#1202 Ashlee Vance On Elon Musk, SpaceX, and Startups Launching Rockets

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

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

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

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  We talk about space, SpaceX, Elon, and a bunch of space startups that are all racing to build rockets, get into space, and be on the frontier of what appears to be one of the big industries that's coming down the pipe, both here in the United States and internationally. This book by Ashley Vance is absolutely fantastic. I read the entire thing from cover to cover, and I highly suggest that you go pick it up yourself. It'll give you a great sense of what's going on in the space industry, who the players are, and why so much money, time, and energy is being spent in what appears to be just a pipe dream a few years ago. Again, here is my conversation with Ashley Vance.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  The action's on the court, and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch, and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21+. Begins on October 1st, 2026, and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:16Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Ashley here with me. Ashley's got a brand new book out. When the heavens went on sale, The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach. I've read the entire thing. It's absolutely fantastic. It is a great space book follow-up to his book on Elon Musk. And I thought that'd be a great place for us to start this conversation is on Elon himself. Obviously Elon is incredibly obsessed with getting to Mars. As you've followed him to write the original book, and now you've continued to kind of pay attention to what SpaceX and Elon has done, what's changed? Is there changes to the mission? Is there changes to Elon personally? What are you seeing as the years go on?

• 2:56Speaker 03

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

• 3:39Speaker 03

  do it SpaceX style, which is pretty cheap and fast. All the money's in satellites, data, communication. So SpaceX's values like totally tied up in Starlink. So, you know, I think there's, there's like all this added complexity to in business to the mission. But at the same

• 3:59Speaker 03

  It's hard. It is hard to like, if you're, if you don't follow space super close, it was like hard to convey how far ahead. This is like not space boy SpaceX fanboy talk, you know, this is just legit. I mean, they're so far ahead of the commercial space layers, but then all the nations that have been doing this for decades, they're it's like, it's kind of the craziest business and tech story I can fathom. Then, you know, beyond SpaceX, yes, Elon has changed and gotten more complicated and sort of let himself loose. I get a little sad. I, to me, you know, Twitter seems like a big distraction. He seems super worried

• 4:39Speaker 03

  about AI. I always kind of thought he would slowly wind things down and just be doing SpaceX all the time.

• 4:46Anthony Pompliano?

  When you look at SpaceX itself, you mentioned just how far ahead they are. To me, it's almost like the operating system of space now, right? Is everyone's got to go through SpaceX for the most part. Now, in this book, you cover a bunch of startups that want to change that. They want to have smaller rockets or more, you know, kind of takeoffs and kind of all these different strategies. But is it still true that SpaceX really is, you know, the big boy in the room? And if you want to go to space with a satellite or some sort of cargo, you're going on a SpaceX rocket?

• 5:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, to a large degree, you know, like, look, Europe has rockets, Russia has rockets, although, you know, not many people can use them now, China, India, they can all get you to space, just not nearly as frequently as SpaceX can and usually not as cheaply. Your point is right. I mean, there's dozens of rocket companies. So people would kind of be like, why? I mean, SpaceX flies, you know, there's, there's different classes, right? There's kind of large, medium and small rockets and SpaceX is pretty dominant in the large part. There's a huge thesis, which I get into in gory detail in the book that, look, we're going to put up, we have about like 9,000 satellites orbiting the earth now. That's been on an exponential increase the last three years. People think we're

• 6:02Speaker 03

  going to put up 100,000, 200,000 pretty quick. You know, not like.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  Nobody now produces enough rockets to make that happen. So if that becomes a reality and it looks quite like it is going to, then we need a lot of rocket players, probably not, not dozens, but, but more. But SpaceX would still be the dominant player in that, in that scenario. It's just that I think there's probably more business to go around. The other thing is just like if Starship works, it's such a, the rocket is so massive that, you know, SpaceX would be taking like what we used to do for an entire year on one launch into orbit at a lower cost.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  There's a lot between here and making that happen. But that's, you know, anyway, things could get quite dramatic. It'll be interesting to see exactly how this all plays out.

• 6:59Anthony Pompliano?

  So I want to talk about the companies that you cover in this book. And there were two things that I think kind of came together that seemed to be the drivers of this explosion of space startups. Now SpaceX obviously started, you know, more than 20 years ago at this point, and they've been at this a long time. But one of the things was this guy Pete Warden, who you cover, you know, almost all throughout the entire book. Talk a little bit about Pete, his role at NASA, this idea that like, he kind of was the misfit of NASA, but he even has this quote in the book where he's like, you know, in times of war, you need different people who kind of think outside the box than during times of peace. And he was that guy. So kind of talk, talk about this guy, maybe his importance to this explosion of startups going to space.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think he gives some of the best quotes. I think he says something like, in times of war, sometimes you need, you know, break, break glass for crazy. And he was kind of the great crazy general. I mean, before Elon, you know, so Pete's, Pete Warden's a bit older. He's probably close to his seventies now. He was, he was like an astrophysicist by training, he had a PhD, he ended up in the Air Force, became a general, you know, hardly anybody knows about him, but he's like this figure that's been lurking back. It was like kind of a puppet master all this time. He worked on the Star Wars missile defense shield during the Reagan era. He did a bunch of black ops stuff that he can't talk about. But yeah, you know, he ends up,

• 8:26Speaker 03

  he ends up at NASA Ames, which was like the Silicon Valley NASA Center. He's the director there in kind of like the early 2000s and. You know, Pete, for decades, I've been writing papers like, God, the government needs to get out of its own way. We need to make cheap rockets. We need to send them up all the time. We need to make cheap satellites. We have to piggyback on Moore's Law and what's been happening in consumer electronics. But NASA and the military contractors were just sort of, you know, allergic to any of these new ideas. But Pete assembles like this team of twenty-somethings and NASA Ames, like his little dream team of space weirdos to go make some of these ideas happen.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  He had to like literally kind of hide them in closets to keep them away from senators and NASA headquarters officials who were going to shut down what they were doing. But he, he kind of makes this new era of commercial space happen. A lot of the startups in the book come right out of NASA Ames. And then Pete was the one who gave SpaceX, you know, Elon was funding SpaceX. But when they, they wanted to fund their first mission through the Defense Department, Pete was the one who really kind of made that happen. And so, you know, I see him and Elon as these, these two figures that, that have propelled all this forward.

• 9:42Anthony Pompliano?

  So Pete obviously was this huge driving factor. You mentioned that he went and found all like the space weirdos and brought them together. And what I took away from the book is like, when we talk about weirdos, we're not just talking about like, oh, this person's not in NASA. We're talking about literally going and finding like the 20-year-old kid who wants to blow shit up, right? Or like get to space in some weird way. It really was this like weird collection of people. Is that what it takes to kind of create something brand new that's so disruptive? Is like you have to go so much to the fringe of society and find these people with these wild ideas? And, and maybe the naivety or the stupidity to like actually go after them? Like, talk a little bit about that group that he had put together there at that facility.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's a great question, you know. There were a lot of people that he brought in. I call them Pete's kids, but there was, there was kind of like this special group that were particularly close, probably about a dozen people. A ton of them lived in a commune called the Rainbow Mansion that I write about in the book. And, you know, I think it's this combination of, you've got these young kids with all these ideas and they're capable, but they've never managed some huge budgets or had to put like structure around a project. And then Pete was the, he was like the wizened old veteran in the room who could kind of set that stuff up.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  And then he could also, it was really like the protection that he gave them, you know? So he hands them the resources and usually this bureaucracy would come and just find its way to, to grind everything to a halt. But, but Pete was that unique person who, who was, you know, he almost got fired like 18 times. I mean, he was willing to like sort of deal with a lot of crap and, and protect these people. So I think it's kind of this mix. I think in space,

• 11:33Speaker 03

  I don't know if the average person really realizes like how stuck in the mud space had become and had just not changed for like 30, 40 years. So yeah, I think you needed like all these clean slates, these, these people that had out there ideas. They, it's sort of like the kind of person that, um, you know, they're going to be told that this is dumb like a thousand times and they're still going to do it.

• 11:59Anthony Pompliano?

  So the other kind of a big trend, if you will, was this idea of taking consumer electronics and being able to shoot them into space. And I didn't understand, I think that component of this explosion of space startups, where my understanding after reading the book is basically there was like space grade materials. And there were, you know, you'd spend $10 million on something that now is available to consumers, literally for a couple hundred bucks. And there was a period where people had the idea, could we take the consumer electronics? And would it survive going to space? Could it be on a rocket, et cetera? And so there's the phone sat program and a bunch of this stuff, but talk maybe about that period of time of like, that kind of seems like a stupid idea, you know, in hindsight of like how simple it is.

• 12:41Anthony Pompliano?

  But it does feel like maybe that was a really, really pivotal moment for space kind of exploration in general. Then now consumer electronics and the lower price points could actually be used for this stuff.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  It really was. Planet Labs, you mentioned this phone sat program. They literally said they like bought a Google Nexus phone or a few of them. Put them on a rocket, launched them into space to see if they would work and they did. And that ended up being the basis of Planet Labs, this company that has all these imaging satellites. And I would argue SpaceX had this huge effect on the the cost of rockets and access to space. But it was like that moment where people finally got Moore's Law and modern technology to space and had this awakening. It's like this weird historical baggage where, yeah, space used to be really hard.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  So you wanted to make a super fancy radio that you knew could survive the launch and all the harsh conditions of space. And then time passed, you know, and you probably didn't need that anymore. But there was some contractor in like Alabama that made the space grade radios. And everyone just bought them from them because they always worked. And so these were the first people like, I think, I think a cellphone might work up there, you know, like space is really freaking cold. The temperatures like swing a lot. The rocket launch itself is really violent, but it turned out these phones worked fine. And so then everybody's minds expanded at that point. And they're like, oh, you know, there's this, there's been 40 years of turns of Moore's Law and all this innovation.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  And now we can not only have cheaper stuff in space, but obviously it's going to be more modern technology. And, and, you know, just the last part of that is that the thinking around satellites used to be that you, you spend a billion dollars and you send this huge thing up and it lasts for 20 years. Like, you know, after 20 years passed, it's not, it's not a super modern bit of equipment. And so like, this was like a whole rethinking of, oh, we should just make these satellites last for like three or five years and just swap them out all the time.

• 14:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So this brings me to Peter Beck and you talk about like this rocket bike, which I think gets back to this idea of kind of the space weirdos, right? It's the same person who would put like a jet engine on a bicycle and see how fast it could go. Same person who thinks that they can launch rockets into space. But there's also a focus on like doing it in New Zealand and not necessarily doing it in the United States. You mentioned in the book, there was no infrastructure, there was no aerospace industry, there was no anything in New Zealand. And yet this guy who literally was spending his time putting, you know, rocket engines on bicycles in his spare time decides he's gonna go instead of horizontal, he's gonna go vertical. Like how insane, is there a way to describe like how crazy of an idea

• 15:35Anthony Pompliano?

  that was before it actually came to fruition?

• 15:39Speaker 03

  You know, I think it's like a one in seven billion sort of situation. I went to New Zealand a bunch of times for this book. I mean, it's like, it's like as unique as SpaceX. It's just this weird or personal story in a lot of ways. Peter grew up in Invercargill, which I don't know if anyone's ever had the pleasure. It's a very nice city, but it's like at the bottom of the South Island of New Zealand. The next stop is Antarctica. It's like very rural. There's, there's not much going on there. And, and this is like not a kid who was, you know, on his way to like a scholarship at MIT or anything. I mean, he was very good with his hands, but he didn't even go to college. He, he was

• 16:20Speaker 03

  working at a dishwasher maker, an appliance maker as like a apprentice. And, and like you said, so he used, he was just obsessed with rockets, you know, and rocket, he just likes to go fast. And so he has this, he has this house and he's got like a shed out back and he's making like his own propellants. He used to put garbage bags around his body to like protect himself from the propellants. And he made his own rocket engines. And he just got really far. I forget how long ago, it was like maybe 2006?

• 16:52Speaker 03

  He made this rocket called the Atia One and it was really just him and two part-time people and it got to the edge of space as like basically a hobbyist project and then turned that into a company and man, New Zealand has nothing. I interviewed the prime minister who was running the country when Peter was doing all this and he's like, look, well, first of all, it was hilarious because the prime minister showed up in like a t-shirt and shorts and like offered to pick me up in his car and take me to brunch. But he's like, look, we've got, we've got like two tanks. We barely have like a ship, you know, and this guy's coming in telling me we're going to space. I was kind of like, do we

• 17:37Speaker 03

  want to, you know, get involved in that? That seems sort of big for us and there's no talent to lean on. Nobody had ever done this before. And for people who don't know, Rocket Lab is like the second coming of SpaceX. I mean SpaceX has launched hundreds of times. Rocket Labs launched almost 40 and after that you drop down to like one or two very quickly. And, and so I don't know, man, I, you know, I do this for a living. I sort of chase weirdos around the world and, and I've never met anyone like, like Peter.

• 18:09Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think makes them so different? Is it just the upbringing? Is it like literally growing up in New Zealand, you know, literally kind of changes the way you think? Is it something about the family? Because I know that there was a lot of mechanics and things that they were doing on a day-to-day basis, tinkering and unpacking machines and things like that? Like what, what drove him to kind of end up in this very different place?

• 18:31Speaker 01

  The action's on the court and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to US residents 21+. Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes and details.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  Part of it has to be the genes because I sort of got super fascinated in his dad, who was like this expert in everything. He was like a master sculptor. He was like the world's leading authority on jade and like worked at a museum. He built his own telescope for the museum that Peter used to sort of like help out with as a kid. And yeah, so they just had this garage. Peter had two brothers and they just sat there tinkering on cars nonstop. And it was just like, it was like this brotherly competition to see who could, who could do more. But, you know, Peter, it's come clear to me over time, Peter is some kind of genius because, you know, he built, after that first rocket,

• 19:43Speaker 03

  they built this rocket called Electron, which is their workhorse today. It's, and it's, you can ask pretty much anyone, as far as small rockets go, it's like the perfectly engineered rocket. And, and yeah, Peter had a team of hundreds of people that helped him, but there were, there were countless times where it just wasn't going to happen. They couldn't solve some problem. And, and I asked Peter about this. So I was like, yeah, I would just go take a shower, you know, and like this idea would come to me of how to fix this thing. He, he seems to have some like intuitive knowledge of like, he seems to be able to translate some intuitive knowledge of physics and the vision in his head, like very directly to his hands. If you ask anyone, Pete's down there with like

• 20:26Speaker 03

  a lathe and milling machine and making the stuff himself. So, I don't know, part of it's the culture, part of it's his genes, and then, and then I think he's just like exceptional. He's also not, he's possessed by having to make stuff, right? Like, like he, he made a rocket engine just because like he, he had to, he's not like Elon. He's not trying to make some colony on Mars. It was more just like, I want to see if I can make a rocket and then like, and then I want to see if I can make a rocket. And then, and then he just, he's, I think that's his calling is the object itself.

• 21:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, what's fascinating is each person in the stories that you tell in this book, they seem to have different drivers, right? And it goes back to, you know, if you look at, think of Elon, actually, my wife has a theory, which I don't think we'll ever get kind of confirmation on. But when she read your book, she said, listen, you know, it seems like Elon was kind of a great entrepreneur and he was going. But when his child passed away, he became possessed. He wanted to save humanity. He wanted to kind of go and it became this thing of like, I'm going to level up my ambition. I'm going to level up, you know, the risk that I'm willing to take. And that was like a very pivotal moment. Did you find the same thing when when you were actually spending time with him and writing that book?

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a hard thing to talk about, you know, because Elon's always, you know, his first child died of sudden infant death syndrome. And Elon's always kind of downplayed it, you know, I mean, maybe for obvious reasons, he just doesn't want to talk about it. His ex-wife, though, used to sort of try to talk about it. And Elon would just say, look, what's the point of dwelling on this? I just gotta get to work. So, you know, it's a hard thing. I did try a few times to kind of get into it. But it was like one of those areas, he just, I don't know, he's, he loves it a bit more of like, I would call it like an expressive state than when I was doing a lot of interviews for the book. I think

• 22:26Speaker 03

  some of those things he wasn't used to talking about. But, you know, I don't know, that's a good question. I never thought about it fully like that. He like SpaceX had already started then, but it was, you know, and he'd always had this Mars idea in the back of his head. But at that point, it was more like to be in the southwest of space to be really cheap and, and more like the people in the book to like get stuff to space all the time, really cheap.

• 22:55Speaker 03

  You have to imagine, right, that something like that has a huge impact on you. And if there's like any defining quality of Elon, it's like this relentless sort of pursuits of making the most of your time that you have. And so, so, you know, if you're playing armchair psychologist, you could definitely see how that kind of would would feed into something like that.

• 23:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's fascinating to kind of think through, you know, you've got Peter Beck, you've got Elon and kind of what's driving those two guys. But then you get to somebody like Chris Kemp. And for those that don't know in the book, basically he has a very similar drive and determination. And it seems like kind of will his way into doing things. And there's this now famous Alameda kind of campus or site. And it's abandoned and he basically goes and he's trying to get the Alameda city council and local leaders to like essentially give it to him. Right. And be like, hey, like bring industry here from the Bay area, right? Like come and build this out and they're kind of like waffling, it seems. And he basically just moves in and just like starts like fixing it up.

• 24:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And next thing you know, they're like, well, like, I guess we should just say yes, because he kind of is like doing what he said he was going to do. Is that what actually happened?

• 24:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretty much. I mean, so I was with Fast Stress is like the first day they started and man, this place was like a real shithole. It was, it was like, there's kind of two parts to it. There's two buildings that they've taken over and one was this, it used to be a naval airbase. And so during World War II, this was like a place where they did a lot of repairs to jet fighters. And the first building Astra had was like this very weird, they used to test jet engines inside. So that, so that like our enemies couldn't see what was going on or whatever. And, and so they have these huge like tunnels with like these 12 foot thick walls and these exhausts for all the fire.

• 24:53Speaker 03

  And, but you know, like this place was full of. Like softball league paperwork typewriters that had been in city. It was like a city dump, you know, it was like all the stuff, the city had just been burying there for years. There was like a dead dude who got electrocuted, tried to grab the copper from some of the wirings. There was like a dead body in there and you know, the city didn't know what to do with it. Part of it is like they thought it was like a hazardous and exactly like you said, Chris was, Chris is like, well, I know what to do with this, you know? And so, so sometimes at night, they would just, they would bash down like entire, they would have to get stuff like a electric, like a power subsystem into the building and the door

• 25:36Speaker 03

  wasn't big enough. So they would like bash down an entire like wall of the building, put the electric subsystem in, in the middle of the night when nobody could see the repair the whole wall and just keep moving forward. And, and over time, this was a long process, like, like they always got kicked out a few times, you know, like the fire marshals would show up and things like that. But yeah, over time, then the city walked in one day and they have like this glorious rocket factory in the middle of Alameda, which is a very like suburban city near Oakland. So yeah, Chris, I think had, had some of that Elon spirit. Similar things happened in the early SpaceX days as well.

• 26:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, the other character that I want to talk about is Max, Max Poljovka. How do you say his last name?

• 26:23Speaker 03

  Poljovka.

• 26:23Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So he's fascinating, obviously. I think you call out in the book multiple times, like, I've never been around a person like this before. For those who are unfamiliar with him, he basically made a ton of money, unclear how much, in building internet companies in Europe. He's Ukrainian. Again, I say unclear because it's unclear how much money he made. It seems like it's unclear in terms of all of the different ways that he made the money. In some ways, people are like, look, he's got dating websites and things that, you know, might not be for everyone, but it's understandable and there's plenty of them here in the US. And then there's some people who accuse him of doing, you know, maybe illegal things or close to it, potentially immoral things, whatever, but he ends up with a ton of money. He then starts to invest heavily in the space business.

• 27:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And basically, it sounds like the US kind of railroaded them. Right? They basically said, look, man, you've got this business. You've done all this work. You've invested all this capital. And right when the rocket's sitting on the launch pad and pretty much ready to go, they come to him and say, yeah, we ain't letting the Ukrainian benefit based on US space technology. Is that kind of your take?

• 27:29Speaker 03

  Pretty much. One of the craziest stories I've ever seen, you know? You got everything about Max right. He was even weirder. He used to be like a OBGYN before he was a software magnate. You know, his parents worked. Ukraine was like the backbone of the Soviet space program. His parents worked on the Soviet rockets and software. So it's kind of like in his blood. He ends up buying this bankrupt rocket maker in Texas called Firefly. And Max had this crazy vision to try to unite like the old Ukrainian Soviet space with like new American space. And yeah, it was all going well for a while.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  He put $250 million in a Firefly, which after that might actually be more than Elon personally has put into SpaceX and is a bit behind Jeff Bezos. But after that, you know, Max is kind of is right there. And it took years. The Firefly rocket is kind of one of those medium sized rockets. Like it's no, no joke. It took a lot of money and engineering and, and they got it to the pad at Vandenberg in Southern California, where a lot of rockets launched from. And then things started to take a turn all of a sudden. I mean, Ukraine is obviously meant to be like an ally of the US. But the US government started to have questions about the Ukrainian owning a rocket company that could fly from the United States.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  So they start like blocking him. They start messing with his other businesses, kind of like stopping the transfer of money from some things. And then, so I obtained all these secret documents. You know, CFIUS is the agency that like raises these foreign ownership concerns. And I actually got the CFIUS complaint against Max.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  I found it pretty hilarious and unsatisfying. There's maybe like two sentences about his shady business stuff. And then there's like multiple paragraphs that they essentially say like, Ukraine is near Russia. Russia is a space superpower.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  Max is Ukrainian. He may become a Russian asset at like some point in the future. So we do not want him to own this company. I was like, these things happen. I've covered Huawei a lot, you know, getting messed with by the US government because of its Chinese ownership and stuff. I, unless the government has some amazing confidential information. I've never seen anything like this to put like 250 million. They let him, it wasn't like, this went on for years. Nobody was questioning it while he was pouring money into it. It was only once the rocket was ready, they're like, oh, this was a bad idea, you know? And we could get into it a little more if you want, but, but the timing on this was terrible

• 30:20Speaker 03

  because they sort of kick him out and then the Ukraine war kicks off like a year later when it would be pretty handy to have someone like Max on your side.

• 30:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, what's fascinating to me is Elon obviously is South African, right? You've got Bezos, who's an American, but we just talked about, we've got people who are from New Zealand. We've got people from kind of all these different countries. And not only are we talking about the individuals themselves and kind of their nationalities, but also we're talking about, well, family members or, you know, grandparents and, and, you know, it's, it's the classic, like, America is just the home of immigrants. And so, you know, it is in one way, kind of a sad story, right? That somebody came to the United States, they poured all this money into it, they built out this amazing thing. On the other hand, I guess the question is like, are there valid concerns about non-Americans owning technology that is being developed in the US specifically around space?

• 31:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, what is your, you're the foremost expert that I would know on space at this point in terms of all these different companies, all the nuances? Like, how do you balance it in your head in terms of like, maybe where the line should be drawn versus where it is today?

• 31:28Speaker 03

  So I've got complicated thoughts on that, you know, like in the in the Max situation in particular. I thought it was a little ridiculous because because Ukraine is an ally of the United States like it would behoove us to have their engineers to set up this linkage linkage between Ukraine and the US. You know, there's been rumors for like decades that that there's not much money anymore in the Ukrainian space program. They have very smart engineers that those guys sometimes are working for like North Korea or Iran on their ICBMs and stuff like that. I thought here's this guy who actually has like a plan and he's like a man of action and means and he's making this happen. Like the bigger question.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  So over the last couple of years, we've seen the US government throw out a couple of people like Max. There was also a Russian dude who had a space company and he got tossed as well. And there's always been these concerns, right? Because they are like the rockets are like ICBMs. Even Rocket Lab, Peter Beck in New Zealand, he basically had to beg the United States government to exist because they did not want another country having like an ICBM. And even though New Zealand's part of the the Five Eyes, it's like our closest alliance. He had to spend like a year going to see Obama to to allow Rocket Lab to happen. They had to set up a headquarters in Los Angeles. It was sort of like a fake headquarters for a while and

• 32:54Speaker 03

  it's real now. But it's it's super complicated. I think to me, I understand the roots of all this. I think it's like a it's getting to be sort of a archaic proposition. We used to not want our aerospace secrets to fall into other people's hands. Like Peter Beck went on the internet and read a few textbooks and made the second most successful rocket company in the world from New Zealand with like no US help. So my general theory is that like if you know, just about anyone can do this if they really put their mind to it and are smart enough at this point. And then

• 33:34Speaker 03

  you know, I make a television show called Hello World, where I go all around the world interviewing scientists. I just went to like Kyrgyzstan and they have a team of 10 women who are just college undergrads who are making the country's first satellite for like $250,000. I don't know. I just think this is like a new era and

• 33:52Speaker 03

  Like if we're trying to keep, um, if our goal really is to like, try to keep ICBM type technology out of the hands of some nations, I just think it's sort of pointless. You know, at this juncture, it's just, it's like not going to happen and, and the US doesn't.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. Anyway, yeah. And China's doing just fine with their space program. I just, I, I think it's, uh, I think these are very like Cold War, Cold War kind of vibes that are still hanging around.

• 34:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, one of the parts of the book that, um, I don't, I think I knew this existed, but I didn't understand to the extent to which it existed is, uh, there's a difference obviously between the rocket company and the launch pads. And there's a payment that gets made to the launch pad when, uh, it is used, but there's also a payment that gets made when it is supposed to be used. It's kind of reserved, but not used. It's just a lower fee, right? Kind of like, hey, you wasted our time. So give us some money. Um, but in the book, you talk about pretty much people going around the world. They're going to Hawaii. They're going to various islands. They're going to Alaska. And I forget who it is, but somebody goes to India, right? And they're essentially looking for, uh, these launch pads. And some of them, it seems like have to do with geography and kind of, you know, a trajectory and

• 35:05Anthony Pompliano?

  things like that. Some have to do with costs. Some of them have to do with backlog of, uh, actual schedule and things like, uh, that. Is there an argument that the United States should just go like, create a bunch more launch pads around the coastlines of the US and like, let's just go all in on space and try to, you know, beat all these other countries? Or is there actual value either for the United States or for these companies in having launch pads literally be, you know, across geographies, across time zones, across, uh, countries? And, and that's actually a better thing?

• 35:35Speaker 03

  Dude, I'm impressed. You're the first person who's like picked up on all this and then like sort of sophistication and, and intricacies of all these, these pads and everything. Yeah. You know, um, I'd never thought about it fully like that before. The US is in some ways launch pad rich. We've got stuff in California, Virginia, Florida and Alaska. On the other hand, most of those are quite government or NASA controlled. So Rocket Lab has a private spaceport. Um, SpaceX has its one in Texas, you know, which is, is pretty starship focused. But other than that, you know, it's hard to find a private, um, spaceport. I think.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  The US is disadvantaged to build a ton more in that I think people are going to be super worried about having like a you kind of need it as close to the equator as you can get. So you want to be like Southern California, Southern Florida. Alaska is good. Just like you mentioned, there's specific orbits you can get to from up there. But I think the trend on all this really just today, we saw this like old concept coming back today, which is these barges out at sea. I think a lot of this moves to like offshore, just getting totally away from people. You pump out a rocket in a factory, you put it on a boat, you send

• 37:01Speaker 03

  it to this this barge and then launch it out in the ocean. And obviously, the US would be in great shape to do something like that. And that was, you know, we talked about Astra, this company Alameda. I mean, this is something they've been pursuing for a long time is that they're right by the water is just you literally pop the rocket out of the factory onto this boat and then like off it goes, maybe even the same day or the next day. I think that's probably where we're heading is like less, less infrastructure instead of more.

• 37:32Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about those barges, are these like normal barges that can just be converted? Or do you think they have to be kind of custom built? Obviously, I think a lot of people will think of a barge in space and they'll see, you know, the rocket boosters come and reland on these like drone ships in the ocean with SpaceX. Is that what we're talking about?

• 37:51Speaker 03

  Like SpaceX is the only one that can land. This is more, this is more on the disposable end. And yeah, they have to be like, you have to have some infrastructure. But this is also like we whatever picture, most of us have this picture in our head of like 120 people in this like NASA mission control and everybody's got a job and they've all got the red phone and they're sweating, you know, like Astro launches their rockets with like two people in a modified, you know, trailer shipping container that can go anywhere around the world. This is really where we're heading. So the barges have to have like some infrastructure to fuel the Rockets and stand it up and all that stuff. But otherwise, no, man, it's just a, just like a flat, flat.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  All you need is a little flat surface and stand the thing up and shoot it.

• 38:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's absolutely incredible to kind of think about how quickly this is all, all playing out. I want to talk about companies like Varda as well. As you know, I'm an investor in it. But what's interesting to me is in reading the book, now I feel much more educated to talk to Delian and Will and those guys, right? And be a little dangerous.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  How do they feel better about your investment, man?

• 38:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, for sure, for sure. But if I had to segment out the industry, you know, kind of after reading the book, it's like, okay, you have the launch pads. You obviously have a lot more of the kind of public stuff. Then you've got all these rocket companies and that's really where the focus has been, right? Is how do we get these rocket companies? I think SpaceX was Starlink, they're the first ones or one of the first ones back. Okay, like now that we can get to space, what do we do when we're there? Right? We've got obviously a couple of other companies that are trying to do things around satellites and stuff like that. Varda is trying to do manufacturing or these like space factory type things. Talk about maybe not just Varda, but like, what is the cohort of companies that are going to say, all right? I don't want to worry about the rocket thing. Like I'll just hitch a ride with these folks who already figured out the rocket thing. But I want to focus on what we actually do once we get to space.

• 39:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I've seen, I think, Bezos and Blue Origin talk some of this as well. Like, what are you seeing there that's interesting to you? Or what are some of the companies or people that I think people should pay attention to?

• 39:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, the rockets are sexy and fun to watch, but this is like where most of the action is. And I think the money and there's just tons more companies than rocket companies. Just super quick, you know, this, like, we would not be having this conversation five years ago. I mean, the stuff is like flipped so quick and, and is part of it is like the industry has matured. So you used to be a rocket maker and now, and that was all you did. And now companies like Rocket Lab, so they make the rocket and then they make 90% of what goes into a satellite. The electronics, the solar panels. If you're another startup, you just take your fancy camera or your scientific experiment.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  And you just plop that into Rocket Labs little sort of bust. I mean, this is what Varda is doing, in fact. And, you know, this just saves a ton of cost. You, it used to be like every startup, you used to have to do all this work, basically building the innards of the satellite for just trying to do their mission in space. Like in the book, I argue. We communications and imaging have been these first two major businesses and we do have thousands upon thousands of satellites doing that. We're gonna add more. I think Varda represents like that. So I think they're going up, what, next month, I think?

• 41:12Anthony Pompliano?

  June, yep.

• 41:13Speaker 03

  I think it's June, yeah. So, and on that rocket, I mean, I think that rocket is like a symbol of a moment in time because it is our first one where we're really getting to new, new businesses. Like everyone's always said, oh, there's imaging and communications and a little sort of fringe science for laboratories, but like, what is the next business? So Varda's gonna go up, they're gonna make pharmaceuticals, you know? There's Astroforge. I used to think asteroid mining was insane until I actually went to Astroforge's office for my show and, and it looks, it's a very talented team. It looks very real to me. They're setting up their first, they're not like mining an asteroid right away, but

• 41:56Speaker 03

  they're setting up their first, you know, like prototype to see if they can burn through a sample up there and get some data off of it. And so, pretty quickly, we, like, we are now, I would broadly call it manufacturing of different stripes, you know? And I think, I think we're gonna move industry into low earth orbit. There's a lot of sense of putting things like data centers that can be solar powered up there, all kinds of interesting things you can do with molecules in, without gravity pressing on you. So I think, I think like right at this very moment, this whole thing is kicking off in, in a new way. It

• 42:38Speaker 03

  reminds me, like, I'm old enough to sort of live through like the 1996 consumer internet where we, we laid all this fiber and we're building these data centers. Everyone's like talking about killer apps all the time. It's annoying, but you know, everyone's searching for like, what are, we know there's something here, like what are people gonna do? Some of the business models were maybe obvious, but nobody would have guessed like sort of what 2023 fully looks like. And, and we're running this huge experiment and Laura Thorburn is like, are we having that same moment right now? And do these things check out or do they not?

• 43:14Anthony Pompliano?

  I gotta ask a couple of questions that I've always been obsessed with. One, are we gonna colonize Mars in our lifetime?

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• 43:53Speaker 03

  You know, people, I am, I could not be more convinced that SpaceX is going to send rockets to Mars. It's going to send tons of stuff to Mars. When you get to like an actual human, I get, it is awful, right? It's like a six month ride. You really want to believe that you get a ride back. You gotta put up, we gotta put up some sort of infrastructure to, some sort of infrastructure to like let a human inhabit that. I would say, when I

• 44:33Speaker 03

  finished the book on Elon in like 2015, I was pretty convinced that of sort of what SpaceX would do there. I'm more convinced than ever that that company is like the most capable company, the most capable like arrangements of thousands of people maybe that's like ever been assembled. So I don't know if I'm ready to commit to full colonization. I am super confident we're going to send stuff to Mars and, and I think probably like have some people try it out, you know? I, I'm less optimistic than Elon about like how hospitable it ends up being up there.

• 45:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think Elon dies on Earth or on Mars?

• 45:14Speaker 03

  It's always said he wants to die on Mars, man. I think if you asked him these days, he'd probably tell you like an AI was gonna assassinate.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  Before he gets up there. I'm kind of surprised he hasn't been on one of these SpaceX missions now. You know, we just set up another batch of like private astronauts.

• 45:34Anthony Pompliano?

  No, come on. Keep that man on Earth. Protect him at all costs. Do not let him get on any rockets.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  They're pretty safe, man. It's probably safer than being in a car.

• 45:45Anthony Pompliano?

  I understand, but still, in the one-off chance, can you imagine the damage that would be done to the space industry? Elon Musk, something happened to him on a rocket?

• 45:55Speaker 03

  You know, and again, I'm sorry, I'm really, this is really not meant to like be a fanboy sort of thing. SpaceX is just very cool. I did not think people realized how fucked the United States would be if SpaceX did not exist. Like, we just killed the space shuttle. It's like Lockheed and Boeing were doing nothing new at all. China has been pumping just billions of dollars. People would be freaking out. I laugh sometimes. I mean, look, Elon brings a lot of a lot of grief upon himself and says some crazy things. I always, I laugh that

• 46:34Speaker 03

  it's so black and white and like, I find the whole conversation sort of stupid. Sometimes it's like, it's like, okay. On some level, why do you care what anybody says? Just look at the last 20 years of what this person actually did. I mean, it sort of speaks for itself. It's also crazy to do it in 20 years is like, look at Blue Origin, you know? They've done okay. I mean, they have like these tourist sites. They've existed for just as long as SpaceX, nowhere in the same ballpark.

• 47:05Anthony Pompliano?

  You think like the billionaires got like a group chat and they're just like, yo, I'm starting a space company. The next one's like me too?

• 47:11Speaker 03

  Dude, if they do, Elon's crapping all over it because like, Bezos and Branson have had a tough time with it, or Paula Allen passed away. It really hasn't gone that well for them. I, when does this podcast go up?

• 47:23Anthony Pompliano?

  This, uh, this week.

• 47:26Speaker 03

  This week. I mean, later this week, I got a story running on, uh, an exclusive story on Sergey Brin, who is, is not doing rockets, but you will see he's also getting in the aerospace game. Um, there does, there seems to be a thing, right? It's like, I guess after you bought a mega yacht, you have to like,

• 47:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  move on, buddy. But Elon's the only one who's turning into a real business, you know? Um, I think,

• 47:52Speaker 03

  I used to not be a moon person. I was sort of like, eh, let's just do the Mars thing. The moon is, is actually getting interesting now. We got like a couple,

• 48:02Speaker 03

  you know, private companies working with NASA to send humans back, but then there's companies now that are like, starting to think about private colonies on the moon, which is actually affordable now. They're putting private satellites around the moon. I actually, I think the moon gets pretty interesting in the next 10 years.

• 48:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Couple more questions for you. Uh, we now are getting to a point where we've got like air traffic control of all these satellites and how do we actually keep them from colliding with each other? We then get into like the whole like military industrial complex and like, you know, can I shoot down your satellite? Can you shoot down mine? You mentioned in the book that Russia basically took out one of their own satellites as kind of a reminder, like, you know, we have missiles that can, that can hit these things. Um, is there legitimacy and like, uh, offensive or just defensive capabilities when it comes to this space force thing? Is there going to be like a Blackwater kind of, you know, private, uh, you know, a defense force that you can hire to protect your satellites? Like what's going on in, in kind of the military components of this, both with the, the military space force, but also,

• 49:03Anthony Pompliano?

  uh, with maybe private companies trying to get into that game?

• 49:07Speaker 03

  Man, that is a cool. I'm going to write a short story on that idea after this. I mean, I don't think people realize how weird shit is about to get.

• 49:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Like Andron absolutely needs space defense service.

• 49:21Speaker 03

  That that would be cool. I could see this. I could see this. You know, like on the big level, right? Everybody should be incented to not screw this up because the second you blow somebody else's salad up, you kind of just risk taking out your own service. So you like on one level, people should be rational actors. I think Russia has already, you know, Russia is the great wild card in all this giant space superpower with space program collapsing. No commercial space startups at all to speak of like, how do they sort of handle this new world? China's like this mix of government, like trying to sort of

• 50:04Speaker 03

  become private. And then the US is just like roaring commercials based the like government guys are kind of laggards. I don't know how things are going to go. There's other stories in the book too. Like people should know, you know, I think it's China put up a satellite that then popped out a baby satellite that would like just hang out by American satellites. And it didn't seem to be doing anything, but it was sort of like, if we wanted to shove you out of orbit, we probably could, or maybe we could hack you. So it's really strange. In the Defense Department, my God, yes, they desire the ability to like fly a rocket tomorrow to put a satellite right over whatever they want. And they're getting like close to that. So I don't know.

• 50:50Anthony Pompliano?

  We did it to an asteroid, right? Didn't we? Didn't we send a rocket and like hit an asteroid and try to redirect the asteroid?

• 50:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, we've done stuff like that. But in this is, this is like you, they call it responsive space. I mean, the DOD has been fantasizing. This is like Space Force all comes from this. And Pete Warden, who we talked about is like kind of the progenitor of a lot of this. It's just treating space like another arm of the military where like something breaks out, you mobilize your air, your aircraft carriers, your jets, your troops, and then you start sending rockets up to do stuff, you know? The problem is like,

• 51:29Speaker 03

  There's things we really depend on like GPS today, which is you sort of take it for granted. But it's like this glue that makes your cell phone work and, and all kinds of transportation work. I mean, the second we screw something up in space that, you know, like we can, we can back in time quite quickly.

• 51:45Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Last question for you. Are aliens real?

• 51:50Speaker 03

  This is funny. Okay. So Pete Warden, you know, astrophysicist, black ops. If somebody should know about aliens is him. I've spent a lot of time with Pete. I've asked him this several times. I mean, he's actually like, look for aliens. He assures me they're not. Maybe, maybe he knows and he's not telling me. If anyone was gonna know, I've asked Elon too. I'm like, look, man, you're going up there more than anybody else. If aliens were gonna contact someone, it's probably you. Elon says he's got nothing either. So I don't know.

• 52:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Do they believe that they exist or do they just believe, hey, we haven't come in contact with them yet?

• 52:33Speaker 03

  Like I think I, Elon, I, I sort of get the feeling he just doesn't even think about this much. Pete's, um, you know, he wants to explore the outer reaches of the solar system and he's, he's being funded by Yuri Milner right now to make like a, a probe that would go out of our solar, like Pete wants to find. I think Pete believes that he wants to find, find stuff. Um, so, you know.

• 52:57Anthony Pompliano?

  It's one of the greatest, it's one of the greatest conquests that a human could do right now. Like the person, the person who contacts aliens, you know, Thomas Edison, uh, you know, Nikola Tesla. You go through all these things, all these inventions, all these things, but there's certain people in history. I think Elon for SpaceX and kind of reusable rockets, all that stuff, like he'll be remembered for literally centuries. The person who contacts aliens first, they're on the map.

• 53:22Speaker 03

  I saw Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian, he tweeted yesterday, he's like, you realize there's a non-zero chance that our first contact with aliens will be a dick pic? That's been like forwarded out or something. But, you know, I don't know, man. If, I wish I knew. This is, I

• 53:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Elon will pay the aliens off in Dogecoin, just for the last

• 53:45Speaker 03

  Can you imagine if Elon was our first contact? I don't know.

• 53:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh my god.

• 53:50Speaker 03

  I don't know if that would involve us or not.

• 53:52Anthony Pompliano?

  He would be attacked. No one would believe him. He'd be just attacked. They'd be like, shut up. You don't know anything. You're stupid.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  I think you're probably right.

• 54:02Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Ashley, this book was fantastic. When the heavens went on sale, The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach. What I love about it is you kind of build off of the work that you did in the book on Elon, but also you cover what now have become some of the most important companies in space. You've got a bunch of people in here, people who worked at NASA, people who are building these companies. But also, you help explain, I think, some of the difficulties and complexities in doing this stuff, right? It's not just like, hey, raise some money from venture capitalists, go out onto this launch pad, launch the thing into space, and we all get rich. There is a ton of complexity. And one of the things that, you know, I think people probably don't understand is, when you build the first rocket, it's not supposed to actually make it to space. Right? Like, if you launch a rocket and it goes to space the first time, like, you are the one in a

• 54:45Anthony Pompliano?

  billion. Right? It's actually, no, we're just launching it to get

• 54:49Speaker 03

  You're the only one.

• 54:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, you may be the only one. And so, I think the book is just, does a great job, one, explaining, kind of, the frontiers of space and why people are doing this, but also the progress we've made to date so far. So I highly suggest people go get it. Again, When the heavens went on sale, The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach, it's even got the really great photo on the front. So if you're watching this, it's worth it, I promise. Any last words from you, Ashley? Where can we send people to find you online?

• 55:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, man. The, we're gonna make an HBO documentary about that here. We're in the process. I spell my name a little weird with two Es, just ashleyvance.com or at Twitter, same thing. And I, it was just great being on with you, Pop. I appreciate it, man.

• 55:33Anthony Pompliano?

  I appreciate you taking the time, a couple of years out of your life, to write the book, and then letting me read it in a few hours. But we will definitely do this again in the future, and I appreciate it.

• 55:43Speaker 03

  All right, thanks, man.

• 55:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.