Why It's Important to have Inclusive Commercialization of Space w/ Narayan Prasad #24

Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to another edition of the age of infinite. Honestly, we're not going to be stepping into the 4th industrial revolution if we do things right. The Internet of things and connected devices, is that our real future? We have the possibility to create the age of infinite, infinite possibilities and infinite resources going into space.

And the podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation, where we are looking to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut. We were named by NASA, and it is through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem. Then we plan on using these endeavors to paradigm shifting and innovation and turn that back on Earth to change how we live on Earth, to improve how we live on Earth for all species.

And today, we're going to be exploring why it's important to have inclusive commercialization of space. We have a guest that I think it's been 2 years I've tried to get on. He comes highly recommended, Narayan Prasad. He is the cofounder of Statsearch, and curator of NewSpace India. Hello, Narayan. How are you, Narayan? Hi. Hi, David. It's a pleasure talking to you, and, you know, having known you, you're a prolific speaker. I can I hope to keep up? You will do amazingly well.

It's not about the speaking. It's about the content, and I'm here to learn from you. And so, you have a set of an outline for us to work from? Yeah. I do have, you know, about 5 bullet points of things that I wanted to say broadly. Okay. So why don't you give them to me or write them down?

Sure. So as a part of the whole, inclusive approach to, you know, space, economy, and commercialization of space, I, you know, I tend to think that taking a historical context to to begin with So why don't we start why don't we start with just give me the outline and then we can go into the the content wise. Sure. So the outline is about, the legacy of traditional space first. Legacy. You know, that's what we've been doing for the last, 70 years. Okay. Number 2?

And and number 2 would be looking at a very close industry, which is in terms of what other lessons from the aviation industry that, you know, we have learned over the last a 120 years to now, which can be, you know, replicated in space. Okay. Number 3? Number 3 would be, you know, what is, new space and, you know, how is new space done in old space countries? Okay. Number 4? Number 4 is, you know, what is new space in new countries or new space fairing countries? New countries.

Okay. And number 5 is, generally, we what are the assumptions of, you know, technology or maturity in terms of, technology in in general and how that, making early assumption can early assumptions can go really wrong at certain point of time. So kind of some lessons that I had in mind. Okay. So let's start with number 1, the legacy of traditional space. Let's where are we gonna go with this? Help me. Sure. So the legacy of, traditional space we all know is, military space. Right?

So essentially, you know, countries, backing, you know, inventors and, and entrepreneurs within their own borders to say that we're gonna build up a certain capability and this is gonna be exclusive to our country and and, you know, our borders, and and we're gonna deploy this against, enemies or, you know, threats that come outside from outside. So that's the legacy of, of traditional space.

And, essentially, what I wanted to bring up there is that, a lot of innovation gets fueled in that way in many industries that's happened in, you know, for for possibly in the aviation industry and, you know, going back to the industrial revolution, maybe you could look at many, many, many inventions and and technologies that have been funded in that way. But then there's a time in which, you know, this kind of innovations spills over and they become really kind of commercial.

As in, they they become kind of boring and they become kind of integrated into lives of people, and you will not notice it that, you know, this had a military background and all of it. And that's because, there's an there's a very nice integration into the whole economy, and the way people are doing stuff with it and using it and are being productive and are being are using it in their daily lives for doing some part of it. Right?

So these are traditionally, like, examples that you would take of spin off or, technologies from, from, you know, NASA or you would take examples from, services. For example, it could be, an ATM machine which is powered by the satellite where, you would never know a novel person would never know that there's a satellite link behind this a this this ATM, and I'm drawing money in this.

But then, you know, it's just made so boring that that people don't notice it, and that's making money and that's making, you know, tech is, funneling productivity of the kind of people. So so let let me I will jump in here for a minute because I I'm my mind is racing, and I've got two points that I'd or possibly 3, but 2 I'd like to to explore.

Military in space, was was it really, and I don't know really in a in a bad way or a good way, Was space a military expedition, or was it first an exploratory and then converted to military? For many countries, was the US really trying to do first for military, or would we go back to Von Braun and the creation of rockets and wanting to get into space, or we go to da Vinci or whomever else? Was it was space, space itself, I could say other industries, but was space a mixture? Was it different?

You know what I'm asking? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. In fact, you don't need to just go back to the last 70 years. You can go back to about 300 years, you know. So the whole, the whole technology in rocketry itself is very interesting. You had the Chinese working on, gunpowder which eventually made way to India.

And I think many people don't know this that, in the 1700, there was a king in southern India, the state where I come from, who, you know, essentially had a a unit within his army which worked on bamboo rockets. And, these bamboo rockets were, you know, fueled by, gunpowder, and, they essentially had mastered a little bit of both the basics of rocketry. And they had inducted these rocketry into their military forces.

And these, weapons in the 1700 the late 1700 were used against the British forces that were in India, and they were fighting these Indian kingdoms. And this particular king, he had a regiment that used, you know, these rockets against the British troops. And eventually, unfortunately, this southern Indian king lost the war.

And, then, you know, the British general, one of the, I think, lieutenants or generals called Congreve, he, actually picked up this technology and he saw an interest into this. And he saw how good this could be if it's, you know, matured and developed over time. And this is, you know, the late 1700 and early 1800 that I'm talking about. Not even the 19 fifties or 19 forties when, you know, the people like Juan Braun come into the picture.

And so we have to I I think we really have to think about at least I have to go back in my mind as racing. Okay. What was 1700 India like? I mean, I I've been through India. I've been to Japur and Agra and a bunch of places. The if you think back at 1700, I mean, we are not we don't have all these amenities that we have today. This is really, really, really far back. Yeah. Absolutely.

And and the thing is in India in 1700 is a bunch of princely states like, you know, what would 1700 look like in much of Europe where you had, for example, Germany had I think 500 different small little kingdoms here and there, which consolidated over time and very much like European, the entire European continent. India was, divided in, you know, kind of, culture and language and kingdoms spread over.

And some of the kingdoms and were more prosperous and, you know, and the artisans there and the trade there enabled a lot of new technology and then a lot of new innovation. And that goes back to some of this kind of rocketry where, you know, the these guys were experimenting on using, rockets against, as a part of the military technology. And, you know, just to go back to a little bit to that, you know, once the guy lost, in fact, that's how rocketry made its way to the to Europe.

Because in 1800, when Congreve, you know, saw the potential of rockets, the British forces took that rocketry technology and went and used it against Napoleon. Oh, really? Yeah. So and so you see how, you know, the technology comes, the early technology of gunpowder coming from China and then coming to India and going to Europe. And this is all, as I said, you know, pre, you know, pre Von Braun kind of generation. That that's fantastic.

You tied it you tied it way back, which I love because I had not gone back to gunpowder, and gunpowder being the prelude to rocketry, being the prelude to the next, to the next, the next. Yeah. That's a that's a a great, a great way to tie it all together. So that was I I hadn't done that, and that's that's fantastic. The the other one that I had brought up or it was in my mind is I'm working on a project in Los Angeles, and it is a university in Los Angeles area.

And what what NASA is doing or the military is doing, it's a combination. I it's no. It's military. It's not NASA. The military is doing is they're letting their IP that they no longer need to be commercialized by the local companies through a project joint venture, public private, where they're bringing in individuals and saying, this is the tech we have. What can you do with it? Which I had never heard of that type of found, format, which is amazing.

I never thought I mean, I know it leaked into the environment. I know there was, but this was something that's directly happening in my life. So it's, interesting the way you just said it because it triggered that thought. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, this is something I haven't seen many people explore extensively and tell the story in a way that, has a very long tail of, of technology flowing between boundaries and countries.

And, because most often, you know, we in, we just tend to focus on the last 50 years or maybe even the last 15 years because of, companies like SpaceX taking off, and and Internet and social media tools, and the generation gaps between people. All of the very historic information and going back to several decades and even millennia is, something that, is not very well communicated in, in the whole sector, I would say. Can you give I mean, this is this is interesting.

Can you give a few other examples that come off the top of your head where you've seen this cross border, cross bordering, cross pollination of ideas? Yeah. Absolutely. And, in fact, I was just reading a book, last week which piqued my interest.

So, you know, one of the things that, early stage, rocketry, developers were experimenting on was actually, mail because, you know, if you had to post stuff and you had to carry stuff from one place to the other as a post, then, you know, there was not really much of technology. People use donkeys and in challenging geographies, you know, they may maybe use some rail if there were intensity. But, you know, if you were looking at transporting in high high elevation places, it could take a while.

And, you know, if you would want to send it across the continent, it could take months. Right? The early days of, post between countries. So one of the things that the experimenters in the, you know, 19 thirties, and early days were thinking that actually rockets are the best way of transporting mail. Because if you would have to send, an, a post between, New York and California, for example, maybe it would it would take months at that point of time for it to reach.

But then they thought, look, there's, these rockets that have an interesting potential, and, I have this mail that I can send now, and then maybe it could reset in a couple of hours instead of 6 months now. And I could get those responses back, and there was a huge community around rocket mail because air mail was an interesting phenomena because you you would have Air Mail. Right?

So Air Mail started in fact, also people didn't know this that, the first, Air Mail stamp, kind of collection, for the first Air Mail flights actually began in India. So Wow. And, and this was, I think, early 19 twenties or something. The first time the airmail was, was carried. And, people thought genuinely at that point of time that airmail is gonna be redundant in 10 or 15 years because airmail is still slower than rocket mail. And rocket mail will be the thing.

It will be the thing, you know, if it's something that people will always, be flying these rockets from one to the other, and and people just even started putting things like livestock. You know, they were people putting chicken in on rockets and flying them and seeing if that chicken reaches the other part of the world. They thought, you know, you could send the mail, when you when a ship is coming into a new region, let's say, an island or a new kind new country.

You have to dock the ship and then get the mail out, and then you have to, you know, exit the ship and then come back into the waters. Right? So and people are saying, you know, it will take hours for us to dock there and then transport everything and come back. And we're gonna save some a lot of time and hours, if we could just fire fire a rocket out of of a ship and then, you know, get the mail out, and then we could just leave that port immediately. Yeah. That that's right.

Well and I'm also laughing because I sent through the US postal service, and different services have troubles too. I sent some 2 day mail to California, and it's 2 weeks later and it still has not arrived. So I'm I'm seeing myself, is there a rocket that I could use in the future? That's it. So, yeah, that's a that's a cool way of looking at the expansion.

So there was I'm gonna say there were there were individuals trying to improve rocketry capabilities so that they could do this, even shipping from a moving or a stationary on water platform. As you're shipping from the ocean and you aim it towards this this side and oh, do you put up a flare? I don't know. Someone's waiting. They have to know that you're going to be shipping sending them something, and then they go run and find it in the brush. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

And, you know, that's the interesting bit, that's again, you know, very, you know, not well known story in the industry. Right? Because, that's a that's a legacy that not really not many people know. In fact, all of that kind of history is captured in the Philatelic societies, because Philatelic or the stamp collecting society had a huge thing about collecting rocket mail, you know, stamps and mint, which was flown on rockets and, you know, it was flown in different parts of the world.

And people would say, this is the first time in the US in some particular region that we are doing this, you know, rocket mail, and then people would bid on it. And today, there's a whole community around people who buy and sell, rocket mail stamps and, because it's not so prevalent anymore, and it was from a 100 years ago. The part of Project Moonhut's platform, which I think you saw the video, I I mentioned in there that we tend to know what ideas came from space.

For example, we could talk about the boots on a plane that is directly a correlation to space industry or air filtration, water filtration, or the fire, fireman's apparatus, their outfits or their tank, both space, components. But the the, what is unknown to me, and I'm I'm trying to find more and more examples, is those technologies that were born from people trying to get to space or involved in space that never made it.

Meaning, they started a company in 1920, or they started 1 in 1950, or they worked for somebody in 1970. They might have worked for a JPL or a European Space Agency or Japanese or a Russian, and they ended up not creating anything, but they left that company, and they went to another company where they started one, and they used those same exact principles to create a product that was really earthbound.

It was a a new mug, manufacturing technology, or you created a stapler because you understood the dynamics of, space fluid dynamics. And so this is an interesting take. My mind is racing of how do I find or how do we find for? How do we find these really, really neat ideas or concepts or constructs or products or initiatives that drove the that meet our everyday needs because of the way in which they were formed? Yeah. Absolutely.

And you can't deny that, some of these early inventors of, Rocket Mail were not, you know, people of the legacy of imagination of somebody like a Von Braun itself. Because, you know, some of the people who were involved including, include people like, Robert Goddard. Right? And he was briefly, involved with the rocket mail community in trying to experiment with the rocket mail. But then he went on to do, of course, you know, bigger and brighter things.

But but, you know, these were a bunch of people who were at the very, very, very beginning of the technology curve. And that's an interesting thing because the technology curve begins, and then there's a generation of early inventors and early experimenters who doing really, like, garage related work and, you know, like, really, they had no real support.

And, you know, this this book that I read, was from a guy who studied about such a guy, you know, one of the guys in India, for example, in 19 thirties experimenting on these kinds of rockets and trying to do rocket mail out of India. And he was the only guy from India trying to do that in the 19 thirties, And he was having relationships by by mail with, you know, people in the US, people in, Europe who are trying to do, same, you know, building rockets to see airmail.

And and a lot of them had this idea that, all of this would culminate into people going into space and people, and and people having to get getting to space. And this is the birth of the technology and, you know, that's where, the this is like a generation before the superstar of, space. Right? The superstar of space including, you know, it could be one of 1 Braun or all the others, the soup and the other astronauts, for example.

Here's a here's a here's a wonderment or a, an interesting concept. You you threw out this word. You said garage related work. And I said to myself, who created the first garage? Like, I mean, we we talk about garage related work. There actually is a link that says who created the first garage because it's overhead door, but there there was someone who actually created a garage. So even that is a a relic of a time that was not 200 years ago. It's, it's more current. So okay.

Cool. So what else on the legacy of traditional space would you like to tie in? This was fascinating. This was this this really made my mind rise. What else did you, Sure. So Go ahead.

So, essentially, what I was trying to say is that, look, in my opinion, at least, I don't know about many others, but at least in my opinion, we really haven't yet exited this mindset of, space is still a heavily military technology, and, and the way commerce is happening in space is still kind of, stuck in the in the age old kind of military era because militaries are still spending the most amount of money in space.

So for example, if you I think look at the US space budgets, for example, NASA gets maybe, I think, $18,000,000,000 maybe, if I'm correct. And, you know, the the military spending in space is at least, you know, 2 or 3 times more than the civilian space budget. Really? And it could yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Okay. And, if you look at that even in other countries, it's the same.

You know, for example, I think most of Russian program is just military, with a little bit of civilian integration into all of it. But essentially, most of Russian military program, and its program is mostly military, and then a little bit of civilian stuff. And, you know, that is where I also wanted to plug in a little bit about, you know, how India took a different approach.

Because, out of all of this in the 19 sixties, India was one of the only countries in the world that, for the first time took a civilian approach to a space agency. Until India came up with the idea in the 19 sixties that there could be a purely civilian, you know, orientation to doing space. No country in the world thought of it as a purely civilian activity.

So, you know, one of the reasons maybe also because, you know, this was, something that, was leadership by the, you know, father of the Indian Space Program, Vikram Sarabhai, who said, you know, essentially, he looked at space as the tool of of leapfrogging communities of people using technology and making them leapfrog over generations. And using space as a means of technology or a base of technology to providing people opportunity and increasing productivity of all of them.

So and that was visionary for that time, and in fact, I've talked to a lot of people, for example, who collaborated with him. And most people who are who his collaborators from the west start, he was just bullshitting them because he, you know, was trying to get access to some other technology or so on.

But then, you see that, a lot of the reality in the Indian space program today, the way it's, you know, kind of power the foundations or the built over the last 50 years has proven his word to be right because, today you can see that, you know, India is the 1st country in the world to reach Mars in its first attempt, successfully.

And so that's the kind of trajectory I think, it goes back where you say, civilian orientation, makes in in in my opinion, that's a core part of, inclusivity, the topic that we were talking about.

Yeah. Because, essentially, if you involve, the normal, you know, person on the street, and you say to the normal person on the street in a way that, look, today you're standing here, you might just have a smartphone with you or you might have whatever x y zed with you or you may not have something with you as well.

But then if you can tell him that look, there are 20 assets up in the sky that is looking after you being productive and, is helping you be to be to more money or to be more productive or contribute to the environment or, you know, contribute to the society. And to kind of, you know, make that happen for each and every individual on the earth is something that can make space more inclusive rather than just putting, you know, space in the hands of militaries.

I I think when you think of Project Moonat and one of the, narratives and I know you're in Germany right I think you're in Germany right now. The there's a guy in Berlin who had said to me good friend, we he had said, when we look at the Earth, we tend to look at the Earth in the construct of that's where we sell and work. And one of the initiatives for Project Moon Hut is we call it Mearth. We live within the moon and Earth.

The space that circles all the way around is the moon and the Earth, and we'll eventually expand that perspective that we're not just on Earth, that anything that happens between moon and Earth, which could be space or on the moon, is, is part of our existence. And this is what you're saying, the smartphone. We look up and we say, well, that's in space with a satellite. But we could be saying, oh, no. No.

That's part of the ecosystem of Mearth, which is the interconnectivity between this the Earth and space. So yeah. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, so that's, is also the way, you know, that makes space a little bit unsexy, you know. So and, unfortunately, like, you know, a lot of unsexy things make people productive and a lot of unsexy things may and and contribute to the society. Right?

But, but, you know, that's where I think, I differ from a lot of the traditional kind of hip hip kind of views that that exist. But also, you know, it is also about making access to the last individual in the last mile and in the last kind of least productive kind of countries because, you know, imagine a country of the size of India, you have 600,000 plus, villages. And, of course, you know, the space can be a game changer where because you could easily set up, you know, communication networks.

You could easily set up navigation networks. And the bigger the size of a country is, the bigger the size of a geography is, especially for a country, for example, or the size of US, China, you know, India, Russia. Why are these players so big in spaces? Because space gives you that footprint. It gives you that kind of, you know, capability to cover massive amounts of ground and to provide services to the last miles of people even in the least connected communities in your country. Right?

And those are the perspectives. Right? So you don't see many European countries, for example, you know, doing the same way or providing the same kind of services as, you know, the US would do or China would do or in India would do. Because they are inherently small and, you know, the the communities live in smaller geographies and they're hyper connected communities, and you can lay cables between them and, you know, be more efficient. And, you know, so on.

So, I mean, a typical example could also be a country like Singapore. Right? You know, you have, basically, a a country that stones throw away your your borders end. And, you know, you can lay fiber there in, I don't know, 6 months time in the entire country and then connect people and you can do a lot of different things there. But then, you know, you can contrast that with something of the size of India or the US.

And that's where I think satellites and space hold a lot of promise to all of us because you can tell all those people there that, you know, space is kind of making you more productive in all of this. And, you know, it's, it's creating the fuel for your, lives. That's, the I just wrote philosophy. It's, or a psychological perspective next to that comment that you're doing this with the same type of services.

That's an interesting dynamic that your solutions to challenges because of scale, size means that you have to create bigger solutions.

And that bigger solution, for example, as you mentioned in any of the countries in Europe, whether it be, Luxembourg being tiny, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, all the way to France, UK, They don't have to think at the same scale to service, and that creates a countrywide mindset that probably is part of the spillage over into investments, education that possibly do limit the expansiveness thinking.

And the only one I can kinda think of that's opposite would be Israel, And Israel has a, a space program and, Ofer Lapid, who works with us in project Moon Hat. He was I think he's credited, he doesn't say it, with putting up most of the satellites in the early stages of all of, of Israel on a military basis because they had to cover large ground of surveillance, all of the Middle East.

So that's actually very cool, and it it it lends itself to a lot of other thinking possibilities on a global scale. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, what makes the case for space, you know, doctor Robert Zubrin talks about the case of Mars and, and so on.

So what also makes the case for space for somebody feel like who's coming from a developing world and you know, comes from an average Indian family is the way you could sell space to me, an average Indian middle class family, is not by saying, you you will take some rich people to space and have them live there, or you would have my military spending all my tax money and putting up satellites to just shoot missiles to other countries and so on.

I think what would sell me as a middle class, you know, normal Indian family would be if you you would say, you know, we are using all of these assets to make your generation of kids more productive. And, and and, you know, making that part of that space is almost like a cell phone. You know, the whole cell phone revolution, the smartphone revolution, it changed countries like India and, you know, several African countries. Right?

Because you have access to information, you have access to being more productive, being more, you know, getting more employment. And there's this whole revolution that, smartphones and Internet connectivity and everything did to societies in developing countries.

And if you could think of something in a future where you're making space as one of the tools that is making such a revolution in some of these countries, think of the impact that that would create for backing, exploration activities or, you know, risky ventures that states could then go out and do more easily.

You would never, you know, then the society would never question a decision by a politician or, you would not have political parties, you know, kind of debating each other as to why we would be we are spending more so much money into, like, space exploration or something. Because, essentially, you have convinced your public that this is important.

Just so you know, Narian, you have just been recruited on to Project Moon Hut to help in one area that I feel I'm deficient to help us to be able to define this one aspect. We've done it in many others, but this one area I'd really like to explore with you because I think it's a brilliant, brilliant approach that being a a Westerner growing up in the United States, even though I've worked all over the world, I I I love that angle. So just so you know, you've been recruited. Thank you.

I'm happy to help. So, anything else on traditional space? Ready to move on to aviation. Do you have any more points? Yeah. I think we could, you know, move further because there are some things that inter overlap between them. So it'll it'll be a good So let's move into the closeness of aviation, looking at the closeness of industry in aviation in specifically.

So, what I wanted to bring up here is, of course, you know, aviation with the first experimental aircrafts going into the late 1800 than the first flights in the 1900, early 1900. There was again an interest in militaries by militaries in all of this.

Essentially, there is a very close relationship between early experimenters of aircrafts and early experimenters of, you know, rocketry being both amateurs and, you know, inventors trying to realize a particular piece of technology after which governments and states looking at the potential of that for militaries and funding a lot of them and making sure that corporations and, you know, big companies realize real capabilities that can be used by militaries, in warfare.

And that could be also seen as a relationship in in aircraft and in space. Right? Where, you know, a lot of the military aircrafts, were funded. The military aircraft projects were funded and realized and, you know, deployed in various parts of the world very independently.

And there's a very good relationship possibly that you could draw with how space programs have been conducted between, the early 19 fifties to, you know, even now, and then how military aircraft programs and military programs in the nation began, and how they've been running between, you know, the early 19 twenties until the late 19 sixties or seventies. There could be an extremely good coin, you know, coincidence between how the two sectors work.

And why I bring that up is because after the 19 forties when the World War 2 ended, you had more military pilots possibly than commercial pilots. There's no commercial aviation at at not really so evident because aircrafts are not that reliable to fly between, the Atlantic or, you know, between such large distances, especially if you had civilians on board. And, you know, military aircraft in fact, even military aircraft hardly made it.

Even the the bomber that, took the nuclear rep, you know, the the bomb to to Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the US had to land in India to refuel before going on its way to the to to Japan to drop the bombs. Really? So Wow. Yes. Not not that it was great thing that we dropped the bomb the United States dropped the bomb. I said we I didn't I wasn't part of it. But it had to so it went it went it circumvented the world going over it went eastbound from the United States.

It did not go westbound from the United States. Yes. And there was a separate airfield that was specially built, you know, close to Calcutta in the eastern northeast part of India, an airstrip that was built just for these this aircraft to land and refuel. Wow. Didn't know that. Okay? So, so, you know, so that's, at that point in time, you had these, you had no commercial airliners. Right?

So, essentially, what I'm trying to say is that when the World War 2 ended, you had a bunch of military pilots who were out of job. And the one thing that you saw is aircrafts, had matured in terms of technology, and the first thing that you could try to do is to offer, service to people who could fly between the Atlantic for the first time. And guess who were there if they were business people who could afford the flight.

They could afford to pay a lot more than getting on a ship because they save time. Yep. They save time to get on board and, you know, the first flights, I just just, seeing some of the pictures from the earliest, you know, business airlines, and they were all made in the seats were made in wood, carved in wood, and installed in it, inside of aircrafts. And, you know, people would sit there and smoke and, you know, have this no not real weather control inside and and so on.

So that's how, messy the aviation world was at the the end of the war.

And people said, you know, business travelers cannot afford to stay on ships between, you know, for months to travel between the Atlantic, and we can afford to pay a lot more and, you know, we could have and so the early aircrafts that, carried people, were mostly only business people who could afford all of it, and then you could see that industry mature over 60 years of time, where today you can book a Ryanair flight between, Berlin and Israel. I went to and fro was €30.

Wow. Ryanair just comes out has prices that are beyond amazing. Right? So so you know, that's the cycle of the industry that that I think space can take a lot of inspiration from. Because very similar to the space world, the aviation world has very stringent requirements on performance of hardware and software and safety. Right? You're carrying so many people on a daily basis, millions of people between airports, and, you know, millions of objects flying around each day.

A continuous operation between one airport to the other, continuous operation of crew, systems, you know, ground equipment. There's so many things, so many moving parts. And if you would have said to some of these inventors in the early days of aircraft that this will be the picture of the aviation world in 2020. You know, if you went back to 1900 and said, this is the picture that you are looking at in 2020, people would have said you're out of your mind.

Yeah. I I think I'm just gonna add in here. There's one thing about the space and the aviation industry that has always amazed me. It is the follow through from any type of accident, even if it doesn't result in death, even if it comes down with a a wheel that doesn't deploy, when anything happens around the world, there is a complete investigation as to why that, that situation happened. And I've got 20:28 hours in a Warrior plane running fly.

And I I was always fascinated because when you have a car accident, someone comes and takes a report. But in a military in a airplane accident, it's not a report. It is an investigation. How did it happen? What went wrong? Was it human error? Was it technological error? Did they get maintenance in time? Were they communicating with the tower? On and on and on and on. So it's an amazing difference. Yeah. Absolutely.

And that's one of the ways that you could make space, you know, more resilient, more safe, more, you know, reliable, you know, the the perception of space would change. You know, nobody none of us who get on a flight, between any part of the world today, or most people don't really think that they will die when they get on the aircraft. Right? There are some. So There are some people who think. There are people who think I mean, they're they're I have been next to them on a plane.

And let me tell you, you are talk I'm thinking of this one woman. She saw that it was a high wing and the the wheel came, went up and she panicked. Do they go up? Do they stay up? Yeah. They we don't fly with them down. She was terrified that they would not come down again. Oh, fuck.

Yeah. So so, you know, that's, that that I think is also not, again, you know, very well, discussed or communicated in, in this space world because we believe, you know, we are this exclusive bunch of industry which is has to do with a lot of, interesting, new technology and a lot of things. And and aviation is also at the cusp of a lot of interesting technology, a lot of complicated technology. And they've made all of that so simple and boring over a 100 years. Imagine this. Right?

Parts that that carry Donald Trump are made in India today. Yeah. And, so and that's, in the aviation world and they've gone from, you know, having, such high quality standards and control and, you know, like, IP controls so that even files of designs, if it leaked between, you know, offices, they could get into jails because this is highly controlled IP and highly controlled environments, and and, you know, this all of this is national security.

And today, you know, you have such a massive integration of supply chains. And, you know, most often, you know, when I work in supply chains. Right? So the biggest difference between the aviation supply chain and the space supply chain is this, they would Aviation supply chain most often procure stuff at dollar per kilogram. Yeah. Imagine that you if you would be selling, aluminum, you know, comes at, plates to an aircraft today. Right? And so that's the difference.

So I have had a lot of chat with vendors at the space sector who says our technology is brilliant for the aircraft. We have composite, you know, structures that can go into aircrafts and and they they can do fascinating things, and they can reduce the weight of the aircraft by 50% and and all of this. But then they go to the aviation world, try to sell them on that, and then they say, how much does this cost per kilogram is is the question.

The, I do the it it was Alan Malele, I believe, who took over Ford when he was first looking to take over Ford. Someone, someone didn't some people didn't want him to do it. And they asked the question about the airline industry is so different, for example, than the automotive industry. And he looked at them and he said, well, let's let me look at this way. I ran an aviation company, and we had 35,000 moving parts. And the automotive industry had 5,000.

However, I had to keep the people up in the air, couldn't bring them in for services more or less, where you could just pull over on the side of the road. And that's not exactly the the quote, but it's there's such complexity to the safety and security of keeping someone up in the air that the the correlation I can see now where we can look at space. I'm assuming we look at space and aviation and probably have an equivalent type of exponential numerical number to do that. So 5,000 is to 35,000.

35,000 is to a 100,000. Yeah. Absolutely. And the the most interesting part of all of this is also the cost per person. Right? Because I bet that, you know, the cost per person in the early 19 fifties of these business travelers going, you know, between New York and, and, you know, Berlin, for an example. Adjusted to today's, money would cost a lot of money considering the same flight that has today.

So that would have seen you know, today, you can fly between, Berlin and New York for maybe €400 return. Yeah. Yes. And if we even if you took the business class, which is about €6,000 or €5,000 or somewhere in there, then you'd still have that that huge differential. Yeah. I wanted to I wanted to swing back. You said, at one point, simple and boring technologies, the airline industry is approaching that are transformational.

Do you have an example or 2 of that that you know of that's happening even possibly as convergence of space and aviation? Not at space and aviation. One thing that comes to my mind, I'm sorry I go back to India quite often because That's okay. Yeah. I I love I love that you are, so don't apologize. I love that you're bringing in and we try to do this in the program is to bring a global, global perspective because this is we are on one one earth. So I love it.

Go back to India whenever you need to. Go wherever you'd like to. Sure. So, you know, I go back to my younger days, in India because, remember my parents telling me when I was growing up that I was a few months old when, they got me onto a flight, and I can't remember any of it. And that was the only flight that I remember that my, parents took in their lives until, you know, I became, more than 25 years old.

So for the first 25 years of my life, I had, you know, stepped into this, let's say, one flight. And that's because that was a vanity that, that occurred because, my parents just thought it will be one nice thing to do, just to experience how it would be to fly. And, that was us treating other, you know, the airline industry like, you know, visiting, Universal Studios or Disney World. It was an entertaining experience. You did it as a as Exactly. Let's go on a ride. Okay. Right?

So, so why I bring that up is because, you know, an established industry there is if you can have that people, you know, use it as a routine service. Right? So today, in India, you are looking at a projected, I think, about 400 airports that will be operational in the next, you know, 10 years or so. And, the highest number of orders coming to Airbus, you know, and Boeing, in the entire world are from airlines that are operating in India.

That is because India has the most number of first time airline travelers in the world. Right? And that number is growing at over 10%, I think, over 10% year on year growth for the last 10 years or so, I think. So the reason why I bring that up is because, you know, that's that is what you want to see in a sector that is growing and it involves complicated technology, complicated, you know, supply chains, complicated, you know, mechanisms to work.

And if you make all of that kind of boring and make people say that, you know, we've made all of that boring because we are making you productive in doing all of this, then you see the uptake in the market and you see, you know, there's, you know, supply chain dynamics that act on it and price pressures and market price and, you know, governments pulling out of it and markets taking control of all all of it. And so those are things that we have to see in space to mature. I agree with you.

Okay. Cool. Any other correlations or ties between aviation and the space industry? I think it's also about, you know, how you could, innovate on services and how you could bring up a lot of things. So, you know, you you you have such, amounts of, you know, service innovation, be it baggage handling or, you know, be it even airline food, for example, how you manage food on the airline.

You know, I think not many people know that if you had the same food that is served in an airline but on the ground, it would taste more salty. Oh, no. I didn't know that. Yeah. Because, you know, their sense of, you know, the the taste buds they the perception of the taste buds change of human beings once you're on the ground and and you're up in the air at that height.

So airline food is normally optimized to have a little bit more salt, because the human, you know, tendency of when flying in air, the tendency is that, you know, you you your taste buds kind of change. And so norm normally, most airline food has more salt if you taste it on the ground. The good there's a there's a positive to that is the inclusion of additional salt in the human body means the holding on of water.

So you have less you can keep I don't know if you'd be more hydrated, but you would have more water in your system. It's not a diuretic. It doesn't make you go to the bathroom. It actually makes you retain water. And retaining water is something that you need to do well in space, at least in the current air aircrafts. So that's there might be a positive side to that. Okay. Yep. Yep. And also, there's also other operational bits. Right?

So because especially, for example, you had this whole challenge at a particular piece of time where, you know, to as the number of aircraft started increasing up in the air, you had airline collisions, midair aircraft collisions. Yeah. Right? And nobody imagined that we would have midair aircraft collisions because the airlines were a vanity.

Yes. You had one aircraft flying here and there and say, we could see this coming from a mile and you can you don't need all the side of sort of traffic control and so on. And you had then technology come into play where you could see 2 aircraft communicate between each other regardless of the pilot, you know, knowing it's there because there were the warning systems came up. And the innovation and the management and cooperation between countries so that such warning systems come into play.

And, you know, now I think even algorithms are set in a way that the 2 aircraft decided that one goes up and the other goes down. So, So they they communicate they communicate separately from the ground and the aircraft to make sure through the system that they keep their, altitude distance. Yep. Exactly. And they tell one pilot to go up and then the other pilot, for example, to go to go down.

So, so you know, a lot of this has, tend to I think, you know, there could be a correlation to how we manage space traffic. Right? So today, we have this phenomena where nobody is really, you know, in charge. We've seen a couple of, you know, collisions in space. We've seen, you know, we've seen number of threats that the objects are people are saying there are, you know, potential threats to the space station and so on.

So we're, again, you know, in the early days of all of that, that the aviation industry has solved extremely effectively, and we could learn again. That's cool. We I just did a a podcast with, Morbid Morbipe, Ja on Yeah. I don't know if you know him. He's we did it on space environmentalism, and he had some really cool thoughts about or or discussion about how managing those expectations in space. So, yeah, very cool. Okay. So, Moriba is a good friend of mine, so I know him quite well.

He's, excellent. I wasn't sure where we're gonna go just like any interview, and I've gotta tell you, he really, really delivered. And we focused on the space environmentalism. I told him that's where I wanted to go because I think it gives a very big picture to the entire, ecosystem of Mearth and what we have to be able to handle. So this is a perfect tie in. I love it. Okay. Anything else, or do you wanna go on to the old space? What is new space and old space? Yeah. Let's go to the next one.

Okay. So we're talking now about, new space in old space countries is what I've, you know, thought about. And, why I, you know, tell that is because, legacy institutions ask for it to be kept up. So for example, right, if you say that, you know, we have, this institution that is building rockets for, you know, military and, you know, you've done that for 50 years, then, you know, you will budget and you will come up with things that, you know, keeps the institution going.

And the institution kind of, you know, nobody wants to leave a legacy of things. So if you say, you know, this is a military unit that's been building aircraft or, you know, space satellites for so many decades, and then you just find new ways and new programs and new technology, and you kind of start fueling all of that. And in my perspective, a lot of the, you know, space countries, the early space countries that are out there, have to deal with it.

And, you know, that's where I think, you know, the the new space world is in a fix because essentially the the money, as I said, you know, is still heavily allocated to the military programs. And essentially, the new space community which people tend to think, you know, wants to be privately funded, wants to have private businesses, and, you know, private consumers as their, you know, cons as their, market.

Essentially, we'll have to then look at ways in which it could work with the traditional legacy establishments to survive. And that I think is, you know, what you see happening in the US extremely quite a lot because you have most US companies that are startups today that are dependent heavily on, you know, military space contracts and, and essentially, you know, they they try to do that.

I'm nothing wrong with it in my perspective, but, you know, that's the way you think that you can survive because that's the way you think you can get some money to stay alive while you realize the piece of technology or you realize the piece of, you know, service that you that you come up with. Which is Elon Musk's model. He not a completely military, but his model has been to leverage the US government in funding. Yeah. Absolutely.

And you could see that even with companies like, Planet, for example. Right? Yeah. Ever, you you look at them and then they say we are democratizing access to, you know, satellite imagery and x y zed on one end. And on the other side, you can see them getting National Geospatial Agency contracts and DOD contracts. So you can see that, that but then what I don't really like is, if if you say that it's it's fine, you could be could be that.

But then you could not you shouldn't be, like, professing to the world that, you know, what we are doing is the right thing always. So because I say that because I think, 2 or 3 years ago, 2 years ago maybe, the, you know, the Indian, establishment, the Indian military conducted an anti satellite weapon, test and they, you know, shot down their own weapon.

And, you know, a company like I think a company like Planet, I think, put out a statement saying we are for, you know, space sustainability or something like that. And, and And here they are here they are being in the military in another angle. That's kind of Exactly. Yeah. And and I don't know if you know Will Marshall. I think that's the one I'd like to get on the show, so I'm just gonna toss it out there if you know well. I'd like to get one of the Planet guys on.

I've spoken for Planet, but I would like I've been in their facilities and I've spoken there, but I'd like to get them on just a a side note. So the when when, around the world, if you were to put a percentage on, how much of space, old space, old space versus new space, is military supported? I mean, Russia has 1 or 2 or 3 private space companies. That's it. Everything is within the infrastructure of the military apparatus. How much is separated and not exclusively one versus the other?

The number I think is in the extremely low front. I would say less than 10%, to be very honest, David. In my perspective, I think, most companies in the world, if you look deep down in their supply chains and the way they are conducting, business, and they would want to have, you know, militaries and and governments, you know, as their customers because that's the safest customer that you can have. That's a customer that you can, you know, always rely on.

And, and unfortunately, that is because, as I said, the integration of the services is, you know, military spending all of this but not really the the average Joe, getting any services, from space as of yet. That's not the future that we've stepped into yet. And, yeah. I mean, that that is a change. I think the step function change that we have to do and we have to see happening.

And, I guess, you know, many of the people are using this format of doing business to probably probably step in to to that future. So it's it's kind of a maybe there's a bad way to say it. I'm trying to come up with a better way, but it's like playing with the devil when you're in the when you get into the space industry. When you enter, you say, I need a stable customer, but I wanna be NewSpace considered. I wanna be a NewSpace company.

However, I need stability on my financial back end, so I'm going to just play with them a little bit. But the reality is when you start playing in their sandbox, you are in their sandbox. Yeah. And you see that, quite a lot. In fact, you know, one of the things that, you know, for example, we at Satsearch, we handle, the supply chain, you know, world. Right? So and you can see some of the US, you know, companies, the news space companies, we get requests.

Let's say a European engineer is requesting for some quotation for a particular piece of technology that a US company that is already being contracted by a US US military agency or the US air force to, you know, to develop that or to be used there is, you know so traditionally, a startup will be excited to receive an email saying, oh, there's somebody on the other side of the world who's looking to buy my product even if I'm new. Right?

And in this case and in this case, you will get no response because they are like, I have the US government as my customer maybe and why the hell do I need somebody else? Like, you know, are there maybe contract restrictions because that that piece of technology maybe said as exclusive to the US borders or or some other reason, but people will not tell that and they will not even respond to your email. And I can't. We filed a patent that we ended up securing. It was, what is it?

It's decision making based upon programmatic and algorithmic analysis, and we use drone and space technology within our patent. And, oh my god, we saw we saw things on our patent we've never seen before, letters and numbers and character, and we were able to figure out. So the US military looking at what we were filing. So, yeah, it does change the equation. Yeah. And, you know, so that's where I think the, the again, you know, going back to even the aviation world and so on.

So you you normally like, you have now 2 established players, for example, building aircraft. Right? So you have Boeing and Airbus building aircraft and there is a bunch of airlines that don't care about building their own aircraft. And they say, we have these 2 providers who have come up with the format and we know that their vehicles are interesting, and they are stable, and they're safe, and everything else. And I am an airline. I am Ryanair.

I'm not gonna create my own aircraft and fly the customers because it's more profitable to me. I know that I'm I am gonna be good at carrying people and optimizing, you know, passage of goods and people, and that's my function in the industry. Right? So you have the airline settling into all of that after a 100 years of innovation.

And in the space sector, however, we have companies that will say, I will build the, you know, satellite, and I'll build the build the service on top of the satellite, and I'll build the product on top of the service. Yep. Right? So They're building their own they're building their own ecosystem from beginning. Exactly. Yeah. So, so that's, you know, again, you know, it's it's it's kind of very childish to think about space as a sector when you compare that with other sectors.

And that that what you just said was the original meeting that I had, and I don't know if you know Bruce Pittman. I'm assuming you've met Bruce. Bruce Pittman in California at Scratch where I said, let me just show you the future of the space industry. And I was not a space person. I'm still not a space person. Right? I outlined, and I said the challenge that we have is we don't have the foresight into the entire ecosystem.

So when I use the caterpillar, I said, caterpillar can't put $14,000,000,000 into space mining, any type of equipment. But what if somebody else built this and someone who built that, and then I explained the technology behind computational social science and AI and modeling and networking, and how we can mitigate risk by saying, no. No. You just put 200,000,000 into developing this technology for space mining, and we'll show you 10 customers that will buy that on Earth and in space.

Therefore, their cost mitigation is so much lower, but then we take those 10 companies, and we show them how they could be part of the ecosystem. And to to give transparency to the the the build out is the challenge for the space industry is what I had articulated that this right now, every many institutions and we'll call SpaceX and Bezos' blue, they're building their entire supply chain from beginning to end, and that's costly and challenging.

Yeah. And, it kind of makes it an exclusive club or a monopoly at the end, which may not transform the the ability to, you know, as I said, to reach the last mile to a great extent. Right? Because you see, you know, I think yesterday on Space News, there was already a news that Starlink, is, being contracted by the US army, I think, to experiment, the usage of Starlink for their, you know, communication links. Yeah. Right?

And so you see already, you know, the the customer being the government coming into play there again. And so my sense of all of this is this is a transition phase of, the entire space industry where unfortunately, because we don't have the supply chains and integration of space as a part of real economy, real productivity of people yet. We have to, you know, undertake ventures and undertake business with governments in such models.

And we're forced to do that because we have not yet, as a collective industry, figured out how do we integrate space that makes normal people more productive yet. And there's one thing that, you know, that has established otherwise, which is the direct to home television industry, which makes the most amount of money in the space industry and is kind of independent. That's the only, you know, sector where you see that the the government is out of the business there.

You know, the government does not want to be in the business of what you and I want to watch on television. Yeah. So So can I, I'd like your perspective on how you perceive the geopolitical pandemic and non pandemic based nationalism development harming or, benefiting the space industry? I think you get the question? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, the thing is, on one hand, there I mean, there's a middle ground to this because I think you can't say you can't take sides here because there are positive and negatives for both the ones. The positive ones, of course, is that, you know, politicians who don't understand technology or all these kinds of, life cycles of technology tend to believe that space is a very important domain. It's a very interesting domain, and it's a military domain, and it's a national security domain.

And those are very the the words are very interesting for them and, you know, the the understanding of that is very simple and for them, and they believe in it, and they will fund it. So that's the baseline of it. And then there's the part of gold there that people are trying to get including the big corporations or even small companies. Right?

So and and that I think is a narrative that, you know, as I said, legacy institutions we have created and we have maintained because, you know, we know that the the part of gold is there to to be grabbed there and if we can, create more threat, or, you know, fuel other events that are out there and create more opportunity to look to make space look like a tool that can aid, you know, kind of alleviating this or supporting some of the other geopolitical scenes, then the pot of gold there becomes big, and keeps becoming bigger and bigger and bigger.

Right? And that's a push there of making that part of gold bigger purely on the geopolitical and and the military side of, operations, but that will never make space an industry, in my opinion. And that's yeah.

That's the risk my take, and that's why I asked the question was immediately when you said it, I said, the risk structure for a nationalistic approach to space development pushes further the military apparatus into whatever technologies that country has because that's its own leveraging point, where when it's a global initiative, when it's a global connective, open source, open capability, ecosystem, you end up driving a different type of, political agenda.

Absolutely. And then I can give you an example from the other industry here. So you know when, GE, General Electric, the American company came up with the the first mobile electrocardiograms, essentially, electrocardiograms that doctors can carry to rural America, to test people there using mobile ECTs. The first, units were, I think, more than $10,000 each for every electrocardiogram. Right?

And that's something that maybe some of the US, you know, doctors could afford based on some, you know, US government subsidy or something like that. But if GE had to establish a market for that in a developing country like India or China or, you you know, Africa back then, you would not sell, you know, electrocardiograms that are mobile at $10,000 a piece in India. You know? So right?

So what GE did back then is they took the electrocardiogram and they brought that piece of technology that they built, for the US and, you know, put that together. And they brought the IPs and and the whole construct of the product to India, to Bangalore where they come from. Where if you know today, there are 15,000 g engineers working there. Yeah. And they brought it there and they said, you know what? Guys, these are the foundation IPs around all of this.

Why don't you, you know, have a free hand free hand in innovating in a way that this makes sense for your local market? And guess what happened to that? The $10,000 piece became a $1,000. I was just gonna say 2, but, yeah, it it was a factorial of 10 x. Yep. And the sales picked up in Africa, you know, it it picked up in India and, you know, so that's what I'm talking about. A little bit of a a combination of Jugad tied into the implication of innovation.

And I think that would be the way Jugad would probably be one of those areas in which to think differently. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. And so that's the thing. Right? Because any product or a service, can hardly be kind of replicated in its true sense everywhere around the world without taking into account the local intricacies that include local economy, local tradition, culture, language, other things. Right? That go into all of it.

Even for example, some, you know, the most established industry in the world, maybe the food industry. Right? McDonald's when it had to come to India, it had to stop selling, you know, beef burgers and hamburgers and had to make 2 by adding, you know, chili powder into fries. Yep. So there's, all of that and you know so that's, that's that's a bit of learnings from a lot of different other industries and we haven't seen all of that, in space yet. We're gonna make it happen. Right?

That's what we're working on. Okay? I I perfect. These are these are fantastic examples. I I do appreciate your I do appreciate the the depth of knowledge you have in these categories, which I absolutely love. They're they're they're exciting and interesting. So, yeah, the geopolitical side is one of the challenges that I'm seeing or have a challenge with because my my take, this is Project Moon Hut's and original conception was that Project Moon Hut is neutral.

We want a global participation in a global initiative to improve how we live on Earth for all species at the same time addressing several categories of challenges that are global challenges with the desired outcome of just getting us to the moon. They so the this whole nationalism, feeling is will alter the trajectory and possibly the timelines. So I'm wrestling with how to get around that.

Yeah. And the one of the again, you know, interesting stories I think from that I read a few years back, I don't know how true it is, one argument that people, you know, say that, US intentionally hold hold it out, you know, held out, not flying the first satellite up in space, is, you know, people there is speculation around this that they said that nobody knew if, everybody knew that if you had an unauthorized aircraft flying over your territory, you could shoot it down. Right?

Yeah. And, nobody knew if there was an unauthorized satellite that was flying over your space, you could shoot it down or you could call it war. Yep. Right? And so there's speculation around people saying the US wanted Soviet Union to establish that precedent of flying an object over somebody else's territory, while you don't have authorization to go the territory but in space.

Isn't there something that's going on in, in the US having to do with spy satellites or satellite and imagery and and capabilities in space over, at least the United States. I think there's something in discussion right now as to what is considered acceptable and what's not. I think that's an issue being addressed in the in the administration. Okay. So yeah.

So essentially, you know, that's a bit of from the historical context that is also something that you could look at as to we had to undergo that kind of barrier initially to to know that, you know, countries could fly over each other, you know, satellites flying over each other.

And that's the same I would imagine with also aviation world because once, you know, civilian aviation became very, you know, an industry by on its own, then countries had to just come together and say, you know, we have a different routine for civilian and air you know, and military aircrafts. And the the the tracks in which they operate and the the ways they function are very different from each other. It doesn't mean that, you know, there are no military aircrafts around.

There are, of course, military aircrafts and, many of them around and doing a lot of things. But, the way the civilian aircraft world has taken over as an industry and the way it operates and the way it has, you know, fueled, for example, ICAO, which is the international, agency, the UN agencies that, that monitors everything around aviation and aviation rules and aviation, you know, agreements between governments. You have all of that.

So people had to figure out if there was a child born on an aircraft with citizenship it would get. Mhmm. Oh, yeah. Right? So, so so there's a lot of kind of, interesting insight into, all of that. And I think, you know, even an organization like the ICOW, which dealt with, you know, intergovernmental negotiation for airline operation, for example, right, and civilian airline operation and rules for all of this and, you know, regulations for standards for all of this.

We haven't seen that kind of an institution in the space industry. No. We have not. So that's another I've had conversations about what happens if someone is born in space, where do they fall, and we probably would adapt the traditional, airline rules and regulations. What country did they originate from? What country passport holders are they? And it will become an interesting challenge years years years into the future if you were born in space.

Your parents were born in or your parents were born in space. Where do as a child are you? And do do you go back to that original country, or do you lack the citizenship? So that's a I I'm assuming the logic as humans are today would, eventually transform. Yeah. Absolutely. And so that, you know, makes me to get into my next topic with just, new space and new countries.

Yeah. So essentially, you know, my PhD was around using satellite imagery in, you know, fundamentally other value chains and other industries in India, and how do you make that sector more productive? So for example, right, let's take, you know, the whole chain of there are about 60% of India's employment come from agriculture. Yeah. 64640,000,000 I think. So something like that. 680,000,000? Yeah. Right? Yeah. And although it only contributes to 15% of India's GDP.

Yeah. I I I actually wrote about this. So, yeah, these are good numbers. Yeah. Exactly. Right? So, now when you look at the whole way the agriculture is operated in India, unfortunately, the rules around the agriculture are very strict in India because, you know, like, a farmer is not allowed to sell or sell land and somebody who is not coming from a farming background cannot buy farming land in Indian rules.

Indian, you know, the national rules of India don't allow such consolidation of land, and it makes farmers hold land.

And essentially, what happened, you know, because of this kind of rules is over the last, 7, you know, like, 3 to 5 generations of independent India, the land sizes have become smaller and smaller and smaller because, you know, your father would have 10 kids and you would have 10 acres of land, And then you would die and then you would say, this land is now divided about 5 sons, so it's 2 acres each.

And then they would have 5 kids and then then you know, now the average, farmland in India is like 1 acre or something like that or in terms of holdings. Alright? So which means that you cannot use precision agriculture.

There's a lot of problems there and it's unlike US where you have 10,000 acres of land, you know, who are held by one company or, you know, farming there and using technology to becoming, you know, to making more, these farmers more productive and not having more farmers instead of, instead having more productivity per farmer and having those original farming families to move into other industries and being productive there. Right?

So Yeah. The point the point that I'm trying to raise is that because of all of this as well as the problems in accessing, you know, finance, for example. Right? So, 30, I mean, 30 to 40% of lending in India is still from legacy, you know, lenders who are who are lending to farmers at interest rates of, 2 or 3% every month. Wow. Right? Right?

And these are farmers who have no institutions, you know, that they want to rely on And, you know, they want to have some money at the beginning of the season to buy seeds and, you know, water their plants and, you know, put pesticides on them and harvest and give that, you know, sell their crop and give the money back to the, you know, the the lender.

And so the challenge is that if you have 30 or 40% of farmers in India out of that massive number that you talked about, depend on informal credit, you have a market out there to bring them to the formal credit. And the problem with formal credit institutions is that they don't have any records on these, on these farmers to know how to, you know, undertake risk and how to how to classify them. And if they to know if they are a risky proposition to invest in or not. Right?

So these are these are also, I'm assuming, the unbanked. Exactly. Yeah. And the unbanked meaning for those who don't understand that this is where I'm breaking out, for those who are unbanked or individuals who have not entered into the formal banking infrastructure that exists in the world today. And so there's no transactional history, there's no records, and they are banking, but they're using a shadow banking system.

Borrowing from someone who borrows from a bank gets a 1,000,000 US dollar and then breaks it up. But there's no record of those breakup transactions, and therefore, that person who's borrowing has no credit history. So Exactly. Right?

Yep. So what I'm trying to say there is that, look, you know, if you have to break that chain, then you could, so one of the papers that I wrote in my PhD was about, taking satellite imagery for the last 7 years and, you know, looking at the credit history of the farmer or developing a credit history of the farmer. And, essentially, you know, by that, if a farmer comes and says to the rural bank in India and says, you know, you I wanna get a loan now from you.

And then there's the the bank just says now today, for example, okay. You know, like, you we don't have you as a previous customer, so you're a risky guy. You go away or something. But then, no. If if the farm bank could then say, okay. Like, where is your land? And this is you know, if they could say that guy would say my land is so and so. And then the bank says, okay.

Now I have a I have a workflow here in my banking system that uses satellite imagery from the last 7 years to know and I know where your land is, and I can tell you how productive you were in the last 7 years. And if you are just, you know, kind of bullshitting me by coming for only this season to borrowing money and escaping from me. And I can then say, you know, this guy was so much productive and, you know, the yield was so much the productivity, the the crop area was so much.

And then you could kind of build a risk index on that and say, okay. I see that you're an honest guy and I see the evidence from the last 7 years that you have been productive. And so I'm gonna invest in you and give you this money. I I've gotta say that is brilliant. That is absolutely brilliant. Because I I mean, I'm my mind is racing and I'm I'm I'm inside of me. My I'm saying, wow.

Taking satellite imagery, tying it to some form of, some form of algorithm, also possibly drone technology that might be integrated within it, and you can then look at a piece of land, you can see color, you could see spread, you could you could even possibly watch machinery or humans, harvesting and how it changed, how during bad seasons and good seasons, you could tie in weather modifications and be able to equalize that yield from that year, and then be able to give them a rating score to say, you are a out of a 100 or out of 50 or out of 10, whatever the number of numericalization is, you can come back and say, so you're a 77.3, which gives you the ability to borrow at x.

I I think that's absolutely brilliant. Yeah. And you could do that as well on the insurance side. Right? So because if you say, you know, my crop was damaged, then you clear come and say, you know, my crop was damaged because of a of a locust attack or of a because of a wildfire or or a drought or something.

You know, people can evenly easily say, you know, I have satellite imagery for your season, and I can see that you've grown your crop or you've not grown your crop or your crop is affected because of x y zed reason. And the whole crop insurance, infrastructure becomes automatable as well. So has has anybody, man, this I'm trying to be kind here in this question. Have people in positions of authority taken this on as a mantra, as a means of facilitating banking? Have they or insurance?

Have you have you introduced this to Nandan Nilekani? Have, has this gone through the chain of command so that this can be adopted? Yeah. I mean, there's a company in India called Satcher that is now trying to, you know, like, build and roll out products around these. The other example that I can also give you is I talked to a company again based in, Bombay in Mumbai in India, that uses satellite data from European satellites.

And what they do is they have an app for fishermen, and they charge fishermen, I think, something like, you know, 3 or $4 a month or and what they do is they have an app where they have imagery or insights, you know, refreshed on a daily basis on where fish is in the coast that they fish normally, which is like a 20 square kilometer area around where they are, where their community fishes. These are not, you know, big fishing companies, but these are just individual fishermen.

So for a dollar or 2, you're getting real current diagnostic or information to where do you put your boat? Where do you drop your line? Exactly. Right? And then, you know, the, advantage there is 1, you know, you have insights from weather. Again, both ground and space based weather capabilities integrated, and it tells fishermen go out during this time and don't don't go out during this time. There's a safety aspect to it.

There's a fuel aspect to it because you're not going around, you know, blind, and just driving your diesel diesel engine on there and, you know, wasting a lot of fuel and creating a lot more pollution, and instead you're being efficient in your route. You could then say there's a a security angle to it because off the coast of Bombay and Gujarat, for example, you have the problems between the Indian and the Pakistani Navy and a lot of fishermen being captured by, that site.

And it's the same, for example, in the India and the Sri Lankan boat, for example. Right? People just wearing off into the other's waters and then just get capturing. So with this, you can even prove where they were located in, and, and you could even warn them that you are going away from certain zones and, you know, be be safe and, get, you know, fish in our waters, for example. Right? And then, so And that is that is a big contention. I didn't realize it while I was in in Sri Lanka.

I didn't realize the contention between India and and Sri Lanka in terms of water rights is a huge issue. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, these are, you have fishermen, in holds. Hundreds of fishermen, I think, who get caught in in between all of this every year. Yeah. I didn't it's a big issue. Yep. Yeah. And then, you know, you look at market access. So let's say you had the catch.

There's been papers, that have been scientifically recorded by our own space agency who did a pilot around this and they said, you know, it increased the fish catch, by by 50% to these fishermen, and then it reduced the fuel cost by, like, 30%. And, you know, they could earn, like, literally, about, you know, 3 or $4,000 on a year more because of this technology.

Amazing. So so these are, I think, you know, this is the theme that I wanted to stress in this, in the podcast because, these are what I call as new space in new countries. Because, you're telling people, you know, that, the fisherman doesn't care if his insights are coming from satellites or not.

But if you tend to make him realize that look, you know, because somebody invested in those satellites, you are able to now get this money, and you're being more productive and you're being more safe, and you could tell that story in a compelling way. I would say no fisherman would say no to space exploration then.

It's the the these are these are fantastic examples of the insight that's part of I don't normally talk about Project Moon not that much, but you've you've just triggered so many things that we are working on. One of them is to the the the fact is growing up or the belief is growing up, that we get very, very little space education.

And I don't know in your history, when you grow up, when you went to school through university, overall, before you specialized, how many hours of classroom when you were 12 and 14 and 16 did you get any education about space? Probably less than 10. Less than 10. And and mine might have been similar because I remember we did a little bit about space a day or 2 in a social studies class in about, let's say I was maybe 8th grade.

Otherwise, I have no knowledge, and part of Project Moon Hut's community engagement is to reach a 1000000000 hearts and minds, to get people to think differently. And within there, we're asking teachers to give every class a little bit of space. And what does that mean, a little bit of space? Is that a a teacher has, blocks that they have to teach, and a block is a segment that they create their course content out of. So we're gonna do a block on this, a block on this.

It could be a day or 3 weeks. It could be 2 days, whatever they're doing. And we're just saying, can you put in any class, a block of space? So if you're doing an English or a a language class, so let's say your language, it could be Lithuanian, Russian, German, whatever, you could have a a day or 2 on how literature was impacted by space.

And then if you have a class in textiles or fashion or design, how fashion has been influences by space, or then you've been doing history, you could even go into movies, and how movies have influenced the world in which we live. So every class from psychology, not just STEM, every class has within it a component, doesn't have to be long, a little bit of space, where the teacher says, how has psychology been impacted by space? How has, ceramics or design or astrology or mathematics?

How has it impacted our discipline? And I think that would be it's I believe so strongly that it would change this, exactly what you're saying. It would make young students, young individuals, all the way up through university, to ask themselves, what, did space impact me? Oh my god. I use a mobile phone. I take photographs. I do I look up. I use weather. I get on a plane. I use GPS to get to my friend's house. Oh my god. I am a space faring individual, which would make it normalized.

Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, that's also a part of, this narrative on, you know, how do you get people to solve problems that are, in this last mile. Right? I talked to you about, you know, the farmer and the fisherman, but you could imagine this with, every other, you know, sector. And if you would say that the last mile individual in every other sector is, the problems that they have have a space solution or space space solution.

I think that that is what I, you know, call as inclusive space commercialization. Can you just for the sake of argument, and I I have, I'd like you to define your definition of last mile. So the last mile in my definition is, an average individual in an average country, for example. I mean, that's a very crude definition, but, essentially, what I'm trying to say is is is an average person who, who is on the street in any part of the world, any part of the developing world. It could be in Africa.

It could be in India. It could be in Southeast Asia. Right? And Yeah. And he has a job. It could be a fisherman. It could be a farmer. It could be somebody else. Right? And, you know, essentially, when they're they are just trying to become more productive and more efficient and more, you know, economically sound and socially sound and everything else. Right?

And, and that's where I think, you know and technology is increasingly helping them being productive and doing all of that magic behind it. Right? And, unfortunately, there's a lot of other technologies that have impacted them. For example, you know, cell phone or, you know, 4 g and mobile phone connectivity has transformed them, over the last 15 years. But but has space done it in a certain way? Not yet.

It's, I the reason I asked is because I look at however we wanna determine it to the first world, third world developing nations. India has been around for a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very long time, and it's still developing. It could be developing for a very, very, very long time too. So it's not about age, it's about policy, it's about structure, it's about religious, orientation. There's a lot of variables that go into whether someone is still developing or not.

So my definition based upon the way you were talking is this last mile is the last mile for anybody on earth to improve their life standing, or maybe not the productivity, but the quality of life that they endure and inclusive of all other species on earth. Because I if farmers knew that there was there were I mean, fishermen knew there were whales or dolphins, they could stay away from that catch so that those species can survive, or we look at the rainforest.

I've, one of the things I look at is the deforestation in the rainforest. And in 1 month, 8 months ago, satellite imagery showed that we deforest about 750 square kilometers, which is to an average person who might be listening to this. It's driving 6 hours or 5 hours in one direction and then the other direction nonstop at maybe 90 kilometers per hour or 60 miles per hour. And that's a lot of space. So I I would I would like to see this last mile inclusive of everybody.

And, there's, again, a global perspective all of this to all of this as well because, you know, about 2 years ago, I had entered a conference on something related to forest sustainability, and there was a Norwegian NGO, you know, working on policies that affect, international policy making in agriculture. And, you know, they were talking about how the rainforests in, in South America are disappearing because meat consumption in Europe and China have been on the rise and have for decades now.

And, essentially, the feed for all the meat, including pigs and, you know, cows and everything, a lot of it comes from South America with, you know, a lot of the deforestation happening, with, you know, people growing soy and other things to feed, you know, meat industry in, China and, in in Europe.

And, essentially, that is because, you know, the South American countries will not tell their farmers to be more productive on their farms and grow more per acre rather than they'll say that we have a big enough land to go out and get the forest and spread our you know, you don't need to be more efficient. We just need to get more land out of the forest. Right?

And so the Norwegian NGO was talking about how can you, for example, use satellite imagery, and have the European Union create a certification system that monitors these farms that are supplying, you know, to the meat industry and to make sure that they are investing in being more, you know, doing more precision farming and increasing productivity rather than getting the forest. But why?

I mean, the the the there's there's not the certification is not going to go that far, so I don't believe that's a solution. But my my mind traveled to the conflict between China and United States and the import changes, the import tariffs that were added on top of soy or, pig farms.

And what happened as a result of that challenge, which I would say that the American system is a highly productive system when it comes to at least farming, is the supply chain between China and the United States for these products was disrupted, and the impact was that China invested a lot of money in South America, a lot of money in other countries where they don't they are not gonna be as productive for a very long time.

And now these countries at low productivity are operating to supply China with pigs and soy, and that supply chain to the United States will never will not come back for a very long time. So what we've done is we've actually exacerbated global warming or resource depletion over over, use of chemicals for, that run into spill off in sea oceans or into water streams. So we've actually exacerbated the entire situation over the past geopolitical 5 years.

Yeah. And, you know, space can be a tool in such policy making, especially, you know, one, when you have to when you hope that there's you can get good behavior out of, you know, actors that you don't have sovereign control about, but, off but you could create good practices in industries where even though you don't have sovereign control, the streamlining, of, you know, the the procurement streamlining and everything else can be based on space based insights. I love it. Right.

So and it could be it's also in terms of, you know, connectivity. It could be, even today, you know, we have no satellite Internet in India. Can you believe it? Really? No satellite wow. A, it was, what was his name? Jeffrey Mamber, who talked about how he and you said it, so it's hitting me. You said Spacebase Insights, which I like the term. However, I don't like it partially because of Jeffrey. And Jeffrey who's anybody listening, he runs a company called Nanoracks.

He's put 700 payloads into the International Space Station, put up several 100 satellites. Very well known player and I know that, you know I am. So what Jeffrey had said that I thought was an interesting comment is he that why are there space agencies? He doesn't like them.

He thinks they're they're counterproductive, that they they diminish the ecosystem of capitalism or the growth of the industry because everybody's trying to feed these mechanisms where by doing so, we don't have we don't use the term there is no automotive agency. There is no farming agency who runs all farming, and runs all automotive, and runs all they have lobbying efforts, and they have groups, and they have associations.

But countries don't have this term they have this term space agency, which means everything for space in our country, we're gonna monitor, and we're gonna try to direct. And when we say space based insights, it'll be an interesting day when someone doesn't use space based, but just use insights. Yeah. And and you can see that also in, you know, that's the part of the legacy institutions. Right?

So because I think, you know, apart from the technology investments that, you know, new technology investments and new science investments that, space agencies do are doing, A lot of the space agency, investments are just jobs programs around the world. This is fascinating. So I guess we're on to assumptions of technology and the lessons you've learned. Is that where we are?

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that was the last, you know, like, the last bit that I wanted to tell you, and that brings back me to the initial part of the episode that we, you know, talked about, RocketMail. So a lot of the assumptions around space based, you know, new space based services are, you know, people immediately say space kit. Right?

And it's a it's a market where people have to invest 1,000,000,000 of dollars and make sure that this, you know, space planes going between there and then there'll be people up to pay a 100, $200,000 to go up and come for 20 minutes. Right? So and that's been, you know, people have been telling that for the last 20 years or so, and then, there's not even, I think, a single operational space tourism flight that has been happening. Go what's Galactic's name?

The Galactic version didn't take off again. They had another challenge. Yeah. Yeah. So, so what I'm trying to say there is, you know, we discussed about RocketMail. Right? About the assumption that RocketMail is going to be a service that people will use was made in the 19 thirties. And, and so that that meant that there was a whole construct and investment around people thinking Rocket mail, is the thing for the future and air mail will not, you know, be around.

But then, you know, today you see FedEx owning aircraft, not rockets. Right? Yeah. And, so I think we, as an industry, are in some instances or in many instances when we think about the future of services and technology, we are sometimes making a lot of assumptions that are on similar lines on similar services which may not be true ever in, in in as as things play out.

And I think, we have to be open enough for us to, you know, organically see people deploying new services and coming up with new ideas and new innovations. And, and rather than seal the the the ideas around pillars where I would go and sell, you know, space tourism as this new pillar and somebody else will sell me, you know, space, base power as a new pillar and somebody else will sell me, like, something else, right, on on all of this.

And I think that's that the adoption often the the adoption chain is, something that we oversee a lot in the space sector. So, one of the fascinating, you know, stories that I was reading, it was about, Michelin, the tire company, I think, had the patent for the for tubeless tire cars in the early nineties. And this is, an innovation that the market creates. Right?

Because nobody wants to have a flat, in the middle of the road and, you know, pull out the to the side and then change tires and then drive. Right? Everybody wants to, you know, even though they have a a puncture, they would want to drive 200 kilometers and then, you know, think about changing tires when they've reached their destination. This is a technology that the consumer needs in the automotive industry.

And, you know, Michelin, the tire company came up with it, but then they they the car manufacturers obviously want it because they can sell, you know, to the consumers that our cars have these tubeless tires and, you know, and it's a fantastic fit when you think about it because the tire many sales force, the car car manufacturers can say this is a novelty in our cars, so come buy our cars, and then the consumers need it.

And, you know, so it's perfect thing, but people launched it this and then people figured out that they completely ignored the whole servicing industry because the servicing industry then said, okay. There's this new tubeless tire and I need to invest into, you know, training my manpower and knowing how to operate on this and fixing a puncture on this, and I need to invest in the new tooling that goes along with it. And so there are, 99 other cars on the street that don't use this technology.

So they're so therefore, I'm not gonna I'm going to say no to this one customer. Yeah. So so I think, you know, space has a lot of that kind of things going on at the moment, and, and I would like to see kind of these assumptions play out, in a in a way for me, I think, this one interesting thing that we could discuss about space. Right? For will space tourism be in a way that would be, an entertainment, park theme park where you would say, I will go visit Disney World every once a year?

Or would you want that to be, like, the aviation world where you would say, I will fly from, you know, like Bangalore in India to New York in, 2 hours? It's a it's a fantastic question because I I don't believe, and this goes all the way back to the first conversation, and this is 6 years ago before Elon was really big and blue. I said to Bruce, we are not gonna build a space industry on space tourism. That's not where it needs to be the foundational aspect of the industry.

So I completely believe that this whole flying from Bangalore to Berlin or Bangalore to Tokyo, wherever you want me to go, is really the the, the foundational building block of our future. And we have to be careful that we don't promote space as tourism, but we promote it as what you've been saying, brilliantly have been saying, the next iteration of improvement of life on Earth for all species with I added the all species, but yes.

Yeah. And, it also goes with all the utilization of, you know, other military bodies including Moon, Mars, and everywhere. And because, you know, the the first explorers, you know, India and China, had a a type of, or, you know, more than 25% of the world's GDP, and had a very big monopoly over the lots of trade going back to, you know, the last, millennium. Right?

So the reason why explorers were trying to find a way to to India or to China a lot to the oceans and, you know, through to seas and everything is because there was the promise, of this, you know, spice or, you know, or other things, cloth, textile, you know, fabrics, and things like that that, people wanted back in home.

And they figured out that if we could optimize and we could do all of this, and, you know, we get the trade route secure, we could, you know you know, get all of this, going and we could establish a trade route and all of this. Right? And that was the and, you know, the whole thing that I'm trying to say there is that people knew that something was there and it was already up for grabs. And it was not like people would have to come to India and then, mine pepper for the next 20 years.

Yeah. Before they would take back, you know, 10 grams of pepper back to England. Yeah. You you can't build the which is what we talked about earlier. You can't build the entire ecosystem or this entire supply chain from beginning to end. There has to be pieces to build that model and everybody's taking a a a small piece of that puzzle. Yeah. And also, it's also about, you know, who, what gets commercialized and what is commercializable is a big question. Right?

And, I haven't, still got the, got the the answer to this, for example, for, the moon, for example. Right? People, who are moon advocates who, talk about, like, you know, helium 3 being on the moon and and some kind of minerals there. We don't even know, like, you know, we don't even have are not even close to any technology that allows to us to mine, you know, helium on on on the moon or things like that. Right?

So there is a a sense certain sense of, for me, I think, you know, what what would in my construct, people will build services and technologies that serve people on the earth so seamlessly and as an industry, like the aviation industry did. And through that, the technology becomes so mature, that, you know, there's all the technologies that are relevant to outer space exploration becomes a reality in all of that. Cool. Any last words to add to this?

Oh, I think it's been, I think the one of the longest chats that I had with anyone. So, I I I I haven't really thought about, you know, talk to anybody on such broad areas and, you know, getting my mind flowing in so many different things consolidated at the same time. And, this is, I think, the first time in my life that I've spoken so much, and, honestly about, you know, what I think about the industry and what I think about, all of this. So I have to thank you for giving me the opportunity.

Well, thank you. I my I'm smiling ear to ear because one of the things that I enjoy is learning from amazing people like yourself and to have my own mind blown, distorted, reshaped by the lessons that other people have learned. So you you were brilliant here. I I really appreciate you going through all of these stories of history and tying them to present day. I think it was, amazing.

So thank you for taking the time to be with us today, and I I know that this podcast will be a very valuable podcast that should be shared throughout India and around the world because it is such important. I'll say important. It is such, insightful thoughts. So you did a brilliant job today. Thank you. Thank you again, David. You're welcome.

So let's, we wanna take for all of you out there who took the time to listen in, I hope you had the same amazing experience that I've had, exploring the world in a way that I had not thought of, and and Narayan did a a fabulous job. And I so I do hope you walked away learning something. And I also hope that you, as a listener, take the time to explore Project Moon Hut. There is a podcast there is a video up. You can type in under YouTube.

You go youtube, dot com and then search for Project Moon Hut and you'll see our logo. Just put the video up. It's not what Project Moon Hut is about. It is not what project Moon Hut is about. Let me make sure you understand that. But what it does do is it gives you a different orientation to what Project Moon Hut has components of our belief structure and our directive, and what we're trying to accomplish as an organization, as a global organization.

We have about 50, 60 people around the world helping us in different ways, and we'd love to see your participation. So is there one way, Narayan, that some people, if they want to get a hold of you, that they could. What would be the best way? The best I think is, email. My email is, [email protected]. Okay. So let's so so why don't you spell that out? Because your name is, just to make sure the spelling. Yep. It is n a r a y a n at satsearch.co. Satsearch. Yes. That's right.

So, again, thank you very much for everybody out there listening. If you'd like to connect, I'd like or we'd like to connect with you. You can reach me at [email protected]. You can reach us at, Twitter, at project moon hut. You can connect to us on, again, YouTube, which has just been put up this video. We haven't been marketing, so that's new. You've got the podcast series you can listen to. If you wanna get a hold of me, you can also connect to me at at Goldsmith on Twitter.

I'm on LinkedIn, Facebook, mister David Goldsmith even on Instagram, and we, we do have a at project. We have a project Moon Hut Instagram. We just haven't put anything up yet. So for everybody out there, for everybody who's been listening, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for being part of our program. Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to another edition of the age of infinite.

Honestly, we're not going to be stepping into the 4th industrial revolution if we do things right. The Internet of things and connected devices, is that our real future? We have the possibility to create the age of infinite, infinite possibilities and infinite resources going into space. And the podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation, where we are looking to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut.

We were named by NASA, and it is through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem. Then we plan on using these endeavors to paradigm shifting and innovation and turn that back on Earth to change how we live on Earth, to improve how we live on Earth for all species. And today, we're going to be exploring why it's important to have inclusive commercialization of space. We have a guest that I think it's been 2 years I've tried to get on.

He comes highly recommended, Narayan Prasad. He is the cofounder of Statsearch, and curator of NewSpace India. Hello, Narayan. How are you, Narayan? Hi. Hi, David. It's a pleasure talking to you, and, you know, having known you, you're a prolific speaker. I can I hope to keep up? You will do amazingly well. It's not about the speaking. It's about the content, and I'm here to learn from you. And so, you have a set of an outline for us to work from?

Yeah. I do have, you know, about 5 bullet points of things that I wanted to say broadly. Okay. So why don't you give them to me or write them down? Sure. So as a part of the whole, inclusive approach to, you know, space, economy, and commercialization of space, I, you know, I tend to think that taking a historical context to to begin with So why don't we start why don't we start with just give me the outline and then we can go into the the content wise.

Sure. So the outline is about, the legacy of traditional space first. Legacy. You know, that's what we've been doing for the last, 70 years. Okay. Number 2? And and number 2 would be looking at a very close industry, which is in terms of what other lessons from the aviation industry that, you know, we have learned over the last a 120 years to now, which can be, you know, replicated in space. Okay. Number 3?

Number 3 would be, you know, what is, new space and, you know, how is new space done in old space countries? Okay. Number 4? Number 4 is, you know, what is new space in new countries or new space fairing countries? New countries. Okay. And number 5 is, generally, we what are the assumptions of, you know, technology or maturity in terms of, technology in in general and how that, making early assumption can early assumptions can go really wrong at certain point of time.

So kind of some lessons that I had in mind. Okay. So let's start with number 1, the legacy of traditional space. Let's where are we gonna go with this? Help me. Sure. So the legacy of, traditional space we all know is, military space. Right?

So essentially, you know, countries, backing, you know, inventors and, and entrepreneurs within their own borders to say that we're gonna build up a certain capability and this is gonna be exclusive to our country and and, you know, our borders, and and we're gonna deploy this against, enemies or, you know, threats that come outside from outside. So that's the legacy of, of traditional space.

And, essentially, what I wanted to bring up there is that, a lot of innovation gets fueled in that way in many industries that's happened in, you know, for for possibly in the aviation industry and, you know, going back to the industrial revolution, maybe you could look at many, many, many inventions and and technologies that have been funded in that way. But then there's a time in which, you know, this kind of innovations spills over and they become really kind of commercial.

As in, they they become kind of boring and they become kind of integrated into lives of people, and you will not notice it that, you know, this had a military background and all of it. And that's because, there's an there's a very nice integration into the whole economy, and the way people are doing stuff with it and using it and are being productive and are being are using it in their daily lives for doing some part of it. Right?

So these are traditionally, like, examples that you would take of spin off or, technologies from, from, you know, NASA or you would take examples from, services. For example, it could be, an ATM machine which is powered by the satellite where, you would never know a novel person would never know that there's a satellite link behind this a this this ATM, and I'm drawing money in this.

But then, you know, it's just made so boring that that people don't notice it, and that's making money and that's making, you know, tech is, funneling productivity of the kind of people. So so let let me I will jump in here for a minute because I I'm my mind is racing, and I've got two points that I'd or possibly 3, but 2 I'd like to to explore.

Military in space, was was it really, and I don't know really in a in a bad way or a good way, Was space a military expedition, or was it first an exploratory and then converted to military? For many countries, was the US really trying to do first for military, or would we go back to Von Braun and the creation of rockets and wanting to get into space, or we go to da Vinci or whomever else? Was it was space, space itself, I could say other industries, but was space a mixture? Was it different?

You know what I'm asking? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. In fact, you don't need to just go back to the last 70 years. You can go back to about 300 years, you know. So the whole, the whole technology in rocketry itself is very interesting. You had the Chinese working on, gunpowder which eventually made way to India.

And I think many people don't know this that, in the 1700, there was a king in southern India, the state where I come from, who, you know, essentially had a a unit within his army which worked on bamboo rockets. And, these bamboo rockets were, you know, fueled by, gunpowder, and, they essentially had mastered a little bit of both the basics of rocketry. And they had inducted these rocketry into their military forces.

And these, weapons in the 1700 the late 1700 were used against the British forces that were in India, and they were fighting these Indian kingdoms. And this particular king, he had a regiment that used, you know, these rockets against the British troops. And eventually, unfortunately, this southern Indian king lost the war.

And, then, you know, the British general, one of the, I think, lieutenants or generals called Congreve, he, actually picked up this technology and he saw an interest into this. And he saw how good this could be if it's, you know, matured and developed over time. And this is, you know, the late 1700 and early 1800 that I'm talking about. Not even the 19 fifties or 19 forties when, you know, the people like Juan Braun come into the picture.

And so we have to I I think we really have to think about at least I have to go back in my mind as racing. Okay. What was 1700 India like? I mean, I I've been through India. I've been to Japur and Agra and a bunch of places. The if you think back at 1700, I mean, we are not we don't have all these amenities that we have today. This is really, really, really far back. Yeah. Absolutely.

And and the thing is in India in 1700 is a bunch of princely states like, you know, what would 1700 look like in much of Europe where you had, for example, Germany had I think 500 different small little kingdoms here and there, which consolidated over time and very much like European, the entire European continent. India was, divided in, you know, kind of, culture and language and kingdoms spread over.

And some of the kingdoms and were more prosperous and, you know, and the artisans there and the trade there enabled a lot of new technology and then a lot of new innovation. And that goes back to some of this kind of rocketry where, you know, the these guys were experimenting on using, rockets against, as a part of the military technology. And, you know, just to go back to a little bit to that, you know, once the guy lost, in fact, that's how rocketry made its way to the to Europe.

Because in 1800, when Congreve, you know, saw the potential of rockets, the British forces took that rocketry technology and went and used it against Napoleon. Oh, really? Yeah. So and so you see how, you know, the technology comes, the early technology of gunpowder coming from China and then coming to India and going to Europe. And this is all, as I said, you know, pre, you know, pre Von Braun kind of generation. That that's fantastic.

You tied it you tied it way back, which I love because I had not gone back to gunpowder, and gunpowder being the prelude to rocketry, being the prelude to the next, to the next, the next. Yeah. That's a that's a a great, a great way to tie it all together. So that was I I hadn't done that, and that's that's fantastic. The the other one that I had brought up or it was in my mind is I'm working on a project in Los Angeles, and it is a university in Los Angeles area.

And what what NASA is doing or the military is doing, it's a combination. I it's no. It's military. It's not NASA. The military is doing is they're letting their IP that they no longer need to be commercialized by the local companies through a project joint venture, public private, where they're bringing in individuals and saying, this is the tech we have. What can you do with it? Which I had never heard of that type of found, format, which is amazing.

I never thought I mean, I know it leaked into the environment. I know there was, but this was something that's directly happening in my life. So it's, interesting the way you just said it because it triggered that thought. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, this is something I haven't seen many people explore extensively and tell the story in a way that, has a very long tail of, of technology flowing between boundaries and countries.

And, because most often, you know, we in, we just tend to focus on the last 50 years or maybe even the last 15 years because of, companies like SpaceX taking off, and and Internet and social media tools, and the generation gaps between people. All of the very historic information and going back to several decades and even millennia is, something that, is not very well communicated in, in the whole sector, I would say. Can you give I mean, this is this is interesting.

Can you give a few other examples that come off the top of your head where you've seen this cross border, cross bordering, cross pollination of ideas? Yeah. Absolutely. And, in fact, I was just reading a book, last week which piqued my interest.

So, you know, one of the things that, early stage, rocketry, developers were experimenting on was actually, mail because, you know, if you had to post stuff and you had to carry stuff from one place to the other as a post, then, you know, there was not really much of technology. People use donkeys and in challenging geographies, you know, they may maybe use some rail if there were intensity. But, you know, if you were looking at transporting in high high elevation places, it could take a while.

And, you know, if you would want to send it across the continent, it could take months. Right? The early days of, post between countries. So one of the things that the experimenters in the, you know, 19 thirties, and early days were thinking that actually rockets are the best way of transporting mail. Because if you would have to send, an, a post between, New York and California, for example, maybe it would it would take months at that point of time for it to reach.

But then they thought, look, there's, these rockets that have an interesting potential, and, I have this mail that I can send now, and then maybe it could reset in a couple of hours instead of 6 months now. And I could get those responses back, and there was a huge community around rocket mail because air mail was an interesting phenomena because you you would have Air Mail. Right?

So Air Mail started in fact, also people didn't know this that, the first, Air Mail stamp, kind of collection, for the first Air Mail flights actually began in India. So Wow. And, and this was, I think, early 19 twenties or something. The first time the airmail was, was carried. And, people thought genuinely at that point of time that airmail is gonna be redundant in 10 or 15 years because airmail is still slower than rocket mail. And rocket mail will be the thing.

It will be the thing, you know, if it's something that people will always, be flying these rockets from one to the other, and and people just even started putting things like livestock. You know, they were people putting chicken in on rockets and flying them and seeing if that chicken reaches the other part of the world. They thought, you know, you could send the mail, when you when a ship is coming into a new region, let's say, an island or a new kind new country.

You have to dock the ship and then get the mail out, and then you have to, you know, exit the ship and then come back into the waters. Right? So and people are saying, you know, it will take hours for us to dock there and then transport everything and come back. And we're gonna save some a lot of time and hours, if we could just fire fire a rocket out of of a ship and then, you know, get the mail out, and then we could just leave that port immediately. Yeah. That that's right.

Well and I'm also laughing because I sent through the US postal service, and different services have troubles too. I sent some 2 day mail to California, and it's 2 weeks later and it still has not arrived. So I'm I'm seeing myself, is there a rocket that I could use in the future? That's it. So, yeah, that's a that's a cool way of looking at the expansion.

So there was I'm gonna say there were there were individuals trying to improve rocketry capabilities so that they could do this, even shipping from a moving or a stationary on water platform. As you're shipping from the ocean and you aim it towards this this side and oh, do you put up a flare? I don't know. Someone's waiting. They have to know that you're going to be shipping sending them something, and then they go run and find it in the brush. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

And, you know, that's the interesting bit, that's again, you know, very, you know, not well known story in the industry. Right? Because, that's a that's a legacy that not really not many people know. In fact, all of that kind of history is captured in the Philatelic societies, because Philatelic or the stamp collecting society had a huge thing about collecting rocket mail, you know, stamps and mint, which was flown on rockets and, you know, it was flown in different parts of the world.

And people would say, this is the first time in the US in some particular region that we are doing this, you know, rocket mail, and then people would bid on it. And today, there's a whole community around people who buy and sell, rocket mail stamps and, because it's not so prevalent anymore, and it was from a 100 years ago. The part of Project Moonhut's platform, which I think you saw the video, I I mentioned in there that we tend to know what ideas came from space.

For example, we could talk about the boots on a plane that is directly a correlation to space industry or air filtration, water filtration, or the fire, fireman's apparatus, their outfits or their tank, both space, components. But the the, what is unknown to me, and I'm I'm trying to find more and more examples, is those technologies that were born from people trying to get to space or involved in space that never made it.

Meaning, they started a company in 1920, or they started 1 in 1950, or they worked for somebody in 1970. They might have worked for a JPL or a European Space Agency or Japanese or a Russian, and they ended up not creating anything, but they left that company, and they went to another company where they started one, and they used those same exact principles to create a product that was really earthbound.

It was a a new mug, manufacturing technology, or you created a stapler because you understood the dynamics of, space fluid dynamics. And so this is an interesting take. My mind is racing of how do I find or how do we find for? How do we find these really, really neat ideas or concepts or constructs or products or initiatives that drove the that meet our everyday needs because of the way in which they were formed? Yeah. Absolutely.

And you can't deny that, some of these early inventors of, Rocket Mail were not, you know, people of the legacy of imagination of somebody like a Von Braun itself. Because, you know, some of the people who were involved including, include people like, Robert Goddard. Right? And he was briefly, involved with the rocket mail community in trying to experiment with the rocket mail. But then he went on to do, of course, you know, bigger and brighter things.

But but, you know, these were a bunch of people who were at the very, very, very beginning of the technology curve. And that's an interesting thing because the technology curve begins, and then there's a generation of early inventors and early experimenters who doing really, like, garage related work and, you know, like, really, they had no real support.

And, you know, this this book that I read, was from a guy who studied about such a guy, you know, one of the guys in India, for example, in 19 thirties experimenting on these kinds of rockets and trying to do rocket mail out of India. And he was the only guy from India trying to do that in the 19 thirties, And he was having relationships by by mail with, you know, people in the US, people in, Europe who are trying to do, same, you know, building rockets to see airmail.

And and a lot of them had this idea that, all of this would culminate into people going into space and people, and and people having to get getting to space. And this is the birth of the technology and, you know, that's where, the this is like a generation before the superstar of, space. Right? The superstar of space including, you know, it could be one of 1 Braun or all the others, the soup and the other astronauts, for example.

Here's a here's a here's a wonderment or a, an interesting concept. You you threw out this word. You said garage related work. And I said to myself, who created the first garage? Like, I mean, we we talk about garage related work. There actually is a link that says who created the first garage because it's overhead door, but there there was someone who actually created a garage. So even that is a a relic of a time that was not 200 years ago. It's, it's more current. So okay.

Cool. So what else on the legacy of traditional space would you like to tie in? This was fascinating. This was this this really made my mind rise. What else did you, Sure. So Go ahead.

So, essentially, what I was trying to say is that, look, in my opinion, at least, I don't know about many others, but at least in my opinion, we really haven't yet exited this mindset of, space is still a heavily military technology, and, and the way commerce is happening in space is still kind of, stuck in the in the age old kind of military era because militaries are still spending the most amount of money in space.

So for example, if you I think look at the US space budgets, for example, NASA gets maybe, I think, $18,000,000,000 maybe, if I'm correct. And, you know, the the military spending in space is at least, you know, 2 or 3 times more than the civilian space budget. Really? And it could yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Okay. And, if you look at that even in other countries, it's the same.

You know, for example, I think most of Russian program is just military, with a little bit of civilian integration into all of it. But essentially, most of Russian military program, and its program is mostly military, and then a little bit of civilian stuff. And, you know, that is where I also wanted to plug in a little bit about, you know, how India took a different approach.

Because, out of all of this in the 19 sixties, India was one of the only countries in the world that, for the first time took a civilian approach to a space agency. Until India came up with the idea in the 19 sixties that there could be a purely civilian, you know, orientation to doing space. No country in the world thought of it as a purely civilian activity.

So, you know, one of the reasons maybe also because, you know, this was, something that, was leadership by the, you know, father of the Indian Space Program, Vikram Sarabhai, who said, you know, essentially, he looked at space as the tool of of leapfrogging communities of people using technology and making them leapfrog over generations. And using space as a means of technology or a base of technology to providing people opportunity and increasing productivity of all of them.

So and that was visionary for that time, and in fact, I've talked to a lot of people, for example, who collaborated with him. And most people who are who his collaborators from the west start, he was just bullshitting them because he, you know, was trying to get access to some other technology or so on.

But then, you see that, a lot of the reality in the Indian space program today, the way it's, you know, kind of power the foundations or the built over the last 50 years has proven his word to be right because, today you can see that, you know, India is the 1st country in the world to reach Mars in its first attempt, successfully.

And so that's the kind of trajectory I think, it goes back where you say, civilian orientation, makes in in in my opinion, that's a core part of, inclusivity, the topic that we were talking about.

Yeah. Because, essentially, if you involve, the normal, you know, person on the street, and you say to the normal person on the street in a way that, look, today you're standing here, you might just have a smartphone with you or you might have whatever x y zed with you or you may not have something with you as well.

But then if you can tell him that look, there are 20 assets up in the sky that is looking after you being productive and, is helping you be to be to more money or to be more productive or contribute to the environment or, you know, contribute to the society. And to kind of, you know, make that happen for each and every individual on the earth is something that can make space more inclusive rather than just putting, you know, space in the hands of militaries.

I I think when you think of Project Moonat and one of the, narratives and I know you're in Germany right I think you're in Germany right now. The there's a guy in Berlin who had said to me good friend, we he had said, when we look at the Earth, we tend to look at the Earth in the construct of that's where we sell and work. And one of the initiatives for Project Moon Hut is we call it Mearth. We live within the moon and Earth.

The space that circles all the way around is the moon and the Earth, and we'll eventually expand that perspective that we're not just on Earth, that anything that happens between moon and Earth, which could be space or on the moon, is, is part of our existence. And this is what you're saying, the smartphone. We look up and we say, well, that's in space with a satellite. But we could be saying, oh, no. No.

That's part of the ecosystem of Mearth, which is the interconnectivity between this the Earth and space. So yeah. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, so that's, is also the way, you know, that makes space a little bit unsexy, you know. So and, unfortunately, like, you know, a lot of unsexy things make people productive and a lot of unsexy things may and and contribute to the society. Right?

But, but, you know, that's where I think, I differ from a lot of the traditional kind of hip hip kind of views that that exist. But also, you know, it is also about making access to the last individual in the last mile and in the last kind of least productive kind of countries because, you know, imagine a country of the size of India, you have 600,000 plus, villages. And, of course, you know, the space can be a game changer where because you could easily set up, you know, communication networks.

You could easily set up navigation networks. And the bigger the size of a country is, the bigger the size of a geography is, especially for a country, for example, or the size of US, China, you know, India, Russia. Why are these players so big in spaces? Because space gives you that footprint. It gives you that kind of, you know, capability to cover massive amounts of ground and to provide services to the last miles of people even in the least connected communities in your country. Right?

And those are the perspectives. Right? So you don't see many European countries, for example, you know, doing the same way or providing the same kind of services as, you know, the US would do or China would do or in India would do. Because they are inherently small and, you know, the the communities live in smaller geographies and they're hyper connected communities, and you can lay cables between them and, you know, be more efficient. And, you know, so on.

So, I mean, a typical example could also be a country like Singapore. Right? You know, you have, basically, a a country that stones throw away your your borders end. And, you know, you can lay fiber there in, I don't know, 6 months time in the entire country and then connect people and you can do a lot of different things there. But then, you know, you can contrast that with something of the size of India or the US.

And that's where I think satellites and space hold a lot of promise to all of us because you can tell all those people there that, you know, space is kind of making you more productive in all of this. And, you know, it's, it's creating the fuel for your, lives. That's, the I just wrote philosophy. It's, or a psychological perspective next to that comment that you're doing this with the same type of services.

That's an interesting dynamic that your solutions to challenges because of scale, size means that you have to create bigger solutions.

And that bigger solution, for example, as you mentioned in any of the countries in Europe, whether it be, Luxembourg being tiny, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, all the way to France, UK, They don't have to think at the same scale to service, and that creates a countrywide mindset that probably is part of the spillage over into investments, education that possibly do limit the expansiveness thinking.

And the only one I can kinda think of that's opposite would be Israel, And Israel has a, a space program and, Ofer Lapid, who works with us in project Moon Hat. He was I think he's credited, he doesn't say it, with putting up most of the satellites in the early stages of all of, of Israel on a military basis because they had to cover large ground of surveillance, all of the Middle East.

So that's actually very cool, and it it it lends itself to a lot of other thinking possibilities on a global scale. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, what makes the case for space, you know, doctor Robert Zubrin talks about the case of Mars and, and so on.

So what also makes the case for space for somebody feel like who's coming from a developing world and you know, comes from an average Indian family is the way you could sell space to me, an average Indian middle class family, is not by saying, you you will take some rich people to space and have them live there, or you would have my military spending all my tax money and putting up satellites to just shoot missiles to other countries and so on.

I think what would sell me as a middle class, you know, normal Indian family would be if you you would say, you know, we are using all of these assets to make your generation of kids more productive. And, and and, you know, making that part of that space is almost like a cell phone. You know, the whole cell phone revolution, the smartphone revolution, it changed countries like India and, you know, several African countries. Right?

Because you have access to information, you have access to being more productive, being more, you know, getting more employment. And there's this whole revolution that, smartphones and Internet connectivity and everything did to societies in developing countries.

And if you could think of something in a future where you're making space as one of the tools that is making such a revolution in some of these countries, think of the impact that that would create for backing, exploration activities or, you know, risky ventures that states could then go out and do more easily.

You would never, you know, then the society would never question a decision by a politician or, you would not have political parties, you know, kind of debating each other as to why we would be we are spending more so much money into, like, space exploration or something. Because, essentially, you have convinced your public that this is important.

Just so you know, Narian, you have just been recruited on to Project Moon Hut to help in one area that I feel I'm deficient to help us to be able to define this one aspect. We've done it in many others, but this one area I'd really like to explore with you because I think it's a brilliant, brilliant approach that being a a Westerner growing up in the United States, even though I've worked all over the world, I I I love that angle. So just so you know, you've been recruited. Thank you.

I'm happy to help. So, anything else on traditional space? Ready to move on to aviation. Do you have any more points? Yeah. I think we could, you know, move further because there are some things that inter overlap between them. So it'll it'll be a good So let's move into the closeness of aviation, looking at the closeness of industry in aviation in specifically.

So, what I wanted to bring up here is, of course, you know, aviation with the first experimental aircrafts going into the late 1800 than the first flights in the 1900, early 1900. There was again an interest in militaries by militaries in all of this.

Essentially, there is a very close relationship between early experimenters of aircrafts and early experimenters of, you know, rocketry being both amateurs and, you know, inventors trying to realize a particular piece of technology after which governments and states looking at the potential of that for militaries and funding a lot of them and making sure that corporations and, you know, big companies realize real capabilities that can be used by militaries, in warfare.

And that could be also seen as a relationship in in aircraft and in space. Right? Where, you know, a lot of the military aircrafts, were funded. The military aircraft projects were funded and realized and, you know, deployed in various parts of the world very independently.

And there's a very good relationship possibly that you could draw with how space programs have been conducted between, the early 19 fifties to, you know, even now, and then how military aircraft programs and military programs in the nation began, and how they've been running between, you know, the early 19 twenties until the late 19 sixties or seventies. There could be an extremely good coin, you know, coincidence between how the two sectors work.

And why I bring that up is because after the 19 forties when the World War 2 ended, you had more military pilots possibly than commercial pilots. There's no commercial aviation at at not really so evident because aircrafts are not that reliable to fly between, the Atlantic or, you know, between such large distances, especially if you had civilians on board. And, you know, military aircraft in fact, even military aircraft hardly made it.

Even the the bomber that, took the nuclear rep, you know, the the bomb to to Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the US had to land in India to refuel before going on its way to the to to Japan to drop the bombs. Really? So Wow. Yes. Not not that it was great thing that we dropped the bomb the United States dropped the bomb. I said we I didn't I wasn't part of it. But it had to so it went it went it circumvented the world going over it went eastbound from the United States.

It did not go westbound from the United States. Yes. And there was a separate airfield that was specially built, you know, close to Calcutta in the eastern northeast part of India, an airstrip that was built just for these this aircraft to land and refuel. Wow. Didn't know that. Okay? So, so, you know, so that's, at that point in time, you had these, you had no commercial airliners. Right?

So, essentially, what I'm trying to say is that when the World War 2 ended, you had a bunch of military pilots who were out of job. And the one thing that you saw is aircrafts, had matured in terms of technology, and the first thing that you could try to do is to offer, service to people who could fly between the Atlantic for the first time. And guess who were there if they were business people who could afford the flight.

They could afford to pay a lot more than getting on a ship because they save time. Yep. They save time to get on board and, you know, the first flights, I just just, seeing some of the pictures from the earliest, you know, business airlines, and they were all made in the seats were made in wood, carved in wood, and installed in it, inside of aircrafts. And, you know, people would sit there and smoke and, you know, have this no not real weather control inside and and so on.

So that's how, messy the aviation world was at the the end of the war.

And people said, you know, business travelers cannot afford to stay on ships between, you know, for months to travel between the Atlantic, and we can afford to pay a lot more and, you know, we could have and so the early aircrafts that, carried people, were mostly only business people who could afford all of it, and then you could see that industry mature over 60 years of time, where today you can book a Ryanair flight between, Berlin and Israel. I went to and fro was €30.

Wow. Ryanair just comes out has prices that are beyond amazing. Right? So so you know, that's the cycle of the industry that that I think space can take a lot of inspiration from. Because very similar to the space world, the aviation world has very stringent requirements on performance of hardware and software and safety. Right? You're carrying so many people on a daily basis, millions of people between airports, and, you know, millions of objects flying around each day.

A continuous operation between one airport to the other, continuous operation of crew, systems, you know, ground equipment. There's so many things, so many moving parts. And if you would have said to some of these inventors in the early days of aircraft that this will be the picture of the aviation world in 2020. You know, if you went back to 1900 and said, this is the picture that you are looking at in 2020, people would have said you're out of your mind.

Yeah. I I think I'm just gonna add in here. There's one thing about the space and the aviation industry that has always amazed me. It is the follow through from any type of accident, even if it doesn't result in death, even if it comes down with a a wheel that doesn't deploy, when anything happens around the world, there is a complete investigation as to why that, that situation happened. And I've got 20:28 hours in a Warrior plane running fly.

And I I was always fascinated because when you have a car accident, someone comes and takes a report. But in a military in a airplane accident, it's not a report. It is an investigation. How did it happen? What went wrong? Was it human error? Was it technological error? Did they get maintenance in time? Were they communicating with the tower? On and on and on and on. So it's an amazing difference. Yeah. Absolutely.

And that's one of the ways that you could make space, you know, more resilient, more safe, more, you know, reliable, you know, the the perception of space would change. You know, nobody none of us who get on a flight, between any part of the world today, or most people don't really think that they will die when they get on the aircraft. Right? There are some. So There are some people who think. There are people who think I mean, they're they're I have been next to them on a plane.

And let me tell you, you are talk I'm thinking of this one woman. She saw that it was a high wing and the the wheel came, went up and she panicked. Do they go up? Do they stay up? Yeah. They we don't fly with them down. She was terrified that they would not come down again. Oh, fuck.

Yeah. So so, you know, that's, that that I think is also not, again, you know, very well, discussed or communicated in, in this space world because we believe, you know, we are this exclusive bunch of industry which is has to do with a lot of, interesting, new technology and a lot of things. And and aviation is also at the cusp of a lot of interesting technology, a lot of complicated technology. And they've made all of that so simple and boring over a 100 years. Imagine this. Right?

Parts that that carry Donald Trump are made in India today. Yeah. And, so and that's, in the aviation world and they've gone from, you know, having, such high quality standards and control and, you know, like, IP controls so that even files of designs, if it leaked between, you know, offices, they could get into jails because this is highly controlled IP and highly controlled environments, and and, you know, this all of this is national security.

And today, you know, you have such a massive integration of supply chains. And, you know, most often, you know, when I work in supply chains. Right? So the biggest difference between the aviation supply chain and the space supply chain is this, they would Aviation supply chain most often procure stuff at dollar per kilogram. Yeah. Imagine that you if you would be selling, aluminum, you know, comes at, plates to an aircraft today. Right? And so that's the difference.

So I have had a lot of chat with vendors at the space sector who says our technology is brilliant for the aircraft. We have composite, you know, structures that can go into aircrafts and and they they can do fascinating things, and they can reduce the weight of the aircraft by 50% and and all of this. But then they go to the aviation world, try to sell them on that, and then they say, how much does this cost per kilogram is is the question.

The, I do the it it was Alan Malele, I believe, who took over Ford when he was first looking to take over Ford. Someone, someone didn't some people didn't want him to do it. And they asked the question about the airline industry is so different, for example, than the automotive industry. And he looked at them and he said, well, let's let me look at this way. I ran an aviation company, and we had 35,000 moving parts. And the automotive industry had 5,000.

However, I had to keep the people up in the air, couldn't bring them in for services more or less, where you could just pull over on the side of the road. And that's not exactly the the quote, but it's there's such complexity to the safety and security of keeping someone up in the air that the the correlation I can see now where we can look at space. I'm assuming we look at space and aviation and probably have an equivalent type of exponential numerical number to do that. So 5,000 is to 35,000.

35,000 is to a 100,000. Yeah. Absolutely. And the the most interesting part of all of this is also the cost per person. Right? Because I bet that, you know, the cost per person in the early 19 fifties of these business travelers going, you know, between New York and, and, you know, Berlin, for an example. Adjusted to today's, money would cost a lot of money considering the same flight that has today.

So that would have seen you know, today, you can fly between, Berlin and New York for maybe €400 return. Yeah. Yes. And if we even if you took the business class, which is about €6,000 or €5,000 or somewhere in there, then you'd still have that that huge differential. Yeah. I wanted to I wanted to swing back. You said, at one point, simple and boring technologies, the airline industry is approaching that are transformational.

Do you have an example or 2 of that that you know of that's happening even possibly as convergence of space and aviation? Not at space and aviation. One thing that comes to my mind, I'm sorry I go back to India quite often because That's okay. Yeah. I I love I love that you are, so don't apologize. I love that you're bringing in and we try to do this in the program is to bring a global, global perspective because this is we are on one one earth. So I love it.

Go back to India whenever you need to. Go wherever you'd like to. Sure. So, you know, I go back to my younger days, in India because, remember my parents telling me when I was growing up that I was a few months old when, they got me onto a flight, and I can't remember any of it. And that was the only flight that I remember that my, parents took in their lives until, you know, I became, more than 25 years old.

So for the first 25 years of my life, I had, you know, stepped into this, let's say, one flight. And that's because that was a vanity that, that occurred because, my parents just thought it will be one nice thing to do, just to experience how it would be to fly. And, that was us treating other, you know, the airline industry like, you know, visiting, Universal Studios or Disney World. It was an entertaining experience. You did it as a as Exactly. Let's go on a ride. Okay. Right?

So, so why I bring that up is because, you know, an established industry there is if you can have that people, you know, use it as a routine service. Right? So today, in India, you are looking at a projected, I think, about 400 airports that will be operational in the next, you know, 10 years or so. And, the highest number of orders coming to Airbus, you know, and Boeing, in the entire world are from airlines that are operating in India.

That is because India has the most number of first time airline travelers in the world. Right? And that number is growing at over 10%, I think, over 10% year on year growth for the last 10 years or so, I think. So the reason why I bring that up is because, you know, that's that is what you want to see in a sector that is growing and it involves complicated technology, complicated, you know, supply chains, complicated, you know, mechanisms to work.

And if you make all of that kind of boring and make people say that, you know, we've made all of that boring because we are making you productive in doing all of this, then you see the uptake in the market and you see, you know, there's, you know, supply chain dynamics that act on it and price pressures and market price and, you know, governments pulling out of it and markets taking control of all all of it. And so those are things that we have to see in space to mature. I agree with you.

Okay. Cool. Any other correlations or ties between aviation and the space industry? I think it's also about, you know, how you could, innovate on services and how you could bring up a lot of things. So, you know, you you you have such, amounts of, you know, service innovation, be it baggage handling or, you know, be it even airline food, for example, how you manage food on the airline.

You know, I think not many people know that if you had the same food that is served in an airline but on the ground, it would taste more salty. Oh, no. I didn't know that. Yeah. Because, you know, their sense of, you know, the the taste buds they the perception of the taste buds change of human beings once you're on the ground and and you're up in the air at that height.

So airline food is normally optimized to have a little bit more salt, because the human, you know, tendency of when flying in air, the tendency is that, you know, you you your taste buds kind of change. And so norm normally, most airline food has more salt if you taste it on the ground. The good there's a there's a positive to that is the inclusion of additional salt in the human body means the holding on of water.

So you have less you can keep I don't know if you'd be more hydrated, but you would have more water in your system. It's not a diuretic. It doesn't make you go to the bathroom. It actually makes you retain water. And retaining water is something that you need to do well in space, at least in the current air aircrafts. So that's there might be a positive side to that. Okay. Yep. Yep. And also, there's also other operational bits. Right?

So because especially, for example, you had this whole challenge at a particular piece of time where, you know, to as the number of aircraft started increasing up in the air, you had airline collisions, midair aircraft collisions. Yeah. Right? And nobody imagined that we would have midair aircraft collisions because the airlines were a vanity.

Yes. You had one aircraft flying here and there and say, we could see this coming from a mile and you can you don't need all the side of sort of traffic control and so on. And you had then technology come into play where you could see 2 aircraft communicate between each other regardless of the pilot, you know, knowing it's there because there were the warning systems came up. And the innovation and the management and cooperation between countries so that such warning systems come into play.

And, you know, now I think even algorithms are set in a way that the 2 aircraft decided that one goes up and the other goes down. So, So they they communicate they communicate separately from the ground and the aircraft to make sure through the system that they keep their, altitude distance. Yep. Exactly. And they tell one pilot to go up and then the other pilot, for example, to go to go down.

So, so you know, a lot of this has, tend to I think, you know, there could be a correlation to how we manage space traffic. Right? So today, we have this phenomena where nobody is really, you know, in charge. We've seen a couple of, you know, collisions in space. We've seen, you know, we've seen number of threats that the objects are people are saying there are, you know, potential threats to the space station and so on.

So we're, again, you know, in the early days of all of that, that the aviation industry has solved extremely effectively, and we could learn again. That's cool. We I just did a a podcast with, Morbid Morbipe, Ja on Yeah. I don't know if you know him. He's we did it on space environmentalism, and he had some really cool thoughts about or or discussion about how managing those expectations in space. So, yeah, very cool. Okay. So, Moriba is a good friend of mine, so I know him quite well.

He's, excellent. I wasn't sure where we're gonna go just like any interview, and I've gotta tell you, he really, really delivered. And we focused on the space environmentalism. I told him that's where I wanted to go because I think it gives a very big picture to the entire, ecosystem of Mearth and what we have to be able to handle. So this is a perfect tie in. I love it. Okay. Anything else, or do you wanna go on to the old space? What is new space and old space? Yeah. Let's go to the next one.

Okay. So we're talking now about, new space in old space countries is what I've, you know, thought about. And, why I, you know, tell that is because, legacy institutions ask for it to be kept up. So for example, right, if you say that, you know, we have, this institution that is building rockets for, you know, military and, you know, you've done that for 50 years, then, you know, you will budget and you will come up with things that, you know, keeps the institution going.

And the institution kind of, you know, nobody wants to leave a legacy of things. So if you say, you know, this is a military unit that's been building aircraft or, you know, space satellites for so many decades, and then you just find new ways and new programs and new technology, and you kind of start fueling all of that. And in my perspective, a lot of the, you know, space countries, the early space countries that are out there, have to deal with it.

And, you know, that's where I think, you know, the the new space world is in a fix because essentially the the money, as I said, you know, is still heavily allocated to the military programs. And essentially, the new space community which people tend to think, you know, wants to be privately funded, wants to have private businesses, and, you know, private consumers as their, you know, cons as their, market.

Essentially, we'll have to then look at ways in which it could work with the traditional legacy establishments to survive. And that I think is, you know, what you see happening in the US extremely quite a lot because you have most US companies that are startups today that are dependent heavily on, you know, military space contracts and, and essentially, you know, they they try to do that.

I'm nothing wrong with it in my perspective, but, you know, that's the way you think that you can survive because that's the way you think you can get some money to stay alive while you realize the piece of technology or you realize the piece of, you know, service that you that you come up with. Which is Elon Musk's model. He not a completely military, but his model has been to leverage the US government in funding. Yeah. Absolutely.

And you could see that even with companies like, Planet, for example. Right? Yeah. Ever, you you look at them and then they say we are democratizing access to, you know, satellite imagery and x y zed on one end. And on the other side, you can see them getting National Geospatial Agency contracts and DOD contracts. So you can see that, that but then what I don't really like is, if if you say that it's it's fine, you could be could be that.

But then you could not you shouldn't be, like, professing to the world that, you know, what we are doing is the right thing always. So because I say that because I think, 2 or 3 years ago, 2 years ago maybe, the, you know, the Indian, establishment, the Indian military conducted an anti satellite weapon, test and they, you know, shot down their own weapon.

And, you know, a company like I think a company like Planet, I think, put out a statement saying we are for, you know, space sustainability or something like that. And, and And here they are here they are being in the military in another angle. That's kind of Exactly. Yeah. And and I don't know if you know Will Marshall. I think that's the one I'd like to get on the show, so I'm just gonna toss it out there if you know well. I'd like to get one of the Planet guys on.

I've spoken for Planet, but I would like I've been in their facilities and I've spoken there, but I'd like to get them on just a a side note. So the when when, around the world, if you were to put a percentage on, how much of space, old space, old space versus new space, is military supported? I mean, Russia has 1 or 2 or 3 private space companies. That's it. Everything is within the infrastructure of the military apparatus. How much is separated and not exclusively one versus the other?

The number I think is in the extremely low front. I would say less than 10%, to be very honest, David. In my perspective, I think, most companies in the world, if you look deep down in their supply chains and the way they are conducting, business, and they would want to have, you know, militaries and and governments, you know, as their customers because that's the safest customer that you can have. That's a customer that you can, you know, always rely on.

And, and unfortunately, that is because, as I said, the integration of the services is, you know, military spending all of this but not really the the average Joe, getting any services, from space as of yet. That's not the future that we've stepped into yet. And, yeah. I mean, that that is a change. I think the step function change that we have to do and we have to see happening.

And, I guess, you know, many of the people are using this format of doing business to probably probably step in to to that future. So it's it's kind of a maybe there's a bad way to say it. I'm trying to come up with a better way, but it's like playing with the devil when you're in the when you get into the space industry. When you enter, you say, I need a stable customer, but I wanna be NewSpace considered. I wanna be a NewSpace company.

However, I need stability on my financial back end, so I'm going to just play with them a little bit. But the reality is when you start playing in their sandbox, you are in their sandbox. Yeah. And you see that, quite a lot. In fact, you know, one of the things that, you know, for example, we at Satsearch, we handle, the supply chain, you know, world. Right? So and you can see some of the US, you know, companies, the news space companies, we get requests.

Let's say a European engineer is requesting for some quotation for a particular piece of technology that a US company that is already being contracted by a US US military agency or the US air force to, you know, to develop that or to be used there is, you know so traditionally, a startup will be excited to receive an email saying, oh, there's somebody on the other side of the world who's looking to buy my product even if I'm new. Right?

And in this case and in this case, you will get no response because they are like, I have the US government as my customer maybe and why the hell do I need somebody else? Like, you know, are there maybe contract restrictions because that that piece of technology maybe said as exclusive to the US borders or or some other reason, but people will not tell that and they will not even respond to your email. And I can't. We filed a patent that we ended up securing. It was, what is it?

It's decision making based upon programmatic and algorithmic analysis, and we use drone and space technology within our patent. And, oh my god, we saw we saw things on our patent we've never seen before, letters and numbers and character, and we were able to figure out. So the US military looking at what we were filing. So, yeah, it does change the equation. Yeah. And, you know, so that's where I think the, the again, you know, going back to even the aviation world and so on.

So you you normally like, you have now 2 established players, for example, building aircraft. Right? So you have Boeing and Airbus building aircraft and there is a bunch of airlines that don't care about building their own aircraft. And they say, we have these 2 providers who have come up with the format and we know that their vehicles are interesting, and they are stable, and they're safe, and everything else. And I am an airline. I am Ryanair.

I'm not gonna create my own aircraft and fly the customers because it's more profitable to me. I know that I'm I am gonna be good at carrying people and optimizing, you know, passage of goods and people, and that's my function in the industry. Right? So you have the airline settling into all of that after a 100 years of innovation.

And in the space sector, however, we have companies that will say, I will build the, you know, satellite, and I'll build the build the service on top of the satellite, and I'll build the product on top of the service. Yep. Right? So They're building their own they're building their own ecosystem from beginning. Exactly. Yeah. So, so that's, you know, again, you know, it's it's it's kind of very childish to think about space as a sector when you compare that with other sectors.

And that that what you just said was the original meeting that I had, and I don't know if you know Bruce Pittman. I'm assuming you've met Bruce. Bruce Pittman in California at Scratch where I said, let me just show you the future of the space industry. And I was not a space person. I'm still not a space person. Right? I outlined, and I said the challenge that we have is we don't have the foresight into the entire ecosystem.

So when I use the caterpillar, I said, caterpillar can't put $14,000,000,000 into space mining, any type of equipment. But what if somebody else built this and someone who built that, and then I explained the technology behind computational social science and AI and modeling and networking, and how we can mitigate risk by saying, no. No. You just put 200,000,000 into developing this technology for space mining, and we'll show you 10 customers that will buy that on Earth and in space.

Therefore, their cost mitigation is so much lower, but then we take those 10 companies, and we show them how they could be part of the ecosystem. And to to give transparency to the the the build out is the challenge for the space industry is what I had articulated that this right now, every many institutions and we'll call SpaceX and Bezos' blue, they're building their entire supply chain from beginning to end, and that's costly and challenging.

Yeah. And, it kind of makes it an exclusive club or a monopoly at the end, which may not transform the the ability to, you know, as I said, to reach the last mile to a great extent. Right? Because you see, you know, I think yesterday on Space News, there was already a news that Starlink, is, being contracted by the US army, I think, to experiment, the usage of Starlink for their, you know, communication links. Yeah. Right?

And so you see already, you know, the the customer being the government coming into play there again. And so my sense of all of this is this is a transition phase of, the entire space industry where unfortunately, because we don't have the supply chains and integration of space as a part of real economy, real productivity of people yet. We have to, you know, undertake ventures and undertake business with governments in such models.

And we're forced to do that because we have not yet, as a collective industry, figured out how do we integrate space that makes normal people more productive yet. And there's one thing that, you know, that has established otherwise, which is the direct to home television industry, which makes the most amount of money in the space industry and is kind of independent. That's the only, you know, sector where you see that the the government is out of the business there.

You know, the government does not want to be in the business of what you and I want to watch on television. Yeah. So So can I, I'd like your perspective on how you perceive the geopolitical pandemic and non pandemic based nationalism development harming or, benefiting the space industry? I think you get the question? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, the thing is, on one hand, there I mean, there's a middle ground to this because I think you can't say you can't take sides here because there are positive and negatives for both the ones. The positive ones, of course, is that, you know, politicians who don't understand technology or all these kinds of, life cycles of technology tend to believe that space is a very important domain. It's a very interesting domain, and it's a military domain, and it's a national security domain.

And those are very the the words are very interesting for them and, you know, the the understanding of that is very simple and for them, and they believe in it, and they will fund it. So that's the baseline of it. And then there's the part of gold there that people are trying to get including the big corporations or even small companies. Right?

So and and that I think is a narrative that, you know, as I said, legacy institutions we have created and we have maintained because, you know, we know that the the part of gold is there to to be grabbed there and if we can, create more threat, or, you know, fuel other events that are out there and create more opportunity to look to make space look like a tool that can aid, you know, kind of alleviating this or supporting some of the other geopolitical scenes, then the pot of gold there becomes big, and keeps becoming bigger and bigger and bigger.

Right? And that's a push there of making that part of gold bigger purely on the geopolitical and and the military side of, operations, but that will never make space an industry, in my opinion. And that's yeah.

That's the risk my take, and that's why I asked the question was immediately when you said it, I said, the risk structure for a nationalistic approach to space development pushes further the military apparatus into whatever technologies that country has because that's its own leveraging point, where when it's a global initiative, when it's a global connective, open source, open capability, ecosystem, you end up driving a different type of, political agenda.

Absolutely. And then I can give you an example from the other industry here. So you know when, GE, General Electric, the American company came up with the the first mobile electrocardiograms, essentially, electrocardiograms that doctors can carry to rural America, to test people there using mobile ECTs. The first, units were, I think, more than $10,000 each for every electrocardiogram. Right?

And that's something that maybe some of the US, you know, doctors could afford based on some, you know, US government subsidy or something like that. But if GE had to establish a market for that in a developing country like India or China or, you you know, Africa back then, you would not sell, you know, electrocardiograms that are mobile at $10,000 a piece in India. You know? So right?

So what GE did back then is they took the electrocardiogram and they brought that piece of technology that they built, for the US and, you know, put that together. And they brought the IPs and and the whole construct of the product to India, to Bangalore where they come from. Where if you know today, there are 15,000 g engineers working there. Yeah. And they brought it there and they said, you know what? Guys, these are the foundation IPs around all of this.

Why don't you, you know, have a free hand free hand in innovating in a way that this makes sense for your local market? And guess what happened to that? The $10,000 piece became a $1,000. I was just gonna say 2, but, yeah, it it was a factorial of 10 x. Yep. And the sales picked up in Africa, you know, it it picked up in India and, you know, so that's what I'm talking about. A little bit of a a combination of Jugad tied into the implication of innovation.

And I think that would be the way Jugad would probably be one of those areas in which to think differently. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. And so that's the thing. Right? Because any product or a service, can hardly be kind of replicated in its true sense everywhere around the world without taking into account the local intricacies that include local economy, local tradition, culture, language, other things. Right? That go into all of it.

Even for example, some, you know, the most established industry in the world, maybe the food industry. Right? McDonald's when it had to come to India, it had to stop selling, you know, beef burgers and hamburgers and had to make 2 by adding, you know, chili powder into fries. Yep. So there's, all of that and you know so that's, that's that's a bit of learnings from a lot of different other industries and we haven't seen all of that, in space yet. We're gonna make it happen. Right?

That's what we're working on. Okay? I I perfect. These are these are fantastic examples. I I do appreciate your I do appreciate the the depth of knowledge you have in these categories, which I absolutely love. They're they're they're exciting and interesting. So, yeah, the geopolitical side is one of the challenges that I'm seeing or have a challenge with because my my take, this is Project Moon Hut's and original conception was that Project Moon Hut is neutral.

We want a global participation in a global initiative to improve how we live on Earth for all species at the same time addressing several categories of challenges that are global challenges with the desired outcome of just getting us to the moon. They so the this whole nationalism, feeling is will alter the trajectory and possibly the timelines. So I'm wrestling with how to get around that.

Yeah. And the one of the again, you know, interesting stories I think from that I read a few years back, I don't know how true it is, one argument that people, you know, say that, US intentionally hold hold it out, you know, held out, not flying the first satellite up in space, is, you know, people there is speculation around this that they said that nobody knew if, everybody knew that if you had an unauthorized aircraft flying over your territory, you could shoot it down. Right?

Yeah. And, nobody knew if there was an unauthorized satellite that was flying over your space, you could shoot it down or you could call it war. Yep. Right? And so there's speculation around people saying the US wanted Soviet Union to establish that precedent of flying an object over somebody else's territory, while you don't have authorization to go the territory but in space.

Isn't there something that's going on in, in the US having to do with spy satellites or satellite and imagery and and capabilities in space over, at least the United States. I think there's something in discussion right now as to what is considered acceptable and what's not. I think that's an issue being addressed in the in the administration. Okay. So yeah.

So essentially, you know, that's a bit of from the historical context that is also something that you could look at as to we had to undergo that kind of barrier initially to to know that, you know, countries could fly over each other, you know, satellites flying over each other.

And that's the same I would imagine with also aviation world because once, you know, civilian aviation became very, you know, an industry by on its own, then countries had to just come together and say, you know, we have a different routine for civilian and air you know, and military aircrafts. And the the the tracks in which they operate and the the ways they function are very different from each other. It doesn't mean that, you know, there are no military aircrafts around.

There are, of course, military aircrafts and, many of them around and doing a lot of things. But, the way the civilian aircraft world has taken over as an industry and the way it operates and the way it has, you know, fueled, for example, ICAO, which is the international, agency, the UN agencies that, that monitors everything around aviation and aviation rules and aviation, you know, agreements between governments. You have all of that.

So people had to figure out if there was a child born on an aircraft with citizenship it would get. Mhmm. Oh, yeah. Right? So, so so there's a lot of kind of, interesting insight into, all of that. And I think, you know, even an organization like the ICOW, which dealt with, you know, intergovernmental negotiation for airline operation, for example, right, and civilian airline operation and rules for all of this and, you know, regulations for standards for all of this.

We haven't seen that kind of an institution in the space industry. No. We have not. So that's another I've had conversations about what happens if someone is born in space, where do they fall, and we probably would adapt the traditional, airline rules and regulations. What country did they originate from? What country passport holders are they? And it will become an interesting challenge years years years into the future if you were born in space.

Your parents were born in or your parents were born in space. Where do as a child are you? And do do you go back to that original country, or do you lack the citizenship? So that's a I I'm assuming the logic as humans are today would, eventually transform. Yeah. Absolutely. And so that, you know, makes me to get into my next topic with just, new space and new countries.

Yeah. So essentially, you know, my PhD was around using satellite imagery in, you know, fundamentally other value chains and other industries in India, and how do you make that sector more productive? So for example, right, let's take, you know, the whole chain of there are about 60% of India's employment come from agriculture. Yeah. 64640,000,000 I think. So something like that. 680,000,000? Yeah. Right? Yeah. And although it only contributes to 15% of India's GDP.

Yeah. I I I actually wrote about this. So, yeah, these are good numbers. Yeah. Exactly. Right? So, now when you look at the whole way the agriculture is operated in India, unfortunately, the rules around the agriculture are very strict in India because, you know, like, a farmer is not allowed to sell or sell land and somebody who is not coming from a farming background cannot buy farming land in Indian rules.

Indian, you know, the national rules of India don't allow such consolidation of land, and it makes farmers hold land.

And essentially, what happened, you know, because of this kind of rules is over the last, 7, you know, like, 3 to 5 generations of independent India, the land sizes have become smaller and smaller and smaller because, you know, your father would have 10 kids and you would have 10 acres of land, And then you would die and then you would say, this land is now divided about 5 sons, so it's 2 acres each.

And then they would have 5 kids and then then you know, now the average, farmland in India is like 1 acre or something like that or in terms of holdings. Alright? So which means that you cannot use precision agriculture.

There's a lot of problems there and it's unlike US where you have 10,000 acres of land, you know, who are held by one company or, you know, farming there and using technology to becoming, you know, to making more, these farmers more productive and not having more farmers instead of, instead having more productivity per farmer and having those original farming families to move into other industries and being productive there. Right?

So Yeah. The point the point that I'm trying to raise is that because of all of this as well as the problems in accessing, you know, finance, for example. Right? So, 30, I mean, 30 to 40% of lending in India is still from legacy, you know, lenders who are who are lending to farmers at interest rates of, 2 or 3% every month. Wow. Right? Right?

And these are farmers who have no institutions, you know, that they want to rely on And, you know, they want to have some money at the beginning of the season to buy seeds and, you know, water their plants and, you know, put pesticides on them and harvest and give that, you know, sell their crop and give the money back to the, you know, the the lender.

And so the challenge is that if you have 30 or 40% of farmers in India out of that massive number that you talked about, depend on informal credit, you have a market out there to bring them to the formal credit. And the problem with formal credit institutions is that they don't have any records on these, on these farmers to know how to, you know, undertake risk and how to how to classify them. And if they to know if they are a risky proposition to invest in or not. Right?

So these are these are also, I'm assuming, the unbanked. Exactly. Yeah. And the unbanked meaning for those who don't understand that this is where I'm breaking out, for those who are unbanked or individuals who have not entered into the formal banking infrastructure that exists in the world today. And so there's no transactional history, there's no records, and they are banking, but they're using a shadow banking system.

Borrowing from someone who borrows from a bank gets a 1,000,000 US dollar and then breaks it up. But there's no record of those breakup transactions, and therefore, that person who's borrowing has no credit history. So Exactly. Right?

Yep. So what I'm trying to say there is that, look, you know, if you have to break that chain, then you could, so one of the papers that I wrote in my PhD was about, taking satellite imagery for the last 7 years and, you know, looking at the credit history of the farmer or developing a credit history of the farmer. And, essentially, you know, by that, if a farmer comes and says to the rural bank in India and says, you know, you I wanna get a loan now from you.

And then there's the the bank just says now today, for example, okay. You know, like, you we don't have you as a previous customer, so you're a risky guy. You go away or something. But then, no. If if the farm bank could then say, okay. Like, where is your land? And this is you know, if they could say that guy would say my land is so and so. And then the bank says, okay.

Now I have a I have a workflow here in my banking system that uses satellite imagery from the last 7 years to know and I know where your land is, and I can tell you how productive you were in the last 7 years. And if you are just, you know, kind of bullshitting me by coming for only this season to borrowing money and escaping from me. And I can then say, you know, this guy was so much productive and, you know, the yield was so much the productivity, the the crop area was so much.

And then you could kind of build a risk index on that and say, okay. I see that you're an honest guy and I see the evidence from the last 7 years that you have been productive. And so I'm gonna invest in you and give you this money. I I've gotta say that is brilliant. That is absolutely brilliant. Because I I mean, I'm my mind is racing and I'm I'm I'm inside of me. My I'm saying, wow.

Taking satellite imagery, tying it to some form of, some form of algorithm, also possibly drone technology that might be integrated within it, and you can then look at a piece of land, you can see color, you could see spread, you could you could even possibly watch machinery or humans, harvesting and how it changed, how during bad seasons and good seasons, you could tie in weather modifications and be able to equalize that yield from that year, and then be able to give them a rating score to say, you are a out of a 100 or out of 50 or out of 10, whatever the number of numericalization is, you can come back and say, so you're a 77.3, which gives you the ability to borrow at x.

I I think that's absolutely brilliant. Yeah. And you could do that as well on the insurance side. Right? So because if you say, you know, my crop was damaged, then you clear come and say, you know, my crop was damaged because of a of a locust attack or of a because of a wildfire or or a drought or something.

You know, people can evenly easily say, you know, I have satellite imagery for your season, and I can see that you've grown your crop or you've not grown your crop or your crop is affected because of x y zed reason. And the whole crop insurance, infrastructure becomes automatable as well. So has has anybody, man, this I'm trying to be kind here in this question. Have people in positions of authority taken this on as a mantra, as a means of facilitating banking? Have they or insurance?

Have you have you introduced this to Nandan Nilekani? Have, has this gone through the chain of command so that this can be adopted? Yeah. I mean, there's a company in India called Satcher that is now trying to, you know, like, build and roll out products around these. The other example that I can also give you is I talked to a company again based in, Bombay in Mumbai in India, that uses satellite data from European satellites.

And what they do is they have an app for fishermen, and they charge fishermen, I think, something like, you know, 3 or $4 a month or and what they do is they have an app where they have imagery or insights, you know, refreshed on a daily basis on where fish is in the coast that they fish normally, which is like a 20 square kilometer area around where they are, where their community fishes. These are not, you know, big fishing companies, but these are just individual fishermen.

So for a dollar or 2, you're getting real current diagnostic or information to where do you put your boat? Where do you drop your line? Exactly. Right? And then, you know, the, advantage there is 1, you know, you have insights from weather. Again, both ground and space based weather capabilities integrated, and it tells fishermen go out during this time and don't don't go out during this time. There's a safety aspect to it.

There's a fuel aspect to it because you're not going around, you know, blind, and just driving your diesel diesel engine on there and, you know, wasting a lot of fuel and creating a lot more pollution, and instead you're being efficient in your route. You could then say there's a a security angle to it because off the coast of Bombay and Gujarat, for example, you have the problems between the Indian and the Pakistani Navy and a lot of fishermen being captured by, that site.

And it's the same, for example, in the India and the Sri Lankan boat, for example. Right? People just wearing off into the other's waters and then just get capturing. So with this, you can even prove where they were located in, and, and you could even warn them that you are going away from certain zones and, you know, be be safe and, get, you know, fish in our waters, for example. Right? And then, so And that is that is a big contention. I didn't realize it while I was in in Sri Lanka.

I didn't realize the contention between India and and Sri Lanka in terms of water rights is a huge issue. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, these are, you have fishermen, in holds. Hundreds of fishermen, I think, who get caught in in between all of this every year. Yeah. I didn't it's a big issue. Yep. Yeah. And then, you know, you look at market access. So let's say you had the catch.

There's been papers, that have been scientifically recorded by our own space agency who did a pilot around this and they said, you know, it increased the fish catch, by by 50% to these fishermen, and then it reduced the fuel cost by, like, 30%. And, you know, they could earn, like, literally, about, you know, 3 or $4,000 on a year more because of this technology.

Amazing. So so these are, I think, you know, this is the theme that I wanted to stress in this, in the podcast because, these are what I call as new space in new countries. Because, you're telling people, you know, that, the fisherman doesn't care if his insights are coming from satellites or not.

But if you tend to make him realize that look, you know, because somebody invested in those satellites, you are able to now get this money, and you're being more productive and you're being more safe, and you could tell that story in a compelling way. I would say no fisherman would say no to space exploration then.

It's the the these are these are fantastic examples of the insight that's part of I don't normally talk about Project Moon not that much, but you've you've just triggered so many things that we are working on. One of them is to the the the fact is growing up or the belief is growing up, that we get very, very little space education.

And I don't know in your history, when you grow up, when you went to school through university, overall, before you specialized, how many hours of classroom when you were 12 and 14 and 16 did you get any education about space? Probably less than 10. Less than 10. And and mine might have been similar because I remember we did a little bit about space a day or 2 in a social studies class in about, let's say I was maybe 8th grade.

Otherwise, I have no knowledge, and part of Project Moon Hut's community engagement is to reach a 1000000000 hearts and minds, to get people to think differently. And within there, we're asking teachers to give every class a little bit of space. And what does that mean, a little bit of space? Is that a a teacher has, blocks that they have to teach, and a block is a segment that they create their course content out of. So we're gonna do a block on this, a block on this.

It could be a day or 3 weeks. It could be 2 days, whatever they're doing. And we're just saying, can you put in any class, a block of space? So if you're doing an English or a a language class, so let's say your language, it could be Lithuanian, Russian, German, whatever, you could have a a day or 2 on how literature was impacted by space.

And then if you have a class in textiles or fashion or design, how fashion has been influences by space, or then you've been doing history, you could even go into movies, and how movies have influenced the world in which we live. So every class from psychology, not just STEM, every class has within it a component, doesn't have to be long, a little bit of space, where the teacher says, how has psychology been impacted by space? How has, ceramics or design or astrology or mathematics?

How has it impacted our discipline? And I think that would be it's I believe so strongly that it would change this, exactly what you're saying. It would make young students, young individuals, all the way up through university, to ask themselves, what, did space impact me? Oh my god. I use a mobile phone. I take photographs. I do I look up. I use weather. I get on a plane. I use GPS to get to my friend's house. Oh my god. I am a space faring individual, which would make it normalized.

Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, that's also a part of, this narrative on, you know, how do you get people to solve problems that are, in this last mile. Right? I talked to you about, you know, the farmer and the fisherman, but you could imagine this with, every other, you know, sector. And if you would say that the last mile individual in every other sector is, the problems that they have have a space solution or space space solution.

I think that that is what I, you know, call as inclusive space commercialization. Can you just for the sake of argument, and I I have, I'd like you to define your definition of last mile. So the last mile in my definition is, an average individual in an average country, for example. I mean, that's a very crude definition, but, essentially, what I'm trying to say is is is an average person who, who is on the street in any part of the world, any part of the developing world. It could be in Africa.

It could be in India. It could be in Southeast Asia. Right? And Yeah. And he has a job. It could be a fisherman. It could be a farmer. It could be somebody else. Right? And, you know, essentially, when they're they are just trying to become more productive and more efficient and more, you know, economically sound and socially sound and everything else. Right?

And, and that's where I think, you know and technology is increasingly helping them being productive and doing all of that magic behind it. Right? And, unfortunately, there's a lot of other technologies that have impacted them. For example, you know, cell phone or, you know, 4 g and mobile phone connectivity has transformed them, over the last 15 years. But but has space done it in a certain way? Not yet.

It's, I the reason I asked is because I look at however we wanna determine it to the first world, third world developing nations. India has been around for a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very long time, and it's still developing. It could be developing for a very, very, very long time too. So it's not about age, it's about policy, it's about structure, it's about religious, orientation. There's a lot of variables that go into whether someone is still developing or not.

So my definition based upon the way you were talking is this last mile is the last mile for anybody on earth to improve their life standing, or maybe not the productivity, but the quality of life that they endure and inclusive of all other species on earth. Because I if farmers knew that there was there were I mean, fishermen knew there were whales or dolphins, they could stay away from that catch so that those species can survive, or we look at the rainforest.

I've, one of the things I look at is the deforestation in the rainforest. And in 1 month, 8 months ago, satellite imagery showed that we deforest about 750 square kilometers, which is to an average person who might be listening to this. It's driving 6 hours or 5 hours in one direction and then the other direction nonstop at maybe 90 kilometers per hour or 60 miles per hour. And that's a lot of space. So I I would I would like to see this last mile inclusive of everybody.

And, there's, again, a global perspective all of this to all of this as well because, you know, about 2 years ago, I had entered a conference on something related to forest sustainability, and there was a Norwegian NGO, you know, working on policies that affect, international policy making in agriculture. And, you know, they were talking about how the rainforests in, in South America are disappearing because meat consumption in Europe and China have been on the rise and have for decades now.

And, essentially, the feed for all the meat, including pigs and, you know, cows and everything, a lot of it comes from South America with, you know, a lot of the deforestation happening, with, you know, people growing soy and other things to feed, you know, meat industry in, China and, in in Europe.

And, essentially, that is because, you know, the South American countries will not tell their farmers to be more productive on their farms and grow more per acre rather than they'll say that we have a big enough land to go out and get the forest and spread our you know, you don't need to be more efficient. We just need to get more land out of the forest. Right?

And so the Norwegian NGO was talking about how can you, for example, use satellite imagery, and have the European Union create a certification system that monitors these farms that are supplying, you know, to the meat industry and to make sure that they are investing in being more, you know, doing more precision farming and increasing productivity rather than getting the forest. But why?

I mean, the the the there's there's not the certification is not going to go that far, so I don't believe that's a solution. But my my mind traveled to the conflict between China and United States and the import changes, the import tariffs that were added on top of soy or, pig farms.

And what happened as a result of that challenge, which I would say that the American system is a highly productive system when it comes to at least farming, is the supply chain between China and the United States for these products was disrupted, and the impact was that China invested a lot of money in South America, a lot of money in other countries where they don't they are not gonna be as productive for a very long time.

And now these countries at low productivity are operating to supply China with pigs and soy, and that supply chain to the United States will never will not come back for a very long time. So what we've done is we've actually exacerbated global warming or resource depletion over over, use of chemicals for, that run into spill off in sea oceans or into water streams. So we've actually exacerbated the entire situation over the past geopolitical 5 years.

Yeah. And, you know, space can be a tool in such policy making, especially, you know, one, when you have to when you hope that there's you can get good behavior out of, you know, actors that you don't have sovereign control about, but, off but you could create good practices in industries where even though you don't have sovereign control, the streamlining, of, you know, the the procurement streamlining and everything else can be based on space based insights. I love it. Right.

So and it could be it's also in terms of, you know, connectivity. It could be, even today, you know, we have no satellite Internet in India. Can you believe it? Really? No satellite wow. A, it was, what was his name? Jeffrey Mamber, who talked about how he and you said it, so it's hitting me. You said Spacebase Insights, which I like the term. However, I don't like it partially because of Jeffrey. And Jeffrey who's anybody listening, he runs a company called Nanoracks.

He's put 700 payloads into the International Space Station, put up several 100 satellites. Very well known player and I know that, you know I am. So what Jeffrey had said that I thought was an interesting comment is he that why are there space agencies? He doesn't like them.

He thinks they're they're counterproductive, that they they diminish the ecosystem of capitalism or the growth of the industry because everybody's trying to feed these mechanisms where by doing so, we don't have we don't use the term there is no automotive agency. There is no farming agency who runs all farming, and runs all automotive, and runs all they have lobbying efforts, and they have groups, and they have associations.

But countries don't have this term they have this term space agency, which means everything for space in our country, we're gonna monitor, and we're gonna try to direct. And when we say space based insights, it'll be an interesting day when someone doesn't use space based, but just use insights. Yeah. And and you can see that also in, you know, that's the part of the legacy institutions. Right?

So because I think, you know, apart from the technology investments that, you know, new technology investments and new science investments that, space agencies do are doing, A lot of the space agency, investments are just jobs programs around the world. This is fascinating. So I guess we're on to assumptions of technology and the lessons you've learned. Is that where we are?

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that was the last, you know, like, the last bit that I wanted to tell you, and that brings back me to the initial part of the episode that we, you know, talked about, RocketMail. So a lot of the assumptions around space based, you know, new space based services are, you know, people immediately say space kit. Right?

And it's a it's a market where people have to invest 1,000,000,000 of dollars and make sure that this, you know, space planes going between there and then there'll be people up to pay a 100, $200,000 to go up and come for 20 minutes. Right? So and that's been, you know, people have been telling that for the last 20 years or so, and then, there's not even, I think, a single operational space tourism flight that has been happening. Go what's Galactic's name?

The Galactic version didn't take off again. They had another challenge. Yeah. Yeah. So, so what I'm trying to say there is, you know, we discussed about RocketMail. Right? About the assumption that RocketMail is going to be a service that people will use was made in the 19 thirties. And, and so that that meant that there was a whole construct and investment around people thinking Rocket mail, is the thing for the future and air mail will not, you know, be around.

But then, you know, today you see FedEx owning aircraft, not rockets. Right? Yeah. And, so I think we, as an industry, are in some instances or in many instances when we think about the future of services and technology, we are sometimes making a lot of assumptions that are on similar lines on similar services which may not be true ever in, in in as as things play out.

And I think, we have to be open enough for us to, you know, organically see people deploying new services and coming up with new ideas and new innovations. And, and rather than seal the the the ideas around pillars where I would go and sell, you know, space tourism as this new pillar and somebody else will sell me, you know, space, base power as a new pillar and somebody else will sell me, like, something else, right, on on all of this.

And I think that's that the adoption often the the adoption chain is, something that we oversee a lot in the space sector. So, one of the fascinating, you know, stories that I was reading, it was about, Michelin, the tire company, I think, had the patent for the for tubeless tire cars in the early nineties. And this is, an innovation that the market creates. Right?

Because nobody wants to have a flat, in the middle of the road and, you know, pull out the to the side and then change tires and then drive. Right? Everybody wants to, you know, even though they have a a puncture, they would want to drive 200 kilometers and then, you know, think about changing tires when they've reached their destination. This is a technology that the consumer needs in the automotive industry.

And, you know, Michelin, the tire company came up with it, but then they they the car manufacturers obviously want it because they can sell, you know, to the consumers that our cars have these tubeless tires and, you know, and it's a fantastic fit when you think about it because the tire many sales force, the car car manufacturers can say this is a novelty in our cars, so come buy our cars, and then the consumers need it.

And, you know, so it's perfect thing, but people launched it this and then people figured out that they completely ignored the whole servicing industry because the servicing industry then said, okay. There's this new tubeless tire and I need to invest into, you know, training my manpower and knowing how to operate on this and fixing a puncture on this, and I need to invest in the new tooling that goes along with it. And so there are, 99 other cars on the street that don't use this technology.

So they're so therefore, I'm not gonna I'm going to say no to this one customer. Yeah. So so I think, you know, space has a lot of that kind of things going on at the moment, and, and I would like to see kind of these assumptions play out, in a in a way for me, I think, this one interesting thing that we could discuss about space. Right? For will space tourism be in a way that would be, an entertainment, park theme park where you would say, I will go visit Disney World every once a year?

Or would you want that to be, like, the aviation world where you would say, I will fly from, you know, like Bangalore in India to New York in, 2 hours? It's a it's a fantastic question because I I don't believe, and this goes all the way back to the first conversation, and this is 6 years ago before Elon was really big and blue. I said to Bruce, we are not gonna build a space industry on space tourism. That's not where it needs to be the foundational aspect of the industry.

So I completely believe that this whole flying from Bangalore to Berlin or Bangalore to Tokyo, wherever you want me to go, is really the the, the foundational building block of our future. And we have to be careful that we don't promote space as tourism, but we promote it as what you've been saying, brilliantly have been saying, the next iteration of improvement of life on Earth for all species with I added the all species, but yes.

Yeah. And, it also goes with all the utilization of, you know, other military bodies including Moon, Mars, and everywhere. And because, you know, the the first explorers, you know, India and China, had a a type of, or, you know, more than 25% of the world's GDP, and had a very big monopoly over the lots of trade going back to, you know, the last, millennium. Right?

So the reason why explorers were trying to find a way to to India or to China a lot to the oceans and, you know, through to seas and everything is because there was the promise, of this, you know, spice or, you know, or other things, cloth, textile, you know, fabrics, and things like that that, people wanted back in home.

And they figured out that if we could optimize and we could do all of this, and, you know, we get the trade route secure, we could, you know you know, get all of this, going and we could establish a trade route and all of this. Right? And that was the and, you know, the whole thing that I'm trying to say there is that people knew that something was there and it was already up for grabs. And it was not like people would have to come to India and then, mine pepper for the next 20 years.

Yeah. Before they would take back, you know, 10 grams of pepper back to England. Yeah. You you can't build the which is what we talked about earlier. You can't build the entire ecosystem or this entire supply chain from beginning to end. There has to be pieces to build that model and everybody's taking a a a small piece of that puzzle. Yeah. And also, it's also about, you know, who, what gets commercialized and what is commercializable is a big question. Right?

And, I haven't, still got the, got the the answer to this, for example, for, the moon, for example. Right? People, who are moon advocates who, talk about, like, you know, helium 3 being on the moon and and some kind of minerals there. We don't even know, like, you know, we don't even have are not even close to any technology that allows to us to mine, you know, helium on on on the moon or things like that. Right?

So there is a a sense certain sense of, for me, I think, you know, what what would in my construct, people will build services and technologies that serve people on the earth so seamlessly and as an industry, like the aviation industry did. And through that, the technology becomes so mature, that, you know, there's all the technologies that are relevant to outer space exploration becomes a reality in all of that. Cool. Any last words to add to this?

Oh, I think it's been, I think the one of the longest chats that I had with anyone. So, I I I I haven't really thought about, you know, talk to anybody on such broad areas and, you know, getting my mind flowing in so many different things consolidated at the same time. And, this is, I think, the first time in my life that I've spoken so much, and, honestly about, you know, what I think about the industry and what I think about, all of this. So I have to thank you for giving me the opportunity.

Well, thank you. I my I'm smiling ear to ear because one of the things that I enjoy is learning from amazing people like yourself and to have my own mind blown, distorted, reshaped by the lessons that other people have learned. So you you were brilliant here. I I really appreciate you going through all of these stories of history and tying them to present day. I think it was, amazing.

So thank you for taking the time to be with us today, and I I know that this podcast will be a very valuable podcast that should be shared throughout India and around the world because it is such important. I'll say important. It is such, insightful thoughts. So you did a brilliant job today. Thank you. Thank you again, David. You're welcome.

So let's, we wanna take for all of you out there who took the time to listen in, I hope you had the same amazing experience that I've had, exploring the world in a way that I had not thought of, and and Narayan did a a fabulous job. And I so I do hope you walked away learning something. And I also hope that you, as a listener, take the time to explore Project Moon Hut. There is a podcast there is a video up. You can type in under YouTube.

You go youtube, dot com and then search for Project Moon Hut and you'll see our logo. Just put the video up. It's not what Project Moon Hut is about. It is not what project Moon Hut is about. Let me make sure you understand that. But what it does do is it gives you a different orientation to what Project Moon Hut has components of our belief structure and our directive, and what we're trying to accomplish as an organization, as a global organization.

We have about 50, 60 people around the world helping us in different ways, and we'd love to see your participation. So is there one way, Narayan, that some people, if they want to get a hold of you, that they could. What would be the best way? The best I think is, email. My email is, [email protected]. Okay. So let's so so why don't you spell that out? Because your name is, just to make sure the spelling. Yep. It is n a r a y a n at satsearch.co. Satsearch. Yes. That's right.

So, again, thank you very much for everybody out there listening. If you'd like to connect, I'd like or we'd like to connect with you. You can reach me at [email protected]. You can reach us at, Twitter, at project moon hut. You can connect to us on, again, YouTube, which has just been put up this video. We haven't been marketing, so that's new. You've got the podcast series you can listen to. If you wanna get a hold of me, you can also connect to me at at Goldsmith on Twitter.

I'm on LinkedIn, Facebook, mister David Goldsmith even on Instagram, and we, we do have a at project. We have a project Moon Hut Instagram. We just haven't put anything up yet. So for everybody out there, for everybody who's been listening, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for being part of our program.