How I Built This with Guy Raz - HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti

Episode Date: April 20, 2023

Joe Laurienti, a former SpaceX and Blue Origin engineer, launched Ursa Major in 2015 with the idea that 3D printing could revolutionize the production of rocket engines.The timing was right: Russia had invaded Crimea the previous year. American sanctions and strained political relationships threatened the supply of Russian rocket engines, which the U.S. had relied on for space missions since the end of the Cold War. American companies like Ursa Major have now begun providing rocket engines for both government and private space endeavors. This week on How I Built This Lab, Joe talks with Guy about the journey of launching and scaling a multimillion dollar aerospace company. Plus, how Joe has dealt with the infamous “startup valley of death” and how Ursa Major’s engines are helping the U.S. catch up to Russia and China in the development of hypersonic weapons. This episode was produced by Chris Maccini and edited by John Isabella, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Maggie Luthar.You can follow HIBT on Twitter & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time who are looking for a way to upgrade their digital footprint. Well, whether you're just starting out or you're scaling your business, Squarespace is the easiest way to build a great website that stands out. It's an all-in-one website platform that gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your products, and get paid. Anyone can use Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools to build an online presence that truly reflects what makes your business special.

There are templates, intuitive drag-and-drop editing, and even an AI-enhanced website builder. Then, Squarespace's built-in analytics tools help you make smarter business decisions. Review website traffic, learn where to focus engagement, and track revenue all in one place. Looking to grow your business, Squarespace even offers fast, easy business financing

through Squarespace capital. Go to Squarespace.com slash built for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe, all loans subject to credit approval. This show is in partnership with Airbnb. This past summer, I took my family to Vienna, and it was incredible. We spent our days wandering the old streets, stopping for coffee and pastries, visiting museums, and just soaking up the history of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And one of the things that made the trip so special was the home we booked on Airbnb.

It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. So if you want to launch something into space, say a communication satellite or supplies from the International Space Station, you have to put it, obviously, on top of a giant rocket, and rockets are powered by rocket engines.

Now, for the past three decades or so, the United States government has basically been relying on rocket engines that are made in Russia, which creates a problem when there are geopolitical conflicts like the war in Ukraine. Now, you've probably heard about private space companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin owned by billionaires like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Those companies are offering an alternative. rockets and engines that are designed and built in the United States. But building one of these rockets can take years, and they're often plagued with delays.

So my guest today, Joe Laurenti, is looking to help both government and private space companies address their rocket engine supply problems, in part by using 3D printing to build rocket engines in the United States, and to build them much faster than they would be with traditional manufacturing. But unlike Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, Joe Laurenti is not a billionaire. In fact, he founded his company, Ursa Major, just four years after graduating from college with a degree in aerospace engineering. Joe grew up in Colorado in an aerospace family. His dad worked for ball aerospace, and as a kid, Joe was always fascinated with rockets and space. Oh, I was obsessed.

I don't think I knew if I wanted to work on rockets or satellites or airplanes. I just, I loved it all. I probably vacillated between wanting to be an astronaut or a pilot or an engineer constantly. Yeah. And eventually the mechanical and kind of hands-on piece won me over. You actually rebuilt a 1969 Ford Mustang when you were in high school. This was not in the 70s. Like you were in high school in like the 2000s, right? That's exactly right.

It was my first car. I think we went and picked it up on a trailer when I was like 13 or 14 years old. and basically got it running right around the time I had a driver's license. So it probably wasn't the best craftsmanship as a teenager. I was learning as I went, but it was a great project. So you were like a tinker. You would do this with your dad? Yes, exactly.

And tinker is a great way to put it. Even as a, you know, seven, eight-year-old, I was the kid that would find old electronics and take them apart and never could reassemble them. But I loved taking things apart. All right. You decide to go to USC to study aerospace engineering. And I guess one of the reasons I think you decided to go there was because it was so close to, like, jet propulsion lab and like those industries are all, many of them are in Southern California. So actually, the reason I wanted to go to USC was it ran in the family.

