Technology, Connected - Elon Musk Wants Mars. Gerard O’Neill Wanted Orbitals

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

John Bucknell made Raptor engines at SpaceX. He also designed a nuclear thermal turbo rocket. He now wants to solve energy. Ambitious young man. Virtus Solis puts solar panels in orbit, beams power to the ground via radio waves that pass through clouds and weather without loss, and delivers electricity at $30 to $40 per megawatt hour while the plant is being financed. Once the asset is paid off: 50 cents per megawatt hour. The UK pays $350 today.John's argument is that every other energy technology fails at least one point of the energy trilemma: clean, firm, and affordable. Space solar is the only one that achieves all three. First plant: 2030.--Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [e-mail]--EPISODE TIMESTAMPS:(00:00) The Question: Can space solar give us free energy?(00:43) The High Frontier: O'Neill's vision for space colonies(01:13) John Bucknell: The SpaceX Raptor Engineer(02:04) Why Did Elon Change His Mind about the Moon?(05:34) The Space Energy Business: Economics and feasibility(11:59) Getting Politicians Behind Space-Based Solar Power(15:34) Post-Capitalism and Free Energy: What happens next?(20:09) Kessler Syndrome Explained: Is orbital debris really a threat?(27:25) Top 3 Things Humanity Should Solve(28:50) 2030 Launch Timeline and next steps

You propose that space-based solar power can give humanity free unlimited energy. If that promise is realised, what happens? The High Frontier, Sherrod Arniel. Yes, it's part three of our space-based solar power exploration. And today we're going to ask what happens if space-based solar power delivers on that promise? What does abundance mean to the space industry, to civilization, to humanity? And are we close to building the high frontier? Today's guest is a very, very special guest.

It's John Buchnell. He's a CEO and founder of Virtus Solus. He has at least 46 patents to his name. And he was, check this out, senior propulsion engineer for the Raptor full flow stage combustion. MetaLox rocket at SpaceX. And if that wasn't cool enough, he's a designer of a nuclear thermal turbo rocket. Good morning.

Great to be here. Talk us through what you think of one versus the other. Hey, is Mars the play? Is O'Neill's Cylingers the play? To get all the way to Mars and have enough effort structure that humans can live and work there, it's non-trivial, right? I mean, just getting there is hard.

I mean, getting out the planet has been hard, and then getting to another planet is dramatically harder. And then what do you do once you get there, right? What's the driver? Who's going to finance all that? And I think that's really the gap, once we started looking at what the high frontier says on the technologically feasible versus economically viable part,

is like, how do you get enough people to work in the same direction to get you to the point of interest? And I think Mars and off Earth in general both require huge amounts of infrastructure to work to make these economies work. And who is going to go there and make it work such that they can leverage all the capabilities of off-forth resources and energy? Who is that going to be? Well, right now we really have only a couple of candidates, right? Less than one hand. And is there enough resources in the cis-luner space to make it worthwhile in the O'Neill?

vision. I think that's easier to get there, frankly. The whole mining the moon and, you know, working for Elon for a long time. He was like, yeah, there's no point doing that. We need to go all the way to Mars. And then in the last few weeks, he's like, no, no, we're going to go mine the moon

and build computation in orbit. So even he can be convinced that maybe near term we should be doing local stuff before we go far away. Why back when you were working for SpaceX, Elon was so adamant that Mars was the solution, not O'Neill's vision of orbitals? The argument that Musk's and all the Martian team,

you know, the Team Martian has had, is that, look, we need a biosphere, ultimately, that will support human life. You need a gravity well, a significant gravity well for human development. And we know that there's detriments to microgravity. the human physiology, and we don't know how to fix that yet.

Maybe, you know, biology, technology is moving fast enough that maybe we will solve that sooner than we'd think. But, um, it's the argument for Mars is like, look, uh, it's still close enough to the sun, it has decent elimination. It's got resources that you don't have to go off planet to find. There's water there and there's enough minerals to, to have us to support a civilization. And it's far enough away that any thing that takes down this local civilization might find it hard to spread that disaster to somewhere else. Those are the arguments for Mars, ultimately, that it is far enough away that it's safe, but also far enough away that it's hard to develop.

Those are the two counterpoints, right? And can you do something similar on the moon in this solar space? Probably. We don't yet have the ability to go out and harvest near Earth objects, but there are several businesses stood up to do that. and having the ability to access those resources that it would be very expensive to do on the planet, I absolutely believe they're worth doing. So I think probably both is going to happen.

Now, where in time that occurs are completely unsupported because, I mean, the vision from Mars is we're just going to build the most efficient transport possible, build everything here and just ship it, and then instant civilization. I think it's going to a little bit more complicated than that, but who knows? So back to the high frontier, back to,

O'Neill's model, it required a catalyst. And I had kind of an epiphany. All we're hearing today in the tech world is, you know, AI this, AI that, and, you know, oh my gosh, we're running out of power and, you know, how do we power these data centers? Are we at a moment right now where what's happening on the AI data center side, is that enough noise to create some momentum for space-based solar power? And if so, what could that look like? I think the answer is yes. indirectly. And I struggle a bit with the whole, hey, you know, the permitting, which is the permitting grid connection are the real barriers to the build out of, you know, the compute a trust really that you need. And the other big thing is to do it in orbit. We can't just take a rack that

Nvidia builds and put it in orbit. It just is not a design for that yet. And there's a couple businesses that are stood up saying, yeah, we can adapt it. But having all this energy just go into compute. And if you put it in orbit, you're only using the solar energy for compute. What about the rest of us, right? I mean, one of the arguments I make for, you know, building out space solar is that those of us who live in the West, we all consume across all forms of energy somewhere in the neighborhood of the 9 or 10 kilowatts. Some of us are a lot more. But the global average is like 1.8 kilowatts. And there's about a billion people between three quarter to a billion that are at zero.

So what are we missing out on on, you know, development of, you know, humanity's capabilities by constraining people's resources, right? What does it look like when you unconstrain them? And if you put compute in orbit, all you're solving is the compute part of what the resource needs of all of us are. How does humanity, how does civilization change the incentive

so that the world isn't obsessed with energy for data centers in space or otherwise? and for the 1 billion people who have zero access to any. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that loops back to around to what my business is all about, is trying to lower the floor enough that a lot more of the developed world or even the undeveloped world can have access to the resources they need. And certainly you look across what does a civilization need

and energy underlies almost all of it and getting those costs lower than where they are today. When energy was really inexpensive, and that was the 50s, 60s, And slightly into the 70s, you know, global economic growth, global GDP was growing very quickly. And energy costs were like 2 to 3 percent of global GDP in that time frame. And now we're like 14 percent. And how do you reverse those trends?

Well, you've got to figure a way to break the lock that we have today on energy costs. The energy costs continue to go up because we're not able to reduce the underlying structural elements of cost. of the energy costs globally, space solar can't do that. That can unlock energy at costs dramatically lower than where we're on today. And frankly, with the model that we've built, that you can build an asset, it generates energy. And then once the assets paid for, it's basically free. And then what do you do with free energy? And that's the big picture kinds of things that the outcomes that we're super interested in is,

what does civilization look like once the underlying resource is free? And then, presumably, all the downstream stuff become closer to free. Could you give us some numbers on what you're proposing your company can do in terms of generating energy? How much? When NASA dug into what Jerry O'Neill was doing with the late 70s, they spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 million in studies. And they produced a lot of reports. I think on about 1,200 pages worth of reports. And my team luckily has read all of them.

And they got told no by Congress for the $3 trillion of today's money they would need to build the first power plant in 2012. six, like a long time, 26 years after they started. But in that time frame, photovoltaics, PV, was 5% efficient. Microelectronics didn't exist. And the space shuttle still hadn't flown in that time frame. So large costs were speculative. And the National Science Council actually wrote an analysis of why NASA's proposal to return to Apollo-level areas of funding to build space solar didn't work.

They're like, look, the technology is not there yet. The economics just not working. however, probably 40 years from now based on the trends we're looking at, they probably will be there. And in 2018, SpaceX is Falcon Heavy Flu and launch costs where they needed to be Moore's Law and microelectronics have made basically the cost of any electronics almost free. Those are revolutions, right, in manufacture. So launch costs, photovoltaic cost, automation costs, all have dropped dramatically. And that's the basis of what Verasolus is, is we're building space-based solar power plants leveraging mass manufacturing, using electronics manufacturing infrastructure to build enough

generation to serve all of humanity at price points around $30 or $40 a megawan hour, which are $3 or $0.4 a kilo one hour during the period when the plant's being financed. And then it drops to like 50 cents a meg one hour, which is 0.005 cents a kilo one hour after 20 years of finance. I read a stat that basically the big tech companies are spending $200 billion on essentially power infrastructure, right? $200 billion on power infrastructure. And they do that. They're not just building one system. Largely, they're building two systems, right?

So you're spending twice the amount you are to have the backup power. The reliability issue is largely solved. So is there a need for 2N infrastructure on the power side when this stuff actually? works. I mean, that's been our argument all along. I mean, one of the qualities that space solar can offer. And really, it's the only one. You have what's called the energy trilemma, where energy wants to be clean, firm, and low cost. And no energy technology other than space solar does that. And when we say firm, it's an energy business terminology that describes reliability. And most energy technologies are at least two nines, 99% reliable, but data centers want four nines,

which is less than an hour or a year downtime. Space solar is probably five nights if you have all the qualities that are necessary. When we talk about the architecture that Vertesolus has developed, it's designed for four nines minimum, probably five nines, because we put the solar panels in space where they're more productive. We have redundant generation capability on orbit, and then we have a wireless power transfer technology allows us to deliver energy from orbit to the ground super reliable by using radio waves that go through weather and clouds with no loss. And that's really the underlying offer that these technologies have. So this moves into the political realm where the wind farms

are getting signed off on and what's it going to take for the politicians to sign off on space-based solar power? I would argue that like these advances are all profit-driven primarily. So whoever is selling offshore wind, they have a, they have a hammer and everything's a nail. So offshore wind's going to solve it, right? Well, offshore wind's a lot more reliable than offshore wind, which is why they do it. But the cost per unit is not trivial, just because engineering for saltwater, all of us hate saltwater that engineer things. Salt water eats all the structural metals that you want. And then even though it's more reliable, it's not 100% reliable.

It's not even one-nine reliable. It's a fraction of a nine. So what do you do about that? Well, you have the S&1 problem. Again, you need long-distance energy transmission, which is cables. You need batteries to back up, or you need a thermal power plant,

or you need all of them. And just because there's offshore wind available in the UK, because it's infrastructure, you know, tourist real, or I'm sorry, the land is owned by a lot of people. And getting around the eminent domain problem is the reason why transmission here in the United States and elsewhere is hard. You can't build cables to get the energy where you want it to where people are using it. So you sidestep it and you put the assets of the water. So that is driving, I think the U.K's average energy costs are about $350 a megawatt hour today.

And that's not, I mean, that's bad. It drives de-industrialization when your energy costs are high. How do you solve that? Well, you find a solution. that doesn't require huge amounts of CAPEX and low eulization rate. The math issue is a little funky too, right? Because if you compare it with other technologies, other energy technologies, some get a ton of subsidies, you know, some don't.

Like, how do you balance the math that people throw at you related to, you know, other technologies? So we would argue that energy technologies have unit costs that are directly tied to the complexity, right? When you build a thermal power plant, it's a gas turbine. Thankfully, there's a lot of jet engines built out there. So we have the tooling to build that. But then there's this burner and all the other parts. So there's probably 20,000 unique parts in a thermal power plant. And you need to have manufacturing capacity for all of them to build at scale.

And the same thing applies to space solar. And again, because my team, frankly, all of this came out of some sort of mass manufacturer background. And my co-founder and I both worked at General Motors a long time ago. And one of the interesting things about General Motors was vertically integrated, just like SpaceX is today for a very long time. And they had their own electronics manufacturing facility. They made all the radios, all the end controllers, every bit of electronics that were in the cars for a very long time.

In fact, they have a chip fab in Kokomo, Indiana, the only empty chip fab at North America, by the way. They're manufacturing all their electronics, millions of devices per year for GM's entire manufacturing volume. globally and their costs to build all these complicated electronics were tens of dollars apiece. But because they're making so many of them, you can get those unit economics. And that's the same underlying complexity argument that we're making is that we're making two devices, effectively but millions of them. When we first spoke, John, you wrote us an email. I was going

to quote from your email because I think it connects to that. We're talking about the high frontier. And you said, obviously a frontier means freedom from the old structures. You purpose. Suppose that space-based solar power can give humanity free, unlimited energy. If that promise is realized, what happens? Yeah, the structures that we have, the humanities build, right? So governments are one. We've had them for a very long time. They've taken lots of different forms.

But what do governments do for you? Well, it's communal protection from a number of things, right? It establishes common language, for example, so you can talk to one another. Then there's other structures. We talk about banks. We talk about land rights, other things. And those are all basically, they're defensible. They're something that you own and operate.

And then we have this thing we call capitalism, which is a way to optimize constrained resources. And that's the key part of that is what capitalism does well is organizes flows such that the resources are maximally utilized, right? But what happens when resources are not constrained? And that's the post-capitalism discussion. And what does post-capitalism look like? It's not too many people agree what that looks like, but you can speculate.

You can imagine. And this is the topic we were talking about earlier is like a lot of us are inspired by science or speculative fiction. And lots of people are taking guesses at what that looks like. And I've read a few post-capitalist stories and other papers and what that might mean. But ultimately, by unconstraining resources, I think the, the medievalist. Dici's structure doesn't work anymore because everyone has access to the same resources that the top of the pile has, right? And that's really what unconstrained resources means. So let's talk through this. So figure out space-based solar power. We, you know, it gets implemented. Countries

start going, hey, I'm putting up a receiver station here. I'd love to get some power from you, you know, and then another country does that and another country does that. Talk us through the first couple years of that iteration. What does that look like in your mind when when people start procuring their own power. A lot of technological challenges are solved with cheap energy. Like, for example, 80 to 85% of the world's needs or energy needs across everything is fossil fuels. And a significant fraction of that is just petroleum, right? So how do you break that? Because there's only half a dozen sources globally of petroleum right now, but satisfying most of the world's needs. So those are very constrained on who owns it, who controls it, and everything.

You can synthesize any form of hydrocarbon. All it takes is electricity and water and a little bit of carbon dioxide generally. And there's sources in the water and in the air. If you don't know this, the carbon dioxide that we have in the air is at equilibrium with the carbon dioxide in the water. And there's a lot more water than there is air on this planet. So anyone has access to electricity, air, and water can make their own fuels. So you could say, hey, I'm going to break the chokehold that the Middle East has on this. or anywhere else on availability of diesel fuel,

which powers all our industrial commit, all our farms, everything. So past the use cases for electricity directly, which is the data centers and powering your microwave oven and powering your home, heating your water, the next thing is make the fuel. The next thing after that is desalinate water, right?

So if you have access to water, but it's not clean enough to irrigate your crops, cheap energy lets you take the salt out. And then you can irrigate basically anywhere there's water regardless of whether it's saltwater or not. So you've solved the basic energy, the transport, because there's a lot of use cases for petroleum that don't electrify well. And as someone who's worked on batteries, batteries are complicated.

They're also a resource constraint. There's minerals in there that are hard to get at. But you solve those two and solve the ability to make your own food. Man, you've solved a lot of the world's underlying challenges almost immediately. Is there anything unlimited, abundant-free energy gives us that is decades, to the future of humanity? Is there a yin to the yang of this? Is there a negative?

I mean, absolutely. I mean, this is part of the prior discussion around the limits of growth and exponential growth. And then, yeah, what happens when all your needs are met? Well, it seems like people do what they want. Lots of interest in art, for example, in entertainment. But there are those of us who would like to make things. So I don't know that there is any clear answer on what happens when humanity's basic needs are met. So according to some, you know, there are, say, 72,000 more things we can chuck up in low Earth orbit.

Most recently, SpaceX made a decision to bring their constellation down, assuming some things that are going to be happening in the coming years that will affect maybe some collision avoidance. They do a lot of collision. These satellites have to do a lot of coordination to make sure they don't run into each other, right? Yeah. Was it 800 maneuvers a day? that you said was it that they were doing? Say what you will about Elon. He's got all of our best interests in mind.

His assets up there in order to provide value, they need to know where things are, and they know. And then automation of what we would normally call dumb matter is a big deal, right? These maneuvers are no big deal. If you have what we call space to be in awareness, and the Kestler syndrome only is assuming everything's dumb. And things are going to run into each other. and collisions, they're going to create debris and more debris and more debris.

And we're in the midst of a solar cycle. I mean, the sun's been very active, and this is right about the peak. This last year has been the peak. So the move by SpaceX to lower significant fraction of their assets into lower orbits improves the performance, number one. But number two, they're up high because our atmosphere has been inflated by the increased output on the sun. And they drag satellites down.

I mean, that's so that altitude in which they get drugged down is, is going to continue to drop over the next 11-year cycle. In the middle of the 11-year cycle is right around 20, 31 or so. So the minimum altitude you can operate a satellite, it's going to drop dramatically. But operationally, space is still pretty huge. The total number of satellites at orbit is still dramatically lower than the number of aircraft,

the commercial aircraft, they're in the air in any given moment in time. Obviously, there's a limit to how much you can put up there, at least in the Leo orbits, but the higher orbits are basically empty. We intend to go to an orbit called Moldia, the only orbit with a name. What's it called? Molnia.

It's Russian for lightning. It was a spy satellite orbit in the 60s, but if you want to put something up that's ground synchronous, which means it passes over the same spot in the ground, you're going to take the time it takes Earth to rotate, which is called a side reel day. It's 23 hours, 56 minutes,

and divide that by the integer. So geostationated idiosynchronous and divide by one. Molnia is a stable orbit that's divided by two. You keep going lower and lower, and you get more and more often in the Earth shadow, but you can do four-hour orbit, six-hour orbit, three-hour orbit, all the way down in 90 minutes is the lowest you can fly without falling out of the sky. And all those orbits, like up there, Molina has got like five things. It's basically empty.

Like if we were to think about it like a real estate perspective, right? It's like there are particular slots where Leo has more of a, a wide range where you could stuff stuff in. Is that accurate right now? Leo has a number of shells, we would call them. Altitudes you can operate at. So there are things that are going over the poles and around around, around.

We call those polar orbits. And some fraction of them are sun-synchronous, which means they always fly over the Terminator between day and night. There are ones that are equator. They're ones that are inclined. So all those orbits basically all fly east to west, effectively.

I'm sorry, west to east, is because that's the way the Earth rotates. And as you go higher orbits, you could do more and more shells that have huge amounts of volume and you're passing through it basically what's empty. So you go up to geostationary? There's not very much stuff up there

because those are regulated spots. People pay for them to operate their telecom satellites. But nothing in geostationary has ever been hit by anything because it's so empty up there. People pay to use them. Doesn't that imply someone owns them? It's a agreement globally around spectrum usage government regulates it says, okay, yes, you can have the slot. So there's a global coordination

around geostationary. But the interesting thing is that the access to orbit cost have dropped so much that almost nobody cares about geo anymore because it's so cheap to get to Leo. Who's orbit's landlord? Like, who do we have to call to? Yeah. It's interesting. Other than geo, it's the Wild West. No one owes anything. And this is the frontier thing again. There's almost no regulatory structure in outer space. Now you've got outer space treaty. around, yeah, am I going to put a weapon up there and other things? But once you're up there, you can do what you want. So the dumb thing that you mentioned, the Kessler syndrome with 7200 or 72,000 pieces left to

throw up there, those would be just on devices that aren't able to coordinate with other devices and say, hey, hey, Mark, get on my way. I'm coming around. Boop, and we move stuff around, right? So we have more room in Leo than a lot of people are saying we do. We're launching more stuff in there at a rate that's exponential than in the past, right? The number of launches that we've had globally has been ever-increasing, and the number of devices putting up are ever-increasing.

There are limits, right? But the interesting thing about Leo is that those orbits decay, and eventually these satellites run out of propellant, the ability to stay up there. So Leo will clean itself out relatively rapidly, like on the decades of time scale, like we said, at the moment where the solar maximum, but the solar minimum means you can put more stuff up at lower altitudes, but the next time the solar cycle comes along, those are what we get dragged down. This solar cycle is fascinating that it changes the altitude of these orbits.

Absolutely, it's blown my mind. I love it. Yeah, yeah, and it's funny that the only reason we know about it is because people used to take their telescope and look at the sun and count sunspots. That's the only way we know how active the sun is is counting sunspots. I mean, it's still today when we have. So, in fact, a lot of satellite developers didn't realize that this was a thing, and design their satellite at the solar minimum,

and then put it up there in the solar maximum, and then their satellite came right back down again. So a space people who are not fall free. John, I've got to, as we're kind of landing the satellite here before it burns out, let me ask you a fun question. If you could grab, you know, the top 10 most influential people in the world, grab them by the collar and say, we're headed in this direction,

here are the three things we really need to do as a species. As a species, right? I mean, you would argue the most influential people are generally the people that have a lot of resource, right? Either you're at the pinnacle of some government running and you have access to tax streams or you're a businessman, you have access to revenue streams from your businesses. So the answer to top for things, what should we solve?

obviously, you know, basic human needs are one thing. And then what aspects of those are the biggest challenges, right? I mean, all of us are going to die from cancer eventually. Can you solve that? I don't know. But there's a lot of engineering on human biology. And actually, all the biologists that's probably solvable. What does it look like when we don't have disease anymore or what we categorize this disease?

So I don't know if I answered your question, Jeremy, but those are the other things I think about. So it's good. Well, what can we, what can we expect from you guys in the, you know, the next couple of years? What goals do you have for your organization? What goals do you have for your technology and its application? Yeah, unfortunately, we're very pragmatic engineers. So we have a number of milestones that we want to meet, but we hope to fly our first power plant in 2030. So that's not that long in the future. So building that first one and then showing it's, you know, showing it what it can do. And then having customers globally say, hey, this is something we want.

and they'll vote with their feet effectively. All right. Sounds amazing. And then the next step is like solving the next few problems. You know, we're interested in. But if we can solve energy, that would be amazing. That would be a good start, yeah. Yeah, just a little problem.

Just figure out energy. Yeah. Solving energy. This has been awesome. Thank you, John. What did you say? Those who own the resources have the influence, and that's kind of lodged in my mind now,

and it will be. And the culture of space will ultimately emerge from the politics of space, I fear, or hope or not sure. Hopefully we just don't bring the baggage from the old house to the new house though, right? Yeah, that is the paramount strategy, isn't it? I will just say for our listeners, we are in space season. We have a new book at book club, space to grow. This week we'll be learning about the Apollo missions, SpaceX in more detail, blue origin. So that's going to be foot. Later in the month, we have Philip Metzger coming on. We're speaking about rockets and the politics of space and some other. In fact, John, if you have any questions for him, that would be great. Audience, if you have any questions for a former NASA scientist, drop them in the comments.

Let us know. Read the High Frontier. Jeremy's book recommendation for life. Like, subscribe, wherever you're watching this. And we will see you next week. And in the time, be disruptive, stay curious. Keep thinking on paper.