探访 Bridgit Mendler 在 Northwood 新建的185,000平方英尺太空工厂

180,000 square feet.

Damn.

This is our manufacturing floor. We will have multiple manufacturing lines for our Prism and Portal products. For both of those, that's going to be hundreds of antennas in production.

Space systems were the major focus for a long time, and ground segment was the afterthought. A lot of networking infrastructure hasn't been touched since the 1990s. What got us excited was that if you could provide that network foundation, think of how many more players could participate.

So you've raised over $136 million from Founders Fund, 137 Ventures, Alpine, Washington Harbor. What do you foresee happening in the next 10 years? Bridgit Mendler, thanks for having us at the new HQ. Your old tenants left you a lot of nice little gifts.

Yep. If you want a hospital aesthetic on your walls, we have a lot of good paintings up for grabs for anyone who wants them.

But you did make away with this amazing NASA astronaut statue.

Yeah. No, this building came with a lot of fun little treasures. There's a NASA astronaut guy and a pool table. The team is advocating for some of the objects around here.

So this is the year of 100s for you.

Yeah.

You recently had a $100 million announcement back in January or February—

Yeah.

—for a new funding round. This is a 185 square foot facility. How big is this?

Thousand, yes.

Okay.

180,000 square feet.

Damn.

Yeah. It's designed to support hundreds of antennas in production, so a lot more antennas are going to a lot more parts of the world and supporting a lot more space traffic.

Amazing.

Yeah.

1. Ground Stations Explained

I guess, for the general audience that does not know what ground stations are, what is the TL;DR—the easy description?

Space missions need to send data into space and back to Earth in order to get any value out of that mission, whether it is taking pictures of the Earth, communicating, delivering Wi-Fi or cellular connectivity, or supporting more of the space mobility use cases where you're commanding a spacecraft that's moving around dynamically in space.

All of that requires some kind of connectivity back to the ground. Today, the state of that ground infrastructure is really lacking in the capacity and volume needed to support the future of space missions. What we're responding to is a big surge in scale that is matching the growth you see both in launch and in spacecraft manufacturing.

2. The Ground Segment Backlog

Why is there such a backlog? It was pretty obvious how many satellites were going to be built, so why didn't the US build out ground stations for this?

I guess it depends on the customer segment. For a government customer segment, they tend to procure their spacecraft and their ground systems separately. Space systems were the major focus for a long time, and ground segment was just the afterthought. People think about what's going up in space, and for a number of programs, the ground was just not really contemplated. They started running into issues, and they were like, "Oh, man, we need to actually account for the ground in our build-out so that we can serve that capacity."

On the commercial operator side, it really is more of a supply chain issue, where you have a bunch of different suppliers, the actual operators of those ground sites, and ultimately the software that's stitched on top of that. For each of those parts of the value chain, it was really challenging, based on that structure, to be responsive to increased spacecraft demand.

As a lot of the operators are looking at launching new constellations, there's this moment of turnover where you have legacy operators with assets that are up in space right now, and they're thinking, "Okay, what does our next generation look like so that we can be a part of this new wave of space?" You have a whole wave of sovereign operators that are increasing their spacecraft manufacturing, so you have a lot of the bus companies that are serving that.

The ground operations need to respond in kind, but that value chain is just not really set up to be responsive. What we're doing is looking across that whole value chain and trying to accomplish it all within one company so that we can actually be responsive to that demand, do it at better cost, make it more flexible, and just generally modernize.

So how are you doing full-stack ground support?

It's a lot of disciplines that you tie into one company. We cover everything from antenna development to electrical work and digital signal processing, all within the hardware that we build.

Then we have a whole sites team, so we actually think about how we manufacture and deploy those antennas, and that incorporates the original design principles of what we build. How can we make things that fit in small form factors and can be shipped to any part of the world? They have to construct really simple versions of sites, so that's a whole different set of disciplines.

You have to think about how you operate in different countries. If you're landing a site in Japan, Argentina, or Iceland—all those wildly different contexts—how can you make sure that the service is legally operating and also technically able to function in those regions? There are all those disciplines.

Then, on top of that, you need to have the software that can tie that all together, both from a user-interface perspective and in terms of networking and making the hardware work. It's a lot of different disciplines that have to come together to make that possible.

