A Perfect Time to Leave Earth
A perfect time to leave Earth... SpaceX and NASA blast astronauts to the International Space Station... An essential public-private partnership... Don't mess with the 'Space Force'... How to make a fortune in the battle for space...
Now seems like a great time to leave Earth...
A pandemic rages on. And for the past several days, cities across the country have been ripped apart by protests...
Police brutality is the flashpoint today, but we've been warning for years that mounting economic frustrations (much less virus-aided ones) would lead to more frequent and more intense civil unrest.
But we're not focusing on that today... Instead, we want to remind Digest readers about the types of triumphs that humankind can reach.
On Saturday afternoon, a pair of NASA astronauts got lucky...
Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley blasted off the planet from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on board a SpaceX rocket bound for the International Space Station – 254 miles up in the sky.
It was a historic day for two big reasons...
It was the first time a private company, Elon Musk's SpaceX, launched NASA astronauts into space. And it was also the first time a crew left Earth via American soil at all since 2011.
For years, NASA astronauts have been hitching rides with Russian cosmonauts to the space station... reflecting an era of innovative stagnation, hesitation, and bureaucracy in U.S. space flight since the Columbia disaster, which killed seven astronauts during a reentry from space in 2003.
Enter SpaceX.
Musk, also known as the polarizing founder of Tesla (TSLA), started the company in 2002 with the crazy idea of colonizing Mars... putting a base on the moon... and having millions of people fly to both places from Earth, as if it were a flight from New York to Los Angeles
As Musk said in a press conference on Saturday night after the successful launch...
This is hopefully the first step on a journey... of life becoming multiplanetary for the first time in the 4.5-billion-year history of Earth. That's seeming increasingly real with what happened today.
Hundreds of years from now, if someone looks back on today's Digest in a blockchain-powered content archive, maybe they'll laugh and say, "Of course... we've been going to Mars every summer for years." Until then, though...
We're not living on Mars yet, but people seem interested...
NASA said that more than 10 million people watched the launch of the Crew Dragon Demo-2 over the weekend.
It was a welcome break that gave us a strange sense of normalcy amid an endless stream of chaotic images on the mainstream news. To that point, Musk said...
This is a day that everyone can be proud of. This even is something that all of humanity can get excited about it. It's a fundamentally positive, good thing. We need more positive, good things in this world.
NASA's broadcast included live feeds of the cockpit. Behnken and Hurley, a pair of former military test pilots, were mostly along for the automated ride, but they did test manual controls while docking the spacecraft with the space station on Sunday...
The events also included fresh footage of one of SpaceX's signature "reusable rockets" landing in routine fashion on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This might be video that you've seen before, but it wasn't always a given...
You see, during a "normal" NASA launch, the "first stage" of the rocket – the most powerful and most expensive part – has usually just broken off and dropped in a freefall back to Earth, crash-landing somewhere in the ocean... never to be seen again.
SpaceX reinvented this standard part of rocket-launching over the past two decades... The company designed technology to guide the first-stage rocket back to Earth in a controlled descent so it can be used again.
Just like we reuse commercial airliners or cars, reusing rockets saves time, money, and critical components. It's a phenomenal piece of evidence for Musk's dream business concept of flying people all over outer space on a daily basis.
Not long ago, SpaceX was best known for exploding rockets...
When the company started experimenting with Musk's idea of reusing rockets and landing them back on Earth in 2013, the early results made for absurdly funny video of the failures...
There were explosions on the ground and in the air, as well as rockets that tipped over sideways like candles falling in the wind.
But these repeated failures, followed by commitment to the plan when no one was watching, is precisely what led to Saturday's breakthrough event with millions paying attention.
Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut and senior adviser for SpaceX, spoke about Musk's approach during a presentation at our annual Stansberry Conference in Las Vegas in October...
That was the key to making this happen, [Elon] was OK with failure. Not only did he encourage us to be OK with failure, he pushed us to failure.
If you do an engine test, and say, "We passed, we're good to go," he'd say, "That's great, now go back and fire it hotter, faster, higher, until it blows up. Go break that thing. I want you to go fail and then tell me how much it can really take."
At this point, the "reusable rocket" idea is almost an afterthought to the operation. That's a testament to the routine... It has been successfully done at least 50 times.
Private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin – headed by Amazon (AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos – provide the technology, testing, and resources to actually build the rockets and take on the liability. (If anything went wrong Saturday, you can bet SpaceX would have shouldered most of the blame, not NASA.)
In the meantime, entities like NASA train the astronauts and bring their facilities and experience to the table. It's a match made in space heaven...
And this private-public partnership became a necessity to actually get things done...
Reisman told attendees at our conference in October that since the Columbia tragedy, NASA's whole identity was upended.
First off, operations were shut down for two years. And after that, engineers needed to get approvals on proposed items or changes from up to several boards, which essentially acted as "filters." The bureaucracy stifled innovation, according to Reisman...
What's the best way to design something if you want to get through this process quick and inexpensive? Just do the same thing you've always. That's where we ended up, with very little innovation.
We didn't really have the freedom to fail anymore, and it was largely because of the accidents we had over time. After Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia, we got less and less willing to fail – even in testing and development, where you need to be a bit reckless and push the boundaries in testing. Otherwise, you never do anything great.
Now, we can't discuss space any further without talking about the 'Space Force'...
Forget for a moment that "Space Force" is the name of a TV sitcom on Netflix (NFLX), starring Steve Carell...
This newest branch of the U.S. military announced by President Donald Trump in December has actually been doing some interesting things in its short history. And the stakes couldn't be larger...
NASA's primary mandate from the White House is to put humans on the moon by 2024. And in the meantime, plenty of other projects are ongoing...
Even though reusable rockets and human spaceflight are what make headlines, satellites actually hold the key to the future in space. That's where companies are lining up to land government contracts...
In March, the Space Force launched its first rocket in the name of national security. The mission was to complete a "constellation" of military satellites... On May 16, the U.S. launched a robotic X-37B space plane into low-Earth orbit to complete a "secret" mission.
In the March issue of Stansberry Innovations Report, Dave Lashmet wrote about this mission. And he also outlined what the Space Force will actually do...
The Space Force will control our military and intelligence satellite launches, plus protect our assets in orbit. As such, it has two main missions...
The first is offensive. It will compete to control space as a U.S. observational post. It's almost a throwback to World War I, when the balloon corps used binoculars to see troop movements.
The Space Force's second mission is defensive. It must protect those satellites.
And it's wasting no time getting started...
One of the Space Force's big early tasks is to find the best partners to launch satellites into orbit and to construct the next generation of military technology – technology that will keep us ahead of our enemies and competitors.
So there's money to be made in space – on Earth...
Saturday's high-profile launch was technically not a "Space Force" mission. But you could call it that by association...
Right now, four companies are competing to be the launch provider for the Space Force from 2022 to 2025... SpaceX is one of them. But if you're looking to make money with this company in the public markets, you can't right now. It's not publicly traded... at least not yet.
But you can make money with others right now...
For example, two of the other three companies in the "launch provider" battle are publicly traded. And a bunch of others could be in line for lucrative government contracts as we delve deeper into the final frontier and look down at Earth with more technology.
Trillions of dollars will be made in the space industry, starting this year.
In the Stansberry Innovations Report, Dave and editor John Engel have identified the companies best-positioned to deliver big space-related returns – including one of the largest, most stable, publicly traded leaders in space technology... and a little-known American company that could have 1,000% upside.
Click here for all the details on these companies now. You'll also have the opportunity to access Garrett's entire Stansberry Conference presentation from October and a host of other bonuses if you sign up for an Innovations Report subscription today.
More on How to Invest in Space
Our friend and Empire Financial Research editor Enrique Abeyta recently sat down with our colleague Jessica Stone to talk about how to find investment ideas in the final frontier – and why all this talk about space exploration reminds him of the early days of the Internet.
Click here to watch this video. And remember, you can subscribe to our YouTube page for instant access to more free video content on a daily basis.
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In today's mailbag, feedback on our first-ever Stansberry Alliance "Town Hall" event. Do you have a question or comment? As always, e-mail us at feedback@stansberryresearch.com.
"Loved the Town Hall. Please keep them coming. I'll probably listen to this one more than once. Thank you." – Stansberry Alliance member Debra W.
I just wanted to pass this on to you all because I feel so strongly about the result of the Town Hall. To me, this was one of the Alliance features that I have found most enlightening. Thanks so much for doing this. The things that it did for me since I am a daily trader of both stocks and options is re-enforce my feelings about the markets and where they are headed and where to put my money.
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All the best,
Corey McLaughlin
Baltimore, Maryland
June 1, 2020