--:-- Host: So I'm closer to low Earth orbit than I am to you. And I think that's what people just don't realize.
--:-- Host: All right, so today we have a new episode of the A16Z podcast, and boy, do we have a treat for you. We have all three co-founders of Privateer in the house. That is Alex Fielding, Dr. Moriba Jah, and wait for it, Steve Wozniak. Yes, that is the Steve Wozniak that you recognize from Apple, whose latest venture is focusing on cleaning up the next frontier.
--:-- Host: This episode actually starts with Woz, and let me tell you, chatting with him was truly a treat, truly an honor. He starts by sharing how Privateer came to be and why a focus specifically on space is so crucial today, including his own reflections from the very first space race and how it helped spur the era of modern computing, which clearly he was very, very involved in so many years ago.
--:-- Host: But I love that he also shared a bunch of personal stories from his days back at Apple, including how him and Steve Jobs thought about iteration on the way to the future, the differences between a visionary, an inventor, and an engineer, and even what prompted him to want to build a computer in the first place.
--:-- Host: And while naturally I love my time with Woz, I think you're really going to enjoy the rest of the conversation with Alex and Moriba. Because here's the thing, many people consider space to be the next frontier and equally this almost infinite horizon to explore. But the reality is that not all space is the same. And there are strategic zones that don't only matter up there, but also down here on Earth.
--:-- Host: Low Earth orbit, sometimes referred to as LEO, is one of those regions, a zone filled with satellites that support life on Earth from agriculture to climate to navigation to defense and much more. And unfortunately, these live satellites are not alone in our space highways. LEO is a zone that's getting increasingly clogged with space debris, and we're basically polluting our skies the same way we're polluting our land.
--:-- Host: And in this episode, we discuss just how much debris is up there. And hint, it's probably a lot more than you think. We talk about how this challenge is expected to progress as launch costs go down. And by the way, they go down exponentially. And ultimately, what infrastructure is missing in this fragile ecosystem, from tracking to global treaties to maybe even a sharing economy of satellites.
--:-- Host: By the end of this episode, listeners should be more equipped to understand how the infrastructure up in space vastly impacts our life on Earth, why this infrastructure hasn't historically been shared, how the preservation of this ecosystem is so crucial, and of course, how Privateer is providing a map to better understand and fix this issue. Oh, and you'll also learn what the hell Elon's orbit is.
--:-- Host: One more thing. If you like this topic, we also did a demo with Alex on their Wayfinder product, and that is on our YouTube channel, some exclusive video content. And if you like the episode in general, we may release some bonus audio with Alex where he shares what it's been like to work with Woz for over two decades. They originally met at Apple.
--:-- Host: All right, let's jump in.
--:-- Host [Disclaimer]: The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures.
--:-- Host: Well, Steve, it's an honor to be talking to you today. I want to say a personal thank you for all that you've done with personal computing, modern computing. I can say for myself, the fact that we're even doing this online or the fact that I've been able to work remotely for most of my career is really a testament to the work that you and many others have done in this space that have completely changed the world. So again, thank you for that.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: Thanks. It's a real case where I can even thank myself for it. All the great things we have.
--:-- Host: Exactly. I want to start with a question, which is around this idea that you really can work on anything today, right? You've left your legacy through modern computing. And now you're at a place where you could work on anything in the world or nothing in the world, right? You could also just chill and move on. Why have you chosen to focus on space and specifically space sustainability, and why are you doing that now today in 2022?
--:-- Steve Wozniak: Well, first of all, I sort of had that freedom. I was just designing products for five cents each for people all over California, incredible things that started big industries. So I always felt that way. I'm doing what I want to do and not doing it for starting big companies or getting super wealthy. A lot of other people have different motivations.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: So first of all, I've always been into doing good for the world because every company starts – you talk to anybody with any little startup – and they say, "Oh, we're doing this, this is how it's going to improve somebody's life or some people's lives." So that's not easy, but I like to go overboard and rate it a little bit higher on the balance of the good you're doing versus other reasons, like figuring out a way to make money on it.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: But Alex Fielding is really the one that brought me into Privateer. He's been my best friend for a long time. He was hanging around all these space people in Maui where he lives. We're always in communication. He was best man at my wedding. So he started approaching me about this space and the issues in space. You start and you look at some of the close ones, everyone hears about space debris and its danger, but that's a kind of long pass for what we're really about.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: And Alex, the way he knows me – he sees the world better than just a logical spreadsheet guy. One time we were starting a startup company involving GPS and we couldn't find the name. Everything is taken that has words. I said a little secret in the back of my head without saying anything to the other members of our board. I had a web domain, Woz.com. I got it in the early days of the web. I don't use Woz.com because .com means commercial and .org means nonprofit, and I'm a nonprofit type. So I secretly thought, what words can I make up that use W-O-Z? I said "Wheels of Zoos" and nobody – what a crazy name for a company. But Alex, he said, "Yeah, that's great." And it actually is a great name regardless. It was from WeGotWoz.com. I was really proud of that because instead of lawyers dealing with licensing a domain name, I was the seller and I was the buyer. I just hand wrote it and signed it. Didn't pay the huge fees that the lawyers have.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: Alex would only approach me knowing how I think of good things for the world. The outcome has to be good. Not just that it makes sense as a product or it'll simplify life. That's not enough for me. And there's always alternatives. Also, I've got to know Alex as the best judge of people – what they're about, what they want to do. In business development, knowing how to convince others, knowing what the sub-markets are and all the aspects of a business. I often call him the smartest person I know because I'm more in technology than I am business. He sees a fuller, long-term picture about things.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: In the past, I've worked with Alex before on startups and of course all my life on everything. We stay in very close touch all the time. You can look up in a magazine article or get an idea from it, and here's a company we could start. But this was a case where you're better off if you have a person you know saying what is good about something, why it is. Personal recommendation, like even seeing a movie, is worth more than just reading the synopsis of it.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: So Alex sees a long-term picture for capitalizing – you have to stay alive. For iterations of products, working through and modifying what's there and being in the right place, you've got to keep the product market fit correct. So anyway, Privateer is just the finest collective of people, thanks to Alex. I could imagine in various roles, even communication roles and all that. It's wonderful to be involved in this startup. We're very early seed stages so far.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: Alex also attracted other good people. He finds them and gets them. He found Moriba Jah, who's a professor at University of Texas in Austin. Moriba has a standing reputation in this field of space and objects in space. He is just so much of a genius. I almost shut up and shy back because he knows all the details and the aspects that you can refer to that make sense. So I thought this was great. And Alex was very strongly into a lot of the space operations lately are going more private than public. So Privateer is a good name based on that.
