#43 - Halen Mattison, Co-Founder & CEO of General Galactic

0:00You don't need to be a billionaire to do a space company or do a cool hard tech startup. In the case of Starship, you've got so much methane and so much oxygen that if those mixed well enough, you would end up with the largest non-nuclear explosion in history by a factor of five. China is the only nation that has demonstrated the ability to capture and rendezvous with a non-cooperative asset. They can basically go and capture anything on orbit. The U.S. cannot do that right now. this is halen madison and uh he used to work at spacex and now he started a new company called general galactic um let's just start off with that spacex stuff what's the worst fuck up that happened while you're working at spacex oh man well there's certainly a few things i probably can't talk about for a lot of reasons um i mean i was there when we had uh one of the dragon capsules explode during a test firing on the ground um so we had just flown demo one it's the first time we're flying the crew dragon vehicle um and we brought it back and we were doing checkouts on the ground uh and we were going to try to do some test firing on the engine and it just exploded everywhere um so everything inside got obliterated um that capsule was supposed to fly again uh and And then I remember I got a call on a Saturday and they were like, yeah, capsule's gone, dude.

1:22So we got to figure out what just happened. And that investigation was actually super interesting. I will say that's actually one of the cool things about SpaceX that they probably do better than pretty much anyone else out there is investigate when they screw up. Yeah. The failure investigation style that SpaceX has crafted has allowed them to figure out a lot of the exceptionally hard problems. How often does something go horribly wrong when they're trying out some new test? Yeah, I mean, with new stuff, pretty often. I mean, it depends how you define horribly. There are constant issues. We break things.

1:59I mean, that's the whole thing. Move fast and break things, right? The ethos of SpaceX was derived from Silicon Valley and what made the early dot-com companies fast. And we started to apply that to hard tech. so we're constantly failing parts testing to failure and it's things that I think would make legacy aerospace and a lot of legacy hard tech like shiver because it's like oh my god how could you blow that up how could you you know fail in this way but we learned so much from those failures that allowed us to move faster than pretty much anyone else out there yeah was there any particular so you talking about the like when things go horribly wrong there's like a really intensive you know discovery process on what had that happen uh is there any specific one that you can remember like on the dragon capsule um what was that like yeah i mean there's a little bit of a moment where um maybe to give a historical example when something would go wrong in a crude space flight you know think of mercury gemini apollo era um if there was a failure or they think they lost the crew they would immediately lock the doors of mission control and everyone would pretty much be stuck there right then it's like hey we are immediately would they not tell anyone well no they like people would figure it out but the idea is hey this just happened we're not going to let you guys leave forget everything that just happened and freak out we're going to immediately start investigating the failure and spacex generally tends to do a lot of the same things um and we use that information to make the next thing better like i think as we're doing this interview starship flight 10 might be happening yeah um sad that we're missing that fuck yeah uh but you know that one may or may not work i couldn't tell you um but what definitely will happen is that the engineers will gather all the data and even if that thing is blown into a million pieces and is raining down you know over trinidad and tobago or wherever um you know they are certainly going to do everything they can to make the next one better and that is a style of innovation that was pretty much dead in the aerospace industry prior to SpaceX getting big.

4:03A fun story about that first flight of Dragon. So, you know, I think you and I had chatted previously about how I even came out to SpaceX. I was sitting in class in 2018 at my undergrad. I watched Elon and the team fly the Falcon Heavy and the Tesla Roadster. And I was like, that is the coolest thing I've ever seen. I would like to go do that and be a part of that and so I applied to SpaceX like in that class I got a call a couple weeks later and a phone interview with the Dragon team and what was that fun interview like it was super intense because they only gave me like 24 hour notice maybe less so it was one of the first times I like truly pulled an all-nighter yeah and I thought about every single part of engineering I'd ever touched at that point every project I'd ever worked on and it actually was not that bad of an interview.

4:57I think I had a really good conversation. We talked a lot about some of the space research I was doing. Um, and I think what has been a through line in my career so far is that I'm a pretty good fabricator. Um, my dad is an automotive mechanic. I grew up working on cars with him, built engines from the time I was like, I think middle school or maybe even elementary. Um, and I ended up talking about that in the interview and they were like, cool. Like that sounds super useful um and i was thinking it was for like a summer internship because this interview was happening i think mid-december like we're getting ready to go home for the holidays and they're like no no this starts like january uh and i'd never even been to the west coast dude like so i get my offer i have a week to get out to california um and i am hilariously like unaware of SpaceX, the aerospace scene, the tech scene.

5:50I am like a perfect example of like kid from North Carolina that's just getting exposed to all this for the first time. And I barely knew who Elon was. I think the first time I saw him in person was during an announcement where he was telling everyone that he was going to lay off 10 % of the company. And just like everybody being terrified after that. Was that like, was your perception that maybe I'm part of the 10 %? Yeah, absolutely. I was like, man, did the interns get laid off too? shit like well short trip to california how long was that into the journey at spacex one week one weekend you're like oh fuck i'm getting laid off yeah yeah it was like pretty scary and like this is totally different um so i didn't know a lot of the stuff and uh demo one happened towards the end of that internship and um we had a few delays with it and i was like this is what i've been working on all summer i really want to see this through so i was there standing outside of mission control the night as we're docking with the ISS.

