Hira Virdee is CEO and co-founder of Foundational, a London company just out of stealth with £8.2 million, building a laser-based network for space situational awareness. In this Astro Ben Podcast interview, host Ben Gamble talks with him about how lasers can track what is in orbit. Hira also founded Lumi Space.
They cover his path from astrodynamics to founding Lumi Space, why he built a company around laser ranging, space debris in plain terms, what Kessler syndrome is, how objects are tracked today, and the role of governments in space traffic management. If you are curious about the space industry and the people building it, browse the full Astro Ben Podcast archive or the complete list of episodes.
What you will hear
From astrodynamics to founding Lumi Space
Space debris in plain terms and what Kessler syndrome is
What satellite laser ranging is and how objects are tracked today
What Foundational is building and rolling out its laser station network
Raising the funding round and the role of governments in space traffic management
Advice for young engineers
Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:45 From astrodynamics to founding Lumi Space
1:58 The stolen phone and Entrepreneur First
3:29 Why build a company around laser ranging
5:14 Space debris in plain terms
8:44 What is Kessler syndrome
11:18 How objects are tracked today
14:19 What is satellite laser ranging
16:14 What Foundational is building
17:52 Rolling out the laser station network
20:46 Why space situational awareness matters now
22:24 Raising the funding round
24:33 Where Foundational sits in the market
27:20 The role of governments in space traffic management
30:14 Quick fire questions
31:58 Advice for young engineers
33:25 Outro
Hira Virdee and Foundational
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Transcript
Ben Gamble: There are tens of thousands of objects we track in orbit, and millions more we can't. One of them could end a satellite's life tomorrow. Hello and welcome to the Astro Ben Podcast. I'm your host, Ben Gamble, and this is episode 125. My guest today is Hira Virdee, CEO and co-founder of Foundational, a London company that has just come out of stealth with 8.2 million pounds to build a laser-based network for tracking what's in orbit. Before that, he founded Lumi Space, working with ESA and the UK Space Agency on the same problem. We'll talk about the debris problem, why tracking it is harder than it sounds, and how firing lasers at satellites could make orbit safer. If you enjoyed the show, please like and subscribe, it helps more than. Right, let's go. Hira, welcome to the show. Hira, welcome to the Astro Ben Podcast. How you doing?
Hira Virdee: Very good, thanks. Thank you for having me.
Ben Gamble: Good. It's great to chat. Let's start with you. Let's jump straight in. How did you go from astrodynamics to founding Lumi Space and now Foundational?
Hira Virdee: Absolutely. I got into astrodynamics by sheer luck. I ended up not really expecting or knowing what to go into, and applied for a bunch of different PhD programs, and ended up selected for, and selecting, astrodynamics with the US Air Force as the topic that I'd focus on. And I think any entrepreneurial journey is quite unique and winding in its own way. But from there I ended up, just by virtue of time and place, going into business and management consulting, so doing data-driven analytics for FTSE 100 companies. And that was quite exciting. And, you know, I think the thread that I draw through any of these aspects is problem solving. So that was solving a different problem every few weeks with a new client. And eventually, you know, it ended up actually having my phone stolen by a masked moped rider in London, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and really again set my mind to solving a problem, because the police case was closed so quickly. So I actually started tracking mopeds involved in crime by crowdsourcing the data, because the halls of residence on the corner there wouldn't give me any of the data, any of the CCTV involved, so I didn't really have anything to hand to the police. And that started catching the attention of international news media, and I got invited in to Entrepreneur First to start a business and to decide how I'm going to solve my problem with some entrepreneurial ambition. And that's really how I got into Lumi Space, and going back to the background of astrodynamics. And that journey from Lumi, of doing research and development across interesting areas of the UK and the global space sector, really led to some core value propositions being validated. And at the time that those reached a fever pitch, actually, my co-founder and myself decided this is the time to start a new business and to go, you know, absolutely all guns blazing at the problem, and here's where we are.
Ben Gamble: Fantastic. Well, I had no idea about the phone stealing aspect. And that's slightly triggering for me. That's happened to me more than once in London and in the same sort of location. So I'm glad you did something about that, just on a personal level. But yeah, that's very interesting how you sort of pivoted and went to a problem solving focus. What was the moment you decided laser ranging was the thing to build a company around?
