Why the NASA Stakeholder Community is Incapable of Delivering on Their Own Vision w/ Brent Sherwood #61

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Hello, everyone.
This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite.
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(00:28):
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(00:49):
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(01:18):
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(01:39):
So today, let's dive into the podcast.
This is an incredible title.
I'm I'm wondering where we're gonna go with it.
It is.
Why the NASA Stakeholder Community is incapable of delivering their own vision.
That's a mouthful.
Today, we have with us Brent Sherwood.

(02:00):
Hi, Brent.
Hi.
Okay.
As always, we give a very brief bio.
Brent is a space architect, and he'll have to go over what that is so we understand that.
But he was senior vice president of Blue Origin where he began with a $30,000,000 budget.
And at the end of his tenure, he had a $1,000,000,000 budget and 1100 people.

(02:25):
He's worked for JPL as the first founder of the JPL Innovation Foundry.
He's worked with Boeing where he led teams in human robotic planetary exploration and space station module manufacturing.
And to this day, he's published over 6 60 papers on exploration and development for beyond Earth.
Today, he does consult with the AIAA, which is the American Institute For Astronautics and Avionic or Astronautics and Aeronautics and Astronautics.

(02:57):
And he Dan Dunbacher, who is the executive director, has done a podcast with us.
So we're very glad to have him here.
Now this point is being brought up.
I know it's been brought up in other introductions.
I personally do not know a single thing that Brent is going to talk about.
People believe that because the podcasts are long and they're rich, they've that we've kind of coordinated all of this.

(03:22):
Brent and I got on a call.
We decided on a topic and a general direction.
We agreed to that, and Brent has been on his own to decide what he wants to cover.
I have no clue.
In front of me, I have multiple pages.
I take notes while we're on the call.
And our objective here, my objective is to learn from Brent, and hopefully, you will too.

(03:43):
So that said, let's get right on to the program.
Brent, do you have an outline or a bullet point list for us to cover?
I do.
Okay.
I suppose you'd like to hear it.
I'd like to know how many points we have so I can make sure to write them down.
What what how many do you have?
I have 2 groups.
The first group has 7 bullets.
The second group has 3.

(04:05):
Okay.
So let's start with the first group.
The first group is, the title of the podcast.
Okay.
And you want me to write that?
To write that because I just did an arrow that said that there.
Okay.
What's next?
I'll just give them to you in order.
Yep.
Number 1, Mars is out of reach despite what anybody says.

(04:27):
Mars is out of reach despite what anyone has said.
I'm loving it already.
Next.
Second.
Mars wouldn't yield the transformation the vision presumes.

(04:51):
Not yield.
The Mars Mars will not yield the transition?
The transformation.
Transformation.
Next.
Number 3, why is the NASA vision stuck on Mars anyway?

(05:16):
Vision stuck on Mars.
Okay.
Next.
Number 4, what about the compromised vision, which is Artemis?
Compromised vision.

(05:38):
Next.
Number 5, are there better visions?
You know I'm smiling.
Are there better visions?
Okay.
6
What should be the role of NASA and other agencies?

(06:00):
All of NASA and other
agencies.
7.
What conversations should we be having?
Should we be having section 2?

(06:23):
Yeah.
Section 2, I've just called the future history of human spaceflight, and it has, 3, bullets.
The first is, a demographic shift from explorers to workers and visitors to settlers.

(06:46):
From work a democratic shift from Explorers.
Explorers.
To workers and visitors
to settlers.
2?
Number 2 is architecture over engineering.

(07:15):
And the last?
Posthuman space architecture.
Okay.
I think I have a filled 3 quarters of a page just with the outline.
That's great.
Yeah.
Okay.
So so that that set ought to get us through an afternoon.
No.
No.

(07:36):
No.
This is I I'm I'm smiling the whole time because if you heard the calls that we had today, We touched on 3 quarters of what you've said just today.
So it's I think this is going to be a very I'm very much looking forward to hearing your perspectives on these.
So Mhmm.
Let's start with the first one, which is why the NASA, stakeholder community isn't capable delivering on their own vision.

(08:04):
Are you gonna start with that, or are you gonna start with how Mars is out?
No.
Let's let's start with the title.
Okay.
And then what you know, the I the 7 I gave you, the 7 bullets in there are they're kind of in a logical sequence, but they don't have to be.
So,
Yeah.
And we will we will address them as we go along.
And before we actually start, can you I know you're probably gonna bring it up later, but during our just few minutes of getting started, you brought up space architecture in the bio.

(08:34):
You've, it's important.
Can you define the space what a space architect is?
Oh, you bet.
So we the field defines itself.
Space architecture is the theory and practice of designing and building human environments for use in space.

(08:57):
And so I it sounds like and tell me if I'm wrong.
It sounds when when we use the term architecture on Earth, we're talking typically about a structure that's on the ground.
You're not talking about an airplane.
We're not talking about a submarine.

(09:19):
Yet your definition uses the geography of space, which also means, planetary.
How do you distinguish between those two dimensions if I think you understand what I'm asking.
Yeah.
So, first, let's go back to to the premise of the question.

(09:43):
In the world of seafaring, there is a field called naval architecture, which is the seagoing equivalent of terrestrial architecture.
That's designing vessels that have human activity in them.

(10:04):
And so in that sense, it's no different in space.
The environments are different.
The requirements are different.
The mission objectives are different, all that kind of thing.
But the fundamental idea is we have machines and we have people and systems that need to host people and support their activities are what we call architecture.

(10:34):
Mhmm.
That's you know, you can you can look retrospectively in history, and that's what all buildings do.
Mhmm.
But in the future, some of our buildings will be moving at 7 kilometers per second.
So when you actually are saying a space architect, you're not saying a moon architect or a Mars architect or a, I'm gonna throw it out there, a Venus architect.

(11:04):
You're talking about the space between objects and space.
Well,
Do you understand that?
That's that's why I'm pushing on the question.
For the foreseeable future, there's not much point in differentiating, in subdividing the field of space architecture among those domains.

(11:30):
There will come a time, but for now, the constraints of spaceflight altogether, coupled with the requirements for all the, I'll call it, messy problems of human activity define why we need space architecture.

(11:58):
And so in our textbook that we published in 2009, we do divide space architecture into orbital architecture, planet surface architecture, and terrestrial analog space architecture.
But that's just a convenient way of dividing.
Right now, the number of people who I'll say like Tyrion Lannister, who know things about space architecture is so small, that it's not a productive effort to try to subdivide the field.

(12:36):
Hopefully, you'll learn over time that I'm, I'm very literal.
It might be a good thing or bad thing.
You're not married to me, but that is something.
So when I hear something, I'm listening to this precise word.
So I'm a little bit more, purposeful when it comes to definitions.
And when it comes to beyond Earth, I'm even more so because I get lost in the conversations.

(13:01):
The the beyond Earth ecosystem has so many so much terminology that to get your mind around it based upon acronyms which are proliferate the entire ecosystem.
It makes it more difficult.
So in my mind, I'm actually trying to say, well, where does this fit, and what would this be in 10 years or 15 years?

(13:23):
So that's why I was asking the question.
You're you're aggregating it for the purposes of today.
But if we were to look 10 years out, let's assuming that the work that we're doing, Project Moon Hut and others that, are working on, we might need to redefine that language so that's more precise.
Yeah.
I mean, I think I I think, this sort of gets to the second grouping of our topics today, the future history of, human spaceflight.

(13:50):
Okay.
I I believe there will, come a time when there will be companies and teams and experts who specialize in orbital architecture, like space stations, versus those who specialize in planet surface architecture, like planetary bases and urban scale settlements.

(14:18):
Because they're skill sets.
They're
specific geographies.
It's driven by something that's really fundamental to the challenge of space architecture, which is that the environmental requirements are unique.
Yep.
And so you might say on Earth, well, yeah, there's architects who specialize in urban skyscrapers and architects who specialize in, I don't know, suburban factories or something.

(14:50):
And that's true.
If we compare the kind of fundamental requirements drivers, even just between the lunar surface and low Earth orbit, they drive you in different directions.
Right?
So lunar surface has 16 gravity.
Earth orbit has microgravity or free fall.

(15:15):
Lunar surface has dust, which is really bad stuff in multiple ways.
Yeah.
Leo has orbital debris at, you know, 15 kilometers per second.
So the the the nature of the environments is different enough that specialization will be it'll become required.

(15:40):
Today, you know, we're just at the beginning.
So
Well, the the, don't wanna belabor it too much.
You use the term naval architecture.
When I'm thinking about someone who's building a submarine or building, certain types of vessels, I don't would it be a naval architect you'd bring on, or would you bring on a naval engineer?

(16:06):
Well, both.
You know, there is a job description in the navy and and in the in the civil, seagoing industry called naval architect.
Okay.
And but like any major system development, bringing a design to fruition and into operation requires teams of 100 to 1000 of people, many, many of whom are engineers.

(16:40):
So are you more or less saying that a naval architect or a, a space architect is an umbrella position over the subcategories?
Hence,
the second bullet in my second rubric, Which which is architecture over engineering.

(17:04):
So,
Okay.
So we can we can get through those letters.
Lisa, at
We can do it later or now if you want.
Whatever you want.
What what's your would it be helpful if we knew it if I knew it?
Because I'm I'm trying to get my mind around it, and we're gonna go if we're gonna travel down your outline, would it be better if we addressed it right now?
You know the outline more than I do.

(17:26):
Matter.
We're there now.
So I I Okay.
So yeah.
So let's explain because I'm hearing naval architect, and I'm thinking a project manager.
I'm thinking, I've worked on very large projects.
I worked with the CEO and executive teams of Maersk.
You know, we're talking big vessels.
We're talking architecture, design, or pathways, and operations, everything that goes into creating large scale structures.

(17:51):
So I'm trying to get my mind around how this would actually transition the way you're seeing it.
Yeah.
So I think the the the way the the simplest way to understand the role descriptions or the differentiation among roles is, let's start with project management.

(18:13):
Okay.
You know, any large scale development requires people who are expert at running large scale programs Mhmm.
To get things done.
So there's project plans.
There's rules of the road.
There's schedules, budgets, supply chain, human capital.
You know, there's all the things that it takes to to sort of bring the forces to bear to get a thing done, a big thing done on a schedule.

(18:42):
Yep.
And that is a discipline unto itself.
Another one, which at the moment is what drives the design side of space programs is engineering.

(19:03):
So what is engineering?
Engineering is a deductive quantitative discipline that sizes systems so that they perform, and it measures their performance and yields a set of performance attributes that is intended.

(19:32):
So, I mean, that may sound like a weird way to describe what everybody knows engineers do.
But No.
No.
That's that's, it's an interesting it it's an interesting way to describe it.
I mean, real really, the key is that engineering proceeds with deductive reasoning.
It has to.
You go from thing to thing to thing, and it all has to hang together.

(19:55):
And that's what systems engineering does is it stitches it all together.
Mhmm.
What architecture does, this so this is a third leg of the stool is how I view it.
Architecture is not analytical deductive.
It's design directive.
And so it's synthetic.
And what it does is it starts with a blank slate and says, here's what this thing ought to look like.

(20:23):
And we'll come back to why it might ought to look like that.
But having defined that on the blank slate, then it operates through design and through project management and through engineering to get as close as possible to that envisioned state of what something ought to be.

(20:45):
So it's design directive.
It directs design activity toward an envisioned end.
This is why in terrestrial building or naval architecture, there is always an architectural vision.
And then, yeah, there's a whole lot of engineering to make it happen.

(21:08):
But your word was umbrella.
It's under the umbrella of an integrating way of thinking, an integrative way of thinking.
This is critical for two reasons.
One is if it's important for the product to have some measure of human value beyond technical efficiency, then you got to have design.

(21:45):
You can't just engineer your way to a solution.
That's why we live in houses and not strip malls.
The other reason it's critical is that architecture at its best certainly is not amenable to algorithmic solution.

(22:16):
So if you set yourself a technical problem that can be implemented without human behavior involved, let's say a robotic device that's gonna conduct science on a remote planet, you can develop that with engineering.

(22:40):
That's done all the time.
But as soon as you have people living in it, trying to use it, acting human in it, that introduces a source of messiness, and unpredictability, which is not amenable to analytical solutions or closed form solutions.
You can't compute your way to an architecture that adequately captures the aspirations and the sociological needs and the psychological needs of a human occupant or set of occupants.

(23:16):
It requires a human designer to do that.
That's why we have architecture.
And the fundamental argument here is that, as we move as human space flight moves into the future, it will get more diverse.
It will include a greater range of demographics of its occupants for a greater range of activities and behaviors, and therefore, it will need architecture just like building on earth does or just like, building a cruise ship does.

(24:00):
It requires architecture.
We're not quite there yet in space, but we're getting there pretty rapidly.
It's funny that the word architecture is the word used because I'm analogizing it to a very simplistic form just for the sake of me to understand the I understand what you're talking about, but I'm actually bringing another level down because almost everything you said could be, kind of brought to life when you think about a clothing designer.

(24:32):
A clothing designer sits down.
They're not an engineer.
There's not an architect, but they sit down, and they draw sketches that would fit the human form, fulfill its, its obligations of usage, be able to be manufactured, could be dissected into the components to be able to produce it, has a complete supply chain behind it, could be part of an entire family of clothing, top, bottoms, clothing that matches, and it's not called an architect.

(25:03):
So in the in the vein of architecture, which I think is just interesting that you're taking it in this direction, is that it's almost as if and I dated somebody who did this when I was in universe in college.
And in order for us to finish the night, I would help her do the work just because I I'd done I'd done a lot of work with architecture growing up.

(25:27):
And the the piece of this is that I can now see where you're positioning this skill set.
It's someone who will create form.
It doesn't actually have to be the beginning, it sounds like.
But you create a form of what is anticipated product design or or use case, then others, engineers could come in and translate that into something that is functional, but it also can go the other way.

(25:57):
The engineers sit down and say, hey.
I've got this, an an an an architect type.
I've got this.
This is what I'm thinking about.
And then you would then say, well, let me transpose that into form.
Is that kind of a position?
I
it's not just about form.
I I'd say think about it this way.

(26:18):
In the world of human space systems, Like we said at the beginning, there's project management no matter what.
Okay?
Yep.
That's off the table.
Yes.
I understand.
All space systems have, the classic disciplines of space system development.
There's structures and mechanisms.

(26:40):
There's, attitude control, propulsion, avionics, guidance navigation, and control.
There's, telecommunications.
This like, every satellite or spacecraft or space station or space platform or exploration system has those subsystems.

(27:02):
And there there is a world of engineering specialties, that has grown up to be expert in designing, developing, building, testing, and operating those subsystems.
Okay, so far so good.
Now, if you're going to stick people in this thing, there's an additional set of disciplines required.

(27:24):
There's what we call human factors engineering.
There's environmental control and life support systems.
There's crew system interfaces, command and control interfaces.
There may be space suits and etcetera.
These are the things that unmanned spacecraft don't have that human spacecraft do.

(27:49):
Alright.
So far so good.
And that works if you have a very small crew of very highly trained professionals, write stuff kinda astronauts, and they're gonna go to the moon or someplace, on a mission.
But it doesn't work if you've got 50 guests a month at a resort in low Earth orbit.

(28:15):
That's a very different demographic.
Yeah.
So if you're going to have a large number of people, if you're gonna have people who are not highly trained, who are not expert in operating the systems that are keeping them alive, and particularly if they're there for a purpose which is not exploration of a lunar crater or, you know, an asteroid or something, if they're there for fun and they paid a lot of money to do it, they're gonna have expectations for types of activities and amenities that, involve human behaviors that traditional space engineers have never ever had to deal with except maybe at home.

(28:59):
Mhmm.
So that's what architects bring.
It's the other end of this spectrum of I absolutely love it.
For for human activity, which as I said at the start is it's it's messy.
It's not like you can't just write a program that makes a great piece of architecture for, a diverse set of users.

(29:22):
So I'm I'm gonna pick on our friend Dan Dunbacher, not in a bad way.
We've had multiple in individuals look at the budgeting for Project Moon, the 4 phases, And we were looking at all sorts of skill sets.
And Dan was the last one to put the and I'm not picking on it.
Dan was a fantastic person.
You know him.
Great guy.
He was the last person to put his mark on this.

(29:44):
And I'm going to add because now we have you.
But we these were the categories of a team that we had designed for modules, nodes, and that type of development was life support power engineer, thermal control engineer, electrical engineer, control engineer, planetary geologist, location specialist kind of, systems engineer kind of generalist, psychology of the moon person, a person who understands that, a logistics communications operation, a mechanical structure engineering, software engineering, human factors, and robotic engineering.

(30:18):
And, again, this is possibly a newer discipline.
That's okay.
This is not a an indictment.
It was just that was Dan happened to be the last person who put his touch on it, and I the what he brought in was powerful.
So I'm gonna add right now a space, architect because you would say that that's one that's missing.

(30:39):
If you got people in it, then yes.
Yeah.
So that there the question wasn't just a question of understanding, meaning I need to understand this so that we could do this conversation.
It's because I'm looking at this list, and I'm asking myself with all the people we asked that have part of Project Moon Hunt, we've got quite a lot of people.

(31:00):
Not a single person brought up space architect.
So can could you answer it's not a why because it's an interesting question in yeah.
Why didn't someone say, with all the smart people, definitely, you're missing space architect?
Yeah.
Because the field is new.

(31:21):
And Maynard Dalton was arguably the first space architect.
He designed the inside of Skylab.
Okay.
David Nixon, who is a member of our global network of space architects, was one of the few people who developed the fundamental interior architecture of the modules on Space Station, all of them, the Japanese one, the European one, the American one with the the the four rack configuration with the standoffs in the corners.

(32:12):
Mhmm.
So there have been, space architects who've worked in the belly of the beast for decades, but not very many of them.
And, when you have a program that involves 1,000 of people, it's easy for the engineers and managers to miss 1.

(32:41):
The so coming at it from a different angle, one of the challenges that someone like myself who has not been a space person my whole life or beyond Earth and not spent the time thinking about it, I have learned through history that, industries' ecosystems get upended by an individual who sees the world in a different way.

(33:05):
And that when you have individuals who are homegrown, they've grown through the system.
They see all the same things.
They, you know, NASA, NASA, NASA, NASA, European Space Agency, JAXA, whatever the, the Japanese Space Agency, whatever the historical references are, they tend to see things the same way.
And I'll give you an example.
Maybe you could then reply to it.

(33:27):
Elon came in, and he said manufacturing could be done a different way, and he changed it.
He came from the outside.
He could have loved beyond Earth for a very long time.
That could have been his life's ambition and all of that.
I don't know his full story.
But let's say he came in and looked at it differently.
Is there something be said for this outside relevance to say maybe Dixon and, Maynard?

(33:56):
Maybe they is it Dixon I said?
David David.
David Nicks.
I I merged them.
It is there something to be said for saying maybe there is a completely different way that we're overlooking because we have this do it for centuries or do it for decades, not centuries, decades of
Yeah.
I I I would I wouldn't be so dramatic as to say we're overlooking it.

(34:24):
We're at the edge of an ocean, and every now and then a wave comes in and laps our feet a little bit.
We've barely begun human spaceflight.
And really, I think my fundamental message here, the reason that this network of people around the world has gotten together to find the field, published a few textbooks in the field, and we're about to conduct a decadal survey of the field.

(34:59):
And there's a AIAA technical committee for space architecture.
The reason we're doing all that is because we recognize that the world of human spaceflight is on the cusp of changing dramatically.
It's really a very simple thing.

(35:20):
As my former boss, Jeff Bezos, likes to say, the reason you fly people in space is to fly people in space.
And part of what that means is these like, engineers call it the human system.
Okay.
Normal people call them people.
Yeah.
I'm I'm

(35:41):
I'm one of those I'm one of those people who say, why are you calling it that?
That's not what we call it on earth.
Yes.
If if they're people and and if the whole idea is to make space and spaceflight increasingly normalized and part of civilization on our way to being a solar system species, then that means exactly what Blue Origin's tagline says.

(36:10):
It's about millions of people living and working in space.
Okay.
Larger numbers doing more diverse activities in more, diverse locations in space introduces, reintroduces, atavistic needs that humans have in society.

(36:31):
That's what architects are trained to design for.
So, you will not find that in aerospace engineering textbooks.
You can learn how to make an airplane safe.
You can learn how to land on the moon, but you can't learn how to make a space faring civilization if you don't include the disciplines that have spent 1,000 of years learning how to do it.

(36:56):
So I guess then, because this is the one that Dan added, he added human factors.
Yeah.
Human factors is a small sliver of space architecture.
Like, there's human factors discipline that's used in the design of cockpits and fighter jets because you gotta be able to reach things at high g.

(37:21):
You gotta be able to read the gauges, etcetera, etcetera.
That's all human factors engineering.
That just means, can you reach it?
Can you use it?
It doesn't say, can you be happy?
Will you go nuts?
Will you go postal?
It doesn't say anything about, living.

(37:42):
Right?
So Yeah.
It doesn't like anything
I like Copostal.
Copostal in there, long enough.
Maybe I'll I'll just give a very specific example.
Okay.
You got you got a worker in an orbiting hotel who has maybe 6 month stint, alternating, you know, 6 months up, 6 months at home, 6 months up, 6 months at home.

(38:10):
Okay.
Well, is that person supposed to put their relationships on hold for their career as a hotel worker in space?
Oh, no.
Oh, well, then we need to accommodate relationships and how they happen, how they start, how they end.
Right?
This is human living we're talking about.

(38:33):
All we're talking about is doing that in an environment which is new.
It happens onboard ships.
Yeah.
It doesn't really happen on airplanes because airplane flights aren't that long.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've been on a lot of 16 hours, but that's about it.

(38:54):
I think this one is what longest one
is 18 hours now, I think.
No.
It's not We we have a different word for a relationship that happens in 16 hours.
Right.
Yes.
We do.
Yeah.
Okay.
I I it it's an interesting additive to the beyond Earth ecosystem vocabulary, and I rightly so.

(39:19):
I I do there's there's nothing I'm disagreeing with.
I'm trying to find out more as Yeah.
And you said the key I mean, what it really is is it is additive.
It is literally additive.
And just, you know, simply recognizing we're talking about human communities building, supporting, you know, hosting and supporting and promoting human communities.
Ah, okay.

(39:40):
Now we're talking about architecture.
If you look, this is I'm going to reference the 4 phases which you've seen already.
We have 4 phase development of the moon, and this was the, sitting with, Bruce Pittman, and and the story is all online.
When the 4 phases were outlined, if you think about the naming, the first one was a box with a roof and a door.

(40:06):
Bruce and the team at NASA Ames came up with this project moon hut, h u t, because the initial orientation that we that was brought up was box to the roof and a door on the moon is a home.
So we're not calling it a lunar this and a lunar that or this.
It's it's a home.
A box to the roof and a door is a home on the moon, which means it fits family, it meets the demands of humans.

(40:32):
You look at phase 2.
Phase 2 is an industrial park.
And as part of the industrial park is you have to be able to have individuals doing their everyday activities, not astronauts, cosmonauts, taikonauts.
It's not that.
It's individuals that could be engineers.
They could be, machinists.
They could be whatever category you'd like.
Phase 3, I remember bringing up what was called extended stay.

(40:56):
That's our 3rd it's called extended stay.
We're gonna stay there longer.
We're gonna have different demands.
And he brought up, what's his name?
Bigelow.
He said, you know, Bigelow, he did that extended stay.
That's what it was called.
You stayed there longer, which had different demands as an architect would have to for someone who's gonna stay longer.
And phase 4 is called community.

(41:20):
Now they're very, very plain titles, but they're very descriptive of different need basis that kind of fit your architectural definitions you shared.
Does that make
sense?
Yeah.
I mean, that's the direction that we are inevitably going.
I I think well, we either will go in that direction or spaceflight will never get close to doing the things that people casually imagine it will.

(41:52):
Yep.
That's a and I'm assuming you're gonna touch on that later.
So is there anything else in this, I'm gonna call it introductory component off of the outline, that you would like to cover when it in this or we could bring it up later too.
No.
Actually, let let's just We did go ahead.
Speak.
So let's go back to the the killer title, why the NASA stakeholder community is incapable delivering on their own vision.

(42:21):
Yeah.
No.
No.
That is your share with me.
I wanna know, and and I'm excited to know.
I wanna hear what you believe or why you believe this because this came out of you.
Normally, titles take a while to develop.
Actually, Dan's took 3 calls.

(42:42):
And I'm, again, not picking on Dan, but I remember it was 3 calls.
We had to find something that he was passionate about that worked.
You were very precise in where you wanted to go with this.
So what do you mean by this?
Yeah.
So this is this has been, a theme for me for most of my career, and I've published lots of papers about different facets of this dilemma.

(43:12):
I guess I'd start maybe by saying, you know, the apocryphal description of, I guess, it's AA or something is, you know, the the the the first step is to recognize you have a problem.
And Okay.
I believe the stakeholder community does not recognize that it is suffering from an existential problem.

(43:41):
I agree with you.
That's why I phrase the title, on purpose to be a little punchy.
Not, you know, certainly not not trying to throw any of my professional colleagues under the bus.
These are people that I've worked with for decades, and I have great respect for everything everybody's trying to do.
However, one of the things that I've learned in my career is well, I'll say it a different way.

(44:11):
It it goes back to something that one of my professors told me in college, at the end of a semester, which is don't mistake effort for results.
Yep.
And I never forgot that.
I think it's a very potent way of thinking.
And in the real world, as opposed to the academy, it says everything.

(44:36):
Because in the real world and in space flight, you don't get partial credit.
So it doesn't matter how many years you've worked on it.
It doesn't matter how serious you are about it.
It doesn't matter how passionate you are.
It doesn't matter how noble the cause.
The only thing that matters is what you deliver.

(44:59):
And if we look at the facts, the SLS and Orion system that NASA has developed in various forms since the early 2000 is on the cusp of becoming usable.

(45:33):
The Orion program has been in existence now for 20 years fundamentally.
SLS in its current form, was given birth to in 2010.
Here we are 14 years later.
It's flown once.
And the NASA inspector general's office says that it will cost $4,000,000,000 every time it flies.

(46:01):
Yes.
Isn't that a crazy number?
So what this what this says is that, again, it has nothing to do with good intentions or or or anything.
It says that the facts on the ground say that the program that we are paying for, you and I, every April 15th, is not delivering the results that we need it to or that we want it to.

(46:28):
It's ironic that most Americans in polls, it shows that most Americans, think NASA is probably overfunded, but they have no idea what the NASA budget actually is, nor do they realize what a fraction of the DOD budget the NASA budget is, nor do they have a grip on how that budget compares to what they themselves collectively spend on pizza and beer every year.

(47:03):
So as a society, our ambitions and our dreams, I would say our image of what we want our NASA to be and do is completely out of sync with what our agency is actually capable of delivering.

(47:27):
So so And we can argue No.
No.
I argue, capability is there's there's what what you are theoretically capable of doing, and then there's what you're in fact capable of doing.
And I'm talking about the facts.
I'm just looking at the output as a measure of effectiveness.
Okay.
Well, you you you're going to the output.

(47:48):
I wanna know what's I'm looking at the title.
Why the NASA Space Colder Community?
And you can't I can't see you.
You can't see me, so I'm just reading it.
Is incapable delivering on their own vision.
You gave me an output.
Why are they incapable?
I know what the many times we've said $4,200,000,000, $2,000,000,000 to to launch.

(48:14):
All those numbers don't work.
But why?
Alright.
So let's start with what the vision is.
We'll start at the end of the bullet.
You know?
What is the NASA stakeholder community's vision?
In in one line, as repeated by every senior leader at NASA for many years now, it is humans to Mars.

(48:44):
That's how NASA defines success strategically of its human spaceflight program, humans to Mars.
And there's phrases that have been used since the early 2000.
It changes a little bit with administrations and administrators.
But, fundamentally, it's we're going to Mars.

(49:08):
Okay.
Mhmm.
So let's tackle that first bullet, of the list of 7 that I gave you.
Mars is out of reach Okay.
Despite what anybody says.
Why is it out of reach?
Well, astrodynamically, it's not.
In terms of propulsion, it's not.

(49:31):
JPL and other organizations around the planet do execute Mars missions on a relatively routine cadence, And we've done some amazing things at Mars.
However, human space flight is fundamentally different.
I'll just give you a couple of data points for this.

(49:56):
One potentially disarming, literally meaning disabling unknown, is how humans who have only in the extremest of cases have spent slightly more than a year in microgravity can execute a 3 year long mission.

(50:25):
In the middle of which is surface operations in space suits on a planet with gravity when we only have experience with microgravity deconditioning and the remediation of it on 1 year timescales.
So this is a topic which the, I'll call it the human Mars community, waves its hands around.

(50:59):
And yet the success of a mission hinges on this.
If you do an opposition class mission, it takes 5 to 6 months one way.
You're on the surface for 30 to 45 days, but then you gotta spend a year and a half or more to get back, if you do it that way.

(51:22):
If you do
it the other way, which
is kinda silly, you can do the long leg on the way out, but then you're really deconditioned by the time you get there.
Most so the the community has gone back and forth between opposition class and conjunction class or so called short stay versus long stay architectures.
The conjunction class mission is a home and transfer out and back effectively.

(51:45):
So it's like 6 to 9 months each way, but you're stuck on the surface for a year
and a half.
A year and a half on the surface of Mars is would be quite an undertaking.
This problem of the challenge, I'd call it, of how to, in today's risk averse world, plan and execute a human mission with this risk of microgravity deconditioning and its effects on the effectiveness or even safety of the mission, that's a problem.

(52:32):
Another one is what to do about radiation in deep space.
So, a lot of people, may well, most people may not know, some people certainly know that we were super lucky in the Apollo program.

(52:53):
There's a major solar proton event that happened between Apollo 16 and Apollo 17.
If it had happened during one of those missions, it would have probably changed the course of the space program.
We were not equipped to shield astronauts from an event like that.

(53:20):
The modern concepts for human missions to Mars require some kind of radiation storm shelter, which could be polyethylene.
It could be water, a combination of the 2.
It turns out for a for a multiyear mission, the amount of water and food you have to have is kind of on the same order as the shielding you might need around a very small storm shelter that you can cram the crew into.

(53:51):
But on those long missions, you've also got galactic cosmic rays, and you cannot shield against them.
And we don't yet have biomedical remediations for them as in cellular repair
Mhmm.
You know, with nanomachines and stuff like that.
We don't have
that yet.
Nope.
We don't.
You're gonna
take a crew and you're gonna, stick them out there for 3 years in that radiation environment.

(54:17):
Okay.
These are only 2.
I I use those examples because they're very vivid examples for, you know, people who are people like we said before.
Back when I was on the Human Exploration Framework Team, NASA's planning team at the end of the constellation program, there was a list of technology areas required to achieve humans to Mars.

(54:51):
The I'm looking at a list right now in a paper I published in 2012.
It's got too many to count in real time here, but it's on the order of about 70 technology needs when they're resolved into discrete projects like energy storage, high high day rate forward link, teller about a control with time delay, a surface suit, on and on and on.

(55:25):
And this was NASA's list, NASA's own list.
Different architectures have different lists of mandatory technologies or essential technologies.
And so you might have some architectures that have fewer bells and whistles, and maybe you can get by with, let's just say, 50 instead of 70.
But it's still an astronomical

(55:47):
it's an astronomical number because if you have so many variables that are not solved, they're not solved.
But to be fair, this is why we have a NASA.
Right?
We tackle hard technology problems, and we solve them.
That's so that's that's fine.
But but but here's a dilemma.
This is a planning dilemma.

(56:08):
This is now not rocket science.
Every one of these things is a technology development project.
Okay?
Like all projects, there is a probability distribution associated with the, cost at complete and the completion date.

(56:29):
And yet, NASA's architectures require all of these before the first mission can happen.
Okay.
So in mathematical terms, if you convolve the probability distributions of all of those essential technologies, it makes predicting the date or the cost infeasible.

(56:50):
You cannot do it.
Mathematically, you cannot do it.
So any administrator that sits in a in testimony on the hill and is grilled about how much is this gonna cost and when are we gonna land on Mars cannot give an answer.
This is a fundamental problem when your agency has wrapped itself around that objective.

(57:13):
But we you you have 2 words here, and we we have to join them.
And to a third this is the bigger question.
So there's NASA and stake oh, it's 3.
Stakeholder community.
I put them as stakeholder, but that's community.
So this includes the, external, vendors, providers that help to make this ecosystem that get funded to make this ecosystem build.

(57:37):
And we're we're talking here only in this case
Also, it also includes the funding sponsors.
So it includes congress and
the administration.
So I'm going to a higher level.
There's a technological challenge.
But when I'm looking at this as why, why is the NASA space holder community, including all of those players, why are they still pursuing this?

(58:04):
So that's the 3rd bullet on my list.
Okay.
So we so we, the third was Mars out of reach, Mars would not yield the TranscribeMeeting.
But that's the but
The third one is why is the NASA vision stuck on Mars?
Oh, okay.
And the answer is the second bullet because of, I'm gonna give you a fact and a binding, I'm gonna call it.

(58:30):
The the the fact is that NASA believes the NASA stakeholder community, the whole community, believes that landing humans on Mars will be transformational, that it is a worthy goal for space exploration.
Okay.
It may be.

(58:52):
But my finding, my conclusion is that it won't be as transformational as the vision presumes.
And the way I say it is 6 civil servants on Mars someday will not have the same effect on the world that 2 civil servants did on the moon in 1969.

(59:16):
And the reason there there there's several reasons for it.
One of which is that, so we we need to get into this a little bit.
Mhmm.
In the public consciousness, Mars is just another planet like the moon.
Mhmm.
It is.
Yeah.
It's maybe farther away because I look up in the sky and I can see the moon sorta.

(59:40):
But if I, you know, I have to kinda know where to look to see Mars, and every now and then I see a red star and somebody tells me, oh, yeah.
It must be Mars because
it's I've been doing this for I've been doing this for 8 years, Brent.
I don't know where Mars is.
And that's not an I'm I'm not trying to stab myself by saying it.
It's that I I don't look for Mars.
Yeah.
But but there are apps for it.

(01:00:01):
So, you know
Yeah.
The way you could I would have to have a desire to look for Mars.
Yeah.
I think
I think my point I I
talk to people all the time.
They're not even looking to the moon, let alone to Mars.
So, but I think my my point is that people will somehow get that Mars is farther away and harder.

(01:00:22):
But unless you're in the field, it doesn't you know, people are not good with big numbers, and so just how far how much farther away it is and just how much harder it is is lost on people.
And so, my prediction is that when it happens, people will, you know, watch

(01:00:45):
It'll be a thud.
It'll be a thud.
They'll watch the 22nd video on TikTok or whatever is the TikTok of that day, and then they'll scroll, you know, or swipe to the next one.
I, so I did a a paper on this several years ago looking at what enabled Apollo to happen.

(01:01:15):
And we don't have to go into it, but I I came up with 8 factors or conditions, I think I call them, that allow Hit the
hit the hit the top levels, the 8, very quickly so I can hear them.
Oh, sure.
An era of geopolitical brinkmanship among Yeah.
Between 2 superpowers, number 1.

(01:01:36):
Yeah.
Number 2, competitive climate.
That competitive climate was susceptible to, suasion of 4 key elements, modernizing nations, free press, American public, America's enemies by proving high-tech prowess.

(01:01:57):
Number 3, ballistic missile technology.
So we are on the cusp of flying things in space.
Number 4, earth moon is a visible destination.
It was deeply embedded in societal consciousness.
Number 5, president Kennedy set a very crisp mission statement in 1961 that was on the edge of feasibility, but it was feasible.

(01:02:24):
Number 6, we were coming from behind, for those who remember history, and nothing motivates Americans like coming from behind.
Number 7, the president was assassinated, and so his objective became a point of honor for the nation.

(01:02:46):
And the momentum from all of that, this is the 8th one, enabled what was fundamentally a blank check funding environment.
It was fought about.
The American public was only 50% behind it and so forth, but, ultimately, Apollo was allowed to cost what Apollo needed in order to meet the schedule set by president Kennedy.

(01:03:11):
Okay.
Not one of those eight conditions is repeatable today.
Not one.
So I will use yeah.
They're not repeatable.
Like, I agree.
I was gonna come in a different angle, but yes.
So so then the the real question is, okay, there's different factors.
So so
don't look backwards.
Look forwards.
Okay.
Mhmm.
There's different factors, and this is where it gets really interesting.

(01:03:36):
Frontiers are not what they used to be.
So I grew up in the sixties.
The American public trusted, scientists in white coats with pocket protectors and horn rimmed glasses, you know, telling them what the truth was.
We believed that space was the final frontier.
We saw it every Friday night on TV.

(01:03:58):
We were told it was the final frontier.
Okay.
Today's frontiers are things like genetic engineering, quantum, nanotechnology.
They're not physical frontiers the way we viewed frontiers in the sixties.
Number 2, today's population is way more skeptical and cynical, than back then.

(01:04:26):
You know, the worst thing you can do in front of a public crowd is put a a white coated scientist with pocket protectors and.
Yep.
Not you're not gonna get the result you want.
No.
Not at all.
Okay.
Number 3, deep space human exploration is harder than people realized.
It's still harder than a lot of people realize.

(01:04:48):
I would argue impossibly hard as to hard so hard that it makes it an impractical goal for a predictable plan.
And that was the point of the discussion we had a few minutes ago.
Number 4, I hate to say it, but NASA is a mature government agency.

(01:05:12):
So you have to you have to look back at history.
1950 I was born the same year as NASA.
Okay.
1958, the Eisenhower administration, took a bunch of laboratories, preexisting laboratories, and rebranded them as NASA, as this new agency.
It was an upstart agency, that was given an impossible challenge just 3 years later.

(01:05:39):
And the at the average age, when Apollo 11 landed, the average age at NASA was 28.
How do you get that?
What you have is a few very senior German rocket scientists and people who came out of the World War 2 environment, you know, large scale systems engineering for flight systems over there, and a whole lot of very young, very bright, energetic people who did not know what they did not know.

(01:06:13):
Okay.
Today I've I've done the data on all of the space company ages and agencies, and you're talking forties fifties.
The only one that's young is SpaceX.
Yeah.
So, less than 20% of the NASA workforce today is younger than 40.
So, anyway, it's a because the agency's been around for decades now, it it it has objective functions it did not have back then.

(01:06:44):
So job security was not an objective function back then.
Institutional or bureaucratic stability and continuity, well, that was not an objective function back then.
All it was was man, moon, decade.
Right?
And so now it's a it's it has bureaucratic needs as an agency that it did not have back then.

(01:07:07):
Number 5 is, I think the NASA brand is not limited to putting people on planets.
NASA does phenomenal things.
And the side of the agency that has nothing to do with human spaceflight produces breathtaking transformational science results at a steady clip in all 4 divisions.

(01:07:31):
And, you know, the launch of James Webb has shown that.
Now we've got samples sitting in sample tubes on the surface of Mars waiting to be brought back.
We're able to predict space weather much better than we were able to before, and now we do earth system science so we can actually quantify, climate change and, the amount of water we're pulling out of the subsurface and all amazing, amazing things.

(01:08:01):
Okay.
That was not the case back then.
Right?
But it is today.
NASA has a much richer brand to leverage than it did before.
Number 6 is that societal motivations are very powerful forcing functions, is the way I say it.

(01:08:26):
Are we motivated by bravura and invention?
Are we willing to tackle bold and hard challenges?
Are we more interested in the health of our four zero one ks?
We have to understand what matters to society if we expect to embark on something that society is expected to pay for.

(01:08:54):
Number 7, I think you can't make vision by looking in the rearview mirror.
You got to look out the windshield.
You got to look forward.
And we we are still implementing a fundamental programmatic sequence that von Braun posited and promoted.

(01:09:24):
If you go back to his, I'll call it, programmatic architecture, his sort of agency objective, it was build a reusable shuttle, use the reusable shuttle to build a space station, use the space station as a point of departure to go explore Mars.
Okay.
Isn't it interesting that all these decades later, we tried a reusable shuttle, didn't quite work out the way we wanted it to.

(01:09:51):
So typical American fashion, we abandoned it.
Instead of doing a second gen shuttle, we decided to do something else.
We built a space station.
Yeah.
But the space station, turns out, isn't really a good literal point of departure for exploration missions.
So now we're about to abandon the space station too.
But in, you know, lurching around a little bit, we are still on the on the von Braun plan.

(01:10:19):
That's making vision in the rearview mirror where we're executing a strategy on momentum rather than basing it on the constraints of today's world.
And I think, the 8th to me is the most important, and that's I call it violating the first principle of marketing, which is very hazardous.

(01:10:43):
NASA and its stakeholder community, congress, the administration, certainly the NASA Industrial Complex, all of its supply chain, the large contractors and their vendors misinterpreted their own history.
So the belief, a very, very deeply held belief in that community is that our purpose is to put boots on planets.

(01:11:16):
That was not what Apollo was there for.
Apollo was a mega project whose objective was embarrassing the Soviets on the world stage of public opinion through a peacetime high-tech endeavor.
It didn't have to be it didn't even have to be space, and it certainly didn't have to be landing on the moon.

(01:11:41):
There's a very, very good thorough analysis of how it came to be those things in John Logsdon's book called John F.
Kennedy and the Return to the Moon or the Race to the Moon.
I'm sorry.
And so a lot of options were considered.
And ultimately, what sifted out was what became Apollo.
But the purpose was geopolitical.

(01:12:03):
It was not technical, and it was not exploration, which is why it was so easy for president Nixon to cancel the program, while it was still underway.
We hadn't even finished all, would have been 7, but 6 Apollo surface missions and the program was canceled, because it had met its purpose.

(01:12:25):
It did exactly what it was supposed to do, and it turns out in retrospect that we were actually not in the race we thought we were.
The Soviets were not raising us, but that's beside the point.
Ever since Apollo, the NASA stakeholder community believe, has believed, that its purpose isn't what Apollo's purpose was.

(01:12:47):
Its purpose is to put boots on planets.
Oh, and if you're going to put boots on planets, you got to find the next planet after the moon and that's Mars.
And Mars was von Braun's favorite target.
So that so we are living, we are attempting, we are asymptotically approaching perhaps, this mirage goal that was, sort of, chosen by a few people decades ago in the face against the all of the harsh realities that are arrayed against us.

(01:13:29):
And here we are still like the little toy that just, you know, hits the wall and backs up and then hits the wall and backs up and hits the wall.
In my career, I watched us as a nation not go to Mars 3 separate times.
And this is the reason.
It's out of reach.

(01:13:50):
It wouldn't yield the transformation that it that the vision presumes because the world has changed around it.
And the reason that the community is stuck on the vision is because it's running on momentum.
So I I I'm you know, as I'm listening to you, there are a few things that just really pop out at me that I'm, I'm trying to ask the question in a kinda nicer way, but maybe more direct.

(01:14:13):
So let me give you the few that popped out from my experiences, and I don't have nearly the knowledge you have, the experience working in these, environments.
Yet.
Worked in over 50 countries, worked with the CEOs and executive teams from nanotechnology, aerospace, water, and sewage construction to the Maersk, GOLs, Tektronix, Infosys, WIPROS all around the world.
So these are the things that jump out at me.
Maybe you can pop, reflect on them a little bit.

(01:14:37):
First of all, we have a management that has a a very, linear sense of innovation.
They keep on pushing the same things, keep on pushing the same things.
And one of the people that you you and I spoke to in another call said he doesn't even know if 25 people or 23 people could have project Moon Hut because they're stuck in the in the past.
The it's an agency system, and the agency system is the only, group of, government, at least in the United States, but even around the world.

(01:15:07):
And Jeffrey Mamber was one who said it the best.
He said the creation of the agency system focused everybody on getting money from the agencies, And therefore, the agency had to coordinate everything, and every country's adding an agency, but the collective, capitalism, the collective ecosystem was not formed.
And to make matters worse, at least on my end, is an agency doesn't understand the interconnectedness of everything that needs to be put together.

(01:15:34):
It is done by a I I don't use this word often, but the only thing that comes to mind is a bureaucratic sense of not efficiency, not producing the right amount of, of fluid to make everything flow.
And the last one is that and there I can give you a few more, but I'm gonna stop here, is that there's a lack of foresight.

(01:15:58):
You gave one ex these few examples of why the system was different.
The environment was different.
There was a a purpose for that was driven, but yet no one is stopping it.
They're allowing it to pursue.
So to me, internally within the administrations, I'm gonna use them globally, within the administrations, there is not enough people who are going to say, this is just plain absolutely wrong.

(01:16:27):
They'll be kicked out.
They'll be moved out.
But my first meeting I ever had with the Beyond Earth ecosystem, I sat there saying to myself, this is ridiculous what they're talking about.
This is this is beyond absurd.
If I was sitting in an organization that had to build, we would never be talking about these topics at this point in time.

(01:16:49):
So those are my kind of 3 overarching.
What about the leadership?
What about the management?
What about the decision making?
What about the structure?
What about all that in your eyes?
Yes.
Well, so the the entire institution, and I don't just mean the agency.
I'm I'm Sorry.
I got a little excited.
Yeah.
I mean, its stakeholder community.
The entire institution is structured around this vision.

