October 12, 2025 • 40 mins
Newt talks with Joel Sercel, PhD., Founder and CEO of TransAstra, a venture-backed company pioneering asteroid mining and the future of the space economy. Sercel shares insights into the company's mission to use asteroids as refueling stations for rockets, potentially enabling extensive space travel across the solar system and beyond. Sercel, a former Jet Propulsion Laboratory technologist and a seven-time NASA NIAC Fellow, discusses his journey from a childhood fascination with space to leading major space engineering efforts. He highlights the strategic importance of asteroid mining for the United States, emphasizing the potential for space industrialization and the creation of a transportation network in space. Their conversation also covers the technological innovations of TransAstra, including the development of a Capture Bag for asteroid mining and the Sutter Telescope Network for detecting asteroids. Sercel envisions a future where space resources are harnessed to build vast new industries and enhance military capabilities, with a focus on robotic operations and the potential for solar thermal propulsion.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of News World. Transastra is a venture
back company revolutionizing asteroid mining and the future of the
space economy, including technology development and economic modeling and planning
for in space transportation enabled by asteroid mining. In an
effort to build a transportation network in space, or to say,
(00:25):
in a simple way, Transastor is using asteroids as gas
stations for rockets the one day may take us across
our Solar system and perhaps the galaxies far beyond. I'm
really pleased to welcome my guests. Joel Cercel, founder and
CEO of Transastor. He has a PhD from cal Tech.
He's a former Jet Propulsion Laboratory technologist, as seven time
(00:49):
NASA NIAC Fellow, and he holds twenty plus patents. He
has led major space engineering efforts at cal Tech, the
Jet Proportion Laboratory, and the US Air Force, and even
has an asteroid named after him. Joel, welcome and thank
(01:19):
you for joining me in news World. You've had an
incredible career from Caltech to NASA and now founding Transastra.
What first drew you to space?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Well, mister speaker, first, I have to say this is
incredible honor. I've tracked your career for decades, and I'm
incredibly grateful for the contributions that you've made to this nation.
So the idea that I get to spend some time
with you this morning is just a thrill for me.
What attracted me to space? The answer is I never wasn't.
(01:49):
I grew up in various different places all over the world,
but most notably in the Arizona Desert, and my father
was a jet fighter pilot, and he would take us
out camp at night, and in the Arizona Desert, the
stars are so close and so helpable that you feel
a connection to the cosmos. Astronauts describe when they go
(02:11):
into space a phenomenon known as the overview effect, where
they begin to understand that the Earth is just a
tiny dot in space. But for me, it was never
not that way. And then I would see my father's
jet blazing through the night sky, and I knew that
was him, And I never had this feeling of separation
between Earth and space that most people grow up with.
(02:31):
When you have that different cosmic perspective, you begin very
quickly to realize that, as Sulkovsky said, Earth is the
cradle of humanity, but we can't live in our cradle forever.
Humanity is growing exponentially. In order to continue to thrive
as a species, we must continue our exponential growth, and
(02:52):
to do that we must tap into the resources of
the cosmos. This is just simply axiomatic to me. We
live in this incredibly interesting time where the first time,
for the first time, humanity or the let's say, life
from the biosphere of Earth now has the ability to
make the leap into the cosmos and to carry the
(03:15):
seed of life into space in order for that which
the Earth gave rise to to become immortal. It's fantastic.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Here you are in the Arizona Desert, you're interested in space,
and you go to cal Tech, which is maybe the
best science institution in the United States or even in
the world.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
I mean, that's quite a jump from the desert. I
got to tell you, it was a dream. So I
grew up reading the books of Robert Heinlein, mostly Robert Heinlein,
but also asim Off Clark, the other science fiction giants,
and inevitably, the hero in a juvenile book written by
Hindlein would wind up being some disenfranchised boy who somehow
(03:59):
wounded up going to either Caltech or MIT, and I've
been accused of being bright. But people don't know about
me is that I grew up with significant learning disabilities,
terrible grades and so on, and so the idea that
I could wind up getting a PhD at cal Tech
is a mind blower.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
How did that happen? Then?
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Well out of college, my first job was working as
a researcher at JPL, and I went and told my
management at JPL I was going to go back to
grad school. And I had this idea for a new
kind of space propulsion engine and I was going to
go do a PhD on that if I could, And
I was looking around for grad schools, and I had
written a proposal to the Air Force Office to Scientific
(04:43):
Research to get my graduate work funded. Basically, the management
at JPL. JPL was a Caltech laboratory. They said, we'd
really rather not go to those other schools. We have
an advisor at cal Tech who would like to talk
to you. And that's how I wound up going to
cal Tech for graduate school. And then what was really
cool is I got to keep my job at JPL
(05:03):
during that time, and I had written a proposal to
fund it, so I actually did my experiment in the
Electric propulsion Lab at JPL while I was taking classes
at cal Tech. And I immediately started teaching part time
at Caltech after that, And.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Was caw Tech as extraordinary intellectually as people say it is.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
It is extraordinary. It's fantastic for me. Yes, there were
some professors there who were just extraordinary, But I have
to tell you, at that time in the twentieth century,
JPL was also a pretty extraordinary place. One of my teachers,
by reading his books, had been Carl Sagan. And I
(05:41):
got to know Carl Sagan and have lunch with Carl
Sagan at JPL JPL as at Caltech Laboratory, and debated
him over lunch, and he absolutely sliced me to ribbons,
and I found out what a mature and sophisticated mind
could do. Yeah, cal Tech was fantastic. I've been blessed
with getting the opportunity to work with and meet some
of the really special historical figures of science and engineering
(06:05):
of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. When I was
in high school, I was working actually on asteroid mining,
and I wrote a letter to a guy named Freeman
Dyson who was at the Institute of Advanced Studies where
Einstein was. He immediately wrote me back and we started
a correspondence that led up until the time of his
death a few years ago. Freeman Dyson is one of
(06:27):
the great physicists and thinkers in science and related subjects.
The idea that I had him as a mentor, it's
just like, you feel so incredibly lucky. It's just you
can't even And I was honored to be able to
introduce him to my son. I have three wonderful sons,
but one of my sons happens to have his PhD
in the same field that I do, background in physics
(06:48):
and engineering, and we were able to have lunch together.
You know, things like that come from these opportunities. You
just feel so blessed and lucky.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
When you look back on that, what would you say
is the biggest single thing you took from.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
It's not a positive. When I started at JPL, I
thought the limitations for human activities were the laws of engineering, physics,
and economics. And what I found is the humans and
especially large institutional organizations, are primarily motivated by fear, fear
(07:23):
of taking risk. And it's interesting. When I was a
young man at JPL. I found out later that during
those times I was the most avid user of the
library at JPL, and I used to invent things all
the time, and the inevitable answer to any invention was,
we can't do that. And the other thing I noticed
is that all JPL did exquisitely good work. Every year,
(07:47):
it costs more to do their planetary missions than it
did the year before, and so they got incredibly good
at doing less and less for more, and sometimes more
for much more, with very little eye towards efficiency. Efficiency
was not rewarded, risk taking was not rewarded, but making
(08:07):
sure not to screw up was the main thing that rewarded.
And so I eventually had to leave. JPL is I
think the most effective government laboratory in the world, But
relative to what is possible, I learned that it's not
a place that I could stay. Much respect to the employees,
not much respect to the processes and the value system
(08:30):
in the culture.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
It's interesting how virtually all bureaucracies acquire similar patterns of
self protection.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Yeah, if the self organizing system like an organism, and
these organisms start to interact with each other and they
take on a Darwinian nature, that is about protecting the
organism instead of the mission, and they need to be reinvented.
They need to be reinvented or terminated. This idea that
(09:01):
Elon had of Doge, that every government agency, every law
should have a sunset clause, is I think absolutely correct.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
So in a sense, you have a chance not to
take that insight and apply it in the private sector.
