The Future of Space: Exploring New Frontiers & Improving Life on Earth with Chris Kemp, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Astra. Delian Asparouhov, Co-Founder, Varda Space. Anousheh Ansari, Chief Executive Officer, XPRIZE Foundation.
Moderated by Justin Fishner-Wolfson, Founder & Managing Partner, 137 Ventures.
SPEAKERS
Chris Kemp
Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Astra
Delian Asparouhov
Principal
Founders Fund
Anousheh Ansari
Chief Executive Officer
XPRIZE Foundation
MODERATOR
Justin Fishner-Wolfson
Founder & Managing Partner
137 Ventures
TIMESTAMPS
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (00:07)
So thank you all for being here. I have the pleasure of hosting this panel with a bunch of really interesting people. Space usually wins for the most interesting topic that you can have with other folks. And today's a particularly auspicious day because there's also a launch in approximately four hours, where SpaceX is taking up an all-civilian crew for really the first time to space. So it's a great panel to have here.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (00:34)
We've got Chris, who's the founder of Astra, a launch company. We have Delian, who's both on investing side and a founder of Varda, which is working to build manufacturing in space. And then we have Anousheh who's actually been to space and probably makes for the most interesting person here, but also the CEO of the XPRIZE. I thought given today, it might be nice to start with your experiences in space, Anousheh. What does it mean that there is a civilian launch in probably four hours?
Anousheh Ansari: (01:06)
Yeah. I'm super excited about it, obviously. And it happens to be the 15th anniversary of my launch. So I think they planned it just for me. But I'm excited because it's a indicator of how far we've come. My family and I sponsored the first Ansari X Prize, which was about opening up space to commercial activities, to reduce the cost of launch, to open up access.
Anousheh Ansari: (01:32)
And the fact that we had so many launches this year for civilians, and this one being particularly important because you have four civilians without any astronauts on board, on their own, going to an orbit above the space station and spending three days in space, this has never been done before. And it shows that we have been able to create a safer, lower cost, plausible access to space.
Anousheh Ansari: (02:07)
And this will be one of hopefully, many that we will see. And if you haven't seen the story of the people who are launching, there's a documentary on Netflix called Countdown that tells their stories beautifully. And I will be watching and praying for their safe return tonight.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (02:29)
Given that this is the trend and you were one of, I don't know, approximately 500 people who's ever been to space, what does it mean to you to be very special today, but potentially not very special in the not too distant future, at least in that regard?
Anousheh Ansari: (02:44)
Yeah. No, I think just going to space will be special regardless. It's like now, a lot of people go to Mount Everest and go to the summit. Whoever is able to achieve that, it's a special moment in their life and it touches them in a different way. And I think space has that potential for humanity. For me, the experience of being in space has given me a complete new perspective on what's important in my life.
Anousheh Ansari: (03:11)
It has given me a global perspective on what's important and what I can do in my life. It relates to this world, this planet that we call home. And it has triggered the fact that we all know, we read reports, but when you're in space, you can see it with your own eyes that this beautiful planet, the only place we can call home right now, is changing and it's not going to be pleasant for us to live on it anymore.
Anousheh Ansari: (03:41)
And a lot of people talk about protecting our planet. It's we're not protecting the planet at all. We're protecting ourselves. The planet will be fine without us, probably better off without us. But if we want to continue living here, or have a plan B and go someplace else and live on another planet, which will not be as nice as our own planet still, so we need to pay attention.
Anousheh Ansari: (04:03)
And there's a lot of work we need to do. And that's why we need these type of conferences, investment, and the risk takers who are willing to invest in the future.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (04:12)
So this is a question for everyone, but Delian I thought maybe you could give us your perspective, having been both on the investor side and also the founder of a company that's in the space industry. Why now? This seems like there's been a huge proliferation of companies, both from launch to services, to actual space travel. What has changed in the last few years?
Delian Asparouhov: (04:38)
I always think of space as being three separate waves, and that we're only at the very beginning of the third wave, where the first wave was government funded hardware doing government projects, IE the Apollo days. Second phase being for the first time government-funded, but the hardware is produced by external groups. So the early work of SpaceX or Planet Labs being that second wave.
Delian Asparouhov: (05:01)
And the third wave being entirely commercially funded and entirely commercially built where now for the first time, there's companies that are going public, like Astra, and a recent one that also went public, Spire, where a significant portion of their revenues and what keeps the companies afloat is entirely commercial revenues. And obviously, that just has a much larger scale and depth than just being entirely based on the government four-year revenues.
Delian Asparouhov: (05:26)
And so I think that's what makes it fundamentally different is there was this glass ceiling in the space 2.0 days that you just should never break through because there's a limited scale that you can get to, versus now, just the scales that companies can operate at in terms of number of launches, satellites that are going up. The amount of engineers you can afford is just so much greater than anything that we've done in the private industry.
Delian Asparouhov: (05:46)
And that's what's allowing now for space to be safe enough and proliferated enough that you can actually have now, individual citizens out. Just as the Falcon 9 landing the first time was extremely exciting, I'm sure a day like today in another five years is also going to seem extremely boring. Like, "Oh, private civilians going up to space on a three-day trip? Grandma did that last week."
Anousheh Ansari: (06:07)
Yeah. And I think there is this really nice time where the Moore's law and miniaturization and reduction of causing satellites and other sensing technologies has enabled to have more customers for the launch companies that you mentioned. So if we didn't reduce the cost of access to space, they could build really cheap satellite, but they couldn't get it to space. So they need this type of solutions.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (06:33)
I think that's a great transition. I was lucky enough to invest in SpaceX in 2008. So it's been a very long time, but they've really brought down the cost of launch to enable this. It sounds like this is an enabling fact. But Chris you've built Astra.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (06:48)
You're really trying to accelerate that trend. Can you give people a sense of what the launch market looks like today? But I think more interestingly, what is the launch market going to look like in the next five to 10 years?
Chris Kemp: (07:01)
I think building on Anousheh, this isn't 1960 anymore. In 1960, when NASA built the Apollo and the Mercury or the Gemini programs, this was about 1% to 2% of GDP. NASA had hundreds of thousands of employees. They were hiring everyone who graduated. This was a program that was only possible if the resources of one of the most wealthy nations on the planet put a considerable amount of its wealth to work. SpaceX has now built Starship.
Chris Kemp: (07:37)
And you might think SpaceX has raised a lot of capital, but it's nothing compared to 2% of GDP. And so I think with what Astra is doing, we're building a rocket factory where we can churn out a rocket a day, like a car. The robots and the automation and the software that exists today, has enabled a level of safety, a level of cost efficiency, both in the production and the operation of these systems.
Chris Kemp: (08:00)
The idea that with a planet's constellation, a single employee runs a constellation of hundreds of satellites from a browser. The technology to make this accessible is as I think, the really big story here. And this year, will have maybe a dozen pure play space companies go public. Astra might have been the first, but there have been six since.
Chris Kemp: (08:25)
And some of these companies are going public through spec mergers or through direct offerings, but they're all going to have billions of dollars to help improve life on earth from space, to help connect the planet, observe the planet. Space is the ultimate high ground.
Chris Kemp: (08:42)
And now, we'll finally have all these entrepreneurs building disruptive technologies to provide global context, new sources of information. This will be probably the most significant decade in the history of space.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (09:01)
Delian touched on this when he mentioned that SpaceX landed the Falcon 9. It was really only six years ago. And so it's become not only passe, but expected. If the rocket doesn't land, people actually think that there was a huge problem. So, what are the sorts of things that are going to be passe as we look forward to what people are excited by now?
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (09:24)
I remember at the beginning, I literally went to every SpaceX launch. If I did that now, I would probably just camp out in Florida and only be at SpaceX launches. There are so many of them, there're barely events. What are the things that people can look forward to being commonplace in the future?
Anousheh Ansari: (09:41)
I can maybe jump in. One thing that I try to talk about, how access to space is opening up new opportunities, comparing it to the internet era. So when companies like Netscape came around, just making it easy and understandable so people can be creative, created an opportunity. No one could predict what would come next. And none of the things we have today, anyone would've predicted it back then. But just opening up and creating a playground was important. And I think that's what we are doing.
Anousheh Ansari: (10:16)
I'm personally very interested in looking at how we can put things we're doing here on the surface of our planet, up in the orbit and do it more efficiently, and without an impact on our planet. I think there will be opportunities for manufacturing things in space. There are things that we can manufacture better in space than you can in the gravity well of our planet. So I think that's a huge opportunity. There are medical opportunities.
Anousheh Ansari: (10:46)
There are some problems to be solved, but I think maybe we can take our data centers, especially for non real-time applications, all the pictures that we get on our FaceTime and Instagram and all those things, we can put them and store them in computers that have already been built for space. So there may be opportunities like this that I think will be exciting to see happen.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (11:08)
You mentioned manufacturing. It seems like the easiest toss over to talk about Varda. We've seen in the current environment with the pandemic, that supply chains are very hard.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (11:20)
Can you talk a little bit about how to build manufacturing, not just on this planet that's easy, but you're going to do it in space? You're going to have to build the supply chains. What exists today and what needs to exist to make this work?
Delian Asparouhov: (11:32)
See, I think one thing that sometimes is underappreciated is the United States has been manufacturing in space now for almost a decade. They've just been small scale, like research projects that have been done on the International Space Station. But the reason that they've never gotten much larger than that comes back to supply chains, where if you're a commercial company relying on a research station that has a lot of safety, security protocol, et cetera, can be difficult to rely on when you need products on a regular basis.
Delian Asparouhov: (11:59)
And so that was the, I'd say intuition or thesis that we had around Varda, which was we're not going to try and do fundamentally new science. That's what the International Space Station is for. We're just going to take that work and scale it up in a way where now, commercial customers are going to be comfortable with us being a part of their supply chain because ideally, Chris prints a rocket every day.
Delian Asparouhov: (12:19)
We buy a launch on that rocket, send whatever good it is, whether it's fiber optic, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, bring them back down to our customers down here on earth, I think the following day. And that relates my answer to your original question, which was, I think the thing that will become much more normalized over the next five to 10 years is people's lives outside of just the space community being touched by space.
Delian Asparouhov: (12:39)
Right now, it's really special if you get to be a Planet Lab satellite operator operating 100 satellites. But most people out in New York City don't really get to appreciate the benefits of space. Whereas I think five to 10 years from now, you're going to start to see whether it's a hobby of satellites being set up, or these types of products that can be produced in space impacting people's life down here on earth, and bringing the benefits of space to a much, much wider group than has ever had it before.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (13:03)
And Chris, you must be seeing this from a customer perspective. Who are the people that are ... What industries? You don't need to give us specific companies, but what are the industries that are buying launches today that you never would have done this historically?
Chris Kemp: (13:17)
I think that it has traditionally been government customers. That's just a small fraction of our current backlog of launches. We have over 50 launches under contract now. Most of them are commercial companies that have new sensors that are able to see CO2 in the atmosphere, or use radars to understand where things are moving around in the ocean, where weather patterns at much higher level of fidelity can be predicted to make aviation safer.
Chris Kemp: (13:47)
For each of these, there's probably a dozen companies that are competing to build technology to create some killer, and they all have to be in space. And when space was really hard to get to, that became a barrier. As companies like SpaceX and Astra and Rocket Lab and others are building these more affordable, but differentiated launch services, we can get them to space much more easily.
Chris Kemp: (14:13)
It just blows open the opportunity for new innovation. When a startup can get funded and fly in space, it's like back in the days where internet companies had to build data centers. Well, that was really hard. What's harder than building a data center is building a data center in space. So the more we can make space accessible, the more innovation and the more we're going to see more companies start up and solve really important problems.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (14:38)
So you mentioned this, and given your role with the XPRIZE, you've tried to catalyze commercial investors, commercial companies. Where do you see that going forward, and what do you think the role of government is in this industry, if it's not necessarily to help build launch anymore?
Anousheh Ansari: (14:58)
So I think specific to government, there are two areas that government can be helpful. When we launched our first competition, which now it's almost 20, 25 years, more than 25 years, we had to really fight hard. And it took us 10 years to get FAA to agree to give a launch license for our teams. And now, that group has become the group at FAA that gives launch licenses to commercial companies. So supportive regulatory system, at least a regulatory system that's open-minded to allow for innovation to happen, it's important.
Anousheh Ansari: (15:38)
The next stop is the moon. Right now, we're talking about commercial companies actually launching and landing on the moon. The ownership rights of who owns one what on the moon, and when you extract something and then say you bring it back, or you throw it back, you launch it back and it lands someplace else, who owns that? All these ownership, there are so many interesting question that needs to be solved, that I think regulatory bodies need to come together and make sure one, we use space for peaceful reasons, so we don't turn it into another war zone.
Anousheh Ansari: (16:15)
And two, that they create an environment of creativity and collaboration, so people can easily work together and innovate. That's I think very important. At XPRIZE, we're looking at the next 25 years. What can we do? Of course, the fact that we are launching so much, it's important for us to actually clean up after ourselves too. So we're looking at orbital debris as one area of work. We're looking at protecting our planet and asteroid impact. And how can we predict if there will be an asteroid impact? Because right now, we don't track all the objects in orbit easily.
