How Voyager Technologies Is Redefining Space Innovation with Founder Dylan Taylor

If you can make the global economy 5% more efficient, that's $3.5 trillion of value. Think of space as the massive massive data play. And more satellites were launched in the last 12 months than the entire history of the world. We have reliable, inexpensive launch to orbit. That completely changes the game.

Great to be with you.

Wow. Fascinating question. Well, I would start at the very beginning. So, how did I get interested in space maybe? And that really for me, I know it's a bit of a cliche, Alexa, but it was Star Trek. And the reason I was so captivated by Star Trek, and I remember vividly watching this with my dad when I was 3 years old, literally, we were living in a pretty rough situation. My parents got married really young. My mom was 19, my dad was 20. He got shipped off to Vietnam right around that time. And so he ended up coming back from that, was in graduate school and we were literally living in a house next to a group of a biker gang basically. I'm not even joking about that. And so what I was really fascinated by was when I watched Star Trek. I mean, not only did you have a new adventure every week and a new planet to explore, which really captivated my sense of adventure, but it was also a post, you know, scarcity world, if I can use that term. Everyone had enough stuff. Everyone was getting along. It was very diverse. And I was kind of comparing that to what I was living in and going through. And I thought to myself, there's a big disconnect here between this show and my reality. And so I was always captivated by space, its adventure, but probably more fundamentally its ability to sort of allow us to reimagine what humanity can be. And I've always thought of it as a blank canvas. I've always thought of it as the best of humans. You know, I know you know a couple of astronauts personally, Alexa. These are some of the best humans that walk the face of the earth. They're not only talented, but they're humble. They're collaborative. So I've always been captivated by how fascinating space can be and how it brings out the best in humanity.

Sure. Honestly, Alexa, I think it was just ambition. Just ambition and hard work. I was super super super driven from a young age and actually probably to a fault. I think we're both Henry Crown Fellows.

Yeah. And so for me Henry Crown came at a great time because you know the whole moniker is from success to significance. And I was feeling successful in quotes but pretty honestly pretty miserable. I was in industries I didn't care about. I was working with people I didn't necessarily like or respect and I was in my mind playing small ball not doing the best work I could do. It wasn't terribly purposeful. I was you know thinking what's my impact on the world, right? And of course in Henry Crown you're asked to reflect on all these questions. And so for me my, as we talked about, my passion had always been space. And so I took my skill set from running public companies in other industries and I thought, okay, well, we know we need to create a company, and here's the way I would frame Voyager. The companies in aerospace and defense, I'll loop that in a little bit as well, but the companies in aerospace and defense that have the most capability have no ambition to do great projects. And the companies that have the ambition to do great projects don't have the capability. And I thought to myself, could we create a company that's assembling enough capability that you could build the replacement to the International Space Station, which we have the privilege of working on that project called Star Lab, and projects like that, go to the moon, build infrastructure that allows people to live and work in space, but do that in a fun, entrepreneurial, innovative way. And so that's really what Voyager is. We were founded six years ago now. And you know we're working on some super cool projects including we're involved in Golden Dome. We are building a replacement to the International Space Station. So it's an exciting time for us and as you alluded to we went public back in June of this year.

Yeah. Well, believe it or not, 20 months after we were founded, we weren't even 2 years old, we won one of the three contracts awarded what's called commercial LEO destinations, which is the commercialization that NASA is going through. So, very similar to what they did with the space shuttle, right? They sunsetted that and they basically said, we're not going to own and operate our own rockets any longer. We're going to put that out for bid. We're going to see what's available in the commercial markets. And of course that gave birth to SpaceX and Rocket Lab and other companies. So very similar on the space station side, the International Space Station, which is one of the greatest things humans have ever done in my view, right? Deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. It's old. It's been up there for 25 plus years. And the plan is to have that come down in 2030, 2031, something like that. So it's going to be decommissioned. They're going to drop it into the Pacific, South Pacific Ocean. Sadly that's what it is because it's too big to burn up in the atmosphere and you can't really disassemble it. So that's what is going to happen to the ISS. So you have to have these commercial replacements online prior to then. Our project is called Star Lab. It's focused on the research and development aspect. A lot of people don't realize microgravity, which is the environment you're in on the space station, that's why people float around, is really a magic laboratory. You can grow perfect crystals. You can do bio-pharma drug development you can't do here on Earth. You can grow essentially perfect semiconductors. So, there's a lot of R&D that can happen in microgravity and we're optimizing our space station to do that. And we brought in partners from around the world on the project. Airbus, Mitsubishi, Palantir, those are the main partners on it, but even companies like Hilton Hotels are involved. Northrop Grumman, we designed a partnership with the Quantum Computing Company. So it's a pretty fascinating project.

Yeah. Well, it was a life changer, Alexa. Truly. So, lifelong dream to go to space. Never thought I would be able to go, right? I mean, it's like saying you want to be a Hall of Fame NFL quarterback, right? It's like one of those things that just seems too insane to even dream about. But had an opportunity. Blue Origin, of course, Jeff's company.

Put out basically the ability to compete in a lottery. You know, you had to pay, of course. I participated in that lottery. My strategy was novel. I thought I didn't want to be the highest bidder, but I wanted to bid high enough to where I had their attention and I could be on a future space flight. The deal I had with my wife is that she said, look, if you want to go to space, let's wait at least until our daughters are out of high school before you do that. But I jumped the gun on that. I ended up going while they were in high school. And the reason for that was I think I was on flight 10, human space flight 10, which means I would not have even flown today because they haven't had 10 human space flights. But I kept on getting moved up in the manifest and ended up going on one of the very early flights. I was on the flight right after Jeff and his brother went and I was on the flight, you might recall, with Michael Strahan, the daughter of Alan Shepard, who was the first American to orbit the Earth. So that was the context of it. I had founded a nonprofit called Space for Humanity. This was actually my Henry Crown venture. Alexa, you'll

Exactly. So, it all comes full circle. And of course, Space for Humanity was meant to democratize access to space. So, we've sent the first Mexican-born female to space. We've sent the first Arab female to space. We sent Ed Dwight to space, who was the first African-American astronaut candidate picked by JFK. Did not go to space with NASA. In my opinion, he was discriminated against. And at age 92, we were able to send him up on Blue Origin and co-sponsor his flight for that. So democratizing space was a passion of mine. And I think Blue Origin was looking for people to be on these early flights that were passionate about space, had a tie-in to why space matters. And so I think that's probably why they moved me up to flight three. And yeah, the day, you know, so first of all you trained for about a week and a half on site there and our flight was actually delayed a couple of days due to weather and I had a lot of friends texting me saying I'm so sorry you must be so disappointed. I'm telling them I'm having the time of my life. This is like fantasy space camp right because you're training, you're doing all these simulations. You're learning about the systems, you're meeting the designer of the spacecraft. So I really loved it. And day of the flight, you're up early. You meet with your friends and family at kind of a breakfast before you go out to the pad. You know, it was the best day of my life. And I have permission from my wife to say that. So it was really fantastic. And you know, here's what's fascinating to me. People say, were you scared?

