Blythe Brumleve:
0:09
Welcome into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. I am your host, Blythe Brumleve, and we are proudly presented by SPI logistics. And in this episode, this is episode four of our five part NASA series, and we are going to be talking about, obviously, we were at the GOES-U mission that you probably heard that mentioned ad nauseam over the last three episodes, if you've listened to any of those. But if you haven't, at the end of June or at the end of the month of June, I was invited along with a couple dozen other creators, photographers, meteorologists, to go to the goes you mission to take part in a two day tour of the NASA facilities in Cape Canaveral, Florida. And because of that mission, so the mission was NASA and SpaceX and then sending a NOAA satellite up in to space. And NOAA stands for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I finally took me four episodes to finally get that acronym right off the top of my head. But in this episode, we are going to be talking about the next frontier. And the next frontier is space and building that infrastructure really building it on here on Earth, so then that way we can build it up in space. And so for a lot of these missions, yes, they are, you know, sort of one time things like the goes, you satellite is a one every eight years type of mission. But there are several companies all around the world, and NASA in particular, that are working on more and more missions, from a private standpoint, from a commercial standpoint, from a government funded standpoint. So there are a lot of different moving parts that are going on in the world of NASA, and I think it's incredibly fascinating, you know, both to you know, partake in this tour, but then also the rabbit holes that it has led me down ever since then. So we're going to be talking about a couple different documentaries that are out right now that you could watch. We'll cover that in a little bit later on. The wild, wild space documentary that was just released on HBO was really, really great, and so definitely, we'll mention that later on. But first things first is I want to talk about Lockheed Martin, because Lockheed Martin has been a partner of NASA for quite some time, and we were able to go to one of their buildings and be able to talk to them about the Artemis mission. And the Artemis mission is, in addition to, you know, all of the things that we were there to, we were there at the tour to talk about, from the goes, you the weather satellite standpoint. But then also we were given a tour of different buildings around the NASA facility. And so one of those buildings was the Lockheed Martin Building, and one of their spokespeople, which I will play a video from him in a minute, he was really like a great character to talk with, and it was a fun conversation. So I will play that video for you here shortly. But I did want to have some sort of level setting of what, what's going on with Lockheed Martin, with NASA and so this will be a good setup in order to get into more of the manufacturing side of things, and all of these different private companies that are starting to pop up. So level setters, unlike other episodes in this series, you do not need to watch it on YouTube. I would still encourage you to watch it on YouTube, because there are some fun visuals. But unlike the first three episodes, where you really have to see it sort of the stunning visual nature of how the large of a scale that some of these rockets are, these buildings are. I mean, it's just, it's, it's incredible to to witness the sort of the human engineering that is going on with these things. So you don't need to watch it. But there are a couple moments, one in particular with the Lockheed Martin representative that he was. He passed around a heat panel, a heat shield panel that was from a working Orion spacecraft, that was from that spacecraft, and it was a faulty piece. So they had, they ended up having to replace all of it, but this was a an actual piece from one of the Orion spacecraft. So he got to pass that around and see it and touch it and feel the weight of it, which there was no weight to it. Kind of looks like a piece of foam with foil around the outside of it. Obviously, it's much more complex than that, but that's the kind of thing that you would see if you watch the YouTube version. But you don't need to. So if you're listening on podcasts, just keep just keep listening, and you'll still, hopefully we'll learn some new things. And then next level center that I want to talk about is the new Artemis missions. So you probably heard of the Apollo program where Artemis is the the next Apollo. It's kind of like Apollo 2.0 art. Is going to be the first effort, or the first missions, especially led by NASA, since the Apollo missions, that we are going to be sending humans back to the moon with the goal of building a base on the moon, so then, that way, it can kind of be like a relay point between Earth and then the moon, almost like a layover, if you think about it from a flight perspective, but we have some infrastructure to build on the moon first, and so we're going to be talking a little bit more about that later on. I had, admittedly, I didn't know too much about Artemis. I had heard that phrase before, and I knew it had something to do with NASA, but I didn't know that that was the goal of the mission is to build a base on the Moon. Have humans be there and building it out and staying there for long periods of time, with the goal to be that relay point, or be that layover point for folks who are going to be doing the same thing, but just on a different planet, which is crazy to even, you know, speak those words, okay. Next Level setter is, I was really surprised. I guess surprised is the right phrase to use. But my group that I was with, as you know, is a couple dozen of us that were invited on this two day tour. It's called NASA Social, which is a, you know, you kind of got to, like, apply to it. You got to stay up on their new email newsletters. If you're anything like me, you won't get accepted the first time or even the second time. It took me three tries to apply to this program in order to to get accepted in, like, a media PR kind of thing. I will say that there was definitely a lot of meteorologists on the trip just because, or on this tour simply because of the the nature of the mission. It was, you know, for NOAA, it was for weather related satellite, weather predicting data capabilities, that kind of thing. There were also a lot of photographers, like Astro photographers that were in my group as well. I don't think there were any other podcasters like me. Now that I think I don't think there were. I think I might have been the only podcaster on the trip, which is kind of cool to think about. But I was there to cover the logistics part of this. So this is obviously, you know, going to be really like manufacturing and supply chain heavy, versus like the growing food in space episode, which is a very