From Orbit to Impact: Earth's New Era w/ Lisa Rich #59

Hello, everyone. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite. Throughout history, we've seen humanity undergo transformational shifts that are so impactful they've, they've been, did that. There we go. That's an example. Hello, everyone. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite. Throughout history, we've seen humanity undergo transformational shifts that are so impactful, they define themselves into entire ages.

Just recently, you've lived through the information age, and what an incredible journey it's been. Now think about this. You could we could very well be in the midst of another monumental shift, the transition into the age of infinite. We're talking about an age that transcends the concepts of scarcity and abundance. It introduces a lifestyle rich with infinite possibilities enabled by a new paradigm shift that links the moon and the earth into the term we call Mearth, moon and earth.

This synergy will create a new ecosystem and economic model propelling us into an era of infinite possibilities. Sounds like a plot for an extra extraordinary sci fi film, doesn't it? But this is a story that we will see unfold in your lifetime. This podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation, where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut, we happen to be named by NASA, through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem.

And then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Now if you're interested, you go to our website, www.projectmoonhot.org, where you can check out some of the really neat, new ads to the website that just went up. But you could check out the 40 year plan, our work, and we just added on the Project Moon Hut classification system. So that's under the 40 year plan. Really, really cool.

So now let's dive into today's podcast. The title is from orbit to impact, Earth's New Era. And today, we have an amazing guest on the line. Lisa and I have spent a decent amount of time together already. Name's Lisa Rich. How are you, Lisa? I'm great. Thank you for having me, David. Well, I'm very excited. And I here's their short bio. We always do a very brief bio of every individual.

Lisa is the founder and COO of Xplore, a service company using a high caliber, multi sensor platform to store and transmit data, achieve data fusion, and on orbit processing. Also, as a VC, she's invested in 37 commercial space and frontier technology companies. She enters the she entered the space industry in 2014 to impact the environment education and United States security interest along with to be a part of the growing economy.

Now before we we begin and we didn't add these in the first interviews, Lisa and I have not reviewed a single bit of what she's going to speak about today. We are learning this together. So Lisa's been on a journey to figure out what we're going to talk about. It's the first time I'm going to hear the outline. First time we're going to be talking about the content. So, Lisa, do you have an outline or bullet point series for us to follow? Yes. I do.

We're gonna start with point 1, which will be influences. Okay. Influences, number 2? 2 is investing in the future. In the future, number 3? 3 is science missions today versus tomorrow. Today versus tomorrow. Next. Point 4 is transition from government to commercial. Government to commercial. Next. Creating value from satellites. From satellites. Next. Infinite streams of proprietary data. Proprietary data. Next. This will be the last one, which is every company is a space company.

And I know you're going to complain about that. But that is No. No. I'm not not gonna complain. Yeah. People who've heard the interviews understand. There's no complaint. There's just clarity. Okay. So let's start with number 1, influences. Yes. So a lot of people ask me, how did I get into the space industry? How did I become an investor in advanced technologies?

And it really began at the earliest juncture with 2 books that changed my life, which would be the, be On Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte. And this was a book talking about the age of the Internet and what the promise of the Internet was and all of that interconnectivity that was going to be changing our lives and certainly changed mine. And then the Singularity is Near with Ray Kurzweil, who is you you talked about, you know, abundance.

But maybe we'll we'll talk about the on being digital first because I think that's No. I I think we should. And and I've worked with Ray. Great. And And And Peter I will share with you. Excuse me? And Peter Diamandis who really has espoused, all of the great, ideas that Ray has had and really helped so many people understand. How was he doing? Is he still he wanted to live forever? That was one of the Peter Diamandis? No. No. Ray. How is Ray doing?

Well, I know that he was at, an event that Peter had, 20 I I saw him at one of Peter's Singularity events, probably 2019. And, but I haven't followed since You know, he was all the inventions he had created, were part of this whole purpose. He wanted to reach the Singularity so that he could last forever or have this long term. He's 75 Yes. And New York, New York. So he's still he's still kicking. So that's good.

Yeah. So all of these things the book on being digital was a great influencer because at that point in time, we were on Mosaic. We were working on these early, you know, search engines. Google didn't exist yet. And yet, we're reading this book saying, at some point, you're going to have video on the web or on your phone. You're going to have tickets that you can buy on on the it's, airplane tickets on the web. Even in flight Wi Fi was probably predicted in that book.

And you read it and you thought, how how is the future going to be like this? And I don't even know what I'm gonna do when it becomes this way. I'm gonna be so excited. And so I wanted to be a part of that future and, got a master's in and focusing on Internet communications back in after, undergrad because I knew that the Internet was changing everything and wanted my first businesses to be web based businesses or involving the Internet.

And so I was involved in in creating That was 9 I'm reading it 1996. Yeah. 96. Right. So I was right out of grad school going to work at the ad agencies to transition brick and mortar, businesses to digital strategies for the websites for the Did you study advertising? Is that what you studied? Yeah. Advertising and Internet commerce At the IIT in Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology.

Yep. And so, the websites were just trying to transition, you know, what was a brochure or a or a brick and mortar business? How did you now relate to an audience on this thing called the World Wide Web? And understanding that that footprint that was being created of a web page reaching unlimited people was an extraordinary concept for me. That like the power of technology, like right at your fingertips, it was this ultimate level of inspiration for me.

And I ended up going into digital technology with my partner, and we built a website that's one of the largest sites on the web. And What website was that? Brainyquote.com. Oh, okay. Has had billions and billions of visitors over the years, and it's a website that's sharing really educating, entertaining, uplifting audiences, and of all things famous quotation.

But the the point of the site, it was utilizing public domain data and monetizing public domain data, which people didn't believe you could even that was a thing. And it was a very complicated way of, you know, not just getting information out there, but how do you expand this audience and have this huge audience.

And so that experience of growing a website and then having it, one of the first to become really huge and monetize and reaching all of these people, it dev it evolved into a great, you know, financially it was a great thing and then it allowed me to look at the investment opportunity of how can I now become an investor in advanced technologies because I wanna be even more of a part of the future? Like, having a website, okay, that's great.

But how do I move humanity forward with other skill sets that I have that I know I'm capable of applying? Right? So I started learning about people involved in accelerators that were finding the smartest and brightest technologists, in particular, Sean O'Sullivan, who founded SOS Ventures. He, created accelerators around the world to really, find great people that were building businesses, wanted to build businesses, and he wanted to support that.

And so I was learning from brilliant people that were going to these accelerators to start businesses. And this was at a time when lab space was scaling in terms of price and size. So this idea of accessibility was for creating new things for, r and d. There it was a transformative time, not just because of the Internet, but because of technology scaling.

So you could see that a a lab was literally renting space by the foot, and you could get smart people in there that could do r and d renting lab space. You didn't have to be a Merck Pharmaceuticals or a big, you know, pharma company or a big, can't think of other other organizations, but where you would have to have 500 people working on a single project.

You could put a small team of people together that were smart researchers in a lab working on some business idea and in an accelerator program at the end of 12 weeks, come out with prototypes or a thesis and an idea that could be the foundation of a future business. So this, in particular, I was looking at synthetic biology.

Looking at cellular agriculture, protein design, future of food technologies, robotics, drones, and the space industry as we know it as the space technology looking at satellites and and things that are gonna, fly above Earth or So from an advertising background Mhmm. You went into all of these other areas. Right.

Because my my skill set is really being able to drill down from a larger view to, like, loving the the deep dive with the scientists where they can share all of these all of these specific ideas and their their, their specialists. You know? But I would love to get into the language of what a a scientist is working on and start absorbing that like a sponge and then stepping back from it and saying, what did I learn?

Because I'm not gonna become some specialist in, you know, a person that's been studying yeast for 20 years or somebody that's studying propulsion for 20 years. I don't need to know all of those specifics. I'd love to hear about it. But my skill set was drawing the larger picture view from that to understand how all these dots connect with the the the larger systems that are at work with commerce, with investment, with how these things become part of our future.

Is that No. I I I no. I completely understand what I I've similar makeup. My my mom used to say, David, you're jack of all trades, master of none. And it wasn't that. It was that it was a very broad set of ideas that I was always interested. Sounds like you were. And you did go deep, but you didn't go down to the weeds. You went high enough so that you could understand the concept, the utilization, the process, the mechanisms, the history, but you didn't go all the way down.

And that gave you even more, you a factorial of knowledge base to absorb the next one. It's like an athlete. You learn 1. You also learn a second sport. Well, the 3rd sport is not as difficult because you already have muscle memory. You already have skill sets that allow you to perform. So, yeah, I completely understand it. I just didn't know you started out in advertising. No. I've always really evolved in my growth, my skill sets, and expanded into areas that I was passionate about.

That's really how I've led my whole career that way. I don't see, you know, I see a future of abundance. So I don't find that I have to pigeonhole myself and say, just because I had an English degree, literally an English degree as a college undergrad, that I should become a writer.

No. Actually that skill of language is what has allowed me to to enter all of these different realms and speak to different specialists in so many different fields because I start to learn their language to communicate and then take that step back and say, okay. Now what did I glean from this? And how does this apply to larger constructs that are of interest and can be useful in what way? Now, I'm gonna pick on you a little bit. You said abundance.

When you have abundance, it means there's scarcity. That's the yin and yang. The reason it's called the age of infinite is there's just infinite possibilities when you open up all of these doors. And that's why we use the Age of Infinite because we're going to get a a an I don't know, logarithmic explosion of ideation that comes out of being able to use Beyond Earth or the Mearth ecosystem and all of those categories. So, yeah, that's great.

So how how did so this book, it this book said to you get involved, see, and then expand. How did Ray fit into this? Well, the Singularity, is near is fascinating because it's talking about this convergence of capabilities that are being all plugged in together. So you've got synthetic biology, for example, merging with robotics for merging with so allowing for high data throughput allow just accelerating a capability as other platforms plug into, something that previously was more analog.

Say somebody sitting at a at a biology lab with their sets of cells and they can't really accelerate beyond the cells that are in their hands. Well, now when you roboticize that, and automate that processes, now it's accelerated. So that idea of these different things merging has always been something that, I've utilized in my career is, like, how do I find other tools that accelerate what I can do today? So you didn't take out of the singularity the singularity.

Well, that the singularity is where it's all going. I mean, we see Moore's law in action. We see, you know, prices moving down. We see capabilities moving up. Everything's scaling. And you're saying, do I care as much about the endpoint of that? Well, we're actually gonna get to that later in this talk. Okay. When I I I I talk about every company. No. No. That no. That that's scrutiny. It's not it's not a bad thing.

It's while I was in, living in Hong Kong, there was this person who ran American Airlines for Asia, and we would get together and we talk about what happens with the convergence of artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, 3 d printing, sensor tech, bioengineering. What happens to the society as a whole with those type of conditions transforming the way we live.

So we actually looked it was really kind of, at this time, we the first time you're seeing these convergences where 3 d printing and robotics were connected or artificial intelligence helped the robotics to make a move. And we saw factories with 1200 employees and then 12 robots put in and a 1000 people laid off. But these people had been working in these factories for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, and all of them are gone. Mhmm. They they're not working there.

So we started asking the questions what happens on a societal level. We looked back at the Germans. Germans were shipbuilders. And there was a transition that'll happen that it took time. From shipbuilding, they went to automotive. And you saw, like, an x y axis in convergence so people could learn new skills. But what happens if it happens overnight? And what does that mean for the future of humanity? And so we were asking these questions.

So you axe you were using a similar formulaic when you started expressing yourself, which I I think is fascinating. Yeah. And you can look at the singularity in both positive and negative ways. Right? As you think about the people that are excluded from this, and how did their lives change, that's a whole other topic. But on balance, I my position is it is good for humanity. And there wasn't a bad or a good thing. We were just trying to figure out what that future would converge into.

What does that mean, for, at that point, 7a half 1000000000 people? So, yeah. The Singularity was an interesting book. I did not read the, I'm being digital. But Oh, yeah. And you'll read it and say, gosh. All of this has come true. So it's incredible. Well, that that's some people get it. Some people don't. The challenge is it's it's easier to view in hindsight, And you and you were you in the valley when you were doing Britney Quotes?

No. No. But obviously influenced by it when I went to the valley to then invest in Frontier Technologies to constantly was was in San Francisco for that, period. So you were you were in Chicago, was was that? Yeah. So how was Ad agencies are in Chicago. I Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Okay. Alright. So any so on are these the the main drivers of your influence that move pushed you forward? Yeah. Definitely.

And and the singularity no. I was just with all these propulsion engineers in Orlando at SciTech, and they're working on nuclear propulsion capabilities for this amazing future of nuclear power, where we we really have more power all over the world. And what happens when energy, is more abundant and cheap? Maybe there will be more peace. This is how they they see it, that they're we're gonna have a more peaceful world, less wars over scarce resources, and things like that.

It's really a fascinating topic. Do do you believe that? I think that, the the the pow there are people I'm involved with that are looking at nuclear power Mhmm. Quickly. And there's so many hurdles for the public to be perceiving it as a safe thing. And, like, and I think that it it allows unleashes a lot of, more, parody.

I was at an event with Oliver Stone, that he he produced a documentary called nuclear now, and it's trying to dispel all the public perception and damage that's been done since the PowerPoint plant scares of the eighties. We've lost years of technological advancement because of public perception. Oh, and you look at France as a whole, has a huge nuclear, infrastructure, which has kind of coming to its end in terms of having new facilities.

But Germany, disbanded them because everybody was afraid. And an interesting point when we were creating the first four we were designing the 4 phases of the moon, the project Moon Hut's 4 phases, On there, one of the teammates put a nuclear symbol. Mhmm. And that alone was enough to get people, all up in arms. It they they don't even know that it is on the moon.

I mean, there it's not gonna explode the same way, but it was enough where people focused so much so on that that they couldn't get past it. Mhmm. And so, yeah, it's a it's a global challenge and I don't even I didn't hear this movie, that Oliver Stone had made. Yeah. And then you did have, what was it, Japan, just had that, the the meltdown scenario. So you hear the bad, but you don't hear the good, the fact that France is able to supply its population with a cheaper power supply. Right. Right.

But the tools we're talking about the tools you could have at the palm of your hand, like the Internet. The other thing that I think relates to singularity, and we're talking about platforms that plug into each other. The advent of the iPhone was changing everything. The ability to have the Internet in your hand and texting capability and the the web, like, and videos, you know, on your phone. All that was fascinating, but to me, the the iPhone that came out 2007, I believe Mhmm.

Yeah. Is the same iPhone today. The boiler plate of that iPhone is the same today. The thing that's changed are the apps. So Yes. The platform, this powerful platform of multiple capabilities that anyone could even decide what the capabilities are that they want on the phone was so powerful. And that concept of building a platform for the ages and something that transformational, that was inspiring to me.

As what what other platforms are out there that either I wanna invest in or work on building that could have this kind of power. And we'll get to that with the company I'm creating with Okay. No, that's the the trans it's interesting. I'm trying to mind map out how these three different sets of conditions that you've given, which is the the digital, the singularity or the, development and interconnectedness of all of these types of new tech, and then you bring it down to the palm of your hand.

And at the same time, you and I I mean, there was a challenge with getting on a simple platform or we still have microwaves in our home, and there's a huge disparity of or a gap between the advanced and some of the things that we still as humans do every day. So it's just, it's a it's a huge gap for for most people. So, for example, creating a nuclear power facility is something that's not gonna be well understood even on the moon. And the majority of people don't know much about the iPhone.

So Right. And and even, now this is predating the the crypto people and that that involvement I've had, but the the the people that were working on, Bitcoin technologies, their mantra, I would say circa 20 17, 2018 when I met these folks, they were talking about the people that don't have a phone and don't don't have banking and Yeah. They don't have a bank account. They don't have the ability to exchange goods easily or services easily, but the phone gave them that ability.

And getting, you know so it really has impacted, the world in so many ways. It's When we're designing, or I think most companies today, you're you're looking at mobile first. Mhmm. Especially if you're global. Because if you're doing Africa or you're working within the Africa region, the Asia region, Phones are ubiquitous to a point where, you know, having a desktop or a system like that is not as I'm not gonna say it's not as commonplace. That would be a very terrible way to express it.

But you're on your phone the majority of the time. It's with you. It's gonna you're gonna get a message. You're gonna test message. You're going to be trying to look something up. You're looking to see if you have a melanoma on your skin by taking a picture of it, which you wouldn't do off of your desktop. Nope. Okay. So no. No. It it's, I I loved our first conversation when we got to know each other, of creating the title. And I would not have thought of this trajectory for you.

So I appreciate it. So are we on to investing in the future? Yes. I think this all kind of built into this idea of, as I mentioned, the platforms. Companies that I would want to invest in are not moonshots. They might have a big idea, but they have to have a platform approach that's derisking the business so that's producing multiple streams of revenue generating opportune generating opportunities because not the the bigger vision that they might have, what if that isn't achievable?

I've always looked at investing from a conservative standpoint of what if everything you're doing fails, then what do you have to hang your hat on? So I was never investing in hype, never investing in loving it, you know, inspiring ideas, but always holding the founder's feet to the fire to say, but what if everything else fails will allow this business to be sustainable? And that's a discipline. And so I always look for people that were thinking that way.

And, typically, it was a company that would have a platform approach because they could say and I'll use an example. The every company started out as a company called Clara, and they're using synthetic biology to, create custom amino acid profiles and products, and the amino acid pro amino acids are used in tools, foods like baking where you could make the Mhmm. Fluffiest eggs or the stiffest meringue, for a baking company, for example.

And when they were starting out and they said, we have this big vision for, you know, working with all sorts of food companies to help customize the outcomes of their baking goods or even, beverages and things like that. We said, well, what what can you produce at the lowest, quantity, but the highest cost to make sure that there's some moderate amount of income that you could get just at the start of this business because it's gonna take a while to grow it.

And they found this unique enzyme that they could create that interestingly is a preservative in wine, and only 5 companies in the world produce this type of a preservative. I think they're called lysozyme. And they 5 companies in the world that produce it were all in Europe, and this preservative, again, supports the whole wine industry. It's in every glass of wine. But what do you do when there's avian bird flu throughout Europe?

What happens to your supply chain when there are only 5 producers of it? And now you can produce it using synthetic biology, and it's only needed in small quantities, and you could have it be a pure source of avian free, you know, avian That's right. Yeah. Flu free enzyme.

Well, that's the kind of creative thinking that I love in founders and I value in our own company is that you have to be thinking about scrappy, creative ways to look at the long view of what your technology can do in the future, but you can't get carried away with it. It can do all of these amazing things. You have to decide what a starting point is and what's real today. And so they pursued that, and that was really exciting.

And other companies I influenced, like, Finless Foods, they were working on, stem cells for fish, specifically for tuna. And Stem cells for tuna? Cellular agriculture using tuna. Instead of killing the fish, you were cultivating tuna cells to create the world's first premium grade sashimi. Oh, wow. Using cell so you don't have to kill the the fish Right. In the ocean? You're you're yes. Yeah. Okay. And, it's really just like yogurt. Is that is that an acceptable food in Japan?

Grown and, the Japanese are, actually a partner for finless foods. And, I I'm one of the people few people in the world that can say I've had the first Non fish fish. Cellular grown tuna. I ate it. Yeah. It was and guess what? It tasted like fish. But but so the company, they they needed to be I thought they needed to be thinking, where does where does this capability go in the future as well for because they are thinking about our sustainable supply chains of Yeah. Fish is such a problem.

And what is it? 70% of the fish on our table when we go to the restaurant isn't even what we think it is. There's this Oh, no. Yeah. It's problem with and the provenance and the mercury and all this stuff. Yeah. The the microplastics, it's part of the the whole evolution of the food chain. Yeah. But the bigger numbers are, to give an example, there are 300,000 fishing vessels just in China alone.

And if you look at the volume of fish taken out of the waters, it's just an astronomical number to feed their people. You can't argue with people trying to feed their population. But we're seeing more and more closer to coastal region regions no longer having fish or large enough fish to be able to support their ecosystem. So to be able to the the challenges are we we're solving the back end and, hopefully, in time, that will allow the front end, which is fish, to be able to thrive again.

Yeah. And it's and, we could have a whole show on that because I love talking about fish even though my life is about space. But, but but in this case, I I had been involved in, in a tertiary way in the space industry and was grow growing in interest in in what was happening and applications of microgravity and things like that. Like, what was happening on the space station and how could we utilize microgravity for manufacturing in the future and even food production.

And so I'd shared this with the company and and offered to connect them to people on the ISS. And they took my idea to heart, and they ended up, getting HP bioprinter on the ISS Yeah. And produce the world's first fish cakes printed on the space station. So I was really proud of them for doing that because it was just an example of, you know, what you could do. What Was there any value to producing a fish cake on the International Space Station? Yeah. I mean, because it's in microgravity Yeah.

How you are producing any kind of product is unique because if we think about a future where we're going to have space stations, plural, and have to supply not necessarily of resupply missions from Earth, If it has to be produced on the station, how are we going to do that? How is the printer going to function? And how does it, you know, create a But the printer still needs supplies. Yeah. So So is there is there not an equivalent mass to mass? You take whatever you're producing.

You're not growing stem cells or cells or any type of you're just taking a, compound or whatever you've used as your original aggregate. And then what you're doing is creating something else out of it. Yeah. This wasn't this wasn't an end to end, process. But, of course, we do know that given microgravity and all of these experiments that are happening on the space station today that are, they're finding that they can grow, in, of course, in 3 d, you have an accelerated ability to grow cells.

And so there are cancer fighting cells, leukocytes, I believe, that are being Mhmm. Different crystals that are forming faster on the space station or they have longer fibers and such that or even so on the cellular side, that's really fascinating for the future of what we could produce on the station. But I was also fascinated with things like ZBLAN, the future production of ZBLAN because that, is a a tool I don't know what ZBLAN is.

That, our undersea cables right now are transferring data and they have repeaters because they connect a cable to a cable. Yep. That I'm for a while you're at. And the zblad is a fiber that the attenuation of it is such that in microgravity, you have these super you can have these super long, long fibers where the idea is you could have a cable that's so long you wouldn't have as many repeaters and that information could travel from one end of the ocean to the other.

It already travels in however many milliseconds, but it would be, you know, mill Yeah. You you're taking out the you're also taking out a risk variable of having to have a repeater in the center of it, so you're now getting a longer duration signal. Yeah. And it's it's maintaining its efficacy through the entire system. So you're you're actually creating spooled cable. You potentially could create spooled cable on a a station orbiting the And that's what they've been doing.

That's what they've been testing. And the idea that it's so valuable that that that's why you would do it in microgravity and then you bring it down for these undersea cables. And then our ability to transmit data is even faster than it already is and, the world gets even smaller. Right? As that information can trap No. I I'm I'm traveling back to conversations we've had about biotech and biology being done above beyond Earth, low Earth orbit environments.

They're getting reactions where they expect one type of growth, but they're getting 10 times the amount of growth in one in another area and no growth in the area that they anticipated. So it would be, like, your neck would be, 2 meters, 2, 6 feet long, but your head and your body would stay the same. And so you're getting these anomalies out of the reaction.

And but you're looking to create the cable we just had on Ken from Redwire, and he talked about just creating the molecular structure, bringing it back and and creating it on earth because that works far better than trying to create that up in microgravity. Yep. And one of these Red Wire was they acquired Made in Space that was working on, and we had invested in them.

They were the idea of printing structures on orbit and large structures on orbit so you don't have to send the mass on a rocket is fascinating. And, they're also have been advancing ZBLAN and some robotic capability. And they just put it they just put a new device, up there, a new factory, small factory type, but it's Ken Sabin. Mhmm. I was trying to remember his name. My my grandfather's name was Slabin and I kept on trying to say, where is it? Where is the name of Sabin?

But Ken Sabin, if you don't know him, he's did a brilliant explanation of how the crystallization on, in microgravity is enough. All you need is a tablespoon of something. You could bring it back and duplicate it. And the question I asked is, how does it work? And his answer was, we don't know. It just works. So you can create a crystalline structure or any type of anatomical, configuration. And as long as you get enough of it, you can come back.

And the way the universe works, it will duplicate that structure over and over and over again. There he said, we don't know why, which I thought was fascinating. Yeah. There this has been studied for a long time, and Zeblan in particular, I haven't found a company yet that's really got the legs that we would be looking for to to make an investment. But in but science is all valuable. Right?

These are these are, like, exquisite science missions, which is kinda getting to my next But but but you called it as I investing in the future. Mhmm. When, 2 things. 1, I'd like to know, when you ask this question, let me go back, to what would be the the low hanging fruits or the repetitive or the value add that you're creating if this goes south, how do you get individuals to discover that? That would be my first question. And the second one is investing in the future.

What do you actually mean by that when it comes to and you can only talk about yourself. When it comes to you sitting down and making these decisions? So those are 2 different questions. How do you get them to, and how do you analyze investing in that? How do we get them to To to find that low hanging fruit. You said you went back to the people with the fish, and you said Yeah. Find it. Yeah. But finding it, people come back with really bad ideas.

Is there something that you've learned over the years that helps to point an individual, a mechanism, a tool, a question, or philosophy that allows them to find something that has, in your case, it's a a financial return the way you were expressing it. Well, I'll give you a good example because it's it's quite an exciting story of Acxiom Space. I was the 1st investor in Acxiom Space that is now sending their 3rd crew of commercial astronauts to the ISS, this week, actually.

Yep. And so Acxiom's goal is to be, creating the world's 1st commercial space station, and then they expect to have multiple space stations because that's what we envision for the future. But starting with attaching to the ISS and building out Acxiom Station, to the point where it's functioning and then the ISS is gonna be deorbited. And Did they just say they're even considering 2,035 now? They keep Was that just They do keep pushing the date out.

But when you have something that's this massive capex, to build a space station, how do you financially support that? Well, they were they had to think and really strategize, and they realized that because they were already they already had this expertise of human space flight under their belt. The cofounder of Acxiom is Mike Suffredini, who was the Yep. Head of the International Space Station for over a decade and, you know, had a 4,000 people and a $4,000,000,000 budget he managed.

I mean, this is someone that knows how to how to run a station and keep everybody safe and and and just phenomenal, people that he had attracted that all had great respect and and and capabilities under his watch. Well, that skill set, how many people in the world would have that skill set? Like, not many. So could they take that human spaceflight expertise and now monetize it? And they did for astronaut training. Training the astronauts for private missions to the International Space Station.

So they're the 1st company to have the right to have commercial astronauts on the ISS for 14 day. They actually had a 17 day mission previously. So, people think SpaceX is going to, the ISS. They do take them to the ISS as a partner, but it's Acxiom that is running the mission on the station with Their their SpaceX is a logistics company. Right. Not a space company. It's a logistics company with the geography between Earth and, at this point At this point. Low Earth orbit.

Yeah. At this point because that's but they're they're a logistics firm. And so, yes, that is their skill set is not the the the we're calling them spacers because there's we there's going to be a lot of different terms. But individuals who are educated well enough to be able to perform up beyond Earth. And so you see a 14 to 17 day mission. So you're so the people who are going up are not skilled to fly like getting on a plane.

They're skilled to do something else in the International Space Station. They have tasks that and an agenda and studies that they're doing and a whole, you know, itinerary that that and led by a commander that's that's leading them. In this case, it's Michael Lopez Elegria, who's one of the most storied astronauts, in in the astronaut hall of fame, etcetera. He's phenomenal, and I don't even know which mission this is, but he's got quite a history as an astronaut and great leader for the team.

So so they had the discipline to say, if we're gonna build the space station, but we need financial strength behind us first, how do we make money, before we go to the space station? Obviously, there's government funding that they could seek out, which they did do for some missions with mice. I love to call them the mousetronaut missions. And then they also just had a 3, I think, $200,000,000 contract. I might have that wrong. But it's to design space suits for, for the I s for the ISS or ACCUS.

That that's yeah. That did they buy were they the ones who bought or did vie Voyager bought by the that new outfit. God, I was we were talking to him. Guy at a university okay. I can't remember the guy's name off the top of my head. But, yes, I've seen the contract, and I've seen some of the samples that they've put out Yeah. So online.

So they're a good example of But was that you who said to them was that you who said to them, find low hanging fruit and they found it, or was this something that they did anyway? Well, we kept asking the question of what how is the business model? How does this how do you square this? You know? And so they had done a lot of studies. They had firms that that help them assess different ways of monetization.

And and so they were more business savvy, already going into it to to figure out how they were gonna, get those first dollars in and and, and fill out the manifest because this hadn't been done before. You have to now go around the world and find those individuals that are able to pay $55,000,000 for a flight. And what it's evolved into, which is quite exciting, is a relationship now with ESA where the astronauts that are going with them, I think they have 1 or 2 ESA astronauts.

But ESA is booking missions with Axiom now, which is really great. It's really great. So Walter Villaday is coming from the Italian Air Force. He'll be on the mission. And, as I mentioned, Mike Allais, and then they have a Swiss astronaut and then the first Turkish astronaut. It will be going. And this is also exciting because when we looked at their their plan, as you've heard, I'm an English major. I love to to craft, a good good written piece of material.

And so, at the very beginning, I was editing their their decks, you know, to to help them raise money, because it was kind of scraping and crawling at the start of the of a company like that to find people that had also a big vision and wanted to financially support it. This was not a time when anybody would have been thinking this way. So My wife was an English minor. So Okay. I I I do she looks at a sentence.

She she'll put down a book because it's not written well and not to the point where it's aggravating, but she said it's very difficult. So, yes, I would have her look at whatever. And she's, no. It's gotta be done this way. It's gotta be done this way.

We we really a concept that I think we helped hone together in those early days was the idea that you're bringing a when a sovereign astronaut is going to the space station, you're bringing that nation is going to space effectively because it's not just the person, it's the whole footprint of all the people that are connected to that person and Mhmm.

Are supporting that person that that you're bringing that nation to space, and then you're be bringing space back to the nation with then what's achieved on orbit. So this interdependency, this relationship of helping, you know, as you say, like, Mearth and creating these environments where it all it all comes back to help humanity is the point. Yes. That's And I I helped we helped communicate that together to future astronauts.

So the the second part of the question was was the where did you I think there was 2 parts now. I I didn't write down the second one. Investing in the future. Yeah. Investing in the future itself. That how do you calculate, figure out, or what's what's underneath that? Sure. Well, all of these concepts that I've shared were all very new and groundbreaking and, enabling, in my view, future marketplace. And the reason and I know you don't wanna talk about money and finance on this show, but No.

No. No. We we that I don't there's no challenge with that. None at all. Okay. None at all. We we've we've had people talk about all sorts of numbers, So that's not an issue. Well, you can't just have something that's interesting and new, become a sustainable business. It has to have financial heft to it or potential to have, hiring people and growing a business and and, and and having other businesses that evolve into an ecosystem. Right?

You can't, it isn't an emerging technology that's going to be helping build a future if it doesn't have those characteristics in my view. So if you just so you can go into anywhere you'd like to. We have a paper written by a professor, Daniele, from the University of Messina on economics and he labeled it, coopetition.

And we've had guests on the program who have kind of argued and we know quite a few people who have argued that there's without government intervention, there is no financial mechanism to be able to make some of the projects that are put out there viable. So if you're going to start a space business, gonna use that term even the way it's we've talked about it, space is not an industry geography.

But if you're going to start a business, many of those that have survived have been because there is, government there are government contracts, and NASA was one that made that transition about a decade ago Yeah. Where they're spending the money more in the in this sector. However, that becomes astrobotics. That becomes where you don't have a $15,000,000,000 budget. You have a smaller budget, and you have to make something work.

And who knows what will happen when you have companies that don't have that that heft of bankroll to be able to address the challenges. Interesting you mentioned Astrobotics because the CLPS program was a $3,200,000,000 program over 10 years designed to give $300,000,000 a year to companies that are going to work on, commercial lunar payload systems. And they CLPS' commercial lunar payload system, is that what it stands for?

And Astrobotic was one of the winners of those contracts and, but the contracts in are kinda it was it was focused on landers. All the contract focused on landers. And what's ironic, and we've talked to NASA about this before, is the sustainable system means that you shouldn't just have a lander, you need to have an orbiter. Because an orbiter without a lander does not get you very much. It doesn't get you the data back to the earth. So what are you doing?

I don't really understand the that, progression. We've talked to, when he was there, Thomas Zurbuchen about this and and trying to have more exposure for for orbiter companies because that's really they should go hand in hand is my point. And I don't know what did Astrobotic have a news story about their landing mission? Because you've got a few others on the way now. Intuitive Machines is next. Mhmm. I haven't heard any others, but the, there there are risks associated with today.

The process of investment where you're giving a $130,000,000 or $250,000,000. Yeah. It's a high bar. It's a high bar to achieve some of these directives and it's, it could be spreading self too spreading too thin. It might be the opposite where innovation, flourishes because there are many players trying to achieve this desired outcome. So how do you determine what you're going to invest in the future? Right.

Well, it's so great that you brought up the the government investment because the government doll government dollars for investors are an indication of great signal in terms of is the company does the company have enough of the skill sets and capabilities that the government finds valuable to award them a contract in the first place? So Interesting you looked at it that way. I I do. Yeah. Because, depending on the award.

I I I I I just putting it out there, just interesting that you looked at it from that perspective. There have been some cases where there's some award and it's been handed out like candy and there isn't really a differentiation between who received it and and that. But, I mean, in my own company, we're, for example, one of 4 companies with 100 that applied for the very first, awards from National Security Innovation Capital, and they only had a $15,000,000 budget.

Several 100 companies applied and only 4 one, and we were one of 4 that won $2,000,000 to advance on our prototype because we, jump ahead of the supply chain with the satellite we're building. So that investors actually requires a higher level of sophistication to understand when dollars are awarded. Is that a significant win or not? So we were learning that ourselves early on.

It's, we have a lot of discussion within Project Moon Hut about governments and accepting money from one government means you might be losing out on opportunities for another government. There are alliances that are out there and if you're trying to create a global ecosystem, you are aligning yourself one way or another. But we also talk about the challenges when you are dealing with the bureaucracy, and we were named we were named Project Moon Hut because of working with NASA.

And the first time I visited the facilities in Silicon Valley, the first three hours, all I heard about was how much money was wasted. The first three hours and I was not at 2 2014, same time as you. All I heard about from them was $10,000,000,000 wasted here. $2,000,000,000 wasted there. This was wasted in this investment. This is a and I'm sitting there saying, oh my god. This is crazy. So do you you feel that because there's that investment mechanism, you feel more confident?

But when you invest, different than NASA investing or the government investing, when you invest, how do you figure out which company that you're you've got 37. How do you pick 1? Because you've gone from Phish to, cables under the sea. Right. Sure. And and, and satellite based Internet and things like that. Yep. Satellite based Internet. So how do how do you choose? Well, you know, there's so many gosh.

The idea of government dollars and how they help a company, there's a there's a lot to unpack there. Even dollars like as I was set you were saying you heard about dollars that were wasted or what have you. There are different types of awards. And so, if the award is to help a company have a proof of their business case and achieve that, that proof of the business model, I'm all for it.

But in other cases, it might in most cases, it's to expand a capability that might not result in some next phase of the company, for example. We had an award with NASA Advanced Innovative Concepts. It's called NIAC, n a I c. And very few of these are handed out. I was with Michael Lapointe, the director of the program at Scitech, on a panel last week.

And he even said, the phase 3 NIAC, which are these these really big ideas of our future in space, future future capabilities, that's what you apply to, that you submit. So it's not likely to have a commercial application for a long time, but that's the point of it. So we won this NIAC for our, a a craft that we created that is a light sail that allows you to go from the Earth to Jupiter in a single year.

And this would be faster than Voyager and quite exciting if we could create that in the future. So only 6 companies in the history of the program ever won this. We won this in concert with JPL and Aerospace Corporation. And it was all very, you know, exciting to have won it because it's this prestigious thing. But are we creating that satellite that can go and it's small. It's or it's not small, but it's it doesn't carry people. This is a just a Yeah. A a light sail, light craft, it's called.

It could go to the Earth to Jupiter in a single year. We could have cameras that would go on it that would image an exoplanet at a 100,000,000,000 times magnification and go out to the solar gravity lens focus region, and it's all very exciting. But what happens after we won our award? Who's ready to go pick up that mission? Did Yuri Miller call us from Breakout and say, hey, I wanna give you $20,000,000 to build that? Well, he hasn't. You know?

So it doesn't it doesn't have its next phase yet, but maybe it will in the future. At least at least Is Pete is Pete still with Breakthroughs? Yeah. Pete Wharton. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I don't know those those folks really well. I just know what they've invested in now. And I'm just saying that we win this award and everybody's proud of themselves, and we do the research and it's all quite exciting and we complete it. But what happens next?

You don't have an ecosystem supporting it or commercial, investors coming out saying, I'm ready to go put more Because because it becomes because it fits into the category of science research and exploration. And the challenge is, and this is my thinking, is the geography is too big. It's so far away that individuals can't create that ecosystem. You it would take a long time. And that's that is partially why the construct of Mearth came about.

Because we are 3 days away, we can create an economic system and an ecosystem where we're supplying, creating products and services within this geography that works. It's it's like saying, hey, family. I'm taking off and going, across the globe as compared to, I'm just gonna travel down a few kilometers or miles. I'm gonna set up another community of business. And will you buy from us?

And so so you when going back to the question about investment, you're investing in the light sale because it sounds like it's interesting to you. Well, this was our company that created it. So it wasn't me investing. It was NASA investing in us in this case. I was I'm sorry. I was flipping from my being investor to having received investment at my Okay. So I didn't mean to. That's okay. I was just trying to follow it.

Mhmm. Yeah. It's Okay. So this actually is a good segue into science missions today versus science missions tomorrow. I think it's point 3 on list. It's 3. Yeah. So when we think about what NASA invests in and their purpose, it's really about answering these these deep questions about our universe and that they're laid out in the decadal survey. And so all of these large investments that NASA has are to go after really what I would like to call exquisite science.

Very, very hard to you know, very difficult missions, very involved, intricate capabilities that that all that have to have hundreds of people working on them, like the OSIRIS VREX asteroid mission to Bennu, for example. It went out 200,000,000 miles, to get to the asteroid Bennu and have a sample return, which is, you know, our friend Dante. Oh goodness. Doctor Dante. I'm forgetting his last name, who'd who was, the PI on that project. Really incredible, you know, to do something like that.

But that's where larger dollars and the focus should be. But what continues to happen today is, science missions that kind of, borderline compete with commercial capabilities because commercial, science missions have accelerated and companies are able to do more, for less money. And so the government shouldn't be investing in capabilities that are replicated commercially. They're they're not supposed to do it, but it does happen. And it and it then limits commercial's ability to advance.

And at the same time, it limits them because they should just be focusing on the exquisite. You you're kind of piggybacking on Jeffrey Manbur's commentary where he says, the space agencies is one of the worst things that happened to the ecosystem. Mhmm. Because by concentrating all the capital to these agencies, what you've done is you've taken away that commercial impetus so everybody's just fighting for agency dollars Mhmm.

Instead of creating commercial alliances to build something forward with like all the other industries or most of the other industries that are out there. And he he's been very vocal. He was vocal on our program too, saying that hasn't helped move things forward. It's he believes it's actually hindered Mhmm. Progress. Yeah. I'll never forget I went to a GeoInt event. I was speaking there, and, the someone stopped me to ask about, my company Explorer, and and they said, oh, you're commercial.

You're trying to put us out of business. They were from the government. And I said, that's I said, no. We're actually enabling you to do more of what you do best. That's really the truth, that these exquisite missions. I mean, when you're talking about But that but that's the that's scarcity and abundance. Yeah. If you're taking something they don't have instead of infinite, By us doing what we're doing, you have more. Mhmm. Yep. That's exactly it.

Yeah. And and the thing is the we have to keep up with the times. Technology has scaled. Costs have come down. There is a democratization happening. And so that's where where they can be more free to do harder things because commercial has got this. You know, we've got So so what's, on the optimistic side So I I mean, our company, for example, we I'm sitting here trying to this is time about. I also realized my wife, by the way, went to Newhouse School of Communications Advertising.

So advertising in English. I think that's kind of fascinating. But, just a side where brains go where they shouldn't go, Optimistically, what do you think based upon this, version of tomorrow, these these science missions today versus tomorrow? What do you think tomorrow is? Well, this is this is what my company we want to unleash is science for everyone, democratizing access to, for researchers, for scientists to access data.

You have scientists today that, for example, might wait 10 years to have access to the Hubble for an observation night. They'd spend years trying to get just one window of an observe observation time.

And my company is gonna have a satellite that can go and allow you to have unlimited observation time because instead of a ground based telescope, we would have a space based telescope, and it would be a commercial company that would allow you access so you don't have to no. You wouldn't have the same level of of exquisite Right. You don't have the the same level of complication and capabilities, but but you're so you're hard you are both hardware and software platform.

So you're tying back your the, the digital being digital. But you've got a software platform that enables more access to usability of the data that comes out of it or your own experimentation or your own vantage point that you couldn't have gotten otherwise. Correct? Yeah. I think the the access to to data is a whole other point here. But, you know, scientists will wait years for access to the Hubble. True. And they will always do that.

But there's also a lot of valuable science that can be done when it's not accessing the Hubble, when it's accessing another small spacecraft, for example, with telescope on it. So would you would that be democratized data? Is that the way you're playing it? So so data that sits or is generated is no longer you're paying I'm gonna make this up and then you could tell me if I'm wrong.

You're paying for a subscription model to be able to have access to what what exploration or scientific endeavor your satellite is working on and that individuals, if they pay the subscription, are capable of either having the data that comes off of this or they can potentially pay for their own exclusive data in certain types of conditions. There will be subscription services in the future. This is probably the case, in the earlier missions before that exists.

But I think, yeah, long term, there will be subscription models for sure. We have to enable that, because I remember, investors saying, so at some point, I can go check on my vacation house that's on the water and make sure that there's been no storm and, you know, the that there's you know, everything's intact. And and could you subscribe to a feed of that in the future? Yes. You can. Yes. You will be able to. Won't that be exciting anywhere in the world to say, I wanna check on my house.

I wanna wanna check out. Yeah. I wanna watch it I wanna watch it flow down the street as a storm comes. Dumpster. You you use the term achieve data fusion. Correct me if I'm wrong. Data fusion is the aggregation of multiple data sources so that you can get either higher fidelity or better consistent data. What do you mean when talking about this tomorrow with the satellite and what you're offering and the capabilities? How does yours create data fusion?

And maybe my my answer of what data fusion is is correct, but how does that play into it? Do wanna I do wanna get to the data fusion discussion, but I think that's really how we're gonna create value from commercial Okay. Then and I think maybe we should be talking about the the, just the capabilities today. I mean, we kinda talk about government to commercial. Do you feel like we've Yeah. Covered that?

No. Well, I I and anything you've got, you can always add, but I'm reading, science missions today versus tomorrow. So I'm trying to dig into today, are you still categorizing the system government and then tomorrow was not, or are we Oh, great. Are we close enough to be considered a hybrid yet? Because so many companies without without NASA contracts or European Space Agency or Japanese Space Agency or South Africa would not be around.

Are are we still on that continuum all the way at the end of still being a part of a government sponsored ecosystem? Well and this gets to what have we achieved today in space with scaled satellites, and how did those, prove what we are those proving to be capable? Will they prove to be have higher capable in the future? Because if they are high have higher capability in the future, then government will be making investments in buying data from them.

And we're seeing this happen, with what's coming online with one of our capabilities, which is winning the National Reconnaissance Office hyperspectral contract. So today, hyperspectral data commercially is not available. Hyperspectral allows you to effect Thank you. I I was going to ask. It allows you to to to understand the chemistry of the earth from space. So all these different bands are indicative of different chemistries of what you're looking at on the earth.

So you can look at, specifically, it's valuable for precision agriculture, which is why the National Geospatial Agency is so interested in it. But you could see, the new nutrients in the soil if there's too much pesticide, if there's too much nitrogen, what the water levels are, what the soil quality is. These insights from a hyperspectral imager are so valuable because they allow us to monitor the climate, not just on a on a basis if you had a drone going over a 1 acre field or something.

That doesn't get you a lot of data. But if you have a satellite going over the Earth 16 times a day collecting data of the entire earth and you can monitor, all the land on the earth and all the agricultural land, you get real indications of of climate change and how you can then have actionable intelligence to increase yield? So this is not a geosynchronous orbit. This is a It's just low earth. Just low earth orbit. This is low okay.

So are, I'm gonna ask you the question because I can't forget to ask this. You're we're now talking about soil degradation. Mhmm. I just read today an entire article about soil capabilities. I've I've looked into and read about the challenges, for example, in parts of Asia where there's some chemicals have been so overused and the soil has been so degraded that there could be less than decades less of of topsoil left for them, but there are other parts of the world that might have opportunities.

What is what is your data signaling for our for our long term future when it comes to agriculture and and crop development, all those things that make us be able to survive? Well, when we can look at the at the Earth and and observe specific plots of land and understand how we can reduce use how we use our resources, how we reduce fertilizer, how we reduce herbicide, pesticide use, or, manage water and reduce water where it's you know, we have too much water.

All of these things lead to better yields and, better crops. You're talking about now replenishing the soil and that's that involves adding nutrients to the soil. There's a whole company I've been talking to working on this, which is fixing our problems with soil depletion. But with the soil that we have and the ability to monitor is is a huge leap forward. Oh, it is a it's a huge challenge.

And I will add a multi multiplier to it with the climate change that's been happening, and let's use Europe as an example, where we're going from, x temperature. I'm not gonna I don't know the specifics of the average temperature that's sitting across, say, Spain, Italy, Greece, Serbia, Macedonia, that whole region in there where we're seeing Spain is now turning into more of a desert environment, not a lot of rain.

That was the vegetable garden of Europe all the way through to, I was I was told, Prosecco, which is moving north. It's it's going north more north in Spain, which is they're having challenges growing, but it's just not getting cold enough. Just to know the soil composition or the soil specifics, how are you integrating this interconnected this complexity into these formulaics if we're seeing, I mean, windstorms that we've not had ever?

I mean, one of our teammates, Space Affairs, does follows all the launches that are out there, and he he follows them and post he does a YouTube channel on that. I think it's also Facebook. And he said the launch the launch capability or predictability has gone down because of just changes in climate. So how does this what you're talking about, this hyperspectral data, how do you see that helping if there's a compounding challenge happening within that environment?

Well, you asked about data fusion and all these other instruments that help with predictive weather monitoring can also be on top of a platform. So it's that merging of different, pieces of information that give us the full picture. Obviously, it can't just be one image in a vacuum. You've gotta factor in all these other other data sources to to, again, have actionable intelligence.

We are with with our company, we get one satellite up and then we have a whole, trove of satellites that we we launch, keep launching after that. As they all then interconnect and, bring that data back to the ground, we're going to have, so much more actionable intelligence.

Today, you can't really get it because, it's well, from commercial, and I am specifically talking about commercial where a company could be signing up to say, I specifically Walmart wanting to monitor all of its, you know, stores, for example, and or land that they have and in a daily basis, what kind of data can we download that is useful to them, hourly or, you know, minute to minute. We don't have that yet, but we will in, the next few years.

It'll be huge what they can tap into, their own feed. But your your tech that you're working on is democratization, but it goes back to you leveraging a platform, having the scalability, having the access to be able to find the data going all the way back to, like we say, improving life on Earth. We're not just about humans on Earth. So democratized means accessible. It doesn't mean free. No. But I didn't mean free. Yes. It means that more individuals have access to it.

That I mean And therefore, at a cost that's reasonable as compared to and I'm gonna use a it's a $100,000 per hour to do x versus $1500 per month to do y. Yeah. And and a company could it's making it affordable for anyone to be buying data and then deriving, their value from it. We don't have to be experts in their field. We're just collecting the data for them and pushing it out. And then they can analyze it and, find, find the value, because it's gonna be honed to their specific needs.

But, this has been an interesting, topic of, like, why why doesn't a company have to be a specialist in oil and gas and agriculture and mining and insurance and finance? Well, all those companies want the data we we collect. That is data. We don't have to be specific to its uses because they already know the use cases and they know what they You're giving data. They can interpret it the way they'd like. That's right. So, it sounds like the way you talk, to you, the satellite is the iPhone.

Yes. Yes. It is. Just so you know, I mean, I don't know if you've ever said that. Exactly it. I mean, some people want I've been listening to you talk, and in my head, I was trying to figure out your modality. And your modality is the iPhone is the satellite. It is. Because we've built something that's powerful enough to support all of this functionality for anyone. That was the idea. If you had a magic wand, what satellite would you build and what could it do?

Well, it would do anything for anyone, which is which is a different philosophy than every satellite that's gone before us because most companies that have been, build building satellites to date came out of the commercial mindset of government mindset, I should say. I'm going to build a satellite with a specific mission for a specific customer to secure a specific government contract and pay my way. Yeah. And that, Ron, Explore.

Do do you believe I mean, is I believe others have a similar modality that they're trying to accomplish with data collection? Or do are are you not finding that? Well, there's this push from every company has to raise funds to to run their business. And you you talk to venture firms that also might be putting in their 2¢ to and you might change your company strategy if if that's the case. If somebody's, you know, wanting to invest and they say, but if you do it this way, I'll invest.

And I don't know if that's what's caused people to operate the way they do today, but most companies are, I would say, aligning with a venture SaaS model. We're in the SaaS world, you're doing one thing and drilling on and doing one thing and doing it well. And that does not work for what we wish to achieve. We don't wish to achieve one thing, one capability. If you're going to It is You should get all the data. You and, let's use the 2 2014 as the date.

I'm I'm a little bit older than you, but I came in and I have not had the same modality of thinking from the very beginning. And it is it has been really, really, really a challenge. The the first day I was at NASA Ames facility, I turned over to Lynn Harper, and I said, I don't get everything you guys are talking about. Why don't you take it in piece of the International Space Station and push it to the moon? I mean, you you're talking about far out science fiction.

And she looks at me and she says, David, if we did that, that would be similar to pushing a win putting a Winnebago on the moon. And so far since I've been involved in this ecosystem, it has been challenging because there are a lot of old thinkers, and I won't name a person's name who's been on the podcast, also runs a very, very, very, very large organization. And I asked him. With all the tens of thousands of people involved, who do you think could understand these concepts?

Because they're very they're more I guess, the term we were using was more contemporary, more modern. And he said, I could probably only name 22 people. Those are that was his number. The rest of the people, he said, are all old school. They're all old school. So it does it are you saying that you're one of the few? Well, when my first trip to NASA facility, the I forget who the director was that, briefed us, but they were very proud of saying that they move at a glacial pace.

I mean, this was a point of pride, and and there the reason is about safety and complexity. And I understand that, but that's all good. But commercial doesn't move at a glacial pace. Commercial is is really pushing to to advance. And so we're a little oil and water there. You know? Well, yeah. It's not that it's oil and water. You're still requiring, let's say, that the, government is the oil or the water. You can pick which one.

But there is still a very, very, very strong symbiotic nature that it sounds like we're relying on. So I I yes. Commercial wants to move at a faster pace, but it's still so reliant on whether it be FAA approvals or, security measures or ITAR EAA or CFIUS challenges or it could be, I mean, the the list is extensive. So how do we get these science missions for today versus tomorrow? How do we get or or we're actually in transitioning from government to commercial. I guess we're talking about it.

Number 4, how do we get from government to commercial where you and I would be not saying to one another, yeah. If not for that acts, they would still not be here. They wouldn't have made it. How do we get there? Well, Is that and you can go wherever you want with number 4, transition from government to commercial. Look at there has been a huge achievement with SpaceX launching a Dragon capsule, for first for cargo then for crew, that was groundbreaking. You know?

We had years after the shuttle where any trip to the ISS required a a flight on the Soyuz. Right. It was the and most end of I didn't know this, but without the Russian help from the from the shuttle time until, we wouldn't had anybody be going there. The Russians the Russians and the Americans, even during all the challenges they were having, they were still working together when it came to be on Earth.

Mhmm. So so we have achievements with SpaceX leading the way and pushing and and and getting us to to have that commercial cargo, commercial crew. And then with, the Ukraine, Russia war. You have an advancement in the need for commercial. You've seen SpaceX providing Internet services via Starlink. So this is now great for the eye is on commercial capabilities for government to get a leg up from the commercial companies that have, something they need. Right?

So, in the case is we're talking about NRO and the hyperspectral contract, they want that hyperspectral data, and they're going to be buying it from commercial companies. That is the goal. They wanted optical data in the past. They had a contract for electro optical, and they bought optical data, to the tune of 300,000,000 a year from Maxar, 30 some million a year from Planet, and I think it was a 100,000,000 a year from BlackSky.

So these were great investments in something that they wanted, but commercial still had to prove that you wanna buy it from us. And that's the hard part is because we're talking about government providing funding for a commercial company to reach that point, get through the valley valley of death, get to the proof of concept, get to a business model that's sustainable, and then they'll buy. So there's this dearth of that, you know, a valley in between of how do you bridge that gap.

And there's so many Space Force, Air Force conferences talking about how do we bridge this. But once we bridge it, we get to the other side and it's proven. I think that's when we're gonna have government saying, okay. I really I really do wanna shift gears instead of and we did see them shifting gears in originally buying just hardware. They're finally beating a drum and saying, we're going to buy services, not hardware. And that that actually is an important moment.

My company, Explorer, is the first to coin the phrase and use the phrase, space as a service. We did this for a reason because government needed to buy space services. We didn't want them to buy our satellite. That wasn't the point. We're not in a we're not a hardware company building a satellite to just get a government contract for them to buy it. We're a company providing services and saying, you too can buy this service just like like anyone else.

You're on parity with everyone else, government. Yet so I'm, the question that I'm trying to get back to is going back to transitioning from government to commercial. I know what you're I hear what you're saying. It's very obvious. If we can get them to untap and start using the services that are created by individual by organizations, the the get away from the SaaS model or there are always going to be specific categorical satellites or or missions or approaches that are being used in there.

We've now got this new modality of, space as a service. Where do you see that trajectory creating an inflection point so it becomes not this conversation we're having? Oh, it's actually now in the, Space Force doctrine that they must buy services. No. That's not what I meant. That's still the government having to buy services. But when do we get to a point where it's not the government's contracts that keep the organizations alive?

And I I'm looking also on a global scale, but let's we tend to be more domestic in the US. But how do we get to that point where, hey. Let's just say tomorrow, government said no more to anybody. We're not gonna fund you. We're not gonna set you up. We're not gonna supply you. We're not gonna buy from you. You're on your own. Right. Where would we be?

Well, we we will be at the point, at least in in the case of what I'm working on with our satellites, We we have commercial interest that's extremely strong. And Oh, yeah. The sounds like a great product. So Absolutely. We're going to be tapping that even before we fly with the companies that are, you know, in such a are are great thinkers and realize that they should be calibrating with us before we fly to make sure they're first in line for our data. Again, I I agree with that.

You you've got a product that has that ubiquitous nature. It's going to you're supplying raw data or different types of data. You're supplying data that organizations can use. I'm not talking about this sentence, transitioning from government to commercial. Weird. It's been a promise for a very long time, since 19 seventies. There would be this space ecosystem. Well, let's say the odd let's say government didn't buy cars. There would still be an automotive industry.

If government didn't buy corn, there would still be an agricultural industry supplying gold. Well, just like they transitioned out of the Internet. Right? Mhmm. Because they So when when is that when do you see when do you feel that it will hit? Oh. Asking you to be a soothsayer. You pull out your magic ball, kinda spin it a few times, look inside of it, and, shit. Well, because of our plan to be okay.

I and I don't wanna go into our defense arena, but because of defense, when you think about the the, capabilities of our satellites today and that industry, you have to think about it like it's an iceberg. And what we've been talking about with commercial activity is on the top part of that iceberg. What is below the surface is the defense side of this industry. That will always exist.

So maybe it's with what you're saying, it's really when do we transition to it only be gover to only the government being involved in really that that other side, which is their responsibility of protecting our our nation and our way of life. Okay. And I wasn't going there, so that's interesting that you went there, and I appreciate it. Yes. With the, we have several people who different parts of the world who are working with Project Moon Hunt. We can't name names.

They've we've signed NDAs and they've signed NDAs. They don't wanna be known. But part of the challenge that we run into when we discuss with multiple branches of different governments around the world or militaries is how do we make sure that this becomes, at least on the Project Moon Hut side, and that's why I'm asking these questions. Because we're looking to create that moon and Earth ecosystem, that Mearth ecosystem.

And I'm I'm trying to extrapolate when from someone like you who's obviously very intelligent, knows ecosystem, knows the terminology, sees the funding and the movement of of, cash as well as technology. Where's that promise of the future? And you're not you're not alone when I ask this question. It's a challenging one. It's being funded underneath by a lot of capital coming from, defense departments.

And as well as we see the expansion of national space agencies, there's a transfer of happening there too because the each space agency is involved in the national interest, and maybe it just becomes more about, what's good for, elevating the nation. But they're not as hands on then in doling out contracts. And you know what I'm saying? It might just be more of the the political side of the spectrum of Oh, it's huge on the political side.

Diplomacy instead of hands on control of how money is moved and spent. How many conversations have you had since 2014 where people talk about the, the space agreements? And and and, I mean, I've gotta believe you've had many of them where people say, well, what about the agreements? Well, the United States has not signed it or this country has not signed it. And we've had on, we've had on Jan Werner. We've had on Saul Messami from this South African Space Agency.

We've had on oh, I could see his picture now from, who ran the US Space Age. We've had multiple people on. And, yeah, there's a lot of political movement that makes it extremely difficult to create this ecosystem. Mhmm. Yep. So, it's okay. It's it's a question. So how about this next one, creating value from satellites?

Yes. So I've mentioned a little bit about the the satellite industry and commercial companies achieving great things by getting satellites in space, where there was no ecosystem for supply chains. You couldn't just go get COGS items to go buy your components off from a catalog years ago, to actually create a satellite was a big deal. And then we had this thought of, small satellites.

There was a whole popularity of small satellites that are called cubesats that are 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter. And all of these startups that that popped up saying, we're gonna build cubesats, and this is gonna be amazing. And everybody said, we're gonna build constellations, and they're gonna have so much value. And they didn't stop to say, okay. But what is the real capability of these beyond the science project? And there's a whole group of colleges that send cubesats up.

I think it's it's I forget the name of it. It's got a cute name like CougarSat or something like that. They they all build these satellites, and and it's great. All all I picture is little ears on them like Cubans. That it's a I forget the name of it, but the the the these colleges, they get the students to build CubeSats, and they fly something to space, and that's phenomenal.

And our center for advancement of science in space, CASIS on the International Space Station, they shoot them out the window of the ISS, and they end up in orbit, and everybody cheers and yay for science. But, what is the value then of that STEM student, for example, that does that and then says, I'm gonna create a company, and it's gonna be worth a $1,000,000,000? Well, you have to think about the capability of what you're starting with.

And a 10 by 10 by 10 centimeter cubesat is very different than what we're building, which is, a very advanced satellite that's got, like, in in, so much power to power all of these instruments to get all of this data back, a cubesat can't do a whole lot is the point. And so then you have venture folks that listen to these stories, and they think it's so exciting and cool because it's space, and they throw their money in.

And it's been problematic because they're putting money into things that are not going to create a lot of value. And so but it's hard to explain that when there was a period where anybody talking about space, with a investor and and Morgan Stanley saying it's gonna be a $1,000,000,000,000 business by 2030, they said, okay. Here's my money. I'm just gonna throw money at space. You know? This is the whole thing.

And so they really got away from asking hard questions about business models and and when will the pro form a show a return on investment, and could a company produce value with a single satellite? Could they produce a unit profitable satellite? Well, we did. Mhmm. But I don't know of anybody else that has, and we can't wait to prove that out when we fly. But we have not seen other companies doing this. It was really a high capex and excitement about, really, science projects.

And that had slowed down the industry, to a certain degree. Even some that I look at, I had one that I they did a model, and I felt like it was looking at a view. Do you remember the Viewmaster viewer? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm I'm old enough to remember the view master viewer. Yes. Model of a view master viewer. It's we're gonna go do space domain awareness. And I thought, no. I don't think you are, but okay. You know? Good for you. You got some people convinced that you could do that.

So, there's not a lot of understanding, from the investment side of what what is it that's being built, what are its capabilities, and why is it transformational? And every investor should be asking that. And then show me what the dollar dollar value like likelihood is. And that's a problem too because we had companies throwing out huge numbers, that they will just not achieve. And this is why we entered into that whole SPAC era. I was just going to say SPACs.

That was I I was holding back and I said, oh my god. What she's talking about SPACs. Yes. But we also we we had challenges with hydroponics. Hydroponics place, facilities are failing all over the place Right. Where we had because it's not a business model. We have a farm. Yeah. You know, growing it in the city doesn't make it better or or more profitable. You know, you you you don't have to transport it from the farm to the city.

So, yes, so the Everything you're outlining, though, becomes degradates or degradates. Is that the right word? It pulls from the value of the possibilities of the Beyond Earth ecosystem. This is a problem.

Yeah. It's shadow there's this shadow that's been cast over the industry, and the highest capability companies just have to keep fighting like mine to show the, where we're where all this is going next is I mean, we even like, where it goes next is exciting, but where it goes first is exciting. So we, you know, we actually have to pay attention to, what these capabilities can do in the future, but what they can do right out of the starting gate in our Okay. So you I'm you know I'm gonna ask.

Yeah. 1st, at a starting gate Yeah. And next. 1st out of the starting gate is, the the utility of satellites today has been a single sensor collecting a single type of data. Our satellite is effectively 8 satellites built into 1. So it's 8 different sensors, each sensor with its own proprietary stream of data that we will collect. And then on top of that, because of the power that we have, we can combine those that data in layers.

It'll be the first ever on orbit data fusion that occurs because So the data fusion is happening not on the ground. Happening in space because every instrument at the same can point at the same object at the same point in time for all on data collection of all the instruments. So What I what I meant, you're you're you're still you're still collecting streams, but then what you're doing is integrating them up there, but you're still creating streams because you do want the select upstream.

That's right. You want it selectively. You want it together. And then what you wanna do is process it. So we have processing on board. Obviously, we need to have and and this hasn't happened with satellites today is compute capability and process it. Commercial satellites, again, I'm talking about Yeah. Where you can store all of this data and then have processing on board. Satellites today are pretty dumb. They operate in a loop. You kinda set it and forget it.

It's not interacting with the ground. You can't change its course. You can't upload software to change, its what it does. But with ours, you can. You can always just like with your with your, I don't know if you ever had navigation in your car when you had to put 7 or 8 CDs into the car to update the nav system? Yeah. That was yes. Yes. You you you went out and you had to grab the next one because you're going into the next third one.

Now now in a Tesla, you're just uploading the latest software and all the new features, and it's just then updated. Like, the satellite can just be updated. So that's Now next gen. It's very next gen compared to what happens today. It's it's not been done. But 2 questions then. 1, and I keep on giving you 2. I don't like to ask 2. But one is, the data stream, doesn't it come back to your structure, your Ground station. They come down to they come down to the ground stations. Right.

They come down to ground stations. So there is a single point of contact. Even though you have a fusion happening, it's still coming to or multiple streams happening. You still come down to a single point. So that was the first one. The second is now I because I said it out loud like that. Can't change the course. Can't create that. Oh, it'll come to me. Okay. So you're still creating a single source, and then you're doing the distribution on earth to all the user base?

Through the aggregate that pushes it up. Oh, it was the energy. You you've pointed out maybe 3 times already. You keep on talking about the energy. So what makes your energy capabilities so different than everybody else's? Yeah. This is not a I know we're not doing a product explanation here, but I'm, I'm really trying to figure out why you would bring it up multiple times.

I can say we have 10 times the power of any satellite that's a small satellite today because we have designed our own solar deployment system. And so solar is how you're gonna collect the power, right, from this Okay. Yeah. I I I was just I was wondering if there was a little bit of nuclear coming out of our solar system. Nuclear. But we we have this phenom We did start there.

So because the nuclear I was just with this nuclear people, and they can't wait for us to to, in the future, have an an X craft. Our satellite is called the X craft. Have it go deeper into space with nuclear, which, you know, it's our our satellite is designed like the iPhone, so different components, we can switch them out. And in the future, we could do a nuclear mission. No doubt. So Yeah. We we've got nuclear subs. We've got nuclear on large.

So it eventually now we've got these they're not called, oh, they're not called micro nuclear reactors. It's a sort small term for the smaller isolated? Yeah. And cap yes. So we do have that capability, but so you're just you're you just have a better you've created a better mousetrap using your mouse, mousetronaut, mousetronaut, whatever you call that. You have a better solar deployment system that has a higher Power. F power absorption rate that allows you to be able to supply Yeah.

What you're doing. Most of the companies today are buying their the bus itself, which is the main part of the satellite Yeah. That carries your payloads. They're buying that from other companies, and they're spending a lot of money for those. And it's I don't wanna call it a commodity because that sounds like like you could buy it at the grocery store, but it is something that they can buy.

And because they buy them from someone else and they haven't uniquely engineered them, they're limited on what to do. Mhmm. So we did not start with, we're just gonna buy somebody else's bus. We engineered it ourselves. And so this has been a long haul effort to build it specific for these multiple capabilities, multiple modalities. But other satellites are designed for 1 or 2 instruments to be on board, and they can't support more than that because they don't have the power.

And they as well, they don't have any fuel. Typically, there's no propulsion. And we've so you have to think about a lot of different things with a business. And in our case, we think about how long is that satellite flying, how much did we have to invest to get it to fly, And then what is what will it return in in value per year for financially to have a return on the asset? Yeah. The numbers must work. Case, it's it returns its value the 1st year and generates a profit.

So that hasn't been done before because they're thinking about a single customer, a single instrument. When you have 8 satellites into 1, you're now, you know, orders of magnitude more capable. Yeah. It's I'm gonna use a bad analogy, but if you buy one coffee cup from a company, it's gonna cost you $10 plus $6 in freight. You buy 4 coffee cups, Now you package them up, and you've got you sell it for $30. Freight is still not gonna be much more, but you've made a lot more coffee.

Yeah. That's a bad analogy, but that's the one that comes to mind is I you someone tries to sell coffee cups, it's not worth it. Sell them 4, and now they spend $30 instead of $10. Now you've got your profit your margin going in there. Right. And I I live in the land of Microsoft and Amazon here in Seattle, and we Oh, I didn't know you were in Seattle. I probably should I probably have you in Seattle. I had to use Austin, Texas. Why do I have as use Austin? I don't know.

I've not been in, Austin. But There must have been well, you and I already looked at the data before on our phone. And you're you're you're not even the person you are 17 years ago. So, yes, I had found Austin, Texas, and that's how I had put you into our database. So I had not thought you were Seattle. We we have, I think we have 5 people working with ProjectMoon in Seattle alone. Well, we're I would've I would've remembered that.

And Microsoft, particularly with Microsoft, everyone would remember that, when bundling occurred and Microsoft was able to bundle its Excel and Word and all these software into one package, that became the new standard. So this is effectively what we're doing on a satellite is the bundling of multiple capabilities. I had a fascinating question from somebody saying, gosh. Well, doesn't that mean that your individual instruments are gonna be degraded because you've bundled them?

And it's almost to me like saying, well, when you use Microsoft, does does it mean that you can't cut and paste because your your package includes Excel? You know? Like, how does that I mean, I do not understand why people think this way, but some people do. They think that, oh, there must be some trade off by having multiple instruments on the satellite, but not in the way we've designed it, not in the way we've powered it. No. There's a it does and it's a multiplicative operation.

You're you're you're still sending it up. So there's a cost to send it up. There's a cost to maintain it. You're putting 8 satellites in one low in one structure. That's a that's a value add. It makes all all the sense in the world. And now it's not that I I wouldn't say it's the data fusion part. That's a great ad that you could say that it's created and aggregated or maybe you have a better reason for it.

I think the more is that you can create 8 streams of value that can be sliced, diced, and I feel like the, what was that? Credit default swaps, This where they did the slice and dice and you can give data in all different forms. What's the reason for doing it up there versus doing it on the ground?

The act act well, there is some proprietary reason I can't really talk about, but let's let's just say if you're driving the collection of the most valuable data for a customer, and then you're downloading that and you're processing it to get an insight back. This is where space is going next, where that satellite is providing the answer to the ground instead of a bunch of files that you still have to go drill down into and process, etcetera. It costs money to download data from space.

We're still in the dark ages today in how we download data because the satellite has to fly over the ground state. So so you can get rid of you can get rid of bad data or unusable data? Filter it. Yeah. You could yeah. That's filter's a better word, but you're filtering out the data and sending what's necessary instead of, a just a steady stream of Mhmm. Content.

So when you when you get rid of the access and you're only downloading what is valuable, then there's a high level of increased efficiency and lower cost. Yeah. You're I mean, that's it just makes a ton of sense. You're bringing together all the data, then you're saying, what do we want from that data? So whatever terabytes or whatever size you're getting, now you're saying, okay. We collected all of this, but we don't need to use it. We only need this. And that's all we're gonna transfer.

That's right. Why is it expensive if in fact you have all I mean, does it use more power? Is that why you call the term expensive? Well, so the reason we're still in the dark ages today is that we have to fly over a ground station. It's almost like dial up modem. It's the age we're still in where you're gonna have to dial up and connect to a satellite and download data.

And if, until we have other ways of of intersatellite links and linking to other bring that data down to the ground in a more ubiquitous way, it's it's going to take, time and money to get data back. So we haven't had this transformation. We might. We given with our our partners, Microsoft, they just announced with, Project Kiper, optical capabilities of downloading massive amounts of data using optical terminals.

So we may have this big transformation that occurs in the next, 2 years even, with the quantity of data we can bring back. All of it's good. All of it is The bigger, you've got a few things. You've got a satellite that's going around the earth, so you have to get it every time it comes around and if you have a large enough data set, you're, it's, you might have to wait 2 or 3 iterations to be able to secure it all if it's a tremendous amount of data.

But now you're saying, we're just gonna send you down this file. This is what you asked for. This is what you need. You're gonna get it in one shot. You have a timing, timing capability of being able to deliver it to the customer faster because now you don't have to wait for multiple iterations. And it could be in their hands if if time means it makes a difference. It could be in their hands in one second versus 50 seconds.

And that's also a value because you're getting more real time data that's more appropriate. Right. Yeah. I mean, if you think about how we use geospatial data today, all of us are interacting with space. We all use our cell phones. We are looking at that blue dot when we're navigating from point a to point b and finding out the best route, that's in real time. So what happens when we have real time answers about what's happening on the Earth?

Oh, I mean, we feel we have real time because Google and everybody else are creating arcs of data. And so they're it's not a complete real time. I mean, it would be, imagine I go to the Internet right now and I say, tell me about Lisa Rich. It is not scouring every single node that is available and then coming back with data. It's looking at Arks about you and giving me whatever to interpret.

So we we're still in an age or a time where I don't I don't know if I don't know if it'll ever be possible to be able to do a complete search, and, only 2% of the data is public. I think that's the some type of number like that. Meaning, I have data on my computer. That's not readily available. You have data on your computer. That's not readily available. Companies have data on their computers that are not available.

So when you're searching the Internet or you're searching, you're only getting the data that's put out there in the, the ecosystem, but it's not what resides on corporations and individuals' hard drives. Mhmm. No. I you're right. Although it's highly useful, that 2% we have to use.

Oh, no. I'm I'm not I'm not discounting it, but you had said about the blue dot in real time and we're using arcs to be able to find where somebody is because it would be way too expensive, too time time consuming to have to I mean, did the map change since yesterday? Did the map change from the day before? Odds that's where Waze was so amazing as it gave you a little bit more of, the information. But how much has changed in our roads? I mean, I live in a community.

The roads around me have not changed much in years. So why would we want to have a new road picture taken every day to have more current data? And and different people would answer that question differently. It depends on the use case scenario, but it wouldn't be for the same purposes of just using your your car to be able to transition from where I am. Degradation of the asphalt, you know. I I I know.

And and I've I've worked in the road construction industry and I'm all familiar with I actually ran one one of my first jobs is I ran a rock quarry that supplied, 96% of all stone that went into New York City. So, yes, I do understand. I I ran a plant. We did about 50,000,000. So back then, it was big. So infinite streams. We're we're talking about infinite streams. What are the infinite streams? Right. Well, the the applications of space data are going to just keep expanding over time.

But what it's been used for, as you're pointing out with, traffic and wet and, weather, people wanna learn about that. Those are those those initial applications. But when we start having, a satellite that's got a long lifetime, because it's got propulsion to last a long lifetime, multiple, at least, you know, 5 to 10 years, versus 1 to 3 and then they die and de orbit. That's typical of satellites today. And you have that daily feed of of data.

Then what can we do to solve, and look at the ground and have knowledge that would solve issues like food scarcity, climate monitoring, methane leaks, over oil wells or or, you know, sources of methane, how we can cap that. Disaster mitigation, wars and conflict zones that we'll have more information about. Oil gas issues that we can see from the the natural environment. We can we can glean so much knowledge from this for science. We could look at soil, coastline erosion.

What's happening with I'm just throwing a lot of things out here. No. No. I I I'm I'm writing them all down as you know I'm I'm taking notes. So You could see, huge container ships that are leading to the soil erosion and increased traffic on the oceans and maritime issues like illegal dumping, illegal trade, human trafficking, the ethical or unethical treatment of workers. How long are the laborers on the field, for example, or land remediation.

We can see our replantings being done of palm oil or the palm industry, for for example. That's always a concern. Or these supply chains that are, so under duress, how do we find better ways of managing them? I mean, there's so many questions we can answer with the data we bring back. It's really limitless. And one of the reasons why I'm so interested in this industry is is all of the unique things that people that I meet that say, could you do this? Could you do that?

And the answer typically is, yes. We can. And, wow, I didn't even realize there was a need. Like, somebody said I did a talk with a land trust, and they were talking about the erosion of the coastlines. And they said, can you see whales and the container ships and, like, whales that are Mhmm. Container ships that are entering the strike zones for whales? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can.

So there's this omniscient view from space and those applications, not just of sight and optical, but temp the temperature and measurements that we can take. It's extraordinary. And these are just kind of the first. So you you took it all you took it all on the positive. So I wanna what about the implications of having all of this? Being able to see someone's house, being able to see their license.

No. I I'm I'm using I I I worked with Maersk for about 4 or 5 years in the shipping line, so very familiar with some of the applications. I'm just I'm saying we're getting just just like the access where people hacking of your computer systems. We all have these computer systems. We have bank accounts that are online. We're using our mobile phone to be able to access them.

And you can't go far long without hearing about people who've had their phone hacked, their computer hacked, their data hacked, their life is in ruin. And there's probably good I mean, the numbers, I do not know them. I'm just using an example. You gave a lot of the positive. Do you sit back at all, just you, Lisa, and say, wow. This could also be x. Do you ever say that? And when you do say that, what do you say?

Well, because we we have the data going to a data aggregator that's then pushing it out to, their customers and who are their customers and who is buying this. There are requirements that, of course, they have to have with where this data goes. So there has to be I mean, there's always a red flag scenario. You know, I was asked this question years ago, not to change the topic, but it's kind of fascinating, of a company that did custom DNA strands. And somebody said, well, gosh. You know?

What if somebody is creating bioweapons or some type of a weapon out of a DNA or, you know, these data these strands that they could create for biology. And the company had to have stop gaps and and really vet who the buyers were. And I think that's that is what's happening in this industry is they have to know who the buyers are. But, you know, if That that's a that's a tough one. The tran the transfer of data once it leaves someone's hands. We never have been able to do that.

Just like if you look up the shadow fleet and what's happening in Russia right now with the oil tankers meeting in Greece and the 2 ships meet, and the Russian oil is transferred to a Greek ship, and now it's Greek oil. So Yeah. The provenance of things, you're kinda getting into that, I think. No. And I well, you went in that direction. I wasn't just thinking about that.

I was just thinking about the ubiquitous and the opportunities that come from so much data and so much visibility and so much capability that I'm asking myself as you're talking about it. What does this mean? Not positive or negative. Just what does this mean? And what jumped into my mind is when we were writing Paid to Think that I had sent to you. I had an example in there, of terrorism. Oh my god. Kin have it. It was not gonna be in there.

And I said, but I I'm being this is not a good or a bad thing, but terrorists tend to be pretty good planners. And the reason is they have to get it right the first time because they might be dying. And it didn't matter that the example that I was using was apropos to the situation to understand if plans always if they had a, an end, like your business would fail, and you made decisions based upon the fact that tomorrow there might not be another day, you make very different decisions.

We all do. If if I if you found out tomorrow you you had cancer and you only had 5 months to live, you're gonna make very different decisions. If you got a phone call that someone in your family has died, you will make different decisions. It's not a bad or a good thing. It's just that how the world works.

So when I'm hearing you talk about all these rich possibilities, which I think are amazing because Project Moon Hut is about moving these things forward, we do get people who call us privately, and they say, do you know what risk you have here? Do you know what you have to be looking at? We have the 7th largest law firm in the world who's been working with us for 2 years, Kirkland and Ellis. They've been amazing.

And they've been working on helping us to craft an ITAR EAR CFIUS program based upon the work we're working on. And that's because there is inherent risk in the work that anybody does beyond earth. So I'm asking you a similar question. When you go through these exercises of amazing things that will come out, do you also go through the exercises of, wow, with this there could be?

Because I don't think I don't think that way, but let me tell you, the people call me So I have a theory about this because I had invested in robotics and was very interested in robotics. And everyone's afraid of robots taking over the world or some people are. And I'm not, and I'll tell you why. And this is just my you know how there's the Turing test? Well, I have the Roomba test. So they have to be able to do the Roomba to be qualified as intelligent.

Company has been around for about 20 years. Yeah. Okay. So you're really talking about the Roomba cleaning the house. Yes. Roomba. I was thinking of, what's Yeah. There's there's a dance too. Right. I I went to the dance because I love to dance. So I went to the dance, not to the robot. So while there's a Turing test, I call it the Roomba test. And, so this is the the vacuum. You know, this is the Roomba that Yep. Now now I I'm here. I'm I'm with you now. Been around for 20 years.

I almost should look it up to see. I bet it's even older than that. And they make, oh gosh, crazy amounts of money selling these Roombas, and we've bought them, and they're wonderful. But, David, the second that Roomba can actually climb the stairs, maybe we've made an advancement. Maybe I'm scared. Night, Electrolux 1996. Boston Dynamics. Just so you know, 1996 was the what I see. It's close to that. So we're talking how many years, though? Yeah. It's it's quite a few years.

Is that the one I'm looking robotics? Does it say here? I I just looked it up because it's an interesting question. I'll give you another one. It's it's still a dumb machine like ours. Now? It it's like our washing machine. It does not say, hey. By the way, give me the Yeah. Give me your dishes. That's right. So now if we also look at Boston Dynamics, how old is the Boston Dynamics robot?

Well, they've actually gone through multiple owners because they haven't been able to create their profitability. So when I watch those late I always watch the latest Boston Dynamics video of the robot dancing and and doing parkouring and things like that. And it's all very impressive, but you have to remember it's all taking place in pretty much a padded room that's full 1992. 292. So, to my point, it's 2024. Boston Dynamics is, 1992, is 32 years old.

So they can't let it out of the padded room. Now we do now this flip side of this, I have been to the Tesla factory. I've seen the KUKA robots and what they can do, and you are Yep. Experiencing the future when you go into a Tesla factory. But just to say that until Roomba or Boston Dynamics get to the next level, I am not worried. I'm sleeping at night. But you heard the you heard the Project Moonat story, and I say to people, I, the Jetsons were promised by the year 2020. 2000.

By 2000, we were supposed to have a robot in our home taking walking our dog, buying our groceries, taking care of the kitchen, and we're supposed to have flying cars. That was 2020. That's 24 years ago. I woke up in a bed. I had sheets on it. I had it when I was a little boy. I'm a lot older than that. I went to use the toilet in the morning. Hey. Same type of thing when I was a boy. No rabeams in my shower. And the microwave, and I've gotta look this up.

Do you know when the microwave was created? For seventies. Oh, wave founded. I don't know if that's founded as a word. 1945, the first patent for a microwave oven. And we still use a microwave. And so when people talk about advances yeah. We have a phone in our hand. It gives us capabilities, but we're not there yet. So the question is not that the robots will take over. It's that the individual machines that robots control will change our life. Meaning, they could take jobs.

They could take opportunities. No different than the conversation about artificial intelligence combined with robotics today. But, yeah, I I don't sit around, and I'm not afraid of our washing machine nor our dryer nor our refrigerator nor our microwave. Not afraid. But so the question wasn't about fear. It was there's a lot of data here. There's a lot of personal or potentially private can be used nefariously. So that was more my question.

The larger challenge is that we talk about in the space industry is the absconding of that data from the satellite so that it gets into other hands. And and there's a lot of encryption and and requirements for security to make sure that the data does go from the satellite to where it's expected to go. So we, you know, we have a plan of where it's coming from and where it's going to and protections in place to make sure that happens. So what let's see. Infinite streams, we talked about.

No. Every company is a Mearth company a space company. Sorry. Yeah. And so this is my my last point as we get heading to a close in our great conversation today that I I do a lot of discussion with Fortune 100 companies to share the story about our our future opportunities of applying data from space and really saying if you wave your magic wand, what is the data that your company would want that they can't acquire right now?

And when companies start thinking about that and they say, gosh, if I could monitor my land, if I could monitor my workforce, if I could, count you know, car counting is popular with hedge funds and financial firms, but can we go way beyond what we're quantifying with data we bring back from space? Would it be good and useful for me? And also, would I be able to now learn about my competitors? Well, yes, you could.

So now this conversation transitions from a strategy typically of, well, how could this affect our r and d in in the future to, oh, wow. This is now a financial discussion of what could we get, about our company and compare it to other companies.

There's so much that will be learned in the data science field in the future, and I encourage any young person listening that's thinking about their career to be looking in the data sciences area because the talent that we need and the jobs are going to proliferate just like they did when the Internet started and everybody was running around saying, who knows how to program HTML? You know?

Like this you you need you're gonna need a lot of talent in these areas and companies will be hiring for this. And it'll be very different than in the Internet days when it was a question of, well, what percentage of your ad budget are you gonna donate or or, like, waste on this thing called the world wide web instead of, oh my gosh. That's an industry that's gonna go from 5,000,000,000 to 50,000,000,000 to $500,000,000,000 and now be responsible for 25% of all GDP. That's the Internet.

Like, you know, like like No. It's and I remember FrontPage, first program done in FrontPage. I went to Dreamweaver and with multiple sites, we we've got from Wix to customized you went to the projectmoonhot.org website and saw some of the work that's being done. It's just out of this world by some of the team members. So, yeah, it's, but you focus primarily on the data side. Why do you think why did data become your point of venture? Well, it's easier to move, but I what is it?

Bytes or, these are these are little bites and bits. Bits and bits. Right? Whatever. And, these are the enablers of, as we saw Salesforce transformed how we operate software from, you know, disks and what have you to just getting it digitally, getting a subscription digitally. There's a lot of power in, just delivering data versus being involved with hardware, that can slow you down. So We we need both, though. We do need the hardware. We need the But we have built the satellite to get the data.

So we did did that part of it. Right? Yeah. Yeah. There's a we could also talk we have a a full initiative on transforming education around the world. And the construct is that every classroom doesn't matter what it is. We we focus on STEM or STEAM, but every classroom should give us a little bit of space. Meaning, a professor who teaches psychology at a university, could they teach 2 or 3 days out of a full semester about beyond Earth? What would they talk about? I don't know anything.

Yeah. You do. Living in confined corners, living away from home, living in gravity. What it's like to live with a group of individuals? What's the transition? What is the overview effect? How does that impact you? Could you just talk 2 or 3 days about that? Yeah. What if every classroom on earth, instead of looking at beyond earth as space because it's just beyond earth, what if every classroom because our world is embedded with technologies from it.

What if every classroom on earth just took give us a little bit of space? So we have a whole initiative on that. We've got people like Andy Aldrin, who we've spoken to for quite some time. We have, Pierce, who is a former military person who wants to see the behavioral impact of the the future of having positive opportunities for Beyonder for for the world.

So we've got a a variety of individuals who are looking at that that might be of interest to you in terms of transforming how we look at even our educational system to fulfill what you just Yeah. We really are excited about the different sectors we can impact with, the different uses of our data. And, I think the idea as we go back to this, every company is a space company.

It it is like a question to to pose to everyone listening, like, how is your company preparing for our space future, preparing to utilize the data that we bring back from space? And and if you weren't thinking about it, how how could you, influence, the company to make sure that they are a part of this future? Because it's like the Internet. If you're not thinking about it now, you'll be left behind.

As I like to say, the future is happening under our feet and you're if it's not early, here's my quote. I'm gonna share this with you. It's kind of hilarious, but Yeah. People have laughed. But but it makes it's not it's it's too early until it's too late. So if you're just not there and you're saying, gosh, it's just not oh, it's gonna be years. And you could easily think that because when you read about NASA and the Artemis mission in 2026 and things getting delayed, that's fine.

That is going on to the longer term plan. But what's happening in the commercial satellite arena underneath our feet, it's going online, like, very soon. I mean, we're launching here. So I I would I would reframe it because the challenge is through my experiences around the world from Lithuania to Estonia to Latvia talking about it, Macedonia, living in Hong Kong and Asia, is that there are so many speed bumps that individuals are kind of tired of the promise.

However, what you're really focusing on is a a certain dynamic within the Beyond Earth ecosystem, and that is data capabilities with satellites that are presently available and have advanced to the point of multiple streams of value. So it's not when we use the term space, I think what it does is it sometimes it pushes a lot of people back. I I I see it all the time. I'm not interested. I'm not interested. But if talk about satellites and data and capabilities, hey. You got a phone. Right?

You look at weather. Right? You you use your GPS. Correct? Have you ever done this? Yeah. I have. That is all technology that comes from beyond Earth. That's all space or satellite technology. I think that conversation fragmented into that one category is an even more powerful, path to less resistance. Well, that's true. Satellites are something people know about that there are telecommunication satellites. I love to, bring out an app on my phone that's called satellite pointer.

It's a free app, and you point it at the window, and it shows you all the big cable satellites that are flying above our heads. They're little marching like soldiers all in a line. And you can see, oh, there's AMC. There's Intelsat. There's Utelsat. You it let labels all of them. And so if you ever feel like you're not connected to space, and, of course, this is one of the the proven industries in space is tele you can see that. And I show that to people and they say, wow. I had no idea.

And this is part of the And and that's my point. It's something they could connect to because it it is their their communication system. It is their their, their their entertainment. And now oh, oh, okay. That's very different than people going to the International Space Station. It's really tactile when you start giving examples and showing them. You know? You were on a plane today. You listened to in flight Wi Fi. That was coming from a satellite. Oh, I did interact with space today. You know?

Yeah. Well, you you watched the second video of the 2, I'm assuming, the one that has the hand drawn diagram for Project Moon Hut. And the first thing it starts off with is that our lives are basically space related to inventions that came from beyond Earth.

I mean, cloud computing, this entire conversation would not exist if not for cloud computing, which came about because we needed to be able to do computing on the international or the deicing or baby food or the elliptical or the so what we're similar in that is we're saying, yeah, our lives are embedded in it. But it's it's not an easy sell. No. You're always having to to just frame it so it's digestible sometimes. It's unfortunate.

But part of the challenge is that we cannot see what is flying above our head there. So what is it? 6,700 satellites that are active today, something like that. We're gonna our life is 4,000. And so people don't, like, it's hard to grasp, what about that activity. Today on I was on a call and the first words out of this person's mouth, yeah, but all the space debris, it's all not gonna survive. No. Yeah. So there's a lot of space in space and a lot of a lot of A whole another conversation.

So so this was fabulous, Lisa, and I truly, truly, truly appreciate you coming and helping and learned a lot. Took 17 pages of notes. So that's fabulous. Appreciate it, tremendously that you were here for us, and hopefully, you'll become more involved in Project Moon Hat. So I wanna thank you for your time. For those of you who took time out of your day to listen to this podcast, listen in. We appreciate it.

We do hope that you too learn something that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others. Now Project Moon Hat Foundation is where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn those innovations and paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Once again, now I didn't say it in the beginning.

If you go to our website, top right hand corner, you can make a donation. We are a 501c3, but we have individuals helping us the world over. And we hope that everybody who's listening in decides to make that little click or to email us and say you would like to help participate because we have people from lawyers to physicians to data scientists. You name it. The gamut of the people who are helping us is pretty extensive. So, Lisa, once again, you're amazing.

When's what's the single best way to get ahold of you? Can you check? I think LinkedIn is is a great way. It's just Lisa Rich's. There are a lot of Lisa Rich's. So you want Yes. I was going to say, you win, what, 400,000 of them? Company. Look for Lisa Rich at explore, which is spelled xplore, and, you'll find me. It's good to write a note of, you know, why you're getting in touch. I have a lot of public events, so, I wanna make sure and and always, respond, as I can.

But that's a good place to reach me. And and I've got a good feed there as well. Explore.com has a feed about our activities. If there's anyone in the Seattle area. I'm not sure when you're posting this, David. Is it this week? Or No. No. Because we just did Ken last week. We've got yours, so it'll be a few weeks out before we post. I don't, have any upcoming things other than something in March.

We're getting into the Redmond Historical Society because of a whole other topic of creating the Redmond Space District here, which is because more satellites than anywhere in the world are produced in Redmond, Washington. So that'll have to be a future Oh, wow. That's the factoid. Yeah. Yeah. So, anyway, thank you so much for the time and great conversation. I appreciate it and look forward to, hearing from your audience and and future conversations with you.

And and for all of you out there, love to connect with you also. It's [email protected]. You can reach us at Twitter at at projectmoonhut, myself at Goldsmith. There's LinkedIn. There's Facebook. There's Instagram. You could reach out to us in a variety of different ways. And do check out, again, the website, project moonhot.org. Take a look at the 40 year plan. Take a look at the new Project Moon Hut classification system.

Take a look at the work that we're involved in, and you'll see there's tons there besides 2 videos that go over some of the introductors to what the work we're working on. So that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening. Hello, everyone. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite. Throughout history, we've seen humanity undergo transformational shifts that are so impactful they've, they've been, did that. There we go. That's an example.

Hello, everyone. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite. Throughout history, we've seen humanity undergo transformational shifts that are so impactful, they define themselves into entire ages. Just recently, you've lived through the information age, and what an incredible journey it's been. Now think about this. You could we could very well be in the midst of another monumental shift, the transition into the age of infinite.

We're talking about an age that transcends the concepts of scarcity and abundance. It introduces a lifestyle rich with infinite possibilities enabled by a new paradigm shift that links the moon and the earth into the term we call Mearth, moon and earth. This synergy will create a new ecosystem and economic model propelling us into an era of infinite possibilities. Sounds like a plot for an extra extraordinary sci fi film, doesn't it? But this is a story that we will see unfold in your lifetime.

This podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation, where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut, we happen to be named by NASA, through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem. And then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.

Now if you're interested, you go to our website, www.projectmoonhot.org, where you can check out some of the really neat, new ads to the website that just went up. But you could check out the 40 year plan, our work, and we just added on the Project Moon Hut classification system. So that's under the 40 year plan. Really, really cool. So now let's dive into today's podcast. The title is from orbit to impact, Earth's New Era. And today, we have an amazing guest on the line.

Lisa and I have spent a decent amount of time together already. Name's Lisa Rich. How are you, Lisa? I'm great. Thank you for having me, David. Well, I'm very excited. And I here's their short bio. We always do a very brief bio of every individual. Lisa is the founder and COO of Xplore, a service company using a high caliber, multi sensor platform to store and transmit data, achieve data fusion, and on orbit processing.

Also, as a VC, she's invested in 37 commercial space and frontier technology companies. She enters the she entered the space industry in 2014 to impact the environment education and United States security interest along with to be a part of the growing economy. Now before we we begin and we didn't add these in the first interviews, Lisa and I have not reviewed a single bit of what she's going to speak about today. We are learning this together.

So Lisa's been on a journey to figure out what we're going to talk about. It's the first time I'm going to hear the outline. First time we're going to be talking about the content. So, Lisa, do you have an outline or bullet point series for us to follow? Yes. I do. We're gonna start with point 1, which will be influences. Okay. Influences, number 2? 2 is investing in the future. In the future, number 3? 3 is science missions today versus tomorrow. Today versus tomorrow.

Next. Point 4 is transition from government to commercial. Government to commercial. Next. Creating value from satellites. From satellites. Next. Infinite streams of proprietary data. Proprietary data. Next. This will be the last one, which is every company is a space company. And I know you're going to complain about that. But that is No. No. I'm not not gonna complain. Yeah. People who've heard the interviews understand. There's no complaint. There's just clarity.

Okay. So let's start with number 1, influences. Yes. So a lot of people ask me, how did I get into the space industry? How did I become an investor in advanced technologies? And it really began at the earliest juncture with 2 books that changed my life, which would be the, be On Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte.

And this was a book talking about the age of the Internet and what the promise of the Internet was and all of that interconnectivity that was going to be changing our lives and certainly changed mine. And then the Singularity is Near with Ray Kurzweil, who is you you talked about, you know, abundance. But maybe we'll we'll talk about the on being digital first because I think that's No. I I think we should. And and I've worked with Ray. Great. And And And Peter I will share with you. Excuse me?

And Peter Diamandis who really has espoused, all of the great, ideas that Ray has had and really helped so many people understand. How was he doing? Is he still he wanted to live forever? That was one of the Peter Diamandis? No. No. Ray. How is Ray doing? Well, I know that he was at, an event that Peter had, 20 I I saw him at one of Peter's Singularity events, probably 2019. And, but I haven't followed since You know, he was all the inventions he had created, were part of this whole purpose.

He wanted to reach the Singularity so that he could last forever or have this long term. He's 75 Yes. And New York, New York. So he's still he's still kicking. So that's good. Yeah. So all of these things the book on being digital was a great influencer because at that point in time, we were on Mosaic. We were working on these early, you know, search engines. Google didn't exist yet. And yet, we're reading this book saying, at some point, you're going to have video on the web or on your phone.

You're going to have tickets that you can buy on on the it's, airplane tickets on the web. Even in flight Wi Fi was probably predicted in that book. And you read it and you thought, how how is the future going to be like this? And I don't even know what I'm gonna do when it becomes this way. I'm gonna be so excited.

And so I wanted to be a part of that future and, got a master's in and focusing on Internet communications back in after, undergrad because I knew that the Internet was changing everything and wanted my first businesses to be web based businesses or involving the Internet. And so I was involved in in creating That was 9 I'm reading it 1996.

Yeah. 96. Right. So I was right out of grad school going to work at the ad agencies to transition brick and mortar, businesses to digital strategies for the websites for the Did you study advertising? Is that what you studied? Yeah. Advertising and Internet commerce At the IIT in Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology. Yep. And so, the websites were just trying to transition, you know, what was a brochure or a or a brick and mortar business?

How did you now relate to an audience on this thing called the World Wide Web? And understanding that that footprint that was being created of a web page reaching unlimited people was an extraordinary concept for me. That like the power of technology, like right at your fingertips, it was this ultimate level of inspiration for me. And I ended up going into digital technology with my partner, and we built a website that's one of the largest sites on the web. And What website was that?

Brainyquote.com. Oh, okay. Has had billions and billions of visitors over the years, and it's a website that's sharing really educating, entertaining, uplifting audiences, and of all things famous quotation. But the the point of the site, it was utilizing public domain data and monetizing public domain data, which people didn't believe you could even that was a thing.

And it was a very complicated way of, you know, not just getting information out there, but how do you expand this audience and have this huge audience.

And so that experience of growing a website and then having it, one of the first to become really huge and monetize and reaching all of these people, it dev it evolved into a great, you know, financially it was a great thing and then it allowed me to look at the investment opportunity of how can I now become an investor in advanced technologies because I wanna be even more of a part of the future? Like, having a website, okay, that's great.

But how do I move humanity forward with other skill sets that I have that I know I'm capable of applying? Right? So I started learning about people involved in accelerators that were finding the smartest and brightest technologists, in particular, Sean O'Sullivan, who founded SOS Ventures. He, created accelerators around the world to really, find great people that were building businesses, wanted to build businesses, and he wanted to support that.

And so I was learning from brilliant people that were going to these accelerators to start businesses. And this was at a time when lab space was scaling in terms of price and size. So this idea of accessibility was for creating new things for, r and d. There it was a transformative time, not just because of the Internet, but because of technology scaling.

So you could see that a a lab was literally renting space by the foot, and you could get smart people in there that could do r and d renting lab space. You didn't have to be a Merck Pharmaceuticals or a big, you know, pharma company or a big, can't think of other other organizations, but where you would have to have 500 people working on a single project.

You could put a small team of people together that were smart researchers in a lab working on some business idea and in an accelerator program at the end of 12 weeks, come out with prototypes or a thesis and an idea that could be the foundation of a future business. So this, in particular, I was looking at synthetic biology.

Looking at cellular agriculture, protein design, future of food technologies, robotics, drones, and the space industry as we know it as the space technology looking at satellites and and things that are gonna, fly above Earth or So from an advertising background Mhmm. You went into all of these other areas. Right.

Because my my skill set is really being able to drill down from a larger view to, like, loving the the deep dive with the scientists where they can share all of these all of these specific ideas and their their, their specialists. You know? But I would love to get into the language of what a a scientist is working on and start absorbing that like a sponge and then stepping back from it and saying, what did I learn?

Because I'm not gonna become some specialist in, you know, a person that's been studying yeast for 20 years or somebody that's studying propulsion for 20 years. I don't need to know all of those specifics. I'd love to hear about it. But my skill set was drawing the larger picture view from that to understand how all these dots connect with the the the larger systems that are at work with commerce, with investment, with how these things become part of our future.

Is that No. I I I no. I completely understand what I I've similar makeup. My my mom used to say, David, you're jack of all trades, master of none. And it wasn't that. It was that it was a very broad set of ideas that I was always interested. Sounds like you were. And you did go deep, but you didn't go down to the weeds. You went high enough so that you could understand the concept, the utilization, the process, the mechanisms, the history, but you didn't go all the way down.

And that gave you even more, you a factorial of knowledge base to absorb the next one. It's like an athlete. You learn 1. You also learn a second sport. Well, the 3rd sport is not as difficult because you already have muscle memory. You already have skill sets that allow you to perform. So, yeah, I completely understand it. I just didn't know you started out in advertising. No. I've always really evolved in my growth, my skill sets, and expanded into areas that I was passionate about.

That's really how I've led my whole career that way. I don't see, you know, I see a future of abundance. So I don't find that I have to pigeonhole myself and say, just because I had an English degree, literally an English degree as a college undergrad, that I should become a writer.

No. Actually that skill of language is what has allowed me to to enter all of these different realms and speak to different specialists in so many different fields because I start to learn their language to communicate and then take that step back and say, okay. Now what did I glean from this? And how does this apply to larger constructs that are of interest and can be useful in what way? Now, I'm gonna pick on you a little bit. You said abundance.

When you have abundance, it means there's scarcity. That's the yin and yang. The reason it's called the age of infinite is there's just infinite possibilities when you open up all of these doors. And that's why we use the Age of Infinite because we're going to get a a an I don't know, logarithmic explosion of ideation that comes out of being able to use Beyond Earth or the Mearth ecosystem and all of those categories. So, yeah, that's great.

So how how did so this book, it this book said to you get involved, see, and then expand. How did Ray fit into this? Well, the Singularity, is near is fascinating because it's talking about this convergence of capabilities that are being all plugged in together. So you've got synthetic biology, for example, merging with robotics for merging with so allowing for high data throughput allow just accelerating a capability as other platforms plug into, something that previously was more analog.

Say somebody sitting at a at a biology lab with their sets of cells and they can't really accelerate beyond the cells that are in their hands. Well, now when you roboticize that, and automate that processes, now it's accelerated. So that idea of these different things merging has always been something that, I've utilized in my career is, like, how do I find other tools that accelerate what I can do today? So you didn't take out of the singularity the singularity.

Well, that the singularity is where it's all going. I mean, we see Moore's law in action. We see, you know, prices moving down. We see capabilities moving up. Everything's scaling. And you're saying, do I care as much about the endpoint of that? Well, we're actually gonna get to that later in this talk. Okay. When I I I I talk about every company. No. No. That no. That that's scrutiny. It's not it's not a bad thing.

It's while I was in, living in Hong Kong, there was this person who ran American Airlines for Asia, and we would get together and we talk about what happens with the convergence of artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, 3 d printing, sensor tech, bioengineering. What happens to the society as a whole with those type of conditions transforming the way we live.

So we actually looked it was really kind of, at this time, we the first time you're seeing these convergences where 3 d printing and robotics were connected or artificial intelligence helped the robotics to make a move. And we saw factories with 1200 employees and then 12 robots put in and a 1000 people laid off. But these people had been working in these factories for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, and all of them are gone. Mhmm. They they're not working there.

So we started asking the questions what happens on a societal level. We looked back at the Germans. Germans were shipbuilders. And there was a transition that'll happen that it took time. From shipbuilding, they went to automotive. And you saw, like, an x y axis in convergence so people could learn new skills. But what happens if it happens overnight? And what does that mean for the future of humanity? And so we were asking these questions.

So you axe you were using a similar formulaic when you started expressing yourself, which I I think is fascinating. Yeah. And you can look at the singularity in both positive and negative ways. Right? As you think about the people that are excluded from this, and how did their lives change, that's a whole other topic. But on balance, I my position is it is good for humanity. And there wasn't a bad or a good thing. We were just trying to figure out what that future would converge into.

What does that mean, for, at that point, 7a half 1000000000 people? So, yeah. The Singularity was an interesting book. I did not read the, I'm being digital. But Oh, yeah. And you'll read it and say, gosh. All of this has come true. So it's incredible. Well, that that's some people get it. Some people don't. The challenge is it's it's easier to view in hindsight, And you and you were you in the valley when you were doing Britney Quotes?

No. No. But obviously influenced by it when I went to the valley to then invest in Frontier Technologies to constantly was was in San Francisco for that, period. So you were you were in Chicago, was was that? Yeah. So how was Ad agencies are in Chicago. I Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Okay. Alright. So any so on are these the the main drivers of your influence that move pushed you forward? Yeah. Definitely.

And and the singularity no. I was just with all these propulsion engineers in Orlando at SciTech, and they're working on nuclear propulsion capabilities for this amazing future of nuclear power, where we we really have more power all over the world. And what happens when energy, is more abundant and cheap? Maybe there will be more peace. This is how they they see it, that they're we're gonna have a more peaceful world, less wars over scarce resources, and things like that.

It's really a fascinating topic. Do do you believe that? I think that, the the the pow there are people I'm involved with that are looking at nuclear power Mhmm. Quickly. And there's so many hurdles for the public to be perceiving it as a safe thing. And, like, and I think that it it allows unleashes a lot of, more, parody.

I was at an event with Oliver Stone, that he he produced a documentary called nuclear now, and it's trying to dispel all the public perception and damage that's been done since the PowerPoint plant scares of the eighties. We've lost years of technological advancement because of public perception. Oh, and you look at France as a whole, has a huge nuclear, infrastructure, which has kind of coming to its end in terms of having new facilities.

But Germany, disbanded them because everybody was afraid. And an interesting point when we were creating the first four we were designing the 4 phases of the moon, the project Moon Hut's 4 phases, On there, one of the teammates put a nuclear symbol. Mhmm. And that alone was enough to get people, all up in arms. It they they don't even know that it is on the moon.

I mean, there it's not gonna explode the same way, but it was enough where people focused so much so on that that they couldn't get past it. Mhmm. And so, yeah, it's a it's a global challenge and I don't even I didn't hear this movie, that Oliver Stone had made. Yeah. And then you did have, what was it, Japan, just had that, the the meltdown scenario. So you hear the bad, but you don't hear the good, the fact that France is able to supply its population with a cheaper power supply. Right. Right.

But the tools we're talking about the tools you could have at the palm of your hand, like the Internet. The other thing that I think relates to singularity, and we're talking about platforms that plug into each other. The advent of the iPhone was changing everything. The ability to have the Internet in your hand and texting capability and the the web, like, and videos, you know, on your phone. All that was fascinating, but to me, the the iPhone that came out 2007, I believe Mhmm.

Yeah. Is the same iPhone today. The boiler plate of that iPhone is the same today. The thing that's changed are the apps. So Yes. The platform, this powerful platform of multiple capabilities that anyone could even decide what the capabilities are that they want on the phone was so powerful. And that concept of building a platform for the ages and something that transformational, that was inspiring to me.

As what what other platforms are out there that either I wanna invest in or work on building that could have this kind of power. And we'll get to that with the company I'm creating with Okay. No, that's the the trans it's interesting. I'm trying to mind map out how these three different sets of conditions that you've given, which is the the digital, the singularity or the, development and interconnectedness of all of these types of new tech, and then you bring it down to the palm of your hand.

And at the same time, you and I I mean, there was a challenge with getting on a simple platform or we still have microwaves in our home, and there's a huge disparity of or a gap between the advanced and some of the things that we still as humans do every day. So it's just, it's a it's a huge gap for for most people. So, for example, creating a nuclear power facility is something that's not gonna be well understood even on the moon. And the majority of people don't know much about the iPhone.

So Right. And and even, now this is predating the the crypto people and that that involvement I've had, but the the the people that were working on, Bitcoin technologies, their mantra, I would say circa 20 17, 2018 when I met these folks, they were talking about the people that don't have a phone and don't don't have banking and Yeah. They don't have a bank account. They don't have the ability to exchange goods easily or services easily, but the phone gave them that ability.

And getting, you know so it really has impacted, the world in so many ways. It's When we're designing, or I think most companies today, you're you're looking at mobile first. Mhmm. Especially if you're global. Because if you're doing Africa or you're working within the Africa region, the Asia region, Phones are ubiquitous to a point where, you know, having a desktop or a system like that is not as I'm not gonna say it's not as commonplace. That would be a very terrible way to express it.

But you're on your phone the majority of the time. It's with you. It's gonna you're gonna get a message. You're gonna test message. You're going to be trying to look something up. You're looking to see if you have a melanoma on your skin by taking a picture of it, which you wouldn't do off of your desktop. Nope. Okay. So no. No. It it's, I I loved our first conversation when we got to know each other, of creating the title. And I would not have thought of this trajectory for you.

So I appreciate it. So are we on to investing in the future? Yes. I think this all kind of built into this idea of, as I mentioned, the platforms. Companies that I would want to invest in are not moonshots. They might have a big idea, but they have to have a platform approach that's derisking the business so that's producing multiple streams of revenue generating opportune generating opportunities because not the the bigger vision that they might have, what if that isn't achievable?

I've always looked at investing from a conservative standpoint of what if everything you're doing fails, then what do you have to hang your hat on? So I was never investing in hype, never investing in loving it, you know, inspiring ideas, but always holding the founder's feet to the fire to say, but what if everything else fails will allow this business to be sustainable? And that's a discipline. And so I always look for people that were thinking that way.

And, typically, it was a company that would have a platform approach because they could say and I'll use an example. The every company started out as a company called Clara, and they're using synthetic biology to, create custom amino acid profiles and products, and the amino acid pro amino acids are used in tools, foods like baking where you could make the Mhmm. Fluffiest eggs or the stiffest meringue, for a baking company, for example.

And when they were starting out and they said, we have this big vision for, you know, working with all sorts of food companies to help customize the outcomes of their baking goods or even, beverages and things like that. We said, well, what what can you produce at the lowest, quantity, but the highest cost to make sure that there's some moderate amount of income that you could get just at the start of this business because it's gonna take a while to grow it.

And they found this unique enzyme that they could create that interestingly is a preservative in wine, and only 5 companies in the world produce this type of a preservative. I think they're called lysozyme. And they 5 companies in the world that produce it were all in Europe, and this preservative, again, supports the whole wine industry. It's in every glass of wine. But what do you do when there's avian bird flu throughout Europe?

What happens to your supply chain when there are only 5 producers of it? And now you can produce it using synthetic biology, and it's only needed in small quantities, and you could have it be a pure source of avian free, you know, avian That's right. Yeah. Flu free enzyme.

Well, that's the kind of creative thinking that I love in founders and I value in our own company is that you have to be thinking about scrappy, creative ways to look at the long view of what your technology can do in the future, but you can't get carried away with it. It can do all of these amazing things. You have to decide what a starting point is and what's real today. And so they pursued that, and that was really exciting.

And other companies I influenced, like, Finless Foods, they were working on, stem cells for fish, specifically for tuna. And Stem cells for tuna? Cellular agriculture using tuna. Instead of killing the fish, you were cultivating tuna cells to create the world's first premium grade sashimi. Oh, wow. Using cell so you don't have to kill the the fish Right. In the ocean? You're you're yes. Yeah. Okay. And, it's really just like yogurt. Is that is that an acceptable food in Japan?

Grown and, the Japanese are, actually a partner for finless foods. And, I I'm one of the people few people in the world that can say I've had the first Non fish fish. Cellular grown tuna. I ate it. Yeah. It was and guess what? It tasted like fish. But but so the company, they they needed to be I thought they needed to be thinking, where does where does this capability go in the future as well for because they are thinking about our sustainable supply chains of Yeah. Fish is such a problem.

And what is it? 70% of the fish on our table when we go to the restaurant isn't even what we think it is. There's this Oh, no. Yeah. It's problem with and the provenance and the mercury and all this stuff. Yeah. The the microplastics, it's part of the the whole evolution of the food chain. Yeah. But the bigger numbers are, to give an example, there are 300,000 fishing vessels just in China alone.

And if you look at the volume of fish taken out of the waters, it's just an astronomical number to feed their people. You can't argue with people trying to feed their population. But we're seeing more and more closer to coastal region regions no longer having fish or large enough fish to be able to support their ecosystem. So to be able to the the challenges are we we're solving the back end and, hopefully, in time, that will allow the front end, which is fish, to be able to thrive again.

Yeah. And it's and, we could have a whole show on that because I love talking about fish even though my life is about space. But, but but in this case, I I had been involved in, in a tertiary way in the space industry and was grow growing in interest in in what was happening and applications of microgravity and things like that. Like, what was happening on the space station and how could we utilize microgravity for manufacturing in the future and even food production.

And so I'd shared this with the company and and offered to connect them to people on the ISS. And they took my idea to heart, and they ended up, getting HP bioprinter on the ISS Yeah. And produce the world's first fish cakes printed on the space station. So I was really proud of them for doing that because it was just an example of, you know, what you could do. What Was there any value to producing a fish cake on the International Space Station? Yeah. I mean, because it's in microgravity Yeah.

How you are producing any kind of product is unique because if we think about a future where we're going to have space stations, plural, and have to supply not necessarily of resupply missions from Earth, If it has to be produced on the station, how are we going to do that? How is the printer going to function? And how does it, you know, create a But the printer still needs supplies. Yeah. So So is there is there not an equivalent mass to mass? You take whatever you're producing.

You're not growing stem cells or cells or any type of you're just taking a, compound or whatever you've used as your original aggregate. And then what you're doing is creating something else out of it. Yeah. This wasn't this wasn't an end to end, process. But, of course, we do know that given microgravity and all of these experiments that are happening on the space station today that are, they're finding that they can grow, in, of course, in 3 d, you have an accelerated ability to grow cells.

And so there are cancer fighting cells, leukocytes, I believe, that are being Mhmm. Different crystals that are forming faster on the space station or they have longer fibers and such that or even so on the cellular side, that's really fascinating for the future of what we could produce on the station. But I was also fascinated with things like ZBLAN, the future production of ZBLAN because that, is a a tool I don't know what ZBLAN is.

That, our undersea cables right now are transferring data and they have repeaters because they connect a cable to a cable. Yep. That I'm for a while you're at. And the zblad is a fiber that the attenuation of it is such that in microgravity, you have these super you can have these super long, long fibers where the idea is you could have a cable that's so long you wouldn't have as many repeaters and that information could travel from one end of the ocean to the other.

It already travels in however many milliseconds, but it would be, you know, mill Yeah. You you're taking out the you're also taking out a risk variable of having to have a repeater in the center of it, so you're now getting a longer duration signal. Yeah. And it's it's maintaining its efficacy through the entire system. So you're you're actually creating spooled cable. You potentially could create spooled cable on a a station orbiting the And that's what they've been doing.

That's what they've been testing. And the idea that it's so valuable that that that's why you would do it in microgravity and then you bring it down for these undersea cables. And then our ability to transmit data is even faster than it already is and, the world gets even smaller. Right? As that information can trap No. I I'm I'm traveling back to conversations we've had about biotech and biology being done above beyond Earth, low Earth orbit environments.

They're getting reactions where they expect one type of growth, but they're getting 10 times the amount of growth in one in another area and no growth in the area that they anticipated. So it would be, like, your neck would be, 2 meters, 2, 6 feet long, but your head and your body would stay the same. And so you're getting these anomalies out of the reaction.

And but you're looking to create the cable we just had on Ken from Redwire, and he talked about just creating the molecular structure, bringing it back and and creating it on earth because that works far better than trying to create that up in microgravity. Yep. And one of these Red Wire was they acquired Made in Space that was working on, and we had invested in them.

They were the idea of printing structures on orbit and large structures on orbit so you don't have to send the mass on a rocket is fascinating. And, they're also have been advancing ZBLAN and some robotic capability. And they just put it they just put a new device, up there, a new factory, small factory type, but it's Ken Sabin. Mhmm. I was trying to remember his name. My my grandfather's name was Slabin and I kept on trying to say, where is it? Where is the name of Sabin?

But Ken Sabin, if you don't know him, he's did a brilliant explanation of how the crystallization on, in microgravity is enough. All you need is a tablespoon of something. You could bring it back and duplicate it. And the question I asked is, how does it work? And his answer was, we don't know. It just works. So you can create a crystalline structure or any type of anatomical, configuration. And as long as you get enough of it, you can come back.

And the way the universe works, it will duplicate that structure over and over and over again. There he said, we don't know why, which I thought was fascinating. Yeah. There this has been studied for a long time, and Zeblan in particular, I haven't found a company yet that's really got the legs that we would be looking for to to make an investment. But in but science is all valuable. Right?

These are these are, like, exquisite science missions, which is kinda getting to my next But but but you called it as I investing in the future. Mhmm. When, 2 things. 1, I'd like to know, when you ask this question, let me go back, to what would be the the low hanging fruits or the repetitive or the value add that you're creating if this goes south, how do you get individuals to discover that? That would be my first question. And the second one is investing in the future.

What do you actually mean by that when it comes to and you can only talk about yourself. When it comes to you sitting down and making these decisions? So those are 2 different questions. How do you get them to, and how do you analyze investing in that? How do we get them to To to find that low hanging fruit. You said you went back to the people with the fish, and you said Yeah. Find it. Yeah. But finding it, people come back with really bad ideas.

Is there something that you've learned over the years that helps to point an individual, a mechanism, a tool, a question, or philosophy that allows them to find something that has, in your case, it's a a financial return the way you were expressing it. Well, I'll give you a good example because it's it's quite an exciting story of Acxiom Space. I was the 1st investor in Acxiom Space that is now sending their 3rd crew of commercial astronauts to the ISS, this week, actually.

Yep. And so Acxiom's goal is to be, creating the world's 1st commercial space station, and then they expect to have multiple space stations because that's what we envision for the future. But starting with attaching to the ISS and building out Acxiom Station, to the point where it's functioning and then the ISS is gonna be deorbited. And Did they just say they're even considering 2,035 now? They keep Was that just They do keep pushing the date out.

But when you have something that's this massive capex, to build a space station, how do you financially support that? Well, they were they had to think and really strategize, and they realized that because they were already they already had this expertise of human space flight under their belt. The cofounder of Acxiom is Mike Suffredini, who was the Yep. Head of the International Space Station for over a decade and, you know, had a 4,000 people and a $4,000,000,000 budget he managed.

I mean, this is someone that knows how to how to run a station and keep everybody safe and and and just phenomenal, people that he had attracted that all had great respect and and and capabilities under his watch. Well, that skill set, how many people in the world would have that skill set? Like, not many. So could they take that human spaceflight expertise and now monetize it? And they did for astronaut training. Training the astronauts for private missions to the International Space Station.

So they're the 1st company to have the right to have commercial astronauts on the ISS for 14 day. They actually had a 17 day mission previously. So, people think SpaceX is going to, the ISS. They do take them to the ISS as a partner, but it's Acxiom that is running the mission on the station with Their their SpaceX is a logistics company. Right. Not a space company. It's a logistics company with the geography between Earth and, at this point At this point. Low Earth orbit.

Yeah. At this point because that's but they're they're a logistics firm. And so, yes, that is their skill set is not the the the we're calling them spacers because there's we there's going to be a lot of different terms. But individuals who are educated well enough to be able to perform up beyond Earth. And so you see a 14 to 17 day mission. So you're so the people who are going up are not skilled to fly like getting on a plane.

They're skilled to do something else in the International Space Station. They have tasks that and an agenda and studies that they're doing and a whole, you know, itinerary that that and led by a commander that's that's leading them. In this case, it's Michael Lopez Elegria, who's one of the most storied astronauts, in in the astronaut hall of fame, etcetera. He's phenomenal, and I don't even know which mission this is, but he's got quite a history as an astronaut and great leader for the team.

So so they had the discipline to say, if we're gonna build the space station, but we need financial strength behind us first, how do we make money, before we go to the space station? Obviously, there's government funding that they could seek out, which they did do for some missions with mice. I love to call them the mousetronaut missions. And then they also just had a 3, I think, $200,000,000 contract. I might have that wrong. But it's to design space suits for, for the I s for the ISS or ACCUS.

That that's yeah. That did they buy were they the ones who bought or did vie Voyager bought by the that new outfit. God, I was we were talking to him. Guy at a university okay. I can't remember the guy's name off the top of my head. But, yes, I've seen the contract, and I've seen some of the samples that they've put out Yeah. So online.

So they're a good example of But was that you who said to them was that you who said to them, find low hanging fruit and they found it, or was this something that they did anyway? Well, we kept asking the question of what how is the business model? How does this how do you square this? You know? And so they had done a lot of studies. They had firms that that help them assess different ways of monetization.

And and so they were more business savvy, already going into it to to figure out how they were gonna, get those first dollars in and and, and fill out the manifest because this hadn't been done before. You have to now go around the world and find those individuals that are able to pay $55,000,000 for a flight. And what it's evolved into, which is quite exciting, is a relationship now with ESA where the astronauts that are going with them, I think they have 1 or 2 ESA astronauts.

But ESA is booking missions with Axiom now, which is really great. It's really great. So Walter Villaday is coming from the Italian Air Force. He'll be on the mission. And, as I mentioned, Mike Allais, and then they have a Swiss astronaut and then the first Turkish astronaut. It will be going. And this is also exciting because when we looked at their their plan, as you've heard, I'm an English major. I love to to craft, a good good written piece of material.

And so, at the very beginning, I was editing their their decks, you know, to to help them raise money, because it was kind of scraping and crawling at the start of the of a company like that to find people that had also a big vision and wanted to financially support it. This was not a time when anybody would have been thinking this way. So My wife was an English minor. So Okay. I I I do she looks at a sentence.

She she'll put down a book because it's not written well and not to the point where it's aggravating, but she said it's very difficult. So, yes, I would have her look at whatever. And she's, no. It's gotta be done this way. It's gotta be done this way.

We we really a concept that I think we helped hone together in those early days was the idea that you're bringing a when a sovereign astronaut is going to the space station, you're bringing that nation is going to space effectively because it's not just the person, it's the whole footprint of all the people that are connected to that person and Mhmm.

Are supporting that person that that you're bringing that nation to space, and then you're be bringing space back to the nation with then what's achieved on orbit. So this interdependency, this relationship of helping, you know, as you say, like, Mearth and creating these environments where it all it all comes back to help humanity is the point. Yes. That's And I I helped we helped communicate that together to future astronauts.

So the the second part of the question was was the where did you I think there was 2 parts now. I I didn't write down the second one. Investing in the future. Yeah. Investing in the future itself. That how do you calculate, figure out, or what's what's underneath that? Sure. Well, all of these concepts that I've shared were all very new and groundbreaking and, enabling, in my view, future marketplace. And the reason and I know you don't wanna talk about money and finance on this show, but No.

No. No. We we that I don't there's no challenge with that. None at all. Okay. None at all. We we've we've had people talk about all sorts of numbers, So that's not an issue. Well, you can't just have something that's interesting and new, become a sustainable business. It has to have financial heft to it or potential to have, hiring people and growing a business and and, and and having other businesses that evolve into an ecosystem. Right?

You can't, it isn't an emerging technology that's going to be helping build a future if it doesn't have those characteristics in my view. So if you just so you can go into anywhere you'd like to. We have a paper written by a professor, Daniele, from the University of Messina on economics and he labeled it, coopetition.

And we've had guests on the program who have kind of argued and we know quite a few people who have argued that there's without government intervention, there is no financial mechanism to be able to make some of the projects that are put out there viable. So if you're going to start a space business, gonna use that term even the way it's we've talked about it, space is not an industry geography.

But if you're going to start a business, many of those that have survived have been because there is, government there are government contracts, and NASA was one that made that transition about a decade ago Yeah. Where they're spending the money more in the in this sector. However, that becomes astrobotics. That becomes where you don't have a $15,000,000,000 budget. You have a smaller budget, and you have to make something work.

And who knows what will happen when you have companies that don't have that that heft of bankroll to be able to address the challenges. Interesting you mentioned Astrobotics because the CLPS program was a $3,200,000,000 program over 10 years designed to give $300,000,000 a year to companies that are going to work on, commercial lunar payload systems. And they CLPS' commercial lunar payload system, is that what it stands for?

And Astrobotic was one of the winners of those contracts and, but the contracts in are kinda it was it was focused on landers. All the contract focused on landers. And what's ironic, and we've talked to NASA about this before, is the sustainable system means that you shouldn't just have a lander, you need to have an orbiter. Because an orbiter without a lander does not get you very much. It doesn't get you the data back to the earth. So what are you doing?

I don't really understand the that, progression. We've talked to, when he was there, Thomas Zurbuchen about this and and trying to have more exposure for for orbiter companies because that's really they should go hand in hand is my point. And I don't know what did Astrobotic have a news story about their landing mission? Because you've got a few others on the way now. Intuitive Machines is next. Mhmm. I haven't heard any others, but the, there there are risks associated with today.

The process of investment where you're giving a $130,000,000 or $250,000,000. Yeah. It's a high bar. It's a high bar to achieve some of these directives and it's, it could be spreading self too spreading too thin. It might be the opposite where innovation, flourishes because there are many players trying to achieve this desired outcome. So how do you determine what you're going to invest in the future? Right.

Well, it's so great that you brought up the the government investment because the government doll government dollars for investors are an indication of great signal in terms of is the company does the company have enough of the skill sets and capabilities that the government finds valuable to award them a contract in the first place? So Interesting you looked at it that way. I I do. Yeah. Because, depending on the award.

I I I I I just putting it out there, just interesting that you looked at it from that perspective. There have been some cases where there's some award and it's been handed out like candy and there isn't really a differentiation between who received it and and that. But, I mean, in my own company, we're, for example, one of 4 companies with 100 that applied for the very first, awards from National Security Innovation Capital, and they only had a $15,000,000 budget.

Several 100 companies applied and only 4 one, and we were one of 4 that won $2,000,000 to advance on our prototype because we, jump ahead of the supply chain with the satellite we're building. So that investors actually requires a higher level of sophistication to understand when dollars are awarded. Is that a significant win or not? So we were learning that ourselves early on.

It's, we have a lot of discussion within Project Moon Hut about governments and accepting money from one government means you might be losing out on opportunities for another government. There are alliances that are out there and if you're trying to create a global ecosystem, you are aligning yourself one way or another. But we also talk about the challenges when you are dealing with the bureaucracy, and we were named we were named Project Moon Hut because of working with NASA.

And the first time I visited the facilities in Silicon Valley, the first three hours, all I heard about was how much money was wasted. The first three hours and I was not at 2 2014, same time as you. All I heard about from them was $10,000,000,000 wasted here. $2,000,000,000 wasted there. This was wasted in this investment. This is a and I'm sitting there saying, oh my god. This is crazy. So do you you feel that because there's that investment mechanism, you feel more confident?

But when you invest, different than NASA investing or the government investing, when you invest, how do you figure out which company that you're you've got 37. How do you pick 1? Because you've gone from Phish to, cables under the sea. Right. Sure. And and, and satellite based Internet and things like that. Yep. Satellite based Internet. So how do how do you choose? Well, you know, there's so many gosh.

The idea of government dollars and how they help a company, there's a there's a lot to unpack there. Even dollars like as I was set you were saying you heard about dollars that were wasted or what have you. There are different types of awards. And so, if the award is to help a company have a proof of their business case and achieve that, that proof of the business model, I'm all for it.

But in other cases, it might in most cases, it's to expand a capability that might not result in some next phase of the company, for example. We had an award with NASA Advanced Innovative Concepts. It's called NIAC, n a I c. And very few of these are handed out. I was with Michael Lapointe, the director of the program at Scitech, on a panel last week.

And he even said, the phase 3 NIAC, which are these these really big ideas of our future in space, future future capabilities, that's what you apply to, that you submit. So it's not likely to have a commercial application for a long time, but that's the point of it. So we won this NIAC for our, a a craft that we created that is a light sail that allows you to go from the Earth to Jupiter in a single year.

And this would be faster than Voyager and quite exciting if we could create that in the future. So only 6 companies in the history of the program ever won this. We won this in concert with JPL and Aerospace Corporation. And it was all very, you know, exciting to have won it because it's this prestigious thing. But are we creating that satellite that can go and it's small. It's or it's not small, but it's it doesn't carry people. This is a just a Yeah. A a light sail, light craft, it's called.

It could go to the Earth to Jupiter in a single year. We could have cameras that would go on it that would image an exoplanet at a 100,000,000,000 times magnification and go out to the solar gravity lens focus region, and it's all very exciting. But what happens after we won our award? Who's ready to go pick up that mission? Did Yuri Miller call us from Breakout and say, hey, I wanna give you $20,000,000 to build that? Well, he hasn't. You know?

So it doesn't it doesn't have its next phase yet, but maybe it will in the future. At least at least Is Pete is Pete still with Breakthroughs? Yeah. Pete Wharton. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I don't know those those folks really well. I just know what they've invested in now. And I'm just saying that we win this award and everybody's proud of themselves, and we do the research and it's all quite exciting and we complete it. But what happens next?

You don't have an ecosystem supporting it or commercial, investors coming out saying, I'm ready to go put more Because because it becomes because it fits into the category of science research and exploration. And the challenge is, and this is my thinking, is the geography is too big. It's so far away that individuals can't create that ecosystem. You it would take a long time. And that's that is partially why the construct of Mearth came about.

Because we are 3 days away, we can create an economic system and an ecosystem where we're supplying, creating products and services within this geography that works. It's it's like saying, hey, family. I'm taking off and going, across the globe as compared to, I'm just gonna travel down a few kilometers or miles. I'm gonna set up another community of business. And will you buy from us?

And so so you when going back to the question about investment, you're investing in the light sale because it sounds like it's interesting to you. Well, this was our company that created it. So it wasn't me investing. It was NASA investing in us in this case. I was I'm sorry. I was flipping from my being investor to having received investment at my Okay. So I didn't mean to. That's okay. I was just trying to follow it.

Mhmm. Yeah. It's Okay. So this actually is a good segue into science missions today versus science missions tomorrow. I think it's point 3 on list. It's 3. Yeah. So when we think about what NASA invests in and their purpose, it's really about answering these these deep questions about our universe and that they're laid out in the decadal survey. And so all of these large investments that NASA has are to go after really what I would like to call exquisite science.

Very, very hard to you know, very difficult missions, very involved, intricate capabilities that that all that have to have hundreds of people working on them, like the OSIRIS VREX asteroid mission to Bennu, for example. It went out 200,000,000 miles, to get to the asteroid Bennu and have a sample return, which is, you know, our friend Dante. Oh goodness. Doctor Dante. I'm forgetting his last name, who'd who was, the PI on that project. Really incredible, you know, to do something like that.

But that's where larger dollars and the focus should be. But what continues to happen today is, science missions that kind of, borderline compete with commercial capabilities because commercial, science missions have accelerated and companies are able to do more, for less money. And so the government shouldn't be investing in capabilities that are replicated commercially. They're they're not supposed to do it, but it does happen. And it and it then limits commercial's ability to advance.

And at the same time, it limits them because they should just be focusing on the exquisite. You you're kind of piggybacking on Jeffrey Manbur's commentary where he says, the space agencies is one of the worst things that happened to the ecosystem. Mhmm. Because by concentrating all the capital to these agencies, what you've done is you've taken away that commercial impetus so everybody's just fighting for agency dollars Mhmm.

Instead of creating commercial alliances to build something forward with like all the other industries or most of the other industries that are out there. And he he's been very vocal. He was vocal on our program too, saying that hasn't helped move things forward. It's he believes it's actually hindered Mhmm. Progress. Yeah. I'll never forget I went to a GeoInt event. I was speaking there, and, the someone stopped me to ask about, my company Explorer, and and they said, oh, you're commercial.

You're trying to put us out of business. They were from the government. And I said, that's I said, no. We're actually enabling you to do more of what you do best. That's really the truth, that these exquisite missions. I mean, when you're talking about But that but that's the that's scarcity and abundance. Yeah. If you're taking something they don't have instead of infinite, By us doing what we're doing, you have more. Mhmm. Yep. That's exactly it.

Yeah. And and the thing is the we have to keep up with the times. Technology has scaled. Costs have come down. There is a democratization happening. And so that's where where they can be more free to do harder things because commercial has got this. You know, we've got So so what's, on the optimistic side So I I mean, our company, for example, we I'm sitting here trying to this is time about. I also realized my wife, by the way, went to Newhouse School of Communications Advertising.

So advertising in English. I think that's kind of fascinating. But, just a side where brains go where they shouldn't go, Optimistically, what do you think based upon this, version of tomorrow, these these science missions today versus tomorrow? What do you think tomorrow is? Well, this is this is what my company we want to unleash is science for everyone, democratizing access to, for researchers, for scientists to access data.

You have scientists today that, for example, might wait 10 years to have access to the Hubble for an observation night. They'd spend years trying to get just one window of an observe observation time.

And my company is gonna have a satellite that can go and allow you to have unlimited observation time because instead of a ground based telescope, we would have a space based telescope, and it would be a commercial company that would allow you access so you don't have to no. You wouldn't have the same level of of exquisite Right. You don't have the the same level of complication and capabilities, but but you're so you're hard you are both hardware and software platform.

So you're tying back your the, the digital being digital. But you've got a software platform that enables more access to usability of the data that comes out of it or your own experimentation or your own vantage point that you couldn't have gotten otherwise. Correct? Yeah. I think the the access to to data is a whole other point here. But, you know, scientists will wait years for access to the Hubble. True. And they will always do that.

But there's also a lot of valuable science that can be done when it's not accessing the Hubble, when it's accessing another small spacecraft, for example, with telescope on it. So would you would that be democratized data? Is that the way you're playing it? So so data that sits or is generated is no longer you're paying I'm gonna make this up and then you could tell me if I'm wrong.

You're paying for a subscription model to be able to have access to what what exploration or scientific endeavor your satellite is working on and that individuals, if they pay the subscription, are capable of either having the data that comes off of this or they can potentially pay for their own exclusive data in certain types of conditions. There will be subscription services in the future. This is probably the case, in the earlier missions before that exists.

But I think, yeah, long term, there will be subscription models for sure. We have to enable that, because I remember, investors saying, so at some point, I can go check on my vacation house that's on the water and make sure that there's been no storm and, you know, the that there's you know, everything's intact. And and could you subscribe to a feed of that in the future? Yes. You can. Yes. You will be able to. Won't that be exciting anywhere in the world to say, I wanna check on my house.

I wanna wanna check out. Yeah. I wanna watch it I wanna watch it flow down the street as a storm comes. Dumpster. You you use the term achieve data fusion. Correct me if I'm wrong. Data fusion is the aggregation of multiple data sources so that you can get either higher fidelity or better consistent data. What do you mean when talking about this tomorrow with the satellite and what you're offering and the capabilities? How does yours create data fusion?

And maybe my my answer of what data fusion is is correct, but how does that play into it? Do wanna I do wanna get to the data fusion discussion, but I think that's really how we're gonna create value from commercial Okay. Then and I think maybe we should be talking about the the, just the capabilities today. I mean, we kinda talk about government to commercial. Do you feel like we've Yeah. Covered that?

No. Well, I I and anything you've got, you can always add, but I'm reading, science missions today versus tomorrow. So I'm trying to dig into today, are you still categorizing the system government and then tomorrow was not, or are we Oh, great. Are we close enough to be considered a hybrid yet? Because so many companies without without NASA contracts or European Space Agency or Japanese Space Agency or South Africa would not be around.

Are are we still on that continuum all the way at the end of still being a part of a government sponsored ecosystem? Well and this gets to what have we achieved today in space with scaled satellites, and how did those, prove what we are those proving to be capable? Will they prove to be have higher capable in the future? Because if they are high have higher capability in the future, then government will be making investments in buying data from them.

And we're seeing this happen, with what's coming online with one of our capabilities, which is winning the National Reconnaissance Office hyperspectral contract. So today, hyperspectral data commercially is not available. Hyperspectral allows you to effect Thank you. I I was going to ask. It allows you to to to understand the chemistry of the earth from space. So all these different bands are indicative of different chemistries of what you're looking at on the earth.

So you can look at, specifically, it's valuable for precision agriculture, which is why the National Geospatial Agency is so interested in it. But you could see, the new nutrients in the soil if there's too much pesticide, if there's too much nitrogen, what the water levels are, what the soil quality is. These insights from a hyperspectral imager are so valuable because they allow us to monitor the climate, not just on a on a basis if you had a drone going over a 1 acre field or something.

That doesn't get you a lot of data. But if you have a satellite going over the Earth 16 times a day collecting data of the entire earth and you can monitor, all the land on the earth and all the agricultural land, you get real indications of of climate change and how you can then have actionable intelligence to increase yield? So this is not a geosynchronous orbit. This is a It's just low earth. Just low earth orbit. This is low okay.

So are, I'm gonna ask you the question because I can't forget to ask this. You're we're now talking about soil degradation. Mhmm. I just read today an entire article about soil capabilities. I've I've looked into and read about the challenges, for example, in parts of Asia where there's some chemicals have been so overused and the soil has been so degraded that there could be less than decades less of of topsoil left for them, but there are other parts of the world that might have opportunities.

What is what is your data signaling for our for our long term future when it comes to agriculture and and crop development, all those things that make us be able to survive? Well, when we can look at the at the Earth and and observe specific plots of land and understand how we can reduce use how we use our resources, how we reduce fertilizer, how we reduce herbicide, pesticide use, or, manage water and reduce water where it's you know, we have too much water.

All of these things lead to better yields and, better crops. You're talking about now replenishing the soil and that's that involves adding nutrients to the soil. There's a whole company I've been talking to working on this, which is fixing our problems with soil depletion. But with the soil that we have and the ability to monitor is is a huge leap forward. Oh, it is a it's a huge challenge.

And I will add a multi multiplier to it with the climate change that's been happening, and let's use Europe as an example, where we're going from, x temperature. I'm not gonna I don't know the specifics of the average temperature that's sitting across, say, Spain, Italy, Greece, Serbia, Macedonia, that whole region in there where we're seeing Spain is now turning into more of a desert environment, not a lot of rain.

That was the vegetable garden of Europe all the way through to, I was I was told, Prosecco, which is moving north. It's it's going north more north in Spain, which is they're having challenges growing, but it's just not getting cold enough. Just to know the soil composition or the soil specifics, how are you integrating this interconnected this complexity into these formulaics if we're seeing, I mean, windstorms that we've not had ever?

I mean, one of our teammates, Space Affairs, does follows all the launches that are out there, and he he follows them and post he does a YouTube channel on that. I think it's also Facebook. And he said the launch the launch capability or predictability has gone down because of just changes in climate. So how does this what you're talking about, this hyperspectral data, how do you see that helping if there's a compounding challenge happening within that environment?

Well, you asked about data fusion and all these other instruments that help with predictive weather monitoring can also be on top of a platform. So it's that merging of different, pieces of information that give us the full picture. Obviously, it can't just be one image in a vacuum. You've gotta factor in all these other other data sources to to, again, have actionable intelligence.

We are with with our company, we get one satellite up and then we have a whole, trove of satellites that we we launch, keep launching after that. As they all then interconnect and, bring that data back to the ground, we're going to have, so much more actionable intelligence.

Today, you can't really get it because, it's well, from commercial, and I am specifically talking about commercial where a company could be signing up to say, I specifically Walmart wanting to monitor all of its, you know, stores, for example, and or land that they have and in a daily basis, what kind of data can we download that is useful to them, hourly or, you know, minute to minute. We don't have that yet, but we will in, the next few years.

It'll be huge what they can tap into, their own feed. But your your tech that you're working on is democratization, but it goes back to you leveraging a platform, having the scalability, having the access to be able to find the data going all the way back to, like we say, improving life on Earth. We're not just about humans on Earth. So democratized means accessible. It doesn't mean free. No. But I didn't mean free. Yes. It means that more individuals have access to it.

That I mean And therefore, at a cost that's reasonable as compared to and I'm gonna use a it's a $100,000 per hour to do x versus $1500 per month to do y. Yeah. And and a company could it's making it affordable for anyone to be buying data and then deriving, their value from it. We don't have to be experts in their field. We're just collecting the data for them and pushing it out. And then they can analyze it and, find, find the value, because it's gonna be honed to their specific needs.

But, this has been an interesting, topic of, like, why why doesn't a company have to be a specialist in oil and gas and agriculture and mining and insurance and finance? Well, all those companies want the data we we collect. That is data. We don't have to be specific to its uses because they already know the use cases and they know what they You're giving data. They can interpret it the way they'd like. That's right. So, it sounds like the way you talk, to you, the satellite is the iPhone.

Yes. Yes. It is. Just so you know, I mean, I don't know if you've ever said that. Exactly it. I mean, some people want I've been listening to you talk, and in my head, I was trying to figure out your modality. And your modality is the iPhone is the satellite. It is. Because we've built something that's powerful enough to support all of this functionality for anyone. That was the idea. If you had a magic wand, what satellite would you build and what could it do?

Well, it would do anything for anyone, which is which is a different philosophy than every satellite that's gone before us because most companies that have been, build building satellites to date came out of the commercial mindset of government mindset, I should say. I'm going to build a satellite with a specific mission for a specific customer to secure a specific government contract and pay my way. Yeah. And that, Ron, Explore.

Do do you believe I mean, is I believe others have a similar modality that they're trying to accomplish with data collection? Or do are are you not finding that? Well, there's this push from every company has to raise funds to to run their business. And you you talk to venture firms that also might be putting in their 2¢ to and you might change your company strategy if if that's the case. If somebody's, you know, wanting to invest and they say, but if you do it this way, I'll invest.

And I don't know if that's what's caused people to operate the way they do today, but most companies are, I would say, aligning with a venture SaaS model. We're in the SaaS world, you're doing one thing and drilling on and doing one thing and doing it well. And that does not work for what we wish to achieve. We don't wish to achieve one thing, one capability. If you're going to It is You should get all the data. You and, let's use the 2 2014 as the date.

I'm I'm a little bit older than you, but I came in and I have not had the same modality of thinking from the very beginning. And it is it has been really, really, really a challenge. The the first day I was at NASA Ames facility, I turned over to Lynn Harper, and I said, I don't get everything you guys are talking about. Why don't you take it in piece of the International Space Station and push it to the moon? I mean, you you're talking about far out science fiction.

And she looks at me and she says, David, if we did that, that would be similar to pushing a win putting a Winnebago on the moon. And so far since I've been involved in this ecosystem, it has been challenging because there are a lot of old thinkers, and I won't name a person's name who's been on the podcast, also runs a very, very, very, very large organization. And I asked him. With all the tens of thousands of people involved, who do you think could understand these concepts?

Because they're very they're more I guess, the term we were using was more contemporary, more modern. And he said, I could probably only name 22 people. Those are that was his number. The rest of the people, he said, are all old school. They're all old school. So it does it are you saying that you're one of the few? Well, when my first trip to NASA facility, the I forget who the director was that, briefed us, but they were very proud of saying that they move at a glacial pace.

I mean, this was a point of pride, and and there the reason is about safety and complexity. And I understand that, but that's all good. But commercial doesn't move at a glacial pace. Commercial is is really pushing to to advance. And so we're a little oil and water there. You know? Well, yeah. It's not that it's oil and water. You're still requiring, let's say, that the, government is the oil or the water. You can pick which one.

But there is still a very, very, very strong symbiotic nature that it sounds like we're relying on. So I I yes. Commercial wants to move at a faster pace, but it's still so reliant on whether it be FAA approvals or, security measures or ITAR EAA or CFIUS challenges or it could be, I mean, the the list is extensive. So how do we get these science missions for today versus tomorrow? How do we get or or we're actually in transitioning from government to commercial. I guess we're talking about it.

Number 4, how do we get from government to commercial where you and I would be not saying to one another, yeah. If not for that acts, they would still not be here. They wouldn't have made it. How do we get there? Well, Is that and you can go wherever you want with number 4, transition from government to commercial. Look at there has been a huge achievement with SpaceX launching a Dragon capsule, for first for cargo then for crew, that was groundbreaking. You know?

We had years after the shuttle where any trip to the ISS required a a flight on the Soyuz. Right. It was the and most end of I didn't know this, but without the Russian help from the from the shuttle time until, we wouldn't had anybody be going there. The Russians the Russians and the Americans, even during all the challenges they were having, they were still working together when it came to be on Earth.

Mhmm. So so we have achievements with SpaceX leading the way and pushing and and and getting us to to have that commercial cargo, commercial crew. And then with, the Ukraine, Russia war. You have an advancement in the need for commercial. You've seen SpaceX providing Internet services via Starlink. So this is now great for the eye is on commercial capabilities for government to get a leg up from the commercial companies that have, something they need. Right?

So, in the case is we're talking about NRO and the hyperspectral contract, they want that hyperspectral data, and they're going to be buying it from commercial companies. That is the goal. They wanted optical data in the past. They had a contract for electro optical, and they bought optical data, to the tune of 300,000,000 a year from Maxar, 30 some million a year from Planet, and I think it was a 100,000,000 a year from BlackSky.

So these were great investments in something that they wanted, but commercial still had to prove that you wanna buy it from us. And that's the hard part is because we're talking about government providing funding for a commercial company to reach that point, get through the valley valley of death, get to the proof of concept, get to a business model that's sustainable, and then they'll buy. So there's this dearth of that, you know, a valley in between of how do you bridge that gap.

And there's so many Space Force, Air Force conferences talking about how do we bridge this. But once we bridge it, we get to the other side and it's proven. I think that's when we're gonna have government saying, okay. I really I really do wanna shift gears instead of and we did see them shifting gears in originally buying just hardware. They're finally beating a drum and saying, we're going to buy services, not hardware. And that that actually is an important moment.

My company, Explorer, is the first to coin the phrase and use the phrase, space as a service. We did this for a reason because government needed to buy space services. We didn't want them to buy our satellite. That wasn't the point. We're not in a we're not a hardware company building a satellite to just get a government contract for them to buy it. We're a company providing services and saying, you too can buy this service just like like anyone else.

You're on parity with everyone else, government. Yet so I'm, the question that I'm trying to get back to is going back to transitioning from government to commercial. I know what you're I hear what you're saying. It's very obvious. If we can get them to untap and start using the services that are created by individual by organizations, the the get away from the SaaS model or there are always going to be specific categorical satellites or or missions or approaches that are being used in there.

We've now got this new modality of, space as a service. Where do you see that trajectory creating an inflection point so it becomes not this conversation we're having? Oh, it's actually now in the, Space Force doctrine that they must buy services. No. That's not what I meant. That's still the government having to buy services. But when do we get to a point where it's not the government's contracts that keep the organizations alive?

And I I'm looking also on a global scale, but let's we tend to be more domestic in the US. But how do we get to that point where, hey. Let's just say tomorrow, government said no more to anybody. We're not gonna fund you. We're not gonna set you up. We're not gonna supply you. We're not gonna buy from you. You're on your own. Right. Where would we be?

Well, we we will be at the point, at least in in the case of what I'm working on with our satellites, We we have commercial interest that's extremely strong. And Oh, yeah. The sounds like a great product. So Absolutely. We're going to be tapping that even before we fly with the companies that are, you know, in such a are are great thinkers and realize that they should be calibrating with us before we fly to make sure they're first in line for our data. Again, I I agree with that.

You you've got a product that has that ubiquitous nature. It's going to you're supplying raw data or different types of data. You're supplying data that organizations can use. I'm not talking about this sentence, transitioning from government to commercial. Weird. It's been a promise for a very long time, since 19 seventies. There would be this space ecosystem. Well, let's say the odd let's say government didn't buy cars. There would still be an automotive industry.

If government didn't buy corn, there would still be an agricultural industry supplying gold. Well, just like they transitioned out of the Internet. Right? Mhmm. Because they So when when is that when do you see when do you feel that it will hit? Oh. Asking you to be a soothsayer. You pull out your magic ball, kinda spin it a few times, look inside of it, and, shit. Well, because of our plan to be okay.

I and I don't wanna go into our defense arena, but because of defense, when you think about the the, capabilities of our satellites today and that industry, you have to think about it like it's an iceberg. And what we've been talking about with commercial activity is on the top part of that iceberg. What is below the surface is the defense side of this industry. That will always exist.

So maybe it's with what you're saying, it's really when do we transition to it only be gover to only the government being involved in really that that other side, which is their responsibility of protecting our our nation and our way of life. Okay. And I wasn't going there, so that's interesting that you went there, and I appreciate it. Yes. With the, we have several people who different parts of the world who are working with Project Moon Hunt. We can't name names.

They've we've signed NDAs and they've signed NDAs. They don't wanna be known. But part of the challenge that we run into when we discuss with multiple branches of different governments around the world or militaries is how do we make sure that this becomes, at least on the Project Moon Hut side, and that's why I'm asking these questions. Because we're looking to create that moon and Earth ecosystem, that Mearth ecosystem.

And I'm I'm trying to extrapolate when from someone like you who's obviously very intelligent, knows ecosystem, knows the terminology, sees the funding and the movement of of, cash as well as technology. Where's that promise of the future? And you're not you're not alone when I ask this question. It's a challenging one. It's being funded underneath by a lot of capital coming from, defense departments.

And as well as we see the expansion of national space agencies, there's a transfer of happening there too because the each space agency is involved in the national interest, and maybe it just becomes more about, what's good for, elevating the nation. But they're not as hands on then in doling out contracts. And you know what I'm saying? It might just be more of the the political side of the spectrum of Oh, it's huge on the political side.

Diplomacy instead of hands on control of how money is moved and spent. How many conversations have you had since 2014 where people talk about the, the space agreements? And and and, I mean, I've gotta believe you've had many of them where people say, well, what about the agreements? Well, the United States has not signed it or this country has not signed it. And we've had on, we've had on Jan Werner. We've had on Saul Messami from this South African Space Agency.

We've had on oh, I could see his picture now from, who ran the US Space Age. We've had multiple people on. And, yeah, there's a lot of political movement that makes it extremely difficult to create this ecosystem. Mhmm. Yep. So, it's okay. It's it's a question. So how about this next one, creating value from satellites?

Yes. So I've mentioned a little bit about the the satellite industry and commercial companies achieving great things by getting satellites in space, where there was no ecosystem for supply chains. You couldn't just go get COGS items to go buy your components off from a catalog years ago, to actually create a satellite was a big deal. And then we had this thought of, small satellites.

There was a whole popularity of small satellites that are called cubesats that are 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter. And all of these startups that that popped up saying, we're gonna build cubesats, and this is gonna be amazing. And everybody said, we're gonna build constellations, and they're gonna have so much value. And they didn't stop to say, okay. But what is the real capability of these beyond the science project? And there's a whole group of colleges that send cubesats up.

I think it's it's I forget the name of it. It's got a cute name like CougarSat or something like that. They they all build these satellites, and and it's great. All all I picture is little ears on them like Cubans. That it's a I forget the name of it, but the the the these colleges, they get the students to build CubeSats, and they fly something to space, and that's phenomenal.

And our center for advancement of science in space, CASIS on the International Space Station, they shoot them out the window of the ISS, and they end up in orbit, and everybody cheers and yay for science. But, what is the value then of that STEM student, for example, that does that and then says, I'm gonna create a company, and it's gonna be worth a $1,000,000,000? Well, you have to think about the capability of what you're starting with.

And a 10 by 10 by 10 centimeter cubesat is very different than what we're building, which is, a very advanced satellite that's got, like, in in, so much power to power all of these instruments to get all of this data back, a cubesat can't do a whole lot is the point. And so then you have venture folks that listen to these stories, and they think it's so exciting and cool because it's space, and they throw their money in.

And it's been problematic because they're putting money into things that are not going to create a lot of value. And so but it's hard to explain that when there was a period where anybody talking about space, with a investor and and Morgan Stanley saying it's gonna be a $1,000,000,000,000 business by 2030, they said, okay. Here's my money. I'm just gonna throw money at space. You know? This is the whole thing.

And so they really got away from asking hard questions about business models and and when will the pro form a show a return on investment, and could a company produce value with a single satellite? Could they produce a unit profitable satellite? Well, we did. Mhmm. But I don't know of anybody else that has, and we can't wait to prove that out when we fly. But we have not seen other companies doing this. It was really a high capex and excitement about, really, science projects.

And that had slowed down the industry, to a certain degree. Even some that I look at, I had one that I they did a model, and I felt like it was looking at a view. Do you remember the Viewmaster viewer? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm I'm old enough to remember the view master viewer. Yes. Model of a view master viewer. It's we're gonna go do space domain awareness. And I thought, no. I don't think you are, but okay. You know? Good for you. You got some people convinced that you could do that.

So, there's not a lot of understanding, from the investment side of what what is it that's being built, what are its capabilities, and why is it transformational? And every investor should be asking that. And then show me what the dollar dollar value like likelihood is. And that's a problem too because we had companies throwing out huge numbers, that they will just not achieve. And this is why we entered into that whole SPAC era. I was just going to say SPACs.

That was I I was holding back and I said, oh my god. What she's talking about SPACs. Yes. But we also we we had challenges with hydroponics. Hydroponics place, facilities are failing all over the place Right. Where we had because it's not a business model. We have a farm. Yeah. You know, growing it in the city doesn't make it better or or more profitable. You know, you you you don't have to transport it from the farm to the city.

So, yes, so the Everything you're outlining, though, becomes degradates or degradates. Is that the right word? It pulls from the value of the possibilities of the Beyond Earth ecosystem. This is a problem.

Yeah. It's shadow there's this shadow that's been cast over the industry, and the highest capability companies just have to keep fighting like mine to show the, where we're where all this is going next is I mean, we even like, where it goes next is exciting, but where it goes first is exciting. So we, you know, we actually have to pay attention to, what these capabilities can do in the future, but what they can do right out of the starting gate in our Okay. So you I'm you know I'm gonna ask.

Yeah. 1st, at a starting gate Yeah. And next. 1st out of the starting gate is, the the utility of satellites today has been a single sensor collecting a single type of data. Our satellite is effectively 8 satellites built into 1. So it's 8 different sensors, each sensor with its own proprietary stream of data that we will collect. And then on top of that, because of the power that we have, we can combine those that data in layers.

It'll be the first ever on orbit data fusion that occurs because So the data fusion is happening not on the ground. Happening in space because every instrument at the same can point at the same object at the same point in time for all on data collection of all the instruments. So What I what I meant, you're you're you're still you're still collecting streams, but then what you're doing is integrating them up there, but you're still creating streams because you do want the select upstream.

That's right. You want it selectively. You want it together. And then what you wanna do is process it. So we have processing on board. Obviously, we need to have and and this hasn't happened with satellites today is compute capability and process it. Commercial satellites, again, I'm talking about Yeah. Where you can store all of this data and then have processing on board. Satellites today are pretty dumb. They operate in a loop. You kinda set it and forget it.

It's not interacting with the ground. You can't change its course. You can't upload software to change, its what it does. But with ours, you can. You can always just like with your with your, I don't know if you ever had navigation in your car when you had to put 7 or 8 CDs into the car to update the nav system? Yeah. That was yes. Yes. You you you went out and you had to grab the next one because you're going into the next third one.

Now now in a Tesla, you're just uploading the latest software and all the new features, and it's just then updated. Like, the satellite can just be updated. So that's Now next gen. It's very next gen compared to what happens today. It's it's not been done. But 2 questions then. 1, and I keep on giving you 2. I don't like to ask 2. But one is, the data stream, doesn't it come back to your structure, your Ground station. They come down to they come down to the ground stations. Right.

They come down to ground stations. So there is a single point of contact. Even though you have a fusion happening, it's still coming to or multiple streams happening. You still come down to a single point. So that was the first one. The second is now I because I said it out loud like that. Can't change the course. Can't create that. Oh, it'll come to me. Okay. So you're still creating a single source, and then you're doing the distribution on earth to all the user base?

Through the aggregate that pushes it up. Oh, it was the energy. You you've pointed out maybe 3 times already. You keep on talking about the energy. So what makes your energy capabilities so different than everybody else's? Yeah. This is not a I know we're not doing a product explanation here, but I'm, I'm really trying to figure out why you would bring it up multiple times.

I can say we have 10 times the power of any satellite that's a small satellite today because we have designed our own solar deployment system. And so solar is how you're gonna collect the power, right, from this Okay. Yeah. I I I was just I was wondering if there was a little bit of nuclear coming out of our solar system. Nuclear. But we we have this phenom We did start there.

So because the nuclear I was just with this nuclear people, and they can't wait for us to to, in the future, have an an X craft. Our satellite is called the X craft. Have it go deeper into space with nuclear, which, you know, it's our our satellite is designed like the iPhone, so different components, we can switch them out. And in the future, we could do a nuclear mission. No doubt. So Yeah. We we've got nuclear subs. We've got nuclear on large.

So it eventually now we've got these they're not called, oh, they're not called micro nuclear reactors. It's a sort small term for the smaller isolated? Yeah. And cap yes. So we do have that capability, but so you're just you're you just have a better you've created a better mousetrap using your mouse, mousetronaut, mousetronaut, whatever you call that. You have a better solar deployment system that has a higher Power. F power absorption rate that allows you to be able to supply Yeah.

What you're doing. Most of the companies today are buying their the bus itself, which is the main part of the satellite Yeah. That carries your payloads. They're buying that from other companies, and they're spending a lot of money for those. And it's I don't wanna call it a commodity because that sounds like like you could buy it at the grocery store, but it is something that they can buy.

And because they buy them from someone else and they haven't uniquely engineered them, they're limited on what to do. Mhmm. So we did not start with, we're just gonna buy somebody else's bus. We engineered it ourselves. And so this has been a long haul effort to build it specific for these multiple capabilities, multiple modalities. But other satellites are designed for 1 or 2 instruments to be on board, and they can't support more than that because they don't have the power.

And they as well, they don't have any fuel. Typically, there's no propulsion. And we've so you have to think about a lot of different things with a business. And in our case, we think about how long is that satellite flying, how much did we have to invest to get it to fly, And then what is what will it return in in value per year for financially to have a return on the asset? Yeah. The numbers must work. Case, it's it returns its value the 1st year and generates a profit.

So that hasn't been done before because they're thinking about a single customer, a single instrument. When you have 8 satellites into 1, you're now, you know, orders of magnitude more capable. Yeah. It's I'm gonna use a bad analogy, but if you buy one coffee cup from a company, it's gonna cost you $10 plus $6 in freight. You buy 4 coffee cups, Now you package them up, and you've got you sell it for $30. Freight is still not gonna be much more, but you've made a lot more coffee.

Yeah. That's a bad analogy, but that's the one that comes to mind is I you someone tries to sell coffee cups, it's not worth it. Sell them 4, and now they spend $30 instead of $10. Now you've got your profit your margin going in there. Right. And I I live in the land of Microsoft and Amazon here in Seattle, and we Oh, I didn't know you were in Seattle. I probably should I probably have you in Seattle. I had to use Austin, Texas. Why do I have as use Austin? I don't know.

I've not been in, Austin. But There must have been well, you and I already looked at the data before on our phone. And you're you're you're not even the person you are 17 years ago. So, yes, I had found Austin, Texas, and that's how I had put you into our database. So I had not thought you were Seattle. We we have, I think we have 5 people working with ProjectMoon in Seattle alone. Well, we're I would've I would've remembered that.

And Microsoft, particularly with Microsoft, everyone would remember that, when bundling occurred and Microsoft was able to bundle its Excel and Word and all these software into one package, that became the new standard. So this is effectively what we're doing on a satellite is the bundling of multiple capabilities. I had a fascinating question from somebody saying, gosh. Well, doesn't that mean that your individual instruments are gonna be degraded because you've bundled them?

And it's almost to me like saying, well, when you use Microsoft, does does it mean that you can't cut and paste because your your package includes Excel? You know? Like, how does that I mean, I do not understand why people think this way, but some people do. They think that, oh, there must be some trade off by having multiple instruments on the satellite, but not in the way we've designed it, not in the way we've powered it. No. There's a it does and it's a multiplicative operation.

You're you're you're still sending it up. So there's a cost to send it up. There's a cost to maintain it. You're putting 8 satellites in one low in one structure. That's a that's a value add. It makes all all the sense in the world. And now it's not that I I wouldn't say it's the data fusion part. That's a great ad that you could say that it's created and aggregated or maybe you have a better reason for it.

I think the more is that you can create 8 streams of value that can be sliced, diced, and I feel like the, what was that? Credit default swaps, This where they did the slice and dice and you can give data in all different forms. What's the reason for doing it up there versus doing it on the ground?

The act act well, there is some proprietary reason I can't really talk about, but let's let's just say if you're driving the collection of the most valuable data for a customer, and then you're downloading that and you're processing it to get an insight back. This is where space is going next, where that satellite is providing the answer to the ground instead of a bunch of files that you still have to go drill down into and process, etcetera. It costs money to download data from space.

We're still in the dark ages today in how we download data because the satellite has to fly over the ground state. So so you can get rid of you can get rid of bad data or unusable data? Filter it. Yeah. You could yeah. That's filter's a better word, but you're filtering out the data and sending what's necessary instead of, a just a steady stream of Mhmm. Content.

So when you when you get rid of the access and you're only downloading what is valuable, then there's a high level of increased efficiency and lower cost. Yeah. You're I mean, that's it just makes a ton of sense. You're bringing together all the data, then you're saying, what do we want from that data? So whatever terabytes or whatever size you're getting, now you're saying, okay. We collected all of this, but we don't need to use it. We only need this. And that's all we're gonna transfer.

That's right. Why is it expensive if in fact you have all I mean, does it use more power? Is that why you call the term expensive? Well, so the reason we're still in the dark ages today is that we have to fly over a ground station. It's almost like dial up modem. It's the age we're still in where you're gonna have to dial up and connect to a satellite and download data.

And if, until we have other ways of of intersatellite links and linking to other bring that data down to the ground in a more ubiquitous way, it's it's going to take, time and money to get data back. So we haven't had this transformation. We might. We given with our our partners, Microsoft, they just announced with, Project Kiper, optical capabilities of downloading massive amounts of data using optical terminals.

So we may have this big transformation that occurs in the next, 2 years even, with the quantity of data we can bring back. All of it's good. All of it is The bigger, you've got a few things. You've got a satellite that's going around the earth, so you have to get it every time it comes around and if you have a large enough data set, you're, it's, you might have to wait 2 or 3 iterations to be able to secure it all if it's a tremendous amount of data.

But now you're saying, we're just gonna send you down this file. This is what you asked for. This is what you need. You're gonna get it in one shot. You have a timing, timing capability of being able to deliver it to the customer faster because now you don't have to wait for multiple iterations. And it could be in their hands if if time means it makes a difference. It could be in their hands in one second versus 50 seconds.

And that's also a value because you're getting more real time data that's more appropriate. Right. Yeah. I mean, if you think about how we use geospatial data today, all of us are interacting with space. We all use our cell phones. We are looking at that blue dot when we're navigating from point a to point b and finding out the best route, that's in real time. So what happens when we have real time answers about what's happening on the Earth?

Oh, I mean, we feel we have real time because Google and everybody else are creating arcs of data. And so they're it's not a complete real time. I mean, it would be, imagine I go to the Internet right now and I say, tell me about Lisa Rich. It is not scouring every single node that is available and then coming back with data. It's looking at Arks about you and giving me whatever to interpret.

So we we're still in an age or a time where I don't I don't know if I don't know if it'll ever be possible to be able to do a complete search, and, only 2% of the data is public. I think that's the some type of number like that. Meaning, I have data on my computer. That's not readily available. You have data on your computer. That's not readily available. Companies have data on their computers that are not available.

So when you're searching the Internet or you're searching, you're only getting the data that's put out there in the, the ecosystem, but it's not what resides on corporations and individuals' hard drives. Mhmm. No. I you're right. Although it's highly useful, that 2% we have to use.

Oh, no. I'm I'm not I'm not discounting it, but you had said about the blue dot in real time and we're using arcs to be able to find where somebody is because it would be way too expensive, too time time consuming to have to I mean, did the map change since yesterday? Did the map change from the day before? Odds that's where Waze was so amazing as it gave you a little bit more of, the information. But how much has changed in our roads? I mean, I live in a community.

The roads around me have not changed much in years. So why would we want to have a new road picture taken every day to have more current data? And and different people would answer that question differently. It depends on the use case scenario, but it wouldn't be for the same purposes of just using your your car to be able to transition from where I am. Degradation of the asphalt, you know. I I I know.

And and I've I've worked in the road construction industry and I'm all familiar with I actually ran one one of my first jobs is I ran a rock quarry that supplied, 96% of all stone that went into New York City. So, yes, I do understand. I I ran a plant. We did about 50,000,000. So back then, it was big. So infinite streams. We're we're talking about infinite streams. What are the infinite streams? Right. Well, the the applications of space data are going to just keep expanding over time.

But what it's been used for, as you're pointing out with, traffic and wet and, weather, people wanna learn about that. Those are those those initial applications. But when we start having, a satellite that's got a long lifetime, because it's got propulsion to last a long lifetime, multiple, at least, you know, 5 to 10 years, versus 1 to 3 and then they die and de orbit. That's typical of satellites today. And you have that daily feed of of data.

Then what can we do to solve, and look at the ground and have knowledge that would solve issues like food scarcity, climate monitoring, methane leaks, over oil wells or or, you know, sources of methane, how we can cap that. Disaster mitigation, wars and conflict zones that we'll have more information about. Oil gas issues that we can see from the the natural environment. We can we can glean so much knowledge from this for science. We could look at soil, coastline erosion.

What's happening with I'm just throwing a lot of things out here. No. No. I I I'm I'm writing them all down as you know I'm I'm taking notes. So You could see, huge container ships that are leading to the soil erosion and increased traffic on the oceans and maritime issues like illegal dumping, illegal trade, human trafficking, the ethical or unethical treatment of workers. How long are the laborers on the field, for example, or land remediation.

We can see our replantings being done of palm oil or the palm industry, for for example. That's always a concern. Or these supply chains that are, so under duress, how do we find better ways of managing them? I mean, there's so many questions we can answer with the data we bring back. It's really limitless. And one of the reasons why I'm so interested in this industry is is all of the unique things that people that I meet that say, could you do this? Could you do that?

And the answer typically is, yes. We can. And, wow, I didn't even realize there was a need. Like, somebody said I did a talk with a land trust, and they were talking about the erosion of the coastlines. And they said, can you see whales and the container ships and, like, whales that are Mhmm. Container ships that are entering the strike zones for whales? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can.

So there's this omniscient view from space and those applications, not just of sight and optical, but temp the temperature and measurements that we can take. It's extraordinary. And these are just kind of the first. So you you took it all you took it all on the positive. So I wanna what about the implications of having all of this? Being able to see someone's house, being able to see their license.

No. I I'm I'm using I I I worked with Maersk for about 4 or 5 years in the shipping line, so very familiar with some of the applications. I'm just I'm saying we're getting just just like the access where people hacking of your computer systems. We all have these computer systems. We have bank accounts that are online. We're using our mobile phone to be able to access them.

And you can't go far long without hearing about people who've had their phone hacked, their computer hacked, their data hacked, their life is in ruin. And there's probably good I mean, the numbers, I do not know them. I'm just using an example. You gave a lot of the positive. Do you sit back at all, just you, Lisa, and say, wow. This could also be x. Do you ever say that? And when you do say that, what do you say?

Well, because we we have the data going to a data aggregator that's then pushing it out to, their customers and who are their customers and who is buying this. There are requirements that, of course, they have to have with where this data goes. So there has to be I mean, there's always a red flag scenario. You know, I was asked this question years ago, not to change the topic, but it's kind of fascinating, of a company that did custom DNA strands. And somebody said, well, gosh. You know?

What if somebody is creating bioweapons or some type of a weapon out of a DNA or, you know, these data these strands that they could create for biology. And the company had to have stop gaps and and really vet who the buyers were. And I think that's that is what's happening in this industry is they have to know who the buyers are. But, you know, if That that's a that's a tough one. The tran the transfer of data once it leaves someone's hands. We never have been able to do that.

Just like if you look up the shadow fleet and what's happening in Russia right now with the oil tankers meeting in Greece and the 2 ships meet, and the Russian oil is transferred to a Greek ship, and now it's Greek oil. So Yeah. The provenance of things, you're kinda getting into that, I think. No. And I well, you went in that direction. I wasn't just thinking about that.

I was just thinking about the ubiquitous and the opportunities that come from so much data and so much visibility and so much capability that I'm asking myself as you're talking about it. What does this mean? Not positive or negative. Just what does this mean? And what jumped into my mind is when we were writing Paid to Think that I had sent to you. I had an example in there, of terrorism. Oh my god. Kin have it. It was not gonna be in there.

And I said, but I I'm being this is not a good or a bad thing, but terrorists tend to be pretty good planners. And the reason is they have to get it right the first time because they might be dying. And it didn't matter that the example that I was using was apropos to the situation to understand if plans always if they had a, an end, like your business would fail, and you made decisions based upon the fact that tomorrow there might not be another day, you make very different decisions.

We all do. If if I if you found out tomorrow you you had cancer and you only had 5 months to live, you're gonna make very different decisions. If you got a phone call that someone in your family has died, you will make different decisions. It's not a bad or a good thing. It's just that how the world works.

So when I'm hearing you talk about all these rich possibilities, which I think are amazing because Project Moon Hut is about moving these things forward, we do get people who call us privately, and they say, do you know what risk you have here? Do you know what you have to be looking at? We have the 7th largest law firm in the world who's been working with us for 2 years, Kirkland and Ellis. They've been amazing.

And they've been working on helping us to craft an ITAR EAR CFIUS program based upon the work we're working on. And that's because there is inherent risk in the work that anybody does beyond earth. So I'm asking you a similar question. When you go through these exercises of amazing things that will come out, do you also go through the exercises of, wow, with this there could be?

Because I don't think I don't think that way, but let me tell you, the people call me So I have a theory about this because I had invested in robotics and was very interested in robotics. And everyone's afraid of robots taking over the world or some people are. And I'm not, and I'll tell you why. And this is just my you know how there's the Turing test? Well, I have the Roomba test. So they have to be able to do the Roomba to be qualified as intelligent.

Company has been around for about 20 years. Yeah. Okay. So you're really talking about the Roomba cleaning the house. Yes. Roomba. I was thinking of, what's Yeah. There's there's a dance too. Right. I I went to the dance because I love to dance. So I went to the dance, not to the robot. So while there's a Turing test, I call it the Roomba test. And, so this is the the vacuum. You know, this is the Roomba that Yep. Now now I I'm here. I'm I'm with you now. Been around for 20 years.

I almost should look it up to see. I bet it's even older than that. And they make, oh gosh, crazy amounts of money selling these Roombas, and we've bought them, and they're wonderful. But, David, the second that Roomba can actually climb the stairs, maybe we've made an advancement. Maybe I'm scared. Night, Electrolux 1996. Boston Dynamics. Just so you know, 1996 was the what I see. It's close to that. So we're talking how many years, though? Yeah. It's it's quite a few years.

Is that the one I'm looking robotics? Does it say here? I I just looked it up because it's an interesting question. I'll give you another one. It's it's still a dumb machine like ours. Now? It it's like our washing machine. It does not say, hey. By the way, give me the Yeah. Give me your dishes. That's right. So now if we also look at Boston Dynamics, how old is the Boston Dynamics robot?

Well, they've actually gone through multiple owners because they haven't been able to create their profitability. So when I watch those late I always watch the latest Boston Dynamics video of the robot dancing and and doing parkouring and things like that. And it's all very impressive, but you have to remember it's all taking place in pretty much a padded room that's full 1992. 292. So, to my point, it's 2024. Boston Dynamics is, 1992, is 32 years old.

So they can't let it out of the padded room. Now we do now this flip side of this, I have been to the Tesla factory. I've seen the KUKA robots and what they can do, and you are Yep. Experiencing the future when you go into a Tesla factory. But just to say that until Roomba or Boston Dynamics get to the next level, I am not worried. I'm sleeping at night. But you heard the you heard the Project Moonat story, and I say to people, I, the Jetsons were promised by the year 2020. 2000.

By 2000, we were supposed to have a robot in our home taking walking our dog, buying our groceries, taking care of the kitchen, and we're supposed to have flying cars. That was 2020. That's 24 years ago. I woke up in a bed. I had sheets on it. I had it when I was a little boy. I'm a lot older than that. I went to use the toilet in the morning. Hey. Same type of thing when I was a boy. No rabeams in my shower. And the microwave, and I've gotta look this up.

Do you know when the microwave was created? For seventies. Oh, wave founded. I don't know if that's founded as a word. 1945, the first patent for a microwave oven. And we still use a microwave. And so when people talk about advances yeah. We have a phone in our hand. It gives us capabilities, but we're not there yet. So the question is not that the robots will take over. It's that the individual machines that robots control will change our life. Meaning, they could take jobs.

They could take opportunities. No different than the conversation about artificial intelligence combined with robotics today. But, yeah, I I don't sit around, and I'm not afraid of our washing machine nor our dryer nor our refrigerator nor our microwave. Not afraid. But so the question wasn't about fear. It was there's a lot of data here. There's a lot of personal or potentially private can be used nefariously. So that was more my question.

The larger challenge is that we talk about in the space industry is the absconding of that data from the satellite so that it gets into other hands. And and there's a lot of encryption and and requirements for security to make sure that the data does go from the satellite to where it's expected to go. So we, you know, we have a plan of where it's coming from and where it's going to and protections in place to make sure that happens. So what let's see. Infinite streams, we talked about.

No. Every company is a Mearth company a space company. Sorry. Yeah. And so this is my my last point as we get heading to a close in our great conversation today that I I do a lot of discussion with Fortune 100 companies to share the story about our our future opportunities of applying data from space and really saying if you wave your magic wand, what is the data that your company would want that they can't acquire right now?

And when companies start thinking about that and they say, gosh, if I could monitor my land, if I could monitor my workforce, if I could, count you know, car counting is popular with hedge funds and financial firms, but can we go way beyond what we're quantifying with data we bring back from space? Would it be good and useful for me? And also, would I be able to now learn about my competitors? Well, yes, you could.

So now this conversation transitions from a strategy typically of, well, how could this affect our r and d in in the future to, oh, wow. This is now a financial discussion of what could we get, about our company and compare it to other companies.

There's so much that will be learned in the data science field in the future, and I encourage any young person listening that's thinking about their career to be looking in the data sciences area because the talent that we need and the jobs are going to proliferate just like they did when the Internet started and everybody was running around saying, who knows how to program HTML? You know?

Like this you you need you're gonna need a lot of talent in these areas and companies will be hiring for this. And it'll be very different than in the Internet days when it was a question of, well, what percentage of your ad budget are you gonna donate or or, like, waste on this thing called the world wide web instead of, oh my gosh. That's an industry that's gonna go from 5,000,000,000 to 50,000,000,000 to $500,000,000,000 and now be responsible for 25% of all GDP. That's the Internet.

Like, you know, like like No. It's and I remember FrontPage, first program done in FrontPage. I went to Dreamweaver and with multiple sites, we we've got from Wix to customized you went to the projectmoonhot.org website and saw some of the work that's being done. It's just out of this world by some of the team members. So, yeah, it's, but you focus primarily on the data side. Why do you think why did data become your point of venture? Well, it's easier to move, but I what is it?

Bytes or, these are these are little bites and bits. Bits and bits. Right? Whatever. And, these are the enablers of, as we saw Salesforce transformed how we operate software from, you know, disks and what have you to just getting it digitally, getting a subscription digitally. There's a lot of power in, just delivering data versus being involved with hardware, that can slow you down. So We we need both, though. We do need the hardware. We need the But we have built the satellite to get the data.

So we did did that part of it. Right? Yeah. Yeah. There's a we could also talk we have a a full initiative on transforming education around the world. And the construct is that every classroom doesn't matter what it is. We we focus on STEM or STEAM, but every classroom should give us a little bit of space. Meaning, a professor who teaches psychology at a university, could they teach 2 or 3 days out of a full semester about beyond Earth? What would they talk about? I don't know anything.

Yeah. You do. Living in confined corners, living away from home, living in gravity. What it's like to live with a group of individuals? What's the transition? What is the overview effect? How does that impact you? Could you just talk 2 or 3 days about that? Yeah. What if every classroom on earth, instead of looking at beyond earth as space because it's just beyond earth, what if every classroom because our world is embedded with technologies from it.

What if every classroom on earth just took give us a little bit of space? So we have a whole initiative on that. We've got people like Andy Aldrin, who we've spoken to for quite some time. We have, Pierce, who is a former military person who wants to see the behavioral impact of the the future of having positive opportunities for Beyonder for for the world.

So we've got a a variety of individuals who are looking at that that might be of interest to you in terms of transforming how we look at even our educational system to fulfill what you just Yeah. We really are excited about the different sectors we can impact with, the different uses of our data. And, I think the idea as we go back to this, every company is a space company.

It it is like a question to to pose to everyone listening, like, how is your company preparing for our space future, preparing to utilize the data that we bring back from space? And and if you weren't thinking about it, how how could you, influence, the company to make sure that they are a part of this future? Because it's like the Internet. If you're not thinking about it now, you'll be left behind.

As I like to say, the future is happening under our feet and you're if it's not early, here's my quote. I'm gonna share this with you. It's kind of hilarious, but Yeah. People have laughed. But but it makes it's not it's it's too early until it's too late. So if you're just not there and you're saying, gosh, it's just not oh, it's gonna be years. And you could easily think that because when you read about NASA and the Artemis mission in 2026 and things getting delayed, that's fine.

That is going on to the longer term plan. But what's happening in the commercial satellite arena underneath our feet, it's going online, like, very soon. I mean, we're launching here. So I I would I would reframe it because the challenge is through my experiences around the world from Lithuania to Estonia to Latvia talking about it, Macedonia, living in Hong Kong and Asia, is that there are so many speed bumps that individuals are kind of tired of the promise.

However, what you're really focusing on is a a certain dynamic within the Beyond Earth ecosystem, and that is data capabilities with satellites that are presently available and have advanced to the point of multiple streams of value. So it's not when we use the term space, I think what it does is it sometimes it pushes a lot of people back. I I I see it all the time. I'm not interested. I'm not interested. But if talk about satellites and data and capabilities, hey. You got a phone. Right?

You look at weather. Right? You you use your GPS. Correct? Have you ever done this? Yeah. I have. That is all technology that comes from beyond Earth. That's all space or satellite technology. I think that conversation fragmented into that one category is an even more powerful, path to less resistance. Well, that's true. Satellites are something people know about that there are telecommunication satellites. I love to, bring out an app on my phone that's called satellite pointer.

It's a free app, and you point it at the window, and it shows you all the big cable satellites that are flying above our heads. They're little marching like soldiers all in a line. And you can see, oh, there's AMC. There's Intelsat. There's Utelsat. You it let labels all of them. And so if you ever feel like you're not connected to space, and, of course, this is one of the the proven industries in space is tele you can see that. And I show that to people and they say, wow. I had no idea.

And this is part of the And and that's my point. It's something they could connect to because it it is their their communication system. It is their their, their their entertainment. And now oh, oh, okay. That's very different than people going to the International Space Station. It's really tactile when you start giving examples and showing them. You know? You were on a plane today. You listened to in flight Wi Fi. That was coming from a satellite. Oh, I did interact with space today. You know?

Yeah. Well, you you watched the second video of the 2, I'm assuming, the one that has the hand drawn diagram for Project Moon Hut. And the first thing it starts off with is that our lives are basically space related to inventions that came from beyond Earth.

I mean, cloud computing, this entire conversation would not exist if not for cloud computing, which came about because we needed to be able to do computing on the international or the deicing or baby food or the elliptical or the so what we're similar in that is we're saying, yeah, our lives are embedded in it. But it's it's not an easy sell. No. You're always having to to just frame it so it's digestible sometimes. It's unfortunate.

But part of the challenge is that we cannot see what is flying above our head there. So what is it? 6,700 satellites that are active today, something like that. We're gonna our life is 4,000. And so people don't, like, it's hard to grasp, what about that activity. Today on I was on a call and the first words out of this person's mouth, yeah, but all the space debris, it's all not gonna survive. No. Yeah. So there's a lot of space in space and a lot of a lot of A whole another conversation.

So so this was fabulous, Lisa, and I truly, truly, truly appreciate you coming and helping and learned a lot. Took 17 pages of notes. So that's fabulous. Appreciate it, tremendously that you were here for us, and hopefully, you'll become more involved in Project Moon Hat. So I wanna thank you for your time. For those of you who took time out of your day to listen to this podcast, listen in. We appreciate it.

We do hope that you too learn something that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others. Now Project Moon Hat Foundation is where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn those innovations and paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Once again, now I didn't say it in the beginning.

If you go to our website, top right hand corner, you can make a donation. We are a 501c3, but we have individuals helping us the world over. And we hope that everybody who's listening in decides to make that little click or to email us and say you would like to help participate because we have people from lawyers to physicians to data scientists. You name it. The gamut of the people who are helping us is pretty extensive. So, Lisa, once again, you're amazing.

When's what's the single best way to get ahold of you? Can you check? I think LinkedIn is is a great way. It's just Lisa Rich's. There are a lot of Lisa Rich's. So you want Yes. I was going to say, you win, what, 400,000 of them? Company. Look for Lisa Rich at explore, which is spelled xplore, and, you'll find me. It's good to write a note of, you know, why you're getting in touch. I have a lot of public events, so, I wanna make sure and and always, respond, as I can.

But that's a good place to reach me. And and I've got a good feed there as well. Explore.com has a feed about our activities. If there's anyone in the Seattle area. I'm not sure when you're posting this, David. Is it this week? Or No. No. Because we just did Ken last week. We've got yours, so it'll be a few weeks out before we post. I don't, have any upcoming things other than something in March.

We're getting into the Redmond Historical Society because of a whole other topic of creating the Redmond Space District here, which is because more satellites than anywhere in the world are produced in Redmond, Washington. So that'll have to be a future Oh, wow. That's the factoid. Yeah. Yeah. So, anyway, thank you so much for the time and great conversation. I appreciate it and look forward to, hearing from your audience and and future conversations with you.

And and for all of you out there, love to connect with you also. It's [email protected]. You can reach us at Twitter at at projectmoonhut, myself at Goldsmith. There's LinkedIn. There's Facebook. There's Instagram. You could reach out to us in a variety of different ways. And do check out, again, the website, project moonhot.org. Take a look at the 40 year plan. Take a look at the new Project Moon Hut classification system.

Take a look at the work that we're involved in, and you'll see there's tons there besides 2 videos that go over some of the introductors to what the work we're working on. So that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.