Talk about the creation of Transastra and what you think
its mission is.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
You know, after leaving JPL, I taught at Caltech and consulted,
and I was consulting for a government agency that many
of your audience would never have heard of, but they'd
buy a lot of space launch vehicles and that sort
of thing. They're located on the East Coast. They told me, Hey,
there's this company called SpaceX. They say they're going to
be building reusable rockets, and there's a government federally funded
(09:44):
research and development organization FFRDC called the Aerospace Corporation. It's
looking them over and helping us decide whether we should
certify them for national security launches. But we think they're
being pretty conservative, and we need someone with sort of
an entrepreneurial bent to look at SpaceX and this is
when the Falcon nine was a new vehicle, barely had
(10:04):
one or two launches, and so I went out. I'd
known Elon a little bit. He's not like my best
body or anything, but i'd met him in two thousand
and six, so I'd known Elon a little bit. And
I know Gwen, the CEO at SpaceX better because she
used to try to recruit my students. And so I
had this consulting contract for this East Coast agency, this big,
(10:26):
multi billion dollar East Coast agency, to help the government
evaluate SpaceX should SpaceX be used for DoD launches. And
they wanted someone with a Silicon Valley perspective to come in.
So I got a chance to do a deep dive
on SpaceX's engineering processes, how they did business, their engineering designs,
their culture, that sort of thing. My mind was completely blown.
(10:49):
This was the dream that i'd had as a young
engineer JPL, thinking JPL would be like this. But these people,
they didn't just talk the top, they walked the walk.
And their efficiency and they're to innovate was exactly what
I'd always dreamed of seeing. So I provided a very
strong recommendation that the government do everything they can to
start launching on SpaceX in spite of the fact that
(11:12):
literally everyone in the aerospace that's an exaggerated everyone, most
of the powers that be and the authorities in the
aerospace industry said that they were going to fail. And
then I remember driving back from meeting with the Colonel
and it was a bunch of government employees recommending against me,
recommending for as a consultant. Thinking, Okay, the low cost
(11:35):
launch that we're all promised is going to happen. Now
what do I do? And I said to myself that
means I need to start an asteroid mining company. That day,
started to gin up ideas for the asteroid mining company,
wrote a white paper and sent it off to Jeff Bezos,
who had known since the year two thousand. I was
(11:56):
one of the consultants he brought in to help set
up Blue Origin. He invited me up to Seattle and
spent a day with me brainstorming about this. He gave
me a tour and everything, and I made the decision
at that point to launch Transastor as a company from
the perspective of using asteroids as the resources to launch
(12:16):
massive and dis industries into space. And I'm really glad
I did. It's been the most fun I've had in
my entire career. I've been able to invent at will.
I hire brilliant young engineers who I can use as
my eyes and hands on the technology to build things,
and it's just the funnest thing I could have possibly imagined.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
One of your focuses is making asteroid mining a reality.
Can you describe why asteroids are particularly interesting?
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yeah, So it's a couple of things. One is, if
you go to any planetary body like the Moon or
Mars or the Earth, they are geologically differentiated. It means
they were built out of asteroids and comets and subplanetary
bodies over the course of a billion years or so.
(13:24):
In the process of being built up, they got hot,
they were molten, and all the materials separated out, and
what you find on the surface is pretty uninteresting materials
that are highly differentiated. Whereas when you go to asteroids,
especially primitive asteroids, you're looking at the primitive material that
the Solar System was first made of. And so if
(13:46):
you look at the periodic table, pretty much everything on
the periodic table is available. There are some things that
are a little less Nitrogen is an important thing that
you don't get a lot in asteroids, but all the
ingredients for rocket propellant, all the ingredients for sil for
making solar cells, metals, everything that you need to build
industry in space is there. So that's part of it.
(14:07):
But the big part of it is, as we say
in the space business, gravity sucks. It is very expensive
to get into space to overcome the gravity well of
the Earth. And it is true also but to a
lesser extent to the Moon and Mars. The reality is,
if you can include small asteroids, there are over a
(14:28):
billion asteroids spread throughout the Solar System, from near the
Sun out to beyond Pluto, and so wherever you go
you have the resupply that's just ready there for you
to get. And in particular, we have studied and found
that there is a population of asteroids. We calculate that
(14:49):
there are about seventeen thousand asteroids in this population that
are in what we call highly earth like orbits around
the Sun. That means everyone learned in school that the
Earth orbits the Sun at a distance of one astronomical
unit in a very circular orbit and goes around the
Sun once a year. Well, there are about seventeen thousand
small near Earth asteroids that also do the same thing,
(15:12):
a few hundred of which we've discovered so far, but
we're discovering them very rapidly with new telescopes. That population
of asteroids constitutes about a million tons of material, and
we now have the technology with transastorisk capture bag and
spacecraft that are basically off the shelf technology to start
(15:33):
going out and getting them and collecting them into a
resource space at the top of the gravity. Well. Now,
the beauty of this is that means the resources are
much cheaper there in space than if you have to
launch them from the Earth. Well, people say, yeah, but
low cost launch is coming. Yes, but even the lowest
(15:54):
cost launch that people are envisioning based on SpaceX is
Starship or Blue Origins New Glen or Stokes launch vehicle,
it's still going to be very expensive to get into space,
more expensive than air travel. And so if you can
then multiply that mass by harvesting in space where you needed,
(16:16):
then you move manufacturing of space objects from the ground
into space and you get another factor of one hundred
or so cost effectiveness. And this is the key to
the next wave of space industrialization, and in fact it's
of tremendous strategic importance to the United States. A lot
of people look at what's happening in space and they say, well,
(16:38):
the US has launched thousands of satellites in the last
few years. SpaceX is launching more into space than everyone
else in the world. But that's one company. Most analysts
who look at what's going on in space come to
the following conclusion. If it wasn't for SpaceX, China would
already be ahead of us in virtually every way in space.
(16:59):
We've got one company that's keeping us ahead, and two
China has massive programs to build fully reusable rockets that
will rival SpaceX's in a single digit number of years.
And then the other thing is SpaceX's other big advantages.
They're manufacturing capability. But anyone that looks at world affairs
(17:19):
knows that the leader in manufacturing globally is China. They
will have no trouble manufacturing thousands of satellites, tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands of satellites as soon as they get
the reusable launch thing hack. So we have a temporary
opportunity of advantage. But the only way for US to
press that advantage in an enduring way is to move
(17:41):
to harvesting resources in space and moving the manufacture of
space objects from manufacturing on the Earth and launching them
expensively into space to actually harvesting the materials there in
space and manufacturing them in situ. What happens when we
accomplish that is vast new industries open up, and vast
new military advantage to our benefit open up.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
How much of that will rely on robotics.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
All of it. I remember chatting with Jeff Bezos about
this many years ago, about what the purpose of humans
in spaces. This is before the current wave of AI
and robotics happened. We both agreed that the purpose of people,
for the most part, to be in space is to
be in space as a person. It's very quickly becoming
(18:27):
true that it just makes no practical sense for people
to do missions in space. I've also debated this and
discussed this with my good friend General Steve cost call
Sign Killer, who was one of the architects in the
Space Force, and he points out that you really don't
want robotics making kill decisions with weapons. That's a reason
to put people in space. But all of the reasons
(18:49):
to put people into space are intangible. Very quickly. Robots
will be better than people at literally everything. I have
a good friend who's an astronaut who did a couple
of EVAs in a short period of time on the
Space Shuttle helping to build the space station, and his
shoulders were just completely beat. This is a fifth degree
black belt in taekwondo. He's a complete mess physically after
(19:10):
it because of the trials of doing an EVA spacewalk
in space, whereas an anthropolopic robot, either teleoperated or autonomous,
that's no problem for them at all. It's really robotic centric.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
In your model, do we consistently go to the asteroid
or do we find a really viable asteroid and try
to bring it closer to us.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
So what we're going to do is we're going to
find a whole bunch of small asteroids and we're going
to build reusable vehicles in space. We're planning to do
our first asteroid mission in twenty twenty eight. We're working
with our sponsors right now to make that happen, and
that will be a small asteroid that's just a few
tens of tons, And what we intend to do is
to build a resource space aggregated out of small asteroids
(19:57):
and build basically industrial park in a manufacturer facility in
space at the top of the gravity Well. The cool
thing about it is, once you're at the top of
the hill, it's easy to fall down through the gravity
well to deliver products and commodities anywhere that people need
to consume them, especially in lower th orbit where all
the activity is going to be for a few years.
