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The space race is heating up, with Blue Origin, SpaceX (SPAX.PVT), Rocketlab, and Amazon (AMZN) Project Kuiper each making significant strides. Andrew Chanin, co-founder and CEO of ProcureAM, joins Catalysts to discuss new developments, competition, and diversification in the launch industry, as well as space race satellite companies to keep an eye on.
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Reusable rockets is is the name of the game. What's your level of confidence? Obviously, Falcon 9 has done thousands of of missions up there and brought satellites up uh with no problem whatsoever. Uh then you've got uh Boeing with Vulcan. They've had two trips, so that's a a positive. And then you've got Blue Origin with New Glenn just doing one trip. How do you expect that competition to accelerate over the next couple years? And kind of what are your heaviest weights in the ETF that are that are playing the space theme?
Yeah, so launch is extremely important. And yes, it's been great for getting costs down, but you do have more players coming out. Um, you look at what Amazon is doing with Project Kuiper and they didn't just sign up Blue Origin to be a launch provider to get their satellites up into space. They actually contracted four different companies for, I believe about 80 launches scheduled over the next several years. And so, you know, even being able to think send things to space, it's really important to make sure that you have a diversified list of launch providers just in case uh there's any mishaps at one company or another. And so that's kind of diversifying across the the launch industry, but then you have your different types of launch companies. So, you know, for Project Kuiper, you know, they're planning to launch about 3200 satellites, about 1600 of them need to be launched uh in about a year's time. And so, you know, you need to have bandwidth in uh and and plenty of supply in launch to be able to get that amount of satellites up. SpaceX has you know, starlink which has been a rival and they have now more satellites in operation than there were total satellites in operation when we first launched our fund six years ago. So we've been seeing tremendous amount of companies sending uh satellites into low earth orbit and it's happening rapidly. So you know, in our fund, we have companies like uh for launch, you have Rocket Lab, uh another name that we we hadn't mentioned doesn't have any of those Project Kuiper launches, but uh they're working on their next generation uh rocket as well so they could send much larger payloads up. We have names like Locky and Boeing which form the United Launch Alliance as well, which is a launch provider.
