Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norrey with
Speaker 2: your doctor David Livingstone with us. David, what are your
Speaker 2: thoughts on the privatization of space We've got Virgin Galactic
Speaker 2: headed up by Richard Branson, SpaceX with the Elon Musk,
Speaker 2: We've got the Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos. What do
Speaker 2: you think of all those?
Speaker 3: Well, I'm very bullish for SpaceX and the private sector
Speaker 3: in general. I'm not so hot about Virgin Galactic. In fact,
Speaker 3: we can talk about that if you want. And Blue Origin.
Speaker 3: It's kind of a mystery because it and I think
Speaker 3: I've talked about this with you before, it's so late
Speaker 3: in doing things and developing things like their new Glen rocket,
Speaker 3: their big rocket and stuff. And it's almost as if
Speaker 3: it's a hobby for Bsos while he's out on the
Speaker 3: yacht or something. It just doesn't seem to be going
Speaker 3: after developing its products and doing everything like a really
Speaker 3: serious company would do. But you know, speaking of Virgin Galactic,
Speaker 3: they did have their second successful flight a couple of
Speaker 3: weeks ago, and I looked at it a little differently
Speaker 3: because I wanted to see what the stock price would
Speaker 3: do with Virgin's success. I thought, God it, it's got
Speaker 3: a pop, right, Yeah, No, it didn't. It hung around
Speaker 3: three to three and a half and as I recall it,
Speaker 3: it didn't move, and in fact, it might have even
Speaker 3: dipped a little bit during the day or by the
Speaker 3: end of the day. And I think that says a
Speaker 3: whole lot about Virgin Galactic, because they have a technology
Speaker 3: that cannot be scaled up. That hybrid rocket that's it.
Speaker 3: It can't go. It can't even make it to the
Speaker 3: Carmen line in space. So they do an Air Force
Speaker 3: definition of space, which which is eighty kilometers fifty mile
Speaker 3: van Carmen line is sixty two mile for three hundred
Speaker 3: and thirty thousand feet one hundred kilometers. We've got five
Speaker 3: American space stations, private space stations coming online over the
Speaker 3: next couple of years as the Space Station gets ready
Speaker 3: to retire, and those are going to be served by
Speaker 3: private sector companies, including tourism, and there's just not going
Speaker 3: to be much of a place for the kind of
Speaker 3: suborbital flight that both Blue Origin do and that Virgin
Speaker 3: Galactic do. But Blue Origin is at least making larger
Speaker 3: rockets to do orbital spaceflight. And in fact they have
Speaker 3: a lunar lander for Artemus, and they're also involved in
Speaker 3: one of the private space stations. But there's no place
Speaker 3: for Virgin Galactic to go. They have a backlog of
Speaker 3: about eight hundred reservations that they sell at a price
Speaker 3: between two hundred and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars
Speaker 3: that they need to honor, and today that price is
Speaker 3: around four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And I don't
Speaker 3: know what their new ticket sales are like. I've not
Speaker 3: seen any news article on Virgin's new ticket sales. But
Speaker 3: they can do up and down suborbital, but that hybrid
Speaker 3: rocket can't scale up. It doesn't have that kind of power.
Speaker 3: And if they wanted to do something else, they either
Speaker 3: have to associate with some other company where they would
Speaker 3: have to develop a real chemical rocket. That's what we
Speaker 3: have for propulsion right now. It's chemical rocket propulsions.
Speaker 2: But you don't see Richard Branson backing out, do you.
Speaker 3: Well, he sold out most of his interests over years ago.
Speaker 3: You know, they Virgin Galactic went public with what is
Speaker 3: called a back SBAC. So it's it's a simple, far
Speaker 3: let's cost way to take a company public. You find
Speaker 3: a company that is already public, it's inactive, it's a shell.
Speaker 3: You merge into it, and bloilay, you're public. So there
Speaker 3: was a really heavy craze of doing spack going public
Speaker 3: in a lot of industry, including the commercial space industry.
Speaker 3: Virgin went public with a stack and jumped its priced up.
Speaker 3: I think at one point it got up close to
Speaker 3: or around seventy dollars a share. Wow, Ramsom sold out.
Speaker 3: I think he may have kept maybe ten percent of
Speaker 3: his holding something like that.
Speaker 2: So he made his bucks big time.
Speaker 3: Cashed out, and then the stock fell and there were
Speaker 3: lawsuits against Virgin for stock manipulation by disgruntled stockholders. I
Speaker 3: don't know how they've come out, or if they dismissed
Speaker 3: for what happened to him. I have no idea if
Speaker 3: there was any merit. I guess if I were a
Speaker 3: stockholder going in at seventy after it's been trumped and
Speaker 3: pumped and humped as a public company, and then it
Speaker 3: goes down to three or four, I'd be pretty.
Speaker 2: I'd be upset too, Yeah, I'd be upset.
Speaker 3: So I don't know to what degree Virgin is getting
Speaker 3: management with Richard. They have new management for Virgin Galactic,
Speaker 3: and they're the ones that are doing it now. And
Speaker 3: I don't follow it very closely, but I do follow
Speaker 3: their stock price, and their stock price is actually embedded
Speaker 3: in some exchange traded funds for space, so it's like
Speaker 3: in a market basket, so if it has a bad day,
Speaker 3: it's not as bad for the investors as if you
Speaker 3: owned only Virgin Galactic stock.
Speaker 2: What do you think of Elon Musk company SpaceX that
Speaker 2: seems to be an up and coming you.
Speaker 3: Do, Yeah, I love it, and I like Musk. I
Speaker 3: know he's falling out of favor with the younger crowd
Speaker 3: since he bought Twitter or X. I guess I should
Speaker 3: call it, But I single handedly credit Musk for rejuvenating
Speaker 3: the space industry, getting reusability going, and dropping the cost
Speaker 3: of space access. I think what must did is Genia.
Speaker 3: There was one other participant group that I think helped
Speaker 3: revolutionize space around the same time as Musk, a little
Speaker 3: bit later, but that was the advent of the CubeSat.
Speaker 3: And what CubeSats did. It allowed allowed school kids to
Speaker 3: build a launch of satellite, and many of those school kids,
Speaker 3: including graduate students at Stanford and elsewhere, went on and
Speaker 3: built satellite companies and sold them and made millions of dollars.
Speaker 3: And that is the origin of Starlink and the origin
Speaker 3: of some of these other constellations that are running on
Speaker 3: cube SATs. We've sent cube SATs to be orbital communicating
Speaker 3: satellites for Mars missions, and cube SATs and small satellites
Speaker 3: like that have revolutionized space right along with Elon Musk.
Speaker 3: And when as I said doctor Curry was talking last week,
Speaker 3: it's revolutionized the data and the amount of data and
Speaker 3: the kinds of data that are coming in for climate science,
Speaker 3: that's for agriculture, for commerce. These two things SpaceX and
Speaker 3: cube SATs to me are the game changers. And I
Speaker 3: think Musk is he came first, and I give him
Speaker 3: responsibility for it because he launched a lot of cube
Speaker 3: SATs for free on what's called ride share. Ula did
Speaker 3: that too, but you know, Musk on his Falcon rockets,
Speaker 3: really made ride share available to a lot of young
Speaker 3: companies that couldn't have gotten to space otherwise. And so
Speaker 3: I'm very bullish on SpaceX and on Musk. That said
Speaker 3: I don't think he'll get to Mars on his timetable.
Speaker 3: I think it's going to take a lot longer to
Speaker 3: get humans to Mars safely than what he's projecting by
Speaker 3: the end of this decade or by early twenty thirty.
Speaker 3: I think he's going to miss that timeline.
Speaker 2: David, we don't hear much about the Space Force. I'll come.
Speaker 3: Probably because it's mostly administrative. It has taken over most
Speaker 3: all of the military's space launches, so they now run
Speaker 3: through the Space Force rather than something in the Army,
Speaker 3: something in the Air Force, something with a national defense agency.
Speaker 3: So they're a big part of the launch industry in America.
Speaker 3: But we don't have any space that's per se. Yes,
Speaker 3: we do have the satellites up there, but the defense
Speaker 3: of the satellite is happening here on the ground with
Speaker 3: cyber So we don't have any high ground troops, which
Speaker 3: sometimes talked about. We don't have any entities or people
Speaker 3: to rescue. If the Space Force was going to take
Speaker 3: on a coast Guard like rescue service. We don't have
Speaker 3: that technology anyway. So mostly it's building and it's administrative,
Speaker 3: and it's very active with launch, and it's very active
Speaker 3: with national security and with cyberspace, and a lot of
Speaker 3: that is stuff that you don't necessarily read or hear about.
Speaker 2: Are you impressed with the fact that we're moving forward
Speaker 2: with that Space Force.
Speaker 3: I'd like to see us move forward faster with it.
Speaker 3: If I were in the Navy today like I was
Speaker 3: back during Vietnam, I would have stayed in the Navy
Speaker 3: longer if they would have granted me a transfer to
Speaker 3: the Space Force. Really, yes, I would have. I would
Speaker 3: have loved to have been in the Space Force doing
Speaker 3: anything for a day. I was in the Space Force
Speaker 3: military service. I don't care much for their uniform, but yeah,
Speaker 3: I would have. I would not have gotten out. They
Speaker 3: were offering early outs, as you know from the Vietnam War,
Speaker 3: and I had eye problems, so they were happy to
Speaker 3: get rid of me. If I waived military benefits for
Speaker 3: genetic eye problem. That I would have stayed in. If
Speaker 3: the Space Force had been there, if they would have
Speaker 3: transferred me, and if the Space Force had been around,
Speaker 3: I would have tried to join the Space Force rather
Speaker 3: than the Navy.
Speaker 2: Do you still see space as a commercial enterprise?
Speaker 3: Totally? It's more and more commercial all the time, and
Speaker 3: it's opening up so many opportunities. I did a show
Speaker 3: with a researcher at theaters Fine Hospital in the research department,
Speaker 3: and they send stem cells the space and by the way,
Speaker 3: they send them on SpaceX, but they're agnostic. They would
Speaker 3: send them on another ride too, But they do a
Speaker 3: lot with SpaceX, and they're doing stem cell research in
Speaker 3: space on replacing disease and defective cardiac muscle. So there
Speaker 3: are so many opportunities for space. And when I ask
Speaker 3: the guests if when the space station retired, if he
Speaker 3: would be disappointed, and he said, no, no, no, bring
Speaker 3: it on, because we'll have so much more opportunity with
Speaker 3: the commercial sector space station and some of the rules
Speaker 3: and regulations that apply to us on the National Lab,
Speaker 3: you know, the space station in International Lab won't exist on
Speaker 3: a commercial lab.
Speaker 2: How did these private companies, David come along so fast?
Speaker 2: Did they hire a former NASA employees who knew rocketry?
Speaker 3: How did they Just some of them do, But a
Speaker 3: lot of these people have worked for space ats and
Speaker 3: have worked for other aerospace companies, and so they do
Speaker 3: have experience. You know, when I started teaching as an
Speaker 3: adjunct at the University of North Dakota, soins maybe fifteen
Speaker 3: years ago or something, they really had the about the
Speaker 3: only multi disciplined space studies program around and it was
Speaker 3: very highly esteemed. And now it's everywhere, and so many
Speaker 3: schools have aerospace engineering or have derivatives of it for
Speaker 3: undergraduate as well as graduate school. And it's a really
Speaker 3: prolific field, so students want to go to it and
Speaker 3: they turn out incredible students that do lots of opportunity.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of them that I get to interview.
Speaker 3: Went to USC and Los Angeles and many of them
Speaker 3: work for JPL, and then they did something like supersonic
Speaker 3: parachutes for the mars Landers, and then they moved into
Speaker 3: the private sector. And one of them who comes on
Speaker 3: the show every once in a while is trying to
Speaker 3: build a hydrogen service car and airplane and they're doing
Speaker 3: really innovative things and they've got capability and expense experience,
Speaker 3: and NASA is a great place to learn how to
Speaker 3: do things and to learn how to do it right
Speaker 3: and to you know, not have failures. And so I
Speaker 3: think it's a combination of a lot of different launching
Speaker 3: companies that are out there now. People start their own
Speaker 3: companies up the cubes. That certainly led to Earth imaging
Speaker 3: companies using Constellation satellite. But there's three or four Constellation
Speaker 3: satellite private sector company keeping tabs on what goes on
Speaker 3: in Ukraine. It's not just Starlink, but there's several others
Speaker 3: that are doing it as well. Rocket Labs has missions
Speaker 3: now to other planets and is doing other things. They're
Speaker 3: in New Zealand and a US company and very successful
Speaker 3: small launcher there. Just the opportunities and the growth are
Speaker 3: phenomenal and people can't believe it. In half the time,
Speaker 3: I can't believe it either, And they're more efficient. And
Speaker 3: the other thing that's happened is money has been available,
Speaker 3: so that may be changing a little bit as money
Speaker 3: and the available capital is more costly now and maybe
Speaker 3: a little bit less risk everts. But for a long time,
Speaker 3: probably most of the Trump years and into at least
Speaker 3: the first part of the Biden year, money has been
Speaker 3: pretty easily available and at a low cost. So these
Speaker 3: companies have been able to go out and do round
Speaker 3: one seed round two rates fifteen million dollars here, five
Speaker 3: million dollars there, and a good many of them succeed,
Speaker 3: not all of them, you know, there's a Japanese American
Speaker 3: company called Astroscale that's doing incredible things in this commercial
Speaker 3: on getting rid of space debris, and there's lots up there,
Speaker 3: and well, there's lots up there. It's a big market.
Speaker 3: It's got regulatory booby traps all over the place because
Speaker 3: of the Outer Space Treaty and the Liability Treaty and
Speaker 3: some other things like that. But you know, private sector entrepreneurs,
Speaker 3: they imagine things that government can't do. And once the
Speaker 3: industry started to change with private launchers and then the CubeSats,
Speaker 3: the entrepreneurs have gone crazy and then they create businesses
Speaker 3: out of nothing, and many of them make great successes
Speaker 3: out of it and are doing incredible services.
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