Chris Kemp on Astra's Comeback, Rockets and Drones from Space

But that's where it's headed. Rockets, AI, and drones. We'll actually take the drones, we'll put them in the rocket, and then we'll deliver them to the other side of the planet in 45 minutes, and they will reenter and they will conduct a mission.

All right, here we go, friends. It's Ashlee Vance with another episode of Core Memory. I always say they're special, and this one is extra special. I swear, uh, if you've seen the movie we made, Wild Wild Space, on HBO, or read my book, God bless you, When the Heavens Went on Sale, uh, you will know our guest, Chris Kemp. He is the co-founder and CEO of the rocket maker Astra Space. He's the star, if not one of the stars, from the movie and the book. Quite a, uh, Larger than life character. People have some, some different views on Chris. He's always happy to get into all that. When you— if you watch the movie, you know that it left off with Astra in some quite challenging financial straits. The company was in peril. We didn't even know if Astra would be around, but it is. And we have news about what Astra is doing and where it's heading. And Chris, as ever, was a fantastic sport. And addressed all of my, my difficult and head-on questions. So you're going to enjoy the show. As ever, our plans for world domination are not yet complete, so please go to your favorite podcast app and give us a likey thing or a review. And go to our YouTube channel, Core Memory. We have new episodes of our TV show covering all kinds of science, technology, up People seem to really love them. I think you'll love them too. And with that, ooh, last note, Al Weston, previous podcast guest, makes a special appearance at the start of this one. So you'll see Al peek in or you'll hear Al peek in. And if you haven't heard that episode, you should 100% go check that out. So with that, let's get to the show. Here's Chris Kemp. Chris Kemp, hello, how are you?

Hey, Ashlee, how's it going? Good to see you again.

It's going well. Every time I see you, I'm reminded that we're almost the same age, but you look much better than I do. I don't know. I don't know what happened to me or what happened to you.

I can't give Brian credit either. This is all just me staying indoors working on rockets instead of being out in the sun, I think.

Whatever you've done, I chose wrong. Thank you so much for doing this. There's a lot of stuff I want to cover. I think some of this will be a little newsier than we do, um, on the usual podcast. Um, and so we'll get to a couple news items here in a second. Um, but I've had a question that I've wanted to ask you, which is, we, we made this movie together, we did a book. I, uh, the movie I think did very well on HBO, but I seem to get this crazy number of emails from people who see it on United. I had no idea that people watch as many movies on United as they do. Have you ever, have you been walking the aisles on a United flight and run into anyone that knows you?

I was saying, oh, look who just walked in. Actually, did you hear we hired Al Weston? I think he was on the last podcast.

Special guest, Al Weston. Live special guest. Is appearing in the background. That is, I think— Al Westinghouse is episode 11, I think. Good for you, Ashlee Vance.

We're just bringing it all together here. Cheers. Well, yeah, I was, I was actually coming back from New York and the guy in the security line next to me said, are you the guy in the, in the movie from my, from my, um, last flight? And I've, I've literally seen it playing, um, while on flights. So I think that's a bigger platform than HBO as far as I can tell.

It's pretty nuts.

I was—

I've been like shocked. I always, every time I'm on a United flight, I walk down the aisle to see who's watching it. Um, has that— has the experience— I don't— I mean, I'm in the movie, but only, you know, as like a pundit. I mean, is it weird to be in a movie? What, what's the experience been like?

I mean, I think, I think the thing is, uh, you guys put together a really entertaining story. For what might otherwise be something that is a pretty, you know, insider thing in the space industry. And I think the team and the director did a fantastic job of making that really entertaining. And part of that, of course, is cutting out all of the really boring stuff. And, you know, I definitely— there's a lot of parts about this that are boring, and those parts aren't in there. Only the most ridiculous things are in there. So I equate it to a funhouse mirror where You know, you're seeing this very distorted version of me where I think a lot of the things that I was throwing in there to be funny made it appear that, you know, that's how I am all the time. And I, you know, I'm sorry to say I'm not quite that entertaining all the time, but it was a really great— it was a great watch.

You're a high-energy man. I think you're entertaining. Well, and I know you give me grief about one part of the movie in particular, which happens to bring us to some of the news we want to talk about. But What is your main, your primary objection to the film?

Well, I think, you know, you definitely told a story about an underdog, and I think that that's fair. And this stuff is really hard. And, you know, as the movie came to a close, we were having a really rough time. And, you know, I think your last words were, "It didn't, it just didn't work out." And I had asked you to add the word "yet." because we were very much at an inflection point where I think there were a lot of people, employees and investors and customers who were quite excited about the next chapter. And so I guess what this is about is, is about the next chapter that really starts at the last frame of the movie.

Let me, let me set the stage for people who haven't seen the movie or who don't follow space. But you guys are a rocket launch company and you also make engines for, for satellites and You've been at this for a few years. When you first started out, you were trying to make— really be the first company ever to mass-produce rockets, turn it from this art, this handmade craft, into having a proper assembly line of rockets. You guys were trying to go very fast, make rockets much less expensive, to launch them often, and to put lots of satellites into space. You were successful in many ways on this quest. You guys did go extremely fast. You've, you've been to orbit. You raised a lot of money at some point by going public. And then, and then you guys have done what few others have. You managed to take the company private again, and you've been heading towards this Rocket 4, which is, is the next generation rocket. And, and we kind of leave the movie, um, Rocket 4 is not finished and you guys have gone, you're in some financial woes at the end of the movie. So why don't you update us on the current state of Astra and what's going on?

Yeah, we just couldn't continue as a public company. You know, the overhead and the cost was high. The stock was trading so low we couldn't raise enough capital to keep it going. And, you know, so I really, as the CEO of the company, as the founder of the company, this was really hard for me because there wasn't really a precedent for the founder of a company to take the company public and then the founder of the company to then take the company private again. I didn't sell a single share of stock the entire time the company was public, so I didn't have the financial resources to, to do this myself. And so we kind of invented a whole new way to do this. I kind of coined the term FLAC, Founder-Led Acquisition Company, where we, you know, we created a the inverse of a SPAC, which is we created a private company. Um, we set up the, the capital structure of that. We did a Series A and we were able to raise about $80 million, um, through the, through the, this period to both fund the public company, buy out all the shareholders, pay all the transaction fees, take out all the secured lenders, finance the company, and then put money on the balance sheet. And, um, we were able to do that, uh, to allow the company to both provide an, an exit for the shareholders, albeit at a small fraction of what many invested, but, but something versus a bankruptcy or, or something. I tried to help the board investigate all alternatives strategically to this. So we were just one option and the board independently looked at all sorts of different strategic options. And I gave them my full support on whatever would be best for shareholders. And we were able to, to get the company private. And now the company and the employees and we continue to deliver for our customers. We then subsequently won a big DoD contract. And then we subsequently have gotten the company to have a profitable satellite engine business. And we're taking those profits, we're reinvesting them back in the launch business, and we're now in a really good position. Like, we've— we can continue to do this until we put a rocket back on the pad, even if we don't raise any more capital. And that's, that's an— that's a remarkable, remarkable position to be in given where we were a year ago.

