Original subtitles

(cheerful music)

- I am Torsten Hoffmann, an award-winning filmmaker,

entrepreneur, and techno-optimist.

You're gonna see it go over my shoulder.

I'm really into emerging technologies

and how a trillion dollar industries

are forming around them.

Right now the space sector is going ballistic.

(rocker roars)

And trust me, it's way bigger than Musk and Bezos.

(rocket zooming)

- There were headlines,

new era private industry is gonna lead the way.

(crowd cheers)

No, they're not.

- [Torsten] So allow me to whirl you around the world,

catapult you into orbit, and hurl you through space.

You ready?

- [Astronaut] Ten.

- [Torsten] This space renaissance

isn't just fueled by governments.

Hundreds of companies are competing for fame and fortune.

- SpaceX were the first private company

to put a satellite in orbit.

We were the second.

- [Astronaut] Nine.

- Oh, my god.

- My mommy's gonna be an astronaut.

- [Torsten] Meet the next generation of astronauts,

the new faces of new space.

So you're literally a rocket scientist.

- Yeah. (laughs)

- [Astronaut] Eight.

- A cube set can be as small as this.

- Launching into space for, say, $100,000 or $200,000.

- So, why is this guy spending 2 billion

on three huge satellites?

Okay, one question, are you crazy?

- No. (laughs)

- [Astronaut] Seven.

- [Torsten] New constellations are filling the skies.

- This is creating a trillion dollar market opportunity.

And the list is really endless.

- [Torsten] Tracking climate change

and tackling geopolitics.

- [Astronaut] Six.

- I think it will change the political calculus

going forward if everyone gets to know

that these things aren't gonna be possible to hide anymore.

- [Astronaut] Five.

- [Torsten] Dying satellites can now be saved.

- I deorbited dozens of spacecraft.

But we don't have to do that anymore.

- We don't have the right to make mistakes

because it would be fatal.

- [Torsten] But debris puts it all in danger.

- This is kind of scary to think about something like this

reentering and like maybe hitting a populated area.

- [Astronaut] Four.

- [Torsten] In our future, asteroid mining is a thing.

- The amount of platinum group metals out there

is in the trillions of dollars.

- [Astronaut] Three.

- Maybe someone is already building a space hotel

like the one I read about as a kid.

- This is happening.

We are building a space station.

- [Astronaut] Two.

- And we use the inedible part of the plants

to feed the insects

which create the substrate for the mushroom.

- My role and purpose is to help save the DNA of Earth

and spread light to the stars.

- [Astronaut] One.

- If the public does not see the value of this,

immediately I will work to ensure that they do.

- Roger that.

Let's meet those turning science fiction into science fact.

(upbeat music)

(bright music)

(elevator dings)

A little space history,

the first rockets were built in Hitler's Germany,

but let's not talk about Operation Paperclip here.

The Russians were leading the early space race.

Sputnik, the first object in orbit.

Scary.

Yay, gold medal.

Sputnik II had the first creature in space

like (indistinct) space dock.

Sadly, she gave her life.

Then Yuri, the first man in orbit, a hundred minutes.

Alexei did the first space walk.

And then Valentina, the first woman in space,

for three full days.

The Soviets sent this little sturdy guy,

hi, Sheldon, around the moon.

And he made it back safely.

- Ah, comrade.

- Seriously guys, the Russians were killing it.

But then, President JFK mobilized 400,000 Americans.

- But it will be done.

- And a lot of taxpayer money

and made the ultimate moonshot possible.

The Apollo board computers had less memory power

than Shelly's birthday card.

Yes, back then the future was bright.

We actually built nuclear reactors and supersonic jets.

And the airline PanAm

even took reservations for tickets to the moon.

No kidding.

Take five.

It's amazing to me that it took humanity only 12 years

from a small Russian ball of steel in low Earth orbit

to 12 Americans with, well, balls of steel

to walk on the moon.

12 years.

That's faster than getting a permit

for a new bridge in my town today.

But after the achievements of Apollo,

some say NASA lost its thrust.

Per kilogram of payload,

the space shuttle of the 1980s was 10 times more expensive

and less reliable than the rockets from the 1960s.

We are skipping ahead a few history chapters,

but eventually it was high time for competition

from the private sector.

Jeff Bezos was inspired by NFI legend, Robert Heinlein.

Maybe when he grows up,

he can build his own rockets and go to space.

Back in 2000, Bezos founded and fully funded Blue Origin.

And 21 years later, his dream finally came through.

Some critics say that the billionaire's Blue moves too slow.

Oh, hi, Shelly, buddy.

Is that you?

Well, if Bezos is the tortoise, then this guy is the hare.

♪ Elon Musk Musk Musk ♪

Love him or hate him,

SpaceX reached orbit in fast and furious fashion,

only six years after Elon Musk founded

and funded it in 2002.

