YouSaid · the spoken record

Joe Laurienti

lines on the record: 46
first: 2023-04-20
most recent: 2023-04-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Hopefully by then, hopefully by my 80s, 90s, we're not just going back and forth to Mars settlers. We are taking long vacations to Mars or we're going well beyond Mars to think the asteroid belt where there are plentiful resources.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I'm really biased here as a propulsion fan and a propulsion company, but I really like the idea of advancing how quickly we can move about the cosmos. Right now, everything SpaceX is working on is to get to Mars, and the fastest trip to Mars is maybe a six-month trip. So I'm really excited about transforming from the days of the Mayflower to the days of really capable international air travel.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. That's quite a ways out because, to your point on regulation and requirements, as soon as you put people on board, the safety side becomes very different, as you can imagine. But down the road, we're really excited about it. I think a lot of what we want to do beyond low Earth orbit has to do with exploration. It's putting people's boots back on the moon. And when you start to look at that, there's this whole tree of new possibilities where right now, if you look at the moon, there are resources like Helium-3 that can be used for fusion power generation. So we can power the Earth with this.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, and the satellites are. Modern enough technology that are replenishable enough because the cost to orbit has dropped so significantly.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Open up windows of data transformation and from space that weren't accessible 10 years ago. So a few examples there is SpaceX's Starlink constellation is really intended to bring a new capability of internet globally. They've been very vocally on the front lines in Ukraine. They are in rural parts of Africa. And that's just data provision, access to internet. If you start to look at collecting new types of data, think about looking at groundwater for farmers and making that cost 10 cents every time they pull it up on a daily basis versus $10,000. So it's only hedge funds trading on that data.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I get so excited about low Earth orbit. I think we're just tapping into if you start to dramatically reduce the cost of access to space, you open up a window of opportunity, you know, where this is similar to, I use the analogy of a PC boom before. This is computers going from the size of a room to being on every desk or smartphones being in our pockets where we start to...”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think before the end of the decade, defense definitely stands to be a significant part of our business. Just the state of the world today, the lack of kind of industrial base and production capability is an open door for us. It's a perfect opportunity for a fast-moving startup to bring new products to market. I think space is a 100 year opportunity. So when we look out, we really want to make sure we are kind of keeping that core focus of propulsion for the most important missions around us. And sometimes it's defense, sometimes it's space, but it's very different time windows.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's a challenge with hypersonic missiles. They are difficult to communicate with in flight. So that technology development is extremely exciting. And there's the development of everything around the hypersonics. So right now, a big notion is how do we detect these if there's a hypersonic missile flying, can we actually track it and detect it? Can we shoot one down? So you've got to develop the counter hypersonic capability. And it's just this new field of development that's extremely exciting. It kind of feels like the space race of the 1960s.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it's traveling at a hypersonic speed and there's a plasma around the vehicle that makes it very difficult to communicate with radios”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the U.S. absolutely is investing in developing an arsenal the ability to field hypersonic weapons, but really importantly and more where Ursa Major is playing today in hypersonics, we are developing the ability to test hypersonic technologies, be it high temperature materials or electronic communications. I like to talk a lot about when it comes to hypersonics. If you remember the movie Apollo 13, where there's the seven minutes of blackout when the capsule is re-entering the atmosphere.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we have delivered engines into a couple of hypersonic programs already. So this is an area we're really excited because it's so nascent. It's still very much an R&D. And to say it's nascent isn't really fair, I guess. The notion of kind of hypersonics and warfare in the US has been around since the 90s. We really kind of backed away from the hardware development and testing side of it. And that's when China and Russia really invested in developing and flying hypersonics. So you're exactly right. We're lagging behind in that the things that make a SpaceX or Inursa major successful are design, build, fly very quickly. Kind of like we said, you want to go fail fast. You want to learn very quickly. And the U.S. hasn't been doing that in hypersonic flight over the last few years, with the exception of really the last 12 months, we've really started to increase our cadence and improve there.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. And that can be anywhere on the fast end, maybe that's 18 months on the slow end, maybe it's three, four years. Because our business model is to be extremely market facing, customer facing, and apply to a lot of missions, our requirements might be a lot more onerous than a company that's vertically integrated or building their own engines. We have to meet the needs of Air Force, Space Force, NASA, missile defense agency. Really, any customer that comes along or even the customers of our customers.