And, and we saw— I'm going to dig into a lot of this because it's a— it is an amazing story. We saw Al Weston pop in the background for a minute. He was just hired, I think, uh, if my sourcing is correct, within the last month or so. And, and he's now, he's now in charge of the, the rocket program, I think.

That's correct, yes. Yeah, and Al, um, was somebody you saw in the movie. I worked with him at NASA, um, a mentor, um, really someone who has decades of experience working in national security space., and was most recently working, as you reported, I believe, originally, as the CEO of LTA, which was an airship company. And we were very lucky to have him come to join us to lead us back to the pad.

And I think I've seen you tweet the goal is— are you saying kind of early next year to do a launch?

Yeah, to do a launch. Now, we want to try to get as much testing done this year as possible. We've actually— with this launch, we've partnered with the Space Force. So a lot of the work that we're doing is overseen, a lot of testing, a lot of the reviews that we do of the different phases of development. We're actually sitting in the room with a bunch of Space Force people. So their, their objective is, is to have this be a much more reliable system than the previous version. It's taking more time. And of course, you know, we, we've been very thoughtful about every penny and every dollar we've invested in this because we can't You know, we can't invest so much that we put the company in a difficult financial position.

You guys, since you guys started a few years ago, the rocket landscape has evolved. I mean, you guys came around in the early part of what was a, you know, a million flowers blooming with all kinds of rocket startups. People had different approaches to what they were doing. You, to your credit, I think you guys have always been very consistent in your objective, which again was to mass-produce rockets, keep them cheap is probably not the best word, but as, as cheap as possible and to launch often. And then you also had this different approach, which is, is to launch, to have the infrastructure really be able to move in shipping containers so that you can— you're very flexible on where you can launch from, to not have a lot of people. And it's interesting to see how this has played out because we had a ton of rocket startups. Some of them now have gone away. Some of them have run into financial problems. And really, I think this is a pretty unbiased take. I mean, we have— we've got kind of SpaceX and Blue Origin on this, a bit to the like mid-range, higher end. SpaceX, if they do Starship, on the very high end with a huge rocket. Um, you've got— you've got Rocket Lab and Firefly and possibly Relativity, which has just been saved by Eric Schmidt, maybe in kind of the mid, mid-range. And then as far as I saw it, you guys' main competitor for a while was ABL, which also wanted to be very mobile and have these shipping containers. They've run out of money and they've changed. They're making missiles now, I think. And so, so if you pull this off, I mean, you guys end up as, as like the only play, unless I'm missing someone, the only player.

I mean, I see, you know, I see also Relativity as building a very large rocket. So I see that kind of in the same class. It's larger than Falcon 9, right? So it's in that kind of Starship class. You've got New Glenn in that Starship class and Starship. And so I think there's 3 really potentially major players now that Eric has stepped in at Relativity on the large vehicle side. And then Neutron, of course, is making a bid for something in between., and then I think Firefly has a couple of different rockets they're simultaneously working on. And, you know, we've really just focused. And if I've learned anything here, it's focus is everything. And these are incredibly complex systems. We did Rocket 1, 2, 3, and this is 4. So, you know, if we had put all of our energy into a 1-ton class vehicle from the beginning, we'd be fine. Um, but we, we realized that the satellites that Planet was building in 2015, '16, '17, when we started the company,, were not the, the big, um, portion of the market that would be driving the, the addressable market that we needed to address. So the satellites were increasingly looking like they were 500 kilograms or 600 kilograms. So you look at Kuiper, you look at the latest generation of Starlink satellites, you look at Telesat, you look at the SDA's transport and tracking layer satellites, 90% of the satellites, uh, are 500 kilograms plus now. So we needed a rocket that we either had to go build another Starship like everybody else, or we said, you know, there's utility in being able to replace a couple of satellites in a constellation, or there's remainder problems. If you're launching on New Glenn and Starship and Relativity, then you are going to have a remainder problem because these have different capacities. And so maybe you want to be able to put up a few more satellites in this plane or that plane. And so we, we always felt that that was useful. What ended up happening with the DOD was we realized that maybe putting satellites in orbit wasn't the only market, and maybe actually putting, uh, drones in the rocket and delivering them back on Earth is a market. And we started to realize that the mobility of our system was something we should really embrace. And so let's make the rocket, um, as large as possible but still small enough to fit in a shipping container. And let's make sure the entire spaceport can pack up into containers. And so we can literally put Imagine, you know, hundreds of spaceports and imagine being able to deploy those anywhere. Uh, and we looked at the Patriot missile system. We said, wow, there's 1,300 Patriot missile launchers and typically organized in batteries of 4 to 8, uh, in 18 different countries in over 100 locations. That's the model for Astra. Like, how do we, how do we give every country sovereign access to space? And you don't do it with a Starbase. It's, uh, that's not where you start. Right? You start just like an airport starts with a small airstrip. You start with Astra, and then that's what you do to get space access. And then you can, as you start to see, you know, as the decades go on, maybe there's Starbases everywhere, but we're the first, we're the Cessna that lands on the airstrip, you know, to get your country access to space.

And there's a lot of interesting things in there. Just to give people some historical background, Um, you know, the Department of Defense, I think since about the 1950s or '60s, has dreamed of this idea of responsive space where there's a conflict or anything you're interested in that's going on and you want to put up a satellite on short notice that's, that's orbiting around a particular location. It's, um, I don't know if it's comical or sad or just the way it is. This dream has been alive for all these years. They still sort of haven't really pulled it off. For a while it looked like the Falcon 1, SpaceX's first rocket, was meant to be to, you know, DARPA funded a lot of that and it was meant to serve that need. And then SpaceX changed gears and went big. With Space Force being behind you guys, the DOD being behind you guys, obviously this That fits into this. Before we get to the drone stuff, I mean, is that still kind of the heart of the agenda that the US wants to see?

I believe it is. I think you look at what space from a logistics standpoint can do. You know, we right now, the way I look at this is go back thousands of years. At some point we discovered that you could move things on water by building ships and that transformed civilization. Right now we had cities ports where you could deliver things and trade and military strength was, was based on your, your superiority of your navy. Right. And then we invented the internal combustion engine. We started moving jeeps and tanks and things. We would land the tanks on the beaches with the ships and then the airplane. And so then, oh, that changed everything. Now we can have air bases and we could, we could basically project force using airplanes, but you still had the range of an internal combustion powered airplane. And then we had aircraft carriers. And so now if you look at the defense budget, which is, you know, better part of $1 trillion a year, most of that budget is about projecting millions of people in, you know, hundreds of locations in airplanes so that you can project force. Imagine if you had millions of drones and thousands of rockets that you could launch from hundreds of locations, both in the United States and at our allies. You wouldn't need that anymore. You wouldn't need a $13.5 billion aircraft carrier. You wouldn't need airplanes with pilots. You could literally put a million drones anywhere you needed them to do surveillance or what have you globally without having a trillion dollars a year of force projection. And maybe that's, maybe that's decades from now, but that's where it's headed. Rockets, AI, and drones and what you're able to do with rockets, AI, and drones is going to exceed what you're going to be able to do with $100 million airplanes and $13 billion aircraft carriers and military bases you're operating all over the world.