So when it came time to apply to schools, I remember only wanting to apply to USC. And my parents very wisely said you need to apply around. I was very fortunate to get scholarships to USC, so it kind of made the decision easy. but I actually applied and was accepted as a double major biomedical engineer and a pre-medic student. And that was really, I just had no clue what I wanted to do. I was 17 years old. I loved space, loved aerospace. But as a 17-year-old who had probably never spoken to a doctor outside of their office,

I thought being a doctor sounded like a great idea. I saw the biomedical engineering piece attached. It still got to be hands-on and a tinkerer. But I very vividly remember walking into the bookstore day one. And I had my biology and chemistry and biomedical engineering textbooks. And there was a book there that was the kind of aerospace engineering 101 textbook called Introduction to Flight. And five days before class started, I put all the books back and grabbed that introduction to flight textbook and changed my major. So I was accepted under something other than aerospace, but never took a class outside of aerospace.

I guess while you were there, you were part of a student group called the Rocket Propulsion Lab, which from what I guess, like, this was a student group that, like, had the intention to send a rocket to space, which they actually did after, after you. I think they did in 2019, and you were a student there in like the late 2000s, early 2010s. What, what, like, what did that group do? So you hit the nail on the head. It was really a. entirely undergraduate student group. We had a ton of autonomy. We had a professor that kind of oversaw our kind of safety and overall activities, but we had a small amount of funding and some really innovative founders. And now that I'm thinking back, kind of the founders behind that lab are probably the first ounce of entrepreneurialism that I got me. But there was a composites and kind of think airframe or aerodynamics expert, you know, as 18-year-old. years old as much of an expert as you can be. And then there was a propulsion expert, another 18-year-old,

who had built hobby rockets in his free time. And they had a competition to see if the person doing the propulsion could design a powerful enough rocket to tear apart the structures that the other student made. And so that was really how the group started. And you got it right. We had the ultimate vision of being the first student group in space, which they ultimately achieved. They actually built a rocket that went into space. So you clearly, I mean, you were on a, to use the word trajectory, I guess, as appropriate here, a trajectory to getting into the world of rocket engineering. And you did, I think right after you graduate from USC in 2011, you went to go work for SpaceX, which at the time, like, was not a, it was not a sure thing. Like 2011, SpaceX was not, I mean, now, of course, we think, oh, my God, it's amazing.

They're, you know, involved in every rocket launch. But then it was not at all, right? Oh, it was a wild idea back then. In my undergrad years, I remember watching the first few SpaceX launches, which all failed. And almost thinking it was ridiculous that an Internet founder wanted to go build an aerospace launch company. And you were even skeptical of that, for that. From what I, like, you thought, who's this guy Elon Musk? Like, what does he know about space?

Exactly. I remember talking to my dad, who'd spent his whole career in aerospace, about how wild this idea was and that it was probably never going to see any traction. Yeah. So you were there, I think for about two years, presumably working on some of the projects that they would eventually become famous for. Yeah, I caught a really exciting phase. I mean, I got to see the first dragon capsules, so the first ever private. spacecraft to dock to the space station, got to see the transition into Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 1.1. So it was really transformational years of SpaceX and drinking from a fire hose while learning.

All right. You're there for two years. This is actually awesome because you leave and you go work for Blue Origins. You're basically going, it's like going from Apple to Google or like something. You know, it's like you're going from one great space company to another. This is obviously Jeff Bezos, a space company, Blue Origin. Why did you make the decision to leave SpaceX? You know, I remember thinking before I started at SpaceX that there were two companies in the world I'd want to work for, and it was SpaceX or Blue Origin. And so I'd spent time at SpaceX, like I said, really drinking from a fire hose. And we had gotten to, back then it felt like a mature product.

It was far from it. But we were launching Falcon 9 successfully. And I saw in Blue Origin really a very tangential ambition. They were focused much more on the human side of spaceflight. And frankly, what won me over was the engine technology. Blue Origin had a completely different architecture. So I could work on a more complicated machine. I want to just kind of back up for a second, ask about the rocket industry in general, right?

Because I think for a long time before SpaceX kind of became this really important player in rocket launches, there was basically a monopoly, I think, right? at least in the case of like U.S. rocket launches, like most of those were like the service providers, so to speak, were Boeing and Lockheed Martin. They formed like a joint venture. And they provided most of the rockets for NASA and the U.S. military. And they kind of had a lock on it, right? Exactly right. It was almost a monopoly. There was another small provider here in the U.S. orbital sciences. They would successfully launch satellites into orbit. But almost every national security launch, every critical NASA launch was done. by one company. Yeah. And I didn't realize this until I was reading about your company. But most of the engines on those rockets, even up until recently, were made in Russia. That's correct.

