The Pomp Podcast - #1202 Ashlee Vance On Elon Musk, SpaceX, and Startups Launching Rockets

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

Ashlee Vance is the author of a brand new book, 'When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach.' He is also the New York Times bestselling author of the book, 'Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.' We talk about space, SpaceX, Elon Musk, and a bunch of space startups that are all racing to be on the frontier of what appears to be one of the big industries in the future. This book by Ashlee Vance is absolutely fantastic, it shows what is going on the industry, what the players are, and why so much money, time & energy is being spent in what appeared to be a pipe dream a few years ago. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 235,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Ashley Vance is the author of a brand new book, When the Heavens Went on Sale,

The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach. Ashley also is the New York Times bestselling author of the book, Elon Musk. I really enjoyed this conversation with Ashley. We talk about space, SpaceX, Elon, and a bunch of space startups that are all racing to build rockets, get into space, and be on the frontier of what appears to be one of the big industries that's coming down the pipe, both here in the United States and internationally. This book by Ashley Vance is absolutely fantastic. I read the entire thing from cover to cover, and I highly suggest that you go pick it up

yourself. It'll give you a great sense of what's going on in the space industry, who the players are, and why so much money, time, and energy is being spent in what appears to be just a pipe dream a few years ago. Again, here is my conversation with Ashley Vance. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions

and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang.

I've got Ashley here with me. Ashley's got a brand new book out, When the Heavens Went on Sale, The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach. I've read the entire thing. It's absolutely fantastic. It is a great space book follow-up to his book on Elon Musk. And I thought that'd be a great place for us to start this conversation, is on Elon himself.

Obviously, Elon is incredibly obsessed with getting to Mars. As you followed him to write the original book, and now you've continued to kind of pay attention to what SpaceX and Elon has done, What's changed? Is there changes to the mission? Is there changes to Elon personally? What are you seeing as the years go on? You know, the big mission is still there.

He is obsessed with setting up this human colony on Mars. He's always thought humans need a backup plan. You know, SpaceX's business itself has kind of changed in some ways. He always said, you know, it was meant to be sort of build a business to get to Mars. And I guess that holds true still, but he used to say he's not a moon person. Now SpaceX is doing missions to the moon. Starlink, the space internet system, is like this massive part of the business that kind of just arrived in the last few years. And that's really, if you look at SpaceX's valuation, there's almost like no money in actually launching rockets, even when you do it SpaceX style, which is pretty cheap and fast.

All the money's in satellites, data, communication. So, SpaceX's value is, like, totally tied up in Starlink. So, you know, I think there's, like, all this added complexity in business to the mission. But at the same time, it's hard to, like, if you don't follow space super close, it's, like, hard to convey how far ahead. This is, like, not SpaceX fanboy talk. You know, this is just legit. i mean they're so far ahead of the commercial space players but then all the nations that have been doing this for decades there it it's like it's kind of the craziest business and tech story

i i can fathom um then you know beyond spacex yes elon has changed more complicated and sort of let himself lose i i get a little sad i to me um you know twitter seems like a big distraction he seems super worried about ai i always kind of thought he would slowly wind things down and just be doing spacex all the time when you look at um spacex itself you mentioned just how far ahead they are to me it's almost like the operating system of space now right is everyone's got to go through spacex for the most part now in this book you cover a bunch of startups that want to change that they want to have smaller rockets or more you know kind of takeoffs and kind of all these different strategies but is it still true that spacex really is you know the big boy in the room

and if you want to go to space with a satellite or some sort of cargo you're going on a spacex rocket yeah i mean to a large degree you know like look europe has rockets russia has rockets although you you know not many people can use them now china india they can all get you to space just not nearly as frequently as spacex can and and usually not as cheaply uh your point is right i mean there's dozens of rocket companies so people would kind of be like why i mean spacex flies you know there's different classes right there's kind of large medium and small rockets and spacex is pretty dominant in the large part um there's a huge thesis which i get into in gory detail in the book that look we're going to put up we have about like 9 000 satellites orbiting

the earth now that's been on an exponential increase the last three years people think we're going to put up a hundred thousand two hundred thousand pretty quick um you know not like nobody now produces enough rockets to make that happen so if that becomes a reality and it looks quite like it is going to then we need a lot of rocket players probably not not dozens but but more and but spacex would still be the dominant player in that in in that scenario um it's just that i think there's probably more business to go around the other thing is just like if starship works it's such a the rocket is so massive that um you know spacex would be taking like what we used to do for an entire year on one launch into orbit at a lower cost

um there's a lot between here and making that happen but that's you know anyway things could could get quite dramatic it'll be interesting to see exactly how this all plays out so i want to talk about uh the companies that you cover in this book and there were two things that i think kind of came together that seemed to be the drivers of this explosion of uh space startups now spacex obviously started you know more than 20 years ago at this point and they've been at this a long time but one of the things was this guy pete warden who you cover you know almost all throughout the entire book uh talk a little bit about pete his role at nasa this idea that like he kind of was the misfit of nasa but he even has this quote in the book where he's like you know in times of war

