Space Business Podcast #100 The first 100 episodes - looking back & ahead

543210 All Engine Running welcome to episode 100 of the Space Business Podcast right after our usual short messages. This also short episode will give you some review and statistics on our first 100 episodes, some selected quotes from our guests, favorite science fiction works that our guests mentioned, and lastly, some of the things we may be doing in the future. My name is Raphael Rodkin and I'm an investor and advisor to space companies. Just as a reminder, this podcast is for informational purposes only and nothing should be taken as investment advice. This podcast is sponsored by Nanoavionics, a satellite manufacturer and mission integrator. Their technologies enable many space companies worldwide to offer services that improve life right here on Earth, such as providing global connectivity, conducting Earth observation, or contributing to scientific discoveries. Check them out. And also check out my episode with the CEO and Co founder. Sadly, I am not a rocket scientist, but I'm an alumnus of the International Space University. ISU offers a number of educational programs about space worldwide. Check them out and@isunet.edu.

And just some final things before we start the episode about ourselves.

If you enjoy the podcast, please leave us a five star rating on your favorite podcast platforms such as Apple or Spotify. If you want us help expand our work, you can do so and Support us at www.patreon.com SpaceBusinessPodcast and we'll also put that link in the episode notes. And lastly, you can follow us on Twitter podcastspace. So this is episode 100 of the Space Business Podcast. You know this is actually not entirely true because for some reason we didn't number all of the episodes. For example starting with the very pilot episode of the entire podcast that wasn't numbered. And another example, the 2023 preview episode also didn't have a number to compensate without wanting to do so. If you look carefully you will actually notice that we missed some episode numbers and a couple of those were just plain mistakes. But Also episode number 69 is kept open and that was on purpose and I let you guess why. And if you know, you know. So let me just say this right at the beginning, this is not going to be an annoying self congratulatory episode of how great this podcast is, albeit I hope you think it is. And if you do a reminder to please give us a five star rating on your favorite podcast platform. Rather it will be a short taking stock of what we have done so far and at the end I will give you a brief vision for our future. Many of you probably saw that we actually ran a quick poll on LinkedIn about what this 100th episode should be. The current format, a review is what won that poll, closely followed by the option of a guest host interviewing me. And we actually decided to do that one too, as a separate episode in the near future, so watch out for that. One thing I actually hope is that this episode will be particularly interesting also for you who is listening to the Space Business Podcast for the very first time, because it will of course, give you an idea of what to expect and what this podcast is and does for all of you listening. I hope it also encourages you to listen to episodes you have not listened to yet, because I think they're all interesting. And I'm always super happy to see in our own statistics that even episodes from over two years ago when we started keep getting downloads. The content is there for you. 100 episodes. Take advantage of it. All right, so let's start with some statistics. 100 episodes. That's the easy one. And one type of categorization of episodes we introduced very early on and longtime listeners know that is splitting our episodes into what I call business episodes and then non business episodes. Okay, some of you may now ask non business episodes. Have you looked at the name of your podcast recently? Well, yes, but as I often say, even I myself get bored only talking about business all the time. There's so much more to the space sector, the science, of course, but also, for example, the legal part, the geopolitics, the humanities element. I could not not cover those important aspects of space. So as a result, we had 33 non business episodes, or a third of all episodes. I think that's a good ratio and I intend to keep that like this in the future, and I hope you agree with that decision. So just as examples for non business episodes, we had guests like, well, astronauts of course, and Chris Hadfield was on that was super exciting and should definitely listen to that episode. He needs no introduction. Another astronaut guest, totally different, was Victor Hispanio, and he was a suborbital astronaut from Brazil on the New Shepard vehicle. We also had prospective as in hopefully future astronauts, and notably already two crew members of the upcoming Dear Moon mission. That's going to be a mission around the moon that's planned on SpaceX's Starship. It's financed by a Japanese billionaire and is meant to take eight artists around the moon. And as I said, we had two of those crew members already on relatively recently. And I actually plan on having the rest of that crew on too, because the project is so exciting and the crew is that wonderfully diverse set of artists. Another prospective astronaut was a guy called Nima Shahinian from Norway and a guy called David Schilling from the uk. Another category of non business or non pure business guests were heads of space agencies. And so far we had Ricardo Condi from Portugal Space and Uri Oron from the Israel Space Agency. I can tell you with certainty that there will be more heads of space agencies. Next up, scientists. Really exciting episode. Professor Avi Loeb from Harvard. And yes, of course we talked about Oumuamua, if you know about that topic. So go listen to the episode. We also had Jim Green, until recently the chief scientist at NASA and an astrobiologist, Graham Lau, who is a great communicator on that topic. We also had several non governmental organizations connected to space. A renowned macroeconomist, a well known blogger, a space event organizer, academics and even an actor from the TV series the Expanse. Lastly, in the non business category, we have regular annual preview episodes that I give about the upcoming year and what it may hold for space. And really lastly, this episode is of course a non business episode too. Now on towards the business episodes. And those are of course the ones that lend the name to the podcast. And this usually means we invite a space entrepreneur, a executive from a space company or other space related business people. So let's break that