Using Space To Make Life Better On Earth with Dylan Taylor of Voyager Space

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February 8, 2024

DESCRIPTION

I sat down to chat with Dylan Taylor, CEO and chairman of Voyager Space. Voyager Space has a contract to build America's next space station, STARLAB, in collaboration with NASA. Dylan I would say is probably one of the top five most significant names in the entire space industry. A lot of people know Bezos and Musk, but Dylan's in that bucket. He's got a message for us today around the importance of space as an industry for social advancement.

A lot of us get tangled up in thinking about space in the context of the mission to Mars. And it seems pipe dream-ish, Dylan brings us back down to reality, reframing space as a unique environment for scientific research, manufacturing, and societal advancement. He highlights Voyager's mission to scale up space infrastructure projects and recent milestones achieved with Airbus and SpaceX. Our conversation explores the implications of privately owned space infrastructure and the emergence of two distinct space ecosystems led by the US and China. Dylan emphasizes the benefits of privatization in advancing the space industry, citing SpaceX's innovations like reusing rocket boosters to reduce costs and increase accessibility to space. Dylan also shares his personal journey from a real estate executive to involvement in space exploration, highlighting the importance of following one's passion.

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TRANSCRIPT (this is an automated transcript):

MPD: Welcome back, everybody. I'm Mark Peter Davis, managing partner of Interplay. I'm on a mission to help entrepreneurs advance society. And this podcast is totally part of that effort. All right, we're back from our winter break. And we're going to kick off today's episode with a really exciting interview.

I am talking to Dylan Taylor. He is the CEO and chairman of Voyager Space. It's probably a company you've never heard of, but you're going to. They have the rights to build the next space station for America. Now it's privately owned by the company, but they have the contract with NASA. So as the ISS goes into its sunset phase, the next space station is going to be a privately owned entity that they've built.

It's really crazy. Dylan I would say is gotta be probably the third most significant name, maybe fourth, something in that top five in the entire space industry. So a lot of people know Bezos and Musk. But Dylan's kind of in that bucket. He's incredible. He's got a message for us today around the importance of space as an industry for social advancement.

A lot of us get tangled up in thinking about space in the context of the mission to Mars. And it seems pipe dream ish, , Dylan brings us back down to reality, reframing space as a unique environment for scientific research, manufacturing, et cetera. So space is going to make life a lot better here on Earth.

And so we're at the very beginning of a journey where this new frontier becomes extremely relevant. For all the rest of us, so without further ado, very excited to bring you Dylan Taylor,

Dylan. Thanks for being here today. My

Dylan Taylor: pleasure, Mark. Great to be here.

MPD: Let's start at the top. Would you give an overview of Voyager Space?

Dylan Taylor: Sure. Yeah, Voyager Space is a space infrastructure company, and it was purpose built to address what I think and others think are important needs for the industry.

And that is to take this new space phenomenon, this high technology, high innovation phenomenon, probably best exemplified by SpaceX, and to scale that such that these large infrastructure projects that are necessary, if we're going to move deeper into space, get built. Most notably, Voyager is working on building the replacement to the International Space Station.

That's in partnership with Airbus. And we have a prime contract with NASA to do that. So that's the big project, that's called STARLAB. But in addition to that, there are other infrastructure projects we're working on as a company. We're about 700 employees scattered around 11 offices total.

And again, our ambition is to take the capability that exists within new space and harness it to really enable these next generation infrastructure projects. And so far so good. And we're having a lot of fun doing it. And I think the industry needs another company out there that's capable of doing big things.

MPD: So over dinner conversation, people are like, yo, what do you do? You're like, I'm building the next space station.

Dylan Taylor: It does come up. Yes, it does. Most people, it's funny, Mark. Some people don't even know there is a space station. You can believe that I've had that conversation. But yeah, it's it is a interesting party trick to say that you're building a replacement to the ISS,

MPD: What's the timing on that?

You guys had a big announcement recently. We did. I know you're starting to put some pieces into place here.

Dylan Taylor: We, we, yeah, we are. So a couple of things. One is we closed on the international transatlantic joint venture with Airbus. It's called Starlab Corp. So that's the entity that's going to build the station.

That was a big deal because you got to get through, as you would imagine, regulatory approval and, siphius review and things like that to get that done. So that was closed a couple weeks ago. And then just yesterday, we announced that we've signed a launch agreement with SpaceX to launch star lab on star ship, which is their next generation rocket.