uh you need different people who kind of think outside the box than during times of peace and and he was that guy uh so kind of talk talk about this guy maybe his importance to this explosion of startups going to space yeah i think he gives some of the best quotes i think he says something like in times of war sometimes you need you know break break glass for crazy and he was kind of the great crazy general i mean before elon you know so pete's p warden's a bit older he's probably close to his 70s now um he was he was like an astrophysicist by training he had a phd he ended up in the air force became a general you know hardly anybody knows about him but he's like this figure has been lurking back as like kind of a puppet master all this time um he worked on the

star wars missile defense shield during the reagan era he did a bunch of black ops stuff that he can talk about um but yeah you know he ends up he ends up at nasa ames which is like the silicon valley nasa center uh he's the director there in kind of like the early 2000s and you know pete for decades have been writing papers like god the government needs to get out of its own way we need to make cheap rockets we need to send them up all the time we need to make cheap satellites we have to piggyback on moore's law and what's been happening in consumer electronics but but nasa and the military contractors were just sort of you know allergic to any of these new ideas but he assembles like this team of 20-somethings and nasa aims like his little dream team of space weirdos to go make

some of these ideas happen he had to like literally kind of hide them in closets to keep them away from senators and nasa headquarters officials who were going to shut down what they were doing but he he kind of makes this um new era of commercial space happen a lot of the startups in the book come right out at nasa aims and then pete was the one who gave spacex you know elon was funding spacex but when they they wanted to fund their first mission uh through the defense department pete was the one who really kind of made that happen and so um you know i see him and elon as these these two figures that that have propelled all this forward so pete obviously was this huge driving uh factor you mentioned that he went and found all like the space weirdos and

brought them together and what i took away from the book is like when we talk about weirdos we're not just talking about like oh this person's not in nasa we're talking about literally going and finding like the 20 year old kid who uh wants to blow shit up right or like get to space in some weird way um it really was this like weird uh collection of people is that what it takes to kind of create something brand new that's so disruptive is like you have to go so much to the fringe of society and find these people with these wild ideas and maybe the naivety or the stupidity to like actually go after them like talk a little bit about that group that he had put together there uh at that uh facility yeah i mean it's a great question uh you know

there were a lot of people that he brought in i call them pete's kids but there was there was kind of like this special group that were particularly close probably about a dozen people a ton of them lived in a commune called the rainbow mansion that i write about in the book um and yeah i think it's this combination of um you've got these young kids with all these ideas And they're capable, but they've never managed some huge budgets or had to put, like, structure around a project. And then Pete was the, he was like the wizened old veteran in the room who could kind of set that stuff up. And then he could also, it was really like the protection that he gave them, you know. So he hands them the resources, and usually this bureaucracy would come and just find its way to grind everything to a halt.

But Pete was that unique person who was, you know, he almost got fired like 18 times. I mean, he was willing to like sort of deal with a lot of crap and protect these people. So I think it's kind of this mix. I think in space, I don't know if the average person really realizes like how stuck in the mud space had become and had just not changed for like 30, 40 years. So, yeah, I think you needed like all these clean slates, these people that had out there ideas. It's sort of like the kind of person that, you know, they're going to be told that this is done like a thousand times and they're still going to do it. So the other kind of big trend, if you will, was this idea of taking consumer electronics and being able to shoot them into space. And I didn't understand, I think, that component of this explosion of space startups, where my understanding after reading the book is basically there was like space grade materials.

And there were, you know, you'd spend $10 million on something that now is available to consumers literally for a couple hundred bucks. And there was a period where people had the idea, could we take the consumer electronics and would it survive going to space? Could it be on a rocket, et cetera? And so there's the phone sat program and a bunch of this stuff. But talk maybe about that period of time of like, that kind of seems like a stupid idea, you know, in hindsight of like how simple it is. But it does feel like maybe that was a really, really pivotal moment for space kind of exploration in general, that now consumer electronics and the lower price points could actually be used for this stuff. It really was. Planet Labs, you mentioned this phone side program.

And they literally said they bought a Google Nexus phone or a few of them and put them on a rocket and launched them into space to see if they would work. And they did. And that ended up being the basis of Planet Labs, this company that has all these imaging satellites. And I would argue SpaceX had this huge effect on the cost of rockets and access to space. But it was like that moment where people finally got Moore's law and modern technology to space and had this awakening. It's like this weird historical baggage where, yeah, space used to be really hard. So you wanted to make a super fancy radio that you knew could survive the launch and all the harsh conditions of space. And then time passed and you probably didn't need that anymore. but there was some contractor in like Alabama that made the space grade radios

and everyone just bought them from them because they always worked. And so these were the first people who were like, I think a cell phone might work up there. You know, like space is really freaking cold. The temperatures like swing a lot. The rocket launch itself was really violent, but it turned out these phones worked fine. And so then everybody's minds expanded at that point.