And are the drones in this vision separate from what you guys are doing, or you're talking about using rockets to deliver drones?

Yeah.

How does— what does that look like?

Well, so we won a contract to demonstrate this. So this is this DOD contract where we'll actually take, the drones, we'll put them in the rocket, and then we'll deliver them to the other side of the planet in 45 minutes, and they will re-enter, and they will conduct a mission. And, um, we're partnering with Anduril on this. So, you know, imagine, um, imagine, um, being able to do that at scale.

So you, so what happens? The rocket goes into space, the drones are its payload, and then, and then the rocket, I, I actually had missed this one shamefully because, because it's part of Europe. So the rocket, the rocket, uh, it, it, it lets go of the payload and then, and then what are the mechanics of how the drones actually get to where they're supposed to go?

Yeah, so the rocket would, would enter an orbital trajectory, uh, probably not a ballistic trajectory because you wouldn't want to accidentally start World War III. Uh, and then you would have a reentry vehicle that would be capable of doing, um, a Mach 15 reentry and, and travel thousands of kilometers off the nominal orbital trajectory, um, and then you would pop a parachute and then the drones would deploy and then they would conduct a mission. So you would have tremendous operational freedom, not necessarily above where you were, um, you were orbiting.

So that's so crazy. That is nuts. And is that— I should know this, I apologize— uh, is that the first— that's not the first mission with the new rocket?

Um, it will not be the first, but it'll be, I think, the third or fourth.

Okay. All right, so that is exciting. Um, so, and then when you're talking about spaceports all over the world, I mean, there's this huge part of me that thinks any country that wants to be a spacefaring nation should have the rights to do that, and, and it's exciting, and it's part of, um doing what's right for your territory and your citizens. Obviously, the United States, you know, has, has lots of feelings about who has these types of machines in their country. Do you think, um, like that vision that you were laying out of, of dozens or hundreds of spaceports, I mean, how does, how does that play out logistically?

I mean, I think it's a question— you go back to how aviation got started in this country. And you look at the pioneers of the early aviation industry, you know, Orville and Wilbur Wright really pioneered flight. But then we saw Howard Hughes and we saw Boeing and we saw Douglas. And, you know, these companies all created, you know, the real foundation of the commercial aviation industry. And we saw that really take off in America. And now we saw— now we see globally the standards that we use across the entire planet, largely being driven by that innovation. The internet is the same thing. You know, we saw that innovation And that, that investment— our country made the investment, and now the standards that drive the internet are used all over the world. I think we have an opportunity now, actually, to pioneer space. And will this— will there be American rockets? ITAR makes this very challenging because if you start to build spaceports and, and operate rockets outside of America, it's very hard. But a rocket in a shipping container doesn't necessarily have to lose— you don't have to lose control of it. You can secure it and then you can operate it and you can launch it. And I think if there is a way to ensure that American space technology is what, versus Chinese or Russian or Indian technology is what the rest of the world uses, Astra is that, you know, and it takes a decade. You know, if you give anybody a billion dollars, they can either burn a hole in the ground or potentially succeed at this., but no amount of money is going to give you a working operational rocket system, uh, in less than a decade. That's my, that's my experience.

For people who have been lucky enough not to encounter ITAR, it's a, it's a law that governs U.S., uh, military systems and, and is, it makes, um, like when Rocket Lab was trying to start in New Zealand, they had to go to some pretty great lengths even to allow the U.S. to let them exist to take U.S. investment, things like that. And, and New Zealand is in, in Five Eyes, the most favored, you know, sort of status. And so other countries, it, it's been a problem historically. Um, so, okay, so with this vision as you present it, you know, we're heading to a world where there are— you mentioned the satellites are, are a bit larger, um, maybe than we, we thought as, as we're entering this age of instead of 1,000 or 2,000 satellites in orbit, of, of tens of thousands. Do you think, are you gonna focus mostly on these pioneering new types of uses for your rocket, or do you think the bulk of your business is still servicing and replacing, replenishing these existing constellations?

I think it's dual use, right? I, I, I think that both drive lots of demand. If you are flying thousands of satellites in a constellation and you have the ability to replace satellites and upgrade and augment planes as needed from a capacity standpoint, that's, that's going to be more efficient than just over-provisioning the entire constellation by 5%, right? Because that's hundreds of satellites that you're having to pay for launches and pay for hardware for. SpaceX is obviously just continuously flying and upgrading and replenishing. But every constellation will not have that luxury. They're not going to have the capital that SpaceX has to just overprovision everything all the time and continue to iterate. Many of the other constellations are being a lot more thoughtful about capacity planning, and that's where we can, we can really help. The other thing is, is let's not assume that every constellation is going to be a homogenous, vertically integrated constellation. Right. I think in the early days of the internet, we saw AOL, CompuServe build vertically integrated networks where a lot of the infrastructure was owned and operated by one company. And that's, I think, where we are today with Starlink and with Kuiper, where you have incredibly deep-pocketed companies that are able to own and operate everything end-to-end as a service. But I think what countries will increasingly want is a model much more akin to the traditional telecommunications model where, you know, you're going to want to own and operate satellites. Just like you own and operate your fiber and your, your cellular and your other data centers. When, when Microsoft Azure and cloud services enter a country, they typically ask, uh, the country asks for the data center to be local so that the laws of that country can govern the data stored in that country. And so I think we're going to start to see a much more heterogeneous standards-based constellation evolve here in the next decade. And those countries will want to probably launch and control access to space. So if something, you know, is, is able to prevent them from replacing those satellites, they're going to want to have a launch system capable of launching a couple of dozen satellites pretty quickly.

I'm super curious about how all this plays out. The— as things currently stand, SpaceX has moved so fast with Starlink. Yeah, I think faster maybe than SpaceX even assumed. Definitely faster, I think, than any regulators or countries were prepared for, but incredibly impressive, to be honest. Yeah, it's, it's, it is because nothing goes fast in space and, and this was like no, no small feat. Um, so they've got this massive constellation. OneWeb, which started almost exactly at the same time as SpaceX, has gone through huge financial gyrations, has been acquired. But you, you kind of have a US— SpaceX is a really interesting concept. It's a US telecommunications company, but it's really, to me, the first global telecommunications company in that, um, yes, other countries can choose to, to block its, its service, but it's now serving dozens of countries, whereas normally you always have— you've got AT&T in the US and Vodafone in, in the UK, and, and things get divvied up. And then, so you have to figure China will build at least one, if not two of these. The US with Kuiper is already heading towards two, if not more. And then, you know, it becomes a real question. It's like Europe kind of has this legacy through OneWeb now, and you quickly get to the scenario where it's like, who is going to actually be willing to put up the billions of dollars to fund one of these things? Does Russia want one? South America, what are they going to do? They're just going to use third-party stuff. So I actually buy into the scenario that you lay out where it seems like there is room for, um, for some kind of— I, I don't think the world will accept SpaceX just running this whole thing.

