Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah on the Data Highway Above

1. 0:00 – 3:31

   Intro

   1. SWSteve Wozniak0:00

      So all of the little orange dots are active satellites, all of the teal dots are dead satellites, and everything that's pink or purple or b- gray is some form of cataloged space debris. We should all be very alarmed. [laughs] These are live data.

   2. SSSteph Smith0:14

      Wow.

   3. SWSteve Wozniak0:14

      This is not a simulation. This is not a drill. We've made a giant ball of trash.

   4. SSSteph Smith0:19

      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. 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 area of modern computing, which clearly he was very, very involved in so many years ago. 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. And while naturally I loved 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. Lower 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. 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. 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. One more thing. If you like this topic, we also did a demo with Alex on their Wayfinder product, and that is up 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. All right, let's jump in. [upbeat music] 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/disclosures. [upbeat music]

2. 3:31 – 9:10

   Why space and why now?

   1. SSSteph Smith3:31

      Well, Steve, it's an honor to be talking to you today. I wanna 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.

   2. SWSteve Wozniak3:54

      Thanks.

   3. SSSteph Smith3:55

      I wanna-

   4. SWSteve Wozniak3:55

      It's a rare case where I can even thank myself for it. [laughs]

   5. SSSteph Smith3:57

      [laughs]

   6. SWSteve Wozniak3:58

      All the great things we have.

   7. SSSteph Smith3:58

      Exactly. Exactly. I wanna start with a question, um, 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, you could also just chill and, 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?

   8. SWSteve Wozniak4:28

      Well, first of all, I sort of had, I had that freedom, and I was just designing products for five cents each for people all over California. Incredible things, uh, you know, starting big industries. But so I always felt that way. I j-- I'm doing what I want to do and not doing it for, oh, starting big companies or getting super wealthy. A lot of other people have different motivations. Um, as far as ... So my-- So first of all, I've always been into doing good for the world because every company that starts, you talk to anybody with any little startup and, "Oh, we're doing this. This is how it's gonna improve somebody's life or some people's lives." So that's, that's, you know, not easy, but I like to go overboard and rate it a little bit higher on the, the balance of the good you're doing versus, um, other re- or other reasons like, ah, uh, figure out a way to make money on it. But, um, Alex Fielding is really the one that brought me into Privateer. He's been my best friend for a long time, and he was hanging around all these space people in Maui, where he lives, and we're always in communication. He was best man at my wedding. And, uh, and so he started ap- approaching me about this space and there's, there's issues in space. You know, when you s- you start and you look at some of the close ones, everyone hears about space debris and its danger, but that's n- that's a kind of long pass for, um, what we're really about. And, uh, I go ... And Alex, the way he knows me is, you know, the type of person he is, he sees the world better than just a logical spreadsheet guy because one time we were starting a startup company involving GPS and, uh, we couldn't find a name. Okay, maybe it's g- we're gonna print the GPSs of cops. Copdetector.com, cop this and that.com. Everything is taken that has words. And I sat on the secret in the back of my head without saying anything to the other members of our board. I said, I, I, I had a, a web, a web domain, woz.com. I got it in the early days of the web.

   9. SSSteph Smith6:16

      It's a great domain.

   10. SWSteve Wozniak6:18

       And I don't use woz.com because com, com means you're commercial, and org means you're nonprofit, and I'm a-

   11. SSSteph Smith6:24

       Mm-hmm

   12. SWSteve Wozniak6:24

       ... nonprofit type. So I secret- I s- thought, "What, what, what words can I make up that use W-O-Z?" I said, "Wheels of Zeus," and nobody, "What a crazy name for a company," you know? And then Ep- but Alex, he said, "Yeah, that's great." And it actually is a great name regardless, and it was from wegotwoz.com. And I was really proud of that because instead of, uh, lawyers, you know, dealing with licensing a domain name, I was the seller and I was the buyer. [laughs]

   13. SSSteph Smith6:48

       Yeah. [laughs]

   14. SWSteve Wozniak6:48

       I just hand-wrote it and signed it. Didn't pay the huge fees that, you know, um, the lawyers have. And Alex would only approach me knowing how I think of good things for the world, the outcome has to be good, and not just it makes sense as a product. It'll simplify life. That's not enough for me, and there's always alternatives. So, um, and Alex also, I've got to know him as the best judge of people, what they're about, what they wanna do, and b- in business development. Knowing how to convince others that we've, you know, what we've got, and knowing what the s- the, the sub-markets are and all of the aspects of a business. So I often call him that he's the smartest person I know because I'm, you know, more in technology than I am business. And he sees a fuller long-term picture about things. In the past, I've worked with Al- with Alex before, you know, on startups and of course all my life on everything, and follow him, and we stay in very close touch all the time. So you can look up in, um, 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, you know, just reading the synopsis of it. So, um, Alex sees the long-term picture, you know, for capitalizing. You have to stay alive, you have to be alive, and for iterations of products, working through and modifying what's there and being in the right place. You've gotta keep the product market fit correct. And, um, so anyway, uh, Privateer is just the finest collective of people, due thanks to Alex, I could imagine in various roles. Even, you know, communication roles and all that, and I- it's wonderful to be involved in this startup. We're very early seed stages so far. Alex also attracted other good people. Finds them and gets them, and he found Moriba Jah at, uh, who's a professor, University of Texas in Austin. And Moriba has outstanding reputation in this field of space and objects in space and things like that, and he is just, like, so much of a genius. I almost shut up and shy back because he knows all the, 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 pr- A lot of the space operations lately are going more private than public.

   15. SSSteph Smith8:59

       Mm-hmm.

   16. SWSteve Wozniak8:59

       So Privateer is a good name based on that.

   17. SSSteph Smith9:02

       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

3. 9:10 – 13:51

   The changing perception around space

   1. SSSteph Smith9:10

      term. I wanna 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, and the investment there. You got to see how the s- first space race impacted technology thereafter, how it helped modern computing. There was 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, uh, 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.

   2. SWSteve Wozniak9:52

      I grew up in what is called Silicon Valley now, but back then it was Santa Clara Valley. Space came to our area, our area of the world, uh, South Bay Area, um, before, long before it was called Silicon Valley, you know, in the '50s. And, and Lockheed Martin moved in. That was, there was a space race going on, a competition with Russia to launch, um, you know, orbiting satellites into space and people into space and, and even to get to the Moon. And the, the thing is, um, it cost a lot of money back then. Huge amount of money to launch rockets. And Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale, California, was looking into, you know, missiles that you could launch accurately, even from, like, submarines. And I don't know... 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. So we had a space race, and, um, and as well as the defense, um, for missiles. And you know, one thing is, back then it cost so much to launch a rocket you had to pay a fortune. Fortune, like billions of dollars today almost. You know, for every gram of mass, you had to pay a fortune. And the more you could make, you could lighten the load of the thinking part, the electronics that thought or the little computer parts that thought, um, the more you could lighten it, the better, and that's what chips did. Chips, instead of having, you know, 20 transistors, you know, after a while, you could have one tiny little chip the size of one transistor, the weight of one transistor doing the job, and that really boosted everything, including, uh, 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. So I grew up in this. And, uh, you know, and of course we always looked up to space because we were in the science field. You know, I've always read books and watched movies and, and, a- and especially if you're kind of like one of those exploring pioneers. Oh, my God, following, you know, uh, either s- you know, shows like Star Trek, but, you know, th- flying m- things into space and, and, uh, beating the, uh, politicians, you know, with, with your o- your own, um, cleverness and ability to maybe go out and harness water from the rings of Jupiter. Um, 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. And the stewardship of space, this is what I got from Moriba. It's just, you know, understanding that we have to be kind of responsible, all of us. And I expect that, that, um, Privateer will be very involved in communications between different parties, even different countries, and probably, you know, even s- getting into things like treaties involving space. Some kinds of agreement so we can work better and understand what we have. It's all connected because we down on Earth, I'm sure Moriba told you this, we down on Earth use so many things from space, from, you know, you know, weather review to, um, flight conditions to, uh, um, um, GPS to our cell phones. So these are important things in our life, and that has to be protected somehow. Um, so anyway, that's our start. And you know, you start a startup and you get some seed money, but then you have to think of what's the right product. And, ah, here's an idea, and it g- it's got to come from people that also think a lot differently, and that's one of the s- nice things about Silicon Valley. A lot of us are that way. And the thing is my house gets real messy sometimes.

