Momentus Inc.

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the momentous fourth quarter 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After this speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. As a reminder, today's program may be recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's program, Daryl Genovese. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Jonathan. And good morning, everyone. Welcome to Momentus' fourth quarter 2021 earnings conference call. With me here today are John Rood, Chief Executive Officer of the company and Chairman of its Board of Directors, as well as Jikon Kim, Chief Financial Officer. Each will provide prepared remarks. Following these prepared remarks, we will take questions from analysts. In the interest of time, we would ask that you limit yourself to one question and one brief follow-up. Earlier today, we issued a press release and made a slide presentation available on our investor relations website, which provides an overview of our business and financial highlights for the fourth quarter. You can download a copy of the release and presentation slides at investors.momentus.space. During today's call, we will make certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Exchange Act of 1934. Forward-looking statements are predictions, projections, and other statements about future events that are based on current expectations and assumptions, and as a result, are subject to risks and uncertainties. Many factors could cause actual future events to differ materially from the forward-looking statements in this communication. You should listen to today's call with the understanding that actual results may be materially different from the plans intentions and expectations disclosed in the forward-looking statements we make. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to materially differ from forward-looking statements, please refer to the earnings press release we issued today, as well as the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and the company specifically disclaims any obligation to update the forward-looking statements that may be discussed during this call. Please also note that we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial information on today's call. You can find reconciliations of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measures in our earnings press release. None of these non-GAAP financial measures is a substitute for or superior to measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. The technology underlying our anticipated service offerings is still in the process of being developed and has not been fully tested or validated in space. Our ability to execute on our business plan is dependent on the successful development and commercialization of our technologies. Development of space technologies is extremely complex, time-consuming, and expensive, and there can be no assurance that our predicted theoretical and ground-based results will translate into operational space vehicles that operate within the parameters we expect or at all. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, John Rue.

Thank you, Darrell. Good afternoon. I'm delighted to be here with you today to talk about our fourth quarter and the progress that we've made since our last earnings call in early November. I'd like to start by thanking the team at Momentus, which continues to drive progress toward our objective of providing the backbone infrastructure services to support the emerging space economy that continues to experience impressive growth. I'll provide some high-level comments on our progress since our last earnings call, and then turn to our current areas of focus and discuss our outlook for 2022 and beyond. After I make my comments, our CFO, Jikon Kim, will take you through the Q4 financial highlights. Turning to slide three, to begin, I'd like to highlight some new developments from the past few months. Overall, we continue to make significant progress on our technology, which will be the foundation of our success as a company. First, we've continued work to bring the Vigorite orbital transfer vehicle to market. We completed assembly and initial system-level functional testing on the Vigorite 3 vehicle that we plan to fly on a demonstration mission later this year. Subsequent to the close of the fourth quarter, we completed system-level thermal vacuum testing on Vigorite 3, which is late-stage environmental testing that simulates the environment in space. Our testing sequence is designed to uncover issues on the ground, where we can deal with them more readily and effectively than we could in space. Over the next few weeks, the team will be addressing issues that were uncovered during thermal vacuum testing. We continue to believe our Vigoride 3 is on path to complete ground tests in time for our inaugural launch planned for June, although the schedule is tight. Last October, we signed a launch services agreement that reserves two ports for Momentus on SpaceX's Transporter 5 mission which is targeted for June of 2022. We plan to use one of these two ports for the inaugural mission of our Vigoride vehicle using Vigoride 3, which is designed to take our customer satellites to custom orbits. We plan to use our second port on the Transporter 5 mission to aggregate rideshare demand from customers that do not require a custom orbit. On this port, we plan to use a deployer system from a third party to place customer satellites in orbit. And I'll talk about this approach more in just a few minutes. More recently, in