Space launch

God called the vault sky," or the firmament, "and there was evening, and there was morning the second day." [thunder] Okay? Separate the waters from the waters.

So when you see, when you go Google SpaceX Daytona rocket launch October the 13th, you will see the waters being separated as it hits the firmament and drops down [thunder] because it can't go through it.

It can't go through it.

You can make a, that little penile-looking rocket, you can make it as skinny as you want.

And now there's a new space kid in town hoping to cash in.

Tāwhaki National Aerospace Centre wants to launch large rockets from its base near Christchurch a dozen times a year as it attempts to tap into the burgeoning world space launch market.

Hi, I'm Amanda Gillies and today on The Detail, we are heading out of this world.

Work is underway to secure capital, consents and customers to build a spaceport in Canterbury to cater for intense global demand for rocket launches.

It's a big industry with big money.

This is New Zealand's next greatest chance to get in on space launch and sending rockets into space of all kinds.

But there's a huge number of questions and a lot of hurdles ahead for it to get over the line.

And what are the risks and pitfalls of our rapidly increasing aerospace activities? In 2025, we were

China says Long March 7A rocket launch failed after flight anomaly.

Beijing, August 11 China set a Long March 7A rocket carrying the ChinaSat-4B satellite failed after an in-flight anomaly following liftoff from the Wanchang space launch site in the southern island province of Hainan on Monday.

The rocket blasted off at 8.02 p.m. Beijing time, state news agency Xinhua said.

But then Elon came along and was really thinking hard about how to actually turn this into a commercial market.

I was actually working at the White House or working with the White House at that point on some of the commercial space launch policy projects.

And one of the first questions that I got asked early on was, you know, why is Space Launch so expensive? And what's this guy Elon doing that's going to change the picture? And so met with him and the team, met with the legacy primes and so forth, got heard all the story about why he was going to fail.

But what really struck me in those conversations was how focused he was on the market opportunity from the beginning and if we can get costs down to the right level, what that could actually do in terms of opening up a market.

And he was talking initially about university markets and students and so forth.

And I would say it started to really pick up probably around the mid-teens as people started to see, you know, some of the changes in the dynamics there with SpaceX become successful.

But you have a ton of companies.

You have a number doing space launch.

And SpaceX even took Slick 6, which I thought was interesting because it's right next to a mountain.

And so for those of you who don't know what it is, Space Launch Site 6 at Vandenberg was built for the space shuttle.

And when they got through spending $370 million to build the damn thing, they realized, hey, it's right next to a mountain.

It could shake the spacecraft apart on takeoff.

I paid attention in school.

Nonetheless, imagine, teachers, imagine if you were actually raising up, though, the next actual space cadet, where we've got somebody who's representing Central Florida so beautifully on today's space launch.

Whoa.

Man, I get so excited about these.

There's a lot of A lot of areas.

And we're not going to do space launch.

We do space products.

We operate a lot of our own satellites and a lot of our own sensors in space.

I'm not trying to incrementally get there, it's just all in on AGI.

And the point that he made was, Palmer, even if I've got a 1% chance of succeeding, which maybe is an overestimation, but suppose I have a 1% chance of succeeding, and suppose that I could pull it off, the risk-adjusted outcome kind of demands that I do it, and that was how I felt about defense.

If there was a 1% chance that I could help solve this problem, then it was one that would be massively impactful to work on, versus, let's say, starting another gaming company, getting into Space Launch, building a car company.

All of the billionaires, they end up doing the same thing.