Closing Bell - Manifest Space: Blue Origin’s 10th Human Spaceflight with Bess Ventures Principal Lane Bess 2/27/25

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

Lane Bess is a long-time tech entrepreneur and investor – and an astronaut, having flown with Blue Origin twice. The former Palo Alto Networks CEO recently flew on the company’s 10th human spaceflight for a suborbital flight. He sat down with CNBC’s Morgan Brennan to discuss the mission, space tourism, and the future of AI in the space business.

Lane Bess is a longtime tech entrepreneur and investor. He's the principal and founder of Bess Ventures and Advisory and the former CEO of Palo Alto Networks, to name just a few accomplishments. Bess is also an astronaut, two times over. I sat down with him ahead of his most recent space flight. I think I'm going to spend a lot more time enjoying and taking in the view. The first flight, the weightlessness, just the overall experience of being in space, it's a lot

to cram into what's essentially about a 16-minute experience. This time, familiar with the weightlessness, I'm going to probably just really enjoy the view. And they've stepped it up a little bit. Now they allow us to bring a GoPro that they provide, and I expect to get some great video. Bess got that opportunity on Tuesday when Jeff Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, launched its 10th human spaceflight from the West Texas desert. The roughly 10-minute suborbital mission on the autonomous New Shepard vehicle carried six private citizens past the Kármán line.

Price tag per seat? Undisclosed. For Bess, space was always a passion, but now it's becoming a business as well. A lot of my investing in tech turned towards companies that were developing critical technologies for space. In fact, one of my biggest investments is in a company that went public on January 14th called Blaze Semiconductor. And the concept is space is the ultimate in air-gapped, disconnected environments. You're going to have to have autonomous vehicles in the form of space vehicles that are going to have to make decisions, use AI to make decisions, whether it's avoiding something that might be hazardous in space, or just simply the navigation systems and control systems and the robotics that are going to be in space.

Bess is the chairman of Newly Public Blaze. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. Joining me now, Lane Bess, the founder and principal of Bess Ventures and Advisory, and a longtime tech entrepreneur and also an astronaut. That's correct. It's good to speak with you. It's a thrill. Thank you.

We're sitting here at the New York Stock Exchange, but a couple days from now, you'll be going back to space. That's right, for a second time. It was so wonderful the first time that I couldn't help, but when the opportunity came up to do it again, no question asked. What was it like the first time that I couldn't help but when the opportunity came up to do it again, no question asked. What was it like the first time? A combination of exhilaration and just reality check, a perspective on life and the planet. We see so much that takes place on this planet, whether it's political, wars, just the day-to-day challenges of the financial markets. When you see things from space, it all seems a little bit less important.

And everything that hits you in your day-to-day afterwards doesn't seem to faze you as much. So now you did your first flight with Blue Origin. You're going to do this flight with Blue Origin as well on the suborbital New Shepard vehicle. Yes. Walk me through what goes into training for that and the ride itself, your expectations, especially having done it before. Yeah, the interesting thing is it's two and a half days of classroom training. A lot of people ask me, did you have to do any medical or physical you know type of things. The reality is that there's just a lot of science. This is an autonomous vehicle right so there's not a pilot or there's not an astronaut there so they teach you to profile the flight in the classroom you go through simulation and the simulation is really sitting inside the capsule and hearing all

the noises, understanding their screens which show you what's happening every second along the flight. So by the time we take off, we know exactly what's going to happen. In fact, I think we were all pretty relaxed and chilled just anticipating that countdown. What are you expecting on this flight? What are you looking for now that you've done it before? That's right. I think I'm going to spend a lot more time enjoying and taking in the view. The first flight, the weightlessness, just the overall experience of being in space,

it's a lot to cram into what's essentially about a 16-minute experience. This time, familiar with the weightlessness, I'm gonna probably just really enjoy the view. And they've stepped it up a little bit. Now they allow us to bring a GoPro that they provide and I expect to get some great video. I know Blue Origin doesn't actually disclose what it costs to fly on New Shepard,

but to the extent you can share what it is to take a ticket to space. Yes. Well, again, as you can appreciate, that's something I'm not allowed to disclose, but let's just put it this way. For somebody who's had some good success in business, it's a small price to pay for one of the most important and great experiences of a lifetime. It's interesting. I mean, we're seeing space perspective, which was building balloons to basically fly to or past the stratosphere, I think is deciding to close up shop. Virgin Galactic is offline right now with its suborbital flights as it builds new spaceships.

