Introducing The Long Frontier Podcast
We’re launching something new. Here’s why, and what Episode 1 is about.
Hey friends — Brannon here!
We have news. Abe and I are launching a podcast.
It’s called The Long Frontier, and the first episode is live now. Before you click play, let us tell you why we’re doing this and what you can expect.
Why a Podcast?
Over the past couple of years building Deep Tech New York and writing this newsletter, we’ve had the privilege of going deep on the technologies and the people that are shaping the future of the physical world. And what we keep finding is that the most interesting conversations — the ones where a founder walks you through the physics of why their approach works, or an engineer explains the manufacturing constraint that everyone else is ignoring — those conversations deserve more than a quick take on social media or a bullet point in a newsletter, and seemingly, no one has made a great podcast dedicated to uncovering that science.
So we built a show for that.
The Long Frontier is a deep tech podcast where Abe and I go deep on one specific technology area per episode — the science, the engineering tradeoffs, and the market dynamics behind the most important innovations being built right now. We bring in the experts who are actually doing the work, and we try to make the content accessible to anyone who’s curious, not just the specialists. You can think of it like a 301 level college crash course for deep tech.
The name is intentional. In investor shorthand, to be “long” an investment asset means you’re committed for the long run. And the “frontier” of human knowledge is vast — there’s an enormous amount left to discover, build, and invent. We’re long frontier tech. As a strategy, as investors, and as students of science-driven progress.
Each episode is designed to be a standalone deep dive. You can pick up any single episode and walk away feeling genuinely more informed about that topic — how the technology works, why it matters now, and where the science and the market are headed. We’re not spending time covering industry news or talking about the latest fund raise, but rather we’re just going to go deep into the tech from the start and we’re having a lot of fun doing it!
Episode 1: The Orbital Economy and In-Space Propulsion
🎥 Watch on YouTube | 🎧 Listen on Spotify
For our first episode, we picked a topic near and dear to my heart: space.
But we didn’t do the usual “state of the space industry” overview. Instead, we focused on a specific question that most people outside the industry never think about: once you get a satellite into orbit, how do you actually move it around?
The space economy is already a ~$600 billion market, and it’s growing fast. GPS, Communications, Earth observation, defense, broadband — all of it depends on assets in orbit. But right now, the vast majority of satellites have extremely limited ability to maneuver. We’ve figured out how to fly stuff up to space. We haven’t figured out how to drive it around once we get there.
We were joined by Jeff Thornburg — the CEO of Portal Space Systems, a 30-year aerospace propulsion veteran who spent time at NASA and was one of the chief architects behind SpaceX’s Raptor engine. Jeff walked us through the fundamental physics of how propulsion systems work, why chemical propulsion has hit its performance ceiling, and why a different approach — one that uses the sun itself as a heat source — could change the entire equation for the orbital economy.
I won’t spoil all the details here (that’s what the episode is for), but I will say this: the conversation about gas stations in space, unlimited delta-V budgets, and what happens when survivability becomes the most valuable characteristic of an orbital asset will change how you think about what’s coming.
Give it a listen and let us know what you think. We genuinely want to hear your feedback — what worked, what didn’t, and what topics you’d love to see us cover next.
Follow The Long Frontier: YouTube | X / Twitter | Spotify
In the News: Space is Having a Moment
Portal Space Systems — $50M Series A
Speaking of Jeff Thornburg — just yesterday, Portal Space Systems announced a $50 million Series A at a $250 million valuation, led by Geodesic Capital and Mach33, with participation from Booz Allen Ventures, ARK Invest, AlleyCorp, and FUSE. This is on top of $45 million in strategic funding from the U.S. military, bringing total capital raised to over $110 million.
Portal is building solar thermal propulsion systems for spacecraft — the exact technology Jeff discussed on the podcast. Their Hex thruster concentrates the sun’s heat to propel spacecraft at high speed, enabling what Jeff calls a “fighter jet for orbit.” Flight electronics launched on a shakedown mission last week, with a full prototype spacecraft expected to launch in October and the first operational SuperNova spacecraft slated for 2027.
We’ve been believers in Jeff and this team from the beginning, and this raise is a major step toward making on-orbit mobility a commercial reality. Read the full TechCrunch story here.
Valar Atomics — Once again in the news!
Our portfolio company Valar Atomics continues to move at an incredible pace. It is rumored that the company has raised a strong round shortly after their $130 million Series A just a few months ago.
For those keeping score: Valar went from incorporation to first criticality in just over two years. Their focus on small, high-temperature gas-cooled reactor clusters designed for AI data centers and grid-constrained regions puts them squarely at the intersection of the two biggest infrastructure buildouts of the next decade — energy and compute.
See You at Space Symposium
The Space Symposium is happening next week in Colorado Springs, and I’ll be there alongside Jeff Thornburg from Portal Space.
If you’re attending and want to connect — DM me on LinkedIn or X, or shoot me an email. And if you’re going to be there and we don’t connect beforehand, I hope we run into each other while we’re out there. It’s going to be an exciting week for the space community.
That’s it for today. We’re
excited about The Long Frontier and what it’s going to become. Thank you for being part of this community — your support of DTNY, this newsletter, and now the podcast means a lot to us. We’re just getting started.
From Sci-Fi to Sci-Fact. Let’s go. 🚀
~Brannon & Abe