How a $10M Bet Made Civilian Spaceflight a Reality w/ Anousheh Ansari, Gregg Maryniak, and Erik Lindbergh | EP #122

30:49Yeah, we did, and that was, I remember you still let me crash at your place because I was living still in the Princeton area and commuting to work in Bethesda, Maryland. And if I'd stay over you and I would, after work on all day, we would get a bite to eat and then and then work for another five or six hours on this stuff. And I remember some of the early interns that we had. Eric Anderson made our first web page Jake Lupata from MIT. I later helped him get it is first job working for the Gary Hudson. I think what you said is important to explain here. The question was, if we're going to run this prize, how much money should it be and what should a person have to do?

31:34Running an incentive prize, right? You have prizes like Nobel and Pulitzer, which award something that was done years ago, sometimes decades ago, as an accomplishment. But in incentive price is very different. It says, I don't care who you are, where you've ever done, where you live. If you do this thing, if you go New York to Paris, you win the money. So the antique price and the centiprice. So the what did you have to do was important, and then how much money should it be? And I had been in the rocket business, Greg, you were one of our directors in that company as well. And I understood how difficult it was to build rockets.

32:17This was way before SpaceX and people to remember back in the early to mid -90s the idea of spaceflight, of commercial spaceflight and human spaceflight was insane. It was, you know, this was something the space shuttles were flying at a billion dollars of flight, a 20 ,000 person army to operate a shuttle mission. And so I wanted something that a small team could do. I remember it was like, you know, what made the orteic prize possible was it was Lindberg and a few engineers at Ryan Aircraft making that vehicle. So what is it that someone could do, but that was what I call audacious and yet achievable.

33:03That intersection was so important. And so it was okay, instead of going orbit and you're right, going to 17 ,500 miles an hour. versus going to, you know, in altitude. So, let me put in mock numbers. Instead of going to mock 25, you're going to mark three. You know, it's seven times faster to get to orbit when you square velocity to get to energy. So, like you said, it's gonna be like 49 to 50 times harder to get to orbit compared to suborbital. And we gave Alan Shepherd wings, astronaut wings, I was considered a space flight. And then the other thing was because I was working on 0G at the time, I wanted to have a commercial company come out of this commercial industry.

33:54And space tourism was very much our vision. And so, okay, how big should the vehicle be? If it's one person, it's a stunt. Two people is interesting, but a pilot and two paying passengers, a pilot and two buddies or a couple, that could be a viable vehicle. So we said, okay, three people going, we originally set it at 100 miles altitude, if you remember famously, and then we had some engineers when you and I are working on the rule set, look at what the peak heating would be if you came in from 100 miles altitude. And the heating was so high that we were concerned that composites wouldn't be possible.

34:42You need special kind of heat sink metals. And so we lowered it from 100 miles to 100 kilometers. As we like to joke, knowing full well, most Americans would know the difference between 100 kilometers, 100 miles. And then the other thing, we had a lot of discussions about this, a lot of debate about this, which was, you know, we didn't want governments playing this, it had to be privately funded and what defined privately funded. Yeah. And there were a couple of interesting pieces to that. One of the reasons we wanted, I mean, a key reason we wanted it to not be government was just because everybody thought it had to be governments.

35:23It wasn't because we don't like governments. In fact, our biggest supporters turned out to be NASA. But and other governments have come to like private spaceflight very much. In fact, it's funny that that's ironic that today, like China is criticizing its companies for not having produced to Neil honor or Jeff basins. Do you remember a meeting at David Wines home? I do. I remember we had a few of those, but I remember in fact, didn't you have a problem where you were trying to get to St. Louis, but you were stuck in Montrose Colorado? We'll tell that story in a moment, but before then, I think we had a meeting with David Wines, his beautiful home in Montrose, Colorado, and we had Gary Hudson there and you and a whole slew of others, we were debating the rules.

36:18And I think we ended up saying that you could have 10 % government funding and that you could only replace I think like 5 % of the mass of the vehicle. And I think the most important rule for the The next prize was that when you made your first flight, you had to do the second flight with the same vehicle within two weeks and get only a place of 5 % of the mass. Yeah, now let's talk about that because that's caused a lot of misunderstanding because we had a sneaky trick there and that was that we didn't want our prize to require us to get into the accounting knickers of every one of our teams.

36:59We joke nowadays that we want prizes that we don't want prizes that have all the excitement of double entry bookkeeping. So, how could we keep the cost down? You and I realized that we weren't going to get Rockwell International or Lockheed Martin as contestant. It was going to probably be small groups and it was going to be labor. So if we keep the time between flight small, it would keep the cost to refurb small Yeah, but there was another thing that was going on that the yeah the rule about about what percentage could be government funded Was interesting we eventually stole a roller -barrer roll from Kodak Kodak company had a competition for Amateur photographers Mm -hmm, but a lot of photographers make a few bucks here and there, but it's not enough to live on doing some small jobs so they get disqualified, they would be disqualified if they had to be true versions.

38:00So we said, well, you have to be, you can't get more than 10 % of your income from government funding. Because we were concerned that people like, in fact, ultimately Bert Routan won our prize, he was getting funding from NASA for some other projects, not specifically for his design of his winning entry, but we didn't want any misunderstanding. understanding. The other thing about private teams, it's that's really important that we talked about a lot and and it turned out to be pivotally true was that

38:35We wanted to get a totally different style of operations than the people that were doing government funded space programs You know, I talk about this and I steal this from from Bert Routier And he says the day before something truly is a breakthrough to crazy idea and And the challenge is that if you really want to break through in space flight, you need crazy ideas. And governments don't like doing crazy things because they have high failure rates. And large corporations that are worried about quarterly stock earning reports and so forth don't like doing crazy things that could fail because of that.

39:10And you end up only with this crazy group of rebels, which is what we actually attracted acted in the final result. This first exprise brought in 2016 from seven countries that were incredible rebels, when we'll chat about some of them. And we created the foundation in 1994, 30 years ago, hard to believe. And you and I were funding it out of our own pockets, doing other work, getting these $25 and $100 donations. But I remembered, there was a moment in time I said, okay, what do we have to sell? What do we have to sell that could allow us to sell this? And I said, I think one thing we could sell is where the ex -price is headquartered.

40:00And I was looking at, for obvious reasons, I was looking at Florida, I was looking at Houston, Texas. I was looking at San Diego because of Ryan. I was looking at California. I was looking at Seattle because Boeing was headquartered there. And then I met an individual who played another, we have these guardian angels in our lives of this story. And anybody going after, you know, a big dream here, right? Our dream to bring it back here is open up commercial spaceflight, open up space for humanity. That was the vision. That was the mission. And that it's almost like this this clarion call and this emotional energy that just every time we hit a brick wall, it was like, no, we have to keep going.

40:49We have to keep this is this is humanity's future at stake here refused to let it stop us. And I met a gentleman by the name of Doug King and Doug was heading the Challenger Centers at that time, I think, and had just accepted a role as the President of the State Louis Science Center. And he was visiting New York, visiting in DC, and I used to have these monthly salons that you'd be part of on occasion too. And he said, listen, I love your ex -price idea. He had read about National Space Society's magazine and he says, you really should look at coming to St. Louis. St. Louis is where Lindbergh got his money.

41:37I was like, yeah, and that's kind of obvious. McDonald Douglas isn't St. Louis. And St. Louis has a chip on their shoulder. I remember him saying that. And there's an incredible population of group there, but they want to be, you know, So St. Louis was like the 1904 World's Fair, was there, Lindbergh was there, it had its heyday and it wanted to revive its heyday. Do you remember any of those conversations with Doug? Oh, I remember it very clearly. So Doug is an interesting character. He'd been an electronics industry executive in California. and he volunteered to help create the Challenger Centers, a keynate son of astronaut Owen Garriott named now a good friend of ours Richard Garriott, he went after Challenger was lost that people were thinking about what they could do as a memorial and he said continue the mission of education.

42:41And... And the first time you called it, right, was the educator in that... Yeah, was the teacher in space who perished on that flight. And so Doug was a super volunteer and eventually winds up running the International Challenger Centers, which still exists today. And I remember that conversation with Doug. In fact, it was a little less polite than you recount at Peter, right? Oh, what did he say? Well, he knew both of us. Remember, were you and I knew him from before? I knew him for some years too. And he kind of said maybe just said this to me. He said, hey, dummy. Come to say Lewis, they talk about Charles Lindbergh as if they saw him last Tuesday.

43:18They have a very strong sense of history. Indeed, right now, the Missouri Historical Society has a big, a big beautiful exhibition about the 1904 World's Fair slash Olympics, which were co -located. And St. Louis had been the fourth largest city in America at one time. I'd like to remember on the Mississippi when waterways were the way you got around. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. So they got surpassed by places like Chicago when the railroads came and that's where the chip comes from. But Doug said, hey, come to St. Louis and he did more than just say that. He welcomed us in a huge way.

43:55And doesn't that lead back to, uh, or being stuck in Colorado? Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting how single individuals can change your life, right? You first informost and then and then Doug and then so Doug calls me one day goes Peter listen there is one person in St. Louis one person that you must meet his name is Alcourth he's the head of something called civic progress he's part he's like a senior executive at Fleischmann Hillard and he's the guy that can lock all of the pocketbooks and the purses and the wallets in St. Louis. And you just have to meet him. And so I'm like, okay, and like, trying to get his calendar, trying to get his calendar, this guy's super busy.

44:40And I finally get a meeting like a month out. And the day before I'm with a friend Mark Arnold, who also plays a character in this story. And we're in LA, we were working on a company called Angel Technologies Long Story. We won't get into it right now. and we're flying in his Cessna 421 and it's a twin engine airplane. Mark is a phenomenal pilot and we are flying from LA back to St. Louis where Mark lived and I've got my meeting tomorrow with Alcourth and I'm like I've been prepping for this for a week. I've got my PowerPoint slides. I've got all my stories. I've got all of the numbers. It's like this is this is probably late 95.

45:26Yeah late 1995 and we land in Montrose, Colorado to refuel its snowy outside and and it weather's awful and we're refueling to get to St. Louis by like 1 a .m. for my 9 a .m. meeting with with Alcourt and I'm waiting inside while the refueling is going on and Mark comes in and he's just he's just massively dismayed. Turns out that the lineman had put the wrong kind of fuel into the Sessna 421, I think it was a 441, and we are stuck in Montrose, Colorado. And I'm like, holy shit, I can't be stuck here. My meaning is tomorrow, I took me a month to get on this guy's schedule. It's like the entire fate of this entire prize and the entire fate of commercial spaceflight and the entire fate of humanity's exploration of space is on this.

46:20And I'm like, in my hotel room, I was like, how, what? It's like I refuse to allow it to be. And I go online and I find out that there is a six AM, or like a 5 30 AM flight from Denver into St. Louis. And I finally find a taxi company that will drive me through the night from Montrose, Colorado to Denver. So I'm sleepless in the back of a taxi cab, get to Denver airport, hop by the commercial flight, land. I have 30 minutes to get to the meeting, I get to the meeting. And to set the setting, I'm in this large St. Louis Science Center conference room with Doug King introducing me. I must have looked like hell.

47:11And, and Alcourt's sitting there and I'm going through this and I'm telling the history of Lindbergh, which obviously all knows, history of spaceflight and this idea of this X prize. And I'm looking for a home and I'm looking to raise $10 million for this, this prize. And literally, he, Alcourt cuts me off and he like jumps up out of his chair, slams his hand on the table, goes, I get it, I get it. This is great. We're gonna have, I'm gonna be extra nice here in St. Louis. And it was like, I was like stunned. And his level of enthusiasm was so high. And he says, listen, meet me for a scotch at the racquet club tonight.

47:53Which by the way was the club where Linberg raised his $25 ,000. And I've got an idea for you and I do. And he says, here's what we're gonna do. So we are going to raise you an initial $2 .5 million of capital to get this prize, this foundation going. If you move the headquarters here to St. Louis, we want you to hear, you know, he was civic progress, was all about bringing companies and industries and jobs to St. Louis. And he said, I'm going to find you 100 St. Louisins who will each contribute $25 ,000, which was the amount of the original or take prize. And he goes, in fact, I found you the first one between our meeting this morning and this meeting this afternoon.

48:43You remember who that was? Ralph Cordy. Yes, Ralph Cordy. God bless him. A big contractor in the St. Louis area. Yeah, in St. Louis in Southern Illinois. And Mark Arnold joined there shortly thereafter. And I was like, listen, you and I had been used to raising money, $25 at a time, $100 at a time, right? And getting these $25 ,000 checks, I remember that when we would get someone to sign up for the end, by the way, he called Al's genius was calling this the new spirit of St. Louis, right? The spirit of St. Louis, people don't know this, but there was a spirit of St. Louis organization, I think was nine St.

49:27Louisins, including Lindbergh. Yeah, it was it was actually nine other St. Louis has plus Lindbergh. Okay, so it's 10 then with him. Yeah, it was 10 He put his life savings up, which was several thousand dollars and yeah, and so they called that group was called the spirit of Saint Louis organization and and Lucky Lindy named his airplane Spirit of St. Louis after that organization of people who funded him and so Alker said let's call it the new spirit of St. Louis and SSL and we'll find those individuals. And you and I, you know, by this point, Greg, I am hard on you to please lead the, lead this effort.

50:12Come on as the executive director. I need help. I'm in the middle of running as I've always have been, you know, there was my, there was There was international micro space, there was angel technologies, all these other companies going on. Zero G, zero G, I'm involved in running. I have always had a hard trouble doing any one thing at one time. And the only way ever succeeded is having an incredible person running the show and on there as a role of chairman. So you were effectively our first CEO. We had a title of executive director because of nonprofit. profit. And you moved your family from Princeton, New Jersey to St.

