Main Engine Cut Off - T+259: Tom Marotta, The Spaceport Company

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

Tom Marotta of The Spaceport Company joins me to talk about what they’re working on, their vision for the future of spaceflight, spaceport operations, the demonstration they did in May, the FAA and its interaction with private companies, reentry licensing, and a whole host of other topics.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 34 executive producers—Steve, Bob, Stealth Julian, David, Harrison, Lee, Jan, Joonas, Ryan, Theo and Violet, Frank, Chris, Pat, Lars and Will from Agile Space, Kris, Donald, SmallSpark Space Systems, Dawn Aerospace, Matt, Pat from KC, Tyler, Craig from SpaceHappyHour.com, Joel, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut), Fred, Benjamin, The Astrogators at SEE, Russell, Warren, and four anonymous—and 833 other supporters.TopicsTom Marotta (@thomasmarotta) / XTom Marotta | LinkedInThe Spaceport CompanyThe Spaceport Company: Overview | LinkedInThe Spaceport Company (@TheSpaceportCo) / XThe Spaceport Company- Full Length Launch ProRes HQ 4 - YouTubeThe Spaceport Company demonstrates offshore launch operations - SpaceNewsCape Congestion: World's busiest spaceport stretched to its limits - SpaceNewsThe Space Review: The spaceport bottleneckChinese Ceres-1 rocket reaches orbit with first sea launch - SpaceNewsThe High Frontier: An Easier Way: Marotta, Tom, Globus, Al: 9781719231749: Amazon.com: BooksThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by ISROWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Managing Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and today I'm speaking with Tom Murata, the founder and CEO of the Spaceport Company. Tom and I have chatted for a bunch of years as he's had a couple different roles over the last couple of years. He was at FAA for a while, at Astra for a bit, and now is running the Spaceport Company. So he's got an interesting history that leads him to the work that they're doing. building platforms that can be used as offshore, but very close to shore spaceports in a way to expand the capability and the capacity of the spaceports, specifically here in the US, but around the world as well. So I'm really interested to dig into questions that I want to get to about the way that they see their operations running and some larger questions about just the, you know, the kind of current

state of spaceports and traffic that they're really dealing with and not only in the near future, but in the far future and how things might shift into the future. So I'm really excited to talk with him. So without further ado, let's give Tom a call. Tom, welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. It's we were just saying it's good to have you on the show after you've had eight different jobs that I've said you should come on the show. We finally got you. How's it going? It's going great. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me, finally. Yeah, and I feel like it's a good first time to have on this show because there's a bunch of things that I felt like we would have talked about previously that are now directly in the purview of the Spaceport company.

Yeah. So there's a reason that you're doing it, I guess. You know, the whole industry is just growing, growing, growing. And we're in the thick of it, for sure. I want to hear the origin story of the Spaceport Company. And I have an inkling of where it may have come from. But I don't want to put my bias on the origin story. So from the start, as far back as you think is useful.

Yeah, yeah. Third grade, cool. If not, wherever it makes sense to start. Yeah, I don't think we have to start in kindergarten or something like that. I was at the beach one day. So my background is kind of unorthodox. I started my career in a space startup right after school, right after college. That failed, but the bug bit me.

It was a great job. Went into commercial real estate, became a city planner planner i actually have a master's of urban planning um after that i joined the foreign service i was a diplomat overseas they were hiring city planners to do reconstruction in iraq and afghanistan so did that for six years was awesome by then was married had kids and it's just like i just want a normal job you know normal life so written worked for the faa office of commercial space transportation and that's when you and i met right i was working for the faa and for the listener i think most of your listeners know but the faa has a teeny tiny little office um that regulates public safety around non-governmental rocket launches so if

it's not dod if it's not nasa everything else it's not NASA, everything else, it falls into the FAA's lap, which is pretty much every launch these days, right? SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, Virgin, it all goes through the FAA. Did that job for five years, was an awesome, awesome job. Great perch to see the industry grow, but also- Yeah, which five years? Which five years? Because I feel like that's the important note. So let me think. I started with Astra in, I think it was 2021. So 2016 to 2021. Yeah. Very pivotal couple years. Very, very pivotal couple years. Everything was really hitting a stride then that we're seeing now.

Yeah. We didn't quite hit that hockey stick growth and we still haven't. So I don't want to, make that implication implication but like we started hitting this very steady increase um almost entirely due to spacex but like we started seeing vg and new shepherd and like all these things that people had been talking about for 10 or 15 years started to actually happen we started seeing recoveries of first stages which was crazy and great and you know we had this meeting where spacex was like we want to build something called the bfr and we're like what's bfr stand for and they're like we can't really tell you so it was it was just a wild time it was really fun um i remember when bfr was the

interplanetary transportation system that That was it for the hot minute. So that was, that was fun. It was a great job. Uh, I created the forecast methodology. So it was always, you know,

thinking about how many launches we're going to have. And it's great to see those forecasts, uh, not only being that, but being exceeded by industry. So, um, but when I was working there,

I also saw a lot of spaceport applications. Everybody in a lot of, a lot of places around the world wanted to build a spaceport and a lot of places around the U S and saw how challenging it was to build a spaceport, saw capacity at, uh, existing spaceports being soaked up. Um, and then a company called Astra came around and said, hey, would you like to come work for us and build a regulatory and an infrastructure framework to let us launch a rocket every day? And I thought, well, that's pretty interesting. Actually, what I really thought was that's impossible, but that's pretty interesting. Let's go give it a shot. And so I had a great time. I worked for Astra for a brief time, for about a year. We were successful getting the first Part 450 license,

did really well on the regulatory side of things, but we failed at the launchpad side of things. We did successfully set up a launchpad at Cape Canaveral faster than it's ever been done before. It still took eight months. And everybody was kind of congratulating themselves saying, look how quickly we like stood up this launchpad. And I was like, I think we could do better. It's great that we did it so fast. Atta boy, way to go team. Let's go faster now. And so when I left Astra, I was kind of, I was talking to my wife and saying, hey, I think I want to do a startup to go build a spaceport, which is kind of a weird thing to say because startups don't build infrastructure.

