Everything is Logistics

Best-Of Space Logistics, Economic Opportunities, and Building the New Silk Road

• Blythe Brumleve Milligan

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2025 has been a massive year for the final frontier, and it honestly feels like the new Wild West of freight. We’re recapping the biggest milestones—from Jared Isaacman being named NASA Administrator to the historic month where we had more launches than days in the month.

In this episode, we’re diving into the inspiration behind the American space industry with two of my favorite conversations:

If you’ve ever thought space was just for astronauts, this episode is for you. We’re moving past the "mythos" and looking at the very real logistics of building an off-world economy.


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Blythe, welcome into another Best of edition of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. We are proudly presented by SPI logistics, and I'm your host, Blythe Milligan, and now before I get into the couple of Best of conversations that we had around space logistics for this year, I wanted to highlight a few just news and notables and some fun facts that happened in the realm of space logistics and 2025 just as sort of like a high level overview, before we get into a couple of those interviews that you guys really loved, two of which is Kelly keedis Ogden. She is talking about how to build up the space economy and how you can get started with it as a startup in working in and around the space ecosystem and the space economy. So we have that great interview for you later on in the show. We also have Joe from CIS lunar technologies, and he is talking about building the New Silk Road in space. We cover a lot of ground in both of those conversations, and so those will play at the end. But first, I just wanted to highlight some of my favorite stories from this year, because we've had a huge year in space logistics and as serving as a little bit of a background. Back in July of 2024 I was able to go to a NASA launch and was able to visit the grounds of Kennedy Space Center, tour the grounds, get up close and personal with, you know, the Defense Logistics agencies and you know just lunar logistics and learning all about that aspect of the logistics process. And so I think I've kind of, you know, carved out a cool niche for myself in the logistics space by covering all of these things that are happening in and around the space economy that it feels like it's the new Wild Wild West that it is the new final frontier, as you know, your favorite sci fi show would say. But this is also, I'm recording this on a day that is a very inspirational in my opinion, because today is December 18, and I was already planning on recording this intro and this, you know, brief story time for this episode today, but it's also the day that we have a new NASA administrator in Jared isaacman. Now he is, if you don't know who Jared is, he essentially two successful parents, and those parents allowed him, begrudgingly in high school, to drop out of high school because he wasn't the best student in a structured environment like that, and he founded a payments company. And that payments company ended up turning out to be very lucrative enterprise for him, where the parents made the correct bet, they let their son kind of go off and invest in himself and invest in these new technologies. He built a billion dollar company, and so through that, after he built this billion dollar company, that's when he felt like he was still his life. Craved more. So we got into the military. He has aerospace experience flying jets all over the country. He's worked for defense companies. He's a defense contractor, and then he's also the only administrator to ever go into space. If you you might have remembered that there was a SpaceX Dragon capsule launch earlier in 2025 and Jared was one of the few people that was in that capsule. And they were able to step outside, into, not step outside, but kind of, I guess, pull themselves outside in especially designed spacesuit and become some of the first humans to ever do that on a, I guess, a non astronaut qualification level. Maybe, I guess, the, the way you would call it is, I'm not even sure the right phrase that I would use for this, but just regular, regular people being able to, you know, go on into a spacewalk and do a spacewalk, and he's not necessarily a regular person. He's highly, highly acclaimed. And so being able to record this on the same day that he is sworn in and confirmed is incredibly great timing, because, I will say, during my time during it was just a couple of days spent at Kennedy Space Center, walking around the grounds at that facility and talking to a lot of the employees and seeing the dynamic. It's still one of, I think, the most inspirational government institution that people, no matter what party line you're on, you can really appreciate in and find it inspiring what NASA has been, what it continues to be, and what maybe it will be in the future, because Jared Isaac man has some very strong opinions on what he believes that NASA should be doing. More importantly, what they shouldn't be doing. He believes that, you know, some of these missions that NASA has focused on for the last couple of decades is is not something that they should be focused on anymore, because the private sector has proven to do a much better job at, you know, going after these programs. One program in particular is obviously SpaceX. You can't talk about, you know, the space economy without mentioning SpaceX and the remarkable job that they have done in making space flight more approachable, more attainable, more budget friendly. And that's at the core of being of having reusable rockets. And so Jared believes that companies like SpaceX and other private sector companies, they have innovated there, and they have brought in the cost structure down from NASA's, you know, admittedly bloated budgets, because this is a still a government institution at the end of the day, they get certain amounts of money, and that money changes every couple of years, depending on the election cycle and budget approvals. And so having Jared at the helm and having a strategic vision for NASA of what doesn't work anymore and what could work is, I think, tremendously beneficial to the entirety of the NASA program. And what he believes that NASA should be doing is that they should be going after the, more you know, moonshot ideas, the science experiments in managing their resources much better or much they're able to experiment more, because the money that they do get is always in flux, and it's never going to be what I say it's never going to be. What I mean is that, from a budgetary standpoint, there used to be a significant amount of the US budget that was allotted to NASA, and that has shrunk tremendously throughout the decades and every, you know, two to four years as the election cycles go, that's where NASA's funding is determined, or it's increased. It's decreased. A lot of times it's decreasing. And for missions and programs that are multi year or sometimes multi decade, that can be a real wrench that's thrown into the entire plan. And so Jared coming in with a new strategic mindset, from a business mindset, from someone who is a space enthusiast, from someone who is well connected and has a proven leadership track record of working with multiple different people, multiple different companies in a variety of ways, he's the perfect person to lead NASA into its next generation. And so it's, it's, you know, it's a little serendipitous that this is happening on the same day that I am recording this episode, because that is such an important nomination. And as we kind of round out the year, I wanted to just briefly mention some other things that I thought that happened, or that happened in space this year, that I thought were really interesting. And I'm just going to kind of kind of go through a little bit of a timeline here, and just going through the way I did this is that I have a very strict way of managing my bookmarks over on x, and as I'm scrolling and I see cool story ideas or things I might want to talk about in the future, I'll save them to different bookmark folders. And so I am reading from the best of of my own NASA bookmarks over the last year as well. And so starting with the first one I want to read off is a firefly aerospaces blue ghost mission. Now you might remember this back in March, but they were the first company to have a commercial landing on the moon. This opens up the space economy even more, because it's the first company to launch a commercial vehicle to the moon, and it opens up exploration opportunities even further. Now I in the show notes, what I'll do is I'll link to each one of these tweets that I saved from my bookmarks. So in case you want to watch the videos about any particular news story I'm about to talk about, I would highly encourage you to go check it out, because it it really is cool to see all of the innovation that has happened over the last year. And this is really just the first one, so let's move on to the next one. Again, I'll have all of these linked in the show notes. But moving into April of this year, we also got our first view of Earth's polar region via the SpaceX Dragon capsule. That capsule has been a little busy this year, and so just being able to, just knowing that we in 2025 we had our first view of Earth's polar regions available for view is just astounding. I would have thought that we would have had that decades ago, but nope, this year, in April, was the first time that we ever got the view of Earth's polar regions. Now the reason this is important is because we want to monitor the global shifts. Of of weather patterns, ice patterns, you know, anything that we're currently monitoring, as far as a weather perspective, you know, adding more data and adding more nuance to, you know, the overall data collection is always a good thing, in my opinion, plus that the photos just look unbelievable. Now, moving into the next one in May of this year, SpaceX released updated renderings of humanoid robots working on Mars. And I know a lot of you might roll your eyes at this, but I thoroughly believe that it is important that we have humans in our country that are going for the moonshot or for this particular phrase, going for the Mars shot, people who are thinking beyond what our current capabilities are, who are not satisfied. You know, the the Think of the original folks who, in the age of exploration, sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and had no idea what they would find. They had an idea, but they had no idea what they would discover, where they would land, what they would find. The same thing for folks who, you know, sought out manifest destiny in the United States when they're moving across out west and they have no idea what to expect. A lot of those areas had never even been charted before from a map perspective, and so having access to the news of these humans searching and, you know, building and creating the different infrastructure to take the human species off planet is just such an incredible idea to even bring to fruition and so but it's not a dream. It's not something in far off land that is never going to occur. This is something that is actively being built towards it. You have the reusable rockets with with SpaceX that is powering this. Tesla also has humanoid robots that will likely be the first quote, unquote, humans. Obviously, it's not humans, but humanoids that are sent to Mars to start building up the infrastructure on that planet. And so some of these photos that are shown as multiple launch pads, the humanoid robots, you know, building out this, these infrastructure of the launch pads, refueling capabilities, storage capabilities, all of those things would have to be built out on Mars to truly make the human species obviously survivable. If something ever happens to Earth, which history has told us it's not, it's it's an inevitability that something will happen, and if we can prolong the life of our species for the first time that we know of in human civilization, then I think that that's something that should absolutely be applauded. So those photos are really, really cool to see. Like I said, those were released in May of this year, and then fast forwarding a little bit to November of this year, and Jeff Bezos, his Blue Origin rocket company, another billionaire that started up a space company. But Jeff Bezos has proven that he is serious about this now. And they have a rocket called New Glenn that had a successful first launch in November of this year, not the one that Katy Perry was on, but this is the one that is a reusable rocket, just like SpaceX. So you might remember from our deep space logistics episodes that when you can bring down the launch costs, which using reusable rockets does, it opens the door to much more supply and much more demand for shipping things into space, shipping things into orbit, eventually the moon, eventually Mars, SpaceX and Blue Origin, and soon to be that, I think it's coming in 2026 but rocket labs, neutron rocket, will all have reusable Rocket capabilities in 2026 and beyond. So the more companies that are the vehicles that are maybe the modern or the old school railroads, the you know, when they were laying track for all of the railroads to be built out. These are the companies, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Rocket Lab, that are building those transportation mechanisms into that next frontier. So that was kudos to Jeff Bezos and the Blue Origin team for getting new Glenn. Some of the videos that you'll see from that launch are just incredible, especially the reusable rocket standpoint. The rocket coming back down is essentially coming down in free fall, and then all of a sudden, the rocket, like, turns back on, and all the propellers and the propellant and the way that the, you know, the rocket engines are blowing in certain directions, it can maneuver itself to land on a little launch pad that's on a barge out out off of the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida. And then, as soon as it landed, perfectly stuck the landing. And then it the barge drives it back on into Cape Canaveral in Florida, and they offload the rockets, and they will then put them on a truck, and they'll send it right back over to Kennedy Space Center in order to prep the rocket to be used again in the near future. I want to say it was SpaceX that earlier this year, for the first time they had three launches in one day. And that just proves how quickly this stuff is speeding up. Because this was also this year 2025. Was an increase in launch cadence, mostly driven by SpaceX. But like I said, with Blue Origin, their new Glenn rocket, and then rocket labs neutron, that should start, I don't want to say, like the new Glenn and Rocket Lab will start eating into a little bit of that market share, but SpaceX still dominates it. But it's incredible to see all of these new companies coming in, but then all of just also the frequency of launches that has started happening like I said, there's three in one day. By SpaceX, in November of 2025 we had 31 launches in 30 days, which was the first month in history that we had more launches than days in the month. And I think that that is another just milestone. We can't continue to hit these milestones when it comes to space logistics, and I just think knowing that, knowing what the launch capabilities are, is a perfect segue into a couple of those favorite space episodes this year covering the building of the New Silk Road and how to do business in space. So hope y'all enjoyed this little bit different spin on this best of episode. I just wanted to share, you know, a bunch of the fun, positive stories around space logistics. And, you know, right around the holidays when, you know, I think we could all use some inspiration and use some good news going into the new year, and so this is a topic that I'm going to continue to cover in the new year, and we're going to continue to expand on it, but until then, I hope you enjoy these next couple of interviews covering building the New Silk Road in space. And then after that, we will play the interview with Kelly ketis Ogborn, and that's how to do business in space. Hope you all enjoy before we can build a base on the moon, we need something most people overlook, a supply chain. Just like the original Silk Road connected civilizations, the New Silk Road in space will connect Earth orbit and the lunar surface through transportation, power and material infrastructure. This isn't sci fi. It's the next great logistics challenge, and the companies solving it today are laying the foundation for a sustainable space economy tomorrow. Welcome into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers and afraid. We are proudly presented by SPI logistics, and I'm your host. Blythe Milligan, I'm happy to welcome in Joe pawalski. He is the CTO at cislunar industries, and we're going to be talking about how to build that New Silk Road in space. So Joe, welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here. Thank you. And just right when we started recording, you had mentioned that you had read the box, which is a book that's in my background over here. And so that's a perfect jumping off place of where we want to have this conversation, because we've been doing regular space logistics episodes for about a year now, and it's a topic that is not slowing down anytime soon. And I was going through your LinkedIn bio, and I noticed that you have on there that you're a plasma propulsion enthusiast, and I think that that's just the perfect way to kick this conversation off. So how do you become a plasma propulsion enthusiast? Well, it started out playing a game called Red Alert Command and Conquer years ago, probably in mid 90s. So this is a strategic game where you try to battle different folks, but you win by logistics. So you win by capturing ore and building bases and building a war factory. And you have to have a certain number of things, the tributes, to build the fancier tanks or build them faster and more power plants and all that sort of thing. You could be the former Soviet Union countries in this game, and they had, for base defense, they had Tesla coils. And at the time, I was like, wow, this is really neat. You can zap people of lightning. And that's I learned quickly that that was a real thing, that not the part. It turns out, it's, it's, it's, they're actually not very harmful to people. You can shock yourself with it. But I learned all about Tesla coils when I was 1312, 13, something like that. I grew up in Richmond. There was a group called the Tesla or the Tesla builders in Richmond, and this was Richard Hall, who went on to be the first few, first garage fuser builder. So he built a fusor in his garage. And anyway, it turned out that I was hanging out with a bunch of folks. Folks from Navy research lab and a bunch of other national labs at this age, and they were all into trying to recreate a bunch of the things that Tesla had built. So Tesla coils, but not just that, obviously, they gradually got into building fusers and all kinds of really exotic induction drivers and directed energy type devices eventually got into. So that's, that's really what kicked the seed, and that's how I started to meet these people, and started to get these mentors that helped me build my own high