I think we really focused on top-of-the-line talent across all of those so that we can execute really effectively and orchestrate it all together, right? Because if any one of those pieces doesn't fall in line, then it impacts the overall offering.

3. Building Global Ground Sites

So you have 5 sites now in 2026. What is it like getting those sites built out, and what kind of regulations do you have to go through?

Putting together a site, you have to think about the base infrastructure that you need. To connect to space, you need to have fiber. That means you need to be able to network back through Earth. You need to have power, so you can actually turn on the devices that you have at the site. Then you need to have a plot of land to put things. We've tried to strip it down to just those 3 things.

We tend to co-locate, optimizing for places that already have those things readily available. Data centers, for example, are really great spots for co-location because they already have that infrastructure in place. They also have smart hands—knowledgeable people on site who can fix things up. That's the first layer of site sourcing: Can you check all 3 of those boxes?

Beyond that, you have to think about what parts of the world you want to serve for your customer base. Our customer base needs to account for global coverage to make sure that its spacecraft can operate. A satellite is moving around the Earth if it's in an orbit lower than geostationary orbit, so you need to make sure that the spacecraft can always be in contact, is turned on, is healthy, and is operating.

You also need to make sure that it can stream data. Where are the users? Where are the customers that you want to make contact with? If you're serving customers in the UK, you want to have a location in the UK where you can make contact with them. That's really the triangulation of locations.

The layer on top of that is: Is it a region where you're going to be able to work with the local government? Fortunately for us, the licensing has been relatively easy to work with in the different regions we've focused on, because most countries are open for business. They want to have more space business.

Once the licensing is checked off, the site is scoped, and you know where your customers are, you've got your ground site.

4. Space Needs Real Businesses

Fun. We've definitely seen, with the SpaceX IPO, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs, that they all put out these reports on how amazing and how big the space industry is. What kind of downstream effects are you seeing from the mainstream, maybe on hiring or culture, just general education and interest in space?

I think there's definitely increasing interest externally, and I think from the talent base, there's also just the excitement of the momentum that it generates with where the industry is going.

I think both from the investor perspective, there are folks considering space as a real business category. On the talent side, they're seeing it as a place where they can build their career.

I think what's interesting, though, with the space economy is that there's a lot of enthusiasm around the category, but you have to tie that back to business fundamentals. Is there a real business happening today while we are super excited about that future that the SpaceX IPO painted?

I think for us as a company, we are, and we have been since the beginning, very bullish on what kind of data was going to be moving through space. We've been big believers that more and more markets are going to be using space as the medium for transmitting data, and that has proven out.

Now there's enthusiasm around compute use cases, and there's enthusiasm about IoT and other future industries moving to space. But the reality is, that's not space today. That's what we're building all this infrastructure to be ready for.

Today, you need to build off of real businesses that exist. I think for us, we're a pragmatic business. We're very excited about the potential of space, and we appreciate that there is public sentiment and excitement about space, but we're also making sure that we're building real business today so that we can rely on our own business going forward.

What I love about coming and doing these factory tours, even when they're pre-built—

Yeah.

—you can see all the different stations and the people who work at them, and they're all very intentional jobs. They're very clear-cut jobs. They're durable, and you build careers with them and that kind of thing. Whereas you can go into software companies and everyone kind of looks the same.

Yeah, yeah.

But everybody at these manufacturing and factory jobs has a role, and they're all different.

Mm-hmm.

So what do you see from your employees about the excitement around those roles, and what are you hiring for?

The excitement of more hardware-based roles?

Yeah.

Yeah. I think there's a lot of excitement around hardware-based roles. As I mentioned, we have a huge variety in the kinds of roles that we're hiring for.

I think folks are seeing that the cool thing about the hardware that we make is that it's the intersection of a lot of different disciplines. If you have a curious person, they like to know that there's going to be some integration between RF, EE, high-speed data processing, and all of that within the same system.

While they're figuring out their piece of the puzzle, they actually have to think about a lot of other disciplines at the same time. If you like hard problems, it's a really juicy place to dig in.

When we were walking through the main HQ area, there was this really interesting room that—

Yeah.

