#226 Matt Gialich - Debunking Aliens in the Ocean, Mining Asteroids and Black Holes

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Matt Galich, welcome to the show, man.

Thanks for having me on, man.

This is awesome.

Mining asteroids?

Well,

dude, that is so far out there.

I can't wait to have this conversation.

But I am curious.

Why mining asteroids?

What are you getting off of them?

Yeah, so we're going after what are called the platinum group metals, right?

Very, very critical resource we all use here on Earth, but they're also worth a lot of money.

And why asteroids?

Well, some of the best ore sources we've ever discovered of the platinum group metals are orbiting us in space.

It's a very specific type of asteroid called the metal asteroid that we're going to go after, mine, and bring it back to Earth.

Wow.

Well, we're going to dive into that deep, so I can't wait.

But everybody starts off with an introduction.

So here we go.

Matt Galich,

co-founder and CEO of AstroForge, a pioneering deep space mining company focused on extracting platinum metal groups from asteroids, engineering leader with over a decade of experience leading teams in high-stakes technical environments, turned down an opportunity at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to start Astroforge in 2022.

driven by a vision to act faster and more economically than traditional aerospace giants.

A risk taker who embraces fear is a requirement for innovation, telling your team that if they're not scared, they're not pushing pushing hard enough.

I love that.

I think I know what it means, but I'm curious

what do you mean by that?

Look, when you're going to go do something like attempt to mine asteroids or go travel to the cosmos, right?

You have an option to go do that in a very safe way at a big company you've probably heard of called NASA.

I probably shouldn't call them a company, right?

A big government agency called NASA.

It takes a lot of guts to take highly technical people and have them kind of throw that away and say, I'm going to go join a small startup and go try to explore the universe for a fraction of the cost.

We're going to take a lot more risk to make that happen.

We're probably going to fail multiple times, but if we can pull it off, we'd change the world.

Those are special people and people that you rarely find.

And those are the people that we hire at Astroforge, right?

We hire the explorers of the future.

And you kind of got to have that gene in you to make it work.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, how do you find them?

There isn't one simple answer to how do you find talent.

I wish there was because then I would just use it on repeat to find the best talent.

People have come to us from people that have emailed us, to people that have said investors that have then came over the fence and worked for us, people we go on and recruit.

People I've spent, you know, our current COO, I spent over three years just talking to.

Oh, really?

Saying like, hey, this is what I'm doing.

When are you interested?

And, you know, he was early at a little company you've probably heard of called SpaceX.

And to get some of those,

to get some of those people that are just really ingrained, also have a lot of capital.

Like, it's not like SpaceX has done bad for these people that were pretty early at the company, right?

But to be able to convince them and get them kind of excited about a new push into the cosmos is really what pushes people over the edge.

I would say most of the team at Ashleford isn't working for the money, they're working for the journey and the adventure.

Like, we're all on an adventure.

Let's go see where it takes us.

So, what I'm curious,

because

I have so many questions.

I'm not organized for now because there's just so many random questions.

I mean,

what was the, I mean, what was the motivator to start,

I mean, what even got you interested in mining asteroids?

Why not just mine here on Earth?

So it's, yeah, I mean, look, those are two different questions, right?

It's not that I actually got interested in mining asteroids.

In early 2021, I went to JPL and looked at a mission called Europa Clipper.

It's a mission that's going out to a moon.

It's about five and a half billion dollar planetary mission.

Amazing mission.

but what i realized is and i think we can all admit this is shouldn't cost five and a half billion dollars like there's just not that much material being used to justify that cost and nasa has this process they've used and it's almost at this point a jobs program right you got to like test your spacecraft in this state and you got to go to this state to do this and these people in this state have to work on it that's how you get congress to approve these budgets and we're kind of seeing that today all over the place right with nasa's budget like every week you hear something different and it's become some some senator like argued for his state to get it and that's not a good way to build low-cost spacecraft and in fact we've just seen these spacecraft balloon in price and five and a half billion is just a massive massive amount of capital to go do something that that I don't think should cost anywhere near that amount and you know you're gonna hear these famous stories about Elon and I think a lot of founders will repeat this that they go and they look at like the raw material costs of what it takes and

and then say like, well, this is, you know, X amount more.

This is a good price to go inflect.

And we've been using that for a long time in business, by the way, which is called margin and something that we looked at as well of like, hold on, why does this cost five and a half billion dollars?

What if I could build it cheaper?

And what I realized is I think I could build a satellite a lot cheaper than what NASA does.

But

is it worth it building it cheaper?

And what I mean by that is you still got to launch the thing.

It's not like I can throw a satellite into space.

I still got to be able to launch the satellite.

And so one of the biggest reasons Astroforge is allowed to exist is actually because of that same organization, NASA.

NASA does this thing called Eclipse missions.

These are the lunar landers you've probably seen.

So I don't know if you watched the Intuitive Machine Landers or the Firefly landers go land on the moon.

And we hitch rides on those rockets for a fraction of the cost, right?

We no longer have to buy an entire dedicated launch to go out to the cosmos.

And so for the first time, you can build a low-cost spacecraft, but also have low-cost launch.

Those two things have never aligned before to go do it.

And so now I can go access the universe.

at orders of magnitude cheaper than anybody's been able to in history.

And then the question became,

what do you do?

Like, I can't go raise money from a venture capital.

So like, hey, I'm going to go YOLO something to the universe and like explore it.

They're like, cool, cool.

There's no, what is that supposed to mean?

And so,

you know, what I first did was I sat down and I wrote this whole list of like, if I can now see this inflection point where I could access deep space for, for much cheaper, right?

Under $10 million, including the launch.

What could I do?

And I had all these stupid ass ideas.

You know, one of my ideas, Sean, was actually to,

I say this one all the time because it was so dumb, but I followed it up for about a week was like, could I sell ads?

Like, we all see these famous pictures of Jupiter and Saturn, and you've probably seen the Voyager mission or Cassini, and you don't know what mission they're from, but you see these gorgeous images.

What if it was like stamped with Coca-Cola at the bottom, right?

Like, could we sell it?

And I called a couple places.

I called Red Bull, and Red Bull was like, no, we're not interested.

I'm like, okay, this is dumb.

But...

There was two companies before that I had really respected and read a lot about, and they were called Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries that attempted to go mine asteroids before.

Now, they had two different cases at the time.

They wanted to mine them originally for water to refuel rockets.

And then later on, they started to look at the platinum group metals because of the high concentrations on these asteroids.

So I said, hold on, maybe I should be looking at these old business models and seeing if I have a lower entry point, maybe they make a lot of sense again.

And that's what we did.

That's how we landed on the idea of mining asteroids.

Interesting.

Now, you did ask a question, they're like, why not just do it on Earth?

Right?

Like, quote, why go to space and do it?

And you'll also hear this argument that will say something like, Well, we have enough material on Earth to mine kind of forever.

Why even bother?

There's this thing called cost, and it's really important.

And what we call the all-in-sustaining cost of mining, especially on the platinum group metals, is extremely high.

And the reason is, is the good ore grades of platinum group metals are really deep in the ground.

You know, when you go to South Africa, where some of the best mines are, about 80% of our PGMs come from South Africa, those mines are 1,500 to 2,000 meters deep.

Like these are not easy mines, right?

They are extremely deep in the ground, which means they're super hot, they're really dangerous, and we're kind of at the threshold of where we can mine.

The mining industry as a whole has been making a big push to say, can we mine below 2,500 meters?

And the question isn't actually, can we mine below 2,500 meters?

Like the answer to that is yes.

Can we economically mine below 2,500 meters?

The answer to that right now is a hard no.

And so that's the problem that actually exists with us as humans is we're not able to access a lot of the resources we have here on the planet because of this thing called physics.

We are now able to go, hopefully, mine asteroids for a fraction of the cost it takes on Earth.

And we think of today,

even at the prices we're seeing today on both launch and building the spacecraft, we're looking at margins upwards of 80%, where a margin on Earth today for platinum on the high end is about 15%.

Wow.

No shit.

So, I mean,

how do you know what's on an asteroid?

How would you know which one to target,

what's on it, or is it just process of elimination?

No, so we study them.

They hit the Earth all the time and we just rename them as meteorites.

So in our office, we have about 300 different meteorites that are just laying around.

It's kind of comical, right?

It's like...

like the science center going on there to some extent.

And we study the ship, right?

We put them under what's called XRF or X-Way fluorescence and get samples from them.

We have an electron microscope with another technology that allows us to to understand composition.

We use all the time on them.

And we really try to break down their structures and see what's on them.

Now, when we talk about asteroids, be very clear, I'm not talking about all asteroids.

I'm only talking about a small percentage of what we think is out there, which is about 5% that we believe to be these special type of asteroids called metal asteroids.

So the real job of Astrophorge is not, do they exist?

We know they exist.

because they hit the planet all the time.

We have a good example or concentration of where we think they are in the universe.

In fact, NASA is sending a mission to one right now called the Psyche mission.

It's a fucking awesome mission.

Wait, what is that?

Psyche 16 is a main belt large, believed-to-be M-type asteroid.

And NASA, about a year and a half ago, launched a mission to Psyche 16 called the Psyche mission.

It's on its way right now.

I believe it gets there in about a year and a half from now.

And we'll get our first images and spectral data from a direct orbiting...

metal asteroid.

So it'd be really cool for the first time to actually see one up close.

We've never been to one of these up close, right?

We've only been to what are called, I'm going to use, the types get a little complicated here.

We've only been to essentially rubble piles, a bunch of rocks, or kind of small little planets that we find in space.

That's all we've really seen is asteroids or comets.

This will be the first one to go to a metal asteroid.

No kidding.

By the way, what's really cool to think about a metal asteroid if you think about it,

we think metal asteroids are the core of a dead planet.

So it's the same as the core of Earth.

It's the same makeup.

And that's why there are really high concentrations of dense material because when you watch a planet form, all the dense material sinks to the bottom.

so what we're essentially harvesting is a planet that for some reason blew up hundreds of millions of years ago and i'm going out to like mine the core of that planet that's what we're doing wow i got a i got a random question for you this we were talking about satellites going out taking pictures of planets i mean i don't know how far these things have gone i mean the the james webb i mean that's Where did that go?

James Webb went to one of the Grange points.

So James Wendb went to the stable orbit on the other side of the moon.

So James Webb is pretty far away.

I actually don't know the distance, but I would assume the moon's about 240 million miles away.

Sorry, 240,000 miles away.

So Webb is probably somewhere in the range of 500,000 miles away where it's stationed right now.

And that was so it doesn't get any reflection from the Earth.

right that's why they wanted it out there so it could be super cool than not getting heat from the earth to get better images i mean so my question is i mean you see all these these

i watch this stuff all the you you were talking about you watch wartime netflix specials I watch space stuff all the time.

And I always wonder how these, I mean, you see these like miraculous images from Uranus and

way out there, right?

And how are they, how do these communicate?

How are they getting the imagery back to the Earth?

If you really want to dive deep, Shiny, go read my blog post on this, which is like 10,000 words of the details here, but

how do they communicate on Earth?

So it's a lot of ways to think about this.

At the end of of the day.

They're really far away, so they're losing a lot of radiated power from the spacecraft over that great distance.

So, how do we communicate?

Really, twofold: big-ass dishes on the ground.

So, if you've ever seen like the early James, I should say, early for me, James Bond movies with Pierce Brosman, right?

Where he's like in Russia on there in front of like a big dish, those are the fucking dishes we use to listen to the spacecraft.

The one we used on our last on our last mission was 32 meters across.

So, put that in your head.