Hira Virdee: Actually, I think the core ideas and that gap in space surveillance were identified even back during my PhD. So if we look at, you know, 2010, 2011, looking at using laser ranging data to validate the physics-based computational models that I was building, there really wasn't enough of the validation data that I could get hold of to advance to the next stage of the models that I wanted to produce. And so seeing that bottleneck long before the reusability of rockets or the growth of SpaceX or the current deployment of constellations, I think that was compounded. So that core idea, or the view of a gap in the world, was compounded significantly by the rise of the space industry. And so when I went into Entrepreneur First, I remember some conversations where I was actually looking initially to start a business around data analytics, around the problems that I'd been working on with large enterprises. And I sat across the table from Matt Clifford, and, you know, one of the questions he asked was, you know, well, why are you the person to solve that problem? I could imagine ten thousand people who have worked in that industry, you know, go back to your background and find some of those problems, because if you're much more uniquely suited to solving a particular problem, figure that one out. And so that really resonated with me, that, you know, the ideas of competition and breadth of market and depth of knowledge, they're quite core to developing a value proposition that really does hit home.
Ben Gamble: Well, let's talk about space debris. I've talked about the space debris problem on the podcast before, but I'd love to hear it from you in plain terms. ESA put out a space environment report which talks about roughly one and a half million pieces of space junk between one and ten centimeters. How should listeners sort of picture that? How big of a problem is that?
Hira Virdee: So I think really there's two sides to this problem, right? One is the growth of the number of objects, and the other is the size of objects. Starting with the number of objects: back when I was doing my PhD, there were a thousand active satellites and of the order of 10,000 debris. And I remember actively planning out sessions to go outside to look at the night sky during the phase where the object is sunlit and you're in darkness, because that's really the time that's best. You can see many of these satellites now with the naked eye. And having to plan out and go at a particular time to go and see these objects is very, very different to where we find ourselves today with fifteen thousand active assets and many tens of thousands of large debris. And I would recommend for any of the listeners to go outside shortly after sunset or during sunset, and just look into the sky and let your eyes acclimatize, start to see some of those objects that are moving around. And they'll look like stars, but they'll be moving across the sky gradually, not flashing, right, that's how you distinguish between planes and satellites. And then seeing that sheer number of active satellites, right? That growth of 10x and coming up to probably 100x, right? If you look at the launch filings, the ITU and FCC filings, the number is going to get bigger very, very quickly, especially as we get new launches online. Now, you mentioned one to ten centimeters. I think it's very important to not over-catastrophize around different sizes of debris. Things smaller than one centimeter we can often shield for with things like Whipple shields. So designing satellites to minimize the proliferation of debris is important. But the size range that you mentioned, one to ten centimeters, that's quite crucial. Because something from the size of a biscuit up to the size of an apple, right, they carry huge amounts of energy in orbit. The equivalent for something the size of an apple in orbit moving at seven kilometers a second, the comparable energy is a hand grenade, right? So in a collision, it's like setting off a hand grenade in the target object. Or, you know, for British listeners, an HGV on the motorway, or for Americans an eighteen-wheeler, you know, travelling at seventy miles an hour. That's a comparable amount of energy of that hitting your satellite. And so then you can start to imagine how many pieces come off during a collision and just what impact that has, because each of those goes and can form other collisions. So we've had two or three major debris-producing events: the Iridium-Cosmos collision, the Fengyun-1C satellite destruction, and there are documented satellites that were taken out by the debris from those events. So it's not a catastrophe if we can get the right data, if we can get positional knowledge on these objects, but also that we design our satellites in the right.
Ben Gamble: Sure. And for listeners new to it, I'd love to hear your explanation of the Kessler syndrome, which I heard about recently. What is the Kessler syndrome, and going from what you said, do you think we're closer to it than people think, or do we have more runway until that becomes a concern?
Hira Virdee: Actually, I don't want to sound alarmist, but I think it's already here. Right. If you look at the ESA State of the Space Debris Environment reports, if we stopped all launches today, the number of objects in space would continue to rise through collisions and explosions. So the Kessler syndrome, you know, by Don Kessler in the nineteen seventies, is this concept, or, you know, now the reality, that an object in space creating multiple objects, either through collision, fragmentation, a battery overheating or a fuel tank rupturing, or the direct collision of debris or a satellite with another satellite. Each of those fragments from that event goes and creates a chain reaction of onward collisions. And so it's a loop where at a particular density of satellites in orbit, that will be a self-sustaining loop that will take out a lot of space infrastructure. And I think we are already there in some ways. So the solutions need to be pretty quick, and they need to be in every satellite design going forwards.
