Technology, Connected - Space Is Filling With Junk. Who Cleans It Up?

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

Space junk is becoming one of the biggest risks in low Earth orbit, from satellite collisions and Kessler syndrome to the millions of debris fragments already moving above Earth. This episode looks at how we got here, why deorbit rules have struggled, and whether active debris removal companies like Astroscale can turn space cleanup into a real market. The second half asks what happens when the same space economy depends so heavily on SpaceX, Starlink, launch access, satellite networks, and a private monopoly that governments increasingly rely on.Please enjoy the show--🎧 Listen to every podcast⁠📺 Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠🏠 Follow us on ⁠X⁠🏠 Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠To suggest guests or sponsor the show, please email: [e-mail]--Timestamps(00:00) Space junk (06:21) Kessler syndrome (10:57) Space Insurance (13:50) Government intervention(20:26) Active debris removal(22:37) Astroscale(24:53) Who pays (26:26) Is SpaceX a monopoly (29:08) NASA Administrator(33:04) Space governance

Disruptors and curious minds, the brave, the courageous, the special. Welcome to Thinking on Paper. And on February the 10th, 2009, an active American communications satellite slammed into a defunct Russian satellite at 22,300 miles per hour, 13 times faster than a rifle bullet. The resulting explosion blasted thousands of softball-sized bits of shrapnel and hundreds of thousands of small, of fragments into near-earth orbits. For the non-American's softball size, I believe, is about the size of a tennis ball, maybe a bit bigger. As NASA scientist, Donald Kessler, cautioned decades ago, the worst case scenario is that

this domino effect causes Leo to reach a tipping point beyond which collisions are ever increasing and unstoppable. The Kessler syndrome. And it's not just theoretical. Thousands of satellites are crumbling above, our heads, the orbits around which they orbit full of junk. Today, we're going to be addressing that problem in Act 1 of the show. We'll be asking how we got here. Why should we be optimistic about clearing up space junk? Why we should be pessimistic. We'll be learning about astroscale

and flirting with them so that they come on the show. And we'll be talking about the politics of clearing up space junk. And then in Act 2, we've been moving on to market power, space monopolies, decentralized versus centralized power. And we'll be looking at SpaceX's position and ask whether their domination is great for space innovation for the long term, as much as it is for the short term. Stick with us. Jeremy, take us on a journey to space junk. Buckle up, kids. Buckle up, kids. Off we go. So first of all, my question for you, Mark, is how, what are the strategic tactics to flirt with a company like Astroscale on a podcast? Three, two, one, go.

Well, I think that probably starts with speaking about Nobu Akada, the founder, visionary, business, human behind Astroscale and his motivations for creating that company and will get to them very shortly. Cool. Well, let's, yeah, let's jump right in. And so this, our last review kind of left some lingering questions from the last few chapters. Number one, this idea of can NASA be this coordinator of trust, of goodwill, that sort of thing, ties it in. And one of the one of the things that I circled here in the beginning of this chapter is, you know, they talk about markets, they talk about competition, they talk about public and private. But kind of what also happens when the invisible hand of the market doesn't work, right? And how do we address those market failures?

One question, quote, this is what I really, I really like this one. Quote, will we repeat the same mistakes made over the past several centuries of terrestrial economics? Terrestrial economics, because we are lifting and going to space. We always talk about don't bring your old problems to new innovation. land, right? But you're talking about the tragedy of the commons and externalities, Jeremy? Absolutely. Absolutely is where we're headed with this. Kessler. Should we go to Kessler first? In 2023, the US space surveillance network estimated that the total number of trackable objects in orbit, so that's debris larger than that softball we spoke of, had surpassed 23,

thousand, but fragments ranging from one to 10 centimeters numbered more than half a million. And as for the tiny shards, shards of metal smaller than one centimeter, estimates put that volume at 100 million particles more. We need to get a proper scientist who can tell us how important is it for those 100 million to be removed. Can those do damage to satellites? I assume they can if they're moving at 23,000 miles an hour. if you get a handful of centimeter long shards of metal

or whatever they're made out of, that's going to do some serious damage to your solar panels. 100%. But also, we'll get to this later. J.C. Liu, I think, was the researcher that referenced the biggest way to affect change in the overcrowded orbit scenarios grab the big stuff first. But I think the small stuff is actually just as big of an issue

because it's moving so fast. It's like bullets. As we know about life, Don't we? It's the small things that count. Talk to us about Donald Kessler, Jeremy. So Donald Kessler wrote a paper in 1978. 1978. And it talked about the density of objects in space and that collisions will actually accumulate faster than, or the potential of collisions will accumulate faster than the atmospheric drag can remove them. So collision potential is increasing quicker than stuff gets pushed into the atmosphere and burns up by itself. There's a certain point where the problem becomes, it's too far down the road, Pandora's box, so to speak, is uncorked, and we can't pull back even if we don't launch anything else.

object just from a high level perspective. It's been, I've read it in a few different places, roughly 70,000 objects kind of put us in that realm. But think about this. This week, Elon Musk put in for a license for a million objects. A million objects. So anyway, suffice it to say, it comes back to coordination and trust the human things that tend to mess innovation up in certain ways. So how did we get here then?

How did we get here? How did we end up worried about the space junk? Why is there so much space junk? And why are Astroscale and other governments and the space industry at large so worried about it? How do we get here? SpaceX has figured out how to bring down launch costs by over 90% right. So now we're like, oh, man, we can shoot things up there.

And then companies, companies like some of the satellite companies we've been talking to you are putting together, or not we've been talking to you that are referenced in the book. Who are the doves? Remind me the doves? Planet. Planet. So Planet figures out how to make satellites out of shit on the shelf at Radio Shack. So they're able to shoot these things up and make some tests and do some things. So the barrier to entry is removed, not removed, but significantly reduced. So now it's like, oh, man, let's see what we can do with all of this.

So you got China's putting up a bunch. You got Starlink is putting up a bunch. You have Amazon who has a couple of prototypes up, but they're down the road going to start putting some things up there. And I think one of the biggest things we talk about in the book and space economy in general is that the space to Earth economy is the first unlock for space economics in general, I think. Like how you can monetize what you can capture from space to Earth. And that requires satellites. That requires orbits. That requires all of these things in coordination.

Yeah, and the human weak spot. So the tragedy of the commons, quote an economic and environmental science problem where individuals have access to a shared resource and act in their own interest at the expense of other individuals. This can result in overconsumption, under investment, and depletion of resources. As far as space debris, it's a classic externality, a side effect. effect. So satellites, anti-satellite missile tests. Yeah, I actually, yeah, this was really. Space stations. There's a lot of people just doing stuff up in orbit, putting things up there, blowing things up up there without really, with no regard for the future generations and other

people and other companies and other nations who wish to go up there. It's pretty much like, Okay, space is my backyard. I'll do what the hell I like. Be damned with all of you. And here we are. Let's talk about anti-satellite missile tests. I looked into this a little bit. I guess in China, China in 2007, they had a satellite up there that they shot down,

created 3,500-ish trackable objects. So back to your softball reference. 150,000 total fragments and the stuff that's still up there allegedly won't decay for a century. Here's the problem. You can't like you can't track. You can't say, oh, these are China's 3,500 pieces in parts. So they need to clean up these things. They're just parts up there that are that are not ownable and trackable kind of thing.

Hey, wait a minute. Here's an idea. Create, create something in the material of satellites that has a D. DNA on it. And the DNA is trackable to the bits. So maybe it's something that you weave into the satellites and when they get destroyed, a little bit of that DNA is in each piece and part. Then you jump in, you have your satellite, you roll around, you scan them and you can identify who left their crap in lower Earth orbit. What do you think? That sounds like you're just entering a big blame game, if you ask me. Maybe like decomposable satellites. I think that's what we need, decomposable

satellites. So it's interesting what you said because you said 100 years that that anti-missar test might last. So this is interesting. How long will all this debris stay in orbit? It depends. So NASA estimates orbits under 600 kilometers where the atmosphere produces more drag debris and dead satellites will burn up within a few years. At 800 kilometers it could take centuries and at 1,000 kilometers or higher it could take thousands of years or longer. So it depends how high

in which orbit they are. And just a bit of data for your satellite launches. So this book was written, released in 2024. So this would have changed. But at the time of writing, one web, 648 satellites, Amazon's Kuiper project, 3,200. China's Guangwang, 13,000. And SpaceX, 42,000. And you just said that's now a million.

So a lot of stuff is going to be going up there. So if you want to be pessimistic, then there you go. What's a conjunction? So Hugh Lewis, now just friends and neighbors, not Huey Lewis of Huey Lewis in the news, but Hugh Lewis. He researched something called conjunctions, which are the chance, which is the chance of two objects passing really closely by, right? So let's look at some stats.

Mark, you're a stat guy. Let me throw some at you 2020. There were 1.7 million conjunctions observed or pretty. predicted, 2021, 2.5 million, 2022, 4 million. So we're, we're getting, we're getting up there. But here's the thing. These are not, these are not like near misses, but they're close enough to require diversion, close enough to require a little burst. And how many maneuvers does Starlink plan? Each Starlink has 350, has enough fuel to do 350 of these deviations over a five-year lifespan. So good look with that.

No wonder we need a million of them. That might not be enough. If you have four million over the satellites that were up there, like at the time, probably 40,000 divided by four million. That's a good amount per satellite. You're digging into that 350 maneuvers. Could get dangerous up there. Do SpaceX give them more fuel?

Do they keep them further apart? If every satellite, like if it has a conjunction, what is it? Do you have a conjunction? Is this a verb? No, that's conjugation. It's a conjunction. Yeah.

Well, here's going to get you up there. Here's the interesting thing. As we're just thinking about it, like my entrepreneurial brain is kind of spinning around a little bit that, man, there are going to be so many things for people to figure out and so many new potential business opportunities with the complication of doing what we, we want to do in outer space, in lower Earth orbit, there's going to be enough stuff for people to figure out to create a whole bunch of businesses. It just goes back to do we have the patient money to make our wishes and dreams come true. Well, talking of money, this is the final

economic frontier. So they speak about the economics of space junk and the insurance and the risk and it's not included in the current projections from the space market. The additional risk from on-orbit collisions is currently an in, I can't say that, currently an insignificant amount of the total insurance. There's no incentive to pursue other options. In other words, the market doesn't care. It's not accounting for it. So if the market isn't accounting for it,

if the market doesn't care about it, you can address the tragedy of the commons, the space commons, in two ways. governments what's the second well there are a couple of interventions that governments can do i think that he goes into but you said like the the market doesn't care what was your phrase there you read the quote it's well it's not incentivized to pursue as options so you know what i thought about immediately and you oddly enough you mentioned it at the top of the show is that a terrestrial comparison to this would be like plastic straws and plastic water bottles

do we need to clean the ocean? Is it putting plastic bodies into our bodies? Absolutely believe that. But there's not enough incentive for any one player to go out and say, hey, let me clean up everybody's mess. And the people that are making the bottle is like, ah, no one's really bitching that much yet. Let's keep riding it.

And that way we don't have to figure out how to address the cost of it. So I think it's applicable. Yeah, well, that's the tragedy of the commons with plastic and the oceans and the dolphins and the turtles and the porpoises. all suffer their individual fates. So broadly speaking, the market isn't going to solve this problem. So the tragedy of the commons can be addressed into other ways. First up, governments.

We're back to the government question, Jeremy. Oh, let's let's, hey, let's put, hey, I got this idea, Mark. Let's create a moon treaty. Let's go around and get people to sign the moon treaty. We go around and we do that. The problem is the majority of the people that sign the moon treaty are not space, So it's kind of this. That was 1979, so yeah.

Might have changed by then. It's fairing nations than then. But yeah, that didn't work. But then, you know, it took until the 2000s for an awareness of space debris to become common. So governments, the United States created a set of guidelines in 2001 to mitigate the creation of new debris, including a requirement that all satellites in Leo, where most debris is concentrated, must be safely deorbited within 25 years, other space agencies and organizations

took similar actions over time. Yeah, okay. Let's talk about how that, let's go through how that exercise worked. And by the way, that requirement has gone to five years as of recently. It's no longer 25. It's now five. So that's a little bit better.

But I mentioned J.C. Liu, NASA. So he did a study that actually looked into this deorbit requirement And who's managing this? Who's there with the clipboard going, Mark, your satellite is 25 years and one day old. You need to remove it. So 50% of the people, according to J.C. Liu from NASA, were following the 25-year deorbit. And as I said earlier, Lou's focus was to remove the big stuff to really make an impact. So in the book, they moved towards active debris removal.

ADR. ADR. as the solution to cleaning up Leo and ADR, active debris removal, another catchy acronym from our friends in the space industry. The stumbling block isn't the technology. The stumbling block is,

who's going to pay, said Harvard astrophysicist, Martin Elvis, nice name. So who is going to pay? I found a little interesting piece in here that I can believe this or not, Mark, we'll point back to Web 3 and Dow's that'll tickle your fancy. So let's start with this guy, Coase, I think, C-O-A-S-E. Ronald.

Ronald Coase, right? So he had this idea that, oh, I've got, we can solve the tragedy of the commons. 1950s Nobel winning economist. He did some good stuff. Nice. Thanks for clarifying that. I'm just calling this guy, Coast, and he's a Nobel Prize winner. Sorry to the family there.

So essentially what he said, you can solve the tragedy of commons if you have a few things figured out if the costs of bargaining are low if you have rational actors and you can uh and property rights are clear so guess what a couple of these are really hard to hard to figure out in space so costs of bargaining so costs in space here's why it might be troublesome in space the cost are high information costs are high in space so collecting data on anything that's going on up there, right? Coordination costs are really high. So coordinating between the things up there and measuring that stuff.

Enforcement costs are high. Who's enforcing all of these laws and regulations, right? And then, of course, currently we have no clear property distinction in lower Earth orbit, specifically geo, I think you can carve out little slots. How do you feel about what Mr. Kos said? Nobel Prize winner, Coast. Or Coase. Geez, terrible at these names.

I'm not really sure I understand the course theorem and how this applies to clearing up space. Well, so if you have, I did a little comparison. So imagine you have like, imagine you have like a factory and a fishery. Let's do two examples of this for the course, coast comparison. So you have a factory that's polluting the water. you have a fishery that's losing its fish because of the pollution in the water.

Okay. In this case, you have two parties. I'm the fishery. You're the factory. Two parties just have to come together and be like, hey, man, can we, you know, can we work something out? I think what Coase is saying is the less, the less people involved to coordinate that solution, the more likely it potentially is to happen.

And on the converse of that in space, you have countries, you have agencies, you have individual businesses, you have subscribers of the services that those businesses provide. And there's a lot, it's more complex going on in space than like a one-to-one issue on terrestrial. Yeah, it sounds like a hypothetical, economical solution that depends on well-defined property rights and low bargaining costs. So neither of which apply to space. So his theory, I'm putting that to bed.

Sorry to the family of Ronald Coase. I think that what this needs is the private sector. I think this needs real financial incentives to sort this mess out. It needs visionaries. It needs visionaries and private funding. It needs astroscale. Nobu Okada, the Napster moment for space. So inspired by, what was he inspired by?

He was inspired by Mamoru Mori, sorry for the pronunciation, Japan's first astronaut. Mori, a national hero, gave Arcada a handwritten note which read, Space is a place where your generation shines. And then he forgot about it and went to business school. And a few, you know, later on having a midlife crisis, he decided to follow his passion, having made his fortune. Let's talk about his approach to this. So he looked at it from, let's call it a conjunction. They call it a triangle in the book, I think. But, you know, technology, legal and financial

challenges addressing all of this stuff. We talked about the financial ones. There's no one, there's not enough drive and need in the market to fund the endeavor, right? But what do they do? They use magnets. They use magnets on their satellite to basically lock in to old satellites. and yank it down into the atmosphere and burn it away. They did a test to deorbitant satellite. I think the test worked, right? No, the test, it crashed and burned. Astroscale adopted a three-pronged strategy to try to move the needle on space debris.

One, develop cost-effective ADR technologies. Two, create a business case for its technologies. And three, inform and eventually help shape international policies around space debris. They settled on magnets, as you said, developing a satellite that can rendezvous, dock, and then safely remove a defunct satellite with magnets. And then in, it was 2017, four years into the Astro Scale story, they were on a launch pad in Siberia.

And the launch vehicle failed, and all the payload, including Astroskales' first satellite, were destroyed. Four years of work gone in a flash. And so that, the same thing happened with SpaceX. didn't it? There's a lot of explosions in space. We've spoken about this with data centers. You can experiment in space and they all did. And he went back to the drawing board. Within a year, the company had raised 100 million and was back on track. Four years after that failure, so 2021, an Astrosic

Gail satellite approached a small companion satellite stuck to it and demonstrated that their magnet locking system works in space. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. And I think I look to see what they're doing lately. And I think, according to what I found, there was a ESA contract regarding, it's called in-orbit reuse and upgrade. So I think what they're looking at next is actually attaching to a satellite, doing some repairs and letting it get back to work. So that is a contract that allegedly has been awarded to those guys. end-of-life services for satellites. End-of-life service. That seems like very like a funeral, like they're a funeral director or something. Like we're providing end-of-life services for satellites.

We bring all the satellites family in. We have a nice little talk. We tell what the satellite did for its life, maybe told some jokes. Keep them peaceful. Remind them of the good times and slowly descend. or ascend.

Yeah, Astroscale. What's interesting, I think, is with Astroscale is, yeah, so they create a solution, they get magnets, they're going to space, take it out. I don't know how quickly they can do this and how quickly it works. But as we've learned when Starship is launching every two minutes, there'll be plenty of time to take some of these astro scale satellite magnets up into space. But it got people talking, it got governments talking, it got people aware of what the problem was.

and global norms, yeah. Good on, yeah, trying to, there was a, yeah, there was a phrase in the book that was really cool. They want to make, they want to make this stuff routine. So it's just like a wrecking service on the interstate, just like a tow service on the interstate. No one thinks of a tow truck, no one. But hey, if there weren't any tow trucks, the highways would be crowded. And I think it's a really cool way to look at it. No, boo, we are ready to have a chat with you.

would love to learn more sounds super interesting. Are you optimistic about what? Space debris. It's interesting. I mean, I think it's cool that people are like looking at a problem and this guy's been working at it for 10 years. Like this isn't like yesterday. He was like, hey, let's put some magnets on a satellite and try to yank him out of

the sky. No, he's been at this for like 10 years and he had to learn. He didn't know anything about it. And he just started interviewing experts and long journey. But he wanted to solve it. I think it's going to be a big issue with launch costs coming down. Everyone's throwing stuff up there. There's no coordination.

There's no, there's no, what a license actually. I read this up to. What a license actually gives you is just permission to throw something up in a shared space. It's not, it's not, hey, you can operate at this particular degree of angle, you know, this space. So I think it's going to get really complicated until someone emerges as the coordination mechanic. Hey, NASA, this could be you. Remember last week, well, remember last week we was talking about space stations and the incentives, the financial incentive to build space stations. And we were asking the question, what can you do in orbit better and more efficiently than you can on Earth?

So business idea. I know we're going to launch a thinking on paper launch company. But now we could do an astro scale competitor. So we just moved to orbit and the thinking on paper. you know, junker that goes around and just pick stuff up and chucks it down. All right. I'll expect the business plan on my desk next week, Mr. Fielding. That's why I didn't go to business school.

Market power. Market power. All right. So, yeah, so let's talk about this. A lot of this chapter talks about monopolies and what happens when monopolistic powers control segments of a market or a market in general. and enter SpaceX. Yeah, according to the book,

the prices are starting to creep up a little bit, but they're innovating like Mammajamas, dude. So, I mean, how does that affect normal monopolistic theory? It doesn't affect the theory. It is an example of the theory. But it's talking about the risks of having a monopoly. And if you have a monopoly that continues to innovate, and prices are only incrementally going up,

I would argue that that monopoly is probably still doing okay in the grand scheme of things as far as benefiting the market, at least at this time. Keep going. There's a market. There's a monopoly. Okay. Control on the whole market. Everything in that market is 90% driven by that company.

So one situation could be gets all the customers in the market and they're like, yo, shut down the R&D. hey marketing let's crank up our cost by 2x we already got this captive market we don't have to iterate we don't have to do anything let's just lock and load and that benefits the monopoly company like the monopoly but it does not benefit the market and the people the consumers buying the stuff right because they're they're stuck with higher costs and shittier products over time right but scenario number two you have a company that yeah maybe prices are going up a little little and according to the book, the prices aren't going up that dramatically, right? But you still have people innovating to make the product better, to take one product and take the next step on a larger

mission to create a space economy, right? That's a big step. That's going to require a lot of little steps along the way. They're continuing to take those little steps along the way. And it's all under this mission, mission oriented versus profit oriented, although it said mission oriented versus profit-oriented in the book referring to SpaceX, but I think, I mean, they're profit-oriented too. But yeah, he wants to go to Mars. First way to get to Mars, we got to get, figure out a way to lift stuff off the planet for cheap, do it over time, you know, make it easier to get stuff up into orbit. And then we kind of take the next step, right? In that case, this monopoly is still benefiting the market in a way, is what. Without doubt, yeah. As I said in the book,

yeah, without doubt, there is, it's unarguable that the space industry is where it is because of SpaceX. And if you didn't have SpaceX, it wouldn't be anywhere near where it is. The thing with monopolies, listen to us talking about monopolies. Maybe like a mature industry and an immature industry react differently to monopolies. And like you said, the visionary, like SpaceX is built on a very, very, very strong mission statement to take civilization to Mars and beyond. And that's the driving force behind it. They say in the book, that's like the driving force every week, Elon's air, reminding everybody that that is the mission of SpaceX. And everything else comes second to that mission.

And he's no, he's nobody's full. He knows that he knows where SpaceX stand in the market. He knows the dominance that it has. It knows the importance that it has. He knows also that the industry is very, very immature and it needs other actors in it. Even if those actors, if their only role is to push him and to push SpaceX and to push the engineers onto bigger and better things, if he's using them as fuel,

it still needs these other actors, at least in the short term. What happens in the long term is a different story, I think. A couple quotes for you. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstein. There is only one thing worse than a government monopoly. And that is a private monopoly that the government is dependent on. I do worry we have put all of our eggs into one basket,

and it's the SpaceX basket. But what other basket is there right now? What other basket is there? There are a lot of companies that have kind of fallen away from a launch perspective, from a capsule build perspective, from a rover perspective. A private monopoly that the government is dependent on the war in Ukraine, the future, you heard at her first war in Iran. Every American, probably every American submarine, every American aircraft carrier,

every American government department in some way relies on a little bit, or if it doesn't now, it soon will be of the space X infrastructure. whether that's Starling internet, whether that's rocket launch, whether that is taking whatever weapons they have, secret weapons into space, whatever they're doing, they are reliant on space X. And the stronger those links become,

the more history is built on those relationships. The stronger that bond becomes, the more powerful that monopoly becomes, the more worried, Jim Bridenstein becomes. Well, there's no question. SpaceX has done tremendous things. No question.

Where we are now, just if you just look at launch costs, where we are now is crazy as where we were, you know, a decade ago. But it's really a couple other quotes for consideration here. This one, I guess from an article in the New Yorker, I think. So quote, Musk is sometimes erratic businessman and private citizen with a penchant for conspiracy theories has played a critical and even unprecedented role in an international conflict,

shaping it in a way no mere tech baron could. There's little precedent for a civilians becoming the arbiter of war between nations in such a granular way or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk. Interconnected, baby. And that's two years ago.

Yeah. But we are fortunate, Jeremy, that leading space companies have much more to gain by growing the pie and claiming their share of it than by slowing growth to grab the larger share. We do have that mission statement. Should we worry about SpaceX? And if so, what should we do about it? Do you worry about SpaceX? It's such a weird thing, man. Like the control that someone might have with all of the satellites.

And now recently, as this wasn't in the book, but this was over the past week, SpaceX has acquired XAI. A lot of people think it's in large part to make the numbers look a little bit better from an IPO perspective. But this is not financial advice, by the way. That makes a pretty big jump. So imagine one company firing the rockets, one company running the launches, one company with the largest constellation of, say, a million satellites that can surveil,

that can communicate, that can turn on and off access. to essential services to nearly anywhere in the world, that seems as we have the pendulum between Doom and Utopia. It's definitely, I don't know. I love that what they've done, hard work and like the engineering and the drive to do what they've done with rockets and launch and all the things they're getting into, man, it's amazing. So I'm in a little middle ground with that that I'm struggling to communicate well.

Everyone says this, the most important time that we all live in is the now and the here and the now. But what happens with Artemis and what happens with Starship over the next 12 to 24 months will shape what happens next. It will shape NASA and by extension the American government's role in the space industry. it will shape how much of a role SpaceX take on. And if, as we've been learning recently, he does get one Starship rolling out of the factory every day. And these launches become so, so regular. And SpaceX control all of that?

Well, that was a bit boring edition of the Thinking on Paperbook Club. Please let us know. what your thoughts are on any of the subjects we've discussed. And if you could do us a favour, the best way for other curious minds to find our show is for you to share it. So please share this episode with one curious space nerd friend. And we'll see you next week. Until then, be disruptive.

Stay curious. Keep thinking on paper.