HELLO FUTURE: How Space Innovation Is Transforming Life on Earth with Momentus CEO John Rood

Speaker 1 (00:07):
By now you've probably become familiar with the word payload
and what it means in the space domain. Basically, it's
putting it super super simply a locker for scientific stuff
to go up into space and be researched. But you
won't believe all of the stuff that is getting researched
in outer space. Hello Future, it's me keV. This is
a dispatch from the Digital Frontier the planet Desert. The
year is twenty twenty six. My name is Kevin Surrilli,
and remember you can listen to all of the latest
Hello Future episodes however you get your podcasts and of
course on the iHeartMedia app. My guest today is the
CEO of a major innovative space company. He also is
someone who has served in the military. He's worked with
companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and I'm thrilled to
have him the CEO of Momentous Space rud John. Thank
you so much for being here, sir.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Oh it's great to be with you. Kevin A big
fan of your newsletters and podcasts, so it's just great
to be invited on.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
Well, thank you so much. Before we talk about all
of the great things that momentous space is doing. I
want to get into your career for a little bit
because you've had a fascinating trajectory. Take us back to
when you were a kid growing up and how you've
ascended to the upper echelons as CEO of a major
space company in America.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Well, I'll tell you what, Kevin, it didn't happen by plan.
I mean, I forget the person that said it. You
know that life is what happens while you're making plans,
and that definitely applies to my career planning. I grew
up in Phoenix, Arizona, and I didn't know what I
wanted to do. But my mother was a single mom
teacher and said, you know, you got to get a scholarship.
So I got admitted to the Air Force Academy. The
day that I got admitted, I hurt my ankle, showed
up in a cast and crutches, and the major that
was the liaison there said, you know, I need you
to go out to Luke Air Force and get that
looked at and they disqualified me. Wow. So I went
to my local school, Arizona State, great school. I still
wanted to find something that would attract me to service
or to interesting things or be challenged. And one day
I was taking a class and a professor from it
was an IBM professor on loan to the school. He
came and would I was talking about internships, said, I
was over at the career center, and there's an internship
at CIA if you're interested. So I went over and
in those days, there was a physical book and I
read the page and I took out my pen and
I filled out the application and mailed it in. Several
months later, I got a call and was brought to
Washington for interviews, and that's how I became an intern
at cias in the analytic cores. And they assigned me
to a branch at that time that was doing chemical
weapons work. But I didn't like it. But I met
the guy that headed the missilin space branch, who was
also an Arizona State grad and the next summer he
had me back, and so I started doing that work,
and after graduation they hired me and I was an
analyst there for a little over ten years, following missile
and space programs, you know. For example, I followed North
Korea's missile and space programs. Other countries around the world,
assigned to support things like the Gulf War and fight
with Iraq, and then later I got sent, you know,
random thing they do directed assignments there at CIA. I
was coming back from a job briefing downtown at the
White House and the head of my section said, hey,
I've nominated you to be a hard nominee to be
a Congressional fellow, which, by the way, is just a euphemism.
Whenever I was told you've been nominated for something, I
was dumb enough the first three or four times to say, well,
how many nominees are they, and they'd always say, well,
there's one, it's you. It's just a polite way of
saying you're going to do this job. And so I
want to be a congressional fellow. And I worked for
a senator from Arizona and went from Mississippi, John Kyle
and Thad Cochran, and they were both very interested in
missile defense advanced programs that the Defense Department was developing,
including in space. After the President, George W. Bush was elected,
I called around and talked to some friends and said,
you know, I'd like to work at the National Security Council.
And I found a way to get introduced to one
of the people heading a director there and did an interview,
and so I went to the White House and I
ended up doing two tours there under Conde. Lisa Rice.
One over at the Defense Department is a Deputy Assistant
Secretary of Defense for forces policy, which included space forces
at that time, nuclear forces, conventional forces. At some point
after being at the White House as a special assistant
to the President, Connedy Rice asked me to come over
to the State Department, and I did, and first as
an Assistant Secretary for International Security, and then I became
the acting Under Secretary, one of six, and then you know,
at the end of the administration, for the first time,
I didn't start my career as a political point I
was at GS five when I started. I became a
political pointee. And so I went to work in industry
and spent eleven years at both Raytheon and Lockheed Martin
doing business development or international business. At Lockheed Martin as
a senior vice president, and then you know, I felt
the call to go back. When Jim Mattis was the
Secretary of Defense, I just couldn't shape this feeling that
while I'm very happy in industry. I know I could
serve and I could help. So I went back as
the Undersecretary for Policy, which is sort of the number
three civilian in the Pentagon, for two years before leaving
and doing board work and consulting. And one of my
clients was a venture capital firm that had invested in Momentous.
They were going through a foreign ownership a discussion or
negotiation with the US government. They said, you know about that, John,
and I started helping them, and after they finished negotiating
their agreement, they told me, well, we need a new CEO.
Do you know some people. I started introducing them to
various people, and at some point along the way, I
would always explain what the company needed and why I
thought this person was a match. And at some point
along the way they said, well, what's the matter with you?
Why don't you want the job? And we'd really like
you to consider being the CEO. And so that's what
led me to this place. And I've been at Momentous
about five years now.

Speaker 1 (06:21):
Well, it's really fascinating to watch your career because I
think it really illustrates everything that I try to not
just cover but convene on. And I'm fascinated by, which
is I don't think there's any other industry right now
in America that's so best illustrates the American spirit then
the space industry. I mean it literally is if you're
a storyteller, if you're a scientist, if you're someone who
loves our country and wants to preserve and protect its
national security, but also if you're a business entrepreneur. I
mean it is literally talk about the ultimate paylofe. I mean,
this is a capsule for the future. And so your
career really illustrates all of the different buckets that I
believe are gonna are gonna lead us to the next
two hundred and fifty years of our country's great greatness
and hope and optimism. What is it about outer space
in particular that really inspires you? And you know you're leading.
You're one of the leaders of what I like to
call space collar jobs and this renaissance in the American economy,
I mean space collar jobs. I grow up outside of Pennsylvania.
I gotta be honest, John, I'm not as smart as you, okay,
but I add those glow in the dark stars that
my mom would tack up on my ceiling them. Only
in America can we give the middle class that hope,
that optimism, that you can dream big and look up
at the moon and think, you know what, I can
go there. It would be ordinary to go there. These
extraordinary things are actually what America does best is take
the extraordinary and make it ordinary for everybody. What is
it about the cosmos and outer space that really pushes
you and feeds your professional passion?

Speaker 2 (08:03):
Well, first of all, I really resonate with what you're
talking about. I mean, I was blessed to be born
in this country, but my mother wasn't. And you know
the pride she felt as an immigrant that how hard
she worked to get to this country and how much
it meant to her to be an American, and how
important it was for her children to have all the
benefits of that. And one of them was what you're
talking about, which is you can be anything you want
to be here, and we can dream big but also
work hard and it's possible to do those things. And
you know, she drilled that into us as children and
as adults, and so you know, space always called to me.
But I always love the idea of being some part
of something bigger than yourself. And that's partly what really
attracted me to government service, or to larger organizations, or
to organizations that were trying to do something different that
I wanted to I wanted my contribution to matter. Even
though sometimes my contribution on the team was very modest,
I still understood I was part of something bigger, that
team that was doing something pushing the boundaries, either to
protect the country or to advance what we knew about
our knowledge or our exploration. And I think there's something
inherent inside us that wants to do new things, that
wants to learn new things, that wants to be challenged
as a people, and I think we find it to
be parochial for a minute. It's stronger, more strongly felt
in America than elsewhere, are having traveled so broadly. It's
one of the wonderful things I think is about our
national character and that we enable people to do that. Occasionally,
sometimes in all the cacophony with social media and other things,
I think sometimes these fundamentals get lost. But I really
think they're present and still strong, and I see it
in our young people that are coming to work at
momentous by the way, not just older generation. It didn't
skip a generation and it doesn't exactly get passed down
in the blood, but I think it's part of our
national culture.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
Then there's something about the space industry. You know. I
used to be a political correspondent. I'm a recovering political correspondent,
I like to say. And the thing about the green
rooms of Washington, DC is you're kind of conditioned to
act like you're the smartest person in the room. And
I think that's very evident when folks are watching cable news,
regardless of what channel they're watching, it's a bunch of
performance of people pretending that they're the smartest people in
the room. And the thing I love about the space
industry is every room I walk into, I'm the dumbest
guy there, and I'm learning something every single day, and
I'm never going to be able to compete with the
astronauts and the astrophysicists and all of these people. But
I agree with you, John, because the young people in
the space collar job revolution, they don't care what party
they're in, They don't care about any of that. They
just are like, when are we building a colony on
the moon? When can we all go to the moon.
You know that explorer spirit is something that is just
so missing right now that people are it's raving, and
I really commend all of the space industry for really
showing us a way out, a way through this hyper
partisan time. And again that's not a reflection on what
anyone believes. I don't do politics, but the space industry.
I mean, that's splash down from Artemis two was just
so moving on My phone was blowing up from people
of all different political backgrounds because they were so excited
by that. So okay, momentous space. You guys put very simply.
A lot of folks who listen to me they love space.
We're not experts, So I'm going to be the everyday
idiot and tell us in Layman's terms, John, what does
Momentus Space do.

