Far Out: Manned Space and Future Investment Opportunities | Tacos & Tech Podcast

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Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host Neil Bloom, San Diego's tech ambassador and together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle.

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It's a really funny story how this came about. So you know the recent rocket launch, I was a huge, a huge fan of space and NASA as a child. As you can see, I've got the retrograde, what they call the worm logo here from the, from the early 80s which was my, you know, that was what I was inspired by and I was tweeting about the recent launch and Neil had mentioned oh by the Way, you know, I used to launch the space shuttle and me being a child of the 80s and being, you know, so profoundly impacted by it, I just lost my mind and was like, I did not know that and we need to talk a little bit more about that. And so that's kind of where this transpired from. So I was super excited when Neil had mentioned his background and I thought, you know, this would be. And actually it was a show that was like, we need to get you together and what better time to talk about, you know, Neil's experience and then tie it into, you know, how we can get involved as investors. And Neil was like, I know. So without further ado, I will let Neil kick this off and talk a little bit about the history, kind of set the time and the place, and then talk a little bit about what he did and how that led him to the startup world.

Yeah, awesome. Thanks, Caitlin. Thanks. Thanks everyone for having me. Most of you know me kind of from the software side and just evangelists of tech ecosystems, but I actually started my young entrepreneurial career or my young career in aerospace. I'm a UCSD graduation mechanical engineer undergrad and then my first full time job. I applied online to a company called Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne, which I applied like 50 places because in 2008, man, it was not easy to get a job. But luckily engineers were still getting jobs and ended up in la, in Canoga park, which had been kind of the site of all rocket propulsion since the mid-50s, since the days of Wernher von Braun. Somehow, randomly, Rocketdyne had become the place where all rocket engines have been developed for every manned launch system since the beginning for the us So I was lucky enough to join a company that had huge, huge history in this area. Not something I was like ever dreaming of becoming a part of. But once I worked with hundreds of thousands of engineers where all they want to do all day was put people in space. I took the Kool Aid and I was super into it. So really, really amazing experience. For five years I got to work on specifically rocket propulsion. So we'll dive deeper into like rockets in general, but my background specifically is the engine, so propulsion just the part, the business side of rockets. One of the coolest things I think about space and what's different about space compared to like, say, defense, is that it is insanely collaborative, worldwide and private partner, almost to its detriment sometimes, which we'll talk about on the politics side in a few slides. So we'll get there. We're going to Talk a little bit about space shuttle, which is going to be more kind of retro. It's in the past, but there's a lot of elements that are being used for future rocket development. So my area of focus was test and launch performance. Engineer and honestly the easiest answer what that sounds like and looks like for the software world is a product manager. So I owned our engines from the moment they were done being manufactured all the way through launch. Our engines specifically were reusable. So when they came back after two weeks in space, I then was in charge of building the plan for how to get them ready to be launched again. So I was colloquially known as engine Mom. There was three of us on a team, we each had about six engines that we owned. I knew my engine numbers, I knew the hardware on it, I knew them very well. Engine 2050, you know, one of my favorites. And so I was there for, for testing every brand new engine as well as any spare hardware. And then I was there for launch day. And sometimes I was in Florida, sometimes I was at our headquarters in Canoka Park. Depends on if it was my launch or not between my team of three. But we always on launch day, our team, we're always monitoring for about 10 hours pre launch. And I'll walk you through what a launch is like as well. I was part of 12 launches and 130 engine tests. And honestly the test took up way more of my time. We only launched four to five rockets a year, space shuttles. So you know, 300, 360 days a year I was working on testing and making sure we always had spare hardware or when they retired the shuttle, I was in charge of the next program, which was a staged rocket, kind of like the SpaceX style today where it's got multiple stages. We were in charge of stage two and I was part of that test program. So something happened though that got me to where you guys know me today. They retired the space shuttle and I stayed, but like 65% of the workforce was laid off. And I had some crazy survivor skill. I did not deserve to as a 25 year old to continue working on the space program when people, for 30 years, that's all they ever wanted to do. And so I actually started working with another co worker of mine, Adam Markowitz, on a way to help engineers retool and remarket themselves for the new workforce. How do they talk about what their skill sets are good for for rockets in any other, any other kind of industry? And that today became, that became Portfolium. We had some major pivots and it became more of a student job tool. But it really was built for engineers based on the experiences we had with the space shuttle program. So that's that picture there on the right is me with I think STS134. So not the very last, but the second to last space shuttle. It's humongous. This really doesn't show scale at all. But that thing is I think three, 250ft tall. It's massive. I think we're just standing at a weird angle so that you get the whole thing in one shot. A little bit about the space shuttle engine itself. And this is more just to nerd out on some really interesting weird stats. The space shuttle main engine, which those are on the right hand side, there's the three that stick out the back of the orbiter. These are about the same size as your average jet engine or a fighter jet engine. So 14ft long, 8ft wide and 8,000 pounds. The difference is a fighter jet engine puts out about 17,000 pounds of thrust, while this puts out 500,000 pounds of thrust. So a completely different magnitude order of thrust that these engines can do. The difference is obviously the fuel tank. That's, that's obviously that huge orange tank is humongous. And a lot of the lift needed for this whole orbiter stack itself is for the fuel tank