York Zhang is a propulsion test engineer at Blue Origin. York thought propulsion was cooler than being a chemical engineer, but completed his degree anyways. He too believes humanity should be a multiplanetary species and the path to transhumanism is inevitable. He spends his time binging video essays and visiting universities.
Time Stamps:
00:15 - What does York do?
1:05 - What does the future of space exploration look like for humans?
3:05 - Anti-fragility
4:19 - Chaos monkeys
5:47 - Augmenting the human body for space
7:05 - Abundance and untapped potential on space
12:31 - Advances in neurotechnology
14:20 - What is the size of the neurotechnology market?
15:51 - What is the difference between SpaceX and Blue Origin?
19:35 - Why should environmentalists be rooting for Jeff Bezos?
23:09 - What will the second generation of space technology look like?
26:07 - How much of the public’s resources should we allocate to space innovation?
30:41 - Lowering cost of access to space
33:44 - What is the rest of the world doing in regards to space?
34:18 - Rocket reusability
39:07 - How long will it be before we’re taking commercial space vacations?
40:55 - Can we experience space while sitting at home?
46:31 - York’s favorite piece of technology
York Zhang is a propulsion test engineer at Blue Origin. York thought propulsion was cooler than being a chemical engineer, but completed his degree anyways. He too believes humanity should be a multiplanetary species and the path to transhumanism is inevitable. He spends his time binging video essays and visiting universities.
Time Stamps:
00:15 - What does York do?
1:05 - What does the future of space exploration look like for humans?
3:05 - Anti-fragility
4:19 - Chaos monkeys
5:47 - Augmenting the human body for space
7:05 - Abundance and untapped potential on space
12:31 - Advances in neurotechnology
14:20 - What is the size of the neurotechnology market?
15:51 - What is the difference between SpaceX and Blue Origin?
19:35 - Why should environmentalists be rooting for Jeff Bezos?
23:09 - What will the second generation of space technology look like?
26:07 - How much of the public’s resources should we allocate to space innovation?
30:41 - Lowering cost of access to space
33:44 - What is the rest of the world doing in regards to space?
34:18 - Rocket reusability
39:07 - How long will it be before we’re taking commercial space vacations?
40:55 - Can we experience space while sitting at home?
46:31 - York’s favorite piece of technology
Thanks for being on the pod York. Yeah. Glad to be here. Thanks to be with you guys. So I was telling Basant about all the wild stuff you were telling me about neural implants and futurism and all this stuff. And he asked me what you did and I don't want to misstate it, you know, and especially cause my background is software. So maybe you can say in your words, like, what is it that you do. Yeah. So I was a Chemmy in undergrad and I decided that in my last year of college, that it was the wrong path to go down. And so I decided to go into rocket propulsion instead. And basically I've been working in development and testing of liquid rocket engines for startups, NASA, and now blue origin. But on the side, I like to dabble in you know, other technology fields as well. And one thing that has particularly caught my eye because of its interdisciplinary field was brain machine interfaces or BCIS or BMI is actually, there's actually two terms, but yeah, just like stuff that seems to work well with technology and the intersection of people and what it means to be human. Cool. Very Saifai yeah, you were telling me before actually that that this is actually fundamental technology to space exploration is being able to hook into your brain neural implants and all that. Yeah. So, you know, if you think about it, we're really fragile meat bags, trying to make space and environment in which we can thrive. And so one way to look at it is we adapt the space to us. But you can also do the reverse if we adapt our bodies to the environment that opens up an entirely different field of exploration. And so something that I brought up last time is, you know, what is the best way to explore a new planet? And it might not be in a human form. It might actually be like a cheetah with eight legs or something like that. Right. But like, you don't necessarily know what the right design is. Because it's not like you can randomly select it out of the hat and be like, yup. This is the thing to do. It's really, you come down to it based on, you know, a lot of trial and error and you might end up with a solution that is completely non-intuitive. So a good example of that would be what's the best way to deliver wifi to the entire world. And if you were to say right off the bat, oh, it's to use hot air balloons that are able to rise and fall depending on the temperature during the time of day. That's how we do internet. And no one would say that, but there is a company, unfortunately, it's now shuttered, but it was a project out of X which was Google's like research arm. And it was called project loon. And that was the design they came up with. And the design philosophy they had was how do we quickly kill an idea and how do we continuously kill it throughout its development process? And what they ended up finding is the ideas that refuse to die. End up being very resilient and produce very counter-intuitive designs and solutions. And so like, I think about, you know, that in regards to neurotech and spaces, we've been doing space for like 60, 70 years in a particular way, but there is definitely untouched fields that we've just never thought about because we've always been thinking that we need to adapt space to us, but the opposite can be totally true and valid. Have you heard of, anti-fragility yeah, Kayla, right? Yeah. The black Swan book as well. See that. Yeah. Could you just explain what that cyber agility is? Yeah. So anti-fragility, is this I wouldn't call it design philosophy, but it's the idea that in times of turmoil, your system actually gets better over time in response to that stimulus, as opposed to how most people think about problem solving, which is I have the system can only work under explicit conditions. But once those conditions are failed, then the entire system goes down with it. So in a sense, you can also say shorting a stock is a form of anti-fragility, right? When everyone is panicking, that their portfolio is tanking, you're still making out like a robber and you know, oh wait, you know, shout out to the big, short and all that good stuff. So anti-fragility is a super great concept. When you think about how do you, how do you, how are you able to create a system that is able to weather. Unforeseeable circumstances and things you can't even predict. Right? You have that whole punnet square of things, you know, and things that you don't know and no knowns and unknown unknowns, right. The unknown unknowns is you can't predict it or prepare for it at all. But if your system is robust enough, then yeah, anti-fragility will make a light out of the darkness. It's, it's sort of like the idea of a