[TV static drones]
[bright tone]
I do need to warn
you of something.
I actually don't have a
valid driver's license,
and the car is not registered,
and they canceled my insurance,
so this is a little risky.
Most people are confused
when you do ill*gal things,
so they just kind of sit
there, and they don't move.
But we have this green arrow...
[engine revving]
Followed by this green arrow...
followed by this green light.
[engine revving]
One of the reasons why
we're in a car right now
and not having a glass of wine
with a whole bunch of fun people
is because I am trying to hire
one of the cofounders of SpaceX
and create a company
that will succeed
beyond the wildest dreams
of the other companies
that they used to work for.
[sweeping music]
If we get good at this,
we'll change the way
people think about space.
Five, four, three,
two, one.
[rocket whooshing]
We have liftoff.
[all cheering]
Yeah!
f*ck, yeah.
[alarm blaring]
Caution on 5.
[beeping]
sh*t.
You've heard about the
billionaire space race.
This isn't that movie.
[mid-tempo music]
What a lot of
people don't realize
is that we're in the midst
of a revolution in space.
It's like the Wild West.
It's a quest for power,
a celestial land grab
that's taking place
in the sliver of space
just over our heads
called low Earth orbit.
This is a film about
powerful satellites
and the rockets that
carry them into orbit.
And in short order, the
fabric of the modern world
will be controlled
by a select few.
This isn't your usual
cast of characters.
We have a slick Silicon
Valley entrepreneur,
a genius engineer,
and a space hippie
trying to save the world.
No one knows if any
of this will work
or where any of this is going.
But there is a lot of
money to be made up there.
Nothing's riding on this,
except things like
our right to privacy
and the power of the world
falling into the wrong hands.
And whoever controls space
may very well control
the future of humanity.
[soft dramatic music]
My name is Chris Kemp.
I am the cofounder and
CEO of Astra Space,
and most people don't know that
because we're very quiet
about what we're doing.
So I run a secret
rocket company.
Astra's mission statement
is simply daily launch.
What we're trying to do
is very quietly build NASA
at 1/1,000,000 the
budget, in 1/100 time,
here in Silicon Valley.
The city actually came
by, and they said,
"You can't put up a
razor-wire fence."
- Really?
- Yeah. And...
- So we doubled down?
- I totally doubled down.
I put, like, razor
wire everywhere.
And they're like,
"You can't do this."
I'm like, "North Korea."
They're like, "What?"
And I'm like, "North Korea."
Chris is this living
embodiment of Silicon Val...
he's Silicon Valley brought
to life in a human form.
How are you?
He is very driven.
You're the founders and
the CEOs of businesses
that are leading the revolution.
Fantastic. [all cheering]
Yes, he wants to get
a rocket to space.
But he wants to be
seen as a success,
and he wants the world
to see him as a success
and will stop at almost
nothing to make that happen.
I've been a longtime
technology journalist.
Worked at "The New York Times,"
"The Economist."
Stumbled into space just
by reporting on SpaceX.
At the time, people thought
Elon was just some crazy kid
who'd sold his tech company
for millions of dollars
so he could go build a rocket.
How much did you know
about the space business
- before you got into it?
- Not very much.
Pretty much everyone thought
SpaceX was a total joke.
Three, two, one.
And liftoff.
An American company blasts
off into the history books.
SpaceX has launched the
first privately funded
rocket into space.
For Elon, it was like,
"Let's turn space
into a business.
"I'm going to build hundreds
and hundreds of rockets
"and thousands and
thousands of satellites
and make this into
a real industry."
So I end up writing the
first biography on Elon.
- How'd he like the book?
- How did he like the book?
He said he was gonna,
like, destroy my life.
[laughs]
But we talk now.
Right after I finished the
book, I'm looking around.
I realize there's
a lot of people
that want to be like Elon
Musk all of a sudden.
This kicks off this
worldwide revolution
in space.
This was capitalist
investors, welders from Texas,
military people, like,
dudes with mohawks,
not whatever most people's
image of space was.
The era of governments
controlling this stuff is over.
Companies control this.
Governments, regulators
are not equipped
to deal with the speed at
which things are going.
There's not a lot of regulation,
not a lot of laws, not
a lot of, you know,
governance that exists there.
And I think that's the
opportunity right now,
because if you can
get there first,
you can have a seat at the table
at defining the laws
that will govern space.
Whoever gets the
rocket there first,
whoever fills the sky with
satellites first wins.
It's a race.
There's a big question about,
how many small rocket
providers can be profitable?
The most prominent
one, of course,
is New Zealand's Rocket
Lab, led by Peter Beck.
[device beeps]
These are some engines
that have just come
off the 3D printer.
Yeah, it's pretty cool, eh?
This is an electron
launch vehicle.
This is obviously the hot end.
These are all the
Rutherford engines.
All gimbal around.
But you should get your camera
here to, like, see the...
Even though you're in the
guts of the rocket here,
I think it's important
to point this out.
As you'll see, these cable ties
are all equally
spaced, you know?
All of the nibs are pointing up.
The margin for
error here is zero.
We often get accused
of building Ferraris.
But...
you know...
if it falls out of the sky,
at least it's beautiful.
[whirring]
We are doing something that
is historic for New Zealand.
All right, everybody get down.
Three, two, one.
[hissing]
Off top!
[motor cranking]
That's what you call a
hard start, everybody.
I battled with, for
many, many years,
the stigma of, like, a crazy guy
building rockets in New Zealand.
You know, I started
Rocket Lab in 2006.
To be brutally honest
with you, if you asked me
who Elon Musk was, I
wouldn't have had a clue.
You could not have a
more unlikely background
for somebody starting
a rocket company...
a kid who grew up,
the southernmost
point of New Zealand.
The next stop is Antarctica.
There's really hardly
anything there.
In the world of
commercial space,
you're supposed to
have a aerospace degree
and some sort of pedigree, or
you have to be really rich.
Peter was neither
of these things.
You haven't studied at
university in any way?
No. No, no.
And what would be one of
the best pieces of advice
that you could give
to other entrepreneurs
that really want to
push their idea out?
Don't talk about
it. Just do it.
Just get off your a*s and do it.
Need to get that
into a fridge quick.
Can someone open the door?
He's, like, this
possessed mad scientist.
And the rest of them?
Quick, quick, quick.
Quick, quick, quick, quick.
I started building
a rocket engine.
I test-fired it a
couple of times.
But to really evaluate,
you know, how good it was,
I felt like I needed to ride it.
So I started building a bike
around the rocket engine.
I've never felt anything as good
as a rocket-powered vehicle.
I've been supersonic
in a fighter jet.
That was good. Wasn't as
good as the rocket bike.
I built the rocket pack.
And I was thinking, let's
get some rollerblades
to try this thing on.
In order to play in this
game, there's a lot of risk.
So, if you don't like risk,
you're not gonna like this.
"Falcon 9's" an
incredible machine,
but it's a big rocket
designed to take big payloads.
Companies like
Rocket Lab and Astra
are committed to
making small rockets
that can take small
satellites for less money
and then undercut
SpaceX on price.
What do you think of Rocket Lab?
What do I think of Rocket Lab?
Rocket Lab is a company
that has approached this
in a very traditional way.
The rocket in itself is a
very high-performance machine.
But it's expensive to build.
We're more like a Ford,
a much more low-cost,
mass-produced,
high-volume product.
I absolutely love how
light this thing is.
If Peter's not
right, Peter loses.
If I'm not right, then I adapt.
I'm not built to build sh*t.
If someone wants
to build a rocket
that throws things into orbit,
that's super rough,
super inaccurate,
and that's what
the market needs,
let them win.
But I'm not built to build sh*t.
[indistinct chatter]
There has to be something
fundamentally different
about how we
approach the problem.
If we're gonna catch up
and then pass Rocket Lab
and then build something
which is ultimately
competitive with SpaceX...
Sweet!
We have to be a lot
better than everyone else.
At the end of the day, it's
about how many satellites
we can deliver into space.
[soft music]
Most people don't appreciate
how much of their lives
has space technology
underlying it.
The fabric of our civilization
runs on satellites...
from package-delivery tracking,
GPS, tomorrow's
weather forecast,
internet delivery.
Elon Musk's Starlink
wants to send
more than 40,000 satellites
into space in the coming years.
In the previous world
that existed for decades,
we'd managed to put
up 2,500 satellites.
From 2020 to 2023,
that number went to about 8,000.
Thousands of
connected satellites
that can do revolutionary things
like bring broadband services
to millions, track refugees,
and fight climate change,
while spotting storms
before they get to
catastrophic levels.
This is not gonna stop.
We are going to 100,000.
In about 10 years, a
lot of people can make
a good argument
we'll go to 200,000.
This is moving so much faster
than what had existed
for the 60 years before.
The world is not
fully prepared for it.
[dramatic music]
He believes that
we can do better
and go faster by
getting smaller,
and thus introduced
flocks of tiny Doves
which today have revolutionized
the entire Earth
observation industry.
Will Marshall, cofounder
and CEO of Planet,
needs no introduction.
The space renaissance
is not about escaping
off to Mars with
billionaire space tourists.
This space renaissance
is really about
how we can advance our ability
to take care of the Earth.
People have been talking
about the potential
of small satellites for decades.
Planet was the first company
to show that that
could really be done.
From these pictures from space,
we don't see borders.
We're giving humanity a
mirror to look back at itself.
When I look at
companies like Planet,
these are mechanisms
to implement the future
that we're trying to build.
We're all kind of
in this together
to do something really,
really significant.
Will and I met in college,
and he was breezing his
way through his master's
in space science and technology.
And it was pretty
clear he was a genius
and super fun to hang out with.
I remember one of the
first things we did was,
we jumped in my convertible.
He was driving
around in his BMW Z3.
Dropped out of university,
as all the cool kids do,
started a company.
He was already a millionaire,
and he was 21 years old.
And I was like, who is this kid?
And we became friends.
I'm just gonna say it.
You guys seem like
an odd couple.
[laughs]
I think... yes, we're
odd. Yes, definitely.
I'm a scientist, and
he's a capitalist.
And, in fact, he often says now
he's converted me
to be a capitalist.
I'm like, no, no, no.
At what point did you
discover the idea of money?
[laughs] Pretty early on.
- You're not looking...
- Hey, Christopher.
How's it going, dude?
All right, man.
I'm, like, in Beverly
Hills right now.
All these people
are here to see me.
[mid-tempo music]
My dad was a professor,
and my mom was a teacher.
And they were extremely frugal.
It's king of the mountain!
I don't really know
anyone like me.
I love "Star Trek."
Because I have had little
experience with emotion,
I am unable to
articulate the sensation.
I would really connect with,
like, the Data character.
There was a period where
I told kids at school
that I was an android
because that was
just so much easier.
I kind of created
my own little...
my own little world in my mind.
I ended up realizing
that if you could take
something apart and fix it,
you could sell it for more
than what you paid for it.
And so that became
quite a hustle for me.
So I made a ton of money
just buying computers,
fixing them, selling them.
And that funded my lifestyle...
[chuckles] As a nerd.
[chuckles]
[playful music]
We were having our
New Year's party.
This was kind of a
young bunch of nerds.
I remember a bunch
of NASA stickers
being plastered on people.
And then this guy comes in
who's clearly three
times our age.
And he just totally
didn't fit in, you know?
He's holding a martini glass,
just cackling away at how,
when he was running
the Star Wars program,
he would have the Darth
Vader theme song play
as people came into his office.
And it's just,
"Who is this guy?"
It turns out that Will
and Robbie had met him
a few years earlier at
this World Space Conference
in Houston.
There was this closed,
invite-only session,
and it was about
military and space.
So we stood outside
and handed out
these little flyers.
"Peace in space.
No space weapons."
Later on that evening,
we were in a bar,
and we get introduced
to Pete Worden.
- All right.
- Hop in the hot seat.
- Hop in the hot seat.
- That's you, sir.
- I'm Pete.
- It's a pleasure.
Good to meet you.
So many great stories about you.
Great. Some of them
are partially true.
[laughs]
Pete Worden, the
tech lead for SDI,
which was the Strategic
Defense Initiative.
People usually know
it as Star Wars.
Spanning into space,
a layered defense
to protect the country
from nuclear devastation.
It was, like, Reagan's...
"We're gonna surround
"the world with a
m*ssile defense shield
of space-based lasers."
A friend of mine and I
decided to have a drink.
There was a bunch
of young people
sitting in the corner
bemoaning the fact
that there was space weapons.
I said, "Who are the assholes?"
"Do you think they
know that Darth Vader
is sitting right over here?"
And then we had a massive
argument in a pub.
A friendly argument,
mostly friendly.
We were like, "Look, you
can't put weapons in space.
It's ethically a
monstrous idea."
And he was like,
"We've got to do this
"to protect American security.
You don't understand what
you're talking about."
He wrote an email to
me the next day saying,
"Hey, I really enjoyed our
conversation last night.
"Why don't we write
a paper together?
"You write the
cons, and I'll write
"the pros of space weapons.
And we'll hash it out."
And we were like,
who is this guy?
I mean, he's a general
in the U.S. Air Force
in charge of, like, a
billion-dollar-a-year
space weapon program,
and we're students.
So we were like, well, might
as well give it a shot.
Sure. Why not?
I mean, basically, we've
met our mortal enemy.
May as well try and persuade him
not to do what he's doing.
Pete Worden is not just someone
with a passing
interest in space.
He's got a PhD in astrophysics.
He's writing papers about
the nature of stars.
Well, I grew up during
the Apollo program.
It was really cool.
I wanted to be an astronaut.
I was a finalist once
but didn't get selected.
So I'm a little
jealous of astronauts.
Getting off the planet,
expanding into the solar system
and beyond is a driving force.
It's my religion.
You love this sh*t.
I do love this sh*t.
I'm a futurist, always have
been and always will be.
I guess that's... [laughs]
[soft dramatic music]
July 20, 1969...
it is said that
500 million people
gathered in TV sets
around the world
to wait for the first earthling
to set foot on the moon.
The kind of exploratory
ventures we're talking about
seem to me to be
precisely the kind
that are needed to re-establish
a cosmic context for mankind.
You know, in the '60s,
NASA was incredibly innovative,
launching new missions to
the moon every couple months,
trying new things.
The brand was synonymous
with exploring the solar system,
and there was magic in that.
It's the next frontier.
And liftoff of "Atlantis"
and the "Galileo" spacecraft,
bound for Jupiter.
NASA was incredibly exciting.
Rock and roll, "Atlantis."
I had a little space shuttle
model that sat on my monitor
for years and years and years.
And I would look at that
space shuttle and go,
"I'm gonna work there one day.
I'm gonna work there one day."
I went to the United
States for a month.
I went on a bit of a
rocket pilgrimage, really,
and went and visited
all these companies
that I'd aspired to work for.
You know, I was pitching
them hard for a job.
As a foreign national,
no university education,
no aerospace background,
asking for a job
wasn't gonna go well.
My expectation of NASA
was NASA from the Apollo era.
The NASA that I had seen in
the movies and had imagined
was very, very different
to the NASA that...
that was actually there.
I'm thinking, "Man, what
the hell happened here?"
It was terribly bureaucratic.
It's very difficult to
start innovative, new things
because there's a lot
of government inertia.
It became a self-licking
ice cream cone.
It only kept going because
it paid a lot of people
and it had a lot of
political support.
The average age was 52,
and everybody was talking
about the things we used to do,
rather than the things
that needed to be done.
Flight attendants, prepare
for gate departure, please.
I had a plan in
my head for years.
I was gonna come to
the United States,
do my rocket pilgrimage,
crawl over some rocks.
It was gonna suck, but
I would find a way.
And then the probable went
to absolutely and
categorically improbable.
There's nothing like
12 hours of just, like,
solid thinking time to
reevaluate your life.
I just remember sitting
in the chair thinking,
this is not good.
This is not how
it's supposed to be.
The only logical solution
was just, like, f*ck it.
Let's start a company.
Bring that around.
It's Peter, a couple
dudes who he knows.
"Can we make a small rocket
and try to get it to space?"
And so they work on this
for, really, a couple years.
Everything is borrowed,
or some generous person
happens to give them
a chunk of metal
or something like that.
This is the very, very humble
beginnings of Rocket Lab.
[indistinct speech]
I was driving to work,
and I heard on the radio
that this guy had renamed
himself Mark Rocket.
You could not write
this. [laughs]
He hears about a guy
actually named Mark Rocket...
[laughs] Who's rich.
He happened to be looking
for a way to invest in space.
And this guy, Peter
Beck, comes along.
He's actually built a
rocket, and says, you know,
"Do you want to start
a company together?"
And Peter gives away
half his company
for a couple hundred
thousand dollars
just to get this going.
You'd be crucified for
doing something like that
in Silicon Valley.
But Peter sort of
doesn't know any better,
and he's also desperate.
And this is, like,
manna from heaven
with this guy named Mark Rocket
who's rich and wants
to pay for his thing.
[steady music]
Prior to that, all
the rockets I'd built
I'd strapped to things
that I had ridden.
So this was the first rocket
that I hadn't actually ridden
nor had any desire to.
You know, we'd done
lots of engine testing,
and stage-separation testing,
and parachute-drop testing.
We had no more money.
We had no more anything.
Everything was on the line.
That rocket needed to go,
and it needed to go well.
In the tradition of great
New Zealand explorers,
New Zealand, we
are a go for space.
Arm igniter.
Arm oxygen.
Coupler disconnect.
Coming through. No smoke.
Ten, nine, eight... oxygen.
Seven, six, five, four,
three, two, one.
You f*cking did it!
Yes!
[all cheering]
[sheep bleating]
She's still burning!
[indistinct chatter]
She's gone!
22 seconds, we're
home free to space!
[mid-tempo music]
NASA Ames is this Silicon
Valley NASA center.
It's gone through all
these ups and downs.
In the 2000s, it's in
a really fallow period
where the government
is thinking about
shutting it down.
At the time, Pete Worden
was the head of this
Office of Strategic
Influence at the Pentagon,
and he'd just been fired by
the Secretary of Defense,
Donald Rumsfeld.
Well, I'd just been
fired from my job
because I was a bit
of a hot potato.
Pete said, and I quote,
"Donald Rumsfeld f*cked me.
"But they're gonna
give me a NASA center
to make up for it."
And they say, "Pete,
you're, like, our last hope.
"We're gonna give
you this NASA center.
"See if you can do
something interesting,
and maybe we'll
keep it around."
Hi, I'm Pete
Worden, the director
of the NASA Ames
Research Center.
Pete starts to have
these thoughts of, like,
how can we innovate in space?
How can we do different things?
When I came to Ames,
I brought a hat trick
of young people with me.
He called Robbie and
me up, and he said,
"I've got this new job.
Do you want to
come work with me?"
And... [laughs] We were
like hemming and hawing
On the one hand, we didn't
want to work for our enemy.
On the other hand, we were like,
he's going to work at NASA.
And he basically
said, "Hey, you can do
whatever space
missions you want."
And we were like, what?
Who gets to do, you
know, missions like that
when we were kids, you
know, mid-20s at this point.
He had this vision for
pulling all this together.
And he said, "Well,
what are you doing?"
I said, "Well, I'm running
this travel software startup."
And he goes, "Well, that's
bullshit," you know?
"Why do travel when you can
come do space travel with me?"
He would surround
himself with people
that had different contexts,
that had a different worldview.
"But let's let 1,000
flowers bloom here
"somehow in the space sector.
I'll create the environment."
These are, like, the
best of the best.
PhDs in all different areas
of physics, computer science.
It really started a revolution,
or I might call it
a counterrevolution.
Pete had hired us to be
a "special studies team,"
which was sort of an ambiguous,
murky umbrella term
for, "Go and do things
that you think will cause"
"just enough trouble
to be interesting
and not enough trouble
to get me fired, mostly."
Chris Kemp gets brought
in because he's a nerd
who had done some
successful dot-come.
Chris was a real
expert in software,
so I ended up making him my
chief information officer.
Chris didn't even have a degree,
but I managed to
force that through.
I actually printed my
own business cards.
I took the coolest
NASA business card
that I'd ever been handed,
and then I made up a title.
And I think I called myself
the Director of Strategic
Business Development.
Invented the role,
printed a business card,
and just did that.
Pete is, like, inheriting
NASA Ames at the same time
that SpaceX is trying to
build their first rocket.
These dot-com-ers
are building rockets.
You welcome that?
Their success is
going to enable us
to settle the solar system
and do all these other
wonderful things in space
because it's gonna
lower the cost.
And it really creates
this joint momentum
at the right time,
where you've got people
outside of NASA
trying some new ideas,
and now you've got this, like,
rebel alliance inside of NASA.
One of the things
we tried to do was,
can we find cheap ways
to get to the moon?
So we ended up setting up a
kind of quiet lunar program.
We were trying to make
a modular spacecraft
that could be used
for various missions.
And we basically crash-landed
into the south pole of the moon.
We found loads of water.
We're gonna build
a lunar lander,
and we're gonna show NASA
that space can be different.
Everything does not have to
be $1 billion, $2 billion.
He really helped bring NASA Ames
into the modern space era.
A lot of the positive
change that's happened
can be traced back
to Pete's work.
[all shouting]
He is legend in NASA
circles, you know?
We call him a rebel.
He did things that...
he broke the mold.
And the young people liked that,
and they followed him.
[upbeat music]
One of the crazier
things he did was,
he allowed our whole team
to organize a space party there.
It wasn't just a space party.
It's a rave with 8,000 people.
So Yuri's Night is
World Space Party.
It celebrates Yuri
Gagarin's first spaceflight.
And the idea is to make space
not, like, a national thing
but an international thing.
I said, well, you know
we're a NASA center.
We can do a really cool party.
He's like, "Jessy, go for it.
Like, you have my blessing."
I love that picture. [laughs]
It's me and Pete
at NASA celebrating
a Russian cosmonaut's first
orbit around the Earth,
beating America to the punch.
For those of you that know me,
I used to be a U.S.
Brigadier General.
I think this is a Soviet
two-star general's outfit,
so I took a promotion.
So we had these raves,
and they were really cool.
Yes, there was probably quite
a bit of marijuana smoking.
And I got in a little trouble
because I told the
security people that...
they said, "Well, what do we do
with those people
smoking dope?"
And I said, "Just
don't go over there."
[chuckles]
One of Pete's Air
Force colleagues
kept on putting up his phone,
saying, "This phone has most
of what a spacecraft has."
This is just when
smartphones were coming out.
Suddenly, there was GPS,
cameras, faster computers.
If you look at the
list of a smartphone
and the list of things
in a spacecraft,
90% the same thing.
And we were like, OK.
Why don't we just fly
a few of these suckers?
We fit one of these
phones into a little cube,
did all these tests on it.
I'm not really sure
whether the phone survived.
- Oh, no.
- Hey!
[indistinct chatter]
Part of it was just
to make the satellite
not be this, like,
precious object.
It's just a phone.
Whoo!
I was hauled into Pete's office.
"What are you doing?"
And we were like, "What
are you talking about?"
And he's like, "You're
launching phones into space.
You didn't tell me."
So we almost got fired.
Then we were like, "No,
no, no, no, chill out.
"It's gonna be great.
"These phones are gonna show
that we can do spacecraft
for much, much lower cost."
So right now we've got the data.
Wow. Both: Oh!
- Whoo-hoo!
- Whoa!
So I thought this
was pretty cool.
And I said, OK, let's see if
we can't put this in space.
We found a cheap
way to have them
thrown out of the Space Station.
We stitched together a
whole picture of the Earth
that we had taken on this phone
that was just floating
around in space.
It was pretty poor resolution.
But the spacecraft had cost
a few thousand dollars,
not a few million
or a few billion.
President Obama showed up.
"And I said, "I'd really like
to show this guy
what we're doing."
I said, "Mr. President,
welcome to NASA Ames.
We just launched the world's
cheapest satellites."
And he stopped.
He said, "How
cheap were they?"
And I said, "Well, two
of them were $4,000,
and one was $10,000."
Without missing a beat,
he looks at me and says,
"We're giving you
guys too much money."
[camera shutter clicking]
We left NASA in earnest in
mid-2011 to start Planet.
We really said, f*ck it.
Let's build something
in a different way.
[soft dramatic music]
Within 12 months,
we built our first
fully integrated satellite.
This is one of the earliest
spacecraft we ever made.
Yep. This is a CubeSat.
All that it is, is just a...
it's a really nice camera.
So this antenna, which
you can actually see
is made of a tape measure...
NASA would spend
millions and millions
on a typical antenna
for a spacecraft.
We cut up a tape measure
that probably cost us $2.50
from a hardware store.
When we were thinking through
why we were doing this,
what benefit would come from it,
the primary use case
that we wanted to do
was to stop deforestation.
We designed these satellites
so that they could just
about see an individual tree.
It was, like, 2:00 or
3:00 in the morning.
We got our very
first picture back.
Robbie actually just came
and blasted into my room
and jumped on top of
me with this picture.
This is the very first picture
that ever came down from space
that we took with
our team at Planet.
You can do all the calculations,
and then you're never sure
it's actually gonna work, right?
And it did, and
everything worked.
I mean, we were over the moon.
We realized, with lots
of little spacecraft,
we could do more
rapid observation
of the entire Earth.
The Earth is
constantly changing.
It's changing on days timescales
with human activity.
And the satellite imagery
we have of it today
is typically years old.
Satellites like these
have done an amazing job
at helping us to
understand our planet.
But if we want to understand
it much more regularly...
we need lots of satellites.
What we'd ideally want is images
of the whole planet every day.
We're gonna launch
more than a hundred
of these satellites.
It's gonna be the largest
constellation of satellites
in human history.
T-minus 30 seconds.
On my mark.
We've got 26 satellites
on this rocket.
It's a big deal.
It's the largest number of
satellites we've ever put
on a rocket, in fact,
the largest number
of satellites that anyone
has ever put on a rocket.
And we have liftoff.
It goes up. Everything's
looking good.
And then I can
quickly see here...
I was like, oh, sh*t.
- [expl*si*n booms]
- Oh, crap.
Oh, God.
Oh, God!
Oh. And that's the end.
- Wow.
- What was that?
And that looks like an
expl*si*n of that rocket.
That looked like
something really...
That looked like
something went definitely
very wrong with that launch.
Whoa! Jesus!
[indistinct shouting]
Planet lost all
their satellites.
Will and Robbie saw
there's all these
rocket start ups
appearing around the world.
Chris was at Ames, and
then he left to go start
this company called Nebula.
The company did not do great,
and so Chris was out of work.
Planet brought him
on as a consultant
to go scour the world,
find the best rockets to fly on.
[soft dramatic music]
I spent six months
traveling around the world,
meeting all the
rocket companies.
I was not impressed.
Chris came down under the guises
of an independent
satellite consultant.
Peter Beck wanted to
fly Planet's satellites,
so he gave him the top-end tour.
Peter really went out of his way
to tell Chris everything.
I suggested to Planet
that they give Rocket Lab
a contract, and they did.
But I also saw how expensive
that rocket would be.
I just saw an opportunity to
do something different here.
They like to talk about
the kind of massive amounts
of power and massive
amounts of propellant
and the massive scale and...
Chris came back to
the United States.
A couple of months passed,
and then, suddenly,
Chris had a rocket company.
Naturally, we were
quite surprised
a few months later
when Astra popped up.
His idea was basically
to undercut Rocket Lab on price.
How cheap and crappy
can we make a rocket?
I'm somebody who wants
to actually succeed
from a business perspective,
versus just make big toys.
I met Adam in a garage.
I was blown away.
You know, he's the
rocket scientist.
He's one of the most brilliant
people you'll ever meet.
I showed him around, talked
about stuff, et cetera.
And he was, I think, you
know, pretty excited.
A rocket a day was
in the very first
pitch presentation
that Chris and I did.
They wanted to make a
rocket faster than anyone
had ever made a
rocket in history.
They wanted it to be
the cheapest rocket
that had ever been made.
And they wanted to
make an actual factory
that could pump these
rockets out every day,
just like you'd make a car
or something like that.
This had never been
done in the industry.
- There we go.
- [grunts] Be careful.
There's broken glass everywhere.
I think people came in
here and played w*r.
It's a perfect, like, set for
a zombie-apocalypse movie.
If we're gonna
make a rocket a day
really, really affordably,
we've got to have
really inexpensive facilities.
The challenge is, we
deal with all this stuff.
This is actually...
it's all lead paint.
[laughs]
And people take this sh*t
really seriously, right?
But we've got to
deal with this stuff
and cover it and repaint it
and clean the building
up a little bit,
or people get stressed.
Credit where credit's due.
Chris is an amazing salesperson.
In this industry, it
takes a bit of that.
[laughter]
It's a better view over here.
You know, he's able
to be very successful
at raising capital.
- This is lead paint.
- OK.
- [blows raspberry]
- Oh.
We've got a lot of work to do
to catch up with Rocket Lab.
It's a race right now, and
we're trying to catch up.
- What do you think?
- I love it.
It kind of brings
post apocalyptic chic
and spacesuit together
in kind of a alien way,
but an optimistic
alien way, in black.
2017, rocket's far enough along.
Chris decides to have a
party to show everybody
the rocket for the first time.
All right, welcome to
Dawn of Space, everyone.
There's lots of people
that have raised
tremendous amounts of money
on the back of
fantasifull promises.
The great thing
about this industry
is that you can make all
the promises in the world.
But at some point, you
actually have to deliver.
Thank you all for coming.
And the next time we have a
party, we will be in space.
[all cheering]
People had started
hearing rumors
that this guy in New Zealand
is doing interesting things.
When Peter ends up
going to Silicon Valley,
all these investors call around
to find out who knows what.
Pete Worden, he'd
caught wind of Peter.
I mean, he's maybe one of the
best engineers I've ever met.
This guy is the real deal.
As he's trying to raise money,
this vote of confidence from
Pete Worden has a huge effect.
The first money hit
the bank January 2014.
And we had a rocket
on the pad in 2017.
[soft dramatic music]
2017, Rocket Lab tries to
launch for the first time.
It's called, like, "a test."
It's not taking a
commercial payload.
The most important thing was
it just get clear of the pad.
That's kind of your
worst nightmare...
[crowd shouting]
Something coming up off the pad,
then coming back
down on the pad.
That is instant
company extermination.
We did not have the
resources to rebuild a pad.
When you're testing your
rocket in the early days,
you pretty much just want
to get it off the pad.
The goal is to get enough
flight time to pull some data.
And if you're lucky,
the rocket will happen
to get to space.
But, basically, nobody gets
into orbit on their first try.
It just... it doesn't happen.
It takes 100 times more energy
to put an object in orbit
versus just going up into space.
It's not just up.
You see rockets as they launch.
They go up and then over.
Well, the over
part's the hard part
because you've got to achieve
a velocity capable of sh**ting
the rocket around the planet.
And if you don't
have enough velocity,
it comes right back down.
When it actually
came time to launch,
it was a big, big day.
Everyone was confident
that it was gonna work.
But also, nobody knew what
the hell it was gonna do.
- Yes! Yes!
- f*ck, yes!
It was a nominal clean liftoff.
Engine performance was nominal.
Everything was nominal.
It had a nominal separation
and an ignition of the
second stage engine.
The rocket does
fantastically well.
It's made it to space,
and it's heading towards orbit.
At that point, you've
achieved more than 99%
of most countries on
their first rocket.
We're literally,
like, 200 seconds away
from reaching orbit.
The folks that are in
charge of making sure
that the rocket flies safely
shut the engine down by mistake.
The safety officer
actually blew up
Rocket Lab's first rocket.
We were literally
seconds away from orbit.
That would have been the
first time in history
that a new rocket had flown
successfully on its first try.
All right, to other news now,
and a truly spectacular
feat for New Zealand.
We've joined the space race.
One small step for Rocket Lab,
one giant leap for
New Zealand aerospace.
In 2017, in India,
Planet Labs launched 88 of
their Dove satellites...
a record number of satellites
to put in space by
many, many times.
It's the largest constellation
of Earth-imaging satellites
in human history,
and it's gonna provide
a completely radical
new data set about
our changing planet.
And we have decided,
therefore, that the best thing
that we can do with
our data is to ensure
universal access to it.
We wanted to ensure
everyone can see it.
Thank you. [applause]
Planet was the very
first company ever
to be able to take
photos of every spot
on Earth every day.
And this is useful
for a lot of things.
You can gather
environmental data
around things like
deforestation,
land use, and drought,
and then some very
practical things
like helping a farmer decide
when to harvest their crops.
We can actually
tell the crop type.
Is this corn or wheat
or soy or whatever?
We can tell how well it's doing,
where it needs to add water,
an early sign of
a health problem,
which can improve their
crop yields by 20% or 40%.
That can help feed the
planet more efficiently.
The things that we're
already learning
about the Earth from Planet's
satellites are amazing.
It was a massive breakthrough.
They've changed the entire
satellite industry forever.
So, in 15 months, we
incorporated a company.
We hired 75 engineers.
We built a development
facility, a test facility,
a manufacturing facility,
a mission control center,
designed and built a rocket,
and are about to
fly it next month.
So, from zero...
like, no company...
[applause] Thank you.
- All right. Wait, hold on.
- NASA crew.
[camera shutter clicks]
Madman on the loose
with ICBM pointed
at San Francisco.
We're taking the rocket
up to a small island
in the North Pacific, and
we're going to launch it.
And if we're able to do that,
that will be pretty
historic, I think.
In the United States,
most companies launch
from Florida or California.
They're all government-owned.
You have to fight for
attention and position
on these launch pads.
Astra's this fledgling company.
Alaska is trying to attract
this commercial business,
and so they kind of
roll out the red carpet.
Give them their own space.
Give them their own pad.
It's just like, go fly it.
Get data. Whatever
went wrong, we fix.
We do this again.
But things were
just not working.
It's 60-miles-an-hour
gusts up here.
Barely staying alive.
Having trouble locating the QDs.
Let's k*ll some helium!
This went on for weeks
and weeks and weeks.
Getting this guy up off the pad
would be a pretty big
win for all of us.
If we do launch the rocket
and it is successful,
it strengthens our
position considerably.
I do hate to see Rocket
Lab get a third launch off
before we get our first.
Ground close OV 107.
[indistinct chatter]
[laughs] Thanks
for coming out.
- Hey, Scott.
- Good luck.
We're gonna try to put
something in space.
- Let's do it.
- Or blow it up trying.
This is Chris Kemp
at mission control
in Alameda, California.
If we're able to
achieve our objective
of getting the
rocket off the pad,
we'd like to fly for
as long as possible.
All right. Tango. Watch P-O-T.
Call Abort if you
see it exceed 20 PSI.
Rocket companies get these
little windows of time
when the weather looks right.
The government's
approved your launch.
35, 34, 33,
32, 31, 30...
[person speaks
indistinctly over radio]
This is TC on countdown.
We are at a hold.
- Is that bad?
- No.
32, 31, 30...
Hold, hold, hold.
[all groaning]
[indistinct chatter]
- It's the whiskey.
- It's hard sh*t.
- It's hard sh*t.
- Yeah. Thank you.
- It's hard sh*t.
- All right.
We've aborted.
This pattern repeated itself
over and over and over again.
That sucks.
You have to take the
whole thing down,
go try to find this
small, tiny problem,
fix it, do this again and again.
This went on for so many weeks.
For those of you just tuning in,
we had several launch
attempts yesterday.
This is our last day
in our launch window.
We're gonna get it this time.
- Hey.
- It's gonna happen.
- Yay.
- All right.
- It's gonna happen.
- I think so, too.
- Counting down.
- Counting down.
All: Ten, nine,
eight, seven, six,
five, four, three,
two, one.
Go.
- Yeah.
- Yeah!
[all cheering]
[indistinct chatter]
That was awesome.
[indistinct chatter]
Nice.
Wow.
It ends up finally launching,
goes for about 27 seconds.
It definitely
didn't reach orbit.
It didn't reach space.
But they were able to
get some data from it.
Thank you again for
all your support.
It was a successful flight.
It's looking like we got
plus or minus 10 seconds
from our 30-second objective.
[upbeat music]
[applause]
I can only imagine
going back in time
and tapping on the
shoulder and whispering
into that little boy's ear,
"One day, that Captain Kirk's
gonna open your
rocket factory."
[laughter]
What a wonderful place to be.
In November of 2018,
they fly their first
commercial mission.
So this launch's got
seven payloads aboard
from a variety of
different customers.
It's called "It's
Business Time,"
in honor of "Flight
of the Conchords."
both: It's business time
Now we had paying customers.
It is business time, in
all sense of the words.
There was a lot,
lot riding on that.
If you're declaring to the world
that you have a
product that works,
it better bloody work.
[tense music]
I hate launches.
I really do not enjoy them.
These early launches,
like, if they go badly,
that's the end.
Flight mode.
Ten, nine, eight,
seven, six, five, four...
- Ignition.
- Three, two, one.
[cheers and applause]
Altitude is 200 kilometers.
The best time of a launch
is a squiggly graph.
See a nice, straight line,
and then it'll give
a wee squiggle.
And that wee squiggle
is the reaction moment
of when you separate
off the payload.
That is the only good
thing about a launch.
Oh, very nice.
[cheers and applause]
The Rocket Lab
Electron launch vehicle
reached a successful orbit
on only its second mission.
They've come out of the
gate looking really good.
[applause]
Another perfect bloody flight.
[laughter]
This one took a while
to get off the pad,
but instantaneous To.
Perfect flight. Nice,
perfect, nominal orbit.
And I don't... f*ck, I
don't know what to say.
[laughter]
But, yeah.
Let's do it again
in a few weeks.
[laughter, cheers, and applause]
Hi, everyone.
For those of you
just joining us,
this is the first launch attempt
of our version 2.0 rocket.
I was just informed
of the range.
Rocket 2, you had a bunch
of ex-SpaceX people come in.
They start to play
this major role.
Chris Thompson,
one of the SpaceX,
like, early founding
team, he's the lead.
It's like, the adult
supervision has arrived.
Five, four, three,
two, one, zero.
No fire. Abort.
This is a better outcome than
having the rocket explode.
[chuckles]
all: Five, four,
three, two, one.
- Zero.
- Go!
- Why isn't it going?
- Do you see it?
It's going?
It's not going.
[indistinct chatter]
No fire. Abort.
- What's this?
- It's my mom.
Nice.
"Hope you find the problem
with the igniters."
[both laugh]
We can't launch because
there's a boat in the way.
You have to put out a notice...
clear out of the area
where debris might
fall from this thing.
There's inevitably
some ship captain
who just doesn't pay
attention to any of this.
They're not moving.
- And...
- Not answering the radios.
Have we sent the helicopter out?
I want the name of that captain.
I'm gonna f*cking crucify him.
Well, there's the
boat right there.
What is he? Tell me.
We're gonna file a lawsuit
against that captain.
- You'll be hearing from me.
- We will find you.
[indistinct chatter]
I once sunk a person's
ship that pissed me off.
It's very easy to
do. You get a drill.
- It's... [mimics drill buzzing]
- Yeah.
- It's gone.
- Yeah. So we'll use that.
Let's not get that...
- You're on video.
- Oh. Hi.
- You want to keep pushing...
- I'm not pushing.
- I'll call right now...
- I'm not pushing.
And say I'm done. Let us
do what we need to do.
That's all I'm
trying to do, Chris.
And I'm just trying to make
sure that your teams are
all on the same page
before I communicate
- anything externally.
- Right. But...
- OK. So we're good?
- Yeah.
Great. That's all
I needed. Thanks.
Hold, hold, hold.
Abort, abort hit.
Daddy, why did, like,
the... why did it,
like, shut down right away?
The computer that
controls the engine...
- Yeah?
- Has a problem inside of it.
- Oh.
- And so it won't work.
Because you said once,
if the launch thing didn't work,
you have to put new engines on.
Basically, you're doing
that, only with the computer?
It is the last try
and the last hour
of the last day.
It's looking good.
f*ck.
Five, four, three,
two, one, zero.
- [all yelling]
- Yeah!
f*ck, yeah.
Go, baby, go!
Hold, hold, hold.
Vehicle has experienced
an anomaly in flight.
Rocket 2 comes pretty much
straight down on the pad.
It's, like, the worst thing
that you can have happen.
What message do you want to put?
Um, what is it?
- Just say...
- On the Webcast page?
Just say, "test
concluded," you know?
Livecast has concluded.
[somber music]
Investors are texting.
Hey, no worries. Yeah.
Just wanted to give
you guys an update.
So we didn't quite
hit 60 seconds.
But it was a really
beautiful flight.
And we got about... we got
about 30 seconds of flight.
It was. Yeah. The
night launches are...
[laughs] They're always
spectacular, so...
Well, I'll pass that
along to the team.
And thank you so much
for all your support.
I've got to, like,
thread a needle...
- Yeah.
- With this stuff because...
- It's gonna be tough for you.
- There's total success.
And then there's total failure.
- And this is... it's about...
- Yeah.
Well done.
This isn't total failure.
This isn't total success.
But it's about... this
is great, actually.
This is a great outcome.
- We launched.
- We launched. And we learned.
And... so this was a fantastic
outcome for the company.
And no one was hurt.
It didn't break anything.
The rocket flew.
- Got further.
- Got further.
So, I mean, period.
Like, full mic drop, this is
a great day for this company.
I'm, like, incredibly happy.
[clock ticking]
A private company named
Planet Labs has put
about 300 small
satellites into space,
enough to take a picture
of the entire land mass
of the Earth every day.
Making it available
to everybody,
people are gonna come up
with uses of that imagery
that you haven't imagined.
Dreamed of, yeah.
[camera shutter clicking]
Now that there are
commercial companies
that have nothing to
do with governments
snapping pictures day after day,
we're starting to call it
open source intelligence.
Commercial satellites
are changing
the way information is consumed.
They are giving us data that
we did not have access to
20 years ago.
Governments and
intelligence communities
have special equipment
to take photos.
Those photos are
restricted and classified.
You can never look at 'em.
In the run-up to the Iraq w*r,
the government disclosed
satellite images
and told the world,
here's evidence that Iraq has
weapons of mass destruction,
Because this fence
and this aluminum tube
kind of look like something
that had to do with weaponry.
And they're kind of trying
to do A plus B equals F.
This can't happen anymore.
Right now if you
gave me two images
and you were a government,
I would buy 60 images
over the same time frame,
and I would tell you
what was happening.
Everything in the world
has a visual signature.
And if you can interpret it...
and not a lot of people can...
it's like you know a language,
and you can translate
for other people.
I remember, in 2008,
I got a tip-off.
And they said, "Hey,
there's an underground
submarine base in China."
I didn't think that was
true because it sounds
a little James
Bond-y and stupid.
And he gave me broad,
general coordinates.
There you are.
There was a lot of
evidence kind of mounting
that this is actually
being hollowed out
so that you could
fit in a submarine.
These are huge piles of dirt.
And as boring as that
sounds, when you see
massive piles of dirt
in a military base,
you know that a lot of
construction is happening.
They put a little barge here.
They open up the sea
cave. They take the barge.
And they move it
over right here.
And the only time I've ever
seen it removed was here.
This image was taken
by a Planet satellite
in August of 2020.
And this is the only
image I've ever seen
where you're actually seeing
this Chinese nuclear submarine
entering that cave.
I had been looking
for this for...
[laughs] For 12 years.
And, safety, can you
confirm that red team
is in a safe location
for UHF testing?
Copy that. Thank you.
We took about a year.
And we came back with Rocket 3.
We had a series of test
flights that failed.
And they failed in ever
more spectacular ways.
Ooh. Ooh.
It's not good. We
hit the ground.
Like, we hit something.
f*ck.
This sucks.
That, I don't think, was good.
[indistinct chatter]
Dolphin, confirm igniter
system is ready for launch.
It's 2020.
It's Rocket 3.2.
[sighs]
This thing has to work
if Astra wants to consider
itself a real rocket company.
Everything was on the line.
How's it looking, Lucas?
OK, tango, at this time,
I would like you to
enable the launch.
[tense music]
Ten, nine,
eight, seven, six,
five, four, three,
two, one, zero.
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Let it go.
Release.
We have cleared the tower.
[laughs]
Here we go. Here we go.
Here we go. Here we go.
- Stage.
- Stage set.
Upper-stage ignition enabled.
Yeah! Yes! Yes!
[cheers and applause]
[excited chatter]
- Yes!
- f*ck, yes, man.
- f*ck, yeah!
- Jesus Christ.
Holy sh*t.
f*ck, yeah.
Oh, man.
[laughter]
Thank you.
No way. That's our rocket?
Yeah.
We're in space. We're
definitively in space.
[laughs]
Oh.
That's incredible.
We've got to figure
out next steps now
because we didn't
expect to pull this off
quite this quickly,
so we have to...
got to figure out how to
accelerate things now.
Oh, f*ck, yes.
[cell phone rings]
- Hey, baby.
- Hey, baby.
We just are in
orbit temporarily.
We made it all the way.
[whistling and applause]
Lots of videos, like the thing
with Earth in the background.
I love you, sweetie.
This makes life so
much easier for us.
Our valuation just
doubled. [laughs]
OK, 22 is the new number.
Man, 3 years of
trying to do this,
22 tries with this.
[sighs]
all: Cheers.
I'm really glad we
replaced that battery.
[laughter]
We have two pictures
of what looks like
we're in orbit, and
then silence, right?
So, like, what do we
do to follow that?
Because the silence is
deafening right now.
We need to say, "Total
mission success,"
exclamation, exclamation.
Mission success.
- Huge success.
- Huge success. Yeah.
Yeah, and that'll be
vague. I like that.
[exciting music]
[bell ringing]
Astra, an aerospace
company sending satellites,
not people, into space is
debuting on the NASDAQ today,
listing at a $2
billion valuation.
You know, there's
a trillion-dollar
space economy that's developing.
And hundreds of companies
over the past few years
have been formed.
So, without further ado,
I am thrilled to declare
that space is now
open for business.
[cheers and applause]
This is a space
renaissance going on.
We got new rockets,
hundreds of new satellites
going into space,
and a big, new economy.
It's like the birth
of the Internet
going on for space.
It's exciting times.
[bell ringing]
The space industry
has transformed
in the last decade.
And what drove that
was a massive influx
of venture capital.
Space is the place.
Space is hot.
Tons of money has
flooded into this,
hundreds of billions of dollars
into all these rocket companies,
hundreds of billions into
these satellite companies.
When there is this kind
of investment into space,
we do end up with
innovations that help people.
Is the venture-capital community
in this for altruistic reasons?
That would not be my view.
The venture-capital community
is in this to make money.
Doves are flying in outer space.
And if you're an investor,
the pictures they send back
could bring you a really
serious competitive advantage
and a profit.
When you have this daily
imagery of the Earth,
it's this huge window
into the economic
activity of our planet.
From West Texas oil fields
to Chinese power
plants in Xinjiang
and Argentine lithium mines.
One of the biggest things
that I did in the tech sector
was look at
floating-lid oil tanks.
They're huge oil-storage tanks
that as you remove oil
from it, the lid depresses.
You can take an image over
that every single day.
You can measure the shadow
of the interior of that.
And you can actually
calculate the volume of oil.
They do a report
every Wednesday,
how much oil they have.
But if you get the
numbers on Monday,
then you have a
financial advantage.
Hedge funds is one of the
most interesting areas
in finance because we
actually know the soy yield
of all the world's soy
fields before anyone else,
the crop yields,
the mining output from all
the world's copper mines,
and so on.
Now you have these very
successful satellite companies
that do have a lot of
power over the information
that describes our lives.
[soft dramatic music]
More than half the
satellites in space
are owned and
controlled by one man.
Elon Musk and his
company Starlink
operate more than 4,500 of them.
So, if I type in Starlink,
these are all the satellites
that are operated by SpaceX.
They will launch them 20
at a time, 60 at a time.
That is a new thing
in the space industry
over the last few years.
SpaceX has moved so fast
that they have become
clearly dominant.
They are the world's
largest satellite maker
by many, many times.
There are challenges
with the satellite era
in terms of the
environmental impact
of humans industrializing
outer space.
In 2009,
an Iridium
Communications satellite
was happily orbiting
over the Arctic
when a dead Russian
communications satellite
from the '90s
headed the same way.
And they smashed
into each other.
Thousands of debris objects,
many of which are
still in orbit today.
This was the most serious
orbital collision to date.
We track all the satellites,
all the space debris.
It's sort of like air
traffic control for space.
So you see on this globe
everything that we've been
tracking over the last day,
so over 20,000 objects,
satellites, pieces of debris,
stuff down to, like,
a centimeter in size,
you know, about the
size of this screw.
And we basically keep
tabs on all of that
and then generate alerts when
important changes happen.
There are always close
calls with space debris.
I was a NASA astronaut
from 1995 until 2007.
[classical piano music playing]
I remember an instance
where we were told
by mission control
that we were gonna
have a close approach.
Never saw it, which goes
to show you how hard it is
to see something
going 20 times faster
than a speeding b*llet.
We really do have
to start cleaning up
low Earth orbit.
In the decades to
come, if we do nothing,
we will start to see
more and more collisions
and more and more
satellites destroyed
due to these collisions.
It's the gateway if you want
to go anywhere else in space.
If you want to go to the moon,
if you want to go to Mars,
if you want to
put up a telescope
like the James Webb to
peer at other galaxies,
you've got to go in and
through low Earth orbit.
So, if it becomes a mess,
then we've actually
limited ourselves to Earth.
[quirky music]
[bird screeches]
So, like, in typical
Astra fashion,
you've just reached
the edge of orbit.
You hope the next one
is a total success.
Instead of that, a few
months later, in 2021,
Astra has their infamous
sideways rocket.
The rocket lost one of five
engines almost immediately.
It pretty much went sideways.
It just goes out the
fence and then up.
We've got a stock
that's really losing
a lot of ground this morning,
and that is Astra Space.
It was their first
commercial mission.
- And it was not a success.
- No, it's not.
So that stock's down.
Look at that. Wow.
17%.
That thing's just
going sideways.
I know.
Again, a couple steps forward,
several steps backwards.
Five, four...
[indistinct chatter]
[applause]
In 2021, everything finally
happens in Astra's favor.
And Astra's LV0007 has
successfully reached orbit.
There is a new orbital rocket.
Take a look at rocket
upstart Astra Space.
Shares surging yesterday,
as much as 30% at one point,
after its small rocket
successfully reached orbit
on Saturday.
The milestone makes Astra
the fastest launch company
ever to reach orbit.
[cheers and applause]
Seeing failure after
failure lead to success,
everyone is just incredibly...
[champagne cork pops]
Passionate about...
- [laughs]
- Corks are flying.
Astra becoming just
the fourth U.S. company
to privately fund and develop
a rocket that has reached orbit.
They're joining a small
group of companies...
SpaceX, Virgin Orbit,
and Rocket Lab.
What happens in
the space business
once you accomplish this is,
governments start to
award you contracts.
NASA had this mission
called TROPICS.
They were gonna borrow from
some of Planet Labs' ideas
and put up a lot of satellites
to measure the weather.
At NASA, we try to bring
in small launch companies
just so we can help create
that competitive environment.
It is in our best interest
that we get the best price.
This is the chance where
you show it wasn't luck.
It was like, we know
exactly what we're doing.
We can do this again and again.
Good morning, everyone.
And welcome to today's
live launch coverage.
LV0010 marks Astra's
mission with NASA.
And it is the first
of three launches
to deliver the NASA TROPICS
satellites to low Earth orbit.
Five, four...
The teams at Alameda
watching on as the
flight progresses.
Again, the flight,
going well so far.
Can see it taking
off from below.
And there is stage separation.
Seven minutes in the
flight, just a little over
a minute left in the
planned upper-stage burn.
[tense music]
We have a premature
second-engine cutoff.
We had a nominal
first-stage flight.
However, the upper-stage
engine did shut down early.
And we did not deliver
our payloads to orbit.
We will end the broadcast here.
And thank you for
sticking with us today.
An Astra rocket launch from
the Cape on Sunday failed.
The startup was unable to
put satellites into orbit.
It seems like it was
an engine-related issue
very, very late in
the second-stage burn.
They were almost to orbit.
In fact, they were probably
maybe 20 seconds away
from actually attaining orbit.
[dramatic music]
This image taken
from a satellite
about 280 miles over Earth.
When Russia invaded Ukraine,
it was an all-hands-on-deck
for our company.
Planet's technology has
been essential in tracking
Russia's ongoing w*r in Ukraine.
You had Russia telling us
they were not gonna
invade Ukraine.
In our imagery, you could
see the troop buildup.
This is now the first w*r
that everyone gets to see
what's happening in real time.
The Russian army does not strike
at any civilian targets.
Putin said, "We don't
b*mb civilian targets."
We showed the next
day on the front page
of "The New York Times"
the five hospitals and
schools that they had bombed.
So how do you know
these are new graves?
This is fresh brown dirt.
And they've been
using bulldozers
to slowly dig out
these trenches.
The broad impact, I think,
is that it's helping
to lift the fog of w*r.
Planet's clients include
the U.S. government
and many other governments.
You know, their key
objective was a utopian one.
In fact, they called
their satellites Doves,
that they were
sort of peace sats.
Now, what's interesting
to me is that
a peace sat can do
a lot of things.
With any new technology, right,
it comes with the great
hope for the future.
And then reality sets in,
and you realize that, as
with anything that humans do,
there are pluses and minuses.
The founders of
Planet have talked
about how their goal was
to use this imaging technology
for the benefit of the world,
particularly choosing the
resolution of the camera
so that it was good
enough to count every tree
and not high enough
to raise privacy concerns.
On the other hand,
a lot of their market
now is the military.
This gives any
country the same power
that a superpower like
Russia or China had before.
Now they can see
everything that's
happening in their country.
And, like, maybe they
use that for good.
And maybe they use that for bad.
Like, if you want to know
where some refugees
are hiding out,
you can watch that all the time.
The technology to get
higher-resolution imagery
is emerging.
And the government's
regulation is receding.
Privacy is very much an issue.
Right now if a
guy wanted to look
at his ex-wife's driveway
to see if her
car's there or not,
the guy could conceivably take
two satellite images a day.
We're not safe from
satellite-imagery analysis.
Hello, and welcome
to Rocket Lab's
mission control center
in Auckland, New Zealand,
for Rocket Like a Hurricane,
a dedicated mission
for NASA to launch
the TROPICS constellation
of hurricane-monitoring
satellites.
The original contract was
awarded to another provider.
They put it in the ocean.
And then they awarded it to us,
and we successfully
put it into orbit.
End of story.
NASA awards all the
future contracts
to Rocket Lab for
the TROPICS mission.
And so, like, clear
blow to Chris.
[car horn honks]
We've been trading right
now under a dollar a share
for the majority of this year.
And NASDAQ will not
allow us to remain listed
if we do not trade for
more than a dollar a share
for more than ten trading days.
So we're kind of in
this laser-focus mode,
where let's make
every penny count.
Let's make every person count.
Let's make every hour count.
On paper, Astra still might have
enough money to
build a larger rocket
and get to launch it.
They're in a tricky spot
financially, mainly,
but also some technical hurdles.
But without money, you
can't continue, right?
This is about two
years in the making.
A lot of people have lost
a lot of trust in Astra,
generally, the market
people and their confidence
in our ability to go deliver,
whether or not they
think we can do that.
The stakes are pretty high.
We need to be
successful out the gate.
We can't afford to have
another mishap mission.
So reliability needs to be up.
Qualification needs to be up.
It's the old story of
just try, try again.
And sometimes the
company goes down.
In the case of Chris Kemp,
he's had a few that
have gone down.
But he keeps trying.
And now I'd like to
invite Chris Kemp
back onstage for one more thing.
Cool. Thanks, Margot.
Thanks, Margot.
And I need my mic
on a little bit.
I'm gonna just do the
walk-on-stage thing
one more time.
Tomorrow morning we have
several hundred people
from across the
space industry...
shareholders of Astra,
customers of Astra,
press, media, analysts.
So it was a difficult
year for Astra.
And there's no way
to sugarcoat that.
Chris is an incredible
entrepreneur.
He has pulled rabbits out
of hats on many occasions.
I really can't tell you
which way it's gonna go.
But it's not like there's
a trivial probability
of it blowing up, so to speak.
In the spirit of
announcing new products,
I wanted to, on
behalf of everyone
here at Astra,
announce Rocket 4.
[upbeat music]
[cheers and applause]
We had to put everything
into this new rocket.
So I think that there
are two scenarios here.
We either succeed,
or we're done.
[tense music]
A bunch of space
companies are gonna fail.
That's the nature of
venture-funded companies.
Does that mean those
companies just go away?
The capabilities go away?
The technology goes away?
The people go... No.
Virgin Orbit went
bankrupt recently.
And its competitors
bought its facilities,
took over its leases,
hired its experts.
[chuckles] They
did go bankrupt.
And, you know, we
bought their assets.
And their assets live
on now building Neutron.
[exciting music]
It is an absolute beast.
It stands 40 meters tall.
It has a 7-meter
diameter at the base
and a 5-meter class fairing.
So Neutron is
basically our answer
to a SpaceX Falcon
9-class rocket.
It's fairly clear
that SpaceX are
absolutely the dominant player.
They're almost a
monopoly, if you will.
It's good to have
some competition.
We think we've got
a reusable vehicle
that will be really,
really competitive.
We'll build it and
bring it to market.
And, you know, we'll see...
we'll see who wins.
Rocket Lab is taking
all their money.
And they're putting it
into a giant vehicle
that will compete
directly with Falcon 9.
So they are moving away
from a small vehicle
mostly because we're gonna, at
some point, eat their lunch.
Ah, f*ck.
I mean, probably a
call with him is best.
Quarter is burning away.
We're burning time.
We're burning money.
And I have a $1,400
water-jet garnet PO.
If we can push that
payment through,
that'll keep the
water-jet running.
Something's got to give.
And now is the time to
break it and go and fix it.
Or I will simply
just take it over
and f*cking run it myself.
Astra's admitted out loud
they're not only
pushing Rocket 4 back,
but, also, they might not
even get to launch the rocket
because they really
don't have enough money
to do it at the moment.
These scenarios
have to be matched
to what is desired in
terms of outcome...
near-term and long-term.
In terms of the schedule.
In terms of a desired
launch date, yeah.
So we had a board meeting.
What the board's looking at is,
they're looking at that plan.
And they're saying, if
you want a year of runway,
you have to cut more.
And that'll cause
the market to respond
very favorably to
the transaction.
But the dichotomy is, in
order to achieve that,
we have to cut deeper.
So, to save ourselves,
we have to cut ourselves.
If we can lead the team
through the ultimate sacrifice
of everyone being let go...
but then potentially getting
all these contracts and
getting the financing,
we might not have to let...
Well, we probably will
still let some people go.
But we might not have to let
anywhere near as many go.
That's the challenge.
[chuckles]
You got to do something, right?
I mean, you can't... you
know, clock is ticking.
Just know, when we
succeed, it's gonna make...
it's gonna be great to watch.
And we are gonna succeed.
Failure is not an option.
[soft dramatic music]
Today Planet images
the entire Earth
every single day.
Mission accomplished.
[applause]
Thank you.
What's Mission 2?
It's space plus AI.
I'm really excited
about the future of AI
on top of Planet's data.
You know, we're scanning
the whole Earth every day...
4 million pictures of
the Earth each day.
It's an insane amount of data.
By turning each picture
into information
about what's going
on in that picture,
we're enabling you
to search the Earth.
The potential there is to do
planetary-scale forensics,
to look back in time
through our archive
and find things that
you didn't even know now
you needed to look for.
Planet, in a way, has
turned on the time machine.
We're getting to the point
where you don't even
have to train the AI
on any object you want to find.
You can actually just
show it one example.
And it will just go
and find all of the
others automatically,
even find things
you don't even know
you want to look for.
It's just getting to a
point of tremendous power
that is much simpler
now than it was
even just a year ago.
There is opportunity and risk
in the commercial sector.
I think we'll see
more innovation.
And we'll see things
moving faster.
That also means that
there is a shifting
of where power is coming from.
In Ukraine's fight to push
out Russian invaders...
[g*nf*re]
One of the most critical
pieces of technology
doesn't fire rockets or b*ll*ts.
It's small, easy-to-use
satellite internet terminals
called Starlink.
[person shouts in Ukrainian]
And they've been vital for
soldiers' communication,
flying drones, and
a*tillery targeting.
Antennas had been
put all over Ukraine.
The military could communicate.
The government
could communicate.
All of Russia's best-laid plans
were now under serious threat.
You can make a very strong case
that Ukraine was able to
fight this w*r successfully
because of this technology.
Last week reports emerged
of widespread sudden Starlink
outages on the front line.
Is that something that SpaceX
is doing intentionally?
Elon Musk has complete
control of the technology
and can turn off satellites
whenever he wants.
If Elon wants Starlink
to be running in Ukraine,
it's running in Ukraine.
When he decides he's
had a nice phone call
with Vladimir Putin and he
wants to turn Starlink off,
he can do that.
The U.S. government,
European allies...
there's nothing they can do.
They have nothing
equivalent to Starlink
to replace this technology.
Musk says he was
reportedly afraid
that Russia would retaliate
with nuclear weapons.
Musk says that's based on
his private discussions
he had with senior
Russian officials.
This is one grand regime change
from countries that used
to control all this power
now to individuals.
That has military
and political leaders
around the world
worried and questioning
whether one man should have
complete control of the skies.
Russia may be keeping
an additional eye
on the w*r in
Ukraine from space.
The Americans claim
that China is using
its low Earth orbit satellites
to spy on American
military installations.
Satellites are a target.
If you can destroy the
enemy's satellite capability,
then you can get a
decisive advantage.
India launched its
first successful
anti-satellite
m*ssile on Wednesday.
There are many different ways
you can do an
anti-satellite test.
One of them is to launch
a m*ssile from the ground
and hit your own satellite,
which just, you know,
breaks up into a million pieces.
Outrage from U.S. officials
after Russia carried out
a m*ssile test early Monday,
obliterating one of
its own satellites
and creating a vast debris field
that's now orbiting Earth.
They launched a m*ssile into
a defunct 1982 spy satellite
that they owned
to show that they could do
that to an American satellite
if they were so moved.
So now you have
thousands of satellites
which themselves are
potentially weapons.
You know, one of the
big concerns is that,
in an actual warfare,
if somebody did that,
they may, you know,
even accidentally
sort of ruin low
Earth orbit for use.
So there's a thing we
call the Kessler effect.
If you have a
satellite that explodes
and now all of its pieces are
going different directions
at 17,000 miles an hour,
some of them are gonna hit
other satellites eventually.
And then if that makes
that satellite break apart,
now you have a chain reaction.
Letting that chain
reaction run to completion,
you can end up with
all of the spacecraft
in low Earth orbit getting
shredded to confetti.
The regulatory bodies
that look over these
kinds of things
are just ill-equipped
and unprepared
for what has
descended upon them.
They were used to a world
that changed very slowly,
that they had a
lot of control over
and monitoring.
There's no place to say,
where are we heading
with our space activities
in the very long term?
The track record of
the human species
is not that great.
All of these issues
that cause us trouble
here on Earth,
we're gonna export
them into space.
That's just the way it is.
[solemn music]
Exactly how this plays
out is anyone's guess.
It reminds me of, like,
the early days of the Internet.
You think, like, Yahoo's
gonna be around forever,
you know, and then,
like, Google comes along.
I think we're at this stage now
where the wheat is being
separated from the chaff.
One time, there
was something like
over 100 small rocket
start ups globally...
in many cases more
significantly funded
than Rocket Lab.
You know, lots of dreams,
lots of aspiration,
lots of cash.
At the end of the day,
physics just does not care
how much money you put in it.
It is great to be
joining you today
from Rocket Lab mission control
in Auckland, New Zealand,
to send our 42nd
Electron to orbit.
I don't know. I don't know.
Stage two ignition confirmed.
[cheers and applause]
Rocket Lab's launched
over 40 rockets.
It's doing reusable rockets.
It's building a bigger
rocket to compete
head-to-head with SpaceX.
They've done it.
There's SpaceX, and
there's Rocket Lab.
There's Elon Musk
and Peter Beck,
and that's pretty much it.
The only sin in business
is to run out of money.
That's why, when we
still have money,
we need to make the
tough choices to cut.
So, fundamentally,
it's all about
doing what we have
to do to survive,
to take care of our customers,
and now take care
of our shareholders.
Hell of a day.
Yeah, it's been a hell of a day.
So I actually feel
a bit relieved
to be on the other side of that.
We've had to make
some difficult cuts.
We've moved some people around.
We've prioritized the things
that are keeping
the business going.
So we can continue to
work on everything.
In a way, we're good
at this, because...
you know, when you spend years
building a really
complicated machine
and a boat gets in your way...
ten seconds away from launch,
you just realize you have
to come back tomorrow,
do it all again.
[laughs] It's like
Groundhog Day.
[laughs]
- I mean, realistically...
- Yeah.
What's the possibility
you'll go out?
Oh, no, no, no, I'm saying
that we're gonna do this.
I know, but there
is a possibility
that you guys will
go out of business.
I mean, sure, if I die.
[laughs]
But as long as I'm alive,
we're gonna make this
thing come together.
I mean, I'm not giving up.
If you look at this, this
is a giant, open space...
When I met Chris
for the first time
in these totally shitty,
dilapidated buildings
in Alameda and he told me,
"One day, these will be
gleaming rocket factories,"
I thought, no way.
And he did build those.
He did exactly what he
said he was gonna do.
It just didn't work out.
[soft dramatic music]
[bright tone]
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Wild Wild Space (2024)
Moderators: Maskath3, GabrielAlejo2341, sidolanters, Maskath3, sidolanters, GabrielAlejo2341