Main Engine Cut Off - T+266: Alex Fielding, CEO and Chairman, Privateer

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

Alex Fielding, CEO and Chairman of Privateer, joins me to talk about what they’re working on and what drives them as an organization.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 36 executive producers—Joel, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Joonas, Tyler, Bob, Craig from SpaceHappyHour.com, Theo and Violet, SmallSpark Space Systems, Matt, Harrison, Benjamin, Kris, Stealth Julian, Donald, David, Fred, Lee Hopkins, Pat from KC, Pat, Frank, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Dawn Aerospace, Jan, Russell, Better Every Day Studios, Steve, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Warren, Ryan, Brandon, and four anonymous—and 828 other supporters.TopicsPrivateerPono in Space! Reflections on the road to orbit - Privateer SpaceThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by NASAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I'm Anthony Colangelo. Today I'm talking with Alex Fielding, the CEO and Chairman of Privateer, a company that was founded by himself, Steve Wozniak, Mariba Jha, people that you might know if you've been following space or I guess tech for years. And I've been following along with the Privateer storyline off and on, but I feel like I don't have the full story. So very interested to talk with Alex to see what they're up to. They just launched some hardware to space not but a couple of days ago as we record this. So really excited to dig in and find out more about what they're working on. So without further ado, let's give Alex a call.

All right, Alex, welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. It's a pleasure to have you here. I've fought along with Privateer over the years, but I'm excited to get the full storyline. So welcome aboard. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I am. I'm really, really pleased to be here. It's a huge privilege.

So thank you for making time. Sorry again for the technical challenges this morning. Oh, it's all good. This is no one will ever know. I barely remember at this point. The only thing harder than spaceflight is updating Chrome. Don't get me started. That's why I'm recording in Brave.

This is the browser update version of this uh of this podcast here um can we start with a previously on privateer because uh we were talking right before we hit record that there's been a couple of different storylines so i'd love as as brief or as long of a kind of how we got to where we are with privateer as you think is necessary well we when we started the company, we said we were in stealth, and that was working great until September

of 2022. And we had been sponsors at a fairly large space conference where they said, would you like to do a video? And we said, yeah, well, I don't know. We're not talking about what we're doing. So no. And I said, But you know, you get a one minute slot to do a video. Well, I guess we should just do a video, we just won't say what we're doing.

That seemed like a great idea. And I huddled with our co founders, you know, with Steve Wozniak, with with Dr. Morvajah. And I said, Look, we have a minute slot. I mean, we could probably say something without saying anything. That'd be great. We'll just talk about how we feel, not what we're doing. And then, you know, if we bump into people at the conference, there's, you know, maybe a couple thousand people there. They'll know how we feel. And that'll be nice, because then they won't just keep asking us what we're doing, because we'll just tell them we're not talking about it. And we all kind of nodded our heads. and, you know, we're media idiots. We have no idea what to do when it comes to media.

So we released this one-minute clip thinking at a maximum, at a maximum, like a thousand people to a couple thousand people at this conference will see it and we'll be left alone to continue working in darkness. That'll be great. That video got like a half a million views in like three days. We're like, what? So I think a lot of editors started whipping a lot of reporters saying,

how can you not know that this thing exists? And they started writing stories based on our values video. So they made all these presumptions and assumptions about what we were working on, most of which weren't true. But we then couldn't correct them because we were in stealth. So we just did what any insane humans would do. And we just went along with it. So that's fine. That'll be OK.

We don't need to correct them. We're in stealth. We don't need to correct them. We're in stealth. And this is why we now have a fantastic marketing team and a PR team because they probably would have advised us to do something totally different. But when we started the company, and to this day, this is none of our first space ventures. And our hearts have always been in a place where spaces is a domain that needs to become accessible and needs to be safe to become accessible to the masses. But it's never had that opportunity before. And I'm not an Elon fanboy, but thanks to Elon, you know, the payload to get there and the communications in terms of industry are

now available, right? And at a very, very low cost and very high availability and very high frequency. So everything else is coming. And so Privateer, when we started, we continued kind of with the narrative that had already been formed around the business. We said, okay, well, it's harder to convince people you're something that you are if they think you're something that you're not. So we just, we just went along with it.

And that's a long winded way of saying that what we have been building in stealth for the last two years are mostly in stealth for the last two years is, is really kind of Uber for space data ride sharing. And that sounds really bizarre, but there's some fundamental problems in space that we really thought needed solving and deserved solving. One of them is tied to space safety and domain awareness and traffic management,

and that is that we don't think there should be a market to charge people to not crash in space. Like that's extortion. That's mafia behavior. We're not going to engage in that. We're not going to build a business charging people to keep their satellites safe. But we will give that capability away because we think that that helps us all and we have to do it. What we acknowledged with space and starting privateer, and it's a strange thesis, so I'll give you the thesis, is that typically government technology, when it becomes mass adopted by us regular folks, it doesn't come with a really high tax or a penalty.

When DARPANET and ARPANET became the internet, there wasn't a massive tax or a baseline fee that Botswana would have to pay to connect to the internet. If they could afford the infrastructure to connect, that was it. You're connected. You're now in. And the same thing is true for GPS. from a technology that we were using for targeting weapon systems to a technology that we were going to use to navigate the Earth, to do Pokemon Go and Tinder and DoorDash and magic stuff, we didn't charge people a fortune to use GPS. And as a matter of fact, we just said, yeah, if you have the infrastructure,

which in this case is like a receiver, you can go. But the domain that we think is going to advance next is Earth observation. And Earth observation, in the space domain, we rename everything so that it doesn't sound too alarming. Because if we were going to be just totally candid, Earth observation up until now has been spying. It's nation-state spycraft on one another using satellites instead of spy planes, right?

