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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norrey with your doctor David Livingstone with us. David, what are your thoughts on the privatization of space We've got Virgin Galactic headed up by Richard Branson, SpaceX with the Elon Musk, We've got the Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos. What do you think of all those?
Well, I'm very bullish for SpaceX and the private sector in general. I'm not so hot about Virgin Galactic. In fact, we can talk about that if you want. And Blue Origin. It's kind of a mystery because it and I think I've talked about this with you before, it's so late in doing things and developing things like their new Glen rocket, their big rocket and stuff. And it's almost as if it's a hobby for Bsos while he's out on the
yacht or something. It just doesn't seem to be going after developing its products and doing everything like a really serious company would do. But you know, speaking of Virgin Galactic, they did have their second successful flight a couple of weeks ago, and I looked at it a little differently because I wanted to see what the stock price would do with Virgin's success. I thought, God it, it's got
a pop, right, Yeah, No, it didn't. It hung around three to three and a half and as I recall it, it didn't move, and in fact, it might have even dipped a little bit during the day or by the end of the day. And I think that says a whole lot about Virgin Galactic, because they have a technology that cannot be scaled up. That hybrid rocket that's it. It can't go. It can't even make it to the
Carmen line in space. So they do an Air Force definition of space, which which is eighty kilometers fifty mile van Carmen line is sixty two mile for three hundred
and thirty thousand feet one hundred kilometers. We've got five American space stations, private space stations coming online over the next couple of years as the Space Station gets ready to retire, and those are going to be served by private sector companies, including tourism, and there's just not going to be much of a place for the kind of suborbital flight that both Blue Origin do and that Virgin Galactic do. But Blue Origin is at least making larger
rockets to do orbital spaceflight. And in fact they have a lunar lander for Artemus, and they're also involved in one of the private space stations. But there's no place for Virgin Galactic to go. They have a backlog of about eight hundred reservations that they sell at a price between two hundred and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars that they need to honor, and today that price is around four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And I don't
know what their new ticket sales are like. I've not seen any news article on Virgin's new ticket sales. But they can do up and down suborbital, but that hybrid rocket can't scale up. It doesn't have that kind of power. And if they wanted to do something else, they either have to associate with some other company where they would have to develop a real chemical rocket. That's what we have for propulsion right now. It's chemical rocket propulsions.
But you don't see Richard Branson backing out, do you.
Well, he sold out most of his interests over years ago. You know, they Virgin Galactic went public with what is called a back SBAC. So it's it's a simple, far let's cost way to take a company public. You find a company that is already public, it's inactive, it's a shell. You merge into it, and bloilay, you're public. So there was a really heavy craze of doing spack going public in a lot of industry, including the commercial space industry.
Virgin went public with a stack and jumped its priced up. I think at one point it got up close to or around seventy dollars a share. Wow, Ramsom sold out. I think he may have kept maybe ten percent of his holding something like that.
So he made his bucks big time.
Cashed out, and then the stock fell and there were lawsuits against Virgin for stock manipulation by disgruntled stockholders. I don't know how they've come out, or if they dismissed for what happened to him. I have no idea if there was any merit. I guess if I were a stockholder going in at seventy after it's been trumped and pumped and humped as a public company, and then it goes down to three or four, I'd be pretty.
I'd be upset too, Yeah, I'd be upset.
So I don't know to what degree Virgin is getting management with Richard. They have new management for Virgin Galactic, and they're the ones that are doing it now. And I don't follow it very closely, but I do follow their stock price, and their stock price is actually embedded in some exchange traded funds for space, so it's like in a market basket, so if it has a bad day, it's not as bad for the investors as if you owned only Virgin Galactic stock.
What do you think of Elon Musk company SpaceX that seems to be an up and coming you.
Do, Yeah, I love it, and I like Musk. I know he's falling out of favor with the younger crowd since he bought Twitter or X. I guess I should call it, But I single handedly credit Musk for rejuvenating the space industry, getting reusability going, and dropping the cost of space access. I think what must did is Genia. There was one other participant group that I think helped revolutionize space around the same time as Musk, a little bit later, but that was the advent of the CubeSat.
And what CubeSats did. It allowed allowed school kids to build a launch of satellite, and many of those school kids, including graduate students at Stanford and elsewhere, went on and built satellite companies and sold them and made millions of dollars. And that is the origin of Starlink and the origin of some of these other constellations that are running on
cube SATs. We've sent cube SATs to be orbital communicating satellites for Mars missions, and cube SATs and small satellites like that have revolutionized space right along with Elon Musk. And when as I said doctor Curry was talking last week, it's revolutionized the data and the amount of data and the kinds of data that are coming in for climate science, that's for agriculture, for commerce. These two things SpaceX and
cube SATs to me are the game changers. And I think Musk is he came first, and I give him responsibility for it because he launched a lot of cube SATs for free on what's called ride share. Ula did that too, but you know, Musk on his Falcon rockets, really made ride share available to a lot of young companies that couldn't have gotten to space otherwise. And so I'm very bullish on SpaceX and on Musk. That said I don't think he'll get to Mars on his timetable.
I think it's going to take a lot longer to get humans to Mars safely than what he's projecting by the end of this decade or by early twenty thirty. I think he's going to miss that timeline.
David, we don't hear much about the Space Force. I'll come.
Probably because it's mostly administrative. It has taken over most all of the military's space launches, so they now run through the Space Force rather than something in the Army, something in the Air Force, something with a national defense agency. So they're a big part of the launch industry in America.
But we don't have any space that's per se. Yes, we do have the satellites up there, but the defense of the satellite is happening here on the ground with cyber So we don't have any high ground troops, which sometimes talked about. We don't have any entities or people to rescue. If the Space Force was going to take on a coast Guard like rescue service. We don't have
that technology anyway. So mostly it's building and it's administrative, and it's very active with launch, and it's very active with national security and with cyberspace, and a lot of that is stuff that you don't necessarily read or hear about.
Are you impressed with the fact that we're moving forward with that Space Force.
I'd like to see us move forward faster with it. If I were in the Navy today like I was back during Vietnam, I would have stayed in the Navy longer if they would have granted me a transfer to the Space Force. Really, yes, I would have. I would have loved to have been in the Space Force doing anything for a day. I was in the Space Force military service. I don't care much for their uniform, but yeah,
I would have. I would not have gotten out. They were offering early outs, as you know from the Vietnam War, and I had eye problems, so they were happy to get rid of me. If I waived military benefits for genetic eye problem. That I would have stayed in. If the Space Force had been there, if they would have transferred me, and if the Space Force had been around, I would have tried to join the Space Force rather than the Navy.
Do you still see space as a commercial enterprise?
Totally? It's more and more commercial all the time, and it's opening up so many opportunities. I did a show with a researcher at theaters Fine Hospital in the research department, and they send stem cells the space and by the way, they send them on SpaceX, but they're agnostic. They would send them on another ride too, But they do a lot with SpaceX, and they're doing stem cell research in space on replacing disease and defective cardiac muscle. So there
are so many opportunities for space. And when I ask the guests if when the space station retired, if he would be disappointed, and he said, no, no, no, bring it on, because we'll have so much more opportunity with the commercial sector space station and some of the rules and regulations that apply to us on the National Lab, you know, the space station in International Lab won't exist on a commercial lab.
How did these private companies, David come along so fast? Did they hire a former NASA employees who knew rocketry?
How did they Just some of them do, But a lot of these people have worked for space ats and have worked for other aerospace companies, and so they do have experience. You know, when I started teaching as an adjunct at the University of North Dakota, soins maybe fifteen years ago or something, they really had the about the only multi disciplined space studies program around and it was
very highly esteemed. And now it's everywhere, and so many schools have aerospace engineering or have derivatives of it for undergraduate as well as graduate school. And it's a really prolific field, so students want to go to it and they turn out incredible students that do lots of opportunity. There's a lot of them that I get to interview.
Went to USC and Los Angeles and many of them work for JPL, and then they did something like supersonic parachutes for the mars Landers, and then they moved into the private sector. And one of them who comes on the show every once in a while is trying to build a hydrogen service car and airplane and they're doing really innovative things and they've got capability and expense experience, and NASA is a great place to learn how to do things and to learn how to do it right
and to you know, not have failures. And so I think it's a combination of a lot of different launching companies that are out there now. People start their own companies up the cubes. That certainly led to Earth imaging companies using Constellation satellite. But there's three or four Constellation satellite private sector company keeping tabs on what goes on in Ukraine. It's not just Starlink, but there's several others that are doing it as well. Rocket Labs has missions
now to other planets and is doing other things. They're in New Zealand and a US company and very successful small launcher there. Just the opportunities and the growth are phenomenal and people can't believe it. In half the time, I can't believe it either, And they're more efficient. And the other thing that's happened is money has been available, so that may be changing a little bit as money and the available capital is more costly now and maybe
a little bit less risk everts. But for a long time, probably most of the Trump years and into at least the first part of the Biden year, money has been
pretty easily available and at a low cost. So these companies have been able to go out and do round one seed round two rates fifteen million dollars here, five million dollars there, and a good many of them succeed, not all of them, you know, there's a Japanese American company called Astroscale that's doing incredible things in this commercial on getting rid of space debris, and there's lots up there, and well, there's lots up there. It's a big market.
It's got regulatory booby traps all over the place because of the Outer Space Treaty and the Liability Treaty and some other things like that. But you know, private sector entrepreneurs, they imagine things that government can't do. And once the industry started to change with private launchers and then the CubeSats, the entrepreneurs have gone crazy and then they create businesses out of nothing, and many of them make great successes out of it and are doing incredible services.
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