No Mercy / No Malice: The Financial Frontier

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– I’m Scott Galloway and this is No Mercy, No Malice.
The space race is over.
However, now we’re fighting over the spoils of space.
Instead of bragging rights,
the stakes now are profits and power.
The financial frontier, as read by George Hahn.
– When Dr. Doug Ross, George Clooney,
changes the direction of our world,
it’s a sign I should return to my knitting
and discuss business.
I don’t know if it’s age or common sense,
but it feels as if this world
is getting increasingly unstable.
So let’s take a break and venture to space.
We won the space race.
Our Nazi scientists were smarter than their Nazi scientists.
Getting to the moon first and planting our flag
was a cosmic branding event, literally and figuratively.
It wasn’t cheap, between 1960 and 1973,
NASA spent more than half of its budget,
about $28 billion, $280 billion adjusted for inflation
on the project.
Spending on NASA at the peak of the space race
accounted for more than 4% of the total US budget.
The worst branding events for space
were the Challenger disaster.
– You saw it just a few moments ago,
about 45 seconds after liftoff,
a huge fireball in the sky.
– We have a report from the flight dynamics officer
that the vehicle has exploded.
– And Virgin Galactic.
– Today, the project was dealt a serious setback.
When its spaceship too exploded during a test flight,
over California’s Mojave Desert.
– Space tourism hasn’t yet transported consumers to space,
but it did shuttle retail investors’ capital
to Richard Branson’s cruises and airline,
and Chamath Palahapitiya’s bank account.
Today, many believe there’s a space race
between the US and China.
While our return trip to the moon has been delayed,
China successfully retrieved soil from its far side.
And this new space race has given way
to space spoils.
Instead of bragging rights,
the stakes are profits and power
here on the moon’s billion year sibling, Earth.
Businesses are either supply constrained,
like rare Earth minerals or a 1945 Chateau Mutant,
or demand constrained, pretty much everything else.
Space tourism is both, which is why it isn’t a business.
Jeff Bezos is not my astronaut,
and Virgin Galactic is, see above, stupid.
As stupid as space tourism is,
the space business is rational.
Valued at $630 billion in 2023,
the space economy is projected
to reach $1.8 trillion by 2035.
But describing space as a business sector
is similar to using Europe as a descriptor.
There’s a big difference between Ireland and Greece.
Satellites are, at this point,
ground zero of the space economy.
Your television signal, nearly everything on your phone,
and anything that relies on GPS all depend on satellites.
Just as machinery and IP were the source materials
for the modern economy on Earth,
satellites will likely be the backbone
of the space economy.
What’s driving the growth in satellites?
One company, Starlink.
The number of active satellites increases weekly,
so it’s difficult to get up to the minute data.
At the end of 2022,
the Union of Concerned Scientists
was tracking 6,718 operational satellites.
Roughly half, 3,394 belonged to the SpaceX subsidiary.
And more are on the way.
The FCC approved SpaceX’s bid
to deploy up to 7,500 satellites for now.
Starlink has plans to launch 30,000 more.
The idea of one man controlling
the world’s high-speed internet access is unsettling.
Hawaiian Airlines and T-Mobile
have already partnered with Starlink.
The Texas firm is on the verge
of becoming this generation’s ultimate ingredient brand,
like Intel, Nutrisweet, or NVIDIA.
The addressable market is cosmic in size.
Currently, Starlink beans internet access
to 2.7 million subscribers in 75 countries.
It has kits for resonances, boats, and RVs.
Monthly plans range from $120 to $5,000.
The basic hardware costs between $499 and $2,500.
There are hundreds of millions of people on earth
who can afford Starlink,
and many are already paying for internet service
that’s tied to their home.
Starlink has a moat the width of Saturn’s rings,
see above 51% of satellites.
Its network already outperforms Huznet and Viasat.
The reviews are getting better as the network scales.
The 20th century saw the manufacturing age
seed ground to the brand and service era.
This millennium, thus far,
could best be described as the 10X era,
where products that leverage digital technologies
are rendering current offerings defunct.
Profits and their potential attract more competitors
to the water’s edge to try to cross the river.
The water level of Starlink’s moat, however, is rising,
and there appear to be crocodiles too,
evidenced by Amazon delaying the launch
of Kuiper to next year.
One pillar of the 10X economy is verticalization,
lowering costs, and SpaceX’s crane kick
is mundane yet dramatic.
In 2010, the company drove down launch costs
with its own Falcon 9 to $2,500 per kilogram,
and it went further still with the Falcon Heavy in 2018
to $1,500 per kilogram.
The requisite expenditure is 30 times lower,
adjusted for inflation, than NASA’s Space Shuttle in 1981,
and 11 times less than the average launch costs
from 1970 to 2010.
(gentle music)
In his 27-year career, Nolan Ryan
threw approximately 250,000 pitches
in exchange for $25 million,
costing his various team owners $100 a pitch.
If the Los Angeles Dodgers started Shohei Otani at Pitcher,
they’d pay him $23,000 per pitch.
The Ryan Express was the SpaceX of his era,
propelling things into the atmosphere for less.
Fun fact, I named my youngest son after the fastballer.
Last year, the world launched seven objects per day
into space, with SpaceX accounting for a staggering 73%
of the global total.
Note, the most valuable company in the world, NVIDIA,
has an 80% share of AI GPUs.
Does SpaceX have a 73% share of space?
The remaining 27% of launches are a mix
of non-SpaceX telecommunications satellites,
defense, navigation, and scientific research satellites,
as well as crafts that monitor the weather,
observe the oceans, and track wildfires.
Not everything in this miscellaneous category is a business,
but hauling stuff into space is.
There’s real competition for reusable rockets.
The European consortium Arianespace
is testing its Arian6 rocket
to reduce its reliance on SpaceX.
Blue Origin, SpaceX, and ULA,
a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing,
each garnered a piece of a Pentagon contract
worth $5.6 billion.
The startup Relativity is developing a way
to use 3D printing to speed manufacturing.
Stoke, another startup focused on building clean,
fueled, rapidly reusable rockets,
raised $100 million at the end of last year.
Then there’s Rocket Lab’s Electron Rocket,
which recently celebrated its 50th launch
after seven years and one month in service,
a record for a commercial launch vehicle.
There’s also a related business
in de-orbiting old satellites and space stations.
NASA just awarded SpaceX an $843 million contract
to safely de-orbit the International Space Station in 2030.
There may even be a business in removing
the 170 million pieces of space junk.
That number will only grow
as we continue to commercialize space.
The FTC has already issued its first fine for space junk.
By treaty, nobody owns space,
and the moon belongs to everyone.
That’s a problem.
Geopolitical competition, a growing private space economy,
and the relative absence of rules
make space the new Wild West, North, East, and South.
Low Earth orbit, where Starlink is scaling its network,
is congested and getting worse.
Even a small object can do a lot of damage
if it hits a satellite or space station.
We’ve already had some near misses.
A SpaceX satellite almost hit a manned Chinese space station.
A Russian anti-satellite test sent debris hurtling
toward the International Space Station,
forcing astronauts on board to take shelter.
This is the plot line of the movie Gravity,
which starred Sandra Bullock
and President Slayer George Clooney.
What happens when someone takes out a satellite on purpose
or an adversary puts nukes in orbit?
When I was a kid, this happened in the James Bond movie
You Only Live Twice.
The axiom of all sci-fi
eventually becoming reality holds.
We now have a space force,
though it’s not a budgetary priority
for the Defense Department.
The fight over space isn’t limited to geopolitics.
It’s also about commerce.
As business booms and resources are unlocked in new regions,
private companies will enter the fight.
It’s happened before.
We call it colonialism.
At its height, the British East India Company
had its own 250,000 man army and the right to wage war.
The corporation ruled India.
Its competitor, the Dutch East India Company,
had a charter that empowered it to raise armies,
build forts, and make treaties.
Question.
