This podcast is brought to you by the Albany Public Library main branch and the generosity of listeners like you. What is a podcast? God daddy these people talk as much as you do! Razib Khan's unsupervised learning.
Hey everybody, I'm here right now with that Eric Berger of Ars Technica. Eric, could you introduce yourself?
Sure. Hi, Razib. My name is Eric Berger. I'm a longtime journalist. I was with the Houston Chronicle for a long time. And for the last six years have covered space for a website called Ars Technica. He also recently wrote a book about SpaceX, basically the origins of SpaceX called "Liftoff". Because if you want to really understand how the space industry has changed over the last 15 or 20 years, you have to understand SpaceX.
Yeah. So you know, "Liftoff". I think it came out in the spring, right? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, it's interesting to me that you, you wrote a book about the early days of SpaceX, and I feel like within the last like five years, Elon, so Elon Musk is obviously a technologist, he was, you know, associated with the PayPal, mafia, all that stuff. And then he did SpaceX and Tesla. And so he's one of these Silicon Valley, guys. But over the last five years, I feel like he's a cultural figure almost. And it's just kind of weird, because it's like he's transcended his nerd fame to just generic fame. And did you did you ever feel a little weird about like, coming out with a book that's like, focused on, like, his technology, like space, and like, just some serious stuff? And then he's also known for just getting high on Joe Rogan, too? I mean, like, you know, I mean, how was that?
It was an interesting experience. So I went to Elon, a couple of years ago. And I said, look, I think, you know, the story of the Falcon 1 rocket, which was their first rocket, really isn't very well known. But if you go back and understand that you understand why SpaceX was successful, where a lot of other companies weren't. And so he said, Okay, yeah, you should write that book. And he basically said, he would talk to me, and then gave the green light to everyone else at SpaceX and former employees to talk to me. So he had no editorial control. But basically, sort of the book had his imprimatur of this, this would be a good telling of our story. And so you asked about the cultural icon thing and, and, and, yeah, like, one of the things I did for the book is, I flew with him and three of his sons, the triplets, from LA to Brownsville, Texas, to the starship site, on his jet. And so I'm sitting there waiting for him to get there at this airport in LA. And he drives up in his Tesla, with his three boys and their dog, a havanese, and they get out and come on the plane. And then it was really interesting, because, you know, obviously, Elon, in some respects is larger than life. But, you know, you got to see him also is like dad, right, and playing iPhone games with his kids, showing them the Rockets in South Texas. And so, you know, he is on one hand sort of this larger than life cultural figure, you say, but he's also a giant nerd. And he's also like a dad. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. So I mean, and so this is obviously I mean, the title like "Elon Musk in the desperate early days that launch SpaceX," so it's obviously focused on this early period for the person. So the reason I brought that up is a lot of people will know about so I mean, I think this is strange to say, but I think a lot of people know about SpaceX through Elon Musk, as opposed to cuz I think I heard about SpaceX first because I do like read some of the space literature and I kind of vaguely was aware of Musk but I didn't know him too well, like this was back in the day, but a lot of people today will come to SpaceX, through Elon Musk. So in terms of the early days, can you talk about the origins of SpaceX? Why they managed to do this thing, which I'm gonna be frank, I thought it was audacious. I thought it was incredible, but I thought they were gonna fail.
Everyone thought they were gonna fail. Because it was it at the time, no private company ever built an orbital rocket like this, especially with just a couple 100 people and starting with $100 million. So, what's interesting if you go right back to the beginning, from the very earliest days of SpaceX, when Elon would hire people, he would tell them whose vision was to settle Mars with humans. And it's what I think makes one of the many things that makes the company different is they've never really moved off of that vision. You know, 20 years later, they've gone from David to Goliath. But it's still very much an upstart mentality at SpaceX and the goal still is is very much to build large reusable rockets that you could use to send humans and all this stuff they need to survive on Mars. And that that's the founders mentality. You sit with so many companies where they start out with these grand visions and plans and then they grow and they get bigger and SpaceX now has almost 10,000 employees, and they lose that mentality. But at the core of it, it's still Elon and his goals and sort of him pushing forward every day.
So basically, you're saying the difference? You know, it's Elon Musk, right? His singular vision, like his personality. He's not he's not - I mean, is he? I mean, he's, he's one of the richest people in the world. But would you say he's in it to be one of the richest people in the world or actually get to Mars? I mean, like, stylized fact, right?