--:-- Host: I think you're right. I got to speak to Moriba and Alex yesterday, both geniuses, both who really understand the importance of space long term. I want to ask you about space and the perception of it or the perception of its importance, because I think there's a lot of opinions about whether it's important, whether it's frivolous. You got to see how this first space race impacted technology thereafter, how it helped modern computing. There were many other dovetails, whether it was LASIK eye surgery or water filtration that came out of the investment into space many, many decades ago. I'd love to just hear your perspective on why it's important again today and why you think it's important for people like Moriba, like yourself, like Alex, to be investing in this particular space or industry.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: I grew up in what is called Silicon Valley now, but back then it was Santa Clara Valley. Space came to our area, the South Bay Area, before it was called Silicon Valley, in the 50s. Lockheed Martin moved in. There was a space race going on, a competition with Russia to launch orbiting satellites into space and people into space and even to get to the moon. It cost a lot of money back then, a huge amount of money to launch rockets. Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale, California, was looking into missiles that you could launch accurately, even from submarines. My father worked there, but I don't really know too much about it. He would never talk about any projects he was working on.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: So we had a space race as well as the defense for missiles. One thing is back then it cost so much to launch a rocket, you had to pay a fortune – billions of dollars. For every gram of mass, you had to pay a fortune. The more you could lighten the load of the thinking part, the electronics that thought or the little computer parts that thought, the better. That's what chips did. Instead of having 20 transistors, after a while you could have one tiny little chip the size of one transistor, the weight of one transistor, doing the job. That really boosted everything, including digital and computer technology, but making it lower cost for us. It was not low cost at first. New technologies like chip making were so high a price.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: So I grew up in this. Of course, we always look up to space because we were in the science field. I've always read books and watched movies. Especially if you're one of those exploring pioneers, following shows like Star Trek, but flying things into space and beating the politicians with your own cleverness and ability to maybe go out and harness water from the rings of Jupiter.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: But today we're sitting here and we're looking up to space and we're saying, there's a lot of stuff up there now and it's very important in our life. The stewardship of space – this is what I got from Moriba. It's understanding that we have to be kind of responsible, all of us. I expect that Privateer will be very involved in communications between different parties, even different countries, and probably even getting into things like treaties involving space, some kinds of agreements so we can work better and understand what we have.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: It's all connected because we down on Earth use so many things from space – from weather review to flight conditions, to GPS, to our cell phones. These are important things in our life, and that has to be protected somehow. So anyway, that's our start. You start a startup and you get some seed money, but then you have to think of what's the right product. Here's an idea. It's got to come from people that also think a lot differently. That's one of the nice things about Silicon Valley. A lot of us are that way.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: My house gets real messy sometimes. What do I want to do if it's messy? I look at it, I want to clean things up so I can get to it, at least find things where they are, what drawers they're in. That's the way I look at it. You feel it in your own house, you're stumbling over some junk on the floor and it's there, I'll kick it over in a deeper corner. But we want to have some ways to keep space more orderly and understood by all. Sharing information, being very open and transparent is important to us.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: You have to imagine your house. You get around it, you kind of know where you've got all this junk. But somebody else comes in randomly. Should things make sense to them? Even if you say, "Go make me some coffee," should they have an easy way to find the way to make coffee in your house? That's how I think of space. We've got to keep it understandable and organized for everyone.
--:-- Host: Well, something you spoke to there is the ability for these technologies to be exponential, right? What we see today from Privateer might not be what it is in five years or 50 years. I had the privilege of talking to Alex yesterday and he told me the story about you from the very, very early days where when you were younger, you basically told your dad, "Hey, dad, I want to have a computer someday." And he said – because at this time, this is true – he said, "You're crazy. Computers cost as much as a house." And you told him, "Well, dad, I'll live in an apartment." You seemed to really, really just want a computer at that time. To your point earlier, starting Apple was not about building one of the biggest businesses in the world. It was wanting a computer and wanting other people to have that. I'm curious just to know from a personal perspective, what did you see back then? Was it truly just like a personal need for this device? I want to dig into that early Woz brain and hear your perspective on what was going on in those early days.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: A lot of great things come personally. I learned even – I taught middle school and elementary school for eight years straight full time, every hour of the day up to seven days a week, no press allowed. So it's not a big story, but I learned that it was less important that you're speaking facts and knowledge from your mouth. Knowledge was less important than the motivation of my students to learn. I had to find ways to make it fun, make it understandable, to make it like stories that tell what's in their head. That's when I decided, you know what, wanting something is even more important.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: I go back. I wanted a computer. It was in my heart. I didn't know if I'd ever get it. I didn't know if designing computers would ever be a job for engineers because we were back in the analog days, smart math stuff. But I kept it in me and eventually I found the path to do it. So I was building a computer for myself. It turned out that the point in time – luck is sometimes there's a lot of luck in business success – the point in time that I was going to build that computer, no matter what it was worth, turned out to be worth a ton.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: A lot of times when people are successful in technology, I've seen them look off into space because we almost all come from science backgrounds. When Apple went public around 1980, our president, Mike Scott, maybe '81 or '82, started a little company with some people. I funded into that. He's a friend. Actually, we did a launch of a rocket from out at sea from somewhere. There were a bunch of rocket engineers around saying it is possible to do with, let's say, money. Now, governments have all the resources, but they're stale in their approaches because of it. Here's what we can do very successfully, very stably. We know we'll get there if we put enough money in and test enough.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: Private industry works so differently. I've only been in private and I just love having ideas and thinking about them, thinking different, and the creativity that comes about when you think, "My gosh, I could do something they haven't done before." Maybe the resources are cheaper. The sorts of huge computing devices are cheaper to make and maybe certain types of motors. I can do something that hasn't been done before, sensors that didn't exist before. You've got to always shoot for the top, being one of the leaders in the world. That's just how we think.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: A lot of times when I think of government versus private, I also come down to types of people, which is very important. You have an inventor who can be given a job. They've gone through all the right skill sets and they've gone through the right university majors and PhDs. They're an engineer and they can design what you sign them. But then there's the inventor. The inventor goes along, thinks, "Oh my gosh, is there something I'm interested in that I could do? Would it work? Maybe it hasn't been done before. Can I make a difference in the world?" The inventor wants to run into a laboratory, hook up some demos real quick, try to get some sort of prototype to show that the idea is right. That's the sort of person I am. It's in your personality. You don't change it. You don't just say tomorrow, "I'm going to be an inventor. Today I'm an engineer." You're usually one or the other. That's another advantage of Alex putting together Privateer. We're looking for the inventor types.
--:-- Host: Yeah, definitely. I mean, another word sometimes people use for inventor is visionary. I'm curious, in the early days when you were just out of passion creating these computers, could you see the path to today? Of course, you can't picture everything with so many advancements since those early days. But how far along were you actually envisioning? I'm asking this partially because even if we apply this to space, a lot of the things that people talk about in the realm of space also sound kind of like science fiction, right? They probably won't be eventually, but I'm trying to understand also how far along you see or the extrapolation that maybe goes on in your brain when you're originally talking about, yes, a computer with 200 transistors, and now we're talking billions and the applications that have kind of sprung from that.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: I myself was really a great engineer in a certain field. I was designing the hottest products in the world for Hewlett-Packard without even having a college degree yet. Then you talk about visionary, vision, see in the future. That's different than invention, though. An inventor really wants to actually go in and create something today that didn't exist and not have a vision that's 50 years out or 10 years out, because that's science fiction a lot. Everybody can talk about it and say later on, "See, I proposed it," but it wasn't possible to do with money. The engineer says, "Feet on the ground. What can I actually do and build and deliver to people?"
--:-- Steve Wozniak: When we started Apple, we had a great product. It was going to be all the revenues of Apple for the first 10 years. We had a great lead. We were comfortable and we could do what we wanted. But the amount of memory that would hold a song costs – we were back in the days of tape – it costs about a good fraction of a million dollars. Do you think we saw it today where you have a device in your hand with a thousand songs on it? No.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs was very instrumental in always taking us, "Do what we can do today. Try to do something a little more tomorrow, a little more." You can have a lot of failures, too, if you'll have one great product bringing in the revenues. But the whole idea was we'll move towards the future and we'll be a part of it and we'll be in with it. After all, you look back and it was kind of invisible, the steps we took, but they all led to today.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: There was some of that invention stuff we got to. Steve Jobs' Apple II was really the iPod music. That was the first time – up till then, our company valuation was the same as the old Apple II days. Then all of a sudden, we sold it to everyone in the world and our sales doubled and our profits doubled. The board gave Steve Williams and stock options and jet airplanes. That was the turning point. Then the iPhone was even better. It was based on the iPod, not the reverse. Not a phone and we'll include an iPod, more like it's an iPod but you get a phone with it.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: It's hard to say that you really see the future more than a year ahead when you're working a year ahead on your projects. Whenever I tried to see the future a year ahead, I knew it one year ahead because I was working on it. If I looked two years ahead and made some guesses, other aspects, other technologies came out from outer space and people's desire which way they wanted to go was different. It's very hard to predict even two years ahead successfully the way I work. Nowadays, we've got huge big companies. So it's kind of like anything that we work on is going to be successful. It's not as much of a gamble. But real inventors like to gamble, like to prove the world that they can do more than you ever imagined.
