Big Technology Podcast - Modern Space Race + State of Elon Musk — With Ashlee Vance

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

Ashlee Vance is the author of When The Heavens Went On Sale, a new book about the modern day space race. Join us for a conversation about the commercial ventures fighting for their place in low earth orbit, and why governments have ceded the space to the private sector. We'll discuss SpaceX, Planet, Rocket Lab, Astra, and Firefly Aerospace. Stay tuned of for the final 20 minutes, where Vance discusses his relationship with Elon Musk and the state of the billionaire entrepreneur. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ You can pick up Vance's book here. Questions? Feedback? Write to: [e-mail]

LinkedIn Presents. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Our guest today is Ashley Vance. He is the author of When the Heavens Went on Sale, The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to put space within reach. He's also the author of Elon Musk. He hosts the show, Hello World, and he is a feature writer at Bloomberg Business Week. Ashley, welcome to the show. Thank you so much.

so we're here to talk about your new book when the heavens went on sale and I just want to let you know and let listeners know that this is a new new territory for us, not quite space here on Big Technology Podcasts, but we were in the frontier because basically I decided that when, you know, every book, for those who don't know, every book comes out on a Tuesday, we typically do our flagship interview on Wednesday and I kept getting like becoming second from all the shows that would release on Pub Day. New rule here on the show, when we have a new book and we do the interview, that will come out on Tuesdays now instead of Wednesdays. So we'll move it up and then we'll return to our regularly scheduled programming, you know, the week after. So I actually want to say thank you for helping me try all this out. I'm honored to be part of your master plan. Thank you. And hopefully, unlike the early SpaceX missiles, it won't go up in flames on the way into the atmosphere. You know, be first.

Be first. when you could be first, man. I'm all for it. Exactly. Well, that's cool. I really enjoyed the book. I think there's a lot to talk about here. I think that the best place to start is actually where you started off the book. And the book doesn't really focus as much as I expected on SpaceX and we'll get off, get into that, you know, as we go through this conversation. But I think we should talk about the innovation that SpaceX had because, you know, I think that a lot of people see it as this company that Elon Musk founded to show he could go to space and just think that it, like, actually does, you know, space, you know, rockets the same way that everybody else.

People might know that they land and they come out. But actually, it's not really like the core innovation as far as, you know, I came away from reading your book. You want to talk a little bit about how SpaceX really changed the game? Yeah, yeah. You know, like you said in the book, I mean, we kick off with SpaceX and then kind of move away from it. But it was really important to me because it's a funny thing.

You know, we think of space is this sci-fi. very modern sort of thing, but, but, you know, if you actually pay attention to the industry, I mean, it kind of like got going, big gangbusters style in the 1960s and, like, didn't really change. The rockets were the same, like NASA, the government-run space programs, the military contractors did not embrace modern computing technology. They used all this sort of like ancient specialized stuff that had been certified. for space. And so, you know, it was just this like, it was this industry that was like kind of

caught in a time warp, you know? Right. This whole idea of space grade, like you need space grade material. It's almost just like, is it, is it really that you need space grade material or do you need to just pay the contractors who've created this term so that contracts get inflated? For people who don't know, we're talking about stuff as simple as something like a radio where I'm sure in the 1960s or 70s, you probably did need a space grade radio to survive the rigors of the launch and the conditions in space. But then once they, and then once they certified this radio as being good for the job, nobody ever wanted to try anything ever again and run the risk of that being this small thing that led the mission wrong. So then you, as you said, you end up with military

contractors that are charging $100,000 for radio. And so SpaceX, you know, a couple very rich people had tried to get into commercial space before and failed. And then Elon and SpaceX, part of it was timing and part of it was, as you could imagine, kind of Elon's force of will. But, you know, right company at the right time. The technology had gotten to this point where somebody with a clean slate could try this all again. And so SpaceX exactly what we're talking about, instead of buying all these space grade components and doing things all the way they had been before, they're like, look, I think materials have advanced, I think computing's advanced, I think we can make this just way cheaper than we have before.

And so, you know, the company starts around 2002, and then it takes them until 2008 to launch their first rocket, which was called the Falcon 1, and it took them four tries. But when that rocket reaches orbit, I argue in the book. that it's this seminal moments where finally commercial space became real and this sort of set this huge shift that I write about underway. Right. And so this book and this conversation is all about basically what happens when you make space accessible and the race that has followed there, like not just the rockets, but actually the businesses that emerge when space becomes something that not just, you know, NASA can get to, but everyone is kind of a stretch, but lots of different

people that can get to. And it's not just the space tourism. It's a whole different variety of businesses. But, you know, it sort of leads me to the question I set up at the beginning here, which is like, when I first heard that you were going to write this book and it was called when the heavens went on sale, I was like, hot damn, this is going to be the book that talks about like Elon Musk's space race against Jeff Bezos, space race against Richard Branson. but that's actually not what it is. So just tell me, like, why did you decide to not cover? I mean, that's kind of sort of the space.

