Design This Day | Episode 1

Advancing Ambitious Machines in Space with John Conafay

John Conafay joins Devin to talk about the kind of attitude it takes to work in space, what outsiders could learn from the space industry, and whether a toaster could be considered an ambitious machine. John Conafay is the CEO and co-founder of Integrate. He served as a mission systems specialist in the Air Force before building a career in the space industry, where he has worked for over 12 years.

[2:02] John’s introduction to microgravity

[3:29] Space neighborhoods

[6:25] Ambitious machines

[8:42] GPS & Tinder

[11:58] Tolerance for risk

[14:45] What is Integrate?

[17:30] Working with the U.S. Space Force

[19:05] The “FIFI” approach

[21:35] Speed round

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About Design This Day

How do we begin creating the future we want, today? Design This Day takes you on a journey to our future world. Join us as futurist Devin Liddell sits down with visionary leaders from some of the biggest names in tech and innovation. Each episode features a brilliant mind who is building the opportunities of the future before most people even know they exist. What will living in microgravity in space look like in the future? Can driverless vehicles go off-roading? What unexpected roles will robots play in our future workplaces and homes? We will explore the role that design plays in shaping our future – with the big thinkers and doers who are creating tomorrow, today.

Design This Day is an original podcast brought to you by Teague.

Episode Transcript

Scene: You slowly open your eyes as they adjust to the brightness. You are in bed and the lighting system has brightened the room gradually in time with your circadian rhythm. "The time right now is 3:00 UTC," a nearby robot says. You loosen the strap securing you to the bed and turn to the window beside you. You reach for one of several buttons on the windowsill. The glass transitions from opaque to perfectly clear in an instant. Your breath catches. The curvature of the earth splits your view in half, a star-filled expanse above, and a blue planet below.

You think you can spot the landmass, the continent where your family lives, but you're not sure because of the cloud cover. You glance at the tablet attached to the wall of your room. You decide to call them and see if you can catch them before you join the other members of your research team for breakfast. This is the future of space. Welcome to Design This Day, a podcast about the future, the futures we want, and the people working right now to make those futures real.

Devin Liddell: I'm your host, Devin Liddell. I'm a futurist at Teague. I spend a lot of my time thinking about the gap between present challenges and future solutions. Today, I'm speaking with John Conafay, CEO and co-founder of Integrate. He served as a mission systems specialist in the Air Force before building a career in the space industry, where he has worked for over 12 years.

We talked about the kind of attitude it takes to work in space, what outsiders could learn from the space industry, and whether a toaster could be considered an ambitious machine.

But first, let's hear John talk about how he found his passion for all things space. Have you ever been in space?

John Conafay: I have not. I would love to. I did fly on the Vomit Comet, which was microgravity, parabolic flight, which was absolutely spectacular, and that was actually speaking of these five or six decisions that made me, decided whether I was going into space or not, but I was studying economics and design, so I didn't think ... I was like, "There's no place for me in space. What could I possibly do?"

And then, I was huge on this club called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. I experienced microgravity for the first time. I was like, "I don't care what I have to do, what it takes. I want to get back to this experience again and make that happen. I am all in on space, and I'm just going to dive in." So that was actually a really, really critical turning point.

Devin Liddell: The Vomit Comet that John mentioned is the nickname given to aircraft originally designed to train astronauts for space missions. Essentially, the aircraft takes a parabolic path. Imagine the steep climb and fall of a roller coaster. As the plane swoops down, passengers inside the plane experience a feeling of weightlessness or microgravity. This flight became commercially available to members of the public in the early 2000's, inspiring dozens of space enthusiasts like John. It was also around this time that innovators in the space industry started laying the groundwork for several waves of important technological advancements.

John Conafay: The first wave was bringing the cost of sending satellites down by changing the entire equation around satellites. So satellites used to be full school bus-sized endeavors that were going to 36,000 kilometers away when there's a whole bunch behind that for telecommunications specifically. And then, I think it was Jordi Puig-Suari out of San Luis Obispo, and I think Bob Twiggs that came up with the CubeSat standard, which was a 10-centimeter by 10-centimeter by 10-centimeter box that they were going to make the standard box for university projects. And the only reason they were able to fit so much capability into that is because cellphones, TVs, all of consumer electronics had become so miniaturized, that they could put substantially more capability. And what that allowed for is you can put a whole bunch of bread loaf-sized satellites onto a single large rocket that costs $180 million.

And if people allow you to only pay for that one to six kilograms as opposed to having to buy the $180 million rocket, you can send a whole lot more stuff up, you can be a little bit more move fast and break things-ish with it because they're costing under a hundred thousand bucks as opposed to $10 million or a billion dollars to build, and then pair that with this incredible flight cadence and lowering of costs that SpaceX has provided and a bunch of other small satellite launchers, Rocket Lab being the one in the lead right now.