Yeah, and by the way, SpaceX is doing a great job, but it isn't, it isn't about SpaceX. It's about, um, there being a more open and standards-based constellation, right? Just like the internet is the internet because China's on the internet and Russia's on the internet. It's TCP/IP, you know, Everybody had an alternative to TCP/IP, right? Microsoft had an alternative, Sun had an alternative, but no one company could control the internet. And because that wouldn't, it wouldn't work for so many other countries. And so I think we just haven't gotten there yet with, with space. I think with these satellites, we need standards to evolve that allow a satellite to point a laser at another satellite and form a network connection and to have that be something that can be done dynamically. The satellites are all traveling tens of thousands of miles an hour relative to each other. So the technology hasn't yet— hasn't existed until now to make this possible. And now there's no market will because you've got a couple of folks that are enjoying their dominant position in the—

and so like today, the SpaceX is not— even if you have another communications satellite up there, it's not, it's not sharing data with your, with your network.

Uh, certainly not if they don't want it to.

Right. Did you, like, for people who don't know, I mean, you have this background of, of doing, of, of being into technology since you were, um, a high schooler, if not before that, of doing startups during the dot-com boom era, of becoming a technology, the technology executive at NASA, and you really reshaped and modernized NASA's IT infrastructure. You did a lot of stuff around open source software, started the, the OpenStack project, which, you know, has to be one of the bigger, more recent things from NASA that's carried on throughout the world. Is that— I mean, I know you've always been into open source software. Is that what's like informing some of your thinking around where this is heading?

Yeah, if you read the the prospectus and the shareholder letter I wrote when we took the company public, you know, we didn't take the company public just to make rockets. And arguably that was what happened. You know, we tried to do too much and we were unable to continue to raise capital to fund some of the other things that we wanted to do. And we had to, you know, go back and focus. And that's— but yeah, we're now back a private company, much more efficient. We're going to get back to the pad. Once you can get to space, you know, the rockets are just the delivery trucks to space. So the question is, Once you can get there, what do you do and what value can you create? The value at SpaceX is in Starlink. And so the question is, is like, can we create something valuable that our rockets can deliver to space that builds on that? And I think we're just, we're in the extremely early days here of the value you can produce from space. And SpaceX is what, a quarter of a trillion dollar company now as a private company. I love being a private company because it's just so efficient. You know, the overhead of everything we had to do to operate a public company that manufactures hardware was incredibly costly. And it created a lot of— a lot— not only a lot of expense that we couldn't maintain, but it just— it really slowed us down. And, you know, we're going fast again.

I wrote about this in my book. When you guys all went public during the SPAC craze, I was— felt like I was— I was worried about all you guys and how this would play out because the rocket business is— is an unusual business, and it usually takes place in private. And, and I don't think Joe Trader on the internet knows how to judge a rocket, you know, not being successful on a launch and, and what goes into this and the normal cadence these things take. Um, I knew you guys would all be— that it was gonna be, it was gonna be intense as, as the public tried to wrap their heads around, around this business. Do you, So when you look back, I mean, it sounded like you said you felt like you guys, you, you brought, you got all this money by going public and that was good because it helped your, one of your central goals, which was to produce this mass manufacturing factory for rockets that we haven't seen. But you felt like that was your biggest lesson that you felt like you took too much on. And, and then I've always been curious to ask you this. Yeah. Like if you could kind of do it over again, what would you do different? And, and what, Yeah, I mean, I guess that's the heart of my question.

Yeah, I mean, I think you look at— we had, we had a backlog of launches. We had over 50 launches that we had sold. And so on one hand, Rocket 3 could potentially continue to deliver on these launches. Our team went off to start manufacturing Rocket 3s. I think we had a dozen of them on the production line, but we also knew what was coming. We knew that the communications constellations were driving the requirement well beyond the 100-kilogram capacity that Rocket 3 could, could perform. So would we continue to invest in Rocket 3 but then lose the overall market? Because we knew we were selling satellite engines to all these companies, so we knew what the satellites were. All the satellites were 500-kilogram satellites. And so the team started to work on Rocket 4 while we continued to launch Rocket 3s. And you saw what the result of that was. We had 4 commercial launches 2 failed, 2 were successful. That's not good enough. And we knew that we had a choice to make. We could either double down on Rocket 3 and try to make it more reliable, but ultimately fail, or we could stop that program, realize that the speed with which we brought that product to market was one of the problems, and we'd have to go back and design margin in and do a lot of major redesign for that. But to what end? You know, we would lose the market if we put more years into that, or we'd have to keep launching and continue to have launch failures cause the shareholders to continue to be very unhappy with us. So that wasn't an option either. So we were in a really tough spot. And so what we chose to do was stop spending money on a program that was, was causing launch failures to, to cause our customers to lose trust in us. Focus on delivering the engines to our customers because we had sold hundreds of satellite engines and then really focus all of our energy on Rocket 4. And that was, that was the playbook we ran. We also had over $100 million we invested in this factory. So I like to use the Model 3 as an example. Like if you look at the Model 3, that is a beautiful machine, right? It is both inexpensive but also very reliable. Right. So you don't have to equate something being simple and inexpensive with being unreliable, right? So what we aim to do is build a very simple rocket, but design it so that it can be produced on a production line at scale. Now, the problem is you have a chicken and egg. Do you have the money to build the production line or not? Because you can design a Model 3 to be stamped out on gigapresses, but if you can't afford a gigapress, well, then this is just a piece of paper. And so what we did do, and I'm proud of this, is we did follow through on the investments needed to actually deliver the rocket that we had designed, which is Rocket 4. And so as you see the tanks that we've been testing, the stages, they've— they've been, they've been passing qual, which means that those exact, exact stages are going to be made on the exact equipment with the exact manufacturing processes that we're using. And that thing can make a rocket a day. It's incredible. And so we've now— we're a company that has made the capital investments needed to drive the cost of the rocket down. We just need to finish all of the development and testing of the thing to make sure that it is reliable when we launch it again.

When we, when we first met and I, again, I actually give you tons of credit for this because I think it's the right way to think about things. You know, you wanted to make rockets faster than anybody had done before. There becomes this issue that I've seen a lot of companies do where it's just you keep over-engineering it, engineering it, you never fly it. It's, it's like It's never going to be perfect. And, and this tends to create some of these massive delays in the aerospace industry. So I really liked your approach. The— it seems like over time though, now you've swung back a bit and it's like, okay, we, you know, we're moving too fast, we need to test more. Has that been— I know that's— I feel like that's what fights your, your inner personality.

I was—

I'm so curious about, about your thinking on this, if it's evolved, if it— how you've, you've come to accept this.

Yeah, well, I think the pendulum did swing back the other direction a little bit, but then we hired Al. So I'm sure what we're going to end up with is something in the middle. What you can do— there's two ways to fail, right? There's— you, you can basically have flight failures or you can fail to fly. And I would say 99% of companies that tackle something this ambitious, they just fail to ever fly anything., right? They run out of resources before they ever even put anything on the pad. That's a failure mode. It's a very real one. You waste everybody's time and money. Uh, so what we did is we, we did what's basically SpaceX is doing now with Starship, right? We, we had 5 launches and then we got to orbit and we got to orbit in 5 years. And that's, that is, I believe, the fastest that that's ever been accomplished. Um, the problem was, is we learned that if you take that design work and you don't think about all the potential failure mode effects and you, you don't design all the margins in evenly and, and have the test coverage applied consistently across that system, that, that stuff takes time. Um, I think someone once said physics doesn't care about how much money you have, but engineering does, right? And when you have a bit more money, what you do is you spend more time doing analysis. You spend a bit more time making sure that you've sufficiently tested everything and you don't have escapes. Quality escapes. You can spend more money on quality control, on supplier quality management to make sure that the thing that you built is the same thing as the thing you built before. And that's what we're doing, right? We're trying to, um, build, you know, strike that balance correctly with Rocket 4 so that we have something that is both relatively inexpensive. We probably put about a quarter of a billion dollars into this thing so far, um, which is not as much as other programs. I think Neutron is, they're about three quarters of a billion in. I think Starship is $6 or $7 billion in. So, you know, this is still a very inexpensive rocket program as rocket programs go. But unlike, say, Falcon 1 or unlike Rocket 3, you know, it's not a $100 million program. So, you know, we needed to, we needed to dial up the rigor and dial up the analysis and dial up some of the engineering investment so that what we had, you know, coming out of this thing is a much more reliable system. And that's, that's what we've been trying to do. And that's what I care about. In the end.

So was that just like a, is that just kind of like a tough lesson to learn? Was aerospace harder than you, harder or different than you thought it was gonna be going in?

Well, maybe it was the only path, right? Because if we had gone slower, maybe we would've had a failure to launch, right? So it's not clear if you go back and you make different decisions that the outcome would've been better than this one. Might've been. I mean, I certainly could have imagined different decisions different allocations of resources at different times where we could have avoided certain failure modes. But we would have had that overall issue of underinvesting upfront in the design and the analysis and the rigor. And the other thing you can do is what Jeff Bezos did, which— and I complimented him on his success— 25 years and $25 billion in, he nailed it the first time, you know, and great. You know, that's another way to do it. That's how NASA does it, right? Where failure is not an option and you're willing to invest whatever it takes. But what you can't do is, is, is kind of what, you know, we did and frankly what SpaceX did in the early days and expect the thing that you do coming out of that, the Falcon 1 that worked, you don't want to go make hundreds of those, right? You do need to do what SpaceX did, which is, you know, go and take everything you've learned and go do Falcon 9. And they fortunately had NASA's support with the $500 million, you know, COTS program. We had, you know, the support of public markets at that time where we were able to raise $500 million from public markets. And we did our best to try to make that work. And frankly, we just couldn't in that construct. And we saved the company, but we of course didn't save much of the shareholder value that was invested at that point.

I, and I've given Blue Origin a little grief online over the years because it does seem to have taken an awfully long time. But credit to them, it's getting interesting now. They're kind of, they're hitting their stride and it doesn't seem like Jeff's gonna pull back on investing anytime soon. To some of your last points, you know, ABL, I know there's lots of people listening to this who aren't rocket nerds, but you know, they kind of came out as like hot shit. They were, it was like some SpaceX veterans, some kind of NewSpace veterans, and they were gonna, you know, I always heard like, through the rumor mills, like they really know what they're doing, they're going to nail this thing. They had problems on their first launches. And then by the time they had issues, the financial markets had changed a lot. And, and, you know, they, they have pivoted hard. I mean, I think they're, they're, like I said before, kind of a missile heading in the direction of being a missile maker. Now, I think anyone who's read my book or watched the movie, they always take away— and everyone I know who knows you just says you're driven, you will never quit. I mean, it is like a— it is miraculous that you guys were— you were going private at roughly the same time as ABL was hitting hard times, Relativity was hitting hard times, and You know, to go find another $80 million and people to buy into what is an extremely high-risk business. Um, I mean, it's kind of crazy in some ways. How did you—

what—

so you gave them the pitch you gave us about where this is all, all heading. Are you— how did you pull it off?

I think there were a couple of things that were really unique about our situation. One was we had a business, right? We had customers that were relying on Astra for the satellite engines and not a small number of them and not an insignificant set of them. We were building—

we should explain that business real quick.

We should. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. So the setup there is when we went public, literally the day we went public, rang the bell on Nasdaq, and then we announced an acquisition. So I had already worked in parallel to negotiate the acquisition of a company called Apollo Fusion. This was a satellite propulsion company. What that means is when you put a satellite in space with a rocket, well, you got to keep it there. Now, you don't have like a rocket engine on a satellite because frankly, you need something a lot more efficient than that. And you don't want to have propellants that are volatile on the satellite. So we have an engine that we call the Astra Spacecraft Engine that is the world's most efficient. Lowest cost, highest performance engine for these satellites. And so we were incredibly successful once we bought that company, we made it work, and we've now delivered, I believe, about 60 of these engines to customers. We have dozens of them on orbit. All of them have worked perfectly. And we're, we're trying to get the deliveries of those this year up to 25 per month. So we have a huge— we have hundreds of these things on order. This is creating cash flow for our business and we're taking the cash from that business. We're reinvesting it in the launch business and then we're taking this DoD contract that we have and the milestones that were being paid under that contract. And that's what's funding us back to the pad. So we might raise more capital to de-risk things, to accelerate things, but I don't need to. And that's, that's really a miraculous thing to put the company back in a position where we're in control of our own destiny. And the reason why we bought the satellite engine business was we were going to buy a few other core satellite components, and we're going to build satellites. And this was something we talked about a lot. And the idea was that the satellites could go in our rockets. But unlike a Starship, we didn't want to deliver, you know, hundreds of them on every launch or dozens of them on every launch. We wanted to do lots of launches from lots of countries, and we wanted to create a much more, much more decentralized constellation where we weren't having to pay for all the launches and pay for all the satellites. We would sell the launches and sell the satellites. For telcos that wanted to operate their own constellations, and they would all together form an inter-constellation. So like, consider the internet moving up into space where instead of having a closed and proprietary system, we'd have an open system where the satellites could route traffic to each other if they chose to. So this was my vision, like an open space, like OpenStack, OpenStack to open space. Um, and we were working on that and capital markets just didn't cooperate. You know, I think we went public at the best possible time and from the moment we went public, we saw all the SPACs start to fail. We saw companies like Virgin Orbit come out and basically lose all the capital that they had in the, in the trust. And it just became, it became a risk-on market. Investing in these types of things became a risk-off market, not willing to make investments in these types of things. And we were a pre-revenue company. And so the basically the Street and the analysts looked at us and they said, well, we're going to, we're going to basically value this company based on balance sheet risk. And there was a lot of balance sheet risk. Because we would have to raise more money in an uncooperative market or borrow, create a lot of debt. And it put us in a very difficult position that frankly, there weren't a lot of routes out.

Did people must have told you, okay, well, and just finish the thought. So as you're trying to raise more money, you've got— so you've got this, this cash-making satellite business and then you've got the prospects of where all this is heading. Tell me a bit about how that played out. And then I don't know, I don't know if the investors are secret or, or, or not.

I think what we, what we had was the, this confluence of things. We had a real business. So we had cash flow from that business. We had employees that were not willing to give up. It wasn't just me. It was my co-founder, Adam London, right? It was, it was all of the people on all of the teams that had designed Rocket 4. Were supporting the satellite engine business. It was the entire management team of the company that they saw it through. And because of their commitment, I couldn't have done it without them. And nor could we have done it collectively without our customers' support. Customers were buying things from us when frankly we were on the brink of bankruptcy and they knew it because they were trying to save us because they needed us and it would have delayed their satellite programs even more. And so what we had was we had a confluence of events where we had an incredibly committed team. We had customers that really needed what we what we were doing. And the combination of those things, that spoke to investors, right? Because investors saw in us, even though that was a very complicated transaction that they'd never seen before, you know, the structure that we put together is, you know, one of the most creative things bankers and people involved in the transaction, they never seen anything like this before.

I'm sure you made some lawyers very happy.

It was a lot of work and a lot a lot of energy, but we were able to do it, you know, because of those factors.

And okay. And, and, uh, is Mike, Mike Judson, is he still there?

Yeah, he's leading the first stage engine program.

Lucas Hundley?

He's leading our flight safety team.

Yeah. So, so, so people who should know, I mean, I think, I think, I mean, they've been there since what, like 2018, 2017? Um, just, uh, I'm calling those two out because they're, Um, just like two fantastic human beings who taught me, who spent endless hours with me talking rockets and, and really helped me learn about this technology and are just good people to boot. So, so you've got, you got some of the old hands.

The kernel, you build the brain, and that's the brain trust, right? That you, you build the thing back. So I think we, we had to literally go down to the, the, the the core group that really brought this company together. And then we brought folks like Alan more recently to, to, you know, really push to get back to the pad. Doug Koonsman joined us. He was running the New Shepard program for, for Jeff, and he's been an incredible, incredible asset for us.

And, and while I ask the questions and obviously you can choose to answer or not, so you've raised $80 million so far. Are you in the middle? Is that like that gets you to Rocket 4 Are you raising more money? What's the—

Yeah, that's called Series A. I mean, that's, that was priced basically when we took the company private a year ago. This summer we're probably going to do a Series B because we put the company in such a strong position. I'm looking at probably $50 million of revenue this year from both the satellite engine and the launch business milestones. And we're running the business basically breakeven. So the, the profits from the satellite engine business are being added to the milestones we're getting from the DoD to support the launch business. So in a steady state, we will just continue doing this until we get back to the pad and we have a launch and another launch. If investors want to continue to invest in the company, we'll, we'll look at that this summer with a Series B.

Has anyone else ever successfully gone private? I mean, I know 23andMe was kind of trying to, and that's not doesn't seem to be working very well. Um, I think what I was researching, there is like, there's like one or two, right? But this is, this is a very rare—

Michael Dell kind of did it, but you know, usually what happens is you have a private equity firm come in and put up the capital. I'm not aware of any other example of this, which, which made it tricky, right? Where, where the founder— yeah, yeah.

No, I, I mean, I, I didn't phrase this question right. I mean, yes, I remember, I remember Dell and some other companies. Being taken private in, in, like you said, in, in sort of this, um, it's a private equity firm making a big bet on like a cash-flowing business. I mean, this was like the founders taking the company private, and, and it's not like you were being thrown into like a— I know you guys had the engines making money and stuff like that, but it's like still challenges very much ahead, you know. I mean, this this to raise money again, I think is, I mean, it's, it would be hard.

Yeah, I think the question is, is obviously, you know, could we have, could we have done a better job? And I ask myself that every day, you know, what, what have I learned from this experience? You know, where, where did we make mistakes? How can we, how can we do better? I mean, what gives Adam and I the right to have another shot at this? And I think to some degree, it's, you know, we need to, we need to really take this seriously and and work really hard and get it right for our customers and for our, for our shareholders. And so, you know, a lot of the shareholders, you know, a lot of the large shareholders, you know, rolled their equity into the new company as well. And we could do that for everybody because, you know, obviously when you're trading, you have thousands of shareholders. The SEC limits the number of, you know, qualified and unqualified shareholders you can have in a private company.

Why? What has kept you personally doing this? You want to I know you're into space. You worked at NASA. You've always been into technology, the future. There's another part of this where it's, it's you came from the software world. You're building an industrial company. There's another part, I'm sure, that's like you don't— you're competitive. You don't want to, you don't want to lose. You don't want to quit if there's still a chance to do this. But, but I mean, it's hard. And, and I see people going at you guys on Twitter every now and then and things like that. I mean, what's, what's kept you, what's kept you wanting to do this?

Well, I mean, I think first it's, it's we have so many customers, right? And, you know, I have generals in here that say, hey, what you're doing is very important for the country and there isn't another option here. Your ability to go and deploy this system anywhere and, and conduct an orbital launch from an austere location where there is no infrastructure You know, that we did that the last launch out of Cape Canaveral. You look at LV-10, it didn't ultimately get all the way to orbital velocity and deliver that payload, as we all know now. Thank you for that. But, you know, we did go set that up in less than a week. Like there was nothing on that pad. You know, we brought electricity to that pad because the Cape couldn't get electricity run to that pad. So, I mean, it is— there's a lot there. You know, we're going to have mission control down to 2 people. So we've automated everything from all of the things that happen on the ground all the way through payload deploy. So the, you know, every time we've done a launch and I think we were looking at it, you know, we had the 4 commercial launches before that. We had about half a dozen launches and counts with the, with the, with various versions of the rocket. So this is like the Starship flights. I look at what SpaceX is doing and it's incredible. Like, and I watch each, each iteration and what they're able to do. What they're doing is they're looking at the capital they have and they're looking at, they're trying to learn as fast as possible. It's about how quickly can you learn, right? And it works. That's how we got to orbit so quickly. And with Rocket 4, you know, I think what we learned was spend a bit more time upfront, you know, doing the analysis and doing the failure mode stuff and doing the testing of the subsystems. You're not seeing it out there. We're going to try to be more public about this stuff, but we're going to have rocket engines firing again next month, for example. And that's exciting.

All right. I gotta ask this next question. I think you'll get mad at me possibly, but, but, uh, I think the public, the public would, would rake me over the coals if I didn't. All right. Um, Peter Beck, how, how are we feeling about Peter Beck these days?

You know, oh, Peter, you know, I, I think, um, I came outta that movie thinking, well, I, you know, I'm the underdog now. So, um, you know, I think a lot of people are rooting for us. And, and I think I'm proud of, I'm proud of the team. I think, I think he's, he's, he's trying to do something really hard. You know, they've got a whole new rocket they're trying to build and operate. They're trying to build and design and get off the pad as a public company. And so, you know, I have a lot of empathy for him. You know, that, that's going to be really challenging. And, you know, I think The movie tried to, you know, paint us as these like arch nemesis people. And, you know, I never, I never saw it that way. I, you know, I, what's hard about this is, is this, right? It's, it's about making it actually work. I don't think a lot about Peter. I just think about what we need to do to make it work.

In fairness, you guys both sent me text messages about each other. I'm not going to take total, total blame on that one. Do you think Eric Schmidt is brave, crazy, both for taking on relativity?

I think, I think Eric's brilliant. I mean, I think Eric sees how important rockets are, you know, and for, for him to go from running Google and, uh, in a business of that scale, and he spent a lot of time thinking about how we can do a better job with national security stuff, both with AI. And I can tell you his heart's in it for the right reasons. And, you know, I'd love to see him be successful with that. I think, you know, you look at what the DOD needs, they need big rockets and small rockets. And if you look at what Europe has with, with Ariane, they've got the, the Vega and they've got the Ariane 6. You know, you look at what the Indians have with PSLV, they have SSLV. You know, you might have a Neutron and an Electron at Rocket Lab. So, you know, I think I want to see Eric successful because I think, you know, we need, we need both large and small rockets in this country to, to meet all the needs, both national security and commercial.

Did you see that European launch site this weekend of that small rocket maker? That thing is like, that is, that's some Bond villain rocket.

Yeah, I actually tweeted, I, for the first time I tweeted, I was like, been there, don't give up was my message. And I, a lot of, a lot of people love that.

You do. And again, please don't hate me for this. I think it's in, I want you guys to succeed. Oh, absolutely. And I want, I want all this just to be happy, but the, the sideways rocket, how do you feel about the sideways rocket? I mean, I, it is, I think among It may be like the rocket celebrity in some ways.

Well, you know, the thing that most people don't know about the way that ended was your movie opened with Peter almost reaching orbit on his first launch, but not achieving that because there was a flight termination event that occurred. That flight had actually recovered from that maneuver.

It was amazing.

We'd flown through a gate, busted through a gate sideways. Burned off enough fuel, right, to recover. And the engine didn't fail, by the way. As it lifted off, it actually lifted off more slowly by design. And there was a leak in one of the QDs as it separated from the pad, which caused a little explosion to occur in a little enclosed space that severed a wire to one of the engines. So the engine shut down and then it had 4 engines when it should have had 5. And so basically the thrust-to-weight ratio of the thing caused it to hover successfully. And, uh, as it was hovering, it actually— GNC hadn't enabled yet, but it was because it started to tip over and the vertical speed of the nose that would normally be in the y-axis due to a little software bug also triggered due to the x-axis being off. And so it woke up and then it righted itself and then it flew sideways. Um, but it actually returned to its nominal trajectory and was on track to go to orbit and, um, it was terminated by the range. And they thought that it was off course because they had loaded the trajectory of our previous launch into their console. And so this was not our mistake. It was our mistake probably not to check to make sure that they had the right trajectory on their console. But, um, that, that very likely would have made orbit as our first— as a public company.

Yeah, it was like heroic. I mean, it did so many things right, you know, it was, it was relentless.

That rocket embodies that rocket embodies the soul of Astra right there. It was gonna, it was gonna go.

This question is tough for different reasons because I think you have a long personal history with NASA and are doing business or, you know, potential customers. As you know, like I love the glory era of Ames when you were there, when Pete Worden was running it, when NASA, that center was trying all these new ideas. We're in such a different era now where commercial space really is humming along, obviously in tandem with the government, and, and a lot of business depends on that. But, you know, it's— I'm not the first person to sort of suggest that maybe NASA changes a bit. I— you're somebody who lived through the change within Ames. You really enacted a lot of stuff. I mean, what's your perfect vision? What's your idealized vision of what NASA should be doing or changing over the next 5, 10, 15 years?

I, I think the thing to realize is that organizations do not do great things. Um, leaders inspire organizations to do great things. So, so if you look at whether it was Kennedy inspiring NASA to go to the moon, or whether it was von Braun inspiring the people at NASA to build the Apollo moon rocket. You look at what happened that allowed SpaceX to be so successful. It was Elon and his passion for being a multiplanetary species and inspiring the people at SpaceX to go and really deliver for NASA the Falcon 9. And it was Lori Garver, right, at NASA, working with Charlie to give Elon a chance. And I think, you know, what we need to see under the— under Jared, and I think Jared's fantastic, he's brilliant.

Jared Isaacman, the new NASA head. Yep.

Yeah. I mean, I think when I was at NASA, it was because Pete was a visionary who wanted to do great things, and we were able to take an incredibly talented group of people at NASA and rally them behind everything we were doing. So, you know, I think there's been a lot of focus in Doge and in the recent weeks about firing people from the US government. But where the real change can be made is when we start to see Jared bring the new leadership in and take the most innovative people at NASA and make them focus on the right things. And I think you're only going to get so far by firing people. Perhaps that's important, but, um, by inspiring people, uh, you're going to see potentially incredible things happen or nothing happen, right? And I think that's the real next test for this administration and for, for, uh, for Trump and Elon and Jared and everybody involved.

Do you think maybe Jared— does that mean he comes up with a new— you know, I, I think somewhere in NASA's DNA it's still sort of like the Apollo program, and we're gonna make rockets and, and just feels like that has to change. I mean, do you think he— does that mean maybe he comes up with like a new, um, central thrust that everybody's chasing after?

