Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Blots podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 3: And I'm Joe Wisenthal.
Speaker 2: Joe, have you ever met anyone at a party and
Speaker 2: you start, you know, you ask them the standard question
Speaker 2: what it is that they actually do? Yeah, and you
Speaker 2: just get a response that kind of blows your mind.
Speaker 2: It's something that you've never even thought of before.
Speaker 3: First of all, can I say my favorite question at
Speaker 3: parties is what do you do? I've heard that.
Speaker 2: I know some people look down at.
Speaker 3: Ask me about my hopes and dreams. I don't care.
Speaker 3: I don't care. I don't care. I want to know
Speaker 3: what you do. No, I do like, oh, where do
Speaker 3: you live? Whatever?
Speaker 4: Who?
Speaker 3: I want to know what you do? I mean, look,
Speaker 3: in some instances, maybe people don't want to talk about it,
Speaker 3: but I figure people devoted big chunk of their lives
Speaker 3: to work. That's a pretty good icebreaker. So we need
Speaker 3: to renormalize that absolutely. And as podcast hosts were always
Speaker 3: looking for interesting people.
Speaker 2: That's right, and sometimes you meet them at parties. This
Speaker 2: person that we're going to be speaking to, we actually
Speaker 2: met at our party our ten year anniversary party. Someone
Speaker 2: else brought them and I was introduced to him and
Speaker 2: I said, what is it that you actually do? And
Speaker 2: the answer that came back was I was NASA's first
Speaker 2: chief economist.
Speaker 3: Amazing, sold have you ever heard of that before? I
Speaker 3: would I would have not. I mean no, I definitely
Speaker 3: would have never heard of that before. I mean, I
Speaker 3: guess I'm not surprised in some sense. I'll say the
Speaker 3: one sense that I'm not surprised that NASA had a
Speaker 3: chief economist, which is like economists seemed to sort of
Speaker 3: be in every organization these days. They have a lot
Speaker 3: of tools and their toolkit that can be applied to
Speaker 3: a lot of things. They're pretty good with statistical analysis,
Speaker 3: et cetera.
Speaker 2: But then also, you know, but this is stats in space.
Speaker 3: Well, then the other thing is, you know, you know
Speaker 3: that there's growing interest in the commercial applications in space,
Speaker 3: and so satellites are another r one area obviously defends
Speaker 3: people talk about asteroid mining. I don't know if we'll oversee
Speaker 3: that in our lifetimes, but I know that there's the
Speaker 3: thing people are interested in. So although I would not
Speaker 3: have necessarily thought it, you know, so I guess I'm
Speaker 3: not totally surprised that NASA's like, all right, let's bring
Speaker 3: it an economist in well.
Speaker 2: I was pretty surprised. I guess I'd never thought about
Speaker 2: it yet. I never thought of But it turns out
Speaker 2: that not only does this role exist, but it sits
Speaker 2: at the sort of intersection of I guess a lot
Speaker 2: of public and private investment space exploration. And we've talked
Speaker 2: about this before, this idea that NASA has perhaps been
Speaker 2: seeding a lot of territory in many ways to private
Speaker 2: capital SpaceX especially, we've done tons of industrial policy episodes
Speaker 2: at this point and what the benefits are of government
Speaker 2: investment versus again, private capital. And so I'm very excited
Speaker 2: to talk space economics.
Speaker 1: But do it the.
Speaker 2: Perfect guest we're going to be speaking with Alex McDonald.
Speaker 2: He served as NASA's first chief economist, as I said,
Speaker 2: and he is now a senior associate at the Aerospace
Speaker 2: Security Project at CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Alex,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for coming on all thoughts.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 3: Thanks for coming to our partner, Yes too, party, I
Speaker 3: enjoyed it.
Speaker 2: Thank you so excellent, So obvious question. First, I suppose
Speaker 2: what does a chief economist at NASA actually do.
Speaker 4: So, the position of chief Economist is essentially one of
Speaker 4: the three independent technical advisors to the administrator. I'll point
Speaker 4: out that all three of those positions were basically canceled
Speaker 4: at the beginning of this Trump administration, but they had
Speaker 4: been essentially people who'd be brought into the agency to
Speaker 4: advise the administrator on technical issues related to economics Chief economist,
Speaker 4: Technology chief technologist, and science chief scientist. These are not
Speaker 4: positions that are responsible for implementing programs. They are essentially
Speaker 4: independent technical advices to the head of NASA. NASA is
Speaker 4: a twenty five billion dollar agency. It has ten different
Speaker 4: centers across the US, it has international partnerships, and of
Speaker 4: course it has an extensive amount of contract for the
Speaker 4: private sector. And so the role of the chief Economist
Speaker 4: is essentially to advise the administrator of NASA on whatever
Speaker 4: the administrator of NASA needs advice on. But it tends
Speaker 4: to be related to what are the markets that we're seeing,
Speaker 4: What level of investment can we expect in a given sector.
Speaker 4: Has this company actually raised money or are they perhaps
Speaker 4: maybe misrepresented? These are all questions that come up in
Speaker 4: procurement and in strategy. I started at NASA in two
Speaker 4: thousand and eight, so that was when the Space Shuttle
Speaker 4: was still flying. We were beginning to think about partner
Speaker 4: with the private sector. SpaceX had received its first essentially
Speaker 4: contract from NASA, but it had not launched anything to
Speaker 4: space yet. So as you can imagine, over the last
Speaker 4: fifteen plus years, the role of the private sector has
Speaker 4: become very significant within NASA's portfolio, and as a result,
Speaker 4: economic analysis became one of the types of internal services
Speaker 4: that essentially the senior leadership at NASA decided they needed.
Speaker 3: That was fantastic, just real quickly backing up even further,
Speaker 3: how did why you in that role? What were you
Speaker 3: doing prior to that role such that you got brought
Speaker 3: in for this?
Speaker 4: So for me, space economics was a real passion. I
Speaker 4: remember very distinctly two thousand and five when I was
Speaker 4: a master's degree student in economics up at the University
Speaker 4: of British Columbia and Canada, and I remember two things
Speaker 4: that happened that year. One was the flight of Spaceship one.
Speaker 4: This was the first privately funded, privately built spacecraft to
Speaker 4: take humans above the Von Carmen line above one hundred kilometers,
Speaker 4: which is the kind of international definition of where space starts.
Speaker 4: And I remember, as an economist kind of saying, that's unusual.
Speaker 4: How long have we been building our own spacecraft and
Speaker 4: doing that with private money. That started my PhD into
Speaker 4: the long run economic history of space exploration. That became
Speaker 4: my first book called the Long Space Age, essentially on
Speaker 4: the economic history of where the money came from for
Speaker 4: astronomical observatories. And when you look at that, one will
Speaker 4: find some very interesting parallels. For example, the people who
Speaker 4: built the largest telescopes in the early twentieth century. These
Speaker 4: are the Mount Wilson and Mount Palamar observatories. They were
Speaker 4: funded by Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, the two
Speaker 4: richest people in America at the time. Sound familiar. So
Speaker 4: this was a type of parallel that a number of
Speaker 4: us were starting to think about in terms of how
Speaker 4: are we going to get new money onto the table
Speaker 4: to advance our objectives in space exploration. And then the
Speaker 4: second thing that happened in two thousand and five was
Speaker 4: essentially the announcement of what was then called the Vision
Speaker 4: for Space Exploration, and this was the George W. Bush
Speaker 4: Era plan to return to the Moon, build a moon base,
Speaker 4: and ultimately use the capabilities to autavirus. And that basically
Speaker 4: told me that eventually we're going to need economists in
Speaker 4: space because if you're building a permanent habitat somewhere else
Speaker 4: outside of Earth, Yes, that's the technology problem. Yes it's
Speaker 4: an engineering problem. It is also an economic development problem.
Speaker 4: You're going to need to think about where the revenue
Speaker 4: source is going to come for this, Where might you
Speaker 4: see cost savings for new types of technologies? And so
Speaker 4: I had decided to go pursue space economics as a field.
Speaker 4: Did my PhD in that. I used to joke that
Speaker 4: once you do a PhD in the economics of space exploration,
Speaker 4: there's nowhere else that can really employ you other than NASA.
Speaker 4: These days, that's not quite the case. These days, there's
Speaker 4: such a growth in venture capital and private equity investment
Speaker 4: in space that actually it's a bit of a booming field,
Speaker 4: to be honest. So I started my work at NASA
Speaker 4: Ames's Research Center. So this is one of NASA's ten
Speaker 4: centers out in Silicon Valley, and I was brought out
Speaker 4: there to essentially start doing some of the economic analysis
Speaker 4: related to venture capital, how do we leverage these private companies?
Speaker 4: And essentially, as I did my work, I started managing
Speaker 4: some of the programs related to encouraging commercial space development.
Speaker 4: Made my way to Washington, d C. With kind of
Speaker 4: these experiances that it had in Silicon Valley, working with
Speaker 4: some of the investors and some of the startup founders,
Speaker 4: found my way to the Office the Administrator and during
Speaker 4: the first up administration that was when the chief Economist
Speaker 4: position was created.
Speaker 2: I have so many questions already, and I'm already struggling
Speaker 2: to choose a particular path to go down because there
Speaker 2: are so many. But one thing that stood out to
Speaker 2: me just then, you know, you talked about the sort
Speaker 2: of history of space exploration and the idea that you
Speaker 2: had these very rich industrialists who are funding the early
Speaker 2: stages of I guess astronomy and observatories. At what point
Speaker 2: did the US flip into more of a government funded
Speaker 2: model for space exploration and how did that actually happen.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a great question, and I think it's instructive
Speaker 4: to think about kind of how do we develop the
Speaker 4: capabilities to go in space in the first place. So
Speaker 4: the history of astronomical observatories in the US really begins
Speaker 4: with these wealthy funders, and there's a mix of motivations.
Speaker 4: I break it down to these two types of motivations.
Speaker 4: One are signaling motivations and economics. Signaling theory is the
Speaker 4: idea that you can credibly transmit information by costly action. Right.
Speaker 4: This is kind of how you know something about someone
Speaker 4: when they're driving a Lamborghini versus you know, say, a
Speaker 4: Ford Pinto. Right, you have some information about the individual
Speaker 4: even if you know nothing else. Similar with education. The
Speaker 4: classic signaling product that I can think of, though, is
Speaker 4: if you know that one country has launched something around
Speaker 4: Earth and another country has not, you know something about
Speaker 4: the technical capacities of that country. Very similar in terms
Speaker 4: of astronomical observatories. These were very complex projects. They were
Speaker 4: about billion dollar projects if we do the kind of
Speaker 4: inflation adjusted metrics today, and so the wealthiest people did
Speaker 4: these things. Fast forward to the nineteen twenties and thirties
Speaker 4: when the technology for liquid fuel rocketry is being developed.
Speaker 4: This year is actually the one hundredth anniversary of the
Speaker 4: first flight of a liquid fuel rocket by Robert Goddard.
Speaker 3: That's why we did this episode. It was all time
Speaker 3: for one hundred year anniversary.
Speaker 4: That's right, I always love it, Unsentiary, you know, thanks
Speaker 4: for that. So he's working on this technology because he
Speaker 4: wants to be able to go to space. He receives
Speaker 4: the vision of space expiation by reading science fiction when
Speaker 4: he's a teenager. He reads a War of the World's
Speaker 4: in his local newspaper, and then a sequel to it,
Speaker 4: an unauthorized sequel called Edison's Conquest of Mars, And he
Speaker 4: actually writes in his diary about a vision that he
Speaker 4: had while trimming a cherry tree on his aunt's farm,
Speaker 4: and he decides that he's going to dedicate the rest
Speaker 4: of his life to space expiation, and every year after
Speaker 4: he celebrates what he calls his Cherry Tree Day. So
Speaker 4: he's going out into the world trying to figure out
Speaker 4: how's he going to get resources for this project, and
Speaker 4: it turns out that the largest funder for his early
Speaker 4: phases is in fact the Guggenheim family. He manages to
Speaker 4: actually convince the Gudheim family to fund this work. But
Speaker 4: when the Second World War starts, which is really when
Speaker 4: the US government starts to get involved with Rocket Tree
Speaker 4: a very significant level he starts working with a number
Speaker 4: of the generals and essentially gets funding to develop a
Speaker 4: genesis to take off rocket to help planes take off
Speaker 4: more quickly, and he starts get funding that way. So
Speaker 4: the Second World War is really when governments across the
Speaker 4: world really start to get involved with rocketry development, most famously,
Speaker 4: of course in Germany, but also in the Soviet Union.
Speaker 4: And so after that point, the technology for rocketry is
Speaker 4: essentially co evolving as a weapon system and as a
Speaker 4: technology for taking humans off of the Earth. That's really
Speaker 4: when the US government gets involved. NASA gets created in
Speaker 4: nineteen fifty eight after the flight of Sputnik, and then
Speaker 4: you have the kind of dual development of essentially the
Speaker 4: civil program which is what NASA is, as well as
Speaker 4: a Department of Defense programs, and both of them are
Speaker 4: roughly kind of equivalently funded for quite some time.
Speaker 3: Well, why don't we talk then about the flip side
Speaker 3: or the other direction. You mentioned that when you were
Speaker 3: at NASA we still had the shuttle program. I've never
Speaker 3: understood what I mean, why do we get rid of that?
Speaker 3: Like why aren't we still launching shuttles and so forth?
Speaker 3: What was the sort of economic logic or national security
Speaker 3: logic or whatever such that from the perspective of the government,
Speaker 3: we don't need to keep launching shuttles, and maybe we
Speaker 3: can begin the handoff for some of this more directly
Speaker 3: into the private sector.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, the Shuttle really
Speaker 4: was an incredible vehicle. But of course, as I'm sure
Speaker 4: you're familiar, there were a couple of fatal accidents with
Speaker 4: the Space Shuttle, first the Challenger disaster and then the
Speaker 4: Columbia accident. So essentially the decision was made after the
Speaker 4: Columbia accident that there was no way to make the
Speaker 4: vehicle sufficiently safe at a regular rate of flight that
Speaker 4: would be economical, and that it was time to move
Speaker 4: on to a safer, more economical form of human spaceflight.
Speaker 4: What's interesting in many ways with the development of vehicles
Speaker 4: like Starship is that the idea originally behind the Space Shuttle,
Speaker 4: it was very much the same idea that is now
Speaker 4: motivating the development of Starship at SpaceX, low cost, refully
Speaker 4: reusable aircraft like operations. You know, that was not ultimately
Speaker 4: achieved in the Space Shuttle. You can look back at
Speaker 4: the original economic estimates for what NASA thought they would
Speaker 4: be able to fly the spatial app and they turned
Speaker 4: out to be rather optimistic relative to what was delivered.
Speaker 4: We'll see where we get to on Starship, but I
Speaker 4: think it's just important to recognize that that it's really
Speaker 4: part of the same engineering and economic capability thrust Shuttle
Speaker 4: to Starship. It's the same idea, we want low cost,
Speaker 4: reusable aircraft like operations so that we can do more
Speaker 4: in space. Ultimately, the Shuttle was deemed to be no
Speaker 4: longer safe after the Columbia accident. Blue Urban Commission was
Speaker 4: kind of fielded, and they decided that it was time
Speaker 4: to move on to what then became the commercial crew program,
Speaker 4: and that came around at the beginning of the first
Speaker 4: Obama administration. At the time, it was very controversial. You
Speaker 4: can certainly go back and watch some of the hearings
Speaker 4: where you've got people like Neil Armstrong who were arguing
Speaker 4: that this is not a good idea for the nation.
Speaker 4: At the same time, there was essentially a need within
Speaker 4: NASA to figure out how to offload some of the
Speaker 4: operational responsibilities for human spaceflight because NASA was seeking to
Speaker 4: go back to the Moon and ultimately on to Mars.
Speaker 4: One of the things that's defining for NASA's strategic landscape
Speaker 4: is its budget history. Budget history is very easy to describe.
Speaker 4: It starts in nineteen fifty eight at a relatively low level.
Speaker 4: It peaks massively in nineteen sixty five sixty six at
Speaker 4: the peak of the PALL program, and then it declines
Speaker 4: very significantly until nineteen seventy two, and it has basically
Speaker 4: been inflation flat ever since. Our ambitions, however, have not
Speaker 4: been inflation flat. Our ambitions continue to increase, and so
Speaker 4: as the agency has been figuring out how do we
Speaker 4: achieve our ambitions, we figured that we would basically partner
Speaker 4: and figure out how to leverage commercial capabilities and private investment.
Speaker 3: Have you ever seen the chart of the NASA budget
Speaker 3: as a share of the federal budget? It's unbelievable. In
Speaker 3: the mid sixties, fought over five percent of the entire
Speaker 3: federal government budget, at least according to this chart that
Speaker 3: I pulled up on Reddit just now. No, but I'm
Speaker 3: pretty sure i've seen this chart before. I think it's
Speaker 3: ye right, I think I know the one I mean
Speaker 3: to take. A staggering level of the federal government spending
Speaker 3: was at one point through NASA and then, of course
Speaker 3: it's sort of declined into relative oblivion, but it's kind
Speaker 3: of extraordinary.
Speaker 2: Well, on this note, Alex, you're talking about NASA's ambitions,
Speaker 2: how would you broadly define those, Because it seems if
Speaker 2: you say that NASA exists for security and as a
Speaker 2: signal to other countries that we have superior technology to them,
Speaker 2: you could justify basically any element of spending as we
Speaker 2: seem to have done in the nineteen sixties. But if
Speaker 2: you say that we actually want some sort of return
Speaker 2: on investment in terms of jobs or i don't know,
Speaker 2: some sort of multiplier effect on the economy, then you're
Speaker 2: kind of thinking about different things.
Speaker 4: Sure, of course, one of the challenges that I always
Speaker 4: ran into is that there's this perner request for calculation
Speaker 4: on the return on investment, which I always had to
Speaker 4: patiently explain that this is not an investment, it's an expenditure. Right,
Speaker 4: You can't actually calculate a direct return on an investment
Speaker 4: in the way that you can for an actual private
Speaker 4: sector investment. You can, however, calculate the economic impact. And
Speaker 4: so every two years I would be responsible for the
Speaker 4: release of our Economic impact report, and for those curious,
Speaker 4: that is the highest level resolution data that NASA releases
Speaker 4: publicly about where it spends its money, and it spends
Speaker 4: its money across all the fifty states.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, this is famous, right, it has to.
Speaker 4: It has to exactly because it is a public it
Speaker 4: is a public program. It is there to meet the
Speaker 4: needs of the American people as determined by their representatives
Speaker 4: in Congress. And so that is a kind of part
Speaker 4: of the agency's responsibilities and mission, and its missions are
Speaker 4: essentially defined by that combination of congressional mandates and presidential direction, right,
Speaker 4: just like any agency. And so what have been the
Speaker 4: consistent requests by Congress and presidents to NASA? Well over
Speaker 4: the last forty years, let's take the post Apollo era
Speaker 4: and even the post Shuttle era. We are now on
Speaker 4: the third attempt to return to the Moon and build
Speaker 4: a permanent habitation there. The first was called the Space
Speaker 4: Expiration Initiative under George HW.
Speaker 5: Bush.
Speaker 4: Then it was as I mentioned in the Vision for
Speaker 4: Space Expiration under George W.
Speaker 5: Bush.
Speaker 4: And today we're working on the Artemis program, which I
Speaker 4: was intmately involved with, and essentially it is very much
Speaker 4: we're using a different strategy now than we've used in
Speaker 4: the past, but it was essentially the same interest. There's
Speaker 4: only one world relatively nearby, only three days away, that
Speaker 4: is the Moon. There's also only one planet nearby that
Speaker 4: you can plausibly land on, that is Mars. I happen
Speaker 4: to personally be a big fan of flybys of Venus,
Speaker 4: but that's actually kind of pouter intuitively, because it is so.
Speaker 2: Important When you say personally, you don't mean that you're,
Speaker 2: you know, flying past Venus yourself, right, just in theory.
Speaker 4: I'd be happy to, but I don't think I've got
Speaker 4: millions for that. But the benefit of Venus is that
Speaker 4: it is literally so hot and high pressure that it
Speaker 4: is impossible to land on, so it stops both engineers
Speaker 4: and politicians from trying to. That's actually a benefit from
Speaker 4: a program management perspective sometimes. But anyways, the real goal
Speaker 4: continues to be Mars, because Mars you can land on,
Speaker 4: and there is increasing signs of potential previous life having
Speaker 4: been on Mars. We continue to learn a lot by
Speaker 4: our robotic missions there. There's starting to be some very
Speaker 4: interesting indications that there may have been a life there
Speaker 4: in the past. It's a very interesting world, and of
Speaker 4: course NASA also does robotic missions out to the outer planets.
Speaker 4: The moons of Saturn and Jupiter are truly some of
Speaker 4: the most incredible objects in the night sky. In our
Speaker 4: Solar System. You have moons like Io that have volcanoes,
Speaker 4: few lava, hundreds thousands of kilometers above the surface of
Speaker 4: these planets. You have worlds that are actually ocean worlds
Speaker 4: underneath these massive ice caps, like Europa and Enceladus. Enceladus
Speaker 4: has water geysers, so it's actually possible to imagine building
Speaker 4: a probe that could just kind of land under one
Speaker 4: of these water geysers, open up an aperture, and then
Speaker 4: assess what might be in that water. And then one
Speaker 4: of my favorites, of course is the moon of Saturn, Titan.
Speaker 4: Titan is the only moon that we have that has
Speaker 4: an atmosphere. It's actually I can't really see through it,
Speaker 4: but it does have lakes, except the lakes are not water,
Speaker 4: they're made of methane. And we now have a mission
Speaker 4: on the books Dragonfly, which is for me one of
Speaker 4: the most exciting missions that NASA is doing, to send
Speaker 4: a robotic helicopter to this moon of Saturn and explore
Speaker 4: it to learn about this different type of liquid cycle
Speaker 4: based on methane rather than water. You know, it's a
Speaker 4: fascinating solar system and one of NASA's cormanate is to
Speaker 4: explore that. And I could keep going. You've also got
Speaker 4: the largest number of Earth scientists employed by one agency
Speaker 4: in the world. Huge amount of the climate data that
Speaker 4: the world relies on comes from NASA and also responsible
Speaker 4: for aeronautics basically search. A lot of the basic research
Speaker 4: for fundamental green aviation electric aviation is funded through NASA,
Speaker 4: so it has a huge mandate, which is why at
Speaker 4: the end of the day, NASA is always looking for
Speaker 4: ways to make that tax dollar go farther, leverage partnerships,
Speaker 4: leverage private sector investment.
Speaker 3: That was great, and I just want to say, like, personally,
Speaker 3: I'm very pro going to space. I'm very pro landing
Speaker 3: on the Moon. Again, I think it would be really
Speaker 3: cool if in my lifetime someone landed on Mars. I
Speaker 3: think it's very cool. But why so if there's going
Speaker 3: to be private money invested in this other than the
Speaker 3: fact that, okay, maybe there can be a return from
Speaker 3: the private dollars because they're getting public dollars, because they
Speaker 3: could do more. From the economists hat is there a
Speaker 3: rationale for some of these projects that you see beyond
Speaker 3: just this is very interesting and cool. Could it ever
Speaker 3: turn into return on an investment? Into classic sense?
Speaker 4: So, the most classic example that I have of where
Speaker 4: the economic return came from some of these types of
Speaker 4: investments really does come from the Apollo program and the
Speaker 4: early rockty development in the nineteen sixties. So during that time,
Speaker 4: for about three years, seventy five percent of all global
Speaker 4: semiconductor demand came from these rockets. Oh yeah, what does
Speaker 4: that mean. It means that this was a technology that
Speaker 4: was pushing the boundaries of capability, of technical capability, and
Speaker 4: it needed this new thing, the semiconductor, in order to
Speaker 4: be effective. That meant that semiconductor manufacturing got to scale
Speaker 4: up at a level that it would not otherwise have
Speaker 4: probably been able to do based on consumer demand.
Speaker 3: If I recall from Chipwar, it was also the fact
Speaker 3: that space was scarce on the Shuttle, and therefore it
Speaker 3: helped create the impetus to miniaturize a lot of this technology,
Speaker 3: which then unlocked various consumer electronic goods.
Speaker 4: Exactly. The Apollo Guidance computer the other example of that.
Speaker 4: So that's exactly right. So when you're pushing the technology
Speaker 4: frontiers for this kind of challenging objective like going to
Speaker 4: the moon or going to Mars. You do push the
Speaker 4: capabilities and that results in, you know, the kind of
Speaker 4: famous case for spinoff effects. And if there's one thing
Speaker 4: that I would just love to correct is this idea
Speaker 4: that spinoff effects are things like tang right, or these
Speaker 4: types of more.
Speaker 2: Triff worth it. We got tang worth it.
Speaker 4: Right, And that's always used as a kind of you know,
Speaker 4: we say, oh, well, yeah, okay, we got some tang
Speaker 4: out of it's great. But the reality is, spin off
Speaker 4: effects are semiconductors, right. It is really fundamental technologies of
Speaker 4: the modern world. Another example of that is you know
Speaker 4: the ways in which we now have very advanced space
Speaker 4: based internet right. In part this stuff came from a
Speaker 4: government demand for rocketry. Right. SpaceX its first major service
Speaker 4: was providing the government with cargo to their national space station. Well,
Speaker 4: that's a pretty high mass demand. It's not a small
Speaker 4: payload to get Carverard with a space station. You've actually
Speaker 4: got to be able to launch a fair bit into orbit. Well,
Speaker 4: once you've already established a demand for something that is
Speaker 4: high mass, well, what other high mass things can you
Speaker 4: launch up into space using your existing infrastructure. Turns out
Speaker 4: the principal demand for SpaceX's rockets are its own products
Speaker 4: right now, Starlink, and that's also part of the plan
Speaker 4: for Orbital Data Center. So these are things that emerge
Speaker 4: from pushing the technology from setting really difficult goals. So
Speaker 4: there's a real kind of economic truth to that whole
Speaker 4: Kennedy statement. We do these things not because they're easy,
Speaker 4: because they're hard. When you do hard things, create new
Speaker 4: technology and new capabilities.
Speaker 2: Can you extrapolate something like the semiconductor experience to I
Speaker 2: guess creating some sort of lunar base because I get
Speaker 2: it for semiconductors, we have computers on Earth. That makes sense,
Speaker 2: But if you're building a base on the Moon, it
Speaker 2: would seem to me that for at least a very
Speaker 2: long time, your principal customers are going to be NASA
Speaker 2: and maybe the Department of de.
Speaker 4: Right and also potentially other international partners. So right now,
Speaker 4: the Artemis base camp as it is being developed, is
Speaker 4: imagining participation from for example, Japanese astronauts and European Space
Speaker 4: Agency astronauts and Canadian Space Agency astronauts. Actually the US
Speaker 4: is committed to landing to Japanese astronauts on the lunar surface,
Speaker 4: the first time the US has ever committed to an
Speaker 4: international partner landing on lunar surface with it, and we're
Speaker 4: now about less than a month away, depending on when
Speaker 4: the launch actually happens from Artemis two, the first time
Speaker 4: that we've returned to the Moon since nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 4: and the very first time ever that a non American
Speaker 4: will be on BART for a mission that is leaving
Speaker 4: Earth orbit, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. And so the international
Speaker 4: element is a key part of it as well. I
Speaker 4: think the lunar economy is one of the ones that's
Speaker 4: going to be a little bit farther down the road.
Speaker 4: I think one of the ones that's coming up sooner
Speaker 4: is what's called the low Earth orbit economy, and this
Speaker 4: refers more to commercial space stations. One of the biggest
Speaker 4: contractual competitions right now is the competition for who will
Speaker 4: get the contract for a private space station from NASA.
Speaker 4: So NASA already starting in twenty ten, as I mentioned,
Speaker 4: privatized commercial human spaceflight with a commercial crew program that
Speaker 4: resulted in the SpaceX Dragon capability and the Boeing star
Speaker 4: Liner capability. Right now, those vehicles are going to in
Speaker 4: their national space station. The plan, however, is to retire
Speaker 4: their national space station, the latest state that's been thrown
Speaker 4: out being twenty thirty two. After that point there would be,
Speaker 4: in theory one or more fully commercially owned space stations.
Speaker 4: There are companies that are raising money. A couple of
Speaker 4: them have actually announced one hundreds of million dollars investments
Speaker 4: ters in the last couple of weeks. What are they
Speaker 4: going to be doing, Well, they'll be hosting NASA astronauts,
Speaker 4: They're going to be hosting international astronauts. It's going to
Speaker 4: be training, but they're also going to be conducting fundamental
Speaker 4: research in microgravity. Microgravity is a very interesting phenomenon because
Speaker 4: not only do you have no gravity, but because you
Speaker 4: have no gravity in a pressurized environment, you also have
Speaker 4: no convection and that allows for different phenomena than you
Speaker 4: see on Earth. So, for example, you're able to grow
Speaker 4: crystals larger, You're able to develop things like fiber optic
Speaker 4: cables more pure that may increase the transparency of them.
Speaker 4: We are still searching one product that we can actually
Speaker 4: make in space uficially profitably and make it again and
Speaker 4: again and again. We're still in the R and D
Speaker 4: phase and we've been working on it for a long time,
Speaker 4: so it may be a while before we see one
Speaker 4: of these things. But there is a huge research effort
Speaker 4: going on across the world to figure out how do
Speaker 4: we leverage the removal of gravity in the production of
Speaker 4: many things, and semi conductors is one of the other
Speaker 4: areas that we're starting to see a lot of investment,
Speaker 4: and so I think that one, I think is easier
Speaker 4: to understand. We are to maintain a zero gravity environment
Speaker 4: on Earth pretty close to the source of mass, but
Speaker 4: when you're flying around the Earth, you inherently have that property,
Speaker 4: and people are really exploring how we can make new
Speaker 4: use out of it and make new products.
Speaker 3: It's going to be an interesting race trace either think
Speaker 3: like who is going to make something economical first, sort
Speaker 3: of that zero gravity space or anyone in crypto which
Speaker 3: industry will deliver something of economic value first? No, but
Speaker 3: for real, so speaking of actual economic value, and you
Speaker 3: briefly alluded to it in one of your answers, one
Speaker 3: of the things you hear is data centers in outer space,
Speaker 3: and you know, like Elon is very bullish on it,
Speaker 3: but of course he has a rocket company, so of
Speaker 3: course he would say. So, I can't tell is this
Speaker 3: like just thing that like people on podcasts and Twitter
Speaker 3: like to talk about, or from your perspective, from what
Speaker 3: you could tell, is there a real plausibility that given
Speaker 3: intense compute demands and I have to imagine it's like
Speaker 3: maybe the cooling bills a little lower up there, that
Speaker 3: maybe this could be like a real thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, obviously one of the currently you know, hot debates
Speaker 4: within you know, engineering, economic analysis in space. How much
Speaker 4: sense does this make. There's actually been a few folks
Speaker 4: who put on really really good calculators online. You can
Speaker 4: kind of look up Orbital Data Center online calculator. And
Speaker 4: the profitability of it depends on a number of factors.
Speaker 4: What do you assume the launch cost is, how often
Speaker 4: do you assume these GPUs are going to fail? How
Speaker 4: effective do you assume the radiators are going to be
Speaker 4: for getting rid of the excess heat. There's a lot
Speaker 4: of different variables, and given the fact that we don't
Speaker 4: have any orbital data centers of scale, it's hard to
Speaker 4: know exactly what their profitability is. Going to be I'll
Speaker 4: say one of the big obvious benefits is not a
Speaker 4: technological one. It is simply that you probably don't need
Speaker 4: to go for extensive permits.
Speaker 3: That's no, yeah, for real, but it's a real advantage.
Speaker 3: There's no space in mbs. Who are about that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean you may end up depending on how
Speaker 4: large these things are and how many of them are
Speaker 4: and what kind of what essentially what reflectivity they have.
Speaker 4: So one of the things that we're now starting to
Speaker 4: see is with constellations size of starlink. These are about
Speaker 4: ten thousand satellites in space right The vast majority of
Speaker 4: satellites that are in space right now that are operational
Speaker 4: are owned and operated by spaces. Ten thousand or so
Speaker 4: constellations have now been approved and submitted to the ITU,
Speaker 4: and various ones submitted to the FCC. At the million
Speaker 4: satellite scale, already a large amount of the night sky
Speaker 4: people are very familiar fly over revies satelites. A orbital
Speaker 4: data center would be significantly larger and potentially more reflective
Speaker 4: than a starlink. So if you've got hundreds of thousands
Speaker 4: of these up there, you might start really seeing them
Speaker 4: a lot. How much do we care about that, right,
Speaker 4: These are these are kind of social you know, social
Speaker 4: public choice issues that you know, we're just starting to think.
Speaker 2: About, speaking of stuff that we might be able to see.
Speaker 2: Are space elevators plausible at all? This idea that we
Speaker 2: could have space elevators instead of rockets to bring stuff up?
Speaker 6: I love it.
Speaker 4: You know, I haven't had a good space out of
Speaker 4: their question for a long time, So thank you.
Speaker 2: Maybe that says something about their plausibility, but go.
Speaker 4: On, well, you know they're they're they're fun idea, right,
Speaker 4: I mean, arth ce Clerk. I mean, it's a beautiful
Speaker 4: kind of vision. And as far as I understand that,
Speaker 4: they're very reliant on high performance carbon nanotubes and equivalent technologies,
Speaker 4: And the joke I've always kind of maintained is, you know,
Speaker 4: I will I will wait until we have a bridge
Speaker 4: or a swing set made out of carbon nanotubes before
Speaker 4: I get too excited, or the space linervator. In order
Speaker 4: for them to work, they would need to be about
Speaker 4: thirty six thousand kilometers in length, right, because your goal
Speaker 4: is to get them into a place where they are
Speaker 4: in GEO, somewhere stable. If it's not in GEO, then
Speaker 4: it's going to be continually moving around, and you know
Speaker 4: that doesn't really work. So it's got to be in
Speaker 4: an orbit that is basically staying above the same place
Speaker 4: on Earth. That's true synchronous orbit thirty six thousand kilometers away.
Speaker 4: These are going to be very long carbonanotubes.
Speaker 5: So I'm not planning on that anytime zone.
Speaker 2: You know, you're obviously focused on the economics of particular projects,
Speaker 2: but I imagine the technology matters as well. How do you
Speaker 2: actually evaluate the technology because as outsiders to this space
Speaker 2: space space pun No, I won't do it. I resisted, Joe.
Speaker 2: As outsiders to this particular topic, it's very difficult for
Speaker 2: us to get a handle on what seems feasible just
Speaker 2: in terms of basic physics versus what seems feasible both
Speaker 2: in terms of reality and also the money that it
Speaker 2: might actually cost.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a great question. One of the things that
Speaker 4: I loved about working at NASA was that, you know,
Speaker 4: you're working with some of the smartest people in the world,
Speaker 4: and you're all working for the public good, and you're
Speaker 4: just trying to figure out, you know, what's the right
Speaker 4: thing to do for the country and the way that
Speaker 4: the agency evaluates these types of technologies and projects is
Speaker 4: through teams, and you have a team with a number
Speaker 4: of different capabilities and skill sets. So you have people
Speaker 4: who are very familiar with systems engineering combined with people
Speaker 4: with experience in expertise and material sciences, throw in an economist,
Speaker 4: throw in a lawyer, and you all as a team
Speaker 4: evaluate you know, what is this, what would it take
Speaker 4: to make this thing real? You know what benefits would
Speaker 4: it have? And you know, you do these types of
Speaker 4: grassroots engineering economics assessments of these projects. And part of
Speaker 4: the kind of you know, the joy is that you
Speaker 4: tend to do these things dedicated for days, weeks, depending
Speaker 4: on how long you know or how serious of a
Speaker 4: procurement it might be. But a lot of that kind
Speaker 4: of stays kind of behind the behind the door, so
Speaker 4: to speak. So we don't put as much of that out,
Speaker 4: and when we do, it'll be in these kind of
Speaker 4: procurement announcements where you kind of will talk about the
Speaker 4: strengths and the weaknesses of a project if you really
Speaker 4: want to kind of get a sense of how the
Speaker 4: agency does these types of valuations. Next time, there's a
Speaker 4: very big procurement that is coming out of the agency,
Speaker 4: like we did for the human landing systems to return
Speaker 4: humans lunar surface. Go look at the procurement assessment the
Speaker 4: agency does on the projects.
Speaker 2: How long are those assessments typically?
Speaker 4: You know, they can be dozens of pages, right, and
Speaker 4: they'll get into some of the technical issues. You know,
Speaker 4: obviously there's proprietary technology involved, so you know, it's not
Speaker 4: like it's it's giving you the kind of you know,
Speaker 4: blueprint diagnostics necessarily, but there's a lot of information in them.
Speaker 4: And so that's the benefit of having a public agency
Speaker 4: like MASS is that it does have to actually put
Speaker 4: out these types of assessments publicly.
Speaker 3: Wait, are we really sending Pew back to the Moon
Speaker 3: next month?
Speaker 4: We are sending people back to the Moon in a flyby?
Speaker 4: Oh so the Artemis two missions will take four crew
Speaker 4: in the Orion around the Moon and then return on
Speaker 4: a roughly you know, kind of week long mission, give
Speaker 4: or take.
Speaker 3: And then what's the timeline for when we want to
Speaker 3: land on the Moon again?
Speaker 4: That is the twenty five billion dollar question. There is
Speaker 4: been a change in the way that the agency has
Speaker 4: approached its lunar landing efforts. So in the Apollo program,
Speaker 4: MASSA did rely on contractors, relied on Grummen the grumb
Speaker 4: and Lander system that they built, but that was ultimately
Speaker 4: owned and operated and kind of managed by NASA. Right
Speaker 4: with the shift to commercial services and operations, that is
Speaker 4: not the case right now for NASA's landing plans. The
Speaker 4: landers are owned and operated and managed as services by
Speaker 4: SpaceX and Blue Origin, and so there isn't quite the
Speaker 4: same level of insight and certainty, you know. And you
Speaker 4: might say, you know, there's some arbitrary certainty in kind
Speaker 4: of government timelines, which is absolutely true, but we don't
Speaker 4: I don't quite know at the same level. For example,
Speaker 4: NASA has not clarified publicly how many refueling flights they
Speaker 4: expect to be needed for a first lander of Starship,
Speaker 4: in part because that depends on this performance of Starship
Speaker 4: and we don't quite yet know. We're still waiting on
Speaker 4: the Version three flight coming up here in the next
Speaker 4: month or two, so there's a lot of uncertainty around
Speaker 4: when that landing would be. The NASA Administrator Jared Eisman
Speaker 4: just announced a change to the Artemis campaign, inserting a
Speaker 4: flight in between this next flight of Artemis two and
Speaker 4: the projected landing, and that would be equivalent to the
Speaker 4: old Apollo kind of nine mission where you're going to
Speaker 4: test docking the lander with the crew module in lower
Speaker 4: th orbit. And the agency suggested actually that if both
Speaker 4: landers are ready, the Blue Origin and the SpaceX Lander,
Speaker 4: maybe a lower orbit or Ryan might dock with both
Speaker 4: of them. So long way of saying, there's still a
Speaker 4: number of technical steps that need to go. I think
Speaker 4: the Agency has targeted twenty eight for a landing, but
Speaker 4: we will see. The architecture for lunar landing this time
Speaker 4: is not as simple as it was in the Apollo program,
Speaker 4: involves a lot more launches. The point where we don't
Speaker 4: get quite even know how.
Speaker 3: Many talk to us a little bit about Elon Musk
Speaker 3: has a Mars obsession, and he's not just interested in
Speaker 3: exploring whatever lakes or potential, you know, he's actually talked
Speaker 3: about colonizing Mars. But I don't totally get that. I'm
Speaker 3: sure I could read a book on it. In fact,
Speaker 3: I think there is a famous book that inspired everyone.
Speaker 3: I gotta read that. But like there's no oxygen up
Speaker 3: there must be pretty miserable, can Like, what's the idea
Speaker 3: behind actually living on Mars, and does that seem And
Speaker 3: you know, I have to say, just to back up
Speaker 3: for a second, like, I don't think we'll ever see
Speaker 3: a space elevator in our life, but I absolutely think
Speaker 3: there will be one eventually, and if it happens in
Speaker 3: a thousand years, that's a very short time in the
Speaker 3: grand scheme of things for human history. So like, but like, Okay,
Speaker 3: so maybe we don't we never see Mars in my lifetime.
Speaker 3: But what is the idea generally beyond behind the idea
Speaker 3: that Mars is a theoreticly habitable location that maybe could
Speaker 3: be economically productive or useful to DeCamp to in some way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think you're asking kind of one of the
Speaker 4: most fundamental existential questions about our journey into space. Right
Speaker 4: in theory, we have a long time to go, right,
Speaker 4: We've got approximately you know, one billion years give or
Speaker 4: take until this planet becomes uninhabitable, right, and so ultimately,
Speaker 4: as hdu Wels would have it, it's all the universe
Speaker 4: or nothingness. Right, Either we managed to escape the planet
Speaker 4: of our origin and we have further experiences and expansion
Speaker 4: and adventures out amongst the stars, or we don't. So
Speaker 4: part of the long run vision is that eventually humans
Speaker 4: will figure out how to leave not just our planet
Speaker 4: but our Solar system. However, we do not have a
Speaker 4: real good understanding of how we would at all make
Speaker 4: that possible today, and so heart of the thought is
Speaker 4: we're going to need to learn how to live out
Speaker 4: in space for extended periods of time. The longest that
Speaker 4: we live in space these days is about one year.
Speaker 4: There have been Russian missions in the paths that have
Speaker 4: lasted longer in lower orbit, but our medical docs these
Speaker 4: days at NASA pretty much don't clear anyone beyond one year.
Speaker 4: So the idea of going to Mars is kind of
Speaker 4: developed over the centuries. For a long time, we thought
Speaker 4: that there would be it would be much more habitable, right,
Speaker 4: We thought there might be oxygen there. There isn't. There's
Speaker 4: a really good book that's come out the last couple
Speaker 4: of years called City on Mars, which really kind of
Speaker 4: goes through some of these things that you're talking about,
Speaker 4: which is that really might not be that nice of
Speaker 4: a place to live. You know, when you ever get
Speaker 4: the question where do you want to go? I often
Speaker 4: say Venus because it's kind of a one year in
Speaker 4: back mission. Because Ultimately, I want to stay on Earth.
Speaker 4: It's literally where all of the restaurants are, right There
Speaker 4: are restaurants anywhere else in the Solar System, And so
Speaker 4: there's a kind of sense of that frontier mentality that
Speaker 4: I think appeals to some people's narratives, even if they
Speaker 4: don't necessarily spend a lot of time on any frontiers themselves.
Speaker 4: And I think that idea of going out to a
Speaker 4: new world and learning from that world is also a
Speaker 4: different related motivator. Right there is a scientific interest of exploration.
Speaker 4: What can we learn from this genuinely different alien world
Speaker 4: and what can we learn about ourselves by learning to
Speaker 4: live on it for decades centuries. There's a cultural argument
Speaker 4: that some of my friends kind of really like, which
Speaker 4: is this argument that goes back to earthsc clerk, which
Speaker 4: is that fundamentally it's about getting variation in humanity, variation
Speaker 4: in the cultures of humanity. What will we learn what
Speaker 4: kind of different humanity will emerge from life in other worlds?
Speaker 4: We don't know, but that seems like an interesting question
Speaker 4: and interesting exploration.
Speaker 2: So I know you spoke previously about how private capital
Speaker 2: has always had a role in space exploration to various degrees.
Speaker 2: But when you look at twenty twenty six, I think
Speaker 2: some people would argue that a lot of territory has
Speaker 2: been ceded to private companies like SpaceX. When you think
Speaker 2: about your framework of looking at this, are there certain
Speaker 2: places or things or missions that you think are better
Speaker 2: for federal funding to take on versus private capital?
Speaker 5: All?
Speaker 4: Yeah, For me, the big determinant is whether or not
Speaker 4: this is something that is going to require public dollars
Speaker 4: for essentially the foreseeable future, right that there really aren't
Speaker 4: options as far as we can you know, kind of
Speaker 4: reasonably assess for their being private markets. So, for example,
Speaker 4: on launch vehicles, there were private markets. Right, the US
Speaker 4: went from having essentially zero market share of global launches
Speaker 4: in two thousand and seven to now basically having seventy
Speaker 4: five percent or above because of the success of SpaceX.
Speaker 4: There are there is a global market to launch. It's
Speaker 4: also global market in satellite internet, right, So these are
Speaker 4: ones where it makes sense to have private companies in
Speaker 4: the lead. There may be you know, kind of natural
Speaker 4: monopoly challenges, so you may think about how you're going
Speaker 4: to manage that in the future, but you know, we
Speaker 4: do that in other industries too. So for me, the
Speaker 4: reason we're experimenting in space stations is because, you know,
Speaker 4: we think that might be an area where there really
Speaker 4: might be some commercial more. We've actually seen multiple different
Speaker 4: private missions that have been paid for. They're not yet
Speaker 4: at kind of a very significant share of the market
Speaker 4: for human spaceflight, but it's certainly a lot more than
Speaker 4: it was ten years ago when it was zero and
Speaker 4: now it's a few percentage. For me, some of the
Speaker 4: things that we need to make sure kind of stay
Speaker 4: within the public domain, within kind of NASA management operation
Speaker 4: includes things like operating the Moon base. It is going
Speaker 4: to be a very expensive proposition. There may be some
Speaker 4: elements to that that it makes sense to have a
Speaker 4: private sector experimentation and potentially even infrastructure ownership. For example,
Speaker 4: you can imagine a world where you might have a
Speaker 4: baseline power system on the lunar surface that is kind
Speaker 4: of owned by the government, but if there's kind of
Speaker 4: interest in expanding that, well, maybe you have some private
Speaker 4: sector kind of you know, take on some of the
Speaker 4: risks to see whether or not they have some other
Speaker 4: infrastructure options there. If we don't have that privately owned,
Speaker 4: then I think there might be some challenges of kind
Speaker 4: of pushback, right to what extent do you want your
Speaker 4: tax dollars going to fund Jeff Bezos's Moon base versus,
Speaker 4: you know, the National Lunar Research Station. I think people's
Speaker 4: answers that are potentially different. And given the fact that
Speaker 4: it's essentially public tax hours they're paying for all these things,
Speaker 4: I think that's something we need to consider. So, you know,
Speaker 4: the standard answer is that we have the government take
Speaker 4: on these higher risk activities where there really is no
Speaker 4: market demand. But I also think that we need to
Speaker 4: think about this as an infrastructure play. For a long
Speaker 4: period of time, we're going to be reliant on publicly
Speaker 4: funded resources for these things, and I think therefore there
Speaker 4: needs to be some some public management or that through
Speaker 4: agency like.
Speaker 3: NASA, we can have private companies doing some of the
Speaker 3: lunar services like catering the space station. We could get
Speaker 3: like sidexo or one of those companies to handle that.
Speaker 3: I'd be comfortable outsourcing some of that. What is the
Speaker 3: deal with lunar territory? Have governments tried to claim slices
Speaker 3: of the Moon? Let's say we land it was a
Speaker 3: US based station on the Moon. Would we then say
Speaker 3: that that is American property that are what is international
Speaker 3: law established with regards to claims on the Moon or elsewhere.
Speaker 4: Yep, great question. So this was actually resolved in the
Speaker 4: the sixties with the unter Space Treaty nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 4: So prior to any human landing on the Moon, essentially
Speaker 4: the powers of the world, including the Soviet Union and
Speaker 4: the US and China all decided we don't want the
Speaker 4: same type of kind of territorial acquisition scramble that we've
Speaker 4: seen in human history to take place on the Moon.
Speaker 4: So there was an agreement that essentially there will not
Speaker 4: be any assertion of national territory, and undernational law there
Speaker 4: are no private sector actors, so essentially there won't be
Speaker 4: any ownership of territory. However, there is ownership of the
Speaker 4: assets that you put there, so any Moon base that
Speaker 4: you put there, any physical infrastructure, would be American infrastructure.
Speaker 4: But just like an Antarctica, there are provisions within the
Speaker 4: unter Space Treaty to allow other countries to come and
Speaker 4: visit these facilities. They can notify and say we'd like
Speaker 4: to come visit your facility to make sure that there
Speaker 4: isn't any underward military activity happening. There. So there's this
Speaker 4: principle of reciprocity of visitation that's established, and the idea
Speaker 4: that we can all so mine has already been established.
Speaker 4: So what I always like to say is that no
Speaker 4: matter what business idea, that you have a lunar surface,
Speaker 4: you can probably engage on it right now if you
Speaker 4: can make the case, with the exception of property speculation,
Speaker 4: if you want to go build a hotel on the Moon,
Speaker 4: you can afford to do it, and you can just
Speaker 4: put it down. You'll get the get the license to
Speaker 4: do it. You don't own the territory, but you can
Speaker 4: put it there. If you want to mine something. The
Speaker 4: Space Actor of twenty fifteen that was approved by Congress
Speaker 4: and signed into a law establish that if you mine it,
Speaker 4: essentially you own it, right So if you take something
Speaker 4: from a lunar surface, that's been established. The Artemis Accord
Speaker 4: signatories have all basically signed up to that. So that's
Speaker 4: now a very popular proposition around the world. And if
Speaker 4: you think about it, we've already established that. When we
Speaker 4: brought back rocks from the Paul program, no one debated
Speaker 4: that the United States could essentially do what it wanted
Speaker 4: with that. And you asked, gave it out to countries
Speaker 4: around the world use it for scientific purposes. So we've
Speaker 4: already established a lot of those principles. But the idea
Speaker 4: that there's going to be territory is one that currently
Speaker 4: the out of Space Treaty, I would argue, thankfully kind
Speaker 4: of established, is not one that we're going to be
Speaker 4: competing over.
Speaker 2: How often do you think about the economic impacts of
Speaker 2: an alien invasion.
Speaker 4: You know, only on Fridays.
Speaker 2: Is this not like a thought experiment that they assigned
Speaker 2: to all NASA economists?
Speaker 4: You know, it's a great point when the agency re
Speaker 4: establishes the position, we should absolutely make that a requirement
Speaker 4: of you know, reporting out on that. Obviously, in an
Speaker 4: alien innovation, it would probably be pretty catastrophic. I would
Speaker 4: certainly recommend to any listeners, you know, the Three Body
Speaker 4: Problem series, but if they ever read it, it's absolutely fantastic,
Speaker 4: and you know, it makes a pretty clear case that
Speaker 4: would be a rough time.
Speaker 2: All right, Alex, thank you so much for coming on
Speaker 2: odd lots, Thank you for coming to our party. I'm
Speaker 2: so glad we actually met and I did get to
Speaker 2: ask you the question of what it is that you
Speaker 2: do so really appreciate it.
Speaker 6: Thanks, It is a real pleasure, Joe.
Speaker 2: That was fascinating. I mean part of me just like
Speaker 2: hearing what we're up to now when it comes to
Speaker 2: space exploration and the answer it turns out is, you know,
Speaker 2: a decent amount. There are so many questions that we
Speaker 2: didn't even get to. I kind of wanted to ask
Speaker 2: for an economist's take on the procurement process. Yes as well,
Speaker 2: but we're going to have to have Alex back.
Speaker 3: On procurement is Actually I want to do more on
Speaker 3: that specifically because I imagine that there's a lot of sort
Speaker 3: of small startups in both the sort of space and
Speaker 3: defense area. I mean, we know there's a lot of
Speaker 3: defense tech startups, and I assume there's a lot of
Speaker 3: space tech startups. How you actually evaluate those ones? I mean,
Speaker 3: it's actually really impressive thinking about backing SpaceX of two
Speaker 3: thousand and eight. Yeah, when it was long before they
Speaker 3: had sort of proven that they could do reusable rockets
Speaker 3: at scale, and now we've all seen the videos and
Speaker 3: they still blow my mind every single time. That was
Speaker 3: a really good bet and it was like, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm sure a lot of people thought that was completely
Speaker 3: implausible or whatever very recently in history. So that's pretty extraordinary.
Speaker 3: I am also I'm still and I think that's right.
Speaker 3: I looked up this chart again and the Wikipedia page.
Speaker 3: Four and a half percent of one point the entire
Speaker 3: federal budget was NASA, which just seems like so hard
Speaker 3: to believe right now that this was like a really
Speaker 3: big part of what the government is spending money out.
Speaker 2: Well, this is the thing. If you couch, If you
Speaker 2: couch it in existential terms, then you know, the upward
Speaker 2: limit of your budget becomes I guess not infinity, but
Speaker 2: you know, four percent pretty good.
Speaker 3: I do wonder, like it does not seem implausible to
Speaker 3: me that we have another Sputnik moment with China. What
Speaker 3: if like tomorrow, the like we're landing, we're landing.
Speaker 2: The other thing I want to ask about how NASA
Speaker 2: differs from China's space agency.
Speaker 3: But look, what if, like you know, they're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: we have we have someone landing on the Moon next
Speaker 3: week or something like that, Like it seems plausible at
Speaker 3: some point they they kind.
Speaker 2: Of suddenly builds a space elevator. They figured out about.
Speaker 3: It, They figured out reusable rockets too. You know what
Speaker 3: the name of their uh reusable rocket is what the
Speaker 3: long March ten?
Speaker 2: Really? Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a good name.
Speaker 4: Anyway.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I thought that was a great conversation. And I
Speaker 3: just don't say, like I don't you know, I'm pretty
Speaker 3: skeptical of the fact that anytime soon we're gonna get
Speaker 3: like actual economic productivity out of space, whether it's from
Speaker 3: mining or I don't know, maybe the Data Center's things
Speaker 3: will happen. But I'm still pro spending money on going
Speaker 3: to space just for the sake of it. I think
Speaker 3: it's I think it's inspiring. If we saw some people
Speaker 3: land on the Moon and hang out there for a while, well,
Speaker 3: I mean, it'd be in such better video condition, you
Speaker 3: know what I'm saying, like those it wouldn't be those
Speaker 3: you know, we could see it in the high dev
Speaker 3: and they could do stuff insaid, those grainy things that
Speaker 3: maybe some people were thought shot on like a set.
Speaker 2: So why don't you just use AI to pretend to
Speaker 2: be on the Moon?
Speaker 3: I want to see it.
Speaker 2: Would you go to the Moon, Yeah, it depends on
Speaker 2: how far developed that particular technology is.
Speaker 3: I would definitely go. I mean, as long as they
Speaker 3: thought it was like plausible, and other people were going,
Speaker 3: I'd go I.
Speaker 2: Would need a certain amount of successful missions before I
Speaker 2: agree to you'd be.
Speaker 3: On the first I'll be on the first one. Let's
Speaker 3: do it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, all right, Well, in the name of
Speaker 2: all blots, maybe I would consider you for do it
Speaker 2: for content for content. That's right, Okay, shall we leave
Speaker 2: it there.
Speaker 3: Let's leave it there.
Speaker 2: This has been another episode of the Odd Loots podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 3: And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
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