Baiju Bhatt is building a rocket company to put data centers in space — and SpaceX's closed capacity is why

Washington. But we have our guest back in the TVP Ultradome. Let's welcome Baj back to the show. How you doing?

I'm back. So fantastic.

Crystal clear.

Crystal clear. Uh yeah, it was extremely painful listening to you do this incredible riff on the state of modern cars and I couldn't

couldn't agree more. Yeah,

couldn't agree more. You'll be happy. You'll be happy that my the the the

the three cars in my driveway right now are

blue, green, and brown. I'm rebelling against uh more subtle, you know, toned down toned down far away. They don't look too crazy, but I'm rebelling

rebelling against the beige and the the blacks and the whites.

Why do you think the colors went away? I understand the transition to electric because of environmental concerns, the move to automatics, because it's less to learn for the average consumer. But why did we lose red?

I don't know, man. It's it's sad, honestly. It's just sad. I and I think it's like a Yeah, I I I I think it's like a commentary on like the modern state of society and human affairs, like why why do we all want to have cars that just disappear into the background?

Mhm. Um I

well well well one thing is like to to me when I think about like a VW bug right a very popular car throughout history

even if it's regardless of the color it's like a fun car but then you add some like exotic color yellow or green or red

like it's it's even more fun and I and I just feel like when every car

every car blends in just the silhouette now

Yeah. And so I think people are just like blending in is just the current meta. We're seeing it. It's funny. Fiat has some new car

that they're coming out with. Uh what is the I think it's the topolino maybe.

I think cute is going to come back.

You think so?

Sounds like topo chico.

Top chico.

Yeah. No, it's the uh the multi-plina

I think it is. I don't know. I get they all they all kind of run together, but

still sounds like dope chico.

I mean, some of it's safety standards. A lot of things have had to standardize around crash crumple zones and whatnot. And I think that creates somewhat of a consolidation around silhouettes. But the color thing, I would imagine, is more like tall poppy syndrome. You don't want to stand out and be the guy with the red car. That became too flashy. So, everyone went quiet luxury and that meant black, white, or gray.

Why do Why do Why does everybody need to fit in? Why does everybody need to be the same? Like, people should just be individuals. Like, that's kind of the natural state of human affairs in my opinion.

I don't know.

At the same time, something crazy comes out and people reject it. Look at the Ferrari Luche. That car doesn't really look like anything else. It looks to be cleared it purely on

I'm getting by the way, guys.

Let's go.

There we go. Let's be honest. Let's be honest. They said if you want the if you want the 12C manual, you're getting the blue. It wasn't said out loud, but it was understood.

No.

No. I Guys, I I got it cuz I'm a huge Johnny I fanboy. I mean,

yeah, I think it's And I think the interior is going to be incredible. And the spec matters a lot. What color did you go with? What do you like? Did you do anything to make it your own?

I haven't done that yet. Um, I'm going to confess right now that I'm going to probably make my wife drive it.

Okay. Yeah.

So, I think it's going to be a baby mobile.

Hey, I mean, if you want five-seater, it's the only option. It's the only option.

No, it's going to be an incredibly fun

car to to drive.

It'll be an experience. My only my only criticism was uh was purely like it felt like they set out to make a $300,000 car and they accidentally made, you know, a $600,000 car.

But fortunately, there's there's there's not a there's not millions of Jews in the world, but there's enough that they're going to sell some.

Let's pull up the picture of this Fiat. I want to show Let's take a look at this thing.

I want to get Baiju's reaction to see if he's going to pick up one of these. Can we c can we share this uh this image that's in the timeline of the Fiat Toppo Lino? Uh hilarious that it has a uh

what is that like a

It's like

By the way, I like that you guys brought me on just to talk about cars.

We're going to get to We're going to get your business. It's July.

We also got a half an hour here. We're hanging out.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's do it. Let's do it.

Can we Can we share the the image of the top? Let's see. It has uh it has like a rope that you would expect at like a nightclub, like a velvet rope to stop people instead of a door. Uh it looks great. Anyway,

I put a link I put I put a link here that you can that you can pull up as well.