If you think about the blockbuster, right? And, okay, I understand you're going to make this into some sort of documentary or movie. But when you think about like the blockbuster hit, like these, you know, billionaire entrepreneurs going after the heavens to me seems like that's the, you know, the blockbuster hit. But you went a different way. Why? Yeah, I heard this more than one person as I was getting into this. I can't even imagine the pitch meeting. Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, well, I mean, you know, it was just very intentional, you know. I mean, look, Elon and SpaceX have done fantastically well, but when you look at the other billionaires, they actually haven't done that great. I mean, there's a little bit of space tourism with Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, although they're both kind of stalling out. And then you get to, like, people trying to get to Mars and the moon, and it's many year-off things. What I saw was that the real act, And this exciting story was, and I apologize because I haven't found a better term for this, was like sort of the wild west of space. It was like this, these people all over the world who we'd gone from countries funding space to billionaires funding space to venture capital now pouring into space. And you had just like this race of capitalists trying to build, you know, this is the focus of my book, is trying to build an economy in low earth orbit through thousands upon

thousands of satellites. And so, you know, it just jumped out at me that I was like, look, I think people have sort of missed. I think they got, they got sort of fixated on the tourism and these these colonies and stuff. But the real action, the real business, the excitement to me was all in this, this, like this is happening now. This is not like we're going to be on Mars in 10 years. You know, we could get into this. But I don't think people realize like how far commercial spaces come relatively quickly and yeah so for me it was just super exciting and the characters were like larger than life all over the place and so i dug in yeah and i think that well Kevin Wheel from Twitter went over to Planet and we've had him on the show. So I was somewhat aware that we're implanted as one of the books, one of the companies you cover in the book. So I was somewhat

aware that we are. There is something emerging in low Earth orbit, as you put it, that is, was interesting. But I think the extent of it was, did catch me by surprise. And it is these sort of stories that we don't hear a lot about that become the ones that you really want to get engrossed in. And I think that's sort of like where you end up with this book. So, you know, You mentioned it, right? We have a lot of capital moving into companies that are trying to get a piece of the wild west of space. By the way, I think it's a good term. So, but anyway, don't come up with a new one. It actually describes it really well. Lots of open space that's out there to be effectively, you know, conquered, colonized. And so the question for me becomes, what do people want to do with this? And what is that, you know, the money's trying to get a return. So where's, Where's the business there? Yeah, I mean, this one's a little tricky to unpack, but you talked about Planet Labs. And so let's just do them real quick because this is where some of the money is.

This is a company that I'm sure most people listening to this have no idea, but they've already surrounded the Earth with hundreds of imaging satellites that take pictures of every single spot on the Earth's landmass every day. So it sounds like espionage, but it's like it's not a bit. about watching individuals. It's about watching the sum total of human activity, you know, where, how many trees do we have on Earth are rainforests being cut down in the Amazon, how much oil is in Saudi oil tankers right now, you know, it's just this sort of day-to-day human activity and following it. So these images are, it's a public company. They make a lot of

money. This is used by farmers, Wall Street traders, nonprofits, all kinds of groups. And so there's money in imaging. There's also money. You know, all the money is in the satellites. It's not in the rockets. The rockets are like the kind of sexy thing that people fixate on. But all the money is in the satellites. And in the next big bucket is communications. So we've seen, you know, SpaceX putting this Starlink space internet system. You could think of it as like a global telecommunications system. It has a couple of rivals. And just to give people like the most obvious data point on this, from from 1960 to about 2020, we had put up 2,500 satellites into low Earth orbit.

From 2020 to 2022, so just two years, that number doubled to 5,000 is going to double again this year. The year after that, we're going to be up to go from 2,500 to 100,000 satellites in short order. And so this is where the money is. The last bit is that outside of imaging and communications, I write about this in the book, I mean, nobody really knows if anything else works after that. And we're sort of, we're putting this huge investment and gamble into the notion that once you get rockets cheap enough and satellites cheap enough and the rides frequent enough that people think up a ton of new ideas of what to do up there right so then what are some

of the more experimental uses i mean i think the planet guys were trying to build a moon colony or something like that so so that might be one but but can you expand a bit on the different uses yeah yeah i mean like to be totally honest um it's a bit frustrating because even the smartest people in this field don't have terrific answers on this but we're already seeing like some hints of what's going to go on. So there's a, there's a startup in Los Angeles called Varda next month. You know, they're going to be on a SpaceX rocket sending up. It looks like sort of one of the capsules you see that brings humans, you know, back from the space station, except a kind of miniature version of that. And they are going to be manufacturing pharmaceuticals in orbit. So it turns out that atoms and

molecules behave very differently outside of the constraints of gravity. And we've already shown you can create all kinds of novel drugs in space. And so, you know, we've got this huge imaging business, this huge communications, this manufacturing stuff. They're one of several companies starting off next. There's a whole raft of like other science going on. But then after that, you know, it reminds me so much of like 1996 with the consumer internet kind of taking hold and it's like we're going to build all these data centers we're

going to lay all this fiber pretty sure this thing is going to be crazy uh can't kind of like tell you exactly what it's going to do but like if you build it they will come and and i think it's less obvious to me on this one but that's the general principle here so i'm kind of curious about like the rules right like you know it's like a question who says who says i mean come on you know it does See, I told you there were some parallels with the West. Yeah. But, like, who sets the rules for, for instance, you're building a pharmacy, you know, in space? Is that, like, are the rules set by the people that, where you, the country that you launched from?

