01:20:09 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[01:20:09] S1: eclipse, yeah. [01:20:10] S0: Yeah. And so clearly, we do need to double. Can we double by 2030? I think that's a big feat. But what all the data centers are planning is, Okay, bringing new transmission online that quickly and going for centralized nuclear plants is going to be too hard. We're going to go behind the meter. And so they're going to bring their own power. They're going to be deploying SMRs. I think we see that really ramp in the 2030s. It'll take a couple of years before they're through licensing and really scaling, but we're planning for ramping in the 2030s. And so as we think ahead to how are we doing things, everything that we're doing is designed to scale. So how do we unlock things like mass manufacturing, all the progress in the last, really, thirty plus years since anyone has completely re architected enrichment? How do we leverage all those things along with the supply chains for them to unlock rapid scaling next decade once we're online. [01:21:04] S1: Do you have any really great stories from working at SpaceX that kind of shifted the way that you think?
01:21:10 · Scott Nolan
[01:21:10] S0: You know, to to your question on schedule and how do you drive schedule, the dimensions I mentioned were, you know, put things in parallel that can be put in parallel, question your granularity on timelines, make decisions without belaboring them. Once you're at a pretty good level of confidence, move forward. I think the fourth dimension that may be very hard for people to do sometimes is don't beat your head against the wall. If you're working on something and it's just a huge roadblock to the question of make a decision when you're pretty confident, Also, don't be afraid to go back and make a different decision. And so early days when I was there of working on the Merlin engine system alongside some incredible people, just as a kid out of school, a couple years out of school, I was working on a lot of the structural thermal analysis and design around those engine systems. And I remember one night, at the time, we had an ablative chamber. And an ablative chamber is basically a composite wrapped chamber that burns away as you operate the rocket, as you operate the engine. And so this ablative chamber was having a few issues. We were operating at probably higher pressures and temperatures than most ablatives had been run previously. They've been proven extremely reliable and low cost before. But we were running into these persistent issues with them. And late one night, a few people, you know, had gotten together to talk about this. And I remember the question came up, like, what if what if we just switch? Like, what if this is if this is a fool's errand to get this ablative working at the thrust levels we need, at the pressures and temperatures we need? What if we what if we just bite the bullet and go as fast as we can rethinking this, accepting that maybe this was not the right path, and going to a regeneratively cooled all metal engine? And that's what we did. And, now, obviously, the Merlin engine and Raptor engines work this way, none that SpaceX flies are ablative engines. And so one lesson I learned was, yeah, try and move fast. Try and make the right decisions. Don't make irreversible decisions, but also don't get completely stuck. And if you're just going down a path that doesn't feel like it's going anywhere, don't have ego around it, like, even enforce a meritocracy in your own mind and just go back.
01:23:42 · Scott Nolan
And, yes, there's gonna be some moving targets. Yes, things are going to change. There might be additional work to do that you're hoping to not do. Maybe you've got to take a hit on spend some more money to go fix this. But don't get too hung up on things, and don't have any sort of sacred ideas that you cannot question. Question everything, question requirements, question the path, and just try and find the best path forward at all times while obviously trying to somewhat minimize chaos. And so, yeah, this almost gets back to the founder question that you asked before. Inside a company, when there's big changes and big shifts in direction in response to new information, it's going to mean people have to do more work. And ideally, that wouldn't be the case. But sometimes the right path is to change and adjust. And I think, yeah, it can take someone who really has the big picture in mind, whether that's a founder who might be the CEO or a founder who's not the CEO, really saying, hey, let's think more about why we're doing this. We've all been going down this path together, but it's okay to change direction. And that was a lesson that I wouldn't have expected to learn, especially given SpaceX being so known for just the classic things, fast schedule, hard charging, cost. But sometimes you have to actually go back and and and change the way you're doing stuff.
01:25:11 · Ty Morse
[01:25:11] S1: So Another thing that I've heard consistently is that Elon will make decisions, like, think through a problem and make decisions that no one else kind of sees, and then it seems like a really hard... Like, the wrong decision short term. And then later on, maybe even a year or two later, it becomes the right decision. Was there any moment at SpaceX where you saw Elon make a call that everyone else thought was wrong that ended up being right?
01:25:38 · Scott Nolan
[01:25:38] S0: I mean, the the classic Tesla example is LiDAR versus no LiDAR. And I think for a long time, the the thinking was, hey. A LiDAR is only a few thousand dollars. Maybe it's tens of thousands, but why don't we just put it on the car, make life easy on ourselves? And then years later, you realize, hey, it's not a perception problem. We can perceive the environment with cameras. It's a controls problem. It's a logic problem. So that's probably the most salient example, where even I, circa 2010, would have said, why not use LiDARs? They're here. We have them. Yes, they're expensive, but the costs will go down. And then it's like, okay, but how much will the cost really go down? Why don't we just think through this ten years out? And it's going to be cameras. At SpaceX, I think that thing might have been going to Falcon nine sooner than people would have expected. When I was there, at some points, we were working on both, Falcon one and Falcon nine. And Falcon one was still in the process of having its first successful flight, and yet we were working on Falcon Nine. And that was Okay from a resourcing standpoint because many of us we'd worked on the Merlin engine. Merlin engine was working. It was working pretty well. And we knew it would be used on Falcon nine, that product could be reused. But there was a lot more rocket to develop. And I think at one point, Falcon nine was Falcon five. And then it was realized, hey, for this thing to really cover the market and to give us the performance we need, it needs to be Falcon nine. And so, yeah, I would say there were probably people in the company who were surprised by that, like, oh, wow, we were doing Falcon five. Now we're already doing Falcon nine. Is this the right choice? And and, obviously, it was. So I think it can be things as simple as that of when do you launch your next product line, when do you when do you take on another challenge, when do you work on something that's, like, much sooner than you would have thought while you're still trying to get the first thing successful, but clearly proven correct, clearly Falcon one was serving what turned out to be a very small market for a very long time, and that market didn't emerge very quickly. And the correct thing was to jump straight to the larger satellite market. And and I think there were other examples of this too.
01:27:54 · Scott Nolan
Even on the tech side, really, that switch from ablative rocket nozzle to regen, you were just adding a whole block in the schedule for that... For its development versus hoping to just get there, and then that's turned out to be absolutely correct versus the unreliability that would have come through the ablative engine. And there were other decisions like that, too, like, hey, instead of this type of nozzle for the vacuum engine, we could use this other more exotic but really exciting other one. And the decision was, no, don't worry about that. We just need to get this working, and don't worry about that potentially higher performance thing. This one is known to be reliable. We can buy it. It's cheap enough, and it's going to get us to where we need to go. So let's do that. And there was just many, many practical decisions like that along the way. I would say many more practical decisions that were obvious when you looked at what the long term mission was versus really, really deep tech breakthroughs. And I think seeing SpaceX succeed over the years, it's been evident that it's just make a lot of decisions that are in line with the core metric that you're going after. And if you stay focused on that, you can do pretty well. Even to that point, on day one of joining SpaceX, we had an employee handbook. And remember the first page of the employee handbook, I think in big, bold letters, said, This is not a science experiment. This is an engineering problem. And so to that question of what unconventional choices were made that turned out to be right, I think they either followed two categories. One was those choices were pragmatic and very focused on cost and schedule. Or category two, those choices were they really looked at the big picture. And let's not optimize for a dead end that's going to come two years from now, like in the case of LiDAR. Let's think a decade out. What are the trends? What things can we really bet on that we know are going to be true? And, yeah, how do we just optimize for that?