How a $10M Bet Made Civilian Spaceflight a Reality w/ Anousheh Ansari, Gregg Maryniak, and Erik Lindbergh | EP #122

Some things happen right when you get this idea from the universe. And I said, that's it. Because I've been so frustrated with space that, okay, I'm gonna do a prize for spaceflight.

I remember people saying that you guys are crazy because you're gonna get people killed.

The idea of spaceflight, of commercial spaceflight and human spaceflight was insane.

We wanted to get a totally different style of operations than the people that were doing government funded space programs.

It would be Monday and we would have $50,000 due on Friday. And if we didn't pay it, the whole thing was over. The X Prize has launched nearly $600 million in competitions. It's driven billion dollars in R and.

D. We've now sort of taken two whole industries, the aerospace industry and the incentive prize industry to a new level.

There are things that people believe are impossible, but it's because they have a wrong assumption someplace. And our prizes target those assumptions.

This is not an overnight success. This is an overnight success after 30 years of hard work. Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to Moonshots. Today is a special episode. It's probably going to be a long one, so buckle in. It's a story of human spirit. It's a story of dreaming big. Hopefully at the end of this conversation, you're going to be inspired to do something extraordinary in your own life and to pull together a band of rebels who are going to transform something that you think is important. This happens to be the 30th year anniversary of the X Prize. We have launched 30 prizes over 30 years. Extraordinary. Hard for me to believe that we've driven about $600 million of incentive competitions driving billions in R and D. And while it's been an amazing story, it has a history that after you hear it, it's an improbability that we exist. Today you're going to be hearing from three individuals. Greg Marina, who I'll introduce in a moment. Eric Lindbergh, grandson of Charles Lindbergh Anushansari, who funded the first $10 million Xprize, who is now the CEO of the Xprize Foundation. At the end of the day, if we look back, most people and still today believe that we're in a world of great crisis where there's few resources, that we are running out of resources on this planet. But the belief of myself and the folks you're about to meet is that the greatest resource humanity needs is that of the committed and passionate human mind. That dreaming big and putting muscle behind those dreams can slay any grand challenge. So settle Back. Get ready to be inspired. This is the story of opening up civilian spaceflight, of opening up the space frontier for everybody. Because it wasn't always that way. Let's begin. Greg Maranak. Hey, buddy. Good to see you. Where are you today?

Hi, Peter. I'm in exurban St. Louis, Missouri, the ancestral home of the XPRIZE Foundation.

Well, for those who don't know. Greg. Greg, first of all, to put context here, Greg is one of my oldest and dearest friends. We go back in now 40, 50 years. No. Well, 40 years in terms of working together in space. Greg gave me the original Spirit of St. Louis book, and we'll tell that story that got the X Prize foundation started. And I think, Greg, it's fair to say that you sacrificed so much in your life for this dream. And I want to say thank you for all of that. Let's kick it off. I mean, today in 2024, people are used to seeing Falcon 9 launching people to the space station. Starship is flying. Bezos is flying. And when you think about human spaceflight, you think commercial companies, but it wasn't always that way. You want to set some context of why the heck did we start this xprize? And originally XPRIZE was just about opening the space frontier, and it was considered an insane idea back then. Let's jump back in our time machine here.

Yeah. So if we go back in our time machine, Peter, we even go back a little further than the question of government or commercial in space. It's like, why do we want to care about space? And one of the things we've learned from XPRIZE over these last 30 years is that there are things that people believe are impossible, but it's because they have a wrong assumption someplace. And our prizes target those wrong assumptions. Well, the assumption that, that people had in the, in the 70s and 80s was that and, and mostly still have today is that the Earth is somehow divorced from the ocean of space that surrounds us. And you and I got into this business because we wanted to give humanity the best chance of success and use the resources in the ocean of space to save our island Earth. But what we discovered through years of working this problem, and literally years you and I worked on this, this was not our first rodeo X Prize. It was probably about our fifth rodeo, we discovered that there was a. Another fundamental assumption that people were making that was holding us back. And that was the assumption that only governments could do space flight. And Peter, you. You sacrificed as much as I did, or more. But, you know, one of the things you were doing back when we started was you were running our little small launch vehicle company, International Microspace. We were going to launch, we had a perfect business plan. We were going to launch 10 pound satellites for non governmental customers at a cost of about $750,000. It was almost flawless. There were two small problems with that. There were no non governmental customers and There were no 10 pound satellites then. Now they are abundant. But we found out right away every single business meeting, well, isn't that NASA's job? Why isn't government doing it? If it's worth doing, how come NASA's not doing it? NASA is a victim of its own marvelous success of the 60s.

When you and I met Greg, you were running the Space Studies Institute out of Princeton, New Jersey, working with Gerard K O' you were president there. And it was a time when there was a very small group of. I almost feel it was like religious believers that space was in our destiny. I think we had all drunk the Kool Aid from Star Trek and great authors like Heinlein. And the idea that after, I mean for me what was really, what was really shaking things up was that the space shuttle program was so damn expensive and it was flying so infrequently and this was not my vision of spaceflight. And Gerard K. O' Neill came in with a very different vision. And I think it's important for people to know that Jeff Bezos today really has taken the mantle. Jeff was at Princeton University as an undergrad and he was in fact the president of the SEDS chapter. And you and I first met through seds, through Todd Hawley who was my co founder with Bob Richards there and Bezos. His vision, different from Musk, Elon's vision is let's go to Mars, let's go into another planetary gravitational well. And Jeff's vision, I think because of the work done at Space studies and by Dr. O' Neill was let's go mine the moon and the asteroids and create large o' Neill colonies and make humanity not dependent on planetary systems.

Yeah. And also bring power down from space 247 for cities and megacities and industry basically use space to save the earth. And Bezos read the same book that I read. I was in law school when I read it, the High Frontier and it cost me my life. And Bezos read it and it costs him a billion dollars a year now in what he's personally funding.

It's fascinating, right? You were, you were a lawyer at the time. People don't know you as a lawyer because you're so brilliant as an educator and a space, you know, a space visionary. But you were doing law at the time, and that changed the course of your life.

Yeah, I met o'. Neill. My wife and I. My fiance and I started the Chicago Society for space studies in 1977, when dinosaurs still roam the Earth. And. And we invited Dr. O' Neill to give a big public speech lecture at Navy Pier in Chicago, which he did in 78, when I should have been studying for the bar exam. I was working this giant event, and I met Jerry, and he invited me to become a director. And eventually he hoodwinked me into. Not hoodwinked me, but he persuaded me to move to Princeton. I joke. Peter has heard so many times that my wife says that o' Neill got me with a commercial pitch that was, join the space business. You could earn as much as some poets. And sadly, it was true.

People think about space now as a billionaire's game and such. And there was no commercial space flight back then. It was all governmental programs. What was Jerry's vision of space that was so compelling? I know what it was for me, but I'd like to hear yours.

Well, for me, it was the notion that we could actually use space not just to look at the problems that the Earth was facing, but to change it. And, you know, there's more context here. Remember the mood when we got into the space business, Peter. Some of the big books that were very popular, in fact, this is a little before that was the Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich. The COVID of which said, in the time it takes to read the COVID of this book, four people have died, three of them children from starvation. Real cheery book. Ehrlich was completely wrong, by the way, and paradoxically, his student, his grad student was Stuart Brandt, who thinks a lot like you do, and I do, Peter, but he was wrong. And another book that was popular and still is popular, is called Limits to Growth. And it says, look, in a limited world, your children will have less than you, their children will have less than them. But those books were based on a fundamentally flawed assumption that the world is a closed system when they. The Earth. And it's not, we get all our energy from space already. And so o' Neill's vision was really compelling because it was in such strong counterpoint and. And it really was based on something that you just said, which is that o' Neill asked his students, as a professor of physics at Princeton, what's the best place for a future, future expanding technological civilization? Is it. Is it the Earth. Is it. Is it the moon or some other planet? Or is it something entirely different? And the answer came back something entirely different. Be in free space. If you get out of your gravity well, don't go down into another one unless Hawaii's at the bottom. And we got the only planet with Hawaii at the bottom. So there's. So it's very. It is a very different vision from the vision of people like Elon. You know, he's sincere. He got imprinted with the old NASA 1950s party line, and he believes it. But this is a different view of space.

To paint a little bit of the vision that o' Neill had and to move us forward. You know, Jerry o' Neill believed that we could go to the surface of the moon and mine resources there. That the moon has lots of oxygen. He didn't know, maybe he theorized there was water at the poles, which we've now, in fact, verified, but nickel iron, all the building materials are in the lunar regolith. And you could actually, because of the low gravity, mine the moon, send the materials out into free space and actually build solar power satellites to create a economic engine, and then, very importantly, create these large o' Neill colonies. Can you describe what an o' Neill colony looks like? Because I think that's, again, what Bezos has as his endpoint vision here.

Yeah. When Jerry wrote his first paper in 1974, published in Physics Today, he did a thought experiment. He said, how big could you build a habitat in free space? If you built it using Brooklyn Bridge technology limits, steel cable and stone? And the answer was astonishing. If you wanted to, you could build Switzerland in space. A big cylinder that you'd rotate for artificial gravity and you'd let sunlight in. And it's basically a hollow shell, and you live inside of it. It's very much like the membrane of a cell. Now that I gotten older and started to study biology, I realized that nature invented this great thing that can allow life to form or exist in hostile otherwise environments. That's what a o' Neill colony is. It's like that. Now, later in Jerry's career, Jerry was a true entrepreneur. He started thinking that maybe this would be a government kind of activity. But he realized almost immediately that NASA would never do it. And he said, how small could you make these things? How small could you make a permanent space habitat that people could live in for long periods of time? And that was really exciting, too. So that was the work that we were doing. And, Peter, you mentioned the possibility of water on the moon. Jerry wrote a Little piece for Omni magazine, which is how I got.

I remember Omni. I wonder if anybody else does.

Well, you wrote a letter to other call students together. That was the formation of SEDs. That was for Momni. And I saw that. But Jerry wrote a little piece which is sort of a. He was good at writing vignettes. And it's like, what's life like 20 years after we start making space habitats? And in it, he. He said, back in the late 90s, a. A small spacecraft discovered ice at the poles of the moon. And that inflamed me. When.

When did.

When did he write that?

Around 83 or so. And I was on. I read it on a dot matrix printout.

Prophetic.

And I was on the train going to see you and Todd at SEDS meeting in Washington. And it wound up taking over the next 10 years of my life because I started the Lunar Prospector team at Space Studies Institute.

That's right.

Designed in the probe. And then we hoodwinked NASA into paying for it. Alan Binder was our chief scientist, and he wrote the proposal to Gus Gustafiro. Our friend helped. And the result was we found the water ice at the poles of the Moon. So the idea, though, is that your friend Arthur Clark, Peter, had a great graphic from the 1950s, which we should throw into this podcast, which shows the gravity well of the Earth compared to the tiny gravity dimple of the moon. 22 times easier to throw something off the moon than from the Earth. It's not to use those lunar resources on Earth. It's to use them to build stuff in space that can send value to the Earth. Either either new land. You know, Mark Twain said, invest in real estate. They're not making any more, but we will.

I want to give people a little bit of a vision of what the o' Neill colony looks like and what, you know, Bezos has grabbed onto versus the surface of Mars. Imagine being able to create a large cylinder a kilometer in length or thereabouts, rotating at the equation. The physics. It's a V squared over R or omega squared r to get 1g acceleration on the inside. But a million people, I think, was his population size, if I don't remember correctly. Please.

Well, the early ones could be that big and. But they can be just as little ones and be nice. In fact, Jerry was fond of the little hill towns in Italy.

What kind of population was he looking.

At in like 5,000 in a Bernal sphere.

What was interesting, I think, is that when you've got the gravity and if you Move towards the center axis of rotation. You're weightless in the center. And as you get older, you could move up hills to have a half a G at a retirement home. But the thing that was interesting today, if you have a polarization of Republicans and Democrats, whatever you want, you fight because you're co located in the future in these o' Neill colonies. You could just build a second o' Neill colony and you could literally bud and have one population who believe in one religious group or one way of thinking move into one colony. And so you could have this kind of constant diversification and growth. But it was this conversation, Greg, that led us together. And I remember just to move this forward, there was a moment in time when it really that crystallized a universe that we're now living in where the X Prize exists. So I used to come and hang out with you because you were my big brother. And we had geeky conversations that I couldn't have with anybody else. And one day you decided it's time for me to get the joy of flight. You want to take us from there?

Yeah, I remember that very clearly. Peter. Actually, you and I love to build things, but our day jobs involved a lot of PowerPoint and Excel spreadsheets. So we would give ourselves permission once or twice a year to get together and build some. And usually with my young daughters at the time. And you came up and you were our house guest in Hopewell, New Jersey, just next to Princeton. And it was a beautiful October day. It was 1991, and we had planned to spend the day in the basement building a robot with my oldest daughter Claire, who was 8 years old. And the weather was so perfect that we said, let's do something outside. And I don't remember if it was your idea or mine, but we decided to go to Princeton Airport and rent a Cessna 172 and I would fly you up the Hudson river corridor under the controlled airspace in New York City. And I remember as we went north, looking over to the right, you were in the co pilot seat and I could see the Empire State Building behind you. And you had a strange expression on your face, ear to ear grin, because that was in the middle of international microspace. And you had all that burden on your shoulder and you were having fun and that was a rare thing. So instead of turning around at the Tappan Zee Bridge, which was my original plan, we flew over Marmaraneck and we flew to Great Neck, Long Island. Overflying your boyhood home.

Yes.

And then all the way back and I remember when we landed at Princeton Airport, you were literally bouncing around on the interior of the plane.

It was such a blast.

And you were saying, greg, I'm going to finish. I'm going to get my license. Because you had already soloed back when you were a student at MIT and Harvard, but you'd stopped because of your misplaced priorities of going to medical school and such. And I remember somewhat patronizingly saying, yeah, Peter, that's great, when you said, I'm going to get my license. Yeah, good, Peter, you do that. But in my heart of hearts, I said, peter's not going to. Two weeks from now, he'll be on something else. So a few weeks after our trip, I was with my wife and daughters in a little river town on the Delaware river called New Hope, Pennsylvania. And in a little bookstore there, I saw a dusty copy of Charles Lindbergh's Pulitzer Prize winning book, the spirit of St. Louis. And I had read it when I was in the first week of high school, when I was a freshman, and. And a year later I was taking flying lessons. So I picked the book up, blew the dust off it. My daughter said, dad, why are you buying that? You have two copies of that at home. Said, I'm buying it for your Uncle Peter. And you very promptly put it on your bookshelf, as I recall. But then a couple years later, you, you. You read it. And I think you were visiting with your parents someplace.

Yeah. So I just want to take a moment and say everything I have done since then comes back to this moment in time. When Greg gave me this book, it changed the course of my life. And I think about this when I give a gift of a book to somebody, and you never know. I did. I picked it up again. I remember it was December of 1993. I was visiting my parents down in Florida, and it was slow Christmas season. And so I decided to read the book, and it changed the course of my life. So here is a book written by Charles Lindbergh. I think he won the Pulitzer Prize with this in 1954, thereabouts. And it tells the story of Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic Ocean. I had always assumed. I mean, everybody's heard of Lindbergh. He was the most famous human on the planet at one point. I'd always assumed that he just flew on a whim, that he woke up one day, decided to fly east. But it turns out that in 1919, a Frenchman named Raymond Orteg, who had come to the US penniless, I think around 1901 or thereabouts, and becomes a hotel busboy and a hotel manager and ultimately the owner of the Hotel Lafayette. And on the heels of World War I, where aviation made its debut, Raymond Orteague said, there is a positive potential for aviation. And I'm going to offer up a $25,000 prize for the first person who flies between New York and Paris or Paris and New York. And you'd go east if you understood the trade winds. And people laughed at that idea. This $25,000 prize, which today is somewhere on the neighborhood of 8 to 10 million dollars, depending on inflation, and they said it's impossible. People had never flown anything near that. But Orteg threw down the gauntlet. And the book tells the story of all the teams that attempted to win this $25,000 prize. And I remember, Greg, in reading the book, I was underlining how much money. Chris Lindbergh details this, how much money all the different teams were spending to go after this $25,000 prize. And some teams were spending, like, $100,000. The prize was much more than just the money. It was just the glory of achieving this.

This goal.

