Great question. So we talk about launch. Obviously, that's, I think, pretty well understood by most of the people. Big candle, light one end, goes to space. Hopefully, doesn't go boom. Right? Okay. Mhmm. But but then thinking about what's being launched, those 100,000 satellites for context, there's about 6,000 operating satellites on orbit right now. So the switch from 6,000 to 100,000 is just gonna be massive change in the industry.
And so going back to my previous comment about what are the products and services that all 100,000 satellites are going to need? Welcome to The Investor, a podcast where I, Joel Palafinkel, your host, dives deep into the minds of the world's most influential institutional investors. In each episode, we sit down with an investor to hear about their journeys and how global markets are driving capital allocation. So join us on this journey as we explore these insights.
So I'll just let you know when we're live. Hey, everyone. Hey, guys. So we're gonna go ahead and kick this off. Looks like we're all set. So I'm excited to have this conversation and welcome a good friend and guest Megan Crawford, who's one of the pioneers in the space industry. We also have a few people in the venture community and people that are both aspiring VCs and also aspiring emerging managers. So hopefully we make it a little more interactive.
Sometimes people get a little shy, but no pressure. It's just a pretty lightweight conversation. But anyways, Megan, good to see you again. Thanks for hopping on. Know you're super busy, so really appreciate your generosity and your time and for coming on here and telling us your story. So ready to kick this off. So maybe we can start with you, your background, where you grew up, what did you study? You are now running an amazing fund investing in the future.
So I wanna talk about all of this and learn more about you personally and hear your story. So, you know, ready wherever you wanna kick it off. Okay. So I am managing partner of Space Fund. So when I tell my background, I like to kind of talk about how I got from from there to here. Right? So I grew up in Houston, Texas. The fifth in a line of women who were all born here. So, I'm a fifth generation native Houstonian which is pretty rare.
But growing up in Space City, space kind of permeates everything. Right? You're taking Mhmm. Field trips to the space center, and, you know, there's things named after Sally Ride. And and so it it just becomes kind of, you know, something that that is just a real deep part of the culture here. Then you visit other places where you mean, what do you mean you don't have a space center? I thought everybody had one of those, right?
But so from a very early age, I was fascinated with NASA, with space, with the shuttle program. And, you know, other little girls were playing with my little ponies and I had my Lego space shuttle, right? So I just, it's always kind of been a part of who I was. And I like to say that my educational experiences, one day when I write my memoirs, the title of this chapter will be A Tale of Two Counselors, right?
So I had a high school guidance counselor who had the unfortunate job of telling me that my chosen path in life wasn't going to be possible. I grew up with an Air Force colonel as my grandfather. And so I decided I was going to go to the Air Force Academy. I was going to be a fighter pilot, and then I was going to fly the shuttle. Unfortunately, and I'll date myself a little bit here. At that time, women could not be fighter pilots.
And so at the age of 16 or so, I had to completely rethink this future that I had planned for myself with this very disturbing news that as a woman, I just wasn't qualified to do the job that I wanted to do and so, I decided to go into business. I'd always been fascinated by entrepreneurship. I'd seen my dad start some really cool projects. He worked in the oil and gas industry and I was really fascinated with this idea of kind of creating value out of nothing, right?
So, I got my undergrad in business and then, I went on to get my masters here in Houston at Rice in in finance and entrepreneurship. I got an MBA And again, I'm I'm sitting in a career counselor's office at my MBA program in Rice and the you know, I said, well, I'm going to just go get a a you know, management consulting job and and try out some different things and see what I like and my career counselor, I'll never forget her. Her name's Marie Bergeron.
She looked me dead in the eye, and she said, Megan, I'm bored just listening to you talk about that. How bored are you gonna be if you have to actually go do it? Mhmm. What is it that's really exciting to you? What is it that that you get up in the morning thinking about? And I told her, well, it's it's always been space, but, you know, I can't be a fighter pilot. I can't fly the shuttle. I'm not gonna be an astronaut. She said, Megan, you just got a master's in business.
Aren't there businesses that do things in space? And this this this light bulb went off the this moment. Right? And it was at that point I decided to take those MBA skills and finance and entrepreneurship and start applying them to the space industry. And in 02/2009, I founded something called the New Space Business Plan Competition.
Because I as as I had started to get into that entrepreneurial world, I found that one of the biggest issues with was these brilliant rocket scientists and engineers had absolutely no idea how to communicate with the finance community. Mhmm. And so I founded the business plan competition to to bridge that gap.
To you know there was a boot camp element where we took these these brilliant engineers and scientists and taught them how to communicate with the finance world and then push them out on stage in a room full of investors to help them try and get some investment. And back in 2009 So it's kind like an accelerator for business entrepreneurs. Exactly. It was very much a mini accelerator. And so back in 02/2009, the idea of space entrepreneurship was still very foreign. Right?
At this time, SpaceX had only had one or two successful launches. And there weren't really any other space startups that that were household names, right? Nobody knew about this. And so I had this kind of through that business plan competition, this front row seat to watching that entrepreneurial space vision come to fruition over the last almost fifteen years now. Okay. And then? And then. So okay. So So so the so the space competition went well. And then what did you want to do with that?
Did you want to keep scaling that and growing that? Or like what, what was kind of the next step? And what were you continuing to be excited about after that? So that was very much a nonprofit part time gig. I'm pleased to say we just held our twenty second new space business plan competition in Paris about a month ago, and our twenty third is gonna be at the end of this month in Austin.