It's like saying, I'm going to do a startup to build a nuclear power plant or a railroad. And to her credit, my wife this time was like, yeah, actually, that sounds like a pretty good idea. And I, more importantly, went out to some colleagues and some mentors. And they all said, yeah, we think you're the right guy for the job. So I was able to raise some startup funding, some seed funding. And we started Spaceport Company in February of 2022. You know, we're not the offshore Spaceport Company. We knew from the very beginning that we were probably going to do sea-based launch, but we spent a significant amount of time very early on scouring the globe for land,

talking to people, talking to stakeholders around the world. Remember, I have a commercial real estate background. I have a government affairs background. And so we kind of threw all the spaghetti at the wall, looking at random islands in the Aleutian chain and places overseas, assessing kind of the-off spaceport, not just one facility, one time to do 12 launches a year. But our goal with the spaceport company is to do cost-effective, reliable, predictable launch pad access for anybody who wants it, to build a network of spaceports around the world, just like we have a network of airports. Well, if you're going to

build a network of spaceports, the fastest way to do that, in light of all of the obstructions and impediments, is to go build them on ships, which is very counterintuitive, right? Boeing built a sea-based launch pad in the early part of the century. It worked, right? They launched 36 times. They had a mishap they came back from it

it was a technical success um financially the the jury is out um what really killed the the boeing's project was their their geopolitical partnership with uh with russia and they were trying to use a ukrainian rocket they did use Ukrainian rocket. And so when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, that project fell apart. But point is, sea-based launch is not unprecedented. But a lot of people, when I went to them and said, hey, we want to do a sea-based launch platform, they're like, oh, Boeing sea launch failed. Like, why are you doing a failed concept? And I was like, well, one, they didn't fail. They were a technical success but two the market has changed significantly there are a lot more uh there's a lot more demand for launchpad

now than their launchpads than there was uh back in uh in the in the early 2000s so anyway um that's that's kind of the creation story we um uh uh you know saw all these spaceport projects saw the demand exceeding supply saw how hard lived frankly the pain of trying to build new space space ports on a commercial basis at existing ranges um tried to build our own spaceport tried to find the land said you know what if we're going to build a network we're actually going to going to go out to sea um and we can we can get into kind of the um technical and business aspects of sea-based launch pads and building a network but that's that's the uh creation story yeah there's a couple angles i want to dive into um it's this i mean you've probably heard me rant on the show about how like the there's a dearth of

polar accessible launch pads in the country and unless you have a rocket of like falcon 9 or bigger you can't do it from the east coast with while maintaining like a usable payload range there's a significant payload penalty right yeah huge and then you go out to vandenberg and there's like three pads available and they're really hard to work on because of the constraints of working next to i mean there's a double fence around the old shuttle facilities there so something's going on out of vandenberg that none of us will know about so there's that whole thing to deal with there sure is um kodiak is hard to get access to at i'm sure as you know at different times of the year it's it's there's a lot of issues and challenges getting stuff out to the

island and setting up so there's always felt like there's a squeeze um but at the same time you know the traffic that we've seen at kennedy space center cape canaveral is like just due to spacex operating out there so much you know there there's there's like i mean they're at how many launches this year 60 or something like that already like they're getting close to 60 SpaceX is soaking up a lot of capacity out of the cape yeah and then but then you factor in you know the thing that we've heard about from like Blue Origin is well if we want to be doing construction out of the pad or any infrastructure work we have to coordinate with all the other things going on at the cape and so it's not necessarily just like launches conflicting with launches. It's launches conflicting with work going on or vice versa. So let's talk a little bit about capacity at the Cape.

And by the Cape, I mean both Kennedy and the DoD side, right? Space Force Station, right? You're absolutely right. They're at capacity right now. The DoD will increase capacity sort of not necessarily by building more physical infrastructure, but by improving their processes. And they have. They have.

So they're going to implement autonomous flight termination systems for commercial. They're going to mandate it for commercial operators. So I think now the date for switchover is 2025. That will open up a lot of capacity, which is great. Like Command Destruct for termination systems is very, very labor intensive. So that's great. So this allows you to compact more launches into the same amount of time, effectively? Like the time between launches can be tighter?

Effectively, yeah. Now the Cape will still have to maintain, I believe, their classic formula termination systems because there's other range users that will still need to use them. But for commercial operators, they are mandated to go to autonomous flight termination systems, so satellite-based termination systems,

which, like you said, will allow them to shove more launches into the same range. Okay, so that's great. They're going to basically increase capacity. They've kind of divvied up an existing launchpad, and it's supposed to be shared amongst different users. My customer discovery in speaking with customers is nobody likes to share a pad.

