The following interview is a conversation we had with Gary Calnan, CEO & Co-Founder of CisLunar, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $5.7 Million Raised to Build the Future of In-Space Manufacturing

Brett
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Gary Calnan, CEO & Co-Founder of CisLunar, a space tech company that’s raised 5.7 million in funding. Gary, welcome to the show. 

Gary Calnan
Hey, thanks for having me, Brett. This is really great. Appreciate the invite. 

Brett
No problem. Super excited to chat with you. So let’s talk here, space companies. This can’t be easy. When a world of cybersecurity, software tools and e-commerce plugins, you chose to go the hard route. Talk to us about that. 

Gary Calnan
Yeah, man. I mean, I have always had a passion for, or an interest anyway, in space. I’ve been interested since I was a little kid. Even tried my hand at going to the air force academy for a couple years before I decided it wasn’t for me as a path to become an astronaut. And I had my eye on the space industry for a long time. You’re right, there are easier ways to make money in the startup world. But the one thing that’s really amazing about the space industry is the whole community, really, especially these days, with all the new stuff that’s happening. You’re really out there on the frontier creating the future, and we imagine what we want to see become possible. We see the science fiction that we’ve all grown up with and want to make it reality. 

Gary Calnan
And this is one of the few industries where you can do that. So that’s one of the things that drew me to it. And it’s an area that’s got a lot of blue ocean to go tackle for opportunities. 

Brett
Preston, what percentage chance do you think there is that someday you’ll go to space? 

Gary Calnan
Ooh, percentage chance. I mean, I definitely want to. I actually think that the chances are quite high. I mean, I think within my lifetime, there is better than 50% chance that I’ll go to space. And I would probably point put it more better than 75% chance. 

Brett
That’s amazing. How have you seen the space industry evolve since you founded the company in 2017? 

Gary Calnan
Yeah, actually, that’s an interesting question, because in 2017, were definitely a bit early. I went to the International Space university. That was my way of getting into the industry and feeling like I had a seat at the table, had a little bit of education. I don’t have an engineering background. I come as an entrepreneur and a business person. And when we came to the industry, we started out in Luxembourg because Luxembourg was pursuing this space resources initiative. So they were interested in what were working on, which is processing metals in space, and they saw that as part of that ecosystem. But at that time, when we looked at the United States, where I’m an American citizen, born and raised here, there was less focus on debris, dealing with debris, finding some ways to handle the space debris problem. 

Gary Calnan
And part of our core approach is to process space debris as one of the feedstocks to create metal materials for in space manufacturing. And so I really seen the US government and NASA and the policy world really move towards wanting to tackle space debris as a serious problem, and seeing the opportunities in. In space manufacturing and having that whole entrepreneurial aspect of that flowing into this as well, that really energizes the whole ecosystem for space. 

Brett
How big of a problem is space debris? Can you just paint a picture for us? 

Gary Calnan
Sure. Yeah. I mean, it’s a problem that is growing exponentially. You know, there’s. There’s something like trying to remember the exact numbers here. Off top of my head, I think there’s 10,000, over 10,000 objects in space right now. And these are intact objects. So these are old satellites upper stages. And, you know, a little more than half of them are, like, viable satellites that are operational right now. The rest of them are left over from old launches from the beginning of the space era. And this process is growing exponentially. The number of satellites that’s expected to be in orbit, active in orbit in the next decade or so is expected to go up by an order of magnitude. So we’re talking about an increase that could potentially go up to 100,000 satellites in orbit at various altitudes. 

Gary Calnan
And as that gets more and more congested, the problem of having any pieces up there that are not controlled, which what makes them debris, you know, becomes more and more of a problem. There’s a collision, though, that debris can create millions of pieces of smaller debris that is moving at extremely high velocities, you know, at cross direction to other orbits. And when they have an impact, it can destroy other satellites. So, you know, we really need to make sure that there’s a way to deal with this and to deal with it in an economically sustainable fashion to create true, you know, space sustainability. 

Brett
And what’s your solution? How are you tackling that? How are you solving this space debris problem? 

Gary Calnan
Yeah, so the way we got into this business, you know, we originally were trying to figure out something that would be impactful to, you know, the industrialization of space, the creation of a sustainable presence for humanity beyond Earth. And we, you know, identified the use of resources beyond Earth as a key piece of that. And as we were analyzing the ecosystem, when I was at the International Space University, we had. We saw, you know, there was companies doing extraction, like asteroid mining and lunar mining and companies that were working on manufacturing, but not really anyone who was working on processing materials. And then at the same time, I learned about space debris. And this is where the space debris piece ties into that. 

