Off-Nominal - 55 - I’ve Slept on a Torpedo

Episode Date: April 1, 2022

Tory Bruno, CEO of United Launch Alliance, joins Jake and Anthony to talk about how he got into space, his background in engineering, the shift from engineering to management, and the future of ULA and the rest of the space industry.DrinksStellar Entanglement - First State Brewing Company - UntappdTopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 55 - I’ve Slept on a Torpedo (with Tory Bruno) - YouTubeWeMartians 79 – Preparing for a Martian Launch (feat. Tory Bruno)Tory Bruno on Twitter: “Saw Neil Armstrong take that first step. Was building my own rockets with moldy old dynamite a year later.”Lockheed Martin MKV-L - YouTubeMultiple Kill Vehicle - WikipediaFollow ToryTory Bruno (@torybruno) / TwitterULA (@ulalaunch) / TwitterULA | United Launch AllianceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Hello, everyone. Welcome to a very special episode of Offenomenal. Very special. As you can tell by the background, the epic, most epic background that we've ever had enough nominal of our guests. There's never been a better one. Like, what is going on here? We're watching SLS testing live on the stand here.

So how's it going, Tori? Yes, you're welcome. It's going really well. And as you guys know, we're the interim cryogenic propulsion upper stage. so that's why we're involved here and this is pretty cool. I'm going to get off the headset so I don't accidentally

talk to the launch pad while you and I are talking. Let's go ahead and turn the screen off. I don't want the right to our guys to get so. Too soon. I'm all yours. Oh man. Okay, yeah.

Working while you're working. That's exactly how we want this to go. it's perfect. It will start with some drinks. So I know you're in the middle of your workday and you're wearing a nice suit, Tori. So I don't know if you're going to have like a real bender going on here. But I did see you have a cup of something. What do you have you got going on today?

This is water as far as any of us know. Okay, excellent. Especially those on the control loop. They will never know what is in that cup. What do you got, Jake? You were like doing vacation stuff the last couple of days. Do you bring anything back from where you were? I tried.

So, yeah, I went to a place called Bacalar, which is this, like, one of the rare lakes in the part of Mexico that I live in. And so we were out there, and I was trying to see if I could find, like, a craft beer. And there was, like, one craft brewery there. And they made this really cool blue beer. And they went out of business two years ago. So that's the end of that story. So I just put something real quick together. This is just orange juice and a little bit of vodka with a splash of grenadine.

So I like to think one of them is locks and one of them is RP1. That's my story. It's a slight mixing. I've got a... You know, it's a little bit red. That might be more like red fuming nitric oxide. So go easy on that stuff. Yeah, it's not a great look if you're thinking about...

Don't breathe it in, right? No. I've got a beer from Delaware called Stellar Entanglement, which I just thought was kind of epic looking. So that's what's going on over here. Cool. Nice. Where do we even start, Jake?

Should we start with the dynamite? That's the story that we're both excited to talk about, I think. Yeah, you know, we want to learn a little bit about Tori Bruno today and just sort of the man, the myth, the mystery. And I don't know, is there a better place to start with when you were a kid? I don't know if that's how you start all kind of biographical interviews, right? Okay, yeah, let's dig into it. There's a dynamite story. Tori, when we had you on We Martians, I sort of like hinted at this, but maybe I'm just going to ask you this anytime we talk because it's just such a fun story.

Sure, we can do that. My poor grandmother, it was her ranch, you know, and we love this story, but she would not love living through it. So, you know, I was just a little boy when, you know, Armstrong walked on the moon. And it was a profound experience for me. I can remember sitting on the carpet, you know, in front of one of these kind of fuzzy black and white televisions just completely mesmerized. And from that moment on, I mean, it was all about rockets for me. Everything was a rocket. And I'd say maybe a year or so later, you know, it's summertime, idle hands,

back of the barn, Grand Mother's Ranch, digging around. and I find a case of like 80-year-old moldy dynamite to spend there from before. And so there's only one thing to do. You know, I may. See if it works. Let's try it. So I got some rod-iron pipe also from the back of the barn, and I took these little sticks of dynamite. And I'll tell you guys, to this day, I can remember being a little bit confused, you know, my nine-year-old brain, eight-nine-year-old brain.

why in the middle of this hot, dry summer, these sticks of dynamite were still all wet. And of course, today, I understand that that's because the nitroglycerin that's wetted out onto the surface. And they were extremely dangerous. But I didn't know. So I got my little Boy Scout knife, and I cut them open, and I pulled out the powder and the paper, and I crammed them into these wrought iron pipes that I found. And I had kind of a makeshift thing because I understood there should be like a nozzle-like-looking thing on the bottom. bottom. And I was, I had days, days of entertainment. And proud to say, by the way, that some of my

rockets made it partway into the sky before they detonated. And then I was thought, and that's the end of that. I'm pretty sure that I'm still grounded. And somehow are allowed to actually play with real rockets. Like, because if you tell anyone that story in the government, they're like, well, we're going to put you on the one list that we keep, just to make sure. My question with this story, though, is that when you saw the dynamite, was there a thought between, I wonder what this stuff is, and I bet I can make a rocket out of that? Or was it, like, immediately, that looks like rocket propellant. I could do some with this.

Oh, it was instantaneous. And I knew it was dynamite, because it looks just like what you would imagine, you know, the wooden crate and the handles and you open it out and the sticks. Oh, yeah. There was nothing else to be done. with that other than build rockets. I also, I really like the part where you, you, you didn't know what the nozzle was for, but you knew there had to be one there on some kind.

