The Space Economy... The Final Frontier

“Gravity's obviously, we're all we know no different. It's like talking to a fish about water. Gravity is all around us, but one of the things gravity does is it creates defects. And so easiest example is fiber optic cable that we just talked about. If you extrude fiber optic cable and you do it here on Earth, you will have inclusions. You'll have defects. Those defects affect the ability for the fiber optic cable to transmit data, light specifically. And there's really no way around that. If you remove gravity, then those inclusions and defects are minimized, and you get literally a thousand x benefit in transmission. But that's true of any manufacturing process where defects impact quality.”

“Chemical rockets are terribly inefficient. Medium term, twenty, twenty five years, thirty years, I think we would be going to deep space with nuclear. Just to give you an idea, Kirk, of how inefficient chemical rockets are, the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, If you were to take a spacecraft the size of the space shuttle and use chemical propulsion and you gave yourself a thousand years to get there, the amount of fuel it would take to get to Alpha Centauri in a thousand years would be more mass than the entire universe. Okay? That's how inefficient chemical rock is. So the point is, if you're talking about interstellar travel, chemical rockets are not possible unless you were gonna take a hundred thousand years to get there.”

“There's gonna have to be some consolidation in the industry. Probably one analogy would be the railroads. If you look at the railroad system in The US, you had all these little micro railroads that would connect to little spurs of different towns. Everyone kinda working on their patch. And then when you had the InterContinental Railroad, that was all joined. Then some of those spurs became relevant because they were tied to the InterContinental Railroad, and others became completely irrelevant. So over time, you had a lot of boom and busts. You had a lot of consolidation. You had people who bet on the wrong patch of land, if you will. But, ultimately, everyone knew what the end state was. The end state was that you were gonna have coast to coast rail.”

“When you talk about the moon, a lot of people don't realize this, but fusion, which, you know, the joke about fusion is it's ten years away and always has been. I do think, realistically, we're coming in for landing on fusion. I do think fusion will happen in the twenty twenties. I really do. We've already sort of demonstrated the feasibility. Now it's about scale up. But one of the things that's important for fusion is Helium three. The Earth, believe it or not, is running out of Helium three. The moon has a ton, literally and figuratively, of Helium three. And just to give you a sense, a teacup of Helium three with a next generation fusion reactor could power Los Angeles for a year. So you don't need a lot of it, but you need access to it.”

“And so there was a book called The Gorilla Game written by Jeffrey Moore. And in the book, he talked about the idea of investing in a basket. And the idea was, there's a lot of companies doing this and, like, as we've been talking, I just checked to see what public companies are. And there's a whole host of public companies. I know SpaceX is supposed to go public, but there are public companies in this space. You can think about investing it with a basket approach because there is so much speculation here. We don't know which company is gonna be the one that emerges. And the whole principle that was brought up in the Gorilla game was the idea that you invest in a basket, figuring that as long as your basket includes the one or two companies that really are the winners, assuming that there is a winner because we can't say for sure there's going to be because it's may still be too nascent from an investing perspective or a business perspective. But if you can include that one or two winners in your basket, whatever they do in terms of how they perform is gonna more than offset whatever losses you have from the ones that you invest in that don't make anything.”

“I mean, to me, back to the technology is interesting, what's over the hill is interesting, the future is interesting. But I also you know, people forget it was Apollo eight that took the Earthrise photo, changed the world. Everyone saw the blue marble for the first time. It changed our perspective on how we see each other. I've had the privilege of being up there on a suborbital flight, as I mentioned, in December 21. That changed my life. Seeing the Earth from space is something you can't unfill and unsee. So just think of space not only as a tool for transformation, but we go to space to benefit Earth and to benefit humans.”