Speaker 2 (11:39):
We're a small Silicon Valley company. We build small satellites
that function as satellites to do unique things, but also
that are basically a space truck in space. In addition
to being a traditional satellite for things like communication, missile tracking,
and the like. Basically, we're like the ups of space
where we can carry just about anything, can move you
to the right orbits you want to be too. We
can support cutting edge experiments, all very flexibly. And one
of the things that I love about, you know, today's
space industry is when I first started watching space, I mean,
you'd be lucky if there was one launch in the
United States per month. And now just this ability to
access space, so many new things are being done because
the ability to access access to launches has populated. The
cost per pound or per kilogram, whatever your metric is,
has gone down dramatically, you know, according to McKenzie by
like over ninety five percent in the last twenty years.
And then what you can do. You know, there's there's
been massive developments in technology like that you cover so
well with microelectronic smaller powerful systems that can be placed
in space and operate effectively. And so you have these
two mega trends, the cost per kilogram coming way down
and the access to launch, and then you can do
so much more with smaller bespoke systems, and it's really
led to this proliferation of activities in space. And you know,
sometimes I get this from people that don't fallow space
very actively, saying, well, that's interesting, but you know, we
have problems on Earth.

Speaker 1 (13:15):
And something makes me more angry than when people, I say,
bring it on, to go ahead. I'm curious how you
answer that question. I have to keep myself calm when
I hear that, because I just want to say, don't
you understand that the solutions to our problems on Earth
are out there in the Cosmos period, and the science
that's going to get us there is going to extend life,
create solutions, create economic opportunity, and create and unleash the
power of the American economy. I mean, don't even John,
you don't want to get me started to go ahead?
I can't help it.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
I mean, we're doing things in space for the benefit
of our lives on Earth, yes, and for the benefit
of ourselves, and it's tremendously important to our economy and
to the betterment of our lives. So you know, occasionally
I'll say, well, what was that in your hand? Where
do you think that data on your phone comes from?
Where do you think the time on your Apple watch
or what have you that all comes from space? Youthn't
used to be able to do that. I still remember
the days walking up to the counter and handing somebody
like a paper bill. And yes, we could do those
things before, but it's much better it's much faster today,
and so all of those innovations came from space.

Speaker 1 (14:23):
Thank god for the US Space Force because they're protecting
all of that. I mean. The other thing that gets
me really mad is when people say they don't, oh,
the militarization is space. I go, these are the same
people that want to get rid of police officers and firefighters,
and I mean, it is so illogical. John Read, CEO
of a Mensa Space, You're going to come back on.
Thank you so much for being here. This has been
a fascinating conversation about leadership, about what momentus space does,
and coming up in our next episode he's going to
tell us specifically about some of the functions of what
these space trucks. I love that analogy, the ups of
the ups of space, what these you of space, payloads
of momentous space, what they actually do. Thanks for listening
to Hello Future. My name is Kevin SURREALI have a
great tomorrow Today