TransAstra: Revolutionizing Asteroid Mining and the Future of Space Economy | Presented by Celestron - Cosmos Safari

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's great to be a visionary, but it's so much
better to be a visionary workingwith a bunch of people who can
build the future.
So we like to say that we'reengineering the future of space.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
So we're here with Joel Sursell, the CEO of
TransAstra.
Joel, your Trans Astra, Joel,your visionary ideas for what
our solar system and our futureare going to look like are
really inspirational, and I'dlove to have you know just your
perspective on what is TransAstra, because I can try to

(00:40):
describe it, but I feel likeit's so broad, the ideas that
you have.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
So thank you so much for saying that.
By the way, I'm just delightedto be here and having you guys
here in the lab where the magichappens, and I really appreciate
you talking about the visionaryideas behind TransAstro I.
It's very important.
The vision of asteroidresources, larger than that,

(01:08):
space resources for the futureof mankind, for the future of
humanity, is deeply motivationalto us and it's the engine that
drives us.
But trans astra is mostly not avisionary company.
We're mostly a company of doersand builders who get stuff done

(01:29):
and it's all about writing codethat does amazing things,
turning wrenches, buildinghardware and making software
happen.
So what I would say is it'sgreat to be a visionary, but

(01:49):
it's so much better to be avisionary working with a bunch
of people who can build thefuture.
So we like to say that we'reengineering the future of space.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
I like that.
Yeah, me too, that's good.

Speaker 3 (02:05):
So when you say engineering the future of space.
I like that.
Yeah, me too.
That's good.
So when you say engineering thefuture, what are the projects
that you're working on right now?
What kinds of things doesTransAstra do?

Speaker 1 (02:16):
Yeah.
So what we do is you knowthere's hundreds of things that
you could work on in the spacebusiness how do you prioritize
and decide what to focus on?
And it's that vision that helpsus with the priority.
So TransAstra is built on thisvision of taking humanity into
space so that we can harness theresources of the solar system

(02:37):
for the betterment of humanityand the terrestrial environment.
But then when you ask yourself,okay, so what am I going to do
to enable that?
We really break it down intofour things and we call them
detect, move, capture andprocess, and these are the four
things that we as a species haveto be a lot better at in a

(03:00):
practical way in order to enablepractical asteroid mining.
So detect is our telescopesystem, because we have to be
much better at finding faintmoving objects in space, and
that's where our connection withcelestron comes from, that's
where, that's where the you knowwe use um telescopes like that,

(03:22):
but integrated into verysophisticated systems, to do
that.
It's for prospecting asteroidsin the long term, but today
we're doing work for thegovernment, including Space
Force and other agencies, tofind faint moving objects in
space.
So it's detect.
Sutter telescopes Our telescopesystems are named after
Sutter's Mill, which is a placein California where, in the

(03:46):
1840s, they discovered gold, andwe think that these telescopes
are going to help us discoverenough resources in space to
lead to a gold rush to the solarsystem.
So it's detect.
The second one is move.
We need to get better at movingaround in space.
Move we need to get better atmoving around in space.

(04:10):
We're really grateful thatcompanies like SpaceX, blue
Origin, stoke, abl thesewonderful rocket companies are
building relativity, arebuilding much better rockets to
get us into space far lessexpensively and far more safely.
But once you get into space,once you get into low Earth
orbit where the rockets drop youoff, you're only halfway to
where you need to go, whetherit's geostationary orbit for

(04:32):
communication satellites, or theasteroids, for asteroid
resources, or the moon.
So we need better ways to getaround in space.
So we have invented propulsionsystems that are vastly more
practical than today's rocketsthat use the power of the sun
and can use virtually anythingas propellant instead of

(04:53):
dangerous and toxic fuels thatyou need to get into orbit.
So there's detect, there's move,then there's capture.
So the third area that we'reworking in is called capture,
because eventually, when we'remining asteroids.
You cannot land on an asteroid,by the way.
Here's a way you can tell ifsomeone knows anything about
asteroid mining they proposeasteroid mining and they show

(05:15):
you a picture and it shows aspacecraft landing on an
asteroid.
So technically andscientifically we know that
asteroids have gravity, but whenyou actually measure the amount
of gravity they have, if youwere there in a spacesuit you
wouldn't notice it.
So instead of landing on anasteroid, our plan is to capture
asteroids in what we callcapture bags, and we've invented

(05:37):
the flytrap capture bag, whichone Time magazine noted it in
its Invention of the Year awardslast year, noted it in its
invention of the year awardslast year.
We have millions of dollars ofcontracts Space Force, nasa and
other organizations to buildcapture bags which we'll
eventually use for asteroidmining.
But today we're working on verypractical problems associated
with orbital debris cleanup inspace, and then the last area

(06:00):
process is materials processing.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
So if you're doing this first capturing, you know,
space junk what is the endresult of it?
Are you deorbiting it?
Is it potentially usefulBecause I was thinking about
this earlier today, you know, ifit's already in orbit, the vast
majority of the work's beendone, and to throw away all of

(06:23):
the resources of a spacecraftthat is rich in all of the
things you need to make a newspacecraft, it seems like
recycling it might be a betteroption than a de-orbit.
Yeah, that's something that'sbeing considered yeah,
absolutely in fact.

Speaker 1 (06:37):
Um, before we started to get in the game of of debris
cleanup, the assumption wasgenerally that there's big
pieces of orbital debris thatare very dangerous up there that
need to be cleaned up.
And the assumption was, ifthere's a big piece of orbital

(06:58):
debris, you send a space missionto it to somehow precision
rendezvous with it, grapple withit using expensive robotic arms
and then you deorbit it, right?
And the issue here is that thereally dangerous orbital debris
is in orbits, that it takes afair amount of Delta V, a fair
amount of rocket propellant todeorbit them.

(07:19):
So we we took a look at that inthe light of the capture bag
and we realized, totally, dave,exactly as you're saying, that's
a lot of really valuableresource up there metals and
that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (07:34):
Right Already, in its enriched form.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
And we realized that, instead of doing it the way
other people have been talkingabout it, we use our, our
capture bags, which are muchmore cost effective for
capturing the debris.
So you don't have to doprecision docking and you don't
have to have complex mechatronicsystems to grapple with or, you

(07:56):
know, dock with something.
Yeah, it seems over complicatedthat way right over complicated
right, because the capture bagis a much simpler approach.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
I'm imagining, like the Apple dongles that you have
to get for the computers, likeyou'd have to get a docking
dongle for this one.

Speaker 1 (08:12):
Exactly.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
You know, you'd have all sorts of stuff where you'd
have no innovation in thedocking mechanisms, and that
wouldn't be good either.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 (08:19):
So instead what we do with our capture bags is we fly
up to and capture the device ina bag and it can still have
some residual mutation androtation relative to the very
crude, more like a birthing thana docking procedure that's not
technically the right word, butyou get what I'm talking about.

(08:39):
And we have patents on how wecan capture one piece, another
piece, another piece, anotherpiece, all in an orbital plane.
So think of it as pac-manflying through an orbital plane.
The debris tends to collect inorbital planes, statistically
when you look at it, and sothere's not much rocket
propellant required to go.

(09:00):
As you're going alongcollecting the debris in a plane
, you know it's a little bit ofthis and a little bit of that,
and then, and because of thecapture bag, we can do several
pieces of debris on a singlemission.
And then, instead of spendingall the delta V, all the rocket
propellant to deorbit it,throwing that valuable resource
away.
And, by the way, people are nowstarting to get very concerned

(09:22):
about the quantity of debristhat's starting to build up in
low-earth orbit.
There's some concerns aboutdamaging the upper atmosphere
here and there's some prettytoxic chemicals in some of these
things.
So instead what we'll do iswe'll bring it to Orbital
Processing Depot and there we'lluse our material processing
technology to separate out thedifferent metals into raw

(09:44):
materials, because othercompanies are very rapidly
developing the technologies tomake practical spacecraft
components, space stationcomponents, usable structures in
space out of metals that we canprocess out of these orbital
debris.
So you know, so it's kind ofinteresting to think about.

(10:04):
The orbital debris problem is asmall version of the asteroid
problem.
You know, I like to say thatthe asteroids are the debris
that are left over from theearly formation of the solar
system.
Yeah, so the way that I, youknow, you know, I think, I think
you have a pretty literatelistener, viewer base.
So most of most of your viewersknow that the solar system was

(10:28):
formed from a disk of gas anddust that accumulated due to
gravity.
It formed a flat disk and thenthe dust and gas aggregated into
the planets, but not, and as itwas aggregating, there used to
be a lot more asteroids thanthere are now.
They aggregated and formed theplanets, but the leftover
asteroids that are still beingcollected by the planets or

(10:51):
spiraling into the sun are theroughly billion asteroids that
populate the solar system today,and so I think of them as the
debris left over from theconstruction project that was
the building of the solar system, and so we're going to go out
and harness that debris.
You know, for humanity.

(11:12):
And the four problems that youneed to solve for doing that are
you got to find them, that'sdetect.
You got to go to and from themyou got to move.
You got to capture them, yougot to process that material.
It's the same four problemsthat you need to solve for
orbital debris.
So orbital debris is a veryearly, easy version of asteroids
that we are moving into veryquickly as a commercial business

(11:34):
for both government, usgovernment, international
partners and private companiesin the US.

Speaker 2 (11:42):
You mentioned Blue Origin and I know that I've
heard some things from JeffBezos that I you know.
I watched some of your contenton YouTube and so very similar
ideas and very large habitats inthe very far future.
What are your thoughts on howwe progress?

(12:02):
What does success look like fortransastra?

Speaker 1 (12:07):
success for transastra looks like thursday.
Um.
I feel incredibly good abouthow the company's doing.
We're still small and seedstage, but we're growing at 50
to 100 a year this year.
You know already in the firstquarter of this year we've won

(12:29):
half the contract value that wedid for the whole of last year,
so we could easily double ourrevenue from last year.
But of course we don't want tostay small forever.
So success in the short term isand you know we've had
tremendous success already forexample with our, with our

(12:50):
network of telescopes and um.
I hope your viewers will get tosee what those look like.
You know we operate compoundtelescopes in California,
arizona and Australia and thespace force right now is paying
us to build two more and thenwe're very optimistic that we'll
have contracts to do others.

(13:10):
Our telescopes right now todayare the most sensitive
commercial sensors for findingthings in cislunar space.
To me that's success.
But a bigger success isbuilding a global network of
ground-based telescopes and then, working with our partners like

(13:31):
Celestron, we're planning onspace, qualifying those
telescopes and putting them intospace where you can see things
that you can't see from theEarth so well, and using them to
prospect the asteroids.
So that's one form of success.
Another form of success is tobe the world's preeminent trash

(13:54):
collector.
In space we're in the trashcollecting and recycling
business.

Speaker 2 (13:59):
I'm thinking about WALL-E.
You know the cartoon with thetrash collecting robots.