So that program is still very much going and moving forward in a positive way, even though I'm not involved in the day to day anymore. We have a great team that's running that. And in the meantime, I had day jobs working as an entrepreneur in the space industry, working for these startups, consulting some full time roles. And had long had the dream of starting a space venture capital fund.
But back in '9 when I founded the business plan competition, there just weren't enough companies and there were there was not any interest to speak of from the financial markets in this kind of early stage space startup world. There's also been a shift in the venture ecosystem where a lot of know, I'm I'm working on this too, but a lot of the education was just not available. Like Like if you wanna start a fund in 02/2009, like who do you talk to?
I feel like it's only been in the last maybe three years where there's been communities and platforms and just people just tweeting about it and like writing long blogs on like how they started their fund. But did you see a lot of resources in 2009 in terms of like how do you start a fund? No, not at all. If your name wasn't Draper, Fisher, Yervitsen, right? You weren't in that game, you know? And and I did. I started following those guys right away.
And if you didn't look a certain way, I would say as well. Exactly. Exactly. I met Steve Yerbetson for the first time. I think it was in 2010 at a Space Investment Summit in LA and I was so impressed with him and I went up to him afterwards just this like, this little college student almost like, oh, I wanna follow you. You're like the you're like the line of people that show up.
Like, whenever there's a speaker, it's like there's kind of like a line for twenty, thirty minutes of people that wanna shake their hand and say hello. Exactly. And I I was that little fan girl, you know, and shout out to Steve. I don't know if he remembers me. I'm sure he doesn't. But I was very inspired and I started watching and learning as much as I could and then working on the other side of it as an entrepreneur going out there and fundraising.
So specifically, I was chief operating officer at a company called Deep Space Industries, which was an asteroid mining firm. Wow. Not easy to raise money for an asteroid mining firm that seems very much science fiction, even though we were making it science fact. So I became intimately familiar with the difficulties of fundraising from the entrepreneur side. And in fact, that company, Deep Space Industries, was sold in 2018, I believe.
And it was after that sale that one of the co founders and the chairman of the board there, Rick Tumblinson, who had been a long time mentor of mine. He and I started tossing around the idea that maybe now it's time. So, this is 2018. Maybe now it's time to start thinking about that space venture capital firm that we've been talking about for over a decade. Mhmm. We're starting to see some success. SpaceX has become a household name.
Some of these other space startups are starting to actually produce revenue. There's excitement. It's almost palpable out in the world, there's no VC that's dedicated to this industry. And we saw our friends, these brilliant entrepreneurs solving real problems in the space industry going up and down Sandhill Road, getting doors slammed in their faces. Mhmm. Because nobody understood the market or where it was going or or much less the technology.
I mean, it is in fact rocket science in a lot of cases. And so we founded Space Fund to kind of be that bridge as space entrepreneurs, as people who understood the science and the market. We wanted to bridge that gap for investors who were interested in coming in, but didn't have that expertise to be able to do the right due diligence and make the right bets in the industry. And so I think our timing was pretty spot on.
A lot of times, space companies, that's one of the hardest things to gauge is the timing. Are you too early, too late? With Deep Space Industries, asteroid mining, we were way too early. But I think that with the fund, we we timed the market quite well and we're able to really provide a very valuable service at the time it was really needed at kind of this inflection point in the industry. And just double clicking on aspirate mining. I've seen a bunch of startups work on that problem.
I guess, is that becoming a more ubiquitous problem now? There are a lot more people doing that. And I guess what the value is really trying to find some interesting valuable minerals that you can pull from the asteroids, I guess. And I guess what are some of the pros and cons of that type of business now? And especially like maybe you can talk about the market and the competitors in that space. Yeah, so it is a fascinating industry, right?
I mean, asteroid mining, like I said, it seems so science fiction, but we're maybe a decade, maybe a little bit more away from it being science fact. And that's one of the problems. As you well know, VCs typically invest on about a seven year time horizon. And with asteroid mining still being ten to fifteen years away from profitability, that doesn't necessarily make it a good fit for VC firms, which was the problem we were having back in the deep space industries days.
Yeah. But then the other problem. So most people, because of the media headlines, most people assume that, you know, asteroid miners are going be out there going after platinum or gold. It doesn't make any sense. The the expense of these missions is very high. And in order to mine enough platinum to cover the cost of the the expedition and return capital, you'd bring back so much platinum that you'd crash the market. Because platinum's only valuable because it's rare. Right?
It's not rare So is that what are the minerals that you can mine? You can get platinum. Can you get gold as well? There so any mineral that's available on the planet is available in the asteroid belt or in near Earth asteroids. Right? We're all kind of made up of the same stuff. It's just different amounts, but it's all about it's all the same stuff, really. Sure. Yeah. But really what's valuable, and this will I'll get to give a nice little plug for this T shirt I'm wearing.
The most valuable thing, most of these asteroids are pretty much big floating snowballs. And water is hydrogen and oxygen. What makes rocket fuel? Hydrogen and oxygen. Humans also need water to drink, oxygen to breathe. And so water is likely going to be the first thing mined either from the moon or from asteroids. And you need a customer for that water, for that rocket fuel. So enter orbit fab, building fuel depots in space to refuel satellites and eventually rockets.
That's this fabulous shirt that I'm wearing is an orbit fab shirt. And so having that market already exists, there's already going to be an in space fuel market. So you already have an end customer for whatever you're mining in space. So, the reality is, early space mining, the materials are never going to return to Earth. They're going to be used in space for space as a part of the fuel for the space economy, both literally and figuratively.
Yeah. So that's the future that we see developing over the next decade or so. That's great. And, you know, so you successfully invested in some of those companies. You also looked at the mining industry, became an expert. You have exposure to it, So you're early, that way you can get access to it and still have ownership of some of the equity when those companies do come into a liquidation event.
And then, tell me kind of your journey in forming the fund, ideating it, really hammering home the thesis. And I think you've built now your second set of your track record, where you're becoming more of the institutional level type of fund now, right? So maybe we can talk about that chapter. But I guess were there a few other chapters we wanna cover before you started the funds?
You built pretty good community, finally identified that that's what your DNA is really focusing after the industry, I guess, there any other businesses or other steps in the career before we jump into starting the fun? Yeah, so actually I rolled out of Deep Space Industries and started my own marketing and PR firm. Wow. For the space industry? For the for space startups specifically. Because that again, coming back to this communication, it's not just communicating with investors.
It's communicating with the world and getting that message out there. Elon's been great for the industry. Well, good and bad, but mostly good Yeah. You know, for for getting this industry on on the map, so to speak. I think one thing that they say about Elon and also Steve Jobs, two you know, one thing that both of them have done really well is just their product presentations. It's a theatrical experience. So when the new Roadster comes out for Tesla, it's a whole experiential thing.
And if you remember Steve Jobs, I mean, the iPad comes out, right? Or like the iPod, it's a theatrical thing. So part of that and all of that is marketing, right? You How tell the story? And then how do you engage people and make it an experience? And space, although it sounds sexy, and the funny thing that I see with space is like a lot of the stuff that came out in movies in the eighties are like things that you see now in market.
So I feel like a lot of times you gotta go back to the eighties, right? Or even farther, you go back to the seventies with Star Trek with their little flip phones, right? Yeah. Right? You know? I know. That's the stuff that is that is it's been inspiring us for many years but but yeah, space industry has a big communications problem and we always have. People know Nasa, maybe they know about Ruskosmos in Russia in Russia but very few people understand.
I'm a numbers girl, MBA and finance, I always like to throw the numbers out there. I'm tracking over 3,000 space startups around the world right now. Most people have no idea that that's occurring, that there's this complete renaissance in the way space technology works and how accessible it is and the rapid drop in launch costs that are allowing all of this because of SpaceX. And now SpaceX has over 160 competitors. There's over 160 companies around the world trying to launch things into space.
Yeah. And so, that's only going to push cost down further, right? As competition always does and so, that just gives us these amazing opportunities and this is again, one of the kind of founding theses of of the fund is everybody's so interested in launch, right? Elon has a launch company. Jeff Bezos has a launch company. Jared Leto invested in relativity space. So, I want a launch company. Well, let's let's not think about launch. Let's think about what's being launched.
What's driving the demand for over 160 launch companies to exist right now. We expect over 100,000 satellites to launch in the next five to seven years. And what are the products and services that all 100,000 of those satellites are going to need? Now that's a market I'm interested in. Right? That's a real market that other people out in the world just haven't yet realized is happening.
And so going back to this idea of communication, I speak at a lot of space conferences, but I'm always more excited to speak at the conferences. Like last week I spoke at the International Automation Society Conference. People like, why would you go to that? Because these are the guys who are building the automation that the space industry needs, and they need to know what the future is going to be because nobody's talking about this. Yeah. And that opens up a new customer set for them as well.
Exactly, exactly. And so I love to be out there in the world talking to people about really what's going on here and kind of turn their heads to this, that this is real and it's really happening and there's enough momentum here that we're not slowing down anytime soon. Can we take a moment to just unpack the space industry? So there's launch. What are the other pillars that you look at?
And I think it might be helpful for the audience for both the LP and GP community and everyone in space to just understand the different categories that you look at it comes Great to question. So we talk about launch. Obviously, that's I think pretty well understood by most of the people, big candle, light one end, goes to space, hopefully doesn't Right? Go Go Okay.
But then thinking about what's being launched, those 100,000 satellites for context, there's about 6,000 operating satellites on orbit right now. So the switch from 6,000 to 100,000 is just gonna be massive change in the industry. And so going back to my previous comment about what are the products and services that all 100,000 satellites are going to need? This is everything from components, radiation hardened computer chips, solar panels, satellite buses.
That's the metal truss that everything gets attached to. Right? There's huge demand pouring in for those kind of components. And then we start looking at the satellites themselves when they're operating on orbit. What are the products and services they need? Well, we talked about OrbitFab being able to refuel those satellites. Until very recently, every satellite that went to space was launched with all the fuel it was ever going to have.
Imagine if you buy a car, and it's got a full tank of gas, and that's the only tank of gas you're ever gonna put in that car. It doesn't seem to make any sense. Right? And so so refueling those satellites on orbit. Also, right now, most of those satellites communicate on radio frequency, which is what? Over 200 year old technology. And that's not very efficient. And we're running out of spectrum. Right? Because each satellite has to have its own spectrum to communicate to the ground on.
Oh, interesting. Okay. So there's a limitation in terms of the the capacity for using up the spectrum is what you're saying. Correct. So you need an entire new medium for communication. Right. And this is this the industry right now led by the space development agency here in The United States is switching to laser or optical communication, which is gonna be a major shift. And and the big bottleneck there's there's several big bottlenecks here, but, this was a number that just blew me away.
So of these 6,000 plus satellites that are orbiting the Earth, most of them are gathering information about Earth, whether they're sending and receiving signals or taking pictures or or or radar. Mhmm. Less than 1% of the data collected in space makes its way back down to Earth. Less than 1%. Wow. Part of this is the downlink constraint. A part of this is also onboard storaging and processing power. As satellites become smaller, they have less storage and processing power.
Yeah. And so a great example here is the lost Malaysian Airlines flight. We know for a fact there were dozens, if not hundreds of satellite images taken of that plane throughout its entire flight path. But because nobody pays for pictures over the open ocean, these satellites are automatically programmed to delete those images as soon as they're taken. So they have enough processing and storage power for the pictures that people are paying for.
Yeah. And so when we look at the Amazon Web Services of space, servers on orbit so that these satellites can immediately offload those images that they're not sure what their value is, but have them stored and processed just in case. And so there's all sorts of kind of immediate needs of that satellite industry. But really where we're starting to get very interested, the majority of those 6,000 satellites exist in what we call low Earth orbit, which is an orbit very close to the Earth.
The satellites are transiting very quickly across multiple planes. And in order to get full coverage of the Earth, you need dozens of satellites. Whereas a little bit further away from the earth in something called geosynchronous orbit, so you're in an orbit that synchronizes you with a certain side of the earth, you can see an entire almost half of the earth and stay in a synchronous orbit so that you orbit with the earth. That's actually the most money making place in the solar system.
That's where your direct TV satellites live. That's where your radio satellites, all of those things, as well as radar or weather satellites, things like that. And so as we get the commercial industry expanding further and further out into the solar system, you're starting to see more and more money making opportunities as we can get smaller satellites on rideshares to a geosynchronous orbit, for example. And then we start looking at the moon.
It's not just NASA and China that are going back to the moon. There's a big push by private companies, most of which are being contracted by NASA, getting some of their early funding there. But it is gonna be private companies that are going to the moon this time. It's gonna be very different than the Apollo missions. And so there's a lot of really exciting stuff on the frontier that we believe is going to create an immense amount of value in the next decade.
What are some of the benefits of going to the moon? Was it you said there's water there or there's other minerals There's considerable amount of water ice. The other thing that a lot of scientists and businesses are interested in is something called helium-three, which has a lot of very important scientific uses and is very, very rare on the earth. But primarily it's going to be water from a mining perspective and the majority of that water will be used either on the moon or in space.
It will likely not make its way back down to earth except for scientific purposes. But it's about creating that community, that long term permanent human presence on the moon in order to prepare us to go to Mars. That's the purpose of the Artemis program that NASA is leading right now. And NASA is not going to be able to solve all those problems by itself.
It's turning to the entrepreneurial community, as well as the large aerospace contractors to help solve some serious problems that they have about keeping humans alive and healthy on the moon. And so there's going to be a lot of very interesting science and very interesting business opportunities that come out of that. One area around Lunar that we're very interested in is communications.
In the next ten years, you're going to have dozens, if not a 100 different companies, rovers, and mechanical devices operating on the moon, all of which will need to communicate back with Earth. Well, there's no cell phone towers on the moon. You can't just phone home, right? So where are we gonna get the communications infrastructure for dozens of different mechanical devices to communicate back to Earth? That's a great business opportunity right now.
And there's a couple of people thinking about that and how to address that. I guess nobody owns the moon. Right? So I guess could anybody just is it pretty much the wild wild west now? Or are there coalitions now that say, hey, you know what? We have the rights to go to the moon. Or could anybody that just comes into a lot of money just build their own spacecraft and go to the moon?
That's a great FAA rules or Well, so during the first moon race in the 1960s, both The USA and The USSR at that time, now Russia, signed an agreement with was like kind of a worldwide agreement that eventually everybody signed that says that nobody can own bodies in the solar system. So when the Americans planted the flag on the moon, we weren't colonialists saying this belongs to us now. Right? You no, human nation on from Earth can own any foreign body in the solar system.
But we do have a a the kind of as mutually agreed upon zone of noninterference. Mhmm. So if I get there first and set up my mining operation, you can't really mess with me. I mean, you could, we could start that's one way World War III might start is China and The US poking each other on the moon. Could see that as a potential unfortunate future.
But so far in space with the Russian and American cooperation and even with China and America who are quite contentious in space, these kind of zones of non interference have been pretty well stuck to even from a spying dark side of the government side. So that's that's it. So if you get there first, you got your zone of non interference, you're as well protected as you can be without any laws. So there really are no laws.
And and here's an interesting question from you from a finance perspective. So let's let's imagine this future where water is mined from an asteroid. It's taken to an orbit fab fuel depot, processed into fuel. That fuel is then sold to a satellite. This entire supply chain now exists only in space. And imagining a future of things happening as efficiently as possible, all of the monetary transfers along that supply chain probably happen in cryptocurrency. Right? They have to be.
Yeah. Okay. So who taxes that? Yeah. That is not the jurisdiction of any government. And as long as that cryptocurrency stays in space in perfect cold storage, I might add, there are, as far as I know, and I'm not a tax attorney, full disclosure, there are no tax implications of that.
So you talk about the Wild West, we do have a Wild West scenario of completely new ways of doing business, completely new ways of transacting, of storing value, and of creating entirely new ecosystems, entirely new economies. So it's going to be fascinating to watch it develop over the next couple of decades. So how many years do you think it'll take for people to be on the moon? And what do you imagine that to be like, I guess? Like what?
Is it gonna be like a glass dome and there's gonna be some apartment complexes? I guess what do you imagine this to be? And how many years from now? So, one of our advisers who's a former NASA medical you know, NASA doctor, flight, flight surgeon, I believe is what they called him. He likes to say, you're not going to live on Mars. You're going to live under Mars. Right?
And then then the same thing goes for the moon because you gotta worry about radiation and all of these other dangers in space when when there's not an atmosphere to protect you like the Earth has. You know, we're we're very delicate, very squishy beings. Right? We we need a lot of protection. And so this idea of a glass dome on the moon is is really not practical. People are probably gonna live in the lava tubes, deep within the moon settlements that can. Oh, interesting.
So, you think it'll be inside the planet? Yep. So, now, one of our portfolio companies is working on a potential solution to this. Shielding material that's being commercialized out of NASA that can provide very sophisticated radiation shielding. But even at its best, this kind of three d printed woven material will be translucent, not transparent. Mhmm. Right?
So this is so so I know that that's like the kind of nineteen sixties iconic pictures everyone's used to seeing these glass domes on the moon. So no beaches pretty much. Right? It'd be like a a shaded kinda life, I believe, right? Yes. And so, and then we also have to worry about the gravity constraints, right? The moon is one sixth earth gravity and Mars is one third earth gravity. We don't know if humans can reproduce in those gravity conditions.
Does an embryo attach to the uterine lining in the right way in one third or one sixth gravity? Probably not. We have no idea how that sort of stuff is going to affect human longevity, health span, and ability to reproduce in space. So there's still a lot of biological experiments to be done. Mhmm. And a lot of actually potential around that. Humans age faster in space because of the radiation and low gravity. And so How much? I don't know the number on that.
My partner, Janai, who you know, would know the number on that. He's our resident expert on that side. He's also an expert in longevity as well. So Correct. Correct. Yeah. And so but if we can make life easier for humans in space, imagine the value of bringing those medications and procedures back down to Earth to increase the human health and lifespan here on Earth.
So I feel like you're coming in, you fly to, maybe it's like it's an aircraft that goes on top of this hole, the hole, like the aircraft connects to the hole, the latch opens and you're like still in the aircraft and you take like this elevator that's like still protected, right? And then that like elevator tube takes you down to the world which is inside of Mars. So I guess you'd have to get people, do we know what's inside? Mean, sorry, let's talk about the moon.
Do we know what's inside the moon? So we do. We know scientifically that the moon was created during a collision in Earth's very early history. Earth collided with another body, and that collision coalesced into two different bodies. One rotating the other. So that's the moon and the earth. Yeah. And so they're pretty much made of the same stuff. Now the moon's different because it doesn't have an atmosphere.
It's you know, kind of the outer parts of the moon have been blown away by the solar wind. It's interacted with the the solar system a little bit differently. The moon being there has been actually fantastic for the Earth because it's attracted a lot of the asteroids that would have other otherwise impacted the planet. So it's it's kind of that's why it looks so pot marked, right, because of all those asteroid impacts.
But it essentially is rock and soil that you can drill into and then hollow out, I guess. Well and there are lava tubes. So, this this coalescing of these two bodies around each other, they were very hot at the time because. Oh, so there's lava in there. So, there was lava in there. There's not anymore. Moon is is is a dead planet. It doesn't have any geological activity that we know of.
Yeah. But there are these tubes caused from those original lava flows that that come all the way out to the surface. So we wouldn't necessarily have to dig our own underground city. There would, I'm sure, need to be some expanding this way and connecting that way, but but the lava tubes already exist and are are a good target for kind of Just kind of drill because that material is probably easier to drill through and they already have the kind of passageway.
So almost kind of like a hyperloop or something that's vertical that you can probably it. That's an interesting way to look at it. I'm imagining. Yeah. And then I guess the cities would be a different, it almost be kind of like, I don't even know what I mean. I'm imagining, obviously, you're not going to have the city and kind of the lifestyle that we have here, but you could probably No, it's gonna be a very hard life. Right now on ISS, the way the astronauts describe it, it's like camping.
Yeah. Right? You don't have any of the modern amenities. Going to the bathroom isn't fun. The food isn't good. You know what I mean? And so it's not gonna be an easier fun lifestyle. But once you build the infrastructure, I mean, you could have Netflix there. You can have the streaming technology as like the picks and shovels finally get in. Then you have the commerce and the apps that get built on top of that.
So you've got kind of obviously you're not gonna have a fancy neighborhood like you would have in the suburbs, but eventually what becomes home is kind of like a bunch of tubes and channels where you can kind of go to different places and little indoor malls and stuff. But I feel like the apps and the connectivity could kind of build on top of that as a community gets built, I'm assuming. Absolutely.
And one of the great things about the moon as opposed to Mars is that it's close enough to Earth to be continuously and frequently resupplied. We're talking about three days. Also, communications can travel fairly quickly. You can basically have a real time conversation with somebody who's on the moon. There'll be a little bit of a lag, but not much. When you start looking at be the motivate but what would be the motivating factor for people to wanna go on the moon?
Is it just a once in a lifetime opportunity to live somewhere else, or is it just another, is it kind of overflow as we expand as our population grows every couple of years? Is it just kind of like an overflow? Like, I mean, right now on earth, I live in New York City, so everybody can't live in New York City, right? So some people start scattering out to Brooklyn and even farther out in Brooklyn.
And when we think about it at higher macro perspective, like America could be crowded, And then do you feel that the motivating factor is just the world is crowded, and people want to go to the moon? Or what's the reason why we would want to or need to go to the moon? It's a great question. So the reality is, the future of space is probably less human and more robotic. Like I said earlier, we're very fragile, very squishy beings, and we're very hard to keep alive in space.
And so the more we can do robotically, the easier, better, all of that. People are gonna wanna go for you know, it's the ultimate vacation. It's the ultimate adventure sport to go spelunking in a cave on the moon. Are you kidding me? Like, yeah, that you'll you'll beat your buddies on the golf course with the stories every time if that's where you where you spent your summer vacation. Right?
So it could be a tourism kinda play as well for, like, a lot that there's very important strategic reasons for the governments of the world to have a presence on the moon. I think that that's going to be the driving factor for the next decade or two. Once a lot of these problems are solved about how to keep humans alive and healthy on the moon, then you're going to start to see some more tourism. In the near term, you're going to see tourism in low Earth orbit on the commercial space stations.
You're already seeing tourism on the International Space Station, but as the commercial space stations come online, that'll give us more and more data. A lot of the health data that we have right now is it's the best and the brightest that are astronauts. Well, what happens when, you know, your 85 year old grandfather goes to space? How does that affect him?
It's gonna affect him very differently than than a man who's who's, you know, the fittest and and the most the most prepared to go astronaut on the planet. Right? Mhmm. And so that will help inform how humans can move further out onto the moon and eventually onto Mars. And I think one thing to also call out is, you know, I know there's some challenges with gravity, but I think gravity also allows some unique manufacturing opportunities.
So, think, maybe you can unpack that a little bit in terms of like the arbitrage that you can have. I think if you create some coax cables and some fiber optics, sometimes it's easier or more effective to build that when there's no gravity. But maybe you can talk about like the material science opportunities when no gravity and maybe manufacturing stuff in space. Great, great topic.
So we were investors in maiden space that was actually the first exit out of our fund when maiden space was acquired. So good job guys. And so they pioneered this idea of creating these fiber optic cables on orbit. So fiber optic cables are created, they're very hot, and then the molecules have to be pulled into these strings. And you need the crystals of the molecules to line up perfectly If you want that laser to be able to travel at the top speed in those fiber optic cables.
The lining up of those crystals happens much more effectively in a low gravity environment. So that's what made in space pioneered. And so you'll start to see, especially as the private space stations come online, shout out to both Acxiom and Voyager, two of our portfolio companies who are working to solve that problem, the private space station, you'll see that there's the ability to manufacture these things at volume.
Right now on the ISS, which is research center, it's a government owned R and D research center, you don't have the capacity to manufacture at scale. So that's why these one of the big reasons these private space stations are coming online. And so I'd also like to talk about another portfolio company, SpaceForge, who is solving a serious problem in the world market right now. We all know there's a computer chip shortage.
Well, the silicon wafers that you need to create these computer chips, again, all of these tiny little microscopic things have to be perfectly in line in order to get the best possible performance from these computer chips. So in order to create those here on Earth, they create a vacuum environment at a near zero degree Kelvin temperature. Well, that's just the natural environment of space. Space is just like that. Sure. We don't have to use all this time and energy and effort to create Yeah.
So, the Space Forge is actually launching hopefully in November out of Spaceport Cornwall on a a virgin flight. They're they're going to be launching their first test satellite to test out this theory about about building these in space. So there there's kind of all sorts of possibilities.
And I I'll never forget when I was first doing due diligence with SpaceForge, one of their founders, he was he was telling me about kind of this is our first product, and this is why and and and computer chips, and this is why it makes so much sense. And And he goes, and then, and then we can just start smashing stuff together and see what happens. We have no idea what we're going to create, all kinds of new molecules and all kinds of new alloys and new materials, we've just gotten so excited.
And that's why you want to see so much is that excitement from a founder for the possibilities for the future. And so we don't know what it is that we're gonna be able to manufacture in space until we get up there and start doing it. And we're gonna find all sorts of cool new things that we can do. Okay. So now I wanna move on to the provocative stuff. So let's talk about Elon Musk, and let's talk about if you believe in aliens. The first one might be a little easier.
So what, you know, what are your thoughts on Elon Musk's vision for his satellite strategy? And how do you think that's gonna impact like mobile communications? Do you think he's gonna launch his own cell phone technology? And just in general, like his management style and just kind of now we're talking about him taking on Twitter. What do you think about his holistic vision of like this portfolio of businesses that he's built?
So I think that most people would agree that Elon's a genius and a visionary, that some people like working for him, some people don't. So you can kind of take or leave his management style based on your own personality. But, you know, I've Twitter, Tesla, it's a little bit outside of my wheelhouse. That's, you know, I do think, as I mentioned earlier, he from a communications perspective, he's been more good than bad for the space industry.
I think he's inspired a whole new generation of young people to be interested and excited about space like we haven't seen since the Apollo era. Yeah. And I think that's really valuable and really important. I also think it's really important to give a shout out to Gwen Shotwell, who's the president and COO at SpaceX. While Elon's off tweeting about taking over the Twitterverse, she's the one who makes the rockets fly on time, right?
Yeah. And it's that partnership, his vision, and her implementation that has allowed SpaceX to be so successful. And as far as Starlink is concerned, I think it's brilliant. He's created a situation where he has all this excess capacity and the cheapest flights to orbit that anybody's ever seen. So how are you going to make money off of that? Starlink's a great way to do that. Whether or not he'll start his own cell phone company, I don't think he needs to.
I think integrating with the existing mobile providers is gonna be, you know, plenty of So do think he could be I guess so Starlink, and just for my education in the community too. So Starlink is essentially a private separate company that just launches a bunch of small satellites to It's a create more broadband? It's a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX.
And there is some scuttlebutt, as we say in the space industry, some chatter, if you will, that it might be rolled out into its own entity to go public. One of the problems a lot of people have with investing in SpaceX, that company is already over twenty years old. And Elon has said publicly that he's not going to IPO the company until they land a human on Mars. Well, I believe Elon will land a human on Mars.
I believe Elon always does what he says he's going to do, just never on the timeline he says he's going to do it on. How much longer is it going to be until they land a human on Mars? I give it probably ten to twelve years, honestly. And very few investors can let their capital be tied up for thirty five years.
But the idea of spinning out Starlink and IPOing that in the near future is a way to get some of those early investors a lot of their capital back, create some value, and then allow SpaceX to go off and do its thing and get humans to Mars. And the secondary markets have also allowed some people to get liquidity and return capital because as you mentioned, a typical venture fund is five to seven years, maybe ten.
So they might have already outpaced the life of the company and they got to get some type of liquidity. There's so many brokers now that are kind of allowing to offer liquidity and then offer access to people that want to still, I mean, space industry, it's a fantasy industry that everybody really wants to be a part of and now it's a reality. And I think I really love what they're doing with Space Ventures as well. And you can invest in companies essentially on the fintech side.
I'm an investor in Space Ventures and full disclosure, but you can get into these deals for like a lower price point, which normally as you know, right? I mean, the minimum check size to get into these really hot space companies is obviously in the millions. So just enabling access to people to learn and be able to invest in those industries know, definitely makes it a reality. Then obviously, like I mentioned earlier, the secondary access allows some people to get liquidity with those vehicles.
So I think that's definitely been helpful. Agreed. We've been big supporters of Aaron Burnett and Brent Arsenault over at Space Ventures since the very beginning and think that that's very much needed in the marketplace. And we see that all the time. Obviously, as a venture capital fund, we can only accept accredited investors into our fund, which leaves a whole bunch of people out there who really want to be a part of this, who haven't been able to before now.
And so we've been very supportive of that platform. And, and, you know, building an ecosystem of financing capabilities for these firms. So, you know, we've done a lot of seed series A, and some later stage as well but we're currently working to raise a much larger fund so that we can do those larger financing rounds as this industry continues to progress. One of the things this industry has historically been very bad at is project finance and debt.
Yeah. So trying to get the word into the industry that there's these other financing mechanism mechanisms that the rest of the world uses to build their big infrastructure projects that the space industry needs to have access to, but that's not gonna happen until the investment banks and the insurance brokers really understand this industry.
So again, going back to that communication and that education part of it is so important now to get this financial system set up to allow these entrepreneurs to be successful. And, you know, the the alien discussion. So do you believe in aliens and and, know, like, because they've got, like, Area 51 and all the stuff with the the CIA and just kind of rumors about, you know, instances and UFOs that occurred on Earth. What's your whole belief system around that?
And do you feel that we have made contact in the past? And how do we fit in the whole ecosystem with other life in different solar systems and planetary bodies? So this is a fun one. I think Carl Sagan probably said it best. In the book Contact that eventually became the Jodie Foster movie that most most people are familiar with, right? The little girl is looking through the telescope talking to her dad, and she says, dad, is, you know, is anybody else out there?
And he said, If not, it's an awful waste of space. Right? So I think that I believe there's got to be something. There's got to be something out there. Whether or not we've had contact directly, I can't tell you. If you're interested in alien life, look into tardigrades. Right?
There's a great possibility that these tiny little organisms called tardigrades, which are also referred to as water bears, they can live for thousands of years with no oxygen, no water, completely desiccated, and be completely revived. So there's a good possibility a tardigrade could have traveled here on an asteroid. What does it look like? Is it like a like an insect or something? It looks like a like a like a tiny little worm with leg. Okay. Interesting.
So those so where where do those live? They live all over the planet in extreme environments. Right? And so so called tardigrades. T A R D I. Great. So those have been seen on Mars? No. No. No. We've not seen any evidence, but but just looking at organisms like that, knowing that there is an organism that could survive a trip through space Yeah. Backs up this kind of panspermia idea that life was seeded here from another place.
We don't We know And did the moon used to did the moon used to look like the Earth? No. The moon was created by this collision, and a very large asteroid hit the Earth. And this was before the Earth looked like the Earth. Right? Right? This is billions of years ago. Sure. So Mars did used to look like the Earth. Mars was wet. Mars had an atmosphere. We don't know if it was green. We don't know if it had life. But, we've got lots and lots of probes and rovers trying to figure that out right now.
Right? Yeah, so at this point, with all the research and the rovers that have been out there, have there been any indications of life at all? Any like fossils or any kind of tracks that can indicate any found the ingredients for life, but no evidence of life to date. And you're thinking that Mars would be the same drill? Like you'll have to live inside of Mars? Because of the radiation, correct. Okay, great. Well, we got a couple of questions.
Before we jump into questions, I want to make sure I get this one out. I always ask this to every guest because I think you gave some really great career advice and career learnings, but what's a piece of advice that you've gotten from a mentor that always calls back to you that you wanna share? That's great question.
So a mentor of mine, a woman named Mary Lynn Dentmar, who worked on the International Space Station project many, many years ago, starting in the 1980s when it was still very much a boys club. She likes to tell some interesting stories about even though she was technically the boss, the way she was treated in conference rooms and things. And so just kind of the culmination of those stories for me over the years have led me to have a lot of confidence in myself, which I didn't early in my career.
And I would just say that imposter syndrome is a real thing, but you're not the only one who's feeling it. Everybody in the room is probably feeling imposter syndrome too. And so if you speak with empathy and understanding, you will end up leading the conversation. That's really good advice. Yeah, and I truly, truly believe that same sentiment as well. I mean, I think it's important to stick to that. And then I got a couple of minutes left, we got a couple of quick questions here.
So maybe we can rapid fire these and then wrap this up. So I guess Mason, do you wanna just rapid fire these? You want me to read them out? Sure, however that works, I'm happy. Yeah, why don't you shout them out? Absolutely, so Megan, very, very impressive story. I'm personally very excited in this space and just had a few quick questions. So you mentioned that basically the commercialization time plan for most of the space, basically the start ups is a bit longer than usual.
So what type of LPs are really interested in in investing in this space? Obviously, probably they have other opportunities to deploy capital, like in b to b SaaS, some of other, like, industries that they can make a quick return in them. I'm very interested to see how you convince them to kind of be invested in your funds. So this is my first question.
The other question I have is I come across lots of startup founders and startups in Canada that they are kind of interested in the space and that the VC ecosystem is not that strong in the space industry up here. So what type of startups, like, are you specific in in terms of the geography that you're deploying capital or your kind of global North America?
So I would love to kind of learn more about the type of sales that they invest in from a geography perspective, because I I have tons of, like, founders that probably I can send your way. And, yeah, like, yeah, the the third question is really, what are the adjacent kind of industries in the space to the space industry that you are interested, like blockchain, AI, that probably they're kind of building like the picks and shovels technologies that can be applicable.
Like you mentioned, like robotics specifically. So what are the other industries that you're interested in? Great questions. So I'll try to be quite quick. As far as the LP profiles, you're right. This was a big problem when we first started founding, you know, we first founded the fund and first started going out to fundraisers. Everybody says, Oh, no, no, no, that takes too long. The space timelines are too long. That doesn't fit into VC fund. Y'all are crazy.
So I did actually some research, some primary research because there wasn't any data available on this back in 2019. And we cataloged all of the space companies that had gone public or been acquired in the last ten years. There were 50 of them, and the average age at exit was seven years, which fits in perfectly with the VC timeline. Now asteroid mining doesn't quite, but many, many, many of these other businesses fit in very well with that VC timeline.
And we see both hardware and software plays. You're interested in software as a service? Great. I've got a couple of those. They just happen to be space software. So the business models kind of run the gamut, which allows us to appeal to a wider LP base that are kind of your more traditional investors. We're able to hopefully in most cases make that argument that we can work within those same timelines as other VCs.
As far as the geographies are concerned, we're truly worldwide in the companies that we look at. The majority of the activity is in The United States. I mentioned those 3,000 startups that I'm tracking. When I first started that database, there were only 600 companies in it and 80% of them were in The US. We're now at over 3,000 and only about 60% of them are in The US. And so that shows how the rest of the world is growing and catching up.
We're seeing hotspots in England, Australia, Singapore, India, Luxembourg. So we're really seeing, you know, Japan, we're seeing activity really all over the world. So Israel, Ukraine, until recently that they've kind of stopped their space development. But so there's just this is truly a global industry in a way that a lot of other industries aren't. So we're happy to look at anything from any geography.
And then as far as adjacent industries, you mentioned AI and block chain, those are definitely big ones. Moore's law has been a big push in creating the space industry that we know and love today. The miniaturization of technologies, satellites that used to be the size of a school bus are now the size of a loaf of bread. So so the continued increase in power and decrease in size and compute is extremely valuable to the space industry.
When you're starting to figure out how do you track 6,000 objects traveling at thousands of miles an hour around the world. You've got to have AI machine learning technology to do that. Blockchain, obviously, I mentioned that scenario of everything happening in space and cryptocurrency, we have the opportunity with the space industry to create an economic and eventually political system from the ground up the right way.
And so how do we use the most sophisticated technologies that we have to do that from the ground up in a way that's beneficial to all? So I do believe blockchain is going to be an important part of both finance and governance in space as we start to see in space communities. And then solar panels are really important to satellites. That's how they get their power. So increase in solar panel productivity is really, really valuable to us. And then just, you know, the bio side of it.
That's just been absolutely fascinating to me as we're learning more and more about the biology of humans in space and how that can help humans here on Earth. Amazing, I appreciate it. Super thorough answers. Yeah, thank you so much, Megan. I know we spent a lot of time with you, but I just want to personally thank you and say thanks for number one, being generous with your time and number two, changing the world, investing in these groundbreaking companies.
You're essentially controlling the future of humanity with what you're doing and the companies that you're backing. So again, thanks so much for creating all the social impact and we get to hang out at some point. If I come over there, you guys come out here. Absolutely. Hope to see you soon. Thank you so much for having me, Joel. I really appreciate it. Keep up the great work.