Ben Gamble: I think you've answered this already, but which matters more? Is it the big dead satellites or the small pieces nobody can see?
Hira Virdee: It is both. It depends on the particular model that you look at, right? Because the key models of how many objects of a particular size exist in different orbital altitudes, even those disagree. So you've got MASTER and ORDEM, the two key models coming out of the US and Europe. We don't really know how many small debris exist at different altitudes. And that's a sensing and a shielding problem that I think takes longer to figure out. Reducing the mass of defunct objects on orbit is an easier way to reduce the potential for Kessler syndrome to take up much more, because if you've got, you know, a thousand small debris, you know, maybe can't track some of them as easily. If you've got one object that might create three or four thousand debris, that's a far bigger potential problem in the kind of Kessler end state. So I think that's why we see a lot of success, along with the dual-use aspects of space, in some of the active debris removal.
Ben Gamble: Sure. So we know there's a lot up there, but how well do we actually know where it is? How are objects tracked today and what are the limits?
Hira Virdee: So I think therein lies the key problem to maintaining a future where we maximize the orbit carrying capacity of space. Historically objects have been tracked using radars, particularly things like ballistic missile early warning systems. So at least in most places in the world, there aren't a whole load of ballistic missiles flying around. So the signatures that these objects end up picking up are those of space debris passing a few hundred kilometers above those sensors. You also have the initially manual space surveillance network. So I think it was called Operation Moonwatch. So in the US in the 1950s, the Smithsonian started convening a large set of volunteers who would look into space using, I think they were excess military stock sights for tanks. So they mounted them in such a way that they could see the sky, they would look at different patches of sky manually. Of course, sensing and electronics and data gathering were in a very different place back then. And they would time with a stopwatch, or write down the time at which a particular object passed a particular star in the sky or a particular constellation of stars in the sky. And that was back when there were a small handful of satellites, right. So 1950s, 1960s. Now that technology advanced quite quickly with robotics and with higher-powered, more advanced radars. So typically satellites and space debris are tracked by optical cameras, so just cameras staring into the sky or mounted to telescopes that slew and get enough light back from an object that's being reflected from the sun. Or from radars that are designed to pick up signatures of objects passing over them. And those will typically give you accuracies measured in tens to hundreds of meters at best and sometimes measured in the kilometers. So the way I like to give an analogy there is if every satellite were hundreds of meters or kilometers apart, then of course they would always be colliding. But the reality is these satellites are most often one to five meters across. So if your error bar is ten times or a hundred times bigger than your satellite, then you've got a problem, because you don't really know where that object is going to be in the future and whether it's on a collision course or not. Whereas I think the gap, and the place that we come in, is in reducing those error bars all the way down to millimeters and centimeters, and then you can actually propagate out the orbit and give much more informed decisions to operators to say, look, you're on a collision course, or, you know, open novel applications of space, rendezvous and proximity operations. So there's a lot that we can get into, but those are the two main methods that are applied today, particularly for defunct objects. You've got onboard GPS as well. But yeah, lots of methods and they all have their place to play.
Ben Gamble: Sure. Well, it sounds like you've identified the problem. So let's talk about satellite laser ranging. What is that to someone who's never heard of it? And you've called it the gold standard before, so I'm interested to understand why.
Hira Virdee: Absolutely. So actually the technology originated not that long after people were manually watching the sky and writing things down in terms of where satellites have been. So you start by shining a very short laser pulse from a ground station, and that light travels to an object in space, either equipped with a reflector or an object without a reflector, and it bounces back off of that object. By measuring that round trip time very, very accurately, we're talking picosecond accuracy, you actually end up figuring out where that object is to millimeter, centimeter. You know, some stations are actually going to, you know, tens of microns of accuracy of measuring that range from a ground station to the asset in space. And this type of data, for a very, very long time, since the 1960s, 1970s, has been the gold standard. So any other sensing mechanism is compared on an object that's got good laser ranging data. Okay, what does the laser ranging say and what do these other sensing methods say? And therefore, here's how accurate we are relative to the gold standard. So one of the early theses, of course, was why don't we just gather more of the gold standard data instead of trying to calibrate other sensing phenomenologies to that data? And so, you know, radar is very good at picking up new objects, the kind of detect and the sense side. Optical is good at refining that for particular objects when they happen to be sunlit, and then laser ranging, when you're in a critical mission phase or when you've got a collision warning that says, hang on, I've got to go and use some propellant or I've got to change my mission operations, really it comes into that staged approach of the type of data that you're using in particular scenarios.