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think the idea that don't pay people to do nothing, pay people to do things. So, you know, I, you know, what, what made SpaceX work was, hey, here's a big contract and we'll pay you if you can deliver things to the space station. And so Elon went and he raised a bunch of money and he did it.. And so I'd like to see more contracts where you, where, hey, go build a lunar lander, go build a Mars sample return thing. Don't hand out $5 billion to a bunch of government contractors to go do that. Um, tell people if they do it, uh, we'll pay you for it and just allow competition and the private sector to go, uh, attempt these challenging things. Like, uh, we'll build rockets if there's contract, if we're, if we're given contracts that say, if you, if you launch this payload, We'll pay you X. I can go raise capital all day to deliver on this. But if you don't have those contracts, it's very difficult to raise capital. So, so I think we're on the right course here. NASA should be only investing in the things that do not make any commercial sense but are good for civilization. And that's where you should draw the line.

Yeah, I know you guys are making a lot of stuff in-house and you have this factory. The aerospace business, like a lot of manufacturing, still depends on on these mom-and-pop shops that are scattered all over the country. In many, many, many cases, I don't think the public is aware of this, the people are hitting retirement age. Their kids don't really want to take over the business. It's weird that like in aerospace, we actually seem almost in better shape, especially versus somewhere like China, where I would argue our space program is ahead and we have way more startups doing innovative things and making stuff themselves. But you've been in this world for a few years now. When I see companies like Anduril, I know they're making their own factory, um, but all these defense startups, all these things that the U.S. is betting on and hinge on, I, I question like our manufacturing capacity and the degree to which it kind of still exist to fulfill this vision of where people want to go. I mean, how do you think about this stuff? Is there— I don't know, what is your take on, on, um, as somebody who's dealt with this on a day-to-day basis? Are you concerned or am I, am I off base?

No, I think you're spot on and it's a huge problem. Most of the aerospace companies that are publicly traded do not machine a lot of the parts in-house. They have a bunch of private companies that are, as you say, mom-and-pop shops, and they're largely integrators. You know, you look at companies like Boeing, they will largely outsource major subassemblies of aircraft, wings, things, things that you would think that Boeing would make. They're made all over the world and then they bring it all together and they paint it and they, they do some testing and they ship it. And, you know, what, what this means is, is that America, it doesn't have companies that can produce things anymore.. And one of the things Astra, as we think about our system, we make it in this building, right? And we can make another one of these buildings somewhere. And the rockets leave in shipping containers that could have Walmart or Amazon logos on them, frankly. Like, you wouldn't need to know that we're making rockets in this building. It doesn't certainly look, look like it from the outside. And I think the value in that is if your supply chain is, you know, one level deep where aluminum comes in one side of the building and you're running the machines that are machining the parts and you're, you're able to make most of those assemblies in-house, not only can you go faster in development because you're not waiting for some machine shop to make one of something, which they're never going to want to do, but you have that means of production under your control. And so, you know, you don't have to solve a very difficult combinatorial optimization problem, right, with DPAS and other blunt instruments that the government uses to try to prioritize, you know, let's make these connectors so that these missiles can be shipped to Raytheon versus those airplanes can be, you know, can be made for Airbus. And, you know, I think we've really tried to be intentional about that. So we bring in, you know, spools of aluminum and we make the rocket. We bring in giant bars of aluminum and we cut them into pieces and we make a lot of the components of the engines. And that's, that's all part of this. You know, you can't, you know, you can't say that you can make a rocket a day and then have a supply chain incapable of doing that, or you're just, you're just, um, you're just making stuff up.

Yeah, it's gonna be, it's gonna be interesting for years. I feel like there's all this ambition, there's a lot of great ideas, and then I get, I just get a little worried about the mechanics of all this. And then I see companies like BYD in China, and the more I hear about everything they can make, and it's just, it's like, I don't know sometimes if all of the US has wrapped their heads around, around what's happening. I'm keeping an eye on time and I promise not to keep you too long. I feel like you've always been incredibly generous with me in your time and your access, and then I'm the one who ends up with like a big platform to say what I want to say. So I want to— is there anything? I know we covered some of the news. Is there anything else people need to know about where Astra is, what the rest of the year looks like, or if you just want to shit on me or whatever you want to do, the floor is yours.

No, I appreciate you coming back. We haven't talked a lot to the press lately. We've been just focused on, you know, making this thing work. I am just in awe of the support we've gotten from our team and our customers that we can be here right now having this conversation, you know, that we can say we now have a profitable business that is investing in launch. The investors that supported us, the customers that supported us,, you know, in, you've seen some of the press and the tweets that have come out, you know, over the last year, despite that. So I think it just shows you how much need there is for what we're doing, you know, that so many people would continue to work so hard to make this work despite all of that.

So if we have Wild Wild Space 2, what is the opening scene? It's like a convoy of shipping containers heading, heading where?

Where's it going?

What does that look like?

I mean, I think I'd like to see just kind of like the car factory of rockets coming off. And I think you're going to come back later this year and you're going to start to see lots of rocket stages on the production line. And then I want to really— daily launch has always been— it's the Wi-Fi password when we started the company. So we're quite serious about that.

Are you supposed to say that out loud?

I think we changed it.

Um, okay. So, and then what would we call that movie?

Well, of course, you know, The Return of Astra or something. I think that's the—

wait, what was the line you were upset at me about? About, uh, it didn't work out. So it could be like, it worked out or something like that. Right, right. But we could just make it, it worked out.

It worked out. It worked out. I think, I think this is going to be a very fun thing for me to watch you have to begin that, to begin the film.

So, wow, you've got all the cameras, you've got all the pieces in place, man. I, I've, I've— knowing you has been one of the, like, joys of my life, watching for— I don't know if people are listening to this who don't know. I mean, I was kind of there when it was like 5 people in a room.

I—

you guys I've always been pulling for you guys. I have a lot of like emotional attachments to a lot of the people who've worked on this for a long time. You've hired Al Weston, who my recent podcast probably makes clear is one of my idols and, and, uh, one of my favorite, favorite people. So all the, all the elements are there for a, uh, for a fantastic, um, next chapter.

Well, um, it's been, it's been fun and, uh, We're just getting started. You know, this is— keep in mind how young we are as a company. We're just celebrating our 8th anniversary. So most of these other companies hadn't launched yet at that point. So we've— I think we've got a lot of experience under our belt and a very resilient team. You know, if anything, that's the one thing that I'll say is it requires an incredible amount of grit and resilience to make this work. And if the last year shows our customers and investors anything, it's Um, you know, we are going to do whatever it takes to make this work.

All right, man. Well, thank you for your time. We will come if you'll have us. We'll come, we'll come film an episode of our new TV show there in the meantime, just to show people what the, what the factory looks like. And, and, um, and thank you. Yeah. Thank you as always for your time. And, um, then I wish you guys all the best of luck. Can't wait to see, can't wait to go to another rocket launch.

Excellent. Can't wait to have you. Thanks, Ashlee. Appreciate it. Thanks, Chris.

Core Memory is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance. Our guest this week was Chris Kemp. The show is produced by me and David Nicholson. Our theme song comes from James Mercer and John Sortland, and Core Memory is edited by the Outstanding, incredible, I'm running out of adjectives. John Sortland.