   3. SSSteph Smith13:03

      [laughs]

   4. SWSteve Wozniak13:03

      And what do I want to do if it's messy? I look at, I want to clean things up so I can get to it, at least find things, where they are, what drawers they're in. And that's the way I look at, you know, I, you feel it in your own house. You're, you're stumbling over some junk on the floor, and it's there. I'll kick it over in a deeper corner and this and that. But we want to, you know, have some ways to keep space more orderly and understood by all. And sharing information, being very open and, um, transparent is important to us. You know, and you have to imagine your house. You get around it. You kind of know where you've got all the stuff, the junk, but somebody else comes in randomly. Should things make sense to them? You know, even if you say, "Go make me some coffee," would, should they be, have an easy way to find the way to make coffee in your house? And that's how I think of space very much, that, uh, we've got to keep it, um, understandable and organized for everyone.

4. 13:51 – 16:56

   Exponential technologies and thinking different

   1. SSSteph Smith13:51

      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 5 years or 50 years. And I had the privilege of talking to Alex yesterday, and he told me this 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." And you seemed to really, really just want a computer at that time. Um, 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? Or I, I want to, you know, dig into that early Woz brain and, and hear your perspective on what was going on in those early days.

   2. SWSteve Wozniak14:47

      A lot of great things come personally, and I learned even, I taught, uh, middle school and elementary school for eight years straight full time.

   3. SSSteph Smith14:54

      Mm-hmm.

   4. SWSteve Wozniak14:54

      Full time, like 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 importance than the motivation of my students to learn. Had to ma- find ways to make it fun, to make it understandable, to make it, um, you know, like stories that, that tell what's i- in their head. And that's when I decided, you know what? Wanting something is even more important. And I go back. I wanted a computer. It was in my heart, and I didn't know if I'd ever, 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, you know, smart math stuff. And but I kept it in me, and eventually I found the path to do it. So I was building a computer for myself.

   5. SSSteph Smith15:36

      Mm-hmm.

   6. SWSteve Wozniak15:36

      And turned out that the point in time. Luck is, sometimes there's a lot of luck in business success, and 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. And you know, and then 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. And even when we, uh, when Apple went public around 1980, um, our president, Mike Scott, maybe '81 or 2, um, started a little company with some people. I even f- I funded into that. He's a friend. And actually we did a launch of a rocket from out at sea from somewhere. So I don't know. 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, you know, 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. And private industry works so differently. I've only been in private, and I just love having ideas and thinking about them and, you know, thinking different and the creativity that comes about when you think, "My gosh, I could do something that they haven't done before." Or maybe the resources are cheaper. The sorts of huge computing devices are cheaper to make and maybe certain types of motors, and I can do something that hasn't been done before, sensors that didn't e- exist before. And let's, you got to always shoot for the top being, you know, one of the leaders in the world, and that's just how we think.

5. 16:56 – 19:11

   Inventors vs engineers vs visionaries

   1. SWSteve Wozniak16:56

      So a lot of times when I think of government versus private, I also come down to types of people, which is very important. And you have an inventor who could be given a job, and they've gone through all the, the right, they have the right skill sets, and they've gone through the right university, you know, um, majors and PhDs, and, and, uh, and they're an engineer, and they can design what you assign them. But then there's the inventor.

   2. SSSteph Smith17:17

      Mm-hmm.

   3. SWSteve Wozniak17:17

      The inventor goes along, thinks, "Oh my gosh, is there something I'm interested in that I could do, and would it work, and maybe it hasn't been done before, and can I make a different, make a difference in the world?" And, uh, 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 g- is right, and 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. So, um, it's, that's, that's another advantage of Alex, you know, putting together Privateer is we're looking for the inventor types, you know.

   4. SSSteph Smith17:52

      Yeah, definitely. I mean, another word sometimes people use for inventor is visionary. And 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, you can't picture everything with so many advancements since those early days. But like-

   5. SWSteve Wozniak18:10

      Mm-hmm

   6. SSSteph Smith18:11

      ... how far along were you actually envisioning? And I'm asking this partially because-

   7. SWSteve Wozniak18:15

      Sure

   8. SSSteph Smith18:15

      ... 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 you, 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, and, and the applications that have kind of sprung from that.

   9. SWSteve Wozniak18:39

      I, myself, I was really a great engineer in a certain field, and I was designing the hottest products in the world for Hewlett-Packard without even having a college degree yet. And then you have, you talk about visionary. Vision, seeing the future, uh, that's different than invention, though. 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.

   10. SSSteph Smith18:59

       Mm-hmm.

   11. SWSteve Wozniak19:00

       Because that's science fiction a lot, and everybody can talk about and then say later on, "See, I proposed it-"

   12. SSSteph Smith19:04

       [laughs] Yeah

   13. SWSteve Wozniak19:04

       ... "but it wasn't really possible to do with money." And the engineer says, "Feet on the ground. What can I actually do and build and deliver to people?"

6. 19:11 – 21:19

   Early days at Apple and moving towards the future

   1. SWSteve Wozniak19:11

      When we started Apple, you know, we had a great product that was gonna be all the revenues of Apple for the first 10 years. B- we had such a, we had a great lead, and we were comfortable, and we could do what we wanted. But the amount of memory that would hold a song costs... You know, we were back in the days of tape. It cost about a million dollars.

   2. SSSteph Smith19:28

      Wow.

   3. SWSteve Wozniak19:28

      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 even? Um, no. S- 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. And we, you can have a lot of failures, too, if you'll have one great product bringing in the, 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. And after all, you look back at it, it was kind of invisible, the steps we took, but they all led to today. And then there was some, um, you know, some of that invention stuff we got to. Steve Jobs' Apple II was really the iPod music, music. And, uh, and that was the first time, oh my gosh, up till then our company valuation was the same as the old Apple II days. And then all of a sudden we sold it to everyone in the world, and our sales doubled, and our profits doubled. And the board gave Steve billions and stock options and jet airplanes. That was the turning point. And then the iPhone was even better, and 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. And so 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.

   4. SSSteph Smith20:37

      Mm-hmm.

   5. SWSteve Wozniak20:38

      Whenever I tried to see the future a year ahead, I knew it one year ahead 'cause I was working on it. If I looked two years ahead and made some guesses, oh my gosh, other aspects, other technologies and all came out of, 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 got huge, big companies, so it's kind of like, you know, anything they work on is gonna be successful. It's not, it's not as much a, it's n- not as much of a gamble. But, you know, real, real inventors like to gamble. Like to prove the world that they can do more than you ever imagined.