in its own right because of how massive it is. But those three engines, when you launched the space, when you were launching the space shuttle, they were on from, from ground all the way until you get to space, eight and a half minutes. And that's the biggest difference for every rocket that's ever been designed from way back in the 50s, 60s, all the way through SpaceX now is that most rockets are not designed to operationally work from sea level to 300 miles up into space. Because of the changing pressures at different altitudes, you usually can't have rocket engines. They're just too expensive to be able to work at all those different varieties. But that was the, that was what this engine was designed for, was to be able to work at every, every potential possibility from a performance perspective. And that's why it was so expensive, to be honest, was because it was the Ferrari of engines. Really something else. Some pretty huge extremes we're working at. Negative 420 degrees of liquid oxygen, negative 340 degrees, sorry, hydrogen and oxygen, these two combine to combust at 6,000 degrees, which melts iron. And so you have to develop some pretty unique materials specifically for this engine. And what that all creates is water Vapor. You're, you know, really just combining two basic elements that are very clean burning, which is incredible. Stage combustion. I'm going to explain this on the next page. But really you've got three engine, three rocket engines within one engine. So you have a turbo pump mentality where you're burning all the propellants to spin the pumps to get them to perform at a higher pressure and then igniting them all over again. The exhaust is used as the fuel all over again. In here, I'm going to play a video of a start. It's one of my favorite videos because it's in slow motion. And through here I'm going to talk through the launch sequence that I was involved in. So this, while this is what's about to happen is, you know, few seconds here on Earth. I was on console for 10 hours before every launch to make sure that our engines were okay to be able to run because of the such extreme temperatures, minus 400 degrees. That does some weird things to metal, as you can imagine. It makes things bend, it makes sensors read really weird things. And so we had to let the whole space shuttle condition itself for four to six hours before it was ready to be actually ready to be ready to be launched. And that's mostly because of the hydrogen. And so like last month, SpaceX, you didn't use hydrogen, uses kerosene and is much easier, much simpler in terms of getting ready for launch. So right here you see the three engines start. They start for about seven seconds. It takes them to get to a steady state. We say, okay, they look good and the astronauts could still abort if they needed to. But at this point you can see the mock diamonds they have fully formed. That usually means we've got about a second left. And then the two giant white rockets on the sides, they will kick off. Once those start, you cannot turn off what's not seen here. But there's so much force that comes out of here. This whole engine here is wobbling. And if you could think of 4 or 5 inch thick metal wobbling and bending, it's insane. You wouldn't expect that whatsoever when you feel how thick that metal is. Just seeing the startup sequence for me is always really, really incredible. So all that obviously happens within milliseconds. But because of the cameras, we have to always monitor like everything, tiles that are falling, the instrumentation inside, even this pad and platform, we have to go and kind of make sure it works. As Michael can really attest to since he built the part of the pad here, it looks like there Is a lot of oversight over just launching seven people into space. One other thing to talk through. So you know, space shuttle 81 through 2011, SpaceX launch was just purely satellites, but just first manned in 2020 and now the Artemis program, which has honestly been in development since like I think the Bush era, but under different names and different, different objectives, has at least since 2017 has a goal of getting to the moon by 2024. And you'll see these are iterations as well that are being used and you'll notice a lot of similar looking colors. At least this is the same design of the space shuttles. Orange fuel and oxygen tank because they're using the same space shuttle main engines on the bottom they're just using four of them. They're also using the same SRBs but they're using taller ones. So they're using. So all this is going to have more thrust but they're smart in that they're vertically integrating meaning like pieces will fall off. It's not something that's gonna have to go all the way to space. It'll be staged as well. And they're using technology that's been developed over the last 30, 40 years so it doesn't have to have as much money to go into it. And so that's kind of a saving grace with the next manned program which the goal is purely get man on the moon and then there is a follow on of what does Mars look like. But these are not, I don't believe any of the Artemis ones are designed for Mars right now. What is interesting around this is the capsules on each of these tops are going to be designed by third party companies. So SpaceX has a proposal and I think this is their style. Blue Origin, which is owned by Jeff Bezos also has been down selected for a capsule and one other. This is separate than what what SpaceX just launched last month which is purely a contract just to bring humans to space station. So that is space station now is, you know, it's still a full time presence in space that we want to maintain, but it's no longer like about exploration. It is more just science experimentation both on the human body and other science. And so SpaceX and Boeing have the contract to pretty much just taxi people and separately supplies to the astronauts who are full time in space and they've been full time since 1998, which is pretty cool to have had a full time human presence that long now. So NASA's budget is tiny. This is a percent of the federal budget is what I'm showing here. It sits between half a percent, 1% right now. It actually is pretty high at 20 billion. It's honestly averaged between 13 to 18 billion for the last 20 years. That is not a lot. An aircraft carrier right now is built for $13 billion. So the entire space program of the United states, at least NASA's, is done for maybe an aircraft carrier battle group. And I'm saying specifically to defense because of the massive scale of difference of what we spend on space versus what defense spends in general. And there's a few reasons for this. Space is largely looked at as like what's the greater, bigger impact on humanity? Honestly, it's mostly technology driven and education really is about. And, and there's some diplomacy too. The fact that we can show that we're working hand in hand with Russia, Japan, Italy, Canada, like all these different.