50:51Louis, where you still are on this on this dream. And I remember you and I going out to meet with incredible people along the way to pitch them on this $25 ,000 membership. And when we got a success, we would go and feast at IHOP. IHOP was our way to go celebrate. Before I learned the dangers of sugar, I'd have those silver dollar pancakes. Peter, I'm glad you mentioned the Spirit of St. Louis organization and the new Spirit of St. Louis organization because it's hit me after living in St. Louis for years now. of that there's a unique quality to an ethos here. And Lindbergh wrote about it beautifully in the book, Spirit of St.

51:45Louis. He writes about being on Long Island, Roosevelt's field. He's ready to go. He's up against the Neil Armstrong, Rev. St. Admiral Richard Bird. And the guys who bought the plane that they wouldn't sell to him first, the Balakka that's Later going to successfully make that trip after Lindbergh doesn't and Unlike those other two teams Lindbergh's really paying close attention to the weather, but he realizes he's gonna get a shot And he might he could beat these these firm runners But if he does it he's not gonna be eligible to win the or take prize because there was a 60 -day notice period and the time as it run out And he he talks about it.

52:28He says I called Harry Knight one of the his liaison with the spirit of St. Louis organization And I told them I could go and beat these other guys, but if I do that I wouldn't win the money That's the whole basis for their organization being created and he said Harry didn't hesitate for a second to how would the money When you're ready to fly you fly and that's the kind of character we had in people like Al Kyrth and and and all the members and Jack Bader You know that folks who some of these were folks that gave us a real half, a lot of people that we're still friends with to this day. And, and McDonald's, that's a great story.

53:12John. So, I want to tell just a couple of those stories, you know, because it was important, you have to understand that we're in the midst of this venture. And this idea that we're going to have people do this privately going into space, when none of this was possible before, none of them believed it was possible. They thought we were nuts and we were trying to get to a level of credibility. And there was a couple of things that occurred. I'm going to tell one story, Greg, and then I welcome you to tell yours. So, Al Kirth, again, absolute genius in this. and he, I think of him as a guardian angel.

53:58And he says, listen, we're gonna have an event at the Racket Club. And I remember it was on March 4th of 1996. And I remember March 4th, because we're gonna march forth towards the future. And we set up a room, Byron Lichtenberg had come. We had the head of the DCX program, who was there. Bill Gabbats. Bill Gabbats, thank you, who flew a vertical takeoff, vertical landing rocket powered vehicle from Donald Douglas. And we had this large poster board with like 50 slots. And we were asking people, we gave a pitch in the room was the Danforth family, the the families from all the multi -billionaire industrial families in the room and we're pitching our hearts out.

54:56And we asked those who had already said yes to the $25 ,000 and you spirit to come up and sign their name. And we had like six or seven names signed up right there, Walter Medcalfe and Ralph Cordy and Mark Arnold. And then we invited people to step up to the podium and sign up for the new spirit of St. Louis organization. And if they didn't want to do it publicly, there was a form they could fill out. And I think at the end of that day, we probably had, my recollection is probably around 20 individuals who signed up. So we raised about a half a million dollars at that moment in time. What story do you remember best about raising that?

55:39It was called the John McDonald story? Yeah, so John McDonald was the chairman of the McDonald Douglas Corporation, which is now part of Boeing. And for him, the $25 ,000 was not at all significant. But what would be significant would be him lending his name to this effort. And he tasked his space wizard Bill Gawbots, who was heading up the Delta Clipper program on working with people like astronaut Pete Conrad on that program. He said, what would it cost? Tell me what it would cost McDonald Douglas to do this ex -price flight to win this prize and Bill, who we came to know, I love, you know, did a very serious engineering study on it.

56:29We could do it for probably about $60 million, $50, $60 million.

56:35And the recommendation was that they should support the, I don't remember, was Bill's recommendation the John or John's recommendation after talking with Bill, but the idea is, well, let's support the effort and if we decide to get into this business, we'll just buy the company that wins, which is kind of what happened at the end in a way to Bert Returns company.

57:01But we had a lot of really courageous, relatively small players that weren't multi -millionaires, there weren't, you know, that people from St. Louis and elsewhere about half of our new spirit members actually ultimately came. In fact, the best story is probably the Tom Plancy story. Well, we'll get to that in a little bit, but what happens now that I think is so important is it's March of 1996. We just raised a half million dollars. And, you know, I think Al thought we would get all hundred people to sign up. And so what do we do now? And it was, let's gamble. We're all gamblers, right? This is a crazy field of dreams.

57:47And Al said, we should go ahead and announce the prize and do a huge media event. And since then, written about this idea, giving birth to an idea above the line of super credibility. You know, I so the question was, could we announce the ex -price on a global stage in a way that would get the world's attention and get the potential sponsor to come to us if we couldn't go out and find them. And so we start aiming and we ended up hitting a date of May 18th of 1996, not far afterwards, where we were assembling this super credibility and just to lay out what super credibility looks like, we're having a massive press event under the Archons Saint Louis.

58:42on the dayus is not one astronaut but 20 astronauts. So Byron Lichtenberg, who is with you and me, sort of early founders of this competition, went out to the Association of Space Explorers and got 20 of them to show up, including Buzz Aldrin and many of the early great astronauts.

59:11And so on the and the head of NASA there. And we have Patty Grace Smith, who was the associate administrator, effectively overseeing spaceflight for the FAAA. So the two big government groups there. And then we have Charles Lindbergh's grandsons. We have Eric Lindbergh and Morgan Lindbergh on the day us with us. And I'm gonna be bringing Eric on with us in a moment. And then we have Bert Routan there also speaking. And it was incredible. We had front page news around the world, right? $10 million space prize, announced out of St. Louis. And no one asked, we have the money, which we didn't and no one asked we had teams, yet which we didn't.

1:00:01But it had entered this period of super credibility. And that was, that was amazing. I think we had a FESSA upbeat that it was not uncontroversial to do this big launch. In fact, we lost two of our board of directors, members who were freaked out by the, by, by, and these are both good friends and good people, but they were, they were. Yeah, well, he was the, he was the, he was their pitch. You're gonna take all the money we just raised, a half a million dollars, and you're gonna blow it on a large PR event. Are you crazy? That was I think the summary of what they said. And yes, that's just the summary.

1:00:47Yeah, and the answer was yes, we're gonna do that. And I mean, it was interesting, right? Because our pitch after that was to go to potential sponsors and say, listen, here's the deal. You don't have to pay until after someone does it. This is pay upon success. You have to pledge the $10 million. You don't have to pay until after someone does it. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me. And could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Companies called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians.

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1:03:32Everybody, let me introduce Eric Lindberg, grandson of Charles Lindberg, artist extraordinaire, aviator, and crazy sports fanatic. Eric? Where are you today? I'm on Mercer Island, very near where I first met you, Bainbridge Island. I wanted to tell a little bit of the background here and then bring it up to that May 18th, 96th date when we're on stage together. So I had obviously all of this got started with grandfather's book. And as in between 94 and the announcement in May of 96, I'm like, I've got to figure out how to connect what we're doing with the Lindbergh name and family. And I was living in DC at the time and I saw this announcement that the Lindbergh Foundation was having their annual Gala event at the Aaron Space Museum.

1:04:36And I was like, I'm going And unfortunately, I wasn't invited. But it didn't stop me. Listen, this is all about opening commercial space flight for humanity. This is all about opening the space for interior for humanity. There's a greater purpose here. So I put on my tuxedo, I don't know if I rented it or owned one back then, and I crashed the party at the Ernst Space Museum. And I'm like, all these individuals are around. And like, where's the Lindbergh family? And I find out that your aunt Reeve is the senior most Lindbergh at this event. And I finally find my opening to go and introduce myself to her.

1:05:19And I'm like, I'm pure demandus. We're doing this $10 price, and I would love to have the Lindbergh Foundation involved. And she goes slow down. You know, slow it down. She goes, okay, listen, let me recommend, there is one of the Lindberg family members, Eric Lindberg, who is a pilot. I don't think she said he's the flying Lindberg, but it sounds like a circus act, but he's a pilot and you should go and meet him. He would be the right member of the family to get involved. And that was the first time I heard your name. And then I think Collette Bevis, who was involved in her earliest days, supporting and creating this expiry as well, I think maybe she reached out to you first.

1:06:10Yeah, I think Collette called me or something and I thought, oh, this is interesting and not normal. But it was very interesting. It was crazy idea. You weren't used to collect calls. I think the next thing happened was that I brought Byron with me and we came to visit. It was still back then astronauts were not as frequent and bringing an astronaut as you're calling card still had a level of pizzazz and Byron got blessed. some joined in and we came. So here we are, Eric, Byron, Lichtenberg, Peter Diamandis here talking about opening the space frontier and doing this version of the RTA prize. So what did you think?

1:07:01Yeah, first of all, I mean, it was crazy. And you guys were crazy. I was, you know, I guess because of my background, my grandparents being the most famous people on the planet for about 10 years straight and then, you know, having this incredibly public life and the latter half of their lives, they really focused on the balance between advancing technology and preservation of the environment. So I thought 10 million bucks into space, you know, this core idea of the prize. It's nuts. We need that $10 million down here on planet Earth. So I really was Resistant and and and and and rive was sort of yeah, I didn't really get it, but you might be interested because you fly and then when you guys came and And I thought law go have dinner with an astronaut and it hey, it's free dinner

1:07:57Couldn't couldn't say no to that but as you recall I had long hair because I kind of couldn't Florida haircut and I was, you know, walking with a cane and really disabled and not living a very constricted life. But, and as I just listened to you guys, you and Byron. I mean, you were so much, you know, listen, we need, you know, the environment's first and, you know, why would you focus on space instead of this? And Byron and I just opened up with every possible argument we possibly could about going to space to save the earth, etc. It worked. I got chills on the back of my neck listening to Byron talk about what it's like to see our planet from space.

1:08:48And I still get those chills. I want to see that. It was really powerful. And then thinking about maybe what we learned from space is what we need to survive on this planet. And then you guys were talking about space solar power, lessening the burden of our resources here on space. And that dialogue you had earlier with Greg is, if you're not really thinking about spaceflight and what it can offer us as a species and and not just humans, but all life on planet. I don't, I don't, I think you just poo poo it. And that's one of the problems that spaceflight has had. Yeah, I think one of the things that is the most valuable asset from the X Prize and from our collective efforts is the ability to dream big again, right?

1:09:38And I think that's one of the most important elements is the human spirit of dreaming big, of there is no problem we cannot solve. So we swayed you enough and offered you, so you had never been to St. Louis. So let's take you back to May 18th of 1996 or some good Strasby told there. You flew in, Morgan flew in as well. Morgan's your younger brother. Yeah, I was having trouble walking in. So I asked if Morgan could help me with that flight and get a wheelchair through the St. Louis Airport just, you know, on and off kind of thing. Because I really wasn't. I wasn't living as a human. Yeah. By the way, Eric today is telemark skiing and having a blast and climbing and hiking and we'll tell the story of this re -buelled rehabilitation as well.

1:10:37But so you come, you've not been to St. Louis before, right? Right. Yeah, no. So now I got a free dinner and I got to talk to these interesting characters and then we want to go to St. Louis for a big gala with a bunch of astronauts. I'm like, woohoo, more free dinners. So what was it like coming to St. Louis? Because I mean like every other street was Lindbergh this and Lindbergh that. Oh man, Lindbergh Boulevard and then of course the first thing we do is get in a car and we're toured around St. Louis and there's like the side of a building has an image of my grandfather on it that's way larger than life and it's Cubist.

1:11:10It's Cubes that look like him and the aviator helmet and the goggles. Quite frankly, I was overwhelmed. And I think when you grow up as a Lindbergh, there's a certain Lindbergh of phobia that goes with that because people say, oh, you're a Lindbergh, you must have grown up with three or four airplanes and so forth. And people have all these preconceived notions. But my reality was obviously different. So I felt kind of really taken aback by all that. But it was also really... I started to get that glimmer of hope and inspiration of my... The excitement, right? Yeah, not just about spaceflight and what that could bring to humanity, but my life.

1:11:59I started thinking, oh, here's this crazy thing I could be involved in and wouldn't be great if it actually happened. Little did I know back then about how risky these kind of startups are, but it really gave me this incredible inspiration in my life that's carried through to today and that's I think the greatest gift that I've ever received. That's awesome buddy. Greg, what are your memories of May 18th. So, my goodness. Well, you know, it was a real tour to force. I actually was just looking at some photographs from that event and the laser light show, Neil Diamond looking to the future. I remember, I was in the evening.

1:12:51Yeah, I remember one thing leading up to, we had everybody staying there in St. Louis at the same hotel, and we had a bus to bring all the astronauts and all the dignitaries to the stage. And I remember that Dan Golden and Bert Rutan got into an crazy argument. Almost English to Coss. Yeah, Dan Golden is the NASA administrator. and Bert Routan is the radical aviation soon to be space entrepreneur and real famous airplane designer I mean yeah yeah you want it so just go ahead and talk about Bert one second give him a context here yeah well Bert Routan at at the time of of our ex -frizen outsmanship he had started a company called skills, composites, and what his biggest claim to fame, he's real well known in the aviation space.

1:13:52But his biggest claim to fame was he built the Voyager aircraft that flew around the world nonstop. His brother, Dick Routin, was the principal pilot of that. So he's really well known. But his philosophy is that Lager has with Dan Golden, the head of NASA at least seemingly so. I think Bert goes, listen, Dan, I think you should take half of NASA's annual budget and give it to ex -prize to do prizes because you guys are wasting the money. What the hell have you done over the last, you know, since the Apollo moon landing, it's really incredible. They got into an argument and that scared the shit out of me and a lot of people there because they're about to be going on stage in an hour in front of the world media.

1:14:40Yeah. And they're going at it. And we literally have to separate them on the bus. Anyway, that was crazy. Yeah, I'll tell a short story on the other bus. I'm hearing a conversation between Alan Ladwick, who's an aide to Dan Golden. Yeah, he was one of the associate administrators. Of an ass, yeah. And somebody who I don't know. And I'm listening to their conversation. I'm sitting one seat in front of them. And this guy that's talking to a lad, who I know well, really a smart guy, and he's talking about how he would go about winning the X prize and I remember the discussion about what propulsion system had to do with using high -aggression peroxide.

