Interviewee
Louis de Goüyon Matignon, is the Co-Founder of GAMA SPACE, a french aerospace company working on the future of deep space transportation thanks to solar sails. Designed to meet the client’s mission requirements, their line of spacecraft enables new missions previously considered too expensive or complex to launch.
Transcript
Louis de Goüyon: So first of all, thank you very much for the invitation. I'm very glad to be part of it and I'm very glad to be able to speak about the company, about the project we have here at Gama. So my name is Louis de Goüyon Matignon, I'm 31 years old. I live in France and I'm French. I live in Paris, but the office is just outside of Paris and I am the CEO and co-founder of the company Gama that we created almost two years ago. We have our first launch where we're gonna fly six cube sets in a few weeks. I will come back to it, but just to give you a little bit of my background. So basically I'm not an engineer. I started studying law as a student and now I'm a PhD in law. I did my thesis on space law and that's how I got into the space domain. Let's say I was interested in how, you know, like satellite operations work from a legal point of view and working on my thesis, I got interested in meeting you with entrepreneurs and space agencies, even astronauts. And that's how I got, you know, the virus of loving space domain and space activities.
When I finished my PhD, I started a small company where there were only two people, called Toucan Space. And basically at Toucan Space we offer a service of sending people objects on the ISS, the International Space Station, oring the Earth and then bringing it back down on earth. So basically if you wanna send, I dunno, a watch or you know, a ring or whatever or your sunglasses to our space and just tell your friends, Hey, I have something that threw in our space, we provide that kind of service. But to be truly honest with you, I was a little like not disappointed, but I wanted to, you know, to bring something a little stronger to the space activities and I said to myself, "Hey, this is not really a prestigious activity".
I wanted something that could actually help more, you know, like look out what's more deep in space and you know, really bring something that's important for humanity, etcetera, etcetera. And that's how I got to think about how I wanted to see the future of space transportation. And I was looking at everything that was on the internet and I was listening to a lot of podcasts, especially NASA's podcast, "Houston, we have a problem, Houston, we have a podcast", sorry. And I understood that today all the activities were just outside of the earth in lower orbits. So that's an attitude of roughly 452 a thousand altitudes. And I said to myself, Hey, if today we are inhabiting, you know, lower orbits, what's the next step?
How are we going to travel further in deep space? And that's how I started my, you know, my research and I started speaking with people and I found out that there was this type of proportion that was really like looked into in universities in, you know, in research groups. But no one had really tried to do anything with solar sailing. And that's how I got the, you know, the interest of building a company around solar sailing. So I started meeting some specialists in France because back in France we have a NASA, it's called Ness, national Digital. And France is actually the third country to have launched its own satellite in the sixties, I think it was 1965, a satellite called aesthetics. It's a French character, really well known in France.
So we send this satellite in 65 and since then we have had this space agency nest. And so I met those people in Kne two years ago and I told them, Hey, I'm Louis, I want to, I just finished my PG thesis and I have this company tooken, but I want to go deeper into r and d and I'm looking for a true project that will help space exploration. And so I started working on solar sailing reading stuff and you know, meeting the right people. And then I had the privilege to meet my first co-founder Tebo, it was two years ago, over two years ago. And he told me, "Hey, I'm going to help you build that company. I'm gonna give you a little bit of money to start the company and then you're going to, you know, create a team, etcetera, etcetera". And as of today, October, 2022, we are about 15 in the company.
We're gonna be 20 by the end of the year. We are launching our first solar sale. It'll be in a few weeks from Florida. We will send a small cube set, a six cube set that will deploy a solar sale of roughly 100 square meters, so the size of a flat inside the size of a shoebox. And then we will start working on our next mission that will find 2024. And this will be a bit more crazy. We'll try some new specificities with the sales such as, you know, changing trajectory and doing some other crazy maneuvers. And then we'll be ready to have on the market a way to procure spacecraft in deep space without using fuel. But of course I will explain it later, but that's basically where we are.
It's a bit like if you have a boat on the sea and you have wind pushing the sail. Well in space, wind is sun, wind is the lights. So that's how solar sales work.
Elisa Muñoz: Can you explain to our audience what a solar sail is? If you want to get technical you can go ahead. I understand that it's something that bounces the light or something.
Louis de Goüyon: That's right. That's exactly it. I mean, so I'm not an engineer, so sorry if I make mistakes in explaining this, but I'm going to try to explain in the simplest way possible.
Today, when you have a satellite in space, usually you need propulsion to change, you know, some parameters over your parameters to rebounce the satellite or to deorbit the satellite in order not to have space degrees. And this costs fuel and this fuel can run out. So when you're doing a mission, what actually kills the satellite, most of the time it's because the satellite runs out of fuel.
Once you want to do a deep space mission, usually you actually use the whole launcher to go there. For example, if you wanna go to Mars, you actually have to have the whole rocket dedicated to the interplanetary trajectory and to actually launch your objects to Mars into the margin orbits. What we realized is that with solar sailing, basically we enable new kinds of space missions and that's what's crazy about it. And so that people can understand, unlike traditional means of proportion, solar sailing is just deploying a very, very big and very, very thin membrane in space that will reflect lights and by reflecting, by reflecting lights. When lights, when the photons will hit the surface, it'll give momentum to the entire spaceship and it'll push the spaceship. It's a bit like if you have a boat on the seas and you have wind pushing the sail. Well in space, wind is sun, wind is the lights. So that's how solar sales work. We have this massive, really huge surface like that deployed in space and you cannot deploy it from Europe, of course it has to be folded in the satellite. And I will show you the material and I will show you how it deploys. And for all parts at gamma we will have our first satellite flying in December. So we are really, really happy and excited about this perspective.
Elisa Muñoz: So if it doesn't need any kind of fuel then it's more sustainable, right? But if it's sustainable, is it less expensive?
Louis de Goüyon: So actually it's less expensive plus, I mean you have way less mass when you launch the satellite. So you actually gain, you know, on the fuel needed by the rocket. So you are actually sending less mass space. So this is a big economy plus while you are in space and when you are deploying the solar sale, you don't need any fuel. So this enables missions never seen before. So that's the big advantage of solar sailing. The second big advantage of solar sailing, you don't need fuel. So you can do a really long mission that it's theoretically the fastest object man will ever make.
So I think the two advantages of solar sailing are those, the first one is you don't need any fuel. So this means longer emissions plus less mass to send in space. So it's cheaper and second thing. And that's, I believe the biggest advantage is that you can actually go really, really fast with the solar sale. You just have, you just have to rethink orbital mechanics, you just have to rethink how we travel in the solar system. We believe that thanks to solar sailing and those new paths in the solar system, we can actually fly small satellites, usually cube sets to beers, to asteroids, to Mars and even further at really low price. And that's where we basically are positioning ourselves. This is the, this is the bet we took. I mean we did not look at lower bobs immediately we looked at what's beyond the orbits and we tried to imagine what the future of space transportation would be and that's how you know, we created gamma.
Elisa Muñoz: Lastly, do you have any advice for future entrepreneurs or people starting in the space industry?
Louis de Goüyon: Yes. First of all, do not change your pitch when you're speaking with investors. I mean you can pivot but try to stay focused on the initial vision. And second, please, I mean try not to do a copycat of something that already exists. I mean you can if you want, but I think what's more challenging for your life is to actually imagine what the future of space activities will be and try to position yourself with this, with this in mind.
Elisa Muñoz: Thank you so much Louis for being here and sharing your experiences.
Louis de Goüyon: Thank you very much. Have a nice day.
