Building a Construction Firm for Space

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Time Markers

00:19 – Guest welcome and the day he met Elon Musk and with whom he later worked with02:56 – On convincing military officials at Vandenberg Space Force Base to let SpaceX land the first stage of a Falcon 905:34 – Pivotal technologies and the ethos that drives a company.09:35 – On the speed of the iterative approach and team burnout12:00 – On early pushback of how SpaceX developed the Falcon 914:20 – On developing the tools to use in building infrastructure in space17:38 – On developing welding technology for space20:33 – On on-orbit x-ray technology to look inside satellites

Transcript – Lee Rosen Conversation

David Ariosto – Lee, thanks for making the time. I want to go back to around 2010 when you were with the Air Force, and I want to maybe set the scene a little bit here you were in Cape Canaveral. You’re waiting for then President Barack Obama, who would later give a speech about this increased reliance on private space companies. But at the moment, you’re standing there in this early SpaceX hangar, hanging around with a young Elon Musk with a lot of time to kill, and that moment became sort of a turning point in your career. And you just started chatting about crazy things, like landing rockets upright, and, you know, going to Mars. And so I wanted to start there, like, let’s, what did you talk about? And why was that such a turning point?

Lee Rosen – Yeah, it was. It was definitely a seminal day in my life and my career for sure. And, you know, the first thing I really remember about that day was, you know, we get to this hangar, you had to be there early because it’s the president, right. No one can come in and no one can go out. And it was pretty much just me and Elon hanging out in this hangar. And the first question, I think he had from here was, Who the hell are you and why are you here, which was an interesting question, as kind of a launch group commander on the base, and, you know, well, I own, you know, this launch pad. And he’s like, Well, no, this is the SpaceX Launchpad, which is a very different kind of concept for how things may have been in the past. So it was right then and there.

I knew that things were going to be different, and I had had the opportunity to interact with Elon quite a bit as SpaceX was getting the launch site and and starting to build up capability on that launch pad. So, you know, just the opportunity to see. It and chat about all those things that you mentioned, David was, was an amazing opportunity. And, you know, we talked about, you know, well, if you’re going to land a rocket, how would you do it, right? And we talked about, you know, while I said, How about some arrow structures on it? Well, too heavy. Well, how about a parachute? Well, that won’t work on Mars. And then you start really scratching your head, going, this guy is either a little bit nuts or has is onto something here. And then we started talking about propulsive landing and those kind of things. And, you know, it seems so elemental to where we are today. But man, that vision, in that foresight was very clear to me right from the get go.

David Ariosto – You know, one of the funny things is, I think about this in terms of your trajectory and how it runs in tandem with SpaceX, in many ways, because you were there for a better part of a decade, but you later became director at Vandenberg for SpaceX, and at the time, you had to effectively convince military officials that it was okay to send what was tantamount to a missile to come back at them. I’m talking about, you know, this relatively new world, reusable rocketry. I’m certainly kind of curious, like, what those conversations were like, and how much like the eyes bugged out of the head when you when you talked about this.

Lee Rosen – Yeah you know, the whole landing thing was, was so different than anybody had ever thought about. And, you know, we had first contemplated doing land, you know, water landings, to make sure that we understood the the technology, and that our ability to hit a point on the earth with the rocket was, was good. And even our first launch at Vandenberg, we did a water landing successfully, and came down in the area where we wanted it to come down. And, you know, talking to the official at Vandenberg, you know, everyone knew that this was an inflection point, right, that things were going to be changing. And everyone, you know, there was very little pushback. Of course, the safety community was going to be concerned about it, and things like that. And I think, you know, there were people in the community that knew that this was, this was truly game changing, right? And, you know, and some of those, and I’ll give you know credit to folks like Brigadier General retired Wayne Monty, who was the commander at the 45th Space Wing when we did the first land landing.

And you know, the infrastructure there the cape, the proximity of Port Canaveral, all of those kind of things were things that had to be taken to account from a safety perspective. But General Monteith, at that time, knew that, man this, this capability, was really going to change the game and and really put his stars on the line, saying that we have done the analysis, we understand what’s going on here, and we believe that SpaceX has the capability to make this happen. And you know, the first successful landing for SpaceX was the land landing on the 21st of December, 2015 you know, I remember this like the birth of my children, right? And, you know, I think from there on out, it became clear that we clearly knew what the heck we were doing and, and, you know, the rest literally is, now history.

David Ariosto – I mean, but there was a yeah, sorry, yeah. But just like, also this, this idea that you’re coming from, you’re coming from the military, you’re coming from a federal agency, and you’re coming from from a place where budgets mean just different things, I would think, in that context. So everything from just building roads on the cheap to, you know, what it would it take to maybe go like, you know, www.rocketspareparts.com, I mean, I’m being facetious a little bit here, but I mean, that was kind of tantamount a little bit to those early space days, and excuse me, SpaceX days. And I’m wondering, like, how that translated, and I kind of want to get into this, how this translated into where you took this. But before we do that, you know you’re you were instrumental with Falcon 9. You and Frank Tibor, who also works at think orbital, where you’re at, were instrumental in terms of starship these are pivotal technologies that we’re looking at are only starting to come to bear now. So like, how did that company ethos drive that? I’m wondering.

Lee Rosen – Which company ethos are you talking about? The ethos for SpaceX?

David Ariosto – Yeah, SpaceX starting, and then we’ll get to ThinkOrbital.

Lee Rosen – Yeah for sure. So, you know, it’s kind of funny. David, you know, I think the fundamental thing that I took away from Yvonne was the only constraint that you really have to deal with is physics, right? And all the other stuff was kind of made up. And there are good reasons for some of those rules, and there are no reasons for other of those rules, right? And if we over constrain problems. Problems and don’t understand the fundamental physics of those problems, then you’re never going to be able to solve those problems.

So if the physics closes and you can make that work, do that first, and then we’ll worry about all the other stuff, all the rules, all the regulations and things like that. I think that was ingrained into us at SpaceX that you know, if you, if you really want to solve a problem, if, if the physics doesn’t close, don’t even don’t go there, but if it does, then we’ll fix the other stuff later. And I think you know, you talked about kind of this, this other part of the scrappiness ethos of SpaceX, right? And what the government thought about it. It just reminds me of, you know, the first time in Vanderburg we had to go buy tanks for RP one, the rocket appellate one, kerosene that feeds the Falcon 9, right? And, and we found these tanks that were at a chemical company lying in a field in Houston, rotting on eBay, literally, and, you know, and normal tankage costs on the order of 10 bucks a gallon for a new tank, and then a used tank was like 50 cents a gallon or something like that.

So it was an order of magnitude savings, right? And we sent somebody down there, and they’re like, well, they’re kind of crappy, they’re a little bit rusty, but, you know, they might work. And we got one of the tanks back up to Vandenberg. I remember getting into the tank and poking at, you know, some rust with my pen, and a hole went straight through the tank. And I went, Wow, this, this could be interesting. But we got them cheap, which was fantastic, and we did the repairs on the tank, and we brought them up to the American Society for mechanical engineering standards and all those kind of things. And we showed this to the government, and they went, you bought these tanks on eBay? We’re like, Yeah, we bought them on eBay, but here’s all the documentation, here’s all the testing, all those kind of things. And again, if you bring the data, if you show that these things are possible, then it really changes a bunch of minds, right? And that’s kind of was, we did that on several different systems to show the government that, you know, the data speaks, and that’s that was the approach that we took.

David Ariosto – I remember hearing from another former SpaceX employee that there’s a single s in between the line, or the word scrappy and crappy, in that sense in the SpaceX being on the lateral smell.

Lee Rosen – Yeah.

David Ariosto – Right, right. Oh yeah. Small s exactly is pace, though, the pace of all this, and the speed of the iterative approach, and, you know, the sort of the design structure in terms of vertical, vertical integration, I wonder, like, how that sort of plays into, like, just the exhaustiveness of the effort, and, you know, maybe even sort of the burnout that that, you know, the team can experience. And you know how that sort of plays into sort of long term structure.

Lee Rosen – Yeah, it’s funny because, you know, we used to say it’s, if you remember the Old Navy saying, it’s not just a job, it’s an adventure, right? SpaceX was not just a job, it was more of a lifestyle, right? And you have to be ready to give it all. And another great thing about Elon was that he would never expect you to do anything that he wouldn’t do himself, which, you know, is a hallmark of most leaders, right? Is that he would put it on the line, he would work the hours, he would make the decisions, all of those kind of things. And that was a very powerful incentive for people to want to work hard, not to mention, you’re working on, like, the coolest technology on the planet, doing amazing things and really changing the game.

And you know, when I first got into this, I had no intention of retiring from the military, but after talking to him and knowing what the situation of the supply base for rocket launches in the United States was and had become, you know, where an entire industry, from a commercial perspective, had been offshore to our Great friends, the Russians and to the French right? And that there was a monopoly kind of being established in government space launch, and the prices were going up, that we had to have competition. We had to get more capability on orbit for warfighter, and we were going in the reverse direction. And Elon really presented the only opportunity to reverse that very dangerous trend.

David Ariosto – You know, what’s interesting though about this? I think in a lot of the pushback that you had at sort of the early onset, and I’m talking even sort of like old Apollo luminaries that that were very, very vocal against this, that this private sector approach that was being adopted, you know, I mean, I don’t want to suggest that SpaceX. And Blue Origin and other companies at that point was just sort of the genesis of commercial space, but at least in terms of this modern era that those were sort of the embryonic stages, but questions about human space flight are wildly different than than having this iterative approach of Falcon 9’s and starships and, you know, it blows up on the pad, or it heads out to sea and like, you know, it’s no big deal, get it back and then do it again. That it that had to be is sort of your purview, kind of in the back of your mind a little bit as as you started to push forward. Like, how, how applicable This was when human lives were really on the line.

Lee Rosen – Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. It’s very different when you’re strapping your friend on top of a rocket, or you got to tell little Johnny or little Jill that mom or dad is going to come back safely, right? I mean, that’s, that’s a lot of pressure. It’s a very different ball game. So, you know, we built the whole system, from the get go with, you know, humans in mind, even you know, the first cargo version of Dragon had a window on it, right? The cargo didn’t want to look outside, or the mice that were being watched didn’t care, but it had a window on it. And I think it was that foresight that we knew that human space travel was essential. And part of the vision of SpaceX right to make life multi planetary, to get large numbers of humans to Mars, that was always in every part of the calculus. A big piece of what we did every day is this antithetical to getting us to Mars or not. And should we continue down that path? Right? And I think that that you talk about kind of the things that drove the company, that that whole imperative for making life multi planetary was kind of a in the room every time you made a major decision, you know, so that piece was important, yeah.

David Ariosto – You know, the window question is even actually kind of almost emblematic of, kind of a broader shift within the industry itself, in terms like the push towards more autonomous systems, as opposed to, I mean, granted, when you’re when you’re launching on Falcon 9, there’s not a hell of a lot of steering going on, but, but there’s this. There’s great at least from inside the vehicle itself, but, but this, this sort of, this pivot a little bit more in terms of relying on automated systems, and what that looks like when you talk about, you know, things deeper in space, or interplanetary space, or the nature of landings. I want to talk about that now, because I think now that we’re in space, so to speak, that seems to be where think orbital is focused.

And this is a space infrastructure company, you know, you’re talking about building things at scale, developing the tools that you need to build and scale. I mean, how else would you go on to build a Death Star in space if you don’t have the tools to essentially do that? Because there are size constraints, right? So, you know, I think when you don’t have those, you start to develop the techniques this. I mean, I guess it’s wrong to say the sky’s the limit. Space is now the limit in this sense. But explain a little bit more to me about what those tools are, specifically with regard to this, these welding guns that you have because you just you can’t do this in the same we can’t do welding in the same way in microgravity, in the vacuum of space, just this simple fundamentals of physics where, you know, conduction of convection just don’t work the same way. So I’ve wondered if you can, like, name is, give us a primer there first, and then we’ll kind of get into more what you’re doing.

Lee Rosen – Yeah, for sure. And I think again, this was, you know, at SpaceX, we were always looking for ways to overcome constraints, and we had the opportunity, while we were there, to overcome the fundamental constraint of space, which was getting there, right and now launches everything we had hoped it would be right. It’s reliable, it’s affordable, it’s super high cadence, all those kind of things. For 100 bucks a month, you can have Starlink and 250 megabits per second. It’s super low latency anywhere on the planet, right?

David Ariosto – Sounds like you’re still working for SpaceX Lee.

Lee Rosen – I’m always working for SpaceX, believe me. You know, I still have a vested interest, shall we say, but I do believe, I do believe. I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it. So, you know, those constraints were huge in my estimation. Another huge constraint that we have to overcome in our space and there are tons of them, is the size of things in outer space, right? Because today, everything in space, even in venerable International Space Station, is tiny compared to any terrestrial application, right? And the reason why that is is because we’re fundamentally constrained by that rocket, right? And we call it the tyranny of the payload fairing, right? And the way we do things in space is the way we’ve been doing it since the beginning, right?

You build it on the ground, you cram it inside a rocket, you launch it into outer space. Now, if you’re super creative, you can do some origami to increase your outer mold line, but your inner mold line is kind of in web varieties. Course. Yeah, right. So the volume of whatever you’re trying to do, and, you know, for for human habitation, over research and things like that, that inner volume matters quite a bit, is fixed by the size of the rocket. And even a huge rocket like starship with, you know, a nine meter diameter, it’s still, you know, not a place I want to live for a long trip to Mars or for an extended period of time in our space, right?

David Ariosto – The welding? How do you do the welding in space?

Lee Rosen – Yeah, well, the welding in space is interesting, right? Because earth, you need carrier gasses to do on terrestrial type of welding. So that kind of welding doesn’t work in the vacuum of outer space, but there’s a type of welding called electron beam welding that has been around since the 1960s it was developed for applications where you needed super deep penetration and.

David Ariosto – These are Soviet initiatives?

Lee Rosen – Yeah, some of it was done, you know, the patent Institute in the Ukraine is, you know, one of the original folks that that pioneered this technology, as well as the welding Institute in the UK. But they developed this technology called electron beam welding. And basically, you take a stream of high speed electrons and, you know, get two negatives next to each other. Those electrons repel each other, and they travel down the distance of a gun. And you know, we use this at SpaceX, actually, to do some of the welding on the thrust chambers. But there are huge guns right there, super high power guns that really weren’t suitable for outer space. So we developed a gun that you can hold in your hand here. Basically we get the top of the gun to minus 20,000 volts. We get a little filament to 20,000 volts. They repel each other. They travel down the length of the gun, and you about four centimeters from the bottom of the gun. You’ve got the perfect focal length for doing welding and melting things inside of a vacuum, right? And in fact, it only works inside the vacuum if you have a bad vacuum, or if you’re trying to do this in air. It will short out those electrons want to go anywhere, other than to that grounded piece of metal that you’re trying to melt. And it makes, actually, pretty, beautiful welds. I’ll just do a little show and tell and show you, kind of, some of the nice welds that this thing can do. Yeah, super deep hand training, nice worlds.

David Ariosto – So the old Air Force guy is building guns in space. This is what you’re telling me?

Lee Rosen – Well, that’s kind of the interesting thing about this technology is it’s kind of like a Swiss army knife. David, you can use it to weld. You can use it by electronically steering the beam to do cutting. And let me show you an example of that, where basically you’re sculpting metal away from the center line, which is cool because you don’t generate debris, nor do you generate thrust when you do that, which you know, if you piss me off, I’m going to sneak up to you and cut your solar panels off, and you won’t know until, until the lights go up, essentially.

David Ariosto – All right, so, so the last thing, the last thing I want to talk to you about a bit is your technology that you’re developing with regard to to x ray capacities and the capacity look inside satellites, potentially from several kilometers away. And so this is, this is useful, not not only in terms of repair and maintenance of existing satellites, but also in the geopolitical context, you know, what actually is inside that Russian satellites? You know, a little bit of a peer inside from from a few kilometers away, I think you you likened it to, sort of a sort of, you to space plane era in space and, you know, terms of that sort of high altitude reconnaissance that you saw back when, like, explain this a little bit more to me, both in terms of technology, but, like, what, what’s, what does this mean in terms of the next era, in terms of transparency, and in terms of just, you know, the broader dynamic between nations?

Lee Rosen – Yeah, that’s a great question. So we talked about, kind of the Swiss Army, nice capability of effects of this electron beam gun that we have, right? And one of the other effects is that if you take that stream of electrons, hit of that it’s traveling very, very quickly, and hit a dense piece of metal and slow it down, you generate a lot of heat, but you also generate X rays, which, at first, we’re like, great. We’ve got our own X ray source. We can inspect the welds that we just did. And then, kind of, from my Air Force past working in the space superiority world, I’m like, wow, if we can generate X rays. You know, I had just had a hip replacement, right? And I got a lot of X rays done. Like, imagine if I could use those x rays to look inside, like the doc looks inside to do my hip replacement. You know, why wouldn’t we do that in outer space? So we started doing some some experimentation with the low power x rays that we were getting off of the gun. And then I was up at the National Space Council briefing, and they said, Well, you know, we have this problem. We believe that the Russians are hiding capability inside of satellites.

How far away could you be? So it’s not a provocative event to do inspection and characterization of satellites. So we went back to the drawing board, and now we can use different types of X ray sources. And focusing of those x ray sources, I’m not going to tell you the how, but because that’s pretty company proprietary, but the itinerant effect is we can focus those x rays down to get it onto a target and basically look inside a satellite, penetrating up to several centimeters of the skin on the satellite, looking actually through the satellite at about 10 kilometers, to tell if there’s something in that satellite that shouldn’t be there. And the other cool thing about X rays, like when you take your luggage through the the TSA checkpoint, right, not only does it look inside and get an image of the inside of your luggage, it also kind of can screen the materials that are inside. There’s some interesting X ray effects that you can use based on the detector and the software to pull out different materials, so that will also be helpful in trying to characterize and determine the intent of enemy satellites or adversary satellites. And I think that’s kind of the key here, from a geopolitical perspective, the ability to attribute capability to others, much like during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as you mentioned that you too, was able to show the world that the Russians were doing nefarious things on the island of Cuba, right? So why not have that capability to do it in outer space and, oh, by the way, if I want to do it for anomaly resolution or things like that, you can also get great imagery up close of the internals of your satellite to.

David Ariosto – Cuba being my old stomping ground, believe it or not. But all right. Lee, founder of think orbital, a space infrastructure company based up there in Colorado, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to spend here with us on space minds.

Lee Rosen – Thanks so much, David. I really enjoyed it, and really appreciate your chance to do this.