Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Ashlee Vance Shares Crazy Stories from Elon Musk to the Billionaire Space Race (#348)

Episode Date: September 17, 2023

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Peter Beck? Who's winning the billionaire space race? And who will take care of all their space junk? Here today to answer all of these questions and more is none other than Ashlee Vance! Ashlee is a writer at Bloomberg, bestselling author, filmmaker, and Emmy-nominated host and writer of the tech series Hello World. Among his most well-known books are Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future and When The Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing To Put Space Within Reach, which was an instant bestseller, and which we will discuss in depth today. Ashlee is one of my favorite writers, and it was a huge honor for me to dive deep into the world of space exploration with him.  Tune in!  Key Takeaways:  Intro (00:00) Judging a book by its cover: When The Heavens Went on Sale (01:04) Pete Worden and his influence on commercial spaceflight (03:20) Communist vs. capitalist approach to space exploration (06:54) Will Elon Musk die on Mars? (11:09) On space junk and regulations (21:57) How to spot talent in space exploration (26:22) On space tourism (32:00) Global banking at the speed of light (34:38) Brain-computer interfaces (38:36) Pete Worden, Robert Zubrin, SpaceX and NASA (41:30) Ashlee’s HBO projects (47:41) Outro (50:20) — Additional resources:  📚 When the Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance: https://a.co/d/7JIhN4X  🥗 Thanks, HelloFresh! Go to HelloFresh.com/50impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus 15% off the next 2 months. 📝 With a MasterClass annual membership, you can take one-on-one classes from the world’s best for $10 a month with your annual membership, get unlimited access to every class — and even better, right now, as an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off when you go to MASTERCLASS.com/impossible. 🧑‍💻 Visit LinkedIn.com/IMPOSSIBLE to post your job for free! 🎤 Join me and ⁦Lawrence Krauss for an Onstage Dialogue ⁦at the San Diego Air & Space Museum Tuesday, Oct 17, 2023 at 7:00 PM: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/live-onstage-dialogue-brian-keating-lawrence-m-krauss-tickets-699430514497 ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who's really leading the new space age? It's not NASA, and it's not the nation states. It's the Silicon Valley's daredevils. Ashley Vance is a renowned investigative reporter and the man who took you inside the mind of Elon Musk. His latest book is an intimate report on the wild west of aerospace engineering. So join us as Vance takes us on an unprecedented journey

into secret space labs, private jets, and even espionage. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Welcome everybody to an out-of-this-world adventure with one of my favorite authors and rock contours, Ashley Vance, joining us from the same golden state that I'm within. He is within a deep and illustrious valley. How are you today, Ashley?

I'm good, man. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. I love your writing. You're a consummate storyteller. You get access. You have a congenial kind of attitude that answers the questions, both from experts, quote unquote, like me, all the way down to the man on the street. And as I mentioned before we hit record, I love to take my readers, you know, my listeners who are book officinados on a journey into the cover and how it came to be because they are the heroes of the story, but you always take people on a hero.

journey in this particular adventure book as many adventures written into it. So, Ashley, please, if you would, hold up the book, explain the cover art, explain the title, and most importantly, the subtitle. And yeah, what was the inspiration for all these? And you cannot say my publisher forced me to do. I will not. I will not say that. I picked this title, when the heavens went on sale pretty explicitly. You know, part of what I was trying to do in this book was, I thought, call a moment. People have been writing about commercial space for a while. obviously, but, you know, there really hadn't been what I saw as like a book that really defined this moment in time. Some people who I was writing about thought the title was quite cynical and

see themselves more as idealists and, you know, people out to help the world. And I clearly, I do see, so I see a lot of that going on. And the book is mostly optimistic, but I did think this was a moment in time when commercial space became real. I had for the image, we went back and forth on a ton of images. There's all kinds of cool stuff to play with, but I knew I wanted a new space rocket as opposed to an old space rocket. And so we found this is a rocket lab rocket launch out of New Zealand. And it was a pretty sort of like a quasi amateur photographer. It'd just take it this beautiful shot. And so I love it. And, you know, the misfits, the misfits of geniuses part is just that that was to reflect again, sort of this new moment in space when it has a bit of this like Wild West

field to it. And so you know, you got to mix. Part of the book is about it has a lot of the idealism of old space, but also this moment in time when some of the idealism goes away and business triumphs over some of our past

notions around space. One of the things that reminded me of the picture, remind me of Neil deGrasse Tyson's accessory to war. I don't know if you've read that book. I have it. That's all about how astronomers have participated in the men's, you know, second oldest business, which is, which is warfare, of course. And so, yeah, the similar kind of arching

image and so forth. But, but I love the, I love the book. I love the introduction. I think that you narrated. I listened to the audio book. I have the hard copy. And I was lucky enough to get one of my undergraduates, one of the most brilliant people on Earth, Charles Cody, who took my cosmology class this year. And I shared with, you know, you get all these books as a podcaster, sent to you and your publicist was kind enough to send me your book. And so I listened to it. I already bought the audible copy. So I gave it to him and he generated four pages of notes. So we're going to take his question as well as some generated from the audience. But the very first, you know, kind of thing I wanted to get into is Pete Warden. I think I might have met maybe at the SETI Institute. Do you know if

