HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti

Joe Laurienti, a former SpaceX and Blue Origin engineer, launched Ursa Major in 2015 with the idea that 3D printing could revolutionize the production of rocket engines. The timing was right: Russia had invaded Crimea the previous year. American sanctions and strained political relationships threatened the supply of Russian rocket engines, which the U. S. had relied on for space missions since the end of the Cold War. American companies like Ursa Major have now begun providing rocket engines for both government and private space endeavors. This week on How I Built This Lab, Joe talks with Guy about the journey of launching and scaling a multimillion dollar aerospace company. Plus, how Joe has dealt with the infamous “startup valley of death” and how Ursa Major’s engines are helping the U. S. catch up to Russia and China in the development of hypersonic weapons. This episode was produced by Chris Maccini and edited by John Isabella, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Maggie Luthar. You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 5:12Guy Raz?

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So if you want to launch something into space, say, a communications satellite or supplies from the International Space Station, you have to put it, obviously, on top of a giant rocket. And rockets are powered by rocket engines. Now, for the past three decades or so, the United States government has basically been relying on rocket engines that are made in Russia, which creates a problem when there are geopolitical conflicts like the war in Ukraine. Now, you've probably heard about private space companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin, owned by billionaires like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

• 5:53Guy Raz?

  Those companies are offering an alternative, rockets and engines that are designed and built in the United States. But building one of these rockets can take years, and they're often plagued with delays. So my guest today, Joe Laurienti, is looking to help both government and private space companies address their rocket engine supply problems, in part by using 3D printing to build rocket engines in the United States, and to build them much faster than they would be with traditional manufacturing. But unlike Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, Joe Laurienti is not a billionaire. In fact, he founded his company, Ursa Major, just four years after graduating from college

• 6:36Guy Raz?

  with a degree in aerospace engineering. Joe grew up in Colorado in an aerospace family. His dad worked for Ball Aerospace, and as a kid, Joe was always fascinated with rockets and space.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Oh, I was obsessed. I don't think I knew if I wanted to work on rockets, or satellites, or airplanes. I just, I loved it all. I probably vacillated between wanting to be an astronaut, or a pilot, or an engineer constantly.

• 7:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  And eventually, the mechanical and kind of hands-on piece won me over.

• 7:06Guy Raz?

  You actually rebuilt a 1969 Ford Mustang when you were in high school. This was not in the 70s. Like, you were in high school in, like, the 2000s, right?

• 7:15Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. It was my first car. I think we went and picked it up on a trailer when I was like 13 or 14 years old, and basically got it running right around the time I had a driver's license. So it probably wasn't the best craftsmanship. As a teenager, I was learning as I went, but it was a great project.

• 7:34Guy Raz?

  So you were like a tinkerer. You would do this with your dad?

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And tinker is a great way to put it. Even as a, you know, seven, eight-year-old, I was the kid that would find old electronics and take them apart, and never could reassemble them. But I loved taking things apart.

• 7:48Guy Raz?

  All right. You decide to go to USC to study aerospace engineering. And I guess one of the reasons I think you decided to go there was because it was so close to, like, Jet Propulsion Lab, and like, those industries are all, many of them are in Southern California?

• 8:05Speaker 01

  So, actually, the reason I wanted to go to USC was it ran in the family. So when it came time to apply to schools... I remember only wanting to apply to USC and my parents very wisely said you need to apply around. I was very fortunate to get scholarships to USC, so it kind of made the decision easy. But I actually applied and was accepted as a double major biomedical engineer and a pre-med student. And that was really, I just had no clue what I wanted to do. I was 17 years old. I loved space, loved aerospace. But as a 17-year-old who had probably never spoken to a doctor outside of their office, I thought being a doctor sounded like a great idea. And I saw the biomedical engineering piece attached, still

• 8:47Speaker 01

  got to be hands-on and a tinkerer. But I very vividly remember walking into the bookstore day one, and I had my biology and chemistry and biomedical engineering textbooks. And there was a book there that was the kind of aerospace engineering 101 textbook called Introduction to Flight. And, you know, five days before class started, I put all the books back and grabbed that Introduction to Flight textbook and changed my major. So I was accepted under something other than aerospace, but never took a class outside of aerospace.

