Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
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.
00:26:38 · Dylan Taylor, Alexa von Tobel
Comms, optical communications, is really, really, really important. So that's another key technology that we're focused on. [00:26:46] S2: Dylan, I'm trying to decide where I wanted to go next, because there's so many questions I want to ask. First, I just want to ask a really simple question, which is, from your point of view, what is the purpose of this future space station that's gonna go up? And I ask this from like a practical point of view, which is kind of wild to think that there that there's been a space station that is obviously being deprecated in 2030 into the ocean. The fact that that technology even last thirty years is kind of astounding. But what is the purpose of this future space station that you are, StarLab, that you're helping put in place? And in so many ways, we're going through the single biggest transition of upgrade of space infrastructure in thirty years. But what's the purge... Just to ask the basic question, what's the purpose of a space station?
00:27:36 · Dylan Taylor
[00:27:36] S1: Yeah. I think a few fold. One is geopolitical. We need a place to go, right, for humans to actually have an outpost, have international cooperation. China just put a brand new space station in orbit in two years, and there is this big East versus West, China versus US geopolitical issue, which has been there for a long time, but the issue is where do The Gulf States go? Where does South America go? Where does India go? I think it's really important, and it's part of the reason STAR Lab brought on these international partners, it's really important that we have beacons of expressions of our value system, for lack of a better word. I think that's really important. All the astronauts on the Chinese space station are active duty military. This is a military outpost. Ours is a commercial endeavor that's focused on research and development. So I think geopolitical is one. Second, as I mentioned, microgravity is this magic laboratory, and so drug formulations, protein folding, growing perfect crystals, all of these things have real impact to our ability to do research, and then ultimately replicate that here on earth. If you grow a perfect crystal in space, you can actually bring it down to Earth, and grow a larger perfect crystal around it. So think of this as a seed that can be commercially expanded here on earth. That's really important. Training astronauts. So NASA will have four astronauts on our station at any given time. We'll also have other international astronauts. There are a lot of countries that want to mint sovereign astronauts, not only because it gets their populace excited, but it's an expression of their sovereignty, of their ambitions in space as well, so I think that's really important. Then lastly, to be a gateway to where we go next, right? We're going back to the moon. When we go back to the moon, we'll go back to stay. A lot of these technologies that we develop for the space station are relevant to the moon, and then ultimately relevant to Mars as That's really what the space stations are focused on. By the way, it's a great deal for the government too. The International Space Station, round numbers, it's the most complicated thing humans have ever built, about $450,000,000,000 roughly.
00:30:01 · Alexa von Tobel, Dylan Taylor
[00:30:01] S2: Wow. [00:30:02] S1: Wow. In our S-one, we disclosed that we're around $3,000,000,000 and ours has 100% of the laboratory space that the ISS has. Obviously, big difference in cost between the two.
00:30:16 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:30:16] S2: Wow. One of the things Mark Kelly, who... Astronaut Mark Kelly, now senator Mark Kelly, once said to me was... He was like, if driving a car, you know, it's a complicated thing. He's like, imagine that times a 100 that's driving a spaceship. And it just... It, like, was a really simple way for me to think about, like, anything that we do here is hard. Anything that we do up there is a thousand... A 100 x more, you know, complicated on sort of the the the simplest level, And that always stuck with me. So when you talk about things like growing perfect crystals, I'm like, it's not that easy to do in space with no gravity. Right? It's just everything is more complicated. I wanna shift a little bit, Dylan, to your predictions. You know, as an investor, someone who runs Inspired Capital, we get to look at big inspired ideas all day long. Space is just getting more interesting, and I've noticed I personally taken many, many more pitches around space, the future of space. What are your predictions as someone who's, you know, you're probably every day walking into... I I I always say I walk into Inspired every morning pretending it's twenty thirty five. That's kinda my job to like live a decade ahead. You're probably walking in in 2040 thinking about the future in a really different way. What's obvious to you about how space is transitioning right now, both practically and sort of hypothetically?