And they're like, oh, you know, there's this, there's been 40 years of turns of moore's law and all this innovation now we can not only have cheaper stuff in space but obviously it's going to be more modern technology and and you know just the last part of that is that the thinking around satellites used to be that you you spend a billion dollars and you send this huge thing up and it lasts for 20 years like you know after 20 years pass because it's not it's not a super modern bit of equipment and so like this was like a whole rethinking of oh we should just make these satellites last for like three or five years and just swap them out all the time so this brings me to uh peter beck and uh you talk about like

this rocket bike which i think gets back to this idea of kind of the space weirdos right it's the same person who would put like a jet engine on a bicycle and see how fast it could go same person new things that they can launch rockets into space um but there's uh also a focus on like doing it in new zealand and not necessarily doing it in the united states uh you mentioned in the book there was no infrastructure uh there was no aerospace industry there was no anything in new zealand and yet this guy who literally was spending his time putting you know rocket engines on bicycles in his spare time decides he's gonna go instead of horizontal he's gonna go vertical uh it like how insane is there a way to describe like how crazy of an idea that was before

it actually came to fruition you know i think it's like a one in seven billion sort of situation um i went to new zealand a bunch of times for this book i mean it's like it's it's like as unique as spacex it's just this weirder personal story in a lot of ways um peter grew up in invercargill which i don't know if anyone's ever had the pleasure it's a very nice city but it's like at the bottom of the south island of new zealand the next stop is antarctica it's like very rural there's there's not much going on there and and this is like not a kid who was you know um on his way to like a scholarship at mit or anything i mean he was very good with his hands but he he didn't even go to college he he was working at a dishwasher maker an appliance maker

um as like a apprentice and and like you said so he used he was just obsessed with rockets you know and rocket he just likes to go fast and so he has this he has this house and he's got like a shed out back and he's making like his own propellants he used to put garbage bags around his body to like protect himself from the propellants and he made his own rocket engines and he just got really far um i forget how long ago it was like maybe 2006 he made this rocket called the atia one and it was really just him and two part-time people and and it it got to uh to the edge of space um as like basically a hobbyist project and then turn that into a company and man new zealand has nothing i interviewed the prime minister who was who was running the country when peter was doing

all this and he's like look well first of all it was hilarious because the prime minister showed up in like a t-shirt and shorts and like offered to pick me up in his car and take me to brunch but he's like look we've got we've got like two tanks we barely have like a ship you know and this guy's coming in telling me we're going to space i was kind of like do we want to you know get involved in that that seems sort of big for us and there's no talent to lean on nobody had ever done this before and for people who don't know rocket lab is like the second coming of spacex i mean spacex has launched hundreds of times rocket labs launched almost 40 and after that you drop down to like one or two very quickly and and so i don't know man i you know i do this for a living i sort

of chase weirdos around the world and and i never met anyone like like peter what do you think makes him so different is it just the upbringing is it like literally growing up in new zealand you know literally uh kind of changes the way you think is it something about the family because i know that there was a lot of uh mechanics and and things that they were doing on a day-to-day basis tinkering and unpacking machines and things like that like what what drove him to kind of end up in this very different place this episode is brought to you by accenture when your advertising operations fall out of sync everything else follows spotify and accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation analytics and smarter workflows to

simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business the result less time spent on operations more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most learn more at accenture.com spotify part of it has to be the genes because i sort of got super fascinated in his dad who was like this expert in everything he was like a master sculptor he was like the world's leading um authority on jade and like worked at a museum he built his own telescope for the museum um that peter used to sort of like help out with as a kid and yeah so they just had this garage peter had two brothers and they just sat there tinkering on cards non-stop and it was just like uh it was like this brotherly competition to see who could who could do more but you know

peter has become clear to me over time peter is some kind of genius because you know he built after that first rocket they built this rocket called electron which is their workhorse today is it's and it's you can ask pretty much anyone as far as small rockets go it's like the perfectly engineered rocket and and yeah peter had a team of hundreds of people that helped him but there were there were countless times where it just wasn't going to happened they couldn't solve some problem and and i asked peter about this so i was like yeah i would just go take a shower you know and like this idea would come to me of how to fix this thing he he seems to have some like intuitive knowledge of life but he seems to be able to translate some

intuitive knowledge of physics and the vision in his head like very directly to his hands if you ask anyone pete's down there with like a lathe and milling machine and making the stuff himself So, I don't know, part of it's the culture, part of it's his genes, and then I think he's just, like, exceptional. He's also not, like, he's possessed by having to make stuff, right? Like, he made a rocket engine just because, like, he had to. He's not like Elon. He's not trying to make some colony on Mars. It was more just like, I want to see if I can make a rocket engine.