Devin Liddell: Does that mean that if we think about the earth's orbit as a neighborhood, there are historical neighborhoods with these school bus-sized satellites, and there are newer neighborhoods with these bread loaf-sized satellites?

John Conafay: Yeah. There's still a lot of action in these historic neighborhoods, we call GEO, but LEO is where it's hot right now because it's easier to get to, less radiation concerns, less just technical concerns, and you're literally closer to the earth where the actual economy is.

Devin Liddell: LEO, which stands for Low Earth Orbit, is roughly 200 to 2,000 kilometers away from earth, whereas GEO, which stands for Geostationary Orbit, is about 36,000 kilometers away. LEO, which is much closer to earth, is where many of the newer and smaller satellites are, and where scientists conduct research on cosmic radiation and solar activity. It is also the place most likely to welcome orbital workspaces, space hotels, and other habitats designed for short-term human occupancy. There are now 100 times more satellites orbiting earth compared to just 20 years ago. This surge of progress in the space industry got me thinking about one of the phrases John often uses when talking about innovation, "Ambitious machines."

John Conafay: So it's a phrase that our VP of product came up with, where he was like, "We're building Integrate for the world's most ambitious machines," and I'm like, "You mean the people, right? Like the people that are building it, like the psychotics that are drawn to these massive, insanely risky, really, really difficult problems?" He's like, "No. I'm talking about the rockets, and the muscle cars, and the nuclear plants, and all of this." And we go back and forth about this all the time.

I say about the space industry it came for the technology, and I stayed for the people because there's just enough crazy in anybody that's willing to put a complex ambitious machine like a satellite onto another complex, ambitious machine like a rocket, and say, "Yeah, that's what I want to bet my career on." You know? You got to be a little bit ... You got to be chasing something there.

Devin Liddell: Send it.

John Conafay: Yeah. We're not necessarily talking about everything that we've already learned or figured out how to build and have a million of right now. We're talking about all of humanity's ambitions and pouring our collective intellect into pushing exploration, and the world, and humans, and hopefully the earth with it forward.

Devin Liddell: Yeah, I love it. I just love that phrase. I think it's beautiful for one, and actually, it has two fantastic words, right? When you think about something ambitious, you do get a little of that undercurrent of maybe a little bit unhinged, right? And then machines, that word has a lot of baked into it as well in terms of precision, but also something kind of extraordinary, something that does something that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

John Conafay: Yeah.

Devin Liddell: At one point, a toaster was an ambitious machine. At one point, right?

John Conafay: Was the toaster ambitious or the person that said, "I'm going to bake this bread again," the ambitious one? I'm just saying.

Devin Liddell: And their peers said, "You're crazy."

John Conafay: Exactly.

Devin Liddell: "You cannot do that. Without a fire? Without a fire?"

John Conafay: "That's a nice crunch. I like it."

Devin Liddell: I think there is a bit of a sensation that the public might have around space, in that they don't quite connect the innovations that are happening in the industry back to how it could change earth, essentially, like a life on earth. When you think about space tourism, there is a easy takeaway, which is, "Okay, there are really exceedingly wealthy people going up into space to experience weightlessness and what it's like to be in zero gravity." So are there other anecdotes or other sort of applications of space-based technology that you're particularly kind of charged up about when it comes to how this might actually change our experience here on earth?

John Conafay: Absolutely. So few anecdotes— Trains, planes, and automobiles were all for the super wealthy before we figured out how to produce them en masse to make them more accessible, full stop. So that's one thing that I always want to reiterate, is that our memories are super short, and I think the fact that we're seeing people fly that are not super wealthy on Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, because the cost has come down so drastically, is pretty intense and awesome. And then, my mind always goes back to, "Well, space doesn't affect me," because I had this conversation while I was at Astranis with someone who I considered a very close friend there, and she was like, "I don't care about space. I'm just here because it's a job."

And I was like, "How'd you meet your husband?" And she was like, "Tinder." And I was like, "There you go. That is GPS enabled, the location tracking for you to figure out who else is close in proximity that you might be able to go on a date with. Wouldn't have it without space," full stop. And I don't think she necessarily cared about that too much, but it did connect a little bit to her. And then, I have a Starlink mobile in my backpack that I took out. I took a vacation. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that as a founder, but I took a vacation, had a board meeting in the middle of the mountains.

Devin Liddell: Good for you.

John Conafay: Vacation.

Devin Liddell: Time away.

John Conafay: Yeah, attempted. Went out into the mountains, and I took this one foot by one foot dish, put it outside, and I had 200 megabyte per second download speeds. I mean, absolutely insane in the middle of Cascade Mountains. So it's becoming more relevant and has become more relevant over the past 10 years.

