Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - When will space be cheap? (featuring Zach Weinersmith)

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

Daniel and Kelly chat with Zach Weinersmith about rockets and the upside and pitfalls of a potential future space economy. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Not with you, Lord. But with the entire state as an idea, as an ethos. Oh, this is two Virginians against one California. It's not fair. It's not fair. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm pleased to say that particle physics is still cheaper than going to space. Hello, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I study parasites and space. And there are parasites. You just got to pick up some roadkill and you can see some parasites. It is super cheap. Good investment. Good investment. What about the space-based parasite research industry? Shouldn't we go to space to space to explore tapeworms in space?

I think that's a bad faith argument, Daniel. Oh, wow. I don't think there's a lot of money to be made from parasites. in space right now. All right. So you're turning down that grant then? For now, yeah. If you want to pay me to think about what parasites women accidentally bring with us to space,

I'm taking money from just about anyone. All right, there it is. Send your money to Kelly, folks, for space parasites. Is it a science fiction movie? Is it a grant? Who knows? We'll find out. Could be both?

Porque and no los dos? Exactly. And so today on the podcast, we have a special guest to come on and talk to us about talk to us about everything that's happening recently in launching to space industries and trying to boost a space economy, trying to get humans off this planet and live out in the cosmos. Kelly, who is today's guest? He's a real cutie pie, and you're going to get a taste of what it's like to live in the Weenersmith House.

Zach likes to go on long soliloquies, where I interject every once in a while by saying, nope, nope, that's wrong. And so welcome to our life, listeners. You're going to get a little taste of the Weenersmith household. All right, and so today's episode is in response to a question from Kay Gilbert, a listener, who wrote to us asking specifically for an update about what's going on in space. Here's Kay's question. I learned a lot from Dr. Katrina Whiteson.

Now, please invite Zach Weiner-Smith so he and Kelly can give us an update on Soonish. Specifically, the first section on space travel becoming cheaper because that seems to be the most nowish. Since they wrote the book, many more nations are developing active space exploration programs and sending astronauts to the ISS. Commercial space flight is still in the startup phase but shows a lot of potential. And inexpensive kubats have made it possible for almost anyone with an interest to launch a satellite into low Earth orbit. Of course, that just makes usable orbits more crowded, messes with astronomy, and greatly increases the amount of space jobs. I'm especially interested in what Kelly and Zach learned about space economics when writing a city on Mars.

Thanks. All right. I love this question because it means like, wow, this person really read both of your books and thought about it. And now they're coming to you for an accounting of what's going on now. You are forever on the hook on these topics, Kelly. You have to stay current forever. You know, it does actually feel that way. I keep trying to move on to the next book project.

And then I keep getting interview requests from people who are like, oh, what do you think about this news? thing. And I'm like, I don't know, I don't check the news. What new thing? And then I got to check the news. But it's okay because it's fascinating. Kelly's so popular. Boo. Oh, you know, you'd be stressed if you weren't getting your other work done. But I do like getting to talk about space. Well, it's a great book. And so all the attention is very worth it. So let's invite onto the podcast, the other Wiener Smith, who will join our conversation about the future of the space economy. All right, on today's show, we have the second best

Weiner Smith, Zach. He is the cartoonist behind Saturday morning breakfast cereal. He has three-eighths of a physics degree, and he is a wonderful co-author. Welcome to the show, Zach. You forgot two-time Hugo nominee. Oh, and one-time winner. And one-time winner. But really the nomination is the true honor. You also didn't get the Eisner, right? I have twice not gotten the Eisner, actually. I have many times not win the Eisner.

Well, Zack was shortlisted. It's a slightly different. I officially didn't win twice. That's right. It's on the record. Well, three-eighths of a physics degree, I wonder at what point you can round that up to one. Not three-eighths. Or ten.

Or ten. He also has a literature degree. Yes, yes, it's true. Well, since we're going to be talking about physics and space and all sorts of stuff, I think we need to hear more about your credentials. Zach, tell us why you didn't push that over the line to five-eighths of a physics degree. That's a good question. I actually had a like semester where I felt like I had to choose.

My comics career was starting to go well. So I had already gotten a degree in literature and I went back for physics. A well-worn path from literature of physics. This was really weird because usually it's the other way around. My last semester and I got like old bees, which like if it's your second time in college, you know, you're not like an undergraduate who doesn't, doesn't know what they want to do yet, you really should be doing perfect. And it was just that, like, I was now managing a comic career that was getting bigger and bigger.

It seemed like the right path was to just kind of, like, do comics that I can teach myself whatever I want on the side, and then things have gotten ever busier. I mostly self-teach, which is, in theory, faster the university, although I suppose professors are some roller or other. So cartooning has stolen another physicist from us. I know. There's quite a few. Long list.

But you're right about self-teaching. I mean, I tell my grad students to really pay attention in classes because it's the last time somebody's going to spend all their time trying to teach you something. After that, it's basically like you in a textbook. That's how I learned something to do. I think it's the only way to get real depth. You can only get so much from another person. You've got to really sit with it.

All right. Well, then consider this your PhD final exam. If you do well today, we can round you. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I think you can give him a bachelor's, but he doesn't get a PhD. How about a POD since the podcast? I can't lured my POD over him if he has one too. My career fantasy is to get an honorary degree from anywhere just so I can say that didn't seem that hard.

So Daniel, when we had your wife on the show, it was very clear that you two are like supportive team. Zach and I are competing over everything, everything. I believe in a free market. I think the best spouse should win. And she's winning. Wow. Well, we're not here to do Weiner Smith Mergotherapy as fun as that might be.

We're here to talk about space and whether we can access it and whether you guys want to continue to throw a wet blanket over the prospects of space colonization. You've been writing about this for quite a while. Your first book, Soonish, talked about space elevators

and how they might be a terrible idea. And then you wrote a whole book about how we might not be ready to colonize. Mars and space. And the listener wants to know, are you guys still bearish on space or have things changed? So give us some background here. Why is space so hard and expensive? Yeah, so there's a lot of angles on that, but I think probably the place to start is just literally the access to space, meaning like getting up and fast. And so you can make a pretty good case that the main reason

that's expensive is because rockets kind of suck. The main reason we use them to go to space is we have no other method, right? So if you look at a rocket sitting on a pad, it's something like 80% propellant, meaning fuel and oxidizer stuff that gets burned on the way up. It's something like, depending on what you're doing, say, 16 to 19% the like machine that historically you discard during the process, although SpaceX has changed that. And then at the very top, you have the faring, which is depending on, again, what you're doing, one to three percent, say, of the total mass, and that's what goes to space. And you say, why is it so awful?