Gary Calnan
We were thinking, oh, we can be the steel mills of this industrial economy, and we still, that is the core vision of the company. But, space debris is a problem today, and it’s also potentially a resource. So if there’s, you know, millions of kilograms of materials out there that’s already refined metals doesn’t have to be extracted from, you know, virgin ore that’s in an asteroid or on the moon, you know, why not figure out how to process that material and use it as a resource, tap into it as a resource. And then by doing that, we create the technology to process other kinds of materials as this economy grows. 

Gary Calnan
And at the same time, we take that debris that is currently a very expensive, somewhat intractable cleanup problem and turn it into a potential mining opportunity so that the economics of it actually drive the cleanup itself. That’s the long term vision of this. As the economy grows and the demand for materials on orbit also grows. 

Brett
And if we look at who’s buying this, is it private companies that are out there to protect their satellites from being damaged by debris? Or is this more of a government sale and a government problem that you need to get the government bought into it? 

Gary Calnan
Yeah, I mean, this is a. It’s a multistage vision for how this unfolds, right? So right now, the primary customers for any sort of in space manufacturing, especially cleaning up debris, which is not a space manufacturing, but it’s in the same ecosystem, is going to be the government. Now, there are companies working on debris removal, and they’ve made a lot of progress thinking through different business models where you involve insurance companies or, you know, companies are incentivized to. Commercial companies might be incentivized to have certain objects removed from an orbit that crosses one of their very valuable satellites that might cause, you know, risk to that satellite in the future. 

Gary Calnan
But in the beginning, I do think that there’s going to be, there is a heavy need for government involvement to finance the creation of the technologies and some of this initial cleanup capability once the larger industrial economy in space emerges. And it’s starting to emerge, but it’s still very early days. Once it emerges and there’s a need for materials to build things like, you know, large structures for space based solar power or, you know, large space stations or big antennas, there’s a range of applications. Once that demand is there for those materials, then. Then, you know, that will create a commercial incentive to go out and harvest those materials, those old pieces of debris, bring them to the. To a recycling platform, process them, turn them into something useful. 

Gary Calnan
We can also actually make propellant or fuel from a perspective of most people for certain kinds of rocket engines that use electricity and solid fuels, solid metal propellant out of that debris to help fuel the collection of the debris itself. So that’s another potential product that can be sold that could be both commercial and with government interest, especially with entities like the Space Force for maneuver and being able to have that freedom of. Of movement in space. 

Brett
Were you just cheering that on when the Space Force was announced? I think that was in 2018. 

Gary Calnan
I mean, you know, there’s been a lot of jokes made about it. There’s a whole series about it that’s a comedy. But, yeah, I think it is a really important distinction to draw inside the armed forces to create the Space Force. I mean, there’s, you know, there’s been a lot of focus on space across the military, but organizing it under one branch, under the Space Force, which is a sub branch of the air force, actually. But it really allows that focus to be on the space activities. And I think it was good. 

Brett
Move in the early days. Was that a little bit nerve wracking to think that for the short term, you really have one potential customer, which would be the US government, or maybe a little bit outside of that, friendly governments, the United States. But I would guess that the US government was that big number one customer. Was that scary, going into it with that idea? 

Gary Calnan
I mean, we were trying to find ways to make it commercial from the very beginning and trying to find ways to create the business case that would make sense for companies to start to create these materials. And went through many iterations for how this might be structured so that could be possible. It turns out that NASA, in 2021, won our first NASA SBIR related to recycling and processing space debris objects outside the space station. But we had created a number of different potential commercial avenues for this. It is a little nerve wracking to have one customer, but I will say that NASA has been an incredible partner, and so has the space force. And now we’ve also got DARPA and the ISS national lab and the state of Colorado, who have all provided government funding to help us drive the technology forward. 

Gary Calnan
But along the way, were encouraged from the very beginning to find, you know, terrestrial applications for our technology or earth based applications, you know, because everybody kind of saw that the commercial time horizon was quite distant, like probably a decade out for metals and materials to be really a big commercial market in space, even if they all believed that it was going to be big. So we, you know, we. We kind of struggled for in the early years, trying to find out what that would be. Then recently, in the last couple of years, we’ve actually created another technology, which is our power conversion systems, that has emerged as our primary commercial revenue driver in the next, I would say probably the next five years, at least. And that’s going to really carry the company forward. 