Our space station is unusual because it's a single launch to orbit solution, so we're not assembling the space station on orbit. We're building it on the ground and we're launching it in a single launch to space. So that was another big announcement. We're looking to get this in orbit by 2028. And I think that's still on target.

It's important it gets up there before 2030 because that's the target date for the International Space Station to be de orbited. And obviously we don't want, we don't want to have a gap, so called space station gap where the U. S. and its allies don't have any solution up there at any given time.

So it's really important we get ours flying before the other one comes down. Why

MPD: do we need a space station? Just kind of base principles here. We've had one for a while. I think to the average consumer, we're imagining people are growing plants in space and it seems like a neat party trick and a hobby.

But I think you probably think it's more than that. Why is a space station important to

Dylan Taylor: mankind? Yeah, no, it definitely is Mark. So I think there's a few different angles on that. One is my oldest daughter's 21. She's never lived in a world where humans didn't live in space, right? We've had humans on the International Space Station continuously for 22 years now.

So geopolitically, I think it's incredibly important to show the international cooperation. Russia's on that station that can control the propulsion and for years, the U. S. only had Russian rockets to take them up there before SpaceX came along. So I think geopolitically, it's one of the best things humans have ever done.

I think it's worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize and I think it's a tribute to what's possible in international cooperation. On the scientific side a recent NASA administrator, I won't quote him by name said to me, That there's never been an experiment done on the International Space Station where we haven't learned something.

So we're doing real research on the International Space Station. And in fact, our company is doing much of that payload those missions to the space station. Because we're the largest commercial user of the International Space Station. But we're doing about the industry is doing about 400 million dollars of scientific research on the ISS today.

That includes Biopharma, drug development ag tech, as you referred to earlier in the conversation concepts in space manufacturing. And for those of you who don't know, the International Space Station is in microgravity because it's in continuous free fall. That's a magic laboratory. And the reason for that is there are things that you can do in microgravity that you simply can't do here on the earth.

For example, in biopharma drug development, , one of the key things with drug development is formulation. How will that drug work in a human body? And to test that here on Earth, because of gravity you either put it in an animal or you put it in a human. Those are your two choices, both expensive and risky and have other issues.

If you do that same formulation, that same experiment in microgravity, You get that third dimension because it's not being squashed by gravity. So the protein folds, the enzymatic reactions, all those things are different in microgravity than they are here on Earth. So we get breakthrough drug development in space as well.

And just final point I'll make is I tell people the commercial space stations coming online do not address demand, they create demand. And by that, there would be vast more research done on orbit if it was easier to do research on orbit. And we've got a few issues with the ISS. One is it was never designed.

It's a hodgepodge. It was never master plan as a laboratory. That's why ours is called star lab. It's optimized for that. Second is astronaut time. Astronaut time is at a huge premium and about half of astronaut time on the ISS. It's dedicated to maintaining the International Space Station, and it's because it's so old and the systems are failing.

So imagine a brand new, shiny commercial space station with a new car smell, optimized as lab space with astronauts who can do 100 percent of their time dedicated to scientific research and imagine all the breakthroughs we as humanity could have under that scenario. Let's make this

MPD: real though. What?

I know there's a bunch of scientific science that's been done up there. Any of that made it into commercialization in the form of things we know to date?

Dylan Taylor: Yeah, I mean there's lots of sort of silly examples. Velcro Teflon memory foam pillows all those things were invented based upon space programs.

But there are actual drugs. There's actually one cancer drug which I don't know by name that's been developed on orbit that is considered a breakthrough drug. Another treatment for diabetes has been developed in up there and many drugs that we knew that they were effective, but again, formulation is a key element.

Of getting drug delivery into a human. So a lot of those have been reformulated based upon research on orbit. So there's many examples of these drugs being refined and or invented. In microgravity,

MPD: so manufacturing in space is going to start saving lives on earth.

Dylan Taylor: Yeah. Manufacturing in space is actually a different topic altogether.

Believe it or not, you can actually manufacture things in space that are a thousand X better than here on earth. One example would be a fiber optic or I'm sorry, the fiber optic cable. So when you manufacture that, convective force, right? And convection is all about knocking molecules together.

And that's where chemistry comes from. When you extrude fiber optic cable here on earth, you get inclusions, you get defects. When you do that in microgravity, you get essentially a thousand X less inclusions or defects in that fiber optic cable. So it's vastly superior to anything that you could ever create here on Earth.

So that's just one example. There are also shapes that we can create in microgravity that you simply can't create here on Earth because of the the weight of gravity, if you will. So there's lots of examples of that. And we're just getting started with space manufacturing. There's so many interesting things that we can do.