It's high resolution cameras and I can see you in the backyard and it's synthetic aperture radar and multispectral imagery. And, you know, typically this has been the domain for governments. And what they've done is as this domain has started to open to real people, what are we going to do with cameras and sensors and other things that help us understand our world better and make it better? We've inserted a tax on it. And we have inserted a very, very high and onerous task on purpose. And the purpose is make sure that the other nation states can't afford the same capability. Because we're not ready for that as a society we're not ready as a nation state or nation states to say everyone can spy on everyone and that's certainly not our intent at privateer we're not

trying to build a domain for spying but the governments have taxed and made onerous the pricing for earth observation in a way that we have never done for any other taxpayer-funded thing, specifically because I think we didn't want everyone to have an equal seat at the party. So it's incredibly unfair. And what we believe at Privateer is that Earth Observation is going to go from this domain of spycraft and spyware to a domain where it really is real people and corporations doing things to not just reduce risk and operate their businesses more efficiently, but it's going to be a domain where we can build entire new industries based on what we can see, sense, and detect from space to improve life on Earth. And we have to fix this inequality or this

inequity so that we don't end up leaving entire countries behind as we as we move into this new frontier and this is true for all of the things that surround it right so we've it's a long-winded response but basically we think that we're building over a space where the satellites are effectively cars, and those of us that need the data are effectively riders. So the satellite operators become drivers in their cars, and we become riders requesting rides, which are not physical, but are the pictures and the sensor data. And these are things that are going to—80% of climate science has already been done from space. So why is that research not in the hands of people who can take that actual raw data and begin to do the work to take it and make it, you know, something that could become correlative almost in real time. Can you,

can you actually monitor track and then identify the problem areas and also potential solutions? We're doing most of the work from space now. I would have to believe that the work on solving these big macro problems is going to happen from space as well. We just haven't seen the first of those solutions really roll out yet because we're still in that transitional window where, yeah, it's government A spying on government B. And now we're just seeing the very first set of applications where it's about saving lives. It's about making sure refugees can get safely through a war zone. It's about making sure that we understand what the risk is when there's a natural disaster and what do you do as a result of it these are all things that are coming and they're coming really fast

and you know we hope to remove this onerous tax on earth observation by building a very fair marketplace and arbiter that not only provides the equivalent of navigation systems for satellites, but kind of turn by turn between all those folks that want these data to fulfill their applications. So it's either going to turn out to be incredibly like the right thing to do, or it's going to turn out that we're going to crater into the ground because we're doing something that no one else seems to be doing just yet. So how does that actually, you know, you're talking a lot about the hardware side there and data collections. How does that actually play out with what hardware you're actively now putting into space and what kind of

hardware you have to build out to be able to support that sort of really like a software API SDK layer to get access to the data? You know, I'll keep I'll keep with the broken Uber analogy because I don't really have a better one. But basically, you don't have to sell new cars to get people to drive Uber for you. But if you if you're going to buy a full self driving Tesla in the future, and that car is going to drop you off at work before it drives you all day to make you some money and pay for itself, that's really the hardware that we put up now is on full self-driving. So this is the underpinnings of the world's first fully autonomous autopilot system for a satellite. And it's also one of the first doing a good amount of compute on orbit so in the past you would have these satellites take images and broadcast them to the ground using you know radio kind of

ground link stations so these ground stations would take the raw data from all the images and then you would go send them to your terrestrial data centers or center um you know could be whatever your own stuff amazon microsoft google who knows and then those images would be processed so they'd be run through some machine learning models to give you some form of intelligence because you know there's not a bunch of us sitting around staring with like a loop at a photograph going to look i can see his backyard barbecue anthony's on fire there's there's a bicycle back there it's red um we don't do that sort of thing, but machine learning models could

tell us a lot of these things and already do. So by putting the compute on orbit, what we're doing is we're speeding up the time to get to the inside because you don't have to broadcast those images to ground anymore. You can run the compute in space. And we're doing that in this flight with Amazon with their space pigeon technology.

We're also looking to the future, to this full self-driving autopilot system because right now satellites, all of our satellites, no matter what lies we tell, and I'm using the Royal Space Community, they're not autonomous. So there's truth and then there's a little bit of fiction, right? It's like we say things like, Starlink has maneuvered autonomously X thousand times this year. Yes, they've moved in an automated fashion, right? It was planned, it was scheduled, X number of Starlinks maneuvered, many times to avoid conjunctions, sometimes to avoid conjunction risk even with themselves.

They're maneuvering. That's true, but they're not doing it autonomously. They're not making the decision on their own, on the satellite, in real time, using some onboard sensing. So, you know, the equivalent of this, to continue using kind of a bad car metaphor, this would be you walking kind of across the street seven hours after somebody's begun a road trick and them having no sensors on board right they can't see you they're just on cruise control

they will mow you right over and this is true for our satellites where we use words like autonomy today or where we use words like automation it's not really automated i mean it's automated maneuvers but it's not autonomous it has has no intelligence. It has no decision-making. And it has no sensing. So it reminds me of a few years ago where we had those two submarines that actually bumped into each other in the ocean. And we're like, what? That's closer to the space domain. Because, you know, you don't have like a front windshield on the satellite where you're just waiting for the little green man.

And you're going, oh, my God, there they are. Turn left. It just never happens that way so explain the benefits there of the edge computing bit that you mentioned um maybe to compare like with planet directly right they're just sending down i don't even know how many images per day but they're imaging the entire however many times a day now with varying levels of resolution and bringing that all down into data centers that are, you know, browsable by somebody who's paying them a subscription. Um, or is there, is this the case where you're like, we've decided or, you know, found out the research that the edge computing model is going to be better for this list of things or each tool

kind of has its own strengths and weaknesses that could be deployed in the right way yeah i mean plan that's an amazing company right i mean we we love those guys we we kind of grew up together at nasa and the same kind of concrete asbestos bunker at nasa aims so my last company was founded about 10 feet away from them when they were still Cosmogia. And the idea of putting edge computing in space, it really speeds the time to intelligence when time really matters. So if you have to do something very quickly. And the other thing it does is it reduces the cost. Because ground station costs right now are like the equivalent of long distance phone calls when I was a kid.

So you're spending like $3 a minute, some cases, to just connect to a radio antenna to download your images. This doesn't scale. economy, if we're trying to actually reduce costs to the consumers, we want to get to a price point where entrepreneurs in dorm rooms can build the Angry Birds and Tinder of Earth Observation from their dorm rooms. And you can't do that at an average of $300 to $500 an image. So what we have to do is make sure that the images are reusable, that the intelligence is cheaper to attain, and get this to the price where it's the cost of a six-pack or a pizza. It has to be dorm room friendly to get a new wave of entrepreneurs to do really incredible things that will help us not just navigate the world, but fix it. And I'm a big believer that, like I said, 80% of our climate science is being done from space already. The very near future is going to be one where

that number's actually only going to go up, but the sensing is much better, and the capability and the resolution and the frequency of the sensing is much higher. And so it could be about the raw imaging. It could be about a whole host of other technologies that we're using to look at planet Earth in a different way. And I suspect the reason this domain hasn't unlocked faster

is that when you're going from DARPANET and ARPANET to the Internet, there are killer apps that just manifest themselves. And you go, oh, that's obvious. Of course it is. But, you know, obvious doesn't always happen in the blink of an eye. A blink of an eye can be five years. And it was for DARPANET and ARPANET becoming the internet. It took a solid five years before we all got our heads around, oh, yeah, hey, there's an idea.

