Episode 41: Investing in Space with Robert Jacobson

Ben: [00:00:00] Welcome to the alt asset allocation podcast, exploring alternative investment opportunities available to the everyday investor. Here’s your host Ben

Lakoff.

Hello and welcome to the all to asset allocation podcast. Today’s interview is with Robert Jacobson, all about the space in this conversation, we discuss all things, space investing.

There has been a massive shift of commercialization of space, and there are loads of opportunities in this area. We talk about what investments can be made now to profit from the inevitable shift of the more space presence in our life from satellite needs to 5g, internet of things, autonomous cars to space, to breeze, clean up moon stations, asteroid minings.

There are a lot of things to get excited about in regards to space. Before you listen, please don’t forget to like, or subscribe to the podcast or even better leave a review. There’s a lot here. And undoubtedly investments in space are going to be huge, but is now the time to start looking, join this conversation with Robert Jacobson on all things, investing in space.

Enjoy Robert, excited to have you on today. Welcome.

Robert: [00:01:17] Thank you so much, Ben. I’m really excited to be here today.

Ben: [00:01:20] Yeah, absolutely.  You were introduced by a mutual friend and I think I told you before we started, but in prepping for this, I knew very little about investing in space. I understand that it’s a big opportunity, but I pretty much went down the rabbit hole on a number of different things.

And I mean, this podcast is all about alternative investments and VCs and space space. This is right up our alley that’s for sure. Excited to have you on. I’m, I’m really excited to jump into all things, space investing and your book. But before we go into that, can you start a little background on you where you are, how you got into space investing?

Robert: [00:01:58] Yeah. It was not it was not a linear path. In school I studied music and business. Although I grew up in the shadow of the space shuttle as a very mom shout, I grew up in Tampa, Florida areas, the West coast of Florida. It seems some space shuttle launches went to things like I even went to space camp in Alabama as a, as I was pretty young, I think it was 11 or something and was very interested in the area.

But you know, in high school and college rolled around, this is like the nineties, late nineties. I was a little disappointed with what was not happening with NASA. It was just not going fast enough. And it seemed like any route to space was. I probably have to, you know, go surfing military and there were, there were a bunch of things you’d have to do, and it was, it would be a very slim chance that even then that I would potentially be selected.

So I went off really to go do other things and explore other interests. I think I’m just kind of a bit of an exploratory nature. My nature, I’m an Explorer and a, an, a dreamer and a visionary. And I was actually working in real estate in the mid two thousands and commercial commercial real estate and working as a musician and I had been tracking what was going on with the X prize.

Now, the X prize was the competition that was started by Dr. Peter Diamandis. And the first X prize competition was to send a. A human to privately have a privately funded spacecraft to send a human to space. And I think part of the rules were that they had to, you know, the pilot and the equivalent of, I think one or two passengers, get them to the edge of space, which is about 62 miles above sea level or a hundred kilometers return them safely and do that twice within two weeks.

So I’ve been tracking that there were a number of teams. Most of them weren’t very, not that necessarily they weren’t credible. They probably just didn’t have the resources. And there was a company out of Mojave, California called scaled composites, and that was led by Burt Rutan who had built the Voyager aircraft, which had, was the first aircraft to fly unrevealed around the world.

He met with Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft with this crazy idea to, to enter the X prize competition. Paul Allen funded it and they ended up winning. So. Where do I kind of fit in? So in June 21st, 2004, I was playing a concert at a festival in downtown Los Angeles underneath inside the Walt Disney concert hall.

There’s the second theater called red cat. And there was this festival. I think it was called year jam no longer around. I think it was called the jam and it was a Sunday night. So this was, I think, June 20th. And I’m telling people backstage and said, Hey, later tonight, after the show, I’m going to drive out to Mohabi and see a CR a private rocket launch who wants to go.

And most people are like, well, it’s a Sunday night. I’m going home. It’s late. Why I got one buddy? My buddy Scott and we rolled out like think 2:00 AM 3:00 AM drove out about a hundred miles to Mojave airport. Didn’t really know what we were getting into. And there were lots of other people up there.

It was dark, it was windy. It was kind of cold, but there was a definite energy in the air. And as the morning, as the, as the Dawn, you know, came in and they brought out the there was the white Knight, which was the carrier aircraft that carried the spaceship one, it was real palpable energy. It was just really amazing.

And then after seeing it. Fly to space and return. I felt, I felt literally transformed and I said, I have to be a part of this. This is going to be a catalyst that’s going to help change humanity. I don’t know how I’m going to be involved. And a number of other things happen. Eventually I transitioned out of commercial real estate.

I started working with a a business partner who was working at a real estate fund. I enrolled him into my kind of crazy dream and we essentially started an investment group kind of early on in R and M. And it wasn’t immediately focusing on space or anything like that, but this was sort of the kind of the, the catalyst for this.

And then several years later, we ended up investing in a, an an aerospace company and we had an investment in a newspaper in Kern County because we really wanted to get to know we figured, well, Mojave might be like a little mini Silicon Valley. There’s all this R and D happening. And what’s a better way to understand the area.

Let’s let’s. Choir the local newspaper. Now this is in the mid two thousands. It wasn’t a total bloodbath of the newspapers yet. And we did we bet we sold it about 16 months later. But we had a really interesting insight to what was going on in this community. And as I was kind of going back and forth between Los Angeles and Kern County I later realized it kind of realized that Los Angeles has a huge aerospace lineage in history.

And I, and I started meeting more people in Los Angeles who were part of All old traditional aerospace and new space in this newer commercial space. And I started making essentially gathering mentors and network meeting people, going to a few conferences. There was a lot of self study. People told me, okay, this is what you need to learn.

This is what you don’t have to focus on. You’re not, if you’re not intending to, you know, build the rocket yourself. So it was, it was, it was sort of a long kind of organic process. I did eventually many years later go back to the international space university where I did some schooling there. Before that I also joined the management team at the space angels network and was there for a number of years.

So I, I, I think what space made me realize is I really had this passion for startup type of activity, but maybe I didn’t really get involved with it in, in, in the late nineties with the, with the internet 1.0, not. For any particular reason, but I don’t think it necessarily as resonated on a, on a, on an emotional level as the way kind of space did that.

I really felt that space was going to be an area that would truly transform humanity and could be the ultimate humanity’s ultimate business plan.