--:-- Host: Definitely. Well, if there's no risk, no reward, right? So to really change the future or change society, you do need to make some of those gambles. I have one final question for you, which is that you obviously were very, very significantly involved in modern computing. You now are focused on space. Everyone has limited resources. But are there areas or problems in the world or industries that you're fascinated by that maybe you wish were talked about more, or that you think more builders, more entrepreneurs, more founders should be paying attention to?
--:-- Steve Wozniak: I read the same things as everyone else. We talk here about quantum computing. You can go either way, but I'm into things that actually feed on the ground, that actually come through and solve all the general problems. So I'm a little skeptical of a lot of these things. Crypto and its place in our future has been really hard to pin down. So I'm kind of for change, but I don't invest. I don't even invest in crypto. I don't invest in stocks. I made a lot of money on crypto, but only because I had to experiment with it when Bitcoin was young.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: I like things that don't add up and necessarily make sense. Bitcoin – who created it? Who owns it? What company? There is no such thing. How many Bitcoin can ever be created? Can we always create more and more to make ourselves wealthier? No, it's got a finite limit. It's mathematical. I like things that are mathematical and pure.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: It's like you say, "When is your birthday?" Oh, it was two days ago, August 23. No, the birthday should be when the earth is around the sun at the same place. You have to take leap years into correction. More important leap years – they fix themselves every four years. You have to take into account there's a leap year correction that's over a 400-year cycle. Your age, as you get older, you've actually moved your real natural nature birth date even later in time. So I like to do things that are based on math, real trueness.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: Instead of starting the year on something called January 1, back when months were named by the Romans. With Roman numerals, they couldn't give a day of the year. So they came up with months and then they stole a day from February for Julius Caesar – that's July. And a day for Augustus – that's August. This is the calendar we use. That's because our human minds are kind of weak if you take everybody into account. Not everybody's a super scientist. Our minds are weak, but we can deal with the sort of calendar that we use. But I'm in this – you would start the year on something like the winter solstice or the summer solstice, something that has a real thing you can look out to the skies and say is real.
--:-- Host: Well, I want to say thank you for taking this time. And also thank you for the work that you, Alex, and Moriba are doing on Privateer. As I started researching for this episode, I was mind blown by the amount of debris that we have above us, but also how much is being launched, the cost of launch going down, and just imagining this future where lower Earth orbit is a finite resource and it's important for us to take care of. So thank you for your work there. Thank you for everything you did with modern computing as well, as I mentioned, because it's completely shaped the way that people in my generation have been able to live and work.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: Thanks. Your summary of space was excellent. Thank you. But there's more to it than things. We're not going to go up and try to gather things and bring them down. Some people are trying that. We just want to make the information available so people could do it if they want.
--:-- Host: Yeah. Well, something I talked to Alex about yesterday is the fact that many people don't even have the terminology or the imagery for what's up there, right? And therefore, it's hard for people to care about that because they can't imagine it and they also can't articulate it. But now even with terms, like I don't know if you've seen Google Trends even, the term "space sustainability" is something that I hadn't heard of before, but it is slowly taking up.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: What really changes public perception in areas like this is sometimes there's a spike due to something. A lot of stuff in the news that all of a sudden people are now much more aware than they were before. It's hard to predict when those will come. We'll do our best to just educate people and keep them informed.
--:-- Host: All right. Alex, Moriba, thanks for taking the time. Welcome to the show.
--:-- Alex Fielding: Aloha.
--:-- Host: Yeah, thank you. We've got Alex calling in from Maui. Moriba, where are you calling in from?
--:-- Moriba Jah: Austin, Texas.
--:-- Host: I want to start with a question about space. That's what we're going to be talking about. Us on Earth, we're all distributed, but Earth feels so small compared to space, right? Even when we talk about space, we use dimensions like light years, which are just magnitudes more than what we talk about on Earth. So it feels like space is this infinite dimension, this infinite void. But is space this infinite void that we have access to?
--:-- Moriba Jah: Yeah, okay. So look, I mean, all of outer space is probably infinite, but where we put satellites, that's actually finite. In fact, we put satellites on very specific orbital highways. They're very close to Earth. In fact, where are you right now, Steph?
--:-- Host: I am in Encinitas, California.
--:-- Moriba Jah: So I'm closer to low Earth orbit than I am to you. And I think that's what people just don't realize.
--:-- Host: Wow. That is fascinating. And I think, to your point, space in theory is infinite, but there are certain aspects or certain parts of space that are really, really essential. Something you've talked about before, Moriba, is that we as humans have started to pollute air, land, the ocean. And now it sounds like we're doing the same with space. But for some reason, it seems like most people know about the pollution in air, ocean, land. Why don't we know more about the pollution happening in space?
--:-- Moriba Jah: Well, I think that most people just aren't aware of how many satellites we have launched. The fact that most of the stuff that we launch just doesn't come back, or it takes a really, really long time to come back if it's in a sufficiently low Earth orbit. Also, people just haven't had a place to just go online and just kind of see the stuff. And now that we at Privateer have rolled out Wayfinder, we're just like a click away from people seeing all these dots all around the Earth.
--:-- Host: I know you originally created something called Astrograph, and I heard you say on an interview that actually seeing the amount of stuff, some of it being valuable, some of it being junk, actually caused you to cry because it was so, I guess, devastating. Or maybe let's hear from your words. Why did that trigger that kind of emotion in seeing that?
--:-- Host: My career started at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab working on Mars missions. But when I moved to Mali in 2006, I started working with the Air Force Research Lab with the telescopes on top of Mount Kaliakala. And all of a sudden, at that time in 2006, there were only 1,200 working satellites and 26,000 pieces of garbage. And I'm like, what? This doesn't make any sense. Holy cow. This is ridiculous. How is it okay for 96% of the stuff we put in space to turn out to be garbage? We don't see that in other domains. We don't have that as acceptable. We're going to put a bunch of stuff out here on the land, but 96% of it is going to be trash? We don't do that.
--:-- Host: Alex, I want to hear from you. How much space debris are we talking? It sounds like it has increased with time, but I don't know if many people have a sense of the sheer magnitude of stuff up above us.
--:-- Alex Fielding: We're talking about over a million pieces of debris that are smaller than a centimeter. But the only thing we can really see from ground-based radar is stuff that's bigger than the size of a softball. So when Moriba says there are 26,000 things, those are things the size of a softball doing roughly 18,000 miles an hour. And MV squared is still MV squared. So it's a real problem because the little pieces of debris, the things you can't see, can really hurt you in space. You wouldn't get on a passenger jet if you were told when you boarded, "There are a million little bullets flying around and this is going to make your life potentially very miserable. Hope you make it." But that's kind of what's going on with spaceflight.
--:-- Alex Fielding: The first challenge is you have to be able to see everything so we can put together a plan on how to solve for that. Astrograph and Wayfinder are tools to help enlighten the world and bring attention to the problem first, so we can all align on the best solutions for cleaning up space. That's one side of Privateer's mission: making space safe and accessible for humankind.
--:-- Host: I want to get to how we solve the problem, but I also want to speak to what is at stake here. You're talking about thousands of things we can monitor, but potentially millions we aren't able to monitor. How often does this stuff actually collide? And how often does that impact us on Earth, whether through things coming down or impacting the satellites and infrastructure we use?
