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we can move electricity from a power plant on the ground up to a flight vehicle okay so today i'm very excited to have robert millman from el sky joining me on video here hello robert how are you scott how are you yeah very good indeed so robert thank you for joining me um in this series of um of interviews that i'm conducting with uh with leaders in the tech with purpose space it's really about trying to understand what it is that's driving you the the the reasons you're doing what you you're doing some of the journey that you took to get here and just understanding more about you know that that passion and the purpose so you know i think what would be really good to understand is you know why is it you do what you do um at our sky and we'll talk about um else guy as well in a minute but tell me the story how did you get here what kind of got you to this point well it's hard for me to separate out why from what it's kind of asking if you ask someone why do you breathe oxygen it's hard to explain why without explaining what oxygen is um so in my case i'll have to explain what we're doing first at else guy what we're working on is moving people faster faster and further than they've ever gone before and to do that we have to make flight dramatically faster high mach less expensive which means it has to be much more efficient which means it has to make a much smaller im footprint on the environment those those two things go hand in hand together you could view it as we're making a smaller footprint and an outcome of that is people go faster and cheaper or you could view it as we help people go faster and cheaper and an outcome of that is there's less impact on the environment but um everyone what we found is everyone wants those three things no one says i'll pay more money in order to get more fumes out of the back of the vehicle everyone wants things that are environmentally beneficial that are faster and that are cheaper less time in the airport uh more time with your friends uh you know so then i guess that begs the question well why this particular problem why did we choose that and there's either a very short answer or a very long answer to that but not much in between unfortunately the short answer might be you know an acquaintance of mine once said you don't choose your passions your passions choose you um and and we're very comfortable with that you know let's say a longer answer would be that we started with space launch it's it's the hardest part of the problem the deep end of the pool so to speak it's the fastest speeds that are involved how do we make space launch something that is economical enough that the average jane or the average joe can go to space um and so we worked a lot we looked at combustion combustion comes with a lot of problems with it there are a lot of limits imposed by it and we worked on electrification as our answer okay so why electrification it's cheaper it's faster it doesn't make as much of an impact on the environment we looked at well why space launch is you know why would anyone want to get involved in launching people into space i worked at a company where you know people tried to outline that in a mission statement something you could put up in a powerpoint slide and you know very quickly there were multiple answers from the room and uh i came to the conclusion that there were probably more answers than there were people in the company and so that as you grow the company you have even more answers you know some of the answers that i heard that that intrigued me uh were you know there's there's an inherent challenge of a hard problem people like a challenge there's the freedom of the open road there's that aspect of going someplace you know where no one has gone before the idea of a new frontier frontiers have new possibilities with them you know there's also there's another nuance to the exploration i'll i'll call it the intellectual equivalent of lara croft tomb raider you know there's the idea of you're breaking into something and finding something that people haven't seen for a long time and maybe there's also just the fact that you can't do it now um there are some people you know i think uh moby dick there's that line that says people love to sail forbidden seas there's there's something about forbidden fruit that seems attractive you know so those are those are all good reasons for me personally uh just me carl sagan from the 1980s had a line that you know natural selection has crafted this kind of wanderlust in in certain people um maybe all of us uh some of us more than others but i think he phrased it as a restless view drawn by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand to understand new worlds something along those lines so you know that's the longer answer but we're back at to you don't choose your passions your passions choose you in the end and we are just passionate about enabling people to move further and faster oh that's really really interesting to hear so i mean is great yeah i think the long answer was was uh more contentful than the shorts answer for sure um so so that i mean the idea then getting people um between from point a to point b faster is by taking them higher um but using electricity to do that and is that the idea to take them into space to get them um to travel further yes but it's it's a range or put differently combustion where we store energy and fuel and we burn it along the way and we kick out the emissions out the back it's it it's created a kind of false dichotomy so we have a false intuition about travel right now you can either travel below let's say uh forty thousand feet or you know thirty forty thousand feet ten to thirteen fourteen uh kilometers or you can travel up in orbit but not much in between that's because combustion engines aren't very efficient they the one thing combustion engines do is they store fuel they store energy well but other than that they're more expensive they're limited in where they can travel they kick out a lot of emissions there's a lot of downsides if we can electrify these vehicles electricity is this marvelous energy we take it for granted in the household because in the wired world it comes easy and cheap if we can bring that easy cheap energy to flight then we've really changed the nature of flight suddenly you would fly at um you would