Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite podcast series, a project Moonhot podcast series, as a matter of fact. And if you're not familiar, Project Moonhot has been working on, for I think now 5 years, establishing sustainable life on the moon, not self sustaining life, through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem.
Make making us more productive in what we're doing as a, as humanity, to make the changes so we can get to the moon, to change how we live on earth for all species. I often hear, the space industry or individuals involved in space talking about humanity, and yet we're looking at the whole earth. So we're, in an essence, turning the earth turning space and using it as a means to change how we live on earth. Today, we have an awesome guest on the line, Hoyt Davidson. How are you, Hoyt? Very good.
Thanks, David. I am so glad to have you on the line. I I didn't look, and I can look this moment. We had met back in wow. This has gotta be, 2015. So it's been quite some time that we had we've known each other, not not on a very, complex level, but we've known each other on a deep level.
He Hoyt is a the founder managing partner of a company called Near Earth, and the the what strikes me in his CV, his background is this, is that he was involved in investment banking, and he cofounded Wall Street's 1st dedicated coverage group for the commercial satellite industry. So I'm not gonna say he's old. I'm just gonna say he's been around the industry for a long time. I know. You're old?
Oh, no. And while there, he did participate in financing over $15,000,000,000 worth of space activity. So today, we have, Hyt on the line. And what's interesting for some of you who've not listened to the podcast, I might I don't think I've ever said this, is every so often, I set up an interview, there's actually homework that goes into this on both ends, White has to do work, I have to do work, we come up with a title. And the day of the program, someone like White says, we're gonna change it.
I got a different title. So now I don't even know what we're going to be talking about in terms of direction. And the title that Hoyt has just given me is he's called this program quadrillions. So, Hoyt, I'm excited to learn from you. I know I believe that people are listening, are waiting to hear something informational from you. So I'm assuming you have some bullet points or an outline or something we've gone to follow. Can you please give me the points? Yes. I've got 5 points.
The first is quadrillions. The second is Earth first, but not Earth only. Yeah. The third is Space is hard. Yep. The 4th is No Bucks, No Buck Rogers. And that may be an old illusion for many of the listeners, but Well well, when we get there, you and I will go over and and reminisce a little bit. Okay. And the last one? And the last one is patient capital. So we're going to let's go to the top of your list. Quadrillions. Great. Where are we going? Share with me. Help me understand this.
The the reason I wanted to title this and and focus on quadrillions is I I think a lot of your listeners will understand, you know, the density of Just talk just talk to me. Just talk to me. Help me understand this. Okay. I think people in general understand the immensity of space, but not necessarily from an economic point of view, from a financial point of view, in terms of what it could mean for the future of humanity and and our economic opportunity.
So if you look through history, there was a time when when everything was talked about in 1,000 of dollars, you know, say in the 17 100. And in the 18 100, we got into the 1,000,000 of dollars, and and and then in the 19 100, into 1,000,000,000 of dollars. And sort of in the late 19 100, we started talking about trillions. And sometimes people would say, that's trillions with a t, just to mark that. We're no longer talking about billions. We've now grown to the trillion level.
Well, I I think the point I wanna make is that through all of human history, we've been working towards, you know, filling up the earth and being fruitful and multiplying, and and we sort of are close to that point to where, we're having, you know, a a significant impact on our environment, on our ability to grow further. We're at 7 or 8,000,000,000 people, and we may grow to 10 or 12, but that's probably all we'll we'll ever have.
So we're we're sort of shifting our economic focus from one of growth, which has been the model for all of human history, to one of sustainability. And economists have been talking about this date that we would some at some point arrive to for centuries now. And now, we're coming to that point. And and what does that mean for humanity when we change to a sustainable economy? And I I I would wouldn't I wouldn't you say though I'm going back to the 19 eighties.
I'm 55. Going back to 19 eighties, we were talking about the unsustainability even in when we were 3 and a half 1000000000 people. We were talking about conservation. We weren't doing much about it because we still have the generation of, of individuals who were starting to, pillage the earth even more than we had ever done. Weren't we talking about that then? Oh, we we are.
And depending on who you talk to, some people think we're already past, you know, the the point of no return, you know, the the pessimist that think no no, amount of of, technological advancements, gonna help us. There are some that think we're not past the point of no return, but we're we're getting close to it and things are dire. And there's other people that think, you know, we've got a few more decades to develop more technologies and there's no need to worry yet.
But I don't think anyone thinks we're not approaching perhaps in our lifetime or certainly that of our children, the point where we sort of, you know, maxed out the waters and the fisheries and the land for agriculture.
You know, whether whether or not you believe in climate change or not, this the impact we're having is profound and if we really want to bring everyone else in the world up to the standard of living of the developed world, like Western Europe and the US, that's gonna take a lot of very efficient technologies that allow that to happen without, you know, damaging the environment and stretching our resources anymore. So, my only point here is that, you know, it's kind of scary.
We're reaching that point where, you know, growth is is is gonna be hard to come by. You can even see that today on Wall Street. People report a 3% growth quarter and it's like, wow, that's amazing. How did we possibly do that? Well, that 3% would have been sort of lackluster in in some decades in the past. It would have been insignificant. Yeah. And you even look at the satellite industry, most satellite commercial satellite companies are growing at somewhere between, negative 2 4%.
So, you know, it's even even getting hard for a high-tech industry like the satellite industry to grow. Okay. I I can see that on both levels. And so what you're what you're proposing is today, the word quadrillions is is that we're we're more aware that the possibility are there quadrillions in the in the universe and then we could tap it or that they always existed at quadrillions and we just didn't realize it? Well, I I think my point is more, sort of twofold.
One is that, we need to make people aware that quadrillions are possible if we go out into space and explore it, develop it, settle it. There's massive amounts of resources. It's said that just the near Earth asteroids has enough mass to make, you know, in space settlements to handle 10,000 times the population of Earth. So it's really boundless. You know, whether it's infinite or near infinite, it's it's really boundless.
So if we wanna get from trillions to quadrillions, I think the only way we do that, the only way we provide those growth opportunities for humanity is to go out and develop and settle space. So that's that's the first point. Well, I do I do like that you used the word infinite in there. Because it just happens to apply. Yeah. I mean, ultimately it does. Well, the Age of Infinite podcast series is good. That's what it's supposed to be. So, okay. Good. So that's the first point.
The second point is that, I don't think most of humanity wants to live in a constrained sustainable world. You know, I you know, historical examples, when people left Europe and spent all of their money to get on a dangerous ship to go over to new world and then live in the frontier, they didn't do it because they were all adventurers. They did it because there were no growth opportunities back in Europe. You know, all the land which was really the value was taken up.
And if you wanted to to have the growth opportunities for your families and your descendants, you had to go settle a frontier. And I think, that's what's gonna happen. I think, the people who settled the moon and Mars and and and Titan and whatever, are gonna be people that don't want to settle for a no growth sustainable world on earth. Does that make sense? Yeah. It does make sense. It's it's a the first thing that comes to mind is, okay, what's a timeline?
When you when you give me these, when you make this comment, I immediately go to timeline. So if if t zero is today and I'm looking outward, how do you see moon, Mars, and Titan? Well, the moon, I think, is obviously the the easiest and the one that will develop first. Even if just as a test bed to figure out how to do it on Mars, which is I don't I don't know why Mars has been a Yeah. Topic of conversation. And I think you remember the first time you meet me, I met me.
Yeah. I was back then saying, we got this little moon here, right here. So so will you say, what's your timeline for moon? Well, right now, supposedly, our timeline for returning is 2024. I hope we make that. It's easy for a change of government to derail the best intentions. But I think space has become, as bipartisan, as it has ever been.
So I I hope, regardless of what changes in administrations in the US and elsewhere, because it's really an international effort these days, that we will go to the moon, and we will use that as a stepping stone, to other places and the stars. But it's not gonna be quick. It it will take decades. It will take Mhmm. 1,000,000,000 or 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars to to do, but it's worth it. I mean, it took ultimately trillions of dollars to develop, you know, the Americas.
Yeah. And it took centuries. But if you look back, it was a worthwhile endeavor for humanity. So so if we say 2024, what is Mars to you? What's what's your timeline when you think Mars and Titan or whoever else? Well, if if you think about it in phases, there's there's an exploratory phase where you have the sort of first boots on the ground and, you're learning how to you know, to live off the land, but it's, you know, dozens of people.
That could be, you know, the 2000 thirties, you know, into 2,040 and but I think in the 2,040 on, you're gonna start seeing an ever growing population, you know, 100 and 1,000 and 10,000. But, you know, it's gonna gonna build up over time just like just like the experience with with the Americas. You know? Okay. I just, just for reference point because I not that I'm trying to nail people down.
That's not my purpose in asking is that I've been in the 5 years I've done this, from the first event I went to to today, you hear different numbers, different figures, and they're changing constantly. So I just needed reference point for you. So Yeah. Earth, Earth first, but not eat, not Earth only. So ships to the New World, got it. Space Time, got it. What else about this? Okay. So the reason I I I'd like to make this point is there's enormous problems to be solved on Earth.
Poverty, health care, you you you name it. And and, of course, that has to be the number one priority of of citizens, taxpayers, governments, whatever. I mean, this is our planet. We've gotta take care of it. That's gotta be our number one priority in terms of spending, and effort. But it can't be our our only priority because if it is, then we're just doomed into this sustainable world where you're never investing in the future so you can grow out of whatever problems you have on Earth.
And every you know, everyone sort of knows this innately. Families, that are wise try to save some amount of their paycheck for the future, regardless of of how much they really need to spend money today. Corporations do it. If a corporation took all of the cash flow it earned and paid it out as bonuses to its employees and dividends to its shareholders, it would be stagnant and never grow. So wise corporations don't do that.
They invest in r and d. They invest in a new capital equipment for higher productivity. And and cut wise countries do the same thing. I mean, you know, Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana, territory because he knew that was gonna be a wise investment for centuries to come. It wasn't a wise investment in terms of returning, having a return on that investment over 5 or 7 years. It took, you know, literally centuries.
But wise people, wise corporations, wise governments, set aside some to invest in the future. And that's in basic science research, it's in, medicine, it's in materials, physics, but it's some of it is also for expanding frontiers, and that's investment in space. So there's this argument always about space is too expensive. We need that money, for whatever social program. So it's a crime to spend that money on space.
And I think that is very short sighted and not wise, and so that's what I mean by earth first, but not earth only. And just the then the space is too expensive. It's shortsighted. You you gave what I heard you say, is that you believe that it's that these individuals are short sighted. And how are you convincing, or how are the people you believe are convincing the best, convincing these individuals that space is a good place?
Well, I think part of it is just, spending more time educating the population on the benefits they've already received from our investment in space, you know, from, from the Mercury and Gemini and Apollo era to today. You know, just you you can make an argument for all of that investment just on on GPS alone and, the productivity and value it's created just from having position navigation and timing capabilities for all the other industries, and consumers on earth.
So we haven't really done a great job of explaining that. People tend to understand that they get some of their telecom and some of their media through satellites, but really don't understand how important they've been. So I guess education would be part of it. Okay. You probably don't remember a lot about what we're working on. Yeah. There's a whole an underlying current of what we're doing.
So I was wanting to hear what you might be doing special that could help us to maybe have a a different way. So okay. But, you know, but again, I I think you do the investment, because it's gonna open up this frontier and create this brighter future for humanity over the next several, you know, centuries or forever as opposed to just focusing on justifying it by the near term benefits it's bringing to, you know, our current population. But I think both are true.
Okay. So the next one is space is hard. Okay. So, if if we're now convinced that, we should invest in space, and that's gonna lead us to a world of quadrillions instead of just trillions, how do we do that? And unfortunately, space is hard. It has all the same risk of any commercial business, for instance, but it happens in a super harsh environment of of temperature swings and radiation and and and just remoteness. I mean, it's vast and and and not easy to get from one place to another.
Plus, there's there's much greater unknowns and uncertainties in terms of of, how hard it will be to mine minerals, how different markets will grow, how big they will be, how long it will take to grow them. So for an investor looking to put money in the space, even if they think it's the coolest thing out there, it's really hard for them, to make a decision to invest in a space venture versus a terrestrial venture, just because there's much greater risk involved.
And so if they're gonna make the right risk reward trade off, for their investors, they made a really high return to justify all of those extra risk. And in space, there may be very high returns, but sometimes they take many, many years to get to. You know, it can take 5 years to develop the technology and launch it and start operating it, and and the markets may be just very nascent and and not profitable yet. It may take years for the markets to build.
So space is a very hard, area for investors to to spend, you know, money on. And there's ways that I wanna talk about addressing that, but I just wanted to first set out the example that, you know, for instance, if you're gonna mine the moon, you have all the difficulties in mining that you do in a remote area on Earth, plus, the harsh environment of the moon, the radiation, the the fine dust that's difficult to deal with, the challenge of getting energy.
So it's just, you know, you really need huge returns to to make that worthwhile. And go ahead. And we we don't even know if we can mine on these facilities with what we've got today or on these, on the moon because we don't know if we can mine through the regolith. Right. We we know or at least we think we know there's lots of, interesting minerals and particularly water. And we think they're in concentrations that would be, minable and perhaps profitably minable. But we really don't know.
There's really been no effort to do a lot of ground truthing. I think we've only, you know, drilled a couple of holes a couple of feet deep. So there's a whole lot of effort that needs to go into the sort of prospecting phase of the moon to see what's there, how hard would it be to mine, can it be mined profitably. So that's kind of the next phase we really need to do.
If we're gonna have a sustainable presence on the moon, we've had to use, you know, in situ resources, which means mining and processing there as opposed to bringing everything up from earth, which is processing there as opposed to bringing everything up from Earth, which is would be way too expensive. So, you know, we got a lot of prospecting to do. Okay. Got it. So tell me how we're gonna do this. Okay. I think that's the next one. So that gets to the no bucks, no buck Rogers.
And, you remember Buck Rogers is one of the earliest science fiction sort of cartoons, which which I think is, you know, inspired at least a a generation before Star Trek and Star Wars. But we we are finally seeing, lots of of capital flowing into to space. About $2,000,000,000 a year now for the last 3 or 4 years, has been invested in commercial space startups by venture capital firms around the world. Little over half of that has come from the US, and the rest from from the other countries.
But something like over 300 venture capital firms have done at least 1 commercial space investment. And a 130 plus corporations have also made investments and and, you know, new commercial space companies. And, you know, half of so of those are not even in the aerospace industry. So we're starting to see, you know, strong interest and, and a recognition that there is quadrillions out there. And maybe we should start investing money in technologies to help us get there.
The bad news is that the average investment, into those 1,000 or so startups is about $20,000,000. And that's great for getting started in developing new technologies and accelerating innovation. But space is hard, as we just said. And it takes 100 of 1,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollars to actually deploy infrastructure that that adds value. Whether it's transportation, or gateways, or habitats, or mining, or processing, these are gonna take 1,000,000,000 of dollars.
And we aren't yet seeing the large pools of capital investing in space. That's the private equity firms, the public equity capital markets, the, high yield debt markets, the the commercial banks. We are not seeing those large pools of capital investing yet because space is hard. So we gotta we gotta bridge. I want to just I'm trying to get my mind around because I I wanna we wanna create project Muna, create sustainable life on the moon.
You what you've just outlined to me, and I'm not seeing it in the outline, so I'm trying to make sure You gave me a date of 2025 or 2024. And now you're saying we're not getting enough in it even though we have a 130 companies, even though we have $2,000,000,000 a year, even though we have 300 VCs. And 2025 is in space years tomorrow. Yeah. So we're not getting the high yield debt markets. We're not getting private equity.
The these companies, these these investment pools, whatever you wanna use, hedge funds, they're still saying they're not saying space is hard. That's not their definition because I've talked to them. They just see no return. It's not that space they don't think space is hard. They say, hey. I've gotta give a return for our investor.
I've gotta make sure that if we're a fund, that we do the following, and I know I can get even if it's 3% or 10% or a 100%, whatever they're investing in, startups or not, they're looking for a return and space with deep space, with planet that both folded even though they were they were merged into something else. Let's just say they stopped operating.
We just had Elon Musk's capsule have a challenge on the liftoff, and I don't wanna go into Elon Musk because there's there's enough about that out in the, in the ether. It's how are we gonna jump start this? Exactly. And that's that's my next bullet point. But before I get to the patient capital Okay. When when I say space is hard, that's exactly what I mean.
When you talk to investors, they can't close the business case to make the investment because they don't see they they see a huge amount of capital to go into it. And then, a 3 to 5 year period of negative cash flow.
And when you when you do a discounted cash flow analysis or, internal rate of return analysis or payback analysis, whatever you're using as an investor, it makes it hard to close that business case, because of this large capital expenditure, many years of no cash flow, and then maybe a small market at at the beginning that takes a while to grow. So that's what I mean by space is hard. It's hard for an investor to wrap your hand around that. So what do we need to get over that?
And that's where the the last bullet point comes in, patient capital. If you're a private equity firm and you have a 3 to 7 year investment horizon, which most of them do, it's sort of hard to deploy money into space infrastructure and expect to to be able to exit, at the sort of multiples of valuation you want. You really need a 12 to 30 to 50 year investment horizon, and and and not 3 to 10. So who can do that? Right now, we're seeing some billionaires.
Obviously, the billionaires can be more patient with their capital. They don't have fiduciary duty to a bunch of, investors or shareholders. The same with, you know, some family offices, which are just, investment arms of of wealthy families. They can take a long term view, and and we're seeing a lot more interest from family offices investing in space than we did even, you know, 3 or 4 years ago.
Governments can you know, if they're wise, they can invest in space and take a long term view, same with sovereign funds. So we're we're already seeing more and more governments, set up new initiatives where they're helping to support commercial space companies.
And to give you an example, there's one idea that I and some others have been advocating for recently, within our government and, you know, National Space Council, Department of Commerce, which is an idea we call the overseas private investment corporation. Now, back in the seventies, the the US congress federally chartered a new entity called, the overseas private investment corporation.
And the purpose of that was to help US corporations invest into expensive infrastructure in developing countries, where the markets in those developing countries were not, strong enough to support that investment. No no one would have made that investment based on the current state of the markets in those developing countries. There was also a lot of political risk involved.
And so the overseas private investment corporations that stepped in, and they would provide, government guaranteed debt or subsidies, where the debt was, you know, 12 to 20 years in maturity and had, you know, fairly low interest rates, if the investors would put up the equity. So they would allow the investors to have their equity levered by this long term affordable debt. And with that, all of a sudden, they were able to close their business cases.
Now the overseas private investment corporation has been a huge success. They've invested in over a 100 countries, you know, 100 and 100 of projects across, you know, hospitals, and and roads, and and water treatment facilities, you name it. Just everything a country might need, they've enabled all of this investment, which is not only help to those countries, and and been good diplomatically for for the United States, but also helped world trade.
And that entity actually returns over a $1,000,000,000 to the US treasury every year. So it's profitable and it's self sustaining. If you went on to their Now just just that point alone, not even talking about space is a case that is is being is being shut down in the walls of America. In what sense? Well, the current administration is pulling out and saying we can't help these countries. We can't work through these countries. We're not gonna give funding to these countries.
And you just said a 100 countries, roads, hospitals, schools, and it has returned $1,000,000,000 for that investment. And do you think they have the wherewithal, the kahunas to take it even further and go space oriented? Well, I Will we be working I hope so. But I I take your point. And, I mean, this is a little different than, just giving foreign aid. This is really creating wealth within the US, because it's supporting US companies that are doing this.
So there's there's employment So it only in in your model, it would only help corporations that are US corporations, and but it's not no longer overseas. And if there's any investment or collaboration from outside countries, for example, you have an American company that has a Russian investor in it or a Chinese investor in it or an Indian investor, would that be allowed?
Well, I I think if you're using, US taxpayer dollars, the corporations would have to be majority owned and controlled by the US. But by by the way, this overseas private investment corporation idea, it was picked up by many other countries. There are versions in Europe. There's the UK has its own version. So it it's it's been a a model that, has been duplicated, by other countries. So And I I don't disagree that other countries aren't doing it.
Mhmm. And I I I shared with you, I'm gonna be speaking in Luxembourg in, the 3 weeks, I think it is, at the the Space Forum. And so I see, for example, the Luxembourg government getting actively involved in activities that would help to generate some space activity. So I do see it.
Yeah. Well, I I think those that have have, tried to shut down these sort of things, these sort of activities, by the US, whether it's the Export Import Bank, have have done so because they think it's sort of crony capitalism and it's there to benefit, you know, one industry and why benefit that industry versus other industries. And there may be similar complaints about this, that it's just benefiting the space industry. But that's not really true.
Because if we're moving humanity into space, we're taking our entire economy with us. It's not just rockets and satellites. It's everything. It's every single industry that we have on Earth will have to be duplicated in space. You know, transportation and and communications is obvious but it's also energy. It's mining as we talked about. It's agriculture. We'll have to, you know, grow crops on on the moon. So it really benefits all industries.
And just like it did in the developing world, it was, benefited multiple industries, not just you know, construction. So I I think it's a good idea. And if you went on to the OPIC, which is what, the original entity is called, opic dot gov. If you went on that website and everywhere you saw overseas, you replaced it with outer space, you wouldn't have to change anything else. I mean, it's just the perfect model.
It solves the same problem in closing business cases for investors in difficult environments where the markets aren't fully developed. And it's been a proven success. So I I, you know, I I hope it's something that we try. I I think, I think you I don't know if it was on the audio or not. I think you did say that we need more evangelists for the space industry.
And the challenge for the space industry is it's not just the evangelists, it's we don't have enough individuals who, on a day to day level of understanding, are incorporated into this industry. It's still a a hope and a prayer. It's still foreign. It's not yet when we talk about the overseas, it's much easier for someone to get their mind around that. We're going to help put a bridge in. We're gonna help put a hospital in. There is gravity. There is water. There is infrastructure.
So if we talk about those tech that tech well, I got it. I understand. We're going to help a country develop and grow. When it comes to space, there's not enough knowledge. So how do you get to that tipping point and just educate? Because this is a this would have to be approved across the board, and I I I'm mostly in Hong Kong or in Asia or working outside of the United States, so I see it from a very different perspective.
I'm watching the members of congress who don't know how data is being used by Facebook or how a cell phone works or how, tech is applied to the Internet. And we're telling them to understand, oh, yeah. By the way, microwave ovens are 60 years old or 70 years old. That's old tech. We've got some really new tech. They're they're just not there. Oh, I agree. You know, personally, I I would love it if there were more politicians that were former engineers and and business executives than lawyers.
But we tend to, attract mostly lawyers into our, our congress. But, yeah, I I think the world is is very complex, and you've you have to have a great grasp of technology and and commerce to really be an effective politician and make wise decisions and wise investments.
So so so my point I guess, my pushback here is I understand what you're saying could be a positive implication to this, and I can understand how if we can, if we can reduce risk, whether it be either through insurance or or rate of return, some type of tool that is used, some mechanism is used to reduce risk. I still think the next hurdle is not just a typical hurdle that you would find in a 100 yard race. You just can't pick up your knee and go over it.
The next hurdle is a pole vault for so many people. So with your solution, do you have a solution in there that you believe can get us over the pole vault? Yeah. I I I guess it definitely there's there definitely is pole vaulting versus hurdles. Again, you know, space is hard, so the the hurdles are big. So in the early years, you know, if we're gonna get humans on the moon in 2024, it's gonna be largely with government funding. Right? As opposed to, you know, industry and private capital.
But, there will be industry and private capital alongside the government, during this period. Our goal should be to to increase the the mix of industry and private capital versus public capital as we go forward. Because there are real limits, as you mentioned, as to how much government capital we're gonna be able to get and for how long. Apollo was an amazing percentage of the U. S. Budget for several years. That wasn't sustainable.
We weren't gonna be able to spend 4 a half percent of our budget on space given all the other priorities, you know, we have on the earth. So we have to transition over time away from government money that's gonna kick start us to industry and private capital. And the way you do that is by having government provide some of the patient capital that helps close the business cases for the industry and private capital. So that's what I'm focused on.
What's missing right now is the patient capital that allows us to leverage the industry and private capital that does have a shorter investment horizon, that does have to compete for investments with everything else going on on earth. So that that's the reason I was focusing on patient capital. So when we so when talking patient capital, we're talking and this is not a commonly used word in average everyday conversation. Patient capital and I'm talking to the people listening for one second.
Patient capital is capital in which the individuals, the organizations, whatever you want to call them, have enough time or willingness to wait for some rate of return that's out in the future. For example, if we're gonna build a nuclear reactor in 20 years, and it's going to take 10 years to get through the process and another 7 to 10 years to build, that would take a sort of patient capital.
So it's a word that's used in the financial sector to refer to capital that is willing to wait a period of time. Just a a sense. Somewhat of a definition. It's probably not the best one, Hoyt, but it's probably good enough. So No. That's My take. Okay. Thank you. My take is I'm not I'm seeing let's let's take this new world concept, and I appreciate the new world concept. It's a small fraction of the industry. The industry is still made up of the larger players.
So the new world gets a lot of visibility, yet it's not the majority of the industry. That has to swing rapidly to be able to create a 20, 24, 20 30, horizon. And I'm not hearing real solutions out there. I understand we've gotta find it. So your can China's gonna do it government wise. So that's not even patient capital. That's opportunity capital in a different way. What other countries can do patient capital like this? Well well, China's a great example.
China, right now, is is telling the world they're gonna spend a $1,000,000,000,000 or more on their, you know, belt and road project to connect all of Asia. Right? That's almost all infrastructure. It's roads and it's ports and it's rail and whatever. Because they see the value of investing a $1,000,000,000,000 in infrastructure to improve commerce across a lot of these developing regions.
Well, I think when we talk about developing cislunar space and spending 100 of 1,000,000,000 or a $1,000,000,000,000, it's the exact same thing. But it has the the extra complexity of doing it in space, which again, is harder. And and it has the added difficulty of explaining if it will really work because it was easy. I'm gonna use the term easy.
It was easy to to, a Maersk ship going from Hong Kong or Beijing or Shanghai is about 32 to 40, 32 to 35 days to get from here, I'm in Hong Kong, to get to Rotterdam support. The United States, Europe is the largest trading partner with China. It is not the United States. It's a misnomer that Americans believe the number one trading partner. There's 400 and, I think, 20 or 30,000,000 people if you take all the blocks of Europe and put them together as compared to the 350 in the US.
So what they did is they took a truck and they drove it from one point to the other. I don't remember the exact number, so please don't quote me on this, but I think it was 18 days. So, therefore, if we can improve the infrastructure if they can improve the infrastructure, then what they what China has the capacity to do is not only feed the the European market and the up and coming, African market, which is supposed to be the next populous, in terms of growth.
China will decrease over the next, 25, 30, 40 years. So that makes sense. We can take a truck 18 days. I get it. Put a road in. Put a bridge in. They happen to be dealing with a little bit more nefarious countries to be able to make this happen. Yet the number works and the process works, and it's not difficult to get your mind around it. How we doing this here? Is that working for us? Are we really getting people to understand? And I'll add to the belt and road.
The belt and road is also to circumvent the United States positioning and controlling of resources because China is a resource needing country with the growth that it's experiencing for multiple reasons. Consumerism for, let's just use consumerism as one which encompasses everything from new cars, new features, new new manufacturing plants, or whatever, is under that umbrella. So how I I get it. I'm here. I'm here with you, Hoyt. I'm looking up. I see. It's it's it sounds like a nice analogy.
I can't do that for I can do it for space on my in in project Moon Hut. I can't do it for space when I talk to a finance person. Well, no. Exactly. That's why I I keep coming back to this focus on on leveraging the sources of patient capital. And right now, that's sort of billionaires in in governments. But you need every To do this, you're gonna need everything. You're gonna need government support. You're gonna need 1 country can't do it anymore. It's gonna be, yeah, international consortiums.
It's gonna be public private partnerships. It can't just be the government because the government's too inefficient. We saw from the the COTS program where, estimates are as much as 10 times more efficient in terms of of use of of government funding, doing it through a COTS type public private partnership model. So we're gonna have to have lots of new innovative public private partnerships.
We're gonna have to have the 1,000 new space startups working with the dozens of large aerospace companies around the world. We're gonna need all of that to do this, because it's it's hard. And you're right. Most of the the people, the talent, the technology, the capital, the equipment, today resides in those dozens of aerospace companies and not in these 1,000 new start ups.
But I think, probably a majority of the new technologies will come from these thousands of startups and end up being deployed by, acquired by, used by these large aerospace companies. So, it's all of the above. It's it's not one or the other. It's it's an and and not an or. It it's yeah. I it's an I and I okay. I'm I I I know I'm pushing here, and that's okay. We're talking and people are hearing a live conversation.
When I look at the the words you had just said, can't see you, I'm talking over a podcast, Is we're going to need them all. International consortiums, private public partnerships, COTS, the 1,000 in new state spread ups, the aerospace. All of those, we're going to need them all. And what that sounds like is the one missing piece is we're going to need them all for what?
And the challenge becomes, we're going to need them all because it sounds like in your estimation from your earlier conversation, we're gonna have challenges on this on this planet. People have to understand that there's climate change, sea level waters rising, mass extinction, political unrest, resource depletion, social displacement, yadayada. They've probably got about 10 of them in my head.
And that connection that we're trying to make at Project Moon Hut, that connection is an assumptive connection because the world does not understand, and I'm using that as a broad brush, so I apologize for those who believe they or do understand, is not plastic straws and plastic bags. And stopping that, because if you stop a plastic bag, you've saved the planet.
Microfibers are so much more destructive to the the oceans in the world that we have, and that comes from clothing when you wash it all the time. Or solid waste runoff, which is 24 Olympic sized pools at a minimum per day going to the ocean. Disconnected. It it is are there models out there that you know if you've been around a long time, Hoyt, and I'm asking these are sincere questions. Mhmm. Is do you know how those are being connected so that everybody's involved the way you said it?
I think it's gonna take more podcast like this, more advocacy, more evangelists sort of spreading the word. But, yeah, there there are serious problems on Earth, and that has to be our first priority. But again, I don't believe we're ever going to overcome these serious problems on earth if we just focus on earth. We have to invest in technologies. We have to open up new frontiers. We have to get to the unlimited resources of space to solve these problems on earth.
It's nothing more than a relief valve, for, you know, populations and people that would otherwise be in a situation of, you know, as we as we say in low earth orbit now, it's it's crowded, contested, and competitive. Well, if that's true in low earth orbit, it's true, on steroids on the earth. We're becoming crowded, contested, and competitive, while we're running out of resources. So, I think we, you know, space could be one of the solutions for humanity, in terms of solving that.
It could be developing space solar power to have limitless, clean, sustainable green energy that we beam to earth. I mean, that's just one example. Yeah. We just had, John Strickland on the line. Brilliant, brilliant guy. I I think I've met him before, but oh my god. The guy's over the top. He he was just he talked about, solving climate change through solar satellites and the tech that he was thinking about.
The the guy I I I don't think I could write fast enough, and I was really I was impressed as his whether it will work or not, I I don't know enough. Yet I was just impressed at his approach to how would that happen. Well, and and you know, even people like Jeff Bezos, you know, the richest man on the planet, talks about turning the earth into, a zone for habitation and light industry and moving everything else, you know, off planet.
So I think I think there is a bright future if we just, realize that, you know, maybe space is gonna be a necessary part of of achieving that bright future. I I I completely agree. And one of the reasons I do the podcast series, it there's a self serving component here. I need to learn. So I get people like you on the line to push me, to find, to think, to integrate. What I'm trying to do here with this podcast, and as I'm I'm looking to say I understand the quadrillions. Got it.
I understand that the the adventures had woken up and needed new space. I understand the challenges that Earth has. I see that space is hard and I've heard that before and and it does have challenges. It's remote, it's harsh, there's dust, there's radiation, there's energy. We do know there's water there. And opening up those capital markets has just been a real challenge. I don't think you are on the board of Deep Space Industries, or somehow related.
I don't think a Deep Space or a Planet Resources, while they did a lot for visibility and they did a lot for the industry in many ways, the fact that both of them within I don't know. What? 6 months? You could probably tell me better. 6 to 8 months, both of them had to be quote unquote, and I don't like to do that often. My wife has tried to stop me from using that. They were absorbed into other entities because they hadn't delivered on the promise.
Yeah. And I I think sometimes if you're a visionary, you focus on doing the hard thing first instead of taking baby steps. If space is hard, you succeed by breaking it up into smaller achievable milestones and taking baby steps. It's just like, you know, what Jeff Bezos says, you know, you know, you're moving forward slowly, but ferociously, with baby steps.
And I think both of those companies, you know, if they had to do it over again, they would have stepped back and and done something easier first, and made money with that, and use that to get to the next level, and and the next level, and and sort of work their way up instead of trying to mine asteroids, you know, in the beginning. It took Is is that what you're is that what you're advising people today? Oh, yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it it took it it the, OSIRIS REx mission that Lockheed Martin did to go out and take a sample off of an asteroid and return it, just to take one tiny sample, the vacuum up a few particles and bring it back, that was a $600,000,000 program. So it it wasn't really realistic to think that that magnitude of investment over that long of a time period was gonna come, you know, from the private capital markets. It is a worthwhile thing to do to develop asteroid mining technologies.
And I think we will eventually mine asteroids. But it's again, gonna take a lot of patient capital and 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars of investment over, you know, a decade or 2, to get there. It's, so so let me let me ask a different question. You've been you've been in the industry for a very long time. You know many of the people I've interviewed. When you go give me 2 perspectives fairly quickly. We don't have a tremendous amount of time to go into, but let's say give me 2 perspective.
I'd like you to tell me what you are telling startups today on how they should approach the space industry, however you wanna define that, but I've gotta believe you're an m and a guy. You understand this. You're sitting down with somebody. There's 10, 20, $30,000,000 being invested. You would say, do this do this this way, and you'll be more successful. And then what are you saying to the individuals in the capital market that are turning them where other people are not able to turn them?
By turning them, Meaning having them invest. Having them say, you have to make money. You're in the business of making money, so I've gotta believe you've got you've turned some deals over. Mhmm. What are you doing as Hoyt that is making these people and near earth your company, near earth, what are you doing to make them turn? Okay. You feel like I'm talking I feel like I'm talking about, Dracula or vampires making people turn, but yes.
No. I I I would say the 2 critical issues, and they both resolve around the market. Most people think investments in space is all about the technology. The technology turns out to be the easy part and maybe the the part that has the less risk. We have some very talented engineers and they typically can, if you give them enough money, build what they say they're gonna build and it will work.
The the real issue with investments is once you've done that, will there be a market opportunity that will pay you enough money to allow you to create a return on that investment? So it's all about the market. So the 2 things, I I think, you know, I tell most new companies is the first is this minimum viable product concept, which came out of Silicon Valley. And that's, in a way, another version of the baby steps.
It's trying to to prove your your technology, your business plan, your organization's ability to develop something from design to implementation that proves that there is a market, and that you're capable of serving that market. Do it with as little money as you possibly can. Create that minimal viable product, get it deployed, show the market opportunity.
And so that Which is also, just for the sake of someone listening in, I'm going out of character again, is MVP is what it's called in Silicon Valley. Exactly. So the second thing is that, you can't have a business plan that just relies on selling to government customers. Because the government is fickle. Things change. Programs change. Even if they don't change, they sometimes get delayed.
It's just hard to make a sustainable business and attract capital from investors if it's totally dominated by serving the government customers. And a lot of investors have been burned by companies who have done that. So they're all looking for business models that have, at least an important contribution from selling to commercial customers. It's okay to also have government customers. It may even be better to have both because of the diversity.
But you've got to be able to show that there is a commercial market for your products or services, and that it's it's if it's not sizable now, it's going to be sizable in the future. And those that can do that, tend to attract money. Again, we are in this this, new era where growth is scarce. You know, flat is the new up. If your company is growing at 2%, you're celebrated. There's 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars of cash sitting on the sidelines looking for growth. They can't find it.
If they ever do find an industry that has high growth, they really pay up for it. The valuation multiples are are incredible. People are really overpaying for growth because it's so scarce. The lucky thing about the space industry is we do have almost unlimited growth opportunities if we can find the right investors to patient capital. We can have growth for the next millennium. So that's attracting capital. Just the fact that we're promising growth and most industries can't.
So what's your and and very short, just as we're wrapping up, if you were to say to me, you walk into someone it's one of the capital markets that you had or individuals or wealth, private family offices, and you had to say to them, and this is the the reason that you need to invest here. What do you say when it comes to moving them in your direction? Mhmm. Well, I I point to, you know, the long term magnitude of the opportunity.
Again, it has to be an investor that doesn't expect to flip something in 3 to 5 years because that's not, the industry we're talking about. You're hitting family groups of a 100,000,000, 200,000,000,000, billion half a 1000000000, $1,000,000,000,000 or more. You're you're you're in large really large family offices or multifamily offices or individuals who are sovereign wealth funds, those type of things. Well and and some, some venture capital firms, a small number of them.
And there's also, interestingly, some private equity firms that are coming back. If you were around in the mid to late 19 nineties, companies like Blackstone and Apollo and KKR and Apex and, some of the and Carlisle, some of the biggest private equity firms in the world came in and basically bought most of the satellite industry. It was a period where there was, a lot of supply in terms of satellites.
We switched from analog to digital, which meant one transponder could now handle 8 television channels instead of 1. So you had this period where you didn't need to invest in new satellites, which meant tons of free cash flow. The private equity firm saw that, came in, and basically bought up the industry and made a ton of money, made 1,000,000,000 of dollars in space in the nineties.
And then when that supply got sort of taken up by, you know, demand increasing over time, they sold all the satellite companies and, well, there's still a few that are that still own some satellite companies. And they hadn't really come back until now. Now I'm having conversations with these private equity firms that are looking at space again because they are starting to see some market opportunities. Okay. It's, not an easy sell today, and I think the past year helped and didn't help.
So it's kind of a mixed bag. So, thank you, Hoyt, for taking the time to to be on our podcast. I truly appreciate it. And the when it comes to the challenges that you're facing, what we're doing at Project Moon Hut, I use the analogy we're kind of Switzerland, is we are trying to fill in some of those gaps in a way that would allow what you're talking about to happen.
And timeline wise, we're looking at shorter timelines, quicker access, and it's in our it's in our directive or nonprofit is to create to establish an earth based ecosystem. Because we believe that it will help how we live on earth because we're not gonna move 10,000,000,000 people off this earth in the next, 20 to 30 years. So True. I'm hoping, hopefully, not an evangelist. Hopefully, someone who is, that we're hoping the people working with us are are moving us forward some way.
So I appreciate it. This this has been fun, David. I I've I've enjoyed it. Good. I'm I'm glad, and I one of the I appreciate it. One of the things that I really love is when someone on the program says, hey. This was good. It pushed. We had some fun. We talked. So I I appreciate it very much. For those of you looking to connect with me, you know some individuals that might be powerful on the program that can help this dialogue move forward and move the industry move forward.
You can reach out to me at david at the project moonhut.org. I do have my own Instagram. It's one way people do connect with me at mister David Goldsmith. You can connect with, us through at project moonhut or directly to me at at goldsmith. We do have LinkedIn and Facebook connections too, and you can find them online. So there's there's plenty of ways to contribute to moving the industry forward, and that's what we're not we're here to do.
We're here to change how we live on earth for all species. So that's hopefully our future and that we have the future that you were talking about, Hoyt. A new way of expanding and not living in a limited, limited world. So for everybody, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening. Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite podcast series, a project Moonhot podcast series, as a matter of fact.
And if you're not familiar, Project Moonhot has been working on, for I think now 5 years, establishing sustainable life on the moon, not self sustaining life, through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem. Make making us more productive in what we're doing as a, as humanity, to make the changes so we can get to the moon, to change how we live on earth for all species.
I often hear, the space industry or individuals involved in space talking about humanity, and yet we're looking at the whole earth. So we're, in an essence, turning the earth turning space and using it as a means to change how we live on earth. Today, we have an awesome guest on the line, Hoyt Davidson. How are you, Hoyt? Very good. Thanks, David. I am so glad to have you on the line. I I didn't look, and I can look this moment. We had met back in wow.
This has gotta be, 2015. So it's been quite some time that we had we've known each other, not not on a very, complex level, but we've known each other on a deep level. He Hoyt is a the founder managing partner of a company called Near Earth, and the the what strikes me in his CV, his background is this, is that he was involved in investment banking, and he cofounded Wall Street's 1st dedicated coverage group for the commercial satellite industry. So I'm not gonna say he's old.
I'm just gonna say he's been around the industry for a long time. I know. You're old? Oh, no. And while there, he did participate in financing over $15,000,000,000 worth of space activity. So today, we have, Hyt on the line.
And what's interesting for some of you who've not listened to the podcast, I might I don't think I've ever said this, is every so often, I set up an interview, there's actually homework that goes into this on both ends, White has to do work, I have to do work, we come up with a title. And the day of the program, someone like White says, we're gonna change it. I got a different title. So now I don't even know what we're going to be talking about in terms of direction.
And the title that Hoyt has just given me is he's called this program quadrillions. So, Hoyt, I'm excited to learn from you. I know I believe that people are listening, are waiting to hear something informational from you. So I'm assuming you have some bullet points or an outline or something we've gone to follow. Can you please give me the points? Yes. I've got 5 points. The first is quadrillions. The second is Earth first, but not Earth only. Yeah. The third is Space is hard.
Yep. The 4th is No Bucks, No Buck Rogers. And that may be an old illusion for many of the listeners, but Well well, when we get there, you and I will go over and and reminisce a little bit. Okay. And the last one? And the last one is patient capital. So we're going to let's go to the top of your list. Quadrillions. Great. Where are we going? Share with me. Help me understand this.
The the reason I wanted to title this and and focus on quadrillions is I I think a lot of your listeners will understand, you know, the density of Just talk just talk to me. Just talk to me. Help me understand this. Okay. I think people in general understand the immensity of space, but not necessarily from an economic point of view, from a financial point of view, in terms of what it could mean for the future of humanity and and our economic opportunity.
So if you look through history, there was a time when when everything was talked about in 1,000 of dollars, you know, say in the 17 100. And in the 18 100, we got into the 1,000,000 of dollars, and and and then in the 19 100, into 1,000,000,000 of dollars. And sort of in the late 19 100, we started talking about trillions. And sometimes people would say, that's trillions with a t, just to mark that. We're no longer talking about billions. We've now grown to the trillion level.
Well, I I think the point I wanna make is that through all of human history, we've been working towards, you know, filling up the earth and being fruitful and multiplying, and and we sort of are close to that point to where, we're having, you know, a a significant impact on our environment, on our ability to grow further. We're at 7 or 8,000,000,000 people, and we may grow to 10 or 12, but that's probably all we'll we'll ever have.
So we're we're sort of shifting our economic focus from one of growth, which has been the model for all of human history, to one of sustainability. And economists have been talking about this date that we would some at some point arrive to for centuries now. And now, we're coming to that point. And and what does that mean for humanity when we change to a sustainable economy? And I I I would wouldn't I wouldn't you say though I'm going back to the 19 eighties.
I'm 55. Going back to 19 eighties, we were talking about the unsustainability even in when we were 3 and a half 1000000000 people. We were talking about conservation. We weren't doing much about it because we still have the generation of, of individuals who were starting to, pillage the earth even more than we had ever done. Weren't we talking about that then? Oh, we we are.
And depending on who you talk to, some people think we're already past, you know, the the point of no return, you know, the the pessimist that think no no, amount of of, technological advancements, gonna help us. There are some that think we're not past the point of no return, but we're we're getting close to it and things are dire. And there's other people that think, you know, we've got a few more decades to develop more technologies and there's no need to worry yet.
But I don't think anyone thinks we're not approaching perhaps in our lifetime or certainly that of our children, the point where we sort of, you know, maxed out the waters and the fisheries and the land for agriculture.
You know, whether whether or not you believe in climate change or not, this the impact we're having is profound and if we really want to bring everyone else in the world up to the standard of living of the developed world, like Western Europe and the US, that's gonna take a lot of very efficient technologies that allow that to happen without, you know, damaging the environment and stretching our resources anymore. So, my only point here is that, you know, it's kind of scary.
We're reaching that point where, you know, growth is is is gonna be hard to come by. You can even see that today on Wall Street. People report a 3% growth quarter and it's like, wow, that's amazing. How did we possibly do that? Well, that 3% would have been sort of lackluster in in some decades in the past. It would have been insignificant. Yeah. And you even look at the satellite industry, most satellite commercial satellite companies are growing at somewhere between, negative 2 4%.
So, you know, it's even even getting hard for a high-tech industry like the satellite industry to grow. Okay. I I can see that on both levels. And so what you're what you're proposing is today, the word quadrillions is is that we're we're more aware that the possibility are there quadrillions in the in the universe and then we could tap it or that they always existed at quadrillions and we just didn't realize it? Well, I I think my point is more, sort of twofold.
One is that, we need to make people aware that quadrillions are possible if we go out into space and explore it, develop it, settle it. There's massive amounts of resources. It's said that just the near Earth asteroids has enough mass to make, you know, in space settlements to handle 10,000 times the population of Earth. So it's really boundless. You know, whether it's infinite or near infinite, it's it's really boundless.
So if we wanna get from trillions to quadrillions, I think the only way we do that, the only way we provide those growth opportunities for humanity is to go out and develop and settle space. So that's that's the first point. Well, I do I do like that you used the word infinite in there. Because it just happens to apply. Yeah. I mean, ultimately it does. Well, the Age of Infinite podcast series is good. That's what it's supposed to be. So, okay. Good. So that's the first point.
The second point is that, I don't think most of humanity wants to live in a constrained sustainable world. You know, I you know, historical examples, when people left Europe and spent all of their money to get on a dangerous ship to go over to new world and then live in the frontier, they didn't do it because they were all adventurers. They did it because there were no growth opportunities back in Europe. You know, all the land which was really the value was taken up.
And if you wanted to to have the growth opportunities for your families and your descendants, you had to go settle a frontier. And I think, that's what's gonna happen. I think, the people who settled the moon and Mars and and and Titan and whatever, are gonna be people that don't want to settle for a no growth sustainable world on earth. Does that make sense? Yeah. It does make sense. It's it's a the first thing that comes to mind is, okay, what's a timeline?
When you when you give me these, when you make this comment, I immediately go to timeline. So if if t zero is today and I'm looking outward, how do you see moon, Mars, and Titan? Well, the moon, I think, is obviously the the easiest and the one that will develop first. Even if just as a test bed to figure out how to do it on Mars, which is I don't I don't know why Mars has been a Yeah. Topic of conversation. And I think you remember the first time you meet me, I met me.
Yeah. I was back then saying, we got this little moon here, right here. So so will you say, what's your timeline for moon? Well, right now, supposedly, our timeline for returning is 2024. I hope we make that. It's easy for a change of government to derail the best intentions. But I think space has become, as bipartisan, as it has ever been.
So I I hope, regardless of what changes in administrations in the US and elsewhere, because it's really an international effort these days, that we will go to the moon, and we will use that as a stepping stone, to other places and the stars. But it's not gonna be quick. It it will take decades. It will take Mhmm. 1,000,000,000 or 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars to to do, but it's worth it. I mean, it took ultimately trillions of dollars to develop, you know, the Americas.
Yeah. And it took centuries. But if you look back, it was a worthwhile endeavor for humanity. So so if we say 2024, what is Mars to you? What's what's your timeline when you think Mars and Titan or whoever else? Well, if if you think about it in phases, there's there's an exploratory phase where you have the sort of first boots on the ground and, you're learning how to you know, to live off the land, but it's, you know, dozens of people.
That could be, you know, the 2000 thirties, you know, into 2,040 and but I think in the 2,040 on, you're gonna start seeing an ever growing population, you know, 100 and 1,000 and 10,000. But, you know, it's gonna gonna build up over time just like just like the experience with with the Americas. You know? Okay. I just, just for reference point because I not that I'm trying to nail people down.
That's not my purpose in asking is that I've been in the 5 years I've done this, from the first event I went to to today, you hear different numbers, different figures, and they're changing constantly. So I just needed reference point for you. So Yeah. Earth, Earth first, but not eat, not Earth only. So ships to the New World, got it. Space Time, got it. What else about this? Okay. So the reason I I I'd like to make this point is there's enormous problems to be solved on Earth.
Poverty, health care, you you you name it. And and, of course, that has to be the number one priority of of citizens, taxpayers, governments, whatever. I mean, this is our planet. We've gotta take care of it. That's gotta be our number one priority in terms of spending, and effort. But it can't be our our only priority because if it is, then we're just doomed into this sustainable world where you're never investing in the future so you can grow out of whatever problems you have on Earth.
And every you know, everyone sort of knows this innately. Families, that are wise try to save some amount of their paycheck for the future, regardless of of how much they really need to spend money today. Corporations do it. If a corporation took all of the cash flow it earned and paid it out as bonuses to its employees and dividends to its shareholders, it would be stagnant and never grow. So wise corporations don't do that.
They invest in r and d. They invest in a new capital equipment for higher productivity. And and cut wise countries do the same thing. I mean, you know, Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana, territory because he knew that was gonna be a wise investment for centuries to come. It wasn't a wise investment in terms of returning, having a return on that investment over 5 or 7 years. It took, you know, literally centuries.
But wise people, wise corporations, wise governments, set aside some to invest in the future. And that's in basic science research, it's in, medicine, it's in materials, physics, but it's some of it is also for expanding frontiers, and that's investment in space. So there's this argument always about space is too expensive. We need that money, for whatever social program. So it's a crime to spend that money on space.
And I think that is very short sighted and not wise, and so that's what I mean by earth first, but not earth only. And just the then the space is too expensive. It's shortsighted. You you gave what I heard you say, is that you believe that it's that these individuals are short sighted. And how are you convincing, or how are the people you believe are convincing the best, convincing these individuals that space is a good place?
Well, I think part of it is just, spending more time educating the population on the benefits they've already received from our investment in space, you know, from, from the Mercury and Gemini and Apollo era to today. You know, just you you can make an argument for all of that investment just on on GPS alone and, the productivity and value it's created just from having position navigation and timing capabilities for all the other industries, and consumers on earth.
So we haven't really done a great job of explaining that. People tend to understand that they get some of their telecom and some of their media through satellites, but really don't understand how important they've been. So I guess education would be part of it. Okay. You probably don't remember a lot about what we're working on. Yeah. There's a whole an underlying current of what we're doing.
So I was wanting to hear what you might be doing special that could help us to maybe have a a different way. So okay. But, you know, but again, I I think you do the investment, because it's gonna open up this frontier and create this brighter future for humanity over the next several, you know, centuries or forever as opposed to just focusing on justifying it by the near term benefits it's bringing to, you know, our current population. But I think both are true.
Okay. So the next one is space is hard. Okay. So, if if we're now convinced that, we should invest in space, and that's gonna lead us to a world of quadrillions instead of just trillions, how do we do that? And unfortunately, space is hard. It has all the same risk of any commercial business, for instance, but it happens in a super harsh environment of of temperature swings and radiation and and and just remoteness. I mean, it's vast and and and not easy to get from one place to another.
Plus, there's there's much greater unknowns and uncertainties in terms of of, how hard it will be to mine minerals, how different markets will grow, how big they will be, how long it will take to grow them. So for an investor looking to put money in the space, even if they think it's the coolest thing out there, it's really hard for them, to make a decision to invest in a space venture versus a terrestrial venture, just because there's much greater risk involved.
And so if they're gonna make the right risk reward trade off, for their investors, they made a really high return to justify all of those extra risk. And in space, there may be very high returns, but sometimes they take many, many years to get to. You know, it can take 5 years to develop the technology and launch it and start operating it, and and the markets may be just very nascent and and not profitable yet. It may take years for the markets to build.
So space is a very hard, area for investors to to spend, you know, money on. And there's ways that I wanna talk about addressing that, but I just wanted to first set out the example that, you know, for instance, if you're gonna mine the moon, you have all the difficulties in mining that you do in a remote area on Earth, plus, the harsh environment of the moon, the radiation, the the fine dust that's difficult to deal with, the challenge of getting energy.
So it's just, you know, you really need huge returns to to make that worthwhile. And go ahead. And we we don't even know if we can mine on these facilities with what we've got today or on these, on the moon because we don't know if we can mine through the regolith. Right. We we know or at least we think we know there's lots of, interesting minerals and particularly water. And we think they're in concentrations that would be, minable and perhaps profitably minable. But we really don't know.
There's really been no effort to do a lot of ground truthing. I think we've only, you know, drilled a couple of holes a couple of feet deep. So there's a whole lot of effort that needs to go into the sort of prospecting phase of the moon to see what's there, how hard would it be to mine, can it be mined profitably. So that's kind of the next phase we really need to do.
If we're gonna have a sustainable presence on the moon, we've had to use, you know, in situ resources, which means mining and processing there as opposed to bringing everything up from earth, which is processing there as opposed to bringing everything up from Earth, which is would be way too expensive. So, you know, we got a lot of prospecting to do. Okay. Got it. So tell me how we're gonna do this. Okay. I think that's the next one. So that gets to the no bucks, no buck Rogers.
And, you remember Buck Rogers is one of the earliest science fiction sort of cartoons, which which I think is, you know, inspired at least a a generation before Star Trek and Star Wars. But we we are finally seeing, lots of of capital flowing into to space. About $2,000,000,000 a year now for the last 3 or 4 years, has been invested in commercial space startups by venture capital firms around the world. Little over half of that has come from the US, and the rest from from the other countries.
But something like over 300 venture capital firms have done at least 1 commercial space investment. And a 130 plus corporations have also made investments and and, you know, new commercial space companies. And, you know, half of so of those are not even in the aerospace industry. So we're starting to see, you know, strong interest and, and a recognition that there is quadrillions out there. And maybe we should start investing money in technologies to help us get there.
The bad news is that the average investment, into those 1,000 or so startups is about $20,000,000. And that's great for getting started in developing new technologies and accelerating innovation. But space is hard, as we just said. And it takes 100 of 1,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollars to actually deploy infrastructure that that adds value. Whether it's transportation, or gateways, or habitats, or mining, or processing, these are gonna take 1,000,000,000 of dollars.
And we aren't yet seeing the large pools of capital investing in space. That's the private equity firms, the public equity capital markets, the, high yield debt markets, the the commercial banks. We are not seeing those large pools of capital investing yet because space is hard. So we gotta we gotta bridge. I want to just I'm trying to get my mind around because I I wanna we wanna create project Muna, create sustainable life on the moon.
You what you've just outlined to me, and I'm not seeing it in the outline, so I'm trying to make sure You gave me a date of 2025 or 2024. And now you're saying we're not getting enough in it even though we have a 130 companies, even though we have $2,000,000,000 a year, even though we have 300 VCs. And 2025 is in space years tomorrow. Yeah. So we're not getting the high yield debt markets. We're not getting private equity.
The these companies, these these investment pools, whatever you wanna use, hedge funds, they're still saying they're not saying space is hard. That's not their definition because I've talked to them. They just see no return. It's not that space they don't think space is hard. They say, hey. I've gotta give a return for our investor.
I've gotta make sure that if we're a fund, that we do the following, and I know I can get even if it's 3% or 10% or a 100%, whatever they're investing in, startups or not, they're looking for a return and space with deep space, with planet that both folded even though they were they were merged into something else. Let's just say they stopped operating.
We just had Elon Musk's capsule have a challenge on the liftoff, and I don't wanna go into Elon Musk because there's there's enough about that out in the, in the ether. It's how are we gonna jump start this? Exactly. And that's that's my next bullet point. But before I get to the patient capital Okay. When when I say space is hard, that's exactly what I mean.
When you talk to investors, they can't close the business case to make the investment because they don't see they they see a huge amount of capital to go into it. And then, a 3 to 5 year period of negative cash flow.
And when you when you do a discounted cash flow analysis or, internal rate of return analysis or payback analysis, whatever you're using as an investor, it makes it hard to close that business case, because of this large capital expenditure, many years of no cash flow, and then maybe a small market at at the beginning that takes a while to grow. So that's what I mean by space is hard. It's hard for an investor to wrap your hand around that. So what do we need to get over that?
And that's where the the last bullet point comes in, patient capital. If you're a private equity firm and you have a 3 to 7 year investment horizon, which most of them do, it's sort of hard to deploy money into space infrastructure and expect to to be able to exit, at the sort of multiples of valuation you want. You really need a 12 to 30 to 50 year investment horizon, and and and not 3 to 10. So who can do that? Right now, we're seeing some billionaires.
Obviously, the billionaires can be more patient with their capital. They don't have fiduciary duty to a bunch of, investors or shareholders. The same with, you know, some family offices, which are just, investment arms of of wealthy families. They can take a long term view, and and we're seeing a lot more interest from family offices investing in space than we did even, you know, 3 or 4 years ago.
Governments can you know, if they're wise, they can invest in space and take a long term view, same with sovereign funds. So we're we're already seeing more and more governments, set up new initiatives where they're helping to support commercial space companies.
And to give you an example, there's one idea that I and some others have been advocating for recently, within our government and, you know, National Space Council, Department of Commerce, which is an idea we call the overseas private investment corporation. Now, back in the seventies, the the US congress federally chartered a new entity called, the overseas private investment corporation.
And the purpose of that was to help US corporations invest into expensive infrastructure in developing countries, where the markets in those developing countries were not, strong enough to support that investment. No no one would have made that investment based on the current state of the markets in those developing countries. There was also a lot of political risk involved.
And so the overseas private investment corporations that stepped in, and they would provide, government guaranteed debt or subsidies, where the debt was, you know, 12 to 20 years in maturity and had, you know, fairly low interest rates, if the investors would put up the equity. So they would allow the investors to have their equity levered by this long term affordable debt. And with that, all of a sudden, they were able to close their business cases.
Now the overseas private investment corporation has been a huge success. They've invested in over a 100 countries, you know, 100 and 100 of projects across, you know, hospitals, and and roads, and and water treatment facilities, you name it. Just everything a country might need, they've enabled all of this investment, which is not only help to those countries, and and been good diplomatically for for the United States, but also helped world trade.
And that entity actually returns over a $1,000,000,000 to the US treasury every year. So it's profitable and it's self sustaining. If you went on to their Now just just that point alone, not even talking about space is a case that is is being is being shut down in the walls of America. In what sense? Well, the current administration is pulling out and saying we can't help these countries. We can't work through these countries. We're not gonna give funding to these countries.
And you just said a 100 countries, roads, hospitals, schools, and it has returned $1,000,000,000 for that investment. And do you think they have the wherewithal, the kahunas to take it even further and go space oriented? Well, I Will we be working I hope so. But I I take your point. And, I mean, this is a little different than, just giving foreign aid. This is really creating wealth within the US, because it's supporting US companies that are doing this.
So there's there's employment So it only in in your model, it would only help corporations that are US corporations, and but it's not no longer overseas. And if there's any investment or collaboration from outside countries, for example, you have an American company that has a Russian investor in it or a Chinese investor in it or an Indian investor, would that be allowed?
Well, I I think if you're using, US taxpayer dollars, the corporations would have to be majority owned and controlled by the US. But by by the way, this overseas private investment corporation idea, it was picked up by many other countries. There are versions in Europe. There's the UK has its own version. So it it's it's been a a model that, has been duplicated, by other countries. So And I I don't disagree that other countries aren't doing it.
Mhmm. And I I I shared with you, I'm gonna be speaking in Luxembourg in, the 3 weeks, I think it is, at the the Space Forum. And so I see, for example, the Luxembourg government getting actively involved in activities that would help to generate some space activity. So I do see it.
Yeah. Well, I I think those that have have, tried to shut down these sort of things, these sort of activities, by the US, whether it's the Export Import Bank, have have done so because they think it's sort of crony capitalism and it's there to benefit, you know, one industry and why benefit that industry versus other industries. And there may be similar complaints about this, that it's just benefiting the space industry. But that's not really true.
Because if we're moving humanity into space, we're taking our entire economy with us. It's not just rockets and satellites. It's everything. It's every single industry that we have on Earth will have to be duplicated in space. You know, transportation and and communications is obvious but it's also energy. It's mining as we talked about. It's agriculture. We'll have to, you know, grow crops on on the moon. So it really benefits all industries.
And just like it did in the developing world, it was, benefited multiple industries, not just you know, construction. So I I think it's a good idea. And if you went on to the OPIC, which is what, the original entity is called, opic dot gov. If you went on that website and everywhere you saw overseas, you replaced it with outer space, you wouldn't have to change anything else. I mean, it's just the perfect model.
It solves the same problem in closing business cases for investors in difficult environments where the markets aren't fully developed. And it's been a proven success. So I I, you know, I I hope it's something that we try. I I think, I think you I don't know if it was on the audio or not. I think you did say that we need more evangelists for the space industry.
And the challenge for the space industry is it's not just the evangelists, it's we don't have enough individuals who, on a day to day level of understanding, are incorporated into this industry. It's still a a hope and a prayer. It's still foreign. It's not yet when we talk about the overseas, it's much easier for someone to get their mind around that. We're going to help put a bridge in. We're gonna help put a hospital in. There is gravity. There is water. There is infrastructure.
So if we talk about those tech that tech well, I got it. I understand. We're going to help a country develop and grow. When it comes to space, there's not enough knowledge. So how do you get to that tipping point and just educate? Because this is a this would have to be approved across the board, and I I I'm mostly in Hong Kong or in Asia or working outside of the United States, so I see it from a very different perspective.
I'm watching the members of congress who don't know how data is being used by Facebook or how a cell phone works or how, tech is applied to the Internet. And we're telling them to understand, oh, yeah. By the way, microwave ovens are 60 years old or 70 years old. That's old tech. We've got some really new tech. They're they're just not there. Oh, I agree. You know, personally, I I would love it if there were more politicians that were former engineers and and business executives than lawyers.
But we tend to, attract mostly lawyers into our, our congress. But, yeah, I I think the world is is very complex, and you've you have to have a great grasp of technology and and commerce to really be an effective politician and make wise decisions and wise investments.
So so so my point I guess, my pushback here is I understand what you're saying could be a positive implication to this, and I can understand how if we can, if we can reduce risk, whether it be either through insurance or or rate of return, some type of tool that is used, some mechanism is used to reduce risk. I still think the next hurdle is not just a typical hurdle that you would find in a 100 yard race. You just can't pick up your knee and go over it.
The next hurdle is a pole vault for so many people. So with your solution, do you have a solution in there that you believe can get us over the pole vault? Yeah. I I I guess it definitely there's there definitely is pole vaulting versus hurdles. Again, you know, space is hard, so the the hurdles are big. So in the early years, you know, if we're gonna get humans on the moon in 2024, it's gonna be largely with government funding. Right? As opposed to, you know, industry and private capital.
But, there will be industry and private capital alongside the government, during this period. Our goal should be to to increase the the mix of industry and private capital versus public capital as we go forward. Because there are real limits, as you mentioned, as to how much government capital we're gonna be able to get and for how long. Apollo was an amazing percentage of the U. S. Budget for several years. That wasn't sustainable.
We weren't gonna be able to spend 4 a half percent of our budget on space given all the other priorities, you know, we have on the earth. So we have to transition over time away from government money that's gonna kick start us to industry and private capital. And the way you do that is by having government provide some of the patient capital that helps close the business cases for the industry and private capital. So that's what I'm focused on.
What's missing right now is the patient capital that allows us to leverage the industry and private capital that does have a shorter investment horizon, that does have to compete for investments with everything else going on on earth. So that that's the reason I was focusing on patient capital. So when we so when talking patient capital, we're talking and this is not a commonly used word in average everyday conversation. Patient capital and I'm talking to the people listening for one second.
Patient capital is capital in which the individuals, the organizations, whatever you want to call them, have enough time or willingness to wait for some rate of return that's out in the future. For example, if we're gonna build a nuclear reactor in 20 years, and it's going to take 10 years to get through the process and another 7 to 10 years to build, that would take a sort of patient capital.
So it's a word that's used in the financial sector to refer to capital that is willing to wait a period of time. Just a a sense. Somewhat of a definition. It's probably not the best one, Hoyt, but it's probably good enough. So No. That's My take. Okay. Thank you. My take is I'm not I'm seeing let's let's take this new world concept, and I appreciate the new world concept. It's a small fraction of the industry. The industry is still made up of the larger players.
So the new world gets a lot of visibility, yet it's not the majority of the industry. That has to swing rapidly to be able to create a 20, 24, 20 30, horizon. And I'm not hearing real solutions out there. I understand we've gotta find it. So your can China's gonna do it government wise. So that's not even patient capital. That's opportunity capital in a different way. What other countries can do patient capital like this? Well well, China's a great example.
China, right now, is is telling the world they're gonna spend a $1,000,000,000,000 or more on their, you know, belt and road project to connect all of Asia. Right? That's almost all infrastructure. It's roads and it's ports and it's rail and whatever. Because they see the value of investing a $1,000,000,000,000 in infrastructure to improve commerce across a lot of these developing regions.
Well, I think when we talk about developing cislunar space and spending 100 of 1,000,000,000 or a $1,000,000,000,000, it's the exact same thing. But it has the the extra complexity of doing it in space, which again, is harder. And and it has the added difficulty of explaining if it will really work because it was easy. I'm gonna use the term easy.
It was easy to to, a Maersk ship going from Hong Kong or Beijing or Shanghai is about 32 to 40, 32 to 35 days to get from here, I'm in Hong Kong, to get to Rotterdam support. The United States, Europe is the largest trading partner with China. It is not the United States. It's a misnomer that Americans believe the number one trading partner. There's 400 and, I think, 20 or 30,000,000 people if you take all the blocks of Europe and put them together as compared to the 350 in the US.
So what they did is they took a truck and they drove it from one point to the other. I don't remember the exact number, so please don't quote me on this, but I think it was 18 days. So, therefore, if we can improve the infrastructure if they can improve the infrastructure, then what they what China has the capacity to do is not only feed the the European market and the up and coming, African market, which is supposed to be the next populous, in terms of growth.
China will decrease over the next, 25, 30, 40 years. So that makes sense. We can take a truck 18 days. I get it. Put a road in. Put a bridge in. They happen to be dealing with a little bit more nefarious countries to be able to make this happen. Yet the number works and the process works, and it's not difficult to get your mind around it. How we doing this here? Is that working for us? Are we really getting people to understand? And I'll add to the belt and road.
The belt and road is also to circumvent the United States positioning and controlling of resources because China is a resource needing country with the growth that it's experiencing for multiple reasons. Consumerism for, let's just use consumerism as one which encompasses everything from new cars, new features, new new manufacturing plants, or whatever, is under that umbrella. So how I I get it. I'm here. I'm here with you, Hoyt. I'm looking up. I see. It's it's it sounds like a nice analogy.
I can't do that for I can do it for space on my in in project Moon Hut. I can't do it for space when I talk to a finance person. Well, no. Exactly. That's why I I keep coming back to this focus on on leveraging the sources of patient capital. And right now, that's sort of billionaires in in governments. But you need every To do this, you're gonna need everything. You're gonna need government support. You're gonna need 1 country can't do it anymore. It's gonna be, yeah, international consortiums.
It's gonna be public private partnerships. It can't just be the government because the government's too inefficient. We saw from the the COTS program where, estimates are as much as 10 times more efficient in terms of of use of of government funding, doing it through a COTS type public private partnership model. So we're gonna have to have lots of new innovative public private partnerships.
We're gonna have to have the 1,000 new space startups working with the dozens of large aerospace companies around the world. We're gonna need all of that to do this, because it's it's hard. And you're right. Most of the the people, the talent, the technology, the capital, the equipment, today resides in those dozens of aerospace companies and not in these 1,000 new start ups.
But I think, probably a majority of the new technologies will come from these thousands of startups and end up being deployed by, acquired by, used by these large aerospace companies. So, it's all of the above. It's it's not one or the other. It's it's an and and not an or. It it's yeah. I it's an I and I okay. I'm I I I know I'm pushing here, and that's okay. We're talking and people are hearing a live conversation.
When I look at the the words you had just said, can't see you, I'm talking over a podcast, Is we're going to need them all. International consortiums, private public partnerships, COTS, the 1,000 in new state spread ups, the aerospace. All of those, we're going to need them all. And what that sounds like is the one missing piece is we're going to need them all for what?
And the challenge becomes, we're going to need them all because it sounds like in your estimation from your earlier conversation, we're gonna have challenges on this on this planet. People have to understand that there's climate change, sea level waters rising, mass extinction, political unrest, resource depletion, social displacement, yadayada. They've probably got about 10 of them in my head.
And that connection that we're trying to make at Project Moon Hut, that connection is an assumptive connection because the world does not understand, and I'm using that as a broad brush, so I apologize for those who believe they or do understand, is not plastic straws and plastic bags. And stopping that, because if you stop a plastic bag, you've saved the planet.
Microfibers are so much more destructive to the the oceans in the world that we have, and that comes from clothing when you wash it all the time. Or solid waste runoff, which is 24 Olympic sized pools at a minimum per day going to the ocean. Disconnected. It it is are there models out there that you know if you've been around a long time, Hoyt, and I'm asking these are sincere questions. Mhmm. Is do you know how those are being connected so that everybody's involved the way you said it?
I think it's gonna take more podcast like this, more advocacy, more evangelists sort of spreading the word. But, yeah, there there are serious problems on Earth, and that has to be our first priority. But again, I don't believe we're ever going to overcome these serious problems on earth if we just focus on earth. We have to invest in technologies. We have to open up new frontiers. We have to get to the unlimited resources of space to solve these problems on earth.
It's nothing more than a relief valve, for, you know, populations and people that would otherwise be in a situation of, you know, as we as we say in low earth orbit now, it's it's crowded, contested, and competitive. Well, if that's true in low earth orbit, it's true, on steroids on the earth. We're becoming crowded, contested, and competitive, while we're running out of resources. So, I think we, you know, space could be one of the solutions for humanity, in terms of solving that.
It could be developing space solar power to have limitless, clean, sustainable green energy that we beam to earth. I mean, that's just one example. Yeah. We just had, John Strickland on the line. Brilliant, brilliant guy. I I think I've met him before, but oh my god. The guy's over the top. He he was just he talked about, solving climate change through solar satellites and the tech that he was thinking about.
The the guy I I I don't think I could write fast enough, and I was really I was impressed as his whether it will work or not, I I don't know enough. Yet I was just impressed at his approach to how would that happen. Well, and and you know, even people like Jeff Bezos, you know, the richest man on the planet, talks about turning the earth into, a zone for habitation and light industry and moving everything else, you know, off planet.
So I think I think there is a bright future if we just, realize that, you know, maybe space is gonna be a necessary part of of achieving that bright future. I I I completely agree. And one of the reasons I do the podcast series, it there's a self serving component here. I need to learn. So I get people like you on the line to push me, to find, to think, to integrate. What I'm trying to do here with this podcast, and as I'm I'm looking to say I understand the quadrillions. Got it.
I understand that the the adventures had woken up and needed new space. I understand the challenges that Earth has. I see that space is hard and I've heard that before and and it does have challenges. It's remote, it's harsh, there's dust, there's radiation, there's energy. We do know there's water there. And opening up those capital markets has just been a real challenge. I don't think you are on the board of Deep Space Industries, or somehow related.
I don't think a Deep Space or a Planet Resources, while they did a lot for visibility and they did a lot for the industry in many ways, the fact that both of them within I don't know. What? 6 months? You could probably tell me better. 6 to 8 months, both of them had to be quote unquote, and I don't like to do that often. My wife has tried to stop me from using that. They were absorbed into other entities because they hadn't delivered on the promise.
Yeah. And I I think sometimes if you're a visionary, you focus on doing the hard thing first instead of taking baby steps. If space is hard, you succeed by breaking it up into smaller achievable milestones and taking baby steps. It's just like, you know, what Jeff Bezos says, you know, you know, you're moving forward slowly, but ferociously, with baby steps.
And I think both of those companies, you know, if they had to do it over again, they would have stepped back and and done something easier first, and made money with that, and use that to get to the next level, and and the next level, and and sort of work their way up instead of trying to mine asteroids, you know, in the beginning. It took Is is that what you're is that what you're advising people today? Oh, yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it it took it it the, OSIRIS REx mission that Lockheed Martin did to go out and take a sample off of an asteroid and return it, just to take one tiny sample, the vacuum up a few particles and bring it back, that was a $600,000,000 program. So it it wasn't really realistic to think that that magnitude of investment over that long of a time period was gonna come, you know, from the private capital markets. It is a worthwhile thing to do to develop asteroid mining technologies.
And I think we will eventually mine asteroids. But it's again, gonna take a lot of patient capital and 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars of investment over, you know, a decade or 2, to get there. It's, so so let me let me ask a different question. You've been you've been in the industry for a very long time. You know many of the people I've interviewed. When you go give me 2 perspectives fairly quickly. We don't have a tremendous amount of time to go into, but let's say give me 2 perspective.
I'd like you to tell me what you are telling startups today on how they should approach the space industry, however you wanna define that, but I've gotta believe you're an m and a guy. You understand this. You're sitting down with somebody. There's 10, 20, $30,000,000 being invested. You would say, do this do this this way, and you'll be more successful. And then what are you saying to the individuals in the capital market that are turning them where other people are not able to turn them?
By turning them, Meaning having them invest. Having them say, you have to make money. You're in the business of making money, so I've gotta believe you've got you've turned some deals over. Mhmm. What are you doing as Hoyt that is making these people and near earth your company, near earth, what are you doing to make them turn? Okay. You feel like I'm talking I feel like I'm talking about, Dracula or vampires making people turn, but yes.
No. I I I would say the 2 critical issues, and they both resolve around the market. Most people think investments in space is all about the technology. The technology turns out to be the easy part and maybe the the part that has the less risk. We have some very talented engineers and they typically can, if you give them enough money, build what they say they're gonna build and it will work.
The the real issue with investments is once you've done that, will there be a market opportunity that will pay you enough money to allow you to create a return on that investment? So it's all about the market. So the 2 things, I I think, you know, I tell most new companies is the first is this minimum viable product concept, which came out of Silicon Valley. And that's, in a way, another version of the baby steps.
It's trying to to prove your your technology, your business plan, your organization's ability to develop something from design to implementation that proves that there is a market, and that you're capable of serving that market. Do it with as little money as you possibly can. Create that minimal viable product, get it deployed, show the market opportunity.
And so that Which is also, just for the sake of someone listening in, I'm going out of character again, is MVP is what it's called in Silicon Valley. Exactly. So the second thing is that, you can't have a business plan that just relies on selling to government customers. Because the government is fickle. Things change. Programs change. Even if they don't change, they sometimes get delayed.
It's just hard to make a sustainable business and attract capital from investors if it's totally dominated by serving the government customers. And a lot of investors have been burned by companies who have done that. So they're all looking for business models that have, at least an important contribution from selling to commercial customers. It's okay to also have government customers. It may even be better to have both because of the diversity.
But you've got to be able to show that there is a commercial market for your products or services, and that it's it's if it's not sizable now, it's going to be sizable in the future. And those that can do that, tend to attract money. Again, we are in this this, new era where growth is scarce. You know, flat is the new up. If your company is growing at 2%, you're celebrated. There's 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars of cash sitting on the sidelines looking for growth. They can't find it.
If they ever do find an industry that has high growth, they really pay up for it. The valuation multiples are are incredible. People are really overpaying for growth because it's so scarce. The lucky thing about the space industry is we do have almost unlimited growth opportunities if we can find the right investors to patient capital. We can have growth for the next millennium. So that's attracting capital. Just the fact that we're promising growth and most industries can't.
So what's your and and very short, just as we're wrapping up, if you were to say to me, you walk into someone it's one of the capital markets that you had or individuals or wealth, private family offices, and you had to say to them, and this is the the reason that you need to invest here. What do you say when it comes to moving them in your direction? Mhmm. Well, I I point to, you know, the long term magnitude of the opportunity.
Again, it has to be an investor that doesn't expect to flip something in 3 to 5 years because that's not, the industry we're talking about. You're hitting family groups of a 100,000,000, 200,000,000,000, billion half a 1000000000, $1,000,000,000,000 or more. You're you're you're in large really large family offices or multifamily offices or individuals who are sovereign wealth funds, those type of things. Well and and some, some venture capital firms, a small number of them.
And there's also, interestingly, some private equity firms that are coming back. If you were around in the mid to late 19 nineties, companies like Blackstone and Apollo and KKR and Apex and, some of the and Carlisle, some of the biggest private equity firms in the world came in and basically bought most of the satellite industry. It was a period where there was, a lot of supply in terms of satellites.
We switched from analog to digital, which meant one transponder could now handle 8 television channels instead of 1. So you had this period where you didn't need to invest in new satellites, which meant tons of free cash flow. The private equity firm saw that, came in, and basically bought up the industry and made a ton of money, made 1,000,000,000 of dollars in space in the nineties.
And then when that supply got sort of taken up by, you know, demand increasing over time, they sold all the satellite companies and, well, there's still a few that are that still own some satellite companies. And they hadn't really come back until now. Now I'm having conversations with these private equity firms that are looking at space again because they are starting to see some market opportunities. Okay. It's, not an easy sell today, and I think the past year helped and didn't help.
So it's kind of a mixed bag. So, thank you, Hoyt, for taking the time to to be on our podcast. I truly appreciate it. And the when it comes to the challenges that you're facing, what we're doing at Project Moon Hut, I use the analogy we're kind of Switzerland, is we are trying to fill in some of those gaps in a way that would allow what you're talking about to happen.
And timeline wise, we're looking at shorter timelines, quicker access, and it's in our it's in our directive or nonprofit is to create to establish an earth based ecosystem. Because we believe that it will help how we live on earth because we're not gonna move 10,000,000,000 people off this earth in the next, 20 to 30 years. So True. I'm hoping, hopefully, not an evangelist. Hopefully, someone who is, that we're hoping the people working with us are are moving us forward some way.
So I appreciate it. This this has been fun, David. I I've I've enjoyed it. Good. I'm I'm glad, and I one of the I appreciate it. One of the things that I really love is when someone on the program says, hey. This was good. It pushed. We had some fun. We talked. So I I appreciate it very much. For those of you looking to connect with me, you know some individuals that might be powerful on the program that can help this dialogue move forward and move the industry move forward.
You can reach out to me at david at the project moonhut.org. I do have my own Instagram. It's one way people do connect with me at mister David Goldsmith. You can connect with, us through at project moonhut or directly to me at at goldsmith. We do have LinkedIn and Facebook connections too, and you can find them online. So there's there's plenty of ways to contribute to moving the industry forward, and that's what we're not we're here to do.
We're here to change how we live on earth for all species. So that's hopefully our future and that we have the future that you were talking about, Hoyt. A new way of expanding and not living in a limited, limited world. So for everybody, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.