Legends of science fiction like Isaac Asimov

were foundational to Elon Musk as a kid.

Maybe humanity could be saved on a galactic scale.

♪ Ironman is just a clown boy. ♪

Yep, the billionaires sure

are getting a lot of heat from the media.

♪ Tech unicorns ♪

♪ But why'd you flame the union ♪

♪ One man saving humanity ♪

♪ Come on that's just insanity ♪

- Cut it out guys.

This is a serious documentary.

We don't care about drama and all this gossip.

(glass tinkling) Oops.

Window broke again.

Sorry, Elon.

(fire blazes)

- Ouch.

♪ Tunnel support really regulates ♪

♪ (indistinct) till the energy storing out of space ♪

♪ Exploring flames and throwing drinks ♪

♪ (indistinct) poke and go smoking with Joe Rogan ♪

- Ah, stop it.

That's our TikTok video.

- Three, two, one.

- [Torsten] Seriously though,

the new space parents were early,

piling billions into this space 20 years ago.

Long before there was a market,

launch was dominated by the government and military.

Slowly, other private initiatives took off.

- My name is Anousheh Ansari

and I'm CEO of XPRIZE Foundation.

- [Torsten] In 2004,

Dr. Ansari funded the XPRIZE competition

to build a spaceship, fly three passengers

a hundred kilometers to the edge of space, and return.

Twice in two weeks without a dime of government support.

- 2016, from 11 countries competed,

a hundred million dollars was spent by the teams

to win the $10 million prize.

And most people thought it's impossible,

they called us crazy.

A lot of people told me that you're gonna get people killed.

What are you doing?

And to me, it just,

it was, you know, a risk worth taking

because it was about future of humanity.

- [Torsten] The winning team was financed

by billionaire, Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen,

and acquired by debonair billionaire, Sir Richard Branson,

who quickly christen it Virgin Galactic.

We'll get to space travel in a minute.

The point here is that competition leads to dropping costs.

Today there are hundreds of competing rocket companies

hoping to reach escape velocity,

but SpaceX towers over them all.

That one company controlled by a single singular man

hauls five times more payload

than all other countries and companies combined.

Ha, and now all eyes

are on Elon's even bigger fricking rocket, Starship.

(gentle music)

Meanwhile, NASA is back on the launch pad,

the new mega rocket, SLS, destined for the moon.

- [Announcer] And lift off of Artemis I.

- [Torsten] Uses leftover engines

from the space shuttle program.

But with each launch,

two of them are thrown away into the ocean.

Imagine discarding an airplane after each flight.

That's why this version of SLS

can only fly a total of eight times.

- [Reporter] And then so now we're seeing

some more of that video of the external tank.

- [Torsten] No wonder launch costs are 40 times higher

than what private rocket companies advertise

because the real key for lower cost is reusability.

Since first landing boosters in 2015,

SpaceX has done it hundreds of times

and offers the cheapest access to orbit.

(bright music)

- SpaceX we're the first private company

to put a satellite on orbit.

We were the second.

You know, we are often asked like,

who do we see as our competitors?

And really, it's only SpaceX if we're honest about it.

- [Torsten] Peter didn't go to university

and instead cut his teeth building jet packs

and bicycles with rocket propulsion.

He found a rocket lab in the most unlikely of places.

New Zealand.

His home country lacks robust venture capital,

and don't they have strong regulations there?

That's right.

Can you hear me guys?

- Yeah, I can hear you fine, Torsten.

- [Torsten] I do also hear sometimes

a little bit of criticism

about the fossil fuels that are being burned.

- We have more carbon emissions from the diesel generators

at the launch site than we actually do from the rocket.

But like I say, one launch for us

is the equivalent of going from LA to San Francisco.

And I don't know how many hundred flights

there are a week, but tremendous number.

- Rocket Lab has an impressive track record

and a stellar reputation but...

That's what you guys are doing even better

if a company like SpaceX

is pulling up 200,000 kilograms a quarter.

- Yeah, no, that's a fair question.

And, you know, the reality is, as I mentioned to you before,

like if you've got...

You have to get a satellite to a particular destination

for it to be commercial.

So, piling up, you know, a hundred tons of satellites

and dumping them all out of one spot

doesn't make a business.

It's kind of got all of the advantages and disadvantages

of riding a bus.

So, you know, you don't get your schedule certainty.

The bus arrives when it arrives

and it leaves when it leaves.

You might be sitting beside someone smelly,

but it's cheap.

- [Torsten] Right.

So you won't see Peter taking the bus anytime soon.

His company's like a white glove limousine service.

Personally, I am more of an Uber guy.

- We are kind of Uber in space,

just a little bit more complicated.

For example, when Falcon 9 delivers a bunch of satellites

to the target orbit,

Falcon 9 deploys all these satellites into space.

But this specific orbit might not be ideal

for the small side customer.

So we need to use our OTV to take all these satellites

to their custom destinations.