Speaker 1 (14:04):
Yeah, so the world that WALL-E was in was an Earth
where they didn't have propertrash collection and recycling
on the surface.
But we don't want the orbitaldebris to build up, to be, you
know, like the rings of Saturnaround the Earth, so that you
can't get around safely.
Already, orbital debris is oneof the chief safety concerns for

(14:25):
traveling in low-Earth orbit,and you know you're right.
Jeff Bezos talks about a futurewhere humanity lives in space
and huge habitats in space.
I think I have tremendousrespect for him and his
accomplishments and hisdirections, and I love his
vision.
The one thing I would like tosee from him is more alacrity

(14:51):
and urgency to get it done.
So, actually, with what'shappening in manufacturing
technology, robotics and AIright now, there's no reason why
that has to be a distant futurevision.
That can be something that canhappen faster than we can
possibly believe, but to enablethat, we've got to be harnessing

(15:13):
the resources of space, theresources that are on the
surface of the moon, theresources of the asteroids, even
the resources of the Martianmoon.

Speaker 3 (15:21):
That's just such a cool vision to think about the
future in that way, and we'vebeen talking a bit right now.
That's.
That's just such a cool visionto to think about the future in
that way.
Um, and we've been talking abit right now about satellites,
satellites of the earth, right,uh, and how we're going to clean
up the ones that that we've putup there, um and um.
What I want to do, which wedidn't get to in the beginning

(15:43):
here, but what I want to do is Ihave a trivia segment for us
right now.

Speaker 2 (15:47):
Does Dave stand a chance against Joel at our next
round of last minute trivia.
Find out after this short break.

Speaker 5 (15:57):
Introducing Celestron Origin stargazing and
astroimaging redefined Origin iscompletely autonomous.
Simply choose a target in theapp.
Origin captures it withultra-fast Rasa optics, perfects
it with AI imaging processingand delivers it to your device.
The results are better thanwhat you'd see in a much larger
telescope under much darkerskies.

(16:19):
Experience and share the nightsky like never before.
Learn more at celestroncomslash origin.

Speaker 3 (16:27):
I've got three questions.
Okay, the first question.
Let's do this.
This should be an easy one, Ithink, in my opinion.
First question is what was thefirst artificial satellite of
Earth and what year was itlaunched?

Speaker 1 (16:44):
Well, you know, there's some dispute about that.
Okay, depending on yourdefinition of an artificial
satellite, but of courseeveryone says sputnik right I
know where you're going withthis um 19?
What 57 was it?
I don't know the year.

Speaker 3 (17:01):
You got it, it was 1957.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
But there is a story that the first thing that
humanity sent into space was amanhole cover, yes, from a
nuclear test in New Mexico.
That's what.

Speaker 2 (17:19):
I heard as well.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
There is a story that the manhole cover.
Basically they used to dosubterranean tests of nuclear
devices and they had a deeptunnel to a subterranean test of
a nuclear device with a manholecover on the top of it.
Someone allegedly calculatedthat that manhole cover was
launched into space at a delta Vof about 70 kilometers per

(17:40):
second second.
Now, um, I spent a fair amountof time in my youth thinking
about working on pulsepropulsion, nuclear pulse
propulsion.
One of my teachers was a guynamed freeman dyson, who was a
mentor of mine for decades, whowas the kind of the chief
scientist of the orion project,which was a nuclear pulse

(18:01):
propulsion project, and I'veheard rumors that that test was
part of the inspiration for theOrion project.
So, but anyway, not to derailthe conversation, no, that is
perfect.

Speaker 3 (18:14):
I'm going to give you triple points for that and
subtract points on my end.
That was fantastic.

Speaker 1 (18:18):
But I'm not going to say that I believe that story,
but I'm saying that there isthat story.

Speaker 3 (18:24):
There's a technical possibility there.

Speaker 2 (18:27):
I wonder what year that would have been.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
It would have been relatively early in the nuclear
test program, so it could havebeen, you know, decades before
Sputnik.

Speaker 3 (18:38):
Okay, yeah, all right .
Question number two Okay, Ithink you'll know this, or at
least have a better idea than Idid when I looked this up.
How many satellites arecurrently in orbit around the
Earth?
In other words, what is yourfuture trash pickup look like.

Speaker 1 (18:57):
Yeah, so it depends on what day it is.
You know, as recently as a fewyears ago, the total number of
satellites you know before thecurrent wave that had been
launched into space sinceSputnik was only a few thousand.
I think it was something likethirty five hundred, and there

(19:20):
have been approvals written bygovernments for network
frequency allocations for tensof thousands of satellites to be
launched within the nextsingle-digit number of years.

Speaker 3 (19:37):
Oh wow, I mean I knew Starlink was going up there and
they're putting tons ofsatellites up there but there's
even more than that.

Speaker 1 (19:42):
There's more than that.
Starlink is the first, and Ithink it's the first mega
constellation that's beendeployed, and I don't think it's
premature to say Starlink isgoing to be, or is, a commercial
success, and that is a hugegame changer.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
I know I want one.
It's just the convenience ofbeing able to travel and have
high speed Internet.
It's phenomenal.

Speaker 1 (20:09):
We use Starlink every day at TransAstra.
We don't have a Starlink herein this laboratory for various
different reasons, but we havetwo remote employees who you
know, I spend hours Zooming withevery day on Starlink, who you
know I spend hours zooming withevery day on Starlink.
And let me tell you like one ofthem is in near Sonoyta,

(20:31):
arizona, where we operate atelescope system.
You know where the sky isreally clear, in the mountains,
near the Arizona-Mexican border,and there's just no good
internet down there.
And it was just a real pain forhim to, you know, to use the
internet until he got Starlinkand Starlink's amazing so what
kind of satellite is DaveMatthews talking about in the

(20:52):
song?

Speaker 3 (20:52):
Is it A Sputnik, b, hubble C, the moon, a natural
satellite or D?
Who knows?
It's art.
It's up to the interpretationof the listener.
Please stop overanalyzinglyrics, well.

Speaker 1 (21:08):
I have to go with D.

Speaker 3 (21:10):
There you go, 10 points for you and you have now
won, in fact.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
I telegraphed that with his body language.

Speaker 3 (21:17):
Yeah, I mean, here's the thing.
I actually did look at thelyrics and it is actually pretty
fairly literally about asatellite.
If you actually look them up,it's actually pretty good uh,
but of course they're vagueenough so you can put your own

(21:37):
uh meanings in there.
And, um, there was an interviewwith dave matthews and he said,
said he doesn't even reallyknow what it's about, but it
might be something about deathand the loss of his father or
something.
But yeah, it is pretty much asatellite.
Tell us a little bit about howyou use telescopes for your

(21:58):
near-Earth asteroid finding.
Near-earth asteroid finding.
In fact, I was looking at oneof your videos and it said that
there are thousands ofnear-Earth asteroids about the
size of a house, and thatsurprised me.

Speaker 1 (22:12):
Oh, there's more than that.

Speaker 3 (22:14):
There's more than that, so like how do you use
telescopes Like how are youworking with that to find the
asteroids?

Speaker 1 (22:21):
Sure.
So let's be clear, there's waymore than thousands of asteroids
the size of a house.
Now, a lot of times, people whoare technically informed, who
hear me say that, say wait aminute, wait a minute, wait a
minute.
I saw, you know, nasapresentation where scientists

(22:42):
got up and said you know,there's 30,000 NEOs or 40,000
NEOs, something like that, butthat is the number of known
asteroids.
Yeah, confirmations, and thevast majority of the known
asteroids are really big, right,and you know, and you know nasa

(23:07):
has been doing a valiant job tofind the asteroids that could
impact the earth and, you know,cause damage and destruction and
so on, and so they've beenlooking for the big ones you
know, like kilometer size orfootball field size asteroids,
and those are pretty easy to seewith conventional telescopes
and so you know we, we knowwhere 90 of those are.
But, um, asteroids follow a sizeversus frequency distribution,

(23:33):
like so many things in nature.
That's a power law and theexponent in the power law so I'm
getting a little, I'm geekingout a little bit here but the
exponent power law is about 2.7,most people think.
So what that means is, let'ssay, you have 101 kilometer
asteroids.

(23:54):
When you go down to 100 meterasteroid, there's going to be
500 times more of those.
And then, when you go from 100meter asteroids to 10 meter
asteroids, there's going to be500 times more of those.
And then when you go from 100meter asteroids to 10 meter
asteroids, there's going to be500 times more of those.
So, um, what's 500 times 500?

(24:14):
That's 10 000, 250 000 timesmore 10 meter asteroids than one
kilometer asteroids.
So, um, uh, there are a lot ofasteroids in a small size.
So actually, the estimates areanywhere from 100 million to a
billion total asteroids, whenyou include ones that are down

(24:34):
to the size that we really wantto mine for asteroid mining.
And so, at TransAstra and ourpartners I'm speaking
particularly of my good friend,professor Robert Jedeke, who
just became emeritus at theUniversity of Hawaii.
Okay, we have.
Rob was kind enough to put meas a co-author on a paper that I

(24:56):
helped a little bit with.
In this area is the best modelof the statistical distribution
of asteroid resources that areeconomically viable in the solar
system.
So when I say that we're veryconfident that there are
thousands of asteroids the sizeof a house, I'm talking about a

(25:21):
very particular population ofasteroids, which is a tiny
fraction of the hundreds ofmillions of asteroids in the
solar system that are in very,very Earth-like orbits around
the sun.
That is, the Earth goes aroundthe sun in an orbit that's 1 AU.
1 astronomical unit like 1.5times the 10 to the 8th

(25:42):
kilometers from the sun, nearlycircular by definition, no
inclination.
Unit in like 1.5 times 10 tothe 8th kilometers from the sun,
nearly circular by definition,no inclination, and very small
inclinic, very smalleccentricity.
So, um, asteroids that are inhighly earth-like orbits, just
like that around the sun, butspread all the way around the
sun, those ones are a magicalkind of asteroid to us because

(26:03):
it takes very, very littlerocket propellant, delta V, for
us to go out to them and go minethe materials and bring it back
.

Speaker 3 (26:12):
So those are the first ones Essentially right.
Like we're in the same orbit.

Speaker 1 (26:17):
We're in the same orbit.
They're co-orbiting with theEarth around the sun.

Speaker 3 (26:21):
Right.

Speaker 1 (26:21):
There is a slight population deficit exactly at
the earth's orbit, because theearth kind of sweeps them out,
but then there's an accumulationa little bit around that.
But, um, but our model suggeststhat about 5 000 of them, of
which all of science knows about, I think at last check 176 and

(26:45):
of those like 10 were ofmaterials that we would be
interested in.
So not enough for the gold rushto space.
So those are the ones that weneed to focus on.
The problem is typicalastronomical telescopes are not
very good at finding them,because anyone who knows about
photography knows if I want totake a picture of something very

(27:07):
, very faint, the way that I doit is I lock my camera onto it
and I take a very long exposure.
All right, so that works great.
If I'm taking a picture of thenight sky and I want to see a
faint galaxy or faint stars, Ido sidereal pointing, which
means I point at the backgroundstars.
I take a long exposure.

(27:28):
So a backyard astronomer with aCelestron telescope with a nice
Sony focal plane can take a15-minute exposure of a very
faint galaxy and it's justamazing.
The problem is the asteroids aremoving and while you're taking
that long exposure they movebetween pixels, so they don't
get any benefit at all from thelong exposure.

(27:50):
So what do you do with that?
You say well, I know where theasteroid is.
Instead of tracking on thebackground stars, I can track on
the asteroid, yeah, but wedon't want to track on asteroids
that we know.
We want to find unknownasteroids.

Speaker 2 (28:03):
New ones, yep, new ones.

Speaker 1 (28:05):
So there's a process called synthetic tracking, or
shift and add or match, filtertracking it's got a lot of names
, but it's basically the samething.
It's been around for decadeswhen, instead of taking a long
exposure, take a whole series ofshort exposures and then you
guess okay, if there's anasteroid moving in this
trajectory, I'm going to take aseries of exposures.

(28:28):
I'm going to take this exposureand I'm going to add it up to
one that shifted over one, andadd it up to this one that
shifted over, shifted over,shifted over, and if I happen to
guess, just right, so theasteroid is always then on the
same pixel, and I add them up inthe computer.
It's as though I took a longexposure of that asteroid.
Say, all right, no problem.

(28:48):
Well, it turns out thatscientists have been doing that
actually for a couple of decadesand there have been thousands
of main belt asteroids foundthat way.
What they do is they take a bigtelescope with a nice focal
plane, they do sidereal tracking, then they take the stack of
images.
They, you know, they put theterabytes of data onto a big
hard disk somewhere, they feedit into a cloud processor it

(29:11):
used to be a supercomputer andmonths later they get all the
tracks of all the asteroids.
Well, the problem is with thelittle ones.
If you wait months later,you'll never find it again.
And um, because it's toocomputationally intensive.
So even the focal planes thatare very affordable, that we put
on our little telescope are 60megapixels plus and we're taking

(29:34):
five second exposures.
Adding those five secondexposures up for five or ten
minutes and if you look at thenumber of computations required
to take every possible vector ofevery possible asteroid in that
space is untenable.

Speaker 3 (29:51):
Right.

Speaker 1 (29:52):
And so what people do is then they, you know, people
say, oh, shift and add or match,filter tracking.
That's nothing, we do that andyou go well, but what you have
to do is you have to do it realtime.
So you know.

(30:12):
So over here there's a computercabinet with our computers,
with our test bed for ourcomputers, so we have racks of
computers tied to our telescopesthat do those calculations real
time.
Because we collect terabytes ofdata off our focal planes every
night, there's no way we coulddownload them to the cloud or
upload them to the cloud then docloud processing on them.
We have to process them at theedge.

(30:32):
So we started processing it atthe edge, which you can just do
with modern GPUs, the kinds thathigh-end gamers use.
And so we got rack-mountedcomputers with high-end gaming
GPUs, and then we realized, well, what we really want to do is
we want to put these in space,and space processors are much
weaker than ground-basedprocessors because you just
don't have the power and coolingin space and you got radiation

(30:55):
concern.
So what could we do to make itmuch more efficient to do these
calculations?
Now, people have been thinkingabout it for decades how to make
it more efficient, and there'sreally no good like clever
mathematical way to make it moreefficient.
It's an irreducible.
To the most part it's amathematically irreducible

(31:16):
problem and beyond the normalefficiencies that you use.
Then we realized ah, it's theway that we handle the images
and the way we take the pictures, and so we fundamentally
invented new ways of organizingthe images and ways that we task

(31:37):
the telescope that areoptimized for finding these
moving objects, and we canreduce the computation
requirements by many orders ofmagnitude, such that we can
easily run these computations ona little computer that will fit
in a CubeSat spacecraft youknow the size of a shoebox and

(31:58):
that's very exciting and itmakes it very affordable for us
to do so.
The Space Force is paying us tobuild an observatory system
that we call TKO TurnkeyObservatory.
It has 18 of these telescopes,each with 100 megapixel focal
plane, and we can process we canreal time process those on very

(32:20):
affordable computers here onthe ground.

Speaker 3 (32:24):
Did you say 18?

Speaker 1 (32:25):
scopes, yes, yeah, affordable computers here on the
ground.
18 scopes, yes, yeah.
So, um, we should show you whatour 18 scope tko system looks
like, and we want to put thoseall over the earth.
So it's 18 of these very costeffective but nicely made,
professionally made celestrontelescopes that you know you
could buy at a camera store.
They've got an 11 inch aperture.
Um, very nice engineering.

(32:46):
They do the trick.
You have to know how to usethem.
You have to know how to youknow correct, uh, for thermal
drift and all that kind of stuff.
We do a lot of really precisionengineering here to make all
that happen autonomously.
Um, but, uh, we can take 18scopes and I think we can show
you guys pictures of our sixscope system.

Speaker 2 (33:09):
Are these 18 telescopes all pointing in
exactly the same location?
Are they offset from oneanother or they overlapped?

Speaker 1 (33:16):
All of the above.
So we we have a lot of reallygood mechatronics engineering
here at TransAstro.
I wasn't planning on showingthis on camera, but let me show
you this.

Speaker 3 (33:27):
All right.

Speaker 1 (33:28):
So this is a 3D print of the original prototype
concept that we had about a yearago.
The design has changed sincethen, so this is a children's
toy size model of a 20-footshipping container that's been
modified to be an observatorywith 18 telescopes in it.
Let's see what happens.
It gets shipped as per anyshipping container and then,

(33:54):
once it gets to the target,let's see if I can grab one of
these out.
I'll probably drop it and it'llbreak and people will kill me,
but that's okay, I'm the CEO.
So that's what the 18telescopes look like in the
shipping container.

Speaker 3 (34:05):
Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 (34:05):
Scale.
Each one of those white thingswith a red dot on it is like
that telescope right there.

Speaker 3 (34:14):
Okay, that's a Rasa scope right.

Speaker 1 (34:18):
It's a Rasa 11.
It's a Celestron Rasa 11.
These telescopes can do um, raand deck adjustment here with
the normal precision of anyastronomical instrument.
But they also have the abilityto either co-boresight, so you

(34:38):
can put all six on top of eachother, okay, and then you can
put all three sets of six on topof each other, so you have 18
telescopes all core boresighted.
So if you want to go deep, umand or we also have actuators so
that you can orient them sothey form a line in in the sky,

(35:01):
then you can swoop that lineacross the sky for survey mode
and you can't go as deep, youcan't see as faint an object.
But it's a very powerful system.

Speaker 2 (35:12):
And you can actuate them on demand.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
Yes, you can actuate them on demand.
So we have a very sophisticatedtelescope operating system that
controls our global telescopenetwork called MIDAS, and MIDAS
runs on our data acquisition andcontrol system, which is called
DAKASTRA, which is a newcommercial product that we're
developing, which is DAQ D-A-Qstands for data acquisition and

(35:36):
control and we build theDAKASTRA system into everything
that we do here.
We build the DAKASTROS systeminto everything that we do here
and it allows us to do precisionmechatronics on everything that
we build.
And so you can sit in youroffice and control these
telescopes anywhere in the worldand if all of a sudden we find

(36:01):
a target, or if all of a suddenwe get a phone call from the
Space Force, hey, there's atarget at this Arian deck that
we suspect, we need you to golook deep at it.
We can point all 18 telescopestogether at it and go deep if
it's faint, but even a singleRasa, with our software on it,
can see a CubeSat at 300,000kilometers.
So recently the Space Forceasked us to take a look at a

(36:23):
Chinese spacecraft that wastransiting to the moon and at a
distance of 300,000 kilometerswe saw a CubeSat separate from
it, and we reported that to theSpace Force, wow, wow that's
really good.
No other commercial company thatwe know can do that.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
Now with the high megapixel I realize you do get a
fairly digital zoom, if youwill, on an object.
Is there any benefit to havinga higher focal length telescope
in this array that you can thentrain that higher magnification
on, or is it just it's too dimto be able to really handle?

Speaker 1 (36:57):
that no, no, no.
Look, the reason that we havewide field of view scopes is
because we're looking for things.
You don't look for somethingthrough a soda straw.
Most astronomical telescopesare very slow optics.
We have fast optics, whichmeans wide field of view, but
narrow field of view, like theHubble Space Telescope.

(37:18):
You're looking through a sodastraw.
That's great for some things,but it's not great for finding
tiny objects in space.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
I guess my question is more within the array you'd
have like a lot of wide fieldscopes but to have like one main
scope that then could beinstantly able to zoom in on it,
or is it just?

Speaker 1 (37:40):
a communication with a real you know, large
observatory that can do that.
Yeah, look, once you find it andyou get the Arian deck.
There's lots of telescopes and,by the way, if you know where
something is, anyone can track aCubeSat in cislinder space.
Anyone can do that who's gotminimal competence Well, I mean,
you have to be a fullycompetent professional telescope
operator to do it, but anyonewho's got the competence of a

(38:04):
journeyman can do it.
And we report our findings tothe different governments, the
government agencies that arelooking for stuff that's
important to find.
But the problem with reallynarrow field for this is that
they're moving pretty fast, andespecially for cislunar topics,
for cislunar objects, but alsofor objects in heliocentric

(38:27):
space orbit, propagation is areal black art.
When we find something, we getwhat are called tracks and
tracklets, a series of RAs anddecks that tell where they are.
Then there's a non-trivialmathematical process that you
have to go through to convertthat track.
The track is a set of tracklets.

(38:49):
Tracklet is a small set ofobservations.
There's a non-trivialmathematical process that you
have to go through to figure out.
Just because I saw somethingmoving like this in space.
Was it something really closemoving slow space?
Was it something really closemoving slow, something really
far moving fast and you have toknow something about

(39:09):
astrodynamics and dynamics.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
And what's that z-axis?
Is it directly going, you know,towards you, away from you?
Is it on an angle?
It could?

Speaker 1 (39:14):
be something like this, and so it turns out that
you have to mathematically fitthat to a series.
You have to do a searchalgorithm.
It's mathematically fitting thecurved arc that you saw to all
the different possibletrajectories to get it, got it,
and then, in order to get anaccurate trajectory, you need
many tracks that are far apart.
The problem with astronomicaltelescopes and the reason the

(39:37):
vast majority of small objectsare lost is they get an initial
track lit.
By the time someone looks at itagain, the trajectory is not
well known enough that a narrowfield of telescope can see it,
even if you think you know itpretty well.
If you look at it with a narrowfield of view scope, you're
liable to not see it.

Speaker 2 (39:57):
Dave and Rob check out the RASA 11 in this month's
InFocus product spotlight.
The kind of cool thing aboutthe Rasa design is because it's
collecting light so fast youactually don't need to be
guiding always.
You can get away with normalsidereal tracking in most cases.

Speaker 3 (40:29):
Well, dave, thanks for bringing me out here.
You brought me out here tocheck out this Rosascope.
Now, I'm no expert in theRosascopes, but from what I know
, from what I've read, is thatthis is the type of scope that
you want to get if you just wantto do astrophotography right,
that's right.

Speaker 2 (40:46):
This is a telescope that you actually cannot look
through.
It only can be looked throughby a camera, and the place where
the camera goes is kind ofdifferent, in that it's up at
the very front, in the primefocus position, as opposed to
behind the telescope's mirror,at the back, like you would
normally see on like aSchmidt-Cassegrain.
Now, this is theRoe-Ackerman-Schmidt Astrograph

(41:09):
which that's a mouthful it is.
It is the RASA, and the kind ofcrazy thing about this is just
how fast it is.

Speaker 3 (41:22):
It's an F2.2 telescope, which so that means
like mostly like an SCT.
I have a Schmidt-Cassegrain,it's like a 10 or 11-inch one,
and that is an F10, right, andthis is an F2.2.
So what does that mean?

Speaker 2 (41:36):
So basically, every time you change the F ratio by
basically doubling the amount oflight Now, because we've gone
very many F ratios, it'sextremely fast when it comes to
imaging and that's because thefocal length is that much
shorter.

Speaker 3 (41:50):
That's right.
So it's about the same sizeaperture, but the focal length
is shorter so you can get morelight.
That's right.

Speaker 2 (41:56):
So this is only 620 millimeters of focal length.
An equivalently sizedSchmidt-Cassegrain is at about
2,800 millimeters of focallength.
The way you calculate the Fratio is you take the focal
length of the telescope dividedby the aperture of the telescope
.
So for this telescope you wouldtake the focal length of 620

(42:19):
millimeters and divide it by the279 millimeters of the aperture
.

Speaker 3 (42:25):
Okay, so that gets you the 2.2.
That gets you the 2.2.
So, in other words, compared tomy SCT of a similar size, less
exposure in order to get thesame amount of light and picture
.
Exactly Right.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
Yep, and so you know, for us here in Pennsylvania we
don't get a whole lot ofcloudless nights, yes, and so
that time that you have is at apremium.
And when you have a RASAtelescope telescope which does
come in three different sizesfor three different budgets,
right, it comes in the eightinch, this is the 11 inch, and
then there's a 36 centimeterversion, which is approximately

(43:00):
14 inches, right, right, okay,and with each of those you get a
from the 8 inch to the 11 inch.
You're getting about double theamount of light.
Okay, gathering power, that'sjust because of the aperture,
and that big step, you know,also gets you that faster image.

Speaker 3 (43:17):
Okay, so then what about the focusing?
I hear there's somethingspecial about how you focus on
this thing.

Speaker 2 (43:22):
Right, this is the V2 version and it has the ultra
stable focus system, whichbasically means that the mirror
in the back here is kept very,very much in place when the
telescope is in motion.
So if you're looking at oneplace in the sky, you move to a
different place in the sky.
The position of the mirrorstays the same.

(43:44):
Now, if you remember, in like aSchmidt-Cassegrain, the mirror
is actually what is moving toachieve focus.
The same thing is happeninghere in the Rasa telescope the
mirror is in motion to get focus, but the ultra stable focus
system allows it to stay inplace in a very, very rock solid
way.

Speaker 3 (44:01):
In this one, the light's coming in, bouncing off
the mirror, going through someoptics here, bouncing off the
mirror and going up to thecamera that's up there, Correct
Right now.
Can that take any DSLR or anytype of camera or what it has?

Speaker 2 (44:15):
a T adapter which can be adapted to your DSLR camera,
mirrorless camera, and thenthere's a separate adapter, that
is, a 48 millimeter threadedadapter for your astronomical
cameras as well.
So, yes, you could have haveall the different types of
camera.
And here we have your canonfull frame, which it can.

(44:36):
It can handle that, which ispretty incredible that it can
handle a full frame camera.
Not all telescopes can do that.
This has a very large imagingcircle to allow for the cameras
up to the very large formatsensors to be able to, you know,
adapted onto this and thecamera is not format sensors to
be able to be adapted onto this.

Speaker 3 (44:53):
And the camera's not actually going to be blocking
that much of the light, right?
Because it already has thesensor up there that's blocking
some of it and the camera justadds like a little bit.
It's not actually going to comeout in the pictures, right?

Speaker 2 (45:05):
Right, and even in a Schmidt-Cassegrain you would
have that central obstruction aswell, and Newtonian's the same
way.

Speaker 3 (45:10):
So let's say I actually go out and get
something like this Sorry aboutthe chickens.

Speaker 2 (45:17):
if you're hearing chickens in the background, we
we're out at the farm right now.
Yeah, yeah, getting a nice darkskies right, you gotta
sacrifice some things.

Speaker 3 (45:27):
So let's say we go out and, and, and.
Let's say I buy this thing.
What kind of mount do I want toput it on?
Or what kind of mount can I putit on?

Speaker 2 (45:35):
So of course, with the 11 inch you are going to
need a pretty substantial mountto place this on.
But the kind of cool thingabout the Rasa design is because
it's collecting light so fastyou actually don't need to be
guiding always fast.
You actually don't need to beguiding always.
You can get away with normalsidereal tracking in most cases

(45:56):
and that's nice because you can,you know, have a little bit
less mount as a result.
Now the weight capacity of themount needs to be correct for
the scope you have.
The bigger the scope, of course, the larger the telescope mount
.
But the precision of that guyis not required as much as it
would be in a normal telescope,especially with an F-10

(46:17):
telescope like aSchmidt-Cassegrain.

Speaker 3 (46:19):
Now you're saying that this has a very wide field
of view.
So is this something that youdon't want to use for really
small stuff, or can you stilluse it for that really small
stuff?

Speaker 2 (46:30):
Well, because you're collecting so much light.
The kind of amazing thing isyou can put very high megapixel
cameras on the telescope andstill collect enough light even
though those pixels are verysmall, and so you effectively
can digitally zoom in.
So you're right in there arebetter options for very small

(46:52):
objects, but you can actuallyget a pretty impressive digital
zoom cropping in even with thisvery wide field.
Maybe, if we have a chance, wecould start to do some of the
asteroid searching for ourselves.
Right, we've got a prettycapable telescope here and maybe
we can discuss trying to getsome of the software capable to

(47:14):
start looking for asteroids onour own.

Speaker 3 (47:16):
That would be quite the quite the trek.
Well, yeah, this is the firsttime I've actually seen Rasa and
it's really cool.
You know, upgrade from from anSCT and I'm actually looking
forward to hanging out with youa bit and taking some pictures.

Speaker 2 (47:30):
I'm looking to see what I can get, and now that
we'll have some time this summer, hopefully we have some nice
clear skies and out here on thefarm we have some really dark
skies.
We can see some Milky Way, andeven though we can see Milky Way
and it is that dark, I cannoteven get away with a 30-second

(47:50):
exposure because it is sooverexposed Really, which is
incredible Nice.
That's fantastic.
So it's gonna make it make areally good scope for these guys
and we'll have to come back andshow you guys what an image
looks like through thistelescope in the months to come.

Speaker 3 (48:04):
Yeah, looking forward to it.
We've got two last questions oftrivia.
Then we'll get into theasteroid mining and then how
your company works in the futureand that sort of thing.
So I've got one question here.
The first one is the total massof all of the asteroids in the
main asteroid belt combined isless than the mass of and I'll

(48:28):
give you four options here Is itA Jupiter, b Earth, c Earth's
moon or D Mars's moons puttogether?
So again, the total mass of allthe asteroids in the main
asteroid belt combined is lessthan the mass of Jupiter, earth,

(48:49):
the moon or Mars's moons.

Speaker 1 (48:51):
So it's about 4% of the mass of Earth's moon.

Speaker 3 (48:57):
That is correct.
That's what I've got as well.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
I have no chance.

Speaker 1 (49:04):
Oh, I'm sorry, was I supposed to let Dave answer.

Speaker 2 (49:07):
No, you're number one .

Speaker 1 (49:08):
You always get to go first because you're the guest
and then my sense is that Phobosand Deimos are probably a small
fraction of that mass.
Do you happen to know?

Speaker 3 (49:21):
No, I'd have to actually go back and double
check that.
But yeah, I have that.
It's less than Earth's moon.

Speaker 1 (49:27):
Yeah, it's roughly 4% of the mass of Earth's moon.
By the way, I get asked that alot.
Oh, really, that's why I knewthe answer, and the reason is
that people go they say what areyou talking about?
So I talk about.
So there's an interestingdialogue that comes out of this,
which is, I say, by the way,when I was a young man, we

(49:54):
thought it was more like 12 ofthe mass of earth's moon, so we
didn't know the mass of theasteroids.
There's bigger air bars.
The air bars are a lot smallernow than they used to be, right,
and gerard o'neill, who's theguy who really came up with and
put science and engineeringbehind the concept of large
settlements in space, hadcalculated then that you could

(50:16):
build worlds in space with fivemeters of radiation shielding
with a total land area of 3,000times that of the Earth.
In 2013, I did a Keck Instituteof Space something, kiss study

(50:36):
at Caltech, with JPL and Caltech, on asteroid mining, and I
updated that calculation tosuggest that it's not 3,000
times the Earth's surface, it's1,000 times, so it's enough
resources to support apopulation a thousand times
greater than the population ofthe Earth, or, in round numbers,
close to a trillion people.

(51:00):
And people say well, how canthat be?
Because you're only talkingabout a mass that's 3% of the
mass of the moon.
Why would we need to move offthe Earth for resources?
Well, the answer is interesting, and it's a couple of things.
The earth is a geologicallydifferentiated target, so we use
the term ore in mining on theearth to mean you found

(51:20):
something that has somethinguseful in it.
Most ores on the earth are inveins.
What these veins are is theseare veins of leftover material
from the formation of the Earth,because all of the precious
metals went to the center of thecore of the Earth, because it
was geologically differentiatedin its formation and most of the

(51:42):
stuff on the crust is notreally what you want for a lot
of different things, whereas ifyou go to a metal-rich asteroid,
in the asteroids, that wholething is an ore body.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
It was the core parts of the not totally formed
planet right.

Speaker 1 (52:03):
Yeah, and then the other thing is, most of the mass
in places like the Earth andthe Moon is useless because you
can't dig that deep.
Most of the mass in places likethe Earth and the moon is
useless because you can't digthat deep.
And then the really big thingis the reason to go into space
is to have an unlimited horizon.
You know Captain Kirk's finalfrontier, so humanity can expand

(52:27):
and grow.
And as soon as you're in agravity, well, you're limited
there.
And if you're in the earth'sgravity, well, everything you do
affects every other livingthing on the earth.
And, um, you know, for example,you know we need to learn to
process energy in order forhumanity to continue grow
exponentially as a species which, by the way, whether we like it

(52:49):
or not, if we're going tosurvive, we're going to do that
because that's what homo sapiensdo, that's what life does.
Um, uh, we're going to processmore and more energy.
Right now, we only process likeone part and ten to the fourth
of all the solar power that thetotal amount of energy that
humanity processes is 110 000 ofjust the solar power on the

(53:09):
earth, even less than that,actually.
Yeah, so for us, and and andand we can't do this without
choking out other life on theearth and tremendously affecting
the biosphere, the environment,and that's one of the most,
that's, you know like, that'sthe most precious thing that we
know of in the universe.
We should treat it with respect.
Whereas the asteroids are rocksfloating in space, and so it's

(53:33):
a resource.
So that's why, even though it'sonly 4% of the mass of the moon
, it's 4% floating in spacewhere it's very easy to get and
work with and build worlds outof and make into things without
much rocket propellant requiredto go between places.
So it's the natural resourcefor space-faring civilization

(53:57):
Long answer.

Speaker 2 (53:59):
I can imagine you mentioned Captain Kirk, right,
and just Star Trek.

Speaker 1 (54:03):
By the way, I went to , William Shatner's 93rd
birthday the other day.
It was amazing.
That guy is such an awesomedude, mean he's, he's a
transcendent figure in oursociety.
He's not just an actor, butanyway, I don't know how he has
that much energy.

Speaker 3 (54:21):
I mean I'm 40 and I don't have as much energy as he
has.

Speaker 2 (54:24):
I think yeah, I have noticed in the last year or two
he's slowing down a little bit,but he's amazing, just amazing
so you know, the search for life, uh, the scientific aspects of
this, I mean, I can't imaginewith all of this technology
you're going to be developingthat you're not going to get
knocks on the door to doscientific missions, um, and

(54:47):
potentially looking for for lifeand things like that out there.
Uh, and you know, as we, as weget further out, you know, and
we're using these, these spacestation gas stations on
asteroids, effectively to gofarther and farther out.
Where do you see that fittinginto, like, our future?
How are we, you know, going toexpand into the solar system?

(55:09):
What does that look like, uh,and, and do you think that
there's potential life out therein our expand into the solar
system?
What?

Speaker 1 (55:17):
does that look like and do you think that there's
potential life out there in oursolar system?
So here's my answer about lifein the solar system, or life in
the universe.
By the way, I have a very goodfriend who's a senior staff at
Caltech.
The senior staff at Caltechteaches their course on

(55:43):
exobiology and spends his timestudying abiogenesis.
Here's my scientific opinionabout life in the universe.
Any scientist who has anopinion is not very rigorous,
because in order to have ascientific opinion, you need
data, and we have no data.

Speaker 3 (55:59):
Yeah, we're speculating right now.

Speaker 1 (56:02):
All we have is our hypotheses.
We have hypotheses aboutabiogenesis how life formed from
not life and these are unprovenhypotheses that in high school
and college textbooks it'staught as catechism and it's not

(56:23):
proven.
And if we understood biogenesiswe could make it in the lab,
and we can't.
And there is no other chemicalprocess in any of science where
the instructions to the recipeare okay take these ingredients,
put them together in a testtube and then wait somewhere
between a thousand years and abillion years and something will

(56:46):
happen.
I'm sorry that's.
There's something missing there.
This is a grosslyoversimplified discussion, but
we need to start taking Fermi'sparadox seriously and we need to
start thinking carefully aboutthis solar system and if there

(57:13):
is other life in the solarsystem, as soon as we find it,
we need to look at it and see ifit shares statistics with our
DNA.
If it has DNA.
First of all, does it have DNA?
So I had a conversation withDavid Baltimore, who used to be
the president of Caltech, aNobel Prize winner in biology.
He said he doesn't thinkthere's another way that you can
organize complex chemicals intosomething as interesting as

(57:34):
life other than dna.
That's really interestingstatement.
Does it have dna?
If it does have dna, does itcome from the terrestrial tree
of life or did the terrestrialtree of life come from it?
Those are really important.
Where was it an independentabiogenesis?
Those have profound then.
If you had any data like that,you could have a meaningful

(57:54):
conversation.
Like you know, one of thethings that I've done is I've
won seven NIAC fellows.
I'm one of the only peoplethat's ever won seven NIAC
fellowships and I spent a lot oftime with the NASA NIAC NASA
Innovative Advanced ConceptsGroup the NASA NIAC NASA
Innovative Advanced ConceptsGroup.
There was a fellow named DrDrake, frank Drake, who used to

(58:16):
be on the NAC, the NIAC.
Advisory Committee and he hadthis equation called the Drake
equation and I remember chattingwith him about the Drake
equation and you know, like myproblem with the Drake equation
is too many of the parametersare somewhere between zero and
one and we don't know anythingbetween zero and one.
So it's an equation that doesn'tbound anything.
So, anyway, so that's my thingabout life and that's why I'm

(58:42):
really skeptical of settlingMars until we've thoroughly
explored it with robotics,because we need to find out if
there's life on Mars and placeslike Europa before we consider
settling them.
But I do not feel uncomfortablesettling barren rocks like the
moon or asteroids, because thereis no credible case that there

(59:02):
can be life there.
But if there is life elsewherein the solar system, it's the
most profound and importantquestion in science.

Speaker 3 (59:11):
Okay, great Now do you think?
Because I've heard ideas abouthow something like a tardigrade
would be able to be living onone planet and then something
hits that planet and then itgoes off, and then it goes and
panspermia, it goes on anotherplanet and inhabits.
Do you think that's the kind ofthing?
Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1 (59:31):
That's exactly the thinking behind.
If there is life on Mars, weneed to look at its DNA, and if
it shares any common sequencesin its DNA with terrestrial life
, then we know that eitherterrestrial life came from Mars
or Mars came from terrestriallife, where they both came from
some common origin throughpanspermia.
So that's a really importantthing, and there's also been

(59:54):
suggestions that even microbescould be transported on
extrasolar objects, you know,like interstellar comets and
asteroids that get ejectedbetween stars.
It's not at all out of thequestion.
I mean, you know, we know whatJeff Goldblum said, and if he

(01:00:16):
said it, it must be true.

Speaker 3 (01:00:19):
Life will find a way.

Speaker 1 (01:00:21):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (01:00:23):
Excellent, so anyway, how?

Speaker 1 (01:00:24):
do I see it happening ?
The way that I see it happeningis I see outposts on the moon.

Speaker 3 (01:00:29):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:00:30):
I see, harnessing lunar resources.
The beauty of the moon is thatit's a resource that's close by
two days travel, relatively lowenergy to get off of it, and
what's beautiful about it is itdoesn't have an atmosphere.
Mars has a problem.
It has an atmosphere.
That's enough to be a pain, butnot enough to do you much good.
On the moon, you can launchpayloads off of it

(01:00:52):
electromagnetically, so gettinglarge tonnage of material in
orbit from the moon could bevery, very cost-effective.
And then the asteroids canprovide all the elements on the
periodic table practically.
I think there's a problem withargon from the asteroids.

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
You mentioned the 4% of the mass problem with argon
from the asteroids.
Speaking, you mentioned youmentioned like the four percent
of the mass of the moon, butthat's is that just the
asteroids?
I mean, if we're able maybe I'mnot really realizing the scale
here because I realize thekuiper belt is far, far farther
than this um, but once we're out, you know, with able to get to

(01:01:31):
the asteroids, and we have thefuel, uh, from the asteroids
that we're mining, which wehaven't, to get to that topic
yet Um, we've got now a platformto go even further.
So, once we have the asteroidsand people are populating the
asteroids, you know, would thatnext step be going out to the
Kuiper Belt and trying to startto populate that, or is it

(01:01:55):
bringing material back to a morehabitable area?

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):
So the thing is is that life doesn't follow central
planning.
Life pops and grows organically, and so there might be one
civilization that goes out intothe cosmos that starts to build
worlds, and then there's anothergroup of people that are

(01:02:20):
harvesting asteroids andbuilding settlements nearby, and
they don't like each other.
So you put a propulsion systemon your settlement, you take
your settlement out.
You know, as Buckaroo Banzaisaid, wherever you go, there you
are.
So it's not a series ofdestinations, it's a way to live

(01:02:40):
in space, and we can live inworlds that move between the
planets and we can have acivilization that spreads
throughout the solar system.
And some people will want tolive in gravity wells.
I don't know why.
There's no compelling reason tolive in a gravity well.
If you build worlds that arebig, you spin them to whatever

(01:03:03):
gravity you like.
You give yourself whateveratmosphere you like.
You give yourself the radiationprotection you like.
You can tailor the environmentto the species, and then, with
genetic engineering, you cantailor the species to the
environment.
Eventually, I think people willbe genetically adapted to be
able to live on the moon or Marswhere there isn't 1G.
There's no science thatsuggests that that would be safe

(01:03:26):
for humans right now?
None, in fact.
There's really good science tosuggest it would not.
Typically, if you take anyorganism and take it out of the
environment that it was evolvedfor for billions of years and
try to make it live, it willhave problems.
All astronauts who've had longduration exposure in space have

(01:03:48):
permanent medical issues.
If you notice, most astronautswear glasses.
There's a reason for that.
It reshapes their eyes Mostastronauts.
It also has permanent effectson the immune system and so on
Permanent effects on theskeletal muscle system.
Calcium in bones is there,because originally calcium was a
buffer of calcium for fishswimming in fresh water.

(01:04:14):
When you go into space, thecalcium leaches out of your
bones and that's an irreversibleprocess.
But it's not just for theindividual.
These characteristics areinherited by the offspring
through epigenetics.
So it could be that if you live20 years in space, give rise to
children in space, thosechildren will never be viable,

(01:04:37):
or maybe not your grandchildrenwill be viable, and the science
of epigenetics is new and wedon't know.
But the one place that we knowthat we can create truly
terrestrial-like environments inspace is space habitats built
out of asteroids and lunarregolith.
Yeah, and that's one of thereasons, I'm a big believer in
it.
Now, as soon as someone showsme that you can live on the moon

(01:05:01):
or Mars and that yourgrandchildren won't grow up and
just collapse because they don'thave bones, I'm open to that.
But I'm also not real keen onsettling Mars until we know what
the situation is with life onMars.

Speaker 2 (01:05:16):
Will Dave make a comeback against Joel in our
next round of last minute trivia?
Find out after this short break.

Speaker 4 (01:05:26):
Dive into the world of astroimaging or level up your
skills with the Celestron RhoAckerman Schmidt Astrograph RASA
.
Thanks to its patented opticaldesign and precision engineering
, rasa captures breathtakingimages in minutes.
Say goodbye to long exposuretimes and hello to instant
gratification.
Choose from 8-inch, 11-inch and36-centimeter models.

(01:05:50):
To learn more, visitCelestroncom slash Rasa.

Speaker 3 (01:05:55):
So that actually gets us into the next thing, which
is the mining, which I think issuper, super cool.
And so I just have a firstquestion.
This is a multiple-choicetrivia for you and this is the
last one, I promise, and I don'tthink you can get this wrong.
So my question you mentionedJurassic Park and I um, I

(01:06:15):
sacrificed my, um, uh, my timeand I sacrificed my intelligence
to watch the 1998 blockbustermovie Armageddon.

Speaker 1 (01:06:27):
Was that the one with Bruce Willis, or was that the
other one?

Speaker 3 (01:06:29):
That's exactly the one that I watched, yep, yeah,
and because I needed to dobackground research.
So my question and this ismultiple choice how predictive
of the future of asteroid miningwas that blockbuster movie
Armageddon?
First option is A solid.

(01:06:50):
It's basically the same thing.
B NASA would definitely find aglobal killer only 18 days ahead
of time.
C once NASA finds the asteroid,they would easily and quickly
find fault lines and decide todrill a nuclear bomb into it,

(01:07:11):
which would definitely notexplode it into smaller planet
killers or just get absorbedinto the asteroid with no
explosion.
I think D Bruce Willis hasalready split an asteroid in two
clean pieces and saved Earth.
This has been documented.

Speaker 1 (01:07:29):
Or G Liv Tyler's acting was the least believable
part well, you know, I thoughtthe best scene in that movie was
when bruce willis was lecturingthe nasa guys about how to make
a drill right.
And you know like theengineering on it was perfect.
It was perfect, in fact.
You know, we, we, we model ourcompany on that.

(01:07:51):
So, yeah, it was perfect.
There's a sarcasm there, butthere are some things that you

(01:08:11):
said that are actually notunreasonable.
So, for example, we know wherethe vast majority of 100-meter
kilometer-sized asteroids arethat are outbound from the Earth
, but for ones that spend themajority of their time between
the Earth and the sun, we don'tknow where they are.

(01:08:33):
And we have a selection bias inour astronomy because
telescopes can't see asteroidsthat are behind us.
If the sun is behind us, we can.
We are really good at the sunis behind me, so I'm looking out
away from the sun.
I get really good observedobservations.
But the astronomical telescopesthat we're using now to find

(01:08:58):
asteroids don't even go downclose to the horizon.
So even asteroids that wouldpop up above the horizon during
dusk and dawn, they're not verywell seen.
And then there's somethingcalled Manx comets.
Have you ever heard of Manxcomets?

Speaker 3 (01:09:15):
No, that's a real name to me.

Speaker 1 (01:09:16):
You know what a Manx cat is.

Speaker 3 (01:09:18):
No.

Speaker 1 (01:09:19):
It's a real name to me.
You know what a Manx cat is.
No, it's a short-tailed cat.
It's a type of feline with astubbed tail.
I'm told I'm no feline guy.
I'm allergic.

Speaker 3 (01:09:28):
Neither am I.
I'm a dog person.

Speaker 1 (01:09:29):
I like cats but I'm allergic to them, so I'm a dog
guy.
But these are comets withouttails.
So comets come in much fasterthan asteroids, because they're
high the infinity, you knowbecause they're coming in manx
comets don't have much of a tail, so you could miss them.
And what?

Speaker 2 (01:09:49):
is the reasoning for that you is there.

Speaker 1 (01:09:52):
It has to do with it has to do with the thermal
history of the object and itsvolatile content.
So the tail of a comet iscaused because, as it starts to
move towards the sun, thevolatile materials start to boil
off and then they blow dust andit forms a gas and plasma cloud
that can be seen from Earth.

(01:10:14):
But Manx comets and, by the way, every time a comet you guys
know this every time a cometcomes around through periapsis,
more volatiles are blown off.
So a lot of times a comet thatcame by last time was very
bright and then the next time itcomes by it's not so bright and
people are like what happened?
The historical record is it wasvery bright.

(01:10:34):
Well, all the volatiles gotblown off last time.
Um, uh, but um, there's aprofessor at university of
hawaii named karen meach whostudies manx comets and, um, she
has convinced me that we shouldbe worried about.
We're very good at findingnear-earth asteroids, but we're

(01:10:55):
not so good at finding, you know, things that come in from the
deep solar system and come swingby.
You know, sangusta may have beensuch an impactor.
Maybe we can't say that itwasn't, and we could.
Also, there could be apopulation of fairly dangerous
asteroids that are relativelyclose to the sun, that we could
see at the last minute becauseof the observing dynamics, and

(01:11:18):
so that's one of the reasons whywe could see at the last minute
because of the observingdynamics, and so that's one of
the reasons why we want to putour asteroid prospecting
telescopes out in space wherethey can see those objects
better.
So that whole 18 day warningthing actually there are people
in the Space Force who actuallythink about that and they
actually and it is notuniversally absurd to use ICBMs

(01:11:40):
as an asteroid defense mechanism.
Now, I do know that there's alot of controversy in this and
experts in the field havedifferent opinions, and the
majority opinion is that if youfracture an asteroid with a
nuclear charge, it could make itmuch more dangerous.
But it's not universal.
But it's not universal.
And, but it's not universal andthere are people that are
looking very carefully at it andsome of those solutions that

(01:12:03):
are kind of science fiction andstupid.
They actually, you know, likeif you're going to innovate, you
have to have your aperture openfor all kinds of different
ideas.
That's true, um, but I mean,the way we would do it is not,
you know.
I like to say that the reasonwe have capture bags is because
the only the only person who canland on an asteroid is bruce
willis.
Other than that, you need toput it in a capture bag before

(01:12:26):
you work on it that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:12:28):
Right, you had talked about how we're, you know,
going to have the sutterobservatories on earth.
We're going to be eventuallytaking, you know, this smaller
telescope, cubesat, into space,but I also saw that there's much
larger plans, the Sutter Ultraeven.
Can you just tell us a littlebit about the generational steps

(01:12:48):
that you're planning in termsof space-based observation,
because I think it's prettyamazing to consider a company
that is going to be having thesemassive, massive telescopes in
space.

Speaker 1 (01:13:01):
Yeah, so you start small and then you get big.
Starting small is running oursoftware on cameras that are
currently in orbit.
So we have a partnership withanother company I don't think
I'm.
I'm sure they wouldn't mind ifI said, but I want to say who it
is.
It's a well-known space companythat has lots of cameras in
space and we have run our movingtarget detection software.

(01:13:28):
Midas is our total networkcontrol system and then our
optimized match filter trackingsystem which operates the
telescope and develops thestrategy for observing and how
we do the calculations for thematch filter tracking.
We call that module Theia, andwe've actually ported Theia to

(01:13:53):
run on a spacecraft operatingsystem and we've actually run it
on a flat sat of a satellitethat's currently in orbit,
taking pictures all the time,and we're going to be running it
on a satellite very soon.
It's up there and I don't thinkI'm allowed to say whose
satellite it is and that sort ofthing, but this was part of a
activity that we actually didwith darpa recently.

(01:14:13):
Um, and so we start small andthen, um, actually, uh, and then
you can't see it.
There's an eight inch reflectorover there which is our mock up
, which is our ground simulatorfor our space telescope, the
first telescope that we wouldfly in space.
That would be a dedicated builtastronomical instrument, or

(01:14:33):
asteroids and space domainawareness, which is SDA is the
acronym for finding debris inspace right, that would be about
an eight inch reflector thatwould have a focal plane that's
a little smaller than the 63megapixel focal planes that we
have in our bigger cameras, andwe fly that on a little

(01:14:55):
spacecraft about that big um.
That's sort of step two andwith that we can see if there
was, if there was, a cubesatflying in a weird orbit at the
distance of geo.
We'd be able to see that um, uh.

(01:15:16):
After that we would flytelescopes that are very much
specced out, like the Rasa 11,but space qualified, and we'd
probably want to fly one or twoof those on a demonstration
mission first, although that'snot really necessary.
Here's a weird thing to thinkabout.
You guys know what a Falcon 9is.
The Falcon 9 bay is about fourmeters in diameter.

(01:15:41):
What's that?
13, 14 feet, something likethat.
So take a deck with somecurvature on it.
How many of those telescopespackaged for space can you fit
on that deck, inside the fairingof a Falcon 9?
The answer is 109.
That's crazy, wow.
And you can package them with amoderate-sized spacecraft and

(01:16:06):
that performs.
That's one Sutter Ultra unit.
We can fly three Sutter Ultraseach with 109 telescopes on a
single Falcon 9.

Speaker 3 (01:16:17):
Wow, that's a good payoff.

Speaker 1 (01:16:19):
109 telescopes on a single Falcon nine Wow, the
single payoff.
With a single Falcon heavy, wecan fly that to deep space and
we can observe all of CIS lunarspace and find everything down
to the size of a basketball inCIS lunar space, continuously.
And when it comes to asteroidprospecting, that's the thing

(01:16:42):
that starts the asteroid miningrevolution, that's that.
That's what leads the gold rushto space, because we will find
hundreds of asteroids, you know,house size asteroids in low
delta v orbits every year.
So that's what Sutter Ultra is.
And let's think about this alittle bit.

(01:17:05):
We humans live on this littledust moat that we call Earth and
we're almost blind to the spacearound us.
I'm talking about a spacemission to fly at commercial
cost, for the cost of one biggeostationary communication
satellite.
We can see everything aroundthe planet out to hundreds of

(01:17:29):
kilometers, hundreds ofthousands of kilometers, down to
basketball size, and we can seeall the targets coming at us
from all directions all the time.
We can be aware, see all thetargets coming at us from all
directions all the time.
We can be aware of all thetraffic and we can be aware of
threats from planetary defenseand we can know what the natural
resources in our neighborhoodare.
That seems to me to be apractical investment for our

(01:17:51):
species that we ought to make,and we think it's important Not
just for our business plans butfor the planet.

Speaker 2 (01:18:00):
And you said this is for the same cost as a large
communication satellite.

Speaker 1 (01:18:03):
Yeah, for you know, like a big communication
satellite that they put up ingeo, those things cost upwards
of $250 million For a small, fornot that much money, we can do
this.

Speaker 2 (01:18:15):
Wow, now you had mentioned data being an issue
prior to this.
You know you have 109 of thesenow.
Well, our algorithm isabsolutely critical.

Speaker 1 (01:18:24):
Our algorithm is absolutely critical because if
you were to try to use bruteforce processing to process all
that data, it would be, you know, the solar arrays would be the
size of basketball courts, butactually when you run the
numbers it's a very reasonable.
Few kilowatts can do all theprocessing and you don't have to

(01:18:47):
send all these images down bythe way, the terabytes of data
that you generate.
You can't downlink all thatdata from space.
Even with optical comm it wouldbe a heavy load.
But you can download thetracklets and the ephemeris what
we call TLEs, of the targetsand then when people want

(01:19:09):
specific images of specificthings, we could send that down.

Speaker 2 (01:19:13):
Right Now.
If I remember correctly, youwere showing this in one of the
videos about how the threeSutter Ultra telescopes or more
could be kind of aimed atdifferent directions, like
towards Earth, towards the moonin one of them, and then kind of
at just different angles.
I could probably include someof that in this podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:19:36):
We have two animations.
I hope we can get them both toyou.
Um, one of them is what, if youwanted to use Sutter altered to
monitor everything that'shappening in CIS lunar space in
which case you would you couldput three telescopes at um, I
think it was L4, l5 and L2.
It was definitely L4 and L5.

(01:19:57):
I think the other one was L2.
, but it might have been L3.
No one ever goes to L3.
But the animation shows it andwith that you can monitor, you
can see everything moving incislunar space and the animation
shows that you know if, at theworst possible time, there's a
launch, you're still going tosee it.

(01:20:19):
Um, then you put the sametelescopes in a um, uh, what we
call a pseudo retrogradeheliocentric orbit.
This which is it's.
It's an orbit that seems to bean orbit around the earth, but
it's not.
It's actually a heliocentricorbit with a semi-major axis of

(01:20:42):
one au, so it has the sameperiod as the earth's orbit
around the sun, but it's gotsome eccentricity on it and what
you what happens is, if youposition the spacecraft
correctly in that, in thatelliptical orbit around the sun,
it actually circles the earthas it goes around the sun, but
it's not gravitationally boundto the earth.

(01:21:03):
It's outside the Hill sphereand if you would do three of
those, you're going to have themcircling the earth at all times
.
There's always one between theearth and the sun looking out
past the earth for planetarydefense targets, or what we call
missions of opportunity forasteroid mining.
And the way we see asteroidmining working in the future is
we have this, um, uh.

(01:21:25):
We have this observation systemthat's constantly watching for
inbound asteroids and when a newasteroid mining target comes up
, we know statistically they'regoing to come up with some
frequency and there's a randomdistribution of when they arrive
, but we know every N months onewill be coming up.
We pre-position our asteroidmining vehicles at the edge of

(01:21:46):
the Earth's gravity.
Well, when they come up, asthey approach, we chase them
down, mine them and then thenext loop around the sun we come
and return the resources to theearth using a lunar gravity
assist for capture how much ofthe material do you think would
be returned to earth versuskeeping?
it in space early on.

(01:22:07):
We think the most valuableresources will be volatiles, you
know, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon,carbon in the form of carbon
monoxide, carbon dioxide,methane, and those are used to
make rocket propellant.
So early on we harvest thesethings for rocket propellant.
So the way that we put it isour first generation full-scale

(01:22:29):
asteroid mining vehicle.
Weighs about as much as aconsumer pickup truck, a big
consumer pickup truck, which isabout as much as a big
geostationary communicationsatellite, and it has inflatable
solar reflectors that are eachlike the size of a tennis court
and it's launched on a normalFalcon 9 class rocket and it

(01:22:52):
flies out to an asteroid.
That's one of these low delta Vtargets.
It captures it in a bag.
The bag weighs about 1,000pounds and it can capture up to
1,000-ton asteroid.
You say 1,000 ton.
That's a really big number.
That's an asteroid about as bigas a big house.

Speaker 3 (01:23:09):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:23:10):
And it captures it in a bag and it can extract mostly
water about 100 tons.
So that's about as much wateras goes in a backyard swimming
pool and it brings it back togeostationary orbit where we can
sell it.
We actually have a contractwith a publicly traded company
to sell them 100 tons of waterin geostationary orbit for

(01:23:35):
rocket propellant that's worthabout $750 million.
Stationary orbit for rocketpropellant that's worth about
750 million dollars, and so um.
So the way to think about it isearly, first generation
asteroid mining spacecraftweighs about as much as a big
pickup pickup truck, inflatableobjects on the spacecraft,
deployed to the size of tenniscourts, captures an asteroid the
size of a house, brings backthe amount of water which is

(01:23:57):
roughly a small backyardswimming pool, that that water
can be held frozen in a in aflexible membrane enclosure
that's uh, several meters indiameter and that's worth the
better part of a billion dollarsjust for water.
Now, once we have plentifulsupplies of rocket propellant
and our omnivore propulsionsystem working in space, now our

(01:24:19):
worker, be our worker, be orbittransfer vehicles.
Take a worker, be orbittransfer vehicle, add the mining
equipment to it, you have ahoneybee.
Once the honeybees areoperating off of water supplied
from asteroids, it starts veryquickly to be as cheap as air
travel to get around in space.
At that point, and only at thatpoint, after the transportation

(01:24:43):
revolution has taken place,then it makes sense to go after
precious metals to return toEarth.
But on the basis of today'smarkets for precious metals and
today's costs and today'stransportation systems, it makes
no sense.

Speaker 3 (01:24:56):
Okay, so we still have a lot of steps to go before
really getting into miningasteroids, right?

Speaker 1 (01:25:03):
No, I think the water harvesting.
We put the four technologiestogether.

Speaker 3 (01:25:09):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:25:10):
Detect, move, capture and process.
Each of those have commercialapplications in low Earth, orbit
and other places.
You put those four thingstogether and you're harvesting
water very quick.

Speaker 2 (01:25:24):
Yeah, now there are multiple fuels being used, even
now with respect to rocketpropellant.
You know there's kerosene,there's methane, there's various
, you know more exotic thingsand then there's hydrogen and
oxygen right the same thing thatthe Apollo program basically
was run on, and you know moreexotic things.
And then there's hydrogen andoxygen right the same thing that
the Apollo program basicallywas run on, and you know,
looking at that and what you'dexpect to see from these

(01:25:49):
asteroids in terms of thevolatiles, is there something
that maybe we Is the diversitygood, or is the diversity in
different types of rocketpropellant an issue that maybe
should be considered?

Speaker 1 (01:26:03):
I mean, that's kind of like saying you know, we have
all genres of movies, we havescience fiction, we have drama,
we have romance.
Is the diversity good or bad?
The diversity is generated bythe market, and the market is
the most efficient system fordeciding right.
Um, now, if I was developing arocket, I would use lox methane

(01:26:25):
for the first stage and loxhydrogen for the second stage.
That's what stoke is doing,that's what blue origin is doing
.
Um, spacex is using lox methanefor both stages because they
want to refuel at Mars wherethey have carbon.
We can sell water to LOXhydrogen or methane from
asteroid resources.

(01:26:46):
Lunar resources really pin youdown to LOX hydrogen.
But I think LOX hydrogen is thechemical rocket propellant that
will drive humans around.
Our omnivore thruster canoperate either as a chemical
rocket on LOX hydrogen or as ahydrogen rocket with a specific

(01:27:07):
impulse of 875 seconds when itgets energy from the sun.
So I personally believe in LOXhydrogen.
But that's like.
Do you like science fictionbetter or rom-coms?
I think there's room in themarket for everything.
I love LOX methane.
The one thing that is going todie is kerosene.

Speaker 2 (01:27:32):
And just for clarification, the LOX is the
liquid hydrogen liquid oxygenthat we're using for the rocket.
Liquid oxygen is LOX.

Speaker 1 (01:27:38):
Yeah, sorry, Not LOX is the liquid hydrogen, liquid
oxygen that we're using for therocket Liquid oxygen LOX.
Yeah, yeah, sorry, not LOX andbagels.
Lox and hydrogen Liquid oxygen,liquid hydrogen.

Speaker 2 (01:27:48):
You know, this is the transcontinental railroad to
space, right the same type ofjourney that we saw as people
migrated west in the UnitedStates.
We're basically doing that intospace.
Do you see yourself more as anexplorer, or is it just your
scientific curiosity that drivesyou?

(01:28:08):
You know, how did you get here?
What?
What was the internalmotivation that for you that
made this possible?

Speaker 1 (01:28:15):
There's two kinds of people, people who organize
people into two kinds of peopleand everyone else.
Sorry, one way to distinguishbetween different groups of
people is there's some peoplewho like when you drive on the
freeway system in LA, there'salways mountaintops in view.
And I like running on trailsand I always look up on the

(01:28:45):
mountaintops and I ask myself Iwonder if anyone's ever run to
that mountaintop.
And then when you ever run to amountaintop that has no human
trails on it, you get to the topof the mountain and there is
something somewhat indescribableabout the moment yeah um, and

(01:29:07):
to me this is just an obviousthing that any human being would
feel and I mentioned this topeople like like, I'll be
driving down the street, wow,I'd like to go to the top of
that hill, and I've had peoplego why would you do?
that, oh bummer.

(01:29:29):
But historically, homo sapien,I think, is adapted so that most
people are are in the.
There's not a reason to go upto the top of that hill.
I'm not going to go up to thetop of that hill.
And then there are some humanbeings, there are some homo
sapiens, that have this thingwhere if you were a paleolithic

(01:29:51):
hunter, gatherer, living in avalley and there was a mountain,
you'd have to go find outwhat's on the other side of the
mountain.
And that's one of thesuperpowers that we Homo sapiens
have, is that we have bothkinds of people Majority of
people want to stay in thevalley and a few people want to
go to the top of the mountain.
Now, I happen to be that kindof a person.
I'm not an explorer, I'm anengineer and an entrepreneur.

(01:30:13):
But I feel that wanderlust inmy heart and when I look to the
skies, they call to me the stars.
You know, as Carl Sagan said,the stars call to us.

Speaker 3 (01:30:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:30:29):
And you know what was it?
He said the stars call to us,and if they do not destroy us,
we will someday venture to thestars.
Destroy us, we will somedayventure to the stars, and it's
because there is a subpopulationof Homo sapiens that must see
around the corner.
Those are the ones that willbuild the settlements, and those
ones who build thosesettlements will have a higher

(01:30:50):
percentage of those genes intheir population.
They will build more and theywill spread further.
And in 100 years or 1,000 years, they will spread throughout
the solar system and there willbe 100 billion of us.
And by that time the nucleartechnology to take those worlds
and send them hurtling betweenthe solar systems, to send them

(01:31:14):
hurtling between the stars inour galaxy, will be trivial.
And the fact that you alreadylive in space, in this
settlement means I don't care ifI'm in orbit around Earth, mars
, saturn, or if I'm hurdlingbetween the stars, it's the same
.
I'm Homo sapiens, cosmos, I'm acitizen of the universe.

(01:31:35):
And so the idea that, oh,people couldn't do long travel
between the stars, no, we havethe basic science to do it now.
We just need to develop thetechnology, and it's relatively
easy relative to what we havenow.
Once we're building worlds madeof asteroids, we'll be pushing
them around the solar system andsome people will go it's too

(01:31:58):
crowded here.
Why don't we get 30,000 of ourbest buddies and head out?
That way, and our grandkidswill be building worlds on
Sirius, which we know has anextensive asteroid belt.

Speaker 3 (01:32:15):
I mean dreaming toward the future.
It's interesting to see howdifferent people have different
visions.
I mean dreaming toward thefuture.
This is it.
It's interesting to see howdifferent, different people have
different visions of the future.

Speaker 1 (01:32:25):
It's, it's, it's really, you know, the same
vision that drives Elon and Jeffdrives most of the
entrepreneurs that are drivingnew space.
Elon sees people living onplanets.
Isaac Asimov said that that wasplanetary chauvinism.
It's a form of chauvinism wherepeople have always lived on

(01:32:46):
planets.
So let's do it in the future.
This is where Elon is probablythe best spokesman on the planet
for not thinking by analogy tothe past and thinking in first
principles, and he just doesn'tthink in terms of first
principles when it comes towhere humanity will live in
space.
It's obviously not at thebottom of gravity.
Well, they'll visit those onexpensive vacations.

Speaker 2 (01:33:09):
But one of the things that Jeff Bezos that did say
that really caught my attentionand it means a lot to me is, you
know, my my, one of my personalgoals is to see all of the
national parks and we have atravel trailer we go around when
we want to show our kids thecountry.
And he said that he foreseesthat all heavy industry is being

(01:33:30):
done in space and that Earth isa national.

Speaker 1 (01:33:34):
Yes, and that should be true of any planet with a
biosphere, any planet that hasindigenous life.
Unless the indigenous life isreally, you know, just in one
little place, then you can put adome on it and terraform the
rest of the planet.
But or I mean, heck, we mightfind out that life is just so

(01:33:57):
plentiful in the universe.
It's no big deal.
And you know, as Bob Zubrinsays, who cares about some
microbes on Mars?
That may be the thing, but wedon't know that yet.

Speaker 3 (01:34:09):
Right right.

Speaker 1 (01:34:11):
But you know.
So the point is is thatTransAstra is a company where we
have this stuff in the back ofour mind.
We don't talk about it all thetime.
We talk about writing code anddebugging software and figuring
out why the RF system on themass simulator for our capture

(01:34:34):
bag isn't connecting or ourcapture bag isn't connecting,
and we talk about getting moreperformance out of the algorithm
on our Sutter telescopes.
We are very practical engineersand business people solving
real-world problems, drivingrevenue growth every day, but we

(01:34:58):
are not just.
The reason that this vision isimportant is that people need to
understand that there's more tolife than lunch and that it's
about having an infinite futurefor our species, an infinite
positive future, that there istremendous reason for optimism.
By the way, if you're notoptimistic, you're not going to

(01:35:21):
be very productive, and so, whenwe have a right to be here, we
have a right to enjoy our livesand we have a responsibility to
make life better for ourchildren and for the other
people of the world, and that'spart of being a productive and
practical engineer and businessperson.

Speaker 2 (01:35:43):
Agreed In saying that .
It gets me thinking.
We have a group of ourlisteners, I'm sure, who are
interested and inspired andyoung, and they're listening to
this beautiful future thatthey're wanting to help make

(01:36:03):
happen.
What are some of the thingsskill sets that you need in as
you scale this to do the workthat we've been discussing?
What kind of skill sets arethese young people needing to
come into the industry to helpto make this vision possible?

Speaker 1 (01:36:24):
Everything.
There's no skill set that wedon't need.
If you're talented inmathematics and spatial
reasoning, then you should gointo STEM.
And when you go into STEM,don't limit yourself to what you
learn in school.
The best engineers are born.

(01:36:44):
They're not taught in schools.
You know, one thing that wenotice in our recruiting is
there are a lot of candidateswho we pass by, who are very
book smart and they got greatresumes and they got great
grades and they're very talentedbut, um, you go to have them

(01:37:05):
design a table and they don'tput gussets in the table to keep
it from going like this.
Because they have no commonsense, because they didn't build
model airplanes and drones andmodel boats.
And we need people who are verysmart and theoretical, but they
think with their hands and theybuild and they write code.

(01:37:30):
Like if I talk to a computersoftware developer who's
graduating in computer scienceand I say, well, what languages
do you know?
Oh, c++ and Python.
Well, what about Java and Rust?
Graduating in computer science?
And I say, well, what languagesdo you know?
Oh, c plus plus and and andpython.
Well, what about java and rust?
And um, how are you on sequel?
Well, that wasn't in thecurriculum.
Well, you mean, you onlylearned the languages that they

(01:37:52):
taught you in school.
You're not a computer scientist, you're a student, right, you
know, I have.
You know like um.
But you know, like you talk toa kid and he goes yeah, which
languages do you know?
And he starts listing them offand he runs out of the language
the fingers on his hand.
And how long does it take tolearn a new language?
I can learn a new language inabout three days.

(01:38:13):
I mean, it depends on thelanguage.
You know like.
I taught myself rust last week,but know Rust is a derivative
of C for embedded systems, andI've been building embedded
systems on Arduinos since I wasin seventh grade.
I'm going to hire that kid, soit's about whatever.
So if you're in STEM, that'sthe attitude.
If you're an artist, you know,show me your art.

Speaker 3 (01:38:36):
And like if an artist comes and you're doing a zoom
meeting with the artist andthere aren't a whole bunch of
artworks behind them, they'reprobably not much of an artist
so are you kind of saying, like,get your hands dirty, like
don't just follow the curriculumand do exactly what they give
you, get your hands dirty and dosome extra engineering and work
with your own stuff.

(01:38:57):
You know, throw your own pots.
You know, throw your own pots.
You know, do your art and getmessy with it.

Speaker 1 (01:39:02):
That's exactly right.
Life is a contact sport.
You need to burr your knucklesfrom turning wrenches,
figuratively and literally.
And building is a team sportand if you can't get along with
people, you can't be a very goodbuilder.
So, um, what have you done withothers?

(01:39:24):
Um, so those?
So, um, you know, I had awonderful experience.
So if you go to the Transasterwebsite, wwwtransastercom, and
click I think it's on the tabover on the right, it's like
media and go down to video, thetop video, there is a video

(01:39:45):
about me and our company thatwas made by a graduate student
who's doing media and an MBA atUSC, and they had a film
festival the other day wherethey invited me and the other
people that they made videos ofby.
By the way, that's an exampleof a kid who makes videos like,
hey, like, take a look at thatvideo and see what an awesome

(01:40:05):
video that is like.
If I was a movie producer, Iwould hire that kid in a second.
It's like better than half thedocumentaries you see on the
history channel.
Um, but what was really cool isthat there was a bunch of kids
who were interested inentrepreneurship who showed up.

(01:40:25):
My panel went on at 8 pm lastThursday night and I walk into
this auditorium in somenondescript building at USC and
I see all these very positivekids just leaning forward.
Almost all of them were like.
They were dynamic and healthyand enthusiastic and like when I

(01:40:47):
got done they'd seen thatdocumentary.
That's a little 15 minute videothat this kid made which is
outstanding.
I hope people check it out.
And then we had this paneldiscussion with some other
founders and they were likeraising their hands and like
afterwards they were mobbing mewith those kinds of questions,
asking what do I do, how do Iget into this?
And that sort of thing.
As soon as they hear about theprospects of a positive future

(01:41:12):
for humanity and their abilityto contribute, they go on fire
and you just you can't.

Speaker 2 (01:41:17):
Solutions based instead of just circling.

Speaker 1 (01:41:22):
A hundred percent, a hundred percent.
And you know like young peoplewant to contribute, they want to
have meaning in their life andthey want to have a future, and
you know, and when they do that,you know they find other young
people to love and they havekids and they build families and
society thrives and that weneed more positivity that causes

(01:41:42):
society to thrive and grow.

Speaker 3 (01:41:45):
Yeah, I noticed in your videos you definitely have
a younger workforce, at leastfrom what I could see from the
videos.
Yeah, I think the most commonage probably.

Speaker 1 (01:41:57):
the median age in the company is probably 24, 25.
Now the company has some seniorpeople in the company.
So we have a MIT PhD in laserphysics and who's got 25 patents
in radars and electronics.
Who's our director ofinnovation and radars and

(01:42:20):
electronics?
Who's our director ofinnovation?
We have Dr Hayden Burgoyne,who's mid-30s PhD 2016, caltech.
Recently we hired Dr ThibautTalon, caltech PhD a few years
after Hayden.
Amazing mechatronic engineer.
Knows every discipline ofengineering.

(01:42:40):
Just an amazing guy.
We have my brother, patrick,who is a brilliant journeyman
engineer who knows every peoplethink the word journeyman,
journeyman is the wrong word.
He's a master engineer ofseveral disciplines and so we
have a mixture of youth andenthusiasm and energy and talent
and experience.
We have people who've sufferedthe hard knocks of life and the

(01:43:03):
thrills of success and victory,and we have people who are
hungry to do all of the aboveand it's just wonderful watching
it all work together.

Speaker 3 (01:43:11):
Yeah, I was going to ask if you, as we're rounding
this out a bit and you'relooking at your company I was
going to ask if you have anyparticular guiding principle or
motto, because I heard one thatI thought would be a good one in
your video and that wasnothing's a bad idea until you
prove it's not viable, and Ithought that was pretty good.

Speaker 1 (01:43:36):
I like that.

Speaker 3 (01:43:36):
But other than that, do you have other like?
Is there something that youhear around the hive all the
time or a certain kind of mottothat you have for the company?

Speaker 1 (01:43:46):
We don't have a catchphrase.
You know, engineering, thefuture of space, is the closest
thing we have to a catchphrase.
But there are certain valuesthat we hold very dear and that
we make sure are communicated.
So they're basically courage,joy, work and integrity.

(01:44:14):
So courage is you must bewilling to fail, as painful as
that is, and you need to takechances work is work is if
there's a job that needs to bedone, you focus on it, and if
you're late, you get it done,and integrity is you tell the

(01:44:37):
truth.
Also, part of courage is youneed to be disagreeable.
So there's a there's aparameter in psychometrics
called agreeability ordisagreeability, and we find
that it's very important forengineers to be disagreeable, to
speak up when something doesn'twork.
Integrity is at the core of thesuccess of the human experience

(01:45:07):
, is the integrity that camefrom the enlightenment and the
scientific method, the conceptof a shared objective reality
that is concrete and believable,that we all trust in, and the
fact that when someone openstheir mouth to speak, you can
trust that what they're sayingis true.

(01:45:27):
You cannot engineer and youcannot have teamwork without it.
So it's those four things Ilike those are the guiding
principles of how I try to livemy life.

Speaker 3 (01:45:38):
I fail miserably at it but we're human right, I mean
right, right and that's okay,it's not.

Speaker 1 (01:45:47):
It's not.
It's not how well you dorelative to perfection.
It's how well you're doingrelative to if you weren't doing
your best, right, right.
And how well are you doingrelative to last week.

Speaker 3 (01:45:59):
Joel, what do you think about AI and what kind of
impact it's going to have onthis industry?

Speaker 1 (01:46:05):
There are a lot of people confidently saying that's
a huge revolution and it mightbe, and if it is, the magnitude
of the change almost is beyondimagination.
So I do believe it's quitefeasible to build humanoid

(01:46:26):
robots that are right out ofscience fiction, sell them for
$10,000 a copy and have them dothings like mow the grass,
assemble that 80-20 structureover there, and then AI is going
to enable us to build giantfactories in space that consume

(01:46:50):
asteroids and turn them intoworlds Faster than people think.
It's stunning what may come Now.
There also may be a brick wallthat we hit, but I think it's
going to work.
And you know we use obviously,like any other tech company, we
use AI in everything we do everyday.

(01:47:11):
You know it's just in the waterand it increases our
productivity and it works andit's very helpful.
I made the mistake of saying weuse it to help write proposals.
Someone quoted me as sayingtransaster uses ai to write a
proposal.

Speaker 2 (01:47:25):
No, no you can't trust it right you what we do is
.

Speaker 1 (01:47:31):
We use it to.
You know it can increase yourproductivity in writing, but it
still has to be written by ahuman.
Same thing with software andthe smart young engineers have
figured out and smart oldengineers too, figured out that
if you get stuck on a problem,go ask your favorite large
language model.
They are amazing.

(01:47:52):
And here's what I tell theyoung engineers they're amazing.
They can get you out of allkinds of blocks and they are
literally always wrong.
Once you get anything of anydepth, they will eventually
start spouting pure AI-driven BSand they can't help you do
something that you don'tunderstand.

(01:48:13):
The physics on Right, on rightwell they on.
At the best they're as good asthe information you provide it,
but they always make conceptualerrors and mistakes.
It's just whether they rise,and every time I've ever had
gotten into something deep withthe ai, eventually it started to

(01:48:33):
spout spout gibberish.
So, but it's fascinating towatch.
You know human beings learnabout a million times faster
than large language models andthere are structural reasons
with that that large languagemodels are so inefficient.
It takes a million times asmuch training.
I think that's a solvableproblem and once that problem

(01:48:55):
gets solved, you know like rightnow the AI industry is
consuming massive quantities ofpower.
There's a software problem inthe way they're organized, that
they need to get more efficient.
If they get 10,000 times moreefficient, which seems
completely reasonable, thatpower problem with AI will go
away.
So that's something I'mwatching.
That's interesting and theexecutables of the models are

(01:49:19):
very power efficient.
You know, probably next yearwe'll have nice AIs built into
you know phones God, I hopethey're better than Siri.

Speaker 2 (01:49:29):
So, joel, I want to just mention something that
we're putting together a CosmosSafari podcast, um virtual, you
know line, where we havet-shirts and mugs and I'd like
to send those over to you as athank you for being on tonight,
and they're available foreverybody.
Um, if you're interested, um,you can now get them on

(01:49:50):
Celestron's website, uh, undertheir merch.
So, uh, I would love to sendthose your way and you know.
Thank you so much for coming ontonight and providing us with
your time.
Please, if there's anythingthat you see coming, that's, you
know of something that you'dlike to talk more about.
We'd love to have you back on.

(01:50:10):
It was such a great time totalk with you tonight.

Speaker 1 (01:50:12):
Well, awesome, I had a ball.
Thank you guys so much.
This was fun.

Speaker 3 (01:50:16):
Yeah, this was fantastic.
Thank you so much for takingyour time with us.
Appreciate it Peace.

Speaker 2 (01:50:22):
If you're still listening and like this podcast,
please consider becoming one ofour Patreon patrons.
Memberships start as low as $3per month, with benefits
including opportunities to askquestions of our guests.
Also, please consider liking,subscribing and sharing this
podcast to help us bring theuniverse even closer than you
think.
The podcast will be availableevery third tuesday of the month

(01:50:44):
.

All Episodes

TransAstra: Revolutionizing Asteroid Mining and the Future of Space Economy | Presented by Celestron

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

24/7 News: The Latest

Therapy Gecko

The Joe Rogan Experience

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}TransAstra: Revolutionizing Asteroid Mining and the Future of Space Economy | Presented by Celestron