1:15:23I said, oh, this guy must be a rocket engine designer. It turned out it was the guy who had produced the movies, the Blues Brothers and the Naked Gun series, who later becomes our super close pal and it has my job. Robert K. Weiss. Robert K. Weiss of Hollywood fame. So I remember I just very quickly I met Bob earlier when I had a film script that I was pitching about the winning of the X Prize and my naive a day is like I'm going to sell this film for $10 million and fund the X Prize. I mean you have to understand we're desperate to fund this prize. It's like how they all find it anyway, you know, bake sales, film scripts.

1:16:03Yes. So we have this announcement. And Eric, you are on stage. I think Morgan spoke as well. We had Dan Golden. We had Buzz Aldrin speaking. We had the Al -Kerth, of course, with our MC. And it was an extraordinary, I mean, just to watch this announcement, announcement, it was historic in nature. And we had media around the world, you know, just praise this, praise St. Louis, everything. And then the next day in the St. Louis Dispatch is an article from a guy named Bill McClellan. And I will never forget this, because I was so proud of all the incredible press. and this article by Bill McClellan says only in St.

1:16:59Louis who built an arch monument to those who left St. Louis would they be naive enough to give money to this crazy ten million dollar prize and I was so depressed by that article and I remember Al Kyrth saying okay listen you got to go and explain to Bill go buy him a few beers and explain to Bill what you're doing and why you're doing it. A few weeks later I did that and one of the proudest moments was he wrote a retraction to that piece and he said, okay, I now get what X -Prize is doing and why it's doing it and very proud. And I remember I framed the original one and the other one above my desk.

1:17:48Yeah, it's like, over time, he wrote two retractions. And because he was so well known in St. Louis as a brilliant guy, but as somewhat of a curmudgeon, he apparently had never retracted anything. So the fact of those retractions gave us much more good local press than the... And that was the only bad press we... I think we ever got really. I do remember that we had somebody... I mean, I didn't discover until years later that somebody in a British science journal had written, we must be crazy libertarians because our prizes for non -governmental spaceflight. And all this is true. Not well not knowing that the head of NASA was there with us and that NASA was very supportive actually of private spaceflight as they are now.

1:18:35And we worked through Alan Ladwig at length to get Dan supportive. and one of the things that people don't realize is that when we, when we started this competition, the rules for the FAA for spaceflight did not allow for private people to go on rockets commercially, did not allow for reentry. And one of the biggest things we had to overcome during this competition was to get the FAA to rewrite the laws that would allow for a commercial space industry to exist. And today, you know, SpaceX and Blue Origin and all other companies are beneficiaries of that legal reconstruction that we spent the better part of five, six years working on.

1:19:29I think it's worth telling some of the stories between after the launch and where we were. I'll tell one quick story, which was I remember getting a call one day at Sunday morning from one of the teams saying, listen, we built our, and it wasn't a team, it was a proto team. We built our vehicle, we're about to launch, do you have the $10 million? And I'm like, who are you? And no, I don't. And, and where did you get my phone number from? And so the, the, there There was teams started to register, and again, we had like 26, I think teams in full from seven countries at the end of the day, who immediately spent $100 million to get this $10 million prize.

1:20:16But we were under a lot of pressure to try and get the funds. And I remember we went first, who did we go to first after that Greg? Well, I want to I have some specific memories. I remember going to the mayor mayorates corporation. Yes, mayorates corporation So mayorates is a company that Does a lot of work in the auto industry? And it said quarter didn't same lowest and they they My memory Peter is you and Colette and I spending all night in a kinkos putting together about 150 slide presentation. Yes, we blew them up onto poster board, and then we were like putting a spray glue on to create these poster boards.

1:21:04And Maritz is in the gold watch industry, the benefits and incentive business. Right. Yeah, so if you want to reward your salespeople, you can get merits points, and they can pick incentives from a catalog, like trips or whatever. So that's what they did. And we really, I think we were actually fairly close on that. We felt as if it was our first big pitch to a company and we felt like they were sincerely interested. And I think they were. And actually Bill Merritt signed up as a new spirit, Beber. Yes. And we pitched God knows everybody, right? A hundred and 150 more. Yeah, well, the crazy thing about those days was that it was all using it.

1:21:53You said PowerPoint earlier, but I think in the early days it was on Codacrum slides, you know, bringing our projector to the presentation and and and it was all those mad scrambles. I remember going to Emerson, which is also a St. Louis area company and going up on the elevator and seeing a call from my I silenced it because we're about to walk into the meeting and take in a while to get to and We pitched them and it went great and we left and I was driving west to go back to Greg's or something and I Listened to the radio and I heard there was an earthquake in Seattle and I was like, oh no my wife and son were went to an earthquake And I tuned them out for a couple hours But that's what those days were like they were they were just it was all shoe leather and it wasn't this sort of virtual presence that we have today that I don't know if people understand.

1:22:46I don't even know if I rock that. Yeah, I mean the countless number of heartfelt pitches and this is the one. This is the company that's going to back it and it's like, you see it, like, you know, we pitched Virgin, we pitched Richard Branson, I think two or three times, we pitched him, Personally, we pitched him for Virgin Atlantic X Prize, Virgin Mobile X Prize. We'll get to the point where he basically didn't back us, but back the winning technology to commercialize and create Virgin Galactic. But it was crazy. And we had so many people telling us, I mean, especially after the Columbia failure and after 9 -11 people telling us give up, there's no way this is not going to happen.

1:23:47This is just a reach too far. Yeah, interestingly, you mentioned Columbia, but and we really, I remember that morning, that Saturday morning when Columbia was lost and we really thought we were over. One of the surprising effects was that NASA came to us after Columbia and the CFO as it were of NASA, that equivalent Steve Isaac was his son Matthew was a teenager and it turned out an ex -price affectionado. He made a bet with his dad. He said, Dad, I bet ex -price will fly a person in space before NASA flies another person in space. Yes, push, chapter. I saw what came to us and said, help us, and this is a year before the success of they ex -prised flights for the UnSariExpress.

1:24:45They came to us and said, Peter, Greg, can you help us figure out whether NASA could do incentive prizes and if so, which ones should we do? And that was critical money for us. I kept us going during 2003 and resulted in NASA's satinial challenges, which are there, equivalent. So, but we're one of the things we did to keep things going. Again, we announced the prize in 96. We don't have any money. We are trying desperately to keep the engine going by going and raising $25 ,000 at a time. I mean, that was our economic engine going out and pitching somebody and getting the next person, the next person to join the East Coast St.

1:25:27Louis. And I remember in 1998, two years later, we would have, we had a gala at the St. Louis Science Center. We invited all of the teams to come and display themselves, right? And we had actually Peter it was it was 97. 97. Okay. It was it was 97. We held it at the Planetarium, which is part of the Science Center out in a big tent. Yep. And we had our first teams coming. In fact, they looked at a possible launch site over in Illinois at the Scot Field Joint Use Air Base. It became it became real at that point when you when you saw the teams and what they were attempting to do. And then I got a call one day from Gary Hudson, who was one of our teams.

1:26:11He was running Rotary Rocket, which was a helicopter version of going into space. I wish he had actually built his original version of it, and not the larger one later. But Gary says, you should go and meet Tom Clancy. And I get a meeting with Tom Clancy who had invested in Rotary Rocket and was interested in spaceflight. And I remember meeting with you and Bob Weiss who we mentioned earlier and I'm going to want to meet Tom at his owner's box at a baseball game. he was an owner of which team was it the Orioles? No. Baltimore Orioles. Yeah, Baltimore Orioles. And you and Bob pull me aside and say, Peter, whatever you do, do not pitch him for money.

1:27:11Don't pitch him for money. And like, but what do you mean? That's like, it's what I do. It's like, no, no, no, you want to build a relationship with the guy. Do not pitch him for money. And I'm like, I feel like this, like, I don't, I feel like I'm just like, I strapped, and gagged and that moment, okay, he said, just get to know the guy. Don't pitch him for money. Probably the best advice, you know, because I was gonna pitch him to become a $25 ,000 donor, Tommu Spirit of St. Louis, and to use his celebrity to support us. And so I'm in the owner's box with Tom Clancy.

1:27:47And I'm trying to get some time to talk about space. And his team is neck and neck and neck and neck. and the other team pulls ahead, not forget who they're playing, and all of a sudden, in the next inning, it's bases loaded, and the next batter, it's a grand slam home run, and Orioles pulls out ahead by four wins, and Tom's ecstatic, and I'm like, okay, now is the moment. And so instead of pitching, it's always about time, instead of pitching for money, I said, But listen, we're having our ex -price Gala, we're bringing all the teams to St. Louis, would you come and be our honored speaker? And I think he was on a, you know, in Dorf and High from that Grand Slam home run, he said, sure, I'll come.

1:28:41And that was a magical moment. Do you remember what was going on there, Greg? Oh, I sure do. Tell me. So two things were going on. One sounded really bad and one turned out really well. Well, the bad one was that our good friend Buzz Aldrin, who we Peter and I have both known for years, stayed at my house in New Jersey in the old days. He was going to come and be our sort of featured headliner speaker for our event. And a couple days before the 97 Gala, he had a problem and it pulled out. And we asked Tom actually to speak and he did a nice job. But before he did a nice job, he's walking around this gala and our new spirit members are wearing these big beautiful medallions And he sees large bronze golden medallions.

1:29:30Yes, I remember. Yeah, I'm big big Railored ribbons. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, and so he asks Cindy Carid who was Peter's your PA at the time. Yes What what's with the medals and he she says well those are folks that are members of the new spirit of St. Louis organization they've each donated $25 ,000 to the ex -price. And he says, I'll take four. And in those things, and so that put our event seriously into the black. Yeah, you know, it was unexpected and it came from me not asking him for money. But it did something more than that, Peter. Oh, yes it did. That's right. It resulted in a story. It resulted in the next day, a tiny little story.

1:30:18a couple paragraphs in the Boston Globe. And it turned out that there was a company in Boston whose job it was to come up with opportunities for the Visa credit card and one of the Visa credit card offering banks in Delaware to find affinity groups. So like if you're if you went to Northwestern College, they go out to all the Northwestern alums and say get the Northwestern Wildcats purple Visa card and every time you use it We'll give the eighth of a penny to your mom a moderate. Well, they said, hey, maybe there's an opportunity there. They contacted us and the result was first US. Can I tell a story?

1:30:58I get a message. I get a message. Who is our admin at that point? Do you remember her name? I don't remember, but you were in the magna place building with a mad man. I get a message that a organization first USA from Boston has called about a donation. And of course, I'm thinking what they want us to give them a donation. It's like, I was like, we don't have money to donate to them for God's sakes. And so, and then who, the admin calls them to get more clarification. No, no, no, they're calling about giving us a donation. I'm like, yeah, speed dialing to call them. Yeah, that was Laurie Metz was.

1:31:37A Laurie Metz, that was it, from Lord Cessri. I'd love you to do that. And then ultimately, it ends up in a meeting. You, Bob Weiss, and I, and Doug King, I remember we're in the St. Louis Science Center, and we look out the window and we see this large black sedan pullup with like three guys and black suits pull out. And there was like the men in black moment. So take it from there Greg. Well, it resulted in us making a deal where we're by first USA would pay five million dollars of the 10 million dollar prize. If somebody won our contest, did the required feat by a date certain in the future, which we hadn't picked yet?

1:32:29We did later. We picked the right brothers, Hunter, Thana, Versailles. It was December 17, 2003. That's right. Originally. That was a contract we made with them. We also got a little bit of our front money and some fractional money as... And some beautiful, incredible credit cards. There was this great company. If we could put, drop pictures into the editing. I've got the pictures. A company called Shamly and Fred Shamly and an associate saver. I was still living in the Princeton area when this deal started. And I was, in fact, that was sitting around trying to think about a slogan that we could use.

1:33:14And I remember because it was in Hopewell where I was living at the time. And we were thinking about giving the winner that they were going to have a lottery. And we were going to give the winner of the lottery a chance to fly on an ex -priced ship. But second prize is you didn't have to fly on this ship. But anyway, I came up with the idea of your ticket to space. Yes. And that was, and we had people around the world getting these ex -prized credit cards. And the challenging thing was $5 million was great, but it wasn't $10 million. dollars. And we still needed to raise that $10 million. And we're barely hanging on by, you know, our fingernails operationally there.

1:34:06I mean, you then move your family out. You know, we're operating. I'm a volunteer chairman of the organization. And we had like, you know, one and a half salaried individuals. And but Bob, why is comes up with, you know, So we're still, we're pitching. We're pitching, pitching, pitching every CEO, every large car company, every company. And I remember Bob Weiss corners us one day to talk about something called hole in one insurance. And yeah, so Bob had gotten really involved. Bob was that guy that I met on the bus on the day of our first gala and he turned out to be We didn't know that he was a serious techno geek.

1:35:00And he came on board to help us when we had our first title sponsor, Peter, we should talk about the old blast off saga at some point.

1:35:14But Bob was aware of a kind of insurance that we had never heard of before because we're sports guys where you don't watch golf games. It's called hole in one insurance. So if you watch a golf tournament and they say if someone hits a hole in one today, they win a brand new Corvette. Some insurance company has taken the bet basically that they know with fine detail the actual aerial possibilities of, you know, how hard it is or how easy it is to hit all on on. And so instead of having to pay for a whole core vet, you pay some amount, maybe 10 % of it or 5 % of it. Well, Bob had the crazy audacious idea that we ought to try to see if we could find an insurance company that would be crazy enough to take our bet that one of our teams would complete the required fee by some date certain.