And my understanding is that was very much an artifact of post-Cold War. We almost wanted to throw a bone to the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union. And they had this incredible propulsion capability. So we agreed to start buying rocket engines. And so essentially that was what powered American rockets with these Russian engines that were So presumably there was really no engine industry in the U.S. Exactly right. There was one other provider.

I say was they're currently under contract to be acquired. So we'll see where that goes. But Aerojet Rocketdyne was the result of consolidation here in the industry. And if you look back to 1995, we probably had 15 companies providing everything from small missile motors to small aircraft engines to rocket engines. Now, circa 2005, we had one. Wow. And why? I mean, was it just that they couldn't compete with the cost of that the Russian, I mean, the Russian engines were just much cheaper? The Russian engines just had an amazing heritage. They were really reliable. I don't think that they were the most inexpensive, but the kind of technical history behind the U.S.'s heritage of rocketry and the Russian heritage of rocketry, resulted in very different architectures.

So the engines built here in the U.S. Think space shuttle. Very reusable. Actually, those engines are still being used today on the SLS vehicle. But really just exquisite engines that are extremely expensive. The Russians were quite a bit cheaper

and extremely reliable. So when it came time to launch satellites and try to build a first step toward commercialization of space, the Russian engines made a lot of sense. So I guess a very pivotal event happens 2014, the Russians invade Ukraine for the first time, obviously now, and this is when they invaded the Crimean Peninsula. And that actually, unbeknownst to, I think any of us, I didn't even know this, it actually caused a huge shift in the U.S. space industry, right? Because basically when Russia invaded Ukraine, that was the beginning of like a ban on buying Russian rockets. That's right. And it really, it sparked a few bouts of funding that have been really successful. It sparked some development funding towards. new rocket domestic rocket engine programs. Unfortunately, Ursa Major wasn't around then. We might have

benefited very well from that. But it also sparked funding toward both Boeing and SpaceX providing launch services of people because we were also dependent on Russia to launch people to space. So the space shuttle retired in 2011 and that was the U.S.'s only means of putting humans in space until I think last year, two years ago, two years ago now was SpaceX's first launch. And so So 2014 was the first time we saw real traction and dedication in the U.S. toward developing a new domestic human flight capability. Right. Instead of just launching satellites into space.

Exactly. All right. So this was a turning point. There's sort of these kind of two things that were happening. On the one hand, Russian engines were not going to be imported to the U.S. any longer, starting in 2014. And many of these companies were not making their own engines. I guess you saw an opportunity to start a business. Yeah, I think the first inkling of something needs to be done here,

or there's a changing of the tide coming, was when I started to get outreach from a few companies that were raising venture capital to do exactly what SpaceX was doing. And, you know, I had worked at SpaceX. I was at the time working at Blue Origin, and both of those companies, to me, felt like first movers. And it just struck me that the next wave shouldn't, be duplicating the first movers. There's got to be something added on or something changed or

a different approach. And that was kind of the first spark behind. Let's provide engines to this next generation. We're going to take a quick break. But in just a moment, we're going to hear how Joe Lorienti went from working as a propulsion engineer for SpaceX and Blue Origin to starting his own rocket engine company. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz. And you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. My guest is Joe Lorienti, who, founder and CEO of Ursa Major. All right. So you decide in 2015, you're just two years since you got to Blue Origin, just a few years out of college in your 20s, to found a company that would make rocket engines called Ursa Major. So the idea was, I'm not going to try to become SpaceX or Blue Origin and launch rockets into space.

Why don't I build a company that can service those companies and others? Exactly. We want to build the next five SpaceXes or next 10 SpaceXes. And that would be by making just the rocket engines, not the other components, but just focus on one but obviously a critical part of the rocket. Yeah, there are a few reasons behind that. One, I was an angsty engineer who loved rocket engines. That was all I wanted to work on. But really, it's the kind of dominating performance component of the rocket. It's also the highest risk, the most expensive.