Like I think the federal ranges keep pushing and the FAA keeps, you know, kind of talking about multi-user launch complexes and shared pads. There's a lot of impediments to that, not only logistically and operationally, but also in terms of the regulations and the insurance. And so it's a long way to go before a multi-user launch complex is, I think, preferable or desired and nevermind even operational. But that said, I do want to give the DoD and the Eastern range a lot of credit for like switching over to AFSS and accommodating the growth in SpaceX.

Now that said, SpaceX alone is doing the vast majority of launches out of the Cape. ULA, very few people have recognized ULA. They have just sold a ton of launches. What is it, like 70 launches between Vulcan and the remaining Atlas Vs? There's still a going concern. launches for between Vulcan and, and the remaining Atlas five is Atlas fives. Like there's still a going concern. Like a ULA operates regularly out of the range. They just did a great launch the other day. Um,

and they're going to be ramping up significantly. I think everyone's getting lulled into the sense right now that they're not flying a lot because there's not many, there's not an Atlas five left, you know, save for every couple months but like, they're working on Vulcan and it just seems like it's going to launch a bunch

the giant lumbering you know, Goliath of Blue Origin will eventually start launching, I have no idea when but that's a big project and then there's a lot of government stakeholders who operate out of that range like the Artemis program does not appear to be going away anytime soon so for a month every year for the foreseeable future that range is going to be completely occupied by artemis at

least a month out of the year um and then you know you have the navy operates out of there there's other stakeholders there was just a hypersonic weapons test out there. So it's a very, very busy place. And so I'll tell you who has not lulled into kind of, you know, a sense of, you know, is the people running the range down there. I can guarantee you, especially in the DoD side of things, they are completely aware of the incredible demand on the infrastructure down there, as I think you know. So that's just the capacity side of things.

But then there's another issue around launch resiliency. Over 75% of U.S. launches occur out of the Cape, whether it's Kennedy or DOD. Well, as you notice, hurricanes are increasingly happening in this world. In other words, if for some reason the Cape was not able to function, whether because of a natural disaster or adversary action or some critical piece of infrastructure falls or the bridge has an issue, that's a real problem, not only for commercial companies, but for national security as well.

So we as a nation and every space fan out there should support disaggregating and distributing the launch capacity in the United States away from the Cape. Like Cape is still going to be super busy i'm not trying to take anybody's job away from them but like we need more you know the pie is growing and we need to have more space ports to support that that newark airport is that worried that

philadelphia international operates exactly exactly they're doing fine up there exactly right thank you yeah there are 20 000 airports in the u U S we have four orbital spaceports, like many more orbital spaceports. And that's the way I think about it too. Like, you know, everyone talks about airline operations on the vehicle side, but it's,

it's always just felt like, okay, well if the optimistic scenario, the future turns out, like we haven't actually figured out what the right methodology for this is yet, because we don't need, we don't need an optimistic scenario.

Like this is happening now. Right. Your point with the capacity is like if if all the users at kennedy get or can everyone kennedy get like 10 more activity going that's you know because there's so many users it's a lot of 10 yeah and that stacks up to like oh we're at another 100 so what does that mean though for for for the nation and for commercial space in general? It means the customers of the launch vehicle providers will find other launch vehicle providers. Specifically, we're going to see a lot more satellite. If delays start piling up at the Cape, you're going to see satellite companies make the pragmatic decision to say, all right, I'm going to go launch out of India, or I'm going to go launch out of some other place that is not the US. I might launch out of Virginia. We've seen a lot more activity dominated almost by Rocket Lab out of Virginia. Wallops Island has been a

big beneficiary of all the congestion down in Florida. And that site is going to get busier as Firefly and Northrop, whatever they're doing, building a new vehicle, I know they're going to want to launch maybe quarterly or perhaps even monthly. And that site is pretty much full as well. They're built on a barrier island. There are severe constraints

on building more infrastructure and adding more capacity to wallops island today now so if we have even the like mid-range or conservative growth uh in launches um there's going to be significant congestion issues at ranges and and all that launch stuff is going to go overseas which we've seen that movie before um when ari on space stood up in the 90s commercial launch activity in the u.s went away it was there was zero uh at some points only until a company called spacex brought it all back so um we've seen this before i think a lot of people at uh the department of and the FAA, you know, decision makers

recognize it. A lot of those people lived that pain. But it's a tough nut to crack. There's a lot of impediments to building more more spaceport capacity. All right, so let's talk about the kind of concept of operations that you've got. And, you know, I see you can I'll post the link to website in the show notes obviously people can watch the concept videos that you've got to show with those platforms how they would operate and stuff like that but i'm curious to talk about you know your vision for is this that you're building uh i mean based on how you were just dunking on multi-user multi-user space sports maybe this is a given but are you gonna be dunking on it it's my customer it's my customer saying we don't want to share we want our own okay so is that the concept that but are you going to build a platform? It's my customer saying, we don't want to share. We want our own.