chaos monkey in software applications. Yeah I can explain this because this is in the software domain. So Netflix created this thing, which is like at the time when they introduced to people thought this was wild, where they would have this system called chaos Kong. And what it would do is it would just go in and randomly take out Netflix's servers. This is their own tool that was essentially like malware that they said, just kill them. And like, there, there were some which were just like destroyed like small servers here and there. And there were some which were like take out an entire region, act like an entire, like, like section like Europe, AWS servers are gone. And the reason they did this was, they said, you have to make sure that when we give you these crazy drills, Your systems will hold up. So when it actually happens, we've literally done this a hundred times or a thousand times. So if AWS goes down, like we're fine. So there have been times where like, you know, AWS, some section of AWS goes down and then people will, then there's like a news report. Oh, half the internet is down, but Netflix is never a hit. Because they bake in anti-fragility into their development practices. I was reading the distributed systems engineers at Netflix get paid like$2 million a year for this exact reason, because this is, this is what they're building. Right. They're building distributed systems that will never fail regardless of what happens. But your, but I wanted to go back to the thing you were saying, which is idea of changing the human body to better adapt to an environment that we cannot foresee yet. How Saifai is that in the space? Like in the, in the space of space? Or the space industry or people really thinking about adapting or changing human biology as a reasonable way of getting to space? So I think that that idea is very futuristic, right? Like if you want to point to. Examples of scifi that's being produced right now, you can look at ultra carbon with the whole stacks, the critical stacks. You can even look at ghosts in the show, which I think is one of the seminal works in terms of animators of all time. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's, it's still a very relevant topic today, but I don't really see people thinking about. You know, augmenting the human body for space. I think we've barely begun to scratch the surface of just augmented the human body period, let alone just on earth, but I can definitely see that becoming much more reasonable to pursue in terms like, you know, total R and D costs when we actually do have a stable foothold in, in space. But right now, as it is, we're clamoring to even. Get beyond low-earth orbit, you know, like the, the ISS is eventually going to be retired and commercialized, and we've got to have the gigantic aerospace companies one of which I'm working for, trying to just get to the moon again. So I would say it's probably, I don't know, 200, but the thing is the rate of innovation improves. If you have more people contributing to the system, and if you lower the, the basic level of sort of Like adequacy and education, right? So like there's a, there's a book by Peter Diamandis called abundance, which talks about how to get the rest of the world plugged into this global economy. And so the basic gist is that there is a whole lot of untapped potential because there, these are people who live in regions where they don't have basic health, basic energy, basic water, basic internet. But once everybody, quote unquote comes online now there's innovation happening everywhere. So the rate of innovation goes up tremendously and I'll even make the case that maybe the rate of the rate of innovation even goes up. But it's very interesting because I was talking with somebody the other day and he was saying we actually live in a time with so much information and abundance, but we're not really moving the needle that quickly because you have examples of like MOOCs MIT, OpenCourseWare Coursera at X. And there's just this abundance of information, but there seems to be a lack of application, right? It's like everyone has all the information. But how many people are actually going the extra mile and using that information beyond just casually, passively sitting to a lecture and saying, I know this it's like, no, you don't know this, you know enough about it to parrot it, but you don't know enough about it to flexibly, bend the concepts to actually create something that is real. And that's either in the form of hardware, software, but hardware specifically is sort of my, my domain. So I've always looked at it as what are you learning to actually create hardware that you can drop in someone's hand and say, I made this, I can explain how I made it and I could explain how it works. I, I saw, I like 50, I like 80% agree with you, 20% disagree. So I'll tell you why. So I think that the reason So the reason that I, that I disagree, I'll tell you that first is because like we're seeing stuff being made that could never have been conceived of before. Like a little like startups are doing are creating new types of computers. Raspberry PI was created by a startup, you know, are, do we know is created by a startup. And now like people like my last company. Instead of making our own computer for our first 3d printer, we literally bought raspberry pies and we stuck them into our printer. And that was how we shipped our first product. So like this kind of thing, like never would have been doable, like a person like me and my friends from college who built this company, we could not have possibly done that even 20 years ago. However, the reason I, 80% agree with you is that. Like I'm impressed that this stuff is happening now, but I'm impressed because compared to previously, like maybe 1% of people are able to do this, whereas before 0.1% of people are. So the reason I, 80% agree with you is because we need to get to like 50, 60, 70. Yeah. Getting as many people plugged in is, is super important. Like, I definitely think the, the spread of how. So like how computer science is taught is, is a great model, right? You're essentially lowering the barrier, such that anybody with a computer and internet access can now do things that they normally could have done. And so it's, it's kinda like the example that I like to use with drones, right? When the person who created drones created it, they weren't thinking, oh, this is all the stuff they can do. There'll be like, Hey, this is a really cool thing. I just want to show it off. Right. But now we have drone applications for like transporting blood, to battlefields, transporting pizza for delivery, Amazon prime and all these certain things. So the point isn't to tell people what to do with the technology, you know, obviously within ethical bounds, but really create the tool. Then distributed to as many people and be surprised by what they come up with. So it almost sounds like the existing sort of distribution applications that we have now are pretty great. It's just that we don't have them into enough. People's hands or are you actually saying that we need to build a bunch of new applications that need to get information in the abundance of information that we have to new people? I think we, so I think there's a, there's an abundance of information. I think there needs to be a greater focus on. Actually using the tools in a sort of direct one-to-one simulation. So there's a, there's a company called synthesis that was born out of space. X's Astro school because Ilan didn't like how education was done. And so he just built his own school and their whole thing was how do you get kids to be self motivated and interested enough to continue to pursue these intellectual fields that they want to work in? And it's all about getting them to be. In an environment where they're encouraged to build actual stuff, right? Whether it's, you know, building their own cryptocurrency within a sandbox classroom experience, or actually going to understand how an engine works by literally taking it apart and getting instructions. So. I think the emphasis needs to be not just, Hey, here's all this info, but this is what the info will do. And actually, how do you build those skills? Because I think the best way to learn is with hands-on and that's sort of what recruiters talk about all the time. Right? You need to demonstrate you've actually built something as opposed to you and 50 other similar candidates, all saying, yeah, I took this class. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. I I, yeah, I was a hiring manager, so I probably look through like 300 resumes and I would see these really weird projects on people's resumes where it's like, oh, we created a database that would tell you about congressional voting records. And I'd see that on one resume. Then I see the next one and it'd be the exact same project and be like, ah, it was a class project and the people who had bring in who like actually built something, cause they thought it was fun are, were just like miles better programmers than the people who just did class projects. Yeah. And so like that's where we're seeing this neurotechnology going. Right. So like sort of circle back to the topic is people now are able to leverage faster, reliable. And cheaper forms of sensor measurements right now. Is there, is there open, like if I wanted to mess around with this, I could just like buy commercial stuff and use it to measure my brain. Not yet, but there is a company called based in Boston newsletter. Yeah. Yeah. So they, they had an Indiegogo fundraiser for the 10 headphone and that's basically, it looks very similar to a Bose QC 35 because the. Engineer who worked on, it was also a Bose engineer and it's essentially a productivity headphone. And so it's got noise canceling. It's got like some sort of motion control to it, but essentially it's a way to measure how productive you are. And so they've actually focused on weaving the. ECG sensors into the foam pads of the headphones. So it's not like, you know, traditional wires or instrumentation poking out. It's just literally just a functional form of headphone, but it's able to measure what is your productivity? Like? How often are you checking your phone or are you in the flow state when certain music plays? And so it's trying to essentially give you the measurements so that you can better understand your own body. And that you were then able to say, okay, this is how I work. And this is how I not work. And how do I work around these different obstacles? And so having that sort of hardware is, is becoming much more widespread. And so I really liked nearer bowl. Like I'm on their discord and everything like that, but your tech is coming and it's, and it's going to be huge. Cause now we aren't just limited by like pure willpower. It's like we have actual hardwired, scientific measurements to act off of. And the hypothesis is only as good as your ability to test it. Yeah, how to make money off of this good question. So I've often wondered how do you, how do you scale a neurotech company? Right? Like, it seems like it's a very niche thing of like, yeah, this is really cool, but like, am I really willing to pay$200 for a headphone? So the question I asked you is how much money are you willing to pay to improve your productivity? Right. People buy supplements, they do like different diets and fads and it's all to like. Feel more grounded in like the best version of themselves. Right? So a pair of headphones that's like$200 is minuscule compared to the compounding effect of actually being really good and building off of that. So for$200, obviously, you know, it's a, it's a privilege to be able to just afford it like that, but the way that you unlock your ability to do things. Is it valuable compared to the sticker price that you pay. Right. Right. And your productivity, you know, compounded over, like even two years is going to pay you back on that headphones, 10 times over. Yeah. That's that's nuts. I don't think I'm ever productive when I listen to music that that might just be me, but It depends on what you want to listen to. You know, if you're listening to some like hard like I really don't also, I wanna listen to a music that is either in a language that I do not know. Or it's like an instrumental, can we, can we go back to the space thing because I have so many questions I don't tell every day that I can talk to somebody that works in space or works in the space of space. You've already made that joke. It's not even a joke. It's a way that I I'm afraid to take that. But York Sylvia earlier, you said that you're at one of the two largest companies that working in this area, you're working at blue origin. I'm assuming the other one is space X and you suggested that maybe the both of you guys are really trying to get to the moon. But it really sounds like, you know, from everything I've read the two companies are vastly different. They have entirely different missions, they are approaching things differently. Could you speak to that a little bit? Well, actually, actually, if we could dumb this down, cause I've read even less than you have this on. So I don't even know. I know that there's a bunch of companies who are working on space. I hear, I read headlines that Bezos is trying to get to the moon Ilan, trying to get to Mars. I don't know who's doing what, what is NASA doing? Like, can you give us like just a primer of the space? Yeah. So essentially so-so so I sort of touched upon this before, but the whole reason why space is commercialized and relevant again is because of electronics, right? Like the way that rockets have traditionally been made is, you know, you have CNC you five axis, you have 3d printing, which is a different form of manufacturing, but it's really the ability to determine how well that space system is. Based on how many instruments you have, like sensors and things. And the reason we're able to instrument the hell out of these things is because sensors are so much cheaper. They're much more reliable, they're smaller, right? So in the same way that the the digital age that we live in now has benefited from Moore's law is the same principle at work driving space, hardware. And so that's why we were able to see space X come out of, you know, seemingly out of nowhere, you know, a bunch of startup people like creating the first privatized orbital class rocket. And the funny thing is that blue origin was started roughly two years before space X, but in today's eyes, they're seen as not even comparable to the, to the rate of progress that space X has done. And it's primarily because in it it's in the way that they think about things like. Blue origin is very much based on analysis, right? They actually hired a bunch of rocket dine people and the rocket nine people were like super OJI when it comes to rockets. Like they've been around since the sixties. So they're very analysis heavy. So they're leveraging that computing power to make accurate predictions, but space X didn't have that sort of. Expertise in their, in their field. They ended up just having to test things in order to prove whether the design worked or not. And so, because I'm very test oriented, I value that test development cycle much more than purely the analysis side, but it's because of that sort of different posts that they're very different. And so the recent news by NASA to select one of the three competitors for that$10 billion contract to bring the Artemis astronauts to the moon. Was primarily because space X embraced a test mythology. They were like, we're going to test things. We have Starship. There's going to be a lot of PR and YouTube. And that's why they're super, well-known vile. Blue origin is very secretive. Like not a lot of people know what they're doing. And so people like the clown on blue origin because they just don't know what to, you know, hold up and say, yeah, this is the company that's doing it. So, so the, so the other difference between space X and blue origin is their, their mission. They're both mission-driven companies. And so everybody knows what space X is all about. It's about making humans into a multi-planetary species, right? We're trying to build a sustainable colony on Mars, low origin, I think suffers from. One because of that secrecy, they, people don't really know what it's about, but I think the way they've talked about it is very, it's very lackluster. It just doesn't galvanize people, right? Like people care about saving the earth, right. To some certain extent, but blue origin is saying, Hey, we're going to make life sustainable on earth by going to space. But I think if you look at it from a different perspective, bayzos has vision for, for earth. Is much more compelling for people who care about the environment. And this is the, this is my, this is my pitch for why I think environmentalist who care about the earth should actually be rooting for basis, as opposed to actively just saying like Musk is dumb and it's because the reason for going to space, shouldn't be all doom and gloom. Like muscular vision of Mars is very much if we don't do this earth is inevitably going to reach a cataclysmic event and there's no turning back. So we need to go to Mars. Bayzos is as much we're optimistic, but it's also based on the fact that he understands that if we were to bring everyone into what we would call like a first-world living situation, right? Like plenty of access to markets, internet, basic utilities, all that basic stuff covered from Maslow's hierarchy. The amount of energy that is consumed will be so much more than what the earth is physically actually capable of doing. So if we just put like a hard limit and say like the amount of power that we can get from earth as it is based on current technology is let's just say like a hundred, like gigatons would not be able to sustain that. The only way to do it is if we were to expand outside of earth and to draw on space resources. So like solar energy, asteroid mining, all of these different things. If we able to do that, then we can treat earth as the valuable and precious commodity that it is in the entire universe, which we know to be the only source of intelligent life out there. And so baseless, his vision is really, we are saving the earth by not draining it to its core Musk. His vision is we are going to save humanity by going to Mars. So there's a strong difference. There's a very optimistic one and there's a very like doom is coming, but people don't realize that because blue origin never. Talks about it in that sense? The only reason I know what blue origin is about was because I literally wrote, I literally read the letter that bayzos writes wrote to new employees. And it's the same letter that gets sent to every new employee. So, you know, like, Hey, there's this culture that you need to embrace, drink the Kool-Aid know what it's about. I'm glad you brought that up. I read that exact letter. And up until that letter, I did not know what blue origin was even trying to do. I think so just to summarize what you're saying. Elon is really just trying to get the hell out of earth. Doesn't really care about earth as a planet, but really cares about humanity versus bayzos is trying to build space colonies on the, around the orbital of earth or outside of the atmosphere of earth, but still care about earth, the planet. And so I it's an important distinction because people eat you're right. People just don't know, which is which yeah. And even if you look at blue Origin's website, even just from the way they talk about it, right. It's not explicit enough to say we care about the earth like you on isn't saying we don't care about the earth. He's just saying, we just happened to care about is more, but Bezos to really galvanize people. And to get that support in the same sort of fanaticism adoration that space X has really needs to rebrand blue origin as like, Hey, this is a real long-term solution. And I think it's very prescient for him to understand that if we were to get a trillion people into the solar system, even 1% of those people would be composed of people who are able to move the needle significantly. Right? 1% of a trillion, I don't know the math ironically, but there's going to be thousands of people who are in the same. Intelligence and caliber and drive and passion like Einstein Feinman Paul direc Newton, right? The idea is to scale. He's all about scaling and that's the very principle behind Amazon. It's all about scaling, but Musk is very much going to just try to transplant somewhere else. And it's not to say one is better than the other. It's just two very distinct approaches to the same problem. Got it. Got it. So where, where does so I think the other thing would be for us, we're talking to you about is there's this idea of first layer of space technology, right? This is like building the internet for the first time blue origin and SpaceX. And I guess to an extent, NASA are helping build sort of the first protocol layer of space technology. What comes. In the second layer, what, what comes, what technologies are going to be built on the fruits of whatever it is you are building and whatever it is that space X is built. Exactly right. Space X is a transportation company, right? It's building the access to go from point a to point B. But the interesting thing is Musk's other ventures like Neurolink boring company, Tesla. Starling. These are all tools that build on the infrastructure of, if I am confident enough to go from point a to point B, what else can I do there? Right. So for example, the first person to open a Popeye's chicken on Mars has an, has a monopoly on fried chicken, right? So you're essentially encouraging the development of an ecosystem. Once you are able to solve the transportation, it's very much like, you know, the whole like Oregon trail thing, right. Once you get to a place and you can settle it, you can then build the cooler stuff. But you need to first focus on making it an actual sustainable place. And then the cool stuff comes in. Like, you know, having like Gucci and Prada, like, you know, really fancy and things that wouldn't survive. If you were just bare bones, survival. So like, in terms of like, what other technology, well, first we, if we can build a colony there, the next thing would be. You know, what's the way to go from one colony to another. So the whole like GM and Lockheed martyr Martin partnership of building the next lunar Rover is another form of once we've established that transportation, how do we get around? Right. So you got to build the infrastructure, you got to build the roads. Then you got to have internet. Starlink is fantastic because it's going to show that we can provide. A planet wide coverage of internet. Now transplant that to Mars, same thing, boring companies, all about creating roads. Right? So we can't, obviously we can't live on the surface of Mars forever. Just like pure radiation wise, so you need to build underground. So you have that vertical layer of infrastructure being built up. Then yearling comes in and says, Hey, how do we actually interface with these machines in a much more intelligent and scalable way so we can prioritize the rate of improvement that we're able to do. So musts whole thing is like, yeah, it all seems very discourteous, but it's all very cohesive when it comes to of an approach to making life. As good if not better than earth, but on an entirely different planet. And that's the genius of it is like, you don't see them connected, but they are, it's all about making life sustainable somewhere else. So let me ask you maybe a topical question. And I think I, I love what you're saying. And I think Bezos and Musk are doing God's work, you know, to an extent,? So when you think about it, when NBA owners are like, we want to build a stadium in a city, the city just gives them like$500 million to build the stadium and nobody blinks an eye because they're like, well, you know, our house prices are gonna increase. The general local economy is going to do well. Well, if this is that on like a hundred X, a larger sort of scale and scheme. And so the question is, how much of the resources that we have publicly available to us? Should we be devoting towards the Musks and the basis of the world? Yeah. Th that's, you know, that's often a criticism of the space program that, that people have. And you have to understand that if you look at NASA, purely from a budget standpoint, most people will never have a billion dollars in their lives. So they think it's ridiculous that we're giving$10 billion to a private company. But if you were to compare the total budget associated with NASA, which is the most public facing aspect of the government, other than the executive branch, compared to the defense industry, It's not even 1%, right.$10 billion is nothing compared to what we are giving for the defense. And the defense is very secretive. So you don't know how they're spending their money. And even the people we're working within the defense accounting are not entirely sure where all the money goes. So it's not necessarily a, Hey, should we give money to the space program? It's how much money are they not getting so that they can actually do and create the technologies that will bring us the leaps and bounds. And so. For me, it's not, Hey, do we have money for space? It's we should have enough money for space. And the other things that are affecting us on earth, poverty, healthcare you know, disease, all these things can be funded at the same time. But NASA being the most public facing aspect of the government just gets the most flack. And in fact, there was a, there was a movement maybe like within the math last 10 years where we were wanting to double NASA's budget. So instead of half a penny. That we get out of every taxpayers dollar. You give them a full penny. No one would bat an eye to that. And so if you were to look at, so I think there was a conversion of the total amount of money for the Apollo program. Accounting for inflation, I think in total was maybe like somewhere between like 600 to$800 billion. Right. And the amount of money for each taxpayer, I think accounted for$53 a year. That's like less than six months of Amazon prime directly funding an agency that is literally dropping a piece of metal on a place you will probably never, ever stepped foot. You won't know the smell of it. You don't know what it'll look like. You don't know what you'll hear. That is amazing for$53. Right. But people just don't seem to understand how the effects of space technology trickles out and is able to return an outsize ROI. So this something like 14%, like 14 X, the dollar that you've given to space returns in the form of GPS or medical technology or something else. So this is, I think this is you're making a great argument for why a space technology companies should really focus on branding. I mean, there is a sort of a cost to being secretive. If you are branding it well, and you're making it sexy or you're making it sound like it's going to help everybody, then more people would put their votes and show up and have their voice heard for the things that are gonna help them. And so, at the beginning, I wasn't sure, like why does it matter whether basis is secretive or not, but this, is the reason why. Yeah. And I think it's, it's a bit of a shame that bayzos, or I don't know if it's just bayzos but blue origin is very secretive, right? Like they're, there's entire subreddits that are essentially always comparing blue origin to the other companies, specifically space X and now space X having won the public's adoration in a sense with the Starship videos and receiving that$10 billion contract, they are the gold standard by everyone by which everyone is comparing them to. And so. I don't, I'm not saying like, oh, if we just became more public about what blue origin is doing, it'll be better. Again, it comes down to that design philosophy, right? Are we analysis heavy or are we test heavy or hardware rich or Farber poor for that program? And it's really, that's the big difference. And only time will tell whether, you know, blue origin is going to catch up or pivot in a different way that will actually get them to the, to the level of funding and, you know sort of. Fanaticism that space X has, but space X has a huge lead and the time in developing hardware in space, it's not like five years, right? It's not like, oh, it's just five years, five years or space. Hardware is a significant amount of time. It's like, you know, you guys understand from a software perspective, you guys are able to go from concept to IPO in two years and make millions of dollars. That's the rate that you need to do in order to get space hardware, because the cost of failure in space is so much more expensive because you can't go in service. A satellite, that's out an orbit, like, obviously there's like on orbit, satellite you know, technology that's being advanced, but it's not like software. We can just go to a computer and just fix it. You literally can't go there. So you have to think, how do I make sure my investment actually pans out for the long duration of the missions? Like, so what so what are some of the interesting technical problems that are being solved right now? Like what is once we solve this, we're going to be 10 times closer than we were before to achieving our goal is to get into space. So the, the whole, the biggest bottleneck right now is simply the cost of access to space. So I think if so, so I think an astronaut on the ISS gets paid something like$60,000 per hour. If you were to do it by like a wage, right. They're making 60 K per hour. That's really, really expensive. And it's prohibitively expensive for merely everyone. But what do you, what do you mean by that? Like, they're not getting a salary. That's 60 K an hour. It just costs whoever's putting on their 60 K an hour to keep them up there. Cost of the space. Hardware is the cost of the operations of getting the space you know, hardware, all working to send them up. Right? Like all of that is bundled up into getting an astronaut to get to point a to point B. Right. That's my, the whole Congress of like, Hey, we don't want to buy. Seats on the Soyuz rocket anymore, the Russian rocket, because we literally paying so much money to get them there. But if we were to develop it on our own, we can significantly reduce that. And that's why space X came in. They were like, we can do it for cheaper and for better. And that's why they're wildly wildly successful. And so that's the big point of, of, you know, reusability is to lower the cost of access to space, such that people are able to do more in space. Than they were ever before. So, so in a sense like basis, this whole thing about you know, the scalability of getting a, truly people in this space and the whole example I brought about. With drones is that same idea. We have no idea what sort of entrepreneurship will exist in space until we can make that accessible for everyone. And then we're going to see who is the person who's going to move the needle. How are we going to surprise? How else are they going to bring the rest of society up? Because when you have something in space, you're now a space company. But the thing is, most people don't understand that most companies are already plugged into the space economy. They have, like, if you think about T-Mobile about all these mobile services television, right? How are they able to deliver the service through satellites? Which means they are invested in the space economy as much as the everyday consumer. And so when we are able to give access to space, like for example, you can pay, like, I think, I think it was planet some money. You can take like a photo of where you're living a high res photo from space, and you can even do like data visualization off of that. You can even do like some sort of machine learning. So a concrete example is there is a conflict and a resource starvation, a certain place. How many tens do I need to put in there so that we can actually provide relief? Well, if you have an aerial view of the total square acres that you're looking at, you can say, oh, 90% of it is occupied by trees, but 10% of it isn't now we can actually do pixel by pixel. This is how big, how many tents, how many things, all these things, right? The everyday person can now do things with space. And that's the big bottleneck is. Getting to space it's so stupidly, stupidly expensive. So blue origin and space X about the American companies. What is the rest of the rest of the world doing in this space? The rest of the world is trying to catch up to space X. So I think Ilan tweeted something like last year space X's total satellites delivered was double the rest of the entire world combined. So they are leading the charge in terms of what the new. Space economy will look like they are trendsetters they're setting. The guidelines are setting the gold standard. And so the thing is, you know, people didn't believe about reusability, like not necessarily the technological feasibility. Can you, can you kind of explain the concept of reusability in space? The reasonability is, you know, the most popular one is when you go on a plane and you go from point a to point B, you don't just Chuck the airplane, you refurbish it, you check it, do diagnostics, health systems, all that, and then you use it again. And so there's sort of a, a fixed cost to developing that infrastructure, to getting that vehicle. And so instead of constantly paying money to rebuild it, you just pay for the refurbishment, the operations and the refueling of it. And just to give you an example, the total cost for the propellant, the oxidizer and the fuel. As, as a percentage of the entire budget of what it takes to build that vehicle is like$200,000. The most expensive part of a vehicle from my understand is the insurance, right? Like you have the most nine V satellite that was on the launch pad for a static fire for the Falcon nine. And it blew up. How do you cover that? Well, that's the insurance part. So you know, him and Zuckerberg went at it, but. Reusability is just using the hardware. So you reduce the cost that it takes to do the thing, so you can get more value out of it. And so space X is sending that trend. They're saying, Hey, not only is this technologically feasible, because like I mentioned before, the sensors to be able to do that, they didn't do that before with, with spaceships. So the misnomer for usability is like, yes, we can point to DCX, which was created by the McDoubles. Like Douglas Dougal, Mick Douglas company, back in like the eighties, it was basically a flying white Dorito that was reusable. Right. But the thing is the DCX never went to orbit space. X is Falcon nine is the first example of an orbital class reusable vehicle. Everything else has not been orbital. Like you can say the space shuttle was reusable, but. It was reusable at the cost of costing more money to fix it up than it was to originally deploy it. So you have to prove two things with re usability first technological, the ability and costs, because if you're spending more money to refurbish it, yeah. That's reusable, but it's costing you more money. So you might as well just make a new one. So the, so the, the spaceship failed in that sense, DCX failed on the feasibility sense. And you can even say like, SSME, didn't even get to orbit by itself. It had these two solid rocket boosters, you know, the big. Side boosters, the gen boosters, whatever. So Falcon nine is able to do both these things and the kicker is