(20:17):
So this is the best way to resupply and build
for lower orbit.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
One of the things you've already done, apparently is develop
a capture bag.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Yes, we're very excited about. We just had our first
launch into space with that and went to the space
station and demonstrated its functionality. What is this all about, Well,
the capture bag is part of our solution to the
problem of how you mine and harvest asteroids in space.
We basically say there are four problems we have to solve.
We call them detect, capture, move, and process. Detect is
(20:48):
about better telescopes for prospecting. So we've invented the Sutter telescope,
named after Sutter's mill in California that led to the
Gold Rush, and we own and operate a small global
network of telescopes to do that. Capture is you can't
really land on an asteroid. That's a misnomer. And when
you do get to an asteroid, it may be crumbly
(21:09):
like a sandpile. In fact, most of them probably are
maybe as soft as a dust bunny, or it may
be a piece of rock, and there's no way to
know in advance. So what you do is you captured
in a bag. Once you've captured in a bag, you
can start to work with it without making a mess
and having it just crumble and fall apart. You captured
in a bag, then you can move it with rocket
(21:29):
propulsion and you can process it. We started working on
our capture bag several years ago. Capture bag for asteroids
was not our idea. It was actually invented by a
guy at the NASA Glen Research Center, and it was
studied extensively at JPL for several years before they decided
it was too risky for them. What you do is
(21:50):
you captured it in a bag, then you can start
to work with it. So we flew a small capture
bag to ISS the International Space Station last week. We've
also won a significant contract from NASA to build a
larger bag, a ten meter bag, so that's more than
thirty feet in diameter. That's big enough to start and
go out and get asteroids. So that's a critical part
(22:13):
of our whole plan. Also, capture bags have many other applications.
Orbital debris is a navigational hazard that's a real problem
in lower th orbit, and we can use capture bags
to go out. It's been estimated that if there are
fifty objects, if you were to pick them up and
clean them up, it would eliminate half of the orbital
debris problem in lower th orbit. That's an easy ask
(22:35):
for capture bag and our mission partners.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
The way your bag works, do you basically creep up
behind it so that you are minimizing the speed differential?
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Yeah, you basically close the speed differential, which means that
you'd use different capture bags for different orbits.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
You couldn't have a capture bag of the thing coming
straight at you because we just blow right through your bet.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Absolutely, the closing voloc in space are so much higher
than you can even imagine without technical thinking and engineering.
It's completely counterintuitive, and so you basically close to a
near zero velocity open the capture bag. It's held open
with struts and trusts that are inflated. Fly the capture
bag over the object, then close the capture bag. We
(23:20):
demonstrated open in capture bag, closing it, cinching it down,
doing that multiple times on the Space station last week.
But there are important defense applications of this. Also, our
lead customer in this area is the Space Force, and
there are things in space that aren't where they should
be as far as the Space Force is concerned, and
we define Debrie as anything that's not where it should
(23:42):
be as far as our important clients are concerned, and
so we do work with the Space Force on applications.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Also, part of those involves, as you said earlier, to
detect and you'll be un developing the Sutter Telescope network.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
What makes it different, So what makes it different is
two things. One, we've patented a software architecture and software
algorithms approaches that make it possible for us to process
a stack of short images to find moving targets in
(24:17):
it much more efficient than any other method that we're
aware of. We think it's the theoretical limit of the
minimum compute you can do. The reason that's important is
normally it takes the equivalent of a supercomputer working for
weeks to process images to find all the moving targets.
What's important about that is it means we can build
low cost telescopes with their compute. And the technical term
(24:39):
for this is on the edge, where we put the
computer in with the telescope. That's Thing one. Now the
compute also is part of Thing one. The compute is
what we call our thes software is so efficient it
can work on a low powered space processor. So we've
actually uploaded it to a satellite in Earth orbit without
much of a computer and shown that that satellite can
(25:03):
only track big satellites without our software. But when we
turn our software on it, it can see very faint
satellites that happen to be very near those big satellites,
which is very important to the space force. So Sutter
technology is for ground and space. Right now we only
routinely operated on the ground, but it has tremendous potential
for going into space, and there are reasons you want
(25:24):
to prospect and find things from space because of the
sun angle and that sort of thing. So Thing one
is our software. Thing two is our practical mechatronics Mechatronics
is a field of engineering close to robotics that involves electronics, software,
and mechanisms all integrated. And we have very robust modular
(25:45):
mechatronics into our telescopes, so that we've made them completely modular,
So we've actually manufacture them here in our laboratory in
southern California, and then we can deploy them all over
the world and very quickly deploy a large network of these,
and that's something that the Space Force is very interested in.
So it's more cost effective and more sensitivity per dollar
(26:06):
than what anyone else has.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Back to the asteroids for a second, I remember reading
that there's one asteroid that's been identified that probably has
the equivalent I would think it's ten trillion dollars of
precious metals in your judgment, in the foreseeable future, will
you be able to start identifying small asteroids reasonably close
to Earth that could in fact be developed.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
Absolutely, we're doing that. We have a list of a
few hundred candidates, and we've identified specific asteroids that we're
planning and going and doing so. For example, there's a
little asteroid two thousand and six RAH one twenty that
can fit in our ten meter bag. It weighs about
thirty tons, and we're planning on going out and getting it. Now.
(27:08):
This is very significant new from a space policy and
law perspective, because we intend to capture that asteroid in
a bag, thereby own all of its resources that's precedent centate.
Then we intend to maneuver it into a permanent, stable
orbit with the Earth and set it up as the
beginning of a resource base for space manufacturing. That is
(27:31):
a seminal historical mission that we're planning on doing in
twenty twenty eight. We think that's a major change in
the course of history of humanity in space. And then
we anticipate building reusable spacecraft to be able to do that,
ramping up over time to as much as twice a week,
to aggregate as much as a million tons of material
(27:53):
into that resource base over a period of about ten years,
being owned by the United States, private sector ownership by
the United States as a resource base for the Space Force,
for NASA, and for private sector businesses in space. We
think that's historic. We think that changes the trajectory of
humanity and the Cosmos because now, for the first time,
(28:14):
it's cheap to get the resources to build tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands of satellites for many applications and to
start building megastructures. Data processing for AI, crypto and other
things needs to move into space for a variety of reasons,
and so we see massive data processing systems being built
out of space resources in the near future. And people
(28:37):
will want to move into space, and they'll need very
large habitats to do it, habitats that provide Earth normal
gravity through spin and radiation, shielding from plentiful materials an
Earth normal atmosphere. All those resources come from the asteroids
to make that happen. There is enough material in the
asteroids to build worlds in space with a thousand times
(29:00):
the carrying capacity of the Earth. This is a thousand
years of exponential growth of our species without limits associated
with energy and material. Now that's the long term vision,
but the practical reality is we can start doing this
now based on the technology stack that transastor is already built,
and there are practical benefits today in pivoting into manufacturing
(29:24):
things in space instead of on the ground and giving
the United States a tremendous business and logistical advantage.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
How soon do you think you'll be able to have
a system and be able to find an appropriate asteroid
to actually make it. Sort of a venture capital where
a company might be set up specifically to actually try
to make money out of the process.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Transastor is a company set up specifically to make money
out of the process. We're working right now with sponsors
to do that mission in twenty twenty eight with a
specific asteroid, and the name of the asteroid is two
thousand and six RH one two. And we have already
begun the engineering development of those systems.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Wow, I mean that's pretty quick.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
Well, one of the big tech billionaires who's involved in
the space business was recently talking about his realization and
I'm surprised it took him so long to come to
it that the next big business in space is building
data processing centers in space. And he said, we could
be ten or twenty years from now. As soon as
you say it's ten or twenty years, it's at least
(30:27):
ten or twenty years. You've got to move everything to
the left on the calendar, and you've got to be
aggressive in your schedules and your projections. If someone says
it's more than ten years, it means they're not serious.