Why is the ratio so terrible? And, you know, of course, you couldn't say, well, if this planet were a little bigger, maybe we just couldn't do it. The example we like to use is, like, if you had to take a road trip from Alaska to Buenos Aires, you would gas up once in a while. If you had to bring all the gas you needed for the entire trip, at the beginning, you would look like a flea on like a gas tanker, right? And the main problem you're going to face is that the first, say, gallon of gas is mostly

going to move gas. There are gallons of gas. You're going to literally move the entire time and finally use up at the end. The most efficient way to do it, and this gets us to space elevators, would be of like a magic pixie just dropped the drop of gas you need in whenever you needed it. So you never had to carry any mass of gas because that's most of what a rocket is doing. This is why we have staging, right? That's why a rocket burns up a bunch of propellant and then just drops off a hunk into the ocean, or if it's SpaceX drops off a hunk that lands itself. Well, if we have magic pixies as an option, we can solve lots of problems, not just road shift to Buenos Aires. I mean, wow, that opens up the door to lots of new things.

That's right. You know, a space elevator in a certain sense wouldn't be the magic pixie, right? So a space elevator is like a cable or a ribbon that dangles from something up in space. And there are different ways to do that. But basically, you can just visualize this cable that goes up like a beanstalk and you climb it. And the nice thing about that is you just expend the energy to, you know, climb one more foot, right? so you can beam the energy that goes up. So most of like your efforts are going into fighting gravity

in the sense of just getting up the next step instead of carrying all this propellant, right? Yeah, and I think space elevators are hard for people to grok because it feels like it's floating and if you're going to stand on it's going to fall down. And there's some complex orbital physics there. But essentially the argument is it's like a ladder, right? It's a lot easier to climb a ladder 100 feet

than it is to jump on. Exactly, yeah. And it takes a lot of this energy because the ladder is supporting you. as you go up. That's right. And there have been lots of hopes to get around the rocket problem, right? Yeah.

Classic one of you read Jules Verne's first man on the moon is, do you remember what they do? I don't know. They shoot a gun. There's actually a whole kind of comedy bit about Americans with guns. It's the Baltimore Gun Club. And they shoot it. It's like a good introductory physics thing because it's like, I think we calculated it either for Sunnish or a city on Mars where it's like the initial Gs are like 20,000

to actually get to the moon with the spaceship they're launching. So the humans would go flat. Oh, I see. It's like a cannon. They fire you out of a cannon to the moon. Literally, it's just a giant cannon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a gun club that came up with the proposal. But anyway, the book is called From the Earth to the Moon. Oh, I'm sorry, yes. Well, that's not so outlandish these days. Have you seen those spin projects, where they like spin something up and then literally launch it into space? It's like

good for some payloads, but not for people. Yeah. The gun would work if your payload was like a hunk of iron or like some fluid or something. But yeah, with like delicate little splatty humans, it's no good. All right. So getting off of Earth is hard. Rockets are bad. Space elevators are problematic for other reasons. We can dig into that in another episode. Why do we want to lift stuff from Earth? I mean, there's lots of stuff in space. Why don't we just like build stuff in space for space? So if you want to get stuff somewhere in space to build with, you've got to say to yourself, well, where am I getting it? You don't have a lot of options, it turns out. You have the moon. But, you know, the moon is still pretty far away. It's hard to get to. And then you have to, like, somehow land on the moon and then boost off, which takes off. a lot of energy, less than doing it on Earth, but a lot. Notably, this is true for the moon

and Mars. You don't have a thick atmosphere, which is very helpful when you'd like to land, right? If you visualize Neil Armstrong and the lunar lander, there's no wings on it because there's no reason. And so that makes it more complicated. You could alternatively, like, go to get asteroids. You know, people usually think when we say that we're talking about the belt, and I think enthusiasts would say that is ultimately the goal, but like for a plausible -ish scenario, we're actually talking about near-Earth asteroids that have a lot of unlikely characteristics. So, like, they have to be high and valuable stuff, usually called platinum group metals. That's the really hot stuff. And ideally, they should be sort of locking

velocity with Earth, by which I just mean, as the Earth is moving, the asteroid comes in such a way that it, like, is not going too fast with respect to us. So you can imagine, like, the Earth is going one way, the asteroid's going the other. Trying to catch it is going to be a dangerous business. That's all really hard and well beyond our current capacity. So we usually say, you know, if you go up to geosynchronous, which is about 24,000 miles high, you can make money pretty much anywhere in that shell by data transmission, by remote sensing, by navigation, by doing stuff for militaries. Outside that shell, there's not a lot of value in a financial sense. There's obviously all sorts of cool science value, but there's not a lot of value beyond that.

It's funny, when I first invited Zach on the show, he's like, I don't know that I'm going to have a lot to say. And I had thought, like, oh, maybe it should just be Daniel and Zach on this episode. And then Zach was like, oh, I don't think I'm going to have anything to say. And I was like, all right, we'll see. But anyway, this is an interview of Zach, so I will continue to let Zach go for it. Well, I guess as an audience member to this, I might be a little bit skeptical about that. I mean, I buy the argument that there's not much in space you want to bring back down to Earth. I mean, I think people often think, ooh, platinum asteroid, that would be worth $75 quatrillion

dollars if I could bring it back here and sell it off bit by bit. And obviously, that's ridiculous. But still catching stuff in space for building in space. I know we don't have the technology now, but is it impossible to imagine that we could never catch an asteroid? I mean, I saw it happen on for all mankind. Yes, yes, yes. Obviously, at some point, we'll have the technology to do that. I have no doubt about that.

