Gary Lai’s resume features his status as chief architect and pioneer spaceflier at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture — but when he received a Pathfinder Award this weekend at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, the veteran engineer highlighted a lesser-known job, as co-founder and chief technology officer of a moon-centric startup that’s still in stealth mode.
“We aim to be the first company that harvests natural resources from the moon to use here on Earth,” Lai told an audience of about 400 banquet-goers on Saturday night. “We’re building a completely novel approach to extract those resources, efficiently, cost-effectively and also responsibly. The goal is really to create a sustainable in-space economy.”
The Tacoma, Wash.-based startup, called Interlune, has actually been around for about three years — but it’s been shrouded in secrecy long enough that Lai can still be considered a co-founder. Lai said the other founders include Rob Meyerson, who was Blue Origin’s president from 2003 to 2018; and Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, a geologist who set foot on the moon in 1972 and served in the U.S. Senate from 1977 to 1983.
Lai noted that Interlune recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation. That grant, amounting to $246,000, supports efforts to develop a system that could sort out moon dirt by particle size.
Neither Lai nor Meyerson, who was in the audience cheering him on, was willing to say much more about Interlune, due to the fact that the venture is still in stealth. But a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicates that the venture raised $1.85 million in seed funding last year from five unnamed investors.
The SEC form also names longtime aerospace industry executive Indra Hornsby as an officer of the company, and lists Estes Park, Colo., as Interlune’s headquarters. However, Hornsby’s LinkedIn page says she’s currently an adviser and a former chief operating officer. Other documents indicate that Tacoma, Meyerson’s home base, has become Interlune’s HQ.
Lai said that he would continue to advise Blue Origin on a part-time basis, focusing on advanced concepts that include the Blue Moon lunar landing system. But going forward, Lai plans to give more attention to what humans will be doing on the moon after they land.
Space-industry boosters, including Jeff Bezos, have long argued that lunar resources — ranging from water ice and solar power to minerals and metals — could fuel the development of off-Earth infrastructure for our home planet’s benefit. “Earth’s future is in our orbit,” Interlune’s website proclaims. Lai said the opportunities for ventures such as Interlune are being made possible “because of the work that companies like Blue and others are doing, funded by the Artemis program, to create an infrastructure for space transportation.”
The Museum of Flight’s annual Pathfinder Awards recognize individuals with ties to the Pacific Northwest who have made significant contributions to the development of the aerospace industry, and Lai wasn’t the only award-winner at Saturday night’s banquet: Ray Conner, the retired CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, was this year’s other Pathfinder Award recipient.
Ray Conner: Bringing out the best in Boeing
During his Saturday night fireside chat, Conner discussed what he learned about leadership while heading up Boeing Commercial Airplanes from 2012 to 2016.
At the time, Boeing was dealing with production problems relating to its wide-body 787 Dreamliner jets. Some of the jets required significant structural modifications and came to be known as the “terrible teens.” As if that wasn’t enough, problems with overheating batteries on the 787 — including a failure that started a fire on Japan Airlines jet — led to an emergency order to ground all 787s in 2013.
It took months to track down the problem, fix the batteries and get the planes flying again. During that time, Conner counseled his team “to have a sense of urgency, but calm” — and to project that message to Boeing’s customers as well.
“Communicate, communicate, communicate,” Conner said.
In the end, Conner was proud of how his team performed during the crisis. “It was the best of Boeing,” he said.
Conner also highlighted Boeing’s contribution to education, including a $30 milllon gift from the company and the Boeing family to fund the Museum of Flight’s Boeing Academy for STEM Learning.
He noted that Boeing had long supported higher education and advanced training. “What I wanted to do was take it down a level, and start bringing in the younger people, exposing them to this great industry,” Conner said.
Boeing also helped set up a program called Core Plus Aerospace to prepare high-school students for aerospace careers.
“Not every kid wants to go to college,” Conner said. “When I looked at the demographics of our workforce, you could see we were aging out, particularly in the manufacturing area. Now, these are really good jobs … I felt like we needed to do something different, and it needed to start in the high schools and get them exposed to this, [to show] that there could be an opportunity for them as well.”
He said the program worked so well that Washington Gov. Jay Inslee used it as a model for programs aimed at preparing high-school students for careers in health care, construction and the maritime industry. “I was starting to think, he’s stealing our people,” Conner joked.
Gary Lai: From Hong Kong to the high frontier
Lai said he experienced the “classic” immigrant story.
“I was born in Hong Kong in 1973, and my family came here for a better opportunity,” he said. “My parents worked very hard, and they made something, and they built a future for their children. I’m extremely grateful for that.”
Lai was intrigued by space missions like the Voyager encounters with Jupiter and Saturn, and by TV shows like Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos.” He studied astronomy at Cornell University, where Sagan taught, but decided against taking the path that led to academic research. “So I changed paths,” he said. “I went into finance.”
Then there was another twist: After working in corporate finance for a year, he realized that engineering was his true passion. That realization led him to the University of Washington’s aerospace engineering program, and then to Kistler Aerospace in Kirkland, Wash. That was where he met Meyerson.
Kistler eventually went bankrupt, but Meyerson moved on to Blue Origin — and it wasn’t long before Meyerson started asking Lai to come join him at Bezos’ rocket company.
“It’s 2003,” Lai recalled. “Jeff was not a household name. Amazon was strictly a bookselling online site at the time. So I was very skeptical that one person could fund something so ambitious in reusable rockets.”
A year later, Lai agreed to join the company, as employee No. 18. He started out as a systems engineer for the New Shepard suborbital launch program, and over the course of several years worked his way up to become New Shepard’s system architect and lead designer.
“There were a lot of very difficult requirements that we eventually backed off from,” he recalled. “We actually started out at some point trying to make the entire wall transparent. We settled for the agreement that if you’re sitting by the window, and you can’t see anything else but the outside, that’s good enough.”
After more than a dozen uncrewed flight tests, the New Shepard rocket ship sent its first crew members — including Jeff Bezos — on a suborbital space ride in 2021. Less than a year later, Lai was asked if he’d like a turn, and he said yes.
During his talk, Lai narrated a series of images showing the launch, the minutes-long dose of weightlessness, the view of Earth out the huge windows that he helped design, and the landing. “Obviously, the thrill of a lifetime,” he said.
A few months after Lai’s flight, the New Shepard spaceship experienced an anomaly shortly after its launch on an uncrewed research mission; as a result, flights have been put on pause for more than a year.
Last month, the Federal Aviation Administration closed its investigation into the incident. Blue Origin says it plans to resume flights soon.
So, would Lai fly again?
“I would love to go,” he told GeekWire after receiving his award. “But I think there are so many deserving people that I would love to be at the back of the line.”