he's affiliated with the SETI Institute up there? You know, I don't know how closely affiliated, but it's right by NASA Ames and I know he's had overlap with them over the years. So I think I met him. I've spoken there a couple times. He's a great individual. Talk about his work, his impact, how much of an influence this relatively unsung character is in the unfolding, you know, modern history of commercial spaceflight. Yeah, I mean, Pete's one of my favorite characters, and he seems to be a lot of people's favorite character in the book. I mean, like you said, a relatively unknown figure, especially outside of space circles, but what an incredible life. He's got a PhD in astrophysics, but he

became a brigadier general in the Air Force. Did a lot of pretty controversial things over the years, some black ops stuff. He ran the office of disinformation for a while until the New York Times learned about it and had it shut down. For that, he was fired by Rumsfeld and George Bush, but his reward was was being granted the NASA aims setter here in Silicon Valley and being made director of that. And so, you know, for about 30 years, Pete had been in the U.S. bureaucracy, military, in space, and just felt like people were doing things wrong, that rockets could be smaller and cheaper, that satellites could be smaller and cheaper, that space could be cheaper in general. And he really, you know, NASA is ironic that he became a NASA director because NASA

sort of hated him for publicly lambasting them for being cost, you know, for all their costs and bureaucracy. So when he gets this NASA center in the early 2000s, this is his opportunity to put into action, all these things he'd been dreaming about for a long time. And he brings in a bunch of 20-somethings from outside of NASA career jobs. And he tells them, go do space differently. I'm going to hide you in some closets some of the time. So people don't find out that you're trying to make stuff cheap like a cheap Luterlander,

you know, cheap, very cheap satellites. And he literally had to hide these projects from people. Otherwise they would shut them down. And so, you know, at NASA Ames, he has this, what I deem like a huge success in the furtherance of commercial space. Obviously, you had Elon in the background

starting SpaceX around the same time. But I would argue, after Elon, at least philosophies. And in some of this action, Pete probably did as much to push commercial space as anyone else. Yeah, you know what I love about the phrase, you know, commercial spaceflight that just resonated with me throughout the book was those two words, commercial and spaceflight. And those are very different skill sets, right? The ones that kind of like me, the geeks and the nerds, look through telescopes, think about being, you know, the properties of exoplanets and life and other planets that hopefully will get a few minutes to chat about before the hours up. And then the commercializers.

And those are very different skill sets. I wonder, you know, shining through here was that story. And also the story, you know, kind of the difference in approach between the former Soviet Union, maybe even the pioneers of the rocket equation and so forth and the, you know, the communist approach and the capitalist approach. What are the fun that like? If you had to choose one, Ashley, would you choose maybe this is a two by two by two matrix?

Communist capitalist, scientist businessman or woman. where is the optimal place in that matrix or is there not such an answer to such a question? I mean, it's probably like ultimately a vague answer. You know, in the book I borrow from this guy Alex McDonald, who's a economist at NASA, who makes a really compelling case, I think, that space took this bureaucratic, if you want to call it sort of communist turn as a result of history, you know, World War II and the Cold War and space becoming this point of national pride. And so you had to deal with humans, mostly.

You had to make rockets that wouldn't fail because you'd be embarrassed for your whole country. So, you know, this became the stuff of government projects, billions upon billions of dollars. Things went great for a while. And then it gets cemented and you can't take a risk anymore because you don't want to be the guy that changes something and embarrasses the country and risks your job. And we got stuck there for a really long time. If you look at SpaceX now, to me, it's hard to argue against what a lot of. for-profit business. I mean, SpaceX is running laps around the entire rest of the world at this point in terms

of launches, rocket families. It's now the biggest satellite manufacturer. The world has ever seen. And so if you had asked me that question 10 years ago, I feel like it'd be harder to answer to me now. But also, SpaceX is sort of an anomaly. I mean, out of all the billionaires, they're the only ones that are really succeeded. But, man, they've succeeded on such a level that I don't think the world has really.

really ever seen before. And an ally question with that, you know, when I look at like Bezos and I look at Branson, and then they play roles obviously here, but I don't see the same kind of passion, you know, base level passion for the science or maybe the mission or as Simon Sinek would say, the why, you know, of this, where do you rank them, these billionaires and Bigelow and, you know, all sorts of other characters? Where do you rank them in terms of their fundamental curiosity, which is a huge hallmark of my audience of myself. I mean, Bigelow seemed to have this like intense interest. And I think Bezos

this appears to be like now his his life passion, but something has got a miss because, you know, Blue Origin started right before SpaceX. And if you look at those two companies, I mean, they're just, it's like you can't even compare their track records, you know, it, SpaceX is so far ahead. You know, when Elon first started, SpaceX, he was not nearly as rich as he was today. And I I think there's something to be said where he had to make the business actually work. It was not going to just be funded by billions of dollars from him in the early days. And I think that gave SpaceX this urgency. It comes down to that urgency, I think, because you can be a dreamer.

If you don't have some sense of immediate purpose and urgency, you end up looking like a government program because you have limitless funds and you don't have consequences to what you're doing. So that seems to be some of the right. Same thing for Rocket Lab, which is one of the main characters, companies in the book, Peter Beck, this guy in New Zealand had to make this work. I mean, he had, this was, this was not, he was not rich. This was like a guy who didn't even go to college. He was working at a dishwasher appliance maker. And so he had to make this work, you know, so there was no other choice.

