Newsletter 050

🤠 It’s Ryaaan! A few weeks ago, our very own Dan Goldin gave a talk at Endless Frontiers in my neck of the woods. He was invited by dear friend of PA Jordan Blashek (investor, veteran, and true mover of this era) to speak on “10 Challenges” that the country needs to address together over the next century.

I worked with Dan to write them down so he could be argued with. I decided to largely abdicate my editor duties, and have Dan skip the polished prose. We’re sharing something closer to his actual notes (and thought process) with y’all.

So here they are, in the rough order they came out of Dan’s head. We figure — you all are so smart — let’s work on this list together.

IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:
📋 Ten challenges for our next century
🇺🇸 Your (split) vote on July 4 criticality
💌 Hard tech's making money + Proto-Town
🔭 Happy Belated Hubble…the BTS of saving it

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Goldin here. In the spirit of “Endless Frontiers,” I’ve tried to name the 10 hard problems the U.S. has to solve and win in the next century. One man attempting this may be presumptuous — but exactly why it’s now a group exercise! Hopefully, it's useful:

Let’s start with a simple one: we need to scale manufacturing with new tools and common sense to get our economies of scale back.

In 1950, Admiral Hyman Rickover set out to build the first nuclear submarine. Four years later he had the Nautilus. Over the next 13 years, we built 41 ballistic-missile subs and 1,092 Polaris missiles for ~$124B in today's dollars. Columbia’s scorecard: 12 subs, 192 Trident D5 missiles, ~15 years, and $130B+. Rickover did it on drafting boards with no computers. We have AI, exaflops, every digital design tool ever made — and we're slower. How in the hell. Time to go FBC.

China is building them by the 100,000s; America by ones and twos. Boston Dynamics is magnificent and not replicable. Our leading humanoid developers — the ones actually trying to commercialize — have learned the hard way that you have to fully vertically integrate, design to deployment, to control your destiny. We need more upstream suppliers. We need the Actuator Manufacturing Corporation Of America. Those on Team Specialist will agree: we need our industry working on all of this!

We want fusion on spacecraft, and we want it — plus fission — for our terrestrial power-hungry tenants down here too.

Pick your horse, there are plenty, but we need more clean, compact, safe power decoupled from hydrocarbons’ geopolitical shocks (e.g. Strait of Hormuz).

We invented the field, and we are not the leader anymore. Shame on us! China has wind tunnels, higher-temp materials (1,600°C hotter), and physics-informed neural nets simulating before flying, that we don’t have. A bright spot: Bryon Hargis and Castelion, shipping a $300K U.S.-built hypersonic, ~3yrs from a cold start.

In 2004, my NASA team flew an air breathing hydrogen fueled scramjet at Mach 9.68 — very close to my goal of Mach 10, and still a world record today. It was my expectation at this point in history, my wife and I would be flying from LAX to Heathrow in 90 minutes, allowing time for taxi take-off and landing, for a birthday lunch with dear friends in London. After lunch, we would return to LA for my 90th birthday celebration with family in July 2030! Guess I’ll now have to wait for my 100th in 2040 with the optimism for a revived American spirit in making commercial hypersonic flight routine and available to humanity!

It starts (or should start) in K-12. We need better, whole-of-society, soup-to-nuts (re)training. Every problem on this list has the same meta-problem: not enough welders, not enough machinists, not enough nuclear engineers. Skills compound, or decay, generationally. Our tribal knowledge is mid-decay. Apprenticeships and trades need what graduate-level applied research has: prestige.

Today's lithium cells run ~380 Wh/kg. Push the chemistry to solid-state and you get to 800, then 1,000+, with charging in 2-6 min… and a 1,000 mi car, drones that don’t come home, and — the one nobody talks about — cheaper subs. (The Japanese run lithium-ion through JS Ōryū.)

The unsexy… but essential stuff. We’ve lagged so badly that countries who also spooled their own energetics down can ramp back up much faster than we can (Germany just overtook the U.S. in ammo production capacity). Our upstream basic ingredients run on old chemistry, single-source dependencies, and political allergies near and around what few factories we do have.

The GPU is a miracle machine, and we’ve squeezed most of the juice out of it. Process node gains are diminishing and the von Neumann tax (memory ↔ compute round-tripping) is taking a bigger bite of the apple every cycle. Let’s look elsewhere: to analog computing, matrix operations on photons, in-memory designs, quantum compute and even GPU-quantum hybrid. Fortunately, more money and minds are flowing here.