• 9:17Guy Raz?

  I guess while you were there, you were part of a student group called the Rocket Propulsion Lab, which from what I guess, like, this was a student group that like had the intention to send a rocket to space, which they actually did, a few years after you. I think they did it in 2019, and you were a student there in like, like the late 2000s, early 2010s. What, what, like, what did that group do?

• 9:43Speaker 01

  So you hit the nail on the head. It was really an entirely undergraduate student group. We had a ton of autonomy. We had a professor that kind of oversaw our kind of safety and overall activities. But we had a small amount of funding and some really innovative founders. And now that I'm thinking back, kind of the founders behind that lab are probably the first ounce of entrepreneurialism that got me. But there was a composites and kind of think, think airframe or aerodynamics expert, you know, as 18 years old, as much of an expert as you can be. And then there was a propulsion expert, another 18-year-old who had built hobby rockets in his free time. And they had a competition to see if the

• 10:28Speaker 01

  person doing the propulsion could design a powerful enough rocket to tear apart the structures that the other student made. And so that was really how the group started. And you got it right. We Had the ultimate vision of being the first student group in space, which they ultimately achieved.

• 10:45Guy Raz?

  They actually built a rocket that went into space. So you clearly, I mean, you were on a, to use the word trajectory, I guess is appropriate here, a trajectory to getting into the world of rocket engineering. And you did, I think, right after you graduated from USC in 2011, you went to go work for SpaceX, which at the time, like, was not a, it was not a sure thing. Like, 2011, SpaceX was not, I mean, now, of course, we think, oh, my God, it's amazing, they're, you know, involved in every rocket launch. But then, it was not at all, right?

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Oh, it was a wild idea back then. In my undergrad years, I remember watching the first few SpaceX launches, which all failed, and almost thinking it was ridiculous that an internet founder wanted to go build an aerospace launch company and...

• 11:39Guy Raz?

  And you were, you were even skeptical of that from what I, like, you thought, who's this guy, Elon Musk? Like, what does he know about space?

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. I remember talking to my dad, who'd spent his whole career in aerospace, about how wild this idea was and that it was probably never going to see any traction.

• 11:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So you were there, I think, for about two years, presumably working on some of the projects that they would eventually become famous for.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I caught a really exciting phase. I mean, I got to see the first Dragon capsules, so the first ever private spacecraft to dock to the space station, got to see the transition into Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 1.1. So it was really transformational years of SpaceX and drinking from a fire hose while learning.

• 12:25Guy Raz?

  All right, you're there for two years. This is actually awesome because you leave and you go work for Blue Origin. So you're basically going, it's like going from Apple to Google or like, you know, it's like, you're going from one great space company to another. This is obviously Jeff Bezos' space company, Blue Origin. Why did you make the decision to leave SpaceX?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  You know, I remember thinking before I started at SpaceX that there were two companies in the world I'd want to work for, and it was SpaceX or Blue Origin. And so I'd spent time at SpaceX, like I said, really drinking from a fire hose. And we had gotten to, back then it felt like a mature product. It was far from it, but we were launching Falcon 9 successfully. And I saw in Blue Origin, really a very tangential ambition. They were focused much more on the human side of spaceflight. And frankly, what won me over was the engine technology. Blue Origin had a completely different architecture, so I could work on a more complicated machine.

• 13:21Guy Raz?

  I want to just kind of back up for a second, ask about the rocket industry in general, right? Because I think for a long time before SpaceX kind of became this really important player in rocket launches, there was basically a monopoly, I think, right? Like, at least in the case of like US rocket launches, like, most of those were, like, the service providers, so to speak, were Boeing and Lockheed Martin. They formed like a joint venture. And they provided most of the rockets for NASA and the US military. And they kind of had a lock on it, right?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Exactly right. It was almost a monopoly. There was another small provider here in the US, Orbital Sciences. They would successfully launch satellites into orbit. But almost every national security launch, every critical NASA launch was done by one company.