--:-- Moriba Jah: There are a lot of collisions. Some we can see and clearly identify as caused by debris, or even a satellite hitting an active satellite, or two objects in near-Earth space colliding. It happens a lot more than we'd like to think. There are also reasons why we don't talk about it as a community, why we don't openly discuss our problems the way we would in other academic or data-driven communities. Some of that surrounds liability and risk. As an example, many insurance policies in space exclude space debris from a covered loss. I'm not saying people do it. I'm probably implying it. But if your insurance policy said, "We don't cover rocks hitting your car windshield," then whatever cracked your windshield is probably not a rock.
--:-- Moriba Jah: These are challenges we're working around: the evolution of space policy, the Space Act, and treaties. These things were based in maritime law, which made sense at the time because we needed a framework for how we interoperate in space. But that is actually creating the challenge because we don't have even the simplest notions like right of way. You're in space, you're going to come very close to colliding with someone else's object, whether it's dead or alive. Who has the right of way? Obviously, if it's dead, you better move. But if you're both active, who has the right of way? These are very simple constructs on the ground. You wouldn't get in your car and not know that. But in space, we're operating in the blind. We don't have these rules fully defined as a community. And yet we keep launching more and more things without solving those.
--:-- Host: Right. That seems extremely important. If we want to clean up the debris in space, who is responsible? Since there are so many actors, even if you have these tracking systems, how do you solve that problem? How do you create the right policy or legislation for people to become good actors? Right now it seems like even if someone wanted to be a good actor, they don't have the rule set to do that.
--:-- Alex Fielding: It's like the International Space Act and treaties. We all sign this thing when we go to space, when we put a satellite up. It includes things like not weaponizing space, not doing generally bad things in space, not doing bad things to each other. And yet, Moriba proved this definitively with his work at UT Austin with IBM on a project called Arcade. They looked at how many objects in space are in or out of compliance with the Space Act and treaties. The number out of compliance is over 40% of those registered objects.
--:-- Alex Fielding: Part of the problem is enforcement. If you stick a speed limit sign up that says 65 miles an hour, and we're all doing 120, and there are no cops — and don't get me wrong, I don't want to be a traffic cop of space — you may not follow the speed limit sign. It might look more like a good suggestion. In space, I think people just cross their fingers, put their hands behind their back, sign the Space Act and treaty, and go about their life saying, "Who's going to call me on it?" Because there is no enforcement.
--:-- Host: Moriba, if 40% is not in compliance, who is the space cop?
--:-- Moriba Jah: I have some good news and bad news. The good news is I know the answer. The bad news is it's the same countries that are non-compliant. I think the thing that really needs to happen is transparency. If people know they're being watched and the evidence is being brought to the public square, that might be a deterrent. It might help curb people's behavior in space. Ultimately, in terms of international law, the responsibility falls on the state parties of the treaty, which are governments. Governments are responsible. Governments need to be the enforcers. But if nobody actually knows, if there's no evidence that companies being licensed by governments are misbehaving, then it's kind of like, who cares?
--:-- Host: But it's not just governments launching stuff into space. Private businesses are doing the same.
--:-- Moriba Jah: Yes, but in terms of international law, all the responsibility for liability, damage, and harmful interference doesn't fall on the shoulders of companies. It's on the governments that give them license and authorize them to operate in space.
--:-- Host: I'm curious, we've seen the price of launching a kilogram into lower Earth orbit go down dramatically. It was over $10,000 and now it's in the hundreds in a couple of decades. Naturally, we can expect a lot more stuff to be launched into space. I hear you that there is some compliance needed with regulatory bodies, but how do we see the amount of stuff changing, whether from government or private actors, and how will that change moving forward?
--:-- Moriba Jah: Here's the deal. There's a lot of money to be made from having robots that we call satellites in space. Physics tells us that two things can't occupy the same space at the same time, and there are no deeds. So it's first come, first serve. At this point, if you want to launch a satellite that goes above 500 kilometers of altitude, you have to coordinate with Elon, because Elon has almost 3,000 satellites at 500 kilometers altitude. It would be wise for you to talk to Elon before you try to go through the orbital shell that he has. It doesn't belong to him. It doesn't belong to SpaceX. It doesn't belong to anybody, but he's operating there. By all intents and purposes, the United States is basically occupying a shell at 500 kilometers altitude. And that makes people very angry.
--:-- Moriba Jah: So when I say people need to curb their behavior and there needs to be enforcement, countries are like, "Well, if it's first come, first serve, I want to get there first. I'm going to authorize as many people as quickly as possible to operate in that space." And once it's there, it's like, "Oh, you can't watch it in here because it's congested."
--:-- Alex Fielding: You're right on the money. Money is part of the issue because we're really strip mining space. I think what the average person — and I'd put myself in that bucket — isn't really aware of is that there's no property tax in space. Once you're there, once you pay that cost to launch and the regulatory cost to be there, like Moriba said, this is international space law. It's similar to flying an American flag off the back of your boat. You represent the United States when you leave that port and leave your country. You're not exactly an asset owned by the U.S. government, but you're representing the United States wherever you go. The same thing is true for people operating in space, and that is changing the nature of how people play those rules and where they're domiciled.
--:-- Alex Fielding: I don't think the average person has realized yet that by strip mining space, we're occupying space in a way that no one actually controls, truly governs, or enforces. That means once your vehicle is in space, if it provides a service to us on Earth, it's actually operating more efficiently and cheaply than if the asset was on the ground and regulated by a single nation state. This is going to change our lives fundamentally forever. Terrestrial companies that have services that could be operated from space, by choosing to strip mine space unwisely and unsustainably, are taking advantage of the fact that regulation and enforcement doesn't exist. They're doing it now, and they're doing it without any recourse.
--:-- Alex Fielding: Once a new frontier opens up — and I'm not saying space is the final frontier, but it is the frontier of our lives right now — there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. It's only a matter of time before the terrestrial companies that are disrupted by space companies will realize, and their shareholders will realize, "Wow, we just got disrupted by something flying above our head that we have absolutely no control over or even taxation on."
--:-- Host: It is a limited resource. It sounds like there are specific highways or orbits that certain satellites can operate within. As we talked about, it's not an infinite resource within that dimension. Is there a reality where we've completely exhausted that resource? If people continue to just ship stuff without any coordination, is there a reality where we say we actually can't fit any more satellites or we can't use this resource anymore?
--:-- Moriba Jah: Yes. One of the things we're working on is developing something we call orbital carrying capacity. Just like there's a carrying capacity for a plot of land, an ecosystem, or a regular highway, there's a carrying capacity for orbital highways. The best way to think about it is: when do you know this capacity is exhausted or saturated? You know the orbital carrying capacity is past its limit when our decisions and actions can no longer prevent bad things from happening. If we're trying to do everything possible to avoid collisions or interference, and we can't help but see those things happen, that orbit is no longer able to provide us with the benefits we intended. We have lost the capacity to use it.
--:-- Moriba Jah: I predict with absolute certainty, if our behavior doesn't change, there will be orbital highways whose capacity will be saturated. We're going to see an increasing amount of undesirable outcomes. To put this in perspective, if you took a shell of the Earth from 250 kilometers to 1,000 kilometers up and placed objects in 10-kilometer bubbles, how many of those bubbles can we stack? About 110 million. The auto industry on Earth did about 80 million cars last year alone. So one year's space vehicle production at a ramp similar to the auto industry would completely exhaust that spacing in near-Earth space to the point that we couldn't put anything else up, if we didn't have the precision, ability to maneuver, traffic management, and control — infrastructure that is largely missing today. If we don't fix that, we would be capacity constrained in a single year in automotive industry terms.
--:-- Host: That's crazy. That is not infinite at all. It is extremely finite. I want to put into perspective for some folks who may think space is a frivolous endeavor what we depend on on Earth. Even if people don't believe in space being the next frontier, what are the things we depend on every single day that rely on space? And how much redundancy is there? If we use GPS as an example, do we have backup on backup on backup, or is it really one very fragile system?