(01:17:17):
Yes.
So it's very, very hard.
It's understandably hard.
And again, I would interrupt myself just by saying, I have tremendous empathy and respect for everyone who's caught up in the system, but they are caught
up in it.
And it's Yeah.
Absolutely.

(01:17:38):
Really hard for the system to, disrupt itself.
This is a, you know, fundamental principle of, Clayton Christensen and everybody else in, you know, business theory.
It's really hard for a company to disrupt itself.
It's really hard for any institution to disrupt itself.

(01:18:00):
And I it could be, and we're gonna get to this because we're gonna talk about alternative visions, but it could be that 6 civil servants by the way, only 2 of them are US citizens because we do things internationally now.
Internationally now.
Okay.
The
6th observance on Mars 30 years from now is a worthy expenditure of 10 to the 11th dollars.

(01:18:26):
That could be.
I personally don't think it is, and everyone I talk to who is not, caught up in the system thinks it's not.
Yep.
Absolutely.
Hence, my
my,
factor number 8 of looking forward, don't violate the first principle of marketing.

(01:18:49):
Okay.
If you're expecting the American public to pay for this and if you're expecting their elected agents or representatives, to, allocate the budgets and, you know, monitor the performance and so forth, If if you're expecting people to want something, it's probably a good idea to find out what they want.

(01:19:18):
Not just
I can tell you.
I can
tell you.
That what they must want is humans to Mars because, of course, that's what they want.
Because, of course, that's the the right vision.
It has been all along.
Right?
That's and and so the the this is what I meant by the by the bullet we're gonna get to eventually.
But before you before you jump to that, though, we're including the European state.

(01:19:41):
We're including the entire network, not only the NASA, but anybody who's allied with the US or anybody in other countries allied with other allies.
They're all following the same model.
They're pretty much running the same race.
You don't see a lot of individuals saying, no.
No.
No.
Let's take a right here because they're so fun financially committed to this model that they they won't even stop it.

(01:20:09):
I would say yes and no.
Okay.
The the yes part is, yeah, I did a a paper probably in 2008 or something that was called something like National Space Visions, and and what what it was about was exploring the phenomenon that when a leading agency, like in the old days, the, you know, what became the Russian Space Agency or NASA, decides to go do a thing and does it because it has the means to do it, the agencies that are more up and coming follow.

(01:20:58):
They all follow.
And and you can see it in, multiple domains.
Like, did it real I'll just pose a couple here.
Sure.
Did it did it really make sense for both the European Space Agency and NASA to devote simultaneous flagship planetary science projects to moons of Jupiter?

(01:21:24):
Yeah.
Right.
We're going to Europa.
They're going to Ganymede.
Okay.
Yeah.
They're both interesting, but it's a big solar system, and there's, lots of
We're all going to the same destination.
Why?
Cable surveys, you know, tell us the priorities across the fields of space science, including planetary science, and there's a lot more to do than moons in the Jovian system.

(01:21:47):
So why is it that that happened?
Why do we both send radar orbiters to Venus?
Why do we, you know, do so many of the same things?
And it's a complex question, and I think there are both spoken and unspoken or recognized and unrecognized drivers for that.

(01:22:08):
But there is a sort of a convergence toward a singular path.
Okay.
That's the yes.
The no is that when it comes to human exploration, nobody can afford to do it other than us.
So, you know, Europe has talked about having a human scale lunar lander, but they're not gonna do one.

(01:22:32):
They're they're gonna spend their resources trying to get a reusable, heavy lift launch system because they don't wanna be out of the launch business, and they realize that it's going all reusable.
So they gotta do that first.
Okay.
So by the time they get around to doing a human scale lunar lander, we will have had multiple ones operating on the surface of the moon, and there'll be no point for Europe to do it.

(01:22:54):
So it it in the case of human deep space exploration, it is driven by the United States.
And so if other people can collaborate and provide things that we are willing to depend on, then that was the point in my paper is we need more of that.

(01:23:16):
We need more willingness to be transnationally dependent on others because, collectively, we will make much faster progress than if everybody just duplicates everybody else And, you know, everybody has to do all of it themselves.
So it's it's funny that
There's there's another very important aspect to this, though, which is, this phenomenology we're talking about applies to public money, that's directed by governments.

(01:23:48):
It does not apply to, the investments made by private investors, genuinely private investors who are self directed.
So the way to think about this is, in the late eighties when I started my career, there there were only 3 if you if you wanted to do human space flight, you only had 3 choices.

(01:24:14):
You could go into academia, where you
got total I just lost power I just lost power in the house.
So if I do lose you
Okay.
I don't, because I Well, we'll just reschedule if we have to.
But No.
No.
No.
It's it could come back, but I'm losing power, but I still got you, which is really interesting.
Okay.
Well, when you're when you're Yeah.

(01:24:35):
We're still here.
I'm I'm actually in the dark, but I don't know if we're operating.
You can see on yours, it says record record.
Right?
Yeah.
It does.
Okay.
So that means we're still going.
If I drop off, we might have to come back to this.
Yeah.
Understood.
So so So Yeah.
Well, that, yeah.
Let let me let me So This is a really important point about about, people following versus leading, or institutions following versus leading.

(01:25:03):
So back then, you you could you could do academia where you have total freedom and no authority.
You could do government where you have all the authority, but you don't do the work.
Or you could do industry where you do the work, but you don't make the decisions.
Okay.
And and so that's obviously an oversimplified model, but that's kind of fundamentally the way the industry was structured back then.

(01:25:28):
I chose industry and went to Boeing because I wanted to build things, and be close to the work.
Today, that triangle has become a tetrahedron, in my view.
There's a 4th pole out of plane, which is what I call the independent space sector.
And these are enterprises that have capable teams, full of experts and experienced people.

(01:25:56):
They have resources that are not coming out of federal agency top line budgets, and they have road maps.
They have things they wanna do.
We're not quite at the level of what you read in science fiction like Daniel Suarez or something, where people are really fully independently capable of executing major transformational deep space missions and things like that.

(01:26:28):
But it's a lot different than it was in the late eighties.
So you will not find, Elon or Jeff or Richard merely doing what NASA wants to do.
And that is, in my view, extremely healthy development that is fundamentally new in the last decade.

(01:26:52):
It's the reason I left JPL and went to Blue Origin because I wanted to see what what is this world like where we get to have our own road maps and we get to, you know, define our own, destiny.
So I think there is and remember, I wrote that paper about National Space Visions back in 2008.
And so, you know Yeah.

(01:27:13):
It's it's still here.
The the world the world is different now.
Some so sometimes things evolve.
So the the premise that we're using or we're considering as part of the way we're building is the it's an all it's a term that was just brought up in Davos.
I think I said in the last podcast, but the last, in Davos, there was a panel, and they talked about this thing called coopetition.

(01:27:39):
Coopetition has been around for quite some time, and we have a paper written by, one of our teammates, Daniele from the University of Messina called coopetition.
And our belief structure is that there are so many individuals going in so many different directions trying to achieve so many different types of, achievements, that if you can get individuals who can collaborate long enough to put in the infrastructure, to put in the tools that are necessary, the entire ecosystem then can evolve and develop.

(01:28:11):
And the challenge with the messaging that comes out of agencies tends to be very confrontational, tends to be, like you've shared, going to Mars, that is somewhat misdirected or at least I believe, we believe it's misdirected, and it won't achieve those big desired outcomes that individuals are working towards.

(01:28:32):
So what if what if we change that model and said, okay.
I'm gonna use these names just because they're popular and well known.
Let's say Rocket Labs, SpaceX, and Blue.
You all wanna have a logistics.
You're a transportation company.
You're logistics firms.
You wanna have this happen.

(01:28:53):
Why don't we get what we need to to the destination we need to have it?
Let's work together to make sure it's there.
And then you can go on your own way.
But if we all try to do it separately, we'll end up with nothing in the end.
It depends on the my view is that Yep.

(01:29:14):
That's what
I'm asking.
My, my my opinion about that subject is that it depends on the dynamics of the marketplace.
So, a good, I think, sort of a case study that illuminates this is the competitive development of commercial cargo services for resupplying the International Space Station.

(01:29:42):
The market was known.
It was quantified.
It was stable.
It was predictable.
This is with NanoRacks and and Jeff
No.
This is the the the winners in that competition were SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, which is how we got, the Falcon 9, Dragon combination and the

(01:30:06):
You're talking about the actual vehicle for as compared to the servicing because Jeff Mamber put up 700 flights, something like that, to the International Space Station in terms of supply.
No.
No.
No.
I'm I'm talking about the, program that NASA ran.
It was one of their first successful public private partnerships to bring private money to the table, to to, be combined with public funding to develop, commercial systems to resupply space station.

(01:30:40):
And there are only 2 who are doing it.
Right?
Orbital Sciences and SpaceX are the 2.
So that program worked very successfully.
You know, kudos to Phil McAllister and, and the the the people who carried that little vision all the way through to fruition.

(01:31:04):
It worked because a resupply vehicle, meaning a space vehicle that sits on top of a rocket, and can go and rendezvous a station, transfer stuff, and then de orbit is a relatively straightforward problem in today's world.
So it doesn't cost a gazillion dollars.

(01:31:25):
Number 2, NASA cost shared over 80% of the development cost in that program.
So it was a little bit of private money and a lot of public money.
Yeah.
And number 3, like I said, the market was known, quantified, stable, predictable, and and in fact, you could go to an investor of various types and say, hey.

(01:31:47):
Here's a market.
You should bet on me winning this market because it's there.
Right?
You can quantify it.
It's real.
Okay.
Contrast that with what's happening in the Commercial LEO Destinations program today at NASA.
This is NASA's program to supplant the International Space Station by shifting NASA research work onto private space stations, commercial space stations.

(01:32:12):
Yeah.
First of all, a space station costs, orders of magnitude more than a capsule to develop.
Yeah.
Number 2, that program is funded in such a way that NASA is only funding 5% of it, not over 80% of it.

(01:32:36):
And the market is completely squishy.
The way NASA defines the market is, oh, we wanna be one of many users.
Oh, who are the other users of a commercial space station?
Oh, well, I you know, people go to panel sessions at conferences and say there's a $1,000,000,000,000 market, so there must be other customers.

(01:32:57):
Yes.
Okay.
But there aren't.
There aren't.
Or there there are some, but certainly not enough to justify a, you know, 1,000,000,000 or 5,000,000,000 or $10,000,000,000 nonrecurring investment.
And the way I described it to NASA leadership a couple years ago, actually, it was last year, was, you know, if I go to any investor, whether it's pension funds or, you know, VCs or, you know, even if I have a single, very committed investor, and I

(01:33:35):
say, hey.
I got
a deal.
You should bet on this race.
I can't exactly tell you what the race course is.
I can't tell you when where the finish line is.
I can tell you not everybody started at the same time.
I know the size of the purse, but I'm gonna divide the purse into some number n, and I don't know what the number n is.

(01:34:02):
And, I'm not gonna be an anchor, you know, customer.
Such a deal.
Oh, by the way, you know, the the price tag to enter the race is the few 1,000,000,000, and you gotta spend it all before you know whether you win the race or not.
No same investor would do that.

(01:34:26):
So the the the nature of the public private partnership, the way it's structured, the expectations for it, and in particular, the solidity and predictability of the alleged commercial market or even the government market is fundamental if you're gonna, do these deals where you expect people to bring money to NASA's table.

(01:34:57):
So, it's different if you're doing exploration like the art of the coordination.
You know, they have budgets.
They have discussions where they can agree on sort of the level of relative contribution.
They can match, system and technology needs to the budgets that they have and sort of spread it around and do it collaboratively.

(01:35:20):
That's that's just the way international government to government collaboration is done.
Collaboration between government and business is really different.
B to c, right, is what they call it.
Right?
Yep.
It it it requires a kind of predictability of market that does not yet exist in human space flight, certainly the use of low earth orbit or or anything that's got people on it.

(01:35:51):
So your next one, because it sounds like that's where I'm assuming Well is what about compromised vision?
Are they right?
Is art is that where you're going?
Well, so I wanna I hear I wanna just, you know, call truth.
The reason that Artemis is a program is it's it's the only thing that seems remotely affordable and feasible on the way to the real vision, which is humans to Mars.

(01:36:33):
So this is why you hear leaders, at the agency, and and their members of the stakeholder community who are echoing that say things like, we're going to the moon to learn, and then we're going to Mars.
Or if you look at the at the the right hand side of the, quote, unquote, road map charts that NASA shows for the Artemis program, you get to some pseudo steady state of, cadence of missions to the surface of the moon, and then the chart kinda runs out.

(01:37:13):
It's like, well, what happens after that?
And the answer is, oh, then we go to Mars.
Right?
And and every every press conference, every you know, the administrator just did it again, the other day when Intuitive Machines landed on the moon.
He congratulated Intuitive Machines and
then anything even Yeah.
Is he hopes us an important step on our way to Mars.

(01:37:35):
Right?
Mhmm.
So, and Actually, Bill had said to one of our teammates at an event he also said it publicly at the event.
He said he was asked, why are we going to the moon?
And his answer was to go to Mars.
So the person said, why are we going to Mars?
And he replied to an audience to beat the Chinese.

(01:37:57):
Oh, well, that's a relatively recent one.
But, Yeah.
It was relatively recent.
It was
a year No.
No.
No.
I mean I mean, the the invocation of an alleged race with the Chinese
Right.
That's they were bringing he was making that was the point is that there was there was a better case would have been we're going to Mars for x.

(01:38:22):
That would do y for the human society, would change the way we, change some there would have been a value additive.
But to
Trying to bring back the 19, 19 sixties is not the answer.
Well, to be empathetic, it for all the reasons we talked about, you know, in the last hour, it's hard for anybody leading NASA to articulate why Mars is the vision.

(01:38:51):
Mhmm.
Anyway, the So so is is the next Hang on.
Historically, for decades now, ever since, really before I started my career, there's been an internecine battle, among people who care about, it used to be called moon first or Mars first.

(01:39:20):
And and the stakes were very high, although they seemed high.
It was really a tempest and a teapot.
But, in the early let's see.
In the mid nineties, NASA went through a cycle of strategic planning for human exploration in which, the planners, mostly at Johnson Space Center, were not allowed to say Mars.

(01:39:48):
So the pendulum swings back and forth, but, ultimately, it tends to stick over on the side of Mars.
But you will find that there are, Martians and lunatics.
And,
you've used that before.
Yeah.
And, I'll just I'll for the record, you know, I'll say I am a lunatic.

(01:40:10):
I've always been a lunatic.
The the I'm circling I'm circling
and putting an arrow.
Brent is a lunatic.
Yeah.
The only thing I wanted to do when I was 8 years old was build cities on the moon, and I can't even tell you why, but that's just where I come from.
I can give you all kinds of No.

(01:40:32):
No.
I'm I'm I'm gonna let me can I give you a little secret?
Don't tell anybody.
You said Martians and lunatics.
I didn't tie because I never call it lunar lunar because it's not a a human vocabulary.
I didn't realize until this point where you were actually lunatic.
So that's how slow I am.

(01:40:53):
Brent, you should never do anything with me.
Oh, you're good.
I didn't get it.
I I didn't get it until, like, a minute after you had done it.
Okay.
Because
you get Mars firsters and Moon firsters.
Well, I I get it now, but it took me a second.
I'm sitting here saying, what an idiot, David.
He's talking about moon.
So okay.
So, about the moon.

(01:41:14):
Tech.
Now I get it.
And I can give you all kinds of rational arguments why the moon makes sense.
Very quickly.
Why?
Go ahead.
Oh, well, I I subscribe to the philosophy that was written by Croft Erich in many years ago.
He said, if God intended man to explore space, he would have given him a moon.

(01:41:41):
And what he meant by that is if you have a planet that's 4 days away and you think you wanna learn how to explore planets Mhmm.
Why in the world wouldn't you practice in your own backyard?
Yep.
So, I mean, that that is a sort of reductionist that that's a collapsing of, you know, many things.

(01:42:06):
But now you hear, rationales for Artemis as, you know, we're practicing.
We're learning.
We're gonna you know?
Okay.
I to me, it's really very simple.
There is the the the so called practice element.
We have a lot to learn about playing in the dirt on another planet.

(01:42:27):
Even the troubles that we had on the Phoenix mission on Mars, a very simple system doing soil analysis, the the problems we had getting the soil into the instrument Yeah.
Are anecdotal proof of the unpredictability of the environment.

(01:42:48):
Okay.
An unpredictable environment means you're gonna have setbacks, you're gonna have to jury rig stuff, you're gonna have to figure out your way around it.
Okay.
There's a lot of learning to do.
That's 1.
2 is the moon is the only planetary destination that has a prayer of someday being related to commercial space activity because Mars is too far away.

(01:43:17):
Yep.
But the moon is close enough that in a world where spaceflight operations are routine and safe enough and cost effective enough, you could have tourists go to the moon.
Okay.
You cannot do that for Mars.
Nope.
The moon is a place you can settle because you can basically build a railroad between Earth and moon.

(01:43:43):
The way you settle Mars is you send Adam and Eve and you wish them luck because resupply is not a thing you can do routinely.
So, anyway, those are just 3 kind of
fundamental You're speaking to the choir because
There's many, many papers worth of analysis that could go in There's
tons of them, and you can't imagine how many have been sent to me.

(01:44:07):
And they've got all sorts of rationale for all sorts of different things, but these are basics.
It's, it's not far away.
It has the its, celestial body around the earth.
It is, can become a commercial long term position.
If you even look at our logo, the the Mearth logo, you'll see that we've created a transit system that becomes that kind of train system that would enable that to happen.

(01:44:33):
So all of those things we're working on.
So you kind of check the boxes as you went down.
So that was good.
I was I was smiling as you hit them.
So okay.
So
There's also I'll just in passing, I'll say there's there's some mythology associated with Mars being more habitable than the moon.
The the the technically correct way to say it is Mars is a skosh less uninhabitable than the moon.

(01:45:02):
It is, just as lethal, very hostile place, and really far away.
So, anyway You
know, I I again, I we one of the people that you one of the people that you know once has said that when all this math that's coming out in terms of how how they can get there, for example, in the starship, the individual said, you know, not a 100.

(01:45:26):
6 people will make that will finally end up surviving that journey.
There's all sorts of challenges which you brought up earlier, radiation, the timelines for travel.
We don't know humans and that those conditions, what would happen in the in the moon is right here.
So okay.
So wait.
Do we go to the compromise?
Is that it?
Or is it The point for today is to recognize that, although NASA has embraced the moon with the Artemis program, it did so as a compromise because it couldn't do Mars directly.

(01:46:01):
And
so okay.
But it was actually it was in you you know for sure because it wasn't we couldn't do it.
Or are you saying that is what your, what your extrapolation is from the people you've spoken with?
It's what the Augustine committee said in 2009.
Okay.

(01:46:25):
So, there's a whole So
then so the switch the the switch happened the switch happened to Artemis, and I was when Charlie Bolden, very early on, put up and showed the in a room of people, there's only about 25 of us in a room, he showed the Artemis program.
And so in when did and I don't know this.

(01:46:47):
When did Artemis become the program of choice after this 2009?
What day what year later?
Well, I I don't know the name the the year that the name was given, but I I do know it was at least a couple of years after I named my cats Apollo and Artemis.

(01:47:10):
Okay.
So So
I I'm gonna say roughly 2017, 2018.
I don't know.
Oh, it's it's that it's that current.
I don't remember what
What was happening in the meantime?
Right?
After Constellation ended and after it became clear that the asteroid re erect mission approach, which was the sort of interim proposal by the Obama administration was DOA.

(01:47:43):
The agency settled into a stepwise approach.
Basically, let's do what we can, and what they, started with is, also indicative of the momentum belief system, but it was the heavy lift rocket and the capsule.

(01:48:04):
Okay.
So that was SLS and Orion.
And then the Artemis program started to, accrete around the the core of SLS and Orion.
In the meantime, you'll remember that the gateway program started.

(01:48:27):
There are some, in my opinion, some, problematic reasons why Gateway happened.
There are certainly no technical reasons why Gateway happened.
It's not necessary to have a space station in a high lunar orbit.
It actually decrements the kind of performance you can get out of a lunar landing transportation system to have it have to go up into that high orbit and come back out, and it complicates the astrodynamics quite a bit.

(01:49:00):
Why do
we have a gateway?
Well, I think there are 2 fundamental reasons.
The obvious one today is that if you want to build an international coalition and not everybody who's in it or that you want to be in it can afford to be on the surface of the moon.
You give them a place that's simpler and cheaper to operate in, which is space.

(01:49:24):
And so Gateway has become the nexus of the Artemis Accords, collaborations.
The I think the an original reason, which, is not widely recognized is that NASA at its heart is an operations agency.

(01:49:46):
Right?
It operates missions.
Space station has, in some ways, become the embodiment of today's NASA because it has to be operated continuously.
If NASA goes into a future in which it no longer owns and therefore no longer operates a space station continuously and if constrained by budget and the cost of SLS and Orion, it can only fly to the moon once a year or once every Every 2 years.

(01:50:22):
Yep.
Then what is it operating?
And if it's not operating anything, it loses its soul.
So it was essential, I believe, in some leaders' minds for NASA to have a thing which would need to be operated continuously.
Hence, they
And this gets to 2 things.

(01:50:44):
1, you've got decisions being made by an agency that fundamentally go against many of the constructs that you and I would have considered to be viable.
And second, they're meeting demands of, of groups of individuals to, placate them.
You know, you've got this one position.
But you have just said that the by putting the gateway, you cause challenges for, landing on the moon.

(01:51:12):
And so we we have come at it in a very different way.
We don't look at the gateway system.
We look at transport between the moon and the Earth in a in a completely different structure.
So at some point, we'll you've sent the NDA.
We'll we'll show you some of these things.
Maybe you've got some great ideas to move forward with it.
But I don't get the gateway system the way you've kinda just described it, but now you've given the answers to why it's putting in in place.

(01:51:40):
And I'll add a small little piece.
The word mission typically means you go out and you come back.
That's a mission.
You have a mission.
You you the missionaries went someplace and then they came back.
We don't call things missions in Project Moon because we're we're doing a project.
We're establishing infrastructure.

(01:52:01):
We're establishing, a system that will be able to operate.
We don't have that same challenge of, having something that would position themselves as a mission condition.
So that's cool.
Okay.
You you checked some boxes there.
That was very good.
So the next one was I I go ahead.
So the, let's just recognize, or for today's purpose, let's let's let's agree that if if NASA had a blank check, it would not be doing Artemis.

(01:52:29):
It would be doing humans to Mars.
Correct.
Okay.
And and I completely agree with that.
So everything I've been saying so far in these first four, points is rather critical and negative.
But, yeah, they're critical and negative, and I, while I'm sitting here, I actually did I did say to myself, wow.

(01:52:51):
There's a lot of negative here.
And so I kind of became a little anxious when I I looked down.
I don't we've right now, I think I'm on page, 14 of notes.
I looked down.
I looked at the the your list, and I said, okay.
What about this one here?
What about the compromised vision is Artemis?
So you're saying that's the compromise, but you weren't describing a better compromise.

(01:53:14):
You were describing the facts of the compromise.
So now what I'm gonna do is start to turn positive and offer some solution path.
Okay.
That that's great.
But that's what I read it as the compromise, meaning you knew of a compromise, but it was a compromise to fulfill what you just said, giving, alliances these type of opportunities to play not play the full game, but be a part of the game.

(01:53:43):
So, I, what I wanna do is for this next point, the question is, are there better vision?
Yep.
Okay.
And, what that's gonna do is take us kind of up a level.
It's gonna take us out of the trench where the bullets are flying, and we're gonna get, a higher level broader picture.

(01:54:06):
I'm I'm good with it.
I just just my own body reaction here was, wow.
We're we're in the deep throes of the challenge is not working.
So I'm glad we're making the jump.
This is perfect.
So what are the better visions?
Yeah.
So, I, I was on the as I mentioned before, I was on HEF, the human exploration framework team.

(01:54:28):
I was deployed from JPL to NASA headquarters to be on this internal planning team at the end of the constellation programme.
And we were challenged to come up with like, what is it that the human program should be all about?

(01:54:49):
And there were 2 generations of heft.
I was on both of them.
Ultimately, the product of all of that ended up being, alas, the SLS program, which is a slightly different story.
But as I was engaged with my peers on that planning team, we were wrestling with things like the, the fact that the asteroid redirect mission was not very appealing, evidently.

(01:55:21):
The constellation program itself had been ended because it was unaffordable.
The Augustine committee had said, not only is it unaffordable, it's really unaffordable.
And NASA should do this thing they called flexible path planning, which meant, build fundamental infrastructure that can be used for any number of things.

(01:55:45):
We had spent some time thinking about what are those other things, What might those other things be?
Most of them were, naturally.
They had to do with, next generation class of space science, like going out to, sun Earth l 2 and assembling planet finder telescope, or going to Mars but not landing on Mars and exploring the moons of Mars, which is a way, way simpler problem.

(01:56:24):
It still has the mission duration and the radiation, the things we talked about before, but it does not have all of the landing and ascent and planet surface operations and all that kind of stuff.
So sort of a way to start on Mars.
Or what was the other one?
Oh, asteroid.
Go to a near Earth asteroid, and which is going to a near Earth asteroid is kind of like a Mars mission in trip time, but it's kind of like a moon mission in propulsion requirements.

(01:56:54):
So it's intermediate in challenge.
And I I did a paper back then, I think it was in 2009, exploring with a bunch of colleagues from around the agency what those types of missions would be.
So that was context.
Heft was trying to think about, like, what do we make, you know, the heart of the replacement human space program?

(01:57:18):
And as we were working, I realized all of this is about exploration.
That may not sound bad.
It isn't bad.
But what I realized is that we're we're sort of rattling around in a groove.
And the real question is, are there other grooves that we're not even looking at?

(01:57:45):
So at the time, it also happened I went to a AAAS, conference, the American Astronautical Society, which has a, great track record of, finding speakers who are provocative.

(01:58:07):
And so I I could look it up.
I don't quite remember which conference it was.
But there was a woman who gave a talk there, named Betty Sue Flowers, who was a former executive from Shell Oil, but now a poet, or then a poet.

(01:58:29):
And she gave a talk about the relationship of the human spaceflight enterprise to what she called societal myths.
And and the question is, we use we use myths as she called she defined myths as stories that create meaningful reality, meaning stories that we use to organize and prioritize values and experiences.

(01:58:55):
They're embedded in deep in society, so that they're kind of instantly recognizable by people, stereotypically recognizable by people.
And, she described 3 myths that made us, she called it.
And by us, she meant, Americans.

(01:59:16):
1, is the hero myth, one is the religious myth, and one is the democratic scientific myth.
And then she said that we had developed a 4th one, called the economic myth or that she called the economic myth, and then maybe a 5th one called the ecological myth.

(01:59:38):
So, anyway, it was a fabulous talk, and I was it really got me thinking, and I had this context of these other kinds of missions.
And then I realized, and so then I wrote about it, that until we know what myth we're building a program to execute or to make real, we don't really know what we're doing.

(02:00:03):
And we and we we owe it to ourselves and our our, sponsors who are the taxpayers to be clear about what myth they are funding.
So, the paper I did in 2010 no.
2011 is when I published it.

(02:00:26):
And, so it's it's taken multiple forms, and I'll quickly get to the the form that I use today.
But, anyway, I I, explored 4 alternative core myths for government funded human space flight.
One, naturally, is the hero myth, which I would sort of envision, like, you can picture Lewis and Clark.

(02:00:50):
I always use Lewis and Clark to embody the hero myth.
We're gonna, you know, go over the next hill and see what's there and, you know, map all the territory and all that kind of stuff.
A completely orthogonal myth, a very different myth is what I call the jet set myth.
And you could personify this with Richard Branson, somebody who flies around the world, you know, owns an island in the Caribbean.

(02:01:20):
You know, it's, that's the modern jet set.
Another myth could be the green myth or what she called the ecological myth.
So the the the, the the draw or the allure or the pull of, being good stewards of earth and resources and so forth.

(02:01:44):
And then the 4th one, that I wrote about was what I call the pioneer myth.
And for this, because we're talking about space, I personify that just by Heinlein.
A lot of Robert Heinlein stories ultimately are about pioneers.
Sometimes they're about heroes, but they're often about pioneers, you know, groups of, iconoclastic, innovative problem solvers who are in a hostile environment, trying to, like, tame the wilderness, so to speak.

(02:02:17):
The reason this is relevant is that those core myths, if you were to design like we said before, let's not look in the rear view mirror.
Let's look forward.
Yeah.
Let's look at the constraints of society.
Let's see what myths might resonate in today's society and then design intentionally design or architect a program around them, what might those programs be?

(02:02:45):
Okay.
Mhmm.
So now I'm gonna fast forward to because this was almost, what was it, 13 years ago, I've I've I've given multiple talks and written multiple papers about this and evolved it, and in its current form is what I call the 4 futures.
This is a very simple model that allows a an adult productive conversation about why we do what we do in space.

(02:03:16):
I've yet to find a single idea for human spaceflight that does not trace to 1 or some combination of these 4.
Okay.
The first one is, so they they all start with EX because it's easy to remember.
So explore, experience, exploit, and expand are the 4.

(02:03:41):
The explore future is what we all know, from NASA.
And I still use Lewis and Clark to to sort of illustrate this.
If you're gonna explore, in that future, what do you do?
You send a small, intrepid crew of highly trained experts to the farthest place you can get them, and you ask them to go look around and see what's there and return knowledge.

(02:04:12):
That's exactly what Jefferson commissioned Lewis and Clark to do.
That's what NASA now expects humans to Mars to do for us.
That future is our history at NASA since the misinterpretation of the Apollo reality, and it's governing all NASA planning for human space flight going forward.

(02:04:45):
Okay.
Fine.
Where a lot of people wanna get to, particularly people who don't know anything about space but they watch Star Trek or people who are advocates for space in organizations like the National Space Society or the Space Frontier Foundation, a lot of the people who go to the AAIS or AIAA meetings and so forth, What they want is the 4th future, which is expand, which means to settle.

(02:05:23):
That means to put down roots, learn how to live off the land, become self sustaining, increase the population so that it attains societally relevant population sizes, and does those things we talked about before that require space architecture and urbanism and so forth, right, to basically establish human civilization in a remote alien hostile place, and thereby expand the footprint of human civilization out into the solar system.

(02:06:05):
Okay.
The problem is that no amount of the Explore future can fund the Expand future.
It takes way, way more to expand than it does to explore, because because we're not just talking about small crews.
We're talking about people, including, like, normal people raising families.
And so you need the hospitals and morgues and etcetera, etcetera, schools and, you know.

(02:06:31):
Okay.
So there's a dilemma.
It says that the dream that a lot of people have without realizing it's their dream is so unaffordable that it's only a dream, and you can't connect the dots.
You can't get from explore to expand.
In this model, the bridge to eventually expanding, starting from exploring, is the other 2 futures, exploit and experience.

(02:07:00):
And the reason is very simple, it's economic.
The only people fundamentally who will fund exploring are governments.
However, if you make a kind of human space flight that people can experience and if you use human space flight and other technologies to exploit space for terrestrial economic benefit, then you have access to sources of capital outside the top line budget constraint of government exploration budgets.

(02:07:38):
Mhmm.
That's the key to growing the amount, the the extent, not the reach, but the extent and the amount and the richness of activity in space that eventually can open the expand future.
So experience, the e the the image I always use for this one is, like, if you've got, you know, Lewis and Clark are exploring, and if you've got, settlers, you know, with a log cabin who are expanding at the other end, what's in between?

(02:08:12):
Okay.
So, I always use a cruise ship for the experience future because it's like fake exploring.
So you will not catch me, exploring some dry valley in Antarctica or some, you know, busted up glacier in Alaska, but you would catch me on a cruise ship in the bay watching the glacier calving.

(02:08:38):
Right?
So I can I can almost You can get close
to it, but you're not you're not Slow?
You're not living that style.
Yes.
What's key is, look at just the cruise ship industry as one example.
You take thousands of people routinely into very hostile environments in environments that are comfortable.

(02:09:06):
I mean, local environment, designed, architected environments that are comfortable and they're safe.
You can know nothing about operating a ship and go on a cruise ship.
You do your muster drill, you know, on the 1st day, and you learn how to put on a life jacket, and that's kind of about it.
Have you done a bunch of cruises?
It sounds like you've done a bunch of cruises.

(02:09:28):
I've done I've done a few.
Yeah.
Okay.
It's, so I call it fake exploring.
But the key is that when I went on my cruises, I wasn't subsidized by NASA.
Mhmm.
Right?
I paid for it out of my own bank account, and that whole industry, a multibillion dollar industry, is based on people wanting to go.

(02:09:51):
The exploit future means extracting something of value for Earth, because that's where the economy is, from space.
Okay?
What is there to extract?
Like, what does that even mean?
What kind of resources are there in space?
I think that they fit into 3 categories.

(02:10:13):
The first is special locations, and we've done that ever since we started putting weather satellites in geostationary orbit or telecommunication satellites or started using the sun synchronous orbits, at lower altitudes, there are special places in space that allow you to do special things, and some of those special things have commercial value on earth.

(02:10:40):
So as an example, just like we already monetize geo for telecommunications, we could industrialize and monetize GEO for clean solar power, solar energy for Earth.
Mhmm.
This is the space based solar power, vision.

(02:11:05):
Yeah.
Which ties back to the green myth.
Right?
This is, enabling a nondisruptive transition to a post petroleum economy on earth, an energy abundant future, etcetera, etcetera.
Okay.
Could be done.
It's ironic in some ways that people who don't know anything about space are like, oh, that's preposterous.

(02:11:31):
You know, that's outrageous.
You could never build that much stuff in space.
To space people, it's kind of uninteresting because it's boring.
It's like we all we understand all the technology.
It's not exploring.
Right?
So it's not sexy the same way, but it's a different future.

(02:11:52):
It's a way of extracting value from, a unique location.
That one also touches the second category of resource, which is energy.
Right?
My favorite space resource to export to Earth is photons because they don't weigh anything.
You can transmit them with microwaves and collect them on earth, put them in the grid, and attain, sustainable clean energy independence.

(02:12:21):
And I'm not particularly interested in in just backfilling for petroleum because petroleum is eventually gonna run out, and there's gonna be a lot of conflict as the supply gets more and more scarce.
What I'm interested in is in a future of abundance, where transportation is electrified.

(02:12:44):
And so you need energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen if you're gonna use hydrogen or to, charge batteries if you're gonna use battery powered EVs, and so forth.
I would like to see desalination of seawater for clean, potable water for, the world's population, which we do not have today.

(02:13:12):
It's energy intensive, so it takes a while.
The, a lot of the, challenge we have with, plastics, everywhere in the environment and increasingly so, is it requires energy to get out of because once you most plastics are not recyclable, because once they're made, they're made.

(02:13:42):
And the only way you can unmake them and start over is to really split them apart into their elemental compositions or very, very soft.
Correct.
And that's energy intensive.
So Yeah.
For for all these reasons oh, and by the way, you know, the developing world would sure love to have, let's say, a European standard of living, which consumes half as much energy per capita as an American standard of living, but, you know, European standard of living is not bad.

(02:14:12):
So if we level the world at that and we have an increasing population and we desalinate, ocean water for drinking water and we, have electrified mobile power and industry, and of these other things, we need a lot more energy than we're making today.
Okay?
So space gives us a way to do that.

(02:14:33):
You I'm sure you've had people on the show.
You've probably had Mankins and others who've talked about it.
So, but doing this is Wait.
You you gave
you gave 2.
You gave special locations, and then you have energy, energy selling.
Was there a 3rd?
The third one is material resources.
And on this, I will just be curmudgeonly, and I will say I have yet to see even a hint of a business model that makes sense.

(02:15:01):
Yeah.
I know.
Or for anything material Neither have I, by the way.
Right?
So, just to be clear for for anybody who cares, there there's there's people who talk about, oh, well, you know, on the on the Oceanus prochlorum, there's, deposits of, rare earth elements.
Okay?

(02:15:22):
It is true.
There are places on the moon with slightly enriched compositions of rare earth elements.
They're not called rare earth because they're rare on earth.
They're called rare earth because that's a very old chemical terminology.
They're in all these high-tech products.
People know that, you know, video screens and magnets and

(02:15:44):
They're very expensive and extremely valuable.
But here's the thing.
Most of if you actually look into this, most of the cost, both the environmental cost, the environmental cost, the energy cost, and the cost cost, the dollars, in the use of rare earth elements is in the, essentially, the purification step, which is getting them separated from each other, not even from where you the or you find them in, but from each other because they're chemically very similar.

(02:16:23):
And, it takes a lot of steps and a lot of poisons, basically, and a lot of energy to get them all separated out into what you need.
But it also takes the
just the extraction of it.
I ran a rock quarry, and we dropped 22,000 ton of stone a day.
And it's just the extraction is a very intensive process also.

(02:16:45):
It is.
It is.
Goes in.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm I'm not I'm not diminishing at all the cost of extraction, but the refinement is way more expensive.
Yeah.
It's very expensive.
Well and in China,
a lot
of these steps.
Yeah.
If if you wanna get rare earths from the moon because you don't wanna get them from China, which people run around saying, you've got to take all of this very complicated processing and do it on the moon.

(02:17:15):
Right.
And do it on the moon, which is just Which is
super hard, never been done.
You gotta get all that stuff to the moon, and then, oh, by the way, there is the transportation cost to get the final product back from the moon.
Okay.
It's a lot easier to get it from China, and it will be for a long, long, long time.
What I love is the equipment that they plan on having on the moon where you see the human figure is this infinitesimally small figure.

(02:17:42):
And they've got machines that are 40 times or 60 times bigger than you would have on Earth just digging up the moon.
It's like We're we're we're gonna we're gonna come to exactly that later in this conversation.
Okay.
But but now I just I mean, the I I personally believe that the best use of material resources in space is for the space economy, not for the terrestrial economy, which makes it not the same type of growth engine that I'm talking about for space programs that are based on earth.

(02:18:17):
Right?
So you see Yeah.
The distinction there.
But energy resources and location resources are things that can be exploited.
And so the again, the 4 futures model says if you can reach into investors' or personal, participants' pocketbooks, you have a source of capital other than just top line budget.

(02:18:40):
If you look at the NASA top line budget, we it's $25,000,000,000 a year.
We know what that buys, both the good and the bad, you know, the efficiency or the or the innovation and the inefficiency, I would say.
We we know what it buys.
There is zero probability that that amount, that top line budget is going to quadruple or go up by a factor of 10, it's not gonna happen.

(02:19:08):
So so we what we ought to do, this gets to the to, the next bullet on the list, what should be the role of NASA and other agencies.
Okay.
That means those those agencies, all of them, including NASA, led by NASA, are spending our taxpayer dollars.
So the question is, what should they be doing, and could we be doing better than we're doing today?

(02:19:33):
So one thing they need to do is scientific exploration.
No argument for me on that, and I would say, again, there is a part of the agency called the Science Mission Directorate that is the world's best at scientific exploration of space.
They do amazing work.
I was privileged to be at JPL for 14 years participating in that and and helping it.

(02:20:00):
Amazing, amazing work.
Most of the scientifically important places to explore are places that humans will never go.
The best prospect, for example, for finding extant life in the solar system is inside the ocean of Enceladus, which is a tiny moon around Saturn.

(02:20:22):
Okay.
People are never gonna go there, never being in quotation marks, but,
you know, so far I understand.
I understand.
I I gotcha.
In some universe that's not the one that we Right.
The one that we know today.
Yes.
I understand.
And and and so the And it's called the encellus.
What I n s Encellus.

(02:20:44):
Encellus.
That's that's a whole other conversation we can No.
That's okay.
I was just right.
I if you saw my spelling of it, you'd probably say, what is that?
Yeah.
P n c e l a d u s.
N c.
Okay.
Then I got it pretty close.
So, and and it's the same as the case for multiple other scientifically very, fundamental, things to learn.

(02:21:09):
Like, we're never gonna send people to the surface of Venus, and yet Venus is a planet that's sort of the most like Earth, and if it's a planet that's like Earth but it's so unlike Earth, it'd be really useful to learn why.
Mhmm.
Yep.
So, I could go on and on about that.
We've we've had conversations not not on the program.

(02:21:32):
We've had conversations about Venus, but not on the program, and there's a lot of positives, but it's still I don't see it, like, as you said, in in the lifetime that we're looking at.
Well, certainly not for humans.
I mean, we can't That's what I meant.
For for humans.
That's what I'm I'm saying.
It's 49 hours.
So it's just it's patently ridiculous to to imagine sending people there.

(02:21:54):
Well, no.
I there are people out there who think it can be done.
So I'm I
I is not patently ridiculous.
Right.
But, you know, the thing is in order to learn, sometimes you have to have the conversation.
And I've heard I've had a few of these conversations to understand what people are coming from where they're coming from so that we could do a better job of what we're doing.
So yes.
Okay.

(02:22:15):
The one that is arguable and feisty, and you'll get a lot of pushback, from me saying this, is, I don't believe that humans are essential or even practical for the most important things we need to learn at bars.

(02:22:37):
So when pressed, the people who wanna do humans to Mars will say the advocates will say, the only way we can really find out if there was ever life on Mars is to send people.
Even even the most experienced explorers on Mars, my good friend, Steve Squires, who was the PI for Spirit and Opportunity, has observed, you know, what we did in a couple of years with Opportunity, we could have done in a couple of weeks if we had had people there.

(02:23:12):
Probably true, but, of course, you didn't have people there and you did have a rover.
So, we were able to do what we were able to do, and we wouldn't have been able to do it at all if we had waited for humans to do it.
I believe that in a future in which every rock the size of a desk is already mapped on Mars, there's very we we have to rethink what it means to even explore.

(02:23:37):
Mhmm.
And the best places to look for potentially extant life are, places that are really hard to get to, like you gotta drill deep, on Mars, which we've not even yet learned how to do.

(02:23:59):
And, oh, by the way, there's this thing called planetary protection.
The dirtiest potential system you could land on Mars is a human, in a spacesuit, in a habitat, whatever.
And so even if you imagine a future in which people are somehow essential for discovering the truth about potential extent or historical life on Mars, they you would not let them near the places that you're actually sampling because of planetary protection.

(02:24:40):
So you're still relegated to a machine mediated exploration scenario anyway.
So we could go on and on about that and
No.
No.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep.
People who this is fundamental to the rationale for well, I would argue it is fundamental to the rationale for humans to Mars, but this is why the rationale for humans to Mars is bankrupt.

(02:25:03):
And the reason, if you were asking why am I letting you continue with this list, is I I wanna hear the the the missing piece that have not heard of before So that there's a it's a full multidimensional, answer to a very complex question.
Because, again, if you're very knowledgeable about this, somebody else like myself who hasn't spent, didn't spend their life paying attention to it, these little pieces or these little nuggets help to be able to explain, certain conditions.

(02:25:38):
So this is perfect.
Great.
So the, so the the the, again, the role of government agencies.
So scientific exploration.
Yes.
Okay.
Technology development and demonstration.
What do I mean by that?
Things that are so hard or expensive or both that they're impractical for enterprises that are not funded with public money to do.

(02:26:10):
Now in space, there's no end to the technical challenges.
So you have to be smart about it.
What's interesting about the 4 futures is that one of the things that's interesting about them is that they lead to, you know, very different visions of the future, but they also require different types of systems, which in turn require different technologies and different breakthroughs.

(02:26:39):
They're not interchangeable.
A very simple example is if you wanted to do the experience future, you need transportation systems for fairly large numbers of people that have what we call 5 nines reliability or at least 4 nines reliability.

(02:27:06):
So point 9999, probability of success.
We don't have that today.
The shuttle was, a little bit less than 2 nines.
It's hard.
And the only way you can really prove to yourself that you got there because you can do it analytically, but spaceflight has a habit of upending models, the the only way you can really know is to fly a lot.

(02:27:35):
Okay.
So but that type of launch vehicle that would be very highly reliable, is different from the kind of heavy lift vehicle you would want if you were gonna industrialize geo for space based solar power.
Because there, you're launching, you know, zillions of tons of stuff.

(02:27:57):
It's all just stuff.
And so if you lose a rocket every now and then, yeah, it undercuts your business case.
But it you can you can tuck a lot of inefficiency at that system level into that overall architecture.
So you would want a different rocket.
Yes.
Absolutely.
They're they're designed for different use cases.

(02:28:20):
Really simple example.
A a little bit more, sophisticated example maybe is life support technology.
So, we have what's called physico chemical life support technology.
That's what operates on space station, to keep a half a dozen people alive, and healthy continuously.

(02:28:47):
It requires a huge amount of maintenance, you know, spare parts, all that stuff.
So could you imagine a version of that system that could take your half a dozen people to Mars and back?
Yeah.
Probably.
You could.
But if you're gonna have 60 people in an orbital hotel, you probably don't want 10 times the amount of racks devoted to tubes and pumps and filters and reactant beds and you know, that we have on space station.

(02:29:24):
So, larger numbers of people, let alone longer durations, let's say, for settling the moon, tend to argue for biologically based life support systems or hybrid systems like the Europeans are developing with the Melissa program, not strictly physical chemical.

