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Hello, Acquired LPs. We are excited to share an interview that I did with Rob Meyerson, the former president of Blue Origin. We recorded this one virtually for the aerospace industry conference Ascend, which is a great event if you are curious about the space industry.
You'll notice a little bit of audio hiccups on my side since I actually recorded this while I was in Lisbon for the Solana conference and I did not have my normal acquired home studio. So thank you for bearing with me on that and enjoy this very special episode with friend and acquired community member, Rob Meyerson.
Okay, good morning. I'm Rob Meyerson, Executive Producer for Ascend, and it's my pleasure to introduce Ben Gilbert, co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs and co-host of Acquired.
Those who know me well know that I'm a huge fan of Acquired. I love the show because Ben and his co-host, David Rosenthal, bring in-depth research, compelling storytelling, and a great sense of community to the Acquired audience. I met Ben in 2018, and I considered him to be a friend and a mentor.
Well, Rob, so great to be here with you. Thanks for doing an interview together. This is going to be great. It is my great pleasure, everyone who's listening, to introduce longtime friend and aerospace veteran executive Rob Meyerson. So Rob is best known for his time as president of Blue Origin for the 15-year stretch from 2003 to 2017. He grew the team size more than 100x
You added new facilities, managed the development and production of New Shepard, the reusable launcher. You created, with the team, a liquid rocket engine business and managed the design of New Glenn while achieving financial and organizational goals, all reporting to Jeff Bezos. Before that, Rob was an aerospace engineer at NASA Johnson Air Force.
Space Center, JSC, for 12 years and the Senior Program Manager for Reusable Launch Vehicles at Kistler Aerospace, which obviously became a very important part of the industry that private space is in today.
And these days, Rob is an independent angel investor and advisor to space and hypersonics companies like Hermias, an operating partner at C5 Capital, where he leads the space practice and invests in companies like Axiom Space. And of course, as Rob, as you mentioned, the executive producer here at Ascend. So...
Welcome, and thank you for my kind introduction too. You bet, Ben. It's really great to be here. We have these conversations often, but I'm glad to be sharing this one with the audience. Well, we've got, I think, an hour here together, and we're going to try and spend 45 minutes and then open up for some Q&A at the end. So first, I want to just ask, how did you find out about Blue in 2003? Because it wasn't exactly a well-known or even publicly known at all company. Right.
No, it was Blue Origin was completely stealth. They were operating out of a small warehouse in South Seattle. And I was working at Kistler Aerospace and I had regular chats with a friend of mine who happened to be consulting for Blue Origin.
And he said, you know, Rob, I'm working for this company and you would just love what they're doing, you know, but I can't tell you anything about it. He had signed an NDA. And so after he told me this, I really kind of pushed a little further and said, OK, you know, I'll send you my resume. And can you get it into the right hands? Because it just seems so interesting. So I sent my resume into, you know, literally a black hole, completely sight unseen. I didn't know anything.
who the backer was. I didn't know what they were doing. I had no idea. But I got a call within a week and invited to come in to interview. And I did a group interview in South Seattle off of East Marginal Way at the original Blue Origin facility. And then I interviewed with Jeff Bezos in 2003 in April.
After that interview, I left with a very strong feeling that, you know, the vision that Jeff had, that if I joined the company, I'd have a seat at the table and have a role in building something special, building the company, making decisions. And I came in as an individual contributor. And within about three months of joining and about October of 2003, Jeff asked me to leave the company. So I will point out within three.
Maybe a week or two after I interviewed, Brad Stone came out with an article about this secret company, which is just kind of interesting. But yeah, there was nothing out there. I didn't realize Brad broke the first news about Blue. He did. Yeah, he sure did.
Well, let me get this question out of the way early. And I figured I have to ask it, but what was it like directly working for Jeff and running a company that was so much of an important pillar of his life? I know he was very into space starting even in high school and college. I think he was the president of the Aerospace Student Organization at Princeton. Yeah, he was led up SEDS, the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. And
Working for Jeff was great. He has a thirst for learning about the space industry, about the notables. He loved meeting people.
folks from the industry, industry leaders. He was well-read, would read textbooks. We took regular field trips to important aerospace locations around the country, the NASA centers, the universities, related companies. We did really anything we could do to go and gather lessons learned about what makes a good company in the phase we were in and what we needed to do to grow. He's super smart and really just literally blew me away technically. That point never changed, but he could participate in
And just about any technical discussion, someone who can devour a report or, you know, a memo and ask great questions, drill down to the to the point that, you know, where the company needed to go. And this is something I watched every day while I work for him and heard repeatedly from other folks at Blue who interacted with him as well. And he did get good.
busier over time, especially after buying the Washington Post and opening Amazon Studios and all the other things that took up his time. But he always managed to make time for Blue Origin. And that's really something that was great about working for him. Was it always a reusable launch company? What was the original thesis, at least at the time that you joined with Blue before it sort of started evolving to what it is today? Yeah. When I joined, Blue was like a think tank.
