00:49:25 · Scott Nolan
[00:49:25] S2: Yes. Fantastic. Yep. I mean, you won't do it at one facility. You'll do it at a number of facilities. That's what we're planning out, thinking far ahead of where we're going and identifying those sites that we can build that sort of capacity. But, just as an example, you had The U. S. Back in early 2000s, something like 20% of global launch capacity. And we were launching, let's see, probably tens of rockets per year maximum. Not even that. Single digits many years. And then SpaceX came and said, Well, the issue is it's not cheap enough. The U. S. Is not competitive. Not just that. Okay, there's a baseline goal of make The U. S. Competitive again, bring it back. That's a good goal. That's very strategic for The US. But on top of that, the goal of SpaceX was let's make space actually something that we go do. Like, you look back to the fifties, sixties, it was supposed to be two things, nuclear and space. Those were the areas where you're gonna get an immense amount of growth and these new possibilities that people couldn't even imagine. So on the space side, it was, how do we do that? We make it much cheaper. And so SpaceX has gone from something like, I believe it was like 10 launches in their first ten years, roughly one launch a year, to now over 100 Falcon nine launches per year. And with Starship, the launch count will get to that level. It will eventually get to more than that level, but more importantly, the capacity is just dramatically, dramatically larger. So The US went from sub 20% of launch capacity worldwide to now over 90% of mass to orbit. I think we can do that in a bunch of industries. And the thing is, it's gonna come down to private sector thinking through how do we drop these costs down, how do we do this in a really commercial way where we can outcompete every country even if they may have subsidies. But it's gonna require a ton of innovation. And for SpaceX, that's been almost a twenty five year story.
00:51:14 · Ty Morse
[00:51:14] S0: Especially with Space Launch and Elon, he's kind of thought out a few years about where do we need to take this. And even if maybe there's not necessarily demand to ship, you know, thousands of satellites to orbit, We're just gonna build the capacity and then just believe that the demand will, like, materialize in effect. How do you kind of do things in parallel? You're turning on your first plant in 2030. Are you gonna start building a second plant or start, you know, working on the second plant now so that you can basically turn on the second one in 2032?
00:51:46 · Scott Nolan
[00:51:46] S2: Yeah. I mean, for us, the sequence is you identify the sites, you prep the land, you build the buildings, you make sure your infrastructure is there, and then you fill the buildings with equipment for that capability to come online. You commission it. You bring it online. And so as we build facilities and then bring them fully online and scale production within the facility, by the time that core and shell is built, we'll be working on the next core and shell. So our approach is we want to take everything possible into our own hands. We don't want to just say, We give up responsibility for a major portion of costs like buildings. We're not going to do every last task in house. We'll be hiring thousands of welders, like construction workers through subcontractors. But the project itself, we'll manage ourselves. You know, we'll be our own GC. We'll be our own EPC, engineering procurement construction company. And this is something that Tesla really proved out in the Gigafactory constructions is own your project, you know, design, build, and operate, and you can get efficiencies across all three, and you can avoid giving up responsibility for something that can really drive the project over budget, over schedule. And that's the whole, like, extreme ownership, just take responsibility approach that we're trying to do. So we have an EPC in house, and that EPC will first do Kentucky. It's working on it now. Kentucky comes on be... Before end of decade. And then as that corn shell is built and Kentucky's ready for the next phase of construction, start building that second site.
00:53:14 · Ty Morse
[00:53:14] S0: The executive orders last year really basically, like, poured a bunch of gasoline on companies, like Valar is one of them, where Isaiah is just burning, you know, the three a. M. Oil and his team is burning the three a. M. Oil to make this happen. How do we kind of incentivize more founders to take on the charge of building ahead of demand?
00:53:33 · Chris Wright
[00:53:33] S1: So right because whether it's AI or nuclear enrichment or nuclear power, this is done by business and innovators. This is not done by government. I'm in the service business. But yeah, what the Trump administration is trying to do is just make America fertile ground for entrepreneurs and risk takers. They're afraid of getting permits. Is the NRC going to approve my thing? Am I going be able to build it anywhere? Am I going be able to get land? So we just think, is the fuel going to be fabricated in The United States? So we're just trying to address all of those. At the Department of Energy, we have 17 labs and millions of acres. We've told data center developers and nuclear developers, we got land. We'll permit you. If you're struggling somewhere else, come to us. We want you to build your thing. We'll permit you. I mentioned we've restructured a new people at the NRC that it's about safety. It used to be bureaucracy, safety, and bureaucracy. Now it's safety, safety, and safety. But the way to do safety is to focus on the things that matter and not the paperwork and minutiae. Of course using AI itself is going to allow optimization of getting regulations and studies done quicker. The complexity of the electricity grid takes forever to get an interconnection thing study done. Well, with AI, we can do something that was years before in a few days. So we need to move faster at what the government services we provide and a greater surety that here's the principles in which we're operating under and if you're going to achieve those principles, we're going to permit you and we're going to permit you quickly. We need a lot more Isaiahs out there. We need entrepreneurs in this country again. And we're feeling that right now. Countries from abroad have all said, We want to invest in The United States again. Business is here. We talked about the supply chain in gas turbines. The local gas turbine manufacturers, the biggest one in the world, they are well more than doubling their capacity as are the other biggest turbine manufacturing capacities, the fuel cell makers, the reciprocating engine makers. We really want to see an industrial renaissance in The U. But you're only going to get an industrial renaissance if you're going to have fair treatment of capital in a secure and reasonable regulatory environment.
00:55:47 · Chris Wright
I could go on but NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, 1970s, reasonable idea. Hey, if you're going to build something in federal lands or with federal money or large scale, just check what environmental impacts it might have and submit a little form on that. We still do that. But it had been weaponized into stopping people from building things that someone didn't like. They could just take you to court and sue you for NEPA. Across the whole government we reformed the implementation of NEPA to be back to the intention of 1970. Midstream as we were doing this, the Supreme Court gave us a unanimous decision reaching the same conclusion. We've got other work to do with permitting reform in the Congress right now, But the Trump administration and really prodded aggressively by President Trump is look across the government at the barriers we put in place of people that want to take risks, that want to do new innovation in America. If we want people to put capital to work, we've to be a friendly, low risk, encouraging place to place capital risks. I'm excited with the direction we're going, but we want to make a lot more progress every day we got.