Faster, Please! — The Podcast #33
fasterplease.substack.com/p/faster-please-the-podcast-33
Vance is the author of the new book, When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach
“The future that all these space buffs have already started building is one in which many rockets blast off every day. These rockets will be carrying thousands of satellites that will be placed not all that far above our heads. The satellites will change the way communications work on Earth by, for one, making the internet an inescapable presence with all the good and bad that entails. The satellites will also watch and analyze the earth in previously unfathomable ways. The data centers that have reshaped life on our planet will be transported into orbit. We are, in effect, building a computing shell around the planet.”
Other than SpaceX, who are the companies building that computer shell?
The one that comes to mind is the next sort of central actor in the book, which is this company called Planet Labs, which is based in San Francisco. For people who don't know, they already surround the Earth with about 250 imaging satellites. They can take, and they do take, pictures of every spot on the Earth's landmass every day. Multiple pictures. Unlike even the world's biggest governments, China, Russia, the US, which have spy satellites obviously, but they only have a handful of spy satellites. And they tend to only look where interesting things might be happening. Planet Labs sees everything that's happening all the time. And this is not some far-off concept. They had this full constellation up and running in 2018 and have just been adding to it ever since.
A fascinating startup called Varda launched just a couple months ago. They have put what you could argue is the first manufacturing system in space. It's making medicines. You can do things without gravity pushing on molecules in space that you can't do on Earth. They're trying to make a whole new class of pharmaceuticals and bring them back to Earth. I think that's just the earliest example. There are things like asteroid mining that I thought were total jokes and are still quite far off, but there's a startup, Astro Forge. Same thing: They set up their first test earlier this year. All this stuff is actually happening now. The business cases on these things, I think some will work and some won't, but we're going to find out.