Thomas McClelland: That’s correct.
Unidentified Analyst: All right. And I think SpaceX, I think, is launching about half the rockets at this point, right?
Thomas McClelland: I don’t know the exact number, but they’re pretty busy, yes.
Unidentified Analyst: Yeah, it’s not really your concern. You just make the product. And I think that’s all I had to ask. It sounds like the backlog is going to grow and your revenue went up this quarter. So that’s always — it’s been going up to like 1.5 years. So good job there and the backlog, kind of going up for a while. Thank you for your time.
Thomas McClelland: Thanks, Mike.
Operator: Thank you. The next question is coming from [Frank Gasser] (ph). Frank is a private investor. Frank, your line is live.
Unidentified Analyst: Yes, thanks for taking my call. I’m going to see if you could say something about not the present technology, but future technology. In particular, several, not quarters, years ago, there was mention of an atomic clock, which could, in fact, be a game changer. I haven’t heard much about that sense. Could you elaborate on that in any way?
Thomas McClelland: Yeah. So we are currently working on an advanced atomic clock. In fact, we’re going to do a demonstration tomorrow for our government customer on that one. That’s post optically pumped rubidium standard. That technology, we anticipate should make an order of magnitude improvement in the capability of these kind of clocks. Now the demonstration that we’re doing tomorrow actually is not for a space-based atomic clock, it’s for terrestrial applications. But we do believe that this technology is definitely something that can work very effectively in the space environment also. So that’s just one thing. I think that the — we — there are some other technologies in terms of even more advanced clocks that we are seeking funding rather for us to develop those technologies on internal FEI money is probably not feasible.
So we are seeking sources of external funding at this point in time and we’ll see over the next year or two, whether we can be successful at that. In addition, I think one of the things we think is very important and we are pursuing with internal funding is smaller, lower-cost atomic clocks and also court space clocks for space applications, but with an emphasis on very high performance. So I know I’ve talked about this previously on these calls, but I think we feel strongly that the trick is to find the sweet spot for a lot of these satellite programs, the lower orbit satellite programs. And the sweet spot is the finding the right compromise between low-cost, small size, low power, low cost and high performance. I think we’ve seen many of the satellites and Starlink is actually an example where the emphasis is on low cost, but the performance capabilities in terms of precision frequency and time are very, very limited.
And so once you add the navigation component of those satellites, much better performance starts to become necessary. And we think that’s where we can make a big contribution and we’re working on that.
Unidentified Analyst: Yes. Thank you very much for getting in detail that. I just have one more short aspect of that. The test you said tomorrow, is that, in fact, then going to show a significant increase in clocks capability?
Thomas McClelland: Yes. Yes, it is. It — we believe that, that technology is capable of even more. We’re going to — by one measure, we’re going to demonstrate roughly an order of magnitude of improvement over what we typically do with our current products but we think that technology is capable of even another order of magnitude improvement if things are optimized appropriately. You have to keep in mind on this particular development, there are — there’s — it’s not just do whatever you need to do to get the best performance possible. It’s get the best performance possible, but you have to keep the power dissipation below a certain amount, the size below a certain amount, the weight below a certain amount and so forth and so on has to work over a wide temperature range.
And so that’s where we end up where we are. It’s the performance that can be achieved given the constraints that we have to operate in. And so yeah, depending on the application, the particular application, this is one particular example, and we do see a very significant performance improvement but if we remove some of the constraints that we have in this particular application, we can do much better.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Thank you very much for the responses and the improvement. Have a good day.
Thomas McClelland: Okay. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. The next question is coming from [Richard Johns] (ph) and Richard is a private investor. Richard, your line is live.
Unidentified Analyst: Thank you. Tom, you were talking earlier about changes in your bidding processes. I wonder if you could expand on that a little further. Would you characterize the contracts, the large and small contracts you’re winning as fixed price contracts?
Thomas McClelland: Most of the contracts we’re bidding on are fixed-price contracts. We do, from time to time, have cost plus contracts. But in general, it’s fixed-price contracts. I think in terms of expanding on things beyond that, let me just say, I think that, yeah, I’ve been here for almost 40 years. So I do have a lot of experience on these programs. And I think that I have a pretty good sense of what we can achieve and I think I have a pretty good understanding of our business and our customers and what the needs are and so forth and so on. So I think part of the trick in this regard is knowing just how to go about things. And I think in some cases, we are, if not the sole source, we are virtually a sole source because nobody else can provide, nobody else has the technology or the demonstrated capability to deliver the product that’s needed.
And in those cases, we shouldn’t be giving anything away. And I think we’ve been working very hard to tow that line. In other cases, there’s — we have to look at potential going forward that maybe there’s a new development and it’s something that we want to invest in with the idea that there’ll be a significant business going forward. And we can — we want to make sure we have the opportunity to participate in that. And so I think the trick is having a good enough understanding of where things are. On the other hand, to invest in a new program where we end up taking on a lot of risk, and there’s not much potential, it’s a one-shot program or whatever, it doesn’t really make sense to invest in that. And I can tell you, over the last year, I can think of specific cases where we lost the program.