Gary Calnan
While the government helps us support the tech development on the metal processing side, the power converter business will drive commercial sales and help us to grow the company on a commercial basis over the next few years and then into the future as well. But we can dive into the details on that if you want to. 

Brett
Yeah. What led to the development of that product? What was like, the aha, where you said, okay, we have a viable product here? 

Gary Calnan
Yeah. So this is really, this kind of. I think. I don’t think this is very uncommon, actually, with entrepreneurial stories, but probably especially with hardware. But we had, in our first NASA contract, phase one SBIR, relatively small dollars to develop this metal recycling foundry that we could process metals with. When we built that, were operating it with induction, electromagnetic induction. So it’s like how your induction stove can create heat in the pot. Anyway. We can talk about the details there if you want to, but the induction is how the furnace creates heat in the metal, and any metal will work with this process. It also allows us to control the metal. 

Gary Calnan
So induction was a key piece of the idea, and we had to build our own power converter for that, because everything went to go buy off the shelf for this project was, like, big and expensive and not really designed or ever would be designed to go to space. So we built our own, and then we brought on this amazing engineer, who, just by some luck, ended up moving to Fort Collins around the same time that our phase one project was ending. And we’re doing our demo of this technology. And, you know, he’s an electronics engineer, brilliant electronics engineer with experience in a variety of different things, including Tesla coils, which happens to have similar electronics to our furnace, ironically. And he’s. He just figured out how to make that. That. 

Gary Calnan
That box that was driving the power, which was originally like the size of a toaster oven, if you can imagine that he shrunk it down to something about the size of a deck of cards, and it still pumps through the same amount of power, 2 power. It can do all the stuff that we need to do. And so we were still pushing with the metal processing, and went to one of our expert collaborators at CSU. We’re talking about the technology we’re developing, and he’s like, you know what, guys? This thing looks a lot like a power processing unit for propulsion and for other things, too, that people need in space. And he’s like, you should look at that. So we took a look at it and realized that, yeah, everything in space, all the satellites you see, except for the. 

Gary Calnan
Like when you light the rocket with chemical propulsion to send it somewhere, everything else is electrical. Electricity is coming from solar panels or maybe a nuclear reactor or some battery or something. And then it’s being Transformed from the state that it comes from that source, the way. The way it comes out of that source transformed into a different type of voltage and amperage and frequency to be used in another use case, whether that’s propulsion or. We’ve done this with high voltage for welding applications. We’ve looked at this to run the satellite, the core of the satellite called the bus. So all these different things that are running on a satellite, all electrical. And once we realized that was true, we’re like, oh, wow. 

Gary Calnan
So we could apply this core technology that we need for our furnace anyway to thrusters, to in space manufacturing technologies like welding, to driving the brains behind the satellite, to maybe a radio transmitter, to all these different things, and then we would have potential applications across the entire industry. And that was just evolved out of our need to build this thing for our own purposes anyway. And a couple of tips from friends in the industry. And as we explored this with partners, you know, we’ve found there isn’t a ready market for this for many different applications. And we’ve even been able to get a patent on the core design as well. So we’re, you know, we’re off to the races on this one. 

Gary Calnan
And we actually just flew it recently on a flight which we just announced today on a press release, suborbital flight with our partners at Think Orbital, who used our technology to run their in space welding technology. 

Brett
So super interesting. How do you think about your positioning in the market? 

Gary Calnan
Yeah, so there’s really two key markets that we’re tackling. One is the metal processing sort of in space resources market and our positioning there. We’ve really become the leader in terms of especially recycling and processing metals that are already existing in space. So old spacecraft or satellites that have reached the end of life, or even metals that might be derived from mining operations on the moon or on asteroids, especially with our latest project with DARPA. On our DARPA Luna ten project, we were sort of identified as one of these, the leader in this niche market of processing metals in space. That’s how we’re positioning ourselves there. We’re trying to stay at the forefront of different applications for that. And then with the power converter market, it’s a little different because you know that market is not new. 

Gary Calnan
There certainly are companies that have been providing these capabilities throughout the years. Where we’re really positioning ourselves right now is kind of have to do with how the market has evolved. So as new space became a thing, as these entrepreneurial space companies started launching small satellites that didn’t require a lot of power and weren’t as big as a school bus, you know, the satellite shrunk down real small. And there became a lot of manufacturers that would supply power converters, power transformers for small satellites that would be 100, 200, 300 watts kind of systems. And that market is pretty, I wouldn’t say saturated, but there’s plenty of suppliers there. But what wasn’t being approached as much was the higher power market. And since we needed high powers for our furnace, we already were developing high power systems. 