Ben Gamble: Sure. And that leads us to Foundational. What is Foundational building and how do the pieces fit together?
Hira Virdee: Sure. We are building a commercial network of laser ranging stations. Right. So today's laser ranging stations are dedicated to things like geodesy, which is the understanding of Earth parameters, how much the Earth's crust is flexing, how tectonic plates are moving. So when we hear that New York and London are moving apart by three millimeters a year, or whatever the actual figure is, or that the moon is receding from us by five or seven millimeters a year, or I forget the exact numbers, those are only made possible through the precision of laser ranging. And realizing that that has massive utility to satellite operators, but that the market doesn't really provide that data to these operators for calibration, for novel applications, for rendezvous proximity operations, active debris removal, in-orbit servicing, refueling, assembly of large structures. Right. In some ways it can be seen as the surveying of objects in space, a bit like you see people with laser rangefinders and theodolites and total stations doing ground-based surveying. This is doing that, but for space assets in a way that really improves our knowledge so that we can go from a world with ten thousand satellites operating with some caveats to a world with a hundred thousand satellites or more operating safely, because the bounds on each of their positions and the knowledge of how they should interact with each other gets improved by that amount.
Ben Gamble: Sure. So in the business plan, how many stations, where would they be and when does the service start?
Hira Virdee: So the exact locations, we are phasing them in a global distribution, to take account of things like weather, take account of things like particular ground locations being passed over by different satellites. We are deploying a network of these around the world and I think the full size of that network is yet to be determined based on how much commercial value it has. Right. So we can deploy a few to begin with and then expand that network just based on demand. That service is already going live. So we've got an API and a portal, and people can sign in and look at some sample data or request data on their assets. And as we build out our network capacity, we'll be able to track more and more objects. But for now we're focusing on a few key customers and getting the data that they need to them. And that's exciting and a little bit daunting because it's a service that no one's really produced before and we're charting new ground.
Ben Gamble: No, it's exciting. This might be a stupid question, so apologies if it is, but does it work on all debris or only on satellites that would carry your reflectors?
Hira Virdee: So for me it's phased, because in the first instance, operators know if they need this data, and given how many satellites are yet to be launched, they can add the reflector before they go to orbit. So initially we're focusing on those that do have the reflectors. We are also doing a lot of work on the debris objects, so being able to track uncooperative objects that aren't prepared with reflectors, and that work is progressing. But I think the commercial value of tracking objects without reflectors versus those who know they need this data and therefore will launch with a reflector, it's just part and parcel of a business plan, and there are companies out there who will end up trying to track the debris objects. But I think it's like any business proposition that you need to know why you're doing it, and typically you know long enough ahead of time as long as you're aware of the technology that you need this. And then that's really why we find people reaching out to us to say, look, I actually could do with some redundancy to GNSS jamming, spoofing or hardware failures, or accurate data would help my mission parameters in these ways. Or even to say, based on things like the ESA Zero Debris requirements, to say, you know, here's how we foster a more sustainable and proactive future for the space industry. I think some of those operators that are launching reflectors are just looking at those kind of requirements and saying, look, we want to think forwards and we want to act responsibly. So a whole bunch of reasons, but for now we're doing the reflectors first.
Ben Gamble: That makes absolute sense. So I'm interested why this all matters now. You know, why is space situational awareness becoming critical right now, do you think? In a sort of wider space ecosystem perspective.
Hira Virdee: So there's two factors there. One is the growth of the number of objects in space. And the other, I think, comes a bit more towards the dual-use nature. So in the past, when there were fewer satellites owned by fewer nations, the idea of awareness was typically built into the military programs in those nations. That you've got your radars, you've got particular facilities that end up tracking, and some nations make that data available. Of course you've got the US catalogues that many people rely on, which have a very significantly degraded accuracy. Operating off of a set of free data is a pretty big risk, given the service level agreements, given, you know, potential outages, given the lack of accuracy. But then you've got more nations coming to the party and therefore needing their own way of ensuring that their assets are safe. So it's a storm between those, the decreasing launch cost or increased launch rate. I don't think launch cost is going to decrease much, if at all. If anything, in the interim it will probably go up. So you've got this hot pot of different factors that leads to both nations and satellite operators needing better situational awareness. And that goes to a whole bunch of commercial companies in radar, in optical, and, you know, we're playing our corner in that.
