The First Bungee Jump, Space Weapons, Lunar Landers and Airships: Al Weston Has Done It All

When the Google founders came and saw this, they initiated what's called the Google Lunar X Prize because it gave them the inspiration that going to the moon isn't that hard and people should really be able to do it. Could, should, would be able to do it for tens of millions, not billions.

Sometimes there is a man, and in this case, that man is Dr. Alan Weston. You probably haven't heard of him unless you're in the aerospace field, but you should have because he is one of the closest things to a living legend of anyone I know. He, um, helped invent the bungee jump while he was a student at Oxford. He went to the Air Force and made space weapons. He went to NASA and built a low-cost lunar lander. And then later in life, he ended up building airships for Sergey Brin, a story that, that I broke a few years ago and, and that helped me get to know Dr. Alan Weston. And today you'll get to know him as well. Here we go. Episode 2 of Core Memory. Dr. Al Weston, thank you for doing this.

Great pleasure.

I could not be more excited about this. I'm gonna embarrass you for a second, or at least I think I'm going to. I get to interview all kinds of interesting people. I, I've been living in Silicon Valley for a long time and run across all sorts of quite compelling individuals. You were always one of these figures who I would hear about from my other friends, and they're like, you can't believe the life this guy has led. And so I always wanted to meet you, and, and we met under unusual circumstances. I'm gonna go nearish the present and then we'll go back into your life. Several years ago, I had heard about this airship being built at NASA Ames, which is this NASA center near my house. And I was intrigued by this project and I ended up breaking a story about it, I think before you guys were prepared for that to come out. And I remember I followed you on LinkedIn, I followed you on Facebook and you made these connections and then A couple days after my story came out, they all went away and I'd been, I'd been cut off. So my sense was you didn't appreciate the story I'd written about the secret airship. Is that fair?

Well, we were, as they say here, uh, in the stealth mode. And so we kept a low profile, as you've noticed, for a really long time. And it wasn't until A year or two later that we started working with media, including you. And so yes, I, at the time when I found out, it was, ah. Yeah.

And, and I was sad because I, I wanted to meet you, this legend, and I wanted to learn more about the airship. But then a couple of years passed and we end up at a dinner that a mutual friend of ours had arranged. I don't think he fully knew what he was doing, but he sat the two of us next to each other, and I remember being excited and I was scared because I wanted to talk to you about the airship. And in hindsight, or at least I think I learned you were prepared to walk out of this dinner with this evil reporter nearby.

Well, that's true. I didn't know you. And so when I sat down next to you, I didn't know who you were. And the, the person who had organized the dinner didn't tell me who was coming to dinner. And that he had put me next to you. And so when I found out, I, I was, as you remember, I was horrified. However, we had a great dinner and we agreed not to talk about the airship project. So we talked about other things, including my experience at NASA working on space projects. And that was really the thing that you wanted to talk to me about anyway. And, and that was fun. And at the end of the night, you gave me a ride home. And, and so that was fun. And we, we, we, we became good friends. But at the beginning, you're right, I was like, "Oh no." So yes, that's the way it happened. That's the way I remember it.

I was very happy. I was nervous while we were sitting there, and then yes, we end up on this ride home. Okay, so this is just a setup, how we met. You've lived this extraordinary life. Al's shaking his head modestly. There's all kinds of places we could begin, we could go biographically, but there's a particular spot I want to start, and maybe we'll work our way back a bit later, but As you know, I've been fascinated by this thing that you were a part of called the Dangerous Sports Club, which was at Oxford. It started in roughly—

Well, I think it began around 1977.

Okay.

I didn't get connected to it until 1978. It was started by David Kirk and Chris Baker, Philip Oppenheim, and Ed Holten, and I met Kirk in 1978, I think at a karate class. And it, it, while it was, while some of the people were at Oxford at some point, it, it was never associated with the university. It was in the same town. It's been referred to as the Oxford University Dangerous Sports Club, but it had no university affiliation.

And you were studying at Oxford at the time?

I was at Oxford from 1975 to '78, and I was studying engineering.

Okay.

And I got to know David Kirk, and through him I met other people in the club. Yes.

I could describe the Dangerous Sports Club, but how would you describe it to people who've never heard about it before?

Well, it was an interesting collection of people which has evolved over the decades. When I met David Kirk, he was very interested in hang gliding, and I had taken up hang gliding. I'd bought a hang glider and taught myself how to hang glide, and that led me to spend time with him talking about various adventures that we could do together. And so that's how it started.

It was amazing. There's a documentary on the internet for people who want to go look for it. You guys got up to all kinds of adventures. You were catapulting people skiing down mountains. You couldn't just go on skis. You had to build like a contraption that you would then ride down the mountain. You guys would just paraglide off mountaintops in, in Africa, sort of heading into totally unknown spots when you would land. And quite famously, more or less invented bungee jumping. I know there's islanders who jump with vines and have done for many years, but as far as I understand, you guys were the first ones to jump off a bridge with a bungee cord.

That's true. The idea came from Chris Baker, who lived next to the Clifton Suspension Bridge just outside of Bristol. And he came up with the idea after watching people in the islands near Papua New Guinea attach vines to their ankles and jump off towers. And so that was the, the origin of bungee jumping. Simon Keeling and I, who were engineers together at Oxford in 1978, we were called upon to do some analysis of the dynamics, you know, the bouncing part to make sure that people didn't get too high G and also that we didn't hit the ground. And so we did.

So you did the math to see if bungee jumping checked out, right?

I didn't actually think I was going to jump when I was at Oxford. I wasn't one of the cool set. And so when it came to this event, I thought the cool people were gonna jump off, but it turns out that in the morning, 'cause there'd been a party the night before, in the morning of the first bungee jump, all the cool people disappeared. And so I, I think kind of by accident, I ended up being one of the first bungee jumpers.

So you're on a bridge somewhere near Oxford?

No, Bristol.

Bristol. You guys just line up one after the other and give it a go.

Right. Well, not one, we, we were all in a line. It wasn't one after each other. Everybody had their own bungee rope. And so we were lined up and we jumped off. There was an invitation that was sent out around people in the UK, maybe in other parts of the world that said bungee jumping at dawn. And somehow my sisters got hold of this invitation and called the police and said, look, you've got to stop my brother. He's going to commit suicide on, on, on April Fool's Day. So, um, the police were alerted and they went there. They went there to arrest us and stop us from killing ourselves. However, they got there at dawn, which is what the invitation said, said bungee jumping at dawn. But we didn't show up until, I think, I don't know, 10 or 11. And by that time the police had gone. So we jumped off and then, you know, there was media there and there was a big circus. And then the police heard about this and they came back.. And while the lower-level policemen thought this was very entertaining, the guy in charge, um, was, was really upset about it.

Just the spectacle of the whole thing?

I don't know. He, he had a really bad attitude. If you see the videos, you can, you can see the look on his face. He was called Superintendent Powell. I still remember his name. So we were marched off to prison and, and spent the night in jail. The police who were there went to Chris's house. We had this party at his house the night before, and they confiscated what was left of the booze. And then the people who got arrested, the bungee jumpers, actually the police came to ourselves and gave us each a bottle of wine. It was very unusual and sweet of them. And then we met the magistrate the next morning, Monday morning, and she very sternly told us to not do this again. We were, as they say, bound over to keep the peace. That was the charge. We were charged with disturbing the Queen's peace.