None of this is anti-gravity. There's no forbidden physics. It's just engineering. The way I think about that is essentially what you're implicitly doing there is assuming some kind of space economy, right? You're wishing it into existence and then it's justified. But it's kind of like saying, well, once we have a city on the bottom of the marriage, on this trench my french bottom chicken sandwich company will really be valuable so i think this is why a lot of space geeks are in the business of saying we have to build the city because it's existential

kelly and i were just talking about this there's a guy we really like named winchell chung who runs something called project row which kind of documents everything ever said about space travel has this idea called mcuffinite which is reference to the idea in movies of a mcuffin like a certain something everyone needs you'll find that movies books everything for space colonization they always positive McGuffinite. So like an avatar, there's an unobtainium, like insanely stupid name, really hard to get him, which is like a room temperature superconductor, then somehow you can't just make back home from the same elements. You have to get it from like these poor natives. And the way I think with this, it's like, I'm sorry to be really boring about this, but it's like

the whole world is running on the same periodic table. There's not like magic stuff you can get. There's no special in-between elements or whatever, anything. like this. So I don't know why you'd suppose you'd find them of all places like on an asteroid or on Mars where, you know, you're just working from the same giant solar system accretion disc that made the other planets. I mean, from a physics point of view, there could be additional stable, super heavy elements that is positive that there might be very heavy elements that are stable. It's called the island of stability. But you need some pretty exotic physics to explain why it's created and exist in asteroids and it's not here on Earth and is also long lived, et cetera,

You're right, Earth is mostly made out of the same stuff as asteroids, and so it'd be pretty unusual that you could find something only in asteroids to put in your chicken sandwich. Yes. When we say Island of Stability, I thought physicists meant like two milliseconds. Long-lived is relative. That's true. Okay, but isn't that the way all economies get started? I mean, there used to be no economy in California, and then,

You know, there was a gold rush, so we had a MacGuffin. All economies do get started somehow, right? Your argument would essentially suggest we can never have new economies. Well, you know, so I say it this way, if, as he promises, Mr. Musk wants to spend, you know, a trillion dollars or whatever, and just plant a city on Mars. You know, we have all sorts of other concerns about that from other episodes you guys have done. But, like, suppose he did it. Like, suppose you woke up tomorrow and he had done it, then maybe there's an argument for some of this, though. But that's because you've made such a bad situation.

Often in sci-fi, you'll be like, well, water is going to be really valuable. And it's worth remarking, if you're in a place where you have to pay huge amounts of money for clean drinking water, that's not a good situation. You'd rather not do that. You're absolutely right. If the economy already exists, then fine. Or as you say, with California, I get frustrated. Not with you, of course. But with the entire state as an idea, as an ethos.

Oh, this is two Virginians against one Californian. It's not fair. It's not fair. I'm ancestrally from Texas, so I hate both of you Coastal elites. My coast is filled with oil, as it should be. Isn't your coast the Gulf of America now? Yeah, that's right. That's right.

You can gas your car up in the Gulf of America. So, you know, often when we say this, I totally sympathize with not wanting to be someone who's like, nah, dreams are dumb. You know, people will say, well, if Columbus had thought that what would have happened, and first of all, I don't want to say, it's probably 50 million people wouldn't have been murdering. But setting that aside, we'd still have all of mine history, right? Right, you'd have a couple nice things. But also, like, Columbus shows up and he gathers resources that are widely available,

in part, by the way, because those indigenous people had found it and could tell them where it was willingly or otherwise. That was generally true, right? So, like, those people who show up in California, these settlers, they found the San Fernando Valley, right? You want to talk about value. And this is in an agricultural era, right? When I want to get out more deeply, I think you and I were talking about this,

earlier is people often talk about resources in this funny way. Like it's just a sort of stuff. And like it obviously exists in the moon or asteroids in some sense because they're made of stuff. But like in the modern world especially, and this is maybe different from how it was for most of human history, value comes from organization, right? Like if you're running a country,

would you rather have a diamond mine or Google, right? Because no those do. Yeah. But I would say even that, if you had both the diamond mine is trivial. It's really not a big contributor to the economy like that tech sector. You know, we got into this, this was actually a late addition to our book. We were talking to an economist, he's a developmental economist. We said something sort of vague about this stuff, and he was like, you should look at this thing from the World Bank, where they actually taught it up, like, the wealth of different nations and like what the actual value was to this planet of natural resources.

And it was like, I think, two and a half percent of overall wealth is a natural resource. It's minimal. So when people talk about, we have to go the asteroids because we'll get so rich because of natural resources, like, by the way, 90 percent of that was fossil fuels, right? which don't exist on mars i was talking to someone who's a real long-termist about this and she was like well but eventually we're going to have to push into space because we're going to run out of resources and i was like if you want to have a 10 000 you're eventually why don't just say will it all be hooked to like the matrix and we'll just experience infinite value in our heads if you can invoke these crazy sci-fi scenarios the idea of value goes bonkers i don't think

it's even worth speculating about yeah we'll all just be downloading our chicken sandwich which is no need to even go to your chicken sandwich shack. And they'll be perfect. Yeah. All right. So getting to space is hard. Mining stuff and using resources in space. It doesn't really have value unless it's already an economy,

which means people there to value it and to need it. So that sort of sets the scene. Let's take a break. And when we come back, I want to hear from the Wendersmiths all about the updates since their book was written, since we have had some rapid progress in reusable rockets and access to space and CubeSats and Starlink and all sorts of other crazy stuff. All right.

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

One of the funny things that happened with us when we were writing soonish was that the change began as we were like going to press. We really met. at SpaceX because they kept landing reusable rockets when we've been trying to discuss... Impressed with, not mad ass. I wish they would cut it out because we're like, this is future tech, and they were doing it and we're like, well, this is just ruining everything for us. And I don't remember the number.

Maybe Kelly, you did. It was like when we went to press, it was like six times they had landed a reasonable rocket. Something like there wasn't much, but it was a huge deal. I remember talking to someone who said something like, I watched the moon landing and this was a bigger deal. I think most people wouldn't agree with that, but I did. But the moon landing was expensive.