February and early March, we signed launch services agreements reserving space for Vigoride on four additional SpaceX missions, including the Transporter 6 mission, which is targeted for October 2022, Transporter 7, which is targeted for January 2023, Transporter 8, which is targeted for April 2023, and Transporter 9, which is targeted for October of 2023. As we stated on our last earnings call, our launch plans are subject to the receipt of licenses and other government approvals and successful completion of our current efforts to get Vigoride and other space hardware ready for flight. We also established a strategic advisory group comprised of five leaders and technology experts to advise company leadership on programmatic, technical, and operational matters. These five individuals bring world class expertise and more than 150 years of combined experience in creating, implementing, and managing aerospace business and technology programs for industry leading companies and educational institutions. They are already challenging our thinking, mentoring, and helping us apply many hard learned lessons and insights from their distinguished careers. Beyond our efforts to mature and expand our product offering, We continue to build out and improve our executive leadership team, adding high-caliber individuals that bring the type of experience and skill sets that we need to grow our business and implement our National Security Agreement, or NSA, with the U.S. government. In February, we welcomed Jason Garkey as our new security officer. Jason reports to Security Director Vic Mercado, who continues to lead our security function and implementation of our NSA, which is overseen by the Department of Defense and Department of Treasury. Since our last earnings call, we have made significant progress further implementing the compliance tasks required under the NSA. In our last earnings call in November, I mentioned that one of the parts of NSA implementation that was a heavy lift was our effort to upgrade and improve the security of our enterprise information systems. I'm pleased to say that we've made good progress since then. having now completed the bulk of this IT modernization plan. While the NSA-related IT work will soon be complete, we'll never stop upgrading and safeguarding the infrastructure we need for both business and mission success. Turning to slide four, our core business objective is to become an industry leader providing the transportation and in-space infrastructure services for the burgeoning new space economy. Achieving this objective requires a well-defined strategy with near-term progress points. I want to remind you of the five key elements of this strategy and point out how recent developments contribute to its implementation. Recall that the first element of our strategy is to bring our initial orbital transfer vehicle, Vigoride, to market as early as possible with the features and reliability we know our customers need. We continue to plan for an inaugural mission with VigRide as early as June 2022. If we're unable to fly VigRide in June, then we plan to do so shortly thereafter. As I mentioned, we have now signed agreements for ports on the October 2022, January 2023, April 2023, and October 2023 SpaceX transporter missions, which can function as backup options if we need them, or alternatively as follow-on missions subject, of course, to the caveats that I mentioned earlier. We also completed the critical design review on our next generation Vigoride design called Block 2.2, which I'll discuss in a few minutes. We see a bright future for our Vigoride vehicle, and we're investing now to prove out its capabilities and position it to provide the services that our customers will expect from us in the near future. The second element of our strategy is to broaden our service offerings with Vigoride beyond the hub and spoke transportation mission. As an initial step in that direction, we're now planning on carrying our first hosted payload customer in 2022. This will allow us to demonstrate our hosted payload capability and grow our hosted payload business with other potential customers. We also plan to bring to market a reusable version of Vigoride toward the middle of the decade. We expect this will allow us to provide more economical transportation services relative to our early vehicles. This will also further expand the menu of services we're able to offer our customers to include in-orbit maintenance, refueling, and de-orbiting of debris and satellites at the end of their useful life, as well as other satellite to satellite services. We have been continuing work ourselves and with partners on the technologies to enable provision of these services, such as a robotic arm for Vigoride. We're also examining ways that we might broaden our SERPs offering into adjacencies. While some may think of this opportunity set as requiring a larger, more capable vehicle that can take larger payloads beyond low Earth orbit, we also think opportunistically about segmenting market demand within low Earth orbit and addressing each segment in whatever way is the most effective in terms of customer satisfaction, price, and profitability. For some market segments, we may not require an orbital transfer vehicle at all. To this end, we are planning to use one of two ports that we purchased for the SpaceX Transporter 5 mission targeted for June to deploy a Vigoride vehicle. On the second port, we plan to launch a third-party product from a trusted partner that is designed to deploy customer satellites directly from the launch vehicle. While