Chris Yip  0:04  
Welcome to Tell Me More: Coffee with Chris Yip, the official podcast of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering at the University of Toronto. Each month, I sit down with someone from our vibrant global community to talk about what places them at the heart of designing bold solutions for a better world. You'll meet alumni, students and professors who are making a difference across a range of fields, including some where you may not expect to find them.

Chris Yip  0:34  
My guest today is Rahul Goel. He is the Founder and CEO of NordSpace, which aims to develop sovereign space launch for Canada for the very first time in the nation's history, coupled with their own satellite manufacturing and Canadian spaceport. His passion for both aerospace and entrepreneurship go all the way back to his time as an undergrad right here at U of T Engineering and he's still a student today working on a PhD at the University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace Studies. Rahul, welcome to the podcast.

Rahul Goel  1:01  
Thank you very much for having me here, Sir.

Chris Yip  1:03  
Yeah, Sir?

Rahul Goel  1:05  
Still used to that from undergrad.

Chris Yip  1:06  
Man, far too formal. It's going to be a fascinating conversation because as we're recording this right now, Artemis just came back. Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on that. It's just the huge interest in space in general. Seems like you've always been passionate about aerospace. Give us a bit of a background on that.

Rahul Goel  1:26  
Yeah, I mean, I get that question fairly often, and first of all, really excited to be on this podcast. Huge fan of the University of Toronto experience, and everything that's sort of enabled for me. So excited to get into all of that, but U of T actually played a pretty big role in my own sort of career trajectory, and getting me excited about aerospace. I lived in, born and raised in North York, and every, like, basically two days or so, I would drive past this, you know, the UTIAS sign, and this like mysterious little campus that I would never enter, but always, you know, just like it sat in my head, and it was one of those things among many, many others. I went to high school around the Downsview Airport area. You know, back then they had this giant, like, Avro Arrow one to one scale model there before it moved to the Edenvale Airport, saw, like, a, you know, one of our CFA teams take off there, and these, like, little moments just stack up in your life, especially at a very young age. I used to go to the planetarium with my grandpa whenever used to go back to India, and that used to be this thing that bonded myself and my grandpa, but also got me really close to the stars and very excited about it. So I began to realize at a very young age just how impressionable I could be, and I've tried to do that through NordSpace and through other initiatives, making sure not to waste a single moment with, with young people especially, to get them those little impressionable moments and experiences, so that maybe they pursue something similar.

Chris Yip  2:51  
For many folks, they sort of think of U of T campus, they sort of think downtown St. George, maybe think of Scarborough, maybe think of Mississauga, but you forget that we have this, we kind of call it this hidden gem, this hidden fourth campus up on Dufferin.

Rahul Goel  3:02  
Yeah, my world was pretty small, right? Like, I mean, you know, I grew up in, in that North York area, Jane and Finch area, and I joke about it. I feel like I never really went north of Steeles for almost like the first 20 years of my life. It was a really small world, but then you see this opportunity, and you see this, you know, hardware, and you see this extension of this campus, and I really sort of fell in love with the term campus as well, where you just sort of have this creative destruction between many different types of disciplines in different physically located areas, people really, you know, brilliant in aerospace and in biomed, and what I love about university is just that there's so many, so much diversity, and it can all come together when it needs to, or operate in some separate ways. So, but aerospace just happened to be the thing I fell in love with pretty early.

Chris Yip  3:46  
As you said, what's nice about engineering is it is so multidisciplinary. You have the opportunity to work at the interfaces between different disciplines, and then at the same time focus. I think our EngSci program is a great example of that. And so, tell me about that experience. Why did you choose EngSci? What was it like going through that program?

Rahul Goel  4:03  
I mean, there was definitely a thread of my life, which has just been unhealthily obsessed with challenge, and EngSci seemed like the ultimate challenge from a lot of kids when I was in high school, who came back and talked about it, and all of that, and I was really excited about just challenging myself to the maximal level, but then also I knew I wanted to study aerospace. In fact, between going from high school to EngSci, I went to the York University for two years, the Schulich of Business. I was sort of gently pressured to pursue business, seemingly a better career opportunity there. That didn't work.