What is this?

Is this pulling that up?

Yeah.

Have you guys seen that? Um what is that? That that new Audi the the one that looks like it's like out of Cyberpunk.

Yes.

I think that same same designer as the new Jaguar. Yeah.

Did you Did you know that?

Oh, that's and and I was excited about that for a minute. Come on. Why you got to do that?

No, but but the issue with the Jaguar was not the silhouette was like very cool. It was one of those like the future is here moments and then there the way that they did the roll out of it and the rebrand like obviously got a lot of push back, but like fundamentally I thought like this is what Batman would drive in the year. We just like you see that thing in matte black. It looks a lot different than like the pink and pastel blues. There was just like a little bit too much contrast. But then we're getting out of the colors. Maybe we got to speck it in some.

If I If I were specking one of those,

I would go full Batman the animated series. Like I would go with like a like a cream color.

Sure.

And make it look as like art deco as possible.

Yeah. Yeah, that'd be good.

The new Ariel Ari is the new Valari is crazy. I have a friend specking one of them in like this crazy crazy color. I'm not even going to I'm not going to say what it is. I want to let him have his moment. I think it will be one, you know, one of

and also a lot a lot less push back for the Audi because it's uh it's built on the Lamborghini platform, I believe. So, it's V10 or V8. It has a you know internal combustion engine. And I think uh Jaguar like changed a lot of things at the same time. Going electric, going huge sedan, going crazy colors, very bold marketing. And when you shift seven different things, you get a lot of visceral fiat.

Let's see this. There we go. What do you think about this? You picking one up?

Oh, guys.

You're not You're not ripping one of these things around with the boys. Imagine Imagine having So, okay. So, one of these is kind of silly, but if you're with your your buddies and you each have one and you're rolling deep,

that's pretty cool. Put a Mansori kit on that.

That's pretty cool. I don't know. Mansor kit on that thing.

I think we got a picture of a There's a convertible version, I guess, with

Can you imagine hang I I just cannot imagine hanging out with my friends and us like caravanning these. It'd be

We look like such dweebs. I'm sorry. Sorry. Fiat

engine swap.

You might say that. You might say that.

Just wait until you fire up the V12 engine that you swap in that thing. That'll be sitting on top of it.

I know it would at all.

Uh, we got we got one more.

Okay, what else we got?

Uh, the Twizzy. The Renault Twizzy. Have you seen these?

The doors go up.

The doors go up.

You sit one behind.

We saw this in Europe. We were in France last week or two weeks ago. And these were uh extremely popular with like young teenagers. They'd have a whole bunch of them sort of caravanning around. Seems like uh particularly good for narrow streets. Again, it's the right tool for the job. Is it going to take it to a track day? Probably not. But, uh, in the right in the right environment, I think the Twizzy the is a Renault, right?

Yeah.

Renault Twizzy. Let's see.

The team's pulling it up. Imagine Imagine at least two of us in here together going on a coffee.

Wait, is that three person? No.

No. One. Somebody's got to stay behind.

Okay. Yeah.

It looks like that person's sitting in that person's lap.

It's a tight squeeze. sort of a motorcycle more than a

It's not It's not very spacious. I will say that. But

how many wheels does this thing have on it? Is it two or four?

It's four.

Okay,

it's four.

I can't quite tell from that angle. It might be a bicycle.

Look, I know you have a great car collection, but clearly there's some holes, right? No Twizzy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You don't have five. You don't have five PS

that this uh hot garbage is coming out. The restood community is making some good stuff right now. I'll just put that out there.

Okay. Yes, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about this. Hot girl cars, uh, old Land Rovers, old Defenders, uh, modified. Sydney Sweeney has one. What is your take on what makes for a good restood in the SUV world?

As long as you're not swapping it out for an electric powertrain, I think I'm I'm I'm down with it.