And did this receive national attention or Yeah, there was a lot of publication.

There are lots of articles in newspapers, primarily in England. I think it may have spread a bit, but that time it was the very first time ever, so it was more of an English thing.

Was this club notorious? Was it celebrated? Was it all engineers and kind of nerdy types? What was the makeup of the Dangerous Sports Club?

There was no formal membership. When I was there, Simon and I were engineers. Chris Baker was a hang glider pilot and someone that likes to ski. I think he ran a school maybe with his brother. And then David Kirk, the chairman, would teach young people English at Oxford. He had graduated maybe 10 years before us, before Simon and I. Philip Oppenheim was a Conservative MP. He was, I think, the youngest MP, um, in the 20th century. So it was a, it was a, a collection from people. Ed Hulton, I never saw Ed Hulton at any of the events. He had been part of the earlier activities, which involved going down the Cresta Run, and I think they had a, an underground canoeing trip in, in Switzerland. But really the thing that got us a lot of fame, fame, a lot of attention was the, the bungee jumping off the Cliffland Suspension Bridge. And then later that year, because we had been told not to do it again, we had came up with a plan to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge on Columbus Day of the same year, 1979.

I love those stories. You guys do do this. You come to San Francisco, the police, if I remember, find out that this is gonna happen. Refresh me.

No, the, the police found out about it when it happened. We jumped off the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge during rush hour. On Columbus Day. So it's Columbus Day, it's a national holiday, so it wasn't that busy, but it was very different to the first jump on, on April Fools' on the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Clifton Suspension Bridge is very light traffic and maybe even no traffic. It's mostly, it's a footbridge. So we had lots of help. When we jumped off the Golden Gate, every person, every man and woman had to take care of themselves. And so, so we had to attach our bungee ropes to the bridge and then throw them over the side and then jump on.

Wearing a tuxedo.

I, I, I wasn't wearing a tuxedo. A few people did. I think Kirk did and Peter Carew did. But no, I, I, I wasn't wearing a, a tuxedo. I did come up with an escape method working with a friend of mine. I was going to Virginia Tech at the time, and a friend of mine at Blacksburg, that's where Virginia Tech is, ran a climbing shop. And so he came up with a scheme where we could slide down on a, a ring. After the bungee had, had, uh, stopped bouncing. And so we had a second line in our shirts and we did that. Two of us, Simon Keenan and I got away. It was a bit tricky getting your weight shifted from the bungee onto the second line. And nobody else wanted to practice, but Simon and I did. And so we, we figured out how to do that and slid down the rope onto a speedboat that was waiting for us that then took us to the north side of the bridge, got into a waiting Cadillac limousine, a white Cadillac limousine that took us back across the bridge, back to San Francisco. Airport where we were gonna jump on the first plane and escape. But it turned out the police who came, they weren't that, that upset. They, they arrested everybody there. But as we were driving to the airport, we did listen to news of this and listened to people saying, well, there's this thing called bungee jumping.

I wonder what this is all about on the radio while you're in the car.

While we're in the car, we're listening to news reports. And also there was a report that two people had escaped. That was us. And that the police were after us. And I thought, yes. Finally, I'm a wanted criminal being chased by the law.

But you make it on the plane and, and it's—

well, we didn't actually leave. It turned out the police weren't that upset. They, they fined, I think they fined people $100 and, and they confiscated the bungee ropes, but I think we got them back. And so it wasn't a big deal.

I've watched the documentary about this. There was also a person in a gorilla costume who had a saxophone that I remember flying around, uh, either Parliament or I think it was Parliament in, in London. Is the identity of that person, um, disclosable?

Well, I think so. It's been such a long time. I don't think they're going to press charges. Yes, that was me. I think that was around 1982, either '81 or '82. And what happened was the chairman of the club dared me to fly a powered hang glider over London, and I was supposed to fly through Tower Bridge. And I had to wear a gorilla suit and I had to play a saxophone, which I can't play the saxophone. And really it just got in the way. I'd never flown a powered hang glider before, but being a bold young man, I just thought, well, I can, you know, I can fly, I can fly anything. I'm, I'm a hang glider pilot. How hard can this be? It was actually pretty tricky, particularly getting off the ground. And the day that this happened was really windy and there was a lot of low-level turbulence. I did Finally managed to get the hang glider off the ground after several tries and started flying slowly towards the bridge. But at low altitude, I realized I couldn't control the, the glider close to the ground, and I wasn't gonna be able to make it through the bridge. I was just gonna collide with one of the towers. So I chickened out and I flew over the bridge instead and crept up towards the Houses of Parliament. In fact, there's video of, of me flying over the Houses of Parliament. And then over Buckingham Palace. I think it was over Buckingham Palace that the helicopter showed up. I don't know if it was really a police helicopter, but could have been, and it should have been. But this was 1981 or '82, and so people weren't really thinking about terrorism, things like this, something like that. Yeah. It was just, oh, what's that? Anyway, I saw the police or whatever it was, maybe news helicopter, and Thought, hmm, time to leave. So I flew into a cloud and fortunately the helicopter didn't join me, otherwise we might have collided with each other and headed north and ended up landing north of London. And one of the people from the Golden Gate Bridge, Peter Carew, picked me up. He chased me, um, on the ground with a, a motorbike, picked me up after I landed, took me to Heathrow where I jumped on a plane and flew back to the US cuz I was still at school at that time.

And this made national news as well, I assume?

There was some news, yes. I've got an article where it discusses it. Yes. And yeah.

I've always been impressed by all this for many reasons. I mean, the exploits that we just went through are a small portion of what the Dangerous Sports Club got up to. I know in the latter years, there were some injuries and a couple tragedies that cast a bit of a pall over the club. More generally, stereotypically, I think of Oxford as a pretty stuffy, place, and you're this very respectable man in the world. How do you reflect back on this time of life? It was just something fun that you guys wanted to do. I, you know, it's, it's quite exceptional and unusual.

Well, it was sort of a student thing. I mean, I, I was active in the club when I was a graduate student and, and also maybe in the very early days of the club, maybe I was involved right in my last days of being an engineering student. I can't remember exactly, but I stopped being active with the club after I moved to the States to study at Virginia Tech. And so many of the things that you referenced earlier, like the ski races and the catapulting, I just, I wasn't involved with it at all. I was aware of them, but I didn't participate in those things. I was a bit nervous when I came to America, when I got a job. I got a job working for the Air Force, right? And I wasn't sure how they would feel about, about these activities. And so I didn't tell anybody, but of course eventually people found out, but it turned out that my bosses thought it was kind of funny and, and they didn't mind at all.

Okay. This helps us get into what you did next. You've had this career in aerospace in different forms and shapes. When you were at Oxford as an engineer, was it clear to you that was the direction you were gonna head in, or what did you think you might end up doing?

Absolutely no. When I, when I was at Oxford, I didn't have a clue what I was going to do. They had job fairs, you know, you'd go and meet people and, and they would say, oh, here's, here are the jobs you can do. And the coolest job that I think I applied for, didn't get, was to go and work for one of the big oil companies and, and do exploration, you know, work on the rigs in, I don't know, in Malaysia or somewhere or Indonesia. And Schlumberger was the company, but I, and they paid really well at the time. They paid, I think, sort of £10,000 a year, which was a princely sum. But I didn't get any of those jobs. Some of my friends did. I didn't get that job offer. The other jobs were not terribly exciting and engineers weren't paid very well. And so there were sort of, I don't know, £3,000 or £4,000 a year. And, um, I, I just didn't find them that interesting. So, so trying to stave off the inevitable challenge of finding out what I was gonna do when I graduated, I decided, well, let's go and get another degree. So I went to Virginia Tech and I studied aerospace engineering. I'd studied engineering science, which was like a mixture of everything at Oxford, but I, I narrowed in on aerospace and I was a hang glider pilot, so I was interested in aviation and but the whole thing of spacecraft and rockets I thought was kind of fun. When I was a little boy, I really liked Tintin going to the moon. So I studied my master's, but my master's didn't last that long. And so then I was thinking, oh gosh, what am I gonna do next? So I said, well, my professor said, well, why don't you do a PhD? And I thought, great, I don't have to make up my mind for another year or two. And so I stayed on for another, actually it wasn't that long, it was maybe a year and a bit. So that's what happened.

Was, did your family have an academic background, were the things you were doing expected or unusual for your family?

Both of my sisters went to university. My sister, my older sister Margaret, went to Lady Margaret Hall and she studied, I'm gonna get this wrong and she's gonna kill me. I think she studied philosophy. I think she did PPE, philosophy and psychology and economics. And then Anne went to Sussex University and studied economics, and then later she, Anne, got a master's at the London School of Economics.

Did your parents also have academic background?

Yeah, both our parents were, had degrees. And my father had an undergraduate degree from Perth, Western Australia, which is also where my mum went to school. And then he'd got a graduate degree at Wadham College in Oxford. At one point he was studying in the Sorbonne for his PhD but didn't finish it. Everyone in the family got, had degrees.

So both your parents were Aussies?

Yep.

But you were born in Canada.

My father was a professor of law and he moved, the family moved. My mother and my father and my elder sister moved to Edmonton, and that's where my middle sister Anne was born. And then, and so he was a professor there and then he moved to Toronto and I was born in Toronto.

And then you go just about everywhere as a kid.

Well, not everywhere, but my family moved in 1961 to Dar es Salaam and we stayed there till 1964. And left Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and moved to Lusaka, Zambia, where my mother then joined the United Nations. And then after 2 years in Lusaka, the family moved to Ankara, Turkey, and my mother was there for 5 years. For the first 3 years, I went to school there, but then at the age of 12, she shipped me off to boarding school in York. And so I went to school in York from 1969 to 1974.

Why were you moving around so much?

Well, my mother working for United Nations, that was something that they did. Why did my father move? I don't know. He was interested in different areas. It was kind of exciting for him. He started the first law faculty in East Africa in 1961.

What effect do you think that childhood had on you? I moved around a lot as a kid and it's always been, I don't know, some part of my identity, I suppose. I don't know if you felt the same way.

Well, I enjoy travel. I like going to foreign countries. I like traveling the world. I remember when I was 13, traveling on my own in between Ankara, Turkey, and York, England, where my boarding school was. And I'm sitting in an airplane on my own, feeling a little bit, I don't know, not intimidated, but a little bit like, oh, I'm on my own. And it suddenly hit me like a lightning bolt that, wow, being on my own in an airplane isn't a bad thing. It's a wonderful thing. It's an amazing thing. And it, I suddenly realized how it was like a sense of power. Like I could, I could travel the entire world in, in this beautiful shiny tube. So I never looked back. But yes, it did impact me a lot. It, it gave me a sense of confidence, which partly related to traveling around the world, but also just a sense of self-confidence.

Yeah, I don't think many— there's not many 13-year-olds that would be in that situation these days.

No, no, no. Sometimes I traveled with my sisters, but a lot of the time, most of the time, I was traveling on my own.

When you eventually get into aerospace engineering, had at least that part been a long-running interest for you, just aviation in general, or was that something you stumbled into just as you studied engineering?

Well, I really liked hang gliding and I, I taught myself how to hang glide in about, in 1976. I bought a hang glider in 1976. So how old were you then? I was 19.

Okay.

But the choice of a job came down to almost an accident. I was at the graduate department of Virginia Tech when An Air Force captain was wandering around the, the corridors and my professor said, Alan, go and find someone with a tie, borrow it and talk to this captain. So someone very kindly lent me their tie and I chatted for maybe an hour with this captain and that led then to an interview at the Air Force Rocket Propulsion Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base and they offered me a job. And so then I moved out there and, and that, that began, that was the beginning of my career.

Okay, so we're about to get into some absolutely fascinating stuff that you worked on. Was it easy for a British citizen?

Is that— I was Canadian.

Canadian.

I was born in Toronto.

Okay, but you could go into the Air Force and no problems?

Then you could. Then it was possible for the Air Force to hire a Canadian citizen. When I started, I was actually a Virginia Tech employee for the first few months. But then the Air Force offered me a position, which I took with the proviso that I had to become an American citizen as quickly as possible. And so I did. In March of 1984, I became an American citizen.

And I learned today you got top secret clearance.

Well, I got a clearance at the same time. So, yes. So I got a clearance on the same day that I became an American citizen.

Okay. The part that I know the most about from your time at the Air Force is working on what's commonly called Star Wars, the Strategic Defense Initiative. It was this Reagan-era program to create a missile shield against the Soviets. Very famous. And we have a mutual friend, Pete Worden, who used to run NASA Ames down the street and was also involved in that program. And I want to get into that, but I assume that's not the first thing that you started working on.

It wasn't the first interesting because the speech that started SDI, do you remember, happened in 1983 and it took a while for the Department of Defense to actually put programs into place. But in 1985, it began for the Rocket Lab. When I first started, I was working on other things. I managed technology development efforts with air-to-air missiles, with ADA-based real-time control on a, uh, very fast computer at the time, a chip called the Intel 432, and also managed the development of AutoCode, which has now become standard practice for many aerospace and other applications. However, in 1985, everything changed and we started getting money to develop technology for the Strategic Defense Initiative. SDI had begun on the basis of laser weapons, directed energy that could move at the speed of light. Unfortunately, the technology wasn't then ready to deliver on that promise. And so after many years of investment, the Department of Defense realized that they needed to get something simpler and you might say more old-fashioned. And so they, they went to kinetic energy, which is basically throwing a rock at the target, a guided rock. And that's what I worked on.

So, okay, so the original idea is you put some systems up in space, they spot presumably Soviets sending an ICBM that's passing through space and you want to intercept it. And so the original conception was that we would instantly just vaporize it with a laser.

That's right.

Okay. And so in, I think like Edward Teller was a proponent. I mean, this was no joke. There was a lot of money.

Billions.

And very smart people. This is always a big question about SDI is like, did we actually believe this could work, or was this all just meant to have the Russians spend themselves into oblivion? Presumably people did believe that the space lasers could work.

Well, there were two flavors. There was the X-ray laser and the chemical laser. The X-ray laser was nuclear pumped, and that was the idea that Ed Teller had and others at Lawrence Livermore. Unfortunately, The underlying technology was never proven. They couldn't show that the weapon actually worked. And so, so while a lot of money went into that, other people in the national lab community at Los Alamos and Sandia reviewed the data that Livermore had been gathering and, and said, look, this isn't, this isn't gonna work. It's not working. And, um, I'm not a laser guy, but I'm just, this is what I've read about that time. So anyway, so, so, so that effort slowed down and eventually was stopped. The chemical lasers kept on going, but they were really big. They, they weighed hundreds of thousands of pounds. They were so big that they needed a new launch system to get them into space.

Like an enormous rocket.

A huge rocket. In fact, there was an initiative in the late '80s called ALS, the Advanced Launch System, which was really there to support the launch of these lasers. But in the end, there was a realization in the Defense Department that this isn't, doesn't make any sense. And, and so that came to an end. But for, uh, for the first maybe 5 years from, you know, '84 through '89, a lot of money went into lasers. Uh, and then that's slowed down.

You said you're not a laser guy. When you would hear about this stuff, did you think it was practical at the time, or, or you instinctually felt like it wasn't gonna work?

Well, I didn't know. I, I, I wasn't involved in it. I studied this after the fact to find out how, how far away they were at the time. At the time, I was just doing my thing, working on rockets, and, but it turned out that the powers that be realized that this wasn't working and they, they needed something else. And so In 1985, technologies were developed to support kinetic energy interceptors as opposed to directed energy weapons. And that's when I started getting involved in SDI.

In, in this case, I believe kinetic interceptor means far from a laser knocking down an ICBM, you're, you're actually going to try to hit an ICBM with some kind of some kind of projectile and blow it up.

Exactly. It's a guided missile basically that works in space, but with no warhead. The point is that you're closing at velocities up to 20 kilometers per second, and all you need to do is to touch the target and everything goes away. So the emphasis was making these interceptors, these projectiles, the guided missile really small and light. And initially, where I was at Edwards Air Force Base at the Rocket Lab, we developed the technology for propulsion, the rocket propulsion that could both boost the interceptor towards the ICBM target as well as the projectile propulsion needed to divert the maneuvering and attitude control systems that used various kinds of propulsion technologies.

Okay, so please tell me where I get this wrong, but I'm picturing I'm picturing a large piece of hardware that's orbiting in space and then coming out of this large piece of hardware are these projectiles and you're putting the propulsion systems on the ends of the projectiles so that they can find their target.

Not so they can find their target, so that they can maneuver in the way. So other people were working on the technology for the telescope, the sensor, you know, the camera that could find the target. We developed the technology to maneuver the interceptor into the path, the oncoming path of the target.

And there's what? There's like a bus-sized container of these projectiles that's going around in orbit? What was the plan?

Well, that was one plan. One plan was to have a platform with some number of these interceptor missiles. I think the smallest number was 3 and the largest was 100. There were different prime contractors that were optimizing the constellation, and these were in orbit waiting for that time that the Russians, because that the Soviet Union, that was the, the threat of the time, were to launch a, a lot of their ICBMs at the United States. Another approach that was being developed by other elements of the defense research community was called a space-based railgun. So this was an electromagnetic launcher which accelerated the interceptor, the homing vehicle, at up to a million Gs to up to 20 kilometers per second.

Okay. And did that, did that actually move along or, or?

No, the platform, the, the railgun itself did not move along. However, technologies were developed for the projectile that would use the railgun that were very helpful for the evolution of missile defense.

There's all these wonderful YouTube videos surrounding different parts of your career. From this particular period, you can find these, these tether tests that you would do. And, and obviously it's very difficult to test some of these things in space. You probably want to find out how well some of this stuff works on Earth. Um, so you were testing your propulsion systems here in California.

Sure. So in 1987, the program office at Los Angeles Air Force Base asked the Rocket Lab where I worked, are there ways that we can test the propulsion technologies that will show that they work in space? And so we came up with an approach which we called hover testing, where we would integrate an interceptor, a projectile, and fly it round in a room. And the program office said, great, let's go and do that. And so we selected a contractor to build the propulsion elements, and we found an old shed that had been used in the Apollo program as a pre-test site for the F-1 engines that were tested. A lot of those were tested at the Rocket Lab. And we started flying these interceptors around in the room starting in 1988.

I mean, this gets a lot of attention. Seems like quite promising work.

Yes. We were successful eventually. We had a number of events that we had to correct. We were moving very quickly. And so in our first tests, we would try and test again within days. And sometimes we found that we were moving too quickly, and so we had to slow down. And test again.

What does that mean, too quickly?

Well, for example, we found out that after our first test, when we tried to test again within, I think, a couple of weeks, that after that one failed, we found out it was because the fuel and oxidizer had been sitting on the valves and the valve material had been corroded. And so, so things needed to be cleaned. More carefully in between tests, as an example. But eventually we got it to work really well, and the community was really excited about this, and it showed a pathway for testing that was treaty compliant, and it was observable, and it was repeatable. So you could go and do it again and again and again and show that the systems actually worked. Initially, the tests were just on the rocket propulsion elements, but then we integrated the cameras, which were infrared at different wavelengths. Some of them were visible cameras, and we tested different propulsion elements as well.

You were talking about the treaties. That's an element that I hadn't thought of in all of this. So already there must have been all kinds of treaties. Well, I know there were all these treaties between the US and the Soviet Union around weapons tests and SDI itself was very controversial, this idea of putting weapons in space. So how did you deal with that and, and what was the thinking around being able to do this kind of work?

Well, we weren't responsible for the deployment of an operational weapon system. We were very early on in the phases of technology development. We were trying to answer the question, can this work at all? Does it make sense to even go to that level? Can we develop the technologies that are small enough, that are affordable? Do they work? And so I was never involved in the question of how this would be deployed and what treaties would have to be changed or, or potentially broken. But the point that we were showing was that by using this ground test facility, we could find out on the ground very quickly, very inexpensively, whether or not the approach could work at all. And that would lead to suborbital tests, which we later did at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and also at sea, which were exoatmospheric. The tests happened in space, but they were all treaty compliant because they weren't an operational space weapon system. It wasn't in orbit. It was just going up and down.

So the major breakthrough here, you went over some of it, but it was to get a, a propulsion system that was small enough, reactive enough, cheap enough, and that could work in space. These were all things that had to be breakthroughs that you solved.

Well, the propulsion part was our primary responsibility, but after we started hover testing, the group that I managed also inherited program management responsible for the entire projectiles. And that included other technologies as well, the sensor and the guidance., and the communication, everything had to be small and lightweight and inexpensive and to work very well. I became the program manager for the Air Force for LEAP. That is the Lightweight Exoatmospheric Projectile program that is now deployed as part of the Standard Missile-3, and it's called the Aegis LEAP interceptor and has been shooting down missiles from Iran targeting Israel.

This is the legacy of some of this technology.

Exactly.

When did this work start to wind down, that particular program?

Well, it hasn't wound down at all. It's, it's operational. It evolved. So I, I was building kill vehicles from 1988 to 1998 and testing them at Edwards and also at sea and these other places. But there was a transition from, um, R&D that different labs were doing into operational developments. And so the Navy, of course, has a big program office for the standard missile. They absorbed our kill vehicle developments into their standard missile development.

And, and there's a transition that takes place with SDI itself as the Soviet Union collapses Reagan was already under a lot of pressure around SDI. A lot of people thought it was a waste of money, it would never work. The, the Soviet Union collapses, we maybe don't need this missile shield anymore anyway. Um, okay, I have two questions on this. One is, in the broadest possible terms, what's your take on SDI? Did it make sense to pursue? Do you think it had any effect on, on the collapse of the Soviet Union? A lot of people make that case?

Well, it's true that we were very public about our activities, and it's different today. A lot of research that's done by the Department of Defense is hidden, but back then we were encouraged, we were directed to bring in the media all the time, and we had press conferences. Larry King came out from CNN, he came out to Edwards for a press conference that we had. I did a press conference in the Pentagon after our first hover flight test of our first kill vehicle. And I don't know if this really helped cause the collapse of the Soviet Union, but certainly we were very open about the progress that we were making. And it, it could have, I, I guess my assessment is that it, it, it may have had an impact on the Soviet Union. I don't know exactly what happened. I know that people make that claim and it doesn't seem crazy to me. It could have had an impact.

And then what you're saying is, I think people sometimes hear about SDI and it ends and they think, oh, well, this was this crazy space laser program. It got canceled. That all went away. And while maybe the laser part faded, what you've been saying is that this work led in some interesting directions for technology that continues to this day in various forms. There was this period post-1989 where all kinds of interesting things happen from, from these different groups.

Absolutely. I again want to reiterate that the Aegis program with the Standard Missile 3 did an amazing job and it's working right now. And I am really in awe of what the Standard Missile community has done with Elite Projectile. It's taken a long time and at first they weren't sure that this made sense, but they became advocates in the early 1990s. And they've, they've run with it and it's working. There's also, of course, another interceptor that's used to be called the Ground Based Interceptor that I also worked on. I wasn't responsible for the program management, but I supported testing of that vehicle and the technologies that we developed for the Air Force program ended up supporting the Ground Based Interceptor as well. But we did some significant testing of their kill vehicle., their kill vehicles at Edwards Air Force Base as well.

You and I share a couple friends who have spent decent chunks of their life politicking against weapons in space. We're in an era where there's drastic increase in activity in space, mostly driven by commercial players. Um, I don't know, I mean, you know, you have so much experience in this. Obviously you did this work, so I assume you're not hugely just anti weapons in space, but maybe you are. What are your thoughts on that? What are your thoughts about where all this is going as space clearly becomes more of a domain for military activity?

One program that we haven't talked about that was derived from SDI is called the ASAT program, also called the KEASAT, Kinetic Energy ASAT program. It was a joint program office that was set up by General Moorman and run out of Huntsville. It was joint in between the Air Force and the Army and the Navy. It had a fly swatter. So the idea was that it wouldn't hit the target spacecraft, but it had a, like a veil that would be ejected, uh, with I think pellets on it. And that veil would, would crush the target satellite. And the theory was that you could destroy the other satellite without creating debris. However, it was never proven to work in the sense that I'm sure that we could kill satellites, but the big question with kinetic energy weapons for anti-satellite applications is debris. And we've seen good examples and bad examples of that. There have been tests by the Chinese that create a huge mess. They were tested against this target at higher altitudes. The United States did, uh, not test, but used the Standard Missile-3 Leap to take out an NRO spacecraft that died on birth. It was taken out just as it was reentering, and the, the debris from that event was minimal and it all reentered, I think, within a couple of weeks.

The Russians have shot down one of their own satellites. I think India's done tests along these lines.

And, and they've demonstrated that kinetic energy anti-satellites can cause a, a huge amount of debris and, and that they really aren't a very good idea. And so, so I, I share concerns that many people have about, about that.

You're doing this work for a number of years, and after the Air Force, if I remember right, you go straight to NASA Ames, or was there a, was there a break in there?

I got a job working at NASA Ames in 2006. So I, I'd been in the US Air Force research community from 1983 until 2006, and then 2006, I, I started working for Pete Worden when he took over NASA Ames Research Center. I had also worked for him earlier. He had been the director of technology at the Strategic Defense Initiative back in 1992., and during that time he sponsored both the Leap work that we've discussed earlier, but also a series of small spacecraft called the Miniature Sensor Technology Integration spacecraft. These were the precursors of what we're seeing today, what we call small spacecraft. And so these were things about the size of a small fridge. And at the time, they weren't very popular with the brass, the, the leadership of the Air Force or, or NASA, they were frowned upon and we were kind of pariahs. But now today they've become, uh, very, very popular. After that time in the 2000, uh, let's see, 2 timeframe, Pete Worden had become the head of developmental planning at Space and Missile Systems Center at LA Air Force Base. And he, he called it, um, Called it something else. I can't remember now. Anyway, it was historically known as XR. So I worked for him as his chief scientist on loan from AFRL, uh, for a couple of years. And then he left the Air Force and I started doing other things, um, in the Washington DC area. But when he took over Ames, I applied for a job there and, and got a job working for him setting up the small satellite activities in the Mission Design Center.

All right, I'm going to take a stab at setting the stage a little bit here. Please correct me for the things that I get wrong, but NASA Ames is this Silicon Valley NASA center that goes back many decades. It's had some tremendous highs and some lows over the years. Pete Worden is a Brigadier General in the Air Force. He is an astrophysicist, a scientist. And an iconoclastic type figure who had been in these various jobs in the government, has a tendency to get in trouble because he fights bureaucracy and has original ideas and is something of a shock to the system. And he'd been basically fired from a previous job in return for taking the fall for something for Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush. They gave him this NASA center, and he comes in and he has ideas. Some of the things you talked about, about doing space a little bit differently, smaller, cheaper satellites, smaller, cheaper rockets, and wants to bring in some young people who were not old NASA hands who thought a bit differently, and some friends that he's known along the way who think differently. And it was this grand— I'm fond of all this. I wrote a book about it and made a movie, partly about about this, but it was a bold experiment to do something different with a NASA center and, and see what could happen. Could you do space cheaper, better, faster? I would say this is a vaguely fair characterization.

Sure. What I remember is that Mike Griffin had brought Pete Worden to run NASA Ames to get it back into space again. Mike Griffin knows Pete really well, and he knows that Pete Warden would run the center with independent thinking and just make things happen. He wouldn't call up Mike every day and ask him for permission. He would go and make stuff happen. That's exactly what Pete did from day one. Now, unfortunately, one of the very first things that Pete what he did was he asked me to come up with a lunar lander concept to go and land some scientific payloads on the moon and to do it faster and less expensively than had ever been done before.

This sounds like a good idea, Al.

Well, and there's some legacy that I had experience with because actually when I was at the Air Force, we modified one of our small kill vehicles to try to show how kill vehicle technology could be used to land on the moon. This was called ACAT, and I think I, I've showed you a YouTube video of this where we, we created a lunar landscape at the hover test facility and, and Dave Scott, who actually went to the moon, helped us and, and we, we actually flew around and landed on, on, you know, what looked like the moon. And I had the little robot that came out of the kill vehicle and crawled around the moonscape. I thought, wow, okay, great. Let's, let's go and build a lunar lander. Now, I'd never built a lunar lander before, but I thought it was a, how cool is this? So I'd learned everything there was to learn. I'm a big fan of history, and when given a new opportunity, I love to go into what's been done before. So I read everything about what had ever landed on the moon, and based on that, started a project. To go and do this again and, and do it as quickly as possible. And, and this was the time when SpaceX had just started, uh, with its Falcon 1 program.

Yeah. We're what, we're like 2004, 2005, 2006, 2005, 2006, 2006.

So 2006, 2007 was when this all began and And so I, I came up with an approach that leveraged some of the, the technology from SDI, and we thought we could do this and get to the moon, land on the moon, all for less than $50 million.

How much, how much does a lunar lander usually cost?

Well, there was another program at the time that I think was programmed for $5 billion, and no, it was a much bigger program with and more, um, greater ambitions. It was gonna carry a much bigger payload and, and do much more stuff. But, but, but the fact that it could be done as cheaply at this turned out to be a real problem. And the problem surfaced because when the people who had the big lander who were at Marshall Space Flight Center found out that we were, we were planning on going back to the moon for $50 million, They thought, wow, this could really hurt our chances for funding. And so they complained bitterly to the senator called Senator Shelby, who was in charge of the NASA budget.

My favorite person.

Anyway, so Pete and I actually went to Luxembourg to teach at the International Space University, and we were on our way out there when Mike Griffin got a call from Senator Shelby and, and who, who chewed him out and just said, look, you know, you've, you've gotta stop those, you know, Warden and Weston, they've got to be stopped right now. And so Mike Griffin did a U-turn cuz he'd already heard about this and really liked this, but, but, but he obviously had to protect his budget. So he called up Steve Zornitzer, who was the acting director while we were away. He was the number 3 person there and he called him up I said, "Steve, I've got 3 things to tell you." Steve said, "What?" Bad, bad, bad. That was the message that we got. So, I mean, can we just spell this out very clearly for some people?

The lunar lander, you said $5 billion, is almost always in the billions of dollars range. Nobody had even conceptualized that you could do it in the tens of millions range. To your point, the other ones might have a lot of scientific equipment to do it, but the idea was, Can we make one that is not in the billions of dollars range? Could we do things a bit different? NASA, because of this competition between the different centers and, and to maintain your budget, more or less did not want to find out. It was certain elements of NASA and the government didn't want to find out if you could make a lunar lander for tens of millions of dollars.

And the key was the Falcon 1, because that at the time had just enough launch capability to get us to the moon, and it was advertised to cost, I think I remember, 7 million or something.

Well, yeah, Elon was pulling numbers out, but yeah, so, so super cheap rocket, far cheaper than anything else that was available.

Anyway, Pete was ordered to, to stop and, uh, in true Pete Worden fashion, he said yes, but we didn't stop. Uh, we, we just went, um, undercover. And so our facility became known as Area 51, and we kept on working on the lunar lander. We just didn't tell anybody about it.

And it was not quite a shed, but it was shed-ish.

It was an old paint shed.

Yeah.

But we strung together some netting and we actually brought in the original bungee cords to hold the lunar lander so it could bounce around inside the netting. And so it married two parts of my career. Dangerous Sports and Lunar Landers. And also the Google founders came to visit and they got very excited about it. Will Marshall was, and Chris Boshuizen.

Who started Planet Labs eventually.

They, they were working on this with me and they did a great job. This was their first real spacecraft work because they were physicists, but they came out to work for me at Pete Worden's invitation. And we were very successful. It, it, it was working. And, and so when the Google founders came and saw this, they initiated what's called the Google Lunar X Prize because it gave them the inspiration that going to the moon isn't that hard and people could, should, would be able to do it for tens of millions, not billions. Now, was the Google Lunar X Prize successful? Nobody won it, but it did inspire people all around the world to work on it. And people tried, uh, people around the world tried, but no one ever won the prize. But I think that it spawned a lot of new technology and it inspired students, it inspired universities, it inspired companies. And we're seeing now, like Firefly, as we're talking, is on its way to the moon.. And so I, I think that in some small way, even though we didn't actually land on the moon, we supported and we helped the new wave of commercial lunar activity. Yeah.

It's just part of a whole renaissance revolution of, of interest in trying to do all kinds of things in space cheaper, faster, better. I think totally to your point, you start to see students doing projects. This idea that these things are possible. When I was reporting my book on Elon and SpaceX, you know, you would talk to 25-year-olds in Option was, was basically you've got your master's degree or your PhD and you're going to go to Lockheed or Boeing and you're going to not work very fast. It wasn't, it wasn't, this is not a previous generation who grew up watching the Apollo program and was full of excitement. It was more like, oh, you're going to get a government job. And then I think what you guys were doing was part of this new era along with SpaceX and of, of excitement coming back to space and new ideas.

And of course, as you've reported in, in your book and also in your movie, in the case of Will Marshall and Chris Boshawsen, they then started working really with Pete Klupper, although I helped a bit on what they called PhoneSat, which, which they, they launched in rockets. I think they put up in balloons that actually led them to start Planet Lab, which has been an extraordinary success. And they're, they're doing amazing things for humanity by mapping the world, uh, every single day.

Right, so you had SpaceX doing cheap rockets. You guys were trying to change the economics of lunar landers, and they were very focused on the satellite part of bringing cheap modern electronics into the satellite industry, shrinking the size of them. And same thing, going from a billion dollars to, to hundreds of thousands or a couple million.

Actually, some of their phone sats were less than $10,000, right?

I mean, in the earliest—

tape measures. They use tape measures for the antenna. They use tape measures. Yeah.

You got shut down a couple times on the lunar lander and Pete Worden would keep moving you around. You talked about some of the, with the X Prize and what happens with this technology, but it did eventually, didn't it become an actual mission? It got supersized with like the heart of this did live on and got expanded into.

Yeah, our lunar lander project. The head of science was going to give us a mission to land on the moon, but he was told by microphone, no, do not do that. So he said, okay, then we'll turn it into a lunar orbiter. And so it became a spacecraft that went around the moon called LADDIE. It was, the D was dust. So, so we went really low around the moon to, to, to measure the dust, but we also demonstrated an optical laser communication system that actually counted individual photons. At the time, I believe it was the most efficient communication system in the galaxy 'cause it did a gigabit or so, uh, per, per second from the moon back to the Earth on a quarter of a watt of, um, laser energy.

This particular week when we're recording this was probably the most prolific week in commercial space history. You had SpaceX set up Starship. Blue Origin flew New Shepard for the first time. You mentioned Firefly, which was on a SpaceX rocket that had two lunar lander missions. Varda had a space factory go up. Stoke Space, which is another startup, got another $300 million for a reusable rocket. I mean, this was a banner week. It looks to me like NASA's giant rocket, the SLS, With Trump coming in, this is, this is all just Ashlee Vance speaking. I think it'll probably get canceled here in the coming months. You've worked there. What's your view on NASA and its role in the next 10, 20 years? What should it be doing?

Well, that's a really big question. I, I think that you're right. I think that SLS is in, in risk. It sounds like The new administration might cancel it. I think that what Ames has done and others in the agency have really helped spur commercial space. And I think that there's a role to continue that. There are certain things that the agency can do really well, but building great big rockets doesn't seem that that's, that's the thing that, that, uh, the agency should focus on as much. Working on small satellite technologies and helping the industry grow is, these are areas that I think NASA can really help on.

That was very measured response, Al.

Well, I want to come back to something that you said though about Pete and that one thing that Pete and I have shared is that we've both gotten into a lot of trouble in our careers and we've both, we've both been removed from positions many times. So Pete, Pete got removed from a lot of different positions in the Air Force and then eventually, eventually, you know, he left NASA. And, and I, I had, I've had the same thing. Both of us were very independent thinkers and there have been many times when I was in the Air Force when I would follow a path that I thought was the right path. But, but sometimes my, my bosses, uh, wouldn't appreciate. So for example, when I was talking earlier about the small spacecraft program, it wasn't popular with, with the mainstream Air Force. And I was actually under instructions from my boss, not, no, it's from Pete Worden who was funding it. He, he was the, the funding source from, from SDI. And, and he actually told me, he's like, you know, we need to operate this on the need-to-know basis and your boss doesn't have a need to know. Well, of course, eventually he had to find out when we launched it and, and, you know, he wasn't very, very happy about that. And there have been other times like that when I've done things that, that I believed were the right things to do, but, but the chain of commands really didn't appreciate. And so Pete and I have both found ourselves in hot water by following the path that we thought was correct at the time. But the chain of command would sometimes say, no, no, no, what are you doing?

It's an age-old story. You're two of my favorite people. You're obviously incredibly smart. You guys try to do things in an intelligent, you know, whatever it's going to take to get the job done in the most pragmatic, effective way. Bureaucracies don't always like that. This is not news to anyone. I don't know, you know, through all your experience of doing this, do you have any words of wisdom of how institutions like NASA or the Air Force can somehow find a way to embrace the people that you want, the creative thinkers, and, and still give them a chance to do their thing?

Well, I've seen a lot of change in my, in my life. And so I, I think that that has happened. I think, uh, both in NASA and in the Air Force, there's a lot of change. And so there's a realization. I, observe that particularly in the Department of Defense, but more broadly speaking within the government, that we can't continue what we've been doing for the last 20, 30 years because we're just falling behind. And this is independent to Republican or Democratic administrations. It's obvious. And everybody has the best of intentions. And now I see changes coming across the board. Give you an example. The National Reconnaissance Office used to only build really big spacecraft. They're starting to look at smaller spacecraft. So far they're really just buying data as a service, but it's a beginning and there's less of a reliance across the board on $5 billion spacecraft. There is an appreciation that we need to diversify and to look at these, what the Space Development Agency is doing, for example, with proliferated architectures. People are realizing, hmm, this isn't crazy. From my perspective, I smile and say, yes, finally after 30 years. But I see change and I see that people are willing to accept more of an independent thinking than they used to in the past.

That's encouraging. We are at a weird time. I think it used to be the, whether it's the military or the Department of Energy, you name it, the idea was things they were taking on were so big they had to build it themselves. They had the most advanced technology. I remember I covered the world's top supercomputers for more years than I care to remember, and they were always at some national laboratory, and typical companies didn't have anything that could compare to them. Today that situation is flipped, right? Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft have computing systems that I, I don't even think the U.S. government could even match if it had the resources and the people to try. And so I guess there is this adjustment of consumer world technology has gotten so The government has to find its place in this, this new era and really decide what it's going to tackle on its own. One of the things that you got into after your Ames career were airships, and you are the most knowledgeable person on airships I've ever met by, by quite a margin. We're in this interesting time where there's some efforts to build new airships and, and have a go at this technology that I think for lots of people would think back to the '30s and '40s and '20s. What makes airships so interesting to you, and why are we potentially in an airship renaissance?

One word: energy. Do you remember the movie Plastic? No, energy. It's all about energy. And so, um, airships are the most energy-efficient form of aviation. Always have been. They are, you, you, you get in essence from an energy perspective, free lift. And so you're not using energy to stay afloat. And so while they can't travel as quickly as airplanes or rockets, they can travel a lot faster than ships, trucks, and trains. Not a lot faster than trains and trucks, but faster. And so I, I, I think that's the, the, uh, the most significant thing. But they also offer potential to operate with less infrastructure and give global access to places that don't have regular transportation, uh, infrastructure.

I, I feel like if you went to the average person on the street, to the extent they know an airship, it's probably the Hindenburg, which is, is also maybe at least at least when I first got into this, in my mind, was part of the problem. You have this giant explosion, it's captured on film, kind of doomed the technology. I know the story is more complicated and nuanced than that, but even before we get there, for people who know nothing about airships, I was shocked at like how prevalent, how big they were, how far they traveled in their heyday. Can you paint a picture of the glory days of airships and what they did?

Sure. Most people don't realize that the world's first airline called DELAG was started in 1909. It was started by Zeppelin in Friedrichshafen, and it flew all around Germany in between 1909 and 1914. And they took up to 25 people up to 1,000 nautical miles. Uh, after that, in 1929, the Graf Zeppelin flew around the world. The Brits had a program to fly people all around the British Empire from Canada to New Zealand.

And it flew from Germany to Brazil, right?

I mean, it had a regularly scheduled service from Germany to Brazil. And so, yeah. And it was remarkable that it was very comfortable, lie-flat beds in 1929. So it was extraordinary.

Yeah. When you go to, I'm gonna butcher the name, of the city every time I say it. But I've been to Friedrichshafen on your suggestion, and when you go there, they have a replica of one of these giant airships. I mean, unbelievable. I mean, there's restaurants in there, lie-down beds, like, there's little office spaces to work in. I honestly had no idea. Even when I saw the pictures of the big ones, I assumed it was still sort of some people jammed into a little, you know, just tiny little area, some cabin. It was almost like a cruise ship in the sky.

They were described as flying hotels. So they took up to 100 people around the world. It was an extraordinary thing and very spacious, really quite extraordinary.

How long would it take to go from Germany to Brazil?

It wasn't that long. It was, I don't know, maybe 2 or 3 days. And they flew quite low, I think about 1,000 feet above the ocean so you could see the whales. They stopped, uh, in northern Brazil, I think Recife when they, they, they came down. But yeah, it wasn't that long.

I don't know why this sticks in my head, but why was that route from Germany to Brazil?

I don't know.

But that was the main international.

It was the first big one, but then they started also flying from, to, um, to New York and back as well.

And then even away from some of this commercial sort of touristy or passenger stuff, We both live in Silicon Valley. I've seen these pictures. I mean, on the military side, it wasn't just like there were one or two of these things. Sometimes the sky would have all kinds of airships in them. You showed me a picture of one that could refuel planes. It would catch a plane in midair, cycle it, refuel it, and then spit it out the other side. Again, just things I had no idea about.

Yeah, two rigid airships were built in Akron, Ohio called the Akron and the Macon, and they were flying aircraft carriers. The Macon used to come out here and flew out of Hangar 1 at Moffett Field.

Part of the Silicon Valley legend of how this place became a technology hub in a lot of ways. NASA Ames, going back to what, the '30s? You're starting to build these hangars for the airships you just mentioned to house them. You're recruiting engineers from universities all over the country who are in their 20s to come to come work out here, right? I mean, this starts to build in addition to some early electronics work. And, and to me, it's always stood out as like part of building the, this tech energy out here.

Yep.

So, I mean, what does happen? Is the Hindenburg, this lore that that sort of killed airships, is that legitimate? Or I'm sure there's much more to all this. Obviously, the arrival of the airplane must not have helped.

Well, the Hindenburg used hydrogen, and since then, in the modern era, in the last 80 years, maybe 90 years, airships that carry people have used helium, and helium is inert. There has been research at various universities to explore additives that would make hydrogen less flammable., but no one has proposed to use that to carry people at this time. Some companies are proposing to use hydrogen as a lifting gas for unmanned airships to carry cargo. I've, I've heard of that, but right now the airships that, that, that people are on board all use helium. And so, so that image that you refer to of, oh, the humanity, that That, that, that's not gonna happen with a helium gas airship.

One other thing we should clear up, which Monty Python, I believe, has done a decent job on, is the blimp versus the airship. I don't know if it's, it's not a debate, it's just a fact. When people have seen Goodyear blimps, things like that, the big difference is they do not have this rigid structure. They are what I was describing before, this giant lifting bag with a tiny little gondola for, for the pilots and just a couple passengers to sit in. Once you put that structure, that's what lets you get to carrying lots of people, carrying lots of cargo.

That's exactly correct. Broadly speaking, there's two kinds of airships. There are rigid airships with a skeleton that defines the shape, and then there are non-rigid airships whose shape is defined by internal pressure. So the non-rigid airship, which also call a blimp, is basically a big balloon where the cut of the surface defines its shape. Ship, but you've always got to keep it pressurized. If you start to lose pressure, then the whole thing folds up. And that's happened back in 1961. There was a big blimp built by Goodyear that unzipped and it folded up and it fell out of the sky. And I think 18 out of 21 of the people on board died. Rigid airship has a number of individual independent gas bags. And so I think maybe up to 19 or 20, depending upon which one you talk about, but always a number of independent gas cells for lift.

Okay, if obviously we've known about helium for a long time, we can solve that problem. Why did we go decades without there being really new takes on a rigid airship if it has all these benefits that you, you listed out?

When you look back at the last 80 years, or 90 years, there have been waves of interest. It comes and goes. So in the 1970s, there were studies and conferences actually sponsored by NASA Ames, along with the Navy, that looked at why we should bring airships back. However, funding was never made available and it was considered too risky by banks to fund the first one. It's always been the case. Who's gonna pay for the first one? Back in 2000, there was a project in Germany called Cargolifter that raised, I think, €500 million, maybe a billion, but they ran out of money before they could complete the airship. They did build a great big hangar, which is now a tropical paradise. That's the, the last, uh, great big airship project that, that, that happened.

And so, I'm sorry, the hangar is what?

It's like a, it turned into a tropical paradise. They, they built a hangar. It's really big. It's, it's maybe 2 or 3 times the size of Hangar 1 here. And, uh, when the project stopped, it was sold off to a company that has converted it into a year-round tropical paradise. So in the middle of, of winter,, you can go, oh, it's really close to Berlin, like an amusement thing. Yeah, it's an amusement. Okay, so, so they have, you know, like sand and, you know, they got a fake beach and I think surfing and stuff.

I think I've seen photos of this now.

That's a huge building.

Okay, so people, it comes, it goes, people spend some money, it turns out to be difficult and expensive and, and just nothing's ever reached the full momentum to make a real another crack at this.

Right.

When I talk airships with people and I try to explain some of this stuff, I mean, everyone says, oh, but still, come on, a plane's so much faster. You know, there's always, well, if the airship's taking cargo, how are you going to deal with the ballast and getting the cargo off? And I don't know, there always seem to be more and more questions. I mean, lay out your, your absolutely pro case for why an airship makes sense and what it would do.

Well, when I look at the history of airships, if all we could do that which has already been done before, it would be spectacular. But with today's materials, we ought to be able to do a lot better. We ought to be able to build airships that are stronger, that are less expensive to build, less expensive to operate, that at a minimum can take up to 100 people around the world, if not more. Now, I understand that people question how we could carry cargo, but there are lots of ideas to address the question that you brought up. About unloading or offloading cargo that people are exploring today. So I wouldn't rule that out. But again, if all we could do was build the, the Graf Zeppelin, for example, that flew around the world, if we could build today's Graf Zeppelin, but make it faster, make it lighter, make, make it stronger, make it, make it less expensive to build, make it less expensive to operate. It would be extraordinary.

And I didn't fully believe you until I went to Germany and flew in one of these. I mean, it is like, it's such a unique experience to be in one of the— it's— you, you sold me because you feel you can open the windows, the world isn't rushing by you, you, you know, you, you kind of feel like you're actually part of the environment. And, and it's hard to put into words, it felt almost magical and so different. I've been in like every helicopter, planes, gyrocopters, you name it. And this was a, it was a totally unique experience. I don't even think most people know you can take a Zeppelin ride today.

But you can't in America. No.

Yeah. I mean, like you've been immersed in this world and you're so into this, but surely you've run across this too, that people just don't seem to even have the first inkling that this still exists.

That's true.

And this has just been some of the limitations of the business. I don't know, I was, I was shocked. This town Friedrichshafen is like, you almost feel like you're transported in time. I mean, the airships are going all the time, there's this museum, there's all these like—

and there's a, there's a statue of Count Zeppelin in every corner. In fact, I remember you stayed at a hotel that had a Zeppelin standing right in front of it.

And Count Zeppelin, for— I fully recommend anyone should hop onto Wikipedia if nothing else and read about this guy.

I mean, there's an interesting guy. Yeah.

So he is obviously into this idea and this technology, but he does what amounts to almost like the first Kickstarter campaign where he gets a large chunk of the populace of Germany to help back him in, in making his, his technology. Um, he ends up leaving the intellectual property to this city. I mean, in the, and it's turned into this empire. I mean, these patents, that he had are used by both an automotive and an aerospace company, and they funnel a certain percentage of their, their profits back to Friedrichshafen.

One of the technologies that was developed to support airships was the gearbox. And you're exactly right, that technology and that company was separated from Zeppelin but owned by the city, and now it's called ZF. ZF, and it's a huge multinational company, uh, that is in essence run by the city. And the Lord Mayor is in charge of a foundation that oversees ZF and other companies. So they say in Friedrichshafen that the Lord Mayor has more employees than he has citizens, right?

Isn't he all— he's the chairman of the company.

He's the chairman of the foundation that runs the company.

Okay.

He's not a chairman of the company.

Okay.

There's a foundation above the company.

And the citizens get like vacations and, and school.

No, I don't think they get vacations, but the, but some of the profits from ZF go into the community.

Okay.

And, and so, so I think there are parks and it benefits the community.

So having studied airships for so long, worked on the technology, I mean, what's your prediction for 10, 20 years? I mean, should we all be expecting to see airships in the sky?

Absolutely.

And this would please you?

Absolutely. Well, it's, it's, it's good for humanity. Airships are going to provide a green transportation method that will, will help everybody. It'll be useful for disaster relief and humanitarian aid, but it will reduce the carbon footprints of aviation. Now, it's not going to replace aeroplanes. People are always going to want to fly. At, you know, 600 miles an hour or whatever an airplane can do. But a lot of people are gonna be happy flying at 100 miles an hour and seeing things. 'Cause right now when you travel from coast to coast, you can't see anything from 35,000 feet. You know, it's just stuff down there. And, but when you're flying at 1,000 feet, it's different. As you've seen, 'cause you've done this.

I have. This is not even part of like the propaganda or anything. I just emotionally felt it. It was, experience I will never forget. Thank you for being so generous with your time. I feel like we just did the highlights of your career because when I talk with you other times, I know behind each one of these stories we told, there's, you know, 100 or 1,000 stories and layers to all this. But thank you so much for at least letting us indulge in some of the big stuff and just getting to know you has been one of the real pleasures of the last few years for me. So thank you, Al.

Well, thank you, Ashlee Vance, and thank you for your continued interest in all of these technologies. And also thank you for showing the world what has happened in Silicon Valley since 2006. The movie that you made and the book that you write, that you wrote, that focused on a lot of these small companies, I think was great. I really think that you've helped explain to the world some of the really exciting developments in what people now refer to as new space.

That was very kind of you. Thank you, Al. It's a real honor. Thanks so much.

All right. Yeah, thank you.

Cheers. I'm your host, Ashlee Vance. Our guest today was Dr. Alan Weston. Core Memory is produced by me and David Nicholson. The theme music is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the sound editing is by John Sortland as well.