Scott Nolan

That's not some five-year overnight success.

It's over two decades of building.

Took a long time.

We went from 20% of launch capacity to now, I believe it's like 90% of total mass to orbit in the world, 80, 90%.

Yeah.

So the US went from third place, second, third place, to now wildly first place.

And if we hadn't done that, China would be the leader in launch capacity.

And so, yeah, 23 years of hard work.

I have lots of friends who are still there, have been there the whole time working on the mission.

So it's been incredible to watch.

Back then, it was early days.

We were 30-something people.

We were designing test stands.

We were designing the first engines that powered the Falcon family of launch vehicles, first the Falcon 1, then the Falcon 9.

and just working through the inevitable challenges of engineering.

We were doing a clean sheet redesign of a rocket engine saying, okay, North Star mission, we want to make humanity multi-planetary.

Before that's gonna happen, we're gonna have to commercialize space.

If space is going to become commercialized, launch has to get way cheaper, a tenth the cost, ideally less.

You can't spend all this money to put something small with only limited utility into space.

And at the old launch cost, there were only a few applications that made sense.