good morning good afternoon and good evening uh it's an honor and great fun to join you today for the sixth and final program of the oxford smart space series uh today we're going to discuss space venturing and try to figure out how space venturing differs from other sectors um the space sector is growing at an unprecedented pace which really makes us uh want to think about this prominent in the news of course are a few wealthy individuals who are doing things and uh their ventures but thousands of new companies are forming in the commercial space sector and these work alongside with space agencies of various countries governments aerospace primes both public and private and they get funding from public and private and even customers beyond governments are developing in this panel today we'll explore the relationship between the space sector you know the intense cost requirements the intense new technology requirements and the immense expense that's going to happen if you want to do business in space with much less evident near-term financial results and significant governance concerns i mean who regulates what's going on in space and who cleans up your mess afterward i'm robert eberhardt i direct research at stanford university's graduate school of business where i study entrepreneurship and how it shapes society by the way i have my phds in management science from stanford university and i have publications which span theoretical constructs of how institutional change has complex effects on new firms and how entrepreneurship is changing society relevant to space i was also a staff scientist at berkeley space science lab where i designed and built and conducted interferometry observations of new exoplanetary systems and yes i can speak to business before my academic career i was a partner at pacific rim partners a venture capital firm and i was the founder and ceo of wine and style in tokyo japan which distributed capital california wines to the japanese market before wine style was executive in the semiconductor business here in silicon valley i'm joined today by three spectacular individuals who will no doubt offer unique and insightful perspectives on our question today uh first may i present miss candice johnson uh ms johnson has a long and distinguished career as the founder and co-founder of space ventures such as scs astra sas global laurel teleport europe europe online and she's played critical roles in bringing about the space sector leaders including iridium and ils she's a cap venture capitalist investor she's been a member of the strategic committee for the irish capital for the past decade and recently was the president of the european business angel network and is now president emeritus she's served on numerous boards and she's a founding president of va team the association of private telecom operators and co-founder as if all that wasn't enough of the global telecom women's network and the co-founder of the middle east and north african business angel network in the african business angel network i'm very proud that she's joined us today um next we have mr mike lawton who's also a spectacular and varied individual he's an oxfordshirt based uh serial entrepreneur he's the founder of oxford space systems uh an internationally and multi-award-winning space technology business based in the harwell space cluster uh it's ranked by the way number 52 in the top 100 uh uk fastest growing companies back in 200 2018. um the company's seen really as an example our uk success story in space but oss is not mike's only play it's his third technology businesses other adventures include remote technology business uh around biofuel technology and a joint venture in india which won him a title of green entrepreneur for india in 2009 he's been awarded the barclays bank startup entrepreneur in the year in 2018. just numerous awards the from space system for the oxfordshire business person the year in 2018 and he's a keen supporter of all of our activities here at oxford and across the uk to get uh space and technology businesses going in the uk he's also assisted government agencies and been part of numerous nato innovation efforts and finally we have with us my dear friend dr alex mcdonald alexander mcdonald dr mcdonald is the chief economist at nasa uh before that he was the senior record advisor to for the office of the administrator and was a founding the program executive of nasa's emerging space office with the office of the chief technologist he's an author he's the author of a number of nasa reports including emerging including topics about emergency in space in the 21st century how public private partnerships uh developed and the economic development of businesses in low-earth orbit he's former executive and commercial space at nasa's jet propulsion laboratory research faculty member at carnegie mellon university and has worked for a numerous space research including at nasa ames research center he got his undergraduate degree at queen's university in canada his master's degree at university of british columbia and he got his phd at the university of oxford um okay now for some housekeeping please ask questions using the chat function located somewhere in your screen uh that some software design decide software designer uh decided it was logical to put it'll probably confuse us anyway but uh good luck in finding it i'll happily pass these ask these questions of the panelists as the appropriate opportunity arises okay now let me please just let me set the stage for the discussion uh today

um by the way is this showing here let me see okay good basically the question i want to set up today is you want to be a space entrepreneur

sorry technology there we

the go that i'm going to pose to these people to our panelists today is about the expense and return we're going to get out of doing something in space and the stage at which business is being con conducted because it's really really expensive to do stuff in space if you're just going to put 100 kilogram object up there and use nasa to do it they're going to charge you millions of dollars just to put it there and once it's there somebody on the iss touches that that's going to cost millions of dollars more and that's just to put 100 100 pound or 100 kilogram package up there um suppose we had to do this 50 times a year to generate revenue suppose we had to do had to put 36 satellites in orbit to do some surveillance activity doing business in space is really really expensive and so far the commercial reasons to go is kind of low basically surveillance looking down from above data transfer moving information around and of course navigation weather and trash cleanup are really basically government issues basically it's colossally expensive to go and in human cases it's really hard to have people even survive in space yet there's an investment frenzy going on we have a thousand space adventures that got investments recently and over 160 billion dollars was invested since 2009 in fact by some accounts the space sector is the fastest growing venture capital investment area in the united states we started all this with kind of a business and government model we all know about the saturn five the government demanded 12 of these and in 2010 those are about 36 billion dollars each so but you total that up that's about half a trillion dollars of technical demand