The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - October 22, 2024


PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Industrialising Space


Episode Stats

Length

43 minutes

Words per Minute

189.50691

Word Count

8,286

Sentence Count

498

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary

In this episode of Brokonomics, I speak to Grant Donoghue, a Planetary Scientist at the University of Liverpool, about the future of the space industry. We discuss the logic behind the logic chain of the supply chain, and how space can become a major contributor to economic growth.


Transcript

00:00:00.300 Hello, and welcome to Brokonomics. Now, as you will know if you followed this show, I'm a tiny bit optimistic about things like AI and robotics and so on.
00:00:10.520 Now, you start to follow through the logic of what that does. At the moment, most economic activity is constrained, not so much by the amount of resources,
00:00:20.300 but quite literally, it's by the amount of management oversight, the amount of intellectual bandwidth going to something.
00:00:27.460 I've worked with many companies over the years, and that ultimately tends to be the restraining factor on a lot of activity.
00:00:35.240 After that, you've got the restraining activity, the restraint of the number of workers that you can bring in, people who can actually do the job.
00:00:43.680 But with AI and robotics, it's not impossible that we could actually solve those two problems.
00:00:48.780 If you do that, then the next logical step is that your constraint becomes the amount of resources available to you.
00:00:55.460 And if you do that, then logically, the next major industry that we're not talking about at the moment,
00:01:02.780 but we will be on the other side of AI and robotics, is going to be space,
00:01:07.300 because that gives you access to the quantity of resources that you need to really take economic growth to an unlimited level.
00:01:14.400 So, given that logic chain, I've been wanting to speak to somebody who knows about space.
00:01:20.120 And I'm delighted to say that I have found just the man, Grant Donoghue, planetary scientist.
00:01:26.200 Welcome to Brokonomics.
00:01:27.200 Thank you so much. I'm very happy to be here.
00:01:29.920 Good. Well, can you tell us about yourself? What is a planetary scientist?
00:01:33.940 So, planetary science is a subfield of geology, which is an annoying term because geology specifically refers to the Earth.
00:01:40.820 But I was trained as a sedimentary petrologist. Professionally, I've worked as both a petroleum and an environmental geologist.
00:01:51.840 But more broadly, it means that I study the evolution of systems as the evolution of systems.
00:01:59.480 We don't tend to say geology in isolation because we've discovered that there's an enormous amount of interaction between the lithosphere,
00:02:04.800 the hydrosphere and the atmosphere, but considering one without the others is simply not reasonable, both on Earth and on other heavenly bodies.
00:02:13.860 I see. OK, so you do you do Earth based geology as well.
00:02:17.940 I mean, that that is probably helpful because one of the things I was thinking leading into this is how do planetary scientists get jobs?
00:02:24.700 Because, you know, there can't be there can't be that much demand for it, given that we're not actually in space yet.
00:02:29.440 But if you can do the geology bit as well, I guess that I guess you'll be going to be OK.
00:02:32.460 Yes. So there are a number of Ph.D. programs, positions in academia, NASA, for example, who are looking into ISRU,
00:02:43.200 a word I'm going to use a lot, in situ resource utilization for whom planetary scientists are of great interest.
00:02:49.100 But that would be for someone who's who's more specifically focused on that.
00:02:54.040 I I'm a mere mortal and the allure of the petrochemical industry and the greater opportunities there.
00:03:01.300 They pay well. Yes. Got it right. But nevertheless, we could we could dream that, you know, 20 years down the line,
00:03:07.680 there'll be there'll be real demand for the for the planetary side of your skill set.
00:03:11.160 Yes. Getting getting to that point, where do you think we're kind of going to go first in terms of making use of space industry?
00:03:19.740 Because I know there is. I mean, there's obviously quite a bit of space industry at the moment with the satellite systems that we have going around.
00:03:25.740 And I understand things are getting pushed in that direction more and more.
00:03:28.780 So, for example, because there's so much data basically up there in the lower Earth orbit,
00:03:33.360 firms are starting to realise that actually it's cheaper to send data centres up into Earth orbit and process the data there than it is to sort of bounce it all backwards and forwards all day.
00:03:43.440 And once you start, you know, once you start pushing more and more the value chain up into orbit,
00:03:47.720 well, then you've got a growing industry and then it's a natural at some point to go beyond that.
00:03:51.980 So what do you think of the sort of key drivers that are going to take us to make this a proper industry?
00:03:58.480 Well, so studying there's a wonderful expression in the in geology, which was by Charles Lyon,
00:04:04.560 who's along with Hutton, considered the father of geologists.
00:04:07.340 He said the present is the key to the past.
00:04:09.900 And so what we I think a principle we can extrapolate from that is that if we want to look at how we might expect the industrialisation to play out of space,
00:04:19.860 we might it might be useful to examine how industrialisation played out or did not play out in the past.
00:04:25.300 And so in that regard, I would say that where we are in space right now is similar to where the Romans were with the area pile,
00:04:32.280 you know, the little thing that spun around in that we that the engineering and the technology is there.
00:04:38.620 But because of a lack of resources or contravening economic motives, you know, for the Romans,
00:04:44.320 it was the fact that they had no real call for labour saving devices.
00:04:48.620 Labour was the one thing they had no no shortage of.
00:04:52.600 That did much to to halt the advancement of that technology.
00:04:56.220 There was no virtuous cycle that led to reinvestment and reinvestment, reinvestment.
00:04:59.980 But by contrast, when industrialisation did kick off in the United Kingdom and the Low Countries and eventually the rest of Europe,
00:05:07.340 there were a series of factors that drove it most principally when it comes to geology coal.
00:05:13.660 England and Wales have the most bountiful resources of anthracite in the world, more or less.
00:05:19.820 High quality coal that burns incredibly cleanly and it runs right to the surface.
00:05:24.320 And so we we've been extracting coal since the 16th century.
00:05:28.420 Railways actually predate the steam engine by 200 years.
00:05:31.060 And a lot of people made a lot of money mining coal around southern England.
00:05:34.840 But the one of the the interesting things that that affected that was that in Rome and Britain,
00:05:41.560 the main thing that limited mining was that you would you wouldn't exhaust the material seams.
00:05:46.760 You'd reach the water table.
00:05:47.760 And unlike many other applications where alternative forms of power, like wind or water, were appropriate,
00:05:53.680 if you want to pump water out of a mine, you can't then stop those pumps.
