Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Momentus, Inc. Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. I would now like to turn to call over to Darryl Genovesi, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

[Technical Difficulty] fourth quarter 2022 and fiscal year 2022 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 Dennis Mahoney, Interim 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 quarter and the year. 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 our 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. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, John Rood.

Well, thank you, Darryl. I’m delighted to give you an overview of the company’s progress in 2022 and so far in 2023 as well as our plans for the future. I’m also pleased to have Dennis Mahoney here for his first earnings call as our Interim CFO, after I make my comments Dennis will take you through the financial highlights. Turning to Slide 4. Momentus took great strides in 2022 and so far in 2023 toward our goal of being one of the market leaders in in-space transportation and infrastructure services. We are one of a small number of companies that have launched orbital service vehicles in the space to serve this market. We have made significant progress on our technology development, conducting the first launch of our Vigoride Orbital Service Vehicle called Vigoride 3 in May of 2022. Vigoride 3 was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida into Low Earth Orbit on the SpaceX Transporter-5 mission. In addition to launching Vigoride 3 on the Transporter-5 mission, Momentus use the second port on the launch vehicle for a deployer made by a third-party. The using Vigoride 3 in this deployer, Momentus placed 8 satellites into orbit. These 8 satellites were from FOSSA systems, Orbit NTNU, and California State Polytechnic University at Pomona. We also carry the payload from a fourth customer who prefers not to be publicly named. Our inaugural launch of Vigoride 3 was followed by a second Vigoride launch in early January of this year with our Vigoride 5 vehicle, which is a lead ship and our new Block 2.2 configuration then incorporated lessons learned and improvements from the Vigoride 3 mission. Vigoride 5 is now in low earth orbit, where it is in good health and is undergoing a deliberate commissioning process as we prepare to fire its…

Thank you, John. I am pleased to present highlights of the financial results achieved by the Momentus team during our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2022 with comparisons to prior corresponding periods. Turning to Slide 14. Our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2022 results reflect our ongoing progress and investments toward our future launches. We currently have contracts for approximately $33 million in backlog representing potential revenue as of December 31, 2022, compared to $43 million at the end of Q3 2022, and $67 million at 2021 fiscal year end. The $33 million in contracts had been entered into with 18 companies in 12 countries, similar totals to the prior periods. The decline in total backlog at fiscal year-end 2022 compared to Q3 2022, and fiscal 2021 is due to the combination of fulfillments of prior contracts, cancellations, and the exploration of option agreements entered into for a fee to participate in Momentus flights at future dates. Typically, our customers have the right to cancel a flight reservation, and when doing so forego their deposits and milestone payments, should a customer cancel a contract for the rescheduling needs or other reasons, before all of his payments are made. The resulting revenue will be less than the full value of the backlog. Momentus has historically included in backlog both firm orders as well as options. These options give our customers the flexibility to opt into an available launch slot without requiring a separate agreement. The decline in backlog from prior periods to $33 million at Q4 2022 was due to a combination of these factors, including the expiration of options. Of particular note, our firm contracted order backlog is consistent with levels reported at the end of Q3 2022. We ended Q4 2022 with non-restricted cash and cash equivalents of $61…

Thank you, Dennis. In a moment we will move on to the question-and-answer portion of our call. I would like to remind participants that all disclaimers outlined at the outset of this call extend to the question-and-answer session. This includes our disclaimers relating to non-GAAP financial measures and forward-looking statements. Mandeep, would you please remind participants how to enter the queue?

The floor is now open for your questions. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Erik Rasmussen from Stifel. Please proceed.

Yeah, thanks for taking the questions. Maybe just starting with the Vigoride 5, given the success you’ve seen so far and the achievement of certain milestones around, I think, you mentioned that solar arrays deployment the vehicle’s power of communications. Has this changed or improved your timeframe maybe for being able to do precise orbits and transportation services?

