From lightweight micro-processing computers, Digital Fly-By-Wire and program and project management to memory foam mattresses, cordless power tools and shock absorbent trainers; space exploration is a driver of change. Consequently, it is hardly surprising that sixteen of the world’s 500 billionaires have committed to space ventures. In this episode we explore the early role of philanthropy in space exploration; we examine NASA’s collaboration with the private sector during the Apollo program; and find out how these partnerships have evolved in the 21st century.
Chris Wright
Roger tranquillity we copy on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again thanks a lot.
The Apollo program that put men on the moon for the first time in 1969 was born out of politics, vision and good old fashioned one upmanship over the Soviet Union, but it would not have got anywhere without state owned NASA having linked arms with the private sector, one of the most far reaching complicated and high stakes private public partnerships ever attempted. NASA may have pulled it all together and paid the bills but industry from the length and breadth of the United States was also involved in this vast effort. North American aviation built the command modules engineering firm Grumman the lunar modules, IBM, the computer complex, Douglas the boosters, that freeze dried food the astronauts grumbled about came from home appliance manufacturer Whirlpool. General Motors built not only the Chevrolet Corvettes, but Alan Shepard and his fellow astronauts raced around Houston, but also the Lunar Roving Vehicle, the first electric car to drive on a different celestial body
John F Kennedy
weight shares go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
Chris Wright
Let's be clear. Kennedy was right. It wasn't easy. A government space agency and a car manufacturing company are not natural bedfellows. The astronauts seconded into these companies, while components and craft were developed often found their relationships with their commercial partners strained and antagonistic. But the technological outcomes from these public private partnerships still resonates to this day. Here is the best example be interested coordination between NASA, MIT's Draper lab and Raytheon that's state agency academia backed nonprofit and private sector industrial Corporation. This resulted in the Apollo Guidance Computer the device that guided and control the lunar modules, in which Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the lunar surface. It led to the development of the first silicon chip computer it advanced, lightweight, miniaturized computing by a decade and established America as the home of modern day software programming, here's Alexander MacDonald, the chief economist at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC.
Alexander MacDonald
NASA did not invent the semiconductor. But it was space programs that created the demand to scale all semiconductors, which provides the basis for you know, all of the computer and internet enabled world that we all enjoy or deride depending on how you think about it all today. In addition, the term software engineering directly emerges from the Apollo program, because through the processing of the calculations of what is required to get to the moon to monitor all the systems had to essentially invent the discipline of software engineering. And of course, the Apollo Guidance Computer was the first digital computer, right that was used and flown to the moon and back in order to help guide the astronauts on that journey. And so that's a great example of how setting these ambitious goals and then challenging people and funding people to figure out how to achieve that them results in technologies that have brought application. Right? It's not because people decided we need the digital computer, right? It's because we set an ambitious goal that we had no idea how we were going to achieve it. That resulted in a flow of funding to brilliant innovators that then solve problems that then led to these types of applications that we all know have in our lives.
Chris Wright
These advancements would lay the foundations upon which the World Wide Web would be built. 20 years later, there's a functional model of an Apollo Guidance Computer in the offices of Draper laboratories in Boston gray and boxy and metal and replete in rugged buttons. Today, it looks extraordinarily dated, but it was in every sense revolutionary. In Boston, I met with Don Eyles, one of the people who wrote the software for the Apollo Guidance Computer in the time before there was really software. And before there was really a computer,
Don Eyles
Well a computer for most people was a big installation in a insurance company or an accounting firm or Were you brought in punch cards and fed those to the computer and some time later, you would have output on paper printed out. It was not in most people's view, you know, something for real time control, which is what the Apollo Guidance Computer was, as you say, we have tremendously more computing power now than we had in the Apollo days. But that is a two edged sword. You know, they were on the order of 30,000 lines of code. In an Apollo computer. There's something like 30 million lines of code in Microsoft Office, which would you trust to take you to the moon. The fact that it was the first time that men trusted their lives to digital computer was certainly an icebreaker for a great many things that have happened since then.