You're good. I had I had uh I saw one

I had people that that are like, "Oh, I'm into cars." And I'm like, "Okay, cool." Like, "What kind of cars are you into?" And they're like, "Well, I bought, you know,

like an old Bronco and I made it electric." And a little part of me just sort of dies when I hear that. I'm like, "Ah."

Yeah.

So, yeah, I'm I'm in favor. I like when they're kept like very pure, right? I don't like when the when the badges or or any of the the markings are changed. I saw a Bronco on Saturday where all the badges were swapped to just say vintage and I was like clearly it's a vintage car. Like you don't you don't need to like

you don't need to like spell it out. And so I I personally I I I appreciate when it's like as left as pure as possible and then just like modified to make it slightly more comfortable or or redoing the interior, etc.

What about a 1955? What about a 1955 Cadillac coupe Deville swapped with a Tesla Model Plaid so you can get 200 mph in it?

That seems good.

I like how I was with you until we put the Model S battery in.

Sorry, what were you saying?

I was I was saying I was with you until we got to the electrification bit of it. Yeah, but at 200 mph bombing down the autobond in a 1955 Cadillac coupe Deville and

so that thing is going to be a rattle box at 200 m an hour. Can you imagine just the whole thing just like

death machine? Uh what's your uh I are are you are you going to be racing at all? Ferrari challenge

challenge maybe

you're too not much of a racer. Not much of a racer. I'm I'm much more of like a hot rodder and like

drive it on, you know, beautiful beach roads kind of guy.

Sure.

Um Yeah. I I you know, it's one of those things like a lot of people really love that side of it. I've never had that much of a need for speed personally.

Yeah. I We enjoy to be totally honest.

Yeah. We enjoy going to the track, but there's there's people that enjoy going to the track that are like putting it all on the line every time. And I I can't do it like with young children. I just like

uh I I I'm I'm building out like a a really robust sim right now

to to

see what you got.

Yeah. Just to just to actually try to push myself, but again, I don't know that I would ever want to replicate what I'm going to do in the sim actually on the track. But

are you are you guys going to car week? It's really poorly timed with the arrival of my next child.

Like very like within within days. Uh

within days, huh?

Yeah. So I'm I'm going to probably have to

get ready to deliver the baby in the back of a

home birth at car week.

At car week. You've heard of babies delivered in bats of of you'll be at you'll be at the racetrack watching vintage racing in like the beating sun uh

and having to rush to the hospital.

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm I I as much as it pains me I think I'm going to be sitting this

maybe next year. Maybe next year. Uh if you had to do one which one would you do? Cannonball New York to LA, Paris Dar Rally, or Gumball 3000.

The Gumball 3000 is across the uh

Tundra.

Oh, I would definitely do that one.

Move around a little bit. I think the Gumball moves around, but uh it's a long it's a long rally, but it's less of, you know, track focus. It's less at the limit as the Cannonball, which is uh New York to uh I think La Hoya as fast as possible. I feel like that one I feel like would have have a lot more of like

eating beans out of a can like on the side of the road, which is kind of the vibe I'd go for.

Yeah. No, it seems really fun. Anyway, we're not here to talk about cars for 45 minutes. Let's talk about space. Let's talk about business.

Totally could.

Okay. So, uh get us up to speed on progress since we last spoke. I want to specifically talk about uh launch vehicles, what it takes to get to space at scale, what you're thinking there. So take us through just the general update and then we can go more specific

then we can get back to

Yeah. So

pretty pretty busy times here at the Cowboy Space Corporation which

uh I love the mission statement. We're on a we're on a mission to power humanity from the high frontier.

Just like got that little bit of country twang to it.

That's good. Uh so we we announced uh fundraising and the plans to vertically integrate into launch vehicle plus data centers and space architecture.

Um

and a little bit on that, right? We I' you we've talked a little while ago, but I'd kind of since I started the company, I'd been pretty focused on figuring out the energy economics and in particular trying to figure out what the path is to making compute from space or, you know, energy derivative services from space competitive on a cost basis with doing a terrestrial. That's kind of the north star.

Mhm. And when when we kind of got to the architecture that we announced, that was the the aha moment is like when you look at the whole when you look at the entirety of the problem including the launch vehicle, the path to getting the data center in space along with the architecture of the data center part in space and and you and you optimize the entire thing. That's one of the paths to getting to Costco competitive economics. um was when we really doubled down on building the launch vehicle as a part of the data center in space and I think also um it's become you know more and more clear over time that the launch capability that people will need to do all this interesting stuff in space like it's it's it's going to be a while before it's there. SpaceX is obviously running ahead with that but they're going to end up using a lot of that capacity for themselves. And so we we knew that if we wanted to control our destiny, we'd have to go down this path, which I did not think I was going to start a rocket business when I started this company. But

what are the dials that you're turning on launch vehicle? Are you going bigger?

First, he's funding the data anti-data center movement here, right? You need to create even more of a catalyst.

That's a tinfoil hat conspiracy.

No, it's not a tinfoil hat. It's a it's a blue hair conspiracy.

Sure. Sure. You guys will see me protesting outside of a data center.

Maybe maybe put them in space.

Yeah, you got to you got to go boot.

People will be protesting that in due time. Don't you worry. Uh but but on the launch vehicle, what dials are you turning in terms of uh the amount of mass to orbit or the size of the vehicle, the fuel like like what how do you want to uh develop something that's different or do you just want to have a secondary option that's as close to the sort of standard interoperable uh market standard launch vehicle or do you want something that fulfills a specifically different role and and fits a different piece of the stack.

Yeah. So, first things first, uh you guys will see a much more detailed update from us on overall launch vehicle architecture, kind of an unveiling of what

the rocket looks like, how pointy it is, stuff like that.

Um so stay tuned on that. But I'll give you I'll give you a couple of breadcrumbs to that right now.

First one is on the launch vehicle itself. We want to optimize for simplicity of architecture and speed to market. Those are kind of highle objectives. We don't have to build the Bugatti Veyron of rocket engines here. We want to build something that's much more the Honda Civic of rocket engines. And what that looks like, it's down selecting each one of the the core trades in the system to optimize for what can we build relatively quickly that gets the job done and starts getting payloads to orbit because

there's there's different paths we could take with this. The the the north star for me is like cut out the arts and crafts projects. Like just focus on building data centers in space, building a rocket architecture that is purpose-built for that. Mhm.

And and notably not focus on reusability at all, at least initially. Is that right?

No, I think we're we're going to aim for reusability as quickly as possible. One of the things that we we hope to do on the path to getting there is having economics that support

making something that's viable with a nonreusable version of it. Yeah.

So that we're not waiting forever to to start getting payloads up. Yeah, because I imagine the I imagine with some of the AI projects uh the the AI compute is so valuable economically so economically dense that nonreusable payloads might actually make sense at least in the short term. Of course, you want to save money over the long term, but uh when you think about the value of a of a of you know largecale compute in orbit that could be potentially higher than some of the other payloads that are going up right now, right? So that sort of pulls forward your road map.

Yeah. I mean I think this if if I understand you right I think one of the things that is an interesting observation here is more on the the sort of business and economics of the rocket business. Hold on one sec. My light just cut off here.

You're good.

Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automates 70% of IT HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password res. got an addin and a nice view of the the art right behind you. So, thank you.

I can't get away from the technical difficulty. My goodness. Uh

what was I saying? Um economics

Yeah.

and the business of rocketry. I think there's something that's pretty interesting that's happened here,

which is if you look back in time towards

kind of when the first commercial rocket businesses were getting started, Blue Origin, SpaceX, etc. The primary business model as I understand it was third party launch. Build a rocket to take stuff to space

and the taking the stuff to space is the monetization.

Yeah.

