Gm. Remember how like 3 days ago we did a poll of who would go on a space ride. Well, SpaceX’s rocket exploded yesterday. Let me explain why this may actually make you more bullish on space travel.

Wednesday’s poll had a surprising amount of Other responses. Y’all are thinking out of the box and I love it.

“Ability to instantly teleport through space. Why? The really short answer is "I hate commuting."” What I’d pay to never sit in traffic again.

“To change elements into another ones 😉😎” You know the story of King Midas and how he turns everything into gold. I’d be him but for chocolate.

“How awesome would it be to travel by flight? No airports/delays/cancellations, no traffic, no crowded sidewalks, AND you get to look cool af at the same time.” You must also have mind-reading ability because SAME.

“Creativity cos the other superpowers are taken by AI. To paraphrase Einstein's quote 'Creativity is intelligence having fun', I need Creativity superpower to have superfun with AI and AGI.” You already have creativity! It’s in you, just keep creating.

“I’m a big outdoors fan. You can’t fathom how much I envy the birds and their flying ability.” I do love sitting in trees.

Yesterday while eating lunch, my Dad showed me a headline of SpaceX’s rocket explosion. “Why the hell is Elon Musk wasting money on this?”

Do I try to explain that the explosion is actually progress? Do I explain that many people didn’t expect the rocket to get off the pad, let alone make it into the atmosphere? Do I explain this is how you do science?

Here’s why an exploding spaceship was a success.

At 119 meters, Starship is the tallest and most powerful rocket ever flown, and the first intended to be fully reusable.

Proposed near-term applications for Starship include delivering astronauts and large satellites to Earth orbit, building the Starlink internet constellation, and facilitating the exploration of the Moon and Mars.

The plan for building Starship followed an “iterative and incremental approach” including a lot of prototypes, testing, and refinement. Explosions are expected.

But this was the first fully integrated Starship lifting off.

It successfully lifted off from the orbital launch pad and climbed to an apogee (point where its furthest from earth) of ~39 km over the Gulf of Mexico.

Then it exploded. Or in the much nicer words of SpaceX, it experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation.”

“Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship! Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months,” tweeted Elon alongside some cool rocket pictures.

Why should I care? As much as we like to ignore the sad reality, the future of humanity may one day depend on being interplanetary. Elon’s philosophy is, the more progress we can make now, the better prepared we’ll be for when that day comes. This is far bigger than space trips and zero-gravity parties. This is the future of humanity.

If you haven’t already heard, Apple is betting big on their soon-to-be-released mixed-reality (VR/AR) headset. So big that CEO Tim Cook ordered its launch despite the wishes of his design team.

So, there’s a lot riding on this pair of $3,000 goggles for the world’s preeminent tech company. Everything has to be top-notch, which explains why Apple’s engineers are working 80-hour weeks. Getting awfully close to Twitter engineer hours there.

Now, because of a report from Bloomberg, we get to hear a bit about the fruits of their labor.

If hardware is Apple’s peanut butter, then software is their jelly. You can’t have one without the other.

Well, according to Bloomberg, we don’t have to worry about the headset lacking software. Basically every app pre-installed on the iPhone will also be on the headset, with highlights including:

And, if Bloomberg is to be believed, there will be millions more where that came from.

This all sounds pretty cool, but we can’t forget why Apple is working so hard on the headset in the first place: no VR headset has proven very successful so far.

VR just hasn’t yet become the next frontier like Zuckerberg believed it would be. Only 4% of teens, the demographic you’d think would be most into VR, use it daily, and Meta has lost more money on VR than everyone reading this newsletter has made in their lives, 100 times over.

But if anybody can buck this trend, it’s Apple.

Why should I care? Apple’s MR headset is likely the best bet for VR to go mainstream for the foreseeable future. If they fail, I really feel bad for those of you with Metaverse real estate.

What else is going on?

Stat: Meta laid off another 4,000 employees. That laidoff-to-founder pipeline is about to get a whole lot stronger.

Rabbit hole: A Peter Thiel-Backed Startup City Wants To Be Africa’s Delaware (Wired)

If you want a full list of startup raises, you can go check Crunchbase. If you want the 2 coolest raises of the week, then check here every Friday.

The best resources we came across this weekend that will help you become a better founder, builder, or investor.

💡 Turns ideas into slides in seconds with MagicSlides.

💰 Hey founders, Startup Equity Calculator is your new favorite tool.

🔨 Notion fans? Check out Startup OS, a complete set of Notion templates built exclusively for startups.

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