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Building a Business on the Moon · What's Your Problem?

• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Pushkin.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: Finally, almost sixty years later, humanity is going back to
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: the Moon. The plan, at least is for the United
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: States to build a base on the Moon in the
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: not terribly distant future, so that the Moon can be
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: both a literal and metaphorical launching pad for humanity to
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: explore the Solar System rad So what's it going to
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: take to build a base on the Moon?
• 0:50
  Speaker 3: A lot?
• 0:51
  Speaker 4: The answer is a lot.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: I'm Jacob Goldstein. This is what's your problem? And my
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: guest today is Rob Myerson. Ub spent fifteen years running
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, and
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: in twenty twenty he started a company called interlun Rob's
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: problem is this, how do you build the infrastructure for
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: a lunar economy that doesn't really exist yet? Eventually, Rob
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: Hope's Inner Lune will help build that base on the Moon.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: For now, though, he's.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: Focused on a more short term but still not that
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: short term goal, going to the Moon and bringing back
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: a gas called helium three to sell on Earth. Helium
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: three is an isotope of helium that is wildly rare
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: on Earth, so rare that it sells for around ten
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: million dollars a pound. Helium three is used to identify
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: smuggled nuclear materials at ports and border crossings. It's also
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: used in certain kinds of quantum computing in certain forms
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: of fusion energy. Both fusion energy and quantum computing are
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: of course acting billions of dollars in investments right now,
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: and that is part of the reason Rob wants to
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: go to the Moon to bring back helium three. In
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: our conversation we talked about a lot. Rob told me
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: why reusable rockets are only the first step for going
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: back to the Moon, what it's going to take to
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: actually manufacture things in space, and how he's trying to
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: build a business by sifting through the.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Dirt on the Moon.
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: I talked to Rob on April tenth, and I mention
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: that because when we talked, the Artemis two astronauts were
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: on their way back from the Moon.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: So of course that's what we started with Rob.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: As we're talking right now on this day, Artemis two
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: is about fifty thousand miles from the Earth, hurtling toward
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: us at about six thousand miles an hour. Everything goes well,
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: it'll splash down later today.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: What does that mean for you? What does it mean
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: for the Moon. What does it mean for your company?
• 3:06
  Speaker 5: Well, first off, I started my career. I'm an aerospace engineer.
• 3:10
  Speaker 5: I started my career as a NASA co op in
• 3:12
  Speaker 5: nineteen eighty five, so I worked on the Space Shuttle.
• 3:16
  Speaker 5: I worked on aerodynamics of vehicles that re enter the atmosphere,
• 3:20
  Speaker 5: just like Oriyan will do this afternoon.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: So you tell me you know a lot about what's
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: about to happen.
• 3:26
  Speaker 3: Is that what you're telling me? I do?
• 3:28
  Speaker 5: And I'm this is right up my alley, and I
• 3:31
  Speaker 5: know personally, I know that people who worked on it
• 3:33
  Speaker 5: to make it happen, And I'm super excited and I'm
• 3:39
  Speaker 5: super confident, and I'm quite honestly a little surprised at
• 3:46
  Speaker 5: the media, like the national excitement about it that is
• 3:53
  Speaker 5: shared because it's because it shows that human spaceflight is different.
• 3:58
  Speaker 5: We can generate excitement about the space program from a
• 4:02
  Speaker 5: broader audience by doing these new and exciting things and
• 4:06
  Speaker 5: going to the Moon to stay. You know, it's like
• 4:09
  Speaker 5: we've been to the moon before, but we haven't, like you,
• 4:13
  Speaker 5: and I like industry today hasn't been that was fifty
• 4:16
  Speaker 5: plus years ago, and we have a whole new group
• 4:20
  Speaker 5: of people that are doing it nuts. It's exciting to watch.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: It is so.
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: Wild that we went to the moon and then we
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: stopped going to the moon, right, It's weird. You would
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: not have thought in whatever nineteen seventy two that humanity
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: would be like, well, that's it, we're done. We went
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: to the moon, and let's just stop going to the moon. Now,
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: exactly what's that all about? Like, why quit? We don't really,
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: it's not in our nature. I mean, there's so much
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: more to learn on the moon. There's so much more
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: to benefit from. So going back to stay as it
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: really matters well and as you point out, right, so
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: this is Artemis two, right, and Artemis one was the
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: same thing, but without people, right, And it is much
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: more excited when there are people on board, which, oh yeah,
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: I get as a you know, as a human being,
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: as an English major whatever. On a certain level, it's
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: not entirely rational, right, because you could do a lot
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: without people, certainly easier to go without people. There's a
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: lot less to worry about, and yet it's so much
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: more exciting when there are people doing it.
