F.O.S. Raphael Roettgen Interview

Hello everyone, and welcome to the future of Space. I'm your host, Daniel Fox. Our guest today is Rafael Rudgin. He's an investor and founder of E2MC Ventures, a space focused early stage venture capital firm. He's the host of Space Business podcast, author of Huck Highness. It's a German word. It's an introductionary book on the space economy and about to be translated in other languages. He's a venture partner, a space for impact, and lectures on space entrepreneurship at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and at the International Space University where he also serves as a governing member. Rafael, welcome to the future Space.

It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Where are we finding you right now? I think you're in Zurich, Switzerland, is that correct?

I'm just right outside of Zurich on Lake Zurich. It's been a beautiful, almost spring like day. Yeah.

Now, before we get into your career in space and your journey, can you Share with Us 3 Words for you that would capture the meaning of space for you?

Okay. I mean, the final frontier. I mean, come on, I'm like, I'm like the biggest Trekkie. I mean, that was sort of like a no brainer. I'm not sure that's what you were looking for, but this literally is what sort of comes to my mind if somebody asked me with three words of space, the final Frontier. You know, I've watched all of the Star Trek, the various series, I love all of them for various reasons. And it's, you know, it's, it's, it's an icon of pop culture that has really brought space close to many people. And you know, I cherish it for that. And even today, you know, as you know and you mentioned, I have a podcast. And you know, very often, well, actually very often my last question in every episode is about science fiction, is like, guys, do you like science fiction? And what do you like? And people can answer anything. Could be books, it could be movie, it could be TV series. And I think in like 65 episodes or so, there's only been like one person who says they don't like science fiction. There's always one, right? But everybody else is like, oh, I love science fiction. And then the two most frequent answers, I mean, sometimes people get really cerebral and have actually read a lot of books. But the two most frequent answers I think is fair to say is either Star wars or Star Trek. And it has really influenced people. And I cherish it for that because, you know, I do a lot of outreach work in space and I think it's still very important to do more space outreach despite all of the things we have going on. I can tell you from my perspective as an investor, we need more entrepreneurs, we need more investors in space, we need more supportive governments, we need more support in the general populations. And anything that helps us with that, even if it's like a science fiction TV series, is very welcome to me.

Do you have one favorite Star Trek series? I mean, obviously there was the original one and then there was the Deep Space Nine and the Next Generation. Is your heart really in. In one in particular or all of them?

Yeah, very much so. Deep Space Nine and. And for many reasons. I mean, you're gonna ask me why? Of course. So of course I love the original and I mean, I love all of them. Right. Voyager. There are mixed opinions and apologies to, to people who are actually not into Star Trek. They're like, oh my God, this interview is going to be the rest of the hours about Star Trek, but I'm sure you're going to ask me something else soon. So really briefly, Deep Space Nine because it's a little bit darker, right? And I like it when science fiction is a little bit more realistic about life so that, you know, there's wars going on, there's fighting factions, there is a lot of politics, there is. I don't want to give too many spoilers. There's a very strong spiritual element in Deep Space Nine. And I think as we go out and venture into the cosmos, as we hopefully will, all of these things that define us as humans, whether they're good or bad, they'll accompany us, right? They'll accompany humanity. Whether it is wars, whether it is fighting, whether it is religion. So I like series who are realistic or science fiction works in general who are realistic in that aspect. Another one which I really love is the Expanse. And again, it's for similar reasons.

In fact, some. I was going to ask you because a lot of people actually compare the two when it time to envision the future. Either the Expanse one where it's based more on conflict, or the Star Trek. And for me, usually my answer is that they're not really different. They're just. It's the same but a different story told from different perspective. I think the Expanse has more of a generic storytelling from different perspectives. But the Star Trek was always told from the main antagonist, which is, you know, obviously the, the from the Enterprise. But that story could have been told from, you know, other people, other characters, and it would have been a total different story. Do you think that the Two are similar, or they're really two different visions.

I think there's. There's similarities and then there's. There's differences, right? I mean, Star Trek, of course, you have many, many different races. And aliens, of course, they're basically all humanoid aliens, right? Just like the ears change or the skin color changes. And then one explanation that's frequently, which of course makes a lot of sense, is that they all evolved from the same race in the beginning, and then it just went off throughout the universe and sort of adapted to local conditions, which is a very elegant explanation, by the way. I think one difference is that I think the Expanse, you can kind of feel it's a little bit nearer in time because it really carries a lot of the things that we have today forward in sort of, very, I think, very plausible ways. I mean, really, the only sort of wildcard element there is the. And again, I don't want to give too many spoilers is the alien element, right? Which I think is a very interesting wildcard element. Whereas Star Trek, I mean, again, it kind of depends which series you're looking at, but it's sort of, in many ways a sort of socialist utopia, right? I mean, they basically seem to have everything right. You need something, you go to replicate it. That's basically it, right? I mean, it's like everybody has all of their needs taken care of. That's clearly not the case in the Expanse, right, where you basically have racism going on against the Belters. And it's a very sort of, you know, clearly a very capitalist society. I mean, Star Trek, the closest to come to capitalism, is probably another reason I like Deep Space Nine. In Deep Space Nine, you have a very strong presence of race called the Ferengi, who are extremely capitalist. Let's leave it there.