Ben Gamble: Great answer. I totally agree with you. On the podcast, I like to talk about the business side of starting a space tech company, and you raised a good amount to start this. How did that come together? I think you said recently it was very quick from formation to term sheet. Why was the timing right? Or was it because this wasn't your first rodeo, you sort of knew what you were doing? Why do you think it was, I won't say easy, because it's never easy raising money, obviously.
Hira Virdee: And I think, yeah, most that have done it will have some grey hairs to show from the process, I'm sure. But I think it was a combination of the demand signal of particular satellite operators saying, you know, this is interesting, or we should be embedding this. It was a combination of technology development and roadmap, and the plan and the progress that we'd made, particularly through some of the research and development that we did in the past. And then the right time, the right place, for the investor cohort that we had. So we originally went out to raise about a quarter of what we ended up raising in total. And conversations progressed and we had a couple of term sheets, but the deal somehow didn't quite fit or fall into place. And I think there was a particular moment, I actually happened to be on holiday with my wife and we started receiving calls. I was taking investor calls whilst walking around nice exotic locations, and word of mouth gets around. So I think when a deal gets to that fever pitch, then it has a way of closing quite quickly. So we were oversubscribed. There were people that we had to close out of participating in the investment round. But I think we're really, really happy with the people that we've got involved. And I think it all does come down to the combination of a tangible, credible plan, a reality rating of the technology, and then the customer demand signal saying that, you know, if this happens, we're going to be going for it.
Ben Gamble: And the investability of the founder, which obviously you're not going to say, but clearly you are very investable. Where does Foundational sit in the market, do you think, alongside players like LeoLabs? What is different about your approach and what's your sort of view on how you sit with other players?
Hira Virdee: So I think it is very, very collaborative, right? We don't solve every aspect of a problem that every government or operator needs to solve. So success in this area for the space industry at large requires cooperation between companies that can sometimes look at each other and be a bit suspicious or, you know, think of themselves as competitors. But I really think, you know, the combination of radar data, of optical data, of onboard data, of algorithms and of laser ranging, it's a meeting of equals that each of those technologies needs to be brought into the fight for us to achieve the key end goals. So, you know, companies like LeoLabs and LookUp, companies like, you know, you've got Slingshot and Space Flux and Sibylla, we've got many, many companies in each of these areas and we go to everyone with open arms and welcome partnerships to solve problems that satellite operators need to solve, rather than to say, actually, buy this data or buy that data. Because that's up to the operator to decide what's most mission critical for them and what fosters their cost effectiveness, their particular view on safety thresholds, on collision avoidance or mission parameters. So I really think it is a far bigger blend than many in the industry might believe.
Ben Gamble: Yeah. No, I agree with you. I agree. I think space is sort of the ultimate of one day hopefully humanity working together in various fields. Obviously you're from the UK, yeah.
Hira Virdee: Actually, just to throw in a question there as well, when you speak to different either space surveillance companies or satellite operators, do you get more of a feeling of that kind of cooperative mentality? Or do you see a lot of competition, and particularly when it comes to things like government contracts, defence contracts, is that the reason that companies start to feel competitive?
Ben Gamble: It's a good question. I think with space junk it's very much in everyone's interest to preempt it becoming a bigger problem. So I think the market will sort of, you know, lead that drive, and as a customer, you know, you want to protect your assets and make sure that it's not going to affect your stock value, you know, if there's a collision in a decade's time. So the incentives are very much on the market to kind of drive safety standards and things like that. But I'm sort of interested, obviously you're from the UK, and the UK is obviously a relatively small country but has a great space agency collaboration with ESA, and what role should governments play in space traffic management? Like, obviously the UK is not going to be contributing to space junk as much as the US or China or other countries. But again, maybe that goes back to our conversation about sort of collaboration really, because it's in everyone's interest to protect low Earth orbit, the same as it is to clean the oceans.