1:36:09And maybe we could find a deal that would let us leverage the money that we did have. And indeed, we went to, because we knew the space business, this is mostly on you, Peter, from your microspace days, we went to insurance underwriters in the satellite business, and to our surprise, they agreed to take our bet. Now, I think the statute of limitations is pretty much wrong on all this stuff, so we can tell what really happened. So one of the things that happened, And I got the most extraordinary phone call one day.

1:36:46It was after 2000 because I was in the offices that we had on Spirit of St. Louis Boulevard at Spirit of St. Louis Airport.

1:36:58And it was the insurance company thinking about whether or not to do this deal with us. And they asked me to provide them with the names of space experts that could help them figure out the odds, basically. So that's like when you're a trial lawyer and you get to pick the jury yourself without the other side being thought. So because I gave them the names of very serious people that I knew in this space business who believed that only NASA and God could, they weren't even sure the Russians could do it. I knew it was you, you obviously proved that they could, but I picked the biggest skeptics of the of, yeah, they were serious people.

1:37:41I didn't load the deck completely, but they were very credible, well -known people, but they had the common belief that it wasn't going to happen. So we did find a company and it enabled us to roughly almost double our striking power for that. So we end up basically negotiating a deal that this insurance company would pay out the other $5 million by December 17, 2003. And we'll go into this a little bit later, but of course, no one won the exprise by December 17, 2003. And the $5 million off of First USA was going away. And there was to be there was ultimately a renegotiation of the deal where the insurance company needed to back it through what we set the new date of through the end of 2004.

1:38:36Most people don't know that the original RTEG prize ended in 1925 and Raymond RTEG actually extended it. And so it was not unusual. In fact, to this day, X -Prize sometimes extends the prize deadlines. But deadlines are important. I hate to use word dead, but deadlines are important because the incentivized teams to do, you know, to like, like make it happen to take their shot. Otherwise, if you had forever, you'll be lazy and you'll take the time. Peter, what, what, what one of the things that strikes me right here is we're talking through this history about, about the Ansari X Prize is that the time scale is a lot longer than we were able to discuss and those deadlines of making the payments on the premiums for the prize and the pressure on the fundraising.

1:39:31It lasted for whatever nine years and that was just the beginning. Yeah, I mean, so I'll tell a little bit and I want to lead us to two stories. One grandfather's flight and the second is a meeting our other patron saint, A Nushan, sorry. So we negotiate this deal with the insurance company and ultimately they are gonna charge us on the order of I forget the exact amount, it was like $2 .5 million, $3 million, that it's a bet. They're like, okay, if you pay us this premium and someone wins, we'll pay the $10 million. dollars. If you pay this premium and no one wins, we keep the premium. So it's legalized gambling.

1:40:20It's what this insurance policy is. And we get that we get the you know when we got to the point where the insurance company is going to have to cover the whole 10 million and go through the end of 2004. We get their premium requirements and I remember Bruce Kraselsky and Missura Ead were go shaying this for us. And the problem was, they were asking us for like, two and a half, three million Greg, was that your memory of the premium amount? Yeah, but at the end of the day, our total premiums were close to five million bucks. So, but we didn't have that money. And so I was like, shit, what are we gonna do?

1:41:04And I had an insight, I said, okay, listen, here's the deal. I want to I'm gonna pay you $50 ,000 a month for the next year and then we'll do a balloon payment That $50 ,000 a month is gonna give us time to go and raise the full amount Whatever whatever it was three four million dollars And I remember you know We would have it would be Monday and we would have $50 ,000 due on Friday day. And if we didn't pay it, the whole thing was over. You know, we'd announced the fact that we had the $10 million through an insurance policy to the teams. We didn't publicly announce this yet, but the teams knew because they were like, do you have the money yet?

1:41:49Do you have the money yet? We're building vehicles. We're the money yet. And it was a lot of a lot of stress. And yeah, by the way, I mean, we should, we should say, Peter, we always told the teams exactly what was going on. Yes, we were telling people were risking their lives, not just their time, but they were doing something that we knew was hazardous. We were very straight up with them, and it formed the basis for all of our team agreements going forward into the future.

1:42:20But where you're going with this is that Eric, you're exactly right, the pressure was incredible. My hair was a very different color beginning of this process. And the burden was mainly on Peter to raise the money. And I made a lot of new friends, right? I paid one myself, a dayo, a reci, who came in and paid one, and Barry Thompson who came in and paid one, and one of these $50 ,000 Fridays. days. But the pressure was on an extraordinary fashion to keep the organization alive and to keep this prize. And I think one of the things I want folks to understand is we died a thousand deaths. We were over so many times.

1:43:10And it was just this belief, this absolute heart -felt perseverance in belief that this was one of the most important things. This was our massive transformative purpose to open the space frontier for humanity and every time we hit a wall we put you know every time there was a no and a no and a no from someone we're absolutely sure and every time you know we had you know 9 -11 happen and the Columbia accident happened we just pick ourselves up off the ground and start again and there were there were two important moments, one was Eric, you making the decision because we were hand them out as an organization.

1:43:56And you made the decision that the 75th anniversary of your grandfather's flight was coming up and that you were going to recreate your grandfather's flight for the purpose of raising a million dollars for operating capital for the foundation. Greg and Eric, would you tell that story because Greg, you were in the middle of this. You get a call from Eric Lindbergh one day. Take it from there. It was in 2000 and we had had a company that was going to be our title sponsor that had lost half of its funding due to the .com meltdown. But this has, the meltdown hasn't happened yet. So I'm out with you, Peter and Bob Weiss in this company called Blastoff in Pasadena and I get a call from my pal Eric.

1:44:55He says, Greg, you've been a pilot for 30 years. I'm thinking about recreating my grandfather's flights for the 75th anniversary in May of 2002. What do you think? And my quick response was, what are you crazy? You have a four -year -old little boy, beautiful wife. You want to go New York, Paris nonstop as part of that flight. And that's about 3 ,000 -some miles, 2600 of which is over wet stuff. You can only get rescued the first 50 and last 50 miles over that wet stuff by helicopter. after. Why? And Eric had three reasons. He said, I want to understand what my grandfather did. And the only way to understand it is to do it.

1:45:47I want to showcase the future of light, including X -Friars. And I'm thinking about those and I'm, they're legitimate reasons. But do I want to be complicit in my friend's emulation? Probably not. And then when he He talks about the future of flight and ex -price. Well, that's my job to promote ex -price. Is it worth success there and against his life probably not, but he got me with the third reason. He said, well, you remember when I was in a wheelchair and on crutches when you met me under the arch in St. Louis, I got my life back. I'm going to do something with it. And where you really got me, Eric, was when you said, I want to show people, especially kids that if they're suffering from something like my rheumatoid arthritis, something horrible, there's hope.

1:46:38All right, so I said, okay, I'll help you. You'll think about it. I remember that conversation well because the gestation of that story is I have dinner with Peter and Byron, and then I go to visit this crazy cabal of astronauts and space geeks and I get excited and I you know my first trip up on stage to say this is pretty cool. I'm wobbling with a cane and then the 97 gala I was actually walking up the stairs. I had had my knees replaced both total knee replacements in 1996 and I had some measure of my life back and then and then a couple years later I started taking a breakthrough biotechnology drug that gave me another chance at life.

1:47:30And I got back into flying, so I was flying again. And I realized I might not get a third chance at life. I had this sort of second chance at a physical life. And I started thinking, and in those days I was doing a lot of sculptures and furniture in my shop. And I was selling them with the local farmers market and other venues. And one of my clients asked me if he'd make a, if I'd make him a spirit of St. Louis, because he and his brother both read my grandfather's book, The Spirit of St. Louis, like Peter did, and it inspired them to become pilots. And that inspiration led them to, you know, him to ask me, would you do this for my brother?

1:48:14And in the process of building that airplane and investing myself into that unique shape and sanding the grains of wood that I had in the wings. I made a spirit that looked like a bird. It got me thinking what would it be like to fly across the Atlantic? And what was it like for my grandfather? And so I started flying this thing in my shop, in my hand, and putting my mind's eye into the cockpit and wondering what it was like for Charles Lindbergh to fly an unstable aircraft for 33 hours across the Atlantic and I thought, huh, could I do it? And since I was working with Greg a lot, we were talking fairly, you know, weekly.

1:48:57I ran it by him and he said, no, you can't do that for all those reasons. And then, but as we kept talking, it's just like the whole idea of space. I think the more you know, And more you start to realize and understand what the potential is the better it seems. And that led me to that desire to retrace. I realized I couldn't walk in his shoes, but having this disease that killed my sense of physical self, my state champion gymnast when I was young to be in the state. One second because you know rheumatoid arthritis really I mean you were The pinnacle of physical health right? Yeah, yeah, that picture second from one end to the other end I guess you know when I grew up I just had a natural physical ability and I could I could climb the rope and PE all the way to the top with just my hands and I climbed and skeed Mount Rainier and I was Washington State Champion gymnast and anything I wanted to do Physically I could do pretty well.

1:50:06If I trained a little bit I could compete. So I have you know boxes full of water ski trophies and things like that and that that physical sense of self when I was in high school I I thought if I ever got stuck behind a desk pushing a pencil for a job I would kill myself. I didn't know what I would do with that because I was so physical and then of course rheumatoid arthritis Came along and it's like having your knee sprained and then your other knee sprained at the same time And then it moves around your body and it mirrors itself in your joints and slowly decays your cartilage. And I ended up bone on bone in my knees.

1:50:43And that's when you guys met me. Yeah. I really owe low point. And I think that was a bottom that led to this incredible achievement. and I think in 2000 Greg, the ex -priced foundation was at a low point as well. We're on fumes. We are basically, everybody is employed by, I think you're the only employee at ex -priced at this point and maybe even part -time. And when Eric said, I'm going to recreate this flight and we'll do it as a a fundraiser, I'm like awesome all in, not being as worried about your right. My family was concerned. It was a craig -wise. It's like, I'll do anything to get this damn prize funded.

1:51:35I mean, just to give you a feel for how bad things were, we were pretty sure we were losing our title sponsor. I remember you and Bob Weiss and I had a meeting at Pasadena and I took a red eye home from that and discovered that my car, which I had a park outside at the airport because we didn't know, you know, because we were broke basically, had been hit by hail. And I took the car into, to a whole many cars were, were, were hailed damage. So the insurance company set up these tent cities where you could go and get an estimate. it. And my, my number two daughter needed like $5 ,000 for orthodontia.

1:52:18And they offered me $5 ,027 .18 and I said, ooh, I have $27 .18 because my car looked like a, like a, a, like a golf ball. We were, we were totally broke. And I, I think, yeah. I just want to point this as a, as a low point for the foundation in 2000, right? And just To remind everybody today, the X Prize has launched nearly $600 million in competitions, it's driven billion dollars in R &D. And you know, this is not an overnight success. This is an overnight success after 30 years of hard work. 11 years for the first competition. I just want to bring it back to the notion that we're the only thing kept us going was is fundamental belief of this importance of the human spirit, that we were on an extraordinary mission and nothing would keep us from that.

1:53:15And the only way that we would fail is if we gave up along the way. And so let's take a second and before I introduce Anusha Ansari who is the next chapter in the story, you make a decision to go forward with this flight across the Atlantic. And what was entailed in doing that? Oh gosh. Well, it was, we had about a year and a half to get to the 75th anniversary and we quickly, you know, had some meetings around St. Louis to understand feasibility back at the napkin calculations of, you know, distance mileage and money. What was it going to take? and who do we need on board and what's the messaging that we could carry and how big could we go?

1:54:04Technically, it was feasible. So I did it 75 years before. So in an old airplane, the family feasibility for me was much tougher. I mentioned I had this Lemberg ofobia and I think the rest of my family was used to not putting themselves out into the public eye. And just and just for perspective, right? Your grandfather's first child was kidnapped and killed Yeah, and then because of the pinnacle of attention um, and then there was this reaction to pull back and to really become a private life And I think all of your siblings and cousins, you know, didn't like the attention. They didn't they reacted negatively to the idea that you were going to put yourself out there visibly and physically to do this.

1:54:57And you had to overcome that. It wasn't just that, oh, you're going to hurt yourself, Eric, and we could never forgive ourselves for that. But it was, what are you doing? And you're stepping into a legacy that has a tremendous amount of pain involved in it. And positive and negative sides of that. There's an amazing new book out right now called the convenient villain where it details all of the reasons why my grandfather was who he was was this incredible entrepreneurial character who was brilliant in the field of aeronautics and astronautics as well. But politically, not even he stuck his neck out and he was a patriot and did all these things.

1:55:44But it kind of, that gets you a better feel for the kind of focus that was heaped on the family that had this burden of legacy. And for me, I realized in that feasibility study that that I had to do this mission, I had to break free of those chains from that legacy that were not mine. I just inherited them. And so I realized that the resistance I was getting from family I needed to push through. And that aligned me fully to do this and to take the physical risk. And then Greg and I of course, you know, went about finding sponsors for the flight. And we went to Oshkosh Air Venture where I, you know, it was my first trip there.

1:56:33And we, I get, forget if it was the first trip for the second trip, we spent the night in a school room and some out near the prison. We got a whole classroom to ourselves. But we found most of our sponsors there. And then we We talked to the company that was making the breakthrough. Biotechnology drug that really wanted to get the news out. And Brow. And of course, X Prize was on board. So we started pulling together the funding for that and then made a partnership with the Lansair company at Lansn Eyebower to take a plane and make it worthy of the transatlantic flight by adding a ton of fuel to it.

1:57:13And give it that longevity and then we started training and that was an extraordinary period of all of a sudden I'm really laser focused on my prime directive which was not necessarily to raise the money or fly from New York to Paris but it was to survive.

1:57:33As we tell the story, we were in the middle of our fundraising when 9 -11 happened. But in fact, I was driving to meet with the Missouri Historical Society, which had heard to the grapevine that we were going to get American Airlines funding for our flight. And they were trying to get funding from American Airlines for a traveling Lindbergh exhibit. So the boss of the museum wanted to cut a deal with me to split that money somehow and get a piece of the action. And as I was driving to that meeting, the first plane hit the towers and the head of OAS and I saw the second one hit because we had set up a TD in his office and that was the end of that.

1:58:17So we lost about half of our potential funding from that. But as it was, of course, it turned out to be the bridge that kept us going. In fact, Eric and I were in New York City doing media training and then driving out to to belong island to take a ferry to Grotten, Connecticut to get dunked and learn how to escape from airplanes in the dark under water when we sighed our agreement with our next guest, Anusha. So we'll segue into that, but you know, the, that story of Eric's flight still has legs today. In fact, the airplane has just been restored to airworthy condition and Eric and I have each just, We'll come back to that.

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2:01:07It really is something that is for me one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy life spans. Go to fountainlife .com, Backslash Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. All right, next guest, a pleasure to bring a dear, dear friend, another patron saint on this incredible journey. A new Sean Sari who is our benefactrix. A new shot, a pleasure to have you here. It's great to be with all of you. Yeah, and this is family time again, huh?

2:01:51So we're at this point the story and it's 2001, Eric Lindbergh has just decided to make his transatlantic flight. Hopefully, you know, we're at a low point in the ex -price. Blastoff, which was a company that was going to potentially be our sponsor, had splashed down. That money was not going to materialize. I did a podcast with Bill Gross talking about Blastoff and folks can go and hear that incredible journey. But we're at a point where I'm not sure how we're going to fund the foundation. We have this this whole and one insurance in place and I'm having these $50 ,000 Fridays. But there's this balloon payment coming up of millions of dollars and I've been wholly unsuccessful.

2:02:42You know, I missed the entire comm revolution where, you know, these comm companies were spending millions and tens of millions and holy shit I forgot to like pitch them properly and I'll never forget I am in my apartment on Third Street in Santa Monica and I pick up this copy of Fortune Magazine and the cover issue says the wealthiest 40 women under 40 and I'm just flipping through this and I happened to land on this page about a new shan sorry and it says a new shan sorry is just sold her company telecom technologies to sonous networks for 1 .3 billion dollars and her dream is to fly on a suborbital flight to space and I'm like say what?

2:03:35Is I read that line like three times it's like to fly on a suborbital flight into space it's like Who says I want to fly in a suborbital flight? You know, people say I want to fly to space. And I'm like, oh my god, this is her. This is her. And I am like, I'm start like, you know, googling around or whatever, searching for telecom technologies in Nushan, sorry. And it turns out that your company had been an asset sale. The company was no longer around. and I'm able, I'm not sure how, I don't remember exactly, I might have been a member of my team, tracking down a your past executive assistant.

2:04:24And I get that person on the phone, and I'm like, this is her, I've been told no, Greg's been told no, Eric's been told no, 100 times, 150 times, and I have to meet you. I have to meet you. And I extract a promise out of your past EA, who tells me that you're vacationing in Hawaii, that if I send her a stack of materials, that she would forward it to you. And why don't you pick up the story from there? Yeah, so I was taking some time off with family because we had worked non -stop for over 10 years building a company, sold the company, and then ended up working for Sonus Network up until the debacle of 2000 and 2001.

2:05:23And so we were taking some time off and I received a call. I said, I had said no meetings because all of a sudden because I was in the papers. Everyone wanted to talk to me about money and donation. and I wasn't ready. So she calls me and says that there's someone who wants to meet which you and talk to you. And he said he wants to talk to you about space. And at that time when we had sold the company, I had made the decision that I wanted to go back to the passion I had since childhood and going to space. I had enrolled in Masters in Astronomy. I was studying. I was researching to see what are my possibilities and how can I get involved in an industry that I had nothing to do with.

2:06:12And decided that Soborbato was probably the most viable option for me at that time. And when she mentioned space, I'm like, oh, 100%. First meeting when I come back. And we came back, I don't remember exactly about a few weeks after that. And you and Byron were the first people I met with in our office. I remember as a Byron, you have to come with me. First of all, you were in Dallas and Byron was in Houston. And it's like, I have to bring my astronaut with me. I used that game card with Eric. And it was going to be using it again with a new shot. And that made a big difference because I had never met an astronaut.

2:06:57And Biden was the first astronaut I ever met. And just sitting next to him and having him talk about his experience and space flight and giving me an autographed picture, that was like I was in heaven. So I want to tell this story a little bit. But so to get some context, you were born in Tehran and you grew up, what was your childhood like and what was your connection to space? Well, I fell in love with the night skies basically. I wasn't thinking about going to space, but as a child, I was very curious. I'm still very curious and that gets me into all sorts of trouble. But I slept outside. We didn't have air conditioning.

2:07:45I slept outside at night on summertime. And just gazing at the night sky was this field of possibility. A place where your imagination can basically make up anything you want. And that's what I did as a child because I had a normal childhood until I was 12 and revolution happened in Iran which brought you know guns and violence and screaming and shouting to my door for the first time in my life. And then the war between Iran and Iraq happened where all the things that come with the war again, death, destruction, lack of food, water, electricity, blackouts all the time, bombings, sirens going to bunkers.

2:08:33and all of that was too much for me to handle. So space became this refuge for me, a place where in my mind I would go there and tell myself stories of this wonderful, peaceful place, the Star Trek world. And you were a trekky along with me, along with us. I was. I started watching Star Trek in Iran, dubbed in Farsi, all sorts of sci -fi, but Star Trek was my favorite. and Spock was my favorite character because I wanted to, I didn't want to be the captain. I wanted to be the science officer, the person who discovers all sorts of things. And so I was on a journey of discovery when I looked at the night skies.

2:09:16And that's what I tried. A few decades later, in your office, Hamid, who was your husband, then, Amir, your brother -in -law, then another brother of Hamid, I mean to their environment are pitching you and we're saying basically listen we're looking for a title sponsor We're looking for at that point The money to cover this whole and one insurance balloon payment and then money's to operate the foundation and I'm like it's it's like I remember I couldn't sleep the night before because I was so excited like this is the person This is the first. I had felt that feeling before, but not anywhere near as much.

2:10:02And I remember leaving your room, your offices without a yes, and I was dismayed by that. And so what was going on in your mind back then? And what did you think? Why didn't you tell Yes, on the spot, you could have saved me a lot of heartache. It's an Iranian in me. No, but so we were sitting there and you, you know, gave your PowerPoint presentation and we had a good conversation. And I remember thinking to myself that you were describing this competition and I had not thought of a competition at all, but you were describing how you're going to ask the world to build a spaceship in their garage and then fly not once two times before they would get any money.

2:10:59And I'm taking to myself, wow, would a brilliant approach to innovation as an entrepreneur, you know, I had selected teams, built teams, asked them to build things usually, you know, they were laid, they didn't deliver exactly what I wanted. I had to pay them up front before they delivered and I'm like we should do this more in building things and especially high -risk thing which is what you know most of the companies that my family and I built were about doing things at the edge so I had the risk taking gene in me already and I saw this as a way to do risky things but risk mitigated through a competition so in my you know sort of calculating head I was thinking oh this this is a brilliant approach.

2:11:45On the other hand, my kid, the space kidded in me, just loved it because I wanted to go to space myself, but I also didn't want it to just be about me going to space, and I wanted it to be something that lasts afterwards. So the fact that we were asking the teams to basically build a reusable access to space, that twice within two weeks. told me that this is going to happen. We wanted to build a business. I mean, part of what you described to me at whole industry in space. And that sort of also struck a note with me. I didn't, in my mind, I had said yes, but not verbally to you. But, and I wanted to consult with the rest of the family, frankly, also.

2:12:34We had glass across the table. I felt like, you know, some were skeptical, some often were okay, but I wanted to make sure everyone was on board because it was significant even though we had sold the company for 1 .3 billion soon after that the stock when you know, no time. I always take care of it. I always take care of it. Next time, next time. But so it was a significant investment for us to do this. It wasn't nothing as I wanted to get consensus as we were all making this bet together and and I truly didn't think of it as a donation I felt it was an investment in the future and it was an investment in the future that I wanted to be a part of and So it took us a little bit To get back to you and say yes back in my apartment in Santa Monica the same place where I'd read that article and just like hunted you down and I get a call from Hamid, your then husband with you on the phone.

2:13:43And I'm like, I'm just like, I'm a nervous school kid, right? Like what's gonna happen? My entire future, the future of humanity lays in the balance here. Are they gonna say yes or are they gonna say no? And you said yes. And you said that you would fund the capital. It was on the order of like five plus million dollars. I forget the exact amount. It covered all of our insurance payments. It gave us a couple million dollars of operating capital to keep the foundation going. And it was interesting, right? Because you said, listen, we will backstop this. If you can find another sponsor to put up the money, to put up the $10 million, we'll give you some of it.

2:14:29And so you realized that as a family, you weren't bringing a massive PR budget to the table. And if we had Virgin, X -Prize, or Amazon, X -Prize, or some other large organization that would put a PR push behind, it would be better for the overall thing. But we never did find that person. And I remember sitting up those meetings, which you are going to, them. We went to Houston Rockets. We felt like they probably will say yes. We talked to Dell. We talked to Bill Banks and so many others and nobody saw the opportunity and the potential we all saw in it. Now everyone wants to be part of it. Or people did see the opportunity, but then thought, oh, what's the downside and decided not to?

2:15:21I remember people telling me actually, I remember people saying that you guys are crazy because you're going to get people killed and especially with the, you know, challenger acts to then, clombie acts to then everything that was fresh in everyone's mind. And I had to actually write an op -ed about it because I was saying that, you know, people who go to the space business or flying to space, they understand the risk. there is a bigger purpose and a belief in the future and they do it with the knowledge of the risk and you know stopping all the progress in space exploration is dishonoring their memories because we're saying that what you believe in didn't matter or it wasn't right or was not a good idea and I think that's what people miss and so you just need a sister in your brotherhood, that's why.

2:16:19Yes, for sure. You were definitely the missing component. And then it was a movie. This would be the end of Act 2. We're at the low point. We're coming out to the high point. And I want to bring us back to what was going on, circa 2001 -2002. We're after the dot com bust. We're after 9 -11. Anusha comes through. Eric, you're flying your flight now in 2002. Anusha, you were admission control there. And then we also started meeting all the teams. And let's go back to some of those stories, some of those teams, because they were truly extraordinary. I knew she was a great work you want to go. I remember two teams, specifically one was of course Bert and his big character, Bert Routin, and meeting him at scale composite.

2:17:24I remember him showing us the sketches and the designs he had. I also remember he didn't take me that seriously because he's like, I don't know if she's serious about this whether she's truly passionate about this. And I think it took me a while to get him to warm up to me. But I'm used to that being in the tech business and a place where women are not taken seriously. But it was truly exciting to just see all the different designs and approaches. The other one that I remember, and I think I met him at an ISU event. He was part of the Argentinian team. He was this guy who was building a balloon take off and he was basically having his neighbors and the entire community bringing him material and stuff and helping him build this balloon.

2:18:22And he was the most unlikely person to build a spaceship and in this case a balloon that would apply him. And but he was like determined. Greg, do you want to recount the details there? Yeah, well, the Argentinian guy was Pablo de Leon, and I visited him after lecturing at ISU in Chile. I realized South America's skinny, it's easy to get to the Buenos Aires from Chile. So I went to see him, and you're right, it was sort of a neighborhood organization, but this guy was, he was very serious, and he was actually a space suit expert and was doing quite a lot of work with NASA. So he was very interesting.

2:19:06We had a Canadian company Brian Fini was heading that up. That was a balloon launch. And he said, look, I'm not Bert Routin. He's using an airplane to drop his spaceship. But I'm not good at designing airplanes. Mine's going to be stupidly simple. I'm going to use a balloon. And when I saw the equipment... They call those raccoons, right? Raccoons and balloons. That's right. Raccoons from the 1950s, the only other person I ever knew, who knew what a raccoon was, was our own Bob Weiss. Yes. But as he's a student of space history, but that was interesting because they had actually filed the notice with us that they were going to launch about the same time as Bert.

2:19:57And we really couldn't afford to put on a big show. It hit Canada and the US and we thought that actually his notice was probably more than optimistic. It was sort of a ploy to ride on the coattails of where we were, but hard to tell. They built some hardware. The company that surprised me the most was some folks that said, what's the most produced rocket that's ever flown to space? and the answer is it's the German V2 because those rockets flew sub -warably during World War II and they said what we're gonna do is we're going to replicate the V2 design. Now we had a there's a professor who would worked at MacDonald Douglas for many years and he was teaching at Park's College of St.

2:20:53Louis University named Dr. Paul Siz and he called me one day. I had just moved to St. Louis, so it was 98. It was winter of 98 and he says one of your teams is coming to visit me and I want to invite you to they hadn't told me so I don't want to invite you come along and I met the folks and they were based in paradoxically and London, Ontario, London being the target for many of the V2 rockets in World War II. And the reason they were coming to St. Louis was because St. Louis University had been given a V2 rocket engine by Warner von Bond during the 50s. And they were going to come and look at it and take some measurements on it.

2:21:40Well, what was interesting was the team was called Canadian Arrow. and shortly after 9 -11, they drove their full -scale V2 rocket on a flat bed truck into Times Square. And so, and it was like, what is, it's like this missile in the middle of New York City, and we had a lot of, a lot of expires. Well, they did it for our event. Yeah, I did.

2:22:23I'm not going to do it. I'm not allowing my engineers to make any changes whatsoever. And that's how we're going to do it within the budget. And I figured they're going to just to come up with a rocket engine for $10 million if you have to build it yourself is pretty much the same. close to impossible given the economics of the situation, but they did it. They reproduced the engine and they test -fired it. Thanksgiving is 2003. We had a team that was in Huntsville, Alabama, and I went down to Huntsville for their opening announcement. One of the original German rocket guys who was in charge of propulsion for V2s was still alive and he was down there.

2:23:10And he had given some advice to that Canadian aeroteam. So the Canadian aeroplane sent me a video of the test firing of the engine and I took them off on the side so it was not the still any thunder and showed it to him and he said with a great German accident, oh they're running it must be running at pressure fed because it's running too rich and I could see it. Nobody had seen one of those engines for 60 years but he was exactly right. So we had some serious teams, but it was always a challenge to make it look like a horse race when there were a whole lot of horses. There were 26 horses, but the challenge, of course, was funding as with all of these.

2:23:50I had said it at a $10 million prize amount because when I thought about how I would do it and and how much would cost me to take a run at this, back from my international micro space, my rocket days, a few years earlier, I said it's gonna be at least 10 million. So 10 million X, room in a roll 10, it works well, X for experimental, and 10 million was, I think a minimum amount that would get someone serious. And it was the largest prize ever in human history at that time, by a significant amount. And we all knew Bert Routan, and Bert, of course, very famously on May 18th of 1996. We had just announced the competition on the stage under the arch in St.

2:24:44Louis, hundreds of reporters, cameras there. And that night we had a gala at the St. Louis Science Center with the laser show and Bert Routan stands up as one of our speakers and he's there because he's an aviation expert and he's there because of his fame, you know, with Voyager and all. He'd built more first flight aircraft than all the prime contractors put together. But he stands up and he goes, I'm not going to tell you what I've come up with because I want to win this thing And he threw his hat in the ring as the very first team, that very night, the night we announced the competition. And then very quickly we had a team from Romania, which was amazing.

2:25:35We had teams from around the world. But Bert was always the dark horse, meaning at the dark horse, he was always the most experienced, but he wouldn't tell us what he was doing. And it's worth stating that, you know, at one point, Greg, you and I went to go and pitch Paul Allen to fund the X Prize, meeting with Dave Moore and others. And they were very cryptic because Paul was a Star Trek fan and super wealthy. But we got a no. And I was like, man, Richard Branson says no. Paul Allen says no, what's going on? And little did we know that in fact, Bertann and Paul Allen had been talking and Bert had talked Paul Allen into being his sugar daddy to fund the company, his vehicle Spatial One.

2:26:39That's interesting. Had a sneaky deal on the side that we didn't know about till the variant. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But that's interesting because he was willing to write a bigger check at 30 million the million dollar check to scale than to express and I think you know when I look back at all the people who said no to you Peter I can't understand their logic because you know at that time since we had taken off the operation with the with the insurance they really didn't have much at risk they They only paid if someone won the prize. That, to me, was like, if someone has already built and demonstrated a spaceship, it's definitely worth more than 10 million.

2:27:25I mean, why wouldn't you? And I couldn't understand. So it's interesting how I see that again today in philanthropy. One thing that was fascinating was that Paul required Bert to keep his involvement secret. And the only time that he allowed it to be publicly disclosed was after the first successful powered flight through the transonic period. And I think what's interesting is, you know, when you've gotten so wealthy that you don't want to seem stupid, you don't want to publicly announce that you're doing something and and then have it fail. So I think the point at which Paul was willing to say that he was backing when the teams was when the technical risk had been reduced.

2:28:21I guess I can understand that, but again, when you look at it, anyone who has been an entrepreneur, when you ask them, one of the ingredients of being an entrepreneur and succeeding, is the fact that you need to understand that you will have failures and that you need to feel comfortable with those failures and learn from them and build again and and sort of have this grit, this perseverance to be able to push forward and without risk and without failure, you can really take those giant leaps forward. You will always be just incrementally inching your way up. And I think that's something that I feel it's important to highlight than people who reach a certain amount of notoriety, wealth, recognition, understood Elon Musk, and they don't care about what everyone thinks.

2:29:17They become risk -averse, and it's a shame because they surround themselves with people who are their blockers, who are to say no all the time, and you become so entrenched that you stop taking risks that got you to that point. You know, I want to take us back to a moment when we all saw Spaceship 1 for the first time. And so, a birch in the Mojave Desert and we're invited for the unveiling. And I would have loved to have been on the inside a little bit more, but we weren't. And appropriately so, we're running this competition. but we all go there together. What was your, what was your, what do you guys think when you first saw a spaceship won?

2:30:07To me, it was unlike anything I imagined and so different, and normal ways of traveling to space. And it felt like a little, you know, many playing. And I was like, it looked beautiful. It looked beautiful. High degree of beauty. And then exactly. And the fact that actually it was on a plane and taking the first part of the flight on a plane and then just, you know, finding the rockets later on at, I think, 60 miles. 60 ,000 feet. It sort of made it less risky. I don't know. It doesn't necessarily make it less risky. And then he also talked about the landing and the special feather feature and all of that was really unique.

2:30:54and fascinating and beautiful. Greg, what do you think? Well, you know, I had one of the same responses you had in Usher. It's little. I mean, I knew it was gonna be little, but I've flown stuff much bigger than that, and it's like, that's tiny. What actually I remember the most about it was, you know, poor bird had lost his voice. Remember that he could barely speak. And he was up at the lecture and talking about it. And he said something really interesting. We what nobody knew was that bird had just facts his master team agreement to us like Less than 24 hours before that rollout so Bird You know, it was assigned agreement that he was gonna compete actually compete in the competition.

2:31:42Yeah, so that was a big deal And I think that was on his mind because he one of the things he got up and said was something that justified the work that we had done in setting up the prize because most people, now we kind of know how to do it, but we spent a year on the rules for the sorry ex -price before we did the announcement, probably more than a year, really. Yeah, 1994 and 95, yeah, for sure. Part of 96. So, Bert said quite publicly that the genius of ex -price was in the rules. and he said that the rules are as valid today as they've always been, which was a big compliment. It was, I mean, as you say to you, you talked about your relationship with the Maya, a similarly stormy relationship, goes back way before XPRIZE because he knew that a good But dear friend of his invited me to meet him.

2:32:48And I think he would have thrown me out if I wasn't with his pal. But I had two strikes against me. I was there on some NASA business. And Brent goes where they introduced me to him. As this is my friend Greg, he's here working on a project for NASA. And he's a former trial lawyer. Very personally. First did not. First did not. have a straight conversation with him. He would needle you and just abuse you and insult you just to have fun just to see what he could do. He would poke the system. Yeah, he did. So so getting birds say anything good about us as an organization and as as people was was was nice and actually he paid me a compliment when he introduced me to Doug Shane.

2:33:36It was his successor eventually at scale and and we'll tell it Doug Shane's story later. He said that I was the toughest son of a bitch that he ever had a negotiate a contract with and that made me feel quite good actually. Eric, you're an artist. Do you remember seeing the spaceship one? What was your thoughts about it? Oh man. You know, I think what struck me most was that these guys are having fun and the pressure and intensity all aside, they're having fun. And this scaled composites in Bert Routan's genius was to take this new material, the composite materials, and start to rethink how we build airplanes.

2:34:22So if you look at any one of his airplanes, they're all crazy. They have wings on the nose. They have, you know, they're upside down. This one, if you look at it upside down, looks like an alien. And he was having fun with it. And so the red, white, and blue and the stars and the crazy, more portals. Portals, damn it. It was super exciting from an artist's standpoint and from a breakthrough, from this stodgy, old, stuck industry that was big business and governments and only this way. and it struck me that we were rewriting the rules and while X -Prize was rewriting the rules, we were kind of running around like kids and these people were doing business as old school and Rutan was kind of a part of that but he was an earlier breakthrough.

2:35:19And so we were just pushing all the limits. I just thought it was amazing. So the day is June 21st of 2004. It is six months till this competition is over because there's no re -extending the competition, right? We had bought the whole one insurance policy. It was over on December 31st of 2004. If no one did it by then, and Bert knows that there's pressure on. And we get invited out for what we have since called the X -0 flight. This is a flight that Mike Melville is most seasoned pilot is flying. and it's the first time that the vehicle, Spaceship 1, is flying with a full tank of nitrous oxide.

2:36:06Its power source is nitrous oxide and polybutadiene, a rubber. And it's called a hybrid rocket engine for those who haven't heard of it. And it's going to fly to trying to achieve 100 kilometers altitude. Greg, do you want to tell the story of what would happen on this X -0 flight? Do you remember or?

2:36:32Well, I'll tell one of the stories. So Mike, who's an excellent pilot and a dear friend of Birds, was given a box of airspace by the FAA to stay within. And in the short stories, there is an illusion of... that happens during acceleration and basically Mike overpulled and instead of being over Mojave, he winds up over a landcaster, California, which is far, that way out of the box, completely safe because he's high enough that he can glide back down. They make it to space with only a few hundred feet of altitude So this causes a real interesting Situation which is that he's not sure he can win the x -price with that vehicle and he's to recount the point here Greg which is important is he to win the x -price you have to fly with the weight Equivalent of two people in the back seat Yeah, he was flying without that and you're right.

2:37:41He cleared 100 kilometers, let's not mix metrics here, right? 62 .5, whatever, see 2 .5 miles, he clears by a few hundred feet. Or to say differently, he clears 100 kilometers by a few hundred meters. And it's like, holy shit, can we do this? We don't have enough oomph to get there. And he starts thinking about, maybe I should strap some side winder missile motors to this thing and asks us whether or not that's going to fit our rules and our rules that you had to use commercially available tech. So our sidewinder missile parts available commercially pretty much. We had some discussions a more fun story was Peter and I are at Ashkosh and we want to show the funny John Stewart bit where he goes is portals damn it we need more portals that were all laughing about and uh...

2:38:37his wife's is over don't don't don't do that that makes fun of you because it makes fun of his his side burns and he said i don't have to do it he's a ham so uh... we got permission more interesting is i get a call from our from the insurance company that is uh... is given us the whole insurance and they say we'd like to meet with you and i flew to san obar bra or drew to san obar bra where they're located and I'm thinking that they are wanting to maybe get involved as a sponsor. They see it's going to be one. And man, I'm there to say listen, why don't you put your logos on the side, pay us a few hundred thousand dollars and we'll promote you.

2:39:17And they said, well actually we noticed that on this flight on June 21st, the vehicle is barely made it without the, you know, two, was probably 400 pounds in the back. And you're unlikely, you're, you're leading horses, I'm likely to win. And so we want to make you a deal. If you cut back the payout from 10 million to 5 million, we'll reduce the altitude requirement from 100 kilometers to 80 kilometers. And I'm like, no friggin' way and I just storm out of there and I say you guys are going to be writing a check and left. Yeah, although Jim Clark from that company who's office you were in did us a big solid at X1 when Paul Allitz people went diverge in that mess.

2:40:16So, let's move forward. So it makes the flight, Bert is and his team are trying to figure out how do we possibly get more oomph to use the technical term. And they do. They find out that they can actually pack more nitrous oxide into the oxidizing tank. And we're there. Now interestingly enough, Bert gives us official notice that he is going to make his first flight attempt on September 29th of 2004 in the Mojave Desert. And we're like, you know, we, one of the things that's so important about this competition is it's not just about building a rocket. It was about changing the global perception that space flight was possible for everybody.

2:41:07That was the most important thing. It wasn't the specific rocket that got people there. It was changing the global mindset. It was saying that spaceflight was now available to everybody and that we were on the verge of making humanity a multi -planetary species. That was our mission. That's where we're there to do. And so on September 29th of 2004, on our X1, we called it the first official flight to try and win this $10 million. dollar, then now we're calling it the Ansari Express. And our logo or our phrase was go, you know, just like the word go. That was all about like go, go forth, go to space, go to the frontier.

2:41:50And we wanted to make this a big event. And so we invited the world to that first flight. And we had tens of thousands of people in campers and lining up the Mojave Desert. We had Stu Witt who was helping us organize that. We had William Schattner there. Captain Kirk was there. How fun was that? I had William Schattner there. That was amazing. I remember we were all staying at this really nice little motel. We're no tell them are having. No, hobby. And it's 4 a .m. We are all, you know, we had their little sleep that night before I did not sleep at all. I was so excited at the same time. I was so scared.

2:42:38It's like, oh my god, if something happens to anyone. So I prayed entire night that everyone would be safe. I wasn't praying that someone would win. I just wanted everyone to be safe. But I remember waking up, coming down the stairs to the lobby and I see, the first thing I see is William Schatner, Captain Kirk with a hat that says, I'm sorry, I'm surprised. I'm like, in my entire life, you never, ever imagine Captain Kirk with my name on that hat. Oh my God, my day was made. Oh, yeah, it was awesome. And Stu Witt was our partner at Mahavi, organizing all this. And so the question was, who's going to be our pilot?

2:43:19and Mike Melville, who did the original flight on June 21st, was again, nominate the pilot on this flight. And so Mike Melville was doing that flight. And what most people don't know is Mojave is one of the windiest places on the planet. And if you fly there, and I just took a Greg guide, took my 13 year old boys, they took pilot lessons, and all three of us in three planes, flew to Mojave on runway 31 where Spatial Point took off and landed. But all around you are all these windmills and like hundreds of not thousands of windmills because it's super windy. But why would you put a test flight facility in the middle of this windy desert?

2:44:02And it's because at dawn the wind stops. At dawn it's perfect flight conditions. So Anusha, you're right, Robert, 4 a .m. to go out for a sunrise launch. I remember driving down with the bus to the test flight site. And I didn't expect a big crowd to be honest with you. I'm like, oh, not many people will show up. And because it was just in the middle of nowhere. And you know, we had a very small marketing budget. just say it wasn't like it was blasted all over the news. And I see going there, this line of, you know, just headlights, you know, going toward it. In the dark and I'm like, oh my God, look all these people, so many people excited about this because it was a pivotal moment for anyone who had any interest in, you know, commercial space program.