--:-- Moriba Jah: Picking the thread on global navigation satellite systems — have you been to a place where they sell fold-out maps and compasses these days? People don't make those things anymore. The way we navigate from point A to point B is dominated by satellite systems. The people who knew how to navigate without that system are either long gone, those companies don't exist anymore, and certainly our youth has no clue. This new generation has no idea how to get from point A to point B in the absence of satellites telling them how.
--:-- Moriba Jah: Not only that, the technology we use today, many applications rely uniquely on position, navigation, and timing services provided by these satellites. If that went away, the app itself just stops working. Everything from produce and food across the country or the globe, transportation systems — all these things stop working. And that's just from global navigation satellite systems. That's not even talking about Earth observation, monitoring climate change, hydrology, agriculture, wars in Ukraine.
--:-- Alex Fielding: When Woz and I started Wheels of Zeus 22 years ago — which tells you how old I am, there's dust coming off me, this is actually a black jacket, this is my dust — we had 2,000 satellites on orbit and half of them were dead. They were already pieces of trash. We were building GPS locators similar to Apple tags, 20 years too early. We ended up building a business that serviced a customer that wasn't those of us using Apple tags or Tile to track things.
--:-- Alex Fielding: The reason I tell the story is that 22 years ago, we had about 30 GPS satellites and we had an SLA for GPS of about 95%. Put that in perspective. If your power company only gave you an SLA of 95%, you would really hate your power company. Your power company gives you an SLA of 99.9% uptime, and that's still not great, but it's pretty good. We haven't really grown that constellation in 22 years. It's still about 30 GPS satellites that are United States assets that enable our GPS systems. Don't get me wrong, there are other things that enhance GPS and give you other capability to triangulate, but there's no other global system like that available to us as the masses on Earth. At 95% uptime, you lose one satellite, you're in trouble. You lose two, you're in a little more trouble. You lose multiples in the same area, you're in a lot of trouble. People say you need three, but it's closer to four to get an actual positional fix.
--:-- Alex Fielding: These services and systems are somewhat fragile. In low Earth orbit, things are flying over our heads much faster, and they're much less certain because we have fewer observations on them less often. That makes it an environment where we have to be much more mindful of how we manage it. We don't have those regulations in place yet. So the space rush is going to continue, especially when launch costs are $5,000 a kilo. I can put a satellite in space for less than I can pay our attorneys to do the paperwork. That's crazy.
--:-- Host: That is very crazy. So it sounds like we have a bunch of compounding effects. There's a lot of stuff already in space, a lot of space debris. Some we can't track because it's so small. There's going to be an exponential nature to more things being launched with no coordination, or at least not the coordination we need. Alex, what is Privateer doing in this space to help mitigate some of these issues?
--:-- Alex Fielding: We're doing two things in two very broad categories. We're focused on space safety and accessibility, and we think they're totally interconnected. Part of that is what you alluded to: my three-year-old daughter knows how to share better than we know how to share in space. Like Moriba said, how many more cameras do we need over flying Kyiv right now? It's great that we have them, but it's sad that we don't do a very good job sharing. You don't need 50 cameras over a region if you know how to effectively utilize one asset.
--:-- Alex Fielding: Privateer's focus on safety includes things like Wayfinder and our conjunction software that helps people not crash in space. We're doing that in a really open way that encourages interaction and involvement among space operators so that we coordinate and cooperate in space. The reason is it should make a ton of sense. There has been a history in space of companies serving this community that look like extortionists. They look like the mafia. "Give me a dollar and your satellite won't crash in space. Give me a dollar and I'll make sure my exquisite observation keeps you from getting into trouble." Those days have to come to an end really fast. We aim to democratize the space situational awareness market by bringing these tools to humankind for free, by enabling and empowering the community so that we have a single source of truth and knowledge. We're not aiming to own it. We're aiming to enable it, foster it, and be good stewards of our space environment.
--:-- Alex Fielding: The other part is accessibility. For that, we're putting up a constellation of our own satellites, which I hope doesn't sound too hypocritical.
--:-- Host: How do you get that data? How do you convince a magnitude of parties to contribute to that database?
--:-- Alex Fielding: It's more mutual benefit than quid pro quo. What we're basically saying is contribution results in capability. If you contribute your state vectors and telemetry, and you share with us where your vehicles are in space, we share with you the capability to make sure we all have eyes on those things, that we can all observe them better, and we can operate more efficiently and safely in space. That benefits the entire community because we can't put our own assets up in an environment that's unknown. The risk is too high.
--:-- Alex Fielding: The risk to space operators — as Moriba said, Elon does have kind of his own orbit right now. Elon's orbit. And it's a pretty good orbit to be in. I think it's not a hard pitch to get space operators to contribute when we are living at the transitional point of space situational awareness, domain awareness, traffic management, and ultimately traffic control becoming services that should be provided by governments but have traditionally only been provided by private industry. Imagine getting on a passenger jet and being told when you board, "Air traffic control needs $10 so we don't hit another plane while we're in flight." That's actually what's happened in the space world for over 20 years. You've had to pay bespoke companies to keep you from bumping into one another. That is like a mafia tactic.
--:-- Alex Fielding: We think disrupting that and using data from a variety of operators — they're tired of being extorted. They've been writing checks for a long time without getting a lot of benefit. These are global services we as humans need so we can keep space accessible, so that someday we can utilize space better to cure planet Earth and some of the ills we have caused on it, and also so we can become a space-faring civilization. That might be mission two, but you've got to do the first thing. As Moriba said, we've done all this damage to the land, our atmosphere, our oceans. I'm an optimist. I believe that if you did that damage one step at a time, you can undo the damage one step at a time. But we have to call that right now and say, "This is the moment. This is the moment where we can undo that damage before it scales so exponentially that it'll be much harder to undo."
--:-- Host: Moriba, I want to hear from you on this idea of undoing the damage. Is what Privateer is doing something that just mitigates future risk or harm? Or how do you actually undo some of the damage we have already caused? Can you move satellites? Can you take them down? Can you do the equivalent of the great garbage patch cleanup in space? How do we think about fixing what's already been done?
--:-- Moriba Jah: One of the things we believe at Privateer is facilitating a circular economy when it comes to space. When it comes to debris, upstream things are debris mitigation. We can get to prevention of debris if we're monitoring and measuring the stuff. You can't know something unless you measure it. So data and information that measures the stuff, and making that a common pool of evidence widely available so people can draw conclusions from consistent evidence — that's step number one.
--:-- Moriba Jah: Going down the chain of this circular economy for space, looking at whether we can, with our platform, provide folks with data and information that helps them reuse and recycle stuff on orbit — that's the next rung. That's certainly a downstream solution, but it's possible for us to do. The next thing, which we don't like so much but is also an option, is disposal and removal. Companies like Astroscale and ClearSpace in Europe — facilitating them with the information to be successful at removal of these sorts of things. The thing we don't want to have to keep doing is abandoning the object there. From most important to least important: mitigation and prevention, reuse, recycle, disposal, removal, and then abandonment. We want to provide actionable, accurate, precise information to people all along that chain to facilitate and motivate the development of a real circular economy in space. So absolutely, we can do that.
--:-- Host: I want to hear from you more about this idea of intent. Something that strikes me is that there is just so much happening in space. I've heard of the Kessler effect, the idea that one collision could cascade into many collisions. There is an element of certain things happening negatively without any bad intent, and then other things happening with malintent. How do you use this information to understand the intent of many different parties with different incentives and goals in space?
--:-- Moriba Jah: It's back to "if you want to know something, you have to measure it." Opportunity to cause harm is the easiest one because it depends on who's where and where can they be at any given point in time. Capability is harder because you need to know something about the physical, operational, and functional characteristics of these objects. Is it carrying a laser? Does it have a grappling arm? All that other stuff. Then it's like, okay, if it's close to me and has a grappling arm, is it going to try to purposely harm me? That's the intent piece. There is no sensor that measures that. There's no intentometer.
--:-- Moriba Jah: This is where we need to understand anthropology, social science, and cultural context. People behave in certain ways depending on where they were born and how they were raised. We don't all have the same values. But in general, we aren't trying to harm each other. But some people are, because every domain of human experience has malicious behavior. To think that if we see banditry on land, piracy on the seas, and planes getting hijacked, that space is this benevolent place where everybody's having pillow fights and tickling each other — that's ridiculous. But we need to be able to somehow infer intent without being so prejudiced as to assume everything is evil. Because the intent piece is so ambiguous, people are using prejudice to get rid of that uncertainty. They're saying, "Hey, if the opportunity and capability is there, if I'm a U.S. satellite and there's a Chinese satellite in the same orbit with a grappling arm, that thing is going to try to get me." That becomes escalatory, conflict-ridden behavior that will end in the complete disharmony of the use of outer space.
--:-- Moriba Jah: What we want to do at Privateer, as Alex said, with the data and information we're aggregating, is also incorporate the nuances of cultural lenses and social science. The fact that this thing is there and has a grappling hook — don't be so quick to press on the intent level. But if somebody wants to blow up a satellite in an orbit that clearly jeopardizes another country, maybe intent is a little easier to infer.
--:-- Alex Fielding: If everyone wanted to share in space and wanted to do what we were doing, we wouldn't have to launch any of our own satellites. We could just ask them, "Why don't you just give us access to your stuff and we'll give access to the entire community?" But it doesn't totally work that way. I think my two cents is that the history of space, most of the people who went to space were scientists and researchers and people with very, very good intent. You don't really send warfighters and politicians to space. You send people to go do research, and most of that research is focused on the betterment of humankind. One small step, right?
--:-- Alex Fielding: But the problem is getting to the giant leap. And we did the one small step. We've probably even done two and three small steps, but we haven't gotten to the giant leap. And right now, those middle steps include a lot of contentious behavior between a lot of people with their own self-motivations and interests.
--:-- Host: Steph, I remember when you put out the personal user manual.
--:-- Alex Fielding: Oh, yeah. I love that. Thanks. And that was a beautiful, transparent thing. No one has to guess what your own self-intent is because you published your own personal user manual. Anyone that would like to interact with you knows what your values and some of your goals are that you actually connect with so that other people can interact with that too. It was beautiful that you were willing to be that transparent.
--:-- Alex Fielding: There is no space user manual. And there's no country-defined user manual for space. So the interpretation of the current actions can come with a lens that are not the people that actually go on orbit. It's the people that direct the people on orbit. Like, I'm not supposed to say on this podcast anything that sounds or rhymes with Prussia. But when we had an ASAT attack last year in November, and I probably shouldn't even go here, the cosmonauts from Roscosmos that were aboard the space station at the time, they had no damn idea that their government was going to blow up an asset and put them and the world in peril. If they did, they certainly wouldn't have been up there.
--:-- So I can only imagine being their crewmates going like, "Dude, WTF." And I'm sure they were like, "Didn't know." And I'm sure they had absolutely no input on the actions of politics and posturing and warfighting and all those bad behaviors. As Morba said, there's 25 shades of space. Let's put it that way.
--:-- Host: Well, it reminds me of what we see everywhere in communities, what's happened with content when things become democratized. The original people who were in that space were just so dedicated, so obsessed with the thing. They really had care and felt a responsibility to advance that particular idea or industry. And then, of course, as it gets larger, more people get involved. It becomes more complex. And then I think space has this very fascinating layer of government regulation, which, anytime you're trying to involve so many parties or countries or states, it just becomes incredibly complex.
--:-- And even throughout this conversation, Morba, I've heard you talk about social science. We've talked about government regulation, the technical side. What is most needed in this space? I'm going to ask you, Morba, in terms of the types of talent, the types of people that Privateer is looking for. I've also heard you say that you're a blue-collar PhD. And again, you think space is for everybody. So who are the types of people that you would love to see get more involved in space?
--:-- Moriba Jah: So I've heard a lot of talk about STEM and focus on STEM and then STEAM kind of stuff. And I've stopped, for the most part, using the word "science" and using the word "engineering" because it is not inclusive. At the end of the day, science is about creation of knowledge and engineering is about creation of solutions. And when I go into rooms across the globe, whether it's in rural areas or in places with affluent people, I say, "Hey, who's into creating knowledge and who's into creating solutions?" Almost everybody raises their hands.
--:-- So the thing is, we don't want to presuppose where the best ideas to solve these wicked problems across humanity are going to come from. We want to make that accessible to recruit empathy across humanity. And for those people that can have an experience of empathy towards solving these problems, lower the entry bar to get their solutions as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
--:-- This is all to say that I've met people in very rural areas where the way that they have solved problems and created knowledge for their own group, their own tribe, I'm like, "Wow, I got a PhD. I don't think I could have come up with that one anytime soon." I'm mesmerized by the stuff that people can come up with. Humans are pretty damn smart. That's what we want to allow access to. That's what we want to recruit.
--:-- Host: Yeah, it reminds me of my favorite Steve Jobs quote, which I know, Alex, you had the privilege of working alongside him way back in the day. I'm going to butcher it, but it's something along the lines of everything that exists around us was built by someone no smarter than you. So I love that notion that sometimes we even have the curse of knowledge and that some industry like space may sound very intimidating to people who don't associate themselves with something that you might consider technical. But sometimes those are the people that you need in the industry.
--:-- Alex, I'm going to ask you a question, which is Privateer has a lot of ambition. There are many things that you're working on that sound very exciting, that sound like they're going to change things in space on Earth. What are your biggest challenges? If Privateer were to fail for some reason over the next few years, why would that be?
--:-- Alex Fielding: Morba actually hit it right on the head. It's a lack of empathy, because apathy is really the enemy of empathy. And we have created an environment in space where people really don't give a shit. It's going to sound like I'm picking on somebody. I'm not picking on anybody, but when you're a billionaire and you put on a cowboy hat and you go up on a rocket, that doesn't feel like all of us could do it. It doesn't feel like our own personal journey is tied to their journey.
--:-- When the Apollo 11 astronauts touched down on the surface of the moon, or at least when two of them did, their messages to humanity while the entire world watched — and I'm too young to have watched it live, but I've certainly watched the recording — the messages from the astronauts were not just to their families and to all humanity, but they were messages of peace. They were messages of love. They were messages of understanding. They were messages of hopefulness. They were messages of what was going to come in the future, that this new frontier was going to enable humankind to reach new levels.
--:-- Even the messages that we delivered onto the lunar surface were from 50-plus countries that did not get along with each other. But those world leaders left similar messages about our humanness and the nature of that, so that if it were ever seen and someone ever interpreted it, they would know that our motivations were really good and really interconnected.
--:-- Space right now, that message got lost along the capitalist route to monetize space. If Privateer fails, it's because humanity failed to recognize space as a frontier for all of us and instead continue to put it in this little compartment that's for billionaires and very, very special people who have tons of resources. And that makes them special somehow. I don't know how, but I guess it does. And that means it's only for them.
--:-- But the problem is people have not yet realized that space will likely govern their actions if we don't actually participate. So it has to be participatory in nature. If Privateer fails, we all fail, because the technology we're bringing to market, we're doing it in a way that is truly cooperative and is designed to encourage participation. So we're not becoming the gatekeeper to space. We're becoming the enabler to space. And we're not competing directly.
--:-- So if you look at this marketplace that some people would put Privateer in the bucket of space situational awareness and domain awareness and traffic management, I would argue it's not a market. Because the commercial companies that are there, they don't make giant amounts of money. They are not the mega-successful companies that you would think of. And we are much more alike than we are different. We're all trying to work on a problem for humanity.
--:-- I don't think if you talk to four or five companies that are in the SSA bucket and you ask them, "Who's your competitors?" We're actually all friends. It's a much more inclusive environment than people would give it credit for, because we're trying to do some good things. There are people outside that spectrum that are off in the gray area that don't have that view. But I think for the most part, we do.
--:-- And accessibility is going to be the gateway drug to encourage us all to see our humanity from a different perspective — a perspective that you don't have to travel there to get. When I was a kid, my family was very broke. The World Book Encyclopedia was the version of Google that we had, and we were missing some volumes, unfortunately, which is why I'm so poorly versed on biology. There's certain parts of the encyclopedia I missed by accident, and it was also outdated by the time I got it.
--:-- We need to change that for space so that somebody in the third world has the same access and the same capability as somebody in the first world without a penalty and without additional friction or cost. It needs to be open and accessible. That's the thing that was missing from going from the ocean to the stars. You can build a boat in your backyard and toss it in the ocean if you want. We all watched Moana. I've got a three-year-old. This is what you do.
--:-- We haven't seen humankind yet, maybe until now, be able to do that travel to the stars the way that we can do that on the ocean. But it is coming very, very, very soon and very affordably. And it will change our lives forever indefinitely.
--:-- Host: Great to have this conversation with you, Steph. I'd like to have it again at some point. Definitely. If you're keen. And yeah, Alex will keep it rolling. Thanks, Morba.
--:-- It's amazing that Privateer is based around this idea of empathy, cooperation, etc. I would push back a little bit, or I want to hear your reaction to this, which is that there have been many other endeavors — let's just use again, like land, air, ocean — which were also collaborative endeavors of many parties on Earth. And there were signs for a very long time that we were mistreating that land, air, and ocean. But it didn't change people's behavior. Empathy wasn't the driver of reversal, if that makes sense. And so I'm curious to know how you're thinking about that.
--:-- I know if we use carbon as a parallel, now people are talking about carbon taxes. They're creating new technologies that make it actually more economical to be more kind to the environment. So how do you think about that within space? How do you design the right incentives so it doesn't rely on people's goodwill, but instead the incentives are just a line where most people will act that way, whether they have empathy or not?
--:-- Alex Fielding: It's going to come down to enforcement. Unfortunately, there is the carrot, which is we all get to participate together. And I am a big believer that that carrot and that reward and that incentive is really huge. And that will encourage people's behavior to do the right thing if we can enable that without making it more punitive for them to do the right thing. It has to be just as easy to recycle your things as it is to throw it out your car window while you're driving.
--:-- This is something that is also societal and behavior-related in nature. I married a therapist. It doesn't show at all. If you travel to Tokyo, you don't see trash cans on every street corner because there's a societal notion that you are responsible for taking care of your garbage. You're not going to toss it on the street. I can't even imagine what it would be like to throw some trash in the street of Tokyo. Now, in contrast, New York City — one of my favorite cities — there's a trash can on every single street corner and there's trash littering the streets.
--:-- So to your point, how do you encourage people to take the thing and just put it in the trash can? It's societal, it's behavioral, it's trained. And the incentive structure isn't there. We all acknowledge that it's trashed, but there's always this notion that someone else will clean it up.
--:-- To be really candid, when Woz and I started Wheels of Zeus 22 years ago, or 21 years ago, we acknowledged that half of the things in space that we could see, that we could sense and detect, were trash. And we used to joke, we'd be the world's first kind of space environmental engineers. We would be the sanitation engineers on the back of the space trash truck, putting satellites into the compactor. We would go do that as our next career. It was a joke at the time, but it resulted in the tragedy of the commons 20 years later, because now we've got a million little things whizzing around that we can't even see and sense and detect or track. And the number of things that we can see and sense and detect and track is exponentially evolving into a giant ring of trash.
--:-- Host: Ring of trash. That's a Johnny Cash song.
--:-- Alex Fielding: Yeah, yeah.
--:-- Host: No, I know. It's also quite the picture to imagine this ring of trash circling around us above. I want to end on a more positive note because I know it can be quite scary, candidly, to think about what's happening above us, all the things that we rely on down here that come from above. But it is also inspiring to hear that you and others are trying to fix the problem. They're trying to coordinate the many parties involved here.
--:-- Contrary to my previous question about Privateer failing, if Privateer were to succeed alongside others who have similar missions, what would that look like? What would the space landscape look like in, let's say, 10 years if we are able to achieve that kind of coordination?
--:-- Alex Fielding: It'll be driven by accessibility and the desire for people to access space resources. I think largely self-interested motivation will be to improve life on Earth. And that remains a big part of our mission. Improving life in space doesn't do much for us, at least not in the short term. But improving life on Earth from space is very, very important. And we see like-minded companies around us working and like-minded people working on the same set of challenges.
--:-- The first part of our mission is safety. My hope is that this notion of giving away these technologies that we develop to help ensure a safe space environment, a sustainable space environment, will encourage usage. And ultimately, if enforcement does occur — which I think it's bound to occur soon, it has to occur soon — you'll start to see space traffic control be very akin to air traffic control. And today, the two things don't even connect.
--:-- But when you have this many things in space and they do reenter — quite a lot of them do ultimately reenter our atmosphere — they don't just totally vaporize. Little pieces come back. Sometimes big pieces come back. With the number of objects we're talking about, Murphy's Law is hard at work. The odds are low, but it is possible that space debris will enter and even intersect with air traffic or shipping traffic. And we're not that far from that. That possibility is already there. The probability is low.
--:-- Host: Does it take one of those catastrophic events to make people want to coordinate? Is that what it'll come to, do you think? Where we have literally a piece of space debris coming back through the atmosphere that hits an airplane? Is that the kind of event that you think will wake people up to the issue?
--:-- Alex Fielding: I hope not. I really hope that we do the right thing because it's the right thing to do. Our satellite constellation is called Pono. And Pono is the Hawaiian word for karma. It means to do the right thing or to do the righteous thing.
--:-- Hawaii is actually a really interesting place to headquarter Privateer because there are notions in Hawaiian society and words that are used that don't exist really in English. Hawaiians have a word for stewardship and responsibility that's called kuleana. That is more than just a word. It's a virtue. It's something that people live — their kuleana, their responsibility.
--:-- Ideas like pono and kuleana and the nature of stewardship and conservatorship — that has to translate to our space environment. Other than in our tax dollars, we don't pay for air traffic control. Space situational awareness and traffic management, domain awareness and traffic control — all these things should be free. They should not be things that space operators have to pay for. They should be things that enable people to do good things while they operate safely in space.
--:-- And we've already had bad things happen. We've had things happen in space that were nearly catastrophic, that have nearly cost a lot of lives. We're co-sponsored by Omega Watches, so this is not a total shameless plug. But Apollo 13 — you've got this crew that's had a catastrophic failure, nearly a mortal failure. Young people growing up today doing a STEM education don't think about the tools they had on board. They had to shut everything down to get home. What did they use? They used a wristwatch, a slide rule, and they timed their burn by hand. They had to shut off their systems and time it on a wristwatch. That's how fragile space is.
--:-- And you look at that and some of these ASAT tests and attacks and things that we've done in space — the United States has also done some pretty bad things there. Those things have put human lives in jeopardy in a way that our lack of empathy has really hurt us. When that ASAT happened, the soundbite within hours of blowing that thing into millions of pieces was "situation green. Everything's normal." I guarantee you it was not normal for the crew on the space station. And it was no way normal. It's a terrifying position to tell seven people whose lives are in peril: "We don't even know where you should move to be in less risk. We just know you're in grave danger." That's terrifying.
--:-- Why was that not front page news for more than an hour? Why was a tweet more important than that? It really wasn't. So we've got to fix this empathy, apathy thing. And then we can get on to accessibility as the focus of the business. And I'm a big believer that accessibility will lead the way because we actually crave that access to move our society and our civilization forward.