Nations, 35 different individual space programs now.

Yeah, exactly. Incredible.

Amazing.

All for, you know, $20 billion. And that includes, by the way, stuff that's done, that's like research on Earth too. That includes deep space probes that we've had running since the 70s. That includes a lot of NASA's weather satellites that they have around the world too. So that's like you get a lot of bang for your buck for that $20 billion. As well as some of the smartest scientists and engineers on Earth working on these things, working on things for good. So pretty incredible. But not a lot of attention. It gets a lot of attention, but for not a lot that comes out of it per se. And so some of the things that happen in space is that because it can take 10 to 20 years to build that rocket, you obviously go through a lot of administration changes. So all of a sudden we want to go to Mars. Well now let's go to an asteroid. Oh, okay. That's different parameters. We had to design a new rocket. Scrap that. Let's start over again. That happens a lot.

Obama have initiative of asteroid landing and maybe Mars too, right?

Yes, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that, that's. Every administration has kind of had ideas and it changes and that restarts development cycles big time. Especially when NASA is the sole one building the hardware, or at least no, not building, but they are the one developing everything. What, what we've now seen. What's great is having this commercial private side. So SpaceX, while yes, they are NASA's customer, they're developing things that they want to develop that hopefully fits and selling it to NASA saying this is the way to get to space as opposed to the other way, where Boeing and Lockheed may say, hey, NASA, just tell us what you want, we'll make it for you. And kind of getting wagged in that regard, where NASA will change their mind and Boeing saying, okay, that's fine, we'll scrap it and work on the next thing. When you have a private company and you're able to fund it on your own, first you can build what you want and kind of push the government into designing and saying, this is what you need. So I think SpaceX has been huge for that and keeping us on track in that regard. Another big hindrance, I will call it. It's been touted as good and diplomatic, but if you look at this slide, every state touches the space program, which means a lot of oversight for NASA. This means that there's probably a private contractor who's developing something. You probably can akin this to kind of the automobile industry, you know, in terms of the supplier aspect. But it actually, for one vehicle, it really makes it complicated. And SpaceX has proven that when they build the entire rocket themselves, they get it done for cheaper, like significantly cheaper. You don't need to have all the shipping of one little piece that goes to the next place, which needs to all be inspected by NASA. SpaceX probably sits in three states. They sit in California, Texas and Florida. And they get it all done. They completely vertically integrate. And that's what private really means is the vertical integration, as opposed to NASA, which says, we're gonna pick a prime contractor and then thousands of subprime contractors to build this. And the reason that NASA's had to do that is to just guarantee that every senator will just vote to maintain their budget. Because it's so easy to just say, oh, a billion dollars for the space program, that doesn't affect my constituency. I don't care. I'll put that towards highway construction or something else. And so SpaceX or NASA has really, over the last 20, 30 years, really distribute itself to make sure that every senator has skin in the game to keep voting for that budget. Good and bad. That's the trend right now, is to vertically integrate and not have to be so concentrated around the entire country. Okay, so let's talk about the kind of the future of space. We talked about where the manned future of space is. That will continue to be because of one to two customers, NASA. Maybe someone else will come to say, hey, we want to. We want to build our own private space station. I don't know. That's not where the big growth is. The big growth is really in Satellites and other things around that. So the industry is booming because satellites have gotten so much smaller and really around the telecommunication aspect. You can beam Internet with a tiny little nanosatellite now. And that's what's really driving the growth of space. But what's great about that is that SpaceX and others like it being private, have been able