And in SpaceX and Rocket Lab are far and away the most successful commercial rocket company. So that seems to be, to me, this driving force. Yeah. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

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Hilton for the stay. When I think about Hilton, I'm hoping to talk to Joe Rogan soon, and I hope to bring up this topic with him, his so-called dream, Elon's dream to die on Mars. And of course, you've written this wonderful book with 40,000 reviews. I mean, that's the square of the number of reviews of all of my books. It's just, if you have more than a thousand reviews, Ashley, you'll basically set for life. So you've got 40 lifetimes worth just from this one book, and now your newest wonderful book when the heavens went on sale. But if I could ask Elon one question, it would be which of your kids are you not going to take with you?

Which of your kids are going to attend your remote funeral here on Earth? When you die as, you know, he's claimed he wants to die on Mars. I hope it's not on impact, as Martin Reese would say. But tell me, you know, what you know him probably better than any, you know, average or citizen, obviously such unprecedented access. What does it mean to say you want to die on Mars to a father of 10 kids? You know, I've got, you know, less than that, but fewer than that, not by much, but tell me, what does that mean? Who is he going to leave behind? It was just a practical question.

You know, I mean, Elon's always, he's always said that line. I never know fully how seriously he takes it. I've been sort of surprised that as SpaceX has gotten so much better with taking humans into orbit on some of these missions, you know, like it's at the point now where Elon could definitely take one of those rides without. Like, you know, not a crazy amount of risk, really. And he's chosen not to. I mean, Elon's always positioned that as like it's the same as going to conquer the new world. And the people who go on those first journeys are in for a rough, rough time of it. And you're sort of sacrificing your life for this greater good.

When I talked to him, because he had that quote in my book, I mean, I don't think he pictures this. What is he now? He's about like 52 or something like that. I don't think he pictures this until he's pretty ripe. I think it's a bit of like a last last act, you know, because Elon tends to view himself as pretty essential to his companies. I get the deeper point of your question, but sometimes I think it's, I think it's more philosophical than real at this point for him. Yeah, I mean, a deeper thing, which he may have talked about with you as well, is extending consciousness in the solar system. But, you know, I always point out, there's a lot of consciousness.

There's a lot of life here on Earth. And as they say, we know the surface of Mars better than the surface of the ocean floor. You know, so we're going to make an impact. But I don't want to make this all about Elon, but I'll ask one more question and beg your forbearance in your characteristic way of indulging me. It would be if indeed that that is a goal, you know, to kind of do this, then what, you know, who's advising him or who's listening? Like, who does he listen to anybody?

I mean, it seems like he does things so, you know, whimsically. changing the name of Twitter, which had global brand recognition to X, which has no recognition, could be a porn site. You know, who knows, my wife is concerned about this 899 every month I'm getting, X.com and double X.com. She doesn't know what that one's. But also, he doesn't seem to, he seems to listen, you know, to kind of the average person, which is commendable, like someone complains about some feature missing on Twitter.

Or some astronomers claim that these SpaceX satellite Starlings are, you know, polluting the sky. And he seems to take some interest and effort in that. But in terms of like the big picture, it doesn't seem like he listens to anyone, which is, you know, could be a good trait. I've heard him say he doesn't give charity. He thinks it's all a scam. What do you make of, you know, his so-called kitchen cabinet?

Are there people that are, you know, that he'll listen? I know you guys had an infamous Twitter space. I know you guys were close. And maybe still are. I'm not applying that you're not. But, you know, it seems like when you get to a certain level, if you don't listen to anybody, you're kind of setting yourself up for really Greek tragic downfall. And I wish him the greatest of success, obviously.

I mean, I think he's always been pretty self-confident and chasing what he believes in without too much advice taking from the side. But what I see happening is he's taking even less sort of advice. than ever and and I think is he's gotten wealthier and you know when you reach this point where you're the richest person in the world the reality of life kind of fades away and you get into this very strange bubble and he was never the easiest person to give critical feedback to that was sort of like a life and death proposition for the rank and file employees at the company there are people close to him who you know I've texted him when he was doing crazy things on Twitter like, you know, that's just too far. Don't do that. I remember during it when he switched off. He was threatening to switch off Starlink in Ukraine. I was texting him that weekend. And then like an hour later, he's like, okay, we'll leave it, leave it on again. So I mean, he will change his mind if enough people go at it. But I think, I think he's pretty much going to do what he's going to do, man. I mean, that's Elon's bonus operandi. And he believes, you know, he believes some of these things

on like a religious level. I mean, the whole, you know, his life's goal really for the last 20, 25 years has been to set up this human colony on Mars, and he sees that as like an existential risk and sort of the highest priority somebody could chase after. And he absolutely believes that in his heart. Like, none of this has anything to do with making money or anything like that. I mean, you think that he would want to listen to experts there, you know, if not on, you know, how to suppress, you know, information from the government or something. You know, listening to astronomers, people that study exobiology. You know, he started a physics degree.

I don't know if he finished it at UPenn. He was very interested in this notion. But, you know, has anyone ever told him that if you took, like, all of the biomass on the earth that existed from 4.3 billion years ago up until today? And you just made a shell of it and you covered the earth. It would cover less than 4 millimeters. And that, you know, imagine like buttering Mars with slathering it with 4 millimeters of biomass. Even if you did that, the next day, that would all be dead. You know, so it's even if you start with a 4 billion year head start, totally lifeless, totally pointless.

