Broadband.io Fireside Chat with SpaceX President & COO Gwynne Shotwell

Jase Wilson: Hello. Hello. Hi, Gwynne.

Gwynne Shotwell: Jase, how are you? 

Jase: I'm pretty great. How are you? 

Gwynne: I'm great. Happy to be here, actually.

Jase: Folks in the audience, how are you? 

Crowd: Awesome.

Jase: Are you good? Hey we have a very, very, very special guest today, y'all. But first, a quick shout out to everybody that's working to connect families to broadband, and I think that's a whole lot of y'all in the room. So can we give a round of applause to folks working on broadband? 

Jase: And we're joined by 30 of our nation's state broadband directors that are guiding their states to the vision of Access for All. And they have one of the largest and least thanked jobs in all of broadband. So can we please give them a round of applause too? 

Jase: And folks, please join me in welcoming our very, very special guest, SpaceX, COO in President Gwynne Shotwell.

Jase: And y'all, we're honored to get time with Gwynne today. But first she brought something out of this world to show y'all.

Jase: That's some pretty wild and world-changing stuff that you and your SpaceX crew have accomplished, Gwynne. But can you tell us first, what is SpaceX? Why was it founded, and what makes it unique? 

Gwynne: Yeah, I appreciate the question. First of all, let me ask, before the video, is anyone in the audience not familiar with SpaceX? I live in a very small world. The space community is very small. But is there anyone in the audience who is unfamiliar with SpaceX? Wow, that's awesome. It's unusual. I do a lot of speeches and usually about a third of the hands are like, I don't know what a SpaceX is. Yeah. So my boss, Elon Musk, founded this company in 2002, with a singular purpose. And that was to build transportation capability, rockets and spaceships that would allow people to live on other planets. And it sounded insane. In 2002, when I interviewed for the job, and it doesn't sound insane to me anymore. We are on the right path. We are figuring out the technologies necessary to take people to the Moon and onto Mars. Who'd like to go to the Moon? It's like a weekend. It's just a weekend trip.

Jase: Pick me.

Gwynne: All right.

Gwynne: And then there's Mars, which is a longer trip. Who wants to go to Mars. Left? Oh, kind of. That's a long trip. That's like a six month submarine voyage. I really wanna go to the Moon actually. I hope when folks get to go regularly, I hope that's less than 10 years from now and I'll be 70. Hopefully I'll be a fit 70 and I wanna go to the Moon.

Jase: Let's go to the Moon.

Gwynne: Let's go to the Moon.

Jase: A couple of Midwestern Moon nights.

Gwynne: Yeah. We're Moon nights. We realized that in the green room. Yeah. So Elon founded the company to make human life multi-planetary. And we've been lucky. We've expended a lot of energy. We've tried really hard. We've fought foes, we've taken hills and we've failed too. And it's all led us to the place where I definitely see that humans will be able to go live on the Moon and Mars.

Jase: That's beautiful, Gwynne. You, I think underestimate your role in all of that. So I would like to talk through something real fast. Like you helm a company that's launched and landed hundreds of reusable rockets. You are launching satellites all the time. You've built a multimillion subscriber internet service provider. You're working with NASA to put Americans back on the Moon, and you're recognized all over the industry. Your Time Magazine, one of their 100 most influential people, and I'm paraphrasing you here, but you once gave the career advice that one should aim high and think big in their career. And I have to ask you, Gwynne, like when the hell are you gonna get around to following your career advice? 

Gwynne: That's great. SpaceX is fantastic and great because of the people that work there. We have nearly 15,000 employees and they're the ones that are building the rockets and they're launching the rockets. I'm really there at launches to speak to the press in case we have a failure. They don't need me to launch actually. It's pretty great. Another thing I think is in your career you should figure out how to obsolete yourself in your role. That's another, I think, important feature. Just like we obsolete our technology to make the next vehicle system better.

