Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:13:48 · Dylan Taylor
[00:13:48] S1: Well, I thought... And I told people. I'm like, of course. I'm gonna be terrified. Right? You get to t minus 10, and you've gotta just be coming un... Unglued. Like, how can you not be terrified? And the fact is, was not nervous at all. At all, Alexa. I... Heart rate on launch was 56, and I don't think I'm a particularly brave person. In fact, the rest of the crew was also very chill, and I think it's because of the training, because you simulate that over and over and over again. There's a ritual where you walk across the jet bridge into the capsule, and you ring a bell. We practiced that. We practiced every element over and over and over and over again. So I think you kind of hack your brain, where your brain's like, oh, I've done this before. And then honestly, the only thing I was nervous about was it getting scrubbed, because we went into a delay where they were waiting for the winds to die down. I thought, oh, you know, if they scrub this flight, maybe we don't go tomorrow, and then maybe something happens, and I don't get a chance to go. So that's all I was nervous about. Yeah, it was just so, so fascinating. So you know, t minus 10, you hit liftoff, and then you're pulling amazing... You're pulling three and a half Gs on the way up, which, just to give you a sense, if you floor it in an F1 car, you're pulling about 1.8. So, you know, this is a lot of Gs. You go supersonic in about... I think it's 27, you're supersonic. I was actually watching the earth fall away. I got special permission from Blue Origin to turn my head in the seat, which is apparently I'm the first person who ever asked that question, so I might have been the first person to ever see the earth fall away. Because keep in mind, when you're on the space shuttle or the crew dragon, you're looking straight up. There is no window off to your right. The only architecture that has that is the Blue Origin capsule, and I think I'm the only Blue Origin commercial astronaut to have ever asked, Can I turn my head in the seat? So that was amazing. I live in Denver. You're taking off from West Texas, so I saw the Rocky Mountains within forty five seconds. Then once you get up there, you unstrap, and I had a strategy. You know, I've been thinking about this my whole life. My strategy was to go to the window, turn myself upside down.
00:16:18 · Dylan Taylor
There's no up and down in microgravity, but because you've trained in the capsule, your brain intuits that that's up and that's down, because that's what you know. The way the Blue Origin windows are, they're kind of angled and sloped down so that when you go to the window and you're turned upside down, there's nothing in your field of view. Your seat's not in your field of view, so it's essentially like you're hovering over the earth. If it's appropriate, I'll just tell you what I felt. Yeah. Imagine an emotion that's got three parts to it. The first is, you see the earth from space, and it's this deep sense of stewardship, love, and affection, where everything you've ever known, every memory you've ever had, every person you've ever met, everyone you love is right there in front of you. It's almost like you're looking at a toddler or a puppy, where you just have this unconditional love. But then that shifts to the second emotion, which is terror, because you realize how fragile of a state we're in. You see literally a whisper of an atmosphere. If you didn't know the word atmosphere, you wouldn't describe the earth as having an atmosphere. It's like completely inconsequential in your field of view. Of course, it's consequential, although we wouldn't be here without it, but it's just a whisper. It's like a hint. Think of the dew on a leaf in the morning. It's just like a touch. You see, compared to that, this dark, hostile, black... I think William Shatner called it black death. You just see this comparison, you think to yourself, that's what's protecting us from the cold hostility of of space. And you're like, that can't be all there is protecting us. And then the third emotion is is anger. Because you feel like you've been whispered the password, And, you know, because when you're up there, it's so clear. There is no other people. There is no other place. There's here and us. That's it. Right? There is no other. There's there's only there's only here. And so deep sense of love, terror, fear, anger, fuse those emotions together, multiply it by a billion, and then bury it so deep inside of your spirit that you can't unfeel it or unsee it for the rest of your life, and that's what it's like. It's a completely transcendental, profoundly impactful moment, and it's a perspective shifter.
00:18:47 · Dylan Taylor, Alexa von Tobel
Frank White's written about the overview effect, a Rhodes scholar, Harvard professor. That's a real thing. Every astronaut I've ever talked to, Alexa, and I know you know a few, they can be Russian, Korean, Japanese, American, fighter pilot, hardcore, artistic, atheist, Muslim, Christian, doesn't matter. Everyone has been impacted by that experience. [00:19:10] S2: I'm remembering a quote that I heard Jeff Bezos say, which is, You don't go to heaven when you die. You go to heaven when you're born because you realize how tiny and fragile our planet is and the fact that we get to do all the things we get to do with amazing people that we love. I just, first of all, thank you so much for sharing what it's like. I almost feel like I can imagine a tiny percentage of what that feeling may have felt like. You must fuel that feeling into everything you do at work now. Know, having founded Voyager and every day going to work on behalf of space and the future, does it let you take more risk? Does it let you... I mean, this whole podcast is about ambition. And I sometimes worry we're not ambitious enough with the problems that we wanna solve and how big we wanna think. I don't think that applies to you here, Dylan, on any level, but did it shift your comfort with risk in any way?
