Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / What is Elon Up To?: An Idiot’s Guide to Space and Why You Need to Pay Attention

Transcript

What is Elon Up To?: An Idiot’s Guide to Space and Why You Need to Pay Attention · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day humans, welcome to the Safe Space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:07
  You may not even realise just how important this conversation is.
• 0:10
  You may not realise how close humankind is to an extraordinary space race.
• 0:18
  Are we about to become an interplanetary species?
• 0:21
  Do we really need a supersized fuel tanker in space?
• 0:26
  And just how many artificial intelligence data centers does Elon Musk plan to have floating above your head by noon tomorrow?
• 0:34
  Anthony Colangelo is a proud space nerd and a space expert who knows anything and everything about the latest state of play between all of the big actors in this space.
• 0:43
  SpaceX, Blue Origin, NASA, a bunch of other companies, the Mars mission, are we about to have permanent moon bases, and why?
• 0:52
  It's fascinating stuff.
• 0:53
  So Anthony, join me for some brain-tickling banter about it all, about what you need to know about the unfolding revolution in humankind's adventure to the stars.
• 1:03
  I hope you enjoy, as much as I did, the one, the only, Anthony Colangelo.
• 1:15
  an airplane mode guy.
• 1:16
  I'm an airplane mode guy.
• 1:17
  You don't do focus modes.
• 1:18
  You do airplane, full on airplane mode.
• 1:20
  Well, can I trust focus mode really?
• 1:24
  Can I trust focus mode really not to interrupt me?
• 1:27
  During a recording?
• 1:29
  During a recording with Anthony, like, where it cannot be interrupted, otherwise it's going to break his brilliant train of thought.
• 1:37
  You know?
• 1:38
  I need to understand more of this.
• 1:40
  You look like a kind of a tech guy.
• 1:41
  And by the way, I'm sure we're recording now, so just assume that we're live.
• 1:45
  This is great.
• 1:45
  So don't say anything terrible about Jews.
• 1:46
  Cold start.
• 1:47
  Cold open.
• 1:48
  But so, no, I need to know more about the way to use my phone.
• 1:51
  I got one of them bricks, Anthony.
• 1:53
  You know the brick?
• 1:55
  Like a battery?
• 1:56
  Yeah.
• 1:56
  No.
• 1:57
  You haven't spent enough time surfing Instagram.
• 2:01
  It's one of those ads that gets offered to you constantly.
• 2:03
  It's a little device.
• 2:03
  I have not had an Instagram account since 2016, so I am so detached from life.
• 2:07
  God bless you.
• 2:09
  It's great for my marketing.
• 2:10
  Obviously, you can tell which one of us has a very large podcast.
• 2:13
  Yeah.
• 2:15
  No, I mean, you're at least more principled than me.
• 2:19
  I'm essentially a whore who doesn't consume the stuff, but pumps the juice into the veins of the unsuspecting public.
• 2:26
  You said don't say anything about juice.
• 2:27
  Yeah.
• 2:28
  Juice!
• 2:28
  Juice!
• 2:29
  Juice, juice, juice.
• 2:30
  Juice.
• 2:31
  And so the brick is a little device that you, with a magnet on the back, you can throw it on your fridge or whatever, and you set your phone to enter various states of inoperability
• 2:42
  at various times of day, which can only be exited by physically tapping it against the RFID on the brick.
• 2:50
  So it means that like every other solution, you can just be lazing around on the couch, you know, and if you've put your phone into a certain mode that says you can't open Instagram or whatever, then you can obviously just, I don't know, restart the phone or you can exit that.
• 3:03
  But here you have to get your fat ass off the couch, waddle over to the fridge and tap it.
• 3:10
  And that's good.
• 3:11
  And I also got a little thing where one of these apps that commandeers the look of the phone.
• 3:16
  So now my phone has no app tiles on it.
• 3:20
  It's just a black and white phone with a list of apps.
• 3:23
  All right.
• 3:23
  Which increases friction.
• 3:25
  But now you're telling me that focus mode could be doing a job of airplane mode.
• 3:29
  No, we're not in the same department.
• 3:31
  No, we're not even in the same zip code on this.
• 3:33
  No, okay.
• 3:34
  What zip code are you in?
• 3:35
  We use technology different.
• 3:36
  Yeah.
• 3:38
  I suppose so.
• 3:39
  I'm also I do this, but I'm also a man who writes a lot of code and makes apps and websites and stuff.
• 3:45
  So I suppose that I am engaged so much with technology for those hours a day that I have a pretty healthy ability to just disable that part of my brain and and go away.
• 3:57
  Yeah.
• 3:59
  I mean, sometimes I'm bad about it.
• 4:01
  I'm not perfect.
• 4:02
  It has not been hard.
• 4:03
  Mine's been incremental.
• 4:04
  I was not using social...
• 4:06
  I just deleted the social media apps, and I didn't really miss them.
• 4:09
  And then my Gmail stopped syncing to my phone because I'd done something stupid.
• 4:14
  And then I was like, well, why don't I just have email on my phone?
• 4:17
  And that was fine.
• 4:18
  And so then through a series of steps, I've just arrived here without having to do a great intervention or something.
• 4:23
  You know, I think it probably helps that I'm nearly a lone wolf in how I work.
• 4:27
  Yes.
• 4:28
  So...
• 4:28
  Yes.
• 4:29
  You know, I have a couple of partners on things, but it's not.
• 4:32
  What mode is your phone in right now?
• 4:36
  I guess it's in a personal focus mode.
• 4:39
  So I have like my wife, family members, very close friends that can text me and then certain apps, my doorbell thing.
• 4:48
  Right.
• 4:48
  You know, stuff that I would like appearing on.
• 4:52
  And this is a native focus mode?
• 4:55
  It's an iOS feature.
• 4:57
  Yeah, and it syncs across all your devices.
• 4:58
  So it's running on my Mac right now as well.
• 5:00
  So I won't get notifications from those things.
• 5:04
  I have personal mode set up.
• 5:07
  I don't have a recording mode.
• 5:08
  I'm giving you all this shit, but I don't have a special mode.
• 5:10
  I just leave it in personal because those people know not to text me.
• 5:14
  And then if they do, I feel like it's a thing that I might leave this show for.
• 5:20
  So if I call you right now, your phone won't ring?
• 5:23
  Yeah, I wouldn't even know about it.
• 5:25
  But if your wife called you, it would?
• 5:28
  Yeah, and you can even set it so that if you called me twice in a row, then I would get it.
• 5:32
  Right.
• 5:32
  So if somebody really means it, they can break through.
• 5:34
  Right.
• 5:35
  So what you're saying is I'm less important than your wife.
• 5:39
  So far, I mean, we'll find out later on, I guess.
• 5:41
  We'll see how it goes.
• 5:43
  I mean, we have a one-way friendship right now.
• 5:45
  You don't even know that we have a one-way friendship.
• 5:48
  Why?
• 5:48
  Because you're such a huge fan?
• 5:49
  Because I've been a Josh fan for a very long time.
• 5:52
  Isn't that sweet?
• 5:52
  Thanks to the Fifth Column Boys for introducing me to you.
• 5:56
  I mean, thanks to them for so much, really.
• 5:58
  Is this the show Wake Up, You Cunts, is what I'm wondering.
• 6:01
  That's in my head still, how they've introduced you.
• 6:04
  For people who don't know that reference, the Fifth Column...
• 6:07
  is a fabulous show with some good, which some good friends of mine do in New York.
• 6:11
  And, uh, I was on it when, I mean, I've been on it a bunch of times, but one time that I was on it, I had just been hosting a breakfast television show, a morning TV show in Australia, which was called weekend breakfast.
• 6:24
  And I was on the fifth column while I was in New York and Michael Moynihan, who's one of the hosts, uh, I mentioned that I was hosting, uh, uh, a, you know, a morning television
• 6:35
  And he always teases me for being Australian and teases Australians in general for being so blunt and foul-mouthed, at least in his imagination, that he suggested that the morning show on Australian television must be called Wake Up, You Cunts!
• 6:53
  It's been in my head ever since.
• 6:54
  And that has gone down in...
• 6:55
  It's in there.
• 6:56
  ...column lore.
• 6:57
  It's so deep in my head.
• 6:58
  ...and in his brain.
• 6:59
  Okay, so maybe I'll play around with the focus mode, and, you know, I'm only mildly offended that your phone is still on, even on.
• 7:06
  It's behind me.
• 7:07
  Yeah, I mean... Yeah, but it's going to ring if your wife rings you.
• 7:11
  Oh, it never makes noise.
• 7:11
  The phone doesn't make noise.
• 7:13
  It buzzes.
• 7:14
  Yeah.
• 7:16
  She's not going to ring me.
• 7:18
  It's night here.
• 7:19
  She's putting children to bed at the moment.
• 7:20
  Oh, yeah.
• 7:21
  That's a good point.
• 7:21
  I've snuck out of the last season of the night.
• 7:23
  Yeah, this is great.
• 7:24
  She's in the house.
• 7:24
  Yeah, I forgot about the whole time difference thing.
• 7:27
  And last question about this before we get to the topic of the conversation.
• 7:31
  Do your focus and personal modes go on automatically at a particular time of day, or do you have to actively turn them on?
• 7:38
  You can decide.
• 7:38
  You can make that settings.
• 7:39
  You can make it a particular time of day or location.
• 7:42
  So if you arrive somewhere, it can flick into a certain mode.
• 7:45
  So my personal one comes on in the morning when I'm waking up, getting kids ready for school, all that, and then turns off sometime around the time I'm driving back to my house to work.
• 7:54
  And then it will turn on, same deal, around pickup time till after they go to bed and it turns off.
• 8:00
  And then I have some others I use if I'm out.
• 8:02
  I like to ride bikes.
• 8:03
  So if I go out riding a bike, I have a cycling mode that people can
• 8:07
  the people that i would need to know same same kind of deal but a little bit a little bit looser restrictions i'm strong calls yeah in cycling mode i'm there yeah he definitely wants a five foot four man from new jersey to be on his team yes absolutely you have a cycling mode you're actively turning it on to cycling mode when you get on your bike then i will yes yeah okay yeah because then i'll get the right notifications on the on the little you know the display on my bike
• 8:32
  All due respect, it sounds like work.
• 8:33
  It sounds like I'm getting timey.
• 8:35
  It's so easy, man.
• 8:36
  I'm exhausted just listening to your regime.
• 8:37
  You're walking over to your fridge, tapping this brick thing that you got scammed about on Instagram.
• 8:41
  Because that's the point.
• 8:42
  But it goes on automatically.
• 8:44
  You don't have to think about it going on.
• 8:45
  Yeah.
• 8:46
  I don't know.
• 8:47
  It's not that hard.
• 8:47
  There's a button on my watch.
• 8:48
  There's a button on my phone.
• 8:49
  All right.
• 8:50
  Okay, well.
• 8:51
  If I were you, I wouldn't investigate this at all anymore.
• 8:53
  I don't think you're ready for it.
• 8:54
  Yeah.
• 8:56
  I'm going to investigate the shit out of it.
• 8:57
  Next time I talk to you, I'm going to have the most complicated system.
• 9:00
  It's going to be full of bells and whistles.
• 9:02
  It's going to be a Rube Goldberg machine.
• 9:03
  Is this your show still?
• 9:05
  You got a guy to talk about space and you wanted to talk about iOS settings at the beginning?
• 9:08
  Yes, I was just interested because you seem like a tech person.
• 9:11
  Yeah, unfortunately.
• 9:12
  He wanted to boast about how good I was for having hacked my phone.
• 9:17
  And then you shot me down like a clay pigeon on a British estate.
• 9:22
  There's a phone.
• 9:22
  I don't even know if this company is still in business.
• 9:24
  There was a phone that was like just an e-ink display and the cell connection.
• 9:29
  I think you should get one of those.
• 9:30
  I've seen that.
• 9:31
  I don't need it anymore.
• 9:32
  I've managed to hack the perfect solution now.
• 9:35
  But yes, some people do.
• 9:37
  I mean, the problem is...
• 9:39
  This is really turning into a long conversation about phones now.
• 9:42
  But the problem is, there are things that I need my phone to do still that I want it to be able to do.
• 9:48
  It was interesting when I was programming the brick to try to decide what apps I want on Android.
• 9:55
  after 10 pm right so after 10 pm i want my phone to just turn into just a phone just does nothing but a phone but then i was like what about the nights that i happen to go out with friends and i forget and i'm not home to tap it or i forget all about it so now it's just a phone plus uber maps and credit card wallet
• 10:19
  Right?
• 10:19
  No music?
• 10:20
  You're raw dogging this?
• 10:21
  You're not listening to anything?
• 10:22
  I'm not raw dogging it.
• 10:23
  No, if I have to raw dogging it.
• 10:23
  No, this is after 10 p.m., right?
• 10:25
  This is 10 p.m. to like 6 a.m. or something like that.
• 10:27
  No, I'm not allowed to listen to it.
• 10:28
  If I forget to tap it against the fridge, then I don't get to listen to any podcasts.
• 10:32
  Got it.
• 10:32
  I'm sorry.
• 10:33
  Not even yours.
• 10:34
  Yeah, I have this thing, though, where I fall asleep to spoken audio.
• 10:37
  I've probably fallen asleep to your voice sometimes.
• 10:39
  Is that right?
• 10:39
  Yes.
• 10:40
  I find that also mildly offensive.
• 10:42
  That's what I mean.
• 10:43
  I have a one-way friendship.
• 10:44
  I'm gently crafting.
• 10:46
  You're a little voice that's whispered in my ear a lot of times, and you don't know that.
• 10:50
  And I think Jono, I think, might have that relationship with me.
• 10:53
  Yeah, he probably does.
• 10:56
  Jono, do you listen to Anthony as you drift off to sleep?
• 10:58
  You got tricked, yeah.
• 10:59
  He does.
• 11:00
  He's nodding.
• 11:00
  Yeah.
• 11:00
  He says yes.
• 11:01
  Yes.
• 11:02
  Okay.
• 11:02
  Yeah.
• 11:03
  there's a lot of things that i want to know but maybe let's the lay of the land for me when i think about your field of expertise and about space is like i've got a few dumb guy buckets in my head that maybe you can help me refine or flesh out or elaborate on one is uh
• 11:19
  humans need to get shit into space, right?
• 11:23
  We need to shuttle things up there.
• 11:24
  And as we all know, NASA used to do that, and then the shuttle program ended, and now SpaceX has been shuttling things into space.
• 11:31
  But the lay of the land there, it sounds like, is shifting quite a lot in terms of how we get shit back and forth into space.
• 11:38
  That's bucket one.
• 11:39
  Bucket two for me is, what the hell's going on with all of these constellations of satellites that people are putting up?
• 11:45
  So people will be familiar with Elon Musk's space internet thing.
• 11:50
  But he's not the only game in town.
• 11:52
  And are we going to end up living in a future where all of our communications and data and all that sort of stuff is in space?
• 11:59
  Oh, and then there's an adjunct to that, which is Elon Musk's harebrained idea to run AI data centers in space.
• 12:08
  Um, and is there enough room for all this?
• 12:10
  I thought space was already getting full.
• 12:11
  There was space junk all over the place anyway.
• 12:13
  And then the third bucket for me is like living in space and like the bigger things about like, does the space station get superseded?
• 12:22
  Are we actually going to Mars?
• 12:23
  Are people going to be living on the moon?
• 12:25
  All that kind of stuff.
• 12:27
  So now that I've filled people in on that, I want to thank you for your time and say goodbye.
• 12:32
  It's great to talk to you.
• 12:33
  No.
• 12:34
  Tell me about what... Tell me...
• 12:37
  I think maybe I was missing a few points.
• 12:40
  Where...
• 12:41
  I mean... What's going on?
• 12:42
  You tell me where do you want to start?
• 12:43
  Because that is the things... Is that right?
• 12:46
  Is there a bucket I'm missing?
• 12:48
  I mean, there's plenty of other...
• 12:49
  There's a lot of national security, defense market stuff that layers in to all these different components here.
• 12:55
  They're a huge player in this.
• 12:57
  But I think in a wide swath, that would be all the components that people need to understand.
• 13:02
  Okay.
• 13:02
  Yeah.
• 13:03
  Getting stuff up to space is, I think a lot of people do think about it in your bucket of it was a space shuttle and then it was SpaceX.
• 13:10
  There's so many other avenues to that and a lot of twisted turns over time for when the shuttle came about and started to launch pretty much regularly.
• 13:21
  It only did so by this weird partnership might be the wrong word, but the combination of NASA and the Air Force.
• 13:28
  The Air Force was a huge reason that the space shuttle got funded in the first place and
• 13:32
  And there was a national prerogative in the U.S. that all launches would occur on the space shuttle.
• 13:36
  So when it was coming about in the early 80s, the idea was every satellite launch would fly on the space shuttle because the space shuttle was going to fly so much that it would be so cheap to actually fly and operate.
• 13:46
  It was going to be this reusable spacecraft that will put everything on it.
• 13:50
  Direct TV satellites, Sirius radio satellites.
• 13:53
  Right.
• 13:53
  Stuff that has no national significance in any way.
• 13:58
  And that changed after Challenger, when people realized we shouldn't, this is a risky vehicle, we shouldn't risk seven people every time we want to launch a DirecTV satellite.
• 14:06
  You know, I'm using the most flippant example.
• 14:08
  But after that, things diverged.
• 14:10
  Is that right?
• 14:10
  That like in the early 80s, they thought that every single satellite that went up, even the one that's just for some bullshit, was going to have a whole crew of people piloting it up into space.
• 14:23
  Yeah, I mean, delve into this enough, you'll hear a lot of people shout that many of these things are jobs programs, and that may be chief among them.
• 14:31
  Right.
• 14:32
  But that unraveled after Challenger.
• 14:34
  The Air Force no longer wanted to fly a lot of its payloads on the space shuttle unless it really required people to service it or something like that.
• 14:40
  So they started flying expendable launch vehicles, rockets that would fly up.
• 14:45
  Stages would get used, they would crash in the ocean like the old ones that you're thinking of.
• 14:49
  And, pardon my ignorance, but when people were going up and back and forth to the International Space Station at the time, pre-Challenge, were they all going up to the Space Shuttle?
• 14:56
  There was no Space Station.
• 14:57
  There was no Space Station before Challenger.
• 14:59
  There were Space Stations.
• 15:00
  There was a Skylab in the Apollo era for NASA.
• 15:03
  We remember Skylab in Australia.
• 15:04
  Yeah, the Russians had Mir in the 80s and 90s.
• 15:09
  The ISS didn't come about late 90s.
• 15:12
  So it was a huge gap.
• 15:13
  Okay.
• 15:14
  Yeah, huge gap.
• 15:19
  in that era was going on the shuttle.
• 15:20
  We weren't doing old Apollo era, like sit on the top of a bomb and blast up.
• 15:28
  Yeah, we were sitting on the side.
• 15:29
  You were side-mounted.
• 15:29
  Sitting on a side-mounted bomb with wings.
• 15:32
  Yeah.
• 15:33
  With some kind of illusion of maneuverability.
• 15:35
  Yeah.
• 15:35
  Exactly.
• 15:37
  Now, the Russians always flew.
• 15:38
  They've been flying the same human spaceflight vehicle since, you know, the 60s.
• 15:42
  And those still fly to the ISS today.
• 15:44
  The Soyuz vehicle, literally almost the same ones have been flying since the 60s, still fly to the space station.
• 15:50
  China's vehicle right now, Shenzhou, is derived from the Soyuz.
• 15:54
  You can salt to taste how much derived versus, you know, given slash stolen or whatever.
• 15:59
  You can write your own storyline there.
• 16:01
  Anyway, they're all communists.
• 16:03
  I'm sure they share shit.
• 16:06
  What does it look like?
• 16:06
  What does the Soyuz look like?
• 16:08
  Does it have wings or is it a... No wings.
• 16:10
  It is a super weird vehicle.
• 16:11
  It's actually three parts.
• 16:12
  There's like this ball part on top.
• 16:14
  There's a little middle part that roughly looks like a space capsule that you're thinking of.
• 16:18
  That's the part that comes back to the ground.
• 16:20
  And then there's this bottom part that contains solar panels and the engines and electronics.
• 16:24
  So it literally is three parts.
• 16:26
  The ball part is just a little extra room to live in when you're on the way to the space station because it is...
• 16:31
  Look up a photo of this after astronauts in a Soyuz for launch.
• 16:34
  They are absolutely crammed in there.
• 16:36
  It is unbelievably tight.
• 16:38
  So they've got the front is like the station wagon with the space that you can climb into.
• 16:46
  And when it comes back, when the Soyuz comes back, is that flying and floating the way a space shuttle would?
• 16:54
  Or is it just wobbling around on a parachute and dropping into the ocean or something?
• 16:57
  It's wobbling around a parachute and lands on the steps of Kazakhstan.
• 17:01
  It is a very interesting landing.
• 17:03
  Lands near farmers.
• 17:04
  Sometimes it's come down, you know, feet away from a tractor plowing a field.
• 17:08
  Very interesting stuff.
• 17:09
  Very Russian.
• 17:11
  Yeah.
• 17:11
  Yeah.
• 17:12
  Okay.
• 17:13
  I mean, they could put it down in the Pacific Ocean, but...
• 17:16
  Yeah, they know they're land landers ever since.
• 17:20
  So anyway, so after the Challenger, the Air Force started to fly on other vehicles.
• 17:26
  And it's actually when the Europeans took a huge chunk of the commercial space launch market from the US.
• 17:32
  So they have vehicles called the Ariane series.
• 17:35
  It was Ariane 4 at the time.
• 17:36
  Then there's an Ariane 5.
• 17:37
  Now there's an Ariane 6.
• 17:38
  And they became a huge player in the 90s and 2000s for launching commercial satellites to geostationary orbit or comm satellites, TV broadcast, radio broadcast, that kind of thing.
• 17:48
  They became a huge player in that market.
• 17:49
  And in the U.S., we were left with defense contractors, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman.
• 17:55
  They were all named different things at the time because they've all merged and re-merged and done corporate espionage and been merged into Boeing and Lockheed, spied on each other.
• 18:02
  And the Department of Defense said, we'd rather not deal with this since you're our only two launch vehicles that can take national security payloads up to space.
• 18:08
  Why don't you two just make a joint thing called the United Launch Alliance and launch both of your rockets together so that we don't sue each other?
• 18:15
  And they said, great, we'll take a billion dollars a year to keep our things running and we'll launch your satellites for an absolute shitload of money.
• 18:23
  And that was the status quo until Elon Musk and SpaceX started getting their act together.
• 18:30
  They started in the early 2000s.
• 18:31
  They didn't really become a presence until the late 2000s, the aughts, as it were, 2008, 2009, 2010 era, when they really started flying.
• 18:40
  And it was a very long and drawn out affair, but they had two things go their way that really changed the spaceflight industry today.
• 18:47
  One is they got this contract with NASA to build and fly cargo to the space station.
• 18:52
  It was a time when NASA was trying to think of how to do things differently in the this was the era where the shuttle was on its way out, was being phased out after the Columbia accident.
• 19:01
  They thought this is too risky.
• 19:02
  We need to come up with some other thing to do here.
• 19:05
  Let's find an off ramp.
• 19:06
  And they were trying to find commercial companies that could fly crew and event or cargo and eventually crew to the space station for not only cheaper, it arguably is not that much cheaper if you really calculate everything altogether, but.
• 19:19
  importantly, be a little bit more redundant and reliable in the transportation because we have multiple ways to get to the space station.
• 19:25
  We have multiple vehicles operating, different ways of working, trying to lift the entire industry.
• 19:31
  So SpaceX in 2008, you know, very end of 2008, they were
• 19:35
  in some cases days away from going out of business, they land this contract to develop and eventually fly tons of flights of cargo up to the ISS.
• 19:43
  And the side effect of that was that the Falcon 9 rocket that they fly on, they have their spacecraft that goes up the ISS called Dragon.
• 19:53
  Falcon 9 is the vehicle that launches that.
• 19:55
  That has become the most reliable, most flown, cheapest, most incredible launch vehicle that the world has ever seen.
• 20:01
  And that was a side effect of this program.
• 20:04
  So not only do they fly these things, the space station, they now put other payloads on top.
• 20:07
  Help us visualize these, Anthony.
• 20:09
  So there's a couple of decades between Challenger and SpaceX.
• 20:14
  So the Challenger, the old space shuttle program, looks like a plane, kind of, looks like a white ceramic plane thing.
• 20:24
  And it goes up on a rocket vertically up into the sky, but when it comes down, it flies down like a plane, right?
• 20:32
  Yep.
• 20:34
  people will have seen footage of the SpaceX rockets taking off vertically and then also landing vertically like you've got a rocket in reverse, like you've just wound the tape back on the rocket.
• 20:48
  You got it.
• 20:49
  But in the period in the 90s and the 2000s, you mentioned the Boeing-Lockheed solution.
• 20:57
  What was happening then?
• 20:58
  How are we getting shit in and out of space?
• 21:00
  What did they look like?
• 21:02
  They looked more like the SpaceX rockets in terms of just being a couple of stages of a launch vehicle stacked up.
• 21:09
  In the case of one of the launch vehicles, the Atlas V, they had a lot of those solid rocket boosters.
• 21:13
  So the space shuttle had the two big white boosters that you're thinking of, the orange tank in the middle.
• 21:17
  Right on the side, yes, massive.
• 21:19
  So those are solid rocket boosters.
• 21:21
  They have insanely high thrust levels, but they are sort of just like you light this thing and it's not turning off until it runs out of fuel.
• 21:30
  It is just a powerhouse of thrust.
• 21:34
  It's a bomb with one end pointed at the ground.
• 21:36
  It's not good to have around people.
• 21:38
  Uh, they, they are very, there's been many solid rocket motor incidents over the years.
• 21:42
  They are reliable and we use them for missiles, but they're not comfortable to ride on.
• 21:47
  They're very rough.
• 21:47
  They, they shake a lot.
• 21:49
  They're just not, not a great technology, but anyway, those would peel off and, uh, they would recover the cases of those, the metal metallic, in some cases, composite cases of those.
• 21:58
  They would pull them out of the ocean, refill them with fuel to be used on later flights.
• 22:02
  The orange tank in the middle was just fuel and that would get burnt up in the atmosphere and just the shuttle part would come back.
• 22:08
  So the Atlas V, the other vehicle that the ULA was flying, did use those solid rocket motors as well, but otherwise a pretty traditional two-stage vehicle.
• 22:17
  It's got one big first stage, that falls off, crashes into the ocean, becomes debris and artificial reef.
• 22:22
  Upper stage goes and does a lot of the work, gets you to orbit.
• 22:25
  But yeah, no reusability or anything like that.
• 22:27
  It was purely flying things to low-Earth orbit, to geostationary orbit.
• 22:32
  Those vehicles did a lot of a lot of the missions out to Mars.
• 22:36
  So any of the rovers you're thinking of probably flew on a ULA vehicle.
• 22:39
  Amazing vehicles, just, you know, astoundingly expensive.
• 22:43
  The, you know, we're talking on the order of 150 million to 350 million dollars a pop.
• 22:50
  And that's a launch.
• 22:52
  Per launch.
• 22:53
  Jesus.
• 22:54
  I mean, and that's like today when they've kind of, you know, had years to bring their prices down.
• 23:00
  I think they were probably a lot higher when it was murkier back in the day.
• 23:03
  SpaceX, they started selling Falcon 9 about $60 million.
• 23:07
  They fly now probably $70, $80 million, $90 million if you've got the right kind of mission where they've got to do other work that's not just the launch.
• 23:15
  But the crazy thing, Josh...
• 23:17
  is the boosters that land that you're talking about, right?
• 23:19
  The Falcon 9 boosters come back and land.
• 23:21
  They recover that part.
• 23:22
  They recover the payload fairing, the little nose cone that pops off of the, that's surrounding the satellite that goes on its way up to launch.
• 23:29
  They recover that as well.
• 23:30
  The only piece they don't recover is the upper stage, which is a tank and a single engine, not a huge tank and nine engines and a lot of fancy stuff that comes back to the first stage.
• 23:38
  A smaller tank, one engine.
• 23:39
  That's the only part they don't recover.
• 23:41
  So their internal cost to fly this vehicle
• 23:45
  from all reporting, internal reporting, now they're public, so we've got a little bit more data, is about $15 million.
• 23:51
  And they can sell these for $60 to $80 million.
• 23:54
  So not only have they nailed the production line on this thing, they have flown this thing hundreds of times and landed them over 600 times.
• 24:03
  Those boosters have come back down and landed.
• 24:05
  The shuttle launched 135 times.
• 24:08
  They've launched more than that last year of the Falcon 9.
• 24:11
  The rate at which they've picked up and the capability of that rocket and the reusability of it has been, has totally changed the face of the industry completely.
• 24:20
  I mean, $15 million to put a satellite into space, like that's very cheap, right?
• 24:25
  For them, that's exactly the point.
• 24:27
  Even for any, well, yes, you mean the cost isn't that for the end user.
• 24:30
  No, I'm saying they're the ones.
• 24:31
  Yeah, yeah, they're the ones.
• 24:31
  Exactly.
• 24:32
  But I mean, like...
• 24:34
  I know rich people who probably spend that on their private jets each year.
• 24:38
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 24:40
  So it's not just silly money the way that hundreds of millions of dollars is per journey.
• 24:44
  And just so that I can understand this and so the listener can visualize it, the bit that ends up landing...
• 24:51
  is the bit that in previous iterations would have fallen into the ocean and had to go out and be recovered and checked for... Or mostly not.
• 25:00
  Or not.
• 25:01
  Yeah, or not.
• 25:02
  But it's basically fuel.
• 25:04
  And when it goes up the first time, there's an additional...
• 25:08
  So the satellite is on top.
• 25:10
  Satellite is a tiny little thing on the top.
• 25:12
  And are we launching multiple satellites at once on these?
• 25:16
  Sometimes.
• 25:16
  Sometimes.
• 25:17
  Yeah.
• 25:18
  I mean, many times.
• 25:18
  I would say more often than not, they're launching, you know, stacks of satellites.
• 25:22
  When they launch a Starlink mission, they're launching 20, 24 satellites at a time.
• 25:26
  They used to launch 60.
• 25:26
  So you've got your little stack of satellites on top.
• 25:29
  I'm saying little.
• 25:30
  This is like, you're like city bus size payload on top, even if you've got a bunch of satellites up there.
• 25:34
  It's huge.
• 25:35
  Enormous.
• 25:36
  Yes.
• 25:37
  But each of the satellites, you mean the totality of the 20 satellites fits into a bus size.
• 25:42
  Think about like a bus.
• 25:43
  That's, I can lift a bus.
• 25:46
  And so the bus is on, and those satellites, what are they encased in?
• 25:50
  What is the bus?
• 25:51
  Or are they just, like, how are they tethered together on the nose of this thing?
• 25:55
  It depends what they're launching.
• 25:56
  So if they're launching Starlink satellites, they kind of have this deployment mechanism that will release all of them at one time.
• 26:02
  If it's something called a rideshare, where it's many different companies that have launched satellites on board, each of them will be packaged in a deployer that once they get to space, will either use springs or pneumatics or explosives in some cases and push these away from the vehicle.
• 26:15
  If it's just one big satellite, like might be a spy satellite or a huge communication satellite for radio broadcast or military or civil intelligence kind of stuff,
• 26:26
  those will just have one big deployment ring on the bottom very standardized piece of equipment with enough thrust to push that away from the vehicle so the upper stage can either dispose itself or go to a different drop-off point yeah so the upper stage so the the bit that that lands when is that when does that detach from the rest of the payload in the upper stage so that it can come back and do its fancy uh landing like an upright uh pogo stick
• 26:51
  In the SpaceX case, it's about two and a half minutes.
• 26:54
  Other ones, we'll talk about Blue Origin.
• 26:55
  Others, roughly around that same time, probably talking two to three minutes.
• 26:59
  How high is that?
• 27:01
  Shoot, you're pushing my knowledge now.
• 27:03
  60, 70 kilometers, I would say.
• 27:05
  Okay, pretty high.
• 27:05
  Pretty close.
• 27:06
  I mean, in many cases, when that detaches and the upper stage keeps going, the upward trajectory of that first stage will take it briefly into space before it comes back.
• 27:15
  Yeah, yeah.
• 27:16
  And for people's context, like a passenger aircraft is like 10 kilometers.
• 27:21
  And so 60 or 70 is...
• 27:24
  Thank you for doing the math because I only do kilometers when it's space.
• 27:27
  Yes.
• 27:27
  So I'm useless to load about 60 or 70.
• 27:30
  33,000 feet is 10 kilometers.
• 27:31
  So that's about the cruising altitude of a passenger aircraft.
• 27:35
  So the, and then the bit... Now, I want to mention one thing though on that.
• 27:39
  Yes.
• 27:40
  Height doesn't matter as much as people think it does.
• 27:42
  Speed matters a lot.
• 27:44
  So to get to space, you do have to go high, but to get to orbit, you have to go really fast.
• 27:50
  Uh, and the first stage contributes very little in the way of speed.
• 27:54
  Uh, its job is to get you a little bit of momentum and up out a lot of the atmosphere.
• 28:00
  That's really it.
• 28:01
  So recovering at first stage, I'm laying the groundwork here for where we're going with Starship.
• 28:05
  Recovering the first stage, very easy.
• 28:07
  You know, I can't do it, but relative speaking, very easy.
• 28:12
  Yeah.
• 28:12
  Yeah.
• 28:12
  You can figure it out.
• 28:13
  You can, well, you get focus modes nailed down and then you'll get the first stage recovery.
• 28:16
  Man, between me and my brick, we've got this sorted.
• 28:20
  Okay, so the second stage then is the one that gives it velocity?
• 28:23
  Is that?
• 28:24
  Exactly.
• 28:24
  Yeah.
• 28:25
  So you think about taking off the launch pad, you're going pretty much vertical.
• 28:29
  And you'll notice if you go to a launch, number one, if people listening and Josh, you if you have not been to a launch yet, my God, should you find your way to a dying?
• 28:36
  I'm dying to go.
• 28:38
  Yeah, you gotta go.
• 28:39
  It's unbelievable.
• 28:41
  But you'll notice pretty quickly after liftoff, this thing will start to pitch downrange away from you and start going more horizontal.
• 28:49
  But that upper stage is going almost entirely horizontal by the time that it gets firing.
• 28:54
  And that contributes, you know, it changes on every launch vehicle, what configuration it's like, but that contributes a huge majority of the initial orbital velocity.
• 29:02
  And then once it gets to space, it might do two or three other maneuvers to put your satellite where you want it, right?
• 29:08
  You might want to launch to an initial orbit that gets you...
• 29:11
  into space and into orbit, but then boost up again to go to geostationary orbit or in the case of these mega constellations to talk about, they might be eight or 900 kilometers up.
• 29:21
  So they, that upper stage is more of like a spacecraft of its own that continues to operate for hours and hours and places these satellites where they need to go.
• 29:28
  And in most cases, then deorbits back to earth to be burnt up in the atmosphere.
• 29:32
  Okay, yes, you're sort of preempting my follow-up question to the bus thing, which was like if you've got a whole bunch of different satellites and presumably they need to be placed in certain places, do the satellites themselves have any propulsion or control or is it the job of the second stage thruster to go around dropping off like a school bus, dropping kids off at each house, like to drop each satellite where it's supposed to be?
• 29:58
  Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
• 30:00
  Everything alike, and even one crazier thing, where you might have the upper stage that's doing multiple deployments, where it's going first stops at, you know, 400 kilometers LEO, then we're going to boost up and go to 600 kilometer orbit and drop a couple more off there.
• 30:12
  The satellites themselves might have their own propulsion to be maneuvering around.
• 30:16
  Now, they're going to only be able to do
• 30:18
  Not in every case, but in most cases, the propulsion that they have on board is more for like attitude control, pointing where they want to point, where they want to look at, maybe a little bit of altitude management.
• 30:29
  But then there's other things that will actually sort of take you that last mile, last mile delivery, where it's a smaller spacecraft than the upper stage, but it kind of operates the same way, where it can do multiple burns, can do very complex maneuvers, has a huge amount of...
• 30:44
  Delta V is the terminology that we use, which is how much it can change your velocity.
• 30:48
  That's the fuel gauge on a spacecraft because you're going, you know, 25,000 kilometers an hour at low Earth orbit.
• 30:56
  And to get anywhere else in space, you got to spend energy to change your speed, right?
• 31:00
  And you got to go...
• 31:02
  That's a whole other...
• 31:03
  I don't even want to do orbital mechanics.
• 31:05
  I think we got so many other things to talk about.
• 31:07
  Go play Kerbal Space Program if you want to know how orbital mechanics...
• 31:10
  Okay, fabulous.
• 31:10
  But what you're saying is that sometimes the satellite itself will have propulsion, which is more than just a little nudge
• 31:18
  for itself.
• 31:19
  It'll have an additional thing, which will get it to go somewhere.
• 31:22
  And just to remind people, the point of orbit, as you sort of alluded to this, but it's worth spelling out, is not that you're just going up and then just randomly dropping something and that you're so far away from planet Earth that Earth's gravitational pull is not pulling things back.
• 31:38
  It's a very fine needle to thread where you have to kind of shoot the thing
• 31:42
  at such an angle that it's about to escape the Earth's gravitational pull, but doesn't quite, and so sort of drops, continues falling around the edge of the Earth indefinitely, which is what gives the sensation of weightlessness.
• 31:57
  But you're still well and truly within Earth's gravitational pull, all of which is to say, you need to sort of get it right.
• 32:03
  It is threading a needle.
• 32:04
  It's
• 32:06
  Exactly.
• 32:07
  And the orbit that you choose depends on your mission.
• 32:09
  So if you're trying to do, if you've got a spy satellite and you want to fly over a certain part of Earth, you've got to be in the right kind of orbit.
• 32:15
  If you are Starlink and you want to transmit internet to certain parts of Earth, you've got to be in that particular orbit.
• 32:20
  So if you're a weather satellite, you want to be at geostationary orbit, which you can be, as the name implies, totally stationary over an area of the Earth and do, you know, wide area research or sensing.
• 32:32
  Yes, and just to clarify for people, geostationary doesn't mean that the satellite is stationary.
• 32:37
  It means that it's moving at the same rate that the thing that it's above is moving.
• 32:42
  There you go.
• 32:43
  That's stationary relative to the Earth, if you want to get Einsteinian about it.
• 32:47
  Yes, exactly.
• 32:48
  That's right.
• 32:48
  You mentioned a couple of things, Starship and LEO.
• 32:52
  Yeah.
• 32:52
  Please explain.
• 32:54
  LEO is just low Earth orbit.
• 32:55
  Sorry.
• 32:56
  That's the orbits that are probably...
• 33:00
  100 kilometers to 600 kilometers.
• 33:04
  I don't know.
• 33:04
  We don't really have a good definition for when Leo stops, but probably 100 to 600 kilometers.
• 33:08
  Starship is the next generation version of the SpaceX vehicle.
• 33:12
  So I mentioned first stages being somewhat easy to get back.
• 33:16
  The upper stage is really hard to get back because you are going, as we're talking about here, incredibly fast.
• 33:21
  When you're going that fast and you meet the atmosphere, what that means is you get incredibly hot, which means that you melt and break up and burn up and you can't come back and reuse the vehicle.
• 33:30
  So you need a heat shield and you need a lot of other systems in place to be able to not only have a heat shield that gets you back through the atmosphere, but is able to guide you to a particular point to come in for a landing.
• 33:42
  And in the case of SpaceX, you might have seen the tower that they have in Texas that catches the booster vehicle.
• 33:47
  Eventually, they're going to be catching the ship.
• 33:49
  that comes back from orbit.
• 33:50
  So this is their idea to have a fully reusable vehicle.
• 33:53
  Not only is that first stage going to be reused, but the upper stage entirely is going to be reused as well.
• 33:58
  No piece of this architecture will be burnt up in the atmosphere.
• 34:02
  All they need to do, all they need to do, is fill this back up with an absolutely enormous amount of fuel, which is a whole other conversation to have too.
• 34:10
  The scale of this thing is staggering.
• 34:12
  And when you talk about catching that, so the big...
• 34:16
  The big, gigantic, you know, blast me up and give me some height, sort of slow lumbering bomb needle that comes back down and gets caught.
• 34:26
  That's one thing.
• 34:27
  The little top bit that's firing off like a bullet with a bunch of satellites on the end of it that goes shooting through outer space, they're now trying to have, instead of having that burn up in the atmosphere, they're trying to have that come down.
• 34:40
  Will that have...
• 34:41
  anything aerodynamic on it, like wings that would resemble the old shuttle to enable it to navigate where it's going to go?
• 34:48
  Or how do you, if not, then how do you slow it down and get it to come back to the baseball mitt that you're trying to catch it in so it doesn't land on the... Nice, thank you for the Americanism.
• 34:57
  Yeah, you're welcome.
• 34:58
  Yeah, I feel so confident.
• 34:59
  So it doesn't land on the steps of Kazakhstan with the...
• 35:03
  Unless you want it to.
• 35:04
  Unless you want it to.
• 35:05
  Yeah.
• 35:06
  Yeah, if you look up...
• 35:08
  I should just...
• 35:09
  I have like a little...
• 35:10
  It's a Hot Wheels model of Starship.
• 35:11
  I feel like I should go grab.
• 35:13
  You'll get major shuttle vibes if you look at Starship.
• 35:16
  I think that sometimes uses criticism, sometimes used in a good way.
• 35:20
  They don't have wings in the same exact way as the shuttle.
• 35:23
  They have four wings, if you will, that actually can all move and actuate.
• 35:28
  The shuttle wings were fixed like an airplane and they had ailerons on the back that would move.
• 35:32
  Like if you're watching an airliner wing and you see yourself coming in for landing, you see things moving back there.
• 35:37
  That's how the shuttle worked.
• 35:38
  In this case, the entire wing surface moves.
• 35:40
  They have two up on the top near the pointy part.
• 35:43
  They have two on the bottom.
• 35:45
  And those are used not only for stability on the way back in to guide themselves, but they have to do this tremendous flip maneuver.
• 35:53
  at the end of a landing for Starship, where they're coming back with the heat side shield down, belly first, and they have to land with the rocket engine side down.
• 36:02
  So they do this kind of crazy-looking flip thing, and the wings are heavily involved in that, where some wings will track, some wings will flip out, it will provide a little bit of a movement arm.
• 36:12
  You mean they have to go from sort of being horizontal to the Earth to vertical, right?
• 36:17
  Exactly.
• 36:18
  Why do I have to land like a rocket like that?
• 36:20
  Why can't you put some wheels on it and have it land the way the space shuttle did?
• 36:24
  So that is an option, but it requires you to be able to fly like an airplane at the end.
• 36:30
  And what that means is a ton of mass for wings that can fly like an airplane, a totally different lifting environment so that you need to be able to generate enough lift to overcome all of your drag.
• 36:40
  So you very quickly become less performant in that way.
• 36:44
  So the concept is we already have these rocket engines on the vehicle.
• 36:47
  Why don't we also use those to land?
• 36:49
  Because the space shuttle, after eight and a half minutes, the...
• 36:52
  Most incredible rocket engine up to the point of Raptor now, which is the engine on Starship.
• 36:57
  The space shuttle main engine was one of the most incredible engines that had ever been developed.
• 37:02
  It was, I mean, it was reused so many times on so many different shuttle flights.
• 37:06
  We're still flying them, but they are tremendously expensive, which is a whole nother thing.
• 37:10
  But they were only used for eight and a half minutes.
• 37:11
  And then they were just, you know, dead weight in the back that would come back and land like an airplane.
• 37:15
  They were not used on reentry.
• 37:17
  So this not only would these engines on Starship be able to be used to navigate to and through space, you can also then use them for landing.
• 37:24
  And most importantly, Starship was designed to also be a Mars lander.
• 37:30
  And there are no runways on Mars.
• 37:32
  There is not enough atmosphere to fly like an airplane.
• 37:34
  So that's what you say.
• 37:35
  That is a dead end.
• 37:36
  Wait till we get there and see the alien runways.
• 37:38
  So the shuttle, you say that the shuttle engine was not used on reentry.
• 37:43
  Does that mean that the shuttle was just like gliding?
• 37:46
  What, did it have propulsion?
• 37:49
  What if it had to do a go around?
• 37:53
  You're getting dodged.
• 37:53
  Yeah.
• 37:54
  Yeah, the shuttle, if you dig deep enough, Josh, you will find the shuttle was not the safest vehicle for a human to fly in.
• 38:02
  Pretty rough track record.
• 38:03
  So get the landing right the first time because you have no ability to blast off again.
• 38:07
  Otherwise, you're just going to crash into a building.
• 38:09
  The shuttle flew in what would be referred to something that is on your fridge, which is a brick.
• 38:14
  That is what people refer to it as.
• 38:15
  It was flying only barely.
• 38:17
  It was...
• 38:20
  It was like one of those early evolutions of a bat or something where it doesn't quite have... Well, like with those little marsupials that have webbed armpits, yeah.
• 38:33
  And they can basically just leap out of a tree and they don't fall quite as fast as they otherwise would.
• 38:37
  That's it.
• 38:38
  That's the shuttle.
• 38:40
  Okay, great.
• 38:41
  So once we can, so now that you've segued us into landing on Mars, why don't we just jump straight there?
• 38:47
  What is the long-term
• 38:50
  goal here of the starship assuming that we get it to land properly how far away when does elon think this is going to happen by the way the ship catch um so the the launch that just happened flight 13 went really well uh the ship it's actually being towed uh you know in your neck of the woods uh it's it's being towed to port now uh it landed in the ocean intact
• 39:11
  which was awesome.
• 39:13
  And it sounds like the next flight, they're actually going to go fully to orbit with the ship.
• 39:17
  And if they get everything approved from a trajectory perspective, there are some hurdles there.
• 39:22
  But it sounds like even on the next flight, they might actually attempt a ship catch, which would be... And when you say a ship catch, and you said in my neck of the woods, because this happened in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.
• 39:32
  But what do you mean a ship catch?
• 39:34
  Are you talking about the spaceship?
• 39:37
  Are you talking about the... Like if it's coming down in the ocean, what's happening to it?
• 39:41
  No, it's not coming down the ocean anymore.
• 39:42
  It's coming down on the southern tip of Texas, where those boosters launch from and get caught with the two arms.
• 39:47
  Those same arms will catch the Starship portion of the vehicle.
• 39:51
  I mean, that's what Elon says, but what was going on in the Indian Ocean?
• 39:54
  So the flights up till now of Starship, the boosters were able to go back and land in their area in Texas.
• 40:02
  Some of them have been caught.
• 40:03
  Some of them they were testing new versions of, so they didn't fly all the way back to land.
• 40:06
  But the ship itself...
• 40:07
  because they were still testing all these systems, getting things verified, making sure it's safe to fly such a large object.
• 40:13
  Because the Starship, just to reiterate, is absolutely enormous.
• 40:17
  The proportions we were talking about before with the upper stage being small, relatively small compared to the first stage is not true with Starship.
• 40:23
  The Starship portion and the booster portion are much closer in size.
• 40:26
  I mean, they are absolutely, this thing is, you know,
• 40:31
  sorry for the American this is over like 400 feet tall at this point it is absolutely enormous 130 meters tall okay so it's a sky I mean that's a skyscraper height
• 40:40
  Yeah, and in Oris.
• 40:42
  So to bring that thing all the way to orbit and then re-enter the atmosphere and come back to a landing site on the south tip of Texas means that you're re-entering over populated areas, sparsely, but populated areas.
• 40:56
  Some of that being Mexico, not a country that SpaceX is licensed out of, so it's gonna get a little hairy.
• 41:02
  But all these flights up until now have been suborbital.
• 41:04
  So they would launch to a trajectory that put the ship on course to land in the Indian Ocean.
• 41:09
  And that way they could test whatever they could test.
• 41:11
  If everything broke, it would still burn up and crash where nobody is.
• 41:13
  And it was a safe way to test the vehicle.
• 41:15
  A bunch of Australian surfers.
• 41:17
  Nobody cares.
• 41:17
  You've gotten hit by our space debris so many times.
• 41:20
  We think we're convinced you love us for it.
• 41:23
  Yes.
• 41:23
  Where can we put it that we care the least about Australia?
• 41:29
  Just off the coast.
• 41:32
  So have they been trying to do the pivot and turn it around and turn it from the aerodynamic airplane horizontal thing into the stand-up-y rocket thing and then land it on the water?
• 41:45
  In the Indian Ocean?
• 41:46
  Is that the point?
• 41:47
  They have, and every time that they've made it to that part of flight, they've absolutely nailed it.
• 41:51
  Wow.
• 41:52
  And even before that, in the pandemic era, 2020 to 21, they were doing very low altitude testing of the same thing in Texas.
• 42:03
  They would fly up to 20 kilometers, and then they would come back down and actually land on the landing pad.
• 42:07
  Just the ship part would fly up and fly back down.
• 42:09
  So they've done that maneuver quite a bit.
• 42:11
  And that's what gives them confidence.
• 42:12
  Up till now, they were testing new heat shields, different types of attachments.
• 42:16
  They were testing their engines, being able to relight in space reliably and put them where they needed to go.
• 42:21
  Because you've got to be very precise to fly this thing back, you know, and get caught by two little chopstick arms when you're coming back in from 25,000 kilometers an hour, you know, 200 kilometers up.
• 42:30
  Right.
• 42:31
  And just out of interest, when it lands in the Indian Ocean with no little chopstick arms to catch it, do they just let it get wet and then they fish it out of the water and dry it off?
• 42:39
  What happens?
• 42:39
  This is the first time that that's happened.
• 42:41
  Every other time they've soft landed and then when it tipped over, it just exploded.
• 42:45
  They've had video of this thing as well, thanks to Starlink.
• 42:48
  But they've all blown up.
• 42:49
  And this one landed nice and soft and is now still intact being towed back.
• 42:54
  So not going to necessarily use this one.
• 42:56
  In the water.
• 42:57
  Nice and soft in the water.
• 42:58
  I mean, that's a huge thing.
• 43:00
  How many of you landed in the water?
• 43:02
  No, I'm not saying it's a bad thing.
• 43:03
  I'm just saying that it's problematic if you don't want your rocket to be wet.
• 43:10
  To be clear, we're in bonus territory.
• 43:11
  This is amazing that they got this back and they're able to go and look at the heat shield after a flight is absolutely amazing.
• 43:17
  Because before, they would do maneuvers to try to get a little bit of video of the heat shield to see how did it make it.
• 43:23
  They would do a little pirouette to just make sure they got it on camera before it blew up.
• 43:27
  They have it fully intact.
• 43:27
  They've been flying drones over this thing.
• 43:29
  They've been doing close-up inspections and they're towing it back.
• 43:31
  So this one won't be reused.
• 43:32
  I'm sure it will go, if it makes it, it'll be a nice lawn ornament somewhere, but they're gonna be inspecting this thing to understand, do we have the right heat shield to be able to use this thing as much as we want?
• 43:42
  Because the idea here is to go from very bespoke launches, the 90s, the 2000s that we were talking about, those were launching a couple of times a year, very expensive endeavors.
• 43:52
  The goal of Starship is to be able to fly like airplane operations.
• 43:56
  You know, lands, gets refueled, gets restacked, gets reflown.
• 43:59
  Now, we're a ways off from that.
• 44:01
  But we're talking about a system that is so many magnitudes closer to that than we were before that it boggles the mind that we've got here.
• 44:10
  Yeah.
• 44:11
  Well, I mean, it sounds to the layperson like we're almost there.
• 44:13
  You've got the big fat rocket booster thing that goes up and comes down and gets caught.
• 44:17
  Yeah.
• 44:18
  And now you've got the slightly smaller thing that goes up and flies really fast and places things in orbit and comes whooshing back down with its heat shield and then turns upright and hopefully gets caught.
• 44:29
  And then, well, that's your thing right there.
• 44:32
  I mean, there's your two pieces of your launcher.
• 44:37
  And so then to move on to living in outer space and like, you know, the moon base to slingshot things to Mars and all that kind of stuff.
• 44:46
  is the idea that once we're habituated to using this system to get things into space, and it's a proven track record of being able to be caught by the metaphorical baseball and go back up and down and up and down, then you send that thing to Mars and it can land on Mars the same way in its little upright pirouette.
• 45:06
  How does it get there?
• 45:07
  Does it need to go via the moon?
• 45:09
  Does it carry people on it?
• 45:10
  What's the story?
• 45:12
  The other part of the architecture that we haven't talked about yet is the idea of in-space refueling of these vehicles.
• 45:19
  So when you have a fleet of starships and you're able to do these operations in such a way that you can launch this many starships, it also means you can put a starship up and you have hardware on there that supports transferring fuel from one to the other.
• 45:32
  And what that does is it totally changes the kinds of missions you can take on because...
• 45:37
  you end up in orbit, think about how much work it takes to get to orbit.
• 45:41
  You're using almost all of your fuel to get there.
• 45:44
  The efficiency measure of a launch vehicle is mass fraction.
• 45:47
  How much of the mass that you have when you're on the launch pad actually makes it to orbit and is useful?
• 45:52
  We're talking like single-digit percentages.
• 45:54
  And if you get high single digits, you're like blowing walls of physics off the walls.
• 46:00
  But when you can get a vehicle as large as Starship up to orbit and then refuel it entirely,
• 46:06
  you can go so many other places in the solar system with an absolutely enormous amount of payload that we have never been able to do before.
• 46:13
  So the idea is to be able to fly this vehicle so much
• 46:16
  and deploy so many things in space, that you also have such a production line and a reusability line that you have enough vehicles to be able to top up propellant in this way and fly off to Mars with full fuel tanks.
• 46:28
  And you can fly to the moon, you can fly to Mars with this vehicle.
• 46:32
  You know, it doesn't, again, doesn't need to land like an airplane.
• 46:34
  You can't do that on the moon.
• 46:35
  There's no atmosphere.
• 46:36
  So landing with rocket engines is a really good idea.
• 46:38
  So the architecture is portable in that way, that it works on Earth, which means it works really well everywhere else because of this kind of mechanism.
• 46:46
  Um, so that, that in-space refueling part, once they've solved the heat shield, the recovery that we're talking about now, that's their big challenge coming up is to prove out that they can do this refueling and that unlocks what they want to do with Starship, which is to go and do, you know, set up moon bases, set up Mars bases.
• 47:02
  Okay, so let me pause on that.
• 47:04
  The refueling and the fleet.
• 47:06
  You said once you've got a fleet of starships.
• 47:08
  Where are your starships?
• 47:09
  Are you saying that there would be starships which are resting in orbit in order to be refueled?
• 47:15
  I'm still a bit confused about the math on how if it takes a certain amount of fuel to get the starship up there in the first place, then how are you carrying extra fuel up to refuel the starships that are up there?
• 47:27
  without burning it off to get the one that you're putting up there.
• 47:31
  You're onto it, man.
• 47:32
  You're here.
• 47:32
  You're here with us.
• 47:33
  Isn't there a...
• 47:34
  It's like lifting yourself up by your bootstraps.
• 47:36
  How are you...
• 47:36
  It is, yeah.
• 47:37
  So some of those starships... Why don't you make the whole plane out of the black box, is your question.
• 47:42
  Right.
• 47:43
  Yeah, make the whole airplane out of the black box.
• 47:46
  Yes.
• 47:47
  So some of those starships, there's probably going to be, and all this I should mention is like what we think based on what SpaceX has said, but all of this is subject to change.
• 47:56
  There's probably going to be a fuel depot variant of Starship that is much longer and has insulation and can maintain that fuel.
• 48:04
  Because by the way, this fuel is like,
• 48:05
  you know, negative a whole shitload of degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius.
• 48:09
  It doesn't matter.
• 48:09
  It's like super cold.
• 48:11
  So maintaining that temperature in space, you might think space is cold.
• 48:14
  It is, but it's also much more complicated than that.
• 48:18
  So it's tough to keep things that cold.
• 48:19
  So they're probably going to have a special variant of Starship that just holds fuel.
• 48:23
  and other vehicles that are just launching fuel.
• 48:25
  They might launch some payload and then with their leftover fuel that they don't need for landing, head over and top up that fuel depot.
• 48:32
  But some of the best things that I've heard in the last year or so from people involved in that program and others that need it are to think about it a lot less like you launched the important starship and then launch a bunch of starships to fill that one up, but that every starship launch would probably send a little bit of fuel over to the depot and it's a gas station.
• 48:50
  When you need it, you get there, you fill up and you go where you need to go.
• 48:53
  Got it.
• 48:54
  Got it.
• 48:54
  And so that would essentially just be a giant tanker, which is in orbit.
• 48:58
  Exactly.
• 48:59
  Yeah.
• 48:59
  And it's very well insulated.
• 49:00
  What if your gas station was a tanker truck that you drove up to and also, you know, it can still drive itself as well.
• 49:04
  Yes, I see.
• 49:05
  And that is as yet hypothetical?
• 49:09
  Do we know plans of what such a tanker would be?
• 49:12
  They've shown some designs of it.
• 49:14
  But SpaceX, the way they work is that they tackle the next thing in front of them, and they have a general roadmap for where they're going.
• 49:21
  But they are very flexible in those farther out details because they like to fly their way through these problems.
• 49:25
  They don't sit on the drawing board for 20 years and then come up with, I've got it.
• 49:29
  This is the idea.
• 49:29
  They fly, they fly, they fly.
• 49:31
  Build the plane while you're flying it, so to speak.
• 49:35
  And just to clarify, when you say space is cold, but it's not easy to keep things cold in space, is that because sunlight shines on it and there's no atmosphere to diffuse the sunlight and so it makes things hot?
• 49:49
  Exactly.
• 49:50
  We should get to it now because we'll talk about it with data centers as well.
• 49:53
  But yeah, there's no sound in space.
• 49:56
  That's because there's nothing to carry the sound in space.
• 49:58
  So there's nothing to carry heat away from an object.
• 50:02
  So the shady side of the moon is very cold because there is no sunlight and you are radiating all of your heat away to black body areas.
• 50:11
  When you're in sunlight, it's very hard to reject heat.
• 50:15
  Uh, you know, if you have a vehicle big enough, you, there is a large shaded portion of your vehicle that is going to be very cold, uh, and you can radiate heat away there, but rate managing your, your heat load is, is really one of the critical things that people outside the industry never think of, but it's really important.
• 50:29
  Um, you know, it's really important.
• 50:30
  Even for something like a, you know, when you're in orbit of the moon, the moon itself is really hot on that daytime side.
• 50:36
  So you're getting blasted with sunlight, blasted with moonlight, and it is an incredibly hot environment.
• 50:42
  And it could be that all the time based on where your orbit is.
• 50:45
  So it's a massive engineering challenge, and it takes a lot of mass to fix that.
• 50:50
  The radiators are very big and expensive and heavy.
• 50:53
  So in my naive brain, I'm just like, well, you would just get a lot of asbestos or like roof cladding.
• 50:59
  and you would put it up there, yeah.
• 51:01
  You would put the insulation, we'd need insulation bats like you put in the roof.
• 51:06
  So like no physical material is capable of blocking that heat.
• 51:11
  You need whiz-bang like
• 51:15
  stuff yeah it's there's systems you know radiator systems are much like um you probably have a circulating uh refrigerant that is kind of out on one side of the vehicle circulates through over the other side of the vehicle back out and radiators i don't know if you've got them down there on the other side of the earth but we've got them here that's how they work right they take cold from the outside and bring it inside or hot from the outside to refrigerate things
• 51:39
  Yes, and that's right.
• 51:41
  It's a problem if the thing that you're refrigerating is an energy depot.
• 51:45
  Exactly.
• 51:46
  And not only that, but you have to launch all of it from Earth.
• 51:49
  So the more complexity you add to vehicle, the more mass that you need.
• 51:51
  Here's where the really gnarly part gets.
• 51:53
  The more mass you add, the more rocket fuel you need.
• 51:55
  You added rocket fuel.
• 51:56
  You need more rocket fuel.
• 51:58
  So this is the tyranny of the rocket equation is that the more stuff you add, the more stuff you need.
• 52:02
  You can't really escape that at a certain point.
• 52:04
  So that's why space is so hard.
• 52:05
  I've got an idea.
• 52:06
  I think I've got an idea.
• 52:09
  Instead of putting the tanker side on, you just point it
• 52:14
  You point it towards the sun and you give it a pointy nose with mirrors on it and that way none of the sunlight and you give it a little umbrella around the side of the nose just to shade it and then you don't have any direct sunlight hitting it because it's pointing at it instead of being side on.
• 52:30
  I mean this is kind of how some of these things work in space.
• 52:33
  You're getting it.
• 52:34
  You're doing it.
• 52:34
  You're doing the first principles perspective.
• 52:36
  Okay.
• 52:37
  So, and just- This is still your show, right?
• 52:40
  We've lost all of your listeners at this point.
• 52:42
  Going back to the starship.
• 52:43
  Who's show is this?
• 52:45
  This is a, I have enough nerds that will indulge me in my curiosity.
• 52:51
  I just feel like you've been tricked is all I feel like.
• 52:53
  So, yeah.
• 52:55
  I thought we were talking about focus mode on phones.
• 52:59
  So the starships are going to be, are they always going to be operating as shuttles, essentially, in order to, by which I mean, to ferry things?
• 53:08
  Or do the star, in other words, moving things around to and from?
• 53:13
  Or are there any starships that are fixed or that are either sitting in orbit or, you know, waiting for a queue?
• 53:21
  I think one of the things you'll find with Starship is the answer is always going to be yes, because SpaceX is like, we'll do anything with this thing.
• 53:25
  You know, the idea is modularity.
• 53:27
  So I think one of the best examples might be a lunar lander version that they're working on for NASA.
• 53:33
  That one does not have the little wings that we talked about.
• 53:36
  That's never coming back into the atmosphere.
• 53:38
  It is built for the moon.
• 53:39
  It's painted white.
• 53:40
  It looks totally different.
• 53:41
  Doesn't have a heat shield.
• 53:41
  Doesn't need it.
• 53:42
  Has little landing engines up at the top, we think, that might be used to land on the surface of the moon because you don't want to kick up
• 53:48
  Moon dust, it's very dangerous, whole other topic.
• 53:51
  So that version might just go down to the lunar surface, come back up to orbit, be refueled and be reused again.
• 53:56
  And that might stay there forever.
• 53:57
  The tanker variant probably would stay in its location forever.
• 54:02
  The ones that might fly up and down quite a bit are ones that carry satellites.
• 54:05
  So they have specialized doors to deploy whatever they're deploying.
• 54:09
  In some cases, right now, they're these little tiny doors that only fit out a Starlink payload.
• 54:14
  In the future, they might have bigger doors that could fit out
• 54:17
  space telescopes or huge payloads.
• 54:19
  That one will fly a lot.
• 54:21
  The smaller tankers that are taking fuel to and from probably would fly quite a bit.
• 54:25
  And there's going to be at some point in its future, we're talking a thousand launches away from where we sit today, probably a version that carries people up and down.
• 54:33
  And that would be a cabin that can carry a ton of people, whereas the lander version that they're building for NASA has a couple of seats, you know, a couple astronauts, but they also have a lot of other areas for an airlock where they might take big payloads out to the lunar surface.
• 54:49
  different storage kind of configurations and experiment configurations that they need to do nasa missions you don't need that when you're thinking about you know taking 100 people launching them flying in the space station and kind of think of it as like an airliner flight right you're going to be jammed in thin line seats we're going to be bitching about the leg room that's you know 10 000 star starship launches away uh but that's right but what you're saying is that the the bones of that
• 55:12
  are there and that it's highly adaptable once you've got the bones in the same way.
• 55:17
  I mean, maybe not exactly the same way, but to a lay idiot like me, you know, if I think about a 747 or something like that, you know, there's a million different things that you could do with it once Boeing had perfected the design.
• 55:29
  You could sell it to a Saudi Arabian Sheikh who could fit the whole thing out with, you know, gold and
• 55:35
  four-poster beds.
• 55:37
  You can shove it full of economy-class seats for low-cost flights between Pakistan and Mecca.
• 55:43
  You can put the first class upstairs, and each airline can choose what it wants to do with the thing, but once you've got it, the world is sort of your oyster.
• 55:52
  Is that somewhat the same way, hopefully, with the Starship?
• 55:54
  You can either take a bunch of people, you can take a bunch of fuel, you can reconfigure it for this, you can reconfigure it for that, you can have a version that lands on the moon.
• 56:01
  By the way, why is moon dust dangerous?
• 56:03
  Yeah.
• 56:04
  Uh, it's, it's kind of like little tiny shards of glass.
• 56:07
  Uh, and it gets everywhere and it sticks to you.
• 56:09
  And if it gets inside the vehicle and you breathe it, we think it would be very hurt.
• 56:13
  It would hurt a lot and it would probably kill you eventually.
• 56:15
  What do you mean we think?
• 56:16
  Are you saying that we never went to the moon?
• 56:18
  I'm pretty sure those guys got back on the moon.
• 56:19
  Well, I don't think we breathed in enough.
• 56:20
  They, they did.
• 56:20
  Well, so that's one of the things is like, they got some of it in the lander and they were like, this stuff is horrible.
• 56:24
  Um, cause they didn't, you know, and then they're out on the lunar surface.
• 56:27
  They kind of have that sense, but you don't really know what that is until we got it back on the earth.
• 56:30
  We look at it and we're like, holy
• 56:33
  Right.
• 56:34
  Yeah, but we didn't clean our shoes when we came back in.
• 56:38
  Like, you know, everything was giving us cancer at that point.
• 56:40
  We didn't know.
• 56:41
  Now we got microplastics, so it's a whole other thing.
• 56:43
  Yeah, don't get me started on the asbestos that I'm sending up to give the fuel cold.
• 56:49
  And, okay, so then I had originally thought that I had heard that the Mars settlement mission, which really has always been Elon's main game.
• 56:58
  I mean, you'll go back to videos from 30 years ago talking about how really what he wants to do is put people on Mars and we have to become an interplanetary species.
• 57:05
  Yeah.
• 57:06
  I thought that a precondition for that under the current planning was that you'd create a base on the moon and you'd need that base to supply or slingshot or something or other.
• 57:15
  Mars, you're just saying we go there, just go straight to Mars?
• 57:18
  Yeah, I mean, this has been a debate for longer than I've been alive of like, do you need the moon to go to Mars?
• 57:23
  I think the best argument is that the moon is really close.
• 57:27
  It is three days away, not several months.
• 57:30
  It's so close, man.
• 57:31
  It's so close.
• 57:32
  It's right there.
• 57:33
  It's frustratingly close.
• 57:35
  You never just go outside and go like, damn, people went to that?
• 57:38
  Yeah, but I think it's a long way away.
• 57:41
  I think that's quite far.
• 57:43
  You can see it.
• 57:43
  You can see the surface, right?
• 57:44
  That's the thing.
• 57:45
  So I feel like we're drifting back towards your kind of show topic.
• 57:49
  We're getting a little more cosmic on this.
• 57:52
  Yeah, right.
• 57:53
  The stone guy is trying to figure out how the relative size of...
• 57:57
  But hang on.
• 57:58
  Put this in perspective because I'll bet you know these kinds of stats.
• 58:00
  How far away is the moon?
• 58:01
  400,000 kilometers.
• 58:04
  400,000 kilometers.
• 58:06
  And the Earth is about 20,000 kilometers around.
• 58:13
  I think it has a half a circumference.
• 58:15
  Because it's 25,000 miles.
• 58:18
  And I told you, my kilometer stops at 60 up, so you're going to have to do the math on that one.
• 58:23
  But what's 25,000 miles?
• 58:24
  Circumference of the Earth, right?
• 58:26
  Yes, so I was saying it's about 20,000, sorry, to go halfway.
• 58:29
  So the half of the circumference is 3,000, so 40,000.
• 58:32
  So that'd be about right.
• 58:34
  So it's about 40,000.
• 58:37
  What does that make the diameter?
• 58:39
  Jono, what's the diameter of the Earth at the radius?
• 58:42
  And so, but either way, it's going to be, is it about a thousand?
• 58:46
  A couple of thousand.
• 58:46
  A couple of thousand.
• 58:48
  Okay, Earth's diameter is 12,000.
• 58:49
  Come on, man, 12,000.
• 58:54
  kilometers.
• 58:54
  That sounds right.
• 58:55
  If it's 20,000, if it's 40,000 around.
• 58:57
  So it's about 13,000 and you're saying the moon is 400,000.
• 59:02
  So the moon is about 30-ish widths of the earth away.
• 59:07
  You're right.
• 59:08
  That's not that far, is it?
• 59:09
  So close.
• 59:10
  It's about 30, if you put 30 planet earths next to each other-ish.
• 59:15
  then you get to the moon, which is about a quarter the size of the Earth.
• 59:19
  Now tell me about Mars.
• 59:21
  Well, so Mars, it's not, again, it's not about distance, because Mars is going to be annoying to tell you how far away it is, because sometimes it's really close and sometimes it's really far away.
• 59:29
  It goes around the other side of the sun sometimes, right?
• 59:31
  The moon's always with us.
• 59:32
  Mars is not always with us.
• 59:34
  So it's not about just absolute distance.
• 59:36
  But at its closest...
• 59:37
  I want to visualize this.
• 59:39
  40, oh God, man, you're making me pull stuff out of my pocket.
• 59:41
  I don't know, 40, I don't know, kilometers.
• 59:44
  Yeah, come on.
• 59:45
  Put some work into this.
• 59:46
  You already got me on the show, Jono, come on.
• 59:48
  Yeah, no, Jono's going to look it up.
• 59:50
  Okay, so anyway, you're about to complain about the planetary orbital fact that Mars moves independently of us.
• 1:00:00
  That's annoying, and it's more about the time that it takes to get there and how frequently you can get there.
• 1:00:07
  So the moon takes three days to fly there once you're in flight, and you can get there...
• 1:00:12
  as frequently as you want if you put it in the right spot.
• 1:00:15
  If you put it in a really weird spot of the moon, at worst, you're getting there once a month because of how orbits work.
• 1:00:21
  Mars, you've got every 26 months, you've got a chance to fly to Mars on an efficient trajectory.
• 1:00:26
  And you either got to fly there and do your business quick and fly home, or you got to wait two years pretty much to have another chance.
• 1:00:32
  I see.
• 1:00:32
  No, no, like another 18 months at Mars to even fly back.
• 1:00:37
  So your mission turns into a three or four year mission.
• 1:00:39
  Yeah, got it.
• 1:00:41
  It's 55 million kilometers away.
• 1:00:43
  I was going to say 40.
• 1:00:44
  So I wasn't that bad.
• 1:00:45
  55, well, 40 would be close to miles, right?
• 1:00:48
  Or they're like, uh, that's probably 40 miles.
• 1:00:50
  That's probably why somebody had 40 million miles.
• 1:00:53
  Uh, so 55 million kilometers.
• 1:00:55
  And so it's 230 million.
• 1:01:00
  Oh, so that's the, that's the closest approach is 55 million.
• 1:01:03
  The average is, is that 320, uh,
• 1:01:08
  So it's a long way away in comparison to the moon being, what was it, 4,000?
• 1:01:14
  4,000 versus 55 million.
• 1:01:16
  40,000.
• 1:01:18
  400,000.
• 1:01:18
  What did we say?
• 1:01:19
  We're doing too many numbers.
• 1:01:21
  Yeah, my brain is... Let me drag us back to why that matters.
• 1:01:23
  It's 100 times... Mars at its closest is 100 times further away than the moon, which is about 30 times away the diameter of the Earth.
• 1:01:34
  The thing that matters the most, though, is that we can fly to the moon frequently, which means that we can get a lot of practice there.
• 1:01:40
  We can get a lot of practice not only with the hardware that we need to fly there, with the crew operations that we need to have.
• 1:01:45
  Because right now, you know, with the exception of the Apollo missions, humans have always been a couple of hours away from Earth when they're in space.
• 1:01:53
  So if something goes wrong, they can just fly home.
• 1:01:56
  When you're independent, you do need to have autonomy and not only command of the mission, but medical situations, things that break, you need spare parts.
• 1:02:04
  There's a lot of logistics that go into being detached from the Earth.
• 1:02:08
  And the moon gives us really easy access to be able to get really good at those things.
• 1:02:12
  The reason that Falcon 9 is so good is that it's flown 600 times.
• 1:02:16
  If they've flown it 12 times, it would not nearly be as good as they have it now because they've got so much practice.
• 1:02:22
  So I think the best argument is that for needing the moon to go to Mars is that you need that time.
• 1:02:27
  You need that buildup of experience to do Mars.
• 1:02:29
  There's nothing about... Get your 10,000 hours of expertise in before you try going somewhere where you're going to get flung around the other side of the sun before you can get home.
• 1:02:38
  But there's no magic orbital.
• 1:02:40
  We know that Matt Damon is exceptional, but you don't want to be in that position if you can avoid it.
• 1:02:45
  There's nothing magical about going to the moon that makes it easier to go to Mars.
• 1:02:50
  People that talk like that are hiding the ball.
• 1:02:53
  If they ever tell you something like that, there's, you know, an extra stop is going to cost you fuel.
• 1:02:57
  So it's actually worse in that way.
• 1:03:00
  Now, if you've done all this practice and you have a moon base set up and you're able to produce propellant there and you're getting a refueling stop at the moon,
• 1:03:06
  now we're talking but if you're just going there to you know grab a sandwich on your way out that's a waste of time okay i want to talk about constellations of satellites and the future of communications and also what the hell china is doing but uh before we leave this i feel like you should just say the word artemis and oh yeah i should tell us what and and maybe we should give blue origin a look in here because we've been pretty elon heavy but who are the other players
• 1:03:29
  Yeah, so Artemis is the program that NASA is flying to fly back to the moon, set up a moon base.
• 1:03:35
  The goals have changed over the years quite a bit.
• 1:03:38
  The idea now is that we're doing it in a way that brings in, much like I talked about with the ISS program, bringing in commercial companies, private companies to fly cargo and crew to the space station, bringing in private companies that have an interest in flying to the moon also to build landers, to build small landers or large human landers, take cargo or people to the moon and build,
• 1:03:57
  companies that might have different interests than NASA, but see a business case there.
• 1:04:01
  What would those interests be?
• 1:04:03
  A lot of these cases, you know, in the case of Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos has a strong desire to move industry off of Earth, to set up manufacturing elsewhere to keep Earth a national park.
• 1:04:12
  This is something he's talked about a lot.
• 1:04:13
  I think it kind of changed over the years what the message has been at Blue Origin, which is a main problem of Blue Origin is that they've had a little bit of a focus issue.
• 1:04:21
  But one of the things that he's keen on is infrastructure should move off of Earth and we should develop, you know, the area around Earth to benefit Earth.
• 1:04:30
  Um, so that might be the case.
• 1:04:32
  Explain this to me because this brings us a little bit to Elon's data center thing.
• 1:04:35
  We've been talking, the whole gist of the conversation we've had so far is how fucking expensive and difficult it is to get shit into space and back.
• 1:04:45
  It requires massive amounts of fuel, ridiculous amounts of technology.
• 1:04:49
  In order to get one bus-sized container of satellites up, you need, like, a skyscraper standing on top of a skyscraper full of fuel that are doing pirouettes in the sky and then getting caught by little –
• 1:05:03
  Why would you be doing more in space than you absolutely need to?
• 1:05:07
  Why are you like, well, we have a factory on Earth.
• 1:05:10
  Let's put it on the moon.
• 1:05:11
  We have a data center in Texas.
• 1:05:13
  Let's put it in orbit.
• 1:05:15
  What am I missing about why they think that's the most parsimonious solution?
• 1:05:21
  Nothing in the near term.
• 1:05:22
  I think if you start super long term thinking, it turns the corner for you.
• 1:05:28
  I mean, an easy example would be that we have this phrase called rare earth minerals, or if you're Trump, raw earth minerals.
• 1:05:36
  They're not called rare minerals.
• 1:05:38
  They're called rare earth minerals.
• 1:05:41
  People don't even call them minerals anymore.
• 1:05:42
  They just call them rare earths.
• 1:05:44
  We call them rare earths in Australia.
• 1:05:46
  No, we do.
• 1:05:47
  We do.
• 1:05:47
  We just drop the mineral.
• 1:05:48
  You don't call them like rare earthos?
• 1:05:50
  Yeah, rare earthos.
• 1:05:53
  Yeah, we got a few of those in Australia as well.
• 1:05:57
  So the idea is that space has a lot of resources that can be harvested if you're able to fly there.
• 1:06:03
  Right.
• 1:06:03
  And the idea is when you go out and harvest an asteroid, that's going to piss off a lot less people than when you go and you dig up a big hole in their country and, you know, make a mess and it's very dirty, pollutes.
• 1:06:15
  And it's just not.
• 1:06:17
  It's not an endless supply here on Earth.
• 1:06:19
  So at some point, right, if you're in, I'm kind of like a humanist, inevitable, inevitableist guy, right, that I see a big part of why I'm interested in space, I believe, is that I have this general sense that the point of life is to just expand what you're capable of, both personally and as humanity.
• 1:06:38
  Like that is the goal of every other species on Earth.
• 1:06:41
  They will live on every little area that they can possibly find a pocket.
• 1:06:44
  They will crawl down to the volcanic vents in the ocean and live there.
• 1:06:49
  Did you ever watch that series Blue Planet?
• 1:06:53
  Yeah.
• 1:06:54
  Blue Planet 2.
• 1:06:54
  There's this episode called The Deep.
• 1:06:56
  Watch that episode.
• 1:06:57
  There are like brine lakes at the bottom of the ocean where it's like a lake in the ocean.
• 1:07:03
  Shit lives there.
• 1:07:03
  Shit lives everywhere possible on earth.
• 1:07:06
  And I kind of see that as just like the forcing mechanism of the universe that that is everybody's goal is to expand and live places and do interesting things when you get there.
• 1:07:17
  So if you have that mindset
• 1:07:19
  we are running out of stuff on earth at some point uh so we need to develop the technologies to go beyond earth if we want to survive the heat death of the sun and eventually the heat death of the universe but wait i feel like you you've dodged my question uh you know i'm just trying to get you anchored to this long-term thinking for a minute you've given three great uh like reasons that have nothing to do with uh putting factories or data centers in space you've given you've given me the um
• 1:07:47
  We may need minerals that we don't want to dig up on Earth.
• 1:07:50
  Great.
• 1:07:51
  Okay.
• 1:07:51
  Well, if there are minerals on an asteroid, let's go get them.
• 1:07:53
  I'm all for that.
• 1:07:53
  If you want to mine something on the moon, be my guest.
• 1:07:56
  You're given the humankind, you know, is the exemplar of life expanding into all the nooks and crannies of the cosmos.
• 1:08:04
  I'm on board with that one as well.
• 1:08:05
  You're talking to a card-carrying member of the Mars Society when I was 19 years old.
• 1:08:09
  hell yeah man fully signed up yes why not just explore and people are like but we could spend that money on poor people at home and I'm like you can always spend that money on other shit but come on it's cool but I'm on board with that and then you're like you know maybe humankind is just gonna have to if we eventually want to escape the heat death of the sun then we're gonna have to be an interplanetary species I think maybe that's a little bit more far-fetched because it's quite a long time that's not far-fetched it's gonna happen that's the thing right it's not far-fetched it's happening we might die before then
• 1:08:39
  Maybe we won't.
• 1:08:40
  Yeah.
• 1:08:40
  No, my point is that...
• 1:08:41
  If we don't die before then, then we will.
• 1:08:42
  But hang on, but I'm still... Yeah, you're saying how do the near-term stuff.
• 1:08:46
  I don't know, but I'm specifically focused on... We're not talking about...
• 1:08:50
  They're not talking about things that are only obtainable, you know, practically from space.
• 1:08:56
  They're talking about things that are very, very easy to do on planet Earth...
• 1:09:01
  being better off being done in space, like just running a bunch of computers that are crunching AI tokens or like manufacturing something.
• 1:09:13
  How do you get to the cost asymptote where it actually becomes... What is changing in the fact that... Yeah, because you're still going to need a ton of fuel to put this in size.
• 1:09:25
  And the fully reusable approach is going to help a lot in that.
• 1:09:28
  That's the idea, is that that changes the economics quite a bit, and it unlocks business cases that then unlock more business cases.
• 1:09:35
  And that's what I'm talking about with this.
• 1:09:36
  The reason I went long-term on you is that if you are in on that,
• 1:09:40
  then your responsibility now in the year 2026 is to find what is the next thing that moves that needle along?
• 1:09:47
  What is the next business model that expands my capability to operate in this way and drags humanity in that direction?
• 1:09:54
  Because if you just start with, I'm going to go, I mean, mine asteroids is a thing that probably is nearer term than we realize, but if you start with something super audacious, you're going to go out of business immediately.
• 1:10:04
  You have to maintain your ability to operate.
• 1:10:06
  You have to, you know, these are enormous budgets.
• 1:10:08
  You know, there's a reason that SpaceX is now public and trying to be the biggest company on Earth because they need to be to be able to do the things that they want to do is a forcing mechanism that way.
• 1:10:18
  So growing your capability set is actually the most responsible thing that people can do in this year if that's what they're interested in long term.
• 1:10:26
  You've got to find something that works with today's world, that gives you enough of a way to make money that you can continue operations and also grow the kind of economic sphere of humans in that way.
• 1:10:37
  Yeah, no, that makes total sense.
• 1:10:39
  It still doesn't quite answer the question of whether or not the idea of putting data centers in space is...
• 1:10:45
  I'm going to, we're going to dive into that.
• 1:10:48
  Give me like 10 minutes on that one at some point, but I feel like we should save that one for the, for the end.
• 1:10:53
  Cause that's a whole, can you give me the short version?
• 1:10:55
  Is the point that solar power is cheaper than energy on earth?
• 1:10:57
  So let's do it.
• 1:10:58
  Let's do it.
• 1:10:58
  Let's go.
• 1:10:59
  Now again, remember where we started this conversation?
• 1:11:00
  I write code for a living.
• 1:11:01
  I am fricking bought in on this stuff.
• 1:11:03
  Like I am, I am living the industrial revolution and I'm talking about space and all the other times where I'm not living the industrial revolution.
• 1:11:09
  So you do not find a more activated man in this department than me.
• 1:11:13
  Uh, I assume that's why you brought me on.
• 1:11:14
  I have no idea why you brought me on.
• 1:11:16
  Solid.
• 1:11:17
  Absolutely solid.
• 1:11:17
  Because I love space and I like we we basically check in with some nerd.
• 1:11:21
  I would say about every seven or eight months, right?
• 1:11:23
  I'm here.
• 1:11:24
  Next time iOS comes out, bring me on.
• 1:11:25
  I'll tell you all the settings.
• 1:11:26
  Fabulous.
• 1:11:27
  Fabulous.
• 1:11:28
  So but just the data center.
• 1:11:29
  The abridged version.
• 1:11:30
  of the data center.
• 1:11:31
  All right, here's the best argument that myself, my co-host Jake on Off Nominal has had a great rundown of this that I'm stealing from him, credit to Jake.
• 1:11:39
  So if you look at Earth data centers, what do you need to make those possible?
• 1:11:43
  You need a big plot of land, you need solar panels and chips, you need governmental approval, you need utilities, you need a lot of things that are outside of your control and getting more expensive.
• 1:11:54
  Yeah.
• 1:11:54
  What do you need to do data centers in space?
• 1:11:56
  You need solar panels and chips.
• 1:11:57
  So those are equal on both sides.
• 1:11:59
  And what you're left with in space is satellite buses, launch vehicles, logistics to get things up and down from space.
• 1:12:06
  You need orbital regimes to operate in.
• 1:12:09
  You need the ability to produce solar panels that are really well operating.
• 1:12:13
  You need all these things that SpaceX has control of.
• 1:12:15
  I'm just using SpaceX as an example here.
• 1:12:17
  They have control over that entire stack and they are making those things cheaper.
• 1:12:21
  So you can debate water usage or token cost or whatever.
• 1:12:26
  But when you look at the basic economics there, that the things that they need on Earth are hard to get and getting more expensive and the things they need to operate these in space, they control and are getting less expensive.
• 1:12:36
  At some point, that line crosses over.
• 1:12:38
  I think it crosses over even a lot sooner when you have a huge public response to building out data centers.
• 1:12:44
  And anywhere it's being built out right now, it's the talk of town.
• 1:12:48
  I live just outside of Philadelphia.
• 1:12:49
  There's one being put in in South Jersey.
• 1:12:51
  I think I understand it now.
• 1:12:52
  I think I understand it now.
• 1:12:53
  I mean, so what the basic argument is not an engineering argument.
• 1:12:57
  It's actually a sociological argument about like, it's an insurance policy against normies being dickheads and making life too difficult for people who want to do audacious things.
• 1:13:10
  With a little side note of if we are expanding humanity into the universe, we're also going to need computers there.
• 1:13:17
  So, like, computers are...
• 1:13:18
  Everywhere we put computers, much like life in the Blue Planet 2 series, everywhere we put computers, they've been really fucking useful.
• 1:13:23
  And we just want more of them.
• 1:13:24
  We want better ones.
• 1:13:25
  Right.
• 1:13:25
  Okay.
• 1:13:26
  I think that clarifies it for me because what we're not...
• 1:13:30
  There is still a universe, a parallel universe, in which it's cheaper to run the data center on planet Earth.
• 1:13:37
  But the precondition for that scenario is that everybody is on board with our glorious AI future and governments are nimble and supportive and legal systems are agile and well-functioning and water rights are well-secured.
• 1:13:55
  So all of those things being in dispute...
• 1:13:59
  space starts looking like an option but then then we're really talking about it as more like a kind of libertarian island in the atlantic ocean yeah sealand is back baby yeah sealand is back john galt is uh you know is creating his a and randy and a universe in outer space okay um so are we done with artemis and is that is that enough on
• 1:14:19
  Let me elevator pitch you Artemis.
• 1:14:21
  Just because, again, Artemis 2 flew around the moon earlier this year.
• 1:14:25
  People went around the fucking moon.
• 1:14:26
  It was amazing.
• 1:14:27
  It was awesome.
• 1:14:28
  Christina Cook is an Eagles fan and a listener of mine, so go birds.
• 1:14:33
  They were awesome.
• 1:14:34
  Uh, so Artemis was, had a, had a kind of weird start, troubled start, uh, coming out of the shuttle program.
• 1:14:40
  You'll notice the, the rocket that they're using, SLS, looks a lot like the space shuttle, because it's the fucking space shuttle.
• 1:14:45
  It's all the same parts.
• 1:14:45
  It was written into law by Congress.
• 1:14:46
  SLS stands for what?
• 1:14:48
  Space Launch System.
• 1:14:49
  Super inspiring.
• 1:14:50
  Okay.
• 1:14:50
  Right.
• 1:14:50
  Brutal.
• 1:14:51
  It was written in the law.
• 1:14:52
  Elon and Jeff Bezos.
• 1:14:53
  Yeah, they need some branding.
• 1:14:54
  Yeah.
• 1:14:56
  Written in the law in the late aughts that when the shuttle was retired, they had to use all the parts.
• 1:15:01
  Came up this rocket.
• 1:15:02
  We spent so much money on it.
• 1:15:04
  It is so over budget.
• 1:15:04
  It's so behind.
• 1:15:05
  It's kind of a terrible rocket.
• 1:15:07
  In the last few years, the program has been rebranded Artemis, Apollo's sister.
• 1:15:13
  Meant to kind of reflect what we're trying to do.
• 1:15:15
  Yeah.
• 1:15:17
  And then they brought in this new architecture that relies a lot more on private companies that have a lot of momentum, have a lot of interesting technology development in place, and really show a better future for what the space industry could do than the old model that we're using shuttle contractors that don't really have interest in expanding much beyond the basically military-industrial complex.
• 1:15:37
  New NASA administrator.
• 1:15:38
  Sorry to interrupt, but just to clarify, Artemis, I didn't realize this is, you're schooling me on Greek mythology here.
• 1:15:43
  So Artemis was Apollo's sister.
• 1:15:45
  Twin sister.
• 1:15:45
  Or twin or something.
• 1:15:46
  Okay.
• 1:15:47
  And the object of Artemis, the NASA program, that is, not the Greek myth,
• 1:15:51
  was to go back to the moon or was Mars involved in... What did they say Artemis was for?
• 1:15:59
  It's changed over the years.
• 1:16:00
  So every time it's a new administration, we have a little bit of a different spin on it.
• 1:16:03
  But yeah, right now it is centered around building a moon base, having an actual piece of infrastructure there that can operate like the ISS, maybe not permanently habited, but close to it.
• 1:16:15
  So definitely setting down and not only trying to build a moon base, but doing it in a way where...
• 1:16:21
  we're reusing components so the budget stays a lot cheaper so we don't get canceled like the Apollo program in the... Yeah.
• 1:16:27
  And I mean, this is where the sort of note of skepticism will enter the minds, especially of non-American audiences who maybe are familiar with American presidents making audacious claims about something that they're going to do.
• 1:16:39
  And then it just sort of gets quietly dropped before the next state of the union.
• 1:16:42
  How much of Artemis is like
• 1:16:46
  signed, sealed, and basically delivered and would need to be proactively reversed, and how much of it is, here's what we'd like to do, ish.
• 1:16:55
  It's a shocking amount of signed.
• 1:16:59
  Before the current administrator of NASA was put in, there was a huge push and pull around which of these directions we were going to take.
• 1:17:06
  Is this SLS program that is billions of dollars over budget and years late and the ire of all space nerds?
• 1:17:13
  You know, that that was pretty firmly implanted in the program.
• 1:17:17
  And the other things were kind of just nibbling around the edges for a billion dollars here and there and really still had a strong hold on the space policy ecosystem.
• 1:17:26
  We have all been shocked.
• 1:17:27
  This NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, has come in and got political support from places that we would never have expected it.
• 1:17:33
  People that were huge defenders of the old way of doing things have been.
• 1:17:36
  come around and seen his way of doing things and have really changed in the last couple of years.
• 1:17:40
  They've been getting money in these reconciliation bills to be now reprogrammed.
• 1:17:45
  And some of the things that I hated most about the architecture, waste of money, space stations around the moon have been canceled and are completely off the map at this point.
• 1:17:54
  And that money being redirected to places that actually do help us like additional funding for landers and things that actually make sense.
• 1:18:02
  So the program is really
• 1:18:03
  crystallizing into something that is coherent, still has problems, still has things that we all want to see done better, but is a lot more coherent than it was two or three years ago and has an incredible amount of political support.
• 1:18:14
  Why has he been so effective in garnering political support?
• 1:18:16
  People might remember that I did an episode about him when he was first appointed.
• 1:18:22
  He's a Trump appointment.
• 1:18:23
  He's an independent guy.
• 1:18:25
  He's a multimillionaire in his own right.
• 1:18:27
  He's a space hobbyist who's been out into space.
• 1:18:30
  He's a full-on...
• 1:18:32
  right tech bro billionaire nerd yeah trump guy and probably embodies the best of the instinct of disruptive trumpism and probably is like what you know trump the trump ideology wishes all of the trumpy people who trump has appointed to things would actually be like in the kind of you know wet dreams of self-made men
• 1:18:55
  Although there was a hot minute there where he was not a Trump boy.
• 1:18:58
  So he got nominated.
• 1:18:59
  Like everybody, he was ousted.
• 1:19:01
  Yeah, he was ousted after finding out that he really wasn't that much of a Trump guy.
• 1:19:05
  He was donating to both political parties.
• 1:19:06
  That pisses off Trump.
• 1:19:08
  Something else happened.
• 1:19:09
  I'm convinced that we don't really know behind the scenes, but his nomination got pulled.
• 1:19:12
  Um, and in that time it was dark days for the space, uh, nerds out here.
• 1:19:18
  It was, it was real bleak at that time.
• 1:19:20
  Everyone was leaving NASA.
• 1:19:21
  Things were getting canceled.
• 1:19:22
  The guy that the Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary was running NASA like a shit show.
• 1:19:27
  It was a mess.
• 1:19:28
  Um, and I, I do have to say that there are, there have to be many Republican congressmen and women that need to be thankful that Jared Isaacman made his way back to be the head of NASA, because I feel like this dude is a political shark and he was starting to think about running for some office.
• 1:19:44
  Um.
• 1:19:44
  and instead kept the ear of the president, made his way to one of those dinners with all the tech guys.
• 1:19:50
  All of a sudden, it reemerged that he was going to be re-nominated for the position, and came in and went on an absolute storm of arranging politics across the aisle.
• 1:20:00
  Space policy is one of those weird, somewhat bipartisan things where they disagree about certain topics party to party, but...
• 1:20:07
  the general direction is pretty well agreed upon.
• 1:20:10
  So he lined up support that we've never seen a person be this effective in this role and get things done that felt undoable three years ago.
• 1:20:19
  Like canceling some of these programs that he's canceled, that everybody in the outside was like, we got to cancel this thing, felt impossible.
• 1:20:26
  And it was depressing to think about it for too long, that we would spend 10 or $20 billion on a thing that clearly was going nowhere.
• 1:20:32
  And in a couple of months, not only did he get that thing kind of, that roadblock cleared,
• 1:20:37
  got a bunch of other money that now can be reapplied elsewhere.
• 1:20:39
  So I really do think he is just a political animal that is incredibly smart and effective at what he applies his energy to.
• 1:20:45
  And, you know, the eye of Sauron was momentarily on running for some seat in Congress.
• 1:20:51
  And whoever that was needs to be thankful that this guy did not get that chance.
• 1:20:54
  I mean, may have been one of the reasons why Trump let him back in.
• 1:20:57
  Probably, right?
• 1:20:58
  Because he might have gotten a tap on the shoulder from some congresspeople being like, you should probably keep him inside the tent.
• 1:21:04
  And he's incredibly pragmatic.
• 1:21:06
  I think he's not an ideological guy, you know, on space takes or political takes, it seems to me, that he is very pragmatic.
• 1:21:13
  So I could see if he and I would not count out that he does make his way to the political scene beyond NASA.
• 1:21:18
  So I could see him being one of those roles that everybody drives everyone nuts where he's voting this way and voting that way because he's extremely pragmatic.
• 1:21:27
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:21:27
  And so if you were a betting man, does the NASA Artemis mission end up like actually building something on the moon, which is inhabited?
• 1:21:37
  Yeah.
• 1:21:38
  I think it's got it going right now.
• 1:21:40
  Not on the timeline that they say.
• 1:21:41
  It's definitely that we're in a rough spot right now from Starship being sluggish based on what their projections were.
• 1:21:48
  Blue Origin that we talked about, they blew up their launch pad four months ago.
• 1:21:51
  So that's a big problem.
• 1:21:53
  It's going better than I would have thought.
• 1:21:55
  You know, everything that we're hearing sounds like they actually might fly again late year, early next year, which is amazing for having, you know, detonated a launch pad that we were measuring.
• 1:22:05
  How does this compare to Hiroshima?
• 1:22:07
  It was enormous.
• 1:22:08
  Wow.
• 1:22:10
  So there's some problems in the near term, but I do think with this political support, with the budgets that they've got lined up in this direction and some of the sensibility coming into the architecture, I am pretty hopeful that we're going to see something come together.
• 1:22:23
  And not only that, I think the Artemis II moment we had earlier this year, I don't know what your experience was, you know, not enveloped in the industry like I was and also having a five-year-old that was enthralled with this.
• 1:22:35
  It was one of the most fun 10-day stretches of my life.
• 1:22:37
  I had the live stream on all day.
• 1:22:39
  It was amazing.
• 1:22:39
  It definitely cut through.
• 1:22:41
  I didn't have the live stream on every day, but I mean, I would definitely sat down with my eight-year-old twins and we were watching the, you know, as they were passing through the dark side of the moon and looking at the photos and stuff and then looking at them landing.
• 1:22:53
  Just when you mentioned the almost Hiroshima-sized explosion at Blue Origin,
• 1:23:00
  The economics of all this, Anthony, like the Elon Musk haters will often say, well, he might be the richest man in the world.
• 1:23:08
  But I mean, it's because he got all this state money from like, you know, green car subsidies and like NASA has been footing the bill for all of his crazy experiments, which I've always thought is a bit disingenuous because like NASA had a thing that they needed to do that they couldn't do.
• 1:23:21
  And so they paid someone who could do it to do it for them.
• 1:23:23
  It's not like they were giving him charity.
• 1:23:25
  It's like he produced a thing and they bought it.
• 1:23:28
  Yeah, they bought a thing, like free and fair.
• 1:23:32
  But when you talk about like the capacity of these companies to absorb the sorts of losses that Amazon has just had on its launch pad, what is the kind of breakdown of the money that they make?
• 1:23:46
  Like just to pivot back to SpaceX, the money that they make from NASA versus the money that they make from private space stuff.
• 1:23:55
  Do you know how that breaks down?
• 1:23:56
  Yeah.
• 1:23:57
  It's going to be a lot more complicated to tell you about SpaceX now because they are such a behemoth making most of their money not on the space side and certainly not on the launch side.
• 1:24:06
  Launch is not a good business.
• 1:24:08
  Every successful space company that you see in the market operating like a commercial company and not like just a straight government contractor.
• 1:24:15
  has launch, but they also have other stuff they do.
• 1:24:18
  That might be building satellites for other people, selling parts to people that are building satellites, operating Constellation.
• 1:24:24
  All of those things are amazingly valuable, and launch is really a tough business.
• 1:24:31
  But why is launch a tough business for SpaceX if the financials are what you said they were before, which is if it costs them 15 million bucks and they charge 70 million for a launch?
• 1:24:41
  there's not a big market yet at this point.
• 1:24:43
  The businesses that can afford to fly, you know, you mentioned this earlier, if you've got, you know, friends that fly on private jets, 15 million bucks, I'd love to hang out a little bit.
• 1:24:49
  But the businesses that can support buying satellite launches for 70, 80, 100 million dollars at a time
• 1:24:58
  There's not that many businesses.
• 1:24:59
  There's just not enough.
• 1:25:00
  Yeah.
• 1:25:01
  And then even aggregating those small university payloads or tech demos from small companies flying for a couple of million dollars or even if they've got a really tiny payload, a couple of thousand, tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars, the market is still pretty restricted.
• 1:25:17
  So when I'd say that SpaceX flies hundreds of times a year,
• 1:25:21
  An insane majority of those, you know, all but 20 are for Starlink, their own satellite constellation, which is an absolute money generator right now.
• 1:25:29
  SpaceX's revenue, you know, before merger and AI and X makes it all weird, their budgets were getting into the range, their revenue per year was getting in the range of the NASA budget.
• 1:25:39
  and actually probably surpassed it in their final year as a just space company.
• 1:25:44
  So just in terms of revenue...
• 1:25:46
  I'm just trying to get a sense of whether or not it's just the space side of things is actually profitable.
• 1:25:50
  It's profitable.
• 1:25:51
  If they've got these things landed in the Indian Ocean, they've got all these tests, they've got this, you know, each of those things is just hemorrhaging cash without... Yeah, none of that's profitable.
• 1:26:00
  ...coming back to it.
• 1:26:00
  So is that less expensive than the profits that they're raking in from their other space activities?
• 1:26:07
  Yeah.
• 1:26:07
  Yes, and all of the things that they hope to unlock with the data center business and some of this orbital deployment that they're talking about, that business model is unlocked with Starship.
• 1:26:19
  So it is, you know, CapEx that they're doing now to pay off then.
• 1:26:24
  Yes, it would not be a, I mean, it wouldn't be a knock on the company if they'd never been profitable.
• 1:26:29
  It's perfectly legitimate to run a company for decades at a loss if you think there's going to be a massive payoff at the end.
• 1:26:34
  I'm just curious about when that...
• 1:26:36
  That said, programs that they have for the US military, we don't know all the ins and outs of that because some of that is like black budget kind of stuff.
• 1:26:45
  But those programs are high budget programs that are reusing hardware that they're building for themselves.
• 1:26:52
  So they take a Starlink bus.
• 1:26:54
  They're going to probably integrate some other payloads from, you know, other defense contractors on that to fly for a U.S. spy agency of sorts.
• 1:27:02
  And they're launching, you know, 6, 10, 20 satellites at a time that are largely reusing satellites that they're building tens of thousands of.
• 1:27:10
  So they're getting economies to scale there.
• 1:27:12
  So there are definitely programs that are hugely profitable, but they are they are reinvesting so much in these next generation versions of their hardware that that's the kind of churn that they're on at the moment.
• 1:27:23
  Now, Blue Origin, totally different perspective.
• 1:27:25
  That is just Jeff Bezos spending money.
• 1:27:28
  Now he's starting to take on external investors.
• 1:27:30
  That's been a story in the last couple of months that they are going to raise some funding from other sources because he's done spending billions of dollars a year on it.
• 1:27:38
  They are a huge company.
• 1:27:40
  And it literally is just him spending billions of dollars because he wants this company to exist.
• 1:27:44
  He wants to seed this into the universe.
• 1:27:46
  You know, he's had some...
• 1:27:48
  benevolent billionaire kind of statements on this in the founding days of blue origin that like he built a business on infrastructure that existed before him and he has the resources and the interest to go and build infrastructure that could do that for the next generation and kind of pass it on you can determine whether you feel that from a jeff bezos perspective or not that's going to be a personal decision that everyone can make um
• 1:28:08
  But that's the idea on the forward side.
• 1:28:10
  He may be sincere, but, you know, the effective altruist in me does not think that that is the most direct and efficient way of contributing to the next generation of infrastructure.
• 1:28:20
  You know, but God bless him for it.
• 1:28:23
  Another company I want to call out just to take it down to the Southern Hemisphere for a minute is a company called Rocket Lab.
• 1:28:27
  Now they're an island away from me over at New Zealand, but they are a company who's been really interesting in the last 10 years.
• 1:28:34
  They operate much smaller vehicles than we're talking about.
• 1:28:37
  They do have a bigger launch vehicle in development that will launch from the U.S. as well.
• 1:28:42
  And they just bought a big satellite communications company.
• 1:28:46
  And they have been really prudent, really interesting and brilliant.
• 1:28:50
  I would kind of put them as like the second in running in the industry right now in terms of companies that seem to get it and seem to have it.
• 1:28:56
  Because SpaceX, I really should impress this lot of people.
• 1:28:58
  The reason they're dominating the conversation this much is not just because I'm an Elon Musk nerd.
• 1:29:02
  It is because they are such an extreme outlier in the space industry that it does not...
• 1:29:06
  I cannot explain this to you, how much of an outlier they are.
• 1:29:08
  They are so much better at the things that they do than the rest of the industry that it is...
• 1:29:13
  you know, sometimes causes great concern that like the whole thing is propped up because this company's figured it out and no one can figure out the mix that they have there.
• 1:29:22
  No one can figure it out.
• 1:29:24
  No one can recreate it.
• 1:29:25
  So anyway, Rocket Lab is doing great.
• 1:29:28
  I see them as a not peer, but I'm very interested in them doing well over the future.
• 1:29:34
  What is their strong suit?
• 1:29:37
  They have been...
• 1:29:38
  So they started with really small launch vehicles that could launch a couple hundred kilograms to space, dedicated launch for small satellites.
• 1:29:44
  They've expanded in the past couple of years, and they've also bought up a lot of really interesting companies that make satellite components, that make solar cells...
• 1:29:53
  And they are a huge supplier of, you know, I mentioned companies that do launch, but also a bunch of other stuff.
• 1:29:57
  They are the prime example.
• 1:29:58
  They make a little bit of money from launch.
• 1:29:59
  They make a ton of money from space services that's selling components to other people, star trackers so that satellites know where they are in space, reaction wheels, which is how satellites keep themselves oriented correctly.
• 1:30:11
  They have bought up a lot of different interesting suppliers that they relied on and have rolled that up into a really nice business.
• 1:30:18
  But they also execute really well.
• 1:30:20
  So they fly a lot.
• 1:30:21
  They now do a lot of suborbital launches for the U.S. military testing hypersonic things that we'll never find out about.
• 1:30:28
  And they just seem to be really gritty in that way where they can find interesting opportunities to jump on and also...
• 1:30:34
  actually do things a huge part of the space industry's past and present a lot of companies that talk that don't really do anything that don't deliver on the things that they sign up for and that's been you know huge budget items that the u.s government spend unbelievable amounts of money on things that just never came to fruition but also small companies that have a couple of photoshop renderings and then never actually do anything
• 1:30:55
  so just a few rise above that excellent uh and yes you mentioned services in space so this uh this brings us to constellations and like the internet and so on so obviously people will be familiar with elon musk's internet from space uh this is by no means the only attempt what is the like cast your mind 20 years into the future what
• 1:31:20
  how, what are services in space and how are they being delivered and how are we using them?
• 1:31:26
  In terms of constellations and communications, Amazon is now deploying their constellation.
• 1:31:31
  So that's called Amazon Leo.
• 1:31:32
  That was low earth orbit, as I mentioned before.
• 1:31:34
  They have a great brand.
• 1:31:36
  It used to be called Amazon Kuiper.
• 1:31:37
  So be thankful that- Okay, it's slightly better, but I mean, really about as bad as the- Wait until you look up how it's spelled, it was not better.
• 1:31:43
  SLS.
• 1:31:44
  Yeah.
• 1:31:45
  um so amazon is a really interesting entrant in this market uh and and to be clear amazon is different than blue origin this is a source of strife for the amazon leo department who has to buy satellite launches for again 80 90 100 million dollars a pop in some cases 120 30 million dollars a pop where spacex can fly a starlink set for 15 million dollars there's a big divergence there but amazon has what is us thinking there why doesn't he just donate blue origin so let me get to that in a second let me get to that in a second okay
• 1:32:12
  So Leo is an Amazon branded project.
• 1:32:17
  It is under the Amazon flagship.
• 1:32:18
  It is meant to be similar to Starlink in that it will provide services for, you know, large bandwidth, you know, high and low latency, high connectivity kind of environment.
• 1:32:30
  So, you know, you'll find it on airplanes and ships.
• 1:32:34
  There will be some personal terminals as well.
• 1:32:36
  I don't know how much of a,
• 1:32:38
  I don't know how well they'll do in the residential market compared to Starlink.
• 1:32:41
  But Amazon's interesting because, again, Amazon Web Services runs half the internet, pretty much.
• 1:32:46
  They are an enormous fixture in that.
• 1:32:49
  And I have to assume at some point... Who aren't fully looped in, Amazon Web Services is cloud data storage, basically.
• 1:32:56
  It's just a bazillion computers that other companies...
• 1:33:01
  pay to keep things on, including probably you if you have like, I don't know whether iCloud uses it.
• 1:33:07
  Half of the shit you use is on AWS.
• 1:33:08
  Yeah, if you've got a Samsung phone or something and, you know, it's saving things to the cloud, it's probably going to Amazon Web Services.
• 1:33:15
  Or a thing that wraps Amazon Web Services.
• 1:33:16
  It's huge.
• 1:33:17
  It literally is 50% of internet traffic ends up at an AWS.
• 1:33:20
  It was data centers before we all cared about data centers enough to be.
• 1:33:23
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:33:24
  But that's a thing that I want to call out because they haven't really weighed in on the orbital data center debate here.
• 1:33:30
  That's mysterious to me, and I don't feel like that will always be true.
• 1:33:35
  And there's a part of me that wonders, you know, is the race, can Starlink become AWS faster than AWS can become Starlink?
• 1:33:41
  That's kind of the... Can Starlink become AWS faster?
• 1:33:47
  faster than AWS can become Starlink.
• 1:33:50
  Yeah.
• 1:33:50
  So Starlink has an amazing communications network.
• 1:33:52
  There's over 10,000 satellites operating in space.
• 1:33:54
  Before Starlink started launching, there were 2,000 active satellites in space.
• 1:33:57
  They now operate more than 10,000 on their own.
• 1:34:01
  Incredible connectivity.
• 1:34:03
  Can also do things like... By the way, before I forget...
• 1:34:05
  While you're talking about all the satellites, the statistics are staggering about the number of satellites that are going up there every year.
• 1:34:11
  Like, every year there's more satellites that go up than the total satellites that have ever been put up there in the history of the universe or some shit like that.
• 1:34:18
  Close enough.
• 1:34:19
  Are we running out of space?
• 1:34:20
  I thought we were bumping into each other up there.
• 1:34:22
  Everyone's talking about how there's junk flying around and, like, you know, what's...
• 1:34:27
  It's not as scary as made to seem.
• 1:34:30
  There are certain areas that are congested and definitely things that are concerning, but I'll give you two things to ease your mind.
• 1:34:36
  Number one, imagine there were 15,000 cars on the surface of the Earth.
• 1:34:41
  How often would you see another car?
• 1:34:44
  Not very often.
• 1:34:45
  Not very often.
• 1:34:46
  And now imagine Earth is way fucking bigger than just the Earth is today, and there were 15,000 things on way fucking bigger Earth.
• 1:34:52
  How often would you see a car?
• 1:34:53
  Even less often.
• 1:34:55
  Why is this Earth way bigger?
• 1:34:56
  Because the circumference is larger.
• 1:34:58
  Because they're orbiting out at 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 800 kilometers up above us, all the way out to 35,000 miles.
• 1:35:06
  So where they are in space, they are very dispersed.
• 1:35:11
  There are also layers.
• 1:35:11
  There are layers.
• 1:35:13
  layers of it, different inclinations.
• 1:35:14
  There are certain areas that are really useful to us.
• 1:35:17
  So where all the weather satellites are is a really useful thing that we are very protective of.
• 1:35:21
  That's getting a little busy, but it's still not majorly concerning.
• 1:35:24
  The second more important point is that who do you think cares about keeping their orbit intact more, you or SpaceX who operates 10,000 satellites that are generating more than the NASA budget revenue per year?
• 1:35:36
  I mean, you don't know how much I care.
• 1:35:39
  That's true.
• 1:35:40
  I shouldn't get inside your head like that.
• 1:35:42
  But there is a massive incentive for the largest users of space to be responsible with it.
• 1:35:48
  This is a self-regulation argument, but I really mean it because if they screw this up, that orbit is not usable for decades.
• 1:35:54
  I'm not suggesting they're going to screw it up, but I remember when the Chinese just did a test and blew a satellite to smithereens, and all of a sudden there were 10,000 pieces of space junk.
• 1:36:02
  I don't think the Chinese Communist Party gives a shit about space tanks.
• 1:36:06
  No, they don't.
• 1:36:06
  In fact, yeah, I mean, them and the Russians, you can figure out who's got more battle plans for what do we do about Starlink and how do we take it out?
• 1:36:13
  That's definitely a thing.
• 1:36:15
  And that is a concern, but that's a bigger concern than what happens if two of these things run into each other.
• 1:36:21
  Yeah, okay.
• 1:36:21
  You know.
• 1:36:22
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:36:22
  Okay.
• 1:36:23
  So, and just on Amazon, just before we leave Amazon.
• 1:36:25
  Okay, so that makes a lot of sense to portray the kind of the war of the corporate titans that way.
• 1:36:30
  In other words, can Elon Musk's space company put enough data in space that it owns that?
• 1:36:38
  Or can Jeff Bezos's data company put enough satellites in space that it can put the data up there and own that?
• 1:36:48
  On the question of why Amazon is paying out of pocket for overpriced space launches when its owner is running this side hustle of blowing up things on the launch pad, why isn't he cross-subsidizing it?
• 1:37:02
  So that's a question that's getting weirder by the day, because now Blue Origin also has a couple of projects that feel like they would fit better over on the Amazon side of the world.
• 1:37:09
  They have announced a constellation that is meant more for business and government use cases.
• 1:37:14
  It's not going to be direct-to-consumer type internet.
• 1:37:17
  It is more supposed to be internet backbone, transport between data centers or internet nodes, like hard work and stuff that nobody's ever thought of before.
• 1:37:27
  Not like no one's ever thought of this, but you just don't think about this kind of stuff that exists out there.
• 1:37:32
  It's very much a project that all of us are like, why is this a Blue Origin thing and not an Amazon thing?
• 1:37:37
  It's called TerraWave.
• 1:37:38
  It's a weird name, too.
• 1:37:40
  There's a little part of my brain that's like, maybe they're trying to start a project that makes more sense when Amazon does acquire Blue Origin.
• 1:37:49
  And if Elon can do a mega merger and SpaceX buys X, who buys XAI and all this kind of shit, then I can do it, too.
• 1:37:54
  And Amazon will buy Blue Origin.
• 1:37:55
  Yeah.
• 1:37:56
  I mean, God help us, it would make so much more sense if this whole thing just happened right now.
• 1:38:00
  It would make the Amazon business case a lot easier.
• 1:38:04
  Now, that said, it would make it easier, but the launch vehicle that Blue Origin's flying does not fly 150 times a year.
• 1:38:10
  It has flown a handful of times and now has blown up on the launch pad once.
• 1:38:14
  And Blue Origin is not public, right?
• 1:38:16
  It's just his, Bezos just owns it.
• 1:38:18
  So it's not like there would be some, I'm just trying to rack my brain as to whether there might be like an SEC rule against one company like donating, you know, it could be considered anti-competitive or something if they gave Amazon a,
• 1:38:31
  a cheap thing, but that shouldn't apply.
• 1:38:32
  If anything, I think it would help the industry a lot because, again, SpaceX being the outlier is concerning because the flywheel that happens when they get all this in place is astounding.
• 1:38:43
  I mean, the scale of Starship they're talking about, not only do they have to have infrastructure to do all that, they're going to be producing a lot of things
• 1:38:50
  you know, natural gas to fuel these things.
• 1:38:52
  They're going to be a producer and consumer, one of the largest consumers, and I assume producers of natural gas in the world, if all goes well.
• 1:38:59
  They're also now starting a chip fab, so they're going to, you know, create their own chips for these satellites.
• 1:39:05
  They have to take on, like, every industry to be this corporation that is capable of operating this scale.
• 1:39:09
  Yeah.
• 1:39:10
  mega globo corp. Do they have plans to like get natural gas?
• 1:39:14
  What are they?
• 1:39:15
  Are they going into mining or fracking?
• 1:39:17
  So this gets more into like Anthony's harebrained chess pieces that he sees coming together.
• 1:39:22
  But interestingly, they are they're buying a piece of land in Louisiana on the Gulf Coast.
• 1:39:28
  Um, now this is meant to, I mean, there's a bunch of thoughts about what this is for, but one of the things is that the cheapest natural gas available, apparently there's a pipeline in that part of the country that they could tap into and get access to very cheap, you know, bountiful natural gas.
• 1:39:42
  Whereas right now, like literally tens of thousands of trucks have to drive this tiny little highway in South Texas to fill up the tanks to fill up Starship.
• 1:39:50
  It is a crazy scale that we're talking about to fill up the thing for a launch attempt.
• 1:39:54
  It's
• 1:39:55
  Tens of thousands of trucks.
• 1:39:57
  So they need to figure this out over the long term.
• 1:39:58
  There's been many different areas where they've had projects in place to produce natural gas, to be a terminal for natural gas deliveries.
• 1:40:08
  There are other companies.
• 1:40:10
  There's a really interesting company run by Gyno called Terraform Industries.
• 1:40:14
  that is working on basically taking carbon out of the air and turning it into natural gas.
• 1:40:20
  And I'm like, well, this certainly feels like a thing that the richest man on earth who needs all the natural gas would be interested in if this works out well.
• 1:40:27
  So I think the expansion of that- Terraform, by the way, is Casey's company.
• 1:40:30
  Casey Hanmer.
• 1:40:31
  Yeah.
• 1:40:32
  He's been on the show in action.
• 1:40:33
  Oh, there you go.
• 1:40:33
  I went and checked out Terraform when I was in LA a couple of months ago and he showed me around and
• 1:40:39
  uh we had a good day together he's great i mean obviously he's australian so i would say yeah obviously it's great but part of me is like i mean this guy is going to be a billionaire because like yeah he's he's making a thing that makes the fuel that the richest man on earth needs out of the air how is that not obviously i mean he's he's also just obviously a genius like he's one of those people who you talk to and you're like i can't even imagine what it's like to be inside your brain because you know so much shit yeah
• 1:41:04
  Casey, hit us up.
• 1:41:05
  Give us a little piece.
• 1:41:06
  Yeah, Casey.
• 1:41:08
  Anyway, so the scale that SpaceX needs to achieve to achieve their goals is terrifying to many people.
• 1:41:13
  And I like SpaceX and it's still terrifying.
• 1:41:15
  So I don't know.
• 1:41:17
  At a certain point, I'm like,
• 1:41:19
  Like anyone in the space industry needs to catch up.
• 1:41:22
  No one's catching up right now.
• 1:41:23
  There's a lot of people doing interesting things, doing stuff that I like.
• 1:41:26
  I really appreciate the space industry that's happening.
• 1:41:28
  But the reason that SpaceX can make that much money per Falcon 9 launch is because no one's putting pressure on their launch price.
• 1:41:35
  Right.
• 1:41:35
  They're getting their costs down to $15 million.
• 1:41:38
  No one's even close on price on what they're selling it to the market.
• 1:41:41
  So what are they going to do?
• 1:41:42
  Right.
• 1:41:42
  They're not going to sell it for $20 million.
• 1:41:44
  They have no reason to.
• 1:41:45
  Yeah, totally.
• 1:41:46
  It's like the domestic Australian aviation market.
• 1:41:49
  You know what it's like from Perth to Sydney costs?
• 1:41:52
  It's a duopoly.
• 1:41:53
  It's just two airlines that do it.
• 1:41:55
  It's awful.
• 1:41:56
  It costs a fortune.
• 1:41:58
  That's a thing that deeply stresses me out because it's a brittle industry in that way.
• 1:42:04
  Yeah.
• 1:42:05
  You're talking about the Australian domestic aviation industry, of course.
• 1:42:08
  The amount of times I've looked up flights between Perth and Sydney is just crazy.
• 1:42:12
  Yeah.
• 1:42:13
  So China, we've got to wrap, but let's talk China briefly.
• 1:42:17
  But I'm also just interested in what you alluded to in passing in terms of the national security implications of this.
• 1:42:23
  I remember a lot of eyebrows being raised in the early days of the Ukraine conflict when Russia,
• 1:42:28
  Elon Musk was essentially in a position to be able to decide whether or not one side of a war had access to precision, to the internet and to precision guided missiles.
• 1:42:40
  Now, presumably in the future, a lot of these new satellite constellations that are not Starlink are going to be providing backup systems by which militaries will be able to, and private citizens will be able to use missiles.
• 1:42:52
  precision guidance and satellite thingies from all kinds of private providers.
• 1:42:57
  So it's not like you're going to have one man's finger on the trigger the way that you do right now.
• 1:43:02
  But give us the lay of the land moving forward on that.
• 1:43:06
  Space grew up a lot that couple of months period of time.
• 1:43:09
  The space industry really went through an interesting moment where so much of the stuff we were talking about just came true.
• 1:43:15
  In the old days, we would build really exquisite spy satellites that cost hundreds of millions, billions of dollars in some cases.
• 1:43:21
  We would build like one to three of them and launch them on launch vehicles that were $400 million.
• 1:43:28
  So it was these exquisite objects that you would put up into space.
• 1:43:31
  You would put all these resources in, but it was just one of them.
• 1:43:34
  They were so vulnerable where you could take this thing out.
• 1:43:36
  And then this era happened where not only have we turned communications from those kind of single points of failure to a distributed network of 10,000, you take out any Starlink satellites, like, who cares?
• 1:43:47
  Who gives a shit?
• 1:43:48
  Like, you literally won't notice.
• 1:43:50
  Same thing happened, though, with spy satellites.
• 1:43:51
  So there are companies that have fleets of imaging satellites in space.
• 1:43:56
  Now, these are not the, you know, the satellites that the U.S. government operates that can read a license plate off a car from orbit.
• 1:44:02
  Right.
• 1:44:03
  They are much lower resolution than that, but they've launched tens or hundreds of them.
• 1:44:07
  So that moment when the Russian military was marching into Ukraine, we had every angle on it, right?
• 1:44:13
  There were just tons of imagery options out there that you could buy from, at the time it was Maxar, or Planet, or Black Sky.
• 1:44:20
  They all had different imagery.
• 1:44:21
  different kinds of imagery.
• 1:44:22
  They have visible light.
• 1:44:24
  There's other ones that are called synthetic aperture radar that can sense small altitude changes, basically.
• 1:44:29
  You actually have a radar shape of an object.
• 1:44:32
  There are companies that have... What's the point of that?
• 1:44:35
  So you can actually get resolution on the shape of something, not just what it looks like.
• 1:44:39
  You can also image at night when there's no light.
• 1:44:42
  Oh, I see.
• 1:44:42
  You need light to take pictures, right?
• 1:44:44
  So at night, through clouds, you can still see what's there.
• 1:44:47
  There are companies that have constellations that pick up signals from ships so we can track shipping traffic and we can track airplane traffic from space.
• 1:44:54
  So the idea of proliferating space capability into constellations in this way made them much more resilient in times of war.
• 1:45:03
  You can't just go take out a satellite
• 1:45:05
  Or in the old days, it was, we know when the spy satellite's coming over, so we'll put a cover over our aircraft that we don't want them to see.
• 1:45:12
  We'll just hide it when we know the satellite's going overhead.
• 1:45:15
  You can't do that anymore.
• 1:45:16
  You cannot hide in that way.
• 1:45:18
  So that has been a trend that the commercial market was pushing on because it was easier to achieve.
• 1:45:23
  You could spend less money on more satellites because you didn't have to make sure that one worked and it was tested to the hell ends of the earth and back.
• 1:45:32
  Um, you could, some of these would fail and they will fail, but you've built 60 of them.
• 1:45:36
  So you're okay.
• 1:45:36
  You're resilient to that.
• 1:45:38
  Um, so the commercial market pushed on that for commercial reasons.
• 1:45:40
  And then the U S government said, that's a pretty good idea.
• 1:45:42
  We should start doing that.
• 1:45:44
  Um, so they are now operating the same way.
• 1:45:46
  So the national reconnaissance office who operates all the spy satellites in the U S uh, there are other branches of the U S space force that are buying, uh, Starlink and other spacecraft buses to build a communications network.
• 1:45:52
  Uh, there are other branches of the U S space force that are buying, uh, Starlink and other spacecraft buses to build a communications network.
• 1:45:59
  that is resilient in this way and has different people building different components.
• 1:46:02
  So it's all interchangeable.
• 1:46:04
  So the push to proliferate, that's the word you'll see thrown about, has been really healthy because it's made our systems a lot less brittle than they were 40 or 50 years ago.
• 1:46:13
  And now that benefits companies that operate in that way.
• 1:46:16
  So the new space companies, the SpaceX's of the world, but other ones that are building as well.
• 1:46:21
  Rocket Lab is certainly in this game, as I mentioned.
• 1:46:24
  It benefits them because this is how they do things.
• 1:46:26
  It's how they operate.
• 1:46:27
  So
• 1:46:28
  the U.S. government has become much more comfortable with that approach.
• 1:46:31
  They've been much more open to accepting failure in some cases because you know you do have this resilient system in place.
• 1:46:37
  And that pressure has changed the face of the market as well.
• 1:46:40
  And it took a while for the government minds to really accept that.
• 1:46:44
  But now it has been accepted.
• 1:46:46
  That's just the way of the world.
• 1:46:46
  So when you look to other countries, Russia's launching constellations like this now too.
• 1:46:51
  China's launching a ton of different constellations, some of which we know what's up to.
• 1:46:56
  The other ones are, we don't really know what this one's for, but we know this is where they launch and this is where they track the satellites.
• 1:47:01
  So everybody's doing it now because it's the way of the world, which is...
• 1:47:06
  We're good at it, but now we have to contend with, oh, shit, like we can't hide.
• 1:47:09
  We can't hide.
• 1:47:10
  We can't blur stuff out on Google Maps anymore, on Google Earth anymore, because...
• 1:47:13
  I mean, not only that, but we've also had an agreement, a gentleman's agreement, not to put weapons in space, not just a gentleman's agreement.
• 1:47:22
  I think it was an actual treaty.
• 1:47:23
  A treaty.
• 1:47:24
  Now, like, how sustainable is that in the sense of, like, how much of a national security...
• 1:47:31
  necessity does it become for you know china or russia to have some capacity to take down some of these systems if they're giving essential support to their adversaries or indeed for us to take down you know to have the capacity to impede chinese or russian or whatever communications if they were used against us
• 1:47:55
  I think it's less about the physical act now, and it's more about finding ways to counteract the thing, the chess match of like, all right, well, you have this capability, so I got to uno reverse it and get you with this one.
• 1:48:08
  So, you know, you find a lot of GPS is one of these areas where it's talked about a lot right now, that GPS jamming is a big topic.
• 1:48:14
  So one of the things that the company Rocket Lab just bought, Iridium,
• 1:48:19
  they're marketing an alternative position navigation and timing signal that they would fly on their satellites that you could hook into.
• 1:48:25
  So it's resilient against stuff that was built for GPS jamming.
• 1:48:28
  And then there's other solutions for protected GPS.
• 1:48:30
  So it's this game of kind of trying to counteract the capabilities they have on orbit.
• 1:48:36
  The physical side is, you know, unless you detonate a nuke in orbit, which is a thing that people are concerned about, you know, certainly, I think rightly so in many cases,
• 1:48:49
  flips the table at the end of the night because they're losing the game of risk, that would really impact the space environment.
• 1:48:54
  But otherwise, it would be so expensive and kind of impossible to take out all of the capability from all the satellites in a physical way that you're much better off spending that money to find electronic measures or trying to hide what you're doing in different ways because you know what imagery they have available or what kind of sensors they have available.
• 1:49:14
  And trying to find holes in the capabilities is a more valuable way to spend your money.
• 1:49:18
  On GPS, wasn't there some cool anecdote about when the military was about to do some precision-guided missile, then the GPS would suddenly get inaccurate, and you'd have a bunch of Israelis driving around, and their Google Maps would all of a sudden not be accurate, and they'd be like, ah, fuck, the Israeli Air Force is obviously about to launch something because the GPS is down.
• 1:49:42
  Yeah.
• 1:49:43
  The last thing I want to ask you about is I want an explanation for why my harebrained pulley system into space is not working.
• 1:49:50
  I was a big fan of this idea that I read when I was a kid that instead of using fuel to blast things into space, you could just, at the equator...
• 1:50:01
  and it had to be at the equator because of the Earth's rotation or something, you could just put a satellite into geostationary orbit, and you would have a filament of wire literally going from a boat as an anchor up to the satellite.
• 1:50:17
  It's not that far.
• 1:50:18
  It's not that crazy.
• 1:50:20
  And just like an elevator shaft where you don't need to use- You gave me so much shit when I said the moon wasn't far enough.
• 1:50:25
  And you're like, what if I put a stream on a boat?
• 1:50:26
  The moon is a lot further than my tethered satellite.
• 1:50:31
  Low Earth.
• 1:50:32
  Low Earth orbit.
• 1:50:34
  Anyway, and then so just like an elevator, you don't need to haul the whole weight of the elevator up.
• 1:50:40
  It's just got a counterweight.
• 1:50:42
  And you use the laws of physics.
• 1:50:44
  Elevators use barely any energy.
• 1:50:46
  It's just like up and down and up and down.
• 1:50:47
  One side goes up, the other side goes down.
• 1:50:50
  So you just put something heavy.
• 1:50:52
  on the pulley and then it just goes sinking down and you just have an elevator into low earth orbit.
• 1:50:57
  Have I just solved space?
• 1:50:59
  I think you've done it.
• 1:51:01
  Uh, have you heard about that plan?
• 1:51:04
  I feel like I'd rather weigh in on, on trans sports than space elevators.
• 1:51:08
  That's how dangerous that feels to, uh, it was a thing.
• 1:51:13
  Like when I was eight years old, this was how we were going to get into space.
• 1:51:16
  It was such an obvious solution.
• 1:51:19
  I mean, people still talk about it a lot.
• 1:51:21
  And there are planetary bodies in which it will make more sense.
• 1:51:24
  But the Earth has a tough atmosphere.
• 1:51:26
  It's super far because you have to build a thing that can support its weight and also be out there.
• 1:51:31
  It's a whole thing.
• 1:51:32
  I don't know.
• 1:51:33
  I have almost no opinion on the matter because I'm like...
• 1:51:36
  I don't know.
• 1:51:37
  Also, two-stage rockets with a landable first stage and reusable second stage turns out works pretty well.
• 1:51:43
  It's going to cost a lot of money, but not as much money as it would cost to develop the elevator.
• 1:51:47
  So maybe at some point... What about the ongoing payoff?
• 1:51:50
  You're like all those people who, at the birth of the elevator, were saying, we should just put a rocket on the bottom of the elevator.
• 1:51:57
  Yeah.
• 1:51:57
  and fire everybody to the top of the building.
• 1:52:00
  If we'd listened to you, Anthony, many lives would have been lost, and elevator rides would be a lot more rickety and noisy.
• 1:52:08
  than the smooth gliding ride we enjoy today.
• 1:52:11
  If you want some ridiculous concepts, look up like spin launch, look that up later.
• 1:52:15
  That's a crazy concept.
• 1:52:17
  A spin launch?
• 1:52:18
  Spin launch, yeah, it's not going to work out.
• 1:52:20
  It uses the Earth's rotation to fling.
• 1:52:22
  That would be so much cooler.
• 1:52:24
  No, it's a centrifuge that spins up and then it's trying to launch a thing out.
• 1:52:29
  But there's a lot of physics problems with this.
• 1:52:31
  I love it.
• 1:52:31
  It's a whole thing.
• 1:52:32
  I know, it looks crazy.
• 1:52:33
  It'll be great on the moon.
• 1:52:34
  It'll be great on the moon, but it's not good for it.
• 1:52:37
  I think we should get a champion shot put.
• 1:52:40
  No, it's not shot put.
• 1:52:41
  Oh, yeah, shot putter.
• 1:52:43
  I think we should build an animatronic shot, like a 100-foot tall animatronic shot putter with a satellite in its hand.
• 1:52:52
  And it just spins around.
• 1:52:53
  And that way it would be almost like a modern-day Roman Coliseum event that you could pay for.
• 1:52:59
  If you think a space shuttle event is interesting these days.
• 1:53:01
  You've been talking about the Odyssey and shit too much, man.
• 1:53:03
  These days.
• 1:53:04
  Yeah.
• 1:53:04
  Imagine an actual robo shot putter.
• 1:53:09
  All right, Anthony.
• 1:53:09
  Make it look like you.
• 1:53:10
  It'll be great.
• 1:53:11
  By the time my mind goes to animatronic Greek mythological shot putters, I think it's time to forward a day.
• 1:53:17
  It's been fascinating.
• 1:53:20
  Come back on any time something happens with regards to space.
• 1:53:24
  For iOS settings, I'll be here.
• 1:53:25
  For iOS settings.
• 1:53:27
  Early September, it'll be out.
• 1:53:28
  It'll be hitting your phones.
• 1:53:29
  Oh, man.
• 1:53:30
  Okay.
• 1:53:31
  You can tell me about it.
• 1:53:32
  Thank you, Anthony.
• 1:53:33
  Lovely to talk to you.
• 1:53:35
  Thanks so much.