   6. SSSteph Smith21:11

      Definitely. Well, it's 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.

7. 21:19 – 24:28

   Steve’s personal fascinations

   1. SSSteph Smith21:19

      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. Um, everyone has limited resources. But are there areas or problems in the world or industries that you are fascinated by that maybe you wish were talked about more, or you think that more builders, more entrepreneurs, more founders should be paying attention to?

   2. SWSteve Wozniak21:43

      Um, you know, I read the same things as everyone else. You know, you know, we've talked here about quantum computing. You can go either way, but I'm into things that actually, you know, s- like I said, feet on the ground, that actually come through and, you know, solve all the general problems. So, 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've, I don't invest. I don't even invest in crypto. I don't invest in stocks, you know. I, uh, I made a lot of money on crypto, but only because I had to experiment with it, you know, when Bitcoin was young. I like things that don't, don't add up and necessarily make sense. I mean, Bitcoin, who created it? Who owns it? What company? You know, 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. It's like you say, "When is your birthday?" "Oh, it was, uh, two days ago. August 23." No, the birthday should be when the Earth is around the sun at the same place.

   3. SSSteph Smith22:42

      [laughs]

   4. SWSteve Wozniak22:43

      You have to take leap years into correction. And 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, and 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 ma- based on math, real trueness. It's all like instead of starting the year on something called January 1, back when, um, you know, months were named by the Ro- the Romans, they didn't... And 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, and that's August. And this is the calendar we use, you know. And we f- that's all, that's 'cause our human minds are kind of weak if you take everybody into account. Not everybody's a super scientist, and our minds are weak, and we can deal with the sort of calendar that we use. But I'm into s- you know, you would start the year on something like the winter solstice or the summer solstice and, and, um, you know, something that has a, a real thing you can look out to the skies and say is real.

   5. SSSteph Smith23:39

      Well, I want to say thank you for taking this time, and also thank you for the work that you, Alex, 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.

   6. SWSteve Wozniak24:13

      Thanks. Your summary of space was excellent.

   7. SSSteph Smith24:15

      Oh, [laughs] thank you. Thank you.

   8. SWSteve Wozniak24:17

      But there's more to it than things. We're not gonna go up and try to gather things, you know, and bring them down. Some people are trying that.

   9. SSSteph Smith24:23

      Yeah.

   10. SWSteve Wozniak24:23

       We just wanna make the information available so people could do it if they want.

8. 24:28 – 25:12

   How vocabulary drives awareness

   1. SSSteph Smith24:28

      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? Um, and, and therefore it's, 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-

   2. SWSteve Wozniak24:44

      Yeah

   3. SSSteph Smith24:45

      ... 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, you know, slowly ticking up. And even just the fact that, again, we have some of that terminology-

   4. SWSteve Wozniak24:56

      Yeah. What, what really changes public perception in areas like this is sometimes there's a spike due to something.

   5. SSSteph Smith25:00

      Mm-hmm.

   6. SWSteve Wozniak25:00

      A lot of stuff in the news that all of a sudden people are now much more aware than they were before. And it's hard to predict when those will come

   7. AFAlex Fielding25:07

      You know, we'll do our best. We'll do our best to just educate people and keep them informed.

9. 25:12 – 26:28

   Is space really an infinite void?

   1. SSSteph Smith25:12

      All right. Alex, Moriba, thanks for taking the time. Welcome to the show.

   2. MJDr. Moriba Jah25:15

      Aloha.

   3. AFAlex Fielding25:16

      Hey. Aloha, yeah. Thank you.

   4. SSSteph Smith25:18

      Yeah, we've got Alex calling in from Maui. Moriba, where are you calling in from?

   5. MJDr. Moriba Jah25:21

      Austin, Texas.

   6. SSSteph Smith25:22

      And I want to start with a question about space. That's what we're, we're going to be talking about. And 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. And so it feels like space is this infinite dimension, this infinite void. But as I learn more about space, it sounds like that might not be the case. Is space this infinite void that we have access to?

   7. MJDr. Moriba Jah25:52

      Yeah, okay. So look, I mean, all of outer space is probably infinite, but where we put satellites, uh, 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?

   8. SSSteph Smith26:08

      I am in Encinitas, California.

   9. MJDr. Moriba Jah26:10

      So I'm closer to low Earth orbit than I am to you, and I think that's what people just don't realize.

   10. SSSteph Smith26:18

       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.

10. 26:28 – 29:48

    The growing pollution in space

    1. SSSteph Smith26:28

       And 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?

    2. MJDr. Moriba Jah26:48

       Well, I think that, uh, you know, most people, they 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, you know, now that we at Privateer have, have rolled out Wayfinder, we're just like a click away from, uh, people seeing all these dots, uh, you know, all around the Earth.

    3. SSSteph Smith27:17

       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?

    4. MJDr. Moriba Jah27:36

       My career started at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab working on Mars missions, but when I moved to Maui in 2006, I started working with the Air Force Research Lab with the, uh, telescopes on top of Mount Haleakalā. 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?" Like, "This doesn't make any sense. Holy cow, like this is ridiculous." How is that-- how is it okay for like 96% of the stuff that we put in space to turn out to be garbage? Like, we don't see that in other domains. We don't, we don't have that as acceptable. "Okay, we're going to put a bunch of stuff out here on the land, but 96% of the stuff we're going to put out is going to be trash." Like, we don't do that.

    5. SSSteph Smith28:21

       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.

    6. AFAlex Fielding28:32

       So we're, 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, you know, when, when Moriba says there's these 26,000 things or, you know, whatever that, that, that number is precisely, those are things the size of a softball doing roughly 18,000 miles an hour. And, you know, MV squared's still MV squared. So it's, it's a real problem because the little pieces of debris, the things you can't see, can really hurt you in space. Uh, you, you wouldn't get on a passenger jet if you got told when you boarded the plane, "There's a million little bullets flying around, and this is going to make your life potentially very miserable. We just don't know. Um, hope you make it." Like that would be-

    7. SSSteph Smith29:20

       Yeah

    8. AFAlex Fielding29:21

       ... but that's kind of what's going on with spaceflight. The first challenge is you have to be able to see everything so that we can put together a plan on how to solve for that. And Astrograph, Wayfinder, these are tools to help enlighten, uh, the world and kind of bring attention to the problem first so that we can all align on what the best solutions are for cleaning up space, which is kind of one side of Privateer's mission of making space safe and accessible for humankind.

11. 29:48 – 31:11

    The impact of space down on Earth

    1. SSSteph Smith29:48

       And I want to get to how we solve the problem, but I also want to speak a little bit to what is at stake here. So you're talking about thousands of things that we can monitor, but potentially millions that we aren't able to monitor. How often does this stuff actually collide? And then also how often does that impact us on Earth, whether it be things actually coming down to Earth or impacting the satellites or infrastructure that we use on Earth up there in space?

