Future of Space Infrastructure and Data

ACAS powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Go touch grass. You have probably heard this phrase. Maybe you have even said it Beneath the sort of lighthearted nature of this meme is something very real and important a growing sense that staying in touch with our humanity and being present in our bodies Matters more than ever in today's digital world. My name is Manouche Zamarodi, and I am taking over as host of Ted Talks Daily this week to explore what technology is actually doing to your body and mind In special interviews with scientists, doctors, parents, artists, and more, we're going to dig into your physical and mental health on test we think about our bodies differently now, how we relate to new innovations that are amazing, but also a little scary, and how we can live a healthier life in this high tech era. Tune in on Ted Talks Daily, wherever you listen to podcasts ACast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere A Cast Duck This episode of the Business is sponsored by PWC. Markets are shifting, teechnology and AI are reshaping industries. Druption is unavoidable. Staying ahead and finding new opportunities for growth demands bold moves. This is where PWC makes things happen. Working with you, combining the industry expertise, data insights, AI capabilities and business change experience. to help you reinvent and lead from the front PWC accelerates what's possible so you can turn vision into value. Discover more at pwc. co. uk Hello, Dominic O'Connell here Last week on the business we had Mark Bogart in the studio. He's the Chief executive of Serifon an international investment firm focused on the space economy Naturally, we talked about Elon Musk's SpaceX, a rocket company that completely dominates the market for space launches and which have just confirmed its plans to become a public company listing its shares on NSDAQ I asked Mark about SpaceX's plans and what it means for companies like Serifum Here's a bit more of our conversation that didn't make it into the main episode I think one thing that a lot of people miss is just how dominant SpaceX has become in Mch.. It now accounts for something like ninety percent, even more than ninety percent of all the mass that's put into orbit. It's something like that, isn't it? Is that dangerous having one company, one private company with a monopoly? So it is But they haven't behaved like a monopolist So they've driven down price to levels that we've never seen before. You know there's been a ten X reduction in the cost But they've also increased capacity and cadence to levels that we've never seen before, to the extent that we're almost at a launch a day So that isn't behaving like a minopolist. They've really worked to open up this commercial market And And what's happened over the last decade, the largest amount of investment has actually gone into launch. There's a couple of hundred of launch companies. that have been well financed and they're all at various sort stages of growth Shouldn't they all just give up though? Because SpaceX is doing it so well and so cheaply. It is doing it so well and so cheaply. They've set a bar that others are know seeking to get to. So Rocket Labs, which is the second most valuable space company in the world, is really hot on their heels. What they've not been able to do is to be able to reach the sort of same level of pricing They're on the pathway to get there, but they are still you know, multiples higher per kilo But what they do offer is the ability to go to the orbital destination that you want to go to So this is the difference again between taking the bus which is cheaper or paying for a rocket lab, which will take you exactly where you want to go, more like a tax buying a car. Let's talk about that price point. So in say the nineties before SpaceX came along, The cost of getting one kilogram into orbit would have been perhaps five thousand dollars. eighty thousand dollars. eighty thousand dollars. Now SpaceX has brought it down to about one thousand dollars a car. That's the lowest, but the market price is about five thousand dollars a low But there's something else coming along, isn't there? There is this giant new rocket from SpaceX, which has had a few trial launches, seems to be working pretty well, I think. It's called Starship What will that do to cost? So this is really calling time on the next stage of growth of the space market The Falcon nine, which has really been the workhorse for the last decade monopolized the space market So the starship is ten times bigger. SpaceX are saying that They're intending to launch up to two of these a week The factory they're building has got to ch turn out like three hundred stars shhips a year. Absolutely. It's crazy. Absolutely. And the price hasn't yet been publicly set mostost market commentators exxpected to be around five hundred dollars a kilo Well, I've seen studies in the U saying that once the cadence gets up with Starship It could be ten dollars a kila. Correct. cororrect. What does that do to this placeace? Well even even at five hundred dollars a kilo, which is where the market expects it to go to, that's ten times cheaper than the five thousand today. But on the same launch, you could put up ten times the amount. So we're just about to enter an era of mega structures in space So if you think about megastructures in space You think about the interternational sppace station that's the size of a football field. Then commercially, so our portfolio company AST There's putting up cell towers in space Their satellites are bordering two football fields There are a bunch of companies out there right now that are planning to put up infrastructure into space that's a hundred times bigger than that. So this is going to be acres of solar farms and they are gathering as much energy as possible. to do things like power data centers And if you can generate enough power to power a data center There's no reason why you can't actually just bring that power back to Earth providing Earth with a new, reliable power source that will help us wean us off the oil economy that is causing so much problems today. Just coming to the cost thing, if it does become one hundred dollars a kilogam ten dollars, whatever it is Does that become a huge disruptor for the companies you're invested in becausecause all of a sudden it becomes so cheap to throw up a satellite that the ones that used to have the technology leadership suddenly don't because actually we'll just toss everything up and anybody can have a satellite. So this is the reason why we've really been very much focused on trying to identify the emerging category leaders If you just think about any technology sector The leader tends to take a disproportionate amount of shares and sort of stays in that leadership position, even though it would be relatively easy for other parties to come along When it relates to space, this is especially true And one of the things that is really compelling is that these companies are doing new things in the space environment. It's greenfield from an IP perspective So we've got portfolio companies that are building up intellectual property portfolios of hundreds or even thousands of patents. We like to invest into companies that are vertically integrated So they're able to to take that through the loop very, very quickly And as they're doing that on all elements of that, they're taking intellectual property as they go And as things are going wrong and they're fixing them, The're patent seeing the fix, and they're also saying what are the four or five other ways we could get somebody else might want to address this problem