David: Well, Arvind, if you're a New Space company deciding to get into rocket science, there will be a lot of challenges. The first one, of course, is related to the access to space. It takes quite a long time to put your satellite into orbit. So you need to book your flight way in advance of your scheduled delivery time. And once it's your window, you need to make sure that everything is right the first time.
So you've got, definitely, no second chance to lift off. So that's point number one, I guess the number one challenge is to make sure that in terms of quality, you do everything right the first time.
The second thing or the second challenge, because there is a lot of competition out there, it's a developing market, but there are a lot of different competitors in there that want to provide better satellites or better launchers than you. So you have a first mover advantage that you need to secure. You need to be the first one to get your product to market.
Also, there is a big war on talent. There are not that many aerospace engineers all over the world. So people and companies are poaching talents from all over the world. So you need to be able to have your full team collaborating 24/7 on different continents, whether that's in the Silicon Valley or in the Space Valley in the U.S. or even in Europe, in Toulouse or Bremen, or even in India and other parts of the world.
I guess the other challenges are really more technical. First, on the engineering side, we are having satellites that are getting much smaller than before. So you need to work on a lot of integration, a lot of miniaturization on the electronics side but as well, a lot of integration between hardware and software.
And finally, on the manufacturing side, we are shifting really from the fact of producing one satellite or two or three or four satellites for each company every year to manufacturing something like 200 or even 300 satellites for a year. So we need to shift from essentially being craftsmen, doing one piece of art every year, to being much more robust on an industrial system. This is, I believe, what are the main challenges facing the new space industry.
Arvind: Well David, 300 satellites a year is pretty much like one satellite every day, even if you consider Sunday a holiday for satellite launch, that's a lot. I mean, with challenges come opportunities. At least that's the way I like to look at them.