About it. Look, we flew our first capture bag in
space last week. We are in the process of closing
contracts to do that mission I just told you about
(30:49):
right now, I've said too much about it, but I
figured if I was going to tell anyone about our
secret plan, it would be you. Ha. No one's listening today,
are they?
Speaker 1 (30:58):
I hope a few people do, including maybe a couple
of guys who may want to call you about investment opportunities.
You are in a real upward curve that, if it works,
could be phenomenal.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Well, right now, it's a venture tech investment, but very
quickly we're going to turn it into an infrastructure investment
and to fulfill the full vision this is infrastructure. This
is tens of billions, but the initial investment to make
it go is well within the realm of venture investment.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
I am a big fan of nuclear engines, and in
particular Eye on Drive if you're going to go any
place much further than the moon, because it seems to
me they give you both speed over time and they
give you a nuclear submarine level of not having to
refuel every week or every two weeks. Do you have
(31:49):
any strong feelings either way about the potential nuclear space.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
If I'm a card carrying expert on anything, it's a
card carrying expert on that. I did my PhD in
electric propulsion. I with a guy named John Brofia JPL
formulated the n Star system, which was the first deep
space application of ion propulsion. That led to the Deep
Space one mission, the JPL FLEU that led to the
(32:14):
Dawn mission, which used the n Star system to go
to the Asteroids series. Investa I used to manage NASA's
Advanced Propulsion Technology program for the country. This is something
I've thought very very deeply about.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
I actually hear a good spot. So what do you think?
Speaker 2 (32:33):
So I'm a big advocate of electric propulsion for the
kinds of applications that SpaceX uses it for, which is
station keeping for satellites. But in a capitalistic economic sense,
if you want to make money, time is money, and
it's too slow, you need high thrust systems. And the
(32:53):
game changer here is the NERD term is in situ
resource utilization ISRU. The game changer here is if you're
refueling in space, then specific impulse, which is how we
measure the propellant efficiency of a rocket engine, becomes less important,
and so what you do is you switch to high
thrust systems that can get you around faster. And you
(33:16):
have to go fast in business because time is money.
You're paying interest on things. So electric propulsion is an
important technology, will always be We started flying in space
decades ago and now it's a cornerstone technology. But for
main propulsion, I just don't see it.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Now.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
There's a much longer conversation that a bunch of nerds
can get together about very exotic advanced implementations and so on.
But my short answer is I'm a huge believer in
electric propulsion, but not for main propulsion, not for the
main drive.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
So do you think some form of gas stations to
use a simple term, that allow chemical systems to refuel
on a root basis actually provides a more likely technology
for the next generation or two.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Well, electric propulsion will always be here, and it is
an important adjunct ancillary technology, no question about it. I'm
a huge advocate of it. But there's a reason why
companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX are baselining propellant resupply.
If you're going to go down to a planetary surface
like the Moon or Mars, you absolutely need to harvest
the propellant there. And in order to land on a planet,
(34:29):
you need a high thrust propulsion system. An electric propulsion
will never be there, but for station keeping and many
other applications it's super important. I'm actually a huge advocate
of a technology called solar thermal propulsion, and in fact
transast has a solar thermal rocket that we call omnivore.
Have you ever heard of solar thermal propulsion? No?
Speaker 1 (34:49):
What is it?
Speaker 2 (34:50):
Well, you know how nuclear rockets work, right, So a
nuclear rocket is basically it's a nuclear reactor. It could
be the size of a refrigerator that gets very very
hot and then you flow propellants through it and a
superheats that propellant. You squirted it out of a nozzle
to produce thrust. So a solar thermal rocket is I
think a much more cost effective approach. And that is,
(35:12):
instead of dealing with all the safety regulations and test
concerns and so on of building a nuclear reactor that
can run cryogenic propellants through. Instead of doing that, you
build a solar receiver and we've built and tested several
of these at Transastra. And then you to a lightweight
solar concentrator in space that concentrates sunlight onto the solar receiver.
(35:37):
We think it's about one percent the cost of a
nuclear rocket for about eighty percent of the performance, and
we think that is a really powerful solution that the
community has kind of overlooked. From an engineering perspective. I'm
a huge advocate of nuclear rockets, but from a cost
effectiveness and overall a good solution, I don't think it is.
(36:01):
But solar thermal is a very exciting prospect.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Let me show you ignorance because I thought I had
read somewhere that if you had an ion drive and
you're talking about going beyond the moon, that its continuous
acceleration means you actually have to be very fast over time.
You're not fast the first two days, but because you
continually accelerating, is that inaccurate.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
It's not inaccurate, but it's a little bit of a misnomer.
The way we measure velocity in space is very different
from the way we measure velocity on the Earth, and
it means something very different. And so we're mixing these
mathematical concepts from space mission design with our terrestrial understanding.
In space, there's a parameter called delta V, and delta
V has a units of velocity miles per hour or
(36:48):
meters per second or whatever, and so people confuse it
with a velocity, but it's not a velocity. It's a
measure of the energy that the propulsion system has to
deliver to get you from point A to point B.
An electric propulsion and can deliver much more delta V,
but it takes years to deliver that delta V, and
we don't have years to wait. While there's truth in
(37:08):
what you just said, the devil's in the details and
you really have to understand the physics and mathematics to
put in perspective. Let me just say this also, there
are world class card carrying experts who would disagree with me,
and we would have a technical discussion. For me as
a NERD would be a lot of fun. And if
you don't know the math, it would be interesting. And
(37:30):
so I recognize that there is not a unanimity of you.
But the leading space technology companies all have electric propulsion systems,
mostly for station keeping, but for Maine delta V. When
you're in a hurry and you need to make money,
it comes down to high thrust systems, which could be
advanced chemical propulsion solar thermal rockets. Those would be my
(37:51):
two choices. And I think solar thermal has the greater
potential in space because chemical rockets require that you get
the right care mmicals. But Transasfor's omnivore propulsion system is
called omnivore because it can use anything as propellant, even
just water.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
If we were serious about it, how far are we
from being able to create a working solar thermal rocket.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
A couple of years. It's not a matter of feasibility,
it's just a matter of dollars. It was invented in
the nineteen fifties by one of the rocket engineers that
came over from Germany after World War Two. His name
was Kraft Araki, and he was actually an instructor of
mine at the Air Force Academy. I found out about
it because I brought him my notes from this invention
(38:36):
that I had had in high school that I called
the solar powered rocket, and I showed it to him
and I said, what do you think of this? And
he reached into his briefcase and showed me his nineteen
fifty seven paper and said, son, I was there first.
It's not magical. Technology, but it does require some work
to make it happen.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
It's kind of wild. Look, this has been very exciting.
I hope maybe a year from now we can redo
this because I'm confident at the rate you're moving, you're
going to have lots and lots of things that's gonna
be very, very interesting.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
This has been fun. Thank you so much for the
insightful questions, Joel.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
I want to thank you for joining me. The pioneering
work that Transastor is doing is the result of your
leadership and extraordinary expertise. And I'll let our listeners know
they can find out more about the work you're doing
at Transastra dot com.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
It's really an honor to meet you, Newt. I think
about how lucky we are that you did the contract
with America and what condition this country would be right
now without it. You've made your mark on history in
a very significant way and we should all be grateful
for it. And the idea that I get to meet you,
in addition to all these other wonderful people that I've
met in my career, is just a delight.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
Thank you to my guest doctor Joel Surcell. You can
learn more about Transastra on our show page at newtworld
dot com. New Toild is produced by Gager three sixty
and iHeart Media. Our executive producer is Garnsey Sloan. Our
researcher is Rachel Peterson we Our work for the show
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
(40:10):
at Ginglish three sixty. If you've been enjoy Newtsworld, I
hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us
with five stars and give us a review so others
can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of
news World can sign up for my three freeweekly columns
at Ginglishtrey sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Nut Gingwich.