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, on the other side of the wall of the room I'm sitting in, we've probably got 10 or 12 engines either finished, ready to ship out the door, or in some state of assembly.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And, you know, a big piece of it for our business and our industry is that investors, while they are well trained and a big part of their job is to see these technology avenues into the future, they aren't rocket scientists and they aren't engineers. And we have to make sure we are communicating our progress and we are explaining why they should continue.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know that I appreciated this term, the Valley of Death. It felt like we were kind of through the Valley or seeing the other side maybe 10 times over the last five years And when we talk about it, I really think back to the number of times Elon at SpaceX would kind of threaten bankruptcy or explain that if we didn't hit a milestone, we were going to go under. And as a young engineer, I thought that's just bluster. That's just trying to get us to work harder. And in hindsight, I think he absolutely was not blustering. I think that SpaceX was facing the valley of death very actively when I was there. I see that now because we've kind of right in the heart of it, like you said. We've made traction. We've got customers, we've got revenue, we've got engines going out the door. But alongside that, your ambitions grow and the vision grows. And the valley gets deeper and deeper. So I think hopefully we see the other end of it here pretty soon, but we absolutely are in the heart of it.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there are 3D printers that can 3D print some pretty high strength metals. They do focus a bit on aerospace, but again, because we, right around that time, the first engines we built were 3D printed with really off-the-shelf metals. So metals that you can go buy powders of anywhere. That was kind of when we started developing our own alloys was to improve and optimize these engines. And a big piece of our philosophy was 3D printing is going to grow alongside us as a company. So we have to be ready to invest in the state-of-the-art today and keep a finger on the pulse of the state of the art tomorrow. So being involved with 3D printing companies over the last seven, eight years has been a really important part of what we do.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It worked. Yeah, we didn't raise our first venture capital money until after we had fired that first engine. And I remember our investors saying that was why they invested in us because we had already shown that progress technically”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very few. And the first hot fire is a nice really fun milestone to celebrate, but anyone who's been through engine development knows you've got to fire the thing thousands of times before you really understand it and can go sell it. But for us, the really important piece there was as a startup that didn't have a ton of money, we could take a lot of kind of outsized risk. We didn't do a lot of testing before firing that engine. We just built the first one and went and fired it and blew it up. That's an approach we've really stuck with that you want to learn and you want to fail as quickly as possible.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a lot of that messaging actually stayed the same, even to today that we're absolutely not understating what SpaceX and Blue Origin are doing. It's just a very different approach from what we are doing. As engineers, we want to focus on the engine because when the engine is one of a thousand things, it goes into a rocket. By its nature, it's not going to be optimized. But we wanted to optimize engines. So it was really that technical challenge and then the business approach of, hey, this is not a deep talent pool. Not every company that wants to build a rocket is going to be able to build engines. Let's go provide that.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We found it about 40 minutes north of Denver, Colorado, a little town called Birthed. And there happened to be built in the late 80s a missile test facility that had kind of been dormant. It had changed hands a few times and there was a fabrication company in the big warehouse, but there are these massive test bunkers, blast concrete, everything you think of for a missile test site. And it was unused. So we got extremely lucky. I think a classic startup story got a cold call from a realtor asking if we wanted a missile test site. And we took advantage.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. I was living in West Texas when I left Blue Origin, so I had a decision to make as to where's the best place to start a company like this. And Los Angeles makes a ton of sense. There's a lot of aerospace out there, but it's also costly, and we weren't going to be able to fire. It doesn't matter. Kind of having a test facility that's more closely tied to the community, to be honest. Every rocket test facility I'd worked in is middle of nowhere, no access to anyone allowed, but I like the idea of let's bring in middle school students for field trips and actually have a test facility that can engage around us.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In those early days, we're almost the easiest because every day was just try to make progress toward building a rocket engine.