Devin Liddell: The satellites that make GPS possible were originally sent into space for military purposes during the Cold War. The U.S. military used GPS to provide navigation to troops and to track submarines and aircraft. Today, GPS is integrated into everything, from cars to smartphones, to dog collars and running shoes. More recently, hundreds of satellites are being launched into LEO, giving humans access to high-speed internet pretty much anywhere on earth. It's a reminder that so many aspects of our everyday lives depend on technologies that operate in space, but building machines meant for space is no easy task. I am curious in terms of like, "Why is it so difficult to build things or to make things for space?"

John Conafay: Risk is so much of it. You do not know how a satellite is going to behave fully until it gets on orbit, and by the time it's on orbit, you have gone through 70 different steps that are psychotic when you think about it. You have put this incredibly complex, ambitious machine on top of somebody else's controlled explosion. Not one controlled explosion. In some cases, four controlled explosions that all have to go perfectly, and not rattle the hell out of your satellite to the point that it doesn't work.

And you can do an incredible amount of testing on the ground and all this, but you don't know if that solar storm that comes about once a century is going to flip some bits that completely destroys the satellite that you worked five years to design and build. So a tolerance for risk.

Devin Liddell: What about once things are already in space? What are the challenges you face when that satellite or another ambitious machine is in space living its space-based life?

John Conafay: There could be any number of things. So radiation, if you're outside of Low Earth Orbit is a big one. Luckily, we have something called the Van Allen belts that helps protect us from that, but if you have to cross through the Van Allen belts, which are just pure radiation, you're going to have a hard time. And that essentially, you have radiation that will just flip bits in your computers that just cause a terrible day because anybody that's had to debug something, if you have to get down to the hardware on your debug, it's going to be a rough day. You have aging propulsion systems or batteries that lead to explosions on orbit because there was something defective in the way they were built that doesn't show itself until two or three years later.

You have a losing communication with the satellite, which means that it's spinning out of control, and what if it hits another satellite or space station, Kessler syndrome, which I think a lot of people have really big opinions on how crowded space is getting, for sure. And I think as with anything, they're nuanced and valid. I think it is absolutely crucial that we do not fall into the tragedy of the commons that we have so many times before. Getting back to though, we have short memories, and I am really happy that people are out there, making sure that we try as hard as we can to not get into these situations.

Devin Liddell: Things can go wrong on any large complex project, but risk takes on a new meaning in environments like space, where there are so many unknowns. Those situations call for powerful tools that help people build machines that continue to push the frontier of what is possible. John said it's why he and the team created program management software called Integrate, developed specifically for those intricate and advanced innovations.

John Conafay: We want seamless communication between all of the different groups and ambitious machines that are building a single rocket or the next generation self-driving electric vehicle or anything like this, minimizing the BS work that none of us like to do so that we can open ourselves up to be more creative and more ambitious in our thoughts and ideas. So how we best found that is breaking down barriers between internal and external organizations, so it's my biggest frustration at so many of the companies that I worked at. So we're working with external vendors to produce something for an external customer. And all of the software that we're using is made to be siloed and internal, which is not how physical products are built at all. No matter how vertically integrated you are, you are reliant on somebody else for a part that you can't build internally or somebody else's perfective and is more reliable than what you can build. So we wanted to break down those barriers of communication.

Devin Liddell: All teams on these kinds of expansive projects have deep knowledge of how their particular part works and what it needs to fit into the larger machine. Being able to communicate with specificity, while also protecting sensitive information is the kind of nuance these innovators need to build trust with collaborators. John has seen that struggle firsthand.

John Conafay: They have their source of truth. They've built this big, beautiful, exquisite schedule, and then they have to kind of take this leap of faith, just like you would the first time you ever sent an email, or the first time that you BCC'd someone or something like this, where you're sharing five tasks out of your schedule directly into somebody else's account. And it's like a, "Did they do it right? Are they seeing everything? Oh, God. Well, what's happening?" You know?

And it's totally real and understandable, but once they get over that hurdle and they just start flying in the application, and they have one place to see all of their programs, and then all of their external stakeholders are seeing only what they need to see, they become pretty stoked and pretty loyal for a while, but it's a hurdle, for sure.

Devin Liddell: One of your clients is Space Force, the branch of the U.S. military.

John Conafay: Yes.

Devin Liddell: So I'm curious, what kind of unique challenges does working with the military bring?

John Conafay: We've had really spectacular time working with the Space Force. Maybe it's a veteran in me in the service to my country that gets me going, but it all surrounds security. They want to make sure that none of the information that is on the platform is accessible to people that it should not be accessible to, and there are a lot of hoops to jump through that, as it should be.