2:44:59And it was a religious experience for the space. It was. It was because we've been promised since the beginning of space program that eventually we will all go to space. This will be for everyone and nothing was done for almost 50 years. And this was the first time an attempt was made to really change that paradigm, to really open up space and create an opportunity eventually for everyone to fly. So I think anyone who was like a Star Trek fan or someone who was from the Apollo era anyone who ever imagined of going to space What was not a the right stuff that was not part of any you know government space program?

2:45:44They saw this as an opportunity and it was a pen and it created so much excitement and it made me very proud at that moment I like oh my pride was a primary Emotion Dan Palata had set up this incredible production facility in the desert. We were transmitting TVs. Greg, correctly if I'm wrong, we were using Edwards Air Force Base and their radar and their imaging system to help us determine whether we hit a... Yeah, absolutely. They were part of the... Essentially part of the judging for both of the flights and they did an optical tracking with a big telescope and they had radar tracking. And Anusia to your point, and I love hearing the emotion in your voice about this because one of the people that was there for both of the flights, both of our ex -Rus flights, was the original pilot of the X -15, Scott Crossfield.

2:46:43And when I was a kid before the Mercury astronauts had been named, he was the person that everybody kind of thought of as America's first person to knock on the door of space. And in fact, after the second flight, I saw him while I was running back from hanging the metal on Brian Benny's neck back to the announcer stand. And I stopped in my tracks and he was standing next to the FAA administrator, Marion Blakey, who would cut the Gordian knot so that we could make these flights. that there are really two women that made this, besides you and Usher, an adduction to you, that made this possible, and they are Mary and Blakey and Patty Grace Smith, both of whom are there.

2:47:31And anyway, I stopped and I saw a cross -fielder and I took his hand and I shook it and I said, oh, I'm so pleased that you came back to see the second express flight. He said, are you kidding? Nothing's happened for 50 years. I had a bee here. It's just what you just said, Anusha. It was really touching and Eric and I had gotten a no crossfield after Eric's flight. Great guy. So, to have, you know, we had the royalty of test flight there for our thing. And we learned later, Neil Armstrong was watching it because he was on the board of space .com and our pal Dave Brody, set it up so that he could watch it, because he made him stop the board meeting of space .com to watch the flight.

2:48:20It was great. There was some drama going in the back. Yeah, I'm going to give you that now. So it is, again, September 29th, X1, the first spaceship, Space One flight. They, we have Mike Melville at the controls and he takes off, beautiful takeoff, ignites the engines. And as he is beginning to climb to altitude, all of a sudden we start to see spaceship one begin to roll and it's rolling and it's accelerating and it's accelerating and it's rolling and going up and up and up. And at this point, there's a hush on the cloud, right? Because the worst thing for the entire spaceflight industry would be that they would fail and have a death that would shut down.

2:49:13Like, yes, okay, spaceflight's only for governments. You private guys can't do it properly. And of course, he survives that. And when he gets out of the atmosphere, he's able to use his reaction control system to nullify the flights. But it was only because Mike Noble was so experienced and had the right stuff that he stuck with it. You know, I remember Pete Seabull was supposed to fly that flight. He was the third astronaut. There were three pilots Mike, Brian Binney and Pete. and Pete pulled himself out of the running, but in an interview later, Pete's evil said that, yeah, he would have definitely just cut the engine as soon as it started spinning.

2:49:58And it was only because they didn't cut the engine and they had data for those 29 rolls all the way to space that they were able to figure out what went wrong and how to very simply fix it for the next flight. Any commentary there Greg or Peter? I think I was standing next to Anusha and we were watching the jumbo tron screen which was kind of blurry because the camera was obviously so far away but we're seeing this rocket trajectory and it looked to me. I mean the crowd went quiet. It looked to everybody like the spaceship was coming apart because it was grainy enough and I remember Anusha's The hand was on my arm squeezing it like, oh my God, and everybody got quiet and the whole place was just hushed.

2:50:50It was so stunning and we thought, this everything leading to now has changed. It was like Steve Austin, the $6 million man, this kind of brainy. And it turned out, it was great, 29 victory rolls or whatever he said.

2:51:11So Mike wasn't supposed to fly that second flight originally. But when Pete pulled out, Bird asked his pal if he would do it, and he said the only thing a person in his situation could say, said, I'll ask Sally, Sally's his wife, because they knew this is death -defying stuff, and Sally's a pilot too, and then talked it over, and he agreed to do it. So now Mike goes through this death -defying thing. And the reason he started spinning was he flew a perfect straight up trajectory because he didn't want to be out of the box like he was on the last one and he flew it so perfectly that it was like balancing on a pin it was able to he caught a uh control surface in the last bits of atmosphere and he ran out of he ran out of molecules of air to to so he couldn't know it out until he got into a vacuum but when he came back in And he got the feather back and locked down.

2:52:09Now the vehicle is now it's just a glider and Mike's a really good pilot. So he knows he's going to be home safe and sound. And Paul Allen's beautiful alpha jet trainer that they were using for high chase pulls up alongside the gliding spaceship one. And there's a guy in the back seat and he's one of Paul Allen's guys who shall remain nameless but his initials are Jeff Johnson who gave me a very bad time earlier that morning. Maybe we'll talk about that later. But Jeff on an open microphone

2:52:46is watching Mike and Mike decides he's flown his two space missions. He's done everything's cool. He's so elated that he does a victory role. He literally does a victory all. Now that would have been cool except that Jeff Johnson says holy smokes so he didn't say smokes Jeff just rolled it. Now what what he didn't know is that his words are booming inside of the hangar of scale composites where Doug Shane is acting as the flight director and their loudspeakers and standing behind Doug Shane are the top 15 people from the FAA office of commercial space transportation and their boss, Mary and Blakey.

2:53:32So any of these people who have the power to pull Mike Melville's pilot's license forever for for doing that. Which was not approved. But Doug Shane without without any perceptible time between him saying Mike's just rolled it. Doug Jane clicks his microphone as flight director and says, uh, copy roll inspection program complete. That's beautiful. Which is why I love Doug Jane. So. So Mike, Mike lands successfully and X one is complete and check the box. Um, uh, and we then find out from Bert that he's going to fly. He has two weeks to successfully conduct a second flight to win this competition.

2:54:25And we're there taking measurements and weights and making sure he's abiding by the rules. When I say we, I mean Greg and his team. And Rick Sirflaas Chief of our judging team is Paul. Yes. Rick was a who is a spatial astronaut extraordinaire. And we hear from Bert that he's going to do his second flight, not two weeks later, but basically six days later on October 4th, 2004. Why? Because it's the anniversary of Sputnik, and Bert loves sticking it to historians and our Soviet historians. And so he's going to do humanity's first private spaceflight, ex -price, winning flight on the anniversary of October 4th.

2:55:15I'll ask you a quiz, a question.

2:55:19We are dealing with death -defying feats. And if someone died in that program, it would have been on our heads for creating the program and funding the program. Did you think about that at all? Did you think about the potential that we were initiating something that would potentially cause people to lose their lives? I did as someone who was worried about it frankly and Peter you talk about people who reached certain level of fame, afraid of failure. To me failure would be not winning but something that from a reputation from just personal guilt would not be good for me was that if something that I supported and sponsored really caused a human life.

2:56:17But at the same time, and I had said this to in many of my interviews before that, well, people asked me if I would go to space and I always said, I would go on a one -way ticket to space. I believed in it so much that I was ready to give my life to actually go to space. So I understood the motivation of everyone who was involved on X -Fi side and on the entrepreneurs and innovators who were building the spaceship. So it was a big burden, but it was not lost on me. And you did go to space on a Russian Soyuz, not a few handful of years later. But you came back. So that was the good news. I can't buy.

2:57:02Thank God. Greg, how about you, Eric? I mean, Eric, you risked your life on your transatlantic flight on a 70th anniversary. Did you feel like your life was at risk at that time? Yes. Although, I think, you know, it's one thing to have personal risk. And for me, I was risking my own life. and Greg was worried because he was associated with me, right? He was being mission control, you know, the... He was running the whole thing behind the scenes, and mission control at the Science Center and so forth. So I felt like it was the right thing to do for me to risk my life, but also to take all the risk out of it, like grandfather did, and that's why we were successful, because we went at it methodically.

2:57:58The X -Prize dialogue about what if someone dies was, I mean, we had a lot of trepidation about that. And in fact, I think scaled lost some people in an engine test down in the desert that was later. There's, and it affected them for spaceship two to go. Oh, that's right. That was later. But it was a huge question. And I think this is where X -Prize separates itself from everything. And this is that we constantly look at how to create the most leverage and create the right conditions for people to risk their development, their money, et cetera, and leverage that because companies get protective, people get protective, governments get protective and they can't take those risks anymore.

2:58:52That's why they have Lockheed's Cunk Works and Phanomorx and so forth. And X -Prize has stepped into an entire niche here and that's what we were talking about then as this risk factor. We've now sort of taken all two whole industries, the aerospace space industry and the incentive prize industry to a new level to help break through those grand challenges that you mentioned early on in the podcast. And Eric, that's just to build on what you said. It's a very important point because yes, we haven't launched an ex -price that puts human life at risk. But what we've seen is the teams who compete in ex -prises, they put a lot at risk, they They more gushed their home, they put their family at some risk, they put their careers at risk, they bet everything because they believe in what they're building.

2:59:48And I think at the heart of the, I'm sorry, I express, and at the heart of every competition and any successful entrepreneur, this is this belief and passion about what they're doing. So yes, the prize is enough incentive to get them interested and attract them to the competition, but it's not the only thing. They're not doing it for the money. They're doing it because they believe in what they're building and believe in the purpose of the competition, not just the money. Yeah. The risk communication around X -Prize was actually one of the most important things. The reason, in terms of the lasting impact of it, it looked to people that were outside of us that the FAA and related agencies made a huge change in a very short period of time when they came up with the present space law that exists, which was just a few months after we gave away the $10 million.

3:01:02The reality was that those people were with us from the beginning. They were standing there on the stage with us in 1996. They were working with our teams, the US teams anyway. And around 2000, about the time that we had our nature, we were really in jeopardy, going out of business, there was a meeting in Washington, D .C. put up by the Cato Institute about the future of commercial spaceflight. And we talked about at that meeting, and I noticed the sea change that happened after this discussion. We added discussion presentation about what we were doing. And we showed a comparison with risks that people are willing to take.

3:01:53So for example, I'll just make up the number because I don't remember the real number. Every year something like 32 people in America die by skiing into trees. We have not seen fit to outlaw either skiing or trees. People figure it's worth something we're doing. When you look at the stuff that, when you look at the real risks that society takes, what you find out is that there's a myth about people being risk -averse. Companies may be risk -averse, organizations may be risk -averse, but people actually take a lot of risk and actually companies take a lot of risk too, but they mitigate the risk.

3:02:31Eric's flight was all about, and Charles's flight, were all about risk -averse mitigation. In fact, the reason Charizard Limbert won the Orteg Prize was he had a superior knowledge of what the real risks were on long flights. Everybody thought multiple engines, big heavy planes were safer, but he realized they were not. The purpose of that second engine was to get you from where the first engine failed to the scene of the crash. He realized it would be safer to have a smaller airplane. sacrifice everything for fuel. Yeah, and get margin. So this discussion is actually where we had some of the biggest impact.

3:03:14First of all, to get people to try stuff, try new things, and secondly, to, you know, but we were, this is not to say we were callous about it. In fact, I'm looking at the ex -price credo that the cred that we wrote in 96. Do you want to read it first? I do. We believe that space flight should be open to all, not just an elite cadre of government employees or the ultra -rich. We believe that commercial forces will bring space flight into a publicly affordable range. We will use our best efforts to achieve this goal. We believe that the resources of space are the key to enhancing the wealth of all nations and people while preserving and repairing the environment of our home planet.

3:04:02We believe this is our duty to our species and our fellow passengers on Spaceship Earth. We believe that the risks involved in human space flight are far outweighed by the benefits to the participant and to humanity. We will use our utmost efforts to foster safety for participants, observers, and the public in all ex -prize activities.

3:04:30And we talk about our own standards of conduct. I'll skip over just because it's not unusual. We finished by saying we believe that a small group of people with passion for a cause can achieve that which has never been attained. This is why we stage competitions that challenge issues that matter most. So, right in our DNA we have risk, we have the benefits to everybody by opening space and you know what our mission was and it actually still fits our, you know, we're seeing it through the lens of our original goals but it fits and I had forgotten that we talked about stage competitions plural in the first one.

3:05:17I'm glad that we did. We had the seeds there real quick. I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin Truth is I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called one skin It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence That is a synthetic that kills senile cells in your skin and this literally reverses the age of your skin And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. So a few days later, we hear from Bert, October 4th is the date, and we are back in the Mojave Desert, getting in at four o 'clock in the morning, the crowds, even though we were not ready to stage another party in the desert, the crowds are there back again.

3:06:14And this time, Brian Binney is the pilot in control. Brian had done a hard landing on Spaceship 1 some year earlier. December 13, the first powered flight, which by the way was the first privately developed supersonic flight ever. Yeah, we showed this. These are images from the X1 flight date. Yeah, we had M &M's as a sponsor. We had ST's rockets being built, forgotten about those. And it was quite a extraordinary event. There's there's Greg at Mission Control And that turned out to be one of the biggest webcasts in history Thanks to Jack Bader who arranged all the arranged all of that. Yeah, so so Brian takes off.

3:07:15Earlier that morning he tells a great story. By the way, there's an amazing book called How to Make a Spaceship, Julian Guthrie wrote, it was an Eartime's best seller that tells in detail the story around all of this. My story Eric Lindbergh and Greg Anusha, Bert Routan, Brian Binney, And that morning, Brian is getting ready to take his flight and his mother -in -law steps up with a 7 -Eleven giant gulp in her hand to give him a hug. And as she's approaching Brian, he's thinking to himself, what is she going to do with that giant gulp in her hand? Actually, it was not a gulp. It was a vanilla coffee.

3:07:55A giant, a styrofoam giant vanilla coffee. And she reaches over to give him a big hug. And of course, the coffee goes down his back and and and he's having to fly with, you know, with like 24 ounces of vanilla flavored coffee down his back and that vanilla smell. You can imagine in the cockpit and he calculates that that additional, you know, half a pound of liquid cost him like hundreds of hundreds of feet of altitude on apogee. Although he said an altitude record on that flight. He did. He sent, you know, Bert Rutan in the cockpit just before they close it up, says, you know, with their, they were both golfing buddies, you know, it's like straight and narrowed down the, down the fairway.

3:08:45And he went after the X -15 altitude record, which had never been broken. And he flyed a perfect flight. He was our Charles Lindbergh, hidden you altitude, came back, beautiful landing. We were sorry, we lost Brian Binney just 18 months ago or so. It was a tragic loss to the community. We also lost Dick Rutan within this past year. But it was this magical moment. Here we are, 8 years after announcing the Arch, 10, 11 years Greg after you gave me the Spirit of St. Louis book, and this incredibly crazy journey of a thousand deaths and a thousand picking ourselves off the floor, and trying to convince every single person out there that this was doable, possible, back at changing the laws and regulations,

3:09:48and it was done. And it had been achieved. I know in that moment I had this incredible emotional experience and I saw myself at the top of this mountain peak. Like it was the journey, we had achieved the goal of reaching this pinnacle. And then as I looked around all I saw were bigger mountain peaks. That was a, it was a, it's like, wow, it were here. I want to ask each of you, what was it like for you seeing this? Greg, I want to start with you because you had been on this journey with me longer than anybody. you gave up a lot of security and a lot of you relocate your family, you took huge risks to be on this journey.

3:10:46What did you feel in that moment? You know what I remember Peter was I was listening to Bob Voice was talking to me through a tiny little earpiece, and he was getting the altitude feeds from Edwards Air Force Base. And I was the color commentator, announcer for things, so I'm talking to the crowd. And I remember, I remember that as Brian was going up and was in the coast phase, I said, that Brian Benny's knocking on Heaven's door, and I heard some people start singing, knock, knock, knock, and on Heaven's door. And then I got the call, the Apigee call. Actually, I got the call that, you know, they surpassed our, our, um, 100 kilometers.

3:11:32And I, as I announced that to the crowd, you were standing next to your debt. I've known for, you know, for many years. And you guys gave each other a hug. And it was, uh, it was, uh, it made me realize that, you know, all of us, uh, had, had, had basically bet everything, better reputations. And it was beginning to sink in that it really had to happen. That was a beautiful moment and other beautiful moments happened there after, but you know I still remember that actual second where that altitude call came in. And I felt it was a great feeling to have been part of something as a team that we live forever.

3:12:29I felt the real sense of community. Yeah. It was it was great. I'm proud to have worked with all of you on it. Yeah, buddy. It was it was harrowing and and and had we stopped at any point it would not have happened. It only happened because we refused to give up. Coming back to that human spirit, that passion, that purpose, that much. And people listening to me to understand this was not about a suborbital flight. This was about opening the cosmos for humanity. This was about the first lungfish moving out of the oceans onto land. And this was about lighting the fuse and saying, we can. This was about dreaming big.

3:13:23And I think in this nation and this world today, what we need is people to dream big, to get out of their complacency and their complaining and start saying, instead of complaining, we can fix things. We can reinvent things. We can do extraordinary things. That's what humans do. Eric, you just call me a lung fish?

3:13:51I'm resembling that remark right now because I just, I can't escape the parallel of my life as Greg had some emotions come up. My life changed dramatically as a result of One, meeting you guys, and I mean all of you, I mean the whole ecosystem that continues to grow as X -Prize is the most powerful force in my life. And the feeling that we were a part of a small team of people that obviously grew bigger. The weird thing about those launch events and the flights was that there were a lot more people there all taking part in the celebrations and the rocket flights, but it was a small team of people that changed the way the world thought about spaceflight and opened up not only this private spaceflight industry where musk, basil, and branson are trying to sell us tickets to fly our stuff into space or our bodies into space but the incentive prize industry this you know the x -price we went from a bunch of rocket keeks and I'm not even a rocket scientist You guys actually are, but as an aviation guy, I just got sucked in and I grew with X -Prize.

3:15:13I had my low and I grew my life and it empowered me in a way that has allowed me to look at aviation as, oh, what are the problems that we're facing? How do we fix them and how can I apply myself in a different way? And that's what the ex -price did and that's why it grew into this incredible industry where we have approaching 600 million dollars in prizes to solve the grandchand challenges facing humanity that's freaking extraordinary and to have you know empowered us all of us to go out and apply our passions in our industry and and apply those lessons learned to try to break through the problems that we're facing.

3:16:00It gave me hope being there on that launch day and seeing Benny and all those launch days. And then the meetings afterwards, should we focus on space? Yes, a good business focuses on, and we have our space focus. And I remember trying to argue a lot, well, we should do some closed -looping systems and Earth -based, you know, coming back to my environmental roots and everyone's like, no, we need to focus on space. And then I remember Larry Page was at that meeting as a guest. And he said, towards the end, he was quiet most of the time. He said, strikes me that you guys have figured out a real good way to solve big problems using a small amount of money.

3:16:42And of course, then we've brought him out from our space focus to lots of other things. And that's to me what the whole X Prize journey is. It is a hero's journey because it was really tough, but it's empowered all of us to do a lot more in that hope that we never stopped. Yeah, rippling out, it's extraordinary. And I just have to thank each of you for your ability to persevere. We all had big lows and we exited at different times to take a break or try to survive. and we all came back together and that story is the most epic of stories. We never stopped dreaming and we're having this conversation now and there's $600 million worth of prizes out there because in this universe we didn't stop dreaming.

3:17:39Had we stopped and any of us not continued on we would not be here and I think I want to have people internalize that lesson that if you care about something enough and it is your massive transformative purpose, despite how difficult it is, despite being knocked down over and over and over again. If you truly believe in your heart of hearts, this is the definition of human spirit. You only fail by giving up. Anusha, drawing the the dotted line between a young girl into Iran, staring up at the stars, and that moment in time, what was going through your mind? So it was very emotional moment for me as well because I could feel that we have just made history.

3:18:35We had changed the course of spaceflight and humanity forever. There was no denying it. And the emotions and all the activities sort of was just a distraction at that moment. I wanted to sit down and just understand what was happening. And I remember shortly after we had a quick meeting behind the scenes with me in Belayke and Patty Grace Smith talking about regulation. Because I remember that was a whole other journey behind the scene that was happening. And we didn't even know if we're going to have permission from FAA to allow the teams to fly. And we were trying to, you know, change the mindset at FAA and regulators that this was important.

3:19:22I remember numerous meetings with NASA administrators and others. And all this sort of pushback that you guys are crazy. You don't know what you're doing. You're going to get people killed. This is not a good idea. and trying to say commercial space is not here to replace NASA, but commercial space is here to work hand in hand with NASA and to push boundaries and bring activities that will never happen inside a government. and that policy change and the group that ended up giving us the launch licenses became the reason today we have a vibrant growing healthy commercial space community and I remember a few years ago I saw this ad for Goldman Sachs Space Investment Conference and I'm like the day has come.

3:20:16Goldman Sachs is having a space investment conference. Oh, God. It was not that way 20, 30 years ago. It was like nobody was putting a penny on this. They were renegades. We were all a bunch of renegades. At least it was only the government. It was purely government contracting. It was. It was. It was. It's worth saying a couple of pick up items here. We met, I met Elon Musk in 2001 just after the dot com bust. He came over with with Adeo Ressi, the two had been college roommates and Adeo got involved on our board at X -Prize. Elon went and joined the Mar society for a little bit, but then came back and joined the new spirit of St.

3:21:05Louis, which was amazing. And he was there on all these flights. and you know, I think you had a good idea. Peter, Elon joined when he heard your pitch for the new spirit organization at the Explorers Club when we were getting Eric, the party for Eric, before he crossed the Atlantic. And I was sitting with Elon and his mother, May, Musk. And he leaned over to her right in front of me. I mean, it's all right. He wasn't doing this quietly. And remember, he's a roughly a billionaire at this point. and he says, Mom, okay, with you, if I join this club, it'd be like me asking if I could buy a Snickers bar, right?

3:21:45For my mom. It was just charming. And he's gotten on since to be an extraordinary supporter for the Foundation backing our global learning ex -price and $100 million, carbon extraction sequestration prize. And Greg, I mean, listen, it's kind of like pinching ourselves to say, after we would go to IHOP and celebrate on a $25 ,000 that we now have $300 million or greater ex -prices. So my takeaway is that we're long due for going to IHOP together. But you know what my, I know you're showing this to your community, Peter, and what an amazing thing this to be able to say that if you follow the lesson of radical persistence in pursuit of passion that you get to be in this place of profound gratitude, which is how I feel toward you guys, all of you.

3:22:47That is the overwhelming feeling of pride and gratitude that comes from all of this. It is truly the same for me and Eric said that express changed his life. I cannot even tell the story of my life. It becomes the story of exprise. And for me, Peter, coming from a country without space program, through all the hardship and difficulties, coming to a new country, without money, without hope, without anything to hang on. And then being able to become part of a story that's so important in my life and has shaped everything I do. I joined the board immediately after we became sponsors and just being part of the community that Eric described and the sense of hopefulness, positivity, anything is possible, has been ingrained in me in everything I do and I owe that to express and the board and everyone who surrounded me during that time and continues to surround me and eventually, you know, sort of made my dream of going to space possible.

3:24:0311 days in the space station. Or 11 days in space, 10 days in the station. They're about to. Yeah, yes, yes. I want to say thank you, Anusha, for coming back as our CEO. Well, it's been amazing to have you as an extraordinary CEO and a leader take X Prize forward. I'll just say we did have that first meeting Eric that you were called with Larry Page. We were able to recruit Larry Page on our board, and Elon Musk and James Cameron, and go from here into prizes of cleaning up oil spills, mapping the ocean floor, pulling water out of the atmosphere, pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, reversing age -related degradation of our health by 10, 20 years.

3:24:52It's been a crazy ass journey and it's been one, I think, of coming back to the human spirit. Humans are amazing. There is nothing we cannot do when we are committed and we persevere within the laws of physics. I'll put that in place or at least lots of physics as I'm currently understood. Guys, I just want to say thank you for recalling this journey. Anybody listening, we're here having this conversation because the four of us didn't give up. And if you care about something deeply enough and it's your purpose in life, you only fail by giving up yourself. This is a story of a thousand knows and an extraordinary band of renegades, all the teams, all the backers, all the sponsors, all the people who worked and still work the Express Foundation.

3:25:54Anyway, thank you guys for this past 30 years. I cannot wait for the next 30 years. It's going to be awesome. Thank you Peter for giving us an opportunity to partner up with you and be part of this incredible journey and I'm grateful I have the best job in the world to be able to continue building this engine of innovation that will truly when I look out there is the only place the only group was really driving massive change towards all of us. these brief problems we face today and it's a source of hope for humanity. So it's such a privilege to be able to be at the helm these days and continue to drive it forward.

3:26:46Thank you. Eric, the 100th anniversary of the Grand Fathers flight is coming up in 1927. Any special thoughts for the 100th anniversary? Oh, man. Well, we just moved the Lindbergh Foundation to St. Louis because because it has a real spirit there and we're building education programs and working on sustainability for aviation, one of the hardest industries to decarbonize. So super excited about that. I want to invite you guys along the journey. I think I don't have an airplane that I'm flying across the Atlantic. I kind of told myself I didn't need to do that again. but you know if scaled came up with a cool design maybe it has to be electric though or high pressure.

3:27:33So you guys infected me with your crazy entrepreneurial space dreaming and I in turn am infecting other people. It really is the gift of hope, as Anusha mentioned, that inspiration in the spirit that's alive and the greatest gift are these people. You, my family, but the ripples and all the people that end up in the orbit of X Prize are the most extraordinary people on the planet. No question. Thank you, pal. Greg, thank you for that gift of a book. Thank you for your friendship now. Four decades. Thanks for giving up so much and for persevering and being mission control throughout this incredible journey we've covered.

3:28:28To quote those philosophers, the grateful dead. What a long, strange, wonderful trip it's been. Thanks to each of you. And Adios for now. I take care everybody. I hope you guys enjoyed this special episode of moonshots. Truly a chance to dream big. I encourage all of you to take the limiter off you to dream as big as you can to find that purpose in your life. To remember the human spirit enables us to do extraordinary things. And that today we're living during the most extraordinary and most exciting time ever powered by exponential technologies powered by the ability to dream beyond even the concepts that have held us back in the past.

3:29:11There is nothing we cannot do. Nothing that the committed and passionate human mind cannot do. Thank you all. If you want more information about the X Prize, please go to xprise .org and join us in going after solving humanity's biggest challenges. to form a team, become a supporter, become a member, just follow what we do. Eric, where can people find you on social media and on Lindbergh galleries? Yeah, linkedin, Lindbergh gallery .com is my sort of, my what I do for my health, make furniture and sculptures, and Lindbergh, you and your, or Lindbergh art forms, they're beautiful. I got excited about rocket chips in the day.

3:29:56And you know that stuff just keeps that practice keeps me from blasting off into space and keeps me grounded here on Earth Which is important to have that balance in life. Okay. All right. I want a blast off in the space So I'm jealous and you show that you had a chance to go and I did not yet But I'm working on it. I'm working on it. We have to go together. We'll do the surprise mission I love that I do show where do people get a chance to follow you? Well, I'm on social media on X and Instagram at Anusha and sorry or Anusha X on Instagram. And also, Express Foundation, of course. Yes. Everything I do today is Express.

3:30:39So all of our activities are excited to have seven active prizes and a lot more to come. So definitely sign up so you learn about our future prizes and join us in our community in any way you can contribute and be part of this amazing journey with us. Onwards to the future and as the slogan for the Unstar EX Prize back in 2004 go.