00:40:08 · Aditya Agarwal, Shubhanshu Shukla, S2
When I was 19, I made some contributions to the Java kind of, like, you know, programming language, which then ended up being part of the first Mars rovers that actually went up there because it was useful for preventing essentially, like, some concurrency deadlock stuff. So I didn't know about this until a little bit later when one day I got an email from my adviser saying, hey, you know that work that you did while at Carnegie Mellon? It actually went to the moon. Oh, sorry. To Mars. So I was like, yeah, that's pretty cool. But no, I didn't go, you know, the software went. But anyway, so I've written a lot of software. So when we first started doing hard tech, deep tech stuff in space, my first reaction was like, oh, man, I don't know whether we have any right to be intelligent investors here. Right? Like, we... Like, there are people who surely must know a lot more than us, who surely must be a lot more immersed in the area, who can make better investing decisions. But now that we have been doing it for a couple of years, I say this with humility, I actually think that this is... It's not as complex as I thought it was going to be. There are lots of space cowboys out there. But I think that it's actually imminently doable if you kind of have the will and the desire to do so. Yeah. [00:41:21] S0: Yeah. I think what you said right now, it applies to life in general. There is This [00:41:25] S2: is true.
00:41:26 · Shubhanshu Shukla
[00:41:26] S0: Nothing complex about anything in life. Know? If you put your mind to something and if you have the resolve, you will figure it out eventually. I used to see those ads, I'm sure all of you would have been saying, it's not rocket science. Know, early on we used to say rocket science is also doable. It is not something that you can't do, you know, it is not that complex. And I totally agree. I think that we definitely have the talent, we definitely have the skill. There is no doubt in my mind. I've also, in whatever limited way I have travelled across the world for my training and meeting all the other people, I think that we definitely are not lacking in these areas at all. What is the change that I am seeing and what was probably lacking was the scale of ambition that we were setting up for our lives, the belief and ambition, right? And so that is changing very rapidly. And if we can get hold of that, I think we are set. We would be able to contribute significantly to this entire space exploration globally that is happening. And if you look at it, the kind of things that we have already been doing, you know, ISRO has been doing traditionally, it is fascinating. The missions that we have achieved in the past, they are not trivial, they are actually and we are very well respected globally for that. The day we pull this off, the human spaceflight mission, we become the only fourth country to achieve this in the world. And that is saying something, right? There are huge players which have been there, countries which have picked up these missions and given up, not successfully being able to execute them. So, it is something to be proud of and I think we are at that stage wherein if all of us decide that we want to contribute in this sector, I think we will grow very rapidly in this domain and we'll make some really good progress out here. So for South Park Commons, please keep a lookout for all these YC startups that
00:43:12 · Aditya Agarwal, Shubhanshu Shukla, S3
[00:43:12] S1: are coming out of this sector. Know, make space lasers, I fund them. Yeah. But... No. But I I mean, the other thing I'd say is that if you look at most of the top engineering institutions in The United States, there is not that many people who are, I would say, kind of like graduating with, like, you know, mechanical engineering, aeronautical engineering, because most of those people just wanna do software. Like, this has kind of been a secular trend. So if I look at the relative density of talent across, you know, the hard tech, deep tech stack, I could think India is really well positioned on that front. So, obviously, very exciting in terms of both what we can and we should build. But we have about ten, twelve minutes left. I'll open it up to the audience for questions. Alright. Yes. And Ananya gets to pick who... Yeah. Go for it. [00:44:05] S0: And recently with the RMS two mission, [00:44:07] S3: there has been a few interest in independent travel. So what are you to you is the hardest challenges for long duration in my travel, whether it is propulsion or in an sustained test?
00:44:19 · Shubhanshu Shukla
[00:44:19] S0: There Hi, are going to be a lot of challenges when we talk about long duration space travel and I think the biggest challenge would be the human that is going to travel because the radiation, the exposure that you get when you are travelling outwards to Mars and coming back, the shortest time right now is six months with the current technology that we have, one way. So, that is already about a year that you are travelling and then staying there on Mars for some time. So, radiation, your basic habitation, waste management, food, all of these are huge problems that we need to solve right now before we get to Mars, which is being worked right now. More possible, when you say Artemis, it looks like we are going back for the moon, and I think that is something that is possible. And when we get there and when we start living there for some time, gradually increasing the duration, I think we'll learn a lot of lessons of the new technologies that we can develop to sustain and enable the future travel to Mars. So I think it is going to be a graduated approach, us finding solutions for humans reaching Mars and coming back, but there is a lot of interest. The catch is that there was always a lot of interest in interplanetary travel, but only to a small section. What Artemis II has done is it has democratized this. Everybody knows about it now because of the way it was covered. And I think that is also something very important for such missions. So, you know about it, I know about it because it was told to us, it was showed to us that this is what we are doing. And it was fascinating just to see the people going back around the moon, you know, after so many years again. So, it is exciting, but I think, yes, for your answer, there are a lot of problems to be solved. The sustenance of human is going to be a very big challenge. That is what actually separates the human space missions from a satellite mission significantly. That is the huge difference between both these missions. Thank you.
00:46:06 · Aditya Agarwal, Shubhanshu Shukla
[00:46:06] S1: It was... By the way, can we just take a second to talk about how amazing the Artemis two mission was? I mean, like, those images as they kinda swung around the dark side as, like, the Earth first became visible, and the fact that we were able to more or less watch it in real... Like, it's incredible. [00:46:21] S0: Oh, it is it is fantastic. But just just imagine this. You know, when I went to space, it was 400 kilometers from the surface of the earth. These guys... 200,000, was it? 200,000 miles. [00:46:33] S1: Miles, okay 300 [00:46:34] S0: and kilometers away. And when you go on the other side of the moon, you're black, no communication, nothing is possible. You're just on your own floating in a small metal case, you know, three eighty four thousand kilometers away. It is mind boggling, you know, it is just amazing if you just think about it, what was achieved. I think this is the power of human perseverance. You know, we can make that happen if we believe in something. That is what is possible. [00:47:00] S1: And, you know, it's... I mean, to kind of stay on this, like, was telling people that if somebody watched those images and those videos and was still asking why do we send humans to space, they really don't get it. Right? Like, those... They were so powerful in terms of, like, what humanity can do. It was amazing. Alright. Next question. [00:47:20] S0: Oh, boom.
00:47:20 · Shubhanshu Shukla, S3
[00:47:20] S0: Oh, boom. [00:47:34] S3: We build fully autonomous drones and docking solutions where we eliminate human interface... Humans completely out of the ecosystem. I would like to email to the office here. You can check it out what we're building. So that is one. And my question for that is, what goes on in your planning to carry out your experiments in space? Because there'll be a number of experiments that would be there, but how do you choose on which is the best one? And how will you be able to finish that with the exact time frame that you had, maybe like eighteen days you had and you had a number of experiments. What is it takes to do all the planning and what was behind the rules for that planning? So that is my question. There