Welcome to In-Orbit, the fortnightly podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world.
[00:00:00] Dallas Campbell: Hello and welcome to In-Orbit, the podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world, brought to you by the Satellite Applications Catapult. I'm your host, Dallas Campbell and we have a live discussion to share with you. Back in May of this year, the and the UK Space Agency collaborated on the IOSM Conference. It was a first of its kind event that brought together leading experts, researchers and academia to discuss and showcase the latest advancements in IOSM Technologies. Today, we are going to be sharing a live recording of a panel from day two of the conference entitled, What's Next and When? Exploring what we can expect from the industry over the next decade. The panel is chaired by Mike Curtis-Rouse, head of In Orbit Servicing and Manufacturing at the Catapult and he's joined by Richard Osborne, who's the chief Technical Officer at Astro Agency. We have Dr. Leon Alkalai, Chief Executive Officer at Mandala Space Ventures, and Dr. Martina Meisnar, Materials and Processes Engineer at ESA.
[00:01:23] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Welcome to the closing panel for the IOSM Conference. I'm Mike Curtis-Rouse and the focus of this panel is very much about where we're going next. What are we doing next and when? I don't want to reiterate that space is big, we all know that. It's also new, but not that new, we also know that and it's also changing rapidly, and you also all know that, otherwise you wouldn't be here. But what I want to cover in this session is what is real, what's viable and what's actually going to happen in the next 10 years. Let me get the panel to introduce themselves initially. So firstly, I'm going to turn to Richard.
[00:01:51] Richard Osborne: Yeah, I worked for a company called Astro Agency, set up in 2019, ostensibly, originally because we thought that there was a problem in the space industry in terms of people just didn't understand just how much wonderful stuff was going on in the space industry and we felt it was about time to get the message out there. But what we discovered in the process was that there was a lot more to it than that. There was a lot of opportunity around doing business intelligence, due diligence, looking at the big picture, the strategic picture, and that's how we got tracked into things like analysis as well. So we've now got a team of, I think it's 24 at the moment, around the world, some in the UK, some in places like Ukraine even, still at the moment and some even at Harwell. We're just setting up at Harwell as well. We've had over 60 clients, so we've covered quite a bit of the space industry, from the launch sector to, downstream and component manufacturers and subsystems. So it's a very interesting job, and I say to people that my job is basically joining the dots and that's pretty much what it is. It's a case of looking at what people are doing, working out where they're going and what they need to do over the next five years and ten years. So, this is why it was quite a good fit when Mike mentioned about this panel.
[00:03:22] Mike Curtis-Rouse: We'll move onto Martina.
[00:03:24] Martina Meisnar: Yeah, thank you very much for inviting me to this panel, I'm very excited. Also, we have now already quite an interesting two days to reflect on. So, a little bit about myself, maybe a little bit about what I do at ESA. So, first of all, I've been building up this ESA Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory for the past almost nine years on the campus here. It's evolved to being a joint venture between STFC and ESA. So we have commercial activities that we run in the lab, but we also support our ESA R&D contracts that we run with European space industry. Which brings me to my second part of my job, which is, I'm the technical officer for a large number of technology development activities, which range from advanced manufacturing to Out of Earth Manufacturing, we have a lot of additive manufacturing obviously included as well. So I have a very wide, broad overview of the research that we're doing at ESA with European Space Industry and oftentimes that gives the opportunity to bring certain, interesting problems into the lab and look at the materials, the manufacturing processes we will be using in the, next 10 years or further in the future, or even closer. Another interesting initiative that we have, I already mentioned, is the Out of Earth Manufacturing Cross Cutting Initiative, which is recently started. We started at ESA and we're trying to look into what manufacturing capabilities will we need within the next 10, 15 years to reach our goals. Our goals we've discussed a lot in the last two days, I think we're all very well aligned, but this is something that's always very interesting. But, one point that I would like to mention is we've had the ESA Agenda 2025 and sustainability, safety, security are very big topics and one of the ways to achieve these goals is in orbit servicing, manufacturing, assembly, in order to go the next step and that's also part of what I do at ESA and what is at the heart, at my heart.
[00:05:52] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Thank you, Martina. Leon.
[00:05:53] Leon Alkalai: Thank you, Michael, for inviting me here today. It's a pleasure to be here on the panel. So my name is Leon Alkalai. I retired three years ago from JPL, this is NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, part of California Institute of Technology. I was just blessed to be there for 32 years, work on a lot of new technologies, missions to the Moon and Mars and then, last couple of years of working at JPL, I was also allowed to do some consulting and I was, consulting for, a few venture funds, venture VCs, pretty large ones, and then I kind of saw that a few of the companies that I was doing due diligence for were becoming extremely successful, at least on paper, very quickly. Relativity Space, Umbra, Planet IQ, a bunch of them and it kind of stimulated me to think of that there's a world outside JPL and so I decided to leave and retire three years ago and create Mandela Space Ventures, which is a venture studio. If you look at the various forms of models, business models, there's accelerators, incubators, studios, venture studios, and venture studio is quite unique. It basically comprises of two entities. One is a studio where you incubate, accelerate, you develop new ideas, new companies and then a venture fund. A venture fund has limited partners that invest in companies and the venture studio model is where the venture fund in our case can invest in the studio output, the studio companies, but also invests in outside companies as well. So, Mandela Space Ventures is the parent company, we have the studio. Our first fund, Explorer One, was a sixteen million dollar fund that invested in ten companies and then now I'm raising a second fund, Mariner 2, to continue investing in the space ecosystem. The reason I'm here is because we actually competed and we won the award from the UK Space Agency to be one of the four selected companies to run the UK Space Agency Accelerator programme. That call is now open for startup companies in the UK, so please, if you know of any company that is in the early stage, early stage and is a space company, they should apply to the Mandala Space Ventures Accelerator Program. The competition is open for applications until the end of May, so there's still a few weeks, left and then the program starts in September. It's an eight week virtual program, so everybody can stay in the UK. But the last week is in person, a pitch day, in front of a large group of VCs. We just held one for the Canadian government, the pitch day was at Caltech, it was very well, received. The Canadian government and the Canadian Space Agency were very happy. So we hope to repeat that for the UK early stage space ecosystem. So anybody who is a CEO or part of a startup company, please consider applying. It's for early stage companies and we work eight weeks with the companies to become venture backable and we introduce them and network them with a pretty large group of VCs all in the United States.
[00:09:30] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Thanks Leon! Branson phones you up and goes, you know what? Had a last minute cancellation. Any of you guys do you want to jump on, effectively, Virgin Galactic? Pre launch, basically, up to the common line, who wants to go?
[00:09:41] Richard Osborne: Absolutely not.
[00:09:42] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Absolutely not from Richard. Okay. Jeff Bezos tells you that in addition to your Amazon Prime membership, you've also got a bonus flight to join a collection of, 1980s celebrities who you've almost certainly never heard of to fly in his vessel, who wants to go?
[00:09:57] Richard Osborne: What you've got to bear in mind is the actual heritage and the systems here. Starship is relatively new, still, obviously, it's only had three launches, but by the time anyone goes on it, it will have had a lot of launches, so it will be a much, much more ironed out system. Similarly with Blue Origin, by the time there's people on anything that Blue Origin build, It's going to be a very ironed out system, but that's in terms of new glenn going to orbit. The reason I say no to Virgin is because I've spent decades working with hybrid rocket motors and I would never, ever go near any hybrid rocket motor if it involves people.
[00:10:47] Mike Curtis-Rouse: So it's a no to Branson from you, then.
[00:10:49] Richard Osborne: Definitely.
[00:10:50] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Okay, interesting. So a little bit about architecture. So let's turn to the panel, basically, let's talk about 10 years, okay, not digging into that too much, we'll come back to launches because it's certainly a favorite subject for you and I, Richard, and certainly people in here know it's a favorite subject for me. But next 10 years, Martina, where do you think we're going to be going? I mean, is it going to be more business as usual? Or do you think we're going to start seeing some really big sort of transformational jumps?
[00:11:15] Martina Meisnar: Well, looking at, back at this conference, I'm actually very motivated and inspired because I think we can make large jumps within the next 10 years if we all focus our minds and our engineering skills to achieve common goals. I think what we first need to do is try to focus these and align these goals, is what I see. What's clear to me is that the Active Debris Removal Initiative is already quite advanced, it's probably in a, stage where, let's say, manufacturing on orbit, on another planet is still very far behind. So what I would like to see is for manufacturing in space on orbit or on another planet to catch up and this is exactly where ESA currently sort of putting their concentration and their funding. We have different initiatives, different roadmaps and I think we are in a blessed position because we don't rely purely on private funding. We don't have to make things commercially viable. So if we say we want to be able to have a 3D printer who produces spare parts on orbit because we need them on the ISS, we can put a lot of funding into that and develop those technologies, even if nobody wants a screwdriver or a screw on earth back from orbit, which is, would make it commercially maybe more viable. So we also have the opportunity to do space exploration and a lot of space exploration is reliant on enabling technologies that we've been speaking about in this conference. So if you think about everything that we need to carry into space to do something with it, we all know that there are limitations as to how much mass we can put into space. So if we want to build a telescope, let's say, or telescope formation that allows us to have, what's the diameter of James Webb?
[00:13:35] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Anyone? I'll give you a prize, probably a useful prize, maybe a keyring.
[00:13:40] Martina Meisnar: Yeah, it's exactly, it's big, but not that big. So we could do much more science with larger telescopes. So if we develop these assembly technologies, but who will pay for it, right? So commercially, it's maybe not of so much interest, but as ESA, as a public agency, we can propose these sorts of developments, which will later potentially lead to more commercial activities, because we also, we're not only talking about exploration in terms of science and telescopes, we're also talking about antennae. So now we have the largest antennae that we have in space are deployable structures, but it's still a limited enterprise. If we can actually make these antennae by assembling and manufacturing them in orbit, then we could even serve a terrestrial market potentially and make it commercially viable. So that's where I think I would like things to go to get to the point where we've demonstrated a lot of these technologies are feasible where the commercial markets have jumped on board and said yeah this is really a good technology and we want to buy into this. So that the companies then get the return on investment and be in the position to make big things in space, make things that, make our lives easier, better.
[00:15:08] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Yeah, I want to jump off that. So, I mean, capturing that in terms of lots of ADR going on, we've heard a lot about ADR recently. Obviously, they're big projects, flagship, and otherwise focus on debris removal and then it's that transition into kind of manufacturing and playing catch up. Leon, you've got a pretty good perspective, you're sitting kind of in the heartlands of basically space innovation. I mean, we're trying it at Harwell, but California's been doing it longer and bigger. What's your perspective in terms of, you know, maybe building on from where Martina was talking about, basically?
[00:15:37] Leon Alkalai: I'll mention two areas that I'm kind of tracking and that I think is very realistic in the next decade that will be transformative. So you brought up the Starship, I do believe the Starship coming on board will be transformational and to agree with Martina, but to add a twist to it, we've been for decades constrained in mass. Every kilogram, every gram has a price you pay for the launch vehicle and so on. By using the Starship as a workhorse to put things in Leo or the Moon and so on, it really is going to loosen significantly that constraint on mass. So I think what will happen is that it will, open up the space to large structures, large deployable structures, large structures in general. So that will, open up a new economy, in my opinion, in terms of building systems that were no longer, that are no longer as constrained in mass as we've had for decades. That means these could be large modules, it could be, we at Mandala have been working on a concept of large data centers in space using large deployable structures. So I think that whole, and there are companies in the UK and in USA and Southern California already building spacecraft and flight systems. that are massive, assuming that the Starship is coming on board. So I think that whole mass constraint is going to be significantly relieved, that's one area that I think is transformative. The other thing, I'm a believer in the rising lunar economy. I do think that's going to open up new opportunities. There's a huge number of landers and the Artemis program and HLS and so on going to the moon and I think just like we've been now listening and are convinced about the rising LEO economy, I think the rising lunar economy is down the road in the next decade in terms of logistics, in terms of P& T, communications, interoperability, mining and looking for resources. It's just going to be a new world that is going to be permanently developing, on the moon. So those are two areas there, certainly, others, but those are two that I would highlight.
[00:18:10] Mike Curtis-Rouse: They're great ones to pick apart. Turn back to the audience, you're getting used to this. So, who here, being a space company, which is broadly all of us, if you have a product, a system, a prototype, etc., if Starship is operational, would you fly on Starship? Yeah, most of you. So, it's a bus, it's a means to get there.
[00:18:26] Richard Osborne: Yeah, I think what you're missing is, and Leon touched on it, is it's utterly transformative because it's not just the mass, it's the volume, it's utterly the scale. So what it means, is it's got better, but there has been a dearth of true leadership and good management in the space industry for decades. It's got a lot better in the last 10, 15 years. In the UK, that's largely down to the UK Space Agency, which, my God, they've been brilliant and we need more of that. So what we're seeing, or what I've seen over the last 10 years or so, especially in the UK, is a change from that. There's a lot more enthusiasm, there's a lot more younger people, which seemed to be frowned upon back when I was younger. There's a lot more passion, there's a lot more enthusiasm around and that means that a lot more things can happen and it also means people will think big. We look at what NASA's doing at the moment with Gateway, it's planned for the moon. I mean, come on, is that the best people can come up with? You know, when I go I really do want to go, I want to go in my space yacht that has been delivered by Starship, in Starship's payload bay and then off to the moon. I don't want to go in a little tin can. I want to go in something with burnished wooden sides, connelly leather, and I want to be drinking my whiskey as I go around the moon listening to opera and that's how it should be and if we want to bring people along, I If we want people involved, engaging people outside of the sector, we need to make it real to them, like that, they're not going to go if it's in a little tin can. Make it exciting for them.
[00:20:17] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Got it, right. Okay. Leon, do you buy Richard's vision?
[00:20:20] Leon Alkalai: Well, I do buy his spirit in the sense that there is a whole other side of space, which is space tourism and space tourism is going to happen, no doubt about it. My first venture fund, Explore One, invested in Space Perspective, a Florida based company that goes into high altitudes, so you see the curvature of space. But that, you described, basically a luxury vehicle that goes on a gondola up and it's affordable to, it's not like going on Virgin Galactic, and so that is the beginning and there will be, tourism to Leo, to the moon and so on and that will happen. There's no doubt about it. it's happening now, but certainly within the decade that will be starting, I think, like a luxury tourism business and then it will evolve into an affordable business.
[00:21:19] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Martina, does the European Space Agency, I guess it doesn't have a tourist agency attached to it, but where does the, where do you think ESA sits within the kind of space tourism aspect?
[00:21:28] Martina Meisnar: We do have a travel agency.
[00:21:31] Mike Curtis-Rouse: That's good. Does it have space yachts?
[00:21:32] Martina Meisnar: But no you can't book a flight to space yet. In terms of answering that, so ESA is not actively looking into space tourism, I would say, but, it's just, it's not a priority. If you think of the first planes, they were designed to bring people from A to B safely and without the shock of their lives, let's say. We've evolved now to a position where you can buy a private cabin on an Airbus A380 and you have all the luxury that you would expect on a yacht. So, I think it is definitely, it is a natural thing for us humans where we go. We start from, we need to get from A to B to we want luxury while getting from A to B. So personally, I completely agree, also with Leon that space tourism is something that will happen, it's just a natural consequence of what we're doing, that's the way I see it from an ESA perspective is we are enabling to technologies that make all these things possible. We're helping industry. We're creating the, hopefully best landscape of evolving the technology so we can do in orbit servicing, manufacturing, humans onto moon and so on and as a, side effect, we always have commercial activities and what people want the most, they'll get, they pay for it. So that's, I think, a natural thing.
[00:23:11] Mike Curtis-Rouse: That's a nice kind of segue then into it. So space tourism is clearly, it's definitely part of the future, we're seeing it beginning to manifest slowly. We'll see Jared and his gang go up and do EVA successfully, or otherwise, I guess we hope, all successfully, in a few months, etc. So we can see that certainly if you have a few spare billion, which naturally all of us have, that's definitely something you can do. However, just digging into that, The perspective in terms of where IOSM sits within space tourism, it's clearly a factor, because in order to build the capabilities to make space tourism work, we can just kind of, well, we're space yacht yet, but I guess we might be one day and maybe not too far in the future, but we're going to need that infrastructure. So just coming back to you Martina, can you dig into that a little bit around where IOSM from your perspective sits? How does it tie into space tourism? Can you see a natural kind of overlap in terms of how we might build that in?
[00:24:00] Martina Meisnar: It's a very wide range in question. I think the first thing that's obviously for space tourism, you, as we just said, we need the infrastructure and we are creating infrastructure right now that makes it possible for the Artemis astronauts to go to the moon and first do some flybys and then actually land on the moon. So it is clear to me that the technology we are developing and whether it's on orbit fueling, which we saw is a very important topic. But also we talked even about food production in space, not maybe commercially for bringing it back to Earth and eat it there, but we will have exploration astronauts in the future that go to moon and then to Mars and somehow we will probably develop a way of making some form of nutrients food on the way there and that could easily also tie into space tourism, where we will have our crisps made in space, served on the yacht, so to say. But another thing is that I would like to highlight, and I wanted to speak about today, is the upcoming Moonlight mission. So, Moonlight is actually an ESA mission, but also with private partnership that will be developed here at EXAD and it is supposed to make the communication and navigation network facility around the moon. So at the first instance, it will be focusing on the south pole of the moon, where most of the activities will take place initially. But basically, it's an essential service, so to say, because we need to know where we are, we need to navigate on the moon as much as we're doing on Earth and all of these facilities like that, basic navigation, communication that we will develop within IOSM, will also help the space tourism.
[00:26:08] Mike Curtis-Rouse: And that's a great way to go back to something Leon was saying. So we talk about, essentially a cislunar economy, and we talk about the Leo economy, but the lunar economy is one I always slightly struggle with. What are we going to get from the moon? Leon, what is realistically useful on the moon? I mean, which commercially we can do things with.
[00:26:24] Leon Alkalai: Yeah, so there's, I think a whole spectrum of opportunities. A lot of it we don't know. So there is the unknown element of discovery, of resources and other minerals and so on that we don't know and there's enough I would say initiative in the commercial sector, even, to explore the unknown. That's on the far, let's say, side of the, spectrum and then there is, before that, there's always been a motivation for science. To put science, telescopes, whether it's radio astronomy on the far side of the moon and so on. It's always been a big scientific need to return samples from the South Pole Aitken Basin, which is the largest crater or depleted area in the solar system. So there's a lot of scientific reasons to go back, there's exploration to look for resources and so on and then I think, just like with where we are with the LEO economy, there's going to be elements of building infrastructure, like Martina mentioned and then that will enable more and more discovery and more venture in, to the moon. To me, this is just a matter of time and financial resources because it's just a natural expansion for humanity to go from earth to sustainability in LEO and then to the moon. So it's not really even a question of whether it's going to happen. It's just a matter of the economic incentive to do that, but I think it's, it would be, it's just the right thing to get ready for that lunar economy to pick up.
[00:28:10] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Just come back to Richard. Richard, so, I mean, there's a lot here to explore, there's a lot of opportunity here. From a UK perspective, bringing it a little bit back, further away from California and the moon, come back to, effectively the UK. How does the UK play a part in that, and where do you think the UK is going to be critically playing a part in that?
[00:28:28] Richard Osborne: If you look at where the UK stands in terms of IOSM. Now, we seem to be right at the cusp where we, I think the UK really can lead the world on IOSM, it's ours for the taking. I mean, look at all the space you've got at Harwell here, the UK Space Agency or the Catapult or your venture fund could very easily set up a competition to do something like building a 3D printed Structure for habitation. You've got the room here to do that, you could absolutely set a competition to build something. It doesn't have to be big, just big enough to show how it would work and how it could be outfitted and from that, that in itself may catalyse new companies to form that will want to do something that will drive forward the lunar economy.
[00:29:27] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Leon likes the idea of this.
[00:29:28] Leon Alkalai: Yeah, so...
[00:29:29] Mike Curtis-Rouse: I think he does.
[00:29:30] Leon Alkalai: I don't want to dampen the enthusiasm at all, but I think it's a little bit optimistic. When you look at just what happens in the United States and California, especially SpaceX and so on, to be a successful company, it's, you have to be more than successful in the first few years or whatever, you need to scale. You need to scale, which requires lots and lots of capital. I don't even know how many billions SpaceX or Elon Musk put into the Starship, it's uncountable and then that's on top of contracts from NASA, the Air Force, Space Force, and so on. So, in order to lead, in order to build, Large enterprises, it requires a lot of capital and that's where the United States really excels. The venture capital understands the risk and understands the reward and so I think the things are changing, there is more venture capital around the world in the Middle East and in many areas in the, in Europe. But I think that element is far, let's say, stronger in the United States. and so I've seen here highlighted Astroscale, Clear, ClearSpace, and so on. Great examples, but, they're still very early stage.
[00:30:54] Mike Curtis-Rouse: So in a way, what you're saying is the barrier is not so much technological, the barrier is commercial and then fundamentally digging into that, it's financial.
[00:31:01] Leon Alkalai: The advantage is moving fast and investing large amounts of capital. You look at AxiomSpace, a startup company from just a couple of years ago, they raised hundreds of millions of dollars, they're currently at a plus three billion plus valuation and more capital is going in. You look at relativity, you look at a bunch of companies, not all of them will succeed, but to become, to lead, to become a big player in this business, it requires a lot of capital and it requires moving very quickly and to do that, there are venture, private equity and venture firms that will put up the money, they're betting on this fast growth, so that is, that's a challenge.
[00:31:45] Mike Curtis-Rouse: There's two facets to this. So we're talking effectively a commercial financial element and then we're talking a technological element. So let's not say, okay, the UK is not going to clearly lead in being able to raise that level of capital, point taken, absolutely, but technologically, does Europe, let's extend the UK, let's extend the UK into Europe, because ultimately, it is a partnership, and it always will be, does Europe have the technological capability to compete and be a global leader? As ESA, you're probably in a pretty good position to answer that, I hope.
[00:32:16] Martina Meisnar: Yes, I think I have very high confidence in European capabilities. Also in terms of, I've been here in the UK at ESA for almost nine years and I've seen the capabilities that are in this country, especially in the manufacturing sector. It's been proven many times that the UK is a leading country. Also, many other European countries have very strong competencies in the sector. Obviously, our GDP can never be compared to that of the US or even other large nations. So we do have to sort of, I always feel like there's a little bit of a limitation. Also in terms of launchers, we haven't had the best period recently. So in terms of the new space development, we're lagging a little bit behind and as you said very well, in terms of the commercial willingness to enter the market, to provide equity and funding, we are behind, but on a technological level, I have the utmost faith in the Engineers that are in place in Europe, that they are capable of producing the same results. It's, I think, it's a question of following this funding route and as a space agency that's what we're here for. We're trying to follow the new developments of new space, we're, placing public funding where we think it's best placed and where it can attract private funding at a later stage, this is our role, we demonstrate technology, we've heard it many times in this, conference to demonstrate technology, to get the private sector interested, who then invests into this technology and where we can upgrade and upscale and ESA, I'm not sure how many people have heard of ESA's new scale up programme. Again, ESA Agenda 2025 places a large emphasis on commercialization and following the new space era and therefore, the commercialisation department was tasked with finding a solution to that and they created the Scalar program, which is basically split into two parts. The first part is InnoVid. So this is what includes, seed funding, so there is a big program, it's probably not known to many of you, but also the new file apps that are being deployed across Europe. Basically places where people with an idea. can develop this idea into, demonstrate into a product and then jump into the next stage of, second phase, B funding, I think you call it and then further funding through other investors and so even in the second stage of scale up, which is the investor phase, we put these companies that have just graduated from this initial seed phase. They are put into touch with, on the ESA marketplace, that's the term we use, they are put in touch with companies that want to invest. So we have investors ready that say, I have money, I want to invest and I just need the right, investment. I need to find the right place to invest this and this is the ESA marketplace.
[00:35:48] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Great, thank you. Richard you had a point on that and then I want to move back to launches, which is a favourite subject.
[00:35:49] Richard Osborne: Yeah, I was just going to dare to disagree with my learned friend on what the UK can do. It would not be a stretch to think that there is the capability developing in IOSM in the UK that combined with an in source resource utilisation system, that you could put something on the surface of the moon and seriously consider additive manufacture of structures and start building out something for it's not going to be cheap, but it's not going to be the billions that perhaps you're thinking of. I think that's the type of capability that the UK could develop and would it then be spun out beyond that and bought out by the US? Potentially, yeah.
[00:36:49] Leon Alkalai: Just to be clear, I'm very, enamored and impressed with the, first of all, the education system in the UK. You have some of the best universities in the world, which is really the beginning. of this process. It goes for Europe and so on. So there's no lack of talent, there's no lack of, leadership in science and technology, that's totally not the issue, I never would even try and argue that, but there is a, in principle, an ecosystem of capitalisation, venture capital that in the U S is far, along developed where billions and billions of dollars every year are invested in high risk, high payoff ventures. Whether it's in AI, you look at the amount of billions that went into AI companies over the last decade and so on. So there, it's just kind of built into the culture. What that does, it results in outcomes on scale. You can pick any one area, which I agree with, there's no reason why the UK and others can't lead, but when you look at it over the whole kind of economy, there's billions and billions of dollars going into taking risk in the U. S. It's just built into the economy.
[00:38:10] Richard Osborne: Yeah, that's something that's lacking in the UK, yes, absolutely and the other thing that's lacking in the UK, within the financial community, I feel, is lack of technical. It's far, greater in the U. S, which is why they're much better at assessing risk. Whereas in the U. K., they tend to be risk averse, because they don't understand technology, because a lot of them have come from dare I say arts or, social science backgrounds, they've not come from a hard science background.
[00:38:44] Leon Alkalai: And when the companies in the U. S. that get a lot of money fail, that's built into the model. It's built into, if you fail on, you know, 99 bets and that one win is a multi billion dollar return, that pays off for all the risk.
[00:39:05] Mike Curtis-Rouse: DARPA model, effectively, in a way. Recognising that we're running out of time, 20 years out, we're talking 2044, if my maths is right. 2044, 20 years from now, Leon. What's big and what's happening? Give me one minute on that.
[00:39:20] Leon Alkalai: Looking long term, I have a, let's call it a faith or a belief system that as a society, and this is now thinking big, that we need to think less local and more global. Less about ourselves and more about others. So I'm hopeful that over time, whether it's investing and developing an understanding of our planet and preserving our planet, understanding climate change and doing things to preserve the planet, that's one direction that I hope will happen and the other is to be more equitable in the benefits of space for everybody, whether it's education or healthcare, there's just, in my opinion, we will evolve more to a global society rather than just, you know, UK or Europe or USA. So I believe space has that magic to provide a perspective of the world, from the moon, you see the planet, you don't see borders.
[00:40:24] Mike Curtis-Rouse: I now. I'm going to keep going. So just going to hang in there.
[00:40:29] Leon Alkalai: So that's my vision and my belief and my hope that, space will provide more of a, call it a just society for all, not just for the U. S. or not just for the rich, but for the whole planet.
[00:40:42] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Thank you, Martina.
[00:40:42] Martina Meisnar: I do want to add and that might be a bit more of a boring topic, that I do hope that we will by then have found agreements on regulation and standards of how we will work with the other countries together. Another thing I would like to see is more recycling of materials. We've heard a lot of, let's burn it up in the atmosphere and be done with it. I don't think that's a long term solution either. I mean, The Zero Debris Approach by 2030, sort of, that's the low hanging fruit, but I would like to see a world or a space, where we actually don't bring mass into space, we take it from what's already there and manufacture on orbit, on planet, in transit, with the things that we already have there and we just bring the minimum amount of stuff because we are working on extracting oxygen from lunar material, same with metals and I think that would be a much better way to sustainably use space than what sort of is floating around as ideas right now.
[00:41:52] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Richard, 20 years. Give me a bold vision. Are we heading towards Jupiter?
[00:41:56] Richard Osborne: Hopefully we'll have fixed the space debris problem.
[00:41:59] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Okay, that's a bonus.
[00:42:00] Richard Osborne: That's really important. IOSM is going to be so important, it's going to bring us a lunar village, a Mars village.
[00:42:09] Mike Curtis-Rouse: In 20 years?
[00:42:10] Richard Osborne: Yes.
[00:42:11] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Okay.
[00:42:12] Richard Osborne: I think it's...
[00:42:12] Mike Curtis-Rouse: To have a visionary, and...
[00:42:14] Richard Osborne: Well, I was going to say in Space Yacht in 20 years. I'm on a retirement asteroid.
[00:42:19] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Okay, good. Okay, well, we'll leave Richard basically a vision. Folks, this has been a great session. I'm at time and my team here have been flashing and waving signs at me desperately for the last five minutes. But hey, if you don't get to push the conference where you want to go, you don't go anywhere and that's the same for IOSM. I'd like to thank my panel, Leon, Martina and Richard. Thank you very much.
[00:42:46] Dallas Campbell: The IOSM conference will be back in 2025, so keep your eyes peeled for more information over the coming months and to hear future episodes of In-Orbit, be sure to subscribe on your favourite podcast app and to find out more about how space is empowering industries in between episodes, you can visit the Catapult website or join them on social media.