Jase: That's good. Gwynne, last year was a pretty huge year for SpaceX. Y'all launched nearly 100 rockets carrying things like astronauts to the space station, and mission critical national security payloads for the Pentagon. And of course Starlink satellites is nearly 100 rocket launches. Is that normal for a rocket company or what's going on there? 

Gwynne: Hopefully it will become more normal. I really wanna see people thriving on Earth, on the Moon and Mars. And it's gonna take more than SpaceX launching hundreds of times a year. It's gonna take a lot to do that. But traditionally, I think a big year for a rocket company is a dozen, maybe two dozen launches a year. And the key for us is, we got to start our technology pathway. We got to make all the decisions early on. We did not develop the Falcon system of launch vehicles under a government contract. So we were working to our requirements, our methods, our testing, our approaches. And that clean sheet of paper approach was incredibly valuable to us. We got to think about all parts of the development program and all parts of how we were gonna operate this vehicle.

Gwynne: If you don't design a vehicle that's operable often, then you get stuck with a rocket that you can only launch once. It goes once and then it dumps itself in the ocean. And we figured a way to not have it be like that. But let's think about the aircraft industry, airline industry. If airplanes were only used once, and you toss the aircraft after that one trip, life would be very different. We probably wouldn't be here chatting today. I don't think we'd know what broadband internet would be. The world would be so different. And we really wanted to take an industry, like the rocket industry and try to make it more like the aircraft industry. So our rockets, currently, the Falcon family of launch vehicles. That was the first part of the video. That was the Falcon and Falcon Heavy. The first stage, the first part of that rocket is reusable. It carries the second stage, drops it off, not quite orbital in a suborbital, and then the second stage lights and goes on to get to orbit. First stage fires a number of times depending on what the mission is and comes back and lands either on land or on a ship. You got to see it land actually. I think there was both a land landing and a ship landing.

Jase: And you are teaming up with NASA to put Americans back on the Moon soon. And so this is a three part question.

Gwynne: I'm 60, so give me one at a time 'cause I'll forget.

Jase: Okay. Part one is how freaking cool is that? 

Gwynne: That's easy. That was super cool.

Jase: It's super cool, right? 

Gwynne: Super cool. We did not anticipate winning that deal and we were very excited when we did.

Jase: Yeah. And part two is, do you have room for one more? 

Gwynne: I thought we talked about. When the Moon and Knights go, you get to go.

Jase: I just wanna make double triple. Okay.

Gwynne: Okay.

Jase: And part three is, critical to that mission is the development of Starship.

Gwynne: Correct.

Jase: Which is the largest rocket ever launched. And you recently not only launched, but you landed it. Can you tell us more about Starship? 

Gwynne: Sure. So as I talked about you obsolete yourself from your job, we obsolete our products as well, 'cause if you don't obsolete your product, someone else is gonna find a way to do that. So as I mentioned, the Falcon family, the first stage is reusable. Starship, our next generation of rockets or the system that's gonna obsolete Falcon, both stages, the entire system will fly, get its payload to orbit, and come back and not just land on land or on a ship out in the middle of the ocean, but it will land back on the pad. So when you land in aircraft, you land on a runway and you taxi to the gate, people get on, people get off, cargo goes on, cargo goes off, and then it goes back to the runway. What we wanna do is kind of eliminate, we're gonna be more efficient than the aircraft industry, right? 

Jase: Yeah.

Gwynne: We're gonna land directly on the runway. We're gonna land on the runway. People are gonna get off on the runway and we're gonna go back, go back and launch from the runway. We've had four flights. And by the way, this one is really hard. We know rockets. We've had a lot of successes. We've had some failures too, by the way 'cause rockets are hard. But the key element of the Starship program is both that it is rapidly reusable, which is why we bring it back to the launchpad and highly producible. It takes us start to finish to build a Falcon probably like 18 months.

Jase: Wow.

Gwynne: Long lead items, machine the engine components, put the engine together, jam them on the back end of those tanks, which are like beer cans. Starship, we wanna fly hundreds of times a year, if not thousands of times a year. If we have a settlement on Mars and you've got a million people there, you're gonna have to have a lot of transportation back and forth.