Well, I thought and I told people I'm like, of course I'm going to be terrified, right? You get to T minus 10 and you've got to just be coming unglued. Like, how can you not be terrified? And the fact is I was not nervous at all. At all, Alexa, my heart rate on launch was 56. And I don't think I'm a particularly brave person. In fact, the rest of the crew was also very chill. And I think it's because of the training because you simulate that over and over and over again. There's a ritual where you walk across the jet bridge into the capsule and you ring a bell. We practiced that. We practiced every element over and over and over and over again. And so I think you kind of hack your brain where your brain's like, oh, I've done this before. And then honestly the only thing I was nervous about was it getting scrubbed because we went into a delay where they were waiting for the winds to die down. I thought, ah, you know, if they scrub this flight maybe we don't go tomorrow and then maybe something happens and I don't get a chance to go. So that's all I was nervous about and yeah it was just so fascinating. So you know, T minus 10, you hit liftoff and then you're pulling amazing, you're pulling three and a half Gs on the way up which just to give you a sense if you floor it in an F1 car you're pulling about 1.8. So this is a lot of Gs. You go supersonic in about I think it's 27 seconds you're supersonic. I was actually watching the Earth fall away. I got special permission from Blue Origin to turn my head in the seat. Which is apparently I'm the first person who ever asked that question. So I might have been the first person to ever see the Earth fall away because keep in mind when you're in the space shuttle or the Crew Dragon, you're looking straight up. There is no window off to your right. The only architecture that has that is the Blue Origin capsule. And I think I'm the only Blue Origin commercial astronaut to have ever asked, can I turn my head in the seat? So that was amazing. I live in Denver. You're taking off from West Texas, so I saw the Rocky Mountains within 45 seconds. And then once you get up there, you unstrap, and I had a strategy, you know, I've been thinking about this my whole life. My strategy was to go to the window, turn myself upside down. There's no up and down in microgravity. But because you've trained in the capsule, your brain intuits that that's up and that's down because that's what you know. But the way the Blue Origin windows are, they're kind of angled and sloped down so that when you go to the window and you're turned upside down, there's nothing in your field of view. Your seat's not in your field of view. So it's essentially like you're hovering over the Earth. If it's appropriate, I'll just tell you what I felt. So imagine an emotion and it's got three parts to it. The first is you see the Earth from space and it's this deep sense of stewardship, love and affection where everything you've ever known, every memory you've ever had, every person you've ever met, everyone you love is right there in front of you. It's almost like you're looking at a toddler or a puppy where you just have this unconditional love. But then that shifts to the second emotion which is terror because you realize how fragile of a state we're in. You see literally a whisper of an atmosphere. If you didn't know the word atmosphere, you wouldn't describe the Earth as having an atmosphere. It's like completely inconsequential in your field of view. Of course it's consequential, we wouldn't be here without it. But it's just a whisper. It's like a hint. Think of like the dew on a leaf in the morning, right? It's just like a touch. And you see compared to that this dark, hostile black, you know, I think William Shatner called it black death. And you just see this comparison. You think to yourself, that's what's protecting us from the cold hostility of space. And you're like that can't be all there is protecting us. And then the third emotion is anger because you feel like you've been whispered the password. And you know because when you're up there it's so clear there is no other people. There is no other place. There's here and us. That's it. There is no other. There's only here. And so, deep sense of love, terror, fear, anger, fuse those emotions together, multiply it by a billion, and then bury it so deep inside of your spirit that you can't unfeel it or unsee it for the rest of your life. And that's what it's like. It's a completely transcendental, profoundly impactful moment. And it's a perspective shifter. Frank White's written about the overview effect, a Rhodes Scholar, Harvard professor. That's a real thing. Every astronaut I've ever talked to, Alexa, and I know you know a few. They can be Russian, Korean, Japanese, American, fighter pilot, hardcore, artistic, atheist, Muslim, Christian, doesn't matter. Everyone has been impacted by that experience.

It's a great question. I think two things. One is I felt like the world, and it's exactly why your podcast matters to the world, the world is playing small ball, right? We kind of go through the motions. We don't have the big ideas and we don't take on the big challenges. Just full stop. We don't. And part of the reason I founded Space for Humanity was this whole notion that if people are dejected in a Henry Crown Fellowship saying I can't impact the world then maybe it's not anything other than we lack perspective, right? That's what really fascinated me by this notion of shifting people's perspective. So I think what it did for me were two things. One is you can't play small ball so dialing up the ambition even more but not personal ambition, ambition for the future of humanity, ambition for how we can do better as a species. And then the second thing is just a huge sense of urgency, feeling like I'm doing the right things. I'm on the right track, whether it's Space for Humanity, Voyager, Star Lab, and just jumping out of bed in the morning saying, I'm just going to go get after it because this is really really really important work. And I think that's, you know, if you and I, it's been probably overused but ikigai, I think is what the Japanese call it, but these concentric circles of what you're good at, what you're passionate about, what the world needs, and what the world will compensate you for. I think when you're operating in that overlap of those four concentric circles you're really unstoppable in many ways. And because it's at the heart of passion, it's at the heart of effectiveness. So I think that's really what it did for me is it was very validating that I was on the right track and it made me more ambitious. But not, you know, it's interesting, you being through Henry Crown election, you'll get this completely. I had a mentor one time who said Dylan when your desire for reflected glory in the people you've mentored and impacted exceeds your desire for personal glory then you'll be a true leader. That's what leadership is. And so I feel like that's more what I'm focused on now. And by the way, it's way more satisfying than personal ambition. Way more.