It had gotten a level of extraordinary attention, especially as people were dying in the attempt and failing in the attempt. It became much more valued to achieve this impossible feat. And I think when I added up was like, $400,000 was spent by all the teams to go after this $25,000 prize. And what I found fascinating, and I remember calling you about this, was that Lindbergh was the most unlikely guy to do it. He had the least experience of all the teams. He had been flying for a couple of years, and, in fact, no one would sell him an airplane or an engine because they were so fearful that he would fail publicly and miserably, that they would give him a bad rep. And ultimately he went to Ryan Aircraft Co. And bought one in San Diego, made the flight to. To St. Louis, from St. Louis to New York and New York to Le Bourget. And we'll tell that story with Eric Lindbergh, who will be joining us in a little while, who recreated that flight with you as mission control to help save the X Prize to financially give us the money to keep doing what we're doing. But that book, I remember reading that book and it was like, I was blown away at the end of reading it. I was like, and some things happen right when you get this idea from the universe. And I said, that's it. Because I'd been so frustrated with space that, okay, I'M going to do a prize for spaceflight. And I wrote down in the margin of the book X Prize because I had no idea who was going to be Ortigue or Nobel or Pulitzer who was going to fund the prize. And we'll meet the person in this podcast later, Anusha Ansari, who had just had a $1.3 billion exit when I, when I met her, who funded our prize and we ended up naming it the Ansari X Prize. The X stuck around because it took so long for us to fund the prize. But I remember calling you and I called Jim Burke who had been involved in the Kramer Prize and said, what do you think about this idea? So do you remember me calling you about this?

I do. And it was really interesting because I had actually been saying in speeches and even writing in some papers that what commercial space flight needed to get going was a Lindbergh like event. But I wasn't thinking about the prize, doing it with a prize. And when you said it, it was like one of those V8 moments that that's a great idea. And, and Jim Burke was an amazing character. He was sort of the Indiana Jones of space. And as a young man, as a 30 year old, he was leading the leading program for the early Apollo program which was to take pictures of the moon with a spacecraft that would crash in the Ranger program. And Jim knew a bunch of interesting people. And thanks to Jim, we got some excellent advice on. He was on my board at Space Studies Institute. He helped me with litter prospector, even helping me to get the gamma ray spectrometer from NASA from the Apollo program. And he knew everybody. He knew Richard Feynman who gave us some really good advice about prizes which we could talk about separately, but. Oh, and the Kramer Prize. You mentioned the Kramer Prize, that was a prize for human powered spaceflight. And, and Jim. Human powered, I mean airplanes. And, and Jim had, Jim actually had a gossamer Condor aircraft in his, in his driveway when I went to his house and he refurbished the one that's in the Smithsonian that won the actual prize. So yeah, he was pivotal. And your pal, Byron Lichtenberg, astronaut, entrepreneur.

I had met Byron when I was at MIT and medical school. He had flown twice in the space shuttle and he and I and Ray Crow and I started a company called Zero Gravity Corporation together. Zero G, that's. It's still operational now, 30 plus years later, doing the only commercial company to offer parabolic flights. Maybe we'll chat about that later because it was very funny. Zero G started in May of 93. Xprize idea came in December of 93, and both of them came into existence within a week of each other. 20 years earlier or no, I'm sorry, 11 years later in 2004 made my life insane. But help me remember, Greg. Between 94 and announcing the prize, we incorporated the X prize as a 501c3 foundation. I remember writing an article for the National Space Society and I started, you know, asking for donations, 25 and $100 donations. And we were funding the XPRIZE in the earliest days, 25 bucks and 100 bucks at a time. And I remember going to the mailbox back when we had mailboxes and I cared about mailboxes and opening up envelopes of donations of $25 checks, $100 checks. And that's how the XPRIZE got started back then. What's your earliest memory of getting some early traction here?

Well, I remember those days. I remember, Peter, you had a room in your Rockville, Maryland department which was all whiteboard. It was like an upstairs bedroom, and you'd converted it to a giant whiteboard room. And I remember you and Byron and I tried to figure out what are all the technical ways somebody could accomplish the feat of suborbital spaceflight. In fact, let's take a little detour and talk about that for a second.

Sure. Please.

The beyond the idea of doing an Ortig Prize prize to kick open the space for humanity, your biggest contribution, Peter, on the design of xprize, was the realization that we could change the way people think about spaceflight. In other words, we could overcome that false assumption that only governments could do it without going into orbit. But doing suborbital spaceflight, which is 25 times less energy intensive and means the Capex is way smaller, that was brilliant. And that's what led us to populating your whiteboards with all the technical ways that could do it. And by the time we were done with xprize, we had a team in every single one of those domains, which was pretty amazing.

I remember that we had vertical takeoff, vertical landing, horizontal takeoff, horizontal landing, taking off out of the water, landing back on the water, using a balloon for a stage, a helicopter first stage being towed behind an airplane, underneath an airplane, above an airplane. And you're right, it was Darwinian evolution of rockets. And every one of those was. We had a team representing every possible configuration of going to 100 kilometers.

Yeah, we did. And you know, that was. I remember you used to let me crash at your place because I was living still in the Princeton area. And commuting to work in Bethesda, Maryland. And if I'd stay over, you and I would, after working all day, we would get a bite to eat and then work for another five or six hours on this stuff. And I remember some of the early interns that we had. Eric Anderson, who made our first webpage. Jake Lopata from mit. I later helped him get his first job working for, I think Gary Hudson.

I think what you said is important to explain here. You know, the question was if we're going to run this prize, how much money should it be and what should a person have to do running an incentive prize? You have prizes like Nobel and Pulitzer, which award something that was done years ago, sometimes decades ago as an accomplishment. But incentive prize is very different. It says, I don't care who you are, what you've ever done, where you live. If you do this thing, if you go New York to Paris, you win the money. So the artig President enterprise. So the what did you have to do was important and then how much money should it be? And I had been in the rocket business. Greg, you were one of our directors in that company as well. And I understood how difficult it was to build rockets. This was way before SpaceX. And people can remember back in the, in the early to mid-90s, the idea of spaceflight, of commercial spaceflight and human spaceflight was insane. It was, you know, this was something. The space shuttles were flying at a billion dollars a flight, a 20,000 person army to operate a shuttle mission. And so I wanted something that a small team could do. I remember it was like what made the ortique prize possible was it was Lindbergh and a few engineers at Ryan Aircraft making that vehicle. So what is it that someone could do? But that was what I call audacious and yet achievable. That intersection was so important. We said, okay, instead of going to orbit, and you're right, going to 17,500 miles an hour versus going to an altitude. So let me put in Mach numbers. Instead of going to Mach 25, you're going to Mach 3. It's seven times faster to get to orbit when you square velocity to get to energy. So like you said, it's going to be like 49, 50 times harder to get to orbit compared to suborbital. And we gave Alan Shepard wings, astronaut wings, always considered a space flight. Okay. And then the other thing was, because I was working on zero G at the time, I wanted to have a commercial company come out of this commercial industry right and space tourism was very much our vision. And so, okay, how big should the vehicle be? If it's one person, it's a stunt. Two people is interesting, but a pilot and two paying passengers. A pilot and two buddies or a couple, that could be a viable vehicle. So we said, okay, three people going. We originally set it at 100 miles altitude, if you remember famously. And then we had some engineers, when you and I were working on the rule set, look at what the peak heating would be if you came in from 100 miles altitude. And the heating was so high that we were concerned that composites wouldn't be possible. You'd need special kind of heat, seek metals. And so we lowered it from 100 miles to 100 kilometers, as we like to joke, knowing full well most Americans will know the difference between 100 kilometers, 100 miles. And then the other thing, we had a lot of discussions about this, a lot of debate about this, which was, you know, we didn't want governments playing this. It had to be privately funded. And what defined privately funded?

Yeah, yeah. And there were. There were a couple interesting pieces to that. One of the reasons we wanted. I mean, a key reason we wanted it to not be government was just because everybody thought it had to be governments. It wasn't because we don't like governments. In fact, our biggest supporters turned out to be NASA, but. And other governments have come to like private space flight very much. And in fact, it's funny that it's ironic that today, like China is. Is. Is criticizing its companies for not having produced an Elon or a Jeff Bezos.

Do you remember a meeting at David Wine's home?

I do. We. I remember we had a few of those, but I remember, in fact, didn't. Didn't you have a problem where. Where you were trying to get to St. Louis, but you were stuck in Montrose, Colorado.

We'll tell that story in a moment. But before then, I think we had a meeting with David Wine in his beautiful home in Montrose, Colorado. And we had Gary Hudson there and you and a whole slew of others. We were debating the rules. And I think we ended up saying that you could have 10% government funding and that you could only replace, I think, like 5% of the mass of the vehicle. And I think the most important rule for the X Prize was that when you made your first flight, you had to do the second flight with the same vehicle within two weeks and could only replace 5% of the mass.

Yeah. Now let's talk about that, because that's caused a lot of misunderstanding because we had a sneaky trick there and that was that we didn't want our prize to require us to get into the accounting knickers of every one of our teams. We joke nowadays that we want prizes that, that we don't want prizes that have all the excitement of double entry bookkeeping. But, but so how could we keep the cost down? And we, you and I realized that, that we weren't going to get Rockwell International or Lockheed Martin as contestants. So it was going to probably be small groups and it was going to be labor. So if we keep the time between flights small, it would keep the cost of refurb small. But there was another thing that was going on that the. Yeah, the rule about what percentage could be government funded was interesting. We eventually stole a rule or borrowed a rule from Kodak. Kodak company had a competition for amateur photographers, but a lot of photographers make a few bucks here and there, but it's not enough to live on doing some small jobs. So they get disqualified. They would be disqualified if they had to be true virgins. So we said, well, you, you have to be. You can't get more than 10% of your income from government funding. Because we were concerned that people like. In fact, ultimately Burt Rutan won our prize. He was getting funding from NASA for some other projects, not specifically for his design of his winning entry. But we didn't want any misunderstanding. The other thing about private teams that's really important that we talked about a lot and it turned out to be pivotally true, was that. We wanted to get a totally different style of operations than the people that were doing government funded space programs.

I talk about this and I steal this from Bert Rutan. He says the day before something truly is a breakthrough. It's a crazy idea. And the challenge is that if you really want a breakthrough in spaceflight, you need crazy ideas. And governments don't like doing crazy things because they have high failure rates and large corporations that are worried about quarterly stock earning reports and so forth don't like doing crazy things that could fail because of that. And you end up only with this crazy group of rebels, which is what we actually attracted in the final result. The first X Prize brought in 26 teams from seven countries that were incredible rebels. And we'll chat about some of them. And we created the foundation in 1994, 30 years ago. Hard to believe. And it was, you know, you and I were funding it out of our own pockets, doing other work, getting these $25 and $100 donations. But. And I remembered there was a moment in time where I said, okay, what do we have to sell? What do we have to sell that could allow us to sell this? And I said, I think one thing we could sell is where the X Prize is headquartered. And I was looking at, for obvious reasons, I was looking at Florida, I was looking at Houston, Texas. I was looking at San Diego because of Ryan. I was looking at California, I was looking at Seattle because Boeing was headquartered there. And then I met an individual who played another. We have these guardian angels in our lives of this story. And anybody going after a big dream here, our dream to bring it back here, is open up commercial space flight. Open up space for humanity. That was the vision, that was the mission. And that it's almost like this clarion call and this emotional energy that just every time we hit a brick wall, it was like, nope, we have to keep going. This is humanity's future at stake here. Refuse to let it stop us. And I met a gentleman by the name of the Doug King. And Doug was heading the Challenger Centers at that time, I think, and had just accepted a role as the president of the St. Louis Science Center. And he was visiting New York, visiting in D.C. and I used to have these monthly salons that you'd be part of on occasion, too. And he said, listen, I love your X Prize idea. He had read it about in the National Space Society's magazine, and he says, you really should look at coming to St. Louis. St. Louis is where Lindbergh got his money. I was like, yeah, that's kind of obvious. McDonnell Douglas is in St. Louis, and St. Louis has a chip on their shoulder. I remember him saying that. And there's an incredible population of group there, but they want to be. You know, St. Louis was like the 1904 World's Fair was there. Lindbergh was there. It had its heyday, and it wanted to revive its heyday. Do you remember any of those conversations with Doug?

Oh, I remember it very clearly. So Doug's an interesting character. He'd been an electronics industry executive in California, and he volunteered to help create the Challenger Centers. A teenage son of astronaut Owen Garriott, named now a good friend of ours.

Richard Garriott?

Yes, Richard Garriott. After Challenger was lost, the people were thinking about what they could do as a memorial. And he said, continue the mission of education.

Christy McAuliffe, right. Was the educator in that.

Yeah. Was the teacher in space who perished on that flight. And so Doug was a super volunteer and eventually winds up running the international Challenger Centers, which still exists today. And I remember that conversation with Doug. In fact, it was a little less polite than you recounted, Peter, I think.

What did he say?

Well, he knew both of us, remember you. And I knew him from before. I knew him for some years too. And he kind of said, maybe he just said this to me. He said, hey, dummy, come to St. Louis. They talk about Charles Lindbergh as if they saw him last Tuesday. They have a very strong sense of history. Indeed. Right now, the Missouri Historical Society has a big beautiful exhibition about the 1904 World's Fair Olympics, which were co located. And St. Louis had been the fourth largest city in America at one time.

Hard to remember, right? On the Mississippi when waterways were the way you got around.

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. So they got surpassed by places like Chicago when the railroads came and they. And that's where the chip comes from. But Doug said, hey, come to St. Louis. And he did more than just say that. He. He welcomed us in a huge way. And doesn't that lead back to being stuck in Colorado?

Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting how single individuals can change your life, right? You first and foremost. And then Doug. And then. So Doug calls me one day. He goes, peter, listen, there is one person in St. Louis, one person that you must meet. His name is Al Kurth. He's the head of something called Civic Progress. He's part. He's like a senior executive at Fleischmann Hillard, and he's the guy that can unlock all of the pocketbooks and the purses and the wallets in St. Louis. And you just have to meet him. And so I'm like, okay. And like, trying to get his calendar. Trying to get his calendar. This guy is super busy. And I finally get a meeting, like a month out. And the day before, I'm with a friend, Mark Arnold, who also plays a character in this story. And we're in la. We were working on a company called Angel Technologies. Long story, won't get into it right now. And we're flying in his Cessna 421. And it's a twin engine airplane. Mark is a phenomenal pilot. And we are flying from LA back to St Louis, where Mark lived. And I've got my meeting tomorrow with Al Kurth. And I'm like, I've been prepping for this for a week. I've got my PowerPoint slides, I've got all my stories. I've got all of the numbers. It's like, this is probably late 95. Yeah, late 1995, and we land in Montrose, Colorado, to refuel. It's snowy outside and weather's awful. And we're refueling to get to St. Louis by, like, 1am for my 9am meeting with Alcurth. And I'm waiting inside while the refueling's going on, and Mark comes in, and he's just. He's just massively dismayed. Turns out that the lineman had put the wrong kind of fuel into the Cessna 421, thinking it was a 441. And we are stuck in Montrose, Colorado. And I'm like, holy shit. I can't be stuck here. My meeting is tomorrow. It took me a month to get on this guy's schedule. It's like the entire fate of this entire prize and the entire fate of commercial space flight and the entire fate of humanity's, you know, exploration of space is on this. And I'm like. In my hotel room, I was like, how?

What?

It's like, I refuse to allow it to be. And I go online and I find out that there is a 6am or like, a 5:30am flight into. From Denver into St. Louis. And I finally find a taxi company that will. That will drive me through the night from Montrose, Colorado, to Denver. So I'm sleepless in the back of a taxicab, get to Denver Airport, hop by the commercial flight, land. I have 30 minutes to get to the meeting. I get to the meeting and to set the setting. I'm in this large St. Louis Science center conference room with Doug King introducing me. I must have looked like hell. And Al Kurth sitting there, and I'm going through this, and I'm telling the history of Lindbergh, which is obviously, you all know, his history of spaceflight and this idea of this X Prize. And I'm looking for a home, and I'm looking to raise $10 million for this prize. And literally, Al Kurth cuts me off, and he, like, jumps up out of his chair, slams his hand on the table, goes, I get it. I get it. This is great. We're gonna have X prize here in St. Louis. And it was like. I was, like, stunned, and his level of enthusiasm was so high. And he says, listen, meet me for a scotch at the Racket Club tonight. Which, by the way, was the club where Lindbergh raised his $25,000. And I've got an idea for you. And I do. And he says, here's what we're going to do. We are going to raise you an initial $2.5 million of capital to get this prize, this foundation going. If you move the headquarters here to St. Louis, we want you here. Civic progress was all about bringing companies and industries and jobs to St. Louis. And he said, I'm going to find you 100St. Louisians who will each contribute $25,000, which was the amount of the original Orteg prize. And he goes, in fact, I found you the first one between our meeting this morning and this meeting this afternoon. Remember who that was?