So I just imagining you fashioning something that you, in some sort of concoction, think looks like a nozzle and serves some mysterious purpose, but it's got to be there. That was purely aesthetic back in those days. Yeah, yeah. Yes, exactly right. But I'll tell you a secret that my, my grandmother and my, in the adults and the family, never did discover. I also found a box of blasting caps at the same time. And they never found those. Oh, man. So, you know, besides dynamite, what are, what are some of the other kind of like,

influences you would have had? So you mentioned Apollo. Is that, like, is that like the North Star for you? Or was there, was there other stuff coming into your childhood that was, you know, building, putting all the building blocks together for who you are today. Yeah, well, I mean, that was the original inspiration. But, you know, after that, of course, space was, you know, just the most interesting thing in the world to me. So I loved that program that went on for years. I loved any kind of sci-fi that involved space and exploration. And, of course, I mean, I'll, you know, I'll take this in a little bit more serious direction for a moment.

you know, at the front part of my career and certainly growing up, seeing Russian tanks in an Eastern European city was not an unheard of thing. So in that time, that sort of overhang of things not always being great in the world and freedom and democracy being something that is important and mattered to people who might be oppressed or not have what we had was also president. in my mind the whole time. And something that was also pretty important to rocketry. And I'll just share with you guys that it's you know, it's personally very saddening for me today to see

Russian tanks in another European city. Thought that was all well behind us. Yeah, it's sort of a history repeats itself situation. That theme may come up a couple times today. I'm thinking so, yeah. And so do you remember like deciding

like more seriously to pursue that, you know, the decision to go to college for that kind of thing. Do you remember those decision points at all? Oh yeah, absolutely. And I'd probably say, you know, once I got old enough to not just be focused on being an astronaut, which is what every nine-year-old boy wants. Yeah, you're like, I'm either going to play in the NFL or I'm going to be an astronaut. Like, those are the two things. I'm either going to be in here, right? You got it. So once I got past that, you know, I realized that love science fiction, but was always drawn to the technology and to the characters that were, you know, the engineers or the scientists in that sort of genre.

And so by the time I was heading off to high school, I already knew I wanted to be an engineer. And from that point forward, it was just how do I get there and how do I get this done? Right, right, yeah. So, go ahead, Anthony. No, I just, like, we're now straying into the territory of like, obviously you've got things on the screens behind you that I don't know what we can or cannot know about. and the next phase of your life, we can or cannot know about a lot of it. So there's going to be a lot of like, which stories can Tori's tell here? But you ended up at Lockheed, and if Wikipedia and all of the associated websites that references are correct,

the string of projects that you worked on are all incredibly interesting. Are there any particular ones that stick out from your time at Lockheed? I think you interned there and then obviously went on to have a long career there. Which are the particular programs that you look back most fondly on in the early days there? Oh, gosh, most fondly, huh? Well, you know, I started in a bunch of defense kind of programs, and I ended up pretty early on in what we called advanced programs, which is where the R&D happens, and where you get to invent things and try and solve sort of intractable problems. And that was the most fun, I think, I've ever had. And I got to develop some crazy things, like my magneto-hydroids. dynamic steering for rockets and power generation on on reentry vehicles and really just crazy stuff like that some of which i got to build and test some of which i did not but you know you put you all together oh my gosh the experiences you could have you know i have i have i have slept on a

torpedo i have shot the forward out of the sky with another bullet i've killed a giant ballistic missile with a huge flying ray gun and of course you know here i got to send a helicopter to mars there's no career like the career you can have aerospace and of course the stuff i did at lock you most of which i could tell you guys about it you know but then then i you know i'd have to pull out the dynamite pull out the giant ray gun yeah the ray gun yeah he's got a whole host of things he could pick from why did you sleep on a torpedo what we got you skipped way too quickly over that Well, I was a designer on what's called a submarine launch ballistic missile. So it's a deterrent system.

It's a system never meant to be used. It was built to basically to intimidate to tell the Russians, look, don't even think about the unthinkable because bad things will happen. Oh, very good. Look at you. Trident 1C4 right there. Oh, no, that looks like a C3. And so when you feel the new version of that, a whole bunch of people go to sea on the submarine with the Navy, you know, to test it and to observe it and to measure things, you know, because you're the designers. And when you go to sea on a submarine, there's no really night or day when you're under the water.

You know, you come out of the port, the boat submerges, doesn't come up until everything is over. and the ship runs around the clock. And if you're a sailor, you've got a specific job and you've got a shift so you know when to start your day, you know when to end it, stuff like that. But for a guy like me, you know, one of the rocket scientists on board, you don't have any of that structured routine. And so I'm cruising along doing my thing and it's super cool and it's exciting. It's my first time at sea on a submarine. And I realize, geez, man, I am really tired. I'm just dragging and I'm having trouble focusing on my data and my data.

calculations and then I kind of dawns on me I've been up for almost 40 hours straight I didn't notice you know there's no day or night so I go find a petty officer and I go hey I need to find a place to bunk and there's no place for us you know the crew has they have their their bunks and the rest of us we come on board and you bring a sleeping bag and you find a corner somewhere and by the time I went looking there was nothing left And so he kind of looks around and says, hey, kid, I'm sorry, but what I got right here are a couple of racks where the big torpedoes are. And there's a gap almost your length in between this torpedo and that torpedo. And there's one underneath you.

You know, if you're not afraid of that, you know, we can throw a piece of plywood up there. You can sleep right there. And I'm like, you got to take what you got. I'll take what you got. So you're like, personally. tell the story on a podcast someday. I'll take it. You were personally those people that did that experiment, like, I think this is the beginning of the pandemic where they went into a cave with no clocks, and they were just like,

let's see, you know, how long we think we're in there or whatever. Like, let's see how the passage of time feels. This was you personally experiencing 40 hours awake on a submarine, which sounds like some form of torture, to be honest. I don't really, I mean, that's, not a lot of people would wish to do that. Well, I didn't do it on purpose. Many of the things in your list here. You often tweet this photo of the,

the name of it is the multi-kill vehicle or something like that, multiple kill vehicle, the crazy little, I got to find this video somehow where we're talking, but are you able to tell any stories about developing that because that seems like particularly something that, you know, at the time, it might have been what you mentioned earlier, that like, we didn't know if this was possible. We're just trying to figure this out.

So what was early days of that kind of program like? Yeah, that's, yeah. MKV, and it was a follow-on to another program I worked on called Thad, which is a missile defense interceptor. It's like a missile, anti-missile missile, a missile that shoots down other missiles. And the thing that was novel about that that rolled forward into MKV was this idea of what we called hit-to-kill technology. So these interceptors don't actually have a warhead on them. There's no explosives. There's no weapon. Instead, they just fly out. And they find an incoming warhead and they just fly right into it and they hit it, physically hit it, which is an incredible piece.

And keep it in particular as possible at the time that we were doing it. In fact, I can remember a well-known scientific publication came out when I was working on the first technology program associated with that, where Nobel laureate physicists had written an article about how this was a giant boondoggle and a big waste of money and it's physically impossible. timing's everything. About a month later, we made a couple of intercepts. I ran to the newsstand by the next issue so I could read their apology, but oddly, there was no mention. Nothing there, right? I love the, is this test apparatus,

something that you experienced because I love the fact that at the end of this test, it's like, I'm all out of propellant, and it just drops, and it's this huge netting environment that it's just like, oh, we'll catch it when it's done doing its work. Is this something that you were there for or something? Oh, yes, I was there for that and many other tests associated with it. This one is like a miniature version of what I was telling you about. And if you're going to be flying at something, you know, at four or five times a speed of a 30-06 rifle round,

that's coming at you even faster, you have to be able to make these rapid adjustments to stay in its path so that you run into it. And so that's what's going on here. There is so much thrust. each one of those little nozzles that you can see firing is putting out way more than 1G, which means that when you throttle it down a little bit for a test like this, it can hover. And the cool thing about it, when you watch that video,

when your viewers watch it if they take the time, it just doesn't even look real because it can move almost without perceptible acceleration. It can stop in the same way and do all those crazy things. I'm running it again because it's too cool of the video, Especially with, oh, it's so loud when it starts. Got to watch over that. Yeah, the little side-to-side translation is just like, what is even happening there?

And you see the bursts coming out from all angles. This is a truly epic video. Like, the fact that this stuff's out there is pretty awesome, especially from 2008. You know, I don't know. Obviously it means we have way better stuff these days if they're like, yeah, you can post a video that now. But it's still awesome to see that stuff. Yeah, yeah.

It's really, the more stories you're telling here, Tori, It's really astounding like you just took the barn with the dynamite and made it into a job. More purposeful dynamite, but... Let's just cut this open and see what it does, and we'll figure out how it goes from there. Now, through the time there, you worked on a lot of things that weren't necessarily space missions, right? They may have entered space while they were on ascent or something like that. I've read rumors that you did work on Athena, or what was Lockheed launch vehicle back in the day. Was that something that you were pretty deeply involved with or something that was more of a glancing experience?

No, I spent quite a bit of time on Athena working on the control system, the steering, what we call thrust vector control for the booster. It was a pretty cool program. You're looking at an all-solid space launch vehicle, and it's from an era where relatively small payloads were still pretty popular and going to pretty accessible orbit. like Leo, and so that's why that rocket could be configured that way. And the Lunal Prospector is one that you were launched on there. I was going to say my favorite launch vehicle from that era is actually one that we never got to work, and I never got to fly it, and that's probably one of the greater disappointments of my career,

which is, of course, the X-33 Venture Star that was a single-com. stage to orbit to Leo again, glide-back vehicle, coolest thing ever. But we were just a little bit ahead of the state of the art on the cryogenic propellant tanks, and we just couldn't make them stop leaking. That is a problem when you're at the thinnest edge of the margin. Non-preferred outcome of those tanks is leaking, yeah. I think he probably just won over a whole bunch of fans, though, because they love those X-33 in our...

Our community here. Linear spike, aerospike engine, I mean, that was super cool. I wish that had an application for that linear aerospike, I would definitely bring it back. That's interesting that you, because you mentioned something earlier that, about when you were kind of coming of age in the late Apollo era and things like that, I'm curious if in that phase, right, where you were very inspired by that, there was a lot of different directions that space industry could go,

if there were like Venture Star is kind of a, we just had the timing a little wrong for that to really work out. Was there something similar in the changeover from Apollo to shuttle? Like, what are your opinions of that era of space history? Which were the projects that you were interested in happening that didn't quite pan out? Did you feel like we were on the right track there? How did you feel about all that? Well, I felt really, really sad when we retired the orbiter,

because it was such a tremendous capability, and it was so inspiring to the public. You know, I worked on it just briefly. That is one of those that I think you described as sort of a touch and go. I kind of touched and went there. I have people here who spent careers before they came to ULA, and, you know, they're aerospace giants. But that ability to just go easily and quickly and to pioneer some of that technology was invaluable. You know, in terms of being cutting edge, yep, that was right out there.

You know, reusing the orbiter, reusing the solids did not. That never, ever saved one penny. Even at the launch rate we did with the orbiter, just because all you recover are the cases, really. I can see them behind you. Yes, you can. But without the propellant in it, they're actually not that valuable.

And so by the time, you know, we drag them back and barge them and then clean them up and recast them and segments and all of that, it was more expensive to recover them than it would have been to just let them sink. I believe that, yeah. Yeah, I've seen the photos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shuttle's definitely the one that we all lists, right? Like, everyone's got one gripe about the shuttle at a minimum.

I have a lot, personally, but everyone's got one thing that they're like, hmm, the shuttle didn't really get this one thing right, that maybe space history would have developed differently. And as Jake knows, I'm like a big skyline. lab guy. I feel like the whole sky lab branch of alternate space history is something that I'm like sad to pan out the way it was intended. But, you know, it's always fun to hear what people

kind of latch on to is the just got away items in their mind. Yeah, that's the quintessential shuttle opinion. My big complaint is that since I worked on it for just a few months, I wanted to see one go. And I went down to Florida

like a zillion times, contrived reasons to travel there. for my, you know, my current job at the time, and the shuttle never launched when it was supposed to. I finally caught one, but totally by accident. Well, you've got a... I'm sure you'll be at the next thing that looks like a shuttle launching to space.