Okay. So is that the concept that you would be able to build a couple of these for whoever wants a spaceport in this way, and they would be able to configure it for their own needs. And then they've got their own C1 platform based on your base model, basically. That's the ideal situation. And we are offering that to our customers. So if you go to our website, there's a couple of different product lines. One of them is dedicated, exclusive use,

essentially Spaceport that's out at sea. That product is designed for a company that's already at scale. So it probably wouldn't be cost effective for a company that's just trying to do their first launch right um but if if a company ever gets up to the level of cadence that we're seeing from rocket lab or spacex where they're launching you know 10 times a year 12 times a year having an exclusive c-base spaceport from the spaceport company would make a lot of economic sense because that was my job at astra to to try and build that for them and so i know exactly what a small launch company or even a medium you know like a spacex size launch company i know what all these things cost um and so we've designed it to be to be cost effective for a company that's operating at scale

now for we also have a product line for companies that are just trying to get their test launch off. Maybe they have a campaign of like three launches. They're not sure if it's going to blow up, so on and so forth. We have a product that's a C-based platform for them that incorporates a lot of insurance and other kind of financial vehicles to protect us and protect them when they inevitably do blow up, but giving them the peace of mind to know that they can get back to the pad quickly. That's one of the biggest problems for these startup companies is it takes them a year, two years to get to the pad. They blow up. Then there's an FAA mishap. The range can't get them back on the pad for another six months or a year.

Well, we want to give them the opportunity to iterate quickly. Okay, you blow it up. We go fix the boat. You're back out there in six weeks. Sort of like what Rocket Lab has down at Mejia. They have a dedicated facility that they can test at, that they can launch at, sort of what SpaceX had or has down in West Texas for Suborbital, giving those companies the peace of mind to have the ability to iterate quickly. I think it's important to differentiate between what we did in May. A lot of your listeners might be familiar with our we did a subscale prototype in may we leased the vessel we modified it we launched four baby sounding rockets solid fueled you know tiny tiny sounding rockets um out at sea we did four rockets in one day um the point of that was to do the iteration right the rocket was frankly just you know for fun like you know we we kind of we wanted to launch something um the purpose of that demo was to show the logistical the operational

the regulatory the staffing to show that we can do number one we can build an entirely new spaceport out at sea um no one had ever launched a rocket in u.S. waters or U.S. territorial waters before or U.S. airspace from a sea platform before. All the Boeing sea launch stuff was done in international waters. Yeah, that's right. Right? It was done outside of U.S. airspace. This was, we were 30 miles off the coast of Mississippi. We were actually, yeah, anyway, squarely in U.S. airspace and U.S. waters.

So it was more of a regulatory and an operational thing, which is the biggest challenge around building a new spaceport. So that was the subscale prototype with the baby rockets. We can take all of the lessons learned there and apply it to a much bigger vessel to launch much bigger rockets. We are designing our full-scale system. We were awarded a contract from the DoD in May from the Defense Innovation Unit. There's a little program called the National Security Innovation Capital Program,

another very long acronym, NSIC. It's a new program. It's about two years old. It's great. It's for building hardware, right? And so they've awarded us a contract to complete the design of our full scale system capable of sending satellites to orbit. And that's what we're doing. So I'll just, I'll just pause there. You got me going a lot. But I just wanted to say that we do have we do have, you know, products for to meet companies where they are in their, in their, in their developmental roadmap. It's an interesting convergence of a couple of things. You know, I think this isn't the case anymore because of space flights acquisition, or they

got acquired by Firefly, but you know, early days space flight, the way they talked about what they were doing was like, we've done this process so much that we're really good at figuring out what paperwork you need to file and how to file it i'll help you fill it out yeah we'll just like white glove you through this process right so you've got a little bit of that where you're like right you know we've we've not only built spaceports before but we've worked at the faa we know what the process is on both sides we can get you through this process easy and it's a little bit of um there's a major trend in the industry right now of the containerized

launch idea astra was doing it abl space is doing it whether or not i don't know you can you can tell me if half of it is bs or not but like that is something that people are talking up the funny part is that it's like well that's great but there's like three spots that you put your container right is it that much better than it was before so on the shared spaceport side of things is that is that kind of the functionality where you would have uh a certain area that would be configurable per each customer and they could bring whatever commodities they need with them or or it's a different model that you've got in mind so so the way it would work operationally speaking for a launch to orbit is um uh you know there's kind of a phase zero right like we work with the customer we sign a contract with the customer customer says uh all

right we have to build the boat right so the customer builds up their launch pad on our boat our our boat is is essentially like a clean pad we provide power we provide a physical base we do all the maritime stuff of course we do all the We provide all the same services that a conventional spaceport provides. So range surveillance, weather, all the regulatory stuff, range clearance, so on and so forth. The customer, just like at any other spaceport, brings their GSC, their tower, and everything like that. Okay. So once the six months, whatever, however long it takes, if it's a containerized modularized system, say it takes two weeks for Astra or ABL to bring all their containers

and build their launch pad on our boat, then we step into, okay, the launch campaign. The launch vehicle and the payload are integrated on land, all right? Launch vehicle is loaded onto the vessel. Cons launch vehicle is loaded onto the vessel consumables are loaded onto the vessel once the weather looks good we go relatively close to shore so unlike boeing sea launch we're not going 40 days out to sea a thousand miles south of hawaii like in the middle of the south pacific no we are designing our system to be typically within u.s territorial water so within

three to twelve nautical miles off the shore um and we do that for a lot of reasons but mostly because it allows for that quick turn cadence it allows for quick communications easy access back and forth and it's just far enough away from the coast that we're avoiding all of the uh community opposition we're not you know there's a lot less noise a lot less disturbance to the environment a lot less disturbance to local stakeholders a lot less disturbance to airspace integration i was gonna say the flights can run on that yeah we we can go around so um uh once the weather looks good once we're in place then uh red team the launch team comes onto the vessel, preps the vehicle for launch.

Once the vehicle is ready to enter terminal count, they come off onto a support boat about a mile or two away. Rocket is launched remotely just as if it was at Kodiak or whatever, Cape Canaveral or something like that. And then the red team goes back on the barge, barge goes home, we do it all over again. So my point is,

we do as much as we can on land and we try to stay as close as we can while still being far enough away that we're not disturbing people to facilitate the regulatory side of things. We can do that. Operational incentives and reasons it's good to go out there

but also not have the effects of having to figure out a whole new model of operations when you have to sail to the middle of the ocean exactly you got it so so we're kind of threading that needle we're balancing it we can do that we can build that range pretty much anywhere in the ocean right um we did it in the Gulf of Mexico back in May. It's hard to get to orbit regularly from the Gulf of Mexico because it's a big bathtub. But we are targeting, we have found places and we are targeting multiple locations up and down the East Coast.

There's a lot of stakeholders in the ocean. There's a lot of airspace users up and down the East Coast. But the ocean is pretty big. There's a lot of airspace users up and down the East Coast, but the ocean is pretty big. And so we can stage that sort of operation out of any industrial port. We also have a lot of stakeholders who want to operate out of the West Coast to get to polar orbits and sun synchronous orbits. We can do that too. We can do that too. In other words, the thing that you see on our website,

the vessel that we used for our Gulf demo back in May, is designed to operate in shallow waters. It has these big giant poles that go down to the seabed, and the whole ship raises up out. You can do that in about 150 feet of water. Our new system will be able to operate in any depth of water. So we can operate off the West coast. We can operate anywhere in the, in,

in the Atlantic ocean. But again, we want to stay as close as we can to shore for all the reasons we mentioned earlier. And do you have a particular size of vehicle that you're targeting early on? Are there break points that you figure, okay,

at this size, we'll need a different configuration at this size., we won't even consider it down the line? Or you're like, nah, there's a big boat, so we can figure that out. No, no, no. So the system, our minimum viable product for orbital launch will serve something up to a Firefly Alpha. So your small-ish vehicles. Is that physical size or thrust or both? So physical size and thrust.

The vessel that we have is pretty big. Thrust is not a big deal. It's more the physical size of the vehicle, like accommodating the actual length of the vehicle on the vessel is the biggest challenge. The reason we're doing that is because that's where the demand is. SpaceX and Blue Origin and, you know, even Relativity, like they have what they need for now. They're good. They're, they are not our customers. They have not come to us

saying, Hey, how do we buy your product? It's the small guys coming to us who are saying, Hey, how do we buy your product? And so, um, that's, that's what we're designing for um we know how to build something to serve a starship um spacex we can talk about spacex and the oil rigs and demos phobos um bottom line like we know how to do that cost effectively um but you know they're they're not our customers there's no demand right now. It's not your problem yet. So I'm going to go where my customers are telling me to. If anything, I would say, can you build a landing platform of that size? Yeah.

Because that seems like something they'd probably buy sooner than the launch platform. Yeah. Yeah, there certainly is demand for landing platforms. We can do that from a variety of customers who are building vehicles that can land. But right now, SpaceX, again, is the only one who's landing vehicles, and they're landing one vehicle. New Shepard lands, but that doesn't land. That doesn't operate on water. So, again, there's no demand.

You know what I mean? Theoretically, there will be. But right now, where the demand is is small launch, both on the commercial and the government side. There's a lot of government users who have small sounding rockets or targets or government-owned vehicles that could use our system. It's also a lot more capital-intensive. To build something to serve a rocket lab-sized vehicle or a Firefly vehicle

is a lot cheaper than, obviously, to build something to serve a Starship, which is helpful. But the main reason we're doing is because that's where the demand is i think that's kind of the methodology that you have throughout this though of being practical with the decisions made and you know honestly even the idea like you're somebody who thinks a lot about the long-term future of space oh yeah uh with you know space settlement stuff that you've written about in the past we could talk about that too yeah but you know when you project out hundreds of years right if if we are the spacefaring civilization yeah like cool what what does it look like yeah but like but you know when you land at midway and you're like 10

feet over rooftops yeah like it feels silly to say rockets will never do this but at the same time it feels silly to say rockets will ever do this you know like but you know if you went back 100 years and showed somebody a 737 and said i'm gonna fly this right over your house and land it on this giant piece of asphalt they'd be like that's never gonna be a thing that we do in the world yeah so i feel like we're in a similar spot now where we can kind of see the shape, but it's really doesn't make any sense yet to, to look at that world and say,

that is the world that will be. So, so let's, let's talk about the practical step for the 2020s. But what are your thoughts on, you know, so the reason, the reason you can fly a seven 37 over people's houses is, um,

there were a lot of mistakes made early on in aviation and and and frankly you know i don't mean to get real here but a lot of people died and there was a lot of you know there were a lot of injuries and there were a lot of casualties in aviation and which resulted in regulations and those regulations were written in blood like i don't want to get too dramatic here um but as a result of those those losses and those sacrifices that's the reason aviation is so super safe like it's a cliche to say but it's true it's the safest form of transportation out there because there were all these lessons learned and because it's like super highly regulated um and so people when they see an airplane flying over their house they're like they're pretty confident it's it's

going to be fine in fact they're like oh it's pretty cool well in order to get to that level of safety you need to have thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of flights of aviation flights and you had to have a bunch of mishaps and deaths and awful things had happened in order to learn how to get better. We're nowhere near that in the rocket world. And so it's a chicken and the egg thing. There are seasons worth of air disasters on TV, and there's

one episode of space disasters. Yeah, yeah. Just to look at it at that level. How much can History Channel or NatGeo monetize this? We're not at the season's worth yet. I don't want to focus on the disasters, but I'm just talking about the level of activity, the number of launches.

We're going to need thousands, maybe tens of thousands of launches before the level of reliability in these vehicles gets to the point where we can operate them from an inland location. And so it's a chicken and the egg. In order to get thousands of launches to get the level of reliability you need probably dozens maybe hundreds of spaceports and the only place to do that is on the coast at least in the west right now even china is starting to realize like hey we probably shouldn't launch these things from inland inland sites and they're moving out to sea china operates two sea-based launch platforms there was a chinese China operates two sea-based launch platforms. There was a Chinese-based launch, sea-based launch last week.

So you have to launch. So in any case, to get to that future where, like, you're hopping on a rocket at the Philadelphia airport and you're flying to Tokyo and, you know, doing Miko in Tokyo and then back home with your family for dinner at the end of the day uh on a rocket it we're gonna need like thousands of launches before we get to that future you know but i it absolutely is inevitable like it's coming one of the things i was hoping to talk

about is virgin galactic like hey why when nobody was looking like virgin galactic all of a sudden had four launches in five months like they're a thing like way to go vg and uh um one of vg's things for a while was point-to-point rocket transportation using rockets to quickly travel around the world um well they just made a huge step forward this year just by just by proving out the white knight two thing they're going to need thousands tens of thousands of more operations before you know there's civilian rocket travel but i think it's inevitable like anybody who's traveled overseas the trans transatlantic flight is like oh my god get me off this airplane like there's a huge latent demand for faster air travel yeah and hopefully it's on rockets so yeah that's a great way to put it of like you know we need to work on the enabling things now that get us to that next step and those are the practical

goals and companies that i always admire of figuring out like yes yes we know the very future far-looking future thing but you know working backwards from that we're gonna have to take this next step before we can even think about the thing between here and there and yeah and it gets and bootstrapping there and making money along hopefully making money like this yeah yeah there's tons of companies i've either talked about on the show or had on the show that have that knack for figuring out like this is the goal that we're on i mean spacex is the golden example of figuring out a roadmap that they're on and finding the ways to continue to have programs or make money that further those goals you know there's smaller examples like that too companies that are gritty at that level and i don't know i

just feel like those are the ones that that tend to work out uh instead of the ones that are i mean i don't want to and i mean we're now now is a list of people that don't take that. In this, in this economic environment, this is the time those, those companies are going to be made, right? It's, it's a lot harder to raise money right now. And so the companies that figure out how to survive and thrive in this, in this new kind of economic environment, um, like 10 years from now, you're going to like the next rocket lab is being built. Now the next like planet labs is being built now, you know, maybe the next SpaceX. So it's, it's,

um, anyway, just wondering. Do you, from your, I don't want to keep it too long, but so tell me when you have a hard out, but I think we at least marked off an hour on the calendar.

So hopefully we're, we're good. If it's less, you got to go, but no, I'm good. There are some interesting things happening right now that you probably have some good insight considering your history.

Um, I know you mentioned mentioned autopup stuff going on there's varda space waiting to come back in on on a recovery mission uh after they launched their first factory in space yeah um we can tackle those things before we get to the starship of it all yeah but i'm curious on you know we've talked a lot about the launches but not necessarily the the re-entries and recoveries, which is another area that FAA has a big hand. So is there anything in particular that on that side of things that you've been curious to follow along with? Yeah, so Varda is, is a very, is one of our customers, they have put down a very modest deposit on eventually returning their capsules to a Spaceport Company facility.

That's very preliminary. There's been no technical work around that. But so in exchange, the Spaceport Company has been advising Varda on getting their reentry license. And that's part of our sales funnel, by the way. Any company out there looking for FAA consulting, FAA work, that's how we get our customers. We start them out with FAA work and then move them down the sales funnel.

So Varda is in that stage. Varda will be the first company to get the Part 450 license for re-entry. So just getting a little wonky for a second, there used to be a whole bunch of different licenses. One of them was for this type of launch or that type of launch, and one of them was for re-entry. now everything has been combined into part 450 and so um i led the team at astra that got the first part 450 launch license uh varda is now trying to get the first part 450 re-entry license and so i can tell you being the first is really really hard it's It's really painful. The FAA is trying this out for the first time. They're exercising the regulations for the first time. They're finding a lot of unusual things. doing it for the first time. And Varda is planning to reenter at a range that doesn't have

a lot of experience with commercial companies, doesn't have a lot of experience with space operations in the first place. I was going to say, they better figure that out quick because they've got an asteroid

coming back their way in like two weeks. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And so, you know, this is part of the benefit, you know, of the Spaceport company is that we give companies an alternative to operating out of federal ranges. And we give the federal ranges the opportunity to say, hey, why don't you go over to this commercial company instead? You know, you're a big headache. Like, why don't you just go work with them as well because the the ranges the federal ranges have higher priorities they were designed to serve national security missions and when a commercial company comes along they're sort of instructed to help them but that's not really what their primary focus is cape canaveral eastern range has done