(02:29:45):
So the the point is that if depending on which future you're aiming at, it tells you which kinds of technologies you better be developing.
And, again, the just to ground us, the only ones that public money is being spent on developing today are the ones to get 6 people to Mars someday.

(02:30:09):
So if you wanted to, if you thought it was important to build the bridge to the expand future and you wanted to develop the experience future, you could imagine a technology investment agenda that developed big windows or birthing mechanisms that could be reused 100 of times or cooking.

(02:30:38):
Nobody knows how to cook in microgravity.
Nobody's ever done it.
There's no such thing as a stove or an oven.
Right?
But you can't have a resort hotel if you can't make an omelette and mix a martini.
So there's these are, nobody knows how to make a, pressure vessel bigger than a rocket.

(02:31:01):
Okay.
Well, then you would say, as Dan Golden did when he was administrator of NASA, pounded on the podium at a Space Frontier Foundation conference, and said, space tourism is not my job.
And I'm like, why not?
Because if you look at the history of NASA, its own predecessor, the NACA, the National Aeronautics Consultative no.

(02:31:33):
Shoot.
I can never remember that.
I'm I'm looking it up because I'm as drawing a blind.
Yeah.
NACA.
Yeah.
The National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics.
Advisory Committee on Aeronautics.
That's it.
Thank you.
Sorry about that.
NAC No.
No.
That's okay.
8.
The the NACA was created in the closing years of World War 1, recognizing what was what had started to be learned in World War 1, the air power was gonna be fundamental to national security.

(02:32:05):
And so the NACA was formed and it funded the development of airfoil technology and airplane engine technology that is at the heart of the entire jet age.
Yeah.
It would it would be, some of its members, but it by the way, Overwrite was a member.

(02:32:30):
So the the the the commercial industries, plural, that we have that are a result of jet travel today exist because the NACA used government money to fund fundamental technology development.
So NASA's own predecessors' DNA was about doing this if the nation chose to invest directly in the growth futures, experience and exploit, then agencies, including NASA, could be turned to develop those essential technologies, beaming lots of microwave energy through the atmosphere, subjecting

(02:33:22):
So let me let me ask
let me ask systems in GEO.
So it it sounds it sounds great.
Do you think I mean, you're giving a hypothetical here.
Do you think the the supertanker can make the turn?

(02:33:43):
In some talks that I've given, I've, said, in my view, the NASA we need is not the NASA we have.
And Mhmm.
There are a variety of ways of solving that.
Okay.
You
know, one one path is that NASA could remain the world premier scientific exploration agency, but we're missing other stuff, right, which could be new agencies or charters for other agencies like Department of Commerce or, I don't know, or NASA.

(02:34:20):
You know?
It could be, the interestingly, the the National Aeronautics and Space Act that chartered the agency does not preclude any of these things that I'm talking about.
It's all a matter of habit and expectation in what is, appropriated,

(02:34:43):
authorized,
but mostly what's appropriated.
We had an individual recently, I would say in my eyes, very well connected.
He has gone through a little bit of the journey you've gone on, but further.
And at one point, we were talking about something, and his brain just triggered.
And he said, this is department of agriculture.

(02:35:05):
This is department of defense.
This is department of this.
This department of this.
I need to call my people this, this.
And he listed quicker than I could type about 10 different places he felt the application works.
So here becomes, kind of a change up to yours.
Not a change up, but a different dimension.

(02:35:27):
What if it is not adding on?
But what if it is implementing within existing structures, different formulaics, different structure that says space is not an industry.
It's a geography.
The geography benefits your application.
So don't make another agency fit in because it's time to have this as an, a positioning.

(02:35:53):
So a bad example, but an example.
I've worked in the in the farming industry.
I mean, you could go to a a large farming structure that has kilometers or miles of farming.
They they go through the whole night because a class 9 harvester is run by GPS, and the person inside is is is watching videos and talking.

(02:36:16):
And even the output is run by a GPS system.
So that's agriculture.
And why not instead of ex why expand the pie?
If the pie is already there, all we're adding is a little bit of spice.
Well, yes.
But Okay.
I'm so I'm here.

(02:36:37):
To do that would require, an integrating, vision under the leadership of the both, an administration that directs the agencies and a congress which funds them.
So, right, the way appropriations
work So let's let's go global.

(02:36:58):
Let's go global.
Let's say it's not just NASA, but there's other, there are many different levers to be able to move government.
Sometimes it's another another activity that's going on.
Sometimes it's an educational shift.
Look at what's happening with the AI side.
Whether it's a it's going to bust boom and bust, that's not the point.
What if it is other levers that can create that evolution

(02:37:23):
on a global scale?
So there's 2 things there.
Okay.
One is, domestic versus global.
The other is, charter versus focus.
So on domestic versus global, I mean, I I'm I I know our system best, so that's what I'm that's what I'm

(02:37:44):
I understand.
I'm just tossing it out as a as a conversation.
Yep.
And because what we talked about before, the world follows NASA's lead.
Mhmm.
At least it does with respect to exploration.
Right.
But they all have systems where there's decision making and budget allocations and so forth.
And then that gets me to the other one, which is, whatever I call it, direction versus funding.

(02:38:14):
At the end of the day, there there is a government budget.
It is suballocated, and it's spent on stuff.
If the stuff isn't specified, then money doesn't get spent on it.
And so, there is no mechanism, for the department of agriculture and the department of commerce and the department of the interior and, I don't know, you know, all the agencies you could name.

(02:38:45):
There's there's
a more if you can name that.
Simultaneously say, ah, yes.
I should be focusing on microwave power transmission, or I should be focusing on four nine's reliable launch, or I should be focusing on how to, make a pressurizable, verifiable structure, off Earth.

(02:39:07):
Well, a
lot of that has to but
a lot a lot of that has
a lot of that has to do with the way in which the beyond Earth ecosystem, which is your starting point, the NASA stakeholder community, the let's change that because space 2, the industry is an industry, which it's not.
It's a geography.
The, the space stakeholder community has got such a grip on calling it space.

(02:39:34):
And I've used this analogy often.
If you make bolts or tool pieces for an auto, an automotive manufacturer, you're considered part of the supply chain.
You don't have to love cars.
You can supply pieces and you're part of it.
I can't tell you how many conversations I've had where I've said, well, what about this company that supplies this?
They're not a space company.

(02:39:56):
Yes.
But they supply an integral piece that but they supply other industries.
Why aren't they?
No.
You don't understand.
They have to be focused on space.
Like, why why does it have to be all or nothing?
And one of the challenges you look at there's only, what, 5 to 10000 space companies if we use that in the world.

(02:40:18):
There are 20,000 laundromat companies in the United States.
Yeah.
There's 230,000 IT companies in
the world.
But one of the reasons that you hear what you hear is, it's not it's not a complete reason, and it's not an altogether justifiable reason, but it is partly valid.

(02:40:40):
The stuff that we use to make space systems is not the same stuff as what we can get away with using on Earth.
You may have heard horror stories about tungsten whiskers in microchips, and, you know, the space environment is it is different.

(02:41:02):
Well, so I I I hear that.
Have you've heard the story.
I've gotta believe the Alan Mulally story.
Alan moved from Boeing, which you were at.
I believe it was Boeing.
He moved to, I think it was Ford.
Ford.
Now I'm gonna I'm making it and he's he was standing up in front of his community, and a guy stood up and said, how are you gonna manage these 5,000 moving parts to make this car work?

(02:41:25):
And he there was a little bit of a a tiff on this.
And he said, well, there are 2,000,000 moving parts in an airplane, and it has to stay in the air.
I think I can handle the car.
And so he changed the dynamics of the language of automotive to say, wait.

(02:41:46):
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
We're comparing 2 different things here.
You're you're stuck in your own ecosystem.
Break out and see that the innovations and we're seeing it today.
See, the innovations that could be put into a car could be all electronic.
They could be remote control.
They could have an IT side of it.
They can have which if you went back I mean, years old is that you're a little bit older than I am.

(02:42:10):
When I had a my father had a Fiat Spyder Convertible, and we had a we called it the yacht, which was a Oldsmobile custom cruiser.
There were no electronics in those, and the world changed.
Can the world change in the way you're right on the using the word used.

(02:42:32):
You're right on the cusp.
I hear it, but it's almost like we're not crossing over.
Well, no.
I would argue that we are.
Okay.
So, the company I know best, of course, is Blue Origin, but they're not alone in the the independent space sector, including the primes and their subs, is in fact eyeball deep in trying to change the game.

(02:43:11):
Mhmm.
So, the the thing the the my caution to so I applaud that.
Right?
And I was part of it, and, yeah, that that's all good.
However, we cannot overlook or pretend that the challenges of the the the challenges inherent in the space environment are different, and we are still learning.

(02:43:41):
I don't I I'm not that's not that's not the premise.
The premise is that ecosystems in technology conditions evolve.
And I can bet you there were people standing around saying horses, cars, complex, people could get hurt.
There were people saying planes, who's gonna go up in a plane?
Who's gonna get in one of those?

(02:44:02):
So what what is your common chances that.
Right.
So is it the same change that.
So what if and we're working on this.
What if it was just in and it's and I'm using it as an answer to your question or your comment.
What if it wasn't creating additional administration or agencies?

(02:44:25):
What if it wasn't that?
What if it was evolving existing agencies to have the the IT and the car x the all the things that we're adding in all these other industries?
What if it was just a modification where beyond Earth becomes a normalcy within them?
Like CubeSats has has done.

(02:44:49):
Well, I think there's full answer because I'm not gonna go into the whole thing, but you understand.
It's it's kind of a a little bit of a shift instead of a full evolution.
Well, I think there will be shifts in traditional organizations, and it's a Darwinian environment.
The future is like the the the deep time is a Darwinian environment.

(02:45:13):
So a legitimate question, this actually gets to the the the last of the 7 bullets, is what conversation should we be having?
And what what I when I started to talk about what's now the 4 futures model, I would never ever tell audiences what I thought.

(02:45:40):
I would just lay out you know, here's 4 paths.
There's 4 different societal myths.
Here's what their core purpose would be.
Here's what their core needs would be.
To first order, I argue that you could spend the same, running resource on them in, you know, NASA's $25,000,000,000 a year.

(02:46:02):
That's 10 to the $10 per year.
Well, about 2 thirds of the 25,000,000,000 is spent on human spaceflight, depending on how you do the accounting.
But all the direct costs of the human space flight programs, plus the carrying costs of the centers, which are predominantly organized around human space flight.

(02:46:24):
But if you do the math, it's about 2 thirds of the NASA budget is spent on human space flight every year.
So in in order of magnitude terms, it's 10 to the $10 per year.
So over a couple of decades, that's 10 to the 11th dollars.
Okay.
If if you spent 10 to the 11th dollars over a few decades, you might end up with 6 international civil servants on Mars.

(02:46:47):
Mhmm.
Or if you spent it to, open space to citizens, create new travel related industries, and, extend the overview effect to a a large population, you would probably end up with 100 to 1,000 of workers and tens of thousands to 100 of thousands of people flying every year in low earth orbit.

(02:47:18):
If you spent it on same amount of time, same amount of money on, industrializing geo to prepare for a, you know, nondisruptive transition to a post petroleum future, to create new energy related industries to become the global exporter of unlimited clean energy, okay, then you would probably only have a couple of 100 skilled workers on extended duty tours in high earth orbit.

(02:47:48):
You might have saved the planet in the meantime, but, you know, the amount of people the number of people flying in space would would be intermediate between the first two scenarios.
If you spend it on settling the moon, you know, the expand future directly to become a 2 planet species as fast as feasible, you might, within 30 years, have a few hundred mixed demographic people living off world, maybe some of them raising families.

(02:48:17):
Okay.
Four completely different futures.
And then so peep in q and a, people would always ask me, well, which one do you think is the right one?
And my answer is, it doesn't matter what I think is the right one because every one of us pays for this every April 15th.
What matters is what people think the right one is, and what especially matters is for people not simply to accept what they're being told by their space agency, which is that the only one that makes sense is the first one.

(02:48:52):
So I I I would you're you're bright you know what's going on in the ecosystem.
And when people are asking that question, I think you know I've spoken a tremendous amount around the world.
So that's not a people ask direct questions.
They're asking with your experience, with what you know.

(02:49:14):
Put put a pin in it.
And you've articulated it already.
You believe that there are certain pathways that are stronger, even the way your tone of language changes, even your sentence structure changes when you get to certain different things that you believe in or not through the entire dialogue that you've had, it it comes out.

(02:49:35):
So if you're waiting for the general populace to make that decision, they will not, and they will make probably a poor decision.
You would not go out to a bunch of people and say, you're the doctor.
Well, I've never done surgery or medicine.

(02:49:57):
No.
No.
But you're the general people, and you would know better.
What you wanna do is get somebody who understands ecosystem, and you obviously know it and you obviously have direction in it.
So I would suggest, and this is just a suggestion, put your pen in it because you you know a 100 or a 1000 or 10000 more, more in-depth knowledge of this ecosystem.

(02:50:22):
Well And so it's it's very evident.
It's evident.
You know, I voted with my feet.
That's why I went to Blue Origin.
Okay.
And
Because you built businesses in, to build the railroad to the moon, number 1, to, develop, a commercial open ended market based space station design, number 2, and, started a program for, I used to call it passenger travel for, you know, people call it tourism.

(02:51:05):
I don't like that word.
But anyway, tourism, on heavy lift vehicles.
So, you know, we we all we we So that's great.
In our toolkit to get as much progress done as we can.
But they see, when you have
the audience I stopped supporting planning for humans to Mars many, many years ago.
Okay.

(02:51:26):
And and I and I love that.
And I also love that you called yourself a lunatic now that I understand it.
And I love the last few bullet points because you're articulating with your knowledge and expertise.
You believe that this would make that movement forward.
The value of standing in front of an audience or the audience that, you know, you and I are talking today is what you're doing is you're articulating to me, again, tone, language, sentence structure, all of the even data that you've supplied, which leans in a direction.

(02:51:58):
Remember, I lived in Asia for 10 years.
I've lived in in Europe, worked in 50 countries.
So each if we did this, if I was not I'm a globalist, but I'm an American.
If I was an American, we were having this conversation and it was a Japanese station, not picking on them, just using them.
A lot of fabulous people around the world.

(02:52:21):
You this would have been a completely different conversation.
Completely.
So I love that you said this.
You voted with your feet because you believe in more of this this, and I I like this.
The tourism I'm not crazy about.
You believe in the logistics transportation side.
You talked about the, what do you call it, the the, the cruise ship.
You talked about open ended spec and design.

(02:52:43):
So, yeah, that's that's fabulous.
So you're you're putting a pin in it, and I love that.
I mean, I I love that because you are also falling in not in line.
It's a terrible word a terrible phrase.
You're what we're doing, we're not completely in sync, yet we are very much in sync in many areas.

(02:53:07):
And I love that because the reason we're doing the call so I, David, can get to know you.
What's important to you?
What do you value?
How do you look at the world?
And this is fabulous.
That's why we create videos for project Moon Hut so you can understand what we're doing.
This this is right it's, like, fantastic.
When I was younger, I was searching for a more politically correct when I when I was younger.

(02:53:39):
You look great, by the way.
So I actually
Well, thank you.
I, I I it probably seems like I'm passionate about what I talk about.
When it took me years at Boeing in early in my career to learn that when they wrote that I was passionate in my performance reviews that that was actually not meant to be a good thing.

(02:54:03):
But I, so I do I do feel strongly interesting.
We we should be getting maximum utility out of our public investment, number 1.
I do feel strongly that, genuine strategic planning is hard and does not happen on its own, number 2.

(02:54:32):
Mhmm.
Yep.
That planning in the rearview mirror is a really bad idea, number 3.
However, you know, just to be very personal about it, I, I I did as much as I could do when I was, you know, gainfully employed, full time employed in the institutions, you know, that I was, hired to help succeed.

(02:55:07):
And then I got to retirement age, and it's like, you can only do what you can do.
So that's a preface to say, I am although I am passionate about these topics and I've tried to write about them as clearly and repeatedly as I can and I speak when I have an opportunity to, I'm also somewhat philosophical about it.

(02:55:33):
So what I mean by that is I I actually don't generally tell audiences NASA should do this or the community ought to do that.
What I I'm I'm a little bit more like Spock about it.
I just observe if we keep doing what we are doing, here's what is and isn't going to happen.

(02:56:02):
So I'm I I am, perhaps unduly aware of my own personal limitations.
You know, I'm not king for a day, so all I can do is, try to be articulate and persuasive.
But the world is gonna be what the world is gonna be.

(02:56:26):
And, and I'm saying from a complete years, only a few years older than me.
I'm 60.
I I believe I've got a lot more time left, a tremendous amount more time left.
I don't wanna spend it saying, well, you guys have the options.
Let's figure it out.
The NASA in your terminology has such a strong grip.

(02:56:47):
And on the future, even though it's not doing what it should and so you're giving the advice, you voted differently with your feet.
You with the you're voted with your feet.
I'm gonna suggest that that passion that you have, it is now the time to not worry about all of those other things and be passionate about making the change.

(02:57:12):
Be passionate about that because you you you've got a a wealth of knowledge.
Maybe I'll focus this by summarizing and saying that the conversation Well, who are we, first of all?
Okay.
Yes.
We are those who pay for our national space program every April 15th.

(02:57:34):
And I believe the conversation we should be having is an earnest and pointed conversation about the value proposition of our investment in our space program.
Okay.
What I mean by that is any value proposition is you put something in, you get something back out.

(02:57:57):
And I think the question that we should be addressing collectively as a society is are we getting out as much as we could given what we're putting in?
What we're putting in is, in numerical terms, is $26,000,000,000 a year.

(02:58:19):
That's the NASA budget.
About 2 thirds of that is devoted one way or another to human spaceflight.
So there are the direct costs of the human spaceflight programs, like the International Space Station, Artemis, and so forth, and the, I call it the prorated carrying costs of the NASA centers that are primarily devoted to human space flight.

(02:58:47):
If you do the math and the NASA budget, it's more or less 2 thirds of the 26,000,000,000 per year.
Okay.
The question to me is if we could choose how we spend that 2 thirds of 26,000,000,000, I just call it 10 to the 10th

(02:59:08):
dollars per year.
If we could have an explicit conversation about what we're spending it on, we might choose a differently vectored program to maximize our value proposition.
Mhmm.
So this is directly related to the 4 futures and the societal myths that the futures are aiming at.

(02:59:35):
So in big round numbers, if you spend 10 to the $10 per year for a few decades, that's 10 to the 11th dollars in
total.
Mhmm.
And if you spent it on the hero myth, which is the explore future, you might after a quarter century, a few decades, have 6 civil servants standing on Mars, of whom 2 would be Americans because everything is done internationally now.

(03:00:06):
And the explicit question for Americans is 2 US civil servants standing on Mars a quarter century from now worth the 10 to the 11th dollars that we're putting in.
And the answer may be yes.
There are alternative futures though, as we discussed earlier.

(03:00:30):
And they offer different value propositions.
So to first order, if you spent that same amount of money in that same amount of time, instead on the green myth, which is a version of the exploit future, and you devoted your energies and programs to scaling up the collection and transmission of infinite solar power in space to the surface of the Earth to enable a non disruptive transition to a post petroleum economy on Earth, that would be a different value proposition.

(03:01:09):
That's the future you would get for the same amount of money and time and effort that we're currently spending on the explorer future.
Or you could spend that same amount of money and time on the experience future and develop the technologies and systems that would break open flying large numbers of people in space routinely, passengers or tourists.

(03:01:38):
So for example, a quarter century from now you could have 100 of 1000 of ordinary people flying into earth orbit every year.
And so the question you get to ask, which I believe we should ask, we're obligated to ask, the conversation we should be having is which future gives us the value proposition that maximizes our societal utility.

(03:02:12):
And I personally believe that the impact on society of a half a dozen civil servants on Mars a quarter century from now will not be the same as it was with 2 civil servants on the moon in 1969.
I agree.
That that was brand new.
It was transformational.
It was shocking to most of the world.

(03:02:35):
A lot of people did not believe it could be done.
And the societal support for the Apollo program was lukewarm at best at the time.
Half of Americans thought it was not a good investment.
But it did, in a lot of ways, change the world.
It gave us iconic images and an understanding of a reality separate from earth.

(03:02:59):
Okay.
That that was clearly transformational for 1969 civilization.
When I was 11 years old, I was, at an impressionable age when that happened.
And so I felt it just like everybody else did.
But a quarter century from now, will Mars be able to do the same thing that the moon did in 1969?

(03:03:20):
I argue not.
And all the other arguments for investing in a direction that is aimed squarely at getting humans to Mars are weak arguments.
Scientific exploration, we do much more, much faster in many more places with robotic systems today than we could in the past and certainly than we would with one human mission in 2,045 or 2,050.

(03:03:56):
I think in a world in which we do not have a clear path, for a non disruptive transition to a post petroleum economy.
We really need to ask ourselves if space could help with making that transition non disruptive, why in the world wouldn't we engage that future?

(03:04:21):
Why wouldn't we vector our space program toward that objective?
And we we may have spoken a little bit before about the ironic situation that space based solar power finds itself in.
To people who don't understand how it would be done, it seems like magic or preposterous because it's it would be so large scale and so forth.

(03:04:49):
To a lot of people in the space business, it's boring.
Yeah.
It is.
It's very boring.
Precisely because, you know, it doesn't require a lot of invention.
It's industrialization.
You know, it's scaled up production.
It's a lot of launch.
It's a lot of assembly.
It's big infrastructure, as is the National Highway System, and, you know, as are many other kinds of infrastructure.
I think there's there's one organization.

(03:05:12):
I'm trying to think of the name that's looking, like, $500, $1,000,000,000 they wanna put ready they want to put solar panels out in space.
There's it's supposed to also be a protective shield from the solar flares, the challenges that could come off of the sun.
Have you heard about that one?
Well, that I don't I don't know of a shield technology for that.

(03:05:35):
Yeah.
I don't know.
I I saw it recently.
Someone sent it to me, and they want to put up these panels, a thousands of them.
So it becomes a an array.
The the architecture I'm aware of is, for something like that, it's it's not about shielding from solar storms.
What you would do is, put some shading, which would be done with thousands of very simple systems or by launching dust from the surface of the moon to the sun Earth L1 point, which is the Lagrange's vibration point that's between the sun and the earth.

(03:06:17):
If you put a little bit of shading there, you wouldn't notice it if you were on earth, but the earth would notice it.
And in particular, the polar regions would notice it.
And it is the fastest, most direct and reversible way that I know of to directly slow down or reverse global warming.

(03:06:45):
So that is a, yet a different example of how infrastructure in space could be used to, we can say, save the Earth.
Mhmm.
My argument about value proposition is where is it written that the most important thing to spend our NASA budget on is putting boots on Mars or boots on the moon to practice going to Mars.

(03:07:12):
Mhmm.
I agree with that.
I think that is a it's a it's a meme which has, overtaken and now dominates without question, without revisiting the assumptions.
It has overtaken and dominates all of the conversations about what the agency is there for, what its industrial base and stakeholder community in Washington, DC thinks it's there for, what people expect of it, and what it's been trying to do ever since the end of the Apollo program.

(03:07:46):
Why do you think that's the case?
It's for some of the reasons we talked about earlier in the conversation, there is there is the misinterpretation of the agency's own history, which is to say the Apollo program was not ever meant to be a boots on planets program.

(03:08:12):
It was not meant to be a scientific exploration program.
It was meant to be a geopolitical statement that embarrassed the Soviets on the world stage of public opinion.
And in that it succeeded and in the process set an expectation within the NASA stakeholder community that that is what we do, that's what we're here for.

(03:08:36):
I would offer a a counterpoint, which is also in NASA's own history.
And that is, if we so I focus a little bit on the exploit future and the green myth and providing clean energy for Earth.
But let's focus on the experience future, and which people sort of casually call space tourism.

(03:09:06):
That's that's a bit of a misnomer.
But anyway, I'm increasing numbers of ordinary people in space for their own purposes, including, and largely including leisure.
Okay, so that's what people call space tourism.
I remember very clearly a meeting of it was either the Space Frontier Foundation or probably the National Space Society in Los Angeles.

(03:09:35):
Dan Golden was the NASA administrator, pounded on the podium and said, space tourism is not my job.
And I don't know why not.
And here's why I think it might ought to be, as we used to say in Alabama.
Are you from Alabama?
I lived there for eight and a half years when I started my career.

(03:09:57):
Okay.
There the 1st, let's look at the value proposition.
In a in a reality in which the overview effect affects every single astronaut who flies, whether they fly for a few minutes or a year or multiple times or in earth orbit or to the moon.

(03:10:22):
Every single astronaut who's flown has experienced the overview effect, which changes their fundamental perception about the fragility of the biosphere, the triviality of political differences and borders and all that.
Okay.

(03:10:43):
There's a whole theory about it then.
And we we've had on, Frank White.
We've had on Frank.
I have a a little bit different perspective on it because our world hasn't improved because of the 680 people who've been up in the way and way.
And here, you just you just you're a good straight man.
The reason is because that's only 600 people.
Right.
680.
Correct.
Imagine if a 100000 people a year experienced that.

(03:11:10):
And most of them would be, let's just say, well heeled in one way or another that'd be able to afford it.
They would be decision makers, either, you know, financial or industrial or political leaders.
And so we could do a lot worse for today's world state than having or the state of the world today than having 100 of thousands of leaders of various types experiencing the overview effect.

(03:11:43):
In addition, if and if a set of industries were to develop around the visitors, space visitors rather than professional crews, that would mean that we would have robust, competitive, resilient systems for transportation, for mobility, for habitation because they'd be servicing that commercial industry.

(03:12:12):
That would then be a very different infrastructure platform upon which an agency like NASA could build its exploration architectures, to go do what they think they wanna do, which is to take humans further out in
the system.
So that would be fundamentally the reason you would do it.
So I have one,

(03:12:34):
Hang on.
Let me let me get the NACA analogy because this is important.
When Dan Goldin said space tourism is not his job, what he meant was we're here to do exploration.
We're not here to promote passenger travel or to enable it.
But there are things that need to be done if you're going to have that many ordinary people flying every year in space.

(03:12:55):
You've gotta have much safer launch and landing systems.
You've gotta have amenities in space.
We talked about some of that before.
Very different types of systems.
Okay.
That requires investment.
And here's the weird thing.
NASA's own predecessor, the NACA, did exactly that.

(03:13:16):
Its job was to develop to invest in and develop airfoil technologies and airplane propulsion plant or engine technologies.
Those two things done by the NACA in all the years from 1917 up through the formation of NASA in 1958, underpin all of the industries associated with jet travel that we have today.

(03:13:45):
Civilian, military, and so forth.
And not just airplanes, but all the associated industries, airports, all the things that support them, the whole travel industry that flies a 1000000000 people per year, all depends on the technologies that NASA's own predecessor invested in.

(03:14:06):
So why is it not a good thing to have our NASA that we pay for invest in the technologies that would open the door to a future that would give us more humans traveling in space, more routinely, more ordinary humans traveling, and open up future industries.

(03:14:28):
That's exactly what their own predecessor did.
So I do not accept the argument that says it's not their job.
I think it's precisely their job.
And I think as a an agency, that spends our money every year, it is incumbent on them to constantly reassess their purpose and make sure that what they're investing in is in the best long term interest of society.

(03:14:57):
So that's the conversation we should be having.
Okay.
I I don't, my question I don't disagree with what you're saying, so that's not my where I'm what I'm going to ask.
It's, you've met this amount of astronauts, so have I.
I have not had this feeling that they were so profoundly different in their perspective on the world.

(03:15:24):
I have found them to be similar to the people that I meet in other places with just a few different experiences that they're not out there changing the world in a way I think the overview effect has been promoted to achieve.
So that's one point.
The second point is a simple one.
We do go up in planes.
We do look down.
Do you believe or how high would you have to go?

(03:15:48):
What would you what would that experience have to be like to act to have that profound effect instead of it just being a, hey.
I just took some pictures.
I went there.
This was amazing.
That's great.
And coming back to do what humans do typically when they go to another country and learn something, they tend to come back and do their own thing.
What do you think would be necessary to make it more positive, which is not a great word or set of words?

(03:16:15):
Yeah.
No.
I I know what you're asking.
So, I've flown to planes.
I've never flown in space.
So I'm speculating based on
I'll take a speculation, but you know what I mean.
And, and experiences as related to me.
So Frank in his theory delves into this.

(03:16:37):
And he he, finds through interviewing many astronauts that the experience is stronger the farther from Earth you go.
For Apollo astronauts who could stand on the surface of the moon and hold up their thumb and then completely block out the Earth Mhmm.
In the sky, very powerful.

(03:17:00):
And it doesn't it's not like it makes people spiritual.
If you're spiritual, it makes you feel spirituality more deeply.
I understand.
If you're not, then, you know, whatever you feel, it makes you, more keenly aware of it in in his theory.
I so to answer your question, my opinion Yep.
Is that, flying in orbit will do it in when you're in orbit, low earth orbit, the earth fills more than 70% of the sky, of the view, it moves and and we which we can now see on our

(03:17:48):
Yeah.
Apple TV screensaver.
Yes.
You know, it it it moves.
Although you can't trust the rate that you see it on Apple TV because all if you notice all the drones for all the scenes on the screensavers move at the same time.
It's kind of incredible.
Rate Yeah.
As yeah.
They do that all.
I I I if you've been to our website and you've seen the the graphic where the International Space Station, the Tiangong are traveling, I asked our team, and they said, no.

(03:18:14):
That's flying at the exact speed that it's traveling around the Earth at the location, which I thought was fascinating.
But, yes, I do understand.
I I I actually think the screensavers have adopted the rate of change of the image that we see when we're in LEO.
Okay.
But in any case, the view changes all the time.
Yep.
18 sunrises and sunsets every day.

(03:18:36):
The the clouds and the lightning and so forth, and and the fact that your orbit is processing means that you when you look out the window, you never actually see the same thing twice.
Yep.
So, I, the best I can tell you is I subscribe to Frank's theory, which is not just about the view.

(03:18:59):
Remember
No.
We've had Frank on.
So, yes, I I
Yeah.
It's it's the experience it's the risk based experience of flying up and flying down, which is, you know, more exciting than any roller coaster ride.
And the unique experience, the visceral experience of being in free fall when you're in orbit, coupled with the view, the overview, with without borders and so forth and being able to directly see wildfires and, river runoff and, you know, all those kinds of things.

(03:19:34):
So I I just I I believe that one of the benefits, part of the value proposition of the experience future is that.
It's not the only one.
No.
It's it's interesting thing.
I I've not heard it in that way.
I'm not as positive, for with human nature to be as progressive as you're promoting.

(03:19:56):
Like, I I tried to put out there is that I know people who've traveled around the world, and they come back.
And it's like, didn't you just learn something in that country?
Didn't you see they had a completely different perspective on the world and the way things are done?
And why are you going back to who you were?
And I you have a very optimistic perspective on human nature changing as more quickly than I.

(03:20:23):
Well, but I I'm not sure it's optimistic.
It's I mean, all all of this is anecdotal Yep.
Because it's based on talking to people.
My own experience is that every time I travel to another culture, another part of Earth, I it changes me.
And so I don't think I'm that You are.

(03:20:47):
I'd I'd love to say that you're not, but you are because, I mean, I I've I've you've I don't know if you lived in other countries.
I don't know if we went over that last time.
Yeah.
It's I would hope that sounds like I I like what you're saying.
I've not heard it in the way you've expressed it, so that's something for me to get my mind around.
And Yeah.
Well And you and you put it as a portion.

(03:21:08):
You've said this is a piece
of Exactly.
That's what it's And
that's what I like.
You know, it's completely reasonable for you could just discount overview effect at all and then say, ah,
but what about What about?
Yeah.
You
know, once once all the rockets are commercial, once all the stations and the the dormitories and so over the commercial, once all the power infrastructure in space is commercial, once all of that is commercial now, then NASA can go do what it wants to do.

(03:21:36):
And it'll be able to do it better and less, expensively than it does it today.
The the SLS being a, you know, the the poster child example of NASA wants to go do a thing, and so they invest in the development of a unique flight system Yeah.
With all of its unique ground infrastructure that can only be used by them and that can barely be used by them because it's so freaking expensive to use.

(03:22:07):
Yeah.
And I just saw an article which we shared within our team, and it said, NASA's old supercomputers are causing mission delays.
1 has 18,000 CPUs, but only 42 GPUs, highlighting dire need for a complete update.
And so, yes, there those are significant challenges.
And I do agree with you.

(03:22:29):
Once you have a commercialization, you have you have standards put in place that might be good or bad, but it would enable a different type of perspective.
And once a full infrastructure is in place, as you're saying, takeoff, landing, in lower orbit capabilities, you NASA would have a jumping point to other future endeavors.
So, maybe we can Yep.

(03:22:52):
Sort of bring bring this part into a close.
I think just the point is, as Americans, we own the space program, but we are not collectively having the conversation about how it could be best used.
And, before I I don't wanna close completely.
How would you get that conversation going?

(03:23:15):
I mean, we're on the podcast, so this will help.
But how would you get that conversation going?
Because I'm assuming you've had conversations with individuals at NASA, so have I.
And these are not conversations that they're willing to even ascertain.
They are not.
The the best answer I can give you is that I spent 35 years working in the belly of the beast.

(03:23:44):
And while I was at Boeing, while I was working for NASA at JPL and even at Blue Origin, my ability to, move to color outside the lines was constrained in various ways.

(03:24:08):
Mhmm.
I've been retired for less than a half a year.
So give me a chance to think about it.
It it's it's a a very, very challenging conversation, and it it was one of our guests on.
I won't name the name.
He oh, we we know him.

(03:24:30):
I asked him how many people in his organization could have conversations like this, and there are there are so many.
And he said, not even a handful.
This is just not the way he described it is old dinosaurs having old conversations are not willing to change.
And when you look at the average age of Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus, the their forties and their fifties, the majority of those people, are looking for retirement, looking for savings, looking for safety nets.

(03:25:03):
And, I'm going to I only know the number for SpaceX, and it's, like, 27 point 8 or 27.6.
It's in that range.
And they are willing to have a different conversation possibly because they're not entrenched in yesterday.
It could be.
I mean, it's so I wanna be clear.
This is not an insidious thing.

(03:25:24):
It's not even a conscious thing.
It it's, and I don't think it's unique to space.
It's not.
I think it is a, one of the many ways in which human thinking and action succumbs to, rational fallacies is by neglecting to constantly go back and revisit fundamental assumptions.

(03:25:52):
That's what we should always be doing, and that's the basis of, classical liberal thinking is what are the assumptions?
Are you sure that the assumptions are valid?
What are the axioms that you're not reexamining and should you?
And if if we just say, nope.
We're good.
We know what we're doing.
We're gonna go do it for the next half century or the next century, and you don't go back and rethink that or revisit and reexamine it repeatedly, well, then that's that's, that's succumbing to a rational fallacy.

(03:26:28):
Okay.
I I I agree with you.
Yeah.
And that's kind of what we're working on is trying to make those changes too.
So what's the next we've got, what conversations are we having next was a future history of human space flight.
Is that the where we're taking the jump?
Yeah.
And so, the where kinda where this goes is, what I see as inevitable trends and patterns coming in the future.

(03:26:57):
And the maybe the preparatory caveat is, the calendar for this is TBD.
So it the these shifts, these trends, may happen within just decades if things kind of explode into a so called robust ecosystem and space, which a lot of people would like to have happen, or it may take centuries depending on how fast things, develop.

(03:27:34):
But I think some of these trends are, happening whether we want them to or not.
And so it's like when the tide comes in, well, you know, you can fight the tide or you can ride the tide.
And so these are things I think are important to be aware of if what your field is or your interest, your vocation or your avocation is human space flight.

(03:27:59):
And I've divided them into 3.
So we can have, you know, sort of 3 conversations here.
The first is what I call a demographic shift from what we have today, which are primarily explorers and workers of an ilk to, a next chapter, which is a much more diverse type of worker and visitors, and then finally to settlers.

(03:28:31):
And
so Wait.
Is this wait.
Because I'm I'm writing, and you have demographic shift, and that's that's number 1.
Number 1 is
No.
I think, oh, do you want the outline?
No.
No.
I'm just making sure.
That's all under democratic shift.
You have, explorers, workers, next chapter, diverse workers, visitors, and settlers.
Settlers.

(03:28:52):
Yes.
Okay.
So that's just one.
So I just wanna make sure I wasn't supposed to break them up.
Okay.
No.
No.
No.
No.
And so the this is important for a couple of reasons.
One is I'll start with, I think, what everybody will experience, and then I'll shift to what space architects care about.

(03:29:13):
Right now well, so back in Gemini, Apollo, and so forth, it really was just explorers.
And you could even argue that in the very early days of the ISS, Mir and the ISS, they were still explorers.
What we were doing was exploring the space environment.

(03:29:34):
That shifted, first on mirror and and then especially on the ISS to mostly being about workers.
What what are they?
They're they're researchers, a couple of flight crew, but, primarily it's what the shuttle program used to call mission specialists.
They're people who are trained to conduct scientific research.

(03:29:55):
And you could argue is that still exploration or are they space workers?
I would argue they're space workers.
And I just find that wonderful because now we've it has enabled us to enter a new era of what spaceflight is used for, how people are trained, the nature of the risks that they undertake, and so forth.

(03:30:24):
The next step of that will come with the emergence of the experienced future one way or another with the, an increased number of, what I like to call passengers or sometimes we just call them visitors.
There are people who, if they're workers, they are paid to go.

(03:30:46):
If they're tourists, they pay to go.
Like getting on a plane.
Well, or think about it in terms of destinations.
So I may go to, oh, pick a city.
I may go to Washington DC.
Yeah.
Right?
I live in California, but I may travel to Washington DC.

(03:31:07):
Why am I going?
Well, I could go there because I wanna take a vacation and go see, the national museums and monuments and so forth.
Most of the time when
I go, I go because I'm working.
Mhmm.
I go there for a reason.
And so I am a visitor to Washington DC who is paid to go because I have worked there.

(03:31:35):
That's what I meant by just like getting on a plane.
We have people who are doing paying to go someplace and people who are paid to go there.
And that Yeah.
And so I I think I think what yeah.
When you it's absolutely right.
But when you said plane, the reason I responded is, increasingly, we need to think not so much about transportation systems as about destination

(03:31:57):
systems.
And I I understood that I was just making a relative term because I I have a similar argue.
I'm on planes because people pay me to go there, and I'm going to that destination, which I would have never gone to Bangladesh or Sri Lanka or Cambodia for any other reason in my sphere, unless someone paid me.
But on the flip side, there are many people on the plane who are going there for tourism reasons.

(03:32:21):
That's why I went to Cambodia.
So
You went to Ankar.
It was Ankar Wat and, yeah.
Yeah.
San Riva.
Yep.
So, so it's it's it's actually it's reminiscent of the scene in, one of the Star Trek movies where, they it's Star Trek 4, the voyage home.
So they go back in time because they're trying to save the whales.

(03:32:44):
Oh, yeah.
That's one of my favorites.
Yeah.
And so he's, having pizza at the restaurant with, the, cytologist.
And she says, let me guess.
You're from space.
And he says, no.
I'm from Iowa.
I only work in space.

(03:33:06):
Yep.
And that's Captain Kirk, right?
So that I think the reason this second phase of the demographic shift is so interesting is that the nature of the workers will shift.
We'll come back to that.
And there will be a larger and larger and increasingly large number of, leisure visitors.

(03:33:30):
Time lines.
What's your timeline?
I said it's it's milestone based.
No.
I'm I'm just taking I'm I'm putting it what are your what's your perspective on timelines?
Because in 19 I've I think I said this before.
In 1972, no one would have thought we were we'd be where we are today if they were working at NASA.

(03:33:57):
Meaning nobody thought we were far past where we were that there would have been Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so, there is no technical or fundamental economic reason why the experience future could not be fully realized.
And I gave you the metric before.

(03:34:19):
100 of 1,000 of ordinary people flying in Earth orbit every year within a quarter century.
The reason that is it either will happen or it won't happen because of programmatics, not because of economics or technical obstacles.
Would you would you then say that's the same thing that happened from 1969 to 2019?

(03:34:53):
What do
you Well, you said it's programmatic and that we expected to get to a certain point, people going to O'Neil having an O'Neil cylinder or they've are real.
We expected a lot of these things to happen, and it didn't happen.
Did it not happen because of programmatic decisions that were made?

(03:35:14):
Yes.
Okay.
Just confirming because you're
I I
think same same scenario.
I think there are 2 there are 2 things at work.
So there's a Calvin and Hobbes, strip.
It's one of my favorites where Calvin is maligning the state of the modern world.
And, you know, where are the ray guns?

(03:35:36):
Where are the flying cars?
Where are the floating cities?
And his punchline is whatever happened to the future anyway?
And so I think one thing that we experience is that for for diverse reasons, the future never turns out the way somebody's quaint image of it anticipated it would.

(03:36:03):
So I think that's kinda more universal.
In in in space in particular, it comes down to how we spend our public resources.
So the conversation we had earlier about what conversation
That's why I was asking.
I was trying to tie the pieces together.
And and so so it it'll either it'll happen sooner or faster I mean, I'm sorry, sooner or later, sooner if programmatically the agency re vectored its intentions later if it does not.

(03:36:36):
But that doesn't mean it's not gonna happen.
It just takes longer to happen.
So, let's think for a minute about what it means to have more diverse space workers.
Well, let me do the other one first.
So passengers.
The the way I think this evolves is it starts the way we're seeing today actually with adventure travelers.

(03:36:57):
So right now, if you've got $60,000,000 that you can spend on it, you can get a ticket on a an Axiom Pan mission, a private astronaut mission.
So you buy it through Axiom.
It's you actually fly on a SpaceX, Crew Dragon to go to the International Space Station, because it's International Space Station is the destination you're going to, the rules, things you can do and things you can't do and so forth.

(03:37:29):
But that is very much akin to other kinds of adventure travel.
It's super expensive, but it's it's risky.
The your opportunities are constrained, but people do it anyway because it's the only way you can do it and it's a unique astounding experience.
So but that's adventure travel.

(03:37:50):
As it gets more curated and more tailored for those visitors, and as the facilities and amenities, get less about, like, camping out in somebody's laboratory and more like going to a resort, then you shift from adventure travel into tourism.

(03:38:13):
And that's when you see the price elasticity curve and the risk elasticity curve, bring to bear larger and larger numbers of customers, increasing numbers of facilities, diversity of amenities, competition among them, and so forth, further price depression, and so all of that goodness.
And eventually tourism opens the door to what I call orbital living.

(03:38:41):
And to be honest, I don't remember if we spoke
No, we didn't.
Before.
But yeah.
So so I think we both know some people who have amazing houses around the planet.
Well, realtors call them homes, amazing homes around the planet.
So we have the capability to make a truly amazing home that is literally around the planet.

(03:39:06):
And so imagine a module outfitted as a condominium, 0 g condominium, that's attached to a mixed use destination like Orbital Reef.
And it's owned by 12 super rich owners, each of whom spends 1 month a year there.

(03:39:34):
So So it's it's a time share.
Time time share condominium.
Right.
The there there are homeowners association the homeowners association fee gonna be pretty steep.
Yeah.
So but if you were one of those owners, you're you're not gonna wanna spend more than a couple of weeks or a few weeks, certainly not more than a month, per year in orbit.

(03:39:55):
First of all, because you got other things to spend your time on, which is, you know, why you got so rich in the first place.
But also, you could spend a month in space without having to exercise every you know, for 3 hours every day and stuff like that.
But you can't live in space, in, free fall continuously without microgravity deconditioning setting in.

(03:40:17):
So a a few weeks is probably right.
So who knows with the business model?
Maybe it's 24 people in the age.
Yeah.
You you're just doing a time share type of allocation to to reduce the capital risk cost of being engaged in it.
So I think the there's a little evolution there that goes from adventure travel to tourism to orbital living.

(03:40:44):
The type of space workers now that support that industry need to be much more diverse than what we have today.
So today, we have mission crews, system engineers, and, laboratory specialists.
In the future, we will have the kind of upstairs, downstairs separation of, you know, front of house, back of house like you have in hotels and resorts.

(03:41:14):
So there will be maintenance crews and administrators and, tour guides and free fall hairdressers and, chefs, there will be there will need to be a kind of specialization that does not yet exist today.

(03:41:36):
And I think that's also very exciting development because it means that the diversity of types of space workers will increase.
If we engage the exploit future and let's say we industrialize the geostationary belt for clean power for Earth, then you will also have a lot of space workers whose primary job is to make sure their robots are working right.

(03:42:05):
That is the robots that are constructing and maintaining these very, very large space power facilities.
And there will be you could call them space maintenance workers, which we have a little bit of on ISS today, but, really, the mission crews on ISS are kind of jack of all trades because there's only a couple of them.
They have to do everything.

(03:42:26):
Yep.
And the facility, even though it looks big, is actually small.
You think about it.
It's as big as a football field, but it only supports 6 humans.
Yeah.
And I I don't remember if I told you one of the first people 1 first astronaut I met, he, I'm trying to remember his name.
I'm it's escaping me.
He was respond he was the person who took out the battery for the telescope and replaced it.

(03:42:53):
So his job was to go up.
That's he was a maintenance worker, more or less.
He he took out a 700 pound battery.
He removed it, put in the new one, and he was responsible for learning how to put screws in.
And he said he had to put screws in and out, take them in and out, in and out, in and out, in and out with gloves on many, many, many, many times because if he stripped it, it would be a bad thing.

(03:43:17):
And he said, wouldn't you know it?
I'm putting the screw in to seal it up, and I feel like it's stripping.
Well, I was thinking that exact same thing.
He was a maintenance worker repairing the telescope, and that was his job.
And when he was, he was told as he was leaving NASA, he was they said, if you break it, don't come home.

(03:43:39):
Well, so the one of the one of the really important things for space architecture about space workers is, tours of duty.
So depending on what orbit you're in, you will accumulate radiation dose being in space.

(03:44:02):
And so today, it's kind of like it's a remarkable thing if an astronaut has flown on 6 missions in their career, for example.
That's considered a high number.
And, you know, if an astronaut has spent an accumulated couple of years in space like Peggy Whitson or some of the others that have multiple missions of, you know, long duration.

(03:44:25):
So you you accumulate radiation.
Okay.
There's in in with current technology, there's no such thing as somebody who just lives in space all the time for the rest of their career.
There aren't yet standards, accepted standards for the risks the accumulated risks that will be incurred by professional workers in these diverse types of labor fields, you could call it.

(03:44:56):
But I think that So that's chapter 2 of this.
It starts with explorers and then we have workers, and now the workers diversify because the demographic is shifting and we have more visitors who are untrained, not professional, there for leisure purposes, they're paying a lot of money to go and so forth.
Then the 3rd chapter is settlers.

(03:45:19):
I personally believe it will be a long time, multiple decades before anybody seriously embarks on anything that could be called settling.
However, it will happen at some point.
And for space architects, the thing that's interesting about that is that it's one thing to design, oh, let's just say a laboratory.

(03:45:50):
It's another thing to design a resort hotel.
It's a really different thing to design a settlement because it you you now have to engage all of the behaviors and needs and aspirations of a community.
And a way to think about this is if if it's not just people coming, doing their thing, and then going home, whether the thing is getting paid to be there or they're paying to be there, but if it's people who are, spending their lives there, well, now they're gonna have families.

(03:46:24):
And then it gets into, like, having kids, and then you have life cycle management.
So, hospitals to mortuaries, for example, and everything in between.
So, we are very far from that.
That doesn't mean it's not fun to think about, and we should think about it.

(03:46:45):
Yeah.
But not only are we far from needing that, we're we're far from being able to settle anywhere because true settlement means deriving the the needs for physical existence from the place where you are.
And despite what people may try to tell you, this is a super hard thing to do.

(03:47:13):
It's gonna be really hard on the moon.
It's gonna be really hard on Mars.
It's Yeah.
Well,
what we we have really
hard in the asteroids.
You you you can't do it in free space without resources from those physical locations.
And so we're we are decades decades away from the ability to do And that's one of When you get there when you get there, think about the implications for even systems that we think we understand.

(03:47:44):
I'll use life support systems, ECLSS, as an example.
The kind of life support technology we have on space station today, which is very high maintenance, expensive, finicky stuff, high maintenance, but it works.
Works well.
You could use that to go to Mars with a half a dozen, you know, government astronauts.

(03:48:06):
You'd probably wanna have multiple backup systems and so forth because you're gone for 3 years and all that, but the technology we have is the technology you could use.
No harm, no foul.
Alright.
At the opposite end of the scale, when you get to settlers, what you're not gonna do is have warehouses full of the stuff that we have inside racks today.

(03:48:28):
Tubes and pumps and reactive beds and, you know, reverse osmosis membranes.
And, it's very finicky stuff.
And and that is you're not going to support a city's worth or a town's worth of population permanently with that.

(03:48:49):
How you're gonna wanna do it is the way we do it on earth, which is with plants and wetlands.
So, you know, of all the oxygen we breathe, all of us, every day, half of it comes from ocean plankton.
A quarter of it comes from the Amazon, and the other quarter of it comes from other forests, including especially the boreal forest in in the northern latitudes.

(03:49:20):
So that's how Earth does it.
And when we get to the scale of actually settling space, that's how we're gonna have to do it.
So the type of techno I I go through that example by way of explaining that the type of technology depends on the demographic you're supporting.

(03:49:44):
So the demographic shift is not just economic and experiential.
It's also technological.
And all these things have to come together to enable us to shift from just visitors and tourists to settlers.
So the reason it's worth spending any time on thinking about this at all is if you're a space architect like I am, you're about designing the human environment for living and working in space.

(03:50:18):
So it kind of depends
on what the humans
are, what type of demographic they are, and what work they're doing, and why they're there, and how long they're there for, to tell you what kind of systems you need to be designing.
Yes.
And that's, it's whether you're gonna be building a cruise ship or you're gonna be building a a military vessel or you're going or a a sailing a small sailing ship.

(03:50:42):
Everything requires a different type of approach to make sure that it functions properly.
Right.
The
So that that relates I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
There was some question I was going to ask you a little early.
I'm trying to see in my notes, implications of life support, high maintenance, go to Mars, multiple backup, settlers.
There was something that I was going to hit on.
Oh, it is.

(03:51:05):
I'm I don't know if you followed what happened during the SPAC series of investments, but there was a huge set of investments into, agroponics.
And almost all of them have failed, and that's on Earth.
When we're talking I do believe that lower Earth orbit or moon and Earth, it's going to have to be supplied by Earth for a very long time.

(03:51:34):
Are you do you believe on the economic perspective that these type of hydroponic systems are going to be so powerful, so, create so much caloric intake, so much produce that it can sustain a larger community?

(03:51:57):
Well, I do think there is there has already been an evolution in, I'll call it, agricultural efficiency on Earth.
And we're, you know, we're all familiar with multiple examples that has
to do with
the green revolution, pesticides, and so forth.

(03:52:19):
And then now it shifted into genetic work, for crops.
That will continue.
So it's it's it's changing the plants and we could say the animals, but it's changing the the, the life forms themselves as well as improving the efficiency with which we cultivate them.

(03:52:43):
So the fact that you now have huge farming machines that are completely robotic
Oh, yeah.
Is a relatively new thing.
And I worked with a roboticist who was the first one who pioneered a lot of that in the late eighties, and now it's a thing.

(03:53:04):
A a class 9 harvester or I mean, these are producing a tremendous amount of offshoot in the middle of the night using GPS to be able to find its way.
But that is not that's not high so you're you believe that the advances in hydroponics or this type of farming will get there fast enough to be a part of this evolution, or are you saying that you don't believe

(03:53:31):
I think no.
I I what I'm saying is that there is a general trend to higher tech interventions that increase the productivity and efficiency of agriculture, and that will continue.
And it may include hydroponics.
It may include aeroponics, but but not limited to those.

(03:53:56):
It's just a lot of space.
It's a lot of space for fruits and vegetables.
And and so I I kind of like the yeah.
That's why I said the economic side of it.
There's a a very large economic cost to creating an environment large enough to create enough produce to make it worthwhile at least in today's dollars.
Well but look at that that description applies exactly to the situation we find ourselves on for today.

(03:54:24):
Mhmm.
Right?
The cost of agriculture to support, humanity, let alone a western convention diet that's rich in animal protein and so forth, that that cost, economically and environmentally is extremely hot.

(03:54:45):
Yes.
It's just that on earth, most people are just kind of, blithely unaware of it, and they're not they're not confronted by the reality.
This is one of the things I like about space architecture, and I think can teach us lessons is in space, there are no externalities.
Right?
You go outside the wall and it's death.

(03:55:06):
So everything you need, what you breathe, what you touch, what you eat, what you drink, you have to control it.
You have to recycle it.
You have to, manage it and and so forth.
And that's all evident because it's surrounding you.
So let's go back to we were talking about station.

(03:55:27):
The International Space Station is a baseball field, but it only supports 6 people.
Why is that?
Well, it's because there are no externalities in space.
I know, by the way, space station, because it's in low earth orbit, depends on routine resupply.
Yep.
So if you're, let's say, at an O'Neil settlement at, you know, earth moon l 4 Mhmm.

(03:55:53):
For example Yep.
Your your supply chain, is, most of your supply chain is internal every cycle.
Let's kind of start there.
But your external supply chain is, orders of magnitude more complicated and expensive, even than it is in the space station today.

(03:56:17):
So that type that your dependence on technology and design and system operations and not to mention good behavior, is literally vital, and it's present all the time.
You you you can't hide it.
You can't get away from it.

(03:56:39):
So, I'm gonna say a little bit more about that in in our our 3rd
Okay.
Topic when we get there.
So let's hold that thought.
I'm I'm I got tons of notes.
So great.
Yeah.
The the second topic is very quick, and it comes directly out of what I was saying about why space architecture.
So interested in space architecture, the different types of die demographics, the different types of systems and amenities and so forth.

(03:57:07):
Because of that
Well, so wait.
So you had demographic shift.
Right.
So now I'm gonna go to the second topic, which is architecture over engineering.
Okay.
That's what I wanna make sure.
Yeah.
And so this is a this is maybe not so consequential in the short term, but it's controversial.
So I love to describe it.

(03:57:30):
Okay.
Because space engineers hate it.
And what it says is that there will come a time when designing for humans in space will be done the way it's done on earth.
Of course.
And that is to say, it's not all led by engineers.

(03:57:52):
It's led by architects for whom the engineers work.
You can see why space Well, you don't have to say it that way.
You could you could theoretically say that the engineers work with the architects, but you specifically use the word for.
Well, that's the way it happens on Earth.

(03:58:13):
Well, I mean, I know architects and they work with engineering firms, and the engineering firms, you know, collaborate with them.
So Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you just you like to dig a little bit.
It's okay.
I'm I I understand.
Nothing nothing I'm saying is is, intended to imply lack of
I I'm I'm I'm I'm prodding you a little bit because it's just a choice of language.
It's yeah.

(03:58:34):
Our that's the way it's done on earth.
I do understand.
Real truth, even in terrestrial architectures, that everybody works for the contractors.
Right?
Yeah.
The develop Yep.
The the everybody works for the developers, because that's the that's the the money That's
where it comes from.
But what what you have in major developments on earth is there's some these days more and more, it's a firm or a or a team of firms who are the kind of design masters of the project, and they will commission work from various types of engineers, structural engineers, environmental control engineers, geotechnical engineers, etcetera, etcetera.

(03:59:22):
The the reason this is important to space architects is for 1, space architecture is a new field, but the there's a little bit of a Rodney Dangerfield thing there.
But, the reason is that, historically, all the stuff that has flown people in space has been designed by engineers.

(03:59:43):
And that makes perfect sense given where we are.
As the engineers will say, well, space is really hard, and it's really dangerous.
And, therefore, you know, it must be done by engineers who know what they're doing and everything else is secondary.
That's true.
However, that's also how you get, the interior design of the International Space Station, which is nothing like the way the architects who worked on the program back in phase a and phase b, framed it out.

(04:00:22):
It's basically like, if you've ever worked in a government building, I used to be at Goddard Space Flight Center, and my office was in a building that's no longer there.
But, it had it literally had metal partition walls.
We used to put stuff up with magnets.
Yep.
You know?
And you've got, like, 19 seventies metal desks and metal desk chairs and metal walls for God's sake.

(04:00:50):
And they were painted, you know, government beige.
So that's what you get if you don't use architects.
Not all architects are great.
Not all non architect buildings are bad.
And there are many engineers who have architecture talents with them too that bring to the table.

(04:01:12):
There's a reason why architects are.
And, that's you know, everybody wants to claim that they're the 2nd oldest profession, architects included.
But
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
So what's the first then?
I'll leave that to you.
I've never heard everybody wants to say that they're the 2nd oldest profession.

(04:01:35):
Oh, no.
That's the joke.
People will say, you know, politics is the 2nd oldest profession.
Oh, okay.
I've I've Doctoring is the 2nd oldest profession.
I've I've not I've not heard that, but I just I was like, okay.
Nobody lays claim to the first oldest profession.
They exchanging money for service.
Yeah.
But, anyway Okay.
As
I I wouldn't know if maybe I was missing something.

(04:01:57):
Just making clear being clear on this.
Okay.
So the the way to think about it is that anything that flies in space has there's like the price of admission is aerospace engineer.
And that's the classic aerospace disciplines like, structures, dynamics, guidance, navigate control, propulsion, attitude control, avionics, on and on and on.

(04:02:23):
They're all the subsystems, the subsystem based disciplines.
You cannot have a space system without those things.
Okay.
If the space system also contains people, now you've gotta have a whole other layer of aerospace stuff, environment control life support, human factors, crew systems interfaces, etcetera, etcetera.

(04:02:50):
If oh, EVA.
Let's not forget EVA because you gotta get outside every now and then.
If you go further on that scale and especially as you engage demographics that are not highly trained, you know, professional mission crews, but you have other kinds of just visitors who are paying a lot of money to be there and they wanna have a good adventure vacation.

(04:03:21):
You need amenities.
You need to design knowing how humans interact with each other, human behavior patterns in less extreme types of societies.
So that means not just researchers in a lab, but, people who are not highly trained, who just interact.

(04:03:47):
Like how do people interact in restaurants and how do people interact when they're shopping?
Okay.
Well, I hate to say it, but aerospace engineers know nothing about that.
That's what architects do.
And then when you get further over into the sociology of, accommodating the sociology of larger groups with the built environment, that is what architecture is.

(04:04:11):
It's It brings
all of the There's other discipline.
There's
Artistics and aesthetics, the history of architecture, all these, capturing, the aspirations of human occupants is what architects do.
That's what makes it a field.
I'm trying to remember what my girlfriend in in in college did.

(04:04:37):
She was not an architect, but she was another discipline.
And because in order for her to go to sleep, she had to get her work done, and I forgot the discipline it was in.
We would I'd stay up with her because I do draw paint, sculpt, I do carpeted, plumbing, electrical work.
I'd sit with her and we'd redesign entire office structures, floor plans.

(04:05:04):
We would look at commercials facilities.
We'd look at retail.
And she wasn't an architect.
She was in god.
I'm trying to remember the discipline.
But I think it it sounds like you're putting a lot into into architecture, which also is managed by other disciplines.

(04:05:26):
Well, that's what architects do is they integrate all those things.
So you may have interior designers and industrial designers and landscape architects.
There's, you know, subspecialties there as well.
Okay.
So you you're you're take you're taking it it's not that they're always doing all of these things, but you're you're you're using the architecture as also an integrator.

(04:05:48):
Well, that's what archa that's what
the No.
I know a lot of architects who really they do architecture.
They design.
They sit down.
They create the plans.
They they draft everything out.
But then there are other architects who build large scale structures where they bring other people and they manage teams of individuals.
Well, every major project is done by a team.
Like, the days of Frank Lloyd Wright sitting down at a drafting table and detailing everything out are long gone.

(04:06:13):
That's not how projects
I the way you were using the term architect, I was taking it as more of a smaller position, and now you're explaining it a little bit differently.
Yeah.
So that's that's the reason I was saying it
is a minute ago.
Like, architecture today is done by firms.
Yes.
Just the way you have been using the terminology since at this point, it sounded more as if the architect was the drafts person, the person who put the the whole concept together.

(04:06:43):
And now what in my mind's eye, maybe I was wrong in the way I was interpreting it.
I wasn't thinking of it as crews of teams of individuals who were an integration individual.
So now I've got it.
That's fine.
But I wasn't there with the way you were framing things.
Okay.
Yeah.
And so, it at Root, this is this is kinda really very simple.

(04:07:06):
The the the performance challenges that face any space system are amenable to engineering.
The performance challenges that are faced by human occupied systems are not only amenable to engineering.
They also require dealing with the inherently messy problem of human behavior, human perception, human reactions, and human behavior.

(04:07:36):
And so, that's that's why you need more than just engineers.
That's the point.
Okay.
Yeah.
And I
I get that That's
why we have a field of space architect.
That's where I got it.
Once I understood where you were going with it, I I didn't tie those pieces together.
So, yes, it's the integration of all of these systems and structures to be able to make a full complete system work for for humans while living beyond earth.

(04:08:02):
And I think that we will find in the future, there are needs, meaning that there needs that humans have, particularly humans in, groups or, you know, social settings that are so deep rooted that they can't really be changed.

(04:08:28):
They're just part of who we are as a as a social species, and those will come to the fore in space architecture.
So the fundamental problems of making a toilet that doesn't break or, you know, a life support system that whose filters don't clog all the time or, you know, a space flight system that maintains the narrow temperature range that's acceptable for human living.

(04:08:57):
All those things which are challenges today, they'll be solved.
So fast forward, you know, I don't know, a half century from now, all those problems will be solved.
They'll be very well solved, and they, they they won't really be as specialized as they are today.

(04:09:18):
And these other atavistic things that govern how we behave as a social species will start to dominate particularly as the demographics diversify.
That's kind of the point.
And and I
because remember, we're talking about the the future history of human species.
So I'm just No.

(04:09:39):
I I'm I'm I'm just kinda painting the No.
You're you're doing a you're doing a great job and and everything you're saying is great.
So we're we're good here.
One of the the what comes to mind, and you've known me as much as you've known me.
I do speak my mind fairly often whether right or wrong.
The words that I'm hearing, not not the understanding of the pieces that you're putting together.

(04:10:02):
I'm gonna say every so often you'd jump in a word and say, that will happen by.
And my if we go back to the today's original start with NASA not knowing or agencies not knowing what their role is, you're saying eventually would happen, but that's what people would have said, I'm gotta believe in 19 eighties 19 nineties, and we were gonna solve this, and we were gonna be there, and this is gonna happen, and it hasn't.

(04:10:35):
So there's a a missing link in making That Will Happen by.
Yeah.
The the the missing link is, patience in the time domain.
So I'm less troubled by things not happening as fast as I might have thought when I was a kid in the sixties.

(04:10:59):
I'm not as troubled by that as I am intrigued by the, direction I see for inevitable trends.
Okay.
So let's go back to, why humans are gonna be in space altogether anyway.
So are you we're adding a we're adding a another piece because you have posthuman space.

(04:11:25):
Yeah.
We'll get to that.
It's fine.
Actually, the this this is a good segue into that.
Okay.
Perfect.
But I think it's important to yeah.
We could call it a a
Segue is great.
I just I was I I'm, as you know, I'm writing, so I just wanna make sure I wasn't losing something.
So I I think, you know, people will talk about, oh, humans have this innate need to explore, and, you know, we are curious and I all those things are true.

(04:11:52):
But, there I I accept that there is a non zero probability that the actual future of humanity is that we are forever only on this planet.
I don't like that future, but I think it's a possible one.

(04:12:15):
The one I think is more likely is that in a universe with a trillion galaxies, each of which has 100 of billions of stars around practically every one of which we now know there are multiple planets, there's a very there's an overwhelmingly rich universe out there.

(04:12:41):
And even if we could never bridge the gulf to the stars, I emotionally don't accept the that the most likely future of humanity is to only ever be on this earth.
We earth is one object in a solar system that has, as as far as we can understand, really, in practical terms, unlimited energy.

(04:13:15):
And not unlimited, but a lot of material resources.
And I think the most likely future of humanity is to push earth life, to seed earth life out in space.
I think we will do that.
And at at the end of the day, that's kind of what motivates, I think, most of us who work in trying to escape the bonds of earth.

(04:13:45):
It's not to leave earth.
It's not to go find some place better.
It's to expand our footprint and our agency throughout the accessible universe, which in our technology, our age, means the material and energy resources of the source.

(04:14:06):
So let me get you're saying you believe that we will not be leaving, but we will send out probes or devices, and we will seed?
I'm taking the word seed and trying to dimensionalize it.
We will seed other places in the world, but humanity will not be that.
No.
I they're they're not they're not mutually exclusive.

(04:14:27):
The when I say we're not gonna leave, what I mean is, there are right now, you know, 8 and a half 1000000000 people on this planet.
I do not ever see a future in which we say, oh, yeah.
We're gonna cap it at 10,000,000,000 and then we're gonna move all 10,000,000,000 offer.
No.
Okay.
And I I I I I would agree.

(04:14:48):
I just wanna make sure because the way it was being phrased.
So I agree with that statement that there's 10,000,000,000.
But then what do you answer to the individuals who talk about the fact that Earth is going to be destroyed?
We have to be on another planet to save the human species, which is not to save cities.
Which
It's it's nonsense.

(04:15:09):
That's what I say.
It's nonsense.
So first of all, it's a terrible attitude to say, oh, earth is gonna be destroyed so I wanna go be someplace else.
Every other place in the universe is hostile and shitty by comparison.
I agree.
Every other place.
So it is a reprehensible attitude to abandon all hope for earth and say, no.

(04:15:33):
I wanna go colonize Mars or no.
That's that's just dumb.
Not like I feel strongly.
No.
No.
And I and I I appreciate that because I we've had conversations before we started, and my take is that we have 10,000,000,000 people on this planet.
Even if we had even if we had 500 people on another planet, we still have 10,000,000,000 people back home.

(04:15:59):
We're not we're not leaving that fast.
That's right.
Well, I don't think we're leaving at all.
What I meant was if they if their their premises that we're going to be traveling to distant galaxies and it was it was Jim Newman.
I looked him up.
Jim Newman was the first astronaut I ever met at dinner.
And he he said to me, David we were talking about this whole construct, and he said, David, let me kinda give it to you in terms of time.

(04:16:25):
We're a blip in time in the universe, humans on this planet.
Even if someone left tens of 1000 of years and they would 100 of 1000 of years to they would look out and they'd say, why would we go to that rock?
Because the light and what they see is 1000 of years earlier.

(04:16:46):
And they would never have seen that we're here.
So the odds of someone coming here are infinitesimal for the purposes of seeing us because they wouldn't be able to see us.
And then he said, it's the same going the other way.
Where we go in the universe, we don't have there's no answer to a better place because what we're seeing is light years away.

(04:17:08):
And that form the odds of us running into somebody, and I'm not saying I believe or disagree.
What I'm saying, it was an interesting conversation that he, to some degree, was saying this is the place that we've got, and we've gotta make sure we're taking care of it.
Yeah.
I, I feel that very deeply.
That was the first astronaut I met, by the way.

(04:17:30):
It was Jim Newman.
I sat at a table next to him, and we just started talking.
So
Yeah.
When when we when we get to the the final bullet topic, I'll I'll come back to this.
But, that's why I named the 4th future expand.
It's not about leaving.
It's not about abandoning or moving.
It's simply about expanding.

(04:17:54):
So I could easily imagine a time in which most of the humans in existence are not on earth.
Not because they went someplace, but because most of the humans who are born someplace are not born on earth.
It's that simple.
And the material resources of the solar system enable us to support a population in the multiple trillions.

(04:18:25):
You I mean, you can do the math, but it doesn't really do you any good because there's a lot of assumptions taped into it.
So you can kinda get any number out that you want.
And the amount of available energy is even larger than that.
So this is why the the Kardashianschoff model of, civilization types, kinda starts to be relevant.

(04:18:50):
So What's the name of the argument?
What's the name?
Yes.
Kardashev.
It was a a Soviet thinker, decades ago who posited, in in that sort of beautifully Russian way of thinking that's, like, kind of complete theory, meaning a theory which is complete.

(04:19:14):
He he posited that in the universe, there would be type 1 civilizations, which are those that control the energies of their planet, their home planet.
Type 2 controls the energies of their solar system, their star, and type 3 controls the energy of their galaxy.

(04:19:37):
And that's you know, it's many orders of magnitude separated.
So Huge.
Type 3, you know, how do you even know what to think about that?
But, I've I've been writing about this recently.
I think, actually, a more productive definition of type 1 isn't something that could arguably be ascribed to us today.

(04:20:01):
There there are some people who've written, yeah.
We're a type one civilization now.
We have to be working toward type 2.
And I'm like, hold on.
Type 1 may mean a civilization that is using the energies and resources of its planet in a way which is sustainable enough that they can keep growing beyond that.

(04:20:24):
We are not there, and we have a long way to go to learn how to even sustain 8 or 10 or 15,000,000,000 people on this earth, let alone grow beyond that.
So the only way to really grow beyond some number that's either, you know, half x or one x or two x, what we have today, to, you know, a 100 x or a 1000000 x is to use the energy and material resources of the solar system.

(04:20:57):
So
Do you play do you play with the Fermi, paradox that we have to
It's a separate topic, but, I yeah.
My my master's thesis in engineering school was engineering planetary lasers for interstellar communications.
So, I've done about
So do you believe that we will overcome the levels that we would need to to be able to get to the point of doing all these things, or do we self destruct as a a society?

(04:21:27):
I mean, that's it's the last term of the Drake equation
Yeah.
Which is the the longevity of a civilization which can communicate at interstellar distances.
So what is the longevity of our society?
I don't know.
I
I thought you you came on.
You were supposed to have answers.
Didn't I tell you you have to have an answer for that?

(04:21:49):
I I would like to think that it is longer, you know, therefore more sustainable than all the evidence implies.
Okay.
So so you're saying the type one, using the energies and resources to be able to maintain 8, 10, 15, Numbers are suggesting that we're we're gonna plateau.

(04:22:10):
Do you believe we're going to continue to grow?
Well, I believe what I see.
Mhmm.
And the evidence of the evidence I see of, the human capacity to ignore what's right in front of our faces is not inspiring.

(04:22:45):
So, you know, I think we may have talked before about the nature of a society that could live in space.
I don't know if we I'd have to look through all my notes, but no.
I don't
There there's one key feature, that that I think is very sobering, and that is if you're living in a space a piece of space architecture, a space habitat of some sort, as I've said a couple of times, on the other side of the wall is death, quick death.

(04:23:15):
So, you know, you can if if you get hit by debris, you know, you'll be gone in microseconds.
But, failing that, which is a a risk in anywhere in space, and it's very high and low earth orbit at the moment.
But, setting that aside, death in space comes within seconds or minutes or days or years, from a whole variety of things that are trying to kill you.

(04:23:49):
Temperature extremes, lack of oxygen, lack of air, you know, lack of water, lack of food, radiation, lack of gravity, all these things.
Right?
So it's it's not gonna be easy to establish human living and working in space beyond just a few highly trained crews and a few occasional visitors.
But if we did so imagine a resort hotel in Earth orbit or imagine O'Neil settlement at Earth Moonell 4.

(04:24:20):
You're now living in a place which far more than a city on Earth is vulnerable at any moment to the bad behavior of a single actor.
So here in the west, especially in the US, we have a culture that believes that the ability of the individual to act individually with utter freedom is sacrosanct.

(04:24:55):
It's not clear to me that that type of attitude and behavior will be acceptable in a space settlement.
So there are cultures on earth in which the, the health or the, what's the word I'm looking for?

(04:25:21):
The, so the well-being.
That's it.
The well-being of the community is more important than the well-being or the individual freedom of a single person.
Mhmm.
The US is not one of those, but there are cultures.
I I've lived around the world.
Absolutely.
I've seen yeah.
Well, and so I think I went I think I shared I think I shared with you when we had COVID, I was wearing a mask in 2012.

(04:25:45):
I was walking down the hall with the CEO in Asia.
He looked at me when I coughed.
He said, do you need a mask?
And I said, you have a cold, and you need a mask.
And I put on a mask.
I wore a mask the whole day, and I realized very early on that in Asia, you wear a mask to protect others.
In the United States, you wear a mask to protect yourself.

(04:26:09):
Well, some of us
Well, in general, that's more of a a statement.
And in Asia, yeah, you you wear a mask in a meeting because it kept people healthy.
Right.
There so there are cultural norms that we might look to for behaviors and expectations, and I would argue self control, which may become not just essential, but vital, literally vital for space communities to even exist.

(04:26:39):
And that includes space police and space all of that in your eyes?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I these again, as a space architect, these are the things that I don't worry about making a toilet that works.
I'd love to get a contract from somebody to design a toilet that actually works.
But there's, you know, there's teams working on that, and it'll happen.

(04:27:03):
I have confidence it'll happen.
But what I'm more fascinated by is the the designing for society and designing for I I call it sociology.
Like, how do we make architecture and an environment and a little piece of civilization that can survive itself and its own members in this remote hostile place.

(04:27:32):
So that's yet another dimension of why I think space architecture is fascinating, and I think it could teach us things that we do not evidently know on Earth or that we haven't, you know, decided are, critically important on Earth.
So, let me use that now to shift to the kind of final topic, which is what I call posthuman space architecture.

(04:28:02):
And this this came about.
It was sort of interesting last, jeez.
It was probably last summer.
I got invited to do a, an article in a special issue of architectural design, that was just published.
It's the January, February 2024 issue, on posthuman architecture.
And the editor called me up and asked me if I would do this.

(04:28:24):
And I'm like, I'm an architect, but I don't understand what posthuman architecture would even be.
What does that mean?
How can we have architecture for something after humans?
And, but, actually, he didn't call me up.
He sent me an email.
So because I remember in in the my first email, I said, I there's only, like, three possible things I could think that this would mean.

(04:28:51):
And he came back with a note that said, that's perfect.
Yes.
Will you do the chapter?
So I'm like, okay.
So I thought about it, and, I the more I thought about it, the more I actually liked it.
And now I, incorporate it into my thinking.
Mhmm.

(04:29:12):
So one of the things about domestic architect all architecture, but I I picked domestic architecture because there's a historical touch point for this, which is in, jeez.
I don't know the year.
It was, like, 1921 or something.

(04:29:33):
I I would have to look up the year.
In, wrote, a house is a machine for living in.
And this is always referenced in courses on modern architecture and art history, as a polemical point of view about what architecture ought to be.

(04:30:00):
And, at least in sort of Scully's version of of architectural history, this is sort of one of the seminal moments in the origin of modern architecture is is this, belief in, you know, the machine age was happening.
Airplanes were happening.
Fast cars were starting to happen.

(04:30:21):
The idea that, yeah, a house also is a machine.
And it's kinda cute because back in the twenties, like, a house was barely a machine.
But in today's world, houses are machines.
You know, now your refrigerator will order milk when you're low on milk, and, you know, Amazon will deliver it to your door.

(04:30:42):
And, the our houses are all wired with, well, they're they're Wi Fi.
They're not even wired, really.
But they're
Some some of us still have wires, but we don't use them.
Yeah.
There you go.
Our our entire house is wired with, with completely wired, and we're using Wi Fi.

(04:31:04):
There you go.
The, the same thing has happened to cities, of course.
So now although it's not fully implemented, one of the most accurate measures of resurgences of COVID is done through monitoring of sewage.

(04:31:27):
Yep.
So, you know, in the future, your your house, when when you flush the toilet, your house will tell you how healthy you are in multiple dimensions.
And the streets will all be the traffic in the streets will be controlled by, networked computing systems that, you know, they're talking to every moving vehicle.

(04:31:54):
They're they're talking to people's wristwatches so they know where all the pedestrians are, etcetera, etcetera.
So cities, houses and cities really have become machines for living in.
In space, space architecture is sort of the quintessential machine for living in because you've got, what the military would call, you know, the the the soft thing inside

(04:32:22):
Mhmm.
That you're trying to keep alive, and it's surrounded by the machinery that's doing it.
And I mentioned earlier that, we it it's become easy on earth the way we do urban design and, regional design and with our transportation networks.

(04:32:43):
It's become, I would argue, too easy to pretend that the things that actually keep us functioning, aren't even there.
But they are.
All those, you know, fields of lettuce growing out in the irrigated desert that, you know, then they're trucked in and refrigerated and

(04:33:05):
The only time you notice it is when they're not there.
Well, there you go.
But all that stuff is what makes society go, the production of power, for example.
So if you a very extreme example, I think, that's under construction now is, a city called The Line in Missouri.

(04:33:31):
Nome.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The so so Nome is, is building this city called The Line.
And, all I'll say about the, well, about its design is that it it it is one of the most extreme examples of the city as a machine for living in that you can find anywhere on Earth, because of where it is.

(04:33:59):
The the,
The harshness.
Natural environment, where it is.
But if, you know, when you look at it, what you see is people living.
When when when I'm sorry.
When you look at the images of the design, what you see is where people are living.
What you don't see is waste treatment or, water purification, or agriculture.

(04:34:27):
You don't see the externalities that make that city feasible.
In space, you don't have a choice.
They're there, and they're right inside the the closeout wall panel.
They're right underneath the floor.
They you may be, like, living amongst them the way you do in space station today.

(04:34:48):
You look out the window and there are the radiators that are rejecting your excess heat.
There are the solar rays that are producing power.
There are the craft that are bringing your resupply.
It's all there and present, which is why, going back to the International Space Station example, it's as big as it is, and it only takes care of a half a dozen people.

(04:35:11):
It takes that is a that is a stark measure.
I think a very instructive measure of just how much stuff it takes to fully support 6 humans.
Now when populations grow and diversify in space that we were talking earlier, the that ratio of stuff to human will, scale linearly.

(04:35:45):
It's not like if you have a 100 people instead of 10 people that there's, you know, efficiencies of scale and you could get away with, you know, only twice as much solar array.
No.
It's 10 times as much.
Everything scales linearly.
So the amount of stuff per person will be will remain, visible, like, in your face in space architecture.

(04:36:13):
I think that's healthy because it may be it should be sobering.
And in a weird sort of analogy, like, you know, people like farm to table because you wanna know where the food came from that you're eating.
Well, okay.
This is like, you know, existential nothingness to life.

(04:36:39):
And this is this is seeing what it is that it takes to be alive in space and is right there in front of you all the time.
That will shape most space architecture, in the future.
So that's that's part 1 is living in the machine.
Part 2, of posthuman the posthuman future space architecture is that most space architecture isn't even gonna be to support humans at all directly.

(04:37:10):
So we will have, vast mining operations distributed among asteroids on the lunar surface, both places in particular.
We'll have vast, agricultural facilities if you look at, even and O'Neil's team knew this back in in the seventies.

(04:37:35):
If you look at, the design of, the sphere or island 1 Yeah.
You see there's a habitat, which is the sphere in the middle, and then there's these bands or rings of stuff on two ends.
Mhmm.
What those are is the the agriculture areas.

(04:37:56):
And why are they separated?
Well, because if you're gonna grow plants most efficiently, you need a c o two enriched atmosphere.
You're gonna use dwarf plants that are robotically tended in clean environments.
They want a spectrum of light that is really weird for humans because you take out the green light because plants don't absorb it, which makes the light look sort of weirdly purple violet sort of, not a natural environment for people to be in.

(04:38:26):
So the point is that the most efficient production of, agriculture will be in environments that are actually not fit for humans.
And so you're gonna keep the agriculture and the human separate, which you look out the window and there it is.
There's the amount of agriculture that it takes to support whatever population you have.

(04:38:47):
So I think, the amount of literally posthuman, that is architecture not for humans, although it's not greater than it is on earth, it will be more present because it's gonna be right there.
It's gonna be visible all the time.
That, I think, will be a good societal reminder of what it takes for society to exist.

(04:39:16):
And then the final piece of the posthuman future is that not all habitable environments will be for people or just for people.
We're gonna take pets, of course.
We'll have agriculture, of course.

(04:39:39):
But there will also be some measure literally of seeding life and space.
So human, the human species is only one of 8,000,000 species on earth.
And if we think that part of our role as agents of life in, a vast universe is to expand earth life into space.

(04:40:16):
It means we gotta take life forms that are not just us.
We know we do anyway because, you know, most of the cells in your body are not human cells.
They're bacteria.
Yeah.
But the same will be the case, for, the life support systems for urban scale human settlements.

(04:40:37):
We said earlier that, you know, we need basically estuaries and plants, which mean, bacteria and protozoa and all the stuff that live in water and live in soil.
We we've seen spiders living on the International Space Station.
We've seen
So Yeah.
So all of those, all of those things will go to space too.

(04:40:59):
But here's an interesting thing, and this loops back to the, I think, the recognition of how special Earth is.
You see these images of O'Neil settlements with you know, it looks like wilderness with, rivers and mountains and forests.
And there's a famous one for blue origin that they called space elk.

(04:41:23):
It has a deer in it, you know, with, standing on a promontory.
It's a beautiful image.
But a wild adult cougar requires a 125 square kilometers of range.
1 cougar.
You not even in the O'Neil vision.
Is that much space?

(04:41:44):
Yes.
That's right.
So what that means is that even if we make, artificial biospheres in space, which is what we have to do to expand and expand Earth life, they won't be wilderness.
They'll be parks.
They'll be curated gardens and parks and farms and cities.

(04:42:08):
So the only place we know
Is there?
Where you can actually have wilderness, where?
It's on earth.
It it So this is why when, Jeff Bezos talks about the importance of, developing civilization in space.
He talks about rezoning earth for, wilderness and light industrial

(04:42:33):
and Mhmm.
Off earthing all the the the challenges.
Bit of Yep.
Any way to say it, but it but it's very evocative in that way.
And what he what he's saying is, and he and he also says it this way.
There there is no, you know, plan b.
There's there's there's no other, there's no other planet.
This is the one.
Yeah.

(04:42:54):
And and so the the the purpose a purpose of expanding, life into space is, yes, to seed space with life.
Yes, to, expand human civilization without limit by taking advantage of the resources that we find in space.
But also, yes, it's to preserve earth.

(04:43:18):
So where where this kinda culminate
I I just one thing is it's funny because as you've gone through some of these pieces, I'm thinking back, for example, in Noam and the Line, a friend of mine, Palmy, were has worked on just fish, and the demands of having fish in the line.

(04:43:40):
He's a fish expert out of I think it's Iceland.
And there are the amount of resources that they have to put into any type of, plant based or produce that has to be there to be able to meet demand is absolutely unbelievably high.
So that the truth is there is, at this point, to be able to supply a large ecosystem, for example, a 1000000 people on Mars, those numbers just don't make sense.

(04:44:09):
It's the way you're kind of articulating it.
Exactly.
Okay.
And, you know, what you what you if you're gonna have wilderness, if if you're gonna be able to support 8 you know, you you're never gonna make a an O'Neil settlement that's Noah's Ark, right, for 8,000,000 species.
It it won't work.
So the only way you can, support that rich of a biosphere is on the surface and in the surface waters of a planet scale object with a planet scale atmosphere.

(04:44:46):
Mhmm.
So we have such a thing.
It's called a planet, and there's only one of them that does that, and it's Earth.
So, I mean, it's just it's kind of very straightforward.
I'm an Earther.
I'm I'm definitely an Earther.
I like all the things that we're working on.
Project Moon Hunt has a lot of activities going on, but when it comes down to it, like you said, there's there might be people up in beyond Earth.
There might be things happening, but there's still gonna be 10,000,000,000 people here by 2050 living on this planet.

(04:45:12):
We have to make sure we take care of where we live.
So, the the kind of, clincher for posthuman space architecture is, this is a habit I have.
I always take things to their logical extreme to see where we end up.
Okay.
I do not think for an instant that the deep future of space architecture is the continued creation of biospheres and bubbles that keep space out.

(04:45:49):
Right?
So say say that again.
Is so what what space architecture is today is we protect the soft thing inside by keeping space.
Mhmm.
Right?
Okay.
The I think what will really happen in deep future is we will reengineer life to suit space conditions better.
And I didn't think this up.

(04:46:11):
Freeman Dyson wrote about this decades ago.
You know, he said, why wouldn't you develop life that can tolerate radiation, can tolerate low light, can tolerate temperature extremes, can tolerate vacuum?

(04:46:32):
And at the time, we did not have the technology to do so, but you can see already, we actually are on the cusp of technology to do all those things.
But we're also finding it on Earth.
Well, yes.
We're finding radiate you know, we're finding
extremophiles, but we're not what we're not finding is organisms that are adapted to space.

(04:46:54):
Correct.
That I understand.
But my point
Extremophiles like, yeah, temperature, temperature, chemistry
Temperature, chemistry, radiation, all of those.
So if in fact they do exist, it means that there are combinations of possible mutations or adaptation that could be implemented to be able to achieve what you just said.

(04:47:15):
Yes.
So in a world where now the FDA has approved a, genetic modification technique to cure sickle cell anemia, how could we rationally imagine that a 1000 years from now or 500 years from now, we won't be reengineering life to suit the conditions in space better.

(04:47:44):
So I think the ultimate, type of space architecture is actually redesigning ourselves for space, And that's what I would anticipate
But the the it won't be a space architect.
The most human.
But it
won't be a space architect.
It's gonna be a a space biotech.

(04:48:05):
No.
I mean, they'll still be physical system.
Okay.
The physical but the the person who will do what you're talking about on the biological level will be coming from somebody else who says, no.
The ultimate person in our industry will be the space biotech, person.
Well, so, you know, the the it space, space exploration, space architecture, it's a team sport.

(04:48:36):
So there there will be a lot of lot of, specialties to come together.
I I appreciate the passion for the the discipline.
I appreciate it.
This kinda this this makes it genuinely, like, literally posthuman because I think, you know, those trillions of people living and working in space someday, they're probably not just like us.

(04:48:59):
They're derived from us.
They're, you know, phylogenetically related to us, but they're
not us.
We we've had there's enough science fiction books out there where the the eco the civilization has different types of mutations that enable them to work in certain conditions, and and they they form their own cliques, and they form their own spaces that that's where they live in.

(04:49:23):
So it's been forecasted that this would happen, but we're talk as you said, I think the words we're using were 1000 of years in the future is what you had said.
Well, I'm not that I don't know because, I I can't tell you when it'll happen, but I can't imagine that if we go a 1000 years in the future and look back that it won't have happened.

(04:49:50):
But you're very optimistic that humans will address the challenges that we have on earth and move forward.
It sounds that way.
No.
I'm I'm not.
Okay.
I'm, like I said, I believe what I see.
I would like to be optimistic, but in a world where people fight over petty stuff

(04:50:14):
Mhmm.
Fight to the death Yeah.
Repeatedly over petty stuff, and are focused on solving wrong problems, by which I mean problems that actually don't have a lever over sustainability in the future.

(04:50:35):
I I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic.
I'm realistic.
Okay.
In in a in a vast universe, I am, I guess I do believe let's use the word believe there.
I I believe that in a universe with, that's, you know, over 13,000,000,000 years old and has trillions of galaxies each with 100 of 1,000 or I'm sorry, 100 of millions of stars each with more than one planet.

(04:51:08):
I don't think we're the only ones.
I I do believe, though, Glenn, that you are more optimistic than you let on.
And there's a hope inside of you because the phraseology you use, the the purse the angles that you address topics are with a hopeful twist.

(04:51:32):
But being realistic, as you've said, that the there is a possibility of something going wrong, but you're you have an optimistic sense about you.
I okay.
I'll I'll take that.
I I do think lots of things are going wrong.
Oh, I I I I'm not I'm Yeah.
I'm not disagreeing or agreeing.
I'm saying from the way in which you phrased certain types of story lines, you've got this twist that if I had to put you on one side, if it was a 0 to 10 and then 10 to minus 10 and, you know, minus 10 is the negative and 10 is the positive, I'm gonna put you on the positive side.

(04:52:08):
Let's go back to the Fermi paradox.
There we go.
Good.
So,
you know, there there are different ways of addressing the question of where are they.
I agree with the description that you, you know, gave earlier that we we've been here for such a short time.

(04:52:29):
It should not be a surprise.
But a model that I came across when I was doing my research in grad school that I just found really un unshakable, is even if you take the slowest, most cumbersome approach that we can imagine for migrating to other star systems.

(04:52:56):
Well, expanding.
Right?
Just to be clear again, expanding to other star systems.
It results and that is world ships, you know, multigenerating world
ships.
I mean,
you if you faster than the speed of light, blah blah blah.
If you just took if you just took Star Wars, if you just took oh, not Star Trek.
It's Star Trek.
They're still based on Earth.

(04:53:18):
Well, but, let's not go there because that requires work No.
No.
But I'm not saying we're I'm just saying the con conceptual, even in the conceptual form, Earth is still
But but let me say what I
where where
it was going.
Even if you assume the most ridiculously cumbersome way of expanding to other star systems, the galaxy is not actually that big.

(04:53:44):
And the wave of multigenerational expansion, would only take a fraction of the age of the galaxy.
So that's what the genuine Fermi paradox isn't like, where are the little green men and why haven't they come to visit?
It's where are we in the almost inevitable event, which is essentially instantaneous in the life of the galaxy in which sentience expands throughout the galaxy.

(04:54:19):
Mhmm.
Okay.
There's only a couple of options.
One is that the wave already happened and it left little pockets and we're in a pocket.
So you're stepping backwards and saying we are part of the firm that some other other society might have, stepped over the great filter.
So I'm I'm getting that.
Okay.

(04:54:41):
Another is that the wave just hasn't happened yet or, you know, is happening, but it we're in a blink and it just hasn't swept past us yet.
Or we are the ones who are gonna create the wave.
And so am I optimistic?

(04:55:03):
I'm sort of accentually optimistic in the sense that I believe that it is conceivable that part of our purpose, you could call it, is to create the wave that settles the galaxy.

(04:55:24):
And so okay.
You know, I'll work toward that.
Okay.
I
because I think that's, that gives us a noble, sort of a spiritually noble role in a vast and complicated and beautiful and lethal universe.
That's it.
I I So
that's why I use this like seeding space with life, because who's to say that, it isn't, you know, Earth life that will move out and and expand.

(04:56:01):
Yeah.
So There's there's no there's nothing written in stone today.
So I it goes back to, you know, it do do I imagine that do I think it's feasible that there's a future in which humankind will always ever only be on this earth?
Yeah.
I think it's conceivable, but I don't like it and I think it's unlikely.

(04:56:23):
I think it's far more likely that, we will expand into the solar system.
We will learn to control the energies and the resources of our solar system.
We will expand further out, and we might actually be the ones who initiate this settlement wave across the whole galaxy.
What I'm going to say is that I believe that what you're saying is a very positive, optimistic perspective to even believe that the human species is the one to go out there says that humanity, even though we're watching what's going on, you have it in your your versions, that humanity has the potential to be that the one, I think is a very interesting perspective.

(04:57:16):
And I'm smiling.
Like, it's not a it's not a bad or it's just yeah.
Okay.
Then got a lot of work to do.
We have the we have the potential, and that's exactly right.
We have a lot of work.
That's the part of this.
That's the part of the Star Trek future that, I've believed ever since I was a little kid, when Star Trek first came on is it's it it doesn't have anything to do with phasers and transporters and warp drive.

(04:57:42):
What it has to do with is believing that humanity has the potential to overcome, all the crappy things we do to each other and the juvenile ways that we behave.
We have the potential to do better.
And if we do better, then there's a galaxy out there.

(04:58:08):
So I'm great.
Great.
Great.
What I don't I've got the outline, so that was the last one on there.
So That's the last one.
I don't have any
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
So I wanna
I'm kidding.
I've actually got a whole other list, but we're not
I've got if you've got the time.
Mike, you have an award or not, there's no award for this, but the longest podcast we've ever done is 4 hours in about 40 minutes.

(04:58:34):
The combination of these 2, somewhere, I believe, comes in at approximately a little shy of 5 hours.
So somewhere in that range.
How did you feel?
I mean, we're we're here.
I just because the we went over a lot.
How did you feel?
Well, I, you'll probably laugh.

(04:59:00):
Based on based based on the first conversation, I'll call it.
Yep.
I I realized I what I was doing was bringing in bits and pieces from various papers that I've written over 30 years and the stuff I've been thinking about for a long time.
And what I I I have more books to write than I thought I did.

(04:59:23):
And I would say that I felt a little bit of that, and I'm the fact that we had a break in between, I I think the second half we call it second half and just for the sake of discussion.
I think you had brought some of the pieces together, in a much more coherent way, and I think that was just given time working talking with me, meaning my style and the style of the podcast.

(04:59:50):
So I think you did a a fabulous job.
I think it was great.
So why don't we end it, and you and I will stay on for a moment?
Happy, I'm happy.
Excuse me?
If you're happy, I'm happy.
Thank you.
So my happiness is the world.
I I wish that's
how it
worked.
So I wanna thank everybody out there who took the time to to to sign in to listen to this.

(05:00:12):
I do wanna thank you, Brent.
Fantastic.
Thank you for being a participant in the age of infinite and the participant in this program.
So thank you.
That said, we wanna thank you for listening in to hope we hope you learned something today that makes a difference in your life and the lives of others.
Again, this was a long time ago, 5 hours ago, the Project Moon Knight Foundation is we look to establish a box of the roof and door on the moon, a home, that's why it's called the box of the roof and a door, on the moon to the accelerate development of an Earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species.

(05:00:57):
There are if you go to the website, project moon hut.org, and you scroll down about 2 thirds the way down, there are 3 videos.
The first one is a presentation of Macadonia.
The second is a construct of what we're working on.
And the third video gives you a sense of where we started all the way back with Bruce Pittman and the tours of NASA and the whole iteration of project Luna.

(05:01:20):
So please take the time to look at that.
So, Brent, what's the single best way to connect with you?
Well, LinkedIn.
No.
I'm I'm joking because I'm I'm, I I don't say yes to all.

(05:01:41):
The the best thing is, probably my, the email that I use for work.
Do you wanna give that to us?
Yeah.
I don't know.
Do people do Yeah.
Yeah.
People give it.
You're you're
I'm a little reluctant to to open floor No.
People do give that, and they can find you.
So it's up to you.

(05:02:02):
You're the first person I've ever had this conversation with over this.
It's it's up to you on my take, and I'll tell you from me.
Written a book, spoken around the world.
People have my email.
And no matter who connects to me, I reply back unless they're selling me something.
And the reason is I never know who that one person is.

(05:02:24):
And just to give you one example, I did get a connection on LinkedIn.
The person had 69 connections.
Oh, come on.
That's that's spam.
That's fake.
That's something.
And I wrote back, which I always do, why did you connect to me?
He wrote this whole thing to me.
David, I read your book.

(05:02:46):
I came into this position.
I've been following this.
I love it.
And from that point, it was with 69 people.
That's it.
I've always tried to respect the individual not knowing who's going to connect to me.
So it's up to you.
I I do the I'll say I do the same, although even in retirement because I'm consulting, my time is super limited.

(05:03:07):
So You're not dead here.
You you look alive when I look at you.
So what's what do you wanna give?
You wanna give a LinkedIn?
You wanna give an email?
You wanna give both?
No.
No.
I'll I'll give an email Okay.
Because it's easier.
It's bs@spacearchitect.org.
Bs@spacearchitect.org.
Fantastic.
And the name is brentserw0od.

(05:03:31):
Anybody could look that up.
So that said, Brent, you stay on for after for a few minutes, but let's say, I would love to connect with you, anybody out there.
We've you could reach me at david@moonhut.org.
You can connect with us at at project moon hut on Twitter, x, whatever you wanna call it.
I'm also at Goldsmith.

(05:03:52):
LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, mister David Goldsmith on Instagram.
There's many different ways to be able to connect with us.
We have so many people joining and participating in project Moon Hut that almost every day there are new groups of people who are coming on board.
So anybody wanna reach out, we'd love to talk with you.
Great podcast.
And that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.
Hello, everyone.
This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite.
Throughout history, we've seen humanity undergo transformational shifts that are so impactful, they define entire ages.
Just recently, you've lived through the information age, and what an incredible ride that's been.
Now think about this.
You could be very well right in the midst of being part of another monumental shift, the transition into the age of infinite.
We're talking about an age that transcends the concept of scarcity and abundance.
It introduces a lifestyle rich with infinite possibilities, enabled by a new paradigm that links the moon and the Earth and what we call Mearth.
This synergy will create a new ecosystem and economic model propelling us into the era of infinite possibilities.
It might sound like a plot of an extraordinary sci fi story, but this is a story that you'll see unfold in your lifetime.
This podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation.
We look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a Moon Hut.
We were named by NASA through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn the innovations and paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.
For more information, you could visit our website at wwwprojectmoonhot.org, Or you can check us, where you could be checking out our 4 year plan, the work that we're engaged in, and so much more.
We are a nonprofit.
So while you're there, consider making a donation to support the cause by clicking on the button in the top right hand corner.
So today, let's dive into the podcast.
This is an incredible title.
I'm I'm wondering where we're gonna go with it.
It is.
Why the NASA Stakeholder Community is incapable of delivering their own vision.
That's a mouthful.
Today, we have with us Brent Sherwood.
Hi, Brent.
Hi.
Okay.
As always, we give a very brief bio.
Brent is a space architect, and he'll have to go over what that is so we understand that.
But he was senior vice president of Blue Origin where he began with a $30,000,000 budget.
And at the end of his tenure, he had a $1,000,000,000 budget and 1100 people.
He's worked for JPL as the first founder of the JPL Innovation Foundry.
He's worked with Boeing where he led teams in human robotic planetary exploration and space station module manufacturing.
And to this day, he's published over 6 60 papers on exploration and development for beyond Earth.
Today, he does consult with the AIAA, which is the American Institute For Astronautics and Avionic or Astronautics and Aeronautics and Astronautics.
And he Dan Dunbacher, who is the executive director, has done a podcast with us.
So we're very glad to have him here.
Now this point is being brought up.
I know it's been brought up in other introductions.
I personally do not know a single thing that Brent is going to talk about.
People believe that because the podcasts are long and they're rich, they've that we've kind of coordinated all of this.
Brent and I got on a call.
We decided on a topic and a general direction.
We agreed to that, and Brent has been on his own to decide what he wants to cover.
I have no clue.
In front of me, I have multiple pages.
I take notes while we're on the call.
And our objective here, my objective is to learn from Brent, and hopefully, you will too.
So that said, let's get right on to the program.
Brent, do you have an outline or a bullet point list for us to cover?
I do.
Okay.
I suppose you'd like to hear it.
I'd like to know how many points we have so I can make sure to write them down.
What what how many do you have?
I have 2 groups.
The first group has 7 bullets.
The second group has 3.
Okay.
So let's start with the first group.
The first group is, the title of the podcast.
Okay.
And you want me to write that?
To write that because I just did an arrow that said that there.
Okay.
What's next?
I'll just give them to you in order.
Yep.
Number 1, Mars is out of reach despite what anybody says.
Mars is out of reach despite what anyone has said.
I'm loving it already.
Next.
Second.
Mars wouldn't yield the transformation the vision presumes.
Not yield.
The Mars Mars will not yield the transition?
The transformation.
Transformation.
Next.
Number 3, why is the NASA vision stuck on Mars anyway?
Vision stuck on Mars.
Okay.
Next.
Number 4, what about the compromised vision, which is Artemis?
Compromised vision.
Next.
Number 5, are there better visions?
You know I'm smiling.
Are there better visions?
Okay.
6
What should be the role of NASA and other agencies?
All of NASA and other
agencies.
7.
What conversations should we be having?
Should we be having section 2?
Yeah.
Section 2, I've just called the future history of human spaceflight, and it has, 3, bullets.
The first is, a demographic shift from explorers to workers and visitors to settlers.
From work a democratic shift from Explorers.
Explorers.
To workers and visitors
to settlers.
2?
Number 2 is architecture over engineering.
And the last?
Posthuman space architecture.
Okay.
I think I have a filled 3 quarters of a page just with the outline.
That's great.
Yeah.
Okay.
So so that that set ought to get us through an afternoon.
No.
No.
No.
This is I I'm I'm smiling the whole time because if you heard the calls that we had today, We touched on 3 quarters of what you've said just today.
So it's I think this is going to be a very I'm very much looking forward to hearing your perspectives on these.
So Mhmm.
Let's start with the first one, which is why the NASA, stakeholder community isn't capable delivering on their own vision.
Are you gonna start with that, or are you gonna start with how Mars is out?
No.
Let's let's start with the title.
Okay.
And then what you know, the I the 7 I gave you, the 7 bullets in there are they're kind of in a logical sequence, but they don't have to be.
So,
Yeah.
And we will we will address them as we go along.
And before we actually start, can you I know you're probably gonna bring it up later, but during our just few minutes of getting started, you brought up space architecture in the bio.
You've, it's important.
Can you define the space what a space architect is?
Oh, you bet.
So we the field defines itself.
Space architecture is the theory and practice of designing and building human environments for use in space.
And so I it sounds like and tell me if I'm wrong.
It sounds when when we use the term architecture on Earth, we're talking typically about a structure that's on the ground.
You're not talking about an airplane.
We're not talking about a submarine.
Yet your definition uses the geography of space, which also means, planetary.
How do you distinguish between those two dimensions if I think you understand what I'm asking.
Yeah.
So, first, let's go back to to the premise of the question.
In the world of seafaring, there is a field called naval architecture, which is the seagoing equivalent of terrestrial architecture.
That's designing vessels that have human activity in them.
And so in that sense, it's no different in space.
The environments are different.
The requirements are different.
The mission objectives are different, all that kind of thing.
But the fundamental idea is we have machines and we have people and systems that need to host people and support their activities are what we call architecture.
Mhmm.
That's you know, you can you can look retrospectively in history, and that's what all buildings do.
Mhmm.
But in the future, some of our buildings will be moving at 7 kilometers per second.
So when you actually are saying a space architect, you're not saying a moon architect or a Mars architect or a, I'm gonna throw it out there, a Venus architect.
You're talking about the space between objects and space.
Well,
Do you understand that?
That's that's why I'm pushing on the question.
For the foreseeable future, there's not much point in differentiating, in subdividing the field of space architecture among those domains.
There will come a time, but for now, the constraints of spaceflight altogether, coupled with the requirements for all the, I'll call it, messy problems of human activity define why we need space architecture.
And so in our textbook that we published in 2009, we do divide space architecture into orbital architecture, planet surface architecture, and terrestrial analog space architecture.
But that's just a convenient way of dividing.
Right now, the number of people who I'll say like Tyrion Lannister, who know things about space architecture is so small, that it's not a productive effort to try to subdivide the field.
Hopefully, you'll learn over time that I'm, I'm very literal.
It might be a good thing or bad thing.
You're not married to me, but that is something.
So when I hear something, I'm listening to this precise word.
So I'm a little bit more, purposeful when it comes to definitions.
And when it comes to beyond Earth, I'm even more so because I get lost in the conversations.
The the beyond Earth ecosystem has so many so much terminology that to get your mind around it based upon acronyms which are proliferate the entire ecosystem.
It makes it more difficult.
So in my mind, I'm actually trying to say, well, where does this fit, and what would this be in 10 years or 15 years?
So that's why I was asking the question.
You're you're aggregating it for the purposes of today.
But if we were to look 10 years out, let's assuming that the work that we're doing, Project Moon Hut and others that, are working on, we might need to redefine that language so that's more precise.
Yeah.
I mean, I think I I think, this sort of gets to the second grouping of our topics today, the future history of, human spaceflight.
Okay.
I I believe there will, come a time when there will be companies and teams and experts who specialize in orbital architecture, like space stations, versus those who specialize in planet surface architecture, like planetary bases and urban scale settlements.
Because they're skill sets.
They're
specific geographies.
It's driven by something that's really fundamental to the challenge of space architecture, which is that the environmental requirements are unique.
Yep.
And so you might say on Earth, well, yeah, there's architects who specialize in urban skyscrapers and architects who specialize in, I don't know, suburban factories or something.
And that's true.
If we compare the kind of fundamental requirements drivers, even just between the lunar surface and low Earth orbit, they drive you in different directions.
Right?
So lunar surface has 16 gravity.
Earth orbit has microgravity or free fall.
Lunar surface has dust, which is really bad stuff in multiple ways.
Yeah.
Leo has orbital debris at, you know, 15 kilometers per second.
So the the the nature of the environments is different enough that specialization will be it'll become required.
Today, you know, we're just at the beginning.
So
Well, the the, don't wanna belabor it too much.
You use the term naval architecture.
When I'm thinking about someone who's building a submarine or building, certain types of vessels, I don't would it be a naval architect you'd bring on, or would you bring on a naval engineer?
Well, both.
You know, there is a job description in the navy and and in the in the civil, seagoing industry called naval architect.
Okay.
And but like any major system development, bringing a design to fruition and into operation requires teams of 100 to 1000 of people, many, many of whom are engineers.
So are you more or less saying that a naval architect or a, a space architect is an umbrella position over the subcategories?
Hence,
the second bullet in my second rubric, Which which is architecture over engineering.
So,
Okay.
So we can we can get through those letters.
Lisa, at
We can do it later or now if you want.
Whatever you want.
What what's your would it be helpful if we knew it if I knew it?
Because I'm I'm trying to get my mind around it, and we're gonna go if we're gonna travel down your outline, would it be better if we addressed it right now?
You know the outline more than I do.
Matter.
We're there now.
So I I Okay.
So yeah.
So let's explain because I'm hearing naval architect, and I'm thinking a project manager.
I'm thinking, I've worked on very large projects.
I worked with the CEO and executive teams of Maersk.
You know, we're talking big vessels.
We're talking architecture, design, or pathways, and operations, everything that goes into creating large scale structures.
So I'm trying to get my mind around how this would actually transition the way you're seeing it.
Yeah.
So I think the the the way the the simplest way to understand the role descriptions or the differentiation among roles is, let's start with project management.
Okay.
You know, any large scale development requires people who are expert at running large scale programs Mhmm.
To get things done.
So there's project plans.
There's rules of the road.
There's schedules, budgets, supply chain, human capital.
You know, there's all the things that it takes to to sort of bring the forces to bear to get a thing done, a big thing done on a schedule.
Yep.
And that is a discipline unto itself.
Another one, which at the moment is what drives the design side of space programs is engineering.
So what is engineering?
Engineering is a deductive quantitative discipline that sizes systems so that they perform, and it measures their performance and yields a set of performance attributes that is intended.
So, I mean, that may sound like a weird way to describe what everybody knows engineers do.
But No.
No.
That's that's, it's an interesting it it's an interesting way to describe it.
I mean, real really, the key is that engineering proceeds with deductive reasoning.
It has to.
You go from thing to thing to thing, and it all has to hang together.
And that's what systems engineering does is it stitches it all together.
Mhmm.
What architecture does, this so this is a third leg of the stool is how I view it.
Architecture is not analytical deductive.
It's design directive.
And so it's synthetic.
And what it does is it starts with a blank slate and says, here's what this thing ought to look like.
And we'll come back to why it might ought to look like that.
But having defined that on the blank slate, then it operates through design and through project management and through engineering to get as close as possible to that envisioned state of what something ought to be.
So it's design directive.
It directs design activity toward an envisioned end.
This is why in terrestrial building or naval architecture, there is always an architectural vision.
And then, yeah, there's a whole lot of engineering to make it happen.
But your word was umbrella.
It's under the umbrella of an integrating way of thinking, an integrative way of thinking.
This is critical for two reasons.
One is if it's important for the product to have some measure of human value beyond technical efficiency, then you got to have design.
You can't just engineer your way to a solution.
That's why we live in houses and not strip malls.
The other reason it's critical is that architecture at its best certainly is not amenable to algorithmic solution.
So if you set yourself a technical problem that can be implemented without human behavior involved, let's say a robotic device that's gonna conduct science on a remote planet, you can develop that with engineering.
That's done all the time.
But as soon as you have people living in it, trying to use it, acting human in it, that introduces a source of messiness, and unpredictability, which is not amenable to analytical solutions or closed form solutions.
You can't compute your way to an architecture that adequately captures the aspirations and the sociological needs and the psychological needs of a human occupant or set of occupants.
It requires a human designer to do that.
That's why we have architecture.
And the fundamental argument here is that, as we move as human space flight moves into the future, it will get more diverse.
It will include a greater range of demographics of its occupants for a greater range of activities and behaviors, and therefore, it will need architecture just like building on earth does or just like, building a cruise ship does.
It requires architecture.
We're not quite there yet in space, but we're getting there pretty rapidly.
It's funny that the word architecture is the word used because I'm analogizing it to a very simplistic form just for the sake of me to understand the I understand what you're talking about, but I'm actually bringing another level down because almost everything you said could be, kind of brought to life when you think about a clothing designer.
A clothing designer sits down.
They're not an engineer.
There's not an architect, but they sit down, and they draw sketches that would fit the human form, fulfill its, its obligations of usage, be able to be manufactured, could be dissected into the components to be able to produce it, has a complete supply chain behind it, could be part of an entire family of clothing, top, bottoms, clothing that matches, and it's not called an architect.
So in the in the vein of architecture, which I think is just interesting that you're taking it in this direction, is that it's almost as if and I dated somebody who did this when I was in universe in college.
And in order for us to finish the night, I would help her do the work just because I I'd done I'd done a lot of work with architecture growing up.
And the the piece of this is that I can now see where you're positioning this skill set.
It's someone who will create form.
It doesn't actually have to be the beginning, it sounds like.
But you create a form of what is anticipated product design or or use case, then others, engineers could come in and translate that into something that is functional, but it also can go the other way.
The engineers sit down and say, hey.
I've got this, an an an an architect type.
I've got this.
This is what I'm thinking about.
And then you would then say, well, let me transpose that into form.
Is that kind of a position?
I
it's not just about form.
I I'd say think about it this way.
In the world of human space systems, Like we said at the beginning, there's project management no matter what.
Okay?
Yep.
That's off the table.
Yes.
I understand.
All space systems have, the classic disciplines of space system development.
There's structures and mechanisms.
There's, attitude control, propulsion, avionics, guidance navigation, and control.
There's, telecommunications.
This like, every satellite or spacecraft or space station or space platform or exploration system has those subsystems.
And there there is a world of engineering specialties, that has grown up to be expert in designing, developing, building, testing, and operating those subsystems.
Okay, so far so good.
Now, if you're going to stick people in this thing, there's an additional set of disciplines required.
There's what we call human factors engineering.
There's environmental control and life support systems.
There's crew system interfaces, command and control interfaces.
There may be space suits and etcetera.
These are the things that unmanned spacecraft don't have that human spacecraft do.
Alright.
So far so good.
And that works if you have a very small crew of very highly trained professionals, write stuff kinda astronauts, and they're gonna go to the moon or someplace, on a mission.
But it doesn't work if you've got 50 guests a month at a resort in low Earth orbit.
That's a very different demographic.
Yeah.
So if you're going to have a large number of people, if you're gonna have people who are not highly trained, who are not expert in operating the systems that are keeping them alive, and particularly if they're there for a purpose which is not exploration of a lunar crater or, you know, an asteroid or something, if they're there for fun and they paid a lot of money to do it, they're gonna have expectations for types of activities and amenities that, involve human behaviors that traditional space engineers have never ever had to deal with except maybe at home.
Mhmm.
So that's what architects bring.
It's the other end of this spectrum of I absolutely love it.
For for human activity, which as I said at the start is it's it's messy.
It's not like you can't just write a program that makes a great piece of architecture for, a diverse set of users.
So I'm I'm gonna pick on our friend Dan Dunbacher, not in a bad way.
We've had multiple in individuals look at the budgeting for Project Moon, the 4 phases, And we were looking at all sorts of skill sets.
And Dan was the last one to put the and I'm not picking on it.
Dan was a fantastic person.
You know him.
Great guy.
He was the last person to put his mark on this.
And I'm going to add because now we have you.
But we these were the categories of a team that we had designed for modules, nodes, and that type of development was life support power engineer, thermal control engineer, electrical engineer, control engineer, planetary geologist, location specialist kind of, systems engineer kind of generalist, psychology of the moon person, a person who understands that, a logistics communications operation, a mechanical structure engineering, software engineering, human factors, and robotic engineering.
And, again, this is possibly a newer discipline.
That's okay.
This is not a an indictment.
It was just that was Dan happened to be the last person who put his touch on it, and I the what he brought in was powerful.
So I'm gonna add right now a space, architect because you would say that that's one that's missing.
If you got people in it, then yes.
Yeah.
So that there the question wasn't just a question of understanding, meaning I need to understand this so that we could do this conversation.
It's because I'm looking at this list, and I'm asking myself with all the people we asked that have part of Project Moon Hunt, we've got quite a lot of people.
Not a single person brought up space architect.
So can could you answer it's not a why because it's an interesting question in yeah.
Why didn't someone say, with all the smart people, definitely, you're missing space architect?
Yeah.
Because the field is new.
And Maynard Dalton was arguably the first space architect.
He designed the inside of Skylab.
Okay.
David Nixon, who is a member of our global network of space architects, was one of the few people who developed the fundamental interior architecture of the modules on Space Station, all of them, the Japanese one, the European one, the American one with the the the four rack configuration with the standoffs in the corners.
Mhmm.
So there have been, space architects who've worked in the belly of the beast for decades, but not very many of them.
And, when you have a program that involves 1,000 of people, it's easy for the engineers and managers to miss 1.
The so coming at it from a different angle, one of the challenges that someone like myself who has not been a space person my whole life or beyond Earth and not spent the time thinking about it, I have learned through history that, industries' ecosystems get upended by an individual who sees the world in a different way.
And that when you have individuals who are homegrown, they've grown through the system.
They see all the same things.
They, you know, NASA, NASA, NASA, NASA, European Space Agency, JAXA, whatever the, the Japanese Space Agency, whatever the historical references are, they tend to see things the same way.
And I'll give you an example.
Maybe you could then reply to it.
Elon came in, and he said manufacturing could be done a different way, and he changed it.
He came from the outside.
He could have loved beyond Earth for a very long time.
That could have been his life's ambition and all of that.
I don't know his full story.
But let's say he came in and looked at it differently.
Is there something be said for this outside relevance to say maybe Dixon and, Maynard?
Maybe they is it Dixon I said?
David David.
David Nicks.
I I merged them.
It is there something to be said for saying maybe there is a completely different way that we're overlooking because we have this do it for centuries or do it for decades, not centuries, decades of
Yeah.
I I I would I wouldn't be so dramatic as to say we're overlooking it.
We're at the edge of an ocean, and every now and then a wave comes in and laps our feet a little bit.
We've barely begun human spaceflight.
And really, I think my fundamental message here, the reason that this network of people around the world has gotten together to find the field, published a few textbooks in the field, and we're about to conduct a decadal survey of the field.
And there's a AIAA technical committee for space architecture.
The reason we're doing all that is because we recognize that the world of human spaceflight is on the cusp of changing dramatically.
It's really a very simple thing.
As my former boss, Jeff Bezos, likes to say, the reason you fly people in space is to fly people in space.
And part of what that means is these like, engineers call it the human system.
Okay.
Normal people call them people.
Yeah.
I'm I'm
I'm one of those I'm one of those people who say, why are you calling it that?
That's not what we call it on earth.
Yes.
If if they're people and and if the whole idea is to make space and spaceflight increasingly normalized and part of civilization on our way to being a solar system species, then that means exactly what Blue Origin's tagline says.
It's about millions of people living and working in space.
Okay.
Larger numbers doing more diverse activities in more, diverse locations in space introduces, reintroduces, atavistic needs that humans have in society.
That's what architects are trained to design for.
So, you will not find that in aerospace engineering textbooks.
You can learn how to make an airplane safe.
You can learn how to land on the moon, but you can't learn how to make a space faring civilization if you don't include the disciplines that have spent 1,000 of years learning how to do it.
So I guess then, because this is the one that Dan added, he added human factors.
Yeah.
Human factors is a small sliver of space architecture.
Like, there's human factors discipline that's used in the design of cockpits and fighter jets because you gotta be able to reach things at high g.
You gotta be able to read the gauges, etcetera, etcetera.
That's all human factors engineering.
That just means, can you reach it?
Can you use it?
It doesn't say, can you be happy?
Will you go nuts?
Will you go postal?
It doesn't say anything about, living.
Right?
So Yeah.
It doesn't like anything
I like Copostal.
Copostal in there, long enough.
Maybe I'll I'll just give a very specific example.
Okay.
You got you got a worker in an orbiting hotel who has maybe 6 month stint, alternating, you know, 6 months up, 6 months at home, 6 months up, 6 months at home.
Okay.
Well, is that person supposed to put their relationships on hold for their career as a hotel worker in space?
Oh, no.
Oh, well, then we need to accommodate relationships and how they happen, how they start, how they end.
Right?
This is human living we're talking about.
All we're talking about is doing that in an environment which is new.
It happens onboard ships.
Yeah.
It doesn't really happen on airplanes because airplane flights aren't that long.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've been on a lot of 16 hours, but that's about it.
I think this one is what longest one
is 18 hours now, I think.
No.
It's not We we have a different word for a relationship that happens in 16 hours.
Right.
Yes.
We do.
Yeah.
Okay.
I I it it's an interesting additive to the beyond Earth ecosystem vocabulary, and I rightly so.
I I do there's there's nothing I'm disagreeing with.
I'm trying to find out more as Yeah.
And you said the key I mean, what it really is is it is additive.
It is literally additive.
And just, you know, simply recognizing we're talking about human communities building, supporting, you know, hosting and supporting and promoting human communities.
Ah, okay.
Now we're talking about architecture.
If you look, this is I'm going to reference the 4 phases which you've seen already.
We have 4 phase development of the moon, and this was the, sitting with, Bruce Pittman, and and the story is all online.
When the 4 phases were outlined, if you think about the naming, the first one was a box with a roof and a door.
Bruce and the team at NASA Ames came up with this project moon hut, h u t, because the initial orientation that we that was brought up was box to the roof and a door on the moon is a home.
So we're not calling it a lunar this and a lunar that or this.
It's it's a home.
A box to the roof and a door is a home on the moon, which means it fits family, it meets the demands of humans.
You look at phase 2.
Phase 2 is an industrial park.
And as part of the industrial park is you have to be able to have individuals doing their everyday activities, not astronauts, cosmonauts, taikonauts.
It's not that.
It's individuals that could be engineers.
They could be, machinists.
They could be whatever category you'd like.
Phase 3, I remember bringing up what was called extended stay.
That's our 3rd it's called extended stay.
We're gonna stay there longer.
We're gonna have different demands.
And he brought up, what's his name?
Bigelow.
He said, you know, Bigelow, he did that extended stay.
That's what it was called.
You stayed there longer, which had different demands as an architect would have to for someone who's gonna stay longer.
And phase 4 is called community.
Now they're very, very plain titles, but they're very descriptive of different need basis that kind of fit your architectural definitions you shared.
Does that make
sense?
Yeah.
I mean, that's the direction that we are inevitably going.
I I think well, we either will go in that direction or spaceflight will never get close to doing the things that people casually imagine it will.
Yep.
That's a and I'm assuming you're gonna touch on that later.
So is there anything else in this, I'm gonna call it introductory component off of the outline, that you would like to cover when it in this or we could bring it up later too.
No.
Actually, let let's just We did go ahead.
Speak.
So let's go back to the the killer title, why the NASA stakeholder community is incapable delivering on their own vision.
Yeah.
No.
No.
That is your share with me.
I wanna know, and and I'm excited to know.
I wanna hear what you believe or why you believe this because this came out of you.
Normally, titles take a while to develop.
Actually, Dan's took 3 calls.
And I'm, again, not picking on Dan, but I remember it was 3 calls.
We had to find something that he was passionate about that worked.
You were very precise in where you wanted to go with this.
So what do you mean by this?
Yeah.
So this is this has been, a theme for me for most of my career, and I've published lots of papers about different facets of this dilemma.
I guess I'd start maybe by saying, you know, the apocryphal description of, I guess, it's AA or something is, you know, the the the the first step is to recognize you have a problem.
And Okay.
I believe the stakeholder community does not recognize that it is suffering from an existential problem.
I agree with you.
That's why I phrase the title, on purpose to be a little punchy.
Not, you know, certainly not not trying to throw any of my professional colleagues under the bus.
These are people that I've worked with for decades, and I have great respect for everything everybody's trying to do.
However, one of the things that I've learned in my career is well, I'll say it a different way.
It it goes back to something that one of my professors told me in college, at the end of a semester, which is don't mistake effort for results.
Yep.
And I never forgot that.
I think it's a very potent way of thinking.
And in the real world, as opposed to the academy, it says everything.
Because in the real world and in space flight, you don't get partial credit.
So it doesn't matter how many years you've worked on it.
It doesn't matter how serious you are about it.
It doesn't matter how passionate you are.
It doesn't matter how noble the cause.
The only thing that matters is what you deliver.
And if we look at the facts, the SLS and Orion system that NASA has developed in various forms since the early 2000 is on the cusp of becoming usable.
The Orion program has been in existence now for 20 years fundamentally.
SLS in its current form, was given birth to in 2010.
Here we are 14 years later.
It's flown once.
And the NASA inspector general's office says that it will cost $4,000,000,000 every time it flies.
Yes.
Isn't that a crazy number?
So what this what this says is that, again, it has nothing to do with good intentions or or or anything.
It says that the facts on the ground say that the program that we are paying for, you and I, every April 15th, is not delivering the results that we need it to or that we want it to.
It's ironic that most Americans in polls, it shows that most Americans, think NASA is probably overfunded, but they have no idea what the NASA budget actually is, nor do they realize what a fraction of the DOD budget the NASA budget is, nor do they have a grip on how that budget compares to what they themselves collectively spend on pizza and beer every year.
So as a society, our ambitions and our dreams, I would say our image of what we want our NASA to be and do is completely out of sync with what our agency is actually capable of delivering.
So so And we can argue No.
No.
I argue, capability is there's there's what what you are theoretically capable of doing, and then there's what you're in fact capable of doing.
And I'm talking about the facts.
I'm just looking at the output as a measure of effectiveness.
Okay.
Well, you you you're going to the output.
I wanna know what's I'm looking at the title.
Why the NASA Space Colder Community?
And you can't I can't see you.
You can't see me, so I'm just reading it.
Is incapable delivering on their own vision.
You gave me an output.
Why are they incapable?
I know what the many times we've said $4,200,000,000, $2,000,000,000 to to launch.
All those numbers don't work.
But why?
Alright.
So let's start with what the vision is.
We'll start at the end of the bullet.
You know?
What is the NASA stakeholder community's vision?
In in one line, as repeated by every senior leader at NASA for many years now, it is humans to Mars.
That's how NASA defines success strategically of its human spaceflight program, humans to Mars.
And there's phrases that have been used since the early 2000.
It changes a little bit with administrations and administrators.
But, fundamentally, it's we're going to Mars.
Okay.
Mhmm.
So let's tackle that first bullet, of the list of 7 that I gave you.
Mars is out of reach Okay.
Despite what anybody says.
Why is it out of reach?
Well, astrodynamically, it's not.
In terms of propulsion, it's not.
JPL and other organizations around the planet do execute Mars missions on a relatively routine cadence, And we've done some amazing things at Mars.
However, human space flight is fundamentally different.
I'll just give you a couple of data points for this.
One potentially disarming, literally meaning disabling unknown, is how humans who have only in the extremest of cases have spent slightly more than a year in microgravity can execute a 3 year long mission.
In the middle of which is surface operations in space suits on a planet with gravity when we only have experience with microgravity deconditioning and the remediation of it on 1 year timescales.
So this is a topic which the, I'll call it the human Mars community, waves its hands around.
And yet the success of a mission hinges on this.
If you do an opposition class mission, it takes 5 to 6 months one way.
You're on the surface for 30 to 45 days, but then you gotta spend a year and a half or more to get back, if you do it that way.
If you do
it the other way, which
is kinda silly, you can do the long leg on the way out, but then you're really deconditioned by the time you get there.
Most so the the community has gone back and forth between opposition class and conjunction class or so called short stay versus long stay architectures.
The conjunction class mission is a home and transfer out and back effectively.
So it's like 6 to 9 months each way, but you're stuck on the surface for a year
and a half.
A year and a half on the surface of Mars is would be quite an undertaking.
This problem of the challenge, I'd call it, of how to, in today's risk averse world, plan and execute a human mission with this risk of microgravity deconditioning and its effects on the effectiveness or even safety of the mission, that's a problem.
Another one is what to do about radiation in deep space.
So, a lot of people, may well, most people may not know, some people certainly know that we were super lucky in the Apollo program.
There's a major solar proton event that happened between Apollo 16 and Apollo 17.
If it had happened during one of those missions, it would have probably changed the course of the space program.
We were not equipped to shield astronauts from an event like that.
The modern concepts for human missions to Mars require some kind of radiation storm shelter, which could be polyethylene.
It could be water, a combination of the 2.
It turns out for a for a multiyear mission, the amount of water and food you have to have is kind of on the same order as the shielding you might need around a very small storm shelter that you can cram the crew into.
But on those long missions, you've also got galactic cosmic rays, and you cannot shield against them.
And we don't yet have biomedical remediations for them as in cellular repair
Mhmm.
You know, with nanomachines and stuff like that.
We don't have
that yet.
Nope.
We don't.
You're gonna
take a crew and you're gonna, stick them out there for 3 years in that radiation environment.
Okay.
These are only 2.
I I use those examples because they're very vivid examples for, you know, people who are people like we said before.
Back when I was on the Human Exploration Framework Team, NASA's planning team at the end of the constellation program, there was a list of technology areas required to achieve humans to Mars.
The I'm looking at a list right now in a paper I published in 2012.
It's got too many to count in real time here, but it's on the order of about 70 technology needs when they're resolved into discrete projects like energy storage, high high day rate forward link, teller about a control with time delay, a surface suit, on and on and on.
And this was NASA's list, NASA's own list.
Different architectures have different lists of mandatory technologies or essential technologies.
And so you might have some architectures that have fewer bells and whistles, and maybe you can get by with, let's just say, 50 instead of 70.
But it's still an astronomical
it's an astronomical number because if you have so many variables that are not solved, they're not solved.
But to be fair, this is why we have a NASA.
Right?
We tackle hard technology problems, and we solve them.
That's so that's that's fine.
But but but here's a dilemma.
This is a planning dilemma.
This is now not rocket science.
Every one of these things is a technology development project.
Okay?
Like all projects, there is a probability distribution associated with the, cost at complete and the completion date.
And yet, NASA's architectures require all of these before the first mission can happen.
Okay.
So in mathematical terms, if you convolve the probability distributions of all of those essential technologies, it makes predicting the date or the cost infeasible.
You cannot do it.
Mathematically, you cannot do it.
So any administrator that sits in a in testimony on the hill and is grilled about how much is this gonna cost and when are we gonna land on Mars cannot give an answer.
This is a fundamental problem when your agency has wrapped itself around that objective.
But we you you have 2 words here, and we we have to join them.
And to a third this is the bigger question.
So there's NASA and stake oh, it's 3.
Stakeholder community.
I put them as stakeholder, but that's community.
So this includes the, external, vendors, providers that help to make this ecosystem that get funded to make this ecosystem build.
And we're we're talking here only in this case
Also, it also includes the funding sponsors.
So it includes congress and
the administration.
So I'm going to a higher level.
There's a technological challenge.
But when I'm looking at this as why, why is the NASA space holder community, including all of those players, why are they still pursuing this?
So that's the 3rd bullet on my list.
Okay.
So we so we, the third was Mars out of reach, Mars would not yield the TranscribeMeeting.
But that's the but
The third one is why is the NASA vision stuck on Mars?
Oh, okay.
And the answer is the second bullet because of, I'm gonna give you a fact and a binding, I'm gonna call it.
The the the fact is that NASA believes the NASA stakeholder community, the whole community, believes that landing humans on Mars will be transformational, that it is a worthy goal for space exploration.
Okay.
It may be.
But my finding, my conclusion is that it won't be as transformational as the vision presumes.
And the way I say it is 6 civil servants on Mars someday will not have the same effect on the world that 2 civil servants did on the moon in 1969.
And the reason there there there's several reasons for it.
One of which is that, so we we need to get into this a little bit.
Mhmm.
In the public consciousness, Mars is just another planet like the moon.
Mhmm.
It is.
Yeah.
It's maybe farther away because I look up in the sky and I can see the moon sorta.
But if I, you know, I have to kinda know where to look to see Mars, and every now and then I see a red star and somebody tells me, oh, yeah.
It must be Mars because
it's I've been doing this for I've been doing this for 8 years, Brent.
I don't know where Mars is.
And that's not an I'm I'm not trying to stab myself by saying it.
It's that I I don't look for Mars.
Yeah.
But but there are apps for it.
So, you know
Yeah.
The way you could I would have to have a desire to look for Mars.
Yeah.
I think
I think my point I I
talk to people all the time.
They're not even looking to the moon, let alone to Mars.
So, but I think my my point is that people will somehow get that Mars is farther away and harder.
But unless you're in the field, it doesn't you know, people are not good with big numbers, and so just how far how much farther away it is and just how much harder it is is lost on people.
And so, my prediction is that when it happens, people will, you know, watch
It'll be a thud.
It'll be a thud.
They'll watch the 22nd video on TikTok or whatever is the TikTok of that day, and then they'll scroll, you know, or swipe to the next one.
I, so I did a a paper on this several years ago looking at what enabled Apollo to happen.
And we don't have to go into it, but I I came up with 8 factors or conditions, I think I call them, that allow Hit the
hit the hit the top levels, the 8, very quickly so I can hear them.
Oh, sure.
An era of geopolitical brinkmanship among Yeah.
Between 2 superpowers, number 1.
Yeah.
Number 2, competitive climate.
That competitive climate was susceptible to, suasion of 4 key elements, modernizing nations, free press, American public, America's enemies by proving high-tech prowess.
Number 3, ballistic missile technology.
So we are on the cusp of flying things in space.
Number 4, earth moon is a visible destination.
It was deeply embedded in societal consciousness.
Number 5, president Kennedy set a very crisp mission statement in 1961 that was on the edge of feasibility, but it was feasible.
Number 6, we were coming from behind, for those who remember history, and nothing motivates Americans like coming from behind.
Number 7, the president was assassinated, and so his objective became a point of honor for the nation.
And the momentum from all of that, this is the 8th one, enabled what was fundamentally a blank check funding environment.
It was fought about.
The American public was only 50% behind it and so forth, but, ultimately, Apollo was allowed to cost what Apollo needed in order to meet the schedule set by president Kennedy.
Okay.
Not one of those eight conditions is repeatable today.
Not one.
So I will use yeah.
They're not repeatable.
Like, I agree.
I was gonna come in a different angle, but yes.
So so then the the real question is, okay, there's different factors.
So so
don't look backwards.
Look forwards.
Okay.
Mhmm.
There's different factors, and this is where it gets really interesting.
Frontiers are not what they used to be.
So I grew up in the sixties.
The American public trusted, scientists in white coats with pocket protectors and horn rimmed glasses, you know, telling them what the truth was.
We believed that space was the final frontier.
We saw it every Friday night on TV.
We were told it was the final frontier.
Okay.
Today's frontiers are things like genetic engineering, quantum, nanotechnology.
They're not physical frontiers the way we viewed frontiers in the sixties.
Number 2, today's population is way more skeptical and cynical, than back then.
You know, the worst thing you can do in front of a public crowd is put a a white coated scientist with pocket protectors and.
Yep.
Not you're not gonna get the result you want.
No.
Not at all.
Okay.
Number 3, deep space human exploration is harder than people realized.
It's still harder than a lot of people realize.
I would argue impossibly hard as to hard so hard that it makes it an impractical goal for a predictable plan.
And that was the point of the discussion we had a few minutes ago.
Number 4, I hate to say it, but NASA is a mature government agency.
So you have to you have to look back at history.
1950 I was born the same year as NASA.
Okay.
1958, the Eisenhower administration, took a bunch of laboratories, preexisting laboratories, and rebranded them as NASA, as this new agency.
It was an upstart agency, that was given an impossible challenge just 3 years later.
And the at the average age, when Apollo 11 landed, the average age at NASA was 28.
How do you get that?
What you have is a few very senior German rocket scientists and people who came out of the World War 2 environment, you know, large scale systems engineering for flight systems over there, and a whole lot of very young, very bright, energetic people who did not know what they did not know.
Okay.
Today I've I've done the data on all of the space company ages and agencies, and you're talking forties fifties.
The only one that's young is SpaceX.
Yeah.
So, less than 20% of the NASA workforce today is younger than 40.
So, anyway, it's a because the agency's been around for decades now, it it it has objective functions it did not have back then.
So job security was not an objective function back then.
Institutional or bureaucratic stability and continuity, well, that was not an objective function back then.
All it was was man, moon, decade.
Right?
And so now it's a it's it has bureaucratic needs as an agency that it did not have back then.
Number 5 is, I think the NASA brand is not limited to putting people on planets.
NASA does phenomenal things.
And the side of the agency that has nothing to do with human spaceflight produces breathtaking transformational science results at a steady clip in all 4 divisions.
And, you know, the launch of James Webb has shown that.
Now we've got samples sitting in sample tubes on the surface of Mars waiting to be brought back.
We're able to predict space weather much better than we were able to before, and now we do earth system science so we can actually quantify, climate change and, the amount of water we're pulling out of the subsurface and all amazing, amazing things.
Okay.
That was not the case back then.
Right?
But it is today.
NASA has a much richer brand to leverage than it did before.
Number 6 is that societal motivations are very powerful forcing functions, is the way I say it.
Are we motivated by bravura and invention?
Are we willing to tackle bold and hard challenges?
Are we more interested in the health of our four zero one ks?
We have to understand what matters to society if we expect to embark on something that society is expected to pay for.
Number 7, I think you can't make vision by looking in the rearview mirror.
You got to look out the windshield.
You got to look forward.
And we we are still implementing a fundamental programmatic sequence that von Braun posited and promoted.
If you go back to his, I'll call it, programmatic architecture, his sort of agency objective, it was build a reusable shuttle, use the reusable shuttle to build a space station, use the space station as a point of departure to go explore Mars.
Okay.
Isn't it interesting that all these decades later, we tried a reusable shuttle, didn't quite work out the way we wanted it to.
So typical American fashion, we abandoned it.
Instead of doing a second gen shuttle, we decided to do something else.
We built a space station.
Yeah.
But the space station, turns out, isn't really a good literal point of departure for exploration missions.
So now we're about to abandon the space station too.
But in, you know, lurching around a little bit, we are still on the on the von Braun plan.
That's making vision in the rearview mirror where we're executing a strategy on momentum rather than basing it on the constraints of today's world.
And I think, the 8th to me is the most important, and that's I call it violating the first principle of marketing, which is very hazardous.
NASA and its stakeholder community, congress, the administration, certainly the NASA Industrial Complex, all of its supply chain, the large contractors and their vendors misinterpreted their own history.
So the belief, a very, very deeply held belief in that community is that our purpose is to put boots on planets.
That was not what Apollo was there for.
Apollo was a mega project whose objective was embarrassing the Soviets on the world stage of public opinion through a peacetime high-tech endeavor.
It didn't have to be it didn't even have to be space, and it certainly didn't have to be landing on the moon.
There's a very, very good thorough analysis of how it came to be those things in John Logsdon's book called John F.
Kennedy and the Return to the Moon or the Race to the Moon.
I'm sorry.
And so a lot of options were considered.
And ultimately, what sifted out was what became Apollo.
But the purpose was geopolitical.
It was not technical, and it was not exploration, which is why it was so easy for president Nixon to cancel the program, while it was still underway.
We hadn't even finished all, would have been 7, but 6 Apollo surface missions and the program was canceled, because it had met its purpose.
It did exactly what it was supposed to do, and it turns out in retrospect that we were actually not in the race we thought we were.
The Soviets were not raising us, but that's beside the point.
Ever since Apollo, the NASA stakeholder community believe, has believed, that its purpose isn't what Apollo's purpose was.
Its purpose is to put boots on planets.
Oh, and if you're going to put boots on planets, you got to find the next planet after the moon and that's Mars.
And Mars was von Braun's favorite target.
So that so we are living, we are attempting, we are asymptotically approaching perhaps, this mirage goal that was, sort of, chosen by a few people decades ago in the face against the all of the harsh realities that are arrayed against us.
And here we are still like the little toy that just, you know, hits the wall and backs up and then hits the wall and backs up and hits the wall.
In my career, I watched us as a nation not go to Mars 3 separate times.
And this is the reason.
It's out of reach.
It wouldn't yield the transformation that it that the vision presumes because the world has changed around it.
And the reason that the community is stuck on the vision is because it's running on momentum.
So I I I'm you know, as I'm listening to you, there are a few things that just really pop out at me that I'm, I'm trying to ask the question in a kinda nicer way, but maybe more direct.
So let me give you the few that popped out from my experiences, and I don't have nearly the knowledge you have, the experience working in these, environments.
Yet.
Worked in over 50 countries, worked with the CEOs and executive teams from nanotechnology, aerospace, water, and sewage construction to the Maersk, GOLs, Tektronix, Infosys, WIPROS all around the world.
So these are the things that jump out at me.
Maybe you can pop, reflect on them a little bit.
First of all, we have a management that has a a very, linear sense of innovation.
They keep on pushing the same things, keep on pushing the same things.
And one of the people that you you and I spoke to in another call said he doesn't even know if 25 people or 23 people could have project Moon Hut because they're stuck in the in the past.
The it's an agency system, and the agency system is the only, group of, government, at least in the United States, but even around the world.
And Jeffrey Mamber was one who said it the best.
He said the creation of the agency system focused everybody on getting money from the agencies, And therefore, the agency had to coordinate everything, and every country's adding an agency, but the collective, capitalism, the collective ecosystem was not formed.
And to make matters worse, at least on my end, is an agency doesn't understand the interconnectedness of everything that needs to be put together.
It is done by a I I don't use this word often, but the only thing that comes to mind is a bureaucratic sense of not efficiency, not producing the right amount of, of fluid to make everything flow.
And the last one is that and there I can give you a few more, but I'm gonna stop here, is that there's a lack of foresight.
You gave one ex these few examples of why the system was different.
The environment was different.
There was a a purpose for that was driven, but yet no one is stopping it.
They're allowing it to pursue.
So to me, internally within the administrations, I'm gonna use them globally, within the administrations, there is not enough people who are going to say, this is just plain absolutely wrong.
They'll be kicked out.
They'll be moved out.
But my first meeting I ever had with the Beyond Earth ecosystem, I sat there saying to myself, this is ridiculous what they're talking about.
This is this is beyond absurd.
If I was sitting in an organization that had to build, we would never be talking about these topics at this point in time.
So those are my kind of 3 overarching.
What about the leadership?
What about the management?
What about the decision making?
What about the structure?
What about all that in your eyes?
Yes.
Well, so the the entire institution, and I don't just mean the agency.
I'm I'm Sorry.
I got a little excited.
Yeah.
I mean, its stakeholder community.
The entire institution is structured around this vision.
Yes.
So it's very, very hard.
It's understandably hard.
And again, I would interrupt myself just by saying, I have tremendous empathy and respect for everyone who's caught up in the system, but they are caught
up in it.
And it's Yeah.
Absolutely.
Really hard for the system to, disrupt itself.
This is a, you know, fundamental principle of, Clayton Christensen and everybody else in, you know, business theory.
It's really hard for a company to disrupt itself.
It's really hard for any institution to disrupt itself.
And I it could be, and we're gonna get to this because we're gonna talk about alternative visions, but it could be that 6 civil servants by the way, only 2 of them are US citizens because we do things internationally now.
Internationally now.
Okay.
The
6th observance on Mars 30 years from now is a worthy expenditure of 10 to the 11th dollars.
That could be.
I personally don't think it is, and everyone I talk to who is not, caught up in the system thinks it's not.
Yep.
Absolutely.
Hence, my
my,
factor number 8 of looking forward, don't violate the first principle of marketing.
Okay.
If you're expecting the American public to pay for this and if you're expecting their elected agents or representatives, to, allocate the budgets and, you know, monitor the performance and so forth, If if you're expecting people to want something, it's probably a good idea to find out what they want.
Not just
I can tell you.
I can
tell you.
That what they must want is humans to Mars because, of course, that's what they want.
Because, of course, that's the the right vision.
It has been all along.
Right?
That's and and so the the this is what I meant by the by the bullet we're gonna get to eventually.
But before you before you jump to that, though, we're including the European state.
We're including the entire network, not only the NASA, but anybody who's allied with the US or anybody in other countries allied with other allies.
They're all following the same model.
They're pretty much running the same race.
You don't see a lot of individuals saying, no.
No.
No.
Let's take a right here because they're so fun financially committed to this model that they they won't even stop it.
I would say yes and no.
Okay.
The the yes part is, yeah, I did a a paper probably in 2008 or something that was called something like National Space Visions, and and what what it was about was exploring the phenomenon that when a leading agency, like in the old days, the, you know, what became the Russian Space Agency or NASA, decides to go do a thing and does it because it has the means to do it, the agencies that are more up and coming follow.
They all follow.
And and you can see it in, multiple domains.
Like, did it real I'll just pose a couple here.
Sure.
Did it did it really make sense for both the European Space Agency and NASA to devote simultaneous flagship planetary science projects to moons of Jupiter?
Yeah.
Right.
We're going to Europa.
They're going to Ganymede.
Okay.
Yeah.
They're both interesting, but it's a big solar system, and there's, lots of
We're all going to the same destination.
Why?
Cable surveys, you know, tell us the priorities across the fields of space science, including planetary science, and there's a lot more to do than moons in the Jovian system.
So why is it that that happened?
Why do we both send radar orbiters to Venus?
Why do we, you know, do so many of the same things?
And it's a complex question, and I think there are both spoken and unspoken or recognized and unrecognized drivers for that.
But there is a sort of a convergence toward a singular path.
Okay.
That's the yes.
The no is that when it comes to human exploration, nobody can afford to do it other than us.
So, you know, Europe has talked about having a human scale lunar lander, but they're not gonna do one.
They're they're gonna spend their resources trying to get a reusable, heavy lift launch system because they don't wanna be out of the launch business, and they realize that it's going all reusable.
So they gotta do that first.
Okay.
So by the time they get around to doing a human scale lunar lander, we will have had multiple ones operating on the surface of the moon, and there'll be no point for Europe to do it.
So it it in the case of human deep space exploration, it is driven by the United States.
And so if other people can collaborate and provide things that we are willing to depend on, then that was the point in my paper is we need more of that.
We need more willingness to be transnationally dependent on others because, collectively, we will make much faster progress than if everybody just duplicates everybody else And, you know, everybody has to do all of it themselves.
So it's it's funny that
There's there's another very important aspect to this, though, which is, this phenomenology we're talking about applies to public money, that's directed by governments.
It does not apply to, the investments made by private investors, genuinely private investors who are self directed.
So the way to think about this is, in the late eighties when I started my career, there there were only 3 if you if you wanted to do human space flight, you only had 3 choices.
You could go into academia, where you
got total I just lost power I just lost power in the house.
So if I do lose you
Okay.
I don't, because I Well, we'll just reschedule if we have to.
But No.
No.
No.
It's it could come back, but I'm losing power, but I still got you, which is really interesting.
Okay.
Well, when you're when you're Yeah.
We're still here.
I'm I'm actually in the dark, but I don't know if we're operating.
You can see on yours, it says record record.
Right?
Yeah.
It does.
Okay.
So that means we're still going.
If I drop off, we might have to come back to this.
Yeah.
Understood.
So so So Yeah.
Well, that, yeah.
Let let me let me So This is a really important point about about, people following versus leading, or institutions following versus leading.
So back then, you you could you could do academia where you have total freedom and no authority.
You could do government where you have all the authority, but you don't do the work.
Or you could do industry where you do the work, but you don't make the decisions.
Okay.
And and so that's obviously an oversimplified model, but that's kind of fundamentally the way the industry was structured back then.
I chose industry and went to Boeing because I wanted to build things, and be close to the work.
Today, that triangle has become a tetrahedron, in my view.
There's a 4th pole out of plane, which is what I call the independent space sector.
And these are enterprises that have capable teams, full of experts and experienced people.
They have resources that are not coming out of federal agency top line budgets, and they have road maps.
They have things they wanna do.
We're not quite at the level of what you read in science fiction like Daniel Suarez or something, where people are really fully independently capable of executing major transformational deep space missions and things like that.
But it's a lot different than it was in the late eighties.
So you will not find, Elon or Jeff or Richard merely doing what NASA wants to do.
And that is, in my view, extremely healthy development that is fundamentally new in the last decade.
It's the reason I left JPL and went to Blue Origin because I wanted to see what what is this world like where we get to have our own road maps and we get to, you know, define our own, destiny.
So I think there is and remember, I wrote that paper about National Space Visions back in 2008.
And so, you know Yeah.
It's it's still here.
The the world the world is different now.
Some so sometimes things evolve.
So the the premise that we're using or we're considering as part of the way we're building is the it's an all it's a term that was just brought up in Davos.
I think I said in the last podcast, but the last, in Davos, there was a panel, and they talked about this thing called coopetition.
Coopetition has been around for quite some time, and we have a paper written by, one of our teammates, Daniele from the University of Messina called coopetition.
And our belief structure is that there are so many individuals going in so many different directions trying to achieve so many different types of, achievements, that if you can get individuals who can collaborate long enough to put in the infrastructure, to put in the tools that are necessary, the entire ecosystem then can evolve and develop.
And the challenge with the messaging that comes out of agencies tends to be very confrontational, tends to be, like you've shared, going to Mars, that is somewhat misdirected or at least I believe, we believe it's misdirected, and it won't achieve those big desired outcomes that individuals are working towards.
So what if what if we change that model and said, okay.
I'm gonna use these names just because they're popular and well known.
Let's say Rocket Labs, SpaceX, and Blue.
You all wanna have a logistics.
You're a transportation company.
You're logistics firms.
You wanna have this happen.
Why don't we get what we need to to the destination we need to have it?
Let's work together to make sure it's there.
And then you can go on your own way.
But if we all try to do it separately, we'll end up with nothing in the end.
It depends on the my view is that Yep.
That's what
I'm asking.
My, my my opinion about that subject is that it depends on the dynamics of the marketplace.
So, a good, I think, sort of a case study that illuminates this is the competitive development of commercial cargo services for resupplying the International Space Station.
The market was known.
It was quantified.
It was stable.
It was predictable.
This is with NanoRacks and and Jeff
No.
This is the the the winners in that competition were SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, which is how we got, the Falcon 9, Dragon combination and the
You're talking about the actual vehicle for as compared to the servicing because Jeff Mamber put up 700 flights, something like that, to the International Space Station in terms of supply.
No.
No.
No.
I'm I'm talking about the, program that NASA ran.
It was one of their first successful public private partnerships to bring private money to the table, to to, be combined with public funding to develop, commercial systems to resupply space station.
And there are only 2 who are doing it.
Right?
Orbital Sciences and SpaceX are the 2.
So that program worked very successfully.
You know, kudos to Phil McAllister and, and the the the people who carried that little vision all the way through to fruition.
It worked because a resupply vehicle, meaning a space vehicle that sits on top of a rocket, and can go and rendezvous a station, transfer stuff, and then de orbit is a relatively straightforward problem in today's world.
So it doesn't cost a gazillion dollars.
Number 2, NASA cost shared over 80% of the development cost in that program.
So it was a little bit of private money and a lot of public money.
Yeah.
And number 3, like I said, the market was known, quantified, stable, predictable, and and in fact, you could go to an investor of various types and say, hey.
Here's a market.
You should bet on me winning this market because it's there.
Right?
You can quantify it.
It's real.
Okay.
Contrast that with what's happening in the Commercial LEO Destinations program today at NASA.
This is NASA's program to supplant the International Space Station by shifting NASA research work onto private space stations, commercial space stations.
Yeah.
First of all, a space station costs, orders of magnitude more than a capsule to develop.
Yeah.
Number 2, that program is funded in such a way that NASA is only funding 5% of it, not over 80% of it.
And the market is completely squishy.
The way NASA defines the market is, oh, we wanna be one of many users.
Oh, who are the other users of a commercial space station?
Oh, well, I you know, people go to panel sessions at conferences and say there's a $1,000,000,000,000 market, so there must be other customers.
Yes.
Okay.
But there aren't.
There aren't.
Or there there are some, but certainly not enough to justify a, you know, 1,000,000,000 or 5,000,000,000 or $10,000,000,000 nonrecurring investment.
And the way I described it to NASA leadership a couple years ago, actually, it was last year, was, you know, if I go to any investor, whether it's pension funds or, you know, VCs or, you know, even if I have a single, very committed investor, and I
say, hey.
I got
a deal.
I can't exactly tell you what the race course is.
I can't tell you when where the finish line is.
I can tell you not everybody started at the same time.
I know the size of the purse, but I'm gonna divide the purse into some number n, and I don't know what the number n is.
And, I'm not gonna be an anchor, you know, customer.
Such a deal.
Oh, by the way, you know, the the price tag to enter the race is the few 1,000,000,000, and you gotta spend it all before you know whether you win the race or not.
No same investor would do that.
So the the the nature of the public private partnership, the way it's structured, the expectations for it, and in particular, the solidity and predictability of the alleged commercial market or even the government market is fundamental if you're gonna, do these deals where you expect people to bring money to NASA's table.
So, it's different if you're doing exploration like the art of the coordination.
You know, they have budgets.
They have discussions where they can agree on sort of the level of relative contribution.
They can match, system and technology needs to the budgets that they have and sort of spread it around and do it collaboratively.
That's that's just the way international government to government collaboration is done.
Collaboration between government and business is really different.
B to c, right, is what they call it.
Right?
Yep.
It it it requires a kind of predictability of market that does not yet exist in human space flight, certainly the use of low earth orbit or or anything that's got people on it.
So your next one, because it sounds like that's where I'm assuming Well is what about compromised vision?
Are they right?
Is art is that where you're going?
Well, so I wanna I hear I wanna just, you know, call truth.
The reason that Artemis is a program is it's it's the only thing that seems remotely affordable and feasible on the way to the real vision, which is humans to Mars.
So this is why you hear leaders, at the agency, and and their members of the stakeholder community who are echoing that say things like, we're going to the moon to learn, and then we're going to Mars.
Or if you look at the at the the right hand side of the, quote, unquote, road map charts that NASA shows for the Artemis program, you get to some pseudo steady state of, cadence of missions to the surface of the moon, and then the chart kinda runs out.
It's like, well, what happens after that?
And the answer is, oh, then we go to Mars.
Right?
And and every every press conference, every you know, the administrator just did it again, the other day when Intuitive Machines landed on the moon.
He congratulated Intuitive Machines and
then anything even Yeah.
Is he hopes us an important step on our way to Mars.
Right?
Mhmm.
So, and Actually, Bill had said to one of our teammates at an event he also said it publicly at the event.
He said he was asked, why are we going to the moon?
And his answer was to go to Mars.
So the person said, why are we going to Mars?
And he replied to an audience to beat the Chinese.
Oh, well, that's a relatively recent one.
But, Yeah.
It was relatively recent.
It was
a year No.
No.
No.
I mean I mean, the the invocation of an alleged race with the Chinese
Right.
That's they were bringing he was making that was the point is that there was there was a better case would have been we're going to Mars for x.
That would do y for the human society, would change the way we, change some there would have been a value additive.
But to
Trying to bring back the 19, 19 sixties is not the answer.
Well, to be empathetic, it for all the reasons we talked about, you know, in the last hour, it's hard for anybody leading NASA to articulate why Mars is the vision.
Mhmm.
Anyway, the So so is is the next Hang on.
Historically, for decades now, ever since, really before I started my career, there's been an internecine battle, among people who care about, it used to be called moon first or Mars first.
And and the stakes were very high, although they seemed high.
It was really a tempest and a teapot.
But, in the early let's see.
In the mid nineties, NASA went through a cycle of strategic planning for human exploration in which, the planners, mostly at Johnson Space Center, were not allowed to say Mars.
So the pendulum swings back and forth, but, ultimately, it tends to stick over on the side of Mars.
But you will find that there are, Martians and lunatics.
And,
you've used that before.
Yeah.
And, I'll just I'll for the record, you know, I'll say I am a lunatic.
I've always been a lunatic.
The the I'm circling I'm circling
and putting an arrow.
Brent is a lunatic.
Yeah.
The only thing I wanted to do when I was 8 years old was build cities on the moon, and I can't even tell you why, but that's just where I come from.
I can give you all kinds of No.
No.
I'm I'm I'm gonna let me can I give you a little secret?
Don't tell anybody.
You said Martians and lunatics.
I didn't tie because I never call it lunar lunar because it's not a a human vocabulary.
I didn't realize until this point where you were actually lunatic.
So that's how slow I am.
Brent, you should never do anything with me.
Oh, you're good.
I didn't get it.
I I didn't get it until, like, a minute after you had done it.
Okay.
Because
you get Mars firsters and Moon firsters.
Well, I I get it now, but it took me a second.
I'm sitting here saying, what an idiot, David.
He's talking about moon.
So okay.
So, about the moon.
Tech.
Now I get it.
And I can give you all kinds of rational arguments why the moon makes sense.
Very quickly.
Why?
Go ahead.
Oh, well, I I subscribe to the philosophy that was written by Croft Erich in many years ago.
He said, if God intended man to explore space, he would have given him a moon.
And what he meant by that is if you have a planet that's 4 days away and you think you wanna learn how to explore planets Mhmm.
Why in the world wouldn't you practice in your own backyard?
Yep.
So, I mean, that that is a sort of reductionist that that's a collapsing of, you know, many things.
But now you hear, rationales for Artemis as, you know, we're practicing.
We're learning.
We're gonna you know?
Okay.
I to me, it's really very simple.
There is the the the so called practice element.
We have a lot to learn about playing in the dirt on another planet.
Even the troubles that we had on the Phoenix mission on Mars, a very simple system doing soil analysis, the the problems we had getting the soil into the instrument Yeah.
Are anecdotal proof of the unpredictability of the environment.
Okay.
An unpredictable environment means you're gonna have setbacks, you're gonna have to jury rig stuff, you're gonna have to figure out your way around it.
Okay.
There's a lot of learning to do.
That's 1.
2 is the moon is the only planetary destination that has a prayer of someday being related to commercial space activity because Mars is too far away.
Yep.
But the moon is close enough that in a world where spaceflight operations are routine and safe enough and cost effective enough, you could have tourists go to the moon.
Okay.
You cannot do that for Mars.
Nope.
The moon is a place you can settle because you can basically build a railroad between Earth and moon.
The way you settle Mars is you send Adam and Eve and you wish them luck because resupply is not a thing you can do routinely.
So, anyway, those are just 3 kind of
fundamental You're speaking to the choir because
There's many, many papers worth of analysis that could go in There's
tons of them, and you can't imagine how many have been sent to me.
And they've got all sorts of rationale for all sorts of different things, but these are basics.
It's, it's not far away.
It has the its, celestial body around the earth.
It is, can become a commercial long term position.
If you even look at our logo, the the Mearth logo, you'll see that we've created a transit system that becomes that kind of train system that would enable that to happen.
So all of those things we're working on.
So you kind of check the boxes as you went down.
So that was good.
I was I was smiling as you hit them.
So okay.
So
There's also I'll just in passing, I'll say there's there's some mythology associated with Mars being more habitable than the moon.
The the the technically correct way to say it is Mars is a skosh less uninhabitable than the moon.
It is, just as lethal, very hostile place, and really far away.
So, anyway You
know, I I again, I we one of the people that you one of the people that you know once has said that when all this math that's coming out in terms of how how they can get there, for example, in the starship, the individual said, you know, not a 100.
6 people will make that will finally end up surviving that journey.
There's all sorts of challenges which you brought up earlier, radiation, the timelines for travel.
We don't know humans and that those conditions, what would happen in the in the moon is right here.
So okay.
So wait.
Do we go to the compromise?
Is that it?
Or is it The point for today is to recognize that, although NASA has embraced the moon with the Artemis program, it did so as a compromise because it couldn't do Mars directly.
And
so okay.
But it was actually it was in you you know for sure because it wasn't we couldn't do it.
Or are you saying that is what your, what your extrapolation is from the people you've spoken with?
It's what the Augustine committee said in 2009.
Okay.
So, there's a whole So
then so the switch the the switch happened the switch happened to Artemis, and I was when Charlie Bolden, very early on, put up and showed the in a room of people, there's only about 25 of us in a room, he showed the Artemis program.
And so in when did and I don't know this.
When did Artemis become the program of choice after this 2009?
What day what year later?
Well, I I don't know the name the the year that the name was given, but I I do know it was at least a couple of years after I named my cats Apollo and Artemis.
Okay.
So So
I I'm gonna say roughly 2017, 2018.
I don't know.
Oh, it's it's that it's that current.
I don't remember what
What was happening in the meantime?
Right?
After Constellation ended and after it became clear that the asteroid re erect mission approach, which was the sort of interim proposal by the Obama administration was DOA.
The agency settled into a stepwise approach.
Basically, let's do what we can, and what they, started with is, also indicative of the momentum belief system, but it was the heavy lift rocket and the capsule.
Okay.
So that was SLS and Orion.
And then the Artemis program started to, accrete around the the core of SLS and Orion.
In the meantime, you'll remember that the gateway program started.
There are some, in my opinion, some, problematic reasons why Gateway happened.
There are certainly no technical reasons why Gateway happened.
It's not necessary to have a space station in a high lunar orbit.
It actually decrements the kind of performance you can get out of a lunar landing transportation system to have it have to go up into that high orbit and come back out, and it complicates the astrodynamics quite a bit.
Why do
we have a gateway?
Well, I think there are 2 fundamental reasons.
The obvious one today is that if you want to build an international coalition and not everybody who's in it or that you want to be in it can afford to be on the surface of the moon.
You give them a place that's simpler and cheaper to operate in, which is space.
And so Gateway has become the nexus of the Artemis Accords, collaborations.
The I think the an original reason, which, is not widely recognized is that NASA at its heart is an operations agency.
Right?
It operates missions.
Space station has, in some ways, become the embodiment of today's NASA because it has to be operated continuously.
If NASA goes into a future in which it no longer owns and therefore no longer operates a space station continuously and if constrained by budget and the cost of SLS and Orion, it can only fly to the moon once a year or once every Every 2 years.
Yep.
Then what is it operating?
And if it's not operating anything, it loses its soul.
So it was essential, I believe, in some leaders' minds for NASA to have a thing which would need to be operated continuously.
Hence, they
And this gets to 2 things.
1, you've got decisions being made by an agency that fundamentally go against many of the constructs that you and I would have considered to be viable.
And second, they're meeting demands of, of groups of individuals to, placate them.
You know, you've got this one position.
But you have just said that the by putting the gateway, you cause challenges for, landing on the moon.
And so we we have come at it in a very different way.
We don't look at the gateway system.
We look at transport between the moon and the Earth in a in a completely different structure.
So at some point, we'll you've sent the NDA.
We'll we'll show you some of these things.
Maybe you've got some great ideas to move forward with it.
But I don't get the gateway system the way you've kinda just described it, but now you've given the answers to why it's putting in in place.
And I'll add a small little piece.
The word mission typically means you go out and you come back.
That's a mission.
You have a mission.
You you the missionaries went someplace and then they came back.
We don't call things missions in Project Moon because we're we're doing a project.
We're establishing infrastructure.
We're establishing, a system that will be able to operate.
We don't have that same challenge of, having something that would position themselves as a mission condition.
So that's cool.
Okay.
You you checked some boxes there.
That was very good.
So the next one was I I go ahead.
So the, let's just recognize, or for today's purpose, let's let's let's agree that if if NASA had a blank check, it would not be doing Artemis.
It would be doing humans to Mars.
Correct.
Okay.
And and I completely agree with that.
So everything I've been saying so far in these first four, points is rather critical and negative.
But, yeah, they're critical and negative, and I, while I'm sitting here, I actually did I did say to myself, wow.
There's a lot of negative here.
And so I kind of became a little anxious when I I looked down.
I don't we've right now, I think I'm on page, 14 of notes.
I looked down.
I looked at the the your list, and I said, okay.
What about this one here?
What about the compromised vision is Artemis?
So you're saying that's the compromise, but you weren't describing a better compromise.
You were describing the facts of the compromise.
So now what I'm gonna do is start to turn positive and offer some solution path.
Okay.
That that's great.
But that's what I read it as the compromise, meaning you knew of a compromise, but it was a compromise to fulfill what you just said, giving, alliances these type of opportunities to play not play the full game, but be a part of the game.
So, I, what I wanna do is for this next point, the question is, are there better vision?
Yep.
Okay.
And, what that's gonna do is take us kind of up a level.
It's gonna take us out of the trench where the bullets are flying, and we're gonna get, a higher level broader picture.
I'm I'm good with it.
I just just my own body reaction here was, wow.
We're we're in the deep throes of the challenge is not working.
So I'm glad we're making the jump.
This is perfect.
So what are the better visions?
Yeah.
So, I, I was on the as I mentioned before, I was on HEF, the human exploration framework team.
I was deployed from JPL to NASA headquarters to be on this internal planning team at the end of the constellation programme.
And we were challenged to come up with like, what is it that the human program should be all about?
And there were 2 generations of heft.
I was on both of them.
Ultimately, the product of all of that ended up being, alas, the SLS program, which is a slightly different story.
But as I was engaged with my peers on that planning team, we were wrestling with things like the, the fact that the asteroid redirect mission was not very appealing, evidently.
The constellation program itself had been ended because it was unaffordable.
The Augustine committee had said, not only is it unaffordable, it's really unaffordable.
And NASA should do this thing they called flexible path planning, which meant, build fundamental infrastructure that can be used for any number of things.
We had spent some time thinking about what are those other things, What might those other things be?
Most of them were, naturally.
They had to do with, next generation class of space science, like going out to, sun Earth l 2 and assembling planet finder telescope, or going to Mars but not landing on Mars and exploring the moons of Mars, which is a way, way simpler problem.
It still has the mission duration and the radiation, the things we talked about before, but it does not have all of the landing and ascent and planet surface operations and all that kind of stuff.
So sort of a way to start on Mars.
Or what was the other one?
Oh, asteroid.
Go to a near Earth asteroid, and which is going to a near Earth asteroid is kind of like a Mars mission in trip time, but it's kind of like a moon mission in propulsion requirements.
So it's intermediate in challenge.
And I I did a paper back then, I think it was in 2009, exploring with a bunch of colleagues from around the agency what those types of missions would be.
So that was context.
Heft was trying to think about, like, what do we make, you know, the heart of the replacement human space program?
And as we were working, I realized all of this is about exploration.
That may not sound bad.
It isn't bad.
But what I realized is that we're we're sort of rattling around in a groove.
And the real question is, are there other grooves that we're not even looking at?
So at the time, it also happened I went to a AAAS, conference, the American Astronautical Society, which has a, great track record of, finding speakers who are provocative.
And so I I could look it up.
I don't quite remember which conference it was.
But there was a woman who gave a talk there, named Betty Sue Flowers, who was a former executive from Shell Oil, but now a poet, or then a poet.
And she gave a talk about the relationship of the human spaceflight enterprise to what she called societal myths.
And and the question is, we use we use myths as she called she defined myths as stories that create meaningful reality, meaning stories that we use to organize and prioritize values and experiences.
They're embedded in deep in society, so that they're kind of instantly recognizable by people, stereotypically recognizable by people.
And, she described 3 myths that made us, she called it.
And by us, she meant, Americans.
1, is the hero myth, one is the religious myth, and one is the democratic scientific myth.
And then she said that we had developed a 4th one, called the economic myth or that she called the economic myth, and then maybe a 5th one called the ecological myth.
So, anyway, it was a fabulous talk, and I was it really got me thinking, and I had this context of these other kinds of missions.
And then I realized, and so then I wrote about it, that until we know what myth we're building a program to execute or to make real, we don't really know what we're doing.
And we and we we owe it to ourselves and our our, sponsors who are the taxpayers to be clear about what myth they are funding.
So, the paper I did in 2010 no.
2011 is when I published it.
And, so it's it's taken multiple forms, and I'll quickly get to the the form that I use today.
But, anyway, I I, explored 4 alternative core myths for government funded human space flight.
One, naturally, is the hero myth, which I would sort of envision, like, you can picture Lewis and Clark.
I always use Lewis and Clark to embody the hero myth.
We're gonna, you know, go over the next hill and see what's there and, you know, map all the territory and all that kind of stuff.
A completely orthogonal myth, a very different myth is what I call the jet set myth.
And you could personify this with Richard Branson, somebody who flies around the world, you know, owns an island in the Caribbean.
You know, it's, that's the modern jet set.
Another myth could be the green myth or what she called the ecological myth.
So the the the, the the draw or the allure or the pull of, being good stewards of earth and resources and so forth.
And then the 4th one, that I wrote about was what I call the pioneer myth.
And for this, because we're talking about space, I personify that just by Heinlein.
A lot of Robert Heinlein stories ultimately are about pioneers.
Sometimes they're about heroes, but they're often about pioneers, you know, groups of, iconoclastic, innovative problem solvers who are in a hostile environment, trying to, like, tame the wilderness, so to speak.
The reason this is relevant is that those core myths, if you were to design like we said before, let's not look in the rear view mirror.
Let's look forward.
Yeah.
Let's look at the constraints of society.
Let's see what myths might resonate in today's society and then design intentionally design or architect a program around them, what might those programs be?
Okay.
Mhmm.
So now I'm gonna fast forward to because this was almost, what was it, 13 years ago, I've I've I've given multiple talks and written multiple papers about this and evolved it, and in its current form is what I call the 4 futures.
This is a very simple model that allows a an adult productive conversation about why we do what we do in space.
I've yet to find a single idea for human spaceflight that does not trace to 1 or some combination of these 4.
Okay.
The first one is, so they they all start with EX because it's easy to remember.
So explore, experience, exploit, and expand are the 4.
The explore future is what we all know, from NASA.
And I still use Lewis and Clark to to sort of illustrate this.
If you're gonna explore, in that future, what do you do?
You send a small, intrepid crew of highly trained experts to the farthest place you can get them, and you ask them to go look around and see what's there and return knowledge.
That's exactly what Jefferson commissioned Lewis and Clark to do.
That's what NASA now expects humans to Mars to do for us.
That future is our history at NASA since the misinterpretation of the Apollo reality, and it's governing all NASA planning for human space flight going forward.
Okay.
Fine.
Where a lot of people wanna get to, particularly people who don't know anything about space but they watch Star Trek or people who are advocates for space in organizations like the National Space Society or the Space Frontier Foundation, a lot of the people who go to the AAIS or AIAA meetings and so forth, What they want is the 4th future, which is expand, which means to settle.
That means to put down roots, learn how to live off the land, become self sustaining, increase the population so that it attains societally relevant population sizes, and does those things we talked about before that require space architecture and urbanism and so forth, right, to basically establish human civilization in a remote alien hostile place, and thereby expand the footprint of human civilization out into the solar system.
Okay.
The problem is that no amount of the Explore future can fund the Expand future.
It takes way, way more to expand than it does to explore, because because we're not just talking about small crews.
We're talking about people, including, like, normal people raising families.
And so you need the hospitals and morgues and etcetera, etcetera, schools and, you know.
Okay.
So there's a dilemma.
It says that the dream that a lot of people have without realizing it's their dream is so unaffordable that it's only a dream, and you can't connect the dots.
You can't get from explore to expand.
In this model, the bridge to eventually expanding, starting from exploring, is the other 2 futures, exploit and experience.
And the reason is very simple, it's economic.
The only people fundamentally who will fund exploring are governments.
However, if you make a kind of human space flight that people can experience and if you use human space flight and other technologies to exploit space for terrestrial economic benefit, then you have access to sources of capital outside the top line budget constraint of government exploration budgets.
Mhmm.
That's the key to growing the amount, the the extent, not the reach, but the extent and the amount and the richness of activity in space that eventually can open the expand future.
So experience, the e the the image I always use for this one is, like, if you've got, you know, Lewis and Clark are exploring, and if you've got, settlers, you know, with a log cabin who are expanding at the other end, what's in between?
Okay.
So, I always use a cruise ship for the experience future because it's like fake exploring.
So you will not catch me, exploring some dry valley in Antarctica or some, you know, busted up glacier in Alaska, but you would catch me on a cruise ship in the bay watching the glacier calving.
Right?
So I can I can almost You can get close
to it, but you're not you're not Slow?
You're not living that style.
Yes.
What's key is, look at just the cruise ship industry as one example.
You take thousands of people routinely into very hostile environments in environments that are comfortable.
I mean, local environment, designed, architected environments that are comfortable and they're safe.
You can know nothing about operating a ship and go on a cruise ship.
You do your muster drill, you know, on the 1st day, and you learn how to put on a life jacket, and that's kind of about it.
Have you done a bunch of cruises?
It sounds like you've done a bunch of cruises.
I've done I've done a few.
Yeah.
Okay.
It's, so I call it fake exploring.
But the key is that when I went on my cruises, I wasn't subsidized by NASA.
Mhmm.
Right?
I paid for it out of my own bank account, and that whole industry, a multibillion dollar industry, is based on people wanting to go.
The exploit future means extracting something of value for Earth, because that's where the economy is, from space.
Okay?
What is there to extract?
Like, what does that even mean?
What kind of resources are there in space?
I think that they fit into 3 categories.
The first is special locations, and we've done that ever since we started putting weather satellites in geostationary orbit or telecommunication satellites or started using the sun synchronous orbits, at lower altitudes, there are special places in space that allow you to do special things, and some of those special things have commercial value on earth.
So as an example, just like we already monetize geo for telecommunications, we could industrialize and monetize GEO for clean solar power, solar energy for Earth.
Mhmm.
This is the space based solar power, vision.
Yeah.
Which ties back to the green myth.
Right?
This is, enabling a nondisruptive transition to a post petroleum economy on earth, an energy abundant future, etcetera, etcetera.
Okay.
Could be done.
It's ironic in some ways that people who don't know anything about space are like, oh, that's preposterous.
You know, that's outrageous.
You could never build that much stuff in space.
To space people, it's kind of uninteresting because it's boring.
It's like we all we understand all the technology.
It's not exploring.
Right?
So it's not sexy the same way, but it's a different future.
It's a way of extracting value from, a unique location.
That one also touches the second category of resource, which is energy.
Right?
My favorite space resource to export to Earth is photons because they don't weigh anything.
You can transmit them with microwaves and collect them on earth, put them in the grid, and attain, sustainable clean energy independence.
And I'm not particularly interested in in just backfilling for petroleum because petroleum is eventually gonna run out, and there's gonna be a lot of conflict as the supply gets more and more scarce.
What I'm interested in is in a future of abundance, where transportation is electrified.
And so you need energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen if you're gonna use hydrogen or to, charge batteries if you're gonna use battery powered EVs, and so forth.
I would like to see desalination of seawater for clean, potable water for, the world's population, which we do not have today.
It's energy intensive, so it takes a while.
The, a lot of the, challenge we have with, plastics, everywhere in the environment and increasingly so, is it requires energy to get out of because once you most plastics are not recyclable, because once they're made, they're made.
And the only way you can unmake them and start over is to really split them apart into their elemental compositions or very, very soft.
Correct.
And that's energy intensive.
So Yeah.
For for all these reasons oh, and by the way, you know, the developing world would sure love to have, let's say, a European standard of living, which consumes half as much energy per capita as an American standard of living, but, you know, European standard of living is not bad.
So if we level the world at that and we have an increasing population and we desalinate, ocean water for drinking water and we, have electrified mobile power and industry, and of these other things, we need a lot more energy than we're making today.
Okay?
So space gives us a way to do that.
You I'm sure you've had people on the show.
You've probably had Mankins and others who've talked about it.
So, but doing this is Wait.
You you gave
you gave 2.
You gave special locations, and then you have energy, energy selling.
Was there a 3rd?
The third one is material resources.
And on this, I will just be curmudgeonly, and I will say I have yet to see even a hint of a business model that makes sense.
Yeah.
I know.
Or for anything material Neither have I, by the way.
Right?
So, just to be clear for for anybody who cares, there there's there's people who talk about, oh, well, you know, on the on the Oceanus prochlorum, there's, deposits of, rare earth elements.
Okay?
It is true.
There are places on the moon with slightly enriched compositions of rare earth elements.
They're not called rare earth because they're rare on earth.
They're called rare earth because that's a very old chemical terminology.
They're in all these high-tech products.
People know that, you know, video screens and magnets and
They're very expensive and extremely valuable.
But here's the thing.
Most of if you actually look into this, most of the cost, both the environmental cost, the environmental cost, the energy cost, and the cost cost, the dollars, in the use of rare earth elements is in the, essentially, the purification step, which is getting them separated from each other, not even from where you the or you find them in, but from each other because they're chemically very similar.
And, it takes a lot of steps and a lot of poisons, basically, and a lot of energy to get them all separated out into what you need.
But it also takes the
just the extraction of it.
I ran a rock quarry, and we dropped 22,000 ton of stone a day.
And it's just the extraction is a very intensive process also.
It is.
It is.
Goes in.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm I'm not I'm not diminishing at all the cost of extraction, but the refinement is way more expensive.
Yeah.
It's very expensive.
Well and in China,
a lot
of these steps.
Yeah.
If if you wanna get rare earths from the moon because you don't wanna get them from China, which people run around saying, you've got to take all of this very complicated processing and do it on the moon.
Right.
And do it on the moon, which is just Which is
super hard, never been done.
You gotta get all that stuff to the moon, and then, oh, by the way, there is the transportation cost to get the final product back from the moon.
Okay.
It's a lot easier to get it from China, and it will be for a long, long, long time.
What I love is the equipment that they plan on having on the moon where you see the human figure is this infinitesimally small figure.
And they've got machines that are 40 times or 60 times bigger than you would have on Earth just digging up the moon.
It's like We're we're we're gonna we're gonna come to exactly that later in this conversation.
Okay.
But but now I just I mean, the I I personally believe that the best use of material resources in space is for the space economy, not for the terrestrial economy, which makes it not the same type of growth engine that I'm talking about for space programs that are based on earth.
Right?
So you see Yeah.
The distinction there.
But energy resources and location resources are things that can be exploited.
And so the again, the 4 futures model says if you can reach into investors' or personal, participants' pocketbooks, you have a source of capital other than just top line budget.
If you look at the NASA top line budget, we it's $25,000,000,000 a year.
We know what that buys, both the good and the bad, you know, the efficiency or the or the innovation and the inefficiency, I would say.
We we know what it buys.
There is zero probability that that amount, that top line budget is going to quadruple or go up by a factor of 10, it's not gonna happen.
So so we what we ought to do, this gets to the to, the next bullet on the list, what should be the role of NASA and other agencies.
Okay.
That means those those agencies, all of them, including NASA, led by NASA, are spending our taxpayer dollars.
So the question is, what should they be doing, and could we be doing better than we're doing today?
So one thing they need to do is scientific exploration.
No argument for me on that, and I would say, again, there is a part of the agency called the Science Mission Directorate that is the world's best at scientific exploration of space.
They do amazing work.
I was privileged to be at JPL for 14 years participating in that and and helping it.
Amazing, amazing work.
Most of the scientifically important places to explore are places that humans will never go.
The best prospect, for example, for finding extant life in the solar system is inside the ocean of Enceladus, which is a tiny moon around Saturn.
Okay.
People are never gonna go there, never being in quotation marks, but,
you know, so far I understand.
I understand.
I I gotcha.
In some universe that's not the one that we Right.
The one that we know today.
Yes.
I understand.
And and and so the And it's called the encellus.
What I n s Encellus.
Encellus.
That's that's a whole other conversation we can No.
That's okay.
I was just right.
I if you saw my spelling of it, you'd probably say, what is that?
Yeah.
P n c e l a d u s.
N c.
Okay.
Then I got it pretty close.
So, and and it's the same as the case for multiple other scientifically very, fundamental, things to learn.
Like, we're never gonna send people to the surface of Venus, and yet Venus is a planet that's sort of the most like Earth, and if it's a planet that's like Earth but it's so unlike Earth, it'd be really useful to learn why.
Mhmm.
Yep.
So, I could go on and on about that.
We've we've had conversations not not on the program.
We've had conversations about Venus, but not on the program, and there's a lot of positives, but it's still I don't see it, like, as you said, in in the lifetime that we're looking at.
Well, certainly not for humans.
I mean, we can't That's what I meant.
For for humans.
That's what I'm I'm saying.
It's 49 hours.
So it's just it's patently ridiculous to to imagine sending people there.
Well, no.
I there are people out there who think it can be done.
So I'm I
I is not patently ridiculous.
Right.
But, you know, the thing is in order to learn, sometimes you have to have the conversation.
And I've heard I've had a few of these conversations to understand what people are coming from where they're coming from so that we could do a better job of what we're doing.
So yes.
Okay.
The one that is arguable and feisty, and you'll get a lot of pushback, from me saying this, is, I don't believe that humans are essential or even practical for the most important things we need to learn at bars.
So when pressed, the people who wanna do humans to Mars will say the advocates will say, the only way we can really find out if there was ever life on Mars is to send people.
Even even the most experienced explorers on Mars, my good friend, Steve Squires, who was the PI for Spirit and Opportunity, has observed, you know, what we did in a couple of years with Opportunity, we could have done in a couple of weeks if we had had people there.
Probably true, but, of course, you didn't have people there and you did have a rover.
So, we were able to do what we were able to do, and we wouldn't have been able to do it at all if we had waited for humans to do it.
I believe that in a future in which every rock the size of a desk is already mapped on Mars, there's very we we have to rethink what it means to even explore.
Mhmm.
And the best places to look for potentially extant life are, places that are really hard to get to, like you gotta drill deep, on Mars, which we've not even yet learned how to do.
And, oh, by the way, there's this thing called planetary protection.
The dirtiest potential system you could land on Mars is a human, in a spacesuit, in a habitat, whatever.
And so even if you imagine a future in which people are somehow essential for discovering the truth about potential extent or historical life on Mars, they you would not let them near the places that you're actually sampling because of planetary protection.
So you're still relegated to a machine mediated exploration scenario anyway.
So we could go on and on about that and
No.
No.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep.
People who this is fundamental to the rationale for well, I would argue it is fundamental to the rationale for humans to Mars, but this is why the rationale for humans to Mars is bankrupt.
And the reason, if you were asking why am I letting you continue with this list, is I I wanna hear the the the missing piece that have not heard of before So that there's a it's a full multidimensional, answer to a very complex question.
Because, again, if you're very knowledgeable about this, somebody else like myself who hasn't spent, didn't spend their life paying attention to it, these little pieces or these little nuggets help to be able to explain, certain conditions.
So this is perfect.
Great.
So the, so the the the, again, the role of government agencies.
So scientific exploration.
Yes.
Okay.
Technology development and demonstration.
What do I mean by that?
Things that are so hard or expensive or both that they're impractical for enterprises that are not funded with public money to do.
Now in space, there's no end to the technical challenges.
So you have to be smart about it.
What's interesting about the 4 futures is that one of the things that's interesting about them is that they lead to, you know, very different visions of the future, but they also require different types of systems, which in turn require different technologies and different breakthroughs.
They're not interchangeable.
A very simple example is if you wanted to do the experience future, you need transportation systems for fairly large numbers of people that have what we call 5 nines reliability or at least 4 nines reliability.
So point 9999, probability of success.
We don't have that today.
The shuttle was, a little bit less than 2 nines.
It's hard.
And the only way you can really prove to yourself that you got there because you can do it analytically, but spaceflight has a habit of upending models, the the only way you can really know is to fly a lot.
Okay.
So but that type of launch vehicle that would be very highly reliable, is different from the kind of heavy lift vehicle you would want if you were gonna industrialize geo for space based solar power.
Because there, you're launching, you know, zillions of tons of stuff.
It's all just stuff.
And so if you lose a rocket every now and then, yeah, it undercuts your business case.
But it you can you can tuck a lot of inefficiency at that system level into that overall architecture.
So you would want a different rocket.
Yes.
Absolutely.
They're they're designed for different use cases.
Really simple example.
A a little bit more, sophisticated example maybe is life support technology.
So, we have what's called physico chemical life support technology.
That's what operates on space station, to keep a half a dozen people alive, and healthy continuously.
It requires a huge amount of maintenance, you know, spare parts, all that stuff.
So could you imagine a version of that system that could take your half a dozen people to Mars and back?
Yeah.
Probably.
You could.
But if you're gonna have 60 people in an orbital hotel, you probably don't want 10 times the amount of racks devoted to tubes and pumps and filters and reactant beds and you know, that we have on space station.
So, larger numbers of people, let alone longer durations, let's say, for settling the moon, tend to argue for biologically based life support systems or hybrid systems like the Europeans are developing with the Melissa program, not strictly physical chemical.
So the the point is that if depending on which future you're aiming at, it tells you which kinds of technologies you better be developing.
And, again, the just to ground us, the only ones that public money is being spent on developing today are the ones to get 6 people to Mars someday.
So if you wanted to, if you thought it was important to build the bridge to the expand future and you wanted to develop the experience future, you could imagine a technology investment agenda that developed big windows or birthing mechanisms that could be reused 100 of times or cooking.
Nobody knows how to cook in microgravity.
Nobody's ever done it.
There's no such thing as a stove or an oven.
Right?
But you can't have a resort hotel if you can't make an omelette and mix a martini.
So there's these are, nobody knows how to make a, pressure vessel bigger than a rocket.
Okay.
Well, then you would say, as Dan Golden did when he was administrator of NASA, pounded on the podium at a Space Frontier Foundation conference, and said, space tourism is not my job.
And I'm like, why not?
Because if you look at the history of NASA, its own predecessor, the NACA, the National Aeronautics Consultative no.
Shoot.
I can never remember that.
I'm I'm looking it up because I'm as drawing a blind.
Yeah.
NACA.
Yeah.
The National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics.
Advisory Committee on Aeronautics.
That's it.
Thank you.
Sorry about that.
NAC No.
No.
That's okay.
8.
The the NACA was created in the closing years of World War 1, recognizing what was what had started to be learned in World War 1, the air power was gonna be fundamental to national security.
And so the NACA was formed and it funded the development of airfoil technology and airplane engine technology that is at the heart of the entire jet age.
Yeah.
It would it would be, some of its members, but it by the way, Overwrite was a member.
So the the the the commercial industries, plural, that we have that are a result of jet travel today exist because the NACA used government money to fund fundamental technology development.
So NASA's own predecessors' DNA was about doing this if the nation chose to invest directly in the growth futures, experience and exploit, then agencies, including NASA, could be turned to develop those essential technologies, beaming lots of microwave energy through the atmosphere, subjecting
So let me let me ask
let me ask systems in GEO.
So it it sounds it sounds great.
Do you think I mean, you're giving a hypothetical here.
Do you think the the supertanker can make the turn?
In some talks that I've given, I've, said, in my view, the NASA we need is not the NASA we have.
And Mhmm.
There are a variety of ways of solving that.
Okay.
You
know, one one path is that NASA could remain the world premier scientific exploration agency, but we're missing other stuff, right, which could be new agencies or charters for other agencies like Department of Commerce or, I don't know, or NASA.
You know?
It could be, the interestingly, the the National Aeronautics and Space Act that chartered the agency does not preclude any of these things that I'm talking about.
It's all a matter of habit and expectation in what is, appropriated,
authorized,
but mostly what's appropriated.
We had an individual recently, I would say in my eyes, very well connected.
He has gone through a little bit of the journey you've gone on, but further.
And at one point, we were talking about something, and his brain just triggered.
And he said, this is department of agriculture.
This is department of defense.
This department of this.
I need to call my people this, this.
And he listed quicker than I could type about 10 different places he felt the application works.
So here becomes, kind of a change up to yours.
Not a change up, but a different dimension.
What if it is not adding on?
But what if it is implementing within existing structures, different formulaics, different structure that says space is not an industry.
It's a geography.
The geography benefits your application.
So don't make another agency fit in because it's time to have this as an, a positioning.
So a bad example, but an example.
I've worked in the in the farming industry.
I mean, you could go to a a large farming structure that has kilometers or miles of farming.
They they go through the whole night because a class 9 harvester is run by GPS, and the person inside is is is watching videos and talking.
And even the output is run by a GPS system.
So that's agriculture.
And why not instead of ex why expand the pie?
If the pie is already there, all we're adding is a little bit of spice.
Well, yes.
But Okay.
I'm so I'm here.
To do that would require, an integrating, vision under the leadership of the both, an administration that directs the agencies and a congress which funds them.
So, right, the way appropriations
work So let's let's go global.
Let's go global.
Let's say it's not just NASA, but there's other, there are many different levers to be able to move government.
Sometimes it's another another activity that's going on.
Sometimes it's an educational shift.
Look at what's happening with the AI side.
Whether it's a it's going to bust boom and bust, that's not the point.
What if it is other levers that can create that evolution
on a global scale?
So there's 2 things there.
Okay.
One is, domestic versus global.
The other is, charter versus focus.
So on domestic versus global, I mean, I I'm I I know our system best, so that's what I'm that's what I'm
I understand.
I'm just tossing it out as a as a conversation.
Yep.
And because what we talked about before, the world follows NASA's lead.
Mhmm.
At least it does with respect to exploration.
Right.
But they all have systems where there's decision making and budget allocations and so forth.
And then that gets me to the other one, which is, whatever I call it, direction versus funding.
At the end of the day, there there is a government budget.
It is suballocated, and it's spent on stuff.
If the stuff isn't specified, then money doesn't get spent on it.
And so, there is no mechanism, for the department of agriculture and the department of commerce and the department of the interior and, I don't know, you know, all the agencies you could name.
There's there's
a more if you can name that.
Simultaneously say, ah, yes.
I should be focusing on microwave power transmission, or I should be focusing on four nine's reliable launch, or I should be focusing on how to, make a pressurizable, verifiable structure, off Earth.
Well, a
lot of that has to but
a lot a lot of that has
a lot of that has to do with the way in which the beyond Earth ecosystem, which is your starting point, the NASA stakeholder community, the let's change that because space 2, the industry is an industry, which it's not.
It's a geography.
The, the space stakeholder community has got such a grip on calling it space.
And I've used this analogy often.
If you make bolts or tool pieces for an auto, an automotive manufacturer, you're considered part of the supply chain.
You don't have to love cars.
You can supply pieces and you're part of it.
I can't tell you how many conversations I've had where I've said, well, what about this company that supplies this?
They're not a space company.
Yes.
But they supply an integral piece that but they supply other industries.
Why aren't they?
No.
You don't understand.
They have to be focused on space.
Like, why why does it have to be all or nothing?
And one of the challenges you look at there's only, what, 5 to 10000 space companies if we use that in the world.
There are 20,000 laundromat companies in the United States.
Yeah.
There's 230,000 IT companies in
the world.
But one of the reasons that you hear what you hear is, it's not it's not a complete reason, and it's not an altogether justifiable reason, but it is partly valid.
The stuff that we use to make space systems is not the same stuff as what we can get away with using on Earth.
You may have heard horror stories about tungsten whiskers in microchips, and, you know, the space environment is it is different.
Well, so I I I hear that.
Have you've heard the story.
I've gotta believe the Alan Mulally story.
Alan moved from Boeing, which you were at.
I believe it was Boeing.
He moved to, I think it was Ford.
Ford.
Now I'm gonna I'm making it and he's he was standing up in front of his community, and a guy stood up and said, how are you gonna manage these 5,000 moving parts to make this car work?
And he there was a little bit of a a tiff on this.
And he said, well, there are 2,000,000 moving parts in an airplane, and it has to stay in the air.
I think I can handle the car.
And so he changed the dynamics of the language of automotive to say, wait.
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
We're comparing 2 different things here.
You're you're stuck in your own ecosystem.
Break out and see that the innovations and we're seeing it today.
See, the innovations that could be put into a car could be all electronic.
They could be remote control.
They could have an IT side of it.
They can have which if you went back I mean, years old is that you're a little bit older than I am.
When I had a my father had a Fiat Spyder Convertible, and we had a we called it the yacht, which was a Oldsmobile custom cruiser.
There were no electronics in those, and the world changed.
Can the world change in the way you're right on the using the word used.
You're right on the cusp.
I hear it, but it's almost like we're not crossing over.
Well, no.
I would argue that we are.
Okay.
So, the company I know best, of course, is Blue Origin, but they're not alone in the the independent space sector, including the primes and their subs, is in fact eyeball deep in trying to change the game.
Mhmm.
So, the the thing the the my caution to so I applaud that.
Right?
And I was part of it, and, yeah, that that's all good.
However, we cannot overlook or pretend that the challenges of the the the challenges inherent in the space environment are different, and we are still learning.
I don't I I'm not that's not that's not the premise.
The premise is that ecosystems in technology conditions evolve.
And I can bet you there were people standing around saying horses, cars, complex, people could get hurt.
There were people saying planes, who's gonna go up in a plane?
Who's gonna get in one of those?
So what what is your common chances that.
Right.
So is it the same change that.
So what if and we're working on this.
What if it was just in and it's and I'm using it as an answer to your question or your comment.
What if it wasn't creating additional administration or agencies?
What if it wasn't that?
What if it was evolving existing agencies to have the the IT and the car x the all the things that we're adding in all these other industries?
What if it was just a modification where beyond Earth becomes a normalcy within them?
Like CubeSats has has done.
Well, I think there's full answer because I'm not gonna go into the whole thing, but you understand.
It's it's kind of a a little bit of a shift instead of a full evolution.
Well, I think there will be shifts in traditional organizations, and it's a Darwinian environment.
The future is like the the the deep time is a Darwinian environment.
So a legitimate question, this actually gets to the the the last of the 7 bullets, is what conversation should we be having?
And what what I when I started to talk about what's now the 4 futures model, I would never ever tell audiences what I thought.
I would just lay out you know, here's 4 paths.
There's 4 different societal myths.
Here's what their core purpose would be.
Here's what their core needs would be.
To first order, I argue that you could spend the same, running resource on them in, you know, NASA's $25,000,000,000 a year.
That's 10 to the $10 per year.
Well, about 2 thirds of the 25,000,000,000 is spent on human spaceflight, depending on how you do the accounting.
But all the direct costs of the human space flight programs, plus the carrying costs of the centers, which are predominantly organized around human space flight.
But if you do the math, it's about 2 thirds of the NASA budget is spent on human space flight every year.
So in in order of magnitude terms, it's 10 to the $10 per year.
So over a couple of decades, that's 10 to the 11th dollars.
Okay.
If if you spent 10 to the 11th dollars over a few decades, you might end up with 6 international civil servants on Mars.
Mhmm.
Or if you spent it to, open space to citizens, create new travel related industries, and, extend the overview effect to a a large population, you would probably end up with 100 to 1,000 of workers and tens of thousands to 100 of thousands of people flying every year in low earth orbit.
If you spent it on same amount of time, same amount of money on, industrializing geo to prepare for a, you know, nondisruptive transition to a post petroleum future, to create new energy related industries to become the global exporter of unlimited clean energy, okay, then you would probably only have a couple of 100 skilled workers on extended duty tours in high earth orbit.
You might have saved the planet in the meantime, but, you know, the amount of people the number of people flying in space would would be intermediate between the first two scenarios.
If you spend it on settling the moon, you know, the expand future directly to become a 2 planet species as fast as feasible, you might, within 30 years, have a few hundred mixed demographic people living off world, maybe some of them raising families.
Okay.
Four completely different futures.
And then so peep in q and a, people would always ask me, well, which one do you think is the right one?
And my answer is, it doesn't matter what I think is the right one because every one of us pays for this every April 15th.
What matters is what people think the right one is, and what especially matters is for people not simply to accept what they're being told by their space agency, which is that the only one that makes sense is the first one.
So I I I would you're you're bright you know what's going on in the ecosystem.
And when people are asking that question, I think you know I've spoken a tremendous amount around the world.
So that's not a people ask direct questions.
They're asking with your experience, with what you know.
Put put a pin in it.
And you've articulated it already.
You believe that there are certain pathways that are stronger, even the way your tone of language changes, even your sentence structure changes when you get to certain different things that you believe in or not through the entire dialogue that you've had, it it comes out.
So if you're waiting for the general populace to make that decision, they will not, and they will make probably a poor decision.
You would not go out to a bunch of people and say, you're the doctor.
Well, I've never done surgery or medicine.
No.
No.
But you're the general people, and you would know better.
What you wanna do is get somebody who understands ecosystem, and you obviously know it and you obviously have direction in it.
So I would suggest, and this is just a suggestion, put your pen in it because you you know a 100 or a 1000 or 10000 more, more in-depth knowledge of this ecosystem.
Well And so it's it's very evident.
It's evident.
You know, I voted with my feet.
That's why I went to Blue Origin.
Okay.
And
Because you built businesses in, to build the railroad to the moon, number 1, to, develop, a commercial open ended market based space station design, number 2, and, started a program for, I used to call it passenger travel for, you know, people call it tourism.
I don't like that word.
But anyway, tourism, on heavy lift vehicles.
So, you know, we we all we we So that's great.
In our toolkit to get as much progress done as we can.
But they see, when you have
the audience I stopped supporting planning for humans to Mars many, many years ago.
Okay.
And and I and I love that.
And I also love that you called yourself a lunatic now that I understand it.
And I love the last few bullet points because you're articulating with your knowledge and expertise.
You believe that this would make that movement forward.
The value of standing in front of an audience or the audience that, you know, you and I are talking today is what you're doing is you're articulating to me, again, tone, language, sentence structure, all of the even data that you've supplied, which leans in a direction.
Remember, I lived in Asia for 10 years.
I've lived in in Europe, worked in 50 countries.
So each if we did this, if I was not I'm a globalist, but I'm an American.
If I was an American, we were having this conversation and it was a Japanese station, not picking on them, just using them.
A lot of fabulous people around the world.
You this would have been a completely different conversation.
Completely.
So I love that you said this.
You voted with your feet because you believe in more of this this, and I I like this.
The tourism I'm not crazy about.
You believe in the logistics transportation side.
You talked about the, what do you call it, the the, the cruise ship.
You talked about open ended spec and design.
So, yeah, that's that's fabulous.
So you're you're putting a pin in it, and I love that.
I mean, I I love that because you are also falling in not in line.
It's a terrible word a terrible phrase.
You're what we're doing, we're not completely in sync, yet we are very much in sync in many areas.
And I love that because the reason we're doing the call so I, David, can get to know you.
What's important to you?
What do you value?
How do you look at the world?
And this is fabulous.
That's why we create videos for project Moon Hut so you can understand what we're doing.
This this is right it's, like, fantastic.
When I was younger, I was searching for a more politically correct when I when I was younger.
You look great, by the way.
So I actually
Well, thank you.
I, I I it probably seems like I'm passionate about what I talk about.
When it took me years at Boeing in early in my career to learn that when they wrote that I was passionate in my performance reviews that that was actually not meant to be a good thing.
But I, so I do I do feel strongly interesting.
We we should be getting maximum utility out of our public investment, number 1.
I do feel strongly that, genuine strategic planning is hard and does not happen on its own, number 2.
Mhmm.
Yep.
That planning in the rearview mirror is a really bad idea, number 3.
However, you know, just to be very personal about it, I, I I did as much as I could do when I was, you know, gainfully employed, full time employed in the institutions, you know, that I was, hired to help succeed.
And then I got to retirement age, and it's like, you can only do what you can do.
So that's a preface to say, I am although I am passionate about these topics and I've tried to write about them as clearly and repeatedly as I can and I speak when I have an opportunity to, I'm also somewhat philosophical about it.
So what I mean by that is I I actually don't generally tell audiences NASA should do this or the community ought to do that.
What I I'm I'm a little bit more like Spock about it.
I just observe if we keep doing what we are doing, here's what is and isn't going to happen.
So I'm I I am, perhaps unduly aware of my own personal limitations.
You know, I'm not king for a day, so all I can do is, try to be articulate and persuasive.
But the world is gonna be what the world is gonna be.
And, and I'm saying from a complete years, only a few years older than me.
I'm 60.
I I believe I've got a lot more time left, a tremendous amount more time left.
I don't wanna spend it saying, well, you guys have the options.
Let's figure it out.
The NASA in your terminology has such a strong grip.
And on the future, even though it's not doing what it should and so you're giving the advice, you voted differently with your feet.
You with the you're voted with your feet.
I'm gonna suggest that that passion that you have, it is now the time to not worry about all of those other things and be passionate about making the change.
Be passionate about that because you you you've got a a wealth of knowledge.
Maybe I'll focus this by summarizing and saying that the conversation Well, who are we, first of all?
Okay.
Yes.
We are those who pay for our national space program every April 15th.
And I believe the conversation we should be having is an earnest and pointed conversation about the value proposition of our investment in our space program.
Okay.
What I mean by that is any value proposition is you put something in, you get something back out.
And I think the question that we should be addressing collectively as a society is are we getting out as much as we could given what we're putting in?
What we're putting in is, in numerical terms, is $26,000,000,000 a year.
That's the NASA budget.
About 2 thirds of that is devoted one way or another to human spaceflight.
So there are the direct costs of the human spaceflight programs, like the International Space Station, Artemis, and so forth, and the, I call it the prorated carrying costs of the NASA centers that are primarily devoted to human space flight.
If you do the math and the NASA budget, it's more or less 2 thirds of the 26,000,000,000 per year.
Okay.
The question to me is if we could choose how we spend that 2 thirds of 26,000,000,000, I just call it 10 to the 10th
dollars per year.
If we could have an explicit conversation about what we're spending it on, we might choose a differently vectored program to maximize our value proposition.
Mhmm.
So this is directly related to the 4 futures and the societal myths that the futures are aiming at.
So in big round numbers, if you spend 10 to the $10 per year for a few decades, that's 10 to the 11th dollars in
total.
Mhmm.
And if you spent it on the hero myth, which is the explore future, you might after a quarter century, a few decades, have 6 civil servants standing on Mars, of whom 2 would be Americans because everything is done internationally now.
And the explicit question for Americans is 2 US civil servants standing on Mars a quarter century from now worth the 10 to the 11th dollars that we're putting in.
And the answer may be yes.
There are alternative futures though, as we discussed earlier.
And they offer different value propositions.
So to first order, if you spent that same amount of money in that same amount of time, instead on the green myth, which is a version of the exploit future, and you devoted your energies and programs to scaling up the collection and transmission of infinite solar power in space to the surface of the Earth to enable a non disruptive transition to a post petroleum economy on Earth, that would be a different value proposition.
That's the future you would get for the same amount of money and time and effort that we're currently spending on the explorer future.
Or you could spend that same amount of money and time on the experience future and develop the technologies and systems that would break open flying large numbers of people in space routinely, passengers or tourists.
So for example, a quarter century from now you could have 100 of 1000 of ordinary people flying into earth orbit every year.
And so the question you get to ask, which I believe we should ask, we're obligated to ask, the conversation we should be having is which future gives us the value proposition that maximizes our societal utility.
And I personally believe that the impact on society of a half a dozen civil servants on Mars a quarter century from now will not be the same as it was with 2 civil servants on the moon in 1969.
I agree.
That that was brand new.
It was transformational.
It was shocking to most of the world.
A lot of people did not believe it could be done.
And the societal support for the Apollo program was lukewarm at best at the time.
Half of Americans thought it was not a good investment.
But it did, in a lot of ways, change the world.
It gave us iconic images and an understanding of a reality separate from earth.
Okay.
That that was clearly transformational for 1969 civilization.
When I was 11 years old, I was, at an impressionable age when that happened.
And so I felt it just like everybody else did.
But a quarter century from now, will Mars be able to do the same thing that the moon did in 1969?
I argue not.
And all the other arguments for investing in a direction that is aimed squarely at getting humans to Mars are weak arguments.
Scientific exploration, we do much more, much faster in many more places with robotic systems today than we could in the past and certainly than we would with one human mission in 2,045 or 2,050.
I think in a world in which we do not have a clear path, for a non disruptive transition to a post petroleum economy.
We really need to ask ourselves if space could help with making that transition non disruptive, why in the world wouldn't we engage that future?
Why wouldn't we vector our space program toward that objective?
And we we may have spoken a little bit before about the ironic situation that space based solar power finds itself in.
To people who don't understand how it would be done, it seems like magic or preposterous because it's it would be so large scale and so forth.
To a lot of people in the space business, it's boring.
Yeah.
It is.
It's very boring.
Precisely because, you know, it doesn't require a lot of invention.
It's industrialization.
You know, it's scaled up production.
It's a lot of launch.
It's a lot of assembly.
It's big infrastructure, as is the National Highway System, and, you know, as are many other kinds of infrastructure.
I think there's there's one organization.
I'm trying to think of the name that's looking, like, $500, $1,000,000,000 they wanna put ready they want to put solar panels out in space.
There's it's supposed to also be a protective shield from the solar flares, the challenges that could come off of the sun.
Have you heard about that one?
Well, that I don't I don't know of a shield technology for that.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I I saw it recently.
Someone sent it to me, and they want to put up these panels, a thousands of them.
So it becomes a an array.
The the architecture I'm aware of is, for something like that, it's it's not about shielding from solar storms.
What you would do is, put some shading, which would be done with thousands of very simple systems or by launching dust from the surface of the moon to the sun Earth L1 point, which is the Lagrange's vibration point that's between the sun and the earth.
If you put a little bit of shading there, you wouldn't notice it if you were on earth, but the earth would notice it.
And in particular, the polar regions would notice it.
And it is the fastest, most direct and reversible way that I know of to directly slow down or reverse global warming.
So that is a, yet a different example of how infrastructure in space could be used to, we can say, save the Earth.
Mhmm.
My argument about value proposition is where is it written that the most important thing to spend our NASA budget on is putting boots on Mars or boots on the moon to practice going to Mars.
Mhmm.
I agree with that.
I think that is a it's a it's a meme which has, overtaken and now dominates without question, without revisiting the assumptions.
It has overtaken and dominates all of the conversations about what the agency is there for, what its industrial base and stakeholder community in Washington, DC thinks it's there for, what people expect of it, and what it's been trying to do ever since the end of the Apollo program.
Why do you think that's the case?
It's for some of the reasons we talked about earlier in the conversation, there is there is the misinterpretation of the agency's own history, which is to say the Apollo program was not ever meant to be a boots on planets program.
It was not meant to be a scientific exploration program.
It was meant to be a geopolitical statement that embarrassed the Soviets on the world stage of public opinion.
And in that it succeeded and in the process set an expectation within the NASA stakeholder community that that is what we do, that's what we're here for.
I would offer a a counterpoint, which is also in NASA's own history.
And that is, if we so I focus a little bit on the exploit future and the green myth and providing clean energy for Earth.
But let's focus on the experience future, and which people sort of casually call space tourism.
That's that's a bit of a misnomer.
But anyway, I'm increasing numbers of ordinary people in space for their own purposes, including, and largely including leisure.
Okay, so that's what people call space tourism.
I remember very clearly a meeting of it was either the Space Frontier Foundation or probably the National Space Society in Los Angeles.
Dan Golden was the NASA administrator, pounded on the podium and said, space tourism is not my job.
And I don't know why not.
And here's why I think it might ought to be, as we used to say in Alabama.
Are you from Alabama?
I lived there for eight and a half years when I started my career.
Okay.
There the 1st, let's look at the value proposition.
In a in a reality in which the overview effect affects every single astronaut who flies, whether they fly for a few minutes or a year or multiple times or in earth orbit or to the moon.
Every single astronaut who's flown has experienced the overview effect, which changes their fundamental perception about the fragility of the biosphere, the triviality of political differences and borders and all that.
Okay.
There's a whole theory about it then.
And we we've had on, Frank White.
We've had on Frank.
I have a a little bit different perspective on it because our world hasn't improved because of the 680 people who've been up in the way and way.
And here, you just you just you're a good straight man.
The reason is because that's only 600 people.
Right.
680.
Correct.
Imagine if a 100000 people a year experienced that.
And most of them would be, let's just say, well heeled in one way or another that'd be able to afford it.
They would be decision makers, either, you know, financial or industrial or political leaders.
And so we could do a lot worse for today's world state than having or the state of the world today than having 100 of thousands of leaders of various types experiencing the overview effect.
In addition, if and if a set of industries were to develop around the visitors, space visitors rather than professional crews, that would mean that we would have robust, competitive, resilient systems for transportation, for mobility, for habitation because they'd be servicing that commercial industry.
That would then be a very different infrastructure platform upon which an agency like NASA could build its exploration architectures, to go do what they think they wanna do, which is to take humans further out in
the system.
So that would be fundamentally the reason you would do it.
So I have one,
Hang on.
Let me let me get the NACA analogy because this is important.
When Dan Goldin said space tourism is not his job, what he meant was we're here to do exploration.
We're not here to promote passenger travel or to enable it.
But there are things that need to be done if you're going to have that many ordinary people flying every year in space.
You've gotta have much safer launch and landing systems.
You've gotta have amenities in space.
We talked about some of that before.
Very different types of systems.
Okay.
That requires investment.
And here's the weird thing.
NASA's own predecessor, the NACA, did exactly that.
Its job was to develop to invest in and develop airfoil technologies and airplane propulsion plant or engine technologies.
Those two things done by the NACA in all the years from 1917 up through the formation of NASA in 1958, underpin all of the industries associated with jet travel that we have today.
Civilian, military, and so forth.
And not just airplanes, but all the associated industries, airports, all the things that support them, the whole travel industry that flies a 1000000000 people per year, all depends on the technologies that NASA's own predecessor invested in.
So why is it not a good thing to have our NASA that we pay for invest in the technologies that would open the door to a future that would give us more humans traveling in space, more routinely, more ordinary humans traveling, and open up future industries.
That's exactly what their own predecessor did.
So I do not accept the argument that says it's not their job.
I think it's precisely their job.
And I think as a an agency, that spends our money every year, it is incumbent on them to constantly reassess their purpose and make sure that what they're investing in is in the best long term interest of society.
So that's the conversation we should be having.
Okay.
I I don't, my question I don't disagree with what you're saying, so that's not my where I'm what I'm going to ask.
It's, you've met this amount of astronauts, so have I.
I have not had this feeling that they were so profoundly different in their perspective on the world.
I have found them to be similar to the people that I meet in other places with just a few different experiences that they're not out there changing the world in a way I think the overview effect has been promoted to achieve.
So that's one point.
The second point is a simple one.
We do go up in planes.
We do look down.
Do you believe or how high would you have to go?
What would you what would that experience have to be like to act to have that profound effect instead of it just being a, hey.
I just took some pictures.
I went there.
This was amazing.
That's great.
And coming back to do what humans do typically when they go to another country and learn something, they tend to come back and do their own thing.
What do you think would be necessary to make it more positive, which is not a great word or set of words?
Yeah.
No.
I I know what you're asking.
So, I've flown to planes.
I've never flown in space.
So I'm speculating based on
I'll take a speculation, but you know what I mean.
And, and experiences as related to me.
So Frank in his theory delves into this.
And he he, finds through interviewing many astronauts that the experience is stronger the farther from Earth you go.
For Apollo astronauts who could stand on the surface of the moon and hold up their thumb and then completely block out the Earth Mhmm.
In the sky, very powerful.
And it doesn't it's not like it makes people spiritual.
If you're spiritual, it makes you feel spirituality more deeply.
I understand.
If you're not, then, you know, whatever you feel, it makes you, more keenly aware of it in in his theory.
I so to answer your question, my opinion Yep.
Is that, flying in orbit will do it in when you're in orbit, low earth orbit, the earth fills more than 70% of the sky, of the view, it moves and and we which we can now see on our
Yeah.
Apple TV screensaver.
Yes.
You know, it it it moves.
Although you can't trust the rate that you see it on Apple TV because all if you notice all the drones for all the scenes on the screensavers move at the same time.
It's kind of incredible.
Rate Yeah.
As yeah.
They do that all.
I I I if you've been to our website and you've seen the the graphic where the International Space Station, the Tiangong are traveling, I asked our team, and they said, no.
That's flying at the exact speed that it's traveling around the Earth at the location, which I thought was fascinating.
But, yes, I do understand.
I I I actually think the screensavers have adopted the rate of change of the image that we see when we're in LEO.
Okay.
But in any case, the view changes all the time.
Yep.
18 sunrises and sunsets every day.
The the clouds and the lightning and so forth, and and the fact that your orbit is processing means that you when you look out the window, you never actually see the same thing twice.
Yep.
So, I, the best I can tell you is I subscribe to Frank's theory, which is not just about the view.
Remember
No.
We've had Frank on.
So, yes, I I
Yeah.
It's it's the experience it's the risk based experience of flying up and flying down, which is, you know, more exciting than any roller coaster ride.
And the unique experience, the visceral experience of being in free fall when you're in orbit, coupled with the view, the overview, with without borders and so forth and being able to directly see wildfires and, river runoff and, you know, all those kinds of things.
So I I just I I believe that one of the benefits, part of the value proposition of the experience future is that.
It's not the only one.
No.
It's it's interesting thing.
I I've not heard it in that way.
I'm not as positive, for with human nature to be as progressive as you're promoting.
Like, I I tried to put out there is that I know people who've traveled around the world, and they come back.
And it's like, didn't you just learn something in that country?
Didn't you see they had a completely different perspective on the world and the way things are done?
And why are you going back to who you were?
And I you have a very optimistic perspective on human nature changing as more quickly than I.
Well, but I I'm not sure it's optimistic.
It's I mean, all all of this is anecdotal Yep.
Because it's based on talking to people.
My own experience is that every time I travel to another culture, another part of Earth, I it changes me.
And so I don't think I'm that You are.
I'd I'd love to say that you're not, but you are because, I mean, I I've I've you've I don't know if you lived in other countries.
I don't know if we went over that last time.
Yeah.
It's I would hope that sounds like I I like what you're saying.
I've not heard it in the way you've expressed it, so that's something for me to get my mind around.
And Yeah.
Well And you and you put it as a portion.
You've said this is a piece
of Exactly.
That's what it's And
that's what I like.
You know, it's completely reasonable for you could just discount overview effect at all and then say, ah,
but what about What about?
Yeah.
You
know, once once all the rockets are commercial, once all the stations and the the dormitories and so over the commercial, once all the power infrastructure in space is commercial, once all of that is commercial now, then NASA can go do what it wants to do.
And it'll be able to do it better and less, expensively than it does it today.
The the SLS being a, you know, the the poster child example of NASA wants to go do a thing, and so they invest in the development of a unique flight system Yeah.
With all of its unique ground infrastructure that can only be used by them and that can barely be used by them because it's so freaking expensive to use.
Yeah.
And I just saw an article which we shared within our team, and it said, NASA's old supercomputers are causing mission delays.
1 has 18,000 CPUs, but only 42 GPUs, highlighting dire need for a complete update.
And so, yes, there those are significant challenges.
And I do agree with you.
Once you have a commercialization, you have you have standards put in place that might be good or bad, but it would enable a different type of perspective.
And once a full infrastructure is in place, as you're saying, takeoff, landing, in lower orbit capabilities, you NASA would have a jumping point to other future endeavors.
So, maybe we can Yep.
Sort of bring bring this part into a close.
I think just the point is, as Americans, we own the space program, but we are not collectively having the conversation about how it could be best used.
And, before I I don't wanna close completely.
How would you get that conversation going?
I mean, we're on the podcast, so this will help.
But how would you get that conversation going?
Because I'm assuming you've had conversations with individuals at NASA, so have I.
And these are not conversations that they're willing to even ascertain.
They are not.
The the best answer I can give you is that I spent 35 years working in the belly of the beast.
And while I was at Boeing, while I was working for NASA at JPL and even at Blue Origin, my ability to, move to color outside the lines was constrained in various ways.
Mhmm.
I've been retired for less than a half a year.
So give me a chance to think about it.
It it's it's a a very, very challenging conversation, and it it was one of our guests on.
I won't name the name.
He oh, we we know him.
I asked him how many people in his organization could have conversations like this, and there are there are so many.
And he said, not even a handful.
This is just not the way he described it is old dinosaurs having old conversations are not willing to change.
And when you look at the average age of Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus, the their forties and their fifties, the majority of those people, are looking for retirement, looking for savings, looking for safety nets.
And, I'm going to I only know the number for SpaceX, and it's, like, 27 point 8 or 27.6.
It's in that range.
And they are willing to have a different conversation possibly because they're not entrenched in yesterday.
It could be.
I mean, it's so I wanna be clear.
This is not an insidious thing.
It's not even a conscious thing.
It it's, and I don't think it's unique to space.
It's not.
I think it is a, one of the many ways in which human thinking and action succumbs to, rational fallacies is by neglecting to constantly go back and revisit fundamental assumptions.
That's what we should always be doing, and that's the basis of, classical liberal thinking is what are the assumptions?
Are you sure that the assumptions are valid?
What are the axioms that you're not reexamining and should you?
And if if we just say, nope.
We're good.
We know what we're doing.
We're gonna go do it for the next half century or the next century, and you don't go back and rethink that or revisit and reexamine it repeatedly, well, then that's that's, that's succumbing to a rational fallacy.
Okay.
I I I agree with you.
Yeah.
And that's kind of what we're working on is trying to make those changes too.
So what's the next we've got, what conversations are we having next was a future history of human space flight.
Is that the where we're taking the jump?
Yeah.
And so, the where kinda where this goes is, what I see as inevitable trends and patterns coming in the future.
And the maybe the preparatory caveat is, the calendar for this is TBD.
So it the these shifts, these trends, may happen within just decades if things kind of explode into a so called robust ecosystem and space, which a lot of people would like to have happen, or it may take centuries depending on how fast things, develop.
But I think some of these trends are, happening whether we want them to or not.
And so it's like when the tide comes in, well, you know, you can fight the tide or you can ride the tide.
And so these are things I think are important to be aware of if what your field is or your interest, your vocation or your avocation is human space flight.
And I've divided them into 3.
So we can have, you know, sort of 3 conversations here.
The first is what I call a demographic shift from what we have today, which are primarily explorers and workers of an ilk to, a next chapter, which is a much more diverse type of worker and visitors, and then finally to settlers.
And
so Wait.
Is this wait.
Because I'm I'm writing, and you have demographic shift, and that's that's number 1.
Number 1 is
No.
I think, oh, do you want the outline?
No.
No.
I'm just making sure.
That's all under democratic shift.
You have, explorers, workers, next chapter, diverse workers, visitors, and settlers.
Settlers.
Yes.
Okay.
So that's just one.
So I just wanna make sure I wasn't supposed to break them up.
Okay.
No.
No.
No.
No.
And so the this is important for a couple of reasons.
One is I'll start with, I think, what everybody will experience, and then I'll shift to what space architects care about.
Right now well, so back in Gemini, Apollo, and so forth, it really was just explorers.
And you could even argue that in the very early days of the ISS, Mir and the ISS, they were still explorers.
What we were doing was exploring the space environment.
That shifted, first on mirror and and then especially on the ISS to mostly being about workers.
What what are they?
They're they're researchers, a couple of flight crew, but, primarily it's what the shuttle program used to call mission specialists.
They're people who are trained to conduct scientific research.
And you could argue is that still exploration or are they space workers?
I would argue they're space workers.
And I just find that wonderful because now we've it has enabled us to enter a new era of what spaceflight is used for, how people are trained, the nature of the risks that they undertake, and so forth.
The next step of that will come with the emergence of the experienced future one way or another with the, an increased number of, what I like to call passengers or sometimes we just call them visitors.
There are people who, if they're workers, they are paid to go.
If they're tourists, they pay to go.
Like getting on a plane.
Well, or think about it in terms of destinations.
So I may go to, oh, pick a city.
I may go to Washington DC.
Yeah.
Right?
I live in California, but I may travel to Washington DC.
Why am I going?
Well, I could go there because I wanna take a vacation and go see, the national museums and monuments and so forth.
Most of the time when
I go, I go because I'm working.
Mhmm.
I go there for a reason.
And so I am a visitor to Washington DC who is paid to go because I have worked there.
That's what I meant by just like getting on a plane.
We have people who are doing paying to go someplace and people who are paid to go there.
And that Yeah.
And so I I think I think what yeah.
When you it's absolutely right.
But when you said plane, the reason I responded is, increasingly, we need to think not so much about transportation systems as about destination
systems.
And I I understood that I was just making a relative term because I I have a similar argue.
I'm on planes because people pay me to go there, and I'm going to that destination, which I would have never gone to Bangladesh or Sri Lanka or Cambodia for any other reason in my sphere, unless someone paid me.
But on the flip side, there are many people on the plane who are going there for tourism reasons.
That's why I went to Cambodia.
So
You went to Ankar.
It was Ankar Wat and, yeah.
Yeah.
San Riva.
Yep.
So, so it's it's it's actually it's reminiscent of the scene in, one of the Star Trek movies where, they it's Star Trek 4, the voyage home.
So they go back in time because they're trying to save the whales.
Oh, yeah.
That's one of my favorites.
Yeah.
And so he's, having pizza at the restaurant with, the, cytologist.
And she says, let me guess.
You're from space.
And he says, no.
I'm from Iowa.
I only work in space.
Yep.
And that's Captain Kirk, right?
So that I think the reason this second phase of the demographic shift is so interesting is that the nature of the workers will shift.
We'll come back to that.
And there will be a larger and larger and increasingly large number of, leisure visitors.
Time lines.
What's your timeline?
I said it's it's milestone based.
No.
I'm I'm just taking I'm I'm putting it what are your what's your perspective on timelines?
Because in 19 I've I think I said this before.
In 1972, no one would have thought we were we'd be where we are today if they were working at NASA.
Meaning nobody thought we were far past where we were that there would have been Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so, there is no technical or fundamental economic reason why the experience future could not be fully realized.
And I gave you the metric before.
100 of 1,000 of ordinary people flying in Earth orbit every year within a quarter century.
The reason that is it either will happen or it won't happen because of programmatics, not because of economics or technical obstacles.
Would you would you then say that's the same thing that happened from 1969 to 2019?
What do
you Well, you said it's programmatic and that we expected to get to a certain point, people going to O'Neil having an O'Neil cylinder or they've are real.
We expected a lot of these things to happen, and it didn't happen.
Did it not happen because of programmatic decisions that were made?
Yes.
Okay.
Just confirming because you're
I I
think same same scenario.
I think there are 2 there are 2 things at work.
So there's a Calvin and Hobbes, strip.
It's one of my favorites where Calvin is maligning the state of the modern world.
And, you know, where are the ray guns?
Where are the flying cars?
Where are the floating cities?
And his punchline is whatever happened to the future anyway?
And so I think one thing that we experience is that for for diverse reasons, the future never turns out the way somebody's quaint image of it anticipated it would.
So I think that's kinda more universal.
In in in space in particular, it comes down to how we spend our public resources.
So the conversation we had earlier about what conversation
That's why I was asking.
I was trying to tie the pieces together.
And and so so it it'll either it'll happen sooner or faster I mean, I'm sorry, sooner or later, sooner if programmatically the agency re vectored its intentions later if it does not.
But that doesn't mean it's not gonna happen.
It just takes longer to happen.
So, let's think for a minute about what it means to have more diverse space workers.
Well, let me do the other one first.
So passengers.
The the way I think this evolves is it starts the way we're seeing today actually with adventure travelers.
So right now, if you've got $60,000,000 that you can spend on it, you can get a ticket on a an Axiom Pan mission, a private astronaut mission.
So you buy it through Axiom.
It's you actually fly on a SpaceX, Crew Dragon to go to the International Space Station, because it's International Space Station is the destination you're going to, the rules, things you can do and things you can't do and so forth.
But that is very much akin to other kinds of adventure travel.
It's super expensive, but it's it's risky.
The your opportunities are constrained, but people do it anyway because it's the only way you can do it and it's a unique astounding experience.
So but that's adventure travel.
As it gets more curated and more tailored for those visitors, and as the facilities and amenities, get less about, like, camping out in somebody's laboratory and more like going to a resort, then you shift from adventure travel into tourism.
And that's when you see the price elasticity curve and the risk elasticity curve, bring to bear larger and larger numbers of customers, increasing numbers of facilities, diversity of amenities, competition among them, and so forth, further price depression, and so all of that goodness.
And eventually tourism opens the door to what I call orbital living.
And to be honest, I don't remember if we spoke
No, we didn't.
Before.
But yeah.
So so I think we both know some people who have amazing houses around the planet.
Well, realtors call them homes, amazing homes around the planet.
So we have the capability to make a truly amazing home that is literally around the planet.
And so imagine a module outfitted as a condominium, 0 g condominium, that's attached to a mixed use destination like Orbital Reef.
And it's owned by 12 super rich owners, each of whom spends 1 month a year there.
So So it's it's a time share.
Time time share condominium.
Right.
The there there are homeowners association the homeowners association fee gonna be pretty steep.
Yeah.
So but if you were one of those owners, you're you're not gonna wanna spend more than a couple of weeks or a few weeks, certainly not more than a month, per year in orbit.
First of all, because you got other things to spend your time on, which is, you know, why you got so rich in the first place.
But also, you could spend a month in space without having to exercise every you know, for 3 hours every day and stuff like that.
But you can't live in space, in, free fall continuously without microgravity deconditioning setting in.
So a a few weeks is probably right.
So who knows with the business model?
Maybe it's 24 people in the age.
Yeah.
You you're just doing a time share type of allocation to to reduce the capital risk cost of being engaged in it.
So I think the there's a little evolution there that goes from adventure travel to tourism to orbital living.
The type of space workers now that support that industry need to be much more diverse than what we have today.
So today, we have mission crews, system engineers, and, laboratory specialists.
In the future, we will have the kind of upstairs, downstairs separation of, you know, front of house, back of house like you have in hotels and resorts.
So there will be maintenance crews and administrators and, tour guides and free fall hairdressers and, chefs, there will be there will need to be a kind of specialization that does not yet exist today.
And I think that's also very exciting development because it means that the diversity of types of space workers will increase.
If we engage the exploit future and let's say we industrialize the geostationary belt for clean power for Earth, then you will also have a lot of space workers whose primary job is to make sure their robots are working right.
That is the robots that are constructing and maintaining these very, very large space power facilities.
And there will be you could call them space maintenance workers, which we have a little bit of on ISS today, but, really, the mission crews on ISS are kind of jack of all trades because there's only a couple of them.
They have to do everything.
Yep.
And the facility, even though it looks big, is actually small.
You think about it.
It's as big as a football field, but it only supports 6 humans.
Yeah.
And I I don't remember if I told you one of the first people 1 first astronaut I met, he, I'm trying to remember his name.
I'm it's escaping me.
He was respond he was the person who took out the battery for the telescope and replaced it.
So his job was to go up.
That's he was a maintenance worker, more or less.
He he took out a 700 pound battery.
He removed it, put in the new one, and he was responsible for learning how to put screws in.
And he said he had to put screws in and out, take them in and out, in and out, in and out, in and out with gloves on many, many, many, many times because if he stripped it, it would be a bad thing.
And he said, wouldn't you know it?
I'm putting the screw in to seal it up, and I feel like it's stripping.
Well, I was thinking that exact same thing.
He was a maintenance worker repairing the telescope, and that was his job.
And when he was, he was told as he was leaving NASA, he was they said, if you break it, don't come home.
Well, so the one of the one of the really important things for space architecture about space workers is, tours of duty.
So depending on what orbit you're in, you will accumulate radiation dose being in space.
And so today, it's kind of like it's a remarkable thing if an astronaut has flown on 6 missions in their career, for example.
That's considered a high number.
And, you know, if an astronaut has spent an accumulated couple of years in space like Peggy Whitson or some of the others that have multiple missions of, you know, long duration.
So you you accumulate radiation.
Okay.
There's in in with current technology, there's no such thing as somebody who just lives in space all the time for the rest of their career.
There aren't yet standards, accepted standards for the risks the accumulated risks that will be incurred by professional workers in these diverse types of labor fields, you could call it.
But I think that So that's chapter 2 of this.
It starts with explorers and then we have workers, and now the workers diversify because the demographic is shifting and we have more visitors who are untrained, not professional, there for leisure purposes, they're paying a lot of money to go and so forth.
Then the 3rd chapter is settlers.
I personally believe it will be a long time, multiple decades before anybody seriously embarks on anything that could be called settling.
However, it will happen at some point.
And for space architects, the thing that's interesting about that is that it's one thing to design, oh, let's just say a laboratory.
It's another thing to design a resort hotel.
It's a really different thing to design a settlement because it you you now have to engage all of the behaviors and needs and aspirations of a community.
And a way to think about this is if if it's not just people coming, doing their thing, and then going home, whether the thing is getting paid to be there or they're paying to be there, but if it's people who are, spending their lives there, well, now they're gonna have families.
And then it gets into, like, having kids, and then you have life cycle management.
So, hospitals to mortuaries, for example, and everything in between.
So, we are very far from that.
That doesn't mean it's not fun to think about, and we should think about it.
Yeah.
But not only are we far from needing that, we're we're far from being able to settle anywhere because true settlement means deriving the the needs for physical existence from the place where you are.
And despite what people may try to tell you, this is a super hard thing to do.
It's gonna be really hard on the moon.
It's gonna be really hard on Mars.
It's Yeah.
Well,
what we we have really
hard in the asteroids.
You you you can't do it in free space without resources from those physical locations.
And so we're we are decades decades away from the ability to do And that's one of When you get there when you get there, think about the implications for even systems that we think we understand.
I'll use life support systems, ECLSS, as an example.
The kind of life support technology we have on space station today, which is very high maintenance, expensive, finicky stuff, high maintenance, but it works.
Works well.
You could use that to go to Mars with a half a dozen, you know, government astronauts.
You'd probably wanna have multiple backup systems and so forth because you're gone for 3 years and all that, but the technology we have is the technology you could use.
No harm, no foul.
Alright.
At the opposite end of the scale, when you get to settlers, what you're not gonna do is have warehouses full of the stuff that we have inside racks today.
Tubes and pumps and reactive beds and, you know, reverse osmosis membranes.
And, it's very finicky stuff.
And and that is you're not going to support a city's worth or a town's worth of population permanently with that.
How you're gonna wanna do it is the way we do it on earth, which is with plants and wetlands.
So, you know, of all the oxygen we breathe, all of us, every day, half of it comes from ocean plankton.
A quarter of it comes from the Amazon, and the other quarter of it comes from other forests, including especially the boreal forest in in the northern latitudes.
So that's how Earth does it.
And when we get to the scale of actually settling space, that's how we're gonna have to do it.
So the type of techno I I go through that example by way of explaining that the type of technology depends on the demographic you're supporting.
So the demographic shift is not just economic and experiential.
It's also technological.
And all these things have to come together to enable us to shift from just visitors and tourists to settlers.
So the reason it's worth spending any time on thinking about this at all is if you're a space architect like I am, you're about designing the human environment for living and working in space.
So it kind of depends
on what the humans
are, what type of demographic they are, and what work they're doing, and why they're there, and how long they're there for, to tell you what kind of systems you need to be designing.
Yes.
And that's, it's whether you're gonna be building a cruise ship or you're gonna be building a a military vessel or you're going or a a sailing a small sailing ship.
Everything requires a different type of approach to make sure that it functions properly.
Right.
The
So that that relates I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
There was some question I was going to ask you a little early.
I'm trying to see in my notes, implications of life support, high maintenance, go to Mars, multiple backup, settlers.
There was something that I was going to hit on.
Oh, it is.
I'm I don't know if you followed what happened during the SPAC series of investments, but there was a huge set of investments into, agroponics.
And almost all of them have failed, and that's on Earth.
When we're talking I do believe that lower Earth orbit or moon and Earth, it's going to have to be supplied by Earth for a very long time.
Are you do you believe on the economic perspective that these type of hydroponic systems are going to be so powerful, so, create so much caloric intake, so much produce that it can sustain a larger community?
Well, I do think there is there has already been an evolution in, I'll call it, agricultural efficiency on Earth.
And we're, you know, we're all familiar with multiple examples that has
to do with
the green revolution, pesticides, and so forth.
And then now it shifted into genetic work, for crops.
That will continue.
So it's it's it's changing the plants and we could say the animals, but it's changing the the, the life forms themselves as well as improving the efficiency with which we cultivate them.
So the fact that you now have huge farming machines that are completely robotic
Oh, yeah.
Is a relatively new thing.
And I worked with a roboticist who was the first one who pioneered a lot of that in the late eighties, and now it's a thing.
A a class 9 harvester or I mean, these are producing a tremendous amount of offshoot in the middle of the night using GPS to be able to find its way.
But that is not that's not high so you're you believe that the advances in hydroponics or this type of farming will get there fast enough to be a part of this evolution, or are you saying that you don't believe
I think no.
I I what I'm saying is that there is a general trend to higher tech interventions that increase the productivity and efficiency of agriculture, and that will continue.
And it may include hydroponics.
It may include aeroponics, but but not limited to those.
It's just a lot of space.
It's a lot of space for fruits and vegetables.
And and so I I kind of like the yeah.
That's why I said the economic side of it.
There's a a very large economic cost to creating an environment large enough to create enough produce to make it worthwhile at least in today's dollars.
Well but look at that that description applies exactly to the situation we find ourselves on for today.
Mhmm.
Right?
The cost of agriculture to support, humanity, let alone a western convention diet that's rich in animal protein and so forth, that that cost, economically and environmentally is extremely hot.
Yes.
It's just that on earth, most people are just kind of, blithely unaware of it, and they're not they're not confronted by the reality.
This is one of the things I like about space architecture, and I think can teach us lessons is in space, there are no externalities.
Right?
You go outside the wall and it's death.
So everything you need, what you breathe, what you touch, what you eat, what you drink, you have to control it.
You have to recycle it.
You have to, manage it and and so forth.
And that's all evident because it's surrounding you.
So let's go back to we were talking about station.
The International Space Station is a baseball field, but it only supports 6 people.
Why is that?
Well, it's because there are no externalities in space.
I know, by the way, space station, because it's in low earth orbit, depends on routine resupply.
Yep.
So if you're, let's say, at an O'Neil settlement at, you know, earth moon l 4 Mhmm.
For example Yep.
Your your supply chain, is, most of your supply chain is internal every cycle.
Let's kind of start there.
But your external supply chain is, orders of magnitude more complicated and expensive, even than it is in the space station today.
So that type that your dependence on technology and design and system operations and not to mention good behavior, is literally vital, and it's present all the time.
You you you can't hide it.
You can't get away from it.
So, I'm gonna say a little bit more about that in in our our 3rd
Okay.
Topic when we get there.
So let's hold that thought.
I'm I'm I got tons of notes.
So great.
Yeah.
The the second topic is very quick, and it comes directly out of what I was saying about why space architecture.
So interested in space architecture, the different types of die demographics, the different types of systems and amenities and so forth.
Because of that
Well, so wait.
So you had demographic shift.
Right.
So now I'm gonna go to the second topic, which is architecture over engineering.
Okay.
That's what I wanna make sure.
Yeah.
And so this is a this is maybe not so consequential in the short term, but it's controversial.
So I love to describe it.
Okay.
Because space engineers hate it.
And what it says is that there will come a time when designing for humans in space will be done the way it's done on earth.
Of course.
And that is to say, it's not all led by engineers.
It's led by architects for whom the engineers work.
You can see why space Well, you don't have to say it that way.
You could you could theoretically say that the engineers work with the architects, but you specifically use the word for.
Well, that's the way it happens on Earth.
Well, I mean, I know architects and they work with engineering firms, and the engineering firms, you know, collaborate with them.
So Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you just you like to dig a little bit.
It's okay.
I'm I I understand.
Nothing nothing I'm saying is is, intended to imply lack of
I I'm I'm I'm I'm prodding you a little bit because it's just a choice of language.
It's yeah.
Our that's the way it's done on earth.
I do understand.
Real truth, even in terrestrial architectures, that everybody works for the contractors.
Right?
Yeah.
The develop Yep.
The the everybody works for the developers, because that's the that's the the money That's
where it comes from.
But what what you have in major developments on earth is there's some these days more and more, it's a firm or a or a team of firms who are the kind of design masters of the project, and they will commission work from various types of engineers, structural engineers, environmental control engineers, geotechnical engineers, etcetera, etcetera.
The the reason this is important to space architects is for 1, space architecture is a new field, but the there's a little bit of a Rodney Dangerfield thing there.
But, the reason is that, historically, all the stuff that has flown people in space has been designed by engineers.
And that makes perfect sense given where we are.
As the engineers will say, well, space is really hard, and it's really dangerous.
And, therefore, you know, it must be done by engineers who know what they're doing and everything else is secondary.
That's true.
However, that's also how you get, the interior design of the International Space Station, which is nothing like the way the architects who worked on the program back in phase a and phase b, framed it out.
It's basically like, if you've ever worked in a government building, I used to be at Goddard Space Flight Center, and my office was in a building that's no longer there.
But, it had it literally had metal partition walls.
We used to put stuff up with magnets.
Yep.
You know?
And you've got, like, 19 seventies metal desks and metal desk chairs and metal walls for God's sake.
And they were painted, you know, government beige.
So that's what you get if you don't use architects.
Not all architects are great.
Not all non architect buildings are bad.
And there are many engineers who have architecture talents with them too that bring to the table.
There's a reason why architects are.
And, that's you know, everybody wants to claim that they're the 2nd oldest profession, architects included.
But
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
So what's the first then?
I'll leave that to you.
I've never heard everybody wants to say that they're the 2nd oldest profession.
Oh, no.
That's the joke.
People will say, you know, politics is the 2nd oldest profession.
Oh, okay.
I've I've Doctoring is the 2nd oldest profession.
I've I've not I've not heard that, but I just I was like, okay.
Nobody lays claim to the first oldest profession.
They exchanging money for service.
Yeah.
But, anyway Okay.
As
I I wouldn't know if maybe I was missing something.
Just making clear being clear on this.
Okay.
So the the way to think about it is that anything that flies in space has there's like the price of admission is aerospace engineer.
And that's the classic aerospace disciplines like, structures, dynamics, guidance, navigate control, propulsion, attitude control, avionics, on and on and on.
They're all the subsystems, the subsystem based disciplines.
You cannot have a space system without those things.
Okay.
If the space system also contains people, now you've gotta have a whole other layer of aerospace stuff, environment control life support, human factors, crew systems interfaces, etcetera, etcetera.
If oh, EVA.
Let's not forget EVA because you gotta get outside every now and then.
If you go further on that scale and especially as you engage demographics that are not highly trained, you know, professional mission crews, but you have other kinds of just visitors who are paying a lot of money to be there and they wanna have a good adventure vacation.
You need amenities.
You need to design knowing how humans interact with each other, human behavior patterns in less extreme types of societies.
So that means not just researchers in a lab, but, people who are not highly trained, who just interact.
Like how do people interact in restaurants and how do people interact when they're shopping?
Okay.
Well, I hate to say it, but aerospace engineers know nothing about that.
That's what architects do.
And then when you get further over into the sociology of, accommodating the sociology of larger groups with the built environment, that is what architecture is.
It's It brings
all of the There's other discipline.
There's
Artistics and aesthetics, the history of architecture, all these, capturing, the aspirations of human occupants is what architects do.
That's what makes it a field.
I'm trying to remember what my girlfriend in in in college did.
She was not an architect, but she was another discipline.
And because in order for her to go to sleep, she had to get her work done, and I forgot the discipline it was in.
We would I'd stay up with her because I do draw paint, sculpt, I do carpeted, plumbing, electrical work.
I'd sit with her and we'd redesign entire office structures, floor plans.
We would look at commercials facilities.
We'd look at retail.
And she wasn't an architect.
She was in god.
I'm trying to remember the discipline.
But I think it it sounds like you're putting a lot into into architecture, which also is managed by other disciplines.
Well, that's what architects do is they integrate all those things.
So you may have interior designers and industrial designers and landscape architects.
There's, you know, subspecialties there as well.
Okay.
So you you're you're take you're taking it it's not that they're always doing all of these things, but you're you're you're using the architecture as also an integrator.
Well, that's what archa that's what
the No.
I know a lot of architects who really they do architecture.
They design.
They sit down.
They create the plans.
They they draft everything out.
But then there are other architects who build large scale structures where they bring other people and they manage teams of individuals.
Well, every major project is done by a team.
Like, the days of Frank Lloyd Wright sitting down at a drafting table and detailing everything out are long gone.
That's not how projects
I the way you were using the term architect, I was taking it as more of a smaller position, and now you're explaining it a little bit differently.
Yeah.
So that's that's the reason I was saying it
is a minute ago.
Like, architecture today is done by firms.
Yes.
Just the way you have been using the terminology since at this point, it sounded more as if the architect was the drafts person, the person who put the the whole concept together.
And now what in my mind's eye, maybe I was wrong in the way I was interpreting it.
I wasn't thinking of it as crews of teams of individuals who were an integration individual.
So now I've got it.
That's fine.
But I wasn't there with the way you were framing things.
Okay.
Yeah.
And so, it at Root, this is this is kinda really very simple.
The the the performance challenges that face any space system are amenable to engineering.
The performance challenges that are faced by human occupied systems are not only amenable to engineering.
They also require dealing with the inherently messy problem of human behavior, human perception, human reactions, and human behavior.
And so, that's that's why you need more than just engineers.
That's the point.
Okay.
Yeah.
And I
I get that That's
why we have a field of space architect.
That's where I got it.
Once I understood where you were going with it, I I didn't tie those pieces together.
So, yes, it's the integration of all of these systems and structures to be able to make a full complete system work for for humans while living beyond earth.
And I think that we will find in the future, there are needs, meaning that there needs that humans have, particularly humans in, groups or, you know, social settings that are so deep rooted that they can't really be changed.
They're just part of who we are as a as a social species, and those will come to the fore in space architecture.
So the fundamental problems of making a toilet that doesn't break or, you know, a life support system that whose filters don't clog all the time or, you know, a space flight system that maintains the narrow temperature range that's acceptable for human living.
All those things which are challenges today, they'll be solved.
So fast forward, you know, I don't know, a half century from now, all those problems will be solved.
They'll be very well solved, and they, they they won't really be as specialized as they are today.
And these other atavistic things that govern how we behave as a social species will start to dominate particularly as the demographics diversify.
That's kind of the point.
And and I
because remember, we're talking about the the future history of human species.
So I'm just No.
I I'm I'm I'm just kinda painting the No.
You're you're doing a you're doing a great job and and everything you're saying is great.
So we're we're good here.
One of the the what comes to mind, and you've known me as much as you've known me.
I do speak my mind fairly often whether right or wrong.
The words that I'm hearing, not not the understanding of the pieces that you're putting together.
I'm gonna say every so often you'd jump in a word and say, that will happen by.
And my if we go back to the today's original start with NASA not knowing or agencies not knowing what their role is, you're saying eventually would happen, but that's what people would have said, I'm gotta believe in 19 eighties 19 nineties, and we were gonna solve this, and we were gonna be there, and this is gonna happen, and it hasn't.
So there's a a missing link in making That Will Happen by.
Yeah.
The the the missing link is, patience in the time domain.
So I'm less troubled by things not happening as fast as I might have thought when I was a kid in the sixties.
I'm not as troubled by that as I am intrigued by the, direction I see for inevitable trends.
Okay.
So let's go back to, why humans are gonna be in space altogether anyway.
So are you we're adding a we're adding a another piece because you have posthuman space.
Yeah.
We'll get to that.
It's fine.
Actually, the this this is a good segue into that.
Okay.
Perfect.
But I think it's important to yeah.
We could call it a a
Segue is great.
I just I was I I'm, as you know, I'm writing, so I just wanna make sure I wasn't losing something.
So I I think, you know, people will talk about, oh, humans have this innate need to explore, and, you know, we are curious and I all those things are true.
But, there I I accept that there is a non zero probability that the actual future of humanity is that we are forever only on this planet.
I don't like that future, but I think it's a possible one.
The one I think is more likely is that in a universe with a trillion galaxies, each of which has 100 of billions of stars around practically every one of which we now know there are multiple planets, there's a very there's an overwhelmingly rich universe out there.
And even if we could never bridge the gulf to the stars, I emotionally don't accept the that the most likely future of humanity is to only ever be on this earth.
We earth is one object in a solar system that has, as as far as we can understand, really, in practical terms, unlimited energy.
And not unlimited, but a lot of material resources.
And I think the most likely future of humanity is to push earth life, to seed earth life out in space.
I think we will do that.
And at at the end of the day, that's kind of what motivates, I think, most of us who work in trying to escape the bonds of earth.
It's not to leave earth.
It's not to go find some place better.
It's to expand our footprint and our agency throughout the accessible universe, which in our technology, our age, means the material and energy resources of the source.
So let me get you're saying you believe that we will not be leaving, but we will send out probes or devices, and we will seed?
I'm taking the word seed and trying to dimensionalize it.
We will seed other places in the world, but humanity will not be that.
No.
I they're they're not they're not mutually exclusive.
The when I say we're not gonna leave, what I mean is, there are right now, you know, 8 and a half 1000000000 people on this planet.
I do not ever see a future in which we say, oh, yeah.
We're gonna cap it at 10,000,000,000 and then we're gonna move all 10,000,000,000 offer.
No.
Okay.
And I I I I I would agree.
I just wanna make sure because the way it was being phrased.
So I agree with that statement that there's 10,000,000,000.
But then what do you answer to the individuals who talk about the fact that Earth is going to be destroyed?
We have to be on another planet to save the human species, which is not to save cities.
Which
It's it's nonsense.
That's what I say.
It's nonsense.
So first of all, it's a terrible attitude to say, oh, earth is gonna be destroyed so I wanna go be someplace else.
Every other place in the universe is hostile and shitty by comparison.
I agree.
Every other place.
So it is a reprehensible attitude to abandon all hope for earth and say, no.
I wanna go colonize Mars or no.
That's that's just dumb.
Not like I feel strongly.
No.
No.
And I and I I appreciate that because I we've had conversations before we started, and my take is that we have 10,000,000,000 people on this planet.
Even if we had even if we had 500 people on another planet, we still have 10,000,000,000 people back home.
We're not we're not leaving that fast.
That's right.
Well, I don't think we're leaving at all.
What I meant was if they if their their premises that we're going to be traveling to distant galaxies and it was it was Jim Newman.
I looked him up.
Jim Newman was the first astronaut I ever met at dinner.
And he he said to me, David we were talking about this whole construct, and he said, David, let me kinda give it to you in terms of time.
We're a blip in time in the universe, humans on this planet.
Even if someone left tens of 1000 of years and they would 100 of 1000 of years to they would look out and they'd say, why would we go to that rock?
Because the light and what they see is 1000 of years earlier.
And they would never have seen that we're here.
So the odds of someone coming here are infinitesimal for the purposes of seeing us because they wouldn't be able to see us.
And then he said, it's the same going the other way.
Where we go in the universe, we don't have there's no answer to a better place because what we're seeing is light years away.
And that form the odds of us running into somebody, and I'm not saying I believe or disagree.
What I'm saying, it was an interesting conversation that he, to some degree, was saying this is the place that we've got, and we've gotta make sure we're taking care of it.
Yeah.
I, I feel that very deeply.
That was the first astronaut I met, by the way.
It was Jim Newman.
I sat at a table next to him, and we just started talking.
So
Yeah.
When when we when we get to the the final bullet topic, I'll I'll come back to this.
But, that's why I named the 4th future expand.
It's not about leaving.
It's not about abandoning or moving.
It's simply about expanding.
So I could easily imagine a time in which most of the humans in existence are not on earth.
Not because they went someplace, but because most of the humans who are born someplace are not born on earth.
It's that simple.
And the material resources of the solar system enable us to support a population in the multiple trillions.
You I mean, you can do the math, but it doesn't really do you any good because there's a lot of assumptions taped into it.
So you can kinda get any number out that you want.
And the amount of available energy is even larger than that.
So this is why the the Kardashianschoff model of, civilization types, kinda starts to be relevant.
So What's the name of the argument?
What's the name?
Yes.
Kardashev.
It was a a Soviet thinker, decades ago who posited, in in that sort of beautifully Russian way of thinking that's, like, kind of complete theory, meaning a theory which is complete.
He he posited that in the universe, there would be type 1 civilizations, which are those that control the energies of their planet, their home planet.
Type 2 controls the energies of their solar system, their star, and type 3 controls the energy of their galaxy.
And that's you know, it's many orders of magnitude separated.
So Huge.
Type 3, you know, how do you even know what to think about that?
But, I've I've been writing about this recently.
I think, actually, a more productive definition of type 1 isn't something that could arguably be ascribed to us today.
There there are some people who've written, yeah.
We're a type one civilization now.
We have to be working toward type 2.
And I'm like, hold on.
Type 1 may mean a civilization that is using the energies and resources of its planet in a way which is sustainable enough that they can keep growing beyond that.
We are not there, and we have a long way to go to learn how to even sustain 8 or 10 or 15,000,000,000 people on this earth, let alone grow beyond that.
So the only way to really grow beyond some number that's either, you know, half x or one x or two x, what we have today, to, you know, a 100 x or a 1000000 x is to use the energy and material resources of the solar system.
So
Do you play do you play with the Fermi, paradox that we have to
It's a separate topic, but, I yeah.
My my master's thesis in engineering school was engineering planetary lasers for interstellar communications.
So, I've done about
So do you believe that we will overcome the levels that we would need to to be able to get to the point of doing all these things, or do we self destruct as a a society?
I mean, that's it's the last term of the Drake equation
Yeah.
Which is the the longevity of a civilization which can communicate at interstellar distances.
So what is the longevity of our society?
I don't know.
I
I thought you you came on.
You were supposed to have answers.
Didn't I tell you you have to have an answer for that?
I I would like to think that it is longer, you know, therefore more sustainable than all the evidence implies.
Okay.
So so you're saying the type one, using the energies and resources to be able to maintain 8, 10, 15, Numbers are suggesting that we're we're gonna plateau.
Do you believe we're going to continue to grow?
Well, I believe what I see.
Mhmm.
And the evidence of the evidence I see of, the human capacity to ignore what's right in front of our faces is not inspiring.
So, you know, I think we may have talked before about the nature of a society that could live in space.
I don't know if we I'd have to look through all my notes, but no.
I don't
There there's one key feature, that that I think is very sobering, and that is if you're living in a space a piece of space architecture, a space habitat of some sort, as I've said a couple of times, on the other side of the wall is death, quick death.
So, you know, you can if if you get hit by debris, you know, you'll be gone in microseconds.
But, failing that, which is a a risk in anywhere in space, and it's very high and low earth orbit at the moment.
But, setting that aside, death in space comes within seconds or minutes or days or years, from a whole variety of things that are trying to kill you.
Temperature extremes, lack of oxygen, lack of air, you know, lack of water, lack of food, radiation, lack of gravity, all these things.
Right?
So it's it's not gonna be easy to establish human living and working in space beyond just a few highly trained crews and a few occasional visitors.
But if we did so imagine a resort hotel in Earth orbit or imagine O'Neil settlement at Earth Moonell 4.
You're now living in a place which far more than a city on Earth is vulnerable at any moment to the bad behavior of a single actor.
So here in the west, especially in the US, we have a culture that believes that the ability of the individual to act individually with utter freedom is sacrosanct.
It's not clear to me that that type of attitude and behavior will be acceptable in a space settlement.
So there are cultures on earth in which the, the health or the, what's the word I'm looking for?
The, so the well-being.
That's it.
The well-being of the community is more important than the well-being or the individual freedom of a single person.
Mhmm.
The US is not one of those, but there are cultures.
I I've lived around the world.
Absolutely.
I've seen yeah.
Well, and so I think I went I think I shared I think I shared with you when we had COVID, I was wearing a mask in 2012.
I was walking down the hall with the CEO in Asia.
He looked at me when I coughed.
He said, do you need a mask?
And I said, you have a cold, and you need a mask.
And I put on a mask.
I wore a mask the whole day, and I realized very early on that in Asia, you wear a mask to protect others.
In the United States, you wear a mask to protect yourself.
Well, some of us
Well, in general, that's more of a a statement.
And in Asia, yeah, you you wear a mask in a meeting because it kept people healthy.
Right.
There so there are cultural norms that we might look to for behaviors and expectations, and I would argue self control, which may become not just essential, but vital, literally vital for space communities to even exist.
And that includes space police and space all of that in your eyes?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I these again, as a space architect, these are the things that I don't worry about making a toilet that works.
I'd love to get a contract from somebody to design a toilet that actually works.
But there's, you know, there's teams working on that, and it'll happen.
I have confidence it'll happen.
But what I'm more fascinated by is the the designing for society and designing for I I call it sociology.
Like, how do we make architecture and an environment and a little piece of civilization that can survive itself and its own members in this remote hostile place.
So that's yet another dimension of why I think space architecture is fascinating, and I think it could teach us things that we do not evidently know on Earth or that we haven't, you know, decided are, critically important on Earth.
So, let me use that now to shift to the kind of final topic, which is what I call posthuman space architecture.
And this this came about.
It was sort of interesting last, jeez.
It was probably last summer.
I got invited to do a, an article in a special issue of architectural design, that was just published.
It's the January, February 2024 issue, on posthuman architecture.
And the editor called me up and asked me if I would do this.
And I'm like, I'm an architect, but I don't understand what posthuman architecture would even be.
What does that mean?
How can we have architecture for something after humans?
And, but, actually, he didn't call me up.
He sent me an email.
So because I remember in in the my first email, I said, I there's only, like, three possible things I could think that this would mean.
And he came back with a note that said, that's perfect.
Yes.
Will you do the chapter?
So I'm like, okay.
So I thought about it, and, I the more I thought about it, the more I actually liked it.
And now I, incorporate it into my thinking.
Mhmm.
So one of the things about domestic architect all architecture, but I I picked domestic architecture because there's a historical touch point for this, which is in, jeez.
I don't know the year.
It was, like, 1921 or something.
I I would have to look up the year.
In, wrote, a house is a machine for living in.
And this is always referenced in courses on modern architecture and art history, as a polemical point of view about what architecture ought to be.
And, at least in sort of Scully's version of of architectural history, this is sort of one of the seminal moments in the origin of modern architecture is is this, belief in, you know, the machine age was happening.
Airplanes were happening.
Fast cars were starting to happen.
The idea that, yeah, a house also is a machine.
And it's kinda cute because back in the twenties, like, a house was barely a machine.
But in today's world, houses are machines.
You know, now your refrigerator will order milk when you're low on milk, and, you know, Amazon will deliver it to your door.
And, the our houses are all wired with, well, they're they're Wi Fi.
They're not even wired, really.
But they're
Some some of us still have wires, but we don't use them.
Yeah.
There you go.
Our our entire house is wired with, with completely wired, and we're using Wi Fi.
There you go.
The, the same thing has happened to cities, of course.
So now although it's not fully implemented, one of the most accurate measures of resurgences of COVID is done through monitoring of sewage.
Yep.
So, you know, in the future, your your house, when when you flush the toilet, your house will tell you how healthy you are in multiple dimensions.
And the streets will all be the traffic in the streets will be controlled by, networked computing systems that, you know, they're talking to every moving vehicle.
They're they're talking to people's wristwatches so they know where all the pedestrians are, etcetera, etcetera.
So cities, houses and cities really have become machines for living in.
In space, space architecture is sort of the quintessential machine for living in because you've got, what the military would call, you know, the the the soft thing inside
Mhmm.
That you're trying to keep alive, and it's surrounded by the machinery that's doing it.
And I mentioned earlier that, we it it's become easy on earth the way we do urban design and, regional design and with our transportation networks.
It's become, I would argue, too easy to pretend that the things that actually keep us functioning, aren't even there.
But they are.
All those, you know, fields of lettuce growing out in the irrigated desert that, you know, then they're trucked in and refrigerated and
The only time you notice it is when they're not there.
Well, there you go.
But all that stuff is what makes society go, the production of power, for example.
So if you a very extreme example, I think, that's under construction now is, a city called The Line in Missouri.
Nome.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The so so Nome is, is building this city called The Line.
And, all I'll say about the, well, about its design is that it it it is one of the most extreme examples of the city as a machine for living in that you can find anywhere on Earth, because of where it is.
The the,
The harshness.
Natural environment, where it is.
But if, you know, when you look at it, what you see is people living.
When when when I'm sorry.
When you look at the images of the design, what you see is where people are living.
What you don't see is waste treatment or, water purification, or agriculture.
You don't see the externalities that make that city feasible.
In space, you don't have a choice.
They're there, and they're right inside the the closeout wall panel.
They're right underneath the floor.
They you may be, like, living amongst them the way you do in space station today.
You look out the window and there are the radiators that are rejecting your excess heat.
There are the solar rays that are producing power.
There are the craft that are bringing your resupply.
It's all there and present, which is why, going back to the International Space Station example, it's as big as it is, and it only takes care of a half a dozen people.
It takes that is a that is a stark measure.
I think a very instructive measure of just how much stuff it takes to fully support 6 humans.
Now when populations grow and diversify in space that we were talking earlier, the that ratio of stuff to human will, scale linearly.
It's not like if you have a 100 people instead of 10 people that there's, you know, efficiencies of scale and you could get away with, you know, only twice as much solar array.
No.
It's 10 times as much.
Everything scales linearly.
So the amount of stuff per person will be will remain, visible, like, in your face in space architecture.
I think that's healthy because it may be it should be sobering.
And in a weird sort of analogy, like, you know, people like farm to table because you wanna know where the food came from that you're eating.
Well, okay.
This is like, you know, existential nothingness to life.
And this is this is seeing what it is that it takes to be alive in space and is right there in front of you all the time.
That will shape most space architecture, in the future.
So that's that's part 1 is living in the machine.
Part 2, of posthuman the posthuman future space architecture is that most space architecture isn't even gonna be to support humans at all directly.
So we will have, vast mining operations distributed among asteroids on the lunar surface, both places in particular.
We'll have vast, agricultural facilities if you look at, even and O'Neil's team knew this back in in the seventies.
If you look at, the design of, the sphere or island 1 Yeah.
You see there's a habitat, which is the sphere in the middle, and then there's these bands or rings of stuff on two ends.
Mhmm.
What those are is the the agriculture areas.
And why are they separated?
Well, because if you're gonna grow plants most efficiently, you need a c o two enriched atmosphere.
You're gonna use dwarf plants that are robotically tended in clean environments.
They want a spectrum of light that is really weird for humans because you take out the green light because plants don't absorb it, which makes the light look sort of weirdly purple violet sort of, not a natural environment for people to be in.
So the point is that the most efficient production of, agriculture will be in environments that are actually not fit for humans.
And so you're gonna keep the agriculture and the human separate, which you look out the window and there it is.
There's the amount of agriculture that it takes to support whatever population you have.
So I think, the amount of literally posthuman, that is architecture not for humans, although it's not greater than it is on earth, it will be more present because it's gonna be right there.
It's gonna be visible all the time.
That, I think, will be a good societal reminder of what it takes for society to exist.
And then the final piece of the posthuman future is that not all habitable environments will be for people or just for people.
We're gonna take pets, of course.
We'll have agriculture, of course.
But there will also be some measure literally of seeding life and space.
So human, the human species is only one of 8,000,000 species on earth.
And if we think that part of our role as agents of life in, a vast universe is to expand earth life into space.
It means we gotta take life forms that are not just us.
We know we do anyway because, you know, most of the cells in your body are not human cells.
They're bacteria.
Yeah.
But the same will be the case, for, the life support systems for urban scale human settlements.
We said earlier that, you know, we need basically estuaries and plants, which mean, bacteria and protozoa and all the stuff that live in water and live in soil.
We we've seen spiders living on the International Space Station.
We've seen
So Yeah.
So all of those, all of those things will go to space too.
But here's an interesting thing, and this loops back to the, I think, the recognition of how special Earth is.
You see these images of O'Neil settlements with you know, it looks like wilderness with, rivers and mountains and forests.
And there's a famous one for blue origin that they called space elk.
It has a deer in it, you know, with, standing on a promontory.
It's a beautiful image.
But a wild adult cougar requires a 125 square kilometers of range.
1 cougar.
You not even in the O'Neil vision.
Is that much space?
Yes.
That's right.
So what that means is that even if we make, artificial biospheres in space, which is what we have to do to expand and expand Earth life, they won't be wilderness.
They'll be parks.
They'll be curated gardens and parks and farms and cities.
So the only place we know
Is there?
Where you can actually have wilderness, where?
It's on earth.
It it So this is why when, Jeff Bezos talks about the importance of, developing civilization in space.
He talks about rezoning earth for, wilderness and light industrial
and Mhmm.
Off earthing all the the the challenges.
Bit of Yep.
Any way to say it, but it but it's very evocative in that way.
And what he what he's saying is, and he and he also says it this way.
There there is no, you know, plan b.
There's there's there's no other, there's no other planet.
This is the one.
Yeah.
And and so the the the purpose a purpose of expanding, life into space is, yes, to seed space with life.
Yes, to, expand human civilization without limit by taking advantage of the resources that we find in space.
But also, yes, it's to preserve earth.
So where where this kinda culminate
I I just one thing is it's funny because as you've gone through some of these pieces, I'm thinking back, for example, in Noam and the Line, a friend of mine, Palmy, were has worked on just fish, and the demands of having fish in the line.
He's a fish expert out of I think it's Iceland.
And there are the amount of resources that they have to put into any type of, plant based or produce that has to be there to be able to meet demand is absolutely unbelievably high.
So that the truth is there is, at this point, to be able to supply a large ecosystem, for example, a 1000000 people on Mars, those numbers just don't make sense.
It's the way you're kind of articulating it.
Exactly.
Okay.
And, you know, what you what you if you're gonna have wilderness, if if you're gonna be able to support 8 you know, you you're never gonna make a an O'Neil settlement that's Noah's Ark, right, for 8,000,000 species.
It it won't work.
So the only way you can, support that rich of a biosphere is on the surface and in the surface waters of a planet scale object with a planet scale atmosphere.
Mhmm.
So we have such a thing.
It's called a planet, and there's only one of them that does that, and it's Earth.
So, I mean, it's just it's kind of very straightforward.
I'm an Earther.
I'm I'm definitely an Earther.
I like all the things that we're working on.
Project Moon Hunt has a lot of activities going on, but when it comes down to it, like you said, there's there might be people up in beyond Earth.
There might be things happening, but there's still gonna be 10,000,000,000 people here by 2050 living on this planet.
We have to make sure we take care of where we live.
So, the the kind of, clincher for posthuman space architecture is, this is a habit I have.
I always take things to their logical extreme to see where we end up.
Okay.
I do not think for an instant that the deep future of space architecture is the continued creation of biospheres and bubbles that keep space out.
Right?
So say say that again.
Is so what what space architecture is today is we protect the soft thing inside by keeping space.
Mhmm.
Right?
Okay.
The I think what will really happen in deep future is we will reengineer life to suit space conditions better.
And I didn't think this up.
Freeman Dyson wrote about this decades ago.
You know, he said, why wouldn't you develop life that can tolerate radiation, can tolerate low light, can tolerate temperature extremes, can tolerate vacuum?
And at the time, we did not have the technology to do so, but you can see already, we actually are on the cusp of technology to do all those things.
But we're also finding it on Earth.
Well, yes.
We're finding radiate you know, we're finding
extremophiles, but we're not what we're not finding is organisms that are adapted to space.
Correct.
That I understand.
But my point
Extremophiles like, yeah, temperature, temperature, chemistry
Temperature, chemistry, radiation, all of those.
So if in fact they do exist, it means that there are combinations of possible mutations or adaptation that could be implemented to be able to achieve what you just said.
Yes.
So in a world where now the FDA has approved a, genetic modification technique to cure sickle cell anemia, how could we rationally imagine that a 1000 years from now or 500 years from now, we won't be reengineering life to suit the conditions in space better.
So I think the ultimate, type of space architecture is actually redesigning ourselves for space, And that's what I would anticipate
But the the it won't be a space architect.
The most human.
But it
won't be a space architect.
It's gonna be a a space biotech.
No.
I mean, they'll still be physical system.
Okay.
The physical but the the person who will do what you're talking about on the biological level will be coming from somebody else who says, no.
The ultimate person in our industry will be the space biotech, person.
Well, so, you know, the the it space, space exploration, space architecture, it's a team sport.
So there there will be a lot of lot of, specialties to come together.
I I appreciate the passion for the the discipline.
I appreciate it.
This kinda this this makes it genuinely, like, literally posthuman because I think, you know, those trillions of people living and working in space someday, they're probably not just like us.
They're derived from us.
They're, you know, phylogenetically related to us, but they're
not us.
We we've had there's enough science fiction books out there where the the eco the civilization has different types of mutations that enable them to work in certain conditions, and and they they form their own cliques, and they form their own spaces that that's where they live in.
So it's been forecasted that this would happen, but we're talk as you said, I think the words we're using were 1000 of years in the future is what you had said.
Well, I'm not that I don't know because, I I can't tell you when it'll happen, but I can't imagine that if we go a 1000 years in the future and look back that it won't have happened.
But you're very optimistic that humans will address the challenges that we have on earth and move forward.
It sounds that way.
No.
I'm I'm not.
Okay.
I'm, like I said, I believe what I see.
I would like to be optimistic, but in a world where people fight over petty stuff
Mhmm.
Fight to the death Yeah.
Repeatedly over petty stuff, and are focused on solving wrong problems, by which I mean problems that actually don't have a lever over sustainability in the future.
I I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic.
I'm realistic.
Okay.
In in a in a vast universe, I am, I guess I do believe let's use the word believe there.
I I believe that in a universe with, that's, you know, over 13,000,000,000 years old and has trillions of galaxies each with 100 of 1,000 or I'm sorry, 100 of millions of stars each with more than one planet.
I don't think we're the only ones.
I I do believe, though, Glenn, that you are more optimistic than you let on.
And there's a hope inside of you because the phraseology you use, the the purse the angles that you address topics are with a hopeful twist.
But being realistic, as you've said, that the there is a possibility of something going wrong, but you're you have an optimistic sense about you.
I okay.
I'll I'll take that.
I I do think lots of things are going wrong.
Oh, I I I I'm not I'm Yeah.
I'm not disagreeing or agreeing.
I'm saying from the way in which you phrased certain types of story lines, you've got this twist that if I had to put you on one side, if it was a 0 to 10 and then 10 to minus 10 and, you know, minus 10 is the negative and 10 is the positive, I'm gonna put you on the positive side.
Let's go back to the Fermi paradox.
There we go.
Good.
So,
you know, there there are different ways of addressing the question of where are they.
I agree with the description that you, you know, gave earlier that we we've been here for such a short time.
It should not be a surprise.
But a model that I came across when I was doing my research in grad school that I just found really un unshakable, is even if you take the slowest, most cumbersome approach that we can imagine for migrating to other star systems.
Well, expanding.
Right?
Just to be clear again, expanding to other star systems.
It results and that is world ships, you know, multigenerating world
ships.
I mean,
you if you faster than the speed of light, blah blah blah.
If you just took if you just took Star Wars, if you just took oh, not Star Trek.
It's Star Trek.
They're still based on Earth.
Well, but, let's not go there because that requires work No.
No.
But I'm not saying we're I'm just saying the con conceptual, even in the conceptual form, Earth is still
But but let me say what I
where where
it was going.
Even if you assume the most ridiculously cumbersome way of expanding to other star systems, the galaxy is not actually that big.
And the wave of multigenerational expansion, would only take a fraction of the age of the galaxy.
So that's what the genuine Fermi paradox isn't like, where are the little green men and why haven't they come to visit?
It's where are we in the almost inevitable event, which is essentially instantaneous in the life of the galaxy in which sentience expands throughout the galaxy.
Mhmm.
Okay.
There's only a couple of options.
One is that the wave already happened and it left little pockets and we're in a pocket.
So you're stepping backwards and saying we are part of the firm that some other other society might have, stepped over the great filter.
So I'm I'm getting that.
Okay.
Another is that the wave just hasn't happened yet or, you know, is happening, but it we're in a blink and it just hasn't swept past us yet.
Or we are the ones who are gonna create the wave.
And so am I optimistic?
I'm sort of accentually optimistic in the sense that I believe that it is conceivable that part of our purpose, you could call it, is to create the wave that settles the galaxy.
And so okay.
You know, I'll work toward that.
Okay.
I
because I think that's, that gives us a noble, sort of a spiritually noble role in a vast and complicated and beautiful and lethal universe.
That's it.
I I So
that's why I use this like seeding space with life, because who's to say that, it isn't, you know, Earth life that will move out and and expand.
Yeah.
So There's there's no there's nothing written in stone today.
So I it goes back to, you know, it do do I imagine that do I think it's feasible that there's a future in which humankind will always ever only be on this earth?
Yeah.
I think it's conceivable, but I don't like it and I think it's unlikely.
I think it's far more likely that, we will expand into the solar system.
We will learn to control the energies and the resources of our solar system.
We will expand further out, and we might actually be the ones who initiate this settlement wave across the whole galaxy.
What I'm going to say is that I believe that what you're saying is a very positive, optimistic perspective to even believe that the human species is the one to go out there says that humanity, even though we're watching what's going on, you have it in your your versions, that humanity has the potential to be that the one, I think is a very interesting perspective.
And I'm smiling.
Like, it's not a it's not a bad or it's just yeah.
Okay.
Then got a lot of work to do.
We have the we have the potential, and that's exactly right.
That's the part of this.
That's the part of the Star Trek future that, I've believed ever since I was a little kid, when Star Trek first came on is it's it it doesn't have anything to do with phasers and transporters and warp drive.
What it has to do with is believing that humanity has the potential to overcome, all the crappy things we do to each other and the juvenile ways that we behave.
We have the potential to do better.
And if we do better, then there's a galaxy out there.
So I'm great.
Great.
Great.
What I don't I've got the outline, so that was the last one on there.
So That's the last one.
I don't have any
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
So I wanna
I'm kidding.
I've actually got a whole other list, but we're not
I've got if you've got the time.
Mike, you have an award or not, there's no award for this, but the longest podcast we've ever done is 4 hours in about 40 minutes.
The combination of these 2, somewhere, I believe, comes in at approximately a little shy of 5 hours.
So somewhere in that range.
How did you feel?
I mean, we're we're here.
I just because the we went over a lot.
How did you feel?
Well, I, you'll probably laugh.
Based on based based on the first conversation, I'll call it.
Yep.
I I realized I what I was doing was bringing in bits and pieces from various papers that I've written over 30 years and the stuff I've been thinking about for a long time.
And what I I I have more books to write than I thought I did.
And I would say that I felt a little bit of that, and I'm the fact that we had a break in between, I I think the second half we call it second half and just for the sake of discussion.
I think you had brought some of the pieces together, in a much more coherent way, and I think that was just given time working talking with me, meaning my style and the style of the podcast.
So I think you did a a fabulous job.
I think it was great.
So why don't we end it, and you and I will stay on for a moment?
Happy, I'm happy.
Excuse me?
If you're happy, I'm happy.
Thank you.
So my happiness is the world.
I I wish that's
how it
worked.
So I wanna thank everybody out there who took the time to to to sign in to listen to this.
I do wanna thank you, Brent.
Fantastic.
Thank you for being a participant in the age of infinite and the participant in this program.
So thank you.
That said, we wanna thank you for listening in to hope we hope you learned something today that makes a difference in your life and the lives of others.
Again, this was a long time ago, 5 hours ago, the Project Moon Knight Foundation is we look to establish a box of the roof and door on the moon, a home, that's why it's called the box of the roof and a door, on the moon to the accelerate development of an Earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species.
There are if you go to the website, project moon hut.org, and you scroll down about 2 thirds the way down, there are 3 videos.
The first one is a presentation of Macadonia.
The second is a construct of what we're working on.
And the third video gives you a sense of where we started all the way back with Bruce Pittman and the tours of NASA and the whole iteration of project Luna.
So please take the time to look at that.
So, Brent, what's the single best way to connect with you?
Well, LinkedIn.
No.
I'm I'm joking because I'm I'm, I I don't say yes to all.
The the best thing is, probably my, the email that I use for work.
Do you wanna give that to us?
Yeah.
I don't know.
Do people do Yeah.
Yeah.
People give it.
You're you're
I'm a little reluctant to to open floor No.
People do give that, and they can find you.
So it's up to you.
You're the first person I've ever had this conversation with over this.
It's it's up to you on my take, and I'll tell you from me.
Written a book, spoken around the world.
People have my email.
And no matter who connects to me, I reply back unless they're selling me something.
And the reason is I never know who that one person is.
And just to give you one example, I did get a connection on LinkedIn.
The person had 69 connections.
Oh, come on.
That's that's spam.
That's fake.
That's something.
And I wrote back, which I always do, why did you connect to me?
He wrote this whole thing to me.
David, I read your book.
I came into this position.
I've been following this.
I love it.
And from that point, it was with 69 people.
That's it.
I've always tried to respect the individual not knowing who's going to connect to me.
So it's up to you.
I I do the I'll say I do the same, although even in retirement because I'm consulting, my time is super limited.
So You're not dead here.
You you look alive when I look at you.
So what's what do you wanna give?
You wanna give a LinkedIn?
You wanna give an email?
You wanna give both?
No.
No.
I'll I'll give an email Okay.
Because it's easier.
It's bs@spacearchitect.org.
Bs@spacearchitect.org.
Fantastic.
And the name is brentserw0od.
Anybody could look that up.
So that said, Brent, you stay on for after for a few minutes, but let's say, I would love to connect with you, anybody out there.
We've you could reach me at david@moonhut.org.
You can connect with us at at project moon hut on Twitter, x, whatever you wanna call it.
I'm also at Goldsmith.
LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, mister David Goldsmith on Instagram.
There's many different ways to be able to connect with us.
We have so many people joining and participating in project Moon Hut that almost every day there are new groups of people who are coming on board.
So anybody wanna reach out, we'd love to talk with you.
Great podcast.
And that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.

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