uh that that rifled through the economy and basically the demand was advanced the most the the you know we're purchasing the most advanced electronics um machinery and we had major advances in human capital and particularly an organization and making things happen silicon valley owes its existence many people think because of that program the government demanded advanced electronics it demanded advanced machinery and so the government created a market for technology that wouldn't have existed otherwise of course we slowed down and we stopped because basically it's really can't sustain signal point um exploration with that kind of money and the problem is that it was either going to become science purely with a small audience or exploitation with a private audience and that's what we were kind of waiting for and maybe it's flowering now but i don't think we should be pessimistic after all after columbus first voyage it was 50 years for a major follow-up in 103 years until anything commercial started going and the regular voyages that went between europe and the united states were commercial after all this is what the world looked like to columbus and the initial voyages just like in space were government funded and they used advanced technology of the time to conduct their voyages they weren't commercial or when successfully commercial it took only about a it was about a hundred years later that commercialization and settlement started started happening uh in the technology and the technology advanced to make that happen now we've just come from an exploratory phase in space it took us 40 years to get from robert goddard's first liquid fueled rockets up to the first flight of the saturn 5. it's slowed down a bit it's taken 54 years to get this far but the interests are different maybe it's not exploratory it's per its business and of course the businesses are things like information is clearly obvious um transportation moving things up is now developing uh uh as as a viable business there's tourism um and i think some of these things are going to get going in two years as they were going to get going two years before that and get going tears before that but it's probably going to happen in two years and extraction is possible manufacturing even uh might be done efficiently in space but the limitations are important how many transportation needs do we have a year that are not being met tourism this is really expensive um information how much is unmet need and how much to go in extraction and mining and manufacturing basically it's cheaper to do it here in almost every case so the question we want to ask today whatever you can do up there is vastly more complex and expensive the energy is required to get an orbital colossal if people are involved the cost and complexity goes way up all the initial oxygen all the food has to be lifted up the implied expense complexity suggests that a product or service will have to be very expensive and the customers therefore may be difficult to identify so the question for our panelists today are given the almost colossal cost of placing anything especially humans into space what specific money-making opportunities do you see excluding surveillance and data transfer that will present real commercial reasons for humans to live and work in space and with that i want to turn the stage over to my new friend ms johnson well it's great to be here and thank you so much for the introduction you know i don't agree with everything that you said i'm a free marketeer um my father started the first well he worked on the first satellites for the united states air force and then he our government and then he actually started westar which was the first private domestic satellite um i myself started uh ses astra in 1983 today it is um luxembourg's largest individual taxpayer and uh very very uh successful um i was everything that i've done i've always done in terms of of privately financed commercially oriented space and i'd also just like to mention that you know you mentioned what i had done but today currently i'm the chair of seraphim space corporate advisory board um and you may have just seen that we are doing an ipo it's on our website so i can talk about it and uh it's the world's first publicly uh first uh space fund to go on the stock exchange so we're very very excited about this i'm the vice chair of north star which is doing uh space situational awareness and hyperspectral um earth observation uh i am uh one of the co-founders of oceania women's network satellite which is um which is one of the first and largest investors in pacific and we're bringing broadband internet to the pacific islands so obviously i think that there are a lot of opportunities uh for commercial um success in space things ha some things have not changed one it's always a question of the bang for the buck and this is you know from the very beginning and secondly you know i think also my dad told me that you know when they first put up the first satellites everybody said oh johnny you know that's great but what are we going to do with this and then he always you know completed the question by saying and from that point on human ingenuity and human imagination has always found new uh uses for space so i i see obviously i mean we are in the golden era of space because of the democratization because of the miniaturization of components i remember telling some russian entrepreneurs don't come and talk to me until um you know we can have one thousand dollars for one kilo um and you know we're pretty much there um so um you know the i see so many opportunities i am an entrepreneur so one i think definitely telecommunications is still very much a um a great source of profit generation um sustainability you know you talked about earth observation but quite frankly it's much more about the environment about climate change um space satellites actually fulfill all of the sdgs um everything having to do with resilience we need to have resilience and in case something happens you know space is there as as a backup um everything having to do with iot today everything that is uh you can put a sensor on everything and you can collect that data and work on it and bring it down um you also have and uh i know that i'm only have three minutes i'll go go quickly here um obviously insurance the the whole insurance industry is being uh disrupted beforehand they used to insure satellites that's not so much the case uh it's not their biggest money generator they have to find new ways of insurance but to use space for insuring cars bicycles buildings all which have sensors etc also i'd like to just talk real quickly about the patents on new technology that could be developed in space but which would be used on earth you know if we think about the cell phone if we think about gore-tex that was those were technologies that were developed when we first went to the moon um i'm talking now about renewable energy uh quantum computing um new types of um of textiles new types of energy all which can be developed and then put down here uh on earth so um i am very excited obviously about the financial returns and the um immaterial returns uh of investing in space uh for our universe and our planet and our humanity thank you so much for those fascinating remarks i enjoyed every perspective you just gave there thank you so much um i'm just