The a16z Show - The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

Many people consider space to be the next frontier and equally an infinite horizon to explore. But the reality is that not all “space” is the same and there are strategic zones that don’t only matter up there – but down here on Earth. Lower Earth Orbit (LEO) is one of those regions – a zone filled with satellites that support life on Earth, from agriculture to climate to navigation to defense. Unfortunately, these live satellites are not alone in our space highways. LEO is getting increasingly clogged with space debris; we’re polluting our skies just like we’re polluting our land. In this episode, we have the pleasure of speaking with all three cofounders of Privateer – Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah, as they explore just how much junk is up there, how this challenge is expected to progress with time due to lower launch costs, and ultimately, what infrastructure is missing in this fragile ecosystem – from tracking to global treaties to a sharing economy of satellites.By the end of the episode, listeners should be more equipped to understand how our infrastructure in space vastly impacts life on Earth, how the preservation of this ecosystem is crucial, and how Privateer is providing the map to better understand and fix the issue.Timestamps: With Steve Wozniak00:00 - Intro3:24 - Why space and why now?8:55 - The changing perception around space13:29 - Exponential technologies and thinking different16:32 - Inventors vs engineers vs visionaries18:46 - Early days at Apple and moving towards the future20:53 - Steve’s personal fascinations23:58 - How vocabulary drives awareness1:21:55 - Woz returns!With Alex Fielding and Dr. Moriba Jah24:43 - Is space really an infinite void?25:55 - The growing pollution in space29:14 - The impact of space down on Earth30:34 - The challenge of space policy and governance38:27 - Orbital highways and carrying capacities41:05 - Dependence on space infrastructure and its fragility45:14 - Privateer’s role in the evolving ecosystem46:52 - Democratizing space through data sharing49:45 - Can we undo the damage that’s been done?52:01 - Determining intent in space58:17 - Talent needed in the space industry1:01:04 - Privateer’s biggest challenges1:09:22 - Space stewardship and Hawaii’s kuleana1:15:19 - Who inspires Alex? Resources: Privateer’s website: https://mission.privateer.com/Privateer’s Wayfinder tool: https://mission.privateer.com/Privateer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PrivateerSpaceSteve Wozniak on Twitter: https://twitter.com/stevewozAlex Fielding on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Alex__FieldingDr. Moriba Jah on Twitter: https://twitter.com/moribajah Stay Updated: Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.com/podcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

So I'm closer to low Earth orbit than I am to you. And I think that's what people just don't realize. All right. So today we have a new episode of the A16C podcast. And boy, do we have a treat for you. We have all three co-founders of Privateer in the house. That is Alex Fielding, Dr. Morbijaw, and wait for it, Steve Wozniak. Yes, that is the Steve Wozniak that you recognize from Apple,

whose latest venture is focusing on cleaning up the next frontier. This episode actually starts with Boz, and let me tell you, chatting with him was truly a treat, truly an honor. He starts by sharing how Privateer came to be and why a focus specifically on space is so crucial today, including his own reflections from the very first space race and how it helps spur the area of modern computing, which clearly he was very, very involved in so many years ago. But I love that he also shared a bunch of personal stories from his days back at Apple, including how him and Steve Jobs thought about iteration on the way to the future, the differences between a visionary and inventor and an engineer, and even what prompted him to want to build a computer in the first place.

And while naturally I love my time with Woz, I think you're really going to enjoy the rest of the conversation with Alex and Morba. Because here's the thing. Many people consider space to be the next frontier and equally this almost infinite horizon to explore. But the reality is that not all space is the same. And there are strategic zones that don't only matter up there, but also down here on Earth. Low Earth orbit, sometimes referred to as Leo, is one of those regions. A zone filled with satellites that support life on Earth from agriculture to climate, to navigation, to defense, and much more. And unfortunately, these live satellites are not alone in our space highways.

Leo is a zone that's getting increasingly clogged with space debris, and we're basically pluting our skies the same way we're polluting our land. And in this episode, we discussed just how much debris is up there. And hint, it's probably a lot more than you think. We talk about how this challenge is expected to progress as launch costs go down, and by the way, they go down exponentially, and ultimately what infrastructure is missing in this fragile ecosystem, from tracking to global treaties to maybe even a sharing economy of satellites. By the end of this episode, listeners should be more equipped to understand how the infrastructure up in space vastly impacts our life on Earth, why this infrastructure hasn't historically been shared, how the preservation of this ecosystem is so crucial, and of course how privateer is provided. providing a map to better understand and fix this issue. Oh, and you'll also learn what the hell Elon's orbit is. One more thing.

If you like this topic, we also did a demo with Alex on the Wayfinder product, and that is on our YouTube channel, some exclusive video content. And if you like the episode in general, we may release some bonus audio with Alex, where he shares what it's been like to work with Woz for over two decades. They originally met at Apple. All right, let's jump in. The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any

investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, we see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Well, Steve, it's an honor to be talking to you today. I want to say a personal thank you for all that you've done with personal computing, modern computing. I can say for myself, the fact that we're even doing this online or the fact that I've been able to work remotely for most of my career is really a testament to the work that you and many others have done in this space that have completely changed the world. So again, thank you for that. Thanks. It's a real case where I can even thank myself for it. It's all the great things we have. Exactly. I want to start with a question, which is around this idea that you really can work on

anything today, right? You've left your legacy through modern computing. And now you're at a place where you could work on anything in the world or nothing in the world, right? You could also just chill and move on. Why have you chosen to focus on space and specifically space sustainability? And why are you doing that now today in 2022? Well, first of all, I sort of had, I had that freedom. And I was just designing products for five cents each for people all over California, incredible things, starting big industries. So I always felt that way. I'm doing what I want to do. and not doing it for starting big companies or getting super wealthy. A lot of other people have different motivations.

As far as, so first of all, I've always been into doing good for the world because every company starts. You talk to anybody with any little startup and, oh, we're doing this. It's how it's going to improve somebody's life or some people's lives. So that's, you know, not easy, but I like to go overboard and rate it a little bit higher on the balance of the good you're doing versus other reasons. like, oh, I can figure out a way to make money on it. But Alex Fielding is really the one that brought me into privateer. He's been my best friend for a long time. And he was hanging around

all these space people in Maui where he lives. And we're always in communication. He was best man at my wedding. And so he started approaching me about this space and there's issues in space. You know, you start and you look at some of the closed ones. Everyone hears about space debris and it's danger. But that's a kind of long pass for what we're really. about. And Alex, the way he knows me is, you know, the type of person he is. He sees the world better than just a logical spreadsheet guy because one time we were starting a startup company involved in GPS and we couldn't find a name. Okay, maybe it's good. We're going to print the GPS as of cops, cop detector.com, cop this and that dot com. Everything is taken that has words.

And I sat a little secret in back my head without saying anything to the other members of our board. I said, I had a web, a web domain, was.com. I got it in the early days of the web. It's a great domain. And I don't use was.com. Because com means your commercial and org means your nonprofit and I'm a nonprofit type. So I secret. I thought, what words can I make up that use WOZ?

I said, Wheels of Zeus and nobody, what a crazy name for a company. You know? And then, but Alex, he said, yeah, that's great. And it actually is a great name regardless. And it was from, we got was. And I was really proud of that because instead of lawyers, you know, dealing with licensing a domain name, I was the seller and I was the buyer. I just hand wrote it and signed it, didn't pay the huge fees that, you know, the lawyers have.

And Alex would only approach me knowing how I think of good things for the world. The outcome has to be good. And not just it makes sense as a product. It'll simplify life. That's not enough for me. And there's always alternatives. And Alex also, I've got to know him as the best judge of people, what they're about, what they want to do. and in business development, knowing how to convince others that we've, you know, what we've got

and knowing what the submarkets are and all of the aspects of a business. So I often call him that he's the smartest person I know because I'm, you know, more in technology than I am business. And he sees a full or long-term picture about things in the past. I've worked with Alex before, you know, on startups and, of course, all my life on everything and follow him. And we stay in very close touch all the time. So you can look up in a magazine article or,

get an idea from it, and here's a company we could start. But this was a case where you're better off if you have a person you know saying what is good about something, why it is. Personal recommendation, like even seeing a movie, is worth more than just reading the synopsis of it. So Alex sees a long-term picture, you know, for capitalizing, you have to stay alive, you have to be alive, and for iterations of products working through and modifying what's there and being in the right place. You've got to keep the product market fit correct. So anyway, privateer is just the finest collective of people. Do it thanks to Alex.

I could imagine in various roles, even, you know, communication roles and all that. And it's wonderful to be involved in the startup. We're very early seed stages so far. Alex also attracted other good people, finds them and gets them. And he found Mariba Jha, who's a professor, University of Texas in Austin. And Mariba has a standing reputation in this field. of space and objects in space and things like that. And he is just like so much of a genius.

I almost shut up and shy back because he knows all the details and the aspects that you can refer to that makes sense. So I thought this was great. Alex was very strongly into a lot of the space operations like they are going more private than public. So privateer is a good name based on that. I think you're right. I got to speak to Moriba and Alex yesterday, both geniuses, both who really understand the

importance of space long. term. I want to ask you about space and the perception of it or the perception of its importance, because I think there's a lot of opinions about whether it's important, whether it's frivolous, and the investment there, you got to see how this first space race impacted technology thereafter, how it helped modern computing, there was many other dovetails, whether it was LASIC eye surgery or water filtration that came out of the investment into space many, many decades ago. I'd love to just hear your perspective on why it's important again today and why you think it's important for people like Morba, like yourself, like Alex, to be investing in this particular space or industry. I grew up in what is called Silicon Valley now, but back then it was Santa Clara Valley.

Space came to our area, our area of the world, South Bay Area, before, long before it was called Silicon Valley, you know, in the 50s. And Lockheed Martin moved in. And there was a space race going on, a competition with Russia to launch, you know, orbiting satellites into space and people in the space and even to get to the moon. And the thing is, it cost a lot of money back then, huge amount of money to launch rockets. And Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale, California, was looking into, you know, missiles that you could launch accurately, even from like submarines. And I don't know, my father worked there, but I don't really know too much about it.

He would never talk about any projects he was working on. So we had a space race and as well as the defense for missiles. And, you know, one thing is, back then it cost so much to launch a rocket. You had to pay a fortune, fortune, like billions of dollars a almost. You know, for every gram of mass, you had to pay a fortune. And the more you could make, you could lighten the load of the thinking part, the electronics that thought or the little computer parts that thought, the more you could lighten it, the better.

And that's what chips did. Chips instead of having, you know, 20 transistors. You know, after a while, you could have one tiny little chip the size of one transistor, the weight of one transistor doing the job. And that really boosted everything, including digital and computer technology, but making it lower cost for us. It was not low cost at first. New technologies like chip making were so high a price. So I grew up in this. And, you know, and of course we always looked up to space because we were in the science field.

You know, I've always read books and watched movies and especially if you're kind of like one of those exploring pioneers. There's, oh, my God, following, you know, either shows like Star Trek, but flying things into space and and beating the politicians, you know, with your own cleverness and ability to maybe go out and harness water from the rings of Jupiter. But today, we're sitting here and we're looking up to space and we're saying there's a lot of stuff up there now and it's very important in our life and the stewardship of space. This is why I got from Moriba. It's just, you know, understanding that we have to be kind of responsible. all of us. And I expect that the privateer will be very involved in communications between different parties, even different countries, and probably, you know, even getting into things like treaties involving space, some kinds of agreements so we can work better and understand what we have.

It's all connected because we down on earth, I'm sure Maria told you this, we down on earth use so many things from space, from, you know, weather review to flight conditions to GPS, to our cell phones. So these are important things in our life. And that has to be protected somehow. So anyway, that's our start. And you know, you start a startup and you get some seed money, but then you have to think of what's the right product and, oh, here's an idea. It's got to come from people that also think a lot differently.

And that's one of the nice things about Silicon Valley. A lot of us are that way. And the thing is, my house gets real messy sometimes. And what do I want to do if it's messy? I look at, I want to clean things up so I can get to it, at least find things where they are, what drawers they're in. And that's the way I look at, you know, you feel it in your own house. You're stumbling over some junk on the floor and it's there. I'll kick it over in a deeper corner and this and that. But we want to, you know, have some ways to keep space more orderly

and understood by all. And sharing information, being very open and transparent is important to us. You know, and you have to imagine your house, you get around it, you kind of know where you've got all to stuff to jump. But somebody else comes in randomly. Should things make sense to them? Even if you say, go make me some coffee, would should they be, have an easy way to find the way to make coffee in your house? And that's how I think the space very much, that we've got to keep it understandable and organized for everyone. Well, something you spoke to there is the ability for these technologies to be exponential, right?

What we see today from Pipert here might not be what it is in five years or 50 years. And I had the privilege of talking to Alex yesterday, and he told me this story about you from the very, very early days where when you were younger, you basically told your dad, hey, dad, I want to have a computer someday. And he said, because at this time, this is true, he said, you're crazy. Computers cost as much as that house. And you told him, well, dad, I'll live in an apartment. And you seem to really, really just want a computer at that time. To your point earlier, starting Apple was not about building one of the biggest businesses in the world. It was wanting a computer and wanting other people to have that. I'm curious just to know from a personal perspective, what did you see back then? Was it truly just like a personal need for? this device or I want to, you know, dig into that early Waws brain and, and hear your perspective on what was going on in those early days. A lot of great things come personally. And I learned even, I taught middle school and elementary school for eight years straight full time, full time, like every hour of the day up to seven days a week. No press allowed. So it's not a big story.

But I learned that it was less important that you're speaking facts and knowledge from your mouth. Knowledge was less importance than the motivation of my students to learn, had to find ways to make it fun, make it understandable to make it, you know, like stories that tell what's in their head. And that's when I decided, you know what? Wanting something is even more important. And I go back, I wanted a computer. It was in my heart. And I didn't know if I ever get it.

I didn't know if designing computers would ever be a job for engineers because we were back in the analog days, you know, smart math stuff. And but I kept it in me and eventually I found the path to do it. So I was building a computer for myself and turned out the point in time. And sometimes there's a lot of luck in business success. And the point in time that I was going to build that computer, no matter what it was worth, turned out to be worth a ton. And then a lot of times when people are successful in technology, I've seen them look off

in the space because we almost all come from science backgrounds. And even when Apple went public around 1980, our president, Mike Scott, maybe 81 or two, started a little company with some people. I funded into that. He's a friend. And actually we did a launch of a rocket from out at sea from some. work. So I don't know. There were a bunch of rocket engineers around saying it is possible to do with, let's say, money. Now, governments have all the resources, you know, but they're stale

in their approaches because of it. Here's what we can do very successfully, very stably. We know we'll get there if we put enough money in and test enough. And private industry works so differently. I've only been in private. And I just love having ideas and thinking about them and, you know, thinking different and the creativity that comes about when you think, by gosh, I could do something. before, or maybe the resources are cheaper. The sorts of huge computing devices are cheaper to make and maybe certain types of motors. And I can do something that hasn't been done before, sensors that didn't exist before. And you got to always shoot for the top being, you know, one of the leaders in the world. And that's just how we think. So a lot of times when I think

of government versus private, I also come down to types of people, which is very important. And you have an inventor who can be given a job and they've gone through all the right, they have the right skill sets and they've gone through the right university, you know, majors and PhDs and they're in an engineer and they can design what you sign them. But then there's the inventor. The inventor goes along. Thinks, oh my gosh, is there something I'm interested in that I could do and would it work? And maybe it hasn't been done before. And can I make a difference in the world? And the inventor wants to run into a laboratory, hook up some demos real quick, try to get some sort of prototype to show that the idea is good is right. And that's the sort of person I am.

It's in your personality. You don't change it. You don't just say tomorrow I'm going to be an inventor. Today, I'm an engineer. You're usually one or the other. So that's another advantage of Alex, you know, putting together privateers. We're looking for the inventor types, you know. Yeah, definitely.

I mean, another word sometimes people use for inventor is visionary. And I'm curious in the early days when you were just out of passion creating these computers, could you see the path to today? Of course, you can't picture everything with so many. advancement since those early days, but like, how far along were you actually envisioning? And I'm asking this partially because even if we apply this to space, a lot of the things that people talk about in the realm of space also sound kind of like science fiction, right? They probably won't be eventually. But I'm trying to understand also how you, how far along you see or the extrapolation

that maybe goes on in your brain when you're originally talking about, yes, a computer with 200 transistors and now we're talking billions and the applications that have kind of sprung. I myself, I was really a great engineer in certain field and I was designing the hottest products in the world for Hewlett-Packard without even having a college degree yet. And then you talk about visionary, vision see in the future. That's different than invention, though. Inventor really wants to actually go in and create something today that didn't exist and not have a vision that's 50 years out or 10 years out because that's science fiction a lot. And everybody can talk about and say later on, see, I proposed it, but it wasn't more possible to do with money. and the engineer says, feet on the ground, what can I actually do and build and deliver to people?

When we started Apple, you know, we had a great product that was going to be all the revenues of Apple for the first 10 years. But we had a great lead. We were comfortable and we could do what we wanted. But the amount of memory that would hold a song costs, you know, we were back in the days of tape. It cost about a million dollars, a good fraction of a million dollars. Do you think we saw it today where you have a device in your hand with a thousand songs on it even? No, Steve Jobs is very instrumental in always taking us, do what we can do today. Try to do something a little more tomorrow, a little more.

And you can have a lot of failures too if you'll have one great product bringing in the revenues. But the whole idea was we'll move towards the future and we'll be a part of it. And we'll begin with it. And after all, you look back at it was kind of invisible the steps we took, but they all led to today. And then there was some, you know, some of that invention stuff we got to. Steve Jobs' Apple 2 was really the iPod music. music. And that was the first time, oh my gosh, up till then our company valuation was the same as the old Apple two days. And then all of a sudden, we sold it to everyone in the world and our sales doubled and our profits doubled.

And the board gave Steve Williams and stock options and jet airplanes. That was the turning point. And then the iPhone was even better. And it was based on the iPod, not the reverse, not a phone and we'll include an iPod. More like it's an iPod, but you get a phone with it. And so it's hard to say that you really see the future more than, a year ahead when you're working a year ahead on your projects. Whenever I tried to see the future a year ahead, I knew it one year ahead because I was working on it. If I looked two years ahead and made some guesses, oh my gosh, other aspects, other technologies and all came out from outer space and people's desire which way they wanted to go was different. It's very hard to predict even two years ahead successfully the way I work. Nowadays, we got huge big companies. So it's kind of like,

you know, anything that work on is going to be successful. It's not as much a, it's not as much of a gamble. But, you know, real, real inventors like to gamble, like to prove the world that they can do more than you ever imagine. Definitely. Well, it's, if there's no risk, no reward, right? So to really change the future or change society, you do need to make some of those gambols. I have one final question for you, which is that you obviously were very, very significantly involved in modern computing. You now are focused on space. Everyone has limited resources. But are there areas or problems in the world or industries that you're fascinated by that maybe you wish we're talked about more or you think that more builders, more entrepreneurs, more founders should be paying

attention to? You know, I read the same things as everyone else. You know, we talk here about quantum computing. You can go either way, but I'm into things that actually, like I said, feet on the ground that actually come through and, you know, solve all the general problems. So I'm a little skeptical of a lot of these things. Crypto and its place in our future has been really hard to pin down. So I'm kind of foreshamed, but I don't invest.

I don't even invest in crypto. I don't invest in stocks. You know, I made a lot of money on crypto, but only because I had to experiment with it, you know, when Bitcoin was young. I like things that don't add up and necessarily make sense. I mean, Bitcoin, who created it? Who owns it? What company?

You know, there is no such thing. How many Bitcoin can ever be created? Can we always create more and more to make ourselves wealthier? No, it's got a finite limit. It's mathematical. I like things that are mathematical and pure. It's like you say, when is your birthday? Oh, it was two days ago, August 23.

No, their birthday should be when the earth is around the sun at the same place. You have to take leap years into correction, and more important leap years, they fix themselves every four years. You have to take into account there's a leap year correction that's over a 400-year cycle, and your age, as you get older, you've actually moved your real natural nature birthday even later in time. So I like to do things that are based on math, real trueness. Instead of starting the year on something called January 1,

Back when, you know, months were named by the Romans. And with Roman numerals, they couldn't give a day of the year. So they came up with months. And then they stole a day from February for Julius Caesar. That's July. And that's day for Augustus. And this is the calendar we use, you know. And we, that's all, that's because our human minds are kind of weak.

If you take everybody into account, not everybody's a super scientist. And our minds are weak. But we can deal with the sort of calendar that we use. But I'm in this, you know, you would start the year on something like the winter solstice or the summer solstice. You know, something that has a real thing you can look out to the skies and say it's real. Well, I want to say thank you for taking this time. And also, thank you for the work that you, Alex Marba, are doing on Privateer. As I started researching for this episode, I was mind blown by the amount of debris that we have above us,

but also how much is being launched, the cost of launch going down and just imagining this future where lower Earth orbit is a finite resource and it's important for us to take care of. So thank you for your work there. Thank you for everything you did with modern computing as well, as I mentioned, because it's completely shaped the way that people in my generation have been able to live and work. Thanks. Your summary of space was excellent. Oh, thank you. But there's more to it than things.

We're not going to go up and try to gather things, you know, and bring them down. Some people are trying that. We just want to make the information available so people could do it if they want. Yeah. Well, something I talked to Alex about yesterday is the fact that many people don't even have the terminology. or the imagery for what's up there, right? And therefore, it's hard for people to care about that because they can't imagine it and they also can't articulate it.

But now even with terms, like I don't know if you've seen Google Trends, even. The term space sustainability is something that I hadn't heard of before, but it is, you know, slowly ticking up and even just the fact that, again, we have some of that terminology. What really changes public perception in areas like this is sometimes there's a spike due to something. A lot of stuff in the news that all of a sudden people are now much more aware than they were before. And it's hard to predict when those will come. You know, we'll do our best. We'll do our best to just educate people and keep them informed.

All right. Alex Marba, thanks for taking the time. Welcome to the show. Aloha. Aloha, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, we've got Alex calling in from Maui. Marba, where are you calling in from?

Austin, Texas. I want to start with a question about space. That's what we're going to be talking about. And us on Earth, we're all distributed. But Earth feels so small compared to space, right? even when we talk about space, we use dimensions like light years, which are just magnitudes more than what we talk about on Earth. And so it feels like space is this infinite dimension, this infinite void. But is space this infinite void that we have access to?

Yeah, okay. So look, I mean, all of outer space is probably infinite, but where we put satellites, that's actually finite. In fact, we put satellites on very specific orbital highways. They're very close to Earth. In fact, where are you right now, Steph? I am in Insaneda, California. So I'm closer to low Earth orbit than I am to you. And I think that's what people just don't realize.

Wow. That is fascinating. And I think, to your point, space in theory is infinite, but there's certain aspects or certain parts of space that are really, really essential. And something you've talked about before Morba is that we as humans have started to pollute air, land, the ocean. And now it sounds like we're doing the same with space. But for some reason, it seems like most people know about the pollution in air, ocean, land.

Why don't we know more about the pollution happening in space? Well, I think that most people, they just aren't aware of how many satellites we have launched. The fact that most of the stuff that we launched just doesn't come back or it takes a really, really long time to come back if it's in a sufficiently low. Earth orbit. Also, people just haven't had a place to just go online and just kind of see the stuff. And, you know, now that we at Privateer have rolled out Wayfinder, we're just like a click away from people seeing all these dots, you know, all around the Earth. I know you originally created something called Astrograph. And I heard you say on an interview that actually seeing

the amount of stuff, some of it being valuable, some of it being junk, actually caused you to cry because it was so, I guess, devastating or maybe Let's hear from your words. Why did that trigger that kind of emotion in seeing that? My career started NASA Jet Propulsion Lab working on Mars missions, but when I moved to Mali in 2006, I started working with the Air Force Research Lab with the telescopes on top of Mount Paliakala. And all of a sudden, at that time in 2006, there were only 1,200 working satellites and 26,000 pieces of garbage.

And I'm like, what? Like, this doesn't make any sense. Holy cow, like, this is ridiculous. How is it okay for like 96% of the stuff that we put in space to turn out to be garbage? Like we don't see that in other domains. We don't have that as acceptable. Okay, we're going to put a bunch of stuff out here on the land, but 96% of the stuff we're going to put out as going to be trash. Like, we don't do that.