this system cannot provide the last mile transportation service that Vigoride can, it is less expensive and it meets the needs of some of the customers in our backlog, particularly those that don't need to get to a precise orbit. This approach allows us to address the market in multiple ways and serves the needs of our customers more economically than we could if we were to fly every one of them on a more capable Vigoride vehicle. It is demonstration of our core belief that we best serve our customers by tailoring our offerings as much as possible to what they need. The fourth element of our strategy encompasses technology development and continued innovation. I mentioned development work on the robotic arm already, but the team is also working on two additional prerequisites to reusability, including a sensor package to enable rendezvous and proximity operations, and a fluid transfer system so that Vigoride can replenish its propellant tanks in space. The team also continues to mature our propulsion and power system designs in preparation for Vigoride block upgrades, as well as larger vehicles that we plan to produce in the future. Finally, the last element of our strategy is to attract, develop, and retain a highly skilled and motivated workforce to give us a competitive advantage in the industry. I continue to view the team and our ability to nurture it as foundational to our success. I mentioned the addition of Jason Garkey as our new security officer, reporting to our security director, Nick Mercado. Jason and I have worked together in the past, and he has the right skills and experience that the company needs to maintain a trusted relationship with the government and is already making a big difference in our effort to implement our NSA. We're also building out our engineering staff. restructuring the organizational design, and making sure that our people have the resources they need to succeed, including access to technical experts such as those comprising our new strategic advisory group. As we look forward, we will continue to opportunistically populate our company with talented individuals and develop them to help us simultaneously serve our customers and shareholders. Turning to slide five. This slide provides an overview of where we stand in production of our first vehicles. So far, we've produced two complete VigRides with four more in various stages of production. VigRide 1, our first vehicle, which has a 30-watt thruster, is fully built and ground tested. VigRides 2 and beyond are much larger than VigRide 1. VigRide 2 is also fully built and has completed most of its ground testing program. As we've said in the past, we've learned a significant amount from production of these early vehicles that we plan to retain in storage and potentially use as ground test articles in support of future Vigoride development. Vigoride 3 has now completed assembly and initial system-level functional testing and just recently completed system-level thermal vacuum testing, which simulates the environment that it will encounter while in space. Over the next few weeks, The team will work to address the issues that were uncovered during thermal vacuum testing. This will be closely followed by final vibration testing, which simulates the environment that Vigoride will encounter on the launch vehicle, and other ground tests. The team continues to progress the vehicles and its many subsystems through the testing process, correcting issues as they emerge. I continue to stress the importance of using ground testing, not just to validate our designs and engineering progress, but also as a critical part of a disciplined process to put us in the best position possible for success on orbit. We're planning for Vigoride 3 to be qualified in time to ship to the launch base for our planned initial inaugural launch in June, although, as I said, the schedule is tight. This inaugural launch is intended to be a demonstration mission. We plan to also take some customer payloads to orbit and to generate a small amount of revenue from this mission. However, the primary goals of the mission, as I said on our last earnings call, are to test Vigoride on orbit, learn from any issues that we encounter, and take important steps toward establishing the viability of our initial market offering. While we'd obviously love for our on-orbit demonstration mission to go flawlessly, as people with experience in the space industry know all too well, in the history of spaceflight, it's not uncommon for issues to arise on early missions. We plan to learn from any anomalies we experienced during our inaugural flight and apply the lessons learned to improve our technology going forward. After our inaugural mission with Vigoride 3, we plan to begin operating vehicles from our improved Block 2.2 Vigoride configuration. We recently completed our Block 2.2 critical design review to incorporate design changes relative to the prior configuration. These changes include a new modular tank system that allows us to swap propellant for payload, depending on mission requirements, as well as a more efficient structural design and improved payload hosting capabilities. We now have three Block 2.2 vehicles in early stages of production. Before I hand the call over to our CFO GCaM Kim for comments on the Q4 financials, I just want to reiterate my excitement for progress and the dedicated team that we have at Momentus, as well as the bright future that I see ahead for commercial space and Momentus. So with that, I'll hand the mic off to our CFO, Jikon Kim, and then we'll take your questions.