Varda's third capsule returns safely — Delian Asparouhov on Golden Dome, Venus Aerospace, and the space economy

Welcome to the show. How you doing, Del? Sorry, I promise I'm normally, you know, right on the dot this time. You're all good. What's up? Three for three. Three for announcing it here exclusively on TVPN. Tell us what happened with the capsule. No one knows. So, you're hearing it here first at 6:13 p. m.

uh PST on Wednesday. Uh you know, early evening, we executed a de-orbit burn uh which you know, happens sort of on the opposite side roughly of the globe from uh Australia. Uh, and we came in ripping through the atmosphere 17,000 miles an hour. Um, capsule has, you know, GPS all throughout. So, we're tracking it.

I actually got a good photo of me, my, you know, co-founder and our CTO and me holding a little baby watching that GPS track, you know, sort of coming in.

It's sometimes a little anticlimactic because, you know, unlike a rocket launch where um, you can kind of do the live stream, you watch it from the ground move up, a re-entry capsule is like moving very, very fast, kind of hard to track, kind of hard to do a live stream.

And literally the way that we call things out is just like it's got this GPS thing and we know that the parachutes have opened successfully only when we just see that the GPS like vertical slows down. This is this is super bullish for the conspiracy. There is like oh there's no live stream. Did it even go to space?

Uh who knows? Maybe he's making it up. I just think you're doing out into the desert. You know you need to create some type of way for Americans to bet on re-entry. Oo yeah. That is that is just unamerican.

I mean, I know you're bringing it down in Australia, but it's frankly unamerican that uh you're not letting us all, you know, place our place our bets, but um was pushing me on, you know, you should figure out how to make more gambling in aerospace.

And I was like, lickb, the easiest way is just like gamble on, you know, sort of mission outcomes. And so this how we know we're not at peak gambling yet is there's not enough gambling on all these hyper specific technical outcomes.

People will gamble on like, you know, will Starship land, but I want it like down to like the individual, you know, sort of like, you know, meter of just like is it going to take 5 seconds to land, 6 seconds to land, like is it going to come in a trajectory? We live in a hardware world. Yeah.

Well, speaking of betting and and uh instead of P Doom, what's your P dome? I want your take on the Golden Dome. Uh what's the probability that we America gets a golden dome in the next few years? And we do have missile defense, right? like missile defense is a thing. We're not domeless right now.

Um, but like we're talking about just improving what we have, right? We're not flying blind here hopefully. Yeah. Let me give the, you know, sort of bull versus bear case.

You know, all this stuff is, you know, sort of somewhat predicated on obviously what um Israel has been able to show and especially over the past, you know, sort of uh, you know, couple years, you know, especially countering some of the Iranian attacks that have happened.

Um, if you were to like take the Israeli system and then extrapolate it to like the scale of the United States, it just doesn't really work, right? There are really small geography, very dense. Um, you know, it is actually possible to set up basically like, you know, missile defense batteries across their entire border.

If you were to do that across like the entire United States, you sort of border around the continental US and you extrapolate the cost of it, it's something on the order of like a $10 trillion program.

And we're not fighting with Canada or Mexico or like even like even smaller like states like these are low-flying projectiles. They're just wildly different, right? Yeah. The threat vectors are also Yeah. totally different. You're looking at like Yeah. Russia, North Korea, Iran, etc.

And so that solution set, you know, sort of looks very different. And so that's, you know, the premise of Golden Dome. And it's the first time that they've opened the Overton window on considering things that aren't just like ground air or sea based for the first time in the Golden Dome language.

talk about a lot of you know sort of space-based applications in particular space-based uh intercept. So the idea there is like if Russia or North Korea basically launches a missile towards the United States rather right now we do have like you said we're not domeless.

We do have some systems they're basically scattered from like you know Guam to Hawaii to Alaska etc.

Basically like all of our furthest out areas and for sure along the you know sort of border as well but furthest out areas that are closer to those adversaries to take them out you know before they get anywhere close to the United States.

The idea is now you can just have a constellation of satellites that are orbiting above North Korea, Russia, etc. regularly. So you can take this stuff out before it even gets up into like the upper end of its, you know, sort of trajectory. Now that type of system is also not trivially, you know, sort of cheap.

So here's, you know, my bull versus bear kits. You're asking is it, you know, sort of going to happen? We proposed a system like this in the early 1980s, right? And Star Wars, right? Yeah. Star Wars days, the uh space development initiative, I think it was called, or space defense initiative.

um they ran some early trade studies. It had a lot of enthusiasm in Congress, etc. And then ultimately it fell apart partially because the like scale of the economics of it relative to like the you know sort of benefits the defense you know sort of the nation just didn't really you know entirely pencil out.