Do you think that the. You're talking a little bit earlier about Deep Space Nine and the spiritual aspect of it. How do you think the mythology or the religion world will evolve as we go to space? Do you think that those religions will find a way to adapt and. And obviously justify the expansion and, you know, create their own story as they go to space? Whether it be new mythology, new religion, as we. As we. As we venture into outer space, what.

Do you think there might well be? And, you know, it could be. Could be really interesting because, I mean, on the face of it, you know, it could challenge some of the creation stories we currently have in the world's religions, right? Like, what if another sort of alien race shows up and it's like, wait a second, I Mean, they weren't in one of the books. It's like, where did it come from? But I think, yeah, there's a chance, I do think spirituality is going to, you know, accompany us and it's going to adapt. I think there is, I don't want to get into religious discussion, I guess, but I think it is something that defines us as humans. And honestly, I, I, I wish it's going to accompany us, you know, and because I sometimes say that if we really now getting serious about now meaning sort of the next, I don't know, centuries this way to settle other places in first the solar system, then, you know, so far we have only taken humans into space, right? Like, like even now with the private flights, we're probably somewhere between 6 and 700 individual humans who have crossed the common line or the air force line of 50 miles and have been to space. We haven't taken humanity into space in any way because what defines us as humanity, in my mind at least Raphael's opinion is things like arts, including music, sports, reproduction, having families, and yes, spirituality. And we're not going to successfully, I think, settle another place in a permanent way if we don't figure out how to take all of these elements that make us define us as humanity along.

And what do you think are going to be the benefits for our own humanity as we go to space? I mean, a lot of, I mean there is the storytelling of science and technology going to space. I mean, people are always super quick to say, well, you know, those are the benefits. But what is the human story? What, what benefits bringing the humanity to space will bring back to the earth?

