Our Perspectives as to How We Got to Now in Space is More Complex Than You Ever Imagined w/ Roger Launius #37

Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith and welcome to the Age of Infinite. Throughout history, humans have made significant transformational changes, which in turn have led to the renaming of periods into ages. You personally have just experienced the information age and what a ride it has been.

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The 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 were named by NASA, through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to use the endeavors, the paradigm shift thinking, and the innovations and turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Today, we're going to be exploring an amazing topic.

Our perspectives of how we got to now in space is more complex than you ever imagined. And we have with us today, Roger Launius. How are you, Roger? Hey, I'm just peachy. Oh, that's good to hear. Well, as everybody who's listened to a podcast knows, I don't go into a lot of details. You can look the information up. One of the reasons Roger is on the program, he, for 12 years, from 1990 to 2,002, he served as the chief historian at NASA.

And he's also worked at the Smithsonian Institute for National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, along with he was a consultant on the Columbia accident investigation. I don't know where we're going to go today, but this sounds like an amazing topic. So, Roger, do you have an outline for us? I'm not sure I have an outline. I have some questions. Okay. So so how many questions do you have so I can write them down? I have 3 major questions. Okay. What are they? Number 1?

First, why do we fly in space? Why do we fly in space? Number 2. Let me tell you, that's a much more complex question, and the answer is even more, complex than you can imagine. Okay. Number 2. What is the human future beyond earth? Okay. Fabulous. And number 3. And finally, how does the fragility of the human body affect that future in space? Human body effect. The fragility in space, you said? Yeah. How does the fragility of the human body affect that future in That future in space. Love it.

Okay. So let's start with this first one. Why do we fly in space? I I have been asking that question for a long time. Oh, that's a great question. And my and my answer to that is I can only find five reasons to fly in space. Okay. And and they they more or less are universal. They're not bounded by geography or or political system or, or time necessarily. They are, of course, bounded by technology, but that's a whole different issue we'll talk about.

And they and it and it does have a specific sort of important history. The first reason to fly in space is for national security purposes, military purposes. And so defense, national security, military, those are sort of the same way, different ways to say the same thing. I'm so surprised that you started with that, which is Well It it's like mine I I've gotta be honest. It was not what I expected. And it was, wow. Why did he start with this one? Because this is the beginning point.

Okay. No. That that's great. But for you, that's my reaction. Yeah. In this particular story, that's the beginning point of why we ever pursued it in the first place. Okay. So the technologies of flight were first viewed as something we could use for military purposes. And, and and and it goes back quite a ways. I mean, there are instances going back to, you know, ancient China where the use of rockets, in this case, is essentially gunpowder type rockets, were used as artillery.

And, that's been modified over time, advanced over time, giving great, greater capability over time. And quite frankly, that's what drove the investment to build the technology necessary to send something into space. So so before you get there Yeah. Do you know about what timeline when did we start with if we were to go all the way back to the first use military, what period? Because you're a historian. You might know the date, this timeline.

Oh, I I mean, you go back a 1000 years to, to to Chinese rockets. And there are permutations of that over time, modifications of it over time. You know, the British military, in the latter 1700, early 1800, so and and certainly during the Napoleonic wars, used rockets extensively for bombardment purposes. And, and and that's a significant story in and of itself. It was a useful sort of, of capability because it did not rock.

If you you could fly it off of a navy ship, for instance, and attack a another ship or a land fortification, and you didn't rock the, the the sailing ship in the same way that Canon would. And there's a famous instance, and everybody knows, the words to the Star Spangled Banner talking about the rocket's red glare and, and how they were seeing the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore, as British naval rockets were attacking that, that fortification in the war of 18/12.

So, that became a significant, technology for military purposes before anybody ever thought about using it to fly into space. You do have people who immediately make the connection. You know, we can, use these rockets, which were built initially for military purposes to do other things. And, and and so you find, modifications to it.

There was rocket mail that did take place, and you could fire a rocket and send something to another location with relative, simplicity from, you know, 1800 or so on. The, the whaling ships use them for all kinds of purposes, to signal each other as well as to, fire harpoons and things of this nature in the 19th century. The, and and in the 20th century, they became a very common, battlefield, combat, technology that was used World War 1, World War 2, and so on.

And especially in World War 2, every major combatant developed rockets of some type for bombardment purse purposes. And some of them are as simple as handheld. Some people may know the term, the bazooka. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. An infantry weapon. It's a rocket with a with a explosive, device on on on the end of it. And just It's not for space flight, but it's but it's the technology. Can we just a question because I my mind is obviously racing through all of the history.

Did Leonardo da Vinci or did any of these other actors throughout history when they were thinking or did they think of space flight? Was it militaristically driven back then? There is always a military component to it. Because when you think about spaceflight and, and, and spaceflight wasn't nobody really considered that anything that was real necessarily at the time, except in the context of sort of science fiction stories.

And those science fiction stories as a scientific revolution proceeds in the in the latter 16th, early 17th century. And and one of the things that happens in that context, is that the points of light that you see in the nighttime sky now come to be viewed as places that you could actually physically go to. Ah. Mars Mars was a point of light for 1000 of years for people that were looking up at the sky, and they might see the patterns of its movement across the sky and things of that nature.

But they did not necessarily equate that with a a rocky body on which someone might stand. That changes in the Copernican revolution, scientific revolution in which our our understanding of the universe is fundamentally altered. And as soon as that happens, then people began to think about, okay, so if this point of light that we call Mars is indeed a rocky body, then perhaps we can go there and land on it and stand on it and do things there.

But that's that doesn't happen until the scientific revolution. I didn't think about that, and that's a brilliant point is that prior to the understanding that these were not just lights in the sky, and I never even thought, my bad, I never thought, what did they think they were? Lights in the sky. Like, if you're back in a time where prior to the Copernicus revolution Copernian revolution, you looked up in the sky and you saw a light. What did you think it was?

Well, I mean, they had very complex theories about what those were, but they they were totally devoid of scientific understanding because they would look at this. And, you know, the bottom line was and and it's rational when you think about it. You know, the earth is in those pre scientific revolution era is is sort of the center of the universe from your perspective because you don't know any different from that. So you look up and you see these points of light move.

So that led to a theory that developed, which solidified over time. Lots of people adopted that, you know, we're sitting in the center, and these things are revolving around us. And they are spheres beyond us, but they are not earthly spheres. We can't go there. We can't do anything with them. They are simply there. And there's sort of a delineation between sort of earth and heaven. Right. It's it I I think about it now. Someone was looking up and they see a light.

And if they didn't have any scientific knowledge prior post what you've talked about, they're just seeing a light. They don't are the earth doesn't give off a light, so therefore, they would have never assumed that must have been either you ignore it or baffling. Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the, you know, I the observers, they were observing with the naked eye, you know, developed theories based upon what they saw, and and they were consistent with with, with what they could observe.

So it's not like they just made stuff up. Yeah. But, but it was based upon a set of information, a dataset, if you will, that was limited. Mhmm. And, and that does not begin to change really Until. Until, you know, Copernicus and Galileo and a variety of other people, who begin to change our understanding of what we're seeing in the nighttime sky. And in the case of Galileo, was able to use a telescope to, to help advance that particular understanding.

And of course, he ran afoul of the Catholic church in that process because he was teaching something that, was strikingly different from the sort of received wisdom from the ancient Greeks. And, and had been ensconced in, you know, a Western medieval mindset. And that, brought him into difficulty with the church. I yes. What will from the Copernicus revolution Copernican revolution to Galileo, how much time was there?

You know, there there are several of these astronomers, and they might they probably didn't call themselves astronomers. I mean, in the sense, like, we think of them today in an observatory somewhere, who were operating literally all over Europe and obviously in other parts of Europe. But our knowledge of of a lot of these activities are European based. And within, you know, a 150 or so years, this really does shift. And there and it was a remarkable shift.

This sort of nature of a scientific revolution and how it totally transformed our understanding, and and you can point to a variety of people who made contributions, along those lines. And it was no one person who, who who was, the critical element in all of this. But, obviously, there are some giants in the history of astronomy. I mentioned a couple of them, Copernicus and Galileo, specifically, who really did change our understanding.

The was there the population within the Asian region of the world they were looking up to? Are there any Yeah. All over the world. I mean, there there are, from very ancient earliest times that we can, that we can study.

And we're limited with our knowledge on this, of course, because it's based upon physical evidence that we can analyze today, all over the world are are are looking at the nighttime sky and even the daytime sky and tracking the sun and and and looking at how things change over time and modifying their behavior based upon those things.

And for one thing, if you're an agricultural society, planting is important, and you have to understand, something about the seasons to be able to do that, which leads you, then to look at the sun and look at the moon and track those sorts of things. And they did that all over the world.

I mean, there are there are ancient observatories in the Americas, in Asia, in Africa, Europe, wherever you can think of where there were people, there were, there's physical evidence to suggest that they were doing this sort of tracking. And some of it was quite sophisticated, and it was different depending on cultures. I remember while I'm trying to think of the city that I was in, Jaipur in India, they have this complex, set of structures to track and measure the sun's movement.

And it's it's not a small it's probably in terms of, I can't say hectares, but acres, It's probably 2 or 3 acres large. And they have well, it's maybe 2 hectares large, and they have all of these complex structures to be able to measure when, time and the movement of the the stars. Right. Yeah. And and I mean, some of the and some of these, places are famous today. Stonehenge was one such place. Now it it it had, as best we understand, religious connotations associated with it as well.

But one of the things that they did there was track the movement of the sun and moon. I didn't know that. And that was true all over the place. So though those sorts that sort of understanding though is pre scientific revolution. And we don't necessarily have a sense that the places that we are seeing, the sun, for instance, the moon, for instance, are places physically you can visit. That changes with the scientific revolution.

And as soon as that happens, then people begin to think about, well, okay, what might that look like? And that's when the realm of science fiction writing, emerged. And there are examples of that. There's a a novel by Cyrano de Bergerac, in the mid 1600 that, is a story of, of going to the moon. And and it doesn't specifically, talk about rockets in that context. But there is there are a couple of attempts by the hero of the novel to do so.

One of them is more the more interesting of the 2 was, the observe observation that everybody's seen of dew on the grass in the morning and how it, sublimates during the day. And as it heats up, it rises. And, so the the the hero of the novel decided to collect dew early in the morning off the grass and put it in vials, and then attach the vials to a belt around him, which as the, as the dew turned from a a liquid form to a gaseous form would rise and he would take him with him with it.

Okay. And therefore he could go to the moon. Now he didn't make it that way, but it's a fascinating idea. It's a it's an interesting construct if we can grab it and it will rise up. That's, I like that. That that's innovative. So, but but he also ended up he also decided, let's take a basket and let's put fireworks on it. And and and I'll get in the basket and then we'll light the fireworks and then I'll, you know, then I'll take off. That's a form of rocketry.

Yeah. So those kinds of ideas are out there. And and that becomes, you know, common when you begin to think about these points of light in the sky being actual entities that now again, I use Mars as an example. You know, I placed it has a rocky surface that we might actually go to. It's amazing because if just the that one piece of awareness changes the entire paradigm because you're no longer looking at stars. You're looking at potential planets.

And in potential planets, there's a general curiosity in human nature to say, can we go there? Can we do something? Can we rise up? And before that, you were just looking at, gods or lights or an another dimension, and I don't think they call it dimension, but a place where you, after death, you would go. So it had a it changed it to a physical destination. Right. Exactly so. And and in that context, people began to think about these possibilities.

But the more practical application for this rocket development was for for military purposes. You can see a very practical reason for it. And and so this there's this intertwining of this military purpose with this desire to go somewhere else. And it's, you know, it's it should not be surprising. No. Well, it was, so I apologize. It's it's very surprising that you started off with military.

But, you know, even even the the people who believe firmly that what we really wanna do is to explore other places in the solar system, maybe beyond, also ended up spending a lot of their lives working for military organizations, building rockets that could kill people and break things. And one of the most famous examples of this, he's not the only one by far, was, Wernher von Braun in Germany Yeah. Who was an enthusiast of space flight for visiting other locations.

I mean, his his great objective in life was to send people to Mars, hopefully him. But was it really, was it really Mars? That was his? Mars was the big enchilada, from his perspective. That was the place. Yeah, the moon's great, but you know, Mars is really the, the place. And in fact, he wrote up, technical, discussion of how that might be accomplished and attached it to a novel that he wrote called the Mars Project, to to explain this.

And early as a young man in Germany, this this is in the 1920s. He joined an amateur group, called the German Rocket Society, and which was dedicated to this, these ideas of, okay, can we develop the technologies that we need to reach into space and to go other places? And these these guys were, you know, not very well funded, but, but engaged in the building of their own rockets. They went out and they launched them. They had some success with it.

And, the first thing that happened, was that the military starts looking at this stuff and said, well, you know, hey, what more capable these are, we can do a lot of things with it from a, you know, from a military perspective. And in 1930, Von Braun and some of the other members of the of that organization as well as people he recruited elsewhere, went to work for the for the, for the German army. There's money. There's capability.

Yeah. Well, I mean, and and in his case and this is pre Nazi Germany Yeah. Not in power yet. In in his case, this was an expedient that would provide him with the resources necessary to enhance this technology to the point where he could do something with it to explore space. But the short term objective was he's building a rocket that can be used for military purposes. And this happens in the United States. It happens in Russia. It happens in all kinds of other places Yeah. As well.

And, and and in case of Vertiv von Braun, he spent the majority of his career working for the military, either the German military or the American military. I I've you just triggered something that I've said for years that I had forgotten I had said for years is that if you when you talk about leadership and edge and learning about leadership prior to the, creation of organizations, 200, 400 years ago, you never saw a large group get together and learn leadership through it.

You learned your leadership through the military. So there's religious leadership and there was military leadership. You didn't have a company that had, a 1000 or a 100000 employees. So what you're really talking about, and I just from my perspective is these are huge machines.

So to be part of the military back then also meant you have tremendous access to individuals who are structured, who are disciplined, who are dedicated to a cause, and will be able to fund, produce, design, everything necessary for whatever desired outcome you were looking for. And I had said that for years, but now I'm tying it together is these are massive these are massive groups of individuals being given direction. Well, that's true.

There's nothing that's, I mean, a dominant institution, in any nation in the world is its is its, is its military. No question about it. In some cases, it gets out of hand and does more than maybe it's intended to do, but, but it is a capable organization in many cases. Mhmm. And, and and does have, an organizing principle that enables it to accomplish, the activities for which it was established. Absolutely. Makes sense. Absolutely.

So, you know, in the case of space flight, and and it certainly is present by the time of World War 2. Everybody understands that, rocketry and other technologies necessary for space flight have dual uses. They can be used to kill people and break things, and they can be used to explore space. Rocket the rocket is the number one technology you can point to, but it's not the only one. There are a whole series of other things.

And so the military, the US military, the Russian, you know, the Red Army and the Soviet Union, the the German military before and during World War 2, they are all investing pretty heavily in this technology. And, it it is really present, in as World War 2 ends because the German army was able to develop the v two rocket. And the v two is a ballistic missile.

It it has the purpose of launching a, a couple of tons of high explosive, a couple of 100 miles to hit a target that is far beyond the range of any sort of artillery and is, is not very accessible even in the context of, of airborne assaults. So, that success of the v two rock in World War 2 really meant that at the end of the war, the Americans and the Russians, to be perfectly honest, both knew that they had to acquire this technology. Small question. The term ballistic. Right.

What does do you know what the definition of ballistic means? I couldn't give you I I there is a textbook definition. I can't cite I can't recite that for you, but I can I can tell you what it means in my own words? Yeah. That's fine. That's good enough. I just wanna It it is the launch of something from the ground, pointed toward a target that is somewhere down off in the distance, whatever that distance might be.

That the, the launcher will go up to a certain point, it will aim in the right direction, it'll run out of gas, and then it will come down in a ballistic trajectory. A ballistic? The ballistics is what you're talking about. We're talking about the firing of a cannon or the firing of a of a of a gunshot, you know, pistol on a range, whatever it happens to be, they follow a ballistic trajectory.

Now I it's one of those moments where I never tied them together, but you're you're talking about the mechanics, the the mechanics of projectiles. Right. I didn't pull that together, but now I get it. Okay. Thank you. So, you know, at the end of World War 2, the Americans and the the the Russians, especially scour occupied Germany looking for, all of this technology that could could lay their hands on, and the people who built it.

Mhmm. That included Vertivon Brown and the rocket team that had been working, at at Pina Munda, which is a location in the North Sea, to develop that v 2 rocket. And they the Americans got about a 150 or so of these German rocketeers led by Bernouette Von Braun, and they brought them to America in 1940 5. And they snatched up, you know, more than components for, the possibility of building as many as a 1000 v v twos and brought all that back too. Wow. The the German I'm I'm sorry.

The Russians did the same thing. They they latched on to as much of this as they could. They took it back to the Soviet Union and and tried to reverse engineer and understand how this was was developed. The Americans did the same thing.

And then in both cases, they expanded on that capability, leading to, the first investment in in in in what we could now call space technology, the development of rockets that could reach into space, but could also be used, you know, to drop a nuclear warhead on the Soviet Union. So the American Redstone Rocket that, was built in the 19 fifties by the Von Braun team in Huntsville, Alabama, was a shorter range ballistic missile.

It also launched the first two astronauts into space in the Mercury program, Alan Sheppard and and and Gus Grissom in 1961. Those it it it wasn't powerful enough to put them into orbit, but it sent them on a suborbital trajectory. So there's a direct example of how this military technology is used for space exploration.

The same is true with the Atlas rocket, which was developed as a ballistic missile and was the first intercontinental ballistic missile in the United States, one that could be based in the US and hit the Soviet Union with a nuclear warhead. And it was used to launch the orbital flights of the Mercury program. So the John Glenn flight and so forth were all launched to top ballistic missiles.

The Gemini program of the mid 19 sixties was, a 2 person capsule, that is, you know, sort of a part of that heroic age of of the space race in the 19 sixties was launched on top of a Titan 2 Rocket developed as a ballistic missile. So the relationship between these technologies really had its origins in the military program, and they footed the bill for it.

Would Sputnik and the, at that point, the USSR initiatives be I I know that you could say they're comparable because they were building rockets, but was there Sputnik because of military? Was their first crew up in the was all of that for the same, or was it scientific with monkeys or and dogs? And how how do we distinguish or how do we separate the 2, or do we Well, oh, okay.

So the r seven rocket, which is the one that launched Sputnik, and a version of that also launched Yuri Gagarin, was built as a ballistic missile. So it's exactly the same story, in terms of they're developing this for military purposes. It it it, it it is able to do that job, but then it is also used for these other, space exploration purposes. And, again, the rocket doesn't care what it's being used for.

No. It can it can, as I said, can be used to kill people and break things, and it can also be used to put an astronaut or a cosmonaut into orbit. So that's sort of the the beginning point, and that's why I have to raise the military purpose first. It's great because I had not taken it completely from that. From my historical thinking about space, I had not gone there. So, yeah, I appreciate it. And and and by the way, and and it's remained the case right up to the present.

I mean, so many of the technologies that we think of about spaceflight were really pioneered for national security military purposes. And some of those things we use directly today, and, I will point to the global positioning system GPS, which was developed as a military program, and it to this day is operated as a military program. We use it here on the ground to support us. It is based in space, and it you know, and most of us don't wanna live our life without it anymore.

It's still complete it's still completely run by the military and given access funded by the military. And it's, how does commercial have access? You know, again, the the satellites are there. They're there for military purposes And, there's a whole broad range, some of which you can talk about in public and others of which are classified. Okay. That that that are that use the GPS system, to enable war fighting here on on earth.

The, so as I said, it has a very specific military purpose, but anybody can get the signal because the signal's there. Yeah. And so, my cell phone uses it. I I turn on a GPS system when I'm trying to find a location. I don't know where So I and I didn't I didn't know this. The GPS doesn't have any control mechanisms to allow nonmilitary to use the exact same system. That's correct. Now there are some modifications.

It is conceivable that in a crisis situation, that there may be a way in which they can prohibit others from accessing that particular capability, but that's never been tested into my knowledge, not been talked about in public. So we didn't just we didn't say that. No. You can say it, but it's not I'm joking.

I'm joking. So I I never thought about that because I've heard that new satellites are being put up and you probably tell me if I'm not wrong, but new satellites are being put up with much greater accuracy, much greater all sorts of capabilities, and they are not accessible from for the general public. And and that's and that takes a variety of forms. There could be a national security component to that, and they're put up as military satellites that are used only by the military.

And then there are commercial firms that are trying to develop their own systems that are much more capable than, the one that's that I use on my cell phone. Mhmm. And, and that would be a commercial activity that would be a subscription based sort of thing, I suspect. Yes. And and all of those are possibilities. But the one that is ubiquitous around the world is GPS because that's the one available to everybody. Right. And and and so that's my first reason.

You know, we do it for national security. And, oh, by the way, you know, NASA has a has a a budget that is, you know, 20,000,000,000 or so per year, and that's that's not chicken feed. That's, you know, that is not enough to do all the things that NASA and those of us in the space community would like to do, but it's certainly enough to do a lot of things. And, and it's a much, much, much, much smaller budget than what you see in the national security space arena.

And so we can also include that out of the national security side, there's a percentage of that budget that's allocated towards, space activity. Yeah. And it's a lot larger than what NASA's budget is. And and it includes everything from ballistic missiles, the use of of, space based assets for all kinds of purposes. And, you know, navigation is 1, that's what GPS is about. Communication is another remote sensing of all types is another.

You could go on and on and on in terms of the national security components in space. And, and that is a huge part of what we do, in space. Is that space exploration? You can question that, but it is space activity, and it's really significant. So that's the first reason to fly. Okay. You want me to go on with the others? Abs absolutely. This is great. K. So the the second reason is the one that NASA is all about, and that is scientific discovery and understanding. You know?

NASA was established in 1958 as an organization dedicated to a very public purpose of, of understanding and learning about the cosmos. And, and it was also going to be a very public effort. While the military program is classified and sometimes very highly classified, The the NASA piece of this is very public, intended to be from the very beginning.

Some people have suggested both then and since that NASA is a convenient cover for a whole lot of things that are done in the military world in space. And there are specific examples of that. In 1960, the, the Department of Defense, develops the first reconnaissance satellites.

And the first twelve of those failed, in terms of just the launches, and it wasn't until the 13th mission that they were able to get the, the the first successful overflight of the Soviet Union, taking images from space with the intention that we are never gonna have another Pearl Harbor. And, because we wanna know what the other side's doing. We're not gonna be surprised again. So that's what that is all about.

But those first failures, every single one of those, they were known as Discoverer 1, Discoverer 2, Discoverer 3. They were all launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base. And the cover story was that these were NASA scientific missions. It's impossible to keep secret a launch of a rocket. Certainly, the people around there are gonna see it when it goes up. So what's the story about it? Why is it being launched? And the answer to that was, it's a NASA cover story.

It's being done for scientific purpose when it was actually a military program. But there is that scientific side of this, which is very real. And, and NASA has been very successful at developing the, the technologies and employing those technologies to learn about the solar system and, obviously, the universe beyond as well. And you can point to, to probes that have visited every planet of the solar system, sometimes several times, and landed on some.

You can point to astronauts exploring in earth orbit and going to the moon and developing a space station that's now in Earth orbit with a crew of 7 aboard even as we speak. And it's all about learning more about the cosmos in all kinds of ways. So that's that's that's a second reason. And nobody really questions it. We we wanna do it. You know, we might question which priority we should aim for in terms of our exploration. You know, do we wanna go to the moon, create a base?

Do we wanna go to Mars and forego the moon? You know, those those are debates inside the community. It's the moon hut, just so you know. It's the moon hut. That's fine. But, you know, and and and you you know, I could argue both sides. But, but the bottom line is nobody, nobody really seriously questions not doing it. They might question how much money is spent on, but they don't necessarily think it's a bad idea. So that that's the second reason. Okay. The third reason is about economics.

You know, can you make a buck in space? And there there's an old joke in the space community. You may have heard it. You know, how do you make a small fortune in space? The answer to that is start with a large fortune because most people lose money. You know? Yeah. Lots of companies go out of business. The landscape was littered in the 19 nineties with failed rocket development companies. And I could cite you chapter and verse about about a bunch of these things.

I I I just I was on conversation with someone yesterday, and we were talking about the number of, space launch companies out there. And I've been saying since for the past few years, at one point, there was 142. There's not enough capacity or need to fulfill the needs of a 142 space launch companies. And the better these companies become, the smaller the ecosystem will be of people because somebody's gonna be able to take that business.

And just yesterday, day before, the CEO of the United Launch Alliance made the almost the exact same play. We have so many space launch companies out there. And how can you they can't survive. And there was one other conversation what we brought up was it was about why Elon didn't get a certain project and the United Launch Alliance did.

And the explanation came back to me and says, well, it was a $1,000,000,000 satellite, and there were they felt that there was more expertise even though they paid more. There was more expertise in making sure that $1,000,000,000 satellite got up, which was a lot. It was not about the rocket. It was about the entire process of getting that satellite into orbit. So but it's there's not enough to support 200 space launch companies today. Right. Right. No no question about that.

And that's one of the things that always happens, is that you find that, you know, some companies will fail, just fail outright, and have to declare bankruptcy and close-up shop. Some will merge, create larger, perhaps better managed and better organized, companies as they as they go through that merger process. And and and and it there will be a winnowing that takes place as this as this happens. But, but but you're absolutely right in terms of market potential.

And this has always been the challenge with space with space, with with companies who wanna use a space for various kinds of things. Is what is the business model and how do you close that case, and have a successful business? It's hard to do. And, and the barrier for entrance into that community is so high because you have to build technologies that are very expensive, that you can't just, you know, open your door and say you're in business.

What is your take on not just historical part, but the view of economics working long term or however you'd like to answer that when you think of the term economics and space? This is the historical part, but is is there something more that you thought about? Well, I mean, one of the things that that you have to consider in in this context is and what is a space company? And I and I I like to sort of, you know, play with this a little bit because there, obviously, there are launch companies.

And and and you just mentioned you're absolutely right. The market is not large enough to support all of the actors who wanna be a part of that. And and from a pure sort of space business, there's no question that that that is is in that category. But what about a lot of other things that we might not think of as a space business? And I'll I'll I'll point again to to a company like, let's say, Garmin, for instance. Is Garmin a space business?

I love this because I've had these conversations with individuals, and I have done the exact same thing. Yes. It is a space business because without agree because if you didn't have space as a part of the component, they would not have a business. And so is Zoom. And so is, what's the name? I'm trying to think of not the Google, but the other one, Waze, who uses GPS to get around. And Right. And g and trucks by UPS are using space to get to where they need to be. Right.

Yeah. These are space companies, but they're not. It's a mechanism. It's a tool. Yeah. And so and and so you you start thinking about this and it can and it gets very dicey very quickly, in terms of what constitutes a space business and what is not a space business. Business. And, people's heads hurt when they start thinking about it quite frankly, because it's it it gets very difficult. It's even difficult for people in the space industry, which is Oh, absolutely. Boggles my freaking mind.

Let me a short story. You've heard some about Project Moon. One of the things I was on I was on a call with an individual from the European Space Agency. Won't mention her name because she is visible. And I said, what we're planning on doing is making the ecosystem, the Mearth ecosystem, the ecosystem bigger and expand. And and she said something and I said, you probably think the space industry is pretty small. And she said, yeah, no, it's a very tight knit group. We tend to know each other.

We're very connected. I've gone to some of these events to the same people showing up. And I said, so so then I said to her, but what about the company in Guangzhou who builds a gasket? They're a $20,000,000 business and they make about $100,000 worth of gaskets a year, high high, temperature ratings and capabilities that are necessary for the space industry. Are they in the space industry? And her response floored me.

She said, Well, David, if you're going to look at it that way, then the then the space industry is huge. And I said, yes. So Salesforce is in the space industry because they sell technology to help space companies manage their deal flow and their customers, and so is the paper company you sells to and so is the man and the tool manufacturer and the the other people in the space ecosystem. And it's mind boggling how much push back I get. Yeah. It it it it is amazing.

I and, you know, there was a social scientist that was trying to analyze, in the 19 sixties, the the the size of the space race. You know, how much was really put into this. There's a variety of ways to try to do that. You can talk about investment and how much money was spent. Talk about this, but but, this individual came up with a with a, an analysis I can tell you how how legit it was, but but this is what he came up with.

About one out of every 11 Americans was engaged in the Apollo program in 19 sixties in some way. And I when I first heard that, I thought, well, it seems like an awful lot of people. And it is. But that's how that's how I was counting this, is that, you know, some company that makes bolts Yep. Absolutely. That you use to bolt together parts of a rocket. I love you, Roger. Those people are part of the program too Correct. At some level. Yeah. Well, they are.

Without the bolts, you couldn't send it up. Right. So, but but, you know, that's the people who are making bolts, it's probably not, you know, using making those for rockets. That's one percentage of their business, but certainly not the sum total of their business. But yet they're still supplying the space ecosystem. Right. You do need bolts to put the rocket up. You do need an electronic. You need a chip. You do need a a cushion for the chair. And without that, you wouldn't have the chair.

So how do you break that line and say the space industry? And once individuals there's a company, I won't mention the name, they're a $7,000,000,000 company. Their executive team is not interested in going to the space industry. So a group of us got together and looked at who they were selling to. They are inside factories. That's their technology, and they're supplying 2 major space companies.

But they say they're not in the space industry, yet they're selling to the space industry massive equipment. Right. And they and they we're not interested in space. Okay. But we're not telling you to go to space. Sell to the space industry. You have all ecosystem. You can make a ton of money. They never had thought about that. Yeah. So, you know, the bottom line is economics are critical for any of this to have, long legs.

Yep. And, and the space business has to be robust enough to support significant activity if we're ever going to to do anything beyond sort of government programs. Mhmm. Yes. That we might do at a modest level. And, and and so there there, you know, there has to be economic if there's a human future in space, there's gonna have to be a human, there are there's gonna have to be an economic activity that humans are engaged in space. And I I completely agree.

One of the things that we've been promoting is space ecosystem because I I love what Elon is doing, and I think what he's doing is absolutely fantastic. And I also love what Bezos is doing as well as everybody who's in the industry. But those are not ecosystems per se. Those are individuals perceiving, and what we really need to create a thriving space industry Mhmm. Is to have a global space ecosystem.

And that means that everybody understands that they play a part in this, not without, not consciously saying I'm a space person, but, hey. It's a market, and they could pay bills, and they deliver services. And our agriculture, we plant off of them. And our our class 9 harvesters that are run by from John Deere. I think it's John Deere. John Deere has class 9 harvesters and those harvesters are run by GPS. That's in places like Minnesota and at least in the United States if you're an American.

These farms are so long that they they run 247. The guy who's in the harvester is not touching the controls. It's dark out. It's all being run by GPS, and that's how food is being manufactured. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. I was, I was really struck by, precision farming as a as a technology that emerged in the nineties, in which, using GPS data analysis from things like, commercial remote sensing satellites and, and fertilizer delivery that's sort of targeted to the individual part of of the land that's under cultivation, that needs a particular type and in particular amount and, and and nothing else. And what that means in terms of efficiencies associated with the, agricultural production.

So here here's a here's a question that you're not gonna get right, but I'm gonna ask you anyway. What do you think happens to the person? What's the number one gripe of the people that are in the harvester because they still have humans sitting in them or in these devices and these tractors? What do you think they get hooked on? They get hooked on? Yep. It's a it's something they get hooked on. I don't know. Are they playing video games or something? I'm not sure. No. Soap operas. Oh, alright.

1 I've spoken to a few beside the that's how I know about class 9 harvesters and all of this tech that's in it. And I did some interviews, and the guy said, I I get hooked on these soap operas. I can't wait for the next day because they're doing nothing for hours on end. Right. Right. And so they could read a book, they could do, but they're watching soap operas, which I thought was a kind of cute, thing that's happening. But, yes Yeah. Precision find something else to watch, but okay.

Persistent Farming well, that was before Netflix, but Precision Farming is a great example of a space industry. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. I love it. So so the first three reasons that I've talked about, and I I I contend there are 5. Don't require humans to be in space. It's not necessary. We're doing all kinds of things there, scientific, military, commercial, using robots.

And, it's not that they are that humans are necessarily excluded, but they are not necessary to the process at this point. The latter two reasons do require humans, and but they're a little bit soft. Those first three are are rock solid. I mean, virtually nobody questions those. But the 4th reason is really about geopolitics and in, in national prestige.

And that is fundamentally about astronauts and cosmonauts, and ultimately, taikonauts and anybody else that's gonna be out there flying in space in the future. The Americans and the Russians began flying humans in space in 19 61 because of the cold war. And it's not to say that they wouldn't have done it another at another time had there been no cold war, but that's what drove them in 61. The Gagarin flight was a was a publicity stunt. And, and it was remarkably successful.

I mean, the the the and and the Russians wanted to pursue this as did the Americans because of this cold war environment. And and I I talked to a lot of students and and, you know, the incoming freshmen this last year in university were not alive when 911 took place. So, so their knowledge of the Cold War is nonexistent. It's whatever they read in history book or talk we talked to in in high school with, with teachers.

And they did not have an understanding of how desperate that struggle truly was. At the end of World War 2, you had 2 competing economic military and, political systems that were 2 scorpions in a bottle. There will be a winner and there will be a loser. There is not going to be coexistence, not over the long haul.

And, and in that sense, the the space race, the space activities of the 19 fifties and the 19 sixties, to some extent, later into the seventies and eighties, but especially that earlier era, is really about demonstrating to the world technological capability. And not because the Americans wanted to feel good about their capabilities or the Russians wanted to feel good about their capabilities, but because of this global struggle.

As you've got 2 sets of allies that are sort of faced off against each other and a whole raft of emerging nations that have become independent after World War 2. Whose side are they going to be on in this cold war? That's fundamentally what this was about. And they knew in the 19 fifties sixties, and we know today as well, that the future belongs to the civilization that can master science and technology. And so if you're I love to use the example of India in the 19 sixties.

Newly independent after World War 2. Yep. A very populous nation, 500 years or so of, of British colonial rule, an educational system that was pretty advanced, certainly for a lot of parts of the world, and, and would be an immediate regional and ultimately world power. No question about that. Whose side are they gonna be on in the cold war? Are they gonna side with the Americans and the west? Are they gonna side with the Soviet Union in the east? It was an enormous challenge.

And they're looking at this and they're saying, okay, I wanna go with the side that's gonna win. And that's true for everybody. That's what the space race, that's what human space flight was all about, demonstrating this capability. The Americans won that race, but it didn't necessarily start out that way. So when you say it didn't start out that way, what do you mean it didn't start out? All of the early successes are Russian.

Yeah. That that it surprises me to the nth degree that almost every single success in the space industry has been done first by the Russians. And it was the most amazing discussion that I had when someone asked me, how do you think people are getting up to the space station since the Space Shuttle went down? It wasn't no longer being used. I didn't know. I I've gotten into this into space, if you wanna call it, since, about 6 years ago.

And the Russians through the Soyuz rocketry has been sending since 2000 was it, 2011? 2011 is when showing. 20 right. 2011. Since 2011, the to get up to the International Space Station, you went with the Russians. Right. And and they've been getting along. I mean, rockets go up and they send up the the European Space Agency members or all the members of the International Space Station through Russia.

And it was it was if you're not if you haven't grown up with this industry, if you haven't heard and followed, it's a jaw dropping moment to realize. I I and I'm not a I'm a globalist in my own perspective. I love the world. It's not anti Russia. It was just an a jaw dropping in that, wow. I never thought about it. How did they get up there? Well, they were the only ship in town. Yeah. Well, not the only one. The Chinese had one. They weren't a part of the partnership.

Oh, the the Chinese had at the same they could have delivered Americans to the Internet or, Americans because I'm looking at the American conflict. They could have, sent individuals up to the International Space Station in 2,011? Well, they certainly had the rocket technology and the capsule technology to do so.

Now their launch capability was, was different than what, the Americans and the Russians had because ISS was put into an orbit specifically that could be reached, from both, the Kennedy Space Center, where the shuttle was flying from and from Baikon Urbichon Oh. Which is where the Russians flew from. I didn't I never thought of that. So it's it's actually on the flight path if you wanna call it so that it can meet them where they need to be, which the Chinese could not be on that flight path.

Is that a good way to say it? I don't know the answer to that. It's possible that the Chinese could, but they had the technology to be able to go to orbit and to send people to orbit. And so Could they have rendezvoused with the space station? I don't know enough about their technology to tell you that. It's it's a good question. Is so when you, this is just a a today, a 20 21 question.

When I watch some of the rockets that do not succeed in China, they just had another one, a few weeks ago, and I I don't pay attention to these like people in the space industry do. But they've had a lot of challenge with the takeoffs not happening the way they would like, and there's a lot more risk. So if we're going back to 2011, I would've this is just conjecture.

I would've thought that they couldn't do it while the Russians had so many successes with their rocketry that there was it was actually, it's been very safe. We haven't had an accident. So did we is there any relationship to from 2021 going back to 2,011 in terms of capabilities? Well, I mean, the Russian program I'm sorry. The the Chinese program has, has obviously been advancing since that time, and they've had a set of successes and they put up a orbital platform.

They have occupied it, and they've done a variety of things along those lines. But that's a they're a standalone program, and they're standalone in part because of the politics of it. Yes. Not in part, mostly because of the politics rather than anything else. And there's a lot of concern about technology transfer, going to going to nation states that might be potential adversaries in the future, and the protection of that.

And, and so that's specifically the reasons why the Chinese are not a part of the International Space Station program, which Yep. From my perspective would make sense to bring them in, but, there are national security considerations beyond that. Which goes back to the military again. It goes back to the military. I mean, the the military is the dominant force in all of these things. And and and maybe justifiably, so I'm not saying it's not, but, but that's been one of the real fears.

And and and going back to the nineties with the theft of Hughes technology Hughes spacecraft technology by the by the the Chinese, you know, that put in place a whole series of laws that made it really difficult for technology to be transferred. So so I I don't know. I don't know that there's ITAR in these conditions, but I didn't it started ITAR is the result of this. So they used space technology. What did they do? What happened?

So, use, space systems, was working on satellites for a variety of organizations, companies, and so forth. And and and there was, you know, intellectual theft that took place in this process. And, and so like it's it's like a lot of other things.

I I mean, you you probably familiar with, you know, with intellectual property rights that are, you know, that are sort of a part of these sorts of discussions and the difficulties of engaging in, commerce, especially technological activities with the with the with, China.

And and because of all of this, then, the the restrictions on transfer of of technology, specifically in the form of ITAR being, it existed before, but it was certainly enhanced significantly by the Congress when all of that went down. Okay. I didn't know that's where it started. Just an interesting point. Well, I I mean, it didn't start there. Technology transfer has been a concern from the very beginning. Because, again, it gets back to a rocket doesn't care what you use it for.

It has it has military purposes and other purposes. So, so you have to protect that technology so that it does not fall into the hands of people who might use it to kill you. Right. No. Makes sense. Just I yeah, I I now tie it together much better because of your explanation. So, yeah, I just didn't I you just mentioned Hughes, and I'm thinking, okay. What did they steal? And I could almost the the first analogy that comes to mind is the capital, insurrection.

And for no doubt in my mind that in the next year, there will be so much technology thrown into the capital that will be guns, forward warning, alerts, systems, because there was a failure of the system Right. That the future will never be the same. Someone's going to walk in. They will not even have to walk through a detector because the detector will be the building. Yeah. And so, yeah, it it causes something.

So Hughes was one of those pivotal points in the push for protection of intellectual property. Yeah. Very much. Anyway, it's, it it's a it's a long way of saying that, that this geopolitics and, national prestige piece has this long history, and it was really significant in the Cold War environment of the 19 sixties.

But hit but it but at no point since that time, has any of the nations that have been engaged in human space activities been willing to step back from that and say, we're not gonna do this anymore. The Americans didn't do it. And lord knows when the Soviet Union collapsed, you know, around 1990, 91, and and their economy was gone, and the nation state had to be reconfigured in very fundamental ways. Their space program did not end.

Their cosmonauts that were on the Mir space station at that point stayed right there, and they continue to fly and do the things that they that they, thought that they should be doing. As if the Soviet Union had not changed whatsoever. That would suggest to me that this is something you don't walk away from even though there might be good reasons to do so. Someone had to put this as a priority, that this still maintains its its.

There's cash going and it's gonna go someplace, and we're gonna make sure that the space industry continues. Yeah. And it and it's very much the human component. And I don't see us walking away from that as Americans or as or or as Russians or as Chinese or the next country that probably is going to get involved is going to be the Indians, who desperately want to enhance their capabilities and get to a human space flight program that can ultimately go to the moon.

And, and I would not be surprised at all to see them do it. They are remarkably successful, nation state when it comes to these these technologies. It's surprising that the the the fact that the Russian engines, rocket engines, have been the predominant engine for as long as they have been. And the coordination around the world with all these countries is mind boggling if you step away from the challenges that we see on the political level, yet on the scientific level, there's collaboration.

Mhmm. Right. Well, I mean, this is something that's always happened. I mean, even at the height of the cold war, while you've got, you know, rivalries taking place between the Soviet Union and the United States, the, the spacefarers themselves, the cosmonauts and the astronauts, gathered in very friendly settings.

And and, I mean and it's not like they're trading state secrets, but there there were certainly a lot of commonality and interest in what each side was doing, and they talked about it with each other. So did the scientists and the engineers, insofar as they could and not give away the technology. You you could have a be you could have a beer with somebody or you could have a shot of vodka. It didn't mean that you were giving away straight secrets. You had a common bond.

Yeah. But but it there's also cooperative you know, that are both informal and and formal throughout this year throughout this whole period. I mean, I love to tell the story about, the International Geophysical Year and and which was formed in the early 19 fifties with the intention that we would have an international effort to understand more about the geophysical properties of the earth.

It was a follow on to 2 earlier efforts along the same lines, and it was a a brilliant success when first proposed, you know, a 100 years before. Where simply we're going to send teams to locations, teams of scientists, to collect readings using the same instruments and the same protocols and recording the data in the same way, so that when we do all of these readings, we can bring back these different datasets and merge them into a single dataset that will give us a global perspective on this.

And in 18/83/84, the international polar year was the result of that, led by the Germans. And the Americans participated. All kinds of countries participated doing just that thing. They did it again about about, 40 years later and again in the 19 fifties with the International Geophysical Year. The Americans, the Russians, this is the height of the Cold War Mhmm.

Are engaged in all these activities, And both the Americans and the Russians agreed that we now have a capability we didn't have previously. And that was to put scientific satellites above the earth to measure the geophysical properties. That's what Sputnik was all about. That's what the explorer program is all about in the United States that discovered the Van Allen radiation belts, was this international effort. And the Russians were just as much a part of this as the Americans.

The week that Sputnik was launched on the it was launched on the 4th October of 1957, there was a conference taking place at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC about the International Geophysical Year. And through that whole conference, that whole week long, the Russians are there.

They're talking to Americans and others, and and they're talking about their program and and they they and they're sort of hinting, you know, we may really have an important announcement before the end of this week. It was the worst kept secret at the conference. No. So the Americans are looking at each other going, what do you think they're talking about? And says, they're they're gonna launch a satellite. We know what they're doing. And and then the 4th of the 4th October was a Friday.

That was the last day of the conference. And, and and and there's a closing cocktail party that's taking place at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, and everybody's there. And that evening, Walter Sullivan, who is the, at the time, the, science correspondent for the New York Times comes in, finds the American head of the IGY, a fellow by the name of Lloyd Birkner. What's IGY? What's IGY?

IGY, International Geophysical Year. The international scientific effort to understand the geophysical properties of the earth. Yep. Walks over to Lloyd Birkner and whispers in his ear, it's up. And Birkner knew immediately what he was talking about. He gets the attention of everybody in the room. He congratulates the, the Soviet delegation on the success of the launch of their first of their first satellite. They they raise their glasses.

They have a toast, and they all go to the roof of the Soviet Embassy to see if they can see it in space. So, you know, I'm I'm I'm I'm telling you this anecdote because of the of the relationship of this group of people, regardless of the larger, geopolitical rivalries that are taking place. At at the personal level, you find that individuals become friends, confidants.

Again, not not being disloyal to their nation state, but nonetheless, they have a common objective and that is to learn more about the universe. Yeah. Anyway, that's the 4th reason of flying space. Okay. Number 5. Number 5. Well, it's a great And another at the center of that 4th reason is humans. And we've been I've been unwilling to walk back from it ever since. The 5th reason is one that NASA loves to talk about. And, it is sort of human destiny.

And I can't tell you how many astronauts I've heard talk about. It's human destiny to want to explore. We always wanna see what's on the other side of the ocean. We always wanna climb to the top of the mountain. We always wanna do that sort of activity, that exploration. And and at some level, that's true. And it's a very ethereal sort of thing. It's very positive.

You know, we can and if you're if you're good at sort of waxing poetic about it, you can talk about the meaning of all of it and how it's how it makes us makes us human, makes us who we are. We've always been like this. We always will be like this. And there's some truth to it, but it's not nearly as compelling in actuality as we might wanna think it would be. Yeah. So so I could hear it in your voice. Tell me what you really feel. So because I can hear it. Come on.

First off, there are many ways to explore. Yes. Humans want to explore. It's human nature, But there are many ways to do that. It does not necessarily mean physically going to some other location. Not even for ourselves. I mean, I can talk about a spiritual awakening as an exploration and be just as on solid ground as anybody who says they wanna cross the ocean and go to the top of the mountain.

There are all kinds of other things about this that are are less about physical movement to some location than and are more about other types of exploration. So the the human destiny argument doesn't carry the same weight that, I think some folks would like for it to. I I've done I've done the interviews with some of these individuals. That's why I'm asking where it they do bring up. It is our destiny. It's our purpose. We need to be out there. We were born to go and travel the galaxies.

And at the same time, I have people sending me videos saying, if you were traveling at the speed of light from the sun, it would take you, 8 days to get to Earth, and to get to Mars is I mean, it the just if you're traveling at the speed of light, it's gonna take forever. So to get all the way out to Pluto I mean, we're not talking to going in the different galaxies and and traveling the universe like Star Trek, which just happens in 13 seconds, they can get to another place in the, warp speed.

It it's and I also get the existential threat an a ton of times. So you sound like you're not in those camps the same way. So that's why I'm asking. Yeah. Well, I mean and and by the way, the existential threat is the flip side of this, the survival of the species. So as I say, there are many ways to explore, not all of them require you physically going somewhere.

Yep. And and, oh, by the way, we have done a lot of exploration, a ton of it with robots, and they have been remarkably robust avatars for us. And, oh, by the way, we don't care what happens to them. Rovers on Mars are on a suicide mission. They're not coming home. And we would never think that about a human mission. So that's a fundamental difference in my mind. There is a flip side to this, which is if we don't get off this planet, we will become extinct here, and that is a true statement.

There will Carl Sagan used to like to talk about the last perfect day on Earth, which sun would rise, people would be there, so on and so forth. And at the end of that day, the sun would become a red giant. It would engulf the entire solar system, and everybody would be dead, extinct, and there is no more. That will happen. The best case scenario, several 1000000000 years in the future. Yeah. It's impossible to get excited about a threat that is several 1000000000 years. I guess.

No member of Congress that I know of is willing to expend resources on that on that for that particular reason. I'm laughing because I say similar things. Yeah. I don't wake up in the morning and say, oh my god, I've got a, there's a chance that in the next few 100 years, my my children's children's children's children will have it at this extinction level event. Yeah. And and and it's a possibility it could be more immediate. Yep. You know, we could so foul a planet, we can't survive either.

That's another hole. Yep. Out of existence. Yep. In in which way we deserve to be extinct. I don't know any other way to put it. So those that reason is all about human space flight, but I don't find it very compelling. But those are the only five reasons I can think of for flying in space. Okay. I I I follow you. Love it. And and a lot of history, which I love too.

Not that I'm a historian, but it's helping me to or yet, not but yet it's helping me understand some of the missing pieces that I have not heard about or didn't know about. So great. So we're ready for number 2. What is the human future beyond directly into what is the human future is, you know, beyond earth.

And, and we can look at this in a variety of ways, and and people usually jump over the the sort of immediate pieces to this and jump right to being a multiplanetary species existing on the moon, Mars. Who knows where else in the solar system, perhaps beyond all of that, as sort of a dream. But there's what we sort of have it's it's like a cartoon I saw one time, the 2 scientists standing in a blackboard working on an equation.

And there's a problem that they've written out, you know, equation on one side. On the other side, they've got an equal sign and a solution. And in the middle, they've got a bracket that says, and here a miracle occurs. Because we see this endpoint, and we see this problem on the other end, but the middle part is just sort of viewed as, oh, it's just gonna work itself out. It's a miracle. And, and and it's not. So, you know, what is the human future?

And and I in terms of immediacy, I could see us developing a a base on the moon. But if we do that, it's not gonna be a commercial base because there's no way to make money at this point in time. Mhmm. And I cannot square a business case. Yeah. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it it sure is not something that's going to be predicated on that. So it's gonna end up being something done for philanthropic purposes. It's called the moon hut, just so we're sure. Yep. We can call it the moon hut.

But but we're talking about an enormous investment. Absolutely. And, and that makes the philanthropic piece of this much, much, much, much harder, if not impossible. Mhmm. Or it's going to have to be supported by a government or multiples of governments. That's what I see happening. Okay. And I, you know, I think that we could see in the 21st century a base, perhaps conceivably multiple bases, but, but a base, anyway, that'll look a lot like Antarctica.

Mhmm. Undertaken as a probably by a consortium of nations, supported by, by them through government funding, where scientists and technical people are rotated in and out of an underground bunker because there's no other way to do this. Got to you've got to protect from radiation. And so, you know, the the the domes that I've seen that are ubiquitous in space art and one movie Yeah. Is is no. You can't do that because you're gonna die with the from the radiation exposure.

But the, but you could create an underground, wouldn't necessarily be a pleasant place to live, but you could go there and survive and there could be scientific purposes that are are undertaken there for for that. So And I and I could see that happening. So if we change that instead of a consortium of countries, but we called it a consortium of wealthy individuals, countries, industry all coming together.

So it's instead of defining it that way because we now have 28150 billionaires on this planet, which is a large number, not including the people who didn't make it. They're only worth sorry. They didn't make it. They're only worth $900,000,000. But if we had a consortium and there was contributions that came about from all different places, we could still hit those numbers. Well, what's the price tag for something like that sustained over, say, a 20 year period? $270,000,000,000?

Well, I think that's low, but, you know, assuming that's it. I mean, we've spent more than that on the space station. Yeah. Well, you're talking about $10,000,000,000 or $8,000,000,000 a year or $12,000,000,000 a year, with a concerted effort to one place. You have you have to build the infrastructure first. Yep. Convuilding the infrastructure and all of that. So my point was still if, there's a there's a story that, is told. Have you ever heard of the stone soup parable?

No. No. I'm not familiar with that. 2 individuals go into town, and they're starving. This is a long time ago. They go into town, they're starving, and they need some food to eat. So one guy says, I'll take care of it. And he walks up to a door and knocks on the door and says, do you have a pot I can borrow? Woman says, what are you gonna do with it? He says, well, I'm gonna make some stone soup. The woman says, well, I wanna see this. Sir, I'll give you a pot.

So guy takes the pot and he goes to the center of town and he starts a little fire, put some water in and he some other people gather around. She says, just because I'm gonna make stone soup. And he says, yeah. Put some stones and takes a spoon and he takes a sip and he says, probably, you know, just a little bit of salt would help. And person says, well, I got some salt, runs back, brings some salt, puts it in. And then they tries it, says tastes better.

And he says, you know, it would be nice if maybe a carrot or 2 would be dropped in. So he drops a day. Someone goes, I got some carrots and pulls them out, gives them some carrots. And pretty soon, they're all collecting these little pieces. And after a period of time, the parable is is they made a soup large enough to feed the village. Yeah. And that has been it's it's called ax soup. There's a 10 there's so many different parables.

But what happened was that everybody contributed in their own little way, which goes back to what you were you know, when I was speaking about of the ecosystem and space. No no government paid the Bolt company to make a Bolt, but they invested in the Bolt because a rocket company wanted some bolts. And no one created the software specifically for the space industry, but yet they sold it to the space industry. So that is all part of that contribution.

And so you can drop the physical cost of going to space, and I'm you know already, my background is not space. I don't look to the stars. I don't dream about these things.

If you have everybody and nobody paying, meaning they're all contributing in their own way because there's agricultural technology and satellites are going up for other purposes, but then they could be reused and the technology is shared, Potentially, potentially, that's a hypothesis, that we could get there to meet what you're saying, a moon hut, that could be used if in fact it was a con a global contribution effort without really saying you need to give us money.

But if I said I could buy that from you, they might invest in the technology themselves. Does that make sense? Yeah. Sure. I I mean, I this reminds me of Huck Finn in the fence, but, restoring the stone suit. But, Hopefully, I'm a good painter. So but, anyway, you know, I mean, it's it's conceivable, but I I think the price tag's probably higher than Well, just for I'm just talking about the moon hut.

So we're not if we go into if we start having 500 people, then you have to have many, many more rockets and we're talking 1,000,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars of development. But if we're talking just the moon hunt and development of that, I Okay. Alright. Fair enough. But I I, you know, I think it's totally within our capability if we wanna create a moon base of some kind. So our future beyond Earth is a moon base? Well, could be. That's one possibility.

Okay. You know, our our problem our our problem is, you know, Apollo was a bunch of camping trips, You know, you know, 3 2 campers land on the moon. They spend a few days there. They take with them everything that they need, and then they come back. And then we have the capability to go to the next stage, which is, okay, we can put some sort of quarters there and and cycle people in and out. And and and that's fine up to a point, but that's not what the space community wants. Of course not.

They wanna see colonists. Yes. And and and as soon as you move from, I'm gonna cycle people in and out on a somewhat regular basis, whatever the regular basis is, and you have permanent residents, then you've opened a whole series of issues that sort of gets to my third concern, which is fragility of the human body, in this environment. Our our we are evolved to operate at 1g at the at the bottom of an atmosphere, a deep atmosphere here on earth and no place else.

And every other place that we're aware of that we might be able to go to is strikingly different from that. So how do you survive? You know, flight surgeons have have talked about this for a long time.

You know, the the gravity, the radiation, the, the percentage in that is basically moon dust, are all health issues that immediately impact the, the human body if it's gonna stay on the moon for any length of time and especially in the context of families where you have children that are conceived, gestated, and born there. How will that body be different from what you have here on earth? It will be different. We don't know how.

And I will tell you, NASA does not wanna talk about that because it raises all kinds of profound questions about whether or not we can survive in space. We were not involved for that. And and does it make us something else? Are we talking about the next stage of human evolution? Or are we talking about artificial modification of the body to enable us to survive there? And what does that mean?

I find those profound questions that we haven't talked about, very much, and that So answer a few of them. Alright. You you're I I had to do this with someone who's in the military on another interview. All the things that you all these, subject matter that you deliver here is the sole purpose of your own personal thoughts and beliefs. So I just wanna hear you. I wanna hear what your thoughts are. Well, by the way, obviously not everything is totally my thoughts and beliefs.

What I meant is they come they come at it. The people I've talked to, the things I've read on and on and on. Because he was in the military, he had to he had to have this disclaimer as my point. So, and I'm just saying that there's a disclaimer that you're not saying that this is the NASA's thought or everybody. These are the things that you've learned and thought about, and we'd love to hear it. These are the things that I'm concerned about.

Okay. So, you know, colonists going to the moon, going to Mars, pick the destination of your choice unless it's an earth like planet, which doesn't exist in this solar system. Maybe doesn't exist at all. Certainly, we don't we haven't discovered one yet. But, but absent that, how will we survive? And I it it it sort of leads me into a path where I can say, you know, we're just this is not really doable.

And and and can we, undertake this huge dream that I see in the space flight community of becoming a multiplanetary species? And, if that's something that is not possible and it's hard to say anything's impossible because sooner or later, somebody may find out how. Find out if they can do something different. But as it stands right now, I just don't see how we can do these things. As I said, I think we can create we can create moon bases. We can create Mars bases.

We can create bases on other places too with proper sort of protections and and survive on short term. But colonizing is different. So You're talking to the camp. So I already I already this is all part of Project Moon Hut. This is what you're saying is so close to what we've been talking about for 6 years that it's not with the I cut out some of the the higher level thinking that you're saying such as we can't we can't and this is impossible. What I've said is what is possible?

And I've kinda drawn a 25 year timeline. What is possible? Can we get a moon hut on the moon? Will people be living there indefinitely? We have too many biological challenges we have not solved yet, so how can that happen? And that's actually how Project Moon Hut started. It started because someone brought up a biological question to me, and I just reacted space. And afterwards, when I've shared it with individuals because I was talking to people from NASA, no one disagreed with the construct.

So I do not believe and it's not that people it's an admirable destination. I I don't see living on Mars today. It's far away. It's not part of our ecosystem. It's a one way trip. You're gonna stay. You're going to be, and there are a lot of challenges we haven't addressed yet. It's a robotic planet today, not a human planet. When I look at mar moon, it's 3 days away with current technology. We could get faster at it, but we're 3 days away. We could put a moon hot on the moon.

We can then create not for experimentation, but, actually, we could potentially, in this day and age, we could rent out a industrial park. We can create a building where there could be experiments done. There could be microgravity experiments. There could be someone could create a perfume, the first one ever sold. It's very expensive.

And we could sell something from the moon to the earth, and then maybe, an extended stay hotel, a nicer facility because you're living in close quarters, maybe a little bigger. But this is countless trips to the moon. This is a lot of energy being put forward. This is a I I look at timelines in my own head. If today on Earth, we do not have a rocket that is human rated that can safely get a human to the moon and it could come, but we don't have one today.

Don't tell me we're going to have an Aneel station in space with 400 people by 2030. Right. And I and I hear that in the space industry, and it's it's not much different in my mind than the blockchain industry, which they're gonna solve every challenge that exists. It's not much different than many other industries. I'm not picking on one. But when I look at timelines, if we don't have a rocket, how many rockets would we need to have an O'Neil station in space?

75, a 100. But if we're gonna have passengers and 40 people living there and people staying inside of it for 3 weeks at 5 to $10,000,000 a piece, how many people would be able to do that and going on further. So we're being very pragmatic in Project Moon Hut to kind of, because I'm not a space geek, to kind of bring the pragmatism back and say, this is possible. We can have a Moon Hut. We've been to the moon. We can create it.

We have not been there for 27 days and stayed and returned like explorers would of the the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria or anybody else. They went, they stayed, and not everybody lived, but they stayed and they came back. And the Industrial Park, they started selling something between the new world, this new place, not just the Americas, but they started to create an economic system. The Mearth economic system is what we're calling it, moon and earth.

So then maybe we could have something sold between the 2. It could be scientific research. It could be new tools and technology. It could be pet rocks or pet moon rocks. And then we come back to the next phase. So our phasing is very much in line with what you're saying. We haven't overcome childbirth in space. We haven't overcome loneliness in space. You live in a tin can the entire time. What happens if a baby is born on the moon or on Mars or in space? What happens?

So the reason I'm asking you these questions is not because I'm saying you're wrong. I'm asking you because I want to understand your historical perspective because you are a historian, but also to understand the messaging you've been using in the real world so that maybe we can learn something as to how we can message it appropriately or maybe we've overlooked something.

So it's a it's a real serious question to solve what we believe is a pragmatic approach to building this moon and earth Mearth economy. It was Burton Lee and I were in a restaurant in Palo Alto, and we came Mearth was the name. So we have a moon and earth economy. How long would it take? What would it require? What would be realistic? Does that make sense? Sure. I understand that. Okay. Here's the challenge in my mind. Yeah. And it's the same challenge that has always been the case.

You know, physical exploration on earth has always been dominated by since the European expansion, you know, of 15th century, has has been fundamentally dominated. And I would contend earlier expansions were in the same category, by what I refer to as the 3 g's. And and I'm I'm gonna be flipping here by by using it in this particular way. I love g's, but it's my name is Goldsmith. So I'm I'm happy using a g. You know, god, gold, and glory. Ah, okay.

So the expansion the European expansion to the Americas, to Asia, to Africa, to Australasia was all predicated on these things. It was in part about the glory associated with, both individual exploration as well as the nation state that sponsored that exploration. And, and secondly, it was about, you know, the god, basically.

Whatever that's that god was that, your particular nation state was involved in, Catholic, protestant, whatever it happened to be, was about converting the native populations to whatever that was. And so coincident with the exploration, whereas were were the missionaries that came with them. Yeah. Very specifically fueling a fair amount of this. But finally, none of this is sustainable unless the gold is a part of it.

In case and in some cases, it was literally gold, which they mostly took from other people. Yeah. Gold, silver, whatever the whatever the, the, the economic results were, were immediately apparent. And I I love to point out the fact that we don't think of Spain as a world power, but it became one in the context of their American exploration because they essentially stole everything they could lay their hands on.

It was worth, had any value and took it back, and it made Spain richest nation in the world. And they weren't alone there. I'm not saying they're particularly worse than anybody else, in terms of what they were doing. But but the component that does not exist in spaceflight, and it doesn't exist with the moon at this point in time, is the gold part. The picture I love to show, that depicts us better than anything else in my mind.

It's an image from Apollo, 17, which the lunar rover has pulled up to a, a crater. Jack Schmidt is staring into the crater, and, it's it's snapped as a panorama. It's not a it's not a close-up at all, and you can see this whole wide expanse. And what you see, except for that little tiny astronaut in a space suit and lunar rover, is miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles.

Yeah. What is the economic activity that it that can exist on the moon in a way that it can fuel the sustainment of activity there. Yeah. And I know people have talked about mining Helium 3 and things of this nature. Yep. And maybe that exists. But right now, that is something that is theoretically present, that can be theoretically mined, that can be theoretically refined, and can be theoretically used for, the creation of of a of a sustainable energy source.

But for here on earth, not for someplace else. Correct. The the operative term here is theoretical. I had a conversation with an individual out of Japan who was sharing with me the entire future of mining in Spey and Moon. And I started asking him questions, and the other person on the line stopped talking. And I was asking very specific questions. What would be the primary? What's the secondary? How does the crusher work? How does this work? How does this work? How does this work?

And I was introduced to him because he was supposed to be brilliant in this, and he couldn't answer any of the questions. And I said, I ran a rock quarry. I know how to drop stone and how to move it. You're not answering any questions. He had only done a theoretical paper on it. Yeah. And I said, that was my job every day. I dropped 22,000 tons of stone. We were the number one supplier of stone into New York City.

And I and I I I just couldn't believe that this person was being taken seriously Yeah. In the space industry because he had written a theoretical paper. Yeah. Yeah. So, to take those 3 and I they're very easy to construct so we don't have to go down God, gold, and glory. That is a very I I don't like this term, Western and Eastern. I don't like those terms because it's the it's merged a lot, and we also have tier 1, 2, 3, and 4. And the and we are a tier 4 in the United States.

Europe is tier 4. Tier 1 would be a country that's less than a dollar a day. So I try to use that, but I will use it in this context. The God, gold, and glory was not the Asian, in many cases, the Asian reason reason for transfer of knowledge and skills.

The the culture of China was very much into the sharing of knowledge and they went out and shared while the Europeans came in and you could tell me if I'm wrong, but the Europeans came in and they were much into take over and ownership and possession. And if you looked back in time, I read this book and I can't remember the name of it off top of my head.

They said if you were to look at the world at the time that China was growing and expanding and you looked over to Europe, you have to think of them in multiple timelines and periods because they were nowhere near each other. And you would have said, well, they're in this the dark ages.

The Europeans are not gonna succeed, but their warfare because they were they were combating each other so much, tools grew very quickly, the turning of ships sideways and put putting, the the guns on the sides of the ships. That all came about because of this rapid advancement of military. But the Chinese didn't have the same, my point, or it wasn't gold, glory, and God. So do you have another construct for that type of expansionism?

Well, I would suggest to you that, that, you know, the the height of Chinese exploration was built around the treasure fleet. They that's what and they called it that for a reason. And it was it was fundamentally motivated by the exact same extraction of resources from other peoples that, that we saw with, the European expansion, somewhat later. Well, but it I guess the one is the god.

I don't think there was, Well, the missionary zeal may not have been, quite the same, although I I would suggest that, the religions of the, of the people who made those, movements also went with them. And in and in some cases, they were a dominant paradigm, and I can't speak to the specifics of that with Asian history, but I can speak to the specifics of that in the context of Islam. Okay. The s x yes. In Islam, I can see it. I just don't see the the the east at that point.

Well, it's referred to that. Sorry. No derogatory. I I I I can't tell you the details of that. So I I don't see that. So what if and and I'm gonna this is just conversation. What if the there's a new paradigm, a new thought involved in here? And you and I spoke here for a minute. For those of you listening, a pre interview could take hours to get to where we wanna go on this topic. So one of the so let's come back.

One of the topics that we had explored is the innovations that are created for space, often turn themselves back on earth, and NASA does a horrible job of it. We just had a person on the from PR. We were talking to MS Project Moon. NASA does a horrible job and so many other organizations around the world do not show that there is a correlation.

It's not always solved for space, but some of the innovations that come out of space, water filtration improved, air filtration improved, technologies for firefighters improved, technologies for aircraft going out, the the cordless tool improved, exercise equipment improved, that our life is so full of space that it's you couldn't even have a day without is the way I tell people. You could not live a day in a tier 4 country without space even if you just looked up weather, that's space.

So what if one of these god, golden glory, and we took out the god and we replaced it with this existential threat, if we might call it, or the need for, innovations to improve some of the challenges we're facing, whether it be climate change or mass extinction or resource depletion where space might be a contributing factor. They there might be something that helps new materials be developed because of microgravity, and the and the endeavor of going to space.

Like you said, we might not have to physically be in space, but because we use microgravity and robotic synthetic engineering in space, that comes back to earth and improves a life on earth. And space has there is a a reason for space to be able to solve some of the challenges we have. Does that make any sense in your mind? No. Of course. Of course. I mean, you you know, but you're sort of making the spin off argument. I I know.

That's why I'm bringing it up because you didn't bring it up in what you've had. So I'm Yeah. I wanna hear your thoughts. There there there is some reality associated with it, but it's hard to quantify. In fact, it's impossible to quantify. And and you can only make it as sort of anecdotal. I need and you've rattled off several of them, you know, cordless machine or cordless, you know, tools. Like I like like I would say, ballistic missiles. They did something for how we live on earth.

If there's a we can't tell you exactly. A young boy watches or young girl watches or young or an old person watches, and they say, I would like to invent a new air filtration system that could be used in space. They find out it can't be used in space, but it could be used on Earth. Maybe and it's a spin off, spin off, spin off. We we have satellites and someone said, you know, I could use that for agriculture. We can't really justify.

We can't say that the satellite is agriculture, but we can say that satellites have improved agricultural farming technologies that allows the ability to create and do what we couldn't have done otherwise. So, yes, I believe it's anecdotal. I don't think there's a measurement or tool that we can pull out and use. Yet, if there are existential threats, which are not there are threats on this planet today.

Climate, we call them the 6 mega challenges, climate change, mass extinction, resource depletion. So, physical and social displacement, political unrest and explosive impact from things such as deforestation or overfishing or whatever. What if what if some of the solutions that come like rocketry that improved over time could be the mechanisms to halt, reverse, change, improve the earth. It could that be one of those new God glory gold? Of course.

But the the the bottom line is it's sort of a chicken and egg problem. Mhmm. Yep. You know, you water purification, use that as an example. Okay. So water purification is a legitimate question, and and doing that better is always, is something that lots of people are thinking about absent any discussion whatsoever or knowledge whatsoever of space activities. Correct. And, and and but how many how many people approach it from the opposite perspective?

And and I don't I don't know the answer to that. So here he so, yeah, you just and it's funny because you chose that one. I was at a I'm just gonna use it a couple of times. Yeah. Well, okay. Then my my mistake is one that comes to mind is I was in Silicon Valley. I was the chief judge of a competition and this guy got up on stage, and he started to talk about how he's a space fanatic. And what he's been working on for 10 years is he wanted to solve the challenge of water on the moon on Mars.

He's a Mars guy. And he knows that you can't go to the local store and buy a, a filter. So he said, how can we do this organically on Mars? And he came up with this concept. Brilliant guy, Godhard Reddy, and he, created a nanotube size like a straw, the size of a, a nanometer. Can only take a water molecule. Nothing else can go through. It's the size of a water molecule. Took them 10 years and they figured out a way to make it so that they're all in the right orientation.

And that water on one side that's dirty would go to the other side that's clean. All for Mars. This was solely a Mars project. He solved it. He has solved the challenge, but he has a huge bigger challenge in right now. The challenge is we are not on Mars. So he's really not a space company if you think about it. He is not where he's never been to space. His technology's never been to space, but he had to he's looking for new markets, and they've been using it for water filtration.

They found out it's great as a biomarker because it's an organic, and Lockheed Martin is using it to spray onto their planes for some unknown reason. So, yes, I don't believe there's a direct correlation with not solving, yet the innovations do have implications, positive and negative. Could there be I'm trying to find out god, gold, glory, and something that would say that there maybe it's not always about god anymore.

Maybe it's about survival, or maybe it's about challenges of human beings covering an entire planet to a degree in which it's difficult for humans to survive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I I wouldn't get too hung up on on the god part except to except to suggest to you that, if we were to find alien intelligence that we could communicate with, what do you think would be the result in context of of missionizing, activities? I think the humans would try to proselytize their belief structure first.

Abs absolutely. Yes. And and I I have said since I've been, like, for 30 years, I've said, do you think if they come that they're going to if they showed up at this planet, they're going to get off and say, I've been looking for Jesus. I've been looking for Mohammed. Where is Moses? That, you know Yeah. They're not going to be coming here for that purpose. So, yeah, it would change the entire paradigm.

You can't follow the same laws unless you believe that you're better than that society, which is a human trait. So yeah. Anyway, but but that I those I think are some of the the major challenges, and and they're very real. I mean, I think in the 21st century, we are going to see some of this movement to other places, but probably on a limited basis, probably not as colonies. Just don't see that happening I agree. Really at all.

And and long term, I think we have to think about, you know, if there is a human future in space beyond this planet on a permanent basis, we have to think about human evolution and and how that may affect, generations to come. Or how we might this is something else to consider, or how we might modify the body so that it's not so fragile and that it can survive in more extreme conditions that we're that we might encounter in other places.

And, you know, I I I got interested in this when I started studying transhumanism. And, and and and that's a sort of a catchall term for all kinds of various activities. Everything from, you know, freezing ahead so that it can be reanimated at some point in the future to all kinds of other stuff that that you might think about, in terms of body enhancement to enable you to survive. And whether or not we ourselves are going to become cyborgs, because I think that that has some potential.

We're already becoming cyborgs. Oh, we already are. Yeah. I mean, I'm a cyborg right now. I have 2 stints in my heart, will not survive otherwise. Think about the people with pacemakers. Yeah. All kinds of other Yeah. If you if you have amalgamated if you have if you have fillings in your teeth, you might not Somewhat. Well, yeah. I mean, that's not technical. It's not technical, but it they would not have survived. Yeah. And, I have, I I had cataracts. I had to have cataract surgery.

I have artificial lenses in my eyes. That makes me a cyborg. Yeah. And what kind of body modifications can we and by the way, NASA sponsored the first studies on this in 1960. Wow. Yeah. And and the question the question was a simple one. Is it easier to create a bubble in which humans can survive in this totally different environment, that is, you know, to create a bubble that's sort of earth like, or, modify the body so that it can survive more effectively in this new environment.

And the answer from some of the scientists was, you know, maybe we can make modifications. You know, can we reduce the amount of oxygen the person has to take in? Can we reduce the amount of pressure that you have to have around your body to survive effectively? Can you change the heart, and the and the cardiovascular system in a way that you can operate more efficiently in a different environment? All kinds of things like this. Now NASA sponsored that study.

And there are articles written by the scientists involved at the time. In 1963, they published what, well, there was a follow on study from that that was published in 1963 called, quote unquote, the Cyborg study. NASA took one look at what the scientists came up with and buried it. We cannot have our heroic astronauts, you know, changed in fundamental ways that they are no longer human. Which is the movies the television series, see shield or RoboCop. I could go on and on. Right.

Yeah. The, in the movie in the television series or Netflix or Apple, it's whichever series, The Expanse, which is Amazon. Right. They to be able to travel through space because they don't have warp speed, they travel through space. They they came up with this idea of injecting a fluid in you. So you get this, this liquid, which allows your body to withstand the g forces. Otherwise, they had no way to be able to travel at those lightning speeds.

You needed to be enhanced for a period of time so that, that that would happen. So, yes, it's, so what's your take? Where do you think we'll go? Yeah. I don't know the answer to that. You know, one of the things that we found, and I wrote a book in 2008 called robots in space, and and it was basically the debate over humans versus robots. I had a coauthor, Howard McCurdy, on this particular book, but the last couple of chapters sort of look at this issue. The robots are are exceptionally robots.

They survive much more effectively than we do when we send them to other places. You know, think of the rovers on Mars or anything else you want to. That's why I said Mars is a robot planet. Yeah. Exactly. For this point in time. And and so they have attributes that we value in the context of survivability, but the humans don't. The humans have capabilities that make them much better in terms of exploration than the robots are at this point in time.

You know, is there a way that you can down and and and, you know, clearly, there are people who have speculated on this possibility. Can you just download your memory and your intelligence into a a computer and become a, a silicon based life form? The the singularity moment. Yes. The singularity and, you know, and Ray Kurzweil and others have talked about the how it is near. And and and maybe it is.

Maybe that's the best way to go about engaging in space activities, but that fundamentally suggests that that, there's a flesh and blood a blood Roger here on Earth and a download of a memory of Roger that's on some That's a freaky roadblock that's all somewhere else. Right. That that's a that's a whole new way of thinking about the universe. We had on Alex Landecker, and he spoke about some research that they've done where they took cockroaches up into space Yeah.

And did some reproduction, and when they brought them back down to earth, they ran faster, they were larger, they were a different color, and a a series of things, they were like a super insect. Yeah. Well, we don't want too many of those around. Well, that's why I said don't do more of these because this is the next generation. It it it there are fundamental challenges in terms of, I would say, time. You're older than me. You're in your sixties. I'm in my fifties.

Is that when I grew up I was born in 63. Yeah. When I grew up, I was told that we're gonna have the Jetsons type lifestyle. We're gonna have robots in our home, that we were going to be seeing flying cars all over the place, and ray beams were being used. I took a shower this morning. I used a microwave, to eat my food. I have not seen a flying car ever in real life in my own, and I, would not robots all over your house.

Yeah. Well, yeah, I've got my dishwasher, my washing machine, my dryer, the the sump pump, the garage door opener. Yeah. We do have them, but nothing like what we had anticipated where they were going to serve us and make our lives they do make our lives easier, but that hasn't come to pass. So even when we talk about the next 50 years or 30 years, I the challenge that I ask individuals in space industry is show me how. Like, do me the numbers. Give me the numbers.

Show me show me how from today you will get to there, and mathematically or financially or technologically, will that actually happen on a ubiquitous level, meaning 50,000 people on the moon in the next 15 years? No. I don't I don't know how the math comes up. So that's why I'm asking these questions. That's why I'm on the program with you. That's why we're talking is so that I can get an understanding of what you've learned in timelines and and challenges people have.

And so I I don't think a a a moon hut within the next 10 years isn't being a crazy idea. I don't think having an industrial park after that where there can be microgravity and zero atmosphere and some type of work being done. Be microgravity if you're on the moon. No. No microgravity, but a one six gravity. One six g. Sure. 1 six g. So a changes in in conditions. So I think that there are possibilities, but I'm not gonna tell you that we'll have a 1000000 people on the moon in in 20 years.

Just doesn't make mathematical sense. So that's why I'm asking these questions. Yeah. You know, one of the things that that I think about in the context of the space community is, you know, and I I grew up with this stuff. I mean, I I've watched the space race in the 19 sixties, and I was very jazzed by it. And I was excited by the possibilities of of a moon base and a trip to Mars. Certainly, by the end of 20th century, I thought that was gonna happen.

And I I think a lot of people were were, sort of jazzed by it, and some of them probably have been disappointed. I know I have. And my and my, skepticism, I think, comes through in that context. But we've also learned that this is a whole lot harder than anybody thought it was gonna be. And, and it takes a lot more, effort than, we perhaps anticipated at the time, And we need to dial back our expectations, and and we don't tend to do that as people.

Whenever whenever we have a belief about something, we tend to, in the face of disconcern disconfirming evidence, we tend not to abandon the belief. We tend to just modify it slightly. And, so we've all had to we've all had to sort of modify our belief that by the end of 20th century, there would be a moon base or people on on Mars or wherever it happened to be. Even though that was clearly expectation and NASA talked about it a lot all through the 19 seventies.

And organizations like the L 5 Society and and and, you know, the National Space Society and a variety of other, advocacy groups, certainly kind of predicated their ideas on on on those sort of aggressive concepts. And they've had they've had to be disappointed. Yes. They have. I've I've had those conversations. Yes. They have. But but it doesn't mean that they have have totally abandoned hope. Oh, absolutely not.

They They they tend to modify it slightly to make up, well, okay, won't be by the end of 20th century. Maybe it'd be by 2030. Maybe it'll be 2024 when, you know, as the Trump administration announcing, wanted to try to have a landing back on the moon, which I think is highly problematic. But nonetheless I I would say that there are solutions out there we haven't thought about. The I I think people have said that Elon Musk's rockets wouldn't fly, and they did.

And now he's got, what, 8 of them in the hangar ready to go to do more testing. I do think there's I do. My life has always been about possibilities. What if? What can we do? Yet at the same time, I think that if there's a a pragmatic view, a little bit more understanding from the general populace, that we can achieve a higher amount than if in fact it's oversold. And so that's what we're that's what I'm trying to do.

It's this is what our group is trying to do is we still would like some achievements. I don't have the same ambitions of everybody in our group, and they don't have the same as I do, Yet that's what makes us, I think, a a a viable reason that people are coming on the program like you, and I I definitely appreciate you taking the time to be with us, is that we would like to be able to go to somebody and say, this is what we've done, and there are huge pot potentials in front of us.

Are you involved? Can you help? Can you participate? Can you be everybody and nobody to some degree? Can you be a part of a a cog that might need more many more cogs to make it happen? Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. You know, I am skeptical of a lot of the things that I hear in the context of imagination that people have about what they can do in space. I think that's a healthy skepticism, to be perfectly honest. But I will say I will be properly supportive if anybody pulls it off. Oh, wow.

Maybe I'll just leave it there. No. No. That that's perfect. That that's absolutely perfect. And I want to thank you seriously, Roger, for taking the time. I I know I know that our first introduction, you there's always a hesitancy. This is gonna be a deep interview. Yeah. How do you take an interview when you actually prepare for the interview in a way that's not normal?

And I and I'm glad that you said it was fun because that's what most people I would say everybody said, this was a journey they went on. Yeah. Sure. They had to pull out old notes and they had to rethink things. And so I I appreciate that you've taken the time to to do this for us. So thank you. It's been my pleasure. Thank you very much. So I wanna thank everybody who's listening in, who have taken part of their day to listen to this program.

I do hope that you learn something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others as well as all species on this planet. Project Moon Hut again, Project Moon Hut Foundation is where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon. You've heard it over and over again, the moon hot. So the accelerated development of the Earth and Space Space ecosystem, which we also talked about.

And then in our case, it's to have that Moon Hut mission, but we also have this lever, and then we have the purpose. And that is to use those endeavors, that paradigm shifting the innovations, and turn them back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species. So, again, Roger, what is the single best way to connect with you? Probably by email. And, you can reach me at Launius r, so my last name, my first initial, l a [email protected]. Fantastic. And I would like to connect with you.

My email is [email protected]. We can you can connect to us on Twitter at at projectmoonhut or at goldsmith for me. We are on LinkedIn. We are on Facebook. We've just starting on our our Instagram. We're in multiple places. There's you can always reach out to us. So once again, thank you for listening. And so there we go. AI I always say at the end, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening. Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith and welcome to the Age of Infinite.

Throughout history, humans have made significant transformational changes, which in turn have led to the renaming of periods into ages. You personally have just experienced the information age and what a ride it has been. Now, consider that you may be right now living through a transition to a new age, The age of infinite, an age that is not defined by scarcity and abundance, but by a redefined lifestyle consisting of infinite possibilities and infinite resources.

The ingredients for an amazing sci fi story that has come to life as together we create a new definition of our future.

The 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 were named by NASA, through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to use the endeavors, the paradigm shift thinking, and the innovations and turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Today, we're going to be exploring an amazing topic.

Our perspectives of how we got to now in space is more complex than you ever imagined. And we have with us today, Roger Launius. How are you, Roger? Hey, I'm just peachy. Oh, that's good to hear. Well, as everybody who's listened to a podcast knows, I don't go into a lot of details. You can look the information up. One of the reasons Roger is on the program, he, for 12 years, from 1990 to 2,002, he served as the chief historian at NASA.

And he's also worked at the Smithsonian Institute for National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, along with he was a consultant on the Columbia accident investigation. I don't know where we're going to go today, but this sounds like an amazing topic. So, Roger, do you have an outline for us? I'm not sure I have an outline. I have some questions. Okay. So so how many questions do you have so I can write them down? I have 3 major questions. Okay. What are they? Number 1?

First, why do we fly in space? Why do we fly in space? Number 2. Let me tell you, that's a much more complex question, and the answer is even more, complex than you can imagine. Okay. Number 2. What is the human future beyond earth? Okay. Fabulous. And number 3. And finally, how does the fragility of the human body affect that future in space? Human body effect. The fragility in space, you said? Yeah. How does the fragility of the human body affect that future in That future in space. Love it.

Okay. So let's start with this first one. Why do we fly in space? I I have been asking that question for a long time. Oh, that's a great question. And my and my answer to that is I can only find five reasons to fly in space. Okay. And and they they more or less are universal. They're not bounded by geography or or political system or, or time necessarily. They are, of course, bounded by technology, but that's a whole different issue we'll talk about.

And they and it and it does have a specific sort of important history. The first reason to fly in space is for national security purposes, military purposes. And so defense, national security, military, those are sort of the same way, different ways to say the same thing. I'm so surprised that you started with that, which is Well It it's like mine I I've gotta be honest. It was not what I expected. And it was, wow. Why did he start with this one? Because this is the beginning point.

Okay. No. That that's great. But for you, that's my reaction. Yeah. In this particular story, that's the beginning point of why we ever pursued it in the first place. Okay. So the technologies of flight were first viewed as something we could use for military purposes. And, and and and it goes back quite a ways. I mean, there are instances going back to, you know, ancient China where the use of rockets, in this case, is essentially gunpowder type rockets, were used as artillery.

And, that's been modified over time, advanced over time, giving great, greater capability over time. And quite frankly, that's what drove the investment to build the technology necessary to send something into space. So so before you get there Yeah. Do you know about what timeline when did we start with if we were to go all the way back to the first use military, what period? Because you're a historian. You might know the date, this timeline.

Oh, I I mean, you go back a 1000 years to, to to Chinese rockets. And there are permutations of that over time, modifications of it over time. You know, the British military, in the latter 1700, early 1800, so and and certainly during the Napoleonic wars, used rockets extensively for bombardment purposes. And, and and that's a significant story in and of itself. It was a useful sort of, of capability because it did not rock.

If you you could fly it off of a navy ship, for instance, and attack a another ship or a land fortification, and you didn't rock the, the the sailing ship in the same way that Canon would. And there's a famous instance, and everybody knows, the words to the Star Spangled Banner talking about the rocket's red glare and, and how they were seeing the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore, as British naval rockets were attacking that, that fortification in the war of 18/12.

So, that became a significant, technology for military purposes before anybody ever thought about using it to fly into space. You do have people who immediately make the connection. You know, we can, use these rockets, which were built initially for military purposes to do other things. And, and and so you find, modifications to it.

There was rocket mail that did take place, and you could fire a rocket and send something to another location with relative, simplicity from, you know, 1800 or so on. The, the whaling ships use them for all kinds of purposes, to signal each other as well as to, fire harpoons and things of this nature in the 19th century. The, and and in the 20th century, they became a very common, battlefield, combat, technology that was used World War 1, World War 2, and so on.

And especially in World War 2, every major combatant developed rockets of some type for bombardment purse purposes. And some of them are as simple as handheld. Some people may know the term, the bazooka. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. An infantry weapon. It's a rocket with a with a explosive, device on on on the end of it. And just It's not for space flight, but it's but it's the technology. Can we just a question because I my mind is obviously racing through all of the history.

Did Leonardo da Vinci or did any of these other actors throughout history when they were thinking or did they think of space flight? Was it militaristically driven back then? There is always a military component to it. Because when you think about spaceflight and, and, and spaceflight wasn't nobody really considered that anything that was real necessarily at the time, except in the context of sort of science fiction stories.

And those science fiction stories as a scientific revolution proceeds in the in the latter 16th, early 17th century. And and one of the things that happens in that context, is that the points of light that you see in the nighttime sky now come to be viewed as places that you could actually physically go to. Ah. Mars Mars was a point of light for 1000 of years for people that were looking up at the sky, and they might see the patterns of its movement across the sky and things of that nature.

But they did not necessarily equate that with a a rocky body on which someone might stand. That changes in the Copernican revolution, scientific revolution in which our our understanding of the universe is fundamentally altered. And as soon as that happens, then people began to think about, okay, so if this point of light that we call Mars is indeed a rocky body, then perhaps we can go there and land on it and stand on it and do things there.

But that's that doesn't happen until the scientific revolution. I didn't think about that, and that's a brilliant point is that prior to the understanding that these were not just lights in the sky, and I never even thought, my bad, I never thought, what did they think they were? Lights in the sky. Like, if you're back in a time where prior to the Copernicus revolution Copernian revolution, you looked up in the sky and you saw a light. What did you think it was?

Well, I mean, they had very complex theories about what those were, but they they were totally devoid of scientific understanding because they would look at this. And, you know, the bottom line was and and it's rational when you think about it. You know, the earth is in those pre scientific revolution era is is sort of the center of the universe from your perspective because you don't know any different from that. So you look up and you see these points of light move.

So that led to a theory that developed, which solidified over time. Lots of people adopted that, you know, we're sitting in the center, and these things are revolving around us. And they are spheres beyond us, but they are not earthly spheres. We can't go there. We can't do anything with them. They are simply there. And there's sort of a delineation between sort of earth and heaven. Right. It's it I I think about it now. Someone was looking up and they see a light.

And if they didn't have any scientific knowledge prior post what you've talked about, they're just seeing a light. They don't are the earth doesn't give off a light, so therefore, they would have never assumed that must have been either you ignore it or baffling. Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the, you know, I the observers, they were observing with the naked eye, you know, developed theories based upon what they saw, and and they were consistent with with, with what they could observe.

So it's not like they just made stuff up. Yeah. But, but it was based upon a set of information, a dataset, if you will, that was limited. Mhmm. And, and that does not begin to change really Until. Until, you know, Copernicus and Galileo and a variety of other people, who begin to change our understanding of what we're seeing in the nighttime sky. And in the case of Galileo, was able to use a telescope to, to help advance that particular understanding.

And of course, he ran afoul of the Catholic church in that process because he was teaching something that, was strikingly different from the sort of received wisdom from the ancient Greeks. And, and had been ensconced in, you know, a Western medieval mindset. And that, brought him into difficulty with the church. I yes. What will from the Copernicus revolution Copernican revolution to Galileo, how much time was there?

You know, there there are several of these astronomers, and they might they probably didn't call themselves astronomers. I mean, in the sense, like, we think of them today in an observatory somewhere, who were operating literally all over Europe and obviously in other parts of Europe. But our knowledge of of a lot of these activities are European based. And within, you know, a 150 or so years, this really does shift. And there and it was a remarkable shift.

This sort of nature of a scientific revolution and how it totally transformed our understanding, and and you can point to a variety of people who made contributions, along those lines. And it was no one person who, who who was, the critical element in all of this. But, obviously, there are some giants in the history of astronomy. I mentioned a couple of them, Copernicus and Galileo, specifically, who really did change our understanding.

The was there the population within the Asian region of the world they were looking up to? Are there any Yeah. All over the world. I mean, there there are, from very ancient earliest times that we can, that we can study.

And we're limited with our knowledge on this, of course, because it's based upon physical evidence that we can analyze today, all over the world are are are looking at the nighttime sky and even the daytime sky and tracking the sun and and and looking at how things change over time and modifying their behavior based upon those things.

And for one thing, if you're an agricultural society, planting is important, and you have to understand, something about the seasons to be able to do that, which leads you, then to look at the sun and look at the moon and track those sorts of things. And they did that all over the world.

I mean, there are there are ancient observatories in the Americas, in Asia, in Africa, Europe, wherever you can think of where there were people, there were, there's physical evidence to suggest that they were doing this sort of tracking. And some of it was quite sophisticated, and it was different depending on cultures. I remember while I'm trying to think of the city that I was in, Jaipur in India, they have this complex, set of structures to track and measure the sun's movement.

And it's it's not a small it's probably in terms of, I can't say hectares, but acres, It's probably 2 or 3 acres large. And they have well, it's maybe 2 hectares large, and they have all of these complex structures to be able to measure when, time and the movement of the the stars. Right. Yeah. And and I mean, some of the and some of these, places are famous today. Stonehenge was one such place. Now it it it had, as best we understand, religious connotations associated with it as well.

But one of the things that they did there was track the movement of the sun and moon. I didn't know that. And that was true all over the place. So though those sorts that sort of understanding though is pre scientific revolution. And we don't necessarily have a sense that the places that we are seeing, the sun, for instance, the moon, for instance, are places physically you can visit. That changes with the scientific revolution.

And as soon as that happens, then people begin to think about, well, okay, what might that look like? And that's when the realm of science fiction writing, emerged. And there are examples of that. There's a a novel by Cyrano de Bergerac, in the mid 1600 that, is a story of, of going to the moon. And and it doesn't specifically, talk about rockets in that context. But there is there are a couple of attempts by the hero of the novel to do so.

One of them is more the more interesting of the 2 was, the observe observation that everybody's seen of dew on the grass in the morning and how it, sublimates during the day. And as it heats up, it rises. And, so the the the hero of the novel decided to collect dew early in the morning off the grass and put it in vials, and then attach the vials to a belt around him, which as the, as the dew turned from a a liquid form to a gaseous form would rise and he would take him with him with it.

Okay. And therefore he could go to the moon. Now he didn't make it that way, but it's a fascinating idea. It's a it's an interesting construct if we can grab it and it will rise up. That's, I like that. That that's innovative. So, but but he also ended up he also decided, let's take a basket and let's put fireworks on it. And and and I'll get in the basket and then we'll light the fireworks and then I'll, you know, then I'll take off. That's a form of rocketry.

Yeah. So those kinds of ideas are out there. And and that becomes, you know, common when you begin to think about these points of light in the sky being actual entities that now again, I use Mars as an example. You know, I placed it has a rocky surface that we might actually go to. It's amazing because if just the that one piece of awareness changes the entire paradigm because you're no longer looking at stars. You're looking at potential planets.

And in potential planets, there's a general curiosity in human nature to say, can we go there? Can we do something? Can we rise up? And before that, you were just looking at, gods or lights or an another dimension, and I don't think they call it dimension, but a place where you, after death, you would go. So it had a it changed it to a physical destination. Right. Exactly so. And and in that context, people began to think about these possibilities.

But the more practical application for this rocket development was for for military purposes. You can see a very practical reason for it. And and so this there's this intertwining of this military purpose with this desire to go somewhere else. And it's, you know, it's it should not be surprising. No. Well, it was, so I apologize. It's it's very surprising that you started off with military.

But, you know, even even the the people who believe firmly that what we really wanna do is to explore other places in the solar system, maybe beyond, also ended up spending a lot of their lives working for military organizations, building rockets that could kill people and break things. And one of the most famous examples of this, he's not the only one by far, was, Wernher von Braun in Germany Yeah. Who was an enthusiast of space flight for visiting other locations.

I mean, his his great objective in life was to send people to Mars, hopefully him. But was it really, was it really Mars? That was his? Mars was the big enchilada, from his perspective. That was the place. Yeah, the moon's great, but you know, Mars is really the, the place. And in fact, he wrote up, technical, discussion of how that might be accomplished and attached it to a novel that he wrote called the Mars Project, to to explain this.

And early as a young man in Germany, this this is in the 1920s. He joined an amateur group, called the German Rocket Society, and which was dedicated to this, these ideas of, okay, can we develop the technologies that we need to reach into space and to go other places? And these these guys were, you know, not very well funded, but, but engaged in the building of their own rockets. They went out and they launched them. They had some success with it.

And, the first thing that happened, was that the military starts looking at this stuff and said, well, you know, hey, what more capable these are, we can do a lot of things with it from a, you know, from a military perspective. And in 1930, Von Braun and some of the other members of the of that organization as well as people he recruited elsewhere, went to work for the for the, for the German army. There's money. There's capability.

Yeah. Well, I mean, and and in his case and this is pre Nazi Germany Yeah. Not in power yet. In in his case, this was an expedient that would provide him with the resources necessary to enhance this technology to the point where he could do something with it to explore space. But the short term objective was he's building a rocket that can be used for military purposes. And this happens in the United States. It happens in Russia. It happens in all kinds of other places Yeah. As well.

And, and and in case of Vertiv von Braun, he spent the majority of his career working for the military, either the German military or the American military. I I've you just triggered something that I've said for years that I had forgotten I had said for years is that if you when you talk about leadership and edge and learning about leadership prior to the, creation of organizations, 200, 400 years ago, you never saw a large group get together and learn leadership through it.

You learned your leadership through the military. So there's religious leadership and there was military leadership. You didn't have a company that had, a 1000 or a 100000 employees. So what you're really talking about, and I just from my perspective is these are huge machines.

So to be part of the military back then also meant you have tremendous access to individuals who are structured, who are disciplined, who are dedicated to a cause, and will be able to fund, produce, design, everything necessary for whatever desired outcome you were looking for. And I had said that for years, but now I'm tying it together is these are massive these are massive groups of individuals being given direction. Well, that's true.

There's nothing that's, I mean, a dominant institution, in any nation in the world is its is its, is its military. No question about it. In some cases, it gets out of hand and does more than maybe it's intended to do, but, but it is a capable organization in many cases. Mhmm. And, and and does have, an organizing principle that enables it to accomplish, the activities for which it was established. Absolutely. Makes sense. Absolutely.

So, you know, in the case of space flight, and and it certainly is present by the time of World War 2. Everybody understands that, rocketry and other technologies necessary for space flight have dual uses. They can be used to kill people and break things, and they can be used to explore space. Rocket the rocket is the number one technology you can point to, but it's not the only one. There are a whole series of other things.

And so the military, the US military, the Russian, you know, the Red Army and the Soviet Union, the the German military before and during World War 2, they are all investing pretty heavily in this technology. And, it it is really present, in as World War 2 ends because the German army was able to develop the v two rocket. And the v two is a ballistic missile.

It it has the purpose of launching a, a couple of tons of high explosive, a couple of 100 miles to hit a target that is far beyond the range of any sort of artillery and is, is not very accessible even in the context of, of airborne assaults. So, that success of the v two rock in World War 2 really meant that at the end of the war, the Americans and the Russians, to be perfectly honest, both knew that they had to acquire this technology. Small question. The term ballistic. Right.

What does do you know what the definition of ballistic means? I couldn't give you I I there is a textbook definition. I can't cite I can't recite that for you, but I can I can tell you what it means in my own words? Yeah. That's fine. That's good enough. I just wanna It it is the launch of something from the ground, pointed toward a target that is somewhere down off in the distance, whatever that distance might be.

That the, the launcher will go up to a certain point, it will aim in the right direction, it'll run out of gas, and then it will come down in a ballistic trajectory. A ballistic? The ballistics is what you're talking about. We're talking about the firing of a cannon or the firing of a of a of a gunshot, you know, pistol on a range, whatever it happens to be, they follow a ballistic trajectory.

Now I it's one of those moments where I never tied them together, but you're you're talking about the mechanics, the the mechanics of projectiles. Right. I didn't pull that together, but now I get it. Okay. Thank you. So, you know, at the end of World War 2, the Americans and the the the Russians, especially scour occupied Germany looking for, all of this technology that could could lay their hands on, and the people who built it.

Mhmm. That included Vertivon Brown and the rocket team that had been working, at at Pina Munda, which is a location in the North Sea, to develop that v 2 rocket. And they the Americans got about a 150 or so of these German rocketeers led by Bernouette Von Braun, and they brought them to America in 1940 5. And they snatched up, you know, more than components for, the possibility of building as many as a 1000 v v twos and brought all that back too. Wow. The the German I'm I'm sorry.

The Russians did the same thing. They they latched on to as much of this as they could. They took it back to the Soviet Union and and tried to reverse engineer and understand how this was was developed. The Americans did the same thing.

And then in both cases, they expanded on that capability, leading to, the first investment in in in in what we could now call space technology, the development of rockets that could reach into space, but could also be used, you know, to drop a nuclear warhead on the Soviet Union. So the American Redstone Rocket that, was built in the 19 fifties by the Von Braun team in Huntsville, Alabama, was a shorter range ballistic missile.

It also launched the first two astronauts into space in the Mercury program, Alan Sheppard and and and Gus Grissom in 1961. Those it it it wasn't powerful enough to put them into orbit, but it sent them on a suborbital trajectory. So there's a direct example of how this military technology is used for space exploration.

The same is true with the Atlas rocket, which was developed as a ballistic missile and was the first intercontinental ballistic missile in the United States, one that could be based in the US and hit the Soviet Union with a nuclear warhead. And it was used to launch the orbital flights of the Mercury program. So the John Glenn flight and so forth were all launched to top ballistic missiles.

The Gemini program of the mid 19 sixties was, a 2 person capsule, that is, you know, sort of a part of that heroic age of of the space race in the 19 sixties was launched on top of a Titan 2 Rocket developed as a ballistic missile. So the relationship between these technologies really had its origins in the military program, and they footed the bill for it.

Would Sputnik and the, at that point, the USSR initiatives be I I know that you could say they're comparable because they were building rockets, but was there Sputnik because of military? Was their first crew up in the was all of that for the same, or was it scientific with monkeys or and dogs? And how how do we distinguish or how do we separate the 2, or do we Well, oh, okay.

So the r seven rocket, which is the one that launched Sputnik, and a version of that also launched Yuri Gagarin, was built as a ballistic missile. So it's exactly the same story, in terms of they're developing this for military purposes. It it it, it it is able to do that job, but then it is also used for these other, space exploration purposes. And, again, the rocket doesn't care what it's being used for.

No. It can it can, as I said, can be used to kill people and break things, and it can also be used to put an astronaut or a cosmonaut into orbit. So that's sort of the the beginning point, and that's why I have to raise the military purpose first. It's great because I had not taken it completely from that. From my historical thinking about space, I had not gone there. So, yeah, I appreciate it. And and and by the way, and and it's remained the case right up to the present.

I mean, so many of the technologies that we think of about spaceflight were really pioneered for national security military purposes. And some of those things we use directly today, and, I will point to the global positioning system GPS, which was developed as a military program, and it to this day is operated as a military program. We use it here on the ground to support us. It is based in space, and it you know, and most of us don't wanna live our life without it anymore.

It's still complete it's still completely run by the military and given access funded by the military. And it's, how does commercial have access? You know, again, the the satellites are there. They're there for military purposes And, there's a whole broad range, some of which you can talk about in public and others of which are classified. Okay. That that that are that use the GPS system, to enable war fighting here on on earth.

The, so as I said, it has a very specific military purpose, but anybody can get the signal because the signal's there. Yeah. And so, my cell phone uses it. I I turn on a GPS system when I'm trying to find a location. I don't know where So I and I didn't I didn't know this. The GPS doesn't have any control mechanisms to allow nonmilitary to use the exact same system. That's correct. Now there are some modifications.

It is conceivable that in a crisis situation, that there may be a way in which they can prohibit others from accessing that particular capability, but that's never been tested into my knowledge, not been talked about in public. So we didn't just we didn't say that. No. You can say it, but it's not I'm joking.

I'm joking. So I I never thought about that because I've heard that new satellites are being put up and you probably tell me if I'm not wrong, but new satellites are being put up with much greater accuracy, much greater all sorts of capabilities, and they are not accessible from for the general public. And and that's and that takes a variety of forms. There could be a national security component to that, and they're put up as military satellites that are used only by the military.

And then there are commercial firms that are trying to develop their own systems that are much more capable than, the one that's that I use on my cell phone. Mhmm. And, and that would be a commercial activity that would be a subscription based sort of thing, I suspect. Yes. And and all of those are possibilities. But the one that is ubiquitous around the world is GPS because that's the one available to everybody. Right. And and and so that's my first reason.

You know, we do it for national security. And, oh, by the way, you know, NASA has a has a a budget that is, you know, 20,000,000,000 or so per year, and that's that's not chicken feed. That's, you know, that is not enough to do all the things that NASA and those of us in the space community would like to do, but it's certainly enough to do a lot of things. And, and it's a much, much, much, much smaller budget than what you see in the national security space arena.

And so we can also include that out of the national security side, there's a percentage of that budget that's allocated towards, space activity. Yeah. And it's a lot larger than what NASA's budget is. And and it includes everything from ballistic missiles, the use of of, space based assets for all kinds of purposes. And, you know, navigation is 1, that's what GPS is about. Communication is another remote sensing of all types is another.

You could go on and on and on in terms of the national security components in space. And, and that is a huge part of what we do, in space. Is that space exploration? You can question that, but it is space activity, and it's really significant. So that's the first reason to fly. Okay. You want me to go on with the others? Abs absolutely. This is great. K. So the the second reason is the one that NASA is all about, and that is scientific discovery and understanding. You know?

NASA was established in 1958 as an organization dedicated to a very public purpose of, of understanding and learning about the cosmos. And, and it was also going to be a very public effort. While the military program is classified and sometimes very highly classified, The the NASA piece of this is very public, intended to be from the very beginning.

Some people have suggested both then and since that NASA is a convenient cover for a whole lot of things that are done in the military world in space. And there are specific examples of that. In 1960, the, the Department of Defense, develops the first reconnaissance satellites.

And the first twelve of those failed, in terms of just the launches, and it wasn't until the 13th mission that they were able to get the, the the first successful overflight of the Soviet Union, taking images from space with the intention that we are never gonna have another Pearl Harbor. And, because we wanna know what the other side's doing. We're not gonna be surprised again. So that's what that is all about.

But those first failures, every single one of those, they were known as Discoverer 1, Discoverer 2, Discoverer 3. They were all launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base. And the cover story was that these were NASA scientific missions. It's impossible to keep secret a launch of a rocket. Certainly, the people around there are gonna see it when it goes up. So what's the story about it? Why is it being launched? And the answer to that was, it's a NASA cover story.

It's being done for scientific purpose when it was actually a military program. But there is that scientific side of this, which is very real. And, and NASA has been very successful at developing the, the technologies and employing those technologies to learn about the solar system and, obviously, the universe beyond as well. And you can point to, to probes that have visited every planet of the solar system, sometimes several times, and landed on some.

You can point to astronauts exploring in earth orbit and going to the moon and developing a space station that's now in Earth orbit with a crew of 7 aboard even as we speak. And it's all about learning more about the cosmos in all kinds of ways. So that's that's that's a second reason. And nobody really questions it. We we wanna do it. You know, we might question which priority we should aim for in terms of our exploration. You know, do we wanna go to the moon, create a base?

Do we wanna go to Mars and forego the moon? You know, those those are debates inside the community. It's the moon hut, just so you know. It's the moon hut. That's fine. But, you know, and and and you you know, I could argue both sides. But, but the bottom line is nobody, nobody really seriously questions not doing it. They might question how much money is spent on, but they don't necessarily think it's a bad idea. So that that's the second reason. Okay. The third reason is about economics.

You know, can you make a buck in space? And there there's an old joke in the space community. You may have heard it. You know, how do you make a small fortune in space? The answer to that is start with a large fortune because most people lose money. You know? Yeah. Lots of companies go out of business. The landscape was littered in the 19 nineties with failed rocket development companies. And I could cite you chapter and verse about about a bunch of these things.

I I I just I was on conversation with someone yesterday, and we were talking about the number of, space launch companies out there. And I've been saying since for the past few years, at one point, there was 142. There's not enough capacity or need to fulfill the needs of a 142 space launch companies. And the better these companies become, the smaller the ecosystem will be of people because somebody's gonna be able to take that business.

And just yesterday, day before, the CEO of the United Launch Alliance made the almost the exact same play. We have so many space launch companies out there. And how can you they can't survive. And there was one other conversation what we brought up was it was about why Elon didn't get a certain project and the United Launch Alliance did.

And the explanation came back to me and says, well, it was a $1,000,000,000 satellite, and there were they felt that there was more expertise even though they paid more. There was more expertise in making sure that $1,000,000,000 satellite got up, which was a lot. It was not about the rocket. It was about the entire process of getting that satellite into orbit. So but it's there's not enough to support 200 space launch companies today. Right. Right. No no question about that.

And that's one of the things that always happens, is that you find that, you know, some companies will fail, just fail outright, and have to declare bankruptcy and close-up shop. Some will merge, create larger, perhaps better managed and better organized, companies as they as they go through that merger process. And and and and it there will be a winnowing that takes place as this as this happens. But, but but you're absolutely right in terms of market potential.

And this has always been the challenge with space with space, with with companies who wanna use a space for various kinds of things. Is what is the business model and how do you close that case, and have a successful business? It's hard to do. And, and the barrier for entrance into that community is so high because you have to build technologies that are very expensive, that you can't just, you know, open your door and say you're in business.

What is your take on not just historical part, but the view of economics working long term or however you'd like to answer that when you think of the term economics and space? This is the historical part, but is is there something more that you thought about? Well, I mean, one of the things that that you have to consider in in this context is and what is a space company? And I and I I like to sort of, you know, play with this a little bit because there, obviously, there are launch companies.

And and and you just mentioned you're absolutely right. The market is not large enough to support all of the actors who wanna be a part of that. And and from a pure sort of space business, there's no question that that that is is in that category. But what about a lot of other things that we might not think of as a space business? And I'll I'll I'll point again to to a company like, let's say, Garmin, for instance. Is Garmin a space business?

I love this because I've had these conversations with individuals, and I have done the exact same thing. Yes. It is a space business because without agree because if you didn't have space as a part of the component, they would not have a business. And so is Zoom. And so is, what's the name? I'm trying to think of not the Google, but the other one, Waze, who uses GPS to get around. And Right. And g and trucks by UPS are using space to get to where they need to be. Right.

Yeah. These are space companies, but they're not. It's a mechanism. It's a tool. Yeah. And so and and so you you start thinking about this and it can and it gets very dicey very quickly, in terms of what constitutes a space business and what is not a space business. Business. And, people's heads hurt when they start thinking about it quite frankly, because it's it it gets very difficult. It's even difficult for people in the space industry, which is Oh, absolutely. Boggles my freaking mind.

Let me a short story. You've heard some about Project Moon. One of the things I was on I was on a call with an individual from the European Space Agency. Won't mention her name because she is visible. And I said, what we're planning on doing is making the ecosystem, the Mearth ecosystem, the ecosystem bigger and expand. And and she said something and I said, you probably think the space industry is pretty small. And she said, yeah, no, it's a very tight knit group. We tend to know each other.

We're very connected. I've gone to some of these events to the same people showing up. And I said, so so then I said to her, but what about the company in Guangzhou who builds a gasket? They're a $20,000,000 business and they make about $100,000 worth of gaskets a year, high high, temperature ratings and capabilities that are necessary for the space industry. Are they in the space industry? And her response floored me.

She said, Well, David, if you're going to look at it that way, then the then the space industry is huge. And I said, yes. So Salesforce is in the space industry because they sell technology to help space companies manage their deal flow and their customers, and so is the paper company you sells to and so is the man and the tool manufacturer and the the other people in the space ecosystem. And it's mind boggling how much push back I get. Yeah. It it it it is amazing.

I and, you know, there was a social scientist that was trying to analyze, in the 19 sixties, the the the size of the space race. You know, how much was really put into this. There's a variety of ways to try to do that. You can talk about investment and how much money was spent. Talk about this, but but, this individual came up with a with a, an analysis I can tell you how how legit it was, but but this is what he came up with.

About one out of every 11 Americans was engaged in the Apollo program in 19 sixties in some way. And I when I first heard that, I thought, well, it seems like an awful lot of people. And it is. But that's how that's how I was counting this, is that, you know, some company that makes bolts Yep. Absolutely. That you use to bolt together parts of a rocket. I love you, Roger. Those people are part of the program too Correct. At some level. Yeah. Well, they are.

Without the bolts, you couldn't send it up. Right. So, but but, you know, that's the people who are making bolts, it's probably not, you know, using making those for rockets. That's one percentage of their business, but certainly not the sum total of their business. But yet they're still supplying the space ecosystem. Right. You do need bolts to put the rocket up. You do need an electronic. You need a chip. You do need a a cushion for the chair. And without that, you wouldn't have the chair.

So how do you break that line and say the space industry? And once individuals there's a company, I won't mention the name, they're a $7,000,000,000 company. Their executive team is not interested in going to the space industry. So a group of us got together and looked at who they were selling to. They are inside factories. That's their technology, and they're supplying 2 major space companies.

But they say they're not in the space industry, yet they're selling to the space industry massive equipment. Right. And they and they we're not interested in space. Okay. But we're not telling you to go to space. Sell to the space industry. You have all ecosystem. You can make a ton of money. They never had thought about that. Yeah. So, you know, the bottom line is economics are critical for any of this to have, long legs.

Yep. And, and the space business has to be robust enough to support significant activity if we're ever going to to do anything beyond sort of government programs. Mhmm. Yes. That we might do at a modest level. And, and and so there there, you know, there has to be economic if there's a human future in space, there's gonna have to be a human, there are there's gonna have to be an economic activity that humans are engaged in space. And I I completely agree.

One of the things that we've been promoting is space ecosystem because I I love what Elon is doing, and I think what he's doing is absolutely fantastic. And I also love what Bezos is doing as well as everybody who's in the industry. But those are not ecosystems per se. Those are individuals perceiving, and what we really need to create a thriving space industry Mhmm. Is to have a global space ecosystem.

And that means that everybody understands that they play a part in this, not without, not consciously saying I'm a space person, but, hey. It's a market, and they could pay bills, and they deliver services. And our agriculture, we plant off of them. And our our class 9 harvesters that are run by from John Deere. I think it's John Deere. John Deere has class 9 harvesters and those harvesters are run by GPS. That's in places like Minnesota and at least in the United States if you're an American.

These farms are so long that they they run 247. The guy who's in the harvester is not touching the controls. It's dark out. It's all being run by GPS, and that's how food is being manufactured. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. I was, I was really struck by, precision farming as a as a technology that emerged in the nineties, in which, using GPS data analysis from things like, commercial remote sensing satellites and, and fertilizer delivery that's sort of targeted to the individual part of of the land that's under cultivation, that needs a particular type and in particular amount and, and and nothing else. And what that means in terms of efficiencies associated with the, agricultural production.

So here here's a here's a question that you're not gonna get right, but I'm gonna ask you anyway. What do you think happens to the person? What's the number one gripe of the people that are in the harvester because they still have humans sitting in them or in these devices and these tractors? What do you think they get hooked on? They get hooked on? Yep. It's a it's something they get hooked on. I don't know. Are they playing video games or something? I'm not sure. No. Soap operas. Oh, alright.

1 I've spoken to a few beside the that's how I know about class 9 harvesters and all of this tech that's in it. And I did some interviews, and the guy said, I I get hooked on these soap operas. I can't wait for the next day because they're doing nothing for hours on end. Right. Right. And so they could read a book, they could do, but they're watching soap operas, which I thought was a kind of cute, thing that's happening. But, yes Yeah. Precision find something else to watch, but okay.

Persistent Farming well, that was before Netflix, but Precision Farming is a great example of a space industry. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. I love it. So so the first three reasons that I've talked about, and I I I contend there are 5. Don't require humans to be in space. It's not necessary. We're doing all kinds of things there, scientific, military, commercial, using robots.

And, it's not that they are that humans are necessarily excluded, but they are not necessary to the process at this point. The latter two reasons do require humans, and but they're a little bit soft. Those first three are are rock solid. I mean, virtually nobody questions those. But the 4th reason is really about geopolitics and in, in national prestige.

And that is fundamentally about astronauts and cosmonauts, and ultimately, taikonauts and anybody else that's gonna be out there flying in space in the future. The Americans and the Russians began flying humans in space in 19 61 because of the cold war. And it's not to say that they wouldn't have done it another at another time had there been no cold war, but that's what drove them in 61. The Gagarin flight was a was a publicity stunt. And, and it was remarkably successful.

I mean, the the the and and the Russians wanted to pursue this as did the Americans because of this cold war environment. And and I I talked to a lot of students and and, you know, the incoming freshmen this last year in university were not alive when 911 took place. So, so their knowledge of the Cold War is nonexistent. It's whatever they read in history book or talk we talked to in in high school with, with teachers.

And they did not have an understanding of how desperate that struggle truly was. At the end of World War 2, you had 2 competing economic military and, political systems that were 2 scorpions in a bottle. There will be a winner and there will be a loser. There is not going to be coexistence, not over the long haul.

And, and in that sense, the the space race, the space activities of the 19 fifties and the 19 sixties, to some extent, later into the seventies and eighties, but especially that earlier era, is really about demonstrating to the world technological capability. And not because the Americans wanted to feel good about their capabilities or the Russians wanted to feel good about their capabilities, but because of this global struggle.

As you've got 2 sets of allies that are sort of faced off against each other and a whole raft of emerging nations that have become independent after World War 2. Whose side are they going to be on in this cold war? That's fundamentally what this was about. And they knew in the 19 fifties sixties, and we know today as well, that the future belongs to the civilization that can master science and technology. And so if you're I love to use the example of India in the 19 sixties.

Newly independent after World War 2. Yep. A very populous nation, 500 years or so of, of British colonial rule, an educational system that was pretty advanced, certainly for a lot of parts of the world, and, and would be an immediate regional and ultimately world power. No question about that. Whose side are they gonna be on in the cold war? Are they gonna side with the Americans and the west? Are they gonna side with the Soviet Union in the east? It was an enormous challenge.

And they're looking at this and they're saying, okay, I wanna go with the side that's gonna win. And that's true for everybody. That's what the space race, that's what human space flight was all about, demonstrating this capability. The Americans won that race, but it didn't necessarily start out that way. So when you say it didn't start out that way, what do you mean it didn't start out? All of the early successes are Russian.

Yeah. That that it surprises me to the nth degree that almost every single success in the space industry has been done first by the Russians. And it was the most amazing discussion that I had when someone asked me, how do you think people are getting up to the space station since the Space Shuttle went down? It wasn't no longer being used. I didn't know. I I've gotten into this into space, if you wanna call it, since, about 6 years ago.

And the Russians through the Soyuz rocketry has been sending since 2000 was it, 2011? 2011 is when showing. 20 right. 2011. Since 2011, the to get up to the International Space Station, you went with the Russians. Right. And and they've been getting along. I mean, rockets go up and they send up the the European Space Agency members or all the members of the International Space Station through Russia.

And it was it was if you're not if you haven't grown up with this industry, if you haven't heard and followed, it's a jaw dropping moment to realize. I I and I'm not a I'm a globalist in my own perspective. I love the world. It's not anti Russia. It was just an a jaw dropping in that, wow. I never thought about it. How did they get up there? Well, they were the only ship in town. Yeah. Well, not the only one. The Chinese had one. They weren't a part of the partnership.

Oh, the the Chinese had at the same they could have delivered Americans to the Internet or, Americans because I'm looking at the American conflict. They could have, sent individuals up to the International Space Station in 2,011? Well, they certainly had the rocket technology and the capsule technology to do so.

Now their launch capability was, was different than what, the Americans and the Russians had because ISS was put into an orbit specifically that could be reached, from both, the Kennedy Space Center, where the shuttle was flying from and from Baikon Urbichon Oh. Which is where the Russians flew from. I didn't I never thought of that. So it's it's actually on the flight path if you wanna call it so that it can meet them where they need to be, which the Chinese could not be on that flight path.

Is that a good way to say it? I don't know the answer to that. It's possible that the Chinese could, but they had the technology to be able to go to orbit and to send people to orbit. And so Could they have rendezvoused with the space station? I don't know enough about their technology to tell you that. It's it's a good question. Is so when you, this is just a a today, a 20 21 question.

When I watch some of the rockets that do not succeed in China, they just had another one, a few weeks ago, and I I don't pay attention to these like people in the space industry do. But they've had a lot of challenge with the takeoffs not happening the way they would like, and there's a lot more risk. So if we're going back to 2011, I would've this is just conjecture.

I would've thought that they couldn't do it while the Russians had so many successes with their rocketry that there was it was actually, it's been very safe. We haven't had an accident. So did we is there any relationship to from 2021 going back to 2,011 in terms of capabilities? Well, I mean, the Russian program I'm sorry. The the Chinese program has, has obviously been advancing since that time, and they've had a set of successes and they put up a orbital platform.

They have occupied it, and they've done a variety of things along those lines. But that's a they're a standalone program, and they're standalone in part because of the politics of it. Yes. Not in part, mostly because of the politics rather than anything else. And there's a lot of concern about technology transfer, going to going to nation states that might be potential adversaries in the future, and the protection of that.

And, and so that's specifically the reasons why the Chinese are not a part of the International Space Station program, which Yep. From my perspective would make sense to bring them in, but, there are national security considerations beyond that. Which goes back to the military again. It goes back to the military. I mean, the the military is the dominant force in all of these things. And and and maybe justifiably, so I'm not saying it's not, but, but that's been one of the real fears.

And and and going back to the nineties with the theft of Hughes technology Hughes spacecraft technology by the by the the Chinese, you know, that put in place a whole series of laws that made it really difficult for technology to be transferred. So so I I don't know. I don't know that there's ITAR in these conditions, but I didn't it started ITAR is the result of this. So they used space technology. What did they do? What happened?

So, use, space systems, was working on satellites for a variety of organizations, companies, and so forth. And and and there was, you know, intellectual theft that took place in this process. And, and so like it's it's like a lot of other things.

I I mean, you you probably familiar with, you know, with intellectual property rights that are, you know, that are sort of a part of these sorts of discussions and the difficulties of engaging in, commerce, especially technological activities with the with the with, China.

And and because of all of this, then, the the restrictions on transfer of of technology, specifically in the form of ITAR being, it existed before, but it was certainly enhanced significantly by the Congress when all of that went down. Okay. I didn't know that's where it started. Just an interesting point. Well, I I mean, it didn't start there. Technology transfer has been a concern from the very beginning. Because, again, it gets back to a rocket doesn't care what you use it for.

It has it has military purposes and other purposes. So, so you have to protect that technology so that it does not fall into the hands of people who might use it to kill you. Right. No. Makes sense. Just I yeah, I I now tie it together much better because of your explanation. So, yeah, I just didn't I you just mentioned Hughes, and I'm thinking, okay. What did they steal? And I could almost the the first analogy that comes to mind is the capital, insurrection.

And for no doubt in my mind that in the next year, there will be so much technology thrown into the capital that will be guns, forward warning, alerts, systems, because there was a failure of the system Right. That the future will never be the same. Someone's going to walk in. They will not even have to walk through a detector because the detector will be the building. Yeah. And so, yeah, it it causes something.

So Hughes was one of those pivotal points in the push for protection of intellectual property. Yeah. Very much. Anyway, it's, it it's a it's a long way of saying that, that this geopolitics and, national prestige piece has this long history, and it was really significant in the Cold War environment of the 19 sixties.

But hit but it but at no point since that time, has any of the nations that have been engaged in human space activities been willing to step back from that and say, we're not gonna do this anymore. The Americans didn't do it. And lord knows when the Soviet Union collapsed, you know, around 1990, 91, and and their economy was gone, and the nation state had to be reconfigured in very fundamental ways. Their space program did not end.

Their cosmonauts that were on the Mir space station at that point stayed right there, and they continue to fly and do the things that they that they, thought that they should be doing. As if the Soviet Union had not changed whatsoever. That would suggest to me that this is something you don't walk away from even though there might be good reasons to do so. Someone had to put this as a priority, that this still maintains its its.

There's cash going and it's gonna go someplace, and we're gonna make sure that the space industry continues. Yeah. And it and it's very much the human component. And I don't see us walking away from that as Americans or as or or as Russians or as Chinese or the next country that probably is going to get involved is going to be the Indians, who desperately want to enhance their capabilities and get to a human space flight program that can ultimately go to the moon.

And, and I would not be surprised at all to see them do it. They are remarkably successful, nation state when it comes to these these technologies. It's surprising that the the the fact that the Russian engines, rocket engines, have been the predominant engine for as long as they have been. And the coordination around the world with all these countries is mind boggling if you step away from the challenges that we see on the political level, yet on the scientific level, there's collaboration.

Mhmm. Right. Well, I mean, this is something that's always happened. I mean, even at the height of the cold war, while you've got, you know, rivalries taking place between the Soviet Union and the United States, the, the spacefarers themselves, the cosmonauts and the astronauts, gathered in very friendly settings.

And and, I mean and it's not like they're trading state secrets, but there there were certainly a lot of commonality and interest in what each side was doing, and they talked about it with each other. So did the scientists and the engineers, insofar as they could and not give away the technology. You you could have a be you could have a beer with somebody or you could have a shot of vodka. It didn't mean that you were giving away straight secrets. You had a common bond.

Yeah. But but it there's also cooperative you know, that are both informal and and formal throughout this year throughout this whole period. I mean, I love to tell the story about, the International Geophysical Year and and which was formed in the early 19 fifties with the intention that we would have an international effort to understand more about the geophysical properties of the earth.

It was a follow on to 2 earlier efforts along the same lines, and it was a a brilliant success when first proposed, you know, a 100 years before. Where simply we're going to send teams to locations, teams of scientists, to collect readings using the same instruments and the same protocols and recording the data in the same way, so that when we do all of these readings, we can bring back these different datasets and merge them into a single dataset that will give us a global perspective on this.

And in 18/83/84, the international polar year was the result of that, led by the Germans. And the Americans participated. All kinds of countries participated doing just that thing. They did it again about about, 40 years later and again in the 19 fifties with the International Geophysical Year. The Americans, the Russians, this is the height of the Cold War Mhmm.

Are engaged in all these activities, And both the Americans and the Russians agreed that we now have a capability we didn't have previously. And that was to put scientific satellites above the earth to measure the geophysical properties. That's what Sputnik was all about. That's what the explorer program is all about in the United States that discovered the Van Allen radiation belts, was this international effort. And the Russians were just as much a part of this as the Americans.

The week that Sputnik was launched on the it was launched on the 4th October of 1957, there was a conference taking place at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC about the International Geophysical Year. And through that whole conference, that whole week long, the Russians are there.

They're talking to Americans and others, and and they're talking about their program and and they they and they're sort of hinting, you know, we may really have an important announcement before the end of this week. It was the worst kept secret at the conference. No. So the Americans are looking at each other going, what do you think they're talking about? And says, they're they're gonna launch a satellite. We know what they're doing. And and then the 4th of the 4th October was a Friday.

That was the last day of the conference. And, and and and there's a closing cocktail party that's taking place at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, and everybody's there. And that evening, Walter Sullivan, who is the, at the time, the, science correspondent for the New York Times comes in, finds the American head of the IGY, a fellow by the name of Lloyd Birkner. What's IGY? What's IGY?

IGY, International Geophysical Year. The international scientific effort to understand the geophysical properties of the earth. Yep. Walks over to Lloyd Birkner and whispers in his ear, it's up. And Birkner knew immediately what he was talking about. He gets the attention of everybody in the room. He congratulates the, the Soviet delegation on the success of the launch of their first of their first satellite. They they raise their glasses.

They have a toast, and they all go to the roof of the Soviet Embassy to see if they can see it in space. So, you know, I'm I'm I'm I'm telling you this anecdote because of the of the relationship of this group of people, regardless of the larger, geopolitical rivalries that are taking place. At at the personal level, you find that individuals become friends, confidants.

Again, not not being disloyal to their nation state, but nonetheless, they have a common objective and that is to learn more about the universe. Yeah. Anyway, that's the 4th reason of flying space. Okay. Number 5. Number 5. Well, it's a great And another at the center of that 4th reason is humans. And we've been I've been unwilling to walk back from it ever since. The 5th reason is one that NASA loves to talk about. And, it is sort of human destiny.

And I can't tell you how many astronauts I've heard talk about. It's human destiny to want to explore. We always wanna see what's on the other side of the ocean. We always wanna climb to the top of the mountain. We always wanna do that sort of activity, that exploration. And and at some level, that's true. And it's a very ethereal sort of thing. It's very positive.

You know, we can and if you're if you're good at sort of waxing poetic about it, you can talk about the meaning of all of it and how it's how it makes us makes us human, makes us who we are. We've always been like this. We always will be like this. And there's some truth to it, but it's not nearly as compelling in actuality as we might wanna think it would be. Yeah. So so I could hear it in your voice. Tell me what you really feel. So because I can hear it. Come on.

First off, there are many ways to explore. Yes. Humans want to explore. It's human nature, But there are many ways to do that. It does not necessarily mean physically going to some other location. Not even for ourselves. I mean, I can talk about a spiritual awakening as an exploration and be just as on solid ground as anybody who says they wanna cross the ocean and go to the top of the mountain.

There are all kinds of other things about this that are are less about physical movement to some location than and are more about other types of exploration. So the the human destiny argument doesn't carry the same weight that, I think some folks would like for it to. I I've done I've done the interviews with some of these individuals. That's why I'm asking where it they do bring up. It is our destiny. It's our purpose. We need to be out there. We were born to go and travel the galaxies.

And at the same time, I have people sending me videos saying, if you were traveling at the speed of light from the sun, it would take you, 8 days to get to Earth, and to get to Mars is I mean, it the just if you're traveling at the speed of light, it's gonna take forever. So to get all the way out to Pluto I mean, we're not talking to going in the different galaxies and and traveling the universe like Star Trek, which just happens in 13 seconds, they can get to another place in the, warp speed.

It it's and I also get the existential threat an a ton of times. So you sound like you're not in those camps the same way. So that's why I'm asking. Yeah. Well, I mean and and by the way, the existential threat is the flip side of this, the survival of the species. So as I say, there are many ways to explore, not all of them require you physically going somewhere.

Yep. And and, oh, by the way, we have done a lot of exploration, a ton of it with robots, and they have been remarkably robust avatars for us. And, oh, by the way, we don't care what happens to them. Rovers on Mars are on a suicide mission. They're not coming home. And we would never think that about a human mission. So that's a fundamental difference in my mind. There is a flip side to this, which is if we don't get off this planet, we will become extinct here, and that is a true statement.

There will Carl Sagan used to like to talk about the last perfect day on Earth, which sun would rise, people would be there, so on and so forth. And at the end of that day, the sun would become a red giant. It would engulf the entire solar system, and everybody would be dead, extinct, and there is no more. That will happen. The best case scenario, several 1000000000 years in the future. Yeah. It's impossible to get excited about a threat that is several 1000000000 years. I guess.

No member of Congress that I know of is willing to expend resources on that on that for that particular reason. I'm laughing because I say similar things. Yeah. I don't wake up in the morning and say, oh my god, I've got a, there's a chance that in the next few 100 years, my my children's children's children's children will have it at this extinction level event. Yeah. And and and it's a possibility it could be more immediate. Yep. You know, we could so foul a planet, we can't survive either.

That's another hole. Yep. Out of existence. Yep. In in which way we deserve to be extinct. I don't know any other way to put it. So those that reason is all about human space flight, but I don't find it very compelling. But those are the only five reasons I can think of for flying in space. Okay. I I I follow you. Love it. And and a lot of history, which I love too.

Not that I'm a historian, but it's helping me to or yet, not but yet it's helping me understand some of the missing pieces that I have not heard about or didn't know about. So great. So we're ready for number 2. What is the human future beyond directly into what is the human future is, you know, beyond earth.

And, and we can look at this in a variety of ways, and and people usually jump over the the sort of immediate pieces to this and jump right to being a multiplanetary species existing on the moon, Mars. Who knows where else in the solar system, perhaps beyond all of that, as sort of a dream. But there's what we sort of have it's it's like a cartoon I saw one time, the 2 scientists standing in a blackboard working on an equation.

And there's a problem that they've written out, you know, equation on one side. On the other side, they've got an equal sign and a solution. And in the middle, they've got a bracket that says, and here a miracle occurs. Because we see this endpoint, and we see this problem on the other end, but the middle part is just sort of viewed as, oh, it's just gonna work itself out. It's a miracle. And, and and it's not. So, you know, what is the human future?

And and I in terms of immediacy, I could see us developing a a base on the moon. But if we do that, it's not gonna be a commercial base because there's no way to make money at this point in time. Mhmm. And I cannot square a business case. Yeah. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it it sure is not something that's going to be predicated on that. So it's gonna end up being something done for philanthropic purposes. It's called the moon hut, just so we're sure. Yep. We can call it the moon hut.

But but we're talking about an enormous investment. Absolutely. And, and that makes the philanthropic piece of this much, much, much, much harder, if not impossible. Mhmm. Or it's going to have to be supported by a government or multiples of governments. That's what I see happening. Okay. And I, you know, I think that we could see in the 21st century a base, perhaps conceivably multiple bases, but, but a base, anyway, that'll look a lot like Antarctica.

Mhmm. Undertaken as a probably by a consortium of nations, supported by, by them through government funding, where scientists and technical people are rotated in and out of an underground bunker because there's no other way to do this. Got to you've got to protect from radiation. And so, you know, the the the domes that I've seen that are ubiquitous in space art and one movie Yeah. Is is no. You can't do that because you're gonna die with the from the radiation exposure.

But the, but you could create an underground, wouldn't necessarily be a pleasant place to live, but you could go there and survive and there could be scientific purposes that are are undertaken there for for that. So And I and I could see that happening. So if we change that instead of a consortium of countries, but we called it a consortium of wealthy individuals, countries, industry all coming together.

So it's instead of defining it that way because we now have 28150 billionaires on this planet, which is a large number, not including the people who didn't make it. They're only worth sorry. They didn't make it. They're only worth $900,000,000. But if we had a consortium and there was contributions that came about from all different places, we could still hit those numbers. Well, what's the price tag for something like that sustained over, say, a 20 year period? $270,000,000,000?

Well, I think that's low, but, you know, assuming that's it. I mean, we've spent more than that on the space station. Yeah. Well, you're talking about $10,000,000,000 or $8,000,000,000 a year or $12,000,000,000 a year, with a concerted effort to one place. You have you have to build the infrastructure first. Yep. Convuilding the infrastructure and all of that. So my point was still if, there's a there's a story that, is told. Have you ever heard of the stone soup parable?

No. No. I'm not familiar with that. 2 individuals go into town, and they're starving. This is a long time ago. They go into town, they're starving, and they need some food to eat. So one guy says, I'll take care of it. And he walks up to a door and knocks on the door and says, do you have a pot I can borrow? Woman says, what are you gonna do with it? He says, well, I'm gonna make some stone soup. The woman says, well, I wanna see this. Sir, I'll give you a pot.

So guy takes the pot and he goes to the center of town and he starts a little fire, put some water in and he some other people gather around. She says, just because I'm gonna make stone soup. And he says, yeah. Put some stones and takes a spoon and he takes a sip and he says, probably, you know, just a little bit of salt would help. And person says, well, I got some salt, runs back, brings some salt, puts it in. And then they tries it, says tastes better.

And he says, you know, it would be nice if maybe a carrot or 2 would be dropped in. So he drops a day. Someone goes, I got some carrots and pulls them out, gives them some carrots. And pretty soon, they're all collecting these little pieces. And after a period of time, the parable is is they made a soup large enough to feed the village. Yeah. And that has been it's it's called ax soup. There's a 10 there's so many different parables.

But what happened was that everybody contributed in their own little way, which goes back to what you were you know, when I was speaking about of the ecosystem and space. No no government paid the Bolt company to make a Bolt, but they invested in the Bolt because a rocket company wanted some bolts. And no one created the software specifically for the space industry, but yet they sold it to the space industry. So that is all part of that contribution.

And so you can drop the physical cost of going to space, and I'm you know already, my background is not space. I don't look to the stars. I don't dream about these things.

If you have everybody and nobody paying, meaning they're all contributing in their own way because there's agricultural technology and satellites are going up for other purposes, but then they could be reused and the technology is shared, Potentially, potentially, that's a hypothesis, that we could get there to meet what you're saying, a moon hut, that could be used if in fact it was a con a global contribution effort without really saying you need to give us money.

But if I said I could buy that from you, they might invest in the technology themselves. Does that make sense? Yeah. Sure. I I mean, I this reminds me of Huck Finn in the fence, but, restoring the stone suit. But, Hopefully, I'm a good painter. So but, anyway, you know, I mean, it's it's conceivable, but I I think the price tag's probably higher than Well, just for I'm just talking about the moon hut.

So we're not if we go into if we start having 500 people, then you have to have many, many more rockets and we're talking 1,000,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars of development. But if we're talking just the moon hunt and development of that, I Okay. Alright. Fair enough. But I I, you know, I think it's totally within our capability if we wanna create a moon base of some kind. So our future beyond Earth is a moon base? Well, could be. That's one possibility.

Okay. You know, our our problem our our problem is, you know, Apollo was a bunch of camping trips, You know, you know, 3 2 campers land on the moon. They spend a few days there. They take with them everything that they need, and then they come back. And then we have the capability to go to the next stage, which is, okay, we can put some sort of quarters there and and cycle people in and out. And and and that's fine up to a point, but that's not what the space community wants. Of course not.

They wanna see colonists. Yes. And and and as soon as you move from, I'm gonna cycle people in and out on a somewhat regular basis, whatever the regular basis is, and you have permanent residents, then you've opened a whole series of issues that sort of gets to my third concern, which is fragility of the human body, in this environment. Our our we are evolved to operate at 1g at the at the bottom of an atmosphere, a deep atmosphere here on earth and no place else.

And every other place that we're aware of that we might be able to go to is strikingly different from that. So how do you survive? You know, flight surgeons have have talked about this for a long time.

You know, the the gravity, the radiation, the, the percentage in that is basically moon dust, are all health issues that immediately impact the, the human body if it's gonna stay on the moon for any length of time and especially in the context of families where you have children that are conceived, gestated, and born there. How will that body be different from what you have here on earth? It will be different. We don't know how.

And I will tell you, NASA does not wanna talk about that because it raises all kinds of profound questions about whether or not we can survive in space. We were not involved for that. And and does it make us something else? Are we talking about the next stage of human evolution? Or are we talking about artificial modification of the body to enable us to survive there? And what does that mean?

I find those profound questions that we haven't talked about, very much, and that So answer a few of them. Alright. You you're I I had to do this with someone who's in the military on another interview. All the things that you all these, subject matter that you deliver here is the sole purpose of your own personal thoughts and beliefs. So I just wanna hear you. I wanna hear what your thoughts are. Well, by the way, obviously not everything is totally my thoughts and beliefs.

What I meant is they come they come at it. The people I've talked to, the things I've read on and on and on. Because he was in the military, he had to he had to have this disclaimer as my point. So, and I'm just saying that there's a disclaimer that you're not saying that this is the NASA's thought or everybody. These are the things that you've learned and thought about, and we'd love to hear it. These are the things that I'm concerned about.

Okay. So, you know, colonists going to the moon, going to Mars, pick the destination of your choice unless it's an earth like planet, which doesn't exist in this solar system. Maybe doesn't exist at all. Certainly, we don't we haven't discovered one yet. But, but absent that, how will we survive? And I it it it sort of leads me into a path where I can say, you know, we're just this is not really doable.

And and and can we, undertake this huge dream that I see in the space flight community of becoming a multiplanetary species? And, if that's something that is not possible and it's hard to say anything's impossible because sooner or later, somebody may find out how. Find out if they can do something different. But as it stands right now, I just don't see how we can do these things. As I said, I think we can create we can create moon bases. We can create Mars bases.

We can create bases on other places too with proper sort of protections and and survive on short term. But colonizing is different. So You're talking to the camp. So I already I already this is all part of Project Moon Hut. This is what you're saying is so close to what we've been talking about for 6 years that it's not with the I cut out some of the the higher level thinking that you're saying such as we can't we can't and this is impossible. What I've said is what is possible?

And I've kinda drawn a 25 year timeline. What is possible? Can we get a moon hut on the moon? Will people be living there indefinitely? We have too many biological challenges we have not solved yet, so how can that happen? And that's actually how Project Moon Hut started. It started because someone brought up a biological question to me, and I just reacted space. And afterwards, when I've shared it with individuals because I was talking to people from NASA, no one disagreed with the construct.

So I do not believe and it's not that people it's an admirable destination. I I don't see living on Mars today. It's far away. It's not part of our ecosystem. It's a one way trip. You're gonna stay. You're going to be, and there are a lot of challenges we haven't addressed yet. It's a robotic planet today, not a human planet. When I look at mar moon, it's 3 days away with current technology. We could get faster at it, but we're 3 days away. We could put a moon hot on the moon.

We can then create not for experimentation, but, actually, we could potentially, in this day and age, we could rent out a industrial park. We can create a building where there could be experiments done. There could be microgravity experiments. There could be someone could create a perfume, the first one ever sold. It's very expensive.

And we could sell something from the moon to the earth, and then maybe, an extended stay hotel, a nicer facility because you're living in close quarters, maybe a little bigger. But this is countless trips to the moon. This is a lot of energy being put forward. This is a I I look at timelines in my own head. If today on Earth, we do not have a rocket that is human rated that can safely get a human to the moon and it could come, but we don't have one today.

Don't tell me we're going to have an Aneel station in space with 400 people by 2030. Right. And I and I hear that in the space industry, and it's it's not much different in my mind than the blockchain industry, which they're gonna solve every challenge that exists. It's not much different than many other industries. I'm not picking on one. But when I look at timelines, if we don't have a rocket, how many rockets would we need to have an O'Neil station in space?

75, a 100. But if we're gonna have passengers and 40 people living there and people staying inside of it for 3 weeks at 5 to $10,000,000 a piece, how many people would be able to do that and going on further. So we're being very pragmatic in Project Moon Hut to kind of, because I'm not a space geek, to kind of bring the pragmatism back and say, this is possible. We can have a Moon Hut. We've been to the moon. We can create it.

We have not been there for 27 days and stayed and returned like explorers would of the the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria or anybody else. They went, they stayed, and not everybody lived, but they stayed and they came back. And the Industrial Park, they started selling something between the new world, this new place, not just the Americas, but they started to create an economic system. The Mearth economic system is what we're calling it, moon and earth.

So then maybe we could have something sold between the 2. It could be scientific research. It could be new tools and technology. It could be pet rocks or pet moon rocks. And then we come back to the next phase. So our phasing is very much in line with what you're saying. We haven't overcome childbirth in space. We haven't overcome loneliness in space. You live in a tin can the entire time. What happens if a baby is born on the moon or on Mars or in space? What happens?

So the reason I'm asking you these questions is not because I'm saying you're wrong. I'm asking you because I want to understand your historical perspective because you are a historian, but also to understand the messaging you've been using in the real world so that maybe we can learn something as to how we can message it appropriately or maybe we've overlooked something.

So it's a it's a real serious question to solve what we believe is a pragmatic approach to building this moon and earth Mearth economy. It was Burton Lee and I were in a restaurant in Palo Alto, and we came Mearth was the name. So we have a moon and earth economy. How long would it take? What would it require? What would be realistic? Does that make sense? Sure. I understand that. Okay. Here's the challenge in my mind. Yeah. And it's the same challenge that has always been the case.

You know, physical exploration on earth has always been dominated by since the European expansion, you know, of 15th century, has has been fundamentally dominated. And I would contend earlier expansions were in the same category, by what I refer to as the 3 g's. And and I'm I'm gonna be flipping here by by using it in this particular way. I love g's, but it's my name is Goldsmith. So I'm I'm happy using a g. You know, god, gold, and glory. Ah, okay.

So the expansion the European expansion to the Americas, to Asia, to Africa, to Australasia was all predicated on these things. It was in part about the glory associated with, both individual exploration as well as the nation state that sponsored that exploration. And, and secondly, it was about, you know, the god, basically.

Whatever that's that god was that, your particular nation state was involved in, Catholic, protestant, whatever it happened to be, was about converting the native populations to whatever that was. And so coincident with the exploration, whereas were were the missionaries that came with them. Yeah. Very specifically fueling a fair amount of this. But finally, none of this is sustainable unless the gold is a part of it.

In case and in some cases, it was literally gold, which they mostly took from other people. Yeah. Gold, silver, whatever the whatever the, the, the economic results were, were immediately apparent. And I I love to point out the fact that we don't think of Spain as a world power, but it became one in the context of their American exploration because they essentially stole everything they could lay their hands on.

It was worth, had any value and took it back, and it made Spain richest nation in the world. And they weren't alone there. I'm not saying they're particularly worse than anybody else, in terms of what they were doing. But but the component that does not exist in spaceflight, and it doesn't exist with the moon at this point in time, is the gold part. The picture I love to show, that depicts us better than anything else in my mind.

It's an image from Apollo, 17, which the lunar rover has pulled up to a, a crater. Jack Schmidt is staring into the crater, and, it's it's snapped as a panorama. It's not a it's not a close-up at all, and you can see this whole wide expanse. And what you see, except for that little tiny astronaut in a space suit and lunar rover, is miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles.

Yeah. What is the economic activity that it that can exist on the moon in a way that it can fuel the sustainment of activity there. Yeah. And I know people have talked about mining Helium 3 and things of this nature. Yep. And maybe that exists. But right now, that is something that is theoretically present, that can be theoretically mined, that can be theoretically refined, and can be theoretically used for, the creation of of a of a sustainable energy source.

But for here on earth, not for someplace else. Correct. The the operative term here is theoretical. I had a conversation with an individual out of Japan who was sharing with me the entire future of mining in Spey and Moon. And I started asking him questions, and the other person on the line stopped talking. And I was asking very specific questions. What would be the primary? What's the secondary? How does the crusher work? How does this work? How does this work? How does this work?

And I was introduced to him because he was supposed to be brilliant in this, and he couldn't answer any of the questions. And I said, I ran a rock quarry. I know how to drop stone and how to move it. You're not answering any questions. He had only done a theoretical paper on it. Yeah. And I said, that was my job every day. I dropped 22,000 tons of stone. We were the number one supplier of stone into New York City.

And I and I I I just couldn't believe that this person was being taken seriously Yeah. In the space industry because he had written a theoretical paper. Yeah. Yeah. So, to take those 3 and I they're very easy to construct so we don't have to go down God, gold, and glory. That is a very I I don't like this term, Western and Eastern. I don't like those terms because it's the it's merged a lot, and we also have tier 1, 2, 3, and 4. And the and we are a tier 4 in the United States.

Europe is tier 4. Tier 1 would be a country that's less than a dollar a day. So I try to use that, but I will use it in this context. The God, gold, and glory was not the Asian, in many cases, the Asian reason reason for transfer of knowledge and skills.

The the culture of China was very much into the sharing of knowledge and they went out and shared while the Europeans came in and you could tell me if I'm wrong, but the Europeans came in and they were much into take over and ownership and possession. And if you looked back in time, I read this book and I can't remember the name of it off top of my head.

They said if you were to look at the world at the time that China was growing and expanding and you looked over to Europe, you have to think of them in multiple timelines and periods because they were nowhere near each other. And you would have said, well, they're in this the dark ages.

The Europeans are not gonna succeed, but their warfare because they were they were combating each other so much, tools grew very quickly, the turning of ships sideways and put putting, the the guns on the sides of the ships. That all came about because of this rapid advancement of military. But the Chinese didn't have the same, my point, or it wasn't gold, glory, and God. So do you have another construct for that type of expansionism?

Well, I would suggest to you that, that, you know, the the height of Chinese exploration was built around the treasure fleet. They that's what and they called it that for a reason. And it was it was fundamentally motivated by the exact same extraction of resources from other peoples that, that we saw with, the European expansion, somewhat later. Well, but it I guess the one is the god.

I don't think there was, Well, the missionary zeal may not have been, quite the same, although I I would suggest that, the religions of the, of the people who made those, movements also went with them. And in and in some cases, they were a dominant paradigm, and I can't speak to the specifics of that with Asian history, but I can speak to the specifics of that in the context of Islam. Okay. The s x yes. In Islam, I can see it. I just don't see the the the east at that point.

Well, it's referred to that. Sorry. No derogatory. I I I I can't tell you the details of that. So I I don't see that. So what if and and I'm gonna this is just conversation. What if the there's a new paradigm, a new thought involved in here? And you and I spoke here for a minute. For those of you listening, a pre interview could take hours to get to where we wanna go on this topic. So one of the so let's come back.

One of the topics that we had explored is the innovations that are created for space, often turn themselves back on earth, and NASA does a horrible job of it. We just had a person on the from PR. We were talking to MS Project Moon. NASA does a horrible job and so many other organizations around the world do not show that there is a correlation.

It's not always solved for space, but some of the innovations that come out of space, water filtration improved, air filtration improved, technologies for firefighters improved, technologies for aircraft going out, the the cordless tool improved, exercise equipment improved, that our life is so full of space that it's you couldn't even have a day without is the way I tell people. You could not live a day in a tier 4 country without space even if you just looked up weather, that's space.

So what if one of these god, golden glory, and we took out the god and we replaced it with this existential threat, if we might call it, or the need for, innovations to improve some of the challenges we're facing, whether it be climate change or mass extinction or resource depletion where space might be a contributing factor. They there might be something that helps new materials be developed because of microgravity, and the and the endeavor of going to space.

Like you said, we might not have to physically be in space, but because we use microgravity and robotic synthetic engineering in space, that comes back to earth and improves a life on earth. And space has there is a a reason for space to be able to solve some of the challenges we have. Does that make any sense in your mind? No. Of course. Of course. I mean, you you know, but you're sort of making the spin off argument. I I know.

That's why I'm bringing it up because you didn't bring it up in what you've had. So I'm Yeah. I wanna hear your thoughts. There there there is some reality associated with it, but it's hard to quantify. In fact, it's impossible to quantify. And and you can only make it as sort of anecdotal. I need and you've rattled off several of them, you know, cordless machine or cordless, you know, tools. Like I like like I would say, ballistic missiles. They did something for how we live on earth.

If there's a we can't tell you exactly. A young boy watches or young girl watches or young or an old person watches, and they say, I would like to invent a new air filtration system that could be used in space. They find out it can't be used in space, but it could be used on Earth. Maybe and it's a spin off, spin off, spin off. We we have satellites and someone said, you know, I could use that for agriculture. We can't really justify.

We can't say that the satellite is agriculture, but we can say that satellites have improved agricultural farming technologies that allows the ability to create and do what we couldn't have done otherwise. So, yes, I believe it's anecdotal. I don't think there's a measurement or tool that we can pull out and use. Yet, if there are existential threats, which are not there are threats on this planet today.

Climate, we call them the 6 mega challenges, climate change, mass extinction, resource depletion. So, physical and social displacement, political unrest and explosive impact from things such as deforestation or overfishing or whatever. What if what if some of the solutions that come like rocketry that improved over time could be the mechanisms to halt, reverse, change, improve the earth. It could that be one of those new God glory gold? Of course.

But the the the bottom line is it's sort of a chicken and egg problem. Mhmm. Yep. You know, you water purification, use that as an example. Okay. So water purification is a legitimate question, and and doing that better is always, is something that lots of people are thinking about absent any discussion whatsoever or knowledge whatsoever of space activities. Correct. And, and and but how many how many people approach it from the opposite perspective?

And and I don't I don't know the answer to that. So here he so, yeah, you just and it's funny because you chose that one. I was at a I'm just gonna use it a couple of times. Yeah. Well, okay. Then my my mistake is one that comes to mind is I was in Silicon Valley. I was the chief judge of a competition and this guy got up on stage, and he started to talk about how he's a space fanatic. And what he's been working on for 10 years is he wanted to solve the challenge of water on the moon on Mars.

He's a Mars guy. And he knows that you can't go to the local store and buy a, a filter. So he said, how can we do this organically on Mars? And he came up with this concept. Brilliant guy, Godhard Reddy, and he, created a nanotube size like a straw, the size of a, a nanometer. Can only take a water molecule. Nothing else can go through. It's the size of a water molecule. Took them 10 years and they figured out a way to make it so that they're all in the right orientation.

And that water on one side that's dirty would go to the other side that's clean. All for Mars. This was solely a Mars project. He solved it. He has solved the challenge, but he has a huge bigger challenge in right now. The challenge is we are not on Mars. So he's really not a space company if you think about it. He is not where he's never been to space. His technology's never been to space, but he had to he's looking for new markets, and they've been using it for water filtration.

They found out it's great as a biomarker because it's an organic, and Lockheed Martin is using it to spray onto their planes for some unknown reason. So, yes, I don't believe there's a direct correlation with not solving, yet the innovations do have implications, positive and negative. Could there be I'm trying to find out god, gold, glory, and something that would say that there maybe it's not always about god anymore.

Maybe it's about survival, or maybe it's about challenges of human beings covering an entire planet to a degree in which it's difficult for humans to survive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I I wouldn't get too hung up on on the god part except to except to suggest to you that, if we were to find alien intelligence that we could communicate with, what do you think would be the result in context of of missionizing, activities? I think the humans would try to proselytize their belief structure first.

Abs absolutely. Yes. And and I I have said since I've been, like, for 30 years, I've said, do you think if they come that they're going to if they showed up at this planet, they're going to get off and say, I've been looking for Jesus. I've been looking for Mohammed. Where is Moses? That, you know Yeah. They're not going to be coming here for that purpose. So, yeah, it would change the entire paradigm.

You can't follow the same laws unless you believe that you're better than that society, which is a human trait. So yeah. Anyway, but but that I those I think are some of the the major challenges, and and they're very real. I mean, I think in the 21st century, we are going to see some of this movement to other places, but probably on a limited basis, probably not as colonies. Just don't see that happening I agree. Really at all.

And and long term, I think we have to think about, you know, if there is a human future in space beyond this planet on a permanent basis, we have to think about human evolution and and how that may affect, generations to come. Or how we might this is something else to consider, or how we might modify the body so that it's not so fragile and that it can survive in more extreme conditions that we're that we might encounter in other places.

And, you know, I I I got interested in this when I started studying transhumanism. And, and and and that's a sort of a catchall term for all kinds of various activities. Everything from, you know, freezing ahead so that it can be reanimated at some point in the future to all kinds of other stuff that that you might think about, in terms of body enhancement to enable you to survive. And whether or not we ourselves are going to become cyborgs, because I think that that has some potential.

We're already becoming cyborgs. Oh, we already are. Yeah. I mean, I'm a cyborg right now. I have 2 stints in my heart, will not survive otherwise. Think about the people with pacemakers. Yeah. All kinds of other Yeah. If you if you have amalgamated if you have if you have fillings in your teeth, you might not Somewhat. Well, yeah. I mean, that's not technical. It's not technical, but it they would not have survived. Yeah. And, I have, I I had cataracts. I had to have cataract surgery.

I have artificial lenses in my eyes. That makes me a cyborg. Yeah. And what kind of body modifications can we and by the way, NASA sponsored the first studies on this in 1960. Wow. Yeah. And and the question the question was a simple one. Is it easier to create a bubble in which humans can survive in this totally different environment, that is, you know, to create a bubble that's sort of earth like, or, modify the body so that it can survive more effectively in this new environment.

And the answer from some of the scientists was, you know, maybe we can make modifications. You know, can we reduce the amount of oxygen the person has to take in? Can we reduce the amount of pressure that you have to have around your body to survive effectively? Can you change the heart, and the and the cardiovascular system in a way that you can operate more efficiently in a different environment? All kinds of things like this. Now NASA sponsored that study.

And there are articles written by the scientists involved at the time. In 1963, they published what, well, there was a follow on study from that that was published in 1963 called, quote unquote, the Cyborg study. NASA took one look at what the scientists came up with and buried it. We cannot have our heroic astronauts, you know, changed in fundamental ways that they are no longer human. Which is the movies the television series, see shield or RoboCop. I could go on and on. Right.

Yeah. The, in the movie in the television series or Netflix or Apple, it's whichever series, The Expanse, which is Amazon. Right. They to be able to travel through space because they don't have warp speed, they travel through space. They they came up with this idea of injecting a fluid in you. So you get this, this liquid, which allows your body to withstand the g forces. Otherwise, they had no way to be able to travel at those lightning speeds.

You needed to be enhanced for a period of time so that, that that would happen. So, yes, it's, so what's your take? Where do you think we'll go? Yeah. I don't know the answer to that. You know, one of the things that we found, and I wrote a book in 2008 called robots in space, and and it was basically the debate over humans versus robots. I had a coauthor, Howard McCurdy, on this particular book, but the last couple of chapters sort of look at this issue. The robots are are exceptionally robots.

They survive much more effectively than we do when we send them to other places. You know, think of the rovers on Mars or anything else you want to. That's why I said Mars is a robot planet. Yeah. Exactly. For this point in time. And and so they have attributes that we value in the context of survivability, but the humans don't. The humans have capabilities that make them much better in terms of exploration than the robots are at this point in time.

You know, is there a way that you can down and and and, you know, clearly, there are people who have speculated on this possibility. Can you just download your memory and your intelligence into a a computer and become a, a silicon based life form? The the singularity moment. Yes. The singularity and, you know, and Ray Kurzweil and others have talked about the how it is near. And and and maybe it is.

Maybe that's the best way to go about engaging in space activities, but that fundamentally suggests that that, there's a flesh and blood a blood Roger here on Earth and a download of a memory of Roger that's on some That's a freaky roadblock that's all somewhere else. Right. That that's a that's a whole new way of thinking about the universe. We had on Alex Landecker, and he spoke about some research that they've done where they took cockroaches up into space Yeah.

And did some reproduction, and when they brought them back down to earth, they ran faster, they were larger, they were a different color, and a a series of things, they were like a super insect. Yeah. Well, we don't want too many of those around. Well, that's why I said don't do more of these because this is the next generation. It it it there are fundamental challenges in terms of, I would say, time. You're older than me. You're in your sixties. I'm in my fifties.

Is that when I grew up I was born in 63. Yeah. When I grew up, I was told that we're gonna have the Jetsons type lifestyle. We're gonna have robots in our home, that we were going to be seeing flying cars all over the place, and ray beams were being used. I took a shower this morning. I used a microwave, to eat my food. I have not seen a flying car ever in real life in my own, and I, would not robots all over your house.

Yeah. Well, yeah, I've got my dishwasher, my washing machine, my dryer, the the sump pump, the garage door opener. Yeah. We do have them, but nothing like what we had anticipated where they were going to serve us and make our lives they do make our lives easier, but that hasn't come to pass. So even when we talk about the next 50 years or 30 years, I the challenge that I ask individuals in space industry is show me how. Like, do me the numbers. Give me the numbers.

Show me show me how from today you will get to there, and mathematically or financially or technologically, will that actually happen on a ubiquitous level, meaning 50,000 people on the moon in the next 15 years? No. I don't I don't know how the math comes up. So that's why I'm asking these questions. That's why I'm on the program with you. That's why we're talking is so that I can get an understanding of what you've learned in timelines and and challenges people have.

And so I I don't think a a a moon hut within the next 10 years isn't being a crazy idea. I don't think having an industrial park after that where there can be microgravity and zero atmosphere and some type of work being done. Be microgravity if you're on the moon. No. No microgravity, but a one six gravity. One six g. Sure. 1 six g. So a changes in in conditions. So I think that there are possibilities, but I'm not gonna tell you that we'll have a 1000000 people on the moon in in 20 years.

Just doesn't make mathematical sense. So that's why I'm asking these questions. Yeah. You know, one of the things that that I think about in the context of the space community is, you know, and I I grew up with this stuff. I mean, I I've watched the space race in the 19 sixties, and I was very jazzed by it. And I was excited by the possibilities of of a moon base and a trip to Mars. Certainly, by the end of 20th century, I thought that was gonna happen.

And I I think a lot of people were were, sort of jazzed by it, and some of them probably have been disappointed. I know I have. And my and my, skepticism, I think, comes through in that context. But we've also learned that this is a whole lot harder than anybody thought it was gonna be. And, and it takes a lot more, effort than, we perhaps anticipated at the time, And we need to dial back our expectations, and and we don't tend to do that as people.

Whenever whenever we have a belief about something, we tend to, in the face of disconcern disconfirming evidence, we tend not to abandon the belief. We tend to just modify it slightly. And, so we've all had to we've all had to sort of modify our belief that by the end of 20th century, there would be a moon base or people on on Mars or wherever it happened to be. Even though that was clearly expectation and NASA talked about it a lot all through the 19 seventies.

And organizations like the L 5 Society and and and, you know, the National Space Society and a variety of other, advocacy groups, certainly kind of predicated their ideas on on on those sort of aggressive concepts. And they've had they've had to be disappointed. Yes. They have. I've I've had those conversations. Yes. They have. But but it doesn't mean that they have have totally abandoned hope. Oh, absolutely not.

They They they tend to modify it slightly to make up, well, okay, won't be by the end of 20th century. Maybe it'd be by 2030. Maybe it'll be 2024 when, you know, as the Trump administration announcing, wanted to try to have a landing back on the moon, which I think is highly problematic. But nonetheless I I would say that there are solutions out there we haven't thought about. The I I think people have said that Elon Musk's rockets wouldn't fly, and they did.

And now he's got, what, 8 of them in the hangar ready to go to do more testing. I do think there's I do. My life has always been about possibilities. What if? What can we do? Yet at the same time, I think that if there's a a pragmatic view, a little bit more understanding from the general populace, that we can achieve a higher amount than if in fact it's oversold. And so that's what we're that's what I'm trying to do.

It's this is what our group is trying to do is we still would like some achievements. I don't have the same ambitions of everybody in our group, and they don't have the same as I do, Yet that's what makes us, I think, a a a viable reason that people are coming on the program like you, and I I definitely appreciate you taking the time to be with us, is that we would like to be able to go to somebody and say, this is what we've done, and there are huge pot potentials in front of us.

Are you involved? Can you help? Can you participate? Can you be everybody and nobody to some degree? Can you be a part of a a cog that might need more many more cogs to make it happen? Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. You know, I am skeptical of a lot of the things that I hear in the context of imagination that people have about what they can do in space. I think that's a healthy skepticism, to be perfectly honest. But I will say I will be properly supportive if anybody pulls it off. Oh, wow.

Maybe I'll just leave it there. No. No. That that's perfect. That that's absolutely perfect. And I want to thank you seriously, Roger, for taking the time. I I know I know that our first introduction, you there's always a hesitancy. This is gonna be a deep interview. Yeah. How do you take an interview when you actually prepare for the interview in a way that's not normal?

And I and I'm glad that you said it was fun because that's what most people I would say everybody said, this was a journey they went on. Yeah. Sure. They had to pull out old notes and they had to rethink things. And so I I appreciate that you've taken the time to to do this for us. So thank you. It's been my pleasure. Thank you very much. So I wanna thank everybody who's listening in, who have taken part of their day to listen to this program.

I do hope that you learn something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others as well as all species on this planet. Project Moon Hut again, Project Moon Hut Foundation is where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon. You've heard it over and over again, the moon hot. So the accelerated development of the Earth and Space Space ecosystem, which we also talked about.

And then in our case, it's to have that Moon Hut mission, but we also have this lever, and then we have the purpose. And that is to use those endeavors, that paradigm shifting the innovations, and turn them back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species. So, again, Roger, what is the single best way to connect with you? Probably by email. And, you can reach me at Launius r, so my last name, my first initial, l a [email protected]. Fantastic. And I would like to connect with you.

My email is [email protected]. We can you can connect to us on Twitter at at projectmoonhut or at goldsmith for me. We are on LinkedIn. We are on Facebook. We've just starting on our our Instagram. We're in multiple places. There's you can always reach out to us. So once again, thank you for listening. And so there we go. AI I always say at the end, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.