—you guys are going to build out. So what's going on in that room?

Part of it is that you inherit the building that you have. I don't know that we would've built out a movie theater ourselves, to be honest. But I think the cool thing, as a ground company, is that you do need to have a form of mission ops.

We're going to be running mission ops out of what used to be a movie theater. I think that'll be a fun piece of the building to figure out.

Cool. And you're going to watch all the launches out of there.

Exactly. I think the thing for ground networks is that we're making sure that all of these diverse space missions are staying online. Being able to track those missions staying online is a key part of our business.

Today we have a bunch of monitors just thrown up in different areas around our existing facility, tracking uptime and other reliability metrics. We're just going to have to continue to track those metrics.

Especially for our customer base, what we have focused on as a business is the customers that really care about reliability. They care about flexibility and being able to allocate capacity where it's needed around the world.

Being able to track and measure that is core to us doing our job well.

5. Government Ground Networks

Northwood recently won a nearly $50 million government contract.

Yeah.

What does that contract go toward?

That contract goes toward a program called the Satellite Control Network, which is a network that is a pool of different space missions.

The way that the government has historically thought about how they manage all their spacecraft is that they break out the functions. On what they call the TT&C side, which is making sure that the spacecraft is moving where it needs to go and is healthy through all the different stages of its operations, that's the Satellite Control Network.

The actual data for that mission—let's say it's an imagery or a comms-in-the-field use case—is handled separately.

The Satellite Control Network side is really important for 2 reasons. 1, because there are so many more spacecraft launching that they need to make sure that they can be in contact with those spacecraft at all times.

The other piece is that those spacecraft are doing different things. I heard you talk with the Impulse team, for example. All of those use cases where spacecraft are moving dynamically around in new ways in the space environment basically don't have a solution for how to connect and control those spacecraft.

When we tie back to how you succeed at doing your mission—how you make sure you can actually do things in space—that really ties back to the networking. That's what the Satellite Control Network use case is for us, and it was the beginning of a partnership with the Space Force in doing that.

It's our trial period. It's us demonstrating that our system works and that we're able to do all the things we said we were able to do. That's the catalyst for a larger engagement for those services.

I think we're very happy with how that program has progressed, both in terms of how they've continued to expand and use it—which I probably can't speak too much officially to right now—but also, I think we've been able to knock out a number of those milestones, which is great for validating our system.

So there are about 15,000 to 16,000 satellites up in space, from LEO to MEO to GEO.

Yeah.

And what's crazy is that around 11,000 of those are just Starlink satellites.

Totally. Yeah.

But there's a component to this which is national security. There was a viral tweet that went out, and it was completely fake. I tried to tell you about this, and you were like—

Oh, yeah, yeah.

—“Oh, shit.” There was a viral tweet that went out about hacking—

Yeah.

—Elon's SpaceX ground stations and about the sensitive data and interception there. How do you think about security and privacy, and national security when it comes to ground stations? How are you fortifying both the physical side of this and the software side of this?

Yeah, no, it's a great question, and it's something that we really think about up and down the stack. It's all the way from the networks and the hardware to the software, to make sure that we are making it basically impossible for anyone to write anything to our local systems or tamper with our hardware at a site.

I think we've really taken a software-first approach with a lot of the security stack. We have conversations with customers who have historically really hardened up each of their individual sites. Think of guards and gates and things like that.

We're taking a bit more of the SpaceX approach, where they tend toward proliferation. We have a bunch of sites and that diversity of sites so that, if any one of those sites goes down—not necessarily for some kind of malicious reason, but let's say there's a crazy hurricane that wipes out the area—we can continue to have continuity of coverage.

We think about both being able to have basically no intervention possible at a local site, as well as having a diversity of sites to cover for any site downtime.

I'm sure this has brought you to many crazy places. What is the craziest place that this entire process of building this company has brought you?

I guess the recent one that I went to was Bulgaria for the first time.

Really?

That was fun.

Okay.

I got to hang out with the EnduroSat team and see what they're doing. They're doing such great stuff over there.

6. Northwood Scales Its Ambition

I'm really excited about what some of the countries around the world are producing. I think that was a real motivating purpose for me with this company: I want to see more space missions be successful and be possible within the US, but also within our allies and across a lot of different commercial operators.