So my thought was if we're seeing the PC boom around us, I want to be providing microprocessors. So give me a sense of what you, I mean, obviously you wanted to create a product that would service this industry. but this is a massive undertaking. It's not like, it's like making a, you know, I always say this, but it's not like making a cookie company or go into like a farmer's market and just start selling kombucha. Like, you're building rocket engines. This is very cash intensive, very complex,

requires a lot of, a lot of resources. And also a long path to forget about profitability, just to like actually get this thing working. And then a long path to making this profitable. I have to imagine a big part of it was daunted by this. Yeah, now that we're talking about it, I definitely remember the three, six month period before really taking the leap and saying I'm going to hand in my notice at this company that I really enjoy working at and going to set out on my own. One of the first steps was actually selling all of my SpaceX stock. So hopefully that pays dividends in the long run.

but I'm going to commit everything I've got toward starting a company with no other employees on board initially. I think the notion of this is risky and I might lose money. It probably didn't phase me as much as this is a massive career shift for me. I loved engineering. I had only really ever wanted to work on things that I could go turn a wrench on with my hands. And now I've got to figure out how to balance a balance. sheet. So that was a big shift. Yeah. Had to run a team that is going to do the work that you're used to doing. And you know, the first vote of confidence, I think, was the team. Our first handful of

employees were former co-workers of mine from SpaceX and Blue Origin, including my boss from SpaceX and my boss from Blue Origin. So that might have been the confidence I needed to really get going. Joe, obviously you're a really smart guy and you had the credentials, but you were still really young, you still are now. And I hope this doesn't sound, I'm not, I'm just forgiving me, but I'm just, when you decided, you went to investors, were they them skeptical? I mean, you were taking on a massive project and you were untested and young. And, you know, I mean, was it, was it hard to kind of convince people to, to part with their money, to finance this thing? Oh, definitely. I, I remember a lot of knows. And when I'm speaking with founders, first time founders,

Now, I love to explain that the number one attribute you've got to have is thick skin because you're going to be told your idea is terrible by investors. The most painful might be candidates when you really want to recruit somebody and they tell you that your ideas in the wrong direction or they do things differently. You're going to hear that from potential customers. You just have to be ready to hear no or you're wrong a lot. Yeah. What I'm wondering is, okay, so obviously there, we're not.

Not many American companies focused entirely on making rockets, but what was the innovation you were going to bring to this? Because you had to obviously offer something that was going to make it more attractive, maybe the price or the efficiency or whatever it was. So what was the technological advancement or development that enabled you to say, you know, we can actually do this? 3D printing of metals was really what we went all in on. And I always give our early investors credit because that could have been the decision. that sunk the company, but it was clear, you know, 3D printing of metals has been kind of picking up steam and becoming viable for 15 years now, maybe even 20 years now. But it really kind of started to break out around 2015, I remember. Exactly. These companies were really emerging. It was just clear that something was changing here. And the cost point, still today, this is an issue, but the cost point back then especially was so high in 3D printing metals that you didn't want to go design a car around 3D printing.

But aerospace, every ounce of weight, every just tiny bit of strength that you can get out of the material is really important. So 3D printing made a lot of sense. So it's completely different than fabricating a rocket, you know, or component parts in the past, because in the past, presumably, it was literally fabrication. You had to like melt metal and pour it into a mold, and that's how you start. Exactly. Completely different. And there are actually, there are still companies existent today that take the approach of we should 3D print everything.

And we very early on made the calculated decision that 3D printing is an enabler and you have to use it in the right places in the right way. So we really use 3D printing for a handful of reasons, but you can dial it down to if we can develop a metal that we can go 3D print in a cost effective manner, that's something you wouldn't go do, like you said, casting, pouring metals. It's just way too expensive. So we develop our own metals in-house for some of our applications. And then the second piece is removing processes from the manufacturing. If a traditional rocket engine part is liquid metal poured into a mold, then you heat-treat it in an oven, and then you machine it and weld it and braze it. You can cut all of those processes out by 3D printing one part. So that's where we see our cost advantage and our performance advantage.

All right. You raised a little bit of money, some seed money, to start out, a few million. bucks, which sounds amazing, but build rockets is nothing. I mean, over time, you would raise more. But initially, once you say, okay, I'm going to start a company that's going to build rocket engines, what then do you do? Like, where did you find a place to start, you know, experimenting and building a prototype? It's, in those early days, we're almost the easiest because every day was just try to make progress toward building a rocket engine.

And you decide to start this. Colorado, I think, from the outset, right? Yes. I really, I was living in West Texas when I left Blue Origin. So I had a decision to make as to where's the best place to start a company like this. And Los Angeles makes a ton of sense. There's a lot of aerospace out there, but it's also costly. And we weren't going to be able to fire.