Ralph Cordy.

Yes, Ralph Cordy. God bless him.

A big contractor in the St. Louis area.

Yeah, in St. Louis in Southern Illinois. And Mark Arnold joined there shortly thereafter. And I was like, listen, you and I had been used to raising money, $25 at a time, $100 at a time, right. And getting these $25,000 checks. I remember that when we would get someone to sign up for the. And by the way, he called. Al's genius was calling this the new Spirit of St. Louis. Right, the Spirit of St. Louis. People don't know this, but there was a Spirit of St. Louis organization. I think it was nine St. Louisians, including Lindbergh, who.

Yeah, it was actually nine other St. Louisians, plus Lindbergh. Plus.

Okay, so it was 10 then with him on it.

Yeah, it was 10. He put his life savings up, which was several thousand dollars. And.

Yeah, and so they called. That group was called the Spirit of St. Louis organization. And Lucky Lindy named his airplane Spirit of St. Louis after that organization of people who funded him. And so Al Kurth said, let's call it the new spirit of St. Louis NSSL. And we'll find those individuals and you and I by this point, Greg, I'm hard on you to please lead this effort. Come on. As the executive director, I need help. I'm in the middle of running as I've always have been. There was International microspace, There was Angel Technologies, all these other companies going on 0G. 0G that I'm involved in running. I have always had a hard trouble doing anything, one thing at one time. And the only way I've ever succeeded is having an incredible person running the show. And I'm there in a role of chairman. So you were effectively our first CEO. We had a title of executive director because of nonprofit. And you moved your family from Princeton, New Jersey, to St. Louis, where you still are on this dream. And I remember you and I going out to meet with incredible people along the way to pitch them on this $25,000 membership. And when we got a success, we would go and feast at ihop, IHOP was our way to go celebrate. Yes.

Before I learned, before we do less.

Carbs, before I learned the dangers of sugar, I'd have those silver dollar pancakes.

You know, Peter, I'm glad you mentioned the Spirit of St. Louis organization and the new Spirit of St. Louis organization because it's hit me after living in St. Louis for years now that there's a unique quality to an ethos here. And Lindbergh wrote about it beautifully in the book Spirit of St. Louis. He writes about being on Long island, at Roosevelt Field. He's ready to go. He's up against the Neil Armstronger of his day, Admiral Richard Byrd, and the guys who bought the plane that they wouldn't sell to him first, the Balanca, that's later going to successfully make that trip after Lindbergh does it. And unlike those other two teams, Lindbergh's really paying close attention to the weather. But he realizes he's going to get a shot and he could beat these front runners. But if he does it, he's not going to be eligible to win the ortique prize because There was a 60 day notice period and the time hasn't run out. And he talks about it, he says, I called Harry Knight, one of his liaison with the Spirit of St. Louis organization and I told him I could go and beat these other guys, but if I do that, I wouldn't win the money. That's the whole basis for their organization being created. And he said, Harry didn't hesitate for a second. To hell with the money. When you're ready to fly, you fly. And that's the kind of character we had in people like Al Kurth and, and all the members and Jack Bader. Some of these were folks that gave.

Us Walter Metcalfe, Holton, oh my goodness.

Wonderful people that we're still friends with to this day.

John McDonald, right.

And McDonnell Douglas. That's a great story. He.

So I want to tell just a couple of those stories because it was important. You have to understand that we're in the midst of this venture and this idea that we're going to have people do this privately going into space when none of this was possible before, no one believed it was possible. They thought we were nuts and we were trying to get to a level of credibility. And there was a couple of things that occurred. I'm going to tell one story, Greg, and then I welcome you to tell yours. So Al Kurth, again, absolute genius in this. And I think of him as our guardian angel. And he says, listen, we're going to have an event at the Racket club. And I remember it was on March 4th of 1996, and I remember March 4th because we're going to march forth towards the future. And we set up a room. Byron Lichtenberg had come. We had the head of the DCX program who was there.

Bill Gabatz.

Bill Gabatz, thank you. Who flew a vertical takeoff, vertical landing, rocket powered vehicle from McDonnell Douglas. And we had this large poster board with like 50 slots. And we were asking people, we gave a pitch. In the room was the Danforth family, you know, the back, you know, the families from all the multi billionaire industrial families in the room. And we're pitching our hearts out. And we asked those who had already said yes to the $25,000 new spirit to come up and sign their name. And we had like six or seven names signed up right there. Walter Metcalfe and Ralph Cordy and Mark Arnold. And then we invited people to step up to the podium and sign up for the new spirit of St. Louis organization. And if they didn't want to do it publicly, there was a form they could fill out. And I think at the end of that day we probably had. My recollection is probably around 20 individuals who signed up. So we raised about a half a million dollars at that moment in time. What story do you remember best about raising that? You want to tell the John McDonnell story?

Yeah. So John McDonnell was the chairman of McDonnell Douglas Corporation, which is now part of Boeing. And for him, the $25,000 was not at all significant. But what would be significant would be him lending his name to this effort. And he tasked his space wizard, Bill Gabotts, who was heading up the Delta Clipper program and working with people like astronaut Pete Conrad on that program. He said, what would it cost? Tell me what it would cost McDonnell Douglas to do this X Prize flight to win this prize. And Bill, who we came to know and love, did a very serious engineering study on it and said we could do it for probably about $60 million, 50. $60 million. And the recommendation was that they should support the. I don't remember if it was Bill's recommendation to John or John's recommendation after talking with Bill. But the idea is, well, let's support the effort and if we, we decide to get into this business, we'll just buy the company that wins. Which is, which is kind of what happened at the end in a way to, to Burke Retin's company. So. But we had a lot of really courageous, relatively small Players that weren't multimillionaires, that weren't, you know, that. That people from St. Louis and elsewhere, about half of our New Spirit members actually ultimately came. In fact, the best story is probably the Tom Clancy story.

We'll get to that in a little bit. But what happens now that I think is so important is It's March of 1996. We just raised a half million dollars and I think Al thought we would get all 100 people to sign up. What do we do now? It was, you know, let's gamble. We're all gamblers, right? It's like this is a crazy, crazy field of dreams. And Al said we should go ahead and announce the prize and do a huge media event. And, you know, I've since then written about this idea of giving birth to an idea above the line of super credibility. You know, I. So the question was, could we announce the X Prize on a global stage in a way that would get the world's attention and get the potential sponsor to come to us if we couldn't go out and find them? And so we start aiming and we ended up hitting a date of May 18th of 1996, not far afterwards where we were assembling this supercredibility. And just to lay out what super credibility looks like, we're having a massive press event under the Arch in St. Louis. On the dais is not one astronaut, but 20 astronauts. So Byron Lichtenberg, who is with you and me, sort of early founders of this competition, went out to the association of Space explorers and got 20 of them to show up, including Buzz Aldrin and many of the early great astronauts. And so on the dais are 20 astronauts. We have Dan golden, the head of NASA there, and we have Patty Gray Smith, who was the associate administrator effectively overseeing spaceflight for the faa. So the two big government groups there, then we have Charles Lindbergh's grandsons, we have Eric Lindbergh and Morgan Lindbergh on the dais with us. And I'm going to be bringing Eric on with us in a moment. And then we have Bert Rutan there also speaking. And it was incredible. We had front page news around the world. $10 million space prize announced out of St. Louis. And no one asked. We have the money, which we didn't. And no one asked, do we have any teams yet? Which we didn't. But it had entered this period of super credibility, and that was amazing.

I think we ought to fess up, Peter, that it was not uncontroversial to do this Big launch. In fact, we lost two of our board of directors members who were freaked out by the by. And these, and these are both good friends and good people. But they were. They were.

Yeah. Well, here was the. Here was the. Here was their pitch. You're going to take all the money. We just raised a half a million dollars and you're going to blow it on a large PR event? Are you crazy? That was, I think, the summary of what they said.

But that's a succinct summary.

Yeah. And the answer was, yes, we're going to do that. And I mean, it was interesting, right, because our pitch after that was to go to potential sponsors and say, listen, here's the deal. You don't have to pay until after someone does it. This is Pay Upon Success. You just have to pledge the $10 million. You don't have to pay until after someone does it. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life, and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side. You go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry, sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on and you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today, and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body mri, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. You might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life, and we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com Peter when Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller LifeForce, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com Peter will put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my Entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com Peter it's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode, everybody. Let me introduce Eric Lindbergh, grandson of Charles Lindbergh, artist extraordinaire, aviator, and crazy sports fanatic. Eric, where are you today?

I'm on Mercer island, very near where I first met you. Bainbridge Island.

Yeah.

I want to tell a little bit of the background here and then bring it up to that 5-18-96 date when we're on stage together. So I had obviously all of this got started with your grandfather's book. And in between 94 and the announcement in May of 96, I'm like, I've got to figure out how to connect what we're doing with the Lindbergh name and family. And I was living in D.C. at the time, and I saw this announcement that the Lindbergh foundation was having their annual gala event at the Air and Space Museum. And unfortunately, I wasn't invited, but it didn't stop me. Listen, this is all about opening commercial spaceflight for humanity. This is all about opening the space frontier for humanity. There's a greater purpose here. So I put on my tuxedo. I don't know if I rented it or owned one back then. And I crashed the party at the Air and Space Museum. And I'm like, all these individuals are around and like, where's the Lindbergh family? And I find out that your Aunt Reeve is the senior most Lindbergh at this event. And I finally find my opening to go and introduce her, introduce myself to her. And I'm like, hi, I'm Pierre Diamandis. We're doing this $10 million prize and I would love to have the Lindbergh foundation involved. And she goes, well, slow down, slow down. She goes, okay, listen, let me recommend there is one of the Lindbergh family members, Eric Lindbergh. Who is a pilot. I don't think she said he's the flying Lindbergh, but it sounds like a circus act. But he's a pilot and you should go and meet him. He would be the right member of the family to get involved. And that was the first time I heard your name. And then I think Colette Bevis, who was involved in her earliest days supporting and creating this X Prize as well. I think maybe she reached out to you first.

Yeah, I think Colette called me or something and I thought, oh, this is interesting. And not normal, but it was very interesting. It was a crazy idea.

You weren't used to collect calls.

I think the next thing happened was that, you know, I brought Byron with me and we came to visit. You know, it was still. Back then, astronauts were not as frequent. And bringing an astronaut as your calling card still had a level of pizazz. And Byron, God bless him, you know, joined in and we came. So here we are, Eric, Byron Lichtenberg, Peter Diamandis here, talking about opening the space frontier and doing this version of the Orteg Prize. So what did you think?

Yeah, first of all, I mean, it was crazy and you guys were crazy. I was, you know, I guess because of my background, my grandparents being the most famous people on the planet for about 10 years straight, and then.

You.

Know, having this incredibly public life and the latter half of their lives, they really focused on the balance between advancing technology and preservation of the environment. So I thought, 10 million bucks into space. You know, this core idea of the prize, it's nuts. We need that $10 million down here on planet Earth. So I really was resistant and, and, and Aunt Reeve was sort of. Yeah, I didn't really get it, but you might be interested because you fly. And then when you guys came and, and I thought, well, I'll go have dinner with an astronaut and hey, it's a free dinner. Couldn't, couldn't say no to that. But as you recall, I had long hair because I kind of couldn't afford a haircut. And I was, you know, walking with a cane and really disabled and not living, living a very constricted life. But as I just listened to you.

Guys, you and Byron were, I mean, you were so much, you know, listen, we need, you know, the environments first. And, you know, why, why would you focus on space instead of this? And Byron and I just opened up with every possible, you know, argument we possibly could about, you know, going, going to space to save the earth, etc.

It worked. I got chills. On the back of my neck, you know, listening to Byron talk about what it's like to see our planet from space and, and I still get those chills. I want to see that. It was, it was really powerful. And then thinking about, you know, maybe what we learn from space is, is what we need to survive on this planet. And then you guys were talking about space, solar power, lessening the burden of our resources, you know, here on space. And that, that dialogue you had earlier with Greg is if, if you're not really thinking about spaceflight and what it can offer us as a species and, and not just humans, but all life on planet. I don't, I don't. I think you just poo, poo it. And that's one of the problems that spaceflight has had.

Yeah. I think one of the things that is the most valuable asset from the X prize and from our collective efforts is the ability to dream big again. Right. And I think that's one of the most important elements is the human spirit of dreaming big, of there is no problem we cannot solve. So we swayed you enough and offered you. So you had never been to St. Louis. So let's take you back to May 18th of 1996. There's some good stories to be told there. You flew in. Morgan flew in as well. Morgan's your younger brother.

Yeah.

I was having trouble walking and so I asked if Morgan could help me with that flight and get a wheelchair through the St. Louis airport, just, you know, on and off kind of thing, because I really wasn't, I wasn't living as a human.

Yeah. By the way, Eric, today is telemark skiing and having a blast and, and climbing and hiking. And we'll tell the story of this rehabilitation. Rehabilitation as well. But so you come. You'd not been to St. Louis before, right?

Right. Yeah.

No.

So now I got a free dinner and I got to talk to these interesting characters and then. Well, you want to go to St. Louis for a big gala with a bunch of astronauts? I'm like, woo hoo. More free dinners.

What was it like coming to St. Louis? Because I mean, like every other street was Lindbergh this and Lindbergh that.

Oh man, Lindbergh Boulevard. And then of course, the first thing we do is get in a car and we're toured around St. Louis and there's like the side of a building has an image of my grandfather on it that's way larger than life and it's cubist, it's cubes that look like him in the aviator helmet. And the goggles. And quite frankly, I was overwhelmed. And I think when you grow up as a Lindbergh, there's a certain Lindbergh, a phobia that goes with that because people say, oh, you're, you're a Lindbergh. You must have grown up with three or four airplanes and so forth. And people have all these preconceived notions. But my reality was obviously different. So I felt kind of really taken aback by all that. But it was also really, I started to get that glimmer of hope and inspiration, excitement, right?

Yeah.

Not just about, you know, space flight and what that could bring to humanity, but my life. I started thinking, oh, here's this crazy thing I could be involved in and wouldn't it be great if it actually happened? Little did I know back then about how risky these kind of startups are. But it really gave me this incredible inspiration in my life that's carried through to today. And that's, I think, the greatest gift that I've ever received.

That's awesome, buddy. Greg, what are your memories of May 18th?

My goodness. Well, it was a real tour de force. I actually was just looking at some photographs from that event and the laser light show, Neil diamond looking to the future.

I remember that was in the evening. I remember one thing leading up to we had everybody staying there in St. Louis at the same hotel and we had a bus to bring all the astronauts and all, all the dignitaries to the stage. And I remember that Dan Goldin and Burt Rutan got into a crazy argument.

Almost Kalistikoffs yelling at each other.

Yeah. Dan Goldin is the NASA administrator and Burt Rutan is the radical aviation soon to be space entrepreneur.

And world famous airplane designer. I mean.

Yeah, yeah. So just go ahead and talk about Bert one second. Give him context here.

Yeah, well, Bert Rutan, at the time of, of our X Prize announcement, he had started a company called Scaled Composites. And his biggest claim to fame, he's real well known in the aviation space. But his biggest claim to fame was he built the Voyager aircraft that flew around the world nonstop. His brother Dick Rutan was the principal pilot of that. So he's really well known. But his philosophy is at loggerheads with Dan Goldin, the head of NASA, at least seemingly.

So I think Bert goes, listen, Dan, I think you should take half of NASA's annual budget and like give it to X Prize to do prizes because you guys are wasting the money. I mean, like, what the hell have you done over the last, you know, since the Apollo Moon Landing. It's really an incredible. And they got into an argument that scared the shit out of me and a lot of the people there because they're about to be going on stage in an hour in front of the world media, and they're going at it. And we literally had to separate them on the bus. Anyway. That was crazy.

I'll tell a short story. On the other bus, I'm hearing a conversation between Alan Ladwick, who's an aide to Dan Golden. Yeah.

He was one of the associate administrators of NASA.

Yeah. And somebody who I don't know. And I'm listening to their conversation. I'm sitting one seat in front of them, and this guy that's talking to Ludwig, who I know well, really a smart guy, and he's talking about how he would go about winning the X Prize. And I remember the discussion about what propulsion system had to do with using hydrogen peroxide. I said, this guy must be a rocket engine designer. Turned out it was the guy who had produced the movies the Blues Brothers and the Naked Gun series, who later becomes our super close pal and has.

Robert K. Weiss.

Robert K. Weiss of Hollywood fame.

I remember just to. Very quickly, I had met Bob earlier when I had a film script that I was pitching about the winning of the X Prize. And my naivete is like, I'm gonna sell this film. Film for $10 million and fund the X Prize. I mean, you have to understand, we're desperate to fund this prize. It's like, how I'll fund it anyway. Bake sales, film scripts. So we had this announcement, and Eric, you were on stage. I think Morgan spoke as well. We had Dan golden, we had Buzz Aldrin speaking. We had the Al Kurth, of course, was our emcee. And it was an extraordinary. I mean, just to watch this announcement. It was. It was historic in nature. And we had media around the world, you know, just praise this, praise St. Louis, everything. And then the next day in the St. Louis dispatch is an article from a guy named Bill McClellan. And I will never forget this because I was so proud of all the incredible press. And this article by Bill McClellan says, Only in St. Louis, who built an arch, a monument to Those who left St. Louis, would they be naive enough to give money to this crazy $10 million prize. And I was so depressed by that article. And I remember Al Kurth saying, okay, listen, you got to go and explain to Bill. Go buy him a few beers and explain to Bill what you're doing and why you're doing it. And a Few weeks later I did that. And one of the proudest moments was he wrote a retraction to that piece. And he said, okay, I now get what X Prize is doing and why it's doing it. And very proud. And I remember I framed the original one and the other one above my desk.

Yeah. In fact, over time he wrote two retractions. And because he was so well known in St. Louis as a brilliant guy, but somewhat of a curmudgeon, he apparently had never retracted anything. So the fact that those retractions gave us much more good local pressure, and that was the only bad press I think we ever got, really. I do remember that we had somebody. I didn't discover until years later that somebody in a British science journal had written, we must be crazy libertarians because our prizes for non governmental spaceflight and.

All this is true.

Well, not knowing that the head of NASA was there with us and that NASA was very supportive actually of private space flight, as they are now, we.

Worked through Alan Ladwig at length to get Dan supportive. And one of the things that people don't realize is that when we started this competition, the rules for the FAA for space flight did not allow for private, for people to go on rockets commercially, did not allow for reentry. And one of the biggest things we had to overcome during this competition was to get the FAA to rewrite the laws that would allow for a commercial space flight industry to exist. And today SpaceX and Blue Origin and all the other companies are beneficiaries of that legal reconstruction that we spent the better part of five, six years working on. You know, I think it's worth telling some of the stories between after the launch and where we were. You know, I'll tell one quick story which was I remember getting a call one day at Sunday morning from one of the teams saying, listen, we built our vehicle and it wasn't a team, it was a proto team. We built our vehicle. We're about to launch. Do you have the $10 million? And I'm like, who are you? And no, I don't. Where did you get my phone number from? There was. Teams started to register and again we had like 26, I think teams in full from seven countries at the end of the day, who cumulatively spent $100 million to go after this $10 million prize. But we were under a lot of pressure to try and get, get the funds. And I remember we went first. Who did we go to first after that?

Greg? Well, I have some specific memories. I remember going to the Merits Corporation.

Yes, Merits Corporation.

So Merits is a company that does a lot of work in the auto industry and is headquartered in St. Louis. And they. My memory, Peter, is you and Colette and I spending all night in a Kinko's putting together about 150 slide presentations.

We blew them up onto poster board, and then we were like putting spray glue on to create these poster boards. And emeritus in the gold watch industry, the benefits and incentive business. Right.

Yeah. So if, if you, If. If you want to reward your salespeople, you can get Merits points and they can pick incentives from a catalog like trips or whatever. So that's what they did. And we really. I think we were actually fairly close on that. We. We felt as if it was our first big pitch to, To a company and we felt like they were sincerely interested. And I, I think they were. And actually Bill Merritt signed up as a new Spirit member.

Yes. And, you know, we pitched God knows Everybody. Right. 100, 100, 150 more.

Well, the crazy thing about those days was that it was all using, you said PowerPoint earlier, but I think in the early days, it was on Kodachrome slides, you know, bringing our projector to the, to the presentation. And it was all those mad scrambles. I remember going to Emerson, which is also a St. Louis area company company, and going up on the elevator and seeing a call from my wife. And I silenced it because we're about to walk into the meeting that had taken a while to get to, and we pitched them and it went great. And we left and I was driving west to go back to Gregg's or something, and I listened to the radio and I heard there was an earthquake in Seattle. And I was like, oh, no. My wife and son were. Went through an earthquake. And I tuned them out for a couple hours. But that's what those days were like. They were. They were just. It was all shoe leather. And it wasn't this sort of virtual presence that we have today that I don't know if people understand. I don't even know if I grok that.

Yeah. I mean, the countless number of heartfelt pitches. And this is the one. This is the company that's going to back it. And it's like, can't you see it? We pitched Virgin. We pitched Richard Branson, I think two or three times. We pitched him personally. We pitched him for Virgin Atlantic X Prize, Virgin Mobile X Prize. We'll get to the point where he basically sort of didn't back us, but backed the winning technology to commercialize and create Virgin Galactic. But it was, it was crazy. And we had so many people telling us, I mean, especially after the Columbia failure and after nine, 11 people telling us, give up. There's no way, this is not going to happen. This is just a reach too far.

Interestingly, you mentioned Colombia and we really. I remember that morning, that Saturday morning when Columbia was lost and we really thought we were over. One of the surprising effects was that NASA came to us after Columbia and the, the cfo, as it were, of NASA, that, that equivalent.

Steve Isakowitz.

Steve Isakowitz. His son Matthew was a teenager and it turned out an X Prize affectionado. He made a bet with his dad. He said, dad, I bet XPRIZE will fly a person in space before NASA flies another person in space.

Yes.

Post Challenger Isocombit came to us and said, help us. This is a year before the success of the XPRIZE flights for the Ansari X Prize. They came to us and said, Peter, Greg, can you help us figure out whether NASA could do incentive prizes and if so, which ones should we do? And that was critical money for us that kept us going during 2003 and resulted in NASA's Centennial Challenges, which are their equivalent.

One of the things we did to keep things going again, we announced a prize in 96. We don't have any money. We are trying desperately to keep the engine going by going and raising $25,000 at a time. I mean, that was our economic engine, going out and pitching somebody and getting the next person, the next person to join the newspaper of St. Louis. And I remember in 1998, two years later, we had a gala at the St. Louis Science center where we invited all of the teams to come and display themselves. Right. And we had.

Yeah, actually, Peter, it was 97.

97.

Okay, it was 97. We held it at the planetarium, which is part of the science center, out in that big tent.

Yep.

And we had our first teams come. In fact, they looked at a possible launch site over in Illinois at the Scott Field joint use area.

And it became real at that point when you saw the teams and what they were attempting to do. And then I got a call one day from Gary Hudson, who was one of our teams. He was running rotary rocket, which was a helicopter version of going into space. Gary, I wish he had actually built his original version of it and not the larger one later. And Gary says, you should go and meet Tom Clancy. And I get a meeting with Tom Clancy, who had invested in rotary rocket and was interested in spaceflight. And I remember meeting with you and And Bob Weiss, who we mentioned earlier, and I'm going to one of to meet Tom at his owner's box at a baseball game. He was an owner of which team? Was it the Orioles?

No, Baltimore Orioles.

Yeah, Baltimore Orioles. And you and Bob pull me aside and say, peter, whatever you do, do not pitch him for money. Don't pitch him for money. And like. But what do you mean? That's like. It's what I do. It's like, no, no, no. You want to build a relationship with the guy, do not pitch him for money. And I'm like, I feel like this, like, I don't know, I feel like I'm just, like, got strapped, you know, and gagged in that moment. Okay. He said, just get to know the guy. Don't pitch him for money. Probably the best advice, you know, because I was going to pitch him to become a $25,000 donor to use Spirit of St. Louis and to use a celebrity to support us. And so I'm in the owner's box with Tom Clancy, and I'm trying to get some time to talk to him about space. And his team is neck and neck, neck and neck. And the other team pulls ahead. I forget who they were playing. And all of a sudden, in the next inning, its base is loaded, and the next batter, it's a grand slam home run. And Orioles pulls out ahead by four wins. And Tom's ecstatic. And I'm like, okay, now is the moment. And so instead of pitching, it's always about timing. Instead of pitching him for money. I said, listen, we're having our X Prize gala. We're bringing all the teams to St. Louis. Would you come and be our honored speaker? And I think he was on endorphin high from that grand slam home run. He said, sure, I'll come. And that was a magical moment. Do you remember what was going on there, Greg?

Oh, I sure do.

Tell me.

So two things were going on. One sounded really bad and one turned out really well. The bad one was that our good friend Buzz Aldrin, who we, Peter and I have both known for years, he stayed at my house in New Jersey in the old days, and he was going to come and be our sort of featured headliner speaker for our event. And a couple days before the 97 gala, he had a problem and to pull out. And we asked Tom actually to speak. And he did a nice job. But before he did a nice job, he's walking around this gala, and our new Spirit members are wearing these big, beautiful medallions and he sees large bronze, golden medallions.

Yes, I remember.

On big, big red colored ribbons. Yeah, things. Yeah. And so he asks Cindy Carid, who was Peter's your PA at the time.

Yes.

What's with the medals? And she says, well, those are folks that are members of the new Spirit of St. Louis organization. The. They've each donated $25,000 to the X Prize. And he says, I'll take four. And in those days. And so that put our event seriously into the black.

Yeah, it was unexpected and it came from me not asking him for money.

But it did something more than that, Peter.

Oh, yes, it did. That's right. It resulted in a story.

It resulted in the next day a tiny little story, a couple paragraphs in the Boston Globe. And it turned out that there was a company in Boston whose job it was to come up with opportunities for the Visa credit card, one of the Visa credit card offering banks in Delaware to find affinity groups. So like if you're a, if you went to Northwestern College, they go out to all the Northwestern alums and say, get the Northwestern Wildcats purple Visa card and every time you use it, we'll give an eighth of a penny to North Europe Alma mater. Well, they said, hey, maybe there's an opportunity there. They contacted us and the result was first usa.

Can I tell a story? I get a message, I get a message. Who was our admin at that point? Do you remember her name?

I don't remember. But you were in the Magna Place building with.

I get a message that a organization, First USA from Boston has called about a donation. And of course I'm thinking, what? They want us to give them a donation? It's like we don't have money to donate to them, for God's sakes. And then the admin calls them to get more clarification. No, no, no. They're calling about giving us a donation. I'm like speed dialing to call them.

Yeah, that was Lori Metz.

Was Lori Metz. That was it from Laurie. That's right. Lori did that. And then ultimately it ends up in a meeting. You, Bob Weiss and I and Doug King. I remember we're in the St. Louis Science center and we look out the window and we see this large black sedan pull up with like three guys in black suits pull out. I remember it was like the Men in Black moment. So take it from there, Greg.

Well, it resulted in us making a deal where. Whereby First USA would pay 5 million dollars of the 10 million dollar prize if somebody won our contest, did the required feat by, by a Date certain in the future which we hadn't picked yet. Yeah, we did later. We picked the Wright Brothers 100th anniversary.

It was December 17, 2003.

Yeah, originally. So that was the contract we made with them. And we also got some. We got a little bit of upfront money and some fractional money as.

And some beautiful looking credit cards.

Yeah. So there was this great company and if we can put drop pictures into the editing, we can. I've got the pictures. A company called Shamley and Fred Shamlean and Associates. I was still living in the Princeton area when this deal started and, and I was. In fact I was sitting around trying to think about a slogan that we could use. And, and I remember because it. This was in Hopewell where I was living at the time. And we were thinking about giving the winner that they were going to have a sort of a lottery. And we were going to give the winner of the lottery a chance to fly on an X Prize ship. Second prize is you didn't have to fly on the ship. But anyway, I came up with the idea of your ticket to space.

Yes. And we had people around the world getting these X Prize credit cards. And the challenging thing was $5 million was great, but it wasn't $10 million. And we still needed to raise that $10 million. And we're barely hanging on by our fingernails operationally there. I mean, you then move your family out. We're operating. I'm a volunteer chairman of the organization and we had like one and a half salaried individuals and. But Bob Weiss comes up with. So we're still. We're pitching, we're pitching, pitching, pitching. Every CEO, every large car company, every company. And I remember Bob Weiss corners us one day to talk about something called hole in one insurance.

Yeah. So Bob had gotten really involved. Bob was that guy that I met on the bus on the day of our first gala. And he turned out to be. We didn't know that he was a, he was a. A serious techno geek. And he, he came on board to help us when, when we had our first title sponsor. Peter, we should talk about the whole Blastoff saga at some point. But Bob was aware of a kind of insurance that we had never heard of before because we're not sports guys, we don't watch golf games. It's called hole in one insurance. So if you watch a golf tournament and they say if someone hits a hole in one today, they win a brand new Corvette, some insurance company has taken the bet basically that they know with fine detail the actuarial possibilities of, you know, how hard it is or how easy it is to hit all in on. And so instead of having to pay for a whole Corvette, you pay some amount, maybe 10% of it or 5% of it. Well, Bob had the crazy, audacious idea that we ought to try to see if we could find an insurance company that would be crazy enough to take our bet that one of our teams would complete the required feat by some date certain and maybe we could find a deal that would let us leverage the money that we did have. And indeed we went to, because we knew the space business. This is mostly on you, Peter, from your microspace days. We went to insurance underwriters in the satellite business and to our surprise, they agreed to take our bet. Now I think the statute of limitations is pretty much wrong on all this stuff, so we can tell what really happened. So one of the things that happened, I got the most extraordinary phone call one day. It was after 2000, because I was in the offices that we had on Spirit of St. Louis Boulevard at Spirit of St. Louis Airport. And it was the insurance company thinking about whether or not to do this deal with us. And they asked me to provide them with the names of space experts that could help them figure out the odds. Basically, yes. So that's like when you're a trial lawyer and you get to pick the jury yourself without the other side being involved. So because I gave them the names of very serious people that I knew in the space business who believed that only NASA and God could, they didn't. They weren't even sure the Russians could do it. Anushi, you obviously proved that they could, but they were, I, I picked the, the biggest skeptics of, of yeah, they were serious people. I didn't load the deck completely, but, but they were very credible, well known people. But they had the common belief that it wasn't going to happen. So we did find a company and it enabled us to roughly almost double our striking power for that.

So we end up basically negotiating a deal that this insurance company would pay out the other $5 million by December 17, 2003. And we'll go into this a little bit later. But of course no one won the X Prize by December 17th, 2003. And the $5 million from First USA was going away. And there was ultimately a renegotiation of the deal where the insurance company needed to back it through what we set the new date of through the end of 2004. Most people don't know that the original ortig Prize ended in 1925, and Raymond Orteague actually extended it. And so it was not unusual. In fact, to this day, XPRIZE sometimes extends the prize deadlines, but deadlines are important. I hate to use the word dead, but deadlines are important because they incentivize teams to do, to make it happen, to take their shot. Otherwise, if you had forever, you'll be lazy, and you'll take the time.

Peter, one of the things that strikes me right here, as we're talking through this history about the Ansari X Prize, is that the time scale is a lot longer than we're able to discuss. And those deadlines of making the payments on the premiums for the prize and the pressure on the fundraising, it lasted for whatever, nine years. And that was just the beginning.

Yeah, I mean, so I'll tell a little bit, and I want to lead us to two stories. One, Eric, your story of recreating your grandfather's flight. And the second is meeting our other patron saint, Anusha Ansari. So we negotiate this deal with the insurance company, and ultimately they are going to charge us on the order of. I forget the exact amount. It was like 2.5 million, $3 million, that it's a bet, like, okay, if you pay us this premium and someone wins, we'll pay the $10 million. If you pay this premium and no one wins, we keep the premium. So it's legalized gambling. It's what this insurance policy is. And when we got to the point where the insurance company is going to have to cover the whole 10 million and go through the end of 2004, we get their premium requirements. And I remember Bruce Krasalski and Monsieur Eid were negotiating this for us, and the problem was they were asking us for like, two and a half, three million. Greg, was that your memory of the premium amount?

Yeah, but at. At the end of the day, our total premiums were close to 5 million.

Bucks, but we didn't have that money. And so I was like, shit, what are we going to do? And I had an insight. I said, okay, listen, here's the deal. I'm going to pay you $50,000 a month for the next year, and then we'll do a balloon payment. That $50,000 a month is going to give us time to go and raise the full amount, whatever it was, three, four million dollars. And I remember we would have. It would be Monday, and we would have $50,000 due on Friday. And if we didn't pay it, the whole thing was over. We had Announced the fact that we had the $10 million through an insurance policy to the teams. We didn't publicly announce this yet, but the teams knew because they were like, do you have the money yet? Do you have the money yet? We're building vehicles. Do you have the money yet? And it was a lot of stress.

Yeah. And by the way, I mean, we should say, Peter, we always told the teams exactly what was going on because people were risking their lives, not just their time, but they were doing something that we knew was hazardous. And we were very straight up with them. And it felt formed the basis for all of our team agreements going forward into the future.

And so I think, I mean, but.

Where you're going with this is that. Eric, you're exactly right. The pressure was incredible. My hair was a very different color at the beginning of this process, Peter. And the burden was mainly on Peter to raise the money.

And I made a lot of new friends.

Right.

I paid one myself, Dao Resi, who came in and paid one, and Barry Thompson, who came in and paid one and one of these $50,000 Fridays. But the pressure was on in extraordinary fashion to keep the organization alive and to keep this prize. And I think one of the things I want folks to understand is we died 1,000 deaths. We were over so many times. And it was just this belief, this absolute heartfelt perseverance and belief that this was one of the most important things. This was our massive transformative purpose to open the space frontier for humanity. And every time we hit a wall, we'd pull. Every time there was a no and a no and a no from someone we were absolutely sure. And every time we had nine, 11 happen and the Columbia accident happened, we just pick ourselves up off the ground and start again. And there were two important moments. One was, Eric, you making the decision, because we were hand to mouth as an organization and you made the decision that the 75th anniversary of your grandfather's flight was coming up and that you were going to recreate your grandfather's flight for the purpose of raising a million dollars of operating capital for the foundation. Greg and Eric, would you tell that story? Because, Greg, you were in the middle of this. You get a call from Eric Lindbergh one day. Take it from there.

Yeah. It was in2020. We had had a company that was going to be our title sponsor that had lost half of its funding due to the dot com meltdown. But the meltdown hasn't happened yet. So I'm out with you, Peter, and Bob Weiss, in this Company called Blastoff in Pasadena. And I get a call from my pal Eric who says, Greg, you've been a pilot for 30 years. I'm thinking about recreating my grandfather's flights for the 75th anniversary in May of 2002. What do you think? And my quick response was, what are you crazy? You have a four year old little boy, beautiful wife, you want to go New York, Paris, non stop as part of that flight? And that's about 3000 some miles, 2600 of which is over wet stuff. You can only get rescued the first 50 and last 50 miles over that wet stuff by helicopter. Why? And Eric had three reasons. He said, I want to understand what my grandfather did and the only way to understand it is to do it. I want to showcase the future of flight, including X Prize. And I'm thinking about those and there are legitimate reasons, but do I want to be complicit in my friend's immolation? Probably not. And then when he talks about the future of flight and X Prize, well, that's my job, to promote X Prize. Is it worth, is it worth success there and against his life? Probably not. But he got me with the third reason. He said, well, you remember when I was in a wheelchair and on crutches when you met me under the arch in St. Louis? I got my life back. I'm going to do something with it. And where you really got me, Eric, was when you said, I want to show people, especially kids, that if they're suffering from something like my rheumatoid arthritis, something horrible, there's hope. I said, okay, I'll, I'll help you.

You'll think about it. I remember that conversation well because it, you know, the gestation of that story is I have dinner with Peter and Byron and then I go to visit this crazy, you know, cabal of astronauts and space geeks. And I get excited and I, you know, my first trip up on stage to say, this is pretty cool, I'm wobbling with a cane. And then the 97 gala, I was actually walking up the stairs. I had had my knees replaced, both total knee replacements in 1996. And I had some measure of my life back. And then, and then a couple of years later, I started taking a breakthrough biotechnology drug that gave me another chance at life. And, and I got back into flying. So I was flying again. And I realized I might not get a third chance at life. I'd had this sort of second chance at a physical life. And I started thinking, and in those days I was doing a lot of sculptures and furniture in my shop, and I was selling them at the local farmers market and other venues. And one of my clients asked me if he'd make a. If I'd make him a spirit of St. Louis. Because he and his brother both read my grandfather's book, the spirit of St. Louis, like Peter did, and it inspired them to become pilots. And that. That inspiration led them to, you know, him to ask me, would you do this for my brother? And in the process of building that airplane and investing myself into that unique shape and sanding the. The grains of. Of wood that I had in the wings, I made a spirit that looked like a bird. It got me thinking, what would it be like to fly across the Atlantic and what was it like for my grandfather? And so I started flying this thing in my shop in my hand and putting my mind's eye into the cockpit and wondering what it was like for Charles Lindbergh to fly an unstable aircraft for 33 hours across the Atlantic. And I thought, huh, could I do it? And since I was working with Greg a lot, we were talking fairly, you know, weekly. I ran it by him and he. And he said, no, you can't do that for all those reasons.

And then.

But as we kept talking, it's just like the whole idea of space. I think the more, you know, and the more you start to realize and understand what the potential is, the better it seems. And that led me to that, you know, desire to retrace. I realized I couldn't walk in his shoes. But having this disease that killed my sense of physical self, my state champion gymnast when I was young, to being the disease.

Can you take here one second? Because rheumatoid arthritis, really, I mean, you were the pinnacle of physical health, right?

Oh, yeah.

Paint that picture a second from one end to the other end.

I guess, you know, when I grew up, I just had a natural physical ability. And I could. I could climb the rope in PE all the way to the top with just my hands. And I climbed and skied Mount Rainier, and I was Washington state champion gymnast. And anything I wanted to do physically, I could do pretty well. If I trained a little bit, I could compete. So I have, you know, boxes full of water ski trophies and things like that and that. That physical sense of self. When I was in high school, I thought if I ever got stuck behind a desk pushing a pencil for a job, I would kill myself. I didn't know what I would do with that because I was so physical. And then of Course, rheumatoid arthritis came along and it's like having your knee sprained and then your other knee sprained at the same time. And then it moves around your body and it mirrors itself in your joints and slowly decays your cartilage. And I ended up bone on bone in my knees. And that's when you guys met me.

Yeah, at really a low point. And I think that was a bottom that led to this incredible achievement. And I think in 2000, Greg, the XPrize foundation was at a low point as well. We're on fumes. We are basically everybody is employed by. I think you're the only employee at XPRIZE at this point and maybe even part time. And when Eric said, I'm going to recreate this flight and we'll do it as a fundraiser, I'm like, awesome. All in not being as worried about your. My family was concerned as Greg was. It's like, I'll do anything to get this damn prize funded.

And so, I mean, just to give you a feel for how bad things were, we were pretty sure we were losing our title sponsor. I remember you and Bob Weiss and I had a meeting at Pasadena and I took a red eye home from that and discovered that my car, which I had to park outside at the airport because we didn't, you know, because we were broke, basically had been hit by hail. And I took the car into to many cars were hail damaged. So the insurance company set up these tent cities where you could go and get an estimate. And my number two daughter needed like $5,000 for orthodontia and they offered me $5,027.18 and I said, woo, woo. I have $27.18 because my car looked like a pocked like a golf ball. We were totally broke.

I just want to point this as a low point for the foundation in 2000. Right. And just to remind everybody, today, the XPRIZE has launched nearly $600 million in competitions, has driven billion dollars in R and D. And this is not an overnight success. This is an overnight success after 30 years of hard work, 11 years for the first competition. I just want to bring it back to the notion that the only thing that kept us going was this fundamental belief of this importance of the human spirit, that we were on an extraordinary mission and nothing would keep us from that. And the only way that we would fail is if we gave up along the way. And so let's take a second and before I introduce Anousha Ansari, who is the next chapter in the story, you Make a decision to go forward with this. With this flight across the Atlantic. And what was entailed in doing that?

Oh, gosh. Well, we had about a year and a half to get to the 75th anniversary, and we quickly, you know, had some meetings around St. Louis to understand feasibility, back of the napkin calculations of, you know, distance, mileage, and money. What was it going to take and who do we need on board and what could. What's the messaging that we could carry and. And how big could we go? And I mean, it. Technically, it was. It was feasible. Some guy did it 75 years before, you know, so in an old airplane. The family feasibility for me, was much tougher. I mentioned I had this limburgophobia, and I think the rest of my family was used to not putting themselves out into the public eye.

And just for perspective, right, your grandfather's first child was kidnapped and killed, and that because of the pinnacle of attention. And then there was this reaction to pull back and to really become a private life. And I think all of your siblings and cousins didn't like the attention. They reacted negatively to the idea that you were going to put yourself out there visibly and physically to do this, and you had to overcome that.

It wasn't just that, oh, you're gonna hurt yourself, Eric, and we could never forgive ourselves for that. But it was, you know, what are you doing? And, you know, you're stepping into a legacy that has a tremendous amount of pain involved in it and positive and negative sides of that. There's an amazing new book out right now called A Convenient Villain where it details all of the reasons why my grandfather was. Who he was, was this incredible entrepreneurial character who was brilliant in the field of aeronautics and astronautics as well, but politically naive. And he stuck his neck out and he. He was a patriot and. And did all these things, but it. It kind of. It that gets you a better feel for the kind of focus that was heaped on the family that. That had this burden of legacy. And for me, I realized in that feasibility study that. That I had to do this mission. I had to break free of those chains from that legacy that were not mine. I just inherited them. And so I realized that the resistance I was getting from family I needed to push through, and that aligned me fully to do this and to take the physical risk. And then Greg and I, of course, you know, went about finding sponsors for the flight, and we went to Oshkosh Airventure, where, you know, it was my first trip there, and we. I forget if it was the first trip or the second trip. We spent the night in a school room and some out near the prison. We got a whole classroom to ourselves, but we found most of our sponsors there. And then we talked to the company that was making the breakthrough biotechnology drug that really wanted to get the news out. Enbrel. And of course, X Prize was on board. So we started pulling together the funding for that and then made a partnership with the Lance Air Company and Lance Neibauer to. To take a plane and make it worthy of the transatlantic flight by adding a ton of fuel to it and give it that longevity. And then we started training, and that was, you know, an extraordinary period of. All of a sudden, I'm really laser focused on my prime directive, which was not necessarily to raise the money or fly from New York to Paris, but it was to survive.

Yeah. You know, as we tell the story, we were in the middle of our fundraising when 911 happened. In fact, I was driving to meet with the Missouri Historical Society, which had heard through the grapevine that we were going to get American Airlines funding for our flight, and they were trying to get funding from American Airlines for a traveling Lindbergh exhibit. So the boss of the museum wanted to cut a deal with me to split that money somehow and get a piece of the action. And as I was driving to that meeting, the first plane hit the towers and. And the head of ohis and I saw the second one hit because we had set up a TV in his office, and that was the end of that. So we lost about half of our potential funding from that. But as it was, of course, it turned out to be the bridge that kept us going. In fact, Eric and I were in New York City doing media training and then driving out to Long island to take a ferry to Groton, Connecticut, to get dunked and learned how to escape from airplanes in the dark underwater, when. When. When we signed our agreement with our next guest, Anusha. So we'll segue to that. But. But, you know, the. The. The. That story of Eric's flight still has legs today. In fact, the airplane has just been restored to airworthy condition. And Eric and I have each. Just.

We'll come back to that, but Anusha was part of that story, too. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. The company is called Fountain Life, and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins And a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side. You go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on and you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four, four across the US today, and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body mri, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. You might as well find out when you can take action found. Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com Peter When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller LifeForce, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com Peter will put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is for me, one of the most important things I offer my Entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com Peter it's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. All right, next guest, Pleasure to bring a dear, dear friend, another patron saint on this incredible journey, Anush Ansari, who is our benefactrix. Anusha, a pleasure to have you here.

It's great to be with all of you.

Yeah. This is family time again, huh? So we're at this point in the story and it's 2001. Eric Lindbergh has just decided to make his transatlantic flight. Hopefully we're at a low point in the X Prize. Blast off, which was a company that was going to potentially be our sponsor, had splashed down. That money was not going to materialize. I did a podcast with Bill Gross talking about Blast off, and folks can go and hear that incredible journey. But we're at a point where I'm not sure how we're going to fund the foundation. We have this hole in one, insurance in place, and I'm having these $50,000 Fridays. But there's this balloon payment coming up of millions of dollars, and I've been wholly unsuccessful. I missed the entire.com revolution where these.com companies were spending millions and tens of millions and holy shit, I forgot to pitch them properly. I'll never forget. I am in my apartment on 3rd street in Santa Monica, and I pick up this copy of Fortune magazine and the COVID issue says, the wealthiest 40 women under 40. And I'm just flipping through this and I happen to land on this page about Anoush Ansari. And it says, anoush Ansari has just sold her company, Telecom Technologies, to. To sonus Networks for $1.3 billion. And her dream is to fly on a suborbital flight into space. And I'm like, say what? I read that line like three times. It's like, to fly on a suborbital flight into space. It's like, who says I want to fly in a suborbital flight? People say, I want to fly to space. And I'm like, oh, my God, this is her. This is her. And I am like, I'm start, like, googling around or whatever, searching for telecom technologies in Noushan. Sorry. And it turns out that your company had been an asset sale. The company was no longer around. And I'm able. I'm not sure how. I don't remember exactly. I might have been a member of my team tracking you down, tracking down your past executive assistant. And I get that person on the phone and I'm like, this is her. I've been told no. Greg's been told no, Eric's been told no a hundred times, 150 times. And I have to meet you. I have to meet you. And I extract a promise out of your past EA, who tells me that you're vacationing in Hawaii, that if I send her a stack of materials, that she would forward it to you and why don't you pick up the story from there?

Yeah. So I was taking some time off with family because we had worked Non stop for over 10 years, building a company, sold the company, and then ended up working for Sonus Network up until the debacle of 2000 and 2001. We were taking some time off and I received a call. I had said no meetings because all of a sudden, because I was in the papers, everyone wanted to talk to me about money and donation and I wasn't ready. So she calls me and says that there's someone who wants to meet with you and talk to you. And he said he wants to talk to you about space. And at that time, when we had sold the company, I had made the decision that I wanted to go back to the passion I had since childhood and going to space. I had enrolled in a master's in astronomy. I was studying, I was researching to see what are my possibilities and how can I get involved in an industry that I had nothing to do with. And decided that suborbital was probably the most viable option for me at that time. And when she mentioned space, I'm like, oh, 100%. First meeting when I come back. And we came back, I don't remember exactly about a few weeks after that. And you and Byron were the first people I met with in our office.

I remember I was like, byron, you have to come with me. First of all, you were in Dallas and Byron was in Houston. And it's like, I have to bring my astronaut with me wherever I go. I used that game card with Eric and I was gonna use it again with Anusha.

That made a big difference because I had never met an astronaut and Byron was the first astronaut I ever met. And you know, just sitting next to him and having him talk about his experience in spaceflight and giving me an autographed picture that was like I was in heaven.

So I want to tell this story a little bit. So to give some context here, you were born in Tehran and you grew up. What was your childhood like and what was your connection to space?

Well, I fell in love with the night skies. Basically. I wasn't thinking about going to space. But as a child I was very curious. I'm still very curious. And that gets me into all sorts of trouble. But I slept outside. We didn't have air conditioning. I slept outside at night. Summertime. And just gazing at the night sky was this field of possibilities. A place where your imagination can basically make up anything you want. And that's what I did as a child because I had a normal childhood until I was 12. And revolution happened in Iran, which brought guns and violence and Screaming and shouting to my door for the first time in my life. And then the war between Iran and Iraq and happened where all the things that come with a war again, death, destruction, lack of food, water, electricity, blackouts all the time, bombings, sirens, going to bunkers and all of that was too much for me to handle. So space became this refuge for me, a place where in my mind I would go there and tell myself stories of this wonderful, peaceful place, the Star Trek world.

And you were a Trekkie along with me, along all of us.

Yeah, I was. I started watching Star Trek in Iran, dubbed in Farsi, all sorts of sci fi. But Star Trek was my favorite and Spock was my favorite character because I wanted to, I didn't want to be the captain, I wanted to be the science officer, the person who discovers all sorts of things. And so I was on a journey of discovery when I looked at the night sky.

So fast forward a few decades later in your office, Hamid, who was your husband, then Amir, your brother in law, then another brother of Hamid is there and Byron and I are pitching you and we're saying basically, listen, we're looking for a title sponsor. We're looking for at that point the money to cover this hole in one insurance balloon payment and then monies to operate the foundation. And I'm like, it's like I remember I couldn't sleep the night before because I was so excited. Like, this is the person, this is the person. I had felt that feeling before, but not anywhere near as much. And I remember leaving your room, your offices without a yes and I was dismayed by that. And so what was going on in your mind back then and what did you think? Why didn't you tell me yes on the spot? You could have saved me a lot of heartache.

It's the Iranian in me. No, but, so we were sitting there and you gave your PowerPoint presentation and we had a good conversation. And I remember thinking to myself that you were describing this competition and I had not thought of a competition at all. But you were describing how you're going to ask the world to build a spaceship in their garage and then fly not once, two times before they would get any money. And I'm thinking to myself, wow, what a brilliant approach to innovation as an entrepreneur. You know, I had selected teams, built teams, asked them to build things. Usually, you know, they were late, they didn't deliver exactly what I wanted. I had to pay them up front before they delivered anything. I'm like, we should do this more in building things and especially A high risk thing, which is what, you know, most of the companies that my family and I built were about doing things at the edge. So I had the risk taking gene in me already, and I saw this as a way to do risky things, but risk mitigated through a competition. So in my, you know, sort of calculating head, I was thinking, oh, this is a brilliant approach. On the other hand, my, you know, kid, the space cadets in me just loved it because I wanted to go to space myself, but I also didn't want it to just be about me going to space, and I wanted it to be something that lasts afterwards. So the fact that we were asking the teams to basically build a reusable access to space that twice within two weeks told me that this is going to happen. We wanted to build a business. I mean, part of what you described to me, a whole industry in space. And that sort of also struck a note with me. In my mind, I had said yes, but not verbally to you, and I wanted to consult with the rest of the family, frankly. Also, we had glanced across the table. I felt like some were skeptical, some of them were okay, but I wanted to make sure everyone was on board because it was significant. Even though we had sold the company for 1.3 billion, soon after that, the stock went, you know, no.

Always take cash. New shops, always take cash.

Next time, next time. So it was a significant investment for us to do this. It wasn't nothing. And so I wanted to get consensus as we were all making this bet together. And I truly didn't think of it as a donation. I felt it was an investment in the future. And it was an investment in the future that I wanted to be a part of. And so it took us a little bit to get back to you and say yes.

So I'm back in my apartment and Santa Monica, the same place where I had read that article and just like hunted you down, and I get a call from Hamid, your then husband, with you on the phone, and I'm like, I'm just like, I'm a nervous school kid, right? Like, what's going to happen? My entire future, the future of humanity lays in the balance here. Are they going to say yes or are they going to say no? And. And you said yes. And you said that you would fund the capital. It was on the order of like five plus million dollars. I forget the exact amount. It covered all of our insurance payments. It gave us a couple million dollars of operating capital to keep the foundation going. And it was interesting, right, because you said Listen, we will backstop this. If you can find another sponsor to put up the money to put up the $10 million, we'll give you some of it so you realize that as a family, you weren't bringing a massive PR budget to the table. And if we had Virgin X Prize or Amazon XPrize or some other large organization that would put a PR push behind it, it would be better for the overall thing. But we never did find that person.

I remember setting up those meetings with you and going to them. We went to Houston Rockets. We felt like they probably will say yes. We talked to Dell, we talked to Bill bank and so many others. And nobody saw the opportunity.

It's crazy.

And the potential we all saw in it. Now everyone wants to be part of it.

Or people did see the opportunity, but then thought, oh, what's the downside? And decided not to.

I remember people telling me, actually, I remember people saying that you guys are crazy because you're going to get people killed. And especially with the, you know, Challenger accident, Columbia accident, everything that was fresh in everyone's mind. And I had to actually write an op ed about it because I was saying that, you know, people who go to the space business or flying to space, they understand the risk, there is a bigger purpose and a belief in the future, and they do it with the knowledge of the risk. And stopping all the progress in space exploration is dishonoring their memories because we're saying that what you believe in didn't matter or it wasn't right or was not a good idea. And I think that's what people miss. And so you just needed the sister in your brotherhood. That's why.

Yes, for sure. You were definitely the missing component. And then it was, if this was a movie, this would be the end of Act 2. We're at the low point that we're coming out into the high point. And I want to bring us back to what was going on circa 2000, 2001, 2002. We're after the dot com bust. We're after 9 11. Anusha comes through. Eric, you're flying your flight now in 2002. Anusha, you were in mission control there. And then we also started meeting all the teams. And let's go back to some of those stories of some of those teams because they were truly extraordinary. Anusha or Greg, where do you want to go?

I remember two teams specifically. One was of course, Bert and his big character, Bert Drutan, and meeting him at scale composite. And I remember him showing us the sketches and the designs he had. And I also remember he didn't take me that seriously because he's like, I don't know if she's serious about this, whether she's truly passionate about this. And I think it took me a while. Yeah, it took me a while to get him to warm up to me. But I'm used to that being in the tech business and a place where women are not taken as seriously. But it was, it was truly exciting to just see all the different designs and approach it. The other one that I remember, and I think I met him at an ISU event. He was part of the Argentinian team. It was this guy who was building a balloon take off. And he was basically having his neighbors and the entire community bringing him material and stuff and helping him build this balloon. And he was the most unlikely person to build a spaceship and in this case a balloon that would apply him. But he was determined. This is his.

Greg, do you want to do this? Do you want to recount the details there?

Yeah. Well, the Argentinian guy was Pablo De Leon. And I visited him after lecturing at ISU in Chile. I realized South America skinny, it's easy to get to. To the Buenos Aires from Chile. So I went to see him and I, you're right, it was a sort of a neighborhood organization. But this guy was. He was very serious and he, he was actually a spacesuit expert and was doing quite a lot of work with NASA. So he was very interesting. We had a Canadian company, Brian Feeney was headed, heading that up that, that was a balloon launch. And he said, look, I'm not Burt Rutan. He's using an airplane to drop his spaceship. But I'm not good at designing airplanes. Mine's going to be stupidly simple. I'm going to use a balloon. And when I saw.

They call those raccoons, right?

That's right. Raccoons from the 1950s. The only other person I ever knew who knew what a raccoon was was our own Bob Weiss. Yes. But as he's a student of space history. But that was interesting because they had actually filed the notice with us that they were going to launch about the same time as Bert. And we really couldn't afford to put on a big show at Canada and the U.S. and we thought that actually his notice was probably more than optimistic. It was sort of a ploy to ride on the coattails of where we were. But hard to tell, but they built some hardware. The company that surprised me the most was some folks that said, what's the most produced rocket that's ever flown to space. And the answer is it's the German V2.

Yes.

Because those rockets flew suborbitally during World War II. And they said, what we're going to do is we're going to replicate the V2 design. Now we had a. There's a professor who had worked at McDonnell Douglas for many years and he was teaching at parks College of St. Louis University named Dr. Paul Sizz. And he called me one day, I had just moved to St. Louis, so it was 98, it was winter of 98. And he says, one of your teams is coming to visit me and I want to invite you to. They hadn't told me, so he said, I want to invite you, come along. And I, I met the folks and they were based in, paradoxically in London, Ontario. London being the target for many of the V2 rockets in World War II. And the reason they were coming to St. Louis was because Saint Louis University had been given a V2 rocket engine by Wernher von Braun during the 50s and they were going to come and look at it and take some measurements on it.

Well, do you. What was interesting was the team was called Canadian Arrow. And shortly after 911 they drove their full scale V2 rocket on, on a flatbed truck into Times Square.

Yep.

And so, and it was like what is, it's like this missile in the middle of New York City. And we had a lot of, a lot of X prizes going on.

Well, they did it for our event.

Yeah, I remember that.

Yeah. But the funny thing was was that, well, anyway, they said that they were going to make a stretch version of the rocket and the head of the outfit whose name I forget this moment, said we're not going to do. I'm not allowing my engineers to make any changes whatsoever. And that's how we're going to do it within the budget. And I figured they're going to. Just to come up with a rocket engine for $10 million if you have to build it yourself is pretty close to impossible given the economics of the situation. But they did it. They reproduced the engine and they test fired it. Thanksgiving ish 2003 and we had a team that was in Huntsville, Alabama and I went down to Huntsville for their opening announcement and one of the original German rocket guys who was in charge of propulsion for V2s was still alive and he was down there and he had given some advice to that Canadian Aero team. So the Canadian Aero people sent me a video of the test firing of the Engine and I took them off on the side so as not to steal any thunder and showed it to him and he said with a great German accent, oh, they're running. It must be running at pressure fed because it's running too rich. And I could see it. Nobody had seen one of those engines for 60 years. But he pulled. He was exactly right. So we had some serious teams, but. But it was always a challenge to make it look like a horse race when there weren't a whole lot of horses.

There were 26 horses. But the challenge, of course was funding, as with all of these. Right. You know, I had set it at a $10 million prize amount because when I thought about how I would do it and how much would cost me to take a run at this back from my international microspace, my rocket days a few years earlier, I said, it's going to be at least 10 million. So 10 million x room, mineral, 10, it works well. X for experimental. And 10 million was, I think, a minimum amount that would get someone serious. And it was the largest prize ever in human history at that time by a significant amount. And we all knew Burt Rutan, and Burt of course, very famously. On May 18th of 1996, we had just announced the competition on the stage under the Arch in St. Louis. Hundreds of reporters, cameras there. And that night we had a gala at the St. Louis Science center with the laser show at all. And Burt Rutan stands up as one of our speakers. And he's there because he's an aviation expert and he's there because of his fame with Voyager and all. He had built more first flight aircraft than all the prime contractors put together. But he stands up and he goes, I'm not going to tell you what I've come up with because I want to win this thing. And he threw his hat in the ring as the very first team that very night, the night we announced the competition. And then very quickly we had a team from Romania, which was amazing. We had, you know, we had teams from around the world, but Bert was always the dark horse, meaning not the dark horse. He was always the most experienced, but he wouldn't tell us what he was doing. And it's worth stating that at one point, Greg, you and I went to go and pitch Paul Allen to fund the X Prize meeting with Dave Moore and others. And they were very cryptic because Paul was a Star Trek fan and super wealthy. But we got a no. And I was like, man, Richard Branson says no, Paul Allen says no. What's going on? And little did we know that in fact, Burt Rutan and Paul Allen had been talking and Bert had talked Paul Allen into being his sugar daddy to fund his vehicle. SpaceShipOne.

Penn version had a sneaky deal on the side that we didn't know about till the very end.

Yeah, it was interesting because he was willing to write a bigger check, a $30 million check to scale than to Xprize. And I think when I look back at all the people who said no to you, Peter, I can't understand their logic because at that time, since we had taken off the operation with the, with the insurance, they really didn't have much at risk. They only paid if someone won the prize. And that to me was like, if someone has already built and demonstrated a spaceship, it's definitely worth more than 10 million. I mean, why wouldn't you? And I couldn't understand. So it's interesting how I see that again today in philanthropy.

One thing that was fascinating was that Paul required Bert to keep his involvement secret. And the only time that he allowed it to be publicly disclosed was after the first successful powered flight through the transonic period. And I think what's interesting is, you know, when you've gotten so wealthy that you don't want to seem stupid, you don't want to, you don't want to publicly announce that you're doing something and then have it fail. So I think the point at which Paul was willing to say that he was backing one of the teams was when the technical risk had been reduced.

I, I guess I can understand that. But again, when you look at it, you know, anyone who's been an entrepreneur, when you ask them, you know, one of the ingredients of being an entrepreneur and succeeding is the fact that you need to understand that you will have failures and that you need to feel comfortable with those failures and learn from them and build again and, and sort of have this grit, this perseverance to be able to push forward and without risk and without failure, you can really take those giant leaps forward. You will always be just incrementally inching your way up. And I think that's something that I feel it's important to highlight. And people who reach a certain amount of notoriety, wealth, recognition, understood Elon Musk, and they don't care about, you know, what everyone thinks, they become risk averse. And it's a shame that they surround.

Themselves with people who are their blockers who are there to say no all the time. And you become so entrenched that you stop taking risks. That got you to that point. I want to take us back to a moment when we all saw Spaceship 1 for the first time. And so Bert's in the Mojave Desert and we're, you know, we're invited for the unveiling. And I would have loved to have been on the inside a little bit more, but we weren't. And appropriately so when we're running this competition, but we all go there together. What was your. What was your. What do you guys think when you first saw Spaceship 1?

To me, it was unlike anything I imagined and so different than normal ways of traveling to space. And it felt like a little mini plane. And I was like, it looked beautiful. It looked beautiful.

High degree of beauty.

Exactly. And the fact that actually it was on a plane and taking the first part of the. The flight on a plane and then just firing the rockets later on at, I think, 60 miles. 60, 60, 60,000ft, it sort of made it less risky. I don't know. It doesn't necessarily make it less risky. And then he also talked about the landing and the special feather feature, and all of that was really unique and fascinating and beautiful.

What'd you think?

Well, you know, I had one of the same responses you had Anusha. It's little. I mean, I knew it was going to be little, but I've flown stuff lots bigger than that. And it's like, whoa, that's tiny. What actually, I remember the most about it was, you know, poor Bert had lost his voice. Remember that? He could barely speak. And he was up at the lectern and talking about it, and he said something really interesting. What nobody knew was that Bert had just faxed his master team agreement to us, like, less than 24 hours before that rollout.

So Bert, it was a signed agreement that he was going to compete, actually compete in the competition.

Yeah. So that was a big deal. And I think that was on his mind because he. One of the things he got up and said was something that justified the work that we had done in setting up the prize, because most people now we. Now we kind of know how to do it. But we spent a year on the rules for the Ansari X Prize before we did the announcement. Probably more than a year. Really? And.

Yeah, 94, 95. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, part of 96. So Bert said quite publicly that the genius of XPRIZE was in the rules.

I remember he said, the rules are as valid today as they've always been, which was a big compliment.

It wasn't. I mean, Bert was, as you say, you talked about your relationship with him. I had a similarly stormy relationship, goes back way before X Prize, because he knew that a dear friend of his invited me to meet him. And I think he would have thrown me out if I wasn't with his pal. But I had two strikes against me. I was there on some NASA business, and Brandt Goldsworthy introduced me to him as. This is my friend Greg. He's here working on a project for NASA, and he's a former trial lawyer.

Bert loved needling people.

Oh, my God.

You could not have a straight conversation with him. He would needle you and just abuse you and insult you just to have fun, just to see what he could do. He would poke the system.

Yeah, he did. So having Bert say anything good about us as an organization and as people was, Was. Was nice. And actually, he paid me a compliment when he introduced me to Doug Shane. It was his successor, eventually at Scaled and. And we'll tell a Doug Shane story later. He. He said that I was the toughest son of a bitch that he ever had to negotiate a contract with. And that made me feel quite good, actually.

Eric, you're an artist.

Do you remember seeing the. The spaceship one? What was your thoughts about it?

Oh, man.

You know, I think what struck me most was that these guys are having fun. And the pressure and intensity all aside, they're having fun. And this. This, you know, scaled composites. And Bert Rutan's genius was, was to take this new material, the composite materials, and start to redo, rethink how we build airplanes. So if you look at any one of his airplanes, they're all crazy. They have wings on the nose. They have, you know, they're upside down. This one, if you look at it upside down, looks like an alien. And he was having fun with it. And so the, you know, sort of the red, white, and blue and the stars and the crazy.

More portholes?

Yeah, four portholes. Damn.

Was super exciting from an artist standpoint and from a breakthrough cut from this stodgy old stuck industry that was, you know, big business and governments and only this way. And it struck me that we were rewriting the rules. And while XPRIZE was rewriting the rules, we were kind of running around like kids, and these people were doing business as old school. And Rutan was kind of a part of that, but he was an earlier breakthrough. And so we were just pushing all the limits. I just thought it was amazing.

So the day is June 21st of 2004. It is six months till this competition is over, because there's no re. Extending the competition right we had bought the hole in one insurance policy. It was over on December 31st of 2004. If no one did it by then, and Bert knows that, there's pressure on. And we get invited out for what we have since called the X0 flight. This is a flight that Mike Melville, his most seasoned pilot, is flying. And it's the first time that the vehicle SpaceShipOne is flying with a full tank of nitrous oxide. Its power source is nitrous oxide and polybutadiene, a rubber. And it's called a hybrid rocket engine, for those who haven't heard of it. And it's going to fly to trying to achieve 100km altitude. Greg, do you want to tell the story of what happened on this X0 flight? Do you remember or.

Well, I'll tell one of the stories, so please. Mike, who's an excellent pilot and a dear friend of mine of Bertz, was given a box of airspace by the FAA to stay within. And the short story is he didn't. There is an illusion that happens during acceleration and basically Mike over pulled and instead of being over Mojave, he winds up over Lancaster, California, which is far way out of the box, completely safe because he's high enough that he can glide back down. They make it to space with only a few hundred feet of altitude. So this causes a real interesting situation, which is that he's not sure he can win the X prize with that vehicle.

To recount the point here, Greg, which is important is he to win the X Prize, you have to fly with the weight equivalent of two people in the backseat. And he was flying without that. And you're right, he cleared 100 kilometers. Let's not mix metrics here, right? 62.5, whatever. 62.5 miles he clears by a few hundred feet, or to say it differently, he clears 100km by a few hundred meters. And it's like, holy shit, can we do this? We don't have enough oomph to get there.

And he starts thinking about maybe I should strap some Sidewinder missile motors to this thing. And asks us whether or not that's going to fit our rules. And our rule said you had to use commercially available tech. So are Sidewinder missile parts available commercially? Pretty much not. We had some interesting discussions. A more fun story was Peter and I are at Oshkosh and we want to show the funny Jon Stewart bit where he goes, portholes, damn it, we need more portholes that we're all laughing about. And his wife says, oh, Bert, don't do that. That makes fun of you because it makes fun of his sideburns. And he said, oh, no, they have to do it. He's a ham. So we got permission.

What was even more interesting is I get a call from the insurance company that is giving us the hole in one insurance, and they say, we'd like to meet with you. And I flew to Santa Barbara or I drew to Santa Barbara where they're located. And I'm thinking that they are wanting to maybe get involved as a sponsor. They see it's going to be one, and I'm there to say, listen, why don't you put your logos on the side, pay us a few hundred thousand dollars and we'll promote you. And they said, well, actually, we noticed that on this flight on June 21, the vehicle has barely made it without the probably 400 pounds in the back, and your leading horse is unlikely to win. We want to make you a deal. If you cut back the payout from 10 million to 5 million, we'll reduce the altitude requirement from 100 kilometers to 80 kilometers. And I'm like, no frigging way. And I just storm out of there and I say, you guys are going to be writing a check and left.

Yeah. Although Jim Clark from that company whose office you were in did us a big solid at X1 when Paul Allen's people went divergent on us.

So let's move forward. So it makes the flight. Bert and his team are trying to figure out how do we possibly get more oomph, to use a technical term? And they do. They find out that they can actually pack more nitrous oxide into the oxidizing tank. And we're there now, interestingly enough, Bert gives us official notice that he is going to make his first flight attempt on September 29th of 2004 in the Mojave Desert. And we're like, one of the things that's so important about this competition is it's not just about building a rocket. It was about changing the global perception that spaceflight was possible for everybody. That was the most important thing. It wasn't the specific rocket that got people there. It was changing the global mindset. It was saying that spaceflight was now available to everybody and that we were on the verge of making humanity multi planetary species. That was our mission. That's what we're there to do. And so on September 29th of 2004, on our X1, which we called it, the first official flight to try and win this $10 million then, now we're calling it the Ansari X Prize. And our logo, or our phrase was Go. Just like the word go. That was all about go. Go forth, go to space, go to the frontier. And we wanted to make this a big event. And so we invited the world to that first flight and we had tens of thousands of people in campers and lining up the Mojave desert. We had Stu Witt who was helping us organize that. We had William Shatner there, Captain Kirk was there. How fun was that to have William Shatner there.

That was amazing. I remember we were all staying at this really nice little motel there.

No hotels in Mojave.

Mojave. And it's 4am we are all, you know, we had very little sleep that night before. I did not sleep at all. I was so excited. At the same time I was so scared. It's like, oh my God, if something happens to anyone. So I prayed entire night that everyone will be safe. I wasn't praying that someone win. I just wanted everyone to be safe. Yeah, but I remember waking up, coming down the stairs to the lobby and I see the first thing I see is William Shatner, Captain Kirk with a hat that says and sorry, X Prize. I'm like, in my entire life, never ever imagined Captain Kirk with my name on a hat, like, oh my God, my day was made.

Oh my God, it was awesome. And Stu Witt was our partner at Mojave organizing all this. And so the question was, who's going to be our pilot? And Mike Melville, who did the original flight on June 21, was again nominated the pilot on this flight. And so Mike Melville was doing that flight. And what most people don't know is Mojave is one of the windiest places on the planet. And if you fly there. And I just took Greg, I took my 13 year old boys, they took pilot lessons and all three of us in three planes flew to Mojave on Runway three one, where spaceship one took off and landed. But all around you are all these windmills and like hundreds if not thousands of windmills because it's super windy. But why would you put a test flight facility in the middle of this windy desert? And it's because at dawn the wind stops. At dawn, it's perfect flight conditions. So Anusha, you're right. We're up at 4am to go out for a sunrise launch.

I remember driving down with the bus to the test flight site and I didn't expect a big crowd, to be honest with you. I'm like, not many people will show up and because it was just in the middle of nowhere and we had a very small marketing budget, so it wasn't like it was blasted all over the news. And I see going there this line of, you know, just headlights, you know, going forward in the dark. And I'm like, oh my God, look all these people. So many people excited about this because it was a pivotal moment for anyone who had any interest in commercial space program.

It was a religious experience for the space.

It was, it was because we've been promised since the beginning of space program that eventually we will all go to space. This will be for everyone. And nothing was done for almost 50 years. And this was the first time an attempt was made to really change that paradigm, to really open up something space and create an opportunity eventually for everyone to fly. So I think anyone who was like a Star Trek fan or someone who was from the Apollo era, anyone who ever imagined of going to space, what was not the right stuff, that was not part of any government space program, they saw this as an opportunity. And it was apparent. And it created so much excitement and, and it made me very proud at that moment. I was like, oh my God.

Pride was a primary emotion. Dan Pallotta had set up this incredible production facility in the desert. We were transmitting TVs. Greg, correct me if I'm wrong, we were using Edwards Air Force Base and their radar and their imaging system to help us determine whether we hit. To help us determine what we did.

Yeah, absolutely. They were an essential part of the judging for both of the flights. And they did optical tracking with a big telescope and they had radar tracking. And Anusha, to your point, I love hearing the emotion in your voice about this because one of the people that was there for both of the flights, both of our X ray's flights, was the original pilot of the X15, Scott Crossfield. And when I was a kid, before the Mercury astronauts had been named, he was the person that everybody kind of thought of as, as America's first person to, to knock on the door of space. And, and in fact, I, I, after the second flight, I saw him while I was running back from hanging the medal on Brian Benny's neck back to the announcer stand. And I stopped in my tracks and he was standing next to the FAA administrator, Marion Blakey, who would cut the Gordian knot so that we could make these flights. There are really two women that made this, besides you, Anusha, in addition to you, that made this possible. And they are Marion Blakey and Patti Gray Smith, both of Whom were there? And anyway, I stopped and I saw Crossfield and I took his hand and I shook it and I said, oh, I'm so, so pleased that you, that you came back to see the second X Prize flight. He said, are you kidding? Nothing's happened for 50 years. I had to be here. It's just what you just said, Anusha. It was really touching. And Eric and I had gotten to know Crossfield after his, After Eric's flight and. Great guy. So to have, you know, we had the royalty of test flight there for our thing. And we learned later Neil Armstrong was watching it because he was on the board of Space.com and our pal Dave Brody set it up so that he could watch it because he made him stop the board meeting of Space.com to watch the flight. It was great. There was some drama going in the background.

Yeah, I'm going to give you that now. So it is again, it's September 29, X1, the first Space1 flight. We have Mike Melville at the controls and he takes off. Beautiful takeoff. Ignites the engines. And as he is beginning to climb to altitude, all of a sudden we start to see Spaceship one begin to roll. And it's rolling and it's accelerating and it's accelerating and it's rolling and going up and up and up. And at this point, there's a hush on the cloud, right? Because the worst thing for the entire spaceflight industry would be that they would fail and have a death that would shut down. Like, yes, okay, spaceflight's only for governments. Private guys can't do it properly. And of course he survives that. And when he gets out of the atmosphere, he's able to use his reaction control system to nullify the flights. But it was only because Mike Millville was so experienced and had the right stuff that he stuck with it. You know, I remember Pete Sebold was supposed to fly that flight. He was the third astronaut. There were, there were three pilots, Mike, Brian, Binney and Pete. And Pete pulled himself out of the running. But in an interview later, Pete Siebel said that, yeah, he would have definitely just cut the engine as soon as it started spinning. And it was only because they didn't cut the engine and they had data for those 29 rolls all the way to space that they were able to figure out what went wrong and how to very simply fix it for the next flight. Any commentary there, Greg or Eric?

Peter, what was it? I think I was standing next to Anusha and we were watching the Jumbotron screen Which was kind of blurry because the camera was obviously so far away. But we're seeing this rocket trajectory. And it looked to me, I mean, the crowd went quiet. It looked to everybody like the spaceship was coming apart. It was out of control because it was grainy enough. And I remember Anoush's hand was on my arm, squeezing it, like, oh my God. And everybody got quiet and the whole place was just hushed. It was so stunning. And we thought this, everything leading to now has changed. It was like Steve Austin, the $6 million man is kind of grainy.

And.

And it turned out it was great. 29 victory rolls or whatever he said.

So Mike wasn't supposed to fly that second flight originally, but when Pete pulled out, Bert asked his pal if he would do it. And he said the only thing a person in his situation could say, said, I'll ask Sally, Sally's his wife. Because they knew this is death defying stuff. And Sally's a pilot too. And they talked it over and he agreed to do it. So now Mike goes through the death defying thing. And the reason he started spinning was he flew a perfect straight up trajectory because he didn't want to be out of the box like he was on the last one. And he flew it so perfectly that it was like balancing on a pin. It was able to. He caught a control surface in the last bits of atmosphere and he ran out of molecules of air, so he couldn't null it out until he got into a vacuum. But when he came back in, he. And he got the feather back and locked down. Now the vehicle, now it's just a glider and Mike's a really good pilot, so he knows he's going to be home safe and sound. And Paul Allen's beautiful Alpha jet trainer that they were using for high chase pulls up alongside the gliding spaceship One. And there's a guy in the back seat and he's one of Paul Allen's guys who shall remain nameless. But his initials are Jeff Johnson, who gave me a very bad time earlier that morning. Maybe we'll talk about that later. But Jeff on an open microphone is watching Mike. And Mike decides he's flown his two space missions. He's done everything's cool. He's so elated that he does a victory roll. He literally does a victory roll. Now that would have been cool except that Jeff Johnson says, holy smokes. And he didn't say smokes. Jeff just rolled it. Now what he didn't know was that his words are booming inside of the hangar of Scaled Composites where Doug Shane is acting as the flight director and their loudspeakers. And standing behind Doug Schoen are the top 15 people from the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation and their boss Marion Blakey. So any of these people have the power to pull Mike Melville's pilot's license.

Forever for doing that which was not.

Approved advanced but Doug Shane without any perceptible time between him saying Mike's just rolled it. Doug Shane clicks his microphone as flight director and says copy roll inspection program complete.

It's beautiful.

Which is why I love Doug Schnein.

So Mike lands successfully and X1 is complete and check the box. And we then find out from Bert that he's going to fly. He has two weeks to successfully conduct a second flight to win this competition. And we're there taking measurements and weights and making sure he's abiding by the rules. When I say we I mean Greg and his team.

Well, Rick Serfos chief of our judging.

Team is Rick who is a space shuttle astronaut extraordinaire. And we hear from Bert that he's going to do his second flight not two weeks later but basically six days later on 10-04-2004.

Why?

Because it's the anniversary of Sputnik and Bert loves sticking it to historians and our, our Soviet historians and so he's going to do humanity's first private spaceflight X prize winning flight on the anniversary of October 4th. Let me ask you a quasi question. We are dealing with death defying feats and if someone died in that program it would have been on our heads for creating the program and funding the program. Did you think about that at all? Did you think about the potential that we were initiating something that would potentially cause people to lose their lives?

I did as someone who was worried about it frankly. And Peter, you talk about people who reach certain level of fame, they're afraid of failure. To me failure would be not winning but something that from a reputation, from just personal guilt would not be good for me was that if something that I supported and sponsored really caused a human life. But at the same time, and I had said this in many of my interviews before that well, people asked me if I would go to space and I always said I would go on a one way ticket to space. I believed in it so much that I was ready to give my life to actually go to space. So I understood the motivation of everyone who was involved on XY side and on the entrepreneurs and innovators who are building the spaceship. So it was A big burden, but it was not lost on me.

And you did go to space on a Russian Soyuz not a handful of years later. But you came back. So that was the good news.

I came back, yes. Thank God.

Greg, how about you and Eric? I mean, Eric, you risked your life on your transatlantic flight on his 75th anniversary. Did you feel like your life was at risk at that time?

Yes, although I think, you know, it's one thing to have personal risk. And for me, I was risking my own life. And Greg was worried because he was associated with me.

Right.

He was being mission control, you know, the, the, he was running the whole thing behind the scenes and mission control at the Science center and so forth. So I felt like it was the right thing to do for me to risk my life, but also to take all the risk out of it like grandfather did. And that's why we were successful, because we went at it methodically. The X Prize dialogue about what if someone dies was. I mean, we had a lot of trepidation about that. And in fact, I think scaled lost some people in an engine test out in the desert that was later theirs.

Yeah. And it affected them for spaceship to develop deeply.

Oh, that's right, later. But it was a huge question. And I think this is where XPRIZE separates itself from everything. And this is that we constantly look at how to create the most leverage and create the right conditions for people to risk their development, their money, etc and leverage that because companies get protective, people get protective, governments get protective, and they can't take those risks anymore. That's why they have Lockheed Skunk Works and Phantom Works and so forth. And XPRIZE has stepped into an entire niche here. And that's what we were talking about then as this risk factor. We've now sort of taken.

Two whole.

Industries, the aerospace industry and the incentive prize industry to a new level to help break through those grand challenges that you mentioned early on in the podcast.

And Eric, that's just to build on what you said. It's a very important point because, yes, we haven't launched an XPRIZE that puts human life at risk, but what we've seen is the teams who compete in X prizes, they put a lot at risk. They mortgage their home, they put their, you know, family at some risk, they, they put their careers at risk, they bet everything because they believe in what they're building. And I think at the heart of the Ansari X Prize and at the heart of every competition and any successful entrepreneur, this is, is this belief and passion about what they're doing so, yes, the prize is enough incentive to get them interested and attract them to the competition. But it's not the only thing. They're not doing it for the money. They're doing it because they believe in what they're building and believe in the purpose of the competition, not just the money.

Yeah, Greg, you were going to say.

The risk communication around XPRIZE was actually one of the most important things. The reason, in terms of. In terms of the lasting impact of. Looked to people that were outside of us that, that the FAA and related agencies made a huge change in a very short period of time when they came up with the present space law that exists, which was just a few months after we gave away the $10 million. The reality was that those people were with us from the beginning. They were standing there on the stage with us in 1996. They were working with our teams, the US teams, anyway. And around 2000, about the time that we had our Nader, we were really in jeopardy of going out of business. There was a meeting in Washington, D.C. put up by the Cato Institute about the future of commercial spaceflight. And we talked about at that meeting. And I noticed the sea change that happened after this discussion. We had a discussion presentation about what we were doing and we showed a comparison with risks that people are willing to take. So for example, I'll just make up the number because I don't remember the real number. Every year, something like 32 people in America die by skiing into trees. We have not seen fit to outlaw either skiing or trees. You know, people figure it's worth something worth doing. When you look at the stuff that. When you look at the real risks that society takes, what you find out is that there's a myth about people being risk averse. Companies may be risk averse, organizations may be risk averse, but people actually take a lot of risk. And actually good companies take a lot of risk too. But they mitigate the risk. Eric's flight was all about and Charles's flight were all about risk mitigation. In fact, the reason Charles Lindbergh won the Orteig Prize was he had a superior knowledge of what the real risks were on long flights. Everybody thought multiple engines, big, heavy planes were safer, but he realized they were not. The purpose of that second engine was to get you from where the first engine failed to the scene of the crash. He realized it would be safer to have a smaller airplane and sacrifice everything for fuel. Yeah, and get margin. So this discussion is actually where we had some of the biggest impact. First of all, to get people to try stuff, second try new things. And secondly to, you know. But we were. This is not to say we were callous about it. In fact, we. I'm looking at the X Prize credo, the creed that we wrote in 96.

Do you want to read it for us?

I do. We believe that space flight should be open to all, not just an elite cadre of government employees or the ultra rich. We believe that commercial forces will bring space flight into a publicly affordable range. We will use our best efforts to achieve this goal. We believe that the resources of space are the key to enhancing the wealth of all nations and people while preserving and repairing the environment of our home planet. We believe this is our duty to our species and our fellow passengers on Spaceship Earth. We believe that the risks involved in human spaceflight are far outweighed by the benefits to the participant and to humanity. We will use our utmost efforts to foster safety for participants, observers and the public in all X Prize activities. And we talk about our own standards of conduct. I'll skip over it just because it's not unusual. We finished by saying we believe that a small group of people with passion for a cause can achieve that which has never been attained. This is why we stage competitions that challenge issues that matter most. So, I mean, maybe right in our DNA we have risk, we have the benefits to everybody by opening space and, you know, and what our mission was. And it actually still fits our, you know, we're seeing it through the lens of our original goals, but it fits. And I had forgotten that we talked about stage competitions plural in the first one. I'm glad that we did.

We had the seeds there real quick. I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously. Called One Skin, it was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10amino acid sequence that is a synolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin. And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. So a few days later, we hear from Bert. October 4th is the date and we are back in the Mojave Desert, getting in at 4 o' clock in the morning. The crowds. Even though we were not ready to stage another party in the desert, the crowds are there. Back again and this time, Brian Binney is the pilot in control. Brian had done a hard landing on Spaceship 1 some year, December 13th.

The first powered flight, which, by the way, was the first privately developed supersonic flight ever. Yeah, we showed this. These are images from the X1 flight date.

Yeah, we had M and Ms. As a sponsor. We had Estes rockets being built, forgotten about those. And it was quite a extraordinary event. There's Greg at and mission Control.

And that turned out to be one of the biggest webcasts in history. Thanks to Jack Bader, who arranged all of that.

Yeah, so Brian takes off earlier that morning. He tells a great story, by the way. There's an amazing book called how to Make a Spaceship. Julian Guthrie wrote. It, was a New York Times bestseller. That tells in detail the story around all of this. My story. Eric Lindbergh and Greg Anousha, Burt Rutan, Brian Binney. And that morning, Brian is getting ready to take his flight and his mother in law steps up with a 711 giant gulpie in her hand to give him a hug. And as she's approaching Brian, he's thinking to himself, what is she gonna do with that giant gulp, you know, gulpie in her hand? Actually, it was not a gulpie. It was a vanilla coffee. A giant. One of those styrofoam giant vanilla coffees. And she reaches over to give him a big hug and of course the coffee goes down his back. And he's having to fly with like 24 ounces of vanilla flavored coffee down his back. And that vanilla smell you can imagine in the cockpit. And he calculates that additional half a pound of liquid cost him like hundreds of feet of altitude on apogee.

Although he set an altitude record on that flight.

He did. He did. Burt Rutan in the cockpit just before they close it up, says they were both golfing buddies. He said, you know, straight and narrow down the fairway. And he went after the x15 altitude record, which had never been broken. And he flied a perfect flight. He was our Charles Lindbergh. Hit a new altitude, came back, beautiful landing. We're sorry. We lost Brian Binney just 18 months ago or so. It was a tragic loss to the community. We also lost Dick Rutan within this past year. But it was this magical moment right? Here we are eight years after announcing under the arch. 10, 11 years, Greg, after you gave me the Spirit of St. Louis book and this incredibly crazy journey of 1,000 deaths and 1,000 picking ourselves off the floor and trying to convince every single person out there that this was doable, possible they should back it, changing the laws and regulations, and it was done, and it had been achieved. I know in that moment, I had this incredible emotional experience, and I saw myself at the top of the. Of this mountain peak, like it was the journey. We had achieved, the goal of reaching this pinnacle. And then as I looked around, all I saw were bigger mountain peaks. That was a. It was a. It's like, wow, we're here. I want to ask each of you, what was it like for you seeing this? Greg, I want to start with you because you had been on this journey with me longer than anybody. You gave up a lot of security, and a lot of. You relocated your family. You took huge risks to be on this journey. What did you feel in that moment?

What I remember, Peter, was. I was listening to Bob Weiss, was. Was talking to me through a tiny little earpiece, and he was getting the altitude feeds from Edwards Air Force Base. And I was the color commentator, announcer for things. So I'm talking to the crowd, and I remember that as Brian was going up and was in the coast phase, I said, brian Binney's knocking on heaven's door. And I heard some people start singing, Knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door. And then I got the call, the apogee call, actually, I got the call that, you know, they'd surpassed our 100 kilometer, 100 kilometers. And as I announced that to the crowd, you were standing next to your dad. I remember, who I've known for, you know, for many years. And you guys gave each other a hug, and it was. It made me realize that, you know, all of us had had basically bet everything, bet our reputations, and it was beginning to sink in that it really had happened. That was a beautiful moment. And other beautiful moments happened thereafter. But, you know, I still remember that actual second where that altitude call came in. And I felt it was a great feeling to have been part of something as a team that will live forever. I felt a real sense of community. Yeah, it was. It was great. I'm proud to have worked with all of you on it.

Yeah, buddy. It was. It was harrowing. And had we stopped at any point, it would not have happened. Right. It only happened because we refused to give up. Coming back to that human spirit, that passion, that purpose, that much. And people listening need to understand. This was not about a suborbital flight. This was about opening the cosmos for humanity. This was about the first lungfish moving out of the oceans onto land. This was about lighting the fuse and saying, we can this was about dreaming big. And I think in this nation, in this world today, what we need is people to dream big, to get out of their complacency and their complaining and start saying, you know, instead of complaining, we can fix things, we can reinvent things, we can do extraordinary things. That's what humans do. Eric, how about you?

Did you just call me a lungfish? I'm resembling that remark right now because I just, I can't escape the parallel of my life. As Greg had some emotions come up. My life changed dramatically as a result of one meeting you guys. And I mean all of you, I mean the whole ecosystem that continues to grow as xprize. It's the most powerful force in my life. And, and, and the feeling that we were a part of a small team of people that it obviously grew bigger. The weird thing about those launch events and the flights was that there were a lot more people there all taking part in the celebrations and the rocket flights. But it was a small team of people that changed the way the world thought about spaceflight and opened up not only this private spaceflight industry where Musk, Bezos and Branson are trying to sell us tickets to fly our stuff into space or our bodies into space, but the incentive prize industry. This, you know, the X Prize, we, we went from a bunch of rocket geeks, and I'm not even rocket scientist, you guys actually are. But, but as an aviation guy, I just got sucked in and, and I grew with X Prize, I, I had my low and I grew my life and it, it empowered me in a way that has allowed me to look at aviation as, oh, what are the problems are we facing and how do we fix them and how can I apply myself in a, in a different way? And that's what the X Prize did. And that's why it grew into this incredible industry where we have approaching $600 million in prizes to solve the grand challenges facing humanity. That's freaking extraordinary. And to have, you know, empowered us, all of us, to go out and apply our passions in our industry and apply those lessons learned to try to break through the problems that we're facing. It, it gave me hope. Being there on that launch day and seeing Benny and all those launch days and then the meetings afterwards. Should we focus on space?

Yes.

A good business focuses on, and we have our space focus. And I remember trying to argue a lot, well, we should do some closed loop living systems and Earth, you know, coming back to my environmental roots and everyone's like, no, we need to focus on space and Then I remember Larry Page was at that meeting as a guest and he said towards the end, he was quiet most of the time. He said, strikes me that you guys have figured out a real good way to solve problems, big problems, using a small amount of money. And of course, then we, we broadened out from our space focus to lots of other things. And that, that, that's to me what the whole X Prize journey, it is a hero's journey because it was really tough, but it's empowered all of us to do a lot more in that.

Hope that we never stopped.

Yeah, rippling out, it's extraordinary. And, and I just have to thank each of you for your ability to persevere. We all had big lows and we exited at different times to take a break or try to survive. And we all came back together. And that story is the most epic of stories.

We never stop dreaming. And we're having this conversation now and there are $600 million worth of prizes out there because in this universe, we didn't stop dreaming. Had we stopped, had any of us not continued on, we would not be here. And I think I want to have people internalize that lesson that if you care about something enough and it is your massive transformative purpose, despite how difficult it is, despite being knocked down over and over and, and over again, if you truly believe in your heart of hearts, this is the definition of human spirit, you only fail by giving up. Anusha drawing the dotted line between a young girl in Tehran staring up at the stars and that moment in time, what was going through your mind?

So it was very emotional moment for me as well, because I could feel that we have just made history. We had changed the course of space flight and humanity forever. There was no denying it. And the emotions and all the activities sort of was just a distraction at that moment. I wanted to see, sit down and just understand what was happening. And I remember shortly after we had a quick meeting behind the scenes with me and Bileki and Patty Gray Smith talking about regulation, because I remember that was a whole other journey behind the scene that was happening. And we didn't even know if we're going to have permission from FAA to allow the teams to fly. And we were trying to change the mindset at FAA and regulators that this was important. I remember numerous meetings with NASA administrators and others and all this sort of pushback that, you guys are crazy, you don't know what you're doing, you're going to get people killed. This is not a good idea. And trying to say Commercial space is not here to replace NASA, but commercial space is here to, to work hand in hand with NASA and to push boundaries and bring activities that will never happen inside a government. And that policy change and the group that ended up giving us the launch licenses became the reason today we have a vibrant, growing, healthy commercial space community. And I remember a few years ago I saw this ad for Goldman Sachs Space Investment Conference. And I'm like, the day has come. Goldman Sachs is having a space investment conference.

Oh, my God, it was not that way 20, 30 years ago.

It was like nobody was putting a penny unless they were renegades. And we were all a bunch of renegades.

No, it was only government. It was purely government contracting. It was, you know, it's worth, worth saying a couple of pickup items here. I met elon Musk in 2001, just after the dot com bust. He came over with Adeo Ressi. The two had been college roommates, and Adeo got involved on our board at xprize. Elon went and joined the Mars Society for a little bit, but then came back and joined the new spirit of St. Louis, which was amazing. And he was there on all these flights and I think had not achieved.

Peter, Elon joined when he heard your pitch for the New Spirit organization at the Explorers Club when we were getting the party for Eric before he crossed the Atlantic. And I was sitting with Elon and his mother, May Musk, and he leaned over to her right in front of me. I mean, so he wasn't doing this quietly. And remember, he's roughly a billionaire at this point. And he says, mom, okay with you? If I join this club, it'd be like me asking if I could buy a Snickers bar, right, for my mom. It was just charming.

And he's gone on since to be an extraordinary supporter for the foundation backing our Global Learning Experts Prize and $100 million carbon extraction sequestration Prize. Greg, listen, it's kind of like pinching ourselves to say after we would go to IHOP and celebrate on a $25,000 that we now have $300 million or greater X prizes.

So my takeaway is that we're long due for going to IHOP together. But you know what? I know you're showing this to your community, Peter, and what an amazing thing to be able to say that if you follow the lesson of radical persistence in pursuit of passion, that you get to be in this place of profound gratitude, which is how I feel toward you guys, all of you.

That is the overwhelming feeling of pride and gratitude that comes from all of this.

It is truly the same for me. And Eric said that XPRIZE changed his life. I cannot even tell the story of my life. It becomes a story of xprize. And for me, Peter, coming from a country without space program, through all the hardship and difficulties, coming to a new country without money, without hope, without anything to hang on, and then being able to become part of a story that's so important in my life and has shaped everything I do. I joined the board immediately after we became sponsors. And just being part of the community that Eric described and the sense of hopefulness for positivity, anything is possible, has been ingrained in me in everything I do. And I owe that to XPRIZE and the board and everyone who surrounded me during that time and continues to surround me and eventually sort of made my dream of going to space possible.

11 days at the space station. 11 days in space. 10 days in the station.

Yeah.

Yes.

Amazing. I want to say thank you, Anusha, for coming back as our CEO. It's been amazing to have you as an extraordinary CEO and leader. Take XPRIZE forward and I'll just say we did have that first meeting, Eric, that you recalled with Larry Page. We were able to recruit Larry Page on our board and Elon Musk and James Cameron and go from here into prizes of cleaning up oil spills, mapping the ocean floor, pulling water out of the atmosphere, pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, reversing age related degradation of our health by 10, 20 years. It's been a crazy ass journey and it's been one I think, of coming back to the human soul, spirit. Humans are amazing. There is nothing we cannot do when we are committed and we persevere within the laws of physics. I'll put that at least. Laws of physics as currently understood. Guys, I just want to say thank you for recalling this journey. Anybody listening? We're here having this conversation because the four of us didn't give up. And if you care about something deeply enough and it's your purpose in life, you only fail by giving up yourself. This is a story of a thousand noes and an extraordinary band of renegades. All the teams, all the backers, all the sponsors, all the people who worked and still work at the XPRIZE Foundation. Anyway, thank you guys for this past 30 years. Cannot wait for the next 30 years. It's going to be awesome.

Thank you, Peter, for giving us an opportunity to partner up with you and be part of this incredible journey. And I'm grateful. I have the best job in the world to be able to continue building this engine of innovation that will truly, when I look out there, is the only place, the only group was really driving massive change towards solving these big problems we face today. And it's a source of hope for humanity. So it's such a privilege to be able to be at the helm these days and continue to drive it forward.

Thank you, Eric. The hundredth anniversary of your grandfather's flight is coming up in 2027. Any special thoughts for the 100th anniversary? Oh, man.

Well, we just moved the Lindbergh foundation to St. Louis because it has a real spirit there. And we're building education programs and working on sustainability for aviation, one of the hardest industries to decarbonize. So super excited about that. Want to invite you guys along the journey. I think I don't have an airplane that I'm flying across the Atlantic. I kind of told myself I didn't need to do that again. But, you know, if Scaled came up with a cool design, maybe it has to be electric, though, or hybrid.

Yes, for sure.

So, you know, you guys infected me with your crazy entrepreneurial space dreaming, and I, in turn, am infecting other people. It really is the gift of hope, as Anusha mentioned, that inspiration and the spirit that's alive. And the greatest gift are these people. You, my family. But the ripples, and all the people that end up in the orbit of X Prize are the most extraordinary people on the planet.

No question.

Thank you, pal. Greg, thank you for that gift of a book. Thank you for your friendship now for decades. Thank you for giving up so much and for persevering and being mission control throughout this incredible journey. We've covered.

To quote those philosophers, the Grateful Dead, what a long, strange, wonderful trip it's been. Thanks to each of you and adios for now.

All right, take care, everybody. I hope you guys enjoyed this special episode of Moonshots. Truly a chance to dream big. I encourage all of you to take the limiter off you, to dream as big as you can, to find that purpose in your life. To remember the human spirit enables us to do extraordinary things. And that today we're living during the most extraordinary and most exciting time ever. Powered by exponential technologies, powered by the ability to dream beyond even the concepts that have held us back in the past. There is nothing we cannot do. Nothing that the committed and passionate human mind cannot do. Thank you all. If you want more information about the Xprize, please go to xprize.org and join us in going after solving humanity's biggest challenges. Form a team, Become a supporter, become a member. Just follow what we do. Eric, where can people find you on social media and Lindbergh Galleries?

Yeah, LinkedIn. Lindberghgallery.com is my sort of what I do for my health, make furniture and sculptures.

And I have a few of your Lindbergh art forms. They're beautiful.

I got excited about rocket ships in the day, and, you know, that stuff just keeps that practice keeps me from blasting off into space and keeps me grounded here on Earth, which is important to have that balance in life.

Okay, all right. I want to blast off into space. So I'm jealous, Anusha, that you had a chance to go and I did. Not yet, but I'm working on it. I'm working on it.

We have to go together.

I love that Anusha, where do people get a chance to follow you?

Well, I'm on social media on X and Instagram. Anusha Ansari or Anusha X on Instagram and also Xprize foundation, of course. Everything I do today is express prize. So all of our activity, we're excited to have seven active prizes and a lot more to come. So definitely sign up so you learn about our future prizes and join us in our community in any way you can contribute and be part of this amazing journey with us.

Onwards to the future. And as the slogan for the Ansari X prize back in 2004, go SA.