The Wisdom Wall

“If you look at, um, if I look back and think of, you know, lots of startups that I've seen or been involved with, the ones that have failed most spectacularly have been the ones that have been funded the most well.”

“Um, you know, I've always viewed the large space companies are going to have the ability to build on their own satellites and launch them. And, um, if you're beholden to someone else providing you all the critical components and you, your ability to scale is governed by their ability to scale. And that's not a place…”

“everything is a giant engineering compromise in the rocket world, and if you fill a room up with engineers, um, from every discipline, if one of those engineers from one of those disciplines is happy, you have failed. Like, everybody needs to be equally as miserable. Then you know you've got the right design, because…”

“The, the, the funny thing is, like, space companies are really hard to kill. Like, the amount of space companies that should be dead, ah, and not, the sort of zombie companies is quite, quite incredible. It's not like other industries where, you know, you go to die, you just die. Like, space companies tend to linger…”

“the most amount of failure I'd say is because people don't build reliable stuff. And, um, it's easy to, to, to kind of rush it and throw something on orbit. But, um, I think the distance between putting something on orbit and putting something on an orbit that can last 12 years or go to a planet, that, that gap is just…”

“if you have a small launch vehicle, um, and you turn up to a large launch pad, um, the reality is that, um, you know, the fees don't change, and when you're trying to sell a rocket for, like, eight million dollars, you can't have a million and a half dollars worth of launch fees. On a fifty million dollar rocket, it…”

“Now, if you make heavy structures, Then you have to make super high performance engines. So you'd be lazy on your structures and like really difficult on your engine, or you can be really lazy on your engine and really difficult on your structures.”

“the challenge with a staged combustion engine is you can't, you can't separate components and then go and test them individually and then bring them together. Um, it's sort of, you know, the first time you, you hot fire an engine, uh, you have to have the turbo pump and everything on it as, as one thing.”

“being a public company teaches you extreme discipline. Like you can't be messing around, uh, as a public company and, and, you know, wasting capital and, and not delivering.”

“there's no such thing as a small acquisition. Ironically, like, some of the smaller companies have consumed vastly amounts more time than some of the bigger companies.”

“sometimes it's easy to start something from scratch and formulate it in a way that best makes sense. Than to try and integrate with a whole bunch of rules that don't, don't fit.”

“being a public company really enforces that discipline of profitability and profitability is survival. You know, the, the rockets and satellites, and it's all cool, but at the end of the day, it's all for nothing if your economics aren't there and you're not comfortable.”

“So, the way I think about looking for life in the universe, I don't think there'll be, like, little, you know, watery sack kind of people floating through the universe. I think it's, you know, most likely, you know, evolved into some kind of, you know, either hardware silicon, or maybe even just signal, because if you…”

“government is non-linear. So you can put an input into a government and you just never know what you're going to get out.”