Anousheh Ansari: (16:53)
And I think there are opportunities again for closed loop systems. If we're going to go to the moon, we need closed loop systems. They're good for space, but they will be also good for us here on earth. So there's innovation there that we're looking at. And fuel and energy. So when I say manufacturing, I also include manufacturing using Institute material for fuel, for building material and other things that we need, if we want to build a permanent habitat on the surface of the moon.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (17:25)
You mentioned regulatory. Where does the US fit into that, relative to international cooperation? Are you seeing leader at the US level? Are you seeing it elsewhere?
Anousheh Ansari: (17:38)
I'm seeing everyone protecting their IP and not even wanting to get to the table right now, because they don't have the right answer. And so they don't want to talk about it. That's what I'm seeing right now.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (17:49)
So it'll get sorted once it has to get sorted?
Anousheh Ansari: (17:53)
It has to get sorted. And the more they wait, the more difficult it will be. And maybe it's a good thing, because people will go there and they will make up their own rules. So then they have to catch up.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (18:03)
That has certainly happened throughout history.
Anousheh Ansari: (18:04)
Yes. Yes.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (18:06)
Delian, you're obviously investing, in addition to being a founder at Varda. How do you think about the regulatory environment? How do you think about the government in terms of support for companies that you're looking at within the sector of space?
Delian Asparouhov: (18:22)
I think one thing that's been a really exciting change in space specifically over the past, let's say three or four years, has been that both the DOD and NASA have recognized that they no longer have an innovation problem, but purely an adoption problem. That they are no longer the ones that are pushing the fold on technology as much, but they need to create systems to actually bring that in and draw that in.
Delian Asparouhov: (18:42)
And so as an investor, I think what it's allowed me to do is because you have institutions like the Defense Innovation Unit, that is the only acquisitions group that rolls up directly to the Secretary of Defense, now you can actually rely on the DOD and NASA as a much more consistent stepping stone for much deeper technologies.
Delian Asparouhov: (19:00)
I think in even 2008 or 2009 when you originally were investing in SpaceX, that in some ways was probably as far as one could possibly extend. Versus now, I feel like relative to where technology's at today, we can extend even further because you don't have to go through suing the Air Force to get them to give you contracts. Instead, now, there's just la much more standardized process for that. And if anything, they're incentivized for it.
Delian Asparouhov: (19:22)
DIU actually tracks how many venture dollars their companies actually raise, and very much wants to collaborate with private industry. And so I find it to be a really exciting time where things that previously I always talk about in space investing, you have to get careful to not go so far into the future that you're investing in sci-fi and just never make returns.
Delian Asparouhov: (19:40)
But I do feel like it has actually fundamentally shifted further out where maybe before, I had to really focus on okay, commercial revenues within four years versus now, it's like well, maybe the DOD satisfies even the first two or three. So maybe it's commercial revenues within seven years. And I think that's a really exciting time.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (19:56)
So you think there's a transition point that's happening, where the government can still step in for the first few years, but commercial revenues are close enough for commercial investors to take advantage of?
Delian Asparouhov: (20:06)
I still think in today's day and age, people talk about, "Oh, you should be investing on 20, 30, 40-year time horizons." I think it's also just hard to incentivize employees to work on such long time horizons. People want to see equity prices going up and things getting more exciting. And that's just hard to do unless you have somewhat near term commercial revenues. Otherwise, you do get this glass ceiling.
Delian Asparouhov: (20:25)
And yes, back in the day, we had 2% of the US' GDP focused on this and so the glass ceiling was really high. But right now, without the potential for commercial revenues, you're artificially limiting your company. So even if in theory, there were investors who were willing to invest on such long time horizons, I don't think employees are willing to.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (20:45)
This is very fundamentally venture investing. And the good thing is venture has a long time horizon. I don't think it has that long a time horizon. And you have this weird dynamic that venture time horizons are actually longer than human time horizons in many respects, so you need these things to line up to make the incentives work.
Chris Kemp: (21:03)
I think building on Delian's earlier phases here, when the phase was the government was paying for things, that's what led to the aerospace industry, where you have cost plus contracts. You can only have so much growth if your revenue is cost plus 10%. And so I think what's happened is we've seen a new space tech industry, just like there was the pharmaceutical became biotech. Because when you're commercially driven, you can grow revenues faster.
Chris Kemp: (21:30)
And so pure play space companies that are out building new capabilities, that are directly marketing new data that never existed, to new customers, are growing faster. They're growing the revenues faster. And so the way that analysts have to look at companies is not like an aerospace and defense cost plus selling 100 airplanes to United Airlines kind of business.
Chris Kemp: (21:51)
But it's about the growth that you would see when you have a pure play, tightly integrated, vertically integrated company. It's creating a new capability and delivering it to customers. I think we've entered the space tech era this year.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (22:06)
Right. Where it's now actually businesses, right?
Chris Kemp: (22:08)
Pure play.
Delian Asparouhov: (22:09)
That sell products, and are contractors.
Chris Kemp: (22:12)
That's right.
Delian Asparouhov: (22:12)
That's what I love about the DIU or amongst many of these various groups, AFRL, SpaceWorks, et cetera, that are now interested in no longer just providing contracts to commercial companies, then trying to convince them to follow our spec. But instead they saying, "Oh, you've got a product that's already on the market? Let me go utilize that product."
Delian Asparouhov: (22:27)
So I'm sure when certain DOD groups are coming to Chris and saying, "I would like a rocket lunch," they're not saying, "Oh, I need the rocket's paint to be this color, and for the engines to work like this, et cetera." They're just saying, "Oh great. You have a certain number of kilograms. You can get me to orbit. This is how much you're going to charge me? Great." This is now a product that I can purchase, rather than a contract that I'm trying to put together.
Chris Kemp: (22:44)
I guarantee NASA is not telling Elon how to build rockets.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (22:48)
I am pretty certain that they have a spec sheet that they very much dislike deviating from. There's been a lot of talk about all these mega constellations. SpaceX is obviously the furthest along in terms of launching and providing services.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (23:04)
Chris, how is that playing out from a launch perspective? Where are you seeing the innovation in these constellations? Because you mentioned Planet also. I think Planet and SpaceX represent 99% of the satellites in orbit.
Chris Kemp: (23:17)
Today.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (23:18)
Today. SpaceX may just continue to try to keep that number going.
Chris Kemp: (23:22)
Yeah. I think that there's probably half a dozen mega constellations that are either being deployed now or about to be deployed. And there are companies like Amazon that have designs around multi 1,000 satellite constellations. The difference is instead of a space-based capability being a billion-dollar satellite, developed over 10 years by an aerospace defense company, you're having high tech startups use the technology that's in your smartphone, and by the way, it's way better, and the satellites are flying lower, which means you're inside the earth's magnetosphere. So you don't have to worry about radiation. And you're also refreshing the satellites.
Chris Kemp: (23:59)
Even with Starlink, they're replacing the satellites with new satellites that have in-space laser links. So the kinds of technology refresh cycles, like in Moore's law and in the consumer electronics industry, is now applying to space. And that wasn't true even just a few years ago. And so the rate of innovation in these mega constellations is going to eclipse anything we've ever seen before. And as cars become covered in cameras and drive themselves, they're going to need software updates. They're going to need to take the data that they're collecting and bring it back up to the cloud. There will be an incredible revolution in how we think about space as being intertwined in what we do here.
Delian Asparouhov: (24:41)
These same trends are entirely what enabled Varda as well, where it's people talk about, "Oh, space manufacturing is finally viable because of decreasing launch costs." And it's like, yes, that's a portion of it. But in some ways, an even bigger portion is the fact that a decade ago, we would've had to build our entire space path from the ground up, entirely from scratch. It would've been a multi-billion dollar project.
Delian Asparouhov: (25:00)
Instead, today, I can focus on what we're particularly good at, which is making those products in space and then bringing them down. Everything from the flight computer to the solar panel, to the in-space propulsion, all that stuff has numerous commercial providers, all of whom are increasing their capabilities, decreasing their costs every single year. And that's a lot.
Delian Asparouhov: (25:19)
There'll be cost curves and capability increases that are actually allowing something like Varda to exist today. In some ways, even more so than the Falcon 9 becoming reusable. That's the cherry on top. But the fact that we can close a deal with Rocket Lab to purchase their Photon platform, which is their in-house satellite platform, rather than develop it ourselves is the only reason why something like Varda is capable to be done today.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (25:41)
Here, you're seeing a lot of stack developments that started in software, has moved into hardware, has now moved into the hardware of space. You talked a little bit about trying to invest in science, not science fiction. How can people draw the line as investors, for the things that are actually possible today, versus maybe one day?