fly higher it depends on where you're going obviously but aerodynamicists the the people who are involved if you talk to the woman who's designing the plane she will tell you that she'd much rather fly at 120 150 000 feet let's say up in the neighborhood of 36 kilometers but the combustion engine can't fly that high it needs more oxygen than that so it's forced down lower which means you're forced to stay in the lower atmosphere where it's thicker and harder to fly faster and and you know supersonic transportation is suddenly really expensive because you're in the lower atmosphere you go up higher and it's much more affordable so yes higher um but higher is is a complicated thing involving uh you know the aerodynamics of it and uh the the drag that's induced and and the cost so question about inspiration so if uh if there's somebody out there in in your field for somebody out there who's uh looking to try and have an impact on on the planet on on travel and human transportation if you could give them you know some some inspiration or point them towards something that inspires you what would that be where would we go and look i i think it'd be a little broader than than what you said you know passions are things that are worth nurturing um there are lots of good and useful things competing for your attention um and and passions don't naturally grow or die it's it's like any relationship it takes some attention paid to it um and so it's what you choose to do with it i would say you know let's say three things they should consider doing number one is explore what you care about um and that could be anything it could be space flight it could be playing the bagpipes it could be saving the planet it could be raising a child it's it's really what what drives you um second step is i find it extremely useful to connect with other people who care about the same thing um we live in this marvelous age with this internet we're doing this interview over the internet it's fantastic you know you'll learn a lot from listening to other people but you'll learn a lot from talking as well just just having to compose your thoughts and lay them out for someone will force you to rethink them in ways you wouldn't do if you were off by yourself or i should say most people don't do off by themselves um and it it could become a hobby it could become a career it could become a passion or as you know you said an obsession you get to choose that along the way but but go mingle with people and talk to them and then let's say the third bit of advice would be give yourself a little freedom along the way you may find you get into something and it's either not what you thought it would be or it doesn't hold the same uh luster that it it formally did it's okay to change paths you're not you're not you know picking something for the rest of your life you're picking for what you want to work on now um and if it if it feels like an obligation then it's probably time to rethink things it should feel liberating you should feel like you know i am so excited about this that uh you know i'm willing to put aside various things that i used to think of as important like you know i thought it was critical to make enough money to pay the mortgage every month but now i realize that that's not so important to me because this other thing is more important when you're in that mode then you've probably found something that is is a good passion to follow you know that's a brilliant answer brilliant um thinking forward in this time machine five years what would you like how would you like people to kind of reflect on your personal and the company's achievements boy um i guess i have two reactions you know um one is if i ever go to a cocktail party and i overhear someone else say you know if anyone charges you more than ten thousand dollars to go to orbit you're being ripped off that will be a great accomplishment that will mean that pretty much anyone could save a little put a little money aside and decide to go it you know ten thousand dollars u.s is not a small amount of money but right now it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend a few minutes in space um visiting there and spending a lot of time up there it it it ought to be at least at the price that let's say a year comparable to what a european would have paid a couple hundred years ago to make that long sale to america that was something that the the average person could do they may had they may have sold all sorts of everything all their worldly goods to do it but they were able to do it um that's our minimum threshold we'd like to do better but that's the minimum you know or i should say the maximum price we want to hit excellent excellent in in when you develop your products take your products to market um you're aiming to be able to cut the emissions from from travel like this um but how are you measuring that and are you having are you planning on any other kind of offsetting or other reductions to help achieve these goals as well i think having worked on a number of aerospace development projects there's we don't have the level of detail that your question would assume in other words at least in a when you're working on a transformational technology as opposed to an incremental uh technology and so what we're working on here at electric sky are a couple technologies but maybe the key one for this discussion is transmitting power over long distances we can we can move electricity from a power plant on the ground up to a flight vehicle in the case of a space launch vehicle those rockets you see on tv um about 90 of by weight is just the propellant so it's just fuel it's a flying gas tank um if we can eliminate that 90 well then to first order we've made the vehicle temper the vehicle was only 10 the weight of the other vehicle right away it's more efficient you're not moving all that weight it's one tenth as much and if we can move the power up to the vehicle we leave the power generation on the ground making it so that the hard thing is the power generation we leave that on the ground where it's heavy and we move the vehicle now the vehicle can be much lighter much faster it can travel at higher altitudes all sorts of goodness comes from that so is that that's a very long answer to your question you asked for a metric and i did not give you one i was making note there was no metric but that's fine