Today, I’m talking with Adam Bry, who is CEO of Skydio, the leading US maker of autonomous drones. Before we recorded this episode, I actually got to remotely operate one of Skydio’s drones in the Bay Area from Adam’s laptop in our podcast studio in New York and fly an indoor drone around our office. You can check out the full video of that on our YouTube channel.

Beyond flying drones around the country, Adam and I talked about why Skydio is so focused on the enterprise market — I asked him a lot about working with police and military, but you’ll hear him say a lot of Skydio’s customers are utility companies that use drones to remotely inspect important infrastructure in ways that weren’t possible before. 

That’s a big market, but it’s also one that was being served by cheap consumer drones in the past — products that basically no longer exist on the US market since most of them came from China, and the Trump administration banned foreign-made drones late last year. All those inexpensive DJI drones disappeared overnight, leaving expensive Skydio products as the main alternative.

Adam and I talked about all that and the reality of manufacturing complex products like drones in the United States. We also talked about Skydio’s work with the military and how Skydio’s use of AI lines up with defense work — I really wanted to know where Adam’s lines were, at a time when military use of AI is more controversial than ever. 

There’s a lot in this one — maybe more than anything, it was refreshing to hear Adam talk about using AI to bring even more people to work at Skydio as the company expands. And again, I got to fly the drones, which ruled. 

Okay: Adam Bry, CEO of Skydio. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Adam Bry, you are the co-founder and CEO of Skydio. Welcome to Decoder.

I’m very excited to be here with you.

I am super excited to talk with you. We just demoed flying an X10 drone remotely. I have a lot of follow-up questions about that. That was super interesting.

I would say the drone business itself is in a moment of extreme change. There are policies keeping some of your competitors out of the country. There’s what you’re doing with autonomy and working with governments and militaries around the world. Then, there’s just the state of drone technology in general, which seems like it’s on the cusp of being yet another thing. So, there’s quite a lot to talk about.

Let’s just start with the basics. Unless you’re a drone nerd, you might not have heard of Skydio. Explain what Skydio is and how the company came to be.

We are the largest US drone manufacturer. We make drones that are essentially flying sensor platforms. We started in 2014, and at this point, we serve what we think of as the critical industries our civilization depends on. We work with public safety. We work with militaries. We also work with energy utilities, construction companies, departments of transportation, and security organizations. 

The common thread between all of our customers is that they have hardcore, oftentimes high-risk physical operations, where putting sensors in the right place at the right time to get better information can fundamentally change outcomes. That’s what we deliver. We deliver end-to-end solutions where the drone is a key piece, but the software, autonomy, integrations, and, increasingly, the end-to-end workflows for the different industries built around the drone’s capabilities are really what our customers are buying.

We’re at a super exciting moment where after years of talking about a lot of this stuff, it’s really starting to work at scale with incredible impact.

If I think about just our drone coverage over the years, it started with those first DJI drones almost 10 or 15 years ago now. The first Phantom drones were pretty rickety. They had these giant batteries. And it was really just about flight, and being able to control flight in an easy-to-use way. Then we very quickly got to, “Oh boy, we could put fancy cameras in the sky,” and that was really fun. And those cameras got really fancy. Now you’re saying it’s a whole sensor suite, or is it just augmented cameras?

I actually think what you described there closely parallels the chapters of the drone industry that I think about. In the very early days, these electric flying machines were really toys. I think of the first chapter, and the first 10 years was about the electrification of radio-controlled airplanes, which were recreational. It was fun to go out and fly. This is the world that I come from. I grew up flying radio-controlled airplanes. 

What I think happened is that people started bringing the toys to work and realizing that if you put the right camera on there and you had a skilled pilot flying it, you could do a lot of useful stuff. That created cool videos that showed up in cinematography, commercial real estate, things like this. 

The next chapter is about autonomy, where the drone lives in a docking station, is connected to the internet, can be flown remotely and autonomously, and is a piece of infrastructure itself. I think the impact that we’ll see from that is going to be orders of magnitude larger than everything we’ve seen thus far. And we’ve seen a lot of good stuff thus far. I mean, a lot of great work has happened in the world of drones as tools. It’s just very small scale compared to what’s coming, and we’re really at that transition moment now.

Describe the idea that flight is the fundamental building block, that you don’t need to think about it as much because you’re talking about the capabilities built on the second and third order of the thing able to fly itself. Do you spend time investing in how the drones fly themselves or is that solved?

We spend a ton of time investing in that. There’s kind of this trope in the drone industry where, “Oh, it’s not about the drone. It’s about the data.” Which is sort of true. You could say the same thing about almost anything. It’s not about the phone, it’s about the apps, the software, or whatever. 

But you have to earn the right to deliver these solutions. The way you earn that right is by being a world-class designer and manufacturer of these systems and making them super capable and super reliable. I think one of the things that’s oftentimes missed with drones is the idea that they are cutting-edge aerospace devices. They vibrate, they have aerodynamics, they have thermal concerns. We have really advanced compute running on board, a bunch of sensors. It’s akin to building a self-driving car that flies.

If you want to be a good drone company, you need to be a world-class aerospace engineering organization across 10 or 15 different disciplines. It’s only once you have that and are great at it that you can then start to focus on enterprise software integrations that connect your solution into, for example, 911 dispatch software that a public safety organization might be using or the incident management system for an energy utility.

Those things really matter, but if the core technology foundation isn’t great, they’re less important.

We’re going to come back to the phrase “world-class.” I have a lot of questions about what it means to be world-class in our current regulatory and tariff environment, but give me some examples. 

We have a consumer audience where probably everybody listening or watching has used one variant of a consumer drone. Just like every other product, they get slightly better every year until the fifth yearly model, which is a step change better than the model people might be familiar with. What are some of the big advancements in flight capability that people might not have perceived over time?

Originally, drones flew with raw stick to control service input. So, I grew up flying radio-controlled airplanes where you held a joystick transmitter. When you moved that joystick, a direct command was sent to either an electric motor or a servo motor that would move a control surface, which moved directly in response to what you did. There was no compute between your stick input and what happened on the device.

The next step after that — which is what made the quadcopter possible — is to take very low level, primitive microprocessors next to inertial measurement units (the thing in your phone that tells it what orientation it’s in) and write what’s called a pretty basic “attitude control loop.” That’s the fundamental thing running at the bottom of every quadcopter control stack. It basically tells it which orientation to hold in physical space. So, when you move the stick, it maps to the orientation of the quadcopter. Without that, a person couldn’t fly a quadcopter. There’s no way you could move the stick to give a raw motor command. Just the mapping would be too much for our brains. So, that was the beginning of those things becoming a bit more accessible.

The next step was the GPS position hold, of not just holding an altitude but using GPS to figure out your rough position and being able to hold a position in sky. That was a big step forward because that meant you could go hands off, and the drone would just sit there and hover. That was a necessary step to get beyond needing expert, pilot-level skills so they can be usable by anybody. That’s what most drones historically have done, and most drones today still operate mostly based on GPS.

I would say the next big chapter — and Skydio really helped pioneer this — is using computer vision, or putting cameras on the drone. Not just the camera that captures the video the user might care about but cameras that see everything. They can go into a computer that’s running onboard AI and use visual information to make intelligent decisions, like holdingposition even if you don’t have a good GPS signal, avoiding obstacles, or tracking moving subjects. 

We started in 2014 and that was around the time… it seemed like a crazy idea, honestly. It’s hard to remember now but 12 years ago, using computer vision for anything outside of the lab seemed somewhat farfetched. We launched our first product in 2018, the Skydio R1, which I think was the first drone built around computer vision. Our competitors started doing similar things, and we’re now at a point where that stuff has reached maturity. I think there are still incredible capabilities yet to come, but it’s mature enough that you can count on it, rely on it, and build products around it. The fundamental thesis there was to build expert pilot skills into the drone, and I think the only way you can do that is by using computer vision.

I’m just so curious about the notion of this thing can fly itself and now we can build applications on top of that core capability. But it sounds like “this thing can fly itself” is not a finished project. That’s something you’re still spending a lot of time on.

Yeah, I don’t think it’s ever finished. There are just so many upsides here in what you can do, how good the automation can get, and what people can do with them. We work with public safety agencies today that are using these things to respond to 911 calls. Sometimes they need to follow a suspect — like somebody’s fleeing a crime scene in a car — and they’ll do incredible things while flying semi-manually.

Our autonomy system is still under the hood, but they’re flying semi-manually to track moving vehicles through urban canyons. Our AI system is very, very good. It’s not as good as the greatest human pilots I’ve seen fly in those scenarios yet, but it will be. And when it is, it’ll be that much more powerful and capable for more people to reap the benefits.

Yeah, I want to come back to that too. 

I’m giving you a lot to come back to.

There are a lot of threads to pull on here!

I want to ask about Skydio itself. You’ve taken in a lot of investment recently. The company’s getting bigger. I think you’re up to Series F. You have a multi-billion dollar valuation. You’re about to make 2,000 more jobs here in the United States manufacturing drones. How many people work at Skydio today, and how’s the company structured?

We’re about 1,000 people, which I think for the scope and complexity that we manage is actually pretty tiny. We do a lot with a very, very small team because we have to span so many different disciplines: across engineering, software development, direct sales and customer support, and manufacturing. In many ways, I think the company’s kind of traditionally structured. We have a head of sales, a chief financial officer, a head of marketing, and a head of people operations. We could talk more about it, but I think people ops is one of the most important functions at the company. 

What might be a bit unique is how technical we are at the senior levels. So, I have six or seven direct technical reports spanning hardware, software, hardware operations, and chief engineers for a number of the vehicle programs we’re working on. A lot of that is because I’m very technical. I have an engineering background. I still consider myself an engineer. I get pretty deep into the details sometimes on products and technologies that we’re working on.

It reflects our belief that these are cutting-edge aerospace devices, and if you want to be a great company in this space, you need to be world-class at engineering and delivering them. We spend a lot of time at the senior level deep in the technical weeds. My weekly staff meeting starts with a comprehensive review of every little technical thing that’s gone wrong with our products over the last week. We’ll go as deep as we need to in that meeting to figure out what’s going on and what we need to do about it. 

We do the same thing with new programs, and we do that for a couple of reasons. I think it’s the most important thing. It’s not the only thing that matters, but it is the most important thing. I think it’s useful even for the people who are leading non-technical functions to get steeped and exposed to what’s happening technically and then vice versa. Having our engineering leaders well versed in the business, what’s happening financially, and what’s happening with our customers is super important because they’re making some of the most consequential decisions on the technical side, which are ultimately going to manifest in the market with our customers and in our financial results.

I get the feeling that you think a lot about the accountants taking over Boeing. That’s what that sounds like.

We’re like the antithesis of that. [Laughs]

Yeah. [Laughs]

I’m certainly familiar with that story. It sounds awful. It’s ultimately just us doing what we think is in the best interest of our customers, which is being really focused on having excellent products and technology, not just today but a year, two, five, or 10 years from now.

I think you are the first CEO in five years of doing this show to say that people ops is really interesting and that we should talk about it more. What do you mean by that?

I have a very talent-centric view of business. We talked about the organizational structure. I think that matters, but I think it’s less important than just the people at the company. One of the analogies I use to think about this… I love sports analogies for business. People obsess over batting order in baseball. I don’t know if you’re a baseball fan, but there’s this whole theory about batting order. It’s evolved over time where you want the leadoff hitter to get on base a lot, and then you get into the meat of the order with the power hitters that are supposed to knock them in.

We’re now at a point where you can use analytics to study this stuff. I think the estimates are that the difference between the most optimal batting order and the worst batting order is like 20 or 30 runs per year for a Major League Baseball team. They score something like 500 to 800 runs per year. Adding one star player to the lineup is like 100 runs per year, and I think business is the same way. 