    2. AFAlex Fielding30:15

       I mean, there, there's a lot of collisions, right? And there are some that we actually can see, and we can clearly identify that was caused by debris or, or even in the case of a satellite hitting an inactive satellite or vice versa or, you know, two objects in near Earth space colliding. It happens a lot more than we would like to think, and there's also reasons why we don't talk about it as a community, why we don't just openly talk about our, our problems in the space community the way that we would in other academic, uh, communities or places where we're more data-driven. And some of that actually surrounds liability and risk. A- as an example, many insurance policies in space on the riders exclude space debris from a covered loss. I'm not saying that people do it. I'm probably implying it. But if your insurance policy said, "We don't cover things hitting your car windshield that are rocks," then whatever cracked your car windshield is probably not a rock. Um, [laughs] so

12. 31:11 – 39:04

    The challenge of space policy and governance

    1. AFAlex Fielding31:11

       these are, these are challenges we're also working around, which is the evolution of space policy and the Space Act and treaties evolving. The- these things were based in maritime law. Uh, and, and I guess that kind of made sense for 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, the simplest notions of, like, right of way. When you're in space, you're gonna come very close to colliding with someone else's object, whether it's dead or alive. Who's, who's got the right of way? Well, I mean, obviously, if it's dead, you better move, but if you're both active, who's got 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, we don't have these rules fully defined as a community, and yet we keep launching more and more things without solving those.

    2. SSSteph Smith32:02

       Right. And yeah, that, that seems extremely important in terms of if we do want to clean up the debris in space, who is responsible for that? And since there are so many actors at play, even if you have these tracking systems that you and others are creating so we know what's going on to a larger degree, how do you even solve that problem? How do you create the right policy or legislation for people to become good actors? Because right now it seems like even if someone wanted to be a good actor, they don't even have the rule set to do that.

    3. AFAlex Fielding32:31

       Well, it's, it's like the International Space Act and treaties. I mean, we all sign this thing when we go to space. When we put a satellite up, we all sign this, and it includes things like not weaponizing space, not doing generally bad things in space, not doing bad things to each other in space. And yet, you know, Moriba proved this definitively with his work, um, that, that he did at, at UT Austin with IBM on a project called Arcade, where they looked at how many objects in space are in or out of compliance with the Space Act and treaties, and the number out of compliance is over 40% of those registered objects are out of compliance.

    4. SSSteph Smith33:05

       Wow.

    5. AFAlex Fielding33:06

       Part of the problem is enforcement. Like, if you stick a speed limit sign up that says 65 miles an hour and we're all doing 120 and there's 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. And in space, you know, I kind of think people just cross their fingers, put them behind their back, and sign the Space Act and treaty and just went on about life and said, "Who's gonna call me on it?" 'Cause there is no enforcement cop.

    6. SSSteph Smith33:30

       Well, who is? Moriba, if, if there's 40% that is not in compliance, who is the space cop?

    7. MJDr. Moriba Jah33:36

       I have some good news and bad news. The good news is I know the answer. The bad news, it's the same countries that are non-compliant. I think the thing that really needs to happen, uh, Steph, is transparency. If people know that they're being watched and that the evidence is being brought to the public square, that might be a deterrent. It might help curve people's behavior and that sort of stuff in space because ultimately, in terms of international law, the responsibility falls on states party to the treaty, which are governments. So governments are responsible. Governments need to be the enforcers, but if nobody actually knows, if there's no evidence that, you know, companies that are being licensed by the governments are misbehaving, then it's kind of like, who cares?

    8. SSSteph Smith34:24

       But it's not just governments launching stuff into space, right? There are, there are private businesses that are doing the same and...

    9. MJDr. Moriba Jah34:30

       Yeah, but, but the thing is, in terms of international law, all the responsibility for liability, damage, harmful interference doesn't fall on the shoulders of companies.

    10. SSSteph Smith34:39

        Right.

    11. MJDr. Moriba Jah34:39

        It's on governments that give them license and authorize them to actually operate in space.

    12. SSSteph Smith34:45

        I'm curious to know, though, we've seen the price of launching a kilogram into lower Earth orbit go down dramatically over the years. I think it's something like it was like t- over $10,000 to in the hundreds in a couple decades. And so naturally, we can expect that just a lot more stuff is going to be launched into space. I, I hear you that there is some sort of compliance where they need the regulatory bodies to enable that, but how do we see the amount of stuff, whether it's from governments or from private actors, how is that changing in terms of just the sheer amount being launched into space, and how is that gonna change moving forward?

    13. MJDr. Moriba Jah35:20

        Here's the deal, Steph. 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 a first come, first served kind of stuff. At this point, if you want to launch a satellite that goes above 500 kilometers of altitude, in today's world, you have to coordinate with Elon, 'cause Elon has almost 3,000 satellites at 500 kilometer altitude, and it would be wise for you to talk to Elon before you try to go through the orbital shell that he has. It u- it doesn't belong to him. It doesn't belong to SpaceX, doesn't belong to anybody, but he's operating there, and by all, uh, intents and purposes, the United States basically is occupying a shell at 500 kilometer altitude, and that makes people very angry. And so when I say, "Oh, well, people need to, you know, curve their, uh, behavior and, you know, there needs to be enforcement on all this stuff," countries are like, "Well, if, if, if it's first come, first served, I want to get there first. I'm gonna authorize as many people as quickly as possible to operate in that space." And once it's there, it's like, "Oh, sounds like can't launch a thing here because, you know, it's congested."

    14. AFAlex Fielding36:41

        You know, what Moriba said is right on the money, right? And money is, is part of the issue because we're, we're really strip mining space, and I think what the average person, I mean, I would put myself in the average person bucket, what most of us are not really aware of is that, you know, there's no property tax in space. Right? So once you're there, once you pay that cost to launch, once you pay the regulatory cost to be able to be there, like Moriba said, it, this is international space law, which it's similar to flying an American flag off the back of your boat, right? You represent the United States when you leave that port and you leave your country. You are not exactly an asset owned by the US government, but you're representing the United States wherever you go. The same thing's true for people operating in space, and that is changing the nature of how people play those rules and where they're domiciled. And I don't think the average person's realized yet that by strip mining space, what we're really doing is we're occupying space in a way that no one actually controls or truly governs or enforces. So that means once your vehicle's in space, if it provides a service to us on terrestrial Earth, it's actually operating more efficiently, more cheaply than if the asset was on the ground and regulated by a single state or nation state, you know, country. This is something that is gonna change our lives fundamentally forever because the terrestrial companies that don't, that have services that could be operated from space, by choosing to strip mine space, by using that space unwisely and un-, uh, sustainably, they're actually taking advantage of the fact that the regulation and the enforcement doesn't exist, and they're doing it at a time that... I'm not saying that they'll be grandfathered in forever, but they're certainly taking advantage of it now, and they're doing it without any recourse. Once a new frontier opens up, and I'm not saying space is the final frontier, but it, it is the frontier of, of our lives right now, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. So y- you know, it's only a matter of time before the terrestrial companies that are disrupted by space companies or, or companies operating in space will realize, and their shareholders will realize, "Oh wow, we just, you know, we just got disrupted by something flying above our head that we have absolutely no control or even taxation on."

    15. SSSteph Smith38:54

        It is, as we talked about earlier, a limited resource, and I'm curious, it sounds like there are these specific highways or orbits that certain satellites can operate

13. 39:04 – 41:45

    Orbital highways and carrying capacities

    1. SSSteph Smith39:04

       within. As we talked about before, it's not an infinite resource, at least within that dimension. Is there a reality where we've completely exhausted that resource? Like, if people do continue to just ship stuff without any sort of coordination between parties, is there a reality where at some point we just say, "We actually can't fit any more satellites," or, "We can't use this resource anymore. It's completely exhausted"?

    2. MJDr. Moriba Jah39:27

       Yeah. I mean, one of the things that we're actually working on is trying to develop something that we call orbital carrying capacity. So just like there's a carrying capacity to, uh, a plot of land or an ecosystem, a carrying capacity to a regular highway, carrying capacity to orbital highways. And I think the best way to think about it is when do you know this capacity is exhausted or saturated? You know that the orbital carrying capacity is past its limit when our decisions and actions can no longer prevent bad things from happening. So if, if we're trying to do everything possible to avoid things colliding with each other or to avoid interfering with each other and we can't help but see those things happen, by all intents and purposes, that orbit is no longer able to provide us with the benefits that we intended, and we, we have lost the capacity to use it. And so I predict with absolute certainty, if our behavior doesn't change, there will be orbital highways whose capacity will be saturated, and we'll j- we're just gonna see an increasing amount of undesirable outcomes occur.

    3. AFAlex Fielding40:37

       Yeah, this is, this is one of those areas where, um... To, to put this in perspective, if, if you took a shell of the Earth and you said from, like, 250 kilometers to 1,000 kilometers up, we placed objects in little 10-kilometer bubbles, right? How many of those bubbles can we stack between 250 and 1,000 around Earth? It's about 110 million. To put that in perspective, the auto industry on Earth did about 80 million cars last year alone. So one year's space vehicle production when we're at ramp that we are, like similar to the auto industry, would completely exhaust that spacing in near Earth space to the point that we couldn't put anything el- else up if we didn't have the precision and the ability to maneuver and the traffic management and control and all of the underpinning infrastructure, which today is largely missing. If, if we don't fix that, we would be capacity constrained in a single year if you put it in automotive industry terms. That's crazy.

    4. SSSteph Smith41:38

       That is crazy.

    5. AFAlex Fielding41:39

       That's, that's not infinite at all, right? [laughs]

    6. SSSteph Smith41:41

       No.

    7. AFAlex Fielding41:41

       That's very finite.

    8. SSSteph Smith41:42

       No. It is, yeah, extremely finite.

14. 41:45 – 45:57

    Dependence on space infrastructure and its fragility

    1. SSSteph Smith41:45

       I, I wanna put into perspective for some folks who may be thinking that space is somewhat of a frivolous endeavor what we depend on on Earth, right? Even if, if people don't believe in space being the next frontier and becoming a multi-planetary species, what are the things that we depend on every single day on Earth, even potentially that we're depending on on this call, that rely on space? And maybe also, how much redundancy is there? So if we were to use GPS as an example, like, do we have backup on backup on backup, or is it really, like, one system that is very, very fragile?

    2. MJDr. Moriba Jah42:23

       Picking the thread on global navigation satellite systems, I don't know, have, have you been to a place where they sell, like, maps these days? Uh, that, your fold-out maps and, you know, compasses. People don't make those things anymore. The way that we navigate and find our way from point A to point B is really all dominated by satellite systems at this point, and the people that knew how to navigate, uh, and stuff w- without that system are either long gone, those companies don't exist anymore. Certainly our youth has no clue whatsoever. This new generation of people, they h- they have no idea how to get from point A to point B in the absence of satellites pretty much telling them, uh, how this has happened. And not only that, Steph. The technology that we use today, many of the applications rely uniquely on position navigation and timing services provided by these satellites. And if that went away, the app itself just stops working. Everything from produce and, and, and think, you know, food across the country or across the globe, uh, transportation systems, like all these things stop working, and that's just from global navigation satellite systems. That's not even talking about Earth observation with, I don't know, monitoring climate change, hydrology and agriculture, wars in Ukraine, that sort of stuff.

    3. AFAlex Fielding43:47

       Yeah, I mean, when, 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, this is actually a black jacket. This is my dust.

    4. SSSteph Smith43:56

       [laughs]

    5. AFAlex Fielding43:58

       Um, when we started Wheels 22 years ago, we had 2,000 satellites on orbit, and half of them were dead. They were already pieces of trash. And we were building GPS locators that were similar to Apple Tags 20 years too early. We were [laughs] we, we ended up, uh, building a business that serviced a, a customer that was not the, those of us that use like Apple Tags to track things or Tile or whatever. The reason I tell the story is that 22 years ago, we had about 30 GPS satellites, and we had an SLA for GPS that was like 95%. Let's put that in perspective. If your power company at home only gave you an SLA at 95%, you would really hate your power company, right? Your power company gives you an SLA that's like 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 give us the... That are United States assets. I'm not counting GLONASS. These are the things that we use as United States assets that enable our GPS systems. Don't get me wrong, there's other things that enhance GPS. There's other things that 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 bit more trouble. You lose multiples that are in the same area, you're in a lot of trouble. I mean, people say three, but it's closer to four to get an actual positional fix. So these are... These services and systems are somewhat fragile. In low Earth orbit, things are flying over our heads much faster, and they're much less, um, certain because we have less observations on them less often. That makes things 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 gonna continue, especially when you have launch costs, like you said earlier, like 5,000 bucks a kilo. I can put a satellite in space for less than I can pay our attorneys to do the paperwork.

    6. SSSteph Smith45:52

       [laughs]

    7. AFAlex Fielding45:52

       Like, let's, let's think about that. That's crazy.

    8. SSSteph Smith45:55

       That is crazy. That is very

15. 45:57 – 47:36

    Privateer’s role in the evolving ecosystem

    1. SSSteph Smith45:57

       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 of it we can't track because it's so small. There's going to be an exponential nature to more things being launched into space and no coordination, or at least not the coordination that we need. So Alex, what is Privateer doing in this space to help mitigate some of these issues?

    2. AFAlex Fielding46:18

       Well, we're, we're doing two things in two very broad categories. We- we're focused on space safety and accessibility, and we think that they're totally interconnected, right? And part of that is, is what you actually kind of alluded to and, and touched on, which is that my three-year-old daughter knows how to share better than we know how to share in space. Like, you know, like Moriba said, how many more cameras do we need overflying Kyiv right now? It's great that we have them. It's great that we can provide the capability. It's kind of sad that we don't do a very good job sharing. You don't need 50 cameras overflying a region if you know how to actually effectively utilize one asset. So Privateer's focused on safety through things like Wayfinder and, uh, our conjunction software that helps people not crash in space, and we're doing that in a really open way to the community that encourages interaction and involvement amongst kind of space operators so that we coordinate and we cooperate in space. And, and the reason for that is it, 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." You know, "Give me a dollar and I'll make sure that my exquisite observation keeps you from getting into trouble." Those days have to come to an end really fast,

16. 47:36 – 50:31

    Democratizing space through data sharing

    1. AFAlex Fielding47:36

       and 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, and we're not aiming to own it. We're aiming to enable it and foster it and be good stewards of our space environment. The other part of this is accessibility, and for that, we're putting up a constellation of our own satellites, which I hope doesn't sound too hypocritical.

    2. SSSteph Smith48:01

       How do you get that data? How are you actually convincing a magnitude of parties to contribute to that database?

    3. AFAlex Fielding48:07

       Uh, it's, it's more mutual benefit than it is, um, quid pro quo because 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 that we all have eyes on those things and that we can all observe them better, and we can operate more efficiently and more safely in space. And 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. And the risk to space operators operating... You know, as Moriba said, Elon does have kind of his own orbit right now. Uh, [laughs] and he's-

    4. SSSteph Smith48:44

       Elon's orbit. [laughs]

    5. AFAlex Fielding48:45

       ... Elon's orbit, and it's, it's a pretty, it's pretty good orbit to be in. So I think that, um, you know, it's not a hard pitch to get space operators to contribute when we are living at the transitional point of space situational awareness and domain awareness and traffic management and, ultimately, traffic control. Becoming services that actually should be provided by governments that have traditionally only been provided by private industry. I mean, imagine that getting on a passenger jet thing and having, you know, getting told when you board the plane, "Air traffic control needs 10 bucks so we don't hit another plane while we're in flight."

    6. SSSteph Smith49:20

       [laughs]

    7. AFAlex Fielding49:21

       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, and that is like a mafia tactic. So we think disrupting that and using these data from a variety of operators, they're tired of being extorted, right? They've been writing checks for a long time without getting a lot of benefit out of it. These are global services that we, as humans, need so we can keep space accessible, uh, so that someday we can, we can utilize space better to cure planet Earth and some of the, the ails that we have caused on it. And also so that we can become a space-faring civilization, which that might be kind of mission two, but you gotta do the first thing. And, uh, you know, as Moriba said, we've done all this damage to, to the land, to our, you know, our atmosphere here, to our oceans. I'm an optimist, right? 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, 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, much harder

17. 50:31 – 52:53

    Can we undo the damage that’s been done?

    1. AFAlex Fielding50:31

       to undo.

    2. SSSteph Smith50:31

       Moriba, I wanna hear from you on this idea of undoing the damage. So excuse my lack of knowledge in this domain, but is what Privateer is doing something that just mitigates future risk or harm? Or how do you actually undo some of the damage that we have already caused? Like, can you, can you move satellites? Can you take them down? Can you actually, you know, do the equivalent of, like, the Great Garbage Patch, uh, cleanup in space? Or how do we think about fixing what's already been done?

    3. MJDr. Moriba Jah51:02

       One of the things that we believe at Privateer is really facilitating a circular economy when it comes to space, when it comes to the debris. You know, upstream things are debris mitigation, and we can get to prevention of debris if we're monitoring and measuring the stuff. Like, 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 that people can draw conclusions from consistent evidence. Like, that's step number one. Going down the chain of this whole circular economy for space, looking at can we, with our platform, provide folks with data information that helps them reuse and recycle stuff on orbit, uh, is kind of the, the next thing, the next rung. Uh, that, that's, that's certainly, you know, a downstream solution, but that's possible for us to do. The next thing that we don't like so much but, um, is also an... The next option is then disposal and removal, um, uh, which, you know, certainly companies like Astroscale, um, and looking at ClearSpace in Europe, facilitating them with the information to be successful at the removal of these sorts of things. The thing that we, that we don't really want to, you know, have to keep on doing is, is the abandonment, abandoning the object there, right? So from most important to least important, you know, it's mitigation and prevention, reuse, recycle, disposal, removal, and then abandonment. And we wanna be able to provide actionable, accurate, precise information to people all along that to facilitate and pretty much motivate, uh, the development of a real circular economy in space. So absolutely we can do that.

18. 52:53 – 59:17

    Determining intent in space

    1. SSSteph Smith52:53

       I wanna hear from you, Moriba, about this idea of intent, because something that strikes me is, is that there is just so much happening in space. And I've heard of the Kessler Effect and the idea that, like, one collision could cascade into many collisions. And there is an element of certain things can happen negatively in space without any bad intent. And then there are other things that can happen with malintent. Um, and, and how do you use this information to understand the intent of many, many different parties with different incentives, different goals in space?

    2. MJDr. Moriba Jah53:25

       Yeah. So it's back to if you wanna know something, you have to measure it kind of thing. And, um, you know, opportunity to cause harm is kind of the easiest one, 'cause it, it depends on who, who's, who's where and, and, and, and where can... You know, where can they be at any given point in time. Capability is harder, uh, because then you need to know something about, you know, the, the physical and operational, functional characteristics of these objects. You know, is it carrying a laser? Does it have a grappling arm? You know, all this other stuff. But then it's like, okay, if, if it's close to me, it has a grappling arm, is it going to try to purposely harm me? That, that's the intent piece, and there is no sensor that measures that. You know, there's no intent-o-meter. And so-

    3. SSSteph Smith54:07

       [laughs]

    4. MJDr. Moriba Jah54:08

       ... this is the... Yeah. I mean, this is where we need to actually understand, uh, you know, anthropology, social science, cultural context to say, hey, I mean, people behave in certain ways depending on where they were born, how are they, they were raised. And we all don't have the same values and, and stuff like that. But in general, we aren't trying to, in general, harm each other. But some people are, uh, because every domain of human, uh, experience has malicious behavior. I mean, to think that, um, if you see it on lands with banditry and on the seas with piracy and all this other stuff, um, even planes get hijacked, to think that space is this benevolent everybody's having pillow fights and tickling each other is ridiculous. But we need to be able to somehow infer, infer the intent, but not be so prejudiced to just assume everything is evil. 'Cause that's the other thing, is that because the intent piece is so ambiguous, people are using prejudice to- Just get rid of that uncertainty and they're saying, "Hey, if, if the opportunity and the capability is there, if I'm a, if I'm a US satellite and there's a Chinese satellite that is in the same orbit, not even close, in the same orbit as me and has a grappling arm, that thing is gonna try to schwack me." That becomes this escalatory, conflict-ridden sort of behavior that will end up in the complete disharmony of the use of outer space. So what we wanna do in Privateer, as Alex said, with the data and information that we're aggregating, is also incorporate the nuances of cultural lenses and social science to say, "Hey, the fact that this thing is there and has the grappling hook, don't be so quick to press on the intent lever." But if somebody wants to blow up a satellite in an orbit that clearly jeopardizes another country, maybe intent is a little bit easier to infer on that sort of stuff.

    5. AFAlex Fielding56:06

       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?" Um, but it doesn't totally work that way. I, I think there's also... My, my two cents here is that the history of space, most of the people who went to space were scientists and researchers and people who have very, very, very good intent, 'cause you don't really send war fighters and politicians to space. You send [laughs] , you send people to go do research, and most of that research is focused on the betterment of humankind, or had been. You know, one small step, right? The, the problem is getting to the giant leap, and we, 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. Steph, I, I remember when you, you put out the personal user manual.

    6. SSSteph Smith57:03

       Oh, yeah.

    7. AFAlex Fielding57:03

       Right? I love that.

    8. SSSteph Smith57:04

       [laughs] Thanks.

    9. AFAlex Fielding57:05

       And, and that was, that was a beautiful, like, transparent... 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.

    10. SSSteph Smith57:25

        Thank you.

    11. AFAlex Fielding57:25

        No, thank you. Um, there is no space user manual.

    12. SSSteph Smith57:29

        Right.

    13. AFAlex Fielding57:29

        And there's [laughs] no country-defined user manual, uh, 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, um, when we had an ASAP attack last year in November, and, and I, I probably shouldn't even go here, the, the cosmonauts from Roscosmos that were aboard the space station at the time, they had no damn idea that their government was gonna blow up an asset and put them and the world in peril.

    14. SSSteph Smith58:14

        Right.

    15. AFAlex Fielding58:15

        If they did, they certainly wouldn't have been up there.

    16. SSSteph Smith58:17

        No.

    17. AFAlex Fielding58:17

        Right? So... And, and I can only imagine being their crew mates, going, like, "Dude, WTF," and I'm sure they were like, didn't know, right? [laughs] Um, and, and I'm sure had absolutely no input on the actions of politics and posturing and war fighting and all those, those bad behaviors that we... You know, as Moriba said, there's, there's a lot of... There's 25 shades of space.

    18. SSSteph Smith58:41

        Right.

    19. AFAlex Fielding58:41

        Let's put it that way.

    20. SSSteph Smith58:42

        Well, I mean-

    21. AFAlex Fielding58:43

        Um, so [laughs] -

    22. SSSteph Smith58:44

        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 governments, regulation, um, which, you know, any time you're trying to involve so many parties or countries or states, it, it just becomes incredibly complex.

19. 59:17 – 1:02:09

    Talent needed in the space industry

    1. SSSteph Smith59:17

       And even throughout this conversation, Moriba, I've heard you talk about social science. We've talked about government regulation. The space side or, like, the, the technical side, what is most needed in this space? I'm gonna ask you, Moriba, in terms of the types of talent, the, the types of people that Privateer is looking for. I've also heard you say that you're a blue collar PhD, and you're, 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?

    2. MJDr. Moriba Jah59:45

       So, um, I've heard a lot of talk about STEM and, uh, the focus on STEM and then STEAM, uh, 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 and blah, blah, blah, it's like... And I say, "Hey, who is, who, who's into creating knowledge and who's into, like, creating solutions?" Almost everybody raises their hand. So the thing is, we wanna... We don't want to presuppose where the best ideas to solve these wicked problems across humanity are gonna come from. We want to basically make that accessible to recruit, to recruit empathy across humanity, and for those people that can have and experience that empathy towards solving these problems, lower the entry bar to get their solutions as quickly and as efficiently as possible to solve these things. This is all to say that, you know, 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, these sorts of things, I'm like Wow. I mean, I got a PhD. I don't think I could've come up with that one any time soon. I'm mesmerized by the stuff that people can come up. People inherently, humans, we're pretty damn smart. So, so, so the thing is, that's what we wanna allow access. That's what we wanna recruit.

    3. SSSteph Smith1:01:27

       Yeah. It reminds me of my favorite Steve Jobs quote, which I know, Alex, you had the privilege of, of working alongside him way back in the day, is, is... I'm gonna butcher it, but it's something along the lines of, "Everything that exists around us was built by someone no smarter than you." And so I, I love that notion that sometimes we even have the curse of knowledge, and that some, some industry like space may sound very intimidating to people who don't associate themselves with something that you might consider technical. Uh, but sometimes those are the people that you need in the industry. Alex, I'm gonna 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.

20. 1:02:09 – 1:10:36

    Privateer’s biggest challenges

    1. SSSteph Smith1:02:09

       What are your biggest challenges? If, if Privateer were to fail for some reason over the next few years, why would that be?

    2. AFAlex Fielding1:02:16

       Well, Moriba actually hit it right on the head. It's, 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 gonna 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, 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, you know, uh, I'm too young to have watched it live, but I've certainly watched the recording. Because the message 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 gonna come in the, the future, that this new frontier was gonna enable humankind to reach new levels. You know, even the messages that we delivered onto the lunar surface were from, like, 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 inter- interconnected. Space right now, that message got lost along the capitalist, uh, route to monetize space. If Privateer fails, it's because humanity failed to recognize space as a frontier for all of us, and instead continued 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. Uh, and that means it's only for them. But the problem is, people have not yet realized that space will be likely to 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, um, cooperative and is designed to encourage participation. So we're not, we're not becoming the gatekeeper to space. We're becoming the enabler to space. And we're not competing directly. So, you know, 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, they don't make, uh, giant amounts of money. They are not the mega-successful, you know, companies that you would, 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. We don't... I don't think if you talk to four or five companies that are in the SSA bucket and you asked them, "Who's your competitors?" We're, we're actually all friends, right? Um, it's, 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, off in the gray area that don't, 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, and a perspective that you don't have to travel there to get the perspective, right? Like, I mean, when I was a kid, I mean, our, our family was very broke, and I would say, like, 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. Um, but [laughs] you know, there's, there's certain parts of the encyclopedia I missed, um, by accident, and it was also outdated by the time I got it. That, 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 know, you can build a boat in your backyard and toss it in the ocean if you want, right? We all watched Moana. I've got a three-year-old. Uh, you know, this is, this is what you do. We, we haven't seen humankind yet, maybe until now, be able to do that travel, um, 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.

    3. MJDr. Moriba Jah1:06:44

       Great to have this conversation, uh, with you, Steph. Li- like to have it again at some point, uh-

    4. SSSteph Smith1:06:49

       Definitely

    5. MJDr. Moriba Jah1:06:49

       ... if you're keen. And then, yeah, we'll... Alex will keep it rolling.

    6. SSSteph Smith1:06:53

       [laughs] Thanks, Moriba. It's amazing that Privateer is based around this idea of empathy, cooperation, et cetera. 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. Uh, 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, 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 versus less kind. 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 aligned where most people will act that way, whether they have empathy or not?

    7. AFAlex Fielding1:08:02

       It's, it's gonna come down to enforcement. I mean, unfortunately, there, there is the carrot, which is we all get to participate together, and I am a big believer that that carrot and that, 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, right? It, it has to be just as easy to recycle your, your things than i- it is to throw it out your car window while you're driving. And this is something that is also societal, and it's behavior related in nature, right? Uh, I, I married a therapist. It doesn't show at all.

    8. SSSteph Smith1:08:37

       [laughs]

    9. AFAlex Fielding1:08:37

       You know, if you, 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 gonna toss it on the street. Like, I mean, 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, hey, 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 trash, but there's always this notion that someone else will clean it up. And to be really candid, you know, 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 fa- first kind of space environmental engineers. We would be the, the, uh, you know, we would be the, the, the guys, 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, 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, you know, ring of trash.

    10. SSSteph Smith1:10:05

        A ring of trash. That's a-

    11. AFAlex Fielding1:10:08

        It's a, it's, it's a Johnny Cash song. [laughs]

    12. SSSteph Smith1:10:09

        Yeah. Yeah. No, I know. It's, it's, it's, it's also just quite the picture to imagine this ring of trash circling around us above. I wanna end on a more positive note because I know it, 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. Uh, 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.

21. 1:10:36 – 1:16:41

    Space stewardship and Hawaii’s kuleana

    1. SSSteph Smith1:10:36

       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?

    2. AFAlex Fielding1:10:53

       It, it'll be driven by accessibility and the desire for people to access space resources. I, I think largely self, self-interested motivation will be to improve life on Earth. That, that, and that remains a big part of our mission. You know, improving life on space doesn't do much for us, at least not in the short term, right? Uh, 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. I think the first part of our mission, safety, my hope is that this, this notion of giving away these technologies that we develop to help ensure a s- a safe space environment, a sustainable space environment, will encourage usage. And ultimately, if enforcement does occur, which I think it, it's bound to occur soon. It, 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, 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, you know, Murphy's Law is hard at work, and the i- 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. The possibility's already there. The probability's low.

    3. SSSteph Smith1:12:23

       Does it take one of those catastrophic events to make people want to coordinate? Is that, 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? Like, is, is that the kind of event that you think will wake people up to the issue?