Yeah, it's, that's a super interesting question. And in fact, you, you mentioned my book and it's. Yes, the original edition is in German, it's called Hokinaus. And I don't expect any non German speaker to pronounce this correctly. It means something like far above or like, you know, know in a positive sense. We haven't figured out the English translation yet of the title, but there's actually a chapter basically on that. It's worded slightly differently. I think that the title of the chapter in English would be something like why is space important? And so you mentioned the signs. And so actually in the chapter and you know, I should have a copy of the book here, but I actually don't. Every time I have a hard copy, I basically give it away right away to somebody, so I can't show it to you. I'm sorry, but there's one chapter in There why space important? So I'm going to just talk off the top for memory here. I basically divided into two parts, so called carrots and sticks, right? So you have the carrots parts like the positive reasons why space is important. And you mentioned science, of course, you know, going to space, exploring the solar system, you know, doing planetary science and things like that, understanding whether there's life in other places, understanding, you know, what if there's something we can learn from Venus with the runaway greenhouse effect for Earth, many, many different things. There's also the technological spin offs. So I mean that's been known since the Apollo program, right? A lot of stuff we developed for space we can then end up using on Earth as well. Stuff like mri, basically origin for MRI and many, many other things. Like NASA has a list of those things somewhere on their website as basically list of spin off technologies. Interestingly also on the technology side, we're now getting to a stage and this is kind of where my role as an investor comes in, where space is getting so much cheaper now thanks to SpaceX and other people both accessing and operating in space that now we can actually think about, for example manufacturing stuff in space and basically substantially making use of microgravity, sometimes also of a hard vacuum or radiation. But most of the time it's about microgravity that enables us in theory, not in theory, we know it enables us to do things like design better pharmaceuticals or grow organ tissue in space and things like that, or advanced materials, better semiconductors. And so all of that of course benefits us back here on Earth. We may produce it in space, but we bring it back and it benefits us here. So that's kind of the technology stuff you mentioned. And that is very important. But I think you wanted me to. I think you were mentioning the words like the human story or something. And so what I think you mean by that is something that I also mentioned in my book is basically I'll give you two examples. One is the act of going to space. There's something called the overview effect. And I don't know where you're going to have Frank White who coined the term on your. On the serials probably would be a good guest. But for listeners who may not know the overview effect. So again, a term coined by American writer Frank Wright to describe something that pretty much, I think every astronaut and cosmonaut has reported that once you're up there and look down, something happens with you emotionally. When you see the world as a whole, almost as a whole, right. You see basically it's Sort of like this ball in blackness, really thin blue line as the atmosphere. You obviously don't see any borders, right? Because no drawn borders on Earth. And you kind of become something like a mixture of an, like immediately become mixture of an immediate environmentalist, pacifist, all of that, right. There's many quotes about the overview effect. One that comes to my mind and I did put it at the beginning of this chapter or one of the chapters in my book is by Ed Mitchell, one of the Apollo astronauts. And I forget the full quote now, but it's basically something like, he says something like, oh, I wish I could drag a politician up to the moon and show him the Earth from the moon and say, look at this, you son of a bitch. And you know, sort of very optimistically speaking, maybe there would be a benefit of like dragging Vladimir Putin up to space. And like, look at this, another person, and I really wish I could remember who said that, I heard it recently. Another person in this war context said, when you're up in space, you realize that every war is a civil war. And I thought it was just an amazing quote. So that's the overview effect. And then talking about the human story, another thing which I find really interesting. And we kind of started talking about settling other places. So I also love history, right? And so I look back at Earth's history and you know, sort of settling in other places that we've done. Places like what became the U.S. right? North America, also Australia and other places. And if you stick with the US example, frankly, also Australia, you know, very interesting societies evolved because the sort of the self selected group of people. Well, Australia, not necessarily self selected, I guess, but anyway, stick with the U.S. australia, of course people may remember as a penal, started as a penal colony, but with the US right, I mean the society of immigrants who are looking for opportunity and willing to work hard, right? And I think that explains a lot of the success of the United States as a country. And I do believe something similar may happen if we start settling places outside Earth, because I mean, those environments are even harsher. Can you imagine the people who choose to go to Mars? You imagine the type of person, the motivation, like knowing the hardship they're going to encounter, like the, like, you know, the inspiration, the willingness to work to, you know, endure really hard conditions in the beginning. I mean, it's going to, I mean, maybe there's going to be some nutcases as always, but it's going to attract many of the best of us, which actually going back to science fiction and to The Expanse. Right. So we're just going to give away some spoilers. So the Expanse, right there's basically Earth as a society, Mars as a separate society, and then the belt, basically the asteroid belt, Mars, which is basically called the Martian Congressional Republic. So it clearly seceded from Earth is clear. I don't know if you agree. Have you seen the Expanse? Okay, so you would agree that Mars is depicted as a far more advanced society, technological and otherwise, than Earth. And I buy that every single day for the reasons I just absolutely.

The, it's, you know, if you look at the people that left Europe, as you were saying, you know, to America, the hardship that they had to, they had to give up, you know, whatever life that they had, the hardship of crossing an ocean to an unknown future with the desire to start something new. And we can all, we can all also compare it to when you have children and then at one point they leave your house and they don't want to replicate also the issues that their parents had. You know, you always leave with the desire not to repeat the mistakes or to do better. And exactly what's going to happen also it's not going to be at the expense of the Earth. It's going to be for the benefit when you leave your house or your parents, you don't abandon your parents behind you try to elevate the knowledge and the experience and the resources and your capacity, your resiliency, your capacity to, you know, increase the wealth. And that is at the benefit of the family. So going to space is going to be that kind of, that same relationship, that principal, the principles. First of all, I mean, from a resource perspective, the sooner we can mine off planet, off the, the Earth, the better it is. I mean, whatever vision of the future that we have, whether it's a battery economy or it's a solar economy, if we have to harvest all these rare materials or anything on Earth, it will be as damaging as any other just because of the scale of it. So harvesting on the moon or harvesting in a place that doesn't have the complexity of environment as you find on the planet, is not even a debate. Of course, course you want to go, you know, you want to take it from there. But all the technology and advances and the question of humanity and seeing humanity within the context of space will just advance the, the big questions that we have, the, the, the societies that we have. Understanding that it just, you know, enlarges or all the, the knowledge and information. So I think that the human story, the human story is the life story like Life goes where it wants to go. As soon as has a way to get there. Like it never whether from the little village that we were. And then we looked at the mountain, we didn't look at the mountain and said, we don't want to go over there. We looked at the mountain and we're like, how can I get over there? And once you get to, over the mountain and you get to the beach, yeah, it's not like, no, I don't want to go to the beach. It's like, well, now I'm stuck. How can I get, you know, how can I get to the wall? So it's always wanting to go forward. Now we have the capacity.