It was in exploratory mode. It was looking at concepts and technologies that Jeff could invest in that might have a 20 to 30 year kind of timeframe. And so the team was looking at non-traditional concepts, like really primarily for application for launch, like
laser beam propulsion, you know, was one idea or air launch from a large flying platform. And back in those days, Neil Stevenson was a key member of the team, the author and writer of Snow Crash and later Seven Eves, Cryptonomicon. And he contributed so much to those early efforts. He stayed on and transitioned into an advanced concepts role and stayed involved with Blue until 2006.
I watched Neil, you know, just contribute greatly to early architecture studies that led to New Shepard and New Glenn. One of the early ideas, this air-launched flying platform led to the development of a vehicle called Karen. It's Karen, you know, the moon, not Karen the...
pandemic era, you know, crazy person. But Karen was a legacy program that was going when I started at Blue back in 2003. And it was a jet engine powered vertical takeoff, vertical landing vehicle that was envisioned to demonstrate this air launch platform. So, you know, when I came on board, I just went to hiring, filling out the team. It was about 15 people to lead and execute on the effort. And, you
They designed and built the structure and the propellant systems and the control actuators, the electronics and the software. And the vehicle itself was powered by these four Rolls-Royce Viper jet engines that were modified to run vertically. We trucked the vehicle out to Moses Lake, Washington, at Grant County Airport in central Washington and flew it for the first and only time on March 5th, 2005.
We knew that was a legacy program, so we wanted to fly it and demonstrate it and have that great rallying cry for the team. But we wanted the team to focus on rockets, so we retired it and put it in the Museum of Flight for a little while.
And did that work right out of the gate? I'm imagining something with four jet engines strapped to the bottom of it. Did it go up and come back down successfully? It did. Yeah, absolutely. It worked perfectly. It went up to a few hundred feet, about 300 feet, but it worked perfectly. And we took the lessons we learned from that and applied it to everything we did afterwards. Amazing.
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You were talking about the team then. I mean, now we have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, let's call it high tens of thousands of people working in privately funded commercial space companies, Blue, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and a very long tail of others working.
That, I imagine, was not the case when you first joined Blue. So what was it like recruiting folks to join what seemed unprecedented and crazy in 2003 to call it 2006 or 2007? All those new people you refer to, they're all new. The aerospace industry is roughly the same size as it was back then. But back in 2003, first off,
My top priority was always recruiting, hiring. You know, I consider that a privilege. And I look back and one of the things I'm most proud of is having the opportunity to work with such a talented and amazing team. And we had one of those at Blue. The thing that challenged us in recruiting was we are so quiet. You know, we're a company that chose to talk about things that we had done versus recruiting.
talking about what we're going to do. So we were in a building phase and there was really not much to talk about. So there wasn't any press releases. There weren't a lot of visits to a podcast or a good morning America for that matter. And there wasn't much as far as social networks either. You know, LinkedIn was created in 2002, 2003 timeframe, but not really widely used. Whereas I would hit LinkedIn today for almost any question about talent. You know, you look back and, uh,
LinkedIn reached 10 million users in April of 2007. Yeah, that really puts things in perspective that this was a pre-LinkedIn era. Yeah. And I mean, I look back on my account recently. I joined in November of 2007. So you can mark this down as the one situation in my entire life where I was a fairly early adopter. But it's now got 800 million users. So pretty much
most people are, you know, many people are on LinkedIn. But the other point about recruiting in those days is there weren't a lot of commercial space success stories to talk about. This was before SpaceX. SpaceX had been started in 2002, but it wasn't
People didn't point to SpaceX as the commercial space success story. There was one negative space story, which was Beale Aerospace, which Andy Beale is a Dallas area banker, made a lot of money. He started an aerospace company and he famously grew it to about 200 people and then he shut it down on a weekend in 2000. And so
We still had that sort of hangover from that where you would be recruiting people that are, you know, might have been interested in coming to a commercial space company, but they said, well, why, why should I trust this person that, you know, that really wasn't accessible to them given the Beal experience. So we often had to explain why blue wouldn't become another Beal. That was a story, but given all those strengths, you know, like how do you find high quality people? And it's just,
You know, it's like eating an elephant one bite at a time. There was just one step, one position. And I had to create the story of the company, what we're doing, how we're going to do it, what types of people we're going to be hiring, how we'd be funded.