able to do it for cheaper than anybody else they're able to do it. And they just have like, are hundreds of successful launch. Like if you want to talk about distinguishing a legit rocket company from all the other, like, you know posers, it's not just, Hey, is the vehicle able to launch and get off the launch pad? It's does it have flight heritage? Has it actually seen flight conditions operating in the conditions that you actually designed it for versus testing it on the ground and being like, yeah, it should work in space. No, it doesn't just work in space. It's something much harder. So space X is the usability is proven that it's a thing. And now everybody is trying to do what space X is trying to do. The European space agency was like, yeah, we're going to get rid of the Ren five at some point. And. Do a reusable thing you'll have like, yeah, sure. I told you that before the Chinese are just legitimately just copying Falcon nine. Like if you look at two of the prominent space companies in China land space, and I think it was one space, or maybe it was linked space, they're both Metalux engines, but they're very, very similar to what space X wants to do with reusability. But now they just get to look at, you know, space X footage and be like, oh yeah, this is what they did. You know, it's obviously not that easy to reverse engineer off of just footage, but. Now everybody does it. Now, any company that wants to go into space and build a rocket, even the layman person, even an outsider from outside the industry will be like, so is it going to be reusable or not? It's like reusability is now a common term to use that. If it's not part of the discussion, people will dismiss you. So it's now become normalized. And in fact, I don't even watch most space X launches anymore because the landed the rocket over and over. That it's no longer a miracle it's just to be expected. Almost like this idea of reusability is just this standard. That's in the back of our heads. Nobody expects anything else? Like gen Z, are going to be like, oh your rocket, does it, is it reusable then? What the hell would we, what's the point of all of this? Yeah. I mean, people don't even look up at the sky and be like, wow, I have the privilege of paying X amount of money to sit in a giant flying metal bird. Like nobody's thinks that they, they just Dell complained that they didn't get pretzels on their flight. Right? So the, the, the amount of like detail that people have to the rate of innovation is, is obviously very distanced from the people in the trenches, actually doing the innovation, but that's the thing it's normal. So basics is setting the bar of it has to be reusable and it has to be commercially successful as in it offers significant value to the consumer. And if you weren't doing it, then you're just not good enough. So two part question for you, number one, how long do you think it will be before? It's just like commercially possible for us to take a vacation to the moon. And how long do you think you will be before people don't even care? So the interesting thing is because space X is setting the rate or setting the standard for what is to be expected from a rocket company. They have partnered up with a Japanese billionaire. I think his name is He is essentially sponsoring a group of like seven other people. And they're literally going to ride on Starship and they're going to go to the moon as a commercial group, right? Like space used to be just the endeavor of governments. But now it's becoming commercialized so that some artists in his friends can just like, go check it out and like come back to earth and be like, guys, we got to make some content, right? They're content creators with exclusive POV's on what it's like to be in space. As an astronaut, looking at the moon, looking at little blue pebble that we call our earth. And that's going to happen within the next 10 years, right? Like we are seeing people becoming invested in space, not just from a financial perspective, but from a, I can see myself as an astronaut. I don't need to go to astronaut school and, you know, go through all the rigors of a PhD in whatever requirements. It's, if I'm just rich enough, I can pay that money. And eventually it's not just in my rich enough it's I think I can save enough to go to the moon. So I'd say that transition will be well within the next 20 to 30 years. If, if the rate at which space X and other companies are doing continues at that rate, even steadily, we will get there. It will be within our lifetimes. Like we are at the precipice of actually having the ability to look at a planet from outside of it for the first time, not through the eyes of a satellite, but with our own to meatball eyes. Yeah, I was just going to bring up, I read a really interesting sort of this other point of view on space travel in, which was, I think it was biology or some other sort of thought leader, but they suggested that we'll come to the future that exists. It's going to happen much earlier than us physically going to space is one where we have the technology and instruments available to us on earth that will recreate. That experience of being on the moon, like a hundred percent, like it will, you will be able to smell, feel touch and whether that's an implant in your brain or whatever it is, but it'll create all the sensory feelings of being on the moon while you're still sitting at your Indian and your living room or something. I don't know if you know much about that or if you think that's even a realistic sort of possibility, I would say it would be realistic if we've had enough. You know, people to legitimately go to the moon and gather all that data. So here here's a really fun joke that I really liked. So Neil Armstrong buzz Aldrin and Michael columns were such difficult actors to work with because they insisted on filming on location. So, yeah, so like the ability to capture all that data and use, you know, a combination of VR and AR. Will definitely happen. And in fact, I don't even, I think there should be a company that does that, but they, again, they're dependent on that, that bottleneck of getting that transportation to a reliable state, but here's the thing, right? Like the small sat market, which is the market that I've primarily followed because I used to work for a couple of those companies is making small set. So a small site is sort of like an arbitrary distinction of like how much the payload weighs. So the purpose of a launch vehicle is to send something to an orbit, right? So the small sat market started within, like, it really started with space X with their, their Falcon one. They were trying to deliver, I think 150 kilograms to low-earth earth orbit. But now we have these companies with that are adopting this Silicon valley style of approach to designing. They are now trying to deliver something up to like 1,500 kilograms to low earth orbit. And so, you know, there's companies that are at different intersections of that entire range, but the small sat market is primarily focused on people who want to deliver something sooner with an exclusive ride to orbit, as opposed to going through one of the bigger names like Atlas, five owned by ULA, but even space X has decided to dip their toes back into the small sat market because. They realized around like maybe 10, 15 years ago that the small stock market didn't exist. And the reason it didn't exist was because the, the amount of people creating small set satellites didn't exist. So the small sat market came out of again, the whole electronics thing, smaller, faster, cheaper. They came out of people now saying I can build a satellite that will deliver useful data, useful telemetry for much cheaper than what it was back then, but I want to get to space earlier. So I'm going to find a dedicated ride to there and space X delivered a record of 143 satellites at once with our transporter one vehicle, which is I think, 14 times more than rocket lab and rocket lab has been in operation for about eight years. And they've done 13 launches. So the payload capacity of rocket lab was one 14th of what space X did in one shot versus the entire duration of rocket lab. So it's, it's insane what space X is able to do at cost. And starships ability to deliver payload would be even cheaper. Like you can say like the, the average cost to send a thousand kilograms to low earth orbit is about 10 mil. But Starship with its hundred ton capacity is opening up a market that nobody has ever thought of pursuing before. And like, just to give you an example, like, Rockets are really hard. Okay. So like the American methodology of creating rockets is to focus on mass optimization, right? Like we want to be able to create the, the hardware that is as minimal mass as possible, because we want to reserve all that mass, you know, being sent into space to the payload. So if you're delivering a payload, that's like a hundred kilograms, the error of margin for your mass is significantly higher. Like you essentially have to find a way to reduce like. A thousand kilograms to like 999 kilograms or something like that. Or maybe it's like like 800 kilograms and you just don't have that thing. Cause once you start cutting into the mass things, you're affecting performance, you're affecting the design and it's just not doable. But if you are scaling a vehicle. If you were scaling to something like a hundred tons, that mass margin becomes so much more negotiable, you don't have to cram everything. Like the reason why satellites are so expensive is because we have to fit as much stuff as possible on a small amount of space, because the amount of money it took to deliver all that small stuff to space is significantly expensive. But if Starship can deliver a hundred tons for$2 million, The way that we designed satellites are going to change. Obviously it still needs to withstand the, the environment of space, radiation acoustics, thermal. But now we can make things that are much bulkier. So we don't have to spend so much money optimizing things we can actually sort of do like like a book, like sloppy way of just like, oh, not enough power, just throwing another battery as opposed to do we have enough mass, do we have enough connections? How many more people do we need to contract to do this redesign where it's really expensive? So. Yeah, it just really comes down to cost again. Cool. Well, I can tell you that this has been an incredibly exciting and informative episode for me. You were Sagan asking your descriptions of space and I have a newfound respect and interest in this. So just to wrap things up, we like to finish every episode by asking in your opinion, what is the greatest piece of technology made either in recent history or of all time? The greatest technology. I think it's so going back to space, I think it's absolutely amazing that the dragon capsule that space X developed to fairy astronauts to, and from the international space station. Is able to autonomously dock to the ISS, like you're essentially trusting the machine vision and the, the software running the dragon capsule to take you from the safest place in the universe earth to literal space. And to, to do all the docking, all the safety, the transfer orbits and everything like that. I think it's absolutely amazing because for me, space hardware represents the cutting edge of any form of technology. It's it's technology that you can't fix once you send out and it's technology that needs to be able to withstand the harshest environment in the entire universe. And the fact that it's able to do it by itself with minimal assistance assistance from people sitting inside is amazing. And the fact that they're able to do it reliably. Is also incredible. And the fact that you can even come back to earth surviving, like speeds of up to like mock 13, with like intense heating and the people aren't roasted. And they're still alive and they're like, yeah, we want to do it again. To me is amazing. So like, I know this is a software sort of centric podcast, but like, if you look at the sort of fault trees that the software running dragon does, it's amazing. It's, it's the type of thing where if the drag, if some aspect of the dragon system overall system fails, they're able to essentially shut off that part. So it doesn't Catastrophically spread to other things, right? It's not like a cancer where one thing fails the entire system fails. They have this sort of built-in redundancy, right? Like for example, the Falcon nine has three computers that runs the same sort of software through both of them. And when some critical juncture happens where they need to make a decision, they will compare all three results to see if it's the same and they'll toss out one of those. So they have they essentially have two out of three sort of this built-in safety assurance. And the fact that it's able to do it well, actually getting input from outside the environment. And, and add that into that feedback loop is absolutely astounding. So the people that make the software for, for dragon and for the Falcon nine in which, and the, the software for both the flight and the ground side are matching and compatible is absolutely insane. Like the coolest thing about a rocket is obviously the engines and the propulsion cause that's the most visually striking, but again, it comes down to the electronics, the sensors, the thing that's driving, the thing, the unsung heroes of that entire space vehicle. That is the coolest thing. Cool. I mean, this is, this has been incredible. I deeply care more about the space after having yeah. And you definitely convinced me like evangelize for blue origin. Very well. Yeah. I mean, you got to rep like a win for either company has tremendous outsized ROI for everybody else, right? Like regarding like obviously, you know, people like to publicize billing air versus billing here, but in the end it's like, you know, a race to the bottom, right. The consumer always wins in this. That's our episode for this week. Thank you so much for listening. Make sure to subscribe to us and rate us on Apple podcasts. We would really appreciate the support. You can also follow me on Twitter at F Z from Cupertino and Busan. The ad next facade. See you guys next week.