I do need to warn you of something.
I actually don't have a valid driver's license,
and the car is not registered,
and they canceled my insurance,
so this is a little risky.
Most people are confused when you do illegal things,
so they just kind of sit there, and they don't move.
But we have this green arrow...
Followed by this green arrow...
followed by this green light.
One of the reasons why we're in a car right now
and not having a glass of wine
with a whole bunch of fun people
is because I am trying to hire
one of the cofounders of SpaceX
and create a company that will succeed
beyond the wildest dreams of the other companies
that they used to work for.
If we get good at this,
we'll change the way people think about space.
Five, four, three,
two, one.
We have liftoff.
Yeah!
Fuck, yeah.
Caution on 5.
Shit.
You've heard about the billionaire space race.
This isn't that movie.
What a lot of people don't realize
is that we're in the midst of a revolution in space.
It's like the Wild West.
It's a quest for power, a celestial land grab
that's taking place in the sliver of space
just over our heads called low Earth orbit.
This is a film about powerful satellites
and the rockets that carry them into orbit.
And in short order, the fabric of the modern world
will be controlled by a select few.
This isn't your usual cast of characters.
We have a slick Silicon Valley entrepreneur,
a genius engineer,
and a space hippie trying to save the world.
No one knows if any of this will work
or where any of this is going.
But there is a lot of money to be made up there.
Nothing's riding on this,
except things like our right to privacy
and the power of the world falling into the wrong hands.
And whoever controls space
may very well control the future of humanity.
My name is Chris Kemp.
I am the cofounder and CEO of Astra Space,
and most people don't know that
because we're very quiet about what we're doing.
So I run a secret rocket company.
Astra's mission statement is simply daily launch.
What we're trying to do is very quietly build NASA
at 1/1,000,000 the budget, in 1/100 time,
here in Silicon Valley.
The city actually came by, and they said,
"You can't put up a razor-wire fence."
- Really? - Yeah. And...
- So we doubled down? - I totally doubled down.
I put, like, razor wire everywhere.
And they're like, "You can't do this."
I'm like, "North Korea." They're like, "What?"
And I'm like, "North Korea."
Chris is this living embodiment of Silicon Val...
he's Silicon Valley brought to life in a human form.
How are you?
He is very driven.
You're the founders and the CEOs of businesses
that are leading the revolution.
Fantastic.
Yes, he wants to get a rocket to space.
But he wants to be seen as a success,
and he wants the world to see him as a success
and will stop at almost nothing to make that happen.
I've been a longtime technology journalist.
Worked at "The New York Times,"
"The Economist."
Stumbled into space just by reporting on SpaceX.
At the time, people thought Elon was just some crazy kid
who'd sold his tech company for millions of dollars
so he could go build a rocket.
How much did you know about the space business
- before you got into it? - Not very much.
Pretty much everyone thought SpaceX was a total joke.
Three, two, one.
And liftoff.
An American company blasts off into the history books.
SpaceX has launched the first privately funded
rocket into space.
For Elon, it was like,
"Let's turn space into a business.
"I'm going to build hundreds and hundreds of rockets
"and thousands and thousands of satellites
and make this into a real industry."
So I end up writing the first biography on Elon.
- How'd he like the book? - How did he like the book?
He said he was gonna, like, destroy my life.
But we talk now.
Right after I finished the book, I'm looking around.
I realize there's a lot of people
that want to be like Elon Musk all of a sudden.
This kicks off this worldwide revolution
in space.
This was capitalist investors, welders from Texas,
military people, like, dudes with mohawks,
not whatever most people's image of space was.
The era of governments controlling this stuff is over.
Companies control this.
Governments, regulators are not equipped
to deal with the speed at which things are going.
There's not a lot of regulation,
not a lot of laws, not a lot of, you know,
governance that exists there.
And I think that's the opportunity right now,
because if you can get there first,
you can have a seat at the table
at defining the laws that will govern space.
Whoever gets the rocket there first,
whoever fills the sky with satellites first wins.
It's a race.
There's a big question about,
how many small rocket providers can be profitable?
The most prominent one, of course,
is New Zealand's Rocket Lab, led by Peter Beck.
These are some engines that have just come
off the 3D printer.
Yeah, it's pretty cool, eh?
This is an electron launch vehicle.
This is obviously the hot end.
These are all the Rutherford engines.
All gimbal around.
But you should get your camera here to, like, see the...
Even though you're in the guts of the rocket here,
I think it's important to point this out.
As you'll see, these cable ties
are all equally spaced, you know?
All of the nibs are pointing up.
The margin for error here is zero.
We often get accused of building Ferraris.
But...
you know...
if it falls out of the sky, at least it's beautiful.
We are doing something that is historic for New Zealand.
All right, everybody get down.
Three, two, one.
Off top!
That's what you call a hard start, everybody.
I battled with, for many, many years,
the stigma of, like, a crazy guy
building rockets in New Zealand.
You know, I started Rocket Lab in 2006.
To be brutally honest with you, if you asked me
who Elon Musk was, I wouldn't have had a clue.
You could not have a more unlikely background
for somebody starting a rocket company...
a kid who grew up,
the southernmost point of New Zealand.
The next stop is Antarctica.
There's really hardly anything there.
In the world of commercial space,
you're supposed to have a aerospace degree
and some sort of pedigree, or you have to be really rich.
Peter was neither of these things.
You haven't studied at university in any way?
No. No, no.
And what would be one of the best pieces of advice
that you could give to other entrepreneurs
that really want to push their idea out?
Don't talk about it. Just do it.
Just get off your ass and do it.
Need to get that into a fridge quick.
Can someone open the door?
He's, like, this possessed mad scientist.
And the rest of them?
Quick, quick, quick. Quick, quick, quick, quick.
I started building a rocket engine.
I test-fired it a couple of times.
But to really evaluate, you know, how good it was,
I felt like I needed to ride it.
So I started building a bike
around the rocket engine.
I've never felt anything as good
as a rocket-powered vehicle.
I've been supersonic in a fighter jet.
That was good. Wasn't as good as the rocket bike.
I built the rocket pack.
And I was thinking, let's get some rollerblades
to try this thing on.
In order to play in this game, there's a lot of risk.
So, if you don't like risk, you're not gonna like this.
"Falcon 9's" an incredible machine,
but it's a big rocket designed to take big payloads.
Companies like Rocket Lab and Astra
are committed to making small rockets
that can take small satellites for less money
and then undercut SpaceX on price.
What do you think of Rocket Lab?
What do I think of Rocket Lab?
Rocket Lab is a company that has approached this
in a very traditional way.
The rocket in itself is a very high-performance machine.
But it's expensive to build.
We're more like a Ford, a much more low-cost,
mass-produced, high-volume product.
I absolutely love how light this thing is.
If Peter's not right, Peter loses.
If I'm not right, then I adapt.
I'm not built to build shit.
If someone wants to build a rocket
that throws things into orbit,
that's super rough, super inaccurate,
and that's what the market needs,
let them win.
But I'm not built to build shit.
There has to be something fundamentally different
about how we approach the problem.
If we're gonna catch up and then pass Rocket Lab
and then build something
which is ultimately competitive with SpaceX...
Sweet!
We have to be a lot better than everyone else.
At the end of the day, it's about how many satellites
we can deliver into space.
Most people don't appreciate how much of their lives
has space technology underlying it.
The fabric of our civilization
runs on satellites...
from package-delivery tracking,
GPS, tomorrow's weather forecast,
internet delivery.
Elon Musk's Starlink wants to send
more than 40,000 satellites
into space in the coming years.
In the previous world that existed for decades,
we'd managed to put up 2,500 satellites.
From 2020 to 2023,
that number went to about 8,000.