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, completely different. And there are actually, there are still companies existent today that take the approach of we should 3D print everything. And we very early on made the calculated decision that 3D printing is an enabler and you have to use it in the right places in the right way. So we really use 3D printing for a handful of reasons, but you can dial it down to If we can develop a metal that we can go 3D print in a cost-effective manner, that's something you wouldn't go do, like you said, casting, pouring metals. It's just way too expensive. So we develop our own metals in-house for some of our applications. And then the second piece is removing processes from the manufacturing. If a traditional rocket engine part is liquid metal poured into a mold, then you heat treat it in an oven and then you machine it and weld it and braise it. You can cut all of those processes out by 3D printing one part. So that's really where”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. These companies were really emerging. It was just clear that something was changing here. And the cost point still today, this is an issue, but the cost point back then especially was so high in 3D printing metals that you didn't want to go design a car around 3D printing, but aerospace, every ounce of weight, every Just tiny bit of strength that you can get out of the material is really important. So 3D printing made a lot of sense.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“3D printing of metals was really what we went all in on. And I always give our early investors credit because that could have been the decision that sunk the company. It was clear 3D printing of metals has been kind of picking up steam and becoming viable for 15 years now, maybe even 20 years now.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, definitely. I remember a lot of no's and when I'm speaking with founders, first-time founders now, I love to explain that the number one attribute you've got to have is thick skin because you're going to be told your idea is terrible by investors. The most painful might be candidates when you really want to recruit somebody. And they tell you that your ideas in the wrong direction or they do things differently, you're going to hear that from potential customers. You just have to be ready to hear no or you're wrong a lot.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you know, the first vote of confidence, I think, was the team. Our first handful of employees were former coworkers of mine from SpaceX and Blue Origin, including my boss from SpaceX and my boss from Blue Origin. So that might have been the confidence I needed to really get going.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, now that we're talking about it, I definitely remember the three six month period before really taking the leap and saying I'm going to hand in my notice at this company that I really enjoy working at. I'm going to set out on my own. One of the first steps was actually selling all of my SpaceX stock. So hopefully that pays dividends in the long run. But I'm going to commit everything I've got toward starting a company with no other employees on board initially. I think the notion of this is risky and I might lose money. It probably didn't phase me as much as this is a massive career shift for me. Yeah. I loved engineering. I had only really ever wanted to work on things that I could go turn a wrench on with my hands. And now I've got to figure out how to balance a balance sheet. So that was a big shift. Yeah.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there are a few reasons behind that. One, I was an angsty engineer who loved rocket engines. That was all I wanted to work on. But really, it's the kind of dominating performance component of the rocket. It's also the highest risk, the most expensive. So my thought was if we're seeing the PC boom around us, I want to be providing microprocessors”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think the first inkling of something needs to be done here or there's a changing of the tide coming was when I started to get outreach from a few companies that were raising venture capital to do exactly what SpaceX was doing. And I had worked at SpaceX. I was at the time working at Blue Origin. Both of those companies to me felt like first movers. And it just struck me that the next wave shouldn't be duplicating the first movers. There's got to be something added on or something changed or a different approach. And that was kind of the first spark behind let's provide engines to this next generation.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And it really sparked a few bouts of funding that have been really successful. It sparked some development funding toward New Domestic Rocket Engine programs, unfortunately Ursa Major wasn't around then. We might have benefited very well from that. But it also sparked funding toward both Boeing and SpaceX providing launch services of people because we were also dependent on Russia to launch people to space. So, the space shuttle retired in 2011, and that was the US's only means of putting humans in space until, I think, last year or two years ago, two years ago now was SpaceX's first launch. And so 2014 was the first time we saw real traction and dedication in the US toward developing a new domestic human flight capability.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Russian engines just had amazing heritage. They were really reliable. I don't think that they were the most inexpensive, but the kind of technical history behind the US's heritage of rocketry and the Russian heritage of rocketry resulted in very different architectures. So the engines built here in the US, think Space Shuttle. Very reusable. Actually, those engines are still being used today on the SLS vehicle. Really just exquisite engines that are extremely expensive. The Russians were quite a bit cheaper and extremely reliable, so when it came time to launch satellites and try to build a first step toward commercialization of space, the Russian engines made a lot of sense.