When will space be cheap? (featuring Zach Weinersmith)

Daniel and Kelly chat with Zach Weinersmith about rockets and the upside and pitfalls of a potential future space economy. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Often in sci fi people will be like, well, water
is going to be really valuable, and it's worth remarking
if you're in a place where you have to pay
huge amounts of money for clean drinking water, that's not
a good situation. You'd rather not do that. You're absolutely right.
If the economy already exists, than fine. Or as you say,
with California, I get frustrated, not with you.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
But with the entire state as an idea, as an ethos. Oh,
this is two Virginias against one Californian. It's not fair.
It's not fair.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
Hi.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm pleased to
say that particle physics is still cheaper than going to space.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
Hello, I'm Kelly wider Smith. I study parasites and space,
and there are parasites. You just got to pick up
some roadkill and you could see some parasites. It is
super cheap investment.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
What about the space based parasite research industry shouldn't be
good at space to explore tapeworms in space?

Speaker 3 (01:08):
I think that's a bad faith argument, Daniel.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Oh wow, I don't think there's.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
A lot of money to be made from parasites in
space right now?

Speaker 2 (01:15):
All right, so you're turning down that grant.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
Then for now? Yeah, if you want to pay me
to think about what parasites women accidentally bring with us
to space, I'm taking money from just about anyone.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
All right there, it is okay, send your money to Kelly.
Folks for space parasites.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Whoop?

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Is it a science fiction movie? Is it a grant?
Who knows? We'll find out.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
Could be both Porqueolo's dose.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
Exactly. And so today on the podcast, we have a
special guest to come on and talk to us about
everything that's happening recently in launching two space industries and
trying to boost a space economy, trying to get humans
off this planet and live out in the cosmos. Kelly,
who is today's guest.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
He's a real cutie pie, and you're gonna get a
taste of what it's like to live in the Winersmith
how Zach likes to go on long soliloquies where I
interject every once in a while by saying no, Nope,
that's wrong, And so welcome to our life, listeners, You're
going to get a little taste of the Wadersmith household.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
All right, And so today's episode is in response to
a question from Kay Gilbert, a listener who wrote to
us asking specifically for an update about what's going on
in space. Here's Kay's question.

Speaker 4 (02:23):
I learned a lot from doctor Katrine Whitson now please
invite Zach Wienersmith so he and Kelly can give us
an update on soonish, specifically the first section on space
travel becoming cheaper, because that seems to be the most
nowish since they wrote the book. Many more nations are
developing active space exploration programs and sending astronauts to the ISS.

(02:48):
Commercial spaceflight is still in the startup phase, but shows
a lot of potential and inexpensive CubeSats have made it
possible for almost anyone with an interest to launch a
satellite into lower Earth oad orbit. Of course, that just
makes usable orbits more crowded messes with astronomy and greatly
increases the amount of space junk. I'm especially interested in

(03:10):
what Kelly and Zach learned about space economics when writing
A City on Mars. Thanks all right.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
I love this question because it means like, Wow, this
person really read both of your books and thought about it. Yeah,
and now they're coming to you for an accounting of
what's going on now. You are forever on the hook
on these topics, Kelly, you have to stay current forever.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
You know. It does actually feel that way. I keep
trying to move on to the next book project, and
then I keep getting interview requests from people who are like, oh,
what do you think about this new thing? And I'm like,
I don't check the news. What new thing? And then
I got to check the news. But it's okay because
it's fascinating.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
Kelly's so popular, Booty.

Speaker 3 (03:44):
Oh, you know, you'd be stressed if you weren't getting
your other work done. But I do like getting to
talk about space.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
Well, it's a great book, and so all the attention
is very worth it. So let's invite onto the podcast
the other Weeeners, Smith, who will join our conversation about
the future of the space economy.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
All right, on today's show, we have the second best
Wiener Smith, Zach. He is the cartoonist behind Saturday Morning
Breakfast Cereal. He has three eighths of a physics degree
and he is a wonderful co author. Welcome to the show, Zach.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
I do forgot two times. Hugo nominee.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
Oh and one time winner and.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
One time winner, but really the nomination is the true honor.

Speaker 3 (04:28):
You also didn't get the Eisner, right.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
I have twice not gotten the Eisner.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
Actually I have many times.

Speaker 3 (04:36):
Well, Zach was shortlisted. It's a slightly different.

Speaker 1 (04:39):
I officially didn't live twice. That's right on the record.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
Well, three eighths of a physics degree. I wonder at
what point you can round that up to one.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
Not three eighths or ten. He also has a literature degree.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
Yes, yes, that's true.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
Well, since we're going to be talking about physics and
space and all sorts of stuff, I think we need
to hear more about your credentials. Zach, tell us why
you didn't push that over the line to five eighth
So a physics degree, that's.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
A good question. I actually had a like semester where
I felt like I had to choose. My comics career
was starting to go well. So I had already gotten
a degree in literature, and I went back for physics.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
A well worn path from literature.

Speaker 1 (05:20):
This was really weird because usually it's the other way around.
My last semester and I got like old bees, which
like if it's your second time in college. You know,
you're not like an undergraduate who doesn't know what they
want to do yet you really should be doing perfect.
And it was just that, like I was now managing
at a comic career that was getting bigger and bigger,
it seemed like the right path was to just kind
of like do comics that I could teach myself whatever
I wanted the side. And then things have gotten ever

(05:42):
busier and mestically self teach, which is in theory faster
the university, although I suppose professors have some role earlier.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
So cartooning has stolen another physicist from us.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
Yeah, there's quite a few lists.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
But you're right about self teaching. I mean, I tell
my grad students to really pay attention in classes because
it's the last time somebody's going to spend all their
time trying to teach you something. After that, it's basically
like you in a textbook. That's how I learned something new.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
I think it's the only way to get real depth,
and you can only get so much from another person.
You got to really sit with it.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
All right, Well, then consider this your pahd final example.
If you do well today, we can round who.

Speaker 3 (06:21):
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoah. I think you can give him
a bachelor's but he doesn't get a PhD.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
How about a pod since the podcast, I can't.

Speaker 3 (06:29):
Lurd my pod over him if he has one too.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
My career fantasy is to get an honorary degree from anywhere,
just so I can say. That didn't seem that hard.

Speaker 3 (06:42):
So Daniel, when we had your wife on the show,
it was very clear that you two are like supportive team.
Zach and I are competing over everything everything.

Speaker 1 (06:52):
I believe in a free market, I think the best
spouse should win.

Speaker 3 (06:58):
And she's winning.

Speaker 2 (07:01):
Wow. Well, we're not here to do Wiener Smith Merrick.
They as fun as that might be. We're here to
talk about space and whether we can access it and
whether you guys want to continue to throw a wet
blanket over the prospects of space colonization. You've been writing
about this for quite a while. Your first book, Sooni
Ish talked about space elevators and how they might be

(07:22):
a terrible idea, and then you wrote a whole book
about how we might not be ready to colonize Mars
and space, and the listener wants to know, are you
guys still bearish on space or have things changed? So
give us some background here, Why is space so hard
and expensive?

