Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I think much of it is secondary. Okay. The point I want to drive home here is that SpaceX was founded. There's one thing that's known about that company at this point. One thing that's not super solidified, at least, as far as I can tell, the thing that is known is we're going to freaking Mars. We're figuring this Mars thing out and we're going to start by lighting a one-engine candle on fire. We're going to figure out how to take baby steps here. That part is figured out. The part that's not figured out is what you'll find in the very first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on SpaceX which is this sentence, "They're an American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company." It is very, very, important to understand SpaceX today is both of those things and they are different. They are a company that makes stuff for aerospace and may well one day run a business on that. They also have this business where they're basically a logistics company to ship stuff up to space. That latter business funds the former business. I think the missing puzzle piece that comes along, that lobbies for SpaceX to do that is not yet in place. Yeah. The business plan for this new company—Elon is very insistent that this is now a company—is that he's seen all these costs bloat in the industry. He thinks they can do much better and he realized, the hard part about launching things into space is the engine of the rocket. He has the best rocket engine engineer in the world, Tom Mueller, working for him. They're going to build their engine completely in-house. The initial idea is they're going to go to third party suppliers, come out with any folks, get all the rest of the stuff together, and work with contractors. You can imagine the business plan, ironically, is sort of the traditional Detroit automotive companies where they make the engines and they make the finished products but everything in between the engine and the final car comes from a whole network of suppliers.…

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