Devin Liddell: Sure.

John Conafay: But I have definitely laid it awake more than a month worth of nights, worrying that it will not function at those higher echelons of security, and it has. So we just got over that hurdle, one of the highest hurdles recently, so I'm very, very excited about that. But otherwise, the government's always been a really spectacular customer. When they need something, they will come and get it, and when they don't, they won't. It's kind of like product market fit anywhere else. Understand why people get frustrated and all this, but the government's a great customer because you get a very clear signal as to whether they want or need what you're building.

Devin Liddell: The U.S. government is just one of many clients John has worked with, and he knows every sector has a different style, a different way of doing things. It's one of the reasons why I love my own work, because I get to meet people working on the frontier of so many sectors. But John says he and his colleagues in the space industry share a particular attitude that he thinks people in earthbound industries could take inspiration from. He calls it FIFI.

John Conafay: So FIFI stands for F-It-Fly It, you know? And you have to get to a point where you're willing to just do the thing. You don't know how something's going to behave until you either test it, fly it, drive it, work with it in the physical world, and I think so many companies don't do that, and it's one of the biggest differentiators of SpaceX, is they're fully open to the fact that they're going to fail in some way, because they're willing to test remarkably fast. It almost pisses me off how much, Starship is an example of this, because they've flown seven times this year. What?

It's just like, "What is happening?" You know? So I think earth is a lot more tolerant for reasonable, safe, and considerate, sustainable experimentation. I'm not just saying like, "Go blow up a bunch of nukes somewhere," but I think everybody could deal with a little bit more, fuck it-fly it mentality.

Devin Liddell: It's an interesting topic because I think there is some sensation that here on earth, maybe we have lost some of our mojo in terms of building big, audacious things. I mean, some of that is related to what you said earlier, which is about risk, right? I mean, when you think about what it takes to take on risk and the appetite required to do so, does that explain why we're not making Hoover Dams anymore? Right? Which is why it's interesting that in space, that still remains like you have to do it. It's part of the game.

John Conafay: That's one of my favorite things about being a founder, and speaking to other founders, and speaking to investors and all this, is it's a study in risk every single day, and you have to really grapple with and understand your relationship with risk. And it's not for everybody, but I think that's where the real big things happen. And if you don't, you'll run out of money or you'll never know, or you'll have wasted a bunch of people's time, which, I mean, the most precious commodity, full stop. We don't have a lot of time.

Devin Liddell: Time for a speed round. What's your take on the most underhyped technology?

John Conafay: Despite all of the attention nuclear is getting and small modular nuclear, it is way underhyped. I want us to lean into nuclear. I think it is the cleanest energy that we need to be pursuing hardcore.

Devin Liddell: Interesting. What's your take on the most overhyped technology?

John Conafay: Social media. As much as I'm on it, I think it's become god-awful.

Devin Liddell: What's an innovation in another industry that has inspired you to think differently about your work in the industry you're in?

John Conafay: Oh, man. I try to think about this all the time, and now that you're asking, I'm just ... Around 14, I got super into music. I think it was Offspring, Smash was the first album that got me nuts about rock and roll. So then got into punk and hardcore.

So I just got really, really ingrained in those scenes or quite a few times, that I would just get the shit kicked out of me, and I had to figure out quickly which places I wanted to go for which bands and who I wanted to be around. And a lot of my moral integrity came out of the punk scene, and luckily I fell on the side that was, I hope more moral and more community-driven, and cared about people rather than exclusionary. And so I think that sense of community definitely lend itself to my wanting to be able to work with people more closely, and then build, integrate in a way that facilitates that.

Devin Liddell: That's amazing. What are you reading? What are you listening to? What are you watching at the moment?

John Conafay: Man, if I'm not doing six things at one time, I can't do one thing so ... The books that I'm reading, I'm finally listening to Radical Candor, the updated version. Great book. I think I've read The Hard Thing About Hard Things 16 times this year, maybe, by Ben Horowitz. Just started Mindhunter.

Super, super fascinated about the actual psychology. This is that relationship to risk and understanding of what aberrant behavior, and I'm just always fascinated by the human condition around those things.

Devin Liddell: Very good set. Love it. John, thank you so much for being here today. It's been a wonderful conversation.

John Conafay: Yeah, thank you so much. I've enjoyed this thoroughly.

Devin Liddell: That's it for today. Thank you for listening to Design This Day, a podcast by Teague. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss the next episode. We have some really exciting guests coming up. I can't wait to share more with you next time.

And if you have a complex problem that needs solving, we'd love to hear from you. Visit us at teague.com, or send us an email at hello@teague.com.