6:45And so the first ever Crew Dragon capsule is slowly approaching the International Space Station. And I'm standing there with like a fairly small crowd of people. Like it's pretty much just leadership and some other folks. And there's a woman standing beside me and she was wearing this like very like floral dress. And I remember thinking to myself, I was like, oh, I haven't seen this person around. um and then she kind of leaned over as we're watching the capsule get closer and closer to the station and she's like so is this happening in space right now and i was like yeah yeah this is like that's the space station like this is really happening and it wasn't until after we had docked and we're like hell yeah we did it you know uh we're all cheering that elon walks out and walks up to her and is like hey are you ready to go and that's when i realized it was grimes and she was just kind of there for the fanfare.

7:35And I was just like, oh, that's who that is. That's cool. Yeah. And I was just, again, like totally unaware, kid from the South, no business being in that. And I just constantly have had these experiences. Like I remember that same internship. I was in a huge rush because we were trying to fly a mission. there was this issue that had come up with some of the pintle injectors for uh part of the propulsion system on dragon and i was in charge of figuring out a small sliver of that and i'm in a huge rush i'm running around the office and i get back to my desk and there's this dude sitting there and he's like talking to some other employees and i'm like dude like why are you at my desk like i you know i need to get work done and so i walked i was like hey man like you know i sorry i need my desk and he's like oh yeah for sure um and it wasn't actually until months later that i saw uh an announcement and then realized that that guy was artemis 2 astronaut victor glover you saw an astronaut to get out of your chair i did yeah amazing um and he's gonna be uh on artemis 2 which will circumnavigate the moon next year incredible yeah so when you're when you're like uh you know during that night when the first uh dragon capsule is going to dock with the space station what were the nerves like in that room oh dude i mean completely frozen yeah um you could definitely hear a pin drop i think one of the cool things though is that you do have these like totally breathless moments in space flight um because some of it can happen so quickly right like the moment before uh starship launched for the first time standing there for that too and you see the engines ignite and then there's just a couple seconds where it's like is this gonna make it off the pad um you know one of the scary things about starship is that in a worst case scenario we do this analysis where we look at hey if this thing just totally bombs on the pad what happens and in the case of starship you've got so much methane and so much oxygen that if you had a case where those mixed well enough you would end up with the fifth largest sorry let me get right the largest non-nuclear explosion in history by a factor of five and it would be like in like starbase or something right yeah just decimate incredible yeah so you know you're dealing with these things it's like holy shit there is a lot of risk in this moment especially as we went to demo two with dragon and started flying astronauts now there's human lives on the line right um and so it's super intense but then the moment that you realize that it worked it's like just the most exciting addicting feeling and that's the reason that people build careers in this space is that it is some of the most dynamic exciting things that you can do ever uh and if you have a chance to contribute even a bolt in that thing you're gonna feel accomplishment yeah for the rest of your life you'll always be able to say that and i've been fortunate to put hardware on a lot of these vehicles now um even in my fairly short tenure at spacex um and yeah i would say i'm addicted to doing that sort of thing at this point yeah i remember elon talking about you know there's almost like this checklist of things that um all the risks that they kind of go down and make sure you know every single one of them is checked off yeah but then there's always that like we just don't know what's going to happen yep where like maybe the bolts rust because of the seawater weather yeah you know like no one knows and uh it's i i got to imagine that that's like especially on the first few flights is just nerve wracking as hell the unknown unknowns are what keep you up right because i think as engineers we're smart enough to figure out where our known unknowns are and those are the things like yeah we know that we probably didn't size this bracket correctly and this is going to yield on flight or you know we have very slim margins on this pressure vessel um and that's kind of fine like you can go to sleep at night because you did the basic calcs and you're like okay it's probably going to be okay it's always the unknown unknowns the interactions between these very complicated hardware systems that's what causes things to explode drastically and no one expected it it's like it's like the whole like complex adaptive system and one little thing is you know just a butterfly flaps it swings and then your entire starship blows up yeah yeah or you know a tech installs a seal upside down and then the starship blows up how many how many hands are working on a starship before it goes up like how many little areas of error are introduced early in a dev program like so for the early starships and really any early spaceflight vehicle like what we're building here a lot there are tons thousands thousands more than that in some cases of individual actions and each one of those if not executed correctly could result in a failure but the magic of building space companies in the 21st and 22nd century will be that we're slowly reducing the number of those points right like starship the assembly line is going to be increasingly automated and that's something that we don't really see in space flight or the space industry like your thought is always engineers and technicians in bunny suits like crawling around in the clean room like torquing every bolt you know checking out every fitting but as we go to do these things at scale like automation starts to reduce those risks and like the realm of human error that can occur in the systems yeah i imagine that it's a little bit like the uh i think it's probably going to be a little bit different than the model three production ramp and like 2018, where I think Elon like way over went, you know, went way overboard on automation at first and then kind of like rolled it back.

