The Weekend Edition is pulled from the daily Stansberry Digest.
Now seems like a great time to leave Earth...
A pandemic rages on. Some states are seeing their highest average of new daily cases since COVID-19 first struck the U.S. And for the past few weeks, cities across the country have surged with protests...
Police brutality is the flash point today, but we've been warning for years that mounting economic frustrations (much less virus-aided ones) would lead to more frequent and more intense civil unrest.
But we're not focusing on that today... Instead, we want to remind you about the types of triumphs that humankind can reach.
On Saturday, May 30, a pair of NASA astronauts got lucky...
Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley blasted off the planet from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on board a SpaceX rocket bound for the International Space Station – 254 miles up in the sky.
It was a historic day for two big reasons...
It was the first time a private company, Elon Musk's SpaceX, launched NASA astronauts into space. And it was also the first time a crew left Earth via American soil at all since 2011.
For years, NASA astronauts have been hitching rides with Russian cosmonauts to the space station... reflecting an era of innovative stagnation, hesitation, and bureaucracy in U.S. space flight since the Columbia disaster, which killed seven astronauts during a reentry from space in 2003.
Enter SpaceX.
Musk, also known as the polarizing founder of Tesla (TSLA), started the company in 2002 with the crazy idea of colonizing Mars... putting a base on the moon... and having millions of people fly to both places from Earth, as if it were a flight from New York to Los Angeles.
As Musk said in a press conference after the successful launch...
This is hopefully the first step on a journey... of life becoming multiplanetary for the first time in the 4.5-billion-year history of Earth. That's seeming increasingly real with what happened today.
Hundreds of years from now, if someone looks back on today's essay in a blockchain-powered content archive, maybe they'll laugh and say, "Of course... we've been going to Mars every summer for years." Until then, though...
We're not living on Mars yet, but people seem interested...
NASA said that more than 10 million people watched the launch of the Crew Dragon Demo-2.
It was a welcome break that gave us a strange sense of normalcy amid an endless stream of chaotic images on the mainstream news.
NASA's broadcast included live feeds of the cockpit. Behnken and Hurley, a pair of former military test pilots, were mostly along for the automated ride, but they did test manual controls while docking the spacecraft with the space station on Sunday...
The events also included fresh footage of one of SpaceX's signature "reusable rockets" landing in routine fashion on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This part of the process might be something you've seen before. But it wasn't always done this way...
You see, during a "normal" NASA launch, the "first stage" of the rocket – the most powerful and most expensive part – would usually just break off and drop back to Earth, crash-landing somewhere in the ocean... never to be seen again.
SpaceX reinvented this standard part of rocket-launching over the past two decades... The company designed technology to guide the first-stage rocket back to Earth in a controlled descent so that it can be used again.
Just like we reuse commercial airliners or cars, reusing rockets saves time, money, and critical components. It's a phenomenal step toward Musk's dream business of flying people all over outer space on a daily basis.
Not long ago, SpaceX was best known for exploding rockets...
When the company started experimenting with Musk's idea of reusing rockets and landing them back on Earth in 2013, the early results were almost comical...
There were explosions on the ground and in the air, as well as rockets that tipped over sideways like candles falling in the wind.
But these repeated failures, followed by commitment to the plan when no one was watching, is precisely what led to SpaceX's breakthrough event with millions paying attention.
Nowadays, the "reusable rocket" idea is almost an afterthought to rocket operations. That's a testament to the routine... It has been successfully done at least 50 times.
Private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin – headed by Amazon (AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos – provide the technology, testing, and resources to actually build the rockets and take on the liability. (If anything went wrong during the launch on May 30, you can bet SpaceX would have shouldered most of the blame, not NASA.)
In the meantime, entities like NASA train the astronauts and bring their facilities and experience to the table. It's a match made in space-heaven...
And this private-public partnership became a necessity to actually get things done...
Following the Columbia tragedy, NASA's whole identity was upended.
Operations were shut down for two years. And after that, engineers needed to get approvals on proposed items or changes from up to several boards, which essentially acted as "filters."
The bureaucracy stifled innovation. As Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut and senior adviser for SpaceX, explained during a presentation at our annual Stansberry Conference in Las Vegas last October...
What's the best way to design something if you want to get through this process quick and inexpensive? Just do the same thing you've always. That's where we ended up, with very little innovation.
We didn't really have the freedom to fail anymore, and it was largely because of the accidents we had over time. After Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia, we got less and less willing to fail – even in testing and development, where you need to be a bit reckless and push the boundaries in testing. Otherwise, you never do anything great.
Now, we can't discuss space any further without talking about the "Space Force"...
Forget for a moment that "Space Force" is the name of a TV sitcom on Netflix (NFLX), starring Steve Carell...
This newest branch of the U.S. military announced by President Donald Trump in December has actually been doing some interesting things in its short history. And the stakes couldn't be higher...
NASA's primary mandate from the White House is to put humans on the moon by 2024. And in the meantime, plenty of other projects are ongoing...
Even though reusable rockets and human spaceflight are what make headlines, satellites actually hold the key to the future in space. That's where companies are lining up to land government contracts...
In March, the Space Force launched its first rocket in the name of national security. The mission was to complete a "constellation" of military satellites... On May 16, the U.S. launched a robotic X-37B space plane into low-Earth orbit to complete a "secret" mission.
In the March issue of Stansberry Innovations Report, Dave Lashmet wrote about this mission. And he also outlined what the Space Force will actually do...
The Space Force will control our military and intelligence satellite launches, plus protect our assets in orbit. As such, it has two main missions...
The first is offensive. It will compete to control space as a U.S. observational post. It's almost a throwback to World War I, when the balloon corps used binoculars to see troop movements.
The Space Force's second mission is defensive. It must protect those satellites.
And it's wasting no time getting started...
One of the Space Force's big early tasks is to find the best partners to launch satellites into orbit and to construct the next generation of military technology – technology that will keep us ahead of our enemies and competitors.
So there's money to be made in space – on Earth...
Last month's high-profile launch was technically not a "Space Force" mission. But you could call it that by association...
Right now, four companies are competing to be the launch provider for the Space Force from 2022 to 2025... SpaceX is one of them. But if you're looking to make money with this company in the public markets, you can't right now. It's not publicly traded... at least not yet.
But you can make money with others right now...
For example, two of the other three companies in the "launch provider" battle are publicly traded. And a bunch of others could be in line for lucrative government contracts as we delve deeper into the final frontier and look down at Earth with more technology.
In the Stansberry Innovations Report, Dave and editor John Engel have identified the companies best-positioned to deliver big space-related returns. That includes one of the largest, most stable, publicly traded leaders in space technology... and a little-known American company that could have 1,000% upside.
Trillions of dollars will be made in the space industry, starting this year. Click here for all the details on these companies now.
All the best,
Corey McLaughlin
Editor's note: Dave and John see the space industry as a booming, profitable market. In their Stansberry Innovations Report, they've tracked down companies that are entering the newest "space race" and are well-positioned to earn you a profit. And recently, Dave and John shared the name of a little-known company entering the space industry... And you can take advantage of its 1,000% upside potential today. Click here to learn more.