00:20:18 · Dylan Taylor
[00:20:18] S1: It's a great question. I think two things. One is I felt like the world, and it's exactly why your podcast matters to the world, the world is playing small ball. We kind of go through the motions, we don't have the big ideas, and we don't take on the big challenges. Just full stop, we don't. Part of the reason I founded Space for Humanity was this whole notion that if people are dejected in a Henry Crown fellowship saying, I can't impact the world, then maybe it's not anything other than we lack perspective. Right? That's what really fascinated me by this notion of shifting people's perspective. I think what it did for me were two things. One is, you can't play small ball, so dialing up the ambition even more, but not personal ambition. Ambition for the future of humanity, ambition for how we can do better as a species. And then the second thing is just a huge sense of urgency. Feeling like I'm doing the right things, I'm on the right track, whether it's Space Free Community Voyager, Star Lab, and just jumping out of bed in the morning saying, I'm just going go get after it, because this is really, really, really important work. And I think that's, you know, if you... And it's been probably overused, but igikai, I think, is what the Japanese call it, but these concentric circles of what you're good at, what you're passionate about, what the world needs, and what the world will compensate you for. I think when you're operating in that overlap of those four concentric circles, you're really unstoppable in many ways. It's at the heart of passion, it's at the heart of effectiveness. I think that's really what it did for me, is it was very validating that I was on the right track, and it made me more ambitious, but not... You know, it's interesting. You being through Henry Crown, Alexa, you'll get this completely. I had a mentor one time who said, Dylan, when your desire for reflected glory in the people you've mentored and impacted exceeds your desire for personal glory, then you'll be a true leader. That's what leadership is. I feel like that's more what I'm focused on now. By the way, it's way more satisfying than personal ambition. Way more.
00:22:39 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:22:39] S2: Way more. I'm only smiling because clearly you and I could be like brother and sister in the way that we think and are wired and everybody listening at this fellowship that we went through just so we stop talking about it without telling you about it. The Henry Crown Fellowship is this really beautiful thing. There's only about, what, 400 and maybe 50 of us in the world. And it's a program where you go and talk about humanity and what humanity needs and how to be a better steward of being better leader. And anyways, it sounds like it changed your life in some really important ways. It definitely changed mine in terms of how you think about being a leader. I loved it. I wanna talk just a little bit about Voyager because, you know, on every level you're a successful businessman. You've raised $482,000,000 You took the company public. You co founded the company in 2019. Two years later, you went to outer space. You took it public on the New York Stock Exchange. All of those things are like, again, check the box, extremely impressive. But you do really important work, and that work is in three main focuses, defense, space solutions, and and of course, Star Lab, which we just talked a bit about. Can you just give us because I'm fascinated? Can you just give us a sense of the other projects like you go to work and you're working on how do you help build a new space station? Like that's pretty wild. Very different than all of our jobs down here on Earth. What other things are you working on that you can share?
00:24:13 · Dylan Taylor
[00:24:13] S1: Yeah. For sure. Well, thanks for the question. So one of the cool things back on space here for a moment is we're doing about half of the commercial activity that happens on the International Space Station today is our company. We're managing those missions. They're typically for universities, or startups might have an experiment they want to run. We actually have our own commercial airlock, private real estate, if you will, on the ISS, so we can run experiments in that. We can actually launch satellites out of that airlock. That's a great commercial business today, and it's part of the reason we won the contract to build the replacement. On the national security and defense side, you'll love this, Alexa, because we're right in the middle of the Golden Dome initiative, which is, you know, what is Golden Dome? Golden Dome just means layers of a protective onion, for lack of a better word. At the outermost layer, the most important layer for The US and its allies is what's called next generation interceptor. That is for nuclear tipped hypersonic missiles from Russia, North Korea, and China, and that's a no fail mission. Right? If you don't hit those missiles, we lose a city, basically. So we have the core technology that allows those, missiles to be more accurate. These are purely defensive. They're not offensive. But think of a bullet hitting a bullet, and it's really important that you have the ability to modulate the propulsion, and our technology allows you to do that. We also have key technology that allows you to navigate. So when something goes into space, GPS doesn't work, obviously. Believe it or not, it's like a sextant from the old days. The way you navigate is you orient yourself with the stars. So these optical navigation systems will pinpoint where it is in three-dimensional space, and then allow you to, with precision timing, guide you to the next step. So think of optical navigation and control. And then lastly, the key area we're involved in is laser communication, so actually sending lots of data from space down to earth. That's typically been in radio waves in the past on K band, and what we do is we actually build the laser comm terminals where you can put lots of data down in a laser link, and that's really important as we talk about data centers in space and things like that.