13:08And now is reintroducing automation after like introducing the algorithm. Was it when you were working at SpaceX, what was like the most, uh, kind of memorable thing for you? I mean, uh, I would say it was a massive turning point for my life as a whole, right? Like, it was the moment where I went from kind of being like just a kid lucky enough to be in California doing cool tech stuff to someone that I felt you know had an understanding of like how to go and build big things that matter and that's the thing that I always think about like in the moment you're there at 2 a.m doing dev testing or you're sweating over this upcoming flight or you're arguing with NASA about something in their requirements list.

13:54But ultimately, you know that what you're working towards is this like massive vision and you're a small piece of it, but it matters probably a thousand X, 10 ,000 X more than pretty much any other job in the industry. And so that's what drives people, I think, to go from SpaceX to doing things like what I'm doing now. I think it's also the thing that you always hold on to is just like how memorable that was to work with some of those really awesome, talented people. And honestly, to just make history the whole time. Yeah. Do you if you were just randomly put into power, you are the leader of NASA one day and you're going to be a leader for like the next year or two.

14:35Yeah. What are the actions that you would take to kind of make the organization as effective as possible? Sure. Yeah. For one, I wish that it was Jared Isaacman, but I don't think it will be at this point. um why do you think he would have like been so good i think jared i mean he's an entrepreneur first um that obviously goes a long way um i think nasa at its best is a super lean organization that is very focused on a specific mission um historically that's when it's performed best and i think it's allowed people to operate and do pretty amazing stuff i think that his uh general vision for the agency aligned with that um if i was in the seat i think i would do several of the same things, we have got to stop giving the primes contracts.

15:17I think they need to just fight for it for the first time. Historically, the primes exist because we had this massive influx of workers into the defense industry during World War II, right? Like America became a production powerhouse. And after the war, it kind of segued nicely into the Apollo program, right? Like you had a lot of that same talent base that we built up in places like here in El Segundo and the supplier base, the industrial base, the talent base, all shifted really well into the space program. But once the geopolitical stresses died down after the first Apollo landing, suddenly we had this massive amount of people, I mean, literally hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S.

16:02economy that didn't really have a great fit. And in my opinion, the primes at this point are just a continuation of what is a jobs program. And that's not to say that there isn't really great work being done, but their mission at this point is to stay alive and to employ as many people as possible in congressional districts where they can lobby really well. Yeah. And that's, of course, not a great incentive for innovation, progress, and becoming a spacefaring future absolutely not and i think it's driven most of the stagnation we've seen like in the space startup landscape uh i have this very like rising tide lifts all ships mentality of like we try to work really closely with pretty much any space startup that wants to talk to us and part of that is because we have this uh massive effectively enemy in the primes that you know don't want any of us to exist right like because if we out innovate them which we will uh they will have a harder and harder time convincing congress to keep funding them but the more and more we can clearly beat them in terms of performance cost and better products the better the entire country will be yeah it's basically if startups succeed it makes them look bad absolutely yeah because they're supposed to be the only ones that can do it you know you have this uh line where you're saying like you want to build the first gas station on mars like work work backwards sure from like how the hell you even get there and like are you first going to put a gas station on the moon like i think we probably will um just because there's enough lunar water that it makes sense um but i'll tell you why that matters um when you think about everything that we've accomplished so far in the space industry we have gone from launching human beings into orbit to eventually landing on the moon to now having a continuous human presence in orbit for over two decades.

18:00A lot of the mission architectures currently stop because they're running out of fuel. Like that is kind of the way to think about it, right? Like we build missions around what our propulsion budget is. And that's like the amount of maneuvers that you can do in space, given your engines and your fuel. And we're currently fundamentally limited by just like how much fuel we can pack into these rockets. Whether it be the Starship architecture, blue origins architecture anytime you want to take those vehicles to the moon or to mars you're going to be doing a lot of refueling and you want to talk about like just how much refueling that really is yeah i mean i was surprised yeah it's enormous um you know you hear elon talking about needing to fly starships like on the hour every hour for every day of the year um and a lot of those are probably refueling flights um you know spacex has shown uh at least publicly that to do the lunar mission they need to do around 14 refueling events and that is a full starship being launched just to fuel the other starship that will go around that's right yeah yeah um and then you know for mars it's a similar story um for uh really a lot of the architectures not just starship by the way um that want to go and do these missions like they're looking at refueling and so being able to do refueling on orbit uh whether that is a depot that you launch like in the case of starship or launching it from the surface of the moon and building a logistics network that way or even on the moon allows you to reach further and further and further so when we say gas station on mars that does literally mean building a fuel depot on the martian surface that allows human explorers to come home and so it basically like closed the loop on sending starships to and from mars that's right yeah i think yeah interesting okay so when you when you're looking at you know that kind of like vision it requires huge amounts of starship productions i think i think on the order of you know if he's going to send you know a thousand starships which i believe is what his like goal is elon's goal is you need roughly 10 times that number or even maybe more for like the whole refueling process on earth yeah i mean ideally you're reusing each one so maybe the number is a little lower but yeah it's an incredible production rate and that's thousand that's why we need insane automation that's why that production line needs to be built the way it is um do you want to talk about just like starting up the production line of starship and what that first like early iteration process was like i wasn't uh on the production team but i was certainly exposed to a lot of what was happening um you know elon says the factory is the product and that's absolutely true like the machine that can build the machine is is ultimately extremely challenging but also the one that moves the needle um we've seen rockets and satellites and all sorts of spacecraft be built one-off many many times the scale that you can achieve with bespoke manufacturing is fundamentally very limited and so watching the production start to become more streamlined and to look more like an automotive production facility than your conventional clean room rocket production facility is pretty staggering yeah is there is there any you know i imagine that you like there's extreme urgency at spacex um have you kind of like what was your experience um from that angle like yeah and then also how is that like kind of translated to running your own startup i think it was actually probably one of the best experiences i could hope for i think about that constantly in how we're gonna achieve what we want to achieve for general galactic um we used to say uh because we operate off of the responsible engineer model both at spacex and general galactic which basically means you are the ceo of your product so let's say i'm the responsible engineer for um part of the nozzle on a raptor that means that i'm effectively authorized to move heaven and earth to make sure that thing flies and that means everything from the initial napkin sketches of like okay well here's how we would roughly size this and the expansion ratio and here's how we'll cool it blah blah blah all the way through me personally standing beside the technicians or even working with the technicians on the 100th iteration of it being installed on making sure that it's done right absolutely that time yeah and until that product is retired you are responsible for it and that is something that i think allows startups to move really quickly too if well implemented i think what we're trying to do here is implement that honestly to a little bit more extreme degree because i don't have a billion dollars uh i unfortunately unlike most space founders like don't get to sit on a yacht or go race my Ferrari on the weekend.