Speaker 1 (07:39):
Yeah, so there's a lot of angles on that, but
I think the probably place to start is just literally
the access to space, meaning like getting up and fast.
And so I would say you can make a pretty
good case that the main reason is expensive is because
rockets kind of suck. The main reason we use them
to go to space is we have no other method. Right,
So if you look at a rocket sitting on a pad,

(08:00):
it's something like eighty percent propellant meaning fuel and oxidizer
stuff that gets burned on the way up. It's something like,
depending on what you're doing, say sixteen to nineteen percent,
the like machine that historically you discard during the process,
although SpaceX has change that. And then at the very
top you have the firing, which is depending on again

(08:20):
on what you're doing, one to three percent, say of
the total mass, and that's what goes to space. And
you say, why is it so awful? Why is the
ratio so terrible? And you know, of course you could say,
well if this planet were a little bigger, may we
just couldn't do it. The example we like to use
is like if you had to take a road trip
from Alaska to Buenos Aires, you would gas up once

(08:41):
in a while. If you had to bring all the
gas you needed for the entire trip at the beginning,
you would look like a flea on like a gas tanker. Right,
And the main problem you're going to face is that
the first, say gallon of gas is mostly going to
move gas. There are gallons of gas you're going to
literally move the entire time, and finally we use up
at the end. The most efficient way to do it,

(09:02):
and this gets us to space elevators would be of
like a magic pixie just dropped the drop of gas
you need in whenever you needed it, so you never
had to carry any mass of gas. Because that's most
of what a rocket is doing. This is why we
have staging, right, That's why a rocket burns up a
bunch of propellant and then just drops off a hunk
into the ocean, or if it's SpaceX, drops off a
hunk that lands itself.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
Well, if you have magic pixies as an option, we
can solve lots of problems.

Speaker 1 (09:27):
Not just.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
That opens up the door, that's.

Speaker 1 (09:32):
Right, you know, space elevator in a certain sense wouldn't
be the magic pixie. Right. So space elevator is like
a cable or a ribbon that dangles from something up
in space, and there are different ways to do that,
but basically you can just visualize this cable that goes
up like a beanstalk, and you climb it. And the
nice thing about that is you just expend the energy
to you know, climb one more foot, right, so you

(09:53):
can beam the energy that goes up. Most of like
your efforts are going into fighting gravity in the sense
of just getting up the next step instead of carrying
oldest propellant, right.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
Yeah. And I think space elevators are hard for people
to grow because it feels like it's floating and if
you stand on it's going to fall down, and there's
some complex orbital physics there. But essentially the argument is
it's like a ladder. Right. It's a lot easier to
climb a ladder one hundred feet than it is to
jump ondred exactly, right, Yeah, And it takes a lot
of energy because the ladder is supporting you as you go.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
Up, that's right. And there's been lots of hopes to
get around the rocket problem, right, yeah, classic one of
you read Jules Verne's First Spin on the Moon is
do you remember what they do?

Speaker 2 (10:34):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (10:34):
They shooting a gun. There's actually a whole kind of
comedy bit about Americans with guns. It's the Baltimore Gun
Club and they shoot it and it's like a good
introductory physics thing because it's like, I think we calculated
it either for Sunnish or a city on Mars where
it's like the initial g's are like twenty thousand to
actually get to the Moon with the spaceship they're launching,
so the humans would go flat.

Speaker 2 (10:53):
Oh I seem it's like a cannon. They fire you
out of a canon into the moon.

Speaker 1 (10:57):
Literally, it's just a giant cannon. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:58):
Yeah, yeah, it was a gun that came up with
the proposal. But anyway, the book is called From the
Earth to the Moon.

Speaker 1 (11:03):
Oh I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
Yes, well that's not so outlanders these days. If you've
seen those spin projects, whether they like spin something up
and then literally launch it into space, it's like good
for some payloads, but enough for people. Yeah, the gun.

Speaker 1 (11:15):
Would work if your payload was like a hunk of
iron or like some some fluid or something. But yeah,
with like delicate, little splatty humans.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
It's no good, all right, So getting off of Earth
is hard. Rockets are bad. Space elevators are problematic for
other reasons. We can dig into that in another episode.
Why do we want to lift stuff from Earth? I mean, yeah,
there's lots of stuff in space. Why don't we just
like build stuff in space for space?

Speaker 1 (11:38):
So if you want to get stuff somewhere in space
to build with, you got to say to yourself, well,
where am I getting it? You don't have a lot
of options. It turns out you have the Moon, but
you know, the Moon is still pretty far away. It's
hard to get to and then you have to like
somehow land on the Moon and then boost off, which
takes a lot of energy less than doing it on Earth,
but a lot. Notably, this is true for the Moon
and Mars. You don't have a thick atmosphere, which is

(11:58):
very helpful when you'd like to land in right, you
visualize Neil Armstrong in the Lunar Lander. There's no wings
on it because there's no reason, and so that makes
it more complicated. You could alternatively, like go to get asteroids.
You know, people usually think when we say that we're
talking about the belt, and I think enthusiasts would say
that is ultimately the goal, but like for a plausible
ish scenario, we're actually talking about near Earth asteroids that

(12:19):
have a lot of unlikely characteristics, so like they have
to be high and valuable stuff usually called platinum group metals,
that's the really hot stuff, and ideally they should be
sort of locking velossity with the Earth, by which I
just mean as the Earth is moving, the asteroid comes
in such a way that it like is not going
too fast with respect to us, So you can imagine
like the Earth is going well way the asteroids going
to the other. Trying to catch it is going to
be a dangerous business. That's all really hard and well

(12:42):
beyond our current capacity. So we usually say, you know,
if you go up to geosynchronous, which is about twenty
four thousand miles high, you can make money pretty much
anywhere in that shell, by data transmission, by remote sensing,
by navigation, by doing stuff for militaries. Outside that shell,
there's not a lot of value financial sense. There is
obviously all sorts of cool science value, but there's not

(13:03):
a lot of value beyond that.

Speaker 3 (13:05):
It's funny when I first invited Zach on the show,
He's like, I don't know that I'm going to have
a lot to say. And I had thought like, oh,
maybe it should just be Daniel and Zach on this episode.
And then Zach was like, all right, I don't think
I'm gonna have anything to say it. I was like,
all right, we'll see. But anyway, this is an interview
of Zach, so I will continue to let Zach.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
Go for it.

Speaker 2 (13:25):
Well, I guess, as an audience member to this, I
might be a little bit skeptical about that. I mean,
I buy the argument that there's not much in space
you want to bring back down to Earth. I mean,
I think people often think, ooh, platinum asteroid, that would
be worth seventy five quad trillion dollars if I could
bring it back here and sell it off bit by bit,
And obviously that's ridiculous, But still catching stuff in space

(13:45):
for building in space. I know we don't have the
technology now, but is it impossible to imagine that we
could never catch an astroid? I mean, I saw it
happen on for all mankind.

