This conversation with Jeff Bezos explores his formative experiences, his vision for space exploration and humanity's future, and his philosophy on innovation, decision-making, and long-term thinking, all framed by his entrepreneurial journey.
Mind Map
انقر للتوسيع
انقر لاستعراض خريطة الذهن التفاعلية الكاملة
- The following is a conversation with Jeff Bezos,
founder of Amazon and Blue Origin.
This is his first time doing a conversation
of this kind and of this length.
And as he told me, it felt like we could have easily talked
for many more hours, and I'm sure we will.
This is the Lex Fridman podcast.
And now, dear friends, here's Jeff Bezos.
You spent a lot of your childhood with your grandfather
on a ranch here in Texas,
and I heard you had a lot of work to do around the ranch.
So what's the coolest job you remember doing there?
- Wow, coolest.
- Most interesting.
Most memorable.
Most impactful.
- And it was a real working ranch.
My grand, I spent all my summers on that ranch
from age four to 16.
And my grandfather was really taking me to those
in the summers, in the early summers,
he was letting me pretend to help on the ranch.
'Cause of course, a 4-year-old is a burden,
not a help in real life.
He was really just watching me and taking care of me
and be was doing that because my mom was so young.
She had me when she was 17,
and so he was sort of giving her a break.
And my grandmother and my grandfather
would take me for these summers.
But as I got a little older,
I actually was helpful on the ranch and I loved it.
I was out there,
like my grandfather had a huge influence on me,
huge factor in my life.
I did all the jobs you would do on a ranch.
I've fixed windmills and laid fences
and pipelines and you know, done all the things
that any rancher would do,
vaccinated, the animals, everything.
But we had a you know, my grandfather,
after my grandmother died, I was about 12
and I kept coming to the ranch.
So it was then, it was just him and me, just the two of us.
And he was completely addicted to the soap opera,
the Days of Our Lives.
And we would go back to the ranch house every day
around 1:00 PM or so to watch days of our lives
like sands through an hourglass.
So are the days of our lives.
- Just the image of the two sitting there
watching a soap opera as ranchers.
- He had these big, crazy dogs.
It was really a very formative experience for me.
But the key thing about it for me,
the great gift I got from it
was that my grandfather was so resourceful, you know,
he did everything himself.
He made his own veterinary tools.
He would make needles to suture the cattle up with,
like he would find a little piece of wire and heat it up
and pound it thin and drill a hole in it and sharpen it.
So, you know, you learn different things
on a ranch than you would learn
you know, growing up in a city.
- So self-reliance.
- Yeah, like figuring out that you can solve problems
with enough persistence and ingenuity.
And my grandfather bought a D6 bulldozer,
which is a big bulldozer, and he got it for like $5,000.
'cause it was completely broken down.
It was like a 1955 Caterpillar, D6 bulldozer
knew it would've cost, I don't know,
more than a $100,000.
And we spent an entire summer fixing,
like repairing that bulldozer.
And we'd, you know, use mail order
to buy big gears for the transmission.
And they'd show up.
They'd be too heavy to move,
so we'd have to build a crane, you know,
just that kind of, kinda that problem solving mentality.
He had it so powerfully, you know,
he did all of his own.
He'd just, he didn't pick up the phone and call somebody.
He would figure it out on his own.
Doing his own veterinary work, you know.
- But just the image of the two of you
fixing a D6 bulldozer and then going in
for a little break at 1:00 PM to watch a soap opera.
- Laying on the floor.
That's how he watched TV.
- Yeah.
- He was a really, really remarkable guy.
- That's how I imagine Clint Eastwood also
in all those westerns.
When he's not doing what he is doing,
he's just watching soap operas.
All right, I read that you fell in love
with the idea of space and space exploration
when you were five watching Neil Armstrong
walking on the moon.
So let me ask you to look back at the historical context
and impact of that.
So the space race from 1957 to 1969
between the Soviet Union and the US was in many ways epic.
It was a rapid sequence of dramatic events
for satellite to space, for a human to space,
for a spacewalk, first uncrewed landing on the moon,
then some failures, explosions,
deaths on both sides actually,
and then the first human walking on the moon.