an outstanding job of accommodating and facilitating, uh, uh, the commercial operations out of there. Um, and other ranges are trying to try and catch up quick. Um, but when you're the company that's like your runway is burning, you've got a payload that either has to go up or,

or in Varda's case has to come back down. Yeah. It can be really, really, really painful, um, to wait for that, for all those approvals, not only the FAA side, but particularly the range side. Yeah, I've been curious about Varda in particular. They've been waiting up there for a couple of months now. I'm sure there's, I mean, from what you described there, it sounds like when you're

the first, there's a lot of things where, where you know someone sitting at your old desk is like oh wait a minute we didn't think about x y or z or we didn't get sign off on x y or z and then we've got to schedule some people to talk about x y or z before we can even say yes or no and then yeah it's that uncharted you know writing the stuff that's uncharted there i want to foot stomp though i want to emphasize there's like a dual uh there's there's two levels of approval right there's the faa and the faa gets um beat up a lot in the industry i want to talk about that um but but there's also the range and so a company has to go through two regulatory processes not even counting the fcc and and noah you know the payload and all that jazz. So there's like multiple regulatory paths.

Sometimes the range can be a lot harder than the FAA. So, well, let's talk about that. Yeah. If you're game, because you were in the office during some Starship drama back in the day. There's always FAA drama as written about. Yeah. And I think even, you know, in last week as as this mishap investigation got closed down there's been like a whole nother round of this talk there are some people out there

trying to like yell into the void about how this actually works and how it's a partnership it's not like no one's going to school and like getting assignments assigned to them they're working on this stuff together so yeah that's right it's exactly right knowing that you know even the company that you've got going right now a lot of it is helping people understand that process. Maybe you can enlighten us as to like, the way you can use mishaps as an example, or if there's a better example, is that just the way that the interaction goes between FAA and companies that are working on these new kind of vehicles? Yeah, yeah. So I think I think a good thing to emphasize first is a couple of things. Number one, the, you know, the FAA is huge. The FAA rocket office, the office of commercial space

transportation, I think now they have 130 or 140 employees. Um, that's a lot bigger than when you were there, I think. Right. Uh, yeah, I think I was the 85th or 86th hire but like okay there's 130 people let's say let's just use round numbers let's just say there's 200 people in the office and that's that's wildly hot like 200 people you know responsible for regulating literally dozens of license applications like i i always kind of roll my eyes when somebody from the federal government is like we need more resources like we don't have enough people we're stretched too thin but in the case of the faa it really is true it really honestly is true and part of their challenge is is is finding talent like they have money to hire more people they have resources now it's a it's a case of like

finding the right people with the right qualifications and then training them up but take you know this is this is rocket science and not only is it rocket science it's the regulation of rocket science and so you could get a really smart aerospace engineer but then you need to teach them regulations that takes about a year so at least so i just want to emphasize that like they there really is a lot going on there um the second thing is you're absolutely right it is a partnership um when a company comes in we spend months with them before they even submit an application in the case of a mishap report that mishap report was already um templated there was a template mishap report was already templated.

There was a template mishap report that was approved by the FAA, that was drafted by SpaceX and approved by the FAA before the license was issued for the last launch back in April, whenever that was. So it's not like SpaceX just had to start from scratch. The FAA and SpaceX and the faa and every license holder work together very closely um side by side to to to do that and the third thing i'll emphasize is unlike most regulatory bodies in the u.s the faa has a statutory responsibility to help a company frankly succeed and so when a company comes to the faa and

they say um you know we want to land first stages on barges you know we don't say no that's a stupid idea get out of here you say okay how can we do this safely how do we do this so you're complying with all the regulations and do it safely? They're legally required to do that. That's statutory. It's called the dual mandate, right? Protecting the public safety and also encouraging facilitating the industry. Now, a lot of us in industry would like to see a lot more facilitation and a lot more flexibility but um i have to say like from my time in the office there are there's a lot of resources there's a lot of emphasis there's a lot of leadership that's focused on that that expediting and that facilitating role so um but but i i will just emphasize like these are bombs that were lighting on fire and

shooting through the air on purpose like these are these are pretty volatile things like some level of regulation is is is is probably warranted so it's definitely warranted there's some stuff that i heard about um i don't know how much of this makes its way to the fa side of things this is me more just picking your brain at this point but you know we've talked a lot about companies doing new things in new ways and one of the things we've seen recently was people starting to use different propellants now methane is like the thing in vogue right and i had heard from the eastern range that when relativity was getting on the pad for their first attempt that the yeah because they you know we don't again per your point about we need like hundreds of thousands of flights before we really have good reliability and and like good data on

what when things do go wrong how they go wrong we don't good reliability and good data on when things do go wrong and how they go wrong. We don't have a lot of data on methane launch vehicles that the effective... What's the word I'm looking for? The... QD distance? Yeah, the danger zone, right? The keep-away distance? In the words of Kenny Loggins, the danger zone was

way larger than even a much bigger vehicle like Falcon Heavy because of the... you're very well informed and you're really in the weeds with that stuff that's good you know i get notes from people sometimes that i file away and i bring up down the line when they won't get in trouble for me saying it so that's how this works um so i don't know if that sort of thing made its way to your desk previously but um i just you know that was relativity with terran one a vehicle that is not terribly big and we've got vulcan about to be out there new glenn about to be out there starship at some point