Yeah, he's in it to get to Mars. He's living in a $50,000 house in Brownsville to be near the launch site and it's not it's not glamorous down there. I've been down there several times Yeah. But you know, the money is nice because it helps him enable his visions, but that's not that's not what's driving him forward, as best I can tell. Yeah, cuz - In a differentiation between SpaceX and these other companies is Elon, but he also did either A got lucky or B did a really good job or maybe both of hiring these early people. And the book is as much about them as it is Elon, because it tells sort of all the travails that they went through to try to get that first rocket to orbit.
yeah, well, why don't why don't you talk about some of the principles real quick, so that just, you know, listeners get familiar with kind of like a dramatis personae. And, you know, Elon does suck up all the oxygen, let's be honest, you know?
Yeah for sure. So I mean, it there's about a dozen people who I profile, but there's of course Gwynne Shotwell. She's the president the company. And you know, where's Elon is kind of this nerdy, brash guy who alienates a lot of people, she's very smooth, and everyone in the industry sort of loves Gwynne Shotwell. But she is very much simpatico with him in terms of like, wanting to charge forward and change the industry. And then another key figure was, was a guy named Tom Mueller, who basically built their first rocket engine, the Merlin engine, and that was critical, that's the most important part of the rocket. You had you had people like Tim Buzza, and Hans Koeningsmann and, and Chinnery all these other people who sort of were there really early on, you know, making a difference. And they Razib they were originally going to launch from north of LA, a few up few hours from the factory. And because of this red tape, and having to wait for other companies, they essentially couldn't launch from there. And so like, on a dime, they stopped building that launch site and pivoted, you know, 4000 miles away to Kwajalein Atoll in the - in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. That... to launch from there, the logistics of it, I mean, just just take one commodity, you know, you need lots of liquid oxygen to launch a rocket for an oxidizer. Yeah. And you can't get liquid oxygen in Hawaii, and you can't get it in Kwajalein. So you had to ship it from LA. And so, you know, imagine trying to ship this commodity, hundreds of degrees below freezing across the tropical ocean. So that's one of the many, many challenges they faced.
What me so it sounds like, you know, they say it personnel is, you know, some people they, you know, these like billionaires, you know, Masters of the Universe, you know, who you hire really, really matters. So Elon Musk obviously has a vision, and he does have a technical background. So he's a smart guy. But there's a lot of people with those. I mean, do you think he has some sense for I mean, I've heard that he's suspected or said he's perhaps autistic or Asperger's or whatever. But I mean, the people he brought around him, were pretty awesome. Like for someone that supposedly maybe a little odd socially.
So he's on the spectrum. He I think he he's admitted that he said, so on Saturday Night Live, so I don't think I don't think that's any secret. He, he has, he has many faults, right? He's extremely demanding. When he feels like he's been done wrong. He gets upset if someone screws up, you know, he'll go after them. And, and so, yeah, but I think what the most impressive thing to me about Elon, and I think the reason why he's been so successful, is he has more drive in him than I've ever seen in anyone. He's, he's exhausting to be around - for me, at least - because he's constantly pushing forward. Never sort of content with the status quo always wants to find a better way of doing something a faster way of doing something, a cheaper way of doing something. And he's got these. I mean, his two biggest goals are to settle Mars, right? And to move humanity off of fossil fuels, right? That's a lot to take on. And so he feels like he's got a finite amount of time. And so he's never sort of stopped pushing forward. And that to me is sort of the secret His success is that he's just got this drive that never really sleeps.
Well, I mean, so, you know, it's Musk, it's the people around him, you know, it's this new industry that he created. But, uh, you know, the US government put some money into it right with some contracts and, and a little bit of support there. And so, um, do you think this could only have been done in America?
I think that's fair. Because, you know, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, there were no other countries out there that really had a commercial space industry, or were trying to nurture it. And as far back as 2005, NASA recognized that and started this program to say, well, maybe, you know, one day the space shuttle is going to retire, and they can get food and you know, supplies, scientific experiments, to the International Space Station, maybe they can do that. And then once they did that, they're like, okay, maybe they can take humans up there. And so those contracts, both for the cargo and then the crew are absolutely essential to SpaceX, without one of them, they would have died for sure. And maybe maybe without another one. And so NASA has been hugely supportive. And now recently, the Department of Defense has as well. And I'll tell you what's interesting, just today, I saw that China, China has a brand new space station Tiangong in low Earth orbit, and it's smaller the International Space Station, but it's similar in other respects, they've just announced that they're going to have a commercial cargo program in China to help stimulate their commercial space industry.
Okay, so um, you know, America might be the trendsetter, but that doesn't mean that it's going to end with us.