Speaker 1 (13:55):
Yes, yes, yes, obviously at some point we'll have the
technology to do that. I have no doubt about that.
None of this is anti gravity. There's no forbidden physics.
It's just engineering. The way I think about that is
essentially what you're implicitly doing. There's assuming some kind of
space economy, right, You're wishing it into existence, and then
it's justified. But it's kind of like saying, well, once
we have a on the bottom of the Marianna's trench,

(14:17):
my French bottom Chicken Sandwich company will really be valuable.
So I think this is why a lot of space
geeks are in the business of saying, we have to
build the city because it's existential. Kelly and I were
just talking about this. There's a guy we really like
named Winchell Chung who runs something called Project Row, which
kind of documents everything ever said about space travel. And
this idea calls mcguffinite, which is reference to the idea

(14:38):
in movies of a McGuff and like a certain something
everyone needs. You'll find that movies books everything for space colonization,
they always positive mcguffinite. So like an avatar, there's an unobtainium,
like insanely stupid name, really hard to get them, which
is like a room temperature superconductor that somehow you can't

(14:59):
just make back home from the same elements. You have
to get it from like these poor natives. And the
way I think with this is like, I'm sorry to
be really boring about this, but it's like the whole
world is running on the same periodic table. There's not
like magic stuff you can get. There's no special in
between e elements or whatever anything like this. So I
don't know why you'd suppose you would find them, of
all places like on an asteroid or on Mars, where

(15:21):
you know you're just working from the same Giant Solar
System accretion disc that made the other planets.

Speaker 2 (15:27):
I mean, from a physics point of view, there could
be additional stable, super heavy elements. It is positive, yeah,
so there might be very heavy elements that are stable.
It's called the island of stability. But you'd need some
pretty exotic physics to explain why it's created and existing asteroids,
and it's not here on Earth, and it's also long lived,
et cetera, et cetera. So you're right, Earth is mostly

(15:47):
made out of the same stuff as asteroids, and so'd
be pretty unusual that you could find something only in
asteroids to put in your chicken sandwich.

Speaker 1 (15:55):
Yes, when we say island of stability, I thought physicists
meant like two millisecond.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
Long lived is reli Okay, But isn't that the way
all economies get started? I mean, there used to be
no economy in California and then you know there was
a gold rush that we had him a guffn. All
economies do get started somehow, right, Your argument would essentially
suggest we can never have new economies.

Speaker 1 (16:25):
Well, you know, so I say it this way, if,
as he promises, mister Musk wants to spend you know,
a trillion dollars or whatever and just plant a city
on Mars, you know, we have all sorts of other
concerns about that from other episodes you guys have done.
But I suppose he did it, Like I suppose you
woke up tomorrow and he had done it. Then maybe
there's an argument for some of this stuff. But that's
because you've made such a bad situation. Often in sci

(16:46):
fi people will be like, well, water is going to
be really valuable, and it's worth remarking if you're in
a place where you have to pay huge amounts of
money for clean drinking water, that's not a good situation,
you'd rather not do that. You're absolutely right if the
economy already exists and fine, or as you say, with California,
I get frustrated, not with you, of course, but.

Speaker 2 (17:06):
With the entire state as an idea, as an ethos. Oh,
this is two Virginias against one Californian. It's not fair.
It's not fair.

Speaker 1 (17:13):
I'm ancestrally from Texas, so I gave both of you
coastal leeds. My cost is filmed as it should be, is.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
Near coast the Gulf of America.

Speaker 1 (17:23):
Now, yeah, that's right, that's right. You can gas your
car up in the Gulf of America. So, you know,
often when we say this, I totally sympathize with not
wanting to be someone who's like, nah, dreams are dumb.
You know, people will say, well, if Columbus had thought that,
what would have happened, And first of all, I don't
want to say is probably fifty million people wouldn't have
been murdered.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
But that side, we'd still have all of min in history, right, right,
you'd have.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
A couple of nice things. But also, like Columbus shows
up and he gathers resources that are widely available in
part by the way, because those indigenous people had found
it and could tell them where it was willingly or otherwise,
that was generally true. Right, So like Theo's people who
show up in California, these settlers, they found the San
Fernando Valley. Right, you want to talk about value, and
this is in an agricultural era. Right, when I want

(18:10):
to get at more deeply, I think you and I
were talking about this earlier. Is people often talk about
resources in this funny way, like it's just the sort
of stuff and like it obviously exists in the moon
or asteroids in some sense because they're made of stuff.
But like in the modern world especially, and this is
maybe different from how it was for most of human history.
Value comes from organization, right, Like if you're running a country,

(18:31):
would you rather have a diamond mind or Google? Right, yeah,
if you had both. The diamond mind is trivial. It's
really not a big contributor to the economy, like that
tech sector. You know. We got into this. This is
actually a late addition to our book. We were talking
to an economists, to the developmental economists. We said something
sort vague about this stuff, and he was like, you
should look at this thing from the World Bank where

(18:52):
they actually taught it up, like the wealth of different nations,
and like what the actual value was to this planet
of natural resources, and it was like, I think two
and a half percent of overall wealth is a natural resource.
It's minimal. So when people talk about what we have
to do the asteroids because we'll get so rich because
of natural resources. Like, by the way, ninety percent of
that was possil fuels, right, which don't exist on Mars.

(19:14):
I was talking to someone who's a real long term
mist about this and she was like, well, but eventually
we're going to have to push into space because we're
going to run out of resources. And I was like,
if you want to have a ten thousand year eventually,
why don't you just say we'll all be hooked to
like the matrix and we'll just experience infinite value in
our heads. If you can invote these crazy sci fi scenarios,
the idea of value goes bonkers, and I don't think
it's even worth speculating about.

Speaker 2 (19:34):
Yeah, we'll all just be downloading our chicken sand, which
is no need to even go to your chicken sand
with shack.

Speaker 1 (19:39):
And they'll be perfect yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
All right, So getting the space is hard, mining stuff
and using resources in space. It doesn't really have value
unless it's already an economy, which means people there to
value it and to need it. So that sort of
sets the scene. Let's take a break, and when we
come back, I want to hear from the Wiersmith's all
about the updates since they're b was written, since we

(20:01):
have had some rapid progress in reusable rockets and access
to space and CubeSats and starlink and all sorts of
other crazy stuff. All right, so everybody go get a
chicken sandwich and take a break and we'll see you
on the other side. Okay, we're back, and I'm mediating

(20:31):
a Wiener Smith marital session.

Speaker 3 (20:36):
I think it's pretty clear that I'm winning, but I'm
going to continue to let you have the stage for
a little while and answer these questions since you were
the guest.

Speaker 2 (20:43):
Yeah, all right, So we've been hearing about how difficult
it is to get to space and to build an
economy there if you don't already have one. What's changed
since you guys have written your book. That's essentially what
our listener wanted to know. Do you have a new perspective.
First start with what has changed, and then let's talk
about what it means.

Speaker 1 (21:03):
One of the funny things that happened with us when
we were writing soon Ish was that the change began
as we were like, going to press, we're really mad
at SpaceX because they kept landing reasonable rockets when we've
been trying.

Speaker 3 (21:15):
To discuss impressed with not mad as.

Speaker 1 (21:17):
I wish they would cut it out because we were like,
this is future tech and they were doing it and
we were like, well, this is just ruining everything. Butzz
and I don't remember the number, maybe Kelly you did,
It was like when we went to press, it was
like six times they had landed. The reason we were
walked with something like that wasn't much, but it was
a huge deal. I remember talking to someone who said
something like I watched the moon landing and this was
a bigger deal. And I think most people wouldn't agree

(21:38):
with that, but I did. But the moon landing was expensive.
There was no way they were going to let us
do this for very long, right the government, whereas like
reasonable rockets, this has been like the dream since like
the fifties. You know, if you go back Max Bajay
of one of the big NASA engineers had these drawings
of reasonable rocket. It would have worked by having three
stacked rockets with a pilot in each of them with

(21:59):
wings right, would have flown back down like insanely dangerous.
It's super awesome. Nothing like it ever happened. There are
a couple like experiments in the nineties, but they weren't
like doing the high speed or any of thething you
needed to do. And then all of a sudden SpaceX
was going to orbit and coming back. And the reason
that matters is that math we talked about earlier. Right,
The old line is like if you have a seven
forty seven, but you have to throw it into the

(22:20):
ocean after each use, the tickets are expensive, and that's
essentially how we did space for the entire Space age
up to SpaceX.

Speaker 2 (22:29):
And why are we usable rockets so hard? I mean,
landing a seven forty seven is tricky, but we can
do it. Why is landing a rocket so much harder?

Speaker 1 (22:35):
I misspake when I said it was the only time
because the course of the Space Shuttle was time before that,
which was partially reusable. And I feel like that's actually
indicative because you know, in the case of the Space Shuttle,
we had two total losses out of you know, one
hundred and thirty something flights. And it's just because it's
really dangerous to take something that's in orbit, meaning like
if it were in air, it would be at whatever
it is Map twenty five or something, and just sort

(22:57):
of gently cruise back into the atmosphere. Right, you get
a lot of heated it's hard to deal with, you know,
you get all sorts of crazy accelerations, and so it's
just tough, especially if you're trying to keep the humans alive.
The nice thing about SpaceX is they don't do this
trick with humans in the vehicle right, operated by computer.
It's still insanely impressive though, but yeah, it's just hard
to make a vehicle that can endure all that. I mean,
this is really hard stuff.

Speaker 3 (23:18):
It was about thirty thousand dollars per pound to send
a mass of stuff to space using the shuttle. It
was really expensive. Once you got that shuttle safely on
the ground, refurbishing it, getting it ready to go back
up again cost a lot of money. And so it
did not lower the cost of sending masks to space
like people had anticipated.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
Yeah, interesting. People thought that the space shuttle was going
to be like a shuttle literally and make it cheap
to get stuff to and front space.

Speaker 1 (23:41):
Yeah, it was actually evidence that it was the most
expensive way during its like heyday, it's funne Ever, when
they retired it, like everyone outside the space community was like,
this is the end of America, and like everyone in
the space community was like, thank god, they like took
that death trap off the market.

Speaker 2 (23:56):
You know, well, what was wrong, like what was wrong
about their kindations or the physics or why didn't it
work out? Was it never going to work out? It
was just silly politics.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
This is like an endless nerd debate. I think people
who are more pro shuttle want to defend it would say, look,
the government made them do all sorts of crazy stuff.
They didn't fund it enough the beginning, and then for
quote unquote safety reasons, you had to disassemble and assess
all these different parts. So part why SpaceX is cheap,
it's not just three usables. They did a clean sheet
design that uses a lot of off the shelf parts.

(24:25):
What argument as part of why SpaceX can exist is
because a lot of off the shelf electronics just got
really good in a way that wasn't true in like
the late seventies. So it's confluence of things. It's possible,
it just wasn't the time yet. Notably, the Soviet Union
had a very similar vehicle called Brand which I think
flew exactly once.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
So let's talk about why it's possible. Is it just
cheap and fast electronics that are also like somehow radiation hard?
Like why is it possible for SpaceX to do this?
Was it a moment of genius a particular insight? Was
it Elon Musk being super cool? What was it that
made this possible?

Speaker 1 (25:00):
Eric Berger has a great book about this called Liftoff,
kind of going into the details. I think it's a
couple of things, like, I mean, reusables matter, but actually
they were doing pretty well before reusables. And a big
part of it is like, if you look at the
history of rocketry, most rockets are not clean sheet designs.
Their old military stuff. The rockets the Mercury guys were
flying and was just there was a warhead and they
took it off and they put Alan Shepherd on top,

(25:20):
and it was reportedly pretty bumpy too, because it was
not meant for humans, right, and This is like the
history of rockets for many years, and in fact, a
lot of those early rocket designs go back to like
the NAZV too rockets. That's like where all early rocketry
comes from, or much of it.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
But if you already have a system that mostly works,
why do you want to clean sheet design? Aren't you
saving money by building off of something you already have.

Speaker 1 (25:40):
I think the argument is usually that those designs they're
built for military stuff, so that means a lot of stuff.
It means, you know, maybe they're paying for high reliability
as opposed to cost. It could also mean famously, you
looked like the F thirty five, where like the Navy
gets to say, the Army gets to say, Marines get
to say, and so you end up with this big,
complicated machine, where I think the SpaceX is like a
very spare rocket. It's very stripped down. It's also like

(26:02):
not as many spoke parts. So that a NASA way
of doing things, which kind of makes sense for research agency,
is you use a lot of smoke parts, you don't
use a lot of off the shelf. And part of
that's like historically these parts didn't even exist, right, and
so now you can like drop an iPhone in space,
it has a chance. These things are pretty durable now,
and so I think something between doing a clean sheet
design having access to modern electronics and yeah, I don't

(26:25):
like always big of a position of complimenting e On Musk,
but you know, he brought a kind of Silicon Valley
view to things. And that was, by the way possible
because of the COTS program, which started at NASA, which
we don't need to get into, but essentially said look,
we're going to stop doing this cost plus contract business.
We're going to actually go out and try to create
a private sector for launch. I think that mattered a
lot too, and people like Musk stepped in to fill
the gap.

Speaker 2 (26:45):
So there wasn't an economy there, and the government invested
in something and built an economy there.

Speaker 1 (26:50):
Right, I would say have still built it. I mean
a lot of the money that ghost to SpaceX is
government contracts and there's still sustaining it.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
So then what is the state of the art now?
How cheap is it to go to space compared to
how it used to be twenty years ago?

Speaker 1 (27:02):
Yeah? Yeah, So even we were writing the book, the
standard number was something like ten thousand of kilogram the
latest numbers for Leo or twenty six hundred dollars per kilogram,
and that's on Falcon nine. So for comparison to the
numbers we have for the Space Shuttle was sixty five
four hundred dollars per kilogram. So that's a pretty non
trivial drop. And it's possible that SpaceX's own internal numbers
are even cheaper when they reuse a lot of rockets

(27:23):
for their starlink system. The numbers we have for the
Falcon Heavy, which is essentially like a Falcon with two
other Falcon boosters strapped to it, is fifteen hundred dollars
per kilogram, like an order of magnitude cheaper than it
was just when we were writing ten years ago.

Speaker 2 (27:36):
All right, So if I had a really big chicken
sandwich it's a kilogram, and I wanted to launch it
to space, it would only cost me fifteen hundred bucks.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
Yeah, well, I mean, you know you really want to
fill the firing with chicken sandwiches, You just have a
lot of chicken sandwich. You have to pay for the
whole vehicle. You don't get a.

Speaker 2 (27:52):
All right, Well, still, fifteen hundred dollars is not crazy number.
I mean, it would cost me like one hundreds of
dollars to send a chicken sandwich in China, for example,
and so you know a factor tend to go to
space honestly seems reasonable. But this is for cargo. What
about for people? Where are we in terms of like
sending people into space?