00:05:58.200 If the water gets back in, you rob the supports and the whole thing falls in.
00:06:01.240 It becomes unsafe.
00:06:02.660 And so you need a form of power that is that is portable.
00:06:05.360 You don't need to be attached to a river and it needs to run constantly.
00:06:07.800 It can't be periodic.
00:06:08.440 And so steam engines allowed you to pump out these mines and suddenly deposits which were
00:06:13.640 still very rich and were well known since the Roman period were accessible again.
00:06:18.160 And this led to a virtuous cycle where now you have an industry building steam engines.
00:06:23.340 You have a a a huge section of the population or not huge, but initially, you know, a reasonable
00:06:30.320 section of the population being coming trained in their manufacture and their use.
00:06:33.360 And so the barrier to entry falls, you get the iterative improvements that come with
00:06:38.500 building lots of something, steam engines, and suddenly that brings down the cost of
00:06:42.440 its utilization everywhere else.
00:06:43.500 And I think the same goes for space and rockets.
00:06:45.680 And so what I suppose what I'm trying to say with this whole diversion is that when it comes
00:06:50.560 to space, I think that the first decisive industry is going to be delta V in the same way that
00:06:55.620 the first decisive industry was coal.
00:06:58.120 I have no idea to what extent delta V is just a word to you or your audience.
00:07:04.640 Explain delta V.
00:07:05.960 So delta V is the ability to change your velocity.
00:07:09.500 If you want, you can look up, there are wonderful maps, maps of the solar system by delta V.
00:07:15.160 And what they're essentially expressing is to say to get from one orbital position to another
00:07:19.620 one, how much do you need to change your velocity?
00:07:21.960 So, for example, and it's given in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, not an acceleration, but
00:07:29.160 in a velocity.
00:07:29.860 So, for example, to escape the surface of Earth, depending on how you measure, it's about
00:07:34.600 eight kilometers, eight kilometers per second.
00:07:38.880 You need to change your velocity by about that much to get from Earth's surface to low
00:07:43.180 Earth orbit.
00:07:44.180 And then to get from, actually, coincidentally, to get from low Earth orbit to the surface of
00:07:48.140 Mars is actually about the same.
00:07:49.380 Um, right.
00:07:52.140 So if, if I'm understanding this right, and, and, and, and I need to circle back to finish
00:07:56.100 the, the earlier analogy and saying, okay, what is, what are the, what is the sort of
00:08:00.500 steam engines and the coal of, of, of the current era?
00:08:03.960 But just, just on the point of delta V, if my mental model is working correct, if I want
00:08:08.840 to go from Earth to say Mars, I don't point my rocket straight at Mars and just start heading
00:08:15.360 towards it.
00:08:15.980 So what I do is I, is I wait for a suitable moment where it's going to be passing us.
00:08:20.220 And then I basically, uh, the Earth is already going around the sun.
00:08:23.460 So it already has that momentum.
00:08:25.540 And then I add a bit more to it.
00:08:27.620 So that instead of doing Earth's orbit, I end up at the orbit of Mars.
00:08:31.620 And likewise, if I want to go to say Venus, which is a bit closer, I kind of do the opposite.
00:08:37.680 I kind of take away some of the momentum that the Earth has to end up back at the, at the,
00:08:42.580 so it's a kind of this series of, of arches.
00:08:45.120 That's what you're describing with delta V.
00:08:46.600 Exactly.
00:08:47.060 You're modifying your orbit such that you get an intersect and then you can do a capture
00:08:50.800 maneuver, which is where you get close enough that the gravity of the body influences you.
00:08:54.840 And then you just need to decelerate a little bit and then you can capture yourself into
00:08:58.360 a stable orbit.
00:08:59.000 So if, if, um, delta V is the, is the steam engines of this current or the, or the upcoming
00:09:06.720 space era, um, what is it, what is the coal or the, or the iron or something that I want
00:09:12.880 to, that I want to get hold of once I can actually go places?
00:09:16.740 So I would argue that, um, delta V is expressible as, as, as, as the means to, in the same way
00:09:24.920 that coal powered steam engines, we are looking at what the coal of our industrial revolution
00:09:29.480 in space is going to be the, the, the ways that we provide delta V that doesn't come
00:09:34.900 from the surface of Earth.
00:09:36.640 Um, now, what do I mean by that?
00:09:38.640 So, so not rocket engines, not chemical reaction engines?
00:09:41.920 Well, not necessarily that, but what I, what I more mean is, um, are, so there's a, an expression
00:09:46.440 called the tyranny of the rocket equation, because let's say you want to take a rocket from
00:09:51.660 the surface of Earth to Mars, and you will need to move a certain tonnage.
00:09:55.020 You need to move people or cargo, let's say nuclear fuel and shelters, that sort of thing
00:09:59.140 you need to send before you send colonists.
00:10:02.000 Yes.
00:10:03.080 Um, you have to, that has mass, and then the, the rocket carrying it has mass, and of course
00:10:09.920 most of your mass is fuel.
00:10:11.760 Um, so if we were to take some numbers, um, the, uh, the starship, if it performs as well
00:10:17.640 as Elon Musk says it will, um, it has a specific impulse of about 350, which is, it's not important,
00:10:23.940 but it's, it's a measure of how efficiently it can turn chemical energy into delta V.
00:10:28.600 Um, well, explain it to me this way of, you know, of, of the total tonnage, what, roughly
00:10:34.720 what percentage is the machine itself, what percentage is fuel, and what percentage is
00:10:40.000 the useful stuff that you're actually doing this whole exercise for?
00:10:43.180 So to get 150 tons of cargo, for example, and into, into low earth orbit with a rocket
00:10:49.400 that weighs 100 tons, you need about 2,200 tons of fuel.
00:10:54.640 Okay.
00:10:54.760 Well, so it's by far, most of it is the fuel.
00:10:57.460 Yes.
00:10:58.740 Starship gets about 2.5% of its mass, of its launch mass to orbit.
00:11:03.460 And that's better than most rockets.
00:11:05.160 That's way better than most rockets.
00:11:06.820 That's, that's actually on the highest peak of performance.
00:11:09.500 Okay.
00:11:10.580 So straight, straight away, what you're suggesting is that you really, really are motivated
00:11:16.260 to find a way to do, um, space-based mining, um, in situ manufacturing.