Chris Yip  4:37  
External pressure.

Rahul Goel  4:38  
Yes, exactly. It didn't work out that great. And then I was like, all right. After a year, I didn't go to any business classes there, I just went to engineering classes. A lot of that transferred over. That's why I was able to take your third year course in my first year, but I eventually was super, super grateful to be accepted after what I thought was kind of a taint on my career, going to go into business school, and then switching that quickly. EngSci accepted me again, and I have been forever grateful, and going through that challenge is really an important part. It's just who I am. I love constantly pushing myself, but also the fact that in the first two years I could study this diversity of areas, quantum, bio, and I love all of those things so much. But then choose a specialization which was unique to EngSci, but also uniquely aligned with my interests. It just felt like the perfect match. It was a really, really tough program for me. Jarring experience going from high school, where I was like hundreds across the board, and then it was, it was, it was interesting, but then I got used to it, developed connections, and the faculty was just amazing, and just fell in love with it in every way.

Chris Yip  5:39  
Interestingly, and I didn't realize, I mean, you've nucleated so many different things. I didn't realize that you had started the RSX, Robotics for Space Exploration team.

Rahul Goel  5:49  
When I was at York University. They had a Mars rover team there that competed in what was called, what is called the University Rover Challenge. Happens in the deep in the desert in Utah, where teams from around the world get together and complete these Mars-like mission tasks with these rovers that they create, so I came to U of T, and I wanted to be a part of that team here, but it didn't exist. How can U of T not have this? Like, you know, we got to...

Chris Yip  6:10  
We needed a nucleator.

Rahul Goel  6:11  
Right, right? I mean, you know, and this was kind of the, again, the thread of my life back in elementary school, that we, our middle school and elementary school didn't have a Lego robotics team, and I was just like, we have to create this, and that was a very formative part of my life. So I started RSX when I got to U of T here, just because we didn't have it. None of the teams that existed, UTRA, UTAT wanted to take that on, and I've always sort of been this like reluctant leader in a sense, where you know it's just like, okay, well, no one's doing it, I guess I'll do it right. And then I shoved myself to operate out of UTIAS, so that we could sort of, I wanted to be part of that environment, even in undergrad, but we started there. We were a thorn in a lot of people's sides, but the first people were my brother and a couple of other people that I could just gather to join me on this crazy journey. Shoestring budget, but we did it, and the team is doing way better than it ever has under new leadership. I'm so glad that they're still around. One of the proudest moments, and I was shocked to see last week in Myhal that our second rover is on display in the, in the U of T Robotics.

Chris Yip  7:09  
Yeah, it's up in the hallway there. You can see it.

Rahul Goel  7:12  
Yeah, I couldn't, it was such a weird.. it was like seeing an old friend again and realizing, oh my god, we could have done such a better job at that. But saw my signature on it, and just really a beautiful experience, so, and it's just amazing how that translates, translates over. We now have a robotic section at NordSpace. We don't really publicize what we're doing there just yet, but we're building over the last couple years, we built a lunar rover. It's going to the moon surface of the moon next year. It's going to make Canada the fifth nation ever to have a rover on the surface of the moon. We're working with people who used to be RSX team members and are now back at NordSpace, and one of the things I wanted to do was create the right culture there, so that I knew what one day I wanted to start NordSpace, and I could sort of feed and pull from that team and bring them to NordSpace, and we're on this mission, and it's going to be historic, it's called Terry, the name of the rover after Terry Fox, and yeah, it's just, it's amazing how far you can come from, from, you know, working on student projects to doing it in real life.

Chris Yip  8:04  
Yeah, I think that's cool. You know, we've got this set curriculum that you go through, and you learn lots of stuff, but I'm always struck by what the co-curricular design teams are doing, because it's, it's taking, yeah, some fundamental stuff you've learned in courses, work on a team, integrate stuff, and you could be in a completely different discipline, so you'd be in Civ, but you're doing robotics, and that kind of linkages are amazing, and to see students progress that to a career, I think is phenomenal.

Rahul Goel  8:31  
These projects are just so multidisciplinary, like I mean, we're now building orbital scale rockets, these are massive machines, you know, 30 meters long, two meter diameter is our first rocket, we need civil engineers just to build structures that can sustain, you know, just the thrust and the launch experience, and all of that, and not basically be disintegrated. We have civil engineers, we have industrial engineers, electrical, mechanical, mechatronics, aero, of course, every single discipline. It's just, it's so important.

Chris Yip  8:58  
Financial engineers.

Rahul Goel  8:59  
Oh my gosh, yeah. I mean, in, you know, our basically our chief financial guy, he's also an EngSci, and did his master's at UTIAS, and then founded, you know, medchart. This is Derek Chow, yeah, and now he's basically the top guy at NordSpace after me, and you know, it's just engineering, just creates such a strong foundation, no matter what what you pursue, whether it's business, finance, or strictly engineering.

Chris Yip  9:23  
Okay, I'm gonna switch gears a little bit. You talked about going to York and doing business, but at the same time, when you're in engineering, you also took advantage of our entrepreneurship in the hatchery.

Rahul Goel  9:33  
Yeah.

Chris Yip  9:33  
Can you maybe talk a little bit about your experience there? What was the Hatchery? How did you leverage it?

Rahul Goel  9:37  
The Hatchery was just like RSX, one of the most formative parts of my undergrad, and you know, the thing about the Hatchery was that there weren't any high expectations, you know, initially coming in. So, for me, in my first year or two, really, what attracted me was every Wednesday there used to be this idea marketplace, and there used to be free pizza. 

Chris Yip  9:56  
There's the incentive.

Rahul Goel  9:56  
Yeah, really, honestly, I, you know, broke undergrad. You know, basically, yeah, hungry all the time, and couldn't afford pizza myself, so I was like, "Oh, we can create pizza, and then we get to talk about entrepreneurship, and I've always, even if I sort of never wanted to admit it, I did love the idea of entrepreneurship and leading teams and maybe companies. I realized that really the best way for me to be an entrepreneur was to have that engineering background and the technical background and the discipline, really, so the Entrepreneurship Hatchery sort of blended those two worlds together for me, and I passively was a part of that for the first two years, sort of just observing in these marketplaces, pitch days, and all of that, and then you know, I used to commute from basically North York, two hours each way in the TTC, and I just learned to code during those times. I had this little PC that I would basically hold in the palm of my hand and code. No place to sit, so I would just be standing and coding, and what turned was basically a project to teach myself how to code, called Feed Loop, turned into a real business, which was cultivated by the Hatchery, and I wouldn't really have necessarily thought of it turning into a business before the Hatchery experience went through this whole experience of pitching it in front of folks like the Dean, Dean Aman. I remember Anthony Lacovara in the front, and really like realizing I'm just this kid in undergrad, and having these very important people taking time out of the day to be a part of this experience, awarding, you know, we won second place on that as well. $10,000 is just huge for me, and it was just this experience that that put a lot of wind in my sails and made me realize that this can be something bigger, and yeah, so the Hatchery was just a place to both a place to hang out, but also to add structure around this nebulous idea of starting a business and having a tech product.

Chris Yip  11:34  
So NordSpace is your third company, right? You had one between Feed Loop and NordSpace as well.

Rahul Goel  11:39  
I started NordSpace and Genepika, almost at the same time. Genepika is a biotech company. Yeah, also lead scientist, U of T EngSci, went on to do his PhD as well here. And so, yeah, so three companies, basically. But NordSpace is where I'm most operationally and tactically focused.

Chris Yip  11:57  
Oh, for sure. Yeah, and I was gonna say, like, the since I follow you on LinkedIn, I get feeds about all the stuff that's happening in NordSpace. So, can you give us a sense of the kind of your portfolio, like what did you start with as the idea, and where has it evolved to over the past few years?