to use NASA dollars to develop rockets for manned space that can also be used for private stuff too. So satellites and maybe even energy one day too. So you will see huge growth in just space in general. But know that that is not as going to be as big for manned space, it'll be for other areas. And we can talk a little bit what I think those other areas, this is my perception what we will see. Satellites. Some have been there for years, I mean decades. Some of these are billion dollar satellites put up by the National Reconnaissance Office. They're one of the largest suppliers or spenders of satellites. These are billion dollar satellites that you know, you don't really want to have to replace. And so if you could, if there's a lot around refueling and reusing existing hardware that's already in space, I think we'll see more of that.

So there's a couple of questions coming in. Michael had a question about tech transfer. Is there tech transfer between the US military and NASA?

Yeah, there is. Especially in propulsion side you'll see that the Air Force, which is pretty much the largest kind of, they're kind of the NASA of rockets for anything non manned they launch most of you know, the reconnaissance satellites and things like that. They will pay for us as a US to have dominance in a lot of aspects of rocketry. So you know, you'll get even Elon. SpaceX got some of its early funding from Air Force just to verify that we, we can produce this kind of rocket technology. So that is, that's kind of the grant side that you'll see in a sense, you know, to go to these is the military that they want to make sure that we have the capabilities that are better than any other country. Right now the big push are in two areas, alternative fuels and alternative only meaning things we haven't used. Methane is one area that we have not built engines in before. But Blue Origin is championing the use of methane. I guess there's three areas, alternative fuels. Also trying to get our reliance off of Russian engines. So we actually still use a lot of Russian. We use two different main Russian engines for launching some of our satellites which is a huge problem because they launched some of like the US's defense satellites. The Atlas 5 is kind of the workhorse of satellite launchers for the National Reconnaissance Office. These billion dollar satellites I talked about and we really need to stop relying on Russia. We need to be able to launch our own rocket engines just like we also need to be able to launch our own people. So that's another area is building pretty large scale engines to replace on the Atlas V. And then the third area, it just escaped me, oh, hypersonics. So this is kind of the next aspect of air breathing engines to get to the highest, highest mach levels. This is kind of taking the Concorde to the next level of really high air fast travel. So those are kind of the three areas that I'm seeing a lot of spend right now in terms of kind of from a propulsion area. The picks and shovels piece though, you're seeing these other areas here in space propulsion. So this is how else besides just liquid rocket engines could we get travel in space. This is what Michael mentioned about nuclear propulsion. There's also things as plasma and solar, solar energy, even solar kites as they call them. So using photons to actually push a giant, giant kite. This is a whole area that we could see some development and investment in space. Gps. So all the GPS satellites right now point back to Earth and they've mapped Earth really well. We have Google Maps on our phone, but we don't know anything around kind of a coordinate system outside of Earth. And so there is kind of, I think a whole, once we start seeing travel to other areas, an asteroid, moon, we're gonna want to map it. And I think there'll be a whole effort to put GPS in space. GPS where we map our eco, our solar system from a coordinate and quadrant area. And then once we're traveling in space, radiation protection is going to be huge. So you'll see a lot of investment around just protecting humans in space. You see a lot around how long can humans stay in space right now? And just I think in February one of the female US astronauts took the new record for the longest time in space. And that is going to keep getting bumped up. I think we're going to keep pushing to see how long can humans get there if we really expect that we can get to Mars, which potentially could be like 18 months or longer. And we need to see what that does to the human body. So these are just areas that I think are going to be interesting to watch.

Yeah, I mean before we jump into, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about like again, how US as an angel group could get involved early in some of these companies. But there was a really interesting comment on the chat channel which is something that I think about a lot, you know, and it's a lot about like ownership of space. Like I know the Outer Space Treaty, the UN Outer Space Treaty exists, right? You can't weaponize things like the moon or celestial bodies or put weapons of mass destruction into orbit. Which would make a lot of the James Bond villains I think would be violating that I can think of. Diamonds are forever. I think there's a. Anyways, but there was a question here about ownership and it says so space assets, for example, when we get into asteroid mining, is it finders keepers when it comes into claiming ownership of territory resources? Are we just applying maritime law into space? So I don't know if the Outer Space Treaty covers that or.

Yeah, I don't have a good sense of this. I think moon is going to be where we all first kind of figure that out. Now that we've had. I think it's four countries have now landed something on the moon, maybe five. China, India, us, Russia I think I can't remember if they actually have. And then Israel I think tried something recently too. So I think that is, that is going to be interesting to watch what happens there. We could look at an Antarctica model where we've kind of given quadrants like saying these areas are. You can have a base at, you know, this is where the US can have a base and kind of come together and say that. But yeah, that is. I have no idea how to bite that off on the diplomacy of space piece.

So I do want to talk a little bit about how we can get involved as an angel group. There's one more interesting question. I'm such a nerd. There's a really interesting question here from Michael again about radiation and he says I see your slides as radiation protection listed. When I was assigned to a nuclear submarine we would receive more radiation by a factor of 100x wow. On a cross country airline flight than we would in week underway. The radiation levels must be far worse in space. Can you comment?

Yeah, there's a lot of research continuously being done on this. But the space station is very much highly protected. I would say from this that is the number one importance is making sure that you are not coming home with cancer after spending 300 days in space. And from all from what we've seen, it is not too significant from some of these astronauts who are coming down 10, 20, 30 years later after spending this much time in space. So I think it's a testament to that focus of building the space station in that way. I think still to be determined since we just had, I think her name is Peggy, who just spent 370 days, it's the longest now that just happened in February. So we don't really know what happens to the body for more than a year. But like you said like one airline flight could produce more. No, we've got the materials to keep people protected in space at least from a year long perspective. So so far it's been good. But I think we will be doing more research there to see what else we can be doing.

Great. And there's some comments from Ted about small satellites. He was talking about small satellites. A friend of him is at Georgia Tech is working on small satellites. I don't know if that's something that is on your radar and could be investable. Investable.