• 5:32
  Speaker 5: There there are you can talk to my co founder
• 5:36
  Speaker 5: Harrison Schmidt, who walked on the moon on Apollo seventeen.
• 5:40
  Speaker 5: But the anecdotes you hear from these artemists, two astronauts.
• 5:44
  Speaker 3: You know, that.
• 5:44
  Speaker 5: Spacecraft that flew around the Moon on Artimist one didn't
• 5:48
  Speaker 5: tell us what it was seeing. These astronauts are telling
• 5:51
  Speaker 5: us that the moon looks brown. That's a surprise. What
• 5:54
  Speaker 5: it's all about lighting, And it's about the human observation,
• 5:59
  Speaker 5: what the eye can see that you don't show.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: I don't believe you, right, it's about feelings. You're saying something.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: I don't believe what you're saying.
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, all right, it is it is. You're right,
• 6:12
  Speaker 3: You're right.
• 6:12
  Speaker 5: It is all about feelings, and it's making me feel
• 6:16
  Speaker 5: great right now.
• 6:17
  Speaker 3: So and I think that there's a lot of people
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: that feel the way I do.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: So I want to talk about your kind of short
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: to medium term plans at Innerlon. But to start, since
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: we're already talking about astronauts and the moon and whatever,
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: let's actually start with like your big dream of you know,
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: humanity and the moon and where inter Loon fits in.
• 6:38
  Speaker 5: Sure, so, reusable rockets are something that is here to stay.
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: Like we I worked on the Space Shuttle.
• 6:47
  Speaker 5: I worked on a private company called Kissler that didn't
• 6:50
  Speaker 5: make it, and then I went to Blue Origin and
• 6:52
  Speaker 5: spent fifteen years there building reusable rockets and SpaceX right
• 6:56
  Speaker 5: alongside there. You know, these companies are building rockets that
• 7:01
  Speaker 5: are being reused in a way that will lower the
• 7:05
  Speaker 5: cost of spaceflight and eventually lower the price of space flight.
• 7:09
  Speaker 5: But that only gets you so far, Jacob. The the
• 7:13
  Speaker 5: the next lever for lowering the cost of space missions
• 7:16
  Speaker 5: is to build things in space using resources that you've
• 7:20
  Speaker 5: sourced from space so metals, rocket fuel, helium three, helium gas.
• 7:27
  Speaker 5: So there will be factories in space building things that
• 7:32
  Speaker 5: will support a long term in space economy.
• 7:35
  Speaker 3: And our big vision.
• 7:35
  Speaker 5: For Interloon is that we're we're the you know, the
• 7:41
  Speaker 5: central cogon net providing the resources that are used to
• 7:43
  Speaker 5: build buildings and uh and once you get that second flywheel,
• 7:49
  Speaker 5: that in space manufacturing flywheel going alongside the reusable rocket flywheel,
• 7:55
  Speaker 5: then you you kind of see, you know where where
• 7:58
  Speaker 5: the costs and where these economics can go in the
• 8:01
  Speaker 5: long term.
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: Why did you why did you start the company? I
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: mean you were you were president at Blue Origin, and
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: that's a cool space job building rockets to go to
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: space or almost to space.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: What led you to start interloan?
• 8:18
  Speaker 5: Yeah, so I'd been at Blue Origin for fifteen years.
• 8:22
  Speaker 5: I was the president for most of those years. I
• 8:26
  Speaker 5: recognized that the infrastructure that we need to do things
• 8:32
  Speaker 5: long term on the Moon and in space is being
• 8:35
  Speaker 5: built by companies like Blue Origin SpaceX. But I also
• 8:39
  Speaker 5: noticed that the Artemis program, which was created under the
• 8:43
  Speaker 5: first Trump administration to go back to the Moon to stay,
• 8:47
  Speaker 5: was continued by the Biden administration. And that was the
• 8:51
  Speaker 5: first time in my career that a major nasive program
• 8:54
  Speaker 5: of record had been continued through the change of administration,
• 8:59
  Speaker 5: which meant to me that there is a lot of
• 9:00
  Speaker 5: support for going to the Moon and on to Mars,
• 9:04
  Speaker 5: what the artist program was created for, and I knew
• 9:08
  Speaker 5: that now was the time to go to go do that.
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: So you have this idea, Oh, like the US government
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: is serious about going back to the Moon. I'm interested
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: in getting into the moon business. How do you get
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: from there to Helium three?
• 9:21
  Speaker 5: So my co founder, Harrison Schmidt, is the only geologist
• 9:26
  Speaker 5: to walk on the Moon.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: That's a cool business card.
• 9:29
  Speaker 3: Right, He is at one of a kind.
• 9:33
  Speaker 5: And I met him in twenty sixteen when I was
• 9:39
  Speaker 5: at blue Origin. We talked about helium three at that time,
• 9:44
  Speaker 5: but he was focused on fusion energy and going to
• 9:49
  Speaker 5: the Moon in twenty sixteen to get helium three for
• 9:52
  Speaker 5: fusion is.
• 9:53
  Speaker 3: The classic two miracle business plan, right.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: Because fusion is not a thing, like there is not
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: commercial fusion. People are working on it.
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of money pouring into it, but it's
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: not happening. So that's one miracle. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: the one miracle. The second is the moon. But what
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: happened since then is that the Artemis program was created
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: by NASA and there's money being invested in lunar landers,
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: lunar rovers, and all lunar infrastructure. That's one miracle eliminated exactly.
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: What's the other miracle that gets eliminated?
• 10:33
  Speaker 3: Well, so the fusion energy part of it.
• 10:36
  Speaker 5: We realized that we could build a pretty good business
• 10:40
  Speaker 5: to support quantum computing, because the truth is, over the
• 10:44
  Speaker 5: next ten to twenty years, there will be people scaling
• 10:47
  Speaker 5: up quantum computers from one hundred cubits to one thousand,
• 10:51
  Speaker 5: to ten thousand to a million and a million cubit
• 10:54
  Speaker 5: quantum computer will need as much helium three as we
• 10:59
  Speaker 5: produce in the United States in one year. So the
• 11:04
  Speaker 5: future I want to see is a data center full
• 11:07
  Speaker 5: of quantum million Cuba quantum computers. But the fact is
• 11:12
  Speaker 5: we won't be able to support that future with the
• 11:14
  Speaker 5: helium three we have on Earth.
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: Is that data center in space in the future of
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: your dreams?
• 11:20
  Speaker 5: Well, I'm not going to go there, Jacob. It might,
• 11:22
  Speaker 5: it might, but that data center with you know, quantum
• 11:27
  Speaker 5: computers will need a lot of helium three, and we'll
• 11:31
  Speaker 5: need to go to space.
• 11:32
  Speaker 3: We'll need to go to the Moon to get that
• 11:34
  Speaker 3: helium three.
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: Okay, So I got the plan. That's the plan. I
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: can see it on the whiteboard with a few arrows.
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: When what do you have to do to actually make
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: that happen?
• 11:47
  Speaker 3: Right?
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: So you mentioned that lots of other people are building
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: lots of other things, Right, you're building some piece of it,
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: So like, what do you have to figure out?
• 11:57
  Speaker 5: Yeah, so ten years ago, there was no lunar landers
• 12:01
  Speaker 5: being built in the US. There was no lunar rovers
• 12:04
  Speaker 5: being built in the US. Today there's many companies building those.
• 12:08
  Speaker 5: And if you think of the technologies we need as
• 12:12
  Speaker 5: a tech stack, that rover provides the wheels, the transmission
• 12:15
  Speaker 5: to drive train the mobility that.
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: We need and we need.
• 12:19
  Speaker 5: What we need is we need to excavate large volumes
• 12:23
  Speaker 5: of lunar soil regolith. We need to sort it. We
• 12:27
  Speaker 5: need to sort the rocks from the sand because we
• 12:30
  Speaker 5: know that the solar wind implants the helium three and
• 12:35
  Speaker 5: other solar wind gases in the outer nanometer thick rind.
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: Of the of the lunar regolith.
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: The lunar regolith is the dirt basically on the Moon. Yes,
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: an outer nanometer you're just saying, in the tiniest sliver
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: of the surface is where the helium three is.
• 12:53
  Speaker 5: Yeah, So you want to get the rocks out because
• 12:55
  Speaker 5: the rocks aren't going to be the high volume producer
• 12:59
  Speaker 5: of the helium three.
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: Do you want to get the fine sand?
• 13:02
  Speaker 5: Then we want to do a mechanical process where we
• 13:05
  Speaker 5: crush the regolith and we release those solar wind gases,
• 13:09
  Speaker 5: and then we cryogenically separate the helium three from the helium.
• 13:13
  Speaker 5: And that last step, that cryogenic separation is.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: That part sounds harder than the other parts.
• 13:19
  Speaker 5: It is, and we've developed we've developed it here in Seattle.
• 13:24
  Speaker 5: We're operating below two kelvin, which is just you know,
• 13:28
  Speaker 5: two degrees above absolute zero. And what we've demonstrated is
• 13:32
  Speaker 5: that we can enrich helium three helium mixtures from very
• 13:39
  Speaker 5: very low point zero zero zero zero two percent helium
• 13:42
  Speaker 5: three and helium to ninety nine percent. And what that
• 13:47
  Speaker 5: represents is that this needle in a haystack, in the
• 13:51
  Speaker 5: helium three we have on Earth, the very very trace
• 13:53
  Speaker 5: amounts of helium three, we can go use this technology
• 13:57
  Speaker 5: that we've envisioned, we've developed for the Moon, but we
• 14:00
  Speaker 5: can use it on Earth in a great a helium plant.
• 14:03
  Speaker 5: We can extract helium three in twenty twenty eight before
• 14:07
  Speaker 5: we get to the Moon, and we can and sell
• 14:10
  Speaker 5: that helium three to our customers in the quantum computing industry.
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: Wait, just so I felt it when you say you
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: can extract helium three in twenty twenty eight before you
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: get to the Moon. Do you mean you're going to
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: be in the helium three business on Earth just by
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: extracting the trace amount exact helium three that are here.
• 14:26
  Speaker 3: Yep.
• 14:26
  Speaker 5: Yeah, And we kind of we came upon this wrinkle
• 14:29
  Speaker 5: and the business plan as we were working back from
• 14:33
  Speaker 5: the original Moon architecture. And that's that's how a lot
• 14:36
  Speaker 5: of these things happen. You know, you have this grand vision,
• 14:39
  Speaker 5: you work backward from it. You start developing core technologies excavation, size, sorting, extraction, separation,
• 14:47
  Speaker 5: and then we realized, hey, well this cryogenic separation process,
• 14:52
  Speaker 5: which is hard on.
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: The Moon, it'll work on Earth too.
• 14:57
  Speaker 5: The problem is there's when there's a million tons of
• 15:01
  Speaker 5: healium three on the Moon, there's very very small amounts
• 15:05
  Speaker 5: on Earth. So we can we can maybe triple the
• 15:08
  Speaker 5: US apply of helium three if we maximize, if we
• 15:12
  Speaker 5: pull every molecule of helium three out, But on the
• 15:14
  Speaker 5: Moon we can ten x one hundred x thousand x
• 15:17
  Speaker 5: ten thousand x the helium three production and we can
• 15:20
  Speaker 5: do that in a in a managed, scaled fashion to
• 15:24
  Speaker 5: allow the market to catch up. So we want, we
• 15:26
  Speaker 5: want to operate on the Moon, and we want to
• 15:28
  Speaker 5: make space resources available on Earth and in space to
• 15:32
  Speaker 5: solve some of these big problems.
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: And that's what we're focused on.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: So when you're going to send something to the Moon,
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: when did you get to go to the.
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: Moon, Well, we yeah, great question.
• 15:42
  Speaker 5: We have a we have a camera that we're going
• 15:45
  Speaker 5: to send this fall with a company called Astra Lab.
• 15:48
  Speaker 5: We developed it with NASA Ames Research Center in San Francisco,
• 15:52
  Speaker 5: Mountain View. We're going to land on the South Pole
• 15:55
  Speaker 5: with Astra Lab and our camera. Our camera will image
• 16:00
  Speaker 5: the surface as the Astra Lab rover is driving around,
• 16:03
  Speaker 5: and we'll bring those images back and we'll look and
• 16:06
  Speaker 5: we'll use our measurements to correlate and get better under
• 16:09
  Speaker 5: standings of where helium three is now. We're not sure
• 16:13
  Speaker 5: how much helium three is down at the South Pole,
• 16:15
  Speaker 5: but this is this is an opportunity for us to
• 16:18
  Speaker 5: do a very early mission.
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: The next thing and the hardware behind me the lab
• 16:24
  Speaker 3: that I'm in right.
• 16:25
  Speaker 5: Now, is we're building up a payload that we will
• 16:27
  Speaker 5: want to fly to the Moon in twenty twenty eight.
• 16:29
  Speaker 5: So it's about a forty kilogram payload, and it's going
• 16:33
  Speaker 5: to include a robotic arm, and it's going to include
• 16:36
  Speaker 5: several devices. One device will sort regulith, one device will
• 16:42
  Speaker 5: mechanically process the regulith, and one device will heat the
• 16:45
  Speaker 5: regolith up to nine hundred and fifty degrees centigrade. And
• 16:49
  Speaker 5: all three of those processes are going to release solar
• 16:52
  Speaker 5: wind gases. So this this mission will do two things
• 16:55
  Speaker 5: for us. One is it'll demonstrate that we know how
• 17:00
  Speaker 5: much helium three is in a certain landing area on
• 17:03
  Speaker 5: the moon, and two will demonstrate some of our core
• 17:06
  Speaker 5: technology are sorting our mechanical processing and reduce risk for
• 17:11
  Speaker 5: the eventual deployment of a robotic harvesters, a fleet of
• 17:16
  Speaker 5: robotic harvesters that will operate for many years processing the
• 17:20
  Speaker 5: soil and extracting the heliot three. Once we have that
• 17:25
  Speaker 5: fleet of harvesters, then we we you know, establish a
• 17:28
  Speaker 5: head start. Then we'll start to add technologies that will
• 17:32
  Speaker 5: extract water and make propellant, extract metals and start to
• 17:37
  Speaker 5: service other markets in space as those markets.
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: You know, begin to begin to grow and take hold.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: I mean, one of the interesting things about your business
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: is you know, you're creating one piece of this whole
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: space economy that many parts of which don't really exist yet, right,
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: like completely getting to space that exists, but the like
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: going back and forth to the moon in an industrial way,
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: like other people are working on other pieces of that,
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: but it's not a real thing yet.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: It's not an industry yet, right.
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: And so so talk me through, like what other pieces
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: do other people have to figure out for your.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: Business to work?
• 18:20
  Speaker 5: So right now, for we envision in the twenty thirties,
• 18:23
  Speaker 5: we'll have a rocket based system that's bringing a small
• 18:28
  Speaker 5: spacecraft back to Earth, re entering ther Earth's atmosphere, just
• 18:31
  Speaker 5: like Artemis two is going to do today, but it's
• 18:35
  Speaker 5: smaller with a payload, with not people, so it's a
• 18:38
  Speaker 5: little different risk profile.
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: And we'll be doing that four or five times a year.
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: And we meaning not your company, but what America, the world.
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: We meaning inter Loom, like this is what we need
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: to do.
• 18:52
  Speaker 5: Okay, we might be able to buy that service in
• 18:55
  Speaker 5: the future, but right now we're planning to build it, okay.
• 18:59
  Speaker 5: And it's a small system that will carry twenty five kilograms,
• 19:03
  Speaker 5: so that's enough mass for a pressure bottle and say
• 19:07
  Speaker 5: three to five kilograms of helium three, which which is
• 19:09
  Speaker 5: you know, a very very valuable payload.
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: Just so I can picture it, like you got this
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: rocket coming back from the Moon to deliver helium three.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: Like how big is the like? Do I picture a
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: tank like a scuba diver wears? What am I even picturing?
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: What do you put the helium three in?
• 19:24
  Speaker 5: It would be roughly a sphere that's a little less
• 19:27
  Speaker 5: than a meter in diameter.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: Okay, that's amazing, and you're going to the Moon and
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: back for that little ball of of helium.
• 19:34
  Speaker 5: And it's going to be worth fifty one hundred million dollars.
• 19:38
  Speaker 5: So and you sell that into a market that's growing
• 19:44
  Speaker 5: and really looking for it.
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: So that's that's what we're counting on.
• 19:53
  Speaker 6: We'll be back in just a minute. Who else is
• 20:07
  Speaker 6: trying to do this?
• 20:09
  Speaker 3: You know?
• 20:09
  Speaker 5: Our biggest competitor, I would say, is probably China. You know,
• 20:14
  Speaker 5: the Chinese are talking about space resource extraction, including helium three.
• 20:22
  Speaker 5: They published papers, they've already demonstrated over the last five
• 20:25
  Speaker 5: six years that they can bring samples back from the
• 20:28
  Speaker 5: Moon and they can operate spacecraft twenty four to seven
• 20:33
  Speaker 5: during the lunar.
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: Night using nuclear batteries.
• 20:37
  Speaker 5: You know, the reason I bring up China is because
• 20:40
  Speaker 5: thirty forty years ago, we sort of made decisions in
• 20:42
  Speaker 5: the US that seeded the rare earth elements.
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: Supply chain to China.
• 20:48
  Speaker 5: You know, and today the processing of those rare earth elements,
• 20:52
  Speaker 5: ninety plus percent of it is controlled by China.
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: The key thing about rare earth elements is they're not
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: that rare. Right, China is winning on rare earth elements
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: because they have the industrial capacity, not because the elements
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: are in the ground there and not elsewhere.
• 21:05
  Speaker 3: Yep.
• 21:06
  Speaker 5: And you see a lot of headlines that the US
• 21:08
  Speaker 5: got is investing billions of dollars in rebuilding the rare
• 21:12
  Speaker 5: elements supply chain in the US. By focusing on helium
• 21:17
  Speaker 5: three right now and making it a priority, I think
• 21:20
  Speaker 5: we can avoid that mistake of the past that was made,
• 21:24
  Speaker 5: and I think it's worth it.
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: What you're doing is hard, and you have to figure
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: out a lot of things when you think about what
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: might go wrong or why it might not work.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: What do you think about?
• 21:38
  Speaker 5: Well, I think five years ago I would have thought,
• 21:42
  Speaker 5: are my projections Are our projections about the future.
• 21:47
  Speaker 3: Going to come true?
• 21:48
  Speaker 5: You know, like we're dependent on many other companies, we're
• 21:53
  Speaker 5: dependent on NASA.
• 21:54
  Speaker 3: So we've done our best to project things, and then you.
• 21:59
  Speaker 5: Make sure, like in any other business, are there adjacencies
• 22:03
  Speaker 5: where you can make some money along the path to
• 22:06
  Speaker 5: your big vision. One of those is extracting helium three
• 22:10
  Speaker 5: from terrestrial helium. So we're taking our prygenic distillation technology,
• 22:15
  Speaker 5: we're packaging it up and we're plugging it into helium
• 22:18
  Speaker 5: plants on Earth. The Air Force is backing network, but
• 22:24
  Speaker 5: we have investors that are really interested in that.
• 22:26
  Speaker 3: Another thing is using.
• 22:28
  Speaker 5: Our knowledge of excavation on the Moon to apply to
• 22:33
  Speaker 5: construction of a moon base. So NASA just announced a
• 22:36
  Speaker 5: three phase, thirty billion dollars moon based program, and we
• 22:40
  Speaker 5: intend to be a part of it. And we want
• 22:42
  Speaker 5: to demonstrate grading a surface, compacting a surface, digging a trench,
• 22:47
  Speaker 5: building a berm remotely on the surface of the Moon,
• 22:51
  Speaker 5: which I think is going to do. You think Artemis
• 22:53
  Speaker 5: too is exciting. I think watching construction happen on the
• 22:57
  Speaker 5: Moon is going to be a pretty fascinating thing for
• 23:01
  Speaker 5: people to watch and witness and witness a part of history,
• 23:04
  Speaker 5: and we want.
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: To be a part of that.
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: When do you think there will be a base on
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: the Moon.
• 23:09
  Speaker 5: So NASA's administrator, Jared Isaacman announced a new program to
• 23:14
  Speaker 5: start increasing the number of flights to the Moon, robotic
• 23:18
  Speaker 5: flights to the Moon, starting in twenty twenty seven. He's
• 23:22
  Speaker 5: described the early phases of a moon base is looking
• 23:26
  Speaker 5: like a junk yard, and I think that I think
• 23:29
  Speaker 5: it's appropriate to set expectations really low on what this
• 23:32
  Speaker 5: is going to look like. It's not going to look
• 23:34
  Speaker 5: like your science fiction Moon base. It's going to look
• 23:37
  Speaker 5: like a series of demonstrations, some of them that work
• 23:40
  Speaker 5: and some of them that don't, and he's using he's
• 23:44
  Speaker 5: putting to work these companies that NASA has enabled over
• 23:47
  Speaker 5: the years that are building small cargo landers, and we'll
• 23:52
  Speaker 5: be working with them. We'll be working with the companies
• 23:55
  Speaker 5: building lunar rovers to put our tools for processing the
• 23:59
  Speaker 5: lunar soil and moving the lunar soil, and we'll be
• 24:02
  Speaker 5: a part of that.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: When I asked you a minute ago what you're worried about,
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: I think you told me what you were worried about
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: five years ago.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: What you're worried about now.
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: Surely there's a lot to worry about, giving your job
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: and the difficulty of what you're trying to do.
• 24:18
  Speaker 5: Yeah, there's certainly a lot of technical risk, a lot
• 24:21
  Speaker 5: of dependencies we have on other companies. The Moon is
• 24:26
  Speaker 5: an unforgiving place. It's extremely hot and cold. The lunar
• 24:30
  Speaker 5: day lasts for two weeks and then the lunar night
• 24:33
  Speaker 5: lasts for two weeks. There's radiation, there's hard vacuum, there's dust.
• 24:40
  Speaker 3: It's very different from Earth.
• 24:41
  Speaker 5: So we're going to learn a lot as we go
• 24:44
  Speaker 5: while we solve some of the big challenges around dust mitigation,
• 24:50
  Speaker 5: heap rejection, operating in a vacuum, all those things.
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: It's hard, just nuts and bolts, like literal nuts and bolts,
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: engineering challenges.
• 25:01
  Speaker 5: Hard engineering, and we've got to raise money to go
• 25:03
  Speaker 5: do all this. So, you know, we have to convince
• 25:06
  Speaker 5: outside investors that this is the this is the the
• 25:09
  Speaker 5: right thing to go spend their money on while they're
• 25:13
  Speaker 5: watching AI and defense tech are big areas where the
• 25:17
  Speaker 5: venture capital, you know, frontier tech investors are focusing their
• 25:21
  Speaker 5: time on. And I think in the coming weeks months, year,
• 25:25
  Speaker 5: we're going to start to see a little more attention
• 25:28
  Speaker 5: paid to space tech, especially with the SpaceX IPO coming up.
• 25:32
  Speaker 3: It's an exciting time for us.
• 25:33
  Speaker 5: So how do we make sure we're positioned right to
• 25:37
  Speaker 5: take advantage of that.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: So you've been working in the space industry, in the
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: space space for thirty five years, Like this whole industry
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: such as it is now has emerged since you started
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: working in space, right, it's so different than when you started.
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: What is surprising to you?
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: Like when you look at the way the world is now,
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: how is it different than you might have thought it
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: would be?
• 26:00
  Speaker 5: I told someone yesterday that when I started my career,
• 26:03
  Speaker 5: I thought I'd missed the Golden Age. You know, Apollo
• 26:07
  Speaker 5: had happened, and NASA working on Shuttle Shuttle was routine,
• 26:12
  Speaker 5: and then and then all of a sudden, some things
• 26:14
  Speaker 5: happen where, oh, you know, it's not so routine. We
• 26:18
  Speaker 5: can't really you know, take our eye off the ball
• 26:21
  Speaker 5: here because this is still extremely risky and we don't
• 26:25
  Speaker 5: have this NASA doesn't have the support that we needed
• 26:29
  Speaker 5: that we had in the past.
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: You mean, the space shuttle blew up. Just to be clear,
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: not to be crass, but that's what you're referring to.
• 26:35
  Speaker 5: And yes, I was in college. I had just you know,
• 26:38
  Speaker 5: done my first internship with NASA at that time. Yes,
• 26:42
  Speaker 5: and the shuttle blew up, and it's like, oh, it's
• 26:46
  Speaker 5: so the space industry is so hard, Like it's just people.
• 26:51
  Speaker 5: You take things take a long time, they take a
• 26:53
  Speaker 5: lot of money, people persevere. It's a it's not it's
• 26:58
  Speaker 5: it's not an industry for the.
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: Faint of heart. The work is hard.
• 27:03
  Speaker 5: It takes a lot of effort, a lot of grinding,
• 27:07
  Speaker 5: and so seeing that there's so many people working in it,
• 27:10
  Speaker 5: we've almost refreshed the entire space talent density, space talent
• 27:16
  Speaker 5: base over the last ten to fifteen years, and I'm
• 27:19
  Speaker 5: proud to have been a part of that, building Blue
• 27:22
  Speaker 5: Origin and in the next space seeing seeing operating on
• 27:28
  Speaker 5: the lunar surface as a real career path for young
• 27:33
  Speaker 5: people coming out of college. That's the next thing that
• 27:35
  Speaker 5: I'm really excited about being a part of.
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: People graduate and say I want to work on the Moon.
• 27:42
  Speaker 5: I want to build robots and systems that operate on
• 27:45
  Speaker 5: the Moon and build build the next factories in space.
• 27:49
  Speaker 5: I think that's a great thing to put on the resume.
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: And so come talk to us.
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: Let's finish with the lightning round. What's one thing you
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: learned working for Jeff Bezos?
• 28:22
  Speaker 5: Oh gosh, keep you cool, Jeff is uh yeah, here here,
• 28:30
  Speaker 5: you know.
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: I I love that answer. Jeff's wonderful.
• 28:37
  Speaker 5: I really really love working Jeff. He has I just
• 28:42
  Speaker 5: I just listened to another podcast. It was with Jeff Wilkie,
• 28:47
  Speaker 5: who ran Amazon retail, and there was a time when
• 28:51
  Speaker 5: he went to Jeff Bezos and said, you're coming up
• 28:54
  Speaker 5: with so many ideas rapidly that it's it's hurting the company.
• 29:00
  Speaker 5: And I want to qualify this by saying, when I
• 29:03
  Speaker 5: ran Blue Origin, we spent nine years below two hundred people.
• 29:07
  Speaker 5: So we were a very small company being you know,
• 29:11
  Speaker 5: led by me, but owned by Jeff who would come
• 29:14
  Speaker 5: in and had new ideas all the time and fabulous ideas.
• 29:21
  Speaker 5: I wanted to do all of them, but we just
• 29:23
  Speaker 5: never we were never at the scale to do it.
• 29:26
  Speaker 5: But a lot of those, you know, it's hard when
• 29:29
  Speaker 5: you've got always got new ideas coming at you. It
• 29:32
  Speaker 5: does really affect you know, it does affect the pace.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: You think we'll find extraterrestrial life in your lifetime?
• 29:43
  Speaker 5: I hope we still keep looking, and I hope we
• 29:47
  Speaker 5: continue to look. And you know, I don't know, I
• 29:51
  Speaker 5: don't know the answer to that, but it's worth looking.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: Do you think you'll go to space?
• 29:58
  Speaker 3: Me personally, probably.
• 30:02
  Speaker 5: You know, the opportunity to go to space would have
• 30:04
  Speaker 5: been on New Shepherd, the Blue Origin.
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, did you have that tuned it? Did you? Did
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: you choose not to go?
• 30:11
  Speaker 5: I did not have that opportunity, So but I would
• 30:15
  Speaker 5: say that that would have been the one opportunity where
• 30:19
  Speaker 5: you know, it's a vehicle that I was involved in building.
• 30:23
  Speaker 5: I trust the team that designed and operated it, you know,
• 30:26
  Speaker 5: one hundred percent. And unfortunately Blue decided to pause that
• 30:30
  Speaker 5: program and they're not they're not flying that anymore. So
• 30:33
  Speaker 5: I don't think my you know, i'll have a chance
• 30:36
  Speaker 5: to go to go to space in my my lifetime,
• 30:38
  Speaker 5: but I think a lot of other people will.
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, what's the secret? What what's one secret to
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: running a barbecue restaurant?
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: You you've done your your your homework.
• 30:56
  Speaker 5: So my grandfather and my dad both operated restaurants and
• 31:01
  Speaker 5: barbecue restaurants in Detroit. I worked for my dad for
• 31:06
  Speaker 5: three or four years through high school. You know, the
• 31:10
  Speaker 5: the amount of work involved and not just being an entrepreneur,
• 31:14
  Speaker 5: but owning a restaurant where you're serving people and your
• 31:17
  Speaker 5: busiest day of year is on Super Bowl Sunday when
• 31:19
  Speaker 5: you just want to be home watching the game. Though,
• 31:22
  Speaker 5: those are you know, the amount of work to go,
• 31:28
  Speaker 5: you know, to go do that, and you're hiring high
• 31:31
  Speaker 5: school kids like me who want to be somewhere else.
• 31:35
  Speaker 5: I think I think those are you know, some of
• 31:38
  Speaker 5: the secrets I took away work.
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: The secret is work all the time, not a secret.
• 31:43
  Speaker 3: I not a secret.
• 31:46
  Speaker 5: But I picked up work ethic from my dad and
• 31:48
  Speaker 5: my mom too, and I think I think you need
• 31:51
  Speaker 5: to to do do what we're doing here at Interland.
• 31:53
  Speaker 3: So it's it's it takes hard work.
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for your time, good.
• 31:57
  Speaker 3: Luck, Thank you, thank you.
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: Jacob rob Myerson is the co founder and CEO of
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: interlun Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang and
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: edited by Lydia Jane Kott. Our engineer this week was Hansdale.
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: She we're always looking for ideas for who to talk
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: to and what to cover on the show. You can
• 32:24
  Speaker 2: email us at problem at Pushkin dot fm. You can
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: find me on x at Jacob Goldstein. You can find
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: me on LinkedIn. I'm Jacob Goldstein. Thank you very much
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: for listening to the show, and we'll be back next
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: week with another episode.