What are some of the more inspiring moments
or insights you take away from that time,
those few years, that just 12 years?
- Well, I mean, there's so much inspiring there.
You know, one of the great things to take away from that,
one of the great von Braun quotes is
"I have come to use the word impossible with great caution."
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- And so that's kind of the big story of Apollo
is that things, you know, going to the moon
was literally an analogy that people used
for something that's impossible.
You know, oh yeah, you'll do that when you know,
men walk on the moon.
- Yeah.
- And of course it finally happened.
So, you know, I think it was pulled forward in time
because of the space race,
I think you know, with the geopolitical implications
and you know, how much resource was put into it,
you know, at the peak, that program was spending,
you know, two or 3% of GDP on the Apollo program.
So much resource.
I think it was pulled forward in time.
You know, we kind of did it ahead
of when we quote unquote should have done it.
- Yeah.
- And so in that way, it's also a technical marvel.
I mean, it's truly incredible.
It's, you know, it's the 20th century version
of building the pyramids or something.
It's you know, it's an achievement
that because it was pulled forward in time
and because it did something
that had previously thought impossible,
it rightly deserves its place, as you know,
in the pantheon of great human achievements.
- And of course, you named the projects The Rockets
that Blue Origin is working on
after some of the folks involved.
- Yeah.
- I don't understand why I didn't say New Gagarin.
is that-
- There's an American bias in the naming.
I apologize.
- It's very strange.
- Lex.
- Just asking for a friend.
Clarify.
- I'm a big fan of Gagarin though.
And in fact, I think his first words in space,
I think are incredible.
He, you know, he purportedly said "my God, it's blue."
And that really drives home.
No one had seen the earth from space.
No one knew that we were on this blue planet.
- Yeah.
- No one knew what it looked like from out there.
And Gagarin was the first person to see it.
- One of the things I think about is how dangerous
those early days were for Gagarin,
for Glen, for everybody involved.
Like how big of a risk they were all taking.
- They were taking huge risks.
I'm not sure what the Soviets thought
about Gagarin's flight,
but I think that the Americans thought
that the Alan Shephard flight,
the flight that you know, New Shephard is named after,
the first American in space.
He went on his suborbital flight.
They thought he had about a 75% chance of success.
So, you know, that's a pretty big risk, a 25% risk.
- It's kind of interesting that Alan Shephard
is not quite as famous as John Glenn.
So for people who don't know, Alan Shephard
is the first astronaut-
- The first American in space.
- American in suborbital flight.
- Correct.
- And then the first orbital flight is-
- John Glenn is the first American to orbit the earth.
By the way, I have the most charming, sweet,
incredible letter from John Glenn,
which I have framed and hang on my office wall.
- What did he say?
- Where he tells me how grateful he is
that we have named New Glenn after him.
And he sent me that letter about a week before he died.
And it's really an incredible,
it's also a very funny letter.
He's writing and he says you know,
this is a letter about New Glenn from the original Glenn.
And he's just, he's got a great sense of humor,
and he's very happy about it and grateful.
It's very sweet.
- Does he say ps don't mess this up?
Or is that-
- No, he doesn't.
- Make me look good.
- He doesn't do that.
- Okay.
- But wait, but John, wherever you are,
we got you covered.
- All right, good.
So back to maybe the big picture of space.
When you look up at the stars and think big,
what do you hope is the future of humanity?
Hundreds, thousands of years from now out in space?
- I would love to see, you know,
a trillion humans living in the solar system.
If we had a trillion humans,
we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts
and a thousand Einsteins.
That would, you know, our solar system would be full of life
and intelligence and energy.
And we can easily support a civilization that large
with all of the resources in the solar system.
- So what do you think that looks like?
Giant space stations?
- Yeah, the only way to get to that vision
is with giant space stations.
You know, the planetary surfaces are just way too small.
So you can, I mean, unless you turn them
into giant space stations or something.
But, but yeah, we will take materials from the moon
and from near earth objects and from the asteroid belt
and so on, and we'll build giant O'Neill style colonies
and people will live in those.
