's working well for launch customers, their pain points, and nuanced insights. As a result of our customer discovery process we pivoted our business, launch service and marketing strategy towards servicing an underserved beachhead customer market: academic and civil researchers. For both suborbital and orbital markets we will begin in these markets and expand to commercial customers within 1-2 years. Let's dive into your specific questions: 1) Competition and Differentiation:[There are quite a few competitors as you note in your slide deck. Can you name your top three direct competitors and what advantages you see having over them?] We are ramping up to provide launch services in the suborbital to space market and then add the much larger orbital one. Our principal operational competitors in the suborbital-to-space market are Blue Origin and Up Aerospace. We also expect Virgin Galactic to also perform suborbital payload services shortly too. Our differentiation evolved from what we heard customers wanted: 1) more time in zero g 2) more room 3) low g forces and zero centrifugal forces during launch. As a result, we have designed Starless Rogue to provide up to double the time in zero g, more payload space than any of them and low g forces that are on par with Blue Origin with no rotational g forces such as with Up Aerospace. In the orbital market there are more operational competitors such as SpaceX, Rocketlab and Virgin Orbit. There are also a number of other fairly well known companies who've made headlines and have performed test flights or are possibly within 1-3 years of doing so. Here again, our choice of launch service differentiation comes from the insights we gained during the customer discovery process. No launch provider was providing dedicated nanosatellite (Cubesat) launch services. Nanosatellites, weighing as little as 1.3kg and more typically around 10kg, currently only have the option of flying as 2nd or 3rd class citizens in payload bays that are capable of carrying up to 1000x's that. What this means for them is that they have zero control, little if any influence of where and when they can go to space, and frequently are forced to tolerate significant delays resulting from the primary payload customers. Customers often are forced to sacrifice their actual science, expend 25-40% more of their limited resources to meet the requirements of these larger launch vehicles that could be better spent on activities directly related to their research. And most disappointedly, frequently researcher customers found that by the time their nanosatellite was launched post-grad, undergrad and even the principal researchers themselves had moved on. And that's where bluShift is different. bluShift Red Dwarf launch vehicle will truly dedicated launch services where the nanosatellite (cubesat) customer is the primary payload to space. At 30kg, our payload carrying capacity means that during launch we will carry as little as one nanosatellite to orbit. And we can do this profitably because of our business model and technology which inherently lowers the costs of launching at this scale.    2) [ You state 50% of launches want polar orbits. What about the other 50%? What are your allowable launch inclination limitations in Maine? Why is launching from Vandenburg so expensive to where Maine would be preferred?] Outside of polar orbits, the 2nd largest demand is for 50-60 degrees inclination with the demand for all other 10 degree segments of inclination representing a very low percentage of the demand. The particular study we used, did not get into the explicit reasons other orbits were chosen. However, we suspect that the 50-60 inclination is due to launches from Cape Canaveral or from being launched from the International Space Station. Additionally, we believe there's an element of "what's available is what customers ask for" especially in the researcher market. We believe that there is an unknown portion of customers who desire orbits other than polar really don't care what orbit their payload is in - just that it's in orbit.  Of which, they would also be able to launch to the inclinations available from Maine.  In terms of inclinations, depending on the ultimate coastal launch site location, it would range from somewhere between 63°-110°. The cost to be allowed to launch each time from Vanderburg, a US Military base, will cost significantly more than the entire Starless Rogue itself (our suborbital launch vehicle). We estimate the site launching costs on par with the entire cost for one of our future Red Dwarf orbital launch vehicles. Exactly why Vanderberg costs so much we don't know, but I would wager a guess that as a military base it was never cost optimized for commercial use. Additionally, as a military base, many of our possible international research customers would either be restricted entirely or exposed to significant, costly bureaucratic hurdles to be sent up on a flight from that location.   In comparison, launching from Maine we are able to build out only the minimal infrastructure required for our nano launchers. Our estimates are that on an on-going basis our per launch cost will represent less than 20% of the cost of Starless Rogue itself. This launch cost is one of our fundamental game changers. Launch site costs are one of the reasons that we would have to increase our payload size (i.e. revenue). The economy of scale is required to pay for all that pre-existing, extensive, large spaceport infrastructure. We pay for only what we need as opposed to whatever everyone else has needed in decades past or the DoD. 3) [Do you have any IP on the engine design or just holding it a trade secret? How confident are you that it will scale up with no issues? Is the engine dependent on the biofuel or can it run conventional fuels such as RP-1?] Currently we have chosen the path of trade secret as patents create additional exposure we consider at this time inappropriate for our portion of the aerospace industry.  Regarding scaling up, we have spent significant time researching this specific issue for our type of rocket engine (hybrid) and conferring with a technical expert at NASA who was our technical advisor during our NASA SBIR grant when we honed in the MAREVL™ engine the first time. As a result, we do fully anticipate there will be tuning issues to the larger size but not fundamental performance issue. We do believe that there would be possible issue if our hybrid engine diameter exceed 50% more than our current plans based upon our research. The MAREVL™ engine as it will be built for Starless Rogue will be the future building block for all of our rockets and stages, used in parallel where more thrust is required.  Using these engines in this fashion will not make the rocket dimensional optimized but cost optimized. And cost is where we need to excel to be competitive at the nanolaunch scale. The engine is a hybrid engine. In our case, that means the fuel is a solid. Is it dependent on our particular solid fuel? Partly yes. We would need to retune the engine, possibly its dimensions too if a different chemical formulation was used. In a fashion, you could say we discovered the basis of the fuel at first and then we spent significant resources to develop an engine that would optimally perform using it.  Also it's important to note since we use a hybrid engine we fundamentally have nearly half the engine complexities of traditional liquid rocket engines that combust RP-1, for instance. We only have to fundamentally control one fluid - our oxidizer. It's one of the many reasons we are able to reduce our R&D, on-going logistics and production costs. 4) [The slide deck mentions as $1.2M convertible note. Has this already been raised or is that down the road?] My apologies, an early version of the PDF of our Pitch Deck on Wefunder erroneously included this reference. Early on we were going down the route of simultaneously doing a convertible note round along with a SAFE note round. Our plans evolved quickly and we decided to focus first on the SAFE note investment vehicle. At this time, after our SAFE note funding rounds complete we plan on doing our first priced round in Series A or Seed Round. This could be as early as mid-2022 or later. Please let me know if that doesn't answer all of your questions or if you have additional ones. Thanks! Sascha