So yeah, this, this is the hugest, biggest area of space I think to invest in for all of us. Nanosats are kind of the smallest, tiny little area. SpaceX is launching their SpaceX in the last few years has put up a 500 satellite FL fleet. They now have 500 satellites in space that they've launched. They put up 60 just last week with one rocket engine, one rocket launch. Because of what telecommunications is really miniaturized ourselves to. Satellites are absolutely shrinking to such a high level or a small level. And what this is typically we're seeing it for is like beaming communications, Internet broadband, other things like that. And like you'll see SpaceX right now is if you read more into their star, I think it's called Starlink 500 satellites where they are, they still got to find a customer. They just put the satellites up and because it's so cheap for them and now they have to go prove that they can meet FCC's requirements. So I believe they're under the gun to test that they can hit some specific wavelength by October to hit a pretty massive grant by the FCC for satellite communication. And the same with I believe Facebook or Google has a satellite that they have launched too. Like they really, it's really all about getting the entire world connected to the Internet or other telecommunication. And so these satellites have just come down so, so much in price because big tech and private industry are paying for it, which is great to have such so many customers. So that I think is where you'll see a lot of the funding going for startups either related to launching tiny rockets that can launch a nanosat or bigger Rockets that can launch a whole bunch. And this could be for a bunch of customers, some areas to focus on for that. So we've mentioned, you know, Rocket Lab is kind of one of the newer and larger companies that is building kind of full rockets. But there's a bunch of companies that you can look up that are raising for the kind of ecosystem around satellites now the hardest thing for angels is how much money that needs to go into these companies to start it. Look at SpaceX, its very first raise was $60 million. It probably already had some of Elon's money ahead of that too. But still that first raise was 60 million and they've gone on to raise $3.2 billion over 18 years. They're valued at people say around 33 billion. You actually could, I hear there are secondaries right now to buy a SpaceX stock.

They also have a lot of grants too.

They do, they have a lot of grants for sure. And they've gotten a lot of customers. Well, not a lot of customers like space. NASA has given them money now to get to where they're at.

So for example, if I looked at, I looked up rocket Lab on PitchBook and their series A, I mean granted this was a few years ago, their Series a was only 5 million on an 8 million pre valuation. So I mean, I mean again, that was a few years ago. Yeah, some of the, I mean I was looking up and some of them were pretty reasonable in their early stages. It's about like how do you identify and where do we find these deals? Right, Yep.

I think LA is definitely much further ahead than us in terms of an ecosystem for rockets. The El Segundo kind of that whole aerospace coast is very well suited for talent. But I think really the biggest thing that we can do is follow the talent. And so I've seen deals come through where it's two former SpaceX people starting blank X thing. I think it's, it's that aspect of getting to know the talent and seeing what they're doing. Another area, this is kind of early talent. But UCSD has two different rocket engine clubs, rocket clubs, two student clubs that I actually sponsored when I was at Rocketdyne. And I love keeping track and saying where are these people now? You know, they've gone on to SpaceX and others and I look to when are they going to start their own. So for me it's very much talent based. Where are people coming from? Getting to know them from your own industry and then asking our LA chapter to send us some of those Deals in San Diego as well as we have a member, Ellen Chang, who is an aerospace focused investor. And so if we want to see more deals, let's ask for it.

Yeah, that would be great. We do need to ask her because that is it. I mean, she is focused on that. So yeah, it was doing a lot of, you know, I was doing a lot of research and a lot of these companies. Yes, some of them are older, but you know, their first couple of rounds were pretty modest. So just a matter of, you know, getting in front of them.

Yeah, I think the, for me is looking at are they picks and shovels or are they going to go for big. And I think if you're going for, you're going to build your whole rocket yourself, you really have to have understand where you can get those grants and early funding that will take you past, way past, like meeting customers, you know. So this is going to come.

What do you mean by picks and shovels?

Sure.

Thanks.

Yeah, so the picks and shovels idea is around kind of the services around this. So this is 3D printing specifically for rocket engines or for unique allied metals. Oh, okay.

Got it.

From the Gold Rush. Yeah, it's the references from the Gold Rush.

Yep. Or it could be a whole new software that is for, you know, I don't know, designing. Designing something for Rocket 3. Yeah. I had a question as a company, I remember at ucsd, I think they are doing sort of workflow software for aerospace. Do you know, are there other examples like that that you've seen in town that maybe we might look out for? Yes, there. There was one. I think they've since shut down. It was called arc. And I'm trying to remember what arc. ARC stood for, but I think that's who you're talking about. Additive Rocket Corp. Yep. Yeah, they're still up and running. Oh, good. Okay. A little bit away from Aerospace. The other, the other company that started on Tri D. Remember that? Tri D? I do. I can't remember what they did. 3D printed design. Okay, got it. Yep, I remember them. And that comes probably exactly from the club they were from. There was a 3D printed rocket club.

Million dollars in fees.

Okay, got it.

Hey, Neil, one more question for you. You mentioned orbital debris and how it tends to stay up there. One of the questions I've never really been able to quite understand is why is it that we have to continually update, for example, satellite orbits and. And make fine adjustments to them, otherwise they would decay and fall to the earth? And why the space debris doesn't Suffer that same problem.

Good science, physics. Question, what's the right answer?

I don't know.

So I know it's. I think it is related to drag of some sort. And so the size of satellites, that it eventually gets to a place that it does get to some atmospheric effects, and so it pulls it down quicker, I believe, versus, like, little pieces, they just don't catch atmosphere the same way. And so just kind of stay in rotation, I believe. I also don't know what size constitutes. I can't claim. Oh, Michael. Michael can answer. I'm gonna stop.

Michael says he's got the answer. Let's.

Michael.

Okay. So every orbital object is not in a perfect orbit. They're, you know, for whatever reason, they. They don't have a perfect orbit. That puts them up there forever, but it puts them up there for a long time. And most of the larger satellites, anything of value, has orbital thrusters to adjust the orbit so they don't dip down into the atmosphere where there's some resistance, and then they fall out of orbit. The space debris, there's so much of it that, sure, some of it touches the atmosphere, falls out of orbit, and burns up in reentry, but again, there's so much of it that it's still a huge problem.

Got it. Thank you. And do you see a business case for cleaning some of that debris, Whether it's from ground based lasers or whether it's actual mechanical devices out in space that go out and clean them up, or is that still too far away?

Well, I think there's a huge need for it. You know, the amount of debris that was put into orbit when the Chinese blew up that satellite, maybe half a dozen ten years ago. There's a huge need for it Because a very small piece of orbital debris traveling at 20,000 miles per hour can be catastrophic on impact to a valuable satellite. But it's a very challenging problem because satellites are largely made of aluminum, which is free of magnetic forces. So there's no actual easy way to capture the debris.

Got it. Thank you.

I don't know enough about lasers or anything else to know if that's an economically feasible way of.

I'm getting really interested in space trash right now.

That's right. We'll go up there, the recycle bags.

It really is kind of a trade off of, you know, we have the infrastructure in place to build satellites and put a new satellite up. We don't have the infrastructure at all to build a roving spacecraft that could go and collect and vacuum up stuff. So it's really just the investment in the business case, if Air Force said, hey, we just lost one or two two billion dollar satellites, we could have put that money into saving them. Here's $2 billion, let's go figure it out. That's, that's when it happens. But you're not, I don't think you're gonna see it from a private customer yet. So.

Right.

And so Neil, would you know the guy to go to at the Air Force to picture this?

I could help figure that out. Yeah, there's probably a few people that we could, we could find out.

I'm down.

We are on a space trash hunt right now. You're gonna help us. That is fabulous. So Neil, I had one quick thing, I'm opening up to questions, but I had a really, really quick question about, you know, we're talking a lot about funding and getting involved and what do you see as kind of the end game for these companies? Right. So when I was doing some research, there's not a lot of acquisitions. Right. I think this private, public, you know, partnership in terms of aerospace is relatively new. So what do you see as the end game? Acquisition play?