• 14:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And I didn't realize this until I was reading about your company. But most of the engines on those rockets, even up until recently, were made in Russia.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  That's correct. And my understanding is that was very much an artifact of post-Cold War. We almost wanted to throw a bone to the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union. And they had this incredible propulsion capability. So we agreed to start buying rocket engines.

• 14:35Guy Raz?

  And so essentially, That was what powered American rockets were these Russian engines that were being also presumably there was really no engine industry in the US.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Exactly right. There was one other provider, I say was, they're currently under contract to be acquired. So we'll see, we'll see where that goes. But Aerojet Rocketdyne was the result of consolidation here in the industry. And if you look back to 1995, we probably had 15 companies providing everything from small missile motors to small aircraft engines to rocket engines. Now circa 2005, we had one.

• 15:13Guy Raz?

  Wow. And why? I mean, was it just that they couldn't compete with the cost of that the Russian, I mean, the Russian engines are just much cheaper?

• 15:20Speaker 01

  The Russian engines just had an amazing heritage. They were really reliable. I don't think that they were the most inexpensive, but the kind of technical history behind the US's heritage of rocketry and the Russian heritage of rocketry resulted in very different architectures. So the engines built here in the US, think Space Shuttle.

• 15:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Very reusable. Actually, those engines are still being used today on the SLS vehicle.

• 15:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  But really just exquisite engines that are extremely expensive. The Russians were quite a bit cheaper and extremely reliable. So when it came time to launch satellites and try to build a first step toward commercialization of space, the Russian engines made a lot of sense.

• 16:00Guy Raz?

  So I guess a very pivotal event happens 2014. The Russians invade Ukraine for the first time, obviously. Now, and this is when they invaded the Crimean Peninsula. And that actually unbeknownst to, I think, any of us, I didn't even know this, it actually caused a huge shift in the US space industry, right? Because basically, when Russia invaded Ukraine, that was the beginning of like a ban on buying Russian rockets?

• 16:26Speaker 01

  That's right. And it really, it sparked a few bouts of funding that have been really successful. It, it sparked some development funding toward new rocket, domestic rocket engine programs. Unfortunately, Ursomager wasn't around then. We might have benefited very well from that. But it also sparked funding toward both Boeing and SpaceX providing launch services of people because we were also dependent on Russia to launch people to space.

• 16:50Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  So the Space Shuttle retired in 2011, and that was the US's only means of putting humans in space until, I think, last year, two years ago, two years ago now, was SpaceX's first launch. And so 2014 was the first time we saw. Real traction and dedication in the US toward developing a new domestic human flight capability.

• 17:11Guy Raz?

  Right, instead of just launching satellites into space.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 17:15Guy Raz?

  All right, so this was a turning point. There's sort of these, these kind of two things that were happening. On the one hand, Russian engines were not going to be imported to the US any longer.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:24Guy Raz?

  Starting in 2014. And many of these companies were not making their own engines. I guess you saw an opportunity to start a business.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the first inkling of something needs to be done here, or there's a changing of the tide coming, was when I started to get outreach from a few companies that were raising venture capital to do exactly what SpaceX was doing. And, you know, I had worked at SpaceX. I was at the time working at Blue Origin. And both of those companies, to me, felt like first movers.

• 17:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  And it just struck me that the next wave shouldn't be duplicating the first movers. There's got to be something added on, or something changed, or a different approach. And that was kind of the first spark behind, let's, let's provide engines to this next generation.

• 18:11Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break, but in just a moment, we're going to hear how Joe Laurienti went from working as a propulsion engineer for SpaceX and Blue Origin to starting his own rocket engine company. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 18:30Guy Raz?