And in fact, as I mentioned, hopefully will mention when I go to speak with Joe Rogan, the, you know, the fact that we get these meteorites, this is a meteorite that I give away to people in my audience that have dot eDU email addresses. You can get that at Brian Keating.com slash edu because they love communicating to college kids and postdocs and professors. This came from, you know, a supernova that blew up in our galaxy five billion years ago, perhaps. But I have a chunk of Martian meteorite that I'm getting Joe Rogan for his birthday. And, you know, it's considerably more expensive. And yet that proves that materials come from Mars to the Earth and likewise go from Earth to Mars. And so there's constant what's called panspermia, one of those words that sounds dirty, but it's not. And it's going back and forth for billions of years.

And yet there's zero probability of life or zero evidence of life on Mars, possibly anywhere else. So this dream of like extending it there might be better suited to the buzzword of the day, artificial intelligence, you know, creating a monolith, you know, as I'll ask you about later, it seems like he gets in his mind. He wants to do something. He's just going to do it. He has the resources of more than the top, you know, the bottom, you know, 9, 190 countries on Earth. So can he just do anything? Anyway, I feel like it could set him up. I don't want to keep talking about him, but I do want to talk about an allied problem, which is the fact that these Starlink satellites and these other satellites that talk about in the book are potentially

a problem for optical astronomers, like my colleagues. I dabble in optical astronomy. I can know my way around a telescope or two, Ashley, don't worry. But the other thing is microwave astronomy. So we studied the origin of the universe, which revealed itself in 1965 at the beginning of the space race at Bell Labs serendipitously. Astronomers were looking to see if they could spot the very first commercial satellite Echo Star, and they found that there was this irreducible background hiss of radiation. They couldn't get rid of it. That turned out to be the famous cosmic microarray background radiation, which butters my bread. That's how I make my living.

I study it. Now, you can darken a satellite such that it's not visible to an optical telescope like this, but as long as it's above zero degrees Kelvin, as every object in low as urban is, as you know, it's actually close to 300 Kelvin. It's going to just be swapping or signals, plus they're broadcasting in the very signal bands that we enjoy. I want to ask you two questions. To what extent does the commercial space industry give a, you know what about such

concerns for our precious few windows into the cosmos. And two, an ally question is, what are we going to do with all the jump? You know, and those satellites become this junk of meteorite. My Starlink's already out of date. So first question is, do they care? The commercializers, I know Elon sort of has a team dedicated to it, but the other ones that you write about, Rocket Lab, Thinal, all these other companies, do they care? I'll never forget. It was like when the first SpaceX rocket took the first batch of Starlink satellites up, all of a sudden the astronomers were like, hey, this is this is, this is going to hurt, you know, our field. I couldn't believe, I mean, I'd been following this as a semi-casual observer for years. It was like this, this was not like a secret, you know? I mean, this was

not a launch manifest for a really long time. I found it to be a very strange time to begin complaining about this and trying to sound the alarm, because I would argue whether they, whether these companies care or not, this ship has sailed. I mean, just in the last, you know, from 1960 to 2020, we had about 2,500 satellites in lower Earth orbit. That number went up, I don't know, about like 10 to 30 satellites per year. This was not like an exponential curve. In the last three years, it is an exponential curve. We've got from 2,500 to 10,000.

We're going to go to 100,000, maybe 200,000. So this is part of the reason I wrote the book was like, I mean, these are wonderful questions, but I think these days are over. I would argue, you know, astronomers and scientists, if they're going to find sort of the blessing and all this is that the price to get a scientific instrument in the space and to put it further in the space is going to be lower, so much lower than ever before, that maybe there's like sort of a boon to science that can be done in that you have much better access than you have before. But yeah, sorry, I just don't even think it matters if these companies care or not

because there's so many of them. And this is going to have. happen. But what about the space junk problem? I mean, this is getting more and more, you know, space is becoming not only a battlefield, but it's a junkyard. Do what are the, you know, deactivation protocols and, and so forth that are in place? Have they thought about that? Any of the companies? Yeah. I mean, they've thought about it, but, but you could argue almost barely, you know, I mean, I mean, this is like commercial spaces moving so much faster all of a sudden than the regulatory bodies that were used to dealing with this. And there's, you know, the, as far as I'm concerned, the company with like the best tools for monitoring debris is Leo Labs.

And this is like a startup of about 50 people. Their technology is fantastic. They have their own antennas that came out of SRI and Silicon Valley. But, you know, people should know that a lot of this hinges on like a, you know, eight-year-old company. New Zealand is like the only country that I know of that has pretty serious legislation around you're responsible for what you put up there and how it deorbites and there's real consequences to pay. Otherwise, you know, it's pretty much the Wild West. Once you get a satellite into orbit, there's not a lot of consequence as to what happens. I think all these companies will have to be incented to make this work or these billions of dollars in investment, you know, are worthless. And the question is, you know, can mankind for the first time, ever get to some new territory, turn it into a capitalist exercise and not screw it all up.

That's sort of the, that's the gamble. Yeah, it's good that you added and, you know, commercialized because we actually, the world was pretty successful in preventing that from happening in Antarctica, where I've been twice. I don't know if you have had a chance to visit there, but it's even more boring in space. No, it's not, there are parts of it that are quite, that are quite, you know, been using and lovely, but most of it's like this flat white sheet of ice that just goes on 700 nautical miles and on directions. But luckily, I only go there for a couple weeks and you guys pay for it,

your taxpayers out there. But they established in 1956 a treaty that only allowed utilization of the continental shelf, if you will, at the whole continent for non-commercial, non-militaristic purposes. And it seems like they thought, you know, that was in 1956. So the commercial space industry you have 75, you know, plus years to figure this out or look to that as a model. Obviously, they want to use it commercially, although you could get a lot of minerals, resources and just, you know, sell real estate in Antarctica. It's one-seventh of the continental mass of the earth, right? And plus it has all this free water, you know, pure water.