developing personal relationships with universities and setting up a great internship program and a new graduate development program and then just a lot of hard work. We had a great team doing it. And I mean, I look back, there's a great team there at Blue and the folks that aren't there anymore have started really cool companies, you know, like the one you mentioned, like Hernius or Starfish Space that you and I know well, companies like Ursa Major, Stokes Space, Relativity Space,
people that have you know from blue that have gone on to work at spacex and astra and space flight so it's kind of cool to see them sort of seeding the growth of the industry and building you know hiring that next
10 to 20 to 100,000 people in the space industry. As someone who's looking to invest more and more in commercial space, that's part of my investment thesis is at this point, it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy that the talent density... I mean, if you think about there were probably hundreds or maybe single thousands of people 20 years ago working on privately funded commercial space. I mean, you were working for defense, you were working for government contractors, you were working for these enormous companies.
that had 10 plus year timelines on the products that were shipping. And at this point, it really is this talent flywheel or self-fulfilling prophecy of whether or not you have high conviction in any specific opportunity that someone is pursuing as a startup. There are
100,000 brand new people to this ecosystem that but for Blue and the other companies alongside you, it wouldn't have gotten catalyzed. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I don't know if we're at 100,000 yet, but certainly tens of thousands. And that talent density is a really interesting way to think about it. And then you think about all the companies that have gone public-
via SPAC, all the new startups that are being created with venture investment. There's a lot of money going towards hiring people. The billions of dollars, you know, a good proportion of that, maybe half of it's going to go to hiring talent and that's new talent. So they're going to be competing with the traditional tech industry. And, you know, space is just one sector in the hard tech area that's growing. There's also high speed flight and there's urban air mobility and there's
nuclear power, fission and fusion reactors, huge amounts of money going into new private companies that are taking on these hard problems. So the talent pool, it's going to get really competitive for new people. So good time to go get an engineering degree.
I bet. So I've recently seen a video of the dozens and dozens of times that SpaceX blew up a rocket trying to land it in a reusable way. And I think it's a public video, so anyone out there can go and watch it. I have never seen such a video for Blue Origin. And I don't think that is just because you didn't decide to release one. I think it was a little bit of a philosophical difference. Can you talk us through what the timeline was before successfully landing the first
New Shepard or New Shepard-like vehicle? And did it kind of work out of the chute, or were there a lot of explosions just like there were over at SpaceX? Well, I wouldn't say it worked out of the chute. But I think what you're referring to, it's kind of an architectural difference in the way
Blue Origin approached vertical powered landing compared to SpaceX. So we felt there was a strong emphasis in throttlability of the rocket engine. And so if you think about a car that goes from a standing stop immediately to 50 miles an hour, and then you can accelerate to 100 miles an hour, that's kind of what rocket engines did in the past. They wouldn't go below
50% throttle because it's just quite hard and most of them didn't really need to. Most rocket engines don't need to throttle even down to 50%, you know, of the full thrust percentage. So what we did at Blue is we put a lot of effort into throttle ability because we wanted to be able to
you know, essentially hover and land our vehicle. We felt that was the best chance at recovering the stage. SpaceX took a different approach where they went in with software and they did something called the hover slam, where you're sensing and coming up with a very precise landing maneuver that would put the rocket on the pad or the drone ship in many of their cases where they're landing over water. So it understandably took them a while to perfect it, but they were perfecting it
They were meeting all their mission objectives because landing wasn't a mission objective for them. Delivering the satellite, delivering the cargo dragon to the space station was their mission objective. And landing the rocket was a secondary thing that they were trying to do to save money and improve their business. Reuse rockets is the holy grail, as we've heard many times. And so Blue was pursuing this deep throttling approach with New Shepard.