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly right. There was one other provider, I say was, they're currently under contract to be acquired. So we'll see where that goes. But Aerojet Rocketdyne was the result of consolidation here in the industry. And if you look back to 1995, we probably had 15 companies providing everything from small missile motors to small aircraft engines to rocket engines. Now circa 2005, we had one.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's correct. And my understanding is that was very much an artifact of post Cold War. We almost wanted to throw a bone to the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union, and they had this incredible propulsion capability. So we agreed to start buying rocket engines.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly right. It was almost a monopoly. There was another small provider here in the US, Orbital Sciences. They would successfully launch satellites into orbit. But almost every national security launch, every critical NASA launch was done by one company.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I remember thinking before I started at SpaceX that there were two companies in the world I'd want to work for, and it was SpaceX or Blue Origin. And so I'd spent time at SpaceX. Like I said, really drinking from a fire hose. And we had gotten to, back then it felt like a mature product. It was far from it. But we were launching Falcon 9 successfully. And I saw in Blue Origin really a very tangential ambition. They were focused much more on the human side of spaceflight. And frankly, what won me over was the engine technology. Blue Origin had a completely different architecture. So I could work on a more complicated machine.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it caught a really exciting phase. I mean, I got to see the first dragon capsules, so the first ever private spacecraft to dock to the space station, got to see the transition into Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 1.1. So it was really transformational years of SpaceX and drinking from a fire hose while learning.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I remember talking to my dad who'd spent his whole career in aerospace about how wild this idea was and that it was probably never going to see any traction.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it was a wild idea back then. In my undergrad years, I remember watching the first few SpaceX launches, which all failed. And almost thinking it was ridiculous that an internet founder wanted to go build an aerospace launch company”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that was really how the group started. And you got it right. We had the ultimate vision of being the first student group in space, which they ultimately achieved”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you hit the nail on the head. It was really an entirely undergraduate student group. We had a ton of autonomy. We had a professor that kind of oversaw our kind of safety and overall activities, but we had a small amount of funding and some really innovative founders. And now that I'm thinking back, kind of the founders behind that lab are probably the first ounce of entrepreneurialism that I got me. But there was a composites and kind of think airframe or aerodynamics expert as 18 years old, as much of an expert as you can be. And then there was a propulsion expert, another 18-year-old who had built Hobby rockets in his free time. And they had a competition to see if the person doing the propulsion could design a powerful enough rocket to tear apart the structures that the other student made.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I very vividly remember walking into the bookstore day one and I had my biology and chemistry and biomedical engineering textbooks and there was a book there that was the kind of aerospace engineering 101 textbook called Introduction to Flight and five days before class started I put all the books back and grabbed that introduction to flight textbook and changed my major so I was accepted under something other than aerospace but never took a class outside of aerospace”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So actually, the reason I wanted to go to USC was it ran in the family. So when it came time to apply to schools, I remember only wanting to apply to USC. And my parents very wisely said you need to apply around. I was very fortunate to get scholarships to USC, so it kind of made the decision easy. I actually Biden was accepted as a double major biomedical engineer and pre-med student. And that was really, I just had no clue what I wanted to do. I was 17 years old. I loved space, loved aerospace. But as a 17-year-old who had probably never spoken to a doctor outside of their office, I thought being a doctor sounded like a great idea. I saw the biomedical engineering piece attached. Still got to be hands-on and a tinker.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, exactly. And Tinker is a great way to put it. Even as a seven, eight-year-old, I was the kid that would find old electronics and take them apart and never could reassemble them. But I loved taking things apart.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. It was my first car. I think we went and picked it up on a trailer when I was like 13 or 14 years old and basically got it running right around the time I had a driver's license. It probably wasn't the best craftsmanship as a teenager. I was learning as I went, but it was a great project.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was obsessed. I don't think I knew if I wanted to work on rockets or satellites or airplanes. I just, I loved it all. I probably vacillated between wanting to be an astronaut or a pilot or an engineer constantly. And eventually the mechanical and kind of hands on piece won me over.”
2023-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Ursa Major: Joe Laurienti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT