Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: Lies, Damned Lies, and Space Data

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

The space sector is data-rich but insight-poor. Jack Kuhr, head of research at Payload Space, joins the show to unpack how business, budgeting, and performance data—not spacecraft science—can shape investments, drive growth, and influence policy. Is there a data crisis in the space industry? What gets measured, what gets missed, and how does that shape the decisions we make about space? Kuhr shares his approach to surfacing the real story behind the numbers—and why clarity, context, and narratives matter. Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/lies-and-space-dataSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello and welcome to the Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Casey Dreier, the chief of space policy here at the Planetary Society. Welcome to this month. I usually try to keep these episodes these days relatively independent of external events just to make them more, you know, listenable in the future. But I just got back from our 2025 day of action. This is early April when I'm recording this. The day of action, for those of you who are unaware,

is the Planetary Society's big congressional visits day to Washington, D.C. And this year, obviously a lot going on in policy, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of troubles potentially facing NASA and NASA science. We had 105 members of the Planetary Society come from all over the country on their own dime. Most of them having no direct connection

to planetary science, to space exploration. They just love it, right? They are just members of the public. They came to Washington, DC and they advocated. We did hundreds of meetings in Congress advocating for space science and the values behind exploration and discovery science and all the big things that we care about here at the Planetary Society.

Some of them are listeners of this podcast and I just will say it's always a pleasure and was a pleasure to meet so many motivated and passionate individuals. It's really just a value to me personally, and it's just always inspiring to me and my colleagues here at the Planetary Society to meet our members. Something else I want to mention this week, first week of April here for Planetary Radio, the other show that we do, the weekly show,

that this is an edition of. We have a special live taping of Planetary Radio and Planetary Radio Space Policy Edition with me in Washington, DC after the day of action in front of a crowd of nearly 500 people. It was really fun. My colleague, Sarah Al-Ahmed, who's the host of Planetary Radio,

did a great job talking about space science with our guests from APL and Bill Nye. And then I was able to host two sitting members of Congress, Judy Chu, the co-chair of the Planetary Science Caucus, and George Whitesides, recently elected to California's 27th district and previously had worked at NASA. I'd say maybe one of the very few members of Congress

who have that career path. That show will be on our main feed in Planetary Radio. I urge you to check that out. It was again, really fun to do that show. And I wanna thank Sarah and the Bloomberg Center in Washington, DC, and again, all of the members of the Planetary Society and supporters who came out for the day of action and really just put themselves out there

advocating for space. It's just such an exciting and again inspiring thing to see. And again, a pleasure to meet you planetary society members, really neat people. They just love meeting you all. Now, this month, going back to our interview, our big picture, I'm a data guy, which is always funny. I think I have a bifurcated approach to space that I have a very strong, a lot of you heard me on this show

talking about the importance of the right brain aspect of talking about exploration, right? The experiential, the feelings, the real reasons, right? That we do space. But man, am I also a left brain data guy. And I love counting numbers. I love seeing and measuring and things where things go in terms of NASA's funding and history. From again, from a very practical sense, you know, the classic phrase, no bucks, no Buck Rogers.

But at the end of the day, dollars can only be spent once. And tracking where dollars go tells you the ultimate priorities of any sort of institution about what their values are and how they spend it. Despite rhetoric and frequently discreet and different from what the rhetoric is. Words are free, dollars cost money. So again, I'm a data guy who again loves the the right brain side as well. And for this month, I reached out to another data guy, Jack Core, who is the director of research at Payload Space. I'd say one of the great new or relatively new online newsletters and reporting outfits that cover particularly commercial space business news that I really recommend checking out at Payload.Space.

Jack Core does their data stuff. Jack Kaur does their data stuff. I first noticed the work that he was doing when a few years ago, I saw an article from Payload that showed the overall revenue breakdown of SpaceX itself. Now this is notable because SpaceX is a privately traded, it's a privately held, privately traded company. They have no fiduciary responsibility to share their revenue or publish this stuff publicly because they are not a publicly traded company. And they're certainly not a government company and government organization like NASA.

So to be able to talk about this and to put these numbers together was actually quite novel and fascinating. And the way that Jack did this was by basically collating a bunch of known data, making reasonable assumptions, doing some basic arithmetic, and really getting into the ballpark, I'd say, of what the breakdown and the sources of revenue and the number from launches and from cost of rockets, but also from Starlink and other sources of revenue, what SpaceX is working with. That kind of stuff is, oddly enough, I think,

vanishingly rare in this business of space exploration. There is often, I would argue, a disconnect between the ambition and hopes of a lot of people either in space or, I'd say, even particularly ancillary to space who are interested in these kind of activities and the actual hard data that shows how this will work, either in a financial sense or a funding sense or ultimate outcome sense. Jack is one of those people who is putting this data out there

and not just putting it out there, he is putting it out there in a way that's readable and understandable and engaging, which is another, again, I think, critical aspect of how you share this stuff. Jack is going to join me on the show this month to talk about how he sees the role of data in the space business, whether we have a data gap, whether we're data poor or data rich, how we deal with outliers, how we share and connect and present data to help provide a narrative without giving too much overt control

over what we want people to see, but just putting the data out there for people to make their own conclusions. This conversation was great. I really recommend you listen to it. But before that, I just make one quick plug to Planetary Society, this organization that produces this show, Planetary Radio, and does all the other great outreach, site

tech development, and other projects that we do here at the organization. It's a member-based nonprofit. Anyone can become a member, four bucks a month at planetary.org slash join. We don't take government money and we don't have any big corporate aerospace sponsors. That means we're independent. That means we can talk about and focus on things that are truly interesting and exciting to us about space. You hear that in the show all the time. Now is the time to join as a member or donate. This happens to also be the period where we are fundraising for advocacy and policy my program here at the Planetary Society That enables me and my colleague Jack Coralli to work in Washington DC every single day

Providing and presenting this perspective of the value of space exploration the value of space science of planetary defense and the search for life Things that are just generally not covered by other organizations. I truly believe that the Planetary Society provides a unique role and a unique perspective in the policy arena that if we don't do it, no one else will. If you like what you hear, if you like what we do, even if you couldn't make it to the day of action this year, consider joining or donating to the Planetary Society at planetary.org slash join or planetary.org slash donate. And now Jack core. Jack core, thank you for joining me today in the space policy edition. Yeah, thanks for having me. I will just go right out and say it.