This is a 100-foot, you know, freedom units dish that we're pointing in space.

And we have to be accurate to be within 0.1 degree so it's got a little tiny beam that we're trying to point out there and that's just to get enough gain to pick up the signal from the satellite on the satellite side we use really really powerful amplifiers so spacecraft like voyager psyche um

new horizons use what's called the traveling wave tube and they can get you know 100 db gains now keep in mind every three db is twice the power so you're talking exponential power growth to send back to Earth.

All of that being said, and I should quantify this maybe so it's a little bit easier to understand.

We talk about something like,

talk a little bit more about our spacecraft.

We broadcast at about 15 watts.

Your cell phone on its highest setting will broadcast at 100 milliwatts.

So

we're much, much more powerful than your cell phone can even get to.

On top of that, the real trick we do here is we slow down the data substantially.

So we communicate, you know, Voyager is communicating at 160 160 bits per second right now.

Like you can, that is so slow.

And that's so we have more integration time on the ground to determine if something is a one or a zero.

So we're just adding it up at very high sample rates to say, oh, that was a one, that was a zero.

But 160 bits per second, think about that.

If you want to send down a basic JPEG image,

that's going to take you, what,

20 days?

Like these things can be really slow.

So then you have to start thinking about, well, what kind of high-end compression do we use?

How does the spacecraft process these?

How many bits do we send back?

the nice thing about space is most of it's black so you can just like make it one one bit pattern right as you go through but the details of communication are extremely hard when you go out that far it is not an easy problem to solve whatsoever and requires a whole bunch of infrastructure what's called the deep space network to make it happen so how i mean how far can these satellites go before we lose connection i mean voyager right now is uh 32 billion miles away from earth someone should fact check me on that because it might be 3.2 billion and i might have got my number wrong whatever billions billions of miles away from Earth.

And

I haven't done the link budget there.

It can keep going.

And I'm sure they can even slow down Voyager's bit rate even more to get farther.

But we can go pretty far.

It's an R-squared loss on the distance we go out.

So it's going to keep getting farther and farther away.

And we'll be able to talk with it hopefully until the spacecraft actually fails.

I mean, think about that spacecraft.

It's kind of insane to think about, right?

Things been up there 50 years and it's still working.

Man, then there's two of them.

That's wild.

Yeah.

That's wild.

What?

I mean, how long have you been in

the space industry?

I mean, look, I grew up in Pasadena, and there's the famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

I mean, my first intro to space was touring in an elementary school.

Like, I've always loved space.

I think more importantly, I've always loved technology.

It's not always focused around space.

It's focused around the cool missions that go out there, the things that happen.

Space also can be really boring.

And I think we forget about that as humans sometimes.

Like, we went to the moon.

That was a really exciting time in space.

And then we made the space shuttle.

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I didn't give a shit about the space shuttle.

I don't know how many kids of my generation were just like bored with NASA.

Like, oh, cool, you guys built an orbiter.

Great.

Like,

it's all cool, and I'm sure there's a whole bunch of scientific rationale, but it didn't inspire you to go explore.

And in fact, NASA has still done some great planetary science missions and really has pushed the envelope on this.

And I think we'll continue to push the envelope on planetary exploration and science.

And those are inspiring missions, but they don't get a ton of press because they don't have people on them.

You know, they're very much in the community as you look at it.

I hope a little bit that we can bring that back.

I hope by lowering the cost of entry to go explore the universe, we can bring back the inspiration piece as well.

You know, again, if I can do this for

double-digit millions, you now have private institutions that can go do this, universities that can go do this, and we can go inspire a whole new generation of people to go explore.

wow deed i mean do you know anything about i'm going down some rabbit holes here sorry let's go down i got you here so i gotta ask this i want to know about this dark matter stuff

what is it what's going on look i know absolutely shit about dark matter what i will say

yeah sorry i just it's all good don't know but but what i will say is that The reason we have so many questions about dark matter is because we just haven't been able to put the instrumentation in space to go explore this.

I mean, dark matter was discovered by mistake, right?

And the way it it was discovered was calculating gravity and realizing like, hold on, these planets in these solar systems, we can see, really, really, I should say, these stars around these galaxies far away are going too fast.

And if we do our normal calculation, they should fly off, which means our mass calculation is wrong.

Why is our mass calculation wrong?

One theory for that is dark matter.

But really what we're saying is our math doesn't work.

on the model we're using.

It's broken.

And I think the most widely accepted solution to that mass or to that, to that math is that there's extra mass that we can't see.

And so we call it dark matter because we can't see it.

I hope we put more science in space to go figure this out.

Like, I want to figure out why the fuck we're here, right?

I want to figure out if there's aliens.

I want to figure out what the universe is built, how we did it.

What is a new branch of physics we can go discover?

There's so many things that space has unlocked for us as these key pieces in time.

including dark matter.

But because of the limited availability to actually go explore it, it's just handcuffed.

And so unless you're willing to be a top-notch professor that spends 20 years writing proposals and hopefully gets your mission approved and then hopefully gets it launched and then hopefully doesn't get it canceled, and then maybe you'll make a really cool scientific discovery.

I don't think that's the best process.

I mean, in some of these documentaries, they kind of allude to the fact that it might be some type of a new energy source.

I mean, do you think there's anything to that?

I love to go down these branches of physics and try to understand them and try to figure out like you have, you have antimatter, you got dark matter, you got all these different states, you got all these different theories, you got theories on variable light theory.

Like there's all these really cool theories that are out there that you can go read and explore.

Here's the reality, Sean.

I'm too stupid to understand all of them.

I'm not going to pretend like I'm the genius on all this stuff, right?

I think it's really cool for me to go read these.

And what I would always suggest, because we all fall down this rabbit hole, which is like we turn on the Discovery Channel and there's like some crazy dude with crazy hair on there being like, oh, if you vibrate an atom at this, it will turn into this and then teleport and you could like teleport humans and go read the actual papers.

And usually you don't draw those same conclusions.

You can get how they get there, but like the statistics to make that happen are infinitesimally small and non-realistic.

The best is, here's a trick I would always recommend you use that I've used a lot.

Scientists don't get reached out to a lot.

Call them.

Just call them and say like, hey, I don't understand this.

Can you help me understand it?

And they are some of the most helpful group of people I've ever run across.

Some of the best things we have done at Astroforge are because I just emailed people on papers I read about certain things like metal asteroids.

And you get in touch with these epic scientists who are willing to pick up the phone and talk to you.

And they'll talk to you for hours.

And like, that amount of information I get from just calling people has changed the course of the company and my life.

And you can do that as well, right?

Anybody listening can do that as well.

Of like, these people are all-stars in the science community, but they're still accessible to you just reach out do you think there's aliens out there you've mentioned that i wasn't gonna go there but hey you brought it up what do you think um i hope there's aliens do i think so here's the here's the here is the sad truth that i think i'm coming to more of the realization that may exist

I think there's got to be other intelligent life forms in the universe.

There is too many stars.

There's too many galaxies to statistically not have that be a case.

I don't know if we can communicate with them or ever reach them.

I don't know if physics will ever allow us to travel faster than light.

And I have seen no convincing evidence that we can.

And so because of that, I actually come up with this really sad scenario, which is,

yeah, I think there are other civilizations out there.

And I think we'll never have confirmed proof that they ever exist because we either cannot communicate with them or cannot travel to them in any way, shape, or form.

And so I hope we're able to break that down.

I hope I'm incorrect.

I hope somebody listening is like, oh, this guy's an idiot.

And here's the solution to that.

And we can go travel faster than light because we all see it in sci-fi movies.

And it's what makes every sci-fi movie work.

Yet it's one of the few things we don't have a theory on.

And so

that's, I think, is the cold hard reality of the universe.

I do think there is life in our own solar system.

I don't think there's intelligent life in our solar system.

I'm pretty convinced that we're going to find microbes or signs of life on some of these moons,

especially around Jupiter.

and some of these other places in the universe.

Like, there's got to be.

It just doesn't make sense for there not to be.

We've already seen the signs of it.

But again, the limitation, Sean, is that we send these really expensive missions out.

And if you're going to go be a scientist, you're probably not going to write like, please fly my instrument that will detect aliens.

You're going to say like, oh, I want to detect the building blocks of the universe on this planet.

And that doesn't always correspond with like, can you see microbes?

I hope that some of the missions we do in the future are going to do that, or actually going to be so low cost that they can go have, I don't know, microbe detection instruments on them that we can send out and land on Mars or some of these other planets, right?

That's the future I want to see created.

What evidence have we found?

Oh, God, you're asking me to go back through it.

We found amino acids, right?

We found some of the building blocks of life.

We found, yeah, water on Mars, right?

That's been a big one that we've come across.

It's crazy.

We've looked at Mars so many times and like you're seeing these discoveries now and it kind of makes you take a step back and realize like

we think of Mars, at least I think of Mars as this little tiny thing in space that we've explored and like the reality is oh no we haven't explored it at all like we we barely scratched the surface of what is on Mars and finding water, finding ice is these huge discoveries that we've been going to Mars for 50 years and we just now figured this out.

Like, what else are we missing?

What else haven't we seen?

We haven't gone subsurface.

You know, we have these moons that we think are completely frozen and they have liquid water underneath them.

Like, is there fish?

Is there things swimming around down there?

I don't know.

But I really, really hope we get the chance to go figure it out and find out.

Yeah, me too.

Me too.

I mean, what do you think about all the, you know, this the the stuff that hits the news with these

gravitic propulsion systems and things going in the water and coming out and

all these sightings what do you think

i love talking you know if you would have looked at the a-12 or what became the si-71 right um

in the 1960s what would you have chalked it up as because i would have said like holy shit there's aliens like what is this thing it's going mach 3 it looks like this thing we've never, ever seen.

What's happening?

And what you realize is like, well, that actually isn't aliens.

That was humans, right?

That was Skunk Works and Kelly Johnson that built that.

And it was physics that dictated that design.

And I think what we've forgot is that we keep in our brain extenuate that out to like, well, what's the SR-72?

In fact,

we've seen advertisements for the SR-72, and it looks like a plane we can all recognize, we can all draw the lineage from that to this.

What we haven't looked at is like, well, what are governments, and I don't even mean our government, right?

This This could be China, this could be Russia, this could be us, this could be any developing nation that's pushing the envelope.

Like,

we're all focused on air.

I don't think air matters anymore.

We've seen satellites kind of dominate our ability to get data.

We don't really need reconnaissance aircraft anymore.

What is the government building in the oceans?

What are they building that goes in and out of the oceans?

Like, are these just man-made objects that are classified and we don't have access to?

Probably.

That's probably the most likelihood thing of what we're going to see there from a probabilistic standpoint.

Do I really hope they're like little aliens that are going to come and all sudden like, you know, come out with their little guns, like, you know, Mars attack style?

And like, fuck yeah.

But I find it really hard to extrapolate to that.

And also,

put yourself in the shoes of an alien.

If you came to a planet with a civilization on it that you could just dominate through a will of force,

what would you do, Sean?

Would you go hide in the ocean?

I don't know what I would do.

I'll tell you what I would do.

I'd become the fucking emperor of the world and it would be sick.

That's what I would do, right?

Like, I would, I would say, all you people are now dominant.

Like, I dominate all of you.

I got better technology.

I'm going to at least be known.

I'm not going to go hide in the middle of the Pacific where, like, one, there's not even anything in the middle of Pacific.

Like, what a boring place to go.

So, it just doesn't make sense to me, right?

I can't connect the dots that these are actual aliens coming here.

Maybe we're an experiment and they're just monitoring.