Chris Wright
Steve Jurvetson, perhaps the most significant venture capitalists in the space sector Today and an early stage Investor and Board Member of SpaceX and Planet Labs as well as other visionary companies like Tesla today runs his firm from a small office in Los Altos, California, festooned with surely the most magnificent collection of Apollo era memorabilia outside of the Smithsonian. He is an unabashed fan of what was achieved by Apollo through things like the Apollo Guidance Computer.
Steve Jurvetson
So Apollo was this incredible accomplishment of humanity, right? It was an unusual time in the 60s, where you had the backdrop of a military industrial complex and competition and the geopolitical aspects but under the covers, you had this incredible engineering effort, a moonshot. But we use the term moonshot app several times today's discussion, proverbially back then that's no it was real. It was really a moonshot. The risks that we're taken, the drama, the solutions that came out were so incredibly inspirational as to why these physical artifacts are so interesting to me is they solve problems with a remarkably small amount of compute But ultimately, the end of the day, the reason the US beat Russia was computer related, we consume 60% of all global semiconductor output in the Apollo program. It was meager, but it was allowed us to do things like rendezvous and all kinds of complex maneuvers and space that and frankly, a variety control algorithms that would have been harder if it was purely mechanical and analog, and it was the precursor of what was an enormous computing industry to come.
Chris Wright
today's generation of space related geniuses continue to speak of the whole achievement of the Apollo Guidance Computer in terms of reverence. Zachary, Manchester is a system professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University just south of San Francisco. This is someone who successfully crowdfunded the world's smallest spaceship and gotten NASA to launch it. And he serves on the advisory committee of breakthrough starshot, whose ambition is nothing less than to create a light sail spacecraft capable of traveling to Alpha Centauri at 20% of the speed of light. But when I meet him at Stanford, he says
Zachary Manchester
I mean, if you actually look at what was accomplished there, it's absolutely mind boggling. Like we probably couldn't do it today. So the Apollo Guidance Computer, right, literally, the integrated circuit was basically that was its first major application. Like we didn't know how to build computers that small. And they had to figure out a whole bunch of really fundamental engineering stuff there. The sheer volume of Yeah, of what that done. That is unbelievable.
Chris Wright
And this is an important point, many who wish to reflect Apollo as having been more than a demonstration of extraordinary human achievements and ideals, and certainly more than a politically driven Cold War flag planting exercise. Like to point to the contribution that the Apollo program made to ordinary consumer life. NASA brought together the best minds and public institutions and companies into a Smart community, a collective effort not seen on this scale since the Bletchley Park code breaking initiative in the Second World War. Without these early collaborations 21st century billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos may never have made their fortunes in the subsequent internet boom. And the key players driving the Kevin Space Race could look very different today.
Vanessa Collela
Change has many faces, names you'll never know. Brave, the visionaries, where challenges exist, you'll find them at City. We empower people who are out to change the world. Because tomorrow belongs to those who welcome it with open arms.City. Welcome What's next?
Chris Wright
I'm standing on the NASA Causeway of Cape Canaveral in Florida. From here looking towards the launch pads on the Atlantic shore, I am in the most storied place in American space history. So, so interesting place to take stock of what has changed the most famous Launchpad of them all 39. off slightly to my left is the one where all the Apollo missions launched, including 11, but one that put man on the moon for the first time. But the pad is now run by SpaceX, which won a bidding contest to take it over for commercial use in 2013 and signed a 20 year lease the following year. over to my right is pad 36 where the Meriden pioneer missions were launched among 145 such launches. Today that is leased by Jeff Bezos Blue Origin. The launch I'm here to see today is from pad 40 straight ahead and still very much NASA. But even today, it will be a SpaceX Falcon nine rocket, with a SpaceX Dragon capsule attached to it that flies from here to the International Space Station, things have changed. And now in the absolute heartland of NASA's endeavor, the private sector is everywhere.