Jase: Wow.

Gwynne: Yeah. So it needs to be very producible as well.

Jase: Visuals might help here. I think we have a clip of Starship.

Gwynne: Yeah. Let's look at flight four.

Gwynne: So crazy. That's so cool. I'm such an idiot. I love our videos.

Jase: Yeah, you all do a pretty decent job at those. This reusability thing, how important is it to SpaceX and how does it enable Starlink? 

Gwynne: So, reusability is key from a number of factors. Let's walk through them. First of all, if you want to send people to other planets, you want to be able to bring them back in case they don't like it. Maybe you can send your neighbor, you're not a big fan. Maybe the first trip is one way and you send people you don't like. But the next trip has to be two way, right? So you have to be able to land, relight, come back. Maybe Mars isn't for everybody. Pretty sure the moon is for everybody, but maybe Mars isn't for everybody. You got to be able to come home.

Gwynne: So, reusability, right? You got to be able to, no one way tickets. You want your return ticket. So that's the first. That's the way you settle other planets. Settle any place, basically. Just make sure you've got return tickets. Second of all, the aerospace industry, at least the launch business, is kind of a crappy business. It's really hard to make money in this business. Because you're building an airplane, let's call it a space plane, and you throw it out after one mission.

Gwynne: That's not a very good, positive economic situation. And so reusability has really dramatically decreased our costs. Took us a lot of time and a lot of money to get to a reusable launch vehicle. But once we're there, we can use that stage over and over, and we save a bunch of money. And so our launch business is actually quite profitable now. So return ticket, necessary, check.

Gwynne: Profitability, got to be profitable because we take all our money and reinvest it in our products to make them better, make them more reliable. Speaking of reliability, we think when you reuse a stage or when you use that system over again, you've already tested it. You've flown it. You get to bring it back and examine it. Are you getting cracks in the hull? You learn from it. And so you can make your system better, more reliable, a more robust design to ultimately carry people further and further. So reusability, ticket, return ticket, higher reliability, better economics, and from an environmental perspective, we're not just dumping it in the ocean, which is terrible, like travesty. So reusability is key.

Jase: Key, key, key.

Gwynne: Key. And you talked about Starlink, right? We're flying Starlinks right now between 20 and 30 per launch about twice a week. Starship will be able to put a few hundred satellites at a time on that vehicle, and it will make it, and because both stages are reusable, it'll be cheaper to fly that giant Starship vehicle than my Falcon vehicle because I do throw the second stage away on Falcon. And it's, like a $10, $12 million throwaway.

Jase: So it's really good business.

Jase: It will be a really good business.

Gwynne: Reusability is good business.

Jase: So on a much more serious note, Gwynne, do you all ever make, rocket blast-off sounds when they're the lift-offs? Like? 

Gwynne: In all seriousness. Or you just play the video, and then you get it.

Jase: Or, like, space laser sounds like pew, pew. You don't do any of that? 

Gwynne: I don't do that, Jase. You can do that, though.

Jase: Okay, I'll do that.

Gwynne: We do the five, four, three. We do the countdown, though. We're kind of nerds that way.

Jase: Okay, but, speaking of space lasers and measuring contest latency, as you all know in the broadband industry, is the Achilles' heel of most non-fiber technologies. And laser link between satellites is just one of many latency-reducing innovations that you all have pioneered at SpaceX into Starlink. And curious, Gwynne, what else and how else does Starlink, as a low-Earth orbit system, differ from what we historically normally think of as, like, internet satellite? 

Gwynne: Yeah, satellite internet prior to the Starlink system and there are others coming as well, was done at geostationary orbit, which is about 35,000 kilometers away from Earth. Starlink is about 500, roughly 500 kilometers away from Earth. So the latency, and it's a ping up and back, right? So it's roughly seven and a half times further to geo and then back. So you're like, it's like 15x.

Jase: The distance is there.

Gwynne: Yeah, so you can see how far it is.

Gwynne: Purely physics, if you take away any of the losses, you know that signal travels at the speed of light. And to go from where we are at 500 kilometers up and back is about three milliseconds, 3.3 milliseconds. And going to geo, it's much more than that.

Jase: So now with the laser links and everything in place, are there situations in which you could potentially be faster than fiber from one part of the world to another? 

Gwynne: It really depends on your networking and how many times you need to go through a gateway or a ground station, 'cause there's losses there, in fact. And what we've been able to do is make the losses between satellite to satellite very low, very low. In fact, we're tracking about 20 millisecond latency right now. We'll never get to the 3.3. So you take your signal from your dish out in the middle of some rural place in the US. You go up to the satellite. It may travel around to another satellite and then come down into our gateway over to a POP. Yeah, and so it's not just the speed of light traveling in a fiber or traveling in space, but depends on how you're gonna land it. And we've been very efficient with the space lasers and we can take a signal from here and get it to Riyadh incredibly quickly with maybe one ground, well, we're not licensed in Saudi yet, we will be soon, but basically with one ground landing.

Jase: That's wonderful.

Gwynne: We also started putting our gateways on or near the roofs of POPs, so you actually eliminate that bit of latency as well.

Jase: Wonderful. Gwynne at Ready, we have the honor to work with 30 state broadband offices and they're in aggregate about to put around 25 billion bucks into broadband. And we build tech to try to help them solve as many of the problems that stand in their way as possible and we work with them to think of their access for all mandate as a math problem. And it's true that fiber can be very expensive and almost impossible to deploy in some places. And you're widely regarded, Gwynne, as a master of cost structure innovation. And I'm just curious, can we talk a bit about what Starlink might be able to do to help these directors with their access for all versus fiber for some math problem that they face? 

Gwynne: So Starlink, so think about a constellation of satellites with complete global coverage. And that satellite doesn't care if I'm landing a beam or landing a signal in the middle of Manhattan or whether it's landing in rural Texas, which is where I live. So what's brilliant about this constellation concept is that it is very complementary with fiber. Like currently the beam projection on the ground is about 22 kilometers. We'll keep shrinking that. And you could put a couple hundred users on a beam currently. Every generation we do makes it beam smaller, more people per beam. If you put a 22 kilometer beam down in the middle of Manhattan, you get a couple hundred users, but there's 10 million people in Manhattan. So Starlink can serve people in cities, but fiber is much better suited to highly populated areas. Now it takes, I know it depends on where you are and even what country frankly, but fiber can be 10 to 30,000 per mile, 10,000 to $30,000 per mile. I can bridge that gap with one Starlink kit, which is 500 bucks and service depending, 50 to $100 a month service. So what we really wanna make sure folks understand is yeah, we can serve cities, but we can't serve everybody in cities, right? But we can serve everybody in rural US and semi-rural populations.

Jase: Yeah. And speaking to this, Gwynne, America has sunk over the years billions of dollars into trying to solve the digital divide and the programs like the BTOPS and the CAFs and the RDOFs and the SLRFs and the whatnots, but B, the program that these directors are overseeing is larger than all of those prior programs combined. Is SpaceX able to participate in a program like B? 

Gwynne: So we're technically capable of serving the need. We can do 100 up, or excuse me, 100 down, 20 up with the latency that's required. There are some structural elements of the B program that we're working with commerce to get through that would make it work really well. So let me explain just a couple of those. If B invests a billion dollars in fiber, if the government pays for that, I could see why the government would say, well, I own that fiber. I want you to manage it. I want you to collect customers, and I want you to make money from that. But if you go away, I wanna be able to take that fiber over and get someone else to run that business 'cause I, the government, paid for that fiber. I've put over $10 billion into Starlink. The government hasn't paid for that. So I've deployed a network. And so for me to participate in B, I don't want B to say, well, if something happens, I get your network, 'cause they didn't pay the 10 billion for that network. So it's things like that.

Gwynne: But by the way, commerce is very interested in SpaceX participating in this program. In fact, I think it's the only way to get to those super high cost areas. I don't think the math works without Starlink or basically a Leo telecom provider. It's just too expensive.

Jase: Shifting gears for a moment, Gwynne, can you honestly think of a better suited name for somebody that leads a rocket company than Shotwell? 

Gwynne: Yeah, that's my husband. I married him because he had that name, actually. Don't tell him.

Jase: Is that why? 

Gwynne: Don't tell him I said that.

Jase: Okay, I hope he's not tuned in on this. Maybe like Stacey Space or like Rhonda Rocketman, but like Gwynne Shotwell would be right up there as one of the top sort of.

Gwynne: It's actually a cool name.

Jase: Yeah, it is.

Jase: Yeah, so Erica and Candice from your team recently hosted a group of us out in your headquarters in Hawthorne. And a number of us were blown away and I walked away personally thinking, thank God that you're doing what you're doing for humans, but also that you're doing it specifically here in America. Starlink is a global internet service provider and SpaceX is working to make humankind multi-planetary, but you're building the future right here in America. And that means a lot to a lot of us. And so I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about what America means to SpaceX and potentially vice versa.

Gwynne: So we are an international company. We serve customers across the globe, both with Starlink and on the launch side as well. But this company was founded in the US in our employee base. We have about 15,000 employees. Most are either US citizens or US green card holders. Not all, we are allowed to hire some international talent, which is great, but State Department, we have to work pretty closely with the State Department to make that work. But we're an American company on American soil, developing, building rockets, spaceships, user terminals, gateways in the US Really proud of that. In fact, when we flew, I don't want to take everybody back to 2020 'cause it was a really horrible time for us, but.

Jase: What are you talking about? 

Gwynne: Maybe we forgot, right? We have a short term memory. Yeah, but in the middle, like the very beginning of COVID in May of 2020, we flew the first astronauts, we flew our first astronauts to the International Space Station and back. And that was the first time that the US had flown astronauts with a US rocket on US soil since 2011 in Atlantis's last flight. So we're proud patriots actually. And I'm just thrilled that we can leverage that technology and it's relevant across the globe as well. But we're starting here at home.

Jase: Thanks for doing what you do. And the SpaceX crew is pretty awesome. Can we fast forward to the future for a few minutes? At Ready.net, we help build technologies that help utility providers connect more families to better services at lower cost. And we're working towards a future in which we've helped those providers and their stakeholders connect tens of millions of families to better broadband and energy and water. What is your vision for the future of SpaceX and Starlink in a few decades? 

Gwynne: So there is no question that as a team of telecom providers, we can connect everybody on the planet that wants to be connected. Starlink is a big part of that. But we won't do it alone, right? We need fiber, fixed wireless, microwave. We can all play in this role or in this space. But in five years, there should be no one that is not connected to the internet, that wants to be. Some people don't wanna be. But there should be no one on planet Earth that wants to be connected that isn't connected. And that is doable in five years. We can do it sooner than that too, actually. So that's on the connectivity side. Then let's talk about 10 years from now, there should be the beginnings of a settlement on Mars. Moon, we'll be there by then. We'll be on the moon. There'll be hopefully a permanent we. For weekend.

Jase: Just checking, I wanna make sure.

Gwynne: I have a ranch. I gotta get home and take care of my cows.

Jase: A moon ranch? 

Gwynne: No, not a moon ranch.

Jase: You're already up.

Gwynne: I have some moon ranch art though, actually.

Jase: Okay, that sounds amazing.

Gwynne: Helmets.

Jase: We need to get into the space banjo collection too the music.

Gwynne: Space banjo? 

Jase: I'm gonna send you some tunes.

Gwynne: Okay, you play the banjo? 

Jase: No, I don't. I should, I wanna. Maybe I should. But no.

Gwynne: I have zero talent in that department.

Jase: Yeah, really talented people that have banjos play space banjo, and y'all should Google that.

Gwynne: Okay, space banjo. All right, so we're on the moon. Everybody is connected. 10 years from now, we'll have the start of a settlement on Mars. And 50 years from now, I think, are you guys old enough to know the Jetsons? 

Jase: Yeah, of course.

Gwynne: Like, less than 50 years for the Jetsons, right? We'll be leaving Earth, flying around in space. No more traffic jams, cause you got little air cars going to space, going to the moon. And hopefully, 50 years from now, we will have found some way within physics or learned something new in physics that's gonna allow us to go to planets beyond our solar system. To find, your doppelganger. From Proxima.

Jase: Wow. Y'all are thinking of interstellar.

Gwynne: I do, actually. That's why I do what I do. I mean, Mars is okay, but it is a fixer-upper planet. You know? It's gonna be rough. It's gonna be really rough. That's why I'm not going.

Jase: It gets some good deals there, though.

Gwynne: I don't like camping. I like nice hotels. But someone's brave enough to go to Mars and start it off.

Jase: Can we get a quick show of hands, like, who didn't go to Mars? Like, did you? 

Gwynne: There was less now, after the talk. Way to go. Way to promote.

Jase: We're gonna do a time series on that. Gwynne, this is a dad joke warning, okay? How do you put the baby astronaut to sleep? 

Gwynne: I don't know.

Jase: You rock it, Gwynne.

Gwynne: Okay. I can't believe I don't know that joke. You rock it. Good. And you said there were, like, three dad jokes.

Jase: Nah, that was the one.

Gwynne: That was it? Just one? That's a good joke.

Jase: Thank you. I saw it online. Thanks to the internet.

Gwynne: Did you look that up? 

Jase: I did. Okay.

Gwynne: I love babies. I wish I had grandkids, but my children aren't participating in my vision.

Jase: If Wynne's kids are in the audience, they're watching.

Gwynne: No pressure. Hurts fertility.

Jase: I have my parents here in the audience.

Gwynne: Do you? 

Jase: Ma and old man. Yeah. We got we ferry way Wilson.

Gwynne: You're grandparents. You're lucky. Yeah.

Jase: Yeah. So, Gwynne, I want to, save some time. If there's anything else, when you're in the industry, you're thinking about Mars. You're thinking about the moon. You're thinking about interstellar. You're building a multimillion subscriber internet service provider in the process as a way of achieving those outcomes, and that's an interesting thing for an industry of broadband. So, anything that you have that you want to share or talk about? 

Gwynne: There's a couple of points that I think are really important. It is a very new technology. Satellite telecom is not, but the way we've put this together is pretty new, and people are always fearful of new things, new and different things. But in order for us to do our jobs, I think we need to figure out a way to make room for the new technology and not be afraid of it. In fact, we can help the big telecom companies when they've signed up to, let's take the broadband program in Ireland. They didn't get a ton of money, and they had to connect every cottage, and they're finding it very difficult to do that. I think the program was like 3 billion, 3.5 billion. They're finding it difficult to do that because sometimes it could cost $100,000 to get that one cottage, or a million dollars to get that one cottage, just because of its geography. I can serve that cottage today, actually, with Starlink Mini, which I have on my car, by the way. It's a little terminal about so big. It's a couple hundred dollars.

Jase: Have folks seen Mini? 

Gwynne: Have you guys seen Mini? It's darling.

Jase: It's pretty wild.

Gwynne: I'm not a skier, but I had to put ski rack on my car to put Mini on my ski rack, because I live in rural Texas. My commute is 40 minutes, and it was frustrating. I would drop calls with Elon while I was driving.

Jase: You're driving on the road, and you're mining your way, and you're not dropping calls anymore? 

Gwynne: No. I do live in the middle of nowhere, Texas. I'm 14 miles away from a town that's about 11,000 people, and 16 miles away from a town that has about 15,000 people.

Jase: How many dishes do you have, you said? 

Gwynne: Well, on the ranch, I have a ranch, almost 1,000 acres, and we have seven units, seven Starlink units, including my car, and I pay for my mother-in-law and my aunt, because they help on the ranch. Before that, I had DSL service, and it was $145 a month, and it was really terrible. Netflix on a Friday night was very jittery. I call it a cable. It wasn't really a cable. A cable actually laid across a gravel road, and you could drive over it. It was hardened enough to be able to drive over in the spring, summer, and fall. On the surface. It was on the road. But in the winter, it would get cold, and then a truck drove over it, and it cracked. And so, well, sorry. The company would come fix it. Sorry.

Jase: Can we strike that? 

Gwynne: Come fix it. They came to fix it. They did, but once we figured out where it was, we could go fix it ourselves then. But it cracked over the road. Yeah, that's what rural Internet is. I mean, we were lucky to have it, but it was expensive. I'm pretty sure the provider didn't make a ton of money on us, and I think we should figure out a way to have technologies that serve those purposes in the way that they should be served, so that fiber is used where it should be used.

Jase: Where it should be, yeah.

Gwynne: Where it should be used.

Jase: To the fullest possible extent. You shared a really interesting story, and the folks in this room are working their tails off to connect folks to broadband, and you shared a story recently in a talk that you gave about an experience that you had in the Amazon.

Gwynne: Yeah.

Jase: Can you share that with this group? 

Gwynne: Yeah, absolutely. So, probably one of my best days at work was when I went to Brazil, landed in Manaus, and we took a boat up the Amazon River to a little town. It took us like two hours to get there, so it was pretty far away, although one engine went down, so it took twice as long as it should have, but it was pretty far away.

Jase: Like a plane engine? 

Gwynne: A boat engine. Oh, yeah. It was a dual engine. One went down, and we got there in time. Luckily, we left early enough. We got there in time, and we were going to connect to school for the first time, and I did have a forward team, and we had to get a gateway in Manaus, and we did put a kit on the roof of the school, and we had a conversation with Elon. Me and 80 little Brazilian kids, never used internet in their life, and somehow they knew who Elon was. They didn't know who I was. They knew Elon. I'm not bitter, because I'm the one that went there, sweating. I was wildly dressed the wrong way. Anyhow, so we had a conversation with Elon. We watched rocket videos, and I got hugs from all these little kids, and it was my best day at SpaceX, actually. I have some really amazing photos. Yeah.

Jase: That's pretty sweet. What's the weirdest thing that you've ever sent to space? 

Gwynne: We chatted about this. I'm glad we chatted first, because we've flown a lot. Well, I think astronauts, when you get in a Dragon, NASA flies astronauts. They get to bring a pack of their own stuff. They probably bring weirder stuff. I don't have any knowledge. I'm just saying, you're up in space for six months. Not a lot to do. Probably some stuff. Okay, so besides that, we flew a giant wheel of cheese in the first Dragon. Yeah.

Jase: Cheese? That's awesome.

Gwynne: Yeah, we flew a wheel of cheese. It was a funny Elon thing. It had something to do with a Monty Python episode. Is there a Wheel of Cheese episode, or something with a wheel of cheese? Yeah. We flew a wheel of cheese, and then we brought it back. Even though cheese lasts a long time, it doesn't last forever. We didn't want to get rid of it, so we put it in this vacuum-sealed container with a clear top, so you could see the wheel of cheese forever. But I don't think it was fully sealed. Yeah. I'm not sure where the cheese is anymore, or if it's even cheese anymore.

Jase: Oh, boy. Has this been a cool talk? 

Crowd: Yeah.

Jase: Just a reminder for folks to hear from world-changers like Gwynne at Broadband.io. I want to send a quick shout-out to the Mountain Connect team for hosting and having everybody here. Another round of applause, please, for the State Broadband Directors that are working themselves up.

Jase: And a major, major shout-out to the Ready.net and SpaceX teams for all y'all are doing to connect families and get stuff done. And I want to say thank you all again. And folks, if you could, in the room, join me in thanking our very special guest, Gwynne Shotwell.

Gwynne: Thank you.