It doesn't matter where you go in Los Angeles. You're not going to be able to fire a rocket engine. So it started in Colorado with the hope of having some sort of proximity and kind of having a test facility that's more closely tied to the community, to be honest, every rocket test facility I'd worked in is middle of nowhere, no access to anyone allowed. But I like the idea of let's bring in middle school students for field trips and actually have a test facility that can engage around us. So where did you find that? We found it about 40 minutes north of Denver, Colorado, a little town called Berthead. And there happened to be built in the late 80s, a missile test facility that had kind of been dormant.

It had changed hands a few times, and there was a fabrication company in the big warehouse. But there are these massive test bunkers, you know, blast concrete, everything you think of for a missile test site. And it was unused. So we got extremely lucky, I think a classic startup story. You got a cold call from a realtor asking if we wanted a missile test site. And we took advantage. Wow. All right.

So you had your initial team, the small team came with you from. Blue Origin, some folks from SpaceX, how did you convince people to leave those jobs and come work with you? I think a lot of that messaging has actually stayed the same even today that we're absolutely not understating what SpaceX and Blue Origin are doing. It's just a very different approach from what we're doing. As engineers, we want to focus on the engine because when the engine is one of a thousand things, it goes into a rocket, by its nature, it's not going to be optimized. But we wanted to optimize engines. So it was really that technical, challenge and then the business approach of, hey, this is not a deep talent pool. Not every company that wants to build a rocket is going to be able to build engines. Let's go provide that.

Yeah. I think in 2017, so about a year and a half in, you guys did your first quote unquote hot fire test of an engine. So help me understand how you actually build. I mean, are there like off the shelf components that you can get to start to instruct a prototype? Very few. And the first hot fire is a nice, really fun milestone to celebrate, but anyone who's been through engine development knows you've got to fire the thing thousands of times before you really understand it and can go sell it. But for us, the really important piece there was as a startup that didn't have a ton of money, we could take a lot of kind of outsized risk. We didn't do a lot of testing before firing that engine. We just built the first one and went and fired it and blew it up. And that's an approach we've really stuck with that you want to learn and you want to

fail as quickly as possible. And it worked. It worked. Yeah. We didn't raise our first venture capital money until after we had fired that first engine. And I remember our investors saying that was why they invested in us because we had already shown that progress technically. So now you've got a prototype. And now, presumably, you have to invest in the equipment to 3D print your engines, right? I mean, and I have to assume that, again, like, this has to be custom purpose built. Like, this is not, there's, there's no 3D printing machines making rocket engines anywhere. So there are 3D printers that can 3D print some pretty high-strength metals. They do focus a bit on aerospace, but again, because we, right around that time, the first engines we built were 3D

printed with really off-the-shelf metals, so metals that you can go buy powders of anywhere. That was kind of when we started developing our own alloys, was to improve and optimize these engines. Yeah. And a big piece of our philosophy was 3D printing is going to grow alongside us as a company. So we have to be ready to invest in the state of the art today and keep a finger on the pulse of the state of the art tomorrow. So being involved with 3D printing companies over the last seven, eight years has been a really important part of what we do. We're going to take another

quick break more from Joe Laurenti, founder and CEO Ursa Major in just a moment. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. I'm talking with Joe Lorienti. His company, Ursa Major, uses 3D printing technology to build rocket engines. All right, you now have three engines either in production or development called Hadley. I think he's a name but for a character from a Ray Bradbury novel. Yes. Ripley, named by for Ellen Ripley. I love that.

I interviewed Sigourney Weaver a couple months ago, and I love that character. And Arrowway, which I guess is, I don't know what Arrowway. What is Arrowway? Arrowway is Jody Foster's character in contact. Oh, yes, of course. Okay. I love it. Okay, great.

So you're developing it. But I want to ask you, just step away from the technology. for a moment, and ask you about the business side, right? Because you are in a very complex business. It's very, as I mentioned, cash intensive. It requires a lot of very sophisticated engineering, testing. It's highly regulated. This is a business that takes years, even decades, to reach sustainability.