The role of the private sector and venture capitalists in space is nothing new. In fact, it can trace its history all the way back to the 19th century. Alexander MacDonald explains,
Alexander MacDonald
it is really important to remember that, you know, the history of spaceflight doesn't begin at Apollo. And now we're seeing a new phase. The history, spaceflight begins in some respects, as soon as Galileo, Galileo looks through the telescope, and sees that the moon is a world. And all of a sudden people across Europe and across the planet, begin thinking about how we're going to construct machines to get there. And there's a long history of intellectual development and social development and economic development. That leads to the point where Apollo happens. And we're now thinking about the next phase, which is just a new iteration on this long cycle of humans thinking about how to explore the universe. What's interesting is that although we're seeing this change relative to Apollo, we're also actually seeing is actually returned to The model existed before NASA. So when you go back to the 19th century 95% of the funding for US observatories, these are the Lick Observatory at the Palomar Observatory, Mount Wilson Observatory, and the world's largest observatories of their time, late 19th century, early 20th century, they were funded by private individuals. Those telescopes were funded by James link and Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefeller Foundation. And I should also say those investments were not trivial. They were billion dollar class investments or expenditures, put in GD equivalent terms today. So what we're really seeing is a reemergence of high net worth individuals who are interested in achieving a legacy for themselves and also to contribute to human scientific process more generally, now married with the combination of private sector companies, and using the markets and contracts to accelerate the development of these capabilities that align with the intrinsic motivations of the individuals. So what I think we're going to see is a continued melding of government funding, and private individuals and private companies who have their own objectives in space continuing to work together to accelerate our expansion out of the cosmos.
Chris Wright
So billionaire entrepreneurs have formed in space. philanthropists such as Guggenheim, Carnegie and Rockefeller have now made way for Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. For these early investors, the rewards could be huge and the range of opportunities is diverse here is Mary Lynne Ditmar of the Deep Space Coalition.
Mary Lynne Dittmar
Space is a forcing function for a whole lot of rapid technology development, right? If you want to go into space, living space, but human beings and space in particular, there are a lot of problems you got to solve and those problems have direct application on Earth. Personally, manufacturing in space, right, I think is something that we're going to see a lot more of there are some advantages that are conveyed by very low gravity, or microgravity, for manufacturing certain kinds of materials, there's a lot of folks that are working on additive manufacturing so called 3d printing here. We're learning things about how the genome expresses itself in low Earth orbit. just beginning to scratch the surface, we need habitats that can be basically managed with very little energy output that recycle everything that are, by definition, green. We don't think about space habitats being green, but they got to be as green as they can be. So there's a ton of things that go on in space, new sensors for science, new sensors for long range, imaging. I mean, I could sit here all day and do this. But basically those things that are necessary for us to be able to advance in space, almost every single one of them has a direct application here and lots of them in markets that are extremely lucrative
Chris Wright
in the day since Apollo, the private sector has shifted from being a paid contract for a state led Space Race to a driving force of space exploration in its own right, where once NASA was owner, operator, paymaster, and boss. Today it not only faces a wave of advanced private sector competition but actively encourages it. NASA has undergone a profound evolution partly as a consequence of what it has observed and the dynamics of the private sector. Private companies have been involved in space since well before Apollo companies like Lockheed Martin Northrop Grumman and Boeing as well as Draper have been so consistently. But over the last 10 years or so boisterous new entrants have arrived none more so than, Elon Musk's SpaceX, they came out of nowhere and changed everything. With flamboyant ambition. They have successfully competed with the once monopolistic United Launch Alliance of Lockheed and Boeing, which ones had a stranglehold on NASA launches, and have created a credible and cheaper alternative. Jeff Bezos has Blue Origin while quieter than SpaceX has had a similar galvanizing effect for two companies being bonded by a shared vision that creating reusable rockets would dramatically reduce the costs involved in payload delivery And therefore make a host of other things affordable and achievable. NASA, therefore, which is not blind to this, and in fact helped it to happen has a new approach. If there's a bold and vibrant private sector, why not use it? Why not get the private sector to do the relatively mundane stuff of launch and payload delivery and let NASA focus on the visionary stuff for science and the endeavor? Steve jurvetson puts it like this.
