Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
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.
00:35:29 · Dylan Taylor, Alexa von Tobel
If you had perfect real time information about the earth, by virtue of having satellites in orbit, measuring our economy, measuring the power grid, measuring boats that might be clogged at the Panama Canal in two weeks, and you know that because you forecasted everything, If you can make the global economy 5% more efficient, which I think is a pretty easy thing to do with this information network, that's $3,500,000,000,000 of value, right? So when you think about these constellations, think of them as data layers that feed into an overall information paradigm that allows better decisions to be made. And of course, I'm not even factoring in AI, I'm just talking basic data collection and machine learning. You put AI on that, and who knows where it goes from there. So I think space is a fascinating... And here's just a final thing I'll say. Think of space as the eighth continent. Right? A lot of people think of the space industry. Well, we don't Yeah. Don't say the China industry. Right? We don't say the China industry because China is a domain, it's a place. So think of space as a domain, and of course it has impacts to these other seven continents here on earth, but think of it as the eighth continent. [00:36:48] S2: Dylan, that's a really interesting shift. I really like it said that way. I want to quickly pull back. You're talking about just incredibly improved data computing. What does that mean for people? Like, just give us a a few things that make it that tangible. What could that mean for us here down on on Earth?
00:37:11 · Dylan Taylor, Alexa von Tobel
[00:37:11] S1: Yeah. So I think, I mean, climate data's one. I mean, that's... I think everyone's recognizing that better climate data matters, so this would be forecasting fires and hurricanes and all that. But, you know, here's just a practical one. Let's say you're a trader, and you wanna put a trade on, should I buy Costco? Is it a good Christmas season? Well, with machine vision and satellites, you can do the parking counts in every Costco in America, and see how many cars are in the parking lot on any given day, and have your little algorithm say, well, that's 2% better than it was last year, and you can put your trade on based upon that information. That's push of the button, right? Think of all the different things, whatever industry you're in. I talked to a group of CEOs at the Wall Street Journal recently, Wall Street Journal CEO Council, which I'm a member of, and I said, Look, everyone in this room is in the space industry. You just don't know it yet, because every industry is going to be disrupted or facilitated or accelerated by space. In everyday experience, just think about what it is space based assets could illuminate, and assume that that's real time. Assume someone's building it, because they are. To me, it's a really, really fascinating thought experiment to say perfect real time information about the earth, that's happening. It's being built right now. [00:38:37] S2: That's amazing. So effectively, perfect real time information about the earth that you can use in real time [00:38:43] S1: Mhmm.