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• 22:10Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. My guest is Joe Lorienti, founder and CEO of Ursa Major. All right, so you decide in 2015, you're just two years since you got to Blue Origin, just a few years out of college in your 20s, to found a company that would make rocket engines called Ursa Major. So the idea was, I'm not going to try to become SpaceX or Blue Origin and launch rockets into space. Why don't I build a company that can service those companies and others?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Exactly. We want to build the next five SpaceXs or next 10 SpaceXs.

• 22:46Guy Raz?

  And that would be by making just the rocket engines, not the other components, but just focus on one, but obviously a critical part of the rocket.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are a few reasons behind that. One, I was an angsty engineer who loved rocket engines. That was all I wanted to work on. But really, it's the kind of dominating performance component of the rocket. It's also the highest risk, the most expensive. So my thought was if we're seeing the PC boom around us, I want to be providing microprocessors.

• 23:17Guy Raz?

  So give me a sense of what you, I mean, obviously you wanted to create a product that would service this industry, but this is a massive undertaking. It's not like, it's not like making a, you know, I always say this, but it's not like making a cookie company or going to like a farmer's market and just start selling kombucha. Like you're building rocket engines. It's very cash intensive, very complex, requires a lot of, a lot of resources and also a long path to.

• 23:47Guy Raz?

  Forget about profitability, just to like actually get this thing working and then a long path to making this profitable. I have to imagine a part, a big part of you was daunted by this.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, now that we're talking about it, I definitely remember the three, six month period before really taking the leap and saying, I'm going to hand in my notice at this company that I really enjoy working at and going to set out on my own. But one of the first steps was actually selling all of my SpaceX stock. So hopefully that's, that pays dividends in the long run. But I'm going to commit everything I've got toward starting a company with no other employees on board initially. I think the notion of this is risky and I might lose money, it probably didn't faze me as much as this is

• 24:38Speaker 01

  a massive career shift for me. I, I loved engineering. I'd only really ever wanted to work on things that I could go turn a wrench on with my hands. And now I've got to figure out how to balance a balance sheet. So that was a big shift.

• 24:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah. How to run a team that is going to do the work that you're used to doing.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  And you know, the, the first vote of confidence, I think, was the team. Our first handful of employees were former coworkers of mine from SpaceX and Blue Origin, including my boss from SpaceX and my boss from Blue Origin. So that might've been the, the confidence I needed to really get going.

• 25:11Guy Raz?

  Joe, obviously you're a really smart guy and you had the credentials, but you were still really young. You still are now. And I, I hope this doesn't sound, I'm not, just forgive me, but I'm just, when you decided, you went to investors, weren't they them skeptical? I mean, you were taking on a massive project and you were untested and young and, you know, I mean, was it, was it hard to, to kind of convince people to, to part with their money to finance this thing?

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Oh, definitely. I- I remember a lot of no's and when I'm speaking with founders, first time founders now, I love to explain that the number one attribute you've got to have is thick skin because you're going to be told your idea is terrible by investors. The most painful might be candidates when you really want to recruit somebody and they they tell you that, you know, your your idea is in the wrong direction or they do things differently. You're going to hear that from potential customers. You just have to be ready to hear no or you're wrong a lot.

• 26:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah. What I'm wondering is, okay, so obviously there were not many American companies focused entirely on making rockets. But what was the innovation you were going to bring to this? Because you had to obviously offer something that was going to make it more attractive, maybe the price or the efficiency or whatever it was. So what was the sort of the technological advancement or development that enabled you to say, you know, we can actually do this?

• 26:39Speaker 01

  3D printing of metals was really what we went all in on. And I always give our early investors credit because that that could have been the decision that sunk the company. But it was clear, you know, 3D printing of metals has been kind of picking up steam and becoming viable for 15 years now, maybe even 20 years now.

• 26:56Guy Raz?

  But it really kind of started to break out around 2015, I remember.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. These companies were really emerging. It was it was just clear that something was changing here. And the cost point, still today, this is an issue, but the cost point back then especially, was so high in 3D printing metals that you didn't want to go design a car around 3D printing. But aerospace, every ounce of weight, every

• 27:21Speaker 01

  every just tiny bit of strength that you can get out of the material is really important. So 3D printing made a lot of sense.