energy type experiments. And then I started to meet other folks that were, you know, similar ages in the community. One of those is Steve ward. He's, he's got a bunch of YouTube stuff out there. But he invented the dual resonant tesla coil, which makes music. You guys have probably seen playing AWOL nation sale or some other electronic sounds like on the steps of University of Chicago and in places like this. A lot of folks have made those at this point. He also invented the quasi continuous wave tesla coil. I have one of them over here. I might fire it up here in a second. But second, but it makes lightning bolts that look like swords. I'll show you. Yeah. So this thing right here is a quiet, continuous wave test the coil, and makes a little spark when I plug it in. But why? Yeah, oh yeah, it makes pretty big bolts of lightning. Here. You can actually shock yourself. We kind of do this as a hobby at cislunar. We, you know, any new hires, they get to play with the tougher done and a little bit of an onboarding that's different, exactly for anyone watching that's that's seen me at some of the events, like Space Symposium, we hosted a party, and I was running around with that thing. So, yeah, so anyway, that's, that's how I got into the whole plasma and enlightening sort of thing. It's kind of been a lifeline thing. And so I had this idea probably a decade or two ago. I was like, Wouldn't it be neat if I could get, you know, these, these folks that are really that I really look up to, that build these things, still get together and start a company, and, you know, I bet we could do all kinds of cool stuff in space with, you know, building off of those types of technologies. And sure enough, quickly. So when we started CIS learner, we actually started to build metal foundries in space. And this was to solve the problem of space debris, but also in order for us to build off world. So, you know, something that I'm really interested I used to be in heavy industry, building, making plastic bottles and cans at 1000s of minutes. So I really wanted to, you know, to give back and figure out a way to give us abundant resources, abundant energy, but, but not, you know, destroy the Earth in the process. I figured, well, okay, we got to get off the Earth. We got it. We got to get this critical mass. But at a certain point, there's a bunch of, I mean, the Earth is made of the same, sorry, the moon is made of the same thing as the Earth. So we have all these resources that we have on the earth, except the moon has no biology happening. You know, there's, there's a lot of, it's covered in, you know, meter, 10s of meters of just dust that is, that is metal and oxygen. So this is a great resource. So anyway, started looking into that, and with the NASA project, it was to use metal for metal foundries. So in order to do that, we found out that induction furnaces worked really well, and the folks that an induction furnace for electronics folks works a lot like a Tesla foil circuit. So I ended up hiring some of these folks that I had known from the Tesla building community as some of my first engineers to help build this induction driver. And then eventually we ended up realizing that, hey, one of the cool things about metal foundries we were looking at, okay, let's start with metal debris. And the problem is getting to the metal debris, because you use propellant to get there, there's this whole Newton's law. It's a real, real pain in the ass rocket equation. You have to, like, get rid of mass in order to move anywhere. Just force equals mass times acceleration. So no matter where you're going, you're you're burning out of propellant. You're, you know, but force equals mass times acceleration. So rocket fuel is can be anything with mass, especially if you're using electric propulsion. I learned about plasma thrusters, like, wow, this is neat. Anything that's you know, that can you can be conductive, whether it's a gas that you can ionize and make conductive, or just metal which is already conductive, you can use that as rocket fuel and as like, hey, wait a minute. These satellites and things are these. There's 13 most derelict upper stages that, if they run into each other, you get to Kessler syndrome, and then you can't launch things for several years. It's like, man, if we could, we could go over there. We could eat these things. We could, like, poop out metal propellant, and we could use that to get to the next thing, and we could use it for station keeping and all kinds of things. So originally, you know, we're focused on this foundry and making this metal propellant, but that introduced us to everyone in the plasma thruster community, and we started to realize that, hey, the very near term problem is. Actually logistics, like, how do you get there, just in the first place, so that you could use that, those resources. And we realized that a plasma thruster, the one of the one of the hardest things about this is actually building the power supply to operate it. And it got even cooler that we realized that the things that we had been making for our induction furnace, and some of the hard problems we've been solving to, you know, this thing, literally, it's like, part of it's like a tractor beam. It grabs metal from space that's floating, and then it directs it in with these magnetic coils and everything, and then it feeds into the furnace. And we're like, the plasma thruster folks that we started meeting were like this part, this part that takes the thing and directs it like and then the circuit that that you did that with. That's what we want to learn more about. Like we think you might have solved some major problems for plasma propulsion. And so, what the heck is plasma propulsion? I got to learn all about it. But essentially, plasma plasma propulsion, it's all these things are similar to what we were doing with with Tesla stuff. It's all about, you know, controlling, you know, you have a controlled spark or controlled discharge, an arc. You know, a lot of times in micro electronics, you don't want arcs. That's what destroys your electronics. You're really trying to prevent that. But if you're doing a plasma thruster or an arc jet, or any of these sorts of things, you're trying to create an arc, and you're trying to sustain that for a really long time. So it turned out all that experience was like exactly what we needed to do. And so that ended up getting us working with all these other research institutions that we work with everyone. It's that any research institution the United States, and I know of this doing plasma thrusters, we've been, we've been working with in one capacity or another. So anyway, it was like, Oh, wow. We can take this stuff and put it on steroids and just do all kinds of wacky stuff with it. So, so anyway, that's, that's what we've been focusing on a lot is, How do you take take something? Now, plasma thrusters are really interesting, because you can get much higher specific impulse. And so what that comes down to is, again, you know Newton's law, yeah, you got to throw mass out. The faster, the harder you throw it, the better. But also the more massive it is, the better. So electropollion allows us to use electromagnets. And basically our, you know, the speed of light is a factor that we're up against, but we can accelerate things many times faster than you can with a chemical reaction, which means that if you're Accel that number mass times acceleration is acceleration is very high, then you can get much more force. And in this case, what ends up happening is you get much better gas mileage, is how you can think of it. They're still working on getting the energy level so that we can get really high thrust. This power is limited in space. It's not the same as, you know, a chemical rocket. You burn this, you can get hundreds of megajoules, or billions of billions of watts generated at a time. And right now with solar cells or even a nuclear you know, you're limited somewhat, but it turns out that we can get very efficient. So it's the way I could kind of explain is, like the difference between a fighter jet and a train. If you need to get somewhere really fast, you're going to use a fighter jet, but guess what? You're going to have to refuel that thing. Like, if you're going to fly a jet from here to somewhere, a fighter jet, especially at Mach two or something, you're gonna have to refuel that thing all the time. You could take a train, and you're going to use a fraction of the gas to get there, and you're going to be able to pull, like, a whole train load worth of stuff at the same time. So, you know, so this really gets down to logistics thing. And hopefully that wasn't too much of a deep dive on propulsion systems, but basically, you have chemical propulsion, we have electric propulsion. And right now, because we can't generate billions of watts on orbit, like a, you know, that's the equivalent of what a, you know, like a falcon nine, is when it lifts off, it's billions of watts generated. So anyway, what we have is we basically have, like, your air cargo for logistics, and you have your train. And so we have to build those logistics notes. Anyway. I've been really fascinated by the plasma side. And of course, too, I'm really interested eventually we can get power levels up to the point where we might be able to get chemical like thrust. So so you might have the best of both worlds, like a fighter jet that can go around the Earth many, many times, or go into space and not run out of fuel, and also have the same kind of thrust. So that's we're going for. But yeah, I call myself a plasma enthusiasm, plasma process enthusiast, because I love all kinds of plasma. And as the folks that build the power supplies, they call them power processing units, we have to understand how all these different systems work at a pretty deep level. And it sounds like, just based on our previous conversations that, you know, one of the, you know, I guess when we back it up and talk about sort of space logistics as a whole, one of the bigger game changing moments was getting that rocket reusability. And now that we have that rocket reusability where, you know, I live in Florida, and, you know, I've told the story before, but we used to have, you know, maybe a few launches every year. Now, there's a few launches every every day, and and then there's, you know, we had a conversation, really, with recently, with Kelly from the Space Foundation. She's talking about how there's, very soon, it could be multiple launches every single hour. And so as we're launching. More, we're starting to find out these different issues and different problems that we need to be solving. And it sounds like what you're talking about with the the plasma propulsion is that we that's sort of the fuel for the rockets that needs to be solved as well, and in some of our inner our greater energy problems that exist here on Earth, but will also follow us into space. Did I summarize that? Okay, yeah. So one differentiator I want to make is that right now, because we don't have chemical like energy levels. So you know, just to get, if you could put a billion Watts into a plasma thruster and have it be the same size as the Falcon nine, you would get chemical like thrust out of the plasma propulsion, but to generate billions of watts, you know, you're talking like a nuclear power plant. That's, that's many buildings large. So, you know, we don't have that yet. So right now, chemical propulsion, or chemical propulsion, is how we get off the Earth. It's the only thing that has enough thrust, you know, to get you. So that's like force over time. So you need, you need a lot of force over a very short time to break free of the drag of the atmosphere. But then once you're out of the atmosphere, now you can use something like electric propulsion to maneuver very efficiently. So, and if you're operating from the moon, you can actually, you can get off the surface of the moon with with it's one stick to the gravity. So it takes a lot less to get into orbit, the orbital velocity where you're orbiting. And now you can use an electric propulsion system. So what's really interesting about the moon is that the delta, the velocity it takes to get off, is actually low enough that, like, spin launch has a launcher that's just a momentum launcher, kinetic launcher, and it actually has enough velocity. The one that they have in New Mexico has enough velocity, I believe, to get off the surface of the moon. Now it's, it's here on Earth, so it can't launch things up off the surface here on Earth. But, but that's kind of interesting, because now you could actually launch something without using any chemical propellant. You just using electricity from converted into kinetic energy, and then you could intercept that with something that's using, perhaps electric propulsion that's orbiting the moon. And now you have something that's that's all EP we're all you know, not using your traditional hydrogen and oxygen propellants to maneuver so. So right now, though, we're limited. We can't we have to rely on, on all of the traditional, you know, rocket technology has been around since Apollo and that era, chemical propellant to get off the surface of the earth and into Leo. At that point, though, we can, we can do our transfers. So probably what's going to end up happening is that you'll end up having your your like your trains, your your trucks, things like that, that that don't need to move super fast, carrying like cargo. You'll also have, of course, like your Falcon nine or, sorry, your starships and your new Glens and things that can carry a lot of payload for less going to nodes. And then you might have, kind of, your regional jets, regional carriers that go in between. Might be electric propulsion starting out. So that's, that's kind of where that, that that goes. So for humans, of course, you know, we have, humans need, probably are going to need chemical prop for quite a while, because we need, you know, life support every day you're out there. That's another whole cost that you have to think about. But, but equipment, satellites and all these other things, and again, like moving the propellant to another depot where a human spacecraft might be able to refuel. Keeping that, keeping that in orbit, is another really interesting thing, because in space, it's a lot like trying to have a boat in the middle of the ocean. You know, if you have a ship in the middle of the ocean, you're not, you're not putting an anchor down because it's too deep. You're in it. You know, there's current, so you got to rely on your motors to stay in the same position. It's the same thing in space. There's, you know, there aren't currents, but there's other things, there's, there's, there's a little bit drag. If you're near the earth, you need station keeping. And then if you go further out, there's always gravity from other things that you have to deal with. So So EP is very efficient at keeping something that you know. So if you have a gas station or a supply node that's going to need something to keep it in the same spot, and EP is very good for that, yeah. In a very similar vein, one of the the episodes that I was listening to to prep for this conversation that made a bunch of analogies, and I have it on on my little notes here, they said the Gateway Station is sort of acting as a port, or like a lunar outpost. Rockets are essentially the ocean carriers. Landers are the delivery trucks. And rovers slash drones are handling the the last mile. And then one other piece of that, which you have a ton of experience in, is the manufacturing side of things, and how, you know, maybe 3d printers are playing a role. And so you're that, I mean, to give every, you know, give this audience, you know, it's sort of those, those space analogies to the on Earth transportation systems, some of what the lessons that you've learned, especially from from manufacturing, are being. Taken into space. And I'm curious as to what manufacturing looks like in space. Is it just a, you know, a bunch of 3d printers? You also mentioned, you know, some recycling efforts as well. I think you mentioned that the phrase of like, taking the machine parts poop, and turning that into something that's sustainable. Can you kind of break that down for us? Sure? Absolutely. So, you know, right now, in space, manufacturing is more modules. It's like modular architectures, and that's, that's probably what we're going to see first. I've been, you know, in our ecosystems, we talk a lot about modular, open source interfaces, but we also talk about making satellites that you could reconfigure an orbit, because, like, the propulsion system is a module, the solar array is a module. The comms is several modules. So, you know, something new, some new frequency, some bandwidth that you want to use comes out. You swap out the comms module with a new one, and now you have an upgraded satellite, a new propulsion that's, you know, twice as efficient and uses half as, you know, have as much propellant for delta V or whatever comes along. You swap out that propellant system with a new one. So see, so you know, you can, right now, we have satellites that are designed to de orbit in five years. That's, that's requirement if you're in Leo. So, you know, these, these are meant to be like disposable, throwaway type things. And that's, that's really, if you think about terrestrial life like that's, that's how a lot of things are designed there, you know, fast fashion and everything else. It's not meant to last. Previously, we had designed satellites to last 20 years because they'd be in some orbit where they couldn't de orbit them. And now, but of course, designing something last 20 years, an exquisite satellite, is very expensive, so we have this interesting spot where we have, we're able to make satellites that that are like, you know, will last forever, and then we're able to make satellites that are designed to de orbit and fall apart in five years. So, so there's this hybrid in between, where you design a satellite to basically just be immortal, because eventually it might not have any of the same DNA. Eventually you replace all the modules. And now it's, it's an immoral satellite. And so this gets around the problem of, like, you know, if you had, I had a my first phone was, was even before flip phones, but it was like, you know, that phone is useless. Now you can't upgrade that. There's no way to, you know, you can't refuel it and make it better. It's just, it's dead. So, so you don't want to, you know, you have to be very cautious that you don't design something that that is going to just prevent you from innovating. So that's, that's why I think this modular approach is pretty innovative. As far as near term in space, assembly and manufacturing, is that, you know, you might still manufacture these modules on Earth. I'd love to see where we manufacture those modules on the surface of the moon. Having some gravity really helps. There are, there are a lot of concepts for making stations with their own gravity, like big, rotating stations, like you've seen in Space Odyssey and newer films. But of course, you still have to get a lot of the materials in orbit. And you know, ISS cost billions of dollars and took decades to build. So you can assume that's the largest, by far, the largest ism project to date is ISS, which is phenomenal, phenomenal learnings from that and so, and also, we've done it, you know, we did it with ISS, and it was awesome. The next step is to derive those resources off world and build something, and show that we can build something without relying on research from Earth, but, but again, I think the first steps are going to be module type satellites. So, you know, just like the space station, Space Station is pretty, a pretty good example of a modular approach there to trusses, although the ways they connected were pretty similar. So now we need to start building satellites that way so they don't de orbit in five years. But, and you'll probably see this with GEO satellites and satellites that are further out, because it makes a lot more sense to do that. And then beyond that, I think you'll start seeing, you know, a lunar assembly manufacturing, where you're still, you know, doing, doing the three printing and things like that would happen on the surface of something, but then they'd be launched up, because generating power, all those sorts of things, the logistics of how you would manufacture are, you know, once you get to the moon, which is not easy, but once you get there, getting things from the surface of the Moon back to Leo is actually less energy than getting something from the surface of the earth to Leo. Kind of crazy to think of. It's just because the gravity well of the Earth is so big versus the moon. So anyway, there's a very good economic reason to manufacture on the moon, but, but, but I that's where I see it going. Is that probably, you know, 3d printing makes a lot of sense. We've worked with a lot of companies that have developed really cool technologies for 3d printing that that could work on the moon today. In fact, one of the things that I just walked past. I'm hoping it shifts soon, but it's an extruder that we met, that we built for NASA as part of the Artemis program. So the idea is, is that they'll run an end to end demo where they take the dirt on the moon is called regolith, and it's a very fine, dusty gray powder, but it contains. A bunch of different metals that are oxidized. So you have to take the oxygen out, great, because right now, starship and all the other types of rockets that can go to the moon, other than than the artist program, SLS, they have to be refueled to get there. The main thing that they need to refuel with that this makes sense, is oxygen, because it has the most mass. So what a convenient thing that once you extract the oxygen from from the regolith, you end up with metal as the waste product. So now you have all this metal that you can use to build things. And so anyway, the idea was to take the metal, extrude it into wire, and then 3d print out of this out of this wire. Now near what I expect would be, the first things that we would do is to build replacement parts. So they call this ground interfacing tooling in the mining industry. But you can imagine there's, there's going to be a lot of heavy equipment, or, you know, smaller equipment on the moon. It doesn't weigh as much, but because of gravity. But anyway, you know, you're going to be digging through this very abrasive regolith, so you're going to get a lot of wear on those surfaces. And you know, this is heavy metal teeth that crack your teeth and stuff like that, and wheels and whatnot. So when we did our DARPA work, we identified that the wheels on these rovers, the blades, you know, the things that actually are interacting with this really abrasive regolith, that's what's going to wear out. And that's where you know right now, it's a million dollars a kilogram to get something that serves the moon. So, like, why would you send a bunch of metal teeth that you could make there, if you could just make them there for a marginal cost versus what it costs to make on Earth and ship it there? Because, because everything costs a million dollars a kilogram, doesn't matter whether it's water or steel, it's all, you know, the cost of getting it there. So that's where we thought that that kind of makes, as far as you know, beyond the modular approach. Now that you know, in space manufacturing, if you're launching modules and assembling, we have that tech today, Northrop Grumman starting to do stuff like this, astroscale like, you know, they're showing that we can actually service, we can remove something, put a new one on. So that's that's starting to happen today, but where we actually make things in space, that's where I think it's really the larger scale stuff where the economics makes sense. It's going to be building things like wheels, like blades, dumb. We call it dumb mass stuff that would be dumb to launch, because you can make it pretty easily there. But yeah, like the wire extruder we make, we made some wire that's we can make it out of most alloys, 6061, is the most common. So, you know, we looked at that for like, ISS. Could we? Could we take scraps off ISS that are 6061, turn them into wire and then make new parts. So that's that's one way to do it. Same thing on the moon. You have silicon is one of the number one materials that you have a lot of aluminum. You have a lot of silicon, aluminum. Silicon turns out to be a really great wire to use for aluminum 3d printing. So, you know, so like that makes a lot of sense. You're going to have a lot of aluminum, a lot of aluminum, silicon. We can make an alloy out of that. We can make it in a wire. We can 3d print those metal parts. Steel is another thing is kind of interesting. We haven't started extruding steel, but there's quite a bit of iron on the moon, because, again, the moon is made of the same stuff as Earth. There isn't any carbon on the moon because there's no biological activity. But guess what? All the rovers, a lot of half the half the landers and rovers are made in a carbon fiber, and a lot of the ones that land initially are not going to be reused. So carbon fiber is made out of carbon, and we realized that you only need, like, less than 1% to make steel. So this is a really interesting value chain where steel is super useful. You could, you can make full on, you know, all kinds of things, if you can make steel and aluminum. So anyway, lunar surface kind of interesting. But then I think that we would start to build things in space. Guitar is one of the companies that's starting to do some pretty interesting things. So I don't know when we'll actually be 3d printing and manufacturing wild things that orbit. There's been some demonstrations where they make antennas and white after arrays. But mostly that's using polymers. There's been years ago, there was this thing called the Grumman beam maker, which was meant to go up on challenger. Of course, we all know what happened there. That got mothballed, unfortunately. But that was to it could make beams and trusses that were unlimited, you know, kilometers long. So you could build these big, rotating, you know, space, space, you know, science fiction type stations and things like that. So, so again, though, it's really kind of a, you know, are we going to actually end up on the moon in the next few years, like everyone's talking about, or, you know, are we going to focus more on on space? I hope we do both, and that'll really determine, you know, we're, you know, follow the money wherever that research goes. Was wherever that that, that, you know, demand for, whether it's military or whatever else drives it, that that's, that's where it happens first. So now a tangent from here. Interesting panel I was on earlier this week about human spaceflight. When I was first in this industry, I was like humans in space, like I'm focused on the science and building like logistics. I'm not too, you know, humans and space is a whole other logistics nightmare. But what's interesting about this is that I've kind of, I've come around full circle and realized that, hey, you know, that could be the best thing. You know, there's enough people that are interested in going to space, or, you know, being buried in space, all these, all these different things, but ultimately, what we need is a reason to be up there persistently. It's not just defense. You know, obviously, there's a lot going on with environmental science, a lot with communications and things like that. But we realized from from the human spaceflight program before, like, you know, Apollo, 13, people kind of lost interest, and all sudden, there is this drama. And everyone's like, whoa, holy cow. Like space really matters. You know, nobody really cares. When the Mars Rover gets stuck in a ditch, it's, you know, it made a Freaks and Geeks episode at one point. But, like, beyond that, it's not super exciting news. But when people are involved, all of a sudden, there's, there's, like, a lot of excitement around this. So for me, as someone that's looking at logistics of this, I'm thinking, Well, hey, like you think about like a hotel. And I tell my kids this all the time, when you look at a hotel, how many buildings do you think it takes to support that hotel? How many cars and trucks does it take to resupply that hotel there? And you start to realize there's a whole ecosystem built around this one hotel. So, you know, a hotel in space, you know, in Leo even, or, you know, somewhere, you know, in lunar orbit, or, who knows, you could put it in all kinds of places all of a sudden in order to support that, you have all these logistics and these highways that have to be created. And now, as long as somebody is there, you're gonna have a constant cycle of resupply in order to do that. So, you know, that's one way that we might end up spurring this type of development, which would lead really force, you know, if you're, if you're just thinking about machines, like threed printing something in orbit, like, you may as well the timeframe isn't really that urgent, so you might just launch it and find the slow boat it. But like, if there's people there now all of a sudden, like, Oh, you're leaking. Like, no, we gotta, we gotta fix this, like now. And so the urgency of doing that is a lot sooner. So I think, I think there's a lot of merits to that, to helping really, really get things going and creating. I'd love to see, kind of, just like we have highway systems on Earth, something like that in cislunar space. And for us, cislunar is the Earth and the Moon. It's the whole Earth, Moon environment. So we're talking about going from Earth to the Moon and everywhere in between, and creating logistics nodes every step of the way, just like the highway system. Yeah, what you're saying makes a ton of sense, because I think back to Elon Musk said a couple years ago, or maybe even a year ago, that going to the moon was a giant waste of time. We need to be focused on Mars, and we need to go to Mars, but having these different outposts and having these different spots closer to the earth, it makes a whole heck of a lot of sense to in order to, you know, get those goals, like, what you're saying with, with refueling, retooling, resupply, it Sounds like there's, you know, there's lots of ways besides reusable rockets, and, you know, a few more efficient fueling that needs to take place as well, such as that, that manufacturing in space. And I always wondered, you know, well, why? Why ignore, like, the the ISS, or, Why are they, you know, just going to, I think they're decommissioning the ISS in a couple of years, and they're just going to send it straight into the ocean with what you're saying, it sounds like there's a tremendous amount of opportunity that we could save and salvage the ISS into something that that's more sustainable, and something that you know is actually useful in space. Yeah, absolutely. And I, you know, I got a ton of respect for Elon. I think we wouldn't be here without SpaceX and Falcon nine being so successful. I really hope that starship is equally successful, and soon, I think that, you know, Elon's, I think one of these folks that gets laser focused on, you know, he's focused on Mars. We should focus on Mars. But you know that that doesn't mean, I think people kind of read between lines like, Oh, we're going to skip the moon. Well, you can't get to Mars very effectively without the moon. I mean, as far, I mean, I haven't had the pleasure of sitting down with Elon and asking him directly about this, but as far as I understand, like, the moon's always part of this. In order to get starship to Mars, it's really important that we get oxygen from the moon. So, you know, it's kind of the way I look at it is, if we, you know, what we're good at is like pushing, or we should do whatever we can motivate ourselves to do if we want to say, let's go to Mars. We're going to learn so much along the way. We're going to end up developing these resupply nodes on, you know, that go to the moon and before we ever get to Mars. Mars, and that's going to be huge. Like we might not even get to Mars in my lifetime. I think we will, but, but you know, if we didn't and we just developed all these logistics notes to the moon on our way there, that would be huge. But anyway, I don't think that his Elad plans to go to Mars preclude the moon. I actually think that that they are very much symbiotic. They you really need the moon and those logistics to get to Mars, and it's just just the way things go. People focus on on the other things. And, you know, it just gets lost so well, I think that's the opportunity of what, what space kind of gives us, is that you can have the folks that are thinking about a lot of different things, and then you have somebody like you that that's thinking about, well, maybe we can, you know, reuse some of these things that we've already paid a lot of money to send up and a lot of time and energy to send up into space. And so I am curious as to, you know, why haven't we started building this infrastructure on the moon? Yet, it feels like, oh, you know, the last, you know, since the 60s, however, much that math is, I can't do math right now, but it feels like we could have been building there the entire time and already had some of this stuff, this infrastructure set up. So what does that, I guess, what was the reasoning for? Maybe not a building changed. Great. You know, if folks that know me know that I've had a lot to do with ISS and talking about ways we could use it more effectively, and, you know, and continue its life and mission. And I think a lot of that, you know, for the spacecraft program we've, we've had, you know, our best and brightest engineers for decades have created phenomenal amounts of things, and a lot of them have just been put on the shelf. So, you know, I fully believe in the 80s, we could have had icing, you know. And then I talked to engineers all the time. They're like, Oh, I'm glad you're picking up on, you know, I was working on this 20 years ago. And then if I early on, I find people that would and I'd be a little crushed, because they'd be like, Oh, I had this idea 20 years ago. And they're like, oh, man, I guess maybe. And it's like, no, no, there's some other person 20 years before me. And then I find something where, like, some, some guy in Russia wrote about this in the 40s, and someone else in, like, the teens, you know, it's like, what's How did people conceive this thing? You know, 100 years ago? It's crazy to think. But anyway, the ideas have been around. We got close in the 70s, of course, but then, you know, funding change. I think with ISS too, you know, I've, I've talked to all kinds of levels of folks about ISS and reusing it. And really, what I gathered is that, you know, these things are, are designed for a certain mission, and they're so far, we don't design things in space to have multi missions. So, you know, for whether it's a satellite, you know, satellite runs out of fuel, that's the end of its mission. You know, it's the end of its life. ISS, you know, we built it. We proved that we were a superpower and so much better than everyone else in the world. And we were able to collaborate with everyone else in the world and all that soft power we we showed everyone we had soft power. And, you know, been there, done that. So now, you know, as far as government's concerned, and funding, that it's like, well, we, we met our objective. The mission was, was met like it was totally worth it. We did it. So I to me, that's the biggest headwind against you know that I've learned now so, but that being said, I do think that ISS, is still a great has. There's, there's still plenty of life in ISS, and we can use it. One of the things, you know, we talked about recycling, ISS, there's, there's concerns to doing that, like, there's safety concerns, there's also policy concerns, you know, like, how do you get I mean, a lot of it comes down to like, Hey, who's going to call Roscosmos and explain to them how we're going to determinate and remove their module. Because, you know, even if we all, if we are all good friends and everything else, it's like, well, what if you drop a bolt and it comes back around at orbit velocities and destroyed something? Or like, you know, what if? What if you determinate, or you push this off and then it gets, you know, somehow it ends up coming back and hitting us. There's all kinds of things. Kinds of things that can go horribly wrong, right? And who takes responsibility and ownership for it between when you have, like, all these different nations involved. So, so really, I think it's a lot more of a we call these, like, policy requirements, or, you know, they're not hard engineering requirements. They're really, you know, diplomatic State Department type things that you know someone else that's not me deals with. So now, if you could get beyond that, though, I think that there are we've talked about using ISS as a propulsion test platform. There's the guy behind vasimir has proposed this, like, years ago, and it was going to be very expensive. I talked to a bunch of folks that worked on that program, and I said, Hey, you know what, if we were to look at this again and do it when there wasn't any crew on ISS? And it turns out that when you don't have crew on the ISS, it's a lot cheaper to do exp. You know, it's potentially 1/10 of the cost, because now you're not worried about killing about. People if something goes wrong. But also, you know, what's, what's intriguing about ISS, is it is the largest generator power on orbit right now. There's, I think, over 200,000 watts of power capability on ISS. Now you can't get all that power at the same time. It's distributed. It depends on where it is. There's, you know, but, but by far, you know, there's, there's some other satellites that might be in the 10s of kilowatts as the next best thing. So like, you know, this is an order of magnitude more than anything that had been an orbit yet. So for somebody like us that's doing a lot of plasma propulsion, or, like, man, there's all these labs that are that can't, you know, nobody's, nobody's throwing blown a hall thruster that's more than a few 1000 watts on orbit. So, like, what if we could fly a bunch of 10,000 watt thrusters, or 100,000 watt thruster, or something like that? Like, there aren't vacuum chambers on earth that can test up to that level, because, not for any duration, because generating a vacuum you know, you're trying to fire a rocket into a vacuum chamber. You know, a certain point, it's, it's hard to pump that fast, once you get to a certain scale. So, so ISS is really ideal for that. And we've even proposed things. Like, I've talked to folks at SpaceX, you know, see, like, hey, high level, is this crazy? Or, like, you know, and they're like, man, we could, we could sell another Falcon nine. That'd be awesome. And, like, you know, we could attach it to the orbit vehicle. And, like, you know, just got to come up with, you know, 100 million dollars or something, and then we'll be set. But 100 million is 1/10 of a billion. So, so Anyway, the thing is, is there's, there's things that we could do on ISS, but it everything does cost money. I do think, though, that you know, that that's the gamut. Is, does it? Is it? Would it be more effective? More cost effective to to use ISS, to reconfigure it so it could be used as a test platform for some of these more advanced cargos, higher power cargos, more you know. The other thing would be obvious is there's companies like space forge that are making chips. They're making very high band gap mediums for chips, which is awesome, but they need to de orbit their vehicle. So like, they have the same problem, you know, keeping having something, a free flyer that's going to have the power level that's easy to use for them is, is a big gap. So if you could attach to ISS and use ISS power, and then de orbit off of ISS, and then there's companies like Florida, same, same thing, you know, there's, there's, there's a number of companies that are making these de orbiting vehicles that could be powered, you know, through an umbilical on ISS, and then as ISS is de orbiting, all these guys jump off and do it themselves. We could run thruster experiments. So anyway, this, this to me, you know, we've, we've come from low let's reconfigure ISS and send it to a higher orbit to, hey, let's just use it while it's uncrewed. Demonstrate, you know, get the TRL up and prove some of these technologies de risk them so that we could actually use, like, you know, a plasma you could turn a space station into a highly dynamic spacecraft with a big enough some of these thruster systems are working on, but until someone actually demonstrates that it's a big risk to spending the money to do it so. So anyway, I think, I think that would be the most effective way. But I mean, it sounds like there's so much more opportunity besides just decommissioning it and just sending it into the ocean. It sounds like there maybe are some conversations that are happening in order to salvage it, to salvage the ISS and keep it in orbit for all of these you know, additional benefits, like you just mentioned, is there a slight chance that maybe that conversation is kind of shifting? I think it's, I don't know. I've been involved in a lot of these conversations at levels that I'm surprised I was able to be involved in. But it's, I think that that the ship has failed, figuratively, for issb, it will get de orbit it at some point. I'm pretty sure that, I think that there is opportunity to to eke, to squeeze more out of ISS that is very valuable, that would Springboard other innovations. But I think that, you know, there's using it for human life support is definitely problematic. A lot of a lot of a lot of the things are start, you know, starting to leak. So, so the safety for human rated things. So to use it, and then, you know, to push it into a higher orbit, there's a lot of question whether the dynamics of it, or, you know, it could break apart and cause a bunch of debris, which would be a problem. And just like, you know, the way that was built at the time it was built, it's not, it's not new space. It's, it's very much old space. And most of the folks that built it are retired and doing awesome stuff, doing other stuff. So, you know, to find the group of people that would be able to say assuredly that this will be safe. And, you know, there's the whole geopolitical problem that's that's really kind of the big elephant in the room. So I, I think that the best thing to do is, like, you know, can we get it? Would? It would cost, you know, 10 different Falcon nine flights and all this up mass to big free flying satellite. Is they could do the same thing that ISS could do in the next five to 10 years, if we, you know, can extend its life a little bit longer, you know, we can get a 10x benefit from it, from from these test payloads. And I think I stand like rendezvous, proximity operations, all the stuff that Northrop Grumman and astroscale and starfish and all these, all these guys are doing, like using ISS, especially once it's uncrewed, as your platform for doing, you know, replacing things doing, proving out ICM makes a phenomenal platform for that. So I think that's the best opportunity for it. Well, keeping in line with that same, I guess, sort of the circular economy. And we briefly talked about this before, but I wanted to dig a little deeper into into that aspect, because you mentioned a couple of different interesting things, of, you know, going to the moon and, you know, having, you know, mining oxygen and having the byproduct be metal. What other, I guess, methods of a circular economy, or, you know, circular supply chain of what we talk about here on Earth can be applied into space? Well, yeah, so, so, so again, like getting back to just, just thinking about the lunar environment, there oxygen to refuel starships, makes sense. I mean, that there's our there's companies, ethos, Star path, a few others that are, that's their whole business plan. We're going to going to land on the moon, we're going to extract oxygen and we're going to launch it back to resupply starships. That's, that's what we're going to do. So So I think that's the most obvious that I mean that one's starship is happening. New blend is happening. They both need to resupply with oxygen. So I think that's the first step in the circular economy. And then again, like, I, like, I outlaid, like the equipment that harvests the converts the lunar dust, regolith into oxygen and metal slag, they're going to have wear parts. So that's kind of the first sustaining those and logistics of keeping those going. And so logistic keeping the things that produce the oxygen going, and then the logistics of getting the oxygen to the rockets, and then hydrogen will probably still come from Earth for a while. So that's, that's step one, phase one. And then, and then, yeah, I think you know beyond, beyond that it's going to be trying to get data centers probably would be a next, pretty obvious resource to use on orbit. Data centers are very quickly, you know, they don't, they don't use a ton of energy right now, but as we know, with AI and everything else compute, compute is going to outpace everything else as energy goes so there are advantages to doing compute on on orbit, especially, you know, you have a lot more solar density. So getting energy is good. Cooling is a little bit of a problem, but I'm sure we'll figure that out. So I could see, you know, building these data centers, and you start to see some of that in logistics and servicing those data centers, getting those things on orbit. And of course, you know, all the com satellites are going to keep expanding. So that's kind of near term stuff. I think that if we get people on orbit, then that's gonna be total game changer, because now you have to bring cargo and food and all the things for life support. And depending on how adventurous people want to be, that could get really interesting. We could, you know, that becomes a lot more like surface logistics. But same thing you're going to have starship, it's probably going to start out wherever starship and new blend refuel. These will become the nodes that you know, your your your ports, if you will, where you're going to get all your new stuff and resupply from that. Now it sounds super interesting, because from everything that we've discussed, from what my my understanding is, is that cis lunar does is kind of dabbling in each one of these different sort of supply chain segments. Is that accurate or where? I guess, because it's taken us what, like 4046, minutes of recording to get to what you actually do, what your company does. Can you can you break down? I guess you know what, what? What? I don't want to say tentacles, but you know, the all of the different lines. Well, again, it's a lot like that game I talked about regular Command and Conquer, where it's like a very, very much of a multi layer strategy game, where, you know, you have to think about, well, what? Okay, we solve this problem. It's gonna open up this other gap, like, you know, if so that's, I think that's, that's, that's the way to look at it. So we, we are very much focused commercially on power management, distribution, and specifically a higher power level. So 1000 watts and above is where we start to become very effective. There's, there's, there's somewhat of a proliferation. I mean, it's, it's hardly a terrestrial version of that. But for Leo, low Earth orbit satellites, CubeSats, the CubeSat market is, is pretty well, you know, there's, there's, you can go online and you can get parts for CubeSats pretty easily. What's a cube. That a CubeSat is 111, unit is a is the smallest CubeSat, typically, and a one unit is basically the volume of one liter of water, which is 1010 centimeters cubed. So 10 centimeters by 10 centimeter by 10 centimeters is one you happens to be the same thing as one liter of water. Way that works out, and typically to like, the density of a CubeSat is similar to the density of water. So 1u is maybe around one kilogram. 6u might be six kilograms. It all scales from there. So, but anyway, there's Aerospace Corporation and a few others. Taryn, like these guys, kind of really commercialized and made CubeSats pretty accessible. Now, CubeSats are not designed to last very long. They go up. They usually don't have their own propulsion systems. Some of the bigger ones might, but they're kind of like a disposable, lowest cost of entry type of satellite. Then once you go beyond that, you get into your microsats and your small SATs happens to be a small set conference coming up here in two weeks or a few weeks in Utah. But anyway, so these are anything that's like, not like a, you know, exquisite type of satellite is typically at this stage, is called a small sat and those get into like, you know, maybe tenu up to, like a ESPA, which is, which is, which is just, I forget what ESPA stands for, but it's, it's like a ring. And it used to be, you know, you inside the fairing. This ring is what would attach your satellite, to the to the to the structural part of the rocket, and then, and then the Esper ring usually has a bunch of smaller ports, so, so there'd be like, one big, you know, defense type satellite on the or weather satellite in the top. And then I think you might have a bunch of smaller sets, small sets located around it. And then someone was like, Man, this Esper ring, we could just use that as a basis for a satellite. So anyway, they're like a meter across, usually, you know, maybe 100 to 500 kilograms is kind of in that range. And so that's where a lot of these satellites for, like SDA, the Space Development Agency, the ones that are, you know, looking for, they're doing a lot of, you know, communications, also space situation awareness, those are kind of in that class. And right now, most of them are around, like 200 watts to maybe 600 watts for their their propulsion overall, they might, you know, somewhere less than, less than 1000 watts. The next versions that are coming out, though, are going to be a lot more power than that. So that's what we anticipated, and now we're starting to see that happening. So we've really been focusing on the larger hall thruster power systems, and then beyond that, just realizing that, you know, a power processing unit for a hall thruster has to manage a bunch of other power sources. It's a power management distribution system and satellites. All you know, we're like, Well, hey, the used to be like, communications and some of these other payloads would be the biggest power consumer. But now that space, force and commercial space, they want dynamic maneuver capability. So they want to, you know, used to be just get something to orbit. You might use your thruster to get you to that orbit, but and then you you turn it on occasionally, just to keep you in the same spot. Now they want to get to orbit. And then they want to move around and move one place to another, and then move back. And so that's dynamic space operation. So you need so now a sudden, like your your communications hardware, whatever that payload is your instruments, that's not your biggest power consumer. Now it's your thrusters. So that's, that's an interesting spot. So now it's like, well, if you're going to be if your biggest source is your thruster then, then why isn't Sicily or doing our power management? Because, you know, the biggest demand is this thing so, and we're already managing power at lower power levels for the rest of the satellite. So, so that's the kind of thing that we started to get into commercially. We've also, there's, there's a lot of development on directed energy and power beaming, I stumbled into this concept called dual use directed energy. So the idea there is that you can use energy for, like communications. You can use it to power your satellite. So that's that's pretty interesting, because now you might have a satellite that's, you know, 10 kilowatts, but if you can get directed energy over your solar panels, you might be able to get up to 100 kilowatts or something. So get a lot more energy with the same size solar panel, and again, with more energy, now you can move a lot faster, do all that sort of thing. So it turns out that receiving that energy is a similar problem to what we run into with some plasma thrusters, where you got to take, take energy that comes in one packet and then distribute that at a lesser energy level. Or, you know, receive a store up a bunch of energy and then send it out pulse. So just, you know, I jokingly to put it layman's term, like we've. Basically build doors and do crowd control for electrons. You know, sometimes you're, you know, you're trying to empty a stadium really fast. You need a certain type of door for that. That's kind of what a power management system does, or power processing system does, but in simple terms, so power management, that's commercially, that's, that's where a lot of our money comes from. But we also do a lot with ICM still. So we have the extruder that's going to NASA, and we're going to be involved in a new group that's a lot of the funding for that type of science from NASA is being I don't think it's being cut. I think it's being moved around. We're not sure where it's going to be moved to, but in the meantime, there's some private groups that were worth and also things like cosmic, and there's, there's a handful of these other groups. They're they're doing, they're still keeping the keeping the burners on, on, on ICM. So we're still involved in that a lot. And as funding as we figure out where that's going to be, we very much want to keep pursuing that sort of thing. And then I guess the last thing that we've been involved in a lot is the logistics and interfacing. So we've worked with several of these companies that are they're looking at refueling and rendezvous, proximity operations. A lot of our skill set, you know, our skill set is, is high power electronics and mechatronics. We find that folks that automation type engineers really work well for us, but we developed, and one of our first Space Force contracts, a way to kind of have cartridges. So it's the idea of having a Line Replaceable unit, as opposed to refueling. You just swap your whole thruster and propellant tank altogether. And we realized doing this with, we were looking at metal propellant at the time, but we realized that, hey, you know, the thing that holds the metal propellant rods is pretty negligible mass fraction compared to the propellant itself. And, you know, and a lot of times it erodes, or there's, there's other things that kind of cause it to not be reliable over time. So we kind of want to replace it anyway. So, so, so we kind of, the other analogy for this is the Propane Exchange. So if you've ever been to a, you know, the grocery store, or if you have propane grill, you swap out the whole tank. You know, you don't have a propane tank. You know, as you live out in the middle of nowhere, you don't have a propane truck. Come to your house, you bring it to the grocery store, you swap it out in a little cave, and you get a new tank. That's, you know, it's not necessarily new. It's oftentimes it refurbished, but it might have a new valve. So, you know, it's not going to leak on you. It's, that's pretty convenient if you're dealing with propane gas. It's a similar thing that we noticed in space. So that's we've been also focused on, you know, how do we develop that's the reason I read the box, you know. How do we develop a C container, if you will. And all and all the interfaces on the sea container, the mechanical interfaces that allow it to latch to the ship or whatever. You know, how do you build a sea container so that it can fit the most different types of systems we've been looking at, propulsion and energy? So it's like, hey, it turns out that a six kilowatt thruster can fit in this box, and so so can a six kilowatt solar array. That's that's that's pretty convenient. That's a good universal size to maybe start with and start building these So, and of course, the idea is to build those into modular satellites that I was talking about earlier, the modular, open source type of assembly you can, you know, propulsion systems, power systems, whatever it is, com systems. And so we've been very, you know, very involved in various capacities, on on what those interfaces might look like. How do you, how do you make them latch, right? You know, what's the thermal? And this thermal is a big thing in space. How do you, how do you move heat? And, of course, how do you move power through those interfaces? Yeah, I mean, everything that you've been talking about in this conversation has felt like building the fundamentals, or everything that we've learned, you know, going back to the box book, you know, all the fundamentals and systematizing certain aspects here on earth absolutely apply in space. And then one extra bonus to that, I think that you really harp on a lot, and I love this aspect of, you know, what we learned in grade school, you know, reduce, reuse, recycle, and being able to reduce some of those costs and recycle some of these goods and reuse some of these goods. I mean, these are all things that we should be thinking about if we could, kind of, you know, be able to start our infrastructure and our logistics plan over in a new realm. What does that look like? And so you've done a really great job of breaking that down for us and how people right now are working on these complex problems. And I thank you so much for your time today. Is there anything else that you feel is important to mention that we haven't already talked about, outside of the fact that I could probably continue this conversation for another few hours? Oh, I guess I always have to give a plug for for NASA and the folks that helped us get here. I do think that at least the small business, the SBIR program, innovative small business, innovative research program. I mean, we wouldn't be here without that, getting getting our legs under us with NASA through our phase one, phase two and phase two extension. Blythe, and then tech flights. The tech flights have really helped. So we've done two, sorry, we've done three parabolic flights. And then we have an orbital flight with momentous that that NASA help pay for. And then we should have an ISS flight actually coming up as well. So, so all of this, you know, we, we started out focusing on this metal thing and that that's still happening, and we spun off this commercial product that everyone needs now, which is awesome. So like that. I mean, it really did exactly what it was supposed to do, as far as we, as we were concerned. I also, you know, Space Force has been phenomenal. I don't know how we didn't have a Space Force all this time. I do think that Space Force is, is is critical, and seeing it grow we, you know, we had a number of SBIRs Through Space Force, and just the type of folks that we get to work with at Space Force are really awesome. Definitely, some of the leadership there's is thinking the same way I'm talking. I mean, a lot of this is from, from talking to these guys, and just, you know, I call it, I describe it like Hogwarts. My job is like Hogwarts. I get to go with, hang out with all the other magicians and come up with ways to save the world and promote, you know, our human an abundant human future. So that's, that's, that's the best thing I can say right now, I guess, well, amazing conversation, and I can't wait to do this again, because there's plenty of more quite I didn't even really look at my notes of what I had, and I probably have, you know, at least 40 questions in that document. So that's the testament, you know, of how good this conversation was. So, so Joe, where can I send folks? Where can I direct them to follow you on social media, you know, all that good stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you're a power electronics engineer or, you know, somebody that's a big builder of Tesla stuff and high energy, we are hiring right now. So please find me on LinkedIn, or reach out to, you know, our CIS, linear industries.com. Is our website. That's the best way to get a hold of us. We are very active on LinkedIn. We are at pretty much every conference. You'll see us just in a person. We try to be very accessible. We love to talk to everybody. We're not, you know we I know that I don't know everything. That's That's probably one of my the secrets that I don't mind sharing is that I always ask, I try to find the people that I want to be like and I surround myself with those people, the people that are really doing it. And that's that's how you get here, and that's how you keep moving things forward. So absolutely, if you see me, come talk to me, I'd love to hear it and reach out to us. Absolutely, I'll put all of that in the show notes. And I echoed that statement. I try to use this podcast to be able to talk to people that are way smarter than me, and you absolutely fit that bill. So thank you so much for joining us and sharing your perspective and helping us you know, understand more of what's going on in the logistics of space and building that New Silk Road. So thank you again, Joe. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Welcome into another episode of everything. It's logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. I'm your host, Blythe Milligan, and we were proudly presented by SPI logistics, and we've got a great episode for y'all today. We've got Kelly keedis Ogborn. She is the VP of space commerce and entrepreneurship at the Space Foundation, and we're going to be talking about how to do business in space and the overall just landscape of everything that's going on, because it's a lot going on. And so based on our previous you know, series that we've done on, you know, NASA and space logistics, the I'm sure the audience is just as excited for this conversation as I am. So Kelly, welcome to the show. Thank you, Blythe. I really appreciate the opportunity. It's one of my favorite things to talk to audiences that are extremely implicated in the space economy and it's growth, but probably don't know. So I appreciate you having me on absolutely now, I have a million questions to ask and so, but before we get into, like, some of you know, like, the more nitty gritty type of questions for this audience, give us a sense of your career background, how you got involved in the Space Foundation, all that good stuff. Yeah, so I it's a funny story, because I would have never pictured myself working in the space industry or doing what I do now, which is kind of part and parcel why I do what I do now. So just quick, kind of history trajectory highlights. I come from a social scientist sociological background, so academically, both undergrad and grad, I was actually kind of trained on the conflict of war, and, like the psychology of war, and really a lot of the movements of people, thought that I wanted to do that with my career in terms of international aid and, you know, sort of everything that comes about with it. But I moved to DC in 2008 did a quick stint on the hill, and then found myself over at DARPA, which is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is the science and tech branch of the Department of Defense. And while I was there, I was fascinated by innovation technology and really like these cutting edge research and development projects that really play into other markets. And I quickly realized. Is that a lot of my skill sets from my academic training is specifically like aid. Like, what I used to look at is, how do you design aid packages for third world crises, and really get the human side of the adoption really also fits on the tech side. So when we are looking at moving these radical innovations and ideas that are so far out of the imagination of people. How do you get them to grasp those concepts, adopt those concepts, and how do you actually build a strategy to understand how to make it scalable, not just from a business aspect, but from a human aspect? So that was sort of where my career dovetailed, and then I left DARPA ran a tech commercialization company for seven years that worked really heavily with scientists and engineers to help them find alternative commercial markets for what they developed, because so many of them might have developed like a laser for a tank. Well, there's no commercial market for a laser on a tank, but there are, you know, very special components, or maybe, you know, sub parts that are way ahead of industry standards. So thinking through those alternative methods, that sort of led me to the Space Foundation, because at the time, in 2018 the Space Foundation had won a grant through the Department of Commerce to help non traditional businesses find their place in space. And so I was brought in to really help design and run those workshops around the country, so looking at everything from artists to mechanics to people in the food service and how they they play in the future growth of space, and it sort of just snowballed from there. Wow. I mean, you really sound like the perfect person to be able to have, you know, these types of initiatives that the Space Foundation is is looking to achieve. So give us that that high level overview of what that, I guess, the current like space ecosystem looks like. I heard it was like a 500 million or $500 billion enterprise right now that's evolving into 800 billion. Is that accurate? Yes. So there are so many projections of what it's going to become, I think that the benchmark that a lot of people use, it's somewhere between one to 4 trillion by 2040 but in reality, as you mentioned right now, so the Space Foundation puts out a space economy number every year that looks at the past quantification of the year. We currently have it tagged at 570 billion. We're going to release our new number next month, which is very exciting. So stay on track for that. But conservatively, we think that it's at least going to reach 772 billion by 2027 which is only two years away. So I think the best way to encapsulate what we mean when we talk about the space economy, and really just the space ecosystem is for so long, space has been, I would say, monopolized by imagery of rockets and satellites and astronauts, because that is, that is classic space, and that is 100% true. You know, our space industry grew out of the Apollo era, where we were in a moon race with the Russians. And at that time, it was, you know, national posturing first, because we needed to be boots on the ground first, and then scientific exploration and technical progression were kind of secondary and tertiary. We're now in a completely different domain, because, as we've continued to engage within space, yes, we do have exploration missions, and we do have a lot of satellites flowing flying, but the ecosystem now has shifted to a place where there is more access, opportunity and engagement than ever before, driven by the proliferation of satellites. Just as a data point, for example, there are currently roughly 12,000 active satellites in orbit. There's already 20,000 that have licenses, and by 2035 we think there's going to be 50,000 plus satellites. So that, in and of itself, brings a lot of opportunity, but also reusable launch, and the cadence of launch now has completely decreased to the point where more people are able to go up, more people are able to take advantage of the opportunities and the what space can bring to bear, whether it's from manufacturing or data or, you know, space tourism eventually and so in the collective mind, space feels more tangible because it is and that, in and of itself, has shifted a lot of companies and countries to now realize that they should be thinking about space, or at least understand how they can play into the future of space. Now, of that, you know, nearly 800 billion. How much is the US, I guess, in control of that, or not, maybe not in control of it, but how much is that US players? So that's a phenomenal question. So just to break that down, so the 570 billion is really encapsulated by two main markers. It's about 78% commercial revenue and 22% global government spending. So this is a global number. What it looks at is roughly about 50 countries space spending budgets as. Much data as we're able to collect an interesting data point, and then I'll answer your question, is that around the world, there's roughly about 80 space agencies, which is quite remarkable. And what we're starting to see over the past couple of years as a trend is that if a country isn't able to really create and mobilize their own space agency, they're creating at least space offices, like out of their commerce department or out of their trade ministry, to at least understand that space is an important economic driver for their nation, and also national security and sort of everything else that comes with it. But it's also a way for them to sort of put their flag in the sand, to say that we are interested in space. We want to become part of this economy, and then looking at opportunities to bring in the industries that already exist within their locality to be part of it. The United States is still the main, the main driver. So out of the global government spending, the United States, the European Space Agency in China, sort of make up the top three. And then there's a the flow down of the other nations, but we are still the predominant and then how does that break? A breakdown from, I guess, from the US standpoint, is it because it feels like it's mostly commercial, that it's, you know, SpaceX, and you know these other company, Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, they partner with NASA and their launch facilities or their launch programs, but it feels like it's much more commercial. Now, is that accurate? So So yes, and so that's a really interesting question for a couple of reasons. When you talk about the commercial space industry and ecosystem, there's, there really is no such thing as a true commercial company, primarily because the number one customer in all commercial markets right now are still governments. So we are at this really interesting point within the commercialization flywheel of space, of space traditionally being a pull industry to a push industry, and so it's primarily been driven by government directives or government needs. The commercial market can innovate much faster. I mean, they can they can design, they can develop, they can innovate. But at the end of the day, the government is still the primary procurement of the product of the services. We need to flip that model. And so currently, right now, one of the best examples that is supposed to sort of show how this push pull between the government and the commercial will actually flow is with the retirement of the International Space Station, which I think most, most people know this is happening, but it's been flying since the 90s. It's old, it's outdated. It's time to retire. And in the mix of that. What NASA wanted to do is, instead of themselves designing and developing and sort of running a space station, they put out bids to allow commercial companies to compete to replace the International Space Station. But the model is really interesting because those commercial companies would then own it'd be a privately owned Space Station. NASA would become one of many customers. So the goal is for them to move all of their research and development and manufacturing currently being done on the ISS to these private models to then allow them to still continue the vital research and and all the things that they need to do, but then also give the opportunity to universities and commercial companies and other private players to have access to low Earth orbit for their needs. And so it's it's one of the first examples of how this flywheel could accelerate and how we can start to really bring in more users beyond a government. But right now, private is they are privately owned, but the government is still an anchor customer, is kind of the way to look at it. Yeah, because I was talking to a gentleman that worked at NASA, and he mentioned that, you know, every four years, their budgets change, and a lot of these missions are sometimes decades long and are in development before actually launching. And so he said he's like, we need to be insulated from that. And I think, you know, with a lot of, you know, sort of the drama around, you know, policy changes and things like that, and budgets being cut, it just makes more sense to have the commercial element involved. So you're not, especially from a NASA standpoint, even though they are an institution, but to be able to rely on commercial partners to fulfill those those experiments and that research that they've been wanting to build, is that a safe, you know, outside perspective, looking in completely accurate? Yeah, so, so the rise of the private commercial company in terms of developing something independently from just a government bid, right, is really what we're talking about when we say that that has been continuing to rise, and it surely will continue to have a place at the forefront where we're looking now with this landscape, and particularly, as you said, with, you know, shifting budgets, shifting priorities, private companies are really expected to take the lead, really driving innovation, you know, through their increased investments. But. But then there is this strategic collaboration between commercial and government entities from a utilization stance. And so I think we're going to start to see some really interesting consolidation, some really interesting, maybe innovation arcs right in the next coming years. Because I personally think that scarcity can breed innovation. And we are at a point right now in this 2025 landscape, where we are starting to engage with space at such an operational tempo that we are at a place where it is almost too big to fail. And so we need to start closing business models. We need to start consolidating supply chains. And we really need to start to put a lot of the infrastructure and technologies that have really interesting demos, but they need to be able to scale to create this next evolution and next generation backbone for what we want the economy to become. I guess, how moving into, I guess some of the, I guess, businesses that are kind of in space now i From what I understand, you know, imaging is the the number one business model for for space right now communications, of course. Are there any other aspects that are happening in space right now that are profitable that can encourage, you know, more missions and more operations taking place? Oh, absolutely. So I think the best way to start for that is really understanding what is making up that 78% of commercial revenue that I mentioned before. So the easiest way to think about it is kind of in two main categories. There. There are things that enable space. So these are the classic things we think of right? It's like satellites and rockets and ground stations, because we need the physical infrastructure to take advantage of satellites. Human spaceflight is part of that. So the suborbital flights that we're starting to see from Blue Origin and SpaceX and Virgin Galactic the insurance industry is also a main component of that interesting, which a lot of people don't realize, but when you break it down, it's actually quite practical, because space is very expensive and assets are extremely expensive. So those classical kind of aspects of space make up 1/3 of that commercial revenue. Two thirds of that commercial revenue right now is made up of things that are enabled by space, primarily satellites. So it's things like telecommunications, broadband, precision, navigation and timing, which is actually the largest, because it's responsible for things like, you know, GPS and financial transactions and an accurate train station times. I mean, all, all of the things that we take for granted are this ubiquitous backbone because of space tech. So really, a bulk of the economy right now is this space to Earth market. It's utilizing space assets. It's utilizing the technology for either terrestrial applications or other industries to be able to benefit from it. The environment we're moving into, which you alluded to, is this space to space market, which truly, if we are going to unlock the space economy, you kind of have to take Earth out of the equation and be able to do things in space we've never been able to do before. And that's really where we're pushing. So currently, right now, if you look at things like ground transport and launch infrastructure and in space maneuvering and recovery systems, these are all aspects that are really, really critical, not only as a backbone to the space economy now, but this sort of like logistics chain extends beyond the Earth's surface and will act also as an anchor for things in space. And then the eventuality that we're moving into are things like in orbit, refueling, for example. So extending the the life cycle of satellites, and if you don't have to actually pull them down, you can refuel them. This also expends a small spacecraft. We're looking at things like, you know, debris removal, which is really critical, because if we want to continue to utilize space, we have to sort of clean it up, you know, where it is now, power delivery, cargo handling, crew mobility. So all of the like, really practical things that you think about on earth will need to extend there. Because if we are going to have, you know, space stations that are going to be servicing really precious payloads for research aspects, or if we are truly going to build this CIS lunar economy, which we are really pushing for, which is infrastructure and services between the Moon and Earth, we need to have these other things that allow us to not just send things from Earth, use them one time or two times in space and bring them back, but be able to kind of this, like holistic ecosystem in and of itself that is such a fascinating I could pull on 15 different threads with everything that you just said, from The I guess, from the logistics angle of it, you mentioned how these reusable rockets are really helping expedite a lot of these different missions. So in this, I guess, in the earth base, it do you call it like terrest terrestrial, terrestrial applications? Yeah, terrestrial applications. So in that scenario. Rio. So the the semi truck is like the rocket, and so when the rocket gets up into space, are there currently, you know, warehouses and refueling stations, you mentioned debris removal. So we've talked previously about, you know, tracking that debris and, you know, trying to not in maintenance in space. Are all of those different, I guess, key points already in space are we working on establishing that infrastructure? We're working on it so they they are in space in the aspect that there are a lot of companies taking on those really hard challenges that have done really tremendous demonstrations. So what's really interesting about where we are currently is, I kind of mentioned it before about 2025 being a really interesting year, and I've been saying this over the past couple of months, but I really do think we're at this inflection point, because beyond us growing and well, it's not even the growth, as I mentioned, it's the operational cadence. So we are at a point now where things are now flying like we are. We are moving past the strategies and the tech dev timeline, and we are now getting things in space. We are testing them in space. We are accelerating them in space, but we're at a point where we need to close the business model, because this is the interesting point. So infrastructure is expensive. Every space or earth it's expensive, right? And a lot of these companies, they need to be able to attract the kind of capital to go from demo to scale to then enable them to be these anchor points within low Earth orbit to then enable other industries to take advantage of it. And so one of the things you know that a lot of people in the ecosystem are now focusing on is, what are those like alternative mechanisms of capital, beyond venture because right now, there's a lot of venture capital, you know, flowing into space, space assets. And last year, in 2024 there was $26 billion of dollars of venture capital that went in. But venture alone cannot get the job done, primarily because a lot of the venture model is looking at quicker returns, right? So looking at more like three to five year returns, or five to seven year returns. With this, with these kind of plays, are not going to enable that, but they need to actually succeed in order for the economy and other industries to take advantage of it. And so looking at things like sovereign wealth funds and, you know, institutional banks and like family offices, like these players that understand the eventuality in the future that we are building and the economic return, but do not need to get some sort of ROI in three to five years. So that's, that's one side of it. So the short answer is, yes, there are. They are now just looking to close the business case and to maneuver more broadly. One of the things that really needs to happen, though, on the other side, so beyond the capital, though, is that, as you can imagine, with any sort of infrastructure and logistics that exists on earth, there is a coordination effort. So, you know, you mentioned things like cargo trucks and gas stations and these, things like these, do not operate in silos, right? They are designed in a way that they enable the success in the other and that they're easy to to collaborate and to cooperate when we talk about space, the need for standards and interoperability and really sustainability of these various companies is really critical. And so another aspect that's really being looked at beyond the technology. But how do you look at things like common docking interfaces or refueling standards or safety protocols, right? Because the eventuality we're moving toward in low Earth orbit is it's not going to be an infrastructure that is owned and operated by one country and one company. It is completely coordinated and completely collaborative. And so all of those other mechanisms to make it successful are really critical, and that's where a lot of the industry is starting to point their attention to to make sure that that is also there while the technology develops at the same time. That's so interesting, because that was, I mean, that's pretty much how logistics got started. You know, different ports were established all over the world, and then it really wasn't until this this book, actually, Mark Levinson wrote this book called the box, where the container was invented, and it standardized shipping all across the world, and, like, lifted, you know, numerous countries out of poverty in order to streamline logistical operations. So it's kind of crazy that we haven't I guess maybe learned from that that innovation and applied it in space. But maybe there are people who are doing that right now is, as you mentioned, with docking technology, there there are. And the reason we haven't done it is we haven't needed to. I mean, so really, if you look at how the term like commercialization of space, so commercial space has been around since the 90s, especially with a lot of the telecommunications and broadband and all of that. Um, that really is, as I mentioned, a critical backbone to what the space economy is now. But 2020 was really like an inflection point. And so we have the inflection point of 2025 but 2020 was really this catalyst for commercial space, because it was the first year that SpaceX flew a crude mission on their Dragon capsule. And so people then started to realize that space was accessible, not just for billionaires or nation states, and that private citizens could engage and interact in ways that they probably had never really thought of before. And so in the collective imagination, people started to pay attention to space in a different way. I think that people are always fascinated by space. I mean, it's interesting. Like, in my day job, I don't meet people often that are like, Oh, space isn't cool. Like, everyone thinks space is cool. It's just that everybody has an opinion of what space is, and generally you just think it's out of touch and out of reach, and that it does not encompass every background, skill set, interest industry that is necessary for its growth, and that's why it's so fun to get that aha moment for people to realize like, oh, what I do actually is part of the space ecosystem. And it's like, yes, you just have to think about it in a different way. So after 2020 when it became more accessible, people started to pay attention more. And then a lot of these technologies that we're then now looking at, okay, now, what can we do? And many of them were being built prior to that, but at least, like the funding and the focus and the interest was sort of catalyzed in a way that it could allow more growth, and that's when things really started to accelerate. And the idea of commercial space in the space economy, kind of became this more common, common topic, where before there were people talking about it, but people sort of were like, Yeah, you're the person in the corner that space is never going to make money outside of exploration and satellites. So it's a different mind shift. I think you said you mentioned it on one of your episodes. It's like the the mythos of space and how people tend to maybe before 2020 they thought it was so far away, but maybe they don't realize that. You know, SpaceX is launching nearly every day, missions up up into space. And I don't even my parents. I was explaining to them over the weekend, because we grew up in Florida, but it was one of those situations where you might have three launches a year, and then it quickly evolved to three launches a week. And now it's maybe three a day, or what we're I think the cadence is moving up to, oh yeah. So globally right now, there's a launch about once every 34 hours. Wow, which, which is, which is mind blowing, right and, and in your right like, I think that this mythical way that we talk about space, and we and we still do it, I mean, even to the point, and for good reason, I'll say this so space is always captured the collective imagination. And you know, when we first went to the moon, it was done with this optimism and enthusiasm, because what we were doing had, like, never been done before. I mean, truly, right? And so it was technologically improbable. We true. We proved it to be possible, and then we built this industry around it. Where we are now is when we still talk about space as this, like, special, mythical ecosystem. It really obscures the fact that goods and services are being created and sold on a daily basis, and that it is this marketplace, and so space, in and of itself, isn't the gamble that it once was, although we are still dealing with very difficult challenges. I mentioned this on probably the podcast you listened to recently about closing the business case for space, but when you talk to a lot of space founders, they will sometimes tell you that space isn't special, like the technology engaging in those environments is the difficult part, right? But space, in and of itself, it's all the other things. It's the maneuverability, it's the policy, it's the coordination, it's a lot of that human stuff that sometimes makes it difficult. Not saying that the environment isn't, but it's not. It's not as tricky as it once was, right? And so people still think of it as the final frontier, and it absolutely is, but when you talk about it in that way, you forget that like there's a $570 billion economy that is actually producing economic return for countries and localities all over the world and people just forget about that and just think the exploration aspect. So for all of these launches that are taking place, what is the I guess the cargo on these launches Is it mostly satellites. So right now, yes. So last year, about 90% of all spacecraft launched into space was commercial, commercial, and the bulk of them were satellites. So a lot of the low Earth orbit constellations that you will see through, like you know, SpaceX is Starlink, and then Amazon has the Kuiper project, and then there's one web the. That's the bulk of it, because really what they're trying to do now, satellites give us a lot of added benefits. So beyond the telecommunication aspect, and what it's doing actually, for connectivity and latency to a lot of areas that maybe weren't connected to the internet before, it's produced really tremendous results in other areas that you may not have realized so I mentioned before, like the insurance industry, for example, is a huge component of the space economy. There is a subsection of the insurance industry called parametric insurance, which is really the insurance that extends to like disaster response and floods and fires. Well, satellites have allowed these insurance agencies to now insure things with such fidelity, because they now have clarity in terms of data and imagery, to actually be able to know blast zones right, or flood zones and how and what the actual economic cost is going to be. And so it's completely transformed that side of it. It's also transformed a lot of other industries that you don't think of like the agriculture industry is actually highly dependent on satellite data. They use it now for more precision farming to be able to know how crop yields are going to perform with precipitation and potential. You know, climate issues over years, there's now a lot of farms and agricultural equipment that are now kind of attached to satellite connectivity, so they have more autonomous farming equipment. John Deere was actually kind of the first agriculture space company because they started to integrate satellite data. So it is pervasive in so many other industries. And so when people think about these spacecrafts being launched, it's not just for you and I to be able to talk on this zoom call. There's actually a lot of really practical applications that people use every day. And like you said, it's mostly about communications for right now, but imaging is another big part of it. We used to we had a guest on recently called inversion space, and they're trying to build warehouses in space that could deliver you cargo within an hour of placing an order. So just like an Amazon but they're going to be delivering it within an hour. It's mostly in, you know, disaster relief, or, you know, maybe some hikers are stranded on a mountain. That's kind of the use cases right now. But I'm curious if there are, you know, outside of, maybe agriculture and, you know, inversion space, what they're doing. Are there any other, like, interesting use cases that you've seen? Oh, yeah, so not in the logistics space. But I think one of the areas that is really relevant and important when you talk about the utilization of space as a as an economic driver is really in, like the biotech and pharmaceutical areas. So a lot of, as I mentioned before, like research and manufacturing, is being done on the International Space Station currently, and it's going to continue, but they have done some really interesting things to accelerate drug delivery. So the conditions of space, not having gravity, with the presence of radiation and others, has really interesting properties for like protein crystal growth that is used in a lot of different mechanisms for precision manufacturing. For example, there was a company that was able to manufacture a retina up in space that has through nanotechnology and that has like the size and sophistication to actually fit on your eye, which you would never be able to do here. They're currently growing organs on chips as backup medical needs, because lack of gravity, again, allows you to do these really interesting things. They've accelerated an osteoporosis treatment is a perfect example. There was one that was accelerated in space and then brought down and actually fast tracked through the FDA. And so those applications not only have really critical use cases and important use cases here on Earth, but it's also a way for us to get things quicker, be able to accelerate technology and innovation, and it's also another way to sort of shore up a supply chain, because instead of sending things, you know, to other countries to potentially manufacture and develop, you can send things into space and bring it back down, potentially with a bit more fidelity and acceleration and innovative clarity that you might want. Why does the lack of gravity help with discovering some of these innovations. So I think it's because, especially well I can tell on the organ, on the organ aspect and the liver aspect, it's because it can grow more symmetrical because of those aspects. And so I don't necessarily know why. On the machining side, I can dig in and send you some sure on that. I just know that it does that. I just as you were talking about these experiments, I'm like, why aren't we doing them on earth? Like, wouldn't that be easier or but it sounds like, you know, maybe there are just some benefits to doing things in space where you don't have, maybe the gravity restrictions. Well, that's, that's exactly what it is. So there is, there are these. Things happening on Earth. And there is, you know, precision machining happening on Earth and additive manufacturing, but the conditions of space allow you just different yields. And so it is really opening up new avenues of what people can do and what they can create and how it can bring back applications on Earth. There was another cool thing when it when I did my NASA tour, is when they were talking about growing plants in space and trying to figure out which vegetables, you know, will we be able to feed the people who are able to get up in it, whether it's astronauts or space tourism, you mentioned with, you know, agricultural evolution, or maybe evolving that's happening in space. Is there other, maybe aspects of feeding people that are in space that maybe we don't know about, maybe a startup that's trying to tackle this, yeah, so there's, there's a lot of companies that are looking at that, and a lot of the research is actually being led by NASA to figure out what this kind of crop development would look like. The interesting thing about it is that when we are looking toward these eventualities of sustained human presence, right in a in a lunar environment or elsewhere. We don't really have the kind of data for that. Really, the kind of data that we have is the data of the astronauts who have been on the International Space Station in the controlled environment for a very particular and limited amount of time. And and so you know, as probably you know, and some of your listeners know, the astronauts have to have very precise diets because of, you know, nutrient replacement. And also they have to exercise for a certain amount of time a day because the lack of gravity can have degradation on the bones when you look at that in an extended, extended period, and also in an environment where we haven't really done that, a lot of the work is still speculative, but there are things that we know. So for example, you do know how your body in these environments performs with like drugs. Like, I was actually really surprised when I found out that, like, ask even aspirin. So if I take an aspirin here on Earth, and I take an aspirin in space. It actually reacts with your body differently. And so the the composition of things, the nutrient replacement, electrolytes. So there are companies that are looking at ways that you can kind of create strips to put on your tongue, you know, like, like high endurance performance athletes might use on rock climbing, similar things. So how do you do fluid replacement in your body when you're in these environments? And then also, what kind of nutrients can grow in these ecosystems? So what can actually grow on the moon? What kind of closed loop systems do you need to create? How does hydroponics play into it? How does Astro farming? I'm sure you've seen some of that vertical vertical farming as well. So there's a lot of people thinking through these scenarios, and there's been a lot of they call them analog missions. I don't know if you've heard of those, but there it's essentially a concept across the world where people simulate environments that people might engage, either in the Moon or Mars, and they might do one that's like on the side of a cave surrounded by water, right? Or they do them in deserts. But it's meant to gather research and kind of behavioral mechanisms of people, of how they engage. So there are a lot of people thinking through these ideas, and also what you would need to grow, what people would need to eat. The other aspect too, is that how then bodies adapt? So if you think about the and we're getting kind of way far ahead, but if you think about future, sustained presence of humans, people that are born in these environments, they're over generations, are going to need different types of nutrients. And so how do you then prepare for that? Not that you necessarily can speculatively upfront, but know that you will need to probably adapt and adjust in a very different way. Yeah. I mean, I just imagine if aspirin affects you differently in orbit, I wonder. You know as a woman, like being pregnant in space, like what happens there, and, yeah, all of these different things that I guess you know none of us know until they try it out. Yeah, your body does all sorts of different things. Like there's different weird fluid shifts upon upon launch and upon being in these environments. You know, bone degradation is a huge aspect, as I mentioned in the beginning. So one of the a lot of the biotech that's actually being developed around that is looking at ways that you can monitor like muscle atrophy and and bone degradation, or overall just kind of like physiological health, to be able to do more predictive and preventive medicine. And so there's a lot of really interesting applications around future suit design and the integration of artificial intelligence and and more sensor mechanisms to be able to look at overall health. The other side of that too, beyond just physical health, is also mental health, which is a huge aspect of future space that a lot of people don't think about yet, but a lot of those in the community are thinking about, because when you are asking people to be in environments that are very unfamiliar to them for long, sustained amounts of time, people. Are still people, and so being able to inject some sort of creature comforts or ways for them to feel more connected to earth or more connected to their family, or, you know, feel sunlight, right? Just just basic human needs. These people that are going to be doing this will obviously be very elite, because they will be trained and chosen to do this, but humans still, at some point, need to have some sort of connectivity to keep some sort of sanity. Yeah, I don't know if you've ever read the book about endurance. It's Shackleton's mission to Antarctica, and how I remember there was one part in the book where they had been stranded in Antarctica for, at that point, I think, at least a year, and some strong storms blew in a stick and like some seaweed. And the way that the crew documented reacting to taking the stick and holding it and burning it was almost it felt like home. And so I the parallels between space and then the, you know, I guess the environment of Antarctica, or lack thereof. I wonder how humans are going to be able to adapt to not having those normal human interactions, sitting in front of the sun, smelling a bonfire, things like that. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question, because one of the things when I talk about, sort of the evolution of the space economy, and what's really critical to grow and sustain it. So as we mentioned before, like we're really looking at this low earth orbit, CIS lunar economy now, and a lot of that is really predicated on reusable launch right, being able to reduce access and cost to for people to take advantage the infrastructure, taking the earth out of the equation. But when you look at these long, endurance, sustained missions, like when we talk about Mars, when we talk about this future end state, it takes seven months to get there. So you have people on a ship for presumably seven months that and there are obviously tasks and things they need to do, but you're still on a ship for seven months. And you know, people need to have some sort of outlet. There always needs to be a community. There always needs to be a human aspect. And so when you start to then come into more of that creature comfort, mental health aspect, even the environments that you know they will be living in, they're obviously like multiple schools of camp. When you look at Mars habitats, is it underground? Is it in domes, like you saw on the Martian? I mean, there's there's pluses and benefits to both, but being able to keep people sane and healthy, I think, is one of the most critical aspects, because we need these humans to also help make sure there is mission success. And so that's a really big aspect. The good thing is that we are now hitting a point where technologically, we have made advancements in things like artificial intelligence, not just AI, but AR and VR technology, right? And being able to simulate environments for humans that we probably will take with us in those engagements, but it is a really critical component that you sort of take for granted everything that's around us here that centers us. Yeah, I mean, if you spend a few days with your family over the holidays, sometimes you can't wait to get out of there. It's like I would imagine that the the chemistry within these crews is just going is going to be just as important as, you know, maybe the the intelligence and the mission itself. Because otherwise, if they don't get along, then there's not so many good things that could happen from that, but on on the flip side, I want to take it back to, you know, sort of the entrepreneurial role of folks who are investing in space. I think you with space foundation, foundation. You have space path, you have space edge, and then you also have the Space Symposium. Can you kind of tell us what each of those programs are, and then sort of the overall goals with each of those absolutely so Space Foundation as an organization is a 41 year old nonprofit that's headquartered in Colorado Springs, but we also have a Washington DC office that's where myself and my team and some other departments are. And really what we do as an organization is we say that we advance the global space ecosystem, and so when you actually break that down, we, in terms of our programs and services, really touch everything from elementary to emeritus. So a quick sort of highlight of where we started and where we're going. Most people know us for our annual Space Symposium, which you mentioned, which we just had our 40th in Colorado Springs this past April. And that really does bring together the global space community. So everyone from national security space, civil space, commercial space, both domestic and international. And we, this past year, had just over 11,500 people. So I always say it's a party with like 11,000 plus of your favorite space friends. We had a bunch of international entities join us. We do every year, heads of agencies. And so it's really a place where all of the different space conversations happen and how they mix. Because what's interesting about the future of space is that national security and Dev. Devers civil space, which is like NASA and other agencies, and commercial they all intertwine and mix in some capacity, because, like dual use technologies, and, you know, some companies have multiple customers, so that's been our anchor flagship for a very long time. On the other side of the house, we do a lot of K through 12 education and workforce development, because we do believe that space begins in the classroom. If we are pushing toward this eventuality where we are going to have, you know, sustained presence of people, and we're going to have all these new jobs and infrastructure, we need people to not self select out early because they don't think it's part of their career growth. And so we do a lot of, you know, space in the community outreach. We do things like teacher liaisons, where we train teachers around the world on specific space curriculum. And then one of our current initiatives is called Swift, and it's focused on workforce development. And so it's making sure that we close the critical skills gap that a lot of companies are finding to be able to retain and attract and train, kind of the next generation skilled workers. A lot of my work, what it does and the programs, focuses on bringing the next generation of companies and capabilities to space. So we focus a lot on the emerging countries, the emerging companies. We work a lot with economic development commissions in different states to get them to understand how their industries are relevant to space and we create programs around it, so like one of them that you mentioned, space path, it's a one day virtual boot camp that's happening August 16, and what it is is for companies are people that want to fully understand, like, really, what the space economy is, but start to create a strategy around it. And so whether it's a company that is interested in space, or could potentially already be in space, but wants to understand how to better scale, how to better integrate that, this is really the program for them. It's kind of like a like an accelerator, boot camp on steroids. Right within that, that component, what we also do our space business incubators and accelerators, that's what you mentioned, the space edge and some others, where we put together either 468, or 12 week programs really designed to help companies understand where they fit and create a strategy for the future of space. What's nice about those is all all sort of accelerators and programs have an entrepreneurial flair, but we really teach people about the business of space. And so really understanding how our markets going to evolve. How are industries relevant? How is your company relevant? How is it going to scale? And so at the end of that, they really get an understanding of what to do, how to do it, and when they can start making money and insert into the future. So I guess what? What does maybe like a high level process look like if I'm an entrepreneur and I want to start a space company, Is it as simple as like, I have an idea and I just need to go find, you know, make the business case to an investor. So it used to be, and it can be, so I'll part of the, part of the challenge and opportunity right now. I'll say that. So, as I mentioned early on, there's, there's never been more interest, activity, engagement, opportunity ever. However, there is a bit of heartburn in the ecosystem right now because of the SPAC boom and bust that happened in 2021 all the free money. Yeah, so just a quick primer for the listeners, if you don't know what I'm talking about. As I mentioned, 2020 was this kind of critical year, because people realize that space was accessible. Virgin Galactic went public via a SPAC, a special purpose acquisition company that essentially allows people to raise capital without having a tech right? So a lot of like PowerPoint companies were able to go public and raise capital like none of them panned out. So, so what what happened was Rocket Lab was really kind of the only company that saw its panned out in valuations, and so without the companies actually getting any sort of return or growth beyond that, what it really did, in many ways, is kind of call into question the integrity of the space ecosystem altogether and the viability of the capabilities. So we started to see private capital start to shrink and start to go more toward classic things, toward like hardware and software and more infrastructure plays like ground stations that you need for satellites, and not take some of those more riskier bets. It is now recovering, which is good. So we are now seeing more capital return to the market, primarily, as I mentioned before, because things are flying. Space is a lot more visible now in terms of these capabilities, but what it means for companies is that they need to be a lot more savvy, as opposed to, I just have an idea, they need to actually show how they're going to make money, or how they will eventually fit into the ecosystem and give some sort of economic return. So not all companies. These need to be able to show this three to five year return, but at least have a plan on how you're going to build into this infrastructure or eventuality or part of the supply chain. So it just, it just takes a bit more pragmatism in terms of the business growth and not just the excitement of what the community and ecosystem brings to bear. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Like, if the free money is done, maybe it shouldn't have have been there in the first place. You can make that, I guess that argument as well in all industries, not not just space. But I am curious how this, how this industry becomes a little bit more business savvy, and how they're making those cases once they once, maybe an entrepreneur or startup has an idea, what does sort of those next steps look like? Because I've heard it's as easy, like, if you want to get on a SpaceX launch. I mean, it is, they're booking, like, a year and a half in advance, I believe. But is it really as simple as just, like, booking a flight on their website? Because that's what I I've heard. I think if the So, I don't know the full answer to that, but I do know that SpaceX has really made the process easy for people to be able to take advantage of their their flights, right, and put different payloads in space. Because you know that the types of things that are going to be going up is everything from potentially like a company's idea to a research payload from an academic institution, and so the ability to give access to a lot of different people needed to be streamlined in a particular way. I will say that sort of the next steps. So it's a it's a couple of things, I think that ultimately, given the the pace and the scale and just the amount of excitement around the industry. One you need to start engaging with people in the industry. The one thing I will say, though about space and why I really love this community, is everybody loves what they do, and everybody wants to talk about what they do, because we are building this future that is extremely exciting, and so it's not a hard industry to start making friends with. So if you go to a space conference, or you start engaging on webinars, online, or even LinkedIn, is like one of my favorite places, because you can get into, like, really interesting conversations, and people will always respond because they love the topic. So I think for companies, they need to start there. They need to start engaging with the players and getting diverse perspectives. Because part of the biggest, I think, misnomer with space is, if you build it, they will come that is not true. And the other piece too is that sometimes a lot of founders need to get out of the echo chamber of everybody saying, this is such a really cool idea, and you're going to be the next Elon Musk and engage with other aspects of the industry that are just as critical to its growth, that might give them alternative views to think about it. So I think the connectivity piece is critical. I think also start to understand where you want to fit. So there is now so much value chain, and there are so many different aspects that you can connect to, right? Do you want to be a component, a component supplier. Do you want to be a third party supplier of space data to an ecosystem or an industry here on Earth? Do you want to do payloads in space and accelerate some sort of research for some other industry on Earth? Do you want to be an architect for the CIS lunar infrastructure, right? Do you want to offer additive manufacturing? There is like so much that can be done that understanding more clearly where you want to fit will also then inform how you fit. Because do you then become a supplier to A prime that may have that contract? Do you offer independent services? Do you go after a government contract? So there's lots of different ways, but you need to actually understand, like, what specifically you want to do, and not just say like cis lunar, because that is 10,000 different things. So from a I guess, outside of getting the funding and then obviously the environment of space, what maybe is, is the most challenging aspect of creating a startup in this industry. So it's really the it's the human side. I would say that, you know, you made the analogy earlier, talking about cargo trucks, right? And like a lot of this so sometimes people think that certain aspects are already dominated and monopolized by a certain company. I mean, certainly people think that about SpaceX. But if you think about the future of space and all of the different missions, like you mentioned, that company that you talked to that wants to actually like transport cargo, we need all sorts of different rockets for all sorts of different missions. You need rockets that are going to put people up there. You need rockets that are going to put going to put small satellites. You need cargos that are going to be transportation type entities. And so there are a lot of different opportunities and offerings for different types of aspects. So that is, that is a good, a good problem to have. I think one. The challenges, though, for companies is the understanding that certain areas are convincing people that it might not be a completely dominated aspect, and that's just launch. I mean, launch is a very different conversation, but part of the other challenge for some of these companies is just starting and getting people to trust you. And so when you look into this environment, as I mentioned, where everything is going to be integrated and coordinated, you have to trust the company, and you have to trust the system. And so it is then come back to those human relationships, right? And so being able to get people to understand your vision, but also you as people, and start to build those sort of company relationships is really critical. And then the other piece that is going to hamper, I think, a lot of them, the ecosystem, if we don't solve it pretty quickly, is just around the regular the regulation aspect of it. So we are in an environment now, you know, we've been we're operating in space like we've never operated before, and there are not laws that extend to property rights in space. There are really no regulatory frameworks for how commercial companies are going to be engaging when they're potentially mining on the moon. And so we also need to make sure that we as a as a country, the United States, but also globally, kind of look at the existing regulatory frameworks and potentially update ones that are antiquated to actually allow the ecosystem and the innovation to evolve at the pace and scale that it needs to. Because for some of these young companies, you know, it may be really difficult for them to get a slot in orbit right. They may not be able to get on a ride share. They may not be able to get the right licenses to be able to conduct what they need to do. And so being able to allow the agility of the of the ecosystem to adapt to like the modern needs, is really one of those critical aspects, and that has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with kind of the policy and the system around it. Yeah, because there's no, from what I understand, there's no governing body in space. It's just kind of loose agreements between countries on earth that kind of agree to a certain set of rules. But they can, they really be enforced? Yeah, so that that, honestly, is the one of the primary conversations that is happening now, because of how engagement is accelerating. Because traditionally, it was nationalistic, right? It was, it was companies that would be doing things on behalf of NASA or or the European Space Agency or elsewhere, and that is still going to exist, but yeah, we are now going to create an eventuality where there may be a commercial company that is engaging outside of the government. We've already proved it with the moon. There have been commercial companies that have landed on the moon, two that are united states based so intuitive machines and Firefly aerospace. And so that is really accelerating the pace of these conversations and the necessity what we have right now are there's the Outer Space Treaty, which was developed in 1969 ratified in 1972 but to your point, that doesn't extend to property rights or sort of that other sort of ownership. And then the framework that we are working on now is the the Artemis accords. That is, I don't know if you're familiar with that, but essentially it, it's essentially an international doctrine that countries can sign on to that essentially establish norms of engagement, or at least people signal that these are the norms of engagement. I think as of a couple weeks ago, there were 55 signatories there. There may be more, but again, that's a non binding treaty, so it's an indication that you want to be allies and that you will work in this way, but there's no enforcement mechanism, and so a lot of those aspects around space, law and regulation and the policy around those are budding on the fringes, because that really is a critical component, because economically, we can justify the return, technologically, we can build it. We can try to attract the capital. But if you don't have those other levers to enable its success, it can really stall. Yeah, because I think it was some I don't know if it was like the Russian government or maybe a Russian company, but they exploded one of their satellites in space a couple of years ago, and all of that debris went into all of these different orbital fields, and that obviously impacts a bunch of countries, a bunch of companies, and so for situations like that, you kind of want some checks and balances, I would imagine, yeah, and that is, that is actually one of the examples in particular that a lot of people use about just kind of like secondary and tertiary effects of things, and then how that also plays beyond commercial but potentially national security threats or or other aspects. And so the domain is just very interesting at the moment in terms of how we are going to move forward collectively. I did want to pull on on the on the string for a little bit of the manufacturing side of things. Because I would imagine that if we can manufacture it and we can make goods in space, then that would reduce the amount of cargo, transports that we would need for maybe some critical supplies. One a reader submitted a question for this episode, and he was talking about asteroid mining, and what do they see as a bigger potential market lassoing asteroids and tugging them back to Earth or zero G manufacturing was the reader submitted question. I'm not sure if you could answer that, but would love to hear your insight. So yes, I can answer it. Maybe not as fully as they would like, but I could give, I could give an example. So asteroid mining is one of those topics that comes up a lot because it is one that excites people, primarily because there have been asteroids that have been identified that have, you know, more platinum that exists on earth, just on one asteroid. And so the economic gain and the potentiality of what that could bring to bear is really exciting for people. The challenge right now is that there is no business case or market for it. What I mean by that is that in order to actually conduct the mission, and you know, dock on the asteroid, mine the Platinum, bring it back down, the yield that you can actually get is is much less than the cost of the mission. And so it doesn't the Delta doesn't make business sense yet. That is where people are going, but it is one of those examples that a lot of investors will say, I'm not investing in that, because it's not a viable, practical aspect right now. What is viable, though, for asteroid mining, and where a lot of the industry is looking at, for that space to space market, which you're talking about, is looking at things like water and and rare minerals and other critical elements that can be used in situ for other aspects. And so if we are going to look at lunar infrastructure and lunar architecture, we need to not just be shipping water up from Earth, right? I mean, that's very expensive, it's very cumbersome, and that that can stall things. So looking at ways to extract water from potential asteroids, and looking at ways to get minerals or other aspects that then can be manufactured through more precision, manufacturing authority manufacturing for infrastructure and architecture aspects there is, is one that they're looking at, and their company's focused on, what about on that? I guess the we've talked about it a couple times of the space tourism aspect Blue Origin just just had their, you know, their flight that went viral all over social media for a variety of reasons. I am curious as to, are we How far away is a future where regular people can just book a flight and go into space, yeah, so that was the whole point of those flights, right? So there's a couple of points for suborbital, and I'm a big proponent of it, because I think, for a couple of reasons, you need to make people feel part of the space story. As we mentioned. You know, people, it's very mythical to folks, and it's very out of touch. But space does affect us, and people will be able to take advantage of it. So anytime you send humans up into space and return them safely, that is a technological feat that needs to be celebrated. And so I really applaud them in their efforts, and by doing more and more of these flights, that is eventually going to drive the cost down, because you are going to be able to prove technology with more fidelity, close more business cases, give more access. And so I could see an eventuality where in the next five to 10 years, it is, it is much cheaper for folks to access it. I know there are a lot of companies that are focused on that. There's also some companies. I don't know if you've seen the balloons, so there's some companies, and I'm blanking on the name, but they it's almost like a it's a space tourism aspect, but it takes you right to the edge on this, like, souped up hot air balloon. Oh, wow. People want to do so that is another aspect. What I will say about the suborbital flights, though, and why it it is also really critical is that there are experimentation and other aspects that are done on these flights. And so people, and I know they did this on the the Blue Origin flight, but there were sensors worn and other other types of aspects tested that you don't necessarily have that kind of testing. And in the five GS that you pull up to get there right, or in the microgravity, and so also what it does to accelerate just basic science and discovery and some of these other innovations that are going to be really critical for future human missions. It's a really critical component. And so I think that having people pay attention to them, getting excited about them, not just from the science aspect, but feeling part of space. And there will be there will be a time when, when everyone will be able to take advantage of it, or hope, or hopefully, most hopefully in my lifetime, is definitely a goal and a dream that I didn't think would actually be attainable. But if you're saying within the next five or 10 years, you know, maybe that is really attainable for a lot of folks, and it's a. To look forward to and be passionate about. Yeah, because, I mean, I don't think most folks realize that they've already flown Blue Origin has already flown another human mission since that flight. Oh, wow. They're set to launch another one, I think, this week. And so the cadence now of when they're flying these with the individuals on board is accelerating as well, which is really exciting. Wow. So I guess is that maybe, like Blue Origin's main focus right now is, like more of the subordinable Tourism style flights. That's a component. So they have a lot of different aspects. They flew earlier this January. They did a test flight of their new Glenn rocket, which is a, which is a heavy, a heavy a heavy rocket. So essentially, it could be a competitor to starship. They also have a contract for a lunar lander, and so they are very much involved in kind of the the moon ecosystem, and so it is a component of one. But they have a lot of really interesting projects and products that they're working on. How realistic is it for us to have a base on the moon and maybe the next 10 years? I think it's very realistic. So it does, though, take, as we mentioned earlier, the coordination of all of the things to enable the the the infrastructure. So when you look at the this individualized components, a lot of these technologies are kind of at a critical mass, right? And they are, they are ready to be scaled. They just need the capital or some sort of other integration infusion to be able to do that. It's the coordination of it. And so I think that if you look at the future growth, you know, we are as a nation, we're planning to go back to the moon. I don't know if 2026 is going to stick, but at least sometime within the next couple of years, to have people back on the moon. They're already, you know, like autonomous flyers, as I mentioned, that are going there. And so I could see very easily in the next 10 years, if we're able to coordinate everything in a concentrated way, that it could be an eventuality. Now, last few questions here, just more from like, I guess, like the logistics industry standpoint. I'm sure anybody I talked to that works in this industry, they are, they are fascinated by space as well, but they don't. They don't. They didn't know it was this approachable. I didn't think it was this approachable until this we had this conversation. I you know, it's kind of a thing in, you know, an aspirational thing. So for folks who may be listening that are working in logistics, what kind of jobs do you think are going to be like logistics related or transferable to the space economy? You're talking about individual jobs and not capabilities, right? Or technologies, maybe both, because maybe some capabilities for professionals here on Earth would apply, and maybe they're industry transferable. Because I think I've heard you talk about, you know, we're we need you know marketing, and we need you know, messaging and you know, that's what stuck with me. But I know that there's other roles, project management, things like that, that all need to be done for space as well. Oh, completely. So the when people start to pull back the onion and realize what this future looks like, I really do believe that every background, interest and skill set fits. It's just finding how it fits. I would say that some of the ones that come to mind, particularly on the logistics side, that are going to be really critical but also really transferable in the future, is understanding like the OP the interoperability, and also like operation side of lots of different machinery, right? So think about like how somebody manages a port in terms of things coming in and out and making sure that there aren't collisions, right? And being able to tag things the same thing is going to be necessary there when you have this sort of infrastructure on the lunar surface, but also when you look at a lot of the payloads that are going in and out of these space stations, right? So being able to understand how that all plays together. Another really critical thing, though, which I think that a lot of the logistics community is already sort of leading in, is this sort of machine human symbiosis, particularly when it comes to the integration of artificial intelligence. I am not a logistics expert by any means, but I can speculate that it is probably being used, you know, not just like I said, for like Port management, but also for tracking routes and other aspects. AI is going to play such a critical role in the future of the space economy in a lot of different ways that I think that the people that know how to utilize it, know how to integrate with it, know how to capitalize on its operational ability, is a really it's going to be a common occurrence and a critical thing to know, because I can give you an example. So when we talked about the manufacturing side of it, artificial intelligence is already being used to keep up with this the scale of satellite demand, and so a lot of manufacturing facilities are now utilizing artificial intelligence to help design, you know, manufacture and develop their satellites. A lot of artificial intelligence will be used on these future missions, not just for planning, but also for coordination of all the different autonomous vehicles to kind of integrate together. And so that sort of skill set is a really interesting one. I know it's definitely one that's being taught at schools because kids are growing up with this technology. But if there are professionals that already know how to harbor the genius or the the effectiveness rather of artificial intelligence into their daily jobs, I think is would be a huge benefit. Yeah, there was that. Going back to that gentleman that I spoke with at NASA, he talked about how he and his team went to an air cargo conference in order to learn how to more efficiently pack their cargo in the shuttle. So they're learning from other logistics pros here on, you know, regular conferences that a lot of this audience goes to, but they're learning from them in order to apply those learnings in space, which I think is just fascinating. Oh, yeah. And even on that thread that just made me think of something else. If you think about putting things in space, every ounce matters. So understanding how to potentially miniaturize, or, like you said, pack or capitalize on space available for the optimal output that you want on the back end is something that is going to be really critical. So it really is kind of just a, I would say, like kind of a creative leap to think about how these entities might come together, but if we do or not it, but when we do have lunar infrastructure, it's going to be really no different than infrastructure here and how it engages, right? So let's last I know I said last couple questions, a few questions ago. Last Last couple questions. For real, are there any sort of trends that are going on within space, any businesses that we should be paying attention to before they kind of hit the mainstream? That's a good question. I would say so, from like, an interesting capabilities point. Yeah, so one of the ones that has come come around a lot recently, which I find really interesting, is data centers in space. Oh, wow. And so it's, it's, it's an answer to a couple of things. So it's, it's the ability to also maintain critical communications, right, also keep up with the demand of the amount of satellites and the power that they demand in terms of latency and others to be able latency and other capabilities to bring back down to earth. But the other reason that they're putting them in space is that a lot of the data centers, or at least what I've read is a lot of the data data centers on Earth are there's they're sort of out growing the space that they have, and also they're really vulnerable to attacks. And so if you think about this super connected world that we are moving into, and particularly, everything is connected now, ground and space and everything in between. When you move it up into space, it's not as vulnerable to things like cyber attacks, and, you know, grid, grid shutdowns and other aspects. And so that is an area that is increasingly gaining more traction, security aspect, from a utilization demand, but then also from a kind of closed loop communication ability. And that's that's that's one that I think is really interesting to watch. The other piece too, that is, you know, really apropos to your readers, is really this portfolio that I call I Sam, or I don't call it that. It's called I Sam. It's the in space service, assembly and manufacturing. And that is that low Earth orbit integrated architecture of the refueling depots, the robotic repair arms, the man the, you know, the manufacturing in space, a lot of the recycling endeavors, that is one of the aspects that is extremely critical to grow and scale, as I've mentioned. But also a lot of those companies are really visible, like orbit fab is doing gas stations in space. Astro scale is looking at sustainability at the forefront, but they are. They recently did this mission where they got really close to a piece of space debris and were able to survey it with like, really impressive resolution. And the next goal is to capture it. And so that portfolio is really timely, really important, and one that's really going to change the game when the whole I Sam chain really comes to conclusion, yeah. I mean, it just feels like, you know, this is very reminiscent of, you know, for a lot of Americans that could be listening the western expansion and, you know, building the railroad. Tracks in order to get to and from a little bit faster and a little bit more efficient. It's kind of what we're doing right now. We're building those gas stations. We're building, you know, those maintenance shops, and you know, it's all taking place like right now in space, and I don't think that most people are aware of that. So Kelly, this has been an amazing conversation. Is there anything that you feel is important to mention that we haven't already talked about the only thing that comes to mind is just a response to just what you said is that is a perfect analogy to use, and I think that the best way to use it is if you think about that Western expanse, and especially the gold rush, the people that made a bulk of the money, it wasn't necessarily the ones like looking for the gold, it was the people selling the picks and shovels. And so when you think about this supply chain aspect, right? It's all of those other aspects that are really critical to its growth, and that's where a lot of the opportunity lies. Is just understanding where that insertion is, that's that's a perfect mic drop moment for this conversation. Kelly, thank you so much. Where Can folks follow you? Follow more of the work of Space Foundation, all that good stuff. Yeah, so our website is space foundation.org, and you can find all the good stuff that the organization is up to. I'm very active on LinkedIn. If anyone also wants to follow me on LinkedIn, it's just Kelly, key to sogborn. Happy to engage, especially for those companies that are trying to start the conversation, please reach out. Yeah, absolutely. We will put all of those links in the show notes, just to make it easy for folks. But this is another fantastic conversation, so Kelly will have to have you back on to talk about how these advancements are improving. Thank you so much. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of everything is logistics, where we talk all things supply chain. For the thinkers in freight, if you like this episode, there's plenty more where that came from. Be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you never miss a conversation. The show is also available in video format over on YouTube, just by searching everything is logistics. And if you're working in freight logistics or supply chain marketing, check out my company, digital dispatch. We help you build smarter websites and marketing systems that actually drive results, not just vanity metrics. Additionally, if you're trying to find the right freight tech tools or partners without getting buried in buzzwords, head on over to cargo rex.io where we're building the largest database of logistics services and solutions. All the links you need are in the show notes. I'll catch you in the next Episode in go jags. You you you.

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Blythe Brumleve

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