SpaceX was pursuing this Hover Slam approach resulted in an amazing video that's on YouTube that you referred to. And it's fun to watch only because they were so open and sharing the work it took to get where they are today. Now today with their approach, it's fantastic. It's highly reliable. They're landing boosters all the time. Blue Origin, you know, from the very first flight in April of 2015, we
We didn't get to land. There was a failure in the hydraulics, but every flight since then, New Shepard has successfully landed using that deep throttling approach that we designed in. And that's an architecture decision that was made. So they both look very similar, but as with all things, there are some nuances under the hood.
Yep. And it's amazing how these decisions you make about what type of fuel or architecturally, how do we want to be able to do a reduced throttle, how that defines capabilities for a decade plus. Absolutely. Yeah.
Well, I want to talk a little bit about the space ecosystem today. And I think we've got a nice sort of framework for a conversation here. So in November of 2018, so three years ago, you left Blue Origin. And I'm curious where we are in the state of the private space ecosystem today versus where you imagined we'd be three years ago. Well, I think I'm pleased to kind of have watched the space industry continue its steep growth curve over the past three years.
Private investments, by most measures, has more than tripled in that time. Now over $10 billion a year. We've seen 10 or 12 companies go public via SPAC, which is interesting in adding a lot of investment into the growth curve. We've seen governments invest
investment maintained or even increased. And that's always going to be a little bit incremental, but NASA's budget is $22-ish billion a year, and it's maintained or gone up a little bit. Wow. So there's a chance that in the next few years, private investment into commercial space could exceed NASA's budget. If it continues to grow at this rate, did you say it 3x-ed in three years to get to $10 billion? To get to $10 billion? Yeah. Yeah, it has. I mean, when you look at sort of the
satellite industry association model or the measure of the size of the global space economy, you know, it's roughly 360 billion a year. And only about 80, 85 billion is government space programs, whether it's NASA, ESA, the European Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency. So most of the global space economy is coming from
satellite services, services provided from space and ground equipment supporting those networks. The last measure I saw, $5 billion of that, $360 billion was launch. $12 is about satellite manufacturing. So yeah, I mean, already commercial space greatly out is larger than the NASA budget. But yeah, you're right. The private investment side is growing rapidly and it could eclipse space.
And it probably should. Yeah. And in some ways, those aren't apples to apples because the NASA budget is really revenue for the ecosystem. NASA is a customer, whereas these private investors are buying equity at these companies to fund them. They're not customer revenue. Yeah. And you can see going back into the 40s and 50s, the NACA, the predecessor to NASA, N-A-C-A, really did all the fundamental research that's seeded a modern aviation industry today.
And aeronautics is a relatively small chunk of that annual NASA budget now. But the aviation industry is a trillion dollar industry. So I see the future, a similar future.
Well, speaking of seeing the future, I'm curious, you and I have talked a lot about the investing philosophy that you have in your angel investments looking forward. And I know you kind of have these seven pillars of here are the types of things that I think are going to continue to grow and want to invest in. Could you pick a few of your favorites and talk about them here?
Sure. I think one I would bring up is that we are, you know, we're approaching probably by the end of this decade, we'll have competing transportation services that we can buy in every leg of the transportation network between the Earth and the moon. So we'll have competing landers, we'll have competing transport services to get from the Earth to the moon. We'll have we already have competing landers.
rockets that can launch satellites and cargo and people will have competing space tugs that can move satellites and goods around in, you know, the cislunar volume. So,
Now you get to a point where these services are kind of a commodity that you can buy and there's businesses that can be built on top of that. So one of the pillars of the philosophy is look for companies that are building on infrastructure that are provided by others. I think, you know, people who are building rockets and building satellites, I have great respect and want to buy their services, but
I'm not looking to invest or create a new rocket company or a satellite company. Just because there's already so many players there and so many folks who have honed their capabilities really well. Absolutely. There's some great teams out there. There's a lot of funding through private venture investment, but also through the SPAC market.
So a lot of companies with hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars on the balance sheet that are looking to go build their business and figure out what the fundamental problems are to growing that $5 billion wedge of the total space economy and then go solve them.
That leads to the other part of the investment philosophy is some may think that there's a bubble in launch and that there's too many launch companies or there's too many satellite companies. I don't. I think there's a lot of competition out there. I think that over time is going to lead to great new services and products that can make our everyday lives better, more efficient, more productive, more connected. And so I
If that's the case, whether there's a bubble or not, there's still a lot of rockets and hardware to build. So I look at the defense industrial base and the supply chain, and I think that companies that are building tools, that are creating machine shops, creating new components, I think that is an area that's really important. I think companies that are mature digitally, that are going to create digital enablement of all these things, things that
The aerospace industry is done that is, you know, by pen and paper with Excel spreadsheets, with phone calls that can be transformed and made more efficient. I think that cybersecurity is an interesting industry.
Pillar of that, making things more secure, more resilient in the defense industrial base, I think is a big thing because, you know, the bottom line is there are so many great passionate people working in the aerospace industry. But to become more efficient and compete, like grow to a trillion dollars like the great people at Morgan Stanley predict is.
We're going to have to be more efficient. We're going to have to take advantage of all this private money and start to grow things. And we've seen a great transformation in the last 10 years with SpaceX and Blue Origin and other private companies that are coming out there. We need to take the next step and take advantage of the lower cost that's been brought in, but even drive it down further with supply chain efficiencies and other things. So those are two things that I think about. There's more, but that's a good start.
It's funny that you mentioned launch. It's a nice market to juxtapose against. So if you want to start a launch company, you will require billions of dollars of capital in order to fulfill the mission and sort of reach the sustainability of the business. And there's lots of businesses that won't require that. And in particular, because there's already such good horizontal integration that's sort of developed throughout the ecosystem where you have different people biting off little chunks of
and offer the ability to have parts of your value chain outsourced to them. And so I'm curious, because there are all these different sort of providers of services for new startups, what are capital light opportunities in space? And I don't necessarily mean light the way that I would for building a web app, but what are some interesting categories where it won't require a billion dollars to get you to a sustainable business?
Well, I think there's a couple of companies that are coming to ascend next week in Las Vegas. One of them I met through the Techstar Space Accelerator, Pruitt Ridge. They're doing like a model-based systems engineering application. They're working with a lot of early stage startups to build tools that can tie requirements to the core analytical tools that develop them and track those throughout the process. You know, they're competing against some of the big incumbent companies out there that all the giant aerospace companies use. They're
There's another one called Epsilon 3 that's doing electronic operational procedures and checklists that are
historically done in Microsoft Word and time's up on doing these things with pen and paper and moving into using the digital tools that we're all used to today with iPads and tablets. So those are two examples. You know, I think a third is Hadrian, a company that you and I have talked about that I made an angel investment in, and they're creating a digitally enabled machine shop. And Chris will be out in Las Vegas next week. I'm looking forward to seeing him. Oh,
That's great. They're building their first shop in Hawthorne, California, and, you know, working with their partners to create something that's much more efficient than what's out there today.
I'm going to set you up for a two-part question here, and one will help lay groundwork for folks that aren't super familiar with the space market today. And then I want to ask you about the next set of opportunities. But of the total addressable market of space, what are the biggest three or four categories? If you think about telecom or defense, or how do you think about how the big chunks of the space total addressable market break down?
Boy, I think there, you know, like I mentioned, there's launch and satellite manufacturing, which are
are chunks. They're in the billions. I think the Earth observation remote sensing is a multi-hundred billion dollar a year market. That's like satellites that are taking pictures of the planet in various ways. Satellites that are taking pictures of the planet using cameras, using synthetic aperture radar, measuring RF signals, thermal imaging, other types of technologies that support
agriculture, climate change, weather prediction,
insurance, all kinds of things. There's also, you know, a smaller but growing area around, you know, resilient alternatives to GPS. So GPS supports tech and all kinds of other industries. So where do you characterize those industries that are supported by GPS and take GPS? And are they space companies? I'm not going to argue that or say that they are or aren't, but there are the alternatives to GPS, which is a U.S. government developed constellation. There's
a European constellation, there's a Russian constellation and a Chinese constellation. So all of those go under this
envelope of GNSS, Global Navigation Satellite Solutions. There's alternatives like Satellis, which runs in low Earth orbit on the Iridium network. There's Zona Systems, which is based out of the Bay Area, creating their own alternative to GPS. And there's other companies out there that, you know, you've got to build the infrastructure, the ecosystem where a chip right now that receives a GNSS signal and gives you a time and a location, you
You need to update those chips to receive either the Satellite signal or different signals. And that's a big choice that companies have to make whether they're going to buy that or not. But that is a growing business because GPS is, while it's something that we rely on every day. And absolutely take it for granted. Absolutely. It's relatively easy to spoof or even hack. So having a resilient alternative is a good thing. And
And what chunk of the revenue generated from space companies falls under the category of things like telecom and what DirecTV is doing and moving information around for consumer purposes? Yeah, that's in that sort of wedge of the $360 billion global economy. That's right around $120 to $130 billion a year. That includes global broadband, which is
arguably one of the fastest growing sectors. And there's a great conversation just before ours with Carissa Christensen and team on what realistically the size of that market is. And I am a big fan of providing global access to help people all around the world have broadband, but can they pay for it? Is there a business model in remote parts of the world to buy that service
And but should it be provided anyway? And so it's kind of a different way of thinking about it. And we see four major companies tell us that Amazon, SpaceX and OneWeb building out global constellations, all using technology.