And so the sort of bare case for you know sort of golden dome would be maybe we end up in that same world where we like start to run these analyses we do these things and then all we do is really just like buy a couple of traditional terrestrial basically missile you know defense battery systems that already exist and we make those sensors a little better like the current you know one is this thing called you know sort of THAD is basically like the largest you know sort of system um it actually doesn't have a particularly high hit rate of being able to take out the missiles on the way in and so you know right now I think we have like 40 THAAD missiles and I think they have like something a 25% unit hit rate.

So it's like we can take out like 10 ICBMs. Russia has like a thousand and so you know we're like a little off on order of magnitude. Um so maybe it's like make that one a little more accurate etc.

So that's sort of like I would say the like maybe not default case but that is like the downside case of like you know we announce this stuff we talk about it when it comes down to like the economics and actually implementing this it becomes too tricky.

Congress flips from, you know, sort of Republican to Democrat, you know, in the next election cycle. They don't want to give, you know, sort of President Trump a win, and so they decide to shut it down.

The bull case is, okay, well, relative to the 1980s, there's a lot of people that can actually do pretty near-term demonstrations of this, right? You know, obviously orbital rockets this year are launching and landing every single day.

There's a lot of companies that, you know, are looking to pitch in on this that aren't just people that are going to throw out white papers, but are actually like very hardware rich, right?

um you know there may be a lot of um overenthusiasm in the defense tech you know funding space and ecosystem but like look you know we were talking about this earlier this week like look at what Venus Aerospace you know sort of just demonstrated right like while there is maybe overenthusiasm and you know lots of funding at least people are translating into like real hardware demonstrations of like next generation technologies and so if there's a set of companies that before Congress flips is actually able to go and do some real world demonstrations show that this is practical capability get some defense funding, you know, sort of flowing into actually operationalizing those initiatives.

So, by the time it flips, there's already something that's sort of pseudo operational or very close. Now, it becomes a little harder to justify.

It's like, yeah, there's some political win if you're a Democrat to not give, you know, Trump a win, but like, you know, the defense budget has always been sort of very bipartisan as well. That's my sort of like bull versus, you know, sort of bear.

It's like, you know, the first time in history we can probably demonstrate this really quickly and we've got a 2-year window and it's a, you know, sort of national priority. bear is well it's pretty easy for us to just you know sort of flip back to just doing what we you know have always done.

Uh you mentioned Venus space they put up a post yesterday they said today Venus Aerospace made history we completed the first ever US flight of a rotating de detonation rocket engine proving runwaybased high-speed flight is possible. I don't really understand what rotating detonation rocket engine is.

Do you understand the applications of this? Is this defense tech or space tech? Is it commercial? is this DoD program like what what is the story here with Venus?

It's been a minute since you know I met up with the Venus team but the last time that I chatted with them the intention of what they were building was to create these you know sort of space planes that would basically take off from a runway get out of the atmosphere cross across the globe and go land back on a runway.

And so that was sort of a you know sort of commercial um case.

It'd obviously be, you know, sort of very expensive on a per seat, you know, sort of basis, but there's obviously, you know, sort of plenty of people in the world that would pay significant in order to be able to like, you know, get from LA to Tokyo, but do that in like, you know, in theory, you could do that in under an hour basically.

Like if you think about how quickly it takes you to orbit between those two, it's roughly 45 minutes. Yeah. This is like SpaceX pointtooint. Yeah. Exactly.

but using you know sort of traditional runways rather than having to build out you know all the like SpaceX basically like landing infrastructure like you know their planes can actually take off and land on you know sort of normal normal runways. Yeah.

Um and so their engine definitely you know um you know demonstration you know is the obviously the very key first step of being able to um um and then you know apologies at home today so hey welcome to the stream. We should just spend the next few minutes just turn this into a kid show. Yeah.

At least at least one of our kids are are probably watching at home. Let's break it down. Uh, Batman or Superman? Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs. Uh, T-Rex or Velociraptor? Uh, fire trucks. Fire trucks. Fire trucks. I like it. I like it. What about rockets, though? Rockets versus space planes? Rockets.

I mean, I I think we got to go to our child correspondent. Is it rockets or airplanes? Rockets or space planes? I think enthusiastic about both. Oh my gosh. I can't I can't wait to I can't wait till he's co-hosting the show with with our children. Yeah, we could only get Delian for 15 minutes today.