Right now, we have some really strong frontrunners, and I think they will continue to be leaders. But what can we do to make it possible to build an economy? That's what I get excited about from the SpaceX IPO: there's more general enthusiasm and adoption for the concept of what the space economy's growth looks like.

For me, founding Northwood, we were looking at the space industry and seeing that there was development in launch and development in spacecraft, but what about the actual economics of space? You need to send data. That is how you monetize space. How is that networking currently being modernized and resolved?

You have SpaceX, which has totally transformed not just the launch side or the spacecraft side, but truly the networking side as well—what they're able to accomplish for sending data through space. I mean, the V3 announcement: a terabit per second per spacecraft. That's incredible that they're able to do that.

Some of the less remarked-upon things are really on more of the networking side of what they've built, like the mesh networks that they've supported. That's really not the paradigm of space today.

With space today, you have much lower throughput and generally challenging reliability requirements, so people tend to solve for that in really expensive ways, like creating a ton of diversity of sites and redundancy, which becomes extremely costly, and a lot of networking infrastructure that hasn't been touched since the 1990s.

What got us excited was that, if you could provide that network foundation, think of how many more players could participate. To date, when we think about the commercial operators that make the most sense to serve, it's those folks that are serving parts of the network where they're moving bits and need those bits to be reliable and flexible. They also, as a company, need to be able to perform at high margins. They need to reduce costs and increase their utilization.

Being able to make more viable businesses by introducing a part of the network—for us, as a starting point, that's ground—can help. Beyond that, we want to continue to support more and more of the networking piece. Being able to introduce cost savings and reduce the time to delivery is a pretty relevant part of making those missions successful and possible.

You've raised over $136 million from Founders Fund, 137 Ventures, Alpine, Washington Harbor. They're a huge name, by the way. They're involved in a lot of these companies down here in El Segundo.

From raising that much capital over time, what do you foresee happening in the next 10 years? Right now, you have a 185,000-square-foot facility. What does the scale-out look like for you in the space industry?

I think that speaks to what I was saying earlier: you want to be a very ambitious business and think in the long term about where the space industry is going and where you envision the set of problems that you can uniquely address and fill. But also, what are the steps to get there?

I think with investors in space today, and I think it's really the right thing, it's not just about bankrolling a vision that takes 10 years to materialize. It's about how you can demonstrate a business year after year that grows and actually hits compelling revenue figures along the way.

For us, the investor partners have been phenomenal, and they're leaning in on risk, which is a great complement to the customers who are really advocating for the demand. It's meeting those in the middle.

We don't want to be externally funded forever. We want to make sure that we can generate our own revenue and get there.

In starting Northwood, we recognized that the networking component of space was going to be a huge part of delivering value for the space economy. There were a lot of problems to solve there, but the most immediate one that would enable missions to get off the ground was on the ground segment.

That's where we set our focus, and fortunately, that's really proven to be correct. We have resonated with the Space Force customer that we've talked about and have been able to meet some of their urgent needs. When we're talking to them about timelines, there's a ton of urgency around being able to support more spacecraft.

On the Prism side of our product, being able to support customers that are trying to increase the throughput and the number of customers that they can serve has been a great product fit. We found that we're addressing something that is genuinely going to be driving a good amount of revenue for us.

Having those foundational pieces enables us to be more ambitious. Once you have that product foundation that you can build on top of, it creates more compounding, both from a product-development standpoint—what do we know now from the products we've built today that gives us an advantage on the next layer of scope we take on?—and in terms of the proof points, legitimacy, and credibility to go to those customers and say, “I think we can do more to help you guys do more.”

I think that's what ambition looks like for us. There could be really lofty expectations. I think there's a valuable spot if you can improve networking for the space economy; that is how you translate bits into dollars.

In the more immediate term, it's about how you gradually absorb more and more scope and solve more and more significant problems.

What are the main categories of customers that you have on the commercial side?

Largely, I think it comes down to communications and Earth observation customers whose ultimate end customer might be the US government or a sovereign government.

As I mentioned, on the communications side, they're monetizing bits, and the customers buying those bits are the ones that need more reliability and flexibility than maybe a SpaceX-driven architecture provides.

