Science in Space Matters w/ Ken Savin #58

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

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And if you don't see it on the larger screen, hit f 11 for full screen, meaning you're a laptop, and you will see that it's incredible. So check that out. We are a nonprofit. So if you ever consider making a donation, in the top right hand corner, it says donate. Every bit counts for us. So let's dive into the podcast. The title for today is Science in Space Matters. And today, we have with us Ken Sabin. Hi, Ken. Hi. Okay. So as always, we do a very, very brief bio.

Ken is the chief science officer at Redwire. He had a 20 year legacy in the farm industry at firms such as Eli Lilly. At Redwire, he's working on projects include protein crystal growth, product development for the International Space Station, development of 3 d bio printer as part of the biofabrication facility, and building a consortium. He's also achieved a PhD in chemistry. Now this has been added just recently for everybody. I have no clue what Ken is going to talk about.

Everybody thinks that I've already seen his outline. I understand the notes. We've had the discussion about it. We have had nothing. Ken and I have an initial call. We spent about some time creating a title, and that's all I know. So I'm on this journey with you. And I've said that because people have thought countless times they've emailed and said, wow, you guys must have talked a lot. No, we haven't. So, Ken, let's get started. Do you have an outline or a bullet point set for us? I do.

You ready? Okay. Can I I am ready pen in hand? So I'm gonna start just by saying a little bit more about my background because I think it's important to help everybody relate to me and to this experience. Okay. So number 1 is your background. Number 2? I'm gonna talk about and describe a definition for science in space. Okay. Science in space number 3. Talk about why science in space is different or special. Is different or special. That's a long one.

Okay. Next. I'm gonna talk about who the players are in getting science and space done. Okay. Next. I'm gonna talk about what the goals of doing science and space are. Okay. And what? Gonna talk about where it's leading, what this means to us. Okay. What this means to us. Is there another one? I'm just gonna conclude at that point. Okay. So we'll call it conclusion and a discussion. Okay. Fantastic. So let's start off with your background.

And as as I've shared, I did some research on you, looked you up a little bit, but you were highly recommended by a friend. I think it wasn't Yosim who recommended you? Yosim who did one of the podcasts earlier. So I I trust I trust him completely, and he's a part of project moon hot. So let's let's move this forward. So I am not a special person. I'm not like a NASA. I'm not a NASA guy. You know? I I'm not I'm not an engineer. I didn't grow up doing stuff in space.

I'm really I'm I'm from I got a degree in chemistry and went to work in the pharmaceutical industry. And, you know, like may maybe many people, I am a fan of what NASA does and but I was always kind of an outsider. And I think that is how I always thought it had to be. That's what it was. There were a small group of people who worked in the enclave of NASA, and then there was everybody else who just sort of watched from the outside.

And, I got a a crazy phone call from this woman who was, you know, telling me that I could do science in space, and I had no idea what it meant. I actually didn't understand that we had a space station. I thought we were still flying space shuttles. This is, like, back in 2013. And, but it it sent me down this odd journey, a career change, and, a change in the way I think about what the possibilities are. I think that's the the key piece of it is that it opened like a whole new world for me.

And as I'll describe to you, it's changed the way I think about science in a general sense. So, the the key element of this is, and I'm gonna talk about this more, is that normal people are starting to participate in this endeavor of us taking truly taking steps out into space. And it's everyday people who are stepping up and doing their part to participate. So it's kind of an exciting thing. Well, no. No. The yeah.

I, you've watched 2 of the videos, the introductory videos, and I don't know if you've kind of gotten from the conversation, is I am not a space person. 2014 showed up at, at an event, started speaking to the team at NASA, knew nothing about space, if you wanna use that term, which is it's the geography of space. And I didn't know the industry. And next thing you know, there's this whole project Moon Hut that's grown out of it. So I would say you're 2013, I'm 2014.

I don't have a background like engineering. My my background is a biology major and a psychology major dual. So we're very similar, and we're engaged in something very not, I would say, similar, but the similar geography. So that's great. That's fab fabulous. I love that. Yeah. I think if we took the time, we could go back and look at the events that were happening in the background that led to this kind of an inflection point. Because I think we are not alone. Right?

I think there's a lot of other people who around the same time will say 2013 through 2017 where things started to change. And we'll talk I'll talk a little bit about, some aspects of that, but I think there there was a a a shift. And in the future, people will look back and see just how impactful it was. Maybe not a specific event, but a series of events that led us in this direction.

So I I I because we're here, we're talking about it right now, I do wanna ask about it because I in my work, the work that we're doing in Project Moon Hut and my work that I've done, I have found that not as many people as I thought were engaged in space. There's a lot of enthusiasts. Yes. Closet enthusiasts. But when I say to them, have you ever donated? Have you ever participated? Have you ever worked in? Have you ever purchased? Have you ever this? Well, I make scale models.

Okay. No. No. You go to movies. Great. I I that's not what I'm asking. Are you involved? And then I traveled back to even landing on the moon. There were a lot of challenges. A lot of people didn't care. They were more concerned with what was going on on earth. So I'd like to know why you think 2,013, 2017 were so powerful because I'm I don't have that. I think there were, 3 general events that occurred.

The first was a change in policy during the Obama administration and, you know, leading out of, previous, presidential administrations that changed the way, we could engage. Right? They were they were opening up beyond NASA to get kind of private industry engaged in doing some of the things that had always traditionally been a NASA only, and So the out so you're saying the outsourcing of activities that you're doing it all Yeah.

I would say Okay. Even, you know, specifically, doing resupply contracts for, space station. That was probably one of the biggest. Okay. You know, I would agree with that because that was a major policy shift, and we've had, we've had former administrators on the program too. So, yes, there has been a shift there, I would agree, and the resupply contracts because we had now had possibilities for resupply, which we didn't before. And it engaged a new group of people who had different, goals.

Right? They were striving for different things and different approaches, which is always, I think, you know, a way to lead to innovation. So Yep. Okay. Well, it's second one was the, SpaceX of getting that contract and, Elon Musk and his approach to sort of space endeavors, his goals, and how it's led him to where he is.

And I, you know, whatever we think of him or say about him or feel, his approach, not just on a technical standpoint, but, just on a sort of a philosophical standpoint has changed the way we are approaching, work in space, whether it be something like getting supplies to the space station, getting people to the space station, or our attitudes towards reaching out beyond space station to go to the moon and Mars.

I think that him being brought in as a kind of a radical, thinker has changed the way we behave and the way we think about it. The the one piece I'd add to it, he was also extremely aggressive because there were other companies out there. There's one one of our teammates was working with Rocketplane Kistler. They had this, vehicle that could take off and land and resupply. And we've got the design some of the designs and the components of it in our database.

And they ended up being partially financed by the Canadian Teachers Union or something like that. And the United States government would not allow any foreign funds into that company. And, therefore, they couldn't get some piece of those contracts. So, we've all seen how aggressive that Elon can be. And so that probably also played into it, that he was going to fight for something that won, and he he was the right person to make that happen. I'm not supporting Elon. I'm not Right.

Saying anything good or bad. I'm just using an is for history. Absolutely. Absolutely. I I think the last Okay. Part is even though those two events that we just described had, significant effect on NASA and how they operate, there are some people who were not happy about, the the rockets and resupply contract going to an external, operator like that. Yep. And money was taken from the NASA budget to to fund this and that you know, there are people who were upset.

I think you will find NASA people on both sides of that. But what I have what I got out of that and what I so the people I know at NASA, what they have said to me is, it really did change the way NASA thinks about its role. And in some ways, it got them to focus on things that NASA does better than anybody. They're they're the best at it, and they do it for a bigger, you know, doing it for a bigger reason than just trying to make money. Right? They're doing it because they wanna know.

They're trying to push the envelope and push science forward. And it also changed them in some aspects. Their enclave's a very economically driven aspects of of their organization. They're looking to drive small business forward and get investment into things that are happening so that in the future, the space station isn't totally funded by NASA, that there's external groups that are trying to make money or find other purposes for space station, and they're willing to pay for it.

That is a big that's a big step. And I, you know, you watch some of these television shows where they make it sound like, oh, yeah. That's, you know, how it's gonna be in the future that NASA is gonna be making money or whatever. That is not you you can't take that for granted. It was just not the way it was done, and they really have stepped up.

It's really an amazing thing to see an organization like that that I always felt, you know, they're, you know, wearing the black ties and the short sleeved white button down shirts, but it isn't like that. They are forward thinking, smart individuals who are driven to do things for the benefit of the American people. Maybe the benefit of the world too for humanity. But, Well, so so those are two points that kind of are are, on my mind, interesting.

So one, there is not a dialogue as much as we believe there is for the betterment of humanity in all space. So I came in in 2014. And interesting, the way you've just framed it, there is the NASA Ames portal in, Silicon Valley of Palo Alto at the, there's the portal at the NASA Ames facility.

And the individual that end up pulling me in was a guy by the name of Bruce Pittman who was at the he might have been more open to to bringing someone like me in because his job was to help create public private partnerships. And so the entire concept of Project MoonRock came about at a lunch a luncheon that he and I were at. We were talking, and this is where it came from. But we then worked for about 5 years together. So concepts came out of it. We met every month.

So, yeah, I would say that that part of it, but NASA also has done a lot of things that I'm not gonna say NASA's the only one because there is the European Space Agencies, the Japanese, the South African. We've had people on from all different groups around the world. But one thing that's interesting is that the NASA logo on people's T shirts that people wear all over the world, there is no licensing fee. Anybody can produce them.

So I my take is that was also a masterful decision that they're not gonna make any money off the brand of the NASA logo. And that allowed the explosion of marketing from the things the activities that were going on within that organization. So Yeah. I think it's the the, most familiar brand on the planet. I I think it beats out Coca Cola, which was, I think, number 2. So I'd have I I have to look that up. I don't know. I I will say, though, that it was in Luxembourg in 2019.

And I think I've shared this before, just so you hear this, Ken, is that, I was at an I was asked to speak at an event in Luxembourg, and that's the video you didn't watch that one. There's another one. That's on I don't it's not on the website either. We I was asked and I was told there were gonna be 500 people in the audience. They put on a conference, one for AI, one for another category, and one for space.

And they have these 3 simultaneously so people can go between them, and then they also have specific activities. And I was sold by the Luxembourg space agency that there'll be 500 people. And just before the event in that year, just before I was speaking, they law, an organization, I won't mention their name, had kinda stiffed them for a lot of money. And when I showed up at that audience, take a it was on the 50th anniversary, by the way. Guess how many people were in that audience?

I'll bet you it was a 1,000. 50. 50? The year before was 500. The next year was 50. Oh my gosh. And so I started the presentation, and it it is recorded. I started the presentation by all of you sitting in this audience are saying, we're gonna make it. We're gonna make it because we're gonna make it. Because they all they care about is space and going to space and distant galaxies and alpha centauri and and going and living on Mars.

And I said to them, I bet you if we went back to 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, There were a group of people just like you sitting in the audience saying we're going to make it. What's to say based upon the activities going on in the world today, climate change, mass extinction, conflict? What's to say in 50 years we won't be sitting in the same seats the same way? And so the expectation of that audience and my expectation was, I thought, 500 people, was we have to be very careful.

I think, my take, that we're so focused on beyond Earth that we're the real value is Earth. And our language has to change, and that is not Latin NASA's language. It's not the European Space Agency's language. It's not all the other languages. It's still about space, and it's very exclusionary. Yes. Does that make sense? No. I I totally agree with you. I, after I left the pharmaceutical industry, I went to work for, CASES, the Center For the Advancement of Science in Space.

It is a congressionally mandated, congressionally funded through NASA or not for profit organization that, its purpose is to encourage industrial experts and academics and, you know, scientists, what have you, on Earth to do work on the space station for the benefit of humanity, for the benefit of the American people, not for exploration purposes, not to further NASA's goals, and it was done by congress.

Congress actually created this group and designated half of the US portion of the International Space Station, to be a national lab, a US national lab, because then they had control of it, congress did. And they could say, hey. This is what it's for. And I think they felt just like you're describing that with all this work being done for the purpose of exploring space that most people won't benefit from the activities and all this money being spent.

So they did something that would benefit the American people, and it is starting to pay off. These things take time, but you can see it's paying off in new technologies that are being brought back down to earth, new products, hopefully, that are being brought back down, but also engaging a broader group of people to be a part of this next step for humanity out into space.

And I'm gonna ask you, do is there a person there, a main person that you might still know that would be good for Oh, absolutely. And after after we're done here, I can give you a a bunch of names. Yeah. There's definitely. And Okay. Yeah. I I would absolutely love that because that's if you've watched the videos, our narrative is completely that's where Dan Dunbacher from the American Institute For Astronautics and Avionics.

That's where Andy Aldrin have said, what project Moon Hat has is the storyline. It is about improving life on Earth. That's the narrative. And so I'd love to speak to people who have that common bond or initiative. Yeah. The thing And that was the fact that really loved about working there was that, it was the mission. Right? That everybody, this whole group, this small group of people were committed to this mission. And, it's just it was great to be a part of it. I I've got to admit.

No. That sound that sounds exciting, and I I've never heard of it. Now this is 8 years. 8 years actively involved. You've seen all the work. You've seen what we're working on. Never heard of it. Well, you yeah. It's there. It's real. But but that's a but but take that take that from the concept of it's expanding. People are learning about it. People are knowing about it. And you're talking to a person who's involved every single day and has never heard that brought up.

So that's that's where the disconnect is. It is we want the average individual to understand that it is not space. It's not science, research, or exploration. That our lives are completely enveloped by things developed by people thought about beyond Earth. And that disconnect is still not there. So, I'd love to talk to people there. That's fantastic. I love the story. I love the background. I love the pieces. This is great.

So, let's get on to your I guess the the the first one was the definition of science and space. Is that where we are now? Yes. So Okay. There's a a few aspects of this that I think we should, talk about. And first of it is first of all, science and space has been happening for a long time. In fact, if we go back to the Apollo missions, although it was kind of an afterthought, the, first scientist to go into space and the the I think the only scientist to step onto the moon was a geologist.

And and they were Oh, okay. Make sense in as an maybe as an afterthought, but it makes sense now because that's what you want. You wanna understand it. If we're gonna utilize it for purposes of building a hut or, finding water or doing something, you have to understand what you're dealing with. And, that is an observational type of science where you gather samples and you look at them and you bring them back and you study them. But that's where it starts.

Mhmm. And science and space in many ways has been driven by NASA. Remember, they're a group of, for the most part, engineers. And a lot of the science is you go out and you observe the natural phenomena. And in the hopes, you know, as you develop it, you get better and better to the point where you're starting to observe the natural phenomena because you're going to try to utilize it. Right?

In situ resources is gonna it's you can't take everything with you when you're you go off and try to explore another planet or what have you. So, that has been the mainstay of, NASA's research program, sending these fantastical probes to Mars that are rolling around, some of which have been rolling around for years, decades even. Right? They've been there for many years, and they've got, sample takers, and they're analyzing the surface and what have you.

And, it was during the Apollo missions, and they started to think about, hey. Could we build a space station and take advantage of, a floating platform in orbit and do science experiments? And what would those experiments be? And in fact, in 1973, May of 1973, the year that Skylab was launched, they published a book. NASA published a book, and it said, this is the type of science we should be thinking about doing on our new space platform, Skylab, that is going up at that time.

And they started to look at, in the beginning, just like, you know, any science endeavor, you're really doing your own little exploration. What makes sense? How do you do it? How do you execute it? How do we observe it? And then how do we take all the data we get and turn it into knowledge that has meaning and allows us to do the next thing? Right? It's the the whole concept of you make some observations, you, put together a hypothesis, and then you test that hypothesis.

And from that cycle, you learn, and then you get better and better. And, Skylab showed us the way, but it was really in many ways, it was very, simple, and we were doing more exploration of how do you do science than really doing hardcore science. Wasn't until shuttle came around where we were doing more routine, flights, and sending up, scientists.

There were people being sent up who were, like, crystallographers, people who grow crystals for the sake of trying to grow crystals in space because they thought there would be some real advantage to doing that. It's it's funny because you you say Skylab, and I went to Skynet. Where's Skynet? What is Skynet? And then I said, oh my god. I've lost it. Terminator. That's Terminator. That's right. That's right. So Like, did they do did they do Skynet? Did they really do Skynet?

So, so, Space Shuttle took us a long way, but same with, you know, Space Shuttle, there were months in between, missions, and the missions were short. And the dream was always that you put a very large, we'll call it permanent platform, in orbit, and that was the, you know, the plan. Initially, it was a all US effort, and it ended up being extremely expensive and very difficult And it ended up being an international effort, and that turned into the International Space Station.

And going back to your point about people, like, not knowing about the Center For the Advancement of Science in Space, I would say that many people don't even know that we have a space station in orbit and that it has been up since, you know, they've been putting assembling pieces since the late 19 nineties, and it has been permanently habited since, 2000. 24 years, if there have been people in space. We have had people in space continuously for now 20 almost 24 years.

It's So so he he you you made the comment, and I'd like you to you just said it's amazing that people don't even know. Why? I don't know. But I'm gonna I'm gonna make right here with you, I'm going to Okay. Make, an I'm gonna announce that I'm one of those people. I did not even know. I'm admitting it. I I didn't even know. When when that woman called me up and said, hey. Would you like to do science in space? I said, sure. I'll I'll do science in a space shuttle.

And she's like, well, we don't we don't actually fly space shuttles anymore, but we have a space station. And I was like, oh, okay. What was that? That's 2013. So that's a good point. So so that's a great point. So let me ask you. Let's not talk about other people. I one of the best one one of the challenges of human behavior is we always try to extrapolate to other people, what other people are thinking. That's why you're talking to me. You're you're helping me understand something.

So I wanna ask you a specific question. What do you think in your lifetime, being a science person, I mean, chemistry? In order to have chemistry, you're like me because you you had biology, chemistry, physics. You had calculus. You had all these sciences in order to get a chemistry degree. I'm assuming very similar because that's what I had to do to get a biology major. My question is, why didn't you what was missing in your life? What didn't you see? Why didn't it permeate it?

Can you answer that just for I'm gonna I'm gonna would admit that the reason I did not, pay attention was because it was so out of reach. I felt. This is I'm I'm, I'm I'm ignorant at the time. I was totally it was so out of reach that it wasn't worth spending a lot of time thinking about. Right? It was it was neat. It was neat to see. Like, I would you know, they'd say, oh, the space shuttle is coming in for a landing, and we would go outside and watch.

And you could actually see it way up way up high. We're here in Indiana. It would be flying across the sky. Right? Going on its way to Florida. You you don't see it. Okay. It's coming through the atmosphere. Right? And things like that, I think, were fun and interesting, but they were so remote and being done by other people who I didn't even know. Right? I when I was a little kid, I used to send away to NASA and say, hey. Could you send me pictures?

And some nice guy at JPL would send me a bunch of pictures from Voyager or something. And that was as close as I ever got as I thought I would ever get. So when that woman called me, it was it was not even real. I thought she was having fun with me today to do. That that's brilliant. I mean, that's because what you're you've actually embedded a few things in there. You didn't know. You felt out of reach. You saw it expensive. You also didn't have an interest. You had some interest. Expensive.

You also didn't have an interest. You had some interest. Maybe I'd send me some pictures. For someone like me, it's I had no interest because I look out. I look down. I'm not a big look up to the sky person. It wasn't the math or the science. It wasn't the it's just it's the bunch of people working on something that I wasn't interested in. So you when you heard about Project Moon Hutton, because we're talking wanna find this out, it's a great conversation piece.

When you hear the video where it says, you know, baby food and the treadmills and the cordless power tool and the and the camera we have and, cloud computing and all these types of little pieces that Project Moon Hut is sharing. And we're trying to make it more normalized. When you saw it now, 8, 10 years later from the day does it now did do you now say, yeah. That's that's exactly what's supposed to be hearing. Do you say that at all to yourself? I don't say that's exactly, but it's, Okay.

It is it has, like, opened my eyes to another reality. Like, it was always there. I just didn't know. And that's I just didn't know, and that's alright. I I look at it and say, that that is okay. And at the same time, I think we miss out because you really want if you're going to do some new adventure, some new, you know, thing, you wanna have the best people you can get on your team to help you make it work. And the problem we run into is is engaging those people. It's getting to those people.

And There's a disconnect. They don't That's right. That's right. Between their everyday life. They they don't see the connection between their everyday life, and they don't see why. And we run into this all the time. I mean, it's constant is you have to describe to them your mobile phone. You checked it this morning. Right? You didn't say it was space weather. You said weather. You checked your phone today. Right? You got satellite transmission, and you got news.

You you used your camera phone yesterday, twice yesterday. Right? That's space technology. You get in a car. The tires you're using go 20% to 30% longer because of space techno. Yeah. Hey. Your grandmother survived because of a cat. Yeah. No. Dave, my my kids will never know the joy of having to print out a map so they can figure out where they're going. Right? It's it is and we Yeah. So we use it all you're absolutely right.

It's invisible, but it is a part of our of our lives, of our daily life. Maybe that's the the most powerful thing we can say about it is that although it's not maybe obvious to everybody, we're already benefiting, all of us, from doing going The way the way the the way we share it is you can't live a day on Earth today without in being influenced working on connecting with the devices, tools, technology, influences that were not created That's right. That's right. Beyond earth.

They were individuals. And by the way, those people who invented it never went up. That's right. They never went up. Only now 600 and some odd people have been up. So, therefore, you don't even it's not about going up. It's about the innovations that come out of going up. That's okay. So so there's So so, yeah, let's Definition space. So I I wanna say, while we're still talking about, this, you know, science and space and and definition space, I think we need to talk about what is real.

And I I only bring that up because of conversations I've had recently, like, with family members over the holidays and, you know, people who who kinda say, you know, did we did we really go to the moon? Right? Or Yep. Is you know, there's this whole organization of people who, talk about the world being flat. Right? The world flat.

Yeah. So I think by, some of the work that we've done by going to space, it has allowed us to look back at us, look at our you know, see ourselves and see our place in the universe and and see that the world is round. But it's the the same yeah. It's it's it's a it's a big sphere. I know. It's a shocker to some people, but it is. Okay. But, I you know, it's important to say that, yes, we did go to the moon, and it wasn't going to the moon.

You know, people said, well, you know, how is that gonna benefit us? Just going to the moon and back. But all the effort, all the technologies, the breakthroughs, it when people were told in the early sixties by their president, they were gonna go to the moon in that decade, The people who were put in charge of doing that thought it was impossible. I mean, there's they had to invent things Yeah. And do things that were not possible to be thing.

And now and then they were when we got there, we you had to answer a 100,000 questions, and they answered them. And and that 100 thousandth question was, what will it feel like when you step onto the moon? They answered them all. They did it. And through that effort, we as a people, as humanity are better. We learned. We saw things that changed the way we think about ourselves. We engaged new people, and we came out with new technologies that do benefit us all.

So it's a But but I I've got to push back. You did say this was your answer. Did we go to the moon? And your answer is the answer is yes. Have you met have you met a a purse a denier? I've I've That doesn't work. What I've met are people who who look at me and say they're just not sure. I'm not sure. Right? So I think there's and maybe that's a thing that's happening in America these days is, you don't have to be a scientist if No. It's happening. You don't have to be a scientist to question it.

I'm not so sure. And, yeah, I I see you went to school and you you learned all this stuff. And I think a lot of people don't understand, going back to that whole point of how the scientific method works. There are some things that we know and we, we with certainty because we can use it every day, and it's never failed us. But there's a lot of pieces of science where we have come up with the best theory as to why something works the way it does or how something is or what have you.

And people test those, theories constantly, and people's theories change, right, as we learn. That's part of the process. And that that going back to your you said we wanna what was the how did you say? You say what is real? I've had people say exactly the opposite of what we're saying here, that it is not real. And when you say the scientific method, well, that's a challenge because I just saw a guy who had a lot of views who said that there is absolutely no climate change. It is all the sun.

Nothing we're doing on this planet has anything to do with anything. We're all being led astray. It's the sun. And there were 7 and a half 1000 comments of people agreeing with them. And the scientific matter was tossed out the window, but there was also a lot of God in those comment in the commentary. And those are hard to fight. It's very hard to fight. So and and people can say whatever they want. Right? Right. So that's yeah.

So, I don't know if there's an answer to that, but our our challenge is to secure that box of the roof and a door on the moon. So okay. Anything else, the last moment pieces of, science and space? No. We're we're we're now I what I really wanna do is transition to why is science and space different? Like, what is what makes it special? Wait. Wait. So I'm I'm I'm gonna make a let me cut it here.

We have the Karman line, which is, you know, probably the the actual definition, a 100,000 kilometers is what it is, I think it is. I don't remember. I don't know. It's a 100000 kilometers. It's a 100 kilometers. A 100 kilometers. Right. I was the kilometers I hit that. 100 kilometers. And, people are gonna laugh at me for that. So a 100 so when you say space, some people argue, well, we're actually in low Earth orbit. We're not really in space.

So when you are using the term, you're saying anything above the Karman line are how do you do it in the I'm going to say that, science and space are, things that are happening in, low earth orbit or above. Okay. That's what I thought. That's what I So so in low earth orbit, there's a there's a range there. But for, like, the space station, you know, where we we can, use that as our, you know, our index. That's the that's the point that I'm gonna work off of. So we're talking 250 or so miles up.

And, an orbit is where it's moving laterally sideways, and it's moving fast enough that even though it's falling, it's in free fall back to the Earth. It's going laterally so fast that it just keeps on missing. So it just and that makes the orbit. That is the orbit. And there's special, properties you get from being in an orbit like that. Now there's benefits to going further out in space, and I'll I'll say a few words about that.

But, really, what I wanna talk about is what's happening in orbit because that's where we spend the bulk of our time in space. Okay. So here's for me, I just act I pulled up the project Luna classification system under the 40 year plan on the website because I wanted to get the data on it. It actually said, 200 kilometers to 2,000 kilometers Yes. Low earth orbit. And so there it's actually this is fantastic. You've got to see it.

And I just just to break, people who are listening, we are don't have our video on. So we don't see each other. We're not sharing screens. We don't we're we're we do this without it intentionally so that we don't react to people's facial expressions and movement. So I'm gonna say that you, Ken, if you did pull up Project Moon Hunt and you did go to the 40 year plan and you scroll down to the project Moon Hunt classification system, you'll see all of this outlined.

It might be useful as a tool for you when you're showing people where we work, what we do, and how we do it. Absolutely. Absolutely. So so let's go to you said the science of space, why science of space is different Yes. Or special. Okay. So, there are, of course, benefits and excitement from going to, let's say, Mars or sending probes to Jupiter and looking at the moons. I think it's it's truly fascinating, and I've always loved, like, Star Trek.

And that's, it hearkens back to all the Star Trek type of stuff. Right? Going in being a I I I I grew up in Star Trek. I mean, that's the thing is being an explorer, and it's exciting. So there, and by doing that, by going to other planets, other moons, you you see what makes our system special and what the opportunities are in the future. You know, if we do if we did go to, Mars and tried to set up camp, how what would you breathe?

There's there's very little atmosphere, and it's all carbon dioxide. So it forces you to think, well, could you set up a system that would make that livable? Could you harvest the atmosphere to make, oxygen to breathe? And if you went through that process, what would you have to bring with you to make water? Right? Those are the so and that pushes us forward. And that type of science, I find fascinating. And every chance I get to be on a project where somebody's talking about that, I do it.

At the same time, the science and space that, I focus on and for, for this discussion, I really wanted to emphasize was science being done, in low earth orbit. And for the most part, there's, like, 3 areas of that science. One is people go to space to look back down at the earth or to look out into space, but it's for perspective.

You can see things when you're off our planet that you otherwise cannot see because either the atmosphere is in the way or you just can't get the whole picture type of thing. And, for when I worked at the, US National Lab with cases, I would say, of all the things we did, that was probably 10% of the time. That's what people were trying to do is get a view back down at the earth or see things in a different way. And, those were always, very interesting and a lot of fun.

With the context, because you're say it sounds psychological when you're saying it, but I think the way you're really performing it, because we have to tie back to the sciences, you're saying looking back down on earth, for example, for topographical mapping, for the for the ocean temperatures, for the movement of migration of species, or all those type of things. We're really talking scientific, discovery.

I I would say, you know, as a caveat, the space station is not a great platform for looking back down at the earth because the way it operates, it does not, see the same thing in every orbit. The it is in a sort of a a stationary orbit where it's just going around and around and around, and underneath it, the Earth is rotating. And for that reason, there's, you know, it's it's, moved on to a new part of the Earth when you come back around.

But what, people have used it for is the development of new observational tools, which you can set up. And if you need to make an adjustment, there's an astronaut there who can just go over and make the adjustment. Whereas if you launch something on, you know, a satellite, a free flying satellite, if something didn't go right, you'd have to retrieve that satellite, and that could be very expensive and difficult.

So, Yeah. The I'd, I happen to have on the screen open from the present from the classification system. And the International Space Station and the Tiangong are both represented. They're actually moving at the same the speed that they're supposed to be around Earth. And it's interesting because I never thought about it just the way you described it.

And I've thought about it as a rotation around the Earth, and I thought about the Earth rotating, but I didn't think about the fact that you wouldn't be seeing the same thing Yeah. Over and over again. Yeah. So okay. So, we talked about the orbit. And you're you're moving and you're moving actually quite fast. They're moving about 17,500 miles per hour in that orbit.

That's how fast you have to be going at that altitude to keep from falling back down to the Earth and at the same time not spin out into space. So they're moving very fast. And what people will do is they will take, a piece of material, plastic or metal or fabric or something that they wanna study, and there's special devices that are, placed outside the space station and exposed to space. So as you're moving along, there's radiation, there's a very large temperature swing.

When you're facing the sun, it's 250 degrees. And when you're in the shade of the earth, it's minus 250 degrees. And that's happening a full a full orbit takes about 90 minutes. So you're going very hot, cold, very hot, cold, and doing that a number of times each day. In addition, the fact that you're moving so fast means that any debris or objects, anything that is falling to the earth, you are striking at about 17,500. That is much faster than a bullet.

So even very small pieces of dust can have an impact, and that's what people are studying by placing things outside. They wanna see what microparticle impacts the effect is, what the radiation or this or the temperature swings have on materials. For the most part, I'm sure people are doing it because they're trying to determine what materials they can make space suits out of or spaceships or satellites or whatever.

But in some cases, people are trying to make high performance fabrics, let's say, for, new jackets to be used on earth, and this is a way to do, interesting kind of analysis of, you know, how well they can hold up to extreme environments. Yeah. I'm I'm picturing now. I I didn't know they were putting pieces outside. I feel I I have this picture of, like, a clothing line where a guy opens the window and puts it puts it out, says, close that. It's getting cold in here.

We're getting we're losing all our oxygen. Close that. And they leave it out there, and it's flat Now there's little little swatches, little, you know, pieces maybe the size of a half dollar or a silver dollar or something. But they one of the platforms is called the MISSI platform, and, that's something that if you as a private citizen wanted to do this, there are mechanisms by which you can get that put onto the platform.

And even the, the facility, which is the Japanese laboratory, it has its own little airlock and a little robot arm on the outside, and you put your whatever you wanna put outside in the airlock, close it up. The robot will open the door from the outside and reach in and grab the thing and put it out on a porch. It's like a porch out in front of the space station and things sit out there.

You know, you wouldn't wanna sit out there, but you can put all of your plastics and fabrics or whatever and and study them. So there's a couple of different ways. Have you have you ever have you personally seen or touched or any of the materials that you have? Seen them, and I've been involved in projects where they were putting them out there, but I've never done one of those experiments myself. Never been, you know, somebody who put a piece of plastic.

You know, here's my sample and send it up and put it out there, but I know people who have, and it was a fairly routine thing to do. I I find efforts like that pretty interesting because you you learn things you don't expect. I think that's a key for me as a scientist, that's always been kind of a striking thing is that I've always been a good observation list for the science I'm doing, but also looking for things that weren't expected and and taking me down paths that, weren't planned.

I enjoy that part of science. So okay. How can you identify putting you on the spot here for the and for the for just for me, I'm just can you identify one of those material experiments that was put outside that turned into something on earth that was useful. I I'm not sure I'm I can talk about it. So I'd have to I'm gonna defer that one. I'm gonna have to Well, can can can you say you can say So do I know yes. So I know what it is.

Yes. Yes. Yes. There have been things that have been put outside where people learned things that, turned into something else, turned into something bigger. And in fact, there is was one study that was done that led to, right now, there is a partner on the space station, there is an inflatable sphere, a piece of, the station that is not made of metal. And it is, it was originally an experiment. I guess in a way it still is, will always be, but it was to see, hey.

Could we make a space station that was out of inflatable material? Because then you don't have to send up all these rigid structures. You could fold it all up like a tent, put it out there, and then just pressurize it. And part of that Right. That's what's the what's the name of what's the name of the company? They they closed. That was the, Bigelow was the the Bigelow Bigelow space. Yes. But the but they haven't used it. They've used it only for only for storage.

And there's other it doesn't have power, and there's other details that make it not fully functional. But it But it's still there. It's still there. It has the collectors that right. And it was supposed to only be up for a long time. You you can imagine that people would be nervous of having essentially a fabric. It's the only thing between them and, you know, if they're a hole, something hit it and it broke. You you depressurize that station, you could run into serious trouble very quickly.

So but but like you said, it's been up there now for a long time. They're using it for storage. And, and things like that then inform us for, hey. What about a space suit? A space suit is a flexible fabric, you know, unit. It's a spaceship. It is a little spaceship, a one person spaceship. And, the design of those and the materials that goes into those has changed over time, and we've learned from that.

You can go all the way back to the original space shoots for, Gemini through Apollo and, you know, a little company, a small company that we all know, that, you know, went into the business of making space suits. It's Playtex. The people at the time, they were making bras, and they felt that, hey. They were they felt themselves to be the best suited to build a, a fabric, a rubberized fabric. Are you making are you making a joke No. Best suited. Best suited. Yeah. It's it's good.

It's a it's good, isn't it? It's best suited. And they and they did it, and and they're still making, space suits. The, part of that organization is still involved. I've had a lot of discussions with members of our team, one in Germany, Andreas, where the the, the astronauts go out, and they wear an outfit that takes a few hours to get in and get out and be able to acclimate where the Russians have an outfit that they crawl into the back, taking half hour, and they can be out onto the outside.

So we we could we have made a lot of advancements, but there's also it's the old, you you invented a pen to go up into space, and we That's yeah. And there's you're still gonna see that. You're it you'll see that going forward, and I think there's also a lot of exchange. There's things that are invented by one group that are then translated into the other. You can even look at, toilets. Where right now, my organization, the company I work for, Redwire, is working to develop a new space toilet.

And there's a couple of versions. One that would be go to the moon, we call the lunar loo, one that is for space, which we call the cosmic mode, and some are We we gotta change those names to project something for a box to open the door, just so you know. We have to make the we have to tie it to. The interesting now here's I didn't know you don't flush on the International Space Station. And, Andreas laughed just I don't know. It was just hysterically, but he said, there's no running water.

It doesn't work that way. Yeah. A lot of it. Yes. And So you have to rethink the way that you do things, and a lot of that was rethought during Apollo. But the current, toilet slash life support system that's on station is a marvel of engineering. It's the fact that it is so compact and that it is, so robust that it has worked over time. But there are challenges with it, and NASA knows it.

They had to make some decisions that were really tough that, you know, it one of the things for recovering urine, they have to, kill all the bacteria. It it would go all over the place. So they have a a special device for capturing it, right, from the human body. Well, now you've got, female astronauts. Your crew is male and female. Yep. They had to then a whole different tool. Right? And then, when the, the urine is captured, they have to treat it.

And they had to make, a tough call on that, and they ended up using a material, chromium is the oxidant they use. You have to oxidize all the organic materials in there to carbon dioxide. That's what you're ultimately trying to turn it all into. And, chromium trioxide, you know, hexavalent chromium, that is what got, Erin Brockovich all upset. Right? That's that stuff is deadly, toxic, and it's a carcinogen. And for a long term mission, like going to Mars, it's unacceptable.

But for a space station, it was the best they could come up within that time. It works. And, so there's technology there that we have used, and and when you look at the toilets and the actual design of the toilet, it is loud. The current station toilets are loud, and they're, they don't look very, appealing. Right? They were design they are of Soviet era design, and and the US toilet was taken to a large extent based on, the Russians, and the Russians used the Soviet era design for their toilet.

So there's a lot of room. It's a very pragmatic approach. All the Is that the easy way? Is that they're just very pragmatic. It wasn't a design concept. It was it had the It's like a Soviet era office building. Right? It did the job, but you wouldn't wanna spend a lot of time in it if you didn't have to. So so, those are some of the things that come from this. The being exposed to the environment forces you to change the way you operate.

It gives you opportunities to look at new materials and, new perspective. Now the last piece of doing science in space, and the one that I would say 85% or so of all the science done in space is trying to take advantage of this, is what we find in low Earth orbit, and that is microgravity. So it's not exactly zero gravity. Microgravity is what you get when you are falling. And in a in a total free fall in a vacuum, that's what you get, and that is what the space station is in.

So although there is very, very little gravity, you would not, as a person, you would not be able to feel it. If you took a tool like a wrench and you left it hovering, you know, in front of you in microgravity, if you came back a day later, you would find that it would be in the bottom towards the Earth and in the front of that compartment. And it would slowly, very slowly get taken down to that point, but you don't feel things falling.

If if we built a, a tower with a ladder and we put on a spacesuit and we climbed up that ladder and that ladder went 250 miles up to the space station and we sat there was a seat on it, and we sat there, we would still feel 90% of the force of gravity. So, it is not just because they are up there. It is because they are in an orbit in a kind of free fall, and they're just missing as they go around. That So wait.

So if you if we were on the top of a ladder that was 250 miles up and we were sitting on it, we would still feel the solids. Feel the gravity, about 90% of it. Because because gravity is, a force between large objects, and the Earth's pull is that far. That is the gravitational force. If it ended, you know, when you got up a a certain ways, then the moon and the earth wouldn't be together. They are held together because of their combined gravitational forces. Right. That I get.

That I get, but I don't understand how I would still feel it. Like, I'd feel it on my butt because I'm sitting on a chair 250 miles up because there's that much worse. Much worse. If, yeah, if you had a 10 pound weight and you took it up there, it would feel like £9 when you were up there. But because the velocity of 175, it take removes that It's not the velocity. It's the fact that the space station and everybody in it and all the stuff on it is all falling to the Earth. It's in free fall.

Right. But you have to be staying up high enough. And the way you do that is you go yeah. You move yourself laterally. You move yourself sideways across. Right. Right. So, therefore, you're not feeling it because you're going sideways. But because you're sitting on a ladder, you would still feel it because you're not falling. Sideways. It's because you're stationary. You're not falling. Sitting That is correct. K?

Okay. So, yeah, so you you need the, it's not 175, but the 7 you need the velocity of going at a horizontal speed to be You need the velocity so that you don't hit the earth. Correct. Yeah. That's my point. Yes. Yeah. So you're not fit you're never hitting the earth no matter how hard you go. You no matter how far or continuous you go Yes. You are constantly falling. Okay. But I never thought you could feel that. In fact, we've We've never done that before.

Built a little thing like that and done that. But you that that would happen. And you you see it when, there are people who have done these extreme high altitude, parachute drops. You know, they go up in a very high, balloon that takes them into the upper parts of the stratosphere, and they just step off and they're just falling. They are just you're just falling. And the same with even bringing, a satellite or some spacecraft back down to the earth.

The way you bring them down is you turn so that your, thrusters, your nozzles are pointing in the direction you're going, and then you just apply resistance and you slow down. And as you slow down, you will start to fall. Gravity, you it will over your speed is no longer enough to keep you from falling. You'll just start to fall down, and that's how they do it. And Oh. Yeah. They just you just have to slow down. That's fascinating.

So you, yeah, you just you're you're going fast enough, so you're constantly overshooting the earth. You just turn And break and you'll fall. And and you don't even have to aim down. You are going down. Yeah. You don't have to aim down, but they do have to aim down if you don't wanna burn up. If you come in too straight, you will, it will get too hot. It will be too much. You wanna come in and use the Yes. Atmosphere to slow you as you come in.

And then as you get slower and slower, your descent starts to become straighter and straighter down, and they've worked all that. Yes. So Okay. So then as you as you start to be so you're use you're still using your thrusters to keep so that you're not in that straight That's right. Once you've slowed yourself to the right speed, they turn off the thrusters, and they just let, resistance air resistance and whatever. So okay. So we've talked about microgravity.

And, if you wanted, like, true zero g, like, you you know, without having to be in an orbit, you would literally have to be millions of miles away from the Earth. Millions of miles. It's a it would be a very long way. So we're lucky that we have this phenomena that's close because it is like a whole new science. It's in its way in a way, it is its own field of science because things happen there that we have never been able to do on earth, never been able to observe or, utilize.

For example, simple things, very simple things. As a chemist and people who've taken general chemistry probably taken the lab where they had to make little crystals and, isolate the crystals, and you grow them in your little flask and, they get bigger and bigger, and then they get to a certain size and they fall to the bottom of the flask. They're precipitating. Things are precipitating, they fall to the bottom, and then you can decant off the liquid. In space, things don't fall.

And when you microgravity, things don't fall like that. So now the crystals are in a position to continue to grow. They aren't, limited by how big they get when they fall. They just can continue to get bigger and bigger.

And because you don't have, heat doesn't rise, if you, like, light a flame on the space station, it doesn't look like what we're used to where it's blue and almost invisible right at the wick, and then it's bright yellow and then orange and red, and then there's smoke coming off the top. It does not look like that. It looks like a small blue orb, and it suffocates itself because it uses all the air right around it.

No more air is moving in like in a flame on the earth where it comes from under and up. It doesn't do that. Mhmm. So, heat doesn't rise. And for that reason, a lot of the perturbations that we see on earth, we do not see in microgravity. So the crystals are not only bigger, but they're more, perfect. They're better formed.

And, the last thing and this is kind of an odd observation that was made by, a a a chemist who had been doing protein crystal work for many years, but he did a little retrospective of people's experiences doing this type of work. And a lot of these people who were growing crystals for a specific purpose would say, oh, my crystals were bigger and better, you know, more ordered. And, by the way, all the crystals that I made were about the same size and shape.

And this person worked in the pharmaceutical industry like I do, and when you say that, it has a specific meaning. What you're saying is all the crystals are uniform. They're the same. And in the pharmaceutical industry, that is an extremely important property to have in a product that you're making. You want if you make a big batch and you're gonna take a little spoonful out to make a pill, you want that spoonful and the last spoonful and every spoonful in between to be identical.

So if you can make all the crystals the same size and shape, that's important. So that So I I I do wanna ask about Sure. 2 things. I wanna make a point and then ask something. Let me ask first. No. Let me make a point first. Okay. I did look it up. You will all it says, strictly speaking, there's gravity will always pull an object no matter how distant. Gravity is a force that obeys the inverse square law. For example, put an object twice as far away, and it will feel a quarter of the force.

Put it 4 times. So you are really talking a million Way out there. In terms of miles before. But but you're gonna be influenced by something else before you'll be influenced by the moon Yeah. Yeah. Earth. Yes. So that was one. I I just looked it up because I hadn't I hadn't heard it that way. The crystal side. We have Mearth Biotech. I think you might have heard that that they used before. And we do know Yossi, and I I'd never asked him that question, but I'd like to ask you.

He talked about or I've read about the fact that you can create this uniform crystal in an environment such as in low earth orbit, and you can put a keystone in, a holding point so it maintains its structure. How do you take that as a chemist and bring it back to earth and duplicate the same thing? Why doesn't it now have the same influence of gravity and not replicate itself? David, that is. You understand what I'm asking? A great question.

That is it's important not only because it's an interesting one. Hey, you know why? But also because if you're going to do something that's going to have economic value, especially in the near term, then the logistics of trying to take tons of material into space and make crystals and bring it back, it's just it's not practical. It's it's impractical. Yeah. It's ridiculous.

It's, yeah, it's it's not it's one of the challenges of beyond Earth is it's financially impractical to do a lot of the things that we expect to do. So, yeah, I'm I'm gonna do this. So I'm gonna explain. So and and, and when we're done explaining this, I'm gonna talk about, some of the practical aspects of trying to do these types of things. And we've just I think the the practical economics, we'll say. Okay. So okay. So so how does that work?

So, as a young chemist, I was always taught this concept of seeding a reaction or seeding a, a crystal, a batch of crystals. So what you do is you take a a one small seed or a few seeds, and you put them into the solution as your this the solution you're making or developing is getting to the point where it's going material's gonna start crystallizing out. And what will happen is Yep. The new crystals formed will use the the crystals you put in there as a template. That is the concept.

And they will see the structure, and they will grow new crystals like it. Now it seems kind of far fetched, but in fact, the pharmaceutical industry and other associated industries like agriculture and cosmetics and food industry have used this concept for many years. And what they will do is they will find a crystal form. So, a single thing let's say water, for example.

Water ice that we know, ice is the only form of frozen water that exists, in an area where we can see it, on the Earth in our atmosphere. So when you go and you look at, you know, ice out in a lake, even a snowflake, if you looked at them at their molecular structure, you'd see that the order, the way they're all these, h two o molecules are stacked on one another, holds true in the same way. And that gives it certain properties which are interesting. For example, it's You mean you mean uniform?

Uniform, and it is the same crystal form, the same crystal lattice structure for ice, no matter where you go on Earth, is going to look like that. Yes. Really? Really? So when so when I have looked at ice, and there's happens to be a a little thing that forms ice outside of our window when I'm eating lunch. And I always look at and say, well, that's gotta be different than the ice on the lake because it looks different.

It's it's cloudier, and and it's probably just pulling up the properties from It's sitting in yeah. There might be minerals in it. There might be oxygen in it. You might see little bubbles. Right? But the ice itself Yes. Is the same structure, and that structure is odd in that if you looked at it, there are little tubes, little openings in the lattice, and there is nothing in those little openings. There are empty space between the molecules.

And because of that, water is slightly larger when it's frozen. It's about, 10% bigger, 9 or 10% bigger when it's frozen, and that's why it expands. K? Now there are Because because of the space. Little spaces. Yes. Now there are ways to make other forms of ice. And, there is a form of ice that is found very, very high up in the Earth's atmosphere, but it would not it is not formed on Earth.

And then I think there's about 13 other forms of ice that have all been made in a special device where you put the water under an immense amount of pressure and then freeze it. So it can't expand. But they're always however or but or whatever whatever word do we need to use here. It's still uniform because of ice. No. In all of those other forms, the crystal structure is is different than the one we see. Yeah. But but what I mean is you have the, ice version 1 Yes. Is uniform.

Yes. The one that we see. Ice version 2, 3, 4 are all uniform to themselves, which is contradictory to other types of molecular structures that are created such as in pharmaceuticals or they can create that. So ice tends to have a property in the form of Yes. Is that what you're saying? So, yeah. And they're all unique and they are so the same thing can be done with pharmaceuticals.

A pharmaceutical can come in several different forms, and there's some famous examples where that has been a problem. One of them is ritonavir, which is, one of the first products that was produced for HIV, back in the eighties by Abbott Labs. And, they made the material. They it went through clinical trials. It worked. They made pills out of it. They put the pills in, like, little gel caplets, were put on pharmacist shelves and people could come and buy it and what have you. It was prescribed.

But what the pharmacist started to see was within those caplets, crystals were forming. And, Abbott had to pull it from the market Yeah. Had to figure out what's going on. What they found was the original crystal that they made was the fastest crystal to form. It was the first crystal to form, and that's what they went with. But what was happening in those caplets was a more stable crystal, One that was of lower energy Yeah. It it was evolving It was in yes.

So what It was evolving because it hadn't It hadn't yeah. It hadn't had a chance. They had they they had taken the original. They thought they had it still not done. It was still not done. Okay. So Yep. What a pharmaceutical company wants to do is find the a a best, and I'm put that in quotes, a best form. And the best form may there might be, for different purposes, different forms that are best. Maybe you want one for a oral tablet, and that is a certain form.

But maybe there's another for a gel caplet or liquid or, an injectable or something that you want a different form. By going into space, we have the ability to make different forms. But it goes back to your point. What do you do? Are you gonna take a a, you know, a truckload of stuff in his face that would be cost prohibitive? And and maybe just from a standpoint, technically impossible at this point. So what you do is you take one crystal, you bring it down, and you use it as a template.

And in the pharmaceutical industry, they'll do that. They'll make get to a form that they like. And then when they make the next batch, they will take half, maybe 40 or 50% of the current batch with the correct form and dump it in to dominate the architecture of the next set of crystals. And they'll do that again and again so that they know they're getting the same form every time. So so I I I get that con well, I get the concept more. Mine is kind of in the middle.

It is that you create in a microgravity environment, you create a structure. That structure, in order to form in my head, sorry, it needed the microgravity to be able to fulfill its replication or its its structure, properties. That piece when brought down why this could be just a question of the way the the universe works. Why does it not fall apart because it's duplicating something that was made in an environment that doesn't exist?

Yes. I know exactly what you're saying, and you're asking the right question. You're asking the right question. So the first is Okay. I don't know. K? I don't and I don't know if anybody really understands what is happening there. But, for growing crystals, you could say the same if you made a crystal once. How does that impart its structure onto the next? And I'm not sure people know. All they but they're they're Okay. So Yeah. Two questions. We have the 1 we have the general one.

We don't even know how it works on Earth. And so now we're making complexity. We're creating a molecule in a space in an environment that we don't even know how it's actually operating, but we do know the microgravity influences it and then bringing it down and saying That's right. We don't know how the foresight. Now I'm at now here's the second part of it, and this is it might be troubling for people, but you but bear with me.

So, so that one individual who saw that you make more uniform crystals, he said, well, my own company has a compound that has a problem with its crystal form. And the problem that they had was it didn't make a single form. Whenever they would crystallize it, it would make, more than one crystal in a certain mixture, like a a 3 we'll say a 3 to 2 mixture of 2 crystals. And it was going to be dosed as an as a solid as there it's a crystalline suspension that is delivered to patients.

So, he said, well, I wonder if I take it to space, will I make a single crystal? Will I make a uniform single crystal like we've seen in all these other examples? So they took some of that material, took it to space, and they not only made a single crystal, but it was a crystal they had never seen before. So it was a unique crystal, and it was a single crystal. So that's half of it. Now we're getting to your part, which is, well, when you bring it down, to what do you make?

So we brought it down, and they did not describe in true detail. All they said is they were able to translate that and to make new crystals on the ground. So it it brings up the question, did they make the same crystal they made in space, or did they make yet us another crystal? And the key there is for me as a pharmaceutical representative, as a chemist in pharmaceutical industry, I really don't care. I'm not trying to necessarily make something better.

I want something different than it is there, and then I can find the utility of that difference, of the you use the benefit. Yeah. It's that's true. You do it doesn't it doesn't matter. It works. But it's just a it's it's like, how? How? What what makes there's the, there's one tool that we created in I shared with you paid to think. There's one tool that's in there called redefining.

It's how to always come up with a solution better than you will ever come up with no matter what you're working on, Every single time. I mean, it's without fail, someone will always improve the condition that they create. And we've done it over and over and over again. So but when we were creating it, one individual turned to me and said we we were 2 of us in this room. And he said, well, you need to do, what he asked the question why. And my immediate reaction was, why does it matter?

And he looked at me shocked. And I said, because it doesn't matter. That's not the question we're asking. And it wasn't it was a we'd worked on it for 3 years. That was a turning point. I remember I was standing in the corner because we were going we had 13 pages going around the walls and why didn't matter. And you've more or less said, I don't care. I can take a crystal. I can make it. I can bring it down. It works. Let's figure out why the universe works another time.

Yes. And I think that is how we learn. Right? When we see it and we see that it works, we say, well, then it's this is because of this. Whatever. We throw out the the hypothesis. And then if that's the case, we'll then test the hypothesis. And you're not you don't prove hypotheses as much as you find data that supports them. And you use them. If the hypothesis worked and you do it a bunch of times, well, then you can use that to make inferences.

Well, if all those worked, well, then this should work. We should be able to do this now. And you that's another way of testing it, but it's how we move forward. That's how we push the science forward. Yeah. It's, yes. It's letting go of that one piece of it doesn't doesn't you don't have to know why it happened. You just know that it does work, and then we can use it. We figure that out later. So That's fast.

Okay. So we've talked about microgravity, and, there's a lot of uses where I talked about crystals, but, plants, express different genes. So they have the same genetic code. Right? The plant's genetic code is the same, but how the genes are expressed as proteins and what the plants turn into changes. And by putting them in microgravity, you can see things that you would never see on earth. And people who study plants learn from that. So that's as Wait. Wait.

Wait. Wait. You you just you just, like, whoosh, right by there. You were going more than 175. Okay. You said plants express different genes. So when a plant is put into microgravity, it acts, behaves, reproduces, whatever, differently. You end up with different ways. That looks different. For example, in microgravity Look look but it it it looks different because of microgravity. But is it is it gen is it different, on the molecular level? It is. Its DNA is the same.

Because But d the way, your, your genetics, your the the DNA code in different parts of your body are expressed in different ways, and then that leads to proteins and structures that have different functions. And in plants, what you see is, well, you don't need a really strong stem. So their stems tend to be, less structurally rigid and longer because all they're trying to do is reach to the light.

So they their genetics, their DNA is the same, but the way they express them and the things, the structures, and their activities are different. So you're using the word structure, but you're not using the structure as related to the plants' growth phases because it doesn't Yeah. It's macro structure. But you're not saying okay. You are use when I heard the word structure, I was going to the crystals and the development of how it forms.

But what you might be saying at the same time is because it's now in a different environment, the DNA is expressing itself differently because it doesn't need to act on those, instructions. It has other environmental pressures that are cut that's right. So Correct. And you and this is something that people who study plants, you might see, things expressed that you didn't even know were in that plant hidden. Right? Because they aren't used. Right? So Right.

There it's just That's exactly what I was saying. And so it's it's it's forming. It's allowing it to express itself completely in a different way, which is, again, fascinating that it allows. But I wonder because we do talk about we we had some we've had some people on humans in space, and we do have challenges because we don't know how certain things will react, such as the birth of a child if you were on the moon, if the cells will split the same way as they would on Earth.

And we know there's changes in people's physiology. Right? Their bones right? Since they don't have gravity, their bones start to, they have osteoporosis, essentially. Their bones start to degrade. Their muscles start to, degrade because they're they're not having to fight gravity all the time. So we know there are changes. And and and that is where what exercise piece of equipment was formed was created? Which I don't know. The elliptical. There you go.

The elliptical the running running was one of the ways in which the crate bone density, and that became a whole industry of sports. It helped to accelerate that entire ecosystem. They go back to 9 to those time frame. You don't think there wasn't the gym. There weren't the gyms the same way we have today. It was a lot of muscle building And then the ellipticals and the all of these trainers came out of it. So it's impacted people who get on a treadmill every day.

So, yeah, the the muscle degradation. And there's also radiation. Challenges that Over time. So so there's a lot of, challenges that are that we find changes, we'll say, that occur when we go to space micro in microgravity and low earth orbit, and other challenges, radiation, and what have you as you start to go beyond, Earth's atmosphere and the electromagnetic shield.

But a lot of the things that for me are most fundamental and most interesting are simple things just like the behavior of water. And if you get a chance, Scott Kelly did a great little video where he stuck, put some, made a little ball of water, which was held sort of in, the middle of the compartment that he was in on space station, and he put some food dye in there to make it change color. And then he stuck an alka seltzer in it.

And if you run that same example on the Earth, of course, you have to run it in a cup, a little plastic cup or something, and you put it in. You put out alka seltzer, and we've seen it right there. Bubbles form millions of little bubbles and little pieces of particles coming out of there and stuffs fizzing out. And when he did it, you can see some particles coming off and fizzing.

But instead of making millions upon millions of little bubbles, you really just make 3 large bubbles, and they don't go away. They just roll around. There's nothing pushing them out. There's nothing driving them to the surface. Like on Earth, the gravity is pulling the water down, and it's much more dense than the air, so the air gets popped out the top. But, when you do that in space, all of a sudden, gravity is removed. So now it is all adhesion and cohesion of the water to itself.

But is it always thorough? Every example I've seen, I've only seen, I think, three times is done. It ends up being 3 large bubbles, which is inter I do not have wonder if it's the the the the volume of the the size of the Alka Seltzer tablet or how much is put into the volume of the water, but it yeah. It could be a combination of the interesting. By the way, if you're next time you speak to Kelly Yeah. Tell him he's gotta do podcast. No. Seriously. Just tell him he's gotta do podcast.

Okay. So what else do we have? We've we've talked about Science and Space, and and now what I wanted to do was talk about, the players and what's happening. Because we you you and I talked about the fact that, things changed, that there was kind of an inflection point, but it continues. And other people have gotten involved. And in some ways, it is driving the whole program forward. It's although things are, I still think, in many ways, dependent upon NASA and the direction it takes.

There are other people who are making, influencing the decisions in in influencing the outcomes and stepping up and saying, hey. I wanna do this or I wanna be a part of that. I'd love to hear your perspective about my own. So some of the big players for, things that are happening, we've talked about Elon Musk and SpaceX. They're they're a huge player. They have a commercial program that, I think is making money. They've got plans to go out and do other things.

And some of the innovations that they have made, technical and, logistical and what have you, are so big that, no one can match them at this point. There is no not even there are governments that cannot match what they're doing. And it is, I think in many ways the beacon that people are moving towards. In fact, I was at a conference, and someone gave a presentation on what they were doing, and then someone in the audience just asked them.

It looks like you are trying to get to the point where SpaceX was 5 years ago. And the guys the guys said, yeah. That's where that's the best we can do. So that is happening.

At the same time, there are other people so that's Elon Musk and and, Blue Origin, and I would kind of, hearken him to someone like Cornelius Vanderbilt who, during the California Gold Rush, was shuttling people and materiel to Panama, and or to Nicaragua, and then they would go across and then he would pick them up on another boat and take them up to California. Elon Musk is is doing that type of thing. He's like the modern day Cornelius Vanderbilt, shuttling people and material into space.

Blue Origin, which is, Jeff Bezos's company, is in many ways Yep. Are trying to do some of the same things, but they've got their own plan, and they're doing their own things. Right? They're big into, lunar, trying to get involved in the lunar, lander program. They're taking people to, sub war into suborbital rides, which are just a few minutes. And, that is a major operation.

It's hard to describe it when but I've been you go down to the Kennedy Space Center, and right near the entrance to the Kennedy Space Center visitor center is the Blue Origin facility, and it is just a massive facility. Just amazing what they've done. And the parking lot is not just full. There are employees having to park out in the grass because there's just not enough parking area. So lots of people, a big program, and they've got facilities, of course, up in the Seattle area.

And, but he's driving that. And and note with those two individuals, you know, they've got money. They've got a lot of money. So they can make calls on their own. These aren't decisions that have to go to congress or have to go to, some committee. If they wanna do something, they're gonna go do it. It's a a radical departure. It's almost like the, it's like the, the James Bond bad guy. Right? Goldfinger or whatever.

But now they're trying to to do things that are based on their own dreams and their visions as well as be aligned with what NASA's mission is. Of course, they want to take advantage of that money too. There's other corporations like Sierra Space that is building a, a plane. It's a it's like a a small space shuttle.

It goes up on a SpaceX rocket, but then can maneuver itself into position, dock to the space station, and then you can load it up with people or materiel and drop it out of orbit, and it will land like a plane on a commercial runway. So you could land anywhere in America if you wanted with this thing. Is isn't Sierra doing it with that? Sierra Space is doing that program is pretty much theirs. Yeah. They are, working on other things too.

They're trying to make a small space station that is independent. That was the That's the Dream Chaser is the space plane, we'll call it. But they're also something called the Unity Platform, or the LifeHab. It's a a small inflatable space station that they're gonna put up in space for commercial purposes where people can if you wanna run a bunch of experiments or make something, you can put it into this thing, and it's, a commercial platform. And NASA has been encouraging this. They have money.

They put money out, and they are trying to get, corporations to come together and come up with a space platform that is only partially paid for by NASA, by taxpayer dollars, with the rest of it coming from investment and people believing that they can run a business and make money off that effort. So there's a couple of, organizations that are, trying to figure that out too. Blue Origin of is, one of them.

With, Blue Origin NC airspace are coming together for their space station, which is called the Orbital Reef. So so Yep. So that's all happening. And, that's what they would call that the commercial LEO destination program or the the CLD program. At the same time, NASA is driving pretty much everything. They're the ones that are, putting money out there to encourage those types of efforts. They're still exploring the universe, sending probes out into the universe.

They, we were we participated in the DART mission, which was to fire a satellite at a very high speed at an asteroid to see if we could redirect it, right, to move an asteroid out of its path from hitting the Earth. And so they're doing those types of missions, which I think are things that if you didn't have a government agency doing it, nobody would do it. Because there's you're not gonna make money. There's you're not, you know, striving to make a lot of money out of it.

But at the same time, it takes us all forward and is perhaps necessary that we do, you know, defense of the earth, for example. All of that is happening.

And now what we're starting to see is schools, communities like local governments, state governments starting to say, well, well, we want to build a science and technology program to develop in our own state, and we can use NASA so we can leverage NASA dollars, leverage the excitement that comes from doing work in space, and at the same time, through these educational programs, deliver more educated, scientifically, technically engineering based students into our own community and at the same time build jobs so they'll stay here locally.

So you see, there was a big announcement, that Berkeley set up something with NASA, a $1,000,000,000 program out of the AIMS, pro, effort, in Northern California. Texas and Texas A&M have a $750,000,000 program directed at doing space related work. And I think you're gonna start to see this happening, across America. It's almost, going back to the Apollo days where businesses all over America contributed. Businesses all over America are still contributing to the space program.

I think that part is kind of invisible, but now it's starting to become more entrenched and more, collaborative with local universities and with local and state governments. That's that is an exciting thing to be a part of, to see that happen because you you can tell there's momentum building. People are getting engaged, and it can only be for the better for America as far as I'm concerned.

At the same time, you still have some of the other, big players like Japan, Russia, and Roskamos, and, the European Union with, the European Space Agency, Canada. They're still engaged, and they're doing their own things. And at the same time, other countries that were not what we would think of as mainstream players in space, like Thailand or the UAE or Israel, they have their own programs, and there are ways for them to engage.

Maybe they don't build a full space station, but they commit to building a, airlock and a piece of one. But before that, they then can send their astronauts up, and they can participate. Right? And for some of these things, like for our toilet, we kinda look at it. Hey. If you come up with a really good design for toilet, anytime you send people in the space, you're gonna have to send a toilet.

That's those are that's a mission critical function, and that's a piece of business you could own forever if you were really good at it. Right? The the the Chinese Space Agency has brought on many alliances recently to help them in their efforts. So, yes, there are a a lot of different activities going on. Yes. And that's another way that it's happening.

As you see, you know, as the Japanese are kind of worried about what happens when the space station comes to end of life in 2030 or 2035, whenever it is. They wanna know that there's a place for them. Love it. Well, I moved to that again. Yeah. I yeah. If I if I worked for Boeing, that's exactly what I would be doing. Right? I think Boeing Just add yeah. 5 what's 5 years? To 5 years. Yeah. What's 5 years?

Because you've got several projects that are going on simultaneously from ACCENTSPACE, from VAST, from the STAR Lab. All of those are are trying to compete for that positioning. There's an economic challenge with how do you make those work financially. You're you're absolutely right. Yes. So there's all those other little players. A lot of, you know, dotcom billionaires who are stepping up and, you know, starting their own small space ship.

Yeah. They the one of the one of the founders of Ripple started a company. They have about 200 employees today. So when you and I one of the things we did talk about before, and I want your take on it now that you've brought all of this up, is we talk about astrobotics and the the failure of the ability for them to drop the lander on the moon. I'd love your take because you just gave all the positive sides of things moving forward.

But there is discussion because NASA did move their launch date out a year, 25 to 26. And some people argue that's great. They're they're doing things right. But other people are saying, no. They've been doing it wrong for quite some time. Now you've got the astrobotics, failure. We've had Firefly have some misses. How do you take that side of the equation when it comes to risk?

And we will be having, by the way, we will have on our podcast a one of the largest space insurance companies companies that do space insurance on our podcast. So we will talk about that another time. But what do you when you take you're adding a lot of risk when you have these You are. You're taking on a lot of risk. First of all, doing work in space is extremely difficult, and I know that SpaceX makes it look routine. That is an extreme achievement in itself.

The fact that they have done that is just, for me, is mind boggling, I think, for a lot of people. But if you go back to the beginning, even for SpaceX, there were failures. There were a lot of failures. They came, you know, very close to just calling it quits. And, we have to understand that that is part of the situation. For me, whether it's, Astrobotic or VARDA is another one. They're a free flyer that, is trying to do things that are similar to some of the things that we're trying to do.

They were unable to bring their, spacecraft back. And for me, even for someone who is a competitor to my organization, that is a loss. We want people to be successful. We will all benefit. Right? What is it To win. Yes. A rising tide raises all ships. Right? And we're we look at it that way. We want these people to be successful. So for the astrobotics thing, it's actually, I think, very unfortunate and disappointing. At the same time, it is really difficult.

The achievements that were made by going to the moon in the sixties early seventies, you you don't understand how what an amazing achievement it was until you find It's so but you you're you're you're stepping around. You're out of your pitter pattering around. There's expression for it. In the 9 19 sixties, we 19 seventies, we went to the moon multiple times. We were able to do it. That one that when the Indian Space Agency, was trying to land, it didn't happen.

When, astrobotics doesn't happen. And why is a really interesting question for a lot of individuals. If we had done it before and we were able to do it many times, why can't we do it today with more technology, more advancements? But before you answer that, because I'd like to, you I love you use the word space is difficult because space is not hard. Earth is hard. Space is harsh. It's a difficult environment.

But all the challenges that Astrobotic faced were challenges they faced on the thinking on earth. It was capital. It was materials. It was time. It was policy. It was process. It was all of those things. We have a deep gravity well. What makes space hard is that you have to do it all on earth, and then you apply it out there, which is a hard to imagine. Environment. So that's kind of the way we say it. So I love that use word difficult.

So what do you think about all of these organizations that 50 years ago, we did it? Why? I I'm Yeah. So, I again, I think what we did 50 years ago was an amazing achievement. And the fact that it all work that it worked, yeah, I this is really remarkable. At the same time, it the same challenges are there. And some you know, in the case of the AstroBot, all it takes is one thing, one seemingly insignificant thing to fail, and Yeah. That takes down the whole the whole program.

But you've you've you've probably been with the Smithsonian. There's a Smithsonian exhibit for space. You've probably seen these things. What they put up there is the equivalent of a what do you call it? You have a car, and if someone was next to you in Yes. A go kart, they when you look at it, you say, oh my god. It's a go kart. This is like a go kart. My car is better than this. And where's the disconnect? How did the go kart make it and not the Ferrari? Yeah. And I love Ferrari.

So I'll I'll Yeah. But for yeah. I'm not I'm not And you're not saying the Ferrari's breakdown? Bad or good. We're not saying that. No. No. No. No. Actually, I've worked with Ferrari. I've raced Ferraris in New Zealand. Unbelievable company. Unbelievable cars. I I love them. They're they are my favorite brand. That said But for sometimes Let's sometimes back over to making a go kart run and work is simpler, and and we're adding certain complexities. Right? So Yeah. I don't know.

It's a very tough it's a very tough thing thing to to say, and I think they're still trying to figure out what went wrong. But as a scientist, the I'm kind of I expect things to fail, and I learned from that. Right? You learn from iteration. And, I think for Astrobotic, I'm worried because I'm afraid they won't be able to iterate. They've done this. They they flew it. It didn't work. They it's a huge challenge for them. Challenge for them. And then what did they get?

A 130,000,000 or something was part of the one day? So 160,000,000 or something? Going to go back and look at it? Because part of this experiment is not just launching the rocket. It's the process and the, infrastructure and the approach of having a small independent company try to do this for you. And that's something that's gonna have to be, reviewed and looked at. I don't know if it's the small independent company.

I there's got to be another fly in the ointment that's not working because we're having multiple failures in different places. And are we not sharing the right information with one another? Have you ever heard the concept stone soup? The there's a parable called stone soup. It's, 22 individuals go into a village. They have no food, no money. Guy walks up to a door, knocks on it, and says, can you give me a pot? I wanna make some stone soup. The woman says, stone soup? He says, yeah.

Just need a pot. So she said, I gotta see this. Gives him a pot. He puts some water in it, put some rocks in it, and then he's testing. And everybody in the neighborhood's coming around saying, what's what is this? What are they doing? And he says he tastes it and everything. How is it? He says, probably a little bit of salt. And the guy says, I got some salt. And they put a little salt in and he tastes. This is a lot better, but maybe some carrots. Says woman, I've got some carrots.

She runs back, bring back some carrots. Maybe potatoes would help. And next thing you know, everybody's contributing to the soup and the soup works. What happened? Are are we too disconnected? Are we really trying to be so involved in making commercial application? Are we so interested in going to the moon? Yeah. There's something that multiple times we were able to go to the moon with go karts. And for the explanation, we went all the way back to deniers. Is how did we go back then?

I would I would I would layer one more thing on there that, you you you you talked about the commercial, and we're kind of not networked. Right? We're trying to do things on these individual little setups. I would also say that the amount of, resources that were applied you know, during the Apollo missions, we were, on an annual basis, probably almost 2% of the gross domestic product was going into Apollo and the NASA program. So But we have all those lessons. Right? We have all those lessons.

But a lot of the challenges, even though you know, hey. We've learned this. When you go to apply it, there are still problems that arise even though you know it's there. You know, experiments, you you know, the things that you know doesn't mean that you've solved it all completely.

We're we're trying to do some experiments right now, and, we're running into a challenge where we're using all the hardware works, all the pieces work, but we're starting to see that when it's all put together, there are, because it's a complex system, there are conflicts that weren't anticipated. Right? And it's causing us to okay. We gotta step back and redo this. That's an easy thing to do if you can retrieve it and just make the changes, whatever.

But in the case like Astrobotic, yeah, they found a problem. There was a conflict or an issue, but it's a huge expensive experiment. But and that's where Earth is hard because it actually happened on Earth. It was the design. It was the lack of anticipation of that happening, not having 2 different fuel capabilities because they ran maybe it was by separation or partition, but it was an earth challenge. What did we miss down here that didn't allow it to to work up there?

But there's a the Well It baffles me. It actually baffles me this whole thing that we I I went to the, the Washington DC. I went to the Smithsonian to look at these things. I remember coming back and saying, oh my god. I mean, the the walls of the rocket were There's nothing special. There was nothing. There's No. There's some there's there's a great video, of a astronaut on the moon next to his lunar lander. This is one of the later missions.

And you're watching the video, and you see him yanking on the side of the lander. It is the funniest thing because it's like, what is that guy doing? He's just yank he's yanking again and again, and what he was trying to do was pull his foldable all wheel drive electric car out of the side. It's it's stuck in a little compartment folded up. You have to pull it out and unfold this little electric car. Right?

And it's just the funniest thing to and you see how basic and fundamental, but at the same time, the only working all wheel drive foldable electric cars we ever made are still on the moon. Right? It's a crazy thing. So there were achievements. I've you know, we're talking about what didn't work. Hey. You know, Apollo 13 had its challenges. Right? There were things that didn't always work. Yep. So I think that's part of it.

At the same time, going back to your point about making mistakes on the ground, we, don't always have all the information, or we're not always able to put it all together. And back at the Smithsonian, there were and I probably still have them displayed. There were, 2 Coke it was a Coke can and a Pepsi can that were designed with a special top to be used by astronauts in space so that they would be able to partake in having a Coke and a smile or have a cold Pepsi while they're in space.

And it was, you know, a big deal, and they both had advertising programs based on this. It was fantastic until the astronauts actually tried to drink the Coke and the Pepsi. And then and the problem is on earth going back to our discussions about why science is different. On earth, the contents of your stomach are all held down, and any gas that is evolved comes up and you burp it out. But in space, the contents of your stomach are a gumble. It's space it's spacey.

So you drink that, and when you have to burp, everything comes out. So and now so yeah. Well, you're not in the suit. Now think about it. You would think that everybody would know that, that this would be expected and we should've but they didn't. They did not consider that until they did it, and we learned from it. So when you go to space now, they're not drinking Coke and Pepsi. Right? They're drinking a lot of coffee. Yeah. I I yeah.

You know what when you know any of your pen and you're kinda turning it up and over and over and over and you're flipping it because you're trying to get some your mind around something else. My head is turned sideways, and I'm saying to myself, there's something missing. There's just something missing. And I don't I I I'm I've got my own thoughts, so we're not gonna go into all of them. But there's just, if we've done it before, we do know about the Coke bottle. We do know about microgravity.

We do know about all the micrometeorites. We do know we have Whipple Shields today. We have 3 d printing technology to reduce weight. We have different engines we could use. There's just if someone was to travel forward in time from 19, 69 and to today, they'd say, oh my god. You guys must have Look at your computers. Look at your all these materials and yeah. Yeah. Look look at what you've got. I mean, I've never seen a car like that. I've never seen what are you holding in your hand?

Oh, we can communicate with everybody. Actually, our kids don't knock on the front door anymore. They call each other from outside. And you say, really? Like, how does the signal get there? Oh, there's things in orbit that we communicate with, these satellites, and we have ground systems and book. And they say, so where are you? Are are you on have you gone to Venus yet? Have you gone to Mars? Have you gone to and they said, no. No. No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. You guys are the last ones there. So, again, just a it's a baffling question. So let's get goal of science and space. So And and we've kind of alluded to this, in our conversation, but, ultimately, the goals of science and space are, you know, to learn about what's happening in space and to bring that learning back.

But for me, the real the real goal is to find benefits that we can bring back down to the people on earth, whether that's a perspective of how we look at our Earth or if it is actually crystals for the pharmaceutical industry. You you had mentioned early in the conversation about the, BFF, the biofabrication facility that my organization has built and is operating on the space station. And, just last year, we, printed a meniscus for Uniform Services University.

It was made of, stem cells and matrix, and it is a meniscus. Right now, if you tear your meniscus, you don't get an implant or whatever. You just let it heal with scar tissue, and you go on with your life. It's never the same. Yeah. But if there was a way that we could actually make a meniscus and using your own stem cells, that would have a potential huge benefit to people and their ability to function over their their lifespan. And there's other tissues.

We're right now in the process of printing cardiac tissue where hope hopefully, ultimately, we'd love to print something like a heart. But at this point, we're just trying to print a very small heart patch so that somebody who maybe had damaged part of their heart tissue with a heart attack or what have you, that we could come in and have a vascularized piece of heart tissue again with their own cells so there would not be a rejection. It would be their own body part that we've just been made.

And what going to space allows us to do is to print things in 3 dimensions without having to build it around some architecture. Every you can stack things up that normally on earth would just puddle out. And if we take them, we print them into the right right size and shape and what have you and put it in an incubator, we find that it sort of gels, almost like gelatin.

It will get to a point where it's firm enough to be able to survive reentry and exposure to the one g environment terrestrially and that it could be used. And, initially, we're just looking at ways to develop models for the pharmaceutical industry or for somebody to use for testing. But, ultimately, we believe that there's a a future where tissue therapy and organ therapy, replaces or at least subsidizes the current, therapies using organ donation or what have you.

So, that is the goal of what we're doing at SAIS is to do things that will benefit people. And I believe if we do things that are important enough, it will work out from an economic standpoint, right, that there will be value in it. And it goes back to something we talked about earlier, which was that, you you can't take tons and tons of material in space. So you have to think about not just the value of the thing you're doing, but the amount of mass it's going to take for you to deliver it.

So things like, crystals, seed crystals, all I need is a thimbleful, and they can have a huge value. You know, there's pharmaceutical products that are worth 1,000,000,000 of dollars a year. And we also look at things like, tissue therapy and organ donation therapy as being having a huge value, both financially, but also benefit to humanity. So those are the types of things we look at, and I think that is the the vision, the goal for science and space.

Because if you do this right, it will work financially and will provide the benefit to humanity that we need. So that's your perception of the directive of what the purpose is. And it's a healthy one. I I I associate with that. From 8 years of doing this, I would not, I would say that the majority of people that I've worked with in Beyond Earth, it is not that. The that the goal is not that or that we have not achieved that? What do you think is The goal is not that.

It's going to distant galaxies. It's going beyond Earth. It's exploring. It's that's where it's always science research and exploration. It's it's about reaching out to the stars and and being able to be a multidisciplinary, a multiplanetary species and saving the human species. You've heard that phrase from someone a lot. You know, so that we have a duplicate version of ourselves because we're gonna destroy ourselves. And it's it it's not that narrative.

And often, it is economics, wanna make a lot of money? You if you listen, we have 60 some odd podcasts now, something in that range. I don't know the exact number. You will hear that the majority of them, that that tonal is not it doesn't come through. And the absence of saying it means it's not a focus. So you could say, well, no, no, that's what they were thinking. But the absence of not putting it in or saying it is also saying it.

And you have articulated from the beginning that your interest is that even the work that you've done at that organization was to make sure that the innovations turn back on Earth. And for us, it's improved life on Earth for all species, is that those innovations happen. So I'm questioning why do you you said it that way. Is that your interpretation of the majority of people you knew? So I'm gonna I'll, I've got a couple of things here.

So first of all, I think you're right that a mo majority of people look at it from the standpoint of, like, the Star Trek. We're going to explore the universe. That's and they're they're, that's kind of the vision. The whole how do we generate value is kind of secondary. And in a lot of ways, that's because it is not straight forward. It is very difficult, and it's never really been done. There's only a few things that have been made in space Mhmm.

That were done for a purpose that had benefit on Earth. In fact, I've got one of them right here in my office, and it was it's a it's in a plaque, and it says, made in space aboard Space Shuttle Challenger, and it was done back in the early eighties, 83 or so. And it is these tiny plastic spheres that were created, as a way, for, like, NIST or one of the government agencies to use, as a model for perfect spherical objects.

This is how up these are perfectly spherical because they did not they they were made without the influence of gravity. So there's very few things, and it's very hard for people to get around that. And what you what we find for the most part are companies coming to us who have generated small, free flying, little laboratories, or they're going to, coming to us saying, hey. We're willing to sell you space so you can do whatever you wanna do. And that's what you see.

That's the traditional Yeah. Hey. If you looked at all of the, space, industry, the aerospace industry, worldwide, 95% of everybody is all working to make satellites that are either for communications or observation or for someone like me to come and utilize. That's the easy thing to do. Put something on a rocket, launch it into orbit, and get paid to do that. And, there's value in that. The problem is we need to figure out how to generate value. Otherwise, we can't pay them for the ride.

So there's, so when I talk about the, the where like, what the real value is and where it's going, we're trying to get to the point where the things that Elon Musk has done very well, sending supplies to space station, are paid for by someone other than the, taxpayers. Because, ultimately, there's gonna be a point where the American taxpayer is gonna continue to make, trade offs. Hey. You know, are we willing to spend, another $20,000,000,000 when we could spend that on some other thing?

And, I think the big push on the NASA side, at least in part, is to say, what are those things that we that we can generate value doing and offload some of those costs? Not just for their purposes, you know, so they can offload cost, but also in a way so they can redeploy their own funds to go to Mars. Right now, they're spending, you know, a 1,000,000,000 plus dollars a year just to keep the space station in orbit functional and operational.

They would love to have some of that money back and get to Mars in 2035 or sooner if they could. So I think that when I talk about, like, where it's going, yes, you're correct. This is a small piece of it, but it is an important piece. The thing that we I believe that we're gonna find a way to make money in space, and it's gonna be like a gold rush. It's gonna be like California gold rush.

You're gonna have all these people trying to get in on the action, get up there, and then slowly, the federal government will be able to offload some of, the, you know, the cost of doing the day to day stuff that they're supporting now. Okay. Okay. You have the next one. What is this All of this efforts. Harkening back to all the benefits that we talked about coming from the space program, those continue.

There are, technological, scientific, and I would say even, political and and social benefits from us working together on these bigger projects to go to space, to do science in space, to look back at our planet. And you see, individuals, communities, countries, businesses coming together to do bigger and better things together. I think that's one of the pieces of things like Star Trek that it was humanity that stepped out. It was, the Earth that was, you know, where Star Fleet was.

It, I think there's there's something about that that we'll see in these coming years. Yeah. But didn't the vol did the Vulcans have to come because they saw a guy out in space hitting, hyperspace and then the Vulcans The Vulcans. Yeah. And the Vulcans. But but, And, yeah, and then they gave the technology Right. But it was So The you know, Starfleet was a, Earth based program. Starfleet was humanity, and our step out.

And and, of course, that's, done for a lot of reasons in that show, but I think that's part of the benefit. I think it's also, like you said, whatever happened with the astrobotic system, there people are gonna learn from it, and the next one will be better, and the next one will be better. And there will be a day where we're going to the moon on a fairly routine basis.

Yeah. We we didn't make the cutoff that, Stanley Kubrick thought we'd hit, right, in, 2,001 or whatever, but, we are going to get there. And by pushing ourselves and doing things that are on the edge, we get better. We and we learn, and our lives will be improved by this. In some ways that are totally obvious, like GPS, and then in other ways, you know, that are, nuanced but are still important to humanity as a whole.

And that I've for me, that is it is so inspirational just to be a part of that and to go to meetings where people are talking about the most mundane things about how water behaves on the space station or, how do we, how do we build a toilet that will work and works every time and people don't have to worry about? It does. It takes us forward, and it makes us better. Well, you, the there's a, Globe Union is one of the largest toilet manufacturers in China and area, and I work with them.

And, you know, they do the same thing. They sit around and say, how do we make a better toilet? They do. They do the exact same thing. They how do we make a better toilet? And I know because we have their toilets and they're phenomenal. Reduced water consumption, better spinning cycle, fewer parts. They do all sorts of things. And they they do a lot of subcontracting out, private labeling. So yes, we we do ask these questions. And what you're doing, you call it mundane.

That's what people do in almost every industry. How do we how do we make a boat work faster? How do we make a printer print with less ink? How do we make a car more efficient or more comfortable or a bed to help us to get more sleep? So you're doing the the things that you want and that's great. And I would say so far Sure. And it's really my fault. But in our conversation, I've really talked about what, is happening in space and what it will do for us.

But what we also have to consider is that through this program, Astrobotic is a little company in Pittsburgh that we, normal people like myself, others like us, are all contributing to this effort. We are all going to have a hand in on this in some way. And it's I had a summer intern, and she, as, a high school student, designed an experiment that went to space station when she was, a senior in high school. Think about that.

A senior in high school send an experiment to the space station, and she would get together with others of her friends. These other girls who did this, and they were girls. They were not women. They were, you know, high school students. And they talk about it like like they would talk about going to the mall. It's, like, it's normalized. It's normalized. It's it's for certain people For for certain people. I think you're gonna see that that more and more people are engaged.

Either they, are participating, like, they're working for a company or they produce something that is part of that program, or they're principal investigators at universities with their students who are coming to do projects with us and people like us, or they are just normal everyday citizens who are, engaged just by observation and understanding what's happening and and and doing just like you said, calling it out. Hey. Why is it why is this so hard? Or why did that fail?

Or why are those people getting to go and not me? And, you know, we, if you go through on the website, you're the website you created. You'd look at, like, the plans when we're gonna have, 60 people or 1600 people on the moon. Who are those people? Are they at this point, if you wanna fly, you know, on a a private astronaut mission, you either have to come up with $50,000,000 or have somebody who does it on your behalf.

But there will be a day, and it's not too far off where, you're going up not because you paid the money, but because you had a skill they needed. Hey. We So and I love that you're dimensionalizing it. So I'm gonna add to it if I can. We have the first paper that's been written on Mearth by a professor, Daniele, out of the University of Messina. We have, another person out of Amsterdam who's the foremost expert on complex variation by design.

He's writing a small paper, and then he's gonna write an academic paper on how Project Moon Hut, what he calls as complex variation by design on steroids. We have individuals who are, I can't mention some of the names that are they're working on, but they're working on things that they had never thought of before. And they're coming in not for the space side, which you think about it, economics is not space the same way.

It's complex variation by design is the concept of taking something and creating it. So someone else could understand something. So you create an environment for someone to understand something else. And Project Moon Hut is that where we're trying to say we have 8 people. We have 9,578, 1,644 on the moon. And you could see it in that that that graphic that was brilliantly created by Marcus and Andreas. And yes, what we're trying to do is normalize it, but not normalize it as space.

We're trying to normalize it as Earth. So you you the reason I brought that up is you said astronauts. You don't talk much about cosmonauts or, the taikonauts or other names. And we have this when we use those words, we separate people. We will have we're using the word spacers Because when you get on a plane, you are you're a chemist, you get on a plane, you're not a pilot. 50, a 100 years ago, if you were in a plane, you were a pilot, then they became passengers.

But people call them astronauts. No. You're not an astronaut. You're a pot you're a passenger, and you have a role to be a chemist on the International Space Station. So we tried to come up with all the words we came up. We said, these are just people who are educated. They've got a they've they've gone to 3 weeks of training. They understand the environment like getting your license, and they will be spacers because they won't have a designation.

When they will get there, they will be a spacer who's responsible for Yeah. They they would call them mission specialist. That's what NASA would call. And so in our so the yeah. But the word mission, if you've ever mission To do something. Go some place and come back and come back. We are creating a box of the roof and a door and a moon, a home. And that home is where we will live in perpetuity that that is now a new ecosystem. So when we use words that separate we're going on a space mission.

Well, no. No. No. I'm gonna be there for 6 months and I'm gonna be working on this, and I'm an engineer, I'm a scientist, I'm a researcher, I'm a builder, I'm a whatever. So but the question that I had is, if we don't become more globally inclusive in our conversation, How did how is that going to lay out where 60 per 70% of the world's population still lives under 10 US dollars a day? We have challenges happening around the world.

How would you suggest that we change that dialogue so it's not protectionist, but inclusive? So part of it, there's a there you know, cultural backgrounds play into this. Right? As as an American, I see everything from that perspective. And there's there's 2 parts. There's the national perspective. And just like you said, there's parts of the world that are living very different lives because of where they are.

It's not because, they're not in the US or just from a different part of the world, and maybe it's the government, maybe it's different conditions that lead to that. We did have a a conversation with some people at SpaceX to add another, dimension to this. We were talking about, astronauts and how we, clothe them. And this was done with a a company that provides a type of clothing for people who do extreme things like extreme athletes.

And, they said that they this company said, well, we look at astronauts as a kind of extreme athlete, and we wanna produce the clothing and the, you know, the day to day materials for their garments, whether it be a shoe or a spacesuit or just, you know, their underwear. And the person from SpaceX said no. That's not how we look at these people. The people that we're sending to Mars, they're farmers. We're sending farmers. And the reason is is because a farmer can fix something out in the field.

They have to be able to do that in order to feed themselves. They live a different kind of life. So I think you're absolutely right. We for different situations, the people will have a different kind of tag, and that's because they're doing a different type of thing, and there are different types of people. Right. The the the remain the remaintenance worker on, in the movie. That's right. I mean, how many years was yeah.

Everyone who won an Apollo mission or especially early on towards the end, it changed, but they were all, like, military pilots. And and on the Russian side too. Right? They were all military. So you Yes. Absolutely. Today, what what's his name? Bezos ships people up. They don't have to go they go through a little bit of training, but you don't have extreme You got William Shatner going up. Right? Yeah. Right. Right. They're they're not extreme athletes.

So that global inclusion, if we have challenges on the planet and I I love your angle. Yet we need I think that we had one person call us, and I can't mention where they're from. And that person said, you need to have the military on the moon with you. I'm like, Oh, someone's gonna try to blow it up. Someone's gonna try to stop this. You're gonna have terrorism up there. Like, geez, we're we everything is about protectionism of the American way. And I not I am an American.

That's nothing to say that I'm not. I can't. I was born here. Yet the solution is inclusionary because we live on one planet, which is partially what we're supposed to be saying. But we don't act that way. Yeah. Right? Isn't that everybody says the overview effect It hasn't worked. Really No. Worse than the way it was professed. Yeah. There's reasons there's reasons for that that are maybe beyond our control at this point. But I I'm a I play the long game.

I look at this from the from the long for a couple in a couple ways. First of all, finding a way to go to Mars and build a colony of Mars is not a solution to our problems on Earth. Just like you mentioned earlier, a lot of the problems of space are going to be things that we've gotta solve on Earth. Right? There are problems on Earth first. So I think doing talking about this now and having this conversation, it's like saying, hey.

If you were to set up a colony, how would you want that to be set up? Starting all again with all the things we've learned from colonies in the in the new Americas and, you know, all of that. What what have we learned to ensure that what we do in space will be successful? If we can't do it well on earth, if we can't get along on earth, if we can't save the environment on earth, going to Mars is not gonna save us. Going to Mars is like trying to live in Antarctica in the winter and no atmosphere.

That's that's what it's like. So if you can't make things work on this beautiful gem of a planet we've got, then we've got much more serious problems. At the same time, we can leverage this effort and the science and the the just like you said, the the need to come together and to work together to our advantage. I'm an optimist in that way. But, yeah, I I we're working on it. If if we didn't think it would work, we wouldn't be working on it.

There's a there's a woman, a Violetta, out of, Europe that we're working with. And at one point, tossed out to her that we're working on what would be the governance model. You know, there's socialism, communism, democracy. And if you ever looked it up, which I don't recommend you do, there are so many different versions of isms out there and versions of dema of of everything, from republics to you name it. It's a lot more than I ever thought of.

And I shared with her what we wanna do is say, what would it potentially be like, like you're saying, a new group of people who are they're not self sustainable on the moon. They're sustainable. We're gonna be shipping things back and forth, like, every time through history. There was always goods and services moved. So how what do we what type of what do we call it? And we've had these, the first one I came up with, neo classical Mearthism or whatever, something of that nature.

And she said, no, no. We found this doesn't work. That doesn't work. And she became so engrossed in this. She almost jumped through the screen. It was brilliant because trying to figure out how we would operate as a human species with within Mearth changes the dialogue. And that comes back to the blue marble. How do we we it's not going to happen in beyond Earth. We don't have enough mass of people, volume of people. It's going to happen as we change on Earth, and that's how we get Mearth.

We don't get Mearth and then create Earth. We create we change Earth over the course of the timeline. And in doing so, it allows us to achieve that. Yes. Make sense? And I think It's not the journey. It's the journey. It's not the destination. It's the journey. And the journey changes you. Right. And it makes you better. And that's, that is what I think this is all doing for us, and it only works to make us all better if we start to get more people engaged in it.

So going to your point, and that's not just more Americans. It is. It's more people from outside to see it, to be a part of it. And we, I think, as Americans are better. That's why America is so great is that it's people from all over. It bring we we have a challenge of hope on this planet today.

And what what we can create if we demonstrate what the things and I and I loved speaking with you because you do have this optimism inside of you, is that we're changing the narrative for the entire globe of 10,000,000,000 people by 2,050. And what does that mean? And we by giving people hope, they don't go to the bad side, right, the dark side, or whatever you want to call it, they they then build for a new future. And we don't do enough of that.

So I've gotta say, Ken, this was absolutely fantastic. I really appreciate you spending the time, even with the challenges of losing power and the tree falling on the lines and, and all of that. I do appreciate we do appreciate you taking the time to talk to you so much. So much. Really enjoyed talking with you. So, yeah, this is great. And I I I'm I'm serious about the toilet and the naming. Serious about the names of the people that you recommend.

And we need to talk more about how, Redwire because you're fan I think we have, like, 700 employees, something like that. I'd love to find a way that Redwire could become a part of Project Moon Hut because we have a lot of organizations all under NDA, all working private quietly in the background so we can move this forward collectively. So so I wanna thank you for taking for everybody listening in.

I wanna thank you for taking the time to listen in today, and we do hope that you learn something that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others.

Again, the Project Moon Foundation is where we look to establish a box of the roof and a door on the moon, a home, through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem, and then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Please do go check out the videos on the website. Do click on, and it is fabulous, the 40 year plan. I think you would agree, Ken. It is a fabulous design.

And, Ken, what's the single best way to do that? Reach out to me via email. I I respond to all my emails at my email is [email protected]. Okay. And for me, I'd love to speak with you. You could reach me at [email protected]. You could also reach us at on Twitter at at project moonhot or at goldsmith if you wanna get directly with me. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, we're all there. We can all communicate and keep moving things together.

So that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening. Hello, everyone. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the age of infinite. Throughout history, we've seen humanity undergo transformational shifts that are so impactful, they define entire ages. Just recently, you've lived through the information age, and what an incredible journey it's been. Now think about this. You could be right now in the midst of another monumental shift, the transformation into the age of infinite.

We're talking about an age that transcends the concept of scarcity and abundance. It introduces a lifestyle rich with infinite possibilities, enabling new paradigm shifting thinking that comes from the moon and earth as what we call Mearth. This synergy will create a new ecosystem and a new economic model propelling us into an era of infinite possibilities. If that sounds like a plot for an extraordinary sci fi story, it is.

But it's what we're working on, and it's gonna unfold right before your lifetime. This podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hunt Foundation, where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut we happen to be named by NASA, through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn those innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.

For more information, visit our website at www.projectmoonhot.org, where you can check out our 40 year plan, our work, and we just launched, just put on yesterday, the project moonhot classification system. It is unbelievably dynamic. It shifts, it turns, it moves. If you're on a small screen or mobile, it doesn't show up as well. It it's good, but it doesn't do what it could if you're on a larger screen.

And if you don't see it on the larger screen, hit f 11 for full screen, meaning you're a laptop, and you will see that it's incredible. So check that out. We are a nonprofit. So if you ever consider making a donation, in the top right hand corner, it says donate. Every bit counts for us. So let's dive into the podcast. The title for today is Science in Space Matters. And today, we have with us Ken Sabin. Hi, Ken. Hi. Okay. So as always, we do a very, very brief bio.

Ken is the chief science officer at Redwire. He had a 20 year legacy in the farm industry at firms such as Eli Lilly. At Redwire, he's working on projects include protein crystal growth, product development for the International Space Station, development of 3 d bio printer as part of the biofabrication facility, and building a consortium. He's also achieved a PhD in chemistry. Now this has been added just recently for everybody. I have no clue what Ken is going to talk about.

Everybody thinks that I've already seen his outline. I understand the notes. We've had the discussion about it. We have had nothing. Ken and I have an initial call. We spent about some time creating a title, and that's all I know. So I'm on this journey with you. And I've said that because people have thought countless times they've emailed and said, wow, you guys must have talked a lot. No, we haven't. So, Ken, let's get started. Do you have an outline or a bullet point set for us? I do.

You ready? Okay. Can I I am ready pen in hand? So I'm gonna start just by saying a little bit more about my background because I think it's important to help everybody relate to me and to this experience. Okay. So number 1 is your background. Number 2? I'm gonna talk about and describe a definition for science in space. Okay. Science in space number 3. Talk about why science in space is different or special. Is different or special. That's a long one.

Okay. Next. I'm gonna talk about who the players are in getting science and space done. Okay. Next. I'm gonna talk about what the goals of doing science and space are. Okay. And what? Gonna talk about where it's leading, what this means to us. Okay. What this means to us. Is there another one? I'm just gonna conclude at that point. Okay. So we'll call it conclusion and a discussion. Okay. Fantastic. So let's start off with your background.

And as as I've shared, I did some research on you, looked you up a little bit, but you were highly recommended by a friend. I think it wasn't Yosim who recommended you? Yosim who did one of the podcasts earlier. So I I trust I trust him completely, and he's a part of project moon hot. So let's let's move this forward. So I am not a special person. I'm not like a NASA. I'm not a NASA guy. You know? I I'm not I'm not an engineer. I didn't grow up doing stuff in space.

I'm really I'm I'm from I got a degree in chemistry and went to work in the pharmaceutical industry. And, you know, like may maybe many people, I am a fan of what NASA does and but I was always kind of an outsider. And I think that is how I always thought it had to be. That's what it was. There were a small group of people who worked in the enclave of NASA, and then there was everybody else who just sort of watched from the outside.

And, I got a a crazy phone call from this woman who was, you know, telling me that I could do science in space, and I had no idea what it meant. I actually didn't understand that we had a space station. I thought we were still flying space shuttles. This is, like, back in 2013. And, but it it sent me down this odd journey, a career change, and, a change in the way I think about what the possibilities are. I think that's the the key piece of it is that it opened like a whole new world for me.

And as I'll describe to you, it's changed the way I think about science in a general sense. So, the the key element of this is, and I'm gonna talk about this more, is that normal people are starting to participate in this endeavor of us taking truly taking steps out into space. And it's everyday people who are stepping up and doing their part to participate. So it's kind of an exciting thing. Well, no. No. The yeah.

I, you've watched 2 of the videos, the introductory videos, and I don't know if you've kind of gotten from the conversation, is I am not a space person. 2014 showed up at, at an event, started speaking to the team at NASA, knew nothing about space, if you wanna use that term, which is it's the geography of space. And I didn't know the industry. And next thing you know, there's this whole project Moon Hut that's grown out of it. So I would say you're 2013, I'm 2014.

I don't have a background like engineering. My my background is a biology major and a psychology major dual. So we're very similar, and we're engaged in something very not, I would say, similar, but the similar geography. So that's great. That's fab fabulous. I love that. Yeah. I think if we took the time, we could go back and look at the events that were happening in the background that led to this kind of an inflection point. Because I think we are not alone. Right?

I think there's a lot of other people who around the same time will say 2013 through 2017 where things started to change. And we'll talk I'll talk a little bit about, some aspects of that, but I think there there was a a a shift. And in the future, people will look back and see just how impactful it was. Maybe not a specific event, but a series of events that led us in this direction.

So I I I because we're here, we're talking about it right now, I do wanna ask about it because I in my work, the work that we're doing in Project Moon Hut and my work that I've done, I have found that not as many people as I thought were engaged in space. There's a lot of enthusiasts. Yes. Closet enthusiasts. But when I say to them, have you ever donated? Have you ever participated? Have you ever worked in? Have you ever purchased? Have you ever this? Well, I make scale models.

Okay. No. No. You go to movies. Great. I I that's not what I'm asking. Are you involved? And then I traveled back to even landing on the moon. There were a lot of challenges. A lot of people didn't care. They were more concerned with what was going on on earth. So I'd like to know why you think 2,013, 2017 were so powerful because I'm I don't have that. I think there were, 3 general events that occurred.

The first was a change in policy during the Obama administration and, you know, leading out of, previous, presidential administrations that changed the way, we could engage. Right? They were they were opening up beyond NASA to get kind of private industry engaged in doing some of the things that had always traditionally been a NASA only, and So the out so you're saying the outsourcing of activities that you're doing it all Yeah.

I would say Okay. Even, you know, specifically, doing resupply contracts for, space station. That was probably one of the biggest. Okay. You know, I would agree with that because that was a major policy shift, and we've had, we've had former administrators on the program too. So, yes, there has been a shift there, I would agree, and the resupply contracts because we had now had possibilities for resupply, which we didn't before. And it engaged a new group of people who had different, goals.

Right? They were striving for different things and different approaches, which is always, I think, you know, a way to lead to innovation. So Yep. Okay. Well, it's second one was the, SpaceX of getting that contract and, Elon Musk and his approach to sort of space endeavors, his goals, and how it's led him to where he is.

And I, you know, whatever we think of him or say about him or feel, his approach, not just on a technical standpoint, but, just on a sort of a philosophical standpoint has changed the way we are approaching, work in space, whether it be something like getting supplies to the space station, getting people to the space station, or our attitudes towards reaching out beyond space station to go to the moon and Mars.

I think that him being brought in as a kind of a radical, thinker has changed the way we behave and the way we think about it. The the one piece I'd add to it, he was also extremely aggressive because there were other companies out there. There's one one of our teammates was working with Rocketplane Kistler. They had this, vehicle that could take off and land and resupply. And we've got the design some of the designs and the components of it in our database.

And they ended up being partially financed by the Canadian Teachers Union or something like that. And the United States government would not allow any foreign funds into that company. And, therefore, they couldn't get some piece of those contracts. So, we've all seen how aggressive that Elon can be. And so that probably also played into it, that he was going to fight for something that won, and he he was the right person to make that happen. I'm not supporting Elon. I'm not Right.

Saying anything good or bad. I'm just using an is for history. Absolutely. Absolutely. I I think the last Okay. Part is even though those two events that we just described had, significant effect on NASA and how they operate, there are some people who were not happy about, the the rockets and resupply contract going to an external, operator like that. Yep. And money was taken from the NASA budget to to fund this and that you know, there are people who were upset.

I think you will find NASA people on both sides of that. But what I have what I got out of that and what I so the people I know at NASA, what they have said to me is, it really did change the way NASA thinks about its role. And in some ways, it got them to focus on things that NASA does better than anybody. They're they're the best at it, and they do it for a bigger, you know, doing it for a bigger reason than just trying to make money. Right? They're doing it because they wanna know.

They're trying to push the envelope and push science forward. And it also changed them in some aspects. Their enclave's a very economically driven aspects of of their organization. They're looking to drive small business forward and get investment into things that are happening so that in the future, the space station isn't totally funded by NASA, that there's external groups that are trying to make money or find other purposes for space station, and they're willing to pay for it.

That is a big that's a big step. And I, you know, you watch some of these television shows where they make it sound like, oh, yeah. That's, you know, how it's gonna be in the future that NASA is gonna be making money or whatever. That is not you you can't take that for granted. It was just not the way it was done, and they really have stepped up.

It's really an amazing thing to see an organization like that that I always felt, you know, they're, you know, wearing the black ties and the short sleeved white button down shirts, but it isn't like that. They are forward thinking, smart individuals who are driven to do things for the benefit of the American people. Maybe the benefit of the world too for humanity. But, Well, so so those are two points that kind of are are, on my mind, interesting.

So one, there is not a dialogue as much as we believe there is for the betterment of humanity in all space. So I came in in 2014. And interesting, the way you've just framed it, there is the NASA Ames portal in, Silicon Valley of Palo Alto at the, there's the portal at the NASA Ames facility.

And the individual that end up pulling me in was a guy by the name of Bruce Pittman who was at the he might have been more open to to bringing someone like me in because his job was to help create public private partnerships. And so the entire concept of Project MoonRock came about at a lunch a luncheon that he and I were at. We were talking, and this is where it came from. But we then worked for about 5 years together. So concepts came out of it. We met every month.

So, yeah, I would say that that part of it, but NASA also has done a lot of things that I'm not gonna say NASA's the only one because there is the European Space Agencies, the Japanese, the South African. We've had people on from all different groups around the world. But one thing that's interesting is that the NASA logo on people's T shirts that people wear all over the world, there is no licensing fee. Anybody can produce them.

So I my take is that was also a masterful decision that they're not gonna make any money off the brand of the NASA logo. And that allowed the explosion of marketing from the things the activities that were going on within that organization. So Yeah. I think it's the the, most familiar brand on the planet. I I think it beats out Coca Cola, which was, I think, number 2. So I'd have I I have to look that up. I don't know. I I will say, though, that it was in Luxembourg in 2019.

And I think I've shared this before, just so you hear this, Ken, is that, I was at an I was asked to speak at an event in Luxembourg, and that's the video you didn't watch that one. There's another one. That's on I don't it's not on the website either. We I was asked and I was told there were gonna be 500 people in the audience. They put on a conference, one for AI, one for another category, and one for space.

And they have these 3 simultaneously so people can go between them, and then they also have specific activities. And I was sold by the Luxembourg space agency that there'll be 500 people. And just before the event in that year, just before I was speaking, they law, an organization, I won't mention their name, had kinda stiffed them for a lot of money. And when I showed up at that audience, take a it was on the 50th anniversary, by the way. Guess how many people were in that audience?

I'll bet you it was a 1,000. 50. 50? The year before was 500. The next year was 50. Oh my gosh. And so I started the presentation, and it it is recorded. I started the presentation by all of you sitting in this audience are saying, we're gonna make it. We're gonna make it because we're gonna make it. Because they all they care about is space and going to space and distant galaxies and alpha centauri and and going and living on Mars.

And I said to them, I bet you if we went back to 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, There were a group of people just like you sitting in the audience saying we're going to make it. What's to say based upon the activities going on in the world today, climate change, mass extinction, conflict? What's to say in 50 years we won't be sitting in the same seats the same way? And so the expectation of that audience and my expectation was, I thought, 500 people, was we have to be very careful.

I think, my take, that we're so focused on beyond Earth that we're the real value is Earth. And our language has to change, and that is not Latin NASA's language. It's not the European Space Agency's language. It's not all the other languages. It's still about space, and it's very exclusionary. Yes. Does that make sense? No. I I totally agree with you. I, after I left the pharmaceutical industry, I went to work for, CASES, the Center For the Advancement of Science in Space.

It is a congressionally mandated, congressionally funded through NASA or not for profit organization that, its purpose is to encourage industrial experts and academics and, you know, scientists, what have you, on Earth to do work on the space station for the benefit of humanity, for the benefit of the American people, not for exploration purposes, not to further NASA's goals, and it was done by congress.

Congress actually created this group and designated half of the US portion of the International Space Station, to be a national lab, a US national lab, because then they had control of it, congress did. And they could say, hey. This is what it's for. And I think they felt just like you're describing that with all this work being done for the purpose of exploring space that most people won't benefit from the activities and all this money being spent.

So they did something that would benefit the American people, and it is starting to pay off. These things take time, but you can see it's paying off in new technologies that are being brought back down to earth, new products, hopefully, that are being brought back down, but also engaging a broader group of people to be a part of this next step for humanity out into space.

And I'm gonna ask you, do is there a person there, a main person that you might still know that would be good for Oh, absolutely. And after after we're done here, I can give you a a bunch of names. Yeah. There's definitely. And Okay. Yeah. I I would absolutely love that because that's if you've watched the videos, our narrative is completely that's where Dan Dunbacher from the American Institute For Astronautics and Avionics.

That's where Andy Aldrin have said, what project Moon Hat has is the storyline. It is about improving life on Earth. That's the narrative. And so I'd love to speak to people who have that common bond or initiative. Yeah. The thing And that was the fact that really loved about working there was that, it was the mission. Right? That everybody, this whole group, this small group of people were committed to this mission. And, it's just it was great to be a part of it. I I've got to admit.

No. That sound that sounds exciting, and I I've never heard of it. Now this is 8 years. 8 years actively involved. You've seen all the work. You've seen what we're working on. Never heard of it. Well, you yeah. It's there. It's real. But but that's a but but take that take that from the concept of it's expanding. People are learning about it. People are knowing about it. And you're talking to a person who's involved every single day and has never heard that brought up.

So that's that's where the disconnect is. It is we want the average individual to understand that it is not space. It's not science, research, or exploration. That our lives are completely enveloped by things developed by people thought about beyond Earth. And that disconnect is still not there. So, I'd love to talk to people there. That's fantastic. I love the story. I love the background. I love the pieces. This is great.

So, let's get on to your I guess the the the first one was the definition of science and space. Is that where we are now? Yes. So Okay. There's a a few aspects of this that I think we should, talk about. And first of it is first of all, science and space has been happening for a long time. In fact, if we go back to the Apollo missions, although it was kind of an afterthought, the, first scientist to go into space and the the I think the only scientist to step onto the moon was a geologist.

And and they were Oh, okay. Make sense in as an maybe as an afterthought, but it makes sense now because that's what you want. You wanna understand it. If we're gonna utilize it for purposes of building a hut or, finding water or doing something, you have to understand what you're dealing with. And, that is an observational type of science where you gather samples and you look at them and you bring them back and you study them. But that's where it starts.

Mhmm. And science and space in many ways has been driven by NASA. Remember, they're a group of, for the most part, engineers. And a lot of the science is you go out and you observe the natural phenomena. And in the hopes, you know, as you develop it, you get better and better to the point where you're starting to observe the natural phenomena because you're going to try to utilize it. Right?

In situ resources is gonna it's you can't take everything with you when you're you go off and try to explore another planet or what have you. So, that has been the mainstay of, NASA's research program, sending these fantastical probes to Mars that are rolling around, some of which have been rolling around for years, decades even. Right? They've been there for many years, and they've got, sample takers, and they're analyzing the surface and what have you.

And, it was during the Apollo missions, and they started to think about, hey. Could we build a space station and take advantage of, a floating platform in orbit and do science experiments? And what would those experiments be? And in fact, in 1973, May of 1973, the year that Skylab was launched, they published a book. NASA published a book, and it said, this is the type of science we should be thinking about doing on our new space platform, Skylab, that is going up at that time.

And they started to look at, in the beginning, just like, you know, any science endeavor, you're really doing your own little exploration. What makes sense? How do you do it? How do you execute it? How do we observe it? And then how do we take all the data we get and turn it into knowledge that has meaning and allows us to do the next thing? Right? It's the the whole concept of you make some observations, you, put together a hypothesis, and then you test that hypothesis.

And from that cycle, you learn, and then you get better and better. And, Skylab showed us the way, but it was really in many ways, it was very, simple, and we were doing more exploration of how do you do science than really doing hardcore science. Wasn't until shuttle came around where we were doing more routine, flights, and sending up, scientists.

There were people being sent up who were, like, crystallographers, people who grow crystals for the sake of trying to grow crystals in space because they thought there would be some real advantage to doing that. It's it's funny because you you say Skylab, and I went to Skynet. Where's Skynet? What is Skynet? And then I said, oh my god. I've lost it. Terminator. That's Terminator. That's right. That's right. So Like, did they do did they do Skynet? Did they really do Skynet?

So, so, Space Shuttle took us a long way, but same with, you know, Space Shuttle, there were months in between, missions, and the missions were short. And the dream was always that you put a very large, we'll call it permanent platform, in orbit, and that was the, you know, the plan. Initially, it was a all US effort, and it ended up being extremely expensive and very difficult And it ended up being an international effort, and that turned into the International Space Station.

And going back to your point about people, like, not knowing about the Center For the Advancement of Science in Space, I would say that many people don't even know that we have a space station in orbit and that it has been up since, you know, they've been putting assembling pieces since the late 19 nineties, and it has been permanently habited since, 2000. 24 years, if there have been people in space. We have had people in space continuously for now 20 almost 24 years.

It's So so he he you you made the comment, and I'd like you to you just said it's amazing that people don't even know. Why? I don't know. But I'm gonna I'm gonna make right here with you, I'm going to Okay. Make, an I'm gonna announce that I'm one of those people. I did not even know. I'm admitting it. I I didn't even know. When when that woman called me up and said, hey. Would you like to do science in space? I said, sure. I'll I'll do science in a space shuttle.

And she's like, well, we don't we don't actually fly space shuttles anymore, but we have a space station. And I was like, oh, okay. What was that? That's 2013. So that's a good point. So so that's a great point. So let me ask you. Let's not talk about other people. I one of the best one one of the challenges of human behavior is we always try to extrapolate to other people, what other people are thinking. That's why you're talking to me. You're you're helping me understand something.

So I wanna ask you a specific question. What do you think in your lifetime, being a science person, I mean, chemistry? In order to have chemistry, you're like me because you you had biology, chemistry, physics. You had calculus. You had all these sciences in order to get a chemistry degree. I'm assuming very similar because that's what I had to do to get a biology major. My question is, why didn't you what was missing in your life? What didn't you see? Why didn't it permeate it?

Can you answer that just for I'm gonna I'm gonna would admit that the reason I did not, pay attention was because it was so out of reach. I felt. This is I'm I'm, I'm I'm ignorant at the time. I was totally it was so out of reach that it wasn't worth spending a lot of time thinking about. Right? It was it was neat. It was neat to see. Like, I would you know, they'd say, oh, the space shuttle is coming in for a landing, and we would go outside and watch.

And you could actually see it way up way up high. We're here in Indiana. It would be flying across the sky. Right? Going on its way to Florida. You you don't see it. Okay. It's coming through the atmosphere. Right? And things like that, I think, were fun and interesting, but they were so remote and being done by other people who I didn't even know. Right? I when I was a little kid, I used to send away to NASA and say, hey. Could you send me pictures?

And some nice guy at JPL would send me a bunch of pictures from Voyager or something. And that was as close as I ever got as I thought I would ever get. So when that woman called me, it was it was not even real. I thought she was having fun with me today to do. That that's brilliant. I mean, that's because what you're you've actually embedded a few things in there. You didn't know. You felt out of reach. You saw it expensive. You also didn't have an interest. You had some interest. Expensive.

You also didn't have an interest. You had some interest. Maybe I'd send me some pictures. For someone like me, it's I had no interest because I look out. I look down. I'm not a big look up to the sky person. It wasn't the math or the science. It wasn't the it's just it's the bunch of people working on something that I wasn't interested in. So you when you heard about Project Moon Hutton, because we're talking wanna find this out, it's a great conversation piece.

When you hear the video where it says, you know, baby food and the treadmills and the cordless power tool and the and the camera we have and, cloud computing and all these types of little pieces that Project Moon Hut is sharing. And we're trying to make it more normalized. When you saw it now, 8, 10 years later from the day does it now did do you now say, yeah. That's that's exactly what's supposed to be hearing. Do you say that at all to yourself? I don't say that's exactly, but it's, Okay.

It is it has, like, opened my eyes to another reality. Like, it was always there. I just didn't know. And that's I just didn't know, and that's alright. I I look at it and say, that that is okay. And at the same time, I think we miss out because you really want if you're going to do some new adventure, some new, you know, thing, you wanna have the best people you can get on your team to help you make it work. And the problem we run into is is engaging those people. It's getting to those people.

And There's a disconnect. They don't That's right. That's right. Between their everyday life. They they don't see the connection between their everyday life, and they don't see why. And we run into this all the time. I mean, it's constant is you have to describe to them your mobile phone. You checked it this morning. Right? You didn't say it was space weather. You said weather. You checked your phone today. Right? You got satellite transmission, and you got news.

You you used your camera phone yesterday, twice yesterday. Right? That's space technology. You get in a car. The tires you're using go 20% to 30% longer because of space techno. Yeah. Hey. Your grandmother survived because of a cat. Yeah. No. Dave, my my kids will never know the joy of having to print out a map so they can figure out where they're going. Right? It's it is and we Yeah. So we use it all you're absolutely right.

It's invisible, but it is a part of our of our lives, of our daily life. Maybe that's the the most powerful thing we can say about it is that although it's not maybe obvious to everybody, we're already benefiting, all of us, from doing going The way the way the the way we share it is you can't live a day on Earth today without in being influenced working on connecting with the devices, tools, technology, influences that were not created That's right. That's right. Beyond earth.

They were individuals. And by the way, those people who invented it never went up. That's right. They never went up. Only now 600 and some odd people have been up. So, therefore, you don't even it's not about going up. It's about the innovations that come out of going up. That's okay. So so there's So so, yeah, let's Definition space. So I I wanna say, while we're still talking about, this, you know, science and space and and definition space, I think we need to talk about what is real.

And I I only bring that up because of conversations I've had recently, like, with family members over the holidays and, you know, people who who kinda say, you know, did we did we really go to the moon? Right? Or Yep. Is you know, there's this whole organization of people who, talk about the world being flat. Right? The world flat.

Yeah. So I think by, some of the work that we've done by going to space, it has allowed us to look back at us, look at our you know, see ourselves and see our place in the universe and and see that the world is round. But it's the the same yeah. It's it's it's a it's a big sphere. I know. It's a shocker to some people, but it is. Okay. But, I you know, it's important to say that, yes, we did go to the moon, and it wasn't going to the moon.

You know, people said, well, you know, how is that gonna benefit us? Just going to the moon and back. But all the effort, all the technologies, the breakthroughs, it when people were told in the early sixties by their president, they were gonna go to the moon in that decade, The people who were put in charge of doing that thought it was impossible. I mean, there's they had to invent things Yeah. And do things that were not possible to be thing.

And now and then they were when we got there, we you had to answer a 100,000 questions, and they answered them. And and that 100 thousandth question was, what will it feel like when you step onto the moon? They answered them all. They did it. And through that effort, we as a people, as humanity are better. We learned. We saw things that changed the way we think about ourselves. We engaged new people, and we came out with new technologies that do benefit us all.

So it's a But but I I've got to push back. You did say this was your answer. Did we go to the moon? And your answer is the answer is yes. Have you met have you met a a purse a denier? I've I've That doesn't work. What I've met are people who who look at me and say they're just not sure. I'm not sure. Right? So I think there's and maybe that's a thing that's happening in America these days is, you don't have to be a scientist if No. It's happening. You don't have to be a scientist to question it.

I'm not so sure. And, yeah, I I see you went to school and you you learned all this stuff. And I think a lot of people don't understand, going back to that whole point of how the scientific method works. There are some things that we know and we, we with certainty because we can use it every day, and it's never failed us. But there's a lot of pieces of science where we have come up with the best theory as to why something works the way it does or how something is or what have you.

And people test those, theories constantly, and people's theories change, right, as we learn. That's part of the process. And that that going back to your you said we wanna what was the how did you say? You say what is real? I've had people say exactly the opposite of what we're saying here, that it is not real. And when you say the scientific method, well, that's a challenge because I just saw a guy who had a lot of views who said that there is absolutely no climate change. It is all the sun.

Nothing we're doing on this planet has anything to do with anything. We're all being led astray. It's the sun. And there were 7 and a half 1000 comments of people agreeing with them. And the scientific matter was tossed out the window, but there was also a lot of God in those comment in the commentary. And those are hard to fight. It's very hard to fight. So and and people can say whatever they want. Right? Right. So that's yeah.

So, I don't know if there's an answer to that, but our our challenge is to secure that box of the roof and a door on the moon. So okay. Anything else, the last moment pieces of, science and space? No. We're we're we're now I what I really wanna do is transition to why is science and space different? Like, what is what makes it special? Wait. Wait. So I'm I'm I'm gonna make a let me cut it here.

We have the Karman line, which is, you know, probably the the actual definition, a 100,000 kilometers is what it is, I think it is. I don't remember. I don't know. It's a 100000 kilometers. It's a 100 kilometers. A 100 kilometers. Right. I was the kilometers I hit that. 100 kilometers. And, people are gonna laugh at me for that. So a 100 so when you say space, some people argue, well, we're actually in low Earth orbit. We're not really in space.

So when you are using the term, you're saying anything above the Karman line are how do you do it in the I'm going to say that, science and space are, things that are happening in, low earth orbit or above. Okay. That's what I thought. That's what I So so in low earth orbit, there's a there's a range there. But for, like, the space station, you know, where we we can, use that as our, you know, our index. That's the that's the point that I'm gonna work off of. So we're talking 250 or so miles up.

And, an orbit is where it's moving laterally sideways, and it's moving fast enough that even though it's falling, it's in free fall back to the Earth. It's going laterally so fast that it just keeps on missing. So it just and that makes the orbit. That is the orbit. And there's special, properties you get from being in an orbit like that. Now there's benefits to going further out in space, and I'll I'll say a few words about that.

But, really, what I wanna talk about is what's happening in orbit because that's where we spend the bulk of our time in space. Okay. So here's for me, I just act I pulled up the project Luna classification system under the 40 year plan on the website because I wanted to get the data on it. It actually said, 200 kilometers to 2,000 kilometers Yes. Low earth orbit. And so there it's actually this is fantastic. You've got to see it.

And I just just to break, people who are listening, we are don't have our video on. So we don't see each other. We're not sharing screens. We don't we're we're we do this without it intentionally so that we don't react to people's facial expressions and movement. So I'm gonna say that you, Ken, if you did pull up Project Moon Hunt and you did go to the 40 year plan and you scroll down to the project Moon Hunt classification system, you'll see all of this outlined.

It might be useful as a tool for you when you're showing people where we work, what we do, and how we do it. Absolutely. Absolutely. So so let's go to you said the science of space, why science of space is different Yes. Or special. Okay. So, there are, of course, benefits and excitement from going to, let's say, Mars or sending probes to Jupiter and looking at the moons. I think it's it's truly fascinating, and I've always loved, like, Star Trek.

And that's, it hearkens back to all the Star Trek type of stuff. Right? Going in being a I I I I grew up in Star Trek. I mean, that's the thing is being an explorer, and it's exciting. So there, and by doing that, by going to other planets, other moons, you you see what makes our system special and what the opportunities are in the future. You know, if we do if we did go to, Mars and tried to set up camp, how what would you breathe?

There's there's very little atmosphere, and it's all carbon dioxide. So it forces you to think, well, could you set up a system that would make that livable? Could you harvest the atmosphere to make, oxygen to breathe? And if you went through that process, what would you have to bring with you to make water? Right? Those are the so and that pushes us forward. And that type of science, I find fascinating. And every chance I get to be on a project where somebody's talking about that, I do it.

At the same time, the science and space that, I focus on and for, for this discussion, I really wanted to emphasize was science being done, in low earth orbit. And for the most part, there's, like, 3 areas of that science. One is people go to space to look back down at the earth or to look out into space, but it's for perspective.

You can see things when you're off our planet that you otherwise cannot see because either the atmosphere is in the way or you just can't get the whole picture type of thing. And, for when I worked at the, US National Lab with cases, I would say, of all the things we did, that was probably 10% of the time. That's what people were trying to do is get a view back down at the earth or see things in a different way. And, those were always, very interesting and a lot of fun.

With the context, because you're say it sounds psychological when you're saying it, but I think the way you're really performing it, because we have to tie back to the sciences, you're saying looking back down on earth, for example, for topographical mapping, for the for the ocean temperatures, for the movement of migration of species, or all those type of things. We're really talking scientific, discovery.

I I would say, you know, as a caveat, the space station is not a great platform for looking back down at the earth because the way it operates, it does not, see the same thing in every orbit. The it is in a sort of a a stationary orbit where it's just going around and around and around, and underneath it, the Earth is rotating. And for that reason, there's, you know, it's it's, moved on to a new part of the Earth when you come back around.

But what, people have used it for is the development of new observational tools, which you can set up. And if you need to make an adjustment, there's an astronaut there who can just go over and make the adjustment. Whereas if you launch something on, you know, a satellite, a free flying satellite, if something didn't go right, you'd have to retrieve that satellite, and that could be very expensive and difficult.

So, Yeah. The I'd, I happen to have on the screen open from the present from the classification system. And the International Space Station and the Tiangong are both represented. They're actually moving at the same the speed that they're supposed to be around Earth. And it's interesting because I never thought about it just the way you described it.

And I've thought about it as a rotation around the Earth, and I thought about the Earth rotating, but I didn't think about the fact that you wouldn't be seeing the same thing Yeah. Over and over again. Yeah. So okay. So, we talked about the orbit. And you're you're moving and you're moving actually quite fast. They're moving about 17,500 miles per hour in that orbit.

That's how fast you have to be going at that altitude to keep from falling back down to the Earth and at the same time not spin out into space. So they're moving very fast. And what people will do is they will take, a piece of material, plastic or metal or fabric or something that they wanna study, and there's special devices that are, placed outside the space station and exposed to space. So as you're moving along, there's radiation, there's a very large temperature swing.

When you're facing the sun, it's 250 degrees. And when you're in the shade of the earth, it's minus 250 degrees. And that's happening a full a full orbit takes about 90 minutes. So you're going very hot, cold, very hot, cold, and doing that a number of times each day. In addition, the fact that you're moving so fast means that any debris or objects, anything that is falling to the earth, you are striking at about 17,500. That is much faster than a bullet.

So even very small pieces of dust can have an impact, and that's what people are studying by placing things outside. They wanna see what microparticle impacts the effect is, what the radiation or this or the temperature swings have on materials. For the most part, I'm sure people are doing it because they're trying to determine what materials they can make space suits out of or spaceships or satellites or whatever.

But in some cases, people are trying to make high performance fabrics, let's say, for, new jackets to be used on earth, and this is a way to do, interesting kind of analysis of, you know, how well they can hold up to extreme environments. Yeah. I'm I'm picturing now. I I didn't know they were putting pieces outside. I feel I I have this picture of, like, a clothing line where a guy opens the window and puts it puts it out, says, close that. It's getting cold in here.

We're getting we're losing all our oxygen. Close that. And they leave it out there, and it's flat Now there's little little swatches, little, you know, pieces maybe the size of a half dollar or a silver dollar or something. But they one of the platforms is called the MISSI platform, and, that's something that if you as a private citizen wanted to do this, there are mechanisms by which you can get that put onto the platform.

And even the, the facility, which is the Japanese laboratory, it has its own little airlock and a little robot arm on the outside, and you put your whatever you wanna put outside in the airlock, close it up. The robot will open the door from the outside and reach in and grab the thing and put it out on a porch. It's like a porch out in front of the space station and things sit out there.

You know, you wouldn't wanna sit out there, but you can put all of your plastics and fabrics or whatever and and study them. So there's a couple of different ways. Have you have you ever have you personally seen or touched or any of the materials that you have? Seen them, and I've been involved in projects where they were putting them out there, but I've never done one of those experiments myself. Never been, you know, somebody who put a piece of plastic.

You know, here's my sample and send it up and put it out there, but I know people who have, and it was a fairly routine thing to do. I I find efforts like that pretty interesting because you you learn things you don't expect. I think that's a key for me as a scientist, that's always been kind of a striking thing is that I've always been a good observation list for the science I'm doing, but also looking for things that weren't expected and and taking me down paths that, weren't planned.

I enjoy that part of science. So okay. How can you identify putting you on the spot here for the and for the for just for me, I'm just can you identify one of those material experiments that was put outside that turned into something on earth that was useful. I I'm not sure I'm I can talk about it. So I'd have to I'm gonna defer that one. I'm gonna have to Well, can can can you say you can say So do I know yes. So I know what it is.

Yes. Yes. Yes. There have been things that have been put outside where people learned things that, turned into something else, turned into something bigger. And in fact, there is was one study that was done that led to, right now, there is a partner on the space station, there is an inflatable sphere, a piece of, the station that is not made of metal. And it is, it was originally an experiment. I guess in a way it still is, will always be, but it was to see, hey.

Could we make a space station that was out of inflatable material? Because then you don't have to send up all these rigid structures. You could fold it all up like a tent, put it out there, and then just pressurize it. And part of that Right. That's what's the what's the name of what's the name of the company? They they closed. That was the, Bigelow was the the Bigelow Bigelow space. Yes. But the but they haven't used it. They've used it only for only for storage.

And there's other it doesn't have power, and there's other details that make it not fully functional. But it But it's still there. It's still there. It has the collectors that right. And it was supposed to only be up for a long time. You you can imagine that people would be nervous of having essentially a fabric. It's the only thing between them and, you know, if they're a hole, something hit it and it broke. You you depressurize that station, you could run into serious trouble very quickly.

So but but like you said, it's been up there now for a long time. They're using it for storage. And, and things like that then inform us for, hey. What about a space suit? A space suit is a flexible fabric, you know, unit. It's a spaceship. It is a little spaceship, a one person spaceship. And, the design of those and the materials that goes into those has changed over time, and we've learned from that.

You can go all the way back to the original space shoots for, Gemini through Apollo and, you know, a little company, a small company that we all know, that, you know, went into the business of making space suits. It's Playtex. The people at the time, they were making bras, and they felt that, hey. They were they felt themselves to be the best suited to build a, a fabric, a rubberized fabric. Are you making are you making a joke No. Best suited. Best suited. Yeah. It's it's good.

It's a it's good, isn't it? It's best suited. And they and they did it, and and they're still making, space suits. The, part of that organization is still involved. I've had a lot of discussions with members of our team, one in Germany, Andreas, where the the, the astronauts go out, and they wear an outfit that takes a few hours to get in and get out and be able to acclimate where the Russians have an outfit that they crawl into the back, taking half hour, and they can be out onto the outside.

So we we could we have made a lot of advancements, but there's also it's the old, you you invented a pen to go up into space, and we That's yeah. And there's you're still gonna see that. You're it you'll see that going forward, and I think there's also a lot of exchange. There's things that are invented by one group that are then translated into the other. You can even look at, toilets. Where right now, my organization, the company I work for, Redwire, is working to develop a new space toilet.

And there's a couple of versions. One that would be go to the moon, we call the lunar loo, one that is for space, which we call the cosmic mode, and some are We we gotta change those names to project something for a box to open the door, just so you know. We have to make the we have to tie it to. The interesting now here's I didn't know you don't flush on the International Space Station. And, Andreas laughed just I don't know. It was just hysterically, but he said, there's no running water.

It doesn't work that way. Yeah. A lot of it. Yes. And So you have to rethink the way that you do things, and a lot of that was rethought during Apollo. But the current, toilet slash life support system that's on station is a marvel of engineering. It's the fact that it is so compact and that it is, so robust that it has worked over time. But there are challenges with it, and NASA knows it.

They had to make some decisions that were really tough that, you know, it one of the things for recovering urine, they have to, kill all the bacteria. It it would go all over the place. So they have a a special device for capturing it, right, from the human body. Well, now you've got, female astronauts. Your crew is male and female. Yep. They had to then a whole different tool. Right? And then, when the, the urine is captured, they have to treat it.

And they had to make, a tough call on that, and they ended up using a material, chromium is the oxidant they use. You have to oxidize all the organic materials in there to carbon dioxide. That's what you're ultimately trying to turn it all into. And, chromium trioxide, you know, hexavalent chromium, that is what got, Erin Brockovich all upset. Right? That's that stuff is deadly, toxic, and it's a carcinogen. And for a long term mission, like going to Mars, it's unacceptable.

But for a space station, it was the best they could come up within that time. It works. And, so there's technology there that we have used, and and when you look at the toilets and the actual design of the toilet, it is loud. The current station toilets are loud, and they're, they don't look very, appealing. Right? They were design they are of Soviet era design, and and the US toilet was taken to a large extent based on, the Russians, and the Russians used the Soviet era design for their toilet.

So there's a lot of room. It's a very pragmatic approach. All the Is that the easy way? Is that they're just very pragmatic. It wasn't a design concept. It was it had the It's like a Soviet era office building. Right? It did the job, but you wouldn't wanna spend a lot of time in it if you didn't have to. So so, those are some of the things that come from this. The being exposed to the environment forces you to change the way you operate.

It gives you opportunities to look at new materials and, new perspective. Now the last piece of doing science in space, and the one that I would say 85% or so of all the science done in space is trying to take advantage of this, is what we find in low Earth orbit, and that is microgravity. So it's not exactly zero gravity. Microgravity is what you get when you are falling. And in a in a total free fall in a vacuum, that's what you get, and that is what the space station is in.

So although there is very, very little gravity, you would not, as a person, you would not be able to feel it. If you took a tool like a wrench and you left it hovering, you know, in front of you in microgravity, if you came back a day later, you would find that it would be in the bottom towards the Earth and in the front of that compartment. And it would slowly, very slowly get taken down to that point, but you don't feel things falling.

If if we built a, a tower with a ladder and we put on a spacesuit and we climbed up that ladder and that ladder went 250 miles up to the space station and we sat there was a seat on it, and we sat there, we would still feel 90% of the force of gravity. So, it is not just because they are up there. It is because they are in an orbit in a kind of free fall, and they're just missing as they go around. That So wait.

So if you if we were on the top of a ladder that was 250 miles up and we were sitting on it, we would still feel the solids. Feel the gravity, about 90% of it. Because because gravity is, a force between large objects, and the Earth's pull is that far. That is the gravitational force. If it ended, you know, when you got up a a certain ways, then the moon and the earth wouldn't be together. They are held together because of their combined gravitational forces. Right. That I get.

That I get, but I don't understand how I would still feel it. Like, I'd feel it on my butt because I'm sitting on a chair 250 miles up because there's that much worse. Much worse. If, yeah, if you had a 10 pound weight and you took it up there, it would feel like £9 when you were up there. But because the velocity of 175, it take removes that It's not the velocity. It's the fact that the space station and everybody in it and all the stuff on it is all falling to the Earth. It's in free fall.

Right. But you have to be staying up high enough. And the way you do that is you go yeah. You move yourself laterally. You move yourself sideways across. Right. Right. So, therefore, you're not feeling it because you're going sideways. But because you're sitting on a ladder, you would still feel it because you're not falling. Sideways. It's because you're stationary. You're not falling. Sitting That is correct. K?

Okay. So, yeah, so you you need the, it's not 175, but the 7 you need the velocity of going at a horizontal speed to be You need the velocity so that you don't hit the earth. Correct. Yeah. That's my point. Yes. Yeah. So you're not fit you're never hitting the earth no matter how hard you go. You no matter how far or continuous you go Yes. You are constantly falling. Okay. But I never thought you could feel that. In fact, we've We've never done that before.

Built a little thing like that and done that. But you that that would happen. And you you see it when, there are people who have done these extreme high altitude, parachute drops. You know, they go up in a very high, balloon that takes them into the upper parts of the stratosphere, and they just step off and they're just falling. They are just you're just falling. And the same with even bringing, a satellite or some spacecraft back down to the earth.

The way you bring them down is you turn so that your, thrusters, your nozzles are pointing in the direction you're going, and then you just apply resistance and you slow down. And as you slow down, you will start to fall. Gravity, you it will over your speed is no longer enough to keep you from falling. You'll just start to fall down, and that's how they do it. And Oh. Yeah. They just you just have to slow down. That's fascinating.

So you, yeah, you just you're you're going fast enough, so you're constantly overshooting the earth. You just turn And break and you'll fall. And and you don't even have to aim down. You are going down. Yeah. You don't have to aim down, but they do have to aim down if you don't wanna burn up. If you come in too straight, you will, it will get too hot. It will be too much. You wanna come in and use the Yes. Atmosphere to slow you as you come in.

And then as you get slower and slower, your descent starts to become straighter and straighter down, and they've worked all that. Yes. So Okay. So then as you as you start to be so you're use you're still using your thrusters to keep so that you're not in that straight That's right. Once you've slowed yourself to the right speed, they turn off the thrusters, and they just let, resistance air resistance and whatever. So okay. So we've talked about microgravity.

And, if you wanted, like, true zero g, like, you you know, without having to be in an orbit, you would literally have to be millions of miles away from the Earth. Millions of miles. It's a it would be a very long way. So we're lucky that we have this phenomena that's close because it is like a whole new science. It's in its way in a way, it is its own field of science because things happen there that we have never been able to do on earth, never been able to observe or, utilize.

For example, simple things, very simple things. As a chemist and people who've taken general chemistry probably taken the lab where they had to make little crystals and, isolate the crystals, and you grow them in your little flask and, they get bigger and bigger, and then they get to a certain size and they fall to the bottom of the flask. They're precipitating. Things are precipitating, they fall to the bottom, and then you can decant off the liquid. In space, things don't fall.

And when you microgravity, things don't fall like that. So now the crystals are in a position to continue to grow. They aren't, limited by how big they get when they fall. They just can continue to get bigger and bigger.

And because you don't have, heat doesn't rise, if you, like, light a flame on the space station, it doesn't look like what we're used to where it's blue and almost invisible right at the wick, and then it's bright yellow and then orange and red, and then there's smoke coming off the top. It does not look like that. It looks like a small blue orb, and it suffocates itself because it uses all the air right around it.

No more air is moving in like in a flame on the earth where it comes from under and up. It doesn't do that. Mhmm. So, heat doesn't rise. And for that reason, a lot of the perturbations that we see on earth, we do not see in microgravity. So the crystals are not only bigger, but they're more, perfect. They're better formed.

And, the last thing and this is kind of an odd observation that was made by, a a a chemist who had been doing protein crystal work for many years, but he did a little retrospective of people's experiences doing this type of work. And a lot of these people who were growing crystals for a specific purpose would say, oh, my crystals were bigger and better, you know, more ordered. And, by the way, all the crystals that I made were about the same size and shape.

And this person worked in the pharmaceutical industry like I do, and when you say that, it has a specific meaning. What you're saying is all the crystals are uniform. They're the same. And in the pharmaceutical industry, that is an extremely important property to have in a product that you're making. You want if you make a big batch and you're gonna take a little spoonful out to make a pill, you want that spoonful and the last spoonful and every spoonful in between to be identical.

So if you can make all the crystals the same size and shape, that's important. So that So I I I do wanna ask about Sure. 2 things. I wanna make a point and then ask something. Let me ask first. No. Let me make a point first. Okay. I did look it up. You will all it says, strictly speaking, there's gravity will always pull an object no matter how distant. Gravity is a force that obeys the inverse square law. For example, put an object twice as far away, and it will feel a quarter of the force.

Put it 4 times. So you are really talking a million Way out there. In terms of miles before. But but you're gonna be influenced by something else before you'll be influenced by the moon Yeah. Yeah. Earth. Yes. So that was one. I I just looked it up because I hadn't I hadn't heard it that way. The crystal side. We have Mearth Biotech. I think you might have heard that that they used before. And we do know Yossi, and I I'd never asked him that question, but I'd like to ask you.

He talked about or I've read about the fact that you can create this uniform crystal in an environment such as in low earth orbit, and you can put a keystone in, a holding point so it maintains its structure. How do you take that as a chemist and bring it back to earth and duplicate the same thing? Why doesn't it now have the same influence of gravity and not replicate itself? David, that is. You understand what I'm asking? A great question.

That is it's important not only because it's an interesting one. Hey, you know why? But also because if you're going to do something that's going to have economic value, especially in the near term, then the logistics of trying to take tons of material into space and make crystals and bring it back, it's just it's not practical. It's it's impractical. Yeah. It's ridiculous.

It's, yeah, it's it's not it's one of the challenges of beyond Earth is it's financially impractical to do a lot of the things that we expect to do. So, yeah, I'm I'm gonna do this. So I'm gonna explain. So and and, and when we're done explaining this, I'm gonna talk about, some of the practical aspects of trying to do these types of things. And we've just I think the the practical economics, we'll say. Okay. So okay. So so how does that work?

So, as a young chemist, I was always taught this concept of seeding a reaction or seeding a, a crystal, a batch of crystals. So what you do is you take a a one small seed or a few seeds, and you put them into the solution as your this the solution you're making or developing is getting to the point where it's going material's gonna start crystallizing out. And what will happen is Yep. The new crystals formed will use the the crystals you put in there as a template. That is the concept.

And they will see the structure, and they will grow new crystals like it. Now it seems kind of far fetched, but in fact, the pharmaceutical industry and other associated industries like agriculture and cosmetics and food industry have used this concept for many years. And what they will do is they will find a crystal form. So, a single thing let's say water, for example.

Water ice that we know, ice is the only form of frozen water that exists, in an area where we can see it, on the Earth in our atmosphere. So when you go and you look at, you know, ice out in a lake, even a snowflake, if you looked at them at their molecular structure, you'd see that the order, the way they're all these, h two o molecules are stacked on one another, holds true in the same way. And that gives it certain properties which are interesting. For example, it's You mean you mean uniform?

Uniform, and it is the same crystal form, the same crystal lattice structure for ice, no matter where you go on Earth, is going to look like that. Yes. Really? Really? So when so when I have looked at ice, and there's happens to be a a little thing that forms ice outside of our window when I'm eating lunch. And I always look at and say, well, that's gotta be different than the ice on the lake because it looks different.

It's it's cloudier, and and it's probably just pulling up the properties from It's sitting in yeah. There might be minerals in it. There might be oxygen in it. You might see little bubbles. Right? But the ice itself Yes. Is the same structure, and that structure is odd in that if you looked at it, there are little tubes, little openings in the lattice, and there is nothing in those little openings. There are empty space between the molecules.

And because of that, water is slightly larger when it's frozen. It's about, 10% bigger, 9 or 10% bigger when it's frozen, and that's why it expands. K? Now there are Because because of the space. Little spaces. Yes. Now there are ways to make other forms of ice. And, there is a form of ice that is found very, very high up in the Earth's atmosphere, but it would not it is not formed on Earth.

And then I think there's about 13 other forms of ice that have all been made in a special device where you put the water under an immense amount of pressure and then freeze it. So it can't expand. But they're always however or but or whatever whatever word do we need to use here. It's still uniform because of ice. No. In all of those other forms, the crystal structure is is different than the one we see. Yeah. But but what I mean is you have the, ice version 1 Yes. Is uniform.

Yes. The one that we see. Ice version 2, 3, 4 are all uniform to themselves, which is contradictory to other types of molecular structures that are created such as in pharmaceuticals or they can create that. So ice tends to have a property in the form of Yes. Is that what you're saying? So, yeah. And they're all unique and they are so the same thing can be done with pharmaceuticals.

A pharmaceutical can come in several different forms, and there's some famous examples where that has been a problem. One of them is ritonavir, which is, one of the first products that was produced for HIV, back in the eighties by Abbott Labs. And, they made the material. They it went through clinical trials. It worked. They made pills out of it. They put the pills in, like, little gel caplets, were put on pharmacist shelves and people could come and buy it and what have you. It was prescribed.

But what the pharmacist started to see was within those caplets, crystals were forming. And, Abbott had to pull it from the market Yeah. Had to figure out what's going on. What they found was the original crystal that they made was the fastest crystal to form. It was the first crystal to form, and that's what they went with. But what was happening in those caplets was a more stable crystal, One that was of lower energy Yeah. It it was evolving It was in yes.

So what It was evolving because it hadn't It hadn't yeah. It hadn't had a chance. They had they they had taken the original. They thought they had it still not done. It was still not done. Okay. So Yep. What a pharmaceutical company wants to do is find the a a best, and I'm put that in quotes, a best form. And the best form may there might be, for different purposes, different forms that are best. Maybe you want one for a oral tablet, and that is a certain form.

But maybe there's another for a gel caplet or liquid or, an injectable or something that you want a different form. By going into space, we have the ability to make different forms. But it goes back to your point. What do you do? Are you gonna take a a, you know, a truckload of stuff in his face that would be cost prohibitive? And and maybe just from a standpoint, technically impossible at this point. So what you do is you take one crystal, you bring it down, and you use it as a template.

And in the pharmaceutical industry, they'll do that. They'll make get to a form that they like. And then when they make the next batch, they will take half, maybe 40 or 50% of the current batch with the correct form and dump it in to dominate the architecture of the next set of crystals. And they'll do that again and again so that they know they're getting the same form every time. So so I I I get that con well, I get the concept more. Mine is kind of in the middle.

It is that you create in a microgravity environment, you create a structure. That structure, in order to form in my head, sorry, it needed the microgravity to be able to fulfill its replication or its its structure, properties. That piece when brought down why this could be just a question of the way the the universe works. Why does it not fall apart because it's duplicating something that was made in an environment that doesn't exist?

Yes. I know exactly what you're saying, and you're asking the right question. You're asking the right question. So the first is Okay. I don't know. K? I don't and I don't know if anybody really understands what is happening there. But, for growing crystals, you could say the same if you made a crystal once. How does that impart its structure onto the next? And I'm not sure people know. All they but they're they're Okay. So Yeah. Two questions. We have the 1 we have the general one.

We don't even know how it works on Earth. And so now we're making complexity. We're creating a molecule in a space in an environment that we don't even know how it's actually operating, but we do know the microgravity influences it and then bringing it down and saying That's right. We don't know how the foresight. Now I'm at now here's the second part of it, and this is it might be troubling for people, but you but bear with me.

So, so that one individual who saw that you make more uniform crystals, he said, well, my own company has a compound that has a problem with its crystal form. And the problem that they had was it didn't make a single form. Whenever they would crystallize it, it would make, more than one crystal in a certain mixture, like a a 3 we'll say a 3 to 2 mixture of 2 crystals. And it was going to be dosed as an as a solid as there it's a crystalline suspension that is delivered to patients.

So, he said, well, I wonder if I take it to space, will I make a single crystal? Will I make a uniform single crystal like we've seen in all these other examples? So they took some of that material, took it to space, and they not only made a single crystal, but it was a crystal they had never seen before. So it was a unique crystal, and it was a single crystal. So that's half of it. Now we're getting to your part, which is, well, when you bring it down, to what do you make?

So we brought it down, and they did not describe in true detail. All they said is they were able to translate that and to make new crystals on the ground. So it it brings up the question, did they make the same crystal they made in space, or did they make yet us another crystal? And the key there is for me as a pharmaceutical representative, as a chemist in pharmaceutical industry, I really don't care. I'm not trying to necessarily make something better.

I want something different than it is there, and then I can find the utility of that difference, of the you use the benefit. Yeah. It's that's true. You do it doesn't it doesn't matter. It works. But it's just a it's it's like, how? How? What what makes there's the, there's one tool that we created in I shared with you paid to think. There's one tool that's in there called redefining.

It's how to always come up with a solution better than you will ever come up with no matter what you're working on, Every single time. I mean, it's without fail, someone will always improve the condition that they create. And we've done it over and over and over again. So but when we were creating it, one individual turned to me and said we we were 2 of us in this room. And he said, well, you need to do, what he asked the question why. And my immediate reaction was, why does it matter?

And he looked at me shocked. And I said, because it doesn't matter. That's not the question we're asking. And it wasn't it was a we'd worked on it for 3 years. That was a turning point. I remember I was standing in the corner because we were going we had 13 pages going around the walls and why didn't matter. And you've more or less said, I don't care. I can take a crystal. I can make it. I can bring it down. It works. Let's figure out why the universe works another time.

Yes. And I think that is how we learn. Right? When we see it and we see that it works, we say, well, then it's this is because of this. Whatever. We throw out the the hypothesis. And then if that's the case, we'll then test the hypothesis. And you're not you don't prove hypotheses as much as you find data that supports them. And you use them. If the hypothesis worked and you do it a bunch of times, well, then you can use that to make inferences.

Well, if all those worked, well, then this should work. We should be able to do this now. And you that's another way of testing it, but it's how we move forward. That's how we push the science forward. Yeah. It's, yes. It's letting go of that one piece of it doesn't doesn't you don't have to know why it happened. You just know that it does work, and then we can use it. We figure that out later. So That's fast.

Okay. So we've talked about microgravity, and, there's a lot of uses where I talked about crystals, but, plants, express different genes. So they have the same genetic code. Right? The plant's genetic code is the same, but how the genes are expressed as proteins and what the plants turn into changes. And by putting them in microgravity, you can see things that you would never see on earth. And people who study plants learn from that. So that's as Wait. Wait.

Wait. Wait. You you just you just, like, whoosh, right by there. You were going more than 175. Okay. You said plants express different genes. So when a plant is put into microgravity, it acts, behaves, reproduces, whatever, differently. You end up with different ways. That looks different. For example, in microgravity Look look but it it it looks different because of microgravity. But is it is it gen is it different, on the molecular level? It is. Its DNA is the same.

Because But d the way, your, your genetics, your the the DNA code in different parts of your body are expressed in different ways, and then that leads to proteins and structures that have different functions. And in plants, what you see is, well, you don't need a really strong stem. So their stems tend to be, less structurally rigid and longer because all they're trying to do is reach to the light.

So they their genetics, their DNA is the same, but the way they express them and the things, the structures, and their activities are different. So you're using the word structure, but you're not using the structure as related to the plants' growth phases because it doesn't Yeah. It's macro structure. But you're not saying okay. You are use when I heard the word structure, I was going to the crystals and the development of how it forms.

But what you might be saying at the same time is because it's now in a different environment, the DNA is expressing itself differently because it doesn't need to act on those, instructions. It has other environmental pressures that are cut that's right. So Correct. And you and this is something that people who study plants, you might see, things expressed that you didn't even know were in that plant hidden. Right? Because they aren't used. Right? So Right.

There it's just That's exactly what I was saying. And so it's it's it's forming. It's allowing it to express itself completely in a different way, which is, again, fascinating that it allows. But I wonder because we do talk about we we had some we've had some people on humans in space, and we do have challenges because we don't know how certain things will react, such as the birth of a child if you were on the moon, if the cells will split the same way as they would on Earth.

And we know there's changes in people's physiology. Right? Their bones right? Since they don't have gravity, their bones start to, they have osteoporosis, essentially. Their bones start to degrade. Their muscles start to, degrade because they're they're not having to fight gravity all the time. So we know there are changes. And and and that is where what exercise piece of equipment was formed was created? Which I don't know. The elliptical. There you go.

The elliptical the running running was one of the ways in which the crate bone density, and that became a whole industry of sports. It helped to accelerate that entire ecosystem. They go back to 9 to those time frame. You don't think there wasn't the gym. There weren't the gyms the same way we have today. It was a lot of muscle building And then the ellipticals and the all of these trainers came out of it. So it's impacted people who get on a treadmill every day.

So, yeah, the the muscle degradation. And there's also radiation. Challenges that Over time. So so there's a lot of, challenges that are that we find changes, we'll say, that occur when we go to space micro in microgravity and low earth orbit, and other challenges, radiation, and what have you as you start to go beyond, Earth's atmosphere and the electromagnetic shield.

But a lot of the things that for me are most fundamental and most interesting are simple things just like the behavior of water. And if you get a chance, Scott Kelly did a great little video where he stuck, put some, made a little ball of water, which was held sort of in, the middle of the compartment that he was in on space station, and he put some food dye in there to make it change color. And then he stuck an alka seltzer in it.

And if you run that same example on the Earth, of course, you have to run it in a cup, a little plastic cup or something, and you put it in. You put out alka seltzer, and we've seen it right there. Bubbles form millions of little bubbles and little pieces of particles coming out of there and stuffs fizzing out. And when he did it, you can see some particles coming off and fizzing.

But instead of making millions upon millions of little bubbles, you really just make 3 large bubbles, and they don't go away. They just roll around. There's nothing pushing them out. There's nothing driving them to the surface. Like on Earth, the gravity is pulling the water down, and it's much more dense than the air, so the air gets popped out the top. But, when you do that in space, all of a sudden, gravity is removed. So now it is all adhesion and cohesion of the water to itself.

But is it always thorough? Every example I've seen, I've only seen, I think, three times is done. It ends up being 3 large bubbles, which is inter I do not have wonder if it's the the the the volume of the the size of the Alka Seltzer tablet or how much is put into the volume of the water, but it yeah. It could be a combination of the interesting. By the way, if you're next time you speak to Kelly Yeah. Tell him he's gotta do podcast. No. Seriously. Just tell him he's gotta do podcast.

Okay. So what else do we have? We've we've talked about Science and Space, and and now what I wanted to do was talk about, the players and what's happening. Because we you you and I talked about the fact that, things changed, that there was kind of an inflection point, but it continues. And other people have gotten involved. And in some ways, it is driving the whole program forward. It's although things are, I still think, in many ways, dependent upon NASA and the direction it takes.

There are other people who are making, influencing the decisions in in influencing the outcomes and stepping up and saying, hey. I wanna do this or I wanna be a part of that. I'd love to hear your perspective about my own. So some of the big players for, things that are happening, we've talked about Elon Musk and SpaceX. They're they're a huge player. They have a commercial program that, I think is making money. They've got plans to go out and do other things.

And some of the innovations that they have made, technical and, logistical and what have you, are so big that, no one can match them at this point. There is no not even there are governments that cannot match what they're doing. And it is, I think in many ways the beacon that people are moving towards. In fact, I was at a conference, and someone gave a presentation on what they were doing, and then someone in the audience just asked them.

It looks like you are trying to get to the point where SpaceX was 5 years ago. And the guys the guys said, yeah. That's where that's the best we can do. So that is happening.

At the same time, there are other people so that's Elon Musk and and, Blue Origin, and I would kind of, hearken him to someone like Cornelius Vanderbilt who, during the California Gold Rush, was shuttling people and materiel to Panama, and or to Nicaragua, and then they would go across and then he would pick them up on another boat and take them up to California. Elon Musk is is doing that type of thing. He's like the modern day Cornelius Vanderbilt, shuttling people and material into space.

Blue Origin, which is, Jeff Bezos's company, is in many ways Yep. Are trying to do some of the same things, but they've got their own plan, and they're doing their own things. Right? They're big into, lunar, trying to get involved in the lunar, lander program. They're taking people to, sub war into suborbital rides, which are just a few minutes. And, that is a major operation.

It's hard to describe it when but I've been you go down to the Kennedy Space Center, and right near the entrance to the Kennedy Space Center visitor center is the Blue Origin facility, and it is just a massive facility. Just amazing what they've done. And the parking lot is not just full. There are employees having to park out in the grass because there's just not enough parking area. So lots of people, a big program, and they've got facilities, of course, up in the Seattle area.

And, but he's driving that. And and note with those two individuals, you know, they've got money. They've got a lot of money. So they can make calls on their own. These aren't decisions that have to go to congress or have to go to, some committee. If they wanna do something, they're gonna go do it. It's a a radical departure. It's almost like the, it's like the, the James Bond bad guy. Right? Goldfinger or whatever.

But now they're trying to to do things that are based on their own dreams and their visions as well as be aligned with what NASA's mission is. Of course, they want to take advantage of that money too. There's other corporations like Sierra Space that is building a, a plane. It's a it's like a a small space shuttle.

It goes up on a SpaceX rocket, but then can maneuver itself into position, dock to the space station, and then you can load it up with people or materiel and drop it out of orbit, and it will land like a plane on a commercial runway. So you could land anywhere in America if you wanted with this thing. Is isn't Sierra doing it with that? Sierra Space is doing that program is pretty much theirs. Yeah. They are, working on other things too.

They're trying to make a small space station that is independent. That was the That's the Dream Chaser is the space plane, we'll call it. But they're also something called the Unity Platform, or the LifeHab. It's a a small inflatable space station that they're gonna put up in space for commercial purposes where people can if you wanna run a bunch of experiments or make something, you can put it into this thing, and it's, a commercial platform. And NASA has been encouraging this. They have money.

They put money out, and they are trying to get, corporations to come together and come up with a space platform that is only partially paid for by NASA, by taxpayer dollars, with the rest of it coming from investment and people believing that they can run a business and make money off that effort. So there's a couple of, organizations that are, trying to figure that out too. Blue Origin of is, one of them.

With, Blue Origin NC airspace are coming together for their space station, which is called the Orbital Reef. So so Yep. So that's all happening. And, that's what they would call that the commercial LEO destination program or the the CLD program. At the same time, NASA is driving pretty much everything. They're the ones that are, putting money out there to encourage those types of efforts. They're still exploring the universe, sending probes out into the universe.

They, we were we participated in the DART mission, which was to fire a satellite at a very high speed at an asteroid to see if we could redirect it, right, to move an asteroid out of its path from hitting the Earth. And so they're doing those types of missions, which I think are things that if you didn't have a government agency doing it, nobody would do it. Because there's you're not gonna make money. There's you're not, you know, striving to make a lot of money out of it.

But at the same time, it takes us all forward and is perhaps necessary that we do, you know, defense of the earth, for example. All of that is happening.

And now what we're starting to see is schools, communities like local governments, state governments starting to say, well, well, we want to build a science and technology program to develop in our own state, and we can use NASA so we can leverage NASA dollars, leverage the excitement that comes from doing work in space, and at the same time, through these educational programs, deliver more educated, scientifically, technically engineering based students into our own community and at the same time build jobs so they'll stay here locally.

So you see, there was a big announcement, that Berkeley set up something with NASA, a $1,000,000,000 program out of the AIMS, pro, effort, in Northern California. Texas and Texas A&M have a $750,000,000 program directed at doing space related work. And I think you're gonna start to see this happening, across America. It's almost, going back to the Apollo days where businesses all over America contributed. Businesses all over America are still contributing to the space program.

I think that part is kind of invisible, but now it's starting to become more entrenched and more, collaborative with local universities and with local and state governments. That's that is an exciting thing to be a part of, to see that happen because you you can tell there's momentum building. People are getting engaged, and it can only be for the better for America as far as I'm concerned.

At the same time, you still have some of the other, big players like Japan, Russia, and Roskamos, and, the European Union with, the European Space Agency, Canada. They're still engaged, and they're doing their own things. And at the same time, other countries that were not what we would think of as mainstream players in space, like Thailand or the UAE or Israel, they have their own programs, and there are ways for them to engage.

Maybe they don't build a full space station, but they commit to building a, airlock and a piece of one. But before that, they then can send their astronauts up, and they can participate. Right? And for some of these things, like for our toilet, we kinda look at it. Hey. If you come up with a really good design for toilet, anytime you send people in the space, you're gonna have to send a toilet.

That's those are that's a mission critical function, and that's a piece of business you could own forever if you were really good at it. Right? The the the Chinese Space Agency has brought on many alliances recently to help them in their efforts. So, yes, there are a a lot of different activities going on. Yes. And that's another way that it's happening.

As you see, you know, as the Japanese are kind of worried about what happens when the space station comes to end of life in 2030 or 2035, whenever it is. They wanna know that there's a place for them. Love it. Well, I moved to that again. Yeah. I yeah. If I if I worked for Boeing, that's exactly what I would be doing. Right? I think Boeing Just add yeah. 5 what's 5 years? To 5 years. Yeah. What's 5 years?

Because you've got several projects that are going on simultaneously from ACCENTSPACE, from VAST, from the STAR Lab. All of those are are trying to compete for that positioning. There's an economic challenge with how do you make those work financially. You're you're absolutely right. Yes. So there's all those other little players. A lot of, you know, dotcom billionaires who are stepping up and, you know, starting their own small space ship.

Yeah. They the one of the one of the founders of Ripple started a company. They have about 200 employees today. So when you and I one of the things we did talk about before, and I want your take on it now that you've brought all of this up, is we talk about astrobotics and the the failure of the ability for them to drop the lander on the moon. I'd love your take because you just gave all the positive sides of things moving forward.

But there is discussion because NASA did move their launch date out a year, 25 to 26. And some people argue that's great. They're they're doing things right. But other people are saying, no. They've been doing it wrong for quite some time. Now you've got the astrobotics, failure. We've had Firefly have some misses. How do you take that side of the equation when it comes to risk?

And we will be having, by the way, we will have on our podcast a one of the largest space insurance companies companies that do space insurance on our podcast. So we will talk about that another time. But what do you when you take you're adding a lot of risk when you have these You are. You're taking on a lot of risk. First of all, doing work in space is extremely difficult, and I know that SpaceX makes it look routine. That is an extreme achievement in itself.

The fact that they have done that is just, for me, is mind boggling, I think, for a lot of people. But if you go back to the beginning, even for SpaceX, there were failures. There were a lot of failures. They came, you know, very close to just calling it quits. And, we have to understand that that is part of the situation. For me, whether it's, Astrobotic or VARDA is another one. They're a free flyer that, is trying to do things that are similar to some of the things that we're trying to do.

They were unable to bring their, spacecraft back. And for me, even for someone who is a competitor to my organization, that is a loss. We want people to be successful. We will all benefit. Right? What is it To win. Yes. A rising tide raises all ships. Right? And we're we look at it that way. We want these people to be successful. So for the astrobotics thing, it's actually, I think, very unfortunate and disappointing. At the same time, it is really difficult.

The achievements that were made by going to the moon in the sixties early seventies, you you don't understand how what an amazing achievement it was until you find It's so but you you're you're you're stepping around. You're out of your pitter pattering around. There's expression for it. In the 9 19 sixties, we 19 seventies, we went to the moon multiple times. We were able to do it. That one that when the Indian Space Agency, was trying to land, it didn't happen.

When, astrobotics doesn't happen. And why is a really interesting question for a lot of individuals. If we had done it before and we were able to do it many times, why can't we do it today with more technology, more advancements? But before you answer that, because I'd like to, you I love you use the word space is difficult because space is not hard. Earth is hard. Space is harsh. It's a difficult environment.

But all the challenges that Astrobotic faced were challenges they faced on the thinking on earth. It was capital. It was materials. It was time. It was policy. It was process. It was all of those things. We have a deep gravity well. What makes space hard is that you have to do it all on earth, and then you apply it out there, which is a hard to imagine. Environment. So that's kind of the way we say it. So I love that use word difficult.

So what do you think about all of these organizations that 50 years ago, we did it? Why? I I'm Yeah. So, I again, I think what we did 50 years ago was an amazing achievement. And the fact that it all work that it worked, yeah, I this is really remarkable. At the same time, it the same challenges are there. And some you know, in the case of the AstroBot, all it takes is one thing, one seemingly insignificant thing to fail, and Yeah. That takes down the whole the whole program.

But you've you've you've probably been with the Smithsonian. There's a Smithsonian exhibit for space. You've probably seen these things. What they put up there is the equivalent of a what do you call it? You have a car, and if someone was next to you in Yes. A go kart, they when you look at it, you say, oh my god. It's a go kart. This is like a go kart. My car is better than this. And where's the disconnect? How did the go kart make it and not the Ferrari? Yeah. And I love Ferrari.

So I'll I'll Yeah. But for yeah. I'm not I'm not And you're not saying the Ferrari's breakdown? Bad or good. We're not saying that. No. No. No. No. Actually, I've worked with Ferrari. I've raced Ferraris in New Zealand. Unbelievable company. Unbelievable cars. I I love them. They're they are my favorite brand. That said But for sometimes Let's sometimes back over to making a go kart run and work is simpler, and and we're adding certain complexities. Right? So Yeah. I don't know.

It's a very tough it's a very tough thing thing to to say, and I think they're still trying to figure out what went wrong. But as a scientist, the I'm kind of I expect things to fail, and I learned from that. Right? You learn from iteration. And, I think for Astrobotic, I'm worried because I'm afraid they won't be able to iterate. They've done this. They they flew it. It didn't work. They it's a huge challenge for them. Challenge for them. And then what did they get?

A 130,000,000 or something was part of the one day? So 160,000,000 or something? Going to go back and look at it? Because part of this experiment is not just launching the rocket. It's the process and the, infrastructure and the approach of having a small independent company try to do this for you. And that's something that's gonna have to be, reviewed and looked at. I don't know if it's the small independent company.

I there's got to be another fly in the ointment that's not working because we're having multiple failures in different places. And are we not sharing the right information with one another? Have you ever heard the concept stone soup? The there's a parable called stone soup. It's, 22 individuals go into a village. They have no food, no money. Guy walks up to a door, knocks on it, and says, can you give me a pot? I wanna make some stone soup. The woman says, stone soup? He says, yeah.

Just need a pot. So she said, I gotta see this. Gives him a pot. He puts some water in it, put some rocks in it, and then he's testing. And everybody in the neighborhood's coming around saying, what's what is this? What are they doing? And he says he tastes it and everything. How is it? He says, probably a little bit of salt. And the guy says, I got some salt. And they put a little salt in and he tastes. This is a lot better, but maybe some carrots. Says woman, I've got some carrots.

She runs back, bring back some carrots. Maybe potatoes would help. And next thing you know, everybody's contributing to the soup and the soup works. What happened? Are are we too disconnected? Are we really trying to be so involved in making commercial application? Are we so interested in going to the moon? Yeah. There's something that multiple times we were able to go to the moon with go karts. And for the explanation, we went all the way back to deniers. Is how did we go back then?

I would I would I would layer one more thing on there that, you you you you talked about the commercial, and we're kind of not networked. Right? We're trying to do things on these individual little setups. I would also say that the amount of, resources that were applied you know, during the Apollo missions, we were, on an annual basis, probably almost 2% of the gross domestic product was going into Apollo and the NASA program. So But we have all those lessons. Right? We have all those lessons.

But a lot of the challenges, even though you know, hey. We've learned this. When you go to apply it, there are still problems that arise even though you know it's there. You know, experiments, you you know, the things that you know doesn't mean that you've solved it all completely.

We're we're trying to do some experiments right now, and, we're running into a challenge where we're using all the hardware works, all the pieces work, but we're starting to see that when it's all put together, there are, because it's a complex system, there are conflicts that weren't anticipated. Right? And it's causing us to okay. We gotta step back and redo this. That's an easy thing to do if you can retrieve it and just make the changes, whatever.

But in the case like Astrobotic, yeah, they found a problem. There was a conflict or an issue, but it's a huge expensive experiment. But and that's where Earth is hard because it actually happened on Earth. It was the design. It was the lack of anticipation of that happening, not having 2 different fuel capabilities because they ran maybe it was by separation or partition, but it was an earth challenge. What did we miss down here that didn't allow it to to work up there?

But there's a the Well It baffles me. It actually baffles me this whole thing that we I I went to the, the Washington DC. I went to the Smithsonian to look at these things. I remember coming back and saying, oh my god. I mean, the the walls of the rocket were There's nothing special. There was nothing. There's No. There's some there's there's a great video, of a astronaut on the moon next to his lunar lander. This is one of the later missions.

And you're watching the video, and you see him yanking on the side of the lander. It is the funniest thing because it's like, what is that guy doing? He's just yank he's yanking again and again, and what he was trying to do was pull his foldable all wheel drive electric car out of the side. It's it's stuck in a little compartment folded up. You have to pull it out and unfold this little electric car. Right?

And it's just the funniest thing to and you see how basic and fundamental, but at the same time, the only working all wheel drive foldable electric cars we ever made are still on the moon. Right? It's a crazy thing. So there were achievements. I've you know, we're talking about what didn't work. Hey. You know, Apollo 13 had its challenges. Right? There were things that didn't always work. Yep. So I think that's part of it.

At the same time, going back to your point about making mistakes on the ground, we, don't always have all the information, or we're not always able to put it all together. And back at the Smithsonian, there were and I probably still have them displayed. There were, 2 Coke it was a Coke can and a Pepsi can that were designed with a special top to be used by astronauts in space so that they would be able to partake in having a Coke and a smile or have a cold Pepsi while they're in space.

And it was, you know, a big deal, and they both had advertising programs based on this. It was fantastic until the astronauts actually tried to drink the Coke and the Pepsi. And then and the problem is on earth going back to our discussions about why science is different. On earth, the contents of your stomach are all held down, and any gas that is evolved comes up and you burp it out. But in space, the contents of your stomach are a gumble. It's space it's spacey.

So you drink that, and when you have to burp, everything comes out. So and now so yeah. Well, you're not in the suit. Now think about it. You would think that everybody would know that, that this would be expected and we should've but they didn't. They did not consider that until they did it, and we learned from it. So when you go to space now, they're not drinking Coke and Pepsi. Right? They're drinking a lot of coffee. Yeah. I I yeah.

You know what when you know any of your pen and you're kinda turning it up and over and over and over and you're flipping it because you're trying to get some your mind around something else. My head is turned sideways, and I'm saying to myself, there's something missing. There's just something missing. And I don't I I I'm I've got my own thoughts, so we're not gonna go into all of them. But there's just, if we've done it before, we do know about the Coke bottle. We do know about microgravity.

We do know about all the micrometeorites. We do know we have Whipple Shields today. We have 3 d printing technology to reduce weight. We have different engines we could use. There's just if someone was to travel forward in time from 19, 69 and to today, they'd say, oh my god. You guys must have Look at your computers. Look at your all these materials and yeah. Yeah. Look look at what you've got. I mean, I've never seen a car like that. I've never seen what are you holding in your hand?

Oh, we can communicate with everybody. Actually, our kids don't knock on the front door anymore. They call each other from outside. And you say, really? Like, how does the signal get there? Oh, there's things in orbit that we communicate with, these satellites, and we have ground systems and book. And they say, so where are you? Are are you on have you gone to Venus yet? Have you gone to Mars? Have you gone to and they said, no. No. No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. You guys are the last ones there. So, again, just a it's a baffling question. So let's get goal of science and space. So And and we've kind of alluded to this, in our conversation, but, ultimately, the goals of science and space are, you know, to learn about what's happening in space and to bring that learning back.

But for me, the real the real goal is to find benefits that we can bring back down to the people on earth, whether that's a perspective of how we look at our Earth or if it is actually crystals for the pharmaceutical industry. You you had mentioned early in the conversation about the, BFF, the biofabrication facility that my organization has built and is operating on the space station. And, just last year, we, printed a meniscus for Uniform Services University.

It was made of, stem cells and matrix, and it is a meniscus. Right now, if you tear your meniscus, you don't get an implant or whatever. You just let it heal with scar tissue, and you go on with your life. It's never the same. Yeah. But if there was a way that we could actually make a meniscus and using your own stem cells, that would have a potential huge benefit to people and their ability to function over their their lifespan. And there's other tissues.

We're right now in the process of printing cardiac tissue where hope hopefully, ultimately, we'd love to print something like a heart. But at this point, we're just trying to print a very small heart patch so that somebody who maybe had damaged part of their heart tissue with a heart attack or what have you, that we could come in and have a vascularized piece of heart tissue again with their own cells so there would not be a rejection. It would be their own body part that we've just been made.

And what going to space allows us to do is to print things in 3 dimensions without having to build it around some architecture. Every you can stack things up that normally on earth would just puddle out. And if we take them, we print them into the right right size and shape and what have you and put it in an incubator, we find that it sort of gels, almost like gelatin.

It will get to a point where it's firm enough to be able to survive reentry and exposure to the one g environment terrestrially and that it could be used. And, initially, we're just looking at ways to develop models for the pharmaceutical industry or for somebody to use for testing. But, ultimately, we believe that there's a a future where tissue therapy and organ therapy, replaces or at least subsidizes the current, therapies using organ donation or what have you.

So, that is the goal of what we're doing at SAIS is to do things that will benefit people. And I believe if we do things that are important enough, it will work out from an economic standpoint, right, that there will be value in it. And it goes back to something we talked about earlier, which was that, you you can't take tons and tons of material in space. So you have to think about not just the value of the thing you're doing, but the amount of mass it's going to take for you to deliver it.

So things like, crystals, seed crystals, all I need is a thimbleful, and they can have a huge value. You know, there's pharmaceutical products that are worth 1,000,000,000 of dollars a year. And we also look at things like, tissue therapy and organ donation therapy as being having a huge value, both financially, but also benefit to humanity. So those are the types of things we look at, and I think that is the the vision, the goal for science and space.

Because if you do this right, it will work financially and will provide the benefit to humanity that we need. So that's your perception of the directive of what the purpose is. And it's a healthy one. I I I associate with that. From 8 years of doing this, I would not, I would say that the majority of people that I've worked with in Beyond Earth, it is not that. The that the goal is not that or that we have not achieved that? What do you think is The goal is not that.

It's going to distant galaxies. It's going beyond Earth. It's exploring. It's that's where it's always science research and exploration. It's it's about reaching out to the stars and and being able to be a multidisciplinary, a multiplanetary species and saving the human species. You've heard that phrase from someone a lot. You know, so that we have a duplicate version of ourselves because we're gonna destroy ourselves. And it's it it's not that narrative.

And often, it is economics, wanna make a lot of money? You if you listen, we have 60 some odd podcasts now, something in that range. I don't know the exact number. You will hear that the majority of them, that that tonal is not it doesn't come through. And the absence of saying it means it's not a focus. So you could say, well, no, no, that's what they were thinking. But the absence of not putting it in or saying it is also saying it.

And you have articulated from the beginning that your interest is that even the work that you've done at that organization was to make sure that the innovations turn back on Earth. And for us, it's improved life on Earth for all species, is that those innovations happen. So I'm questioning why do you you said it that way. Is that your interpretation of the majority of people you knew? So I'm gonna I'll, I've got a couple of things here.

So first of all, I think you're right that a mo majority of people look at it from the standpoint of, like, the Star Trek. We're going to explore the universe. That's and they're they're, that's kind of the vision. The whole how do we generate value is kind of secondary. And in a lot of ways, that's because it is not straight forward. It is very difficult, and it's never really been done. There's only a few things that have been made in space Mhmm.

That were done for a purpose that had benefit on Earth. In fact, I've got one of them right here in my office, and it was it's a it's in a plaque, and it says, made in space aboard Space Shuttle Challenger, and it was done back in the early eighties, 83 or so. And it is these tiny plastic spheres that were created, as a way, for, like, NIST or one of the government agencies to use, as a model for perfect spherical objects.

This is how up these are perfectly spherical because they did not they they were made without the influence of gravity. So there's very few things, and it's very hard for people to get around that. And what you what we find for the most part are companies coming to us who have generated small, free flying, little laboratories, or they're going to, coming to us saying, hey. We're willing to sell you space so you can do whatever you wanna do. And that's what you see.

That's the traditional Yeah. Hey. If you looked at all of the, space, industry, the aerospace industry, worldwide, 95% of everybody is all working to make satellites that are either for communications or observation or for someone like me to come and utilize. That's the easy thing to do. Put something on a rocket, launch it into orbit, and get paid to do that. And, there's value in that. The problem is we need to figure out how to generate value. Otherwise, we can't pay them for the ride.

So there's, so when I talk about the, the where like, what the real value is and where it's going, we're trying to get to the point where the things that Elon Musk has done very well, sending supplies to space station, are paid for by someone other than the, taxpayers. Because, ultimately, there's gonna be a point where the American taxpayer is gonna continue to make, trade offs. Hey. You know, are we willing to spend, another $20,000,000,000 when we could spend that on some other thing?

And, I think the big push on the NASA side, at least in part, is to say, what are those things that we that we can generate value doing and offload some of those costs? Not just for their purposes, you know, so they can offload cost, but also in a way so they can redeploy their own funds to go to Mars. Right now, they're spending, you know, a 1,000,000,000 plus dollars a year just to keep the space station in orbit functional and operational.

They would love to have some of that money back and get to Mars in 2035 or sooner if they could. So I think that when I talk about, like, where it's going, yes, you're correct. This is a small piece of it, but it is an important piece. The thing that we I believe that we're gonna find a way to make money in space, and it's gonna be like a gold rush. It's gonna be like California gold rush.

You're gonna have all these people trying to get in on the action, get up there, and then slowly, the federal government will be able to offload some of, the, you know, the cost of doing the day to day stuff that they're supporting now. Okay. Okay. You have the next one. What is this All of this efforts. Harkening back to all the benefits that we talked about coming from the space program, those continue.

There are, technological, scientific, and I would say even, political and and social benefits from us working together on these bigger projects to go to space, to do science in space, to look back at our planet. And you see, individuals, communities, countries, businesses coming together to do bigger and better things together. I think that's one of the pieces of things like Star Trek that it was humanity that stepped out. It was, the Earth that was, you know, where Star Fleet was.

It, I think there's there's something about that that we'll see in these coming years. Yeah. But didn't the vol did the Vulcans have to come because they saw a guy out in space hitting, hyperspace and then the Vulcans The Vulcans. Yeah. And the Vulcans. But but, And, yeah, and then they gave the technology Right. But it was So The you know, Starfleet was a, Earth based program. Starfleet was humanity, and our step out.

And and, of course, that's, done for a lot of reasons in that show, but I think that's part of the benefit. I think it's also, like you said, whatever happened with the astrobotic system, there people are gonna learn from it, and the next one will be better, and the next one will be better. And there will be a day where we're going to the moon on a fairly routine basis.

Yeah. We we didn't make the cutoff that, Stanley Kubrick thought we'd hit, right, in, 2,001 or whatever, but, we are going to get there. And by pushing ourselves and doing things that are on the edge, we get better. We and we learn, and our lives will be improved by this. In some ways that are totally obvious, like GPS, and then in other ways, you know, that are, nuanced but are still important to humanity as a whole.

And that I've for me, that is it is so inspirational just to be a part of that and to go to meetings where people are talking about the most mundane things about how water behaves on the space station or, how do we, how do we build a toilet that will work and works every time and people don't have to worry about? It does. It takes us forward, and it makes us better. Well, you, the there's a, Globe Union is one of the largest toilet manufacturers in China and area, and I work with them.

And, you know, they do the same thing. They sit around and say, how do we make a better toilet? They do. They do the exact same thing. They how do we make a better toilet? And I know because we have their toilets and they're phenomenal. Reduced water consumption, better spinning cycle, fewer parts. They do all sorts of things. And they they do a lot of subcontracting out, private labeling. So yes, we we do ask these questions. And what you're doing, you call it mundane.

That's what people do in almost every industry. How do we how do we make a boat work faster? How do we make a printer print with less ink? How do we make a car more efficient or more comfortable or a bed to help us to get more sleep? So you're doing the the things that you want and that's great. And I would say so far Sure. And it's really my fault. But in our conversation, I've really talked about what, is happening in space and what it will do for us.

But what we also have to consider is that through this program, Astrobotic is a little company in Pittsburgh that we, normal people like myself, others like us, are all contributing to this effort. We are all going to have a hand in on this in some way. And it's I had a summer intern, and she, as, a high school student, designed an experiment that went to space station when she was, a senior in high school. Think about that.

A senior in high school send an experiment to the space station, and she would get together with others of her friends. These other girls who did this, and they were girls. They were not women. They were, you know, high school students. And they talk about it like like they would talk about going to the mall. It's, like, it's normalized. It's normalized. It's it's for certain people For for certain people. I think you're gonna see that that more and more people are engaged.

Either they, are participating, like, they're working for a company or they produce something that is part of that program, or they're principal investigators at universities with their students who are coming to do projects with us and people like us, or they are just normal everyday citizens who are, engaged just by observation and understanding what's happening and and and doing just like you said, calling it out. Hey. Why is it why is this so hard? Or why did that fail?

Or why are those people getting to go and not me? And, you know, we, if you go through on the website, you're the website you created. You'd look at, like, the plans when we're gonna have, 60 people or 1600 people on the moon. Who are those people? Are they at this point, if you wanna fly, you know, on a a private astronaut mission, you either have to come up with $50,000,000 or have somebody who does it on your behalf.

But there will be a day, and it's not too far off where, you're going up not because you paid the money, but because you had a skill they needed. Hey. We So and I love that you're dimensionalizing it. So I'm gonna add to it if I can. We have the first paper that's been written on Mearth by a professor, Daniele, out of the University of Messina. We have, another person out of Amsterdam who's the foremost expert on complex variation by design.

He's writing a small paper, and then he's gonna write an academic paper on how Project Moon Hut, what he calls as complex variation by design on steroids. We have individuals who are, I can't mention some of the names that are they're working on, but they're working on things that they had never thought of before. And they're coming in not for the space side, which you think about it, economics is not space the same way.

It's complex variation by design is the concept of taking something and creating it. So someone else could understand something. So you create an environment for someone to understand something else. And Project Moon Hut is that where we're trying to say we have 8 people. We have 9,578, 1,644 on the moon. And you could see it in that that that graphic that was brilliantly created by Marcus and Andreas. And yes, what we're trying to do is normalize it, but not normalize it as space.

We're trying to normalize it as Earth. So you you the reason I brought that up is you said astronauts. You don't talk much about cosmonauts or, the taikonauts or other names. And we have this when we use those words, we separate people. We will have we're using the word spacers Because when you get on a plane, you are you're a chemist, you get on a plane, you're not a pilot. 50, a 100 years ago, if you were in a plane, you were a pilot, then they became passengers.

But people call them astronauts. No. You're not an astronaut. You're a pot you're a passenger, and you have a role to be a chemist on the International Space Station. So we tried to come up with all the words we came up. We said, these are just people who are educated. They've got a they've they've gone to 3 weeks of training. They understand the environment like getting your license, and they will be spacers because they won't have a designation.

When they will get there, they will be a spacer who's responsible for Yeah. They they would call them mission specialist. That's what NASA would call. And so in our so the yeah. But the word mission, if you've ever mission To do something. Go some place and come back and come back. We are creating a box of the roof and a door and a moon, a home. And that home is where we will live in perpetuity that that is now a new ecosystem. So when we use words that separate we're going on a space mission.

Well, no. No. No. I'm gonna be there for 6 months and I'm gonna be working on this, and I'm an engineer, I'm a scientist, I'm a researcher, I'm a builder, I'm a whatever. So but the question that I had is, if we don't become more globally inclusive in our conversation, How did how is that going to lay out where 60 per 70% of the world's population still lives under 10 US dollars a day? We have challenges happening around the world.

How would you suggest that we change that dialogue so it's not protectionist, but inclusive? So part of it, there's a there you know, cultural backgrounds play into this. Right? As as an American, I see everything from that perspective. And there's there's 2 parts. There's the national perspective. And just like you said, there's parts of the world that are living very different lives because of where they are.

It's not because, they're not in the US or just from a different part of the world, and maybe it's the government, maybe it's different conditions that lead to that. We did have a a conversation with some people at SpaceX to add another, dimension to this. We were talking about, astronauts and how we, clothe them. And this was done with a a company that provides a type of clothing for people who do extreme things like extreme athletes.

And, they said that they this company said, well, we look at astronauts as a kind of extreme athlete, and we wanna produce the clothing and the, you know, the day to day materials for their garments, whether it be a shoe or a spacesuit or just, you know, their underwear. And the person from SpaceX said no. That's not how we look at these people. The people that we're sending to Mars, they're farmers. We're sending farmers. And the reason is is because a farmer can fix something out in the field.

They have to be able to do that in order to feed themselves. They live a different kind of life. So I think you're absolutely right. We for different situations, the people will have a different kind of tag, and that's because they're doing a different type of thing, and there are different types of people. Right. The the the remain the remaintenance worker on, in the movie. That's right. I mean, how many years was yeah.

Everyone who won an Apollo mission or especially early on towards the end, it changed, but they were all, like, military pilots. And and on the Russian side too. Right? They were all military. So you Yes. Absolutely. Today, what what's his name? Bezos ships people up. They don't have to go they go through a little bit of training, but you don't have extreme You got William Shatner going up. Right? Yeah. Right. Right. They're they're not extreme athletes.

So that global inclusion, if we have challenges on the planet and I I love your angle. Yet we need I think that we had one person call us, and I can't mention where they're from. And that person said, you need to have the military on the moon with you. I'm like, Oh, someone's gonna try to blow it up. Someone's gonna try to stop this. You're gonna have terrorism up there. Like, geez, we're we everything is about protectionism of the American way. And I not I am an American.

That's nothing to say that I'm not. I can't. I was born here. Yet the solution is inclusionary because we live on one planet, which is partially what we're supposed to be saying. But we don't act that way. Yeah. Right? Isn't that everybody says the overview effect It hasn't worked. Really No. Worse than the way it was professed. Yeah. There's reasons there's reasons for that that are maybe beyond our control at this point. But I I'm a I play the long game.

I look at this from the from the long for a couple in a couple ways. First of all, finding a way to go to Mars and build a colony of Mars is not a solution to our problems on Earth. Just like you mentioned earlier, a lot of the problems of space are going to be things that we've gotta solve on Earth. Right? There are problems on Earth first. So I think doing talking about this now and having this conversation, it's like saying, hey.

If you were to set up a colony, how would you want that to be set up? Starting all again with all the things we've learned from colonies in the in the new Americas and, you know, all of that. What what have we learned to ensure that what we do in space will be successful? If we can't do it well on earth, if we can't get along on earth, if we can't save the environment on earth, going to Mars is not gonna save us. Going to Mars is like trying to live in Antarctica in the winter and no atmosphere.

That's that's what it's like. So if you can't make things work on this beautiful gem of a planet we've got, then we've got much more serious problems. At the same time, we can leverage this effort and the science and the the just like you said, the the need to come together and to work together to our advantage. I'm an optimist in that way. But, yeah, I I we're working on it. If if we didn't think it would work, we wouldn't be working on it.

There's a there's a woman, a Violetta, out of, Europe that we're working with. And at one point, tossed out to her that we're working on what would be the governance model. You know, there's socialism, communism, democracy. And if you ever looked it up, which I don't recommend you do, there are so many different versions of isms out there and versions of dema of of everything, from republics to you name it. It's a lot more than I ever thought of.

And I shared with her what we wanna do is say, what would it potentially be like, like you're saying, a new group of people who are they're not self sustainable on the moon. They're sustainable. We're gonna be shipping things back and forth, like, every time through history. There was always goods and services moved. So how what do we what type of what do we call it? And we've had these, the first one I came up with, neo classical Mearthism or whatever, something of that nature.

And she said, no, no. We found this doesn't work. That doesn't work. And she became so engrossed in this. She almost jumped through the screen. It was brilliant because trying to figure out how we would operate as a human species with within Mearth changes the dialogue. And that comes back to the blue marble. How do we we it's not going to happen in beyond Earth. We don't have enough mass of people, volume of people. It's going to happen as we change on Earth, and that's how we get Mearth.

We don't get Mearth and then create Earth. We create we change Earth over the course of the timeline. And in doing so, it allows us to achieve that. Yes. Make sense? And I think It's not the journey. It's the journey. It's not the destination. It's the journey. And the journey changes you. Right. And it makes you better. And that's, that is what I think this is all doing for us, and it only works to make us all better if we start to get more people engaged in it.

So going to your point, and that's not just more Americans. It is. It's more people from outside to see it, to be a part of it. And we, I think, as Americans are better. That's why America is so great is that it's people from all over. It bring we we have a challenge of hope on this planet today.

And what what we can create if we demonstrate what the things and I and I loved speaking with you because you do have this optimism inside of you, is that we're changing the narrative for the entire globe of 10,000,000,000 people by 2,050. And what does that mean? And we by giving people hope, they don't go to the bad side, right, the dark side, or whatever you want to call it, they they then build for a new future. And we don't do enough of that.

So I've gotta say, Ken, this was absolutely fantastic. I really appreciate you spending the time, even with the challenges of losing power and the tree falling on the lines and, and all of that. I do appreciate we do appreciate you taking the time to talk to you so much. So much. Really enjoyed talking with you. So, yeah, this is great. And I I I'm I'm serious about the toilet and the naming. Serious about the names of the people that you recommend.

And we need to talk more about how, Redwire because you're fan I think we have, like, 700 employees, something like that. I'd love to find a way that Redwire could become a part of Project Moon Hut because we have a lot of organizations all under NDA, all working private quietly in the background so we can move this forward collectively. So so I wanna thank you for taking for everybody listening in.

I wanna thank you for taking the time to listen in today, and we do hope that you learn something that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others.

Again, the Project Moon Foundation is where we look to establish a box of the roof and a door on the moon, a home, through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem, and then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Please do go check out the videos on the website. Do click on, and it is fabulous, the 40 year plan. I think you would agree, Ken. It is a fabulous design.

And, Ken, what's the single best way to do that? Reach out to me via email. I I respond to all my emails at my email is [email protected]. Okay. And for me, I'd love to speak with you. You could reach me at [email protected]. You could also reach us at on Twitter at at project moonhot or at goldsmith if you wanna get directly with me. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, we're all there. We can all communicate and keep moving things together.

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