The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - SpaceX Takes "One Giant Leap" for Space Tech || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

This video was originally released on Patreon 1 week ago. If you want to see the videos as soon as they come out, join the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan And if you needed another reason, if you join me on Patreon in the month of October, your subscription fees for the rest of the year will be donated to MedShare: https://bit.ly/medsharepatreon Watch this video I sent out a year ago for a refresher on a few of these technologies and the limits to innovation. Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/fF4YTDsxcnc Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/spacex-takes-one-giant-leap-for-space-tech

Hey, everybody, Peter here coming to you from, I don't even not worry about the moment. Anyway, if you've been following for a while, you know about a year ago, I recorded a video that listed the six kind of breakthroughs technologically that I thought might deflect the world into a more productive, happy direction. And in the last couple of weeks, we've had a number of issues that have caused me to revisit these technologies. And we're going to do this very short series about what has changed in the sort of impact. can have. And so this first video is coming to you from New Orleans where we talk about space technology. Hey everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from the Superdome in New Orleans. And while I've been in the Big Easy, a couple interesting things have happened around the world. The one I want to talk about today is Space X's successful booster catch. They launched a rocket up. All rockets in order

to reach orbit require boosters. You need extra fuel so you can achieve escape. velocity. And we already know for several years that SpaceX has been recovering their rockets for reuse and they can even land them vertically now. But the boosters until now have been discarded. Well, this time they were able to let the booster land back at a different facility and land itself and they grabbed it and basically had it on the platform then. Number one, that's amazing. What I actually found more interesting was that they then immediately refueled it, meaning that now the Lots of testing. They have to do this over and over and over again to prove that it's a viable model, but they caught it on their first try, which means that the main launch vehicle is now reusable,

and the boosters are reusable. And this drastically, potentially, reduces the cost of launching things into orbit. If you go back to the 70s and especially the 80s with the onset of the space shuttle, getting stuff into orbit was more than $50,000 per kilogram. With SpaceX having the main module be reusable, they've gotten that down to $1,500 per kilogram, and now that the booster looks like it's going to be reusable as well, that number is probably going to drop by half to a third of what we become used to. And when you're talking about $500 per kilogram or less, all of a sudden the economics of space start to change,

and people can come and go on a lot more frequency. I mean, we're basically starting to talk about some Gattaca-level shit here. Now, I'm not too interested in space tourism, because, you know, that's just a few people going up and enjoy writing and come back. And I'm not too interested in things like Mars or even the moon, because even with this technology, you're still talking several days to get there and back. Economics of that hasn't changed all that much. But we can now start thinking about manufacturing.

Basically, what you're looking at things that are high-value product, that you can fly the raw materials up and then bring the finished product back down. There's kind of four categories that I see that kind of play in that pond. The first one and probably the one that will get going the most are lenses, which I know doesn't sound very exciting. but when you think about what we're doing is semiconductors right now, the lenses that go into the lithography machines

are among the most finely milled things that we have on the planet. Just keep in mind that we are now at the stage for maybe semiconductors where the individual resistors are not all that much bigger than the individual molecules, and so you're talking about manipulating objects

at the atomic level. When you're doing that precision is absolutely critical. Okay, so that's number one. Number two is drugs. Most of the more advanced drugs that we're doing dividing today are proteins, and proteins can only form so long in gravity

because they collapse on themselves or just get mushy and then they're useless. So if you can grow them in orbit, you are no longer limited in the length of the protein that you can grow, especially when you're talking about tailored drugs for individuals. You can easily fly up the medium and then fly down the finished product. I swear I've been on aircraft carriers that are quieter than this town.

Anyway, what was the third one? Fibroptic cable. Now, the stuff that is in your house and your neighborhood it probably costs in the vicinity of a dime to a quarter a meter. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the new stuff, something called Z-Blan, which is a more specialized system that can communicate terabets of information per second. It runs at least $100 per meter and upwards of 1,000

based on how good of the stuff you want. And the problem is in the manufacturing process is that it crystallizes, and in order to control that, you need very, very precise conditions. So space. Basically, you can grow it like a crystal and do whatever you need to do with it. Now, you have to, like all these other things, bring it back home, and that's going to put a limit on what you can do. But when you're talking about something that is 10,000 times as valuable, you know, there's a little bit of margin in there for transport costs, even if you happen to be going, you know, way up. The fourth thing involves in experimental technologies.

One of the reasons that quantum computing has not happened yet is because each machine is different. It's handcrafted. It's not just that it hasn't been serialized or regularized. It's that we're inventing ways to perceive and manipulate quantum space. And so every single thing about each of those machines is unique and precise. And if you can grow the crystals that do the focusing in space, then you don't have the errors that you're going to get in the flaws. You're going to get on a more terrestrial system.

Also, considering that a quantum computer isn't all that big, you're talking launch costs versus the benefit you get, that's pretty high. So those are the big four. There is a fifth one to consider, but although it would require a significantly larger manufacturing system, and that's using things like 3D printing technologies to print stuff in space for space. I'm not talking here about a trip to Mars, although I'm sure that's what Elon Musk wants to go on and on about. I'm talking about something a lot more basic. Satellites, because if you can drop launch costs to the point that you can build a satellite manufacturing facility in orbit,

then all of a sudden you can have a satellite bay and repair facilities in manufacturing. facilities also in orbit and that would dramatically lower the cost of things like information transmission and raise the possibility of even more manufacturing and yes eventually in time maybe a moon base or even a trip to mars okay that's it for me i am going to go to a quieter city worth