Think about a customer that needs to make sure a certain amount of throughput is always on. They need to make sure that amount of throughput is something they can control. They need to make sure that, if they have some kind of bulky, bursty load to send from point A to point B, they can actually accomplish that.

It could be anything from an enterprise that today is using a private network. There are a ton of businesses that don't use the public internet but use private networks. That falls into the same category.

Or it could be a hospital where they need to make sure that, when everybody is watching the World Cup, they can still maintain their connection. There are a lot of different use cases, both on the government and commercial side, that require that level of reliability and flexibility.

Historically, the way they've solved that from the ground side is with a lot of redundancy. Think about wanting to be able to surge to support a World Cup scenario. If there's a whole bunch of extra customers in an area, they want to be able to capture that revenue. Maybe the satellite can, but maybe they don't have enough ground support for it.

If they wanted to have that surge capacity, it's going to be really expensive for them to support and maintain it all year round. Or, if they're serving a use case where they can't afford to go down, sometimes they'll have 3 times the amount of ground capacity they would otherwise need, just to make sure that it doesn't go down in any scenario.

So all of that translates to a lot more networking on the ground, which today is super expensive and also really long to deliver. Both the cost and the time horizon that they need to address that against—think about 18 months in advance, considering the ground infrastructure they have to provide—are significant. If we can condense that time period and condense the cost, that enables them to have a lot more optionality with the customers that they can serve, and also to have it be a lower-risk endeavor from a cost standpoint.

As critical national and global infrastructure—

Yeah.

What are the biggest challenges that you've faced and had to overcome?

What are the biggest challenges we face, just in general?

Yeah, or building it out—the processes as a growing—

Yeah, yeah.

Company.

Supply chain is one that people mention a lot, and that is definitely the case for us as well. From the get-go, we've been thinking about supply chain: How can we lean on a kind of supply base that is unconventional to space? We took the philosophy of, let's not buy the aerospace-grade components that are readily off the shelf. Let's just hire incredible engineers who can figure out how to reconfigure a cellular diplexer. And so that's been successful thus far. We've been able to make space-grade performance out of standard, high-volume cellular components.

So there's that piece of just targeting parts of the supply chain that are easier to work with. But then there's also: What do you bring in-house? Like a lot of the companies in the area, we've taken that approach as well. I think we've tried to be pragmatic about it, where we don't start with doing everything. We only bring in-house what actually turns into a pain point on the timeline.

At this point, we're doing a fair amount in-house, and we'll continue to do that. That means you need to have the best talent that can actually serve a very wide range of functions, and you need to be able to deliver something that has the performance that you need. We've been able to do that so far.

I always take this on a personal angle for performance, because I think performance is really about who you surround yourself with and who you're inspired by. Maybe it's a mentor.

Yeah.

And so I'm curious for you, who are those people? Is there anybody that you particularly look up to? Maybe it's Elon, maybe it's Gwynne. I don't know.

I think it's helpful to have founders who are a step ahead of you, so you can understand what problems are going to be around the corner. Obviously, Elon has been a huge influence on the industry and set a lot of axioms that companies now abide by. I do think Steve Jobs isn't the name that's mentioned as much anymore. Well, maybe that's an understatement. But I think there's a lot of emphasis on the Elon mode, which I think is true.

But I also think the things that I really relate to—or that I admire and seek to glean from—more of the Steve Jobs mode of operating are just the obsession with craft and perfection. I think that's definitely in the Elon mode as well, but maybe I'm just connecting more to the artistic aspect of it in the Steve Jobs way, because I very much am a perfectionist and I wrestle with that sometimes. Sometimes things just need to get shipped and be done.

But I think there's also a lot of value in just being maniacal about craft and quality. Knowing when to apply each of those is really important.

What was the biggest surprise that you've had growing as a leader or CEO in this space?

Maybe just the trusting-your-gut bit of it. I tend to be the type of person who likes to triple-check everything because of that perfectionist thing. I think being more comfortable with making more gut calls and being like, "I'm here for a reason." I've made enough good judgment calls along the way to be here, and sometimes those gut calls are actually the right ones on the first go.

What are the biggest misconceptions with ground stations? Why aren't you building a very large parabolic dish?