glad you joined us uh next i'd like to invite uh mr mike lawton to uh give his share his perspectives and thoughts and yes my slides were hopefully deliberately provocative so go for it great thanks robert uh well candice touched on a lot of great points there and i'm going to stick to the exam question that you set so not talk about earth observation and and data relay but those are of course i think the reason you excluded them is because there are great examples where there are many companies being very commercially successful today including canada's company scs for normal revenues profit generating from the use of space assets so yeah it's very expensive to get hardware on orbit but that doesn't mean even today there's some fantastic business models uh to be had and of course direct-to-home television has really dominated and given us examples of some of those profitable space businesses currently um around but to um uh to make an observation um i think it's very easy to criticize a young fledgling industry and trying to you know kind of almost snub it off on the vine before it even grows of course it's expensive like any new technology it's always incredibly expensive and i'm reminded some of the comments made by i think it was the chairman of ibm whose own company actually thought the world would not actually really need their technology i think he's famously on record as saying in the late 50s very early 60s the world would never need more than five mainframe computers because you just couldn't see the use of them but where are we today we all carry around a computer that's way more powerful than ibm's product with us everywhere in fact we've probably got several on on our bodies uh and we have the same with the mobile phone industry when they were first launched they were no one's ever going to buy this technology it's way too cumbersome way too expensive but of course technology advances cost collapse and now it becomes ubiquitous so i think we're at the very very early stages of a phenomenally exciting and lucrative industry but to directly answer your question what i think those first uh or additional exciting revenues are going to come from you touched on it space tourism it's an obvious place to start you can target high net worth individuals sub-orbital flights in reality rather than getting to orbit initially but that's a fast turnaround business with no end of people queuing up to put down a quarter of a million dollars to get that first 90 minute flight and of course i think it's going to follow the same trajectory as commercial flight when we first started having commercial aircraft once again it was only the preserve of the incredible rich uh to to to take part in that in that uh in that technology but with advances uh we can now all fly to different continents well if you live in the uk you can actually fly overseas cheaper than it is to get a train uh to put technology into into context so i think tourism is probably going to be the next lucrative industry and then i'm very excited about manufacturing of novel materials on on orbit if you can get into low earth orbit you're now free of microbe you're free of the earth's gravity and effects like sedimentation so you can produce very high purity diamonds much larger than we can produce on on earth so i think that's going to open up some very interesting avenues and sidestepping or bypassing the issue of lifting all the materials that we need on orbit i think there's going to be very interesting uh developments and opportunities for recycling on orbit most satellites don't wear out they simply run out of fuel and end up pointing in the wrong direction but they still have very usable electronics materials solar panels you know we spent hundreds of millions getting very high value high purity materials on orbit let's recycle them so i would imagine space robotics and the use and recycling of on orbit materials is going to be a growth industry and then much much further out extraction and mining of of asteroids incredibly highly pure highly valuable uh assets orbiting our solar system if you're free of the earth's turbulent weather systems and plate tectonics which churn all the minerals and alls together we have fantastically pure incredibly high value running to trillions of dollars in orbit in our solar system makes hell of a lot of sense to secure those bring them back to low earth orbit and mine them there so well there's my crystal wall and uh look forward to getting into deeper discussion as we go on uh just absolutely terrific and uh i can't wait to uh give my wife one of these huge diamonds that you manufacture um beats the tiny little thing i gave when we got married uh now i'd like to switch the stage to uh my friend dr alex mcdonald and um i hear some insights from uh nasa well uh thanks bob and it's been a pleasure listening to all the comments so far i i think i agree with many of them actually even the ones that are mutually contradictory uh you know for me to answer the exam question as it was put right i think it's also important to figure out how we got to where we are today so uh literally today we have 10 people living and working in space and interestingly as of yesterday we now have two different vehicles on which we live uh the international space station of course has been continuously inhabited for over 20 years uh which is a significant accomplishment that we're very proud of at nasa and we're proud of the international partnership that has allowed that to happen but as of yesterday a new space station built by china just received three crew members and the intent is for that station to also be permanently inhabited uh so this is a really exciting moment so thinking about you know where we might be going in the future uh you know as an economic story and i i tend to think it's it's at least sometimes useful to think about how we got here and from my perspective how we got here is is a mix of both supply side and demand side phenomena and on the supply side what we have is a number of people who for literally uh well over 100 years have for whatever intrinsic reasons they have uh decided that they want a future where humanity travels into space and lives amongst the stars and for also over 100 years individuals have dedicated their their life and therefore their labor hours to making that uh future possible they have built rocket companies uh you know we are very excited about the current uh venture capital uh kind of explosion in the space sector um but the very first venture capital backed uh company was uh reaction motors incorporated which was funded in the 1940s by laurent rockefeller so a lot of this isn't as new as we think but that's actually what has allowed us to get here we've had generations of people supplying their labor to try to make a future for humanity and space possible uh and that really kind of covers the supply side obviously a certain amount of people need to be uh you know paid for their labors but not everybody some early innovation was done by people who basically sell finance uh and that's an important source of uh of labor and development as well but then the question is well where do you get the really massive amounts of money that bob was referring to to kind of get the apollo program going to to get the uh get the mercury program going um well in my analysis you know that really comes