Great to hear from you, allandias!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking these questions in judgement, at all. I’m asking because you’ll need to develop good answers to them. The best thing I can do is to be brutally honest in my advice. The last thing I want is for you to be deterred, but your time is valuable so I want to help you find your path as rapidly as possible.
If you had a team of seasoned engineers of course that would certainly raise credibility! 😂 But if you don’t have access to those, you will need to prove to the world, over time, that you’re on track to be more capable than other teams already building and launching rockets across the globe. Even if you could point to a history of being a part of a rocketry society, having prototyped basic rocket motors at home, or some kind of entry-level practical experience, that would be helpful.
For someone to give you money for something like this, you’re going to need to prove you can become the best team in the world. Wishful thinking fueled by only passion is not going to move the needle - start building and experimenting and learning about the launch market in much more depth. Without any of this, there’s nothing for you to pitch yet. There are a lot of people who would love to be handed money to play with rocket tech, and I love that there are some fancy pics in your deck now, but you need to start to develop real substance now - you’ll need to answer why someone with money should hand it over to you. That’s the whole game. 🙂
These questions I asked above will be answered as part of your journey. As you build your credibility by doing the right small things with the little resources you do have, you’ll be more likely to get extra bits of support - whether money or other resources - to get you to the next stage. No one expects you to know it all now. Your mission is to develop a strategy to keep moving forward and upward.
The biggest questions you should be trying to address are:
- Who are you solving a problem for and what are they willing to pay for it? Be precise and honest.
- Do you really need to start with SSTO? I can’t see how it will help you, especially with no clear answer to 1 yet. How is that going to help with affordable launch prices? Why a 50kg payload? Without knowing much at all about your customers (at least, you should know more than I do) you can’t know what you need to design for.
I appreciate that you’ve got a financial slide, but I’d take it out. It doesn’t convince me that you’ve thought about a budget in a useful way. If your budget is $100 today, spend it and show the world what you can do with that $100. Small, cheap experiments to incrementally build credibility are critical.
You might be a team of volunteers today, but if you want to be taken seriously then you’re going to have to find a way to become a team of capable rocket engineers and launch sector salespeople. Use that passion of yours to come up with a way to do this. 🙂
