Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:02:57 · Dylan Taylor
[00:02:57] S0: bit of a cliche, Alexa, but it was Star Trek. And the reason I was so captivated by Star Trek, and I remember vividly watching this with my dad when I was three years old, literally, we were living in a pretty rough situation. My parents got married really young. My mom was 19, my dad was 20. He got shipped off to Vietnam right around that time. And so he ended up coming back from that, was in graduate school, and we were literally living in a house next to a group of biker gang, basically. I'm not even joking about that. What I was really fascinated by was when I watched Star Trek, not only did you have a new adventure every week and a new planet to explore, which really captivated my sense of adventure, but it was also a post scarcity world, if I can use that term. Everyone had enough stuff, everyone was getting along, it was very diverse, and I was kind of comparing that to what I was living in and going through, and I thought to myself, there's a big disconnect here between this show and my reality. And so, I was always captivated by space, its adventure, but probably more fundamentally, its ability to sort of allow us to reimagine what humanity can be. And I've always thought of it as a blank canvas. I've always thought of it as the best of humans. You know, I know you know a couple of astronauts personally, Alexa. These are some of the best humans that walk the face of the earth. They're not only talented, but they're humble, they're collaborative. So I've always been captivated by how fascinating space can be and how it brings out the best in humanity.
00:04:36 · Alexa von Tobel, Dylan Taylor
[00:04:36] S2: Let's go to your early career. What do you think was the single most important trait that you had, that was essential to founding Voyager? Then tell us, what is Voyager in your own words? [00:04:46] S1: Sure. I... You know, honestly, Alexa, I think it was just ambition, just ambition and hard work. I was super, super, super driven from a young age, and actually probably to a fault. I think we're both Henry Crown fellows, so [00:05:00] S2: I was think gonna connect the dots on that, yep.
00:05:02 · Dylan Taylor
[00:05:02] S1: Yeah, and so for me, Henry Crown came at a great time because, the whole moniker is from success to significance, and I was feeling successful, in quotes, but honestly pretty miserable. I was in industries I didn't care about. I was working with people I didn't necessarily like or respect, and I was not... In my mind, playing small ball, not doing the best work I could do. It wasn't terribly purposeful. I was thinking, what's my impact on the world? Of course, in Henry Crown, you're asked to reflect on all these questions. For me, as we talked about, my passion had always been space, I took my skill set from running public companies and other industries, and I thought, okay, well, we know we need to create a company, and here's the way I would frame Voyager. The companies in aerospace and defense, I'll loop that in a little bit as well, but the companies in aerospace and defense that have the most capability have no ambition to do great projects. The companies that have the ambition to do great projects don't have the capability. And I thought to myself, could we create a company that's assembling enough capability that you could build the replacement to the International Space Station, which we have the privilege of working on that project called Starlab, and projects like that go to the moon, you know, build infrastructure that allows people to live and work in space, but do that in a fun, entrepreneurial, innovative way. That's really what Voyager is. We were founded six years ago now, and we're working on some super cool projects, including we're involved in Golden Dome. We are building a replacement to the International Space Station. So it's an exciting time for us, and as you alluded to, we went public back in June of this year.
00:06:57 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:06:57] S2: Dylan, first of all, thank you so much. And just to kinda get to the chase, you're currently running a company that you founded that is a, call it, $1,200,000,000, and I'm sure more today, even. So very, very successful on every single level. You just said a few things that I'm fascinated by, which is that in the middle of helping the the be part of the the plan and project to replace this current space station, can we just double click on that just as one of the interesting things you said? What goes into that? That's wild. What's Voyager's role in helping make that happen?
00:07:33 · Dylan Taylor
[00:07:33] S1: Yeah. Believe it or not, twenty months after we were founded, we weren't even two years old, we won one of the three contracts awarded what's called commercial LEO destinations, which is the commercialization that NASA is going through. So very similar to what they did with the space shuttle, right, they sunsetted that, and they basically said, we're not gonna own and operate our own rockets any longer. We're going to put that out for bid. We're going to see what's available in the commercial markets, and of course that gave birth to SpaceX and Rocket Lab and other companies. Very similar on the space station side, the International Space Station, which is one of the greatest things humans have ever done in my view, right, deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, it's old. It's been up there for twenty five plus years, and the plan is to have that come down in 2030, 2031, something like that. It's going to be decommissioned. They're going to drop it into the Pacific, South Pacific Ocean, if you... Sadly, that's what its fate's going to be, because it's too big to burn up in the atmosphere, and you can't really disassemble it. That's what is going to happen to the ISS. You have to have these commercial replacements online prior to then. Our project is called Starlab. It's focused on the research and development aspect. A lot of people don't realize microgravity, which is the environment you're in on the space station, that's why people float around, is really a magic laboratory. You can grow perfect crystals. You can do biopharma drug development you can't do here on earth. You can grow essentially perfect semiconductors. So there's a lot of R and D that can happen in microgravity, and we're optimizing our space station to do that. We brought in partners from around the world on the project, Airbus, Mitsubishi, Palantir, those are the main partners on it. But even companies like Hilton Hotels are involved. Northrop Grumman, we designed a partnership with a quantum computing company, so it's a pretty fascinating project.
00:09:38 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:09:38] S2: That's incredible. So you grew up watching television about space, and now you're literally helping build the Starlab, which is sort of a pinch me moment, I'm sure, to your little kid self. When you went to space, so actually in 2021, flew aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard Mission 19 becoming the six hundred and sixth human to ever go into outer space. Can you just like, for fun, because that's just such a wild thing to get to do. And you went through a different door because you were not a trained astronaut. So one, what the heck made you do that? Because it's pretty exciting and terrifying thing to do. Two, what was it like? And walk us through that day.