from essentially the demand uh originally by nation states but now increasingly from individuals for signaling goods and uh i'm sure many folks here are familiar with signaling but it's essentially uh an action a costly action that can incredibly transmit information uh about the person undertaking that action so in the context of space flight one of the reasons that space flight was so uh important geopolitically during the cold war was that it was very costly it was very complex and undertaking it and executing it a credibly transmitted information about the nation states that we're doing it that is now also true for individuals and so i i think the signaling function is is a big part of of the demand side of the equation of how we have currently uh inhabited platforms in space and if you think about the geopolitical level uh what's interesting about signaling is that you can as a geopolitical actor you can signal a desire for for a competitive posture but you can also signal desire for a cooperative posture and uh you know the international space station is very much a function of the ladder uh and it is uh you know 20 years going strong and and we think we've got another good decade in it yet um so that is kind of sufficient to get us to where we have uh gotten to and where we might be going for a little bit you know further still that uh combination of signaling and the intrinsic motivations of individuals uh will uh i think be able to take us to certainly uh more people in orbit than the ten we have today uh and also i think it'll be able to take us to uh humans who are living and working around the moon certainly the next major national project that nasa is engaging in with its partners is the gateway project a a a crew-tended vehicle that will orbit the moon and which will be part of our overall artemis uh program that will return uh humans to the surface of the moon uh and so i think those those forces will will allow us to get there for sure um the interesting thing from an economic perspective though is that once you're there the marginal cost of doing new things is actually quite less and that's where i think a lot of the stuff that mike was referring to will come in right um not just the tourism but also the cultural products you know think back to chris hadfield when he uh somewhat famously sang uh david bowie's uh ground control to major tom from the space station uh and uh produced one of the early kind of youtube breakout music videos from space uh and the research uh materials uh activities are also really interesting activities that can result in economic value uh one of the ones that we're very excited about is we're seeing really significant results in terms of creating uh better fiber optic cables in space uh for things like laser applications uh because in microgravity and also when there's no convection uh you can actually have the fiber optic uh cables be potentially made with a much higher transparency which which opens up the application so that's just the start uh of where we are uh and i think we're we're definitely directory to be increasing the number of people living in space and it'll be fun to see what happens as a result

oh wow thank you so much alex um it's always fun to be on a panel with people smarter than me and it's a really cool i really enjoyed this idea of signaling and i never thought of it that way before and your other insights so thank you very very much i want to uh move to questions now um i have a couple of my own that i'm going to switch to the the audience questions um first for any of the panel much of the opportunities that mike and candace talked about sustainability climate change um you know another place to be these suffer from the tragedy of the commons i mean how are you going to get somebody to pick up your trash and uh you know the climate change is multinational right and so how do we get everyone to participate or does one country have to do that so i like to think of how you're going to solve the tragedy of the commons as you do stuff in space and then the second thing i'd like you to react to and you can react in any order much of what we're doing now appeals to a very small and very wealthy and affluent segment of the population somebody who can afford a 200 000 flight or buy diamonds um you know or access much of the uh this is a small segment of the population and are we solving problems uh of ordinary people and people of their world so let me just have the panel react to that for a minute or two and then we'll go to audience questions okay well i'll i'll you know i'll take you thank you again and um thank you and and and here again i i think you're deliberately provoking me uh so well first of all you know we always say that it starts in space it never ends in space and so really anything that we do when we're sending signals collecting signals etc they really um you know there is a much much exponential more exponential use when you talk about the tragedy of the of the commons and and and and people picking up um uh debris i'm actually working with indonesia at the moment which will be um the g20 uh meeting place for uh 2022 next year and they have a really big problem with um trash and so what uh what i'm suggesting to them is to indeed use first of all the broadcast opportunity of space which we all know is great mass consumer broadcast to get the message out and then to inspire the um the the the mass community to pick up the trash and to also do this by using ai etc so i think that there's a real opportunity there and and um that you know that the space can be used to also uh solve the problem also with the the mass broadcasting uh part and then the second thing you know you talk about um tourism and and diamonds and everything you know quite frankly that is not at all where i see the opportunities uh the opportunities are are really with the young kids today you know when i was six which was 62 years ago i was you know building my own transistor radio um then a couple of years ago people were building their computers and now kids are building their own satellites and their own rockets and and they're doing it usually not for the you know the big profit and everything these kids are doing it because they think that they can use space to help us create a better world so um yeah wonderful thank you so much really really good mike you want to take a swatch at that yeah yeah i'll dive in yeah i i use that quite often use the term the kind of nirvana syndrome or nirvana complex you know there's always the argument of why are we spending a huge amount over here when we haven't solved all the problems kind of over here um but that's not that that's not how mankind is you know why did we start exploring overseas when we had problems with plague and illness back at home why did the realm spend a huge amount to go and explore because well we always do that humans are natural creatures of exploration and we are going to do that it's just in our nature um but that doesn't mean it's dead money when we explore we discover we bring back new materials we invent new materials we discover new medicines new way of curing diseases new way new ways of being sufficient how do we purify water so we have all these ripple benefits from what perhaps initially look like superfluous use of of money and a waste of time and activity and i'm sure alex will dive in on nasa's side i think 8 000 plus patents developed by nasa most of which are being employed terrestrially and commercially and most people probably don't realize velcro was a byproduct of the space program we have dried baby food which is saving lives in developing countries as a direct result of our investment in space technology and i could go on there's many many more so i think it's a bit short-sighted to say why why spend money on space and yes it is still the preserve of some very rich high net worth individuals but so was every other industry when it first started cars transportation aircraft even crossing the atlantic initially you had to be very wealthy but as soon as money starts flowing into these industries that's when we see technology expansion costs collapse and then it becomes more and more accessible to everybody i go back to my example a mobile phone when it first launched it was only the preserve of rich businessmen now it's unusual for people in developing nations not to actually have a digital mobile phone so as i said a very young industry we're just getting going we will see these benefits but just give it time we need the investment and the development thank you thank you i'm one who delights in that optimism thank you very very much um hey alex do you have anything to add here yeah sure mike did a great job of the spin-off argument as as we sometimes like to call it so i'll not repeat that there but i do want to pick up on your on your uh your space debris and the tragedy of the commons aspect here bob um you know it's very interesting when when we were first going into space the 1960s there was a real international understanding that space problems were global problems that that really if we're going to address our challenges in space we're going to need global cooperation and that was something that really was quite literally you know established as as global law through things like every space treaty um and and one of the things that i think is is is is a challenge going forward is that i think we've had a bit of a practical erosion of that over the last couple decades and uh some of that comes from uh obviously military activities uh the the kind of emergence of uh asap tests uh essentially anti-satellite tests that basically destroy satellites in orbit and then produce a significant amount of debris so far we've only had tests of these things but should this ever become an actual war fighting issue as in fact a number of militaries around the world have suggested they are preparing for uh space debris might become a a literally quite uncontrollable and unmanageable problem and and i think we're at some significant risk of that happening um similarly we have uh you know in our in our enthusiasm for uh for for new commercial activities and quite quite rightly we have encouraged a significant expansion of satellites we're now looking at constellations of tens of thousands of satellites uh in orbit which uh even in the kind of uh the 90s during the teledesk era we weren't quite really uh imagining things of quite that scale certainly on multiple constellations of that scale simultaneously um and and i don't think we've really uh kind of figured out how this is really going to be managed from a space debris perspective for the decades to come um there haven't really been a a significant set of agreements internationally between uh the nation states um and even within nation states there's not always agreement with an industry about how we should manage these things so um i think it's a real challenge i think it's actually one of the most significant challenges for the decades to come and i hope some of the folks listening to uh this conversation uh we'll look into that and i agree also kenneth that there are of course business opportunities in that but the business opportunities are are downstream let's say of uh international international coordinated action um because these things are are going to require significant investment to address so if i may if i may yeah so um uh alex uh you know i did say i am the vice chair of north star and we're doing space situational awareness and space traffic management just to um you know solve that problem of space debris which it can be very very bad because what happens is you know besides you know messing up the universe uh it it has more for potential for um when con collisions uh etc so the we are working on this we're the first space-based space situational awareness company in the world uh we agree with you it is absolutely uh um a huge problem that needs to be solved i'd always tell everybody it's like when you know cars were on the road they didn't have any traffic management and so you know now we have so many satellites in space we need to put into place not only rules for space traffic management but also a way how to monitor them and um and and avoid the collision so i agree with you it's um it's it's a very exciting place to be in yeah mike did you have a comment sorry alex didn't you know i'm glad to hear that candace there and you know maybe maybe that will hopefully mean that luxembourg may uh kind of take a lead in in space debris international coordination in the same way that it's taken the lead over the last 10 years in space resources i think that would be wonderful to see well that's true

that's just terrific and uh we could we could probably spend hours on how we're going to get these international agreements going when we can't seem to agree on almost anything else um anyway um let me go to some of the audience questions now because we've been asked a number of absolutely fascinating questions uh for example from chris at oxford uh wants to know is private investment uh and we have you here more interested in space solutions to help things on earth or in general space exploration infrastructure to go and focus outward mike why don't you grab that first i i would say knowing the investors that i've worked with uh it's all about the financial return and unfortunately um investors venture capitalists are bound by typically the life of the fund and that's around about 10 years so it means invariably you've got to focus on investing in those businesses that are going to give a return to the fund in a pretty quick time and unfortunately for the space sector that does mean space as a service you're delivering something pretty quickly that you can start generating revenue on in the next couple of years or at least within the life of the fund to increase the value of the company let's receive that investment unfortunately i think things like space infrastructure and space exploration you know asteroid mining are currently beyond the the ability or the interest zone purely because of the financial constraints on existing funds and that's why i think it's still the preserve of entities such as issa and nasa those that aren't bound by short-term time horizons um yeah so yeah that's that's a long-winded way of saying it's all about the immediate returns and therefore it is very uh focused on commercial returns uh for i think space-based businesses rather than infrastructure thank you um okay let me go to another question unless the rest of you want to jump in there um real quickly if i made two points okay first of all you know ses 1983 the first money that we got was from an angel investor count roland de kerguele one million dollars at the time we didn't even have euros and so angel investors um uh can have what we call patient capital yeah like you know infrastructure family offices etc so so that is why you see a lot of angel investors in space the second thing is that with our seraphim ipo we are doing an evergreen fund so that we don't have that problem about the time limits fantastic okay um i'm interested daisuke from japan is asking us how do we accelerate or attract more attention to you know from the non-space related companies to get them interested in opportunities in the space market um boy who wants to grab that first no i'll actually take a quick one with that um you know it's uh it's a great question it's actually one that uh it's kind of a long-standing area of interest for lots of people uh thinking about how do we how do we build uh you know space economic activity in general um and it's interesting you know uh bob kind of showed some of the early costs that it you know that it costs to send money to the space station uh but actually in many respects that policy uh was put in place uh relatively recently to allow for exactly the kind of thing that you're talking about and in japan jaxa has been doing similar activities uh in terms of you know sending up yeast uh for i think there was a kieran space beer right um and i think this is one of the things that commercialization can enable is that uh you know while it may not be really worth uh government subsidy to enable that and in fact uh you know we've received you know kind of direction from from the us congress that that we shouldn't be subsidizing these types of activities such as marketing activities for example on the international space station that's not because people don't want them to happen right people are very interested in a a commercial market emerging out of that and i really think that that's going to be something that is going to be a an interesting growth area because once you have uh private suborbital vehicles private orbital vehicles um whatever business arrangement you can arrange take whatever you can you know uh pay someone to take up uh you can get that engagement at a much lower marginal cost than has ever been possible before um so i i think really it's it just comes down to figuring out what uh what what business engagement you want to want to have figuring out how much it costs what the minimum viable product in that area is going to be and uh you know seeding those types of ideas across as uh as many industries as as you think are are what's eating oh thank you very very much um let me move on to another question that i just think is a fascinating thing to talk about uh chris from the united kingdom wants to know why all these americans um sorry um has questions of uh he wants to know about questions of data privacy we reconcile with the pro data transmission in space i mean you know it's one thing when it's in your office and you can move it around but you're going to transmit it across the world basically where anybody can pick it up at least once a day and many countries have playful that can decode stuff so um yeah how do we reconcile the needs of privacy having people's information up there and candace you seem eager so go for it well you know i read that question and i said i would it's like somebody put put the question in for for us uh so uh one of the companies that seraphim hasn't invested in is a company called arkit and it's from the uk chris it's from the uk and we are basically doing quantum uh computing via satellite in the cloud and we are and and when i say we i mean the portfolio company is distributing the key security key in the most encrypted uh safe solution that you can possibly use so this is really um uh it is absolutely um i'll just read a little bit quantum cloud puts a lightweight agent at any endpoint device this software creates an unlimited number of symmetric keys with partner devices the process is very simple and fast but is powered by quantum satellites in the cloud and you can read more about it under arkit but i saw that question i said whoa fantastic anyone else want to grab that too all right let me move on to we are doing an ipo and they're valued at 1.4 fantastic and more power to them and i have great confidence in any company that tells me that my information is secure um let me see uh let me go to question interesting question for laurent in luxembourg he asked when is this going to happen when are we going to get a profit out of uh recycling and reuse and low earth armament it's a good proposition but boy when is this going to happen we're going to start generating cash mike i think this works for you i i think it's like saying when we start seeing profit from recycling companies on earth you know it's incredibly tough to make a recycling business highly profitable terrestrially um so i think those challenges extend to orbit i i think it actually comes down and starts with those designing spacecraft because at the moment every satellite and spacecraft built has not been designed to be disassembled on orbit so i think it needs to start with appropriate design techniques and it probably will start with some of the most complex and expensive structures to to start recycling so for instance one of the challenges is having large aperture antennas on orbit either for communication link or or earth observation so very expensive very high risk structures so once they've deployed and locked into place that's really a high value asset you would love to be able to take from from an old satellite where perhaps the electronics is aged and you don't really want to use that generation of hardware anymore but you still want that fundamental foundation bit of technology such as the antenna and also solar panels yes they degrade when they when they're when they're on orbit but they still have a useful end of life energy and once again a solar array a solar ray is an incredibly complex bit of technology and once it's deployed on orbit that's a really useful bit of hardware to potentially transplant to to another satellite um so it starts with design when is it going to happen your crystal ball is probably as accurate as mine but work is taking place to understand things like robotic systems how we manipulate satellites on orbit how we engage with satellites those technologies are being developed and demonstrated today but until someone makes money yeah that's the tough one yeah yeah okay i really appreciate that and good answer go please alex just because it's a good example of you know where you stand depends on where you sit so uh from the perspective of human space flight and space stations uh we're already there we already invest significant amount of money in improving our water and oxygen recycling processes and in fact that's because if we're going to successfully get to mars and back you know still even if we have significant transformations on the cost of launch every every kilogram of mass is still going to be very expensive and even more so for interplanetary human missions and that puts a premium uh at recycling your water which is one of your your high mass activities or your high mass uh kind of support functions that you need for that mission so we've already been been investing millions of dollars in recycling water systems and improving recycling water systems for decades and we continue