A Space Revolution w/ Rick Tumlinson #16

Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to a new edition of the Age of Infinite. Today, we have an amazing guest on the line. We have Rick Tumlinson. Rick, how are you? I'm doing great. How are you? Good. The topic we're gonna be talking about is, the title we've gone up with for this program is called the Space Revolution. And let me share a few things about Rick and why he's on the line. Rick and I go back I don't know how many years now. When was the pioneering?

Or that was 4 years ago already? 5 years ago? 5? 5 years ago. Mhmm. 5 years ago. I had been We had started the Project Moon Hut project out of NASA, and Bruce Pittman said to me that I had to go to this event in Washington DC. And I wasn't sure what it was. He said it's called the Pioneering Space Summit or program. And I said, sure. Whatever you want me to go to, I'll go to. And this is where I met Rick. Now Rick has a long history in the space industry.

He's been involved in several space companies and nonprofits. He's been credited for partaking in and being involved in all sorts of different initiatives, including possibly being there when the space revolution happened that we'll have to hear about potentially. He's testified on Capitol Hill. He signed up the 1st space tourist. Most of that probably doesn't mean as much as what the content we're going to go over today, which is this, the space revolution.

So I'm excited to learn from you today, Rick. You teach me what you can. What's the, give me the bullet points that you've put together, and I'll take them, and then we'll start from there. Okay. Well, we have several and we we can see how the, the format rolls out. Yep. I I started with the what is the space revolution. Okay. Next. How does it relate to what we call commercial space and, the term new space? Are they gonna be 2 different commercial space and new space? They are actually.

And I'll show I'll explain the difference. Okay. Next. Given that we're on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, I often talk about Apollo's children or as they're called in a documentary about some of the stuff we did, the orphans of Apollo. Who are they? And, in a sense, what would we be doing if we do go back to the moon? How how will we do that? And, those are 2 separate things. But who are these Apollo's children?

And and how will we go back to the moon or or Mars or what's about to happen? Okay. How and why did I get into this? Oh. Hopefully, you weren't pulled, kicking and screaming as I was. I'll explain later. But, You'll tell me later. Yes. I am, I am an accidental tourist as they say. Okay. Who is doctor Gerry O'Neil and why is he so important? Something that's never addressed enough. Yeah. Some call this the quote unquote benevolent conspiracy.

This does relate to doctor O'Neil, and I'll I'll come into an explanation with you about how that started. Okay. And the fact that what we're seeing with Elon and Jeff is not just billionaires playing with rockets. This is actually a planned, almost 30 year long, project for some of us.

Okay. And why do I go back and forth between things like starting the Space Frontier Foundation, which is, I think, 30 years old, 31 years old, the Earthlight Foundation, New Worlds, and then going back into companies like Deep Space Industries, or my new venture capital company, Space Fund. Okay. Any others? Is that 3 more. We can Okay. See how they go. Give me give me the next.

I've I've recently in social media, people have been asking me about pictures they've seen where I'm hanging out with the US Air Force and, working on, what is called Space Force. And I've been invited to some sessions there. I'd like to explain perhaps why I'm doing that and what does that have to do with my goal of expanding life and humanity into space. Okay. What else? Well, this, kind of goes back to the earlier conversation and it's, you know, which I've spent about 30 years plus.

I'm dating myself, of course. Trying to change the conversation about space. And so where is the conversation today? Where does it need to go next? K. And some of these will be answered within other questions. Of course. They always do. Yeah. Sure. We'll jump we'll jump. I know our conversations already jump all over, so this will we'll we'll manage. Yeah. This is gonna be a field mosaic that people can put together into an image.

How do we answer how do I answer the question when somebody asks me after one of my talks, why are we spending our money to go to space? We have so many problems down here. I'd love to hear that one because I have an answer for that one too. Okay. Great. Why am I writing a space manifesto, which is my latest private project? And another thing that I've been speaking about in public a bit is what is the declaration for the rights of humanity in the universe? These kind of roll together.

And then last, and I think this is, you know, whenever I do a talk, I go into a phase where there's a big finish with music and galaxies, and I talk about why are we here and why are we here now doing what we're doing. And so we might if we make it that far, we might go into that. We will. We will. There we are. Well, there you go. We're we're going to hit all of this. You're gonna teach today, I'm your student. You're gonna teach me everything.

Okay. So I I wanna walk away knowing everything about this about Rick Tumlinson's changing the world, if we wanna call it, or or attempts. And so I'm I'm I'm ready. So let's start off with this. What is the space revolution? So the space revolution is a term that that I use to help encapsulate and, and capture what people are seeing when they're seeing things like, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, the X prize. They're hearing about asteroid mining.

They're hearing about the private sector going into space, the end of the space shuttle, the flights of private spaceships, to and from the space station. All of these things in a sense are manifestations of what is literally a revolution in how we look at space, what we're doing in space, who's doing that, and the goals of those people when it comes to space. And so that's what the revolution is. It's bigger than, just the question of of billionaires playing with rockets.

So that's that's the short answer. Okay. So it's just a phrase or a term because I haven't I haven't heard this space revolution in my 5 years in the space industry. So is this something you've just come up with as a means to kind of counteract the 4th industrial revolution? Not to counteract anything, really.

It's just my own encapsulation of, of what I see happening and trying to, you know, the the way we describe things, the words we use to describe things is very often, creates or helps manifest what that thing is in terms of how we act with it, how we react to it. And I'm trying to help people understand. So, yes, you could call it the 4th industrial. You could call as long as people understand that this is a movement, a revolutionary change.

I don't care what you hang in front of the word revolution. It is a change, though. You know, you can talk about going into a space renaissance, all of these different things, rather than having people look at it and think it's these individual little projects and things like that. Trying to have people understand. Mhmm. So if you were to put a date on it, what day what year, day, or whatever would you say that the space revolution started?

I would say that it started in the mid 19 seventies, and it, I can almost put a specific date on it. I think it was 1976, and that was when doctor Gerard k O'Neil, a Princeton professor, published the book, The High Frontier. So h I g h? H I g h, Frontier. Okay. That book So that that is the the starting point. So you must have been Young. 17 years old? I was young. I was young. 55. Are you afraid of your date? No. No. I I am, I'm a leap year child.

I have a birthday every 4 years which helps with denial. But, I am, how old am I this year? 6063 Earth years. Okay. So that's right. So I'm probably not far off than what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. And and and literally, I I I have to think about it sometimes because the whole leap year thing is throwing me off my whole life. Well, it's a it's an interesting that you you that you use that thinking because I and I this is a sad story. I had a friend who you when he became, I think it was 40 Mhmm.

He would celebrate the first anniversary of his 40th birthday, the second anniversary of his 40th birthday. And he was always on his birthday, and then he died young. So just be careful. There you go. There you go. So so okay. So let's go to the next one then. Yes. How does it relate to commercial and news, commercial and new space? So commercial and new space are, if you look at the space revolution let me give it a little bit more definition.

The space revolution is this idea that we're moving out into space as the next level, the the next thing that we're going to do as the human species. And that that means we're going to be living out there or shall we say settling or whatever, words, you know, are appropriate to to describe the fact that people will have homes and be living in space.

So as we move into that, and that's the dream that we have, and I know that's the dream of everybody that you see doing these different things, then you have to, you have to be able to finance it. You have to be able to to pay for it. Now the kinds of people and companies that are doing this are what we call new space.

New space is a word that we literally, I'm I'm using that phrase too much, but that we actually sat down at a table and made out, in around 1999, 2000 at somebody's dining room table. What do we call this? And new space companies are basically those companies that are funded by, created by, operated by, or have the goal of opening space to humanity. And those those companies and projects, which can, some of which, be not for profit, are, the drivers.

They're they are the engine, not to be confused with the goal and destination, which some people do. Now in government and in traditional space or what some people call old space, I call it more traditional. I don't wanna be that insulting. But, they use the word commercial space, which is in itself a really interesting indicator because that calls out the fact that maybe aerospace industrial complex is not commercial.

But commercial space are those kind of companies that are out there doing private sector, activities with the goal of creating a profit. I I like to say sometimes that when it comes to space, nobody stays until somebody pays. And that could be the government or it can be, customers, and, come from places of where you're making money by what you're doing. So it's sort of the engine of what you might wanna call the space revolution or the frontier movement.

So you're, so let's start with the first question just because I'd like to have it on record. Mhmm. Who was at the table? Basically, it was the board of directors of the group, the Space Frontier Foundation, that we had founded in 1988, 20 years before. And Or 10 years. Who who would give me some of the names. I wanna know if they're names or I I will go blank on it. I can tell you that there's Charles Miller, a guy named Jim Muncie, Benigno Munoz, Bill Boland, and, I think Robert Noteboom.

These are people you probably don't know, And that's one of the points I wanna make at some point in our conversation that there are people who have poured their lives into making this happen. You know, we created the Space Frontier Foundation in 1988, with the goal of making this happen. We immediately went to war with the establishment. Immediately, well, we started with a 40,000 name petition calling for a return to the moon, which was delivered to the 1st president Bush's desk.

And then we ended up going into battle over the space station. We were the only pro, humans in space group to actually, attack what was to become the International Space Station. We did that because the government in our belief shouldn't be building buildings and that we didn't buy the fact that president Reagan had when he had said that, it was gonna cost $8,000,000,000 and be done by, like, 1992 or 1994. And, as it turned out, as you know, they stopped building the space station.

The the one that's up there has never been finished, actually, somewhere north of a $100,000,000,000 of expenditures. And it doesn't do many of the things they had originally told us it was gonna do, such as be a port to space or a place to test different kinds of gravities that you could then use in a settlement context.

So we went to battle, over the station and, almost killed it by one vote or as my friend, Bill Gerstenmaier, says, who is in charge of human space flight for NASA right now, they saved it by one vote. And we went on from there and began to support other activities.

In fact, we traded our battle over the station to save a vehicle called the DCX that was being, a project that was run by, general Pete Warden and, later was famously piloted remotely by the astronaut Pete Conrad because we believe that the idea of single stage to orbit reusable space systems, was important. A very quick little story on that if you don't mind. Sure. Yeah. After we, had had that vote and it really isn't that the Space Frontier Foundation was some mega powerful, group.

But as you find in parliamentary systems or in the Knesset or the UK parliament, when the votes are tight, small groups can have great leverage. And we were in that position at the time. So after, that one vote, after the squeaker by which the space station, stayed alive, we got on the phone through a an intermediary and spoke to, a gentleman that we waited I waited butted heads with, a lot named, Dan Golden, who was running NASA.

And Jim Muncie and I, told him that, look, there's this little vehicle called the DCX that the military has funded. It was initially part of the strategic defense initiative or what was called Star Wars. But it was running out of money. And the White Sands test facility had almost locked the gates and said you can't go any further. We told mister Golden that if NASA would take it over, we would drop our attack on the space station permanently and step away from that. He agreed.

The program was transferred to NASA, and we immediately kept our word and stopped our attacks on the station. Now at the time, there was a former president Johnson adviser, old fellow, amazing guy who many in our field know who passed away named Tom Rogers, one of the few people I've ever known who could pull off a seersucker suit. And Tom had this amazing accent, this amazing voice. And at one point after this, we were having a meeting in DC, and Tom pulls me away and he's like, well, Wreck.

So what are you doing? You, you you got the space station now. You're stuck with it, aren't you? He said, it's it's you got this lemon. You You got this lemon, don't you? The space station. What are you gonna do about it? Are you gonna turn it into lemonade? And that's how we talk. And, and I'm sitting there. Well, like, well, yeah, let me think about that, Tom. So I ended up, testifying shortly thereafter in front of the house based subcommittee.

And with my associates, we came up with this concept called AlphaTown. The idea of AlphaTown was basically that, okay. If you're going to have a federal facility, out on the frontier, let's look at an analogy. And by the way, I I do wanna be very clear to your listeners. Some of the things I say may sound a little unpolitically correct. Don't worry about this. This is global. You're talking to me. Right. You're teaching me. Like I said, you don't even have to worry. No one out there.

You don't even have to talking to me. Teach me. Okay, David. Don't be offended if I am, uninterested. I'm not offended by anything you say. I know you well enough. Bless you, my friend. Bryce. Yeah. So, anyway, the point is that, we took the analogy of the fort on the frontier, a fort which is built by a federal entity in a wilderness. And Mhmm. That that fort then in the interest for whatever reason that that entity puts it out there can then become a purchaser of goods and services.

Because what happens is a trading post will spring up around the fort, and then the people who live in the fort will use the secure route back to quote, unquote civilization as a trading route and the technologies that are needed to get to and from the fort, maybe their stage coaches or whatever. You know, I am from Texas. I have an old west heritage. So those analogies will show up with me. We'll we'll I'll excuse you for that. Well, thank you very much. No comment.

So moving along, the, the idea of the, the fort in the frontier, you know, if you cut to a 100 years later, that fort is a tourist attraction or monument in the middle of a thriving city, an economic industrial complex called the city. And so in a way, it can almost be the analogy another analogy might be a grain of sound around which you grow a pearl.

These the idea of actually taking this federal expenditure called a space station, by the way, this will apply when we go back to the moon or wherever when the government does, and using it to help, drive economic activity. In other words, for example, the purchase of goods and services. So in my testimony, and and this was, 1996, in front of the house based subcommittee, I called for all transportation to and from the space station to be provided by the private sector, for example.

And, eventually, perhaps to have energy and space, provided by the private sector and also habitations, the the modules, the the buildings in space would be provided by the private sector.

Therefore, the tax dollars that people are putting into it, whether they're European tax dollars through ESA, or even Russia or whatever, but this is our government here in the US that I can try and influence, That money rather than being spent is actually being invested in the opening the economic opening of the frontier. So that's kind of, where that came from now.

It took us only about 23 years to get to the point where we've got SpaceX and Blue Origin, you know, flying to and from or about to fly to and from the space station with with, crews, over time. Or Even Jeff even Jeff Manber's company is that private institution Yes. Delivering over 700 payloads. Absolutely. And they're leveraging off of the federal facility that was funded by taxpayers.

But what's really important, going back to those people sitting around the table whose names you did not know largely, these are the people that made this happen. I recall being up at 2 in the morning sometimes with people counting votes on the floor of the house and the senate to protect the funding that was going into what we this program called, cuts. And this, is We we did that at the last NS, National Space Society meeting. Mhmm. A lot talked about COTS. Right.

So we we in the Space Frontier Foundation wrote the initial white paper that led to COTS. We were the ones who started that project that eventually became COTS.

And then these volunteers who who you don't know were on the ground counting the votes to protect the funding of companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin and Cox because the traditional aerospace companies, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and, others, the aerospace companies that, and the, politicians that they work with, oh, and I'll put air quotes around work with. Mhmm. We're trying to kill that project and we're draining the funds away from it. Go ahead.

I've heard, and this is a discussion with someone that you and I both know Mhmm. That we I just had recently about how with all this new space, there still is a tremendous amount of challenges that new space, using your terms, new space has with the commercial space industry. And I when I use that term, I'm using it wisely because Elon Musk is commercial. But we're I think we're talking about the Boeings and Lockheed Martins and the big companies when you use that this terminology.

Mhmm. Do you feel that it I know it's breaking through, but I've heard people say that they feel that it's gonna be extremely difficult to maintain and really fight these large behemoths. It's a challenge. Look. Boeing just to be so people understand or so you understand, so you that you understand. The Boeing has a commercial airline company. Boeing's space activities are not necessarily what you would call commercial.

They are a contract company that largely depends on for the majority, to, in in many ways of their space, money, comes from the government, and the heritage comes from the government. Now there's some degree the United Space United Space Alliance, which was with Boeing and Lockheed to deliver and take care of the space shuttle? Things like that. Yes. ULA is is what it's called. ULA. Yeah. So you see this all the time. Now United. Yes. ULA. United Launch Alliance.

Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Now, yes, Elon and Jeff and these other folks are taking government money, but they're also doing it using different contracting methods, that are, more pay for delivery, those types of things that come out of that. That's that's I'd like to can you give me a few of those? Because I'm interested in understanding how you separate them and what would be the distinction in the future.

So you're saying that there's a a different type of contract methodology that they're using with the United States government or governments around the world that makes these different. What are those? Okay. So there's what we're what we're trying to do with COTS and what we're trying to do with more of a frontier enabling model with the government is where you basically get I'm gonna stop you for I'm gonna stop you for 1 minute just because we're gonna use this word COTS a lot.

And I've I've heard about it, the National Space Society. We've talked about it. I just wanna hear your, your description of it so that I'm on the same page with you. Okay. The basic underlying concept is that there's basically 2 phases in the relationship between the government, and the private sector.

The first phase is there is an interaction between the government and private sector in terms of, re technology and development of particular kinds of things or services or the ability to deliver services. And the government participates, back and forth with the private sector to help develop those things, for example, launch systems.

Then it moves to another phase where you have the government actually paying for the service, the delivery service that these launch systems are, are enabling or carrying out. It is unlike, for example, with the space shuttle where you had a single provider that was working directly for the government using heavy, heavy levels of government specification, etcetera, to develop and manage a service, under government supervision. There is, 2 kinds of contracting.

There's what we call cost plus, which is the I hate to use the word again, traditional, but it's the way that a lot of aerospace, companies, in the US operate and military companies. It's how you get a $1,000,000 toilet. It's why aircraft military aircraft are so expensive. Cost plus basically says that, you know, for example, I'm sitting here drinking out of a bottle of water.

And if if I'm a a contractor and you're the government and you want me to design a bottle of water for your soldiers or for your astronauts to use, I get to charge you 10% of whatever it costs me to develop this bottle of water. Now in that case, the incentive would, of course, move towards why would I charge you a $100 to develop a bottle of water and only be able to keep $10 when I can charge you a1000000 and keep a 100,000?

So the incentive within the cost plus model is to make things as expensive as possible. So that's different than we need, 10,000 bottles of water that are this shape and will fit into this and when will you deliver them? That's a very different type of thing. And when you get into that kind of a model What what do you call that? Cost cost plus is 1? Yes. Purchasing? Cost plus is is the one, and and the other one I would call, the rest of the world. I mean, Right. I was just saying purchasing.

Purchasing. You know? It's like when I hop into an Uber, I'm, you know, I'm paying for to be taken from point a to point b. I'm not paying I am paying a little bit through the amortization of the cost that it took to develop it, but I'm not paying for, you know, 10% of the cost of all development blah blah blah. It it's just yeah. It's what we do every day.

Okay. So, yeah, just just traditional purchasing, getting a product, putting it out for bid, finding out what the best service model is, whoever can deliver the product at a certain reasonable price, and you buy it Right. Fits the need. So And and at the same time, part of our mandate in the in the white papers, things like that that led up to to the cots. And again, I I, you know, I I I may have mentioned to you in the past this idea of success has a 1000000 fathers or mothers.

Mhmm. When when we started down the path of cuts, there was nobody talking about this. Nobody. It was really, generated by people through the Space Frontier Foundation, and through some white papers. There was a seminal white paper largely written by a fellow named Charles Miller with with Jim Muncy working on it, in the early nineties that kinda laid this out.

And, we used to, compare it to Ralph Nader's paper that you may or may not remember, which was unsafe at any speed, which, you know, led towards car safety type things. It was meant to lay out this idea that this is what we have to do.

Keep in mind, the difference between a frontier orientation that is being manifested in the revolution versus aerospace industrial complex and the space centers and things like that is our goal is to get to a point where regular folks can go into space and create communities to build homes, to build, moon huts, to be able to build whatever they wanna do. I I don't care what anybody says about you. You just got a 1000000 points. Okay. But I I yeah. That's what I wanna see happen. Right?

And and so when it comes to that, it really is our goal is creating you know, look. I'm gonna take a little side path here that kind of lays something in here. I have three principles or what I call the, the 3 keys to opening space. And and and you have to have these or you can't open spaces in frontier. 1 is low cost, reusable transportation that and eventually safe, but low cost, reusable transportation, to and from the place you're going.

Mhmm. 2 is the ability to utilize the resources and the place where you're going for anything you see fit. And 3, our governments that either help you or stay the heck out of the way. If we have those three things, and we can go through how they're how they they're being achieved or where they're coming from or what their state is right now. But if you have those three things, you have the elements necessary, the keys, to be able to turn space into a frontier.

And you would you could apply that to air transportation, rail transportation, cars, boats. Put you can apply those rules to any of those and see how having all of those line up. If you took any one of those away, then the the economy, the freedom of of regular folks to be able to participate in those systems to get to and from places would go away. It's it's interesting here you say these, but, again, because I've I was at the Pioneering Space, Summit.

And the first conversation I had with Bruce, which was in Palo Alto, about how I would redesign the space industry hit on all three of these. Mhmm. And I never studied anything about space. Oh, yeah. I didn't have any clue what space was. Yeah. And so So there's that's I guess that's one reason. There were a lot of things that happened at that pioneering space, summit that I said, oh my god. These people are off track. And you're reiterating why they were off track. I didn't know it from you.

I just felt it. Mhmm. No. That's why we had them at the summit to try and get them on track. Okay? Look. I I I wanna let me we've mentioned this summit a couple of times. Let me explain to to or remind you, you know, sort of what happened. I I know nothing about it except I was invited and you Yeah. And and so here's the deal. We had 2 days.

Having been in the position of, one of the leaders of the rebel rebellion or revolution for so long, I had gotten to a point I I went through some personal family crises slightly before that. It gave me some pause. I took that time and, started reevaluating. And, again, I was sort of the battle worn, you know, soldier for the cause for so many years, and this is around 2014. Right. And 2013. Basically, I lost my mom in an accident, in, 2011.

And for 2 or 3 years after that, I was here in Texas helping my father, kind of get back on his feet out in the country, spending a lot of time walking around pastures at night and looking at the stars and just I kinda just pulled out. And I'll say this with with no sense of embarrassment. In fact, be proud because I just recently passed, but, I had basically gotten clean and sober in 2009. Okay. And so I'm 10 years as of now. And, Congratulations. It it helps with eyes opening.

And I'm I'm saying this because if anybody out there, you know, or or you or anybody you know, let's say, is interested in that, it can be done. And so what happened was my eyes opened. I got clarity of vision. I was walking around in this field thinking about, okay. I really wanna focus on the big picture. Why are we going? Who's going? How do we help that happen? So I had a call with Bill Gerstenmaier, the head of human space flight.

Now Bill basically has the job of carrying out the human space program for NASA. He's the guy who writes He was he was at the event. He he was at Yeah. I'll come back to that. I'll explain that how that happened. It wouldn't have happened without Bill. So he almost was the embodiment of the other side of the other guys. Right? What you might wanna call traditional space, old space, the the aerospace industrial complex.

That was Bill Gersonmeier's job, protecting the, what I I had been actually writing editorials about the giant NASA rocket called the, big, the space launch system. I branded it the senate launch system. This is and these were brutal editorials and, a lot of political stuff going back and forth. So I gave Bill a call, and he apparently was in Moscow. His secretary said, well, I'll pass the message on.

I remember I was driving through Texas, and I I get this call, from this, you know, weird number. And it's Bill Gerstenmaier calling me back from the runway in Moscow where he had just landed, and he must have gotten a message from the secretary. I said, why the hell is this guy calling me? And I pulled over, and we had the most amazing conversation. You can imagine it started out somewhat, roughly. You know, I'm attacking his multibillion dollar projects, and I've been doing it for decades.

And so we started talking, and we got to the point. Both of us were committed to having a what what what I would call a conversation about possibility. And so we got to a point where it was like, you know, what if we just didn't talk about rockets and launch systems? What if we just talk about where we're going and why? And it was like, bam. And we started having fun and engaging each other. And and what happened was coming out of that, it's really, really interesting, David.

Once once you have a a mental shift like that occur, once you're able to to step to the other side, to maybe view from the other person's perspective or or or take on a different approach to something, it begins to cascade and it begins to grow. It's it's almost like you're cracking open a doorway into a different perspective on life. So that led me to think, you know, what if we could do what Bill and I just had happen on a larger scale?

Now I had been pushing for a long time for people to start using the word, and and we can talk about it because it's there there are arguments for and against it, but at the time, it was very important to to get this concept across the the word settlement. Mhmm. As as it denotes people living somewhere. There are better iterations. I bet there are stronger ones.

You've got many yourself, and I know you've We we I I think you were at the last, meeting where I said that summit or colonization are challenging words for certain people. Mhmm. Colonization colonization far more than settlement. Yes. Far more than settlement. Yes. Absolutely. And and by the way, we do slip into that. We use the word colony. It isn't meant offensively, You know?

And I've spoken many times in countries recently in Morocco and others where I had to be very careful and and apologize in advance in case it came out of my mouth. But settlement and and it did. Settlement, is really about people living, and that's the idea. It's to talk about more, people living, building these homes, you know, your your I'll say it again. Just give you that extra point. The moon hats building your or whatever they are out there. Project Moon Hut is a home. It is a home.

It's a hot. It's a it's a it's a box with a roof and a door in another place. And that's where Bruce came up with the Project Moon Hut because we started off the first paper I wrote was a box with a roof and a door. Exactly. We called it a hut. And that's how it came Project Moon Hut. Right. And I, in the this project I'm working on, this writing I'm doing, I define, you know, home, in terms of you know, the the the home is the place you go to, you know, after your job.

The the home is the place where your your family is the place you operate out of into the world, which makes something like a space station not a home. And what we're after is homes in space. Right? Mhmm. I don't know if Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Settlement's an easier we've gotta come up with a good one because you can't say the homization of space or the homie ing Nope. Of space. But, anyway, at the time, it was important to try and get that word in there.

I have been bringing it up in speeches, prior to that, and so decided to hold this, summit. And what's really interesting is I wanted to call it the space settlement summit, but I was spoken to by some, congressional staffers. I remember, I think it was Jeff Bingham who had been, a major, staffer in in Washington, in the senate.

And and, he and some others said to me, look, you don't wanna call it a space settlement summit because then the the traditional players, the aerospace companies, the others are not gonna show up. Mhmm. It's and and I remember one guy said, Rick, you gotta get him in the car lot before you sell him the car. And and and I was like, oh, you're right. You know? And and so we changed the word to the pioneering space summit.

But it really was the first space settlement summit because as you know, the entire discussion was how do we get the 100 people we had in the room. And we had, Mitt Romney's adviser, Scott Pace, who now runs the National Space Council under the Trump administration. And we have Lori Garver who would have been, a good candidate for Hillary's pick for administrator. We had Boeing. We had Lockheed Martin.

The aerospace, we had Buzz, but then we had, representatives, you know, from the different, commercial new space companies, such as SpaceX and others in the room as well. And at the end of the 2nd day, as you recall, roughly, there it was roughly a 100 people, but we got, all except 1. It's funny how we always focus on the one, but all except one. It turned out she was a contractor and, her, her boss was in the room. She didn't wanna commit.

Basically agreed that the word settlement should be included in the language that precedes NASA's funding, in the in the I remember that whole conversation that went on and on and off. Oh my god. But we got it. We got it. And what happened was it was, what we used to call the foundation ended up being a cultural cruise missile, and that it just we launched it into the society. We launched it into the conversation, and it started to take root over the the years that followed.

And last year almost made it into the final bill from which NASA is funded, in in what's called conference committee where the house and the senate get together at the end of the process and write the actual words. It got pulled, we believe by somebody from the aerospace community. But this year, it's been reintroduced, by an unlikely pair of senators who are not usually involved with space.

And so we think this year, the word settlement and development, which goes with it, will be, put into the NASA language as one of, not the only, but one of the major goals of the US human space flight program. I would love to see this happen in every country. I would love to see 1 by 1 country. The reason this is important, David, is because it is it is the let's call it the the North Star, the, you know, the Southern Cross, whatever it is.

You're guiding you're guiding point by which you can judge all of your other activities. It allows you to compare what you're doing with where you're actually trying to get. So that's why that's important. And, you and I have never sat down and done or gone over project Moon Hut. But our 4 phase approach is the first one is to get a box of the roof and a door, which is to get a laser focus for civilization on earth, not on all the extraneous, because to me, it feels like a shotgun going off.

Everybody's going in different directions. Mhmm. To get a singular target, which is to create a box with a roof and a door, a place that people can live. Four people, 8 people go around the moon, the 27 days, come back, and then it goes to industrial park, then it goes to extended stay, and then it goes to community.

So that has been since 2014, That has been the initiative is to get a laser like focus, or you call North Star, into an initiative that can draw all communities on earth to one central beacon. Mhmm. And exactly right. And and yeah. And and and I wanna be very clear. I I have no no pride of ownership of any of this, and a lot of it, bits and pieces were were made up and discussed by people much smarter than me before I ever heard of it.

There's there's a ton of people that went into everything that we had done. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. We have to acknowledge that. You build on the build on the shoulders of others. It's it's interesting because I didn't know this story when I went to this event. I just went. Mhmm. And so so let's do this. We've got that story. Is there anything more to add that service? I wanna get to Wow. We have 3. Yeah. That's okay. We're gonna go.

I I did this interview on my other podcast series called redefining tomorrow with this amazing guy, Jeffrey Wernick, and it was the first time I went over an hour. Uh-huh. First time. And he talks about democracy and changing systems and Bitcoin and currencies, and he's brilliant guy. And first time I'd ever gone over an hour, we went 3. So I've decided that if the program's going and there's content and there's we're just gonna keep on going as long as we can.

So let's get on to Apollo's Children. Okay. So Apollo's Children and this will will knock out 2 or 3 altogether here, including Gerry O'Neil because that's part of this. Apollo's children or the orphans of Apollo, which is the the title of a documentary about our mirror when we took over the Russian space station for a little while by Michael Potter. The, that reference goes to the fact that if you look at the 19 seventies, and this is where it starts.

It doesn't stop there, but this is where it begins. We've been to the moon. We had Voyager and Galileo. We had the Soviet space program. We had the American space program. Amazing things happening, in space. We had Skylab. We had Salyut. All kinds of things happening. And if you were a little kid as I was, and you were, in that period of time, you're sitting there watching the TV.

And, you know, on that TV set, you're seeing these inputs coming into, and and and and they're they're they're really bizarre and unique in all of history types of inputs. You're hearing that there is a cold war going on in places like Vietnam and around the world, that there are people on the other part of the world who want to kill you using rockets, by the way, to launch things at you that will destroy the entire world. We were actually still having drills that had to do with Mhmm.

With nuclear launches. Nuclear fallout. Yep. Yeah. The idea that somehow climbing under a desk would protect you, I don't get that, but okay. And all of these types of things were going on. And it's almost like if you flip the channel, it would be nuclear disaster, Apollo, you know, rockets on parade in in Red Square, Voyager, you know, and you turn the channel, and, and then the next one you hit is Star Trek.

And you roll on and roll on, and then moving into the seventies, you know, along comes Star Wars. And you're you're seeing this melange of images of death and destruction and the end of the world possibly in your lifetime at the same time that you're being presented with both the reality of people doing things like driving cars around on the moon and and, you know, probes going out beyond the solar system and amazing feats of science and technology.

And the 3rd element mixed into that is you're getting the science fiction of Captain Kirk, you know, all of this kind of thing happening. And as a child That wasn't real? I know. Exactly. Real. You're making my point. As a child, that begins to blend in your mind. You're you're you're putting these things together and going, you know, I want to have a positive future. These people are doing it. I wanna go make that happen.

Now during the seventies, we'd come out of Vietnam, all of this stuff, was happening. And ahead of us then, off in the distance, supposedly around 1980 or so, there is this thing that's being talked about called the space shuttle. And it's being pitched at the time as a vehicle, completely reusable vehicle. You look at the early images, and that vehicle was gonna bring the cost down of going into space to around $100, a pound.

At that point, if you think about your own weight or what you might wanna take with you, that meant we could really go out there and do stuff. Great things were gonna happen.

So in the middle of all of that, in that cultural melange, and there's still the the the in here in the US, the bad taste of the Nixon scandal and the lack of belief in what we're doing, there was this Princeton professor teaching physics in Gerard k O'Neil, and he was trying to engage his students in thinking about the future in a positive way. And he, came up with this idea.

I won't get into the whole process of it, but he came up with this idea of, what he called the high That the I that an expanding technological civilization should expand beyond one planet, the surface of a planet. He was really about what I an area that I've designated for years is what I call free space, which is the place Mhmm. Between planets. And and he wrote this book, The High Frontier, and it basically also did several other things at once. It said, you don't have to be NASA astronaut.

You don't have to be a government employee or a military person to have the right to dream about living in space. It said, we can use the resources of space, the concepts of free enterprise, democratic institutions, people working together, and we can go out there. We we, you and I, regular folks, and and build. Now he did call them colonies at the time. It was a different time, but build colonies in space.

And it was very interesting because in the book, there's a a section in the book where, like, I think there's a a little girl riding home from her her house in in space, her home. There's a very much of a humanistic aspect to it. But doctor O'Neil went one step further. Rather than launching a book out into the culture and being right about it. Hey. I was right about this. Nobody ever did anything.

He formed an organization called the Space Studies Institute, and, you could join that group if you believed in the book. And the Space Studies Institute then would actually have projects. We became what we call senior associates, and they were we were the elites of the revolution at that point. And, senior Did you get a little certificate and a badge? Oh, absolutely. Yes. We got lapel pins, gold ones. And, the point is that this book went out there.

And so you have these interesting people like, there's this young guy, in high school at the time, and he wants to, he's he's got a book club. And, he has these 12 books that he's, you know, selling to his friends, and, one of them is the high frontier. And he has this dream of starting an online eventually an online bookstore, and a guy named Jeff Bezos. And he reads the high frontier and goes nuts over it.

He actually gives his valedictorian speech when he's graduating from high school about, I'm gonna go build space colonies. I'm gonna make money, and then I'm gonna go build space colonies. Yes. Did did did did he talk about this last year at the new, new space conference? New Worlds. Yes. New World Conference? Yes. He actually did. He's talked about it several times. He's he won the, the, O'Neil Award, over at the National Space Study last year as well.

But the point is that he, he picked up on it. There was another friend, a guy I've worked with and competed with, off and on for many years, a guy named Peter Diamandis. He picks up the book, and eventually leads to him founding with a fellow named Todd Holly, who was an amazing rock star of our field who we lost during the AIDS epidemic. They founded the International Space University, the students for the exploration development of space.

There were other people that got together and created a group called the L5 Society. L5 standing for Lagrange Point 5, which is a place between the Earth and or within the reach of the earth and moon's gravity where if you're gonna build a place in space, that's where you'd wanna put it. It's prime real estate. And that well, isn't is that the that's this place where, gravity doesn't you can sit where gravity is equal on both sides so you can kind of be in limbo. Yeah. In a way.

It's like if yeah. In a way, in in terms of gravity, it's almost like, if you're looking at a creek and there's a It's a neutral point. Yeah. If you're looking at a creek and there's a little eddy where the leaves and stones are just kinda going in a circle, that's that's like a that's like a Lagrange point. Right. That's a that's the l five. Yeah. Right. And so that's that organization got started with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein and, and and Jerry Purnell, Arthur c Clark.

They're all in that organization. And, all these groups start to spring out of this concept of the high frontier. There are copycat books written, coffee table books with bright illustrations. Eventually, NASA spends a $1,000,000 and does a study on building space colonies that comes out of this. So he he had this just seismic, effect, And and yet he was, like, a very humble guy. I I should mention, it's not my project, so I'm not plugging myself here.

But, later this year, there is a documentary film called Gerry, g e r r y, that's coming out. And I've seen some of the rough cuts. It's pretty amazing that goes into doctor O'Neil's life because he is the unsung hero, of this this field, and yet he's responsible for perhaps the biggest cultural change in the history of humanity. And and I say that absolutely with no grin on my face. Totally true. So what happens is these guys get inspired. I was lucky enough.

I was living in New York City at the time, and I founded the L 5 Society of New York. We met on the intrepid aircraft carrier, which at that time was basically a ghost ship. Now it's a major museum. And, we started having meetings about this. I eventually came across doctor O'Neil in the Institute in Princeton. I volunteered. I told them, please let me in. I will do anything. I will mop the floors.

I started doing this interesting reverse commute from New York City to Princeton and eventually became a staffer at the institute. Over time, I started meeting these other people, like Jim Muncie, who's a legend in our field. And we started realizing and believing that maybe the institute was working very quietly as was doctor O'Neil's nature noncontroversial, to try and they were actually building some of the actual technologies. They did a thing called the mass driver.

They built a test that was featured on an old television show called Nova. And they tested the ability to use an electromagnetic launch system to launch things off the moon. And, you know, I was privileged to work on it. I didn't well, between you and me, I didn't really work on it. I stood in the corner and handed people wrenches who were actually working on it because I I was just so thrilled to be there. That's still that's still working on it. You Yeah. Yeah. I know.

But I was just a junior at that point. I was just thrilled to to to freaking be there. You know? That sounds exciting. Yeah. And so what happened was, this ripple effect starts to go out from him. The, I mean, it even made it over to Japan. I remember, there was a whole series of, of cartoons called Mobile Suit Gundam. And if you look at the Mobile Suit Gundam, it takes place in O'Neil colonies. Right? So anime even was affected. All of this stuff just started coming out of his his work.

So there we are, and we decided, in our New York group, I met another guy named Bob Werb, who was a an extreme liberal, from, what we call upstate New York Jewish real estate family. And and then Jamunce, who had been a protege of the right wing Republican Newt Gingrich and myself, I guess my thing is I'm a Texan, like you said, you forgive me. And we get together and say, you know what? We need to be a little more radical on this. And so we founded the Space Frontier Foundation.

As I told you, then we engaged and we became the the, frontline activist revolutionaries. So my friend, Diamandis, and his guys, Bob Richards, who now runs a company called Moon Express, went off and did the educational stuff, International Space University. The l five society then became, merged with the National Space Institute that had been founded by Wernher von Braun to act as a cheerleader for NASA.

Later on, Boeing and the aerospace companies tried to buy off the L5 Society and the National Space Institute by offering them a $100,000, which would seem to like a lot of money back then if the 2 would merge. Because they yeah. They were concerned that these l fivers who were frontier oriented people were getting a little crazy talking about all the settlement stuff. They wanted to harness that energy and maybe take that chess player and put it on their side of the board.

There were interesting periods back then where back in those days, as you recall, we used to use what we call 35 millimeter slides to do I remember. What would what would be a PowerPoint now.

And Boeing used to put out sets of slides that would show this originally, it would show this shuttle development, and then it would show the space station, and then the last slides would be, human settlements in space as if the viewer would then understand that somehow if you supported the space shuttle and the space station, you would end up with human cities in space. Of course. And and that was the game they were playing.

And and so that's how you ended up, that's how we ended up with the National National Space Society was and it it's interesting because you'll still see the hardcore l five people. In fact, they're kinda coming back into their own now. But for years, the the National Space Society, never met a NASA program that they didn't like and, never took the side of anything against anything that NASA was doing. And then gradually over time, they've gotten it and have started to come on board.

They never lost at the core the vision of settlement. It's just that, you know, they kind of got a little bit co opted for a while there, but they came back around. You know, we've all had those periods. I mean, I remember the the very, very, very first time I ever, ended up, I testified in front of the National Commission on Space in the eighties. It was the first time I ever got called anything official. And I actually, at that time, the very beginning of the eighties, thought, you know what?

We need more NASA astronauts on talk shows that will solve everything. Yeah. There was a show on back that used to be called Johnny Carson. Oh, what? And I like a remember, I'm 55. I know. I know. You're Remember watching Johnny Carson. Okay. And and I used to I used to think that would solve everything. You know, it's like when people say, if you just give NASA more money It actually would have solved a lot because everybody watched Johnny.

Yeah. But all it would have done would have meant more money to go into the aerospace companies, and it wouldn't have really Yes. You know, it's how you spend money. Solve the challenge, but it would have created a different impression of space. Right. It's how you spend the money and why you spend the money, not how much you spend. Alright. So anyway, all of that happened. And again comes from Gerry O'Neil.

Leading up to, the point where, in the nineties, I ended up getting the best job on earth where a wealthy guy and you should always find a wealthy guy if you know 1 or can capture 1. Karen feeding is a little rough, but everybody should have 1. And, he put $25,000,000 into a bank account. And in this bank account, he, he had invested his money in dotcomcompanies. This was the early nineties.

And he told me that I could, run this endowment for him and give away 50% of the increase in the endowment every year. The rest would go into funding my salary and my office and travel. And it was called FINES, the Foundation For the International Nongovernment Development of Space. And we took that money and we funded things like, experiments and laser launch, solar sails, asteroid mining, things like that.

We did a study on how to keep the mirror from coming down, which led eventually to us actually taking over the mirror for a year. Jeffrey told his whole story. Right. And I was the one who actually asked suggested to Walt that he hire Jeff, during the Mir project. Because when we first arrived in Russia on the first trip, Jeff was working for the Russians and sitting on the other side of the table. Yes. He was sitting he was working with the Russians. Yes. Right.

And we were sitting on this side of the table, and you can see actually and I actually have physical pictures that show Jeff on the other side, then it kinda shows him in the middle, and then we're all in one room on at the same table. And, and I suggested that he become, the CEO of what we call Mircorp. And, because he he had the free enterprise credentials, He had some amazing training from the Russians, and we needed a CEO who could have a a foot in both camps.

And then I transitioned out, right away and went back to to fines. But but MIRCORP was the name there was a moment where I came up with MIRCORP, and I remember turning to the Russians in the room and saying, okay. Why don't we call it MIRCORP? And does this mean anything weird in Russian? Because I don't wanna offend anybody. Does this mean I hate your mother or something? You know? And, so that's where we came up with the term.

But, anyway, so one of the things that came out of fines, for example, was, there was a guy named Bob Zubrin, who was a Martin Mariette engineer. We've been looked at how been looking at studies of how to use the Martian atmosphere to create rocket propellant. And he had shown up at a Space Frontier Foundation conference. We liked him, and he was trying to put together a thing that later became the Mars Society.

So we, at Fiennes, wrote him a check for a $100,000 that he got a matching check for, and he started the Mars Society. And the reason we did that at the time was we wanted to create a social group that would put pressure on NASA to get out of low earth orbit so the private sector could take over low earth orbit, and NASA could go off and start exploring Mars. This was back then. It's changed a little since then, but and so was the strategy.

Now the funny thing about Bob is then one week after the check cleared, cleared, he kicked me off his board. Rightfully so. I know. I know you well enough. I I would kick myself off the board. What did you do? What did you do? I used the other m word too much. Moon. Moon. And I talked about You had to have done something. Yeah. I I talked about other destinations. And now this was a different era because now Bob is working on Moon Direct and all of that.

But back then, it was taboo with with Bob and his acolytes to talk about going to the moon or the world. Tell you that over the past 5 years, it has not been fun being the moon guy with everybody talking about Mars. It has not been fun. Yeah. And it's ridiculous that anybody cares about any of those differences. Alright? It it's it's been why are you working on the moon? Everybody's working on Mars. I met with Charlie, the administrator. What's Charlie Bolden?

And and everything was about the Mars. And I said, we gotta go to the moon first. It just makes sense. Mhmm. And everybody was Mars. So Yeah. It's ridiculous. It is. It's just ridiculous. It's the moon is right. It's near us. It's close. It sits there. It changes the dynamics of our entire conversation about earth in which you've heard me talk about Mearth, moon and earth. This is where we live between moon and earth. Let's change the dialogue.

Once the paradigm shift happens, everything else opens up. Well yeah. And as you put within that, you know, what I my approach is and maybe there's a book here someday I'll write called all of the above. Alright? And and it's really all of the above. You know, this is saying the moon is better than Mars, is better than free space, is better than Leo, is better than is really like saying, if you were coming over to this new world from Europe that, you know, what the hell? You're gonna go to Ohio?

Ohio sucks, man. You know? It it's all about Florida. You know? It no. It It all comes together. Yet yet if you're going to go along the way and it's right at a pit stop, it might be a good place to pick up some food. Oh, no. There's there's a great argument. There's a great argument for the moon as a place to learn how to camp out in a high radiation dirty environment.

And by the way by the way, you can almost picture the moon like learning how to camp in your mom's backyard because then you can run home quickly into the house. Right? That's exactly. Yeah. Mom. You don't you you need some and you use your you use your solar sails if you need to get some medicines quickly there with a laser beam and shoot the medicine to the moon. Yeah. Whatever. You know, I Yeah. One of the things I I will tell you this and it's very important understand with me.

I I have some pet technologies. I have some pet things that I've done in different companies like Deep Space Industries where we, where we turned resources into a thing. But, really, outside of that, I whatever works. You know? Yeah. You know, if if if it's the son of Fidel Castro coming up with communist, fairy wings that gets us out there, I'll Right. Take it. That's that's exactly what we've been saying. I'll take it. Exactly. It it doesn't matter. We're all in this together.

And you know what, David? Here's the really important point. Once you get out there a couple of generations, it doesn't matter where you came from because where you came from will become them and where you are will become us. And they will Right. That's that's for sure. And they're gonna revolt and say, you know what? Screw you. You don't understand our problems. How dare you tax us? We are space people. You are earth people. And then they're gonna separate them.

To some degree, that's the 7 eves story. Yes. Yes. A good book by the way. Yeah. Very good book. I I finally read it after everybody recommended it. Let's go on to this next one. How about benevolence conspiracy, Elon, Jeff? Okay. So the benevolent conspiracy term, comes back into Gerry O'Neil.

We were at a Space Studies Institute conference, and there was a bar there in Princeton, a very famous bar with a big painting by the classic American artist who used to do the, Norman Rockwell, on the wall. And we're all sitting there, a bunch of us. Some of the people had gone to bed, but the the tone was generally shared.

And, we're having a few beers, and we decided, a a group of us, that we were gonna pledge our lives and fortunes to making the to creating the breakout of humanity into space and making it irreversible in our lifetimes. And we had a toast. And, I think it was Diamandis, one of the guys said, well, why don't we call this you know, it's a conspiracy. Somebody said, this is a great conspiracy. And I remember one of them said, well, it's a benign conspiracy. Let's call it that.

And I made a joke that I think that sounds like a tumor. Why don't we call it a benevolent conspiracy? And it became that. And, you know, some people don't even remember that that happened, but there were a bunch of us there. And it really was kind of that approach that we're gonna all branch out into our fields. I'm going to education. People like Muncy went behind the scenes into Washington and became a chief staffer, in congress. I became the loud guy out in public.

All of these different people went off in their different directions to begin to make this happen. And what I'm really proud of is the fact that 99% of them are those who are still alive are still fighting the fight and that they've done such a good job of changing the global conversation. When we got started, the idea of human beings living and exploring and, building communities was was not a thing. The space program was a nationalized entity. Civilians were not invited.

There was no such thing as space resources. There wasn't new space. There wasn't this idea that somebody could buy a ticket. None of that existed. But for this group of people inspired by Gerry O'Neil, who became the benevolent conspirators and went out and made the work happen. I I picture you I actually picture you guys standing around taking out one of those, hunting knives and cutting your hand and then doing a a a a blood shake. You know what? Don't get me started.

I never figured out why those guys always cut the middle of their hand. That's such a stupid thing to do. Right? Like, why would you do that? What? You're gonna need that. You're gonna need your hand. And you need the hand. Right. And then it then their hand falls off a weakling. Yeah. Right now, prick your finger, you know, and and and Yes. Prick your pinky finger. Anyway, go ahead. How many people were how many people were in this benevolent conspiracy on their story?

Well, I I I you know, again, this is not a formal thing. I'm I'm using that moment to identify a group of people who were at that event, and came to those events. But I I would say a couple of dozen and then that expanded outwards. Now keep in mind, if you were to ask Elon Musk, are you an O'Neilian? He's gonna say no, because he, you know, he's going to Mars, and he's gonna be very strict about the fact that Jerry O'Neil was talking about settlements and free space, etcetera.

But, actually, Elon is an O'Neilian because he wants to do human settlements, and Elon would not exist with a company called SpaceX. He's a he's a beneficiary of the people who've worked before him to get him to a point where he could create rockets and Yeah. Use We got him as funded. We got him as funded. Yeah. We we we got him the the path, and and he really is. And and, you know, that's an old like, I I would like to like, Carl Sagan hated Jerry O'Neil. Hated him. Okay?

We used to have a toast that we would do at the end of our, especially these institute conferences. We'd all be out on the beautiful grass outside of the institute. Freeman Dyson would be there and it's got a name Gordon Woodcock who had been the actual station designer for Boeing and, John Lewis, who was the guru of asteroid mining, and and us Young Turks.

And we would do this toast, and it was a quote from Carl Sagan that Gerard K. O'Neill is a robber baron who wants to plunder and pillage God's pristine solar system. And then we would all go, and so am I. And, because Sagan at that point was very much focused on astronomy and all of it, which is awesome. But he didn't really buy this idea that those dirty civilians should be out gallivanting around the solar system and, you know, anything less than a few 100 years from now. You know?

There's there's people who still think that. There are. And and god bless them, and we're going. Yeah. So so let's let's get to the, what back and forth between initiatives. Oh, okay. So going back to the idea of the commercial space and new space, being the engines of realizing our dream of opening the frontier, creating an economy, and then, you know, what you might wanna call a Mearth economy or, a space industrial economy. You you have to make money.

You have to figure out how to make this thing happen. And so for me, there's 2 aspects to this that that came to play in terms of why I occasionally forget how hard it is to develop a private company. One is I remember, fairly clearly, back in the mid nineties, speaking at a NASA event doing my on brimstone, we're going and and a guy asking me said, you know, that stuff is easy for you to talk about because you're so far, removed from it. I mean, you you don't have to raise the money.

You don't have to make it happen. We work on this stuff every day. You're just evangelizing about a concept. So if you cut to a few years later, you know, I led the team. We took over the Russian Mir space station. We flew a commercial mission, 1, and, I've been involved in several, space companies, which several of them didn't work.

You know, at times, if you ever saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail, there's a scene in there where the guy's like, we built a castle and and and then it sank into this one. And we built another one, and then that sank. And then we got a 3rd, and it sank. You know? And and and then we've got this one. You know? So I've had several companies that, that haven't worked well. But on the other hand, now after especially the MIR project, somebody, wanted to challenge me. I could say, yeah.

How many of you guys have actually owned a piece of the space station? You know? I'm I'm in there. I get my hands dirty. I believe you have to walk the walk if you're gonna talk the talk. So having gotten in there many, many times now, and gotten engaged in the private sector, had some successes and done some great work.

It helps me to to understand what's necessary and also to be able to then help others by, you know, frankly, the scars that I've got, by the knowledge that I've gained of of how the private sector works, how private companies work, what what you need to do, how you get a how do you get beyond your own the stars in your own eyes to be, you know, ruthlessly businesslike at times? So, yeah, that that's why I do these things. I go back and forth. It's all part of the thing. I've had to Go ahead.

I've had to personally kind of, let's say, defend people in the space industry. There's a person that I did an interview with whose company folded and people aren't sure where the money went, and it's the same questions over and over again. And if you the way the take that I've got on this is that these are new like any new pioneering tech industry of any time, of any time in history, there are people who will make it and people who don't.

Yep. We happen to be at a time where raising money is done through venture instead of through banking. It's or some type of crowdsourcing or funding. And, actually, there's a few people on here whose businesses have not survived. And that's just gonna be, the industry is gonna be littered with them. Right. There's there's just going to be a ton of them. And one of them started an organization.

They had 80,000 or a 100,000 people who had signed up to become part of their organization, as a nonprofit educational space related company. Yeah. And come to find out they didn't make it. I don't think there's a formula yet at the same time, I think the individuals who've partaken this space side, not unlike dotcom bubble, not unlike any of these tech businesses, We're going to see a lot of them that don't make it.

And unfortunately, both Deep Space and Planet Resources, who are high flying models of space, are or have been, they they spoke very loud and didn't deliver on that promise. However So it's However, I let me like, go ahead. I'll let you finish. But Go ahead. I I just think it's part of it's part of the game. And lux I'm gonna be in Luxembourg in a week, week and a half. And Luxembourg invested in Sure. You know, I was I signed the first deal.

I was the one who signed the first contract with Luxembourg. What happened there look. The, I I had a interview recently with the Wall Street Journal and spoke about this. I founded, you know, Deep Space Industries, and there are several challenges that came out of it. But let's let's you also have to remember, both companies are still alive. They were just acquired by other companies. And so there were exits in both companies.

The vision that's at the core of them is actually still just watch over the next year or so slowly being realized. Deep Space Industries has 3 water based thrusters that are in space right now functioning perfectly on the Hawkeye 360 spacecraft. So I I'm not I I understand that. I want I'd like you to think take another pass at this. Mhmm. I don't know if you've paid attention to the banking industry, but banks don't fail. Banks get acquired. Mhmm. Right. And the reason is the money has to move.

There's reasons for keeping people's assets, protection, a variety of them. And I'm not an expert in banking, yet I've been involved with people in banking, and they say banks don't fail. They're always acquired or absorbed of something. So the fact that these 2 were put on the chopping block and they were acquired, one of them by a blockchain guy, I think, is who made a lot of money in crypto or blockchain, it just means it's transforming yet to the general public.

The announcement went out that way. And my my point is it doesn't matter. These are going to happen. They just happen to be high profile flag waving watch assistant companies that didn't make it. And that it it won't stop the industry. It just transforms it. No. I I agree. And it it look. It was a completely educational experience.

And one thing that the 2 companies did do historically, and we were competitors and friends, was we were able to work together to get laws passed in the United States recognizing the right of future companies to operate, and retain their, their assets, their resources in space, number 1. Number 2, if you go back before our 2 companies existed, space resources was not a thing. It wasn't a thing. It wasn't talked about. It wasn't legit in any form.

It wasn't even out there in the world's conversation. Since the 2 companies dialogue. Yeah. And we created it's a thing now. Now the 2 companies themselves, yes. And look, we had issues. We had management issues. We had finance issues, all of that. But in the meantime, you know, Luxembourg, United States, UAE, different countries have have now jumped in, and they're moving ahead with new companies. They're doing great work. Without Deep Space on NASA Ames and Daniel Faber Mhmm.

I don't know if Project Moon Hut would be around. Yeah. No. It's great. So Daniel, by the way, is working on a great project now about moving propellant in space, which is one of the things we wanted to do. And so there's a lot of good stuff happening. Greg. So when when you when you use this term, why go back and forth between initiatives, what did you mean? Because they're the same, just different aspects. Space is not just a social movement. It's not just a business. It's all.

It's all of these things. You have to to have a successful revolution, you have to have a change in the conversation. You have to have a change in hearts and minds, but you have to have the finance. You have to be able to make, the trains run at the end of the revolution and on and on. And for me, it's somewhat seamless at times. Now, just to address a couple of things you mentioned, you know, I have the the new company, and what we're looking at is how to apply that knowledge.

We work with new startups and entrepreneurs, and, you know, that we're out there getting them started, trying to get them funded. We're raising money based on that. And it's it's being, it's it's a lot of fun. It's challenging, but I think we're going to be able to make a real difference in helping some of these little guys get started and not make the same mistakes and learn from some of the positive lessons, of the different things that we need. Wanna go on over on the phone.

Did you read the 40 page document I sent you? I started to look at it. I looked at it. I have more It's all in there. Yeah. We'll have to go over that. Yeah. We'll have to go So so let's go on to the next you had a few points. One of them is the that you're helping the fund. This what's another one? Yeah. And if you don't mind, I'll mention the name, Space Fund. But we're not gonna do a big promotion. But what the reason I wanna mention No. No. We're not doing any promotion.

There's no promotion on the show. Yeah. Right. And so the one thing I do wanna mention is that we are putting out a thing called the Space Fund reality rating, as a service to the field where we're putting lists together of people in these different sectors that are worth looking at. Most people will look will never be able to invest in us. That's fine. But it tells you, like, there's a 100 launch companies. And here's their management. Here's what we think are gonna happen to them.

And that's worth looking at as well as the other resources out there. You need to really understand what you're looking at before you get involved in these companies. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's really helps us. So that'll that'll tie into our post conversation. So let's go into this next one. Let's go on to Space Force.

You you told me you had this you you we we spoke last week or week before or whatever it was, and you said you are just with this the United States Space Force, and you I think the words were, I'm against militarization of the space, and what am I doing with Space Force? So that's your intro. Well, here here's the here's the, there's couple of angles here. I got invited to Colorado Springs. There is no Space Force formally yet.

This is the group that's working on it coming out of the Air Force and Space Command. And I got invited, to a private meeting of people to look at what we believe will happen in space in the next 30 years. For some reason, they think I might have some insights into that.

And so we brainstormed for for 3 days on on this, looking at what China's doing, looking what we're doing, looking at, you know, and my job, as I saw it, was to help them understand this frontier concept to if they're going in this whatever direction they're going in, they need to understand that they have the ability to help open the frontier through how they spend their funds, and help to make sure that citizens of all nations have the ability to navigate, to utilize, and to act in space.

I personally and in fact, there's an initiative that I've started with a friend or 2 that you'll be hearing about in the next few months. I'm putting out a statement, which is sort of what I would call a no kill tech statement. And I know this is confusing and ironic. How can I work with Space Force?

And before that, and our statement is basically that we will not participate in fund or support the development of technologies that will be used to initiate the death and and destruction of people in their property. And that's where I stand. Now that doesn't mean that I can't sit down and work with people, in the military, many of whom don't wanna do those kinds of things themselves. By the way, you know, as you know, most wars are started by politicians, not soldiers.

And the idea here is to help them really try and and do this right, to understand that there are resources in space, that there are there is this this movement of people who want to live out there. You know, it's it's interesting if you look at the the captain Cook or captain Kirk model. Okay? To to explore, to to do good stuff, and and and, you know, to also maybe enforce some civility and things like that. But look, the militarization space, and I hate this, it kills me, has already started.

Oh, of course, it is. It's happening. And it's happening in a big way that most people aren't aware of. You heard about India recently doing an anti satellite test. The US has done it. China's done it. Others have done it. It's out there, and it's happening. And I believe you used 2 words, and I wanna make sure that it's very clear here because you you did use them. And I'll now as I said, I sometimes attack to the listener.

James Cook and Captain Kirk are 2 separate people for people who don't know that. Oh, yes. Captain Kirk was the fictitious character on Star Trek, who was the captain of the USS Enterprise. Boldly went nowhere and was gone. Don't have to go much into that. But there was a guy by the name of James Cook, and he was in the 1700. He was an explorer. He was a British explorer. He traveled the world, I, as part of the a captain in the Royal Navy, and I believe he was responsible for mapping Australia.

He he was really a a a frontiers man, a frontiers person, who did amazing things. So you use them, and you use them just in quick reference. Mhmm. Wanna make sure that there's at least a context to that. Yeah. There's a this is the this is almost sort of the benevolent aspect of of how military can be used. It it heads over towards disaster relief and these other ways that the military can be used. And and and it's, you know, it's a it's a more positive spin.

It's almost as if, and I would support this if it became space guard instead of space force, you know, or the Space Corps instead of SpaceForce. So my my my role in there was to try and, get them to understand this, to to help them see potential pathways into the future where they could play a positive role. There were discussions of the interaction between the US and China and, and Russia and things like that.

But I absolutely had nothing to do with and stay away from any of the, let's call it direct war fighting stuff. I I'm I don't participate in that. The I believe that also the Chinese anti satellite tech was used on their own satellite. It'll be of a weather satellite. Mhmm. And it was successful putting debris into space. And there's Mhmm. Those type of those are challenges that, we're a warfaring world. Yeah. It's it's totally unfortunate.

And, you know, this gets to some of the stuff we'll talk about in a few minutes. But the idea of of, you know, we're human beings. We we are look, David. We are still apes. We are apes. Our sticks are now made of steel and have computer chips in them. And we still have some of the tendencies of of of, of apes and and this kind of, aggressiveness and, that kind of thing. Now hopefully, as more women take control of our society No.

Actually, there are there's data points that when women take over society, they are more ruthless, that they the wars that they fight through sometimes the the king or queen or the but they fight viciously too. That's why you a cat fight, you've seen the 2 women fight. It's a horrible fight. Men punch, done fall. So there's a here's a date appointment which might be useful to you at some point, and I'm not sure how true it is. So let's just take this as a hearsay from David Goldsmith.

I once read that there have been over 17,000 conflicts since recorded time. 17,000. Mhmm. And at any point on earth, there are 6 to 8 conflicts going on. Mhmm. Doesn't matter when Mhmm. Since recorded history. Yeah. I mean and all one has to do is listen to one of my favorite channels, the BBC, and, you'll hear about most of them within within an hour. They're they're they're there. So so with the Space Force, not that you have to divulge anything. Did you when you left Mhmm.

Were I I know they'll understand that there's more resources. They learned some of the things that I learned in the very early days. Did you feel that they were going to be that they will make that move, or are they ingrained in the protectionist belief? I think it's gonna be, I think it's gonna be both.

Look. The the the Space Force and the other things that are doing are just bringing together all of these different aspects of things they're already doing, you know, communications, support for people on the front lines. You know, I mean, there were talk of, like, you know, how do you launch a rocket from the United States that can carry a squad of soldiers or support to the other side of the world in 90 minutes? Things like that.

But also Which is also an energy beam from Earth to all of the, stations so that there's a constant flow to the military because that's one of the biggest challenges. How do you get energy fuel resources to combat places. Right. I think the the Americans have 800 bases around the world. Right. And that gets into things like you said. You could beam, energy from space, which by the way, the Chinese are working on a space solar power program.

Yeah. And they're, one of the interesting things, we had a great briefing on China. And, it's amazing the stuff China is doing. It's interesting that, a lot of it occurs under the banner of, and I'm gonna say this, I'm gonna get the name wrong. I'm very bad at pronunciation.

But, Zheng He, who was the Chinese admiral, who had gone out before Columbus, was heading down the coast of Africa, with ships that were so big, you could put the Nina, the Pinto, and the Santa Maria on the deck, proclaiming the greatness of the emperor that he worked for. Zheng He was a eunuch, which were the the main people working in that empire at the time. There was a rebellion or a change. The eunuchs were basically decimated. The ships were recalled. They were burned.

The trees large enough to make the mass were destroyed. All of the maps, everything that went with them was destroyed. China pulled inward. And now interestingly, as they move out into space, that is one of the flagship names that they they use as a part of the description of what it is they're doing in space. They are going out after, 500 years, and they're very proud of it. They're doing a great job. It's amazing what they're doing. But there has to be, you know, balance in all of this.

There are a lot of geopolitical issues. I I believe China should be invited to work on the International Space Station. Yeah. I believe people should work together on this. The Go ahead. I I'm I've been in Hong Kong, between New York, Hong Kong for 9 years now. Mhmm. And there is a misconception of many of the challenges that the earth that people face in the South Pacific region in China.

And it would I think the inclusion, as some of the my friends have said who've come and visited and gone into China. They'll they walk out saying, there are really nice people in China. Oh, hell yeah. What are you talking about? And then I've worked in Moscow. I've worked in Saint Petersburg. There are really nice people in Moscow. Yeah. So what's your point? There are bad players everywhere.

The to help just for the purposes of zheng, is how the spelling is, and it was in the Ming dynasty in 13/71 he was born. Mhmm. And I don't I'm not exactly sure it's Zheng, but the n g has a nasal sound. So Ng. You really don't say the g on the end. So Zheng, that's my little bit of Mandarin, and I probably screwed it up. So someone's gonna have to tell me a later way. Yeah. So okay. So, anyway, we're seeing some We're seeing that that coming back.

And, and we're very you know, there's there's there of course, the US, there are strategic interests and balances and all of this kind of stuff. And and, again, I I come back constantly to the fact that I want people to get out there. And I'll I'll tell you this.

One of the things that kinda spun their heads around, that I brought up, and it's something that's I think gonna be very interesting is if you take the ability of having onboard AI, onboard, printing, you know, additive printing, 3 d printing, and your own ability to maybe have asteroid or lunar resources, unlimited energy from the sun, the ability to isolate so you can head off in a direction where nobody else is.

One of the things that we're going to encounter for the first time essentially, in in a massive way in history are people who are operating under no flag of the they are tribal units. They're family units. They're gonna control the entire supply chain from beginning to end within the unit of their habitat, of their their moon hut, their Mars hut, their colony in space habitat, whatever you wanna call it. And they're gonna be independent. They're gonna be flagless.

You know, they're gonna declare themselves to be the, you know, whatever. You know, we are the the settlement of people who like SpaghettiOs. And, and if you like SpaghettiOs, you can be in our settlement. But if not, you're out the airlock. You know, they're they're gonna be these kinds of things going on that are gonna transform and, you know, with the blockchain, all of these kind of things, creating different social interactions, different ways of funding, different ways of trading.

And I don't think anybody is ready for that. I think there are people focused on pieces of it, but I think that the culture that's window horizon space you know, and then we're gonna split off just for a second here. We're gonna split off into, you know, there'll be what I call homo Marsialis, homo Monaris, homospatialis. They're gonna be different branches of humanity occurring. They're not ready for it. Exactly to, back to the seventies Mhmm.

Is that you've got the development of different style of different pieces or different types of delivery or or thoughts. So the Mhmm. I don't know if you're familiar. There's a country that's been formed recently. Mhmm. Liberland. And Liberland is in, near Croatia and Serbia, part of the Yugoslavian block, that piece of land that was not taken. There's a guy from crypto or blockchain, forget what it was, made a fortune, bought this piece of land, and he's a a Czech guy.

And what he's done is he started a new form of governance using you your voting and your contribution and no taxes, and taxes only go to things that the country wants, and they're studying the new passport. So I think on Earth, we're actually seeing also with this blockchain crypto, in this one example, how a new entity could be formed that lives in a virtual space, and that's what we're gonna see in the, going out.

So I I do agree this is gonna be a challenge for for societies to get their mind around. Oh, definitely. And, you know, you can't really, do it nearly to the scale that I'm talking about on the earth. A friend of mine, Joe Trout is the founder of the seasteading movement. We had him in our conference last year. And, you know, you really need to be able to be away from others.

And going back to the early part of our conversation, no matter who sends people out there, eventually, they are going to be independent. They're going to declare their independence. It happens every all the way back to the great colonies in the Mediterranean. Yeah. Eventually, they are like, no. No. We're Martians. We're we're we're Lunarians, whatever. Yeah. We're different. What what is it total recall? The movie Total Recall with Schwarzenegger.

You had the the mining populations and the different populations that were separated because they grew up in different places. Right. And the the best science fiction TV series on the air right now that we gave an award to last year at New Worlds which is The Expanse. Yeah. That's cool. The Expanse talks about the the belters who identify, you know, and what's great what's interesting is the belters can't handle gravity.

So when they come to the earth, they have to be in water tanks, and stuff like that. I just, I love that stuff. But anyway but I digress. No. No. That's okay. So we've got, we've got now 30 years, the conversation today, conversation today and next. That's yeah. That's kind of we're we're touching on that, and, maybe we should start moving towards, kind of getting you to a close on this, if you don't mind. I So so so let's let's hit we've got, which one do you wanna hit? We'll pick one of them.

You've got 4 left. I'll roll them all into, 1 or 2 answers for you. Okay. Because, shortly after the top of the hour, I have to go into a meeting, unfortunately. Okay. We're having too much fun, David. And thank you for a great show. You you were everybody says to me they're challenged with the way I introduce and put together the program together, and then they get on it. Jeffrey said he liked it. It was great. So, yeah, same thing.

No. You're having it's it's a lot of fun, and and and I appreciate you being such a good interviewer. And and and, yeah. And and so look. And interviewer. And and and, yeah. And and so look, and I'll send you a check. No. I won't. But, anyway, the okay. So the last part of this, I am actually working on a book called The Space Manifesto. I'm saying that because I need to be accountable to the world so I actually finish the book so people can say, what the hell happened to that book, Rick?

Not to promote it. I just need to be knowing that people are expecting it so I can actually get it done. It was putting accountability on yourself. Exactly. It's a thing I have to deal with with ADD. And in that book, I will talk about the declaration of rights of humanity in the universe.

The idea there is to talk about some of those things that we've already spoken of, but that I believe it is the right of all human beings to be able to go anywhere in the universe and do anything they want, utilize the resources of space to build anything they want of any type so long as, and I'm not gonna get the exact language here, but that they do not threaten harm or interfere with other human beings or sentient species, that they do not desecrate or destroy historical or sacred places, that they do not harm or destroy existing ecosystems, and they do not harm, threaten, harm or threaten the earth, the mother world itself.

And other than that, I believe that it should be hands off. People should be able to go do anything they want, within those rules. So I've tried to put that into, just a declaration. It's about 3 pages long, actually about 2 pages long, and that's within the space manifesto project that I'm working on. And this all ties into what such an incredible opportunity that we have, you know, right now, David.

We are we are at this moment in time, We're using the same technology, the same brains, the same people, the same infrastructure, the same capabilities. We can either destroy this planet utterly or take the seeds of life from this world to places that are now dead, to take the civilization of the earth and expand it into the universe, to become what I believe is part of our destiny, part of who we are, which is the sensing mechanism by which the universe knows of itself.

You know, I've done a piece recently that I call the hands of Gaia, but I believe we are the hands of Gaia. We are the mechanism by which the earth will expand, reproduce, and go out into the universe. And it becomes to me, even more critical if one starts to look at the things that we're finding in space or more directly the things we're not finding in space. And that is at least within the spear of our ability to to see and judge other civilizations. We're not finding them.

I I have friends who've said, they're looking desperately and deeply. They're not finding it. Now maybe that means they've moved on. Maybe they've done these other things. But there may be 2 other possibilities. 1, or a few other possibilities. 1, they got to a certain level. They reached a level like we do where we are. Mhmm. And they had the same global leadership, and they didn't solve their climate change and they died. Yep. Okay? That's I believe that may be the big one.

Or, we may be the first within the sphere that we can understand and reach to actually get to this level. And we may be the first experiment of a technologically capable, intelligent, quote, unquote, in quotes, species that can actually venture beyond the bubble of the mother world into space. So in either of those possibilities, I believe it becomes even more incumbent on us to save this planet, to do the right thing vis a vis the earth. I'm not all I'm not about fleeing.

I wrote an essay recently called the Elysium effect, where I talk about the movie with Matt Damon and where the the rich people flee to what I call the ultimate gated community of a, you know, a habitat in space and leave the earth to the underlings. You know, the 0.1% leave. Yep. And, that's a very scary message to put out there. We have to be careful about it. But I believe that go ahead.

It was either Stephen Hawking or one of the scientists who had a they came up with some type of an experiment on I think it was a a flight that I was taking. I was watching a video, and I saw this experiment. And they showed how it was so challenging for the the evolution of species, plant, animal, on earth. And that was a risk that it had happening, the fact that the moon was there.

Then it was the getting out of the water, and and then it was the development of tools, then it was the and they went all the way through, and they they went through this whole piece of how challenging each step was for, for the habitants of the earth to get to the point in which we are today. And at the very end, this ball is going, and it looks like it's gonna make it. And at the bottom and it's there's a a flash of fire or spark. It goes pooch, and it extinguishes it all.

Yeah. And what the point was, with everything we've done, we could still destroy it. And the odds are that humanity will destroy itself and the earth before it gets out. Exactly. So that we have a larger chance of doing that than we do of succeeding. Absolutely. And so there becomes from that arises part of the imperative that we get this breakout going quickly. Not to leave, not to escape, although some might, but so that we can expand and inspire and also defend the planet.

So there are 3 projects that I would love to see us do. I call them the Earthsavers. You know, it's I have the nonprofit Earthlight Foundation, and, so it's a clever name. But, the Earthsaver projects, there would be 3 of them that I would love to see undertaken. One of them is, there would be 3 of them that I would love to see undertaken.

One of them is, what I call Earthshine, which is the development of space solar power so that we can get rid of coal and nuclear power on the earth and capture the sun's power in space and beam it down. Number 2, would be Earth's shield, which is us getting out into space and having an understanding of the neighborhood such that we can protect ourselves from incoming, asteroids. Yeah. Distinct extinction level events.

And number 3, which is a little more controversial, which I I call Earth's shade, which would be the idea that if we do tip into what, scientists call runaway greenhouse, If we hit a tipping point where the planet is heating up faster and faster and faster as it occurs in a greenhouse to where you're heading towards the planet actually becoming like Venus, where no life can survive, which we have right next to us, that model of Venus. If that were to start to happen, it becomes an emergency.

There are people that talk about geoengineering, you know, putting white bubbles all over everything to reflect the light, etcetera, etcetera. The problem with those is you can't really turn those off so easily once you start them.

However, we could take swarms of intelligent robots, send them out to asteroids, a few asteroids in the l points, and move those asteroids 1 at a time, by the way, between the Earth and the sun and drop slightly, ever so slightly, the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth. Now the nice thing about that is that using the same technology we use to discover planets around other suns, and we do that by what's called studying the occultation.

In other words, if a little speck moves inside in front of one of these suns, you know, 100 of millions of miles from here away from us, we're able to actually pick that up. That's how sensitive our telescopes are. And then we can tell there's a little planet there. Using that same technology, we could move an asteroid, a small one between the Earth and the the sun, do a measurement, do the, you know, algorithms, yeah, the math Yeah. And figure out whether that would work or not.

And if it worked, maybe we can move a second one, maybe a third, a 4th, or 5th. And by the way, the robots stay attached to them. They're using the resources on the asteroid that they're propelling. And then you say, well, you know what? Let's just move that one out of the way so you could it's literally I don't know. Going all the way back to that word from the beginning, literally the ability to open and close the blinds in space.

And what's beautiful about all three of these projects is, a, they help save the planet. B, they give us something grand and exciting and, and amazing to to rally around that all nations can be involved in, and and, see, when you're done with them, the technologies or as you're doing them, technologies and infrastructure capability you develop help you create an, space faring civilization. So those are some projects. Go ahead. So that's this is great. We're gonna end it here.

Yes. I, I think I've been trying to call you for 2 years to get you on this program Mhmm. Even though we haven't been around for 2. So I so much appreciate that you have taken the time to with me to fill me in on what you're working on and some of these thoughts because they're really cool. I think you've got some neat ideas. I think you you are I'm not a psychologist nor will I pretend to be 1. You don't have ADD.

You have the ability to concentrate on the topic, and you do, like many people, you go off top or tangent because you're excited about something. You did a fantastic job of giving me at least some new information that I hadn't thought about, And, so I appreciate it. So thank you very much. Well, I thank you, David.

And I wanna tell you, I look forward to seeing you at New Worlds, November 15th 16th, and having you on stage with us, because I think you you do an amazing job of communicating as well. So Thank you. So, for everybody, the Project Moon Hut or the Age of Infinite is supporting Project Moon Hut. Our initiative has been, the very beginning, to establish sustainable life on the moon.

That's not self sustaining life, but sustainable life, which we could support, through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem. And our desired outcome is to change how we live on earth for all species. So we are, in many ways, in sync with what Rick has been talking about in a different context than we have. We've designed what, Rick, you might find to be very useful to do the acceleration that you're thinking about.

So with that said, there's a few ways you can, you can go to www.projectmoonhut.com dot org is one way to reach us. You can reach to me specifically at [email protected]. Instagram, if you're interested, mister David Goldsmith. You can connect with us on Twitter at at projectmoonhot. And we've also got linked in, Facebook. So you've got many ways to reach out to us. Appreciate you listening. There'll be more shows coming. And thank you, Rick, once again for your time.

For that, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening. Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to a new edition of the Age of Infinite. Today, we have an amazing guest on the line. We have Rick Tumlinson. Rick, how are you? I'm doing great. How are you? Good. The topic we're gonna be talking about is, the title we've gone up with for this program is called the Space Revolution. And let me share a few things about Rick and why he's on the line.

Rick and I go back I don't know how many years now. When was the pioneering? Or that was 4 years ago already? 5 years ago? 5? 5 years ago. Mhmm. 5 years ago. I had been We had started the Project Moon Hut project out of NASA, and Bruce Pittman said to me that I had to go to this event in Washington DC. And I wasn't sure what it was. He said it's called the Pioneering Space Summit or program. And I said, sure. Whatever you want me to go to, I'll go to. And this is where I met Rick.

Now Rick has a long history in the space industry. He's been involved in several space companies and nonprofits. He's been credited for partaking in and being involved in all sorts of different initiatives, including possibly being there when the space revolution happened that we'll have to hear about potentially. He's testified on Capitol Hill. He signed up the 1st space tourist.

Most of that probably doesn't mean as much as what the content we're going to go over today, which is this, the space revolution. So I'm excited to learn from you today, Rick. You teach me what you can. What's the, give me the bullet points that you've put together, and I'll take them, and then we'll start from there. Okay. Well, we have several and we we can see how the, the format rolls out. Yep. I I started with the what is the space revolution.

Okay. Next. How does it relate to what we call commercial space and, the term new space? Are they gonna be 2 different commercial space and new space? They are actually. And I'll show I'll explain the difference. Okay. Next. Given that we're on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, I often talk about Apollo's children or as they're called in a documentary about some of the stuff we did, the orphans of Apollo. Who are they? And, in a sense, what would we be doing if we do go back to the moon?

How how will we do that? And, those are 2 separate things. But who are these Apollo's children? And and how will we go back to the moon or or Mars or what's about to happen? Okay. How and why did I get into this? Oh. Hopefully, you weren't pulled, kicking and screaming as I was. I'll explain later. But, You'll tell me later. Yes. I am, I am an accidental tourist as they say. Okay. Who is doctor Gerry O'Neil and why is he so important? Something that's never addressed enough.

Yeah. Some call this the quote unquote benevolent conspiracy. This does relate to doctor O'Neil, and I'll I'll come into an explanation with you about how that started. Okay. And the fact that what we're seeing with Elon and Jeff is not just billionaires playing with rockets. This is actually a planned, almost 30 year long, project for some of us.

Okay. And why do I go back and forth between things like starting the Space Frontier Foundation, which is, I think, 30 years old, 31 years old, the Earthlight Foundation, New Worlds, and then going back into companies like Deep Space Industries, or my new venture capital company, Space Fund. Okay. Any others? Is that 3 more. We can Okay. See how they go. Give me give me the next.

I've I've recently in social media, people have been asking me about pictures they've seen where I'm hanging out with the US Air Force and, working on, what is called Space Force. And I've been invited to some sessions there. I'd like to explain perhaps why I'm doing that and what does that have to do with my goal of expanding life and humanity into space. Okay. What else? Well, this, kind of goes back to the earlier conversation and it's, you know, which I've spent about 30 years plus.

I'm dating myself, of course. Trying to change the conversation about space. And so where is the conversation today? Where does it need to go next? K. And some of these will be answered within other questions. Of course. They always do. Yeah. Sure. We'll jump we'll jump. I know our conversations already jump all over, so this will we'll we'll manage. Yeah. This is gonna be a field mosaic that people can put together into an image.

How do we answer how do I answer the question when somebody asks me after one of my talks, why are we spending our money to go to space? We have so many problems down here. I'd love to hear that one because I have an answer for that one too. Okay. Great. Why am I writing a space manifesto, which is my latest private project? And another thing that I've been speaking about in public a bit is what is the declaration for the rights of humanity in the universe? These kind of roll together.

And then last, and I think this is, you know, whenever I do a talk, I go into a phase where there's a big finish with music and galaxies, and I talk about why are we here and why are we here now doing what we're doing. And so we might if we make it that far, we might go into that. We will. We will. There we are. Well, there you go. We're we're going to hit all of this. You're gonna teach today, I'm your student. You're gonna teach me everything.

Okay. So I I wanna walk away knowing everything about this about Rick Tumlinson's changing the world, if we wanna call it, or or attempts. And so I'm I'm I'm ready. So let's start off with this. What is the space revolution? So the space revolution is a term that that I use to help encapsulate and, and capture what people are seeing when they're seeing things like, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, the X prize. They're hearing about asteroid mining.

They're hearing about the private sector going into space, the end of the space shuttle, the flights of private spaceships, to and from the space station. All of these things in a sense are manifestations of what is literally a revolution in how we look at space, what we're doing in space, who's doing that, and the goals of those people when it comes to space. And so that's what the revolution is. It's bigger than, just the question of of billionaires playing with rockets.

So that's that's the short answer. Okay. So it's just a phrase or a term because I haven't I haven't heard this space revolution in my 5 years in the space industry. So is this something you've just come up with as a means to kind of counteract the 4th industrial revolution? Not to counteract anything, really.

It's just my own encapsulation of, of what I see happening and trying to, you know, the the way we describe things, the words we use to describe things is very often, creates or helps manifest what that thing is in terms of how we act with it, how we react to it. And I'm trying to help people understand. So, yes, you could call it the 4th industrial. You could call as long as people understand that this is a movement, a revolutionary change.

I don't care what you hang in front of the word revolution. It is a change, though. You know, you can talk about going into a space renaissance, all of these different things, rather than having people look at it and think it's these individual little projects and things like that. Trying to have people understand. Mhmm. So if you were to put a date on it, what day what year, day, or whatever would you say that the space revolution started?

I would say that it started in the mid 19 seventies, and it, I can almost put a specific date on it. I think it was 1976, and that was when doctor Gerard k O'Neil, a Princeton professor, published the book, The High Frontier. So h I g h? H I g h, Frontier. Okay. That book So that that is the the starting point. So you must have been Young. 17 years old? I was young. I was young. 55. Are you afraid of your date? No. No. I I am, I'm a leap year child.

I have a birthday every 4 years which helps with denial. But, I am, how old am I this year? 6063 Earth years. Okay. So that's right. So I'm probably not far off than what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. And and and literally, I I I have to think about it sometimes because the whole leap year thing is throwing me off my whole life. Well, it's a it's an interesting that you you that you use that thinking because I and I this is a sad story. I had a friend who you when he became, I think it was 40 Mhmm.

He would celebrate the first anniversary of his 40th birthday, the second anniversary of his 40th birthday. And he was always on his birthday, and then he died young. So just be careful. There you go. There you go. So so okay. So let's go to the next one then. Yes. How does it relate to commercial and news, commercial and new space? So commercial and new space are, if you look at the space revolution let me give it a little bit more definition.

The space revolution is this idea that we're moving out into space as the next level, the the next thing that we're going to do as the human species. And that that means we're going to be living out there or shall we say settling or whatever, words, you know, are appropriate to to describe the fact that people will have homes and be living in space.

So as we move into that, and that's the dream that we have, and I know that's the dream of everybody that you see doing these different things, then you have to, you have to be able to finance it. You have to be able to to pay for it. Now the kinds of people and companies that are doing this are what we call new space.

New space is a word that we literally, I'm I'm using that phrase too much, but that we actually sat down at a table and made out, in around 1999, 2000 at somebody's dining room table. What do we call this? And new space companies are basically those companies that are funded by, created by, operated by, or have the goal of opening space to humanity. And those those companies and projects, which can, some of which, be not for profit, are, the drivers.

They're they are the engine, not to be confused with the goal and destination, which some people do. Now in government and in traditional space or what some people call old space, I call it more traditional. I don't wanna be that insulting. But, they use the word commercial space, which is in itself a really interesting indicator because that calls out the fact that maybe aerospace industrial complex is not commercial.

But commercial space are those kind of companies that are out there doing private sector, activities with the goal of creating a profit. I I like to say sometimes that when it comes to space, nobody stays until somebody pays. And that could be the government or it can be, customers, and, come from places of where you're making money by what you're doing. So it's sort of the engine of what you might wanna call the space revolution or the frontier movement.

So you're, so let's start with the first question just because I'd like to have it on record. Mhmm. Who was at the table? Basically, it was the board of directors of the group, the Space Frontier Foundation, that we had founded in 1988, 20 years before. And Or 10 years. Who who would give me some of the names. I wanna know if they're names or I I will go blank on it. I can tell you that there's Charles Miller, a guy named Jim Muncie, Benigno Munoz, Bill Boland, and, I think Robert Noteboom.

These are people you probably don't know, And that's one of the points I wanna make at some point in our conversation that there are people who have poured their lives into making this happen. You know, we created the Space Frontier Foundation in 1988, with the goal of making this happen. We immediately went to war with the establishment. Immediately, well, we started with a 40,000 name petition calling for a return to the moon, which was delivered to the 1st president Bush's desk.

And then we ended up going into battle over the space station. We were the only pro, humans in space group to actually, attack what was to become the International Space Station. We did that because the government in our belief shouldn't be building buildings and that we didn't buy the fact that president Reagan had when he had said that, it was gonna cost $8,000,000,000 and be done by, like, 1992 or 1994. And, as it turned out, as you know, they stopped building the space station.

The the one that's up there has never been finished, actually, somewhere north of a $100,000,000,000 of expenditures. And it doesn't do many of the things they had originally told us it was gonna do, such as be a port to space or a place to test different kinds of gravities that you could then use in a settlement context.

So we went to battle, over the station and, almost killed it by one vote or as my friend, Bill Gerstenmaier, says, who is in charge of human space flight for NASA right now, they saved it by one vote. And we went on from there and began to support other activities.

In fact, we traded our battle over the station to save a vehicle called the DCX that was being, a project that was run by, general Pete Warden and, later was famously piloted remotely by the astronaut Pete Conrad because we believe that the idea of single stage to orbit reusable space systems, was important. A very quick little story on that if you don't mind. Sure. Yeah. After we, had had that vote and it really isn't that the Space Frontier Foundation was some mega powerful, group.

But as you find in parliamentary systems or in the Knesset or the UK parliament, when the votes are tight, small groups can have great leverage. And we were in that position at the time. So after, that one vote, after the squeaker by which the space station, stayed alive, we got on the phone through a an intermediary and spoke to, a gentleman that we waited I waited butted heads with, a lot named, Dan Golden, who was running NASA.

And Jim Muncie and I, told him that, look, there's this little vehicle called the DCX that the military has funded. It was initially part of the strategic defense initiative or what was called Star Wars. But it was running out of money. And the White Sands test facility had almost locked the gates and said you can't go any further. We told mister Golden that if NASA would take it over, we would drop our attack on the space station permanently and step away from that. He agreed.

The program was transferred to NASA, and we immediately kept our word and stopped our attacks on the station. Now at the time, there was a former president Johnson adviser, old fellow, amazing guy who many in our field know who passed away named Tom Rogers, one of the few people I've ever known who could pull off a seersucker suit. And Tom had this amazing accent, this amazing voice. And at one point after this, we were having a meeting in DC, and Tom pulls me away and he's like, well, Wreck.

So what are you doing? You, you you got the space station now. You're stuck with it, aren't you? He said, it's it's you got this lemon. You You got this lemon, don't you? The space station. What are you gonna do about it? Are you gonna turn it into lemonade? And that's how we talk. And, and I'm sitting there. Well, like, well, yeah, let me think about that, Tom. So I ended up, testifying shortly thereafter in front of the house based subcommittee.

And with my associates, we came up with this concept called AlphaTown. The idea of AlphaTown was basically that, okay. If you're going to have a federal facility, out on the frontier, let's look at an analogy. And by the way, I I do wanna be very clear to your listeners. Some of the things I say may sound a little unpolitically correct. Don't worry about this. This is global. You're talking to me. Right. You're teaching me. Like I said, you don't even have to worry. No one out there.

You don't even have to talking to me. Teach me. Okay, David. Don't be offended if I am, uninterested. I'm not offended by anything you say. I know you well enough. Bless you, my friend. Bryce. Yeah. So, anyway, the point is that, we took the analogy of the fort on the frontier, a fort which is built by a federal entity in a wilderness. And Mhmm. That that fort then in the interest for whatever reason that that entity puts it out there can then become a purchaser of goods and services.

Because what happens is a trading post will spring up around the fort, and then the people who live in the fort will use the secure route back to quote, unquote civilization as a trading route and the technologies that are needed to get to and from the fort, maybe their stage coaches or whatever. You know, I am from Texas. I have an old west heritage. So those analogies will show up with me. We'll we'll I'll excuse you for that. Well, thank you very much. No comment.

So moving along, the, the idea of the, the fort in the frontier, you know, if you cut to a 100 years later, that fort is a tourist attraction or monument in the middle of a thriving city, an economic industrial complex called the city. And so in a way, it can almost be the analogy another analogy might be a grain of sound around which you grow a pearl.

These the idea of actually taking this federal expenditure called a space station, by the way, this will apply when we go back to the moon or wherever when the government does, and using it to help, drive economic activity. In other words, for example, the purchase of goods and services. So in my testimony, and and this was, 1996, in front of the house based subcommittee, I called for all transportation to and from the space station to be provided by the private sector, for example.

And, eventually, perhaps to have energy and space, provided by the private sector and also habitations, the the modules, the the buildings in space would be provided by the private sector.

Therefore, the tax dollars that people are putting into it, whether they're European tax dollars through ESA, or even Russia or whatever, but this is our government here in the US that I can try and influence, That money rather than being spent is actually being invested in the opening the economic opening of the frontier. So that's kind of, where that came from now.

It took us only about 23 years to get to the point where we've got SpaceX and Blue Origin, you know, flying to and from or about to fly to and from the space station with with, crews, over time. Or Even Jeff even Jeff Manber's company is that private institution Yes. Delivering over 700 payloads. Absolutely. And they're leveraging off of the federal facility that was funded by taxpayers.

But what's really important, going back to those people sitting around the table whose names you did not know largely, these are the people that made this happen. I recall being up at 2 in the morning sometimes with people counting votes on the floor of the house and the senate to protect the funding that was going into what we this program called, cuts. And this, is We we did that at the last NS, National Space Society meeting. Mhmm. A lot talked about COTS. Right.

So we we in the Space Frontier Foundation wrote the initial white paper that led to COTS. We were the ones who started that project that eventually became COTS.

And then these volunteers who who you don't know were on the ground counting the votes to protect the funding of companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin and Cox because the traditional aerospace companies, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and, others, the aerospace companies that, and the, politicians that they work with, oh, and I'll put air quotes around work with. Mhmm. We're trying to kill that project and we're draining the funds away from it. Go ahead.

I've heard, and this is a discussion with someone that you and I both know Mhmm. That we I just had recently about how with all this new space, there still is a tremendous amount of challenges that new space, using your terms, new space has with the commercial space industry. And I when I use that term, I'm using it wisely because Elon Musk is commercial. But we're I think we're talking about the Boeings and Lockheed Martins and the big companies when you use that this terminology.

Mhmm. Do you feel that it I know it's breaking through, but I've heard people say that they feel that it's gonna be extremely difficult to maintain and really fight these large behemoths. It's a challenge. Look. Boeing just to be so people understand or so you understand, so you that you understand. The Boeing has a commercial airline company. Boeing's space activities are not necessarily what you would call commercial.

They are a contract company that largely depends on for the majority, to, in in many ways of their space, money, comes from the government, and the heritage comes from the government. Now there's some degree the United Space United Space Alliance, which was with Boeing and Lockheed to deliver and take care of the space shuttle? Things like that. Yes. ULA is is what it's called. ULA. Yeah. So you see this all the time. Now United. Yes. ULA. United Launch Alliance.

Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Now, yes, Elon and Jeff and these other folks are taking government money, but they're also doing it using different contracting methods, that are, more pay for delivery, those types of things that come out of that. That's that's I'd like to can you give me a few of those? Because I'm interested in understanding how you separate them and what would be the distinction in the future.

So you're saying that there's a a different type of contract methodology that they're using with the United States government or governments around the world that makes these different. What are those? Okay. So there's what we're what we're trying to do with COTS and what we're trying to do with more of a frontier enabling model with the government is where you basically get I'm gonna stop you for I'm gonna stop you for 1 minute just because we're gonna use this word COTS a lot.

And I've I've heard about it, the National Space Society. We've talked about it. I just wanna hear your, your description of it so that I'm on the same page with you. Okay. The basic underlying concept is that there's basically 2 phases in the relationship between the government, and the private sector.

The first phase is there is an interaction between the government and private sector in terms of, re technology and development of particular kinds of things or services or the ability to deliver services. And the government participates, back and forth with the private sector to help develop those things, for example, launch systems.

Then it moves to another phase where you have the government actually paying for the service, the delivery service that these launch systems are, are enabling or carrying out. It is unlike, for example, with the space shuttle where you had a single provider that was working directly for the government using heavy, heavy levels of government specification, etcetera, to develop and manage a service, under government supervision. There is, 2 kinds of contracting.

There's what we call cost plus, which is the I hate to use the word again, traditional, but it's the way that a lot of aerospace, companies, in the US operate and military companies. It's how you get a $1,000,000 toilet. It's why aircraft military aircraft are so expensive. Cost plus basically says that, you know, for example, I'm sitting here drinking out of a bottle of water.

And if if I'm a a contractor and you're the government and you want me to design a bottle of water for your soldiers or for your astronauts to use, I get to charge you 10% of whatever it costs me to develop this bottle of water. Now in that case, the incentive would, of course, move towards why would I charge you a $100 to develop a bottle of water and only be able to keep $10 when I can charge you a1000000 and keep a 100,000?

So the incentive within the cost plus model is to make things as expensive as possible. So that's different than we need, 10,000 bottles of water that are this shape and will fit into this and when will you deliver them? That's a very different type of thing. And when you get into that kind of a model What what do you call that? Cost cost plus is 1? Yes. Purchasing? Cost plus is is the one, and and the other one I would call, the rest of the world. I mean, Right. I was just saying purchasing.

Purchasing. You know? It's like when I hop into an Uber, I'm, you know, I'm paying for to be taken from point a to point b. I'm not paying I am paying a little bit through the amortization of the cost that it took to develop it, but I'm not paying for, you know, 10% of the cost of all development blah blah blah. It it's just yeah. It's what we do every day.

Okay. So, yeah, just just traditional purchasing, getting a product, putting it out for bid, finding out what the best service model is, whoever can deliver the product at a certain reasonable price, and you buy it Right. Fits the need. So And and at the same time, part of our mandate in the in the white papers, things like that that led up to to the cots. And again, I I, you know, I I I may have mentioned to you in the past this idea of success has a 1000000 fathers or mothers.

Mhmm. When when we started down the path of cuts, there was nobody talking about this. Nobody. It was really, generated by people through the Space Frontier Foundation, and through some white papers. There was a seminal white paper largely written by a fellow named Charles Miller with with Jim Muncy working on it, in the early nineties that kinda laid this out.

And, we used to, compare it to Ralph Nader's paper that you may or may not remember, which was unsafe at any speed, which, you know, led towards car safety type things. It was meant to lay out this idea that this is what we have to do.

Keep in mind, the difference between a frontier orientation that is being manifested in the revolution versus aerospace industrial complex and the space centers and things like that is our goal is to get to a point where regular folks can go into space and create communities to build homes, to build, moon huts, to be able to build whatever they wanna do. I I don't care what anybody says about you. You just got a 1000000 points. Okay. But I I yeah. That's what I wanna see happen. Right?

And and so when it comes to that, it really is our goal is creating you know, look. I'm gonna take a little side path here that kind of lays something in here. I have three principles or what I call the, the 3 keys to opening space. And and and you have to have these or you can't open spaces in frontier. 1 is low cost, reusable transportation that and eventually safe, but low cost, reusable transportation, to and from the place you're going.

Mhmm. 2 is the ability to utilize the resources and the place where you're going for anything you see fit. And 3, our governments that either help you or stay the heck out of the way. If we have those three things, and we can go through how they're how they they're being achieved or where they're coming from or what their state is right now. But if you have those three things, you have the elements necessary, the keys, to be able to turn space into a frontier.

And you would you could apply that to air transportation, rail transportation, cars, boats. Put you can apply those rules to any of those and see how having all of those line up. If you took any one of those away, then the the economy, the freedom of of regular folks to be able to participate in those systems to get to and from places would go away. It's it's interesting here you say these, but, again, because I've I was at the Pioneering Space, Summit.

And the first conversation I had with Bruce, which was in Palo Alto, about how I would redesign the space industry hit on all three of these. Mhmm. And I never studied anything about space. Oh, yeah. I didn't have any clue what space was. Yeah. And so So there's that's I guess that's one reason. There were a lot of things that happened at that pioneering space, summit that I said, oh my god. These people are off track. And you're reiterating why they were off track. I didn't know it from you.

I just felt it. Mhmm. No. That's why we had them at the summit to try and get them on track. Okay? Look. I I I wanna let me we've mentioned this summit a couple of times. Let me explain to to or remind you, you know, sort of what happened. I I know nothing about it except I was invited and you Yeah. And and so here's the deal. We had 2 days.

Having been in the position of, one of the leaders of the rebel rebellion or revolution for so long, I had gotten to a point I I went through some personal family crises slightly before that. It gave me some pause. I took that time and, started reevaluating. And, again, I was sort of the battle worn, you know, soldier for the cause for so many years, and this is around 2014. Right. And 2013. Basically, I lost my mom in an accident, in, 2011.

And for 2 or 3 years after that, I was here in Texas helping my father, kind of get back on his feet out in the country, spending a lot of time walking around pastures at night and looking at the stars and just I kinda just pulled out. And I'll say this with with no sense of embarrassment. In fact, be proud because I just recently passed, but, I had basically gotten clean and sober in 2009. Okay. And so I'm 10 years as of now. And, Congratulations. It it helps with eyes opening.

And I'm I'm saying this because if anybody out there, you know, or or you or anybody you know, let's say, is interested in that, it can be done. And so what happened was my eyes opened. I got clarity of vision. I was walking around in this field thinking about, okay. I really wanna focus on the big picture. Why are we going? Who's going? How do we help that happen? So I had a call with Bill Gerstenmaier, the head of human space flight.

Now Bill basically has the job of carrying out the human space program for NASA. He's the guy who writes He was he was at the event. He he was at Yeah. I'll come back to that. I'll explain that how that happened. It wouldn't have happened without Bill. So he almost was the embodiment of the other side of the other guys. Right? What you might wanna call traditional space, old space, the the aerospace industrial complex.

That was Bill Gersonmeier's job, protecting the, what I I had been actually writing editorials about the giant NASA rocket called the, big, the space launch system. I branded it the senate launch system. This is and these were brutal editorials and, a lot of political stuff going back and forth. So I gave Bill a call, and he apparently was in Moscow. His secretary said, well, I'll pass the message on.

I remember I was driving through Texas, and I I get this call, from this, you know, weird number. And it's Bill Gerstenmaier calling me back from the runway in Moscow where he had just landed, and he must have gotten a message from the secretary. I said, why the hell is this guy calling me? And I pulled over, and we had the most amazing conversation. You can imagine it started out somewhat, roughly. You know, I'm attacking his multibillion dollar projects, and I've been doing it for decades.

And so we started talking, and we got to the point. Both of us were committed to having a what what what I would call a conversation about possibility. And so we got to a point where it was like, you know, what if we just didn't talk about rockets and launch systems? What if we just talk about where we're going and why? And it was like, bam. And we started having fun and engaging each other. And and what happened was coming out of that, it's really, really interesting, David.

Once once you have a a mental shift like that occur, once you're able to to step to the other side, to maybe view from the other person's perspective or or or take on a different approach to something, it begins to cascade and it begins to grow. It's it's almost like you're cracking open a doorway into a different perspective on life. So that led me to think, you know, what if we could do what Bill and I just had happen on a larger scale?

Now I had been pushing for a long time for people to start using the word, and and we can talk about it because it's there there are arguments for and against it, but at the time, it was very important to to get this concept across the the word settlement. Mhmm. As as it denotes people living somewhere. There are better iterations. I bet there are stronger ones.

You've got many yourself, and I know you've We we I I think you were at the last, meeting where I said that summit or colonization are challenging words for certain people. Mhmm. Colonization colonization far more than settlement. Yes. Far more than settlement. Yes. Absolutely. And and by the way, we do slip into that. We use the word colony. It isn't meant offensively, You know?

And I've spoken many times in countries recently in Morocco and others where I had to be very careful and and apologize in advance in case it came out of my mouth. But settlement and and it did. Settlement, is really about people living, and that's the idea. It's to talk about more, people living, building these homes, you know, your your I'll say it again. Just give you that extra point. The moon hats building your or whatever they are out there. Project Moon Hut is a home. It is a home.

It's a hot. It's a it's a it's a box with a roof and a door in another place. And that's where Bruce came up with the Project Moon Hut because we started off the first paper I wrote was a box with a roof and a door. Exactly. We called it a hut. And that's how it came Project Moon Hut. Right. And I, in the this project I'm working on, this writing I'm doing, I define, you know, home, in terms of you know, the the the home is the place you go to, you know, after your job.

The the home is the place where your your family is the place you operate out of into the world, which makes something like a space station not a home. And what we're after is homes in space. Right? Mhmm. I don't know if Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Settlement's an easier we've gotta come up with a good one because you can't say the homization of space or the homie ing Nope. Of space. But, anyway, at the time, it was important to try and get that word in there.

I have been bringing it up in speeches, prior to that, and so decided to hold this, summit. And what's really interesting is I wanted to call it the space settlement summit, but I was spoken to by some, congressional staffers. I remember, I think it was Jeff Bingham who had been, a major, staffer in in Washington, in the senate.

And and, he and some others said to me, look, you don't wanna call it a space settlement summit because then the the traditional players, the aerospace companies, the others are not gonna show up. Mhmm. It's and and I remember one guy said, Rick, you gotta get him in the car lot before you sell him the car. And and and I was like, oh, you're right. You know? And and so we changed the word to the pioneering space summit.

But it really was the first space settlement summit because as you know, the entire discussion was how do we get the 100 people we had in the room. And we had, Mitt Romney's adviser, Scott Pace, who now runs the National Space Council under the Trump administration. And we have Lori Garver who would have been, a good candidate for Hillary's pick for administrator. We had Boeing. We had Lockheed Martin.

The aerospace, we had Buzz, but then we had, representatives, you know, from the different, commercial new space companies, such as SpaceX and others in the room as well. And at the end of the 2nd day, as you recall, roughly, there it was roughly a 100 people, but we got, all except 1. It's funny how we always focus on the one, but all except one. It turned out she was a contractor and, her, her boss was in the room. She didn't wanna commit.

Basically agreed that the word settlement should be included in the language that precedes NASA's funding, in the in the I remember that whole conversation that went on and on and off. Oh my god. But we got it. We got it. And what happened was it was, what we used to call the foundation ended up being a cultural cruise missile, and that it just we launched it into the society. We launched it into the conversation, and it started to take root over the the years that followed.

And last year almost made it into the final bill from which NASA is funded, in in what's called conference committee where the house and the senate get together at the end of the process and write the actual words. It got pulled, we believe by somebody from the aerospace community. But this year, it's been reintroduced, by an unlikely pair of senators who are not usually involved with space.

And so we think this year, the word settlement and development, which goes with it, will be, put into the NASA language as one of, not the only, but one of the major goals of the US human space flight program. I would love to see this happen in every country. I would love to see 1 by 1 country. The reason this is important, David, is because it is it is the let's call it the the North Star, the, you know, the Southern Cross, whatever it is.

You're guiding you're guiding point by which you can judge all of your other activities. It allows you to compare what you're doing with where you're actually trying to get. So that's why that's important. And, you and I have never sat down and done or gone over project Moon Hut. But our 4 phase approach is the first one is to get a box of the roof and a door, which is to get a laser focus for civilization on earth, not on all the extraneous, because to me, it feels like a shotgun going off.

Everybody's going in different directions. Mhmm. To get a singular target, which is to create a box with a roof and a door, a place that people can live. Four people, 8 people go around the moon, the 27 days, come back, and then it goes to industrial park, then it goes to extended stay, and then it goes to community.

So that has been since 2014, That has been the initiative is to get a laser like focus, or you call North Star, into an initiative that can draw all communities on earth to one central beacon. Mhmm. And exactly right. And and yeah. And and and I wanna be very clear. I I have no no pride of ownership of any of this, and a lot of it, bits and pieces were were made up and discussed by people much smarter than me before I ever heard of it.

There's there's a ton of people that went into everything that we had done. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. We have to acknowledge that. You build on the build on the shoulders of others. It's it's interesting because I didn't know this story when I went to this event. I just went. Mhmm. And so so let's do this. We've got that story. Is there anything more to add that service? I wanna get to Wow. We have 3. Yeah. That's okay. We're gonna go.

I I did this interview on my other podcast series called redefining tomorrow with this amazing guy, Jeffrey Wernick, and it was the first time I went over an hour. Uh-huh. First time. And he talks about democracy and changing systems and Bitcoin and currencies, and he's brilliant guy. And first time I'd ever gone over an hour, we went 3. So I've decided that if the program's going and there's content and there's we're just gonna keep on going as long as we can.

So let's get on to Apollo's Children. Okay. So Apollo's Children and this will will knock out 2 or 3 altogether here, including Gerry O'Neil because that's part of this. Apollo's children or the orphans of Apollo, which is the the title of a documentary about our mirror when we took over the Russian space station for a little while by Michael Potter. The, that reference goes to the fact that if you look at the 19 seventies, and this is where it starts.

It doesn't stop there, but this is where it begins. We've been to the moon. We had Voyager and Galileo. We had the Soviet space program. We had the American space program. Amazing things happening, in space. We had Skylab. We had Salyut. All kinds of things happening. And if you were a little kid as I was, and you were, in that period of time, you're sitting there watching the TV.

And, you know, on that TV set, you're seeing these inputs coming into, and and and and they're they're they're really bizarre and unique in all of history types of inputs. You're hearing that there is a cold war going on in places like Vietnam and around the world, that there are people on the other part of the world who want to kill you using rockets, by the way, to launch things at you that will destroy the entire world. We were actually still having drills that had to do with Mhmm.

With nuclear launches. Nuclear fallout. Yep. Yeah. The idea that somehow climbing under a desk would protect you, I don't get that, but okay. And all of these types of things were going on. And it's almost like if you flip the channel, it would be nuclear disaster, Apollo, you know, rockets on parade in in Red Square, Voyager, you know, and you turn the channel, and, and then the next one you hit is Star Trek.

And you roll on and roll on, and then moving into the seventies, you know, along comes Star Wars. And you're you're seeing this melange of images of death and destruction and the end of the world possibly in your lifetime at the same time that you're being presented with both the reality of people doing things like driving cars around on the moon and and, you know, probes going out beyond the solar system and amazing feats of science and technology.

And the 3rd element mixed into that is you're getting the science fiction of Captain Kirk, you know, all of this kind of thing happening. And as a child That wasn't real? I know. Exactly. Real. You're making my point. As a child, that begins to blend in your mind. You're you're you're putting these things together and going, you know, I want to have a positive future. These people are doing it. I wanna go make that happen.

Now during the seventies, we'd come out of Vietnam, all of this stuff, was happening. And ahead of us then, off in the distance, supposedly around 1980 or so, there is this thing that's being talked about called the space shuttle. And it's being pitched at the time as a vehicle, completely reusable vehicle. You look at the early images, and that vehicle was gonna bring the cost down of going into space to around $100, a pound.

At that point, if you think about your own weight or what you might wanna take with you, that meant we could really go out there and do stuff. Great things were gonna happen.

So in the middle of all of that, in that cultural melange, and there's still the the the in here in the US, the bad taste of the Nixon scandal and the lack of belief in what we're doing, there was this Princeton professor teaching physics in Gerard k O'Neil, and he was trying to engage his students in thinking about the future in a positive way. And he, came up with this idea.

I won't get into the whole process of it, but he came up with this idea of, what he called the high That the I that an expanding technological civilization should expand beyond one planet, the surface of a planet. He was really about what I an area that I've designated for years is what I call free space, which is the place Mhmm. Between planets. And and he wrote this book, The High Frontier, and it basically also did several other things at once. It said, you don't have to be NASA astronaut.

You don't have to be a government employee or a military person to have the right to dream about living in space. It said, we can use the resources of space, the concepts of free enterprise, democratic institutions, people working together, and we can go out there. We we, you and I, regular folks, and and build. Now he did call them colonies at the time. It was a different time, but build colonies in space.

And it was very interesting because in the book, there's a a section in the book where, like, I think there's a a little girl riding home from her her house in in space, her home. There's a very much of a humanistic aspect to it. But doctor O'Neil went one step further. Rather than launching a book out into the culture and being right about it. Hey. I was right about this. Nobody ever did anything.

He formed an organization called the Space Studies Institute, and, you could join that group if you believed in the book. And the Space Studies Institute then would actually have projects. We became what we call senior associates, and they were we were the elites of the revolution at that point. And, senior Did you get a little certificate and a badge? Oh, absolutely. Yes. We got lapel pins, gold ones. And, the point is that this book went out there.

And so you have these interesting people like, there's this young guy, in high school at the time, and he wants to, he's he's got a book club. And, he has these 12 books that he's, you know, selling to his friends, and, one of them is the high frontier. And he has this dream of starting an online eventually an online bookstore, and a guy named Jeff Bezos. And he reads the high frontier and goes nuts over it.

He actually gives his valedictorian speech when he's graduating from high school about, I'm gonna go build space colonies. I'm gonna make money, and then I'm gonna go build space colonies. Yes. Did did did did he talk about this last year at the new, new space conference? New Worlds. Yes. New World Conference? Yes. He actually did. He's talked about it several times. He's he won the, the, O'Neil Award, over at the National Space Study last year as well.

But the point is that he, he picked up on it. There was another friend, a guy I've worked with and competed with, off and on for many years, a guy named Peter Diamandis. He picks up the book, and eventually leads to him founding with a fellow named Todd Holly, who was an amazing rock star of our field who we lost during the AIDS epidemic. They founded the International Space University, the students for the exploration development of space.

There were other people that got together and created a group called the L5 Society. L5 standing for Lagrange Point 5, which is a place between the Earth and or within the reach of the earth and moon's gravity where if you're gonna build a place in space, that's where you'd wanna put it. It's prime real estate. And that well, isn't is that the that's this place where, gravity doesn't you can sit where gravity is equal on both sides so you can kind of be in limbo. Yeah. In a way.

It's like if yeah. In a way, in in terms of gravity, it's almost like, if you're looking at a creek and there's a It's a neutral point. Yeah. If you're looking at a creek and there's a little eddy where the leaves and stones are just kinda going in a circle, that's that's like a that's like a Lagrange point. Right. That's a that's the l five. Yeah. Right. And so that's that organization got started with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein and, and and Jerry Purnell, Arthur c Clark.

They're all in that organization. And, all these groups start to spring out of this concept of the high frontier. There are copycat books written, coffee table books with bright illustrations. Eventually, NASA spends a $1,000,000 and does a study on building space colonies that comes out of this. So he he had this just seismic, effect, And and yet he was, like, a very humble guy. I I should mention, it's not my project, so I'm not plugging myself here.

But, later this year, there is a documentary film called Gerry, g e r r y, that's coming out. And I've seen some of the rough cuts. It's pretty amazing that goes into doctor O'Neil's life because he is the unsung hero, of this this field, and yet he's responsible for perhaps the biggest cultural change in the history of humanity. And and I say that absolutely with no grin on my face. Totally true. So what happens is these guys get inspired. I was lucky enough.

I was living in New York City at the time, and I founded the L 5 Society of New York. We met on the intrepid aircraft carrier, which at that time was basically a ghost ship. Now it's a major museum. And, we started having meetings about this. I eventually came across doctor O'Neil in the Institute in Princeton. I volunteered. I told them, please let me in. I will do anything. I will mop the floors.

I started doing this interesting reverse commute from New York City to Princeton and eventually became a staffer at the institute. Over time, I started meeting these other people, like Jim Muncie, who's a legend in our field. And we started realizing and believing that maybe the institute was working very quietly as was doctor O'Neil's nature noncontroversial, to try and they were actually building some of the actual technologies. They did a thing called the mass driver.

They built a test that was featured on an old television show called Nova. And they tested the ability to use an electromagnetic launch system to launch things off the moon. And, you know, I was privileged to work on it. I didn't well, between you and me, I didn't really work on it. I stood in the corner and handed people wrenches who were actually working on it because I I was just so thrilled to be there. That's still that's still working on it. You Yeah. Yeah. I know.

But I was just a junior at that point. I was just thrilled to to to freaking be there. You know? That sounds exciting. Yeah. And so what happened was, this ripple effect starts to go out from him. The, I mean, it even made it over to Japan. I remember, there was a whole series of, of cartoons called Mobile Suit Gundam. And if you look at the Mobile Suit Gundam, it takes place in O'Neil colonies. Right? So anime even was affected. All of this stuff just started coming out of his his work.

So there we are, and we decided, in our New York group, I met another guy named Bob Werb, who was a an extreme liberal, from, what we call upstate New York Jewish real estate family. And and then Jamunce, who had been a protege of the right wing Republican Newt Gingrich and myself, I guess my thing is I'm a Texan, like you said, you forgive me. And we get together and say, you know what? We need to be a little more radical on this. And so we founded the Space Frontier Foundation.

As I told you, then we engaged and we became the the, frontline activist revolutionaries. So my friend, Diamandis, and his guys, Bob Richards, who now runs a company called Moon Express, went off and did the educational stuff, International Space University. The l five society then became, merged with the National Space Institute that had been founded by Wernher von Braun to act as a cheerleader for NASA.

Later on, Boeing and the aerospace companies tried to buy off the L5 Society and the National Space Institute by offering them a $100,000, which would seem to like a lot of money back then if the 2 would merge. Because they yeah. They were concerned that these l fivers who were frontier oriented people were getting a little crazy talking about all the settlement stuff. They wanted to harness that energy and maybe take that chess player and put it on their side of the board.

There were interesting periods back then where back in those days, as you recall, we used to use what we call 35 millimeter slides to do I remember. What would what would be a PowerPoint now.

And Boeing used to put out sets of slides that would show this originally, it would show this shuttle development, and then it would show the space station, and then the last slides would be, human settlements in space as if the viewer would then understand that somehow if you supported the space shuttle and the space station, you would end up with human cities in space. Of course. And and that was the game they were playing.

And and so that's how you ended up, that's how we ended up with the National National Space Society was and it it's interesting because you'll still see the hardcore l five people. In fact, they're kinda coming back into their own now. But for years, the the National Space Society, never met a NASA program that they didn't like and, never took the side of anything against anything that NASA was doing. And then gradually over time, they've gotten it and have started to come on board.

They never lost at the core the vision of settlement. It's just that, you know, they kind of got a little bit co opted for a while there, but they came back around. You know, we've all had those periods. I mean, I remember the the very, very, very first time I ever, ended up, I testified in front of the National Commission on Space in the eighties. It was the first time I ever got called anything official. And I actually, at that time, the very beginning of the eighties, thought, you know what?

We need more NASA astronauts on talk shows that will solve everything. Yeah. There was a show on back that used to be called Johnny Carson. Oh, what? And I like a remember, I'm 55. I know. I know. You're Remember watching Johnny Carson. Okay. And and I used to I used to think that would solve everything. You know, it's like when people say, if you just give NASA more money It actually would have solved a lot because everybody watched Johnny.

Yeah. But all it would have done would have meant more money to go into the aerospace companies, and it wouldn't have really Yes. You know, it's how you spend money. Solve the challenge, but it would have created a different impression of space. Right. It's how you spend the money and why you spend the money, not how much you spend. Alright. So anyway, all of that happened. And again comes from Gerry O'Neil.

Leading up to, the point where, in the nineties, I ended up getting the best job on earth where a wealthy guy and you should always find a wealthy guy if you know 1 or can capture 1. Karen feeding is a little rough, but everybody should have 1. And, he put $25,000,000 into a bank account. And in this bank account, he, he had invested his money in dotcomcompanies. This was the early nineties.

And he told me that I could, run this endowment for him and give away 50% of the increase in the endowment every year. The rest would go into funding my salary and my office and travel. And it was called FINES, the Foundation For the International Nongovernment Development of Space. And we took that money and we funded things like, experiments and laser launch, solar sails, asteroid mining, things like that.

We did a study on how to keep the mirror from coming down, which led eventually to us actually taking over the mirror for a year. Jeffrey told his whole story. Right. And I was the one who actually asked suggested to Walt that he hire Jeff, during the Mir project. Because when we first arrived in Russia on the first trip, Jeff was working for the Russians and sitting on the other side of the table. Yes. He was sitting he was working with the Russians. Yes. Right.

And we were sitting on this side of the table, and you can see actually and I actually have physical pictures that show Jeff on the other side, then it kinda shows him in the middle, and then we're all in one room on at the same table. And, and I suggested that he become, the CEO of what we call Mircorp. And, because he he had the free enterprise credentials, He had some amazing training from the Russians, and we needed a CEO who could have a a foot in both camps.

And then I transitioned out, right away and went back to to fines. But but MIRCORP was the name there was a moment where I came up with MIRCORP, and I remember turning to the Russians in the room and saying, okay. Why don't we call it MIRCORP? And does this mean anything weird in Russian? Because I don't wanna offend anybody. Does this mean I hate your mother or something? You know? And, so that's where we came up with the term.

But, anyway, so one of the things that came out of fines, for example, was, there was a guy named Bob Zubrin, who was a Martin Mariette engineer. We've been looked at how been looking at studies of how to use the Martian atmosphere to create rocket propellant. And he had shown up at a Space Frontier Foundation conference. We liked him, and he was trying to put together a thing that later became the Mars Society.

So we, at Fiennes, wrote him a check for a $100,000 that he got a matching check for, and he started the Mars Society. And the reason we did that at the time was we wanted to create a social group that would put pressure on NASA to get out of low earth orbit so the private sector could take over low earth orbit, and NASA could go off and start exploring Mars. This was back then. It's changed a little since then, but and so was the strategy.

Now the funny thing about Bob is then one week after the check cleared, cleared, he kicked me off his board. Rightfully so. I know. I know you well enough. I I would kick myself off the board. What did you do? What did you do? I used the other m word too much. Moon. Moon. And I talked about You had to have done something. Yeah. I I talked about other destinations. And now this was a different era because now Bob is working on Moon Direct and all of that.

But back then, it was taboo with with Bob and his acolytes to talk about going to the moon or the world. Tell you that over the past 5 years, it has not been fun being the moon guy with everybody talking about Mars. It has not been fun. Yeah. And it's ridiculous that anybody cares about any of those differences. Alright? It it's it's been why are you working on the moon? Everybody's working on Mars. I met with Charlie, the administrator. What's Charlie Bolden?

And and everything was about the Mars. And I said, we gotta go to the moon first. It just makes sense. Mhmm. And everybody was Mars. So Yeah. It's ridiculous. It is. It's just ridiculous. It's the moon is right. It's near us. It's close. It sits there. It changes the dynamics of our entire conversation about earth in which you've heard me talk about Mearth, moon and earth. This is where we live between moon and earth. Let's change the dialogue.

Once the paradigm shift happens, everything else opens up. Well yeah. And as you put within that, you know, what I my approach is and maybe there's a book here someday I'll write called all of the above. Alright? And and it's really all of the above. You know, this is saying the moon is better than Mars, is better than free space, is better than Leo, is better than is really like saying, if you were coming over to this new world from Europe that, you know, what the hell? You're gonna go to Ohio?

Ohio sucks, man. You know? It it's all about Florida. You know? It no. It It all comes together. Yet yet if you're going to go along the way and it's right at a pit stop, it might be a good place to pick up some food. Oh, no. There's there's a great argument. There's a great argument for the moon as a place to learn how to camp out in a high radiation dirty environment.

And by the way by the way, you can almost picture the moon like learning how to camp in your mom's backyard because then you can run home quickly into the house. Right? That's exactly. Yeah. Mom. You don't you you need some and you use your you use your solar sails if you need to get some medicines quickly there with a laser beam and shoot the medicine to the moon. Yeah. Whatever. You know, I Yeah. One of the things I I will tell you this and it's very important understand with me.

I I have some pet technologies. I have some pet things that I've done in different companies like Deep Space Industries where we, where we turned resources into a thing. But, really, outside of that, I whatever works. You know? Yeah. You know, if if if it's the son of Fidel Castro coming up with communist, fairy wings that gets us out there, I'll Right. Take it. That's that's exactly what we've been saying. I'll take it. Exactly. It it doesn't matter. We're all in this together.

And you know what, David? Here's the really important point. Once you get out there a couple of generations, it doesn't matter where you came from because where you came from will become them and where you are will become us. And they will Right. That's that's for sure. And they're gonna revolt and say, you know what? Screw you. You don't understand our problems. How dare you tax us? We are space people. You are earth people. And then they're gonna separate them.

To some degree, that's the 7 eves story. Yes. Yes. A good book by the way. Yeah. Very good book. I I finally read it after everybody recommended it. Let's go on to this next one. How about benevolence conspiracy, Elon, Jeff? Okay. So the benevolent conspiracy term, comes back into Gerry O'Neil.

We were at a Space Studies Institute conference, and there was a bar there in Princeton, a very famous bar with a big painting by the classic American artist who used to do the, Norman Rockwell, on the wall. And we're all sitting there, a bunch of us. Some of the people had gone to bed, but the the tone was generally shared.

And, we're having a few beers, and we decided, a a group of us, that we were gonna pledge our lives and fortunes to making the to creating the breakout of humanity into space and making it irreversible in our lifetimes. And we had a toast. And, I think it was Diamandis, one of the guys said, well, why don't we call this you know, it's a conspiracy. Somebody said, this is a great conspiracy. And I remember one of them said, well, it's a benign conspiracy. Let's call it that.

And I made a joke that I think that sounds like a tumor. Why don't we call it a benevolent conspiracy? And it became that. And, you know, some people don't even remember that that happened, but there were a bunch of us there. And it really was kind of that approach that we're gonna all branch out into our fields. I'm going to education. People like Muncy went behind the scenes into Washington and became a chief staffer, in congress. I became the loud guy out in public.

All of these different people went off in their different directions to begin to make this happen. And what I'm really proud of is the fact that 99% of them are those who are still alive are still fighting the fight and that they've done such a good job of changing the global conversation. When we got started, the idea of human beings living and exploring and, building communities was was not a thing. The space program was a nationalized entity. Civilians were not invited.

There was no such thing as space resources. There wasn't new space. There wasn't this idea that somebody could buy a ticket. None of that existed. But for this group of people inspired by Gerry O'Neil, who became the benevolent conspirators and went out and made the work happen. I I picture you I actually picture you guys standing around taking out one of those, hunting knives and cutting your hand and then doing a a a a blood shake. You know what? Don't get me started.

I never figured out why those guys always cut the middle of their hand. That's such a stupid thing to do. Right? Like, why would you do that? What? You're gonna need that. You're gonna need your hand. And you need the hand. Right. And then it then their hand falls off a weakling. Yeah. Right now, prick your finger, you know, and and and Yes. Prick your pinky finger. Anyway, go ahead. How many people were how many people were in this benevolent conspiracy on their story?

Well, I I I you know, again, this is not a formal thing. I'm I'm using that moment to identify a group of people who were at that event, and came to those events. But I I would say a couple of dozen and then that expanded outwards. Now keep in mind, if you were to ask Elon Musk, are you an O'Neilian? He's gonna say no, because he, you know, he's going to Mars, and he's gonna be very strict about the fact that Jerry O'Neil was talking about settlements and free space, etcetera.

But, actually, Elon is an O'Neilian because he wants to do human settlements, and Elon would not exist with a company called SpaceX. He's a he's a beneficiary of the people who've worked before him to get him to a point where he could create rockets and Yeah. Use We got him as funded. We got him as funded. Yeah. We we we got him the the path, and and he really is. And and, you know, that's an old like, I I would like to like, Carl Sagan hated Jerry O'Neil. Hated him. Okay?

We used to have a toast that we would do at the end of our, especially these institute conferences. We'd all be out on the beautiful grass outside of the institute. Freeman Dyson would be there and it's got a name Gordon Woodcock who had been the actual station designer for Boeing and, John Lewis, who was the guru of asteroid mining, and and us Young Turks.

And we would do this toast, and it was a quote from Carl Sagan that Gerard K. O'Neill is a robber baron who wants to plunder and pillage God's pristine solar system. And then we would all go, and so am I. And, because Sagan at that point was very much focused on astronomy and all of it, which is awesome. But he didn't really buy this idea that those dirty civilians should be out gallivanting around the solar system and, you know, anything less than a few 100 years from now. You know?

There's there's people who still think that. There are. And and god bless them, and we're going. Yeah. So so let's let's get to the, what back and forth between initiatives. Oh, okay. So going back to the idea of the commercial space and new space, being the engines of realizing our dream of opening the frontier, creating an economy, and then, you know, what you might wanna call a Mearth economy or, a space industrial economy. You you have to make money.

You have to figure out how to make this thing happen. And so for me, there's 2 aspects to this that that came to play in terms of why I occasionally forget how hard it is to develop a private company. One is I remember, fairly clearly, back in the mid nineties, speaking at a NASA event doing my on brimstone, we're going and and a guy asking me said, you know, that stuff is easy for you to talk about because you're so far, removed from it. I mean, you you don't have to raise the money.

You don't have to make it happen. We work on this stuff every day. You're just evangelizing about a concept. So if you cut to a few years later, you know, I led the team. We took over the Russian Mir space station. We flew a commercial mission, 1, and, I've been involved in several, space companies, which several of them didn't work.

You know, at times, if you ever saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail, there's a scene in there where the guy's like, we built a castle and and and then it sank into this one. And we built another one, and then that sank. And then we got a 3rd, and it sank. You know? And and and then we've got this one. You know? So I've had several companies that, that haven't worked well. But on the other hand, now after especially the MIR project, somebody, wanted to challenge me. I could say, yeah.

How many of you guys have actually owned a piece of the space station? You know? I'm I'm in there. I get my hands dirty. I believe you have to walk the walk if you're gonna talk the talk. So having gotten in there many, many times now, and gotten engaged in the private sector, had some successes and done some great work.

It helps me to to understand what's necessary and also to be able to then help others by, you know, frankly, the scars that I've got, by the knowledge that I've gained of of how the private sector works, how private companies work, what what you need to do, how you get a how do you get beyond your own the stars in your own eyes to be, you know, ruthlessly businesslike at times? So, yeah, that that's why I do these things. I go back and forth. It's all part of the thing. I've had to Go ahead.

I've had to personally kind of, let's say, defend people in the space industry. There's a person that I did an interview with whose company folded and people aren't sure where the money went, and it's the same questions over and over again. And if you the way the take that I've got on this is that these are new like any new pioneering tech industry of any time, of any time in history, there are people who will make it and people who don't.

Yep. We happen to be at a time where raising money is done through venture instead of through banking. It's or some type of crowdsourcing or funding. And, actually, there's a few people on here whose businesses have not survived. And that's just gonna be, the industry is gonna be littered with them. Right. There's there's just going to be a ton of them. And one of them started an organization.

They had 80,000 or a 100,000 people who had signed up to become part of their organization, as a nonprofit educational space related company. Yeah. And come to find out they didn't make it. I don't think there's a formula yet at the same time, I think the individuals who've partaken this space side, not unlike dotcom bubble, not unlike any of these tech businesses, We're going to see a lot of them that don't make it.

And unfortunately, both Deep Space and Planet Resources, who are high flying models of space, are or have been, they they spoke very loud and didn't deliver on that promise. However So it's However, I let me like, go ahead. I'll let you finish. But Go ahead. I I just think it's part of it's part of the game. And lux I'm gonna be in Luxembourg in a week, week and a half. And Luxembourg invested in Sure. You know, I was I signed the first deal.

I was the one who signed the first contract with Luxembourg. What happened there look. The, I I had a interview recently with the Wall Street Journal and spoke about this. I founded, you know, Deep Space Industries, and there are several challenges that came out of it. But let's let's you also have to remember, both companies are still alive. They were just acquired by other companies. And so there were exits in both companies.

The vision that's at the core of them is actually still just watch over the next year or so slowly being realized. Deep Space Industries has 3 water based thrusters that are in space right now functioning perfectly on the Hawkeye 360 spacecraft. So I I'm not I I understand that. I want I'd like you to think take another pass at this. Mhmm. I don't know if you've paid attention to the banking industry, but banks don't fail. Banks get acquired. Mhmm. Right. And the reason is the money has to move.

There's reasons for keeping people's assets, protection, a variety of them. And I'm not an expert in banking, yet I've been involved with people in banking, and they say banks don't fail. They're always acquired or absorbed of something. So the fact that these 2 were put on the chopping block and they were acquired, one of them by a blockchain guy, I think, is who made a lot of money in crypto or blockchain, it just means it's transforming yet to the general public.

The announcement went out that way. And my my point is it doesn't matter. These are going to happen. They just happen to be high profile flag waving watch assistant companies that didn't make it. And that it it won't stop the industry. It just transforms it. No. I I agree. And it it look. It was a completely educational experience.

And one thing that the 2 companies did do historically, and we were competitors and friends, was we were able to work together to get laws passed in the United States recognizing the right of future companies to operate, and retain their, their assets, their resources in space, number 1. Number 2, if you go back before our 2 companies existed, space resources was not a thing. It wasn't a thing. It wasn't talked about. It wasn't legit in any form.

It wasn't even out there in the world's conversation. Since the 2 companies dialogue. Yeah. And we created it's a thing now. Now the 2 companies themselves, yes. And look, we had issues. We had management issues. We had finance issues, all of that. But in the meantime, you know, Luxembourg, United States, UAE, different countries have have now jumped in, and they're moving ahead with new companies. They're doing great work. Without Deep Space on NASA Ames and Daniel Faber Mhmm.

I don't know if Project Moon Hut would be around. Yeah. No. It's great. So Daniel, by the way, is working on a great project now about moving propellant in space, which is one of the things we wanted to do. And so there's a lot of good stuff happening. Greg. So when when you when you use this term, why go back and forth between initiatives, what did you mean? Because they're the same, just different aspects. Space is not just a social movement. It's not just a business. It's all.

It's all of these things. You have to to have a successful revolution, you have to have a change in the conversation. You have to have a change in hearts and minds, but you have to have the finance. You have to be able to make, the trains run at the end of the revolution and on and on. And for me, it's somewhat seamless at times. Now, just to address a couple of things you mentioned, you know, I have the the new company, and what we're looking at is how to apply that knowledge.

We work with new startups and entrepreneurs, and, you know, that we're out there getting them started, trying to get them funded. We're raising money based on that. And it's it's being, it's it's a lot of fun. It's challenging, but I think we're going to be able to make a real difference in helping some of these little guys get started and not make the same mistakes and learn from some of the positive lessons, of the different things that we need. Wanna go on over on the phone.

Did you read the 40 page document I sent you? I started to look at it. I looked at it. I have more It's all in there. Yeah. We'll have to go over that. Yeah. We'll have to go So so let's go on to the next you had a few points. One of them is the that you're helping the fund. This what's another one? Yeah. And if you don't mind, I'll mention the name, Space Fund. But we're not gonna do a big promotion. But what the reason I wanna mention No. No. We're not doing any promotion.

There's no promotion on the show. Yeah. Right. And so the one thing I do wanna mention is that we are putting out a thing called the Space Fund reality rating, as a service to the field where we're putting lists together of people in these different sectors that are worth looking at. Most people will look will never be able to invest in us. That's fine. But it tells you, like, there's a 100 launch companies. And here's their management. Here's what we think are gonna happen to them.

And that's worth looking at as well as the other resources out there. You need to really understand what you're looking at before you get involved in these companies. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's really helps us. So that'll that'll tie into our post conversation. So let's go into this next one. Let's go on to Space Force.

You you told me you had this you you we we spoke last week or week before or whatever it was, and you said you are just with this the United States Space Force, and you I think the words were, I'm against militarization of the space, and what am I doing with Space Force? So that's your intro. Well, here here's the here's the, there's couple of angles here. I got invited to Colorado Springs. There is no Space Force formally yet.

This is the group that's working on it coming out of the Air Force and Space Command. And I got invited, to a private meeting of people to look at what we believe will happen in space in the next 30 years. For some reason, they think I might have some insights into that.

And so we brainstormed for for 3 days on on this, looking at what China's doing, looking what we're doing, looking at, you know, and my job, as I saw it, was to help them understand this frontier concept to if they're going in this whatever direction they're going in, they need to understand that they have the ability to help open the frontier through how they spend their funds, and help to make sure that citizens of all nations have the ability to navigate, to utilize, and to act in space.

I personally and in fact, there's an initiative that I've started with a friend or 2 that you'll be hearing about in the next few months. I'm putting out a statement, which is sort of what I would call a no kill tech statement. And I know this is confusing and ironic. How can I work with Space Force?

And before that, and our statement is basically that we will not participate in fund or support the development of technologies that will be used to initiate the death and and destruction of people in their property. And that's where I stand. Now that doesn't mean that I can't sit down and work with people, in the military, many of whom don't wanna do those kinds of things themselves. By the way, you know, as you know, most wars are started by politicians, not soldiers.

And the idea here is to help them really try and and do this right, to understand that there are resources in space, that there are there is this this movement of people who want to live out there. You know, it's it's interesting if you look at the the captain Cook or captain Kirk model. Okay? To to explore, to to do good stuff, and and and, you know, to also maybe enforce some civility and things like that. But look, the militarization space, and I hate this, it kills me, has already started.

Oh, of course, it is. It's happening. And it's happening in a big way that most people aren't aware of. You heard about India recently doing an anti satellite test. The US has done it. China's done it. Others have done it. It's out there, and it's happening. And I believe you used 2 words, and I wanna make sure that it's very clear here because you you did use them. And I'll now as I said, I sometimes attack to the listener.

James Cook and Captain Kirk are 2 separate people for people who don't know that. Oh, yes. Captain Kirk was the fictitious character on Star Trek, who was the captain of the USS Enterprise. Boldly went nowhere and was gone. Don't have to go much into that. But there was a guy by the name of James Cook, and he was in the 1700. He was an explorer. He was a British explorer. He traveled the world, I, as part of the a captain in the Royal Navy, and I believe he was responsible for mapping Australia.

He he was really a a a frontiers man, a frontiers person, who did amazing things. So you use them, and you use them just in quick reference. Mhmm. Wanna make sure that there's at least a context to that. Yeah. There's a this is the this is almost sort of the benevolent aspect of of how military can be used. It it heads over towards disaster relief and these other ways that the military can be used. And and and it's, you know, it's a it's a more positive spin.

It's almost as if, and I would support this if it became space guard instead of space force, you know, or the Space Corps instead of SpaceForce. So my my my role in there was to try and, get them to understand this, to to help them see potential pathways into the future where they could play a positive role. There were discussions of the interaction between the US and China and, and Russia and things like that.

But I absolutely had nothing to do with and stay away from any of the, let's call it direct war fighting stuff. I I'm I don't participate in that. The I believe that also the Chinese anti satellite tech was used on their own satellite. It'll be of a weather satellite. Mhmm. And it was successful putting debris into space. And there's Mhmm. Those type of those are challenges that, we're a warfaring world. Yeah. It's it's totally unfortunate.

And, you know, this gets to some of the stuff we'll talk about in a few minutes. But the idea of of, you know, we're human beings. We we are look, David. We are still apes. We are apes. Our sticks are now made of steel and have computer chips in them. And we still have some of the tendencies of of of, of apes and and this kind of, aggressiveness and, that kind of thing. Now hopefully, as more women take control of our society No.

Actually, there are there's data points that when women take over society, they are more ruthless, that they the wars that they fight through sometimes the the king or queen or the but they fight viciously too. That's why you a cat fight, you've seen the 2 women fight. It's a horrible fight. Men punch, done fall. So there's a here's a date appointment which might be useful to you at some point, and I'm not sure how true it is. So let's just take this as a hearsay from David Goldsmith.

I once read that there have been over 17,000 conflicts since recorded time. 17,000. Mhmm. And at any point on earth, there are 6 to 8 conflicts going on. Mhmm. Doesn't matter when Mhmm. Since recorded history. Yeah. I mean and all one has to do is listen to one of my favorite channels, the BBC, and, you'll hear about most of them within within an hour. They're they're they're there. So so with the Space Force, not that you have to divulge anything. Did you when you left Mhmm.

Were I I know they'll understand that there's more resources. They learned some of the things that I learned in the very early days. Did you feel that they were going to be that they will make that move, or are they ingrained in the protectionist belief? I think it's gonna be, I think it's gonna be both.

Look. The the the Space Force and the other things that are doing are just bringing together all of these different aspects of things they're already doing, you know, communications, support for people on the front lines. You know, I mean, there were talk of, like, you know, how do you launch a rocket from the United States that can carry a squad of soldiers or support to the other side of the world in 90 minutes? Things like that.

But also Which is also an energy beam from Earth to all of the, stations so that there's a constant flow to the military because that's one of the biggest challenges. How do you get energy fuel resources to combat places. Right. I think the the Americans have 800 bases around the world. Right. And that gets into things like you said. You could beam, energy from space, which by the way, the Chinese are working on a space solar power program.

Yeah. And they're, one of the interesting things, we had a great briefing on China. And, it's amazing the stuff China is doing. It's interesting that, a lot of it occurs under the banner of, and I'm gonna say this, I'm gonna get the name wrong. I'm very bad at pronunciation.

But, Zheng He, who was the Chinese admiral, who had gone out before Columbus, was heading down the coast of Africa, with ships that were so big, you could put the Nina, the Pinto, and the Santa Maria on the deck, proclaiming the greatness of the emperor that he worked for. Zheng He was a eunuch, which were the the main people working in that empire at the time. There was a rebellion or a change. The eunuchs were basically decimated. The ships were recalled. They were burned.

The trees large enough to make the mass were destroyed. All of the maps, everything that went with them was destroyed. China pulled inward. And now interestingly, as they move out into space, that is one of the flagship names that they they use as a part of the description of what it is they're doing in space. They are going out after, 500 years, and they're very proud of it. They're doing a great job. It's amazing what they're doing. But there has to be, you know, balance in all of this.

There are a lot of geopolitical issues. I I believe China should be invited to work on the International Space Station. Yeah. I believe people should work together on this. The Go ahead. I I'm I've been in Hong Kong, between New York, Hong Kong for 9 years now. Mhmm. And there is a misconception of many of the challenges that the earth that people face in the South Pacific region in China.

And it would I think the inclusion, as some of the my friends have said who've come and visited and gone into China. They'll they walk out saying, there are really nice people in China. Oh, hell yeah. What are you talking about? And then I've worked in Moscow. I've worked in Saint Petersburg. There are really nice people in Moscow. Yeah. So what's your point? There are bad players everywhere.

The to help just for the purposes of zheng, is how the spelling is, and it was in the Ming dynasty in 13/71 he was born. Mhmm. And I don't I'm not exactly sure it's Zheng, but the n g has a nasal sound. So Ng. You really don't say the g on the end. So Zheng, that's my little bit of Mandarin, and I probably screwed it up. So someone's gonna have to tell me a later way. Yeah. So okay. So, anyway, we're seeing some We're seeing that that coming back.

And, and we're very you know, there's there's there of course, the US, there are strategic interests and balances and all of this kind of stuff. And and, again, I I come back constantly to the fact that I want people to get out there. And I'll I'll tell you this.

One of the things that kinda spun their heads around, that I brought up, and it's something that's I think gonna be very interesting is if you take the ability of having onboard AI, onboard, printing, you know, additive printing, 3 d printing, and your own ability to maybe have asteroid or lunar resources, unlimited energy from the sun, the ability to isolate so you can head off in a direction where nobody else is.

One of the things that we're going to encounter for the first time essentially, in in a massive way in history are people who are operating under no flag of the they are tribal units. They're family units. They're gonna control the entire supply chain from beginning to end within the unit of their habitat, of their their moon hut, their Mars hut, their colony in space habitat, whatever you wanna call it. And they're gonna be independent. They're gonna be flagless.

You know, they're gonna declare themselves to be the, you know, whatever. You know, we are the the settlement of people who like SpaghettiOs. And, and if you like SpaghettiOs, you can be in our settlement. But if not, you're out the airlock. You know, they're they're gonna be these kinds of things going on that are gonna transform and, you know, with the blockchain, all of these kind of things, creating different social interactions, different ways of funding, different ways of trading.

And I don't think anybody is ready for that. I think there are people focused on pieces of it, but I think that the culture that's window horizon space you know, and then we're gonna split off just for a second here. We're gonna split off into, you know, there'll be what I call homo Marsialis, homo Monaris, homospatialis. They're gonna be different branches of humanity occurring. They're not ready for it. Exactly to, back to the seventies Mhmm.

Is that you've got the development of different style of different pieces or different types of delivery or or thoughts. So the Mhmm. I don't know if you're familiar. There's a country that's been formed recently. Mhmm. Liberland. And Liberland is in, near Croatia and Serbia, part of the Yugoslavian block, that piece of land that was not taken. There's a guy from crypto or blockchain, forget what it was, made a fortune, bought this piece of land, and he's a a Czech guy.

And what he's done is he started a new form of governance using you your voting and your contribution and no taxes, and taxes only go to things that the country wants, and they're studying the new passport. So I think on Earth, we're actually seeing also with this blockchain crypto, in this one example, how a new entity could be formed that lives in a virtual space, and that's what we're gonna see in the, going out.

So I I do agree this is gonna be a challenge for for societies to get their mind around. Oh, definitely. And, you know, you can't really, do it nearly to the scale that I'm talking about on the earth. A friend of mine, Joe Trout is the founder of the seasteading movement. We had him in our conference last year. And, you know, you really need to be able to be away from others.

And going back to the early part of our conversation, no matter who sends people out there, eventually, they are going to be independent. They're going to declare their independence. It happens every all the way back to the great colonies in the Mediterranean. Yeah. Eventually, they are like, no. No. We're Martians. We're we're we're Lunarians, whatever. Yeah. We're different. What what is it total recall? The movie Total Recall with Schwarzenegger.

You had the the mining populations and the different populations that were separated because they grew up in different places. Right. And the the best science fiction TV series on the air right now that we gave an award to last year at New Worlds which is The Expanse. Yeah. That's cool. The Expanse talks about the the belters who identify, you know, and what's great what's interesting is the belters can't handle gravity.

So when they come to the earth, they have to be in water tanks, and stuff like that. I just, I love that stuff. But anyway but I digress. No. No. That's okay. So we've got, we've got now 30 years, the conversation today, conversation today and next. That's yeah. That's kind of we're we're touching on that, and, maybe we should start moving towards, kind of getting you to a close on this, if you don't mind. I So so so let's let's hit we've got, which one do you wanna hit? We'll pick one of them.

You've got 4 left. I'll roll them all into, 1 or 2 answers for you. Okay. Because, shortly after the top of the hour, I have to go into a meeting, unfortunately. Okay. We're having too much fun, David. And thank you for a great show. You you were everybody says to me they're challenged with the way I introduce and put together the program together, and then they get on it. Jeffrey said he liked it. It was great. So, yeah, same thing.

No. You're having it's it's a lot of fun, and and and I appreciate you being such a good interviewer. And and and, yeah. And and so look. And interviewer. And and and, yeah. And and so look, and I'll send you a check. No. I won't. But, anyway, the okay. So the last part of this, I am actually working on a book called The Space Manifesto. I'm saying that because I need to be accountable to the world so I actually finish the book so people can say, what the hell happened to that book, Rick?

Not to promote it. I just need to be knowing that people are expecting it so I can actually get it done. It was putting accountability on yourself. Exactly. It's a thing I have to deal with with ADD. And in that book, I will talk about the declaration of rights of humanity in the universe.

The idea there is to talk about some of those things that we've already spoken of, but that I believe it is the right of all human beings to be able to go anywhere in the universe and do anything they want, utilize the resources of space to build anything they want of any type so long as, and I'm not gonna get the exact language here, but that they do not threaten harm or interfere with other human beings or sentient species, that they do not desecrate or destroy historical or sacred places, that they do not harm or destroy existing ecosystems, and they do not harm, threaten, harm or threaten the earth, the mother world itself.

And other than that, I believe that it should be hands off. People should be able to go do anything they want, within those rules. So I've tried to put that into, just a declaration. It's about 3 pages long, actually about 2 pages long, and that's within the space manifesto project that I'm working on. And this all ties into what such an incredible opportunity that we have, you know, right now, David.

We are we are at this moment in time, We're using the same technology, the same brains, the same people, the same infrastructure, the same capabilities. We can either destroy this planet utterly or take the seeds of life from this world to places that are now dead, to take the civilization of the earth and expand it into the universe, to become what I believe is part of our destiny, part of who we are, which is the sensing mechanism by which the universe knows of itself.

You know, I've done a piece recently that I call the hands of Gaia, but I believe we are the hands of Gaia. We are the mechanism by which the earth will expand, reproduce, and go out into the universe. And it becomes to me, even more critical if one starts to look at the things that we're finding in space or more directly the things we're not finding in space. And that is at least within the spear of our ability to to see and judge other civilizations. We're not finding them.

I I have friends who've said, they're looking desperately and deeply. They're not finding it. Now maybe that means they've moved on. Maybe they've done these other things. But there may be 2 other possibilities. 1, or a few other possibilities. 1, they got to a certain level. They reached a level like we do where we are. Mhmm. And they had the same global leadership, and they didn't solve their climate change and they died. Yep. Okay? That's I believe that may be the big one.

Or, we may be the first within the sphere that we can understand and reach to actually get to this level. And we may be the first experiment of a technologically capable, intelligent, quote, unquote, in quotes, species that can actually venture beyond the bubble of the mother world into space. So in either of those possibilities, I believe it becomes even more incumbent on us to save this planet, to do the right thing vis a vis the earth. I'm not all I'm not about fleeing.

I wrote an essay recently called the Elysium effect, where I talk about the movie with Matt Damon and where the the rich people flee to what I call the ultimate gated community of a, you know, a habitat in space and leave the earth to the underlings. You know, the 0.1% leave. Yep. And, that's a very scary message to put out there. We have to be careful about it. But I believe that go ahead.

It was either Stephen Hawking or one of the scientists who had a they came up with some type of an experiment on I think it was a a flight that I was taking. I was watching a video, and I saw this experiment. And they showed how it was so challenging for the the evolution of species, plant, animal, on earth. And that was a risk that it had happening, the fact that the moon was there.

Then it was the getting out of the water, and and then it was the development of tools, then it was the and they went all the way through, and they they went through this whole piece of how challenging each step was for, for the habitants of the earth to get to the point in which we are today. And at the very end, this ball is going, and it looks like it's gonna make it. And at the bottom and it's there's a a flash of fire or spark. It goes pooch, and it extinguishes it all.

Yeah. And what the point was, with everything we've done, we could still destroy it. And the odds are that humanity will destroy itself and the earth before it gets out. Exactly. So that we have a larger chance of doing that than we do of succeeding. Absolutely. And so there becomes from that arises part of the imperative that we get this breakout going quickly. Not to leave, not to escape, although some might, but so that we can expand and inspire and also defend the planet.

So there are 3 projects that I would love to see us do. I call them the Earthsavers. You know, it's I have the nonprofit Earthlight Foundation, and, so it's a clever name. But, the Earthsaver projects, there would be 3 of them that I would love to see undertaken. One of them is, there would be 3 of them that I would love to see undertaken.

One of them is, what I call Earthshine, which is the development of space solar power so that we can get rid of coal and nuclear power on the earth and capture the sun's power in space and beam it down. Number 2, would be Earth's shield, which is us getting out into space and having an understanding of the neighborhood such that we can protect ourselves from incoming, asteroids. Yeah. Distinct extinction level events.

And number 3, which is a little more controversial, which I I call Earth's shade, which would be the idea that if we do tip into what, scientists call runaway greenhouse, If we hit a tipping point where the planet is heating up faster and faster and faster as it occurs in a greenhouse to where you're heading towards the planet actually becoming like Venus, where no life can survive, which we have right next to us, that model of Venus. If that were to start to happen, it becomes an emergency.

There are people that talk about geoengineering, you know, putting white bubbles all over everything to reflect the light, etcetera, etcetera. The problem with those is you can't really turn those off so easily once you start them.

However, we could take swarms of intelligent robots, send them out to asteroids, a few asteroids in the l points, and move those asteroids 1 at a time, by the way, between the Earth and the sun and drop slightly, ever so slightly, the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth. Now the nice thing about that is that using the same technology we use to discover planets around other suns, and we do that by what's called studying the occultation.

In other words, if a little speck moves inside in front of one of these suns, you know, 100 of millions of miles from here away from us, we're able to actually pick that up. That's how sensitive our telescopes are. And then we can tell there's a little planet there. Using that same technology, we could move an asteroid, a small one between the Earth and the the sun, do a measurement, do the, you know, algorithms, yeah, the math Yeah. And figure out whether that would work or not.

And if it worked, maybe we can move a second one, maybe a third, a 4th, or 5th. And by the way, the robots stay attached to them. They're using the resources on the asteroid that they're propelling. And then you say, well, you know what? Let's just move that one out of the way so you could it's literally I don't know. Going all the way back to that word from the beginning, literally the ability to open and close the blinds in space.

And what's beautiful about all three of these projects is, a, they help save the planet. B, they give us something grand and exciting and, and amazing to to rally around that all nations can be involved in, and and, see, when you're done with them, the technologies or as you're doing them, technologies and infrastructure capability you develop help you create an, space faring civilization. So those are some projects. Go ahead. So that's this is great. We're gonna end it here.

Yes. I, I think I've been trying to call you for 2 years to get you on this program Mhmm. Even though we haven't been around for 2. So I so much appreciate that you have taken the time to with me to fill me in on what you're working on and some of these thoughts because they're really cool. I think you've got some neat ideas. I think you you are I'm not a psychologist nor will I pretend to be 1. You don't have ADD.

You have the ability to concentrate on the topic, and you do, like many people, you go off top or tangent because you're excited about something. You did a fantastic job of giving me at least some new information that I hadn't thought about, And, so I appreciate it. So thank you very much. Well, I thank you, David.

And I wanna tell you, I look forward to seeing you at New Worlds, November 15th 16th, and having you on stage with us, because I think you you do an amazing job of communicating as well. So Thank you. So, for everybody, the Project Moon Hut or the Age of Infinite is supporting Project Moon Hut. Our initiative has been, the very beginning, to establish sustainable life on the moon.

That's not self sustaining life, but sustainable life, which we could support, through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem. And our desired outcome is to change how we live on earth for all species. So we are, in many ways, in sync with what Rick has been talking about in a different context than we have. We've designed what, Rick, you might find to be very useful to do the acceleration that you're thinking about.

So with that said, there's a few ways you can, you can go to www.projectmoonhut.com dot org is one way to reach us. You can reach to me specifically at [email protected]. Instagram, if you're interested, mister David Goldsmith. You can connect with us on Twitter at at projectmoonhot. And we've also got linked in, Facebook. So you've got many ways to reach out to us. Appreciate you listening. There'll be more shows coming. And thank you, Rick, once again for your time.

For that, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.