22:30Like we're here, we're working. And that means that we also have less capital to play with and less room for error. So everyone on this team is super laser focused on the mission. I try to constantly just give them as many resources as I can to execute as quickly as possible. We tend to measure our schedules at times and days, but where possible in hours. Can you walk me through the process of like how SpaceX designs a dev vehicle versus the same process for how they're actually designing the thing that will go to space or like yeah it's one process okay so there's basically you can think of it as like an evolution of maturity um the early dev articles uh are never gonna fly and that's super clear like nobody's gonna try to send it to space like it's just like let's go and test the things we're most unsure about so those unknown unknowns um test those on the ground repeat it as much as possible if it fails try to recreate the failure mode but everything else just totally de-scope it right like those vehicles didn't have nose cones on them they were just like stubby uh in some cases we needed to simulate the mass of a payload or some other component and we would mcmaster car or order a massive brick of metal because it's like don't put more thought into this than needed just you just slam a brick of metal in the thing and send it up yeah it's a mass simulator and it's not going to break.

23:57It's like, just make it as dumb as possible. And that's some of the secret, I think, to like really great hardware engineering is learning when to delete things. If you've ever heard of Elon's algorithm, you know, first thing is challenge the requirement. It's like, do we even need to be doing this? Like, do we really need to be doing this? That's the thing that I have consistently come up against in the space industry, whether it was working in the dod and um kind of the ic world whether it was at startups spacex wherever is that there is an incredible amount of inertia and this like legacy carried knowledge that people just do things because it's the way the industry does them and the more that you can get smart about that doesn't seem like it needs to be that way and the more that you're willing to take the risk and go and challenge it and test it out and maybe you get it wrong like i'd say probably about half the time you're wrong and you're like oh there's actually a good reason we do this that's cool put it back in yeah just whenever that also means that half the time it shouldn't be there yeah and then you've discovered something that probably no one else has even taken the time to look at was there any specific moment uh that where you kind of discovered something that just didn't need to be there oh man well so there's a few things that i'm proud of having deleted um both out of the um you know future architectures and also um out of some of the stuff that flies uh i think one of the funny ones is there are these like little components that go into space flight systems one of my favorite ones is a k seal and a k seal is this little uh gold donut looking thing that you stick in between two pressurized fittings um and it's actually truly coated in gold and because that gold is so soft and malleable it forms a really nice seal um so they're super reliable we use them in spaceflight all the time there are hundreds on many spacex vehicles and they cost like anywhere from like 400 bucks to a thousand bucks a piece because it's literal gold um i spent a lot of time uh digging into whether they were actually needed because like they're so expensive that they're like a significant line item for the vehicle and how many are you using on a vehicle thousand you know it's like easily four hundred thousand dollars easily and you know maybe that's uh small in the world of you know the expense of some of these vehicles but it matters especially when you're trying to do it at rate and the other thing is they're not reusable so every time we would seal a joint for a test every time we would do a checkout you just incinerating dollars yeah uh and we found a lot of kind of creative ways around using them um and again just because we're willing to kind of just spend the time to challenge whether the leak paths were actually real in some of these cases and you know how you could actually build better seals without using super expensive kind of raw materials and how does elon and like spacex kind of instill the whole, actually, you should question the requirement in the first place.

26:51Like, I know that there's some there's there's a lot of companies where they'll have some like value, like core value or mission statement, whatever. But then they don't actually have employees that are that are focused on it. I would like in working at SpaceX to playing at the major league of like any sport. And our sport is just like engineering in that case. you know that everyone around you is busting ass and going to work their hardest. And so part of it is just the pure motivation that comes from that. I would say the other part of it is if you don't challenge your requirement and someone else realizes that it was a dumb requirement, you're going to hear about it.

27:32At some point, someone's going to be like, we shouldn't even be doing this. And why are why have you not challenged this? Why have you not deleted this stupid thing um and i think that comes from having like a high respect culture from like building an organization where people are totally willing to go up and down the chain it's like hey look at something and say that's fucking retarded delete sure yeah like you can kind of just uh you could go directly to elon even in some cases this has happened where people were like hey i don't think we should be doing this or i think we should be doing this differently here's a really clear physics first principles based case why and sometimes we change direction because of that yeah so i know that you're gonna like the shorter term version of what you're building is like a almost like mini thruster or maybe it's a normal size thruster i have no context all right so it's a pretty big uh size thruster we'll throw up you know a little picture on the screen or something of what it looks like firing um how did you think through what should we work on first?

28:32What things do we need to knock off the list? What's the critical path? Yeah. I mean, so I loved working at SpaceX. I had a really great job at an amazing team, but I also recognized that SpaceX is only one part of the equation of making humanitarian interplanetary and also just kind of the dreams that I think a lot of us have for what the space industry should look like. I remember kicking around ideas with some of the leadership at SpaceX around Mars habitats and, you know, basic infrastructure. And a lot of times they were just kind of like, yeah, like this is really cool. This is part of our vision, but it's not really on our roadmap.

29:14SpaceX is a transportation company and we own one part of the transportation system. And so I think SpaceX is going to continue to dominate the way that human beings take things from earth and move them to orbit but what happens after that which is where most of the value creation starts for space missions is still largely an unsolved question um there are ways people have learned to kind of cope with what's available out there um but i think that uh if you think of any of the kind of sci-fi concepts out there that i think i largely consider inevitable like building massive infrastructure in space and power in space and eventually energy in space, they all require the ability to move things from Earth's orbit to other places.

30:02And so that became a place that we started to look. My last really kind of year at SpaceX, I was also working on a team called Propellent Generation, where we were looking at the means through which you could make fuel on Mars and start to do some of these things and that's when i realized that the tech we need for that was really outdated and really being used in a way that i didn't think was super scalable um and so i mean like what was that so most of the tech when you think about building a mars base is like normal construction infrastructure and fairly normal energy infrastructure um it's not fundamentally that different uh but some of the core things that actually enable human presence and rocketry and stuff like the ability to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and then to take that hydrogen and either use it as fuel or convert it into other hydrocarbons was really only being explored for like climate angles and for earth energy and really like for the green economy side of things and there are ways that you would build that to actually fly it in space like what we want to do at general galactic and eventually put it on the surface of the moon and mars that are fundamentally different.

31:14And so there was kind of a diverging path where I was like, okay, the tech is headed, in my opinion, in the wrong direction here. And we're not seeing the emphasis on the elements that would make it useful in space, where there's actually a really amazing value proposition. The way that we can transform energy in the space domain unlocks these crazy architectures and the ability to scale well beyond, like I said earlier, the bespoke one-off missions to actually do long duration missions, refueling missions, missions to the outer solar system and back if we want to. All of that comes down to the energy problem.

31:48And so as I thought about where that's going, we started to kick around ideas of like, OK, well, where do we start with that? And the mobility problem was kind of clearly the obvious one. Yeah. And a great place for us to kind of wedge in because that is still so outdated. The mobility solutions that exist for spacecraft today are mostly from the 60s and they require these outdated fuels that are extremely expensive hard to use like there's really not a lot positive i don't want to go into some of that like sure what what is the current solution what does that look like yeah sure what's bad about it the way people move things in space now assuming you aren't just going to fall directly back to earth what some some people do um is you pretty much either have a high thrust mode or a high efficiency mode high thrust is what you think of when you think of a rocket engine it's what we've been developing here so far um and that is almost always run on a fuel called hydrazine hydrazine it was developed uh actually it might be a natural chemical but i know it really came into providence uh in the 1960s and it's pretty much stayed that way since then it's super reliable we actually fly it on dragon um however it's actually one of the most dangerous chemicals that humans like can come into touch with uh you have to like cause cancer and shit oh it's horrible it will kill you it will literally kill you if you get a drop of it on you um humans have to put on spacesuits basically just to load hydrazine into a vehicle so is that like good to light on fire and just put into the atmosphere no it's terrible it's super toxic um we don't really use it in atmosphere for fuel um it is actually used on some fighter jets but um no it's just like a super outdated way of doing things.

33:33It's not produced in the U S it's like a major pain point for the defense logistics agency. And yeah, it's just a crappy baseline. And then the other mode, the high efficiency mode is mostly xenon, which is a noble gas. It's really great for hall effect thrusters. It is also extremely expensive and hard to deal with for a variety of reasons. And so there's clearly just a logistics need there. And then you had this thing happen within the last couple of years, which I consider to be like a Sputnik moment for the space industry that is not really widely discussed, but you can look it up. I mean, there's some people talking about it where the Chinese at this point are far outpacing American capabilities in the space domain.

34:19China is the only nation that has demonstrated the ability to capture and rendezvous with a non-cooperative asset and what that means is they can basically go and capture anything on orbit the u.s cannot do that right now and we are limited by our propulsion technology and relying on these kind of two somewhat outdated and unperformant legacy chemicals i feel like i remember seeing that yeah i mean this happened within the last two months one of the bigger events um one of the chinese uh geo satellites is effectively demonstrating that it can refuel which again the u.s can't do so when that happens when that's just in the news yeah our you know government is seeing that what is their reaction um you know a lot of it is treated through classified channels um so they're not uh super up front about it but i think that anytime you have a i wouldn't even say near peer adversary just a pure technical adversary with the ability to do something that you can't to affect uh things in the space domain which effectively operates like international waters yeah pretty much you know you can basically be a space pirate right now if you want to um and maybe that's an interesting business model for us at some point uh when you have your adversary moving things around and kind of showing that they can sneak up on your satellites they could go grab them if they wanted to they could de-orbit them if they wanted to uh that has got to be ringing alarm bells in washington um so we actually saw that u.s space command uh put out their priorities list for the next couple years and the first bullet is build us better novel propulsion systems and so that aligns really well with the direction we're building um that's really kind of our core focus is just create a step change in the realm of the possible for spaceflight with this technology.

36:16And then here's an amazing early user who desperately needs this. We were talking yesterday and you basically said your bet is that there's going to be a lot more objects in space very shortly. I think like the cost to launch going down is going to be a massive, you know, fuel to that fire kind of thing. Yeah, it's the cost and then the cadence. It's way easier to find a launch slot today than it was even five years ago. and then five years before that it was non-existent what what is that how like how long does it take to actually get a launch slot right now is it months is it like a year there's so if SpaceX has slots available like if you want to fly uh let's say Ty and Relentless want to go put up a CubeSat um I you could get a slot two day on the SpaceX website for 2027 and so it's a year and a half a year and a half out right now um but that's because there's so much demand like there are I I think six flights between now and then before there's a publicly open slot.

37:11So what's the main limiting factor for SpaceX launching more rockets in a rapid or succession? I think SpaceX does the transporter missions, which are the ones where it's really easy to go and get a slot, mostly out of goodwill for the industry. Really? Like they have enough demand for Falcon that they could just solely sell to the big dollar private individuals and companies that want to go fly their thing for the foreseeable future. But the transporter slots allow small players and startups and universities to go and get flight time or to put their thing into whatever orbit they want. And so they're mostly doing it out of goodwill.

37:49But as someone who was following along on some of the earlier transporter missions, it's a big lift for them because they go from working with, like, I don't know, one to five different customers for a single launch to, like, hundreds. So it's chaos for a transporter mission. But there's incredible demand. Um, we're actually, you know, seeing some startups look at launch slots out of India, um, and out of some of the other new launch providers because the transporter slots are getting filled up and it's harder and harder to get time. Um, but yeah, as, as those continue to be available and continue to be cheap, we're seeing just incredible step changes in the way people think about utilizing space.

38:31yeah um we're having a lot of conversations at general galactic with players that want to put constellations upon constellations like starlink for x all over the place um and i think that the number of space objects the number of satellites that fly grow exponentially absolutely um and so building what is effectively the transportation and mobility solution for that um i think scales really well because the demand i mean we feel like it's high now i can't even imagine what it's going to be in 10 years i so assuming that like let's run two different you know hypothetical scenarios uh one is spacex everything as far as starship goes crushes it they are ramping production of starships we're sending i think it's like uh we're sending robots to mars in 2027 and then like humans to mars in like 2029 i believe get your years off so the earth or the earth mars uh basically short paths are on the even years so 26 and 28 that's how are we going to try and send the the monkeys to mars on 26 i think that's the publicly stated goal at this point is for next year yeah okay so assuming that everything goes right and you know golden scenario everything works um what do you think the scale up of starship is going to look like and like especially also the the launches of like new satellites orbit yeah i mean so starship enables you to have access to a lot more mass a lot more payload volume and so you're seeing some companies that are preempting this um a couple of startups are pretty much only going to work if starship works um which is which is not a terrible bet to take um but it's going to allow you to do just bigger and better and more powerful things like a lot of times when we look at mission budgets, we're constrained by the fact that we can't fit enough solar arrays to get enough power to do whatever we want to do, or the mass of a certain item becomes just kind of a non-starter.

40:28Starship changes that equation. And so that enables us to do some really creative things with General Galactic's tech where we can load an incredible amount of propellant onto some of these vehicles. We can think about things like nuclear electric propulsion, nuclear thermal propulsion based on our technology that gets you unbelievable performance, the ability to send things basically wherever you want to go in the solar system, all for a price that's probably less than what people were paying even 20 years ago. As far as your kind of like critical path, how fast do you think that you can actually be putting objects in space yourself?

41:06Yeah. And then like, what is the ramp on your business going to look like, assuming that starships are like available and working? Yeah, Yeah, I mean, one of the cool things is I don't think that we are super reliant on Starship for this to scale really well. However, that will be like a cheat code when it does happen. It will pretty rapidly change the way that the economics work. Yeah, we're looking at flight opportunities as soon as next year. And that'll be cool because I've been super fortunate to put a handful of things in space. um you know i those have ranged from very small components on things like dragon and starship to uh i built a cubesat in my apartment one time that actually flew to the space station um you want to tell that story sure um so uh i was super fortunate just to go to college in the first place um the other plan was just to you know basically be a technician um and find a living that way.

42:03But I knew that I needed to get a scholarship to go to school. That was really the only way that I was going to get out of North Carolina and have a shot at doing some of these cool things. And so I basically focused on achieving as much academically as possible, which I know is not in vogue. Like, you know, it's not the like I totally, you know, pissed off school. I don't care. You know, I don't my GPA sucked. No, I had a 4.0 GPA for 10 years straight. from the time that I guess it was like first week of high school until I left Stanford in 2022. And part of that was because there was no room for failure.

42:43If I didn't achieve that, the risk that I wouldn't be able to keep a funding opportunity or a scholarship was always on the line. And so, you know, I'm the kind of person that I am extremely competitive and academics is a pretty easy thing to get you know right uh and as i found my way uh out of nc state and then decided to do grad school at stanford because i got a uh a fellowship from the national science foundation to go there um i was pretty disappointed to find that stanford was like super different and super non-practical about a lot of stuff i mean nc state uh and a lot of the big state schools that people kind of think of as like mid-tier are very practical because they're land-grant schools like their agriculture background and so students are taught to like use their hands right like we still have like labs and practical training courses and things like that stanford has a little bit of a legacy in that but not nearly what i had expected and so i moved out to palo alto and was kind of like trying to find what to do.

43:47So I was like kind of dicking around, like spending time in different labs. And one of the labs was trying to help the student space club fly a CubeSat. And they wanted to do this experiment where we would use cow protein, so bovine protein as a binder in Mars regolith to create bricks. and the idea was you can grow animal proteins so you could land on mars grow a bunch of these proteins off of organic materials mix some small percentage of that with the dirt and then you get these like nice hard bricks that you build your houses out of um you're gonna build like you're gonna make bricks out of cow proteins yeah exactly amazing um and so i was like of course i'm gonna gravitate towards that but the funny thing was this really um came to fruition during covet and Stanford kicked everybody out of the labs.

44:40You weren't allowed to even go into the buildings. And so we had a flight opportunity. And I remember we were trying to fly and get our payload to Houston by September. And the team was locked out of the lab. And so I was actually interning here in El Segundo at the time. And I was renting an Airbnb just on the other side of the airport and i was like you know fuck it we're just gonna build it here um and so a couple of guys basically broke into the lab took all the equipment we needed like a few 3d printers some like basic hand tools um all of the material samples that we needed drove them down to la and we spent two weeks pulling all-nighters building a cube set outside of a lab very much outside in the living room of an unconditioned unair conditioned airbnb in west chester california amazing um and so uh that actually flew um later that year so we managed to get through that it's pretty crazy experience uh you know credit to my roommate at the time for being cool with that um and yeah having a bunch of people sleeping on the floor and so i think um you know i've kind of gone from zero to one when it comes to spaceflight via that experience and a few others.

46:00The path for General Galactic now is to go from zero to one and then very rapidly go from one to a hundred. And so we're working towards that demo flight, that kind of one moment. But very quickly, it's going to switch into a mode of like, okay, how do we rapidly produce these? How do we become a manufacturing company? And how do we become the kind of company that just dominates the mobility space yeah have you ever had a moment of like so i know that you kind of grew up on food stamps and that sort of stuff uh in north carolina and you're basically like working really hard to get out of that environment that situation has there ever been any real moments of like extreme adversity um yeah i mean so to talk a little bit about my like personal background like yeah it you know wasn't always easy i was the first person in my family to like even go to college or in anything like that um yeah there was a period where we were on like the ebt program and just trying to figure things out during the recession um and i actually you know even i remember being like eight years old and realizing that i was like basically a poor southern kid and if i ever wanted to do like the cool things that i saw on mythbusters uh that was probably not going to be accessible to me like that just didn't really seem to be in the cards um and so you know i had plenty of times as a kid where i wanted to like try to break out of the mold that just didn't super work out um what were your parents doing when you were a kid so yeah my dad's a automotive mechanic um my mom worked different kind of odd jobs she ended up going back to school when i was in high school um and then um you know they were super supportive of of me um i remember uh my aunt uh got me this book which i imagine a lot of founders probably read as a kid called how things work it's like a classic kids book and in it there's like a basic explanation of like how rockets operate and i was like that's so sick like that's like really cool i want to go build that and i remember one summer i like found like an old dr pepper bottle uh like one of those plastic uh 12 ounce bottles and uh poured some gasoline in it and like found some um fuses from those like cheap uh fireworks and was like in the process of like basically creating a rocket and you know luckily my mom found me in this process how old are you eight i think eight or nine because i was definitely in elementary school um and she's like you're gonna kill yourself uh like don't do this um where'd you find the gasoline my dad's a mechanic so there was plenty of gas picked it up yeah around in the backyard or in the garage or something anyways um so you know i was trying to find ways to like experiment with things even as a kid and i remember um my uh i think i was like 11 and I was in middle school and I really wanted to take a high school math class because I was like, you know, this is really interesting and, you know, I think my grades are good enough for it.

