Well, thank you guys. Really appreciate, all of you for attending the TD Cowen Aerospace and Defense Conference. My name is Gautam Khanna. I'm the TD Cowen Aerospace and Defense Research Analyst. We're very privileged to have with us representatives from Voyager Technologies, a relatively new IPO. We have with us Chief Strategy Officer Wallace Laughrey and Adi Padva, Adi Padva.
Good.
My name is Gautam Khanna, and I'm sitting there mispronouncing people's names. It's appalling. Anyway, I wanted to first just open it up to you all to give us a quick overview, and then we can go to Q&A if that's all right.
Well, Adi and I are going to tag team.
Okay, cool.
Because he is a much better presenter than I.
Nice.
We're going to go through the business. I mean, it's just for some framing. You know, my Voyager is a, at least in my experience, a very unique company. It was interesting hearing Kaman before this because I know them very well from my past. My background, most of my career was in traditional aerospace and defense, ran large portions of businesses at Northrop Grumman and Legacy TRW and Raytheon, ran the space business for a number of years, and then made a completely different shift to join the Anduril leadership team to stand up some of their businesses. So the mix between those two, and I think as you kind of hear about Voyager, you hear all this stuff about space and the market and, you know, the technology and the moon, it all sounds fantastic. Space is very exciting, and there's a lot going on.
Sure.
Underlying it all is a core set of technologies and products and infrastructure that Voyager's building and building towards what that future looks like. I think hopefully this gives you kind of a signal of what that looks like. Adi is going to fancy up all the words and make it sound much better than you and I can do.
Sounds good. Thanks, Adi.
Okay, so a quick introduction. First of all, just a little bit of my background. I started my career in the Israeli Air Force flying F-16s and F-15s, went to HBS and joined the investment community and worked at Neuberger Berman and Brown Advisory for 18 years, covering industrials and aerospace and defense companies, and then saw the light and transition into industry. I've been with Voyager for a couple of years.
We raised private capital, and we took the company public in June of 2025. The purpose of establishing Voyager was to add value in critical pain points within the aerospace and defense and space industry. Our founders identified areas where the industry became a little bit slow to adapt, waiting for the customer to give them the signal, the money, and yes, the checkpoint all the time instead of innovating.
The industry was not disrupting and moving fast enough, adapting to new levels of threats. In the space market, we've seen a lot of good ideas that were not well capitalized, whether the business models were not strong or the balance sheet. So Voyager was funded to capitalize on those opportunities. We work more as a technology company rather than a defense company. We're very low capital intensity.
This year will probably be an exception because we're capitalizing our business for the Golden Dome-related growth. But over the long run, we'll have very low CapEx percentage of revenue. But we are highly innovative, and we spend about 20% of our revenue of R&D, and most of our contracts will be, if not already, our commercial contracts. So very much like a technology business operating in the aerospace and defense businesses. We focus on mission-critical.
We're not trying to solve everything for everyone. So we are focusing on pain points where the outcome significantly improved with the solution we bring to market. We are an organic highly organic growth platform. So you'll see when we talk about financials, we guided the street for 25% organic CAGR between the IPO time to 2030. This is augmented by M&A. We're highly acquisitive, but Wallace will talk a lot about it.
We do not acquire growth. We do not acquire revenues. We assemble technologies that improve our capabilities so we go to the market with stronger and more value-added solutions. So many of our 13 acquisitions to date were with zero revenue. It was a concept, an IP, a team, or a product in development. Some come with revenue, some don't. We have a highly capitalized balance sheet.
We have over $400 billion sorry, over $400 million of cash. We have $200 million of undrawn credit facilities, and we deploy that cash towards M&A, in organic growth, or IREG, and lastly, Starlab. So what you'll see, when we talk about our segment, Starlab is a separate company. Voyager won the contract from NASA to build a commercial space station to replace the ISS by 2030. We capitalized that company separately.
So Starlab is a joint venture between Voyager as a majority shareholder, Airbus, Mitsubishi, Palantir, and MDA from Canada. We also added Northrop, who started as a competitor and now a partner. We're building a commercial replacement to the ISS, but it has its own management board, balance sheet, and business. We are just a majority shareholder. So when you look at financials, for example, they're all consolidated.
So this is kind of the high-level overview. I wanted two words on our two sentences on our founders. Dylan Taylor and Matt Kuta. Dylan was a public company CEO, took several companies public, and he's an avid venture investor in the space industry, very well known and respected. Matt Kuta was an F-15 fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force, so we get along well and we also compete a lot.
Worked at Goldman on the private equity team for a few years and then founded Voyager with Dylan. And Matt is our president today and basically runs our day-to-day operations. One of the things that are most important to our management is the talent that we're bringing to the company. So one of the nicest feedback we got during the IPO roadshow last year was that this management is high quality relative to the revenue base.
The point is that this revenue base is well undercapturing what this company can and will do in a few years. I do want to mention two names here. One is the head of our space board, which is Jim Bridenstine. He was the NASA administrator under the first Trump term, and was never fired, full term. And then, who you don't see here is Dan Kane, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When he retired from the military, he joined two companies. One of them was Voyager. The other one was private equity. And he was the head of our board. But then Trump tapped him to lead the military, so he had to resign. But again, Wallace is another proof that the ability to attract talent to this emerging business model. With that, I'm going to pass it to Wallace.
Yeah, when you think about our business, think of it in three segments. Segment one being Starlab, which Adi talked to, the replacement of the International Space Station. And then the other two segments under the umbrella of Voyager Technologies are defense and national security business and space solutions. And what does that mean? Today, we provide mission management and the pipeline for operations for about 80% of what the traffic on the International Space Station for research is today. That's a pathway that is not the Starlab equivalent, but the pipeline for how you get from research on the ground where everybody doesn't have to be a space scientist, but it's mission management. So we just recently have awards where we execute those contracts on the existing ISS.
So it's a bridge between what comes post on the Starlab side. Additionally, there, we have a long history in NASA research and development for core technologies associated with things like lunar exploration or, you know, and all of its various instantiations from in-situ resource utilization, core technologies that we've developed in concert with NASA in preparation for whatever comes next for the moon to Mars.
So most of those are the underlying things that are the durable infrastructure products, more or less so than building the lunar lander itself. It's the things that make the lunar lander work and other products to derive research and science onto those platforms. And the last piece is just our national security side, which is really a combination of solid rocket motor energetics technologies from vertically integrated, from critical chemicals to core constituents to tactical solid rocket motors.
We're not trying to go build large-scale solid rocket motors, but throttleable solid rocket motors, technology that drives the implementation of many of these systems, whether it's future next-gen Interceptor or space-based interceptors or other Golden Dome instantiations. And then lastly, that cuts across all of our business is core products that we sell into the space market: sensors, electronics, processing, and compute, the basis of all the pieces of infrastructure that everybody needs to build what, you know, is, is a pretty exciting set of opportunities in the market.
Maybe, a couple of words on Starlab, just so you can quantify this opportunity. We are building a pretty unique structure to replace the ISS. It is a single module to orbit. Why is that important? First, it enables us to build the entire structure on Earth and test it on Earth. So when we launch it to space, we know it works. It significantly reduces both the cost and the execution risk. Second, Starlab, the joint venture that I mentioned with Voyager, Mitsubishi, Palantir, Airbus, and MDA from Canada, we are a design and integration company. We're not vertically integrated. That allows us basically to operate like a commercial off-the-shelf. For every system, subsystem, structure, we bid out the work, and we leverage existing mature capabilities and technologies out there.
So our entire station, for those who are familiar with technology terms, our entire station is TRL technology, readiness level eight or nine. Nine is the highest. Our competitors are somewhere in the three all the way up to seven, eight, etc. The advantage of having a more commercial off-the-shelf philosophy is, again, reducing execution risk, reducing technology development risk, and reducing timeline and cost to market.
So when we price our services to NASA and the other multiple customers that will use Starlab, we will have a pricing advantage with very high margins. Lastly, we are the only proposed space station that will launch on SpaceX Starship. Luckily for us, when we designed Starlab, SpaceX already had the specs available for Starship, so we can launch the entire. That's what enabled us to build a large, single module station.
We will launch it in on a single launch in 2029. The advantage for the customer and for shareholders is that we unlock 100% of our capacity in a single launch. Our two other competitors that we can talk about later, they have a modular approach. So they're like Lego parts. They build a module. They launch it separately. They assemble it in space. A year later, six months later, who knows? They build another module, launch it separately, and assemble it in space. More complex, takes longer to wrap capacity, also takes longer to monetize. Starlab will unlock 100% of the capacity, for our customers on basically within weeks. And we will be able to monetize the full capacity very quickly. Return on investment capital is quite tremendous. So let me end with that, and we can open up to Q&A.
Unit economics for Starlab, per station, $4 billion of annual revenue once in orbit, $1.5 billion of annual free cash flow, over the life of the station. And that's, we estimate, about 30 years. Cost of building the first station is $3 billion. So $1.5 billion of annual free cash flow for 30 years, the one-time cost of $3 billion. We believe demand will exceed capacity, and we will build additional stations.
The cost of the future stations will be about $2 billion because we do not repeat the $1 billion of NRE, non-recurring engineering cost. So the unit economics will improve. Starlab today owns ±60% of Starlab. We're raising some external capital right now, so we'll likely get diluted. During the IPO, we said we'll not go below 55%, likely. So that's the ownership of Voyager and Starlab. We obviously consolidated the full financials into our financial statements.
Helpful. Just maybe you did touch on this earlier. The competitors are doing it in steps. They're not just doing one launch, get it up and running. Could you talk a little bit about who the competitors are and how you assess their technology in general?
Yeah. So, we are all operating under a program within NASA called CLD, Commercial LEO Development Program. It is the Space Act Agreement between NASA, the government, and the commercial providers to replace the ISS. So NASA has been funding us, fully. We received a contract under the first phase of the CLD program for $218 million. That is fully funded NASA to date.
There were initially four competitors in the program: Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman, Axiom Space, and us. Northrop since then joined our team and now part of Starlab. So there are remaining three companies. The industry is now getting ready to receive the next phase of the program, phase two of the CLD program. RFP should come out any day, and we expect the decision within six months of the RFP date. The next program is important because, one, it may include down select.
So going from three current competitors to two, NASA intends to buy two. So this is not a winner-take-all. This is a multiple provider. And this is a repeat of every pro public-to-private transition NASA has with space launch, with human spacecraft, and with resupply missions, always two. We're all familiar with SpaceX, but there's always a second Boeing Starliner and Northrop Cygnus and Blue Origin in launch. It's just SpaceX better capitalize it. So this market will, like, will be two players or more, at least. The next phase of the program also comes with significantly greater fundings. If you guys Google the five-year budget request from NASA in the fiscal 2026 budget, you'll see about $2.1 billion allocated for the program. And we assume we'll get slightly less than half of that, that will help our funding.
And that's over five years?
Between 2026 and 2030, yes.
Gotcha. Okay.
And then obviously, the next contract from NASA post-certificate post-development and certification, NASA will transition to services where they buy commercial services from the provider. So they'll buy astronaut time. They'll buy mission. We already know what NASA indicated to us, the internal capacity, how many astronauts, how many days in space, what, what percentage of our capacity. And we are already selling our capacity to governments and commercial players. And demand, I believe, exceeds our expectation at this point.
And to that point, so yeah, what percentage of the capacity will be reserved for NASA, if you will, when you're fully up and running? And is it microgravity experiments for commercial players, I guess? So if you could just talk about the mix and how that might evolve over time.
Okay. So revenue, the $4 billion annual revenue on average, it will probably be a mix of 50% astronaut time, and then 50% the we call it payload. It's research, development, and manufacturing in microgravity. Some of the microgravity, the payload activity will come from the nations that send astronauts. So the astronauts will bring, payload work with them. Some will be commercial companies or, education, university, etc. that will send payloads. And the astronauts that are on board a station will perform. So that's the mix. NASA indicated that they want two astronauts on board a station. It could be four astronauts, six months each, or two astronauts for the full year, an X amount, about a third of our, payload capacity. So overall, NASA takes about a quarter of our capacity because we can, host eight astronauts on board a station.
By the way, The ISS which is significantly larger can host seven on an ongoing basis. They can surge, but so we will have more astronauts. We assume for our modeling purposes that four astronauts will be there on a recurring basis every day. Then, four astronauts will come and go for a shorter duration mission, accommodating significant pent-up demand from countries that want to have presence in microgravity but were locked out of the ISS, which is controlled, owned, funded, and operated by only five countries. So we're seeing multiple countries in discussion, LOI, to have capacity on board Starlab.
So that's interesting. So because this will be open to.
It's a commercial entity.
Got it. They could. You could sell to any.
Yes. But NASA obviously will get a priority, although our customers are all, I mean, commercial customers. It's not a cost-plus program.
No, I gotcha. That's interesting. Is there, so how far along are you in developing Starlab here within on Earth, if you will?
Yes. So one way to measure it is the milestones that we have as part of our SpaceX agreement with NASA, the CLD phase one agreement. We've delivered on. We've disclosed we delivered on 27 milestones to date, all on time, on track. I believe there are about 35 in the first phase, and then we'll move to the next phase. So we're on track for a launch in 2029. Often, we press release some significant partnerships, supply contracts, and manufacturing agreements.
So I would say the maybe significant one is in the fourth quarter. We disclosed that we partner with a company in Louisiana, Vivace. They are a trusted supplier of NASA advanced technology, extremely compelling costs. And they will build a shell for Starlab, the shell you see in front of you in the picture. And we disclosed several other partnerships, etc. We'll continue to do this as we both add partners to the program and customers. So it's, it's going very well. Again, all pointing towards a 2029 launch. The ISS will deorbit in 2030. So we want to have a capacity in orbit before that.
Just in how you choose partners, equity partners in this, it's based on what they can contribute to the actual production of the Starlab?
Yeah. That's a great question. And then I'll pass it to you, Chris.
No.
You need to talk to me. So, this is, again, a very unique characteristic of Starlab relative to the competition. The competition is siloed. Like, it's U.S. companies alone trying to solve for this. We structured Starlab in a very different way. We talked about the commercial off-the-shelf concept that we design and then integrate, available costs. Gives us a time and cost advantage. But the structure of Starlab is also very unique.
We mimicked the structure of the ISS, excluding Russia, on the commercial side. So we brought in Airbus, which is about 30% equity owner in Starlab. They're representing the European Space Agency, the second largest in the world. Mitsubishi, representing the third largest space agency in the world, Japan. MDA from Canada. And MDA does the Canadarm, the GN&C ISS. They're building the arm for Starlab as well. Palantir writes the ops code for the ISS.
They're writing a lot of our code as well, plus integrating AI and machine learning into the Starlab facility. So we brought them for several reasons. The know-how. Each one of them is a well-capitalized, experienced, and savvy technology provider. Second, they all represent international customers that now have the buy-in. So Japan and Europe view Starlab with kind of view Starlab as their station.
Gotcha.
That's the reason. However, I would also add that we are, they're not providing all the CIPS subsidy manufacturing. This is a competitive bid that we bid out, and we choose the best supplier, the best technology, the best industrial-based, and the lowest cost.
Gotcha. Of these partners, are any of them invested in some of the rivals that you mentioned earlier?
No. They're not invested. They may do business with them. Some of them are exclusive. Palantir, for example, is exclusive to Starlab. NASA may provide an arm to a supplier. They don't have to. But they cannot be equity owners in any other. They're exclusive to Starlab.
That makes sense. But to your point, demand on the microgravity experiments and what have you, the 75% of capacity that's not NASA, you're already getting lots of inquiries.
Yes. We'll disclose some more during our upcoming quarter and annual guidance call that we'll have. But we feel very strong about the capacity. I mean, we're close to being sold out.
Okay. I didn't want to spend the entire time on Starlab, so I was wondering if we could also talk about, you mentioned NGI, for example, Next Generation Interceptor. Could you talk a little bit about what you're doing there? And it sounds like some of the technology there, I would think, has application elsewhere. And so how are the conversations?
Yeah. If you had asked that question a year ago, it would have been NGI and its scale. And now with Golden Dome and others, I mean, our core contribution to the NGI program started with throttleable solid rocket motor technology that we have for what's called a roll control system. That technology applies to different applications on weapons, interceptors writ large. So with Golden Dome ramping up because it has that same technology kind of has applicability across many, many different options that are emerging, both terrestrially, whether it's second source opportunities on existing programs of record, and then new programs that are emerging.
And on top of that, for our business as well, what tends to occur is many of our technologies can couple together, where some of our compute tech that we do for avionics or processing is also applied directly to control algorithms, which give customers the ability to integrate systems together and optimize using software instead of how we would have historically been, like, "Here's a box. Plug it in. This is all you get." So we do across different customer sets where, you know, I call them competitors. They will compete. And at the same time, we're selling them products that are enabling many of the things they're doing across the business.
Can you describe the roll control system? What does it actually do?
Fundamentally, it's what you think of solid rocket motors. We all hear about, like, Aerojet. Big solid rocket motors, like a standard missile, is what's called a 21-inch-ish booster, so 21-inch diameter, and pretty big. So the solid rocket motor is a propellant grain. It's called AP, ammonium perchlorate. And they run it through these mixers. And they put it down in these casings. And that's pretty large. We build solid rocket motors, but the motor is not a 21-inch motor. It might be the size of a half bowling ball. What we have been investing for the better part of 15 years through legacy acquisition is how do you use that solid grain in a way that you can throttle it, turn it on, and turn it off because what it gives you is the ability to control and,
Modulate?
Modulate real quickly maneuvers in a way that you can't do with in the same form factor or size. That's why it's a huge game changer for weapons because you get the ability to maneuver in a small form package that you can control and get a lot of energy out real quickly. You just can't do it really any other way in that sort of size factor. And that application cuts across many, many different systems and application types. So recently, at the end of last year, we acquired a company called Estes Energetics that does everything from critical chemicals that feed into energetic systems or solid rocket motors to actually building solid rocket motors themselves at a small scale.
So we did a groundbreaking two weeks ago in Pueblo, Colorado, on an ammunition and weapons factory to be able to kind of focus on the application set that is a bit different than what you normally would hear of, like, a big solid rocket motor. So we build small solid rocket motors, even in 155-mm artillery rounds. And the only way you can do that is if you're able to package it in such a way and use it where it's different, it's a different application than it has historically been.
Just to be clear, like, for a dummy like myself, normally, you light the gunpowder.
Not that you're a dummy. I'm sorry.
No, no. I'm just saying, like, it's like I think of it as, like, you got gunpowder. You light it, and it just goes, right? And you're saying you can actually modulate it so it doesn't burn the entire.
Correct.
Once you start it, it's not. It's gone.
The example we use is the solid rocket motor is great because you store it. And for 20 years, you don't have to touch it. When you need it for a missile interceptor, it will work. The problem is that it's on or off. There is no in-between state. Our technology, which we believe we're the only one in the world that have it, and it's been in development for over 15 years, allows you to modulate. And the example we use is you drive on the highway, 70 mph , and then you want to take the ramp off the highway. If you turn at 70 mph, you fly off the highway. So you want to slow down, maneuver, and then reaccelerate, and drive away. That's the same thing with the missile.
The problem with missile interceptor technology today is that when they maneuver to intercept the kill vehicle, maneuvers to intercept, it flies at full throttle, and it doesn't maneuver well. So with our technology, the ability to scale down the thrust, maneuver, we were able to improve the maneuverability, for at about 400% better maneuverability because we save on the fuel. It's on a full burn. We can extend the range of the interceptor by 10x, which means you can intercept further away. And all that comes at a lower cost versus existing technologies.
So as Wally said, we now take this, this technology on NGI, which is the marquee Missile Defense Program for the U.S. and will be a core part of Golden Dome. We have the roll control system. But we can use this technology, the ability to throttle solid rocket fuel in multiple other applications, other missile defense programs, etc. As, as Wally said, we, the proof that it works on NGI now opens up a pretty large market for us.
I was going to say, are the other prime contractors, RTX, you know, Raytheon Missile Systems, are they looking to perhaps adapt some of this technology for some?
What I would say is across our portfolio, we are engaged with just about everybody that builds weapons today as potentially a second source or a new technology that can be added into their portfolio of existing programs, as well as their future programs. I think there's something a little bit unique about what's happening in the industry because you may say, like, "Well, that sounds interesting. Why hasn't anybody else done it?" People say, "Well, we are sort of doing it." And there's varying ranges. So what I would say is different about today, which is one of the reasons why I came to Voyager from Anduril. I stood up a weapons business at Anduril and was like, "Wow, none of the stuff to build any of these things exists." And that's not an Anduril problem. That's not a Raytheon problem. That's an industry problem.
The stuff is modern in the sense that there's a recap of how we build systems that they will look the exact same, but the degrees of control that are implemented through what you can do now with software algorithms and compute and power in a what we call mission-critical, which is we find now that we're selling as much space hardware to weapons programs as we are to space programs. You go, "Why is that?" Because the reliability is so high and the environment's so it's all sort of starting to converge. Now it's not that the throttleable technology just couldn't exist before. It's that all of the pieces of technology weren't necessarily there. There wasn't enough of an industrial base that, you know, guys that build solid rocket motor grains aren't necessarily software control engineers.
And so when you start bringing them together and they realize the convergence of, "Oh, wait a second. You're doing this space thing, and I'm doing this, this weapons thing. We have to produce the same exact stuff on the same exact production infrastructure. And we're writing and we're using the same compute. Why aren't we figuring out how to optimize this?" And I think that's the play where for our business and what we're seeing across the market, the opportunities are very broad, whereas historically, they would have been small businesses that sold into a traditional prime that sold into the weapons business. And that small business couldn't see because they just didn't have any context of what the adjacencies were. And they could never scale. So yeah.
No, that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious, how are you guys penetrating ex-US? Are you guys actually looking at some of the foreign manufacturers of missiles or what have you as customers?
Very much so. We're sort of tracking right now what's happening with AUKUS and how the, in the most recent information that's coming out of the department is great. Our emphasis right now, especially on the energetic side, is on onshoring. A big part of our business is, as you talked about, Starlab. The one of the reasons we know so much about how the bridge will work is because today, we run about 80% of the research we call it mission management for universities, commercial entities through the ISS National Lab. And then we run those missions, like, orchestrate all the science. So if a nation wants to go, then we work through, whether it's universities or others, a big portion of our business is actually international, where we support certain countries that are doing work and want to get into microgravity research.
We facilitate that through sort of the orchestration of the ISS National Labs that is all currently underwritten by the government. So the transition over is not waiting for Starlab to come, but also bringing in other partners, particularly those that are aligned with kind of the Artemis coordinations that want to get into space but maybe aren't going to be able to build rockets or even buy a rocket, but they want to maybe do a private astronaut mission, or they want to do research on orbit where we can facilitate that. So that's probably the biggest international pathway we have right now. And coming out of 2026, I would fully expect that, on the energetic side, we're building and reshoring industrial production capacity for things like black powder production, which we haven't produced in, I think, 30 years.
We used to have 60 factories in the United States. Today, we have zero. We're currently building the first one. We'll start reproducing black powder, which is not super sexy, but it's really important, and critical chemicals, you know, reshoring. There's 18 critical chemicals for munitions that nobody else in the industry needs except for munitions. And the government said, "Oh, we better reshore some of that." So that's a big emphasis for us. But we know full well that looking forward in the future, it's the key nations. Everybody has a.
A need.
Production, you know, being able to produce, a challenge, I'd argue.
Perfect. We're up on time. So I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for taking the time.
If anyone has other questions, we're available. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you.