A Billionaire Just Unveiled His SpaceX Rival... And the Internet Has THOUGHTS [10:48]

YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai *may* follow.

🚀🛰️

Is that Babu’s son (from Seinfeld)?

Competition is good..............

re: Baiju Bhatt, the billionaire co-founder of Robinhood.

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Is his company Robinhood any good?

I doubf Musk feels threatened. Anyway Musk also learns from others when it can help, and isnt afraid to fail in order to succeed.

I’ve heard it’s second only to Fidelity in terms of ease-of-use for trading/investing, and the younger folks like it better particularly because it integrates with the krypto stuff better.

Curious of anyone here has opinions. This is my bookmark.

Thanks for that!

frequently launches payloads for direct competitors, even as its core business strategy increasingly prioritizes its own internal network and shifts toward dominating rival markets.................

Dunno, I’ve known people who use Robinhood, right on their phones (I think most brokers offer that now). And they kinds pioneered fractional shares. That’s about all I know. I think I did see this guy in the Dream Cafe.

Andy Beal started a rocket company around the turn of the century and developed a workable engine before giving up on the project. And more recently, L3 gave up on Rocketdyne and spun it off to private equity (which usually means an unhappy end for a company.

It apparently isn’t as financially feasible as it looks.

*May* follow? You’re not sure? That’s a weird first comment, no?

Yeah, you got a lot of money. But rocket science is HARD. The things you don’t know can destroy your vehicle. And there are 1000 things you don’t know until they go wrong. (See the Blue Origin launch pad explosion as an example of “No one died, but thing went HORRIBLY wrong”).

I like them, and they give bonuses. I moved my IRA from Schwab to them and got 2% and they also give a 2% bonus on contributions. From there, I got a savings and checking accounts from them with a current interest rate of 3.6%. Also, their credit card offers 3% cash back on all purchases.

That’s great, thanks!

Beal got started before the notion of maybe letting private enterprise do it caught on (instead of using pork barrels to keep everything the same). He wanted to use Sombrero Island (Caribbean I think) as the launch site, and his company developed one of the most powerful liquid fueled engines ever made. But they didn't plan for reusability, so they may have been overtaken by events, even had they'd managed to actually start launching things.

Hot Fire! NASA Tests Powerful Artemis Moon Rocket Engine [8:47] [10/21/2026]

“rocket science is HARD”

True—but the good news is that public relations (crowds of cheering employees and their families is always good) and teams of graphic artists (these days with the help of AI) is easy.

Fake it until you make it!

Lol.

No, but yours is a weird first comment.

Transcript

Ouch. Can’t wait to watch this thing blow up on launch. Ooh, this whole vehicle looks like generated slop instead of a well-thought-out plan. Cowboy Space talking about their strat to beat SpaceX, but referring to them as the Empire from Star Wars. Holy Lar.

Okay, so you guys are not all big fans of this Cowboy Space. Okay, wasn’t planning on making a video about this, but after seeing the conversation on Spitter Space Twitter, uh, I figured it would be worth talking about it. Even Eric Burgerer chimes in saying, “The pitch raises pretty much all of the red flags I have as a non-engineer when it comes to evaluating these things.” I will say they are apparently paying a lot of real money to real engineers, so who knows?

And yes, they boast that the Cowboy Space team has almost 600 combined years of aerospace experience from the likes of SpaceX, North of Grumman, JPL, Relativity, Blue Origin, NASA, Rocket Lab, Loheed Martin, Stoke Space, and more.

So, who is Cowboy Space? Well, to get to know Cowboy Space, we got to meet this guy. But as we all know, uh, Cowboy Space is not the only space company in the world. There’s another company out there, um, that’s also building these. Um, and when we take a look at that architecture, um, from the Empire, you see the Imperial class satellites, [laughter] they’re just way smaller than ours. Those are smaller than yours. Tiny.

Um, each one of them packs about one rack. Um, ours packs five. And so whether you’re taking a starship or a star destroyer to orbit, we think Big Iron actually delivers more interconnected compute per satellite um than what the Empire is working on.

There’s a big question. Is Cowboy Space the next SpaceX or completely delusional? And it’s funny because I actually just messaged them randomly a few days ago asking for an interview. No one responded, but now that we have their debut presentation, I wanted to go through it and also share some of the commentary that I’m seeing online. So, Cowboy Space is a brand new rocket company. They just unveiled their plans to compete with SpaceX, and the space community is unfortunately tearing them apart. Some people are calling the presentation a joke. Others are accusing the company of using AI-generated animations instead of showing real engineering. And one commenter went so far as to question whether the entire company exists to defraud investors.

Ouch. So, the man behind the company in this cowboy hat apt for Cowboy Space is Baiju Bhatt, the billionaire co-founder of Robinhood. And hey, there’s something strangely familiar about a wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur deciding he’s going to revolutionize the rocket industry despite having no previous experience running a rocket company. Because more than 20 years ago, a guy named Elon Musk did exactly that. And everyone knows how that turned out. And hey, a lot of people doubted SpaceX. So, I’m not saying we should necessarily just doubt this company, but they’re making some pretty grand claims. So, what is Cowboy Space actually promising?

Well, first I want to show you what the company is trying to build. Cowboy Space, which is formerly known as Aether Flux, originally focused on transmitting solar power from space using lasers. But now the company has announced something much bigger: a rocket called Big Iron. This rocket will be approximately 282 feet tall, powered by nine methane-fueled engines on its first stage with a reusable booster designed to land on a ship. Sound familiar? Instead of carrying a traditional satellite into orbit and releasing it, Cowboy Space instead wants the rocket’s upper stage to become the satellite itself, specifically an AI data center.

Once in orbit, the upper stage would deploy enormous solar arrays, use parts of its own structure to radiate heat, and power racks of advanced NVIDIA GPUs. Each orbital data center is supposed to support approximately 1 megawatt of computing load. And the company’s ultimate vision is a constellation of up to 20,000 of these things. Gez, space might start to get crowded in the next few years. So, if every launch delivers one orbital data center, we’re talking about 20,000 launches just to deploy the initial constellation. And that’s before you consider replacements, maintenance, launch failures, or the cost of manufacturing the rockets themselves.

And yes, the internet was paying attention to this debut presentation almost immediately after the criticism started pouring in. One commenter wrote, “I would love to have an opinion on this, but everything about this just seems wrong.” He specifically criticized the animations, arguing that the landing legs appear to grow out of the rocket instead of deploying properly. Another commenter described the presentation as a collection of investor buzzwords and complained that the company provided too few technical details. And someone questioned how Cowboy Space could possibly develop a reusable rocket larger than Falcon 9 and launch it by 2028. Ambitious indeed.

But never say never, because once upon a time, the idea of a privately funded company competing with the traditional aerospace giants sounded ridiculous to plenty of people. And SpaceX almost didn’t make it. Their first rocket, Falcon 1, failed three consecutive launches before finally reaching orbit in 2008. And look at SpaceX today. They dominate the commercial launch market. And Baiju Bhatt has experience disrupting a different industry. He helped build Robinhood, a company that has definitely disrupted the established financial industry. Shout out Robinhood. I use Robinhood. But now he’s trying to apply that entrepreneurial, oh my goodness, that word is hard to say, approach to aerospace.

But when Elon Musk started SpaceX, he wasn’t proposing a constellation of 20,000 orbital AI data centers on top of developing his own reusable rocket. Cowboy Space is effectively trying to solve multiple enormous engineering and economic challenges at the same time. But they do tout that they have experience from multiple different companies in aerospace currently, including former SpaceX engineers. Is there any actual hardware? Well, yes, they did show something. It wasn’t just these animations that people didn’t like. The company did show actual propulsion testing. Oh, we’ve been cooking.

Uh, saw this earlier today. Can you describe what we’re looking at here? Yeah, this is uh the first bit of our engine turning on. So, those of you that don’t know, we announced um in the spring that we were going to build a rocket to put data centers in space. And the reason we had this thesis was because we knew that if we wanted to actually make something cost competitive here, we’d need to control the economics of it. Now, people said, “Oh, Beiju, you’re going to build a rocket like you. You and what army?” Well, this army. Um, actually, some of them are here. Um, what you’re looking at here is five months of work. Um, and it’s uh what I would call uh turning hardware into data or uh because we blew blew blew part of the engineer.

You built this from nothing to that in five months about. Yeah. During the presentation, we saw footage of a gas generator test at NASA’s Stennis Space Center. A gas generator is an important part of certain rocket engine designs. It produces hot gas that can drive the turbines powering the engine’s propellant pumps. But of course, that’s not the same thing as having a completed flight-ready engine. But it’s also not nothing. The company says it’s developing its Clydesdale engine with a target of roughly 300,000 lb of thrust per engine. That’s a lot of thrust.

It also already has a satellite in orbit. Reason 1 launched aboard a SpaceX ride-share mission in October of this year to demonstrate technology related to laser power beaming, which is probably why they decided to give their debut presentation. So yes, there are engineers, facilities, hardware tests, and a real spacecraft. But Cowboy Space is going to have to prove a lot in the meantime to actually get to its target uh first launch in 2028 because for them it is their first rodeo.

Sorry, I thought that was funny. 2028 is not far away, and this is an extraordinarily aggressive timeline for a company developing a new rocket, new engines, reusable landing technology, and a novel orbital payload architecture. So, I want to know what you guys think in the comments. Do we actually think that we’re going to see Big Iron, Big Iron back in the saddle of the uh orbital launch pad here, launch in 2028? Do we think they’re going to be successful? I mean, it’s just crazy to me. This is many ambitions at once.

Okay. Um, if it works, it could be great, but it sounds like it’s going to be a lot of work. So, I just wanted to, you know, extend this conversation here. A lot of people were saying some interesting things about it on my timeline. And thank you so much for watching this video. I’ve been trying to get back in the game and put more content out there. And I’ve also been trying to do it while the baby is sleeping because, you know, I know that can be distracting. Anyway, thanks so much for supporting Ellie in Space. I’ll see you in the next video.

The first time I’d heard of Elon Musk was when the last failed Falcon 1 launch was in the news. I recall thinking, it’s going to be harder than you thought. Then the last one succeeded, and that unlocked a large round of OPM financing.

The tests were conducted from Omelek Island, which is remote from most of the landmasses of Earth. Logistically challenging place.