and then like and then uh i want to see if i can make a rocket and then he just i think that's his calling is the object itself yeah what's fascinating is each person in the stories uh that you tell in this book uh they seem to have different drivers right and it goes back to um you know if you look at think of elon actually my wife has a a theory which i don't think we'll ever get kind of confirmation on but um when she read your book she said listen you know it seems like elon was uh kind of a great entrepreneur and he was going but when his child passed away he became possessed he wanted to save humanity he wanted to kind of go and it became this thing of like i'm going to level up my ambition i'm going to level up you know the risk that i'm

willing to take and that was like a very pivotal moment did you find the same thing when when you were actually spending time with him and writing that book yeah it's a hard thing to talk about you know because elon's always you know his first child died of sudden infant death syndrome and um elon's always kind of downplayed it you know i mean maybe for obvious reasons he just doesn't want to talk about it his ex-wife though used to sort of try to talk about it and you know i would just say look what's the point of dwelling on this i just gotta get to work um Um, so, you know, it's a hard thing. I did try a few times to kind of get into it, but it was like one of those areas.

He just, I don't know, he's, he loves it a bit more of like, I would call it like a expressive state than when I was doing a lot of interviews for the book. I think some of those things he wasn't used to talking about. Um, but you know, I don't know. That's a good question. I never thought about it fully like that. He, like, SpaceX had already started then, but it was, you know, and he'd always had this Mars idea in the back of his head. But at that point, it was more like to be in the southwest of space to be really cheap and more like the people in the book to, like, get stuff to space all the time really cheap.

You have to imagine, right, that something like that has a huge impact on you. And if there's like any defining quality of Elon, it's like this relentless sort of pursuits of making the most of your time that you have. And so, you know, if you're playing armchair psychologist, you could definitely see how that kind of would feed into something like that. Yeah, it's fascinating to kind of think through, you know, you've got Peter Beck, you've got Elon and kind of what's driving those two guys. But then you get to somebody like Chris Kemp. And for those that don't know in the book, basically, he has a very similar drive and determination and it seems like kind of will his way into doing things. And there's this now famous Alameda kind of campus or site and it's abandoned. and he basically goes and he's trying to get the Alameda city council and local leaders to like essentially give it to him right and be like hey like bring industry here from the Bay Area right like come and build this out and they're kind of like waffling it seems and he basically just moves

in and just like starts like fixing it up and on next thing you know they're like well like I guess we should just say yes because he kind of like doing what he said he was going to do is that what actually happened yeah pretty much I mean so I was with Bastress is like the first day they started and man this place was like a real shithole you know it was it was uh like there's kind of two parts to it there's two buildings that they've taken over and one was this it used to be a naval airbase and so during world war ii this was like a place where they um did a lot of repairs to to jet fighters and and the first building astra had was like this very weird they to test jet engines inside so that so that like our enemies couldn't see what was going on or

whatever and um and so they have these huge like tunnels um with like these 12 foot thick walls and and these exhausts for all the fire and but you know like this place was full of uh like softball league paperwork typewriters that had been in city it was like a city dub you know it was like like all the stuff the city had just been burying there for years there was like a dead dude who got electrocuted trying to um grab the copper from some of the wirings there was like a dead body in there and uh you know the city didn't know what to do with it part of it is like a they thought it was like a hazardous and exactly like you said chris was chris was like well i know what to do with this you know and so so sometimes at night they were just they would bash down like

entire they would have to get stuff like a electric um like a power subsystem into the building and the door wasn't big enough so they would like bash down an entire like wall of the building put the electric subsystem in in the middle of the night when nobody could see the repair the whole wall and uh and just keep moving forward and and over time this was a long process like like they always got kicked out a few times you know like the fire marshals would show up and things like that but yeah over time then the city walked in one day and they have like this glorious rocket factory in the middle of alameda which is a very like um suburban city near oakland so um yeah chris i think had had some of that elon spirit similar

things happened in the early spacex days as well now the other character that i want to talk about is uh max max pull up how do you say his last name oh yeah all right so he's fascinating obviously i think you call out in the book multiple times like i've never been around a person like this before uh for those who are unfamiliar with him he basically made a ton of money unclear how much uh in uh building internet companies in europe he's ukrainian um again i say unclear because it's unclear how much money he made it seems like it's unclear in terms of all of the different ways said he made the money in some ways people are like look he's got dating websites and things that you know might not be for everyone but it's understandable and there's plenty of them here in

the u.s and then there's some people who accuse him of doing you know maybe illegal things or close to it uh potentially immoral things whatever but he ends up with a ton of money he then uh starts to invest heavily in the space business and basically it sounds like the u.s kind of railroaded him right they basically said look man you've got this business you've done all this work you've invested all this capital and right when the rocket's sitting on the launch pad and pretty much ready to go they come to him and say yeah we ain't letting a ukrainian uh benefit uh based on u.s space technology is that kind of your take pretty much one of the craziest stories i've ever seen you know um you got everything about max right he was even weirder he used to

be like a ob-gyn before he was a software magnate you know his parents um worked ukraine was like the backbone of the soviet space program his parents worked on the soviet rockets and software so it was kind of like in his blood he ends up buying this this bankrupt rocket maker in texas called firefly and and max had this crazy vision to try to unite like the old ukrainian soviet space with like new american space and um yeah it was all going well for a while he put 250 million dollars in a firefly which after that might actually be more than elon personally has put into spacex and is a bit behind jeff bezos but after that you know max is kind of is right there and took years the firefly rocket is kind of one of those medium-sized rockets like it's no

no joke it took a lot of money and engineering and and they got into the pad at vandenberg in southern california where a lot of rockets launched from and then things started to take a turn all of a sudden i mean ukraine is is obviously meant to be like an ally of the u.s but the u.s government started to have questions about a ukrainian owning a rocket company that could fly from the united states so they start like blocking him they start messing with his other businesses kind of like stopping the transfer of money um from some things and then so I obtained all these secret documents you know CFIUS is the agency that like raises these foreign ownership concerns and I actually got the CFIUS complaint against Max um I found it

pretty like hilarious and unsatisfying there's there's maybe like two sentences about his shady business stuff and then there's like multiple paragraphs that they essentially say like ukraine is near russia russia is a space superpower um max is ukrainian he may become a russian asset at like some point in the future so we do not want him to own this company i was like these things happen i've covered like huawei a lot you know getting messed with by the u.s government because of its chinese ownership and stuff i unless the government has some amazing confidential information i've never seen anything like this to put like 250 million they let him it wasn't like this went on for years

nobody was questioning it while he was pouring money into it it was only once the rocket was ready they're like oh this was a bad idea you know and um we could get into it a little more if you want but but the timing on this was terrible because they sort of kick him out and then the ukraine war kicks off like a year later when it would be pretty handy to have uh someone like max on your side well what's fascinating to me is elon obviously is south african right you've got bezos who's an american but we just talked about we've got people who are from new zealand we've got people from kind of all these different uh countries and not only are we talking about the individuals themselves and kind of their nationalities but also we're

talking about well family members or you know uh grandparents and and you know it's it's the classic like america is just the home of immigrants and so um you know it is in one way uh kind of a sad story right that somebody came to the united states they poured all this money into it they built out this amazing thing on the other hand i guess the question is like are there valid concerns about non-americans owning technology that is being developed in the u.s specifically around space like what what is your you're the foremost expert that i would know uh on space at this point in terms of all these different companies all the nuances like how do you balance it in your head in terms of like maybe where the line should be drawn uh versus where it is today

so i've got complicated thoughts on that you know like in the in the max situation in particular um i thought it was a little ridiculous because because ukraine is an ally of the united states like it would behoove us to have their engineers to set up this linkage between Ukraine and the U.S. You know, there's been rumors for like decades that there's not much money anymore in the Ukrainian space program. They have very smart engineers that those guys sometimes are working for like North Korea or Iran on their ICBMs and stuff like that. And I thought, here's this guy who actually has like a plan and he's like a man of action and means and he's making this happen um like the bigger question so over the last couple of years we've seen the u.s

government throw out a couple people like max there's also a russian dude who had a space company and he got tossed as well and there's always been these concerns right because they are like the rockets are like icbms even rocket lab peter beck in new zealand he basically had to beg the United States government to exist because they did not want another country having like an ICBM. And even though New Zealand's part of the Five Eyes, it's like our closest alliance. He had to spend like a year going to see Obama to allow Rocket Lab to happen. They had to set up a headquarters in Los Angeles. It was sort of like a fake headquarters for a while and it's real now. But it's super complicated. I think to me, I understand the roots of all this.

I think it's like it's getting to be sort of an archaic proposition. We used to not want our aerospace secrets to fall into other people's hands. Like Peter Beck went on the Internet and read a few textbooks and made the second most successful rocket company in the world from New Zealand with like no U.S. help. So my general theory is that like if, you know, just about anyone can do this, if they really put their mind to it and are smart enough. at this point and then you know i make a television show called hello world where i go all around the world interview scientists i just went to like kyrgyzstan and they have a team of 10 women who are just college undergrads who are making the country's first satellite for like 250 000 dollars um i don't know i just think this is like a new era and like if we're trying to keep um

if our goal really is to like try to keep ICBM type technology out of the hands of some nations I just think it's sort of pointless you know at this juncture it's just it's like not going to happen and in the U.S. doesn't you know anyway yeah it's been China's doing just fine with their space program I just I think it's uh I think these are very like cold war cold war kind of vibes that are still hanging around now one of the parts of the book that um i think i knew this existed but i didn't understand the extent to which it existed is uh there's a difference obviously between the rocket company and the launch pads and there's a payment that gets made to the launch pad when uh it is used but there's also a payment that gets made when it is supposed

to be used it's kind of reserved but not used it's just a lower fee right kind of like hey you wasted our time so give us some money um but in the book you talk about pretty much people going around the world they're going to hawaii they're going to various highlands they're going to alaska in i forget who it is but somebody goes to india right and they're essentially looking for uh these launch pads and some of them it seems like have to do with geography and kind of you know a trajectory and things like that some have to do with cost some of them have to do with backlog of uh actual schedule and things like uh that is there an argument that the united states should just go like create a bunch more launch pads around the coastlines of the u.s and like let's just go all

in on space and try to you know beat all these other countries or is there actual value either for the united states or for these companies in having launch pads literally be you know across geographies across time zones across uh countries and and that's actually a better thing dude i'm impressed you're the first person who's like picked up on all this and they're like sort of sophistication and intricacies of all these these pads and everything yeah you know um i never thought about it fully like that before the u.s is in some ways launch pad rich we've got stuff in california virginia florida and alaska on the other hand most of those are quite government or nasa controlled so the rocket lab has a private spaceport um spacex has its one in texas you know

which is is pretty starship focused but other than that you know it's hard to find a private it um spaceport i think the the u.s is disadvantaged to build a ton more in that i think people are going to be super worried about having like a you kind of need it as close to the equator as you can get so you want to be like southern california southern florida alaska is good just like you mentioned there's specific orbits you can get to from up there um but i I think the trend on all this really, just today, we saw this like old concept coming back today, which is these barges out at sea. I think a lot of this moves to like offshore, which is getting totally away from people. You pump out a rocket in a factory, you put it on a boat, you send it to this barge and then launch it out in the ocean.

And obviously the U.S. would be in great shape to do something like that. And that was, you know, we talked about Astra, this company Alameda. I mean, this is something they've been pursuing for a long time is that they're right by the water. It's just you literally pop the rocket out of the factory onto those boats and then like off it goes, maybe even the same day or the next day. I think that's probably where we're heading is like less infrastructure instead of more. When you think about those barges, are these like normal barges that can just be converted or do you think they have to be kind of custom built? obviously i think a lot of people uh will think of a barge in space and they'll see you know the rocket boosters come and re-land on these like drone ships in the ocean with spacex

is that what we're talking about like spacex is the only one that can land this is more this is more on the disposable end and yeah they have to be like you have to have some infrastructure but this is also like we whatever picture most of us have this picture in our head of like 120 people in this like nasa mission control and everybody's got a job and they've all got the red phone and they're sweating you know like astro launches their rockets with like two people in a modified you know trailer uh shipping container that can go anywhere around the world this is really where we're heading so the barges have to have like some infrastructure to fuel the rockets and stand it up and all that stuff but otherwise no man it's just a

just like a flat flat all you need is a little flat surface and stand the thing up and shoot it yeah it's absolutely incredible to kind of think about how quickly this is all uh all playing out um i want to talk about uh companies like varda as well as you know uh i'm an investor in it but what's interesting to me is in reading the book uh now i feel much more educated to talk to delhi and will and those guys right and be a little dangerous i really feel feel better about your investment for sure for sure but if i had to segment out the industry you know kind of after reading the book it's like okay you have to launch pads you obviously have a lot more of the kind of public stuff um then you've got all these rocket companies and that's really where the focus has

been right is how do we get these rocket companies i think spacex with starlink they're the first ones or one of the first ones back okay like now that we can get to space what do we do when we're there right we've got obviously a couple of other companies that are trying to do things around satellites and stuff like that. Varda is trying to do manufacturing or these like space factory type things. Talk about maybe not just Varda, but like, what is the cohort of companies that are going to say, all right, I don't want to worry about the rocket thing. Like, I'll just hitch a ride with these folks who already figured out the rocket thing. But I want to focus on what we actually do once we get to space. I've seen, I think, Bezos and Blue Origin talk some of this

as well. Like, what are you seeing there that's interesting to you? Or what are some of the companies or people that i think people should pay attention to yeah i mean honestly the rockets are sexy and fun to watch but this is like where most of the action is and i think the money and there's just tons more companies than rocket companies um just super quick you know this like we would not be having this conversation five years ago i mean the stuff is like flipped so quick and and part of it is like the industry has matured so you used to be a rocket maker and now and that was all you did and now companies like rocket lab so they make the rocket and then they make 90 of what goes into a satellite the electronics the solar panels if you're a

another startup you just take your fancy camera for your scientific experiment and you just plop that into rocket labs little sort of bust i mean this is what varda is doing in fact and And, you know, this just saves a ton of cost. It used to be like every startup used to have to do all this work, basically building the innards of the satellite for just trying to do their mission in space. Like in the book, I argue communications and imaging have been these first two major businesses. And we do have thousands upon thousands of satellites doing that. And we're going to have more.

I think Varda represents like that. So I think they're going up what, next month, I think? In June, yep. I think it's June, yeah. So, and on that rocket, I mean, I think that rocket is like a symbol of a moment in time because it is our first one where we're really getting to new businesses. Like everyone's always said, oh, there's imaging and communications and a little sort of fringe science for laboratories, but like, what is the next business?

So VARD is going to go out, they're going to make pharmaceuticals, you know, there's Astroforge. I used to think asteroid mining was insane until I actually went to Astroforge's office for my show. And it looks, it's a very talented team. It looks very real to me. They're setting up their first, they're not like mining an asteroid right away, but they're setting up their first, you know, like prototype to see if they can burn through a sample up there and get some data off of it. And so pretty quickly, like we are now, I would broadly call it manufacturing of different stripes, you know, and I think we're going to move industry into low Earth orbit. There's a lot of sense of putting things like data centers that can be solar powered up there, all kinds of interesting things you can do with molecules without gravity pressing on you. So I think right at this very moment, this whole thing is kicking off in a new way.

It reminds me, I'm old enough to sort of live through the 1996 consumer internet where we laid all this fiber and we're building these data centers and everyone's talking about killer apps all the time. It's annoying. But everyone's searching for, we know there's something here. What are people going to do? Some of the business models were maybe obvious, but nobody would have guessed like sort of what 2023 fully looks like and and we're running this

huge experiment in lower earth orbit is like it are we having that same moment right now and do these things check out or do they not i gotta ask a couple of questions that i've always been obsessed with one are we going to colonize mars in our lifetime this episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify.

you know people i am i could i could not be more convinced that spacex is going to send rockets to mars it's going to send tons of stuff to mars when you get to like an actual human i get uh it is awful right it's like a six month ride you really want to believe that you get a ride back you gotta put up we gotta put up some sort of infrastructure um to to um some sort of infrastructure to like let a human inhabit that i would say when i finished the book on elon in like 2015 i was pretty convinced that of sort of what spacex would do there i'm more convinced than ever that that company is like the most capable um company the most capable like arrangements of thousands of people maybe that's like ever been assembled so um i don't know if

i'm ready to commit to full colonization i am super confident we're going to send stuff to mars and and i think probably like we have some people try it out you know i i i'm less optimistic than elon about like how hospitable it ends up being up there do you think elon dies on earth or on mars it's always said he wants to die on mars man um i think if you asked him these days he'd probably tell you like an ai was gonna assassinate him before he gets up there i'm kind of surprised he hasn't been on one of these space exhibitions now you know we just set up another batch of uh of like private astronauts no come on keep that man on earth protect him at all costs do not let him get on any rockets they're pretty safe man it's probably safer

than being in a car i understand but still in the one-off chance can you imagine the damage that would be done to the space industry elon musk something happened to him on a rocket you know and again i'm sorry i'm really this is really not meant to like be a fanboy sort of thing spacex is just very cool i did not think people realize how fuck the united states would be if spacex did not exists like we just killed the space shuttle it's like lucky to boeing we're doing nothing new at all um china has been pumping just billions of dollars people would be freaking out i i laugh sometimes um i mean look elon brings a lot of a lot of grief upon himself and says some crazy things i i always i laugh that uh it's so black and white and like i find the whole conversation

sort of stupid sometimes it's like it's like okay who like on some level why do you care what anybody says just look at the last 20 years of what this person actually did i mean it sort of speaks for itself it's also crazy to to do it in 20 years is uh like look at uh blue origin you know um they've done okay i mean they have like these tourist lights they've existed for just as long as spacex um nowhere in the same ballpark you think like the billionaires got like a group chat and they're just like i'm starting a space company the next one's like me too dude if they do elon's crap it all over because like bezos and branson have had a tough time of it or paul allen passed away it really hasn't gone that well for them i when does this podcast go up as uh this week

this week i mean later this week i got a story running on uh an exclusive story on sergey brin who is not doing rockets but you will see he's also getting in the aerospace game um there does there seems to be a thing right it's like i guess after you've bought a mega yacht you have to like of course move on but elon's the only one who's turned it into a real business you know um i think I used to not be a moon person I was sort of like yeah let's just do the Mars thing the moon is is actually getting interesting now we got like a couple you know private companies working with NASA to send humans back but then there's companies now that are like starting to think about private colonies on the moon which is actually affordable now they're putting private

satellites around the moon I actually I think the moon gets pretty interesting the next 10 years A couple more questions for you. We now are getting to a point where we've got like air traffic control of all these satellites. And how do we actually keep them from colliding with each other? We then get into like the whole like military industrial complex and like, you know, can I shoot down your satellite? Can you shoot down mine? And you mentioned in the book that Russia basically took out one of their own satellites as kind of a reminder, like, you know, we have missiles that can that can hit these things. Is there legitimacy and like offensive or just defensive capabilities when it comes to the Space Force thing? Is there going to be like a Blackwater kind of, you know, private, you know, defense force that you can hire to protect your satellites? Like, what's going on in kind of the military components of this, both with the military space force, but also with maybe private companies trying to get into that game? Man, that is a cool, I'm going to write a short story on that idea after this. I mean, I don't think people realize how weird shit is about to get.

