The Space Entrepreneur With Marc Bell, Co-Founder Terran Orbital
46m | May 26, 2022Guest:
Marc Bell - Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder
Hosted By:
It's Marc Bell, chairman and CEO of Terran orbital. How are you doing today, Marc? I am doing great. And so thank you for having me. Great to have you we'll first off the bat. I would love to just learn a little bit about Terran, like the name, the stories around it before we jump into too much long-term stuff.
I just want to know about you guys. Terran orbital started, I started in 2013 and I started as a vehicle. To acquire companies that were working in space. I'm a lifelong Trekkie. So there was 10 years old, always fascinated with space, always wanting to go to space. At some point I realized they weren't putting middle-aged overweight Jews into space.
So I decided to go ahead and start buying companies that I could build things to put into space that don't include myself. And it's been a dream come true. It is, we are now building satellites and we're solving problems from space. And we're the guys who helped invent the cube set. So we're all this whole new space revolution that everybody talks about.
It's all our fault. And so all these new startups and everything else, they're all there because of the technology that we created, a company we bought called tie-back because was about. Austin has a question too. It sounds but I right off the bat, the first question I can think of which you touched on already, like the go space revolution since you guys are right in the thick of it, you've started it.
When did this begin? Because we see at least for me, and I think other people in my generation, we see videos of the space shuttles, and that, that kind of felt like the big thing. And then things seem to sleepy for awhile, but it seems like there's been so much going on in the background to make everything that's going on now actually happen.
What's been going on. Two guys, a guy named Dr. Jordan pug Suare who was a college professor and Bob Twiggs called professor about 13 years ago, invented educational demonstrator called the cube set. This was a satellite. You can hold in the Palm of your head. And the point was to demonstrate that you don't need to build big satellites to do big things.
And if you think about it, you mentioned the space shuttle, your iPhone or Android phone that you hold has more computing power than the space shuttle did. And so things have changed dramatically. And so what used to cost a billion dollars to build? You can outdo for 10 million, but that was the only part of the chip sets costs a lot less.
So cubes. Open the door, but you still had to get these things to orbit. Then came along space X and space X made it affordable to go to space. So between us making payload, making the satellite sheep and space X, making the rideshare. A whole revolution was created of small sets. And now that you hear people talking, the government talks about how 50,000 satellites are going to get launched over the next 10 years.
And if you put that in perspective, you may be have like 14,000 thousands of satellites launched over the past few. Wow. Those are some impressive numbers. That's a lot of, that's a lot of stuff flying up into space around us is is that gonna be a problem? That's my one question. The good news is there's a lot of space in space
you have on earth. You have 40% of the planet is covered by land the, of. You have 3.2 billion cars and on a single plane in space, you have 43,000 miles of Y that 40,000 miles of planes. You have a lot of highways, a lot of roads of space that you could travel. And then what times objects tend to hit each other is when it's intentionally done.
When people want to demonstrate how smart they are, that they can create space junk and. And for those of you who are listeners, if you look at the TV show quark from 1977, you'll get a good laugh, but that was a space, garbage truck. And that's what we need today to clean up all this trash that these guys created.
But there is a, is it everyone says, oh, this is a problem. Not really a problem, a space situational awareness, which is what's called tracking space. Garbage has a fancy name for it is become a bigger thing. And the us, government's doing a very good job of tracking what's in space. And now there are technologies that we're developing that are similar to what airplanes have.
Airplanes have today, something called T cast or traffic collision avoidance system. So you sit in a cockpit and if you're, if something's coming out of the planes going at you, it goes traffic, and then it tells you what to do, what to go, pull up. And if you ever hear the words pray, you're, it's all over, but no one would ever hear those words.
But the goal is on a satellite it'll move. It'll be a lot. We use a lot of AI, so sell it. We'll know something's coming. It'll move out of the. It will calculate the trajectory and then I'll move back to where it's supposed to be and do it all on its own without human interaction. Like we have to do today on the.
That's interesting. Okay. Yeah, because I had heard some concern, of course you gotta have the YouTube sensational videos, so I had, I'd seen one floating around and talking about, oh my gosh, we're going to be shrouded in a trash, trash blanket over, over Earth's atmosphere and the next 10 years.
And I thought it was pretty sensational. So I figured I would bring that up and ask a real expert because I'm sure if anyone would know it would be the guy launched and all that. Spy satellites into space. So that's a reassuring answer to, to hear there's solutions to avoid exactly that, that issue.
I, I do want to ask though about the name as well of the company Terran or orbital. Is there any, anything behind that name? I know has some some connotations. With any company I've started, I've always had a naming scheme of, for lack of a better term. And this case, I went for a science fiction, schema, Taran.
Isn't our fire word for earth earthlings. Terror, I think is the basis of the word are these either the Latin or Greek or something for earth. And so we picked Heron in the, in StarCraft, they use the name terrines and it's moving to the typical Teranova TV show. And there's lots of reference Saifai references over the years.
And prejudice. Our constellation that we're building was Remington will be predator. So predator that it gov trader predecessor. So we try to have some fun as we named things. And, but you'll see, like our stock symbol is LL AP live long and prosper. And we were very excited to do your second exchange, gave it to us.
They wouldn't let us put Spock's hand on the side of the New York side, but we thought it was pretty funny. And and it's it's just, we try to make it, we're, we do very serious work here at orbital and we work mostly for the DOD and the IC community. Though we do some civil work and some commercial work, but we want our people here to have fun and enjoy working here.
Yeah. It's also a good way to to get the suits on wall street to just loosen up a little bit. I give a little live long and prosper hand signal there on the exchange. So that's good. It probably brings some levity to the situation. It does. It does, especially with things going on in this world with Ukraine and everything else.
And we've been very active over there helping the Ukrainian government. We are thrilled to bring a little bit of smile to people's faces
Austin, by the way. I think he's. We might be frozen. It looks, he's looking frozen. So we'll just, we'll we'll let Ashley edit this little chunk out and then I'll continue and he should be able to hop back.
So a follow-up to that, the idea of it seems like space travel, at least in my opinion has always been this this thing that gives hope to humanity. It's this thing. Sparks curiosity. And it's just, it's something that people from countries all over the world, cultures all over the world, love and love to see and experience and think about.
And like talking about things like the Ukraine and everything, there's so much, there's so much bad, bad press all time all the time. And. But it seems like space flight is one of those things that just gets everyone excited. How did you first get into the industry? Was it a curiosity thing from a young age?
Was it like just the thing that built? Cause it seems like something that everyone would love to do. I got very excited about space when I was a kid. It really started when I was 10 years old and got stuck somewhere in a hotel with my dad and it was raining outside and ended up watching a 24 hour star Trek marathon.
And years later, I had a company called Globex or my first comedies and we ran 28,000 miles of fiber around the world as part of the original internet backbone. And we were the world's largest logical. And we were the second largest owners of data centers in the world. And we hosted some of them, we hosted some of Microsoft's original websites, Walmarts, regional websites.
We hosted about half of the fortune, fifties, original websites back in the day. And but we couldn't reach, we, and by being the largest logical pier, what I mean is we connected to more networks than anybody else. So we connected to over a thousand ISP around the planet, but we couldn't reach ESPs in Eastern Europe.
So we started building ground stations and buying satellite transponder space. And that's how we started connecting all these Eastern European ice IPS onto the global internet. And it was very a, and that was my first exposure into a space. And I've been enamored ever since. It's just been exciting journey.
Yeah, definitely get that. What was that? What was that like transitioning to. In an industry setting in a practical setting, transitioning to using space to, to solve a practical issue. Cause it seems like there's so much talk around. I've heard skeptics be like, oh, we're still decades away from, I don't know, being able to colonize Mars and all those things.
And that's fair, but it seems like there's some people who are just. Pessimistic about space being able to solve real issues in general, but it does. What's your kind of take on that. Look at all the things that have been invented that came out of space. Everything from God, perfect.
Ball-bearings certain kinds of glass. There's this, all these man missions to space have CIF created all these technologies that we use today on a daily basis. How they're part of our society and and so it helps us innovate, innovating, and you are right people aspire and dream of going to space.
They dream of it. We see movies and TV shows everything you're fantasizing about it. And it gives us hope, like you said, but there are ponds we can track globally global warm. We can watch icebergs in real time and we come and we can measure the depth of them and measure the decrease them day by day, hour by hour.
If we choose you, can't do that with drones. You can't do that with planes. It's too big. A but you can do it from space and you can do it economically from space. You can measure crop yields from space globally. If you want to figure out where your there's going to be famine ahead of time and where you're going to have to move food suppliers around because you'll know in a wheat field, how hydrated.
There's some amazing technologies that just are not economical to do from the air from airplanes, with drones, but our economical space, but also helps with things like insurance fraud. And, we can map out Florida the day before hurricane the day after hurricane and see whose roofs were missing before the hurricane using AI.
So you, there's a lot of things that are good. A lot of good comes out of space and, human space travel is a desire and colonization of the planets and the moon and Mars and beyond is a desire. And you, we have to, you have to imagine there obviously, Other planets, like earth Goldilocks, planets around the universe.
We're not the only ones. I'm sure if the other ones found us, they ran long ago, they went to Washington and they saw they left. They got scared, in general, there's a lot of a lot of dreaming to go on there.
Definitely. And that's, I think that is something that so many people. I have, like you said, have aspired to, to go to space, to see earth from space, to, see the pale blue dot. And to the curiosity, like we've already talked about that, that inspires. Where do you see, we've talked a little bit about the past.
Where do you see the long run of, we're in the long run show. We're always talking about the long run. Where do you see. In the long run. Even the medium term, I'm really curious even just about two to five years, but certainly 10, 20 years of where Taryn is going and where the industry is.
Yeah. So we look at Taran, I don't want to be in an industry unless we can be the number one or number two player. And if you look at all the businesses, we visit my fifth unicorn, all the businesses we started in the past with rare exception, we've been able to be number one and number two.
And we strive to do that. We want to do it right. We want to be the best. We want to be different. We want to create barriers to entry and what we do, and this case we're innovating, becoming Tulloch technologically superior to other people. And we're building something for a very well used to close to a billion I could build for 10 million and I can deliver a higher quality product for phenomenally less money.
And so it's not evolutionary, but it's revolutionary, but we're working on become revolutionary, was creating the cube set that we did here at Tyvac evolutionary is what we're doing today tearing and going ahead and creating products that will continue to get cheaper and smarter and better.
And we're going to see more and more applications with space today. You're going to see 5g, there was saying that's something everyone's talking about. Cell phones. You go, you're going to see it. You see a lot of internet things, Starlink, everyone's getting, everyone wants to buy the internet bandwidth for space, but you can see that bandwidth is starting off slow, and then it's going to get very fast.
It's just like today. I remember when Globex, we used to sell up 1.5, four megabit connection for $999 a month to companies today, I got 2.5 gigabits of Google fiber in my home for $99 a month. It's a whole different world, and you're gonna see that in space. The images today you get from space are they're great and they're going to get phenomenally better.
You're going to see more and more interesting images and more detailed. And eventually you'll be able to just take a selfie from space. You both to look up, say, take a picture of. You're sitting in the football game and I'll take a picture of you and it to your phone. That's technologically very doable.
It's just about, as somebody wants to spend the money to do it, but that's something that's totally doable. Those are some wild applications there. Mark and I, it brings up some interesting questions for me. I, if you haven't noticed yet, Mike tends to be of the two of us a bit more on the the.
Positive. And I tend to be a little more skeptical most of the time. My, my trash comment earlier, and then also I have another one coming up here, a question for you and in almost more than negative light. But with that excuse that I guess is my preface there. But with all that, This basically mapping of the earth.
And you're just at being able to take a selfie from space, which is a crazy idea. What are the kind of Issues from a privacy and ethical standpoint that you have to think through when we're talking about taking pictures and mapping, people's property, because obviously we have the rules where your property lines don't extend vertically upward.
But they only go up so high. So where's the privacy kind of layer come into effect. I know we've seen some interesting situations with drones, but satellites has just, that's a whole nother. On the other level, it seems because you have a lot more, ability to see things you may not be able to see in any other way, which again, not saying Teran is out to do bad things, but there are plenty of bad people in the world.
So how do we think about this kind of moving forward as we map earth from space, we work for the good people in the world
that, you bring up a very good question. There are lots of laws out there to what we can and can't. And when we can, and can't image a, there are lots of laws today that perk to protect us citizens. Not necessarily global citizens but it is a as they control resolution. So the resolution we can image and the resolution we're allowed to sell are two different things.
So we can sell, we can image super high resolution. We, we can, but we can't sell that to the public. So they learn and that's when national security. Otherwise we'd just be reading the text on your phone as you type. And so it is a it does bring up some interesting questions on privacy.
I have or I have friends who accidentally got taken a picture of. From a satellite of him laying on his backyard. And so we started a picture, we laughed very hard and he was almost laughing. And it's it is going to be, does more and more of these imaging satellites go up there.
Then it's going to have to be some sort of regularly. To protect your privacy, because if you're out in your backyard, sunbathing, and let's say you were going for new 10 lines, you don't want that picture. And then you hop on Google and but I'm trying, I'm sure everybody would be imaging every pool in Vegas if they could do that.
So there are privacy issues abound, and it's going to be, there will be somewhere where regulations, I think drones right now are the bigger problem because you can't get the go over your property. Shoot them down. You can't take them down. You can't shut them down. He came and put a drone net up, you can't.
So it's a real privacy issue of having that, having drones over your property. And now, right now it's a much bigger issue from space then from space and listen. I see drones buzzing around all the time where I live and, we don't like it, but there's nothing we can do about it right now.
Yeah, it is interesting. It's when we get into these new spaces and this is what we've talked about this in crypto, Mike and I have, it's just interesting, like you get into a space where humans haven't really had to think about these problems before. We haven't really been able to just hover above someone's property before it's it presents these interesting interesting problems to, to think through.
But on the positive side, like you were saying, it also presents solutions that we. Ever imagined like the whole crop issue and being able to predict, okay, we're going to have a, have an issue with supply of food over here. Let's move some food around. Let's make sure that this country sells to this country to make sure they're taking care of that.
That's something where I think it seems like the positives could outweigh the the cons, even though I am somewhat skeptical sometimes or can be less positive than a than Mike, I do think in the long run, we're, our human ingenuity is pretty astounding. And the fact that they took a satellite, made it into a cube that is a little bigger than a large Rubik's cube.
Kind of wild to me, so I'm sure we can solve these issues. I believe, I always tell people, who privacy issue does come up a lot. And I tell people just don't do anything wrong. Don't do anything you don't want to see on the cover of the New York post. And you're doing okay. And as long as that's my metric and that's why I lived my life as long as I don't care, if it ends up on the cover of the New York post it's.
Okay. And so you want to make sure that whatever you're doing, you do the right thing. And that, that is cause there's no reason why you should be doing something wrong and just live your life.
A lot of freedoms in this country, you should have. Touching off of that. And we've mentioned a little bit of, the situation that Ukraine right now, but that for me looking at space and go individual privacy and the individual's perspective zooming out to, we've never really, at least since, since decades, at this point, we never really had as intense of a possibility of conflict.
Between two space powers, astronauts from both Russia and the U S and the ISS. So it's like what do you think is there the capability for space war in the future? It's all scifi and everything, but it's something that definitely seems to be interesting, especially now that conflict is a little more sadly normalized.
I don't know. What are your perspectives on the future of space? Defense, he's a space wars person. You said space defense. So we'll tackle it from both sides, and we have a very sophisticated military. That's doing some very sophisticated things and we live a very blessed life here in the United States.
Because it's all the things that don't happen that you never read about that you never hear about is what allows you to live your life. Because if you knew everything that was going on, you'd never go to a shopping mall. You never go to a restaurant and you probably would leave the country for the rallies because of the phenomenal job that the U S government does in protecting us is that we are able to leave the life that we.
And that's on the defense side on the worst side, I'm sure there's somebody somewhere that even the Pentagon building, trying to figure out how to build a death star. I totally see it happening. It's just know somebody's gotta be creative enough to say, Hey, we just build a battleship in space and that's it.
But the reality is nobody wants to do there's no such thing as winning. Everybody loses at the end of the day, both sides lose because those are things as a winner, no matter what the outcome is, war everybody loses. And and what's going on right now is incredibly unfortunate in the Ukraine because there really was no need for it.
And, and all these people are dying for no reason and it's not making the world a better place. It's just destroying. And and that's that's the problem. And, but, we have, we will, I would like to think the human race is becoming more evolved, but obviously not. And the space is becoming a contested domain, just like the Chinese are building all these islands in the south Pacific and it's taken, the Ukraine has taken away.
China and Taiwan conversation, if you know that you're, if the Europeans, really got their act together and cut off north school, And bit the bullet and cough Russia's supply of cash. Then all of a sudden, there'd be some real economic sanctions with some real power who are still, they're still paying billions of dollars a year to the Russians in funding, or they're a military attack cut off their money and they'll stop.
And, but the U S the Germans don't want to do that. And they can't cause they. And so the true lined off, because it's winter time, the waiting the summertime in order to stop a war, which is ridiculous. We have in the U S the Chinese economy relies on us, but the Chinese are, I've never really, I've never been aggressors.
So you had a peaceful handover of Hong Kong, there could be people arguing about freedoms. But overall, it was a peaceful handover in the military. All of the lease expires for the British and the Chinese moved in, but that was their island. They were able to do that Sydney with Macau Taiwan is a different story.
But I'm hoping that will be a piece of resolution at some point in the future and not a conflict which would decimate the island. Yeah. It's interesting. You were, you're saying. To think that humans are more evolved and it is an interesting hole to run down. But you mentioned earlier that, even if we are or are not, that's a totally separate question.
If there were other. Life forms out there on other Goldilocks planets, and they found us first. You think that they would just run away and hightailed away. I tend to agree with you. I think maybe Mike would have a different opinion. What's your opinion? Ever the optimist, maybe I am, maybe I hope they say hello or something that I guess will.
Yeah. If I was smart enough to travel light years, And I found this shit, the shit storm going on, I go right back there. There, there are better planets to go visit. So my question is underlying that people are always asking this question. Are there other earths out there? And you seem, you hinted.
You seem to think there are. It could be very intelligent lifeforms up there as well. I am super open to the possibility. I would love to think that there's aliens out there we could interact with, I don't know if they would want to interact with us, but what is your after launching lots of things into space and studying space, what is your kind of thought process on that?
In whole it's pierced, it's pure odds. It's like going to Vegas and gambling at a rillette table. There are only so many numbers, you're going to win. There are so many planets, so many. I only need to apply in at a certain distance from the sun to have you a Goldilocks planet, to have the right heat temperature for things to be able to grow.
Now, keep in mind, earth is very young compared to the rest of the universe. And as a civilization, we're very young. So they're going to be civilizations that are millions of years old, that hyper sophisticated or ones that never got sophisticated for. There has to be somebody in other people that are out there.
And they're not just going to come here and bring us. That's an old Woody Allen joke from years ago, but they are there is a it's just statistically speaking. There has to be other things going on. But, be careful what you wish for. They could bring a calm, their common cold could be a deadly virus to us.
They could be the friendliest people on earth when they, we always make movies that they're always hostile because that's what sells tickets. You never have a movie that they're all friendly and happy go lucky. And they don't have, they have utopia, that would be nice. And they're just happy go lucky people that just want to hang out and have fun.
But then again, we and then when, again, and again, I go back and, I look at what goes on in DC and I'm like, oh, they're already here. And
yeah, I think that's what I could agree with a lot of wild characters out there. That's for sure. Sometimes they feel a foreign to our planet too. Yeah, it's interesting. I always think of, I always think of. Twilight zone episode to serve, man, have you seen the Twilight zone where it's there?
All the aliens come down and they're very nice and leave. All of these ways to just fix society. And then everyone's all the people are going to the alien planet and they're all getting eaten. That's a cookbook, the whole Sony pictures did a great short called the Chub chubs. If any of our listeners want to download, it's got four minute video, but these little parties, but furry, little funny creatures that just eat you.
And but they're very cute until the youth. And so it's a very funny. Too funny. So I have to bring it back down to earth here to use it, to use a good punter. She'd never that one, mark. So you guys just went public and I believe it was through a SPAC. Is that correct? We did. We did. We decided there are three, as there are three ways to go public and do an IPO.
A direct listing or a spec, and we've done it. And I did this back before my spec was in 2007 called enterprise acquisition. So $250 million back, we deice back to 2009 with 90% redemptions into a company that today is armor ARR in the New York stock.
And I'm with art with AMR on a $25 million beginning equity base. That's what we started off. We've paid out over $1.8 billion of dividends and and returned on the $7 million PO or promote reparented return to significant portions of promote. So it was a hundreds of millions to promote it. So we did.
We created a very good structure that was good for everybody and showed us a house backs can work and there'd be prop and work out. So in our case, if we had tried to do an IPO on February 24th, we would have had what's called a market out. Meaning all the books would have impacted. We've had that happen.
I want to try to price a deal on the day of the Greek debt crisis. And we had a market out that day and didn't go public. And we wanted certainty of close. We created a unique $250 million exit financing arrangement with Francisco partners between capital industrial, Lockheed Martin and others that allow guaranteed.
And we would have a positive back, which is what. And now we're no longer a spec and we never want to hear that four letter word again. They have a very bad rap but I keep reminding people it's just because they bought bad targets. It's all about the company they're merging with and has nothing to do with the vehicle.
Interesting. Yeah, you were doing specs and you said 2007 was the first. Yeah. So you were doing them way before they were cool. They were cool in 2020 and 2021. And that was the hip thing to do was, oh yeah. We're going to go public through a spec and clearly it can be done and it just needs to be done.
Correct. And w it's all about the target? So the, oh, they're all these companies that are emerging into specs that never should have gone public, especially all these new space companies that don't have a re don't have real revenues. They don't have a real backlog. Don't have real management. They don't have a real pipeline.
They don't have real customers. They just have an idea that's called venture capital. And they should never have been allowed to emerge into a spec. And of course they're all missing their numbers. They're all there. They're being investigated. The FCC rightfully they are, it's just, they never, this should've been rules to allow companies like that.
In our case, we announced our over $200 million. We are we are, we announced, reviewed our numbers for last year. I think we're the first space back to we actually beat their numbers. And so we are continuing to continuing to fly ahead on our work speed and we're doing exceptionally well.
And and we continue to build our business at a rapid pace. What do you think? Is it that sets apart? The successful space companies. Cause it's it. I think it was mind boggling for me to see the rise of space X, how it went from an idea to real in there. It seemed like a very short time, especially if you look back at, very old legacy, Lockheed Martin, like you mentioned or the other companies that have been in aerospace for a long time, it's amazing to see companies come into the space realm, which is this incredibly capital intensive.
Space and succeed. What do you think is what separates the ones that do succeed from the ones that, don't get the numbers. So let's take space sex as an example. So what seems like a short time flies Ilan started 20 years ago. It is 20 years in the making and everyone forgets in the early days of space.
A lot of things used to blow up and a lot of things used to crash, but he stuck with it and he innovated and he kept building. So then I look at turnover. We started with young over 10 years ago and we stuck with it and we kept innovating and we kept going. And so we are, it's you learn from your.
And, we're not to the end. You hear all these startups and he's still private and people aren't, people would always tell me that I should have stayed private and I should have enjoyed the being private, but we are in like Ilan we're in a capital intensive business. But because of our business that we're in, it's not very sexy in terms of.
Talking about our customer programs, talking about what we do, because we do a lot of work for the national security. So it's not like we can tell you, oh, we're building this really cool satellite. And and I can see you laying in bed and every new Orleans had been with you kind of thing.
You can't do stuff like that. And so we're trying very hard to we've taught the public markets, give us a better, easier access to capital to continue to expand. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I also wanted to ask you, I know you mentioned, and I don't know if it was when I was researching beforehand or if we'd talked about this before, but you mentioned that you're the ones building the satellites, right?
The keeps hats. And then we don't reduce that to anymore. We haven't pulled the cube setting. Those are okay. Got it. Okay. So you're building the satellites though. Not now. I'll start with that. We build satellites now, the size of your refrigerator in your house. That's got gotcha. But you're not though.
You're not actually building the rocket that launches that into space. Is that. No Eland does a very good job of that. So he builds the rockets. We build the satellites. It's a very symbiotic. Gotcha. Okay. So the question I was going to ask is when it comes to launching other things, I know this is not necessarily specific to what Tara is doing, but just with your experience, when it comes to launching other things like human beings, we've seen a lot of human launches that.
Super they didn't go very far into space, but they were definitely, out into space through blue origin, through space X, when it comes to those types of things, just space travel for humans, not necessarily launching technology up there. What do you think about the kind of the long run outlook for, say Mike or I hop it on a hopping on a space shuttle and going up and.
Looking down at earth. What do you see, do you think that's just going to remain this elite class thing? Or do you think that's going to become a little bit more democratized? Do you think it could? The numbers are hard. I think. Space travel. The cost will continue to decrease.
So it'll become more accessible people, but we say travel, right now. And you're on the road to nowhere because you don't. So they need to build like a restaurant in space or something cool like that, where you can get out, go have lunch, then come back. This is the. And rallies it's going to happen.
Someone's going to build a space station, a private test-based station, and some guy, then you're going to get David Grutman from Miami. He's going to build a restaurant on it cause you're already down. So he's going to go build the rest of the restaurant is on a space station and he's going to make it happen.
He's going to put a nightclub in there too, and then you're going to have a roof. Then you're going to have a real party. They'll let live Miami. And we were trying to, but it's going to be, it's going to, those are probably things in the realm of reality the realm of, going to the moon for vacation, that's a long way away.
And to Mars or vacation, that's probably not in our lifetime. But in orbit. Yeah, I think it's the Costco. You'll see people spending money and you're seeing your wealthy people like Elan, like bayzos on others are able to afford and fund building private space stations, and then they got to figure out how to try to turn it into a revenue generator to sustain.
I think that's a great point to bring up because it seems like. The idea of colonizing or, I think, like you said we're pretty far away from, cause I think people forget just how far even just the moon, how far away the moon physically is from the earth and Mars, especially as it is very far.
And I think people can fall into a tendency to forget just how much potential there is enormous. That seems like a really, maybe an overlooked untapped idea. Is that kind of what you sense from a lot of people? Yeah. I use a lot of opportunity in space, but you also to remember spaces, dangerous, the odds of you coming by you, the odds of you coming back are not great.
And that is that's the scary. Space is still a very dangerous thing. They haven't made, it is not as dangerous as you recall. I still more dangerous in your car. It's Niagara. And if you go to the drive to the airport is more dangerous than getting on the plane, even though everyone thinks flying is dangerous, right?
You have a better chance of dying on the way to the airport, the fly on a plane. You're going to space is very dangerous. It's going to come down. It's going to become less than one, the written with more and more risk-free, you're still, strapping yourselves to audio, a few million pounds of fuel.
And as far as lighting a match and you're wishing yourself luck that's a risk. It's a, it's quite a ride, but still it's your, the beginning. And sometimes they go, boom. But they will make it safer just like they made cars safer and they will, it's going to happen. And and then that's when things started getting really exciting.
Yeah. It seems like there's a lot to look forward to as far as the long run of space and a lot to think about too, as far as, how do we. Work through some of the problems we talked about. And also what are the amazing possibilities that seems like they're almost endless, I'm sure there's some end point to some of these, there's a lot of solutions you can provide by getting essentially eyes in the sky, but more eyes in the space, so for our listeners who are looking at this area of the capital markets, obviously it's. Hot topic. It's always fun to talk about space and space travel, but for our listeners, how should they be thinking? Obviously this is not, we don't give financial advice here, but we like to think, okay, how could we be thinking about space, travel about space businesses?
Like you said, it costs a lot of money. Just to put someone and, or something up into space right now. So it needs to be, there needs to be some sort of, from a business standpoint, there needs to be some sort of revenue driver there. And you guys are doing it from the defense side. It sounds like a bit, but there's also, other companies looking to do to supplement what you're doing.
Elon Musk is building the rocket. So there's a lot of different ways to create revenue. How should we think about that from a business perspective, this whole space area? Part of it is yo, the innovation from space, things like scratch resistant lenses, ear thermometers, shoe insoles, and visible braces for your teeth, cordless tools, tap water filters, memory foam.
Now satellite navigation all came about. From things in space, there was a company called maiden space that we had invested in that was on the ISS that actually made things in space, so there is lots of things in space that come out. Engineering-wise, there's lots of opportunities to build things in a zero G environment that you can't build in a gravity environment.
Like I mentioned earlier, perfectly. No gravity, certainly there's certain things. You've been manufacturing space. That's easier and cheaper to manufacture on earth. It's just getting it back and forth right now is the expensive part where they'll fit up. That cost will come down eventually. It's, there's lots of innovate innovation and there's a science, basic science or learning more about our planet, as we're able to watch our planet in real time, we'll learn a lot more about what.
We'll learn a lot more about global warming and how it's affecting us. We build more and more kinds of sensors to study our earth. And the goal is to, stop famine, figure out when storms are coming, sooner to do better weather tracking. It's, the list is endless, what can be done from space.
And that turns into dollars for businesses. You have people like us that are creating businesses that are we're enabling companies are enabling the governments to go ahead and solve problems from space that you couldn't do before economically. Yeah, it sounds like there's, again, a lot of possibilities.
I didn't even think about manufacturing in space. That would be totally different than manufacturing with gravity. That's just blowing my mind right here. Zero gravity would be a completely different you'd be able to build completely differently. And I'm sure, probably like you said, things that you couldn't build here on earth, where you have to deal with gravity because that has to be factored in everything.
That's very interesting. It's great to hear that that you have such a positive view. You keep saying it's going to get cheaper. The costs are going to come down and I have to agree with you. It seems like just what we've seen. At least in my lifetime, and I'm not that old. What we've seen is just spectacular as far as the ability for.
Things to be gotten into space and come back. Sometimes they blow up, like you said, but most of the time not. And that, that sort of long run optimism, I think can definitely help with this innovation here. It's pretty mind boggling to think that not, just flight in general is so new.
I've ever seen a chart, like showing human progress and it's like the Wright brothers. And then it's oh, first space launch is like very shortly after in the grand scheme of things, which is mind boggling. And I I think I'd say as we're running a little bit low on time here, I do have one question that I really want to ask, which is I've heard a lot of people draw comparisons.
To computing and how, we've seen computational technology gets smaller and more powerful and I've heard people say, okay, the space is going to be similar. It's going to go on this. This upward trajectory. Do you see that as a good analogy or is it different? Is it is it more complex?
It's going to take longer to move up that slope? I think you're not seeing things moving at a very rapid trajectory because people are in governments are investing a lot of money to make them. Before there wasn't a lot of investment that went on to make things change. Everybody was happy for 50 years with the status quo.
Now it's, everything's changing and everybody's everyone realizes you can actually do a lot more, a lot cheaper and a lot faster. And we're seeing, I visit a time when you'll literally be able to order a satellite on Monday and get it on Friday. And that, that is, so that is a desire of many to have satellites on.
Wow. That's incredible, mark. Thank you so much for infusing. At least me and I think you Austin, as well as some optimism on the long run of space, and it's just incredible to even just think about it. Thank you very much for having me today, gentlemen. It's been the longer end show with Mark Bell, chairman and CEO of Terran orbital, go check out tearing and all the amazing stuff that they're doing.
This is Michael O'Connor and Austin Wilson from the long run show. We'll catch you next time. .
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