WSBW Торнбург 10

Hey Space Watchers - welcome back to the close of day three at World Space Business Week in Paris, where Torsten Kriening sits down with Jeff Thornburg, CEO of Portal Space Systems - and one of the engineers behind SpaceX's Raptor engine. The conversation opens with the headline that turned heads a few weeks ago: Portal bought an entire SpaceX rocket. Jeff explains the reasoning - with two highly manoeuvrable platforms in development, Starburst at around 300 kg and the larger Supernova closer to a tonne, plus a new facility and a path toward 30 spacecraft a year, securing access to orbit was about protecting the company's future and its customers. The mission will also carry others to orbit, offsetting costs along the way. Then to the heart of it: rapid orbital manoeuvrability. Jeff describes moving from medium Earth orbit to low Earth orbit in under three hours, or to geostationary in half a day - and why that matters. On the defence side, intercepting adversarial manoeuvres threatening critical infrastructure. Commercially, getting an asset into position faster means selling data sooner. The how is beautifully simple to picture: a magnifying glass on a playground. A mirror concentrates solar energy onto a heat-exchanger thruster, heating the fuel before it exhausts through the nozzle. The magic, as Jeff puts it, is in the heat exchanger design and the materials that survive it - delivering both high ISP and, crucially, the thrust needed to actually move fast. He closes on nuclear propulsion, firmly on Portal's roadmap, and why deeper human exploration of the solar system will ultimately depend on it. Fascinating, technical, and genuinely inspiring. Press play. #SpaceCafe #SpaceWatchGlobal #WorldSpaceBusinessWeek #PortalSpaceSystems #SpacePropulsion #jeffthornburg