Like, Android absolutely needs space defense service. That would be cool. I could see this. I could see this. you know it's like on on the big level right everybody should be incented to not screw this up because the second you blow somebody else's salad up you kind of just risk taking out your own service so you like on one level people should be rational actors i think russia has already you know russia is the great wild card in all this giant space superpower with space program

collapsing um no commercial space startups at all to speak of like how do they sort of handle this new world china's like this mix of government like trying to sort of become private and then the u.s is just like roaring commercial space the like government guys are kind of laggards um i don't know how things are going to go there's other stories in the book too like people should know you know i think it's china put up a satellite that then popped out a baby satellite that would like just hang out by american satellites and and it didn't seem to be doing anything but it was sort of like uh if we wanted to shove you out of orbit we probably could or maybe we could hack you so it's it's really strange in the defense department my god yes they desire

the ability to like fly a rocket tomorrow to put a satellite right over whatever they want and and they're getting like close to that so we did it we did it to an asteroid right didn't we didn't we send a rocket and like hit an asteroid and try to uh redirect the asteroid yeah we've done stuff like that but in this is this is like utah they call it responsive space i mean the dod has been fantasized this is like space force all comes from this and pete warden who we talked about is like kind of the progenitor of a lot of this it's it's just treating space like another arm of the military where like something breaks out you mobilize your air your aircraft carriers your your jets your troops and then you start sending rockets up to do stuff you know um the

problem is like there's things we really depend on like gps today which is you sort of take it for granted but it's like this glue that makes your cell phone work and and all kinds of transportation work i mean the second we screw something up in space that dot you know like we can we can back in time quite quickly all right last question for you are aliens real this is funny man okay so pete warden you know astrophysicist black ops if somebody should know about aliens is him i've spent a lot of time with pete i've asked him this several times i mean he's actually like looks for aliens he assures me they're not maybe maybe he knows and he's not telling me if anyone was gonna know i've asked elon too i'm like look man you're going up there more than anybody else

if aliens were gonna contact someone it's probably you you know elon says he's got nothing either so i don't know do they believe that they exist or do they just believe hey we haven't come in contact with them yet like i think i elon i i sort of get the feeling just doesn't even think about this much pete um you know he wants to explore the outer reaches of the solar system and he's he's being funded by uri milner right now to make like a a probe that would go out of our soul like pete wants to find i think pete believes that he wants to find find stuff um so you know it's one of the greatest it's one of the greatest conquests that a human could do right now like the person yeah the person who contacts aliens you know thomas edison uh you know

Nikola Tesla you go through all these things all these inventions all these things like there's certain people in history I think Elon for SpaceX and kind of reasonable rockets all that stuff like he'll be remembered for literally centuries the person who contacts aliens first they're on the map I saw Andy Weir who wrote

The Martian he tweeted yesterday he's like you realize there's a non-zero chance that our first contact with aliens will be a dick pic that's been like you know forwarded out or something but you know i don't know man if um i wish i knew this is i elon will pay the aliens off in dogecoin just for the last can you imagine if uh elia if elon was our first contact i don't know

he would be attacked no one would believe him he'd be just attacked they'd be like shut up you don't know anything you're stupid i think you're probably right all right ashley this book was fantastic when the heavens went on sale the misfits and geniuses racing to put space within reach uh what i love about it is you kind of build off of the work that you did in uh the book on elon but also you cover uh what now have become some of the most important companies in space you've got a bunch of people in here uh people who worked at nasa people who are building these companies uh but also you you help explain i think some of the difficulties and complexities in doing this stuff right it's not just like hey raise some money from venture capitalists go out

onto this launch pad launch the thing into space and we all get rich there is a ton of complexity uh and one of the things that you know i think people probably don't understand is uh when you build the first rocket it's not supposed to actually make it to space right like if you launch a rocket and it goes to space the first time like you are the one in a billion right it's actually no we're just launching it yeah yeah you may be the only one and so i think the book is just does a great job one explaining uh kind of the frontiers of space and why people are doing this but also the progress we've made to date so far so i highly suggest people go get it uh again when the heavens uh went on sale the misfits and geniuses racing to put space within reach

it's even got the really great photo on the front so if you're watching this uh it's worth it i promise um any last words from you ashley where can we send people to find you uh online yeah man the uh we're gonna make a hbo documentary about that here we're in the process um i spell my name a little weird with two e's just ashleyvance.com or at twitter same thing um and i uh just great being on with you pop i appreciate it man i appreciate you taking the time a couple years out of your life to write the book and then let me read it in a few hours uh but we will definitely do this again in the future and i appreciate it all right thanks man