If someone threatens a Starlink satellite,
does Elon Musk call the US government to fight his battles?
Or does he arm his satellites with tiny projectiles
that can neutralize the threat?
Follow up.
If two companies claim the same spot on the moon,
do they call lawyers?
Or does someone go all Nolan Ryan
and throw a moon rocket at a fragile piece of equipment
and claim the resources for their shareholders?
My prediction?
The next battlefield for proxy wars
between the West and its adversaries will be in space.
The armies fighting this war
will be well-paid mercenaries disguised as corporations.
Two asteroids sped by Earth recently,
the smaller one passed between us and the moon
at a distance of about 180,200 miles.
The moon is 238,900 miles away.
Practically a near miss for space travel.
All we could do was watch the rocks zoom by,
but as the cost of space hauling decreases,
new business categories will emerge.
One possible commercial opportunity
is mining asteroids and the moon.
This is still a ways off,
but the spoils could be galactic.
The industry brings new meaning to the term wildcatting.
It would be highly speculative
and driven by the prospect of abundant booty.
If you can reach it, mine it and bring it back.
Last year, NASA launched a probe to an asteroid
that supposedly has a valuation of 10 quintillion dollars.
Note, that makes no sense
as any mineable material of that quantity or value
would result in a crash in value, but I digress.
If asteroid mining is possible, a big if.
It could leverage cheaper space hauling costs
to meet demand on Earth for the critical metals,
cobalt, iron, nickel, platinum and other goodies,
used in electronics, electric car batteries
and solar and wind power.
Creating energy off planet is another compelling idea.
Isaac Asimov first wrote about space solar
in his 1941 short story, Reason.
But a recent NASA study concluded
that it is feasible to generate solar energy in space
and transport it to Earth.
Last year, Caltech launched a prototype
that demonstrated the ability
to wirelessly transmit power in space,
beaming a tiny amount of detectable power to Earth.
This year, UK based startup Space Solar
tested a way to collect solar 24/7.
On Earth, solar collection is limited to daylight hours.
Finally, there’s the idea of relocating manufacturing
and the pollution that comes with it to space.
Jeff Bezos told CBS This Morning.
– This sounds fantastical, what I’m about to tell you,
but it will happen.
– He’s right, it sounds fantastical.
But if the choice is between shifting manufacturing
to space or colonizing Mars,
let’s hear the pitch for space factories.
At the height of the space race,
NASA scientists realized that pens couldn’t function
in space.
To boldly write where no man had written before,
they spent millions developing implements
that worked in zero gravity.
Soviet scientists had a simpler, cheaper solution.
Pencils.
Actually, the space pen story is a myth.
Pencils aren’t great in space, they’re flammable,
the tips break off and drift away in microgravity,
risking harm to the equipment and astronauts.
The real story, in 1965, the Fisher Space Pen Company
patented a pen that could write upside down
in extreme heat and cold and even underwater.
They sold pens to the US and Soviet space programs.
Fisher is still selling pens to this day,
about a million per year,
ranging from $5 to $150 a pen.
Fisher Space Pen found a business in the stars
by serving a market on Earth.
Anyone who wants to reap the spoils of space
will have to do the same thing.
Space is the collision of the business trends
that have defined the last century,
manufacturing, branding, 10X and unexpected externalities.
On a recent flight from Miami to New York,
I was able to try Starlink.
My phone rang was my son FaceTiming me.
The sound and resolution were flawless.
During the call, our pilot announced
that peering out of the left side of the plane,
you could see a SpaceX launch.
It was one of those tech aha moments,
like the first time you called someone from a car,
bought something from your phone,
took a picture of a check to deposit it.
It was also a moment to reflect on the teen depression,
propaganda from bad actors and coarsening of our discourse
that technology has washed up on our shores.
It feels less than bold to posit that
if we weren’t more thoughtful about the externalities
of the commercial development of space,
it won’t be the final frontier, but our last.
– Life is so rich.
(gentle music)
(gentle music)
(gentle music)
you

As read by George Hahn.

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