Chris Williamson

And to do this, he like went around trying to buy a rocket.

He's like, why are these rockets so fucking expensive?

He went to Russia and tried to buy an intercontinental ICBM.

And they laughed at him and spit on him and like fucked him around and he got pissed.

And so he's like, maybe the problem is that space launch costs are so high.

Why are rockets so expensive?

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.