I think we're in that same period where we're probably two to three years away for Earth observation, where you're going to see a trend of real people, real developers in dorm rooms, real corporations that are in the global 2000. Looking at this, it'll start the way everything starts right what did the government do with it oh yeah we could do that too and we are seeing some of that unfortunately right we're seeing companies spying on one another from space i mean this sounds like science fiction but it's actually science fact that we're seeing what in the in the corporate world they have a phrase for this that I think is just absolutely bizarre and kind of somewhat disgusting, but they call themselves corporate intelligence consultants. They're effectively spies with a new title again. It's like, yeah, I work in the embassy.

Spies with some equity at this point. Exactly. And those applications are company A wants to judge its performance versus its closest rival. And they want to benchmark themselves on a very regular basis to know where they're going to land at the close of quarter. There's amazing companies that are out there that are doing additional intelligence for corporations that are more focused on supply chain. So these are other applications where again, it was like, oh, the government looks at their supply chain and their enemy's supply chain. Okay, we can look at supply chain. What does it take to get from raw minerals to retail? So how do we get something from a factory

in China into the hands of somebody at Walmart? And that's probably the wrong way to say it, but it's very true. Now that the obvious use cases are falling kind of down the road, they're in the rearview mirror in this car analogy, we're now moving forward to the new applications. And these are the ones where it's helping us improve our lives. It's helping us understand our risk. It's helping us navigate our world in a totally new way. world in a totally new way. And it's also stuff that, you know, it will become as obvious as all as having GPS in our phones. It will become that obvious as we begin to use imagery and sensor data overhead. All the applications for this type of sensing from drones and airplanes and overhead sensors and balloons and, you know, know you name it a lot of radio signal intelligence all that stuff that companies and us have been doing traditionally from from from from earth are now going to happen from space and as you said you know about planet they've got a

lot of satellites there's other companies that look like them that have a lot of satellites that in low earth orbit you're doing roughly 17,000 miles an hour. I mean, 7.7 kilometers a second on average. So at that speed, that satellite that's over your head right now, it's going to be over your head 16 times today. It's orbiting the Earth every hour and a half. That's very different. And I think, you know, hey, Elon has done what industrial tycoons have done for the history of mankind. With SpaceX and Starlink, he's taken out two of the most lucrative opportunities, right?

He just built trains that go to space. Okay, so we've checked transportation. Starlink is coming. Um, you know, very cheap, very pervasive space travel. Um, then he solved communications with Starlink. So, okay, get the telegraph poles up. This is like, so, so he's, he's taken out two of the major underpinnings and I'm sure the companies that we're now seeing that are being built that are just amazing, they're working on manufacturing space, right? Because you now need the kind of steel mills of space in a weird way. You need the recycling plants.

You need these capabilities on orbit. taking all the capabilities of all the things in space that can be virtualized or can be packaged in a way that it's data it's information it's intelligence it's things that you can use to to make your world better and we're making those readily accessible to people at about a tenth of the price that it's available today and we're helping the space operators earn more money while the consumers get a better price so we're kind of helping everybody out a little bit to make this economy connect. It's not a wholesale-to-retail arbitrage. This orbits-for-price line of space thing is being tried,

where you just go to satellite operators and you go, hey, sell me something for $300 and I'll sell it for $500. We have no interest in doing that. The arbitrage that we're doing is not one between provider and consumer. It's really one where our governments have created an artificial tax on the cost of imagery because there are many companies that are stood up on our tax dollars where our governments help pay them so that we have capabilities that are government capabilities that come from companies. And hey, that's, that's, that's great. But the space domain is the first one where we've ever left the tax on it. So this is the first.

How does that, how do you calculate that though? Like, how do you know planets data that they're selling to people or Albedo who now has you know thermal imaging and 10 centimeter imagery how do you know that that is not them running their own you know business model to say what it costs us to get this data up there based on launch and acquisition is x y or z like what portion of buying a planet image would you say is the tax left on there and how is that different than privateers, you know, the data that you're selling down? Well, you know, we're working with the same operators and they all have similar challenges. I say they all.

In this domain, in Earth observation. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, Albedo is a fantastic company, right? I mean, Envelio is going to be a very hot topic very, very soon, right? This is yet another altitude that is going to become unlocked very quickly. I'd give you the very simple formula. And this is this is the Forrest Gump formula, right? If any of those businesses that we've mentioned, and many that we haven't lost their government contracts, would they go bankrupt? Now, so this is, this is the, this is the test. And most of the businesses we've just mentioned, if they lost just their contracts with us government, I'm not even talking about foreign

government would go bankrupt. That is a problem because what it means is that the us government, and I'm not blaming our government. I bleed red, white, and blue. I've spent my five years at NASA. I married a therapist. I'm fine. The problem is that when you don't want all the other children, nation states, to have the same capability you do, you can set a floor on pricing when you're standing up a business, when you're paying their bills effectively. And that floor has to be high enough that you've set a bar of entry that not every nation state will have capability on par with you. So what you'll

see is companies where the government, if it were to go away as a customer, would leave the company and solve it or bankrupt, can't even test the business model that we're proposing easily, even if they want to. And I bet you most of them want to. So the problem is, this is one of the areas, and it's one of the few areas, thank goodness, where our government has created a market environment that capitalism actually doesn't work. Because if you were Planet or Maxar, you would want to provide imagery from space to earth to entrepreneurs for $10 an image. But you can't because your government contracts. So what we've had to do is think a lot about how do we solve for that, first and foremost. How do we make the data effectively oversubscribable?

So there's a lot of people right now that would like a picture of Gaza. There's a lot of people with a lot of humanitarian applications that would like to help people even getting out of the region safely navigate a war zone, or thankfully at this minute, hopefully not a a war zone for a little time here how do you do that from space like how do you how do you really do that you you can only do it if you can afford and one of the ways you can afford it is you make the images not owned by the person who requested them but you make them available over creative commons or you make them available in a form

that is oversubscribable. And you see if you can find 100,000 more buyers that would be interested at a much lower price. Can you get to 10% of the price? We think we can. The other way that we think we can is that we're providing space operators those underlying safety features,

the maneuver plans, the conjunction analysis. Conjunction, again, when safety features, the maneuver plans, the conjunction analysis, conjunction. Again, when we're when we talk about the space domain, we use words like conjunction, because no one wants to say collision. And also because technically, we don't know, right, they could be doing RPO, they could be doing an intentional maneuver. But we provide the conjunction analysis for free, we provide the maneuver plans for free, we provide all the safety and underlying services on regulatory compliance for free. We provide the maneuver plans for free. We provide all the safety and underlying services on regulatory compliance for free. We provide the marketplace, right? I mean, we take a fee, but we provide the marketplace. What does that do? It solves for yet another weird