The reason why we've chosen the architecture we've chosen is all about scale and flexibility. We want to be able to produce a lot of units, and we want to make them able to do a lot of things for a wide variety of missions. We're not just serving one customer. We want to basically be an index for space, where whatever use case winds up panning out for space, we're able to support it. That's a pretty unique design factor for us.

If we were trying to build the Stanford dish and the Stanford dish alone, we'd build a giant parabolic that only sits in one place and does one thing. But if we want to accomplish serving the Stanford dish while serving a lot of other things, we probably would build something that's more modular, that could add up in the sum of its parts to the kind of performance that's required for that operation. In the meantime, you can use it for a bunch of other things. That's kind of the economic model we have in mind.

This is a random question, but do you have a favorite sci-fi movie? Every single space or factory tour we've gone on, they're kind of—

Yeah.

Obsessed with sci-fi.

They have a favorite?

Yeah.

We're going through the Star Wars series with my boys, so we're trying to indoctrinate them early. They're so in on it.

Yeah.

That's great. But actually, my favorite sci-fi book—which I don't know if they've made into a movie, and I think they should—is Sphere by Michael Crichton. I'm actually getting somebody else to read it right now, and I'm trying to read it with them as well. I don't want to spoil the plot, but it's basically an underwater UFO situation.

Ooh.

I highly recommend it.

Do you believe in underwater UFOs?

Well, it didn't come about from underwater. It landed there. I hope I'm not giving away spoilers. But do I believe in UFOs? I have the boring answer, but statistically, yes, I feel like there is other life out there. It's just a matter of probabilities that will eventually collide with us in some form.

7. Building The Antenna Factory

This is our manufacturing floor, and there's nothing in here yet, aside from the old paintings over there. What we will have is multiple manufacturing lines for our Prism and Portal products. For both of those, that's going to mean hundreds of antennas in production.

What do you need to have? You need to have a lot of inventory, so there'll be sections for us really just storing the components and making sure that we can have them on hand. There's also going to be a bunch of different fabrication stations and build stations that we have. We'll have testing stations. The floor plan's going to get occupied pretty quickly with all that.

This is huge. As you build this out, there's obviously a lot going on behind us, which will be inventory, antennas, that kind of thing. What is going on over here? These are really interesting, huge bays.

Yeah. When you're scaling up production, you have to think about a couple of different pieces together. You have to think about how to have a resilient supply chain strategy. That factors into more of the infrastructure—the inventory supply. You have to think about how to actually have the production line space to be able to have all of those units run through their assembly process.

You also have to think about what the testing apparatuses are for them. There are going to be things that we're sourcing from inventory, but there are also going to be things that we're building ourselves in-house. We have things come through shipping and receiving over here. We're going to have our antenna production lines running here for multiple product lines, running in parallel side by side. In this back corner over here, you can actually start to see our anechoic—

Oh, yeah.

—chamber starting to get stood up.

Oh my God.

So, yeah, we're going to have our chambers over here for testing. When you're building out antennas, you need to do a couple of different testing processes. You need to do the anechoic chamber, for example, where you test the signals on the antenna to make sure that it can operate as it's expected to.

For people who don't know what an anechoic chamber is—

Yeah.

—can you explain that?

A lot of blue, spiky foam that looks really cool. It protects the integrity of the signals because, believe it or not, where we're standing right now has a bunch of different signals and noise interfering. It basically creates a very isolated environment where you can focus on the performance of that antenna.

Back to what you were asking, over here we're going to have a lot of that inventory supply, and we're also going to have our machining shops. Those are going to be for the components that we're actually building in-house.

Mm-hmm.

When we are building out different antenna feeds, for example, we will build an all-new antenna feed that we then test in the chamber to validate its performance. We're going to be doing PCB assembly as well. Basically, we're bringing in all the different parts of the supply chain that are imposing timeline restrictions and things like that, and we're going to put them here at Northwood so that we can control it, test it, and then assemble it all together.

Cool. Should we walk over there and just show it?

Yeah.

Okay. So we're inside the building.

Yep.

This is all going to get built out.

Correct. A lot of this is going to be office space, but the building came with some fun perks.

Mm-hmm.

Kind of fun perks.

I think the movie theater was in here, right?

Did I pass it?

I think so.

Oh, it is right here. Okay.

It's hidden in here.

Yeah. Oh, “On Air.” It'll always be—

Oh—

—on air. Exactly. Molly's recommendation, and I think this is correct, is that this screen is too small.

The screen's too small.

Um—

Look at the screen.

It's true.

It's tiny.

If you have so many nice lounge chairs, you might as well have floor-to-ceiling, or even ceiling-included, screens.

Yeah.

Just screens everywhere, really simulating satellites overhead, right? You could just have them all—

Well, did you see—

—flying around.

I'm really late to watching this movie, but I just saw Project Hail Mary.

Oh my gosh, yeah. So good.

They have one room where it's a 360—

Yeah.

—kind of screen.

Yeah.

So you could make this whole room—

Oh, for real. Yeah, that's great.

—a screen.

You could.

And simulate—

Being a ground station.

—being a ground station.

If you want to get the vibe for what it feels like to be a ground station, this is where we could take people. They could just get the whole emotional experience of being a ground station.

I think that's pretty fun, putting the screens everywhere. I actually have no idea why they had a movie theater here because they were doing automotive production and stuff, so maybe it was just some guy who wanted to have a—

He could have built a—

—a movie theater—

—a man's den—

Exactly.

—at home—

Yeah.

—so he did it here.

There's also this interesting window back here, which I don't know—

Oh, gosh.

—what it goes to. It's covered in foam. Oh, there's actually—no, it goes this way. There's a room behind the screen if you want to spy on what's going on in here. A lot of possibilities. A lot of possibilities for what we design for here. And a bucket, if anyone wants to take home a bucket. I don't think anyone's going to claim it at this point.

Oh my God. Okay, so maybe we'll see the lobby and the astronaut.

Sounds great.

Awesome.

Watch, it'll come back—

It's really cool—

—and it'll be—

—completely built out—

—totally different vibes. Yeah.

I mean, it's really cool to see how raw the manufacturing facility is, and then you come in here and it's just a full-on—

Yeah.

—office.

Yeah.

It's a nice office. It's built out. It'll obviously be cleaned and that kind of thing, but this is an amazing entrance.

Yeah. This is coming into Northwood. We saw the manufacturing floor side where we're going to be cranking out antennas.

You can see the smokestacks of El Segundo.

Exactly, so you know where you are. Coming off the freeway, seeing the big old Northwood logo, El Segundo smokestacks, echoing lobby, and then you come inside.

We're trying to account for a bunch of people on the manufacturing floor, as well as, like I mentioned, the other disciplines that work at Northwood. There's the regulatory side, the site build-out side, and the software team. A lot of different teams are not on the manufacturing floor as well, but we all get to be together and get the benefit of working close by.

I got the squeaky shoes.

I like the sunlight.

Yeah, this is really pretty.

Yeah.

Maybe look at that.

It's kind of dramatic. If you ever want to intimidate one of your guests, you just walk down this staircase—

—on the way in.

It actually kind of reminds me of that Titanic scene—

Oh, gosh.

—when she's coming down, you know?

I mean, hopefully not—

Yeah.

—in a scary way.

They gave us a pool table, so my son has enjoyed that. And then this was another one of the fun things.

This is the most fun thing.

Yeah.

I thought this was awesome.

Just strike a pose with the NASA guy.

I think we should put this near the entrance.

Exactly. Hold hands. That's our other gift. Again, they had nothing to do with space, but they left us a NASA astronaut.

Everyone loves space. It's great.

Everybody loves space. It's true.

Hopefully there's no one inside of that.

That would be terrifying. Everybody has the LEGO rocket ship thing.

Mm-hmm.

Everybody loves space.

Well, Bridgit, thank you for taking us around Northwood.

Yeah.

I know it got a little bit silly, but you can't tempt me with a scooter.

That's how I like my interviews. I just bombarded you with ground station information. I had to treat you to a little more—

I got distracted. I'm like—

—right after that.

Well, thank you so much.

Yeah.

I'm so excited for the build-out, and we'll be back here in a week to see everybody working.

Yeah. Exactly. All right. Thanks for coming by.

Cool.