Do you think the space industry has a data problem? I think it has a lot of data. There's a lot of data in this industry. So we have, you know, primarily still, we talk a lot about commercial space, but the government provides a lot of the funding, the contracts, the money in this industry, and they are obligated to be open about that. We do have a lot of space companies that are now publicly traded. So we get quarterly data from that. So I would say I would say and honestly, I do think a lot of the non publicly traded companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin, smaller businesses are pretty open with their like, you know, kind of this build in the open concept and are willing to provide information even if it's not required.

So I would say there's not, there is, we don't have a data problem, but I think one of my goals and I would say yours as well, and that's why I think we probably would get along quite well because we're both two people who are passionate about that is taking all the data in the industry, compiling it, making it digestible and being able to actually tell a story from it. That I think is a really important point. And just from my experience, when I put together the Apollo spending history, I was almost shocked. I did this a few years ago. So it was like 50 years after Apollo started or landed.

And no one had actually done a detailed analysis of it. The data that everyone had been referencing, I traced it back to one publication from the mid 1970s that was riddled with errors that no one had ever looked at again. Why do you think, you know, for such an important or at least visible industry and activity of government, why do you think there's so few people or efforts to compile and accurately represent this data and present it in a way that people can can actively make decisions

with? Yeah, I mean, I think the industry is old, going back to the Apollo days, but it really wasn't until you could probably start with 2015, but really the 2020s when it became a commercial industry where there was enough, you know, perhaps money flowing in where there can be a space industry publication like Payload or what you guys do at Planetary Society. So we think it's this huge industry, but it's still like a burgeoning field that most people don't really know about and most people haven't had the time to really dig through it.

I've always been curious, how long did that take you to put together that Apollo, you know, massive spreadsheet of funding that... Well, I had to go to NASA's historical archives and, you know, get, you know, elbow deep in, you know, variety of old boxes and to... And just kind of look through it. I mean, I spent probably a full day, at least, just seeking out the data and then trying to interpret it and compile it and put it all together and double check and validate where those were. A lot of the data was self-referential.

That's what you see, this kind of someone, NASA publishes it somewhere and then people just start referencing that and then they lose the source to that and then you don't know where this data is coming from anymore. So, I was almost, and then trying to reconcile it with other, you know, publicized sources of it. I mean, it took a couple of months. And again, it took that effort just to go through the archives. And frankly, I didn't even know if I'd find anything there.

And perhaps one of the most important documents that I found there that I had never seen anywhere else or any congressional archives was just the breakouts of, you know, after Apollo 11, just what NASA spent on not just the entire program, but the data and tracking the construction of facilities, the overhead, all these things that are really relevant to it, but for some reason, we're just never carried forward. So the other thing I think from that I learned too, was that it's not like NASA itself had a secret collection of this data themselves. I found a memo basically from an effort done internally within NASA 20 years earlier saying

we have no idea. It's basically the same problem that I was having. And I wonder, this kind of goes back, you know, you talk about this industry being relatively new. That's a good point in that it's intersecting with finance and money for the first time beyond just a government program. Do you think that fundamentally changes the relationship in that you worked in finance before working as a payload, as a reporter? This is, I imagine they're relatively, they want to know this data in order to make wise

investments. And is that maybe the shift too, that once private money started really coming into play there is a more motivation to Understand some of these fundamentals and financials. Yeah, I think that's a really good point because it is you know when when it's siloed within government You know, the stakeholders are all tax payers But you're not gonna have a taxpayer knocking down a door somewhere asking for a detailed breakout of the Apollo. Well, there's one. It's me, but I think I might be the only one. Exactly.

But when you do have private money in it, there's different motivations. You have the investors who need to know this information to make decisions, but then you just have a different level of interest from the general public. People want to see if a company is succeeding or not, if it's a potential maybe public investment that they'd want to make or there's just something and it's maybe a referendum on human psychology or maybe capitalist Western human psychology. Once you put money in it, people just have more of an interest. But that is, you know, that was at Larry Summers who said no one ever washes a rental car. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, that is so that's I can give also for folks who are listening that don't

or have heard of Payload or don't really know Payload. Payload is a space media publication that focuses on the business and policy of space. The publication was founded four or five years ago, really when commercial space and the SPACs are coming online and we really started to see a pickup in the space industry. So a lot of what we cover. If the mainstream media publications or even space publications are covering SpaceX and NASA at 80% of the time. We kind of flip that and cover the startups or the smaller entities at 80% of the time and cover the fundraisers and more nuanced stories in the industry. You said something, I just want to jump back to something. This is interesting.

You mentioned the SPAC era, the Special Purpose Acquisition Company. I'll let you explain what that is. But does that undermine in a sense the role of data here? Because a lot of that exuberance to me at that time about investing in these companies that had no or literally just would not basically share their long-term revenue strategies or business plans, if I could summarize what SPAC was, that that was almost like a faith-based approach, right? Data did not seem to be, they purposely went through these processes to go public in order not to share data. So how does that, you know, was there lessons

you think you learned from that, or what do you see from that era about the role of data in these types of decisions in finance and space? Yeah. Well, they would share their projections, but with a SPAC, it's not an IPO. So you don't have a bank underwriting it and really digging in to if these projections are real or not. And let's put institutional money behind that. So like I have a good example. I wrote an article late last year about Planet and when they went public

at the time, they were talking about commercial revenue being 75 percent of their business by 2025. So by now. Well, it turns out the opposite happened. The commercial revenue declined since they went public. And now commercial revenue is only 25 percent of the business. So a flip from what they were saying it was going to be at 75 percent. And that's a big you know, that's a big deal.