00:11:25.980 So 3D printing, basically, um, you need, well, so, so there's a number of problems you need
00:11:30.700 to solve that you need to solve the, cause you can't send, you can't do this with humans
00:11:35.440 because you're going to be in space for such a long time that it's just not viable.
00:11:38.420 And then you, you've got more support systems.
00:11:40.260 So you, you've got to solve the AI problem.
00:11:42.280 You've got to solve the robotics problem.
00:11:44.500 They've got to be able to do, um, sort of mapping, uh, power.
00:11:49.500 They've got to be able to, um, self-repair all that kind of stuff.
00:11:53.700 But once you solve that, and it doesn't feel like we're necessarily more than one human
00:11:58.980 generation away from solving all of that stuff, you can then basically send mining operations
00:12:07.600 of to wherever, well, and in fact, I'll, I'll circle back in a minute to where you think
00:12:12.780 they're going to go, but you can send them off to somewhere and then they can basically
00:12:15.860 start producing useful stuff in space.
00:12:18.260 That's, that's kind of what you're describing, isn't it?
00:12:19.860 Precisely.
00:12:20.280 And, and my point is that, um, the, and it's very good.
00:12:23.500 You mentioned 3d printing because the thing, the thing, unlike on earth, where the transportation
00:12:28.920 costs are a function of lots of complex things in space, the transportation costs are essentially
00:12:33.160 just a function of how much does it weigh and what's the delta V between the two orbits
00:12:37.340 you need to move it.
00:12:38.840 Yes.
00:12:39.100 And so because mass is the only thing that matters, the first thing you want to make in
00:12:43.420 space is fuel because the most of your rocket is going to end up fuel.
00:12:47.800 Um, and then you want to, you, you move down the, the hierarchy.
00:12:51.640 So what's the next heaviest thing?
00:12:53.000 Hull sections, you know, pieces of metal, because you don't, um, the idea of a space
00:12:57.640 dry dock, you don't need to manufacture all the parts in space, just like on earth.
00:13:01.060 If some tin pot dictatorship wants to build say missiles, it doesn't need to, to build
00:13:06.080 every component of the missile.
00:13:07.240 It can just buy in some of the parts, make the basic parts and assemble it.
00:13:10.220 And that builds up a basis of skill.
00:13:12.320 It creates some reinvestment.
00:13:14.140 And so we might get to the point where you make all the light, but, but difficult to make
00:13:19.140 stuff on earth, you know, microchips and circuits.
00:13:20.900 And you send that up as in a rocket.
00:13:22.480 And then you make that with all the heavy, but simple stuff like the hull plating and
00:13:25.700 the fuel and assemble that in a space dry dock.
00:13:28.880 Ah, okay.
00:13:29.680 That makes sense.
00:13:30.580 Yes.
00:13:31.240 Um, so you get your mass down significantly.
00:13:35.360 Yes.
00:13:36.420 While you're doing all of the heavy stuff.
00:13:37.680 And I believe there is a company doing that.
00:13:39.220 I mean, there's a company called Made in Space that are kind of pioneering this kind of
00:13:42.440 stuff.
00:13:43.040 They're, they're, they're, um, sort of doing 3d printing and they're aiming to sort of put
00:13:46.820 orbits into space and, um, the, you know, put, put these payloads into space and then
00:13:51.860 set up sort of lightweight manufacturing.
00:13:54.280 Um, the issue with them of course, is that if they have to take the raw materials with
00:14:00.060 them, there's no change in the total mass that it needs to take up.
00:14:03.380 But there is, well, short term, there's a lot of space junk.
00:14:07.740 There's a lot of old satellites up there that they can reuse.
00:14:10.460 And longer term, if they can go to somewhere else as well, they can start making stuff in
00:14:14.620 situ.
00:14:15.320 Yes.
00:14:15.560 And that allows you to then build up the space economy proper with what you're talking about,
00:14:21.260 which is dry dogs.
00:14:22.080 So tell us about that.
00:14:23.340 Orbital manufacturing in these dry dogs.
00:14:25.100 What, what do you mean by these?
00:14:27.140 So, um, there's an expression that if I said that a few times, but there's an expression
00:14:33.260 that if you're, if you get to low earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere.
00:14:36.500 And so, um, it, it, when I say a space dry dock, I'm referring to installations or ships
00:14:43.140 or, you know, just a station of any kind sitting in low earth orbit, which can take a combination
00:14:47.760 of parts and crew and personnel launched from the earth and from other bodies and transform
00:14:53.120 them into finished products.
00:14:54.320 And one of the most important things is rockets that don't need to be able to enter planets,
00:14:58.020 because if you can build a rocket that doesn't need to enter planets, then you don't
00:15:01.600 need to the heavy heat shielding.
00:15:03.200 You don't need all of these other things.
00:15:04.180 You can get rid of everything that's surplus to requirement.
00:15:06.200 And suddenly rockets are much cheaper to move around because you can build something that's
00:15:09.960 dedicated.
00:15:11.300 And by definition, if you've taken it from the earth, it's had to endure the earth's
00:15:15.880 atmosphere.
00:15:16.960 So anything you launch from earth is not going to be as cheap as this stuff could be able
00:15:23.400 to.
00:15:23.680 So if you can get your in-situ manufacturing going, you can produce very cheap system
00:15:29.460 to system transport.
00:15:30.680 Exactly.
00:15:31.400 And it also lets you use engines that are more efficient than chemical rockets, because
00:15:35.460 on earth, for example, there's a concept that we've tested pretty well called a nuclear
00:15:39.900 thermal engine.
00:15:40.760 So in a chemical rocket, you're igniting an oxidizer and a fuel, and they are creating
00:15:46.740 high temperature, high pressure gas that is expelled.
00:15:49.960 In a nuclear thermal engine, you instead have a nuclear reactor on your rocket, and it's got
00:15:54.360 a tank of hydrogen.
00:15:55.400 And the heat from the reactor heats the hydrogen to a far higher temperature than a chemical reaction
00:15:59.840 could.
00:16:00.660 And so it accelerates it much greater.
00:16:02.700 It produces much more thrust for a certain amount of mass.
00:16:05.620 But the problem is, because of that big, heavy nuclear reactor, it's very hard to make one
00:16:10.020 of those that has enough impulse to actually get off the surface of the earth.
00:16:13.260 But in space, it doesn't matter if it takes 10 years to burn from one orbit to the other,
00:16:17.540 if you're only using a small amount of fuel.
00:16:20.040 And so suddenly, instead of needing to be 90% fuel, you can have an engine that's quite
00:16:24.060 weak.
00:16:24.860 But because you don't have to overcome gravity and escape a body, it doesn't matter that
00:16:28.680 it's quite weak.
00:16:29.320 It's you have a very efficient engine.
00:16:31.060 And again, that brings down fuel costs.
00:16:32.820 It lets you get experience with certain technologies.
00:16:36.780 A good example of just how bad this gets is, I mentioned earlier, Mars is about the same
00:16:43.260 delta V to get from Earth.
00:16:45.620 From low Earth orbit to Mars is the same to get from Earth's surface to low Earth orbit.
00:16:49.860 It's about 8 kilometers per second in either case.
00:16:52.760 And so you might assume then, you might assume then that, okay, let's say we want to get that
00:16:58.600 150 ton payload we talked about earlier with a 100 ton rocket, and we need to get that to
00:17:02.860 the surface of Mars.
00:17:05.260 Well, that means we have to carry the amount of fuel that we needed at the beginning, that
00:17:08.860 2,000 tons.
00:17:09.480 We need 2,200 tons of fuel in orbit.
00:17:11.580 So you can treat that as a payload.
00:17:12.540 So if it took 2,200 tons to get 250 tons in orbit, how much is it going to take to get
00:17:18.300 2,500 tons into low Earth orbit?
00:17:21.980 You need to carry all that fuel.
00:17:23.040 Well, yeah, you're going to have to do, you know, 10, 12 runs just to get the fuel
00:17:28.420 to then do the other half of the drift.
00:17:30.220 Exactly.
00:17:30.920 And so this is why I'm saying the profit margins are widest for a fuel station, because in that
00:17:36.200 example I gave, you would need 15 launches just to get enough fuel up.
00:17:39.740 And so let's say SpaceX is charging 50 million a launch.
00:17:43.360 Well, if they need to do 16 launches to get a payload into space and the competitor says,
00:17:47.180 well, just launch your small rocket, refuel up here, then the competitor can charge upward
00:17:51.840 the cost of 15 launches and it still will be cheaper.
00:17:55.660 So there's an enormous profit margin to be made there.
00:17:58.420 I see.
00:18:00.580 Yes.
00:18:01.020 Okay.
00:18:01.660 Because I mean, SpaceX are kind of dominating at the moment, aren't they?
00:18:04.040 But they're doing something like 90% of the launches.
00:18:06.680 But as you say, I mean, it's wide open for competition.
00:18:11.980 In fact, I bought a company recently.
00:18:13.500 I bought Rocket Labs a couple of months back.
00:18:16.060 I don't know if you know anything about them.
00:18:17.400 I don't know too much about them.
00:18:19.060 All I know is that they're a rocket company based in New Zealand that was valued at about
00:18:24.240 2 billion that is successfully putting payloads in orbit.
00:18:28.060 And I looked at them and I thought, well, it can't be a 2 billion pound company because
00:18:32.080 I'm seeing AI companies that come up and they say, oh, we're planning to do something
00:18:37.440 with AI at some point in the future, but we don't have a product.
00:18:39.920 And they get a valuation of 2 billion.
00:18:41.660 And this thing is actually putting payloads in orbit.
00:18:45.020 In fact, I'll just check it now to see how it's doing.
00:18:48.720 And yeah, they, okay.
00:18:50.680 It's 5 billion now.
00:18:51.840 So I'm good.
00:18:52.480 I've more than doubled my money.
00:18:53.840 That's how we like to do it.
00:18:56.140 Yeah.
00:18:56.480 So, I mean, but I mean, that's one example of, you know, a whole suite of companies that
00:19:01.800 are now operating on this basis.
00:19:04.620 Are there any that you also got your eye on?
00:19:09.060 Because I mean, there are some big names amongst them, aren't there?
00:19:11.480 Well, so of course you've got Elon Musk, but Elon Musk is in an interesting position where
00:19:16.100 he's sort of in the same position as Bell Labs.
00:19:18.100 You know, Bell Labs had the advantage of it.
00:19:20.080 It possessed the entire telephone market of America, but it, despite it having this enormous
00:19:24.500 research budget, it actually wasn't incentivized to push forward telephones because, you know,
00:19:29.560 it, by advancing telephones, it would create its own competitors.
00:19:32.100 Musk is in a position where he makes the most money by doing the opposite.
00:19:35.540 Instead of trying to create fuel in space, he's trying to lower the cost per launch.
00:19:40.100 So Elon Musk is in the best position to do it, but weirdly he has the least incentive
00:19:44.660 because he makes his money based on the total number of launches.
00:19:48.340 So I would bet that it would probably be a, an up and coming second place runner who works
00:19:53.860 in competition with SpaceX and after they do manage to succeed at all, they get purchased
00:19:58.260 by SpaceX, you know, something on those margins.
00:20:00.900 Oh, okay.
00:20:02.120 But, which will just inspire more competition.
00:20:04.020 Yeah, exactly.
00:20:04.760 Because of course, once you've got the first space gas station, getting the second one is
00:20:08.840 far cheaper and the third one and the fourth one.
00:20:11.560 And so it becomes much more practicable for competitors to emerge and you still have this
00:20:17.080 enormous profit margin.
00:20:18.400 And so what happens eventually is you start to get a market in space.
00:20:21.700 And once you have a market up there, instead of every good needing to get either from Earth
00:20:26.280 to an orbit or from an orbit to Earth, now you have exchanges between orbits and you
00:20:30.940 have, and essentially everything is expressible.
00:20:34.100 Every mission profile, be it putting an observatory on a centaur comet or anything like that, can
00:20:40.600 be expressed as a tolerance of acceleration.
00:20:43.060 Is it basically, does it have people on board?
00:20:44.800 How much does it weigh?
00:20:45.660 And how much delta V do you need to move?
00:20:47.500 Every mission can be expressed like that.
00:20:48.980 And if you can bring down the cost of the delta V, then you can move more tonnage for
00:20:53.860 a given dollar.
00:20:54.580 Well, incidentally, then you could easily put that on a commodities trading market as
00:20:57.920 well, because if it's expressible for a few simple terms, you can develop a futures market
00:21:02.980 around it as well.
00:21:03.900 Yes.
00:21:04.440 And then it becomes very reliable because firms can say, okay, well, I need this much
00:21:09.220 payload in space, or I need this much moved from this orbit to this much, or I need this
00:21:14.740 this amount of data processing to be produced up there and then shipped to this orbit and
00:21:20.980 so on.
00:21:21.860 And you can kind of forward plan it, finance it, build your business plans around it, and
00:21:27.840 then it becomes, it's like the coffee or the orange juice industry.
00:21:32.140 It's just, just get it done.
00:21:35.300 Exactly.
00:21:35.800 Remarkable.
00:21:36.840 Okay.
00:21:37.160 So, so Starlink, obviously, my little rocket labs, which, which hopefully is going to be
00:21:42.300 a decent competitor, you've got Starlink as well, as well as SpaceX.
00:21:48.840 I know, I think Starlink is still a part of SpaceX, but you've got Amazon who are working
00:21:52.660 on their project, Cooper, Kuiper, I think it's called.
00:21:57.420 They're, they're, they're putting sort of satellites up there as well.
00:21:59.940 You've got OneWeb who's sort of doing the same sort of thing as well.
00:22:02.600 So in all of these areas, you can see a network of firms are starting to emerge to provide
00:22:08.940 that marketplace that you're talking about.
00:22:10.500 Exactly.
00:22:11.940 And, and right now we're, we're at the, we're, we're at the stage of very early steam
00:22:16.260 engines where initially steam engines were only useful to pump out mines, but be, because
00:22:20.520 that belt experience, eventually that opened other doors.
00:22:24.220 Because what we, what's happened is the number of people who are building rockets, the number
00:22:27.520 of firms, the number of people are, is growing.
00:22:29.980 And as a result, launch costs are falling.
00:22:31.540 And as launch costs fall, getting the equipment to mine up in space gets cheaper because you
00:22:37.720 asked earlier, where do you think this will happen?
00:22:39.380 I think the first candidate is Luna for, because of all of the type kinds of Delta V you can
00:22:44.500 make in space.
00:22:45.200 The obvious one is you take water ice, you melt it, you electrolyze it into hydrogen and
00:22:49.560 water, rocket fuel, chemical rocket fuel.
00:22:52.180 Mars.
00:22:52.840 And the water is easy enough to find on Mars, on, on, on the moon.
00:22:56.660 At the, at the poles.
00:22:57.680 Minerals, yes.
00:22:58.140 And it's also available in minerals.
00:23:01.000 A little known fact is that, for example, on Mars, most of the water of the primordial
00:23:06.540 oceans isn't frozen or escaped.
00:23:08.380 It's, it's silted over.
00:23:09.760 So that is to say that there are lots of minerals, which as bodies of water evaporate,
00:23:14.480 trap water in them.
00:23:16.780 Evaporites, we call them.
00:23:17.960 So when water is evaporating, one of the very first minerals that condenses out is a mineral
00:23:22.320 called gypsum.
00:23:23.140 And gypsum has H2O actually locked up in its chemical structure.
00:23:26.860 We have huge amounts of gypsum, gypsum on Mars.
00:23:29.800 It's one of the most common minerals.
00:23:30.940 And you can D, you can denature the water out by simply heating it in a kiln and it escapes
00:23:36.780 the steam.
00:23:37.620 Okay.
00:23:38.380 Well, that's pretty simple.
00:23:39.980 Exactly.
00:23:40.640 And unlike water ice, you don't have the problem of volatile contaminants.
00:23:46.460 And some really interesting ones is that, for example, on, on Venus, Venus has very little
00:23:51.920 water in the atmosphere, but the water in the atmosphere is way more concentrated.
00:23:56.860 In deuterium, there's way more heavy water, 600 times more heavy water in the atmosphere
00:24:01.620 of Venus per molecule of water than on Earth.
00:24:05.400 And so that's how you start to get the more exotic products.
00:24:10.040 I mean, while we're speaking about Venus, you didn't happen to catch my little podcast
00:24:14.560 on colonizing Venus, did you?
00:24:16.620 I was sort of arguing with Bo.
00:24:17.920 I did.
00:24:18.240 I was kind of arguing for the sake of it because he was so keen on Mars.
00:24:20.960 But how did I do in terms of planetary science?
00:24:24.980 Very good.
00:24:25.340 I really liked how you pointed out that getting from Venus to any other orbit is actually easier
00:24:30.160 than, for example.
00:24:32.200 Because if you build a mining base on Mars, intuitively, we think, well, that's closer
00:24:36.260 to the asteroid belt.
00:24:37.260 But on average, an asteroid from Mars can be a very long distance away.
00:24:41.720 And so gravitationally, it doesn't really quite matter so much that you're proximal in your
00:24:46.840 orbit because the closer you are to the sun, the lower your average distance is to everything.
00:24:52.360 There's a wonderful trick you can pull on people when you ask, what is the nearest planet
00:24:56.340 to Earth on average?
00:25:00.960 Venus, I would guess.
00:25:02.380 Mercury.
00:25:05.860 Yes.
00:25:06.620 Exactly.
00:25:07.260 And that's actually true of every single body in the sun.
00:25:09.460 It is, isn't it?
00:25:10.220 Yes.
00:25:10.580 Exactly.
00:25:11.000 Because, yes, our closest approach is to Venus.
00:25:14.720 But that doesn't matter very much because, on average, Venus can also end up on the other
00:25:19.000 side of the sun.
00:25:19.600 And so every...
00:25:20.640 You didn't ask for the absolute closest.
00:25:22.460 You asked for the closest average.
00:25:24.020 Exactly.
00:25:24.860 Which, of course, yes, of course, is going to be Mercury.
00:25:27.600 Yes.
00:25:29.260 Okay.
00:25:29.580 So we probably start with a lot of...
00:25:33.420 Well, we are starting right now with a lot of low Earth orbit stuff.
00:25:36.660 Yeah.
00:25:37.380 The next logical progression from that is to go to the Moon because you need materials.
00:25:44.660 You particularly need water.
00:25:46.200 And you can find it there at the poles, as you say.
00:25:48.420 And presumably lunar regolith can be turned into something useful.
00:25:53.480 I mean, I know you can actually turn it into solar panels.
00:25:55.940 They're very low efficiency solar panels, but because it's already there, you're willing
00:26:02.920 to accept like 5% of the efficiency you get on an Earth-made solar panel because all the
00:26:07.360 raw materials are there.
00:26:08.320 It's just a question of building them up.
00:26:09.980 So what would...
00:26:10.940 We talked about what the low Earth orbit economy is starting to look like.
00:26:16.280 What would the economy of the Moon start to look like when that gets rolling?
00:26:21.260 Well, I would say that they're integral steps together because, of course, you can't manufacture
00:26:26.760 fuel in low Earth orbit without a source of raw material from somewhere.
00:26:30.740 I think the Moon makes the most sense as that raw material.
00:26:32.800 So I think that the very first economic activity on the Moon will be to support that kind of
00:26:37.680 low Earth orbit gas station.
00:26:40.600 Because the delta V to get from the surface of the Moon to low Earth orbit is tiny compared
00:26:45.760 to the amount it needs to take off from Earth.
00:26:47.580 And so if you mine, say, 100 kilograms of ice on the Moon, and importantly, then refine
00:26:54.120 it there so you're not carrying all the weight of useless rock, the Moon doesn't have an
00:26:57.900 atmosphere.
00:26:58.620 So you can put that in a tank, fire it out of a rail gun or a chemical gun, or just use
00:27:03.160 a traditional rocket.
00:27:03.880 It doesn't matter.
00:27:04.860 And then carry that to low Earth orbit and sell it there for an enormous profit.
00:27:10.220 Yes.
00:27:11.220 And on...
00:27:11.580 Touch on rail guns because they're interesting as well.
00:27:13.940 Yeah.
00:27:14.440 Because you can...
00:27:15.460 If I got this vaguely right, sort of electro-propelled, basically big sled, get it up into space and
00:27:24.780 then it basically takes itself and then finds itself in low Earth orbit and then you just
00:27:29.260 come along and pick it up.
00:27:31.040 Is that right?
00:27:31.760 What you do is you fire it such that it becomes gravitationally influenced by the Earth and
00:27:36.320 it would normally whiplash around.
00:27:37.780 But then you just have a small little rocket that goes and slows it down just a tiny bit at
00:27:41.880 the apihelion and then you can do a stabilisation burn.
00:27:45.320 So you sort of fire these sleds from the Moon full of processed water or you could have
00:27:52.260 already cracked it into hydrogen oxygen if you wanted.
00:27:54.680 Exactly.
00:27:55.280 And then so you're basically supplying your gas station from the Moon in low Earth orbit.
00:28:02.440 And in that case, all of the propulsion doesn't need to go with the payload because it's just
00:28:06.920 electricity.
00:28:07.360 So you generate that locally.
00:28:08.740 You put some solar panels down and you can generate...
00:28:12.100 And so you don't need to carry Delta V.
00:28:13.860 The rocket equation can't touch you because you're not burning anything.
00:28:16.760 You just fire the slug and you then manufacture another slug and fire another one.
00:28:22.340 So the only thing you really need to take up from Earth at that point is particularly clever
00:28:26.120 stuff.
00:28:26.680 Exactly.
00:28:26.960 So let's say 90% or 90 plus percent of whatever you send from the Earth is going to be consumed
00:28:34.940 in fuel and the ship itself.
00:28:36.620 Yeah.
00:28:36.880 You really want to focus that down on very sensitive, very complicated electronics or
00:28:42.020 humans.
00:28:43.020 Exactly.
00:28:43.700 And their food.
00:28:45.100 And then kind of everything else, you're manufacturing up there and then you're going on to the next
00:28:52.540 stage of whatever comes after that stage.
00:28:54.940 Exactly.
00:28:55.300 It's a hierarchy of mass, which is, first of all, how well does its manufacturing scale?
00:29:03.020 So there are certain manufacturing processes which are relatively efficient at any scale,
00:29:06.440 like brick making.
00:29:07.420 If you have a large brick factory or a small brick factory, you'll produce about the same
00:29:11.280 amount per kiln.
00:29:12.120 But a small electronics workshop is going to produce far less than a large electronics factory
00:29:18.060 because of the nature of microchips.
00:29:20.360 And microchips are pretty hard to make in orbit.
00:29:22.500 Actually, they have some advantages to additive manufacturing might actually be easier in a zero
00:29:28.280 G environment.
00:29:29.180 But that's that's a question.
00:29:31.340 But not enough to overcome the economies of scale of doing it on Earth.
00:29:34.900 Exactly.
00:29:35.620 Especially since most manufacturing processes actually decrease mass.
00:29:38.920 So sending up raw material is going to weigh more than just sending up that finished
00:29:42.960 products.
00:29:43.440 So what is it, the opposite end of that equation?
00:29:47.680 I mean, fuel, presumably.
00:29:49.060 Sure.
00:29:49.360 Is it the other end of the equation?
00:29:51.160 And then heavy hull plating, stainless steel, for example.
00:29:54.580 OK.
00:29:55.860 So the first.
00:29:57.100 Anything basic and heavy.
00:29:58.660 Yes, exactly.
00:29:59.460 Because then all you what what you can do is a bit like Vickers, you can essentially just
00:30:05.220 build sections of hull plating.
00:30:07.200 Vickers in the in the late 19th, early 20th century was famous for this.
00:30:11.680 Just build huge sections of ships and then sell them.
00:30:14.140 Go around the world and see if anyone was interested in buying them.
00:30:16.860 It's why when World War One kicked off, British shipyards were building warships for like Brazil,
00:30:24.540 Paraguay and the Ottoman Empire.
00:30:26.600 So we've got now a fairly sophisticated low Earth orbit economy, gas stations.
00:30:37.740 We've got data centers.
00:30:39.140 We've got presumably companies like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are now operating up there.
00:30:44.760 They're taking tourists up.
00:30:46.620 We've got our lunar base, which is providing manufacturing of fuel and heavy components and stuff like that.
00:30:57.360 What's the moon like in terms of other stuff?
00:31:01.100 The nice.
00:31:01.460 What if I want to get, I don't know, iron, nickel, lithium?
00:31:04.120 So a bit like on Earth, the problem isn't necessarily the amount of the the presence of a particular material.
00:31:13.480 It's down to concentration.
00:31:15.000 If you were to take a good example of this is seawater.
00:31:18.120 There's more gold dissolved in the ocean seawater than has ever been mined on Earth.
00:31:21.780 But because the volume of water is enormous, trying to sift it for that concentration isn't economical.
00:31:29.420 On the moon, you can find traces of metals pretty easily.
00:31:33.240 It's just coming down to are you going to find ores?
00:31:35.960 And the trouble with that is that the things that create ores on Earth are a large number of processes that require an atmosphere and a hydrosphere.
00:31:45.340 So, again, an example of this is placer deposits.
00:31:48.640 A placer deposit is where you get a situation where uranium, most of the uranium on Earth comes from placer deposits where you have water flowing and uranium, small uranium particles, which are present in volcanic rocks.
00:32:00.420 They're brought up from the mantle.
00:32:01.980 They are heavier by mass.
00:32:04.440 And so when water is dispersing, the uranium is heaviest and drops first.
00:32:08.740 And then that over millions of years builds up a sandstone that's rich in uranium.
00:32:13.080 It's naturally concentrated.
00:32:14.380 Other environments are where you have water that is enriched.
00:32:18.360 You have water moving through a rhyolitic stone.
00:32:21.940 It becomes enriched in gold ions.
00:32:23.920 That then moves through a less oxidizing environment.
00:32:27.480 The gold reacts and falls out of solution.
00:32:29.500 That's why veins look like flows of water.
00:32:33.460 I see.
00:32:34.100 OK, so that's something I hadn't really considered before.
00:32:36.740 But a living planet is crucial for its geological development, the actual living element of it.
00:32:44.380 And the water flow and all the rest of it.
00:32:45.860 That is crucial in of itself that we shouldn't necessarily expect to find on something like the moon, which has never had life.
00:32:53.300 Well, you can address that point.
00:32:55.580 And then I'm wondering, OK, well, what about Venus and Mars, which we might reasonably have assumed at some point in the past may have had ocean and a, you know, some proto ecology system.
00:33:08.580 So, yeah, address those.
00:33:11.020 How does that work on the moon and then our closest neighbors?
00:33:13.480 So the iron is the one we named.
00:33:16.480 And this is where we really get picked off because iron, rather than just needing a hydrosphere specifically on Earth's case, needs ice.
00:33:23.180 Most of our needs life.
00:33:25.060 Most of our iron comes from something called a banded iron formation, which is where you have microbes on Earth that were taking iron ions and building them up.
00:33:35.080 And so you can get these enormous layers, meters and meters thick of iron, chert, iron, chert, iron, chert.
00:33:40.360 And these were assembled over millions of years.
00:33:42.720 And this is where like 85 percent of our iron ore comes from.
00:33:45.900 There are other sources of iron ore that don't need life, but they're much less concentrated, much less common.
00:33:51.280 So on the moon and on Mars, the moon and Mars, I'll start with first, we have reason to believe they have a similar geological model, which is called stagnant lid, where the primordial heat trapped by a body is not enough and the radioactive decay is not enough to keep the lid mobile.
00:34:10.800 And so active volcanism stops.
00:34:14.100 The mantle heat is not producing enough heat that it breaks through and tries to get to the surface, as opposed to Earth, where we have a tectonic lid.
00:34:22.720 Is that largely a function of their smaller size?
00:34:25.040 Yes, and their lower metallicity.
00:34:28.580 OK.
00:34:29.840 Because, of course, as you know, that as a sphere gets larger, its volume increases more rapidly than its surface area.
00:34:37.140 Yes.
00:34:37.320 And so on Earth, our larger size means that we trapped a lot more heat during formation, primordial heat, and we also have a lot more heavy elements that are undergoing radiometric decay and generating heat inside the planet.
00:34:52.200 And so on Earth, that's why we still have active volcanism.
00:34:55.920 There isn't active volcanism on Venus.
00:34:57.580 There isn't active volcanism on the moon.
00:35:00.800 Sorry, there isn't active volcanism on Mars or the moon.
00:35:05.980 But on Venus, as of three months ago, we've proved those active volcanism.
00:35:12.080 Yes, I understand it's got more volcanoes than anywhere else in the solar system.
00:35:16.780 We're not sure.
00:35:18.280 In terms of total volcanic structures, yes.
00:35:21.400 But with regards to living volcanoes, we've only just found one thus far.
00:35:27.460 So we found, because Venus is very hard to study on the surface because of its thick atmosphere.
00:35:33.700 Yes, it's a bit cloudy.
00:35:35.740 Well, yes.
00:35:36.540 And so we needed to, when we were surveying it, use something that had a high enough wavelength that it wasn't going to interfere with the atmosphere of CO2.
00:35:45.460 So we used radio waves.
00:35:46.960 But radio waves are enormous compared to visible light, and so the resolution is very poor.
00:35:52.980 Right.
00:35:53.460 So if you were to study, for example, a mountain on Venus, that might only be one or two pixels.
00:36:03.620 And so we've had a very hard time learning about the surface of Venus.
00:36:07.780 And also, since the Soviets went there, we've invested almost nothing in exploring it.
00:36:12.380 Venus has been really neglected because people saw it as a hell world, and we said, well, there's not life there.
00:36:16.980 It's just a big ball of rock, CO2, basaltic minerals.
00:36:20.600 Why would we expect anything to be of value there?
00:36:23.840 And so finding out that unlike every other planet in the solar system that we know, it didn't just have historical volcanism, but volcanism is still going on.
00:36:33.840 And it's not like Io, where it's driven by tidal heating.
00:36:36.260 It's actually Earth-like volcanism.
00:36:37.960 That is a big discovery.
00:36:39.440 And that has inspired a lot of active investigation.
00:36:41.660 And so my idea that I discussed in that podcast of, well, you just put a cloud city up there, and you float above the clouds, and then you use, again, sort of in-situ 3D printing and robots and stuff.
00:36:53.680 You send them down, you stick them under a dome, and you heat-bent it.
00:36:56.880 Is that viable?
00:36:58.820 With regards to human habitation, that's probably the only way you would want to try and do it, without the sort of terraforming that you can only do once you've won the game of civilization, once resource scarcity just no longer exists.
00:37:12.160 Yes.
00:37:12.740 Because at that level, first of all, the delta V to get from the surface of Venus to orbit is three times the delta V to get off the surface of Earth, because of the incredibly thick atmosphere.
00:37:24.800 Ah.
00:37:25.300 Venus also, because of its incredibly slow and retrograde rotation, it's rotating the wrong way around and incredibly slowly, doesn't give you a gravitational assist getting into an orbit.
00:37:36.600 Ah, right, that's interesting.
00:37:38.820 Okay, so Venus obviously has, you know, 90% of the gravity that the Earth has.
00:37:43.520 Yes.
00:37:43.880 So you'd think that it'd be easier getting off the surface, but the bit of the atmospheric drag, which is a much smaller part on Earth, becomes a hugely significant factor, presumably, than in Venus.
00:37:57.380 Yes, on the surface.
00:37:58.060 And also, the other thing you do on Earth is you launch as close as you can to the equator, because that spin of the Earth, it doesn't give you much, but every little helps.
00:38:06.380 It gives you about 20%.
00:38:07.260 When you're dealing with that, and that helps you get off.
00:38:09.900 But of course, yeah, so Venus has the thick atmosphere, and the spin goes the wrong way, so it doesn't help you at all.
00:38:15.380 So everything is, so the surface is a bit of a bitch.
00:38:19.300 It absolutely is, but the weird side factor of that is there is a resource on the surface which doesn't need geology to be concentrated, which is very exciting, which is silica.
00:38:32.680 Silica, we know that the Venezian crust is rich in silica.
00:38:36.880 It's covered in basaltic rock, which can be like 50% to 70% silica by weight, and if you have silica, and you have hydrogen, which you can get from the sulfuric acid clouds, you can make silane, and silane burns in CO2.
00:38:53.840 CO2 and silane burn on their own.
00:38:55.700 CO2 can be an oxidizer to silane, which means you can get craft, which, a bit like on Earth, when you have a jet engine, unlike a rocket, it doesn't need to also carry an oxidizer.
00:39:10.300 On Earth, the reason a plane is more efficient than a rocket is because it can get its oxidizer, oxygen, from the atmosphere, but a rocket needs to carry both.
00:39:20.120 Well, if you have a silane-based propulsion system, there's an enormous disadvantage, which is you can probably only use them once, but the advantage is you don't need to carry the oxidizer.
00:39:31.600 The reason you probably can only use them once is one of those products is solid.
00:39:36.440 It's silica crystals.
00:39:38.080 So hang on.
00:39:38.800 It's not clear to me what the useful takeaway from this is.
00:39:42.540 I mean, is this going to give you propulsion within the atmosphere of Venus, or more broadly than that?
00:39:47.940 It would give you a way to go from your cloud city to low Venusian orbit without spending an arm and a leg.
00:39:53.780 You can use a rocket plane, and because of the relative buoyancy, you can float on Venus at 50 kilometers up incredibly easily.
00:40:05.180 The CO2 is much denser, and because hydrogen doesn't burn in it, you can get enormous buoyancy forces.
00:40:10.800 And so if you take off from 50 kilometers up, you get to avoid the incredibly thick atmosphere.
00:40:14.300 In fact, the atmospheric drag is slightly less than Earth, and by not needing to carry an oxidizer, and because of the lower mass, if we can get jet planes working on Earth, that is to say, a craft that can get you to orbit, and then you have a rocket meet it, that's a much cheaper launch.
00:40:33.560 And it's easier to get working on Earth.
00:40:35.140 They call that a jet plane, do they?
00:40:37.100 It's one term for it.
00:40:38.980 There's also a space plane.
00:40:40.600 And that's basically a jet that will get you into low orbit.
00:40:44.060 Well, not orbit specifically, but orbital altitude.
00:40:46.940 And then you can have a rendezvous with a craft that then picks you up, and then you skim back into the atmosphere.
00:40:54.620 Okay, and then you use a bit of rocket thrust in order to do that last bit.
00:40:58.180 Yes, exactly.
00:40:58.960 But presumably that would be significantly easier on Venus because of the density of the atmosphere.
00:41:04.240 It's easier on Venus for a number of reasons.
00:41:09.140 First of all, even though Silane has a relatively low specific impulse and you can only use it once, because it can be used at any altitude in the Venusian atmosphere, you can use that to communicate resources from the surface to your sky city and from your sky city to low Earth orbit where it meets with a rocket.
00:41:29.340 And then that rocket can go off into the solar system.
00:41:31.640 And the reason that's important is because Venus is very good for supporting the second and third stages of space industry because it has abundant sulfur.
00:41:39.720 It has abundant carbon.
00:41:41.120 It has a lot of resources, which sulfur especially is not common in the asteroid belt.
00:41:45.480 It's kind of hard to find it.
00:41:47.040 And if you want to make electronics, you cannot go without sulfuric acid.
00:41:50.120 So if you have a planet that has clouds of it, that sulfuric acid is an enormous resource.
00:41:56.340 Well, and presumably it's also useful for leaching any other materials that you gather from the asteroid belt.
00:42:01.400 Leaching is exactly the word for it.
00:42:02.880 That's actually the term in ore processing.
00:42:04.140 Because if you have an asteroid, instead of needing to drill it, imagine if you build a space station that's rotating.
00:42:13.180 You know the concept in sci-fi where you generate an artificial gravity by spinning.
00:42:17.340 Instead, you have a cylinder and then you spin it and you're on the inside of the cylinder and you stick to the outside.
00:42:25.340 Like those old-fashioned fairground rides that spin around and then go up.
00:42:28.180 Exactly. You can do the same thing where you fill it, you crush an asteroid, you take big chunks of an asteroid, crush it, and then inject high-temperature CO2.
00:42:36.400 And the minerals will simply be, the valuable material will be leached out by the centrifugal forces.
00:42:42.820 It will differentially separate because of the higher mass.
00:42:46.160 So actually Venus is very, very viable for that phase that we're talking about, which is going to be the key driver, which is the gas station bit.
00:42:54.400 Exactly.
00:42:55.040 And this is a port for the other stuff.
00:42:56.660 So, okay, so we've now got our lower orbit stuff.
00:43:01.200 We've got our moon base.
00:43:02.720 That then gets us to Venus and it gives us all of the things you've just talked about that support fleshing out that industry significantly,
00:43:10.220 which then enables us to go to the asteroid belt.
00:43:14.280 And with the resources that we took from Venus via the moon, via Earth, we can then start, well, basically we have, not unlimited,
00:43:23.040 but from our perspective right now, almost unlimited amounts of useful metals and other stuff that if our in-situ,
00:43:30.340 our 3D printing is sufficiently developed to that point, I mean, you could start building pretty much anything you want.
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