That'd be a cool outcome, right?

Like, I, again, I hope there is intelligent life and I hope that is what's going on.

I just, it's this hard thing where until we have evidence, it's really hard to draw any delineation here to anything special happening.

And, you know,

you got to have extraordinary evidence to make extraordinary claims.

And I just haven't seen any extraordinary evidence to suggest that anything is here other than some like shitty videos showing some things move in ways that we can't describe.

And I think that's really cool to study.

I think you can do calculations to figure out, out like, oh, actually, humans can't be in there.

They would be killed by gravity, right?

Like g-forces are too high if we do this.

And you can do math on these and kind of get a sense of what's going on and how we do this.

But let's be honest, the F-22 was essentially handcuffed because pilots can't handle the g-forces in it.

And that was what went into, I think that went into service in 1994.

I think started its development in the late 70s.

You're telling me that like, oh, all of a sudden after 1994, we're just like, okay, cool.

You know,

we can beat g-forces on the human body on airframes now.

We're just going to stop development.

Like, I could just extrapolate it out and say, 30 years later, yeah, that probably went up even more.

And maybe some of these g-forces we can calculate are now realistic with some of the propulsion techniques we're using.

I don't know.

It's a whole bunch of new propulsion techniques out there that

some,

there's one that I've looked at a lot.

It's called the Rotate and Detonating Engine or RDE.

There's a couple companies now building them, which is pretty awesome.

I love to see this.

Russia did a whole bunch of publications here until 2010 and then stopped.

What is it?

It's a very special type of engine that allows you to get theoretically, it uses a totally different, instead of using combustion, it uses detonation.

So you can get much more efficiency out of the same fuel sources going into it.

Best way to put it is you could take something like a Falcon 9 and by replacing the engine with one of these RDEs, make it lift as much mass as a Falcon Heavy.

Right?

So you can essentially make a rocket much, much better by using these engines.

It's a long extrapolation.

There's a lot of questions to them.

There's a lot of physics to still be figured out.

But why did Russia go silent in 2010?

Like, did they just give up on developing it?

Maybe.

Or did they make some breakthroughs that they didn't want to release anymore that now enables these type of technologies to exist, right?

Hypersonic missiles are a big, big thing that we're looking at with RDEs.

There's a lot of cool things you can draw from this that don't require you to believe in aliens.

As much as I want to, Sean, I just...

I find it hard to believe they exist.

And if they did, God, I wish they were cooler because, again, I want want to see like Emperor Alien.

I don't know.

I don't.

I don't.

I'm leaning towards no, they don't exist.

I've interviewed a bunch of people about this stuff.

I just, it's, it's all, oh, that's classified.

That's classified too, this, that.

You know, and it's just, it's like, all right.

So nobody really knows anything.

So much of what is classified is not like, it's not like you get a clearance and all of a sudden you walk in a skiff and they're like, oh, hey, actually, there's fucking aliens and and they fly these ships.

They're like, you walk in there and they're like, here's the frequency.

You're like, that's it?

Like, what are we talking about here?

Right.

Like, this is not how it works.

And I think movies have really turned our brain to think there's some Area 52 where they have Element 114.

And like, I love all.

I think they're awesome to go explore.

And you got to go explore whenever you hear new things like this.

It just doesn't make sense to me, though.

And understanding how the government works, like,

I'm sorry.

The government is one of the most inefficient things I've ever seen operate.

And usually, everything that comes out, like, we got the

signal messages from the Secretary of Defense.

They couldn't even hide that.

You're telling me that we're going to go hide like secret alien aircraft underneath a mountain and nobody's going to leak this?

Please, I just, I can't, I can't draw that conclusion.

I'm with you.

I'm with you.

Man, well,

back to asteroids.

Let's get back to, let's get back to asteroids.

So, you know, I'm

you're the second guy that I've had on that's that's talking about mining stuff in space i had this uh gentleman on steve quast and uh he's

he's he was he came in and he was talking about how china is mining helium-3

off the back side of the moon for for for energy have you heard about this

okay i don't think first off

China is not mining helium-3 off the backside of the moon for energy right now.

It has been theorized.

There's a couple companies in the United States going after helium-3 mining off the moon.

So what happens is when you have this solar the solar flux coming through like we have an atmosphere on earth so we don't have this happen on the moon high energy protons will hit those i'm probably saying this wrong and some physicists will yell at me right but some particles from the sun hit the helium atoms on the moon and will create this this isotope helium 3 and uh that's what people want to go mine because it it has really good power properties it allows you to cool things really really low and it's theoretically worth a lot of money

i think there's a couple problems with helium three um

I think this is something we get wrong a lot when we look at companies and we look at markets, which is the market cap.

It's my same problem with rare earth metals as we go into it, right?

The market cap for helium-3 is extremely low.

So Helium-3 in 2023 had a total market cap of $5.8 million.

So yeah, it might be worth $100 million a kilogram or $20 million a kilogram or whatever the number is.

But like, that's not how economics work, right?

It's supply and demand.

And if you increase the supply, you lower the demand, thus the cost goes down.

There's all these people that study this, but again, basic business isn't that hard.

And sometimes we try to convolute it.

It's pretty straightforward.

Helium-3 has a really small market cap.

Now, it may grow.

And one of the ways we think Helium-3 may grow is with nuclear, right?

We've talked about fission reactors being able to use off helium-3, and there's this whole philosophy how to get there.

The big problem with that is that nuclear reactors make helium-3.

It's one of the byproducts byproducts of them.

So we know how to make helium-3 on Earth.

Really?

Yeah.

I don't think there's going to be a supply problem as we go into the future.

But the cool thing is startups is we all get to make these different theses and bets on what's going to happen.

And maybe I'm wrong, right?

There is also another theory that says on the positive side for helium-3 that quantum computing is going to use it at a high level.

Someone makes a breakthrough tomorrow in quantum computing and it takes off, like, I could be totally wrong, and this shit could be worth 10x, right?

And those are the huge markets you can go into.

But as of today, it's a really small market.

And it's one of the things that will allow us, it's one of the few economic use cases you can even think of on the moon right now.

Because the reality is like lunar dirt is pretty much the same as the dirt we have here, right?

Maybe it's a little bit higher in aluminum content, I believe, than what we have here.

Sure, some geologists can give you some details, but it's not really that different.

There's nothing that special in it.

Interesting.

So when we're talking about metals like platinum and

what other metals are you looking at?

Really, right right now, we're looking at the platinum group metals, right?

Massive market cap.

So, platinum group metals used in manufacturing last year was about $60 billion.

That's the market we want to go after.

I'm not even talking about the store of wealth.

Like, people will wear platinum as jewelry, things like this, right?

But

platinum group metals enable the future.

So, you've probably had a lot of people come on the show recently and talk about, I see your nuclear hat over there.

That's why I'm talking about this.

And I know you've had Scott Nolan on here and some others talk about nuclear and

energy demand as it's growing

and i think they're right the one piece they're forgetting on that in my opinion though it's like that's not the only thing that goes into a big data center the other thing that goes into a big data center are computer chips right that mostly nvidia is making that go built there what metals use to make computer chips one of the biggest metals consumers in making a six is the platinum group metals so i think in the future and look we can go on this long road about capitalism capitalism requires you to have a pretty high growth rate as a country.

We have to keep growing, right?

We have to grow 2% to 3% a year to maintain capitalism.

If we become flat, like this system does not work.

And that's really how we've driven it.

That means we're going to have to have exponential growth as we go into the next century.

And it's going to get huge.

We're going to have all of these things.

Energy is going to have to grow exponentially.

So are materials.

And the one I'm going after on the material front, just like these guys are going after on the power front, is the platinum group metals.

We use it in computer chips.

We use it in your cars.

We use it to treat cancer.

Like It's used throughout our lives.

The honest truth is, Sean, it's just not a sexy metal.

Like, if you ever look at this stuff, it's kind of boring.

It looks like some gray iron shavings.

You're like, cool, what is this shit?

Don't care.

But it's a pretty important metal to our way of life.

So, how abundant is it on some of these asteroids?

I mean, look, we got examples of asteroids that are extremely rich in the platinum group metals.

We have one that's just above 1% platinum group metal by mass in the office.

No, that is an N of one, right?

As a general part, they're probably going to be about two orders of magnitude lower than that as a general concentration.

But compare that to what we have in South Africa.

We have a mine in South Africa.

It's eight parts per billion.

Like, it's a very, very thin margin of what we have on ore quality here on Earth.

So these things on average are about five to ten thousand times better than the best ore mines we have on earth.

Wow.

So, you know, Mike, we were just talking about margins.

and supply and demand and all that stuff.

So if platinum is that abundant on asteroids and i don't know we'll get into how you're going to mine it and bring it back and all that stuff i mean wouldn't that lower the demand by quite a quite a bit of course but that doesn't happen overnight right and so i'll give you two different futures both of which i'm happy to create and i really don't have a i really don't actually care which one happens i shouldn't say that out loud but i really don't give a

um

so again 60 billion dollar market cap now keep in mind on our first mission we're going to bring back 60 million dollars worth of platinum that's a drop in the bucket on the first mission on the first mission that we go do the mining on, right?

That'll happen.

That'll launch in about two years.

Real quick, before you go on,

how much is 60 million dollars worth of?

A thousand kilograms of the platinum groove metals.

A thousand kilograms.

Yeah, of these six elements, right?

So that's at the expected concentration.

We expect it to be worth right around 60 million.

These prices, it's a commodity.

They vary, right?

By the time the show comes out, it might be twice as much or half as much.

It's actually gone up quite a bit in the last two months as this goes forward, but we bring back around 60 million.

So when you look at that into a market cap of 60 billion, we look at elasticity of this element, like that's not going to affect the price at all, right?

It's like if you go take your gold ring and turn it into pawn shop, you don't affect the price of gold.

Now, if you go

back up a brinkstruck with a thousand tons of gold, like you're probably going to fuck the price up a little bit.

But the other thing here is, I think we all got to be reminded of someone named Napoleon.

And the reason is Napoleon, his silver war was made out of aluminum because in the 17, I don't even know when this guy lived, right?

1780s or whatever, you know, some shit like that.

The most baller shit you could have was aluminum.

So like he's eaten with aluminum silverware because it was the, it was what the kings, you know, the kings had.

And then we found this new process to make aluminum.

And now if you have aluminum silverware, you're like, what is this garbage?

Like, can you make it out of steel so it's a little heavier?

Like, our

water bottles are aluminum.

The airplane I flew here is aluminum.

Like our actual modern way of life was created because of this process of extracting aluminum.

We knew about aluminum before.

We knew what it was.

The difference was, is the cost of aluminum was astronomical.

Do you have those same analogies to platinum right now?

Platinum costs are very high.

They're astronomical because it's a supply and demand created ecosystem.

But you've probably heard of hydrogen.

The way you make green hydrogen so it isn't spewing out carbon and isn't just you know being a less effective energy transfer is with a platinum catalyst there's all these theoretical use cases, and I shouldn't even say theoretical, there's all these use cases for platinum that monetarily don't make any sense right now.

That if you could flip the switch on, do.

And so, I'm happy with two outcomes.

One is we have an aluminum revolution, right?

We changed the way that we operate on this planet because we now have an abundance of a resource coming from outside of the Earth that allows our growth rate to continue, it allows us to expand out in the universe, and it allows us to really,

I think, level up as a civilization.

The other use case is: I bring back $60 million at at a time into a massive market and we make a shitload of money.

Either one of those I'm good with.

We'll see which ones happens.

Right on.

Right on.

So how far along are you?

So in this in the process to mining asteroids.

We are getting ready for our next mission.

Next mission is called Vestri.

Vestri is a 200 kilogram spacecraft.

So for a deep spacecraft, by the way, that's extremely small, you know,

on relative terms.

And that'll go out and do a landing on one of these metal asteroids.

So that's targeted to launch next year.

No kidding.

Following year, we will send essentially Vestri Part 2.

It'll be the

same overall spacecraft, but we will add the refinery to it and return capability.

And we'll go out, mine the asteroid, and bring it back to Earth.

So the first one, what is the mission of the first one?

So the first one, well, the first mission we launched, the first planetary mission we launched was one called Odin.

We launched that in February.

That was our first commercial attempt to go to deep space.

February of this year?

February of this year.

Smaller spacecraft went out.

We made it about twice as far as the moon.

So last signal we got from it was 850,000 kilometers away from the planet.

But one of the solar panels stuck.

Didn't work.

Right.

And that's the hard realities of space sometimes is these things don't always work.

They don't always work the way you want to.

And again, that's when it comes back to like

how resilient are you as a leader of a company and how resilient is your company to pick up the pieces, say, cool, we made some mistakes.

We fucked it up.

Let's go fix it.

So what happened there?

Just...

you lost connection?

Well, no, what happened there is when we departed Falcon, so, you know, we fly on a Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket.

We're shot towards the moon on a trajectory called translunar injection.

It's the same trajectory the Apollo astronauts flew on.

And we depart from the rocket and one of our solar panels did not open.

And we don't actually know why.

I have a couple theories of why, right, as to why that could have happened.

It's not really important, though.

Spacecraft didn't become power positive.

And so what that means is we're constantly slowly draining our batteries with only one panel open, right?

And there was no way to save the spacecraft.

We knew that thing was essentially broken pretty quickly into the mission.

But you still see what you can do, how you can communicate with it.

We were able to do one thing, which is update our navigation.

Like I mentioned, when you have a 100-meter dish and you have a 0.1-degree beam width, you have to know where you are in space.

You have to know it pretty accurately.

And we were one of the first commercial companies to ever do that for a deep space trajectory, right?

Something going out past the moon to confirm that we could locate and navigate to our spacecraft and communicate with it.

And that was some of the big successes of Odin.

Big failure wasn't didn't make it all the way to asteroid.

It was supposed to do do a flyby mission.

Didn't happen.

Interesting.

So is it one satellite that

it's not triangulating?

No, it's one satellite.

Nope.

Nope.

One satellite that goes out.

I'm sorry, dish, not satellite.

Yeah, sorry.

So, well, we did send one satellite, but also one dish on the ground, right?

And we use two different techniques.

We use

what's essentially called range and range rate, very similar to GPS, very similar in the same way, except we don't have, you know, GPS requires four satellites to get a complete signal with time.

We use one, and so we we determine how far away we are and what velocity we're going.

And then we have to propagate that through our filters to say where we should be, where we are, use it as an update.

We know we're on a trajectory.

Keep in mind, the spacecraft and Earth are moving in different relativistic trajectories from each other, right, at the time.

So while we're not triangulating with multiple dishes, what we are doing instead is waiting for Earth to move.

and then getting an update, just like you would in a synthetic aperture radar.

It's the same idea for how we do spacecraft communication, right?

The Earth is moving away from the vehicle, so we get multiple data points of where it is, and

we can correlate its trajectory out into space.

So what happens when

there's got to be about, what, 12 hours where there's no connectivity, we're correct.

So the Earth does get in our way.

That's why we use multiple dishes, which, oh my God, for our last mission, we had like Disaster Central with multiple dishes.

It was a fun exercise in learning this.

One thing that's a little bit different than us, Sean, than a lot of space companies right now, well, than all of them is we're going to deep space.

And so what this is, is I'm assuming the same shit Elon went through with Falcon 1.

You're dealing with antiquated infrastructure.

So our big dish, the 32-meter dish we used, was owned by ISRO, which is the Indian space agency.

And we had to license it through a provider and then talk with them.

We had a dish in the Azores that was owned by a totally different company that we had to independently contract with with a different receiver stack and a different dish.

And that dish actually caught on fire two days before launch, so we couldn't use it.

We had one in the US that we could only use to receive but not to transmit with the spacecraft.

We had one in Australia where we had a configuration issue with it early on, but it was too small.

It would only work for the first day.

Like it was just such a disparate thing trying to work across all these different independent organizations to figure out how to talk with the spacecraft.

So one of the biggest challenges we have is how do we get access to these large dishes?

And one of the changes we made on Vestri is we actually added more gain on the spacecraft so that the dishes on the ground could be smaller so we could have access to more of them.

And it's this kind of like never-ending cycle.

To give you a sense here,

most spacecraft you hear about like Starlink or anything in low Earth orbit, right?

It's about a million times more power needed to communicate at the same data rate you would with Starlink to something that's at the moon.

And we want to go 30 times farther than the moon.

So like the dish size has to just be so much bigger than a little tiny dish that you can communicate with Starlink.

Well, you can have something in your backpack that communicates with it, right?

Or when we launch rockets, we usually use two to three meter little dishes that sits on top of your roof.

Like those are easy, you know, a couple costs 50 grand to go put up on your roof.

Just doesn't work for us.

It's one of the biggest challenges we got.

Are there any, I'm just curious, are there any national security concerns with using

space agency in India or

any other country?

So we don't fall under, well, we fall under some regulation.

I shouldn't say any regulation right now, but realistically, no, I don't think we have formed a national security opinion about deep space.

I don't think it's hotly contested right now.

And the thing about it is when you talk about, you know, there's been a lot of talk of Golden Dome and some of these like Chinese satellites moving in space.

And now we look at that, it's all in low Earth orbit.

It's pretty close to us.

It's a pretty confined, you know, volume that we're worried about.

A lot of our really expensive satellites and really good national security assets are in MEO or GEO, medium Earth orbit or geosynchronous orbit, like GPS.

We want to protect those assets.

And I think that's why the government cares a lot about those areas of space.

The nice thing is once you get past the moon, like

it expands and there's nobody out there, like even if you could go try to shoot me down, the orbits are really hard.

There's a lot of energy needed to catch up with it.

It's almost impossible to actually access our spacecraft once it's past the moon by any other spacecraft unless it knows our trajectory before the launch.

Okay.

Okay.

Wow.

The expanses here are crazy.

And when you really start to like put it on a map, you realize, I mean,

it almost doesn't resonate in your brain, right?

Like something in low Earth orbit is 400 miles above us.

You can see that with a telescope on the ground.

We can study these, the space station.

We all kind of have a sense of like what that picture looks like going down.

There's the famous picture of Voyager looking back on Earth, that pale blue dot picture you may have seen, which is like Earth is this little tiny speck.

That's where we are, right?

Like that's the area we want to go operate in.

It's a very different regime than what we have on Earth or in low Earth.

Who else is doing this?

Anybody?

I mean, there's other companies going after this for sure.

We have a couple of U.S.

companies that are going after it but i think our biggest competitor is in china really what's china how far along are they

i wish china would publish more like i probably publish too much we're very i'm very transparent about the company like i don't hide anything we we we fuck up i write about it right we do good i write about it i think that's really important is that whether it's us or somebody else like humanity has to see this happen to to again maintain our way of life like growth rates are exponential space mining has to happen at some point i'm hopeful the timing is right now i could be wrong China doesn't take that same approach.

They don't write about it.

There's very little information that comes out.

We've had some movie shit happen to us, Sean.

We had some Chinese tourists show up at the door one time.

We've had a lot of requests to go to Hong Kong.

It's very interesting to see how China will try to work with you to see what information you have that can benefit some of their state-backed companies.

This is pretty clear.

I'm sure everybody gets this to some extent.

It's been comical.

I'm I'm like, guys, could you maybe try a little harder and mix this up a little differently as you go through it?

But China's definitely very interested in what we're doing, and I think very interested in trying to beat us at it.

Interesting.

I mean,

how do you navigate through that?

Be better.

Espionage.

That's it.

Like, I think the best way to beat anybody is just be better.

There's nothing else.

We could try to hide everything.

We can try to keep our system super secure and spend all this money to kind of gatekeep everything and not tell anybody what we're doing.

Or we could just go faster.

And I think

people have really seen that speed matters a lot.

And this is the thing I preach all the time.

It's like speed matters.

If you think you can do something tonight, do it.

Don't wait till tomorrow, right?

And that's how we beat anybody.

And if we can be there first and we can do it first, there's a lot of things that allow us to continuously do that at a high rate.

Keep in mind, Sean, I just got to get to one of these asteroids.

I make it to one.

I can mine it multiple times.

There's one asteroid we're looking at right now.

It's about 400 meters in diameter.

I really love it.

It's got like all the right spectral data.

It's like this perfect asteroid that we think we can get to.

I could mine it one e to the 15 times before it runs out of ore.

Like that's essentially infinity times, right?

I'm not even going to really do the math.

That's a shitload of times.

So I just got to find one and I just got to do it continuously.

Once I have that, I can protect that asset pretty easily both through UN law and

with our military, right?

Like we know how to defend ourselves in every adversarial situation

wow how far i mean

how how far out is that asteroid

so

it's a really hard question to answer because it's rotating around the sun i mean sorry it's orbiting around the sun so at different times it's different distances from us there's times this asteroid has come within a million miles of the earth There's times or like right now where there's an asteroid is somewhere in the range of about 50 million miles away racing towards us right and so when you have have it going around the sun, there'll be a little bit of plane.

For the most part, we're pretty in lockstep, but they'll be out of phase a little bit and they'll rotate at different speeds.

How many asteroids are there?

I mean, is this a belt or is this just a random asteroid?

I don't know much about this.

Yeah, it's something.

So, what we are going after is a specific type of asteroid called a near-Earth asteroid.

These are newly discovered.

In 2000, I think we had discovered about seven of them.

There's estimated now to be, we think scientifically it's 10 million of them.

It's a good round number number to think there is.

Now, this ranges in particle size, you know, from down to like really, really small, up to about a kilometer and a half in diameter.

One really important thing happened recently, though.

The Rubin telescope came online, Rubin Observatory, and in its first viewing, you know, found 4,000 bodies.

Now, about half of them were new.

That's a huge discovery and a huge amount of time.

And it really correlates to that paper saying we think there's about 10 million of these near-Earth asteroids.

What near-Earth asteroids do for us is just allow our trip times to be much shorter.

If I have to go 10 million miles away from the Earth, that's a lot faster than going out to the belt, right?

The asteroid belt, which is 300 million miles away from the Earth, give or take,

takes a lot longer.

You know, I mean, those missions would be 14, 15 year missions to go out and mine a main belt asteroid and come back.

How long does it take you to get a million miles away?

We want to do all our missions in less than two years.

It's what allows us to keep the spacecraft cheap, small, higher risk.

Like, radiation is a bitch in space.

You just get blasted by the sun.

And things like solar flares happen,

We just wave by to our spacecraft as it gets destroyed.

So limiting the amount of time you're actually in that environment is pretty key to having a much more higher reliability spacecraft.

So it would take two years.

And your next launch is when?

The max we look at is two years.

Some of these missions take much less.

But again.

Because we are not dedicated launch, like every interplanetary mission has been dedicated launch.

This means they're on a rocket.

They control exactly when that rocket takes off.

And if they want to go to Jupiter, like you point the rocket at Jupiter and go to Jupiter.

we don't get that option we're going on a rideshare to the moon when the people that want to land on the moon decide to hit go and so for us we have to be really open to what asteroid we go to on any given time we track about 20 asteroids for every single day for the next six years that we think are viable targets that we can get out to that's how we kind of think about this so there isn't one specific asteroid at any given time we're going to go to there's some of my favorites but they may or may not be in the launch window when we actually when we actually take off on the earth gotcha gotcha and then as far as i mean are the are these asteroids these near-earth asteroids are they sorry i have no concept of distance in space so

when you're saying they're orbiting around the sun are they closer to the sun than earth or are they farther they are almost the exact same distance as the earth from the sun now i say almost the exact same because you know we talk about this in astronomical units for distance from the earth to the sun which is about 150 million miles sure i got that off a little bit um

we operate within plus or minus 0.1 AU.

So we operate within plus or minus 15 million miles from Earth.

So when you say that, if you were to look at the picture of the universe, they're going to look like they're like in the same orbit as Earth.

They're almost indistinguishable from Earth orbit, most of the ones we're looking at.

They are slightly off, and that allows them to be at

a little bit different orbital speeds and thus go in and out of accessibility for us.

Wow.

Let's take a quick break.

When we come back, I want to talk about how you're actually going to mine the asteroid.

Let's do it

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All right, Matt, we're back from the break.

We're getting ready to dive into

how are you actually going to extract metals from the asteroids?

This is a fun one to talk about, right?

So the trick of an asteroid is when I get there, and let's

use a random number that's pretty simple for everybody to understand.

Understanding, this is like not what we're going to run into.

But let's say the asteroid is 1% platinum group metals.

That means it's 99% shit that's not worth a lot of money.

And so if I bring it back to Earth, that's just wasted material.

So what I have to develop and what we have developed is essentially a machine that can turn 1% platinum group metals into a much higher percentage of platinum group metals.

So what I'm returning is worth a lot.

You may have seen, actually, there was a pretty famous article that came out, I think about three years ago right now, and it said there's a hundred quadrillion million, whatever bajillion dollar asteroid out there in the world.

It was referring to that asteroid Psyche 16 that I talk about, saying it.

And the fallacy with that article is it was just calculating the iron content on

Psyche.

Like you could put that same number on top of Mars.

It actually doesn't mean anything.

It's not economical to bring back.

I'm not trying to mine iron.

Like iron is essentially free on the planet, right?

The cost of iron is actually just the processing cost of it.

There's plenty of ore everywhere.

There's plenty of nickel everywhere.

The thing we want to bring back is platinum.

So the way we do it is, first off,

we have to land on an asteroid.

Now, the trick to landing on an asteroid for us is these are primarily iron, right?

M-type asteroids are iron-nickel asteroids, which means they should be magnetic.

So the way we land on it is, or I should say more dock with it.

I mean, try to imagine this.

Sean is

at the biggest size, these are 400 meters in diameter, which in relative terms means they're tiny as shit in space.

Like, there's really no gravity here.

You're not landing.

We can't even really go into orbit around these asteroids.

We almost dock with them like you would dock with the International Space Station, and we use magnets to stick to them.

That's how we attach ourselves to the asteroids.

I have, there's been a, there's an ESA mission that did a really complicated way to try to grapple onto an asteroid with these hooks, and it was pretty cool.

And they spent a lot of money, I think about a billion dollars trying to figure it out, and it kind of worked.

I mean, they were able to do it, but it was a little bit fraught with air.

I don't think, as a startup, I have any other way to land on an asteroid other than to magnetically attach to it.

Landing on a piece of dirt or a rubble pile in space that is really small like this is next to impossible, or I'm just not smart smart enough to figure it out for the for the for the capital we have

so we land on it and then we'll how close do you have to get to it to for the magnets to

pretty close I mean we have to touch the surface right we got to touch it so we'll essentially crash into it at about one meter a second that's the upper limit of velocity we'll have when we intercept the asteroid so if you think about it that's that's not slow especially when you think about space hardware and how slow we usually go on space stuff but it's not fast it's a pretty low impact that we hit the asteroid asteroid with to attach to it that's what we build the system for

and then what we do is we use a laser system so we use a laser system to essentially start drilling into the asteroid we remove the material so we're removing iron nickel and platinum group metals and then using that same philosophy that iron is magnetic and the platinum group metals are not we essentially use magnets to reject the iron and we keep the platinum group metals inside the spacecraft.

It's a pretty simple approach to do it.

Now keep in mind, I'm 10 million miles away and I'm a startup.

If I start coming out here with we got robot arms and we got conveyor belts and like it's just not going to happen.

I mean, if you look at any spacecraft, they're hard enough to fly when shit isn't moving.

And then when you start to add mechatronics to it, like they're next to impossible, right?

I mean, look at the arm that we developed that not we actually Canada did, MBA on the on the space shuttle.

Like that was a huge undertaking to get two actuators to work correctly.

Like it's really hard to do that in space.

So we just can't do it.

I don't want to have the team.

Keeping it simple is part of one of the, it's one of the biggest philosophies we have at the company.

And so we'll store that.

And then we just essentially launch a spacecraft back at Earth.

There's nothing special here.

We crash into the atmosphere, use a heat shield to burn off kinetic energy and recover the material.

In fact,

the really cool thing about a spacecraft that's just mining and doesn't do any scientific exploration is...

I don't have to have all these weird constraints.

It doesn't have to land nicely, right?

It doesn't have to have nice parachutes that come out to slow you down really slow so I don't like hurt my precious cargo.

In fact, I don't think we're going to use parachutes.

What we're probably going to use is if, you remember when you were a kid and you would launch little model rockets and then have streamers?

Probably just going to use a streamer to slow it down enough so that when it impacts the ground, the metal is recoverable.

And like being able to remove those constraints of scientific instrumentation and value collection from it really opens up the envelope here.

Wow.

One thing that's a little bit crazy that I don't think a lot of people realize, you may not as well, is we've already mined asteroids before.

We have?

Like the Japanese, JAXA, has done this twice and NASA has done it once.

So the Japanese did it with a mission called Hayabusa 1 and Hayabusa 2.

They both went out to asteroids, took samples from them and brought it back to Earth.

And Osiris-Rex went out to an asteroid called Bennu, which is how we really found out about these rubble piles, right?

Bennu was a really cool asteroid.

I think it was about a kilometer and a half in size.

And it was just a whole bunch of essentially little particles stuck together with static electricity.

And so if you ever watched the landing of Osiris-Rex or landing, I call it landing because they didn't really land.

land.

They just like sunk into the surface.

And then this is where NASA does extremely good job, and I don't think anybody else can do it to this level.

They thought it was fucking solid.

They go to land and they start sinking into the surface, but they had thought through this and had a theory that maybe it wasn't solid.

What could we do?

And we're actually able to like not just destroy the spacecraft by going into some random dirt.

They backed up, they re-went around it, they re-rethought about it and were able to still grab a sample and complete the mission.

Cyrus-Rex returned a sample about a year ago now that came back in a small capsule to be recovered.

I think

we recently opened it up.

It was really difficult for us to open for some reason.

But so we understand the physics to all this.

There isn't some like physics barrier we have to get past to mine an asteroid.

This is simply, can we do it cheaper and economically to make it work?

No kidding.

Wow.

So

how does the

satellite actually get the metals inside of it?

I mean, I get the magnetism pushing the iron and all that other shit away would it does it have like an arm that comes out to no fact the metal and the way we do it with ring magnets is the the platinum group metals flow up through the middle of the spacecraft and essentially are trapped in a very small mylar bag this isn't a lot of volume to bring back right if you think about it platinum group metals are some of the most densest elements on earth it's a third of a meter cubed

It's not a big amount of material.

Did you say it's a thousand kg?

A thousand kg is a third of of a meter cubed of pgms it's not a it's not a lot of volume

it's pretty small's really dense that's why it's worth a lot of money right it's like it's a very dense element that we're going after these six elements so it kind of works out perfectly to be the first one we bring back and then obviously sean as we look at like platinum is where we're starting as prices change as we're able to lower spacecraft as we start thinking about things like hey we launch one at a time right now what if we bought an entire falcon 9 we could fit about 20 spacecraft on it what if we bought an entire starship we We could fit, I don't know how many, but I'm sure it's a shitload of spacecraft on it, right?

And like, as these technologies advance and we get lower cost into space, we can do a lot more for cheaper.

And then other metals start to meet that price threshold, right?

You have indium, you have indium.

Indium is an element that's in pretty high concentration on these metal asteroids.

We have quite a few of the rare elements on these metal asteroids.

You can look at nickel, you can look at iron, you can look at cobalt, right?

You can look at these different elements and see when do they hit the price threshold where it makes sense to actually bring them back.

Obviously, if our economy keeps expanding at that 3% per year as world GDP, like, as I mentioned, we're going to have to push out.

We're going to use everything here.

And those prices will continue to fall and this will continue to be more economically viable as we go into the future.

What do we use indium for?

I have no idea.

Literally have no idea what we use indium for.

I study it from an economic value proposition, not from a scientific one.

Any gold, silver?

So gold is, this is, gold is in higher concentrations on asteroids than it is in your backyard they're not high enough for me to mine gold on earth forms because of water this is i should say high concentrations of gold form gold doesn't form high concentrations of gold deposits form in the presence of water this is why you see it in veins and this is why when you think of gold mining you think of like panning for gold on a river because that's where all the shit is um it's not really economically viable we even have to remove too much material from the asteroid to get enough gold to make the return trip back right now gotcha Gotcha.

I mean, how

many

satellites do you think eventually you'll have up there?

The best way that I think.

So

this is a question that has a little bit bigger meaning, which is

kind of funny to me about, I think, a lot of founders is I don't spend a lot of time thinking about like this grand future of how many satellites I'm going to send up or what this is going to look like.

I pretty much spend every waking moment making sure we're not fucking up the next mission and the mission after that.

And that's about it, Sean.

But there's a really easy abstraction here, which is we can fit about 20 of our spacecraft and that 200 kilogram size point on a Falcon 9 and go to the moon, right, and do one of these TLI launches.

And so I do see us in the near future, probably in the early 2030s, trying to launch 20 at a time.

And if we do that, we can launch probably once a quarter.

with the volume we see to manufacture on the satellite buses.

So we'll be somewhere in the range of about 100 per year that we would launch.

That would probably be the max we do for the platinum group metals.

Because after that, when you're at that throughput, then you start to affect the elasticity of the metal, right?

And that's when we start talking about the supply and demand curves getting out of whack.

So I'm kind of upper-limited to about 100 platinum group metal spacecraft per year.

Okay.

Just about $6 billion.

Still pretty, I think, pretty good return on investment, right?

Sounds pretty good to me.

But I mean, so

if you're targeting asteroids that take two years or less to get to so you're looking at about roughly four years

correct no no two years or less round trip round trip two years or less round trip all the asteroids we keep on the board nine months or less to get to three months to mine them and a year to come back it's always a little bit longer to come back because we're heavier and we leave slowly um so yeah two years round trip is what we look at that's what we cap it at why do you why do you think it takes why three months why does it take three months that is what so anytime you're you're going to build a system like this, I got to give the team constraints, right?

I got to say, like, it's really easy.

When we're talking about a laser-based mining system, it's a linear trade between time and power.

So when I say we have three kilowatts on the spacecraft and we have three months, you now know how much material you have to remove.

It's really easy to say, oh, we have three kilowatts, we have three kilowatts.

Well, I could use known techniques that work really well and just sit there for 10 years.

But then I got to build a spacecraft that can last in space for 10 plus years.

That's actually really hard to do.

So I've given the team the constraint of three kilowatts, three months.

It's a pretty arbitrary constraint, Sean.

Not going to say like there's a whole bunch of science that goes into it.

What there is science that goes into is the two years are less.

And that has to do with radiation tolerance of the spacecraft, right?

The electronics on board can only handle so much radiation before they will start to fail at high rates.

And that high-rate failure in our spacecraft will start to happen around the three-year mark with what we use today.

So I want to make sure in two years we're back on Earth and safe, and then all the components can fail once we're back on the ground.

Right on.

Will you be able to reuse these or rebuild them?

Absolutely not.

I know.

We have no plans to reuse them.

Okay.

I mean, we're going to fucking crash land them, right?

Like keeping them light, keeping them cheap is pretty important to us at this point in time.

And the economic use case for satellites at that scale that can be reusable is extremely difficult to make work, I think, if not impossible.

I think when you start looking at Starship level reusability and these kind of massive structures, sure, you can talk about massive reusability when you're putting a lot of capex into one of these projects.

The reality is, man, I'm not Elon Musk.

I don't have, you know, $50 billion behind me.

I can just dump into one of these.

I have to think really economical at the beginning.

And like, part of this is having the economic constraint as well.

If we had unlimited money, we know how to mine an asteroid.

It's called Osiris Rex.

It costs $1.2 billion.

You know, it's really easy to iterate to that works.

That's a solution.

It's not an economical business, though.

We have to think cheap.

We have to think light.

And we have to make those trades all the time of like cost is in every trade study we do.

and it's not a common thing for engineers to see most engineers are like oh you know what what's what's the feature what's the requirement how much do i get out of this but like cost is a big part of what we look at on every spacecraft build we do

who

who all is interested in in what you're doing

i think there's a well I'll put in three categories.

Who's going to benefit?

I mean, who will you sell the metal to?

That kind of stuff.

Yeah.

So the metal, we're going after a commodity.

So the nice part is, it's like, we have about $8 billion in off-take agreements right now.

And they're kind of comical because it says like, if you bring me $8 billion in platinum, I will buy it from you.

Like, it's really easy to sell this into the commodity market that will then be used.

So who's going to benefit from it?

Tesla, Boeing,

NVIDIA, like every company that now has access to a U.S.

source base of platinum group metals.

I should make one thing really clear.

We have one platinum group metal mine in the United States.

It's in Montana.

It's called Sabane Stiltwater, and it's recently been shut down.

So as of today, none of the platinum we have comes from the U.S.

Now, some of it is recycled here, but none of the new input comes from the U.S.

We talk a lot about the rare earth elements, and you probably see this in the news all the time, like Trump's signing all these executive orders, and MAP Material has got this huge investment.

The rare earth metals are a fraction of the market cap of the platinum group metals.

And we have a lot of rare earth metal ore in the United States.

The processing of the rare earth metals is very difficult.

We don't have a lot of platinum group metals in the United States.

As we expand, platinum group metals, if we continuously use it the way we use it in the United States, we'll run out of it by 2035.

Now, the reality is the globalization on the world, that's not how it works.

And we come up with these deals.

And, you know, half of this is like us posturing to other countries.

And we've even seen this with rare earth, right?

So I mean, if you follow the news, it's like every other day China is giving us rare earths or they're not, and I can't really keep track, and we keep negotiating back and forth.

It's like, this is how economies work, and this is actually a really beneficial way for economies to work.

The next wave of this will be in platinum group battles.

It's probably one of the most dangerous things that I foresee that we're coming up against because it's one of the critical building blocks to what we do.

And the United States doesn't have any.

So if you do this, I mean, how many other platinum mines are there in the world?

Is there a ton of them?

Or is there not very many?

There's a whole plethora of them in South Africa.

There's quite a bit in russia china has a couple i don't know the exact number though but i there's quite a few of them well so if you're successful in this

will u.s become the leader in platinum u.s will become dominant platinum in fact i'm going to say this differently

three percent of global carbon emissions are caused by platinum group metal mining alone because it's so deep right because it's so deep it's so hard to access it requires so much to get it out

what if i told you a story of the future where we provide it from space at a fraction of the carbon cost to the point where platinum group metal mining on the planet becomes banned?

That's what I think the future holds for mining, especially on these critical elements.

It's like as soon as we can show that there's an economically feasible, reliable way to secure minerals from space, Earth-based mining becomes regulated out of existence.

And so what Astroforge can become one day is one of the first regulated monopolies, right?

We can dominate the mineral supply chain and also have have laws in place where nobody else can dominate it.

That's how I become the alien emperor.

I mean, speaking of red tape and

what kind of red tape are you dealing with?

Is the government involved?

So

thank God

there was a company called Planetary Resources because with Ted Cruz, they teamed up to pass the 2015 Commercial Space Act Agreement.

I actually don't think that's what it's called.

So space agreement, something like this, whatever.

2015, some space shit was passed.

And what that says clear as day is commercial companies in the United States can mine asteroids and sell the materials for money.

Clear as day.

So from a regulatory perspective, we don't have a concern in the United States.

Now,

we do have the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that the UN made.

And it has some lines about anything that's done in space must benefit all of humanity.

So one of the common questions I get asked whenever I talk to any reporter that lives in Europe is how I'm going to share the wealth with the whole world.

And I'll say on your podcast, my honest answer is, I'm fucking not.

Love it.

I mean, like, I don't understand this logic.

So, you know, it's this kind of,

man, it's a trap that

we love to fall into is this like, oh, if you're successful, you want to benefit.

But if you're not successful, we're not willing to take the risk.

And so what I'll say is like, hey, France, if you want to invest in Astroforge now, you can benefit from it.

But you don't get to say at the end of the day, once we're we're successful, that, oh, we knew all along and now you need to share the wealth.

Absolutely not.

I do not think that is the best way for advancement of humans.

Incentive alignment is a big deal in everything you do, right?

And if you're not going to align incentives, then I'm not interested in talking to you.

And like, I think the world needs to take a look at this.

You know, over the last 50 years, capitalism has greatly improved the standard of living to it's thinking about this on the on the plane flight over here, Sean.

Even though I'm in a plane and I'm at, you know, 40,000 feet or whatever in this little tiny seat like this, like my standard of living is still probably higher than like a king in the 1600s.

Not from a volume perspective, but like I could have hot water.

I could have cold water.

I can use the bathroom and like it flushes and they're not some dude at the bottom like scrubbing it.

We have toilet paper.

Like we have advanced so much as a human species and it's exponentially increasing.

And that's because of the way we govern ourselves and we've progressed into the future.

Capitalism is the dominant force behind that.

And I want to see that continue into the future.

I mean, as far as spreading the wealth, I mean, it's going to happen, right?

If you sell,

if NVIDIA

picks a bunch of platinum, then that's up anymore, computer chips.

So there you go.

Let's think about leveling up humanity, not leveling up individuals, right?

And I think as soon as you look at this from a greed perspective, like, you know, France or another, I'm blaming this all on France.

I don't even know why.

But another country coming in and saying, like, we want our fair share, like, it's not how it it works, but let me hope that I can help level up the entire world so our standard of living is even higher than it is today.

Like, that's the goal.

Is the administration excited about this?

I mean, do you have any talks within government?

No, you know, we haven't.

So I've had a very different approach to government than a lot of people that I think you see in space.

Space has always started with, and you'll hear this all the time, you want to have a space company, like you start with the government, and then you go pretend you have a commercial use case.

And

we've invented some cool words that have even got into the regulatory bodies called like dual-use technologies, right?

I have a very different view on this, which is I don't really believe any of it.

You know what's a great dual-use technology?

Like a Mac laptop.

It's really the only thing I think the government buys and commercial customers buy.

But, you know,

About a year ago, I talked to a cruise missile company and they told me they were dual use.

The fuck is your commercial use?

What?

can I buy a cruise missile?

Like, I mean, that'd be pretty legit, right?

But I don't think this makes any sense.

And I think a lot of in space, we get trapped in this thing of like,

we build geo satellites for the U.S.

government, but we're dual use because a commercial company is going to want them.

I find that hard to believe and hard to see.

And you'll see a couple examples here, but it's pretty rare that commercial actually takes a bite at these at any kind of level that makes a commercial viable use case.

I wanted Astroforce to be a commercial space company.

And so we did not start off with the government.

We started off with the mining industry.

What do I do with this material?

Who can I bring it to?

How can I underwrite this company differently, right?

Can I get investors to believe in the mission of trying to upend all Earth mining?

That being said, at this point, we have now gone the other way with dual use, which is said, cool.

Now that we are developing a low-cost, really cheap spacecraft that can access the cosmos, can we start to work with the government on it?

as a way where this is viable.

I'm not interested in things that are not directly applicable to what we're doing in our space mission.

If you want to go send a satellite bus to low Earth orbit, there's a lot of companies doing that.

Please go talk to them.

Don't fucking talk to me.

I'm not interested, right?

I guess the honest truth, because that kills the dream of the company.

It kills the dream of what we're doing.

And I'm also just not interested in low Earth orbit.

Like I said, the space shuttle kind of like ruined my childhood.

I don't want to continuously ruin my childhood because there's a great economic use case in low Earth orbit potentially.

It's not important.

What's important is we have a mission to go mine, go mine the cosmos.

And if we can help the government along that way, I'm all for it.

And so those are the conversations we've started to have, especially around the moon, around

this keyword of like space domain awareness around lunar.

And as we go out further, and also

we have probably one of the most advanced detection algorithms for how we see things in space.

Because keep in mind, we got to find these asteroids on our spacecraft.

Like we know in the general realm of where they are, but usually we're off by plus or minus two to three thousand kilometers.

So we have to be able to find it in these boxes.

Those detection algorithms work really well for other things, you can imagine.

And so those are the type of areas we started to branch off into with the government.

Do you think, I mean, you know, and I don't know how real this is.

I don't really believe much I see on any news outlets, but you know, you always, you always see these things pop up every once in a while that's, oh, this asteroid is going to be, you know, X amount of miles when it passes the Earth.

It's the closest encounter we've had.

This one's going to hit the Earth in,

I don't know, 75 years.

Do you think that your company could be used to, I mean, where I'm going is I saw the movie Armageddon a long time ago.

Do you think you could be used for something like that to

I'm going to save the world, Sean?

That's the goal.

This is a detailed question, but in essence, yes, 100%.

I mean, one of the things we're talking with the government about is exactly this, planetary defense.

You are talking to the government.

Of course.

Like I said, I said we just went the other way, right?

We started with commercial, and then we'll shift it over to use cases in the government.

We didn't go from government to commercial.

I don't think that approach leads to a commercially sound company.

It may lead to a Boeing, right, or a Raytheon, which, by the way, I shouldn't say that's a bad thing.

You can make a lot of money off that.

It's just not in my interest lane.

Planetary defense is a big deal, for sure.

And planetary defense is all about early detection and how we get there.

And so it needs to have multiple things.

It needs to have ground-based assets that can help detect these like Ruben.

You know, we can find thousands of asteroids and determine if any of them are going to detect us.

And then we need to be able to access them quickly.

And I think this is where we come in.

A lot of people, a lot of companies that go build deep spacecraft like Maxar, which will contract through JPL to build big buses, will take five to 10 years to build a spacecraft, right?

Because they start off very differently.

It's a very different thought process.

They also require dedicated launch.

We require neither of those, right?

We can build them very quickly, and we don't require dedicated launch.

We're almost perfect for this mission as we go out there.

The other thing is, you got to do something with the asteroid when you get there.

What did I talk about in a refinery?

We essentially reject a large amount of material.

Well, when you reject that, even though it's very small, when you shoot an iron atom off an asteroid, it imparts a force into the asteroid to push it one direction.

And so if we can continue to remove material and throw it out, you can start to steer asteroids.

Now,

I want to be clear.

You can't steer them very much.

And this is why it matters how early we detect it.

If we detect an asteroid that's pointed right at Earth and it's three months away, start having parties.

Like, we ain't going to do shit.

But if we detect it 10 years in advance and we can, you know, put very, very small changes in it, we can hopefully steer it away from the Earth enough to minimize the impact.

In a lot of cases, you're talking about impact minimization, not necessarily going to completely get it away from the planet.

There's an asteroid called Apothis that's getting more and more pressed in the news.

It's coming by in 2029.

And we believe will break up when it comes by the Earth.

And depending on how it breaks up, there may be some re-impact in, I think, 2034.

Not to scare anybody.

These will be relatively small-size impacts.

We're really good at predicting them.

We can evacuate cities if they're going to hit them.

They'll probably land in the oceans, though, just on statistics.

And

those kind of missions are what we're kind of set out and purpose-built for.

How long did it take for those discussions to start?

With planetary defense?

Who brought it up?

Was it you?

No, actually, planetary defense was brought to us by NASA to ask if we could help with these kind of missions since we've gone out there.

So it's not something that we bring up a lot.

Again, I got to keep the Sean.

The problem that is with government work is you become a government company.

And if you ever have worked at Boeing or anybody that contracts with the government, which I have, not with Boeing, but with a government contractor, it's a very different methodology.

You have time cards.

You're keeping track of your hourly rates.

You're trying to manage all this.

And what it becomes is marginal dollars for a service.

You're a consulting service, right?

Now you're just consulting for what the government wants.

That is not the company I want to build.

I do not think that is the most efficient company you can build.

I want highly motivated people that are willing to go explore the universe and work really fucking hard seven days a week.

And that doesn't drive with the culture of a Boeing.

Not saying those people don't work hard, but they work hard for a dollar amount that is calculated as an hourly rate that is charged to a charge number on a contract.

The incentives, again, are just misaligned.

And that's where we get different here.

So for us, if we can go work with NASA in a way where we can have aligned incentives with them, amazing.

If we go with private institutions or even the government in a way where incentives are aligned, I'm all for it.

If I need to become Boeing 2.0,

which let's say all of a sudden we get a billion dollar contract tomorrow to become Boeing 2.0, great.

Get a new CEO.

Not interested.

I have zero passion for it.

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You're driven.

You know exactly what you want.

That's

it, right?

Like it's not,

that's the whole point of starting companies I think I mean

again you could look at every single you can go to get your MBA from any university and sit there and do a whole bunch of mouths and be like I found this economic opportunity there's plenty of people that do that and they're very good at it and they can make a lot of money and they're super respected and I know a lot of them and I have nothing bad to say about them I'm just not that person what were you gonna do for NASA work on Europa Clipper on what work on Europa Clipper what is that that is the mission going out to the moon Europa to go do a scientific discovery mission on it right it was a big NASA class A mission, cost $5.5 billion.

I was going to be a piece of that wheel at JPL.

And then, you know, at JPL, like, you get hired, you work on some of these, and

you go on to the next mission, and blah, blah, blah, as you go through.

A lot of people have had really great careers at JPL and get to talk about some really cool stuff.

And JPL has these inspirational pictures of people working on Voyager and people working on, you know, Curiosity and Spirit and Opportunity and these kind of monumental missions that we've done as humans.

A lot of them have come out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

So, again, it's not about cash, it's not even about the job, it's about

you could be a small part of writing history.

I mean, where did you say they're going?

Europe is going, it's going to one of the moons, it's going to Europa.

Which moon is that?

Where's that?

It's a moon of Saturn.

Fact-check me on that.

Is it Saturn or Jupiter?

I mean, that's pretty cool, man, that you got you had the opportunity to do that and

you switched and started this.

It's

cool or stupid.

I don't know.

I think like you kind of I say this all the time you kind of got to be stupid to start a company like all the inst all the kind of math doesn't math you're like hey, hold on.

I can make a lot of money going into I mean look to be honest with Sean I was at a company called bird rides which was the scooter company and we can go into why I went there It's actually not important I wanted to learn how you built if you had no constraints like if you use China instead of saying China's the enemy What if we use China?

How fast could we build?

And I was blown away by how fast you could build if you got rid of all your preconceived notions about what you could do.

That's why i went to bird

when i left bird i left seven plus figures on the table to to go start this company why

probably because i'm stupid but also because it's not what drove me right the money

is is great i don't come from a wealthy family i wasn't rich growing up or anything like that and i just look i think if you can

If you can afford to go to dinner and not have to worry about the bill, you're in a pretty good fucking spot in life.

That's it.

I don't need much more than that.

So like, let's go do what you want to do.

And I asked myself the question of, if I had Elon Musk's level of wealth, if I had $300 billion, what would I do?

I'd go try to explore the fucking universe.

So why don't I just go do that now?

That's all this company is.

I think it's more than that to me.

But,

I mean, because you could have just explored the universe at the JPL lab.

Yeah, but I wouldn't have got to control where I explored or saw or actually saw those missions go faster.

The thing that I had a real problem with at JPL was simply saying,

hold on.

Our missions and spacecraft cost $4.5 million.

Europa clip costs $5.5 billion.

It's a lot of zeros in between those two numbers.

And you don't see that in what's produced.

And I'm not saying what's produced as a NASA Class A mission isn't a really great mission.

Really great people work on it.

What it is, though, also is a jobs program.

And when I talk about the same reason we're not a government contractor, JPL is, right?

That's what they're doing.

They're a contracting agency.

And you see that in the work ethic there.

You see that in the people there.

And you see that in how it's constructed.

There's people that definitely dream about space there.

And there's visionaries at JPL.

But there's also people that are clocking in and clocking out.

And that kind of culture just doesn't

attract me.

It doesn't interest me.

When I want to do do something i want to go all in to the point where it's unhealthy and if i'm not unhealthy about it then like

what's the point i don't live for the weekends right i don't i don't actually even live to retire like i live for this i live for the experience of what i'm going through today to see if to see if you can make it to see if you can have a lasting impact on the future i love that i love that what else excites you in space or do you do you

Is there anything else?

Are you 100%, like, do you dive into anything else?

I mean, look,

like anybody that's around space and you're around this, what else excites me?

I think there is a revolutionary going on in rocketry right now as we look at it.

And whether it's the RDE that I talked about, whether it is a Starship coming online, I think Starship is a fucking hard rocket to build, man.

And I think you're seeing that.

You're seeing that move fast culture really get tested right now with how Elon is building Starship.

And I hope Elon...

I hope Elon goes back to dedicating himself 100% to SpaceX because I think he could really make an impact there on Starship.

I think it needs that back in there.

And then you have vehicles like the rumored New Armstrong, which will be

Blue Origins Starship competitor.

I don't know if it's real or not, but I fucking hope it is.

It's kind of like Aliens.

I hope that these companies are working on bigger rockets, right?

Because it's fucking cool.

I want to see what that revolution enables.

Now, what it's going to enable is two things in my mind.

It's going to enable different business cases.

And so you're probably going to have more Starlink competitors come out.

I don't know what else.

I don't really care because those are all boring.

And I'm sure those people make a lot of money.

Again, all my friends work in those industries and I tell them this.

If you're low Earth orbiting, like, I don't care, it's boring.

I want to see,

like it just is,

it just doesn't excite me, right?

It doesn't like Starlink, really cool technology.

I don't care.

That's the honest truth.

I want to see what we do with the science side.

Like if Starship comes online, we can launch some gigantic fucking ass telescopes.

We can get really far.

We can launch cheaper interplanetary missions.

Can we actually go colonize Mars?

Can we get there?

Can we become multi-planetary?

I don't know.

To be clear, I don't know the answer to any of this.

All I'm saying is, I really like when people go try.

Same thing with Ashford.

I'm not going to sit here and say I'm 100% confident this is going to work and I'm going to pull it off.

I actually don't know.

I think the magic in this is that you still got enough, you know, you still got enough balls to go for it and try.

Do you think that the

when I

this is what I watch at night?

I just fall asleep to space documentaries.

I fall asleep to war documentaries.

So like, you know, say my wife laughs at me all the time.

She's like, dude, you're literally listening to people like die in Vietnam and you just pass out to that.

Like that's how you go to sleep.

I'm like, yeah, it's kind of, you know, like some great stories, right?

Is the universe expanding?

So when we look at...

Again, I'm not a physicist or scientist, so I'm probably going to get shown for this.

But what I'll say is when we look at data from telescopes and we see light shifts on galaxies, they appear appear to be moving away from us and so the logical thing you can draw from that is that the universe again it is a it is a hypothesis based on observation we have in space so we've seen something that happens we've seen a redshift out of these galaxies we think they're moving away from us everything's moving away from us everything is moving away well not everything andromeda is moving towards us right so not everything is moving away from us certain things are moving away from our galaxy and when we look at that we can make the assumption that the universe is expanding and we have no fucking idea why.

We don't know why it's accelerating.

So there's two ways you can look at this.

You can either say, well, probably three, actually.

The universe is expanding.

Our understanding of physics is fundamentally incorrect.

Our understanding of how to take these scientific measurements is incorrect.

I think we understand how to take scientific instruments.

I think you have to say, is our basic thesis for physics correct or are we missing something?

And I think there's a lot of holes in our modern way of physics, but it does a really good job of explaining all the phenomenon that we witness today and we see here.

And it kind of falls apart at the super small and the super large.

And we don't know why.

But it's really, really interesting to go talk to some of these people that are going and trying to solve these problems and the math they do and the way they look at this.

I mean,

You know, Kip Thorne's discovery of gravity waves was essentially just math equations.

And he said like, hmm, I see this in mathematics.

I should be able to see it.

And here's how I think think we would be able to see it and

that's pretty cool man that we can go from that level of understanding of math and and and make observations that then 20 years later we can detect just gravity waves right and and and see these experimental results and so is the universe expanding

we observe it to be expanding is it or is it not

We can get super philosophical here on like, what is expanding?

What is the universe?

What is let's do it?

Like, you know, there's all these things.

I love this stuff.

There's all these variables you can have there.

And if you start to question the fundamentals of every variable,

you can lead to some really interesting

theses.

And so, like I said, there's a thesis called variable light theory that light is not static, that we don't think the speed of light is a constant.

That obviously goes counteractive to all other physics, right?

And probably

wrong.

This Bhaji Bhatt, who is sending up satellites and wants to beam solar energy back into Earth.

He was talking about, I think it was him,

he had mentioned that we've recently frozen light.

I don't know how you freeze light, but that's pretty sick.

But I think that's cool.

But they said that they, was it, I think it was, I think it was him that was talking about it, that had mentioned that we have found a way to freeze light.

So this is where the math becomes super important, because we say we can't travel faster than light.

That's wrong.

We can't travel faster than light in a vacuum.

We travel faster than light in different mediums, right?

And so, like, there's all these different ways to chalk up what we're talking about and how you take your assumptions and make them different.

And this is where the math and the details, details matter.

Details matter a lot.

And we start to talk about these kind of math equations and the way we look at physics.

Like, you got to dive into details.

So, what does freezing light mean?

Did we go really cold?

Did we use a different medium?

Does it mean to just slow down?

You know, how do we look at this?

Like, people love to put Hollywood on top of these physics discoveries.

And the reality is they're not usually that Hollywood.

They're actually usually pretty mundane and boring.

And that's why I think going back to my original point is like,

I really think you should do this, Sean, it's just like, when you're reading one of those, just call the fucking author.

We will.

Call the paper and say like, hey, what does this mean?

Or I was talking about the, you know, call Kip Thorne.

He's at Caltech.

Like, he will pick up the phone.

When I was at NASA-Gaudder, there was a guy named there named John Mathis.

And he discovered the background radiation of the universe.

Won a Nobel Prize for it, right?

The mission in 92, I think it was, that took that famous picture of the background radiation of the universe.

I literally just walked up to his office and was like, can I talk with you?

And he's like, dude, come in.

I'm just working on this.

Like, come in.

What do you want to talk about?

And I'm like, these people, we kind of hold them up as like these fictitious characters

that are different than us.

They're all just people.

They're all just humans.

Yeah, some of them are fucking total oddballs.

But like, what they are not is celebrities.

And I think that's important because that means they're accessible.

And as soon as these things become celebrities celebrities where we're watching documentaries on them, usually those, that math has been convoluted so much to help explain it to us as laymen that you're actually not getting the true story of what's happening.

And in some cases, you'll have the original authors of these papers or these theories come out and say like, it's actually not what I was saying at all.

Like, this doesn't make any sense.

It's not what I meant at all by this.

I mean, a good one, again, the psyche asteroid saying it's worth $100 quadrillion dollars.

Talk to Lindy about it.

She's the PI for the NASA Psyche mission.

She's like,

this is not what I meant.

I didn't mean like, oh yeah,

I was trying to equate for how much is on this, how much material is here in form somebody else could understand.

But that's been taken differently.

And, you know,

that's kind of how this works.

So a couple of questions just from what you were talking about.

One, I want to talk about background radiation in space.

I don't know what that is.

But before that, you mentioned traveling faster than the speed of light in other mediums.

What do you mean by that?

Light travels slower in metal.

Okay, so what does that even mean?

Because because it seems like you put a chunk of metal in front of light and it it doesn't go through the other side it blocks it so what does that mean that it travels slower through metal any kind of fiber whether it's look there's a whole bunch of ways i guess to slow down light whether you talk about fiber optics it's going to go slower and this is because the photons are hitting other atoms and being deflected um

light over what i'm what i'm getting at though is when we talk about these equations though the details matter right when we say light travels at a constant speed we're referring to light in a vacuum.

And so all of these ways we describe this science, again, those variables are the important piece of it.

And if we forget about those other variables, we lead ourselves to believe falsehoods that are not true.

Okay, okay.

Let's talk about background radiation.

Is that what you called it?

That's what it's called.

That's very little about background radiation, right?

So I talked with...

So there was a Nobel Prize award on this.

I think the scientific mission was in the early 90s, and it was a spacecraft that went out and mapped this as the background radiation of the universe.

This was the famous story that was found.

Maybe it's just famous to radio engineers that when I went to school of

it was these guys on a military base and I don't remember exactly what they were doing.

They had this antenna, they had this radio telescope they were looking at things with and they kept seeing noise on the telescope and they thought it was birds nesting in the telescope.

So they kept cleaning it out and cleaning it out and going like, what the fuck?

Why is this thing noisy?

And checked everything.

And what they realized is is their instrument was perfectly fine.

What they were viewing was the background radiation of the universe.

And that apparently, according to physicists, comes from the beginning of the Big Bang.

Like, don't ask me how or why.

I actually have no idea.

But what John did with this imager was be able to image and categorize it.

And so it's, I'm sure you've seen the image before.

Is this the thing that

hear me out?

Is this the thing they're talking about where

it looks like

a brain, how it's all connected?

Is that what you're talking about?

I don't know what you're talking about.

That sounds awesome, but no,

it looks like almost a map of the world, even though it is the universe.

So it's like this oblong kind of ellipse, and in it, you'll see light and dark spots.

There's quieter spots of the universe, there's hotter spots of the universe.

And I should call them colder and hotter because that's how they're measured.

But I don't think we know why or understand why it's not uniform.

This is kind of a big discovery.

But again, there's so many cool things in science that we just, we discover, we go witness, and we actually don't know why

that's what makes us beautiful right

please put a satellite into a black hole please put a satellite into a black hole i want to know what's on the other side i mean if we did we wouldn't know right this black holes are this

and black holes are such a cool concept and it went through this whole thing of like hey if you have infinite gravity and you can draw these math equations that show we should have black holes and then you start to have all these theories things like hockeying radiation and these discs and it wasn't until recently that we were able to image a black hole.

Now we didn't actually image a black hole because no light can escape a black hole, right?

But show the disc and show everything going into it.

And that was a pretty big moment because it, again, it goes through what is probably a hundred years of theory going down into one image to say, holy shit, that theory was true.

That theory that started out with basic principles of math.

and physics and a human sitting there thinking outside the box was able to prove this to be right.

It's not very often that happens in human history, but it's kind of revolutionary when it does.

And there's some lesser famous ones that I actually think are more impressive.

Like what?

I mean, look, talk to anybody about Maxwell's equations, these four fundamental equations of electromagnetism that

are comp, I mean, his paper to do this is like his proof for it is like 300 pages long.

This guy was clearly batshit insane.

Came up with some of the most important theories for how the modern world operates with electronics.

And

I think because he wasn't good good at the Hollywood style, because he wasn't good at articulating what he was doing, and because his proof is so fucking long that only some loser is going to sit there and read it, um,

it makes it so that you don't get the press from it, right?

And like, you've probably never heard of Maxwell's equation.

In fact, when I say Maxwell's, you probably think coffee, right?

This Maxwell house or whatever, like it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't resonate with anybody at the same level because there is, there has always been a side of showmanship to science.

This is why Einstein is so famous.

You know who Einstein is.

Probably because you always call somebody you don't like.

You're like, oh, yeah,

you're an Einstein, right?

Like, you're stupid.

I love how we use his name to be that.

The reason you know about Einstein, though, I think, is because of the nuclear bombs.

I think if it wasn't for that, we may not know him at the same level.

There's probably more important physicists at the time, like Bohr with the atom, right, and other things, all these other physicists at the time that are really not as well known as Einstein because

they didn't have the marketing.

Interesting.

What do you think about the multiverse theory?

Oh, God.

I know so little about this that I'm just going to be totally like, multiverse theory is when you go into multiple dimensions to help describe phenomenon, it resonates from something called string theory.

I don't know shit about it.

And I think that these ideas are what you get when you extrapolate scientific equations.

When you say, yes, if this happens, every possible scenario has to be true.

Thus meaning we must have multiple universes universes for all of those scenarios to be true.

And

it's in pure conflict with other forms of our theories, right?

Like, okay, we, so do we make universes?

Are they created every instance?

Is the universe exponentially expanding?

Like, you can kind of take this any direction you want.

And to be honest with you, I haven't spent enough time here to have a good idea of like,

is this relevant?

Is this not?

I have no fucking idea.

I think it's a cool theory.

I think all these theories can be really interesting theories, but

I love diving into them.

I love that.

It just fascinates me.

Then I fall asleep.

It's a fun thing to talk about, but I think what's important to understand is almost all these theories are based off a very small amount of scientific observations.

And the real way we're going to solve these theories is add more fucking scientific observations.

And we've seen the capital cost and the capital allocation for each scientific observation go up by orders of magnitude.

Look at the particle accelerators.

We have how many particles accelerators in the United States?

I mean, there's tons of it.

You can make a really small particle accelerator in your office.

We made one.

I don't recommend it.

You're talking about the stuff like CERN.

That's what I'm saying.

As you get to CERN, they start to become, oh, these are now billion-dollar projects.

And then we start looking at things bigger than CERN and they're trillion-dollar projects.

And then this law of scale almost applies to everything in the universe.

It's something we try to apply to companies as well.

I want my company to grow at the same growth rate, right?

We want it to be an exponential growth rate.

But the cost of science has also become exponential.

I hope we can change that.

I hope we can actually stop that dead in its tracks and bring it back because I think we've seen the lowering of the accessibility to space.

We've seen the lowering of how we access space.

We've seen the lower thing of everything around the science of space, except for doing the actual science in space.

How do we change that

fundamental theory of it, right?

How do we make that cheaper to go send up these, to get more measurements on the universe expanding, on what the hell is dark matter?

Is there multiversal?

I don't fucking know.

But those scientists and engineers can can send up instruments to go help us understand it.

Well, Matt, we're wrapping up the interview.

So I do have one question.

I've been interviewing a lot of innovators like you

over this year.

And I just want to know, what's your advice to future innovators?

My advice to future innovators?

Don't fucking do it.

And the reason I say that is actually because if you need to listen to my advice,

you already don't believe in yourself.

Don't listen to fucking anybody.

It's really easy, Sean, to sit here

and poke holes in everybody else's companies.

Like I said, it's human sometimes.

It's really, we love to want to know why people are going to fail.

Oh, Elon's going to fail because he does this.

Oh, Jeff's going to fail because he does this.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You know what those guys, you know how much Elon cares about if I think he's going to fail?

Zero.

And that's really fucking important that he doesn't give a shit.

It's really easy to be a pessimist.

I don't build statues of pessimists.

Good point.

Good point.

If you could see three people on the show, who would they be?

Three people on the show, who would they be?

I think you should get

a real scientist in here to answer all your scientific questions because I think they're fucking awesome.

So I try to get Kip Thorne

or

I try to get Lindy.

Elkinstanton from Berkeley, who runs the psyche mission.

I try to get one of them on the show because I think they could be really cool.

They'd They'd probably sit here and be like, who the fuck was that Mac guy you had?

He's an idiot.

Here's how these things really mean, right?

No, but I think getting someone really on here that you could dive into with those at the level of detail that isn't an engineer, that's a physicist, I think would be exceptional because you can go forever and talk about some of these rabbit holes, but get a different take on it, right?

Get a different approach to how these work and what you think about.

I think you should have,

now you're going to be better at selecting this person than me, but I think getting people that have been in really interesting situations in times of high stress are really cool to interview.

So somebody that's been on missions in war, right?

Like I said, I love listening to these podcasts of like the old generation going through and fighting in the jungles of Vietnam or being in Iraq and just being able to explain that there's

probably 50% of them are probably really good about explaining the emotional connection that people have when those high stress time comes because we're all going to experience high stress.

There's a different different level that's raised to when your life is on the line.

And very few people, I think, experience that during their lifetime and live to see the other side of it.

And like those people can really be exceptional storytellers when it comes through.

The last person I think you should have on here is a guy named Victor Vesco.

Who's that?

He's the only Triple Crown explorer in human history.

So he's been to space.

He's been to the bottom of this Marianas Trench.

And he's climbed Mount Everest.

Nice.

And he's, I don't know if I can talk about what he's he's doing next, but it's fucking cool.

And like, I just love these guys who...

Do you know him?

Yeah.

Can you connect me?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Victor's amazing.

He's one of the few guys that you have in history that like he has a lot of money.

He's very, he could do whatever he wants and he chooses to try to push the envelope and continue.

I mean, the way I put it, honestly, is like.

There's very few people that do this, but there's there's a certain subset of people that are always trying new ways to find new ways to kill themselves and I love those guys because they're fucking awesome, right?

Because they're the ones that are living on the edge and exploring.

And that's that's a really cool place to be.

And Victor's one of them.

Right on.

Well, we'll reach out.

And, Matt, I just want to say thank you for coming on the show.

I love, I love what you're doing.

It's fascinating.

And

can't wait to see that thousand kilos of platinum come back.

Me as well.

Thanks for having me out, man.

You're welcome.

Cheers.

Appreciate it.

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