Uber-like challenge that is happening in space, which is inter-nation state regulatory compliance, which means in Uber terms, I push the button and I say, I need a ride. And you go, oh, okay, you're in Chinatown. The closest available driver is German, and he has to drive through an area where there's a toll road. And the toll road's owned by the Chinese, and you yourself are Italian. Can I actually make the ride work? Now, in Uber terms, yes. In space terms, no, not today. So we have to solve for this inter-nation state compliance issue, which

is very complicated and is one of the reasons why this domain, I think, hasn't been unlocked yet. Like, why in the past did this not work? It didn't work because you have to know at what resolution, at what frequency, of what capability is authorized by that German satellite for the consumer of the data, which is a Japanese citizen in Japan, what can they actually legally buy? And how do we sitting between them and a frequency licensing body who authorizes that communication to occur and a licensing body that licenses where the satellite can fly? So can you maneuver them through Chinatown through the toll highway? You have to know what resolution, what frequency, what capability, what buyer, what consumer, what provider, through what radio, at what location is it physically flying?

And you have to actually work that arbitrage out in real time, and you have to become the real-time platform to actually provide that capability so that no one gets in trouble, that you're doing the right thing, that you're providing that at the resolution that is acceptable. And the more that we do this, the lighter the regulation is going to be. The regulation is not going to tighten up as a result of what we're doing. It's just like what we've seen. I know Uber is not a great analogy. I know our PR team is going to stab me in the face for saying this, but all the problems that they've had scaling Uber are problems that we will face in space. And what I mean by that is if you've ever gone through an airport in the middle of nowhere, and we've all done it, and you push the button saying, I need an Uber, and they tell you to walk

two miles to a parking garage in the snow that's next to the airport because the union for the taxi cab has the curb locked up. You can't get in the cab or walk. That's the equivalent of what's happened in space right now. So we have to solve for that. And we also have to solve for other issues as we build a business. As we build kind of Uber of space data, we also have to solve for those problems that are surrounding which operators can actually drive with us, right? If your car is 20 years old, you can't drive with us, right? If you have a criminal history, you can't drive with us. There's a lot of things we have to do to keep people safe. And it's also, you know, it's also an obligation to the rider and to the driver that we keep them both safe. The drivers don't want to pick up a psycho.

And you don't want a driver that's like a knife-wielding type of crazy. You just want to get to where you're going safely from wherever you are. And they want the same thing. And they want to make a couple of bucks while they do it. wherever you are, and they want the same thing. And they want to make a couple of bucks while they do it. So there's all these problems we can solve that have to be solved if the entire space economy is going to work. And most of the companies I've seen, and this is not, you know,

a purely shameless privateer pitch. Most of the companies I've seen are working on point problems and point solutions. It's, I need this capability. I'm going to build this thing that does it. We are much more interested in making sure that all the capabilities available to everyone at an affordable price so that we can build an actual economy. And if we fail to do that, like we as an entire generation of people who want to use space capability

without owning the assets, we're going to be waiting a long, long time. So it's really important to me that that underlying fabric is there and that it's not something that we're taxing. We should not be building an economy off of charging people to not crash in space. We should not be charging people to simply operate in near earth safely i mean it's in all of our best interest to make sure that these things don't crash into each other or into people which that's the real fear coming soon is that we have enough assets up and we have enough we still are tracking more trash than we are live satellites at this point

you know that is a dangerous environment where you can only use prediction um to know what your probability is in a risk model that's not that's not great it's not not not ideal not ideal right i have a four-year-old daughter and she is space obsessed i don't know where she gets this, but she's space obsessed and you know, she can, she can identify all the stages on, on pretty much every rocket since Saturn five. And that's not really a huge challenge, but I've met adults that can't do it. And she, you know, she always is talking about how she wants to go to space. She wants to go to the moon very specifically. She's very curious about going to the moon.

And she's told me that the mommy and me can come with her and she's going to fly the rocket. And I totally believe it. I really believe this is, it will be her generation that actually has that chance, but we can't screw it up. So we have to, we have to make this useful and I wouldn't let her go right now.

Right. If she, if she said, I want to go tomorrow, not just because she's four, but I wouldn't let her go right now, right? If she said, I want to go tomorrow, not just because she's four. But I wouldn't let her go right now because the dangers of doing that are much more significant than we on earth give them credit for because our world looks like a very big place. But we're like the head of a needle, right? It's a very small domain and the the issue in space is that where we fly things are like where we drive our cars so they're highway systems in space and and guess what there's a lot more people in la than there are in the middle of, you know, you name it in the snow right now, America, right? It's, it's, there's a lot more demand where they're interesting things to look at and where there's opportunity that's economic. So our space assets do the same thing. We fly our

satellites at inclinations over the globe where there's interesting stuff to look at earth. They're not looking outward. Most of them, the vast majority, are looking at us on planet Earth. So that means you have some really congested highways, and you have some highways that have no cars in them. There's the interstate highway system, and it's just like, oh yeah, I'm going to Nebraska.

All the major debris incidents were either in the weather satellite, sun synchronous band, or in the one that crosses the ISS's path at some point. It's not a complete coincidence that those are the cases. either in the weather satellite, sun synchronous band, or in the one that crosses the ISS path at some point, you know, it's not, it's not a complete coincidence that those are the cases. Well,

and I mean, you know, we've all seen the Chris Hatfield interviews and I had the privilege of meeting him this, this, this year. And, um,

you know, when you hear somebody that spent as many days on the ISS and as much time in space, I mean, Chris has probably spent more time in space than he has on earth at this point. I mean, it's just, okay, not quite that much. But I mean, he spent a lot of time in space. When you hear, you know, Chris talk about those little pings and those little noises that he heard when he first boarded the ISS and how he thought, oh, that's really interesting. You know, it must be the whole of the space station kind of compressing or, you

know, contracting and moving around. No, it's little fragments of debris hitting the whole of the space station kind of compressing or contracting and moving around. No, it's little fragments of debris hitting the skin of your space vehicle. You know, there's a reason why astronauts… You have to have a certain psychological profile that says, yeah, I'm fine with that. It's going to be okay. But we don't talk about it, and we don't talk about the future of space travel, right? I mean, we just had our space flight for Pono a week ago, where we've put up this compute and autopilot kind of test system with the orbit, a partner of ours in Italy. You know, when it's technology, if it gets hit, it gets hit, right? It would be like your car

in traffic without a person in it. Okay. If I park my car in the parking lot and somebody dings the door, eh, okay, whatever. Nobody's hurt. It's okay. But in space, you look at our flight from a week ago, you look how short that flight was, right, in terms of getting us from the ground on a Falcon 9

to our operating altitude, being dispensed, heading to where we're going, where we're going to be operating for some time. You're talking about a few minutes, right? Just a few minutes. So let's think about that. The world is turning below those assets, or those assets are effectively turning above the Earth at this seven-plus kilometers a second.