And again, we just haven't, we haven't fully explored that because the constraint has been.

MPD: So the other one, the other example that I found fascinating was or printing organs, specifically eyeballs. Can you touch on that for a second?

Dylan Taylor: Yeah. So 3d printing is a thing on orbit. In fact I personally had commissioned the 1st object commissioned manufactured in space by private citizen.

It was a gravity meter. We did that about 10 years ago, but with 3d printing in microgravity again, you can do things that you can't do here on earth. Thank you. And organ printing is one of them, because you essentially need to lay down biological material in such a way that the whole system needs to be complete before you expose it to gravity, right?

Because if you're exposing each layer to gravity, it's gonna, it's gonna get squashed. But once you create the entire object and it has the surface tension to keep it as an eyeball, for example then you can do that in microgravity and presumably bring that via down mass back down to earth and utilize it.

So organ printing is something that's very cutting edge, but obviously that would be. a total game changer. If they can continue to refine that that technology. So awesome. We're at the

MPD: very beginning of the story. And when you talk about these types of technologies, it's so clear geopolitical implications.

The prior space station was in partnership with a bunch of countries, most notably Russia. And they were always ahead of us on, it seemed like on a lot of the. Space tech and rocketry. I'm sure I'm wrong on that. We're in a little bit of a new era now with SpaceX and our whole industry really going private and building out.

How does how does this lab look different from a geopolitical standpoint?

Dylan Taylor: I think the model's been inverted, right? So it's commercially owned. It'll be owned by Voyager in partnership with our, other joint venture partners. So a sovereign nation won't own it. That's one point.

But second point is by creating, let's say, international partnerships in business, we can provide access to many of the countries who are on the station today. Russia's an exclusion because of some of the embargo and some of the things for U. S. nationals doing business there, but literally Japan, Canada, European Union, which are the other countries on the station.

Are all going to be part of our project as well. So I think geopolitically we can recreate a lot of that. The bigger dynamic that's happening today is we have the rise of China in China space capability. China has their own space station, right? It just was launched about a year and a half ago. And it's more advanced than the International Space Station, by all accounts.

So I think where we're headed, Mark, it, it's interesting, I use the analogy of Apple versus Android. We're really developing two different ecosystems, a U. S. led, Western led ecosystem, and a Chinese led ecosystem. The real question is, we went at the UN, they had 22 space agencies registered at the beginning of the 2010s.

That number is now over 90. So many countries have space ambitions. Many of these countries have resources, Saudi Arabia, India. So the real question is, where will those countries gravitate? I don't think they can have a leg in both camps. I think they need to pick. So I think we're going to have a big sorting between the nations of the world into these two different ecosystems.

And that's what I see. So almost think of that as a little bit of a cold war in space between those two ecosystems.

MPD: And those lines are mostly already drawn, right? There's a handful of countries sitting in the middle. Yeah. That's true. The NATO countries

Dylan Taylor: already. Yep.

I think the question is Russia, Gulf States, India, South America. Those are some of the open issues in terms of where they go.

MPD: This is privately owned. It is. That's a big concept. The idea that, that's gotta be the biggest flex ever when you can tell people at dinner. Yeah.

I own a space station. What's the how do you think about the pros and cons from a advancement of the industry? Most importantly. Of having this be private, right? And this has been the whole macro trend, right? This went from a public venture and via NASA to, SpaceX really kicking things off.

But now there's a whole ecosystem of folks out there, right

Dylan Taylor: on the commercial. I'm a big believer in the privatization piece. I know that's controversial and even people within NASA are not totally on board necessarily. They have factions that are pro commercialization versus not. The clearest example I can provide is is launch, which you alluded to mark space shuttle.

Right, which unfortunately had 2 tragic accidents as we know, Columbia and challenger. If you took a 16 ounce bottle of water, and you send it to orbit on the space shuttle was 100, 000 dollars. 100, 000 dollars per pound to orbit. So they kill the shuttle program. They put out bids for private launch.

The winners on that were SpaceX and Orbital ATK, which is known by Northrop Grumman. And then later for crewed, , space flight, it was SpaceX and Boeing. Fast forward 10, 12, 14 years later, SpaceX makes orbit, right? At that time, only I think five countries had ever made orbit, much less a private company.

Then they started reusing rockets, right? Reusing the rocket booster. I think everyone's seen that magical image of the dual rocket booster. Landing simultaneously. That was back in February 2018. In my mind, that was the, that was the moment, right? That was the moment that everything changed. And now with the Falcon system, SpaceX is launching about every three and a half days, which is insane.

