preserving the pieces in a way that makes it efficient to use them. and once you start lowering that cost and make it more repeatable which is what reusability is all about, it just changes the equation. you know what we used to say in the shuttle era, it was $10,000 per pound of anything to put it in space. that s your weight in gold and then some. that is down by orders of magnitude now because of these guys. and if space is to become a you know, a place where in bezos mind it s where heavy industry is ultimately moved and earth becomes a place to live and have light industry, and that s a future way to protect the planet as well, that requires just a huge investment in bringing costs down and having rockets that can come and go. the way we have been doing
airliner. we wouldn t be doing much of that. we tried to make it reusable during the shuttle era, but that didn t go so well. it turned out to be very expensive the way it was done. the way musk is doing it, the way bezos is doing it, the preserving the pieces in a way that makes it efficient to use them. and once you start lowering that cost and make it more repeatable which is what reusability is all about, it just changes the equation. you know what we used to say in the shuttle era, it was $10,000 per pound of anything to put it in space. that s your weight in gold and then some. that is down by orders of magnitude now because of these guys. and if space is to become a you know, a place where in bezos mind it s where heavydry is ultimately moved and earth becomes a place to live and have light industry, and that s a future way to protect the planet as well, that
imagine airbus flying across the atlantic ocean. the idea is to begin with the rich people and as it becomes more repeatable, reusable, more affordable, more seats becoming available, it becomes more accessible to a larger group of people. that s an exciting prospect. good point. good historical comparison there. over what time period does that happen, though? does that happen over a few years or over decades? reporter: it s interesting. i did the math yesterday. 17 years after lindbergh flew, it was 1944. we had the b-29. we were on the cusp of flying supersonically. 17 years since the x prize, which ushered in the era of civilian space and this technology that branson is using, we re just getting to this. so, it s taken much, much longer. space is not the same as aviation in the sense that there was a built-in reason for aviation for commerce and for
besides democratizing space travel? it s the tang and space food sticks and teflon argument. if we go to space, we re going to have better ways to cook or whatever. you re not going to see a lot of that with this, frankly. what we re doing is taking technology in some respects is pretty tried and true here, and applying it in a way that makes it more cost effective, repeatable, reusable and, thus, ultimately more affordable. imagine if every time you flew an airliner you had to throw it away. that s what we were doing with the space shuttle which was supposed to be reusable. big parts were thrown away. it was very expensive. elon musk has proven that mon musk can be taken to a higher level. something like this gets you to the cusp of space. you re not going to take this