And then, like, are there any, like, regulations? I mean, you know, on one hand, it's, you cite these numbers about the exponential growth of satellites in space. And one hand is, okay, that's cool. On the other hand, like, damn, we are firing a lot of stuff into space. And, like, that's oftentimes it stays there. right and you know we're pretty good at polluting things so are we just now going to ruin another environment tell me if you've heard this story before of what happens when humans get to do a new playground you know um well so there are some regulations right the the federal aviation

administration in the united states governs can't when can you send off a rocket is it safe the FCC governs a lot of stuff around the satellites. There's international bodies that try to coordinate all this stuff, make sure satellites aren't running into each other, making sure your communication satellite isn't interfering with somebody else's. That's sort of like the good news. The bad news is this commercial space explosion is taken off so much faster that the regulators cannot keep up with it. And at the moment, I mean, not to keep Harbin on this Wild West thing but it very much is like if you get there first you get the territory and it makes it extremely difficult for somebody else to sort of barge in and then there's almost no laws

if you once you there's like laws gating how you get the satellite to space but once the satellite is in space it's like pretty much nobody cares new zealand is actually the only country that i'm aware of that has um a sort of policy that says you know like if you stuck something up there, you're kind of responsible for what it does and getting it back without causing damage. Everyone else is just like, all right, that was good. Nice work, everybody. It's there. No need to worry. So, you know, it's interesting because you describe like, okay, let me see if I get this right, but a territory where like there's not many rules and, you know, only a few countries care what you do and you sort of are at the frontier of potential

innovation, it sounds like kind of exactly the type of place that Silicon Valley wants to be. The question is, of course, like, well, what is, what's the deal? What happens if Silicon Valley, you know, takes, or even the tech industry, right? Maybe Silicon Valley isn't the best metaphor, but the tech industry sort of gets there first and sort of, yeah, I mean, before governments for anything like that. Like, is it a good thing? And I'm curious if you can sort of talk a little bit about that tension, which does. run through your book. What do you end up with if Silicon Valley is the one that's

getting in there and doing all this stuff? Well, I mean, this is like the many trillion dollar question. And I, you know, I don't think we're exactly sure how it plays out. There's some early indicators that are pretty fascinating, though, without jumping too far ahead. Like if you, let's look at Ukraine for a second. You know, this conflict breaks. out Russia attacks Ukraine. Russia is a traditional space superpower. Ukraine ends up very astonishingly turning commercial space against Russia. So Russia goes in. They try to take out Ukraine's communication systems. Ukraine fires up SpaceX's Starlink internet to like be the backbone of their military and the country. Meanwhile, they're tapping into all of these imaging satellites

from Planet and another company called Maxar watching the Russian troops every move. It's like one of the major reasons they were able to stave off that initial attack on Kiev. If you look at Starlink in this example, SpaceX is a nation state. Like there is no government that could have done what SpaceX did. SpaceX has more satellites than any government on Earth. They have more access to space than any government through the rockets. And so, like, already just, like, this would have been impossible five years ago. And this whole balance of power has already tilted. And, you know, Elon became like a, like a supreme ruler during this. You had Ukraine begging him to keep Star Lake on. He was saying, oh, it's really expensive. We're having to donate it.

Nobody will pay for it. And this was like keeping this country alive. And it was dependent on this one person's kind of whims as to what he wanted to do. Yeah, it was crazy. Like, they had to watch the way they even spoke about him because he threatened retaliation, which is like, is it your ego or is it the decision to help a country that really is motivating you? But anyway, that's besides the point. Go ahead.

Well, yeah, but it's fascinating, right? Because the, like, the U.S. government, like, obviously would have wanted to just be like, okay, we'll just hop on our system. There was no other system. There's nothing they could do. They couldn't send up 3,000 satellites. the next day to sort of replace this. And so we're already at this, you know, planet is the same way, right? The U.S., China, Russia, do not, they don't, they have a fraction of the satellites

that planet has. Their spy satellites from the governments can only look at certain points on Earth, a very limited set of stuff, whereas planet sees everything all the time. And, you know, so there's this, there's this changing balance of power. But it's pretty fascinating, too, because if you are, if you're, say, Peru or you're Mexico and you really haven't had a chance to invest in some sort of like satellite infrastructure or have access to imagery like this, you can just buy it now. You don't have to, you know, pay billions of dollars to send up tons of satellites. And so it's like a leveling of the playing field while things are getting sort of turned upside down. And so it's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out to say

the least. Yeah. That's what I want to hear from you. I mean, you call the Ukraine war like the first space war where you have planet being used to like monitor truth movements in the beginning and Starlink like you mentioned. So like my sense is you that governments aren't big fans of like when companies become, you know, as powerful of them as them in certain sectors, right? Like of course like SpaceX doesn't have an army, but like you don't like governments don't like being reliant on the private sector most of the time on critical functions. You know, And some of the other stuff, maybe they can turn it over. But critical functions, no.

So, you know, I'm curious, like, you know, A, how you might end up, how this might play out at home, right? And B, like, do these companies become seen as combatants in war? And how does that change for them? And also, like, I think we should also mention just, like, the reason why planet is able to see this is because they just have. So, I mean, but phone-sized satellites out there, thousands of that. Hundreds, thousands? They have hundreds. I mean, that was the big idea, was that you, traditionally, for people who don't know,

you know, a satellite is something that takes like five years to build. It's a cost of billion dollars. It's the size of like a school bus. It's supposed to stay in space for 20 years. As much as SpaceX changed the economics of rockets, planet changed the economics and thinking around satellites. So, you know, they realized more than anyone that computing had gotten so good that you could...

You could shrink these things, and instead of trying to put up one that's supposed to last forever, you just put up hundreds of them, and they're really cheap, and you surround the Earth. And so, you know, they're the first ones that sort of pushed this revolution through, and the people who founded Planet really are the most idealistic bunch in my book. I mean, they would not want any part in a space war by nature. They wanted all of this to be able to track the environments, what's happening with refugees and things like that, but they had to become a going concern as a business. And so, you know, it's like the same old technology story. We see play out time and time again. It's like things start in this kind of one place.