Anyway, as that, were these things not thought about by government regulators? I mean, make it a condition that you must have a safe way to deorbit it, or was it like, well, China's not going to think about that. India's not, you know, they're just going to deorbit and burn up whenever they want. or load up on purpose for military testing. Was there no foresight leaned from our experience in Antarctica, Ashley? Well, I mean, I think it's kind of different because space had such obvious military applications and then commercial applications that I don't think would be apples to apples

maybe with Antarctica. And then, you know, I really think what happened was things were progressing. Okay. And I want to reiterate. My book is generally, I'm excited about all this stuff and optimistic. You know, this is sort of like the down case for a lot of this. But it's hard to stress to people. We had tried commercial space for 20, 25, 30 years, and it had largely been a failure.

And so I don't think a lot of this felt real to regulators. And it's only within the span of about five years where SpaceX really hit its stride. Some of these other startups appeared. All of a sudden, we're on this exponential curve with the same. satellites that these questions are real. You know, if you go back even like three years ago, the major rocket players were lucky to do one a month. SpaceX is now running almost one every two days.

Rocket Lab's starting to get to like one a week. Like this is a massive, very quick change. So you used to have a lot of time to contemplate these things that are trying to slow things down. And that's over now because it is sort of like a land grab. Whoever gets there first really has an advantage. And so, you know, I just think this is moving. so much faster than regulators

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for my wonderful student, who sent questions. It's just so lovely. You read and enjoyed the book. I'm going to make him posted as a review, one of your 50,000 reviews, Charles Cote. Thank you so much. So he was really enthralled by, you know,

kind of, you know, the ability for these nerdy, egghead scientists. I don't know if you ever heard this, you know, Ashley, but how do you know that a scientist is outgoing? I don't know. He looks at your shoes when he talks to you. Goes for engineers. So the ability, it seems like, of these characters that you profile,

and then some of them come out so, you know, just so wonderfully, you know, portrayed and their characters, even though, you know, people with Chris Camper, or others, Peter Beck, especially, they're not only good at the technical side delivery of commercials, but they're good at the people. management skills. Can you say anything about the commonalities and the four companies that you profile? Is there, Charles wants to know, and I do too, is there a way to isolate their ability

to spot talent and is there a way that my audience, you know, many of them are PhDs and engineers or bachelor's injured, that they can take lessons from this book and what to enable success in their own businesses. I mean, it's an interesting observation because I don't know if I feel exactly the same way. I felt that one of my biggest revelations from doing this book, there were a number of these companies where I was able to be there basically from day one to follow their journey, which I'd never been able to do before, is to like see a company from its start to its first major product. And, you know, I've been reporting on business for decades now. And I was, maybe this was like naive on my part, but I was actually surprised at

the influence the CEO has over the company and really like how the company begins to sort of embody a lot of their personality. And so I was kind of surprised that each company had a very different flavor to me based on who was running it. And I tried to write the book where essentially breaks into four different sections where each one had a bit of that same flavor. Like some is the hero's journey, some's a comedy, some's a tragedy. And it sort of hinges a lot on the driving force behind the company.

If there's a unifying factor, I mean, it's not a great, I don't think it's any genius. Inside is just, it's perseverance, you know, and this stuff is hard. I mean, that's what I tried to, especially in the Astra section of the book, I wanted to make that like a bit of a toome to engineering. And even though space has this sort of sexy aura to it that, you know, in the end, it comes down to like grunt work and suffering through some pretty dark times and sort of just boring times sometimes waiting for, a rocket to launch and the people who've been the most successful, I really think of like Elon

and Peter Beck faced tremendous odds and just would not be stopped from their dreams. I mean, that's really the sort of secret to their success. And they, you know, Peter is quite unique. Like I would say Elon's probably better at business, a little less technical. And Peter's more technical and had never really had to run a business before, but was able and made mistakes. like huge mistakes. I mean, he gave away 50% of his company at the beginning and managed to get it back for $100,000. But, you know, learn the business stuff away. So it's sort of like adapting on the fly. But ultimately, perseverance and persistence, I think, win. Yeah, it reminded me again, I'm kind of an Antarctic nerd, so I see a lot of stuff through that lens.

And reportedly there was a job ad that Shackleton's voyage had way back when. And it reminded me of some of the themes of when the heavens went on sale. It says, men wanted for hazardous journey, low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness, safer turned doubtful, honor and recognition and invent of success. Well, no, it could be apocryphal, but I thought it was kind of cute. A lot of these people, yeah, depend on a lot of luck. It's hard for scientists or an engineer, as you know, to depend on luck. One of companies, you know, that stuff. Well, go ahead, yeah.

I mean, it's interesting, well, you know, one of the most interesting things to me, reporting this book was that, like, if you take Rocket Lab, I mean, this is a company in New Zealand that has no aerospace experience. Peter didn't go to college. The people from the United States were really not allowed to work there on the rocket because of government regulations. So you had a bunch of 20-somethings from Australia and New Zealand, a few Europeans. They were quite successful.