And one of the, and this is, and Tesla has gone through this, SpaceX, you know, Blue Origin, all these companies have gone through versions of this, known as the, Valley of Death, which is just a period sort of between the initial venture money coming in and or funding coming in and then the long-term viability. And this is a long period that you're and you're in the middle of it now. What does that, what does that mean for you guys? I don't know that I appreciated this term, the Valley of Death. It felt like we were kind of through the Valley or seeing the other side maybe 10 times over the last five years. And when we talked. And when we talked. talk about it, I really think back to the number of times Elon at SpaceX would kind of threaten bankruptcy or explain that if we didn't hit a milestone, we were going to go under. And as a young engineer, I thought, that's just bluster. That's just trying to get us to work harder. And in hindsight, I think he absolutely was not blustering. I think that SpaceX was facing the Valley of Death very

actively when I was there. So I see that now because we've, we're kind of right in the heart of it. Like you said, we've made traction, we've got customers, we've got revenue, we've got engines going out the door, but alongside that, your ambitions grow and the vision grows and the valley gets deeper and deeper. So I think hopefully we see the other end of it here pretty soon, but we absolutely are in the heart of it. And presumably the research and development process is so cash intensive that even though you've got revenue coming in the door, it's not obviously going to cover your costs. Exactly. And, you know, a big piece of it for our business,

our industry is that investors, while they are well-trained and a big part of their job is to see these technology avenues into the future, they aren't rocket scientists and they aren't engineers. And we have to make sure we are communicating our progress and we are explaining why they should continue to invest in us or be patient with their investment or be excited about the milestones that we're reaching because we're still very much dependent on investors. Yeah. I mean, and from a regulatory standpoint, like the Hadley engine is, is available now. You've got customers buying that engine, right? Yeah, on the other side of the wall, the room I'm sitting in, we've probably got

10 or 12 engines, either finished, ready to ship out the door or in some state of assembly. But once the other, the next generation of rockets of your building are ready to go, they still have to go through, again, a regulatory process, right? It's not like you can just, you're just good to go. Like, they have to be tested and certified. That's exactly right. And that can be anywhere, you know, on the fast end, maybe that's 18 months, on the slow end, maybe it's three, four years. And because our business model is to be extremely market-facing, customer-facing, and apply to a lot of missions,

our requirements might be a lot more onerous than a company that's vertically integrated or building their own engines. We have to meet the needs of Air Force, Space Force, NASA, missile defense agency, you know, really any customer that comes along or even the customers of our customers. All right, let me ask you about another part of your business. business. We've been talking about rocket launches. And so I think a lot of us think of satellites or even manned, you know, flights, right? And so they're rockets. And you're talking about engines that propel these rockets into space and then send personnel or, you know, material into space. But actually, there's another part of your business, which is missile defense. And this is important because there is a technology out there, I guess sort of broadly referred to as hypersonic weapons. These are like missiles that can travel. five, six times a speed of sound, and that are being developed. I guess the Chinese are really quite advanced. The Russians are quite advanced on building this technology. The U.S. has lagged behind. But this is also an area where your engines may play a role.

Yes. We have delivered engines into a couple of hypersonic programs already. So this is an area we're really excited because it's so nascent. It's still very much an arm. and D. And to say it's nascent isn't really fair, I guess. The notion of kind of hypersonics and warfare in the U.S. has been around since the 90s. We really kind of backed away from the hardware development and testing side of it. And that's when China and Russia really invested in developing and flying hypersonics. So you're exactly right. We're lagging behind in that the things that make a SpaceX or a nurse major successful are design, build, fly very quickly. Kind of like we said, You want to go fail fast. You want to learn very quickly.

And the U.S. hasn't been doing that in hypersonic flight over the last few years. With the exception of really the last 12 months, we've really started to increase our cadence and improve there. And so these are essentially rockets that can fly low, so they evade radar and very, very fast. And obviously, I hope they're never used because that would not be a good day. But ultimately, if other countries developing it, the U.S. has an interest, presumably, in developing a robust arsenal of these missiles. And the U.S. absolutely is investing in developing an arsenal, the ability to field hypersonic weapons. But really importantly, and more where Eursa Major is playing today in hypersonics, we are developing the ability to test hypersonic technologies, be it high-temperature materials or electronic communications. I like to talk a lot about when it comes to hypersonics,

if you remember the movie Apollo 13, where there's the seven minutes of blackout when the capsule is reentering the atmosphere. Yeah. Expect entry interface in 45 seconds. Gentlemen, it's been a privilege flying with you. That's because it's traveling at a hypersonic speed, and there's a plasma around the vehicle

that makes it very difficult to communicate with, with radios. You might have lost the radio contact? Roger that. So that's a challenge with hypersonic missiles. they are difficult to communicate with in flight. So that technology development is extremely exciting. And there's the development of everything around the hypersonics. So right now, a big notion is how do we detect these?

