 Hello everyone, welcome to tomorrow. While I was at the ISDC conference this year, I met two gentlemen who have a company called Space Division Inc. that recycles composite materials from aerospace companies. So check out this interview, we're talking about bringing a little bit of space into your everyday life. Well Jason, Ryan, thank you very much for sitting down and talking with us today. You guys have a very interesting project here where you guys are using recycled materials to manufacture all sorts of things, but first I want to kind of find out how it is that you guys got started in this and what brought about the idea. When I was a freshman at the University of Southern California, I was the lead composites engineer in the rock propulsion lab and at the time we were trying to track down some rolls of carbon fiber to use in the construction of our rockets and they're pretty expensive, it's about five thousand dollars for a single roll and so that exceeded our budget that we could spend on carbon at the time, so we're trying to track donations down and we reached out to Boeing and a bunch of other companies and eventually Boeing got back to us in about May of 2013 and they said hey, we've got all this material that we're going to have to throw away, we're doing a freezer cleaning, you guys should come and see if there's anything you want to use and we show up and they roll out 10 pallets of material which we valued at over five hundred thousand dollars and we were blown away, the guy told us if you guys don't take this tomorrow, we're going to landfill all of it and right there I knew there was a huge problem in the aerospace industry with carbon fiber scrap disposal and a great opportunity to go and do something about it and so that summer and over the course of the next year I worked on developing carbon fiber skateboards using this upcycled material. Wow and then you guys actually brought some of those skateboards with you today, but first how was it that you found out about just and you got involved with the project? So Ryan was at USC studying, was put in contact with Greg, I don't remember exactly how that introduction was made, but Dr. Autry, one of our co-founders, a major investor and I were working at a healthcare software company and so that was back at the time it was that I wasn't involved with skateboards or anything, it was software development and if you would have told me at the time that you're going to go start which is essentially a skateboard company yeah okay that's funny but then I found out what it's really you know really this huge problem that's out there you know the the amount of waste is it's a waste of a valuable resource you know it's filling up landfills millions of pounds of this go 10 million just in aerospace going every year and I just thought that was you know something I wanted to get involved with trying to you know help solve this problem wow very cool and so with this material are you guys just doing rapid forward or are you guys doing like a some sort of system to 3D print some of these some of these materials? So the material we collect comes straight off of the production line it's mostly trim scrap which is a carbon fiber fabric that's pre-infused with a resin system and that resin system is activated with heat and then uh compacted with pressure in order to form the solid material that most people know is carbon fiber and it's really a carbon fiber reinforced plastic and so in order to turn it from that fabric into the the solid carbon fiber that everybody knows we use a hot press and we hold it under heat and pressure for the recommended cure cycle and then outcomes whatever product we need to make very cool very cool well some of the stuff that you guys have here obviously you guys started was it first with the skateboards or what was it a little different yeah right had the first skateboard made before I got involved that was really amazing give him a chance to tell you about it but when I saw it what he was able to do just with the resources that he had at the rocket lab and it just really was like a an awesome show of like ingenuity and being able to like really start this up with on a you know a student budget and that that kind of like dorm room startup mentality getting it done so yeah in 2015 we launched our first skateboard the aileron on Kickstarter and it was pretty exciting for us it started taking off and we were actually going to be working with a manufacturing partner who was going to make the boards for us we would bring them the material and work with them to figure out a process in order to manufacture the boards and about twenty thousand dollars into our campaign he calls us up and says you know I don't think I'm going to be able to make these boards for you anymore but fortunately our campaign was so successful that it allowed us to actually go and get our own facility and start manufacturing the boards ourselves which in turn helped us move a lot faster and farther than we thought we would right away now some of your boards have electric motors to them how did that come about so after we launched our second Kickstarter at the rover there was a company in Singapore called Arcboards that reached out to us and they had seen the aileron and they had seen the rover and they knew about the message that we have which is trying to save carbon fiber from the landfill and they really enjoyed the way that we presented our boards and said it would be awesome if you guys would sell us boards that we could put electric units on so we shipped about 125 boards up to Singapore that they took and then converted into their electric skateboards it's a actually a different slightly different shape of variant we had additional holes so they can mount their electronics to it but it's essentially it's that collaboration very cool now are you guys putting yourselves out as more of like a supplier or a contractor are you guys selling some of the the products that you guys have manufactured so up until about 2016 we were selling mostly just skateboards and then right at the start of 2017 we started working on a larger business to business contract manufacturing portion and then in 2018 we launched the space division Inc which focuses on office furniture and other cool carbon products that we got really inspired to build just in our office and so now our office is full of carbon fiber desks and monitor risers and laptop stands and that is kind of the inspiration that pushed us to go and build the space division which we just launched on Kickstarter right now what is the goal of space division are you guys actually trying to make aerospace products and other than just office materials what's the goal of space division so the really really