It'd be so much easier if you could just delegate this whole this whole call-in thing to your son. Be fantastic. Be a much more entertaining guest. Okay, I know we didn't quite make it to the top of the hour, but maybe I'll uh you know go take care of this bad boy. No, this is great. It's great having both you guys on.

Delta V today. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Talk soon. Have fun, guys. Bye. See, that is pro-atalism in action in reality. Uh, he's not just threading about it. It's great. Well, uh, let's tell you about numeralhq. com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

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Uh Nvidia, we we we we talked about this. This next post is great from Bryce. Let's do it. That SBF built one of the most legendary private investment portfolios of all time tells you more about the business of venture than a thousand podcasts on the subject ever will. Well, what about this podcast, Bryce?

Because we're we're saying we're saying what you're saying. He did he did make some good bets. Nobody can take that away from Cursor. Curser and Enthropic very very early. Even though uh David Tish, friend of the show, was also in the original cursor round.

He said that he didn't get into it wasn't like 200k to $500 million, which was the number circulating around. He said there's no way that that would math out. Can you imagine if SPF is like secretly got like co-founder shares or something or like got like inc like an incubation type deal?

So, he did get that massive stake at 200k. Who knows? I don't know. But now someone else owns it. Financial investor. Yeah. Somebody was able to buy out that cursor position. And I wouldn't be surprised if we had him on the show at one point. Future guest. Maybe they might have been in the audience.

They might be listening right now. They're probably listening right now from their yacht in the Amalfi Coast. Just off that one bet, basically. I mean, it's enough, right? Uh, crazy. Anyway, uh, we already covered the uh the We should cover the Brian Brian Armstrong news.

Coinbase basically cyber criminals bribed and recruited rogue overseas support agents to pull personal data on 1% of Coinbase uh Coinbase's MTUs. No password, private keys or funds were exposed. Prime accounts were untouched.

Uh and Coinbase has committed to reimbursing users that were basically you had to be impacted by social engineering attacks. So people weren't getting support agents to move funds around. Funds weren't stolen like that.

But it would be, let's say, somebody gets your personal information, you get a random call and they say, "Hey, we were talking about this, how the spam around Coinbase was getting crazy, right? You'd get spam text saying like, you know, click here to log in or something.

" So no, it's truly it's truly it felt like it 100xed like two months ago or something like that. Great business for these scammers, right? Like the scammers are it's just whatever money they make is pure profit. Yeah. I wonder how much of those phone social engineering phone calls now are happening with AI.

I don't know. It has to be a good percentage. The the spam calls I would get when I pick up were ridiculous. Just recordings with like music on them and it just didn't sound it didn't sound anything like an actual uh call that you'd get ever. Yeah.

And the and the concern here is that this data is floating around now and people can find out where big crypto holders live and find out what they look like. There's ID information uh you know as part of this.

And so it's a huge risk if if somebody was on Coinbase and they had you know 10 Bitcoin now somebody could go to their house and say I would like those 10 Bitcoin. Yep. Transfer very risky. So, it's super unfortunate, but responded very well like with the director camera. Yeah, the response is very interesting.

They asked for a $20 million bounty. He's saying, "We're not paying you the bounty, but we will give we're willing to pay $20 million to anybody who gives us information leading to the arrest. " And so, what's a lot of ransom? Oh, yeah. You haven't even seen it.

And so, so it sounds like a movie plot, but but what happens here is that there's probably multiple criminals involved in this. And so let's watch them turn on each other because somebody's like, "Well, if they're not paying the bounty to our criminal group, why don't I turn on the big boss, get him in the clink.

" Oh, wow. Get the, you know, and uh so anyway, some some interesting game theory and good founder comps by Brian putting up the the video just, you know, not overproduced, just, you know, almost stream of consciousness.

Obviously thought about what he was going to say, but doesn't come off as as stiff or callous or not taking it seriously. So, so good job to him. Yeah, the information is name, address, phone, email, masked, social, so the last four digits only, masked, bank accounts, uh government ids, account balance.

Uh so anyways, not great, but uh I think this is the best response they could have given the circumstances.

Uh and again this is just very rough if you know you're this is somebody who lives in a random apartment somewhere and suddenly they have to be thinking about do I have to be worried you know how you're going to authenticate their bank account in the future world that's right scan your eyeball you can't social engineer that we got Alex from WorldCoin in the studio welcome to