• 27:28Guy Raz?

  So it's completely different than fabricating a rocket, you know, or component parts in the past because in the past presumably it was literally fabrication. You had to like melt metal and pour it into a mold and that's how you start.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Exactly. Completely different. And there are actually, there are still companies existing today that take the approach of we should 3D print everything. And we very early on made the calculated decision that 3D printing is an enabler and you have to use it in the right places and the right way. So we really use 3D printing for a handful of reasons, but you can dial it down to If we can develop a metal that we can go 3D print in a cost-effective manner, that's something you wouldn't go do, like you said, casting, pouring metals. It's just way too expensive. So we develop our own metals in-house for some of our applications. And then the second piece is removing processes from the manufacturing.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  If a traditional rocket engine part is liquid metal poured into a mold, then you heat treat it in an oven and then you machine it and weld it and braise it. You can cut all of those processes out by 3D printing one part. So that's where we see our cost advantage and our performance advantage.

• 28:38Guy Raz?

  All right. You raised a little bit of money, some seed money to start out, a few million bucks, which sounds amazing, but to build rockets is nothing. I mean, over time, you would raise more. But initially, once you say, okay, I'm going to start a company that's going to build rocket engines, what then do you do? Like, where did you find a place to start experimenting and building a prototype?

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Those early days were almost the easiest because every day was just try to make progress toward building a rocket engine.

• 29:11Guy Raz?

  And you decided to start this in Colorado, I think, from the outset, right?

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Yes. I really, I was living in West Texas when I left Blue Origin. So I had a decision to make as to where's the best place to start a company like this. And Los Angeles makes a ton of sense. There's a lot of aerospace out there, but it's also costly and we weren't going to be able to fire. It doesn't matter where you go in Los Angeles, you're not going to be able to fire a rocket engine.

• 29:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Started in Colorado with the hope of having some sort of proximity and kind of having a test facility that's more closely tied to the community, to be honest. Every rocket test facility I'd worked in is middle of nowhere, no access to anyone allowed.

• 29:50Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  But I like the idea of let's bring in middle school students for field trips and actually have a test facility that can engage around us.

• 29:59Guy Raz?

  So where did you find that?

• 30:01Speaker 01

  We found it about 40 minutes north of Denver, Colorado, a little town called Berthoud. And there happened to be, built in the late 80s, a missile test facility that had kind of been dormant. It had changed hands a few times and there was a fabrication company and the big warehouse. But there are these massive test bunkers, blast concrete, everything you think of for a missile test site, and it was unused. So we got extremely lucky. I think a classic startup story, got a cold call from a realtor asking if we wanted a missile test site and we took advantage.

• 30:34Guy Raz?

  Wow. All right. So you had, your team came, your initial team, the small team, came with you from Blue Origins and folks from SpaceX. How did you convince people to leave those jobs and come work with you?

• 30:47Speaker 01

  I think a lot of that messaging has actually stayed the same even to today, that we're absolutely not understating what SpaceX and Blue Origin are doing. It's just a very different approach from what we are doing. We, as engineers, we want to focus on the engine because when the engine is one of a thousand things that goes into a rocket, by its nature, it's not going to be optimized. But we wanted to optimize engines. So it was really that, that technical challenge and then the business approach of, hey, this is not a deep talent pool. Not every company that wants to build a rocket is going to be able to build engines. Let's go provide that.

• 31:20Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I think in 2017, so about a year and a half in, you guys did your first quote unquote hot fire test of an engine. So help me understand how you actually build, I mean, are there like off the shelf components that, that you can get to start to construct a prototype?

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Very few. And the first hot fire is a nice, really fun milestone to celebrate, but anyone who's been through engine development knows you've got to fire the thing thousands of times before you really understand it and can go sell it. But for us, the really important piece there was, as a startup that didn't have a ton of money, we, we could take a lot of kind of outsized risk. We didn't do a lot of testing before firing that engine. We just built the first one and went and fired it and blew it up. And that's an approach we've really stuck with, that you want to learn and you want to fail as quickly as possible.

• 32:15Guy Raz?

  And it worked.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  It worked, yeah. We, that, we didn't raise our first venture capital money until after we had fired that first engine. And I remember our investors saying that was why they invested in us, because we had already shown that progress technically.

• 32:31Guy Raz?

  So now you've got a prototype and now presumably you have to invest in the equipment to 3D print your engines, right? I mean, and I have to assume that, again, like this has to be custom purpose built. Like this is not, there's no 3D printing machines making rocket engines anywhere.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  So there are 3D printers that can 3D print some pretty high strength metals. They do focus a bit on aerospace, but again, because we, right around that time, the first engines we built were 3D printed with really off the shelf metals. So metals that you can go buy powders of anywhere. That was kind of when we started developing our own alloys was to improve and optimize these engines.

• 33:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  And a big piece of our philosophy was 3D printing is going to grow alongside us as a company. So we have to be ready to invest in the state of the art today and keep a finger on the pulse of the state of the art tomorrow. So being involved with 3D printing companies over the last seven, eight years has been a really important part of what we do.

• 33:41Guy Raz?

  We're going to take another quick break. More from Joe Laurienti, founder and CEO, Ursa Major, in just a moment. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 34:05Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. I'm talking with Joe Laurienti. His company, Ursa Major, uses 3D printing technology to build rocket engines. All right, you now have three engines, either in production or development, called Hadley, I think it's named after a character from a Ray Bradbury novel.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:26Guy Raz?

  Ripley, named after Ellen Ripley. I love that. I interviewed Sigourney Weaver a couple of months ago and I love that character. And Arrowway, which I guess is, I don't know what Arrowway, what is Arrowway?

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Arrowway is Jodie Foster's character in Contact.

• 34:37Guy Raz?

  Oh, yes, of course. Okay, I love it. Okay, great. So you're developing it, but I want to ask you, just step away from the technology for a moment and ask you about the business side, right?

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:47Guy Raz?

  Because you are in a Very complex business. It's very, as I mentioned, cash intensive. It requires a lot of really sophisticated engineering, testing. It's highly regulated. This is a business that takes years, maybe decades, to reach sustainability. And one of the, and Tesla's gone through this, SpaceX, Blue Origin, all these companies have gone through versions of this, known as the Valley of Death, which is just a period between the initial venture money coming in, or funding coming in, and then the long-term viability. And this is a long period that you're, and you're in the middle of it now. What does that mean for you guys?

• 35:31Speaker 01

  I don't know that I appreciated this term, the Valley of Death. It felt like we were kind of through the valley or seeing the other side maybe 10 times over the last five years.

• 35:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  And when we talk about it, I really think back to the number of times Elon at SpaceX would kind of threaten bankruptcy or explain that if we didn't hit a milestone, we were going to go under. And as a young engineer, I thought, that's just bluster. That's just trying to get us to work harder. And in hindsight, I think he absolutely was not blustering. I think that SpaceX was facing the Valley of Death very actively when I was there. So I see that now because we've, we're kind of right in the heart of it. Like you said, we've made traction. We've got customers. We've got revenue. We've got engines going out the door. But alongside that, your ambitions grow and the vision grows and the valley gets deeper and deeper. So I think, hopefully, we see the other end of it here pretty soon.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  But we absolutely are in the heart of it.

• 36:31Guy Raz?

  And presumably, the research and development process is so cash intensive that even though you've got revenue coming in the door, it's not obviously going to cover your costs.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Exactly. And you know, a big piece of it for our business and our industry is that Investors, while they are well-trained and a big part of their job is to see these technology avenues into the future, they aren't rocket scientists and they aren't engineers. And we have to make sure we are communicating our progress and we are explaining why they should continue to invest in us or be patient with their investment or be excited about the milestones that we're reaching because we're still very much dependent on investors.

• 37:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, and from a regulatory standpoint, like the Hadley engine is available now. You've got customers buying that engine, right?

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've, on the other side of the wall of the room I'm sitting in, we've probably got 10 or 12 engines either finished, ready to ship out the door, or in some state of assembly.

• 37:27Guy Raz?

  But once the other, the next generation of rockets that you're building are ready to go, they still have to go through, again, a regulatory process, right? It's not like you can just, you're just good to go. Like, they have to be tested and certified.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And that can be, anywhere, you know, on the fast end, maybe that's 18 months, on the slow end, maybe it's three, four years. And because our business model is to be extremely market-facing, customer-facing, and apply to a lot of missions, our requirements might be a lot more onerous than a company that's vertically integrated or building their own engines. We have to meet the needs of Air Force, Space Force, NASA, Missile Defense Agency, you know, really any customer that comes along, or even the customers of our customers.

• 38:10Guy Raz?

  All right, let me ask you about another part of your business. We've been talking about rocket launches. And so I think a lot of us think of satellites or even manned, you know, flights, right? And so they're rockets, and you're talking about engines that propel these rockets into space and then send personnel or, you know, material into space. But actually, there's another part of your business, which is missile defense. And this is important because there is a technology out there, I guess, sort of broadly referred to as hypersonic. Weapons, these are like missiles that can travel five, six times the speed of sound and that are being developed. I guess the Chinese are really quite advanced, the

• 38:51Guy Raz?

  Russians are quite advanced on building this technology. The US has lagged behind, but this is also an area where your engines may play a role.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Yes, we have delivered engines into a couple of hypersonic programs already. So this is an area we're really excited because it's so nascent, it's still very much an R and D. And to say it's nascent isn't really fair, I guess. The notion of kind of hypersonics and warfare in the US has been around since the 90s. We really kind of backed away from the hardware development and testing side of it. And that's when China and Russia really invested in developing and flying hypersonics. So you're exactly right, we're lagging behind in that the things that make a SpaceX or an Eartha Major successful are design, build, fly very quickly. Kind of like we said, you want to go fail fast, you want to learn very quickly. And the US hasn't been doing that in hypersonic

• 39:47Speaker 01

  flight over the last few years. With the exception of really the last 12 months, we've really started to increase our cadence and improve there.

• 39:54Guy Raz?

  And so these are essentially rockets that can fly low so they evade radar and very, very fast. And obviously, I hope they're never used.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:06Guy Raz?

  Because that would not be a good day. But ultimately, if other countries are developing, if the US has an interest presumably in developing a robust arsenal of these missiles.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  And the US absolutely is investing in developing an arsenal, the ability to field hypersonic weapons. But really importantly, and more where Eartha Major is playing today in hypersonics, we are developing the ability to test hypersonic technologies, be it high temperature materials or electronic communications. I like to talk a lot about when it comes to hypersonics. If you remember the movie Apollo 13, where there's the seven minutes of blackout when the capsule is re-entering the atmosphere.

• 40:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  Expect entry interface in 45 seconds.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Gentlemen, it's been a privilege flying with you. It's because it's traveling at a hypersonic speed and there's a plasma around the vehicle that makes it very difficult to communicate with, with radios.

• 41:00Speaker 04

  We have lost the radio contact.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Roger that.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  So that's a challenge with hypersonic missiles. They are difficult to communicate with in flight. So that technology development is extremely exciting. And there's the development of everything around the hypersonics. So right now, a big notion is how do we detect these? If there's a hypersonic missile flying, can we actually track it and detect it? Can we shoot one down? So you've got to develop the counter hypersonic capability. And it's just this new field of development that's extremely exciting. It kind of feels like the space race of the 1960s.

• 41:37Guy Raz?

  Do you think that the defense side of what you're working on will ultimately be the biggest part of your business?