Google wants to do no evil. It's just a search engine giving us all the information in the world. and then you fast forward 20 years and things have gotten a lot more complicated. And so talk a little bit then about, again, the government question. Like, are they going to want to like come after these companies? Well, I think it's like it's over, you know, as far as I'm concerned. SpaceX has these thousands of satellites, Amazon's about to put up 14,000 satellites of their own. One Web is a company sort of quasi based in Europe.

They're doing the same thing. there's this percentage of sort of computing that was up there has already tilted so far towards the commercial side. And this comes with major ramifications. I mean, Russia's space business is basically kind of going away in part because of the war, but it was already on this huge decline because of SpaceX. And so all these rules that have existed for like 60, 70 years, these boundaries, the status quo of, you know, how we knew this was supposed to operate is over. And super quick, you know, Rocket Lab, which is another of the main characters in my book, is a fantastic example of this. This is a company based in New Zealand. This was

started by a guy named Peter Beck, who did not even go to college. New Zealand has no real military. They've got no aerospace experience. What they've made, it's a rocket. It's the equivalent of a missile, an ICBM, and they built it in New Zealand in the middle of nowhere with a guy who had like no formal training in any of this, you know? And Peter's probably like a one in a billion kind of person, but the point is like we've spent decades trying to keep someone like North Korea from developing technology like this or whomever. But the stuff is all like gotten good enough that somebody who's motivated enough and smart enough and has a bit of access to capital can reach space and do interesting things there.

You know, when you say it's over, it sounds like you discount the possibility of like cyber warfare against some of these satellites. I mean, if I would, if I'm a country who this stuff is being used at, I have all of my top hackers immediately trying to get a hold of these systems and crash them into each other. Well, so we've already seen, you know, there's been rumors flying around for a long time that the Russians tried to hack planets, satellites, because if you're taking these images,

and this is supposed to be sort of this ground truth, but somebody's able to hack your satellite, it raises all these questions about what's true and what's not, right? And so you have to believe that this image is accurate in order for it to have meaning. And then a couple of years ago, Russia did something pretty spectacular and dumb, which is they shot a missile from Earth into one of their own satellites to blow it up and remind everybody that they can do that. And it created this huge debris field in low Earth orbit that's still going around.

But yeah, so, you know, to your point. It's crazy, man. Yeah, like the governments are not going to go lightly. Can I tell one quick story that's totally crazy? Of course. I think freaks people out. So we've seen, I'm trying to remember now if it was China or Russia, but what of these countries put up a satellite and then it launched a baby satellite out of it, which then went. And it was it was like orbiting right near American satellites.

It was basically like a reconnaissance satellite. And the implication of this was that, you know, we could attach ourselves to your satellite if we want to. could deorbit your satellite if we want to. And so I totally get your point. I'm saying, I guess I'm saying writ large kind of commercial has taken off, but you're exactly right that some of these countries will not go quietly, you know, into the night. Ashley Vance is here with us. He's the author of When the Heavens Went on Sale, which is on sale today. We'll be back in the second half to talk a little bit more about what's going on in space and talk about everybody's favorite character, Elon Musk.

Hey everyone, let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you, you're using right now. And we're back here on big technology podcast with Ashley Vance, author of the terrific new book When the Heavens went on sale, also author of Elon Musk. He also hosts the show, Hello World, and he is a feature writer at Bloomberg Business

Week. Ashley, I feel like I got to tee you up for a story where you end up in an ICBM factory effectively and craziness ensues. Why don't you tell it? Yeah, I mean, I don't want to give people the impression that this, I mean, yes, there are things in this book that are about business and space, but I mean, this is really meant to be more of a narrative, a story more than anything else. You know, it's kind of written for a mainstream audience, sort of like the right stuff, if I can, not that I'm trying to say, I'm Tom Wolf, but for the modern age, you know, giving people inside into this world. And one of my favorite characters in the book is this guy named Max

Poyakov. He was born in Ukraine. His parents worked on the Soviet space program. He was an OBGYN coming out of university and then made a ton of money in software. And then, lo and behold, a rocket company in Texas called Firefly went bankrupt. And Max decided he wanted a rocket company. So he bought it. And Max, you know, he had this great vision that Ukraine, for people who don't know, was a major part of the Soviet space program. They built a ton of the ICBMs and then the rocket bodies and had this just incredible expertise in engines, all kinds of stuff tied to aerospace. And so Max's great vision was that he was going to unite the Ukrainian aerospace industry, which was kind of declass. with the American space industry that was on the rise and create this thing that would have

been unthinkable during the Cold War, this like union of Soviet and American space technology. So I went with Max to Ukraine, to the city that's a little sort of in central Ukraine, not too far from Crimea actually called Denepro, which is where a lot of this stuff was housed. And I think I'm the second Western journalist and the first, because I had a video camera with me to go into the it was the mega center of the Soviet ICBM line with the camera got a tour got to see where these things were made and then also got to see you know the the remnants of Ukraine's space program and I'm curious as any of that technology being I mean if they have this missile technology sitting into Nipro is any of that being used in the war well you know the Russians

went after it pretty quick I mean one of the reasons Max wanted wanted to bring the Ukrainian technology to the U.S. as sort of like a patriotic gesture was because there have been rumors circulating for years, which are sort of backed up by photos that places like North Korea have been, you know, getting Ukrainian expertise and smarts kind of on the black market. And, you know, in Ukraine, obviously, the salaries for these people have dropped off dramatically. There wasn't a lot for them to do. And so it was sort of like the highest bidder for their brains. I actually think the U.S. made just a horrendous mistake. I mean, they left Ukraine in this tough spot. They said, you know, give up your nuclear weapons as the Cold War ended and we're going to protect you from Russia. And you can like hold on to some of this other stuff. But the business was never big enough. And so these scientists have been like up for grabs. And kind of shockingly, like you'll find out in the book it's on the internet so i don't mind saying it um max puts 250 million dollars into firefly and and then tries to create this this merger of technology

and the u.s government basically accuses him of being a russian spy and throws him out of the the country um and then a few months later the war in ukraine breaks out and all those assets and factories, you know, go up for grabs. Wait, so as when you say go, oh, I could go up for grabs in the U.S. No, no. I mean, you know, the Russians moved in very quickly. So they've taken over. It's unclear, you know, like Dinepro hasn't fallen yet. It was, it was bombed very early in the war, but this is like one of the things the Russians have gone after. All the engineers, as you can imagine, are either in the military or fled the country. Right. And so then what's going on with the company in Austin? Well, so Bax got tossed out. They brought in

some, he was forced to sell it to some venture capitalist and hedge funds. And so now it's run by money people. It's done okay. You know, they, Firefly has launched twice. They haven't reached orbit yet, but the second launch got very close. And that's pretty good for a rocket startup. sounds bad to other people, but this is like normal operating procedure. And so, you know, after Elon and Jeff Bezos, Max had put the most money into a private rocket company and just never really got to enjoy it. And he's, he's in Ukraine now. He's in Ukraine part of the time and then in Scotland. He actually has British citizenship as well. Okay. I see. All right. So we've talked about Firefly. We've talked about Rocket Lab and Planet Labs. What about Astra, which is the fourth company

at you cover. Yeah. I mean, this was, you know, like when I wrote the book on Elon, some of my favorite stuff was like the early days of SpaceX, which I didn't get to live through myself. I just had to hear all these stories. And right as I was kind of getting into this world, this company called Astra, I heard rumors about it. Somebody said, look, there's these crazy people. They've got a, they're setting up a rocket factory like in Alamedo, which is this city near San Francisco. It's like right by a neighborhood. They're going to build this, you know, equivalent of a missile without anybody knowing. And I talked my way in and I, this was my, I was there pretty much like the very first day they started. And so I got to like follow a rocket company from day one to launching

their first rocket, which is something I always wanted to do. But Astra is the, they're the most extreme end of this whole enterprise. You know, so they, SpaceX charges like, $60 million a launch, Astor wants to make a $1 million rocket that you can build every day and launch every day. And you could think of it as like, you know, the Model T of rocketry, like sort of turning this into a proper mass manufacturing assembly line type industry. They've had a tough go of it. It's been lots of ups and downs.

But that's really, that's the part of the book. It's one of my favorite parts because it's like this. It shows people to struggle and why this is still hard. and like what it takes to engineer these things and sort of the chaos that ensues. Yeah, it's such an interesting business because you effectively get a handful of very expensive shots at the very beginning. And if you mess those up, the company could be done. Like one of the things that I found interesting in your introduction was that SpaceX was effectively maybe one or two launches away from folding. I mean, Elon had to borrow money in order to get and they sort of cross your fingers and hope that it works.

And it's not a very high success, you know, rate at least in the beginning. No. And like, you know, traditionally these companies are private and you, yes, people can see your rocket launch, but but you're, you're kind of like operating behind closed doors. But most of the startups that we're looking at now, they made this like Faustian bargain during COVID when the SPAC money was flying around. And it was like, oh, well, okay, let's go public. and let's take all this money on the speculative business and now they're all getting judged. You can watch their stock prices go up and down every launch because, you know, someone like me who's followed this for a long time, I know sort of the struggle is real and what goes into it.

If you're a investor in Astra and you see their rocket blow up, you know, you start hitting sell really quick. And so it's like this thing where you take a little bit of the pressure off because you've raised a ton of money, but now you've got all this pressure of doing all this right in front of the public eye. Like SpaceX probably would not. SpaceX is still private today, partly for some of this reason. It's like the math and the rationality on so of these businesses doesn't really check out. To continue with our Wild West theme, there's kind of a cowboy feel to a lot of this, which was surprising to me because I would imagine that the rocket scientists are kind of buttoned up

I quote people sitting behind computers, but, you know, you talk about as people without college degrees that are, you know, pushing this forward. Of course, you know, Elon Musk is an interesting character himself. And the launch sites are just kind of, you know, they're wild, like, you know, deep inside India or on, you know, islands in the Pacific. So I'm kind of curious, like, why you think, you know, this very important business has taken on this kind of. like renegade feel well i think in some ways is like normal i mean every this is another this is you were asking at the beginning like why not the billionaires i mean this is kind of why i wanted to write the book is like every space story anyone listening of this has ever seen on tv or read

in a book is like our best and bravest pilots you know are the ones we're going to send up and and like oh god something's going wrong on apollo 13 like we have to use their courage behind with, like, the genius of these lab-coded MIT engineers to figure this out. And the point here is, like, this is not what commercial space looks like at all anymore. It is, it's like welders from Texas and people who worked on, like, racing teams and people from the military and, like, there's dropouts all over the place. I mean, it's similar to, it's kind of like any tech business that combines hardware and software, but just with these like sort of added explosions and bizarre locations. But that's what this is just, this is just the point is like,

whatever image people have of space in their head is like not what exists anymore. Yeah. So just trying to put a, you know, exclamation point in this discussion, let's just focus a little bit more on the implications for heavens and earth. So let's start with Earth. I mean, One of the things that runs through your book and has run through this conversation is this theme that, oh, my goodness, building an ICBM is something that's becoming way more accessible. Aren't you kind of worried about like what's going to happen to all of us if this is. So, I mean, you mentioned North Korea more than once in, you know, under 40 minutes. So that to me sounds pretty concerning. you know it's um there's this law called i tar in the u.s it governs like the export of

prized technology um especially you know in the defense military realm which and it governs all the space stuff and um yeah i think it's largely pointless now um you know like peter back the guy in new zealand he hopped on nassas website and like made his own propellants in a shed by his apartment and learn how to do all of this off the internet. I mean, you still have to okay, you know, you still have to be pretty

freaking smart and have a bit of money, but not that much surprisingly. And so, yeah, it's scary. You know, the scarier part, obviously, is there's a lot of room in space, but the odds of a collision when you go from 2,500 satellites

to like 100,000 obviously increases dramatically and there's a thing called the Kessler effect which is if one of these things runs into another one and you create this field of debris it's it's sort of like a cascading exponential you know disaster which i mean we could end up seeing that like we could end up having this huge you know like space junk proliferate and make it impossible to get stuff into orbit like absolutely and not only impossible to get stuff into orbit but you know We take things like GPS for granted, but GPS is like the fabric of your cell phone and modern life. And that would be over, you know, that all happens in space.

You know, so there are governments that are tracking this stuff, but the leading company tracking everything in space is called Leo Labs, which is a very cool and awesome company. But people should know that it's like a 50-person outfit, you know, that's a startup that's kind of like. in charge of this at the moment. So, like, interesting times. Yeah, I don't know how all this plays out, but it is, it is, that's sort of the point of why I wanted to write this now. Yeah. Because I don't think, I don't think the average person on the street has any idea

that this is happening. Yeah. So, okay, we covered heaven's earth in one question, which is good. So that's good. So that saves me, save some time. But no, I, I want to ask you also, well, can you give us something optimistic? I mean, I know I've like spent a lot of time about this concerning, but like, holy crap, like the human race, human civilization is starting to be able to harness the harness space and in a way that we haven't before and enabling amazing capabilities. And, you know, I don't want to get too, too down on it, even though there's like real risks, like this, this is amazing many ways.

It's pretty exciting, you know, like when you, when we talk about planets and what they can do, um, you know, it's almost like having a Google search engine for Earth above us. And they can literally count every tree on the planet. They can tell using AI software, what kind of tree, how much biomass it has, how much carbon dioxide it sucks down. Like we can put numbers behind this stuff. I think when we think about climate change, this technology is going to be key, not just to understanding what's going on, but if you're talking about like any kind of

carbon credit program or taxing a business for like how much methane is coming out of their oil fields this is like the only way we can actually count this and put numbers behind it and we're like we are doing that now and on the cusp of this this sort of exploding and the space internet thing is fascinating like the downside is that you'll never escape your internet connection again no matter what high mountain you climb. But, you know, half the world's population cannot access fiber optic cables and high-speed internet. And they can because of this space internet.

And, you know, it's like obvious that once you plug in to the modern economy, your opportunities just increase so dramatically. And so, you know, this puts people on a much more level playing field. yeah let's just one follow up about the space internet how far away are we from that being you know readily accessible to the whole world and affordable it's pretty it's close in some ways now i mean you can hop on and order starlink or you can hop on in order one web which is just a bit less consumer facing um and you know i think star link costs something like 90 dollars a month or 60 and it's a few hundred dollars for the terminal the limit on that is is there only a they're

like a fraction of the way to putting all the satellites they need up. And so it's, it's regional depending where you live. But, you know, within the next, call it, three to five years, there should be at least two rival systems that people could tap into. But already, you know, Starlink is surprisingly widespread. I have it at my parents' house in Mexico. Okay, cool. All right. So we have 10 minutes left. I'm not going to let you go without letting you, making you answer some questions about Elon. You wrote the book Elon Musk. What is your take on the state of Elon right now?

You know, I find it all pretty funny, man. I mean, I've had a real up and down relationship with Elon over these many years, some little PTSD along the way. I think it's funny maybe as somebody who's like kind of studied him, I guess, for lack of a better term. the world seems in my impression to have chalked him up to this like binary proposition you're either like for Elon or against him obviously he brings an incredible amount of this on himself through the things he says and does on Twitter in particular but after a period when like he would not talk to me at all for years we talk a lot more now and I've seen him in person he's I just think

he's like so much more nuanced and complicated and interesting than like most people give him credit for and I generally think he's like sort of I mean he's pretty upfront that he's like a troll but I think I think a lot more than people expect is him just sort of trolling the world and having you know sort of sport about all this like when you talk to him in person he's actually I wouldn't say he's like down to earth he's Elon Musk but he's like really easy to talk to he's interesting and yeah anyway i just think he's a much more nuanced character than the rest of the world seems to see right and yeah i mean that we're like nuances in the tagline and i have to say like i'm a little conflicted about him i don't think he's done a good job with twitter but i'm glad that

SpaceX exists and glad well glad that Tesla exists so there's you know if you if SpaceX and Tesla were to go away tomorrow you cannot question that he like changed the world i mean electric cards would still be a reality. Commercial space would be a reality. The U.S., which had like this dwindling, depressing, sad space program would still be at like the forefront of space. So the band did a lot in 20 years. I think the Twitter stuff is like he clearly, he's never really been a guy that is like

super savvy about reading consumer tastes and sort of like. like human, you know, wants and needs. I mean, that, that was like, this is like this, like, kind of Steve Jobs thing, you know. This is not Elon's specialty. And I think he's getting, like, horrendous advice on how to run it. But the dude is relentless and he's persistent. And who knows where it actually ends up when all of a sudden done. Yeah.