It’s not as directly trackable as baseball, but an exceptional person anywhere in the organization can completely change the trajectory of a product or a business. Most things really come back to talent, more than people realize. This is even for big, late stage companies and certainly for early stage companies. So, we spend a lot of time focused on that, on trying to get the best people in the world for each of the different disciplines, and putting people in a position to have tremendous impact. 

If you look at amazing new products that we’ve worked on over the last year…  we talk about the F10s, this fixed wing drone that gets caught with a robotic arm. It’s a crazy sci-fi thing. I think we did a good job creating an organizational structure for that team to be successful, but it’s really just that the people on the team are phenomenal. And it’s the same thing with R10, which I think is now the best enterprise indoor drone that’s ever been created. We did that in 15 months. Amazing people did that, and that’s ultimately what it comes down to. And our head of people ops [Anna Wiesenthal-Birch] is awesome. She and I work together quite closely on recruiting and talent management inside the business to get more of that.

I like this anti-Moneyball approach to running a tech company. We’re going to send this clip to the Sabermetrics people. It’s going to go viral.

Look, I’m not anti-Moneyball. I actually don’t think this is that anti-Moneyball. I would argue that a lot of what it was doing was sort of talent assessment, like deeply studying what attributes lead individual players to be successful or not. I’m not saying the batting order doesn’t matter. It does. You might as well pull all the knobs to optimize them, but the most important piece is having world-class people.

This is one of the weirdest talent markets in tech that I’ve certainly ever covered. You have outrageous salaries for people who work in AI, outrageous promises about AGI, and maybe you want to be on teams that are going to build AGI. You have big platform companies saying that all 6,000 people are going to report to Jack Dorsey with the power of agentic software tools. I’m not sure what any of that means. Is that affecting you? Is it hard to get the talent you want? Is it hard to pay them?

It certainly is a very competitive talent market, which is great. I’m an engineer. I think it’s great that engineers are sought after and that the market compensation for them is going up. I think we have a pretty unique value proposition for everybody, but especially for engineers, in that we’re building products that are very real and having real impact today. Robotics is hot again, and there are a lot of companies talking about robotics. There are a lot of grand promises being made. 

I think a lot of the companies starting off today are probably five to 10 years away. They don’t think this, but I think they will realize that if they succeed at all, they’re five to 10 years away from having anything like a viable business. We’ve been through that journey. We have an awesome core business and it’s growing really quickly, but I still think we’re at the beginning of what’s possible in our space. There’s a huge amount left to be built, but we build it knowing that it’s really going to matter if we can deliver. It’s going to save people’s lives. It’s going to make the energy infrastructure in our country operate more safely and efficiently. And because of that, we’ve been able to attract really, really excellent folks to Skydio.

Are you competing in the bleeding edge AI research area, or are you hiring different kinds of engineers?

We’re not trying to build foundation models that are $100 or $200 million training runs. We are probably some of the earliest users of AI in real products. We use deep neural networks in our perception system going back to 2017 or 2018, before anybody was doing that on a shipped robotic product. We are certainly hiring folks and have folks on the team who are experts in AI, neural networks, and all the other algorithms it takes to build these autonomous systems. So, I think there’s now this smaller set of folks who are experts in these very large cloud-based models. We’re not training those ourselves.

Let me ask you the other Decoder question, and then I want to start to pull on some of these threads that I’ve been pointing at along the way. You’ve had to make a lot of decisions in your run as CEO, most importantly, the decision to switch from consumer to enterprise. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework, and how has it evolved?

I think a lot of what makes super effective companies effective is that a lot of decisions almost become reflexive. It’s like when you’re learning a new skill as a person. You have to think about it a lot. If you’re learning to ice skate or something, you spend a lot of time thinking about foot placement, stride, and whatnot, Then, it just becomes very natural over time.

For me as a leader and for us as a company, I think what’s enabling us to move so quickly now is that we’re just reflexive on a lot of things. We’ve been through a bunch of product development cycles, we’ve seen new industries start to adopt our products and technology and the patterns that they go through. So myself, my leadership team, and everybody in the organization just know how to deal with a lot of different kinds of stuff, such that it doesn’t even feel like we’re making decisions oftentimes. Things just happen. The right thing just happens. It’s super powerful and fun to be a part of that.

That’s not everything. The new stuff, the frontiers, is where you have to do slow thinking (or reasoning in LLM parlance). For me, writing is a very powerful tool to do that. So, anytime we’re facing a lot of uncertainty or ambiguity, I tend to just start writing to help myself think about it. That helps clarify my thinking. I also think the output from that tends to be a really powerful artifact for fostering debate and discussion, so you ultimately have the thing that says, “All right, here’s the plan. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

The other thing that I think is super obvious —  a lot of things in business are super obvious and super simple, it’s just hard to do them —  is that the whole point of a company is to do useful things for other humans. It’s surprisingly easy to lose sight of that, especially as companies get bigger. So, we really force ourselves to focus on that. What is what we’re doing now going to mean? How’s it going to be valuable to somebody, and what are ways that make it more useful and more valuable to somebody? Ultimately, everything in a company should be oriented in that direction.

Then, the final thing that I’d say is that one of our values is, “Love the problem, get to the essence.” It’s worth spending a lot of time going deep, deep, deep on understanding problems, whatever they are. I think the best solutions are born out of a deep, deep understanding of problems, such that the simple, elegant solution oftentimes emerges from that. So, for myself and the team, I always try to focus people on really understanding the problem before swinging at too many different kinds of solutions.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of the tech industry, what kind of products we’ve all been dealing with, and, I don’t know, the rise of B2B SaaS companies, which are a dime a dozen. Do you feel like it’s different because you make hardware, that your attitude towards your customer and what you have to deliver is because there’s a complicated piece of hardware they have to charge, put on the roof, and deploy versus a customer signing up for a subscription software product they forget about, and that’s your whole business?

I’m so deep in it at this point that it’s probably hard for me to perceive. I don’t know what it’s like to lead a pure SaaS company. I certainly know that hardware is extremely unforgiving. You’re dealing with hard physical constraints, and the surface area and complexity of things that can go wrong is immense, and I think that that forces a deep level of rigor. But one of our goals is to be able to tolerate a very heterogeneous posture with respect to risk and complexity and uncertainty. So, reliability is the single most important feature in our flagship, mainline products. We maniacally focus on it. We have to vet everything that we ship extremely rigorously and carefully. 

But not everything is like that. There are pieces of the cloud user interface where we need to be much more iterative and ship things faster. It’s okay if there’s a bug, an issue, or something isn’t polished. When we start a new hardware program like with our indoor drone the R10, it has a very different risk profile. It’s not flying over people. In many ways, it’s designed to crash because it’s flying in indoor spaces. Reliability is still super important, but it’s a different profile from the X10.

So, a part of the challenge, and what I think we’re pretty good at, is being able to focus on the specifics of what we’re trying to accomplish, what a particular product is meant to do — whether it’s hardware or software — and dealing with it on its own merits rather than just applying blanket rules across everything.

Maybe there’s no answer yet, but one of the reasons I’m asking is that we see a lot of pure software companies totally rebuilding themselves around the idea that  AI will just vibe-code everything, or a bunch of engineers will control 50 agents so they’re going to ship more software faster than ever. Maybe that’s great, but also, is it going to be good? I wonder if your relationship to the customer… with this piece of hardware, your drones are very expensive. They have to be good.

I mean, we are extremely heavy AI users. I’m super excited about the hardware engineers I’ve seen throughout the company. They’re brilliant engineers, but they don’t have a deep background in software. They probably  wrote a little bit of software when they were an undergrad, but now they’re vibe coding incredible software applications to help them optimize different aspects of the hardware design to study vibration, aerodynamics, or something. So, the hardware we’re building is for sure better because of AI.

We’re super heavy users on the software side. We have all kinds of internal automations. We have the ability for designers, product managers, or anybody else to prompt a change to the code base that will then automatically get put into the queue to be tested and reviewed by AI and ultimately approved by a person. So, we’re super heavy AI users.

Nobody knows exactly how this is going to play out. I do think that having hardware in this AI world is super valuable because the hardware and software integration gets more and more powerful. I think hardware, is going to be among the last things to be vide codable, to be able to prompt, “I want a drone that does X, Y, Z thing.” Maybe we’ll get there someday, but making the hardware is really hard, and once you have it, being able to more easily add software on top of it to adapt it to more applications and more industries is a very valuable place to be.

I’m personally fascinated by some of the old hardware in my life that has gotten new life because of AI. I have old cameras, and AI denoise has breathed new life into them. I’ve added software to an old piece of technology, and now it has a whole new life in a different way. You can kind of see that across the entire hardware portfolio. 

You said build hardware, and we can’t just vibe-code hardware. The United States government has banned Chinese drones. They’re hard to get in this country. There’s a bunch of great market stuff. We’re constantly covering gray market DJI drones coming from Canada and other places. You’ve got to build the drones here. How is that working right now? Are you invested in that supply chain? Do you have all the pieces you need to build them here? How does that work?

We have always manufactured our drones in the US. We started doing this in 2016 and 2017 when people thought it was truly insane. We had investors in the early days who would come and do diligence on us, see a manufacturing line, and basically pull the ripcord, “What the hell are you guys doing? I’m out of here.” Conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley in 2014 was, one, probably don’t do hardware, and two, if you are going to do hardware, definitely outsource it to China.

That’s just not the path that we went down. Honestly, we didn’t go down it originally for geopolitical reasons. We went down the path of US manufacturing for practical reasons because their aerospace devices, engineering, and manufacturing are tightly coupled, and I think doing both side by side  enables you to build better products faster.

Now, it has become a critical strategic imperative for national security, and a critical strategic advantage for us and the decade of experience under our belts building these things in the US because manufacturing is hard. Hardware is hard. Manufacturing is definitely hard. Running a factory and integrating the supply chain for your product in your own factory is an extremely complex, messy endeavor, and we’re very good at it now.

I saw you key in on “world-class.” I don’t think we are a world-class manufacturing outfit yet. That’s a blunt assessment. I think China’s still better at manufacturing drones than we are, but I think we’re pretty good. I don’t think there’s any law of physics that says that you can’t be a world-class drone manufacturing outfit in the US, and we’re going to do it. We’ll invest in whatever hardware and software systems and people we need  so we have the world’s greatest drone factory right here in the US.

Let me ask you about that. The idea that you can be a world-class drone manufacturer in the United States is, in one way, the right ambition for a company that makes drones, but it’s also fairly narrow. Apple just turned 50. We did a bunch of coverage on Apple turning 50. A big part of that story is that it stood up the supply chain in China, and now there’s a huge array of vendors, sophisticated manufacturing partners, and component suppliers.

You talked about the history of drones. Why are there cheap IMUs and microprocessors all over China? Well, it’s because Apple built the smartphone supply chain, and we can build a bunch of stuff out of lithium-ion batteries and cheaply-available IMUs. We don’t have that here. 

I guess I’m just asking. You can be a world-class drone manufacturer, but the ecosystem that allows you to do that doesn’t exist here. Do you need that ecosystem, or have you found a way to do it all on your own?

I 100 percent agree with you. Drones are, in many ways, the combination of consumer electronics with hobbyist quadcopters, and historically, all consumer electronics have been made in China. 

So, I’ll say a couple of things here. One, I don’t think there’s any law of physics that says we can’t have a world-class consumer electronics, wide-scale hardware manufacturing ecosystem here in the US. Maybe there’s some alternate universe where slightly different policy decisions or a few decisions here or there have the East Bay and San Francisco Bay Area looking something like Shenzhen, China. I think it’s a bummer that we don’t have that kind of hardware richness in the US. These counterfactuals are always hard, but I don’t think there’s a rule of physics that says that that couldn’t be the case.

