Today, the Pathfinder podcast brings on its first sibling/cofounder duo. Before founding K2, CEO Karan spent a decade at Boston Consulting Group and helped lead Text IQ, an artificial intelligence company, through to a nine-figure exit. CTO Neel spent 6 years at SpaceX developing avionics systems for the Dragon spacecraft and then went on to become a senior electrical systems engineer at electric aircraft company Kittyhawk.

Mo, Neel and Karan discuss K2's origin story, optimizing for mass-scale, a post-Starship world, and much more...

Today’s episode is brought to you by SpiderOak Mission Systems, a US-based software company that builds space cybersecurity products and solutions for civilian, military, and commercial space operations. Learn more at https://spideroak.com/

• Chapters •

00:00 Intro

00:30 SpiderOak Ad

01:15 K2 Space overview

05:00 The problem K2 is looking to solve

06:34 A mass constraint vs mass abundant world

10:56 Other manufacturers optimizing for mass scale?

12:48 How the cost of JWST skyrocketed because of mass constraints

18:12 How is K2 going to drop costs?

22:04 Learnings from SpaceX

23:44 Sizing the demand-side of large-scale buses

26:03 SpiderOak Ad

26:51 Defense, commercial, and scientific use-cases

30:22 Customer traction

32:15 The future of large-scale buses in LEO

34:00 The K2 advisory board & team

38:45 Predicting the success of the first Starship launch

46:50 Starship launch costs

48:30 Where does the K2 name come from?

49:37 Favorite sci-fi book or movie?

51:55 Another space startup that really excites you

53:15 When do you think we'll land on Mars?

• Show notes •

K2 Space - https://www.k2space.com/

Mo's socials — https://twitter.com/itsmoislam

Payload’s socials — https://twitter.com/payloadspace / https://www.linkedin.com/company/payloadspace

Pathfinder archive — Watch: https://www.youtube.com/@payloadspace

Pathfinder archive — Listen: https://pod.payloadspace.com/episodes

• About us •

Pathfinder is brought to you by Payload, a modern space media brand built from the ground up for a new age of space exploration and commercialization. We deliver need-to-know news and insights daily to 15,000+ commercial, civil, and military space leaders.

Payload is read by decision-makers at every leading new space company, along with c-suite leaders at all of the aerospace & defense primes. We’re also read on Capitol Hill, in the Pentagon, and at space agencies around the world. Payload began as a weekly email sent to a few friends and coworkers.

Today, we’re a team distributed across four time zones and two continents, publishing three media properties across multiple platforms: 1) Payload, our flagship daily newsletter, sends M-F @ 9am Eastern (https://newsletter.payloadspace.com/) 2) Pathfinder publishes weekly on Tuesday mornings (pod.payloadspace.com) 3) Parallax, our weekly space science briefing, hits inboxes Thursday (https://parallax.payloadspace.com/)

A Mass Abundant World, with Karan and Neel Kunjur (K2 Space)

Valley of Depth