Rahul Goel  12:12  
My goal was to start NordSpace out undergrad, was very, very difficult. I mean, you know, undergrad starting a rocket company, needing, I don't know $20 million to start, whatever, I decided that I'm going to continue building my software company for about 10 years as I did and I wanted to make that extremely successful and be able to just invest all that capital myself into starting NordSpace and not have to chase after VCs or do anything because I had a very clear vision understanding of what NordSpace needed to start and operate permissionless without dilution, so NordSpace started in 2022 and the goal had been, has been to build an end-to-end space missions company, so that means under the same roof we handle the launch aspect and we handle what goes on top of the vehicle as well, the satellites and payloads more, more generally, so in the same facility we're building our launch vehicles, we're building small satellites, and we're building a spaceport out in Newfoundland to kind of create this vertically integrated model, following in the footsteps of companies like SpaceX or Rocket Lab. Really, any launch company that's been successful has had a significant degree of vertical integration. Some of them bolted on later, some of them realized that early on. So that's what that's what we're doing as well. We're building our first satellite, launching later this year, not on our vehicle, on a SpaceX vehicle. One of the reasons it's very exciting to be doing this in this day and age is that with seemingly our own competitors, we can still be collaborators and customers. We rideshare that SpaceX offers, that you know, UTAT uses, that we use didn't exist, maybe 10 years ago. Now it does. We're flying to the moon with.. we can't announce it yet, but another competitor of SpaceX's. Didn't exist. Rideshare to the moon, we can use it now. So, yeah, the vertical integration is key. It maximizes sovereignty, maximizes our business potential, and just doing it from the start allows us to just do the hard thing first, front load all of that, and be ready for the future.

Chris Yip  14:03  
I love the idea of a vertically integrated system, because then you aren't so dependent, you're relying on yourself in a sense, and you can build those platforms, and we're seeing sovereign launch appearing all over the place. You know, France is doing, everybody's trying to do this, there's even multiple launch places, I guess, in Canada right now, there's another one, you're, you're looking at Newfoundland. There's someone else in, I think, Nova Scotia right now, and I think it's amazing capabilities, an amazing opportunity, because then you also become part of the rideshare, in a sense. Someone says, "I got to launch now, hey, I can use NordSpace to do the launch, right?

Rahul Goel  14:35  
It's infrastructure. I mean, one of the things that's really exciting about launch, we think of launch as a means to an end, a lot of challenges people end up having that try to build launch companies or rocket companies is that they, they make the launch aspect so sacred, and they so focus on the actual, you know, solving the technical problems around launch, coming up with innovative solutions, or we're not trying to reinvent the wheel, we're just seeing a very standard architecture and just trying to build basically a truck that gets to space. It's still extremely complicated, it's literally rocket science, but it's also very exciting, and especially for our youth. I mean, there's something so visceral about seeing a rocket go up, and what that does to the culture and psychology, I think, of our youth and Canada, more broadly, is going to be very, very interesting.

Chris Yip  15:18  
What is your sort of sweet spot that you're looking at in terms of launch vehicle, like size, payload opportunities.

Rahul Goel  16:10  
Our primary project is working on Tundra, which is our first orbital rocket that's designed to get us about one ton to low Earth orbit, which is in the small lift category, but still not as small as something like a Rocket Lab Electron. It's the right size that we can launch, obviously, a bunch of small satellites, but a couple of medium-sized satellites as well at the same time. You know, the government of Canada put out a competition called Launch the North. It's $105 million competition over the next three years. We were one of the three winners in the first phase of that, which is great.

Chris Yip  17:51  
Congrats.

Rahul Goel  15:54  
Oh, thank you. Yeah, it was a great team effort, but their requirements, 200 kilograms, that might be useful, say, in the defense context. There may be certain satellites who want to launch in that category. For us, we look at the market and where it's going. The thing about building something so challenging is you really have to try to predict where things are going to be 10 years from now. That's how long it takes, you know. We started a couple years ago. Over the next five years, we're going to reach operational maturity. We have to really have a good sense of where the market's going to be and what kind of satellites and services we want to be able to cater to, so one ton to low earth orbit allows us to internalize a lot of the demand that we're going to create with our own constellations that we're going to be developing, but also customer satellites, replenishment of large satellites, so you'll still go to a SpaceX to launch your large constellation of Telesat, if they're communication satellites, but you can still use a rocket of our size to replenish individual assets as since it's in that category. Our next generation of vehicle in the 2030s would be Titan, which would be about five tons low earth orbit, and would be a reusable launch vehicle that would be addressing a very different market, and in fact have enough capacity to even support manned missions if we wanted to. And on top of that, being built uniquely in Canada, where we're sort of ITAR free, which is a kind of highly restrictive framework for defense-adjacent technologies for for our listeners. The vision that that I have, that we have, is that when we excel over the next couple of years at vertically integrating at launch the payloads and the infrastructure, we can package all of that up. I'm still saying the SaaS business, I call it space agency as a service, where we basically go around the world, we already have initial traction around this, where there's countries, you know, in Latin America and Asia and Middle East who are friendly nations, but also want their own sovereign capabilities, just like they have in land scene air, they want it in space as well. We, being friendly Canadians, for a reasonable price, can help install all of this within their, or their, their nations and give their own, give them themselves access to space and the tools and institutional knowledge to gain sovereignty over this incredibly critical domain. It's inevitable, and we think NordSpace in Canada specifically can conserve that need.