I mean, Blue Origin is really in many ways the only game in town if you do want to be a space tourist, other than SpaceX, which is orbital flights and a little bit different. Yes, yes. You're talking about two different price points too, which again, I've looked at the SpaceX ones as well. But really, this is a very big capital investment. And unless you have somebody like Jeff, who is really committed with his own money, and one of the questions I asked him the first time I was down there is, Jeff, you know, what makes you really want to do this?

And he said, look, I have the privilege of having built a great company and have the ability to follow my passions. And as we all know, one of them is space. In the case of Elon Musk, he's great at using capital that's available through the markets. But both of them, unless you really understand the costs of running these things, it's a dangerous journey. So space perspectives, unfortunately, a great concept, but not fully aware of what it takes to drive something like this. Have you always been interested in space? I mean you're a longtime tech entrepreneur. You've been

involved in quite a number of companies. Has space always been there in the background? A lot in the background. My son and I used to shoot off model rockets in the schoolyard and most of the time they landed up in trees. I hope we don't do the same here and I don't think we will of course. so it was always there, and it was actually my son who brought it to my attention when the auction for the first flight with Jeff went online, and it was just a great opportunity, and I never thought that I'd actually have the opportunity to live something and even more so do it with my son.

So it was always in the background and you know having been former CEO of Palo Alto Networks also running company Zscaler, you know tech has been a means to an end for me. The financial outcomes from success in the cyber market really afforded me the ability to be a passenger to space and I thank the investment of time and money that Jeff and others are doing to push this forward and hope to see a lot more people be able to do it. As you mentioned, you have this background in cybersecurity.

You're also focused on AI. I find myself increasingly having these conversations about the role that space and AI can play with each other as that market continues to evolve. Yeah, actually, as you mentioned, Best Ventures, a lot of my investing in tech turned towards companies that were developing critical technologies for space. In fact, one of my biggest investments is in a company that went public on January 14th called Blaze Semiconductor. And the concept is space is the ultimate in air gaps disconnected

environments you're going to have to have autonomous vehicles in the form of space vehicles that are going to have to make decisions use AI to make decisions whether it's avoiding something that might be hazardous in space or just simply the navigation systems and control systems and the robotics that are going to be in space. So I followed a lot of my passion for space, used my tech experience and outcomes to continue to fuel my passions and experience space flight and now be able to invest in companies like you know Blaze and others that are going to carry a lot of technology forward. You mentioned Blaze went public a couple of weeks ago. How does it speak to, I guess, how are you thinking about investing right now

and taking companies like Blaze public in this environment? Yeah, it's an interesting environment. In fact, before this, I was watching your on-air, and the markets have been just tremendous in moving forward. Tech will always be an important market. AI as we know it's in full steam, some might argue overheated, but I say that we're just at the beginning. You know I'm somebody who my first startups were during the time of the bubble crash as well as Palo Alto

we did it 2008 right after the market had crashed again so markets will go up markets will go down but important technology and advancement and AI is going to carry forward regardless of the markets I always say that there'll be bumps but it'll probably continue to be up into the right hmm I mean given the fact that you've been through a number of these technological and innovation cycles before, how do you see this moment we're in right now with something like AI? Yeah, it's exciting. Again, if you go way back in my career, I was the product manager launching AT&T's internet business back in the 90s.

To me, this is as important as the internet revolution and I think it has the opportunity to accelerate a lot quicker. That's the whole idea of AI acceleration, intelligence and so the big challenge particularly for investors is to really going to be to pick the winning ideas, the winning companies because there is a lot of stuff out stuff out there. A lot of companies are trying to remake themselves as AI companies when they're fundamentally not. So for tech investors, it's a great opportunity, but you have to have a little bit of a laser beam precision in your choices. We find ourselves having conversations about the commoditization of LLMs. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, said just earlier

this week that, I'm gonna paraphrase him because it's not the exact quote, basically seeing some overcapacity, oversupply in the market. I guess are we entering this next phase of application and seeing companies actually realize the results or the return on their investment? The answer is yes. Again, I think there are going to be some clear winners, but at the same time I think there are going to be companies that fall out. But this will be the time.

