Often in sci fi people will be like, well, water is going to be really valuable, and it's worth remarking if you're in a place where you have to pay huge amounts of money for clean drinking water, that's not a good situation. You'd rather not do that. You're absolutely right. If the economy already exists, than fine. Or as you say, with California, I get frustrated, not with you.
But with the entire state as an idea, as an ethos. Oh, this is two Virginias against one Californian. It's not fair. It's not fair.
Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm pleased to say that particle physics is still cheaper than going to space.
Hello, I'm Kelly wider Smith. I study parasites and space, and there are parasites. You just got to pick up some roadkill and you could see some parasites. It is super cheap investment.
What about the space based parasite research industry shouldn't be good at space to explore tapeworms in space?
I think that's a bad faith argument, Daniel.
Oh wow, I don't think there's.
A lot of money to be made from parasites in space right now?
All right, so you're turning down that grant.
Then for now? Yeah, if you want to pay me to think about what parasites women accidentally bring with us to space, I'm taking money from just about anyone.
All right there, it is okay, send your money to Kelly. Folks for space parasites.
Whoop?
Is it a science fiction movie? Is it a grant? Who knows? We'll find out.
Could be both Porqueolo's dose.
Exactly. And so today on the podcast, we have a special guest to come on and talk to us about everything that's happening recently in launching two space industries and trying to boost a space economy, trying to get humans off this planet and live out in the cosmos. Kelly, who is today's guest.
He's a real cutie pie, and you're gonna get a taste of what it's like to live in the Winersmith how Zach likes to go on long soliloquies where I interject every once in a while by saying no, Nope, that's wrong, And so welcome to our life, listeners, You're going to get a little taste of the Wadersmith household.
All right, And so today's episode is in response to a question from Kay Gilbert, a listener who wrote to us asking specifically for an update about what's going on in space. Here's Kay's question.
I learned a lot from doctor Katrine Whitson now please invite Zach Wienersmith so he and Kelly can give us an update on soonish, specifically the first section on space travel becoming cheaper, because that seems to be the most nowish since they wrote the book. Many more nations are developing active space exploration programs and sending astronauts to the ISS.
Commercial spaceflight is still in the startup phase, but shows a lot of potential and inexpensive CubeSats have made it possible for almost anyone with an interest to launch a satellite into lower Earth oad orbit. Of course, that just makes usable orbits more crowded messes with astronomy and greatly increases the amount of space junk. I'm especially interested in what Kelly and Zach learned about space economics when writing A City on Mars. Thanks all right.
I love this question because it means like, Wow, this person really read both of your books and thought about it. Yeah, and now they're coming to you for an accounting of what's going on now. You are forever on the hook on these topics, Kelly, you have to stay current forever.
You know. It does actually feel that way. I keep trying to move on to the next book project, and then I keep getting interview requests from people who are like, oh, what do you think about this new thing? And I'm like, I don't check the news. What new thing? And then I got to check the news. But it's okay because it's fascinating.
Kelly's so popular, Booty.
Oh, you know, you'd be stressed if you weren't getting your other work done. But I do like getting to talk about space.
Well, it's a great book, and so all the attention is very worth it. So let's invite onto the podcast the other Weeeners, Smith, who will join our conversation about the future of the space economy.
All right, on today's show, we have the second best Wiener Smith, Zach. He is the cartoonist behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. He has three eighths of a physics degree and he is a wonderful co author. Welcome to the show, Zach.
I do forgot two times. Hugo nominee.
Oh and one time winner and.
One time winner, but really the nomination is the true honor.
You also didn't get the Eisner, right.
I have twice not gotten the Eisner.
Actually I have many times.
Well, Zach was shortlisted. It's a slightly different.
I officially didn't live twice. That's right on the record.
Well, three eighths of a physics degree. I wonder at what point you can round that up to one.
Not three eighths or ten. He also has a literature degree.
Yes, yes, that's true.
Well, since we're going to be talking about physics and space and all sorts of stuff, I think we need to hear more about your credentials. Zach, tell us why you didn't push that over the line to five eighth So a physics degree, that's.
A good question. I actually had a like semester where I felt like I had to choose. My comics career was starting to go well. So I had already gotten a degree in literature, and I went back for physics.
A well worn path from literature.
This was really weird because usually it's the other way around. My last semester and I got like old bees, which like if it's your second time in college. You know, you're not like an undergraduate who doesn't know what they want to do yet you really should be doing perfect. And it was just that, like I was now managing at a comic career that was getting bigger and bigger, it seemed like the right path was to just kind of like do comics that I could teach myself whatever
I wanted the side. And then things have gotten ever busier and mestically self teach, which is in theory faster the university, although I suppose professors have some role earlier.
So cartooning has stolen another physicist from us.
Yeah, there's quite a few lists.
But you're right about self teaching. I mean, I tell my grad students to really pay attention in classes because it's the last time somebody's going to spend all their time trying to teach you something. After that, it's basically like you in a textbook. That's how I learned something new.
I think it's the only way to get real depth, and you can only get so much from another person. You got to really sit with it.
All right, Well, then consider this your pahd final example. If you do well today, we can round who.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoah. I think you can give him a bachelor's but he doesn't get a PhD.
How about a pod since the podcast, I can't.
Lurd my pod over him if he has one too.
My career fantasy is to get an honorary degree from anywhere, just so I can say. That didn't seem that hard.
So Daniel, when we had your wife on the show, it was very clear that you two are like supportive team. Zach and I are competing over everything everything.
I believe in a free market, I think the best spouse should win.
And she's winning.
Wow. Well, we're not here to do Wiener Smith Merrick. They as fun as that might be. We're here to talk about space and whether we can access it and whether you guys want to continue to throw a wet blanket over the prospects of space colonization. You've been writing
about this for quite a while. Your first book, Sooni Ish talked about space elevators and how they might be a terrible idea, and then you wrote a whole book about how we might not be ready to colonize Mars and space, and the listener wants to know, are you guys still bearish on space or have things changed? So give us some background here, Why is space so hard and expensive?
Yeah, so there's a lot of angles on that, but I think the probably place to start is just literally the access to space, meaning like getting up and fast. And so I would say you can make a pretty good case that the main reason is expensive is because rockets kind of suck. The main reason we use them to go to space is we have no other method. Right, So if you look at a rocket sitting on a pad, it's something like eighty percent propellant meaning fuel and oxidizer
stuff that gets burned on the way up. It's something like, depending on what you're doing, say sixteen to nineteen percent, the like machine that historically you discard during the process, although SpaceX has change that. And then at the very top you have the firing, which is depending on again on what you're doing, one to three percent, say of the total mass, and that's what goes to space. And you say, why is it so awful? Why is the
ratio so terrible? And you know, of course you could say, well if this planet were a little bigger, may we just couldn't do it. The example we like to use is like if you had to take a road trip from Alaska to Buenos Aires, you would gas up once in a while. If you had to bring all the gas you needed for the entire trip at the beginning, you would look like a flea on like a gas tanker. Right, And the main problem you're going to face is that the first, say gallon of gas is mostly going to
move gas. There are gallons of gas you're going to literally move the entire time, and finally we use up at the end. The most efficient way to do it, and this gets us to space elevators would be of like a magic pixie just dropped the drop of gas you need in whenever you needed it, so you never had to carry any mass of gas. Because that's most
of what a rocket is doing. This is why we have staging, right, That's why a rocket burns up a bunch of propellant and then just drops off a hunk into the ocean, or if it's SpaceX, drops off a hunk that lands itself.
Well, if you have magic pixies as an option, we can solve lots of problems.
Not just.
That opens up the door, that's.
Right, you know, space elevator in a certain sense wouldn't be the magic pixie. Right. So space elevator is like a cable or a ribbon that dangles from something up in space, and there are different ways to do that, but basically you can just visualize this cable that goes up like a beanstalk, and you climb it. And the nice thing about that is you just expend the energy to you know, climb one more foot, right, so you
can beam the energy that goes up. Most of like your efforts are going into fighting gravity in the sense of just getting up the next step instead of carrying oldest propellant, right.
Yeah. And I think space elevators are hard for people to grow because it feels like it's floating and if you stand on it's going to fall down, and there's some complex orbital physics there. But essentially the argument is it's like a ladder. Right. It's a lot easier to climb a ladder one hundred feet than it is to jump ondred exactly, right, Yeah, And it takes a lot of energy because the ladder is supporting you as you go.
Up, that's right. And there's been lots of hopes to get around the rocket problem, right, yeah, classic one of you read Jules Verne's First Spin on the Moon is do you remember what they do?
I don't know.
They shooting a gun. There's actually a whole kind of comedy bit about Americans with guns. It's the Baltimore Gun Club and they shoot it and it's like a good introductory physics thing because it's like, I think we calculated it either for Sunnish or a city on Mars where it's like the initial g's are like twenty thousand to actually get to the Moon with the spaceship they're launching, so the humans would go flat.
Oh I seem it's like a cannon. They fire you out of a canon into the moon.
Literally, it's just a giant cannon. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it was a gun that came up with the proposal. But anyway, the book is called From the Earth to the Moon.
Oh I'm sorry.
Yes, well that's not so outlanders these days. If you've seen those spin projects, whether they like spin something up and then literally launch it into space, it's like good for some payloads, but enough for people. Yeah, the gun.
Would work if your payload was like a hunk of iron or like some some fluid or something. But yeah, with like delicate, little splatty humans.
It's no good, all right, So getting off of Earth is hard. Rockets are bad. Space elevators are problematic for other reasons. We can dig into that in another episode. Why do we want to lift stuff from Earth? I mean, yeah, there's lots of stuff in space. Why don't we just like build stuff in space for space?
So if you want to get stuff somewhere in space to build with, you got to say to yourself, well, where am I getting it? You don't have a lot of options. It turns out you have the Moon, but you know, the Moon is still pretty far away. It's hard to get to and then you have to like somehow land on the Moon and then boost off, which takes a lot of energy less than doing it on Earth, but a lot. Notably, this is true for the Moon
and Mars. You don't have a thick atmosphere, which is very helpful when you'd like to land in right, you visualize Neil Armstrong in the Lunar Lander. There's no wings on it because there's no reason, and so that makes it more complicated. You could alternatively, like go to get asteroids.
You know, people usually think when we say that we're talking about the belt, and I think enthusiasts would say that is ultimately the goal, but like for a plausible ish scenario, we're actually talking about near Earth asteroids that have a lot of unlikely characteristics, so like they have to be high and valuable stuff usually called platinum group metals, that's the really hot stuff, and ideally they should be sort of locking velossity with the Earth, by which I
just mean as the Earth is moving, the asteroid comes in such a way that it like is not going too fast with respect to us, So you can imagine like the Earth is going well way the asteroids going to the other. Trying to catch it is going to be a dangerous business. That's all really hard and well
beyond our current capacity. So we usually say, you know, if you go up to geosynchronous, which is about twenty four thousand miles high, you can make money pretty much anywhere in that shell, by data transmission, by remote sensing, by navigation, by doing stuff for militaries. Outside that shell, there's not a lot of value financial sense. There is obviously all sorts of cool science value, but there's not a lot of value beyond that.
It's funny when I first invited Zach on the show, He's like, I don't know that I'm going to have a lot to say. And I had thought like, oh, maybe it should just be Daniel and Zach on this episode. And then Zach was like, all right, I don't think I'm gonna have anything to say it. I was like, all right, we'll see. But anyway, this is an interview of Zach, so I will continue to let Zach.
Go for it.
Well, I guess, as an audience member to this, I might be a little bit skeptical about that. I mean, I buy the argument that there's not much in space you want to bring back down to Earth. I mean, I think people often think, ooh, platinum asteroid, that would be worth seventy five quad trillion dollars if I could bring it back here and sell it off bit by bit, And obviously that's ridiculous, But still catching stuff in space
for building in space. I know we don't have the technology now, but is it impossible to imagine that we could never catch an astroid? I mean, I saw it happen on for all mankind.
Yes, yes, yes, obviously at some point we'll have the technology to do that. I have no doubt about that. None of this is anti gravity. There's no forbidden physics. It's just engineering. The way I think about that is essentially what you're implicitly doing. There's assuming some kind of space economy, right, You're wishing it into existence, and then
it's justified. But it's kind of like saying, well, once we have a on the bottom of the Marianna's trench, my French bottom Chicken Sandwich company will really be valuable. So I think this is why a lot of space geeks are in the business of saying, we have to build the city because it's existential. Kelly and I were just talking about this. There's a guy we really like named Winchell Chung who runs something called Project Row, which
kind of documents everything ever said about space travel. And this idea calls mcguffinite, which is reference to the idea in movies of a McGuff and like a certain something everyone needs. You'll find that movies books everything for space colonization, they always positive mcguffinite. So like an avatar, there's an unobtainium, like insanely stupid name, really hard to get them, which is like a room temperature superconductor that somehow you can't
just make back home from the same elements. You have to get it from like these poor natives. And the way I think with this is like, I'm sorry to be really boring about this, but it's like the whole world is running on the same periodic table. There's not like magic stuff you can get. There's no special in
between e elements or whatever anything like this. So I don't know why you'd suppose you would find them, of all places like on an asteroid or on Mars, where you know you're just working from the same Giant Solar System accretion disc that made the other planets.
I mean, from a physics point of view, there could be additional stable, super heavy elements. It is positive, yeah, so there might be very heavy elements that are stable. It's called the island of stability. But you'd need some pretty exotic physics to explain why it's created and existing asteroids, and it's not here on Earth, and it's also long lived,
et cetera, et cetera. So you're right, Earth is mostly made out of the same stuff as asteroids, and so'd be pretty unusual that you could find something only in asteroids to put in your chicken sandwich.
Yes, when we say island of stability, I thought physicists meant like two millisecond.
Long lived is reli Okay, But isn't that the way all economies get started? I mean, there used to be no economy in California and then you know there was a gold rush that we had him a guffn. All economies do get started somehow, right, Your argument would essentially suggest we can never have new economies.
Well, you know, so I say it this way, if, as he promises, mister Musk wants to spend you know, a trillion dollars or whatever and just plant a city on Mars, you know, we have all sorts of other concerns about that from other episodes you guys have done. But I suppose he did it, Like I suppose you woke up tomorrow and he had done it. Then maybe there's an argument for some of this stuff. But that's
because you've made such a bad situation. Often in sci fi people will be like, well, water is going to be really valuable, and it's worth remarking if you're in a place where you have to pay huge amounts of money for clean drinking water, that's not a good situation, you'd rather not do that. You're absolutely right if the economy already exists and fine, or as you say, with California, I get frustrated, not with you, of course, but.
With the entire state as an idea, as an ethos. Oh, this is two Virginias against one Californian. It's not fair. It's not fair.
I'm ancestrally from Texas, so I gave both of you coastal leeds. My cost is filmed as it should be, is.
Near coast the Gulf of America.
Now, yeah, that's right, that's right. You can gas your car up in the Gulf of America. So, you know, often when we say this, I totally sympathize with not wanting to be someone who's like, nah, dreams are dumb. You know, people will say, well, if Columbus had thought that, what would have happened, And first of all, I don't want to say is probably fifty million people wouldn't have been murdered.
But that side, we'd still have all of min in history, right, right, you'd have.
A couple of nice things. But also, like Columbus shows up and he gathers resources that are widely available in part by the way, because those indigenous people had found it and could tell them where it was willingly or otherwise, that was generally true. Right, So like Theo's people who show up in California, these settlers, they found the San Fernando Valley. Right, you want to talk about value, and this is in an agricultural era. Right, when I want to get at more deeply, I think you and I
were talking about this earlier. Is people often talk about resources in this funny way, like it's just the sort of stuff and like it obviously exists in the moon or asteroids in some sense because they're made of stuff. But like in the modern world especially, and this is maybe different from how it was for most of human history. Value comes from organization, right, Like if you're running a country, would you rather have a diamond mind or Google? Right, yeah,
if you had both. The diamond mind is trivial. It's really not a big contributor to the economy, like that tech sector. You know. We got into this. This is actually a late addition to our book. We were talking
to an economists, to the developmental economists. We said something sort vague about this stuff, and he was like, you should look at this thing from the World Bank where they actually taught it up, like the wealth of different nations, and like what the actual value was to this planet of natural resources, and it was like, I think two and a half percent of overall wealth is a natural resource.
It's minimal. So when people talk about what we have to do the asteroids because we'll get so rich because of natural resources. Like, by the way, ninety percent of that was possil fuels, right, which don't exist on Mars. I was talking to someone who's a real long term mist about this and she was like, well, but eventually we're going to have to push into space because we're
going to run out of resources. And I was like, if you want to have a ten thousand year eventually, why don't you just say we'll all be hooked to like the matrix and we'll just experience infinite value in our heads. If you can invote these crazy sci fi scenarios, the idea of value goes bonkers, and I don't think it's even worth speculating about.
Yeah, we'll all just be downloading our chicken sand, which is no need to even go to your chicken sand with shack.
And they'll be perfect yeah.
All right, So getting the space is hard, mining stuff and using resources in space. It doesn't really have value unless it's already an economy, which means people there to value it and to need it. So that sort of sets the scene. Let's take a break, and when we come back, I want to hear from the Wiersmith's all about the updates since they're b was written, since we have had some rapid progress in reusable rockets and access to space and CubeSats and starlink and all sorts of
other crazy stuff. All right, so everybody go get a chicken sandwich and take a break and we'll see you on the other side. Okay, we're back, and I'm mediating a Wiener Smith marital session.
I think it's pretty clear that I'm winning, but I'm going to continue to let you have the stage for a little while and answer these questions since you were the guest.
Yeah, all right, So we've been hearing about how difficult it is to get to space and to build an economy there if you don't already have one. What's changed since you guys have written your book. That's essentially what our listener wanted to know. Do you have a new perspective. First start with what has changed, and then let's talk about what it means.
One of the funny things that happened with us when we were writing soon Ish was that the change began as we were like, going to press, we're really mad at SpaceX because they kept landing reasonable rockets when we've been trying.
To discuss impressed with not mad as.
I wish they would cut it out because we were like, this is future tech and they were doing it and we were like, well, this is just ruining everything. Butzz and I don't remember the number, maybe Kelly you did, It was like when we went to press, it was like six times they had landed. The reason we were walked with something like that wasn't much, but it was a huge deal. I remember talking to someone who said something like I watched the moon landing and this was
a bigger deal. And I think most people wouldn't agree with that, but I did. But the moon landing was expensive. There was no way they were going to let us do this for very long, right the government, whereas like reasonable rockets, this has been like the dream since like the fifties. You know, if you go back Max Bajay of one of the big NASA engineers had these drawings
of reasonable rocket. It would have worked by having three stacked rockets with a pilot in each of them with wings right, would have flown back down like insanely dangerous. It's super awesome. Nothing like it ever happened. There are a couple like experiments in the nineties, but they weren't like doing the high speed or any of thething you needed to do. And then all of a sudden SpaceX was going to orbit and coming back. And the reason
that matters is that math we talked about earlier. Right, The old line is like if you have a seven forty seven, but you have to throw it into the ocean after each use, the tickets are expensive, and that's essentially how we did space for the entire Space age up to SpaceX.
And why are we usable rockets so hard? I mean, landing a seven forty seven is tricky, but we can do it. Why is landing a rocket so much harder?
I misspake when I said it was the only time because the course of the Space Shuttle was time before that, which was partially reusable. And I feel like that's actually indicative because you know, in the case of the Space Shuttle, we had two total losses out of you know, one hundred and thirty something flights. And it's just because it's really dangerous to take something that's in orbit, meaning like if it were in air, it would be at whatever it is Map twenty five or something, and just sort
of gently cruise back into the atmosphere. Right, you get a lot of heated it's hard to deal with, you know, you get all sorts of crazy accelerations, and so it's just tough, especially if you're trying to keep the humans alive. The nice thing about SpaceX is they don't do this trick with humans in the vehicle right, operated by computer. It's still insanely impressive though, but yeah, it's just hard to make a vehicle that can endure all that. I mean, this is really hard stuff.
It was about thirty thousand dollars per pound to send a mass of stuff to space using the shuttle. It was really expensive. Once you got that shuttle safely on the ground, refurbishing it, getting it ready to go back up again cost a lot of money. And so it did not lower the cost of sending masks to space like people had anticipated.
Yeah, interesting. People thought that the space shuttle was going to be like a shuttle literally and make it cheap to get stuff to and front space.
Yeah, it was actually evidence that it was the most expensive way during its like heyday, it's funne Ever, when they retired it, like everyone outside the space community was like, this is the end of America, and like everyone in the space community was like, thank god, they like took that death trap off the market.
You know, well, what was wrong, like what was wrong about their kindations or the physics or why didn't it work out? Was it never going to work out? It was just silly politics.
This is like an endless nerd debate. I think people who are more pro shuttle want to defend it would say, look, the government made them do all sorts of crazy stuff. They didn't fund it enough the beginning, and then for quote unquote safety reasons, you had to disassemble and assess all these different parts. So part why SpaceX is cheap, it's not just three usables. They did a clean sheet design that uses a lot of off the shelf parts.
What argument as part of why SpaceX can exist is because a lot of off the shelf electronics just got really good in a way that wasn't true in like the late seventies. So it's confluence of things. It's possible, it just wasn't the time yet. Notably, the Soviet Union had a very similar vehicle called Brand which I think flew exactly once.
So let's talk about why it's possible. Is it just cheap and fast electronics that are also like somehow radiation hard? Like why is it possible for SpaceX to do this? Was it a moment of genius a particular insight? Was it Elon Musk being super cool? What was it that made this possible?
Eric Berger has a great book about this called Liftoff, kind of going into the details. I think it's a couple of things, like, I mean, reusables matter, but actually they were doing pretty well before reusables. And a big part of it is like, if you look at the history of rocketry, most rockets are not clean sheet designs.
Their old military stuff. The rockets the Mercury guys were flying and was just there was a warhead and they took it off and they put Alan Shepherd on top, and it was reportedly pretty bumpy too, because it was not meant for humans, right, and This is like the history of rockets for many years, and in fact, a lot of those early rocket designs go back to like the NAZV too rockets. That's like where all early rocketry comes from, or much of it.
But if you already have a system that mostly works, why do you want to clean sheet design? Aren't you saving money by building off of something you already have.
I think the argument is usually that those designs they're built for military stuff, so that means a lot of stuff. It means, you know, maybe they're paying for high reliability as opposed to cost. It could also mean famously, you looked like the F thirty five, where like the Navy gets to say, the Army gets to say, Marines get to say, and so you end up with this big, complicated machine, where I think the SpaceX is like a very spare rocket. It's very stripped down. It's also like
not as many spoke parts. So that a NASA way of doing things, which kind of makes sense for research agency, is you use a lot of smoke parts, you don't use a lot of off the shelf. And part of that's like historically these parts didn't even exist, right, and so now you can like drop an iPhone in space,
it has a chance. These things are pretty durable now, and so I think something between doing a clean sheet design having access to modern electronics and yeah, I don't like always big of a position of complimenting e On Musk, but you know, he brought a kind of Silicon Valley view to things. And that was, by the way possible because of the COTS program, which started at NASA, which we don't need to get into, but essentially said look, we're going to stop doing this cost plus contract business.
We're going to actually go out and try to create a private sector for launch. I think that mattered a lot too, and people like Musk stepped in to fill the gap.
So there wasn't an economy there, and the government invested in something and built an economy there.
Right, I would say have still built it. I mean a lot of the money that ghost to SpaceX is government contracts and there's still sustaining it.
So then what is the state of the art now? How cheap is it to go to space compared to how it used to be twenty years ago?
Yeah? Yeah, So even we were writing the book, the standard number was something like ten thousand of kilogram the latest numbers for Leo or twenty six hundred dollars per kilogram, and that's on Falcon nine. So for comparison to the numbers we have for the Space Shuttle was sixty five four hundred dollars per kilogram. So that's a pretty non trivial drop. And it's possible that SpaceX's own internal numbers are even cheaper when they reuse a lot of rockets
for their starlink system. The numbers we have for the Falcon Heavy, which is essentially like a Falcon with two other Falcon boosters strapped to it, is fifteen hundred dollars per kilogram, like an order of magnitude cheaper than it was just when we were writing ten years ago.
All right, So if I had a really big chicken sandwich it's a kilogram, and I wanted to launch it to space, it would only cost me fifteen hundred bucks.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know you really want to fill the firing with chicken sandwiches, You just have a lot of chicken sandwich. You have to pay for the whole vehicle. You don't get a.
All right, Well, still, fifteen hundred dollars is not crazy number. I mean, it would cost me like one hundreds of dollars to send a chicken sandwich in China, for example, and so you know a factor tend to go to space honestly seems reasonable. But this is for cargo. What about for people? Where are we in terms of like sending people into space?
So you know, the Shuttle retired and basically the way we were able to get to space was embarrassingly by employing the Russians to launch us. And then SpaceX comes along and made it possible. But it's like it's hard to have the extra step where you get humans on board. There's just a lot of extra stuff that has to not go wrong. You have to have high reliability, you have to have these little capsules that have oxygen. And
so they built one. They built the Dragon Capsule, where notably, like companies like Boeing which is a pretty storied company, have not really succeeded, they built this capsule successfully docked multiple times now with the ISS. They also have sent up restocking missions that bring like, you know, consumables, that sort of thing. Cool.
All right, so then what does this mean? Right? We talked earlier about how difficult it is to get into space. Getting up from Earth is expensive. But now things have changed, things are cheaper. Does that change our calculus about building stuff out in space, getting that space economy going? That things changed qualitatively or just quantitatively.
I would say both. I mean so quantitatively. More and more of the space business has become private. You know. Of course, at the beginning it was exclusively governments, and for a very long time that was true. And it's really changed, especially in the last ten years. It's majority private. We tried to find people who are trying to estimate this. In a couple of years ago it was already three quarters private, and I'm sure that's just continued. The business
has grown. I mean, the nice thing is, you know, the stuff grows in what am I trying to use?
Tandem Panda? Thank you so good? Kelly?
Is he one for Kelly? Zero point ten?
Oh? All right, well you're way behind this plant. We're all ever more data hungry for like I cat videos. There's also practical stuff like even ten years we're all in self driving cars. Then they might want you know, lowers orbit satellite uplinks for constant connectivity, and so we just want more and more and more data and so the satellites can supply that, right, So you know I said earlier everything below geosynchronous is valuable, and that's what
it's valuable for. This is nice because it's a sort of ratchet where you know, you keep throwing up more satellites. It gets cheaper to mass produce them. Data gets cheaper. But when the data gets cheaper, we just demand more and more and more of it, and so we keep throwing up satellites. And so this is why we're finally you know, for a long time people talked about having problems with like satellites smashing into each other, and it's finally becoming like maybe a bit more serious. And it's
also maybe we want to lead it into this. It's making space tourism at least more plausible. That we haven't seen like an explosion in that yet.
All right, So then is there a space economy for tourism? I mean people have been launching on these things, you know, I don't know how high up they're getting, whether their accounts of space, whether their counts is tourism, whether they're you know, commercial knots or whatever. Do you think this is the beginning of a space tourism industry.
Yeah, So, I mean, you know, people have been doing space tourism for like over twenty years now. A bunch of people have gone up to the ISS. They're all very rich people. Most of them wrote books about it.
We read some of them. And more recently Blue Origin has been sending people up and you can kind of debate if they are space tourists because they don't go to orbit, which is kind of like for a nerd, the important thing when you go to space, you want to go to orbit, which is much harder to do than to just do what they do, which is they
go up really high. They get the view of space you want, right, They get to see you above the atmosphere with the stars above, and they get to I think something like four minutes in free fall floating, so they get a kind of like astronaut like experience. So if you count that, the number has gone way up.
But why does the nerd only value being in orbit? Why does it only count if you're in orbit?
Because it's the hard part, right, I forget. There's some famous line from Hindline which is like the hard part about going to space is not going up high, it's going over fast. Right, So you feel aout this idea that when you're in orbit you don't experience gravity, But of course you experience gravity because you didn't as you know, you fling off in a straight line until you encountered something else. And so it's just that you're at the
right velocity. The slingy outy tendency is balanced by the polleyanny tendency, and so you go to a circle.
I guess. So, but if I wanted to go to the Moon or Mars, whatever, I wouldn't go to orbit, and I would still count that as going out into space, right.
Okay, yeah, sure, sure. If if Vegas was shipping build to the Moon, I would waive my objection by all means.
I'm glad we settled that here in nerd Corta.
That's right, it's good, right, Yeah, so we don't need to go on this change. But actually comes up legally because you have different legal protections if you're an astronaut versus a non astronaut under international law.
Protection from who.
That's a good question, Aliens.
Ghosts on the Moon, Moon's haunted bro.
I think it's usually imagined that if there's some disaster in space or you land in a foreign country, there's a legal obligation to whoever could help you out to help you out.
So like if you went to orbit with your chicken sandwich and you fell over Siberia, the Russians, even if they were really mad at us, would be obligated to deliver you and your vehicle and not be jerks about it. Basically, there's more precise language in the out of space Street, but not much more precise. And I guess they'd have to render up the sandwich or something you can visualize, right,
So SpaceX dragon capsule goes up. If you wash the rocket, it'll turn and it will go at high speed into an orbital trajectory, whereas a Blue Origin rocket and this is still really cool, but it'll just go up and then come down. There's no attempt to go into orbit anything like that. So they're not doing the hard part. And that's why you know, you only get to spend whatever it is, like some amount of minutes doing space as opposed to days or weeks or whatever.
Can I ask a quick clarifying question, So when Kentucky Fried Chickens sent one of their chicken sandwiches up on a high altitude balloon, because it didn't orbit. That doesn't count.
Rat did that really happen?
That did really happen? Yes, that doesn't count.
Right to Zach, that doesn't count as the chicken sandwich being an astronaut.
No, no, going to space, going to space? Did they waste their money on that advertising campaign?
Are you guys trying to get KFC as a sponsor right now?
We talked about Taco Bell recently having a target for a reusable vehicle.
We shouldn't go on a tangent, but there is a kind of formal line called the carm online you've probably talked about at some point, which is like sixty something miles up that like is technically space, but who cares, it's not orbit. It doesn't count as tourism. I don't know. Let's address the actual question, are we going to get a tourism business? And doesn't matter. If you look at the number of satellites, it's just totally exploded in the
last ten years. That has not happen with space towards The equivalent would be something like dozens of tourists are up right now. SpaceX wants that they've talked about they have this new vehicle called starship. It's as big as
a Saturn five, Like, it's enormous. It could put we don't know yet, but say fifty or one hundred, one hundred and fifty tons in orbit, so plausibly you could have like fifty people there all puking on each other at the same time as they enter orbit, but getting that magnificent view that John Glenn got on his first orbit, right, And so one question you might ask is is there any money in this? And so Kelly and I actually
tried to look into this. There's not a lot of people who run surveys that are like how much would you pay to go into space? But there's some evidence everything the exact number, but it's something like a decent amount of middle class Americans would at least say on a survey that they would part with like fifty grand for an orbital trip. Whether they would whether you could convince your spouse that that's like a good investment, is
therek question? It does seem like there's an economy there, right, There is a market. And what's exciting about that if you want there to be like a really cool moon base, is you know, if you've got a tourist market like this, even if it was just adventure tourism for the relatively rich, Like that's going to require a lot of development of
like high reliability vehicles, life support. One of our big things we winged about is there all these basics that you don't think about, like making sure the toilet doesn't break like it did on inspiration for launched by SpaceX, you know. And so you're getting all this basic tiki
TACKI life support stuff really worked out. One thing is a big d the US is like most astronauts are middle aged dudes, right, just some high percentage of all astronauts ever middle aged men who are in like peak physical condition, and so like the question is, like what happens when like I go up, I bring like a slightly sub average body into space slightly.
Oh you're very handsome.
Let's have some boundaries here, Yeah, thank you, minus one. I'm blowing a whistle on that one.
Yeah, but no more seriousness, Like we don't have a lot of on like old people, people have various conditions how they're going to performance this. We just don't have it. And so there's all this stuff you'd want to have for a really cool moon base that you would get naturally from a tourism business.
Zach and I in a city on Mars, call ourselves this space. I'm gonna say jerks for the show so that our editor doesn't have to do too many bleeps, but to just to provide a non space jerk counter argument. One of the Wiener Smiths leaves the house, and so I went to a bunch of space conferences. And if you go to the space conferences, they would say that space tourism is just absolutely taking off. They count the suborbital flights. They are saying that the number of astronauts
is increasing rapidly. And so I do think there's a lot of activity in this area, a lot of people who are excited. And so there are people who are not as negative as the Wiener Smiths.
Is there anybody who's more negative than.
There are there are?
Yeah, yeah, there are friends.
That's right. There are the people who talk to us. All right, So let's take a break and when we get back we will talk a bit more about the space economy.
Okay, we're back, and we're talking to the Winnersmith's about the future in space. Where are the great great, great great great grandkids of this wonderful marriage, going to set down their roots where they live on the moon, where they live in space, or would they still be in Virginia.
It's hard to be in Virginia.
I don't think we're gonna have sunsets on the moon the way we have in Virginia for quite agreed, Yeah, exactly, we have to paint them on the wall or something. All right, So let's talk about realistic space economies. I mean, we've talked a lot about how difficult to it is, how expensive it is, but it is getting easier, and
we have an explosion of space satellites. And you guys are skeptical about space tourism, But what are some space economies that we could have eventually, maybe somehow get going without finding gold on the Moon?
Can I clarify real quick that I'm not necessarily skeptical about space tourism. That seems to me to be a thing that's happening right now. I might be a little less skeptical than Zach. All right, go ahead, Zach.
I would actually agree with that it's not exploding, But I would actually say that's the most optimistic case of space tourism. You know, it's not like an industry that makes us all more productive, but it is one that might exist. I there's enough each people want to go, so yeah, so let's talk about other possibilities. So there's been this desire for many years for there to be some reason to go to the Moon or Mars or
the asteroid belt. So we could talk about like some of the most common things and why we're a little bit skeptical. I would say the most common ones you hear Kelly current me of you disagree are space based solar and let's go mind the Moon or the asteroids
or something and space based solar. You know, it could be a whole episode, but the short version is do a back of the envelope calculation, and you know, even with really low launch costs, it's almost always going to be better to put up a good voltap panel and like Arasz or the Sahara desert them launching itto space.
If I can just quickly plug some work that Daniel and I have done in the past back on Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. Daniel and I did a chat about space based solar where we talk about some of the limitations, and also I do feel like something we've sort of skipped over. That's important to mention is that the economy and low Earth orbit for satellites and stuff is huge. That is making tons of money, and
we'll continue to expand. And we talked to Jonathan McDowell about the implications of more satellites going into space and collisions and how that could affect the economy. But so now we're working beyond just putting satellites in space, right, And.
There aren't some arguments for space based solar power. I mean, I think on the whole they don't win out, but there are some reasons. It's not total insanity. The idea is that your solar panels are always in the sun right, because you're never in the Earth shadow, which is cool. So it's a gain of three x right there on Moost or two x. And they could beam power to
anywhere on Earth, which is very cool. So you don't have to have solar panels in a place where you have lots of sun Norwegians can get solar power in the winter. That would be amazing and nice and cozy, But of course there's lots of issues there, like you're building a huge beam and pointing it at the Earth. Could that ever go wrong? I can't imagine.
The father of rocketry, Hermon Obert, actually proposed putting a giant mirror in space for agriculture and for weaponizations. This is one of the oldest ideas in space.
But of course we do use solar power in space, right, satellite solar panels and all sorts of stuff. There is a solar power up there, and you know, I think that highlights it, like, if you want to do something in space, you should do it for the space economy bringing it back down to Earth is almost never profitable. Yes, so then what is like, what is the space economy? What is the space version of the chicken sandwich.
One of the possibility which I'll just do this very quickly, is we either mind the Moon or there's something we need to make in zero gravity. And so there's been talk of the something for decades and you will still say this be like, well, you can make very pure materials. I guess there are plays to be easier to make certain biochemicals in space. And this is all to my understanding, true.
It's just that it's hard to win on price when you have to fly to like a space station and assent bloat there, and so far it just hasn't happened. And if someone in your audience is probably objecting, like, well, such and such company just put in millions of dollars to do it, so what are they crazy? And my answer is that our book I read a book from the eighties it was like, you know, John Deere just paid three million dollars to send this thing into space,
and it's like, look, companies do this for promo. It's not proof that it's a good idea. But the other option is the moon or the asteroid bilt like we're going to go mine. And that goes back to what we were saying earlier about like, look, there's no special stuff. So the exception people often say is on the moon, we'll get helium three. And their papers written about this. Harrison Schmidt, the senator slash astronaut slash geologist, it was big on it, and we cite in our book there's
a great paper. I'm blanking on the name, but basically just is this incredible takedown. But the very short version is, you know, the only real use for helium three that's big money is you could have a neutronic fusion, which is to cleaner form of fusion. And the problem is, like it's a much harder version of fusion that the fusion we already can't do, and the vision we already can't do is actually quite clean compared to like other
energy methods. I think of like this a neutronic stuff as like a kind of show off version of fusion. We've already achieved utopia, why not push it a little further. It's not like there's hunks of it on the moon. It's just an a moderately higher concentration on the You're in the position of saying we have to like mine and process huge parts of the moon, and like, don't even get us started on how to run construction equipment in a vacuum at one six gravity. It's a whole
other thing. But also, and this for me really got me. If you know your nuclear reactors, think y'all did an episode on this at some point. You know, there's a type called a heavy water reactor. The main ones are in Canada, the mini states that are built thinking that uranium would be hard to come across in the future. As they're a little more efficient, they use deuterated water and one of their byproducts is helium three. We really
urgently needed loads of helium three. Probably you're better off building these like weird fission reactors and just sucking off the byproduct. So unfortunately, if you're boring, you run into this problem every time you have one of these ideas about why we need to go to space.
I think another problem is that you're always kind of vulnerable. So say you did start mining helium three, it would be super expensive. As soon as someone figured out a cheaper way to do it on Earth, or any way to do it on Earth, they almost immediately can beat you at cost. And so there's fiber optic cables I think that people want to make in space. But again, if you can figure out how to do it on Earth and get them just as good, you immediately beat
the competition. So I feel like you're always at risk.
Yeah, I mean that's the whole Like sex sorting story, this is our favorite story, which is there were proposals in the seventies to send bull seam into space for sex sorting, which I guess is a little easier in zero gravity. And then the eighties methods were developed, and so it's like any money that had been spent in like nineteen seventy five to sort bullga meats on Skylab would have been really badly spent.
I feel like a lot of these ideas are sort of bad faith reverse engineering to cover. Like somebody just wants to go to space, and like, let's come up with an excuse to do it. And I think there's just sort of like an enthusiasm there, like it feels like it's the future. Let's just get it started.
I know those people. I go to conferences with those people, and I genuinely believe that a lot of them really do feel like the things they're doing in space are just so much better than what we could do on Earth. I think there's plenty of people who believe and aren't acting in bad faith. I'm just not convinced.
I guess bad faith is too strong. I mean, I think the real motivation is enthusiasm for space, not like, hey, this is a good idea and it needs space, so therefore let's go there. Is that fair?
Yeah?
I think, all.
Right, so let's get back to trashing other people's data centers in space. I've heard people talk about these data centers because, like Google spends huge amounts of money building these computers and taking up a lot of land and using a lot of energy and like warming the planet and you know, using a lot of water. But like, why don't we build this stuff in space? Right? Space is big and cold? So what are your thoughts about data centers in space? Exactly?
Yes, I mean this is one of those ideas that structure is one of the most bizarre ideas I'd never heard. I was like nervous to argue about it because people be like, no, the physics works out, and I was like, but so may maybe we should go over for your audience. Like it's hard to dump heat in space. Okay, it's
really hard. Space is like colded in some formal sense, But it doesn't mean it's easy to dump heat right, for the same reason, like if you have a hot hunk of metal, it's easier if you have a bucket of water than like cold air to dump heat. There's just more molecules to pull away the heat. In space, You've got nothing or almost nothing, right, and so it's
very hard to dump heat. If you look at the ISS, a lot of it is just radiators that are dumping the heat, like generated by the systems and the humans in it. It's just one of the problems for space based solar is you have to deal with all this heat.
Yeah, so let's get into the physics that for a minute, Like, yeah, how do you cool down? You cool down in two different ways. One is like you have air around you, which is bouncing off of you, and it's stealing your heat. If you're hotter than the air, you're going to lose your heat to the air. It's like heat diffusion essentially, and out in space you don't have that method. There is no wind to make it feel cold. There is another method you can use to cool down, that's what
you mentioned, which is radiation. You know, everything that has a temperature it can be thought of as a black body, and so it radiates, and things that are hotter radiated higher frequency. That's your only way to lose heat in space because there is no wind. So, as you say, even though space is technically cold, although parts of space are technically super duper hot because the particles are moving really high speed and so like you would freeze to
death in a super hot but very dilute plasma. But also you could burn up, right, you could burn up because it's hard to cool down, even if you're in a super hot, very dilute plasma. But so all your intuition about hot and cold goes out the window. And the bottom line is it's hard to shed heat in space because there's no air to dump it into.
Yeah, and to be clear, the people proposing data centers in orbit know this. Yeah, But the point is, like, data centers are hot, so what is the solution.
The solution is basically giant radiators. And I think the people proposing data centers in space they understand that they are complicated, right, because you need more elaborate cooling and also like refurbishing your data center is harder, Like everything is in space, right, and you need radiation protection and getting up there to swap out a new GP or whatever. It's complicated. I think they acknowledge that all these things
are hard. I think the argument, if we're going to like steal man it to try to be fair about it, is that resources eventually on Earth aren't limited, right. We have limited space and limited energy and basically unlimited demand for computing, so eventually space has to be an efficient way to do This.
Is another part of the argument that they're using the space based solar to power the data center, and so being in space solves a bunch of the problems for space bace solar we were talking about earlier.
Yeah, you don't need to bring the power back to Earth. You just power the computers there, and in principle, maybe even the compute is for your space economy. Right. For people who are generating images of chicken sandwiches on the Moon, they don't have to go back and forth from Earth in order to have their AI slave make their art for that.
Whoa. You know. One of the things I probably often had writing the books is you'd be talking to someone and they'll be like, and that's why we'll need a thousand foot tall tower in the poles of Mars. And you'd be like, but I don't see when that's going to be a good idea. They'll be like, well, I'm talking about ten thousand years from now, when we're I'm like Kardashev scale level eighty three, And you're like, well, okay,
I guess I would even argue about that. So people will say this right, so like, we'll eventually have to do this because we're going to use up all the resources. But resources don't work that way. There's not like a sort of lump of stuff called resources that you can use up right. So like before lithium ion batteries, like lithium had uses, but it wasn't this super valuable stuff. Now it's a really important resource. The same was true for like high quality sand, for silicon. It was true
of petroleum before the combustion engine. Right. People substitute stuff when new technology comes along, right, And that's how you
get more valuable over time. And so you know, not to be too deprising, but you mentioned like we're all going to have our like AI, I'll say servants, like, look, if you just want value, value means humans say they're willing to pay dollars for it or whatever for it, right, So like you can literally have infinite value just by putting people in the matrix or something like if we're willing to entertain these like, well, in a thousand years,
we'll do this possibility, like wehen as well entertain that. And just to like talk about what it would mean to need to go to space for a data center, Kelly, you correct me if I'm wrong, but I think under the Antarctic Treaty system you could like litter Antarctica with data centers. You could probably do that now, and it's like cold and there's water. They have pancake breakfast at McMurdo,
and we're not doing that. So I don't know. Maybe when we're done with Antarctica and we've like filled the oceans with data centers and we're all just made of data, then that like aggregative like computronium, will need to expand
into space. I have trouble seeing it earlier. The only last thing I would say is I think people who are really into this, well, I think often have a kind of libertarian leaning, so they'll say, well, look like the Earth is getting bureaucratic and overregulated, and this is going to be the only place where we could put more stuff without having the like save the whales. Maybe that's the future. I don't know. The costs are so extravagant.
I mean, like even if you had elon Musk predictions, like it's ten dollars, it's kilogram to go to space, Like I don't know if anyone's way to data center, but it's a lot of kilograms. It's just hard to imagine you're gonna win on price here.
Well, a lot of this feels like chicken and egg problems. Right, you argue that there's no eggs because there's no chickens. There's no chicken because there's no eggs. Let me ask you this in fact, like think a thousand years in the future or five thousand years of the future, do you think humans will ever have a viable space economy or do you think it's never. Because if it's ever, that means it's going to happen, and eventually you are
going to want data centers in space. The only other argument I think is that it's never going to happen. Is that what you think?
I would actually say, there's a middle argument, which I prefer to make. I'd be curious if Kelly disagrees with me. But it's like, so, it may be the case that there's never a quote unquote good economic reason to do this, just meaning you pay a dollar or someone does something, you get two dollars back. Right, I think there's a pretty good case that it'll either never be like that or wouldn't be any time soon. It doesn't mean we
won't do it. It just means that at some point it might be like Star Trek, Right, so it's like, why does Captain Kirk go around the galaxy? Was because we're all doing well and we'd like to see what's out there, and so, meaning like it could be at some point we're just so technologically advanced and riched we put people on Mars as a sort of esthetic choice.
Like building particle colliders or something exactly like that.
I don't want to let up the secret, but I don't think CERN is going to like get you cheaper butter. You do grow cows abuff parts, it don't think so. I don't know.
There are buffalo at Fermulab, yes, and bison butter is pretty good.
Okay with drawn, but no, I mean, like why do we have a base at McMurdo. I mean there is geopolitics. It's not like nice all the way down, But mostly it's because we think it's cool. We're much richer than we were one hundred years ago, and we just do it, and so like stuff like that could lead to a serious martyrs presence. It's just that there's no good economic
case for it. If you really want to give me a thousand years to work with, I don't see why you don't get to a stage where we all individually have like four thousand robot butlers who attend on us all day long, and we have like amazing rockets to do anything we want and it's all very safe. Then yeah, why not that at least rules out what ninety nine percent of advocates are saying when they say we have to go soon to get rich or to fix society or not be like thwarted by the bureaucrats who are
dominating Earth. All that stuff goes out the window. If you're saying it's just an aesthetic choice will make because it's cool.
So Zach and I spent like five years writing the book, and we had to argue until we agreed in the content that would go in the book.
That's why it took so long.
Yeah, well, you know, so we don't usually diverge too much, but I do want to add to what Zack said. I think a lot of why we do stuff in space comes down to prestige, and I suspect Zach agrees with me on this point too. Yes, and so you could end up getting a space economy because the US and China are in a race to put research out there, and then they need data centers and things just kind of build up over time, and so it might not be because there's something out there that's so valuable we
should actually go out there and get it. It might just be that both nations think that they look great on the international stage if they were doing these things, so they'll do it. So I think that could be another way we create the economy that makes some of these ideas worthwhile.
It wouldn't be the first time that science and technology has ridden on the back of nationalism and patriotism to make its case, right. I accuse other folks of bad faith arguments, but there's a lot of that also in science, Like, Hey, what we really want to do is X. We're going to sell it to you as why because we think you want to buy why. So I'm a little bit of a hypocrite there, or at least a ten billion dollar here.
Zach and I are waiting for our alien question. Oh yeah, don't let us sound Daniel.
All right, here's my alien question. So, Zach, do you think that you guys are the reason for the Fermi paradox? Do you think on every planet is somebody out there that's written the wet blanket book about going to space? And that's why the aliens have never gone to space and we haven't been visited by aliens. It's all the Wiener Smith's faults.
There's some kind of tentacle like Smith.
Holding the back humanity exactly.
Wow, that's what I'm suggesting.
As a guy with a book to sell, I would go on any broadcast. I suppose maybe our message has reached other planets and they gave up.
Are you guys going to sell your book on Mars when there is an economy on.
Mars if we can, that's right, Well premise, that's right, that's right, you know, even if they're just selling it to laugh at us because of how wrong we were.
That's great. We'll take the royalties, will.
Yeah. Just like I love hate downloads of the podcast, and there people who downloaded just to complain about it, like, keep going for it.
That's beautiful, all.
Right, So thank you very much Zach for coming on the podcast to tell us all about why going into space is still hard and still expensive and everybody should go to Antarctica first.
Great job, Zach, All right, yes, thank you, yeah, yeah yeah. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you, We really would.
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