Chris Yip  17:55  
Okay, so you're super busy guy, so you're running this company, you've got a couple other things going, but the same time you've you haven't left your academic home, like what else do you have on your plate in your spare time, like you're doing something else with U of T right now, right?

Rahul Goel  18:08  
If you're talking about the PhD.

Chris Yip  18:10  
Yeah, yeah.

Rahul Goel  18:10  
Doing a doing a part, very part time...

Rahul Goel  18:12  
Very part time. 

Rahul Goel  18:13  
...PhD. It's a new flex time option that I'm extremely grateful for. Doing at UTIAS, a place I love, and it's, it's for a bunch of reasons. First, it's because I've always.. it was a path I always wanted to pursue, and you can only do so much. After undergrad, I decided to, you know, try to generate enough personal resources, build businesses, so that I can eventually start NordSpace, and hope that one day I can get back into the academic world. When I see the technical work that our team does, I feel extremely jealous. I mean...

Chris Yip  18:40  
You want to get into the lab. 

Rahul Goel  18:42  
That's what I want to do.

Chris Yip  18:43  
Right.

Rahul Goel  18:44  
And, like I said, the reluctant leader, you know, I know I have to be the CEO and do all of this for the company, but if I could choose, I would love to do that. So, I get an element of that and stay current and stay fresh and keep my mind sharp. I have a lot to catch up on over, you know, that I lost over the last 10 years, knowledge-wise, but then also I love UTIAS. I see a lot more potential in that, in that institute to grow, and I hope I can be a small part of that. And I want to also keep talent here in Canada. We are hiring a lot of people from UTIAS. I want to be the first to pick them out, so if I'm amongst them, you know, I can, I can see who the smartest people are and pick them out, but also try to keep them in Canada, and, and that's been really, really important to me. The gentleman leading the lunar rover project, Terry, for us launching next year, Olivier Lamarre, just completing his PhD at the STARS Lab with Jonathan Kelly, Professor Jonathan Kelly, and you know, we were frenemies back in undergrad. He was McGill Robotics, I was U of T RSX, and then we, you know, frenemies became friends. I worked at NASA JPL, graduated from UTIAS, could have easily gone to JPL or anywhere else he wanted in the world, but we kept him here. And this is really important.

Chris Yip  19:53  
You are doing your PhD with Jonathan again, right?

Rahul Goel  19:55  
I am. Yeah, that's right.

Chris Yip  19:56  
Can you tell us anything about the project, or is it kind of stealthy or...?

Rahul Goel  19:59  
No it's not stealthy or anything like that, it's honestly quite undecided at this point. Yeah, I'm still in that early phase. My interest has always been, when I say always, over the last, say, decade, as I've sort of came out of undergrad, sort of understanding the realities of Canada's space program and ambitions and history, and all of that, is, you know, I believe Canada should pursue its own first interplanetary mission, and specifically to Venus, and there are a lot of reasons for that, and this is not some like pie in the sky idea. Countries way less advanced than us, let's just say in space, have done this and are doing this, and I want to use my PhD as a catalyst to achieve that in the early 2030s, collaborate with a couple of professors, both Canadian and in the United States and Canada and abroad on that project, and I'm trying to formulate my PhD work around that specific mission, so you know, high level, that's that's kind of the regime I'm operating in. Specifically, what challenge I'll be addressing is still up in the air.

Chris Yip  20:58  
Still to be determined. I love the fact that you're talking about a sovereign Canadian mission, where it's an all-Canadian crew, but maybe you have a guest from another country on the flight crew, for instance, or it's an all-Canadian built. Why do you feel it's so important to have kind of a sovereign program in Canada in general?

Rahul Goel  21:14  
I think sovereignty, certainly in the national context, is important, but just in general, I think it's very important to be self-sufficient as an individual, as you know, as a university, as a family, a team, anything like that. It gives you the maximal flexibility and capability to assist others. And I think when I think about sovereignty for Canada, I think if we're able to achieve very complex things within our own domain, with our own borders as the world shifts inevitably as things do you know from what may be trending towards you know isolationism a little bit to back to like you know global efforts and and all of that, Canada can spearhead a lot of that but we have to be capable here at home. That's one aspect of it that I'm very excited about over the next call it 10 years but also this is a matter of national security, and very, very importantly so. Space is a domain that's kind of, you don't see the infrastructure the way you see, like, you know, telephone lines or roads or ports for ships or anything, or railways, and things like that. So, it's really important to bring awareness, I would say, to space. Rockets are very visible in that equation. We have a lot of great assets in space that are built in Canada, but again, they just sort of are unknown or underappreciated. Everything we do in our life, from navigation to weather to communication, it's all governed by space, and most people believe in the war fighting sort of domain, that space is going to be probably the first arena that this is fought in, and some of them say within the first 10 minutes it will be decided just based on space capabilities. This is extremely important for national security reasons, and for that reason alone, you need to be able to access space and put your own assets in space and not have to piggyback on anyone else. It's just, it's as simple as that. If we're not able to get to space, somebody else is making national security decisions on our behalf, and that is not the definition of a sovereign nation.

Chris Yip  23:08  
I think it's an interesting point. I mean, Canada has such a long, obviously long history, Telesat, and stuff. Like, we have been pioneers in space for so many, like, decades.

Rahul Goel  23:17  
Alouette 1 — it was the third satellite in space — [and] built by Canadians. We punch way above our weight as Canadians. Our Canadian students launched the largest liquid rocket in history. They fired the largest liquid rocket engine in history.

Chris Yip  23:29  
Space, they got record in terms of how far it went up, right?

Rahul Goel  23:32  
Amazing, amazing capabilities. And all of them, well, a lot of them leave, and they.. it's not just the talent and the jobs, but it's there's something unique about space, and why I love working with people in this domain. They're so deeply passionate. There's just something about it that calls out to people like myself, and we put everything on the line. Every bit of our life force goes into this pursuit, and you want people with that kind of drive to stay in the country.

Chris Yip  23:59  
Now, last year you created a scholarship in aerospace studies. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Rahul Goel  24:05  
Yeah, yeah, thanks. That scholarship is called the Depika Goel Scholarship in Aerospace Studies for PhDs, and it's named after my mom, who passed away around the COVID time from ovarian cancer, and it was very, very difficult time, but she was, she's really probably the most important reason for why I am who I am, at least all the good stuff. So, and she was just somebody who, who was so passionate about living and life, and I don't just say this because, because she's my mom, and she's genuinely, she was, she loved every aspect of life, so much, and you know, this is the least I could do in her honor, and she always supported my dreams of aerospace, and all of that, but also, you know, like I said, I'm excited to be part of the ecosystem. I want to protect our students from, or not protect too strong, but let them know that there's opportunity to stay here. Whether it's international or domestic students here, that there's financial support. I received a scholarship. I wouldn't have been able to pursue my undergraduate education at U of T if I didn't get a scholarship. I basically got a full scholarship for all four years, and that was huge for somebody like me. So, I've always had this deep set feeling of paying it forward, and you know, my mom is a big part of that, that equation. So, I, you know, I hope this honors her a little bit and helps a bunch of students out.