Alex, I want to hear from you. How much space debris are we talking? Sounds like it has increased with time, but I don't know if many people have a sense of the sheer magnitude of stuff up above. us. So we're talking about over a million pieces of debris that are smaller than a centimeter, but the only thing we can really see from ground-based radar stuff that's bigger than the size of a softball. So, you know, when Morbis says there's these 26,000 things or, you know, whatever that number is precisely, those are things the size of a softball doing roughly 18,000 miles an hour. And, you know, mv squared, still mv squared. So it's a real problem because the little

pieces of debris, the things you can't see can really hurt you in space. You wouldn't get on a passenger jet if you got told when you boarded the plane. There's a million little bullets flying around and this is going to make your life potentially very miserable. We just don't know. Hope you make it. But that's kind of what's going on with spaceflight. The first challenge is you have to be able to see everything so that we can put together a plan on how to solve for that. and astriograph, wayfinder, these are tools to help enlighten the world and kind of bring attention to the problem first so that we can all align on what the best solutions are for cleaning up space, which is kind of one side of privateers' mission of making space safe and accessible for humankind.

And I want to get to how we solve the problem, but I also want to speak a little bit to what is at stake here. So you're talking about thousands of things that we can monitor, but particularly, potentially millions that we aren't able to monitor. How often does this stuff actually collide? And then also, how often does that impact us on Earth, whether it be things actually coming down to Earth or impacting the satellites or infrastructure that we use on Earth up there in space? I mean, there's a lot of collisions, right? And there are some that we actually can see and we can clearly identify that was caused by debris or even in the case of a satellite hitting an active satellite or vice versa or two objects in near space colliding. It happens a lot more than we

would like to think. And there's also reasons why we don't talk about it as a community, why we don't just openly talk about our problems in the space community the way that we would in other academic communities or places where we're more data driven. And some of that actually surrounds liability and risk. As an example, many insurance policies in space on the riders exclude space debris from a covered loss. I'm not saying that people do it. I'm not saying that people do it. probably implying it, but if your insurance policy said, we don't cover things hitting your car windshield that are rocks, then whatever cracked your car windshield is probably not a rock. So these are, these are challenges we're also working around, which is the evolution of space policy and the

space act and treaties evolving. These things were based in maritime law. And I guess that kind of made sense for the time, because we needed a framework for how we interoperate in space, but that is actually creating the challenge because we don't have even the simplest notions of like right of way. You're in space. You're going to come very close to colliding with someone else's object,

whether it's dead or alive. Who's got the right away? Well, I mean, obviously if it's dead, you better move. But if you're both active, who's got the right away? These are very simple constructs on the ground. You wouldn't get in your car

and not know that. But in space, we're operating in the blind. We don't have these rules. fully defined as a community, and yet we keep launching more and more things without solving those. Right. And yeah, that seems extremely important in terms of if we do want to clean up the Dipperian space, who is responsible for that? And since there are so many actors at play, even if you have these tracking systems that you and others are creating so we know what's going on to a larger degree, how do you even solve that problem? How do you create the right policy or legislation for people to

become good actors. Because right now it seems like even if someone wanted to be a good actor, they don't even have the rule set to do that. Well, it's like the International Space Act and treaties. I mean, we all sign this thing when we go to space. When we put a satellite up, we all sign this. And it includes things like not weaponizing space, not doing generally bad things in space, not doing bad things to each other in space. And yet, you know, more of approved this definitively with his work that he did at UT Austin with IBM on a project called Arcade, where they looked at how many objects in space are in or out of compliance with the Space Act and treaties. And the number out of compliance is over 40% of those registered objects are out of compliance.

Wow. Part of the problem is enforcement. Like, if you stick a speed limit sign up that says 65 miles an hour and we're all doing 120 and there's no cops, and don't get me wrong, I don't want to be a traffic cop of space. You may not follow the speed limit sign. It might look more like a good suggestion. And in space, you know, I kind of think people just cross their fingers, put them behind their back and sign the Space Act. and treaty and just went on about life and said, who's going to call me on it? Because there is no enforcement. Moreba. If there's 40% that is not in compliance, who is the space cop?

I have some good news and bad news. The good news is I know the answer, the bad news, it's the same countries that are non-compliant. I think the thing that really needs to happen stuff is transparency. If people know that they're being watched and that the evidence is being brought to the public square, that might be a deterrent. It might help curve people's behavior and that sort of stuff in space, because ultimately, in terms of international law, the responsibility falls on the state's party to the treaty, which are governments. So governments are responsible. Governments need to be the enforcers. But if nobody actually knows if there's no evidence that, you know, companies that are being licensed by the governments are misbehaving,

then it's kind of like, who cares? governments launching stuff into space, right? There are private businesses that are doing the same. Yeah, but the thing is, in terms of international law, all the responsibility for liability, damage, harmful interference doesn't fall on the shoulders of companies. Right. It's on governments that give them license and authorize them to actually operate in space.

I'm curious to know, though, we've seen the price of launching a kilogram into lower Earth orbit go down dramatically over the years. I think it's something like it was like over $10,000. to in the hundreds in a couple decades. And so naturally, we can expect that just a lot more stuff is going to be launched into space. I hear you that there is some sort of compliance where they need the regulatory bodies to enable that. But how do we see the amount of stuff, whether it's from government or from private actors, how is that changing in terms of just the sheer amount being launched into space and how is that going to change moving forward?

Here's the deal, stuff. There's a lot of money to be made from having role. robots that we call satellites in space. Physics tells us that two things can't occupy the same space at the same time, and there are no deeds. So it's a first-come, first-serve kind of stuff. At this point, if you want to launch a satellite that goes above 500 kilometers of altitude, in today's world, you have to coordinate with Elon. Because Elon has almost 3,000 satellites at 500 kilometers of altitude,

and it would be wise for you to talk to Elon before you try to go through, the orbital shell that he has. It doesn't belong to him. It doesn't belong to SpaceX. It doesn't belong to anybody. But he's operating there. And by all intents and purposes, the United States basically is occupying a shell

at 500 kilometer altitude. And that makes people very angry. And so when I say, oh, well, people need to, you know, curve their behavior. And, you know, there needs to be enforcement and all this stuff. countries are like, well, if it's first come, first served, I want to get there first. I'm going to authorize as main people as quickly as possible to operate in that space. And once it's there, it's like,

oh, it sounds like you can't watch your thing here because, you know, it's congested. You know, what more of us said is right on the money, right? And money is part of the issue because we're really strip mining space. And I think what the average person, I mean, I would put myself in the average person bucket, what most of us are not really aware of is that, you know, there's no property tax in space, right? So once you're there, once you pay that cost to launch, once you pay the regulatory cost to be able to be there, like more of a said, this is international space law, which it's similar to flying an American flag off the back of your boat, right? You represent the United States when you leave that port

and you leave your country. You are not exactly an asset owned by the U.S. government, but you're representing the United States wherever you go. The same thing's true for people operating in space, and that is changing the nature of how people play those rules and where they're domiciled. And I don't think the average person's realized yet that by strip mining space, what we're really doing is we're occupying space in a way that no one actually controls or truly governs or enforces. So that means once you're vehicles in space, if it provides a service to us on terrestrial earth, it's actually operating more efficiently, more cheaply than if the asset was on the ground and regulated by a single state or nation state, you know, country.

This is something that is going to change our lives fundamentally forever because the terrestrial companies that don't, that have services that could be operated from space by choosing to strip mine space, by using that space unwisely and unsustainably, they're actually taking advantage of the fact that the regulation and enforcement doesn't exist. And they're doing it at the time that I'm not saying that they'll be grandfathered in forever, but they're certainly taking advantage of it now, and they're doing it without any recourse. Once a new frontier opens up, and I'm not saying space of the final frontier, but it is the frontier of our lives right now. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle. So, you know, it's only a matter of time

before the terrestrial companies that are disrupted by space companies or companies operating in space will realize, and their shareholders realize, oh, wow, we just, you know, we just got disrupted by something flying above our head that we have absolutely no control or even taxation on. It is, as we talked about earlier, a limited resource. And I'm curious, it sounds like there are these specific highways or orbits that certain satellites can operate within, as we talked about before, it's not an infinite resource, at least within that dimension. Is there a reality where we've completely exhausted that resource? Like, if people do continue to just ship stuff without any sort of coordination between parties, is there a reality where at some point we just say

we actually can't fit any more satellites or we can't use this resource anymore? It's completely exhausted. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that we're actually working on is trying to develop something that we call orbital carrying capacity. So just like there's a carrying capacity to a plot of land or an ecosystem, a carrying capacity to a regular highway, carrying capacity to orbital highways. And I think the best way to think about it is when do you know this capacity is exhausted or saturated? You know that the orbital carrying capacity is past its limit when our decisions and actions can no longer prevent bad things from happening. So if we're trying to do everything possible to avoid things colliding with each other or to avoid interfering with each other and we

can't help but see those things happen by all intents and purposes, that orbit is no longer able to provide us with the benefits that we intended and we have lost the capacity to use it. And so I predict with absolute certainty if our behavior doesn't change, there will be orbital highways whose capacity will be saturated and we're just going to see an increasing amount of undesirable outcomes occur. And this is one of those areas where, to put this in perspective, if you took a shell of the earth and you said from like 250 kilometers to a thing. thousand kilometers up, we placed objects in a little 10-kilometer bubbles, right?

How many of those bubbles can we stack between 250 and 1,000 around Earth? It's about 110 million. To put that in perspective, the auto industry on Earth did about 80 million cars last year alone. So one year's space vehicle production when we're at ramp that we are like similar to the auto industry would completely exhaust that spacing. in near-Earth space to the point that we couldn't put anything else up if we didn't have the precision and the ability to maneuver and the traffic management and control and all of the underpinning infrastructure, which today is largely missing. If we don't fix that, we would be capacity constrained

in a single year if you put it in automotive industry terms. That's crazy. That's not infinite at all, right? No, no. It is, yeah, extremely finite. I want to put into perspective for some some folks who may be thinking that space is somewhat of a frivolous endeavor, what we depend on on Earth, right? Even if people don't believe in space being the next frontier and becoming a multi-planetary species, what are the things that we depend on every single day on Earth, even potentially that we're depending on this call, that rely on space and maybe also how much redundancy is there? So if we were to use GPS as an example, like, do we have? backup on backup or is it really like one system that is very, very fragile? Picking the thread on

global navigation satellite systems, I don't know, have you been to a place where they sell like maps these days that you fold out maps and, you know, compasses, people don't make those things anymore. The way that we navigate and find our way from point A to point B is really all dominated by satellite systems at this point. And the people that knew how to navigate and stuff without that system are either long gone. Those companies don't exist anymore. Certainly, our youth has no clue whatsoever. This new generation of people, they have no idea how to get from point A to point B in the absence of satellites,

pretty much telling them how this has happened. And not only that, Steph, the technology that we use today, many of the applications, rely uniquely on position navigation and timing services provided by these satellites. And if that went away, the app itself just stops working. Everything from produce and food across the country or across the globe, transportation systems, like all these things, stop working. And that's just from global navigation satellite systems. That's not even talking about Earth observation with, I don't know, monitoring,

climate change, hydrology and agriculture, wars in Ukraine, that sort of stuff. When Waz and I started Wheels of Zuz 22 years ago, which tells you how old I am, there's dust coming off me. This is actually a black jacket. This is my dust. When we started wheels 22 years ago,

we had 2,000 satellites on orbit and half of them were dead. They were already pieces of trash. And we were building GPS locators that were similar to Apple Tags 20 years too early. We ended up building a business that serviced a customer that was not those of us that use like Apple text to track things or tile or whatever. The reason I tell the story is that 22 years ago, we had about 30 GPS satellites and we had an SLA for GPS that was like 95%. Let's put that in perspective. If your power company at home only gave you an SLA a 95%, you would really hate your power company, right?

Your power company gives you an SLA that's like 99.9% uptime, and that's still not great, but it's pretty good. We haven't really grown that constellation in 22 years. It's still about 30 GPS satellites that give us that are United States assets. I'm not counting grown assets. These are the things that we use as United States assets that enable our GPS systems. Don't get me wrong, there's other things that enhance GPS. There's other things that give you other capability to triangulate, but there's no other global system like that available to us as the masses on Earth.

At 95% uptime, you'll lose one satellite. You're in trouble. You lose two, you're in a little bit more trouble. You lose multiples that are in the same area. You're in a lot of trouble. I mean, people say three, but it's closer to four to get an actual positional fix. So these services and systems are somewhat fragile. In the lower orbit, things are flying over our heads much faster, and they're much less certain

because we have less observations on them less often. That makes things an environment where we have to be much more mindful of how we manage it. We don't have those regulations in place yet. So the space rush is going to continue, especially when you have launch costs, like you said earlier, like 5,000 bucks a kilo. I can put a satellite in space for less than I can pay our attorneys to do the paperwork. Like, let's think about that. That's crazy. That is crazy.

That is very crazy. So it sounds like we have a bunch of compounding effects. There's a lot of stuff already in space, a lot of space debris. Some of it we can't track because it's so small. There's going to be an exponential nature to more things being launched. into space and no coordination, or at least not the coordination that we need. So, Alex, what is privateer doing in this space to help mitigate some of these issues? Well, we're doing two things in two very broad categories.

We're focused on space safety and accessibility, and we think that they're totally interconnected, right? And part of that is what you actually kind of alluded to and touched on, which is that my three-year-old daughter knows how to share better than we know how to share in space. And like more of us said, how many more cameras do we need overflying Keeve right now? It's great that we have them. It's great that we can provide the capability. It's kind of sad that we don't do a very good job sharing. You don't need 50 cameras overflying a region if you know how to actually effectively utilize one asset.

So privateers focused on safety through things like Wayfinder and our conjunction software that helps people not crash in space. And we're doing that in a really open way to the community that encourages interaction. and involvement amongst kind of space operators so that we coordinate and we cooperate in space. And the reason for that is it should make a ton of sense. There has been a history in space of companies serving this community that look like extortionists. They look like the mafia. Give me a dollar and your satellite won't crash in space. You know, give me a dollar and I'll make sure that my exquisite observation keeps you from getting into trouble.

Those days have to come to an end really fast and we aim to democratize the same. space situational awareness market by bringing these tools to humankind for free, by enabling and empowering the communities so that we have a single source of truth and knowledge. And we're not aiming to own it. We're aiming to enable it and foster it and be good stewards of our space environment. The other part of this is accessibility. And for that, we're putting up a constellation of our own satellites, which I hope doesn't sound too hypocritical. How do you get that data? How are you actually convincing a magnitude of parties to contribute to that database? It's more mutual benefit than it is quid pro quo because what we're basically saying is contribution

results in capability. If you contribute your state vectors and telemetry and you share with us where your vehicles are in space, we share with you the capability to make sure that we all have eyes on those things and that we can all observe them better and we can operate more efficiently and more safe playing space. And that benefits the entire community because we can't put our own assets up in an environment that's unknown. The risk is too high. the risk to space operators operating, you know, as Morbis said, Elon does have kind of his own orbit right now. Elon's orbit.

Elon's orbit. And it's a pretty good orbit to be in. So I think that, you know, it's not a hard pitch to get space operators to contribute when we are living at the transitional point of space situational awareness and domain awareness and traffic management and ultimately traffic control, becoming services that actually should be provided by governments that have traditionally only being provided by private industry. I mean, imagine that getting on a passenger jet thing and getting told when you board the plane, air traffic control needs 10 bucks so we don't hit another plane while we're in flight. That's actually what's happened in the space world for over 20 years.

You've had to pay bespoke companies to keep you from bumping into one another. And that is like a mafia tactic. So we think disrupting that and using these data from a variety of operators, they're tired of being extorted, right? They've been writing checks for a long time without getting a lot of benefit out of it. These are global services that we, as humans, need so we can keep space accessible

so that someday we can utilize space better to cure planet Earth and some of the ails that we have caused on it, and also so that we can become a space-faring civilization, which that might be kind of mission two, but you've got to do the first thing. And, you know, as Morpus said, we've done all this damage to the land, to our atmosphere here, to our oceans. I'm an optimist, right?

I believe that if you did that damage one step at a time, you can undo the damage one step at a time. But we have to call that right now and say, this is the moment. This is the moment where we can undo that damage before it scales so exponentially that it'll be much, much harder to undo. Morbo, I want to hear from you on this idea of undoing the damage. So excuse my lack of knowledge in this domain, but is what privateer is doing something that just mitigates future risk or harm? Or how do you actually undo some of the damage that we have already caused?

Like, can you move satellites? Can you take them down? Can you actually, you know, do the equivalent of like the great garbage patch clean up in space? Or how do we think about fixing what's already been done? One of the things that we believe at privateer is really facilitating a circular economy when it comes to space. When it comes to the debris, you know, upstream things are debris mitigation. And we can get to prevention of debris if we're monitoring and measuring the stuff. Like, you can't know something unless you measure it. So data and information that measures the stuff in making that a common pool of evidence widely available

so that people can draw conclusions from consistent. evidence like that's step number one. Going down the chain of this whole circular economy for space, looking at can we with our platform provide folks with data information that helps them reuse and recycle stuff on orbit is kind of the next thing, the next run. That's certainly a downstream solution, but that's possible for us to do. The next thing that we don't like so much, but is also the next option is then disposal and removal, which, you know, certainly companies like Astroscale and looking at clear space

in Europe, facilitating them with the information to be successful at the removal of these sorts of things. The thing that we don't really want to, you know, have to keep on doing is the abandonment, abandoning the object there, right? So from most important, least important, you know, it's mitigation and prevention, reuse, recycle, disposal, removal, removal, and then abandonment. And we want to be able to provide actionable, accurate, precise information to people all along that to facilitate and pretty much motivate the development of a real circular economy in space. So absolutely we can do that. I want to hear from you more about this idea of intent because something that strikes me is that there is just so much happening in space.

And I've heard of the Kessler effect and the idea that like one collision could cascade into many collisions, and there is an element of certain things can happen negatively in space without any bad intent. And then there are other things that can happen with malintent. And how do you use this information to understand the intent of many, many different parties with different incentives, different goals in space? Yeah. So it's back to if you want to know something, you have to measure it kind of thing. You know, opportunity to cause harm is kind of the easiest one because it depends on who's where and where can, you know, where can they be at any given point in time. Capability is harder because then you need to know something about, you know, the physical,

the operational and functional characteristics of these objects, you know, is it carrying a laser, does it have a grappling arm, all this other stuff? But then it's like, okay, if it's close to me, it has a grappling arm, is it going to try to purposely harm me? That's the intent piece. And there is no sensor that measures that, you know, there's no intent to me to. And so this is, yeah, I mean, this is where we need to actually understand anthropology, social science, cultural context to say, hey, I mean, people behave in certain ways depending on where they were born, how they were raised. And we all don't have the same values and stuff like that. But in general, we aren't trying to, in general, harm each other. But some people are because every domain of human experience has malicious behavior. mean, to think that if we see it on lands with banditry and on the seas with piracy and all this other stuff,

even planes get hijacked to think that space is this benevolent, everybody's having pillo fights and tickling each other is ridiculous. But we need to be able to somehow infer the intent, but not be so prejudiced to just assume everything is evil. Because that's the other thing is that because the intent piece is so ambiguous, people are using prejudice to just get rid of that uncertainty. And they're saying, hey, if the opportunity and the capability is there, if I'm a U.S. satellite and there's a Chinese satellite that is in the same orbit, not even close, in the same orbit as me and has a grappling arm,

that thing is going to try to shwack me. That becomes this escalatory, conflict-ridden sort of behavior that will end up in the complete disharmony of the use of outer space. So what we want to do in privateer, as Alad said, with the data and information that we're aggregating is also incorporate the nuances of cultural lenses and social science to say, hey, the fact that this thing is there and has the

grappling hook, don't be so quick to press on the intent level. But if somebody wants to blow up a satellite in an orbit that clearly jeopardizes another country, maybe intent is a little bit easier to infer on that sort of stuff. If everyone wanted to share in space and wanted to to do what we were doing, we wouldn't have to launch any of our own satellites. We could just ask them, why don't you just give us access to your stuff and we'll give access to the entire community? But it doesn't totally work that way. I think there's also my two sense here is that the history of space, most of the people who

went to space were scientists and researchers and people who have very, very, very good intent because you don't really send war fighters and politicians to space. You send people to go do research, and most of that research is focused on. the betterment of humankind or had been, you know, one small step, right? But the problem is getting to the giant leap. And we did the one small step. We've probably even done two and three small steps, but we haven't gotten to the giant leap. And right now, those middle steps include a lot of contentious behavior between a lot of people

with their own self-motivations and interests. Steph, I remember when you put out the personal user manual. Oh, yeah. I love that. Thanks. And that was a beautiful, like, transparent. No one has to guess what your own self-intent is because you published your own personal user manual. Anyone that would like to interact with you knows what your values and some of your goals are that you actually connect with so that other people can interact with that too.

It was beautiful that you were willing to be that transparent. No, thank you. There is no space user manual. Right. And there's no country-defined user manual for space. So the interpretation of the current actions can come with a lens that are not the people that actually go on orbit. It's the people that direct the people on orbit. Like I'm not supposed to say on this podcast anything that sounds or rhymes with Prussia.

But when we had an ASAP attack last year in November, and I probably shouldn't even go here, the cosmonauts from Ross Cosmos that were aboard the space station at the time, they had no damn idea that their government was going to blow up an asset and put them and the world in peril. Right. If they did, they certainly wouldn't have been up there. No. And I can only imagine being their crewmates going like, dude, WTF.

And I'm sure they were like, didn't know, right? And I'm sure had absolutely no input on the actions of politics and posturing and warfighting and all those bad behaviors that we, you know, as Morbis said, there's a lot of, there's 25 shades of space. Right. Let's put it that way. Well, I mean, it reminds me of what we see everywhere in communities, what's happened with content. When things become democratized, the original people who were in that space were just so dedicated, so obsessed with the thing. They really had care and felt a responsibility to advance that particular idea or industry. And then, of course, as it gets larger, more people get involved.

It becomes more complex. And then I think space has this very fascinating layer of governments, regulation, which, you know, anytime you're trying to involve so many parties or countries or states, it just becomes incredibly complex. And even throughout this conversation, Marba, I've heard you talk about social science. We've talked about government regulation. and the technical side. What is most needed in this space? I'm going to ask you more, but in terms of the types of talent,

the types of people that privateer is looking for. I've also heard you say that you're a blue-collar PhD, and again, you think space is for everybody. So who are the types of people that you would love to see get more involved in space? So I've heard a lot of talk about STEM and focus on STEM and then Steam kind of stuff. and I've stopped, for the most part, using the word science and using the word engineering

because it is not inclusive. At the end of the day, science is about creation of knowledge, and engineering is about creation of solutions. And when I go into rooms across the globe, whether it's in rural areas or in places with affluent people and blah, blah, it's like, and I say, hey, who's into creating knowledge and who's into creating solutions. Almost everybody raises their hands. So the thing is, we don't want to presuppose

where the best ideas to solve these wicked problems across humanity are going to come from. We want to basically make that accessible to recruit, to recruit empathy across humanity, and for those people that can have an experience that empathy towards solving these problems, lower the entry bar to get their solutions as quickly and as efficiently as possible to solve these things.

This is all to say that, you know, I've met people in very rural areas where the way that they have solved problems and created knowledge for their own group, their own tribe, these sorts of things. I'm like, wow, I mean, I got a PhD. I don't think I could have come up with that one anytime soon. I'm mesmerized by the stuff that people can come up.

People, inherently, humans, were pretty damn smart. So the thing is that's what we want to allow access. That's what we want to recruit. Yeah, it reminds me of my favorite Steve Jobs quote, which I know, Alex, you had the privilege of working alongside him way back in the day, is I'm going to butcher it, but it's something along the lines of everything that exists around us was built by someone no smarter than you. And so I love that notion that sometimes we even have the curse of knowledge and that

some industry like space may sound very intimidating to people who don't associate themselves with something that you might consider technical. But sometimes those are the people that you need in the industry. Alex, I'm going to ask you a question, which is, Privateer has a lot of ambition. There are many things that you're working on that sound very exciting, that sound like they're going to change things in space on Earth. What are your biggest challenges?

If Privateer were to fail for some reason over the next few years, why would that be? Well, more of actually hit it right on the head. It's a lack of empathy. Because apathy is really the enemy of empathy, and we have created an environment in space where people really don't give a shit. It's going to sound like I'm picking on somebody. I'm not picking on anybody, but when you're a billionaire and you put on a cowboy hat and you go up on a rocket, that doesn't feel like all of us could do it. It doesn't feel like our own personal journey is tied to their journey. When the Apollo 11 astronauts touched down on the surface of the moon, or at least when two of them did, there are messages to humanity while the entire world watched.

And, you know, I'm too young to have watched it live, but I've certainly watched the recording because the message from the astronauts were not just to their families and to all humanity, but they were messages of peace. They were messages of love. They were messages of understanding. There were messages of hopefulness. They were messages of what was going to come in the future that this new frontier was going to enable humankind to reach new levels. You know, even the messages that we delivered onto the lunar surface were from like 50 plus countries that did. did not get along with each other. But those world leaders left similar messages about our humanness and the nature of that so that if it were ever seen and someone ever interpreted it, they would know that our motivations were really good and really interconnected. Space right now, that message got lost along the capitalist route to monetize space. if privateer fails, it's because humanity failed to recognize space as a frontier for all of us. And instead, continue to put it in this little compartment that's for billionaires and very, very special people who have tons of resources.

And that makes them special somehow. I don't know how, but I guess it does. And that means it's only for them. But the problem is people have not yet realized that space will be likely to govern their actions if we don't actually participate. So it has to be participatory in nature. If private share fails, we all fail. Because the technology we're bringing the market, we're doing it in a way that is truly cooperative and is designed to encourage participation.

So we're not becoming the gatekeeper to space. We're becoming the enabler to space. And we're not competing directly. So if you look at this marketplace that some people would put private here in the bucket of space situational awareness and domain awareness and traffic management, I would argue it's not a market. Because the commercial companies that are there,

they don't make giant amounts of money. They are not the mega-successful, you know, companies that you would think of. And we are much more alike than we are different. We're all trying to work on a problem for humanity. We don't, I don't think if you talk to four or five companies that are in the SSA bucket and you asked them, who's your competitors, we're actually all friends, right?

It's a much more inclusive environment that people would give it credit for because we're trying to do some good things. There are people outside that spectrum that are off in the gray area that don't have that view. But I think for the most part, we do. And accessibility is going to be the gateway drug to encourage us all to see our humanity from a different perspective. And a perspective that you don't have to travel there to get the perspective, right? Like, I mean, when I was a kid, I mean, our family was very broke, and I would say, like, the world book encyclopedia was the version of Google that we had, and we were missing some volumes, unfortunately, which is why I'm so poorly versed on biology. But, you know, there's certain parts of the encyclopedia I missed by accident. And it was also outdated by the time I got it.

That, we need to change that for space so that somebody in the third world has the same access and the same capability as somebody in the first world without a penalty. without additional friction or cost, it needs to be open and accessible. That's the thing that was missing from going from the ocean to the stars. You can build a boat in your backyard and toss it in the ocean if you want, right? We all watched Milana. I've got a three-year-old. You know, this is what you do. We haven't seen humankind yet, maybe until now, be able to do that travel to the stars the way that we can do that on the ocean. But it is coming very, very, very soon and very affordably, and it will change our lives.

forever indefinitely. Great to have this conversation with you stuff. Like to have it again at some point if you're keen. And yeah, Alex will keep it rolling. Thanks, Marba. It's amazing that privateer is based around this idea of empathy, cooperation, etc. I would push back a little bit, or I want to hear your reaction to this, which is that there have been many other endeavors, let's just use again, like land, air, ocean, which were also collaborative endeavors of many parties on Earth. And there were signs for a very long time that we were mistreating that land, air, and ocean. But it didn't change people's behavior. Empathy wasn't the driver of reversal, if that makes sense.

And so I'm curious to know how you're thinking about that. I know if we use carbon as a parallel, now people are talking about carbon taxes. They're creating new technologies that make. make it actually more economical to be more kind to the environment. So how do you think about that within space? How do you design the right incentives? So it doesn't rely on people's goodwill, but instead the incentives are just aligned where most people will act that way, whether they have empathy or not.

It's going to come down to enforcement. I mean, unfortunately, there is the carrot, which is we all get to participate together. And I am a big believer that that carrot and that reward and that incentive. is really huge and that will encourage people's behavior to do the right thing if we can enable that without making it more punitive for them to do the right thing. It has to be just as easy to recycle your things than it is to throw it out your car window while you're driving. And this is something that is also societal and it's behavior related in nature, right? I'm married a therapist. It doesn't show at all. You know, if you travel to Tokyo,

you don't see trash cans on every street corner because there's a societal notion that you are responsible for taking care of your garbage. You're not going to toss it on the street. I mean, I can't even imagine what it would be like to throw some trash in the street of Tokyo.

Now, in contrast, New York City, hey, one of my favorite cities, there's a trash can on every single street corner and there's trash littering the streets. So to your point, how do you encourage people to take the thing and just put it in the trash can it's societal, it's behavioral, it's trained, and the incentive structure isn't there.

We all acknowledge that it's trashed, but there's always this notion that someone else will clean it up. And to be really candid, you know, when Watson and I started Wheels Azuse 22 years ago, or 21 years ago, we acknowledged that half of the things in space that we could see, that we could sense and detect were trash. And we used to joke, we'd be the first kind of space environmental engineers. is we would be the, you know, we would be the guys, the sanitation engineers on the back of the space trash truck, putting satellites into the compactor. We would go do that as our next career. It was a joke at the time, but it resulted in the tragedy of the commons 20 years later,

because now we've got a million little things whizzing around that we can't even see and sense and detect or track. And the number of things that we can see in sensing detect and tract is exponentially evolving into a giant, you know, ring of trash. A ring of trash. That's a... It's a Johnny Cash Slash. Yeah. No, I know. It's also just quite the picture to imagine this ring of trash circling around us above.

I want to end on a more positive note because I know it can be quite scary, candidly, to think about what's happening above us, all the things that we rely on down here that come from above. But it is also inspiring to hear that you and others are trying to fix the problem. They're trying to coordinate the many parties. involved here. Contrary to my previous question about privateer failing, if privateer were to succeed alongside others who have similar missions, what would that look like? What would the space landscape look like in, let's say, 10 years if we are able to achieve that kind of coordination? It'll be driven by accessibility and the desire for people to access space resources. I think largely self-interested motivation will be to improve life on Earth. And that remains a big part of our

mission. You know, improving life on space doesn't do much for us, at least not in the short term, right? But improving life on Earth from space is very, very important. And we see like-minded companies around us working and like-minded people working on the same set of challenges. I think the first part of our mission, safety, my hope is that this notion of giving away these technologies that we develop to help ensure a safe space environment, a sustainable space environment will encourage usage, and ultimately if enforcement does occur, which I think it's bound to occur soon, it has to occur soon. You'll start to see space traffic control be very akin to air traffic control. And today the two things don't even connect, but when you have this many

things in space, and they do reenter, quite a lot of them do ultimately reenter our atmosphere. They don't just totally vaporize. Little pieces come back. Sometimes big pieces come back. with the number of objects we're talking about, you know, Murphy's law is hard at work and the odds are low, but it is possible that space debris will enter and even intersect with air traffic or shipping traffic. And we're not that far from that. That possibility is already there. The probability is low. Does it take one of those catastrophic events to make people want to coordinate? Is that what it'll come to, do you think, where we have, literally a piece of space debris coming back through the atmosphere that hits an airplane.

Is that the kind of event that you think will wake people up to the issue? I hope not. I really hope that we do the right thing because it's the right thing to do. Our satellite constellation is called Pono. And Pono is like the Hawaiian word for karma. It means to do the right thing or to do the righteous thing. You know, in general, Hawaii is actually a really interesting place to headquarter privateer because there are notions in Hawaiian society. and words that are used that don't exist really in English.

Hawaiians have a word for stewardship and responsibility that's called Kuliana. That is more than just a word. It's a virtue. It's something that people live their Kuliana, their responsibility. Ideas like Pono and Kuliana and the nature of stewardship and conservatorship, that has to translate to our space environment. Other than in our tax dollars, we don't pay for air traffic control. space situation awareness and traffic management, domain awareness, and traffic control,

all these things should be free. They should not be things that space operators have to pay for. They should be things that enable people to do good things while they operate safely in space. And we've already had bad things happen. We've had things happen in space that were nearly catastrophic, that have nearly cost a lot of lives. You know, we're co-sponsored by Omega Watches. So this is not a total shameless plug. But Apollo 13, you got this crew that's had a catastrophic.

failure, nearly a mortal failure. You know, young people growing up today doing a STEM education don't think about the tools they had on board. They had to shut everything down to get home. What did they use? They used a wristwatch, a slide rule, and they timed their burn by hand. They had to shut off their systems and time it on a wristwatch. That's what, that's how fragile space is. And you look at that and some of these ASAT tests and attacks and things that we've done in space that we've also, United States has also done some pretty bad things there, those things have put human lives in jeopardy in a way that our lack of empathy has really hurt us. You know, when that ASAT happened, the sound bite within hours of blowing that thing into

millions of pieces was situation green, everything's normal. I guarantee you it was not normal for the crew on the space station. And it was no way normal. I mean, it's a terrifying position to tell seven people whose lives are in peril, we don't even know where you should move to be in less risk. We just know you're in grave danger. That's terrifying. Like, why was that not front page news for more than an hour? Why was the tweet more important than that? It really wasn't.

So we've got to fix this empathy, apathy thing, and then we can get on to accessibility as the focus of the business. And I'm a big believer that accessibility will lead the way because we actually crave that access to move our society and our civilization forward. Something that's coming to mind for me right now is, as you've talked about, the importance of words, and even the importance of hearing something coined like space sustainability, which is something I hadn't heard before, researching privateer and doing this episode. But it is important when you have words, I mean, you gave a couple examples from Hawaiian culture. I actually created this website years ago that was a compilation of all the untranslatable words from different countries because they do have power because in those cultures there are such unique traits that surface in words because words are code, right, for people to need that vocabulary in their culture. And so I'm very excited to see how certain words surrounding this issue may help illuminate the problem. There's a term that people can understand, they can conceptualize, they can associate with. And so I think that'll be fascinating to watch.

The final question I have for you is, privateer and many of the businesses that you've done before are incredibly inspiring. And we like to ask if there's someone that inspires you and what they're working on, whether it's space-related or not. I mean, there are so many inspirational people working to do really hard things in space. I just don't see, and don't get me wrong, there's a part of my heart that has to remain a cold, dark capitalist because we must make money. We're not building a nonprofit. We have investors, and those investors want to see a great return. And I'm a big believer that you can align good things that you do in the world that can still make money. You know, it doesn't have to be a nonprofit to do good things. I also am a huge believer that if it's a problem I can solve in my lifetime, it's probably not all that interesting, right?

because our lives are so fleeting and so momentary, we should all be working on really, really hard problems. And they are moonshots. If we don't make it the whole way, we still all win. And that's okay. You know, it's inspirational to get to work with Waz. You know, he's a brilliant, lovely, lovely human. We've known each other for a long time,

but I will say working between him and getting to work with Steve Jobs back in my time at Apple, the thing that's interesting, I was helping Waz clean out his garage. This is a true story. You don't think about Waws cleaning out his garage, right? But in his garage, I came across a blue three-ring binder, and it was filled with HP graph paper from when he worked at Hillard Packard before they started Apple. And he was moonlighting working on his designs for Apple One and Apple II.

And this was a solo endeavor. I mean, this is different from the type of endeavors that we have to do at the scale, right? But I'm going through it page by page as an engineer and looking, at every trace and every chip that he hand drew on every page for Apple 1 and Apple 2, and then in assembler for Apple ROM and Apple DOS. And then I get to the back of this book that is, it's an engineering PhD manifesto that I don't think you could create today. Like, this should be a part of engineering school curriculum for every kid that wants to go

into STEM. at the back of the same book on the same HP graph paper before he started Apple were hand-ridden song lyrics from the Beatles and Bob Dylan that he had heard on the radio while he was working on Apple 1 and Apple 2. And I thought, man, how

can you be the human that did this and be the human that cared enough to write this down and to live by those things? And I think it is important that we make a difference and we make an impact. And, you know, there are a lot of things on planet Earth that are technology projects that I really don't care about.

I mean, I'm not the type of person that's going to go start the next Tinder or, you know, the next, I'll skip all the other great app examples, but they're fleeting. And I'm a big believer that Elon oftentimes actually means what he says. Sometimes he doesn't. I mean, I think he's pretty damn funny. But I think sometimes he says exactly what he means and people glance over it because it sounds so crazy. But all of these enabling step zones on the way to Mars and on the way to an interplanetary species, on the way to ultimately a space-faring civilization, all absolutely critical. And we can't start on it at the last minute.

There's going to be a million baby steps to get that one giant leak. And we have to work on it now. Yeah, something I took from what you just shared there, even the example of seeing the drawings in Waz's garage, is that I think you've had the unique perspective or ability to see something from its very, very early stages like those drawings to obviously the giant that Apple became today and getting to work with someone who had the capacity to understand something that can emerge from being a seed into something much, much bigger. And I think you're perhaps uniquely able to with your team understand how much this problem can and will scale and the need to start at the seed stage. today in order to address it because it's going to be too late if we address it tomorrow. And it was weird. It was too early when we did Apollo. Now that we are in a commercial space environment where 80% of the things that went up last year were commercial versus government,

that's a flip. Most of my lifetime, the things that went up most years were 80% government and you'd be lucky to find 20% commercial. Now, the dollars haven't shifted yet. The government's still outspending the commercial sector because of all of those things. things, the war machine and intelligence gathering and defense. But that's going to change very, very, very soon. It's bound to because the government's taking rise on commercial rockets now. That's not exactly a total unexpected trend. We've seen it happening for a while, but the rate has changed. So now you can actually, you know, exponential things are really hard to measure when they're tiny and tiny and tiny, but once the steps get bigger, you can measure them. And we're now

in an environment where we can measure that. We have to get ahead of it now. The timing is definitely urgent. And the urgency, there are a number of companies that are feeling that urgency and a number of people that are innovating in space that clearly see the urgency. And you can sense it because, you know, the conversations with them and the work that they're doing is absolutely critical to this minute in time. But these are all steps that we're on a bigger path. And that path is going to, it's going to as far surpass our lifetimes. I think you're right. Every exponential curve looks flat, one direction, and it looks vertical, the next.

And so I'm very interested to see where this goes. I'm very interested to also see specifically some of the technologies that privateers working on, where those go, how those develop, what else comes to be. So I want to say thank you for joining us today, Alex, and also more of a hit to drop early. But this is really fascinating. And I'm glad that we have people working on this, because as we've talked about, this problem is going to get just more and more pervasive with time. And so it's worth us understanding it today. So hopefully more people listening to this will have encounter this idea of space sustainability. And again, thank you for sharing that, Alex.

Oh, Steph, thank you for giving us a platform and shining a light on this really incredible topic at this really pivotal time. It really means a lot. So thank you very, very much for having us. Let me add one other small thing about, you know, oh my gosh. like your house getting messy and all that. We're in the move from California, Colorado right now. We got a new house. I am fighting like the devil not to bring the stuff from the other house, put in storage, if anything.

Keep a nice house clean. You can see it as a house, you know, and not just a big collection of memorabilia or whatever. But it's a fight. But that's sort of like space. Let's start getting up to space with the intent ahead of time, keeping it clean and also being prepared for backups and being able to, you know, get out of the way and not make space messier than it is.

Yeah, it's hard enough to take care of your own house. Imagine sharing a house. Yeah, I had one idea. What if you could put up a satellite and it got hit by space debris and a bunch of particles spread off? What if it was made out of some instrument that when they spread off in the space, the coldness of space turned them into, well, maybe what if it could turn into like gummy bears? Something not as, not as harmful as metal. Maybe even a gas would be the best. That's certainly an image imagining a broken, satellite turning into a bunch of gummy bears. But, you know, all change.

You only starts down at the atomic level, physicists and chemists that understand the atoms and new materials that can be made that have new properties that always changes life a lot. Yeah. Well, I mean, something that I still don't know if I fully understand is what happens when you do have a bunch of space debris. Because it sounds like what privateers doing is setting the information so people have it so they understand what's going on up there.

Also, hopefully creating. more of a sharing economy of these satellites. But of the debris that's already up there, you can't really get rid of it, right? Or there's a couple companies working on that. But we're just, we have to deal with this stuff in our house for quite some time now, right? Well, last week I wrote forward for a book coming out by the guy, Erie Levine, who founded Ways, created Ways.

And you start out. And at the seat stage, you have some ideas and you work on me. You have to modify, modify, modify, it's continual iteration. So is even to what privateer will be. It's not like we're going to bring stuff back from space. No, we're going to help it get back. And we're going to think of other ideas along the way. That's just our nature of business.

Definitely. Yeah. So we're looking forward to that. Okay. Have a good day. Thanks, Steve. Bye. Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, or tell a friend.

We also recently launched on YouTube at YouTube.com slash A16Z underscore video, where you'll find exclusive video content. We'll see you next time.