Ben: [00:08:02] Awesome. Awesome. What a great intro. that’s fascinating.  I haven’t had that aha moment with space investing until doing quite a bit of research for this.

And it’s definitely something I want to jump into more.  Your book spaces open for business is now available and then. As I told you, I mean, I I’ve got this backlog of books, but now I’m super excited to read it. But a lot of what I’ve read about it is it kind of is broken into a few different parts.

History of the space industry opportunities, and then like sneak peaks of the of where this industry is going. That’s kind of the way I’d like to structure this conversation. And I think starting off with a brief history of the space industry might be very beneficial. Your space history started with the X prize in 24, 2004, but you know, what do what do investors in this area need to know about the history?

Robert: [00:08:50] So traditionally it there’s, so people know who like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, who are well-known people who are investing in active in the space industry. And there’s been plenty of other wealthy people who could have done these sorts of activities earlier, but they didn’t. I had heard actually, and I, I, that, that the Rockefeller family actually, I think back is maybe in the late.

Fifties or early sixties did invest in some type of rocket propulsion company. And I don’t know whatever happened to it, but that was, that was kind of interesting, but there were really policies in place by the U S government that was not in favor of private sector involvement. You really had department of defense and NASA working with a few hand selected encumbered.

And these incumbents didn’t really want to a lot of other players because they had very juicy contracts. There’s, you know, there’s fixed price, contracts and cost. Plus many of their contracts were cost, meaning that they could kind of take yeah. Time. There’s not a lot of competition for you know people eating away at their contract.

So why would they want new income? Why would they want new entrance to a field? There was just, there was a lack of incentive or accountability. And especially in terms of progress, in terms of time of program, you know, having a program that might go for a decade was, was. Not a big deal without necessarily been showing a deliverable.

So it was, it was cool kind of accepted that space was special. It was protected. It’s highly regulated and space also. Unfortunately, you know, there’s a lot of risks, so there’s, there was kind of a political and legal type of risks, regulatory risks, because it was highly regulated. There is market risk.

So, you know, if you had say, you’re coming up in the eighties or nineties, or even early 2000, you had some crazy idea. And there were some people who had these crazy seemingly crazy commercial space ideas, but there was no market or no proof in market, no track record and technology risk having those three.

Barriers makes it difficult for an investor. So they’re like, yeah, let’s just let the tax payer and government kind of handle it. Now there was exceptions because there is a fairly, there’s a robust communication satellite industry where we get, you know, radio TV, you know, we have these big, large, expensive satellites that sit out thousands of miles away from earth.

And they’re positioned usually in geostationary orbits, they’re just facing what they’re, they’re, they’re tracking the earth. So maybe they’re facing Europe or Africa or North America. And those business models are well understood and they’re publicly traded companies. But so th there had been some of these kind of these dreamers and visionaries back in the, probably even as far as, maybe in the late seventies and eighties and nineties who had wanted to do things differently, but the environment just wasn’t right.

Or they had great ideas and they didn’t have the resources, but then comes along, you know, where you have. People like Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, where they were making money in technology media and other places. And they were interested in investing in some of that in actually putting this app some of their capital to, to to use in some of these other ways.

So to kind of to, to bookend that in the early two thousands, you had government being a little bit more starting to be more open to working with these new entrance, because some of these new entrance we’re putting a lot of this early capital. It was like they were spending the cap backs themselves or their investors.

It wasn’t just coming from the us government. So when NASA. Said saw that there were some of these new players, NASA said, okay, we don’t have the space shuttle anymore. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of we’re missing some infrastructure, transportation infrastructure. There’s only so long that we can rely on the Russians because what happened in about was it 2010 or 2011?

Is that the space shuttle program has retired and NASA had the U S based program had no indigenous domestic way to get humans to space. We could get satellites and our robotic spacecraft for an UN crude ones, but we no way to get humans and we’re relying on Russians. And that was necessarily had some of its own challenges.

So we S so NASA started using putting some contracts out there first saying, Hey, if you can get cargo to the space station, that was an interest area. We’ll pay for this. And then date, they created a new contract for crew, which was humans and space sacks and Boeing where awardees in those, in those contracts and the benefit and the upside is that the amount of call it an investment that came from the U S government through NASA was much was, was, you know, it was not a lot of money, a few billion dollars, and they’re getting entirely new, dependable forms of transportation infrastructure in much shorter periods of time.

So there so there’s, there was like this aha moment, like going, wow, this was actually really, really good money for the, for, for, for what, for what NASA spent. And now we have this new rocket that the, a, that flies regularly, that space X has called the Falcon nine flies. It’s operational. It has a price.

And that’s an important thing that that space was a very opaque market. You can never really get a price on sending something to space. You can just call maths and say, Hey, I want to send my widget, whatever it is there, it was very difficult to get a price. And now space X started publishing their prices.

And just for the fact of having some marketing, some pricing transparency has probably give them more comfort level for different types of players, actors, whatever terminology you want to use new entrance to start participating in this area because they at least sort of say, Hey, at least we can build a financial model around this.

If we at least know. If we want to do this activity in space, but we, we at least now know how much it’s going to cost to get there. It used to just be a big X.

Ben: [00:15:12] Oh yeah. . there’s a lot there that I want to unpack. I think you know, thinking about security and things like that. If, if it’s just totally democratized you, you can write a check and kid to space and we’ll certainly go down there.

But I think you brought up a good point.  Privatization really works to advance a lot of these aspects forward more quickly than it would if it were in the hands of the government, which I completely agree with. But then there are other aspects like you know, deep space, colonization of Mars, these things that transcend the lifespan of a typical investor, that’s willing to foot the bill for a private enterprise to do this.

I think there’s a necessary role for government in. Investments in space, just because they have this ability to transcend multiple investor generations and actually fund these things that, you know, zooming out and 200 years, like, is it going to be profitable? Absolutely. But like over the next hundred years, trying to build a colony on Mars or these deeper space excursions, I mean, there’s not really, unless you’re building the technology for the government to do these things.

You know, it’s very, very difficult to make a profit along the way I would think. Right.

Robert: [00:16:26] Yeah. Nobody, I mean even I mean, like what. Ilan I think has alluded to, for his idea of his city on Mars, is that people go well, what does that economic model, what he and a few other people have described as that they believe that there will be IP created.

So intellectual property, new inventions, new technology could get created that would there facilitate. That development on Mars or get created on Mars that will get exported off Mars. That’s the thought we don’t really get, it sounds plausible, but we don’t really know you would have, you know, no, no one knows.

Yeah, it’s plausible though, but

Ben: [00:17:08] yeah, definitely, definitely makes sense. Zooming out and that kind of helps set the stage of, of privatization and the ability to profit from this expansion space investing rather. Jumping into the next kind of segment that I was thinking opportunities.

I mean, there’s, so there’s a lot from asteroid mining to just low orbital satellites. Like what how do you think about all the different opportunities and how does this fit into your overall thesis on space investing?

Robert: [00:17:38] Well, there’s some different verticals that you can look out at. Spread out horizontally and you can call them categories for space.

You could let’s just take real estate was, was my background and I initially did spend some time scouting around the Mojave Aaron spaceport. What are the tangible real estate brick and mortar opportunities at a potential space port? So you could look at, you could, you know, a real estate investor, someone who knows that area really well could, could look at that as a terrestrial market there’s communications and I mean that your satellites, that offer communications.

Satellites require something to talk to on the ground. So there’s a ground, they call it ground segment. There’s that area there’s on orbit experimentation, whether you’re looking to do new types of manufacturing processes for materials or pharmacy or biological experiments, there’s that area they’re sending humans to space.

There’s that in-between area of entertainment, whether you’re bringing, you know, VR content or like video and VR content from space or creating space themed entertainment for people here on earth, or actually physically getting humans into space there’s habitats. There was resource extraction, which would be asteroids, other celestial bodies, like the moon there’s even potential energy place.

That’s probably further out where, you know, generating energy in space probably initially for in space utilization. It gets pretty it’s debatable on, on, on there. And there’s some who are big advocates on, on sending energy from space back to earth. That’s we don’t have to go into that too much right now.

I’m particular, I think w where it’s going right now is this industrialization of this lower earth orbit and that’s kind of the altitude that’s about. Kind of about to where the space station is. It’s a few hundred miles out and that’s where that’s a lot of the low hanging economic for people building new types of satellites.

They’re usually smaller. And then putting the greater numbers, the providing some type of data services, whether it’s potentially internet commercial weather other analytics or putting telescopes on them basically. So they can do imaging of for variety of reasons. I think that’s, that’s kind of what’s happening right now.

And then you’re going to see that all slope expand. And then I think the moon, which is about a quarter of a million miles away is probably there is some traction there because there’s just, it seems like government, different governments around the world are putting energy back to the moon or private resources going back to the moon.

So I think the moon will, the moon will be both a place. To stay long-term and a training ground for other longterm missions. Since it’s, you can get there in two to three days. There’s a lot of reasons why we should do some there’s useful resources there we can, we can learn. So I, I see it as being kind of a training ground where we can have a long-term presence and, and just test out things because Mars is, I mean, any other planet, whether it’s going to Venus or Mars is, is, is substantial.

There’s a lot of things that we still don’t know about. Long-term for humans, we, there’s still a lot. We don’t know for, for humans to thrive on, on a long-term journey. Even though we’ve had astronauts stay in space for like over a year, but they’re close to earth or on a space station, there’s just other, there’s other variables that aren’t accounted for.

Ben: [00:21:00] Yeah, definitely. Man all these conversations like the the, the jumping off point on the moon and mining for water to use as propellant for these things, like definitely want to get into that. I’m curious. How, how do you think? As an investor, I mean, every investment is an opportunity cost into another one.

In terms of timing, it sounds like industrialization of lower earth orbit is like the next thing. Right. And does this tie into 5g and IOT and the need for more better imaging with autonomous vehicles? Like what is driving the industrialization of this lower or earth orbit and how to investors?

Robert: [00:21:41] I don’t see it as being kind of seek quenches like it’s because there’s this interest in 5g.

That’s why they’re building satellites or vice versa. But I do think it’s co it’s an ecosystem because as I share, we’ve had satellites for a long time, but I’ve done a lot of these activities. They were high performance and very expensive. But what we’ve seen is, is there’s a few, few facets. One is that electronic miniaturization.

So just as like, you know, I got my, my phone here it’s, you know, and it keeps getting more powerful each year. If I choose to upgrade and it’s practically a disposable, disposable satellite technologies coming the same way. Now, people are still spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on satellites up to many millions, but the, but you’re getting a lot of in somebody smaller satellites, you’re getting a lot of bang for the buck and it’s getting less expensive to get to space.

So that’s helpful and it’s getting more predictable. It used to just me where you didn’t really know when you could get to space. So now you can, you can go to a third-party service and they can help you if you need to get to space. Q3 2021. They can probably help make it happened. So there’s this transparency in pricing scheduling and getting your, let’s just say your satellite to space.

And then also in parallel on the ground, we have these other industries like IOT, you have self-driving cars, just general automation and efficiency, you know, just generally technologies pushing for, for, for efficiency and optimization in every, anything. Like not, there’s nothing sick. Like it’s, there’s nothing sacred.

There’s no area that’s undiscovered. And groups have started to look and say, Hey, are there some gaps, but maybe we need to fill out, you know you know, can we use it? Like, let’s take internet access. There’s still billions of people without. Any internet access and there’s all sorts of projects using high altitude balloons, using drones building expensive fiber off to, you know, laying in fiber optic into new roads and developing countries.

And satellite there have been, they had tried using the past satellite, but it was expensive and difficult, but because the price is coming down, there’s now new efforts. There’s like six different major companies from Apple to Amazon and one web in space sex that all have they’re different flavors, but essentially doing, providing internet access, using smaller satellites.

And they’re there. A lot of those plays are around providing broadband higher speed services to consumers. It’s a B to C business, although with the big cap ex there’s also groups out there like Skyla, which is a startup, they just closed, I think a hundred million dollars. I think their series day was a hundred million.

Maybe their series B a hundred million SoftBank was one of the partners. And they’re using they’re actually using, they’re taking existing, existing satellites and doing what narrow band to provide small packets of data to things like agricultural customers for IOT. So now you also have it’s like, say example, the agricultural market.

They’re trying, you know, they’re trying to optimize their yield and use less water, use less fertilizer for economic and environmental reasons. And they’re trying to maybe they have large pots of land. They’re trying to. Get all these diff there, the equipment and the sensors to field to talk to each other and satellites are just kind of like another place on the it’s.

Just like, it’s like having a, it’s like another hub. And there’s, there’s. And I’ve from what my limited knowledge around self-driving cars is that there’s still places that have like these gaps in cell, in satellite. And they think that satellite could be a place that I’ll be like, it’s not gonna be complete the car.

Won’t be completely reliant on the satellite. It’ll be like a, it’s just like, it’s just an extra check box to give it more dependability, you know, when it’s in a remote area. So there’s probably not an industry yet. We’re space, doesn’t touch in many times. It’s just not well well-known. But but I think we’ll just find more, we’ll continue to find more and more use cases.

Ben: [00:25:52] Yeah. Yeah. And I agree. All the tech improvements here are moving towards more satellites. We just need more of them. We need more visibility, all of this data and information, and then you have that part paired with miniature zation, the ease and lower costs of sending these things up. So. In my mind, I’m thinking, okay, more satellites.

That makes sense. I get it. But then something that I read about that terrified the crap out of me is something called Kessler syndrome. The Kessler syndrome is, is a theory that was proposed by NASA scientists in 1978, that the satellites just bang into each other and create debris. And then this debris.

Keeps banging into other satellites until it’s just a debris cloud that surrounds the U S or around the world, rather we’re the center of the world to, you know, no, it surrounds the world. This is a cloud of debris, so we can never leave or come back because we’re surrounded by this debris cloud. So I start thinking about something like that.

And then, you know, the space debris is, is a big issue already. And if more and more satellites are coming up, then, you know, thinking through the second order effect, maybe it’s made them maybe instead of investing in the satellite companies, which is an obvious play. Maybe you start thinking about these.

Debris cleanup companies that are growing up, they’re developing the AI necessary to say, this is a piece of debris vaporize. It, this is a, this is not, or, you know, China’s technology in 2007 when they blasted a satellite out of, out of orbit. I mean so what which created a ton of debris by the way, but you know, is that something you’re thinking about when investing in space as well?

Robert: [00:27:36] Yeah, so I’ve, I met, I’ve met organizations there’s a company there’s a few of these companies that had started saying, Hey, we want to clean up or build debris. And it sounds great. And you’re like, I love mission, love the idea, but the problem has been is there’s nobody wants to pay for it yet.

And you’ll find that a few of the few of these companies have all pivoted and they’re changing. They’re going to now instead of. Debris mitigation to debris tracking or they want to be like a towing service to tow a satellite to somewhere else, which is great. It’s useful and there’s customers for it.

But we, we as a society or, or nation States have not necessarily, they’ve not, they have regulations in terms of like how you’re a good actor with your satellite. You know, usually when you have like one of these big, large communication sites, they’ve got, they’ve got propulsion. They’re usually assigned to graveyard or when they get to the end of their life, they move to a graveyard orbit.

They’re far away from earth. There’s not a problem. And, and, and in some of the technology now we’re looking at refueling these satellites to be able to extend their life and make them so they can still generate revenue for longer. And that’s great too. But now we have all these smaller satellites that are near earth that could potentially collide each other.

Well, when they put, they’re not just putting them up anywhere, they are trying to put them up in a place where it’s not going to collide, but there’s now just so many call it debris. You would have. I have this increased possibility of this, you know, Corpus Kepler’s potential capitalist syndrome. So a couple of things can happen.

One is that the satellite, the small, these smaller settlements that are in lower earth orbit do decay. They they’re always falling and eventually they will. Burn up now. Hopefully they don’t hit it on their, on their way back into our, they don’t hit anything else. But the idea is that they will, they will decay.

They will burn up. No problem. Some of these smaller satellites are ha are being included with propulsion so that you can maneuver them and there’s even discussion whether that’s going to be a requirement for all these small satellites. I don’t know what, what that answers because there’s, I mean, there’s, there’s groups that are looking at putting up satellites that are like smaller than your hand.

Think of it. Like there’s a group called thumb Thumbtack. They want to make like these little, almost microchip size satellites. But if it’s still moving at 17,000 ish miles per hour, it’s still potentially dangerous.

Ben: [00:30:05] Absolutely. I mean, there was a piece of paint that punctured triple Bulletproof glass or whatever.

I mean, it’s, it’s terrifying how fast these things go and the destruction that they can do.

Robert: [00:30:15] Yeah. So I, I think we’re gonna eventually see, unfortunately, humans are not great at being proactive. I imagine some something in the space environment we’ll have to get a little worse until we decide to do something a little more proactively or create economic incentives for the private sector to create businesses around.

I don’t know whether it’s like a tax that’s buried into some type of bill, you know, like a cellular phone tax was a little one penny for orbital debris clean up. So there’s no shortage of ideas and very early stage technology to, to deal with it. But there’s not been a an economic model yet.

Ben: [00:30:57] Okay, that makes sense.

You said regulatory risk obviously, there are strict regulations on who can send up what, and you have to get a, you have to get a pass from people. Like, how does this work? Can I create a satellite and go launch it off?

Robert: [00:31:12] Okay. So you can, you can buy satellite off the internet or a kit and you can do it for even a few thousand dollars.

Get a kit for the thousands, put it together yourself. It’s not that it’s really getting, not that expensive. I mean more, you know, 10 tens of thousands of dollars, probably for like a kit.

Ben: [00:31:31] From from beginning to end too, I have my own satellite

Robert: [00:31:35] orbiting the earth. No, you still have to pay for launch and some licensing things.

So, so what you gotta do is so say you, you there’s there’s kits, you can build your, your, your satellite and you, maybe whatever sensor you have on it. And you can lots of upgrades, lots of ways to upsell you on things you want, but then you have to find, you have to get you have to pay to get it launched to space.

And then if your satellite is going to talk to the ground to make it useful, you’re going to have to get a license. And so there’s nuts with like, if it was us, the FCC and they cover that. And so there are there’s a few bureaucratic, but they’re not insurmountable, but there are third-party services that could help someone who basically.

A can hold them or do it for them. And there’s even groups that like, I think as young, as like elementary schools that have sent satellites to space, and there are groups that have helped facilitate that. So you have literally elementary age students through high school and university sending satellites to space.

And that’s part of it because the it’s just the, the parts are cheaper. The whole, the whole, the whole value chains, just getting less expensive and easier to make easier to navigate. Yeah.

Ben: [00:32:50] And school is so much cooler now than what I remember. I mean, kids are meditating in class, there’s shooting up satellites.

Like we had recess and we like, I think I adopted a star at one point or something. You like pay $5 to some organization. You get to name a star who knows what I even named it. Okay. Before we jump onto the next one, satellites for the everyday investor, is this something you pick a few private companies that are investing in it?

How do you think through this

Robert: [00:33:23] one way, if you’re just a kind of a main street way to, to, to, to easily sample, there’s a few ETFs that people can buy into where electronically traded funds, where, and they’re, they’re basically holding companies. You’re familiar with large contractors, maybe some.

Communications companies, some launch companies, but that’s maybe a way to, to just super inexpensively, just kind of see like how things are kind of trading, you know, they they’ve got, I mean, it’s a company like Boeing, Hare is Harris corporation public, I forget. But there are like communications coupling and doing government or and then you’ve got now you’ve got private companies.

That you know, it’s falling under, purely under alternative investments where some of these companies are at the level where it’s really early stage technology, where you could put in a few thousand bucks, but it is highly risky. It’s like it, maybe it’s a very low TRL level. So in this, it’s not just purely in the space industry, but there’s this term called technology readiness level.

I think it’s on a one through 10. And it goes from like a very basic technology that sucks still in the lab all the way through something that’s maybe commercialized. So there are ways to invest at the low TRL level, highly risky, but you’re, you’re, you’re essentially helping a mentor along and saying.

Okay, this is just like, I’m gonna assume I’m losing this money to companies that now have very well-developed business plans, well-developed teams, and they can be invested in directly through syndicates, through angel groups, or you can invest as a limited partner into venture capital funds that might allocate a portion of or that are looking at space or complete.

Or now we have venture funds that are, that are attempting be solely focused on the space sector. So it really, really varies. And I think because space is its own ecosystem, it’s not just one thing. And they just, I think the investor needs to get out of thinking it’s just rockets or salads. There’s all this other enabling activity going on.

Think about something that either resonates with you personally or professionally. Let’s just say you own you’re involved with insurance products. Well, there are Insurance-related space efforts there, you know, rockets get insured. Satellites can be insured. There’s insurance companies, climate Corp climate corporation that Monsanto bought for a little under a billion dollars.

And they were using satellite data to, to, and they were selling insurance products or they aren’t selling insurance products to farmers. And Monsanto realized this was pretty valuable and they acquired it for about a billion dollars. So it was a private company based in North California. So you see, so, so an investor, if they have a you know, a forte and expertise in an area yeah.

Whatever that is, do a little researching and see, where does that, what is space? How is it leveraging it? Is there a way that space enables that sector. That would be way I might kind of do it just using my, and then you can get, you know, you can go completely do a again and say, Oh, okay, what’s going on?

And like, is anybody doing sports in space or sports and, you know, mashing up sport. You know, I remember hearing a pitch from a guy who was trying to create a sports league using parabolic aircraft using you basically get like 20 seconds of zero microgravity and creating sports. But what was funny was the entrepreneur wasn’t really Pat that passionate about sports and it was pretty expensive to fly these planes to do it.

And I don’t think that I don’t think that went very well. Far.

Ben: [00:37:07] I love it. I love it. ,

Robert: [00:37:08] I think this is the type of thinking, you know, you have to, you have to sometimes, you know, doing a lot of your own research and reading and doing some of your own thought exercise because you don’t see right now, a lot of typical, like, you know, for people investing in kind of alternative assets, say in like companies, they’re thinking about maybe IPOs and there’s not a lot of IPO’s in the space sector today, industrial public offerings.

But what you do have is more M and a activity. You have companies acquiring other companies in this type of activity. And I expect you’ll continue to see that. And another area that we. It’s happening and we’ll see more of is probably the stacks. What are they the special purpose acquisition companies?

Yeah, those are the CDs. Yeah. So Virgin galactic went public through, through a S a SPAC. There’s a, a company called momentous, which is a private new space company that will be going public through a spec in 2021. So, you know, so there’s these CA you know, there are these examples and there’ll be, you know, every investor has to like, do their due diligence on this and it’s, and it’s not easy.

More people have lost money in, in the space sector that have made money. It is, it is still rare to make money, to, to ma to make. To make money as an investor it’s possible. And I still believe in it there’s there are, we’re now at a time where there’s better business models, but it’s still a difficult road.

It’s sort of like the early days of the internet where there was a lot of money floating around, but not a lot of people were making money at the internet. I think we’re smarter. Now we have the benefit of experience. It’s it’s like, it’s like the pioneers or the first Europeans who were coming to the Americas, they didn’t really know what they were getting into.

We know more about Mar even though we haven’t had humans go to Mars yet we will know more about Mars because we have these robots on Mars and other explorations. So we just have all this benefit of this technology that gives us insight. And as an investor, we have. Almost too much data that we can we glean from.

So I would suggest to, to you know, to investor find what resonates, pick a few things and just go there. It’s easy to get over overwhelmed by the number of choices.

Ben: [00:39:39] Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, being early and right sometimes actually is very wrong with, from an investment perspective.

Robert: [00:39:46] I’ve been there. I’ve been there.

So I’ve been there. I know, I know. I know the pain. I know the, I know the pains.

Ben: [00:39:51] Yeah. Yeah. This perhaps a good segue into let’s, let’s jump right into the moon. , that was another one of the opportunities that you had talked about. I’ve read a bunch of wild stuff on it. It just, at first glance, it seems crazy to me that something that happened, you know, we landed on the moon and we’d beat the Russians and it was like, tick that box.

And now all of a sudden, there’s this re renewed interest in it for a number of reasons. Perhaps a touch on those reasons. why something like the moon gets you excited?

Robert: [00:40:21] Yeah. So the moon has actually been interest to Even from governments for a long time before we had the Apollo mission, that us air force had a plan.

I think it was in the late fifties, 1950s to put a base, a human crude based on the moon and there’s papers that are available out there. So you can, you can read about this the moon, you know, so, so space is a strategic high ground. You’re literally at an altitude where you can see the earth and get a great vantage point.

And that’s, and in early on during the, the cold war days you know, we were flying airplanes and we were flying balloons and trying to look at what the our adversaries were doing. And satellites were thought to be useful. They, they were worried about either them being delivered to, to deliver nuclear devices as a weapon.

But initially, just to see what the other side was doing, putting cameras on them, it was just a really, it had a you know, it was potentially, you could, your airplane could be shot down a little more difficult to shoot down your satellites, but then if you go a few hundred thousand miles out to the moon and imagine if you had an observatory.

On the moon, you can not just see what’s going on and like maybe say a small field of the earth. If you’re closer, you could see what’s going on on a much larger area. So there’s really from a strategic vantage point, when you’re at the moon, you can see you’re looking at the whole earth. So you get that then.

Yeah. You also have the materials there. It’s been, the moon has been being pounded by meteorites for millions of years. And a lot of those mere meteorites, some of them that are, that are near the surface have potentially useful materials that we could use to make other things on the moon or use in space for manufacturing in space.

And at the at the polls, there is water ice, which could be useful that water could be. You know, used for fuel or for drinking water for oxygen, for crew. So that’s, that’s very useful. And more recently we found that maybe there’s what looks like there’s water and other parts of the moon. We’re not really sure how much of it and how useful the water that’s spread around the moon.

And I’m sure we’ll find ways to, to, to utilize it. But there’s activities. I think we’ll start seeing man, like again, the moon will be like a jumping off point manual, you know, maybe some manufacturing, some some research you know, kind of a gateway destination going to other parts of the solar system.

I mean, who knows maybe in the far future, it might be a good retirement place. You’re like, okay. One six, one, six gravity, easy on the bones for an older person, you know, great view the moon, you know, great through the earth, you know, and the solar system, you know, maybe you’ll have entertainment complexes who knows one day being stood up there, you know, new types of sports and low gravity I’ve, I’m launching I’m on I a co-founder of a startup that we’re launching this fall too.

Help democratize the sort of space experience and we’re bringing our, our goal in 2021 is to bring a million people to the moon, through their legacies. And we’re doing that using some mission tested technology through a nonprofit I work with is called arc mission foundation. And we had a we had payload on the Israeli spacecraft that went to the moon, that brace sheets and we’re using the same technology where we’re going to be able to take about a million people’s legacy through their stories, their dreams, their photographs, and etch that onto a nickel desk.

And this disc is only about a hundred grams. It’s really small, but it’s etched into analog and can be read without a computer just with the microscope. And that’ll be taken on a commercial provider in 2021. So the moon, so we’re and this will just be something that people will be able to sign up for on a, on a website and have.

You know, a piece of them go to the moon. So there’s a range of activities. And, and I think things that are we’ll have we’ll have different types of economic value leveraging the moon.

Ben: [00:44:36] This begs the question of like geopolitical risk. I mean, this really seems like some game theoretical situation, some sort of nuclear arms, race V2 of like,  can this exist especially like a miss de-globalization kind of trend that it seems to be happening.

Can this sort of advancement and putting a, putting a space station on the moon, can this happen without a collaboration amongst a number of key countries?

Robert: [00:45:10] It can, it, it, it is allowed to happen. So a country can unilaterally go to the moon and utilize the resources, the moon. It gets tricky. When if you say, if that entity, whether it’s a nation state or a corporation, or an individual says, I want to own this area, the moon, you can’t really do that, but you can utilize the

Ben: [00:45:35] resources, take all the resources,

Robert: [00:45:38] get them off.

Exactly. But I know like the United States has, has created this thing called Artemisia courts where they’re trying to they’re getting their attempt to get other nations States to sign on, to sort of say we’re gonna behave in a, in a particular way under certain guidelines and rules and norms on the moon.

But they’re having difficulty, I think getting like, I don’t think. China hasn’t signed on, or I don’t know if they’ve invited China or Russia to sign, so we could still see a lot of bifurcation of, you know and I don’t want to describe as good or bad or positive or negative, but we will see different nation States will have different viewpoints on how to do things.

I think what is clear is that some of the historical activity, whether it’s Chinese Landers, the Apollo missions, those areas, I think it’s being understood that like that, that that’s kind of like hallowed ground, that nobody’s gonna go mess up the, you know, nobody’s going to go land next door and go kick the, the, the, the astronauts footprints, how that gets enforced will be TBD.

You have, but I do think you’re going to see several different nation States that will put forth their own ideas on how to operate. But I do know there are, there’s definitely a growing interest by, in U S policy about concern about China in the moon that whether it’s warranted or not, and maybe the Chinese feel the same way about us.

So as, as American. So I just think that would caution and ask people to start thinking of themselves as not just a citizen of their country or multiple countries that have multiple passports or citizen of the earth, but start thinking of ourselves as a citizen of the solar system. And that’s difficult to think about, but we really are going to start.

We really need to, I think, impress upon ourselves and our children and our grandchildren. That we are members and citizens of this bigger neighborhood and that we should use it wisely because like earth, the resources of the solar system are not unlimited. They are limited. There’s only so much of the moon, but if we use the resources of the solar system in a smart way, thinking more, long-term rather than short-term, we will have plenty for many generations and where this will help us is when we’re ready as a species.

Or if we volt other species to leave the solar system, we need to be able to have the right amount of research so that we can, that we can, we can go and be interstellar. And I know that’s really difficult for us when we can barely think about what’s going on next week.

Ben: [00:48:31] Well, this is a very pervasive issue with.

Society as, as it is right. Short-termism ed right now, we’re recording this on November 4th and like it’s immense the amidst, the the U S presidential elections. And it’s the whole world stops every four years for a couple of days while this is happening. And it’s like, are we focusing on the important long-term things?

And, and actually on that topic, just to talk comment, the U S has very good reason to be worried about China because they are very good long-term strategic thinkers. And if the moon creates some sort of strategic advantage for the long long-term, you better believe that they’re thinking about it and thinking very, very hard about it.

Robert: [00:49:15] Yeah. There’s a movie. I recommend people see if they’ve not seen it called the wandering earth. It’s a, one of the short stories based on popular. Very popular science fiction author in China. And it’s now available on, I think it’s streaming on Netflix and it’s kind of a preposterous. The, the, the, the, the synopsis is that several hundred years in the future, our son is going supernova while we want to survive.

What are we going to do? We’re going to move the earth out of the solar system to a new star, and China’s helps lead the way. And they literally put a ring of engines around the planet, not giving too much more. It’s a bit of a mashup of Armageddon and several other films. It’s fun and kind of ridiculous, but the film had some investment from the Chinese government and it, there is.

Propaganda and the film and there’s several messages in the film. And one of the key messages is that China is a space faring nation thinks long-term and is going to space. So if anybody is interested in, and this is an it’s a, it’s a spun action site. It’s action, meat, science fiction, but encapsulates some of these things like what China’s interest in, go see this film.

Ben: [00:50:24] I like it. And I’ll definitely link that in the show notes. I haven’t seen it yet. Looking forward to that as well perhaps a good segue. Another long-term thinking something that’s totally unfeasible now, space mining, and I’ll also leave the Bloomberg quick take from YouTube that I went down the rabbit hole, but it’s about 27 minutes.

A few stats that I took from this asteroid, psych 16, NASA’s launching a 2000, 2022 probe. And it is it’s 95% metals and some have estimated its value at 700 quadrillion dollars, which doesn’t even make sense. Right. Or the DaVita asteroid, which is valued at over a hundred trillion dollars with platinum gold iron rare earth materials.

The economic incentive to figure out. Asteroid mining, even though, even if you mine it correctly, like you probably can’t bring it back to the U S so that, that the Japanese one in in 2010, the total cost to just bring back a little bit of dust was about $250 million. You need to bring back, you need to figure out those economics before it can make any sense, but I mean, what are your thoughts on asteroid mining?

I used to totally dismiss this as something insane, but

Robert: [00:51:42] apparent th there are some asteroids that are a lot closer than we think they’re not all just as far away people imagine, or they seem to show expanse. There are some close ones. I think it will happen. It’s just a matter of time. I think this is my personal sense, is that what we learn in lower earth orbit in terms of automating things in robotics will be very useful because it’s going to be, it’s a dangerous activity.

Why put humans there, these robots, the moon will be very informative and that’s happening. This, this technology, what I still don’t don’t understand is so say you have this, whatever, quadrillion, this, this, this rock in space as that quadrant, if we could extract some fraction of it. And it’ll probably be most useful for in space things because we’re probably, it’s gonna be too difficult to bring maybe platinum metals or other metals off earth in this space.

So it’s sort of like, it’s, it’s gonna be like our tool. It’s going to be our mind and space for using active for doing activities there. What I still don’t understand is if, and when we’re able to bring back some of these resources to earth, this that just depressed the pricing of the markets, because you have more of it, but maybe that’s a good thing because, you know, at one period of time, cellular phones were very expensive.

You know, they were only in car they’re bolted in cars. It was the, the per minute cost was, was several dollars. But if you eventually have where you know, platinum is, you know, is, is so abundant and so ubiquitous, you can do all these other, create all these opera, other applications with it. Maybe that does get interesting and an area I would hope we can.

Maybe we can, we can. Sort of spearhead before this becomes an issue and make it is CIF, C4, mining, there’s discussion about mining to C4 for metals that are there. It’s still difficult in like, you know, you’re dealing with pressure under and, and at least you don’t have in space. You’re not having to deal with that issue.

If there’s maybe temperature issues you’re, you’re, you’re dealing with, it would be great to see us say, Hey, you know what? Let’s not strip mine the sea floor. And instead focus some energy on using space resources. And if you go to some of the people like Jeff Bezos, his long-term vision is, you know, taking our dirtier more toxic activities on the earth.

And taking them into space. So I think that would probably be more in line in saying, why do we need to just go straight mine, the bottom of the ocean floor every time humanity thinks, Oh, there’s nothing there it’s barren. There’s no, we’re probably going to find out that it’s something is really important to the ecosystem where maybe there’s whale carcasses that are falling, that we, we, we now know that capture carbon and maybe there are food resources for who knows what that’s maybe a really important part of our ecosystem.

We make too many assumptions about, I think about how our own earth ecosystem works. So I would hope that we can tread cautiously in terms of into this law of diminishing returns on how we’re extracting resources on earth, whether it’s you know, fracking and shale rock for oil or, or metals from the bottom of the ocean.

Ben: [00:55:04] Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and there’s actually a term for that  resources, utilization, situ

Robert: [00:55:11] resource. They sometimes call it in situ like in situation. So when they say it it’s basically sink in situ resources, like using the resources in that environment. So if you say, well, sometimes say Luna lunar in situ lunar or Lennar, which is like on the moon or you know, you using the RI it’s like, you know, using the resources where you’re at.

So use the resource if you’re in space, use those resources,

Ben: [00:55:33] right? So like you said, I mean, it becomes a toolbox where you go up there and you might you might a bunch of platinum that is super abundant in this asteroid, and then you repair your earth, use it as fuel somehow for the next rocket. I don’t know something like that, which is crazy.

There was a lot going on with space investing. I mean, What, what gets you most excited? There, there there’s so many moving parts. What, what really gets you so excited about this there?

Robert: [00:56:02] I like looking for some of the areas that are a little bit blue water, you know, a little bit undiscovered, so I’m not necessarily gonna reveal all my butt, but I would say that there are areas that, you know, I think launch is probably becoming less of an issue.

There’s like over a hundred launch companies. I don’t think most of them are going to survive because it’s an issue that’s becoming solved. I think the areas that’s interesting is, you know, how are we going to make humans thrive in space? Psychological health, their health and wellbeing. Like how do we get people?

Because right now we’re kind of camping up in space, but how do we get people? So, you know, they don’t need as much training. They can we can deal with some of the bone, bone loss issues. And I think as we, we understand that we might find some maybe therapies for, for things and treatments for things on earth.

I think that’s really kind of, you know, health and wellness is I think interesting. I think we might come across new ways to make manufacturing, create new materials is of interest. I really want ubiquitous VR from space where I can like whether I just put on a big screen or a headset and I can just see some really high resolution, beautiful things and like kind of like meditate there.

There’s a company I’m working with called space VR. And so full disclosure, I am working with them, but they’re, they’re doing, they initially wanted to put VR cameras on the space station and I don’t quite know why they pivoted, but they did and what they’re doing now. And they got this, they got this this pivot idea from a retired astronaut who said one of the closest activities that you could experience on earth to feeling space was going into a flotation tank.

They’re taking virtual reality and flotation tanks. Bam putting it together. So they’re getting high res video data from satellites. They’ve created the world’s first waterproof VR headset. They have a location in Los Angeles, which I know where you’re at. They’re already operational. So you go into flotation tank.

So you get the feeling of being, and, and if you don’t know what a flotation take is for those listening, they put several hundred pounds of salts. They heat the water just to about body temperature. And after a few minutes of settling in you, you stop feeling the water and it feels like you’re floating.

And having this this virtual reality headset on you’re looking at earth that you get this simulated overview effect experience. So you could see the earth without looking up borders from space. So instead of spending tens of millions of dollars go to space, you could spend a hundred bucks to, to feel that

Ben: [00:58:47] link to that afterwards.

There’s a, there’s an one flotation tanks are amazing, but they’re also called sensory deprivation things because you have nothing around you and it’s, it’s a really wild feeling, but what’s the impact. What’s the effect called when you like realize how big the world? Well, the overviewing

Robert: [00:59:05] facts by, by author Frank White and he had, he’d been talking to a number of astronauts and they had this cognitive shift in their experience of after being in space.

Sometimes it was in space seeing the earth with no borders and many times that affect lastly, when they came back to earth, just like they wanted. Treat people the earth better. They, they just,

Ben: [00:59:29] Oh man, that’s amazing. I mean, it’s a real thing, right? You go out at night and you start gaze and you realize how all of this overview effect is, is quite strong.

I can’t imagine you gotta send me a link to that cause.

Robert: [00:59:42] So I think there’s some neat things. I mean, entertainment, entertainment, probably. I don’t know what the word is. It’s not edutainment, not entertainment. It’s an experience that base or 10 minutes space attainment. But, but I think there’s some really cool things that all developed because we have all this great stuff going on with a AR VR and space is just such a cool medium.

And I think I would love to see kind of more, it’s not science fiction, but maybe more. Things taking the domain of space and then creating new content pieces that are positive and uplifting and not necessarily just cynical and dystopian, which many times is kind of the, the easy default on, on like science fiction.

So I think that’s the kind of a near term NEC opportunity. I think the moon is going to have some really valuable ones, but it’s, it’s, it’s still expensive. It’s about a million don’t, it’s, it’s close to not maybe an exact number, but about a million dollars per kilogram to get something on the moon.

This is what companies are quoting little less, a little more. So if you think you’re like, you’re like, well, I want to take my whatever and you realize you do the math. You’re like, Oh my God, just to land it on the, moon’s going to be like, Hundred million dollars. And that’s not even with like building whatever you can build.

So they’re there right now. I think for moon, you still have to think kind of small and nimble and they’re going to be putting a a cellular network. I think it’s a 4g network on the moon. That’s so there’s gonna be some communications. I think we need to think about how we’re going to power. You know, I, I have a feeling that, that nuclear, that using some type of nuclear energy is going to be will come into favor because the moon has long days, but also has long nights.

So if you’re in darkness for, for weeks, w you gotta have a way to power things.

Ben: [01:01:32] Interesting. All right. Just being aware of time, we can talk about these things forever, but I mean, there are so many ways of, of different playing this to play this, this, this inevitable shift to. Space as a bigger part of our lives.

Right? For somebody like you that lives and breathes and wrote a book on space investing, I mean, clearly an expert within the space. If you had to only choose three, like three, this is where I have to put my money in these sectors. And you don’t have to name certain companies obviously, but like with the best, your best bets for profiting on this expansion, into space over the next 10 years, because you know, looking out 200 years, it’s very different, right.

But like over the next 10 years, like what three areas would you focus most on?

Robert: [01:02:23] Oh, I got it. I’m going to keep it kind of broad. I’m going to say bio life science, data and analytics, which communications kind of fits in there too. I’ll say data analytics and, and I. And I think something about energy, you know, energy now, granted, because I think there, I think that we still need in space.

There’s going to be like a, a big need for uni. You need to power things in space, and that’s still, we kind of do things with solar batteries. Like on Mars, they use these new, these basically nuclear heating units. And, and I don’t think we have kind of like, there’s no, there’s no commercial Duracell. If you want to think about it like that, nobody’s come up with like the Eveready or Duracell for that’s like very commonplace.

Or if you want to go into like Elon Musk parlance, like the Tesla power banks or power walls and this and I think we, you know, investors could start looking at things like that. Like what’s going to be powering, powering this. Cause right now, like the satellites they use, can you solar? And that’s fine.

But when we start thinking about. Bigger applications. You know, you, you have to, to, to think about other things that are gonna scale out.

Ben: [01:03:37] Awesome. Awesome. Good stuff. Well, Robert, I loved having you on and love this conversation. And like I said, I mean, this is something we could talk about for hours.

You’re incredibly knowledgeable about it. So really appreciate you taking the time before we cut off. I mean, where can my listeners find out more about you, about your book? I’ll link all of these things in the show notes, but where would you like to see?

Robert: [01:03:58] Yeah, so the book website and thank you, Ben.

The book website is spaces open for business.com have all sorts of weight. It’s some free things. People don’t even want to buy the book. They can sign up and get some strict, getting some information there. We also have some amazing book bonuses there that that that people can check out that I, that I’m using to, to share about the diversity and breadth of space, experiences, and products on social media, I’m Robert C.

Jacobson. They can usually find me on Twitter at 62 mile club, which is an a. Which is a nod to the Karman line, which is the edge of space, which is 62 miles above sea level.

Ben: [01:04:36] Awesome. Awesome. And I’ll link all of those 62 mile club. I love it, Robert. Really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on today.

Robert: [01:04:43] Thank you very much, Ben.

It was wonderful speaking to you.

Ben: [01:04:46] There you go. First off. Thank you very much for listening all the way through. I hope you got a lot of value out of that conversation. As always. You can find show notes, links, and [email protected]. Please share this with anyone you think might be interested in derive any value from this conversation.

And as always, you can reach out to me for any feedback or questions. Please give the video a like, or even better subscribe on YouTube or your podcast player of choice. This really helps others find the podcast or the video as well. Thanks a lot. Hope everybody has a fantastic day and stay safe out there and invest wisely.

Cheers.