to expect to uh do that for for decades to come because it's actually a really critical enabling technology for interplanetary human spaceflight thank you very very much when we uh worked with the state department and japan and jaxa on uh opportunities for space one of the main things we thought was exploration of mars and even farther would generate technologies and recycling and biomass and how we stay alive for that period of time with limited resources which seems to be really relevant so that's really cool hey um one more uh and well hope we have time for a few more but this one i think uh i'd like to ask alex and then uh david from istanbul asks us does innovation space require international conflict do we have to be in tension in competition with other countries to make this happen yeah that's that's a great question david and um you know i i think the international space station uh really proves that it doesn't um and and and i don't say that lightly right i mean it it you can't underestimate um the significant role that you know national security and military demand has played in in the development of uh of the basic enabling technology of space flight which of course is rocketry know robert goddard who was kind of the first space entrepreneur in the u.s uh he interestingly enough got most of his money throughout his multi-decade career pursuing liquid fuel rocketry from the guggenheim family but he was convinced that he would not be able to get to space until he finally got uh military funding and of course when the very first rocket breached the atmosphere of the earth and got into uh you know the approximate vacuum of space it was in fact a military rocket the v2 uh that achieved that and and uh you know icbms are the result of of both uh conflict and uh space entrepreneurial passion around the world um which is not something we should we should kind of take lately um but i think you know humans have a great capacity uh for you know at least wanting a better world as well and the international space station is is really one of the most uh beautiful expressions i can think about um you know if you're not familiar with the history in uh state of the union address in the 1980s uh ronald reagan kind of stood up in front of congress and said that the us was going to build a space station space station freedom and it was going to do it with its international partners at the time uh that was canada uh the european space agency uh and uh japan uh but over the course of a decade or so as as the project developed and then the the soviet union fell replaced by the russian federation uh it it actually became a u.s foreign policy goal to incorporate russia a former adversary into this project uh in part because they had of course very significant human spaceflight capabilities but also because it was recognized that a partnership here could potentially prevent um some of the the aerospace workforce from you know maybe selling their services and their expertise uh for potentially destabilizing military technologies elsewhere and that's been incredibly successful i mean we're now literally 30 years on from from that uh that foreign policy decision and even though we have a lot of challenges obviously uh between the u.s and russia today uh our partnership in space is incredibly strong uh we could not be operating the international space station without our russian partners and i think it really is a true example of the ability of humans around this world to cooperate together on important projects to muster our resources to achieve kind of wondrous results that can inspire people to maybe be more cooperative than competitive in the future and i'm very hopeful that we're going to see future such uh results we already know we have one project in the making uh which is the gateway as i mentioned and that is a partnership that's already been agreed upon uh by canada europe and japan uh but the world is returning to the moon uh it's not just the us it's it's a number of international parties and uh my hope is that we will find an ability to cooperate again on the lunar surface uh in peace um just like we have in low earth orbit but that's not guaranteed and so all of us who care about that around the world uh i hope we all act to try and make that future uh the one that we uh the one that we live in that we we end up acting to live in that timeline rather than some of the other timelines that we might find ourselves in excellent uh answer in fact um i if anybody wants to say i didn't we only got one minute left before i give you another great example of innovation that doesn't come from conflict or competition and it's kick-starting entire element of the space sector and that's the cubesat that was born out of the frustration of of a u.s professor wanting to introduce students to space engineering frustrated at the cost so i thought that must be a cheaper way of doing this and came up with a low-cost form factor which then spawns the cubesat industry yeah fantastic all right um we're five minutes before and so um i have to leave some of these fantastic questions aside but i do want to thank each of the panelists for their wisdom i'm inspired and i'm glad they took up the challenge uh that i proposed to them of look this is kind of a waste of time it's really expensive and i think you've answered that beautifully um i'd like to make just some quick closing remarks i think you've clearly shown the profit potential and the commercial potential of space and also the way that this works to generate cooperation and uh good feelings basically among nations i also want to point out that it's pretty obvious that it still can remain an inspiration for youth people want to get involved in this it was when certainly when i was a kid i grew up with the space age and i think it still is doing that and i think you pointed out how i think one of the most interesting things that i heard today though was the hope that it gives us for cooperation between nations this stuff is really expensive to do the problems we have to solve are common um they are shared problems that we have to solve and i think all of you pointed out how both at the high level of developing uh systems of cooperation between nations but also at the commercial level how we have to cooperate with other companies and systems down here to make to develop to solve our own problems and some of these can only be done in space probably the solutions to climate change are necessarily going to involve some space involvement

i also like to think that what i like about this is i do think it parallels the historical situation i put in the beginning i think we've had our initial burst of expensive government-funded exploration which was inspirational for sure but we're still fulfilling i think a basic human need to go farther and explore i think that's part of our nature and i think by commercial interest picking this up i think you have all demonstrated that we can fulfill that not only by paying taxes but also by using services that we need and i think we're right we should see this developing and getting broader more access to other people i think we all know that mr benz created the first car but henry ford made it available to people and so i think we're looking for our henry ford anyway i thank you all for your wonderful comments here and i want to turn this over to professor ventresca for closing remarks that's great bob thank you very much uh hello everyone uh mark ventresca uh here uh on the faculty at the university of oxford in the uh side business school in wolfson college uh very glad to join uh for both the session today and the earlier five sessions i want to thank bob and the whole uh set of uh panelists today alex and candace and mike what a what a compelling and riveting debate really that we had uh and i want to thank them and i want to thank uh the colleagues in the prior five sessions this is as you know a six episode series today's session really integrates and brings that to closure uh just to briefly recap we've run this series smart space at oxford as an effort to make visible both research venturing regulatory issues and practical action in the emerging global space sector we've offered that in the language of one of our colleagues lucas kello in political science we've called that smart space to do two things to recognize that the contemporary era in space sector venturing and governance is smart in the conventional sense that is making use of new technologies that transform what's possible also smart in the sense of being dependent on both the long-term continuity of public policy and government involvement and the energy that comes from commercial activity over the six episodes we've had a chance to reflect on technology emerging technologies and how they shift the adjacent possible we've had a chance to think about governance particularly the thinness of governance in the space sector today and both the opportunities that's creating but also the challenges and there we've reflected on the range of new actors that are making claims in space that are able to launch to take advantage of the developments in inexpensive launch and many many kinds of actors now are seeking to inhabit space and to use space and to make claims in space that raises i think really powerful questions that we've continued in our research and also in teaching around the governance of the commons we've had sessions on the changing expertise of space exploration and careers new kinds of skills new kinds of skill sets and professionals and others coming in to this domain we've got a session on business innovation and venturing we've talked about inclusive space raising questions of both demographic and also intellectual diversity who's involved in space how does that shape what happens what's the role of many emerging global south countries and agencies that are now also interested in space and bring with them a very different mindset from core exploration that characterized a nasa and esa dominant era now much more interest in what the valentine has spoken to solving terrestrial problems solving issues on earth the role of the sdgs the the work of the sustainable development goals as bob said in those last few moments many many solutions for earth and its challenges may only be found from the work in space we've also talked today about space venturing in comparative context and again i want to thank the team i think there are a couple of quick themes i want to sound from the whole series what we've learned i think we started out with a very familiar latin phrase at astra to the stars to capture that that millennial millennium-based view of the fascination with the skies and what's out there and what's beyond there our colleague emma molloy quickly reminded space has always been inhabited and the nature of that inhabiting has varied enormously over time is varying more and more now the that idea from at astra to now a focus on earth-focused challenges and solutions is important we've chronicled the variety of actors and the changing cast of actors what they do in space and why they pursue initiatives in space we've begun to address the very real challenges of governance we begin to think now of the value of decades of investment in space exploration and how that has changed our world already we're now looking at a new era of investment new kinds of investment new kinds of actors potentially new kinds of solutions and also new challenges i think everyone is familiar with the idea of the challenge of space debris the legacy of all those efforts to go into space has created literally pollution in the uh upper atmosphere and beyond i think we've also really begun today and then this session in this series to reflect on the current plural promises of space commerce and what those ventures bode for both human uh kind and others we've also begun to think more and more about the long arc of what i'm going to call long journey human voyaging and settlements and as you know if you read the news the newspapers in the media social media these days in the last year are marked by very lively debates about each one of these issues so it reminds us how central and pervasive space sector activity is today for our lives now and also for the tomorrows that we want to build i want to conclude very quickly with appreciation to many colleagues really to my team in the oxford space initiative i want to call out specifically several of our research students and alumni chris marzeni uh sally edmondson uh robin de meri uh david layman richard johansen michele scottillini who've been stalwarts who literally put this together and by that i mean they recruited two dozen speakers from every sector from every kind of expertise the the people who really were the heart of these panels i want to acknowledge those uh 20 people who have given their time and expertise i also want to recognize my faculty colleagues who have moderated the panels uh and finally a couple of key partners at oxford arocs which is the student aeronautics society colleagues at the side business school colleagues at pembroke college i want to call out specifically at saeed tiffany franklin and her team who have done all the best the scenes work that made these uh panels these episodes fascinating visible and nearly flawless i also want to thank joe fox who's a senior colleague at the school who really authorized and encouraged us to do this so let me stop there again thank you for listening all six episodes will be posted on the website uh there's a real opportunity to learn uh from these panels as i said we were fortunate to engage such an array of both distinguished talented and experienced people from the legacy government space sector the public sector activities from the transitional colleagues at places like spacex who really pioneered new forms of initiative new forms of exploring often closely with government funding the legacy of aerospace and defense primes and now a generation of ventures and venture capitalists and angel investors who bring again heterogeneity heterogeneity of purpose and vision and possibility i think the series sits as a as a quick primer for everyone who's interested to know more about space sector and space governance and i really invite you to reach out to me and our colleagues at oxford we have a lively group in the social sciences uh we are working closely with colleagues in the sciences the the basic scientists who are doing work on material science and robotics photonics laser quantum which is part of that legacy of new space and smart space so again thank you to many many colleagues who made this possible we look forward to being in conversation with you over time thank you very much and by the way