the reason that we started all of this and space division in particular is to bring a little bit of space to everybody because this material is so ridiculously expensive to go out and buy that it can't be used in a lot of applications and so what we're able to do with the space division elevated materials in 121c is bring these products to customers and then connect them with the space industry because what we're really here to do is help promote the space industry and move the industry forward as a whole awesome so given if you have an ideal situation where where funds were an issue what sort of companies or products would you like to collaborate on we're finding that's that's a good question yeah i would personally just as a fun project i would love to make a nice set of carbon fiber skis so working with someone like salomon or k2 would be super awesome and then on top of that we'd like to get into the case manufacturing industry working with companies like pelican to make cases for camera equipment oh but the list goes on yeah it's it you could build a pretty fun list with this material because of i mean it's used in aerospace because it is so amazing now technically advanced and so that's why we thought it was a shame companies that really might have products that could use this type of material but find it way too expensive to even pursue it's really for us the brands are to raise awareness that there's this new classic material that we can provide that is absolutely that aerospace grade pre-pride carbon fiber in like for instance these quantity or excuse me uh you know flat stock sizes of various thicknesses and weave patterns that we can provide different sizes and we really want to work with companies kind of like what you just said where we can kind of come in and show what's possible as what really the products that we've created beyond just wanting to make sure anybody who's a space enthusiast can literally hold a piece of this technology that came off of one of those rocket lines showing what's actually possible to create with the material as well and that really does scratch the surface as far as the capabilities of what we can expand to in the futures as we grow what's pretty inspiring for me is that a lot of people reach out to us with ideas that we had never even thought of it had been on my mind a little bit but some place that we're finding some traction is with the drone industry customers will send us a part file or a DXF file which is basically just a drawing of what they want cut out and then we'll take it to our CNC equipment and make their parts and we can turn around and ship them iteration after iteration as they develop their racing drones to you know be the fastest and the best out there it's kind of the blessing of really that manufacturing partner get you know having their own situation they need to focus on and essentially turning over what they had developed or what we developed together first to move forward because it allowed us to kind of really hone in on this idea of not just creating a company and skateboard brand but you know this whole manufacturing capability brought our in-house water jet cutting and composites are actually you know much more difficult as Ryan would would attest to to work with than you know a metal or other things that you water jet is used for firstly we'll really tune that process and be able to then bring that capability to other companies is is really fun well we have a pretty good idea of why you're doing this but is there anything else that is inspiring or another cool that you have in order to to be recycling the materials that you hope will have a larger effect in the industry so what's kind of I would say what's exciting for us is there's about we estimate there's about 10 million pounds of carbon fiber going into the landfill just from the aerospace industry every year and with the aluminum industry and the plastic bottle industry and the steel industry there's an entirely established supply chain for this material to go through there's a guy who goes and collects it and then it gets brought to a processing facility where it's turned into pellets or ingots and then somebody buys that and converts it into a product and then somebody buys that product and sells it to a customer and none of that exists for the carbon fiber industry so our mission really is to develop an entire industry around carbon fiber recycling to educate people about how they can use it figure out how to manufacture it in unconventional ways to bring the costs down reuse stuff that people thought was just trash and turn something that's incredibly valuable resource into something that's usable again yeah and what he was saying I actually think we've also mentioned about you know the maker movement us being able to really bring down the cost so far that we have by really tooling up ourselves building rhyme designing the presses that are required his you know taking his his knowledge of composites and kind of bringing that down to a level that allows us to just even enter this market by you know the custom mill presses the hand mill presses and with with me really excited about the the way we are able to inexpensively monitor those pressings and really develop like what's considered internet of things for manufacturing tool and then allow that us to then share that with our partners and people that we work with to really just expand and grow as quickly as possible I think that's pretty exciting for me that's very cool yeah where do people find out more information about you guys about this problem in general the best place to see the Kickstarter the best place to see our current progress is on our Kickstarter space division Inc if you go to Kickstarter and you search for space division Inc will come right up top result we launched the space office fleet we started it with 45 days about two weeks ago so it's going to end right around the end of June all right well awesome thank you very much for us sitting down and talking with us today and hopefully you'll have quite a few more interesting people with cool ideas or at least want to get some I definitely want to get a couple of these skateboard so thank you very much for sitting down and talking with us thank you yeah and we do hope that anybody who has a an idea of concept where they just could use the carbon fiber for its properties or its look or its connection to space or really to help us solve this environmental problem we don't want to hear from anybody or investors or investors or investors and we're also raising funds through crowdfunded equity on StartEngine and selling on Amazon Prime and all those great things you have to do with us awesome great thank you again thanks Mike thank you thank you