You think there's a chance that it's going to end up well? It's not like a great at the moment. I know he's not, I know he will not give up. It's kind of funny, you know, like in every other thing. I mean, like Tesla and SpaceX were like days from dying. Like, he's kind of been through. Yes. He's been through this before.

So I don't think it's like really that horrifying to him and the prospect that this could just, he'd lose $42 billion and this would go away. But, you know, he also, if if the lights are like still on, he will be there trying to fix it. And so I don't know, man. somebody's got to think of something, you know, it was always like a flawed business to begin with. I mean, somebody's got to think of like a new idea with this thing that makes it bigger and more useful than it has been historically. It was not a well-run company before. No, I do think that he's doing one thing useful, which is proving that it's probably not wise

to run your business on the advice of podcasters. And I say this as a podcaster myself, but my advice to him, which would be like circuitous because I am a podcaster, but maybe turn off the all in podcast and start speaking to people in the advertising world and consumer tech world that might help. Like I know David Sachs and I don't know if we're friends, but we're friendly and I respect him. He, when I see him tweet some stuff, like I, he like does not seem to understand what most people use Twitter. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy listening to the show. I think the ideas are fun to think about, but I wouldn't put them into action inside a company. Like, you know, he was saying something about journalists should, they should be so happy the organizations would pay for their Twitter is like, you know, from day one, it was the journalists were like, oh, I'm free from the brand that I work for. And this is like my little fiefdom, you know.

Yeah. When you speak with Elon, what do you talk about? I've been going. I spent most of my time actually at Neurlake, which is his brain computer interface company. And it's an area I've been into for years and years and years. So we spent a lot of time. I'm talking about monkeys with chips in their head at the moment. Yeah, I'm curious. What is going on there? Well, I would love to tell you everything. I got a big story coming, so I will be a little reserved. I would say people, something like equally fascinating has happened in that space,

which is this thing that was a very academic pursuit for like 20 or 30 years, almost like just because Elon showed up and put a bunch of money into it has become like Silicon Valley again, for better or worse, is now going after our brains. But there's like 20 or 30 brain computer interface startups now. And I would say neuralink is the most, some of them are certainly farther along with like human trials of bits and pieces. But neuralink is the most ambitious. And if it works, has the most advanced technology by about like 100 to 1,000 X. It's just

can we get it into a human safely anytime soon? Could you see yourself within five years putting a chip, one of those chips attaching it to your brain? No. And I want to give people the right perspective. I mean, the coolest thing about this, and I just went to Switzerland for

my TV show, Hello World, and saw paralyzed people walking again thanks to a spinal implant is that people should get their heads sort of in the right space. You know, the obvious beneficiaries of this technology will be people who've suffered from like horrendous diseases where they can't talk, they can't move, and they will be able to talk and move again.

And I do think that will happen within the next five to ten years. I will not be signing off for like the general purpose, neuralink, chip anytime soon at all. And I also don't think that'll be available. Within your lifetime? It's a good question. I think that the technology will be there and it might be safe, but I don't, we still don't know, like, we still don't even know if it's possible to send information from a computer into your brain. We know you can read stuff out and you can, like, command a computer with your thoughts. We don't know about, like, the going in and at all what that would look like, like brain research hasn't got that.

far so um so it's like it's like what does it even mean if we can do this i don't think that's clear yet yeah okay one more elon question for you spacex does do a lot of business with the government um curious i guess i think about it like a lot from like the twitter perspective right like it does seem like elon well actually let me let me put it this way two questions one Elon is is doing all you know all this work with the government um he's become way more political recently. Is that a risk for him? And then two, like Tesla depends on China. And I'm curious how you think that will like sort of influence his operation of Twitter. Sorry, I know. We're going over. Do you have five more minutes? I'm here for it, man. This is funny. You know, I think it's more of a risk.

There was a time when Elon was dependent on the U.S. government to sort of help fill some gaps with SpaceX. Now, the tables have turned on that one. I think the U.S. government is completely dependent on Elon when it comes to SpaceX. We have no other, we've got no other way to get humans to the ISS. They send up the bulk of our military assets in the space. There are a couple other rockets. They're incredibly expensive. I know people dig on, on SpaceX, you know, getting like what they call subsidies from NASA or other parts of the government. But like SpaceX is the biggest saver of taxpayer money you can imagine when it comes to space.

So anyway, I think Elon's actually, like, I think the stuff that happened in Ukraine with Starlink was probably like horrifying for the U.S. government to realize that like they are at the whims of a person they do not control and who is not have a deep track record of like predictable. To put it lightly. I think that was... To put it lightly. I think there was probably some very interesting conversations that happened during that period. The Tesla question, man, I mean, that one, it's like, what can you say?