Well, let's interesting like it, you look at the Chinese commercial space industry, and it is certainly the second most vibrant in the world behind the United States. But a lot of the companies right now, over there are just trying to copy what SpaceX has already done. They're not really innovating further. And so I think for quite a while the Chinese companies are going to be behind the US industry, because it's not just SpaceX anymore. There are other companies out there, they're doing pretty innovative things as well.
What's the, you know, you know, you talked about the early days and the Falcon 1. And, you know, some of the stuff that went on there. I do have to say, sometimes I watch some of their landings, and I think one of the one that, like, landed in multiple stages. I thought I was watching a science fiction movie, it was really strange. Like how other people told you that, like, it's just like, it's like, you don't understand what you're seeing. Like, it's just so weird. Like, I'm not the only one, right?
No, no, no. So I was, um, I'm 48 years old and always like, felt like I had missed out because I was born just after the last lunar landing. I was like, I missed Apollo. That was like the greatest. And that's I felt that way, right up until April of 2016. When the first rocket, the first Falcon 9 rocket landed on a drone ship. Like in the middle of the oceans, his rocket had gone to space. Yeah, entirely, autonomously came back landed on an autonomous robot ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And I was like, holy sheesh, holy shit. That's the future like, like, they. I had never seen anything like that in my life. And for the first time, I like no longer regretted Apollo. And then a couple years later, you know, you're referencing the side by side, Boucher landing for the Falcon Heavy in 2018. Yeah, again, that just felt like that felt like the future had arrived. Yeah. And now there's built now SpaceX is building this starship vehicle in South Texas, which is this huge rocket, it would be fully reusable. If it works, it'll be amazing. And again, that that feels like starship feels like the first sci fi spacecraft like something right out of the pages of a science fiction novel come to life. And I think that's the excitement around the company.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just, um, I think, you know, ever since Apollo, I think we've kind of been in. I mean, to be honest, even regression, in some ways with the retirement of the space shuttle. So, you know, you obviously wrote a book about SpaceX and Musk in the early days there. But I want to ask you now about what's going on with SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, like, you know, what's your evaluation of the landscape right now? It seems like, you know, they're competing, it seems like Virgin is kind of having some problems, actually. And, you know, Blue Origin, obviously, you know, Bezos went up and all that stuff. So, I mean, what's your evaluation of the landscape? Obviously, I think SpaceX is ahead right now, quote, unquote, but, you know, Bezos has a lot of money.
So SpaceX is way ahead of the other two companies. I think you have to think about it in two different regimes. So first of all, there's suborbital spaceflight, and that's like Alan Shepards. The Mercury flight, you go up, you come back down, it's over in 10 or 15 minutes. And that's what Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are doing with these space trips that they're doing that they're selling for 100s of 1000s of dollars and blue origins case right now millions of dollars. And that is a market for rich people and that will serve a niche but that really doesn't advance the ball game because the real The future is an orbital spaceflight right you know, if you want to go to the moon, you want to go to Mars, you want to build habitats, you know around the moon or are in low Earth orbit, you have to go to space. And Virgin Galactic has no plan to ever do that. They're much more focused on point to point transportation or or, you know, sort of these, you know, suborbital space trip. Blue Origin, is building a large reusable rocket, but their technology is probably about a decade behind where SpaceX is and, and in a matter of fact, Blue Origin is now older than SpaceX is more than 20 years old, and they've never actually reached orbit and may not for a few more years.
Well, I mean, why? is the difference just a Musk because obviously Bezos was focused on other things. And you know, he has a lot of money, but you know,
It's complicated, but I think one fact is that Elon is more driven than Jeff Bezos, when it comes to space. There's no question that over the last five years, Elon has been much more heavily involved in SpaceX than Jeff Bezos has been in Blue Origin and Bezos has a lot on his plate, okay. You know, he's got he was trying to get out of Amazon. He has the Washington Post, he had the thing with the Saudis. So I mean, he's, he's dealing with a lot of things. But Elon is too, right. He's got Tesla, and SpaceX and the Boring Company and all this other stuff going on in his life. But Elon has been much more heavily invested in SpaceX in terms of his time and effort. And, and SpaceX is much more scrappy, to Blue Origin, like they have to get contracts to survive. And they've been that way for a long time. And I think one of the things that we see in the space industry is if someone comes along and has a lot of money, then that company is not driven or does not move as quickly because they don't feel the pressure. Whereas it SpaceX, especially in the early years, but even today, like they move ahead, when they went to NASA contractor, they went commercial contracts, they went military launch contracts, like that's how they grow. Whereas at Blue Origin for years, you've just been able to count on Jeff Bezos writing you a billion dollar check every year, and you kind of continue on. And so it's really like the intensity of effort, I think is reflected in that. And the fact that you need to win contracts to eat.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that makes sense. I mean, that's how capitalism works, right? You need to make money and you need to like, you react to incentives. So you know, you're talking about, I mean, Blue Origin sounds, frankly, a little bit more like a bureaucracy, kind of like an old corporate bureaucracy. So let's talk about an old corporate old bureaucracy. It's like, what NASA what's going on with NASA? Like I don't, I feel like I'm in some ways. space. I mean, I don't think SpaceX - SpaceX wouldn't exist without, with without NASA. Right? And that's like contracts and other things, and also the technology and all that stuff. Right. And there are people from NASA, you know, who've gone to SpaceX - I mean, I know people personally. So I'm not discounting NASA here. On the other hand, I feel like in the 21st century, not... the oxygen has gone out of NASA, like, I don't hear about NASA very much. I mean, is that just me? Or is it? I mean, you cover space as a journalist, and so you have like, a certain amount of bandwidth? And do you think SpaceX has just like swallowed that bandwidth? I mean, I don't know.