Steve Jurvetson
There's there many commentators who wonder what is next NASA sort of existential, you know, mission and vision. And I think they're, it's up to them to decide. But whatever they do, whether it's science, exploration, exploring the frontiers of the unknown in space, all those lofty goals, they shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel, right? So if they have a commercial launch industry, they should leverage that to the hilt, just like you would never expect NASA to build their own laptops, right. Like, like, we don't even ask that question, right? Or to build their own, you know, servers data, like there's all these elements that once there's a commercially available solution for your infrastructure that you then do your stuff. That's what you should do. And I guess it just is a slow realization for people outside of NASA to say well yeah launch used to be something where you had to ask industry to build you a custom rocket because they wouldn't otherwise, like in the era of Apollo, you're not going to get a Saturn five, just waiting around, hoping someone builds it for you. And I guess it's slowly sinking in that SpaceX is in fact, building the entire gamut of large and heavy lift vehicles that NASA would be for all its missions.
Chris Wright
People like jurvetson have been saying things like this for years, but recently NASA has started to agree. Here's Jim Bridenstine, NASA Commissioner speaking to press in November 2018.
Jim Bridenstine
We're doing something that's never been done before. When we go to the moon. We want to be one customer of many customers in a robust marketplace between the Earth and the Moon. And we want multiple providers that are competing on cost and innovation. So that we as NASA can do more than we've ever been able to do before. We're not going to purchase, own and operate the hardware, we're going to buy the service
Chris Wright
Bridenstine was talking about something called the commercial lunar payload services program known in the industry as CLIPS. That day it's elected nine companies will have subsequently followed, that will be allowed to compete for a share of up to $2.6 billion of contracts over the next 10 years, doing everything from building spacecraft components to experiments and robots all in the service of a plan to return to the moon. Yes, but going back.
Donald Trump
The directive I'm signing today will refocus America's space program on human exploration and discovery. It marks an important step in returning American astronauts to the moon. For the first time since 1972. For long term, exploration and use. This time, we will not only plant our flag and Leave our footprint, we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday to many worlds beyond.
Chris Wright
That was President Donald Trump in 2017, signing a new policy directive, which makes returning to the moon a key priority with an eye watering really tight deadline of 2024. That year, NASA is now tasked with putting the first woman and the next man as it carefully phrases on the moon establishing sustainable lunar operation by 2028. With further plans to send astronauts to Mars in the mid 2030s. The return to the moon has become known by a single project name, Artemis. These are big ambitions and it's true they may be delayed by the disruption caused by COVID-19. But they're much more than just a pipe dream. A manifest presented at a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council in May 2019 said 37 missions will be required between then and 2028 for Artemis, and crucially the same Trump directive also specifically directed NASA to seek and encourage additional private sector participation. And that's what Jim Bridenstine's speech about buying the service, not the hardware was all about. Here is Alexander MacDonald.
Alexander MacDonald
So what was really important with the shift to purchasing services is that it allows individuals or other companies or even other nations, to be able to contract with American companies, and purchase those human spaceflight services as well. In addition to NASA. NASA is the primary customer for these systems. NASA is the primary customer for human spaceflight private activities at this time, certainly to orbit. But the hope is that other people will also be buying those services, which will mean more revenue into your US companies or abroad and also to generate new private activity as well as individuals and eventually other companies who may be purchasing those services. So that's really the core behind why that shift is important and why we think it's going to help open up economic growth in a new way.
Chris Wright
And now everybody's getting in on the act from listed stalwarts like Lockheed to a host of venture capital backed newbies and nonprofit Draper, which said it was build an uncrewed lander called Artemis seven. Since then, companies have started teaming up on programs to carry humans not just payloads. In October, Blue Origin announced a national team to offer a human landing system alongside Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. It's exactly what Bridenstein said he wanted. An evolution in what NASA is for. Commercially, this makes a lot of sense for NASA. His Seamus Tuohey, Principal director of space systems at Draper in Boston, which is having its most exciting time for half a century with these new contracts and proposals.
Seamus Tuohy
What it provides NASA is stability of budget. So to a company there's that curve of I'm investing, and then I make it back. But for the government, it's flat. So this is now being extended to the moon, particularly for the landers in the same type of way. So you have the original and still used Federal acquisition cost reimbursable contracts, you have these new hybrids, which are NASA is going to help you but it's still up to you to innovate and supply service and then think what that does? It'll provide a third way, which is completely private. And you see companies doing this, whether it's Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin are SpaceX and other companies who are saying, Yes, thank you. We are going to use some of the investment from the government to help in furthering our designs and development. But what we're really going after is a private customer.
Chris Wright
Space Programs today represent a somewhat cluttered field, their estate programs, public sector programs, and those that combine the two, there are manufacturers working on entirely separate vehicles for themselves and for NASA, which fundamentally cater to the same purpose. There's not evidence of a great deal of coordination between them but Tuohy, he argues This isn't a problem and in fact, an advantage
Seamus Tuohy
in the early days, the space program is very successful, but you had essentially one program going forward, you had Mercury, then Gemini then Apollo you had in the United States. So you needed everybody to be tightly integrated, because there was just one goal in mind. What I think the beauty of the way we where we are now is the diversity and what people are trying to achieve. NASA is trying to have a capability to return astronauts, you know, for science and exploration. But other companies, yeah, they'll support that. But they also have their own interest. And I think that's a wonderful thing.
Chris Wright
Is it commercially viable to have that many competing attempts to do broadly similar things?
Seamus Tuohy
I think so. But in kind of in a backward way, if you only have one company, then I think that hurts the commercial viability. Because if that one company makes a mistake in their business plan, makes a mistake in that marketing, then everything goes away, almost having enough companies like this with the diversity of business plans and approaches, that you would think that some will succeed and that's the whole point is to have people succeed. Will all companies succeed? Probabaly not that's that's not the point. The point is, a few will.
Chris Wright
So are we right in our premise. But getting the private sector to do the things that have become routine frees NASA to do exploration and get us dreaming. Here is Alexander MacDonald.
Alexander MacDonald
That's certainly part of it. It's also about which of the parts of spaceflight and spacecraft production are the most repeated and repeatable. So one of the things that's harder to think about kind of becoming a commercial service are things like sending unique scientific probes as close to the sun as possible. And the reason is, because we don't do that very often. It's very hard and you're sending new scientific instruments there every time because you want to ask new questions about the sun and want to answer new science questions. For launching cargo to National Space Station that is essentially the same problem every time. And so that is exactly the kind of thing that is amenable to the private sector taking over and figuring out how to turn that into a regular process. And human spaceflight is Actually not entirely different, at least, to low Earth orbit. However, those problems that require kind of first off frontier expansion, new adventures, those are the kind of things that we're going to have to really, you know, stay involved with at NASA in the kind of engineering manner in an operational manner, because they're incredibly challenging. No one's ever done them by definition, right? You know, that you can only go to Mars for the first time once. And that's something that NASA still is taking the lead in, even though we're gonna be working with our private sector partners, just like we did back in the Apollo days.
Chris Wright
And even NASA veterans now believe it's time to get the agency out of the way. And the private sector entrepreneurs do what they're good at, as Bill Anders from Apollo eight puts it
Bill Anders
They ought to Get out of the way, or encourage or whatever you do. For the Musks and the Bezos and these other nutty guys.
Chris Wright
Our series is called money and the moonshot. So how about the money? Our next episode, we'll look at how the financial side of space has evolved over time. And now the relationship between money and moonshots is not the same today, as it was In the 1960s,
there is no business case for going to Mars. There's just no business case for going to Mars. There's really not a business case for going to the moon yet. Well call me shit which one of these programs will get the most votes in Southern California? I don't understand how someone invest in the 20th, the fifth, the 92nd, the hundred and third, like what are they thinking? in space? If you're not willing to write it out for at least a decade? Don't put your money on the table? It'd be my advice IIf SpaceX succeeds, and we're a multiplanetary species that might go down like one of humanity's greatest hits history books could be written about them.
But before we get there, we'll leave you with a reminder of those visionary Apollo flights by asking bill Anders of Apollo eight to explain what it was like to be the first human to see the earth in its entirety. A colorful sphere, hanging remote, and but nothing.
Bill Anders
Well, I mean, it left me with perspective that the earth is a tiny little dust bowl. floating out there from a physical and from a philosophical point of view. So it's undercut my, you know, earthed centered religion. Is God up there sitting on some black hole with a supercomputer wondering whether I'm in a good boy or a bad boy? No. Does it suggest that somehow that humans are the only folk around? No? Has it suggested the earth is tiny and fragile? Yes. It's giving people an insight into their planet in most of it. I think in the long run, we'll be good.
Chris Wright
To conclude our episode, we're going to speak about some of the topics that raised with Vanessa Collela Chief Innovation Officer of our supporting partner Citi. As Chief Innovation Officer Vanessa is focused on harnessing the power of cities to help people businesses and communities thrive in a world of technological behavioral societal change. She leads for Citi ventures and city productivity teams, which helps Citi accelerate and discover new sources of value by exploring, incubating and investing in new ideas. Vanessa joined city in 2010, and previously ran marketing for Citi's North American consumer bank. Prior to city, Vanessa was an entrepreneur in residence for us Venture Partners, head of North American marketing, and then SVP of insights at Yahoo. And a partner at McKinsey and Company, Vanessa Collela, thank you very much for joining us.
Vanessa Collela
Thank you for having me.
Chris Wright
So as we speak, it's just a week or so after a visionary SpaceX launch, which once again, I think captured the public imagination. Did you see it?
Vanessa Collela
Absolutely. I have a seven year old boy. And we watched together live and I have to say, it was incredibly exciting. He was jumping up and down but you know, you're sort of on pins and needles both watching the takeoff but then, you know, watching the Falcon come back down and land I it's It's impressive no matter how many times you see it,
Chris Wright
it's important the point that you raised the returning rocket, because I think this demonstration effect is really very important for being able to be able to dream about something but need to be able to see it.
Vanessa Collela
It makes a difference, right? I now have a son who wants to grow up and be an engineer and work on rockets. Because people made that dream visible to him. And I think it was extremely powerful.
Chris Wright
So in the series, we've heard a lot about the many commercial applications coming out of the space program. What in your view are the best opportunities that you can see for the private sector to engage with space related activity?
Vanessa Collela
You know, at Citi, we think there are a number of growth avenues for the private sector, whether you think about lawn services or government satellite manufacturing, places that have seen quite robust growth over the last few years. And those are trends that we believe are likely to continue, you know, launch services companies are continuing to innovate. And this is driving down launch costs and really making space more accessible. You know, well done. Satellite manufacturers have certainly benefited from the increasing focus on space, you know, you can still see many other opportunities. If you take just as one example, satellite imaging, there's already been a dramatic reduction in launch costs in this space and huge opportunities to deploy technology in new ways. If you think about nano satellites that are able now to visit every part of Earth every day, and some of these cameras can go down to resolution of 50 centimeters, so it gives you a way of thinking about the Earth observation business, it could be one of the biggest pieces of the commercial satellite opportunities. This has the potential to impact and disrupt all sorts of sectors from Agriculture, Transportation to construction and energy, and potentially even environmental protection. You can catch illegal fishing, when that happens. You can monitor illegal deforestation. These are all things that can happen real time in our capabilities that we simply didn't have before. That could ultimately Help us to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals. And if you add all of this, the fact that these terabytes of data will give us opportunity to apply machine learning and deep learning, it could be quite transformational as you think about not only the private sector opportunities, but public sector opportunities as well.
Chris Wright
Vanessa Collela, thank you very much for joining us.
Vanessa Collela
Thank you for having me.
Chris Wright
This has been a Euromoney audio production created by Chris Wright and Chris hunt.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai