#234 Jared Isaacman - Will China Trigger the Next Sputnik Moment for NASA?

Jared Isaacman is an American billionaire entrepreneur, pilot, and commercial astronaut. He founded Shift4 Payments in 1999 at age 16, growing it into a leading integrated payment processing company that went public in 2020, handling transactions for a third of U. S. restaurants and hotels. An accomplished aviator with over 7,000 flight hours, Isaacman set a world speed record for circumnavigating the globe in a light jet in 2009 and founded Draken International in 2012, the world's largest private air force providing adversary air support. In space exploration, he commanded the all-civilian Inspiration4 mission in 2021, raising $240 million for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, and Polaris Dawn in 2024, conducting the first private spacewalk and testing Starlink communications. Nominated by President Trump for NASA Administrator in December 2024, the nomination was withdrawn in June 2025 due to prior political donations, after which Isaacman donated $15 million to U. S. Space Camp programs. He advocates for advancing human spaceflight, public-private partnerships in aerospace, and philanthropy, including support for Make-A-Wish and veteran causes through his Polaris Program. Married to Monika with two children, Isaacman continues to push boundaries in business, aviation, and space. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://betterhelp.com/srs This episode is sponsored. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. https://bunkr.life – USE CODE SRS Go to https://bunkr.life/SRS and use code “SRS” to get 25% off your family plan. https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://shawnlikesgold.com https://helixsleep.com/srs https://mypatriotsupply.com/srs https://patriotmobile.com/srs https://prizepicks.onelink.me/lmeo/srs https://rocketmoney.com/srs https://ROKA.com – USE CODE SRS https://simplisafe.com/srs https://ziprecruiter.com/srs Jared Isaacman Links: X - https://x.com/rookisaacman IG - https://www.instagram.com/rookisaacman Shift4 Payments - https://shift4.com Polaris Program - https://polarisprogram.com/team/jared-isaacman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards, all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com/protectionterms.

• 1:04Shawn Ryan?

  Jared Isaacman, welcome to the show.

• 1:06Speaker 03

  Wow, thanks for having me.

• 1:07Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I've been excited about this one.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  I'm honored to be here, but honestly, looking around the room, don't feel very worthy, but it's great to be here and chatting with you.

• 1:18Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man, a lot of people think that, and, but you're perfect for the show. So, I've been, I've been following you. I was really excited about the NASA thing, and then, you know, that got pulled, and we'll talk about that soon in the interview, but I, I, I appreciate the humility, but you very much, I love having you here, and it's an honor to have you here. So, thank you for, for making the time.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure to meet you, by the way.

• 1:48Shawn Ryan?

  You too.

• 1:49Speaker 03

  You're an American hero.

• 1:50Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. You too. All right, everybody starts off with an introduction, so here we go.

• 1:57Shawn Ryan?

  Jared Isaacman, billionaire entrepreneur, adventurer, and commercial astronaut. CEO of Shift4 Payments, a company you started when you were just 16 years old and now a global leader in payments. Founder of Draken International, world's largest private tactical fighter fleet for military training. Record-setting pilot with over 7,800 hours in a jet aircraft, that's almost one full year in flight. Commanded Inspiration 4 in 2021, the first all-civilian spaceflight, orbited the Earth for three days. Then you led the farthest mission into space since the last Apollo mission on Polaris Dawn in 2024, where you conducted the first commercial spacewalk.

• 2:42Shawn Ryan?

  You're nominated, you were nominated to be the NASA Administrator until pulled just days before the boat. You're a husband and proud father of two children. And our friend, Scott Bouteet, connected us and he just had really good stuff to say about you and, and so like I said, I'm really excited about this.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  I have nothing but great things to say about Kid, so.

• 3:08Shawn Ryan?

  Awesome, awesome human. But, uh, so I'm, before we get in, I want to do a life story on you and just starting all the way back from childhood and go through everything that you've accomplished in your career, but I do, I've got a question that a lot of people have interest in. We talk a lot about the moon landing, was it real, did it happen? I want to ask you, why have we not been back to the moon? Why has man not been back to the moon since?

• 3:35Speaker 03

  Well, I would tell you right from the get-go, I'm 100% in the camp, we absolutely went to the moon. And what a travesty that we haven't been back. And I can tell you how we got there. We had a, we had a great Cold War rivalry, our ideology versus theirs, and 4.5% of the federal budget and the will of the nation is what, is what happened. And. Once we got there and we went a handful of times and collected enough moon rocks, that was an expense that was no longer palatable. I will say for 35 years as taxpayers, we spent over $100 billion to return to the moon.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  35 years later, we haven't been able to do it. That's obviously a big problem that we need to fix. There's probably a lot of underlying reasons associated with it.

• 4:27Shawn Ryan?

  What would those reasons be?

• 4:30Speaker 03

  You know, it's interesting. And some of it goes to like even the competitiveness that we have with, you know, kind of competitive nature of our country, our great geopolitical competitor in China that now has incredible second mover advantage on us. So what I mean by that is like, take the Manhattan Project. You know, we know something can be done and we resource it accordingly. We gather up the best and brightest and we set up locations all around the country to contribute and bubble up to this grand endeavor, which was to build the atomic bomb. Well, we did the same thing during the space program. You know, we opened up a Stennis in Mississippi to do engine work and we set up Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama to build the actual rocket.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  And Kennedy Space Center, what a great location to shoot a rocket going eastbound. And you staff up all these great locations and it all bubbles up to a singular purpose and then you get it done and then what? You know, the mission kind of loses its way a little bit. And then everybody goes into self-preservation mode and it's like, well, let's move on to other broad-based science or other things, lots of little things that we're going to entrench ourselves into. And then what happens is when you are ready to re-rally those resources back towards their original goal, it means a lot of people changing what they've been accustomed to for some period of time. And it gets really hard to get that machine rolling again. And I say all this in relation to China because they're doing the same thing now where instead

• 5:58Speaker 03

  of trying to repurpose facilities and resources that have kind of lost their way to some extent over the years, they're literally doing the same thing of just setting up shop here, setting up a location here, all in optimal locations, all getting the right people and talent and then resourcing accordingly and willing it into existence. It's basically doing exactly what we did during the Manhattan Project, during the great space race, and doing it now, having learned exactly, you know, our approach to it. Puts us at a disadvantage.

• 6:30Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, we were talking about, you know, the potential helium three on the moon at breakfast and mining asteroids. I've talked to a lot of the people, a lot of other people that are very interested in this stuff. And it's just, it's just so weird that we haven't been back there to explore. I mean, and we're talking about going to Mars.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, look, we need to get back to the moon. Um, not, um, you know, I wouldn't have minded if 35, because some people can take the position of like, we already did it. We did it long ago. And, um, and I have, I have two reasons to go. One of them is, hey, we don't know what we may find that has economic or scientific or national security value, like helium three, that could change the balance of power here on earth if we get it wrong. But mostly because we said we're gonna do it. You know, you can't go back. Every president for 35 years has said, we're gonna return to the moon and have a path to Mars. And as taxpayers, we spent $100 billion trying to do it. The moment you say that, you've just committed the nation and our resources, um, our national prestige to getting something

• 7:33Speaker 03

  done. And if you fail to do it, there are ramifications. There's consequences to it. So if we never said that, if 35 years ago, we said, you know what, we, we, we've done it. And we wish the Chinese and the Russians the best, and we'll, we'll celebrate when they get there. But we're setting our sights on Mars. And I, it wouldn't bother me as much. I would still think we should do it because we don't know what we might find that could change things. But we didn't. We said we're gonna do it. And now we spent 35 years and a lot of money doing it. We better get back there.

• 7:59Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, where's the $100 billion gone?

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 8:03Shawn Ryan?

  What did it go to?

• 8:04Speaker 03

  It's gone into continuously repurposing, uh, old space shuttle hardware. So first, it was the, the constellation program, uh, which repurposed, you know, shuttle rocket boosters, shuttle main engines. Uh, and then that program was canceled and then reimagined, uh, as SLS, um, which is the current name for NASA's internal big rocket program. Uh, and that is also repurposed shuttle hardware. So, um, you know, RS25 engines, uh, that were designed, you know, in the, in the 1970s. Are still what's going on SLS and that's what they went on the space shuttle. It's actually this continuously repurposing old hardware, just so you don't ruffle any

• 8:47Speaker 03

  feathers with any manufacturers, any congressional districts, keep jobs where they're at. It would be the equivalency of taking the P-51 Mustang into Desert Storm because, well, we got to keep the plants open.

• 9:00Shawn Ryan?

  Jeez, jeez. All right, a couple, we're going to dive into this pretty thick here later on, but a couple of things to knock out real quick before we get going on the life story. One of the things, I have a Patreon account, it's a subscription account. A lot of these guys have been with me since the very beginning when I was doing this out of my attic and, and here we are, two studios later. And so one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. So this is from Richard Beamer. How close are we to affordable space travel for the general public? And based on your expertise, what is the projected timeline for its availability?

• 9:42Speaker 03

  It's, what an awesome question and we are so close. I mean, you know, in the, in, and what is that like relative to the 60 some odd years of, of human space exploration? We're within five to 10 years at the absolute most. I mean, think about it, up until now, up until rather recently, every time we've put humans in space, we've pretty much thrown away some portion of the rocket. So, you know, with the, with the space shuttle, we threw away the, the fuel tank and then it was an incredibly expensive multi-month overhaul of the vehicle. In the Saturn V that took astronauts to the moon, we threw the whole thing away. Nothing was, was reusable.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  And now with Falcon 9, you've got rockets that land on ships and we reuse them within a couple of weeks. The Dragon capsule that I flew into space, I flew on the same one twice. And prior to, to, prior to me flying on it, NASA's Crew 1 flew on it. And all of that has reduced the cost to put mass and humans into orbit materially. But now where, where does it get to the point where every day anyone can go and do it and it's, it's, you know, it's as affordable as like maybe a really expensive vacation? That's when you don't throw any of the rocket away. And everything is reusable, just like you're taking your family to Disneyland, you don't throw any portion of the airplane away. So Starship, that's that monster vehicle, you know, it's the size of a skyscraper and

• 11:10Speaker 03

  it's twice as powerful as the Saturn V rocket that took us to the moon. That's what you saw SpaceX catch with the tower. And that's so the top half is reusable and the bottom half is reusable. And you can fit 100 people on it. I mean, that's your 737 Southwest, now boarding next flight to orbit type thing. Now, because it's entirely reusable and it has to propulsively land on Earth, there's a lot of things you need to figure out and get right, so it doesn't have a bad day. But, you know, at SpaceX's, you know, pace of operations, their iterative design philosophy, the factories that are making them hardware-rich, five, 10 years away, you're gonna, you're gonna see lots and lots of spacecraft going up and down. It's gonna be a light switch moment for, for humankind, really.

• 11:54Shawn Ryan?

  Man, you know, I talked to my wife about this and I'm like, you know, I told you we have toddlers and I'm like, you have young kids too. And I just, I like thinking about it. I tell my wife, I'm like, I think our kids are going to space. It won't be long and there'll be field trips, you know, this is it. And, I mean, you think we're that five to 10 years from that, or?

• 12:19Speaker 03

  100%. I mean, you, you, you have our generation's most accomplished entrepreneur with more resources than any human being has ever accumulated in history. And, you know, his, I want to say a singular focus, but the guy's trying to solve a lot of, you know, the world's greatest, greatest challenges, a lot of the world's greatest problems, but one of which is making life multi-planetary. And he knows the only way you can do that is with fully reusable launch vehicles. And he's not doing it to send four people to Mars. He's doing it to send thousands of people, tens of thousands, literally making it our the first human outpost in, in space. And he can will things into existence. I mean, and he's got the greatest talent this country, you know, has produced.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  And, I mean, it's gonna happen. And when it does, for sure, my kids, your kids, I mean, seeing astronauts on the moon and Mars will just be the beginning.

• 13:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. I'm excited, man. I'm real excited about that.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 13:19Shawn Ryan?

  But, I mean, what do you think will? How do you think the world will change when, I mean, just from, just from seeing everyday people get the opportunity to go to space, see what it is, feel that, see the earth from afar, I mean, how does that change humanity?

• 13:38Speaker 03

  Well, I think there's a couple, couple of different ways to approach this, and one of which is just to simply say, like, I have no idea, like, and, and the reason being is, like, the analogy I love to use is in the 1980s, cell phones were, were so damn big, you had to build it into your car, right, and they were, they were just car phones, and they were incredibly expensive, and who had them, uh, like, Wall Street traders, like, you know, uh, rich guys had them, right? Who could have ever imagined in the 1980s, when they were setting up the first cell towers and installing cell phones in cars, you know, that a couple decades in the future, every 13-year-old would have it, and some of the most valuable companies in the world were not the ones that were building the towers, or building the phones, but the ones

• 14:23Speaker 03

  that created a, a piece of software on your phone so you could order food at 2:00 in the morning, or, or connect with your friends from high school or college. No one could have imagined that, no one could have imagined, like, social networks or something in, uh, in the 1980s when they created cell phones or cars. Well, you're gonna have a similar kind of light switch moment when, when Starship comes online, and when Blue Origin, you know, what Jeff Bezos is working on with New Glenn, and the cost to put mass in orbit is so low that we can start experimenting, you have no idea what's gonna come of it, like, what that orbital economy will be. I mean, maybe we're gonna find, uh, you know, cancer-treating drugs, or tumor-killing drugs that are up there, or maybe it is mining helium-3, which unlocks fusion power here on Earth, maybe, I don't know, maybe it's mining asteroids, maybe we're manufacturing

• 15:07Speaker 03

  in space, and that, you know, like, everyday trade jobs are, are doing maintenance on hardware in lower-thorbit, we, we don't know, because up until now, the cost to access space has been so damn high that you couldn't experiment, it had to be sure things. You know, you wanna, you wanna put a spy satellite up, it's gonna cost a half a billion dollars, you're gonna spend billions on it, you're gonna get it right, it's gonna take years and years and years, and when you put it up there, it's gonna last for 20 years. Now, they can, you know, on a single Falcon Heavy, they can distribute 60 different satellites, you can experiment, you can try new things.

• 15:36Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  So, like, so much is gonna change when this is, when this is gonna happen, um, and it's hard to predict what, what that picture will ultimately look like, because we just... It's hard to even imagine it.

• 15:46Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, what about just from a person, like a, a, a personal perspective? I mean, you've been up there, you've seen the earth in, you know, from an aspect that not very many people get to see it from. And so, I mean, is, is that, is that experience, you know, when we start sending masses of people up just, you know, just for tourism? I mean, is that, is that going to change humanity, do you think? Did it change you?

• 16:10Speaker 03

  So, um, so they call this the overview effect of like, when you go into space and you look back on your home planet, you know, how does it, how does it change you? And, um, I think no doubt you are, you are changed in some way or another. I do think a lot of what people say is kind of, you know, almost like recycled talking points from, uh, you know, the sixties and seventies. Cause when, if you're one of the first astronauts, you know, uh, in the 1960s, you have not a clue what earth looks like. I mean, now we have, we have high resolution HD cameras looking down from the space station. You can go on YouTube and, you know, you know, your kids can look at what earth looks like from there. And generally speaking, it looks the same. Um, you know, it radiates light a little bit more. It's certainly impactful to be there and, and going

• 16:54Speaker 03

  through it. But it's like a long way of saying, like, I don't think you need to go to space to know to be a good person and not destroy our planet or fight wars over lines drawn on maps from, from long ago. What, what impacted me wasn't any of those things. Like, I felt like I knew those things before I went there. It was, it was being farther away, you know, from earth and anyone's gone in a half century. And it's no different and, and it's no greater distance from, than Pennsylvania to North Carolina. Uh, it's seeing the moon come around, you know, unexpectedly and catch me off guard and say like, why haven't we been back? Because that's not that far away. I mean, we haven't even scratched the surface in our solar system, let alone the Milky Way galaxy or the trillions of other galaxies out there. It's, it's not, uh, so I was saying like that impact

• 17:37Speaker 03

  from being up there, at least for me, was not looking back on, on earth. It was looking out there at what is the greatest adventure in human history and saying, let's get going. Like, what is taking us so long? Let's get out, let's get back to the moon, let's get to Mars, let's continue onward. Cause what we'll find will change everything someday.

• 17:54Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I mean, what's it feel like out there? It's gotta be, I mean, Well, I mean, do you feel like this small? I mean,

• 18:03Speaker 03

  Absolutely. You feel like like you are like literally a grain of sand in the most vast desert you could imagine. Like, we have, we are so small. We have literally just scratched the surface, not even put like our little toe in the biggest, grandest ocean you can imagine. That's why it is the greatest adventure ever. There are trillions of galaxies out there. And we haven't, as humans, gone farther than our moon. You know, which is our next door neighbor. I mean, really. So, um, so it's pretty, uh, it's a pretty awesome adventure.

• 18:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, it'll be interesting to see what it all develops into. But, uh, one more thing, everybody gets a gift on the show.

• 18:49Shawn Ryan?

  Those are Vigilance Elite gummy bears made in the USA, legal in all 50 states. You don't have to worry about feeling weird or anything.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  Okay, good. I can give them to my kids.

• 18:58Shawn Ryan?

  You can give them to your kids.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  Thank you. Hey, thank you so much.

• 19:02Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, they might be illegal here pretty soon when RFK gets gone.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  Okay, got it. Yeah.

• 19:06Shawn Ryan?

  But, uh, but there's, right now they're legal, so, but, uh, all right, Jared, well, I would like to, like I said, I'd like to do a life story on you. I mean, I was also telling you at breakfast, you know, watching young people dive into their confidence and leave school, drop out of high school to start companies is, I mean, it's, it's amazing. And I was telling you, you know, I've had two younger guys on that are doing just incredible things and, uh, and you're one of those guys. We're one of those guys. So, where did you grow up?

• 19:43Speaker 03

  I grew up in Westfield, New Jersey.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  And I, uh, I was either, whether you call it the accident or the happy surprise, so my, uh, my, my siblings are, uh, are much older than me. My brother, uh, is 15 years older than me. My sister's 13 years older than me, and my other brother's eight years older than me. And, um, so when I was growing up, they were all out enjoying their lives. And I was raised to be really, uh, independent. So,

• 20:14Speaker 03

  I guess this all just meant I hated high school because I was wondering why am I why am I here raising my hand to go use the bathroom or something when you know my brothers are out kind of make and sister they're making lives for themselves they're they're kind of on their own doing things so I was able to convince my parents to let me leave school early I did have to get my GED and I did go I did go to college and get my degree later on but I I wanted to kind of get out there and start making my contributions in the world.

• 20:43Shawn Ryan?

  What I mean what did your parents do?

• 20:46Speaker 03

  So my my father was an alarm salesman and later when I started my company he left and and joined me in the basement as we kind of created what would become Shifur and my mother she was she was like a college recruiter for a while but mostly she was just taking care of the family.

• 21:04Shawn Ryan?

  Right on so Shifur it's 16 I mean that's when you left so the idea must have come earlier I mean what when did you get into this?

• 21:15Speaker 03

  Oh it's a really interesting story I I was working at so I started this kind of basement computer repair company with a buddy of mine who who was just leaving for college and to create leads I went and worked at CompUSA so like a big computer retailer I think they're out of business now they've been out of business probably for a long time.

• 21:36Shawn Ryan?

  I remember it.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  And if unless somebody like literally needed to buy something off the shelf I was just solely using it to like create leads oh you need to you need to build a website it's like well we can do that or you need to fix your computers or something so this company these guys came in from a company called Merchant Services and this is in New Jersey and they were doing credit card processing and this is in 1999 and you know they were they were trying to they had some virus issues in their computers but they were also trying to figure out what this whole e-commerce thing was of being able to you know enable people to buy things on the internet and so I you know That became a lead for my company. I was like, well, I have nothing here to sell you to fix

• 22:18Speaker 03

  this, but here's my card. And so they called and my father had to drive me because I didn't even have a driver's license to their offices. And they offered me a job. And I convinced my parents to let me leave school and do it. And it's not because like as a kid, I dreamed of someday growing up and running a fintech. Like, nobody's like, when I grow up, I want to be, I want to run a payments company. No, when I grew up, I wanted to be an astronaut or pilot, which is way cooler. But I learned enough. So I wound up, yeah, I wound up going and working there for six months. I learned enough about this kind of emerging industry that I thought maybe you could do it a little better. Quit that job, started shift four in my parents'

• 23:00Speaker 03

  basement. 14 years later, I bought that company, by the way. So came back full circle, merchant services. Dice. And yeah, I mean, now we have like 6,500 employees. We're, we process payments in six different continents.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen, snacks, a stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards, all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com/protectionterms.

• 24:15Shawn Ryan?

  How do you convince your parents?

• 24:19Shawn Ryan?

  To let you drop out of high school to start a company.

• 24:22Speaker 03

  Well, it helps if you're not a good student right from the get go. So he felt like I didn't have much to lose.

• 24:26Shawn Ryan?

  You weren't a good student? Are you kidding me?

• 24:28Speaker 03

  I hated school. I looked for any excuse to not be in school. I mean, if there was like a fire drill, that to me was a pass to just skip the rest of the day. It was like, you know, the teacher, where were you? It was like, ah, the fire alarm went off. I don't know. I got, you know, discombobbed. I was in the library. I see you. So I was pretty, I was doing just enough not to like, you know, flunk out. So my parents were losing patience with my, you know, academic progression anyway. And they, the deal was like, you're taking care of yourself. We're not supporting you. And you gotta get your, your high school diploma and you have to, you have to promise us you'll go to college. So I was like, deal. And that's how it went.

• 25:12Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. I mean, how fast did you start seeing success?

• 25:16Speaker 03

  Pretty fast. We were, which by the way, I mean, you know, every, you work really hard and what a better, what a great time to start a company, by the way, when you're a teenager, you have no other responsibilities in life, no family, no kids. So you could truly burn yourself out just working. So there was a lot of hard work, but there was certainly luck throughout my career. The ball bounces your way every now and then. And I mean, we were profitable pretty fast.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it went pretty.

• 25:42Shawn Ryan?

  How fast?

• 25:43Speaker 03

  Like within probably two years, we were, we were profitable.

• 25:47Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. So 18. You're crushing it. Do you think your parents were surprised?

• 25:53Speaker 03

  Totally. I was surprised. I mean, I never, my expectations were pay rent and pizza and beer in the city in New York for weekends. Like that was, that was really where, you know, my, my goals were calibrated at. So the fact that we grew as much as we did, as fast as we did, I mean, we were the, geez, what was it? 2003? So maybe four years after starting the company, we were the sixth fastest growing company in America.

• 26:21Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 26:22Speaker 03

  We had four years in a row. We were in the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies in America. We, I mean, we were.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  You know, it's not that, by the way, that we were that good. It was just everybody else was so bad. All the big banks in the late 90s and early 2000s, all they cared about was pushing credit cards on people. They just wanted to get consumers to spend. And the belief was that, you know, businesses, no matter how painful the process is or was, would conform to how consumers wanted to spend. So they put all their energies, resources and innovation into pushing credit cards on consumers and the whole acceptance side was neglected. So it wasn't hard for us to create a lot of, you know, operational efficiencies and, you know, good process workflow.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  And as a result, we were just winning customers over like left and right.

• 27:16Shawn Ryan?

  And you saw that at age 16?

• 27:18Speaker 03

  It was just so bad, the way everybody was doing things. Like it was, everybody was outsourcing everything. The banks just could care less about acceptance. I mean, the example I used to give all the time is if, you know, if you were 18 and you wanted a credit card in 1999, you went on the internet and in 60 seconds, you got an instant approval of credit cards in the mail. But if you were a pizza shop in 1999 and you wanted to accept credit cards, the paperwork was like getting a commercial mortgage. Like it was 60 pages, you know, copies of your passport, everything was like, like what do we, why is this so painful and complicated?

• 27:50Shawn Ryan?

  How did you know this at 16?

• 27:51Speaker 03

  Because I was selling it. I mean, this is what I was doing when I worked at that company, Merchant Services. Like I had exposure for six months of trying to sell the service and I was like, it's pretty bad. It wasn't their fault, it was just the industry neglected it. And now fintech is, you know, is really hot and, you know, companies like Square and Stripe and everything like have, you know, all, you know, broken barriers and innovated in their own rights, but for the longest time, like it was just a boring bank industry that no one, you know, gave a crap about.

• 28:19Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I'm just, I'm just curious. I mean, did your parents, I mean? Did they see, they had to have seen the level of potential that you brought.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  I just think they thought I'd be less of a, like again, an academic embarrassment if they put me on another track in life.

• 28:38Speaker 03

  But they were very supportive. Like I would never, like, uh, like I would never permit this with my kids. Like this is, the path I went down, you know, 99 times out of 100 ends bad. Like I should be pumping gas in New Jersey or something. So like I'm all for like the well, you know, paved road, um, you know, through higher education to get to success. And that's certainly the road my kids will be on. So my parents were a little, um, they were out of their minds to ever let me go down this path. But I'm grateful they did.

• 29:10Shawn Ryan?

  How did you get into Drake?

• 29:14Speaker 03

  So, um, I always wanted to be an astronaut. I mean, when I was five years old, this is how I got into an aviation career. When I was five, um, I would, in kindergarten, I would check out books from the library, like the kid, the elementary school library with picture books of the space shuttle. And I, I remember telling my kindergarten teacher, someday I'm going to be an astronaut. She said, uh, she'll be watching in her rocking chair one day. When I did wind up becoming an astronaut, she, she'd already passed away. So that, she didn't get to see it. But, um, I was always enamored by space and, um, I built my first computer so I could play flight simulators. I became a pilot because I thought that's as good as it's going to get. I'm a realist, like not going to be struck by lightning and become an astronaut.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  I went to, uh, like, uh, the space camp, uh, for aviation. It's called the Aviation Challenge at Space Camp. And, you know, I was 20 years old, I guess, where, four years after I started my company, where I was waking up on my keyboard and I was just burning myself out because it was going, you know, 20 hours a day. And I told my parents, I was like, I need a hobby. I'm going to start flying. And I started flying and I knew I wanted to fly jets, so I built time as fast as I could. I was flying as much as I could everywhere, moved to jets, then got into ex-military aircraft, met a bunch of really awesome people in that world that, you know, some of the greatest

• 30:41Speaker 03

  military fighter pilots in the world that I got exposure to. Dale Snort Snodgrass, like naval aviation legend. There's a cool picture of an F-14 passing in front of an aircraft carrier, like in Knife Edge, that was him. You know, Jive Kirby, I was flying the F-4 Phantom demo, Stroker Gustafson, Slick Baum, just off the Thunderbirds. And basically, we put together an airshow team in 2010 and 2011. And we had seven jets doing like a Blue Angels type routine. I was flying right wing in the Diamond and we just had all-stars that I was able to learn from. But we were having the absolute time of our lives, because that was the year of sequestration, where the Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds were stood down.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  So every show in the country was begging for us. And it was like this horrible rock star life where you're flying constantly, you're drinking late, you're eating terrible, everybody's gaining like 30 pounds. And we were like, this is going to end poorly for us if we don't kind of pivot to something a little more commercial. So we went around the world and bought up about 100 fighter jets and created this commercial adversary business where we were just professional bad guys for the Department of Defense. And that's where Draken came from.

• 31:54Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I mean, how do you, where do you, where do you purchase a MiG-28 or any of these guys? Where do you get them?

• 32:04Speaker 03

  That was part of the fun, is you, you know, so we were flying airshow fighters that are like basically trainers. And they're great for, you know, making noise in front of the crowd and doing loops and rolls, but they're not, you know, like they're not tactically relevant, they're not a credible threat, so you're not going to train the DOD against it. So we had to fly around the world, the different countries that had fleets of aircraft that still had life left on them. That were relevant, that were threatening, so they had a radar, you could put a training sidewinder on them. And that you had enough quantity of that you were a useful training aid. One or two jets isn't going to make a difference. And that's hard.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  That's the whole secret sauce of the business was finding aircraft that were safe, credible, and sustainable. Because generally speaking, when a country is done with their jets, they've squeezed everything out of them because they know whatever comes next is going to cost like 10 times more, like an F-35 or something. So we went to New Zealand, we bought the entire New Zealand Combat Air Force. They made a political decision to not have any offensive capability. So we bought their A4 Skyhawks, which were same jets used in Top Gun, but they were upgraded with F-16 radars. We bought Mirage jets from France, from Spain, from Jordan. We bought L-159 Alcas from the Czech Republic. We bought MiG-21s from Poland.

• 33:31Speaker 03

  It was awesome. It gave me a whole nother side. Because by that point, I already had 11, 12 years of business experience. So now I was getting into dealing with governments, which meant everything I learned in business, you just throw out. Nothing makes sense in this world anymore. Everybody's motivations are different. And when you're buying fighter jets from other countries, by the way, like people can talk about, "Our government is corrupt." Our government is not corrupt compared to any of these other countries that you're out there doing business with. Where you've got to jump through some hoops to be able to buy military hardware from there. It was a great learning experience, put it that way.

• 34:13Shawn Ryan?

  So what did it, I mean, can you talk a little bit about more what the company did, Dragan?

• 34:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. So our job was basically to be professional bad guys. So, or the OP-4, if you will, or aggressors, these are kind of the terms that would be used. So the history behind this is the US used to have organic aggressor capability, and they still do. But they used to have a lot more of it during the Cold War. And the reason was, is they could use their own aircraft to do it, generally speaking. And in order to handicap, like say, an F-16, so that it could simulate, I don't know, a MiG-29, for example. You know, in the early 2000s, in the 90s, maybe they wouldn't use afterburner.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  Or maybe they would set their radar scope to like a 40 mile scope or something. And everybody still got good training out of it. The pilot who was being the red air, the Russian, or the Chinese, or the Iranian, or something, was still getting good training out of it. The problem that started to develop in, over the last 15 years or so, when we created this business in 2011, is the 4th gen platforms like F-15, F-16, F-18, were reaching the end of their service life, and the replacements were continued to keep slipping to the right, the F-35. So every hour remaining on that airplane became precious. You didn't want to waste it, being the bad guy, when you might need it for national security reasons. Second, because they're old, they cost more.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  So it costs a lot more to use it as red air. And then, third, our capabilities had developed to such an extent that in order to simulate being the bad guy, you had to turn off a lot of systems, so much so that it became negative training. And then, when 5th gen came, so stealth fighters like the F-22 and F-35, it was even more negative training to take such an airplane that costs like 80, 90,000 an hour to operate, and pretend to be a Russian MiG-29 or something. So all of this was the demand signal for kind of a dedicated force of red air, where it was our jets, so it didn't matter how much time we used against it. They were foreign aircraft, so they looked different, which is pretty important.

• 36:27Speaker 03

  And the pilots could focus just on being Russian, Chinese, Iranian fighter pilots, instead of taking away from blue air training. And out of nowhere, it became this, you know, like, multi-billion dollar industry.

• 36:40Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, wow. How many jets are there within the company?

• 36:46Speaker 03

  I mean, Draken, we, you know, our peak had over 100 fighters. And we did air-to-ground training too for JTACs. We supported, you know, the Navy Special, you know, Special Operators at Fallon. We would drop, you know, like Mark 76 and training ordinance for JTAC controllers and such on the ground because, again, you didn't have to use an F-16 or an A-10 that you might need to use in other parts of the world when it was, you know, kind of more about, you know, who you're talking to and what's falling off the airplane than it was the actual airplane type. So, we got to do a lot of really cool

• 37:25Shawn Ryan?

  No kid, I spent a lot of time out at Fallon when I was in. I'm wondering if we work together.

• 37:31Speaker 03

  Draken still has that contract even today, you know, supporting, supporting the guys up at Fallon for, yeah, JTAC training and such.

• 37:41Shawn Ryan?

  How do you think you, I mean, how do you hold up against some of these legendary fighter pilots that you were talking about?

• 37:47Speaker 03

  Me personally?

• 37:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Are you flying out there?

• 37:51Speaker 03

  We, I, we used to fly together all the time. I would tell you that Snort Snodgrass was unbeatable. I mean, I think, you know, he was, he was just born at a different time. I mean, he led all the Tomcats into Desert Storm. He, he was unbeatable. He was the greatest, like, BFM, you know, that's your, in a, in a phone booth night fight, night fight kind of guy. He, nobody could beat him and he was an unbelievable mentor. He, yeah, I think he taught me a lot about, I mean, just who I am, but also how I fly. And, but, you know, I mean, there's, I've certainly had some successes against, you know, some of our, our less skilled fighter pilot friends.

• 38:36Shawn Ryan?

  I'll bet. So, I mean, you were, you were up, you, I mean, as the owner of the company, you were up there training our fighters.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, not anywhere near as much as like the dedicated line guys. I mean, who did we, we hired people right out of the aggressor squadrons because they were very current on the tactics and the threat. But I did fly in it from time to time. I was part of a big exercise at White Sands Missile Range. We did a 16 turn 16. And we just got these new aircraft in from overseas and I was the first one checked out in it. So I had to fly in it, which was awesome.

• 39:09Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 39:09Speaker 03

  That was cool. But I was in A4s when we were fighting the first kind of F-35, the JOT, the Joint Operational Test Team at Edwards. Flown in some A4s at Fallon, brought the first L-159s to Fallon, but nowhere near like the guys that were doing it full-time every day.

• 39:28Shawn Ryan?

  So I mean, being up there against, you know, our own, how do you feel? You feel pretty safe?

• 39:35Speaker 03

  So, I'll give you two sides to this. In the beginning, so when we first started the company, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, I felt really good. So F-35s were just coming online. And I remember we had four, we had a, it was supposed to be just a 4v4, which means we should just get killed. A4s against four F-35s from the Joint Operational Test Team. And three of the F-35s grounded aboard it. So it became a 4v1. And we had used up the entire airspace. I mean, we had jets high, low on the deck, and from different angles. And this one F-35 just went around and made easy work of everyone, just dispatched everyone super quick.

• 40:18Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 40:19Speaker 03

  But what I thought over time, and this kind of comes to my only real like political position that I really truly care about, which is just the competitiveness of the nation, I got concerned when, you know, we were coming up with ways that could really create problems for Blue Air. That were, that if like, if I could afford it, if I could afford to do these things to our aircraft, then certainly the North Koreans could, and the Iranians, but definitely the Chinese are going to be able to do it. And we started to be very dismissive of it as, you know, well, that's not going to be a problem because if it is, we'll do that. But those were things that, but there were a lot of other scenarios

• 41:02Speaker 03

  where we didn't apply that kind of thinking or logic to it. And every year that started to go by, the Chinese threat specifically was getting better and better and better. I mean, really, over You know, again, a five-year period of time, you know, you're simulating a MiG-21 to a, you know, dramatically improved flanker. I almost like, I use kind of the SpaceX example sometimes on it, where when it comes to China, what we think we know is already so dated, you know, two years is a long time in that world. It's the same thing with SpaceX, you're like, wow, four years ago, they just, they barely put astronauts in space. They've done over a dozen, you know, commercial space missions right now, you know, in just

• 41:46Speaker 03

  a short span of time, not to mention caught a skyscraper with chopsticks from a building, like, things happen quick. And we started to see that a lot, I think, in the last years I was at Draken, which made me really, I mean, really concerned about their pace of progress while we were stagnating.

• 42:03Shawn Ryan?

  Man, man. How did you move into SpaceX? I mean, you got two enormous companies, and now you want to go to SpaceX. How did that happen?

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Well, so, in 2008, I did a world record flight, and it was just speed around the world. It was just a fun challenge, I wanted to do it, and did also to raise funds and awareness for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. And when I came back from that, I was invited to go to Bikenor, Kazakhstan, by Peter Diamandis, who's like a serial entrepreneur, but very forward-thinking, brilliant guy, like MIT MD. And he's like, do you want to come and see this commercial, you know, it's a Soyuz launch from Bikenor, but it's going to have a commercial astronaut on it, Richard Garriott. And I was like, do I want to go to Russia, Kazakhstan, to see a rocket launch? Yes, of course.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  And I wound up going with a lot of the early pioneers of the commercial space industry, including a lot of the SpaceX guys. And by the way, that is so cool. If you, if you go to a rocket launch, a human rocket launch in, at NASA Kennedy Space Center, the closest you'll get is about three miles away. When you go to see the Russians send their astronauts up from Kazakhstan, you're like a par three away.

• 43:20Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 43:22Speaker 03

  You're like a hundred yards away. The night before the launch, you can touch the rocket, whereas like we're surrounded with security at KSC and you're basically in this trench. Now, maybe they've upgraded it since 2008, but all I was thinking at the time is, man, this thing goes even a little bit off course. Like it's game over for everybody. And if you know a little bit of the history, the, the, kind of the Soviet space program, that, that's happened. It's happened more than once. But, um, anyway, I met a bunch of the folks there and, uh, you know, I, I heard about this thing, you know, Dragon, the Dragon spacecraft. I was like, well, I'm a pilot and if the time ever comes where, you know, the goal always was from the get go to make life multi-planetary, you know, to open up space for the many instead of the few. And, um, I said I'd be interested

• 44:04Speaker 03

  and I just kind of knocked on the door periodically and, in two, in, uh, in 2020, uh, you know, they answered and, um, they said, yeah, we were ready. And, uh, man, in just a matter of weeks, we went from nothing to the first commercial space mission being announced, inspiration for.

• 44:21Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's incredible. You know, I didn't real, I thought that the Make-A-Wish Foundation was after this, so I would like to talk about that now. I mean, so you, you rode a jet, drove a jet, piloted a jet around the world and how, how long did that take?

• 44:38Speaker 03

  Uh, 61 hours, 50 minutes. Um, it was, uh, honestly, it wasn't that hard. It's a, it's actually, it's not the piloting or the flying. Like I, we did it because it was the first all glass jets where you were starting to fuse a lot of information together in the, in the airplane. So you didn't need to do as much flight planning on the ground. And since these record flights, it's like NASCAR, you know, whether you're stopped or you're driving, it all counts. Like you're getting fuels. It's all the logistics of can you, um, you know, get all that, you know, can you get all that done? So you're not sitting on the ground for too long, fueled up and in the air and do your flight planning essentially in the air, um, in order to beat the record. And I was like, for sure, with all this extra information, you can. Um, but any like good adventure that I've been

• 45:22Speaker 03

  lucky enough to go on, you try and always, um, you know, couple it with a really, uh, a really good, you know, philanthropic effort, try and. You know, try and pay back what you're fortunate enough to be able to participate in. And so Make-A-Wish has been a charity I've worked with for a long time. Once kind of the, you know, the space missions came around and the platform got a lot bigger and could raise a lot more money, I kind of pivoted to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. And that's where we've, you know, mostly been focused on for the last few years.

• 45:51Shawn Ryan?

  What draws you to that?

• 45:53Speaker 03

  So I know how lucky I've been in life. And it's pretty, I think it's pretty damn important to acknowledge that from time to time, too. You get a lot of successful entrepreneurs that, you know, you make all your own luck. It's like you make some of it, okay? I mean, you're born in this country. You know, you were born healthy. You know, there's a, there's a lot of families that no fault of their own, just got dealt really shitty hands in life.

• 46:17Speaker 03

  You know, no, you know, no child should be, you know, faced with the possibility of never growing up to get a driver's license or go to college or something. So I think that's always kind of gravitated towards those, you know, those causes that try and help people going through, you know, absolutely horrific times. And with Make-A-Wish, I mean, it just seems absolutely terrible that an organization like that needs to exist in the first place to give a child with like, you know, a life-threatening illness a last wish, right? But if they're going to be in those circumstances, do, you know, do whatever you can to try and help. So that's, that's kind of what paired me with Make-A-Wish for a really long time. I got exposure to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital where, when you understand their

• 46:57Speaker 03

  mission, which is that no child should die in the dawn of life, and if they're successful, you don't need to grant as many wishes. And, and I thought, you know, with Polaris, you know, it was a big enough platform that you could, you could raise enough money to kind of make a real dent at it. So that's kind of how it, how it went down.

• 47:14Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I love that about you. That's, I mean, when I read that, that was just, that's so cool. Is, is all the philanthropy that you do focused towards children?

• 47:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretty much entirely. So. You know, you've got the not so happy side of it, which is what Make-A-Wish and St. Jude try and do, which, I mean, look, it's happy as they keep increasing the survival rate of childhood cancer, those are good days. But there's kind of like the other side, which is more of the, I don't know, I guess the inspirational side, like where I try and help out a lot. So Space Camp, I've donated an awful lot to that organization. I think it's a national treasure. I went there. Senator Sheehy, you know him, Navy SEAL, he went to Space Camp seven times as a kid. It is a place where you get experiences as a kid that you can't get in the classroom, that you can't get playing a video game.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  And it's all the things that we need for, you know, to ensure the competitiveness of our nation. I mean, it started Space Camp, it's Space Camp, it's Aviation Challenge, it's Robotics Camp, it's Cyber Camp. I mean, all the areas you want to expose kids to things that they wouldn't get anywhere else, so that when they grow up, they can kind of contribute to the grand plan, if you will. So, anyway, that's another area I try and put some resources towards.

• 48:34Shawn Ryan?

  I love that. Where did you start the Make-A-Wish Foundation flight?

• 48:37Speaker 03

  I started in Marstown, New Jersey, actually.

• 48:40Shawn Ryan?

  Marstown, New Jersey. What was, I mean, where did you go around?

• 48:44Speaker 03

  Oh, it was, you went up through Canada. So, these were in light jets, so you can't cross the Atlantic or the Pacific direct. So, went from Marstown, New Jersey, up to St. John's in Canada, from there to the Azores. We had different routes each time, but basically from the Azores, usually either to Spain or to Sardinia, from there, like Greece, to the Middle East, like Cairo or Luxor, Oman, Pakistan, India, Maldives, Thailand, you know, Indonesia, South Korea, Russia. All times you had to go through Russia to get to Alaska, which was pretty cool. It landed at a big naval base they have out there, which was pretty wild, so.

• 49:29Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man. That sounds like a hell of a lot to do in three days.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  It was a lot of, I mean, it was tons of fun. All the adventures are fun, you know?

• 49:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, let's get back to SpaceX. So, they call you up and say, "We're ready to do this." I mean, how does that feel?

• 49:49Speaker 03

  I can't believe how fast it went, honestly. And also their willingness to even take it on. So at the time that Inspiration 4 was created, which was October of 2020, they put two astronauts up, Bob and Doug, on demo two. It was a demo flight. It wasn't even the return of operational capability to the United States after the Shuttle was retired. That was NASA Crew 1. That came after. So like, I mean, to have the confidence, which by the way, in itself is another travesty, that we went 10 years in this country with having zero capability to put astronauts into space. 10 years when the Shuttle was retired in 2011,

• 50:32Speaker 03

  we had to send all our astronauts via Russia. So you think of all the things of SpaceX and Elon and, you know, the good and the bad. They returned operational capability to the United States for sending astronauts into the high ground of space. It's like absolutely a travesty that we ever let ourselves be in that position in the first place. But yeah, I mean, I just think of like the confidence they must have had in October of 2020 to say, yeah, we're ready to do this and we're ready to do it with civilians. And they did and they signed up for it. And then NASA Crew 1 launched. Crew 1 came home. NASA Crew 2 launched. And before even NASA Crew 2 came home, Inspiration 4 launched. So it was about kind of nine months from when we said

• 51:16Speaker 03

  we were going to do it to when we went to space.

• 51:19Shawn Ryan?

  What was the train up like? What's it like getting in there?

• 51:23Speaker 03

  It was, the training was awesome. I mean, it was, I've said it, my two missions to space, the time I spent on the ground with the teams at SpaceX and also NASA too, I mean, they played a part in both missions just as good as going to space. I mean, to be surrounded by the best and brightest that are focused on such an amazing mission. You know, we talked about St. Jude's mission of no child should die in the dawn of life. Well, how about, you know, the world is a more interesting place when you can journey among the stars. That's a, that's a hell of a vision, right? It certainly calls to me. But yeah, you spend a lot of time. My first mission, you had to get all the academics. So everything about the vehicle. You know, the Falcon 9 launch, the ground systems.

• 52:06Speaker 03

  You just, it was death by PowerPoint for a really long time. And then you get to the fun stuff of being in the simulator, the centrifuge. We went, you know, out into the mountains. You know, I brought my crew up Mount Rainier. And you're flying fighter jets. You know, you're doing all the, all those kind of good things to get comfortable being uncomfortable and build mental toughness. And in addition to, yeah, you know, a lot of time in the simulator and then eventually you go. It's a great journey.

• 52:33Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, so what, what was the first mission about?

• 52:36Speaker 03

  First mission was just showing could be done. I mean, that was, it was kind of simple in that regard that, you know, up until that point in time, you had to be one of those lucky few that got struck by lightning to get, essentially to be picked to be a NASA astronaut or a Russian cosmonaut. And to show that you didn't have to be a perfect human specimen. I mean, you know, the crew we assembled, which was a really inspirational crew, and I didn't know any of them. It all came together, you know, essentially with, you know, with luck, the stars aligned, where our medical officer was Haley Arseneau, childhood cancer survivor, 10 years old, has bone cancer. All she wants to do is live and grow up and be able to help other kids in the fight and work at St. Jude. So that's exactly what she did. She beat the odds.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  She grew up, she became a physician assistant at St. Jude. Never knew she was going to get a phone call one day and said, hey, you want to go to space? She was a great astronaut. First, young, still the youngest American to go to space. First astronaut to have a prosthesis. She has a prosthesis in her leg from her bone cancer.

• 53:39Speaker 03

  So anyway, she was, she was totally awesome. The first black female pilot of a spacecraft, Dr. Cyan Proctor. I mean, a story about perseverance. She, she did everything she could. Her father worked on, in Guam, on a radio site, talking to the Apollo 11 crew. So he was a contractor for NASA. She did everything she could to be a NASA astronaut. I mean, she's a PhD geoscientist.

• 54:04Speaker 03

  She's a pilot, she's done analog astronauts where they lock in like shipping containers. She was runner up in NASA selection process, just never gave up, ultimately got picked. And then Chris Symborski, Air Force veteran, worked on ICBMs and wound up riding a rocket. And was a space camp counselor. So it's just really awesome crew. But the goal was just to show it could be done. You know, pick these people at random, get it right, don't screw up. You screw up, you set back this whole idea of commercial space for decades, but you get it right and all the fun missions will follow. And we got it right, we did a bunch of science, we raised a quarter of a billion for St. Jude, and then now the fun missions have come.

• 54:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, what's it like being up there for the first time?

• 54:50Speaker 03

  Uh...

• 54:51Shawn Ryan?

  It's still like getting struck by lightning, by the way.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is, it is. It is. But it is, I'll tell you, just on like kind of the health side of it, everybody feels different. So that's like, you know, you can talk about the amazing views and how that impacts you, like we were talking before about the overview effect. But the simple reality is when you're, we didn't evolve to exist in microgravity. So, everybody feels differently. And the bookends here are, you feel like you're hanging upside down from your bed, and it lasts for days, but otherwise, pretty functional. That's your best case scenario, by the way. And then the other-

• 55:34Shawn Ryan?

  That's your best case?

• 55:35Speaker 03

  Best case scenario. The other end of the spectrum is you get incredibly sick, like horrible motion sickness, and you're throwing up for a couple of days. And that's just, that's the reality. 600 and some odd people, almost 700 have been to orbit, just more than 50, greater than 50% will get what's called space adaptation syndrome, and they'll be a mess for a couple of days until they get some shots and they feel better. And it has nothing to do with whether you get motion sickness on the earth. You can be like this amazing fighter pilot, fly upside down, loops and rolls and whatever, and you can be a wreck in space for a couple of days. So yeah, everybody feels different in orbit, but it's, it's worth it.

• 56:16Shawn Ryan?

  How did you feel?

• 56:17Speaker 03

  I'm one of the lucky 50% that does not get space adaptation syndrome. So for me, it was simply, you're hanging upside down from your bed. All your fluid shifts up towards your head, your cheeks puff out a little bit. You know, you kind of this little bit of a brain fog for a day or so because you're getting used to the, you know, increased intracranial pressure. But yeah, that's what it feels like.

• 56:41Shawn Ryan?

  All right, well, what about from a personal aspect?

• 56:44Speaker 03

  Uh, you feel

• 56:45Shawn Ryan?

  When you reach it?

• 56:46Speaker 03

  Well, you feel incredibly fortunate and lucky to be there because you can't get to space without gaining a great appreciation for the thousands of people that it takes to put you there and to bring you back safely and to know the history of the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands that came before you over the last 60 years to figure all this out for it to even be made possible. So I don't know anyone who doesn't get up there floating around, looking out the window and doesn't have this profound sense of gratitude for everybody that helped contribute to make it possible.

• 57:18Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's, but that's just like, were you married at the time?

• 57:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've been married since 2011.

• 57:27Shawn Ryan?

  How did that, I mean, what's your wife say when you're like, "I'm gonna go to orbit, I'm gonna go to space."

• 57:36Speaker 03

  Uh, my wife and I have known each other for a long time, so we were on the same bus in middle school together. She was like the 12th employee at my company. Started dating in like 20, you know, I mean, 24 years ago, I guess, like when it was still cool to date in the office, you know? And, uh, so she's been here for all the adventures, amazingly supportive of it. She'd probably prefer I don't go back to space, but I was explaining like relative to flying airshows, 18 inches apart from other aircraft, like, I think it's safer. So, I think that, I think that argument held.

• 58:15Shawn Ryan?

  She bought off on that, huh?

• 58:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, so.

• 58:18Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. So you come back and then are you right back in the program?

• 58:24Speaker 03

  So, um...

• 58:27Speaker 03

  We had set out all these goals for Inspiration 4. We were going to put together an inspirational crew. We are, we're going to do three days of science in space and we are going to raise a bunch of money for St. Jude. And when we came back, we checked all the boxes, except we were a little short on, on the fundraising goal. Like we, like we didn't, we didn't set a $50 million goal, 100 million. We said we're going to raise, you know, over $200 million for St. Jude. And, and we were close, you know? And I, I felt, you felt pretty, pretty accomplished.

• 59:06Speaker 03

  And as we were getting, we helicoptered from, from the ship that picks up the capsule in, in the Atlantic. And we were going back for some medical tests and somebody on their phone, we didn't have our phones, was like, hey, Elon just tweeted and said, you know, congratulations Inspiration 4, put me in for 50 million. And it was like, there wasn't, there wasn't a dry eye in like the vehicle. We were, we were all pretty emotional because we, we now far surpassed the goal. And I was like, well, this is it. Like we, we set the bar high, we got everything done, like it's over now. And, and then a couple of weeks later, I got invited to go to Starbase, Texas. And this is right near Brownsville.

• 59:51Speaker 03

  And, and Elon was there and I got a tour of Starbase. And it was a religious experience. I'm telling you, I have to imagine that's like what it was like when people first set foot on the grounds of like Los Alamos. I mean, not to, you know, using a Manhattan Project analogy here, but I mean, that's what, when you're talking about making life multi-planetary and going to Mars, it's a Manhattan Project, like, and that was like, that's, that's where it was all beginning. You know, building this city out of, out of the dirt and like there's nothing around and they're building massive launch pads and factories for, for vehicles, interplanetary spaceships. Wild stuff, going to a planet other than our own for the first time.

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  And, and I was, I was just totally, totally hooked at that point. And, and basically the message was, is okay, we showed we could do it. Now let's actually build the damn thing. And he's like, what are we gonna need? We're gonna need to go farther into space than we've gone in a while because it's harder. Farther you go out there, the harder it is to come home and the more hazards there are. There's debris that are, I mean, there's a billion bullets flying around in orbit right now. And even a one millimeter piece of aluminum at orbital velocities will shred a spaceship.

• 1:01:03Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 1:01:04Speaker 03

  A hundred percent. We put the space station at 400 kilometers approximately for a reason. Because the atmosphere, the debris that's out there will burn up in the atmosphere very quickly. As a result, though, we have to keep boosting the space station. But you go farther out there, especially in the thousand kilometer regimes. You've got micrometeorites and orbital debris, paint chips that fall off old satellites. Or worse, satellites that were blown up in ASAT tests will create this like just debris field. And it's flying around at eight kilometers a second. So you have debris, you have more radiation, which avionics don't like. Human bodies don't necessarily like it either. And then in order to come home, you have to put that much more energy to go farther out, which means you have to take that energy to come back.

• 1:01:49Speaker 03

  So he's like, we gotta go farther out there if we're gonna go to the moon and Mars. We're gonna need space suits. He's like NASA's been using the same space suits for 40 years. They literally cost billions of dollars. I mean, it's hundreds of millions a year in just upkeep on those suits every year. And they leak. You know, there's a situation on the space station where, you know, you had an astronaut where their helmet was filling with water from their liquid cooling suit. I mean, like totally scary stuff. So he's like, we're gonna need to build suits for thousands of people. And no one's done it in decades, so we gotta do that. And we're gonna need to test new forms of communication. Because, you know, our various, you know, legacy infrastructure of ground stations and teacher satellites are 40 years old. And I was like, I'm totally in on this. And Kid Potied, who he interviewed, he was too. He was the mission director on Inspiration 4 and obviously flew with me on the last one.

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  Like, we were totally sold on the idea of a developmental program and... Yeah, so I guess about a month or so after I came back from Inspiration 4, we created Polaris program and we were back at it.

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• 1:03:43Shawn Ryan?

  Man, so what's it, I mean, how is it being in orbit?

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  It's awesome. I mean, like I said, once you get past the hanging upside down from your bed feeling for a little bit, it's, um, yeah, it's amazing, man. You know, everything happens like quickly, but like time melts away. You, um, you're just always busy doing things. Your schedule is planned out to the second, and you want to make every bit of that time count. Like, you know how lucky you are to be there. And if there is an experiment that could help with cancer treatment, or, you know, the human body's ability to endure microgravity for long periods of time, like you want to play your part in learning that. And, um, and you do. And it's kind of amazing how much time you have to get stuff done, because it's not like you have to go far or anything. Like, people were telling me,

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  "Oh yeah, you know, when you brush your teeth, it's going to take five times longer than it is here on Earth." It was like, I went, I literally floated a foot, grabbed the toothpaste, and then I floated a foot and I picked up an experiment. Like, things just, you're just sailing through things super fast, you know?

• 1:04:48Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. I mean, what is, you keep bringing up, you brought it up a couple of times at breakfast too, you know, cancer treatments in space and what we might find. Why do we think... The cure for cancer is in space. Are we on to something there? Or?

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

  I don't know if we think it. I think it's more we hope, right? And it doesn't, we, we, we hope that there is something that we will find in space, in the unique environment of microgravity, or say on the lunar surface with lunar regolith, that unlocks an economy that creates a justification for us to be there. Because right now, we are there mostly for national prestige. We have an international space station. We have American astronauts there. I think if you ask anyone at NASA, like, what is the single greatest accomplishment we've, we've gotten from the International Space Station? They won't say cancer-treating pharmaceutical drugs, even though we've done lots of experiments. They'd say, "We kept astronauts alive continuously.

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  We've had a continuous heartbeat on the International Space Station for nearly a quarter of a century." It's a hell of an accomplishment, but you need, you need that orbital economy to pay for everything we want to see in space someday. Like, it can't be perpetual taxpayer funding. So whether it's cancer-treating drugs, like, you can use microgravity to create crystal formulations of pharmaceutical compounds to increase, like, the density of the treatment, which might increase the effectiveness. People talk about 3D-printing organs in microgravity, but none of these things have, like, truly come to fruition yet.

• 1:06:20Shawn Ryan?

  People talk about 3D-printing organs?

• 1:06:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:23Shawn Ryan?

  What?

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  I mean, microgravity. What, what, what can we do there that we can't do as easily here on Earth? But there's lots of experiments, but nothing that has cracked the code yet on it. But if we don't figure it out, then it's perpetual taxpayer funding. And frankly, space, since the beginning of the space program, has always faced the debate of, how can we invest so much money here? NASA's budget, 25 billion a year, whether it's 25 billion or 20 billion dollars, which it may, may wind up, you know, tracking towards. How can you justify that when people are starving here and people are homeless and, and healthcare is bad? Like, we are always going to be faced with that debate, and it's a good debate to have, until we, we kind of crack the code and figure out how to extract more value from being in space than we put into it.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  And when you figure that out, whatever it may be, that's when you're in your Star Wars future, man. That's when you've got multiple space stations and people on the moon and Mars, because you're mining helium-3 or... Printing organs, everybody's got a spare kidney in their fridge, you know, it's like we we gotta figure that out at some point, uh, or else we're just gonna be on the taxpayer, um, you know, pipe for a long time.

• 1:07:31Shawn Ryan?

  Could you just help me understand, I know nothing about this, microgravity, I mean, why are we, why are we experimenting with cancer drugs and 3D printing of organs in space? What is it about space that, that is motivating people to, to do this type of research up there?

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you know, kind of the lack of gravity, which is not even the, the really right way to say, because you got a lot of gravity, gravity's keeping you pretty much where you are, right, uh, when you're, when you're in orbit, um, just allows you to do things without the influence of something, you know, being held on the table like that. Now, this is what the big bright, you know, the big brilliant minds are working on, uh, I can tell you a hundred percent, they have done crystal formulations of cancer treating drugs in space, which kind of, you know, increases the density of the treatment, um, in a way that hopefully increases the effectiveness of it. I don't know if it's conclusive or not yet. Uh, how far have they come with 3D printing in space? Um, not organs, um, but they do, they are doing various biotech, uh, experiments in

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  space, but nothing's, nothing's come to fruition yet after a quarter century. That's kind of the problem. We need to fix that and accelerate it pretty quick. Uh, you know, also breakfast, uh, talking about the For All Mankind on Apple TV. NASA, if you watch that show, is like the most influential agency in the US government. Everybody comes to them because they bring in revenue, you know, uh, it's not just all about tax revenue, and it's from mining helium three on the moon. Um, that doesn't mean that just because there's an Apple TV show on it, that, you know, that's a, that's a credible path. We, we, we do, we do believe you can get more power out of, um, you know, through a fusion reaction with helium three, you can get more power out than you put into it. Um, but the point is, you need something like that.

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  You need some orbital economy, uh, in order to build that future. Um, and that show does a pretty good example of it.

• 1:09:29Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, it seems like, you know, this year I've talked to a lot of, a lot of innovators. And a lot of these guys, I mean, we talked to Astroforge Mining.

• 1:09:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Shawn Ryan?

  Asteroids, talked to Steve Quast, who has a company called SpaceBill with the Assemble Satellites and stuff like that in space. He was talking about helium three on the moon and he, and he said that China was mining that. We talked to Bajibad, who is building solar, solar power, uh, power plants up there and hopes to beam solar energy back to Earth from space. Talked to a lot of people about this stuff. I mean, it seems like as far as the, you know, civilian type population, the, the innovators, I mean, they're gung ho on this.

• 1:10:22Shawn Ryan?

  And you know what else I'm seeing is I'm seeing all these, uh, younger, younger innovator types, uh, who they're all jumping on the mission to Mars train. We're gonna need power, we're gonna need food, we're gonna need, you know, all these things. And they're all, they all seem to be, I mean, Elon has just inspired so many people, you know, with this mission. And it's cool to see the younger generation start building, um, businesses, uh, to help accomplish that. It's, it's fascinating.

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  We need a thousand more companies like SpaceX across the whole, like aerospace, defense apparatus, every major technology endeavor across any important domain should, you know, should have its SpaceX like equivalent, at least a couple of them in there. It's what we need to ensure, you know, America's leadership and free world.

• 1:11:17Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about the spacewalk.

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:11:19Shawn Ryan?

  What was that for?

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  So we tested out the first new spacesuit that was made in 40 years. And SpaceX and their team of really brilliant engineers built it in about two and a half years. And it's pretty important because people have been working a really long time to build replacement NASA suits and it hasn't happened yet. Now, it was like, I would say, I mean, look, it was a lot closer to a min viable product than it was something you'd walk on the moon or Mars with. But I can tell you, I recently just got an update on it and they've already gone two generations beyond it, which will be cool to see them test at some point in the future. Just like I mentioned before, you can't go to space without feeling gratitude for everybody who helped you get there. And when I was in that suit outside the Dragon vehicle, I was thinking about all the people

• 1:12:06Speaker 03

  that worked really hard to make it and test it to keep me safe. I mean, there is nothing between me and death, other than a visor. And I had no doubt that what they built was going to perform well and that someday some evolution of it would be used on the moon or Mars. And that's what's going to happen. But I guess maybe just say like, it's a lot different than looking out the window. I'll bet. I really, I was like, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be a visual thing. And it's an everything thing. You, I mean, you've got all these sensations coming together, you know, you're cold. I mean, we were really cold. You're using, two thirds of your oxygen supply is being used to cool you. And I think SpaceX erred on really cold because a lot of the old air-cooled suits from the

• 1:12:51Speaker 03

  60s, all those astronauts overheated and sweating in their eyes, they could barely get back in the Gemini capsule. Well, we were plenty chill. You know, you've got all these pressure changes and sensations because we were operating at 5.2 PSI. You've got exertion because you're working against a suit at 5.2 PSI. You're hearing the airflow and then you're getting the visual stimulus and it's all coming together at once. It's pretty wild.

• 1:13:18Shawn Ryan?

  What are you walking on?

• 1:13:19Speaker 03

  Uh, so I was on the top of the spaceship. So they built this mobility aid. They called it the Skywalker. And it's basically, they removed the docking mechanism from the Dragon and replaced it with this. It's just a metal structure to hold on to. You need mobility aids because if you're not holding on to it, you're screwed. And, uh, yeah, we were just going through a series of tests with the suit to figure out its mobility and dexterity because it's, uh, yeah, it's not easy to move into it when you're pressurized.

• 1:13:48Shawn Ryan?

  How long were you out there?

• 1:13:49Speaker 03

  Uh, the whole operation from when we vented the entire vehicle, the vacuum, to repress was about two hours and change, but I was outside for about eight minutes.

• 1:13:59Shawn Ryan?

  Eight minutes? Were you tethered?

• 1:14:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, you're, you're, you're definitely tethered. You don't want to just float and not hold on to anything.

• 1:14:07Shawn Ryan?

  I'll bet not.

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  We, you know, people are like, well, in the 1960s, they were floating around. I was like, well, we learned not to do that in the 1960s. You can't fix something, you can't repair something, you can't build something if you're just floating in space. You need to, the, the goal is to figure out how to maintain points of contact and get things done where you overheat, um, and you don't accomplish anything. So, um, but yeah, we were pretty limited because we had no airlock and we were, we needed to use consumables to keep us alive outside the vehicle and consumables to repress the spaceship. We, um, and you had to maintain some fault tolerance for something to go wrong. We, we basically had a limited amount of time you could, you could be outside.

• 1:14:48Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, what, I mean, the, the hatch is getting ready to open. I mean, you have to be, I know you jump out of planes, you're a pilot, you fly crazy airplanes, I mean, but this is, this is different. It's different. Not a whole lot of people have been floating around out in space or, or, or left the craft. Let alone, there hasn't been a lot of people that have even been to space.

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:14Shawn Ryan?

  And so, I mean, what's going through your head when the hatch is getting ready to open?

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  Uh, don't screw up.

• 1:15:21Speaker 03

  Um, it's totally before about that, that great fighter pilot who's really, um, he's one of my best friends. He died in a crash, uh, uh, four years ago, but Dale Snort Snodgrass. And a lot of the attitude I have in life and everything has been being mentored by him. And it was, yeah, I was just thinking, when I was on the launch pad, I was thinking, whatever it is, you, you, you just gotta hack it. And that was a mindset from him. And then when I was getting ready to open the hatch was just, don't F this up, man. Like, it's just like, you don't wanna screw up. You don't wanna let everybody down who got to help you get to this moment. But, um, I do have a funny story about that hatch. So, um, when we started our journey training for Polaris Dawn, we were doing a lot of,

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  we, we would be suspended from these offload harnesses that would, um, replicate microgravity. And we were doing hatch drills, cause pretty much the most important thing was, was closing the hatch.

• 1:16:16Speaker 03

  Can't close the hatch, can't repress the vehicle, you probably won't survive reentry. Cause you run out of air or you burn up. And, um, so we're doing all these hatch drills, it was all manual. And then, you know, SpaceX and, you know, with all their, you know, big, bright minds were like, we just can't get this wrong, so let's build a, let's build a hatch motor. Take the human out of the loop. They're really big on trying to minimize what the dependency on a human being. I get it, uh, they're engineers and that, but as humans, we do like to have some control. And, um, so they built this, uh, this automated hatch motor, probably took like six to nine months to do it. And then a couple of weeks before we launched on the mission, they're like, hey, we've been running some numbers and we don't think it's gonna work.

• 1:16:58Speaker 03

  We think there's gonna be enough residual pressure coming out of your suit, venting from your suit, across the surface area of the hatch, that, um, it's gonna be, it's gonna be, it's gonna overpower the hatch motor. So you may need to do it manually. And I was like, man, we spent so much time building on this thing for, for that to happen. Well, when I was there and I got to go to open the hatch, I opened the hatch and they're like, okay, unseat it. Let's get the last of the residual pressure out. I do it and they're like, okay, let go. And I do and it's a Goes right back to flush with it. And I'm just looking at it and then like it was like a two or three second delay and they were like, "Your go for manual hatch opening." Which, uh, which was cool because you got to actually partake and, and, and do the human thing and,

• 1:17:41Speaker 03

  and open the hatch and next thing you know, you're just staring out into the, you know, just the black void.

• 1:17:48Shawn Ryan?

  Is that what you saw? Just a black void?

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  At first, until I climbed out and then I was, I was facing Earth, but I only had, um, I only had a couple of minutes before, um, we were in the eclipse. And most of the, uh, the motion tests we were doing in the suit was facing away from Earth. So you're just looking out into the, just the, just this dark blast sky, you know, sky. And it definitely was a, what I was feeling was like a very unsettling, like almost it's a threatening environment. Like we don't know what's out there, but it's all very hazardous to us humans and proceed with caution. Kind of like the explorers in the 1400s, like I may sail off the end of the earth because it's flat or there might be a monster there waiting to eat me, but I'm still going anyway.

• 1:18:34Speaker 03

  And that was kind of the feeling I had looking out into the darkness of space.

• 1:18:38Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. Would you remember what continent you were looking at when you walked out?

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

  Sure. Uh, I was just coming over Antarctica, actually. I was in, uh, the very South Atlantic. I know because it was the highest radiation point of the orbit that I was out in. Uh, we were at 750 kilometers, so almost like double the height of the space station during the, during the spacewalk and the poles are a higher radiation environment. So my, actually my heart rate sensor burnt out from rad hits. But yeah, I remember looking at, as we came over, it was just a portion of Antarctica going into the, um, the South Atlantic.

• 1:19:16Shawn Ryan?

  Man, does time feel different? Did it feel like a short eight minutes, a long eight minutes or just eight minutes?

• 1:19:22Speaker 03

  Time just melts away in space, no matter what, inside or outside. It was just, just time just disappears. You're just always busy doing something. You're never, you're never wasting a second. And as such, like it just all kind of melts away.

• 1:19:37Shawn Ryan?

  What was it like coming back in?

• 1:19:39Speaker 03

  Back inside the spacecraft?

• 1:19:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:41Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, it was disappointing. I would have loved to have stayed out there more. But, um, I had another crew member, um, you know, Sarah Gillis, um, and she was, uh, she, she was due to go out. So I didn't want to eat into any of her time. And unfortunately, she was out the entire time we were in eclipse. So she didn't get really any view of Earth at all. Um, but, uh, but yeah, it was, uh, wish we could, we both wish we could have stayed out there so much, so much longer.

• 1:20:13Shawn Ryan?

  So the eclipse, I mean, it was, it would just darken the Earth?

• 1:20:16Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:20:17Shawn Ryan?

  And so you couldn't see anything?

• 1:20:18Speaker 03

  Right. Because of where we were coming over, uh, off of Antarctica in the, in the South Atlantic. So, um, if you're over Europe, uh, you know, or parts of Asia or North America at night, you can see all the city lights and everything and it's, it's gorgeous. But where we were in the orbit, it was, um, there just wasn't much in the way of, you know, city life.

• 1:20:39Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 1:20:43Shawn Ryan?

  What did Scott say when you came back?

• 1:20:46Speaker 03

  Oh, man. What was the first thing Kid said? I, I don't know. I remember once we fully repressurized and I opened my, we all opened our visors. I was like, whatever that smell is, that's what space smells like. And honestly, it just smelled like fresh nitrogen and oxygen.

• 1:21:04Speaker 03

  But, uh, other than that, we probably all remarked about how freaking cold we were. I mean, we were shivering. We all had these core body temperature pills and, and we were all cold. Um, yeah. But, you know, incidentally, obviously Kid and I were on that mission together, but our two crewmates, Sarah and Anna, um, they're the women who've been farthest away from Earth ever. Um, pretty, pretty awesome. And they're brilliant engineers.

• 1:21:33Speaker 03

  Really great people.

• 1:21:33Shawn Ryan?

  So when you come home, do you, do you guys have a debrief with Elon and the crew that made it possible?

• 1:21:44Speaker 03

  Elon wasn't in the debriefs. He was incredibly engaged in all of the major milestone meetings that lead up to a launch. So you have a launch readiness review and a flight readiness review and it's like a full scrub of everything, including all the risks, all the open risk issues that could potentially play a part. He was super involved in that. And he showed up to the launch too. We didn't see him because we were already strapped into the vehicle. But the debriefs are usually with the engineering teams that own various components. So you'll do kind of a general crew ops debrief and then you'll go almost system by system, which is awesome.

• 1:22:27Speaker 03

  It's a fun thing to be involved in and kind of share what you learn from it back to the people who are going to try and make it better and more reliable. But yeah, Elon wasn't in the debriefs, but he was definitely in all the big decision-making points leading up to launch.

• 1:22:40Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of questions, I mean, were they asking you? Other than the systems and stuff that none of us are going to understand? I mean, there has to be a ton of questions about what was it like?

• 1:22:50Speaker 03

  You know, they don't generally ask things like, it is usually more technical or operational related. The first thing, which is immediately after you come back, is anything that poses a safety of flight risk to the next crew up or those that are up there on the space station that have to come home. So they'll go very specific into things that they need to know immediately. So like my first mission, Inspiration 4, the toilet broke. And it was not something we did to it. There was a line under the floorboards that like disconnected and you had really no indication.

• 1:23:32Speaker 03

  Bottom line is like urine was just getting sprayed into the bottom half of the vehicle. It's down, you know, kind of, it's not like you'd see like, you know, like pee floating around. It was trapped underneath the vehicle in a bad spot and it was mixing with this chemical that accelerated the corrosion on the, you know, on the, like the pressure vessel of the vehicle. And in three days, that combination of urine and that chemical actually started corroding portions of our spaceship.

• 1:24:07Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:24:09Speaker 03

  They needed to figure that out immediately because NASA Crew Two was on the space station. They used that toilet and that vehicle's up there for six to nine months. And it's like, if the same thing happened to them, we could have a serious problem with the integrity of that spaceship. And the same thing did happen to them and there was a lot of corrosion. And SpaceX had to immediately go to work and do a bunch of testing to make sure that that hull of that vehicle was capable of surviving the conditions of reentry. So that becomes like kind of day one priority. Or something with like the parachutes or an avionics issue. Like they want to get to the things immediately that affect human life. And then some of the nice to have stuff that you don't need to figure out right away.

• 1:24:52Speaker 03

  That's like two weeks later, four weeks later, and it's kind of more technical.

• 1:24:55Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha. Did you, I mean, did you, have you spoken with Elon since you got back?

• 1:25:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:25:02Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of questions did he have?

• 1:25:04Speaker 03

  You know, he didn't, I mean, I, you know, I was nominated for the NASA gig like two months after I got back from the mission. And it was shortly thereafter when I was at Mar-a-Lago where I saw him for the first time. And we were more talking about things like, you know, some of the things he was trying to tackle with Doge where he thought that there was, you know, inefficiency or bureaucracy that was, you know, impeding, you know, agency progress within the government. It was, it was kind of conversations like that. We honestly didn't even, you know, people assume like, we talked about like Mars at all costs, you know, forget the moon, everything else, or conversations like that. We never really did.

• 1:25:48Speaker 03

  It was just more about, you know, kind of government inefficiencies. I don't think we ever talked about Polaris, none.

• 1:25:53Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:25:54Speaker 03

  I mean, he was, he always moves on to trying to solve the world's biggest problems.

• 1:26:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:01Speaker 03

  And he's trying to solve a lot of them across his companies. But at that time, he was trying to solve the national debt with an interest payment that exceeds the Department of Defense budget. That was his priority. So we really weren't talking about Polaris.

• 1:26:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:16Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, when it comes to, you know, getting to Mars and everything that SpaceX is doing, it seems like everything is geared towards that. I mean, what is it going to take to get there?

• 1:26:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I would say first, like, they, they're very good at setting very challenging goals at SpaceX, but when they achieve them, the capability has utility beyond that. So, you know, they need, you know, they want laser link communications between spaceships, but you know, that also creates a giant mesh network across their constellation of Starlinks, which allows them to sell more consumer broadband and solve airplane and ship and vehicle internet connectivity, not to mention people living in, you know, sparsely populated areas, which contributes revenue, which further funds space development. So my point is like, they kill a lot of birds with one stone. So, yes, there, there is certainly an organizational objective of making life

• 1:27:11Speaker 03

  multi-planetary and our best, our best first stop on that journey is Mars. But when you have a fully reusable vehicle that tops off and refills propellant in low Earth orbit, you can send it anywhere. You can send it to the moon if you want. You can send it past Mars. It doesn't necessarily even have to have people on it. You could use it to send cargo for point-to-point DOD applications. You could put giant telescopes in them and send them to every corner of our solar system and, and have them be like these prefab, you know, discovery probes because you basically have factories building these prefab spaceships. So, the point is, even though it's like kind of a Mars focus, what they will get from this breakthrough of fully and rapid reusable

• 1:27:54Speaker 03

  vehicles has like broad utility. But man, Mars is a hell of a goal. It is a Manhattan project and there is a lot of things they're going to have to get right and a lot of things the government is going to have to do. It can't all be on SpaceX's shoulders. And for that matter, all those other entrepreneurs you were talking about, they're all trying to contribute to that effort. Lots of problems that need to be solved in order to make that dream a reality.

• 1:28:15Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, what, what year are we looking at here?

• 1:28:19Shawn Ryan?

  Is there a timeframe?

• 1:28:21Speaker 03

  I mean, I would say that within, um, within 10 years, we'll, we'll, we'll have astronauts on Mars. I mean, you know, I don't want to ever like, you know, be out of sync with some of Elon's timetables, but I think he's even recalibrated to, you know, probably 2030s are a lot more realistic than, but we're going to see some cool stuff along the way. Like, do I think in, in 2026, he's going to send some starships with some Optimus robots on them and maybe some will crash into Mars, maybe some will land? Totally. And that's going to look pretty awesome when you see a robot walking around on Mars, even if it happens in 28. So it's not like, um, we'll be without some entertainment, uh, over the next, you know, 10 years until this happens.

• 1:29:01Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, what are some of the biggest obstacles? I mean, we've got power and/or fuel. We've got food. We've got oxygen. I mean, you just brought up all the debris that's going. I didn't, I've never even thought of that. You know, there're going to be refueling points or we're going to stop on the moon. What, what are the, what are the, the big problems that we need to solve before we, he does that move?

• 1:29:26Speaker 03

  I think there's two, there's two problems that we're going to have, um, in order to make that dream a reality. There's a lot of them. I mean, look, they're going to, the reentry of, of starship into the Mars atmosphere, propulsive landing, all that. But let's just assume they solve all those things. How do you come home? So that's the biggest issue I, I think of is like, you will be able to get astronauts there a lot sooner than you would be able to bring them home safely. And there's no one-way missions in this work. If someone wants to sign up for a one-way mission to Mars, auto excluded from the list. See ya. Like you are absolutely the wrong mindset to go on a, on an endeavor like that. So you have to have pretty high confidence that you can get people back. Right now, if

• 1:30:10Speaker 03

  SpaceX were to do this entirely on their own, they're going to need to mine propellant, um, manufacture propellant on the surface of Mars. And they need a lot of power to do that. Uh, so you need either a, a nuclear reactor on, on a starship to create surface power, or you're going to need like endless football fields of solar cells, which I, I don't love that idea. Because I don't know what, I mean, you can have a million Optimus robots maintaining it and cleaning off all the dust and everything. Not to mention farther you are away from the sun, the less utility there is in solar power. So I think it's going to be nuclear. And you're going to need to make propellant to top off your starship to launch back home.

• 1:30:53Speaker 03

  And if you see starships launch here on Earth, they have this whole stage zero, which is the whole tower with, you know, a thousand people working on it under an atmosphere in 1G, and it still doesn't go always great. So, you know, pulling off that operation to refuel and come home is going to be hard. I think the government can help with that by kind of working on what no one else is capable or willing to do that's hard, the near impossible, which is start building nuclear electric propulsion, nuclear spaceships. I think it's absolutely the right mini Manhattan project for NASA. Get America underway under nuclear power and space. If you can do that, you take a lot of pressure off of the in-situ resource manufacturing. And then number two is going to be the human.

• 1:31:38Speaker 03

  People are going to have a hard time. So nobody likes talking about this because it takes away the hero image of the astronaut. But you've had plenty of astronauts freak out in space. They've tried to kill their whole crew before. Like, there is a, there was a lock put on the space shuttle door for that reason, because somebody tried to open the hatch more than once and take everybody out. There's a lock on the Dragon space capsule for that reason. That was a carryover from that time period. It's happened to Russian cosmonauts. It's happened to American astronauts. And this is during a time when mostly American astronauts were the best of the best coming out of the military.

• 1:32:15Speaker 03

  So it is a unique environment, and that stressor has caused people to crack. So that's the psychology of it. Now, when you're in low Earth orbit, you can be in the water in 90 minutes. So you're 90 minutes from being on a helicopter ride to a cheeseburger, and people have cracked in space. When you're on the moon, you're two and a half days from coming home. And when you're on Mars, you could be anywhere from six to nine months to more than well over a year before you can come home. So, and that's, and like, and think about it from like, again, you get into like the psychology of it.

• 1:32:58Speaker 03

  When you're in low Earth orbit, you look out your window, you see big Earth. When you're on the moon, it's still the blue marble. When you're on Mars, it's a blue speck in the sky. So, like, we're gonna have the, you know, psychological issues to deal with when you send humans to that environment, and then you're gonna have physiological issues, which is, we didn't evolve to be in sub 1G. So astronauts spend six to nine months on the space station, they come back to Earth, they're a wreck for two weeks. Right? So basically, that's the equivalent time of going to Mars. So when they get to, you know, a reduced gravity environment and they step off the spaceship, are they gonna throw up in their helmet? What if we have to do surgery? Nobody's done surgery in space. I mean, it's only a matter of time when you're on multi-year missions, that someone's gonna

• 1:33:42Speaker 03

  have a ruptured appendix maybe, or something else that goes on. So like, all the things that make us who we are are gonna be highly problematic on journeys of two years plus in space, and we gotta figure that out. You know, at some point, if, that doesn't mean you have to have it for the first four people, but if you're talking about sending thousands of people into space, there's a lot where, you know, onto an outpost on Mars, there's a lot from the psychology and physiological side of being a human being that we have to figure out.

• 1:34:12Shawn Ryan?

  Man, it's just something I can't even fathom. I mean, sending thousands of people to another planet when we haven't, we haven't even sent anybody back to the moon, and what, how long has it been? Sixty-something years?

• 1:34:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:25Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and, I mean, what is the...

• 1:34:27Speaker 03

  Fifty-three years.

• 1:34:29Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think the plan is? I mean, when, when we, okay, we got a thousand volunteers, we're going to Mars, I mean, what does that look like?

• 1:34:36Speaker 03

  Well, first, I mean, again, I think you gotta have some of the most highly screened individuals possible, and, because we haven't learned anything about this yet. Like, I'm, the analog Ashon environments where they put people in like shipping containers and these bubbles, like, look, you do learn some things from it, but you open the door, you're on Earth. You know, if somebody's having a heart attack, you open the door, like, they're gonna, you know, it's... You always know in your mind that underneath you is your home planet. So it's gonna be that psychological stressor, not to mention all the physiological issues. You're gonna have to pick some highly screened individuals that are capable of going on that mission.

• 1:35:21Speaker 03

  You have to know for sure that you have a way to bring them home. There are no one-way missions on those first ones. You get that right, and then you can start building up that outpost. Look, in terms of the technical skills to go, whether it's the moon or Mars, the incremental velocity, whether you're going to the moon or Mars, is negligible. So if you can build a spaceship and top it off in low Earth orbit with tons of propellant, you can send it to the moon or Mars. The only difference now at this point is habitability, landing, and how you come home. Starship should be able to work fine for both, considering both are designed for habitability landing. But coming back from the moon is a hell of a lot easier than coming back from Mars.

• 1:36:04Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, have you thought about that? Have you thought about what civilization looks like on Mars?

• 1:36:08Speaker 03

  It's gonna be horrible.

• 1:36:10Shawn Ryan?

  Let's say it's, you know, let's say, I mean, if 2030-ish seems to be the goal, what does it look like in 2050, 2060?

• 1:36:20Speaker 03

  Not much better. I mean, it's gonna be horrible for a while. That's why, like, there's a, like, we're probably, there's a spectrum here of making life multi-planetary. Elon has correctly identified, probably the most important goal for Mars is to make it self-sustaining, so if someday something terrible were to happen on Earth and the resupply ships stopped coming, that, you know, our species could continue on. Totally. You know, from my perspective, like, Mars doesn't have to become Earth, never will become anything like Earth, not in any foreseeable future. It is more of an outpost in my mind. It is more akin to a research station in Antarctica than anything else.

• 1:37:03Speaker 03

  Like, we need to get there and show that we can get there, and that we can, you know, maintain an outpost and, you know, generate power and propellant and learn things with the idea that we are going to continue on, that it is one stop on a much longer, grander journey, because that is not gonna be a good home. And we also have been never faced anything like this in our history here on Earth. You know, the age of exploration, you get on a ship, you go from Europe to the New World. Trees are trees, water is water, fish are fish, deer are deer. You work really hard, you chop down enough trees, you build a bigger house. You know, you figure out, you know, you're trapping fur and you're selling enough of it, like you're wealthy or whatnot.

• 1:37:48Speaker 03

  You could spend your entire life on Mars, you're gonna be in a bubble. Like, you're not gonna go outside and, you know, chop down more trees and build a nicer bubble. So, life there is not gonna be pretty, but we have to go there and we have to have that stepping stone if we wanna go even farther, and we must, because even Mars is, you know, again, it's our next-door neighbor. It's nothing compared to the trillions of galaxies out there that we are inevitably destined to explore.

• 1:38:14Shawn Ryan?

  How do you think NASA, I mean, you had mentioned earlier that SpaceX shouldn't be the one to have to head all of this up. Where does someone like NASA fall into play?

• 1:38:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a fantastic question, because of late, you know, there's been this kind of like, do we even need NASA anymore? Of course we need NASA. Like NASA, a government agency, why are we all chipping in as taxpayers into an agency like NASA? Because you need NASA to do what no one else is capable of doing. Like, what no organization, nonprofit, or company is capable of doing. And that's what they did for a really long time. And parts of it today, they still do. Like, the whole science, planetary science aside, heliophysics, like, they're doing things that no one else will do unless we, as taxpayers, fund it, and we should, because we should wanna know about the solar system around us.

• 1:39:06Speaker 03

  We're highly dependent on our star. We should know as much as we can about that. Star can get angry at times, create solar storms, it's problematic for our way of life on here, we should study these things. But then there's another side of NASA. And it's about forty percent of the budget, but does a lot of things that SpaceX and companies eventually like Blue Origin and Rocket Labs and Stoke will be capable of doing. And that's a problem. It's a problem when NASA's in the business of building rockets, and so is Blue Origin, and so is SpaceX. Because if you're doing what other people are doing, you know, what's the draw? Why wouldn't you just go work at SpaceX and you get a bunch of stock that's gonna be worth money, or go work at Blue Origin and get a bunch of stock that's gonna be worth even more?

• 1:39:47Speaker 03

  NASA needs to constantly be recalibrating to do the near impossible, what no one else is doing, and the things they figured out, they hand off to industry. Industry is gonna build rapidly reusable rockets that'll reduce the cost of space materially. Awesome. I hope SpaceX and Blue Origin and Rocket Lab are competing like crazy because they're gonna make their rockets awesome and lower cost. What should NASA be doing? What they can't. Build nuclear spaceships. Like, no, these companies are not gonna play around with highly enriched uranium. They're not gonna, they're never gonna take the liability, nor get the approvals to launch, you know, nuclear reactors with highly enriched uranium in it. That's exactly what taxpayers should be funding NASA to do. And in doing so, it will help enable commercial industry do what they wanna do.

• 1:40:31Speaker 03

  So that's kinda, you know, the division of responsibilities, I think.

• 1:40:35Shawn Ryan?

  And then, you know, what do you think the most important part of the journey to Mars is? Is it exploration? Is it, is it a fallout shelter of Earth cease to exist? I mean, would, in your mind, you know, what is the most important part, or all of the parts, of why we should be going there?

• 1:40:59Speaker 03

  Well, there's an optimist side and a pessimist side. The optimist side is like, who knows what we may find? What if we find that there was life there at some point in time or another? That'd be quite the development, wouldn't it? And actually, it's very helpful for funding all things space-related, because in my mind, there's only two ways you have the future that we all dream of someday, one of which is an orbital economy that helps pay for it all, or two... Find proof that we're not alone. Because if you do, the demand for that knowledge will be insatiable and it will fund lots of exploration and discovery missions. So there's possibility we might find proof of life. The capabilities we will develop in order to get to Mars will become a national asset.

• 1:41:44Speaker 03

  We could use it for transporting telescopes, for mining asteroids, for going to and from the moon and helium-3. Like, all these capabilities, like I mentioned before, that will need to be pioneered in order to make that mission possible, will be useful. You build nuclear spaceships, you could have solid-state lasers in space, you could have a whole new golden dome apparatus as a result of it. So, there's lots of, like, good or useful things that can come from establishing an endeavor like that. The kind of, you know, more negative approach to it, or hedge if you will, is, what if something really awful happens here on Earth? You know, there aren't any dinosaurs around anymore. So you pick it. I mean, eventually at some point or another, our star will kill us off.

• 1:42:28Speaker 03

  Or maybe it's a bioweapon, or a chemical weapon, or a nuclear war, or some new virus that just appears out of nowhere and takes us out. I mean, we're an asteroid. That's just a matter of time. So for all those reasons, you know, it would seem to make sense that we should, you know, hedge our bets a little bit and start, you know, spreading out. Not to mention, I just think it's our destiny. I think that there's way too much space out there and too much to learn for us to just sit here the whole time.

• 1:42:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Fascinating stuff. Let's take a quick break.

• 1:43:04Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:43:05Shawn Ryan?

  And then when we come back, we'll dive into some NASA stuff.

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• 1:44:51Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Jared, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to get into some NASA stuff, but I just have a slew of random questions I want to ask you. One being UFOs. What do you think? Are we alone?

• 1:45:06Speaker 03

  I think if we're thinking about the entirety of the universe, there is almost certainly other life out there. I would bet heavily on that. I would bet heavily that there's intelligent life out there. Have they interacted with our planet? I would be, I would say the odds of that are incredibly low. You've got a couple of things working against you. You can't really exceed the cosmic speed limit, which is the speed of light. So when you think about the trillions of galaxies and all the stars and all the planets out there, the odds they would have found us and somehow been able to travel to at a time when our civilization was alive, and you think of the industrial age that would give off...

• 1:45:48Speaker 03

  Clues of our existence just seem incredibly low. So if I had to bet on UFOs, I'd probably put my Draken hat on again and say it's either our stuff or it's our adversaries that are checking in on us. It's amazing, right? Like if the aliens are gonna visit, you could just have those flying Tic Tacs show up over New York City or somewhere else, but they all seem to be around our naval bases and in Las Vegas area. So I think that probably leads me to believe it's something that's human created.

• 1:46:17Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you know, it's interesting. We see all this disclosure stuff starting to hit the government. A couple of years ago, you know, they had the first congressional hearing on the UAP stuff and you've had a couple, maybe one or two more, I think, since then. But, I mean, what do you think about that stuff? Is that a big distraction? Do you think a lot of people thinks that is a distraction? Or are they screaming for disclosure? You think there's actually something that they're hiding from us when it comes to aliens?

• 1:46:49Speaker 03

  No, I mean, look, I'm not, I don't want to be dismissive of people's beliefs or hopes or interests.

• 1:47:00Speaker 03

  When I was nominated to lead NASA, I got a million emails from interested people all around the world, people in government, out of government, at NASA, not at NASA, with all sorts of ideas and theories that range from well thought out, good intended, to crazy. That's what space does to you. How can you not, when you look out at, you know, you're laying on a field looking up at the stars and how does it not make your mind just wander? So I think that fuels a little bit of it. The idea also, like, we do have lots of classified programs and our adversaries have lots of technology too that they don't advertise to try and figure out what we're doing that we don't advertise.

• 1:47:40Speaker 03

  So like, my Occam's razor analysis on that is it's more likely in that camp than it is all the miracles that would need to happen for intelligent life out there, which I believe is. Like, I just have to believe it based on the size of the universe, that these miracles that needed to happen to create life are not that unique.

• 1:48:03Speaker 03

  That surely would have happened again, but for it to exist, to build a spaceship, to travel at the speeds necessary to show up at this particular time in our history, super low probability.

• 1:48:15Shawn Ryan?

  So you don't think that there have been beings out, I mean, we hear a lot about bending space and time and, you know, this whole whatever, that's about the extent of how I can articulate it is.

• 1:48:28Speaker 03

  Flying through black holes and wormholes and such like that?

• 1:48:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you're not buying into any of that. Can we manipulate space and time?

• 1:48:36Speaker 03

  Okay, I hope we can at some point because we're not gonna, if we are, if, if our limits are sub light speed, like materially sub light speed, um, we're not gonna get very far.

• 1:48:50Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:48:50Speaker 03

  Right? Um, so we're gonna have to be putting, putting humans in some sort of cryosleep and, you know, they're gonna wake up thousands of years later. Like, that's, so my point is like, I wanna believe that we will crack the code on some sort of exotic form of propulsion that will take us close to those kind of speeds, simply because we won't be able to explore without it. Um, but I, like, I, you know, I'm not betting on wormholes or anything any, anytime soon, but I'd love to see us moving in the, the direction of, you know, goodness, like, uh, which would be nuclear propulsion and then, you know, kind of evolving from there.

• 1:49:29Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of stuff, I mean, you've been, you've been interested in space for a long time, since you were a little kid. And so, you know, I, I wanna go and, what excites you about space? I mean, we hear stuff about, this is what I watch. I don't watch other interviews. I don't really watch much of anything. In fact, every night I pretty much fall asleep watching something about some documentary about the universe and, you know, they're always talking about dark matter or dark energy. But, I mean, what do you, what is it?

• 1:49:58Speaker 03

  It's all of that. It's everything we don't know.

• 1:50:00Shawn Ryan?

  You think we can use it?

• 1:50:01Speaker 03

  I mean, that's like the if the question is like, what is it that, you know, captivates you or interests you about it all is there is so much we haven't figured out or understand yet, and therefore it's intriguing. I mean, I remember, I think it was probably like fifth or sixth grade in geography class and how bummed out I was looking at a map. And it's like, man, we found all the damn islands. We crossed all the seas. We climbed the mountains. Like, what's left?

• 1:50:31Shawn Ryan?

  Under the ocean.

• 1:50:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then you go and you look up at the stars and you're like, oh, man, there's a there's an awful lot left out there, right? So it's all of that. It's all those things that we don't understand. I mean, you know, the same way, like, think of us as like in a primitive way of like our our ability to understand the solar system in the universe is like, you know, natives, you know, that were carving a canoe out of a log. Like, I mean, that's the equivalency of what we're at right now. So we have no idea what, you know, automobiles and trains and airplanes and supersonic travel is in our future because we are still hollowing out that log. So it's everything, everything we might stand to learn that could change, you know, and will change our understanding,

• 1:51:16Speaker 03

  you know, is out there. We just have to find it.

• 1:51:18Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's fascinating stuff. I mean, you know, the and that recent one, they were talking about how, you know, we thought that we thought that space was just empty and, you know, it's not in our what visual spectrum that to see that is it dark energy or dark matter? I can't remember. I think it's dark energy. But now they're saying that all that empty space is dark, dark energy, and that we there may be a way that we could potentially utilize it, you know, for an unlimited amount of energy.

• 1:51:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there's look, there's there could be like dark matter, antimatter as a form of propulsion that we could use to unlock massive amounts.

• 1:51:57Shawn Ryan?

  Antimatter. What's that?

• 1:51:59Speaker 03

  I'm like, we are going down a path that is is far from my area of expertise. Thankfully, there's a lot of a lot of scientists and big brains that are out there thinking about these kind of things. But I think where you're getting at is like when when people try and understand the structure of our galaxy, there is clearly something else out there that's helping form the structure that we don't we don't have our arms around yet.

• 1:52:24Speaker 03

  But that's like, again, that's what's so exciting about this journey. Just kind of a quick story. One of my crew members from Polaris Dawn was with Kid and I. She played the violin in space. She was raised, and she was a toddler, to be a classical violinist. And ultimately, she chose engineering and science, and she wound up being hired as the lead astronaut trainer for SpaceX. She trained me for my first mission to go to space, and then I picked her to be an astronaut on Polaris Dawn. And part of it was, she was going to bring her violin up to demo this Starlink transmission, where we basically

• 1:53:06Speaker 03

  created this flash mob orchestra around the world to raise money for St. Jude. And she is playing this wooden instrument floating in space, and it's really cool. Anyway, I know this is a long story long, but she was since asked to come and perform at an observatory in California, top of a mountain. It's this 100-plus-year-old observatory. And I was like, I'm definitely coming to see it. And this observatory where she was playing, which may be the coolest venue next to seeing her play in space, was where Hubble discovered that there is more than just one galaxy in the universe, right? So not that long ago, we thought it was just our galaxy, and that all these stars were part of it. And then through his analysis and his research, he determined, not only is there more than one,

• 1:53:51Speaker 03

  eventually, there's trillions of them. And every one of those has who knows how many stars inside it, and who knows how many planets inside it, and how many of those are potentially inhabitable regions, right? We haven't even scratched the surface. So like, yes, you're picking on a couple of areas that we think we might be starting to know something about, but there is so much that we don't, and that's the appeal.

• 1:54:11Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's crazy. I mean, even just the vastness. And, you know, I had Avi Loew on a couple of years ago, I think now, but, you know, we were talking about how everything is getting farther apart. Planets are getting farther apart. Galaxies are getting farther apart. I mean, why is that happening?

• 1:54:31Speaker 03

  I think that's all, you know, part of what underwrites the Big Bang. You know, is the eventual creation of the universe and that everything is moving away from it. But that's, well, it's like, that's where it ends because like, we don't really know where it began either. What came before the Big Bang and what created it? And, you know, we have this expansion right now. Is there a contraction again? We don't know.

• 1:55:03Shawn Ryan?

  That's a damn good point. I never thought about that.

• 1:55:05Speaker 03

  The, uh, it's, um, yeah, I mean, we certainly know that the, the universe is expanding. We, we observe that.

• 1:55:15Shawn Ryan?

  But now, is it expanding or is, I mean,

• 1:55:20Shawn Ryan?

  that's what I want to know. Cause if it's expanding, then that means there's an edge to it, right? So what's on the other side of the edge?

• 1:55:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I, I mean, this is certainly.

• 1:55:30Shawn Ryan?

  It's a hypothetical conversation.

• 1:55:32Speaker 03

  But I mean, the expansion of the universe is what helps, you know, underpin the, the Big Bang theory. But, um, I don't, uh, look, I don't know where it goes. Um, I don't know what created it, what happened before it.

• 1:55:49Speaker 03

  Or what happens next 14 billion years from now, you know?

• 1:55:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. What about black holes? What do you know about black holes?

• 1:55:57Speaker 03

  Black holes is where, is what happens when, you know, really big stars eventually die. And, you know, there is just, you, you basically have such an extreme amount of gravitational, uh, influence that not even light can escape from it. But then Stephen Hawking figured out some things do escape from it.

• 1:56:18Shawn Ryan?

  What escapes from it?

• 1:56:20Speaker 03

  Hawking Radiation, actually. It's, it's named after him. So basically whatever is consumed inside this black hole, will slowly, over some extraordinary period of time, gradually radiate out of it. And the black hole will disappear, like it was never there.

• 1:56:43Speaker 03

  That's certainly the limit of my knowledge on it. I probably butchered that up pretty good.

• 1:56:47Shawn Ryan?

  I just love thinking about this stuff.

• 1:56:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:49Shawn Ryan?

  You know, it's like I said, it's fascinating stuff.

• 1:56:53Speaker 03

  And this is like I was saying, when I got nominated, my inbox just blew up from people all over the world that all had opinions and thoughts and some were appreciated and some really were not. And you know what I was saying? I was like, there is no way the Secretary of Agriculture gets any emails like this. But that's what's so cool about it, right? Is like, people do, no matter where you are in the world, at some point or another, you're lying back in a field and you're looking up at those stars and your mind wanders. And that's such an awesome thing, right?

• 1:57:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Do you think more about your companies or more about space?

• 1:57:30Speaker 03

  Well, you know, the company I started when I was 16 is what helped enable a lot of these things, a lot of these adventures I've been able to go on, my aviation career, my space career. But you know, when I was nominated to lead NASA, I had to, you know, you have to do a lot of separation from your kind of business affairs. So my president of that company became CEO. So I'm like, I'm a kind of chairman of the board now, which means like, one day a week, you know, a couple of weeks a quarter, I'm really involved. But the rest of the time, you know, I can be focused on other interests, which this

• 1:58:12Speaker 03

  past summer has been the first time since I was a teenager that I had no real professional obligations. It was kind of cool. And it was, it felt really great to be able to, you know, still be young enough to have a whole new chapter, whether it was in government service or elsewhere. So yeah, I guess I'd say like, I don't put anywhere, when it was my full-time job, it had to consume the majority of my thoughts. Now it does not.

• 1:58:35Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I'm just curious, business owner to business owner, I mean, how did, I mean... Did that create a tremendous amount of anxiety to walk away? I couldn't imagine just being a part of it a couple of times a year.

• 1:58:50Speaker 03

  No, because the company is in a really excellent place. There couldn't have been a better time to get nominated to go into a whole new direction in life. Like, the business is killing it. You know, we have an incredible leadership team, tons of firepower, lots of demand, good opportunity, good products. There was no better time to be able to walk away and feel like, you know, what I helped create long ago was going to remain an enduring business and a good trajectory. So now, if this was 10 years earlier, if any other time when the company still had, you know, an equal number of challenges and opportunities where you're like,

• 1:59:34Speaker 03

  I don't want to risk things going off course that could hurt people's jobs and livelihoods, but it's in a good place.

• 1:59:40Shawn Ryan?

  Good. You know, before we move into NASA too, I'm just curious, you know, how you raise your kids? I mean, it sounds like you grew up in what sounds like a middle-class, everyday, American home. I mean, you've obviously done very well for yourself, created a couple of empires. You've been to space. I mean, what are you hoping your kids do? How do you raise them?

• 2:00:03Speaker 03

  I mean, you want them to be...

• 2:00:05Shawn Ryan?

  It's a whole different world than what you grew up in.

• 2:00:07Speaker 03

  You want them to be happy, healthy, and good people. And I think I owe like 99% of that to my wife. I think I can take credit for very little over how awesome my kids are. My wife is amazing.

• 2:00:24Speaker 03

  But, yeah, I mean, you know, you don't want to spoil them. You want them to be very appreciative for what they have in life and to, you know, look to others that aren't as lucky or as fortunate. I mean, they, you know... Again, just got dealt a, they got dealt a great hand in life.

• 2:00:41Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:00:42Speaker 03

  And need to understand as early as they can that that is not how it exists for, for a lot of others. And now they carry some weight in life to, to try and make it better, to elevate other people's lives. Uh, so we try to, to make sure we teach them that.

• 2:00:57Shawn Ryan?

  Um, how do you teach them that? How do you instill those type of values on them?

• 2:01:02Speaker 03

  I mean, to, from, from my perspective, it's to, to show them, um, you know, what the world really, you know, looks like. So, um, you know, I got to take them on an adventure into, um, into Africa a couple of weeks ago. And to me, it's like, look, there's going to be, there's going to be a part of this trip that you are going to like and enjoy. And you're going to see, you know, zebras and, uh, and giraffes and elephants. And then you're going to see a lot of people that, you know, this is where they were born and they do not have much in life. And the things that you would take for granted, um, would be, you know, would be life changing for them.

• 2:01:43Speaker 03

  Like, uh, you know, and, and it's like, you try and find opportunities to educate them in a, in that kind of a way as often as possible. Um, yeah, I mean, I definitely want, and, and again, I'm very lucky because my kids are, they're awesome and they're very grounded. Um, and they do appreciate what they have in life. And they, I think they do, are growing up, you know, with something instilled in them that they have an obligation now to help others. Um, but doesn't just happen on its own.

• 2:02:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. All right, let's move into NASA. So you were selected by Trump to head up NASA and then lead, and lead that. And then a couple of days before your confirmation.

• 2:02:29Shawn Ryan?

  They pulled it. So, let's start at the beginning. How did these conversations start? How did you wind up on the radar to head NASA?

• 2:02:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I certainly wasn't preparing for any sort of political career. If I had been, I probably, you know, I would have done some things differently to prepare for it. But, um, no, I got a text message in late November. Well, first of all, let me just say, as somebody who's been always very apolitical, and I generally felt like the system is kind of self-correcting, that, you know, the forefathers did a pretty decent job putting enough checks and balances in place that things can't get too off the rails. Um, I don't know, maybe that was just easier to think that way, I guess, because things can't, they can't get off the rails. But anyway, that's just kind of how I've lived most of my life. I never

• 2:03:21Speaker 03

  had a reason to be actively involved in politics as a defense company, like, you know, our service was in demand regardless of who was in office. And in my fintech, you know, my day job was just, uh, just never really required any lobbying or whatnot. So, um, never really, you know, imagined it coming, although I always felt like I owed this country a great debt for living the American dream, so I would look for any opportunity I could to repay it. Uh, so anyway, back to that, I, late November, I got a text message from a, um, from a retired four-star that I had known a little bit from my time at Draken, and said that, you know, "Your name is being, uh, kind of passed around for a couple of

• 2:04:05Speaker 03

  positions in the administration." And, um, and I was like, "Wow, that's awesome. I never really imagined, but yeah, I'd be honored to have a chance to serve." Then I, uh, it's like I, I had a, um, a missed call, and then a text message. I was actually running in New York, in Central Park. I just missed, number I didn't, that wasn't in my phone, missed call, it was like, um, "Would you be interested in serving in DJT's administration?" And I deleted it, because I was like, you know, if it was not a scam, someone that I, like, it would be like, just a little bit more legit than this. And then I got another text from the, from the general, who's like, "They're trying to get a hold of you."

• 2:04:50Speaker 03

  So the next thing was a call, a phone interview with Howard Lutnick, who's Secretary Lutnick now, a Commerce Secretary, and he was leading the President's transition. And it was like an hour-long call, and he asked me if I was interested in the NASA job, and I said absolutely, and the next day I was in Mar-a-Lago with an interview with the President, and shook my hand at the end of the meeting and said, "You got the job."

• 2:05:16Shawn Ryan?

  What was it about you that they liked?

• 2:05:18Speaker 03

  I think that I was a political newcomer, so I know the name, I mean, they mentioned in the interview that some of the names that were being considered were kind of, you know, in the system for a long time, and that we're looking to do things a little differently. I mean, I did come in with somewhat of a plan to talk about what I thought were the, you know, important steps and a couple priorities that we needed to hone in on, and I guess those landed.

• 2:05:48Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think that your name was pulled? Why did they pull you right before the confirmation?

• 2:05:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I...

• 2:05:56Shawn Ryan?

  It seemed like a really good fit for the job. In fact, I've been reading a lot of your tweets, and, I mean, everything seems on point, makes a lot of sense. I was a little frustrated, more than a little frustrated.

• 2:06:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't think it had a whole lot to do with me. I think that there was a very widely-covered falling out, you know, between some pretty important people, and I became a good target, you know, to kind of, as a parting shot, I think, in that whole divorce. I mean, I wouldn't even call it, really, you know, speculation. I've, you know, heard enough from enough folks of, you know, how it all went down to understand. And I didn't take any of it personally, by the way. Like, I knew what I was getting into, eyes wide open, there were risks of falling out

• 2:06:51Speaker 03

  and divorce, and, you know, where, you know, where my connections were weren't coming from SpaceX and such. So, like, I understood it all, I just, I kind of falsely assumed that I would have an opportunity to kind of get in the job and have an opportunity to... You know, kind of make my contributions and stand on my own, but um, you know, prior to the confirmation, if there was going to be a big falling out, you know, um, I probably should have anticipated I might be one of the ones taken out in it.

• 2:07:20Shawn Ryan?

  What a shame, man. What a shame. So let's go into NASA. I mean, what?

• 2:07:26Speaker 03

  And that's, by the way, the real shame. Like, like, the world's greatest space agency doesn't have a confirmed leader right now. Probably, I mean, I think other than GSA, it's the only agency, um, or cabinet kind of position that doesn't have a confirmed leader. Like, the most accomplished space agency in the world, it doesn't have a, you know, confirmed leader at this point. Secretary Duffy is the acting. Um, I guess that's, that's really the unfortunate part, right? I mean, space is the ultimate high ground. We have a competitor that's making incredible progress in that domain. Um, so for something that didn't have to do with really job qualifications and whatnot, was probably more personal with other folks, that's like, really, the disappointment. Personally, I don't take any of it personally.

• 2:08:10Speaker 03

  It's just, it's an awful shame for the agency.

• 2:08:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, I mean, it seems like, I mean, we're, we had alluded to it at the beginning, but you know, it is, we're just, we're, it seems like we're at such a pivotal point with China and space exploration. And now we have, you know, Duffy, who's Department of Transportation and NASA, and so his time's getting split 50/50. And I mean, it's, it's frustrating to see that we don't, we haven't identified the next guy in that, you know, essentially, this is all happening because of a pissing match, which sucks.

• 2:08:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, and, and, you know, Secretary Duffy has stepped in as the acting in the last couple of months. But I mean, you're talking, it's been seven months since the confirmed leader of NASA, you know, resigned during the inauguration. A long time. Like, a lot can happen over seven months. And, um, so yeah, I mean, to me, if somebody had said, you know, Three weeks after kind of, "Hey, we don't like you," or "We don't like this connection to this organization," or whatnot, "So we're shooting you in the head and we're going with somebody else." I get it. My life is going to be fine. I'll get back to business. Get somebody else in there. Like, I just care about America winning in the high ground of space. So that's really just the disappointing part, is like, it leaves an important agency leader list for a bit.

• 2:09:34Shawn Ryan?

  So, I mean, what does NASA do? I mean, we hear all about SpaceX. How many rockets are they launching a year now?

• 2:09:42Speaker 03

  SpaceX?

• 2:09:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:43Speaker 03

  Oh, man, every two days, probably. Every 48 hours, they're probably launching a Falcon 9.

• 2:09:48Shawn Ryan?

  And, I mean, what's NASA doing?

• 2:09:51Speaker 03

  So, NASA's huge, and they're doing a lot of things. Some are really important, why the agency was created in the first place. And then they're doing a lot of little things that I would say were not necessarily why the agency was created and can be somewhat of a distraction. I mean, there's 40,000 people, you know, between contractors and employees at NASA across 10 major centers. And in my mind, you know, the agency, again, should be doing the near impossible, what no one else in the world, no other organization or company is capable of doing, like, the true radical, cutting-edge things in space and in our atmosphere, from a human exploration

• 2:10:36Speaker 03

  and a scientific discovery and trying to usher in the orbital economy. Like, they should have two or three really big things that need to be solved in this incredibly important domain. And I'd say that their budget is split across, like, thousands of things that kind of make it hard to do any of those things.

• 2:10:57Shawn Ryan?

  What are some of the big things that you think are important that they're doing?

• 2:11:01Speaker 03

  That they are doing?

• 2:11:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that they are.

• 2:11:02Speaker 03

  I mean planetary science for sure. So, look, all the things they're doing are directionally correct. How well are they doing it, right? Is Hubble and James Webb Space Telescope awesome? Absolutely. Are the rovers on Mars cool as hell? Absolutely. Why do we need to wait every 10 years to launch a new one? Like, why aren't we launching these things every year? Why don't we have 10 telescopes out there looking out at different galaxies? Why don't we have rovers on Venus and on Mars? Why do we have to wait, you know, X number of years for the helicopter to tour Titan, for example? Like, so planetary science is a great thing they're doing.

• 2:11:43Speaker 03

  It's approximately a third of the budget is science at NASA. Like, why aren't we doing a lot more with it? Like, can we get more mileage out of approximately 7 billion a year? I bet you can, right? And that's because for every, like, one or two kind of big flagship things, there's lots of little things that may not be as important. And the big flagship things, because they're defined as at least a billion-dollar program, become very expensive and take a long time because you can't get them wrong. And that's part of the problem. So, like, science is an important thing they should be working on. You just should be getting a lot. The American people are eager for world-changing headlines. We should be delivering it all the time and not every 10 years.

• 2:12:26Shawn Ryan?

  What are some of the things that you had mentioned? You think that there's some smaller things that would be distractions?

• 2:12:33Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, I think a lot of things are. Like, how about aeronautics? Like, the first A in NASA. As a pilot, I should be supercharged up about what they're working on at NASA in aeronautics, and I'm not. And I don't think the people working at NASA on aeronautics are charged up about it. So, you know, you talk the 1960s, 70s, 80s. Almost all of the most badass breakthroughs in aeronautics made their way through NASA at some, at least in the last, like, you know, 50 years. That's not what's been going on in the last 25 to 30 years. So, the days of NASA with the forward-swept wings and, you know, fly-by-wire technology and thrust vectoring, which wound up going into the F-22, those are all NASA's work.

• 2:13:18Speaker 03

  What are they doing on now? You know, they spent, I think, about $800 million on a boomless supersonic airplane that hasn't flown yet. Those guys built one already and flew it multiple times and retired it. And they're moving on to something else. And I guarantee you, they didn't spend $800 million in X number of years on it. They committed $400 million to a, to this, honestly, it's a very ugly looking, you know, modified Boeing airplane that they were going to use for high efficiency flight. Boeing walked away from their commitment in it. They're working on drone technology that's like decades behind other agencies in the US and certainly behind China. So why are we working on all?

• 2:14:02Speaker 03

  They fund fuel efficiency enhancements to like Pratt and Whitney Motors that have been around for decades to squeeze three or 4% more fuel efficiency out of it when they should be doing that themselves for competitive reasons. Like what should NASA's aeronautics program be working on? Things that go super high, super fast, radical designs that if you, that if you figure out something pretty wild from it, has in direct influence over DOD designs or commercial airliner designs. They should be at the absolute tip of the spear on breaking ground on aeronautics. And honestly, like even bridging, you know, bridging the divide between in atmosphere and out of atmosphere type atmospheric wave riding technology, but they're not. They're working on a lot of boring stuff.

• 2:14:47Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, 800 billion, 800 million for a supersonic jet that Blake Shoal's working on right now. I mean, where is the money going to?

• 2:14:58Speaker 03

  Lockheed. They, they'll make a cool video every six months of like doing an engine run or something. But that's the point. They're done already. They flew it, they tested it, they've moved on. And, you know, NASA's hoping that they'll fly their quiet supersonic demonstrator soon. And it's like, part of it is a fear too. Like if you were to ask the, you know, it's like, do people who show up to work every day at NASA want to see America kick ass? Absolutely. Like there's no one there that wants to lose. But like they also get entrenched in the system and it's like, well. If I recommend to cancel all these programs, because honestly, they don't really check the box anymore for what we should be doing at NASA, how do I know I get something else? Like, isn't a bird in hand better?

• 2:15:41Speaker 03

  Shouldn't I take this and kind of still fight for this trustless, you know, efficient airliner or solar-powered airplane? Because how do I know I won't get something else? And that's like, I mean, that's, it's almost a leadership issue. Like, you have a, there's a trust issue almost with the team where it's like, look, guys, if you're working on something that no longer fits the definition or the mission of NASA, I need you to tell me about it because I will stand behind you and make sure that you do get the resources to be working on what will move the needle. Right? But that, that doesn't exist. It's this fear, so you gotta entrench yourself and perpetuate programs that shouldn't exist.

• 2:16:18Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I mean, I think NASA's budget was, was at 25 billion, and now they're moving it to 19 billion. I mean, is that part of your plan? Did you put that in place?

• 2:16:30Speaker 03

  No. Um, so, uh, honestly, when you're a nominee, they don't tell you anything about the president's budget or any of those kind of plans because they want you to have deniability with the senators. I mean, if I knew that the president's budget was going to slash by 20%, they'd never get, they'd never let you out of committee. You'd never get a floor vote. Like, they would hold you hostage intentionally, um, until they got some, you know, the senators would, until they got concessions. So, I was as surprised as anyone. I mean, during my hearing, I basically said, "Look, I don't think budgets are going up, guys, so like, we don't have unlimited funding. We gotta be smart and concentrate our resources on what moves the needle." Um, but, you know, did I generally assume that we were gonna try and shrink the government

• 2:17:14Speaker 03

  under, under President Trump and, and get back, back on more fiscal, you know, stronger fiscal footing? Sure, and I totally support it. I, I, I mean, you know, um, would I pick different things if I was like, you know, being surgical in the budget?

• 2:17:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:29Speaker 03

  I mean, but generally, I assumed across the board, we were all gonna have to do more with less. And do I think the US government is capable of doing more with less? Absolutely. No question.

• 2:17:38Shawn Ryan?

  Would you have cut the budget?

• 2:17:40Speaker 03

  If I if I was like a total, you know, I would have been advocating for the same budget, like, keep it flat, and I will do way more and get far better results with those dollars because I will know how to allocate them more effectively and efficiently than any government employee is going to be capable of it because I've literally had to do that for a quarter of a century. Like, there's no doubt if you have if you're, you know, if you're a successful entrepreneur, you are far better at capital allocation than any government employee. I that you just had to have been because you don't if you screwed up, you don't get more. And then, you know, generally, the government, you know, will keep funding things for a while. But I wouldn't have like, unless they told

• 2:18:21Speaker 03

  me like, hey, you have to cut it by 20%, then I would have said, great, let me pick what needs to go, and I'll make sure that what the 80, you know, the 80% that we retain will be focused on the things that will truly change the world.

• 2:18:33Shawn Ryan?

  You know, you had a or have a plan for where you would have taken NASA, and so I'd like to dive into that.

• 2:18:41Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:18:42Shawn Ryan?

  What were some of the changes and stuff that you were you were planning on making when you took over?

• 2:18:47Speaker 03

  So what I, you know, I briefed the president on during my interview, and honestly, I I've handed off the whole plan to Secretary Duffy. I don't know if he'll use any of it at all. But I, you know, everything that's for the good of the country, I'm 100% for, and what work we did, that was assembled by a lot of great people, by the way, a lot of people contributed to that plan. Yeah, I wanted to make sure it went into to good hands. But step one is you got to reorganize the agency and rebuild the culture. I mean, that's just you can't do the fun stuff until you reorganize and rebuild the culture. Like, this is a total step one. We got to admit we have a problem here. 35 years and $100

• 2:19:29Speaker 03

  billion have been spent trying to get us back to the moon. And we haven't flown humans around the moon, which we did in Apollo 8, you know, 1968. We haven't even done that yet, let alone landing. So like, we got to admit that what we're doing right now is imperfect. And it's hard in a politically divided time and like, you know, you know, Elon's bad and all these things people say it's like it kind of in somehow balances out to like what we're doing must be right. No, like there can be lots of things wrong and certainly there's a lot of things wrong at NASA and not unique to NASA. It's like government wide, but we got to reorganize. You know, there's 50 different safety departments inside NASA. Doesn't mean safety isn't important, but if you have 50 people, 50 different offices

• 2:20:13Speaker 03

  that all have the ability to say no, that's not a good thing necessarily. Like safety should build up logically. So one, you know, one department has all the necessary information to make the right call. And honestly, we got to recalibrate that risk framework because like you're not going to explore the worlds beyond ours without taking some risks. This kind of trying to drive risk to zero is why telescopes that are supposed to cost a billion become $15 billion. Why, you know, missions that are supposed to take people back to the moon are taking 35 years and 100 billion. So, and we need cultures around ownership. We need accountability. We need, you know, freaking more doers and less management.

• 2:20:55Speaker 03

  Everybody inside the agency has a deputy or a vice who has a chief of staff, who has a deputy chief of staff. I mean, departments with six people in it have a chief and a deputy chief. It's just, you know, it's, it's creating a hierarchy that serves the hierarchy instead of just like, look, we need, certainly need management leadership, but we need to empower the best and brightest to get the damn mission done. So anyway, the step one is all reorganize, rebuild the culture, you know, and then you move on to the priorities. America leads in the high ground of space, you know, unlock the orbital economy and accelerate the rate of world changing discoveries. Those are the three things that NASA should be thinking about every single day.

• 2:21:35Shawn Ryan?

  How would you have done those?

• 2:21:38Speaker 03

  So in terms of America leading in the in the high ground of space with the with the investments that have already been made with SLS, return to the moon, do it as quickly as possible and determine why we need to be here. Is there any economic, scientific, or national security value of being here? If yes, then you rely on commercial industry, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, to get you to and from the moon at a frequency far greater than every couple of years, which is what the NASA four and a half billion dollar per launch disposable rocket cost. So you use SLS to get back to the moon, determine why you need to be there with any frequency, and then from there, you rely on commercial industry. So it's actually affordable and repeatable and not an every

• 2:22:22Speaker 03

  couple of years event. And then you pivot those resources. So it's about a third of NASA's budget, like call it seven billion a year, away from competing with industry on building giant rockets and start building nuclear spaceships because no one else is going to do it unless you unless it's the Russians or the Chinese. And they're in China for sure is going to do it. So build nuclear electric spaceships. It has do it's all dual use stuff. So for as much as it's good for peaceful space, believe me, it has it has defense implications with for it as well. And it's very important for getting to Mars. So that's all generally in your high ground of space. The step two, which is unlock the orbital economy, which is the space station has only so much life left in it. Use every bit of it to figure out what will actually generate more value than what we put into

• 2:23:07Speaker 03

  it in space. So, you know, go have a huge outreach effort to companies like Astroforge and Varda in the pharmaceutical space, everybody who's trying to figure out what can happen in space that generates value so that we don't have endless perpetual, you know, perpetual dependency on taxpayers. Because without it, you won't have these commercial space stations. I mean, there's like four companies right now that are building space stations. I don't even know if there should be one because you have like one customer. It's the NASA plus ESA, the European Space Agency. So I don't know what how those companies will survive if you don't figure out an orbital economy. So that's two and then three. You know, a third of NASA's budget is going into science.

• 2:23:51Speaker 03

  We need Hubble's like every year, James Webb's every year, Rover's every year. We can't be waiting five, 10 years for the next great discovery asset. Anyway.

• 2:24:02Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, so I'd like to dive in these into these a little bit more. So I mean, when it comes to the moon and sending people or machines out there or whatever your plan was, I mean, how would you determine whether we need to be there or it's time to move on?

• 2:24:17Speaker 03

  Well, I think the cost of being there is something we we got to get our arms around. Right now, the way we get to the moon is a four and a half billion dollar disposable rocket called SLS reusing 60 year old space shuttle hardware made by thousands of people. And it's a it is a huge jobs program across Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. These are the SLS states. Some people joke that it's SLS stands for the Senate Launch System. All right, great. We spent 35 years and 100 billion. Let's use what we got, get back to the moon. But that is not a way to get there frequently. That is a way to get there every three years, which is like really insane. And not only that, it introduces a whole other part called Gateway, which is a lunar

• 2:25:02Speaker 03

  gateway that we need to it's makes things even more expensive. The reason we need to do that is because our partners on SLS that are building the European Service Module doesn't have the performance to do what we need it to do. So we need to create a new space station over the moon. None of this is affordable. You know what I mean? But, um, but anyway, we leverage what we have to get back to the moon and then figure out, do we need to stay? Is it helium three? Like our, I mean, there's more of it on the moon. Not a lot of it, but there's more of it on the moon than on Earth. Is that going to be the key to, I don't know, any sort of quantum computing or or fusion power source? If so, you're going to need to stay? Well, the good news is you can't get back to the moon without either Blue Origin, SpaceX or both, because they're both building the landers.

• 2:25:46Speaker 03

  And in order to get the landers to the moon, it means they're reusable big rockets. So Starship and New Glenn work. And if that works, now you have a way to get to and from the moon affordably, repeatedly, without having to spend four and a half billion per launch. So now you've determined why you need to be there. And now you have an affordable path to go back and forth. So now you pivot the money that you were investing in that four and a half billion dollar per launch vehicle to nuclear spaceships. And that has applications for moon, Mars, low Earth orbit, and it's just a natural evolutionary step for the agency.

• 2:26:20Shawn Ryan?

  So you would have just, for lack of a better term, you would have just slashed all the the rocket programs that NASA is doing and offloaded that on to SpaceX, Blue Origin, and then had NASA specifically concentrating on on nuclear starships.

• 2:26:40Speaker 03

  For the third of the budget that is SLS, I would have used what we already have and will have over the next two years to get to the moon a couple of times, certainly get back before China, because I do think that failing to do so would be one hell of a dent in American exceptionalism. I mean, we knew nothing in the 60s and got to the moon. We paid a lot to do it, four and a half percent of our budget for a while did it. But China knew nothing about going into space at that point in time. I mean, and now for them to get back after we've said for 35 years we're going to do it is going to be a major blow. And I think the ramifications are, like, there will be congressional hearings.

• 2:27:23Speaker 03

  It will expose a lot of things that we don't do right. So we can't let that happen. So let's get it right and use the hardware that we have. And that hardware strategy has inherently a dependency on both Blue Origin and SpaceX. You can't get to the moon without one or both of them now. So when you do get to the moon, as expensive as it was, you now have one or two viable paths to get back there at far lower cost. So when that comes, you then pivot. Investing in this legacy technology into the next generation that no one else will do, except our adversaries, if we don't do them. And yes, I believe that's nuclear

• 2:28:02Speaker 03

  electric propulsion. And I also don't understand why it's so controversial. The plants in like in Mashoud in Louisiana that are building SLS and Marshall Space Flight. These guys built landing crafts in World War II. They built the Saturn V rocket. They built the space shuttle. They built SLS. Why wouldn't we be pivoting on to the next great thing? I mean, this is literally the same. This is like, it doesn't matter what happened at Pearl Harbor. I'm not taking any chances. Keep building battleships. Forget these aircraft carriers. Like, why wouldn't we? Why wouldn't we evolve our thinking when we learn new things? And we've learned a lot of new things over the last 50 years.

• 2:28:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I think a lot of people have the exact same questions. And then as far as telescopes and satellites and stuff that we're sending out for exploration, I mean, can you get a little more specific? What would, where have you, where would you be sending these? Would you have sent them all in different directions?

• 2:28:56Speaker 03

  You know, I think like, there are a couple of things broken with the science process, for one of which the prioritization of scientific missions is done every 10 years. It's called the Decadal Survey. I just don't, I mean, presumably, we would learn new things in that time period that might change or shape our thinking. So like, I just don't think that needs to be, I mean, it is a total sacred cow thing. Like, the Decadal is what drives the prioritization. All right, why don't we make it an every three year survey or something? And then the other thing I would say is, you just need to go in and there is a lot of inefficiency and bloat and outsourcing that takes place across the scientific spectrum. There's multiple mission controls. There's just lots of inefficiencies,

• 2:29:40Speaker 03

  which means we get really exciting missions less frequently. It starts probably with flagship missions definitionally being over a billion dollars. And if you're going to spend a billion dollars, then you have to get it right, which means you have to take a long time and you have to de-risk it a lot. Instead, I would be trying to shift that philosophy towards launch 10, 100 million dollar missions every year, and it's okay if three fail.

• 2:30:08Speaker 03

  Let's just increase the rate of discovery here. We don't need to do a single billion-dollar mission that inevitably becomes a five-billion-dollar mission because of all of the fear associated with getting the billion-dollar mission correct.

• 2:30:21Shawn Ryan?

  What would you like to see explored specifically?

• 2:30:24Speaker 03

  I think generally, where we're going is all correct. I'm nowhere near an expert on the scientific prioritization of our exploration missions to say that sending this here or there is wrong. Everything that the science mission directorate has briefed is good. Yeah, I want to know all those things, too. I just want to help them know those things faster and for lower cost.

• 2:30:51Shawn Ryan?

  Would you have sent anything closer to the Sun? Can we?

• 2:30:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you just had the Parker Solar Probe, kind of kissed a portion of the Sun. That was an awesome breakthrough.

• 2:31:02Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know about that.

• 2:31:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, it actually, I believe, I mean, it's one of the highest-velocity man-made objects ever, and it was only this, it was just over a Christmas timeframe. It actually recorded the sounds of the Sun and transmitted it back. It's pretty wild. But it definitely, it's the closest approach we've ever had to the Sun. Again, it's called the Parker Solar Probe. And it was actually one of the reasons I was challenging this 10-year-decadal survey process is, what if you learned something amazing from that? Wouldn't you want to just like immediately fire up, if you could, a half a billion dollars to build something else and send it right back to the Sun? Why would you want to wait 10 years for scientists to process that information potentially and determine, yeah, it's a medium priority,

• 2:31:48Speaker 03

  it's high? Like, don't we want to listen to the data constantly and make good, informed decisions from it? But yeah, I mean, I wouldn't even pretend to be anywhere near as much of an expert to weigh in on the prioritization of scientific missions. I just want to help them all do it better.

• 2:32:06Shawn Ryan?

  Who would you have put around you?

• 2:32:08Speaker 03

  So, you know, I had a number of like really great people that were that were contributing to kind of the the planning of the of the, you know, of what would have taken place if I if I was confirmed at NASA. And they're good folks from all over. You know, certainly some SpaceXers, because I honestly, they're very accomplished. They are brilliant people. And they want to repay back. I mean, you know, you spend 10 years at SpaceX, you did really well financially. I mean, that stock has gone up a lot. They're not trying to get rich. They want to they want to apply their knowledge back to an agency that inspired them. There were folks from Relativity, Blue Origin. I was bringing in people from Wall Street,

• 2:32:50Speaker 03

  from the finance world. These are specialists that go in and and help, you know, big organizations that lose their way at times. See, that's the thing, like, you know, so the best companies in the world, you know, Google, Apple, Meta, they're constantly changing. They don't make a plan 60 years ago and stick to it. They're they're listening to the world around them and information and course correcting. You know, a couple of years ago, what was it, like Meta was like $80 a share and everybody thought, you know, Zuckerberg had lost his mind with the VR goggles and and all that. And and he woke up one day and he said, you know what, I may have overdid it and pivoted, put more into AI, scaled back some of his

• 2:33:32Speaker 03

  funding here on that. And, you know, the stock's probably 10x that in the last couple of years as a result. Like, he got some of it wrong. You know, Google bought Motorola at one point in time, building phones. And they were like, oh, we got this one wrong. And they sold it at a loss. Microsoft bought Skype, you know, vastly overpaid for it. And and eventually, they shut it down, right? Like, they're just the point being is like, you don't always get it all right. So if you don't reorganize and like, do a true bottoms up build of looking at where is all the dollars going? Where are all the experts putting their time and energy? And what are we getting in return? Like, what are the KPIs? What should we care about at NASA? How about time to science? Why wait five years to learn something

• 2:34:13Speaker 03

  if we could learn it in a year and at lower cost? And like, you bring in, you know, experts who do that at large organizations that have lost their way. And it's like, you know what, I want a team of 14 of them, two at every one of the centers and Get them out there and do the analysis we would do if a Google lost their way or Meta lost their way and give me the information so we can course correct a little bit. So yeah, it wasn't just like SpaceX or just people from various backgrounds that could help refocus the agency on the true needle movers.

• 2:34:45Shawn Ryan?

  You know, we've been talking a lot about helium three has come up a couple of different times and talked about it at breakfast. You brought it up a couple of times in here. You know, I've mentioned Steve Kwas, who said that he thought that China was mining helium three off the dark side of the moon. I mean, when did helium three actually show up on everybody's radar?

• 2:35:07Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I mean, I, you know, I don't know the full history behind it, like how far it goes back and when we thought it might be a key to fusion power. But I'll tell you, there's a lot of really smart people that are champions of it. Harrison Schmidt walked on the moon, first geologist, first true scientist to walk on the moon. You know, he's in his 80s and sharp as hell and, you know, he's still studying lunar rocks and you ask him and he's like, I think helium three is going to unlock a lot of potential here on Earth. And there's certainly more of it on the moon than there is here on Earth. I don't think, I do believe, also again, and I'm not pretending to be a physicist on

• 2:35:52Speaker 03

  this, I do believe we have demonstrated that we can get more power than we put into a very brief fusion reaction using helium three as a fuel source. So anyway, that's like what we know.

• 2:36:04Shawn Ryan?

  It's the cooling process, correct?

• 2:36:06Speaker 03

  I'm definitely not taking it an inch farther than I have already, other than we need an orbital economy and helium three is probably one of the better ideas on what it could be. And that would be more or less a lunar economy. All that said, I don't think... You know, not to contradict, um, you know, Stephen, I don't think China is mining anything on it. Like China has certainly had some successful missions to the moon like they are. And honestly, if we don't course correct, they will beat us back to the moon.

• 2:36:38Speaker 03

  But I don't think we've got, you know, they're not, they haven't set up industrial operations yet on it. That doesn't mean we should like, we should try to everything we can to make sure that we don't fall behind in that. But, um, we still have time to.

• 2:36:51Shawn Ryan?

  What are some of our adversaries doing in space?

• 2:36:54Speaker 03

  I mean, the high ground has mattered, uh, you know, from the beginning of human history, you know, from a, you know, there's tactical and strategic advantages of it and they are well aware of it. So they're building out their constellation of communication satellites, earth observation satellites. They are leaning heavy into hypersonic weapons. I mean, you know, when something is in space in orbit, it's very predictable. It's like literally a railroad track. Like, once it's in orbit, you know exactly where it's going to be. Um, which makes it pretty easy to, you know, intercept, um, a lot of the satellites that are up there. China's been working on like hypersonic wave riding technology. You can put something in orbit, bring it back into the atmosphere where you've, you get, you know, where some, you know,

• 2:37:39Speaker 03

  air resistance, some aerodynamics come back in, turn, go right back up in and you've changed the inclination that object is in space. Like that's, that changes the game on certain things and they, they, they.

• 2:37:52Shawn Ryan?

  They're doing that right now?

• 2:37:53Speaker 03

  They have been doing it. Like they are, they're, they are not messing around in space. I think from like a hypersonic weapons, you know, capability, I, I would think a lot of people are not happy with the progress they've made. So they're not, um, you know, they've gone through this phase of like buying or stealing and reverse engineering and copying things. And then they started to, to reverse engineer and improve upon it like they're flankers. Um, you know, they, they call Russia up and say like, we need to buy two fighter jets and like reverse engineer it. And the next thing you know, you know, you got like a J-15, it looks just like a flanker, but they made it better. Right, but then they just started to learn from all of that and build brand new

• 2:38:37Speaker 03

  things. You know, their J20, their J35, they're showing off 6gen. This is obviously all like aircraft related, but they did, they're doing the same things in space. It's not just like their copy and paste stuff anymore and reverse engineering. They are building a lot of good capabilities out in the high ground. Yeah, I mean, when was, when was the last time we fought a war where we didn't have either air supremacy or own, you know, the domain of space with a, with a peer?

• 2:39:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, when you talk about, you know, kind of unlocking economy, what do you, what do you call it? A space?

• 2:39:13Speaker 03

  Like an orbital economy.

• 2:39:15Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, what all does that entail? We, we brought up a couple of them earlier, but I'd just like to see, what am I missing here?

• 2:39:22Speaker 03

  Well, so like what's a, what's an example of it working?

• 2:39:25Shawn Ryan?

  Internet?

• 2:39:26Speaker 03

  And honestly, it's the only, yeah, Starlink, 100%. That's the only example I can really point to where more value is being created than what's being put into something that requires space. Outside of that, like where you have real consumers paying for a fee and Starlink's making, or SpaceX is making money off it and taking those dollars around and investing in cool stuff in space, right? Without it, all these other commercial companies that are, everybody's excited about, and a lot of them are alumni from, you know, SpaceX or Blue Origin or whatnot, and they're getting VC funding, they're excited about something. Who is going to pay them for those companies to exist, to perpetuate? And it's either NASA

• 2:40:08Speaker 03

  or the DOD, and there's more companies and the budget is the same or smaller. That's not, that's not a formula for success. So if we want to see space really grow and all these commercial space companies that have created an economy here on Earth, but may not be sustainable, we need to figure out how we can unlock value from that unique environment of microgravity. And we don't have good answers for it yet.

• 2:40:32Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, there's, there's just, I mean, we have, I'll just rattle a couple off, and I want to see if you know of any that I'm missing, because one, selfishly, I'd love to interview them, because I'm always fascinated with anything in space, but I mean, We've got Starlink, you know, communications, we have SpaceX. We have Steve Kwas Company, Space Build, who wants to assemble satellites in space and other equipment. We have Astro Forge, who wants to mine metals off of asteroids. We have, shit, what's the other one? We have Baji Bots, you know, company where he wants to beam in solar energy to receivers, you know, and distribute that.

• 2:41:16Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, and then we have, you know, what we talked about earlier, just regular everyday, like, space tourism. I mean, that's, we're on the precipice of that. What am I missing?

• 2:41:31Speaker 03

  I want them all to succeed, but the simple reality is, other than what SpaceX is doing with Starlink and their launch vehicles, I don't think any of them are profitable. And actually, I would think for most of the names that you've rattled off, I don't think any, I think almost none of them have any revenue. I mean, look, Boeing is, you know, their Boeing Space Systems, every quarter loses billions of dollars, and that's like an established legacy player with real government contracts. I don't know if anyone else. Blue Origin doesn't, isn't profitable, Rocket Lab isn't profitable, they're all negative earnings. You know, the point is, is there's all these commercial companies that are all endeavoring to do something in space, and none of them have cracked the code on anything that generates value other than Starlink.

• 2:42:15Speaker 03

  It's not like me saying like winner take all, Starlink, not even close. I wanted all the work, and hopefully, as the cost to be in space comes down with Starship and New Glenn and, you know, Rocket Lab is working on a big, you know, Neuron, their big vehicle, and Stoke is working, I hope it all works out. But I'm just saying, other than Starlink, the space economy is unchanged for 60 years. It's launch, observation, and communication, and almost entirely paid for by world governments. That's not good.

• 2:42:45Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, don't you think, I mean, don't they have to, I mean, when I talk to these guys, it seems like a lot of the problem is the red tape. And, and, you know, I mean, I can't remember, a lot of these guys are launching, you know, within the next couple of years, I think, uh, 2027, 2026, I mean, is when we're gonna see like the first landing on an asteroid, and I could be off by a couple of years, but it all sounded relatively, um,

• 2:43:15Shawn Ryan?

  soon, you know, Banji Bots, Solar, you know, is him beating Solar and he's a couple of years out from a test of that, according to him.

• 2:43:25Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, is that why they, I mean, how could they be profitable? It's gonna take a lot of innovation and getting through red tape to actually get up there.

• 2:43:34Speaker 03

  I think, I mean, look, it's, look, you've got SpaceX, Rocket Lab, ULA, um, you know, Blue Origin soon, um, you got Firefly, there's plenty of launch providers. You can launch something in space. Shockingly, there's almost no red tape. It's actually one of the problems.

• 2:43:51Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 2:43:52Speaker 03

  Is that, um, like, don't get me wrong, we wanna start talking nuclear, there's red tape.

• 2:43:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:56Speaker 03

  You wanna launch nuclear reactors, there's red tape. Um, but, uh, in terms of just general commercial space, they all basically get a free pass to do what they want. It's called a learning period. And it, and basically, you know, Congress actually got this right of giving commercial industry time to figure out what the economy is. Um, look, you have to get a, uh, an FAA launch license to launch a rocket. If that, there is no one who inspects the integrity of the rocket. No one signs that off. So you wanna talk about no regulation? So if that rocket gets up into orbit and then blows up and showers low Earth orbit with debris that takes out other satellites and whatnot, there's no one who inspected that or signed off on it. At some point, there will be.

• 2:44:37Speaker 03

  So in a lot of areas, commercial industry to figure this all out has a lot of latitude. I think, look, what's holding it back is that the revenue model is highly dependent on either DoD or NASA, and there's only so much money to go around. I think I said before, there's four different companies trying to build space stations. There are two in existence, the Chinese and the International Space Station, and neither one of them make money. Why are there four companies trying to build space stations? I hope that we need four companies to build space stations someday. I'd like nothing more than to see lots of space stations up there. There's no economy for it. There's no one that needs to have lots of people in lab coats up there figuring cancer drugs out. I hope there is at some point in time or another.

• 2:45:22Speaker 03

  So, look, I think the part of the problem is that there isn't a revenue model that actually underwrites a lot of these businesses. Do I believe at some point it's inevitable we will mine asteroids? Totally. It's like one of the sure things that will happen. And as the cost comes down to launch things out to mine asteroids, it will become more and more of a reality. I can believe in that. Will it be less expensive to capture solar power in space and beam it back to Earth versus just covering large portions of the Nevada desert with solar panels? I think the latter's cheaper, but maybe it'll happen. But whatever it is, we got to figure out a way to drive revenue from space in excess of what goes into it, and it has to come from more than the government, or we're not going to have that future in space we all want.

• 2:46:07Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have ideas on how we do that?

• 2:46:09Speaker 03

  Nope. I mean, I was spending a lot of time. It was my number-two priority if I was confirmed at NASA. I think it all starts with very inexpensive launch. So Starship, New Glenn, Stoke, Firefly, Rocket Lab. Make it cheap to experiment in space, and the more we experiment, that's how you go from the 1980s car phone to the 13-year-olds with Meta and DoorDash and Uber on your phones that you never could have imagined 30 years ago.

• 2:46:40Shawn Ryan?

  Have you invested in any of these companies personally?

• 2:46:43Speaker 03

  I was briefly invested in SpaceX, but divested as part of the NASA process, so I have no equity interest in any of them. I wish them all incredibly well. You can't not love space and not want to see them all succeed.

• 2:46:58Shawn Ryan?

  Is Russia a player?

• 2:47:00Speaker 03

  Not really anymore, or as much.

• 2:47:03Shawn Ryan?

  What about India?

• 2:47:05Speaker 03

  A emerging player, you know, they're just getting going. I mean, reality is, anyone in the launch business, if you have to throw away your rocket, SpaceX can eat you alive. Like, they can use the same rocket 25, 30 times and they're about to do it with a starship. New Glenn is gonna get there. I'm sure Rocket Lab and Stoke will get there too, and Firefly. Russia's not a... I mean, I'd be... I mean, in a combat context, like, they can brute force and throw a lot of stuff up there and create a lot of problems. So I think that's more of a DOD consideration. But in terms of just, like, broad capabilities to wow us from peaceful space, military space, and whatever blurs the line between the two, it's China.

• 2:47:47Speaker 03

  China's the threat. They will be the ones that will... that will cause issues.

• 2:47:52Shawn Ryan?

  Are they ahead of us?

• 2:47:54Speaker 03

  No. Honestly, thanks SpaceX. I'm not trying to make it a SpaceX love story, but they've been landing rockets on ships for 10 years now and no one else has done it once. So SpaceX gave us reusability because they saw opportunity to break the monopoly that was ULA. I mean, all of... basically, US launches was, up until SpaceX, was a monopoly, a government-sanctioned monopoly, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed called United Launch Alliance. And they charged, like, half a billion a launch, and SpaceX was like, "This seems like something I could disrupt," not to mention, they have a great vision. So, we launch more orbital-class rockets every year, you know, largely thanks

• 2:48:35Speaker 03

  to reusability. The country that launches the second most without any of that tech is China. And they're not, like, too far behind. So, they will be the next country to unlock reusability. Like, they will make something that looks like a Falcon and a starship, inevitably.

• 2:48:53Shawn Ryan?

  Is there anything that they're doing that... That we're not doing that you find innovative that you know about?

• 2:48:59Speaker 03

  Yes, and it's not just limited to space. I think they are literally sitting back and saying, "What are the absolute coolest world-changing projects across all technology domains? And assign somebody to it and resource it and make it happen." I mean, they went from literally like coal-fed locomotives 25 years ago. Now they have 25,000 miles of high-speed rail across the country. They're like, "Build a fusion research center. Build the largest telescope in the world. That sounds like a good idea. Build the biggest dams. Send some people to the moon. Put nuclear reactors in space because we're going to want that kind of power generation

• 2:49:41Speaker 03

  from a propulsion or laser perspective. Build an aircraft carrier." They're literally going across the board. AI. Figure out how to do AI on the cheap. We don't have the big hyperscalers like we do in the US. Figure out a way to get comparable on it. Quantum computing. Like, they take on all of the most interesting projects. They're not going to win at all of them. Like, I'm not trying to say like, "US is going to lose, America, you know, America's going to lose, China's going to win on everything." No, there are areas that we will have some advantages in, but they are taking on big, bold, world-changing projects, like we used to do during the Manhattan Project and the space program. And they're going to, they're going to get wins. Like, they're going to, they're going to definitely, you know, they're going to get some wins.

• 2:50:30Shawn Ryan?

  What should I be asking you that I'm not?

• 2:50:33Speaker 03

  All your questions are really good, eh?

• 2:50:37Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a quick break.

• 2:50:41Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:51:26Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. All right, Jared, we're back from the break. I wanted to talk about kind of the history of the space program, you know, is from a global aspect and, you know, you were talking at breakfast about how you kind of looked up to some of the cosmonauts and so I'd like you to just go into that a little bit.

• 2:52:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, all the astronauts, the cosmonauts of the space race, the engineers, the operators, the mission controllers, like, I mean, they started with zero. I mean, they really were breaking down the door on a whole new frontier and, I mean, they knew nothing compared to what we know today, which is still not a lot. I mean, they didn't have, you know, supercomputers, any of like, you know, their, our iPhones are more powerful than the, you know, the, the computers they had on Apollo spacecraft. So it's just, it's just they were starting in, you know, um, they were just beginning this great adventure and they were taking, you know, a lot of risks, um, but they were risks worth taking. Um, they're just all pioneers and I admired that.

• 2:52:45Speaker 03

  So, I mean, just again, you know, the, the, the mission, the people in mission control, like the flight directors, like Gene Krantz, you know, I mean, you know, he had to write the rules for how we conduct operations in space and keep people safe. And then when things go wrong, to bring them home safely, like on Apollo 13. So anyway, I admire them all. I think, you know, the, the Soviet cosmonauts, um, but they took even grander risks. You know, we're talking over breakfast. I mean, Yuri Gagarin, like, so the first two American astronauts that went into space, Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, it was, they were suborbital flights, you know, like not too dissimilar to the Blue Origin flights now, like what goes up must come down. They weren't, they were in space for a matter of minutes.

• 2:53:30Speaker 03

  The first, uh, you know, the first person to go into space ever, a Soviet cosmonaut, it was orbital. I mean, it was what goes up. May stay up the whole damn time, you know, may not come back. Um, so Yuri Gagarin, I mean, he went right to orbit. It wasn't until our third astronaut mission, when John Glenn went up, that we sent someone into orbit. And then when he re-entered, I mean, you know, you're just, you're a meteor, you know, crashing through the atmosphere, surrounded by a fireball. And when he came through all that, he didn't land in a spacecraft, he ejected.

• 2:54:06Shawn Ryan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:54:07Speaker 03

  He had to eject out of that thing. And it wasn't just him, it was a lot of other cosmonauts thereafter. And they didn't tell anyone that. You know, they were, they had to land under parachute, uh, under their own parachute and the spacecraft just smashed into earth. Wild times, man.

• 2:54:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, well, can you talk about Sputnik?

• 2:54:28Speaker 03

  Sure. I mean, that was, um, I mean, they call it a Sputnik moment for a reason, right? Um, you know, Eisenhower wasn't, uh, super big into space. Um, you know, I think he, he was on the other side of a debate that still rages on now of couldn't that money be spent elsewhere? Um, you know, obviously funded certain things to give us our, you know, early ballistic missile programs and such. Um, but I mean, at some point or another, and he, by the way, was, I don't know if dismissive is the right word. I mean, I try and be reasonably studied on, on early space history, but at least publicly, he was very much downplaying Sputnik too.

• 2:55:09Speaker 03

  It was a lot of others, um, you know, that were concerned and said, hey, wait a second here. You know, if this was a, if this was a Soviet bomber that was flying over us right now, we'd all be pretty pissed off. But because it's a little bit higher than that, because we can't really see it, we should be okay with it. And if they can put this, this, you know, tiny radio beacon of a satellite above us, what else can they put above us? Could they put a nuclear weapon above us? Like, it was a very unsettling moment because we knew, we overlooked something and we were behind. And then when we tried to catch up, you know, the first satellites we tried to put up, well, first, they were very small in comparison to what the Soviets put up.

• 2:55:53Speaker 03

  So that told us already that we had a, we were at a disadvantage from like a heavy lift capability. They could put something big in space. We were going to put something like the size of a grapefruit in space and it didn't work. Our first attempts all blew up on pad. It was not, it was not pleasant. So it was a wake up call, right? And when we, you know, kind of, you know, rallied our resources and focused it on something extraordinary, we did it. Um, yeah, I mean, sometimes I guess, you know, look, competition is a good thing. You just don't want to lose and Sputnik set off a great space race and in the end we didn't lose. Um, but the story doesn't end there.

• 2:56:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Do you think it's going to take another Sputnik moment to get our asses in gear here?

• 2:56:43Speaker 03

  You know, when I was at Draken, and again, our job was to, to be the bad guy and I watched as years went by and what we were replicating or attempting to replicate in terms of the Chinese threat was getting better and better and better and it was getting scary. And we would sit around, I mean, this is like seven, eight years ago, long before I went to space, you know, and you're at the bar talking, you're like, this is going to be a problem, right, guys? And it's like, I remember saying, and it was probably a handful of beers deep in the conversation, I was like, you know what? They're going to get back to the moon before us and it's going to be a wake up call and they're going to have congressional hearings and we are going to, all these things that we allowed to happen, you know, the over consolidation in the defense industry that

• 2:57:26Speaker 03

  has killed innovation, that makes things cost way too much for the warfighters and come too little, too late, like, like it's going to fix all of that. And I was, you know, I wouldn't, as an American, I don't want to see that happen. I care about the competitiveness in the nation, but I was like, maybe that's what it's going to take. Until I got nominated to lead NASA and I was like, hell no, like, we're not going to let that happen. But, I mean, there's a chance it could. And if it does, um, you know, maybe it'll be the, you know, maybe it'll be the wake up call we need, I don't know.

• 2:57:54Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe, maybe Draken's getting ready to move into red cell space, uh, space operations.

• 2:58:03Speaker 03

  There are space aggressors.

• 2:58:04Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe, maybe you'll be the guy that shows us, hey, here you go. What are you going to do? Luckily, it's just me and I'm a friend.

• 2:58:12Shawn Ryan?

  Bud, well Jared, last question. If you were to get renominated to head NASA and be the administrator, would you take it?

• 2:58:22Speaker 03

  In a heartbeat. In a heartbeat. I mean, like I, I have no, I didn't, I didn't take any of it personally. There's no hard feelings. I, I care about the competitiveness of the nation. I think there's a lot of great people that could lead NASA, but if I had the opportunity, I would absolutely step up and want to contribute.

• 2:58:39Shawn Ryan?

  Well, maybe that'll happen. I hope it does. But, well Jared, I love that about you, man. You're not taking anything personally and, and you know, you have the attitude of, I just want to win. I don't really care who's in there. And I think we need a lot more of that in this country. So, thank you for being who you are and, and thank you for coming in today. And like I said, it was an honored interview.

• 2:59:03Speaker 03

  Hey, the honor is mine, really. It's a, it's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much.

• 2:59:08Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.