It seems like you have a vested interest in actually having a legitimate reason to go see that launch that's sitting behind you on the path. Yeah, you may not have to make up that reason to put it in your camera this time. It seems like someone will maybe expense your flight for that. That is a gorgeous, gigantic, gigantic super heavy launch vehicle. What a sight that's going to be.

Yeah, we're excited to see it too. One thing I'm particularly, unless you had more history topics, Jake, I'm interested to dive into the engineering to management changeover in your career. Because this is something I always find an interesting topic when people start out in engineering. Eventually, what's that theorem that, like, some of that I always find an interesting topic when people start out in engineering eventually? what's that theorem that like somebody's theorem where people get promoted to the level of their incompetence and oftentimes engineers will get promoted into management and kind of burn out because it just wasn't a fit for them clearly not the case with you or maybe I don't know whatever is

the next promotion up maybe that's where you're incompetent but how did you find that changeover go is it something that you know there's a lot of a lot of agencies and companies out there that never really have like true managers they have engineers that are still working on the actual product but do some management on the side and then there's others that go pretty hard into like a manager's manager what was the path like for you is it one of the other or something weirder it was reluctant i wanted to be rocket scientist that's what i did for that first 10 years it's all i ever wanted to do and i would say there was probably an event in my career that was a turning point where I got involved in leadership, not on purpose. And that's when they started pulling on me

to go into management. I didn't want to do it. It was a rocket that we developed that was really important at the time. And when we did our first launch of this thing, it spun in a corkscrew and exploded. And then we had, you know, we had, you know, sort of every man, woman, and child in the company working on this thing and it was super intense, you know, seven days a week and around the clock and this kind of stuff. And I had sort of the day after, or the night after this had happened, was in there studying my data for my system and had honestly had figured out what happened. And we didn't instrument for that. It wasn't a failure mode that was expected, you know, was that kind of thing. And I just discovered it almost by accident. And I had, you know, I came, so I stayed there all night. It was like an all-nighter because I had to be right of-

sleeping on a torpedo, something weird like that. Sleeping on a little calculator. And so in the bright early next morning, my boss comes in my supervisor. And I run in there and I go, I go, Don, I figured it out. I know exactly what happened. And this is, he's like a grizzled old, you know, rocketry veteran, this guy had been in the industry for like 40 years, and he's smoking a cigar because you still could then. He's like, yeah, kid, sure, you know. Show me what you got. And so I kind of show it to him. And he goes, can we swear, are we on Twitter or are we on, is this family hour?

No, this is the head, the name of this show is called Off Nominal. So that's, uh. So he says, well, shit, kid, you did figure it out. out. So the reason he was in there early is because we had like the whole program coming in every morning at like like, you know, I guess it was probably 6.30 in the morning to huddle up and everybody had to report out, you know, what they found because this is like the day after the thing blew up.

And they're rolling through and they get to me and they get to my boss actually. And he goes, no, no, I'm not going to brief. You know, Tori's going to brief. So I get up there and I walk through my story and I get grilled for like. like an hour and they go, yep, that's it. You know, we need to go, now we know what to fix. And because I was in the middle of that, I ended up sort of leading our team that came up with a bunch of design fixes and a bunch of the analyses that showed how to size them

and if they'd work. So it ended up being an engineering lead position. But when it's over, I'm like, thank God this is over. I can go back to being an individual contributor. And then, you know, my boss community says, well, we want to create a lead position. We want you to be elite. And I go, well, I don't really have any interest in management. And it was like that for several years until finally I kind of, you know, light bulb went off

and I realized that I could have more impact if I would go into leadership. And so I reluctantly made that transition. And then and then here I am today, you know. It was great. I mean, it was, I miss it. And the hard thing when you go from being a technologist to being a manager is to stop trying to do all the technology yourself and realize that you're now helping other people, working through other people, coaching them, you know, helping them get the work correct, but not always getting to do it yourself. That's hard. I still miss it.

I can imagine it's really hard, especially as CEO, because if you, if you ask you. to get into the details, no one's going to stop you. No one's going to say no to you. You could get lost in whatever project you want to get lost in right now, and it's going to be allowed by anyone you ask. Well, and I do occasionally, and my staff is very patient. They will occasionally realize, oh, Tori needs an engineering fix, so we're going to humor him for a couple of days here.

So when you were still at Lockheed, that's kind of when this happened. So this, you did a, I think was it VP of, was it strategic missiles? I can't remember all the department names, but you did a few pretty high level stuff there, right? So are there projects on the management side that you like remember fondly of being able to contribute to and be a part of? Yeah, there absolutely are. So, you know, that first program we talked about when we were talking about MKV, that was just a technology demonstration to show that it was possible and that these physicists were all wrong. Later, we came back and turned that into an actual system that is in the field today.

And I was the program manager for that that took it through development and actually into production and got the first couple of batteries fielded. And it was still really high-tech and very challenging. The program part of it was really, really hard. There was a lot of schedule pressure on this thing, and there's never enough money to do everything you want to do. So that's that management part where you've got to balance all that and get it to work and serve its mission. And it was hard. I mean, it was probably, I don't know, I guess I was probably five years in a row almost without a single day off.

We work seven days a week. We work really long days. And to get to the end of that and have the thing work and work beautifully and go forward. And today it's considered the gold standard in that mission area. I look back on that pretty fondly. And I made friends and colleagues there that, you know, it's a special bond. Yeah, yeah. Trial by fire, right?

Okay, cool. So I guess that kind of brings us to the big job, right? Not only were you not, you were reluctant with being in management. Now there was this whole situation where they're like, hey, do you want to run a whole company? I'm sure that was a weird question. But you spoke earlier about Russian tanks rolling in Eastern European countries. In 2014, when you were coming into lead ULA, boy howdy, if that was not a more relevant thing to talk about today. the amount of chaos that was going on in the industry when you took over is like I think we got normalized to it at the time because it was like the boiling frog situation where there's all these different situations but you look back you had your two biggest customers at ULA were undergoing total mindset shifts right

Department of Defense was changing how they buy missions NASA was changing how they contract missions the RD-180 was a congressional topic at the time the sheer amount of chaos that was going on around the ULA side of the industry at the time, I imagine was slightly terrifying to you. It was a daunting environment, and there were plenty of people who were not interested in taking on a challenge like that. But, you know, for me personally, we've been talking about rockets and technology and, you know, super cool experiences all this time. And I love all of that stuff, and it is so much fun. but what's always been really, really important to me are the missions that are done. The importance of the work we get to do, the impact we have on the world, making our country safe, making the rest of the world safe and open in a smaller place to live in, that sort of thing is what gets me up every day to come to work and gives meaning.

When you're working seven days a week and 12 and 14 hours a day, that's the motivation to keep going. And so when I looked at this situation, I thought, wow, you know, sort of good news and bad news. You know, good news is the space industry is changing in almost a chaotic way, but it's broadening out. And there's going to be more industrial capability, which is a great thing for our country. But at the same time, here's ULA, you know, the workhorse, the company that put up 90% of the satellites that are there to explore. the universe and observe our environment and constitute our national security. And it's in a really bad place. And it's liable to not survive. And even its workhorse rocket, the Atlas, as you pointed out, was being challenged by not wanting to be relying on the Russians for that

engine anymore. And I was very, very concerned that ULA was not going to survive. And the reason that mattered to me was because while new things were happening and new people were coming on to the scene, most of the missions that were attached to national security could only be flown by ULA. And it would be years before other people could take that on. And in fact, still today, the most exotic and complex of those missions still could only be flown by this company. And my concern was ULA was going to go bust and it was going to get shut.

down by the owners because it just wouldn't be able to compete because it wasn't set up to do that. It was set up to be really almost an extension of the Air Force. And then the country was going to get stranded. And it seemed, you know, a pretty quiet geopolitical scene back then. But these challenges are always just under the surface, as we have been rudely reminded of here just a few weeks ago. And so I felt that I had an obligation. I felt I had a duty to come to ULA and do what I could to avoid that future and to save the company and keep this capability in place. So that's why I did it. So what was your backup plan if that all flamed out? If your, you know, prophetic vision of the bad future of Tori Bruno was not there to step in,

like what was your backup plan? Oh, well, for me personally, I could retire. I could retire. I could do other things. The business I was running at Lockheed Martin was actually larger than this one, even though it was only a division and was also very important work. And I enjoyed doing it. But I just felt like I had other people who could do that. And there wasn't anybody for this. And I had to do it.

And in terms of a backup plan for ULA, you know, if you guys, you know, listen when I talk or you follow me on Twitter, you've probably heard me say, I always got a backup plan for everything, and I generally have a backup plan for that. But for you, there was no backup plan for not allowing this company to succeed. It had to succeed. I know like with CEO positions, it's not like this isn't the kind of job that would have just showed up on Indeed.com and then you filled out a form and applied. Like this is a, you know, this is like a, it's a relationship that a company has with it with the CEO, right? So was this something that someone came to you and tapped you on the shoulder or did you pursue it and ask for it first? Like how did the, how did it come about that you were, that you transitioned over from this division to a new place?

Yeah, I want to say first that I am thrilled to be here. I wouldn't be anywhere else. I want to be here. But no, I didn't seek it. I didn't ask for it. Yes, I was. I was tapped on the shoulder and said, hey, you know, this is a situation that is kind of in trouble a little bit. And, you know, we need you to do this.

Please do this. And my initial reaction was that I was happy where it was. But when I looked at it, I realized, no, this needs, you know, this needs help. And, you know, shame on me if I just leave it to languish. Interesting. It's cool to hear that backstory, you know, eight years on to, like, compare how history went over the past couple years and the things that you've been working on. And I think it helps map some of the reasoning behind the stuff that you've been working on with Folkin and the way that you've been changing the business that's operating there. The decisions about, like, shutting down Delta 4.

Atlas 5 obviously had a hell of a sale recently to Amazon to get, you know, nine sold their direction. So I'm curious how long you thought this phase that you're, in was going to last when you took over in 2014 if you had this idea that like what we need is this new development program that kind of you know finds the common denominator between delta and atlas lines what what did you envision 2014 and how do you think that compares to where you are today so you may not believe this but we are exactly on plan i'll say with a possible exception that i had hoped to be able to fly vulcan last year rather than this year but in terms of the whole thing, you know, I had a plan kind of from day one. You know, and when they said,

hey, you know, we need you to help and please do this. And I, it was kind of like when I first went into management and said, you know, I probably need to do this. I sat down and I built a very short kind of crisp plan, put it on a on a couple of charts sort of thing. And I went to our owners and I said, well, this is what I'm going to do to make ULA competitive. and responsible and relevant in marketplace, and it's going to be really hard, and it's not going to be fun, at least not at first. It'll be fun on the back end, but the front part's going to be hard, and some of it's going to be unpleasant. But this is what I'm going to do, and if this is not what you guys are up for, then I'm probably not your guy. And they said, no, no, no, that's, yeah, go ahead.

And so I came here and we've been executing through that plan. You know, the first thing we had to do was to figure out how we were going to replace Atlas, which we did. And then we had to figure out how we would make the company much more competitive and more agile. And that's why Delta 2 got retired. That's why Delta 4 got retired. Delta 4 heavy now, three left. It'll be gone. And, of course, finally Atlas.

You know, we flatten the organization. I mean, almost the first thing I did after deciding on doing a new rocket and choosing the architecture and technology set for that rocket was to actually thin out our executive ranks. We dropped by 40%, you know, let people retire, let we did an incentive program. Then, you know, then we restructured the company and began consolidating facilities. One of the things that the competitive marketplace enabled me to do, by the way, is some of those things. See, we used to be charged by the government to have two independent rocket systems to confide any orbit just in case one of them was down or broken or flawed. And when there's two providers, I didn't have to solely carry that burden anymore. That's part of what allowed me to be the plan and the backup plan.

Yes, I didn't have to be the plan and the backup plan. So we did all that stuff. And then, you know, we restructured our suppliers and our partners. And the very last thing was the workforce. And, you know, sitting here today, I'll tell you guys, you know, a couple years back, several years back now, sometimes you really do have to shrink to grow. And we reduced the size of our workforce by 30%.

We got about 68% of those folks by offering, you know, an incentive program, a voluntary layoff, because I had a really senior workforce here. People came to ULA when it started in 2006 and nobody ever left. And so I had a lot of guys that were getting close to retirement. And, you know, they're finishing out getting in the position to be able to afford to retire. And by offering this incentive program, it had money. I mean, I'll just be straight with you. It was a bonus.

And by offering that, I could help close that financial. gap for them and then choose who went and when and manage that and then come down pretty quickly over a span of about two years. That was hard. You hate doing that because you're disrupting people's lives and it wasn't 100% voluntary. It was only about 68% voluntary. And we did it. And it's dangerous. You can really disrupt your culture and your attention to detail and your technology when you do these big transformative changes in your business, when you reorganize it, when you retire people, all of that, it's pretty risky. And, you know, we count, right? So you heard me counting. We're at 149, you know, successful missions. But just between you and me, the number I'm

most proud of is 69 because that's the number of flawless missions that I've flown since coming here and turning the company upside down and not having broken that record. And so we got through all of that, and then we were much more competitive and much better fitted to what was needed from us now. We were what the country needed us to be back then in the early 2000s. They needed something different. And now today we're that different thing. And we're rocking and rolling.

I mean, I haven't even flown a Vulcan yet, and I've already sold over 35 of them. Well, that's a number I haven't heard before. Well, the real news, you've got a scoop. More to come. I'm curious if you thought that... So we're also growing. We really are growing now, and you're going to see us hire a bunch more people soon. That phase where the workforce contraction is happening, you know, a couple of years back,

was there any insight that you had into, like, the state of the industry, the larger industry at that time, was much different than it was when ULA was formed 2006, right? There's, I mean, there's people moving in next door to your place in Huntsville all the time, new commercial companies testing rockets at Stennis. The industry is just shaped very differently. Did you, I don't know if you heard from people after the fact that, like, you know, we heard these stories from the shuttle era when the shuttle retired and SpaceX took over 39A. And there was all these shuttle engineers that left the shuttle program, didn't know what they were going to do. And a couple years later, they're back at 39A flying falcons and falcon heavies. Did you hear any of those kind of stories about where some of that workforce went?

and if there were, you know, other interesting opportunities that they were, you know, maybe some of the younger crew were ready to take on more startup kind of life? We know where all our people went. We got the list. It's the list of people playing with dynamite and barns, and then there's the list of ULA people that have left. Well, you know, when you're going to start a new launch company, these are specialized skills and experiences. Where do you find people like that? It's actually not in the universities.

You find them at ULA. So we were well aware that, you know, the people entering our industry were recruiting from us. We were happy that the people who weren't ready to retire yet who left us had a place to go. We've had quite a few of them back after we started hiring again after recovering from that. And that's okay. You know, you can both have a successful company, in this case, ULA, and be competitive in the marketplace. but also recognize the broader benefit to our country of having a larger industrial base. I support that and I love competition because it makes everybody healthier and it lets you invest in things.

It's very, very hard to build a business case around spending a bunch of money on a new technology or capability if it doesn't actually change anything about your business. and when you're in a competitive environment, that's a whole different story. And then you can do a lot more exciting stuff. I liked your point a couple minutes ago about how, obviously, there's, you know, the ELC debate that Twitter loves to get on. I have a different view than most of Twitter on that situation, but you made an interesting point that, like, the industry changes allow you to make different strategic decisions over time, right? Because your customers, DoD and NASA specifically, they're taking different advantage. of different parts of the industry, that it lets you streamline certain things that you want to

focus on. And I feel like now with the, we're getting into kind of future stuff, but the launch industry, much as it was in 2014, is in an era of chaos again, where there's about a thousand small launch companies. They're all making bigger rockets now. Starship's a thing. You know, there's new glens coming online soon. We're in another round of chaos. And I find that most companies are either trying to be the, we're going to launch everything company or the, we have a very specific niche to fill, like Virgin Orbit offering air launch to different countries around the world that want, you know, launch from their own soil, that kind of thing. You've got Astra and ABL doing containerized launch so they can, if you've got a concrete pad and some fuel, we can launch

from there. How do you, how do you see ULA fitting in there? Are you trying to be a, we launch everything company, or do you have a niche that you're trying to go into with Vulcan? Well, we're really centered on kind of a special set of missions. You can call it a niche. You know, a large heavy class launch vehicle can fly lots and lots of stuff. But every rocket is optimized or centered on a specific mission. And that's where it is the most effective, the most efficient, generally the least cost, highest performance. And then as you move away from that, you can do other things, but that's not your sweet spot. Literally what sweet spot means is absolutely embodied in a rocket architecture.

For us, it is still the most complex high-energy missions. That's what we designed Vulcan around. And we'll be the, we are the best at that. We'll continue to do that. And as we make investments, we keep moving that bar up higher and higher because I think that there'll be more demand for that as time goes by. And we want to be the leader there, and that differentiates us. and so that lets us do new technologies, and we have a whole string, and some of which we're going to be talking about in the public very soon.

