The Space Race Is So Back — EP 76 Ashlee Vance And Kylie Robison

**Ashlee Vance** (0:00)
All right, Kylie, we're going to save America this week.

**Kylie Robison** (0:02)
We got all the answers.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:04)
We got them all. I am Ashlee Vance.

**Kylie Robison** (0:06)
I'm Kylie Robison.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:08)
And this is Core Memory. Here we go. All right, we are indeed Saving America.

**Kylie Robison** (0:28)
We sure are.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:29)
I think we started a movement for months now. I have been calling for America to make actuators. If you don't know what they are, you will find out here shortly.
And they are a very important part of many industries. Turns out America was not making many of them. China was making a lot and then I got Kylie completely filled into this cause. And I genuinely think, well, okay, we're diving deep on this in just one second. But Kylie wrote this masterpiece story, all about actuators, about a couple startups who are trying to make actuators in the United States. Again, I know these companies existed before we started our campaigning and tirade, but I do think we helped foment a moment.

**Kylie Robison** (1:22)
We did, yeah.
You've seen my progression of actuators on this very pod because I was looking back for my reporting because I was like, obviously, I was skeptical and then I became an acolyte and I went back to one of our pods where you say, Kylie didn't even know what an actuator was. And now I'm completely peeled. We are so fucked, not enough people are paying attention to it. And so we wrote this big, big story on it.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:48)
Yeah. So let's explain to people, if you haven't caught it on the site, I mean, we're going to talk about it here. So you don't have to, but you should read the story.

**Kylie Robison** (1:55)
No, you have to.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:56)
You do have to. This is why America can't have robots and other nice things. So where should we start? You want to explain what an actuator is for the people?

**Kylie Robison** (2:05)
Yeah. So this was my favorite part of the story because Ashlee said, I want you to ask every person you talk to to define an actuator. And this was in the story when I asked Jordan Sanders, a co-founder of West Mag, one of the companies featured. He tried to make it into a haiku and got lost and don't think he really defined it. An actuator is a machine component that turns energy into motion. It can go linear one way up and down or rotary in a circle. And they make up about 60 percent of the cost of making a humanoid robots in every joint.
They are largely made in China.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:44)
And as you point out in your story, they're very broad. I mean, they're in laptops, smartphones, anything that moves more or less. I got hung up on this because of the humanoid robots, because they are such a big part of the cost. It's where all the interesting stuff happens with the limbs moving. Anywhere you see a joint, anything like that. And as we were reporting for a documentary project on the rise of these humanoids, it became very clear that not only does China have way more humanoid robots than we have, but they make all the parts, the key parts that go into this. So in the actuator, there's a motor, an electric motor.
And these two things are really joined together because it's the same problem that affects the United States drone industry, for example, where we don't make any of the motors that help the propellers grow. So even if you have a United States drone company, like a Skydio, that's trying to, trying to revive the US drone business, you get in trouble pretty fast when you need these extremely important components.

**Kylie Robison** (3:49)
Do you know where they source their motors and actuators?

**Ashlee Vance** (3:51)
I think they were with a Japanese or a Taiwanese or a Korean company, which you can't, there are people in all of those countries who make motors, actuators, and China is cheapest and just totally dominant. And anytime I would ask anyone about, well, why don't we do this? Like part of this is, it's not like it's impossible to do. The United States has plenty of smart people in the manufacturing capability to make these things. The one of the main issues is cost. And it's just this notion that it's pointless for the United States to even try to do this because our, even if we built these motors and actuators, they'd be 10 times the cost of China. But at some point you sort of have to do it if you think, if you think stuff like drones and electric cars and human rights are going to be a thing in the future, which I'm pretty sure they're going to be at only more. And this goes to weapons, this goes to all the things that are getting electrified.