00:00Laura Crabtree, CEO of Epsilon-3. Laura spent more than a decade at SpaceX, supported milestone
00:06missions, the first Dragon launch, the company's first crewed mission to the International Space
00:11Station. I think you left prior to Starship really kicking off, but you understand why this
00:19matters. So let's start with the V3. Why does it matter? It matters because people have been
00:26waiting. As Lauren just alluded to, everyone's been waiting for this next iteration, for it to
00:32be operational, to be able to book a launch on Starship. And I think it will enable the next
00:39iteration of what we want to see as the space industry continues to grow and access to space
00:45continues to be easier, more affordable, et cetera. And we can take larger payloads. We can take more
00:54people to the moon. We can take lunar rovers more quickly. And I think everyone's been waiting for
01:01that for a long time now. Laura, you'll understand. So SpaceX's S1 went public, and a main focus of it
01:10was that larger future payload you're talking about being orbital data center. But the core mission,
01:17the kind of founding mission of SpaceX is to make humankind a multi-planetary species, right? We
01:22haven't on the show talked as much about that human payload. Sorry if that's probably not the kindest
01:28way of putting it, but the human payload element of it. How would that work in Starship? The idea is
01:35that if you're going to go the distance of Mars, but even in the near term, the moon, it is
01:40Starship
01:41that is the best technology platform to get us there. Is that the idea? That is the idea. And Elon
01:48has
01:49talked many times at Company All Hands, and I'm sure also out in the public, about the future goal
01:57of making humans multi-planetary species. So the ultimate goal of something like Starship is to make
02:06life interplanetary, to enable that future we want to see. As he said, we don't want to be like the
02:13dinosaurs, and we don't want to go extinct on this planet. And so there are a lot of pieces that
02:19SpaceX needs to achieve to get there, because the mission for SpaceX to be multi-planetary, but you
02:26have to have the building blocks of data centers, you have to have Starlink, you have to have all of
02:31the things that we've built up to this point. And this is just the next piece of the puzzle.
02:37You were the senior mission operations engineer, you basically trained the crew, and you oversaw and
02:45ran the Dragon spacecraft mission. So for the Bloomberg Tech audience, SpaceX getting humans to
02:51the International Space Station or into space so far has been Falcon 9 with a Dragon capsule on top.
02:57I'm now showing Starship V3 pictures right now, Laura. The bit that I think people are finding it
03:05hard to understand is, within the design of the Starship spacecraft, different to putting a capsule
03:10on Falcon 9, how would that work? Like, literally, where do the astronauts go?
03:16So there have been lots of design iterations, and I'm not entirely sure where the design iteration is
03:23right now. But from the last I saw, the Starship would then take all the humans to the moon, and
03:30there would be the complete payload would be human. So, you know, it would be geared towards humans. So
03:37there would be toilets, there would be the pods for people to live in while they're being transported to
03:44the moon. So that is more the idea, I believe. And so that's something that we still have yet to
03:52see
03:52until Starship is operational, and many flights have taken place. I don't think we will know exactly
04:00the designs, and I believe SpaceX is probably waiting to unveil that in future versions.
04:07Can you try and take us inside SpaceX a little bit? You know, part of covering the almost launch of
04:15the 12th test flight yesterday is seeing this sort of gathering of SpaceX staff and engineers,
04:21everyone that worked on the re-engineering, the new architecture. When Elon Musk or the other
04:27leaders go to the team and say, let's rip up the script, the blueprint and start again, what's that
04:33process like to get it onto the pad? Yeah, you know, it's a challenge. In the industry, there's
04:43something called a challenge coin. So you get a challenge coin if you're going to work really hard on
04:48something. But it feels like there's a challenge coin on the on the line all the time. So you're
04:54given a somewhat insurmountable problem, and you have to go and solve it. And I think the difference
05:00that most people are now noting is that within SpaceX and many startups that you see in the industry
05:07today, you're given more responsibility to make decisions than you would have in a traditional large
05:14aerospace company. And so you're given a problem, you go and solve the problem to the best of your
05:19ability. And then you come together, test the problem, iterate. That's why you're seeing so quick
05:25iteration from Starship, because the engineers are being pushed to continue to think outside of the box.
05:35You can't design something like Starship with the things that have been done in the past.
05:41Present day, Laura, you're the CEO of Epson 3, a software platform that if you are trying to pull
05:46off a high stakes operational testing manufacturing procedure, which I think Starship kind of is right
05:53now, that's what you need. So I think you're in a good place to just tell us to end. We
05:58have 30 seconds.
05:59Just how difficult is what SpaceX is trying to do right now with this Starship program?
06:05Yeah, I think Lauren alluded to this earlier, but there are millions of decisions that need to be
06:12made and millions of technical things that need to go right. So having one small thing like a pin
06:18and maybe a couple of out of family temperatures is actually miraculous. You can expect scrubs,
06:25you can expect some failure, but when you get to the end, you should have tested enough small things.
06:32And that's really what we, you know, at Epson 3 want is to have the infrastructure built to test
06:38enough small things that when you get to the mission, you get to the final launch that you
06:43have done enough, that you have the most confidence that your mission will go well. And I think that's
06:49what SpaceX is doing.
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