slightly different approaches, different technologies, different orbits, but they're spending tens of billions of dollars to put those things into place. So I think broadband becomes one industry sector all its own. I think commercial human space flight is the most recent. You know, just in the last few months, we're seeing people flying into space now. And what is the size of that market where, you know, space tourism ultimately is about going to space and experiencing space and
ideally in orbit or going for a walk on the moon and taking a tourist trip to the Apollo 11 landing site, that might be like what your end goal is. But where do you start? You know, you start with maybe taking your family to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center. And maybe you go fly in an airplane that flies parabolas and gives you access to weightlessness. Or you fly in one of these high performance military airplanes. Or you fly in a balloon with a company called Space Perspective, which
Takes you up to about 120,000 feet and gives you a first look at the curvature of the earth and gives you an understanding of the fragility of our, you know, our ecosystem. Then the next step is a new Shepard flight or a spaceship to flight on Virgin Galactic priced in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The next step is a three-day mission like Inspiration4. Then the next step, you know, is a flight to the International Space Station on a company like Axiom Space, which I'm on the board of. So it's, you know, space tourism can be like a
Unfortunately, you know, it's not available to everybody. It's too expensive. But reusability of launch is a first step towards lowering the cost. There's other things like fine tuning the supply chain can help to lower the cost. What are the other things that we can do to lower the cost of space missions? You know, one of my other investment philosophies is around space resource utilization. So the next lever for lowering the cost of space missions is don't
launch things that you don't have to launch, build those things in space. So use resources that you can source and use 3D printing and manufacturing in space to build those products there and then only focus on flying the people. Well, I think you can tell sort of where I'm leading the witness here. I asked the question of laying the groundwork of the current market because I think
The more I get excited about investing in the space market, the more I realize that the common criticism is, okay, there's a market that's well understood today. And then there's a big future market that, sure, it could be many trillions of dollars if there's actually people living and working on Mars.
And what in between? And I think I like all the things you just laid out because it's a lot of different plausible things that could create a lot of value for people and allow companies to capture some of that value in revenue in the next 10 years before we are in that sort of far future of people living and working in space or on other planets. There's a lot of ambiguity on getting there. But I think at Ascend, we can do a really good job of helping people understand
how to connect the dots, you know, from here to there. And one of the big things about this event that I'm so passionate about is attracting adjacent industries that aren't in the space industry yet to see, you know, not only how can space technology help them improve their business today, but how they can contribute to
building this off-world future, which is a decades-long vision, but something I'm willing to put some time into. Well, before we get to some audience questions, I have a general thing that I want to catch up with you on because about a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago, June of 2020, acquired on the podcast, we did a deep dive on SpaceX.
and I'm very curious to hear what you think changed since then. And thank you for providing all the perspective you did to prepare for that episode, but it's been an unbelievably year and three months since. Yeah, it has been. And I think you told me that's one of your most popular episodes on the podcast. For sure. And I'll give you my answer, but what I'm hoping is that our
audience can reach out to Gwynne Shotwell and get her to come on the show and give her answer. What do you think? I'll ask her myself again as well. Since that time, first off, SpaceX has just continued to crank on their business, doing what they do, which is launch things into space. And they've had, I think, something like 40 to 45 launches since last June, June of 2020, all successful. So that's like
more than two launches a month. There is a reliable scheduled thing that we have to transport items to space where if you miss this one, you'll catch the next one. We live in the future. Yeah, we do. And it's only going to get better and more routine because we're really still in the barnstorming age of reusable rockets. We're still very, very early.