They went public basically on this kind of grand idea that it's not just commercial space, but there's going to be commercial revenue and Earth observation. And frankly, it just never really came to fruition. Obviously, it's it's growing, but just not the magnitude. It's still a government revenue-derived business. But you can, you know, when when these facts went public, they could say what they want, they could say what they want,

and they could project what they want, just as any company that goes public can. But if you're forecasting something and talking about the future, it's not data, it's just a hunch and you're never really held accountable for it. So this article I found really interesting to write because it shows, hey, they were actually they actually performed the opposite of what they said when they spacked. And maybe investors, some investors lost some money because they thought there was going to be this big commercial demand boom. But that makes being able to track the data afterwards

even more important to be able to tell the story and look back on that SPAC era and say, hey, you know, maybe be careful next time you really bet on these big ideas that a company will put forth. Yeah. I mean, it's like, be careful about when a company does not give you all the details about its business. I mean, that's it. This is it's just so interesting to me. So you worked in finance in the aerospace sector. Is that a correct way to characterize that? And so do you see that there may be a mismatch between, or do you think it's required to make good decisions on the financial side and the analytical side,

even internally, even within a private financial situation, that you also need to understand something about the domain of space? and the analytical side, even internally, even within a private financial situation, that you also need to understand something about the domain of space. This is another area that I've wondered about, this idea with SPACs and all these, even things like the, one of my things always makes me crazy is the Merrill Lynch

or whatever Bank of America claims that space will be a however, 18 kajillion dollar business. And we'll just so, and by the way, we will happily sell you the financial products to get in on this. Yeah, yeah. And they'll say Uber is part of that. Right. Yeah. Anything that has been a kind of geolocation trip. And I mean, and I think you can see where this hype comes from, led by some very visible companies. But at the end of the day, you know, day, I wonder if there's a,

you can have all the data analytics you want in terms of tracking projections and dollars and quant. But if you don't understand that the space environment is unforgivably harsh or that orbits require you to only, you know, there's a lot of limiting spaces, like a fundamentally alien domain. And it's so alien that our metaphors don't really do us much help.

They almost hinder us in terms of applying things that we've done on Earth out into space. Do you think that's part of the problem here, part of the mismatch is that you can have all the data you want, but unless we have some specific domain knowledge, physics or mechanical engineering or just any sort of historical engagement with the issue, you can easily be led astray by some of the hype. Yeah, definitely. And the industry is very passionate and the people who are in the industry are very passionate and I love that. I'm very passionate. I didn't go into space because

I didn't care about the stars and not. I went into space because I do want to see this industry succeed and I want to see Human space flight succeed in a robust space economy just because I'm interested in it So that is everywhere and you're kind of allowed to get away with being very big like having having big big ideas about the space industry because you kind of needed Dream to be here. But you get, you know, you definitely get let us, you can get let us stray if you're not used to that type of talk and if you're not used to being able to mitigate some of those big statements. So I think you don't need a physics background or engineering background. It's more just like time

spent in the industry. Like I've now been a reporter in the industry for three years and you know I think I understand the industry pretty well but there's just a lot of historical context that needs to be understood you know when I'm writing some of these pieces that it took a little while for me to pick up on. You kind of have to understand that there has been Leo Satcom constellations before Starlink. And Iridium is doing OK now, but they went through bankruptcy. And Global Star has had their issues too.

So it's just these things are measured in decades, not like six months. Right, yeah. It's like SpaceX didn't make the first reusable spacecraft. I mean, technically that was the shuttle, right? But it's a very different application of it that most people have kind of watched out of the history.

I feel that exuberance. I mean, there's a great paper that I actually had that the author on this show called Human Space Flight as Religion by Roger Lanius, he was the chief historian of NASA. And that there is kind of this, we feel something very big about this activity that we do and going into space and a lot of us, myself included,

just want this to be true. And so, and this is where I actually find the data part to be really helpful in tempering my ambition, or my desire for something to be the case. Not just the understanding some of the dynamics of the requirements of being in orbit means you have to be moving and you can't just park in one place. When they talk about the ultimate high ground of the moon, you can do your math and physics and it's like three days and you have to orbit and all this precise stuff. A lot of this stuff is just, it helps you understand the limits of what we can do and

it's humbling in a sense, but also I can see why that would be. I wonder again, that's almost why some of the data collation and analysis and sharing publicly isn't really paid for by anybody until more recently. I mean, I think, I mean, there's people probably internally that do this for a variety of companies, but I mean, I can think of few equivalents of your role in the public kind of outreach that it's just like accessible to anybody. And because it almost like undermines the dream, perhaps, right? So do you almost feel like there's too much of a faith-based motivation to this field that is kind of like a funny counterpoint to like the hard engineering,

right? And the hard data that you need to get into the space in the first place. I mean, when you started reporting, when you kind of got into this field, were you struck by, was it distinct from other fields that you had studied or, you know, engaged with in your role in finance or prior to that? Yeah. I mean, there's, there's a lot of similarities to finance. And I think, I think having a finance background in this new space age is very helpful because I was doing very similar work back in my, like, when I was

fine financing, private equity acquisitions in aerospace, it's,'s you know we're looking at financial statements or understanding trends or understanding what makes a business good and bad we're trying to be realistic with readers by laying out problems like if someone's gonna talk about orbital refueling all right like yeah that's that that's a buzzword but you know where's the money coming from. What's look at what makes is good and bad how realistic is this and some of that analysis a lot of all that analysis that i'm able to just like naturally think about a business comes from comes from the finance. the finance role. And I think that's important to like be, you know, just upfront with the readers. I would never like poo poo passion in dreams because I too am a dreamer and I really appreciate people who think big and entrepreneurs that think big and maybe set

lofty goals for themselves and for their employees. But for someone who's in the industry or following the industry, it is important to understand, maybe look at the data and see where the trends actually are and how something actually is doing versus just hearing about it or telling the story. What I love about a good chart is that it's one, as objective as you're going to get, and it also allows the reader to come to their own conclusion. Like I will, when I publish a chart and talk about a chart or a trend,

I'll publish a chart and I'm gonna break the chart down and contextualize it and offer an analysis of it. But the reader is allowed to be engaged too in reading that chart and maybe having a different interpretation of it Which I find is a just a more active way of storytelling Tell me more about that. That's that's an aspect that you've done such a great job on payload research about the visualization of data What have you learned about this?

