Balerion Senior Associate Aidan Daoussis sits down with Jacob Portukalian, Co-Founder & CEO of Cascade Space, to discuss deep space communications. Cascade Space is building a commercial alternative to NASA’s Deep Space Network using arrays of smaller parabolic dishes. The company aims to expand communications capacity for lunar, Lagrange point, asteroid, and Mars missions.

Timestamped Overview

00:00 – Introduction and Cascade Space overview00:53 – Building a commercial alternative to the Deep Space Network02:32 – Founding story and the AstroForge connection05:15 – Why deep space communications differ from low Earth orbit08:16 – Signal loss, noise, and the physics of long-distance communications11:36 – Cascade’s dish-array approach versus single large antennas15:00 – Near-term demand from NASA and lunar missions21:17 – Y Combinator, founder-market fit, and early fundraising32:07 – Government demand, commercial missions, and future deep space markets36:04 – Infrastructure costs, deployment speed, and scaling strategy41:16 – How parabolic dishes, feeds, and digital beamforming work46:14 – Site selection, fiber, power, and RF interference challenges51:16 – Upcoming Cascade milestones and lunar downlink goals52:47 – Key takeaway: the scale of deep space communications54:23 – Contact information and closing

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