Um, SpaceX is, is easily the most interesting company and entity in spaceflight in the space industry today. And that's above all space agencies. However, NASA is still very important. The way you gotta think about NASA. So you know, we talked about the Apollo program, and that was like the height of the space agency, like they had this clear goal. They had the funding, and they by God, they achieved it, right, they met the deadline. But, you know, that was a geopolitical goal. Like in the 1970s. There was no real purpose for NASA. I mean, you know, no, overriding, it wasn't in the strategic national interest, the United States, really, so the budget, you know, fell off the cliff. And so they came up with the space shuttle program to live within the budget. And they've just kind of been percolating along. And as they've done that, for 50 years, it's become a government bureaucracy. And what does a government bureaucracy do? It tries to protect its own funding, increase federal funding. And so it's just it's, it's, you know, it's got 10 field centers across the United States, they're all competing with one another. It's got layers of management. And so it's just really hard, really hard for NASA to get things done. To their credit, especially over the last five years, they've really recognized the rise of commercial space. And with contracts, to not just SpaceX, but a lot of other companies as well. They have really tried to lean into this effort. So before about 2012. The vast majority of contracts that NASA let were so called cost plus, where you give someone contract, and then you pay them, whatever their expenses are plus a fee and that leads to overruns and delays and more recently they started trying to move to fixed price contracts, where you give them they will give you $2 billion to build this spacecraft. And if it costs you more than that tough, right? You know, of course, you're less than that you keep the profit. And so NASA has really leaned into this commercial space effort. Now it's been held up because Congress, which, you know, sort of helps feed into that bureaucracy because Joe Congressman in Utah wants to make sure that Northrop Grumman gets a contract for, you know, Promontory, Utah for their test facilities there and, and someone in Washington State wants to protect interest there. And so they're not really concerned about the big picture goals of NASA. And so it's just it's very difficult for NASA to get things done, I think they've done a reasonably good job of move around that.
Well, so, you know, back Back in the day, I remember people, you know, let's say before SpaceX, or like early days of SpaceX, a lot of people in science, were saying manned spaceflight is a waste, etc, etc. You know, the International Space Station is just kind of a boondoggle that's there for marketing and optics. And like, unmanned is the way to go. And there was like, the recent mission, you know, you know, obviously, that swung by Pluto, that was a big deal. What are the unmanned missions that NASA is - because like, honestly, like, I just have not been keeping track of this. What are the unmanned missions that NASA is focusing on right now? Because I think that's something that, you know, it can do that obviously, SpaceX is not doing.
So I'm happy to talk to you to have that debate about human spaceflight, because I think there's only really one reason why we should send people in the space ultimately. But to answer your question about sort of these robotic missions of interest, probably the most exciting one is launching in 2024. It's actually a mission to Europa, which is one of Jupiter's moons, and Europa. Europa is covered in ice. But the shell is probably only about 10 kilometers thick. And then beneath that scientists are pretty sure that there's the largest ocean in the solar system, larger than there's more ocean on Europa, more water on Europa than there is on earth. And so, you know, they believe there's these smokers at the bottom of that ocean. So because there's internal heating on on, on Europa, due to tidal forces from Jupiter. So the thinking is, there could well be some form of life.
And those Yeah, I mean, I've read, I've read, you know, I read Arthur C. Clarke. And I don't know, like, have they gone through the IRB, cuz like, I don't want to get the Europans mad at us you know?
We're not gonna land there with this mission. So it's okay, so fly by. Right, it's gonna make about 40 fly bys. But so the Europa Clipper is one that's very exciting. There's another mission that's about to launch to Lucy. And there's another mission, which is a bunch of going to go fly by a bunch of Trojan asteroids. And there's a Psyche Mission, which has a rad name, but it's going to go to a metallic asteroid. Okay, we have no idea what that's like. But if we're going to have a future of asteroid mining, we really need to understand what these metal rich asteroids are like and what they actually contain.
Yeah, I want to ask you about mining but Okay, so let me Let me loop back human manned spaceflight, like, like, make the pitch or, like, explain what's going on here. Because, you know,
Well Razib - like, What if you were to find a justification for spending 10 or 100 times more to send a human mission to Mars, as opposed to a robotic mission? What would it be? Could you come up with anything?
You know, I do buy the idea, that existential risk on earth of like something happening where civilization collapses, like I accept that. A secondary issue is also because we're an insane species. You know, I'm a, I'm a do evolutionary genetics. And I can tell you, we made it to the new world, we made it to Australia, like that is we're the first we're - I mean, there, except for mice and bats, there were no placental mammals in Australia, right? So we're obviously crazy. We do we do crazy things. And so I think it's almost like the art of it, to me would also be a separate justification aside from the, you know, existential risk and colonization,
Right. So for a long time, NASA's justification has been, we can do better science with humans on Mars. But if you look at the cost benefit analysis, it just doesn't make sense to send people to Mars for science, because you can afford many robots to do many different things. You don't have to worry about planetary protection. If you're worried about that. You know, the only really valid reason I can think of for human spaceflight, ultimately, to other worlds is settlement, you raise that you like, existential threat, and that's what Musk talks about a lot. But if you believe the destiny of humans is to spread out into the galaxy, you have to start somewhere. So you have to start in our solar system. And Mars is not a great place, but it's the sort of the best option. And so I think that the settlement of the solar system is probably not going to be led by space agencies, because they're not interested in that, like NASA is just not interested in that. But, you know, certainly SpaceX is certainly there are other reasons to do it. So So settlement would be the one reason Why. And so I don't think it's for exploration, I think it's for settlement.
Yeah, I'm a little worried that Elon's 30 sons are going to produce a genetically homogeneous homogenous colony, like when they get to Mars.
I mean, let's face it, the first people that go, I mean, you're going to run into all kinds of messy issues on the surface of Mars, these are not going to be NASA astronauts who have been carefully selected. I mean, their astronauts are wonderful people, but they're humans too. And so, you know, when you get beyond the cradle of Earth, like, you know, and when you're like, months away, psychologically, like, you're not going to be listening to Mission Control anymore. It's going to be your show. It's gonna be a weird, weird thing. For sure.
What So, you know, I've said to friends before, just like my own, you know, uninformed impression is if we're gonna get to Mars, I, I'm assuming it'll be, or at least in the next, like, 10-15 years? I don't know. It'll be SpaceX or it'll be China, like, what do you think about that assertion?
I think that's right. I think I think getting to Mars anytime in the 2030s would be a remarkable Herculean achievement. I don't think so I think there's two scenarios. Scenario one is like SpaceX leads the way and NASA provides some support. I think the other scenario is that we - geopolitically things get so messed up here on Earth, that we decide like, as a species that we need to do something together. And so you get this, US Chinese, Russian, European Indian mission to Mars, and sort of they all work together to make it happen. And they probably buy SpaceX launch vehicles, let's be honest, but it's like an international effort, like Apollo was a US thing geopolitically to prove our superiority. And maybe Mars is to prove that like we can collaborate, like as a species to go to another planet. But China is not going to be able to do it individually, at all, anytime soon, I think there will have a chance to reach the moon for about a decade from now, but Mars is so much more difficult than going to the moon.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know off the top of my head, my head, how much farther is Mars than the moon?
Well, it's probably best to think about it in travel time. And so the moon is three days, three days away. And if you have an emergency, you can get your spacecraft to be back in three days. You know, you can, you can poop in bags, you can survive for without food for three days, whatever. If you're going to Mars and the toilet breaks, you die. It's a six month journey there. Right and then if you come right back, it's about six or seven months, but But typically, you'd want to stay maybe a year and a half and then come back. And that would be about a six month journey back. And it's just, you know, if you go to Mars, you need a large spacecraft. You need power propulsion, ie power on the surface of Mars, which we don't have right now. You need some kind of habitat, you need to figure out food, water, you know, clothing. And then you need to figure out how to safely ensure you can launch a rocket from the surface of Mars to get back to Mars orbit to come back to Earth. And so yeah, it's just so many challenges and so much risk. I - it's hard for me to see NASA taking that risk on its own just because what's it gonna be a 50% chance those people make it back safely? I don't, It's not gonna be that high.
Yeah, I mean, it feels like what you're describing is Europeans leaving for foreign lands in the 1400s and 1500s in the little caravels. And, I mean, how many people came back ... Magellan didn't come back. It was like maybe like, 10%, or something of the crew that survived?
I mean, like, yeah, I mean, you look at our greatest explorers, and many of them died while out while exploring, you know, during the Age of Discovery. And so I think there will be sort of the first people to Mars will be assuming enough risk that it probably will be a private led mission, because NASA is not going to want to put it's stamp - stamp on that. And it's just it's become so risk averse. That it's just hard to see them accepting a mission where like, there's like a greater than 20% chance that Yeah, the crew dies.
Well, I, you know, I think in the United States in particular, you know, we, when it comes to SpaceX and Elon, there's some polarization some negativity towards him because of his personality. His brashness. I also think there's something where a lot of people and I'm not you know, I'll put my cards on the table. I'm not one of those people who think oh, well, space is a waste of time. It's not practical, we should invest in I don't know eradicating malaria all of these usual things right. Okay, so that's the United States as a as a guy, you know, who's covering the space beat How do you think the people in other countries so um, you know, let's go back to China like I mean, how did the Chinese feel because I The reason why I said China's, I think technologically you make a good point, like they don't have the technology, but I do feel like they want to make an impact on history. And I feel like the United States, a lot of us just feel like you know, well, we did our thing. And you know, we need to, like fix our country now.
Yeah. So it's interesting you say that, you know, when when Obama was president, he was they were trying to figure out some kind of Space Policy because it was a big mess. And they, they were asked about, he was asked about the moon. And his response was been there done that, right? That's exactly what you said. China's China looks at exploration of space, like NASA, the United States did in the 1960s and 70s. It's sort of a way to establish themselves on the international stage as a premier superpower. Like if they can land people on the moon. I mean, no one has done that. But the United States, right, that clearly elevates them ahead of China, Russia, every other country in the world, outside the United States. They look at that from they look at Space Exploration as sort of another branding of themselves as a preeminent superpower in the world. That's not how the United States view space at all.
Well because we are the superpower - We got nothing to prove. We are a superpower. We got nothing to prove.
Yeah. So like, a couple of things. First of all, if China does continue to move towards sending humans to the moon, what is the response of the national security community in the United States, because believe me that the space force is very much looking at that. And has the funding to make a difference pretty quickly. And they could go ahead and buy SpaceX rockets and put soldiers on the moon ahead of China if they wanted to. And and so how does the United States look at it? I mean, it was really interesting, because in July, we had Jeff Bezos launch Shepard, and Richard Branson flying into space on on VSS, Unity has space plane. And that that really reinforced their narrative that you were referencing this kind of boys and their toys, billionaires in space, you know, what - Should we be fixing the problems here on Earth, instead of Jeff Bezos getting his 10 minutes of joy? You know, while while the while the planet burned, he took off, right? And that's a real problem for the commercial space industry, and I'm not sure they're really addressing it in a meaningful way.
Well, I mean, you're talking about the moon, we kind of need to go back to the moon to get to Mars, right? I mean, you can't just like go straight to Mars, or I mean, it told me about this, like, Am I wrong?
You're wrong, we could go straight to Mars. I mean, you do not have to go to the moon, to learn how to go to Mars. The reason we're gonna go back to the moon, at least NASA is is because it's something they can actually do. It's tangible. Like if, if you were to say NASA say we're going to Mars, like the earliest realistic date, you could put on that if you're the NASA administrator would be like, 2040. That's what four to eight presidents. I mean, how how is that going to serve that programs never gonna survive? Yeah. So they're, they're focused on the moon because it's doable. And then I think if they do that in a competent way, they can start talking about Mars.
Okay. Okay. And so, but SpaceX go to the moon. I mean, they're going to the moon right? Or is it just Mars?
SpaceX has a NASA contract to go to the moon, so they're going to the moon. Okay, but they're, but what's brilliant about that is they've built this starship vehicle, and starship is the vehicle that they're going to send, they plan to send to Mars. But now they're getting NASA funding to help turn starship into a vehicle that can land on the moon and take off from the moon. And that's super helpful for them because it helps them NASA's got great expertise about living in microgravity because it's been on the space station for 20 years. So they can transfer all that expertise to SpaceX. And SpaceX can get paid for that, because they're going to have help developing all these life support systems for starships. It's quite brilliant.
Well, so they're all these other companies that had rockets over the decades. Like, why SpaceX again, is it Elon Musk's vision or the other companies just too bureaucratic, like collecting their their checks from NASA, I mean, what's going on here?
So those companies were fat and happy. So So basically, in the 1990s, there were two main US rocket companies, there was Lockheed, and Boeing. And they were competing to develop the next generation of launch contracts. And they were both were getting funding from the Department of Defense because the military wanted assured access to space. And they wanted two different families of rocketseed, the Atlas family and the Delta family. Boeing started to lose to Atlas, financially, and there were some lawsuits and stuff back and forth. And then so the military stepped in 2005 and said, Okay, we're keeping both rockets, both Atlas and Delta rockets, and you're just creating one company. So it became United Launch Alliance in 2005. And it This is, this was Boeing's rocket business and Lockheed rocket business under one roof. And each of those companies own 50% of it. That company got fat and happy, because it hadn't a monopoly on all military launches, on virtually all of NASA's science missions. So anytime a US institution needed to get to space They had to go to ULA and pay him 200 million 300 million 400 million for launch. And so that's the market that SpaceX came in to disrupt. And they 15 years later, they've been largely successful in doing so.
Okay. Okay. As you mentioned, asteroids, asteroid mining, this is like a science fiction scenario. Know, a look rare earth metals like phosphorus, there's all sorts of things where, you know, we might be subject to some limitations on this planet at some point. Do you think that this is a feasible thing for the 21st century in terms of the economics and the technology of it?
Yes, um, one of the things that I like about Jeff Bezos, his vision for space, is that he thinks that we ought to sort of really transition to try to get most of the raw materials we need down here on Earth from space, that's energy. That's raw metals, you know, let's let's strip mine asteroids, let's not strip mined planet Earth. And so that is the vision, the problem is that most asteroids are really far away. So we're gonna have to build really smart robots to go out there and either mined these asteroids or bring them back closer to Earth. And so that, that'll I think it's coming. So the biggest hurdle to doing all this stuff, buzzy has been the fact that it costs so damn much to launch a rocket, like it was $150 million, maybe. And what SpaceX has done, is they've come along and reduced the cost of access to space by one half or two thirds. And they sort of made this huge paradigm shift over the last five years of where every rocket that launched a space was expendable to, if you're not developing a reusable rocket, you're going to be left behind, like, you know, like, like horses, right? Instead of cars and automobiles, like like, it's a huge transition. So the very first step to doing all of these interesting things in space was getting lower cost reliable access to space. And so we're starting to see that first step. That's why it's so exciting is opens up to these possibilities.
What so you know, you're saying that it's dropped up, you know, several fold, it seems up, do you think it's gonna go order of magnitude? I know that, you know, physics is, is different than, say, information technology or computer science, like, you run into limits, right? how cheap can SpaceX go? Like? Is it still going cheaper? Or are they running into limits in terms of their technology.
So they're running into limits with the Falcon 9 rocket that we talked about landing before because they haven't figured out a way to get the second stage back. So if you think about it, let's say that the, the cost of SpaceX for launch is a little more than 30 million. So you've got 20 million for the first stage 10 million for the second stage, 6 million for the payload fairing and then you've got fuel and other costs on top of that. So right now SpaceX brings the first stage back, and they're gonna fly each of those at least 10 times. They bring the payload fairing pack, which is on top of the rocket protects the satellite, that's about $6 million. The second stage is thrown away. So they've brought down their costs by more than half. But but they can't bring them down much further, because you still got to build the second stages. And so what they've done with starship is they're trying to they're going first of all, they're going bigger, so that every launch you instead of getting, you know, 20 tons into space, you get 120 tons. So it's like a lot more stuff. And you make they're trying to make the whole thing reusable. So like the first stage is gargantuan rocket with 2029 32 engines - It's a beast beast. And that comes back and lands at the launch launch site. And then the second stage, the starship vehicle is fully reusable as well. So the idea would be that you could launch both these vehicles, they come back to the launch site, you restock them, fly them again, within a day or two. That's the vision. If we get there, then yeah, you're really gonna see a multi multi factor drop in costs.
Nice. So you know a lot of the stuff you've been talking about here it sounds a little science fictiony to me, but it's because I haven't kept track of it. What is what's the most science fiction thing that we are close to in regards to space because like asteroid mining, I've read that in science fiction. These I mean, like literally watching the Falcon 9 land. I thought I was seeing CGI, like I kind of had to watch it multiple times and convinced myself that it was real so there's a lot of things that are overwhelming say like my senses, but I mean, what are you excited about? Like, what do you know about or it's on the horizon that I think that's gonna wow people.
Um, I think, you know, this sort of full reusability of launch will be a huge wow moment, because it will be pretty interesting to see that kind of vehicle but in terms of like, really big changes that have big impacts on Earth, something I think we could see within a decade or two is space based solar power. Like that sounds pretty science fictiony like you put this huge, you know, this huge field of solar panels up in up in a, you know, space where they're, you know, angled at the sun all the time. And you beam the power back as a microwave to earth, and you basically solve the planet's power needs. There are some people who are skeptical about this, but there are a lot of people take it seriously, it's in China's now it's in their like, plan to like by 2050 provide much of their power by solar space based solar power. And so when we're, as we're bringing down the cost of launch, you're sort of opening up the economics of space based solar power. And so I think that could become a geopolitical contest. And just think about if like we could solve our power needs, with space, right? how beneficial that would be for our environment here on Earth, it's, you could see some combination of sort of China pressing ahead with this, you know, lower cost of access to space, climate - you need for immediate climate change mitigation, all of these things kind of coming together to push space based solar power, you know, we might be getting our energy from there by 2040.
So, that sounds a little bit like a, you know, baby steps towards the Dyson sphere.
Yeah, I mean, it is so like, you know, Jeff phases is big vision space. And again, we talked about it like he is not as involved in Blue Origin to make a difference as, as I wish he would be. But his vision is to create these things called O'Neill cylinders, which are like, basically small Dyson spheres in space habitats that you know, that are in orbit around Earth.
Are those main vectors Gerard O'Neill? Exactly. Okay. Yeah, I think like the space nerds out there will know what I'm who I'm alluding to there. Okay. Very
Exactly. Very good reference. That's a very inside baseball space.... Gerard O'Neill, very influenctial.
Now. I used to be, I used to be into this stuff. But you know, I gotta say, Eric, you know, I, you know, I'm a geneticist, I focus on the genetics. And it's just like, I feel like, you know, you know, I think I have some young people who are listening. And you know, don't don't forget your passions, obviously, in focus. But sometimes when you get super involved in one area of science, you kind of like, lose the focus on another area. And I was super interested in space in the 1990s. And, you know, I'd read like Space and Telescope and all these magazines, and then it's like, oh, well, I have to figure out these metabolic pathways. I gotta figure out this and that. And so periodically, like, I do follow your Twitter feed, which I recommend everyone check out, just because there's still other stuff going on, you know, just over the horizon, kind of like, you know, the stuff that really inspires you as a kid. And these big engineering projects, these big space projects, I understand that people think it's impractical, but like, civilizations impractical? You know, I mean, like, what are we here for? So I do want to put that out there. You know, your book "Liftoff" I, you know, I think it presents Elon and his vision in a positive way. And I know he gets a lot of hate, but I have to say, love him or hate him. He's got a vision. So what's your vision? Right. And so I think like talking to you, I think that's what I would, you know, tell the people out there like, you know, space is still there.
I don't blame you for being, you know, sort of looking at spaceflight in the 1990s or early 2000s. And becoming disillusioned, because quite frankly, you know, that's when I started getting into covering the industry in journalism, it was pretty boring, because you had, you know, three or four or five space shuttle flights a year ago in the International Space Station. And that was just about it. And to space shuttle was a magnificent engineering marvel. But it was pretty damn boring to cover because it was the same thing. It was a 10 day or 14 day mission, and they did something then they came back. And it was just it was got to be really monotonous. And so that's what's really exciting to me. And I didn't cover space full time until about 2012. Because that's when I really got turned on by the commercial space industry because they were like carrying out the vision. Like, the thing about Bezos, and it was Elon Musk and Paul Allen, people like that. Like when they were kids, like they thought that NASA was going to solve all of these space challenges, right that the space shuttle was going to open up access to space blah, blah, blah. And when they got to like the 2000s and they were starting to be successful in business, they realize that Wait a minute, you know, NASA wasn't taking care of this business it was actually this bureaucracy and these large defense contractors were sort of sucking off all these dollars to provide okay reliable services but it was the same old stuff and so that's what's really exciting about commercial space is that these companies are trying to make sustainable businesses in space and and that's really what's pushing the envelope forward now.
All right, um, well, thank you for your time Eric. I just been really interesting conversation I learned a lot I have to say and that's like legit true. A lot of positive things actually, you know, while we're recording during the Delta wave in the south, and there's just been a lot of negativity in the world out there. It's not our fault. That's just how it is. But this is great to think About I'm glad that I'm you know alive in this time hopefully we will see humans go to the moon go to Mars. I'm excited about it. Your book is "Liftoff: Elon Musk and the desperate early days at launched SpaceX" and really appreciate the time and the conversation, man.
It's been my pleasure as he was great to hook up with you.
