Information dump - Chapter One - Robbie Schingler - Planet Labs - PSLV - ISRO - Chapter Two - General Simon P. Warden - Known for trying to make bureaucratic institutions less bureaucratic - Space and Missile systems center in Los Angeles - Musk meets Warden - "This is not a baloney artist, this is the real thing" - DARPA SpaceX satellite contract - Chapter Three - NASA Ames Research Center - Key in subsonic and supersonic aircraft development - Engineers here made Apollo, Gemini and Mercury missions possible - Late 1930s, Charles Lindbergh proposed new aeronautics centre on the West Coast - Known for wind tunnels - Outmaneuvered politically by other centres, like JPL - 1980s, Engineers found PC companies better than heading to NASA - Worden became director in May 2006 - Worden advocated for cheaper satellites, launch systems, etc. since 1990s. Wanted to shake things up as director at Ames. - More about Worden - 1983, President Reagan unveiled the Star Wars program (considered unfeasible at the time) - Spotting and analysis of Soviet missiles as soon as they were launched - Air Force General James Abrahamson's (in charge of Star Wars) assistant was Worden - Worden took on a role in 1991 as head of technology, with $2bn at his disposal - Clementine mission - Success - 1/5th cost of other similar probes, due to focus on commercial software and hardware - Delta Clipper - Reusable launch vehicle with VTOL - SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) cancelled in 1993 - Due to unfeasibility of ideas - International Astronautical Congress - October 2002, Houston, Texas - Worden and Will Marshall, Chris Boshuizen, Robbie Schingler (future founders of Planet Labs) and George Whitesides (Virgin Galactic) attend the same event - "Whether in business, politics, science, or whatever, the best thing to do is find somebody who is smart and disagrees with you" - Worden: "There needs to be someplace within NASA that runs on the motto of, you know, 'Proceed until apprehended'. And that's what we did." - Richard Shelby, senator from Alabama, impeded Worden's ambitions. Shelby fought to get rid of just about every New Space-type project - Worden tasked with putting rovers - Worden started a secretive project within Ames to make a lunar lander for about ~$20 million. Alan Weston would lead this project - Alan Weston - US Air Force weapons designer, who also was a part of the Star Wars initiative - By 2008, progress had been made on the micro lunar lander - Larry Page and Sergey Brin came to witness it in action - Ames team built the lunar lander for less than $3 million. Bureaucrats weren't happy. Project cancelled again - Work caught the eye of Alan Stern, responsible for $4.4bn budget for science projects - New project: orbiting vehicle for the Moon - $80 million budget - Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) - Money came with bureaucracy strings attached. "Gained 12 management layers overnight" (lol) -