Delian Asparouhov: (26:04)
I think these things are actually simple with logical analysis in the space industry, especially as I've gotten deeper into it. I think people think of space as this very broad, hand wavy. How do I actually understand it? But when you actually dive into it, the number of CEOs or founders that have raised north of let's say 10 million is actually probably on the order of I would guess 20. There isn't a space industry. There's 20 people.
Delian Asparouhov: (26:27)
And so if you can solve a problem for one of those 20 people in the next four years, then you have a viable company that's not sci-fi. And if you do not, then it's sci-fi because who's going to be your customer? And that's especially true if you're selling into space. Now, if you're selling the more broad groups, like Varda is, where it's like our customers aren't actually other space companies, it's a little different.
Delian Asparouhov: (26:46)
But a lot of times I get impatient on a space thing, and you're like, "Yes, we're going to sell to the other space companies." And I'm like, "Great. Which one?" They're like, "Some future hypothetical one." I'm like, "Okay. So in order for me to believe in your company, I also need to believe in a hypothetical other company that hasn't been started yet, doesn't exist, and nobody is working on to work in order for you to have a customer?"
Delian Asparouhov: (27:04)
That's I think, the simple delineation. If Chris or the other 19 CEOs aren't going to buy your stuff, there's probably nobody that will.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (27:11)
Right. I refer to that as startup squared. It's like, you need this startup to work, and then you need this other startup to work. And you're not really sure the likelihood of it, at least the second one. Chris, you've gone through the whole capital formation cycle in this industry. How has that conversation with investors evolved over the last ... When did you start Astra? How long has it been?
Chris Kemp: (27:31)
We started in 2016. Yeah, we're not yet five years old.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (27:34)
Okay. So I feel like that's a lifetime right now. So it's like the equivalent of 25 years. How has the conversation changed during that period?
Chris Kemp: (27:42)
Yeah. I think that if you go back five years, we were still in the pioneer and the hobbyist phase, if you will. So you look at Anousheh, you look at what Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos just did, they're pioneers. It's like the Charles Lindberghs and the Amelia Earharts of the space generation. And so tonight, when the SpaceX launch happens, we're going to go from being pioneers to being passengers. And I think that's a huge evolution. And going from the hobbyist to the entrepreneur phase is a huge evolution.
Chris Kemp: (28:15)
So now we see entrepreneurs going, and there are space funds. There are space ETFs. There are business models. There are companies, there are many companies going public in this space. So we've reached a point in history where space is mainstream, and we've got analysts saying it's going to be a one, two trillion-dollar industry with double digit growth over the next decade. That's a real business. And so it's not hobbyists anymore. It's real, it's venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, ETFs, analysts covering it as a sector, space tech sector.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (28:50)
I wanted to close with you, Anousheh, because I think there's something from ... I've talked to a few people who've been to space, and it always seems to very fundamentally change their viewpoint. And so maybe I would just close it with, what are the things that you wish people understood, had they had the opportunity to go to space like you've been?
Anousheh Ansari: (29:12)
It's an important question. And one of the reason I tell people I wish our policymaker, our leader, the government's leader would actually have this opportunity to go to space, because one fundamental truth that intuitively, but it becomes real when you're in space, is the fact that there's only one planet. That those maps that you see in geography books that has these lines drawn, there is nothing separating us.
Anousheh Ansari: (29:44)
If the pandemic taught us one thing, it's that you cannot contain anything, any particular part of the world. So problems spread, and good things spread too. So we need to look at our planet as our collective home, that it requires our collaboration to make it a viable place for life. And it requires us to live in peace and harmony, and in a sustainable manner with the environment we live in.
Anousheh Ansari: (30:13)
We do that in our own homes, but we think that our home protects us from everything else. And that's not true. This is a realization I had in space, and I really hoped I had a way to convey it. So it becomes part of the decision-making for everyone in every business, in everything you do in life, and everything you do on a daily basis.
Anousheh Ansari: (30:35)
Because that's what it takes to make this planet a place for all of us to have children, to raise our children and their grandchildren, and be very happy and hopeful about the future that we are going to have.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson: (30:51)
Well, hopefully, more people get that experience. And I want to thank all of you for having this conversation.
Anousheh Ansari: (30:57)
Thank you.
Delian Asparouhov: (30:58)
And thank you.