Yeah, I agree. I think something, what you're touching upon is I very much believe that sort of exploration is something that's innate in humans. Maybe not every single human, but I think at large in humanity. And by the way, it doesn't necessarily mean that you sort of, if you kind of keep moving forward, that you sort of hate the place you leave. I mean, sometimes it does because maybe you were treated very badly and you left for that reason, which obviously happened throughout history. But very often it actually also means you go to another place you explore and you love coming back. Right? There was, I'm forgetting all of these people whose quotes I love now, but there was a famous mountain climber who once said sort of like, you know, one of the reasons I go to the mountains is to come back. I go there, I enjoy the mountain, you know, the majesty of the mountain. But then I come back to humanity and I love that. And I think that, you know, something similar could happen to people who were space for a longer time than currently that you come back to Earth and you're like, oh my God, this is such a great.

Well, that's, that's part of the, the experience of traveling. You know, we, we live in places, we take things for granted. And then you travel. Now you can travel without really experiencing the outside, just always living in your little bubble. But you, you can. I mean, from my end, I've lived in many places. And when you live in different places, you start to discover the realities of those places. And then it makes you appreciate what you have back home that you took for granted. So when you do come back, you have a better appreciation of these little things that like, oh, you know, we don't really think about it. And one of them as we go to space is I do believe that there's going to be a tremendous wave of innovation when it comes to recycling and how we manage our resources. Because on Earth there's not really a. Well, now there's more, but there hasn't been this huge pressure to be careful because it's always there. You know, water in some ways is always there. The, that atom of carbon that is so essential for our life is kind of present in many places. But when you go to space, you, you can't just like, oh, I'm gonna start traveling for 30 years and then I can do these little pit stops and just, you know, replenish in carbon atoms of carbon that whatever you, you get on board or whatever you have on the moon, you will have, you will have to figure out ways to recycle and reuse and be extremely logic about how, how you, you use it because you can't, you can't just like open the gate, open the door and just throw that out into the, you know, into space because that would be like throwing gold or water. So there's, there's definitely going to be, I think, a lot of innovations in managing more sustainably and more responsibly our resources. And that's going to come from actually going to space. Do you agree?

Yeah, I do agree. There's an interesting right dichotomy here that on the one hand, space is the solution because it has basically everything that we could ever need, right, for practical purposes, unlimited energy and unlimited raw materials. And then in practical terms, like you described, we have to, because we're very fragile beings outside of our natural biosphere, we have to be very careful how we use these raw materials.

I mean, we are fragile, but also believe that we're extremely resilient. And now we've, I think we've managed to bypass. I don't know if you read the book Homo deus, the follow up to Homo sapien, but in his book he states how we've managed to overcome these three big killers. So there were disease, wars and famine, but now even exploration, the cost of human exploration is almost, I mean, there is a risk, obviously, you know, there's been a risk and with the, the rockets and there will be risk as we go on the moon and Mars. But that, that human cost of exploration is also, we've, we've met, we're managing that now. We can send a helicopter and we can send rovers to places and we can send environment that's going to kind of create a certain stability so that by the time we show up, it's going to be much easier and you won't have. I try when I Say that we won't have, you know, to make sure that there's not going to be a time, but like there won't be these, these expansion where like thousands or millions of people die trying to settle to new places. Like we saw when, you know, in the Americas when people came and you could have an entire village disappearing because of famine or because they didn't know what to do or the hardship of a, you know, creating the land and dying in the process.

Yeah, I think that's true in this context. It's actually also. And some of the initial people may still die because it's a very dangerous activity. Right. But again, I think, you know, it's something, this type of exploration is something innate in us humans and some of the members of humanity are sort of willing to take those risks. Right. And it's always been like that. I mean, it's like the great explorers centuries ago or even like last century, like, you know, the great Antarctic explorers like Shackleton. I mean, many people don't remember that. Yes, on the one hand, going to Antarctica in whatever the 1910s was easier than space because, you know, you can breathe the atmosphere, the pressure is right. Temperature range, not really, but of course it's easier than being in like the vacuum of space. On the other hand, you know, some stuff was more difficult. I mean, think about communications. I mean, it was worse than going to Mars because, I mean, you were there in Antarctica. There was no, basically no easy communications back to, you know, England or anywhere else in the civilized world. Right. But at least in Mars, okay, if you're very far away, you may have a 20 plus minute delay, but you can communicate.

I read, I read this book about, I can't remember which explorer, but they were down in Antarctica to record the weather. They were there. And just the hardship of being on the glacier stuck and dealing with minus 40s and minus 50s just for the sake of recording the temperature, the weather, so that they could create, you know, because with the information they would be able to create a model and that would be able to predict and help, you know, people back in London. But like the, the story of this person stuck in a little cabin almost dying several times just to get these pieces of information or the other. There's a recent on Netflix, it was in Greenland where they go just trying to figure out if Greenland is actually connected to the land and in the process, you know, go through almost dying at several times just to have these infant. The knowledge that now it's really easy to get just through the satellite. Rafael can you, can you share with us your journey of obviously a Star Trek fan, but to the actualization and where you are right now, really neck deep into the space industry and community?

Sure. I mean, so I loved Star Trek as a child and very sadly I actually did not go into space very early on. I wish I could tell you I'm MIT trained rocket scientist, but I'm not, I'm, I'm an, I'm a Wharton trained investment banker. And so I started out my career in investment banking. I then switched to the investment side and the public markets and worked on prop desks and hedge funds and then sort of accidentally slipped into the space industry, you know, five, six years ago, basically by doing a project about SpaceX and I, which I had, you know, I'd seen sort of like the SpaceX rockets launch and then eventually come back from 2015 onwards and was kind of as fascinated with that, watching that as probably many other people. But I never studied it in detail and it's the first time I actually really looked in detail and also in business and financial detail, economic detail, I guess. And then I started realizing everything is about to change. It's like space, the space sector is really about to change. This is an inflection point. Like finally, finally, finally we are really decreasing the costs a lot. The cost of accessing space. Right. Thanks to the reusable rockets. And then actually as a second step, I realized that what's going, what was going in parallel was that the costs of operating in space and so that this is connected to the cost of components and entire satellites that was falling really fast too. Sort of like faster than Moore's Law. Right. And it was like, oh my God. And there was also miniaturization going on so that the components were getting smaller too, which smaller meaning typically less mass as well, which means even lower launch costs. It was like, oh my God, space is becoming much, much, much cheaper. And due to my training as a investment banker, investor, you know, I sort of know that you don't have an industry that goes through a dramatic change, economic change of the economics like this and doesn't have a dramatic impact. Right. So this is when I really started developing this. So this is about 2017 or so I started developing this thesis that the space sector may be right now at a similar point point in time as the Internet was in the mid-1990s, that you have some really big technological trends which are really changing everything. For the Internet, by the way, you could argue it was also cost decreases because what the Internet enabled was reaching the end customer in a much, much, much, much cheaper way. Because you didn't have to use bricks and mortar stores anymore, you could do E commerce. And also because you didn't have to advertise to the consumers on TV or radio anymore. You could just really go direct. Right. So that's why I got really excited. I was like, well, if this is sort of like how the Internet was in the mid-90s, then this is more exciting than anything else that I'm doing purely from a sort of investment point of view, so I should focus on it. Plus then you have the overlay points that this, for the reasons I described, is really important for humanity. Why would there be any other place that, where I would spend my time? I mean, the only other sort of related place where I would spend my time would be biotech, which I also think is hugely important. And it's going through like an enormous, enormously important time right now. But biotech has been around for a much longer time and I didn't train as an MD, PhD at Harvard, so I kind of missed that. So I'm like, it's space. And then I really worked my way into it. I spent some time at, you mentioned International Space University, isu, which is an sort of, as the name gives away, an academic institution purely focused on. On space training, holistic space training. It was started as a project at MIT in 87, 87 or 88, I think 87 by Peter Diamandis and, and two other gentlemen. And then eventually it got a permanent campus which is in Strasbourg in France. I spent a summer there, sort of partly learning about space, but also a lot of networking. ICU Network is arguably, I'd say, the strongest network in the space sector. Call it Space Mafia. And I came out of ICU and I was like, okay, what am I going to do here in space? I could be an entrepreneur, I could be an investor. Well, I was already an investor, so it's kind of logical for me to continue doing that. And again, I thought it was a very, or it is a very interesting time, comparable to the Internet. And if you could go back in time, right to the mid-90s, what would you choose to do? Right. Okay, you say I would choose to found Amazon. Okay, but you would, let's say like more generically.

Right.

It probably would have been a good idea to be an early stage investor and then try to invest in some of these companies which were eventually founded, you know, like Amazon, but also eventually the, the apps like, you know, Facebook or Airbnb. Or even Tinder or something like that. Right. And that's also my excitement about the space industry from an investing point of view that I think we are in this very, very early moment. I mean, the space has been in the news a lot and space companies and, and SPACs and all of that stuff. I still think we're really, really early. I can tell you that I was at a big annual space conference in Washington, D.C. last week called Satellite. It's still such a tightly knit, defined community where everybody knows everybody else. And I love all of those people. Right. But it's nowhere near, you know, like, if you go now to a crypto blockchain conference, it's like packed with investment bankers and people who weren't in the industry like three months ago and realized there's something going on that's not the case yet in space. It's basically this close group of people and which, by the way, so that tells me it's really early and it's still the right time to have an early stage investment firm. So that's what I spend most of my time on. But by the way, it also tells me that if we really want to grow space a lot. That's something I said, I think, at the beginning of the interview. We need to bring a lot more people into space, more entrepreneurs, more investors, more of everything. And that then requires education about what's going on in space. Right? Because it's easy to have the wrong cliches. I don't know where you saw the Matthew McConaughey Super bowl ad. I know where it's coming from. There probably wasn't any bad intent, but it kind of hurts. It's like, come on. It's just that tells me there's a lot more education required. And that's why I spend pretty much the rest of my time that I don't spend on investing, I spend on space education and outreach. And that's where all of these other things come in that you described in the intro. So that's why I wrote a book, introductory book to the space economy in sort of accessible language, nothing overly technical, just explaining, okay, look, these are the big trends in space, what I just mentioned about the cost decreases and everything. Here's like the main business models in space, satellite communication, self observation, space tourism, gnss, whatever. And then also it's like a futuristic part, so it's a book. Another example of that, like you mentioned, is the podcast where almost every week I interview, typically a space entrepreneur, again in totally accessible language, saying, okay, what Are you up to why are you doing this? And talk a little bit about your business. And that's also why I teach, you know, at a couple of two or three universities on space business and entrepreneurship.

Yeah, you were mentioning the Salesforce. I think it would have been less hurtful had it been kind of, you know, a commercial on the fringe from a small company trying to, you know, trying to make a point. But coming from Salesforce, who also invests in space, and Matthew McConaughey who has a history of actually playing astronaut, it was such a dividing kind of, you know, poking in the wrong places and not really helping in unifying the narrative of what's going on right now. It was more kind of dividing and even people on the Internet that you would not have, you would not hear them talking about space. Now we're getting into it and kind of pointing the finger in virtue signaling when come on, like there's, it's. We don't need to go there. You were talking earlier about how space is, you know, at the beginning of really this new era, crypto is even more advanced. And I think that if we compare it to the phone company or to the technology of phone, like phone really took off when through the apps like the phone. And that's the success of Apple is when they started to create a platform where suddenly everybody could come and use this platform for more than what a phone is and texting or even accessing the Internet. When suddenly it became the thing that I need to communicate with my bank, the thing that I need to here in meditation, the thing that I need to. So all, so now all my life has been helped and, or elevated because of the little machine. Right now space is just if we need satellite or if we need this, then it's, you know, it's limited to this industry. But when it becomes this kind of rallying, this unifying platform for people to innovate and then to create, that's going to be I guess the like the big opening for what the iPhone was for the phone technology and sort of.

We'Re working on these platforms in many ways. So, you know, you could look at SpaceX as in some ways a platform company for space in the same way that Amazon is a platform company for a lot of the Internet.

Right.

For various reasons, not just the E commerce, but also AWS and everything. And so SpaceX very reliable launch platform. By now, very soon we'll have what you call a Transporter four rideshare mission is going to take dozens and dozens and dozens of satellites from dozens and dozens of dozens of different space startups and established companies up to space. We're working also on other sort of platforms to make space more accessible also to entrepreneurs. Right. So, for example, there is now a range of companies which are offering essentially space as a service, satellites as a service. So you don't have to develop your own satellite from scratch. You basically can just take an existing platform or even run time on an existing platform. You just put your sensor there or your payload, and everything else is taken care of. So in the same way that it's gotten much easier to be an Internet Internet entrepreneur, right? It has already become much easier to be a space entrepreneur and it's going to become even easier. And that's, of course, a very positive thing. Now, what you mentioned is sort of people realizing, you know, that this is all very positive. Space is kind of interesting, right? So, because despite the Matthew McConaughey and the Salesforce ad, I mean, space by and large has a very positive connotation, I think, because of these throughout society, right. I mean, obviously not every single individual, but speaking in general, right? Because it has these connotations that I've talked about, we talked about, right? Sort of like exploration and something that's innate to humanity, you know, the glory of the Apollo days and all of that. And you can see that, right? I mean, I'll give you a very recent example. So three days ago, I'm not going to do advertising here, but a Swiss luxury watch brand, in working together with a Swiss budget watch brand, did a crossover version of a watch that may have been used on the moon. You know, sort of one model for all of the planets and the sun. And I tried. So on the day it was launched in Zurich, I went to the watch store sort of like two hours after it opened, and they almost laughed at me. It was like, it's sold out worldwide. Right. This is how space inspires people. It's a stupid example, but space is just cool. What we have to do is now take that sort of positive bias that space already has in society and make people realize it isn't just like some random cool thing. It's actually really important for society. But we're starting with that head advantage that people think it's cool and we should build on that.

You mentioned the International Space University. Is that a really a good entry point for anyone that wants to, when you went over there at the particular time in your career, but for someone, is it is the targeted audience for the university or people that are kind of just looking to change their career or someone who's looking to get into space. This is a good starting point.

So if I look at my class, which is probably not unrepresentative, it's actually a mix of people. So you have some people who are already, who were already in space and we had a lot of space agency people, dozens and dozens and dozens. And plus then some people who worked at, you know, aerospace primes. But we certainly had also some people like me who are basically like, okay, I, I wasn't a space person before. I'm using this sort of as a tool to help the conversion towards space. And I think it's a very good way of achieving that because again, besides some theoretical knowledge, with theoretical knowledge, to be honest, you could also autodidactically learn, right? I mean, so the famous example, Elon is not a trained aero astro engineer, right? He learned that stuff. But what ISU helps you really with is the network. It has an extremely strong social aspect now. That's why I think it's actually a very good place to spend some time at. Of course, not everybody. So the most famous program is the summer program, which is about a little bit over. It's like two and a half months long. So not everybody has that time. There's a shorter version, there's executive courses, but then of course the networking is much more limited. And there's also a one year master program now, you know, so it's good those programs exist now in my educational efforts again, I really care about educating more people about space and what's going on. I wanted to have some stuff that's even more accessible. So for people who don't have the time or money, to be honest, because those programs cost money. I mean a lot of them are subsidized, but even with the subsidies they can cost money. I wanted to create some more accessible courses. So that started about a year and a half ago. I put out the first, what I called Space Entrepreneurship 101 as a course on Udemy. And I consciously chose UDEMY because it's a very sort of popular low price point platform. Lots of students in places like India and so forth. And that's I think to like 900 students or so by now, which I'm very happy about. And then we sort of the same thought, we very, we recently, myself, my firm, we collaborated with Space for Impact, which you mentioned, Swiss not for Profit organization. And then the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne or epflu, the French Appreciation. It's one of the top engineering schools in the world to create another online course or what they call a mooc. Right. Again on it's called the Space Economy. Right. And it's sort of like a roughly 30 lecture course taking you sort of through business models in space and how they can be generating benefits to Earth. And with the same thought, let's do something that's, that's really accessible. And you could even take that course for free. You can audit it for free. It's on the EDX platform. And if you want, if you want a certificate, like an EPFL certificate, okay, there's a paid track, but theoretically you can take it for free as well.

We know that the European model is different even in the business, in the corporation, than the US model within the space. The ESA now is taking like a big presence. The Europe space industry is rising. But how would you compare the American space industry to the European space industry?

Yeah, it also depends a little bit where you are in Europe. Right. There's differences between countries as well. It's interesting. So until very recently, one big difference I would have always highlighted is that in the US you just have so much money that's coming from defense related entities and the intelligence community. And I would say, look, in Europe we just don't have that. And probably for historical, a lot of it's for historical reasons. Of course. Interestingly, that that may have changed. Right. You may have seen that as a consequence of the war, you know, countries like Germany said they're going to invest an extra 100 billion euros in the armed forces, some of which has to flow back into space because space is such an important military domain. Right. So actually that disadvantage might be, might be decreasing a little bit, which is positive. You still have some, you know, cultural differences. Deep tech investing is just much less developed in Europe than the U.S. i mean, deep tech invest, I mean, venture capital in the US is something like a few decades ahead of Europe. Right. It's just, that's just simply a fact. And it's for historical reasons. And then related to that, you have some, you know, of the cultural differences also into entrepreneurial mindset. Right. I was giving a mentoring session to a European space entrepreneur either this morning or yesterday morning, I think it was this morning. And basically, you know, the company of this entrepreneur is sort of like they're almost hitting a little bit of a wall. Right. And they're very qualified engineers, just the particular model they've chosen. So for various reasons they're encountering difficulties. So this entrepreneur asked me sort of like, okay, so we're Thinking about pivoting now. But, you know, I'm, I'm worried, like, how will investors and others perceive that we pivot? And I was like, nobody in Silicon Valley would ever even ask this question. Like, this is ridiculous. Like, you're smart guys. There's an opportunity, there's other opportunities. You can find opportunities. Go pivot. Like, I will never, ever hold it against you guys. And that's a little bit sort of a mind frame which we still have to work on in Europe.

So for anyone that is looking into getting into the business right now, your advice would be just to go for it. I mean, do whatever, find something. There is enough momentum in the industry and from the technology that anyone who has the desire to get into it will find an angle to it, correct?

