Chris Williamson

Can't they be done better?

And so he gathered a bunch of rocket engineers who had experience at his house.

And I think this is an interesting part of the story.

He did a series of Saturday sessions of like,

first principles, let's look at all the historical things, but let's also say like how good could good be with all the modern technology, modern design, like is there a design that we can come up with that would be a massive improvement in space launch costs such that this would be possible?

And he realized like the market for space launch

That was the bottleneck.

That was the real problem that you couldn't get stuff off the planet cheap enough because all we had was Space Shuttle, which is this massive bloated government program that's not particularly capital efficient.

They weren't iterating.

They weren't doing volume.

They were way overspending on basic parts because they were all aerospace grade or whatever.

And so as soon as the PayPal thing sold, he's like, all right, I'm going to go, I'm going to hire some rocket engineers and like, let's see if we can do this.

Maybe.

I mean, he's not a rocket scientist.

So he's like, how did you learn how to do this?

And he's like, I just read books and I talk to people.

I read all the textbooks on rocket science that I could find.

I borrowed them and I started talking to experts.

And his rocket propulsion engineer was a guy who was like the foremost rocket hobbyist.

He had built the single largest rocket engine as just a dude in his garage, Tom Mueller.