So, we’re focused on drones, and we’re focused on doing awesome stuff with drones. I do see broader momentum towards building more and more stuff in the US. I think some of this is driven by policy. I think some of it is driven by capitalist opportunity, and all of that is good. Yeah, we’re still using a supply of components that come from Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and so on. Over time, I think more of those will probably be made in the US, but I have the most visibility into and the most confidence in the drone piece. We can definitely do that at world-class levels in the US.

Are there any Chinese parts in Skydio drones right now?

Very, very, very, very few. So we had the great distinction of being sanctioned by the Chinese government about a year and a half ago. We knew that we had China risk. We had done a lot of work to get our supply chain out of China, and the big remaining dependency that we had was batteries, which was public. We fortunately had a decent supply of batteries on hand, but we had to, stand up a new supply chain for batteries independent of China in very short order. At this point, all the first-level dependencies are gone. Anybody who’s saying that they don’t have any Chinese content in what they’re building is deluding themselves because it’s very hard to trace back to the second and third levels. But all our critical components, all the first-level dependency stuff, is outside of China.

Explain what you mean by “first-level dependency.”

The suppliers that we work with directly to buy the camera module, the sensor in it, the processor, the circuit board, the metals and plastics, and, as far as we can push, the suppliers that they’re working with. But it’s hard to say with 100 percent certainty on things like some passive component on a circuit board or the material that’s used in a particular thing.

The reason that Chinese government sanctioned Skydio was because the United States government was trying to kick DJI out of the country. The FCC banned foreign drones last December. It had basically been fulminating about doing it since 2020. Do you understand why the FCC banned DJI drones?

So the stated reason for China sanctioning Skydio was that we sold drones to Taiwan.

Sure.

I’m glad you had intuited the possible real reason. I think the real reason, as you stated, is that we compete with DJI and the US government has taken actions against DJI, so I think it was retaliatory. 

I don’t know exactly what the right answer is, but I think it’s pretty clear and non-controversial at this point that depending on Chinese technology and critical industries has a lot of risks associated with it. And this spans across a bunch of different categories. We’ve seen this in chips, in raw materials like steel and magnets, and with cars. Drones are one slice of this broader geopolitical competition, which is really technology competition.

With respect to drones, I don’t think it’s a uniform landscape. The drones used by our military are probably the most sensitive. Buying that from China clearly seems like a terrible idea. I would argue that it doesn’t seem like a good idea to have drones that live in docks deployed across US cities and across critical infrastructure calling home to Chinese servers.

The most controversial piece of this is probably with consumer drones. There’s frustration in that market now since people who’ve been using these inexpensive, very capable Chinese consumer drones are now having trouble getting access to them. But I think the national security stakes are quite real even there. If you look at the drones the Ukrainians and Russians are using, there’s a lot of direct consumer heritage there, and the supply chain that goes into a consumer drone is very closely aligned with the supply chain that goes into a military or enterprise drone. So, it’s hard to completely disentangle those things. Ultimately, that’s what the policy actions — which, by the way, have spanned both administrations and I think are fairly bipartisan — are aimed at.

There’s a supply chain and then there’s software command and control. It doesn’t seem likely that the Chinese government is going to take my DJI Mavic Air, launch it in the sky on my behalf, and then do something nefarious with it. So, is the actual consumer drone a danger or is it the fact that it connects to the internet at some point?

Again, I think it’s non-uniform. It’s different in different stories. I think having like a network-connected autonomous docking station drone at a nuclear power plant calling home to China — 

Yeah, that seems bad. I’m just saying in the consumer market — 

So, there I think it’s like a direct cybersecurity exposure risk. On the consumer side, it’s more about supply chain leverage. I don’t think anybody’s done anything wrong by going out and buying a Chinese consumer drone. But economically, that is essentially supporting a Chinese defense contractor, and it’s helping it build up its technology and economic might, and that really matters in aggregate. Again, you can debate what the right answer to that is, but you can’t deny that it is not in our national interest to support Chinese drone companies.

We have a big consumer audience. They have a lot of feelings about the differnt ways to support defense contractors. Skydio is a defense contractor now. Even your website directly speaks to military applications. You stopped making consumer drones in 2023. I think your first enterprise drone was 2020. 

I’ve always been curious, was it because the cost of building the product in the United States was so high that you couldn’t compete at a consumer level, and it was easier — or in some ways, more lucrative — to go after enterprise and government contracts?

This was probably one of the most consequential, difficult decisions that we made as a company. It was hard largely because I personally thought the consumer product was awesome, and I loved the things that our customers were out there doing with them. It was really driven by the fact that we were still a very small company, and there’s always this trade off between focus and serving different customers in different ways. I didn’t feel like we could be great at both. I didn’t think that we could be great at continuing to build the best consumer products for the kinds of things that we were doing while figuring out how to serve enterprise and government customers. 

It was a combination of factors. Honestly, the biggest one was the impact opportunity that we saw with enterprise and government customers. When we started in 2014, these markets didn’t exist. The enterprise stuff was always part of our long-term vision, but nobody was really doing anything with these things in 2014. So in the beginning, the idea was that we’d build these consumer products. The consumer market’s probably going to develop first and fastest, and then the technology platform we have will enable us to do other things.

I think at the time we were thinking we could do it all. In practice, it felt to me like we had to choose when we got there. But it’s really life-saving, efficiency-driving work for our civilization and the customers that we serve. Yes, it seemed like there was a good business opportunity there, but at the time, the markets were basically at zero. So, it wasn’t obvious. I and a lot of us at the company were drawn to the impact potential and a belief that there was a great business to be built.

The X10 that I flew earlier on your laptop, how much does that cost?

It depends on the configuration and whether it’s in a dock or not. As a standalone system without any of the associated cloud software and the advanced sensor package, it’s probably something like $15,000. But it’s substantially more with a dock and everything associated with that.

I have a line here that says it’s $25,000 per year per drone if you do have the cloud software and then the operating cost.

There are certainly some configurations that are like that. There are a lot of different options out there depending on what you want to do with it and what hardware and software you’re getting.

We’ve talked to a lot of drone professionals, firefighters, and volunteer fire departments, and their fear is that there are no cheap consumer drones to do the jobs that they were doing. I’ll just read you the quote here. “First responders are using consumer drones for the most part. A lot of fire departments in search and rescue, they’re volunteers with small budgets. They can’t spend $50,000 on the Skydio program. They’re going to get gifted a handful of cheap DJI drones, and that’s good enough to save people’s lives.”

If I was being as rude and direct as possible, I would say the United States government —  doesn’t matter which president — has handed you a gift. They’ve taken away your cheap, disruptive competition that was a good enough substitute for consumer products and now, you have the opportunity to sell $50,000 Skydio programs to first responders who have no other options. Can you get cheaper? Can you deal with that?

I think there are two pieces of this. One is, yes, we definitely can. The R10, our indoor drone, costs $6,000 for the hardware, and that includes the controller and the drone. There’s incredible capability there that I don’t think you can get at any other price point. People build other flavors of indoor drones that cost tens of thousands of dollars that are outpaced by the R10. The more we scale up, the lower the costs we can reach with our products. But I believe the highest impact in most scenarios — and I think that the data is bearing this out now — is coming from more advanced, dock-based, remotely operated autonomous drones. You can see this in the data. We have hand-flown fleets, we have dock-based fleets. The dock-based drones fly five to 10 times as fast, much in the same way that a cloud server is fully loaded even though a desktop computer might sit at home unused. Once  the thing is available to be driven through software, there’s much more you can do with it.

We’ve competed head-to-head against DJI in the dock-based world for the last year and have won head-to-head on that capability. There are a lot of agencies out there that were skeptical of Skydio and liked flying their Chinese drones. They were doing these 911 responses with drones and were open-minded enough to trial our system, and they will tell you that it’s better. The autonomy and the integration just enables them to do more, better, faster. Ultimately, I think reaching that massive scale is going to be our highest impact path. 

For example, the F10 product, which is our fixed wing drone, will have something like a 50-mile coverage radius from its docking station. When you think about sparsely populated areas where there might be just a volunteer fire department, being able to click a button on a map and have an F10 show up 10 minutes later, 30 miles out from its docking station is a lifesaving capability. Not to say that great stuff hasn’t been done with consumer drones in the hand of volunteer firefighters, but when I think about the best possible solution here, I think it’s a badass, dock-based F10 that’s zipping around at 100 miles an hour and can cover thousands of square miles.

I agree. I think I’m just focused on the cost, right? They were buying $800 consumer drones, not—

So on the cost, I think the cost permission for that F10 will be way lower if you do a fully balanced analysis of what it takes for the person to go out there and fly it and how much training is involved versus clicking a button on a map and having a dock-based F10 show up. Not everybody’s going to like that answer, but I think it’s fundamentally true in most scenarios.

I’m excited for you to go to something like the city council meeting in my hometown of Racine, Wisconsin, and pitch cost permission because the upfront cost is very high. This is what I’m getting at. There was a low-end competitor and it’s just been eliminated. We’ve gone looking around for other US consumer drone companies, and there don’t appear to be any. Maybe a better comparison here is the car industry. Ford CEO Jim Farley, who’s been on the show, loves to talk about how much better the BYD cars are. He’s always like, “Man, these are here.”

It’s kind of his shtick.

Yeah, it’s good. He’s gotten very good at it. It’s great practice. And the United States government is straightforwardly protecting our auto industry from that competition. The car influencers are like, “Man, these cars are better than our cars.” Do you worry that you’re being insulated from that competition?

I think that the only long-term stable solution is building the best drones here in the US. Honestly, I don’t really care  whether Chinese drones are allowed in the market from a product development standpoint. We serve the US military. We know for certain that our adversaries are going to be using Chinese drones in a conflict. If we want our troops to have the best capabilities, the stuff coming out of China is the relevant competition. That’s the standard that we hold ourselves to from a hardware standpoint, whether or not they’re in the market or not. 

I can say with pretty high confidence that in this new world, the world of drones as infrastructure where AI and autonomy are central, integrating these things together into end-to-end solutions is the winning recipe that’s most valuable for customers. I think… not think, I know we have the best solutions in that space, and you can talk to customers who have used both and will tell you that. In that world, we have the upper hand. In the hand flown world where the drones are more manual and there’s more pressure on price, China has the upper hand. Fortunately for us as a company and a country, I think we’re headed more towards the autonomous remote world. I still think that whether or not they’re allowed in the market, that’s the competitive bar that we want to hold ourselves to.

Obviously, the United States is just one market. The European market is huge, and who knows what will happen with NATO. There’s a lot of pressure on the kind of contracts you want to fulfill. As you go into different markets around the world and compete with DJI, are they winning on price like you’re saying? Are you winning on features? What’s the balance?

It’s going to be a slightly different story in different markets for different customers who care about different things. Most of our business is still here in the US, but we operate in Canada now. We operate in Japan. We have and will continue to successfully compete head-to-head on the strength of the integrated automated solutions we can deliver. And as we get bigger, we’re getting better and better at manufacturing more hardware at lower cost, which will enable us to serve more and more markets.

Are you going to keep all the manufacturing here in the United States?

That’s the plan, yeah. We’re doubling down. We announced we’re spending $3.5 billion over the next five years in the US on our own manufacturing with domestic suppliers on our internal operations. We’re getting a new giant factory. We’re all in. I think that we’re already one of the leading examples of real US manufacturing working at substantial scale, but there are many more gears we can find.

Real US manufacturing working at substantial scale. You have 1,000 employees. How much of your manufacturing is automated? As you invest in manufacturing, how many people are you going to hire versus how much automation are you going to bring to bear?

Automation is definitely a key part of the story. R10, the product that we just launched, is the most automated product we’ve made from a manufacturing standpoint. We actually overinvested in automation there because we wanted to develop and trial a lot of new techniques. So, automation will be a key piece of it, but there’s always going to be a lot of jobs involved in running a factory, operating the company, and delivering and installing this stuff for customers.

I’m just thinking about the famous Tim Cook saying something like “I couldn’t fill this ballroom with manufacturing, engineering management, and in China I could fill like multiple football fields.” Do we have the talent base for you to do what you’re saying you want to do?

Well, I think that these things take time. I don’t think you’re going to create the talent base and the ecosystem that exists in China overnight, but it’s not zero. Look, Tesla gets a lot of the credit here. It has built and operated factories at large scale. In the area, we have a large number of Tesla alumni that work at Skydio. There are actually a lot more than people realize. A lot of higher end enterprise servers and things of that nature are built in the Bay Area. So, the talent base is larger than I think most people realize, and there’s a lot of momentum behind it now. 

It’s easy to look at the world today and say like, “Yes, China has a richer ecosystem. It has more happening there.” But I don’t think that it has to be that way. As a company, we’ve actually got a great foundation. These things ultimately are demand driven. If there’s a need to build more and more drones, that creates the conditions for more people to get into it and get great at it. We’re seeing that happen right in front of our eyes.

I want to end by talking about AI and autonomy here. The need for a government and defense contractor to build more and more drones, which we’re seeing happen in front of our eyes, is going to cause a lot of our audience to have a lot of very specific feelings about what these drones are for, who’s making the decisions, and whether they have any say in the matter. The demo I saw with you was very cool. There’s an emergency somewhere, the drone takes off from the dock, it flies to it, and helps the first responders do whatever they’re going to do. The flip side of that is there are a lot of surveillance ideas baked into that.

As you add more and more autonomy to the drones, boy, there are a lot of ideas baked into that about who’s making which decisions, especially if the drones have any lethal capabilities. What’s your perspective there? How do you draw the lines?

There are two things you kind of alluded to, and we could talk about either of them. There’s the military use of the products, where we are in a technology race against China. I very strongly believe we want our troops to have world leading capability. I think the world is better off. I certainly think the US is better off. If that’s the case, our military is ultimately accountable to democratically elected folks who are calling the shots. They’re controversial. Obviously, not everybody agrees, but there is a democratic process in place.

The other side of it is with public safety and law enforcement where the products have incredible impact. I actually think if you care about transparency and accountability in policing, it’s hard to imagine a better tool than a drone. It’s like a flying body camera. It provides objective, documentary video evidence of everything that’s happened, and it’s extremely narrow and precise. It’s not blanketing a city in cameras that are passively collecting. It’s responding where you know there’s an emergency and providing very narrow intelligence just in that scenario to drive better outcomes.

So, I think there are definitely legitimate concerns and questions about this stuff. But one of the things that I’ve learned and have actually been very positively surprised by is the level of direct accountability that exists within state and local law enforcement today. All the contracts we have with police customers have to be approved by the city council, and that incentivizes the police agency and us as a company to do everything we can to make it an obvious win for the community. We have a feature we call the Transparency Dashboard that makes it easy for agencies to publish the flying they’re doing so they can create a public record of all the flights that they’ve done, where the drone went, what it was responding to, what its trajectory was along the way, and what the camera looked at. We don’t publish the video, but you can see the camera footprint on the ground. So, any citizen can go and look at it and see what their agency is doing. 

This is an example where technology is just a straight win. In the trade-off between better policing with better outcomes and protecting civil liberties and transparency, I think drones are an example of technology fundamentally moving that curve up for the better so that you can get better outcomes while still protecting privacy and transparency. 

Yeah.

I think the trajectory the space is on proves that. I was concerned five years ago that public pushback was going to be one of the big barriers to adoption, even though we knew the impact was strong, and we just haven’t seen that. We’ve seen communities oftentimes asking for their local police department to use it. The stories speak for themselves. There are videos of finding missing people or deescalating a dangerous situation where it’s obvious that you would have had a different outcome without a drone. I think when people see that, they tend to get it. 

I’d say the good news for people who have questions or concerns here, is that there are democratic processes in place. If Skydio is being considered in your city, you can go to the city council meeting, you can see what the debate looks like, and you can speak up, and I think that’s healthy. Every community ultimately gets to decide for themselves.

I understand why you want to pull apart military and policing applications, and I won’t linger on it too long. I think for a lot of people in US, their police forces look ever more militarized or the president has deployed the military into their city. The idea that there will be pervasive surveillance backed up by something that feels militaristic is definitely more real today than it was 10 years ago. People don’t like the idea that there will be pervasive surveillance or preemptive policing enabled by cameras, sensors, or what have you, and they don’t feel agency, right?

So, saying you can go to the city council and get rid of Skydio when there’s muddy interests pushing Skydio forward… I think there was a controversy with Skydio in Las Vegas, right? How do you feel about that? Do you feel like people actually have enough agency, or is this just a way for you to say, “Look, your city’s going to buy it, we’re just the vendor?”

Look, part of living in a democracy is that not everybody’s going to agree, but I’ll give you a non-Skydio example. So, there’s a company may be familiar with, Flock Safety, that makes automatic license plate reader cameras as its core business, which is a completely different kind of technology. It’s basically passive collection on all the time. The value of it is creating a database of every car and where it’s been. The business model incentivizes the sharing of that data as broadly as possible.

Then on top of that, the company doesn’t have a great history of what it says publicly lining up with what’s actually happening with that data, and there’s a huge amount of pushback against it. I think some of it may be misguided. I think the company’s mishandled some of it. Some of it has to do with concerns about the core technology. But because of that pushback, the contracts are debated at city council, and in a lot of places, it’s being ripped out or replaced with something else. 

Again, I don’t know what the right answer is. It’s probably different for different communities, but it’s an example of the process in action where communities get to decide. There are inevitably going to be concerns. My personal view is that even the harshest critics are valuable because it’s part of our accountability mechanism. We get to see what people are concerned about and what don’t they like. Even if it ends up getting deployed in a community, it’s valuable to see what the concerns are and to be asked tough questions because it changes how we think about product development in some cases and what can we do to address it.

What changes have you made specifically as you’ve thought about Flock?

Well, this is not in response to Flock. The Transparency Dashboard was largely driven internally. It seemed like a good thing to do, but a lot of the specific features have been iterated on and improved based on raised concerns. I’ll anonymize it a bit, but there was a case where a woman was afraid that a police agency flying one of our drones might have been looking at her on her private property. They weren’t. So, we enhanced the Transparency Dashboard to show the camera footprint on the ground so she could go and see for sure that they weren’t.

How do you validate that? If you’re a citizen, you’re like, “Man, I see that drone flying. They’re big. They’re noisy.” I’ve seen a lot of TikTok clips of people noticing the boxes getting installed on roofs, and the conspiracy theories flourish, right? You can say there’s a dashboard and you can look at the dashboard provided by the company, but you have to validate. You need some external, perceived, independent validator of that. How does that work? Is there a feedback loop there?

This is the thing with social media. What is the ground truth? How do we decide what misinformation is? Who gets to decide? There’s no perfect answer to these questions. The thing that I would say is there are generally very good accountability and feedback loops almost uniquely with state and local law enforcement. Socounty sheriffs are directly elected. Police chiefs are usually appointed by an elected mayor. When something goes wrong or if there’s a concern about technology they’re using, they’re on the nightly news explaining it. And they usually don’t want to be there. It’s part of their job, but — 

Some of them really want to be there.

Some of them may want to be there more than others, but look, I think that the feedback loops there are actually pretty active and healthy. Again, not everybody’s going to like the outcome. There’s going to be some percentage of the population that doesn’t like the idea of having police at all or aving police with advanced technology. 

But I always think it’s helpful to think, “Well, what do you want to have happen?” Let’s say that somebody’s trying to break into your house or a loved one goes missing. What do you want to have happen? Do you want a drone to show up in 30 seconds so that the officers know exactly what they’re heading into? If you have a loved one lost in the woods, do you want to be able to quickly surveil that area with a bunch of autonomous drones to increase the chances of them being found? I think that the concerns around privacy and transparency are totally valid, but you also have to weigh that against the alternatives. Drones, in particular, uniquely optimize this, where you’ll get maximum benefit in terms of better outcomes with minimum trade-off in terms of mass blanket, always-on surveillance.

Let me make a comparison for you. Jamie Siminoff runs Ring. He’s been on the show several times. His thesis is that if you put up enough Ring cameras in certain neighborhoods, you can “zero out crime“. He and I have debated this at length, where Ring can actually zero out crime. Does that feel doable to you or is that the wrong trade-off? Like, actually, if you put enough Skydio boxes on enough roofs, you can zero out crime.

Look, I think the Ring cameras are great. I have one myself. I’m not an expert in all things Ring. Let me take a different spin on it—

It’s an example of what you’re talking about. There’s a trade-off here. You put up enough fixed cameras—

Let me give you a more concrete [example] that I think gets at what you’re talking about in our space. There’s something like 300 million 911 calls per year in the US, one per citizen per year on average. Do I think the world is better off if there is an autonomous drone that shows up in 15 or 20 seconds to every one of those by default? Yeah, I do. I think that we’ll save a lot of people’s lives. Cities will just operate more efficiently. I think we can do that with maximum protection of privacy and civil liberties because it’s targeted, narrow, and it creates a digital record. Because of that, it’s less subject to abuse. 

Does that end crime? Probably not, but I think it takes a really big bite out of it,and a lot of people are going to be safer and happier because of it. It’s a huge motivator for what we’re doing at Skydio. I do want to emphasize that it’s fair and right that public safety and the military get a lot of attention, but this is not all that we do. A lot of our drones are just off inspecting the energy grid, making sure that the power stays on or gets back on faster, or keeping roads open for departments of transportation, which is boring and out of sight for most people. I think that stuff will ultimately end up being the biggest segment in the business. But yeah, this is an example of technology just fundamentally moving things forward for the better.

Sadly, I have to keep asking about military applications. I do want to talk about power line inspection, and we’ll do a full hour on that one of these days. The other complicated moral question that you’ve alluded to is how the military uses this technology. There is brewing controversy with Anthropic drawing some red lines about how Claude might be used in military applications, whether or not it’s even capable of doing things the military might want it to do. Mass surveillance has certainly come up in the Claude discussion. Do you have red lines, where you’ve told the military that you won’t allow your technology to be used for certain things?

This is an area where I’ve gotten some things wrong. We said some things previously that led folks externally and internally to believe that, for example, we would prevent the military from putting weapons on our drones. Now, we’re generally focused on building flying sensor platforms. We’re what the military calls, “dual-use technology”. It turns out that the requirements from a sensor, flight time, and reliability standpoint for inspecting the energy grid are actually pretty similar to what makes something useful to a soldier on the battlefield for what they call ISR intelligence (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance). 

I have a pretty strong opinion that the people who are putting their lives on the line and who are ultimately accountable to democratically elected leaders are in the best position to make these life-and-death decisions about what tools to use and how to use them. It’s very easy to sit back in a Silicon Valley office and think that we’re very smart, that we know the technology, and the idea of using it for X, Y, or Z thing seems evil or bad, so we’re going to write a policy or ban people from doing it. I think that’s ultimately misguided. It’s actually dangerously misguided. It’s not giving democratic processes enough credit. It’s not giving the service women in our military enough credit. The military has a whole policy wing of brilliant people that sit around thinking about this stuff. They’re not going to get it exactly right, but they care a lot about it.

At the end of the day, you’re typically talking about a young person in a trench somewhere whose life is on the line. It’s not our place to tell them what they can and can’t do. We’re focused on making our products great at certain things, and we’re less focused on other things. Out voice matters in the conversation, but it should ultimately be up to the folks whose job it is, who are putting their lives on the line to decide how to use it.

Do you think this is different because you make hardware?

From like Anthropic, for example?

Yeah.

No. The practical implication or the instantiation details might be different, but we faced this question when the Army started running experiments where it would put grenade droppers on our drones. There were people who felt like we should shut that down. There were questions internally. I think that’s a pretty visceral example of the military’s experimenting with turning this thing into a lethal device, but I just don’t think it’s our place to decide. And I think a lot—

There’s decide, but then there’s building the capability, right?

Maybe in the case of Anthropic, no one knows what the models can do and you can just ask it for anything. You’re like, “Make me a bomb,” and maybe it’ll do it. Maybe Anthropic has some real feelings about whether or not that’s a good idea, and it restricts it. For you, the military hands you a purchase order and says, “Put a grenade dropper on it.” You can or cannot do that. You can literally say, “We will not allow our sensor platform to target people, identify them, and then fire the gun.”

I think one of the problems here is you end up with really strong adverse selection. If you make a policy that says, “You’re not allowed to do X, Y, Z thing with our products,” the chances are pretty high that the US military is going to follow it, right? They have lawyers, they look at this stuff, and they will probably follow the terms of service. Ultimately, that may mean they don’t buy the product. Our adversaries or terrorists are not going to follow the terms of service, right? They don’t care. They don’t care what our policy says. They’re happy to buy the thing or hack it, and they don’t care what Anthropic’s policy says. So, if you try to draw these lines to establish purity where, “We think X, Y, Z thing is bad, you shouldn’t do it with our product. We’re going to try to create legal terms or things in the product that prevent you from doing it.” 

Ultimately, I think you just end up on the wrong side because the “good guys” will will generally follow what the policy says, although maybe not uniformly. Bad actors are not going to care. They don’t care at all what the policy says. It’s not to say that you can’t have an opinion, you can’t talk about it, or you can’t debate it. But when you start trying to draw these bright lines and say, “This is good, this is bad,” you more often than not will just end up on the wrong side of moral questions.

Can I bring this back all the way to the beginning? You started by talking about talent, recruiting talent, getting the best people, and how that is better than the right structure, which is some real Decoder bit. I have to be honest with you, that’s the whole thesis of this show. 

As you’re out in the world recruiting, people have a lot of feelings about working for defense contractors, about working for the military, about helping to kill people. Right now, Google is beset by internal controversy about working with the government. They’re going to do it anyway, because Google has enough people that maybe some attrition is fine. You only have 1,000 people, and you have to recruit some more. How does your talent base feel about this, and how has it affected your recruiting?

Look, I think debate about this is healthy. Questions about it are healthy. Different companies have different postures. There’ are some companies where you have to get on board or get the hell out. It’s generally healthy to have a diversity of perspectives on this stuff. I think this is actually one area where we have quite a bit of diversity, and diversity is awesome and really helpful. 

One of the dynamics that I’ve seen — and you can see this most clearly in public safety —  is when we started working with military and police in the summer of 2020, which was not a super popular time for law enforcement in the US. There were a lot of negative headlines about it. There were a lot of people internally who had some concerns. As our products have grown in that space and people have seen the impact that they’ve had, almost everybody, including folks internally who were initially very concerned, have come to the belief that it’s really incredibly impactful, positive work to be a part of.

So, I’m happy to have this conversation with anyone. I’ll have it with a candidate who I’m talking to. I’m having it with you right now for the world to see. People get to make up their own minds on it, but if you really care about developing cutting-edge tech that will have a positive impact on the world —  defined as helping people do their jobs better, helping our critical industries run safer and more efficiently, and saving lives — I think Skydio is hard to beat.

You’re part of a cohort of companies. I think Andreessen Horowitz led your last round. It’s led almost all of your rounds, I think.

No, it led our seed in Series A and then they doubled down in the Series D. So, it’s been a great partner and great investor, but we’ve got a lot of great investors.

I’m asking about Andreessen particularly because there’s its American Dynamism Project. It does a lot of government lobbying. There are reports today that it’s going to do even more lobbying in this cycle. Palantir exists. Anduril exists. There is a new cohort of defense companies that are thinking very differently about what it means to defend America as some of these contractors. Do you perceive yourself to be part of that group? Do you have a different culture? How does that work?

We’re our own thing. I would say each of those companies has their own thing. A lot of the folks from Anduril came from Palantir, but they have a different identity and a different culture than Palantir does. I don’t really think of us as being part of any particular group or cohort. I think about us trying to be the best in the world at what we do from a technical standpoint and trying to deliver outcomes that really matter for our customers. 

Actually, everything in the defense business is growing right now. Defense is growing very quickly for us. It’s actually a shrinking percentage of our overall business because other things are growing that much faster. So, I’m super proud to work with the US military, and I think it’s generally good that more tech companies are doing so, but  I would say that our identity is less defined by being a defense contractor or being super defense focused compared to the other companies you’re talking about, 

I actually think some of the biggest value we can provide to our defense customers, especially in our space, is by being incredibly successful in civilian markets so that when they go head-to-head against adversaries using Chinese consumer drones, we’ve got the best thing to match that.

We’re out of time. Thank you for being so open. I have a million more questions for you, but I’m just going to ask here at the end, can you build us a cheap consumer drone again, please?

This is probably the hardest question to end on because I would love to do it. I think we could do it, but we’re still so early in these markets with massive potential, and there’s still so much left to build. I can’t justify taking our focus off of that. So, I really hope somebody else does. Maybe we can partner with them in some way, maybe we can provide some technology. I certainly think there’s a need there. I hope that we will get great, American consumer drones. I think it’s unlikely that it’ll be us that’s manufacturing them.

Sounds good. We’ll have you back to do a full hour on power line monitoring soon. Thank you so much.

All right. Thank you. This was great.

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You don't really ever have to explain why a universal remote is a good idea. You have a bunch of stuff that needs controlling; this thing controls them all. Many companies have set out to build a product worthy of this idea, and one product came much closer than most. It was called the Harmony, and for many years it was the best universal remote on the market. Maybe the only one that mattered. And still, even the Harmony couldn't make it work.

On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the Harmony. The Verge's David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and John Higgins are joined by Matt Rogers, the CEO of Mill and former cofounder of Nest, t …

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You'd be forgiven for thinking this day would never come. Siri has spent a decade and half somewhere between "sort of useful at a few things" and "utterly disastrous, why did I even try, can it honestly not even set a timer." But the wildest thing just happened: Apple put out a new version of Siri, and it actually seems to be pretty good.

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay talk about their early experiences with Siri AI, and what it means for users, and the rest of the AI industry, for the iPhone's built-in assistant to be good enough at most things. There's very little about Siri AI that feels bleeding edge or brand new, but …

Read the full story at The Verge.

From Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, explore the world of human spaceflight with NASA each week on the official podcast of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Listen to in-depth conversations with the astronauts, scientists and engineers who make it possible.

On episode 426, the Artemis III astronauts discuss their backgrounds and training ahead of them to prepare for one of the most complex human spaceflight missions in history. This episode was recorded in June 4, 2026.

Transcript

Nilufar Ramji 

Houston We Have a Podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, episode 426: Meet Artemis III. I’m Nilufar Ramji, and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts: scientists, engineers, and astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human space flight and more.

On the heels of NASA’s historic Artemis II mission, the agency is preparing to return Americans to the lunar surface and build the capabilities needed to stay there. While NASA continues to advance the systems needed to support a sustained human presence beyond Earth, we here at NASA Johnson are supporting the astronauts and mission teams who are training for the future of space flight.

The Artemis III mission will demonstrate the capabilities of lunar spacecraft in low Earth orbit. A crew of four astronauts will launch in the Orion spacecraft on top of the Space Launch System rocket to test rendezvous and docking capabilities between Orion and commercial human landing systems.

In this episode, we meet the crew of Artemis III, four explorers who will test the spacecraft, demonstrate capabilities, and eventually train crews who will go on to perform these maneuvers at the Moon.

Let’s go, for all humanity.

 

Nilufar Ramji

First up, we’ll be talking to the Commander of the mission and the Pilot.

The Commander of Artemis III is Randy “Komrade” Bresnik, a Marine Corps test pilot turned NASA astronaut. He’s logged 149 days in space across two missions, flown in both the space shuttle and Russian Soyuz, done five spacewalks totaling over 32 hours, and commanded the International Space Station on Expedition 53. With over 7000 flight hours in nearly 100 aircraft, including combat missions, as an F/A-18 pilot, he blends raw experience with exceptional leadership. A Citadel Military College math grad and University of Tennessee Aviation Systems masters, he’s now shaping Artemis missions at NASA. Before being selected as commander, he was serving as Assistant to the Chief of the Astronaut Office.

Next our Pilot, European Space Agency’s Luca Parmitano, an Italian Air Force test pilot who has spent 367 days in space over two long duration space station missions. He’s flown twice on the Russian Soyuz, conducted six spacewalks totaling 33 hours, and made history as the first Italian and third European to command at the International Space Station during Expedition 61. With over 2000 flight hours across more than 40 aircraft, he blends technical skill with leadership. A political science grad from the University of Naples, he also holds a master’s in experimental flight test engineering.

Let’s meet your Artemis III Commander and Pilot.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

Well, first off, congratulations on your assignments. This is incredibly exciting, but you have lots of work and training ahead. So, tell us a little bit, how you were told you were assigned to the mission, and what was it like when you found out?

 

Randy Bresnik

I had the fortunate opportunity this flight to have the chief of the astronaut office call a meeting where all the crew members were present, and that was really special for me, because my previous flights, it was me and the chief, and that was it, and my crew wasn’t, you know, who I was gonna be flying with was not there, and so that was just afterwards. I sat and was just really thankful for that, for everybody to find out about each other at the same time.

 

Luca Parmitano

So for me was slightly different, because I believe that my boss couldn’t quite, the way we say Italian, hold the nut in his mouth.

 

Nilufar Ramji

He had no poker face.

 

Luca Parmitano

And so he called me, and I was on a train, so a public space, and at the time I was responsible for the crew on orbit on the on the International Space Station with Expedition on 74 the role, so-called the increment lead, so when I saw the call, I immediately thought that it was going to be something concerning the crew on orbit. And so I answered the phone, and the boss told me, “Hey, Luca, I want you to know that we want you to be the pilot on the Artemis III mission.” And I was very much unprepared for that answer, and so it went through one ear, it didn’t register in my brain, came out the other ear, and I literally said, “Can you say that again?” and it told me the same words, and then it did register, but I was in a public environment, so I knew that I couldn’t say anything out loud, so I was literally speechless, which doesn’t happen very often, and then I was very, very honored when I, when I met the crew for the first time a couple of days later.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

So you all knew each other, but in this configuration as the Artemis III crew you had met, and how are you feeling right now?

 

Luca Parmitano

Well, Komrade has known me since I’ve been an astronaut, because I came into the core in 2010 So he has known me for my entire professional life as an astronaut. And for me, I can only hope to learn as much as I can from, from the crew, from the team, from my commander.

 

Randy Bresnik

And certainly you know we started off and have very little time together so far, but the majority of the time we’ve been together we’ve been laughing, and so that is a very good sign to me that you know with the stresses of the limited time or the you know complexity or the weight of the mission that being able to have that levity and comfort with each other will make the mission go very smooth.

 

Nilufar Ramji

That’s phenomenal. And I want to switch gears here and talk a little bit about before NASA. So you came to the agency, both of you came into space flight, came in as astronauts with several hundred, if not thousands of flight hours under your belt. So do you recall a moment in your early years, maybe when you were growing up, or as you were going through your education, where that interest in flight was sparked?

 

Randy Bresnik

Well, I certainly was always interested in flight, because our house was under the traffic pattern of the Santa Monica airport, where I grew up, and I looked at the window and just watched planes go around and listen to them. It’s just, it’s just fascinating to me. And so my father was a pilot, but it wasn’t, you know, because of what he did, it was just, it was innately fascinating to me. So I was super fortunate to be able to get a scholarship from the Marine Corps to be attend college, and that then took me to flight school, where you get the opportunity to fly a trainer aircraft, and then they decide what you go to fly, you know, whether it’s jets or helicopters, and so certainly a lot of people have your druthers, but it’s always the needs of the service. So I happened to be at the fortunate time where I did well enough in flight school, where I got selected to fly jets, and then when I finished up my jet training, I was fortunate enough to be able to get selected to be able to fly F-18s. And so you know doing that and being able to master that airplane, become a training officer, attend, you know, Top Gun in our weapons schools was awesome, because you’re the pinnacle of that tactical aviation, and then what next? And so you know, was able to apply for test pilot school, and go to test pilot school, and be able to do that cutting-edge development of stuff that hasn’t been done before, and that to me was just fascinating. Be able to bridge engineering and operations, knowing that I was bringing something to the fleet operators of that aircraft that was going to make things better, more survivable, you know, and be able to employ the weapon system better. And so, you know, doing that, the next, you know, thing that you know is an option is, you know, wow, can I really, you know, do that, have an opportunity to do that thing, and go to space? And in 2000 Doug Hurley got selected as an astronaut, and I’d known him well from our fleet days, and while we were at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station as Marine test pilots, and at that point it was like “if they like Chunky, maybe I’ve got a shot too,” you know. So and then the rest is history. The old school way to become at NASA is a test pilot.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

Right. What about you, Luca?

 

Luca Parmitano

Incredibly enough, my story is actually also connected to California in one way. I will get there in a second. I was, I was, and to the Marines, so this is serendipitous, but I was always interested in flight and space flight, as a kid. I watched airplanes, and I was curious about how they flew helicopters. Anything that flew really captured my attention, but like many things, it disappeared in my teenager years, where I thought about being a rock star, a professional athlete. There were so many things that I wanted to do. I had hair at the time, so being a rock star was an option nowadays, not so much. But in 1993 I got a scholarship to be an exchange student in the US, and I came to the US to California in Orange County, where my host starter was the schedule commander for a Marine squadron of F-18s.

 

Randy Bresnik 

Which one?

 

Luca Parmitano 

I don’t remember the number of the squadron, but it was El Toro.

 

Randy Bresnik

1993 I was flying F-18s out of El Toro.

 

Nilufar Ramji

What?! We’re finding this out right now.

 

Luca Parmitano

Serendipity is magic. So he reintroduced me to the idea of flying and a military flight, specifically. At the time, you know, as a teenager, I was like every teenager looking at myself and what my future was going to be, and I just felt enamored with the world of military aviation. So, I went back to Italy at the end of the year. I finished high school, and I applied for the Italian Air Force, which is a selection process.

I went in as a pilot, I started flying, and there is a second moment where Lieutenant Colonel Maurizio Cheli, an Italian astronaut, came to talk to us about this space flight on STS-100 and that was the moment when I thought that’s who I want to be. I was looking at the stage at this super humble pilot and astronaut, and I thought there is a path, and, and I just want to know what that is. And I learned that you had to be a fighter pilot, a test pilot, so I put every effort I could into becoming a fighter pilot. And after seven years as a fighter pilot, I went into, into that, I was selected to become a test pilot. I went to a test pilot school, and there, there was a call for astronauts from the European Space Agency. At the time, I was the youngest astronaut, the youngest test pilot in my squadron, and so I thought that that would be fantastic to apply, but probably not, not my chance, because all these other colleagues are more experienced, they’re older, the more experienced they have, more capabilities. So I probably should wait for the next time. And that was my, that was my idea that I was going to have another chance when I had more capabilities and more experience. Except that one morning my schedule commander asked me if, if I had applied for the selection, because he knew that I wanted to be an astronaut, that I was dreaming about that. And I told him, I don’t think that’s, I don’t think that’s my chance, I don’t think it’s the right time, I’m too young, I’m too inexperienced, and he told me, Well, if you don’t apply, you have 100% chance of not being selected.

 

Nilufar Ramji

Exactly.

 

Luca Parmitano

Yeah, and at least you have the experience, you’ll see what it’s about. So I felt authorized to do it. And so that night I brought my, my letter of intention. I applied for the selection, and a year later I was being called to Paris to be introduced as a, as a young astronaut.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

What a story. And now you are standing here on the heels of Artemis III. You talk about Randy, you had mentioned, you know, test pilots is the old school way to get in to be an astronaut. So let’s just to contextualize for our audience, you used to manually pilot the space shuttle. Now we have vehicles that are more autonomous. We’re going to Artemis III. It’s going to be manual piloting, because we have to demonstrate the docking capabilities of these human landing systems. So, it’s actually very serendipitous that we have test pilots that are going to be supporting Artemis III. You’ve flown your respective missions to the International Space Station, and those those skills will apply to your upcoming assignment. So, what are you most looking forward to with Artemis III?

 

Luca Parmitano

Honestly. I’m looking forward to whatever contribution I can give as a test pilot, as an experienced astronaut with a year of space time on the International Space Station, six space walks. That’s one part of it. The other part is that I’m really looking forward to learn and improve my capabilities, improve my experience and just get better at what I do, and hopefully keep giving my contribution to this incredible program.

 

Randy Bresnik

And so I’ve been in this Assistant to Chief Astronaut job for Exploration for almost eight years now, and so I’ve been working everything Exploration from Artemis I and its first flight to Artemis II and getting the crew on board and now being taking this role for Artemis III, just awesome to see how we are making those incremental steps and testing out our flight envelope and determining the system’s capabilities and testing as much as we can, so that when we have our next mission after this one, it has as much risk bought down and as much stuff proven for its capability that we can, and so I look forward to most is whatever we are able to put into this mission, getting it tested out and, and, and proven, flight proven operations figured out timelines, all that type of stuff, so that we can then go on to Artemis IV, which would hopefully be our moon landing with confidence, because of all the stuff we were able to prove out on our flight.

 

Nilufar Ramji

Yeah, and so many things that you can learn and train future crew for as well. So, lots of documentation and lots of heavily choreographed and dynamic events.

 

Randy Bresnik

And certainly you know the amount of training, Artemis II crew had three years to train. They were doing the, they were the first one, so we were figuring out training along the way, they came back and said, hey, we can, you know, make this training more efficient, and so there’s a massive reduction in the amount of hours, because they said we, if we train this way on these particular subjects, we’re gonna be able to train the crew to much less time. Which is exactly what we need, because our mission right now is on the books for in a year from now.

 

Nilufar Ramji

Yeah, so increasing efficiencies, but also this is exactly what test missions, test flights do for us, right? So, between the spacewalks both of y’all have conducted and the support that you’ve done from the ground, you are seasoned astronauts, and your upcoming assignments, as I mentioned, will involve a series of highly choreographed and dynamic events. So, how do you both prepare mentally and physically?

 

Randy Bresnik

Well, we are fortunate to have some flight test experience with crew in Orion, so that is massive for that foundation. We’ll be able to get those basics here pretty quick. It’s just in applying how that vehicle, you know, and the experience we gained on Artemis II with the prox operations demo, and that close flying we had with the ICPS, doing that to actual landers, you know, doing that to a Blue lander and a SpaceX Starship during that proximity, doing actual, you know, rendezvous and docking, being able to undock, fly around, that is going to be amazing. For instead of a, a spent second stage, like the ICPS was on the with Artemis II, they see actual lander spacecraft in that view and test these things out here in Earth orbit, so that we can make sure that when we get to lunar orbit, it’s not the first time we’re doing it.

 

Luca Parmitano

I’m sorry, I was salivating while you were talking. The fascination that I have for test flying comes from being able to go into an environment where we have an idea what’s going to happen, but then you have to be part of making it happen. And specifically for a mission like this one, it really is creating a stepping stone for the future. And it is such an honor to be able to make it better for the next guy, for the next mission to be able to contribute to any to a program so vast, but being at the early stages and doing something for the first time, it’s I would say that is the true nature of test flying, and so as a test pilot, I could not be more excited at the prospect of being part of it.

 

Nilufar Ramji

Now, let’s go into the preparation. Let’s talk about game day. What do you do on your game day? Do you have any rituals or routines that help your mindset to do something that’s literally out of this world? Is there, is there a song you listen to? Do you hug your kids a certain way? What do you do?

 

Luca Parmitano

So, since I’ve been a pilot, I have a, not a routine, but there are simple gestures that for me represent the beginning of the mission. If you’re a pilot, the mission is flying an airplane. For me, the moment in which I separated the rest of the world from what was going to happen was locking a canopy. When I locked the canopy on my aircraft, this is 25 years ago now, but it would lock everything else outside, and it was almost an immediate transformation for me. It was the moment that I became one with my aircraft, and now everything outside of this of the aircraft doesn’t exist any longer. It’s me, the mission, the guy on the other airplane, and what we’re going to do. It was that the physical click was almost a switch, and you can replicate that in any environment you are. You go out on a spacewalk, locking the helmet for me was that moment. You know, the click of the helmet, now everything is out, is outside, everything that’s outside of this, on the spacesuit is not important. It’s for later. I could have problems at work, I could have problems with with my family, I could have anything going on, but it stays outside of the head and outside of the spacesuit, outside of the spacecraft, outside of the airplane. And I’m sure that during the 100 of hours that we will spend training together, we will we will find what is that that switch that puts everything leaves everything outside and makes me focus on the on what’s happening in the moment.

 

Nilufar Ramji

I love that. Top that, Randy.

 

Randy Bresnik

Well, and it’s called compartmentalization. Okay, and you have to be able to do it so that things that when you’re in a high stress, high stakes, time sensitive environment, that you’re not distracted, and you’re totally focused with all your capabilities, physical and mental, in that one spot. And on launch day, you know, we’ll be getting up, having seen our spouses and kids for the last time, you know, in an intimate environment the day before, and that day you’ll get up, you might have a phone call with them, but then it’s into the routine of the breakfast, the suit up, and all of that. And you’re in your suit doing leak checks, it’s you’re, like it’s game day, but you walk out and you get that one little snippet back to reality, because you walk out and your family’s standing there as you get ready to go in the van and hit the launch pad, you don’t get to touch them, you don’t get to hug them. All you can do is stand across because you’re in quarantine and wave at them, blow them a kiss, you know, give them a give him a heart sign. And then you step on that bus and it’s all business, you know.

Luca mentioned going on a spacewalk in the helmet. I totally resonate with Brother Luca, because on my first flight, on my first spacewalk, my wife was in labor here in Houston with our daughter in the hospital, and once that helmet clicked down, there was going to be no more updates, no more anything. It had to be focused completely on that spacewalk. And on my first spacewalk, I haven’t experienced this. I don’t have any frame of reference. All I have is the training I had here on the ground, but I had to rely on that training and be at peace that me and my spacewalking teammate Mike Foreman were ready to go execute, and they, he needed to build the whole team needed to rely on me to be able to compartmentalize and turn that switch off until I got back inside. I thought, you know, during when I got back inside, we’re repressurizing the airlock, that when that helmet came off and the switch could be turned back on, they’d be saying, “Hey, Komrade, you’re a father, and unfortunately for my wife, she was still in labor. That’s a different story.

 

Nilufar Ramji

Poor thing!

 

Randy Bresnik

She did say “top that.

 

Nilufar Ramji

I’m sorry, I know. I’m just like, I want to talk about mental preparation, and-

 

Luca Parmitano 

I’m so happy that you said that!

 

Randy Bresnik 

That was really good. I was- there’s only one story that could have topped that, that was my wife’s in labor on the ground…

 

Nilufar Ramji

Okay, Artemis I tested the Space Launch System, and Orion Artemis II certified the vehicles as human rated. These test flights help support the foundational building blocks for humans to get closer to the moon. Now you have the task of testing another part of the mission, the commercially developed human landing systems. How does it feel to take us closer to being on the Moon again?

 

Randy Bresnik

The most important Artemis mission is the next one. Everything has to proceed, you know, with these steps. You can’t just go straight to the lunar surface without having done Artemis II, without having done Artemis III. And so, as Luca has said, what a privilege to be a part of that. And Orion, we’ve got one flight with crew on board, you know, are we able to do a longer mission and prove that out? Are we able to do things that we didn’t have time to do on our own? Start, we’ll expand the flight envelope or testing the heat shield, the new heat shield for the first time. And so there’s all these things that are still expanding the envelope of Orion, so that we can feel comfortable that that part risk has been brought down, and when we go to lunar surface, the new part is actually taking that human landing system and actually touching down on the surface.

 

Luca Parmitano

For anybody who hasn’t seen the HBO series, From the Earth to the Moon. Is one on one of the episodes, it’s about Apollo 9, one of my favorite episodes, because in that, in that event, what was happening is that there was a crew that was going to perform testing of the lunar lander, and they were going to be, they were not going to land on the moon, and then they told them there is, we’re going to anticipate another mission, and we’re going to send Apollo 8 around the moon and back, but because you, you were assigned first, we want to, we want to give it to you the opportunity to step into Apollo 8 instead of performing Apollo 9, and the crew gets together, and they ask them what you want to do, and they look at each other and they’re like, well, they might be going to the moon and back, but our mission is fun. Because they’re all test pilots and they were testing systems, and that’s what we will be doing. But that the Orion spacecraft that we’re going to fly is very different from the one that’s already flown, there’s there’s testing systems that that we’re going to have to do, and then we’ll be testing lunar landers and maneuvers, and at that mission is is so much fun.

And so I, the way I feel about it, I feel that it’s an incredible contribution, I feel that it’s important, and if you, if you think about grappling up a mountain, there is always somebody that needs to plant that nail, so that somebody can go and use that nail to be safe and go on, but exploration is a mountain without a summit, so our only hope is that we can just plant the nail well enough, so then the next person can go above and beyond, and then they can plant another nail, and the next crew can go up and and go higher and higher. So when Komrade said the next mission is the most important, I think I like to think that it’s always the next mission, not the one that’s coming after Artemis III, but the one that’s coming and coming and coming is always going to be the most important, and so the idea of contributing that way for me is the essence of what we do.

 

Nilufar Ramji

I love that. So, what I’ve heard from you two today is: one, you love the thrill, you have a great game day plan, and I couldn’t think of a better commander and pilot to be assigned for Artemis III, so congratulations again. We’ve gotten to, we’ve gotten to know you a little bit, so that’s been good, but I want our listeners to get to know you a little bit more. So are you ready for a rapid fire?

 

Randy Bresnik

Yes.

 

Nilufar Ramji

Okay, let’s go. Morning person or night owl?

 

Randy Bresnik

Morning.

 

Luca Parmitano

Morning person.

 

Nilufar Ramji

Me too. Not that I’m playing. You walk into your coffee shop. What’s your go-to order?

 

Luca Parmitano

Caffe macchiato.

 

Randy Bresnik

I don’t drink coffee.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

No caffeine at all. Tea, anything?

 

Randy Bresnik 

No tea, no coffee.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

Oh, okay. That’s good. Sweet or salty?

 

Luca Parmitano 

Salty.

 

Randy Bresnik 

Salty at night, sweet in the morning.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

Ah, nice. Phone call or text?

 

Luca Parmitano 

Nowadays, text.

 

Randy Bresnik

Phone call

 

Nilufar Ramji 

What kind of pet? If you, any of you, have one.

 

Luca Parmitano 

I love dogs. I was adopted by a cat.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

Oh, you did mention before we began recording. that’s your boss.

 

Luca Parmitano 

My boss, yes. Tati.

 

Randy Bresnik 

I have become a dog person.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

Become a dog. Okay. Book or movie?

 

Luca Parmitano 

Book.

 

Randy Bresnik 

Movie.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

Thank you for joining us.

 

Luca Parmitano 

Thank you for having us.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

Next up, our two Mission Specialists.

Francisco “Frank” Rubio is a U.S. Army Colonel, physician, and NASA astronaut. Rubio holds the American record for the longest single spaceflight: 371 days aboard the Space Station, having flown on Soyuz MS‑22 and 23 during Expeditions 67–69. A veteran UH‑60 Black Hawk pilot with over 1,100 flight hours and over 600 combat hours in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Rubio later earned his MD and served as a flight surgeon before joining NASA’s 2017 astronaut class. On his mission he performed three spacewalks totaling 21 hours 24 minutes, and contributed to critical long-duration space medicine and station maintenance experiments.

Last but certainly not least, our fourth crewmember, Andre Douglas. He’s a U.S. Coast Guard Reserve Commander and versatile systems engineer from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics lab.  His Coast Guard time included search and rescue operations, ship salvage response, and drug interdiction missions. While with Hopkins, he worked space exploration design and test missions, nuclear ballistic missile defense, and multidomain autonomous systems development. This is his first flight assignment, but he’s no stranger to Artemis. Douglas was key to Artemis II serving as a backup crew member, fully trained and ready to step in if it was needed. He was also the astronaut support person on the closeout crew handling astronaut ingress and strap in before the Space Launch System and Orion launched earlier this year.

Let’s meet your Artemis III Mission Specialists.

Frank, Andre, welcome to the fun, and congratulations to both of you. You’re about to go into an intense training flow, but before we get there, tell us a little bit about how you were told you were assigned to the mission, and what was it like when you found out? How did you feel?

 

Andre Douglas 

Well, I think it was amazing, but we were all called into Maker’s office, that’s our chief, and he said, “Hey, come on in.” There was a few of us in person, and then there was a few online, and basically said, “Hey, you guys are assigned as a crew,” and it was nice to have people there and talk about it, and kind of give some hugs and some handshakes, and it was.. it was really nice, I would say, just very nice.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

Were you shocked, or did you anticipate that it was coming? Maybe Andre?

 

Andre Douglas 

I kind of anticipated that it might come, so I wasn’t too shocked, but I was still kind of like, oh, this is nice to have with the crew to get it all at once. So that was really, really nice.

 

Frank Rubio 

Yeah, it was awesome to find out with the crew that day. I had had a conversation with Scott a couple of weeks prior as some final pieces were being decided for several missions, and so to come together with these guys and see the crew eye to eye was pretty exciting, and knowing what we were going to participate in for the next year, year and a half is just a, it’s, it’s exciting, but really it’s humbling, right? Just to know that you’re lucky enough to be selected, it’s a huge honor. So, yeah, happy to be here.

 

Andre Douglas

Yeah.

 

Nilufar Ramji

And like your crew mates, you are both members of the military, so thank you so much for your service. Frank, as a pilot, was this always the dream for you? And Andre, you’re with, you were with the Coast Guard. What is it that drew you to serve with them? So, let’s start with you, Frank.

 

Frank Rubio 

Yeah, honestly, my dream was always to be a physician, working with a special operation. So, I was actually living my dream when I decided to apply for this job. And the reason was, you know, the more I looked into the mission, the team, it was something that I thought would fit me perfectly, and just so appealing to, you know, think that I could possibly be a person that could help explore space, right? I never once in a million years thought I’d be selected, but when you find something that you think might fit so perfectly, you got to give it a try, and so, yeah, so you know, ultimately, even though it wasn’t my dream, it has actually worked out to fit exactly the way I imagined.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

I love that.

 

Andre Douglas 

Yeah, and I think for me, for the Coast Guard, my parents served in the Coast Guard, so my dad was in the Coast Guard, and then my mom, she was in the Marine Corps, the Army, and the Air Force at different points. Yeah, at one point she was Air Force Cadet, and then she did the reserves for the army and taught nursing, and then she was in the Marine Corps, she got her scholarship with Penn State and went enlisted and everything, so she did all of that, and I remember as a kid she used to take me to all of her nursing courses across the country. And then you know growing up with my dad and having him go off to duty and just serve and not be there, like this concept of service was just kind of permeating throughout my, my life. And so for me, you know, when it comes to serving the Coast Guard, I thought, man, being in service, but for humanity, right, humanitarian service, the Coast Guard was what I chose. I thought about Air Force, thought about. All the other services, and they’re great too, but the Coast Guard was like, “Hey, let’s go save some lives. So that’s been kind of my calling to serve with them, and currently in the reserve, and did active duty before, but it blends well into NASA, right? It’s we’re serving humanity, we’re serving the public, and it makes it that much easier to do as we’re doing that job day to day, and it’s an honor to be here, just like Frank said, but the service makes a big part of it, you know, come easier, and just honored to be here. So-

 

Nilufar Ramji 

Both of you are so humble. And Frank, you are a space station veteran, and Andre, you trained alongside the Artemis II crew. So, how have these experiences informed what you’re about to get into, and tell me a little bit more of what you’re looking forward to?

 

Andre Douglas

Yeah, so I think you know being with Artemis II was very, very special, because you know, before I got assigned, I was actually getting very involved with the architecture, understanding the rovers, the suits, understanding the, you know, potential habitat, either orbiting or on the surface of the Moon, and understanding that this is a massive organization with a lot of different players. You know, as I was going through the astronaut candidate training program, I just focused on my T-38 you know, my flying, my diving, the little tactical things that would make me a good operator, but like having context of this is a big machine, and it’s going to take a lot of people to do hard things, and to see Artemis II go off and it to go well was awesome. But knowing behind the scenes all of that stuff that comes together, it’s impressive. So having that perspective coming into this crew and this mission, it helps to just have that context, so I can know where to focus, and you know, contribute the best that I can. Seeing how things at the end of the previous flow went, where I could have made changes and additions early, like I can do that now, and I can help the crew and everybody see certain things, and so I’m just happy to bring that to the table, and it’s just a nice vantage point to have in the past.

 

Frank Rubio 

Yeah, and I think Dre captured it perfectly. The number one thing is that we are part of an awesome team, right, and one of the coolest parts about our team is that we do help to inspire humanity. Both from outreach to engineering to exploring, right, and getting on the rocket and going to space, and ultimately space is awesome, right? And so we’re going to work our butts off for the next year and a half, and it’s going to be challenging, and then you get to get on a rocket and go to space, and it’s absolutely worth every little bit of work that you’re going to put into it. So a lot of work, a lot of sacrifice, but ultimately the payoff is both incredibly fun and amazing, and then a few minutes after that, it hits you that how privileged you are to be able to do it, and that we are helping to inspire future generations, and it’s pretty cool that you know, really, regardless of what mission you’re doing, it’s all of those things, but being part of a mission now that’s going to help set the foundation for a program that’s going to take our nation and humanity back to the Moon and then onto Mars, that feels, I think, a little bit extra special, just being part of that foundation for something, right, and something that’s bigger than ourselves. So, so, yeah, super excited about it.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

And the four of you as this this team making something happen that involves a series of dynamic events, but lots of lots of coordination and choreography you’re going to have to do as you prepare for Artemis III. How do you, how do you do this? How do you prepare both mentally and physically for a mission like this?

 

Andre Douglas

Yeah, I think that’s a really good question, and sometimes I think that’s different than what you’ve done in the past. I know for me it helps to do a lot of mental prep with respect to procedures, and you know, all the tasks that you’re going to do on the mission. So, some of the things that we do, which is translatable from what we did early in the astronaut candidate training program is something called Chair Fly, right? So I’m sitting in a chair right now, and I’m envisioning where am I going to be. I’m going to be either on Station, I’m going to be in Orion, and I’m going to think about, okay, I have to get my suit off. I have to work my cuffs on my gloves, and then I have to work my helmet. I have to figure out how to get my head out of the neck ring, and I’m going to talk through those motions. I’m going to actually physically move in that manner without the stuff, but I’m going to mentally and physically connect those actions in my mind, right? I’m going to chair fly. I’m going to do all on the chair. That goes with space walks out the door, that goes with other procedures on the display units. These are our DUs that we, we do in commanding Orion. I’m going to go to all these different menus in my mind, so that when I’m there in the moment, I’ve already done that mental prep, and it becomes more automatic as I’m executing, and it helps a lot. I think from an operational standpoint, that’s very helpful.

So that’s the mental prep, and the physical prep to me is about it’s not just. Working out, so you can get stronger and faster. It’s actually working out, so you understand your response, your physiological response. How can you control your breathing when you get super tired? How can you know, you know, how to control your heat load and things like that? Because it can get hot in Orion, it could get cold in Orion, all these different environments we might encounter based on our mission, which we’re still learning about, right? So, if you can control your body in terrestrial like conditions and understand and test bed a little bit, I think it’s a great way to know, like, no matter what happens, I know kind of where my limits and I can make decisions based on those. So, I think it’s important to definitely train the brain and the body as much as possible. But those are some methods that I would employ.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

What about you, Frank?

 

Frank Rubio

Yeah, I think ultimately it comes down to trust and confidence, right? Trust in the team that’s going to train us, and knowing that they have put in way more work than we ever will into developing all the possible scenarios that we could encounter, and training us over and over for those things, and that repetition builds confidence, right? And so when you do strap into that rocket, you think of all those people who’ve trained you, and it just gives you confidence that, like, we- you know, hopefully the mission will go perfectly, but when it does not, because it just never does go perfectly, we are ready and trained to deal with almost any contingency you can imagine.

 

Nilufar Ramji

So this segues perfectly into my next question. Now, what happens if things don’t go as planned? So, Frank, you had a bit of an extended work trip to the space station, to put it lightly, and Andre, you were training alongside Artemis II, as I mentioned, just in case. So, now, how have these experiences informed how you approached an unplanned or anomalous situation? Now, Frank, let’s start with you.

 

Frank Rubio

Yeah, so I think again, there’s a confidence in knowing that you are ready for everything you’ve trained for, right? You just put in a lot of time and effort, as Dre said, but then also part of our job is just to be ready to improvise and make things happen, right? And you do that in communication with the ground team, right? There’s an incredible team led by a flight director and all the flight control teams, and they’re ready to support and provide you as much information and data as you need, but ultimately, sometimes you just need to improvise and make something happen. I think that’s one thing that all of our backgrounds contribute to, is you just learn and are comfortable making the best out of a situation that you may not have ever thought of, or you know, couldn’t have imagined. But then you assess, you take store of what’s available, and then you make the most of it, and usually it turns out pretty well.

 

Andre Douglas

Yeah, I think those are really good words, Frank. I mean, it’s, it’s crazy, too. When we train, a lot of the public does not see all of the plan B’s and C’s and D’s and E’s, and so, in addition to the confidence in the reps that we get, we get reps in all of those scenarios, and it’s, it’s pretty awesome to have that, that breadth of experience. And one of the things I think that also helps, that we can do, as well as, you know, all of our trainers train us, like Frank said, they can also give us these guiding principles that can try to fit all the impossible scenarios that gives you that 80% solution, because we can’t get every scenario when we’re doing our sims right, but you know, if you know that a box on a system has data power cooling right, and you may not know the specifics, but you know that you have basic functions, and we have to reset it in Orion. We need to troubleshoot through those basic functions. Those are ways to kind of help bound the scenario, and I think that’s a decent method to help with preparing for the unknown.

But at the end of the day, like, the more that we practice and more that we trust the team, then the better off we’re going to be, but there are some little techniques that may help from like a first principle standpoint, and so especially like as we’re doing these things, we can easily talk in this room about how to solve the problems when we’re comfortable, we got oxygen, we’re hydrated, but when things start to degrade and it helps to fall back to the first principles, so we’re not overthinking and just completely off kilter there. But yeah, those are some things I think about when trying to make sure we prepare for that off nominal.

 

Nilufar Ramji

You two are exceptional humans, and given me lots of tips for myself here on the ground with the oxygen and the hydration. So, speaking of hydration, I wanted to switch gears and talk a little bit about meals, they bring us together, and food just is something that everyone loves. So, let’s talk about some of your favorite meals that you had, Frank, while you were in space, or that you, Andre, tried in the food lab. Is like, what are you guys going to eat?

 

Frank Rubio

You know what I learned is you’re going to eat whatever they give you.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

That sounds like what I tell my kids now! That’s dinner.

 

Frank Rubio 

You know, actually, it was a lesson that was reinforced, and something I already knew from the army, right? Like, unfortunately, the environment that you usually placed in doesn’t allow for gourmet meals,  and ultimately, you just have to have the energy you need to conduct a mission. But what, what being in space for that long reinforced is it’s not really the meal, it’s the people you’re sharing it with, right, and just ultimately you can be sharing some pretty untasty food, and it’s still an awesome experience, right, and you’re sharing stuff with each other, and you’re fellowshipping, and smiling and laughing, and ultimately that’s what the part that matters, and I’m pretty confident we’re going to do exactly that. So, not to minimize, you know, our Food Lab’s awesome, so they do provide us with some great food, but ultimately, again, it’s not going to be, you know, foodie gourmet food, right? But we’ll make the most of it, it’ll be awesome, and it’ll be good memories from, I think, those times around the table.

 

Nilufar Ramji

That’s true. The camaraderie.

 

Andre Douglas 

Really good words, Frank. I mean, somebody told me in our office that food is better shared. It just tastes better shared. There’s a psychological thing, you know, that that goes to it. So, I think that’s all there is to it. It’s gonna taste good when we’re together, you know, going through whatever we’re going through, the ups and the downs, and so I completely agree. As far as Food Lab goes, I think the one thing I tasted that I thought was pretty decent was the brisket. I think there was some brisket there, and I was like, “Oh, I’m in Texas, maybe I’m a true Texan now.” I don’t know, I wouldn’t have said that maybe like eight years ago, but I was like, “Oh, I’ll do the brisket.” But other than that, yeah, I think it’s all gonna taste pretty good.

 

Frank Rubio

Now I’m just gonna imagine Randy as our Commander, being like, “Here’s your food!”

 

Nilufar Ramji 

This is dinner.

 

Andre Douglas 

Good Luck!

 

Nilufar Ramji

The first meal you had when you came back from space, your gourmet meal, what was that, Frank?

 

Frank Rubio

You know, we have some awesome support personnel. One of those teams is the people who pick us up from when you land on a Soyuz from Baikonur, and so you have about a 24 hour travel back to Houston, and they had reached out and said, “Hey, what do you want your first meal to be?” And I was a little aggressive, thinking, “Oh, I feel great, and I want steak and salad.” And you know, the first leg of that flight from Kazakhstan to Scotland, I did not feel great. So I had to wait for the second leg from Scotland back to Houston, and actually felt great. I enjoyed a steak in the salad, and it was fantastic.

 

Andre Douglas

That’s a good idea. Yeah, that’s..

 

Frank Rubio

I wouldn’t recommend it right away, but eventually.

 

Andre Douglas

Yeah, see, we learned from our peers.. This is good.

 

Nilufar Ramji

Okay, now I did this with Luca and Randy, but I want everyone to get to know you, so I’m going to do some rapid fire questions. Are you ready?

 

Frank Rubio

Ready.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

Okay, let’s go. Morning person or night owl?

 

Andre Douglas 

Morning person.

 

Frank Rubio 

Also a morning person.

 

Nilufar Ramji

All four of you are morning people. This is gonna be great. Good team!

You’re going for a run. Are you listening to music, podcast, or alone with your thoughts?

 

Andre Douglas

Definitely music for me, and running.

 

Frank Rubio 

Alone with my thoughts.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

You know what the right answer would have been? You’re listening to Houston We Have a Podcast!

 

Frank Rubio 

Of course.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

Phone call or text?

 

Andre Douglas 

Phone call.

 

Frank Rubio 

Yeah, 1,000% phone call. I think texts are easy to misunderstand.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

Agree. You don’t get tone.

 

Frank Rubio 

And yeah, and as someone who is occasionally sarcastic… doesn’t come across.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

I respect that. What kind of pet, if any, do you have?

 

Andre Douglas

I don’t really have any true pets. The kids have a fish or two.

 

Nilufar Ramji

A fish or two. Okay.

 

Frank Rubio 

Yeah, you might have asked the wrong person on this one. So, I, we have a small little farm, and-

 

Nilufar Ramji 

I love that! Tell us about that!

 

Frank Rubio 

So I have two dogs, three cats, five ducks, and 17 chickens. Yeah, so we got rid of the goats and turkeys, but yeah, we had a little bit more before that.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

So egg prices didn’t affect you,

 

Frank Rubio

But that’s for another podcast. No, egg prices definitely do not affect us.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

Do you have a comfort movie or show?

 

Andre Douglas

So, man, my just favorite movie is Interstellar, and that sounds cliche, but I just really enjoyed it. Show-wise. I actually recently finished a series, it’s an anime series called Dr. Stone. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, but it’s about this – it’s about the earth, and apparently everybody on earth turns to stone, and they don’t know why. But then there was this one character who, like, drank an energy drink right before it happened, and he counted for like 30,000 years or something, and then he broke out of the stone, and then he took his time breaking everybody else out of the stone using like bat feces fluid or something. And like it talks about, the thing that’s crazy is, it talks about all of the, all of the human-made inventions over time, and it’s like, how do you make an iPhone? How do you make a wheel, like all these things? It’s insane. So I thought that was, like, at first kind of crazy, and I started watching them, like, oh. It got me. It’s I finished it. And yeah, that was an interesting one. I did not expect, so I’ll leave it at that.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

Top that, Frank!

 

Frank Rubio

Bat feces fluid is a difficult one to…

 

Nilufar Ramji

I can’t stop laughing- I’m crying!

 

Andre Douglas 

I do what I can.

 

Frank Rubio

I was like, huh, how can I weave that into my story? And you just can’t.

 

Nilufar Ramji 

It’s its own thing.

 

Frank Rubio

Yeah. So I don’t watch a ton of TV, but when I do, I love college football. And so for four months out of the year, I’ll enjoy that on a Saturday. And then I actually don’t love the show myself, per se, because of who usually wins, but my kids love Survivor, and so that’s become a regular staple, just because they enjoy watching it. So, watching it with them. So, yeah,

 

Nilufar Ramji

Learn by watching or learn by doing.

 

Andre Douglas

Oh, by doing. I’m a learn by doer.

 

Frank Rubio 

That’s interesting, because I always associate the two things together, together, yeah. Usually, if I can watch it and then do it, that’s pretty ingrained.

 

Nilufar Ramji

I need someone to sit there and teach me as I’m doing it. I will perform a lot better, it’ll retain in my, my head more.

 

Frank Rubio

Yeah, yeah. But, like, you know, I can watch a YouTube video and pretty much feel like MacGyver, right? Like, anything in the world now, I can do. Yeah, I don’t know what people did before. I guess I probably hired a bunch of other people.

 

Nilufar Ramji

Well, we are limited on time. So, thank you guys so much for being here. We appreciate you being on the podcast. And once again, congratulations on Artemis III.

 

Frank Rubio 

Thank you.

 

Andre Douglas

Thank you.

 

Nilufar Ramji

Thanks for sticking around. I hope you’re as excited for Artemis III as I am!

You can check out the latest from around the agency at NASA.gov. And you can find out more about Artemis III at NASA by visiting nasa.gov/artemis.

Our full collection of episodes, and all the other wonderful NASA podcasts, can be found at nasa.gov/podcasts.

On social media we are on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, X, and Instagram. If you have any questions for us or suggestions for future episodes, email us at nasa-houstonpodcast@mail.nasa.gov.

This interview was recorded on June 4, 2026.

Our producer is Dane Turner. Audio Engineers are Will Flato and Daniel Tohill. And our social media is managed by Leah Cheshier and Kelcie Howren. Houston We Have a Podcast was created and is supervised by Gary Jordan. Special thanks to Anna Schneider for helping us plan and set up this interview. And of course, thanks again to our Artemis III crew, Randy Bresnik, Luca Parmitano, Frank Rubio, and Andre Douglas, for taking the time to come on the show.

Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on, and tell us what you think of our podcast.

We’ll see you next week.

3… 2… 1… This is an official NASA podcast.

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