There was no way they were going to let us do this for very long, right? The government, whereas, like, reusable rockets, this has been, like, the dream since, like, the 50s. You know, do you go back, Max Pajé, one of the big NASA engineers had these drawings of reusable rocket. It would have worked by having three stacked rockets with a pilot in each of them, with wings, right? Who would have flown back down, like, insanely dangerous and super awesome. Nothing like it ever happened. There were a couple of, like, experiments in the 90s, but they weren't, like, going to high speed or any of the things. you needed to do. And then all of a sudden, SpaceX was going to orbit and coming back.

And the reason that matters is that math we talked about earlier, right? The old line is like, if you have a 747, but you have to throw it into the ocean after each use, the tickets are expensive. And that's essentially how we did space for the entire space age up to SpaceX. And why are reusable rockets so hard? I mean, landing a 747 is tricky, but we can do it. Why is landing a rocket so much harder? I miss fake when I said it was the only time because the course of the space shuttle was time before that, which was partially reusable. And I feel like that's actually indicative, because, you know, in the case of the space shuttle, we had two total losses out of, you know, 130-something flights.

And it's just because it's really dangerous to take something that's in orbit, meaning, like, if it were in air, it would be at whatever it is Mach 25 or something, and just sort of gently cruise back into the atmosphere, right? You get a lot of heating. It's hard to deal with. You know, you get all sorts of crazy accelerations. And so it's just tough, especially if you're trying to keep the humans alive. The nice thing about SpaceX is they don't do this trick with humans in the vehicle, right?

It's operated by computer. It's still insanely impressive, though. But, yeah, it's just hard to make a vehicle that can endure all that. I mean, this is really hard stuff. It was about $30,000 per pound to send a mass of stuff to space using the shuttle. It was really expensive. Once you got that shuttle safely on the ground, refurbishing it, getting it ready to go back up again, cost a lot of money.

And so it did not lower the cost of sending mass to space like people had anticipated. Yeah. Interesting. People thought that the space show was going to be like a shuttle literally and make it cheap to get stuff to and from space. Yeah, there's actually evidence that it was the most expensive way during its like heyday. It's funny. I remember when they retired it, like everyone outside the space community was like, this is the end of America. And like everyone in the space community was like, thank God they like took that death trap off the market, you know.

Well, what was wrong? Like what was wrong about their calculations or the physics or why didn't it work out? Was it never going to work out? It was just silly politics? This is like an endless nerve debate. I think people who are more pro-shuttle want to defend it would say, look, the government made them do all sorts of crazy stuff. They didn't fund it enough at the beginning.

And then for quote-unquote safety reasons, you had to disassemble and assess all these different parts. So part of why SpaceX is cheap, it's not just the reusable. They did a clean sheet design that uses a lot of off-the-shelf parts. One argument is part of why SpaceX can exist is because a lot of off-the-shelf electronics just got really good in a way that wasn't true in like the late 70s. So it's confluence of things. It's possible it just wasn't the time yet.

Notably, the Soviet Union had a very similar vehicle called Baran, which I think flew exactly once. So let's talk about why it's possible. Is it just cheap and fast electronics that are also like somehow radiation hard? Like, why is it possible for SpaceX to do this? Was it a moment of genius, a particular insight? Was it Elon Musk being super cool? What was it that made this possible? Eric Berger has a great book about this called Lift Off, kind of going into the details.

I think it's a couple things like, I mean, reusables matter, but actually they were doing pretty well before reusables. And a big part of it is like, if you look at the history of rocketry, most rockets are not clean sheet designs. They're old military stuff. The rocket, the mercury guys were flying in was just, there was a warhead, and they took it off and they put Alan Shepard on top. And it was reportedly pretty bumpy too because it was not meant for humans, right? And this is like the history of rockets for many years. And in fact, a lot of those early rocket designs go back to like the Nazi V2 rockets. That's like where all early rocketry comes from, or much of it.

But if you already have a system that mostly works, why do you want a clean sheet design? Aren't you saving money by building off of something you already have? I think the argument is usually that those designs, they're built for military stuff. So that means a lot of stuff. It means maybe they're paying for high reliability as opposed to cost. It could also mean famously look like the F-35 where like the Navy gets to say, the army gets to say, Marines get to say. And so you end up with this big complicated machine.

Or so I think SpaceX is like a very spare rocket. It's very stripped down. It's also like not as many bespoke parts. So the NASA way of doing things, which kind of makes sense for a research agency, is you use a lot of bespoke parts. You don't use a lot of off the shelf. And part of that's like historically these parts didn't even exist, right? And so now you can like drop an iPhone in space.

It has a chance. These things are pretty durable now. And so I think something between doing a clean sheet design, having access to modern electronics. And yeah, I don't like always being in the position of complimenting Elon Musk, but, you know, he brought a kind of Silicon Valley view to things. And that was, by the way, possible because of the COTS program, which started at NASA, which we don't need to get into, but essentially said, look, we're going to stop doing this cost plus contract business. We're going to actually go out and try to create a private sector for launch.

I think that mattered a lot, too, and people like must step in to fill the gap. So there wasn't an economy there and the government invested in something and built an economy there, right? I would say have still built it. I mean, a lot of the money that goes to SpaceX is government contracts and they're still sustaining it. So then what is the state of the art now? How cheap is it to go to space compared to how? used to be 20 years ago. Yeah, yeah.

So even when we were writing the book, the standard number was something like 10,000 a kilogram. The latest numbers for Leo are $2,600 per kilogram, and that's on Falcon 9. So for comparison, the numbers we have for the space shuttle was $65,400 per kilogram. So that's a pretty non-trivial drop. And it's possible that SpaceX's own internal numbers are even cheaper when they reuse a lot of rockets for their Starlink system. The numbers we have for the Falcon Heavy, which is essentially like a Falcon with two other

falcon boosters strapped to it, is $1,500 per kilo. Like an order of magnitude cheaper than it was just when we were writing 10 years ago. All right. So if I had a really big chicken sandwich, it's a kilogram and I wanted to launch it to space, it would only cost me 1,500 bucks. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, you really want to fill the faring with chicken sandwiches. If you just have a chicken sandwich, you have to pay for the whole vehicle. You don't get to.

All right. Well, it's still $1,500 is not crazy number. I mean, it would cost me like hundreds of dollars to send a chicken sandwich to China, for example. And so, you know, a factor 10 to go to space honestly seems reasonable. But this is for cargo. What about for people? Where are we in terms of, like, sending people into space? So, you know, the shuttle retired.

And basically the way we were able to get to space was embarrassingly by employing the Russians to launch us. And then SpaceX comes along and made it possible. But it's like, it's hard to have the extra step where you get humans on board. There's just a lot of extra stuff that has to not go wrong. You have to have high reliability. You have to have these little capsules that have oxygen. And so they built one. They built the Dragon capsule where notably like companies like Boeing, which is a pretty

storied company, have not really succeeded. They built this capsule. It successfully docked multiple times now with the ISS. They also have sent of restocking missions that bring like, you know, consumables, that sort of thing. Cool. All right. So then what does this mean, right? We talked earlier about how difficult it is to get into space.

Getting up from Earth is expensive. But now things have changed. Things are cheaper. Does that change our calculus about building stuff? stuff out in space, getting that space economy going. Have things changed qualitatively or just quantitatively? I would say both. I mean, so quantitatively, more and more of the space business has become private.

You know, of course, at the beginning it was exclusively governments. And for a very long time, that was true. And it's really changed, especially in the last 10 years, it's majority private. We tried to find people who were trying to estimate this. And a couple years ago, it was already three quarters private. And I'm sure that's just continued. The business has grown. I mean, the nice thing is, you know, stuff grows in, what word am I trying to use?

Tandem. Handem, thank you. It's so good Kelly is here with us. Point one for Kelly. No, point 10. All right, well, you're way behind. This point, we're all ever more data hungry for like high-diff cat videos. There's also practical stuff, like even 10 years, we're all in self-driving cars.

They might want, you know, lower orbit satellite uplings for constant connectivity. And so we just want more and more data. And so the satellites can supply that, right? So, you know, I said earlier, everything below geosynchronous is very. And that's what it's valuable for. This is nice because it's a sort of ratchet where, you know, you keep throwing up more satellites. It gets cheaper to mass produce them. Data gets cheaper.

But when the data gets cheaper, we just demand more and more and more of it. And so we keep throwing up satellites. And so this is why we're finally, you know, for a long time people talked about having problems with like satellites smashing into each other. And it's finally becoming like maybe a bit more serious. And it's also maybe we want to lead into this. It's making space tourism at least more plausible that we haven't seen like an explosion in that yet. All right.

So then is there a space economy for? tourism. I mean, people have been launching on these things, you know, I don't know how high up they're getting, whether it counts of space, whether it counts as tourism, whether they're, you know, commercialauts or whatever. Do you think this is the beginning of a space tourism industry? Yeah, so, I mean, you know, people have been doing space tourism for like over 20 years now. A bunch of people have gone up to the ISS. They're all very rich people. Most of them wrote books about it. We read some of them. And more recently, Blue Origin has been sending people up And you can kind of debate if they are space tourists because they don't go to orbit, which is

kind of like, at least for a nerd, the important thing when you go to space, you ought to go to orbit, which is much harder to do than to just do what they do, which is they go up really high. They get the view of space you want, right? They get to see you above the atmosphere with the stars above and they get to, I think, something like four minutes in free fall, floating. So they get a kind of like astronaut-like experience. So if you count that, the number has gone way up. But why does the nerd only value being in orbit? Why does it only count if you're an orbit.

Because it's the hard part, right? I forget there's some famous line from Heinlein, which is like the hard part about going to space is not going up high, it's going over fast, right? So you feel this idea that when you're in orbit, you don't experience gravity. But of course you experience gravity because if you didn't, as you know, you'd fling off in a straight line until you encountered something else. And so it's just that you're at the right velocity, the slinging outy tendency is balanced by the Pollyini tendency, and so you go in a circle.

I guess so, but if I wanted to go to the moon or Mars, whatever, I wouldn't go to orbit, and I would still count that as going out. into space, right? Okay, yeah, sure, sure. If Bezos was shipping people to the moon, I would waive my objection. Okay. By all means. I'm glad we settled that here in nerd court.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. So we didn't even go on this tangent, but it actually comes up legally because you have different legal protections if you're an astronaut versus a non-astronaut under international law. Oh, protection from who? That's a good question.

Aliens, ghosts on the moon. Moon's haunted, bro. I think it's usually imagined that if there's some disaster in space or you land in a foreign country, there's a legal obligation to whoever could help you out to help you out. So like if you went to orbit with your chicken sandwich and you fell over Siberia, the Russians, even if they were really mad at us, would be obligated to deliver you and your vehicle and not be jerks about it, basically. There's some more precise language in the outer space tree, but not much more precise.

and I guess they'd have to render up the sandwich or something. So people could visualize, right? So a SpaceX Dragon capsule goes up, but if you watch the rocket, it'll turn, and it will go at high speed into an orbital trajectory, whereas a Blue Origin rocket, and this is still really cool, but it'll just go up and then come down. There's no attempt to go into orbit, anything like that. So they're not doing the hard part,

and that's why you only get to spend whatever it is, like some amount of minutes doing space as opposed to days or weeks or whatever. Can I ask a quick clarifying question? So when Kentucky Fried Chicken sent one of the, chicken sandwiches up on a high-altitude balloon because it didn't orbit. That doesn't count, right? Did that really happen? That did really happen.

Yeah. That doesn't count, right? To Zach? That doesn't count as the chicken sandwich being an astronaut? No, no, going to space. Going to space. Did they waste their money on that advertising campaign? Are you guys trying to get KFC as a sponsor right now?

We talked about Taco Bell recently having a target for a reusable vehicle, yeah. We shouldn't go on a tangent, but there is a kind of formal line called the Carm Online. probably talked about at some point, which is like 60 something miles up, that like is technically space, but who cares? It's not orbit. It doesn't count as tourism. I don't know. Let's address the actual question. Are we going to get a tourism business and doesn't matter? If you look at the number of satellites, it's just totally exploded in the last 10 years. That has not happened with space tourism. The equivalent would be something like dozens of tourists are up right now. SpaceX wants that. They've talked about they have this new vehicle called Starship. It's as big

as a Saturday 5, like it's enormous. It could put, we don't know yet, but say 50 or 100 to 150 tons in orbit. So plausibly, you could have like 50 people there all puking on each other at the same time as they enter orbit, but getting that magnificent view that John Glenn got on his first orbit, right? And so one question you might ask is, is there any money in this? And so Kelly and I actually tried to look into this. There's not a lot of people who run surveys that are like, how much would you pay to go into space? But there was some evidence. I didn't bring the exact number, but it's something like a decent amount of middle class Americans would at least say on a survey that they would part with like 50 grand for an orbital.

trip. Whether they would, whether you could convince your spouse that that's like a good investment. It's a different question. It does seem like there's an economy there, right? There is a market. And what's exciting about that, if you want there to be like a really cool moon base, is, you know, if you got a tourist market like this, even it was just venture tourism for the relatively rich, like that's going to require a lot of development of like high reliability vehicles, life support. One of our big things we whinge about is there all these basics that you don't think about, like, making sure the toilet doesn't break like it did on Inspiration 4 launched by SpaceX, you know? And so, you know, getting all this basic ticky-tackey life support stuff

really worked out. One thing, it's a big deal of us, is like, most astronauts are middle-aged dudes, right? Just have high percentage of all astronauts ever are middle-aged men who are in, like, peak physical condition. And so, like, the question is, like, what happens when, like, I go up? I bring, like, a slightly sub-average body into space. Slightly? Oh. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. You're very handsome. Let's have some boundaries here. Yeah, thank you. Minus one. I'm blowing a whistle on that one. Yeah. But no, more seriously, it's like we don't have a lot of data on like old people, people have various conditions, how they're going to perform in six. We just don't have it. And so there's all this stuff you want to have for a really cool moon base that you would get naturally from a tourism business. Zach and I, in a city on Mars, call ourselves the space. I'm going to say jerks for the show. So, or editor doesn't have to do too many bleeps. But just to provide a non-space jerk counter argument,

one of the Wiener Smiths leaves the house. And so I went to a bunch of space conferences. And if you go to the space conferences, they would say that space tourism is just absolutely taking off. They count the suborbital flights. They are saying that the number of astronauts is increasing rapidly. And so I do think there's a lot of activity in this area, a lot of people who are excited.

And so there are people who are not as negative as the Wiener-Smith. Is there anybody who's more negative in the United States? There are, there are. Daniel, too, yeah, yeah, they're our friends. That's right. They're the people who talk to us. All right, so let's take a break. And when we get back, we will talk a bit more about the space economy.

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going to set down their roots? Would they live on the moon? Would they live in space? Or would they still be in Virginia? It's hard to be in Virginia. I don't think we're going to have sunsets on the moon the way we have in Virginia for quite a while. Exactly. Well, to paint them on the wall or something. All right. So let's talk about realistic space economies. I mean, we've talked a lot about how difficult it is, how expensive it is, but it is getting easy. and we have an explosion of space satellites, and you guys are skeptical about space tourism. But what are some space economies

that we could eventually maybe somehow get going without finding gold on the moon? Can I clarify real quick that I'm not necessarily skeptical about space tourism? That seems to me to be a thing that's happening right now. I might be a little less skeptical than Zach. All right, go ahead, Zach. I would actually agree with that.

It's not exploding, but I would actually say that's the most optimistic case of space tourism. You know, it's not like an industry that makes us all more productive, but it is one that might exist if there's enough rich people who want to go. So, yeah, so let's talk about other possibilities. So there's been this desire for many years for there to be some reason to go to the moon or Mars or the asteroid belt. So we can talk about, like, sort of the most common things and why we're a little bit

skeptical. I would say the most common ones you hear, Kelly, correct me of you disagree, are space, space, solar, and let's go mine the moon or the asteroids or something. And space-based solar, you know, it could be a whole episode, but the short version is do back to the envelope calculation, and even with really low launch costs, it's almost always going to be better to put up a photovoltaic panel in like Arizona or the Sahara Desert than launching into space. If I can just quickly plug some work that Daniel and I have done in the past, back on Daniel

and Jorge Explain the Universe, Daniel and I did chat about space-based solar where we'd talk about some of the limitations. And also, I do feel like something we've sort of skis-based. that's important to mention is that the economy and low Earth orbit for satellites and stuff is huge. That is making tons of money and will continue to expand. And we talked to Jonathan McDowell about the implications of more satellites going into space and collisions and how that could affect the economy. But so now we're working beyond just putting satellites in space. Right. And there are some arguments for space-based solar power. I mean, I think on the whole,

they don't win out. But there are some reasons. It's not total insanity. The idea is that your solar panels are always in the sun, right? Because you're never in the Earth shadow, which is cool. So it's a gain of 3x right there almost, or 2x. And they could beam power to anywhere on Earth, which is very cool. So you don't have to have solar panels in a place where you have lots of sun. Norwegians can get solar power in the winter. That would be amazing and nice and cozy. But of course, there's lots of issues there. Like, you're building a huge beam and pointing it at the Earth. Could that ever go wrong? I can't imagine. It's funny. The father of rocketry, Hermann Obert, actually proposed

putting a giant mirror in space for agriculture and for weaponizations. This is one of the oldest ideas in space. But of course, we do use solar power in space, right? Satellites and solar panels and all sorts of stuff. There is a solar power up there. And, you know, I think that highlights it. Like, if you want to do something in space, you should do it for the space economy. Bringing it back down to Earth is almost never profitable.

Yes. So then what is? Like, what is the space economy? What is the space version of the chicken sandwich? One of the possibility, which I'll just do this very quickly, is we either mine the moon or there's something we need to make in zero gravity. And so there's been talk of the something for decades, and people will still say this to be like,

well, you can make very pure materials. I guess there are ways to be easier to make certain biochemicals in space. And this is all, to my understanding, true. It's just that it's hard to win on price when you have to fly to like a space station and a sandblote there. And so far it just hasn't happened. And if someone in your audience is probably objecting like, well, such and such company, just put in millions of dollars to do it.

So are they crazy? And my answer is, for our book, I read a book from the 80s. It was like, you know, John Deere just paid $3 million to send this thing into space. And it's like, look, companies do this for promo. It's not proof that it's a good idea. But the other option is the moon or the asteroid belt, like we're going to go mine. And that goes back to what we were saying earlier about, like, look, there's no special stuff. So the exception people often say is on the moon, we'll get helium-3.

And there are papers written about this. Harrison Schmidt, the senator-slash-astronauts, geologist. It was big on it. And we cite in our book, there's a great paper I'm blanking on the name, but basically just is this incredible takedown. The very short version is, you know, the only real use for helium-3 that's big money is you could have an anutronic fusion, which is just a cleaner form of fusion. And the problem is, like, it's a much harder version of fusion than the fusion we already

can't do. And the fusion we already can't do is actually quite clean compared to, like, other energy methods. I think of like this A-neutronic stuff is like a kind of show-off version of fusion. We've already achieved Utopia. Why not push it a little further? It's not like there's hunks of it on the moon. It's just at a moderately higher concentration on the moon. You're in the position of saying we have to like mine and process huge parts of the moon and like don't even get us started on how to run construction equipment in a vacuum at one-sixth gravity. It's a whole other thing. But also, and this for me really got me. If you know your nuclear reactors, I think y'all did an

episode on this at some point. You know, there's a type called a heavy water reactor. The main ones are in Canada. The miners are built thinking that uranium would be hard to come across in the future, and so they're a little more efficient. They use deuterated water, and one of their byproducts is helium-3. We really urgently needed loads of helium-3. Probably you're better off building these weird fission reactors and just sucking off the by-product. So unfortunately, if you're boring, you run into this problem every time you have one of these ideas about why we need to go to space. I think another problem is that you're always kind of vulnerable.

So say you did start mining helium three, it would be super expensive. As soon as someone figured out a cheaper way to do it on Earth or any way to do it on Earth, they almost immediately can beat you at cost. And so there's fiber optic cables, I think, that people want to make in space. But again, if you can figure out how to do it on Earth and get them just as good, you immediately beat the competition. So I feel like you're always at risk. Yeah.

I mean, that's the whole like sex sorting story. This is our favorite story, which is there were proposals in the 70s to send bullseam into space for sex sorting, which I guess is a little easier in zero gravity. And then in the 80s methods were developed. And so it's like any money that had been spent in like 1975 to sort bull gametes on Skylab would have been really badly spent. I feel like a lot of these ideas are sort of bad faith reverse engineering to cover like somebody just wants to go to space and like let's come up with an excuse to do it. And I think there's just sort of like an enthusiasm there. Like, it feels like it's the future.

Let's just get it started. I know those people. I go to conferences with those people. And I genuinely believe that a lot of them really do feel like the things they're doing in space are just so much better than what we could do on Earth. I think there's plenty of people who believe and aren't acting in bad faith. I'm just not convinced. I guess bad faith is too strong. I mean, I think the real motivation is enthusiasm for space.

Not like, hey, this is a good idea and it needs space. So therefore, let's go there. Is that fair? Yeah. I think, yeah. All right. So let's get back to trashing other people's ideas. Data centers in space.

I've heard people talk about these data centers because, like, Google spends huge amounts of money building these computers and taking up a lot of land and using a lot of energy and, like, warming the planet and, you know, using a lot of water. So people are like, why don't we build this stuff in space, right? Space is big and cold. So what are your thoughts about data centers in space, Zach? Yes, I mean, this is one of those ideas that struck me as one of the most bizarre ideas I'd ever heard. I was like nervous to argue about it because people would be like, no, the physics works out.

And I was like, but maybe we should go over for your audience. Like, it's hard to dump heat in space. Okay, it's really hard. Space is like cold in some formal sense, but it doesn't mean it's easy to dump heat, right? For the same reason, like, if you have a hot hunk of metal, it's easier if you have a bucket of water than like cold air to dump heat. There's just more molecules to pull away the heat. In space, you've got nothing or almost nothing, right? And so it's very hard to dump heat.

If you look at the ISS, a lot of it is just radiators that are dumping the heat, like, generated by the systems and the humans in it. It's one of the problems for space-based solar is you have to deal with all this heat. Yeah. So let's get into the physics that for a minute. Like, how do you cool down? You cool down in two different ways. One is like you have air around you, which is bouncing off of you and it's stealing your heat. If you're hotter than the air, you're going to lose your heat to the air.

It's like heat diffusion, essentially. And out in space, you don't have that method. there's no wind to make it feel cold. There is another method you can use to cool down. That's what you mentioned, which is radiation. You know, everything that has a temperature, it can be thought of as a black body. And so it radiates and things that are hotter, radiate at higher frequency. That's your only way to lose heat in space because there is no wind.

So as you say, even though space is technically cold, although parts of space are technically super duper hot because the particles are moving at really high speed. And so, like, you would freeze to death in a super hot. but very dilute plasma. But also, you could burn up, right? You could burn up because it's hard to cool down, even if you're in a super hot, very dilute plasma. So all your intuition about hot and cold goes out the window,

and the bottom line is it's hard to shed heat in space because there's no air to dump it into. Yeah. And to be clear, the people proposing data centers in orbit know this. Yeah. But the point is like, data centers are hot. Mm-hmm. Maybe you know what is their solution.

The solution is basically giant radiators. And I think that people proposing data centers in space, They understand that they are complicated, right, because you need more elaborate cooling. And also, like, refurbishing your data center is harder, like, everything is in space, right? And you need radiation protection and, like, getting up there to swap out a new GP or whatever, it's complicated. I think they acknowledge that all these things are hard. I think the argument, if we're going to, like, steal manate to try to be fair about it, is that resources eventually on Earth are limited, right? We have limited space and limited energy and basically unlimited demand for computing.

So eventually space has to be an efficient way to do this. Is another part of the argument that they're using the space-based solar to power the data center? And so being in space solves a bunch of the problems for space-based solar we were talking about earlier. Yeah, you don't need to bring the power back to Earth. You just power the computers there. And in principle, maybe even the compute is for your space economy, right? for people who are generating images of chicken sandwiches on the moon, they don't have to go back and forth from Earth

in order to have their AI slaves make their art for them. Whoa. You know, one of the things I probably often had writing this books is you'd be talking to someone and they'll be like, and that's why we'll need a thousand foot tall tower in the poles of Mars and you'd be like, but I don't see when that's going to be a good idea. And they'll be like, well, I'm talking about 10,000 Europe from now

when we're at like Cardochev scale level 83. And you're like, well, okay, I guess I wouldn't even argue about that. So people will say this, right? So, like, we'll eventually have to do this because we're going to use up all the resources. But resources don't work that way. There's not like a sort of lump of stuff called resources that you can use up, right? So like before lithium ion batteries, like lithium had uses, but it wasn't this super valuable stuff. Now it's a really important resource.

Same was true for like high quality sand for silicon. It was true of petroleum before the combustion engine, right? People substitute stuff when new technology comes along, right? And that's how you get more value over time. And so, you know, not to be too depressing, but you mentioned, like, we're all going to have our, like, AI, I'll say servants. Like, look, if you just want value, value means humans say they're willing to pay dollars for it or whatever for it, right?

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

water. They have pancake breakfast at McMurdo. And we're not doing that. So I don't know, maybe when we're done with Antarctica and we've like filled the oceans with data centers and we're all just made of data, then that like aggregate of like computronium will need to expand into space. I have trouble seeing it earlier. The only last thing I would say is I think people who are really into this will, I think often have a kind of libertarian leaning. So they'll say, well, look, like the earth is getting bureaucratic and over-regulated, and this is going to be the only place where we can put more stuff without having to, like, save the whales. Maybe that's the future. I don't know. The costs are so extravagant. I mean, like, even if you had Elon Musk predictions,

like it's $10 a kilogram to go to space, like, I don't know if anyone's weighed a data center, but it's a lot of kilograms. It's just hard to imagine. going to win on price here. Well, a lot of this feels like chicken and egg problems, right? You argue that there's no eggs because there's no chickens, there's no chicken because there's no eggs. Let me ask you this, Zach, like think 1,000 years in the future or 5,000 years of future. Do you think humans will ever have a viable space economy or do you think it's never?

Because if it's ever, that means it's going to happen and eventually you are going to want data centers in space. The only other argument I think is that it's never going to happen. Is that what you think? I would actually say there's a middle argument, which I prefer to make. I'd be curious if Kelly disagrees with me, but it's like, so it may be the case that there's never a quote-unquote good economic reason to do this, just meaning you pay a dollar, someone does something, you get $2 back, right?

I think there's a pretty good case that it'll either never be like that or wouldn't be any time soon. It doesn't mean we won't do it. It just means that at some point it might be like Star Trek, right? So it's like, why does Captain Kirk go around the galaxy? What is? Because we're all doing well, and we'd like to see what's out there. And so meaning like it could be at some point we're just so technological.

technologically advanced and rich. We put people on Mars as a sort of aesthetic choice. Like building particle colliders or something. Exactly like that. I don't want to let out the secret, but I don't think CERN is going to like get you cheaper butter. I think they do grow cows above parts. Don't think so? I don't know. There are buffalo at Fermilab, yes. And bison butter is pretty good. Okay, with fun. But no, I mean, like, why do we have a base at McMurdo? I mean, there is geopolitics. It's not like nice all the way down. But mostly it's because we think it's cool. We're much richer than we were 100 years ago. And we just do it. And so like stuff like that could lead to a serious

Mars presence. It's just that there's no good economic case for it. If you really want to give me a thousand years to work with, I don't see why you don't get to a stage where we all individually have like 4,000 robot butlers who attend on us all day long and we have like amazing rockets to do anything we want and it's all very safe. And yeah, why not? Then at least rules out what 99% of advocates are saying when they say we have to go soon to get rich or to fix society or not be, like, thwarted by the bureaucrats who are dominating Earth. All that stuff goes out the window if you're saying it's just an aesthetic choice we'll make because it's cool.

So Zach and I spent like five years writing the book and we had to argue until we agreed in the content that would go in the book. That's why it took so long. Yeah, well, you know. So we don't usually diverge too much. But I do want to add to what Zach said. I think a lot of why we do stuff in space comes down to prestige. And I suspect Zach agrees with me on this point too.

Yes. And so you could end up getting a space economy because the U.S. and China are in a race to put research stations out there. And then they need data centers and things just kind of build up over time. And so it might not be because there's something out there that's so valuable we should actually go out there and get it. It might just be that both nations think that they look great on the international stage if they were doing these things. So I think that could be another way we create the economy that makes some of these ideas worthwhile. It wouldn't be the first time that science and technology has written on the back. of nationalism and patriotism to make its case, right?

I accuse other folks of bad faith arguments, but there's a lot of that also in science. Like, hey, what we really want to do is X. We're going to sell it to you as Y because we think you want to buy Y. So I'm a little bit of a hypocrite there, or at least a $10 billion hypocrite. Zach and I are waiting for our alien question. Oh, yeah. Don't let us down, Daniel. All right, here's my alien question.

So, Zach, do you think that you guys are the reason for the Fermi paradox? Do you think on every planet is somebody out there that's written a wet blanket book about going to space? And that's why the aliens have never gone to space and we haven't been visited by aliens. It's all the Wiener Smith's fault. There's some kind of tentacle like proto Wiener Smith. Holding back humanity. Exactly. Wow. That's what I'm suggesting. Grant me that as a guy with a book to sell, I would go on any broadcast.

I suppose maybe our message has reached other planets and they gave it. and they gave up too, so I don't know. Are you guys going to sell your book on Mars when there is an economy on Mars? If we can. That's right. Well, no, we'll just update the preface and keep selling it. That's right. That's right.

You know, even if they're just selling it to laugh at us because of how wrong we were, that's great. We'll take the royalties. I will take it. Yeah, just like I love hate downloads of the podcast. That's right. People who download it just to complain about it. Like, keep going. Go for it.

Yep. tell all your friends that's right that's beautiful all right so thank you very much Zach for coming on the podcast to tell us all about why going into space is still hard and still expensive and everybody should go to Antarctica first great job Zach all right yes thank you yeah yeah yeah Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe is produced by iHeart radio we would love to hear from you We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows.

If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms you can find us at D and K universe. Don't be shy. write to us.

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