And they have a lot of advantages over planetary surfaces.
You can spin them to get normal earth gravity.
You can put them where you want them.
I think most people are gonna wanna live near Earth,
not necessarily in earth orbit, but in you know, earth,
but near earth vicinity orbits.
And so they can move you know, relatively quickly
back and forth between their station and Earth.
So I think a lot of people,
especially in the early stages,
are not gonna want to give up Earth altogether.
- They go to earth for vacation.
- Yeah.
Same way that you know, you might go
to Yellowstone National Park for vacation.
People will, and no one,
and people will get to choose where they live on earth
or whether they live in space,
but they'll be able to use much more energy
and much more material resource in space
than they would be able to use on earth.
- One of the interesting ideas you had
is to move the heavy industry away from Earth.
So people sometimes have this idea
that somehow space exploration is in conflict
with the celebration of the planet earth,
that we should focus on preserving earth.
And basically your ideas that space travel
and space exploration is a way to preserve earth.
- Exactly.
This planet, we've sent robotic probes to all the planets.
We know that this is the good one.
- Yeah.
Not to play favorites or anything.
- But earth really is the good planet.
It's amazing, the ecosystem we have here,
all of the life and the lush, the plant life
and you know, the water resources, everything.
This planet is really extraordinary.
And of course, we evolved on this planet,
so of course it's perfect for us,
but it's also perfect for all the advanced life forms
on this planet, all the animals and so on.
And so this is a gem.
We do need to take care of it.
And as we enter the Anthropocene,
as we get, as we humans have gotten
so sophisticated and large and impactful,
as we stride across this planet, you know,
that is going to, as we continue,
we want to use a lot of energy.
We want to use a lot of energy per capita.
We've gotten amazing things.
We don't want to go backwards.
You know, if you think about the good old days,
they're mostly an illusion.
Like in almost every way,
life is better for almost everyone today
than it was say, 50 years ago or a hundred years.
We live better lives by and large than our grandparents did,
and their grandparents did, and so on.
And you can see that in global illiteracy rates,
global poverty rates, global infant mortality rates,
like almost any metric you choose,
we're better off than we used to be.
And we get, you know, antibiotics
and all kinds of lifesaving medical care
and so on and so on.
And there's one thing that is moving backwards,
and it's the natural world.
So it is a fact that 500 years ago, pre-industrial age,
the natural world was pristine.
It was incredible.
And we have traded some of that pristine beauty
for all of these other gifts that we have
as an advanced society.
And we can have both.
But to do that, we have to go to space.
And all of this, really,
the most fundamental measure is energy usage per capita.
And when you look at, you know,
you do want to continue to use more and more energy,
it is going to make your life better in so many ways.
But that's not compatible ultimately
with living on a finite planet.
And so we have to go out into the solar system
and really you could argue about when you have to do that,
but you can't credibly argue
about whether you have to do that.
- Eventually, we have to do that.
- Exactly.
- Well, you don't often talk about it,
but let me ask you on that topic about the Blue Ring
and the orbital reef space infrastructure projects.
What's your vision for these?
- So Blue Ring is a very interesting spacecraft
that is designed to take up to 3000 kilograms of payload
up to geosynchronous orbit or in lunar vicinity.
It has two different kinds of propulsion.
It has chemical propulsion, and it has electric propulsion.
And so it can,
you can use blue ring in a couple different ways.
You can slowly move, let's say up to geosynchronous orbit
using electric propulsion
that might take you know, a hundred days
or 150 days depending on how much mass you're carrying.
And then, and reserve your chemical propulsion
so that you can change orbits quickly
in geosynchronous orbit.
Or you can use the chemical propulsion first
to quickly get up to geosynchronous
and then use your electrical propulsion
to slowly change your geosynchronous orbit.
Blue Ring has a couple of interesting features.
It provides a lot of services
to these payloads.
So the payload, it could be one large payload,
or it can be a number of small payloads,
and it provides thermal management,
it provides electric power, it provides compute,
provides communications.
And so when you design a payload for Blue Ring,
you don't have,
you don't have to figure out all of those things
on your own.
So kind of radiation tolerant compute
is a complicated thing to do.
And so we have an unusually large amount
of radiation tolerant compute on board Blue Ring,
and you can, your payload can just use that
when it needs to.
So it's sort of all these services,
it's you know, it's like a set of APIs.
It's a little bit like Amazon web services,
but for space payloads that need to move about
an earth vicinity or lunar vicinity.
- AWSS space.
Okay, so computing space.
So you get a giant chemical rocket
to get a payload out to orbit,
and then you have these admins that show up,
this Blue Ring thing that manages various things
like compute.
- Exactly.
And it can also provide transportation
and move you around to different orbits.
- Including humans, you think?
- No, but Blue Ring is not designed to move humans around.
It's designed to move payloads around.
- Okay.
- So we're also building a lunar lander,
which is of course designed to land humans
on the surface of the moon.
- I'm gonna ask you about that,
but let me ask you to just step back to the old days.
You were at Princeton
with aspirations to be a theoretical physicist.
- Yeah.
- What attracted you to physics
and why did you change your mind
and not become, why you're not Jeff Bezos,
the famous theoretical physicist?
- So I loved physics and I studied physics
and computer science,
and I was proceeding along the physics path.
I was planning to major in physics
and I wanted to be a theoretical physicist.
And the computer science
was sort of something I was doing for fun.
I really loved it.
And I was very good at the programming
and doing those things.
And I enjoyed all my computer science classes immensely,
but I really was determined to be a theoretical physicist.
It's why I went to Princeton in the first place.
It was definitely, and then I realized
I was gonna be a mediocre theoretical physicist.
And there were a few people in my classes,
like in quantum mechanics and so on,
who they could effortlessly do things
that were so difficult for me.
And I realized like you know, there are a thousand ways
to be smart and to be a really, you know,
theoretical physics is not one of those fields
where only the top few percent
actually move the state of the art forward.
It's one of those things where you have to be
really just, your brain has to be wired in a certain way.
And there was a guy named,
one of these people who convinced me.
He didn't mean to convince me,
but just by observing him, he convinced me
that I should not try to be a theoretical physicist.
His name was Yosanta.
And Yosanta was from Sri Lanka.
And he was one of the most brilliant people I'd ever met.
My friend Joe and I were working on a very difficult
partial differential equations problem set one night.
And there was one problem that we worked on for three hours,
and we made no headway whatsoever.
And we looked up at each other at the same time
and we said, Yosanta.
So we went to Yosanta's dorm room.
And he was there, he was almost always there.
And we said Yosanta, we're having trouble solving
this partial differential equation,
would you mind taking a look?
And he said of course.
By the way, he was the most humble, most kind person.
And so he took our,
he looked at our problem and he stared at it
for just a few seconds, maybe 10 seconds.
And he said cosine.
And I said, what do you mean Yosanta?
What do you mean cosine?
He said that's the answer.
And I said no, no, no, come on.
And he said let me show you.
And he took out some paper
and he wrote down three pages of equations,
everything canceled out.
And the answer was cosine.
And I said Yosanta, did you do that in your head?
And he said oh no, that would be impossible.
A few years ago I solved a similar problem
and I could map this problem onto that problem.
And then it was immediately obvious
that the answer was cosine.
I had a few, you know, you have an experience like that,
you realize maybe being a theoretical physicist
isn't what your,
isn't what the universe wants you to be.
And so I switched to computer science and you know,
that worked out really well for me.
I enjoy it.
I still enjoy it today.
- Yeah, there's a particular kind of intuition you need
to be a great physicist, applied to physics.
- I think the mathematical skill required today is so high.
You have to be a world-class mathematician
to be a successful theoretical physicist today.
And it's not you know,
you probably need other skills too,
intuition, lateral thinking, and so on.
But without just top-notch math skills,
you're unlikely to be successful.
- And visualization skill,
you have to be able to really kind of do
these kinds of thought experiments.
And if you want truly great creativity,
actually Walter Isaacson writes about you.
It puts you on the same level as Einstein.
- Well, that's very kind.
I'm an inventor.
If you wanna boil down what I am,
I'm really an inventor.
And I look at things
and I can come up with atypical solutions and you know,
and then I can create a hundred such atypical solutions
for something.
99 of them may not survive, you know, scrutiny.
But one of those 100 is like hmm, maybe there is,
maybe that might work.
And then you can keep going from there.
So that kind of lateral thinking,
that kind of inventiveness
in a high dimensionality space where the search space
is very large, that's where my inventive skills come.
That's the thing is I self-identify
as an inventor more than anything else.
- Yeah, and he describes in all kinds of different ways,
Walter Isaacson does that creativity
combined with childlike wander that you've maintained
still to this day, all of that combined together.
Is there, like if you were to study
your own brain introspect, how do you think,
what's your thinking process like?
We'll talk about the writing process
of putting it down on paper,
which is quite rigorous and famous at Amazon.
But how do you, when you sit down, maybe alone,
maybe with others,
and thinking through this high dimensional space
and looking for creative solutions, creative paths forward,
is there something you could say about that process?
- It's such a good question,
and I honestly don't know how it works.
If I did, I would try to explain it.
I know it involves lots of wandering.
- Yeah.
- So I, you know, when I sit down to work on a problem,
I know I don't know where I'm going.
So to go in a straight line, to be efficient,
efficiency and invention are sort of at odds
because invention, real invention,
not incremental improvement.
Incremental improvement is so important
in every endeavor, in everything you do.
You have to work hard on also just making things
a little bit better.
But I'm talking about real invention,
real lateral thinking, that requires wandering.
And you have to give yourself permission to wander.
I think a lot of people,
they feel like wandering is inefficient.
And you know, like when I sit down at a meeting,
I don't know how long the meeting is gonna take
if we're trying to solve a problem.
Because if I did, then I'd already,
I'd know there's some kind of straight line
that we're drawing to the solution.
The reality is we may have to wander for a long time.
And I do like group invention.
I think there's certainly nothing more fun
than sitting at a whiteboard with you know,
a group of smart people and spit balling
and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas,
and then solutions to the objections
and going back and forth.
So like you know, sometimes you wake up with an idea
in the middle of the night
and sometimes you sit down with a group of people
and go back and forth
and both things are really pleasurable.
- And when you wander,
I think one key thing is to notice a good idea
and to maybe, to notice the kernel of a good idea.
Maybe pull at that string.
Because I don't think a good idea has come fully formed.
- A hundred percent right.
In fact, when I come up with what I think is a good idea
and it survives kind of the first level of scrutiny,
you know, that I do in my own head
and I'm ready to tell somebody else about the idea,
I will often say look,
it is going to be really easy for you to find objections
to this idea, but work with me.
- There's something there.
And that is intuition.
- Yeah.
- Because it's really easy to kill new ideas
in the beginning.
'Cause they do have so many,
so many easy objections to them.
So you need to,
you need to kind of forewarn people
and say look, I know it's gonna take a lot of work
to get this to a fully formed idea.
Let's get started on that.
It'll be fun.
- So you got that ability to say cosine
in you somewhere after all.
Maybe not on math, but-
- In a different domain.
- Yeah.
- There are a thousand ways to be smart, by the way.
- Yeah.
- And that is a really, like when I go around, you know,
and I meet people, I'm always looking
for the way that they're smart.
And you find it is,
that's one of the things that makes the world so interesting
and fun is that it is not,
it's not like IQ is a single dimension.
There are people who are smart in such unique ways.
- Yeah, you just gave me a good response
to when somebody calls me an idiot on the internet.
You know, that's a thousand ways to be smart, sir.
- Well, they might tell you,
yeah, but there are a million to be ways to be dumb.
- Yeah, right.
I feel like that's a Mark Twain quote.
Okay.
All right, you gave me an amazing tour
of Blue Origin Rocket Factory and Launch Complex
in the historic Cape Canaveral.
That's where New Glenn,
the big rocket we talked about is being built
and will launch.
Can you explain what the New Glenn Rocket is
and tell me some interesting technical aspects
of how it works?
- Sure.
New Glenn is a very large,
a heavy lift launch vehicle.
It'll take about 45 metric tons to LEO,
very, very large class.
It's about half the thrust,
a little more than half the thrust
of the Saturn V Rocket.
So it's about 3.9 million pounds of thrust on liftoff.
The booster has seven BE-4 engines.
Each engine generates a little more
than 550,000 pounds of thrust.
The engines are fueled by liquid natural gas,
liquified natural gas, LNG as the fuel
and LOX as the oxidizer.
The cycle is an ox-riched stage combustion cycle.
It's a cycle that was really pioneered by the Russians.
It's a very good cycle.
And that engine is also going to power the first stage
of the Vulcan rocket,
which is the United Launch Alliance rocket.
Then the second stage of New Glenn
is powered by two BE-3U engines,
which is a upper stage variant
of our New Shephard liquid hydrogen engine.
So the BE-3U has 160,000 pounds of thrust.
So two of those 320,000 pounds of thrust
and hydrogen is a very good propellant
for upper stages because it has very high ISP.
It's not a great propellant in my view for booster stages
because the stages then get physically so large.
Hydrogen has very high ISP,
but liquid hydrogen is very,
is not dense at all.
So to store liquid hydrogen, you know,
if you need to store many thousands
of pounds of liquid hydrogen,
your tanks, your liquid hydrogen tank, it's very large.
So you really, you get more benefit from the higher ISP,
the specific impulse.
You get more benefit from the higher specific impulse
on the second stage.
And that stage carries less propellant.
So you don't get such geometrically gigantic tanks.
The Delta IV is an example of a vehicle
that is all hydrogen.
The booster stage is also hydrogen.
And I think that it's a very effective vehicle,
but it never was very cost effective.
So it's operationally very capable
but not very cost effective.
- So size is also costly.
- Size is costly.
So it's interesting.
Rockets love to be big.
Everything works better.
- What do you mean by that?
You've told me that before.
It sounds epic, but what does it mean?
- I mean, when you look at the,
kind of the physics of rocket engines
and also when you look at parasitic mass,
it doesn't, if you have,
let's say you have an avionic system,
so you have a guidance and control system,
that is gonna be about the same mass and size
for a giant rocket as it is gonna be for a tiny rocket.
And so that's just parasitic mass
that is very consequential if you're building
a very small rocket,
but is trivial if you're building a very large rocket.
So you have the parasitic mass thing.
And then if you look at, for example,
rocket engines have turbo pumps.
They have to pressurize the fuel and the oxidizer
up to a very high pressure level
in order to inject it into the thrust chamber
where it burns.
And those pumps, all rotating machines, in fact
get more efficient as they get larger.
So really tiny turbo pumps
are very challenging to manufacture.
And any kind of gaps, you know,
are like between the housing for example,
and the rotating impeller that pressurizes the fuel,
there has to be some gap there.
You can't have those parts scraping against one another.
And those gaps drive inefficiencies.
And so, you know, if you have a very large turbo pump,
those gaps in percentage terms end up being very small.
And so there's a bunch of things
that you end up loving about having a large rocket
and that you end up hating for a small rocket.
But there's a giant exception to this rule,
and it is manufacturing.
So manufacturing large structures is very, very challenging.
It's a pain in the butt.
And so, you know, it's just if you have,
if you're making a small rocket engine,
you can move all the pieces by hand,
you could assemble it on a table, one person can do it,
you know, you don't need cranes and heavy lift operations
and tooling, and so on and so on.
When you start building big objects, infrastructure,
civil infrastructure, just like the launchpad
and the you know, all this,
we went and visited,
I took you to the launchpad
and you can see it's so monumental.
- Yeah, it is.
- And so just these things become major undertakings,
both from an engineering point of view,
but also from a construction and cost point of view.
- And even the foundation of the launchpad,
I mean, this is Florida,
like isn't like swamp land?
Like how deep do you have to go?
- You have to at Cape Canaveral,
in fact, at most ocean, you know, most launch pads
are on beaches somewhere in the oceanside.
'cause you wanna launch over water for safety reasons.
The yes, you have to drive pilings,
you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of pilings,
you know, 50, a 100, 150 feet deep
to get enough structural integrity
for these very large, you know, it's yes,
these turn into major civil engineering projects.
- I just have to say everything about that factory
is pretty badass.
You said tooling, the bigger it gets,
the more epic it is.
- It does make it epic.
- Yeah.
- It's fun to look at.
It's extraordinary.
- It's humbling also,
'cause you know, humans are so small compared to it.
- We are building these enormous machines
that are harnessing enormous amounts
of chemical power, you know, in very, very compact packages.
It's truly extraordinary.
- But then there's all the different components
and that you know, the materials involved.
Is there something interesting
that you can describe about the materials
that's comprised the rockets?
So it has to be as light as possible, I guess,
whilst withstanding the heat and the harsh conditions?
- Yeah, I play a little kind of game sometimes
with other rocket people that I run into where
say what are the things
that would amaze the 1960s engineers?
Like what's changed?
'Cause surprisingly, some of rocketry greatest hits
have not changed.
They are still,
they would recognize immediately a lot of what we do today.
And it's exactly what they pioneered back in the '60s.
But a few things have changed.
You know, the use of carbon composites
is very different today.
You know, we can build very sophisticated,
you saw our carbon tape laying machine
that builds the giant fairings.
And we can build these incredibly light,
very stiff fairing structures
out of carbon composite material
that they could not have dreamed of.
I mean the efficiency, the structural efficiency
of that material is so high compared to any you know,
metallic material you might use or anything else.
So that's one.
Aluminum lithium and the ability
to friction stir weld aluminum lithium.
Do you remember the friction stir welding that I showed you?
- Yes, incredible.
- This is a remarkable technology.
This was invented decades ago,
but has become very practical
over just the last couple of decades.
And instead of using heat to weld two pieces
of metal together, it literally stirs the two pieces.
There's a pin that rotates at a certain rate
and you put that pin between the two plates of metal
that you wanna weld together.
And then you move it at a very precise speed.
And instead of heating the material,
it heats it a little bit because of friction,
but not very much.
You can literally immediately after welding
with stir friction welding,
you can touch the material and it's just barely warm.
It literally stirs the molecules together.
It's quite extraordinary.
- Relatively low temperature.
And I guess high temperature is what makes them,
that makes it a weak point?
- Exactly.
So with traditional welding techniques, you may have
whatever the underlying strength characteristics
of the material are,
you end up with weak regions where you weld.
And with friction stir welding,
the welds are just as strong as the bulk material.
So it really allows you,
and so, 'cause when you're,
you know, let's say you're building a tank
that you're gonna pressurize
you know, a large liquid natural gas tank
for our booster stage, for example.
You know, if you are welding that with traditional methods,
you have to size those weld lands,
the thickness of those pieces
with that knockdown for whatever damage you're doing
with the weld.
And that's gonna add a lot of weight to that tank.
- I mean, even just the looking at the fairings,
the result of that,
the complex shape that it takes and-
- Yeah.
- And like what it's supposed to do is kind of incredible
'cause so people don't know it's on top of the rocket,
it's gonna fall apart.
That's its task.
But it has to stay strong sometimes.
- Yes.
- And then disappear when it needs to.
- That's right.
- Which is a very difficult task.
- Yes.
When you need something that needs to have 100% integrity
until it needs to have 0% integrity.
It needs to stay attached until it's ready to go away.
And then when it goes away, it has to go away completely.
You use explosive charges for that.
And so it's a very robust way
of separating structure
when you need to.
- Exploding
- Yeah.
Little tiny bits of explosive material
and it just, it'll sever the whole connection.
- So if you wanna go from 100% structural integrity
to zero as fast as possible use explosives,
- Use explosives.
- The entirety of this thing is so badass.
Okay, so we're back to the two stages.
So the first stage is reusable.
- Yeah.
Second stage is expendable.
Second stage is liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen.
So we could take advantage of the higher specific impulse.
The the first stage lands downrange on a landing platform
in the ocean, comes back for maintenance
and get ready to do the next mission.
- I mean there's a million questions,
but also is there a path towards reusability
for the second stage?
- There is, and we know how to do that.
Right now we're gonna work on manufacturing
that second stage to make it as inexpensive as possible.
Sort of two paths for a second stage,
make it reusable,
or work really hard to make it inexpensive
so you can afford to expend it.
And that trade is actually not obvious which one is better.
- Even in terms of cost.
Even like time cost?
- I'm talking about cost is, you know,
space flight, getting into orbit is a solved problem.
We solved it back in you know, the '50s and '60s.
- You're making it sound easy.
- So the only thing that,
the only interesting problem
is dramatically reducing the cost of access to orbit,
which is if you can do that,
you open up a bunch of new, you know, endeavors
that lots of startup companies, everybody else can do.
So that's, we really,
that's one of our missions
is to you know, be part of this industry
and lower the cost to orbit so that there can be
you know, a kind of a renaissance, a golden age
of people doing all kinds of interesting things in space.
- I like how you said getting to orbit is a solved problem.
It is just the only interesting thing is reducing the cost.
You know, how you can describe every single problem
facing human civilization that way.
The physicist would say everything is a solved problem.
We've solved everything.
The rest is just well, Rutherford said that
"it's just stamp collecting."
It's just the details.
It's some of the greatest innovations and inventions
and you know, brilliance is in that cost reduction stage.
Right, and you, you've had a long career of cost reduction.
- For sure.
And when you,
what does cost reduction really mean?
It means inventing a better way.
- Yeah, exactly.
- Right, and when you invent a better way,
you make the whole world richer.
So, you know, whatever it was,
I don't know how many thousands of years ago,
somebody invented the plow.
And when they invented the plow,
they made the whole world richer
because they made farming less expensive.
And so it is a big deal to invent better ways.
That's how the world gets richer.
- So what are some of the biggest challenges
on the manufacturing side and the engineering side
that you're facing in working
to get to the first launch of New Glenn?
- The first launch is one thing
and we'll do that in 2024 coming up in this coming year.
The real thing that's the bigger challenge
is making sure that our factory
is efficiently manufacturing at rate.
So rate production.
So consider if you wanna launch New Glenn
you know, 24 times a year.
You need to manufacture a upper stage
since they're expendable every, you know, twice a month,
you need to do one every two weeks.
So you need to be,
you need to have all of your manufacturing facilities
and processes and inspection techniques
and acceptance tests and everything operating at rate.
And rate manufacturing is at least as difficult
as designing the vehicle in the first place.
And the same thing.
So every upper stage has two BE-3U engines.
So those engines you know, you need
if you're gonna launch this the vehicle twice a month,
you need four engines a month.
So you need an engine every week.
So you need to be,
that engine needs to be being produced at rate.
And that's a,
and there's all of the things that you need to do that,
all the right machine tools, all the right fixtures,
the right people, process, et cetera.
So it's one thing to build a first article, right.
So that's you know, to launch New Glenn for the first time,
you need to produce a first article.
But that's not the hard part.
The hard part is everything that's going on
behind the scenes to build a factory
that can produce New Glenn's at rate.
- So the first one is produced in a way
that enables the production of the second and third
and the fourth and the fifth and sixth, and so on.
- You could think of the first article
as kind of pushing,
it pushes all of the rate manufacturing technology along.
You know, in other words, it's kind of the,
it's the test article in a way
that's testing out your manufacturing technologies.
- The manufacturing is the big challenge.
- Yes.
I mean I don't want to make it sound like any of it is easy.
I mean the people who are designing the engines
and all this, all of it is hard for sure.
But the challenge right now is driving really hard
to get to rate manufacturing
and to do that in an efficient way.
Again, kind of back to our cost point.
If you get to rate manufacturing in an inefficient way,
you haven't really solved the cost problem
and maybe you haven't really moved
this state of the art forward.
All this has to be
about moving the state-of-the art forward.
There are easier businesses to do.
I always tell people look, if you are trying to make money,
you know, like start a salty snack food company
or something, you know.
- I'm gonna write that idea down.
- Like make the Lex Fridman potato chips,
you know, this is-
- Don't say it, people are gonna steal it.
But yeah, it's hard.
- You see what I'm saying?
It's like there's nothing easy about this business
