David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Well, the last one that I want to bring up before we get to a grading here is frankly applauding the government. I think it's the government finding the right way to be involved to enable private enterprise in a win-win. The big one that jumps out to me here is the New Mexico state and county governments that actually funded Spaceport America. Virgin Galactic has this $5 million a year lease on it which is expensive. It's a material cost for the company. It would have been completely impossible for this company to go and raise $200 million on their own to build this facility, in addition to all the other money they needed to raise. Who is going to fund that if that's in your pitch deck? Right. When we think about that $5 million rent a year, that's 40 years to just pay back the construction costs. Right. The state of New Mexico being forward-looking to say this could be huge for our local economy if we become the Silicon Valley of space and we build this thing. Not only the goodwill that comes from that. Who knows how much money we’ll make in the future if we're actually the center of this ecosystem? On top of that, the literal dollars that will come from [...] two, three, four, five, the payback period actually isn't bad if you can get several Virgin Galactics in there. For anyone who's curious, you should go to Virgin Galactic's website and look at the pictures of Spaceport America. This thing is awesome. It looks like a spaceship while you're driving up to it. They did a fantastic job working with this great architecture firm and making the whole thing. It does feel like the front door to Disneyland of space. They did an amazing job at that. I do think it reminds me a lot of our SpaceX episode where we covered NASA's forward-thinking approach with the crew resupply and cargo crew initiatives to outsource those missions to the private companies. We just saw Crew-1 and we've talked about it several times. It launched last weekend, actually yesterday as we record this. I think governments take a lot of heat for being stodgy, for being backward-looking. I think these are two great examples of government enabling not only private sector innovation, but in a way that will benefit the government and that government shareholders over time.…

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