E125: SpaceX launch, Fox News settlement, "Zombie-corn" exodus to AI, late-stage implosion

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
Hey, everybody, welcome to episode 125 of the All In Podcast. On a historic day, we're taping 420 Really excited that SpaceX was able to launch Starship, and it made it off the launch pad, an incredibly successful day today.
We have, of course, with us the Rain Man, David Sacks, the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg, and of course, the dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya. But two special guests are here. Special guests, Gavin Baker from Atreides. How do you pronounce it?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:32)
Atreides.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:33)
Atreides.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:34)
House Atreides.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:34)
House Atreides, if you know Dune. And then SpaceX board member, Antonio Gracias, one of the first investors in SpaceX. Antonio, a big day for you.
Maybe you could just tell the audience what happened today, why that is so important in the history of this company.

**Antonio Gracias** (0:54)
Well, first, I want to thank you guys for letting me come on and have a little chat with you about this.
Today was extraordinarily important for SpaceX, I think for America and for humanity.
And the Starship is the realization of the vision Elon had 20 years ago, 25 years ago, even as a child really, to go to Mars.
And the engineers here at SpaceX and the entire team working extremely hard are really just to get this vehicle off the pad, as Elon has said, right? This is a brand new vehicle. Everything about it is new. So the engines, the material science, the structure, the design, all of it new. And the most important thing here was to get off the pad, so we could collect data. And this technology platform is the platform that will allow us to go to Mars. So from a non-engineer standpoint, why this is important is that what we've proven with this flight, we got past a point called Max Q, which is the point at which the vehicle takes maximum stress. That's how I think about it. I'm sure engineers will tell you a lot more description to it, or David Friedberg will give you a better description to it, but it's the most amount of stress in the vehicle, which means this vehicle will get to orbit.
And this is the vehicle that's going to take us to Mars. So today is the day that all of the hardworking people at SpaceX accomplished a goal of making the human race spacefaring. When we look back in history, I believe this will be the day when we mark the technological development that we broke through and built a vehicle that could actually go to Mars.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:24)
Now, when we look at it, obviously it didn't make it to orbit. Maybe you can give some context into what is the typical life cycle of a new rocket ship coming out. The Falcon, the original one, has done, I think, 224 missions, 222 of them successful, I think 160 or so actually landed themselves.
And so you had two or three mulligans, I think, in the development of that, maybe two actually.
So what can we expect here? When are they going to stack and rack and launch the next one? Antonio, what's the timeline here to getting to orbit? What would we expect versus some of the other projects that we've seen like the Russian rockets?

**Antonio Gracias** (3:04)
So look, this is a brand new vehicle. And whenever we develop a brand new vehicle, it takes a long time development.
You know, my understanding, all this is as again, a layman and sort of as a board member, not an executive here, is that it'll take at least two or three months to really get the pad rebuilt and get another vehicle back on for testing, maybe longer.
But it's really important to note here that we've gotten sort of used to the idea that SpaceX launches rockets and all these rockets come back and all those vehicles are stable because the Falcon 9 and 9 Heavy are so stable and they're so well engineered and they're amazing vehicles, the most reliable vehicles on earth in human history. This is a brand new vehicle. This was a huge win. I mean, it was an enormous win for the company, an enormous win for the country, just getting it off the pad and collecting the data. And now we know it works. We just have to get it stable now and get it up to orbit. So it's really, it's a hard problem, but it's a solvable problem from here. And we learned here is that this vehicle does work.

**David Friedberg** (4:02)
Amazing. Can you guys talk about like the impact of this vehicle, cost to launch, payload, like the big metrics that are, that kind of help realize that outcome? Gavin, I think I saw you did a bunch of really good tweets on this. You shared some of the metrics that I thought were really succinct and really helpful.