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How do we begin creating the future we want, today? Design This Day takes you on a journey to our future world. Futurist Devin Liddell sits down with visionary leaders from some of the biggest names in tech and innovation. Each episode features a brilliant mind who is building the opportunities of the future before most people even know they exist. What will living in microgravity in space look like in the future? Can driverless vehicles go off-roading? What unexpected roles will robots play in our future workplaces and homes? We explore the role that design plays in shaping our future – with the big thinkers and doers who are creating tomorrow, today.
Design This Day is an original podcast brought to you by Teague.
About the Host: Futurist Devin Liddell
Devin Liddell is the Principal Futurist at Teague. With over two decades of experience in innovation and design strategy, Devin has worked with industry giants like Boeing, Intel, and Nike, helping organizations anticipate changes across both near and far-term horizons to create their preferred futures. Devin is a frequent contributor to Fast Company.
Get in Touch:
Have a complex problem that needs solving? Have a great guest or topic idea? We want to hear from you. Visit us at teague.com or send us an email at hello@teague.com
Rob Meyerson:
In the 2030s and 2040s, we're going to have a 3D printer on the moon. We're going to be extracting aluminum and titanium from lunar regolith and we're going to be making our own. We're going to be building those there and that's the future that I see. We just got to get to that future.
Devin Liddell:
Welcome to Design This Day, a podcast about the futures we want and the people working right now to make those futures real. I'm your host, Devin Liddell. I'm a futurist at Teague. This year we're celebrating Teague's 100th anniversary, so I'm thinking a lot about the challenges of today and how we're going to solve them over the next 100 years.
My guest today is Rob Meyerson, an aerospace legend. He's worked with NASA, Kistler Aerospace, and most notably served as president of Blue Origin for 15 years. And in 2024, Rob and two co-founders emerged from stealth and announced their new startup Interlune.
Rob Meyerson:
Interlune is a company that's focused on commercializing natural resources from space and starting with Helium-3, which is an isotope of helium that's plentiful in space because it's created naturally in the sun and it's extremely rare on earth.
Devin Liddell:
Just to focus for a second on Helium-3, My understanding of Helium-3 is that we actually need Helium-3 for at least a couple kind of key applications, like one of which is clean nuclear fusion. And it's also important for our future in quantum computing because it's important to help achieve that absolute zero temperature that quantum computers require. Is that correct?
Rob Meyerson:
That's correct. But the big use of Helium-3 today is for border security.
Devin Liddell:
Oh, okay.
Rob Meyerson:
We talk about Helium-3 selling for the equivalent of $20 million a kilogram right now. And the reason the price has gotten to that over the last couple of decades is because, after September 11th, we were looking for a neutron detector that would detect dirty bombs at our borders and at our critical facilities. And Helium-3 is the obvious choice for that. So, the Department of Energy was sitting on a stockpile of Helium-3 that was used for all kinds of research applications like you mentioned, fusion, ultra low temperature conditions for quantum computing, medical imaging. But after September 11th, most of the Helium-3 in that stockpile got steered toward the borders.
So, new supply of Helium-3 was not changing and there are today no new sources of supply that are being developed. So, that's why Interlune exists because we're focused on the Helium-3 supply chain.
Devin Liddell:
So, does Interlune already have customers waiting for Helium-3 from you?
Rob Meyerson:
Yeah, we do. And that's what differentiates us from a lot of the space companies out there. The Department of Energy has signed a purchase order to buy Helium-3 from us, whether it comes from the moon or not. And then two of the quantum computing companies that produce the environment that allow quantum chips to operate right down near absolute zero, like you mentioned, will sell them Helium-3 for their uses.
Devin Liddell:
That's fascinating. I'm also curious on the nuclear front. Do you already have customers who are waiting for Helium-3 to power clean nuclear for data centers and the like?
Rob Meyerson:
Yeah. The growth in AI and the growth and demand for data centers and growth of power has created more of a sense of urgency for fusion. And if you survey the companies out there building fusion machines, there are very few companies out there that are focused on Helium-3 now because there's not enough Helium-3 to support that. So a rule of thumb I like to use is a city the size of Seattle, like a million people, would need a hundred kilograms of Helium-3 in a fusion reactor to power it for one year. We don't produce a hundred kilograms of Helium-3 in the world in one year. So, there's just not enough Helium-3 out there.
And that's why if you want a future where there is Helium-3 fusion that's producing energy that's much cleaner than any other option that's out there, you have to go to the moon to source the Helium-3 for that process.
Devin Liddell:
To go back to your figure, 100 kilograms, like if you wanted to power the city of Seattle, you would need 100 kilograms per year of Helium-3, to me, the biggest question of like, what amounts are we talking about when it comes to mining and extracting Helium-3 from the moon and bringing it back down to earth?
Rob Meyerson:
Yeah. This is the thing that most people get caught up of when they hear about Helium-3 mining or, we call it, harvesting on the moon. So, the Apollo measurements that were taken, which was soil samples brought back from the moon, they measured from different locations, they measured between two and 20 parts per billion of Helium-3.
What we knew going into this is that we would have to get great at excavating very large volumes of regolith, of soil. We know that there's about a million metric tons of Helium-3 on the moon. We know that it's going to be hard to get out. We know we need big equipment to go get it. We know we need to excavate a hundred tons of regolith per hour. On earth, it's the kind of thing that's done every day in a large industrial operation. On the moon it's never been done before at that scale. We've had astronauts picking up rocks. We're talking about an industrial scale system.
So, is a little startup in Seattle going to figure out how to do that on our own?
Devin Liddell:
The answer is no. They needed to recruit a partner who can pull off designing machinery at this scale and they found them in Iowa.
Rob Meyerson:
We actually are working with a partner. They're a world leader in industrial equipment for mining and agriculture. They invented the round hay baler, so really innovative company and we've been working with them hand in hand for a couple of years now designing and building excavators.
Devin Liddell:
I am curious, by the way, what was that initial conversation like with them when you explained, "Yeah, actually I know your background is in industrial and agricultural [inaudible 00:06:06] here on earth. We'd like to partner with you to actually bring Helium-3 back from the moon"?
Rob Meyerson:
Yeah. Well, that's where the network comes in and that's where LinkedIn comes in because I learned that the CEO is an aerospace engineer. He's been interested in this sort of thing but we'd never met. And so, I cold reached out. I guessed his email address and within an hour, he responded with something along the lines, we joke, of, "Where have you been all my life?" kind of a response, which was the best kind of response you can ever get.
Devin Liddell:
That's amazing. I love that.
Now, I think from a design standpoint, the challenge in front of you is to make a harvester that is capable of processing a hundred tons of material per hour. Now right off the bat, that sounds like a rather large machine and that size is important because you're going to need to get it into space where, of course, weight is such an extraordinary issue. That's a formidable design brief. So, I'm just curious, how did you actually just go about the initial concepting phase of even imagining in a machine that's capable of this?
Rob Meyerson:
Yeah. First off, we decided to take mobility, wheels, transmission, drive train off the table. And we said, we are going to design this thing to work with the lunar terrain vehicle, which NASA is funding development of, and that allows us to just focus on excavation. So, that mobility system is going to be light. It's going to be designed to land on the moon. It's going to be robust because it's got to operate for more than 10 years robotically.
The moon's gravity is one sixth out of earth. So, it's not just a matter of needing to have a light system. The system isn't going to react. When you start cutting into the ground, it's going to be one-sixth lighter than what it is and it's going to just want to push off the surface.
So, we thought about the basic physics, went back to first principles, and we designed a system that has much better tracted force. It comes in at an angle under the ground rather than cutting from the top. And that does a few things for us. It pulls the vehicle to the ground as it's operating and then it also, because it's coming in from underground, you're reducing the amount of dust that you generate from cutting down from the top. And so those were two simple things that we liked about this concept.
We're continuing to evolve and refine the concept and we're still evolving the whole architecture as well. Look, we haven't put a system on the moon yet so five years from now, seven years from now, we very well could learn something that pushes us in a different direction because nobody's ever done this kind of thing before.
But my goal, and what we've been successful in doing, is building a team at Interlune, which is a few dozen people, less than 30, that is agile, smart, uses prototyping in first principles and engineering excellence to go solve these problems and get us ready.
Devin Liddell:
What was the broad brushstroke start to finish between initial concepts to first prototype?
Rob Meyerson:
Yeah, that started out a couple summers ago with some subscale prototypes that are a variety of different configurations, started out with whiteboard sketches. They built some subscale prototypes, developed a test track, which was like a linear sandbox and did some drive tests with different excavators. We looked at the performance of four or five concepts. We selected the one that we built full scale and we've released some videos and photos of that. It's the angled under-cutter. The machine that provides the hydraulic drive to drive the system is existing tractor, but the tool is all new and designed from the ground up.
I mean, it always feels good to see things that you've sort of imagined get turned into real hardware and into a test. It was that concept of being surprised by your team. The surprises are almost always positive. When you bring smart people together and they make really good decisions and they're trying new things, it's hard to describe that sort of goosebump, kind of positive feeling you get when your team is just kicking and you see it and you know it. So, it's a very unique design that could someday be excavating on the moon.
And it may also have some useful uses on earth, as well. That's the benefit of this partnership. We work together. We're building a company that knows the moon really well. They're a company that knows industrial equipment. They see the moon as another job site. And we want to bring the technology and knowledge of the lunar environment to make sure that those machines are robust and can operate for a long time. There's not going to be a human astronaut there to sharpen the cutting tools or replace them. We're going to have to do that all robotically.
Devin Liddell:
The anecdote about the potential applications of the machine here on earth too is actually worth dwelling on for a second because it's actually one of the rather common and kind of rather aggravating critiques that I sometimes hear about activities in space. Sometimes you'll hear people say, "Well, why aren't we just focused more on what we need to do here on earth? Why are we distracting ourselves with these excursions off planet?"
But that entirely misses all of the goodness that comes from the science and engineering and innovation that is applicable back here on earth. There's all kinds of examples of things that we would not have here on earth if it were not for science that was developed in space.
Rob Meyerson:
Oh, absolutely. So, many applications and that's why we have a chief scientist at Interlune because we believe there's so much more to learn and our ability to tell a story about not just the economic benefits, but the scientific benefits, is greatly enhanced by having the science team and the instruments team at Interlune that are working this. People are really inspired by learning. And not to mention the quantum computing applications, which very few people really understand, but when you talk about the benefits and the possible things that we can learn from having a quantum computer, it's fascinating.
Devin Liddell:
Absolutely. So, to pivot a little bit to testing, I mean, testing a machine like this that is going to operate off-planet, that's a very, very different challenge than most sort of industrial design, machine-making challenges that we face where we get to test it right here on earth. I mean, it's going to operate here on earth, and so we get to test it on earth. This requires an extraordinary amount of planning and consideration, I'd imagine.
Rob Meyerson:
Yep. So, you want to do everything you can on earth to make sure it works and we're building the capabilities to go do that.
Testing for the lunar environment, first you do computer simulation. Can it work in one-sixth gravity? You design things, best practices for vacuum, for extreme cold, extreme heat. Things have to be radiation-tolerant, so you need to make sure your electronics can operate in a radiation environment.
And then you get into the physical testing. When you need to test something in the moon environment, you need to test in lunar gravity. And we do that using a parabolic airplane that instead of doing a zero G parabola, we do a lunar gravity parabola. You need to test in vacuum, but you also want to test in the environment of the moon, the lunar regolith, the dirt.
And the moon has this regolith that has been created by billions of years of impacts. So, the soil, the rocks are crushed into this regolith so if you look at it under a microscope, it's jagged and sharp, whereas if you look at the soil on earth, it's created by rocks being flowing water, turning these rocks into smaller rocks into pebbles into sand. Earth is from decomposed organic matter, the soil. But you don't have those same processes on the moon. So how you design things for the lunar environment, you have to make them robust. You need redundant seals. You need to use systems to remove the dust. There's a charged environment by the sun. So, you have electrostatics and charging that are going to keep the dust on your equipment. You want to find ways to get the dust off your equipment.
NASA has developed some technologies for that. And so it's a combination of things and in the business we call it belt and suspenders. You want to design things to the best of your knowledge to make them robust to the environment and then you want to have redundancy. So, we'll have redundancy in the seals. We'll have redundancy in the cutting tools because ultimately it's going to get jammed up or it's going to get dull. And that's belt and suspenders. It's like, you got to keep your pants up. You got to keep the system operating and we're going to do whatever we can.
If you think about it, Devin, though, you're sending a system to the moon that's 40 to 50 metric tons and the incremental mass of just putting another cutting tool in that is a few hundred pounds. It would be silly to not have like, 20 extras and the ability to robotically separate and then reattach, put a new tool on there. That means that we have to invest in systems that need to be de-mated and re-mated in the lunar dust environment, as well. And that's not trivial either.
So, you think about all those things, it's interesting.
Devin Liddell:
It's formidable.
Rob Meyerson:
It is. Oh, that's with a capital F, for sure, yeah.
Devin Liddell:
It's fascinating. And I was laughing by the way at belt and suspenders, partly because if you look closely at my senior photo... Which I'm not sharing with anyone, but when I see my senior photo, I actually am wearing a belt and suspenders. So, I apparently was a big believer in redundancy even back then.
Rob Meyerson:
Yeah.
Devin Liddell:
But I'm curious on that front, like you mentioned the capacity for the machine to make and remake things. In commercial aviation, there is this impossible tension between passenger comfort and operator profitability. So, how do you make the passenger really comfortable and then how does the airline make money? And those are at odds with each other, which is why I call it an impossible tension. And impossible tensions require design to reconcile them.
I'm curious, in this application, is the impossible tension between weight and redundancy? Meaning, you have to right size the payload to get it to the moon. You also have to make sure that you have everything you need once you're there. I imagine that's something that you kind of constantly have to optimize and re-optimize.
Rob Meyerson:
Yeah, there is a tension there. And I think that sometimes it's like the example I gave. Let's say you're sending 50 tons of equipment to the moon in 2030. Well, that's not going to be the last delivery to the moon. The moon base is going to have many, many deliveries. So, I might decide that, my fleet management, I'm going to send five cutting tools twice a year that'll be deployed and sitting in the warehouse or out in the lunar mare sitting waiting to be used once a harvester needs a new cutting tool. I think that that is probably going to be the best way to do that for the near future. But in the 2030s and 2040s, we're going to have a 3D printer. We're going to be extracting aluminum and titanium from lunar regolith and we're going to be making our own. We're going to be building those there.
And that's the future that I see. We just got to get to that future. So, redundancy and this belt and suspenders approach is going to help us get there.
And it's not unlike, look, first flight of the Falcon 9, for example. It was a very low performing rocket. You put on a lot of extra margin in the system to make sure that you had one job and that is to get a payload from earth to orbit and they did that successfully and then the next job is to make it more efficient, put a bigger payload into orbit.
And what SpaceX did with the Falcon 9, which is so fascinating, is that they got something flying and then they did incremental development to improve that product from the Falcon 9 version one to the one that's flying right now, which has reusable landing legs and grid fins on it. But if you look at the performance increase that they got out of it, they improved the rocket engine, they improved the structure, they made it lighter, they made it more efficient.
And so, you don't seek perfection on day one, you seek to make it work and then you improve it. And that's the same kind of operation I'm thinking about for Interlune. It's like we're going to start with a system that we can make work and maybe our ultimate goal is to have excavators that can work five years without maintenance, but let's face it, that's impossible right now. So maybe we'll have five years with replacement and then we'll do five years with repair on the surface where we actually replace the cutting surfaces with new tools that we fly from earth. And then eventually we'll just print those on the surface and then we'll do something else.
But we're going to learn as we go.
Devin Liddell:
Every part of the Interlune mission is a challenge no one has ever done before getting an excavator into space, harvesting the moon, extracting Helium-3 from its soil. So, it makes perfect sense that they're going to send a workable and well-tested first mission then iterate as they learn. And that strategy applies to the return journey, as well.
Just to kind of fill out the napkin sketch, if you will, the harvester goes to the moon, it processes and separates material, and so it eventually has a payload of Helium-3. And apologies for the naive question, but how does the Helium-3 get back to earth?
Rob Meyerson:
Yeah. Well, we spent a couple of years thinking about this.
The very first time I talked, not publicly, but with one of the NASA leadership about this, it was with Pam Melroy who was the deputy administrator of NASA at the time. And I mentioned to her what I was doing and we were still operating in stealth and she was so fascinated with what we were doing, but the very first thing she said was, "We're going to need the capability to bring science samples back for Artemis." And this was probably 2022.
And there's today, four years later, there's still nobody that's sort of offering a service. There's companies that are building lunar rovers that they'll offer as a service. There's landers that you can buy as a service. There's companies working on power, but nobody focused on earth return.
So, we started designing our system. It's a storable rocket and a capsule that'll bring back roughly 20 kilograms of payload. That could be a 20 kilogram pressure bottle that includes three or four kilograms of Helium-3 or just rock samples, as well. And so, that could serve our needs as well as NASAs that come up in the future.
And once we're there producing things on the moon, like Helium-3, we want to advance that and make propellant, make water, extract industrial metals that can be used to build satellites on the moon or in space so that you don't have to launch those things from earth because we live in the world of reusable launch vehicles now. Pretty soon we're going to live in a world of fully reusable launch vehicles, which are going to be incrementally lower cost per kilogram to get things to space.
But the next lever for lowering the cost of space missions is building things in space using resources that you've sourced from space. And that's what Interlune's all about.
Devin Liddell:
It's amazing. Just to paint the picture of what earth return likely looks like, this 20 kilogram capsule is being loaded aboard a rocket and then the rocket is taking off, blasting off from the moon, and then reentering the Earth's atmosphere. And then just like we return payloads now, it's essentially parachuting into a soft landing in the ocean. Is that how it would work?
Rob Meyerson:
Probably not the ocean. This is a payload that's going to be valued at somewhere between 50 and $100 million, the value of the gas. We'd like to land that on land so we can secure the payload quickly.
Look, Dev, in my career, I've worked in parachutes when I worked for NASA and at Kistler before Blue Origin. I'd love to have an alternative to parachute landing. The fact of the matter is, nobody's invented a more efficient way of decelerating systems that are coming back from space. But I'd love to see that. I'd love to use it sometime in the future. But I think for now it'll be earth landing with something that's very parachute-like.
Devin Liddell:
Okay, interesting. And if there are any science fiction authors who are listening, there's the specter of Helium-3 pirates emerging, right?
Rob Meyerson:
There you go, yeah. I'm sure that that would make a really engaging story. Science fiction writers have been talking about moon and asteroid mining for decades and what makes these stories venture-investible today is the lower cost of launch, the lower price of launch. And what's going to make other things investible 10, 20 years from now is that we don't need to launch those things to space anymore. We can build them in space using materials that we've sourced in space. And I think that there's a lot more science fiction for us to go turn into science fact.
Devin Liddell:
It's amazing. Well, it paints a really vivid portrait of what the moon looks like. I mean, to go back to the timelines you were talking about, I mean, when you think about what the moon might look like in 2030 and 2040 and 2050 and beyond, the portrait you're painting is that, for lack of a better word, it's going to be busy. There might be a lot happening.
And this is partly born of a statement I saw that Interlune makes on its website, which is essentially along the lines of like, "Hey, we believe the moon belongs to everybody." Given that you believe the moon belongs to everyone, do you foresee, in that 2050 timeframe, to use that as an example, that there will be competitors from Europe or China or elsewhere that are doing kind of what you're doing potentially, but they're also present on the moon? Is that a fair assumption?
Rob Meyerson:
Absolutely. Yeah. We expect that there's going to be competitors. There's eight quadrillion dollars worth of resources on the moon. So, obviously we're not going to be the dominant player there. We want to get out there quickly and we want to demonstrate a lot of these core technologies.
And we do believe the moon is for all of us. We want to do this in accordance with all the policy and laws that are out there, but we also want to make sure that we secure our right to operate as a Western company, as a US company, as a private company. And you got to be there. You got to get there and go do it, so that's what we're focused on.
Devin Liddell:
Shifting gears a little bit, and this is partly because I threw out the 2050 timeframe earlier, which gets into very much sometimes science fiction timeframes-
Rob Meyerson:
Yeah, thanks for that show of confidence, Devin. I appreciate it. 2050, hey, I'll be long gone. Thank you.
Devin Liddell:
When will Interlune do you think be on the moon near-term?
Rob Meyerson:
Yeah. So, we have a payload that we've already delivered to Astrolab, our partner, that's been installed on the FLIP Rover, which is going to fly to the moon in October in the fall. It's a camera that will image the surface of the moon and help us figure out how to predict where the Helium-3 is.
Then this payload we're building now that we recently announced is going to be ready to be integrated on a lander in 2027 in the fall. So, it could fly as early as 2028 and that's what we're hoping for. And then, after that, it'll be a series of other demonstrations that will either go to the moon or be demonstrated in space to try to test out all these properties that I talked about earlier, vacuum and radiation and earth entry and the things that are going to be important to make sure we can do this routinely and reliably.
Devin Liddell:
We talked about Artemis a little bit earlier and NASA has essentially announced that it has long-term plans for Artemis, right? That there'll be this sustained presence on the moon that's kind of like a stepping stone to missions to Mars. So, I'm curious, what does that announcement mean to Interlune specifically?
Rob Meyerson:
Well, first off, Artemis 2 was a huge shot in the arm to the whole country really in a lot of ways, because it was really inspiring to see these four astronauts complete this mission so successfully share their experience. So, congrats to NASA for that.
NASA's administrator, Jared Isaacman, had an event called Ignition in March where he announced a new direction for the agency, including a moon-based program. And that moon-based program is going to operate in three phases. And in a nutshell, he initially described it as a junkyard on the moon. But he very carefully changed his language to talk about a construction site on the moon, which I think is very, very smart.
But the point is clear that he wants to try a lot of things. He wants to emphasize execution. He wants to give the industrial base, companies like Interlune, a chance to show their wares and demonstrate things on the moon. And he's going to do that by buying dozens of landers, 73 landers over 10 years. There's going to be a lot of payload opportunities so a company like Interlune will have opportunities to fly on these missions that are primarily going to the South Pole, but they'll go to other sites as well. All the things that we're going to need at Interlune, the moon-based program is going to go demonstrate.
So what we're going to do is, again, it's not requiring new invention. It's all engineering. But the key step in engineering is testing the thing in the environment you're going to operate in. So, the moon-based program is going to move the optimism around Interlune's business case forward a significant step and that's what I'm just super excited about. We're actively awaiting the next steps.
So, it's all about going to the moon and going on to Mars and demonstrating the ability to do these really exciting and inspiring things that we need to be doing.
Devin Liddell:
I'm curious, separate from Interlune, I imagine you hear about others and what their plans are for the moon. Are there applications that you're particularly enthused about that are separate again from what you're doing at Interlune?
Rob Meyerson:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, we're not building a lander or a rover or a power system like a base load power system. So super excited about the companies that are working on LTV. We have been working with Astrolab on this payload we're going to fly later this year. Ten years ago, there were zero lander or rover companies working on this. Today there's half dozen funded lander companies and there's many more on the rover side.
On the power side, companies working on beaming power to the surface of the moon, very interesting radioisotope heater units like nuclear batteries, companies working on those that provide heat that can be turned into energy to keep critical systems on during the lunar night, which at the equator on the moon is two weeks long. So, surviving the night's important.
There's no GPS. GPS doesn't work on the moon. There's companies working on that positioning, navigation and timing.
Seeing how these companies that are building small cargo landings scale up to face the challenge that NASA's putting in front of them right now, which is tell me how you're going to deliver more landers per year up to 12? And in a nutshell, what NASA's asking is, if you give me a credible plan for meeting that scale up, I'm going to give you a contract to go do it. Because once you have a contract for multiple landings, then everything gets easier. You're buying two of something instead of one of something or five of something instead of one of something. If you have multiple landings, you can go raise money from investors. It's like the equivalent of subscription revenue in a SaaS business, for example. Things get easier.
