Jace Burlbaugh

I love God | Army Veteran | Father | Building AllContraX + JankBots in Kentucky | Space, AI, and giving contractors a fair shake

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

We built our AI receptionist for contractors. Then it hit me: a missed call costs a barber a client the same way it costs a roofer a job. So now it answers for any local business. $69 a month. It never eats lunch and it never lets a call hit voicemail.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

@NASASpaceflight Static fire days turned into the quiet story at Starbase. Test, review, fly, repeat. The vehicles get the headlines but the ground crews turning boosters around like a pit lane are what make a launch and a static fire in the same week feel normal.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

Saturday, 6:20 AM Eastern: a Falcon Heavy launches the Roman Space Telescope. Hubble sharpness, a field of view a hundred times wider, built around a spy satellite mirror that sat in a warehouse for a decade.

Best free show of the weekend. Coffee and https://t.co/XMr6PRJMzK. Set the alarm.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

@KanekoaTheGreat Everyone reads this as a space story. I read it as a construction story. 3000 direct jobs means concrete crews, electricians, iron workers, HVAC, plumbers, for a decade, across the whole Gulf region. The space economy touches the ground as trade work first.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

Tried to hand a contractor some business today. No answer. Voicemail full. Could not even leave a message.

He is not lazy, he is on a roof working. That is the trades right now: demand so strong the phone became the weakest part of the business. The guys who fix the phone win the next decade.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

@cb_doge The plume makes the pictures, but the number is the story: that booster just flew its 37th mission. Nobody else has flown the same orbital rocket thirty seven times. The photo op is a side effect of routine, and routine is the actual achievement.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

Pulled the numbers on my home market: 620 contracting and trade businesses across five western Kentucky counties. Two thirds have no working website. Most have a full book of work anyway.

The internet skipped an entire industry here and nobody noticed.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

@NASARoman The detail I always come back to: that mirror started life as an NRO spy satellite mirror and sat in storage for a decade before it got this mission. The glass was never the hard part. Deciding what it was for was. See you on the 30th.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

Roman Space Telescope cleared for launch this week. Hubble sharpness with a field of view a hundred times wider.

My favorite part of the story: the mirror is a spy satellite mirror the NRO donated in 2012. It sat in storage for years. The glass was never the hard part. Deciding what to do with it was.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

The alloy switch is the part people skim past. 301 was the off the shelf answer: strong at cryo, cheap, weldable. But fly enough hardware and you learn exactly where the material lets you down, and at that point making your own alloy is cheaper than engineering around the shortfall.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

First contractor I have never met signed up to my platform this weekend. Found it on his own, filled out the whole profile, came back the next day and walked through every tab.

Three years in business, six counties, crew of four. I vetted his business against the state registry the same way we vet for homeowners.

Small milestone. Does not feel small.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

@FelixSchlang The part I find quietly impressive is the round trip itself. Ship goes to Massey's, fires, comes back, gets checked, rolls out. That is a production line, not a test campaign. The boring logistics between the fireworks are most of what cadence actually is.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

@SustateSystems Pre is doing all the work in that sentence. After the fact it is damage control. Before, it is just a plan. Costs nothing to write down, and it is the difference between a customer who waits and a customer who calls.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

This is the same tension every operator hits at a smaller scale. The dependable thing pays the bills, the new thing is the actual business, and running both forever means neither one gets your best people. Making the call out loud beats letting Falcon quietly rot while the attention goes elsewhere.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

@SpaceX @Starlink The part that still gets me is that this is routine. 29 satellites, a booster that has flown before, and it barely makes the news. Routine is the achievement. Every dish on a roof in rural Kentucky is downstream of a launch nobody watched.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

Starlink over the ocean makes headlines. The bigger story is boring: in rural Kentucky a dish on a roof is now a better business connection than anything the cable company ever ran out here. Infrastructure that shows up beats infrastructure that gets promised.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

@elonmusk The catch will get the headlines but the reflight is the whole business case. Falcon took about 15 months from first landing to first reflight of a flown booster. If ship beats that clock, the cost per kg curve bends again and everything downstream of it gets cheaper.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

Homeless shelters that generate their own power and grow their own food are an engineering problem, not a charity problem. Solar plus batteries, greenhouse, water catchment. The tech all exists and it keeps getting cheaper. Somebody should treat the whole thing like a product. I keep coming back to this.

[Jace Burlbaugh @JaceBurlbaugh]

@Reuters The demos that matter here are not the boxing matches, they are the ones where a robot handles a task nobody rehearsed with it. Choreographed robots have been impressive for a decade. Unrehearsed is the product.