I encourage you guys to keep an eye on us over the month of April, if you will. What a tease. Hopefully not tomorrow. Hopefully not every fool's day, but maybe, you know, second through 30th would be good. And there's new things happening in the commercial marketplace that we're never here before. So that's kind of a neat thing too. You know, these so-called mega constellations or what the government likes to call proliferated Leo in their space is an entirely new market that did not exist at all before. Also very interesting, very potentially beneficial for the planet in a way because we're talking about ubiquitous internet and communications access anywhere on Earth, something we've never had before, but also at the same time a challenge.

because they're giant constellations. Just in the last couple of years, we have seen a 20% increase in the objects that we track in Leo, and that's just going to multiply by leaps and bounds, boom, boom, boom, as we're adding thousands of spacecraft. So that means we're going to have to manage them differently, and we're going to have to have some real understanding of norms of behavior,

rules of the road. You know, where can a constellation be? where can it not be? Who moves when there's an imminent collision? How do we deal with orbital debris? What's responsible? You know, should you make your spacecraft very reliable before you place it in the congested Leo space? Trick question. The answer is yes. Should you shorten its life deliberately reserving enough propellant to do a controlled re-entry at the end rather than just let it cascade through all the shells that are beneath it? You know, kind of another obvious. Yes, you should.

Should you do anti-satellite demonstrations in low-earth orbit? Probably not. Probably a bad plan. Just yesterday I was reviewing the data for the debris field left over by what you're talking about. And most of what the Chinese anti-satellite mission put into orbit as debris is still there. All this time later. That's terrible. And it's a problem.

So all of that now is not tomorrow's problem or next year's problem because we always talk about oral degree. We go to conferences, I sit on panels, I talk about it with other people, and we all are very concerned about it. But there's time. It's 10 years away. Well, guess what? It's not 10 years away anymore. It was actually about a year ago. Yeah, yeah.

It seems relevant to the destinations question that I know you were dying to talk about, Jake. Do you want to get into that for the last of a minute? Yeah, well, I mean, it's just sort of a follow-on to this idea that, you know, like the launch market is crazy right now. There's tons of new rockets coming. And there's a lot of discussions around whether there are enough destinations for these rockets to go to, right? Like we're going to send all the stuff up. What's it going to do there? Where is it going to go?

What is the point? I love this saying that nobody needs a drill. What they need as a hole. And in an interesting sort of analogy, no one needs a rocket. What they need is to have something due to. something in space, right? And so are there enough somethings out there? Are there enough destinations out there? It's a really important question. And I kind of want to just ask you how you think about that problem. Are you, you know, is that playing a big role in some of the

decisions you make as CEO? Is it guiding your strategy? What's, what's the Tori Bruno take on destinations? Well, it does. And it's really about timing. And when we look out into the marketplace place today, you know, we've got a handful of heavy lifters trying to be there and a gazillion micro-launchers. The reality is in the near-term horizon, the horizon that would be associated with any investor who actually knew what they were doing, in that you and I could think realistically about as a business, no, there are not nearly enough destinations. There's room now for probably not two domestic heavy lift providers,

but I would say we're probably going to be able to support three with one international partner. That is code for saying Europe, which generally today. I would have been a little murkier a couple weeks ago, but I feel like that's a pretty firm statement these days, yeah. Yes. And in terms of the micro-launchers, I continue to say what I've been saying in the last several years.

There's market for probably two. And right now, when we count the serious ones that actually have funding, not necessarily hardware, but at least funding, there's over 130 of them out there. And most of that investment is going to be destroyed. They all have money. People have given them a pot of money and said, hey, go build a rocket and fly to places, you know, and give me a return on my investment. And that money's gone.

There's only going to be a couple of them. their marketplace is relatively narrow. When they were making those first pitches to those investors, it was all about mega constellations. And they would look, there's going to be 3,000 satellites in any given constellation. You know, and they're all small,

so they'll fit on a small launcher. And our small launchers are pretty inexpensive compared to the big ones. So we're going to launch a gazillion things every day. And at that time, we said, well, no, guys, I mean, all of that is true. The part you're missing is, is when spacecraft get really tiny, then we can put lots and lots of them on a big launcher

and effectively use our volume. And now the figure of merit becomes dollars per kilogram. And the difference in that number on a big launch vehicle versus one of these tiny ones is literally in order of magnitude. I love that moment. Oh, shit, we can stack them. We can stack them. How hadn't I think of that?

And if you look today, where are they all going? All of the mega constellations are going up on heavy launch vehicles because you can't beat physics. There's still a market for the little guys. There's experiments. There's demos. There's urgent replacements when we have several adjacent spacecraft that have died. A single one dying is not a crisis. You just respaced the plane.

But there will be places like that. And what are they all doing? What are the serious ones doing like rocket lab? They're moving upscale. They're developing a new rocket. And the new rocket is basically a. Delta 2. It kind of looks like a shark too.

Kind of looks like a shark. But let's go further into the future. Just a little bit further, and we can talk about cis moon. That's the future. That's the thing that is going to change our human

destiny. There is such an abundance of natural resources on the moon and on the asteroids within easy reach of the moon. We call the near earth objects that are just outside that orbit. It defies human imagination. It's amazing. There's a thousand years of the entire planet's industrial production of industrial metals sitting in those asteroids. There's more platinum, gold, silver, precious

metals than we have extracted from the earth in all of human history. And it's just like right there. It's a week away from where you and I are sitting. And we haven't been able to tap it, even though we know it's there, because when you got to lift all your propellant from the surface of the earth, it's still impractical to go get it. And the great discovery of our time that's gotten largely unheralded is that there's actually already rocket fuel out in space. Water is everywhere. And coincidentally, magically, water is really easy to convert to locks in liquid hydrogen, which are the most energetic rocket fuels we have. Over 20 billion metric tons on the moon. We're going to develop that propellant. We're going to have propellant in space.

We're going to create a transportation network, and we're going to change the future of our species with that natural resource. And when that moment comes, there won't be enough lift. That's a good tagline. I think you should maybe slap that one on ULA's website somewhere. There won't be enough lift. That's good, yeah. Awesome. Well, I know we're getting down to the end of the time here, and you may have some SLS things to get back to behind you.