But you have to have a credible plan. You have to have a factory that can support building that. You have to have to have a supply chain that can provide the components. You have to have a workforce that can build more than one at a time. You have to have processes that are closer to standardized. It's hard to do and NASA's looking for companies to give them credible plans where they're going to help NASA get to where NASA wants to be, which is a thriving, operating moon base, which I think is pretty cool, pretty worthy, a worthy goal.
Devin Liddell:
Very cool. Yeah, it is very cool.
And now, as always, it's time for the lightning round.
We've changed up our typical questions a little bit to acknowledge Teague's 100th birthday. So, I'm curious, from your vantage point, what would you regard as the most over-hyped technological innovation of the past century? It's a lot to ask because it's asking you to assess 100 years of potential hype.
Rob Meyerson:
I'm going to say the Segway. And look, I think the Segway is useful and I really enjoy riding a Segway, but my God, it was like the way it was released back in the early 2000s and the way it was hyped, certainly when you compare input to output in terms of hype versus usefulness, that would be one that comes to mind.
Devin Liddell:
I think it's a good one. Yeah, I do remember having the same sensation as well, like, "Oh, the story here does not match with what I'm now seeing." Yeah, the story was that it was going to revolutionize how we actually moved around. As a sidebar, by the way, that one is an interesting kind of unfulfilled design brief that's sort of been out there for a while. We seem to be pining for a form of mobility that is faster than walking but smaller/lighter than a bicycle. And we've not yet arrived at the one that actually everyone has said, "Oh yeah, this is the next thing."
Rob Meyerson:
I want my jet pack, right? My rocket pack and my flying car? We grew up in an age of so much promise. Yeah, I'm going to stick with Segway.
Devin Liddell:
That was good. Okay, so at the other end of the spectrum, what would you regard as the most under-hyped technological innovation or development of the past 100 years?
Rob Meyerson:
Boy, I think the internet and GPS, the two of those combined. But the internet, it has been hyped. It was hyped and it came through, but I still think the outcome has changed our lives. And so, I would argue that no amount of hype would be too much because of the way it's changed our lives. And so, it's all worth it.
I think GPS is in there, too. It's like most people don't realize that when they're doing a credit card transaction at a gas pump or they're pulling up the maps on their Google Maps in their car and the navigation system, which used to be a bunch of disks in the trunk of your car, it's now coming down from a satellite. Most people don't realize that and it's pretty damn cool.
Devin Liddell:
Oh, it's amazing. Yeah, I was explaining to my college-age sons, by the way, recently about pre-GPS navigation and how you would actually call someone on a landline and they would say, "Well, you go down to the street and then if you see this red barn on the right, then that means you've gone too far." That's completely anachronistic to how my sons have maneuvered the world from a navigation standpoint.
Rob Meyerson:
Exactly.
Devin Liddell:
Anyway, all right, do you have a book or show that you are particularly enthralled with right now you feel has been instructive to your work as an innovator?
Rob Meyerson:
I think a recent book that I read that really had an impact and that it scared the crap out of me is "Apple in China," which is all about Apple's growth in China, building iPods and iPads and smartphones. And it's just gotten me even more focused on that advanced manufacturing, rebuilding our industrial base. And so, how I think about Helium-3 and how important it is to create a domestic supply of Helium-3 is kind of entrenched in learnings from what I've learned from that book.
Devin Liddell:
Awesome. Thank you, Rob, for being here today. This has been a really, really fun conversation. We've covered actually quite a diverse bingo card of topics, but again, thank you so much for being here and sharing Interlune's journey so far.
Rob Meyerson:
You're very welcome. It was my pleasure. Thank you, Devin.
Devin Liddell:
That's it for today. Thank you for listening to Design This Day, a podcast by Teague. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss the next episode. And if you have a complex problem that needs solving, visit us at teague.com or send us an email at hello@teague.com.