Hira Virdee: I think that hits the nail on the head in terms of a global commons, right? Tragedy of the commons. But when it's everyone's responsibility, effectively it's no one's responsibility. And in some ways that's why we see people filing for satellite constellations in less developed space nations, right. So filing for satellites in Tonga or Rwanda, you know, the increase in regulation or expectation in some places forces, for pure commercial value for some operators, to focus in a different way. I don't think there's an easy solution, but the UK has been very core in things like the IADC, the Interagency Debris Committee, which was hosted here last. So we play our corner through, I believe, contributing the right types of data, contributing new things into the global industry, and I feel very strongly that Foundational can be that contribution of the UK ecosystem into the global sector, because this is currently a global niche. If you look at the data that's provided from the US or EUSST or other programs, that typically relies on other sensing phenomenologies. But that idea of cooperation and bringing your own capability into that global matrix, I think that's quite key. And it goes beyond that for the UK because we do have some excellent academics and companies in different corners of that. But it then also falls to the satellite operator to pull those requirements out of governments, because this is quite a big point of contention in the space surveillance market at large, and you only have to look at the history of TraCSS and EUSST. Does government pay for the data? Or do operators pay for the data? And governments can pay for a certain amount of data and they do typically pay for the data on assets of interest to national security or assets that are registered in that country or operated from that country. But the data at large does need to be gathered. And so back to your point on tracking debris: who really pays for the debris data? Yeah.
Ben Gamble: It's so interesting and it's definitely a great time to be launching a company in twenty twenty six or twenty twenty seven, we're nearly at now. But look, it's been great to chat to you. I've just got a few quickfire questions, if that's okay, which can be one-word answers. There's five questions. I'm sure you thought about this before, but would you go to space if someone phoned you up and said we've got a spot on Blue Origin or whatever, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic? Would you go or would you have any hesitation?
Hira Virdee: Absolutely. I wouldn't have a hesitation. The only question would be which launch vehicle is it?
Ben Gamble: Really? Are there some, you don't need to name them, but are there some that you'd be more hesitant to step into than others?
Hira Virdee: I think it's more about the track record. You have to protect what's valuable, and if someone doesn't have the track record yet, then of course there would be a bit of a hesitation.
Ben Gamble: One word for the state of orbit today. If you had one word for, let's say, low Earth orbit, how would you describe it?
Hira Virdee: Productive. I think. Yeah.
Ben Gamble: Nice. Nice. Do you have a favorite spacecraft or mission? It could be now or in history.
Hira Virdee: I think for me it's probably Envisat. So that's a large, you know, it's about the size of a double-decker bus. It's got a large single solar panel on one side, and it does have a laser retroreflector. So that's the satellite that I studied most during my PhD. And yeah, so that's grown a fonder spot than most in my heart.
Ben Gamble: Love it. If you had a young engineer listening who wants to work in the space industry, what advice would you give to them? I know it's a very obvious question, but there's a lot of information out there that people can watch on YouTube and, you know, so I'd love to hear your perspective on, you know, what should a young engineer do if they want to work in space or start a space tech company?
Hira Virdee: Besides something a bit tongue in cheek like playing some Kerbal Space Program, I think find a project, right? Figure out what particular aspect of space you're most interested in and learn. Like you say, there's plenty of resources. You've got YouTube, you've got plenty of online materials, you've got the ability to chat with LLMs. Understand a particular part of the problem, develop some core knowledge around every aspect of what touches that problem, whether it's launch or satellite design or space weather or space policy. Right. I think space goes far beyond just the engineering, and getting hands stuck in and hands on really does beat a lot of even academic teaching these days, because that experience and that mindset count for a lot.
Ben Gamble: Absolutely. Well, it's been great to chat, and I will be following Foundational closely over the coming years. But good luck with everything and thank you so much for coming on.
Hira Virdee: Thank you so much, Ben. My pleasure.
Ben Gamble: That was Hira Virdee of Foundational, and that was episode 125 of the Astro Ben Podcast. Thank you, Hira. You'll find his links in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe, follow and rate the show, and share it with a friend who loves space. I'm at AstroBenPodcast on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, and I'm at Gambleonit on X. Use the hashtag AstroBen. So until next time, you know what to do. Keep looking up at the stars, not down at your phones. Ad astra. Goodbye.