I mean, the first rocket really, it was only safety regulators that kind of prematurely blew it up. otherwise they would have launched successfully on their first mission, which almost really has like never happened, I think. And, you know, in the U.S. we've had about, I don't know, depends where you draw the line, but say 10, 12 rocket startups who have really struggled. And these are companies that can borrow from Boeing and Lockheed and from SpaceX and all this talent. It was interesting to me that it's not just, you know, like at Astra, they brought in a whole

SpaceX team. Virgin Orbit brought in like the whole huge chunk of the Falcon 1. team and went years and years without being able to launch. So there is some sort of like magic that even without like this knowledge that these teams come together to figure this out at somewhere like SpaceX or Rocket Lab that is, there is something unique there. I'm not even sure I've been able to put my finger on it. Yeah.

And certainly it's not only large deep pockets that can do it. I mean, for one thing, the U.S. space program is, you know, has infinite budget and they weren't able to really commercialize things even like the space shuttle. was supposed to launch once a week, you know, when I was a kid and ended up, you know, 120 launches over 25 years or something like that with two notable tragic events, which I want to get to in just a bit. But in the time we have left, I wanted to bring up a kind of a thought and get your reaction from one of your neighbors up there. Andy Weir, who is a past guest on the podcast and a good friend. And actually, I can't say

he's an alumnus of UC San Diego, because he never graduated, but he's a good friend of our campus. And we love him. And his book, Artemis, which I don't know if you've read, he really makes the case that the only case for tourism or for space, you know, commercialization besides, you know, satellites, communication, military stuff, you know, for people being in space is tourism. And that's the big theme of the book, Artemis. I'm not, you know, spoiling it, obviously. What do you make about that?

Tourism, you know, humans in space. And then, you know, how would they react to a challenger or Columbia type of event? How these companies react to such a bit? Well, for people who don't know, it's like I do not get into Mars. I don't get into the moon. I don't get into tourism. To me, the business case is very obviously right now. All the activity, major activity, is low Earth orbit and filling it full of satellites.

I think we are building quite clearly the next layer of our technological infrastructure in low Earth orbit. I just see this as like the next step in human progression. Like how viable space tourism becomes if you, I mean, we have a long way to go between what Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are doing now and a viable space tourism. in business like a really long way. I mean, it's like really tech. I mean, it's some orbital, but for a lot of things, obviously

it's orbital. And these business models are not great. The experience is not great. SpaceX, yes, you can take like a week long journey. That would be awesome. That's still going to cost you many tens of millions of dollars to do today. You know, perhaps things change over time. I don't know. I get a little

less excited about space tourism. I get more excited about what you brought up earlier, which I think is inevitable, which is, you know, either we all die on this planet in a few billion years or we push our intelligence out into the universe. And to me, I mean, that is the, that's the bigger quest here and what kind of interests me. People always ask, like, why are we even pursuing any of this stuff? I mean, otherwise, I think there's, it gets hard to figure out what the point of any of this is if we're not pushing off this planet one day. Well, one company that's not mentioned is sort of

conspicuous to me and I want to run my business proposition by you and then I'll close it, open it up to, you know, Series B funding. His Apple. And the reason I bring them up, unfortunately last week, there's been tremendous tragedy in Lahaina, Maui, with, you know, the whole town, which I love and, you know, the visit of many times is basically burned up. Yeah, it's quite tragic. And there was a lot of, you know, satellite imagery and forecasting and stuff. But actually Apple, you know, released this new feature where they can do SOS communications with satellites directly. And I've reportedly saved at least one family of six or seven people's lives.

And now they're saying even more people. I want to kind of take you through an idea than I had and prompted by something Elon said, again, you know, he's like Voldemort, you know, we can't avoid it, but we shouldn't dwell on him too much. But, you know, kind of putting satellites in orbit and also combining Apple with a handset, you know, making the possibility, not just for S. I don't want to say just, but not only for rescuing. human beings and providing, you know, the greatest service one could ask for, but for like banking

and putting, you know, like cryptocurrency servers in space. They could have an independent network and I think Apple's using old iridium satellites or something like that, but, or MRSAT. But the question right now is, you know, is, are people thinking about a truly decentralized network, instant, you know, sending a beaming at the speed of light more or less to Africa from San Diego, for example, sending cryptocurrency and, you know, Elon. would probably have it be doja coin or whatever he calls it. So, yeah, what are the opportunities there? So getting like layer two companies, once the picks and shovels are there, what can be done,

you know, to enable things like global banking at the speed of light that's permissionless and decentralized? This is what people don't really realize yet. I think we're at like 1996 internet, consumer internet. I think all these satellites, all these new cheaper rockets going up more often. This is just laying fiber optic cables, building data centers all around the planet. We have like not even, you know, the business cases around the current stuff. Some of them are okay. Most of them seem terrible to me. What has to come next for this to actually work is a whole

flood of new ideas. There were rumors like I was covering a chase in a story five, six years ago that Apple, you know, when Starlink was kind of just starting up, it looked, there were a lot of rumors that Apple was looking to build something similar to Starlink. And yes, I completely saw this as, okay, you have all these iPhones. Now you could just be your own global telco and have your own private network. You know, Apple's so big on security and privacy. What better way to offer this to your consumers that they have this kind of global, private network that works anywhere all the time.

And I don't think people have yet understood. Like Starlink is not, this is not just about connecting your farmhouse to the internet or even like the 3.5 billion people who can't. get fiber today, Starlink and all of its competitors, this is, this is, you know, washing the world, coding the world in an always on high speed internet connection that is going to like change things in such a dramatic fashion that we can't even sort of fathom yet. I mean, I really think this is like the next step in the internet and there's going to be so many businesses that come out of this. And, you know, like data centers in space, these private networks, I could totally see many

companies wanting to run their own private network through their own satellites. Yeah, that's just, just, you know, kind of a phenomenal opportunity. Yeah, I can't really put my mind on exactly what's going to come up next. But yeah, I mean, if you have any stock tips confidential, let me know, Ashley, please. Whoever, there's going to be young kids who figure us out. There were a lot of kids who got, you know, were not interested in space for a long time because it got sort of boring on the commercial end. And now there's a lot of 20-somethings who are getting into this, and they're going to think up all kinds of stuff.

So last question on mine before we pivot to some audience questions, including a character in the book, who I solicit the question from today. And it's not Elon to disappoint my listeners. Hope to get him on the podcast someday because he's never talked to a real physicist astronomer, as far as I can tell, on a podcast, and I would enjoy it. It was a work that you did. It was actually came out last year, but it's about brain computer interface. And this is in Bloomberg, and I should mention that. you write a wonderful, you know, semi-regular.

I don't know how regular it is, but talk about your interest in these devices. I mean, the most commonly known one is, of course, Neurrelink, but there are many others. So talk about this, synchrons, you know, a device that you wrote about last year. What's your interest there? Is this your next book? Ashley, give us the straight scoop. Man, you're doing your research. I don't like that.

I love your writing and really, I, I, I, really. No, I appreciate. I think this is, this is something I'm pursuing. It's hard to, like, figure out the timing on this, but it's an incredible time. Say, sort of a similar thing. I mean, you had this technology that was quite academic for the last 25, 30 years. There's a thing called a Utah array, which is this kind of crude device we've been putting into people's heads to let them think and move stuff again. And then all of a sudden, you know, same thing. A bunch of venture capital money poured into this. It's turned into a commercial exercise, and the technology has advanced of this incredibly rapid clip. So I just got back from Switzerland. There's a company called Onward. I saw two paralyzed people walk again through a spinal implant, and those spinal implants are now being combined with brain implants. It's like one of the most incredible. It's like hard to put in a word.

Oh, it's so moving. Yeah. Like it's so moving and has changed their lives. you know, people, we've already gotten so hung up on, like, the Matrix. I'm going to download Kung Fu or Spanish. Like, what people should know, I, my gut is telling me, you know, in the next 10 years, people with ALS, Parkinson's, if you've had a stroke, if you've been paralyzed, I mean, your life is going to get much, much better, I think, without overpromising to people.

But yeah, yeah, so this is a fascinating field. Neurrelink is like the best funded, most ambitious, highest risk of all them, and is, really try to be like the general purpose machine. You know, some people are focused just on the spine or just on the brain. Neurilink kind of wants to do it all. I have a big story coming out on NeurLink. I've been going there for about three years. I'm not sure exactly when it'll come out, but in the next like month or two. And so yes, no, this is a, I think it's a fascinating area. I think it's, to me, like, maybe the most exciting tech area. If Neurlink is successful, you may remember Elon Musk, like, for that company first and foremost

before any of the others. Yeah, I agree. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans

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majority disabled. So to me, that's a very special mission that he has. And, of course, you know, all these companies, I hope that they all succeed. I mean, it's not like a finite pie where, you know, some person can solve it. It's going to be a monopoly on, you know, curing. paralysis. It's idiotic, right? Okay. So I solicited questions online. Just a reminder in my audience, you can always send me questions from my audience. I try to do it a little bit more in advance than I did today, but nevertheless, on Twitter, Dr. Brian Keating or Instagram, Theo, or

YouTube, Dr. Brian Keating with this interview will show up. And if you're listening to it, you should check out all those venues and leave me questions for my esteemed guest that come on. So I asked a friend of mine who is mentioned in the book, and his name is Creon Levitt. He said, he has a question for you. Can you give your analysis of the importance of both Pete Warden and Robert Zubrin on the new space activities you chronicle in your book, including, by not limited to, their effects on SpaceX and NASA? Clearly, Robert had this. He seemed to have some influence on Elon and this whole Mars quest before SpaceX really formally started. And I think probably, probably like, helped cement some of these ideas in Elon's head.

And so maybe he gets a ton of credit to actually like actualizing SpaceX and making Elon chase that dream. I tend to find Roberts stuff a little more. You know, I know he does his research. He's very bright. It's just a little more pie in the sky to me. I think Pete is for me a little bit more of a man of action who, you know, has had to run very large programs with huge budgets and whose work has had major consequences out in the world. And for the stuff that I'm interested in around this commercial space, very clearly, like, has had an impact. And I think, I just know Pete so much better.

I think the world would benefit a lot for more people like Pete Ward. I mean, there's a guy who's like a Republican, maybe a libertarian at heart, a military guy, but he surrounds himself with a bunch of hippies and people who think the opposite of him. And he's willing to not only hear them out, but help them and support them. He's a relentless fighter of bureaucracy and groupthink. And, you know, obviously, I think the world, if the government had more people like Pete, we'd be in gray shape. Yeah.

Government comes off in a very positive light in this wonderful book, On the Heavens Went on Sale. Let me ask the final question from a YouTube, oh, no, from a Twitter subscriber. He's lit, I think is how you pronounce it. Huss Yelt says, or she said, thank him for covering Planet Labs. Their impact has been incredible.

Highlight on the space industry. He wants to know from you, would NASA ever help fund a private crude mission to, let's say, Venus, fly by if the data signs returns were good, or they stick to just renting vehicles? And I know that NASA is planning a crude void. Did you hear about the crude voyage to the sun, Ashley? I, and what? No. They're going at night. They're going at night.

So what do you think about this idea of? sending a commercial or private crude missions instead of just the macho and machete, I don't know, astronauts that are coming in Artemis. I mean, the lines blurring pretty quick, isn't it? You know, and there gets to be a point here very soon where, I mean, SpaceX is like, can do this stuff, whatever it wants. You've got startups that are putting these private crews and missions together. I mean, how long does it make sense to have, like, some, in 12,

years we're going to send these few people off. You know what I mean? I mean, it's looking like a little bit more, I wouldn't say like commonplace, but a little bit, a little bit closer to sort of day-to-day life at this point. If it's something like going to Venus, okay, maybe that has to be like a special government-backed mission. But anyway, you know, I just think this line is blurring. I think, I think, God willing, we're at like the last stages of the government trying to fund things like SLS and sort of getting out of the way to actually help support things exactly like that that commenter is talking about where you know the best parts of NASA's smarts that are in areas SpaceX and Blue Origin and Rocket Lab haven't covered can come into play so yeah you I mean we're such a strange interesting

time where there's so much commercial space activity but you still have this government especially somewhere like China it's obviously government led somewhere like Russia the United States is this strange hybrid. It's unclear to me how this plays out in terms of like who is planting the flag for some of these big missions and where, you know, like where business and science kind of end. Like I assume the moon is pretty much going to be a capitalist exercise now. You know, like Mars is probably like in between and beyond Mars is probably more of a government thing. I think you're right. Okay. We asked five maybe for two, well, one last question from me. It's the hottest prerogative.

But before that, can you say anything about your HBO projects that you're working on, a space one? I wish I could say more I can. So throughout the whole course of this book, I had a film crew with me. We make it a documentary for HBO. People will be when I can announce my fellow producers that will be quite impressed, I think. But it's going to be great. You know, it's a little more focused than the book, a smaller set of characters. But it was amazing.

So we got to film like at Astra, you know, on D. Day one, you get to see, like, what a rocket company looks like to be formed from scratch. Like, nobody's ever had a camera in some of the stuff. I went to Ukraine. I'm the only Western reporter ever to get a camera into the old ICBM factories, the old Soviet rocket engine testing sites. So, you know, I think, especially for space nerds, it'll be exciting. And then obviously, I always try to bring stuff to a mainstream audience and explain all this stuff to everybody. A remarkable storyteller, and I think that's such a rare commodity in the age of chat GPT, which generated all the questions.

I was kidding. I don't want to call my undergraduate a chat trans, what do they call it, the transformer, although he had one that beats the eye. Ashley, I want to conclude, I usually ask four questions in my patented final four questions, but we only have time for one. They're all inspired one way or another by phrases of the great Arthur C. Clark, who came up with not an insignificant amount of technology and ideas, at least in science fiction. in fact, related to space, including 2001 of Space Odyssey, but also the idea of allegedly of geosynchronous satellites and things like the iPad and artificial intelligence, which I have in the back over here. But so I want to ask a question inspired by him, which is his famous aphorism that any sufficiently

advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic. In your career, you've encountered tremendous numbers of technologists as a reporter, Bloomberg, and many, many wonderful books and hopefully future books. what is the most magical thing, the thing that human beings should have a little bit of swagger collectively as a species about that you ever encountered, know about, or have ever pondered about, that we should justifiably think as close to magic as technology can provide. Wow, man, you snuck this one oddly. I feel like I should give us some real, real deep thought. Hasn't you ever watch the podcast, which is okay. It's okay. God, I don't know if this answer will be satisfactory to people, and maybe it's lame. But I think open source software is like such an incredible human achievement that we take for granted.

I mean, it's essentially like the fabric that runs the entire modern world that we were somehow able to like take the best parts of human nature and have people willing to collaborate and share their ideas on this level and have it become this like integral, inescapable part of our modern world. I mean, it's really, to me, it's like the best part. of human nature and like I think the average person has no idea about open source software at all or sort of what it entails but to me it's incredible it's like everything you dream of the world coming together to solve problems in a magical way I thought you're gonna say the pyramids or you know but I've never heard something you know that's not hardware but that is a wonderful answer I want to thank you so much and remind my audience you can always connect with me and my

wonderfully just esteemed guest, including Ashley. Hopefully we'll get you for a part two. Maybe we'll get it in person. I'll give you one of these meteorites. I want the Mars one, man. Come on. My birthday is next month. All right, cool.

Send me your address. I will send you a Marsha Rock, I promise. Ashley Vance, New York Times bestseller, one of the best storytellers I've ever read. Enjoy your rest of your day. Thank you for making the time to chat with me and my audience. And I really appreciate all of your writing, but especially your newest wonderful book

when the heavens went on sale. Thank you, Ashley. Thank you, Brian. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.