Effort about how you do make that narrative How do you communicate something to the reader in a way that they can engage with it, but not in a sense where you're just saying not lecture them about it or tell them or force them to a certain conclusion. What's the, is this kind of an art you've had to develop over time?

Or is there a key aspect to making sure that you communicate effectively with data? I think the chart, just by having a chart itself, will allow the reader to immediately form their own opinions on it. And then maybe it can be a maybe they are questioning more of the things I'm saying, because they they read the chart in a different way. But there is, you know, there's an art to doing it. Because I mentioned before, a chart should be objective, but the amount of times I've fought with myself over how many footnotes I can put in a chart because things do need to be contextualized and a chart can be a little misleading in

it and I kind of have to either explain that as a footnote, but it has to be a very brief footnote, or it can be explained through like the context and the writing afterwards. I'll give it, I'll give an example of this, which is debated in the industry, but rocket lab is the second most prolific launcher with electron, a second most prolific commercial launcher outside of SpaceX and Falcon nine. Most of their launches come from New Zealand. They're domiciled in the US, but when I put together, let's say, a chart on global launches from the year, should Rocket Lab launches out of New Zealand be considered New Zealand launches or

US launches? And this is debated throughout the industry. And I'm firmly in the, if it's on New Zealand soil, it should be New Zealand, you know, considered a New Zealand launch. But this is just something that's debated throughout the industry, which would require, someone can look at, you know, would require a footnote or at least some sort of contextualization.

Another point with that is like, well, let's say Rocket Lab launched Electron 10 times from New Zealand, 15 times from New Zealand. Well, you know, the Electron's payload capacity to LEO is like, I don't know, 300 kilograms. So the aggregate amount of payload volume put into mass payload volume you put into orbit is call it, I don't know, three or 4,000 kilograms, which is the equivalent to a fourth of one Starlink Falcon 9 launch or a Vulcan launch. So a chart can show Rocket Lab launching X amount of times

and looking awesome, but how much payload are they actually putting into orbit? So those are things that like maybe a chart can't exactly explain, but it's good to kind of just explain all the dynamics in the commentary below. Well, and I think that's where having some sort of independent perspective is so important to that you're able to step back and say, what are we actually trying? What's actually useful to know? What's the important part of knowing where something launches from? In the New Zealand case with Rocket Lab, they're launching from New Zealand. So the impact, the skill set, the infrastructure, that's going to be

in New Zealand. It doesn't make calling it a US launch does not help you understand that aspect of it. Payload levels, right? I mean, yeah, you can talk about what are we trying to communicate? Are we trying to take about overall capability or mass capability or just are we only interested in number of launches and why would we care just about that? You can see then how having a dearth of other sources of independent or data-driven reporting or analysis can then make it really easy also then to kind of create an alternative narrative, right?

And maybe kind of going to some of this over-exuberance we talked about earlier with the SPACs, that unless you know the kind of the context and the industry and relatively well, you can use these same tools to kind of create intentionally or unintentionally an alternative story. Yes. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's the it's it's the amazing part about charts and also the drawback of charts, because those charts can be cropped and they should they should be cut in shared places.

But then without the context of that chart, I'm all for people coming to their own conclusions of it, but it is more helpful when you have, you know, a little some context below. What have you learned about reputation and credibility in this role? Because particularly with with payload establishing as a relatively new organization and then you, I think, from this perspective and how you're presenting information, and this is, we talk about this as quantitative information.

We can measure it. We would kind of intuit, oh, this will be completely objective, right? We're just putting the information up. I think we've just stated that how you present something modifies or can create the narrative about it regardless of if you're sharing the same data in various different ways.

How do you approach that role of credibility and what drives your thinking in terms of what you're trying to achieve with this? I mean, I would say getting it right is just super, super important, particularly with your role and my role. I'd rather limit how many articles I publish and really just focus on getting particularly the chart right with, you know, being patient and double checking things and quadruple checking

things and making sure everything is right. Because when you write an article, it happens. You can get stuff wrong and you can issue a correction with a chart. It's those things are generally screen shotted and shared pretty fast. And then particularly, yeah, particularly mentioned payload is five years old, but there's not that many space media publications out there. And we've been able to garner a reputation for ourselves where we are a trusted, reliable source. And with that, it means doing our very best to make sure that we are,

you know, reporting the truth and putting out data that is the truth. And I just take, I take that like very, very seriously, because people like with, with with your work to people are just going to cite it at this point in payloads lifecycle and and your work as well. They're going to cite it as the truth. And then that can be cited cited and just make its way around the Internet in 24 hours as the truth. Again, like with my Apollo anecdote, right? That someone did not do a good job 40 years ago and therefore created a completely alternative story to how that program's spending until someone went back to the beginning. So yeah, you get some, maybe, yeah, it would be great. I think people are still citing my work 40 years.

I'm not saying that, but the idea of like you, as you're saying, like once it goes out there, people will rely on that. And I think maybe if you care about, in a way, like having a real commitment to the industry or to the activity of going into space, you want it to be right, even if it doesn't always tell you like the most romantic story,

you'd rather it be right and allow people to make then good decisions. I think that's always been my argument. It's like knowing the limitations and challenges of what we do is better because then we can make smarter investments with the resources we do have rather than, again, just kind of going on some misplaced sense of faith

or what things, you know, quote unquote, should be. And that doesn't really help anybody in the long run. Yeah, no, 100%. It can both attenuate people's passions, but it can also like reinforce them in a good way, too. You know, it can be like, hey, this is actually working and the data is backing it up. And there's like a ton of tailwinds here.

And, you know, it's not just a marketing tool or a sales tool. It's just data that's showing it. So that's really cool. I think another thing is like, this is the first question you asked at the beginning of this podcast, but is there enough data in the industry? I think there is a lot of data in the industry, but there's not that many people who are going to take the time to compile it and then like, you know, put it in a form that's easily digestible. Because for you and I, it could take a day, it could take a couple of hours, it could take a

couple of weeks to put together a data set and then put it into one chart. Not many other people are going to do it. So when one person does do it, then that is going to be kind of used as the reputable source of it and then kind of quoted based on that, which is great because you can, you know, we have the privilege of taking all this data and then putting it in a very digestible format that someone can, you know, look at or read a three to five minute article and understand what's happening. But, you know, we have the responsibility

to make sure that is right because people will, you know, the amount of work we put into it will have these kind of moats that other people are not going to are not going to try to do themselves. So there's just going to be less people working on it and putting more emphasis on the work that we've done. Is there a distinction that you've noticed between government reporting of data and coming out of the space industry side? Like for example, I would assume that publicly supported programs would have more data to work with. So, you know, obviously I work with NASA budget data, they publish a ton of detail every

single year in their congressional budgets. And even theoretically, I could, you know, send a FOIA request to NASA and ask for more detailed information. Companies unless they're, you know, I know that there are laws about publicly traded companies, but a lot of these space businesses are not yet publicly traded. They, a lot of these space businesses are not yet publicly traded. They, in a sense, get to choose. This is where you can correct me. There's different requirements for data sharing and maybe just fundamentally a public institution has a responsibility to be open and transparent what it's doing. Whereas you don't have that same responsibility, at least to the public, you have a different

fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and other investors. But do you see that represented in the type and consistency and quality of data coming out about government space activities versus private space activities? I think the data is pretty good. You do have the big players are publicly traded and they are going to have that fiduciary duty to at least historically provide quarterly revenues, margins, talk about how much they're investing in a specific program. I think once you start getting into the forecasting that a company like we talked about, you know, these SPACs we're doing, then you get into murky territory that government is not going to go into. But in terms of like historical data, I feel pretty good about the space companies. And then if you're a really small company, if you just got funded, normally it takes

three to four years for you to even be revenue generating. So it's not even data to really, you know, understand or sift through. It's more of them just like building the product. SpaceX is a good example. They're the biggest space business and they are privately traded. But they do put out information we get every couple of months. We get information on their their Starlink customer account online. We can see it's not like,

it's not in a PDF document like you would get with government data, but there is data out there where you can see, and this is how we, Payload puts together our SpaceX revenue estimates. I was gonna bring that up. I mean, you, one of the, I think your most valuable regular activities you do is, yeah, you put together these annual revenues for SpaceX, but I mean, and that's kind of the essence of the, I think, your most valuable regular activities you do is, yeah, you put together these annual revenues for SpaceX.

But I mean, and that's kind of the essence of the problem, though, right? The fact that you have to do this, that they don't just share this themselves, that you have to kind of make a lot of smart guesses about it. And at the end of the day, it's an estimate. You probably, I mean, it's very thoughtfully done. But you're depending on, in a sense, piecing together a bunch of different pieces of data, right? So without someone to do that, how, I mean, that, that, I guess that's what I'm going

into that the, the requirements of sharing things, it's almost like at their, if they're excited to share it, maybe like with Starlink, they will. Yeah. But if not, then they probably won't. And that to me makes it, how do you then, you know, this goes into a bigger issue of like measurement with that. We record things that we have data for,

and how do you seek out, you know, things that they don't want to share? So how do you approach that with something with a company like SpaceX? Yeah, so we publish, like you mentioned, we publish our SpaceX revenue estimates, and we also publish the builds, and we also publish the builds and we also publish the assumptions that we, you know, at the bottom, we have, you know, maybe 2000 words of our

thoughts behind it, which I think is super important just to like, be open with people about how we're coming, how we're building this. And frankly, we do, you know, every year we get, you know, opinions and crowdsourced thoughts on how to make the model better and better. And I think we're able to tune it continuously. Like they might not put out the information directly, but I feel pretty confident in all the numbers and the breakdown in our estimates and in the the chart that we put together in the table we put together, because they do publish it somewhere on the internet. It's just all aggregated. Are they required? Help me under, I mean, you're back on finance.

Help me understand exactly how SpaceX is privately traded and what that means compared to a publicly traded company. Yeah, sure. I mean, they have, their investors are, it's private capital, it's not on the stock market easily. The shares are don't easily trade hands. So they do to their investors. To my understanding, they do publish, but they do send out

like financial data. I've never seen them. I never had access to it. I don't have any proprietary access to that kind of data. But I think they they do have a fiduciary duty to keep Their investors so call it fidelity is a big investor. There's Fidelity, you know up-to-date on how they're doing Maybe that's yearly. Maybe that's every six months, but that's not for the for the broader public To see whereas if it's publicly traded then that information is all out there on a quarterly basis for everyone to see.

What they do do is they publish. They publish a year end Starlink report that allows us to see how many maritime customers they have, how many aviation customers they have, how many the breakdown of each Starlink subsegment that they're not that they're not going to lie about it. They don't have a fiduciary duty not to lie, but they're not going to lie about it. There's no reason for them to lie about it. So it's not easily accessible for people to like see what they're what a SpaceX revenue would look like.

But I find it, you know, it's part of my job to take that information that's out there, that's scattered throughout the internet, that comes from reputable sources, and compile it all together to create what I deem to be a pretty decent stab at an estimate. We'll be right back with the rest of our Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio after this short break. Hi y'all, LeVar Burton here. Through my roles on Star Trek and Reading Rainbow, I have seen generations of curious minds inspired by the strange new worlds explored in books and on television. I know how important it is to encourage that curiosity in a young explorer's life.

That's why I'm excited to share with you a new program from my friends at the Planetary Society. It's called the Planetary Academy and anyone can join. Designed for ages 5 through 9 by Bill Nye and the curriculum experts at the Planetary Society, the Planetary Academy is a special membership subscription for kids and families who love space. Members get quarterly mailed packages that take them on learning adventures through the many worlds of our solar system and beyond. Each package includes images and factoids, hands-on activities, experiments and games, and special surprises.

A lifelong passion for space, science, and discovery starts when we're young. Give the gift of the cosmos to the explorer in your life. Is that, in a sense, a competitive advantage for SpaceX that they're privately traded rather than publicly traded and that they have a smaller group of competitive advantage for SpaceX that they're privately traded rather than publicly traded and that they have a smaller group of people they report to that in a sense, it's almost like being a club. From my understanding, you have to work hard to find a way to invest in SpaceX, right? And that probably drives up the perceived value of it.

I mean, so I guess, is this unique in this sector or in other sectors? Do you see this from your knowledge of finance and other areas? Is this type of setup for a company, this privately traded approach, is this uncommon or is it common? Yeah, it really depends on the company. If you look at SpaceX that has pretty much an infinite access to capital because of their success and various other reasons, it's a big benefit to be private. They don't need more capital. Maybe the first couple years of Starlink, they struggled with getting the thing profitable

or maybe the satellites weren't working or they spent way too much in R&D and CapEx that the public markets and public analysts would be really complaining about, but was probably good for the business as a whole in a longer horizon mindset. So for companies that don't have an issue, Blue Origin is another example. They have infinite access to capital. Being private is great. If you're a company like Rocket Lab, which would be a comp, and we've brought them up a couple times, they don't have that infinite access to capital. So being on the public markets is great for them.

And they would probably be slower in the private markets where they're able to raise, people are excited about Rocket Lab, they're able to have these offerings and raise capital pretty easily rather than banging on the doors of VCs across the world and trying to cobble together some dollars, they're able to just raise capital more easily. It really just depends, I mean, it's more of like, do you have access to capital?

Do you think SpaceX is an outlier in the industry, not just its capability, but we were just talking about access to capital. And I'll add a second part of that question. Do you think that that outlier talking about in data terms like pushes the average expectation in the wrong direction? Right. People aren't doing their standard deviation, you know, they're kind of like deviations analysis of things or what the median would be. Is SpaceX almost a problem for setting expectations for performance of other companies?

Yeah, I mean, they are an outlier because of Elon, but also because of the tremendous success they've had. And actually, I would say probably almost all of it is because of the tremendous success they've had. And actually, I would say probably almost all of it is because of the tremendous success. I mean, they are when they landed their first booster in 2015. So 10 years ago, companies aren't particularly close to doing that. So call it a 10 to 12 to 13 year head start on companies. And also like they're. You know, they're like start.

The Starlink is growing really, really fast and way faster than I imagined, way faster than we talk about, like how, you know, there's an issue in the industry of companies overpromising and under delivering Starlink is like almost under promising and over delivering. They are growing so tremendously fast and opening up brand new markets in a way that I that took a lot of people by surprise, particularly last year when they they, you know, doubled their their customer base in a increasing fashion. If you're going to comp, it's good to comp to SpaceX because we'll take Rocket Lab again. If SpaceX is valued at $350 billion, Rocket Lab can go out to the public markets and say,

hey, we should be 10% of that value. It's just 10%. We just need to like get 10% of the revenues of SpaceX, 10% of the launch of SpaceX. And that puts them at a 35 billion market cap. And meanwhile, I don't know what they're trying to get now, but they're probably something more like 2% of what SpaceX is valued. So in that sense, it's good to have a really successful company that investors are backing. And then in the other side of things, it's like, well, you're a rocket company that can only launch two or three times a year,

or you're not even thinking about reusability yet, or you're a satellite communication company that is getting eaten by Starlink. You just have these really high expectations that a near monopoly like SpaceX is, it just makes it difficult to play and come to. Yeah, I see an additional issue with that is that I believe that the policy outcomes

then also overweight SpaceX and consider that an average outcome for commercial space partnerships rather than a wild outlier. I think we're running that experiment now with the commercial lunar payload services that the predicate is that, oh well we'll have at least one or two SpaceX like capabilities delivered from this. And I always you know I think most people forget that there were there were two commercial orbital transportation services contracts awarded.

And the other one's still going now owned by Northrop Grumman. But that is not setting the space world on fire. Right. You don't have Cygnus and Enteres. I don't even know if they have Enteres anymore. Right. I think they don't have access to the R181s. And that could have easily been the outcome of the commercial transportation awards. That you could have had two companies that were just happy to do exactly what they were told to do and nothing more.

But SpaceX has taken that story and almost like, you can correct me, it was maybe single-handedly almost created the whole industry of commercial space or allowed it to be taken seriously as an investment opportunity. Yeah. And it's it's also dictated how the government approaches procurement. And Eclipse is just such a good example because, yeah, these are low. These are low cost lunar landers, super low cost, 100 million bucks for a lunar lander. But what have what have the results been? We had one for the astrobotic lander, you know, failed in orbit. You had two intuitive machines that landed sideways at one.

But then you also had one, you know, firefly blue ghost lander that has been really successful. Right. I mean, and it's not just a hundred million dollars for a lander. It's you know, three hundred million dollars over five years. I mean, to get to that one single lander purchase, right? So the government spent one and a half billion dollars, which is roughly one probably guaranteed landing on the surface in the classic way. And obviously, I mean, there are other reasons why they do this. But yeah, I

mean, I wonder and I worry sometimes that the application of this type of partnership so widely is just without the level of like there is real risk here, right? We just really don't know, right? We have like a kind of one data point. I think as data people, we can say one data point usually you could draw, you can extrapolate your line in any direction from that one data point, right? And so do you see that as being a real issue here or do you just, I mean, in a sense, too,

maybe we just don't have, we had to have a really incomplete data set. Like this is such a new activity that we're doing. Why would we know? Yeah, I think the, I think the approach of low cost kind of iterative multiple shots on goal is the right one, even if it, you know, we have a lot of failures here. And that's, you know, you could you could tie that back to SpaceX, but it's just like the commercial approach to it.

And frankly, it is, you know, you have Doge that is is coming in and taking a real whack at a lot of these like science programs. It's going to do really, really irreparable damage to the industry. But I think there's generally like you can't have. You can't have SLS launching at two billion dollars a launch every three years. Yeah. And like Frank James Webb has done amazing things for understanding of science, but is a 10 billion dollar project. And the D.O.D used to, and NASA used

to procure satellites that were a billion dollars for just one exquisite satellite. I think that even if you have a lot of failures with this kind of more commercial high risk mindset, I do think it is the right approach. I think you can just like coming from like a business standpoint, you're here. It helps tremendously with supply chains, getting manufacturing ramp. If you can say, hey, intuitive machines, you had two that fell over sideways,

but you can have a third. You know, like maybe on the third, we can actually get it going. And once you have these programs that are just one and done, and then where do people go after that, it's not really a sustainable model. And I see that, yeah, there's an interesting, I mean, there's no test like real world test, right?

Like actually doing it and learning from that. I wonder though, that there's a limited domain or specific domains of space where that works, right? So to do rapid iteration, you need to be, in a sense, you have to have a reason to go a lot, and you have to have a place that you can go relatively quickly in order to have that feedback cycle. And so obviously, I think quite a bit about this

on the science side. Could you ever have a rapidly iterative project to land a lander on Europa? Right, it takes seven years to get there. Even with, let's say Starship was working four years, right, three years to get there. There may just be, you know, maybe this may just be limited to types of science

that you do like on the moon or at Mars or in Earth orbit. But once you get further out, you really start to lose the pathway with that. And the other thing too, it's like it's interesting. This was like a topic I wanted to explore just a bit here at the end. You talk about James Webb, right, which is this rightly pointed at as kind of this very troubled somewhat of a boondoggle development. But of course, now once it's up there and it's working better than perfect, right? It's just like perfectly working. How do you measure? Yeah, we can measure dollars, we can count

them, they're discrete. We can measure, you know, jobs, we can measure, you know, economic impact. How do we measure knowing the oldest thing that we've ever seen in the universe or how do we measure peering back into the recombination period of the cosmos or how do we measure the feeling of looking at a picture of some of these, the nebula that are first sent back? That almost becomes an issue too that I worry sometimes and I do this as that like it's funny because I'm a such a data left brain person by nature but I have the simultaneous like I'm at the Planetary Society because of Carl Sagan was like preaching to me right that my seeing my first rocket launch was my conversion moment right that and I use that very deliberately, that word, right? That I felt something big changing me seeing that.

And I worry sometimes that we downplay that there's a deeper aspect and experience side of this because it's not measurable. Yeah, something happened over the last five, 10 years that in the public eye and maybe in the political eye too that separated space from science You now just get these and it's really really quite sad because that's me too. That's why I got I'm in this industry because I looked up at the stars and wondered what the hell is going on, you know and just like

dreamt about it and That is science. That is an understanding of our existence That is gonna that is an understanding of our existence That is gonna need government and institutional Support but then I'm sure you get it too. But like from friends and family it becomes like Space is a waste of money. Why do we care about space? It could be because it just became politicized and you have You know you on really making it like you love the guy or hate the guy.

And that means you love space or you hate space. It can also be frankly like you just have how many people, how many 20 year olds have seen the stars? My guess is like, you know, I guess it's crazy to think that. But like probably if you're swiping through TikTok or something. Right. Yeah. And it's like and think that, but like probably. Maybe while they're swiping through TikTok or something. You're right. Yeah. And it's like, and like, and maybe if they have, it's like once or twice. So I'm not like in the science world, like I'm in the industry world, but I,

I find it very disheartening to realize that that it's people are not really associating the two as much as they as they should. And then and then how do you how do you it's harder to like measure the impact of James Webb when the general public is not thinking or is not associating science with space and NASA. Yeah, we're I'm like this is veering into like one of my favorite topics that we probably don't have time to fully explore.

But I do think I resonate with that very strongly. And I believe, I would say, that that's part of a larger cultural shift towards literal experience and downplaying of a more of a harder to express non-logical, maybe sublime or soulful experience, just in all aspects of our culture. And as part of that, space has to be utilitarian. And obviously, that's going to be driven by when you're

trying to raise money for your commercial space venture, you have to justify it as a way of returning some value to your investors. And so the whole framing goes to, what are my extractive abilities, whether I'm talking about costs of providing a service or mediating a communication, or am I going to bring some valuable something back to earth or use it in space? It shifts that conversation is that it's not this kind of hallowed ennobling activity, but a more, again, this utilitarian extractive

relationship. And that's not necessarily, I mean, I think we should have that. I think space isn't a national park. But yeah, I think that we've lost, in a sense, or downplayed the other aspect of it, that there's still this too. And part of that, I think, is because that there's the interplay between the kind of

the big growth in space and the energy in space has been on this commercial side and not fully embracing that or being able to use it in the right way or allowing missions that cost so much and finding ways to make that work. I will say though, data-wise, you know see those polling from Pew and others on a regular basis, that when they do ask people, what should the priorities of NASA be, it's always at the, I mean, consistently every time that they've done this, I think every two or three years over the last 10 years, it's earth science, planetary defense, and space science. Quite a lot, right?

And then at the very bottom, it's send humans to Mars and send to the moon. I always like to say that public polling, you just invert the chart, and that's your spending chart. And so there is a disconnect too. And I wonder maybe that there's also a data gap in really understanding public opinions about space. And frankly, probably most people

don't think too much about it either. But there is I think a serious issue and I wonder finding this is where I try to you know we look into this data aspect of data is really important but it can't capture everything. There's no science benefit index that we can like quantifiably measure and that's always going to be a challenge in a world where I think it helps to have this type of measurable approach, right? We can always count dollars, we can't count feelings.

Yeah, that's a good way of summing this all up because I made a anecdotal statement and then another story was told by your data statement. But you can also, you know, you can also ask how that question was phrased and if you only elicited a response because it was asked and whether people are thinking about this independently. But I do appreciate that. I would hope that people are thinking about this and thinking about space as a science domain and being curious about what's out there. I almost worry that yeah because if I always say we got to put something on the rockets that everyone's making and sure we can

have communicate everything you know you make money with things that point down back to earth yeah space and you know we we talked about going further out but you kind of need something to do there. And even if you want to go and settle, you know, create a settlement on Mars, science gives you something to do. And you're probably quite motivated to want to know that so you don't die on Mars, right? Like when they discovered that, oh, the ground is actually full of a highly reactive perchlorate

chemical that will not make it easy to use in a lot of different ways or certainly to grow things. That you don't want to just be, you know, you don't want to be the type of, you're like, all right, great, I'm on Mars. I'm going to carry on humanity. And what do you do? You just stare at the wall, right? The entire time you need something to give you broader meaning and purpose.

I want to go back to one more thing about SpaceX. Again, SpaceX is really, I think, the core of a lot of, it's probably why, in a certain sense, payload exists downstream, that you're downstream of the fact that they've helped create this larger capability and industry, and then you have all these other ambitious companies coming up.

How do you, when you approach space, you did, I'll plug that you did a really, and are doing a really great series. You went to Starbase down in Texas. You're kind of following this, like the impact of the community, what it's like to be down there. And it must be probably quite energetic and exciting. How do you yourself again, try to use it? Has data been helpful to kind of temper how you've been feeling about that? Or is it only validated it? And I'll, I'll, I'll throw this in here. Last year, you were saying you expected Starship

to be fully operational, reaching orbit by the end of the year. And now we've seen two rapid unscheduled disassemblies of the rocket. Has that changed how you're approaching it? Or was that a moment where the data helped you recontextualize your expectations? Or do you still see something very fundamental both in

your reporting and in your data that you have of the company? Yeah. This series that you're referring to was a six-month project of really understanding the city that SpaceX and Starbase is in, and mainly the people of the city. It was a story about people and jobs that are difficult and are on the frontier and that require risk taking.

And that is just a theme that I love, whether it was SpaceX or I was down there and it's a huge commercial shrimping hub. It's also a city that's, Brownsville's a city that's 97% Hispanic. So you think about people who are working on the frontier. So that's and trying to start a new life for themselves. So there is, you know, that ties in with passion

and dreaming, which I love. And I really like I think that everybody should have these dreams. And if that means that, you know, you're you have to be careful because you don't want to go on earnings call and say a dream that's going to make people invest money in something that doesn't exist. But internally and when you're like trying to find a pursuit in the world I think you know thinking big and dreaming is great and then you're also you know you're also open yourself up to criticism and you know if you come in

if SpaceX is coming into a community, how do people react to it and why do people react to it? So so there was a lot of, you know, just that was kind of on the ground, long form journalism. When I look at the the data behind Starship, yeah, they've had to they've had a string of a lot of successful launches. But I would say, yeah, they have a string of successful launches and the last two have been. It's okay to have one blow up, but to have two back to back at similar times is a is

a setback for them. It doesn't change how I view their operational status, because what I would consider operational is when they're deploying their Starlink satellites, which. Mm-hmm. Which. And they're going to. And that's like a financial, like that's like the. Yeah.

To the lifeblood of the company. Exactly. That's like, right. They're, you know, at this point, it's going to, we're going to soon get to a point where they might just retire Falcon nine and customer launches that are not Starlink because it just makes up such a small it will eventually make up such a small amount of the revenue right now it already does but eventually it'll be like minuscule could be 10% of revenue I don't think they will

because like I think they are gonna be their loss leader is launching NASA missions or they are good actors in their loss leader is launching NASA missions or they are good actors in the industry and like they like you mentioned they opened up the startup world it was really these transporter rideshare missions that opened up commercial space and they're running these missions at a Break even they're not really it's not a money made huge money maker for them Maybe they make some money, but there are youhip is not operational, but it has, you know, we recently got data from some filing where it said, you know, how much SpaceX is investing in Starbase and Starship each year, which I don't want to quote the number because I don't want to be right on it. But so you can, you can continue to track the program from a monetary dollar and data perspective,

but you can also see these gigantic blowups that are clear setbacks that maybe even setback like a, that will setback orbital refueling and HLS that you can use both the data in that and also the broader broader, you know, storytelling to tell a tell a picture of paint, a picture of what SpaceX is doing with Starship. So you would say, yeah, is he setbacks more than some fundamental issue that you know that I'm definitely not worried about this being a fundamental issue? I think the next big question is whether they can land successfully if their heat shield

on the second stage starship can work well enough to be able to catch it consistently back at the launch pad. That's gonna be the big kind of existential question of it. I'm worried because like I never wanna see like two big kabooms like that's just, like, not great for just the public, you know, public safety and public perception. But in terms of the program, like, it's eventually going to get done. By the way, like we're in what is it right now?

We're in 2025. They were originally when SpaceX won the HLS contract. They were supposed to be landing on the landing crew, I believe, on the moon by now. So they are we talk about them being this hyperactive, amazingly fast rapid iteration program. But they too are, you know, we can put we can chart that out and show that they are delayed by three or four years from what the, you know, taxpayer dollars originally banked on. I'm old enough to remember how long Falcon Heavy took to become operational, right? I was there I think in 2013 when they were talking about it launching in 2015. I forget exactly.

But yeah, it's it's not uncharacteristic. And yeah, I guess and again, rocket blowups are accountable thing. So I look forward to your charts on this. Jack Kaur, thank you so much for your insight and all the work that you do at Payload Research. How can people find you? Yeah, you can just, my name is Jack, last name K-U-H-R. I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter. My stuff is also, my writing is also available

on payloadspace.com. But this has been awesome to chat and love to do this again. Absolutely. Plenty to talk about and lots more interesting data to sort through. We've reached the end of this month's episode of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, but we will be back next month with more discussions on the politics and philosophies and ideas that power space science and exploration. Help others in the meantime learn more about space policy and the planetary society by

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