Yeah, for sure. Well, thanks for the question. So, one of the cool things back on space here for a moment is we're doing about half of the commercial activity that happens on the International Space Station today is our company. So, we're managing those

Missions—they're typically for universities or startups that might have an experiment they want to run. We actually have our own commercial airlock, private real estate if you will, on the ISS. So, we can run experiments in that. We can actually launch satellites out of that airlock. So, that's a great commercial business today, and it's part of the reason we won the contract to build the replacement. On the national security and defense side, you'll love this, Alexa, because we're right in the middle of the Golden Dome initiative. Golden Dome just means layers of a protective onion, for lack of a better word. At the outermost layer, the most important layer for the US and its allies is what's called next generation interceptor. That is for nuclear-tipped hypersonic missiles from Russia, North Korea, and China. And that's a no-fail mission, right? If you don't hit those missiles, we lose a city basically. So, we have the core technology that allows those missiles to be more accurate. These are purely defensive. They're not offensive. But think of a bullet hitting a bullet. And it's really important that you have the ability to modulate the propulsion, and our technology allows you to do that. We also have key technology that allows you to navigate. So when something goes into space, GPS doesn't work obviously. And believe it or not, it's like a sextant from the old days. The way you navigate is you orient yourself with the stars. So these optical navigation systems will pinpoint where it is in three-dimensional space and then allow you to, with precision timing, guide you to the next step. So think of optical navigation and control. And then lastly, the key area we're involved in is laser communication—actually sending lots of data from space down to Earth. That's typically been in radio waves in the past, on K-band. And what we do is we actually build the laser comm terminals where you can put lots of data down in a laser link. And that's really important as we talk about data centers in space and things like that. Optical communications is really, really, really important. So that's another key technology that we're focused on.

Yeah, so I think a few—one is geopolitical. So we need a place to go, right, for humans to actually have an outpost, have international cooperation. China just put a brand new space station in orbit in two years, and there is this big east versus west, China versus US geopolitical issue which has been there for a long time. But the issue is where do the Gulf states go, where does South America go, where does India go? And so I think it's really important—and it's part of the reason Starlab brought on these international partners—it's really important that we have beacons of expressions of our value system, for lack of a better—I think that's really important. All the astronauts on the Chinese space station are active duty military. This is a military outpost. Ours is a commercial endeavor that's focused on research and development. So I think geopolitical is one. Second, as I mentioned, microgravity is this magic laboratory. And so drug formulations, protein folding, growing perfect crystals—all of these things have real impact to our ability to do research and then ultimately replicate that here on Earth. If you grow a perfect crystal in space, you can actually bring it down to Earth and grow a larger perfect crystal around it. So think of this as a seed that can be commercially expanded here on Earth. So that's really important. Training astronauts—NASA will have four astronauts on our station at any given time. We'll also have other international astronauts. There are a lot of countries that want to mint sovereign astronauts, not only because it gets their populace excited, but it's an expression of their sovereignty, of their ambitions in space as well. So I think that's really important. And then lastly, to be a gateway to where we go next, right? We're going back to the moon, and when we go back to the moon, we'll go back to stay. So a lot of these technologies that we develop for the space station are relevant to the moon and then ultimately relevant to Mars as well. So that's really what the space stations are focused on. And by the way, it's a great deal for the government too. The International Space Station, round numbers, is the most complicated thing humans have ever built—about $450 billion roughly. In our S-1 we disclosed that we're around three billion, and ours has 100% of the laboratory space that the ISS has. So obviously big difference in cost between the two. Well, one of the things Mark Kelly—who, astronaut Mark Kelly, now Senator Mark Kelly—once said to me was, he was like, if driving a car is a complicated thing, he's like imagine that times 100—that's driving a spaceship. And it was a really simple way for me to think about anything that we do here is hard, anything that we do up there is a thousand, hundred times more complicated on the simplest level. And that always stuck with me. So when you talk about things like growing perfect crystals, it's not that easy to do in space with no gravity, right? It's just everything is more complicated.

Yeah, so now that we've had the elevator built, right? So here's the analogy I use. Alexa, you live in New York, I know. So in 1915—I'll pick a date—pre-World War I but not by much, right? World War One was just getting started. There were probably five or six buildings in New York above 10 stories, and the tallest building was probably 15. And you ask yourself, why was that? Did we not know how to build tall buildings? And the answer is actually we did know how to build tall buildings. The issue was we hadn't commercialized the elevator and nobody wanted—in fact, the most expensive real estate was not the penthouse, it was the garden apartment, right? And all the inexpensive was higher up in the building. So commercializing the elevator and making that inexpensive and making that safe added that third dimension to the skyline in New York, and of course right after the Chicago fire, Chicago rebuilt with skyscrapers and the rest is history. So think of us as having built the elevator. You know, you got to credit Elon—I know he's controversial in a lot of circles—but you know, we have reliable, inexpensive launch to orbit. We re-land boosters now. And of course Jeff and his company, Blue Origin, just did that.