down numerically again. So of 67 business episodes we had 51 space entrepreneurs of space startups at all stages, from pre seed all the way to growth stage. We had five space company executives, like for example Matt Dash, the CEO from Iridium. So a very mature, long standing publicly listed company. Or Buhlen Altam from the German optical comms company Monaric. Until very recently he was the CEO and we had 11 other space related business people, including several consultants. Now of the 56 entrepreneurs and executives, they really came from all sorts of subsectors of Space. We had 11 from Earth observation, eight from satellite communications related businesses and three from launch companies. And they were also satellite integrators. And at this point in time I want to give a really big shout out to our sponsor of this podcast, Nanorveonics. We had component manufacturers, we had space talks, space situational awareness companies, even an asteroid mining company, recently space tourism company, you name it. All of the different space business models were there. Okay, let's shift gears a little bit to another type of statistics. Episode length. The episode length, the mean, the average is 49 minutes. The median is 51 minutes. The mean gets dragged down a little bit by the shorter Occasional episodes like the annual previews, which are more like 15 or 20 minutes, or an episode like the one you're currently listening to, which is also probably going to end up more something like 15 minutes in total though there are almost 79 hours of content, so several days of content. So if you want to listen, if you want to binge listen to the Space Business podcast, you absolutely can. The longest episodes so far were with Ricardo Condi from Portico Space and with Chris Hadfield. Both of them a little bit over one hour. I haven't had really long episodes yet. I always envy Lex Friedman and his podcast and he has these two, three. I think his longest episode was even seven hours. Not sure I should be doing this, but at the moment we're around 50 to 60 minutes and I think hopefully you agree that works quite well. Let's talk briefly about the most downloaded episodes and actually I was debating whether I should include that statistics because that number may be influenced by many things. It may be influenced by lucky social media reposting of the episode and frankly things that not necessarily reflect the episode quality at all. As I said, I think all episodes are interesting. And another thing that impacts this is simply when an episode came out. So of course the longer an episode has been out there, the more chance, the more time it has had to get downloads. But in any event, I'll tell you anyway, the top five most downloaded episodes of all time were the ones with number one, Dr. Pippa Malgram and she's a world renowned macroeconomist and US presidential advisor. And it is a great episode. So I do think you should listen listen to it. Then we also had the top five Bulandaltan again from Maneric, Peter Platzer of course very prominent space entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Spire, Payam Banazade from Capella Space, the Synthetic Aperture Radar Constellation and in closing off the top five, Delian Asparoua from Founders Fund and also of course a co founder of vada. And as a last category in the statistics section, let's talk about reach. Many thousands of monthly downloads occurring it's growing double digit percentage every month on average. And excitingly we are in well over 100 countries globally. Now the top five countries are the US I should say by far then followed by the UK, Germany, France and Japan. But what's really interesting is we are present on all permanently inhabited continents. So every continent except Antarctica and maybe people in Arctica are listening as well actually I don't know. And we get downloads in places like in no particular order and just as a short selection, places like Madagascar, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Nepal, Cambodia, you name it. All around the world. Okay, next section. Some quotes from our guests. And obviously nothing substitutes for listening to the actual episodes, but I thought it'd be fun to cite half a dozen or so things people said at some point during one of the episodes. Anyway, alright, so again, in no particular order, let's start. QUOTE 1 Space needs to be boring before it can be real. You need that basic infrastructure that enables living and working, like roads and rails and power lines and sewers that we take for granted in most of the developed world. That was from Tim Christman from the foundation for the Future. Next quote. The space infrastructure is more or less like a high speed motorway network that had no tow truck for years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is from Luc Piguet, the CEO from ClearSpace, the company that's engaged in active space debris removal. Next one the space age has always been militarized. If it wasn't for the military and industrial complex of several countries, we wouldn't have had the space age that we've had. That one is from Professor Blevin Bowen, who wrote several books, including a recent one called Original Sin, which is essentially a book on military space. Well worth reading. Next quote unfortunately, even the practitioners of science, even those that on social media advocate and say we are promoting science, they very, very often go against collecting evidence, arguing that they know the answer in advance. And perhaps also unsurprisingly for those who know, this is from Professor Avi Loeb, the longtime chair of Harvard's Astronomy Department. The more that people see of our world and I guess space, the more we can understand each other and be better connected. Space travel is not the world's safest thing, but the rewards are so incredible, the reward is beyond anything that I can comprehend. And this is from Karimi Leah, who is one of the people who was selected for the crew of Dear Moon, that circumlunar flight that I'm here mentioned a few minutes ago. Next one let's make sure that there's more women that get into every single space. Let's make sure that we are working out the unique economics and driving them down so that the future of human spaceflight is accessible to people who have disabilities, to people who speak different languages, to people that are committed for space exploration to be not only affordable, but to be a sustainable practice of the human experience. Quite a coordinates from Sita Santi from Boston Consulting Group. I do think there's a question for humanity about how should humanity progress into space? And this is huge. It's literally like the humanitarian question of our generation. It was Dr. Pippa Malgram, the famous macroeconomist, and lastly, Chris Hadfield, and he said, it's the life on Earth and the activities and the things you are involved in that are going to really determine whether you enjoy life and feel you're accomplishing something or not. I think that's a good one to close on. Okay, on to the next section of this episode. 