Yeah, that's, that's a tough one to regard that there's only so many customers. Right. So right now SpaceX is the big player and they've declared we're gonna build it all ourselves. They're kind of the apple, right? They want, they want their whole ecosystem. What they will do is acquihire so they will look for talent teams that they're missing. And so I see talent moving around in the industry kind of going to them or really a lot going to Blue Origin lately. But I think what we need to look at is where do the next big customers come from. And so if we unlock satellites the way that we're doing, what services can be moved to satellite and in a sense this new version of wireless that we don't think about right now. So I think it's gonna be more on the services side like what can satellites do beyond just beam Internet and beam us directv and satellite radio? I think that is an area where we might find a whole new customer. And therefore you could see some kind of big giant come to that. But from the rocket engines and the rockets themselves, hard to say who buys them, except for maybe if you look at some of the players from say Space Shuttle and others who got pushed out by SpaceX, they may consolidate and buy their way back in. So you might see Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman somehow buy their way back into trying to compete with SpaceX or catch up. So I think you'll see some big space, maybe get there. But yeah. And maybe, you know, Rocket Lab and others. Maybe they go public. I don't know if SpaceX, if that's a plan for them, I'm not. Honestly not sure. But their end game is. I don't know if it matters right now. Same with Blue Origin being just Jeff Bezos pet project. Yeah. I don't think it's about a business that they're trying to run.

I think their origin is that it is just him and like a ton of grants. That's it. It's crazy, right?

And we've had a number of those. We've had, you know, there was what. Well, Richard Branson is another one. And then there's what's the. We had one where it was. What was the former co founder of Microsoft and he was going to launch rockets to go. Paul Allen had his own. Right. So there's a lot of like it's kind of the billionaires who can afford to build these right now. So I hope that we get back into a. I think if we've cracked the private side and we're seeing Rocket Lab and a lot of these others build from scratch, I think there's a potential where we. We could see some conglomerate come together that could compete with these.

Yeah, yeah.

Real quick, the background here. I want to give a shout out that you can go see my desk coffee mug. This is it right here. The white and my chair in the LA Air and Space Museum. So we donated our entire mission control. We like literally this is what I worked on. We donated it. And so if you go see Endeavor, they take you through this part first. And. And yeah.

And so how do I identify when I take my kids? How do I identify which seat is yours? That mug still there or.

It says it is, but it says Performance Engineer above my seat.

Got it.

Very cool.

I'd be open to doing like a TCA road trip one day probably months from now where we go. I'm totally down to like go walk and see the Endeavor and other stuff like that.

Sign me up.

Look at Jason's background. I like that Tron Talk about viasat. You've been very quiet.

Actually. And I'm not at viasat anymore.

Oh.

But I partly was there because I thought space was really cool. This is a really cool talk. Neil. That's really neat about your coffee mug there. I want to see that.

Thanks. The mug isn't as cool as the, the countdown and everything experience. But, you know, it's cool to me.

But it's neat that you have a piece of your history in a museum.

Jason, you, when, while you were with TCA and invested, I think, in the company even before that, led a 3D metal printing company.

I was thinking about that as you were talking Fabricate label.

Right.

And they.

They're doing well. Yeah, they're. They're there in Sorrento Valley doing well. So they're continuing to progress their 3D printing metal technology. They've got contracts with BMW and Stanley and a bunch of others.

That's cool.

Is it FDM or is it Sintering or What kind of 3D printing?

So, you know, you're probably exceeding my expertise here, but it uses metal suspended in fluid and then they use like lasers, like lcd, like the tft, electric, electromagnetic, whatever.

Oh, yes. I've seen these guys. Yes.

Bind the atoms that are in the fluid down and so it can print these very complex structures that are really, really solid because all of the atoms of the. Of the material are lined up in a precise fashion, which doesn't happen with the laser powder systems or other systems, produce these very precise, very dense hard metal objects.

Is the name of that company, Jason.

It's called Fabric 8 Labs. You can look it up on the web. It's fabric and the number eight. Assemble eight.

Got it. Thank you.

Sure.

All right. I gotta get out of this spacesuit. I'm sweating. Looks cool.

It is cool. Hey, thanks for the presentation, Neil.

Very cool. Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Blum. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest Co Working in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter at Neobloom as well as Fresh Brewed Tech and Tacos and Tech Pod on Twitter too.