If there's a hypersonic missile flying, can we actually track it and detect it? Can we shoot one down? So you've got to develop the counter hypersonic capability. And it's just this new field of development that's extremely exciting. It kind of feels like the space race of the 1960s. Do you think that the defense side of what you're working on will ultimately be the biggest part of your business? I think before the end of the decade, defense definitely stands to be a significant part of our business. It's just the state of the world today.

The lack of kind of industrial base and production capability is an open door for us. It's a perfect opportunity for a fast-moving startup to bring new products to market. I think space is a 100-year opportunity. So when we look out, we really want to make sure we are kind of keeping that core focus of propulsion for the most important missions around us. And sometimes it's defense, sometimes it's space. But it's very different time windows. This is just a maybe a naive question. But given the fact that it's so expensive, what value is there right now for like space exploration?

I'm not talking about going to Mars, but like going back to the moon or just going into low Earth orbit. Oh, I get so excited about low Earth orbit. I think we're just tapping into if you start to dramatically reduce the cost of access to space, you open up a window of opportunity. You know, where this is similar to, I use the analogy of a PC boom before. This is computers going from the size of a room to being on every desk or smartphones being in our pockets where we start to open up windows of data transformation and from space that weren't accessible. 10 years ago. So a few examples there, SpaceX's Starlink constellation is really intended to bring a new capability of internet globally. They've been very, very vocally on the front lines in Ukraine. They are in rural parts of Africa. And that's just data provision, access to internet.

If you start to look at collecting new types of data, think about looking at groundwater for farmers and making that cost 10 cents every time they pull it up on a daily basis versus is $10,000, so it's only hedge funds trading on that data. Because you have the data from the satellites. Exactly. And the satellites are modern enough technology that are replenishable enough because the cost to orbit has dropped so significantly. But what about just like a manned mission, you know, for example?

Because presumably, you know, if all goes well, your rockets will be on some manned missions. Absolutely. That's quite a ways out because, to your point on regulation and requirements, as soon as you put people on board, the safety side becomes very different, as you can imagine. But down the road, we're really excited about it. I think a lot of what we want to do beyond lower Earth orbit has to do with exploration. It's putting people's boots back on the moon. And when you start to look at that, there's this whole tree of new possibilities where right now, if you look at the moon, there are resources like helium-3 that can be used for fusion power generation

so we can power the Earth with this isotope that we find on the moon. It seems very far fetched, but right now China is planning lunar missions for exactly that reason. Yeah. I think you've got about 250 people who work for Earth's a major now. Is that right? Yes. You are, I mean, it's amazing. You're in your early 30s and, see, you're obviously still a young company.

When you, you know, you're going to be doing this for a long time. I mean, you, you know, you're going to look back on this in your 80s and 90s. Where are we going to be? What is space, the space industry going to look like when you're, you know, towards the end of your career. So I'm really biased here as a propulsion fan and a propulsion company, but I really like the idea of advancing how quickly we can move about the cosmos. Right now, everything SpaceX is working on is to get to Mars, and the fastest trip to Mars is maybe a six-month trip. So I'm really excited about transforming from the days of the Mayflower to the days of really capable international air travel.

Yeah. Yeah, I still can't understand how right now how we would get to Mars in six months because you just can't carry that much water. It's too heavy. Exactly. Just to make people alive. Not to mention get back from Mars. Right, right. It's so, yeah. Hopefully by then, hopefully by my 80s, 90s, we're not just going back and forth to Mars like settlers.

We are taking, you know, long vacations to Mars or we're going well beyond Mars to think, you know, the asteroid belt where there are plentiful resources. Yeah, and we don't even have to do it with Matt Day. Damon. No, we don't, though I wouldn't mind him tagging along. That's Joe Lorienti, founder and CEO of Ursa Major. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, I'm at guy. ros. If you want to contact the team, our email address is H-I-B-T at ID.wondery.com. This episode was produced by Chris Messini with editing by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Maggie Luthor.

Our music was composed by Routin Arableu. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, Elaine Coates, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Palson, Carrie Thompson, and Kira Joaquin. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.