--:-- Host: Something that's coming to mind for me right now is, as you've talked about, the importance of words and even the importance of hearing something coined like "space sustainability," which is something I hadn't heard before researching Privateer and doing this episode. But it is important when you have words. You gave a couple examples from Hawaiian culture. I actually created this website years ago that was a compilation of all the untranslatable words from different countries because they do have power — because in those cultures, there are such unique traits that surface in words because words are code for people to need that vocabulary in their culture.
--:-- And so I'm very excited to see how certain words surrounding this issue may help illuminate the problem. There's a term that people can understand, they can conceptualize, they can associate with. So I think that'll be fascinating to watch.
--:-- The final question I have for you is, Privateer and many of the businesses that you've done before are incredibly inspiring. And we like to ask if there's someone that inspires you and what they're working on, whether it's space related or not.
--:-- Alex Fielding: There are so many inspirational people working to do really hard things in space. I just don't see — and don't get me wrong, there's a part of my heart that has to remain a cold, dark capitalist because we must make money. We're not building a nonprofit. We have investors, and those investors want to see a great return. And I'm a big believer that you can align good things that you do in the world that can still make money. It doesn't have to be a nonprofit to do good things.
--:-- I also am a huge believer that if it's a problem I can solve in my lifetime, it's probably not all that interesting. Because our lives are so fleeting and so momentary. We should all be working on really, really hard problems. And they are moonshots. If we don't make it the whole way, we still all win. And that's okay.
--:-- It's inspirational to get to work with Woz. He's a brilliant, lovely human. And we've known each other for a long time. But I will say, working between him and getting to work with Steve Jobs back in my time at Apple, the thing that's interesting — I was helping Woz clean out his garage. This is a true story. You don't think about Woz cleaning out his garage, right? But in his garage, I came across a blue three-ring binder, and it was filled with HP graph paper from when he worked at Hewlett-Packard before they started Apple. And he was moonlighting, working on his designs for Apple I and Apple II. And this was a solo endeavor. This is different from the type of endeavors that we have to do at scale.
--:-- But I'm going through it page by page as an engineer and looking at every trace and every chip that he hand drew on every page for Apple I and Apple II, and then in assembler for Apple ROM and Apple DOS. And then I get to the back of this book. It's an engineering PhD manifesto that I don't think you could create today. This should be a part of engineering school curriculum for every kid that wants to go into STEM. At the back of the same book on the same HP graph paper before he started Apple were handwritten song lyrics from the Beatles and Bob Dylan that he had heard on the radio while he was working on Apple I and Apple II.
--:-- And I thought, man, how can you be the human that did this and be the human that cared enough to write this down and to live by those things? And I think it is important that we make a difference and we make an impact.
--:-- There are a lot of things on planet Earth that are technology projects that I really don't care about. I'm not the type of person that's going to go start the next Tinder or the next — I'll skip all the other great app examples — but they're fleeting. And I'm a big believer that Elon oftentimes actually means what he says. Sometimes he doesn't. I think he's pretty damn funny, but I think sometimes he says exactly what he means and people glance over it because it sounds so crazy.
--:-- But all of these enabling step zones on the way to Mars and on the way to an interplanetary species, on the way to ultimately a space-faring civilization — all absolutely critical. And we can't start on it at the last minute. There's going to be a million baby steps to get that one giant leap. And we have to work on it now.
--:-- Host: Yeah, something I took from what you just shared there, even the example of seeing the drawings in Woz's garage, is that I think you've had the unique perspective or ability to see something from its very, very early stages — like those drawings — to obviously the giant that Apple became today. And getting to work with someone who had the capacity to understand something that can emerge from being a seed into something much, much bigger. And I think you're perhaps uniquely able, with your team, to understand how much this problem can and will scale and the need to start at the seed stage today in order to address it, because it's going to be too late if we address it tomorrow.
--:-- Alex Fielding: And it was weird. It was too early when we did Apollo. Now that we are in a commercial space environment where 80% of the things that went up last year were commercial versus government — that's a flip. Most of my lifetime, the things that went up most years were 80% government and you'd be lucky to find 20% commercial. Now the dollars haven't shifted yet. The government's still outspending the commercial sector because of all of those things — the war machine and intelligence gathering and defense. But that's going to change very, very, very soon. It's bound to, because the government's taking rides on commercial rockets now.
--:-- That's not exactly a totally unexpected trend. We've seen it happening for a while, but the rate has changed. So now you can actually — exponential things are really hard to measure when they're tiny and tiny and tiny. But once the steps get bigger, you can measure them. And we're now in an environment where we can measure that. We have to get ahead of it now. And the timing is definitely urgent.
--:-- The urgency — there are a number of companies that are feeling that urgency and a number of people that are innovating in space that clearly see the urgency. And you can sense it because the conversations with them and the work that they're doing is absolutely critical to this minute in time. But these are all steps that we're on a bigger path. And that path is going to far surpass our lifetimes.
--:-- Host: I think you're right. Every exponential curve looks flat one direction and it looks vertical the next. So I'm very interested to see where this goes. I'm very interested to also see specifically some of the technologies that Privateer is working on, where those go, how those develop, what else comes to be.
--:-- So I want to say thank you for joining us today, Alex, and also Morba. He had to drop early. But this is really fascinating. And I'm glad that we have people working on this because, as we've talked about, this problem is going to get just more and more pervasive with time. And so it's worth us understanding it today. So hopefully more people listening to this will have encountered this idea of space sustainability. And again, thank you for sharing that, Alex.
--:-- Alex Fielding: Steph, thank you for giving us a platform and shining a light on this really incredible topic at this really pivotal time. It really means a lot. So thank you very, very much for having us.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: Let me add one other small thing about — yeah, please. Oh my gosh. Like your house getting messy and all that. We're in the move from California to Colorado right now. We got a new house. I am fighting like the devil not to bring the stuff from the other house, put it in storage. If anything, keep a nice house clean. You can see it as a house, you know, and not just a big collection of memorabilia or whatever. But it's a fight. But that's sort of like space. Let's start getting up to space with the intent ahead of time, keeping it clean and also being prepared for backups and being able to get out of the way and not make space messier than it is.
--:-- Host: Yeah. It's hard enough to take care of your own house. Imagine sharing a house.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: I had one idea. What if you could put up a satellite and it got hit by space debris and a bunch of particles spread off? What if it was made out of some instrument that when they spread off into space, the coldness of space turned them into — well, maybe what if it could turn into like gummy bears? Something not as harmful as metal. Maybe even a gas would be the best.
--:-- Host: That's certainly an image — imagining a broken satellite turning into a bunch of gummy bears.
--:-- Steve Wozniak: But all change only starts down at the atomic level. Physicists and chemists that understand the atoms and new materials that can be made that have new properties — that always changes life a lot.
--:-- Host: Well, I mean, something that I still don't know if I fully understand is what happens when you do have a bunch of space debris. Because it sounds like what Privateer is doing is setting the information so people have it, so they understand what's going on up there. Also, hopefully creating more of a sharing economy of these satellites. But of the debris that's already up there, you can't really get rid of it, right? Or there are a couple of companies working on that, but we just have to deal with this stuff in our house for quite some time now, right?
--:-- Steve Wozniak: Well, last week I wrote a forward for a book coming out by the guy, Uri Levine, who founded Waze, created Waze. And you start out and at the seed stage, you have some ideas and you work on them, you have to modify, modify, modify. It's continual iteration. So it's even what Privateer will be. It's not like we're going to bring stuff back from space. No, we're going to help it get back. And we're going to think of other ideas along the way. That's just the nature of business.
--:-- Host: Definitely. Yeah. We're looking forward to that. Okay. Have a good day. Thanks, Steve. Bye.
--:-- Host: Thanks for listening to the a16z podcast. If you like this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, or tell a friend. We also recently launched on YouTube at youtube.com slash a16z underscore video, where you'll find exclusive video content. We'll see you next time.