    4. AFAlex Fielding1:12:42

       I hope not. You know, I, I really hope that we do the right thing because it's the right thing to do. Our, our satellite constellation is called Pono, and Pono is like the Hawaiian word for karma. It means to do the right thing or to do the righteous thing. You know, in, in general, Hawaii's 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, a, 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 and 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. You know, we're, we're co-sponsored by Omega Watches, so this is not a total shameless plug, but Apollo 13, you got this crew that's had a catastrophic failure, nearly a mortal failure. You know, 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 what s- that's how fragile space is. And you look at that and, uh, you know, some of these ASAT tests and attacks and things that we've done in space that we've also, 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. You know, when that, when that ASAT happened, the sound bite 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. I, I mean, it's a terrifying position to tell seven people whose lives are in, 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, that's terrifying. Like, why was that not front page news for more than an hour? Why was, why was a tweet more important than that? It really wasn't. So we, we've got to fix this empathy, apathy thing, and then we can get on to accessibility as the focus of the business. So, and I'm a big believer that accessibility will lead the way because we, we actually crave that access to move our society and our civilization forward.

    5. SSSteph Smith1:15:39

       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. I mean, 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, right? For people to, to need that vocabulary in their culture. And so I'm, I'm very excited to see how certain words surrounding this issue may help illuminate the problem. There's, there's a, a term that people can understand, they can conceptualize, they can associate with. And so I think that'll be fascinating to watch. The final question I have for you is, is Privateer a- and many of

22. 1:16:41 – 1:23:27

    Who inspires Alex?

    1. SSSteph Smith1:16:41

       the businesses that you've done before are incredibly inspiring, and we like to ask everyone who joins us on these episodes if there's someone that inspires you and what they're working on, whether it's space related or not.

    2. AFAlex Fielding1:16:52

       I mean, there, there are so many inspirational people working in to do really hard things in space. I just don't see... And, and don't get me wrong, there's a part of my heart that has to remain a cold, dark capitalist-

    3. SSSteph Smith1:17:04

       [laughs]

    4. AFAlex Fielding1:17:04

       ... because we must make money. We are not building a nonprofit. We have investors, uh, and those investors wanna 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. You don't have to... You know, 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, right? Uh, 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. Uh, and, and that's okay. E- even, uh, you know, it's inspirational to get to work with Woz. You know, he's a brilliant, lovely, lovely, uh, human. We've known each other for a long time, but I will say working between him and getting to work with Steve Jobs back, uh, back in my time at Apple, the thing that's interesting... I was, I was, I was helping Woz clean out his garage. This is a true story. Like, this is not... You don't think about Woz cleaning out his garage, right? But in his garage, um, I came across a, 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 1 and Apple 2. And this was a solo endeavor. I mean, this is different from the type of endeavors that we have to do at this scale, right? 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 1 and Apple 2, and then an assembler for Apple ROM and Apple DOS. And then I get to the back of this book that is... It's, it's a, it's a engineering PhD manifesto that I don't think you could create today. Like, this should be a part of engineering school curriculum for every kid that wants to go into, to 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 1 and Apple 2, and I thought, "Man, how, like, how can you be the human that did this and be the human that cared enough to write this down, uh, and, and, and to live by those things?" And I think it is important that we make a difference and we make an impact, and, you know, there are a lot of things that on, on planet Earth that are technology projects that I really don't care about. I mean, I, I, I'm, I'm not the type of person that's gonna go start the next Tinder, um, or, you know, the next, uh, I'll, I'll, I'll skip all the other great app examples, but- They're fleeting. And, uh, I, I'm a big believer that Elon oftentimes a- actually means what he says. Sometimes he doesn't. I mean, 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, uh, civilization, all absolutely critical. And we can't start on it at the last minute. There's gonna be a million baby steps to get that one giant leap, and, uh, we have to work on it now.

    5. SSSteph Smith1:20:23

       Yeah, something I took from, from what you just shared there, even, 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 to, with your s- team, 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 gonna be too late if we address it tomorrow.

    6. AFAlex Fielding1:21:07

       When it was... And it was weird. It's too, 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, right? 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 gonna change very, very, very soon. It's bound to, because the government's taking rides on commercial rockets now. That's not exactly a t- a total unexpected trend. We'd seen it happening for a while, but the rate has changed. So now you can actually... You know, 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. The timing is definitely urgent. And the urgency, there are, there are a number of companies that are feeling that urgency and a number of people that are innovating in the space that clearly see the urgency. And you can sense it because, you know, 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 gonna, you know, it's gonna ex- far surpass our lifetimes.

    7. SSSteph Smith1:22:32

       I think you're right. Every exponential curve looks flat one direction, and it looks vertical the, the next. And 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 wanna say thank you for joining us today, Alex, and also Moriba. He had to drop early. Uh, 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, 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.

    8. AFAlex Fielding1:23:15

       Oh, 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.

    9. SWSteve Wozniak1:23:26

       Let

23. 1:23:27 – 1:25:56

    Woz returns!

    1. SWSteve Wozniak1:23:27

       me add one s- other small thing about, you know-

    2. SSSteph Smith1:23:29

       Yeah, please

    3. SWSteve Wozniak1:23:30

       ... oh my gosh, like, y- 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, uh, it's, it's a fight, but that's sort of, it's like space. Let's start getting up to space with the intent ahead of time, keeping it clean, and also being prepared to, for backups and being able to, you know, get out of the way and not make space messier than it is.

    4. SSSteph Smith1:24:03

       Yeah.

    5. SWSteve Wozniak1:24:04

       Like-

    6. SSSteph Smith1:24:04

       It's hard enough to take care of your own house. Imagine sharing a house.

    7. SWSteve Wozniak1:24:07

       Yeah. 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, some instrument that when they spread off into space, the coldness of space turned them into... Well, may- what if it could turn into, like, gummy bears?

    8. SSSteph Smith1:24:20

       [laughs]

    9. SWSteve Wozniak1:24:21

       Something, something not as, not as harmful as metal. Maybe even a gas would be the best.

    10. SSSteph Smith1:24:27

        That's certainly an image, imagining a, a broken satellite turning into a bunch of gummy bears.

    11. SWSteve Wozniak1:24:32

        But, you know, all change generally starts down at the atomic level.

    12. SSSteph Smith1:24:35

        Mm-hmm.

    13. SWSteve Wozniak1:24:35

        Physicists and chemists that understand the atoms and new pro- new materials that can be made that have new properties. That always cha- always changes life a lot.

    14. SSSteph Smith1:24:44

        Yeah. Well, I mean, something that I still, I still don't know if I fully understand is what happens when you do have a bunch of space debris. 'Cause 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, like, you, you can't really get rid of it, right? Or there's a couple companies working on that. But-

    15. SWSteve Wozniak1:25:09

        Mm

    16. SSSteph Smith1:25:09

        ... we're, we're just, we have to deal with this stuff in our house for quite some time now, right?

    17. SWSteve Wozniak1:25:13

        Well, well, last week, I wrote a forward for a book coming out by the guy, uh, Uri Levine, who, um, founded Waze, created Waze.

    18. SSSteph Smith1:25:21

        Mm-hmm.

    19. SWSteve Wozniak1:25:21

        And you, 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 is even what Privateer will be. It's not like we're gonna bring stuff back from space. No, we're gonna help it get back, and we're gonna think of other ideas along the way. That's just how it, nature of business.

    20. SSSteph Smith1:25:39

        Definitely. Yeah.

    21. SWSteve Wozniak1:25:40

        So we're looking forward to that. Okay. Have a good day.

    22. SSSteph Smith1:25:43

        Oh, [laughs] thanks, Steve. Bye. [upbeat music] Thanks for listening to the a16z podcast. If you like this episode, don't forget to subscribe here on YouTube to get our exclusive video content. We'll see you next time.

Episode duration: 1:26:06