So if there's anything else, can I just ask questions? because I'm a huge centaur fan. Everyone's focused these days. Vulcan, where's the engines, this, that, or the other. Can you just give me like a minute on Centaur 5? Because I'm a, I mean, Jake's a Mars guy, so he's a very large Centaur fan. I love Centaur too. What's going on with Centaur 5 these days? I want to hear a little Centaur update. Centaur 5, that's the game changer. The Vulcan booster is really cool, but the really cool capabilities are about Centaur 5. almost three times the energy, you know, incredibly longer endurance in space. We're going to start out not at seven hours, but at 12, but we're just going to ratchet that

right up, not hours, days, months. That's the backbone of that transportation system. This is the most advanced, high performance, upper stage ever, and it will start the revolution in SISLUNER that I just talked about. That's the future. And right now, we've got our first couple of them built. They're off being tested. When I'm doing fluid testing, you know, we're pumping in cryogenics and out, we're sloshing it.

You know, this thing's gigantic. Are you doing it manually? Like the guys at the Center or the Saturn 5 back to do. We do. And we're structurally testing it. Remember, it's, you know, paper thin, stained with steel. This thing collapses under its own weight if it's not pressurized. I mean, you know, it's an amazing engineering work of art.

But the other cool thing about Centaur 5, not only is it bigger and more capable and everything than Centaur 3, we build it with almost complete automation. Centaur 3 is a handmade Labergini, 180,000 welds, all done by a person. And Centaur 5 is done in a giant set of robots so we can just bang them out. We make them about four times as fast and with actually better quality, better repeatability. Wow. Do we get to see any videos of the sloshing? I want to see some videos of the sloshing. Well, if you guys are interested, yeah.

Sometimes I forget what is interesting to people. Post the slosh. Hashtag post the slosh. Everybody tweet at Tori. Post the slosh. There we go. Okay. You got it.

Well, that's normally our tagline for the amount of beers that we're drinking on off-nominal, but not today, I guess. Tori, it's been awesome hanging out with you. We'll let you get back to SLS stuff. But it's been a real pleasure. You've been on our list for a long time. So this was checking off a lot of boxes for us today. Oh, I had a blast talking with you guys. Anytime you want, I'm your guy.

We will see you in Florida, hopefully very soon, for a couple of different launches of your vehicles. You got it. All right, thanks, Tori. See you. I figured we'd let him get back to the SLS testing when we close us out. He doesn't need to hear our plugs.

Yeah, yeah. That dude's sitting there with a live feed of SLS behind him. It's fairly epic. He was literally on the loop when we called him up. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he took his headset off for the show, but he had the headset on and all. I thought he was going to keep one ear on the loop the whole time.

Yeah, just to see it up. Anthony, you got a pot out recently. Screw that. We're doing memberships first, Jake. We always forget about memberships. YouTube memberships for Obnomercials. You like the show. You want to support the show.

You want to throw some. some cash towards the upcoming Artemis 1, Vulcan meetups that will assuredly happen in Florida, YouTube.com slash off nominal. You can get into Discord. Do you want to do a little Discord plug? You love Discord. Yeah. So I do. So our Discord, everybody like, I, saying it's just like a community where we hang out is underselling it like completely. It's like so much better than that because, you know, the small little paywall that you pay to get into it keeps out all the riffrap. And so it's like a really good signal to noise. when we're not talking about gritty, but, you know, it's a pretty good signal to noise.

The people are amazing and we care for each other and we have great discussions and we learn a lot and there's just like a ton of really smart. Like, I mind it for information a lot of the times. I don't know what you know. I'm always going to the search. I'm like, I know somebody posted something about the thing that I'm looking up info on. Let me just do a quick search and it's there. Yeah, yeah.

You know, we've got people in industry, people in science, all kinds of stuff happening in there. And so it's a really cool place to hang out. And you get that with the YouTube membership. So I think it's probably where it's just like, you know, down here somewhere there's a button that says. Yeah. I'm doing the YouTube thing. It's one of one of these. So yeah, I encourage you to help us help us up with the beer money and the Discord enjoyment.

What else we got going on? Next week, Philip Sloss of NASA Space Flight is going to come on. SOS doing its big test this weekend as we just saw. And Philip Sloss is like unbelievable. fountain of SLS information. So we're going to talk to him about how he does that. I mentioned this to Jake the other day that like if there was ever an SLS incident a la like that needed a big investigation board, I would just vote Philip Sloss to be like the Feynman of the SLS board. It's one of those projects that's like so big and spread out. No one person knows the whole thing except for Phillips

Sloss. Yeah, he's got the Charlie Day board in his house probably. Yeah. So yeah, so we're excited about that next week. What else you got going? And then, yeah, so pods, right? So you got a new Miko about this week about budget stuff, right? Budget request. Objectively, maybe my best monologue episode. I've really, I thought I nailed it. I'm not going to lie to you.

So Managingcutoff.com. I really nailed this one. I love it. That's awesome. Yeah, I listened to it. It was good. You have some things coming out soon as well that maybe you want to tease? Yeah, well, when was it? So we already talked about my Venus episode last week.

Yeah, another week in the feed there will be another Rocket CEO interview coming. So I talked to Peter Beck from Rocket Lab. And it's not, it's a Rocket CEO conversation not about Rockets. So it was kind of fun because they're really like getting into the planetary space. They've got Venus and Mars and. moon literally on the books already. So like they're, they're really kind of reaching out

into the solar system. And a vehicle that Tori's maybe a little jealous of. Maybe a little bit. Yeah. Maybe a bit. So, so I'm really excited for that conversation. You'll see that out next week.

Awesome. Well, that does it. That does it. I'm at the bottom of the glass. Yep. So. Everybody, thanks for hanging out.

That was fun. I had a great time. That was super fun. There's probably a lot of people mad at us on the internet. Yeah, we didn't ask where the engines were, and that's on purpose, guys. Yeah, like, we know where they are. They're not there yet. They're not there yet. And what's he's going to say?

He's going to say, no, they're not there yet. It's in Texas, man. All right, everybody. See you later. Bye. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 2, 1,000, 2, 1,000, end of death.