I mean, Tesla has a huge business in China. I noticed Elon doesn't tweet a lot about China, you know, or jump on any anti-China wagons. And now in the beginning, the people who were associated with like Chinese state media were tweeting on Elon, take off my label. And I don't know if you saw this. No, I didn't. He put the label on NPR and NPR complained. He took the label off of NPR and the China State media. Okay, okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, uh, that one's tricky. And I'm sure that probably raises some more, like, like Elon's a nation state. You, like, think about Tesla even for a second, you know, beyond the cars. Think about like the charging network. I mean, that is like real infrastructure that nobody else has. anything close to and it's like this global you know he's he's like done things on this scale that

that only nations did in the past is pretty interesting yeah interesting well i'm not i'm kind of curious now because you're a journalist that he speaks with why do you think he hates journalists so much maybe that's an unfair blanket statement but there's many that yeah maybe not all right go ahead. He seems to say that. Yeah. You know, he just, he's, he's always had, Elon's kind of got his version of the truth. You know, it's, it's kind of changed over the years. I mean, I think in the early days when I started covering him, somebody would write something and he would disagree with it. And he's got this like very literal kind of brain, you know, and to him it was like this. this like deep um a front against that which is like true and right and like integrity um even

though like probably reasonable people could sort of you could make a case for either side um as time has gone on it's just like really clear just it's sort of you know i think he's said as much it is like gets to him you know and and he's due to the things he says on twitter he's become way more polarizing than he used to be. And so he gets, he gets like dragged through the press in ways he used to not. I mean, it used to be like, oh, this Tesla car doesn't do this or that or the mileage isn't what you said. It's a totally different ballgame. Yeah, you know, and I just, I don't think this like plays to sort of his strengths. And, and so, you know, and then I think he realized you could see, you know, he used to be like a kind of moderate Twitter user. And then

somewhere roughly around like 2017, 2018. Obviously, he just like shifted and was like, oh, I don't have to like talk to the media anymore. I can just talk through this thing, you know? And then he was kind of like, oh, well, I'm going to talk to the Tesla fan club to put out news instead of like the New York Times Tesla journalist because I can, why would I not do that, you know? And so we've been on this path.

And it's pretty interesting. It's funny to me because he did that BBC interview. You know, he grew up in South Africa and he still has these little, like, this, like, soft spot for, like, British media. Oh, my God, that BBC interview. It would have been nice if the BBC prepared for that interview. That gentleman was not, he was not up to the task. No. The, yeah, that was painful.

Yes. So I don't know, man. He's got a weird relationship with Chernos. Like I said, we have. had a real up and down sort of thing. And it's just, you know, I think it's like not unusual, probably. Like if you think back to Steve Jobs, he like had his little handpicked reporters and hated everybody else.

It's just that like Elon is the first richest person in the world, like business titan to just have his life play out on Twitter. We've never seen anyone do this before. So you just know everything he's thinking. well yeah it's his it's his own doing um you mentioned that you had a falling out with him you know i i guess like i'm i'm pretty curious like when in your position right like i guess like being able to speak with elin is amazing because you have insight into all like four really four or five really important businesses and you know i feel like the biggest tech story of the year is always

an elon story at least it has been recently and then like so i'm curious like how do you balance like the sort of need to stay in touch with him, but also, like, you know, the understanding that if you write something that he's not going to like, he might ice you out. Like, I know you, you know, I'm sure it's not like, oh, God, I have to compromise the truth here, but like it is this sort of balance being that you have to walk, right? Yeah. Like, some of it was solved for me because, like, after the book, I was just so tired of thinking about him. It's, like, weird when you do a biography you start to right it's like you just things I didn't know before I did a biography you just you just get way too into this person's life to the point where you're like dreaming about that

give me a break yeah you just have to think about them all the time and then he was like you know threatening legal action against me and things like that so it's kind of like okay I'll just put that Elon stuff down for a while that's okay and then and then I really stayed away for a long time. And then, like, in that interim period, Bloomberg, like many other publications, seem to, like, develop, you know, five Elon Musk reporters who were either, like, doing SpaceX or Tesla or just Elon himself. And I was like, oh, okay. It does command an army. Yeah. This is, like, quite the crowded field now. I don't know. And so I would write kind of essays. And I would say what I wanted. I mean, he didn't talk to me for a lot

that period and then for a couple of the latter ones he did um then i was still anyway neuralink is like kind of the first thing that i really um had like that same fresh enthusiasm for and wanted to to dig into it is just like i was i felt like i had done so much SpaceX and Tesla stuff and was doing the new book and uh and so i don't know i got my first big neuralink piece coming here soon we'll see we'll see what happens but you're you did the what The Bloomberg cover and the headline was not Elon's Rocket. Oh, that was, well, and that's about Peter Beck. Yeah, yeah.

And Rocket Lab. Right. Well, he didn't, he hasn't graded me for that. I'm sure by the time this comes out, there'll be some tweet. So looking forward to reading. Okay, last question for you. You spent, you know, years looking at space. Are you going to go?

I mean, and do you have a desire? I actually do. I kind of... I bet it's depending how the Neurrelink story comes out, Elon will send you. Right. That was always,

that's always, like, imagine he was just going to hover a Falcon 9 over my house. The, you know, the stuff that's like existed so far with Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic where you do this like six minutes

kind of like barely on the edge of space is like, is not really what I would want to do. And I was, hoping to use my connections as a well-sourced space reporter to do, be the first journalist out there. I would love to do like, you know, SpaceX looks like they're going to do a thing where you can do two laps around the moon as part of this like multi-day sort of mission. I don't think

I could afford that, but if I could go, you know, as a messenger for the good people of Earth, I would actually do that. SpaceX has flown a lot of rockets successfully. I actually would feel pretty confident on that one. The book is titled When the Heavens went on sale. You can pick it up today. Ashley Vance, thanks so much for joining. This was super fun. Thank you.

I really had fun. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, everybody for listening. Thank you, Nate Gwattany, for handling the audio. Thank you, LinkedIn for having me as part of your podcast network. We will be back on Friday with an interview.

Well, recapping the week's news with myself and Ranjan Rai as always. And Ben Smith, author of Traffic, he's been doing the circuit, but we'll have some fair stuff for you. So we hope to see you there. All right, that will do it for us here. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcasts.