Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:26:38 · Dylan Taylor, Alexa von Tobel
Comms, optical communications, is really, really, really important. So that's another key technology that we're focused on. [00:26:46] S2: Dylan, I'm trying to decide where I wanted to go next, because there's so many questions I want to ask. First, I just want to ask a really simple question, which is, from your point of view, what is the purpose of this future space station that's gonna go up? And I ask this from like a practical point of view, which is kind of wild to think that there that there's been a space station that is obviously being deprecated in 2030 into the ocean. The fact that that technology even last thirty years is kind of astounding. But what is the purpose of this future space station that you are, StarLab, that you're helping put in place? And in so many ways, we're going through the single biggest transition of upgrade of space infrastructure in thirty years. But what's the purge... Just to ask the basic question, what's the purpose of a space station?
00:27:36 · Dylan Taylor
[00:27:36] S1: Yeah. I think a few fold. One is geopolitical. We need a place to go, right, for humans to actually have an outpost, have international cooperation. China just put a brand new space station in orbit in two years, and there is this big East versus West, China versus US geopolitical issue, which has been there for a long time, but the issue is where do The Gulf States go? Where does South America go? Where does India go? I think it's really important, and it's part of the reason STAR Lab brought on these international partners, it's really important that we have beacons of expressions of our value system, for lack of a better word. I think that's really important. All the astronauts on the Chinese space station are active duty military. This is a military outpost. Ours is a commercial endeavor that's focused on research and development. So I think geopolitical is one. Second, as I mentioned, microgravity is this magic laboratory, and so drug formulations, protein folding, growing perfect crystals, all of these things have real impact to our ability to do research, and then ultimately replicate that here on earth. If you grow a perfect crystal in space, you can actually bring it down to Earth, and grow a larger perfect crystal around it. So think of this as a seed that can be commercially expanded here on earth. That's really important. Training astronauts. So NASA will have four astronauts on our station at any given time. We'll also have other international astronauts. There are a lot of countries that want to mint sovereign astronauts, not only because it gets their populace excited, but it's an expression of their sovereignty, of their ambitions in space as well, so I think that's really important. Then lastly, to be a gateway to where we go next, right? We're going back to the moon. When we go back to the moon, we'll go back to stay. A lot of these technologies that we develop for the space station are relevant to the moon, and then ultimately relevant to Mars as That's really what the space stations are focused on. By the way, it's a great deal for the government too. The International Space Station, round numbers, it's the most complicated thing humans have ever built, about $450,000,000,000 roughly.
00:30:01 · Alexa von Tobel, Dylan Taylor
[00:30:01] S2: Wow. [00:30:02] S1: Wow. In our S-one, we disclosed that we're around $3,000,000,000 and ours has 100% of the laboratory space that the ISS has. Obviously, big difference in cost between the two.
00:30:16 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:30:16] S2: Wow. One of the things Mark Kelly, who... Astronaut Mark Kelly, now senator Mark Kelly, once said to me was... He was like, if driving a car, you know, it's a complicated thing. He's like, imagine that times a 100 that's driving a spaceship. And it just... It, like, was a really simple way for me to think about, like, anything that we do here is hard. Anything that we do up there is a thousand... A 100 x more, you know, complicated on sort of the the the simplest level, And that always stuck with me. So when you talk about things like growing perfect crystals, I'm like, it's not that easy to do in space with no gravity. Right? It's just everything is more complicated. I wanna shift a little bit, Dylan, to your predictions. You know, as an investor, someone who runs Inspired Capital, we get to look at big inspired ideas all day long. Space is just getting more interesting, and I've noticed I personally taken many, many more pitches around space, the future of space. What are your predictions as someone who's, you know, you're probably every day walking into... I I I always say I walk into Inspired every morning pretending it's twenty thirty five. That's kinda my job to like live a decade ahead. You're probably walking in in 2040 thinking about the future in a really different way. What's obvious to you about how space is transitioning right now, both practically and sort of hypothetically?
00:31:47 · Dylan Taylor, Alexa von Tobel
[00:31:47] S1: Yeah, so now that we've had the elevator built, right, so here's the analogy I use, Alexa. You live in New York, I know. In 1915, I'll pick a date, pre World War I, but not by much, right? World War I was just getting started. There were probably five or six buildings in New York above 10 stories, and the tallest building was probably 15. You ask yourself, well, why was that? Did we not know how to build tall buildings? The answer is, actually, we did know how to build tall buildings. The issue was we hadn't commercialized the elevator, and nobody wanted... In fact, the most expensive real estate was not the penthouse, it was the garden apartment. Right? And all the inexpensive was higher up in the building. So commercializing the elevator and making that inexpensive and making that safe added that third dimension to the skyline in New York, and of course right after the Chicago fire, Chicago rebuilt the skyscrapers, the rest is history. So think of us as having built the elevator. You've got to credit Elon, I know he's controversial in a lot of circles, but we have reliable, inexpensive launch to orbit. We re land boosters now, and of course Jeff and his company Blue Origin just did that- [00:33:00] S2: I saw that. Yep.
00:33:02 · Dylan Taylor
[00:33:02] S1: With their orbital rocket. The the the the new Shepard, which I took on my suborbital flight, that booster already was relanding and being used. In fact, I think the one we launched onto space had been used four times, but that's different than an orbital rocket, right? That's a much more difficult thing to do. So now we have two companies that have reusable orbital rocketry. That completely changes the game. So just to give people a sense, a bottle of water, which is almost by a 16 ounce bottle of water, which is kind of by definition a pound, to orbit on the space shuttle was $200,000 a pound. We're now pre Starship, which is the next generation rocket that Elon's working on, SpaceX is working on, we're at around 800 a pound, you know, 1,000 a pound, depending on what the payload is. And then with Starship, we're to 200 a pound, and maybe lower. So this is a really extraordinary development. So what does that mean? Well, now it means a lot of business plans close. We can get more hardware to orbit. In fact, more satellites were launched in the last twelve months than the entire history of the world to this point put together, right? Now a lot of those are Starlink. They're Starlink because Elon controls the Falcon program, but Jeff and Amazon are building their own satellite constellation called, I think they just renamed it to Amazon Leo, it was called Kuiper before. All these different business plans now close, so lots and lots and lots of hardware are being launched to space. Lots of startups are built around this. Lots of data being generated. Back to kind of putting your investor hat on, I think anything with ones and zeros, one of the things we're focused on with Palantir as a partner is this notion of doing edge computing. Rather than collect a bunch of data in space, transmit it back down to space, put it in the cloud, machine learn it, put AI on it, and send the answer to the customer, why wouldn't you just build that technology stack where the satellite is collecting data, and then you're just transmitting the answer to the customer? That whole technology stack is being worked on. I think there's a massive, massive, massive data play, and here's the way I think about it. We have roughly a $75,000,000,000,000 global economy.