Well, thanks for the question, Erik. The Vigoride 5 mission, of course, is the second mission that we’ve conducted first one being last year in May of 2022. The Vigoride 5 spacecraft right now is in Low Earth Orbit. Again, the spacecraft is in good health. Its solar arrays are fully deployed and generating power and nominally, we’re able to charge and discharge the batteries normally. The telemetry we’re getting back through regular communications and the uplinks are in good health. The key performance requirements that we’re going to aim to meet coming up soon, is that we – as I mentioned, attitude determination has been enabled. And we’re – our pressurization of the fuel system essentially allows you to move the water propellant around on the spacecraft. So we’ve tested our ability to do that. The things that are coming soon will be completion of commissioning of the reaction control system first. And the reaction control system uses the same water in the same propellant tank as the Microwave Electrothermal Thruster. And so with that RCS, we will not only reorient and adjust our attitude as necessary, but it’s one of the redundancy features that we have in Vigoride that if for some reason the Microwave Electrothermal Thruster should not perform, we can maneuver the vehicle using the water based reaction control system to different altitudes and adjust our position in space that way. Now, we do plan to test the Microwave Electrothermal Thruster soon in just the coming weeks, we expect to – we plan to test that system. We’ve tested it, of course, dozens and dozens of times on the earth and conditions that stimulate space. But, now, we’re looking forward to this latest, the next generation, I should say, of our Microwave Electrothermal Thruster operating in space. And those are the keys to space transportation, as we mentioned. Having the ability to maneuver and deliver customers to precise customer orbits, either through space transportation services, or through the kind of hosted payload service that we’re providing to a customer like Caltech. And we do think that our technology provides a competitive advantage in our ability to service those needs particularly hosted payloads. And there’s more opportunity in hosted payloads for differentiation and margin expansion.

Great. So it seems like this is just – it’s an ongoing process and we’ll find out more as in the coming weeks and then obviously with the Vigoride 6 coming up in April. But maybe just my follow-up question. You settled the class action lawsuit that was a material drag on the business, as you continue to scale the business and drive efficiencies, how should we be thinking about the quarterly cash burn rate and your timeframe for achieving breakeven? Thank you.

Sure. Maybe I’ll mention a couple of things and turn over to our CFO, Dennis, on that matter. Certainly, it’s something that we’re paying close attention to, as we begin to scale the business. You mentioned the settlement, the class action lawsuit. We’re very pleased to have that behind us. It’s been pending for a while. And while the settlement provides a near-term cash outflow, it does allow us to reduce our ongoing legal spending now, but that issue is behind us. So why don’t I turn to Dennis to cover some of the things on the cash outlook?

Right. Well, thank you, John. And, Erik, it’s very nice to meet you on this call. Well, of course, we do not give forward-looking guidance, Erik, perhaps I can clarify for you more about our results that we’ve achieved and progress we made in this year just ended. Also, we are absolutely focused on resource utilization, and putting our wood behind all the right arrows and managing our cash appropriately. We also, of course, watch our – watch markets and watch opportunities, and we will continue to act opportunistically, and we believe we can say with good judgment going forward. When we look at our cash burn this last year, we also see a trend. And while we can’t predict what that trend might be in the future, we’re certainly well focused on the goal. And our monthly cash burn for the fourth quarter of this year was $6.8 million that compares to cash burns in the first half of the year that were between $8 million and $9 million. So we had a very good trend as we completed fiscal year 2022. Cash is king. We’ll continue to watch it and manage our business tightly.

And, of course, those were monthly figures that Dennis provided.

Understood. Great. Thanks for the update. Good luck.

Thank you, Erik.

Our next question comes from the line of David Strauss from Barclays. Please proceed.

Hi, good afternoon. This is Josh Corn on for David. Just wanted to ask how does the forward sales pipeline look? Thanks.

Sure. One of the things that we’re very pleased about is, as we generate more flight heritage, and as we get further in our development cycle. We’re seeing growing interest from commercial customers, as well as government customers. On the pipeline, we continue to see customer opportunities bidding about, we feel good about the way our service offering aligns with our customers plans to go-to-market. As we mentioned earlier, we recently announced in customer orders from repeat customers like FOSSA Systems, as well as new customers like CONTEC and CUAVA, where we’re seeing significant opportunities to grow our business and that we’re actively pursuing is with the Defense Department and NASA. The feedback we’re receiving is very encouraging about the capabilities of our Vigoride Orbital Service Vehicle, and its ability to support a range of military, intelligence, scientific needs, and things of that nature, at the Defense Department and NASA, some of the discriminators so the things that we think set us apart in that market is that the Vigoride Orbital Service Vehicle has a lot of power relative to our competitors. And power is one of the coins of the realm that allow you to support instruments, payloads, the operations of the systems onboard to spacecraft, and hosted payload, and to do different missions with them. Secondly, our configuration is very flexible compared to our competitors. Right now, we’re flying the Caltech payload on Vigoride 5. I would say a number of our other competitors are not able to fly a payload of that type, because of the size and configuration of it. And so that’s the second advantage that Vigoride provides. The third would be the payload hosting capacity. Fourth, would be our speed to market. One of the feedback pieces we’re getting particularly from government customers is…

Our next question comes from the line of Edison Yu from Deutsche Bank. Please proceed.

Hey, thanks for taking our questions. First, I understand that you’re going to test MET properly in the next few weeks. Do you have some parameters in mind and how you would define success or are a various level of success? Curious, how are you thinking about that.

Well, thanks for the question, Edison. The Microwave Electrothermal Thruster onboard Vigoride 5 is something that we intend to test here in the coming weeks, as we mentioned. Some of the things that we’ll evaluate is the water onboard Vigoride 5, once it is moved to the thrust chamber, if you will, first, it’s vaporized. And then there’s a startup sequence, that we’ll monitor and evaluate carefully, because once that startup sequence begins, we can control the burn and the duration of it and modify the position of Vigoride 5 using the MET. And so we’ll evaluate its performance, we’ll look very carefully and deliberately at the telemetry we’re receiving. And, we’ll look at any refinements that we want to offer in the performance of it and assess its performance. That’s the plan. Now, once the MET begins operation, we do intend to change the altitude and inclination of Vigoride. That’s one of the benefits of an orbital service vehicle is your ability to take satellites to different altitudes from the drop off location. So your customers receive a custom orbit, they’re not just going to the general location of being about 500 kilometers up in space, but they’re going specifically to where they want to go. And so a lot like a container ship, it being the equivalent of the launch vehicle on Earth that takes a series of cargo payloads to the port, but that cargo needs to be redistributed elsewhere, and that’s the role we intend to play in our play. Then secondly, on the inclination change, that allows you to modify the orbits so that you can go to a more precise location that it’s optimized for a customers’ needs, depending on whether it’s a communications mission or a remote sensing mission, or whatever their particular customer requirements are. So we’ll do those things using that that’s our plan anyways, to do those things with the MET in the coming weeks.

Understood. Separately on the Vigoride 7, the reusable one, how comfortable are you with the tech upgrades that are needed to do this? And also you mentioned significant savings. Do you have a sense of how much we’re talking about here in terms of the cost?

Well, Vigoride 7 is currently being assembled in our cleanroom here, we’re doing this call from San Jose, California. Vigoride 7 will be assembled over the coming weeks, and will complete the testing of it. Vigoride – just to clarify, Edison, Vigoride 7 is a Block 2.2 vehicle, which is the same configuration, which is expendable as Vigoride 5 in orbit now and Vigoride 6 that is integrated for launch next month. Now, a reusable Vigoride is part of our future product roadmap. And the first demonstration of some of those key technologies needed for a reusable version will be on Vigoride 7 with the remote proximity operations, or RPO projects. We do think it’s very important to eventually develop a reusable Vigoride vehicle, as this has the potential to reduce our 2 largest cost items, which are manufacturing costs and launch costs, while also allowing us to add new revenue streams such as in-orbit refueling, maintenance and de-orbiting. In terms of rule of thumb to assess the magnitude of the cost reduction, the intent is for the reusable or you might call it refuelable Vigoride to stay in space. So it would go to space on the launch vehicle, deliver its customers, or support hosted payloads or do in-space servicing, and then stay there. And on a subsequent launch vehicle, replenishment fuel or additional payloads would be delivered, and Vigoride reusable version in the future could then refuel itself, take the payloads and continue onward, and the plan is to do this is a few times. And so if you think about the cost to produce one Vigoride, and one launch then useful to support one set of missions. If you can do that for 2, 3, 4, 5 missions, you can see the commensurate reduction in launch costs. It’s not exactly a 100% reduction, because after all, you have to send up new fuel and payloads, but you’re being much, much more efficient by not launching the mass of the vehicle itself, but rather just the fuel in the additional payloads.

Thanks. I could just sneak one more in. I think, on the last earnings call, you had mentioned your bidding or going after some government contracts, defense contracts. Do we have any update on the prospects of those?

Yes. Thanks for the good question. We are focusing on the government business, particularly with the Defense Department that we are pursuing the interest that we’re receiving has been very rewarding. These government organizations are actively engaging with us. They’re commenting about a number of the ways that they see our platform, our capabilities being differentiated. And there are – they like the flexibility of the platform that we have the power that’s available, the speed at which we can produce the vehicles and the cost. So we’re in active dialogue with Defense Department organizations like the Space Force, SDA, DARPA, and we’re also talking to NASA into pursue additional business. And so, we’re optimistic about those as you know, these are long cycle business with the government. And so we don’t have any contracts to announce today. However, we’re optimistic about the future in that area.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of James Ratcliffe from Evercore ISI. Please proceed.

Hi, thanks for taking the question. I know that SpaceX recently raised the rideshare prices and what does that mean for you directly, particularly, in regards to, call it, the aggregation business? And how protected if at all, are you against those increases? And in regards to the bigger picture, what’s your view on overall trends in cost to orbit now versus the way things we’re looking for a year ago? Thanks.

Well, thanks for the question, James. We currently have launched service agreements signed with SpaceX that will – that cover our launches in planned 2023, and the first one planned in 2024, which is currently targeted for January of 2024. And so on those missions, where we already have a signed launch services agreement contract, our prices there will not be affected by the increase in prices that SpaceX recently announced. After those contracts, though, we would like others in the market be subject to the increased pricing that SpaceX has introduced. Those – that new pricing structure, which is really meant to also come with a new interface for ridesharing missions, is designed to provide increased flexibility to SpaceX customers. We maintain a very close dialogue with SpaceX. And I will say once those new costs come into play, our cost permission will be higher under that new framework. However, that will be unique to us, it will also affect our competitors, who are also flying on SpaceX. And, certainly, once Starship is introduced to the market by SpaceX and, of course, they’re saying that they’re planning to launch Starship this year. That’s a much larger rocket, British understatement there, it’s substantially larger, of course, that will significantly reduce the per pound or per kilogram cost to place things at orbit. The other thing I’d say is, we’re seeing other competitors to SpaceX begin to mature their rockets relativity, for instance, is talking about conducting their own – it’s planning to conduct their first launch here shortly. And we have seen other new systems to be tested. It reminds us all of the difficulty in doing that. You probably saw the news about the Japanese Space Agency, and the unfortunate failure of the H3 launch here in the last 24 hours from Tanegashima. And we’ve seen other examples of that with Arianespace and their recent Vega failure, ABL and Virgin Orbit. So it just reminds us to how difficult space can be. But as those new systems come online, and we see more competition and more capacity, including from Starship, we think, we’re going to see launch costs begin to have price positively affected to come down? So, this is one of the things that there’s a lot of demand for existing launch vehicle capacity in the industry. And so, I think is there more opportunities to go space, our customers will also benefit.

Thank you.

Thanks for the question.

Our final question comes from the line of [Michael Mathison] [ph] from Singular Research. Please proceed.

Good evening, gentlemen. Just coming back to some of the financial figures that we work with. You mentioned that your order backlog stands at $33 million as of quarter end, and the committed portion of that is consistent with prior periods. But I didn’t come here to figure, do you disclose the figure for the committed amount?

Now, we have not been disclosing that breakdown.

Okay.

Michael, the backlog at the year end, December 31, was $33 million. And the key takeaway would be that our fixed component of that because $33 million includes firm orders as well as options. And the firm component of that has remained steady from previous quarters when we announced that the decline and recent backlog was due the expiration of some options. The way we signed contracts with our customers is we allow them site options in some cases if they wish to for future contracts. And, obviously, that’s an advantage for us to potentially gain future new business. And so, a number of those options had expired this last quarter.

Very good. Thanks for clarifying. So just for modeling revenue going through this year anyway. Do we have committed payloads for the October launch?

We have some committed payloads for the October 2023 launch that are presently in backlog, and obviously our salespeople are out trying to get more. And I for one I’m hoping to get more.

So what we are – well, thank you very much for taking the questions and thank you for good quarter.

Thank you, Michael.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today’s call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.