Speaker 1 (28:09):
So you know, the Shuttle retired and basically the way
we were able to get to space was embarrassingly by
employing the Russians to launch us. And then SpaceX comes
along and made it possible. But it's like it's hard
to have the extra step where you get humans on board.
There's just a lot of extra stuff that has to
not go wrong. You have to have high reliability, you
have to have these little capsules that have oxygen. And
so they built one. They built the Dragon Capsule, where notably,

(28:32):
like companies like Boeing which is a pretty storied company,
have not really succeeded, they built this capsule successfully docked
multiple times now with the ISS. They also have sent
up restocking missions that bring like, you know, consumables, that
sort of thing. Cool.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
All right, so then what does this mean? Right? We
talked earlier about how difficult it is to get into space.
Getting up from Earth is expensive. But now things have changed,
things are cheaper. Does that change our calculus about building
stuff out in space, getting that space economy going? That
things changed qualitatively or just quantitatively.

Speaker 1 (29:05):
I would say both. I mean so quantitatively. More and
more of the space business has become private. You know.
Of course, at the beginning it was exclusively governments, and
for a very long time that was true. And it's
really changed, especially in the last ten years. It's majority private.
We tried to find people who are trying to estimate this.
In a couple of years ago it was already three
quarters private, and I'm sure that's just continued. The business

(29:27):
has grown. I mean, the nice thing is, you know,
the stuff grows in what am I trying to use?

Speaker 2 (29:31):
Tandem Panda? Thank you so good? Kelly?

Speaker 3 (29:33):
Is he one for Kelly? Zero point ten?

Speaker 1 (29:35):
Oh? All right, well you're way behind this plant. We're
all ever more data hungry for like I cat videos.
There's also practical stuff like even ten years we're all
in self driving cars. Then they might want you know,
lowers orbit satellite uplinks for constant connectivity, and so we
just want more and more and more data and so
the satellites can supply that, right, So you know I
said earlier everything below geosynchronous is valuable, and that's what

(29:58):
it's valuable for. This is nice because it's a sort
of ratchet where you know, you keep throwing up more satellites.
It gets cheaper to mass produce them. Data gets cheaper.
But when the data gets cheaper, we just demand more
and more and more of it, and so we keep
throwing up satellites. And so this is why we're finally
you know, for a long time people talked about having
problems with like satellites smashing into each other, and it's
finally becoming like maybe a bit more serious. And it's

(30:18):
also maybe we want to lead it into this. It's
making space tourism at least more plausible. That we haven't
seen like an explosion in that yet.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
All right, So then is there a space economy for tourism?
I mean people have been launching on these things, you know,
I don't know how high up they're getting, whether their
accounts of space, whether their counts is tourism, whether they're
you know, commercial knots or whatever. Do you think this
is the beginning of a space tourism industry.

Speaker 1 (30:39):
Yeah, So, I mean, you know, people have been doing
space tourism for like over twenty years now. A bunch
of people have gone up to the ISS. They're all
very rich people. Most of them wrote books about it.
We read some of them. And more recently Blue Origin
has been sending people up and you can kind of
debate if they are space tourists because they don't go
to orbit, which is kind of like for a nerd,

(31:00):
the important thing when you go to space, you want
to go to orbit, which is much harder to do
than to just do what they do, which is they
go up really high. They get the view of space
you want, right, They get to see you above the
atmosphere with the stars above, and they get to I
think something like four minutes in free fall floating, so
they get a kind of like astronaut like experience. So
if you count that, the number has gone way up.

Speaker 2 (31:18):
But why does the nerd only value being in orbit?
Why does it only count if you're in orbit?

Speaker 1 (31:23):
Because it's the hard part, right, I forget. There's some
famous line from Hindline which is like the hard part
about going to space is not going up high, it's
going over fast. Right, So you feel aout this idea
that when you're in orbit you don't experience gravity, But
of course you experience gravity because you didn't as you know,
you fling off in a straight line until you encountered
something else. And so it's just that you're at the
right velocity. The slingy outy tendency is balanced by the

(31:44):
polleyanny tendency, and so you go to a circle.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
I guess. So, but if I wanted to go to
the Moon or Mars, whatever, I wouldn't go to orbit,
and I would still count that as going out into space, right.

Speaker 1 (31:53):
Okay, yeah, sure, sure. If if Vegas was shipping build to
the Moon, I would waive my objection by all means.

Speaker 2 (32:02):
I'm glad we settled that here in nerd Corta.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
That's right, it's good, right, Yeah, so we don't need
to go on this change. But actually comes up legally
because you have different legal protections if you're an astronaut
versus a non astronaut under international law.

Speaker 2 (32:15):
Protection from who.

Speaker 3 (32:17):
That's a good question, Aliens.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
Ghosts on the Moon, Moon's haunted bro.

Speaker 3 (32:24):
I think it's usually imagined that if there's some disaster
in space or you land in a foreign country, there's
a legal obligation to whoever could help you out to
help you out.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
So like if you went to orbit with your chicken
sandwich and you fell over Siberia, the Russians, even if
they were really mad at us, would be obligated to
deliver you and your vehicle and not be jerks about it. Basically,
there's more precise language in the out of space Street,
but not much more precise. And I guess they'd have
to render up the sandwich or something you can visualize, right,

(32:55):
So SpaceX dragon capsule goes up. If you wash the rocket,
it'll turn and it will go at high speed into
an orbital trajectory, whereas a Blue Origin rocket and this
is still really cool, but it'll just go up and
then come down. There's no attempt to go into orbit
anything like that. So they're not doing the hard part.
And that's why you know, you only get to spend
whatever it is, like some amount of minutes doing space

(33:15):
as opposed to days or weeks or whatever.

Speaker 3 (33:17):
Can I ask a quick clarifying question, So when Kentucky
Fried Chickens sent one of their chicken sandwiches up on
a high altitude balloon, because it didn't orbit. That doesn't count.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
Rat did that really happen?

Speaker 3 (33:27):
That did really happen? Yes, that doesn't count.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
Right to Zach, that doesn't count as the chicken sandwich
being an astronaut.

Speaker 3 (33:35):
No, no, going to space, going to space? Did they
waste their money on that advertising campaign?

Speaker 1 (33:40):
Are you guys trying to get KFC as a sponsor
right now?

Speaker 2 (33:43):
We talked about Taco Bell recently having a target for
a reusable vehicle.

Speaker 1 (33:47):
We shouldn't go on a tangent, but there is a
kind of formal line called the carm online you've probably
talked about at some point, which is like sixty something
miles up that like is technically space, but who cares,
it's not orbit. It doesn't count as tourism. I don't know.
Let's address the actual question, are we going to get
a tourism business? And doesn't matter. If you look at
the number of satellites, it's just totally exploded in the
last ten years. That has not happen with space towards

(34:09):
The equivalent would be something like dozens of tourists are
up right now. SpaceX wants that they've talked about they
have this new vehicle called starship. It's as big as
a Saturn five, Like, it's enormous. It could put we
don't know yet, but say fifty or one hundred, one
hundred and fifty tons in orbit, so plausibly you could
have like fifty people there all puking on each other
at the same time as they enter orbit, but getting

(34:30):
that magnificent view that John Glenn got on his first orbit, right,
And so one question you might ask is is there
any money in this? And so Kelly and I actually
tried to look into this. There's not a lot of
people who run surveys that are like how much would
you pay to go into space? But there's some evidence
everything the exact number, but it's something like a decent
amount of middle class Americans would at least say on
a survey that they would part with like fifty grand

(34:50):
for an orbital trip. Whether they would whether you could
convince your spouse that that's like a good investment, is
therek question? It does seem like there's an economy there, right,
There is a market. And what's exciting about that if
you want there to be like a really cool moon base,
is you know, if you've got a tourist market like this,
even if it was just adventure tourism for the relatively rich,
Like that's going to require a lot of development of

(35:11):
like high reliability vehicles, life support. One of our big
things we winged about is there all these basics that
you don't think about, like making sure the toilet doesn't
break like it did on inspiration for launched by SpaceX,
you know. And so you're getting all this basic tiki
TACKI life support stuff really worked out. One thing is
a big d the US is like most astronauts are

(35:33):
middle aged dudes, right, just some high percentage of all
astronauts ever middle aged men who are in like peak
physical condition, and so like the question is, like what
happens when like I go up, I bring like a
slightly sub average body into space slightly.

Speaker 3 (35:48):
Oh you're very handsome.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
Let's have some boundaries here, Yeah, thank you, minus one.
I'm blowing a whistle on that one.

Speaker 1 (35:56):
Yeah, but no more seriousness, Like we don't have a
lot of on like old people, people have various conditions
how they're going to performance this. We just don't have it.
And so there's all this stuff you'd want to have
for a really cool moon base that you would get
naturally from a tourism business.

Speaker 3 (36:12):
Zach and I in a city on Mars, call ourselves
this space. I'm gonna say jerks for the show so
that our editor doesn't have to do too many bleeps,
but to just to provide a non space jerk counter argument.
One of the Wiener Smiths leaves the house, and so
I went to a bunch of space conferences. And if
you go to the space conferences, they would say that
space tourism is just absolutely taking off. They count the
suborbital flights. They are saying that the number of astronauts

(36:36):
is increasing rapidly. And so I do think there's a
lot of activity in this area, a lot of people
who are excited. And so there are people who are
not as negative as the Wiener Smiths.

Speaker 2 (36:46):
Is there anybody who's more negative than.

Speaker 3 (36:48):
There are there are?

Speaker 1 (36:51):
Yeah, yeah, there are friends.

Speaker 3 (36:53):
That's right. There are the people who talk to us.
All right, So let's take a break and when we
get back we will talk a bit more about the
space economy.

Speaker 2 (37:17):
Okay, we're back, and we're talking to the Winnersmith's about
the future in space. Where are the great great, great
great great grandkids of this wonderful marriage, going to set
down their roots where they live on the moon, where
they live in space, or would they still be in Virginia.

Speaker 3 (37:33):
It's hard to be in Virginia.

Speaker 2 (37:35):
I don't think we're gonna have sunsets on the moon
the way we have in Virginia for quite agreed, Yeah, exactly,
we have to paint them on the wall or something.
All right, So let's talk about realistic space economies. I mean,
we've talked a lot about how difficult to it is,
how expensive it is, but it is getting easier, and
we have an explosion of space satellites. And you guys

(37:55):
are skeptical about space tourism, But what are some space
economies that we could have eventually, maybe somehow get going
without finding gold on the Moon?

Speaker 3 (38:04):
Can I clarify real quick that I'm not necessarily skeptical
about space tourism. That seems to me to be a
thing that's happening right now. I might be a little
less skeptical than Zach. All right, go ahead, Zach.

Speaker 1 (38:14):
I would actually agree with that it's not exploding, But
I would actually say that's the most optimistic case of
space tourism. You know, it's not like an industry that
makes us all more productive, but it is one that
might exist. I there's enough each people want to go,
so yeah, so let's talk about other possibilities. So there's
been this desire for many years for there to be
some reason to go to the Moon or Mars or

(38:35):
the asteroid belt. So we could talk about like some
of the most common things and why we're a little
bit skeptical. I would say the most common ones you
hear Kelly current me of you disagree are space based
solar and let's go mind the Moon or the asteroids
or something and space based solar. You know, it could
be a whole episode, but the short version is do
a back of the envelope calculation, and you know, even
with really low launch costs, it's almost always going to

(38:57):
be better to put up a good voltap panel and
like Arasz or the Sahara desert them launching itto space.

Speaker 3 (39:03):
If I can just quickly plug some work that Daniel
and I have done in the past back on Daniel
and Jorge Explain the Universe. Daniel and I did a
chat about space based solar where we talk about some
of the limitations, and also I do feel like something
we've sort of skipped over. That's important to mention is
that the economy and low Earth orbit for satellites and
stuff is huge. That is making tons of money, and

(39:24):
we'll continue to expand. And we talked to Jonathan McDowell
about the implications of more satellites going into space and
collisions and how that could affect the economy. But so
now we're working beyond just putting satellites in space, right, And.

Speaker 2 (39:36):
There aren't some arguments for space based solar power. I mean,
I think on the whole they don't win out, but
there are some reasons. It's not total insanity. The idea
is that your solar panels are always in the sun right,
because you're never in the Earth shadow, which is cool.
So it's a gain of three x right there on
Moost or two x. And they could beam power to
anywhere on Earth, which is very cool. So you don't

(39:58):
have to have solar panels in a place where you
have lots of sun Norwegians can get solar power in
the winter. That would be amazing and nice and cozy,
But of course there's lots of issues there, like you're
building a huge beam and pointing it at the Earth.
Could that ever go wrong? I can't imagine.

Speaker 1 (40:12):
The father of rocketry, Hermon Obert, actually proposed putting a
giant mirror in space for agriculture and for weaponizations. This
is one of the oldest ideas in space.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
But of course we do use solar power in space, right,
satellite solar panels and all sorts of stuff. There is
a solar power up there, and you know, I think
that highlights it, like, if you want to do something
in space, you should do it for the space economy
bringing it back down to Earth is almost never profitable. Yes,
so then what is like, what is the space economy?
What is the space version of the chicken sandwich.

Speaker 1 (40:43):
One of the possibility which I'll just do this very quickly,
is we either mind the Moon or there's something we
need to make in zero gravity. And so there's been
talk of the something for decades and you will still
say this be like, well, you can make very pure materials.
I guess there are plays to be easier to make
certain biochemicals in space. And this is all to my understanding, true.
It's just that it's hard to win on price when

(41:04):
you have to fly to like a space station and
assent bloat there, and so far it just hasn't happened.
And if someone in your audience is probably objecting, like, well,
such and such company just put in millions of dollars
to do it, so what are they crazy? And my
answer is that our book I read a book from
the eighties it was like, you know, John Deere just
paid three million dollars to send this thing into space,
and it's like, look, companies do this for promo. It's

(41:24):
not proof that it's a good idea. But the other
option is the moon or the asteroid bilt like we're
going to go mine. And that goes back to what
we were saying earlier about like, look, there's no special stuff.
So the exception people often say is on the moon,
we'll get helium three. And their papers written about this.
Harrison Schmidt, the senator slash astronaut slash geologist, it was