And when we look at DeepSeek, which was big news over the last few weeks this just is an example of how quickly the interest acceleration advancement innovation the race is going to continue and it's going to be quite interesting and I'm excited to see how we can shift a little bit of the conversation away from Nvidia which is a wonderful company to more and more of the tech companies that are going to be able to do this at lesser cost from a power consumption, smaller footprint. Edge AI, companies like Blaze, which are going to be able to do things on the edge. In fact, most of the things that are going to affect people's lives today are probably going to be at the edge. We can all do LLMs and do inquiries that we're going to get great answers to. But edge applications, I think, is going to be as large, if not a larger market, than what we see in the data center with GPUs. When we talk about edge applications,

literally we're talking about compute on the edge. Yes. Yeah. Good example is smart cities, right? We have cars that drive around right now. You don't make a lot of money in a car but my Rivian I have a software subscription that keeps it connected to the cloud I can stream if you can imagine driving down a road and the car being able to suggest do you want to go to dinner tonight you know I can talk to Alexa on my Rivian yes what are the nearest restaurants your car talking to cloud so services services on the edge So in smart city infrastructure, that's going to be able to track traffic. For example, here in New York, I was thrilled with the reduced traffic, right? But that can be handled through smart city applications. Those are edge applications, autonomous vehicles, right? You can't talk to a cloud if you need to stop at a stop sign instantly. It needs to be a decision that's made on the car. A lot of that exists today, but it's going to advance great for robotics. We can go on and on. These are not things that

people are going to be accessing a data center necessarily. So that market's going to expand. And you see a lot of companies starting to pop up. And I think that some of the larger companies are going to probably over the next two to three to five years be hunting for companies that are going to help them on the edge. And there's a connectivity and communications aspect to it, which in some ways brings us full circle back to the space piece of this conversation, too. When do you think we start to see these capabilities actually meaningfully impact people's day-to-day lives? I think it's going to happen within the next three to five years. Look, if you take a look at it, Starlink in and of itself, right, that really has in many

ways created a much greater advantage to people who are mobile, people who need to get internet access in remote areas. That's really about satellites being deployed in space in large mass. Amazon will probably have a similar initiative focusing on it. So you see a lot of these companies that have already invested in space and understand the potential of space in the form of just communications bringing real applications and use to people. So I think that's probably the first play we'll see and then it'll build from there. So are there, and we talked about edge AI with Blaze, but are there other companies or

other technologies specifically that you're investing in right now that you're especially excited about? The cyber. I mean, I've been a long time cyber investor. I'm the CEO of a company called Deep Instinct, which is using the most advanced AI capabilities. It's called Deep Learning, and we won't get into the science here, but that technology actually has the predictive nature. It's a cyber capability akin to a chat GPT with that level of sophistication.

And as you'll take a look at cyber threats, particularly the newest and latest ones that we see in ransomware, is what they call zero-day or first-time-seen threats. A lot of the existing technology, even of the best cyber companies, some of which I've been involved with, can't respond quick enough to actually prevent a threat. So a lot of these companies and governments are into the remediation and cleanup, which I've been involved with, can't respond quick enough to actually prevent a threat. So a lot of these companies and governments are into the remediation and cleanup, which is extremely costly and disruptive to businesses. So AI in the cyberspace is equal.

That's probably where I see some great business development near term and continues to be a gift that keeps giving to me from an investment standpoint. But space, I think, is my passion one. Yeah. So shifting from reactive to predictive when we talk about cyber. Exactly. Yeah. Anything else you're doing to get ready for your second spaceflight? I'm going to have a good relaxing weekend tomorrow. It's really a reflective time. You know, Blue Origin does a great job with the people who travel on their various missions. You go down to Texas, you've seen it I believe, it's a nice set up. Sit around a campfire, you get to know other people who are space enthusiasts and they really make it a comfortable and just memorable experience.

So I'm going to take Saturday as I fly down there to relax and Sunday we begin training. But I'm ready. I have an advantage over the others. I've done it before. I'm sure they'll be asking me a lot of questions. Maybe they'll be a little bit nervous, but I'll be pretty chill. Well, Godspeed. Can't wait to watch it and hear all about it on your return, Lane Best. Thank you for joining me. Thank you. That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.