important component of setting up infrastructure, is being able to feed your workers. So that's why that episode, I think it was episode two. And so yeah, we'll, I'll link to all of them in the show notes. So if you missed any of them, I highly, highly encourage you to go watch them. Go listen to them. There's Deep Space logistics, there's how to grow food in space. Then there's a really in depth coverage of the NOAA satellite and how, you know, obviously weather affects everyone, but how that the weather data collection works? And then basically it's just a bunch of really smart people that are trying to make predictions off of that data that everyone essentially has access to. So just a couple different level setters. One, oh, wait, one more level setter in the group, is that, or within the group that I was referencing is how many of them were space nerds. So it was really kind of cool to hear people spout off, you know, sort of space facts of which astronauts were on, what mission, what mission, and what year, and the goal of that mission, and the good things that came out of it, the bad things that came out of it, like they're, this is gonna sound dumb, but there are people who know those kinds of like astronaut space facts that like, for me, like football knowledge. I, you know, they could spout off these different stats, like I could spout off, you know, Jacksonville Jaguar stats. And that was a little like, I don't want to say jarring to me, but it was surprising to me that there were, there were fans like that out there. But it makes total sense now, especially considering just the impact and sort of the aura of these folks, their passion, like I thought I was passionate about space, nowhere near the level of passion, the level of enthusiasm and fandom that they have, not only for NASA, but for SpaceX, and for, you know, some of these other satellite and rocket companies. So we're going to talk a little bit more about those other rocket companies later on in the show. But for this speaker that I'm going to play a video from, it's about a 20 minute long, I guess, clip, quote, unquote clip, but he's standing in front of a quarter scale model, and it the Orion spacecraft, and he mentions that the spacecraft was a team effort, one part manufactured by Lockheed Martin and the other part by the European Space Agency. And so like uh. You know, kind of like a lot of, I guess, European electronics and American electronics. Most people who have traveled over to Europe know you need to bring that converter plug over when you travel, because we don't all have the same working plugs. Well, that's the same thing that's going on with the European Space Agency and the American company in Lockheed Martin. So I thought that that was interesting, that the Orion spacecraft that he's standing in front of, he mentions what part was built by the European Space Agency, what part was built by Lockheed Martin, and then Lockheed Martin had to go in and make almost like an adapter to make the two functions fit. And I thought that was such a good analogy, or Yeah, analogy to really display the way the private sector and the commercial sector are helping these other space agencies really take that next step where funding and budget have been such a big obstacle to overcome. Think there was one clip from our deep space logistics episode, where they said that NASA used to have 4% of the budget, and back in, like the 50s and the 60s, and that's when we first went to the moon. And since, I think the 80s, the budget has been cut dramatically. So it's like point two, 5% of overall GDP is what NASA's budget has. And they, a lot of the people at NASA believe that they would have already been back on the moon, that they would have been building already towards future Mars missions, or could already be on Mars if their budget, if NASA's budget was the same as it was back in the 60s, in the 70s. And so I thought that that was really eye opening, that they the these space agencies, almost need the private sector and the commercial sector in order to further space exploration experiments, things like that that benefit us all. You know, one of the better quotes that I've heard is that money that's spent on space stays right here on Earth. And so this is a massive investment being made by lots of companies. And so for, you know, just to kind of, I guess, kick this episode off, we're going to play that speech from the Lockheed Martin speaker, and then we'll come back with some takeaways, and then get into the second part of the episode, or of this episode, where we talk more about, you know, what other private companies and commercial companies are stepping in in order to help build that next frontier. So let's go ahead and play that clip. You all right, I hope y'all enjoyed that clip, and as promised, let's talk about a few of the takeaways from it. Now first, I want to show y'all the manufacturing process by Lockheed Martin for this satellite. The goes, you satellite, because they really, and I mentioned this in another episode, but they the whole sort of like space ecosystem, like NASA's team, Lockheed Martin's team, like all a SpaceX, of course, like all of these teams, do a really good job at documenting their entire process and then sharing it with the world via social media. So Lockheed Martin and the goes, you team, they have all of these manufacturing pictures making the satellite itself. And I don't know if I explained this properly before, but the manufacturing process is obviously an intensive one. But then you think about the process of shipping that satellite from where it was being built was in Colorado all the way to Cape Canaveral in Florida, that any kind of like jarring, any kind of like accident or turbulence, can all affect like the smallest instrument on this satellite, and it's so intricate that I want to bring up one of the documents, or, I guess, the documentation process of what happened during the manufacturing process of this satellite. They have a Flickr account, which I had not heard the name Flickr in a very long time. It's a photo sharing site for folks who are curious, or maybe you're a little young to remember the photo sharing site Flickr. But they know a satellite still uploads tons of photos and imagery to this, to the to their site, and so they documented the entire process. I mean, look at some of these images. I mean, if you're just listening, it is just, it's a giant room with a lot of different electronics and space equipment, and it looks like there's all these, like solar panels that actually go on the satellite itself. And lots of people in, you know. Sort of full protection, sort of, you know, to protect more of, like the equipment, you know, I don't know, nail clippings or hair or follicles, anything like that, from getting into some of these really, really small, really, really small instruments. I mean, you don't want any of that, you know, impacting at any point where, you know, a small like, you know, piece of hair that fell onto an instrument could probably have a lot of effect on the data that it's going to be, that it's going to be capturing, and that it's going to be reporting. But I just thought this was so cool that they showed the entire process of building the satellite and then testing it, and, you know, just the whole manufacturing process of it. And then eventually they they wrap her all up, and they put it into a capsule, and they test that too. And then they take the entire thing and they put it in to a special container that is made specifically for the satellite. And that's the container that they then ship over to to Cape Canaveral, in order to, you know, I guess, begin the next part of of the shipment process, or of the the logistics process. The next thing I want to share is, I know, if you were paying attention to the conversation by the Lockheed Martin spokesperson, then you would have heard him say, the NASA barge Pegasus. So the Pegasus barge is referred to quite frequently. Ever since I heard this phrase that the Pegasus barge, it made perfect sense because I had heard that phrase, and maybe this is kind of like the Artemis phrasing too, that I had heard that name for quite a long time, very similar to the Pegasus barge, but I didn't really know you know any of any other details outside of just hearing about it. So if you're looking on the screen right now, you can see barge Pegasus that's docked in the harbor at a facility in New Orleans. And so they New Orleans actually, very surprisingly, they do a lot of NASA shipments as well. So typically what will happen is like, say, for this example, NASA or not NASA, but Lockheed Martin will take that satellite ship, it to New Orleans via air, and then from New Orleans over to the Cape Canaveral. Then they will put it on a barge. And so the barge will go really, really slow. It will avoid, obviously, inclement weather. But it's basically, it's not like a typical barge where you just kind of throw whatever on top of it, like it is very intricate. If you're looking on the screen, you can kind of see it looks like a big, obviously, it looks like a barge, but then it has a big white shield, kind of built around it to contain whatever they put inside of it. So this Pegasus barge has been used for a lot of different shipments. It is it for the stat nerds out there. It's about 310, feet long, 50 feet wide. Cargo deck length is 240, feet the width for cargo is 36 feet. Usable cargo deck height is 41 feet on board power there's also tugboats engines. None tugboats or towing vessels are required to move the barge. It says NASA has for decades used barges to move its large spaceflight structures. Pegasus was specifically designed and built in 1999 to transport the giant external tanks of the space shuttles from the Louisiana shore to NASA's Kennedy Space Center on the eastern coast of Florida, a 900 mile journey that includes both inland and ocean, open ocean waterways. Pegasus replaced Poseidon and Orion barges that were used to carry Saturn rocket rocket stages and hardware for the Apollo program. Pegasus completed its final space shuttle related voyage in 2011 I don't know if there's really. I mean, if you're looking at the screen, you can kind of see a lot more of the photos that shorter sort of definitely show the scale of it. I'll link to this in the show notes, in case you want to check that out. But I just thought it was interesting that he that the speaker mentioned the that they're going to throw it on a barge. Or, you know that everybody within the office goes out and watches all of the barge shipments come in, very similar to the rocket launches as well, where I personally witnessed that, where, you know, during the launch itself, of the goes, you satellite, everyone that was working in all of the buildings around the facility that we were at were outside, where it all of them watching the launch. And so it's kind of cool to know that all of the people that are working there are also fans. I mean, why wouldn't they be fans of the work that they're doing? And so that was really cool to hear is that even when you know, there's no cameras around, or it's not like a big, flashy launch, that there's still people you know, there's still rockets coming in on a barge, and everybody runs outside to go watch it come in. I thought that that was a cool moment. From the speech. Then you can also, if you watch the video, then you saw that he passed around the sheet of the panel, aka the piece of thermal protection system that helps protect against heat and radiation, which was, I said before, that was surprisingly light. It felt like a regular piece of foam with just some aluminum foil around the outside, obviously, much more expensive than that, but one cool note is how they also believe that there's solid ice on the moon inside of Shackleton's crater, which is, if that's true, the major mission of Artemis is going to be finding that water at the bottom of Shackleton's crater, and then being able to use that for, I mean, you can imagine, you know, finding water on the moon, or finding ice that can be turned into water is something really, really major, and would help out from, you know, for future missions, because water is essential for, obviously, humans, and then also for making plants grow in space. If you listen to our how to grow food episode, you know that that could be a vital component in order to help expedite, you know, some of those efforts on on growing food in space. And I also love the fact that they call it Shackleton's crater, because I'm reading this book called endurance, and it is about Shackleton. He led his group of, I think it was 28 men off the coast of South America, and they wanted to be the first group that landed in Antarctica and then traversed on foot to the South Pole. It's they faced a lot of challenges they face. It's an incredible story of leadership, of humanity's desire to sort of explore and to push forward. And I won't spoil it for you, but very much. It's one of it's called as one of the great adventure stories of our time. But the book is called endurance. It's by Alfred Lansing, but it's basically, I'll read a you know, first couple paragraphs on the back of it, it says, In August, 1914 polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the endurance and set sail for Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last Uncharted continent on foot. In January, 1915 after battling its way through 1000 miles of pack ice and only a day's sail short of its destination, the endurance became locked in an island of ice. Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of 27 men, not 28 I think I was counting Shackleton in that number for 10 months, the ice moored. Endurance drifted Northwest before it finally was crushed between two ice flows with no options left, Shackleton and a skeleton crew attempted a near impossible journey, over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest seas, to the closest outpost of civilization. Their survival and the survival of men they left behind depended on their small lifeboat successfully finding the island off of South or the island of South Georgia, a tiny.of land and a vast and hostile ocean and endurance, the definitive account of Ernest Shackleton's fateful trip. Alfred Lansing brilliantly narrates the harrowing and miraculous voyage that has defined heroism for the modern age. It's incredible. I've only gotten about halfway through the book, and it's it. It's very, very good. So if you've never read this book, definitely go out and read it, and if you have read it, then you understand the significance of what that crater on the moon, calling it Shackleton's crater, and having ice at the bottom of that crater in order to so hope you know that could lead to a lot of cool things for the Artemis mission, but just really, really cool to learn that little note, I had no idea that it was called Shackleton's crater, and that was the whole goal, or is the whole goal of the Artemis mission, is to be able to build a base around there so that they can tap into that frozen water that they believe is on the moon at the bottom of that crater, And then use that as a relay point to Mars. Just, just super cool, okay, but now that we kind of know about how a company like Lockheed works with NASA and their role within building the base on the Moon, you probably might ask yourself, well, why hasn't this been done yet? And well, in our deep space logistics video, I kind of already touched on this before, but he mentioned about the budget, and Matt Whittle from that deep space logistics video, he talks about how NASA gets what they get now versus what they got in the past. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna read a quote that he said, and you know, you can go listen to that episode to hear it in sort of full context, but for the sake of this show, Matt says, ask Congress if we have a continuing budget, then we can get it done pretty quick, talking about getting back to the mood, getting to Mars. The biggest challenge to NASA, quoting Matt here, the biggest challenge to NASA is, every four years our priorities change. If we were back up to the Apollo. Low budget, which was 4% of GDP. By comparison, we are point 5% of the budget. If we get back up to that 4% we would have already been on the moon again. We would have a base, and I think we would be thinking about Mars. So it stayed about half a percent of the national budget for a long time. And during that very small percentage, we've got ISS, we have SLS, which is not the best rocket in the world, but if you, if you compare it, you know, against Elon starship, but with that point, 5% of GDP, 1/30 of what the Department of Defense gets. Matt says, we still managed to do that. We're still trying to do it. And I have to imagine is has to be very challenging that every four years, every time a new President is in office, that your budget, your programs that you have been working on for years and years, maybe decades, could be at risk because of just the change of political parties. And so Matt goes on to say that they really need to be insulated from that in order to further their their space goals and their their their space missions. As you can imagine, sure, working with the government is a lot of red tape. It's a lot of slowness to it, especially with the US government, where there's so many sort of there's a lot of leaders, and not enough, I guess doers. If that makes sense, there's a lot of people that are spouting off of what should be done, but there are very few people that are actually doing the job that needs to be done in order to further a lot of these efforts. So that's a lot of sort of red tape from the NASA perspective, but where there's, not surprisingly, not a lot of red tape is in space. That has been one of the bigger, I guess, sort of eye opening things is that there are no laws governing space. There's no red tape in space. Basically, if you can hitch a ride and get into space. Anybody can do it right now. So a few things that are happening around this movement and around the the private sector in the commercialization of space, and that is what they see, as in, when I when I say they I'm meaning a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of just space enthusiasts in general, starting up different space companies. They're getting VC funding in order to further their mission. So you could say that there's definitely a lot of space fans in the, I guess, the investment market, the private equity markets, and they're investing in a lot of different startups in it. So it's not just a, you know, a SpaceX game anymore. What has really shifted this mindset is the rapid reusability of rockets. So for a long time, NASA, it was, you know, use one rocket and it's done. It's you can never use it again. It's also very expensive. But if you can, with what Elon has proved, and the SpaceX program has proved, is that if you can reuse the rocket, then you can make it dramatically, much affordable. You can dramatically lower the price of the cost of shipping goods into space, sending humans into space, and, you know, furthering those, you know, build a base on the Moon, get humans to Mars. So there's a lot of that going on. So rapid reusability has been essentially a game changer in that regard. One of the, one of the quotes that I really liked from the tour is that you wouldn't throw away a wouldn't throw away a boat or truck after one use. So we should do that with rockets. Like, imagine driving a car, once, you know, on a road trip, and then throwing it away. Like that's essentially what you know, a lot of different space programs all around the world were doing from the 60s up until about, I think 2008 is when SpaceX first launched. But launched as a company. I believe I they might have gone into space during that time frame. I think I have it in my notes below. But there were two other pieces, or a few other pieces of content that I have watched since, since going on this tour. And one of one of them is a podcast that I listened to, the acquired podcast where Ben Gilbert, he's the host of the podcast interviews Austin link. Austin link is the co founder and CEO of starfish space. It's basically private companies that are helping to make it easier to commercialize space. A quote from the podcast says, If you want to get into space, you go on SpaceX because they have regular shuttle launches and it's affordable. The starfish space company, they have satellites that they're launching up into space. And he said, basically the size how satellites are the size of dishwashers. They're being flown into space on what's called a transporter mission. Nine where hundreds of these satellites can be on a single transporter mission, he bought the ticket online, used his satellite specs and then compared it to buying an airline ticket. And the waiting list for these launches is so long because there are so many companies that want to launch a satellite months and months, I believe, he said in that acquired podcast interview at the time of recording, I believe that released in May of 2024 so because on the podcast itself, he said that it's takes about 910, months of a waiting list in order to get on one of these transporter missions. And then he goes on to talk about how, if you kind of prove yourself, as far as, like your, you know, being able to reliably send your satellites up into space, and then you are a good customer, then basically you can secure your own rocket launch for, you know, and just take up the entire so it's almost like LTL shipments going up into space that eventually you can rise up to where you are the full truckload. So you are the full rocket load instead of an LTL shipment. That's currently what starfish is doing. Now if you're wondering, what the heck does starfish do? They are a satellite maintenance and servicing company, which is crazy, if you think about there's maintenance company. There's so many satellites in space that now they need maintenance companies that can help elongate, or, yeah, make the, I guess, the shelf life of a satellite much longer, because they can perform maintenance in space on that particular satellite, he said. Austin goes on to say his nine person team can come up with a plan for maintenance propulsion rocket and get it into space. They were able to use some already developed infrastructure, like space cameras, to deploy their satellite faster, which I thought was really interesting, that there's sort of like open source technology among the space enthusiast group that they can and how starfish sort of expedited their trip to spaces that they were manufacturing these satellites, but they use already publicly available machinery and stuff like that, so they were able To use the developed infrastructure like space cameras to deploy their satellite faster, the infrastructure and services are now becoming more common. He goes on to say how companies like starfish invest all this time and money into a product that is dependent on a smooth launch, and the high or low of these moments can impact years of work and additional investment. All of the NASA Social folks were really tense all day on Tuesday, of that mission, of the goes, you launch that I could visibly see, but you have to like, I will say, not necessarily the NASA folks that were nervous and that were stressed. It was the people in the group that I was with, so the meteorologist and the Astro photographers even myself, like I during the two day tour Monday night. Monday evening, it was the first day of the tour, and everybody was really stressed, because we had no idea if the launch was actually going to take place. I'm a Floridian. I know that these storms roll through every single day, but the unique location of Cape Canaveral and the unique weather that happens on some of these barrier islands off the coast of Florida, it creates a unique weather area where you're almost insulated from those afternoon storms. I say this as somebody who you know, used to live four minutes from the beach. Now I live 28 minutes from the beach, and the weather reports are vastly different. It could be pouring down raining for my house here in 30 minutes, a 30 minute drive. I can be in blue skies and sunshine and so just knowing, I guess, the tense nature of the group of our NASA social group, everybody was incredibly stressed. You know, there were, I remember having trouble sleeping that night because I wasn't sure if the launch was actually going to take place the next day. There were provisions or plans in place that, you know, the group could stay an extra day, and they would just push the mission back from or the push the launch back from Tuesday into Wednesday. But the overwhelming majority of the people in my group flew in for this. They had plane tickets heading out to Florida on Wednesday, and so all of those people would have had to change their plans had the launch been delayed. It wasn't, I think it was delayed by like 10 minutes, which is fantastic, but everyone was so tense leading up to it, and this was only two days. I can't imagine what it's like to work on a project like this, or work on like a starfish space, for example, to work on a satellite for years and or. Months and years at a time, and then your fate is, you know, you're waiting around, watching a countdown clock to see if it's actually going to take place. So the amount of stress that we felt over a two day period, I can't imagine what you know some of these other folks, especially in the private sector, or even, you know, not anyone who is around this kind of stuff, I imagine that the stress level has to be crazy, or maybe they're kind of just used to it, and maybe that's why, you know during a launch, it's almost like a relief that you know the launch actually takes place. And you know you can fly up into space and then get into orbit, and then the fun things can start, the fun things that you've been preparing for, but none of that stuff can happen unless you actually have liftoff. So thought that was a cool little note, because at 1.0 that, yeah, I forgot about this little I'm just going through my notes here. But one of the other notes that I had is that on Tuesday, the launch was only had a 30% chance of happening. And so that's also what led to a lot of our different sort of stress levels. There were people within our group that were watching different sort of source accounts, rumor, space accounts, and the middle of the night, they rolled out the rocket and attached it to the lift gate. I believe that's what it's called. So the rocket sort of sits upright, and then it gets attached to the lift gate. And when the rocket is going to when the boosters are set, so all the flames are coming out at the bottom, and it takes off, and the lift gate detaches from it to allow that net, that flight up in, up and over, to take place. The starfish founder, ending with a couple little quotes here, he said, the bottlenecks are finding a spot on future launches, ordering parts that have a 12 month lead time. It's a long sales process, and the government not being able to keep up with the speed that startups are used to. So it's an interesting dynamic that you have sort of the red tape and political parties leadership changes every four years. But then you also have the startup community that just wants to go, go, go, go, go, and they want to go fast. And what is the famous line like, move fast and break things. That's the ethos of the startup community. And so it's interesting to see those two dynamics, kind of butting heads a little bit, but the 12 month lead time, which is crazy, and then finding a spot on a feature launch, and you can find that spot when you get accepted into that little layer, then you can go in and you can purchase your plane ticket online, and, yeah, that's crazy. I would say, oh, last one that I thought was from Austin, that I thought was really, really eye catching, he says that being the launch provider like SpaceX is coming as a huge commercial opportunity. It's the shovels to the Gold Rush, because there's really no other and this is a perfect segue into the next part and into the next piece of content that I really want to talk about. And that's the wild, wild space documentary that appeared on HBO. It just debuted, I believe, less than a month ago at the time of recording. This is August 16, at the day that I am recording. This is probably going to publish the last week of August, right before the Labor Day holiday. That's the goal, anyways. But that documentary just released out on HBO, so if you have the max app, then you can look that up. And it really is insightful to see some of these other people try to become the shovels to the gold rush. One of my main takeaways from watching this episode is that, well, I guess I could really go into a lot of details about this, and I think I might make this a future episode, but for the sake of this episode link, I want to do this episode justice without going into all of the details, because it really could be its own episode. So for a few of my favorite takeaways from the wild wild space documentary is that one of the quotes it says, Whoever controls space may very well control the future of humanity, the fabric of our civilization runs on satellites. Think about it, weather, GPS, obviously, military, communications, all of these things are run by satellites. And from 2020 until 2023 there were 8000 satellites in lower Earth orbit, we have managed to put up 2500 satellites for decades before these years. So from Think about it, 2500 satellites for decades before 2020 but from 2020 until 2023 there were 8000 so it's all. Almost tripled just in the last handful of years. That one of the people in the documentary, they say this not this is not going to stop. There's a good argument to be made that in 10 years, we will be at 200,000 satellites, which means there's going to be a lot of satellites, I guess, going back to, you know, the starfish company is going to be a lot of satellites that are going to be needing some maintenance. The Wild Wild West also follows a few entrepreneurs from all different, I guess, walks of life, very, very interesting people, a few of these entrepreneurs. So there's a few other different companies not named SpaceX. So there is Rocket Lab, there's planet lab, and then there's Astra. Astra is definitely the most controversial of the three that are featured in this documentary, and because the founder feels like everything that they warn you, that Elon is the founder is he's okay, kind of, let me see what's a good comparison? So, well, I write this one down. Okay, yeah, I wrote this one down. Um, remember the movie I Robot, um, not VI, which is like the, you know, artificial intelligence, like super computer device that Will Smith, like, you know, defeats, in the end, with, I guess, injecting Vicky with a virus. But the boss of the company, the boss of usr, which is United States robotics, not real companies that exist right now, but in the i robot movie, the boss, so it's Bruce Greenwood, the character. He's the actor who plays the character, Lawrence Robertson. That is what the Astra founder. It reminds me of just kind of like this. I guess ego driven, capitalistic reasons like, that's the reason why you get the drift of like he's really in it for the fame, and he's, they call him like a carbon copy, of like a typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur, still a typical Silicon Valley, you know, founder. So if you think of it in that lens, then he this Astra founder, just makes much more sense. It's definitely like, is he a bad guy? Is he a good guy, I and I'm not exactly sure, so that was that was interesting. Astra, in case you don't know, their goal is to build smaller, reusable rockets. They have faced a lot of funding issues. They were close to being delisted from the stock market because they had so many issues around different launches, a lot of failed launches. They also have one of the more famous sort of faulty launches that happened, where the the rocket goes a little sideways at launch. Obviously, it doesn't take off. It's not successful. But surprisingly, after all of those issues that Astra has been going through, they raised enough money again to go private. So earlier in 2024 the company Astra went private. Then the other company is Rocket Lab, and their founder is Peter Beck, and he almost feels like the mad scientist of the group. Apparently, he was just like a space hobbyist living in New Zealand. He really, really wanted to go and work for NASA, but he said that when interviewing at NASA, it felt like everyone was talking about the things that NASA used to do, not the things that NASA was going to do. And so he really didn't want to work in that kind of environment. And so he founded his own company, Rocket Lab. Funny little caveat is that the Astra founder originally went and talked to Peter Beck at Rocket Lab, and with the under what Peter would, I'm assuming reading between the lines what Peter believed was sort of like an Intel mission that the founder of Astra really only pretended like he wanted to work at Rocket Lab to gain Intel, because very shortly after that, he quote, unquote, interviewed over at Rocket Lab. That's when Astra, the company, was founded, and that's where, you know, sort of these two competing companies who are trying to make reusable rockets, but they're trying to make them much smaller than the SpaceX rockets, and so then, that way they're using less fuel, they're using less equipment. They're trying to make it basically you have like the, I guess the era 2010 era, like h3 Hummer, versus, like the little God, what is that? Little like scooter kind of car. You know, which car I'm talking about, the very, like small, like two seater car that think it's in, like famous, like car chase and The Bourne Identity, or one of the bored movies, anyways, Mini Cooper, Mini Cooper. So, yeah, it's like, h3 versus a Mini Cooper. And that's how they're trying to. Astra and Rocket Lab are trying to make, you know, kind of put their name out there by building smaller, reusable rockets. Astra has had much more trouble. Rocket Lab, alternatively, has had a lot of success. They, I think they, to date, they have more than 50 successful launches, and they are now considered one of the top rivals to SpaceX, and they're starting to not just have their smaller rockets, but they're starting to build bigger rockets now to directly compete with SpaceX. So that I thought that that the Peter Beck seemed like somebody who was actually working on these things for the greater good. That was my impression, anyways, from this documentary. And so I he seemed like a, you know, like, almost like a Bill Nye that's doing it for science. And I, you know, I just kind of admire that. So that was really cool to watch. And then there's also this company called Planet Labs that was another major, major feature in the wild, wild space documentary. They are an imaging satellite company, so they were the first primary, I guess, use case for their imagery satellite was to monitor deforestation. So planet lab, I guess, to sort of back it up for a second, they have, I think, anywhere from 200 to 300 imaging satellites all over the world. The idea is that you can make Planet Earth searchable, and so they take a picture a day of the same spots all over the world. So then that way, you can become that search engine. And so the goal initially was to monitor deforestation, but as you can imagine, you know, imaging satellite that's taking pictures all over the world, lots of people would probably find that information very useful. And so for my understanding, especially from from watching the wild wild space documentary, is that they are now more in their biggest customers, the governments. I say governments because it's not actually confirmed which governments they work for. Hopefully they work for work for us, for our our own security, national security efforts. But there was an interesting there were other interesting use cases that that planet has become the first company to take daily images of the earth surface. It helps farmers, unique weather events, wars, mining operations, oil use, and all of the data is open to everyone, which I think is very interesting. One of the examples that they gave talking about Planet Labs capabilities is that when the US went to war with Iraq, there were obviously those big claims of weapons of mass destruction, and they use the US government sort of made the case for going to war with Iraq, that they had all of these different locations and facilities, and that they're moving, you know, these equipment from this location to the next, and that was their proof. Turns out, a lot of that proof was fraudulent. Years later come, to find out, there was a person in the documentary that said, if these imaging satellites existed back then, that that could easily be disproven from just a citizen scientist standpoint, or private companies that are, you know, charged with looking at some of these images every single day. So it was, you know, that would be a huge group of people that could now use those satellite images to prove or disprove claims like Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, which took very long time, a lot of money and a lot of lives that were destroyed because of that unnecessary war. There was also a case more present day when Russia invaded Ukraine. Planet lab could prove that Russia was bombing elementary schools and digging mass graves and things like that. Like you know that I think space is sort of seen as like such a positive thing, but there is a struggle as a startup to have the intention of starting up a satellite company to combat deforestation, and then all of a sudden, you know, you're being asked by the government to provide images for, you know, countries that we are not on the best terms with. And so you can imagine all of the things that you would find out from daily imaging that these satellites are taking care of or that are doing. Couple more notes here, the Astra founder and Rocket Lab founder absolutely hate each other. One is out of the business, and you know, one is out for business, and I would argue that the other is out for the science. It's an interesting look at the sort of the competitiveness that has started to creep up among these different space startups. Which leads me to this quote that there is no one country. There is no one or country leading what should or shouldn't happen in. Space. No legal governing body is in space. And then they go on to sort of end the documentary by saying that all of these issues on Earth are going to follow us into space. It's just the way it is, which is terrifying, I think, in a way, especially if some of the you know, some of the worst people have access to, you know, a lot of what they said, in the next 10 years, 200,000 satellites are going to be up in space. Nuts. Okay, so moving on to sort of the next couple segments, as I sort of round out the show that space launches are not just a handful of companies fighting for dominance and building the infrastructure in space. There are also real problems that require collaboration between these companies and governments, not just the US government, but governments all over the world, such as fuel remains a big problem to solve. Think that's kind of an obvious one, but that, you know, it's an obvious problem that lots of people are trying to solve. A couple of the things that I don't know that people are trying to solve just yet, but they probably should, is. One of them is the mental health aspect. It isn't talked about enough when it comes to the aspect of sending humans into space and keeping them there for a long period of time. There was an in an example in wild, wild space that they talked about what happened in Antarctica. Basically, one guy, they had a bunch of books in Antarctica, a couple citizen scientists, or actual scientists, that were down in Antarctica, was passing the time and reading a bunch of different books. And one of his colleagues would see the book that he was reading, and he would just spoil the ending for him. And he did it several times just being, I don't want to say, like, be, yeah, being a jerk. And so when he was doing this thing, the guy who was reading the books got so pissed off that he just had it was fed up one day and ended up stabbing the guy that was spoiling all of the books. So it just kind of signals about the mental strength, the mental capabilities that are going to be needed for people that are living together for long periods of time in confined environments. And I mean, we all have had, most of us have had an annoying roommate or people we just can't stand. Now, imagine doing that in a place like space where you can't just get away, you can't just like, you know, go take a walk around the block to, you know, de stress. So those are things that we really have to think about, and another aspect to this that they talk about during the documentary is how this lady, who was a truck driver in South America, she started a religion that convinced folks that they are descendants of another species on another planet. And this signals to sort of the power of faith and how things like faith are the cornerstone of humanity, and so you have to have a plan for that. When it comes to building space infrastructure, you have to have a plan for mental health. You have to have a plan for faith. Like, what does faith look like when you can travel to other planets? I don't know. I would, I would, would love to hear somebody that has, you know, a tremendous amount of faith be able to comment on what they think about things like this and traveling to different planets, and how maybe their faith has evolved with this sort of, you know, expedition of humans, you know, trying to get further further out into different planets and moons and set up bases and civilization. Like, what does faith look like? In that regard, there's also making the argument about how important nature is to our soul. Like, how do we transport that in the book that I mentioned earlier, endurance there where there's a moment in the book where the men, for the first time, I think in like 10 or 11 months, there was a stick, because you can imagine, Antarctica is not a place where plants can live, but they were stuck on this ice flow, and the seaweed comes through, and they find a stick from a tree, probably from South America, that they pull the stick out of the seaweed and they light it on fire, and the smell from lighting that stick on fire, for these men, was like a renewed sense of of being connected to nature, knowing that things exist that are just not white and windy and cold. So I thought that that, you know, if you think about Antarctica being one of the more heart, the harshest place to to live and to try to work, and you know, all of these different things that Antarctica is can be very applicable to the nature of space. And so how do we. Support faith. How do we transport mental health? How do we transport our deep connection to nature whenever we are trying to become an interplanetary species? I just think that those are really interesting topics that I don't think are talked about enough. In this regard, kudos to the wild wild west documentary for talking about it and for mentioning it, because it didn't connect for me until I read that line about the men being read that line from the endurance book about the men being so tied to just their daily life of just being cold and on ice and seeing nothing but white all around you, and then all of a sudden, some seaweed floats by, and someone lights a stick on fire, and it brings back all of these different emotions and makes you longing for home, law, being really homesick and longing for nature. So that's a really interesting parallel to what's going to happen to us as a species if we don't have these things that make us innately human, which is an interesting sort of, you know, thought concept. But to close it out, I do want to end it with some other like, sort of light hearted and just because I think it's cool, a couple of little footnotes here, as I've been diving into a lot of different resources and a lot of different information since the the NASA Social trip, is the 3d prop there printed rocket that was just created by India's space team. So that's another sort of evolution in this space process. Is all of these different countries that have their own space agency and what they're doing and the different initiatives that they're they're taking on I think 3d printing is going to be absolutely crucial when it comes to solidifying space travel and building out space infrastructure. You're going to be need, you're going to need to be able to build new things in space. And 3d printing is probably the best shot that we got at doing that. So I thought that that was really cool, that the India space team building a 3d rocket. There's also a company that was mentioned in the wild wild west, or the wild wild space documentary, and a company is called Leo labs, and they track debris in space. Stefa Small is a crew, a crew. Stefa small as a screw can severely impact, you know, a satellite in space. And so what they're doing, I think it was a few years 2021 maybe, when Russia shot off a missile from Earth that took out one of their satellites. Satellite wasn't working anymore, but they shot off a missile to take out a satellite that wasn't working anymore, which obviously singles or signals to, you know, space war efforts and, you know, communications and how that can be used as sort of a war strategy or a war tactic. But when they blew that satellite up, it created a debris field that was so massive, like, apparently, the rest of the world, like all of these different space agencies, were furious that they did this, because it created so much debris, and because these things are traveling so fast in space, something as small as a screw can deeply impact a satellite that's already up there in space. And so Leo labs actually tracks debris in space, which I thought was really, really cool. So shout out to them. Maybe I can try to get them on a future show, because I that's so I mean, when you talk about, like, visibility here on earth, when it comes to logistics, like, we track weather, we track traffic accidents, you know, any of those other delays that could impact, you know, getting the job done. Now there are other companies, like a starfish that is doing maintenance of satellites in space, and then Leo Labs is also tracking space debris. These are all companies that you're going to need if you were sending satellites up into space, if you are building rockets and all of these different things. And then lastly, I want to I want to end on a positive note. And you might wonder, okay with all of these shipments going on in space, like, what does it actually look like to get a shipment in space? And luckily for you, I have an image that I want to show, and this comes from astronaut Matthew Dominick. He is actually in space on the ISS, and this photo is just incredible. This is actually him getting a shipment in a tweet. He says, we received a cargo shipment this week with lots of cool stuff to include some new camera lenses. Spent a good part of the weekend with a 15 millimeter T 1.8 lens. Don't know what that means, but he made a whole bunch of time lapses, still looking through a 1000s of frames, lots of which I have the Aurora, but the Milky Way, and this one stood out. So if you were looking at this image, it is absolutely incredible. I will link to it in the show notes, but that's what it looks like to get a cargo transport. A ricargo shipment out in space. So this astronaut took this photo himself. He's been an astronaut I or he's been in the NASA space program since, I believe, 2017 but if you look right here and where my mouse is, that is the actual capsule that is bringing all of the shipments in, and it kind of docks here, and that's when, once it docks, then you can go and, you know, take out whatever stuff you need. Here's another image here that just shows it from the astronaut. What did he call this? This orientation looks more natural, but the original post is how we see it on station. So Matthew is Matthew Dominick is a fantastic photographer. He's taking these photos in space and tweeting them out on X so I thought that that was a good a good note to end on. So hopefully you enjoyed episode four of our series. If you want to go check out the other episodes. Like I said, Deep Space Logistics was the first one. Then we had how to grow food in space. Then we had the NOAA episode. So this is our fourth episode. We're gonna have one more, which is more of like behind the scenes, of like the stuff that didn't, that wasn't really a lot of meat on it to make it its own episode, but it's kind of a more, more fun, more lighthearted one, so I will make sure to link to all of those in the show notes, but thank you for tuning in, and I hope you enjoyed it. You.