• 41:44Speaker 01

  I think before the end of the decade, defense definitely stands to be a significant part of our business. Just the state of the world today, the lack of kind of industrial base and production capability is an open door for us. It's a perfect opportunity for a fast-moving startup to bring new products to market. I think space is a 100-year opportunity. So when we look out, we really want to make sure we are kind of keeping that core focus of propulsion for the most important missions around us. And sometimes it's defense, sometimes it's space, but it's very different time windows.

• 42:18Guy Raz?

  This is just a maybe a naive question, but given the fact that it's so expensive, what value is there right now for like space exploration? I'm not talking about going to Mars, but like going back to the moon or just going into low Earth orbit?

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Oh, I get so excited about low Earth orbit. I think we're just tapping into if you start to dramatically reduce the cost of access to space, you open up a window of opportunity. You know, this is similar to, I used the analogy of a PC boom before. This is computers going from the size of a room to being on every desk or smartphones being in our pockets, where we start to open up windows of data transformation and from space that weren't accessible 10 years ago. So a few examples there, SpaceX's Starlink constellation is really intended to bring a new capability of internet globally. They've been very...

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Very vocally on the front lines in Ukraine, they are in rural parts of Africa. And that's just data provision, access to internet. If you start to look at collecting new types of data, think about looking at groundwater for farmers and making that cost 10 cents every time they pull it up on a daily basis versus $10,000, so it's only hedge funds trading on that data.

• 43:39Guy Raz?

  Because you have the data from the satellites.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Exactly, and the satellites are modern enough technology that are replenishable enough because the cost to orbit has dropped so significantly.

• 43:50Guy Raz?

  But what about just like a manned mission, you know, for example? Because presumably, you know, if all goes well, your rockets will be on some manned missions.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely, that's quite a ways out because to your point on regulation and requirements, as soon as you put people onboard, the safety side becomes very different, as you can imagine. But down the road, we're really excited about it. I think a lot of what we want to do beyond low earth orbit has to do with exploration. It's putting people's boots back on the moon. And when you start to look at that, there's this whole tree of new possibilities where right now, if you look at the moon, there are resources like helium 3 that can be used for fusion power generation, so we can power the earth with this isotope that we find on the moon. It seems very far-fetched, but right now China is planning lunar missions for exactly that reason.

• 44:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:41Guy Raz?

  I think you've got about 250 people who work for Earth Summit now, is that right?

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:46Guy Raz?

  You are, I mean, it's amazing, you're in your early 30s and see, you're obviously still a young company. When you, you know, you're gonna be doing this for a long time. I mean, you know, you're gonna look back on this in your 80s and 90s. Where are we gonna be? What is space, the space industry gonna look like when you're, you know, towards the end of your career?

• 45:06Speaker 01

  So I'm really biased here as a propulsion fan and a propulsion company, but... I really like the idea of advancing how quickly we can move about the cosmos. Right now, everything SpaceX is working on is to get to Mars, and the fastest trip to Mars is maybe a six-month trip.

• 45:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  So I'm really excited about transforming from the days of the Mayflower to the days of really capable international air travel.

• 45:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Yeah, I still can't understand how, right now, how we would get to Mars in six months because you just can't carry that much water. It's too heavy.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 45:40Guy Raz?

  Just to make, keep people alive.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Not to mention get back from Mars.

• 45:44Guy Raz?

  Right, right. It's so...

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Hopefully, hopefully by then, hopefully by my 80s, 90s, we're not just going back and forth to Mars like settlers. We are taking long vacations to Mars, or we're going well beyond Mars to think the asteroid belt, where there are plentiful resources.

• 46:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah, and we don't even have to do it with Matt Damon.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  No, we don't. Though I wouldn't mind him tagging along.

• 46:10Guy Raz?

  That's Joe Laurienti, founder and CEO of Ursa Major.

• 46:17Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at @howibuiltthis and mine is at @guyraz. And on Instagram, I'm at guy dot raz. If you want to contact the team, our email address is h i b t at i d dot wondery dot com. This episode was produced by Chris Messini with editing by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Maggie Luthar. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, Elaine Coats, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, Kerry Thompson, and Kira Wakim.

• 47:01Guy Raz?

  Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.