(41:45):
big on it, and we cite in our book there's
a great paper. I'm blanking on the name, but basically
just is this incredible takedown. But the very short version is,
you know, the only real use for helium three that's
big money is you could have a neutronic fusion, which
is to cleaner form of fusion. And the problem is,
like it's a much harder version of fusion that the

(42:05):
fusion we already can't do, and the vision we already
can't do is actually quite clean compared to like other
energy methods. I think of like this a neutronic stuff
as like a kind of show off version of fusion.
We've already achieved utopia, why not push it a little further.
It's not like there's hunks of it on the moon.
It's just an a moderately higher concentration on the You're

(42:26):
in the position of saying we have to like mine
and process huge parts of the moon, and like, don't
even get us started on how to run construction equipment
in a vacuum at one six gravity. It's a whole
other thing. But also, and this for me really got me.
If you know your nuclear reactors, think y'all did an
episode on this at some point. You know, there's a
type called a heavy water reactor. The main ones are
in Canada, the mini states that are built thinking that

(42:48):
uranium would be hard to come across in the future.
As they're a little more efficient, they use deuterated water
and one of their byproducts is helium three. We really
urgently needed loads of helium three. Probably you're better off
building these like weird fission reactors and just sucking off
the byproduct. So unfortunately, if you're boring, you run into
this problem every time you have one of these ideas

(43:10):
about why we need to go to space.

Speaker 3 (43:12):
I think another problem is that you're always kind of vulnerable.
So say you did start mining helium three, it would
be super expensive. As soon as someone figured out a
cheaper way to do it on Earth, or any way
to do it on Earth, they almost immediately can beat
you at cost. And so there's fiber optic cables I
think that people want to make in space. But again,
if you can figure out how to do it on
Earth and get them just as good, you immediately beat

(43:34):
the competition. So I feel like you're always at risk.

Speaker 1 (43:37):
Yeah, I mean that's the whole Like sex sorting story,
this is our favorite story, which is there were proposals
in the seventies to send bull seam into space for
sex sorting, which I guess is a little easier in
zero gravity. And then the eighties methods were developed, and
so it's like any money that had been spent in
like nineteen seventy five to sort bullga meats on Skylab
would have been really badly spent.

Speaker 2 (43:57):
I feel like a lot of these ideas are sort
of bad faith reverse engineering to cover. Like somebody just
wants to go to space, and like, let's come up
with an excuse to do it. And I think there's
just sort of like an enthusiasm there, like it feels
like it's the future. Let's just get it started.

Speaker 3 (44:13):
I know those people. I go to conferences with those people,
and I genuinely believe that a lot of them really
do feel like the things they're doing in space are
just so much better than what we could do on Earth.
I think there's plenty of people who believe and aren't
acting in bad faith. I'm just not convinced.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
I guess bad faith is too strong. I mean, I
think the real motivation is enthusiasm for space, not like, hey,
this is a good idea and it needs space, so
therefore let's go there. Is that fair?

Speaker 3 (44:39):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (44:40):
I think, all.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
Right, so let's get back to trashing other people's data
centers in space. I've heard people talk about these data
centers because, like Google spends huge amounts of money building
these computers and taking up a lot of land and
using a lot of energy and like warming the planet
and you know, using a lot of water. But like,
why don't we build this stuff in space? Right? Space

(45:03):
is big and cold? So what are your thoughts about
data centers in space? Exactly?

Speaker 1 (45:08):
Yes, I mean this is one of those ideas that
structure is one of the most bizarre ideas I'd never heard.
I was like nervous to argue about it because people
be like, no, the physics works out, and I was like,
but so may maybe we should go over for your audience.
Like it's hard to dump heat in space. Okay, it's
really hard. Space is like colded in some formal sense,
But it doesn't mean it's easy to dump heat right,
for the same reason, like if you have a hot
hunk of metal, it's easier if you have a bucket

(45:30):
of water than like cold air to dump heat. There's
just more molecules to pull away the heat. In space,
You've got nothing or almost nothing, right, and so it's
very hard to dump heat. If you look at the ISS,
a lot of it is just radiators that are dumping
the heat, like generated by the systems and the humans
in it. It's just one of the problems for space
based solar is you have to deal with all this heat.

Speaker 2 (45:48):
Yeah, so let's get into the physics that for a minute, Like, yeah,
how do you cool down? You cool down in two
different ways. One is like you have air around you,
which is bouncing off of you, and it's stealing your heat.
If you're hotter than the air, you're going to lose
your heat to the air. It's like heat diffusion essentially,
and out in space you don't have that method. There
is no wind to make it feel cold. There is

(46:08):
another method you can use to cool down, that's what
you mentioned, which is radiation. You know, everything that has
a temperature it can be thought of as a black body,
and so it radiates, and things that are hotter radiated
higher frequency. That's your only way to lose heat in
space because there is no wind. So, as you say,
even though space is technically cold, although parts of space
are technically super duper hot because the particles are moving

(46:31):
really high speed and so like you would freeze to
death in a super hot but very dilute plasma. But
also you could burn up, right, you could burn up
because it's hard to cool down, even if you're in
a super hot, very dilute plasma. But so all your
intuition about hot and cold goes out the window. And
the bottom line is it's hard to shed heat in
space because there's no air to dump it into.

Speaker 1 (46:53):
Yeah, and to be clear, the people proposing data centers
in orbit know this. Yeah, But the point is, like,
data centers are hot, so what is the solution.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
The solution is basically giant radiators. And I think the
people proposing data centers in space they understand that they
are complicated, right, because you need more elaborate cooling and
also like refurbishing your data center is harder, Like everything
is in space, right, and you need radiation protection and
getting up there to swap out a new GP or whatever.
It's complicated. I think they acknowledge that all these things

(47:24):
are hard. I think the argument, if we're going to
like steal man it to try to be fair about it,
is that resources eventually on Earth aren't limited, right. We
have limited space and limited energy and basically unlimited demand
for computing, so eventually space has to be an efficient
way to do This.

Speaker 3 (47:42):
Is another part of the argument that they're using the
space based solar to power the data center, and so
being in space solves a bunch of the problems for
space bace solar we were talking about earlier.

Speaker 2 (47:52):
Yeah, you don't need to bring the power back to Earth.
You just power the computers there, and in principle, maybe
even the compute is for your space economy. Right. For
people who are generating images of chicken sandwiches on the Moon,
they don't have to go back and forth from Earth
in order to have their AI slave make their art
for that.

Speaker 1 (48:09):
Whoa. You know. One of the things I probably often
had writing the books is you'd be talking to someone
and they'll be like, and that's why we'll need a
thousand foot tall tower in the poles of Mars. And
you'd be like, but I don't see when that's going
to be a good idea. They'll be like, well, I'm
talking about ten thousand years from now, when we're I'm
like Kardashev scale level eighty three, And you're like, well, okay,

(48:30):
I guess I would even argue about that. So people
will say this right, so like, we'll eventually have to
do this because we're going to use up all the resources.
But resources don't work that way. There's not like a
sort of lump of stuff called resources that you can
use up right. So like before lithium ion batteries, like
lithium had uses, but it wasn't this super valuable stuff.
Now it's a really important resource. The same was true
for like high quality sand, for silicon. It was true

(48:52):
of petroleum before the combustion engine. Right. People substitute stuff
when new technology comes along, right, And that's how you
get more valuable over time. And so you know, not
to be too deprising, but you mentioned like we're all
going to have our like AI, I'll say servants, like, look,
if you just want value, value means humans say they're
willing to pay dollars for it or whatever for it, right,

(49:13):
So like you can literally have infinite value just by
putting people in the matrix or something like if we're
willing to entertain these like, well, in a thousand years,
we'll do this possibility, like wehen as well entertain that.
And just to like talk about what it would mean
to need to go to space for a data center, Kelly,
you correct me if I'm wrong, but I think under
the Antarctic Treaty system you could like litter Antarctica with
data centers. You could probably do that now, and it's

(49:35):
like cold and there's water. They have pancake breakfast at McMurdo,
and we're not doing that. So I don't know. Maybe
when we're done with Antarctica and we've like filled the
oceans with data centers and we're all just made of data,
then that like aggregative like computronium, will need to expand
into space. I have trouble seeing it earlier. The only

(49:58):
last thing I would say is I think people who
are really into this, well, I think often have a
kind of libertarian leaning, so they'll say, well, look like
the Earth is getting bureaucratic and overregulated, and this is
going to be the only place where we could put
more stuff without having the like save the whales. Maybe
that's the future. I don't know. The costs are so extravagant.
I mean, like even if you had elon Musk predictions,

(50:19):
like it's ten dollars, it's kilogram to go to space,
Like I don't know if anyone's way to data center,
but it's a lot of kilograms. It's just hard to
imagine you're gonna win on price here.

Speaker 2 (50:28):
Well, a lot of this feels like chicken and egg problems. Right,
you argue that there's no eggs because there's no chickens.
There's no chicken because there's no eggs. Let me ask
you this in fact, like think a thousand years in
the future or five thousand years of the future, do
you think humans will ever have a viable space economy
or do you think it's never. Because if it's ever,
that means it's going to happen, and eventually you are
going to want data centers in space. The only other

(50:50):
argument I think is that it's never going to happen.
Is that what you think?

Speaker 1 (50:52):
I would actually say, there's a middle argument, which I
prefer to make. I'd be curious if Kelly disagrees with me.
But it's like, so, it may be the case that
there's never a quote unquote good economic reason to do this,
just meaning you pay a dollar or someone does something,
you get two dollars back. Right, I think there's a
pretty good case that it'll either never be like that
or wouldn't be any time soon. It doesn't mean we

(51:13):
won't do it. It just means that at some point it
might be like Star Trek, Right, so it's like, why
does Captain Kirk go around the galaxy? Was because we're
all doing well and we'd like to see what's out there,
and so, meaning like it could be at some point
we're just so technologically advanced and riched we put people
on Mars as a sort of esthetic choice.

Speaker 2 (51:30):
Like building particle colliders or something exactly like that.

Speaker 1 (51:33):
I don't want to let up the secret, but I
don't think CERN is going to like get you cheaper butter.
You do grow cows abuff parts, it don't think so.
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
There are buffalo at Fermulab, yes, and bison butter is
pretty good.

Speaker 1 (51:46):
Okay with drawn, but no, I mean, like why do
we have a base at McMurdo. I mean there is geopolitics.
It's not like nice all the way down, But mostly
it's because we think it's cool. We're much richer than
we were one hundred years ago, and we just do it,
and so like stuff like that could lead to a
serious martyrs presence. It's just that there's no good economic
case for it. If you really want to give me
a thousand years to work with, I don't see why

(52:09):
you don't get to a stage where we all individually
have like four thousand robot butlers who attend on us
all day long, and we have like amazing rockets to
do anything we want and it's all very safe. Then yeah,
why not that at least rules out what ninety nine
percent of advocates are saying when they say we have
to go soon to get rich or to fix society
or not be like thwarted by the bureaucrats who are

(52:29):
dominating Earth. All that stuff goes out the window. If
you're saying it's just an aesthetic choice will make because
it's cool.

Speaker 3 (52:34):
So Zach and I spent like five years writing the book,
and we had to argue until we agreed in the
content that would go in the book.

Speaker 2 (52:40):
That's why it took so long.

Speaker 3 (52:41):
Yeah, well, you know, so we don't usually diverge too much,
but I do want to add to what Zack said.
I think a lot of why we do stuff in
space comes down to prestige, and I suspect Zach agrees
with me on this point too. Yes, and so you
could end up getting a space economy because the US
and China are in a race to put research out there,
and then they need data centers and things just kind

(53:03):
of build up over time, and so it might not
be because there's something out there that's so valuable we
should actually go out there and get it. It might
just be that both nations think that they look great
on the international stage if they were doing these things,
so they'll do it. So I think that could be
another way we create the economy that makes some of
these ideas worthwhile.

Speaker 2 (53:20):
It wouldn't be the first time that science and technology
has ridden on the back of nationalism and patriotism to
make its case, right. I accuse other folks of bad
faith arguments, but there's a lot of that also in science, Like, Hey,
what we really want to do is X. We're going
to sell it to you as why because we think
you want to buy why. So I'm a little bit
of a hypocrite there, or at least a ten billion
dollar here.

Speaker 3 (53:42):
Zach and I are waiting for our alien question. Oh yeah,
don't let us sound Daniel.

Speaker 2 (53:48):
All right, here's my alien question. So, Zach, do you
think that you guys are the reason for the Fermi paradox?
Do you think on every planet is somebody out there
that's written the wet blanket book about going to space?
And that's why the aliens have never gone to space
and we haven't been visited by aliens. It's all the
Wiener Smith's faults.

Speaker 1 (54:06):
There's some kind of tentacle like Smith.

Speaker 3 (54:11):
Holding the back humanity exactly.

Speaker 2 (54:14):
Wow, that's what I'm suggesting.

Speaker 1 (54:17):
As a guy with a book to sell, I would
go on any broadcast. I suppose maybe our message has
reached other planets and they gave up.

Speaker 2 (54:28):
Are you guys going to sell your book on Mars
when there is an economy on.

Speaker 5 (54:31):
Mars if we can, that's right, Well premise, that's right,
that's right, you know, even if they're just selling it
to laugh at us because of how wrong we were.

Speaker 3 (54:43):
That's great. We'll take the royalties, will.

Speaker 2 (54:47):
Yeah. Just like I love hate downloads of the podcast,
and there people who downloaded just to complain about it, like,
keep going for it.

Speaker 1 (54:55):
That's beautiful, all.

Speaker 2 (54:56):
Right, So thank you very much Zach for coming on
the podcast to tell us all about why going into
space is still hard and still expensive and everybody should
go to Antarctica first.

Speaker 3 (55:05):
Great job, Zach, All right, yes, thank you, yeah, yeah yeah.
Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We
would love to hear from you, We really would.

Speaker 2 (55:22):
We want to know what questions you have about this
extraordinary universe.

Speaker 3 (55:27):
We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions
for future shows. If you contact us, we will get
back to you.

Speaker 2 (55:33):
We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us
at Questions at danieland Kelly dot.

Speaker 3 (55:40):
Org, or you can find us on social media. We
have accounts on x, Instagram, Blue Sky and on all
of those platforms. You can find us at D and K.

Speaker 2 (55:49):
Universe will be shy right to us