Chris Yip  25:29  
I mean, first off, thank you so much for that support, and I think it's a wonderful way to honor your mom, the inspiration she provided, and the support she writes as you went through your career. I'm sure she's still doing it now, as you go through as well. I think that's hope so terrific recognition, and you know it's so such a powerful statement. We're gonna wrap this up. One of the things you actually just mentioned a lot was the resilience thing. I think it's one of the things we teach our students a lot. You talked about how difficult Eng Sci was, and be able to make it even through my course. What's something you've learned at U of T Engineering that has stayed with you till this day?

Rahul Goel  26:00  
You know, the first thing that comes to my mind is definitely the discipline and the resilience. I mean, it's not just because you said it, it's, it's, it is a tough program, but it's a challenging program, and just to the point at which it keeps you engaged and constantly, you know, it feeds your curiosity, and it's just always on that edge. And for me, you know, I think back to a couple of months ago, we tried to launch our first rocket, and it didn't work, and for a lot of people, they're like, "Oh my gosh, like your dreams are crushed, like, you know, I remember this article in the CBC, like Nordspace, you know, Toronto entrepreneurs' dreams for launch go up in flames, and it's like, I've been through, like, this is nothing, like this is part of a 30-year long journey for me, especially over the last, call it 15 years, going through undergrad and the rest of my life. This is, it's not even a blip on the radar, it's or a bump in the road, and being able to have that perspective where if you do go on to take on some very deeply technical and hard challenges, where you're going to face all kinds of failures - failures is probably not even the right word for it. It's just part of the process. Are you able to be mentally, physically, emotionally resilient enough? And I think if you get through a program like EngSci, you have a pretty good shot at that. And one of the reasons we hire people from EngSci. I didn't have the greatest grades coming out of EngSci, honestly, but I made it through, and I was very proud of that, and I know whenever I see an EngSci or U of T Engineering applicant, or really an engineering applicant, in any context apply to NordSpace, I know that they've sort of been through the same, they've been in the same trenches, especially EngSci, because I can relate, and I know they're going to be resilient, if nothing else, and that's really important.

Chris Yip  27:36  
I think those are all good things to remind people of, is like you're in a, you're in a domain where failure happens, and you learn a lot from it. Failure actually is, you learn more from it. At some level failure equals a success, because you understand now what didn't go wrong, or what went wrong, and how you're going to fix it. So, I think those are all things to remind students about when they did that midterm and didn't do well. You did learn something out of it, right? And so always take that as a positive,

Rahul Goel  28:03  
And just your network. I mean, so many of the people I work with today, whether it's in at NordSpace, whether it's from a software company, biotech, they're all from in some way, shape or form, connected to my experience. You talked about Derek, for example, among so many others, but Derek just comes to mind. He was part of the Hatchery too. I wasn't really that close to him, but I knew of him, and we sort of stayed in contact, and then now he's like the most instrumental, one of the most instrumental members of the team. Everyone is. So it's just the network that you build here is so powerful. You don't have to be great friends with everybody, but just interact with people, know about them, follow them, see where they go, and it's just a, it's a really strong community.

Chris Yip  28:38  
Yeah, wonderful to hear that, and something I reflect a lot, especially as we're looking to bring in a new class, obviously every September, and we're looking to convocate a class in June. Rahul, thank you so much for spending some time today. This has been an absolutely super phenomenal chat. Wishing you continued success with NordSpace. Can't wait to.. I want to be there when at your next launch event.

Rahul Goel  29:00  
Sure, it's a couple weeks.

Chris Yip  29:02  
I will come to Newfoundland and watch it launch, but excited to see. I wish you all the best.

Rahul Goel  29:07  
Thank you very much, Dean. Appreciate it.

Chris Yip  29:11  
Thanks again for listening to Tell Me More: Coffee with Chris Yip. You want to catch up on past episodes, and to make sure you don't miss the next one, please subscribe. We're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and more. Just look for Coffee with Chris Yip. You can also check out @uoftengineering on Facebook, Instagram, X and LinkedIn for more stories about how our community is building a better world. And finally, if you'd be inspired to join us, we'd love to welcome you. If you're thinking of taking a degree or working with us on our research projects, you can find us online at engineering.utoronto.ca or you can visit our beautiful campus in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I hope I can join you for coffee soon.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai