David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…In a lot of ways, and I think Elon certainly looks at it that way. Another thing that I didn't really realize was that there's this great talk linked in the show notes. It's a relatively under-viewed video on YouTube of Gwynne Shotwell giving up a small fireside chat to some industry insiders in 2014. She points out that the US was competitive in commercial space up till the 80s or in the 80s but has basically lost it since then. That was the case really until the reignition of a commercial space industry here. Long story short, ULA was completely unsuccessful in capturing a commercial market in the US. If you think about it, it's actually a huge failing on their part because there were tons of commercial satellites starting to go up. You have DirecTV who owns and operates tons of satellites in order to provide their service. You have intelligence satellites. You have surveillance. You have researched concepts. You have startup companies. David, you mentioned these CubeSat. ULA managed to capture basically zero of this because they were focused on winning contracts from the US government. There's more to blame than ULA themselves. International Traffic in Arms Regulations in the 90s built up barriers, but the biggest problem was Boeing and Lockheed Martin just didn't compete anymore. Everything got so bloated and expensive when they just combined into one big behemoth. You might see the opportunity here. If you do, then you are similar to Elon, Quinn, and everyone else who saw this gap and then decided we're going to go build a freaking cash cow of a business in the Falcon 9. We're going to go shoot that gap. Ben, you mentioned a minute ago that I think over the life of SpaceX thus far, they've received just under $8 billion from the government. Now by our calculations, SpaceX is obviously a private company but you can tell by their launches and launch manifests in public. We think based on sticker price for Falcon 9 launches of which they've now been over 80 that they've done. I think over 80. Eighty-six launches and somewhere around 55 on the future manifest.…

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