The future of transportation is going to be boarding that ride on that spacex rocket and knowing you can be anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes reliably safely cheaply um and we're talking enough minutes that there won't be a bathroom break right it's like oh we're in space we're landing um So this is coming very, very soon, but the amount of debris in these popular, like you said, sun synchronous, stuff that crosses the ISS, stuff in that four to 600 kilometer band of things above her

at those inclinations that are most interesting. What does it take to pierce the Whipple shield on the space station and effectively be a catastrophic event, kill everybody on board. It only takes something in the size of a BB to survive the Whipple shield. The Whipple shield's like, it's like Kevlar and aluminum.

It's like, it's like you put a Coke can around the space station and then you just leave a gap and whatever hits the first skin of the coke can kind of we hope breaks up and slows down before it hits the next piece which is the hole the space station's like super light it's super fragile it doesn't take much and we you know oh the whipple shield looks like um it looks like somebody took a bottle of nail polish and went over the outside of it thousands of times

because the ding log is in the hundreds. So you've already had hundreds of things that we know of and have cataloged the dings with a number on the whole of the space station. Just imagine one was a little bit larger. And then we do things as nation states that are just horrible.

I was in Dubai in November of 21 for the air and space show when the Russians blew up Cosmos 1408. One, the Ross Cosmos guys were also at the space show with me November 21. And I guarantee you that the ross cosmos cosmonauts had no idea that their government was going to blow up a dead satellite and put other cosmonauts who were aboard the space station at the time in in peril um and risk of peril and it was pretty horrible i mean you watched the whole international kind of

press corps chasing these these cosmonauts around the thing as if they had something to do with this right it's like i was born and you know it's like okay well wherever they were born it doesn't have anything to do with how they feel or what they do they're scientists right they're not war fighters they're cosmonauts um but you know i can only imagine and this is also a lesson in propaganda right so not to go down a giant rabbit hole i know i already have but you know the russian press corps put out a statement within hours of the anti-satellite you know they i mean calling it a test is almost comical they blew up something in space using a missile from above. This is my soapbox I had got on. I feel like the ASAT terminology is a pretty weak one for, or ASAT test is a pretty weak terminology for the situation that happened.

We washed down everything, right? If there was dating in space, we would call it having coffee, right? It would just be like, it's not really, it's not what you think. But I mean, I tried to put myself, myself in the, you know, in the head of those astronauts and cosmos. We had seven people on board that day on station. We didn't, we have a space fence, right? We love our marketing.

So there's a space fence. We, and we've, we're tracking the space station at all all times and privateer is actually under contract with the space station when you go to wayfinder and you go to iss tracker we work with the space station and if you go to the international space station national labs and do station tracker you're using our software looking at the station telling you what's going on on board who's on board what are they doing what's fun on on board, who's on board, what are they doing, what's fun. We have a great relationship. I can only imagine that day, because all we could tell these guys was, this has happened, and you're at risk. How much risk? We don't know. Okay, that's comforting. What should we do? Well, you know, ISS, when vehicles are docked at ISS, we always have enough vehicles to make sure everyone could safely exit the station, right?

So you got seven people on board. You have like two four-seat cars docked with it, kind of. And it's generally like Crew Dragon and Soyuz or something like that. And that day it actually was. It was Crew Dragon and Soyuz. Crew Dragon and Soyuz or something like that. And that day it actually was. It was Crew Dragon and Soyuz. So we tell them, basically,

hey, look, until we figure this out, because we don't know what's going on, would you please get your flight suits on, climb into your cars, your escape vehicles, close the doors, pressurize, or normalize, and just wait

for the debris field to go flying by this is like this is george clooney sandra bullock gravity except for totally unknown right like we don't even know what's going to happen we just something's going to happen would you just would you just go do that so i guarantee you on board okay i don't guarantee you but in my mind on board these astronauts and cosmods you know the astronauts look at the cosmods and go wtf and the cosmods go dude we didn't know and they all take a shot of vodka and they climb into their space vehicles and they close the doors and i

guarantee you because soyuz is like a 1991 honda civic and crew dragons like a Tesla, right? I guarantee you with some level of probability that the Cosmolots had to go to Soyuz and everybody else got to go to Crew Dragon. Because in that moment, it's like, hey, if we're going home, you're taking the Honda Civic, right? Like you're not sharing a ride in the Tesla with us, even if we have an empty seat. So, but we didn't have them do this just once. We had them do this every hour because it takes some time.

You got to put your suit on, go and be, and then while the Russians were issuing propaganda that said everything, and the statement was absolutely bizarre. Situation green. All systems are normal. Everything everything is fine this is like the iraqi misinformation minister when we were moving into iraq it's like they are not here the pig dogs are not around me and then all of a sudden it's like the feed gets cut off because he's being

chased out of the airport um this was like similar to what statements were getting issued everything is green everything is not green when you're asking your rat your astronauts your cosmonauts and space stations to sleep in their cars worried and why they're only sleeping in their car they had just as much risk being in the car it was volume it was just probability right is it going to hit the car is it going to hit the house well we think it's maybe it'll hit the house. If it hits the car, they're dead, but it hits the house.

They're going home. Yeah. Just, it's probabilistic like the rest of it. Yeah. So, I mean, this is very much like the video that you maybe didn't fully intend to get

captured by space media and think that this is the, like, this clearly the stuff that keeps you guys up at night right so how does it connect to you know the other half of privateer if there's another half or maybe it's it's kind of all bundled in the same thing but maybe you can talk a little bit about the hardware that's up there now and some of the ideas that you've got working there and how it connects to both both parts of the storyline that we've told so far?

Well, I think the thing that we acknowledged when we started the company, and this does connect to space safety and accessibility and traffic management, you have to find a way to give those things away. You can't charge people for sitting at red lights. So how do you do that? How do you give away a capability? You clearly should give away. But there were entire companies trying to build an industry around space safety and situational awareness. And we didn't want to be amongst them.

And I mean no offense to them because they have to make money to survive as commercial businesses. But I don't believe it's a commercial market. And, you know, now this would normally be like saying, I don't believe that the boogeyman exists. But in space situational awareness, if you took the total combined revenue of those companies who are in that domain, and I truly, they're wonderful people, right? I'm not picking on them.

If you took the total revenue of all of those companies, and there's about eight of them that are well-known space situation awareness companies, the combined revenue of the eight of them is under $100 million. That's not an industry. That's Jeff Bezos' house, right? This is not an industry where you can build a market that will satisfy investors and a positive return and fulfill your mission. So we acknowledged very early that we wanted to do these things, that we had the capability to do it, but it does cost money. So we had to make sure that we had a business model that we really believed would work where we could give those things away.

Now, unfortunately, for some of the companies that have to sell them, we look like an enemy because we're giving them away. But we have to give them away. I mean, can you imagine getting an Uber that doesn't have navigation? You know, an Uber builds their own their own nav, right? I mean, you can still use Google Maps as a driver, you can still use Waze as a driver, you still have other map kits that you can use but uber has a default one and they spend a fortune building it and it's pretty good as i understand i've never used it but i've heard it's pretty good you need to have that pretty good navigation for all your space objects and our governments and our nations have we've argued back and forth using words that i think are absolutely insane. We use words for tracking things in space like exquisite.

We have an exquisite observation. No, we don't. We saw something. We sensed something. We detected something. And when we did, we were probably right. But when we predicted it, we're almost always wrong. So this is an unusual situation.

Most of the time on Earth, when we sense something and we monitor it, we can predict it pretty well. Not in space. And there are bureaucratic reasons that we have to solve for. So we realized if you're going to be in the middle of this, you have to be connected to the space operators. You have to have the benefit of their transponders. You have to know where they think they are. You have to know where all the other objects are. You have to build a way for people

to share that data relevantly and in a timely manner. And I think we're doing that with Wayfinder today. The launch that we just did with Pono is hugely critical to the future of space because we're using

consumer hardware in the space domain. Now, we have designed it. We've built it. We've spaceflight certified it. We've qualified it. We've put it up with a partner. It's on orbit now saying hello. Nothing bad has happened yet.

Knock, knock on, knock on wood. And we don't think anything bad will happen, right? That could be a little naive of us, but we're, we're being pretty optimistic here.

If this plays out, what it means is that every satellite that is being built going forward will have the benefit of our technology and these advancements at no additional cost. If you agree that your new self-driving Tesla can drive Uber for us for a little while while you're at work, we'll give you effectively the car or the autopilot system for free because it's benefiting us and it's benefiting you. And that's a fair exchange. So we're doing that with hosted payload that you're flying now is the intention is that that would be a hosted payload on,

on others, other satellites as well. That plays into this old network effect. Absolutely right. And it'll be owned by those people who want it. So we'll give away the design files, the assembly instructions. We'll give away the ability for any space customer

in any nation state that can legally have it, the capability to have it. And they can connect to our network and we'll help make them more money, keep them safe, and provide a much wider network of potential customers to them. I suspect we're going to see Lyft and a whole bunch of other things

chasing us down the road here in terms of similar business models. They haven't come about yet, which is weird to be first. I always expect that there's someone else that's doing exactly what we're doing. We just don't know they exist yet. I hope so, or it means that we're really crazy. So that's all good. And on the compute side, the compute portion of that, so if you exclude the autopilot, the compute side, we've got about 10 times the compute of the nearest available compute systems for space at one-tenth the price. So you get 10 times the compute for a tenth the price. And that's not a price to us.

That's a price just to buy the components and have systems integrators stitch them in your satellite, right? So we want to make that so pervasive that there's a space mesh network of compute, and it doesn't matter who owns it, right? And this is a very different take on things, right? I mean, this is what I mean by different take on things right i mean this is um what i mean by different take on things is that right now if you're hosted on aws or you're hosted on azure

no one ever tells you hey if you have some computers at home they can become servers for amazon right like you can just yeah that's called a botnet and it's bad it's exactly it's bad. This is, this is kind of closer to the equivalent of like having kind of Bitcoin mining at home, but now you can put it on your satellite. So when your satellite's not, not doing anything for you, it can still do compute for other people. And what it does for us on earth is it means that we get,

we get real time actionable things faster. So, I mean, wouldn't it be interesting if rather than predicting what a storm is going to do when it hits the coast of Florida, knowing almost in real time what is unfolding and where and how to get people to safety. You know, we just went through the, I say just went through, we're still really struggling in Maui. We're headquartered in maui hawaii after the maui wildfires and during the maui wildfires we did everything we could and the guys at spacex were wonderful to work with um to provide a lot of starlink and communications to people on the west side we we did as much as we possibly could we

we weren't paid to do it We weren't paid to do it. We weren't contracted to do it. We just did it because they're our neighbors. And there were a lot of people living in parks and having the worst moments of their life and a lot of people that lost their lives. As soon as we got involved in that, we started to meet fire crews

that didn't know where to put water. That's a bizarre situation when you have people who are in the fire department. Many of them had flown in to volunteer like a day after the fire. We had volunteers just landing, which was great. People have huge hearts. And then they're asking, where do I go? What do I do? And the fire departments were using some space-based data.

They were using multispectral that was a day old. We're talking about a fire moving at like wind gusts were 80 knots the day of the fire. So all of a sudden you have four to six giant wildfires on a small island. I mean, my house, which is where I'm sitting right now, because I'm on the way to office this morning, is about a 20-mile drive to my office in Maui. It's about eight miles in a straight line if I could just fly there. A fire on, and we're on the south side of the island, so our home is in what they consider kind of upcountry Maui, and our office is in south Maui. It's in Kihei. It's in the, basically there's a

research and tech park here where we have our headquarters. A fire that same night that Lahaina was burning broke out near my home. My neighbor's fence got fired. And that fire evacuated our neighborhood and also evacuated our office eight miles away. It burned in a straight line so quickly that both were evacuated. And we were very, very, very lucky. But the moral of the story is I started asking everyone that we work with on the military side, and we have friends and contracts

and research and development agreements with Space Force and stuff like that. And they have assets that certainly have multispectral capability. I'm guessing. Hey, could we get high-resolution multispectral data, like the type of thing where you can see a backyard barbecue every 45 minutes instead of this junk where you have to wait to see an image a day old that did a city block burn?

Every one I spoke with and, and they all have some significant rank said, yeah, of course, like we need to do that. Great. How do we do it? Like nobody, nobody knew, nobody knew how to unclassify or declassify an image actively. So I started, I'm a professional beggar. So I just kept on annoying people. I kept going back. Okay. I don't need the image. Can you just give me the GPS location of a hotspot? So we can share it with fire teams on the ground at high frequency. Give it to me every hour and a

half. That would be really helpful. We don't know how to do that because the drive data is classified. There's no way an enemy can unpack what our capability is if you just give me a pin drop on a map. There's no way. Everyone I spoke with wanted to do the right thing, and none of us knew how to do the right thing and i will tell you some of our friends like the the eight you know the 15th space wing is headquartered on maui the air force has got a lot of assets here national guard's got a lot of assets here there's a lot of really good people who have their hearts absolutely in the right place like this is not a conspiracy theory they were not people you know wringing their hands going, oh, good, our neighbors are going to be hurt.

We live here. Doesn't the space laser storyline with that image out of Vandenberg? I mean, I can tell you, we did many tens of transport supply trips to the West side. And we ended up with 40 Starlinks running on the West side of which 10 of them we had on rented pickup trucks and duct tape together to provide people charging stations and freezers and internet access. And that was just our company and companies next door volunteering to band together, to hooey up with us, partner up and like, let's, let's go and help. Man, the stories of people on the west side

and what they went through especially you know because we we were each other's first responders right and i don't mean that as a dig against any of the amazing people mali fire department they lost an entire an entire engine company was lost like that they were surrounded by fire. The guys were lucky to make it out with their lives. They lost a lot of their equipment in the fire. Everyone was trying to do the right thing. If there was some type of Mr. Burns-type character involved,

they certainly were not someone who lived on this island or cared. involved. They certainly were not someone who lived on this island or cared. And the people on the West side that are, they are all a part of our extended family. I mean, we take care of each other. Man, the number of what we saw, and I don't want to go too far from the space piece of this, what we saw was neighbors helping neighbors, neighborhoods, even neighborhoods without power, without water, without any form of communication. Neighbors got together, rolled up their garage doors and set up fulfillment centers in their front yard. And then they patrolled them and neighbors got everything they had out of their homes and shared it on tables and said, if anyone needs anything, we are not leaving, right? Come here. We're going to help each other. We started referring to these, even I say we, everyone on the island started referring to these in really loving terms

as like Kanaka Costco's, just kind of Kanaka is kind of the word for native hawaiian um but they were better run than any of the federal things that came later because we kept them running uh as a matter of fact last weekend and the fires broke out on like the 8th of august last weekend was the weekend where we have pulled back almost all of our starlink communications to the west side we finally have communications back and power back to most of the West side. Well, Hyena doesn't exist anymore. Could have we known anything using space-based capability that could have prevented the fire? I mean, that's Monday morning quarterbacking,

but we certainly would have known things that would have helped us contain the fire. Could have that saved lives? I don't know. Could have it saved property certainly could have saved property there is no doubt in my mind it could have saved a lot of property and you know and it could have given us a perspective that would have been a perspective where people would have known how to help um so is this the case where you're talking about like the fact that there weren't because of the fact fact that the imagery market is the way it is in terms of the players involved and the agreements that have been signed and the nature of imagery that there was nobody who knew that they could say yes to more real-time imagery, even if they knew they were coming off satellites minutes ago. There was just not the chain of agreements or decision makers that could get that to people that actually use need to use it

that's right and and in many cases it's more than one domain right would it be nice to see the pictures well no i mean the right word's not nice but would it be needed yeah i mean the images would have been great if you could see to the ground with all that smoke. Right. Do you need the multispectral? You can actually see the hot spots. That's right. So, you know, had Albedo had a vehicle up at the time of the Maui wildfires and could have they provided like 10 centimeter, 15 centimeter equivalent GSD multispectral. Whoo.

Game changer. Right. Are there people who have resolution similar to Albedo for multi-spectral in space today yes were any of them capable of sharing that with us no are there some of them that actually have those assets over our head because you know hey if you go to wayfinder at privateer all of the data you see on that thing that looks like Google Maps of space, always zoom in, right? You can get to Earth. All of those satellites and their positions are alive.

There's no delay. So we knew who was looking at this that had the capability and who couldn't share it. So what does that teach us? Like, what is the thing that my heart took away from this? We need, if we're on the ground and you're being hurt and I can intervene and help you, I'm not just ethically, if not morally obligated to step in. It's just a human.

I'm not going to let you get hurt if I can help you. I think we're all human. We don't want to let you get hurt if I can help you. Right? That's, I think, we're all human. Right? We want to, we don't want to see someone get hurt. So guess what? We create laws that just make that a legal requirement. So it just removes one more thought process. Like, should I do it?

I'm obligated to do it. Right? There's a Good Samaritan Act that says if I can intervene, I must intervene. We don't have a Good Samaritan Act in space. Right? We don't have a good Samaritan Act in space, right? We don't have a good Samaritan Act for military. But I would argue for space, we should. We should absolutely implement a good Samaritan Act that says, hey, if you see a wildfire and you can help and you don't, shame on you.

You should. You must help. And we'll figure out how people get paid later. Who gives a shit about that? You've got to help. And if it's about refugees, if it's about escaping or fleeing a war zone with your kids, refugees, if it's about escaping or fleeing a war zone with your kids, if you can provide a safe passage or a route that is safer than where refugees are walking and you can see it from space and you don't give them a safe path out, what type of person are you, right?

Who would want to work with that? I mean, companies are people, right? Who would want to work with that type of company? that i mean companies are people right who would want to work with that type of company so we have to create this you know this this good samaritan act and we have to find a way to enforce it because you know watching people suffer from a space perspective and doing nothing when we could do something it's just disgusting when we could do something it's just disgusting and it's heartbreaking the thing that i struggle with is then if that's sort of the if if we know that the space market as it is right now for and i don't want to keep too long so maybe this is a good one to to land the ending on

um is the is it kind of privateers uh i don't know, I wouldn't say like mission statement, or maybe it's just kind of the mindset that privateers in is that the path of least resistance from where we are today to the case where there's a wildfire going on and people can access to data that is as real time as possible and actionable. that the path of least resistance is to build that network, routing around all the regulatory issues rather than the uphill battle of like trying to change military contracting and government intelligence data and that that side is would be a longer road than let's build a network with a data access layer that would make this possible? Yeah, I think so. Right. I mean, that's our thesis. Our thesis is you have to do both. I mean, ultimately, we have to make regulation that is fair and equitable and accessible to everyone, or at least to all friendly people.

And what I mean by all friendly people is people who we acknowledge are not using this to do bad things. And that's a hard one. But, you know, you have to try. You have to try. You won't always get hard one, but you have to try. You have to try. You won't always get it right, but you have to try. We have to create those rules,

those common rules, so that not only can we enable the data to the people that need it to solve for these types of missions, it's going to be ESG. It's going to be climate change. It's going to be supply chain. It's going to be insurance.

It's going to be agriculture. It's going to be banking. It's going to be transportation. It's going to be ESG. It's going to be climate change. It's going to be supply chain. It's going to be insurance. It's going to be agriculture. It's going to be banking. It's going to be transportation. It's going to be connected to all these industries on the ground and many, many more. You know, minerals, mining, oil and gas, energy. The amount of things that we can see, sense, and detect from space are vast. And those capabilities are coming now to these applications that will help us do better things on planet Earth, we have to create the systems to actually know how to do that within everyone's laws and regulations today.

And we have to use that as a lever to update the laws and regulations to not get even more strict, but to actually be at a baseline where we all agree that, yeah, it's pretty fair. Most people are going to do good things. There'll be a few random outliers, but we're not going to make a domain that used to be a domain for spying a domain for spying in the future. It's going to be a domain to help us do good things. How do we do it?

And this is one way to get started. how do we do it? And, you know, this is, this is one way to get started. Pono, Pono is,

is a Hawaiian word that, well, if you, if you do it on the Google dictionary, it kind of says like, you know, do what's right. Do the Pono thing,

right. To be Pono is to be righteous, to be, to be, I mean, to be fair, right. In a re in reality, to be Pono,

Pono is like Hawaiian karma. So we named the satellite after, in a weird way, karma, and trying to just do the right thing and be fair. And, you know, Hawaii has never brought a death weapon into the world, right? We're not going to start now. So this is, and if the Maui wildfires taught me one thing, and it connects to space and it connects to real people, it's that when people come and visit Hawaii, there are words we use in passing that have become cliche because of Disneyama on our playlist, but at a certain point, people use words like aloha, like ohana, like kuleana, like tumalama. They use these words in passing,

but they still mean something here. They mean something deeply and nuanced different than they do in popular culture on a t-shirt. And when people were hurting and people are still hurting, we still have a lot of people living in hotels and, and a lot of people not knowing where they're going to be next month. And Christmas is here and the holidays are upon us. I mean, we're more than halfway through Hanukkah, right?

It's, it's, it's what, where are we? Those words go back to their original meanings and they're, they're pretty beautiful, right? We have, we have all of these things that I really believe you don't want to appropriate Hawaiian culture, but there's some good parts that I I'd like to think that Privateer is working within Hawaii to bring those good things. Just like, you know, we named our software Wayfinder right after the Hawaiian wayfinding tradition. Many of these things are alive and well. And I'd like to think, you know, we're never going to see a space death weapon or

a negative technology come out of Hawaii. We haven't seen it yet. I don't think we're going to see it now. I hope not. But, yeah, we have to work within the system, and then we have to change the system, right? We have to be a change agent for some good things to come. And my goal is, you know, in the next few years here, that all of these space capabilities, whatever they are, imagery, synthetic aperture radar, multispectral, can become available very readily and very cheaply

to anybody who's going to use them to do some good things. And those good things obviously involve continuing to help companies make money and make more money, get better profits and do other things like that. But it's also about these types of things

that we're talking about that are, these are positive byproducts, right? Because if you can do that, you can help people understand where to put water in a fire, how to get out of risk, how to grow their lives and their families better. And with climate change,

I mean, Al Gore, why couldn't have you stopped after you invented the internet? You were ahead, right? Sorry, Al Gore, why couldn't have you stopped after you invented the internet? You were ahead, right? Sorry, Al. But on the topic of climate change, space technology is probably going to be the number one tool in helping us undo the damage we've done to this planet. And you can argue about what percentage and whatever. It doesn't matter.

Just matters that we work together to solve the problem that is on our doorstep. I'm not about blamestorming where it came about from. We have it now, right? It's here. It's been here for a long time. How do we fix it together? We're going to use space. We're going to use that holistic perspective of the planet Earth to begin to repair the damage. And it's going to be one step at a time we didn't screw up planet earth all at once we did

it one small step at a time we can start to fix it one small step at a time um but we need to think about these things i think in that way so that we can we can do something good all right and it's uh and and yeah we still have to make money while we do it, but we don't have to make an extortive amount of money to provide a capability that we would all like to have. I'd much rather see some good stuff come about. And heck, I mean, come on, Steve Wozniak's our co-founder. Woz doesn't need to make another penny. I think he's fine. I love Steve to death.

He is the most brilliant engineer. He's my best friend. He's an absolute crazy person in all the good ways. He's kind of a corporate conscience, I think, for Apple. He probably annoys them to death. But it's a good thing because it means that those of us that still buy Apple products go, I think I trust what he said because we know he has no filter and he's going to tell us what he thinks. That's for sure.

trust what he said because we know he has no filter and he's going to tell us what he thinks, you know? So I think we need that perspective on space and I'm, I'm really honored and privileged that I get to work with the team that I get to work with because I know none of them are wringing their hands going, you know, we could have made another $10 during the Mali. Well,

that's just, it's, that is not, it's not a thing. Yeah. No, like it just, it's, that is not, it's not a thing. Yeah. No, like it just, it just,

it shouldn't. So, and I think that's true for most of space, right? I think for the most part, people's hearts are in the right place because it is a domain for scientists. It's not a domain for,

you know, traditionally it's not been a domain for war fighters. Right. Um, so I, I like to think everybody's got their heart in the right place, but I, I hope that this is one way we can begin

to get space technology into the hands of everyday people and then DoorDash from space is coming right? You said Pokemon Go so I can't wait to see which ones of those are on the space station that'll be a whole thing There are three Pikachu on station right now

I mean You gotta get them you gotta go up there and get it exactly yeah we gotta talk to bo about that bo could probably hook us up you know he's always when you point the app at the space station there's one right there no and people never look alex thanks so much for hanging out this was a thank you so much a wide-ranging conversation that i very much enjoyed so hopefully we can uh have you guys back when you when you know you've got more hardware heading to space and follow along with the storyline more frequently but uh if people have not checked out privateer do you have anywhere in particular you'd like to point them to

poke around maybe play with wayfinder i mean i'll be selfish i would say go to wayfinder.privateer.com and always zoom in so no matter what shortcut you use, no matter what you look at, because you're going to see all the satellites flying over your head, zoom in. And as you do, you know, you'll see risk for collisions, you'll see things on the ground, you'll see other things. But yeah, definitely, I would go to wayfinder.privateer.com or mission.privateer.com, which that's more aspirational and, you know, why do we feel these ways? But no, thank you so much, Anthony. Really appreciate it. Thanks again to Alex for coming on the show. That definitely went some places. And I had a great time chatting with him.

So hopefully you enjoyed hearing him and, you know, hearing about what makes them tick and what they're working on with privateer. A lot of questions that I'm sure we'll follow up on in the future as they move through their roadmap. So for now, if you enjoyed this show, if you like what I'm doing here, if you want more of it, head over to manage your cutoff.com slash support and join in the 863 people who are supporting managed cutoff every single month. They are the people that make this thing keep going. I'm 100% listener supported. So if you like what I'm doing, head over there to support. Like these 36 executive producers who made this episode

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