Which if you rewind the clock 10 to 15 years ago, the majority of that activity was driven by government, right? It was government needs, government payloads, national security, etc., etc. Um what we're seeing now is the bulk of the payload that at least you know that is going to be going to orbit a lot of it is commercial and in particular the AI component is is commercial in nature by and large and when you when you realize that that fundamentally changes the way that you think about the rocket business you you you realize that like the how how to say this the development velment path starts to change, right? Because as you're if you're launching first party payloads, you look at the economics of what does it take to get a successful launch to orbit? What is the cost of a failed launch to orbit? And you control the entire economic stack there. So if you have a failed launch to orbit and you're and the sort of consequence of that is a first party payload, it's very different than if the failed launch is for a government payload. To say it differently when it's purely commercial, the incentive I think is much more to try early and often

um and to get to that that sort of like successful launch and eventually to get to reusability and get payloads to orbit that start monetizing along the way. And I think that flows through the entirety of the decision-m of how you build a rocket company in 2026. Right?

Said differently, we're building this thing for our data center and space payload. We're not building it for third party payloads. We're not building it for human space flight or any of that stuff. We might do that at some point in the future.

Yeah. But we think that the majority of like the actual substance and the revenue of this is going to come from the first party payloads of data centers in space.

Yeah. Very different company from Robin Hood. What lessons are you actually taking? What are you drawing from the Robin Hood playbook if anything for this company? Um, well, it's kind of interesting because the the technoeconomic analysis of how do you how do you make a service make sense like this? There's there's some overlapping and thinking there of like how do you make the economic cases make sense.

The other part is building engineering teams like that that translates over pretty well. Um,

and building them.

I think the interesting thing here is that it's a largely distributed engineering workforce. A lot of it is quite different, I'll be honest.

Um, there's less consumer product involved. There's much more manufacturing involved.

Um, but at the end of the day, the the the circumstances in some ways are similar, right? It's like starting out from the standpoint the Robin Hood, you know, era of my life. I guess it's still going on, but the the starting of that was how do you build something that competes against these existing brokerages and how do you really really focus on a very specific set of things that gets a meaningful use case in the market. Yeah,

I think that part is actually kind of similar is like how do you

make a meaningful rocket space company by being hyper hyperfocused on a small number of things because like I said, we're not in the business of doing human space flight and all these other things, but how do you find that that niche that you care about and say ultra focused on on making that happen?

In 30 seconds, cuz I know you have to hop. SpaceX is in the cloud business now. They have a launch business. You can imagine that Elon just wants more and more and more and more of that end market. Has that changed the dynamic of conversations that you're having with, let's say, other hyperscalers and labs that are competing with with Elon Inc. and don't want to end up in a situation where they are, you know, basically forced to purchase from a monopoly, you know, or, you know, cloud from monopoly, uh, etc.

Yeah. I mean, I think the the overwhelming dynamic here now and in the future is just the need for compute, right? I think there's there's definitely people that are concerned about controlling their own data centers, but if you kind of look around at the marketplace right now, people are trying to get capacity whenever and wherever they can get it. So,

there's I'm sure there's a little bit of that behind the scenes, but I think the the primary thing that I'm seeing is just the the need for compute and trying to bring it online as quickly as possible. And I don't know, I feel like we all kind of live with that on a day-to-day basis, you know, like I was asking, you know, Fable to

I was asking Fable to make some Magic the Gathering decks for me

uh over the weekend, and I I kept hitting my limits. Like come on guys, like just make the deck for me.

Yeah. No, it is a crazy time. Like Apple is leasing GPUs from Google. Google's leasing GPUs from SpaceX and like everyone

Google's telling Meta like sorry and then Meta is like we have too much capacity to sell and so everyone's doing a deal with everybody else. So, uh, it's a good it's a good business to be in since everything's growing and demand is, uh, demand solves so many headaches and and and justifies so many.

All right, I know you have to jump.

Let's get a couple of these Fiats. Let's bomb around car week. The three of us, maybe a few others.

Maybe car week 2027.

Yeah.

So, I don't I love it. I I go most years.

Amazing. Well, great to see. Congrats on the progress. Congrats on the progress and we'll talk to you soon.

Thanks, boys.

Have a good one.

Cheers.

Goodbye. Our next guest is Daniel