I think so. Let's also be clear, like, we've talked a lot about entrepreneurship. Not everybody has to be an entrepreneur. That's a very high risk, demanding journey, right? It was a year ago, so Elon, Elon tweeting, right? Saying like, being entrepreneur is like eating glass. And you know, I think there's some truth to that. You really want to only want to do it if you have really an extremely high level of motivation to do what you choose to do as an entrepreneur. But, you know, you don't have to be the main entrepreneur. You could be sort of like one of the early employees or even later employees in a space company. You could go to an established aerospace company. You can be as nowadays we have space lawyers, right? We're starting to have more and more what we call flight surgeons, space physicians. You know, there's non for profit entities looking at things like, you know, the more sort of sociological and philosophical elements of space, there is kind of room for everybody, right? I think. And we really have this momentum and actually one of the takeaways of, you know, meeting a lot of people at the satellite conference last week, one of the things that came out is that there was sort of consensus opinion that we're getting really constrained on people again because the sector is growing. We need more people. And the people you currently have in the space industry, mostly engineers, they just don't do it justice. So we need to bring in more people, which of course is positive for people who are looking to possibly move into the space sector.

I was talking earlier with Patty Stoll, who is the president of Space System, and Alice Y. Dover. She's, she's an engineer herself. She was talking about how many positions the engineers are opening. But then I asked her, you know, what about someone who's at the fashion institute or fashion school, and they're not an engineer, but they want to get into the apparel of tomorrow. Is there a place for them? And Patty was like, absolutely. In fact, this is what we want. We want now, not the engineer, but we want the humans. We want a different perspective. We want the artists, we want the ones who actually will elevate and take the conversation and the knowledge and the innovation to a new level. Because it's not just an engineering future, but it's a human future. And we need to bring a lot more to the table than just being in one particular, particular area. Rafael, any last, Yeah, I mean, I.

I, I, no, no, go ahead. So on this point, I, on this point I fully agree. Sort of like, you know, if I was to travel to space and you need a spacesuit, I, I would say I'd want, I want the engineers to design it from the functional point of view and make sure the life support systems also will work. Right. But I wouldn't want the typical engineer to design the, the look of it. Right. SpaceX has done quite a good job, I think, on there, on the human space flight suits. But yeah, look, I think there's space, space, space. There's space for all of these people in, in space and certainly also for designers. We have examples, right? Virgin Galactic partnered with an American apparel company basically to design their spaces.

It's the engineer mindset is often like, linear and clean and within its, it's only a vacuum. But life is messy and humans are messy, so we need a certain messiness in it. So it has a certain resiliency and something that people can connect to. Any last words of wisdom? I mean, obviously you've experienced a lot, you see a lot, you talk to a lot of people. What would you like the audience to kind of leave you with in thinking about space?

Well, I think we touched upon a lot of the points hopefully throughout this conversation. And, you know, I really believe this is a very, this is the most interesting moment to be in space. We're right, really on this cusp. I mean, it's an, it's an amazingly exciting time to be alive. You could literally, we are alive. And literally, like, humanity could sort of like go out and start settling places beyond Earth, which is by definition only going to happen once in history. So if you have any sort of affinity, if anybody has any affinity with this, right, I mean, go with it. Like, if not now, when, like, there is no other moment. And again, I think it's also like, it's not even such a high risk bet because, again, the sector is growing. You know, we need more people and we welcome people from. From every background and we want people from every background because, you know, we also want to make sure that this is going to be a diverse future which reflects the diversity and richness of human society.

Now, if people have questions to ask you, they can go on your website. They can also access you on your LinkedIn profile. We'll put all the links in the description anywhere else they can go to learn more about your work or your book. That's coming up in English, I assume, soon.

So we try to be good, my staff to pull everything that I do like the book podcast on my personal website, which is just rafaelrodkin.com so that's the easiest. That's actually the easiest entry point in sort of any, you know, professional context, you know, so, like, you know, entrepreneurs are listening who want to pitch something or other potential business contacts. Certainly my LinkedIn. Yeah.

And your. Your Space Business podcast is available on all the podcast platforms, correct?

Yeah, that's. That's everywhere. That's Apple, Google, Spotify, Pandora, and you name it.

We'll make sure to have all the links impossible so that people can subscribe. Rafael, it was a pleasure. I look forward. I mean, I know you're near Europe right now. You'll be traveling in space. I might be traveling to Europe, but I'm pretty sure that our path will cross and we can carry on this space conversation. But at that moment, we'll have a glass of wine and we can elaborate.

We're in the same time zone. It's easier otherwise. Now it's very early for you to have a glass of wine. Absolutely. We'll do that soon.

Rafael, a pleasure. Take good care.

My pleasure. Take care. Thanks.