being out on the eastern range with way more methane and way more oxidizer um is that a case too where where uh like technical choices that companies make are things that come up and and you help look at what the impacts would be i I just, I'm curious how that goes with old companies doing new things and having to relearn. It's a really weird problem. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, the FAA had a lot of, you know, innovative companies coming to us and saying, Hey, we want to do X, Y, and Z. And we'd say, say okay like the implications from a regulatory standpoint uh are are this um there's also the insurance company completely independent of the federal regulator or the state regulator there's an insurance company that might say um great you got your license you got your pad

we're going to charge you so much money because we, the insurance company, on a private commercial insurance transaction, think this is just way too risky. And then that's a business decision for the company. So I just also want to emphasize, like, there's a whole insurance side of things separate from the FAA-mandated insurance that can factor into a company's business decision so it you know talking to the engineers when i was when i was at astra and then also at the faa there they'll be like we've got this great new gizmo we've got this great new approach and um often that gizmo has to be considered holistically in terms of not only regulations and insurance but but also just operationally. It might work once. It might even work regularly. But is it really a viable business?

I think back to the space shuttle. Technical masterpiece. Operationally pretty good. Launched 135 times. But financial disaster. You know what I mean? Just like economically. SLS.

Technologically, okay, pretty cool big rocket you know um operational it got off the pad once worked flawlessly financially complete disaster it's weird it's weird how similar those two yeah yeah so that's that's the government like they have different incentives like commercially when we see commercial companies operating uh i often advise startup companies to say uh consider the the operational and the regulatory and and how is this going to factor into you scaling up like cool you can get to the pad once that's just the beginning how are you going to get to the pad every week for the next 10 years? And you might want to change your architecture now to enable that high cadence later on. I'll just,

I'll just say another thing. Like there's a reason LNG buses and trucks haven't really taken off. There's a reason like hydrogen, I think is going to be really challenging. Hydrogen, the hydrogen economy is really going to be an ammonia economy. And with a lot of energy, you know, penalties in there. I think is going to be really challenging. Hydrogen, the hydrogen economy is really going to be an ammonia economy. Um, and with a lot of energy,

uh, uh, you know, penalties in there. Um, kerosene is just so much easier to use. It's so much more forgiving operationally, same with gasoline and diesel.

Um, so, uh, you know, working with these, these really high pressure, high energy cryogens, it's great from a propulsion standpoint, super efficient,

but operationally it's really, really challenging. We only got a couple minutes left, so I'll let you, if there's anything in particular you want to plug, whether it's the book or an email address for people to get a spaceport, if they want one. Yeah, just check it out, the spaceportcompany.com. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the the book i'll just mention that i mean this was this was a couple years when i was working at the faa back in 2018 i co-authored a book with a guy named al globus um it's called

the high frontier an easier way back in the 1970s a princeton physicist wrote a book called the high frontier it's about building human communities in space you know tens and millions of people living in space jeff bezos read the same book when he was in high school and that's what inspired him to start blue origin well al and i wrote kind of another book uh following on the high frontier an easier way showing how it would be easier to build those human communities in space in light of all the new technology uh you know starship and and computers robotics and so on and so forth all the new findings the scientific findings about ice on the moon and all the new resources in space so um uh not only am do i try to be a

pragmatic business person trying to bootstrap this company using revenue following demand but uh you know I also I'm a fan right I want to see a future where we're all living in space I want to see the future where there's where there's millions of people living working and planning in space and and uh and I co-authored a book about it to talk about about uh my vision for that um yeah again spaceportcompany.com. We're on, we're on LinkedIn. We're on Twitter.

Uh, we're on all the meta platforms. Um, I guess I'd have to call it X now. X. Yeah. Twitter. The other Twitter versions are you on?

Yeah. I'm so crumpy about it lately, but yeah, you gotta do it. You gotta do it. I, I, I want to give a shout out to Lindsay Rogers.

She's our comms person. She does all social media, you know so yeah I think that's all that's all the plugging I want to do right now awesome Tom it's been awesome hanging out I'm glad we finally got to do this thanks for hanging out so long

yeah my pleasure we saw each other at the space symposium right that's right finally got this together I mentioned before we started talking we'll have to have you, I mentioned it before we started talking, we'll have to have you on off nominal to have fun and talk. Cause I know Jake, I probably didn't get to some of Jake's favorite questions.

So I'd love that. Let's not wait another four years for the next. Totally. Another couple, hopefully not another couple of jobs. Hopefully just a couple more space ports. Yeah, that's right.

That'd be great. Great. All right. Thanks again, Tom. You got it, man. Good talking to you.

Take care. Thanks again to Tom for coming on the show. It was good to finally chat with him and i feel like we got into some really interesting areas so hopefully you enjoyed the conversation as well if you did you can support this show over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support there are 867 of you supporting every single month we can't quite crack the 900 number it keeps kind of ebbing and flowing so So if you want to help out, let's get us over the 900 number. We are produced here by 34 executive producers who made this episode possible. Thanks to Steve, Bob, Stealth Julian, David, Harrison, Lee, Jan, Eunice, Ryan, Theo and Violet, Frank, Chris, Pat, Lars and Will from Agile Space, Chris, Donald, SmallSpark Space Systems, Dawn Aerospace, Matt, Pat from KC, Tyler, Craig from SpaceHappyHour.com, Joel, Tim Dodd, TheEverDashNut, Fred, Benjamin,

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