So then they're building Starlink outside of Seattle here in Redmond. They're building Starship in South Texas. I've seen reports there are over 2,500, 3,000 people living in Boca Chica. They're building rockets in tents on the beach, which defies anyone's thoughts about what is their quote right way to go build a rocket. And it's an amazing lesson and exercise in agile development. And then they're also practicing building and operating at scale, not just with the
Starlink satellites where they launch
60 of them or 53 of the current ones with the laser optical links in them. They're launching 53 at a time. So they have an assembly line where they're building satellites, which is not the first time. I mean, Motorola did this with Iridium at smaller scale, but now they're building like 50 or 100 of these things at a time. Which actually I should point out for anyone who's not in the space ecosystem listening, it seems to me at least that nearly everything made for in the space ecosystem is prehistoric.
purpose-built and it's a one-of-one or a one-of-three or four, and the three or four get made over the course of a few years. And the idea that they're making thousands of these Starlink satellites regularly in an assembly line fashion is something that's well-known in consumer electronics, but really not as much in space. Yeah. And it's a scale that's not really been seen in the industry before. So I think it's quite remarkable. My last trip down to Hawthorne or
Earlier this year, I saw the Raptor rocket engine line, and they're building multiple Raptor engines per day, which is a 500,000-pound thrust complex rocket engine that powers the Starship. So they're getting really, really valuable equipment.
practice at operating and building at scale. I remember reading a quote of Elon's vision for having a thousand starships flying people and payloads up to the moon. Every starship, the second stage has 37 Raptor engines. So they got to, they have to build 37,000 Raptor engines. So they want to get great at this at scale. And I think that's, that's really different. It brings different skills. And so as you're get back to this,
influx of talent into the space industry. It requires many more folks with operational, industrial engineering experience, business experience, production, just different types of skills and experiences to build that factory of the future. It's crazy. The one thing that always jumps out at me is they've already done 20 Starship prototypes of at least the first stage. They're not waiting to see the results of the first one before they go and manufacture and redesign for the second one.
They're lined up. Yeah, they're lined up. And the value you get in building, having multiple vehicles in process on the floor, you know, Jet Propulsion Lab does this with like every
Mars lander, they have two and they can take advantage of that in many ways. And SpaceX is doing it, but they have six or 10 or some big number. And you have to believe that once you learn from the flights, if you learn something that requires you to make a significant change to the next prototype, you're going to be able to make that change and still fly it. You're still getting value from the process, you know, moving as fast as you can.
Well, Lawrence Wynn from the chat asks, what could make rockets obsolete for access to space? I'm laughing because way back when, getting back to your recruiting question earlier, people would ask, what if this doesn't work? And I always thought about pulling together the smartest group of people so that if the space elevator were invented and rolled out tomorrow,
We had a company at Blue that could take advantage of that. And so what could make rockets obsolete? I haven't seen anything on the drawing board that's ready to push them to the sideline. But I do think that Starship fully reusable launch is the next logical step. And I think it's going to greatly disrupt what we're doing today because there's an opportunity to reduce the cost by one to two orders of magnitude.
That's great. What about other potential means of propulsion? It's ludicrous to propose how close are we to the warp drive, but how close are we to a nuclear engine on rockets? Yeah. I think we need to get comfortable with nuclear on Earth. And for modular nuclear reactors, I think there's a lot of investment going into the advanced fuels, Gen 4 fission reactors and infusion reactions that are aneutronic, that create no neutrons, no nuclear waste.
companies that are raising significant amounts of money and making great progress in those areas, but they're still five to 15 years away from kind of demonstrating a terrestrial power station that can support that. I think once you have comfort on Earth with that, then we'll be able to push for nuclear propulsion in space.
And I think there's a number of companies that have interesting ideas. The key is that you can shorten the transit time from Earth to Mars from like 210 days to 110 days and maybe even 39 days. I think the other thing about interstellar kind of propulsion is
There is some investment going into that. And Cam Gafarian, who will be at Ascend next week, founder of Axiom Space and Intuitive Machines and X-Energy, has founded the Limitless Space Institute out of Houston, where he is trying to fund research into interstellar in our lifetime. So I think Limitless Space Institute is the area to look on supporting research at universities around the world.
That's great. Well, Rob, this has been really fun to learn about early blue stuff and get your kind of state of the landscape today. If folks want to follow up, what's the best way for them to sort of find you on the internet or potentially reach out? I am on LinkedIn under Rob Meyerson. So happy to connect and answer questions. And I'll be in Las Vegas next week, Monday through Wednesday at Ascend. So I hope you all can join me. Awesome. Thank you, Rob. Thank you, Ben. It's a pleasure.