49:09And I went to this school that was like a weird charter school. North Carolina schools are funky and they wouldn't let me take it. But they did let all of the kids whose parents could donate to the schools take it or whatever class they wanted for that matter and i remember being like yeah like i think 12 years old uh you know realizing that hey i'm kind of getting excluded because of my like economic class from like opportunities that i want that i asked my parents if i could change schools um and so i ended up moving schools going to like kind of a funkier high school that at least allowed me to do that another public school um and this one had free lunch too which was sweet uh so you know started kind of doing a lot more tinkering there and that's where i was able to actually really figure out that i liked engineering or like the concept of it um what were the things that you like started working on yeah i uh the school had i said it was kind of funky it was previously like the county's community college and so they had uh an old like metal shop in the back and so i fixed their cnc uh they're like it was probably from like the mid 90s and so i fixed that up um and we used it for a few projects i built like an e-bike which definitely was like super sketch because i was using really old batteries and i would ride it around in the hallways in between classes what could have gone wrong in that with that i mean batteries like that love to catch on fire and i was i mean i was not particularly good at wiring at the time so there's just wires hanging out i'm like basically riding around with a bomb um and you know figuring out how to build things figuring out like a little bit of what I liked about these things.

50:53And around this time, I also started, you know, applying to colleges. And I was like starting to figure out, I was like, oh, shit, I need a scholarship. Like I have no money. And my grades were good enough that I got invited to interview for Harvard. And I remember I drove my super crappy 1991 Mercury Cougar that I bought for 500 bucks from my kind of like rural town into charlotte north carolina to do this interview with someone from harvard and i sit down and she's like yeah so um like what's your national rank in chess and i was like what she's like what is your national rank in tennis uh and i was like i don't what what are you talking about like these are like things that kids in the south especially poor parts of the south don't do um and so long story short i didn't go to harvard uh and again it was just kind of this moment of like i'm hitting a ceiling because of my economic status um i did this thing when i was a kid because i used to have a pretty decent southern accent um and i remember i uh someone kind of made fun of me for it at one point and i was like i don't want this to hold me back and i spent a lot of time with my grandparents and so uh they you know like a lot of uh senior folks that watch the news all the time they always have like the captions going on the screen and i would read the captions on the screen as the newscasters were saying it to figure out better pronunciation and to kind of delete my accent so there was that um and then uh because of these projects when i did eventually you know get a scholarship to go to nc state um it actually kind of flipped at that point like what was kind of an adversity thing of like man i kind of have to stick to the practical things i don't have the like soft fancy skills um kind of became an advantage big time um when i uh was a freshman i wanted to work in the space lab and they were very like no no this is for graduate students like you know go away freshmen um but then they put up a posting like a physical piece of paper that was like hey we need a fabricator because we're going to try to build these rovers and rockets and stuff and and no one on the team knows how to like mill things or bend metal and I was like well I know I do that and so for a while my way of making money in college was like working in that lab and building them stuff and then I worked part-time at this old racing team in Charlotte it's actually one of the teams in Ford vs Ferrari if you ever seen that movie yeah yeah fantastic film it's the other team it's not the Shelby team that races the GT40s it's it's the other team and so I was learning like very strong practical metalworking from this guy who was 82 at the time which means he's probably over 90 now um he'd like yeah like been a race engineer for bruce mclaren back in the day like just crazy experience and he was teaching me how to use these like super 1960s like metalworking machines and stuff but it gave me a really good practical set of skills that i took into the research lab at nc state um and you asked me earlier what did i talk about in my interview with SpaceX, I mostly talked about that.

54:02So what had become, you know, something that enabled me to do a lot of the amazing things I get to do now was initially something that was just what I had access to. And so I think that the way I look back on it now is like, if I hadn't just said, you know, screw it, I'm just going to like learn what I have around me. I would not be able to do what I do today. When you were working at SpaceX, I think that a huge part of working at company like that is the mission and i imagine that you know if you work there for a couple years you get really attracted and like attached to that mission and so what is it like kind of going through your head deciding to say no i'm going to break away i'm going to go start my own thing well time will tell if it was the right decision yeah um but i think that uh me like many other former SpaceXers are people who want to go and do big things in the world.

54:57And I think that you've seen a really a decent kind of cohort of folks who started at SpaceX are now building on lots of the other big problems in the world. And so the thing that we all have in common is that desire to work on big things. And kind of a lot of us got to a point with the thing we were working on where it's like, hey, this is a stopping point where I'm comfortable kind of handing off my baby, right like it's like a lot of people tend to leave after like the first flight with astronauts the first flight of starship it's like okay i got this from zero to one or one to two or whatever now i'm ready for something new and a little bit different but i would say in in my case uh and with general galactic like we are still very much operating in the space domain right like it's just another flavor of it um and i i do hope that we will get to work with spacex uh as we grow um i think that we're building you know with a shared vision and a lot of overlap and so i hope that um general galactic is is just another multiplier towards the spacex mission is there any you know you've got this interesting vantage point having worked there having you know working on this now is there any other companies or ideas that just seem really smack yourself over the head obvious that other people just aren't working on because they don't have that kind of background knowledge yeah more people should be starting companies i'll just i'll just say that up front um there's so many hard problems that unfortunately like um working in other industries will scare you away from when it's the thing that you should be attacking i would say examples of what those are yeah yeah like i mean uh what's happened in the nuclear space in the last few years i think was obvious to a very small portion of the population for a very long time um and really did require just folks like Doug Bernhardt, Irradiant, and others to kind of jump into the space and try to supercharge it.