It is time to revive, or reinvent, the universities. American frontier research is in decline at the very moment we need stunning technical leadership the most. We built and defended this country by leading on technology, not by fast-following, and the universities are now in an anemic financial posture (and deserve their fair share of blame for getting us here). China is out-publishing us on patents and out-citing us in the prestige journals across every critical industry. Federal research funding, meanwhile, is in retreat — and with $39T in national debt now exceeding our GDP, it has to be. Government can play a role but it can’t/shouldn’t be the senior partner. There are interesting private precedents (Bell Labs, IBM, Xerox PARC, RCA) that produced foundational science and IP that compensated their backers. Family wealth in America quadrupled from $52T to $199T between 1989 and 2022, with the top 10% now holding 60%. I’m no socialist, and this isn’t socialism. A socialist would say: make the government do it! This is the opposite. Those who got rich off the technology stack should step up, help fund the research system that built it, and earn IP returns for doing so!

🙏 Homework for you all: I’m a mere mortal. I’ve probably forgotten or overlooked things. Write in on what we’ve missed, what nuances should be addressed, what earnestly viable solutions you’ve come across thus far, and nominate your favorite players (founders, executives, govvies).

LAST WEEK WE ASKED YOU: how many of DoE's 11 Reactor Pilot Program projects will reach first criticality by July 4? The verdict is in, and it's about as close to we have no idea as a poll can produce:

That’s the spirit. We’re just under 60 days from America’s 250th bday, and the 3x first criticality target. Godspeed to those of you in the program racing to safely, scalably get us there; Aalo Atomics, Antares Nuclear, Atomic Alchemy, Deep Fission, Last Energy, Natura Resources, Oklo, Radiant Industries, Terrestrial Energy, and Valar Atomics. 🇺🇸

Everyone say: “Happy 5th Birthday” to Out of This World! 5 years ago, on May 4th 🖖, OOTWD opened its doors to help space + defense teams communicate their ideas visually through brand, design and motion. Since then, they've helped companies go from seed to IPO + raise over $1B in grants & investments — all while working in stealth as a quiet, but deadly team behind many of your favorite 🇺🇲 space + defense brands.

👆️ Founders 'n marketers: take screenshots! This yearbook is packed with visual comms wisdom for reaching investors, customers & talent.

001 / WE’RE MAKIN’ MONEY… For the first time in decades, hard tech’s got the spotlight. And it’s making real money. Memory is perhaps the clearest example: after the ‘22–23 downturn, DRAM op. margins are 60+%, prompting the WSJ to ask whether the memory folks are making too much money (who woulda thought, ten years ago?!). The belle of the IPO ball, SpaceX, reportedly has Starlink at $Bs in EBITDA and accelerating FCF while reusability fuels profitable launch operations. You see the same dynamic — technical difficulty + economics of scale = durable pricing power — in lithography, adv. packaging, industrial robotics... In our collective pursuit, we should be clear that the goal isn’t just “make more.” History and Mr. Market tell us: pricing power attracts capital → capital attracts competition → competitors compress margins. That path leads straight into the commoditization trap (*🇨🇳*). Avoiding a deep tech winter, or Last Supper-style consolidation, will require relentless R&D reinvestment — so the frontier keeps moving too fast for commoditization to catch up.

002 / PROTO-TOWN RISES... Ryan here: the first time I drove out to Proto-Town and walked the grounds, it felt a bit like being in Toys R Us as a wide-eyed kid. Proto-Town, for the uninitiated, is what happens when you take a stretch of Texas ranchland outside of Lockhart, turn it into a hard-tech startup town, hand it to a generation of founders who just might build the thing, and tell the lawyers to go have a Lone Star. It’s still got a long ways to go but, critically, it has the room (+ other ingredients) it needs to grow. So the recognition and love that Proto-town is getting recently (Core Memory, Bloomberg, WSJ, and GQ a while back) is well-deserved.

003 / A POLL… And now a question for you all:

Goldin again. We let our beloved Hubble's birthday slip by 😱 — was two weeks ago!

The $5B Hubble telescope launched in 1990 with a primary mirror too flat at the edge by 1/50th of a hair. Early images were quite blurry. Turns out, it had astigmatism! It was such a public failure, Letterman ran a Top 10 Hubble Telescope Excuses bit. By 1993, the gyros were dying, the solar panels vibrating, and electronics aging.

My first big test as NASA honcho: send astronauts up to fix all of it. The team walked into my office with a wishlist of 11 upgrades — corrective optics, a new camera, new solar arrays and their drive electronics, multiple new gyros and their control units, computer upgrades, and more — and said it would take all 11 days the Shuttle had on orbit. No margin!

I told them: “Get outta my office… and don’t come back! Until you have just the important things, with four days of margin built in.”

The team, under the leadership of former fighter pilot Randy Brinkley, worked with precision to clearly define the seven truly critical fixes and treated the rest as “nice‑to‑haves”.

And here was the rich irony: Because the crew was so focused and clear on the order of importance…

…they ended up getting all 11 done anyway.

The lessons:

Happy belated birthday, Hubble! (P.S. I’ll admit: Isaacman faced an even tougher first test w/ Artemis II.)

🥂 And here’s to all of us… pursuing — hey, endless frontiers!