Space, For The Humans Of Today

Why do we go to space?

JFK: “Not because it is easy, but because it is hard”

Elon: “To go to Mars”

Many see a Starship launch on YouTube and wonder if the reason is more about the glory of exploration and the spirit of adventure than a concrete contribution to their lives or Earth. Worse, they wonder if the growing space industry is just an extension of Cold War-era superpowers racing each other to the Moon, with billionaires in place of nation-states. [0]

In other words “Is space only for those who dream on the timescale of centuries? Or is there something up there for me?”

There is. 

In the prototypes and products of today, we’re seeing the space industry take off, with millions of people already benefiting and further impacts measured in years, not centuries. We’re here to share the progress we’ve made and the benefits to humanity we’re already seeing.

Why now?

The impetus for much of this space renaissance is of course SpaceX and Starship. Starship, the most powerful rocket in history, left the atmosphere in a third test flight in March, with a long-term mission of transporting colonists to Mars. Mars aside (more on that later), Starship and its launch competitors are reducing the cost of launch by 90% and may reduce launch costs by another 90% over the next 10 years. And even before Starship, Falcon Heavy reduced launch costs by 70% over previous rockets.

At the same time, an array of space launch startups are following in SpaceX’s footsteps. Rocket Lab, Relativity, Blue Origin, Firefly, ABL, and Stoke are all building rockets, and some early-stage startups like SpinLaunch and LongShot are attempting inertial launches.

Falcon Heavy and Starship represent radical cost reductions

One Giant Leap

As a result of these dropping costs and an accompanying shift in mindsets and startup focus, we’ve seen headlines that sound like they’re picking up shortly after the 1969 moon landing.

This year, the first commercial lunar lander to reach its destination intact touched down on the moon, with competitors set to follow. A company emerged from stealth mode with $18 million in backing to mine lunar resources, starting with Helium-3 for future fusion reactors.

Varda, a space manufacturing startup completed its first mission delivering made-in-space pharmaceuticals. And Astranis is scheduled to launch four more satellites this year, on a path to bringing affordable internet to billions of people who need it.

A Varda capsule returns, loaded with a space-grown antiviral drug

2023 saw the first in-space demo of wireless power beaming and Starlink named the best ISP in the U.S. By then, service from Starlink was proving instrumental for Ukraine fending off Russia.

With these milestones in mind, we surveyed major space industries.

We estimated

1) their benefits to humanity

2) the time horizon of those benefits

We asked “Will the industry deliver concrete benefits that help humanity in the next ten years, or do we have to wait a century for results that move the needle for humanity?

Exploration and Planetary Backup

Commercial exploration has already taken off, led by companies like Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines–which built and operated the first commercial machine to soft-land on the moon–Rocket Lab, which launched the first automated pharmaceutical lab with Varda, and others.

Commercial human spaceflight activities are also underway, with crewed suborbital flights by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, orbital flights by SpaceX, and planned orbital missions by others.

Vast, founded by crypto coin billionaire Jed McCaleb in 2021, plans to launch the first commercial space station in 2025. Dream Chaser, built by Sierra Nevada, will begin cargo deliveries to the International Space Station for NASA even sooner, in 2024, with crewed missions to follow.

The ultimate ambition of SpaceX, the number one launch company: to enable humanity to put its eggs in another cosmic basket in the form of a self-sustaining colony on another planet [1].

Mars colony and rocket pads

Quantifying this benefit is hard. It weighs the need for a planetary backup (researchers give us a 5-30% chance of extinction over the next 10-200 years) and the difficulty of establishing a backup on the moon or Mars.

Estimates for the cost of a Mars colony range from $100B to more than $10T for a self-sustaining civilization, but costs are largely driven by estimates for the number of people required and the $/kg costs of launch. If humanoid robots can construct many of the physical necessities of modern life and space travel, it’s possible the minimum viable human population could be radically lower than existing estimates. And if launch costs drop another 90%, perhaps propelled by technologies like LongShot’s [2], the cost of a self-sustaining civilization would drop further, perhaps reaching Elon’s $100B mark. At 0.1% of world GDP, it’s something humanity should eventually purchase. But for an individual living today the tougher unit of cost is not dollars, but years. Estimates suggest terraforming Mars might take between 50 and 100 million years. Colonizing it would be faster (i.e., people live in buildings or underground and need a space suit to go outside), but potentially still require 100+ years to make room for a million people.

The takeaway? Mars as a planetary backup will be “affordable” in the coming decades with advanced robotics and cheaper launch, but there are huge question marks around how long it would take and when we’d see the benefits on a large enough scale to actually benefit tens of millions of people directly. It’s a planet-scale benefit outside the context of most of our lives, and probably not something that’s going to benefit us or our children directly in the next fifty years.

Telecommunications and Imaging

Space imaging and telecommunications represent the low-hanging fruit of space development. Opportunities are being realized by Astranis, Maxar Technologies, Planet Labs, Spire, SpaceX’s Starlink, and others. You may have already used Starlink on a long flight, and data from companies like Planet Labs is already baked into some home insurance models.

San Francisco-based Astranis is one of the newer entrants in the space-telecommunications realm. It aims to bring low-cost internet service to the approximately three billion people who still don’t have it with small, relatively cheap satellites in geosynchronous orbit.

Astranis already has one broadband satellite in orbit, plans four more launches in 2024, and has raised north of $500 million.

“Our customers are looking for the lowest-cost internet that they can get,” says cofounder and CEO John Gedmark. “They’re providing internet to their customers who might only be paying four or five dollars a month for an internet connection on their cell phone.” This market could represent hundreds of billions of dollars for Astranis in the future.

Gaining internet can be as profound as gaining electricity. Education, healthcare, banking, economic development, and communication all radically transform, even at low bandwidths. In one 2020 study, yearly incomes jumped at least 15%. This sort of increase will likely grow in the future, as access to internet is synonymous with access to powerful LLMs.

What will the profits be for getting 3 billion more people online? At least $250B per year [3]. And the social benefits will likely dwarf that. Internet for 3 billion people represents better lives for more than a third of humanity.

An Anstranis satellite in the making

Manufacturing

With space-based manufacturing, we get more speculative, but some activity has already begun.

Space-based manufacturing promises to create materials such as exotic crystals, ultra-efficient fiber optic cables, and even purer semiconductors that cannot be duplicated on Earth. Cost is likely to be high, but so is the potential value of products for which there is no substitute. Challenges in drug optimization result in about 10% of drug failures. Novel drug formulations developed in low gravity could treat diseases more effectively and represent tens of billions of dollars in future drug revenue. Past experiments making semiconductors in space resulted in gallium-arsenide semiconductors 10,000x better than those made on Earth. Semiconductors of this purity could be used to make solar panels with triple the efficiency of panels today.

As a first step towards these goals, Rocket Lab and Varda Space Industries recently brought pharmaceutical crystals made autonomously in orbit back to Earth. It was the first commercial landing of a spacecraft from orbit on U.S. soil. Investors have put $145 million into the company so far, banking on the commercial success of the capsule and bus, which together are about the size of a van.

Space-Based Solar Power

Massive Solar arrays on NASA’s Psyche spacecraft

NASA’s recent report on space-based solar power (SBSP) says there are no technical showstoppers for orbiting, grid-scale solar panels beaming energy down to Earth as microwaves, unimpeded by clouds and the day-night cycle.

We asked Space entrepreneur, Chris Lewicki, co-chair of the space domain at the XPRIZE Foundation and a former Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer who worked on the Mars Spirit and Opportunity rovers about SBSP.

He says SBSP would be a game-changer for energy because it would be available anywhere, any time.

“Space-based solar power lets you do what packet-switched networks let you do in routers,” he explains. For example, “I can instantly take my gigawatt of energy and give 10% of it to Spain, 50% to Germany, and then the remainder could go to desalination plants in the Middle East.”

Thanks to steerable energy transmission from space, operators could also direct it to the scene of a natural disaster at a moment’s notice. “You can just drop a receiver wherever it's needed and instantly start giving that spot power,” Lewicki says.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) recently conducted the first in-space demo of space-based solar power generation, transmission, and receiving.

Multiple startup companies are capitalizing on the reduction in launch costs to create new business models. One, Reflect Orbital, is deploying large arrays of mirrors to focus sunlight on solar farms in the twilight or early morning hours. Based on technology that worked in the 1990s and decreasing launch costs from Starship, the founders have already demonstrated increased yields on solar panels in a test from a hot air balloon.

This sort of control of sunlight could be profound for the solar industry, potentially doubling its size. Doubling this value in 2028 would represent over $100B in energy value [4], and accelerate our fight against climate change.

Two Dyson Spheres

And some companies are setting their sights on even more ambitious energy harvesting. Empowered by Starship, K2 Space literally has a Dyson Sphere in its logo. With the

cheaper satellite busses they’re making and declining launch costs, we could be several decades away from vast solar arrays capturing more than a trillion dollars of renewable power from the sun each year and beaming it down.

Asteroid Mining

The Apple TV+ series For All Mankind dramatizes the potentially astronomical returns of mining asteroids for precious metals. In the real world, private companies have tried and failed to build the infrastructure needed to mine asteroids. But they may have been too early for a business with a decades-long time horizon.

A 2023 study coauthored by researchers at the Colorado School of Mines and the International Monetary Fund estimates that space mining could surpass terrestrial production of some metals by the 2060s.

The authors conclude that rising demand for the minerals needed for the clean energy transition, rapidly declining launch costs, and metal concentrations 1000x higher in some asteroids could drive space mining. At the same time, space mining would reduce the Earthly environmental and social costs of resource extraction.

However, they acknowledge the difficulty of predicting the actual costs and timelines for asteroid mining since the tech for extracting resources beyond Earth doesn’t yet exist. We’ll need to survey and prospect nearby asteroids to discover which resources might be profitable first.

The uncertainty doesn’t stop a new generation of asteroid mining startups like AstroForge and Trans Astronautica from going for it. If it works, it could spur clean energy forward by dropping prices for rare metals, and be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The exact market value, like terrestrial mining, depends on the makeup of specific deposits. But if an asteroid was discovered with significant gold deposits, it could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars on the Earth market.

High Impact

Surveying these categories we have:

Colonizing Mars. This represents an affordable $100B insurance policy for humanity, but not a practical benefit for today’s humans. We should buy it for its future benefits.

Telecomunications and imaging. This has already impacted millions of people. These technologies will be worth $200B+ and impact billions of people as Astranis and Starlink scale up.

Manufacturing. We’ve already run experiments demonstrating huge potential on the ISS, and companies like Varda could impact millions of people with a single new drug worth $1B+ in 5-10 years, and advanced semiconductors worth $10B+.

Space-based solar. Early proof of concepts could vastly expand the solar market, representing $100B+ of yearly energy value in several decades and benefitting billions of people.

Asteroid mining. Early startups building equipment and scanning asteroids could reach $10M+ or $100B+ in decades, depending on which metals happen to be on asteroids near us.

These are huge opportunities in wide-open markets, with impacts for millions of people today, and billions of people over the next two decades. This is a real impact on the majority of today’s humans.

To see how focused founders and investors are on these industries, we did an analysis of startups founded in the last 10 years in the space industry. Outside of launch, only roughly $1B has been invested per year into new companies. These are markets

 cumulatively worth hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 10 years, with huge positive benefits for humanity.

Compare the amount invested in these space startups to the amount invested in SaaS over the last 10 years.

Yearly startup investment in the above space industries ($300B+ market), and yearly investment in SaaS ($230B market)

We created the Progress Map to help great people find underinvested spaces that will be massively impactful. If you’re interested in building in space to benefit humanity, reach out! We’d love to chat.

Footnotes:

[0] See "What Do Americans Want Us to Do in Space?” https://web.archive.org/web/20231119052007/https://www.aei.org/articles/do-americans-care-about-space/ and “More Americans view monitoring climate or asteroids as top NASA priorities tan do so for sending astronauts to the Moon or Mars.” https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2018/06/06/majority-of-americans-believe-it-is-essential-that-the-u-s-remain-a-global-leader-in-space/ 

[1] Mars is the most obvious choice as planetary backup, but there’s also Saturn’s moon, Titan. Atmospheric pressure on Titan’s surface is about 1.5 times that of Earth’s, meaning colonists won’t need pressure suits and will be protected from solar and cosmic radiation. But given the distance—the international space probe Cassini-Huygen took seven years to get there—it’s unlikely anyone will get to Titan in the foreseeable future.

[2] The approach taken by LongShot might sound unlikely, but it was floated in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and similar approaches have been prototyped in the past.

[3] The poorest 3 billion people live on $2.50 a day, and 1.3 billion live on less than $1.25, so we took $1.50 as a conservative average. $1.5*365*3 billion = $ 1.64T. 15% of that is $246B.

[4] https://www.electricrate.com/data-center/electricity-prices-by-country/ and https://www.statista.com/outlook/io/energy/renewable-energy/solar-energy/worldwide These represent very rough estimates that don’t take into account transmission costs.