Thousands of connected satellites
that can do revolutionary things
like bring broadband services to millions, track refugees,
and fight climate change, while spotting storms
before they get to catastrophic levels.
This is not gonna stop. We are going to 100,000.
In about 10 years, a lot of people can make
a good argument we'll go to 200,000.
This is moving so much faster
than what had existed for the 60 years before.
The world is not fully prepared for it.
He believes that we can do better
and go faster by getting smaller,
and thus introduced flocks of tiny Doves
which today have revolutionized
the entire Earth observation industry.
Will Marshall, cofounder and CEO of Planet,
needs no introduction.
The space renaissance is not about escaping
off to Mars with billionaire space tourists.
This space renaissance is really about
how we can advance our ability to take care of the Earth.
People have been talking about the potential
of small satellites for decades.
Planet was the first company
to show that that could really be done.
From these pictures from space,
we don't see borders.
We're giving humanity a mirror to look back at itself.
When I look at companies like Planet,
these are mechanisms
to implement the future that we're trying to build.
We're all kind of in this together
to do something really, really significant.
Will and I met in college,
and he was breezing his way through his master's
in space science and technology.
And it was pretty clear he was a genius
and super fun to hang out with.
I remember one of the first things we did was,
we jumped in my convertible.
He was driving around in his BMW Z3.
Dropped out of university, as all the cool kids do,
started a company.
He was already a millionaire, and he was 21 years old.
And I was like, who is this kid?
And we became friends.
I'm just gonna say it.
You guys seem like an odd couple.
I think... yes, we're odd. Yes, definitely.
I'm a scientist, and he's a capitalist.
And, in fact, he often says now
he's converted me to be a capitalist.
I'm like, no, no, no.
At what point did you discover the idea of money?
Pretty early on.
- You're not looking... - Hey, Christopher.
How's it going, dude?
All right, man.
I'm, like, in Beverly Hills right now.
All these people are here to see me.
My dad was a professor, and my mom was a teacher.
And they were extremely frugal.
It's king of the mountain!
I don't really know anyone like me.
I love "Star Trek."
Because I have had little experience with emotion,
I am unable to articulate the sensation.
I would really connect with, like, the Data character.
There was a period where I told kids at school
that I was an android
because that was just so much easier.
I kind of created my own little...
my own little world in my mind.
I ended up realizing
that if you could take something apart and fix it,
you could sell it for more than what you paid for it.
And so that became quite a hustle for me.
So I made a ton of money just buying computers,
fixing them, selling them.
And that funded my lifestyle...
as a nerd.
We were having our New Year's party.
This was kind of a young bunch of nerds.
I remember a bunch of NASA stickers
being plastered on people.
And then this guy comes in
who's clearly three times our age.
And he just totally didn't fit in, you know?
He's holding a martini glass, just cackling away at how,
when he was running the Star Wars program,
he would have the Darth Vader theme song play
as people came into his office.
And it's just, "Who is this guy?"
It turns out that Will and Robbie had met him
a few years earlier at this World Space Conference
in Houston.
There was this closed, invite-only session,
and it was about military and space.
So we stood outside
and handed out these little flyers.
"Peace in space. No space weapons."
Later on that evening, we were in a bar,
and we get introduced to Pete Worden.
- All right. - Hop in the hot seat.
- That's you, sir.
- I'm Pete. - It's a pleasure.
Good to meet you.
So many great stories about you.
Great. Some of them are partially true.
Pete Worden, the tech lead for SDI,
which was the Strategic Defense Initiative.
People usually know it as Star Wars.
Spanning into space, a layered defense
to protect the country from nuclear devastation.
It was, like, Reagan's... "We're gonna surround
"the world with a missile defense shield
of space-based lasers."
A friend of mine and I decided to have a drink.
There was a bunch of young people
sitting in the corner bemoaning the fact
that there was space weapons.
I said, "Who are the assholes?"
"Do you think they know that Darth Vader
is sitting right over here?"
And then we had a massive argument in a pub.
A friendly argument, mostly friendly.
We were like, "Look, you can't put weapons in space.
It's ethically a monstrous idea."
And he was like, "We've got to do this
"to protect American security.
You don't understand what you're talking about."
He wrote an email to me the next day saying,
"Hey, I really enjoyed our conversation last night.
"Why don't we write a paper together?
"You write the cons, and I'll write
"the pros of space weapons.
And we'll hash it out."
And we were like, who is this guy?
I mean, he's a general in the U.S. Air Force
in charge of, like, a billion-dollar-a-year
space weapon program, and we're students.
So we were like, well, might as well give it a shot.
Sure. Why not?
I mean, basically, we've met our mortal enemy.
May as well try and persuade him
not to do what he's doing.
Pete Worden is not just someone
with a passing interest in space.
He's got a PhD in astrophysics.
He's writing papers about the nature of stars.
Well, I grew up during the Apollo program.
It was really cool.
I wanted to be an astronaut.
I was a finalist once but didn't get selected.
So I'm a little jealous of astronauts.
Getting off the planet,
expanding into the solar system
and beyond is a driving force.
It's my religion.
You love this shit.
I do love this shit.
I'm a futurist, always have been and always will be.
I guess that's...
July 20, 1969...
it is said that 500 million people
gathered in TV sets around the world
to wait for the first earthling
to set foot on the moon.
The kind of exploratory ventures we're talking about
seem to me to be precisely the kind
that are needed to re-establish
a cosmic context for mankind.
You know, in the '60s,
NASA was incredibly innovative,
launching new missions to the moon every couple months,
trying new things.
The brand was synonymous
with exploring the solar system,
and there was magic in that.
It's the next frontier.
And liftoff of "Atlantis" and the "Galileo" spacecraft,
bound for Jupiter.
NASA was incredibly exciting.
Rock and roll, "Atlantis."
I had a little space shuttle model that sat on my monitor
for years and years and years.
And I would look at that space shuttle and go,
"I'm gonna work there one day. I'm gonna work there one day."
I went to the United States for a month.
I went on a bit of a rocket pilgrimage, really,
and went and visited all these companies
that I'd aspired to work for.
You know, I was pitching them hard for a job.
As a foreign national, no university education,
no aerospace background, asking for a job
wasn't gonna go well.
My expectation of NASA
was NASA from the Apollo era.
The NASA that I had seen in the movies and had imagined
was very, very different to the NASA that...
that was actually there.
I'm thinking, "Man, what the hell happened here?"
It was terribly bureaucratic.
It's very difficult to start innovative, new things
because there's a lot of government inertia.
It became a self-licking ice cream cone.
It only kept going because it paid a lot of people
and it had a lot of political support.
The average age was 52, and everybody was talking
about the things we used to do,
rather than the things that needed to be done.
Flight attendants, prepare for gate departure, please.
I had a plan in my head for years.
I was gonna come to the United States,
do my rocket pilgrimage, crawl over some rocks.
It was gonna suck, but I would find a way.
And then the probable went
to absolutely and categorically improbable.
There's nothing like 12 hours of just, like,
solid thinking time to reevaluate your life.
I just remember sitting in the chair thinking,
this is not good.
This is not how it's supposed to be.
The only logical solution was just, like, fuck it.
Let's start a company.
Bring that around.
It's Peter, a couple dudes who he knows.
"Can we make a small rocket and try to get it to space?"
And so they work on this for, really, a couple years.
Everything is borrowed, or some generous person
happens to give them a chunk of metal
or something like that.
This is the very, very humble beginnings of Rocket Lab.
I was driving to work, and I heard on the radio
that this guy had renamed himself Mark Rocket.
You could not write this.
He hears about a guy actually named Mark Rocket who's rich.
He happened to be looking for a way to invest in space.
And this guy, Peter Beck, comes along.
He's actually built a rocket, and says, you know,
"Do you want to start a company together?"
And Peter gives away half his company
for a couple hundred thousand dollars
just to get this going.
You'd be crucified for doing something like that
in Silicon Valley.
But Peter sort of doesn't know any better,
and he's also desperate.
And this is, like, manna from heaven
with this guy named Mark Rocket
who's rich and wants to pay for his thing.
Prior to that, all the rockets I'd built
I'd strapped to things that I had ridden.
So this was the first rocket that I hadn't actually ridden
nor had any desire to.
You know, we'd done lots of engine testing,
and stage-separation testing, and parachute-drop testing.
We had no more money. We had no more anything.
Everything was on the line.
That rocket needed to go, and it needed to go well.
In the tradition of great New Zealand explorers,
New Zealand, we are a go for space.
Arm igniter.
Arm oxygen.
Coupler disconnect.
Coming through. No smoke.
Ten, nine, eight... oxygen.
Seven, six, five, four,
three, two, one.
You fucking did it!
Yes!
She's still burning!
She's gone!
22 seconds, we're home free to space!
NASA Ames is this Silicon Valley NASA center.
It's gone through all these ups and downs.
In the 2000s, it's in a really fallow period
where the government
is thinking about shutting it down.
At the time, Pete Worden was the head of this
Office of Strategic Influence at the Pentagon,
and he'd just been fired by the Secretary of Defense,
Donald Rumsfeld.
Well, I'd just been fired from my job
because I was a bit of a hot potato.
Pete said, and I quote, "Donald Rumsfeld fucked me.
"But they're gonna give me a NASA center
to make up for it."
And they say, "Pete, you're, like, our last hope.
"We're gonna give you this NASA center.
"See if you can do something interesting,
and maybe we'll keep it around."
Hi, I'm Pete Worden, the director
of the NASA Ames Research Center.
Pete starts to have these thoughts of, like,
how can we innovate in space?
How can we do different things?
When I came to Ames, I brought a hat trick
of young people with me.
He called Robbie and me up, and he said,
"I've got this new job.
Do you want to come work with me?"
And we were like hemming and hawing.
On the one hand, we didn't want to work for our enemy.
On the other hand, we were like,
he's going to work at NASA.
And he basically said, "Hey, you can do
whatever space missions you want."
And we were like, what?
Who gets to do, you know, missions like that
when we were kids, you know, mid-20s at this point.
He had this vision for pulling all this together.
And he said, "Well, what are you doing?"
I said, "Well, I'm running this travel software startup."
And he goes, "Well, that's bullshit," you know?
"Why do travel when you can come do space travel with me?"
He would surround himself with people
that had different contexts,
that had a different worldview.
"But let's let 1,000 flowers bloom here
"somehow in the space sector.
I'll create the environment."
These are, like, the best of the best.
PhDs in all different areas of physics, computer science.
It really started a revolution,
or I might call it a counterrevolution.
Pete had hired us to be a "special studies team,"
which was sort of an ambiguous,
murky umbrella term
for, "Go and do things that you think will cause"
"just enough trouble to be interesting
and not enough trouble to get me fired, mostly."
Chris Kemp gets brought in because he's a nerd
who had done some successful dot-come.
Chris was a real expert in software,
so I ended up making him my chief information officer.
Chris didn't even have a degree,
but I managed to force that through.
I actually printed my own business cards.
I took the coolest NASA business card
that I'd ever been handed, and then I made up a title.
And I think I called myself
the Director of Strategic Business Development.
Invented the role, printed a business card,
and just did that.
Pete is, like, inheriting NASA Ames at the same time
that SpaceX is trying to build their first rocket.
These dot-com-ers are building rockets.
You welcome that?
Their success is going to enable us
to settle the solar system
and do all these other wonderful things in space
because it's gonna lower the cost.
And it really creates this joint momentum
at the right time, where you've got people
outside of NASA trying some new ideas,
and now you've got this, like, rebel alliance inside of NASA.
One of the things we tried to do was,
can we find cheap ways to get to the moon?
So we ended up setting up a kind of quiet lunar program.
We were trying to make a modular spacecraft
that could be used for various missions.
And we basically crash-landed
into the south pole of the moon.
We found loads of water.
We're gonna build a lunar lander,
and we're gonna show NASA that space can be different.
Everything does not have to be $1 billion, $2 billion.
He really helped bring NASA Ames
into the modern space era.
A lot of the positive change that's happened
can be traced back to Pete's work.
He is legend in NASA circles, you know?
We call him a rebel.
He did things that...
he broke the mold.
And the young people liked that,
and they followed him.
One of the crazier things he did was,
he allowed our whole team
to organize a space party there.
It wasn't just a space party.
It's a rave with 8,000 people.
So Yuri's Night is World Space Party.
It celebrates Yuri Gagarin's first spaceflight.
And the idea is to make space not, like, a national thing
but an international thing.
I said, well, you know we're a NASA center.
We can do a really cool party.
He's like, "Jessy, go for it.
Like, you have my blessing."
I love that picture.
It's me and Pete at NASA celebrating
a Russian cosmonaut's first orbit around the Earth,
beating America to the punch.
For those of you that know me,
I used to be a U.S. Brigadier General.
I think this is a Soviet two-star general's outfit,
so I took a promotion.
So we had these raves, and they were really cool.
Yes, there was probably quite a bit of marijuana smoking.
And I got in a little trouble
because I told the security people that...
they said, "Well, what do we do
with those people smoking dope?"
And I said, "Just don't go over there."
One of Pete's Air Force colleagues
kept on putting up his phone,
saying, "This phone has most of what a spacecraft has."
This is just when smartphones were coming out.
Suddenly, there was GPS, cameras, faster computers.
If you look at the list of a smartphone
and the list of things in a spacecraft,
90% the same thing.
And we were like, OK.
Why don't we just fly a few of these suckers?
We fit one of these phones into a little cube,
did all these tests on it.
I'm not really sure whether the phone survived.
- Oh, no. - Hey!
Part of it was just to make the satellite
not be this, like, precious object.
It's just a phone.
Whoo!
I was hauled into Pete's office.
"What are you doing?"
And we were like, "What are you talking about?"
And he's like, "You're launching phones into space.
You didn't tell me."
So we almost got fired.
Then we were like, "No, no, no, no, chill out.
"It's gonna be great.
"These phones are gonna show that we can do spacecraft
for much, much lower cost."
So right now we've got the data.
Wow. Both: Oh!
- Whoo-hoo! - Whoa!
So I thought this was pretty cool.
And I said, OK, let's see if we can't put this in space.
We found a cheap way to have them
thrown out of the Space Station.
We stitched together a whole picture of the Earth
that we had taken on this phone
that was just floating around in space.
It was pretty poor resolution.
But the spacecraft had cost a few thousand dollars,
not a few million or a few billion.
President Obama showed up.
"And I said, "I'd really like
to show this guy what we're doing."
I said, "Mr. President, welcome to NASA Ames.
We just launched the world's cheapest satellites."
And he stopped.
He said, "How cheap were they?"
And I said, "Well, two of them were $4,000,
and one was $10,000."
Without missing a beat, he looks at me and says,
"We're giving you guys too much money."
We left NASA in earnest in mid-2011 to start Planet.
We really said, fuck it.
Let's build something in a different way.
Within 12 months, we built our first
fully integrated satellite.
This is one of the earliest spacecraft we ever made.
Yep. This is a CubeSat.
All that it is, is just a...
it's a really nice camera.
So this antenna, which you can actually see
is made of a tape measure...
NASA would spend millions and millions
on a typical antenna for a spacecraft.
We cut up a tape measure that probably cost us $2.50
from a hardware store.
When we were thinking through
why we were doing this,
what benefit would come from it,
the primary use case that we wanted to do
was to stop deforestation.
We designed these satellites
so that they could just about see an individual tree.
It was, like, 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning.
We got our very first picture back.
Robbie actually just came and blasted into my room
and jumped on top of me with this picture.
This is the very first picture
that ever came down from space
that we took with our team at Planet.
You can do all the calculations,
and then you're never sure
it's actually gonna work, right?
And it did, and everything worked.
I mean, we were over the moon.
We realized, with lots of little spacecraft,
we could do more rapid observation
of the entire Earth.
The Earth is constantly changing.
It's changing on days timescales
with human activity.
And the satellite imagery we have of it today
is typically years old.
Satellites like these have done an amazing job
at helping us to understand our planet.
But if we want to understand it much more regularly...
we need lots of satellites.
What we'd ideally want is images
of the whole planet every day.
We're gonna launch
more than a hundred of these satellites.
It's gonna be the largest constellation of satellites
in human history.
T-minus 30 seconds. On my mark.
We've got 26 satellites on this rocket.
It's a big deal.
It's the largest number of satellites we've ever put
on a rocket, in fact, the largest number
of satellites that anyone has ever put on a rocket.
And we have liftoff.
It goes up. Everything's looking good.
And then I can quickly see here...
I was like, oh, shit.
Oh, crap.
Oh, God.
Oh, God!
Oh. And that's the end.
- Wow. - What was that?
And that looks like an explosion of that rocket.
That looked like something really...
That looked like something went definitely
very wrong with that launch.
Whoa! Jesus!
Planet lost all their satellites.
Will and Robbie saw
there's all these rocket start ups
appearing around the world.
Chris was at Ames, and then he left to go start
this company called Nebula.
The company did not do great, and so Chris was out of work.
Planet brought him on as a consultant
to go scour the world,
find the best rockets to fly on.
I spent six months traveling around the world,
meeting all the rocket companies.
I was not impressed.
Chris came down under the guises
of an independent satellite consultant.
Peter Beck wanted to fly Planet's satellites,
so he gave him the top-end tour.
Peter really went out of his way
to tell Chris everything.
I suggested to Planet that they give Rocket Lab
a contract, and they did.
But I also saw how expensive that rocket would be.
I just saw an opportunity to do something different here.
They like to talk about the kind of massive amounts
of power and massive amounts of propellant
and the massive scale and...
Chris came back to the United States.
A couple of months passed, and then, suddenly,
Chris had a rocket company.
Naturally, we were quite surprised
a few months later when Astra popped up.
His idea was basically
to undercut Rocket Lab on price.
How cheap and crappy can we make a rocket?
I'm somebody who wants to actually succeed
from a business perspective, versus just make big toys.
I met Adam in a garage.
I was blown away.
You know, he's the rocket scientist.
He's one of the most brilliant people you'll ever meet.
I showed him around, talked about stuff, et cetera.
And he was, I think, you know, pretty excited.
A rocket a day was
in the very first pitch presentation
that Chris and I did.
They wanted to make a rocket faster than anyone
had ever made a rocket in history.
They wanted it to be the cheapest rocket
that had ever been made.
And they wanted to make an actual factory
that could pump these rockets out every day,
just like you'd make a car or something like that.
This had never been done in the industry.
- There we go. - Be careful.
There's broken glass everywhere.
I think people came in here and played war.
It's a perfect, like, set for a zombie-apocalypse movie.
If we're gonna make a rocket a day
really, really affordably, we've got to have
really inexpensive facilities.
The challenge is, we deal with all this stuff.
This is actually... it's all lead paint.
And people take this shit really seriously, right?
But we've got to deal with this stuff
and cover it and repaint it
and clean the building up a little bit,
or people get stressed.
Credit where credit's due.
Chris is an amazing salesperson.
In this industry, it takes a bit of that.
It's a better view over here.
You know, he's able to be very successful
at raising capital.
- This is lead paint. - OK.
Oh.
We've got a lot of work to do
to catch up with Rocket Lab.
It's a race right now, and we're trying to catch up.
- What do you think? - I love it.
It kind of brings post apocalyptic chic
and spacesuit together in kind of a alien way,
but an optimistic alien way, in black.
2017, rocket's far enough along.
Chris decides to have a party to show everybody
the rocket for the first time.
All right, welcome to Dawn of Space, everyone.
There's lots of people
that have raised tremendous amounts of money
on the back of fantasifull promises.
The great thing about this industry
is that you can make all the promises in the world.
But at some point, you actually have to deliver.
Thank you all for coming.
And the next time we have a party, we will be in space.
People had started hearing rumors
that this guy in New Zealand is doing interesting things.
When Peter ends up going to Silicon Valley,
all these investors call around to find out who knows what.
Pete Worden, he'd caught wind of Peter.
I mean, he's maybe one of the best engineers I've ever met.
This guy is the real deal.
As he's trying to raise money,
this vote of confidence from Pete Worden has a huge effect.
The first money hit the bank January 2014.
And we had a rocket on the pad in 2017.
2017, Rocket Lab tries to launch for the first time.
It's called, like, "a test."
It's not taking a commercial payload.
The most important thing was it just get clear of the pad.
That's kind of your worst nightmare...
Something coming up off the pad,
then coming back down on the pad.
That is instant company extermination.
We did not have the resources to rebuild a pad.
When you're testing your rocket in the early days,
you pretty much just want to get it off the pad.
The goal is to get enough flight time to pull some data.
And if you're lucky,
the rocket will happen to get to space.
But, basically, nobody gets into orbit on their first try.
It just... it doesn't happen.
It takes 100 times more energy
to put an object in orbit
versus just going up into space.
It's not just up.
You see rockets as they launch.
They go up and then over.
Well, the over part's the hard part
because you've got to achieve a velocity capable of shooting
the rocket around the planet.
And if you don't have enough velocity,
it comes right back down.
When it actually came time to launch,
it was a big, big day.
Everyone was confident that it was gonna work.
But also, nobody knew what the hell it was gonna do.
- Yes! Yes! - Fuck, yes!
It was a nominal clean liftoff.
Engine performance was nominal.
Everything was nominal.
It had a nominal separation
and an ignition of the second stage engine.
The rocket does fantastically well.
It's made it to space,
and it's heading towards orbit.
At that point, you've achieved more than 99%
of most countries on their first rocket.
We're literally, like, 200 seconds away
from reaching orbit.
The folks that are in charge of making sure
that the rocket flies safely
shut the engine down by mistake.
The safety officer actually blew up
Rocket Lab's first rocket.
We were literally seconds away from orbit.
That would have been the first time in history
that a new rocket had flown successfully on its first try.
All right, to other news now,
and a truly spectacular feat for New Zealand.
We've joined the space race.
One small step for Rocket Lab,
one giant leap for New Zealand aerospace.
In 2017, in India,
Planet Labs launched 88 of their Dove satellites...
a record number of satellites
to put in space by many, many times.
It's the largest constellation
of Earth-imaging satellites in human history,
and it's gonna provide a completely radical
new data set about our changing planet.
And we have decided, therefore, that the best thing
that we can do with our data is to ensure
universal access to it.
We wanted to ensure everyone can see it.
Thank you.
Planet was the very first company ever
to be able to take photos of every spot
on Earth every day.
And this is useful for a lot of things.
You can gather environmental data
around things like deforestation,
land use, and drought,
and then some very practical things
like helping a farmer decide when to harvest their crops.
We can actually tell the crop type.
Is this corn or wheat or soy or whatever?
We can tell how well it's doing,
where it needs to add water,
an early sign of a health problem,
which can improve their crop yields by 20% or 40%.
That can help feed the planet more efficiently.
The things that we're already learning
about the Earth from Planet's satellites are amazing.
It was a massive breakthrough.
They've changed the entire satellite industry forever.
So, in 15 months, we incorporated a company.
We hired 75 engineers.
We built a development facility, a test facility,
a manufacturing facility, a mission control center,
designed and built a rocket,
and are about to fly it next month.
So, from zero... like, no company...
thank you.
- All right. Wait, hold on. - NASA crew.
Madman on the loose
with ICBM pointed at San Francisco.
We're taking the rocket up to a small island
in the North Pacific, and we're going to launch it.
And if we're able to do that,
that will be pretty historic, I think.
In the United States, most companies launch
from Florida or California.
They're all government-owned.
You have to fight for attention and position
on these launch pads.
Astra's this fledgling company.
Alaska is trying to attract this commercial business,
and so they kind of roll out the red carpet.
Give them their own space. Give them their own pad.
It's just like, go fly it.
Get data. Whatever went wrong, we fix.
We do this again.
But things were just not working.
It's 60-miles-an-hour gusts up here.
Barely staying alive.
Having trouble locating the QDs.
Let's kill some helium!
This went on for weeks and weeks and weeks.
Getting this guy up off the pad
would be a pretty big win for all of us.
If we do launch the rocket and it is successful,
it strengthens our position considerably.
I do hate to see Rocket Lab get a third launch off
before we get our first.
Ground close OV 107.
Thanks for coming out.
- Hey, Scott. - Good luck.
We're gonna try to put something in space.
- Let's do it. - Or blow it up trying.
This is Chris Kemp at mission control
in Alameda, California.
If we're able to achieve our objective
of getting the rocket off the pad,
we'd like to fly for as long as possible.
All right. Tango. Watch P-O-T.
Call Abort if you see it exceed 20 PSI.
Rocket companies get these little windows of time
when the weather looks right.
The government's approved your launch.
35, 34, 33,
32, 31, 30...
This is TC on countdown. We are at a hold.
- Is that bad? - No.
32, 31, 30...
Hold, hold, hold.
- It's the whiskey. - It's hard shit.
- Yeah. Thank you.
- It's hard shit. - All right.
We've aborted.
This pattern repeated itself over and over and over again.
That sucks.
You have to take the whole thing down,
go try to find this small, tiny problem,
fix it, do this again and again.
This went on for so many weeks.
For those of you just tuning in,
we had several launch attempts yesterday.
This is our last day in our launch window.
We're gonna get it this time.
- Hey. - It's gonna happen.
- Yay. - All right.
- It's gonna happen. - I think so, too.
- Counting down. - Counting down.
All: Ten, nine, eight, seven, six,
five, four, three,
two, one.
Go.
- Yeah. - Yeah!
That was awesome.
Nice.
Wow.
It ends up finally launching,
goes for about 27 seconds.
It definitely didn't reach orbit.
It didn't reach space.
But they were able to get some data from it.
Thank you again for all your support.
It was a successful flight.
It's looking like we got
plus or minus 10 seconds from our 30-second objective.
I can only imagine going back in time
and tapping on the shoulder and whispering
into that little boy's ear,
"One day, that Captain Kirk's
gonna open your rocket factory."
What a wonderful place to be.
In November of 2018,
they fly their first commercial mission.
So this launch's got seven payloads aboard
from a variety of different customers.
It's called "It's Business Time,"
in honor of "Flight of the Conchords."
It's business time.
Now we had paying customers.
It is business time, in all sense of the words.
There was a lot, lot riding on that.
If you're declaring to the world
that you have a product that works,
it better bloody work.
I hate launches.
I really do not enjoy them.
These early launches, like, if they go badly,
that's the end.
Flight mode.
Ten, nine, eight,
seven, six, five, four...
- Ignition. - Three, two, one.
Altitude is 200 kilometers.
The best time of a launch is a squiggly graph.
See a nice, straight line,
and then it'll give a wee squiggle.
And that wee squiggle is the reaction moment
of when you separate off the payload.
That is the only good thing about a launch.
Oh, very nice.
The Rocket Lab Electron launch vehicle
reached a successful orbit on only its second mission.
They've come out of the gate looking really good.
Another perfect bloody flight.
This one took a while to get off the pad,
but instantaneous To.
Perfect flight. Nice, perfect, nominal orbit.
And I don't... fuck, I don't know what to say.
But, yeah.
Let's do it again in a few weeks.
Hi, everyone.
For those of you just joining us,
this is the first launch attempt
of our version 2.0 rocket.
I was just informed of the range.
Rocket 2, you had a bunch of ex-SpaceX people come in.
They start to play this major role.
Chris Thompson, one of the SpaceX,
like, early founding team, he's the lead.
It's like, the adult supervision has arrived.
Five, four, three,
two, one, zero.
No fire. Abort.
This is a better outcome than having the rocket explode.
All: Five, four,
three, two, one.
- Zero. - Go!
- Why isn't it going? - Do you see it?
It's going?
It's not going.
No fire. Abort.
- What's this? - It's my mom.
Nice.
"Hope you find the problem with the igniters."
We can't launch because there's a boat in the way.
You have to put out a notice...
clear out of the area
where debris might fall from this thing.
There's inevitably some ship captain
who just doesn't pay attention to any of this.
They're not moving.
- And... - Not answering the radios.
Have we sent the helicopter out?
I want the name of that captain.
I'm gonna fucking crucify him.
Well, there's the boat right there.
What is he? Tell me.
We're gonna file a lawsuit against that captain.
- You'll be hearing from me. - We will find you.
I once sunk a person's ship that pissed me off.
It's very easy to do. You get a drill.
- It's... - Yeah.
- It's gone. - Yeah. So we'll use that.
Let's not get that...
- You're on video. - Oh. Hi.
- You want to keep pushing... - I'm not pushing.
- I'll call right now... - I'm not pushing.
And say I'm done. Let us do what we need to do.
That's all I'm trying to do, Chris.
And I'm just trying to make sure that your teams are
all on the same page before I communicate
- anything externally. - Right. But...
- OK. So we're good? - Yeah.
Great. That's all I needed. Thanks.
Hold, hold, hold.
Abort, abort hit.
Daddy, why did, like, the... why did it,
like, shut down right away?
The computer that controls the engine...
- Yeah? - Has a problem inside of it.
- Oh. - And so it won't work.
Because you said once,
if the launch thing didn't work,
you have to put new engines on.
Basically, you're doing that, only with the computer?
It is the last try
and the last hour of the last day.
It's looking good.
Fuck.
Five, four, three,
two, one, zero.
Yeah!
Fuck, yeah.
Go, baby, go!
Hold, hold, hold.
Vehicle has experienced an anomaly in flight.
Rocket 2 comes pretty much straight down on the pad.
It's, like, the worst thing that you can have happen.
What message do you want to put?
Um, what is it?
- Just say... - On the Webcast page?
Just say, "test concluded," you know?
Livecast has concluded.
Investors are texting.
Hey, no worries. Yeah.
Just wanted to give you guys an update.
So we didn't quite hit 60 seconds.
But it was a really beautiful flight.
And we got about... we got about 30 seconds of flight.
It was. Yeah. The night launches are...
They're always spectacular, so...
Well, I'll pass that along to the team.
And thank you so much for all your support.
I've got to, like, thread a needle...
- Yeah. - With this stuff because...
- It's gonna be tough for you. - There's total success.
And then there's total failure.
- And this is... it's about... - Yeah.
Well done.
This isn't total failure. This isn't total success.
But it's about... this is great, actually.
This is a great outcome.
- We launched. - We launched. And we learned.
And... so this was a fantastic outcome for the company.
And no one was hurt.
It didn't break anything. The rocket flew.
- Got further. - Got further.
So, I mean, period.
Like, full mic drop, this is a great day for this company.
I'm, like, incredibly happy.
A private company named Planet Labs has put
about 300 small satellites into space,
enough to take a picture of the entire land mass
of the Earth every day.
Making it available to everybody,
people are gonna come up with uses of that imagery
that you haven't imagined.
Dreamed of, yeah.
Now that there are commercial companies
that have nothing to do with governments
snapping pictures day after day,
we're starting to call it open source intelligence.
Commercial satellites are changing
the way information is consumed.
They are giving us data that we did not have access to
20 years ago.
Governments and intelligence communities
have special equipment to take photos.
Those photos are restricted and classified.
You can never look at 'em.
In the run-up to the Iraq War,
the government disclosed satellite images
and told the world,
here's evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction,
Because this fence and this aluminum tube
kind of look like something that had to do with weaponry.
And they're kind of trying to do A plus B equals F.
This can't happen anymore.
Right now if you gave me two images
and you were a government, I would buy 60 images
over the same time frame,
and I would tell you what was happening.
Everything in the world has a visual signature.
And if you can interpret it... and not a lot of people can...
it's like you know a language,
and you can translate for other people.
I remember, in 2008, I got a tip-off.
And they said, "Hey, there's an underground
submarine base in China."
I didn't think that was true because it sounds
a little James Bond-y and stupid.
And he gave me broad, general coordinates.
There you are.
There was a lot of evidence kind of mounting
that this is actually being hollowed out
so that you could fit in a submarine.
These are huge piles of dirt.
And as boring as that sounds, when you see
massive piles of dirt in a military base,
you know that a lot of construction is happening.
They put a little barge here.
They open up the sea cave. They take the barge.
And they move it over right here.
And the only time I've ever seen it removed was here.
This image was taken
by a Planet satellite in August of 2020.
And this is the only image I've ever seen
where you're actually seeing this Chinese nuclear submarine
entering that cave.
I had been looking for this for...
For 12 years.
And, safety, can you confirm that red team
is in a safe location for UHF testing?
Copy that. Thank you.
We took about a year.
And we came back with Rocket 3.
We had a series of test flights that failed.
And they failed in ever more spectacular ways.
Ooh. Ooh.
It's not good. We hit the ground.
Like, we hit something.
Fuck.
This sucks.
That, I don't think, was good.
Dolphin, confirm igniter system is ready for launch.
It's 2020.
It's Rocket 3.2.
This thing has to work
if Astra wants to consider itself a real rocket company.
Everything was on the line.
How's it looking, Lucas?
OK, tango, at this time,
I would like you to enable the launch.
Ten, nine,
eight, seven, six,
five, four, three,
two, one, zero.
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Let it go.
Release.
We have cleared the tower.
Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go.
- Stage. - Stage set.
Upper-stage ignition enabled.
Yeah! Yes! Yes!
- Yes! - Fuck, yes, man.
- Fuck, yeah! - Jesus Christ.
Holy shit.
Fuck, yeah.
Oh, man.
Thank you.
No way. That's our rocket?
Yeah.
We're in space. We're definitively in space.
Oh.
That's incredible.
We've got to figure out next steps now
because we didn't expect to pull this off
quite this quickly, so we have to...
got to figure out how to accelerate things now.
Oh, fuck, yes.
Did we make orbit?
We don't know yet.
- Hey, baby. - Hey, baby.
We just are in orbit temporarily.
We made it all the way.
Lots of videos, like the thing with Earth in the background.
I love you, sweetie.
This makes life so much easier for us.
Our valuation just doubled.
OK, 22 is the new number.
Man, 3 years of trying to do this,
22 tries with this.
All: Cheers.
I'm really glad we replaced that battery.
We have two pictures of what looks like
we're in orbit, and then silence, right?
So, like, what do we do to follow that?
Because the silence is deafening right now.
Yes, exactly. That's the point.
I also don't think it's deafening in a bad way, right?
Yes. It's not deafening in a bad way.
It's in an incredibly positive way.
We need to say, "Total mission success,"
exclamation, exclamation.
You shouldn't call it a 'total mission success.'
Mission success.
I wouldn't even say "mission."
- Huge success. - Huge success. Yeah.
Yeah, and that'll be vague. I like that.
Astra, an aerospace company sending satellites,
not people, into space is debuting on the NASDAQ today,
listing at a $2 billion valuation.
You know, there's a trillion-dollar
space economy that's developing.
And hundreds of companies over the past few years
have been formed.
So, without further ado, I am thrilled to declare
that space is now open for business.
This is a space renaissance going on.
We got new rockets, hundreds of new satellites
going into space,
and a big, new economy.
It's like the birth of the Internet
going on for space.
It's exciting times.
The space industry has transformed
in the last decade.
And what drove that was a massive influx
of venture capital.
Space is the place.
Space is hot.
Tons of money has flooded into this,
hundreds of billions of dollars
into all these rocket companies,
hundreds of billions into these satellite companies.
When there is this kind of investment into space,
we do end up with innovations that help people.
Is the venture-capital community
in this for altruistic reasons?
That would not be my view.
The venture-capital community is in this to make money.
Doves are flying in outer space.
And if you're an investor, the pictures they send back
could bring you a really serious competitive advantage
and a profit.
When you have this daily imagery of the Earth,
it's this huge window
into the economic activity of our planet.
From West Texas oil fields
to Chinese power plants in Xinjiang
and Argentine lithium mines.
One of the biggest things that I did in the tech sector
was look at floating-lid oil tanks.
They're huge oil-storage tanks
that as you remove oil from it, the lid depresses.
You can take an image over that every single day.
You can measure the shadow of the interior of that.
And you can actually calculate the volume of oil.
They do a report every Wednesday,
how much oil they have.
But if you get the numbers on Monday,
then you have a financial advantage.
Hedge funds is one of the most interesting areas
in finance because we actually know the soy yield
of all the world's soy fields before anyone else,
the crop yields,
the mining output from all the world's copper mines,
and so on.
Now you have these very successful satellite companies
that do have a lot of power over the information
that describes our lives.
What the fuck is that?
More than half the satellites in space
are owned and controlled by one man.
Elon Musk and his company Starlink
operate more than 4,500 of them.
So, if I type in Starlink,
these are all the satellites that are operated by SpaceX.
They will launch them 20 at a time, 60 at a time.
That is a new thing in the space industry
over the last few years.
SpaceX has moved so fast
that they have become clearly dominant.
They are the world's largest satellite maker
by many, many times.
There are challenges with the satellite era
in terms of the environmental impact
of humans industrializing outer space.
In 2009,
an Iridium Communications satellite
was happily orbiting over the Arctic
when a dead Russian communications satellite
from the '90s headed the same way.
And they smashed into each other.
Thousands of debris objects,
many of which are still in orbit today.
This was the most serious orbital collision to date.
We track all the satellites, all the space debris.
It's sort of like air traffic control for space.
So you see on this globe
everything that we've been tracking over the last day,
so over 20,000 objects,
satellites, pieces of debris,
stuff down to, like, a centimeter in size,
you know, about the size of this screw.
And we basically keep tabs on all of that
and then generate alerts when important changes happen.
There are always close calls with space debris.
I was a NASA astronaut from 1995 until 2007.
I remember an instance
where we were told by mission control
that we were gonna have a close approach.
Never saw it, which goes to show you how hard it is
to see something going 20 times faster
than a speeding bullet.
We really do have to start cleaning up
low Earth orbit.
In the decades to come, if we do nothing,
we will start to see more and more collisions
and more and more satellites destroyed
due to these collisions.
It's the gateway if you want to go anywhere else in space.
If you want to go to the moon, if you want to go to Mars,
if you want to put up a telescope
like the James Webb to peer at other galaxies,
you've got to go in and through low Earth orbit.
So, if it becomes a mess,
then we've actually limited ourselves to Earth.
So, like, in typical Astra fashion,
you've just reached the edge of orbit.
You hope the next one is a total success.
Instead of that, a few months later, in 2021,
Astra has their infamous sideways rocket.
The rocket lost one of five engines almost immediately.
It pretty much went sideways.
It just goes out the fence and then up.
We've got a stock that's really losing
a lot of ground this morning,
and that is Astra Space.
It was their first commercial mission.
- And it was not a success. - No, it's not.
So that stock's down. Look at that. Wow.
17%.
That thing's just going sideways.
I know.
Again, a couple steps forward,
several steps backwards.
Five, four...
In 2021, everything finally happens in Astra's favor.
And Astra's LV0007 has successfully reached orbit.
There is a new orbital rocket.
Take a look at rocket upstart Astra Space.
Shares surging yesterday,
as much as 30% at one point,
after its small rocket successfully reached orbit
on Saturday.
The milestone makes Astra
the fastest launch company ever to reach orbit.
Seeing failure after failure lead to success,
everyone is just incredibly
passionate about...
corks are flying.
Astra becoming just the fourth U.S. company
to privately fund and develop
a rocket that has reached orbit.
They're joining a small group of companies...
SpaceX, Virgin Orbit, and Rocket Lab.
What happens in the space business
once you accomplish this is,
governments start to award you contracts.
NASA had this mission called TROPICS.
They were gonna borrow from some of Planet Labs' ideas
and put up a lot of satellites to measure the weather.
At NASA, we try to bring in small launch companies
just so we can help create that competitive environment.
It is in our best interest that we get the best price.
This is the chance where you show it wasn't luck.
It was like, we know exactly what we're doing.
We can do this again and again.
Good morning, everyone.
And welcome to today's live launch coverage.
LV0010 marks Astra's mission with NASA.
And it is the first of three launches
to deliver the NASA TROPICS satellites to low Earth orbit.
Five, four...
The teams at Alameda
watching on as the flight progresses.
Again, the flight, going well so far.
Can see it taking off from below.
And there is stage separation.
Seven minutes in the flight, just a little over
a minute left in the planned upper-stage burn.
We have a premature second-engine cutoff.
We had a nominal first-stage flight.
However, the upper-stage engine did shut down early.
And we did not deliver our payloads to orbit.
We will end the broadcast here.
And thank you for sticking with us today.
An Astra rocket launch from the Cape on Sunday failed.
The startup was unable to put satellites into orbit.
It seems like it was an engine-related issue
very, very late in the second-stage burn.
They were almost to orbit.
In fact, they were probably maybe 20 seconds away
from actually attaining orbit.
This image taken from a satellite
about 280 miles over Earth.
When Russia invaded Ukraine,
it was an all-hands-on-deck for our company.
Planet's technology has been essential in tracking
Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine.
You had Russia telling us
they were not gonna invade Ukraine.
In our imagery, you could see the troop buildup.
This is now the first war that everyone gets to see
what's happening in real time.
The Russian army does not strike
at any civilian targets.
Putin said, "We don't bomb civilian targets."
We showed the next day on the front page
of "The New York Times"
the five hospitals and schools that they had bombed.
So how do you know these are new graves?
This is fresh brown dirt.
And they've been using bulldozers
to slowly dig out these trenches.
The broad impact, I think, is that it's helping
to lift the fog of war.
Planet's clients include the U.S. government
and many other governments.
You know, their key objective was a utopian one.
In fact, they called their satellites Doves,
that they were sort of peace sats.
Now, what's interesting to me is that
a peace sat can do a lot of things.
With any new technology, right,
it comes with the great hope for the future.
And then reality sets in,
and you realize that, as with anything that humans do,
there are pluses and minuses.
The founders of Planet have talked
about how their goal was
to use this imaging technology for the benefit of the world,
particularly choosing the resolution of the camera
so that it was good enough to count every tree
and not high enough
to raise privacy concerns.
On the other hand,
a lot of their market now is the military.
This gives any country the same power
that a superpower like Russia or China had before.
Now they can see
everything that's happening in their country.
And, like, maybe they use that for good.
And maybe they use that for bad.
Like, if you want to know
where some refugees are hiding out,
you can watch that all the time.
The technology to get higher-resolution imagery
is emerging.
And the government's regulation is receding.
Privacy is very much an issue.
Right now if a guy wanted to look
at his ex-wife's driveway
to see if her car's there or not,
the guy could conceivably take two satellite images a day.
We're not safe from satellite-imagery analysis.
Hello, and welcome
to Rocket Lab's mission control center
in Auckland, New Zealand, for Rocket Like a Hurricane,
a dedicated mission for NASA to launch
the TROPICS constellation
of hurricane-monitoring satellites.
The original contract was awarded to another provider.
They put it in the ocean.
And then they awarded it to us,
and we successfully put it into orbit.
End of story.
NASA awards all the future contracts
to Rocket Lab for the TROPICS mission.
And so, like, clear blow to Chris.
We've been trading right now under a dollar a share
for the majority of this year.
And NASDAQ will not allow us to remain listed
if we do not trade for more than a dollar a share
for more than ten trading days.
So we're kind of in this laser-focus mode,
where let's make every penny count.
Let's make every person count. Let's make every hour count.
On paper, Astra still might have
enough money to build a larger rocket
and get to launch it.
They're in a tricky spot financially, mainly,
but also some technical hurdles.
But without money, you can't continue, right?
This is about two years in the making.
A lot of people have lost a lot of trust in Astra,
generally, the market people and their confidence
in our ability to go deliver,
whether or not they think we can do that.
The stakes are pretty high.
We need to be successful out the gate.
We can't afford to have another mishap mission.
So reliability needs to be up.
Qualification needs to be up.
It's the old story of just try, try again.
And sometimes the company goes down.
In the case of Chris Kemp,
he's had a few that have gone down.
But he keeps trying.
And now I'd like to invite Chris Kemp
back onstage for one more thing.
Cool. Thanks, Margot.
Thanks, Margot.
And I need my mic on a little bit.
I'm gonna just do the walk-on-stage thing
one more time.
Tomorrow morning we have several hundred people
from across the space industry...
shareholders of Astra, customers of Astra,
press, media, analysts.
So it was a difficult year for Astra.
And there's no way to sugarcoat that.
Chris is an incredible entrepreneur.
He has pulled rabbits out of hats on many occasions.
I really can't tell you which way it's gonna go.
But it's not like there's a trivial probability
of it blowing up, so to speak.
In the spirit of announcing new products,
I wanted to, on behalf of everyone
here at Astra, announce Rocket 4.
We had to put everything into this new rocket.
So I think that there are two scenarios here.
We either succeed,
or we're done.
A bunch of space companies are gonna fail.
That's the nature of venture-funded companies.
Does that mean those companies just go away?
The capabilities go away?
The technology goes away? The people go... No.
Virgin Orbit went bankrupt recently.
And its competitors bought its facilities,
took over its leases, hired its experts.
They did go bankrupt.
And, you know, we bought their assets.
And their assets live on now building Neutron.
It is an absolute beast.
It stands 40 meters tall.
It has a 7-meter diameter at the base
and a 5-meter class fairing.
So Neutron is basically our answer
to a SpaceX Falcon 9-class rocket.
It's fairly clear that SpaceX are
absolutely the dominant player.
They're almost a monopoly, if you will.
It's good to have some competition.
We think we've got a reusable vehicle
that will be really, really competitive.
We'll build it and bring it to market.
And, you know, we'll see...
we'll see who wins.
Rocket Lab is taking all their money.