(40:30):
This is news World.
On this episode of News World. Transastra is a venture
back company revolutionizing asteroid mining and the future of the
space economy, including technology development and economic modeling and planning
for in space transportation enabled by asteroid mining. In an
effort to build a transportation network in space, or to say,
(00:25):
in a simple way, Transastor is using asteroids as gas
stations for rockets the one day may take us across
our Solar system and perhaps the galaxies far beyond. I'm
really pleased to welcome my guests. Joel Cercel, founder and
CEO of Transastor. He has a PhD from cal Tech.
He's a former Jet Propulsion Laboratory technologist, as seven time
(00:49):
NASA NIAC Fellow, and he holds twenty plus patents. He
has led major space engineering efforts at cal Tech, the
Jet Proportion Laboratory, and the US Air Force, and even
has an asteroid named after him. Joel, welcome and thank
(01:19):
you for joining me in news World. You've had an
incredible career from Caltech to NASA and now founding Transastra.
What first drew you to space?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Well, mister speaker, first, I have to say this is
incredible honor. I've tracked your career for decades, and I'm
incredibly grateful for the contributions that you've made to this nation.
So the idea that I get to spend some time
with you this morning is just a thrill for me.
What attracted me to space? The answer is I never wasn't.
(01:49):
I grew up in various different places all over the world,
but most notably in the Arizona Desert, and my father
was a jet fighter pilot, and he would take us
out camp at night, and in the Arizona Desert, the
stars are so close and so helpable that you feel
a connection to the cosmos. Astronauts describe when they go
(02:11):
into space a phenomenon known as the overview effect, where
they begin to understand that the Earth is just a
tiny dot in space. But for me, it was never
not that way. And then I would see my father's
jet blazing through the night sky, and I knew that
was him, And I never had this feeling of separation
between Earth and space that most people grow up with.
(02:31):
When you have that different cosmic perspective, you begin very
quickly to realize that, as Sulkovsky said, Earth is the
cradle of humanity, but we can't live in our cradle forever.
Humanity is growing exponentially. In order to continue to thrive
as a species, we must continue our exponential growth, and
(02:52):
to do that we must tap into the resources of
the cosmos. This is just simply axiomatic to me. We
live in this incredibly interesting time where the first time,
for the first time, humanity or the let's say, life
from the biosphere of Earth now has the ability to
make the leap into the cosmos and to carry the
(03:15):
seed of life into space in order for that which
the Earth gave rise to to become immortal. It's fantastic.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Here you are in the Arizona Desert, you're interested in space,
and you go to cal Tech, which is maybe the
best science institution in the United States or even in
the world.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
I mean, that's quite a jump from the desert. I
got to tell you, it was a dream. So I
grew up reading the books of Robert Heinlein, mostly Robert Heinlein,
but also asim Off Clark, the other science fiction giants,
and inevitably, the hero in a juvenile book written by
Hindlein would wind up being some disenfranchised boy who somehow
(03:59):
wounded up going to either Caltech or MIT, and I've
been accused of being bright. But people don't know about
me is that I grew up with significant learning disabilities,
terrible grades and so on, and so the idea that
I could wind up getting a PhD at cal Tech
is a mind blower.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
How did that happen? Then?
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Well out of college, my first job was working as
a researcher at JPL, and I went and told my
management at JPL I was going to go back to
grad school. And I had this idea for a new
kind of space propulsion engine and I was going to
go do a PhD on that if I could, And
I was looking around for grad schools, and I had
written a proposal to the Air Force Office to Scientific
(04:43):
Research to get my graduate work funded. Basically, the management
at JPL. JPL was a Caltech laboratory. They said, we'd
really rather not go to those other schools. We have
an advisor at cal Tech who would like to talk
to you. And that's how I wound up going to
cal Tech for graduate school. And then what was really
cool is I got to keep my job at JPL
(05:03):
during that time, and I had written a proposal to
fund it, so I actually did my experiment in the
Electric propulsion Lab at JPL while I was taking classes
at cal Tech. And I immediately started teaching part time
at Caltech after that, And.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Was caw Tech as extraordinary intellectually as people say it is.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
It is extraordinary. It's fantastic for me. Yes, there were
some professors there who were just extraordinary, But I have
to tell you, at that time in the twentieth century,
JPL was also a pretty extraordinary place. One of my teachers,
by reading his books, had been Carl Sagan. And I
(05:41):
got to know Carl Sagan and have lunch with Carl
Sagan at JPL JPL as at Caltech Laboratory, and debated
him over lunch, and he absolutely sliced me to ribbons,
and I found out what a mature and sophisticated mind
could do. Yeah, cal Tech was fantastic. I've been blessed
with getting the opportunity to work with and meet some
of the really special historical figures of science and engineering
(06:05):
of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. When I was
in high school, I was working actually on asteroid mining,
and I wrote a letter to a guy named Freeman
Dyson who was at the Institute of Advanced Studies where
Einstein was. He immediately wrote me back and we started
a correspondence that led up until the time of his
death a few years ago. Freeman Dyson is one of
(06:27):
the great physicists and thinkers in science and related subjects.
The idea that I had him as a mentor, it's
just like, you feel so incredibly lucky. It's just you
can't even And I was honored to be able to
introduce him to my son. I have three wonderful sons,
but one of my sons happens to have his PhD
in the same field that I do, background in physics
(06:48):
and engineering, and we were able to have lunch together.
You know, things like that come from these opportunities. You
just feel so blessed and lucky.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
When you look back on that, what would you say
is the biggest single thing you took from.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
It's not a positive. When I started at JPL, I
thought the limitations for human activities were the laws of engineering, physics,
and economics. And what I found is the humans and
especially large institutional organizations, are primarily motivated by fear, fear
(07:23):
of taking risk. And it's interesting. When I was a
young man at JPL. I found out later that during
those times I was the most avid user of the
library at JPL, and I used to invent things all
the time, and the inevitable answer to any invention was,
we can't do that. And the other thing I noticed
is that all JPL did exquisitely good work. Every year,
(07:47):
it costs more to do their planetary missions than it
did the year before, and so they got incredibly good
at doing less and less for more, and sometimes more
for much more, with very little eye towards efficiency. Efficiency
was not rewarded, risk taking was not rewarded, but making
(08:07):
sure not to screw up was the main thing that rewarded.
And so I eventually had to leave. JPL is I
think the most effective government laboratory in the world, But
relative to what is possible, I learned that it's not
a place that I could stay. Much respect to the employees,
not much respect to the processes and the value system
(08:30):
in the culture.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
It's interesting how virtually all bureaucracies acquire similar patterns of
self protection.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Yeah, if the self organizing system like an organism, and
these organisms start to interact with each other and they
take on a Darwinian nature, that is about protecting the
organism instead of the mission, and they need to be reinvented.
They need to be reinvented or terminated. This idea that
(09:01):
Elon had of Doge, that every government agency, every law
should have a sunset clause, is I think absolutely correct.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
So in a sense, you have a chance not to
take that insight and apply it in the private sector.
Talk about the creation of Transastra and what you think
its mission is.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
You know, after leaving JPL, I taught at Caltech and consulted,
and I was consulting for a government agency that many
of your audience would never have heard of, but they'd
buy a lot of space launch vehicles and that sort
of thing. They're located on the East Coast. They told me, Hey,
there's this company called SpaceX. They say they're going to
be building reusable rockets, and there's a government federally funded
(09:44):
research and development organization FFRDC called the Aerospace Corporation. It's
looking them over and helping us decide whether we should
certify them for national security launches. But we think they're
being pretty conservative, and we need someone with sort of
an entrepreneurial bent to look at SpaceX and this is
when the Falcon nine was a new vehicle, barely had
(10:04):
one or two launches, and so I went out. I'd
known Elon a little bit. He's not like my best
body or anything, but i'd met him in two thousand
and six, so I'd known Elon a little bit. And
I know Gwen, the CEO at SpaceX better because she
used to try to recruit my students. And so I
had this consulting contract for this East Coast agency, this big,
(10:26):
multi billion dollar East Coast agency, to help the government
evaluate SpaceX should SpaceX be used for DoD launches. And
they wanted someone with a Silicon Valley perspective to come in.
So I got a chance to do a deep dive
on SpaceX's engineering processes, how they did business, their engineering designs,
their culture, that sort of thing. My mind was completely blown.
(10:49):
This was the dream that i'd had as a young
engineer JPL, thinking JPL would be like this. But these people,
they didn't just talk the top, they walked the walk.
And their efficiency and they're to innovate was exactly what
I'd always dreamed of seeing. So I provided a very
strong recommendation that the government do everything they can to
start launching on SpaceX in spite of the fact that
(11:12):
literally everyone in the aerospace that's an exaggerated everyone, most
of the powers that be and the authorities in the
aerospace industry said that they were going to fail. And
then I remember driving back from meeting with the Colonel
and it was a bunch of government employees recommending against me,
recommending for as a consultant. Thinking, Okay, the low cost
(11:35):
launch that we're all promised is going to happen. Now
what do I do? And I said to myself that
means I need to start an asteroid mining company. That day,
started to gin up ideas for the asteroid mining company,
wrote a white paper and sent it off to Jeff Bezos,
who had known since the year two thousand. I was
(11:56):
one of the consultants he brought in to help set
up Blue Origin. He invited me up to Seattle and
spent a day with me brainstorming about this. He gave
me a tour and everything, and I made the decision
at that point to launch Transastor as a company from
the perspective of using asteroids as the resources to launch
(12:16):
massive and dis industries into space. And I'm really glad
I did. It's been the most fun I've had in
my entire career. I've been able to invent at will.
I hire brilliant young engineers who I can use as
my eyes and hands on the technology to build things,
and it's just the funnest thing I could have possibly imagined.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
One of your focuses is making asteroid mining a reality.
Can you describe why asteroids are particularly interesting?
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yeah, So it's a couple of things. One is, if
you go to any planetary body like the Moon or
Mars or the Earth, they are geologically differentiated. It means
they were built out of asteroids and comets and subplanetary
bodies over the course of a billion years or so.
(13:24):
In the process of being built up, they got hot,
they were molten, and all the materials separated out, and
what you find on the surface is pretty uninteresting materials
that are highly differentiated. Whereas when you go to asteroids,
especially primitive asteroids, you're looking at the primitive material that
the Solar System was first made of. And so if
(13:46):
you look at the periodic table, pretty much everything on
the periodic table is available. There are some things that
are a little less Nitrogen is an important thing that
you don't get a lot in asteroids, but all the
ingredients for rocket propellant, all the ingredients for sil for
making solar cells, metals, everything that you need to build
industry in space is there. So that's part of it.
(14:07):
But the big part of it is, as we say
in the space business, gravity sucks. It is very expensive
to get into space to overcome the gravity well of
the Earth. And it is true also but to a
lesser extent to the Moon and Mars. The reality is,
if you can include small asteroids, there are over a
(14:28):
billion asteroids spread throughout the Solar System, from near the
Sun out to beyond Pluto, and so wherever you go
you have the resupply that's just ready there for you
to get. And in particular, we have studied and found
that there is a population of asteroids. We calculate that
(14:49):
there are about seventeen thousand asteroids in this population that
are in what we call highly earth like orbits around
the Sun. That means everyone learned in school that the
Earth orbits the Sun at a distance of one astronomical
unit in a very circular orbit and goes around the
Sun once a year. Well, there are about seventeen thousand
small near Earth asteroids that also do the same thing,
(15:12):
a few hundred of which we've discovered so far, but
we're discovering them very rapidly with new telescopes. That population
of asteroids constitutes about a million tons of material, and
we now have the technology with transastorisk capture bag and
spacecraft that are basically off the shelf technology to start
(15:33):
going out and getting them and collecting them into a
resource space at the top of the gravity. Well. Now,
the beauty of this is that means the resources are
much cheaper there in space than if you have to
launch them from the Earth. Well, people say, yeah, but
low cost launch is coming. Yes, but even the lowest
(15:54):
cost launch that people are envisioning based on SpaceX is
Starship or Blue Origins New Glen or Stokes launch vehicle,
it's still going to be very expensive to get into space,
more expensive than air travel. And so if you can
then multiply that mass by harvesting in space where you needed,
(16:16):
then you move manufacturing of space objects from the ground
into space and you get another factor of one hundred
or so cost effectiveness. And this is the key to
the next wave of space industrialization, and in fact it's
of tremendous strategic importance to the United States. A lot
of people look at what's happening in space and they say, well,
(16:38):
the US has launched thousands of satellites in the last
few years. SpaceX is launching more into space than everyone
else in the world. But that's one company. Most analysts
who look at what's going on in space come to
the following conclusion. If it wasn't for SpaceX, China would
already be ahead of us in virtually every way in space.
(16:59):
We've got one company that's keeping us ahead, and two
China has massive programs to build fully reusable rockets that
will rival SpaceX's in a single digit number of years.
And then the other thing is SpaceX's other big advantages.
They're manufacturing capability. But anyone that looks at world affairs
(17:19):
knows that the leader in manufacturing globally is China. They
will have no trouble manufacturing thousands of satellites, tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands of satellites as soon as they get
the reusable launch thing hack. So we have a temporary
opportunity of advantage. But the only way for US to
press that advantage in an enduring way is to move
(17:41):
to harvesting resources in space and moving the manufacture of
space objects from manufacturing on the Earth and launching them
expensively into space to actually harvesting the materials there in
space and manufacturing them in situ. What happens when we
accomplish that is vast new industries open up, and vast
new military advantage to our benefit open up.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
How much of that will rely on robotics.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
All of it. I remember chatting with Jeff Bezos about
this many years ago, about what the purpose of humans
in spaces. This is before the current wave of AI
and robotics happened. We both agreed that the purpose of people,
for the most part, to be in space is to
be in space as a person. It's very quickly becoming
(18:27):
true that it just makes no practical sense for people
to do missions in space. I've also debated this and
discussed this with my good friend General Steve cost call
Sign Killer, who was one of the architects in the
Space Force, and he points out that you really don't
want robotics making kill decisions with weapons. That's a reason
to put people in space. But all of the reasons
(18:49):
to put people into space are intangible. Very quickly. Robots
will be better than people at literally everything. I have
a good friend who's an astronaut who did a couple
of EVAs in a short period of time on the
Space Shuttle helping to build the space station, and his
shoulders were just completely beat. This is a fifth degree
black belt in taekwondo. He's a complete mess physically after
(19:10):
it because of the trials of doing an EVA spacewalk
in space, whereas an anthropolopic robot, either teleoperated or autonomous,
that's no problem for them at all. It's really robotic centric.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
In your model, do we consistently go to the asteroid
or do we find a really viable asteroid and try
to bring it closer to us.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
So what we're going to do is we're going to
find a whole bunch of small asteroids and we're going
to build reusable vehicles in space. We're planning to do
our first asteroid mission in twenty twenty eight. We're working
with our sponsors right now to make that happen, and
that will be a small asteroid that's just a few
tens of tons, And what we intend to do is
to build a resource space aggregated out of small asteroids
(19:57):
and build basically industrial park in a manufacturer facility in
space at the top of the gravity Well. The cool
thing about it is, once you're at the top of
the hill, it's easy to fall down through the gravity
well to deliver products and commodities anywhere that people need
to consume them, especially in lower th orbit where all
the activity is going to be for a few years.
(20:17):
So this is the best way to resupply and build
for lower orbit.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
One of the things you've already done, apparently is develop
a capture bag.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Yes, we're very excited about. We just had our first
launch into space with that and went to the space
station and demonstrated its functionality. What is this all about, Well,
the capture bag is part of our solution to the
problem of how you mine and harvest asteroids in space.
We basically say there are four problems we have to solve.
We call them detect, capture, move, and process. Detect is
(20:48):
about better telescopes for prospecting. So we've invented the Sutter telescope,
named after Sutter's mill in California that led to the
Gold Rush, and we own and operate a small global
network of telescopes to do that. Capture is you can't
really land on an asteroid. That's a misnomer. And when
you do get to an asteroid, it may be crumbly
(21:09):
like a sandpile. In fact, most of them probably are
maybe as soft as a dust bunny, or it may
be a piece of rock, and there's no way to
know in advance. So what you do is you captured
in a bag. Once you've captured in a bag, you
can start to work with it without making a mess
and having it just crumble and fall apart. You captured
in a bag, then you can move it with rocket
(21:29):
propulsion and you can process it. We started working on
our capture bag several years ago. Capture bag for asteroids
was not our idea. It was actually invented by a
guy at the NASA Glen Research Center, and it was
studied extensively at JPL for several years before they decided
it was too risky for them. What you do is
(21:50):
you captured it in a bag, then you can start
to work with it. So we flew a small capture
bag to ISS the International Space Station last week. We've
also won a significant contract from NASA to build a
larger bag, a ten meter bag, so that's more than
thirty feet in diameter. That's big enough to start and
go out and get asteroids. So that's a critical part
(22:13):
of our whole plan. Also, capture bags have many other applications.
Orbital debris is a navigational hazard that's a real problem
in lower th orbit, and we can use capture bags
to go out. It's been estimated that if there are
fifty objects, if you were to pick them up and
clean them up, it would eliminate half of the orbital
debris problem in lower th orbit. That's an easy ask
(22:35):
for capture bag and our mission partners.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
The way your bag works, do you basically creep up
behind it so that you are minimizing the speed differential?
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Yeah, you basically close the speed differential, which means that
you'd use different capture bags for different orbits.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
You couldn't have a capture bag of the thing coming
straight at you because we just blow right through your bet.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Absolutely, the closing voloc in space are so much higher
than you can even imagine without technical thinking and engineering.
It's completely counterintuitive, and so you basically close to a
near zero velocity open the capture bag. It's held open
with struts and trusts that are inflated. Fly the capture
bag over the object, then close the capture bag. We
(23:20):
demonstrated open in capture bag, closing it, cinching it down,
doing that multiple times on the Space station last week.
But there are important defense applications of this. Also, our
lead customer in this area is the Space Force, and
there are things in space that aren't where they should
be as far as the Space Force is concerned, and
we define Debrie as anything that's not where it should
(23:42):
be as far as our important clients are concerned, and
so we do work with the Space Force on applications.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Also, part of those involves, as you said earlier, to
detect and you'll be un developing the Sutter Telescope network.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
What makes it different, So what makes it different is
two things. One, we've patented a software architecture and software
algorithms approaches that make it possible for us to process
a stack of short images to find moving targets in
(24:17):
it much more efficient than any other method that we're
aware of. We think it's the theoretical limit of the
minimum compute you can do. The reason that's important is
normally it takes the equivalent of a supercomputer working for
weeks to process images to find all the moving targets.
What's important about that is it means we can build
low cost telescopes with their compute. And the technical term
(24:39):
for this is on the edge, where we put the
computer in with the telescope. That's Thing one. Now the
compute also is part of Thing one. The compute is
what we call our thes software is so efficient it
can work on a low powered space processor. So we've
actually uploaded it to a satellite in Earth orbit without
much of a computer and shown that that satellite can
(25:03):
only track big satellites without our software. But when we
turn our software on it, it can see very faint
satellites that happen to be very near those big satellites,
which is very important to the space force. So Sutter
technology is for ground and space. Right now we only
routinely operated on the ground, but it has tremendous potential
for going into space, and there are reasons you want
(25:24):
to prospect and find things from space because of the
sun angle and that sort of thing. So Thing one
is our software. Thing two is our practical mechatronics Mechatronics
is a field of engineering close to robotics that involves electronics, software,
and mechanisms all integrated. And we have very robust modular
(25:45):
mechatronics into our telescopes, so that we've made them completely modular,
So we've actually manufacture them here in our laboratory in
southern California, and then we can deploy them all over
the world and very quickly deploy a large network of these,
and that's something that the Space Force is very interested in.
So it's more cost effective and more sensitivity per dollar
(26:06):
than what anyone else has.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Back to the asteroids for a second, I remember reading
that there's one asteroid that's been identified that probably has
the equivalent I would think it's ten trillion dollars of
precious metals in your judgment, in the foreseeable future, will
you be able to start identifying small asteroids reasonably close
to Earth that could in fact be developed.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
Absolutely, we're doing that. We have a list of a
few hundred candidates, and we've identified specific asteroids that we're
planning and going and doing so. For example, there's a
little asteroid two thousand and six RAH one twenty that
can fit in our ten meter bag. It weighs about
thirty tons, and we're planning on going out and getting it. Now.
(27:08):
This is very significant new from a space policy and
law perspective, because we intend to capture that asteroid in
a bag, thereby own all of its resources that's precedent centate.
Then we intend to maneuver it into a permanent, stable
orbit with the Earth and set it up as the
beginning of a resource base for space manufacturing. That is
(27:31):
a seminal historical mission that we're planning on doing in
twenty twenty eight. We think that's a major change in
the course of history of humanity in space. And then
we anticipate building reusable spacecraft to be able to do that,
ramping up over time to as much as twice a week,
to aggregate as much as a million tons of material
(27:53):
into that resource base over a period of about ten years,
being owned by the United States, private sector ownership by
the United States as a resource base for the Space Force,
for NASA, and for private sector businesses in space. We
think that's historic. We think that changes the trajectory of
humanity and the Cosmos because now, for the first time,
(28:14):
it's cheap to get the resources to build tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands of satellites for many applications and to
start building megastructures. Data processing for AI, crypto and other
things needs to move into space for a variety of reasons,
and so we see massive data processing systems being built
out of space resources in the near future. And people
(28:37):
will want to move into space, and they'll need very
large habitats to do it, habitats that provide Earth normal
gravity through spin and radiation, shielding from plentiful materials an
Earth normal atmosphere. All those resources come from the asteroids
to make that happen. There is enough material in the
asteroids to build worlds in space with a thousand times
(29:00):
the carrying capacity of the Earth. This is a thousand
years of exponential growth of our species without limits associated
with energy and material. Now that's the long term vision,
but the practical reality is we can start doing this
now based on the technology stack that transastor is already built,
and there are practical benefits today in pivoting into manufacturing
(29:24):
things in space instead of on the ground and giving
the United States a tremendous business and logistical advantage.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
How soon do you think you'll be able to have
a system and be able to find an appropriate asteroid
to actually make it. Sort of a venture capital where
a company might be set up specifically to actually try
to make money out of the process.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Transastor is a company set up specifically to make money
out of the process. We're working right now with sponsors
to do that mission in twenty twenty eight with a
specific asteroid, and the name of the asteroid is two
thousand and six RH one two. And we have already
begun the engineering development of those systems.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Wow, I mean that's pretty quick.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
Well, one of the big tech billionaires who's involved in
the space business was recently talking about his realization and
I'm surprised it took him so long to come to
it that the next big business in space is building
data processing centers in space. And he said, we could
be ten or twenty years from now. As soon as
you say it's ten or twenty years, it's at least
(30:27):
ten or twenty years. You've got to move everything to
the left on the calendar, and you've got to be
aggressive in your schedules and your projections. If someone says
it's more than ten years, it means they're not serious.
About it. Look, we flew our first capture bag in
space last week. We are in the process of closing
contracts to do that mission I just told you about
(30:49):
right now, I've said too much about it, but I
figured if I was going to tell anyone about our
secret plan, it would be you. Ha. No one's listening today,
are they?
Speaker 1 (30:58):
I hope a few people do, including maybe a couple
of guys who may want to call you about investment opportunities.
You are in a real upward curve that, if it works,
could be phenomenal.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Well, right now, it's a venture tech investment, but very
quickly we're going to turn it into an infrastructure investment
and to fulfill the full vision this is infrastructure. This
is tens of billions, but the initial investment to make
it go is well within the realm of venture investment.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
I am a big fan of nuclear engines, and in
particular Eye on Drive if you're going to go any
place much further than the moon, because it seems to
me they give you both speed over time and they
give you a nuclear submarine level of not having to
refuel every week or every two weeks. Do you have
(31:49):
any strong feelings either way about the potential nuclear space.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
If I'm a card carrying expert on anything, it's a
card carrying expert on that. I did my PhD in
electric propulsion. I with a guy named John Brofia JPL
formulated the n Star system, which was the first deep
space application of ion propulsion. That led to the Deep
Space one mission, the JPL FLEU that led to the
(32:14):
Dawn mission, which used the n Star system to go
to the Asteroids series. Investa I used to manage NASA's
Advanced Propulsion Technology program for the country. This is something
I've thought very very deeply about.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
I actually hear a good spot. So what do you think?
Speaker 2 (32:33):
So I'm a big advocate of electric propulsion for the
kinds of applications that SpaceX uses it for, which is
station keeping for satellites. But in a capitalistic economic sense,
if you want to make money, time is money, and
it's too slow, you need high thrust systems. And the
(32:53):
game changer here is the NERD term is in situ
resource utilization ISRU. The game changer here is if you're
refueling in space, then specific impulse, which is how we
measure the propellant efficiency of a rocket engine, becomes less important,
and so what you do is you switch to high
thrust systems that can get you around faster. And you
(33:16):
have to go fast in business because time is money.
You're paying interest on things. So electric propulsion is an
important technology, will always be We started flying in space
decades ago and now it's a cornerstone technology. But for
main propulsion, I just don't see it.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Now.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
There's a much longer conversation that a bunch of nerds
can get together about very exotic advanced implementations and so on.
But my short answer is I'm a huge believer in
electric propulsion, but not for main propulsion, not for the
main drive.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
So do you think some form of gas stations to
use a simple term, that allow chemical systems to refuel
on a root basis actually provides a more likely technology
for the next generation or two.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Well, electric propulsion will always be here, and it is
an important adjunct ancillary technology, no question about it. I'm
a huge advocate of it. But there's a reason why
companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX are baselining propellant resupply.
If you're going to go down to a planetary surface
like the Moon or Mars, you absolutely need to harvest
the propellant there. And in order to land on a planet,
(34:29):
you need a high thrust propulsion system. An electric propulsion
will never be there, but for station keeping and many
other applications it's super important. I'm actually a huge advocate
of a technology called solar thermal propulsion, and in fact
transast has a solar thermal rocket that we call omnivore.
Have you ever heard of solar thermal propulsion? No?
Speaker 1 (34:49):
What is it?
Speaker 2 (34:50):
Well, you know how nuclear rockets work, right, So a
nuclear rocket is basically it's a nuclear reactor. It could
be the size of a refrigerator that gets very very
hot and then you flow propellants through it and a
superheats that propellant. You squirted it out of a nozzle
to produce thrust. So a solar thermal rocket is I
think a much more cost effective approach. And that is,
(35:12):
instead of dealing with all the safety regulations and test
concerns and so on of building a nuclear reactor that
can run cryogenic propellants through. Instead of doing that, you
build a solar receiver and we've built and tested several
of these at Transastra. And then you to a lightweight
solar concentrator in space that concentrates sunlight onto the solar receiver.
(35:37):
We think it's about one percent the cost of a
nuclear rocket for about eighty percent of the performance, and
we think that is a really powerful solution that the
community has kind of overlooked. From an engineering perspective. I'm
a huge advocate of nuclear rockets, but from a cost
effectiveness and overall a good solution, I don't think it is.
(36:01):
But solar thermal is a very exciting prospect.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Let me show you ignorance because I thought I had
read somewhere that if you had an ion drive and
you're talking about going beyond the moon, that its continuous
acceleration means you actually have to be very fast over time.
You're not fast the first two days, but because you
continually accelerating, is that inaccurate.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
It's not inaccurate, but it's a little bit of a misnomer.
The way we measure velocity in space is very different
from the way we measure velocity on the Earth, and
it means something very different. And so we're mixing these
mathematical concepts from space mission design with our terrestrial understanding.
In space, there's a parameter called delta V, and delta
V has a units of velocity miles per hour or
(36:48):
meters per second or whatever, and so people confuse it
with a velocity, but it's not a velocity. It's a
measure of the energy that the propulsion system has to
deliver to get you from point A to point B.
An electric propulsion and can deliver much more delta V,
but it takes years to deliver that delta V, and
we don't have years to wait. While there's truth in
(37:08):
what you just said, the devil's in the details and
you really have to understand the physics and mathematics to
put in perspective. Let me just say this also, there
are world class card carrying experts who would disagree with me,
and we would have a technical discussion. For me as
a NERD would be a lot of fun. And if
you don't know the math, it would be interesting. And
(37:30):
so I recognize that there is not a unanimity of you.
But the leading space technology companies all have electric propulsion systems,
mostly for station keeping, but for Maine delta V. When
you're in a hurry and you need to make money,
it comes down to high thrust systems, which could be
advanced chemical propulsion solar thermal rockets. Those would be my
(37:51):
two choices. And I think solar thermal has the greater
potential in space because chemical rockets require that you get
the right care mmicals. But Transasfor's omnivore propulsion system is
called omnivore because it can use anything as propellant, even
just water.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
If we were serious about it, how far are we
from being able to create a working solar thermal rocket.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
A couple of years. It's not a matter of feasibility,
it's just a matter of dollars. It was invented in
the nineteen fifties by one of the rocket engineers that
came over from Germany after World War Two. His name
was Kraft Araki, and he was actually an instructor of
mine at the Air Force Academy. I found out about
it because I brought him my notes from this invention
(38:36):
that I had had in high school that I called
the solar powered rocket, and I showed it to him
and I said, what do you think of this? And
he reached into his briefcase and showed me his nineteen
fifty seven paper and said, son, I was there first.
It's not magical. Technology, but it does require some work
to make it happen.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
It's kind of wild. Look, this has been very exciting.
I hope maybe a year from now we can redo
this because I'm confident at the rate you're moving, you're
going to have lots and lots of things that's gonna
be very, very interesting.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
This has been fun. Thank you so much for the
insightful questions, Joel.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
I want to thank you for joining me. The pioneering
work that Transastor is doing is the result of your
leadership and extraordinary expertise. And I'll let our listeners know
they can find out more about the work you're doing
at Transastra dot com.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
It's really an honor to meet you, Newt. I think
about how lucky we are that you did the contract
with America and what condition this country would be right
now without it. You've made your mark on history in
a very significant way and we should all be grateful
for it. And the idea that I get to meet you,
in addition to all these other wonderful people that I've
met in my career, is just a delight.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
Thank you to my guest doctor Joel Surcell. You can
learn more about Transastra on our show page at newtworld
dot com. New Toild is produced by Gager three sixty
and iHeart Media. Our executive producer is Garnsey Sloan. Our
researcher is Rachel Peterson we Our work for the show
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
(40:10):
at Ginglish three sixty. If you've been enjoy Newtsworld, I
hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us
with five stars and give us a review so others
can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of
news World can sign up for my three freeweekly columns
at Ginglishtrey sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Nut Gingwich.
(40:30):
This is news World.
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