Sam Rubin: Well, I can share with you that the positive thing here is that the lifetime of those satellites is pretty short. And I believe that those satellites, if you look at Starlink as an example, I think they publicly talked about the roughly two-year lifetime of a satellite. So, while it is not a recurring revenue as I would love to have, like a license and just a piece of software that you write once and keeps paying back, it is a recurring revenue in a sense that even when the constellation is fully deployed, we’re going to need to provide optics and assemblies there and everything we provide on ongoing basis to replenish the satellites that burn out.
Gene Inger: You’re basically saying you’re not in a position to provide man — backspace management, if you will, of these systems, which would be a recurring revenue approach. And that is AI.
Sam Rubin: Yes. In this case specifically, in this program specifically, what we provide is a glass, it’s a hardware.
Gene Inger: Well, and I hope it develops very well.
Sam Rubin: Okay.
Gene Inger: And by the way, one quick question which might be odd and then I’ll jump off, which is I saw that there’s a new photonics department created at UCF. When I logged in, I heard — the first thing I heard was something about UCF and a joint project. Is that you? And I know that there was an electronics department, Eichenholz, whatever his name is, was the co-founder of Luminar, which you may have provided lenses to. And but is this the same thing or is this a whole separate department, which they and University of Arizona in Tucson appear to be the only places working on this.
Sam Rubin: Yes. Jason Eichenholz is a good friend, and is doing great things with UCF and with other organizations. This is not related to that. This is collaboration with Dr. Kathleen Richardson, who is part of Creol, the school of optics, and has been for so many years, and she is a well-renowned expert on the field of infrared glass. And it’s a very important collaboration, which DoD spending $1.2 million with us and other members of that collaboration to develop this recycling technology, which down the road will help significantly reduce the cost of the materials. Germanium has an advantage, where 30% of the material roughly that gets scrapped or is leftover in production and so on, gets recycled. So, you can sell back the leftover germaniums that you have for cents on the dollar.
And then, that gets thrown in and added into the next batch of germanium. We do pretty much do the same with chalcogenides with our BlackDiamond glass. And that means that down the road it would drive price down quite a bit.
Gene Inger: While we’re adding, could I quickly ask of whether you have any involvement and drives my channel laser systems, which were added about three years, never made progress. But supposedly, the military is not only making progress, it’s starting to equip ships with it. And I wonder if you’re involved?
Sam Rubin: It is possible. We honestly don’t know. We provide a lot of infrared optics to a lot of different players. I don’t keep track of every single project, if we do it from the level of the components. I’m not aware of involvement in the level of engineering or subsystems that we have in that. Our subsystem and the sort of solutions, product, all are sold around imaging.
Gene Inger: So, you are not involved in, for example, even in Israel, in something like Iron Dome?
Sam Rubin: Maybe we, maybe we aren’t. If we are, it’s from the component levels.
Gene Inger: Yes, I got you. I appreciate it. Good luck, guys. I know this is challenging times.
Sam Rubin: Thank you.
Gene Inger: I appreciate it.
Operator: At this time, there are no further questions. I would like to turn it back over to our moderator, Albert Miranda for closing remarks.
Sam Rubin: Okay. Thank you everyone. It’s Sam who is making the closing remarks. And thank you everyone for taking the time to follow LightPath Technologies. Really appreciate the continued trust you place with us. We are on a long journey, and we are making good progress, we are on the turning point right now, and the coming quarters are going to be critical, and we are going to be seeing some of the fruit of the efforts start to come to fruition and deliver results. Thank you, and goodnight.
Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for attending.