Gary Calnan
And it turns out that there’s only a few manufacturers that develop high power 1 above kind of systems for the industry. So we found an opportunity there to penetrate that market and provide a system that has some advantages from a size and weight and efficiency basis, as well as a scalability and adaptability basis by using our core technology and having it be kind of modular and almost like Lego bricks, where you can build them up to be as big as you need them to be, or scale them down and apply them to different use cases. And that’s where we’re positioning ourselves now. Is that one of the leading. 

Gary Calnan
We’re early, but we want to become one of the leading suppliers in this higher power segment where we’re going to a kilowatt and above, which is where we see a lot of the satellite market trending towards is these larger, more capable satellites. 

Brett
Something else that I wanted to ask earlier, and I forgot was about government contracts. What have you learned from securing government contracts? And the reason I ask, I think a lot of founders, and I don’t know if you’ve been seeing those headlines, but defense tech is cool now. There’s a lot of people, defense tech, everyone’s talking about it. So there’s a lot of buzz there and I think there’s a lot of interest now for Silicon Valley and just tech companies in general to work with the government. What’s that process like and what have you learned? 

Gary Calnan
Yeah, I mean, it’s a little bit daunting at first because it’s unfamiliar. There’s lots of jargon, especially when you get into the military, there’s even more jargon. So, you know, it is a little intimidating at first blush. And I think that’s why historically a lot of companies have steered clear of that. What I have observed is that you can, most intelligent people running businesses are generally intelligent people can figure out how to navigate if you want to. It is a process. It does require dealing with some bureaucracy and you need to spend a little bit more money for certain systems like email and so on. So you can meet the security requirements, but it’s doable. And if you have a good product, the SBIR process, the small business innovation research contracts process, which is available throughout the US government. 

Gary Calnan
And every department has to have some money allocated to this. So any technology that you’re developing, whatever industry it is, there’s probably an SBIR that you can tap into that you could get some money for this. And it’s great because it’s early stage non dilutive funding. They’re framed as contracts. And you get tied into the government system and depending on the. I don’t know about other agencies, but we’ve dealt with NASA, space, four star ISIS national lab so far. And what I’ve also noticed is my expectation was that they, you know, you expect bureaucracies are slow and kind of, you know, hard to work with and maybe a bit opaque and not willing to work with you as an entrepreneur. But I’ve actually found it to be kind of, you know, that. That to not be true, especially with the space force. 

Gary Calnan
We’ve observed that they’re. The Space Force is a new agency. They’re trying to be adaptable to the industry as it is, and take advantage of the benefits of. Of entrepreneurship. And they’ve moved pretty fast, and they’ve been very helpful and collaborative with us. So it seems daunting, but it’s not as bad as it seems, I guess I would say. And it takes a lot of. Sometimes it takes a lot of tries at bat to win some of those contracts, and, you know, you don’t really know what you’re doing the first time around. Maybe you won’t win it, but you’ll learn and you’ll get feedback, and putting it out there to get that feedback. 

Brett
Is super helpful just to set expectations there. What was that like for you? Did you try to win 50 contracts and you won one or two, or did you try to win three and you won one or two? What does that look like for you? 

Gary Calnan
Yeah, I mean, so, okay, so the first interaction with the government was not the US government, it was the Luxembourg government. And went through about two and a half years and multiple rounds of proposals with them that were very big and time consuming. You know, the luxury patient needs is great, but. But it just wasn’t the right fit at the right time for us with them, apparently. So, anyway, we moved to the United States, and ironically, our first try, we did try a NIAC proposal, which is a type of NASA really advanced concepts proposal that didn’t go through, but we want our next one. And I don’t know. I don’t think this is super common, but we want our first SBIR proposal to NASA. We had a couple of things that went in our favor. 

Gary Calnan
A couple of the companies that would have been prime competitors for this were acquired by larger companies and were no longer eligible as a small business to participate. So we had kind of a more open field to participate in this particular request that they had. And we brought on our CTO, who was our last Co-Founder at the time of the company, Joe Pwelsky. And he really brought some technical rigor and maker mindset to that process, and were able to win that one. So I think we got a little bit lucky with some of the aspects on that we won. I guess it was our second try on that. Or maybe it was our third try. Cause we also tried to do an ISS national lab on the other ones. 

Gary Calnan
We’ve done a few couple tries on most of the other agencies before we’ve gotten in the door. And once you start to get in the door and people see that you can produce things and you can build stuff and successfully achieve the project, you’ll find that, well, what we found is that you get more opportunities to propose to more things and people, you start to build a reputation amongst those who are evaluating these things. 

Brett
What about the appetite for investors? Or from investors, I should say. I’m a big follower, a big fan of Josh Wolf from Lux Capital. I don’t know if you ever saw that article, but it was like inside Josh’s war or something like that. Their approach to betting big on defense. What are those conversations been like for you with VC’s? If we compare them to 2017, 2018, the early days to the conversations that you’re having now? 

Gary Calnan
Yeah, I mean, trying to get through to investors with this idea has been, you know, has definitely been a challenge. It’s the real challenge for us is that the market we’re creating a new podcast is about category, new categories, right? We’re creating a new category here with this mental processing that hasn’t had any real commercial action yet. And it requires a visionary investor who gets it and gets the big potential and who’s willing to invest in a longer time horizon. So one of the big challenges we’ve had with your typical investor, VC investor, is that our time horizon to get to commercial viability for metal processing is not your typical five to seven years. And that just doesn’t fit with the turnaround time that most VC’s typically say they need. 

Gary Calnan
So there are other kinds of investors who have a longer time horizon, but it just takes longer to find them and meet them. Our first VC actual institutional investor didn’t come on board until this first quarter of this year. So we’re still early on our process of getting actual institutional capital in. We’ve had friends and family and angel investors come in on board for the 1.2 million that we’ve gotten from investors so far. It’s a challenge, no doubt about it, and it takes some creative thinking and trying to figure out how to explain a complex market and solution to investors who may not be, who may see this as not the immediate market opportunity. Now, power converters is a little different. That’s opened up some new doors, but I can imagine. 

Brett
Are you seeing that there’s more appetite, or I should say just are the conversations going better now than they were a few years ago? Are you seeing. 

Gary Calnan
Absolutely. And now we’re even getting more inbound interest as well, which is always great, but we do see. Well, of course, as you’re well aware and probably most listeners are aware, there was a bit of a vc downturn over the last, until recently for at least a year or so, where a lot of the market was doom and gloom market had pulled back bc winter, all these kind of comments, and we definitely saw that it was even harder to get people to start looking at it during that timeframe for about a year and a half or so between, I guess towards the beginning of this year. Prior to that, it was pretty difficult timing for trying to raise money. Kind of came after the sPAc boom and all that stuff where it was very frothy, so it was just the mirror image of that. 

Gary Calnan
But now it seems to be loosening up. I think we’re come out of that downturn. People are starting to want to use that capital that’s on. Sorry about that. The capital that’s on the table there. And yeah, it’s definitely getting better. Plus we’ve gotten a lot more traction. So for us as a company, having all that government support in the beginning has definitely made a difference for showing traction. 

Brett
Yeah, just taking a pulse from all these conversations. I’ve had about 600 of them now. They were very depressing there for a year or so. Late 2021, early 2022. They were tough conversations with a lot of the venture backed farmers out there, but now it seems to be trending in a more positive direction. So that’s a good sign. 

Gary Calnan
Yeah, I think so. And some of it is just about figuring out how to survive those moments in time. Structure your company with optionality so you have more than one way to move forward where you’re not dependent upon continuing to raise so you can keep burning capital. And we even took contract engineering deals with some customers who were aligned with us strategically and where were helping them with things that were complimentary but not what we wanted to be working on for ourselves. And that allowed us to bring cash in the door and even hire people new to the company even though we couldn’t raise money. So, you know, there are other ways to get there. You just gotta be scrappy. 

Brett
Yeah, I think that’s the advice that a lot of founders say, a lot of investors say is it’s all about survival. I think the famous startup example of that is Airbnb and the serial story. 

Gary Calnan
Oh, yeah, I love that story. 

Brett
It’s almost like too perfect. It is the most perfect startup story that exists, I think. 

Gary Calnan
And the only thing that’s like, it’s a great story. And the thing about the serial thing is it’s so out of left field and it’s not like it’s maintained remained as part of their business. Right. I think ideally you want to find some kind of spinoff opportunity that’s, you know, not just like a gimmick to get some cash, but hey, if it works and it gets you through a crux, you know, do whatever you got to do. 

Brett
So survival is survival, I guess. 

Gary Calnan
Exactly. 

Brett
Now, I think anyone when they’re a kid, they dream of being an astronaut. For most of them, that doesn’t happen. But the next best thing I think, is to be a space tech entrepreneur, space tech Founder like yourself. So given that you spent a lot of time in this industry, what’s the number one piece of advice that you’d give to an up and coming space tech Founder or just a Founder that wants to build a space tech company? 

Gary Calnan
Yeah, that’s so, I mean, you have to have the passion, first of all, if you don’t have it, like I said in the beginning there are easier ways to make money from an entrepreneurial perspective. So you really have to be bought into this to go through the long ups and downs and every industry has that with startups, really. But I think it’s especially true with something like the space technology industry. It definitely helps and it comes through. The other thing I would say is one of the things that really helped us was just getting out there and telling our story. Especially if you’re doing something that’s more nature out on the frontier edge of space technology. I think going to conferences, telling people what you’re building. 

Gary Calnan
We made a decision early on that were small and we didn’t have our own pile of wealth to use to build a business. So we had to go out and tell the story and try to find partners that we could work with, help add value to and leverage to get these government contracts and so on. And that proved to be extremely valuable decision for us to make to go out and tell the story, be open about it. We decided not to go stealth from the very beginning. And I encourage any entrepreneur, unless you’re independently wealthy and you want to just fund it, even still making contact with the market is always better to refine your idea and you know, and be willing to be flexible and open to changing paths. And don’t get married to one kind of technology. 

Gary Calnan
But I mean, this is not unique to space, actually. I think this is any kind of hardware tech startup. 

Brett
Did you watch the Palmer lucky kind of mini documentary on Bloomberg? 

Gary Calnan
I think. I think I caught the one you’re talking about. Yeah, it was, it’s a fascinating story. Story that he’s got. 

Brett
I think I’m there. Hardware is hard. 

Gary Calnan
Yes, yes, hardware is hard, and it can be very capital intensive. But, you know, I mean, I think, yeah, it’s, it’s the things I already said. And it’s also being, making sure that whatever you, at least for us anyway, we always try to approach what were building to maintain as much flexibility as how it could be applied as possible. So we didn’t say, like, what’s our killer app? It’s going to be large antennas in space or whatever. We don’t know because it’s such a new market. And I think keeping an open mind as to how your technology can be applied can uncover some very unexpected opportunities, which is exactly how we got into this, you know, power processing business. 

Brett
So, final question for you, since we’re almost up on time, let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision here? 

Gary Calnan
Yeah, so, you know, three to five years in the future. I mean, our vision really is to be, is to help open up the solar system for humanity. We want to, we want to see, and this might be more than three to five years, honestly. But, but I mean, from our perspective, having metal processing and having this capability is a fundamental cornerstone to any industrial economy. And in order to expand on a sustainable way out beyond Earth, we need to have that industrial foundation in the Earth moon system, or Cislunar space, which kind of encompasses the earth orbits and the moon lunar surface. 

Gary Calnan
And so, no, our vision is to make that a reality and to supply the industry with materials and end of life solutions and to create, to be able to take space debris cleanup and turn it into an economic opportunity instead of something that’s just a cleanup exercise. And to really enable the industry to grow and develop into a solar system wide economy. Eventually, we want to be at the foundational part of that and develop these key capabilities that metal processing or materials processing and power conversion are two of those power processing capabilities are two of those key pieces to that puzzle. And we’re carving out a strong niche in that area, and we expect to grow. Right now we’re 15 people. I think we have projections to be in three to five years to be in the range of like 50 to 70 people. 

Gary Calnan
And we see a lot of opportunity to supply the industry with the power and the metal processing capabilities. 

Brett
Amazing. I love vision. All right, we are up on time here. Before we wrap, where can people follow along? Where should they go if they want to keep up with your journey? 

Gary Calnan
Yeah, I mean, so we, space industries is heavily on LinkedIn. We find ourselves announcing things there mostly. Also we have our, you know, we have a website, sisterindustries.com, where you need to keep track of the latest and greatest. But probably LinkedIn is the best place to follow us. You can find any of the co-founders there. We’re not hiding our contact information. So, you know, if people want to reach out and connect about things, we’re always open to doing that. 

Brett
Amazing. Gary, thanks so much for taking the time. 

Gary Calnan
Yeah, thanks for having me on. It was a lot of fun.