The coolest jobs in America

And the guy who’d never heard of SpaceX

In today’s Diary:

• The ship that never lands

• Meat-fridge snow lab

• Seven Skittles of rain

• A rainbow in a vial

• You can’t live in an app

Hey Rational Optimist,

What weighs 140 pounds but can carry 40,000?

I held the answer over my head in a warehouse in downtown LA.

It's the skeleton of a giant cargo airship. A steel frame, the zigzag kind you see on a construction crane. It’s made of something like 30,000 feet of thin steel.

Jim Coutre, founder and CEO of Airship Industries, winched it down from above and told me to lift it. I pressed it over my head like a barbell.

Jim's office walls are lined with old photos of the great airships. In the 1930s the US Navy flew the USS Macon, an airship longer than two football fields. It even carried its own fighter planes that flew up underneath, hooked onto a trapeze, and were reeled inside.

That’s the kind of giant, audacious, slightly insane thing America used to build.

And then… we stopped building real things.

Matt Ridley, the original Rational Optimist, calls this the "innovation famine." Everything on a screen got faster, cheaper and better. Everything you can touch got slower, pricier and harder to build.

Now real-world innovation is making a comeback in a big way. Meeting the founders making it happen is the best part of my job. Over the past year I've flown around the world several times to meet founders bringing innovation back to the physical world. I look forward to the day Ian Brooke, Blake Scholl, and AJ Piplica roll out their supersonic jets that can get me from Abu Dhabi to NYC in 4 hours instead of 14.

Today I'll introduce you to three of these founders and their missions, starting with Jim’s airships.

Jim joined SpaceX in 2008. A year later, at a party, he told a Northrop Grumman engineer where he worked. The guy replied:

"SpaceX? Never heard of it."

Today SpaceX puts more stuff into orbit than the rest of the world combined.

Jim spent six years there working on the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule. Then he founded Airship Industries to build something even bigger: cargo airships 2X to 3X the size of the Hindenburg that fly themselves.

Why so big? Unlike planes, airships get better the bigger they get. Make one 2X as long, and it can lift about 8X as much.

An airship floats for the same reason a beach ball pops up in a swimming pool: it's full of gas lighter than the air around it. Inside Jim's steel skeleton are giant bags of helium, which, unlike the Hindenburg's hydrogen, can't burn.

Jim's team of nine, mostly ex-SpaceX engineers, designed small electric fans placed around the hull. The fans push the airship along and hold it steady in the wind. Software does the flying, and hunts for tailwinds to ride.

And get this… it never has to land.

To pick up cargo it hovers over a factory, lowers a winch, grabs a shipping container and reels it up into its belly. It can even refuel without landing.

A 747 cargo plane can cross the Pacific in under a day. But the stuff inside usually takes a week or more to reach you. It’s unloaded at the airport, trucked to a warehouse, checked by customs, stored, then trucked again.

An airship that picks up at the factory and drops at the warehouse skips most of those steps. Jim says he can get cargo across the Pacific, door to door, in under five days.

That's faster than air freight. And he thinks he can do it for half the cost, using about a quarter of the fuel of a 747. Cheaper, faster shipping means cheaper stuff on the shelves.

The team built a prototype and even invented its own machine to keep the airship's cables straight. Next comes a hangar big enough to build a full-size one in.

The future should look like the future. I can't wait to see Jim's airships floating overhead.

We showed up at Rainmaker on a Sunday expecting an empty office.

Instead, its small HQ was packed with young engineers writing code and assembling drones. Only in Gundo.

Founder Augustus Doricko, a Berkeley dropout still in his twenties, gave us the tour. The company outgrew its building, so out back it builds drones and tests them in tents. There's an old meat fridge turned into a freezing chamber and a Plexiglass cage for test flights.

Rainmaker flies drones into clouds and “seeds” them so they drop more snow and rain. It's really a bunch of startups rolled into one. It builds its own drones, makes biodegradable seeding chemicals, and writes software to pick the right clouds.

Many clouds are full of tiny, subzero water droplets that haven't turned to ice because they need something to freeze onto. Silver iodide is perfect because its crystals are shaped almost exactly like ice. The droplets grab on, freeze, grow heavy and fall as snow.

Augustus said it only takes “about seven Skittles’ worth of silver iodide to produce tens of millions of liters of water.”

Cloud seeding is 80 years old. Rainmaker’s breakthrough is using drones.

Drones are cheaper, can fly right into the clouds… and put no pilot’s life at risk.

But nobody sold one that could survive a storm. A single drop of water can freeze on a drone propeller and snap it.

So Rainmaker built its own drone. “Elijah” has heated propellers and flies into icy clouds up to 15,000 feet high. I got my hands on one of its propeller blades, which are threaded with veins of thin orange circuit boards that melt ice off mid-flight.

When I first met Augustus in 2024 Rainmaker had no customers. Today it has customers in six states and across the globe.

Last winter Rainmaker ran what it calls the largest cloud-seeding project in modern American history, over 7,500 square miles of mountains that feed Utah's Great Salt Lake.

Last month a single drone flying near Homer, Alaska, released less than a pound of silver iodide. Rainmaker says 19 million gallons of rain fell over the next three hours.

I’ve visited hundreds of startups, and Rainmaker wins the award for grunt work.

The best clouds typically sit over mountains, far from anywhere. So crews load pickups with drones, drive deep into the backcountry and camp out for weeks. Once, while retrieving a test drone in Jordan, a pack of wild dogs chased Augustus!

Why go through all the trouble? The West is running dry.

Lake Mead, the giant reservoir behind the Hoover Dam, fell to its lowest level since it was first filled in the 1930s. A few years ago Arizona stopped approving some new homes around Phoenix because there wasn't enough groundwater.

Every extra inch of mountain snow becomes water in our rivers and reservoirs come spring, right when farms and cities need it most.

Rainmaker’s goal: refill the Great Salt Lake and green the American West.

Curtis Wu handed me a small vial…

Inside were rare earths with each metal in its own band of color. It looked like a bottle of layered colored sand my kids play with.

Rare earths are a family of 17 metals that make the strongest magnets on Earth. They're in the tiny speakers in your earbuds, the motor in an electric car and the guidance systems of missiles and an F-35 fighter jet.

The funny thing is rare earths… aren't rare. Even the scarce ones are far more common than gold.

They’re only “rare” because separating them is one of the hardest jobs in chemistry.

America first cracked the problem during WWII. By the 1960s a single mine at Mountain Pass, California, supplied most of the world's rare earths.

Today China separates about 90% of the world's rare earths. That’s the innovation famine in a nutshell. Americans invented it, then handed it over to China.

Last year Beijing slapped sweeping new limits on rare earth exports. Detroit had to pause car production. And from January the Pentagon can't buy magnets made with rare earths processed in China.

That's a big problem. But our core belief at ROS is that behind every big problem, a driven founder is solving it.

I visited Maglut Heavy Industries’ lab in Long Beach. Founder Curtis Wu, an MIT-trained chemical engineer who spent years purifying medicines at Amgen, walked me through his master plan to bring rare earths back to America.

China’s approach is brute force and takes hundreds, sometimes thousands, of rounds to separate the metals. It’s energy-hungry and filthy.

Curtis’s approach collapses all those steps into one. He told me China needs a factory 100X the size to do what his team does on a lab bench.

Maglut's machine, ARC-1, is a tall column packed with tiny beads, each covered in microscopic chemical hooks. Pour dissolved rare earths in the top and wash them through with a water-based liquid. Each metal grips the hooks a little differently, so they separate.

That's how you get bands of color, like the ones in the vial I held.

In January Maglut’s Long Beach warehouse was empty and full of cockroaches. Six months later Maglut’s pilot hit 99.9% purity on real ore from an American mining supplier. Next up: a demonstration plant, fully running by August 2027.

Curtis's goal is to be about 25% cheaper than American rivals soon, and to match China on cost at scale.

Separating rare earths is a small market… but turning them into magnets is a much bigger one. That's where Maglut is going next. He also wants to adapt the same machine to purify uranium.

America is building real things again.

I care about this because real things are where prosperity comes from.

Also, because trillions of dollars were made outsourcing our ability to make real things. Trillions will now be made bringing it back.

Almost two-thirds of the average American household’s spending goes to housing, transport and food. That's all stuff you can touch. Software turned your phone into a miracle. But you can't live in an app.

Of course an awesome future isn’t guaranteed. Some of these companies will fail. That's the deal at the frontier. But it only takes a few wins to change how we all live.

The people trying to invent the future are grinding out 100-hour weeks. Three things you can do to make that future a little more likely:

1. Go see it for yourself. Meeting founders is my favorite part of my job, and it's the fastest cure for pessimism I know. It's hard to stay a pessimist after seeing a computer “smell.”

Take your kids to watch a rocket launch. Go to a factory open day. If there's a hardware startup near you, ask for a tour.

Maybe we’ll take a small ROS trip one day. Would you come? Let me know in the comments.

2. Tell one of these stories this week. Every new technology meets the same three fears: it'll take our jobs, wreck the planet or kill us. And I hate to say it, but the pessimists are winning the narrative battle.

Last year Florida made cloud seeding a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. Meanwhile the UAE flies roughly 300 seeding missions a year.

It's our job to tell a better story. Utah has been seeding clouds for decades. The state reckons seeding adds 6% to 12% to its snowpack every year. One study found Utah's seeding makes an acre-foot of water, enough for two or three families for a year, for less than $3.

That's the story worth telling.

3. Share this with the kids. Curtis told me his biggest hurdle to scaling up is finding chemical engineers. Isaiah Taylor, founder of nuclear startup Valar Atomics, is also in the market for world-class engineers.

If you know a teenager who loves tinkering or taking things apart, share this with them. “Dirty jobs” are the coolest jobs in America once again.

Pessimists sound smart… but rational optimists build the future.

Share this Diary to get more eyes on people building real things.

—Stephen McBride