100. And perhaps it's my personal favorite one because it's about science fiction. And unless this is the very first episode of the podcast you're listening to, you know that this is always my last question to every guest in every episode. The question being, what are some of your favorite sci fi works, whether books, movies or TV series? And across all episodes, we had 182 mentions of science fiction works. That's the total. But of course, some works get mentioned several times, so we'll get to that in a minute. But there were 59 distinct works that have been mentioned. And you may have seen that we already posted the top five favorites of our podcast guests on LinkedIn. I think that was on my personal LinkedIn account a few weeks ago, but here they are again. Number one most favorite sci fi works of the space business podcast guests was Star wars with 26 mentions, closely followed by number two, Star Trek with 24 mentions. And I only really guessed afterwards. I should really force people to specify which Star Trek series they like because I think they're very different. My personal favorite being Deep Space Nine. But in any event, number three in the most favorite sci fi works of our guests was the Expanse, 15 mentions, followed by the Martian, 11 mentions. And lastly, Interstellar, the movie with 10 mentions. Now, some other works that have been mentioned multiple times include, in no particular order, Firefly, the culture novels, the Red Mask trilogy, Asimov's foundation, the Three Body Problem Trilogy, Apollo 13, the Movie, Alien, 2001 A Space Odyssey, the Arrival, Battlestar Galactica, several of Heinlein's books, several of Arthur C. Clarke's books, Dune, of course, Doctor who, Ender's Game, and many others. One person answered Lego Lego space sets to this question. And yeah, we accepted that anyway. And actually, I really like the Lego space set. So there you go. And from memory, a couple of people actually said they don't like sci fi, which, I mean, this is clearly very disappointing. We won't name and shame these people. And secondly, it always leaves me at sort of a loss of words and unclear of how I should close the episode. But again, this was like 2 times out of 100 times or so. So lastly, let's talk a little bit about the future of this podcast. And first, I can guarantee you we'll keep doing what we've been doing because people seem to like it, at least that's what they tell me. But nevertheless, we'll do at least three new things and maybe more. First, we may have what I'd call sub series on very interesting, timely topics. And the first example of that we actually already recently started. And that's a sub series on all things space biotech. Yes, space biotech is a thing. I think it's usually exciting. That's why we're having a sub series, because people should be educated on this topic. And it actually already has one episode out with Ken Savin from Wetwire, which you can find on the podcast. And the second thing we will try to do is we will try to expand the categories of people we bring in specifically for the non space people. And so we'll have more categories besides the ones that are already mentioned above. You know, like the astronauts and the scientists and so forth. For example, I want to bring in some science fiction authors. And yes, you can tell I like science fiction, but this actually has a reason. One key goal when I started the podcast was to try to bring space closer to people who are not yet part of the space sector. And again, hopefully every episode we have is, is helpful in doing so. But I do believe that it's helpful sometimes to have episodes with people who are just good communicators and get people excited about the topic of space in a, in a different way. And that's where sci fi authors come in. But also actually people like bloggers and we already had Casey Hanmer as an example of that and other types of space influencers, communicators and teachers. So it'll be more of that. And lastly, we will aim to achieve greater diversity in general, but also for example, in terms of the geographic origin of our guests. And I probably should have mentioned this in the statistics section before, but anyway, I'll mention it now. The vast majority, really, I'm guessing 90% plus of our guests have been from North America or Europe, with occasional exceptions like Uri Oron from the Israeli Space Agency already mentioned Temi Dario Onyosun from an organization called Space in Africa, or Flavia Tadanadini from Fleet Space in Australia. Now you will see more episodes from Asia, including India and the Middle East, Australia, Latin America and Africa. And lastly, to close off this episode, I have two calls to action for you. First, we're doing all of this for you, the listeners. If you have any suggestions, we love to hear them. And whether that's about specific guests, you'd like to see changes in the format, complaining that the audio could be better. Whatever it is, please email us your suggestions@spacebusinesspodcastmail.com or if you're connected to me on LinkedIn, just ping me on LinkedIn and I promise we will follow up. And second, and lastly, do help more people find a podcast. And one way you can do that is, I mean of course spread the word of mouth, but also do leave us a five star rating on your favorite podcast platform. We really appreciate it. And that's it. I'm really looking forward to the next 100 episodes. You have no idea how much I enjoyed doing this. I hope you enjoy listening and I'll see you very soon for episode 101. Bye.

Well, that's it for another nominal episode of the Space Business Podcast. If you like this podcast, please consider giving it a 4.5star rating on your favorite podcast platform such as itunes. You can follow us on Twitter odcastspace. Also consider supporting us at www.patreon.com spacebusinesspodcast. If the podcast got you interested in learning more about the business opportunities in the space economy, check out my new online course on space entrepreneurship on udemy.com the link is in the episode description. Lastly, if you have any feedback including ideas for guests and that may include yourself. If you have an exciting space story to tell or interested in being a sponsor, drop us an email@sparebusinesspodcastmail.com I look forward to seeing you for the next episode.