And they're putting it into a giant vehicle
that will compete directly with Falcon 9.
So they are moving away from a small vehicle
mostly because we're gonna, at some point, eat their lunch.
Ah, fuck.
I mean, probably a call with him is best.
Quarter is burning away.
We're burning time. We're burning money.
And I have a $1,400 water-jet garnet PO.
If we can push that payment through,
that'll keep the water-jet running.
Something's got to give.
And now is the time to break it and go and fix it.
Or I will simply just take it over
and fucking run it myself.
Astra's admitted out loud
they're not only pushing Rocket 4 back,
but, also, they might not even get to launch the rocket
because they really don't have enough money
to do it at the moment.
These scenarios have to be matched
to what is desired in terms of outcome...
near-term and long-term.
In terms of the schedule.
In terms of a desired launch date, yeah.
So we had a board meeting.
What the board's looking at is, they're looking at that plan.
And they're saying, if you want a year of runway,
you have to cut more.
And that'll cause the market to respond
very favorably to the transaction.
But the dichotomy is, in order to achieve that,
we have to cut deeper.
So, to save ourselves, we have to cut ourselves.
If we can lead the team through the ultimate sacrifice
of everyone being let go...
but then potentially getting
all these contracts and getting the financing,
we might not have to let...
Well, we probably will still let some people go.
But we might not have to let anywhere near as many go.
That's the challenge.
You got to do something, right?
I mean, you can't... you know, clock is ticking.
Just know, when we succeed, it's gonna make...
it's gonna be great to watch.
And we are gonna succeed. Failure is not an option.
Today Planet images the entire Earth
every single day.
Mission accomplished.
Thank you.
What's Mission 2?
It's space plus AI.
I'm really excited about the future of AI
on top of Planet's data.
You know, we're scanning the whole Earth every day...
4 million pictures of the Earth each day.
It's an insane amount of data.
By turning each picture into information
about what's going on in that picture,
we're enabling you to search the Earth.
The potential there is to do planetary-scale forensics,
to look back in time through our archive
and find things that you didn't even know now
you needed to look for.
Planet, in a way, has turned on the time machine.
We're getting to the point
where you don't even have to train the AI
on any object you want to find.
You can actually just show it one example.
And it will just go
and find all of the others automatically,
even find things
you don't even know you want to look for.
It's just getting to a point of tremendous power
that is much simpler now than it was
even just a year ago.
There is opportunity and risk
in the commercial sector.
I think we'll see more innovation.
And we'll see things moving faster.
That also means that there is a shifting
of where power is coming from.
In Ukraine's fight to push out Russian invaders...
One of the most critical pieces of technology
doesn't fire rockets or bullets.
It's small, easy-to-use satellite internet terminals
called Starlink.
And they've been vital for soldiers' communication,
flying drones, and artillery targeting.
Antennas had been put all over Ukraine.
The military could communicate.
The government could communicate.
All of Russia's best-laid plans were now under serious threat.
You can make a very strong case
that Ukraine was able to fight this war successfully
because of this technology.
Last week reports emerged
of widespread sudden Starlink outages on the front line.
Is that something that SpaceX is doing intentionally?
Elon Musk has complete control of the technology
and can turn off satellites whenever he wants.
If Elon wants Starlink to be running in Ukraine,
it's running in Ukraine.
When he decides he's had a nice phone call
with Vladimir Putin and he wants to turn Starlink off,
he can do that.
The U.S. government, European allies...
there's nothing they can do.
They have nothing equivalent to Starlink
to replace this technology.
Musk says he was reportedly afraid
that Russia would retaliate with nuclear weapons.
Musk says that's based on his private discussions
he had with senior Russian officials.
This is one grand regime change
from countries that used to control all this power
now to individuals.
That has military and political leaders
around the world worried and questioning
whether one man should have complete control of the skies.
Russia may be keeping an additional eye
on the war in Ukraine from space.
The Americans claim that China is using
its low Earth orbit satellites
to spy on American military installations.
Satellites are a target.
If you can destroy the enemy's satellite capability,
then you can get a decisive advantage.
India launched its first successful
anti-satellite missile on Wednesday.
There are many different ways
you can do an anti-satellite test.
One of them is to launch a missile from the ground
and hit your own satellite, which just, you know,
breaks up into a million pieces.
Outrage from U.S. officials after Russia carried out
a missile test early Monday,
obliterating one of its own satellites
and creating a vast debris field
that's now orbiting Earth.
They launched a missile into a defunct 1982 spy satellite
that they owned
to show that they could do that to an American satellite
if they were so moved.
So now you have thousands of satellites
which themselves are potentially weapons.
You know, one of the big concerns is that,
in an actual warfare, if somebody did that,
they may, you know, even accidentally
sort of ruin low Earth orbit for use.
So there's a thing we call the Kessler effect.
If you have a satellite that explodes
and now all of its pieces are going different directions
at 17,000 miles an hour,
some of them are gonna hit other satellites eventually.
And then if that makes that satellite break apart,
now you have a chain reaction.
Letting that chain reaction run to completion,
you can end up with all of the spacecraft
in low Earth orbit getting shredded to confetti.
The regulatory bodies
that look over these kinds of things
are just ill-equipped and unprepared
for what has descended upon them.
They were used to a world that changed very slowly,
that they had a lot of control over
and monitoring.
There's no place to say, where are we heading
with our space activities in the very long term?
The track record of the human species
is not that great.
All of these issues
that cause us trouble here on Earth,
we're gonna export them into space.
That's just the way it is.
Exactly how this plays out is anyone's guess.
It reminds me of, like,
the early days of the Internet.
You think, like, Yahoo's gonna be around forever,
you know, and then, like, Google comes along.
I think we're at this stage now
where the wheat is being separated from the chaff.
One time, there was something like
over 100 small rocket start ups globally...
in many cases more significantly funded
than Rocket Lab.
You know, lots of dreams, lots of aspiration,
lots of cash.
At the end of the day, physics just does not care
how much money you put in it.
It is great to be joining you today
from Rocket Lab mission control
in Auckland, New Zealand,
to send our 42nd Electron to orbit.
Why are you attracted to the super hard stuff?
I don't know. I don't know.
Stage two ignition confirmed.
Rocket Lab's launched over 40 rockets.
It's doing reusable rockets.
It's building a bigger rocket to compete
head-to-head with SpaceX.
They've done it.
There's SpaceX, and there's Rocket Lab.
There's Elon Musk and Peter Beck,
and that's pretty much it.
The only sin in business is to run out of money.
That's why, when we still have money,
we need to make the tough choices to cut.
So, fundamentally, it's all about
doing what we have to do to survive,
to take care of our customers,
and now take care of our shareholders.
Hell of a day.
Yeah, it's been a hell of a day.
So I actually feel a bit relieved
to be on the other side of that.
We've had to make some difficult cuts.
We've moved some people around.
We've prioritized the things
that are keeping the business going.
So we can continue to work on everything.
In a way, we're good at this, because...
you know, when you spend years
building a really complicated machine
and a boat gets in your way...
ten seconds away from launch,
you just realize you have to come back tomorrow,
do it all again.
It's like Groundhog Day.
- I mean, realistically... - Yeah.
What's the possibility you'll go out?
Oh, no, no, no, I'm saying that we're gonna do this.
I know, but there is a possibility
that you guys will go out of business.
I mean, sure, if I die.
But as long as I'm alive,
we're gonna make this thing come together.
I mean, I'm not giving up.
If you look at this, this is a giant, open space...
When I met Chris for the first time
in these totally shitty, dilapidated buildings
in Alameda and he told me,
"One day, these will be gleaming rocket factories,"
I thought, no way.
And he did build those.
He did exactly what he said he was gonna do.
It just didn't work out.