And it's about 1, 500. a pound to orbit. A hundred X improvement. And then they're working on the next generation rocket, which is what we've agreed to launch star lab on star ship. And we're looking at 400 a pound roughly to once that makes orbit. So these are complete game changers. And I don't think you get that innovation.

I don't think you get that disruption if you stay with the status quo. And so I think NASA realizes that. And they realized that with private space stations, they're going to get much more innovation. They're going to get things implemented that they hadn't considered before. The private sector can take a bit more risk in terms of ideas.

So I think ultimately it benefits everybody. It benefits NASA. It benefits the private industry. It benefits humanity. So I'm a big believer in privatization. Now

MPD: what's the, you guys landed a pretty massive public contract. As a private sector guy, I'm always been building companies and investing in companies for years and years now, guess decades and decades getting old.

As I look at this, though, I've never journeyed into picking up government contracts. It just seems like it's in the territory, um, beyond where there's sunlight, like we're entering into a new environment, a new level of complexity. A whole bunch of unknowns, can you shed any light on what that journey is?

And I'm sure when you demystify it, it's just a bunch of paperwork and relationships and anything else. But we'd love to hear what that looked like for you to get signed off on to build the next base station. Yeah,

Dylan Taylor: it's the answer is a little bit, it depends, right? So if you have a contract with someone like NASA, which is a civil agency, you have a whole set of regulations and have to do's.

If you have a contract with the Department of Defense, let's say, , which is a military and defense organization, national security organization, those set of requirements are different and typically more stringent. And then within defense, if it's a classified program, which, we operate several classified programs.

At Voyager some of which I'm not even aware of, which is interesting as chairman and CEO of the company but but though, those have another layer of requirements and regulation. It really does depend government contracts, I think is too vague of a term to define it generally, but what I'll say with NASA, they're a great partner.

And where they've ended up with these they're called space act agreements. And it's a special type of contract only NASA can award that essentially allows you to have a milestone based compensation system. So once you have been awarded the contract, you lay out all the milestones to get from point A to point B.

You negotiate what those milestones will be in terms of time and in terms of money being delivered for various milestones. It has to add up to the total contract value, obviously, and the timeframe needs to match what NASA's requirements are. But there's a lot of flexibility within those two parameters to establish those milestones and I think it works quite well.

We're incented to chase the next milestone and make sure we get it on time and hit the requirement that the milestone has outlined. And I think NASA's knows if a program's in trouble, they're going to know pretty quick, right? Because you're going to start missing milestones. So I think it's a good approach.

NASA, they're great partners. They really are. And I'm not just saying that because I'm being recorded. I really believe they're great partners.

MPD: For the innovative engineer. Sitting on a campus somewhere right now, dreaming about getting into this game and helping out. Where do they start?

What's the first step you do if you want to start developing a relationship and Get into this. Is there a lawyer you call? Is there a group you reach out to? Do you gotta go work in the industry for a bit? What's first base? Because I feel like once people get into a system, it usually helps them figure it.

You it becomes self navigable. Where does this begin?

Dylan Taylor: Yeah, I think I think there's a couple of different ways to look at that. So if you're a recent college grad and you want to get into the space industry I would start with any kind of internship, any kind of work experience you can get within the industry, even if it's unpaid.

I would really encourage people to do that. In addition to that, I would seek out people in the industry, cold email them, LinkedIn, whatever you need to do, let them know what your ambitions are, what you're trying to do and see if you can't find one or two people that can be a virtual mentor for you.

I respond to those emails from time to time. I get a lot of them, but I respond to those from time to time. So I think. I think tenacity wins the game there, but ultimately, you've got to also decide what kind of career path you want to have, right? Do you want safe and secure working for a big company on really big projects, but you're just a very small part of that?

Or do you want to work in a more dynamic environment, high speed, lots of innovation, but could, It could fail in six months kind of thing, and then you're out on your ear and you're looking for a new opportunity. So I think your risk tolerance and your ability to security, I think is whatever dial you want that security, financial security stability dial that will dictate where you want to push into the industry.

But SpaceX is always hiring, they're growing like a weed. They do turn through some people because they work them very hard. I think people get there and they say this isn't for me. So I think those are the kinds of things that I would encourage people to do. There's also some really good fellowships out there for young women, Brooke Owens fellowship is a great one.

Matthew, which is another fellowship named after a young man who tragically died of cancer at a young age, but those kinds of fellowships catapult you into the industry as well, because they'll place you at one of a handful of prominent space companies.

MPD: Another question on behalf of the entrepreneurs out there.

We're in the emphasis of this industry. The doors are open now, which is really exciting. What does the industry need? What, if you could wave a wand or herd people towards a mission within the industry, what is it?

Dylan Taylor: How can they help? Yeah, no it's a brilliant question because this is the way my brain works, right?

I start with the end state and then I think, what does the industry need? That's why we created Voyager. And before that's why we created a conduits for early stage capital because that's where the industry was plugged at that time. It's human resource, honestly, Mark, I, people ask me what keeps you up at night as CEO of Voyager and it's talent.

It's attracting, retaining talent. So I think the industry needs more talent. It's attracting a lot of talent today, but we still need more and more talent. So how can people help? If you're passionate about space, get in the industry, no matter what your skill set is. And if you're not passionate about space, but still want to help encourage and, inspire other people within your network to seek out a space as a career.

But that's really the constraint right now is human capital.

MPD: Dylan, I'm going to brag about you for a second. I know you got this in your bio and everywhere else, but if I have this right, you're the youngest human to go to the bottom of the ocean and into space. You were

Dylan Taylor: 606

MPD: person human ever to be in space. And you did also do a submarine dive. Way deep into the ocean.

What compelled you? How did you before this, you were a successful real estate executive. There's been a transformation here. How did that happen? What's the thinking?

Dylan Taylor: Yeah I'll try to be, I'll try to be succinct here, but. My ambition getting out of college was to be a fortune 500 CEO, make a bunch of money and live happily ever after.

Right? That was my motivation. I was very amped up. I was hyper competitive and that was my fuel, right? That's what I, that's what I was doing. And so I ended up successfully running large public companies, a bunch of different industries, electronics, banking, real estate, as you mentioned, but I reached a point in my career It was in my late thirties, about 38, 39, where I was successful in quotes, but pretty miserable, feeling like I wasn't living a purposeful life, feeling like I wasn't working with people that I respected or that I looked up to.

That I wanted to further enrich, frankly. And so I really did a lot of soul searching. There was a book I read that really changed my life. I don't know if you've read it, Mark, called The Last Lecture. And it's also a lecture on YouTube. If you want to check it out. It's by Randy Pausch. I've watched the video.

It's powerful. It's powerful. And, I won't give it away to spoil it for the listeners. I would encourage them to seek it out. But what I took away from it is you have to follow your passion. And you can have your cake and eat it too. You can have your day job and still do your passions on the side.

And then ultimately those passions become your day job. And if you don't know what your passions are, because a lot of people say I don't really know what that is. Randy says, go back in time. And the further you get and the closer you get to your childhood, the more accurate that passion will be.

And for me, it had always been space. Always. Since I was earliest memory. So I'm like, wow, that's, that is my passion, right? So then that's when I really started getting into the industry. I started as an investor, not because I'm a great investor necessarily, but it was a way for me to contribute to the industry, contribute some capital, maybe some business acumen because I had some scar tissue running large companies.

So I, I had some insight that maybe others didn't in the industry. So that's how I got into it. And fast forward every day is a dream because you're doing exactly what you love to do. And I had the opportunity to go to space, which was a lifelong dream, right? It's like one of those things where it's I want to play with play in the NFL and be a hall of fame quarterback, right?

It's it's silly to even dream it because it's crazy. So go into space being an astronaut it just seemed insane. And I thought, if they privatize commercial space flight, maybe in 20 years I'll go, but I ended up getting an opportunity to go very early.

I went in December of 21 and life changing flight completely changed my life. I was on the flight, if you might remember with Michael Strahan. So that was really covered pretty widely. It was. Live on CNN and, Michael was hosting good morning America from the pad and all this sort of thing.

But, uh, but that was a life changer. And then after that spaceflight, back to the ocean, deep ocean stuff, people assume when you go to space, they assume 2 things. They assume you have resources and they assume you're crazy. . Those are the two things that , that they think.

And so I had this opportunity to go with Victor Veco who had the sub, the only sub capable of going to the bottom of the Mariana Trench and got invited to go with Victor. And for me it was like, how do you say no to something like that? It's do you wanna go to the bottom of the Maria Insurance?

I'm like, yeah, I think I do. I didn't even know that. That was a thing, but. And that ended up being the second coolest thing I've ever done in my life, because we went to a part of the Mariana Trench that no humans had ever been to before. So I felt like a true explorer, true pioneer. We, we discovered things down there that they didn't know was, were there.

So that was super cool. So yeah, that's how that all came about. But space