We've launched over 100 satellites with SpaceX

over the last couple of years,

but we are open to work with everyone.

And a lot of emerging players

will enter this field very soon,

and we can't wait to launch with all of them.

I'm in charge of the commercial success of the company

of like sales, bidding our contracts with our customers,

with our launch vehicle providers.

Yeah, surprisingly, we are a self-funded company

and we've been profitable from day one,

which is like a very unique case for the industry.

- [Torsten] This German company has deployed

more than 350 satellites

for over 60 international customers.

The wait time for Exolaunch's rideshare

lifting you to low Earth orbit, LEO,

can be as fast as four to six months.

But time is money.

So if you're in a hurry,

there's an express from Texas.

- I'd always been making engine sections,

I'd been building engines,

I'd been integrating vehicles,

but I'd never made fire.

And that was the next step for me,

was to be the mother of rockets to make fire.

- [Torsten] The US Space Force wanted to demonstrate

the capability of launching payload on short notice.

- I got a phone call and it said,

"You are launching to this orbit,"

which we had not known before.

"Go ahead and get ready."

In 24 hours, you have to launch a rocket

exactly in this three-minute window.

So it's actually more like a ten-second window,

24 hours out.

- Well when they pointed at us and said go,

we were able to get done in 24 hours

what previously had never been done faster than 21 days.

This company, Firefly, we did that.

- So there's nothing both more exciting and more terrifying

than when the rocket leaves the pad

and she's moving and you're not just testing,

she's actually lifting off.

(crowd cheering and applauding)

(gentle music)

- [Torsten] The most precious payload is people.

Someone beat the billionaires to space by 15 years.

- I grew up in Iran wanting to become an astronaut.

As a young girl, becoming an astronaut,

of course, was a big dream for me,

but my parents thought it's impossible.

I sort of hung on to that dream

and wanted to make it come true.

- Dr. Ansari trained as a Soyuz astronaut.

And for a few million dollars,

bought herself a ticket to ride.

She spent a full nine days aboard the ISS.

That's 140 times around the planet, fulfilling her dream.

These new companies and an influx of investment

created modern day space tourism.

You can follow it on a screen near you.

Even Captain Kirk was beamed up.

- What you have given me

is the most profound experience (indistinct).

- [Torsten] Whether you think billionaires

should ascend to the heavens or go to hell.

- Maybe Bezos shouldn't be allowed to return to Earth.

- [Torsten] Their fed wallets

have kicked open space trouble for more of us,

and some are really into it.

My friend Dylan, a space entrepreneur

and a leading figure in the new space economy,

was one of the first to go with Blue.

And he has an appetite for more.

- I'm a ticket holder on Virgin Galactic.

I think number 642 in line space perspectives,

which is the high altitude

stratospheric balloon and worldview.

(crowd cheering)

(rocket zooming)

(indistinct)

The first space investment I made was about 2007,

which was very early for this industry.

And my friends at the time in finance

were sort of snickering.

You know, you're investing in asteroid mining

and all these crazy ideas.

And, of course, those same friends now call me today

for investment, advice, and tips,

which I think is hilarious.

- I had an opportunity just coincidentally

to dive to the Mariana Trench, to the Challenger deep,

which is something I don't think you can say no to.

We actually went to a part of the Mariana Trench

that no humans had ever been to.

Wow, look at that.

And so it was like exploring another planet.

- [Torsten] Astronauts often describe

a profound moment of awe.

Frank White dubbed it the overview effect.

So that others can experience it,

Dylan founded the nonprofit Space for Humanity,

which aims to democratize access to space

by giving tickets to those

who could otherwise not afford it.

- [Dylan] So it was really founded around this idea

of getting citizens to space but for the benefit of Earth.

Everyone seems to be profoundly impacted by this experience.

I know I was.

I think you'd come back a changed human.

I think you'd come back a better human.

So how do you change people's perspective?

You get as many people as you can to space.

(upbeat music)

- [Torsten] I really wanted to talk to Space for Humanity's

first citizen astronauts.

So we crashed Dylan's birthday party

and set up shop in the corner office.

- I've dreamt of the moment when we get to tell someone

that they're gonna be our first citizen astronaut.

Right now is that moment, Katya,

and you're gonna be our citizen astronaut number one,

and you're going to space.

(Katya sobs)

- Congratulations.

- Oh, my god.

My mom is gonna to freak out.

My name is Katya Echazarreta.

I am an electrical engineer.

- [Torsten] So you're literally a rocket scientist?

- Yeah.

(camera shutter clicks)

I am a citizen astronaut with Space for Humanity.

And through that,

I also became the first Mexican-born woman in space.

Living through that and going through that experience

and being able to actually see our planet.

- I had what I guess you would call an epiphany.

- Oh my... - Hello.

The Earth is a whole system.

Everything's interconnected.

We're a part of it.

And I thought, "Okay, it's the overview effect."

We're all astronauts on spaceship Earth.

- Oh my god.

That image of the Earth,

it was just burned into my eyelids for days.

- You picked?

Good job.

- For me, I remember that I had just such big dreams.

And so with my salary at McDonald's,

with my mom cleaning houses,

with both of us walking dogs,

with me grading papers,

with me doing tutoring,

that's how we paid for a family.

This is really important

because for the first time in human history

we are seeing organizations take the lead

in this way, like Space for Humanity,

of sending very talented qualified individuals

to have this space experience

to come back empowered and do something to help the world.

- Oh, my god.

Can I show you? - Yeah.

- I am Sara Sabry.

I'm going to space.

I am the first Egyptian and the first African woman

and the first Arab woman to ever go to space.

(camera shutter clicks)

I have a background in mechanical engineering,

worked in aerodynamics on Formula 3 car body designs,

and then did my master's in biomedical engineering,

and then worked in stem cells for a while,

and then also on robotic surgery.

Thank you.

Now when I look at the sky,

it just feels very, very different.

It's not that big anymore.

Like, it's kind of weird to say that,

but it feels manageable.

It could really, really touches you.

It's not something that you just look at, you know?

(indistinct)

We're right here.

- [Speaker] So we pay for their tickets.

But in return, they've gotta come back to Earth

and do something, a fellowship benefiting Earth

linked to one of the UN's sustainable development goals.

- The more I got into this space field,

the more I realized how inaccessible it was

for people like me.

I don't have a US citizenship,

I don't have a European citizenship,

so I decided to do something about it

and founded a company called Deep Space Initiative.

We're a nonprofit.

And we're trying to change that.

We're trying to make space more accessible

by providing opportunities and education and research.

- My next goal is to create a foundation.

I'm currently working with the Mexican Space Agency

to draft up what this foundation

is going to eventually look like

to start supporting those individuals

that are interested in STEM

and interested in joining the space industry within Mexico.

- Hi, I am Sirisha Bandla.

I'm the vice president of government affairs

and research operations at Virgin Galactic.

Also, I'm Astronaut 004 at Virgin Galactic.

It was amazing.

When my name was announced on

as a part of the Unity 22 crew,

the amount of messages I got,

especially from young women in India

that just talked to me about being an inspiration.

And it wasn't necessarily, I've seen you go to space,

I'm gonna go to space now.

It was, "Hey, it's so great

to see someone from a community like mine

do incredible things."

- You're kind of a big deal in India nowadays.

No?

- My Instagram definitely says so.

- Oh, my god.

- You can't wait till we send up lawyers

and professional communicators and artists to space

'cause they'll go through that transformative experience.

- [Crew] Please return to your seats and strap in.

Approaching reentry.

- I cannot imagine anyone's gonna come back to Earth

the same as they were before.

It...

I came back to Earth energized.

Just completely energized.

- [Torsten] Just look at this new generation of astronauts.

They're already having an impact in India, Mexico, and Egypt

and they're just getting started.

- I'm Kellie Gerardi.

I'm a citizen scientist

and I'm flying to space on a dedicated research mission

with Virgin Galactic.

I'm gonna be conducting bioastronautics research.

I'm gonna be conducting healthcare experiments

and fluid experiments in space.

One of the most emotional parts of this journey

is seeing it through the eyes

of my four year old's daughter, Delta V.

- Guys, this is important.

My mom used to be an astronaut.

She could go space.

- Delta is growing up with this new framework.

She believes that going to space is just something moms do,

and I love that.

We need to have more accurate representation of humanity

be a part of that.

- One of our major goals here and our commitment

is to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility

in terms of our workforce.

So we put a lot of effort into making sure

that, you know, we are bringing in

diverse classes of interns.

- [Torsten] Katya was one of those interns.

And look at her now.

She's already being immortalized as a Barbie,

just like Neil Armstrong and the other Apollo superstars

were part of the cultural zeitgeist in their time.

- We know when we have a diverse workforce

that we are going to be more successful.

And so it's really exciting to know

that for the Artemis Mission,

the next humans going to the moon

will be the first woman and the first person of color.

- [Torsten] As we break through the galactic glass ceiling,

maybe diversity in space means more

than where you're from, your skin color, or your gender.

- So one of the realities that we face here on Earth

is that one out of every five individuals

on the planet right now has some kind

of measurable significant disability.

My name is Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen,

and I study astrobiology and disability studies

and how those two things intersect with one another.

We can't say, "Oh, we're cool with only 80%

of humanity combating global warming

or working on all the other problems that we have."

We need all of us.

We need our best people on every job, including space,

not just our best people who happen

to also not have a disability.

- If I was legally blind,

you wouldn't let me pilot this car.

But if I was, say, unable to speak,

you would still consider me capable of driving, right?

Now, in space,

this notion of what is and what isn't a disability

is about to get turned upside down.

- What these super qualified,

highly paid individuals have to do

with two hours of their day is exercise.

So if you have someone

who is not worried about losing muscle mass,

at least in their legs,

does that decrease the amount of time

that they need to exercise?

Do they need to exercise at all?

What is that accommodation that we need

to make a zero gravity environment accessible

to a disabled scientist

whose job is to go to space and get their work done?

In 2021 in October,

we chartered our first zero G parabolic flight

with the Zero G Corporation and we sent 12 disabled people.

We had some deaf folks, some blind folk.

And our mobility crew, which are our wheelchair users

and our folks with prosthetics.

(astronauts cheering)

Most fun anyone's ever had in their life

is to be in lunar gravity.

Not gonna lie, we should all go do it.

And we figured out some tasks

that we thought might be initial investigations

that we wanted to do.

What it revealed to us is that there's a lot

that we have to learn

and we know how to do it now.

- [Torsten] Dylan is one of the benefactors of AstroAccess

and many other space companies are supporting the cause.

- Boy, why space?

Well, because it benefits Earth.

And, oh, by the way, space is gonna happen

whether we want it or not.

And I'd rather shape that future

and make sure that humanity 2.0

is a better version of what we've been.

- [Torsten] These are the new faces of new space.

And they've got the right staff.

Okay, so reusability and other rocket technologies

are elevating the Earth to space sector.

But now the downstream space to Earth economy

is also seeing dramatic leaps in innovation.

This enables entirely new business models.

Satellites have been around for a very long time.

Actually not very far from here,

just after World War II,

a young scientist called Arthur C. Clarke first described,

oh, they could act like a very large cell tower.

Today we know him as a towering figure of science fiction

and his principle as geosynchronous orbit or geo for short.

- And if you think about it militarily,

it is the ultimate high ground, right?

If you have superior assets in space,

you really control the battlefield.

Maybe a bit of Hobbesian fear

about what the other person might be doing.

- [Torsten] That's why the first generation

of satellites was commandeered by men in uniform

to spy on adversaries.

Get this, decades before photography was digital

and ground stations could receive data,

actual film canisters had to be ejected from up high,

slowed down by mini thrusters

and then caught mid air by planes.

Crazy.

Anyway, spy satellites were soon joined

by communications and observation satellites.

They offered services for the public.

Weather forecasts typically brought to you by the government

and broadcast television usually provided

by private businesses.

All right, so this is Viasat mock take one.

So who are you?

- Hi, I'm Mark Dankberg..

I am one of the founders of Viasat

and I'm the CEO and chairman.

- So you've been around for a little

longer than two or three years, don't you?

- Yeah, 36 and a half years.

Since we started the company, yeah.

We had a really good technical understanding of satellite.

We did a lot of defense stuff.

We didn't have any money,

we started my house, and there were three of us.

- A startup story from the 1980s.

Today Viasat is a multi-billion dollar business

with over 6,000 employees.

They're all about very large communication assets and geo

that require very large investments.

But haven't we been told the polar opposite?

Satellites like these used to be the size of a mini bus.

It took nation states hundreds of millions of dollars

to launch and operate them.

Today a cube set can be as small as this.

- So that little box is called 1U.

- And everybody wants to have one, or a few thousand.

- A small fridge size,

another size of a microwave.

- In the size of a loaf of bread.

- The size of a pizza box.

- Maybe two shoe boxes.

- [Torsten] Sheldon, there you are.

Clearly, precision manufacturing

with the latest components

is one of the key drivers in this industry.

- So this is a star camera.

Solar rays fold flat.

There's a really interesting disruption

happening in the industry

where Moore's law was starting to arrive in space,

and the incumbent space industry at that time

hadn't quite noticed

this massive disruption that was coming.

- [Torsten] Today, Spire Global operates a constellation

of more than a hundred nanosatellites

that are specialized in radio frequency technology

and manufactured in Scotland,

a place for the history in electronics.

Though the physics challenges

for these devices are out of this world.

- Traveling at eight kilometers per second,

which means it goes around our planet every 90 minutes.

So you go into the hot side where your plus 100 Celsius

to the cold side, minus 40 Celsius.

You can imagine the engineering challenge that presents

between making sure your electronics will function

in all these temperatures,

making sure that thermal fatigue,

you know, expansion and contraction

every 90 minutes doesn't cause problems.

- Planet runs the largest constellation

of optical satellites.

Founded back in 2010,

they kept improving the hard and software.

- [Astronaut] Did you literally start in a garage

or is it just a marketing...

- No, it's not marketing rumor.

We started in a garage.

So since that,

literally had to sweep the leaves out in the morning.

It wasn't very clean room like.

- [Torsten] So, you build many iterations

and generations of these satellites.

So help me understand, roughly,

like, the performance increase that you managed to achieve.

- Roughly, over the period of,

from our first satellite to our latest satellite today,

we've had about a 10,000 fold increase in performance.

So that means in terms of the amount of imagery

produced per day, per dollar spent.

And a 10,000 increase is just...

It's crazy, right?

I mean, very rarely does that sort of thing happen.

Once somebody said,

"Oh, this is like Model P4.

It's the first mass manufactured satellite."

And I looked up,

and actually the Model P4

was about two to three times lower cost

than lowest cost cut at that time.

So, this is not two or three X lower cost.

This is hundreds if not thousands of times

lower cost for this same sort of capability.

That is closer to the revolution in IT

when it went from mainframe computers to desktop computers.

That's the kind of shift we're talking about,

and that's happening in space today.

- [Torsten] Shelly, how about a 2:00 PM booster?

- Satellites I've worked on in the past

have cost up to half a billion dollars.

So now with a CubeSat for example,

you could be launching into space

for, say, 100,000 or 200,000 dollars.

- The entire fleet of satellites we've ever launched

is much lower cost than a single typical satellite from NASA

or anyone else.

- [Torsten] That makes mega constellations.

- I hate using the word constellation

'cause that's our word.

Constellations don't move.

They're like there, and the ancients have seen them

and we have stories about them,

and they took that word to describe satellites.

Okay?

To describe too many satellites.

- Right.

As I was saying,

these low cost consumer electronic components

make mega constellations economically viable.

- The OneWeb project, Kiuper, Starlink,

there are definitely differences in them

that I won't get into right now.

But the idea is they're all trying to offer a service

that is similar to what we would've thought of

as satellite internet.

But it is different.

It's designed to work in places that are harder to reach

or that are in conflict or that are more mobile.

And so my parents are RVers, you know?

They drive around the country on one of those big rigs.

And without me ever mentioning Starlink

or any of these companies to them,

they were discussing with me the various reasons

why this service might be better than this service.

No one ever says that 60-year-old Americans

are the first adopters of a lot of things,

but we're seeing that, as well as these,

hopefully, these services be adopted in countries

where they are filling an even more critical gap.

- Like providing connectivity

that cannot be shot off even in war,

Starlink is getting a lot of attention

and is already generating a ton of cash.

But internet from space isn't new at all.

So, Mark, basically I'm coming here to this place.

The whole day is for this one question, okay?

People in this industry have been telling me

the costs to build a satellite

is a couple hundred thousand dollars that the size of this,

and you're building a $2 billion fleet of three satellites.

Are you crazy?

- No. (laughs)

When you're really close to the Earth,

your field of view is small.

What turned out is, the farther away you go from Earth,

the more of it you can see.

So now I'm accessible...

Instead of just to this small area underneath me,

I'm accessible to a very large market.

- [Galactic Gal] Hey this is Galactic Gal.

Let me take it over from here.

Compared to LEO, the geosynchronous orbit

is about 100 times farther from Earth,

and satellites there are all circling the planet

in the same direction.

Think of it as a fixed parking position.

Some very powerful satellites are here

because it's almost always sunny.

Viasat's rationale for geo

is also based on the technical ability

to focus its beam on areas where the demand is.

In fact, 95% of the world population

lives on only 10% of the land.

In other words, the majority of economic activity

happens on only 3% of our blue planet surface.

We can see human activity with a naked eye at night.

From geo, all these markets can be served

with very few satellites.

Meanwhile, in low Earth orbit,

the new space constellations are spending most of their time

over oceans and unpopulated areas

where there are no customers.

Moreover, they are in the shade half of the time

each round trip.

Their position in very low orbit

brings the benefits of much lower launch costs

and lower latency,

but this also means a much smaller field of view.

That's why so many are needed

to offer reliable communication services.

- [Torsten] But there are more use cases

than just internet connectivity.

This UK-based fund has deployed around $300 million

in over a hundred different companies.

- And our thesis at Seraphim

is that that is now creating a digital infrastructure

in the sky.

So this is about space looking down at planet Earth.

This digital infrastructure which is made up

of hundreds and thousands of satellites

are able to collect data,

a tsunami of data that they're collecting about our planet

in high resolution, low cost, and importantly,

real time or close to real time.

And we believe that this digital infrastructure

is a bit like the creation of a new internet.

This is creating a trillion dollar market opportunity.

- In other words,

different constellations for different markets.

There's optical radar, infrared,

so many different technologies

serving different customer needs.

In a dark forest,

MindPoint's Sven has identified a market opportunity.

He's building a business based on all this new data.

And how can you help me not have train delays?

- That's a great question.

So what we do is we analyze satellite data

and identify precisely where trees

are sending too close to railway tracks

and where they could fall potentially on them.

The trees is one of the biggest reasons

why trains are being delayed.

We can identify where the trees are,

how tall they are, whether they are sick.

What we do is we take two satellite images

which are taken from slightly different angles.

And from these two satellite images,

we calculate the height of the tree.

It works very similar to your human eyes

so your eyes can calculate depth.

- Ha, 3D glasses for satellites.

Brilliant.

LiveEO has raised one of the largest

space investment rounds in Europe.

They already protect millions of miles of railway tracks

and electrical grids globally.

With their help,

I'll make it to my next destination on time.

A former American spy station in Berlin, Teufelsberg.

Locations like this remind us that governments

have been spying on other governments,

and sometimes their own citizens, for a very long time.

But finally space data can empower us

to look back at government activities

with a virtual time machine.

- I think our data in general can be very empowering

for journalists around the world.

It's a tool that enables them to see what's going on.

It was a great case where some journalists from Buzzfeed

had used our data to discover Uyghur detention camps.

- Megh is an investigative journalist

who was based in China for many years

until somehow her visa wasn't extended.

Thanks, Luke.

Thanks for catching that.

Satellite data helped her and two collaborators

to get to the truth on the ground,

and they want a Pulitzer for it.

- So basically the process started

actually with Baidu Maps

where we noticed that the government

was essentially putting grayed out tiles

over a number of locations in Xinjiang.

- [Torsten] Low resolution images that looked like this.

Megh and her team suspected

that the Chinese government was censoring Baidu Maps

to hide prison camps holding Uyghurs

and other Muslim minorities.

Ultimately, they used high resolution images from planet

to identify several hundred new prison

and detainment centers.

- We won the Pulitzer Prize in 2021.

We were really grateful for that award

because it brought a lot more attention

to the work than I think it would've otherwise gotten.

- It's mind boggling to me how this panopticon

could have changed world history.

Think about the Cuban missile crisis

or the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

- Again, it comes to accountability.

I think it will change the political calculus going forward

if everyone gets to know

that these things aren't gonna be possible to hide anymore.

(camera shutter clicks)

- So let's imagine a world where traffic jams, oil spills,

troop movements, bouncy castles, everything can be seen

and verified by everyone almost in real time.

Journalists, the open source

intelligence community on Reddit,

the good guys, the bad guys, me and you.

- But yes, we work with militaries.

And I wanna say this about this,

we do that on purpose, in good faith,

because we believe that it will enhance peace and security

with one important caveat.

We will never do it exclusively.

We will not give this image to this client

with saying, "I will never give this to anyone else."

If the New York Times also wants access to that image,

they can also get access to that image.

If the UN and this NGO wants access to that image,

they can also get access to that image.

- But can't the bad guys hide in the dark?

Well, turns out there's a set for that.

- [Tero] Real-time SAR.

- [Torsten] Which is a form of radar.

- That is something that can be looked through the clouds,

through the darkness, through rain, through snowfall.

You don't need the optical light

in the Arctic areas where you have the darkness,

I mean, half of the year.

Or if you go to an area like the Amazon

where there's a lot of rain all the time,

it doesn't matter when you have a radar constellation.

But also many other layers of data,

including geographical data,

stuff like meteorological reports and things like that

where we help the insurance companies

to predict a flood development

or we support the Finnish icebreakers

in the Bay of Bothnian area.

We take images, how the ice develops, you name it.

A lot of different types of use cases.

- So optical satellites look at the outside of the building,

infrared gives you an inference on what's going on inside.

So it sort of opens the box.

It's a new category of Earth observation data.

If you're a housing association,

then you would be interested in this data

to make sure that your portfolio is getting to net zero.

- [Torsten] The tech is maturing.

It can defeat darkness,

peak through clouds or locate leaky windows.

And there's even a Canadian company

that can detect cow farts from space.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas.

Eat your veggies.

- We have a huge vision going forward

to enable this transition

to a sustainable economy and a secure world.

- [Torsten] Climate tech, a trillion dollar opportunity

for Earth observation companies.

- We have fantastic investors at...

- One of planet's latest investors is BlackRock,

the world's largest asset firm.

- Oh, they're trying to demand all their companies

to track their ESG.

And the E in ESG is environment.

- Yeah, and what's good for the planet

is good for planet, right?

- Well, that's also true.

- I mean, I remember that first Earth Day

and, you know, that view from space

back looking at our planet

that you know kind of became the beginning

of the environmental movement.

That we are just one part of the greater universe.

And how do we make sure that we survive?

There were a lot of things that came up.

A new awareness, a new consciousness

- Now, to live long and prosper,

humans and vulcans need a planet.

Climate science relies heavily on satellite data.

Using AI, we can now zero in identify and analyze

billions of individual trees.

- So space diplomacy and space information is critical.

Climate change is a global problem.

We can't solve it without global data.

Without that big picture view

of what's happening on our planet.

And making sure that every country

is meeting their pledges.

And that globally, we're able to meet our targets

for keeping within 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

- Actually, over half of our users,

half of the users are scientific communities worldwide.

And they have published over the last few years

more than 2,000 papers.

Research papers, thesis and also white papers.

- Legal fishing, another great example.

We are plundering the oceans now.

There are many bad actors in the ocean,

and the only way we can tell

how much they're impacting the ocean

is by following their tracks in space.

- So one of our portfolio companies, HawkEye 360,

they are the largest constellation of radio frequency

signal intelligence satellites.

So that means that they're able to monitor signals

from walkie talkies or mobile phones.

- [Torsten] When a boat switches off their beacon,

Spire Global notices it and notifies Hawk I 360.

Their small sats can detect

and document the dark vessel's activities.

- And they're able to then use that information

to hold the owners of that boat to account.

- [Torsten] Yeah.

- So this can ultimately eradicate things

like illegal fishing,

but it can also work on other areas

- [Torsten] Like drug or human trafficking.

Next stop, Ecuador, where they make heavenly coffee

and where agriculture is critical to the economy.

- Size of our pineapple farm is 230 acres

And we produce seven

to eight shipping containers every week.

About 70% of it is exported overseas,

30% is for domestic sales.

- I had asked an Irish company, Origin Digital,

to do a thorough biomass analysis of Emilio's Fields.

This is what I'm showing him here.

- So one of the many challenges that farmers have

is to be able to keep an eye on the crops

and how the crops are developing seamlessly.

So they have to walk miles and miles

to be able to find that out.

And that too, they do not have bird's eye view

of the entire thing.

- [Torsten] Madhumita says

that their sophisticated analytics

can help Emilio to understand

where a pest might be spreading,

where he should use more or less fertilizers,

or adjust irrigation where the moisture levels aren't right.

This is a potential game changer.

- If the farmers are using

our optimal technology and software,

yield can increase to around 11 and a half times

per hectare, which is like straight away 38% increase.

That is phenomenal.

- This would be a useful tool as we would save money

and a lot of factors like analysis and laboratories.

We technicians could manage everything here on the ground,

and that would be invaluable.

- We are the top quality producers

of food-based products in Ecuador such as pulps, jams,

toppings that are used in the food industry.

We have clients in the dairy,

in the ice cream industries.

(upbeat music)

In the food industry, we use not high tech technology

but we should start moving over there.

Resources are very limited,

Water, soil, and the population keeps growing,

so therefore we need to look for better

and higher technology to introduce to our sector.

- [Torsten] Okay, drones make me kind of nervous,

I'm out of here.

EO Constellations, the hardware,

and machine learning, the software,

make monitoring millions of farms possible on a daily basis.

- So defense and climate are connected.

As the climate changes, there will be droughts, wildfires,

and other natural disasters

which might lead to migration of people,

which is obviously a security issue.

- No matter where I go in this industry,

national security is always close by.

How about the CIA, venture capital fund,

the involvement there?

- They don't like to be called the CIA fund.

One of our investors is In-Q-Tel

that represents the US defense intelligence community.

So they allow us to sell our data

and open doors to those agencies

that are interested in intelligence as a whole.

- I hear echoes of my meeting

with the co-inventor of the internet.

It was also funded by the Pentagon.

That's the thing, defense isn't a dirty word in space.

Satellites protect ecosystems

but also connect weapon systems.

Developed by the Department of Defense

and still operated by the US Space Force,

GPS is the one space service that everyone uses daily.

And now startups see an opportunity

in the satellite navigation market.

This one, funded by Lockheed Martin and Toyota,

wants to enhance the accuracy of GPS to a few centimeters.

Aren't you competing with like the biggest

and most powerful governments in the world?

China, Russia, the US and the European.

They all have their own GPS.

- So we're not competing with (indistinct) actually.

What we're doing is that we are augmenting GPS.

So autonomous vehicles, they need to know precisely

where they are on the road,

what they are on the road,

and where within that lane they are.

- All these satellites need to place

to beam back the data.

Contact is a South Korean company

that operates a global network

of ground stations like these.

Clients include Viasat and ISI,

allowing them to focus on things

other than building dishes in remote places.

So how many constellation pitch decks

have you seen and watched

and how many are there being built right now?

- We get to see around a hundred a month,

and we have consistently since 2016.

So that's thousands of businesses around the world

that are looking to develop technology solutions

to address this market.

- It doesn't take a genius to predict

that the number of satellites is going to take off.

(indistinct) Arthur C. Clarke

wrote about accumulating space junk back in the 1970s.

You probably remember this from my previous documentary.

Before mass production and standardization,

cars used to be just toys for rich people, really.

Well, at one point, satellites used to be the size of cars

and were so complex and expensive

that only a handful of countries could afford them.

Well, those costs are now plunging.

So just like on our roads

where space is congested and contested,

LEO is getting so crowded, we may need to check for traffic.

- We don't put satellites in random places.

We put 'em on very specific orbital highways.

Just like regular highways

have a finite capacity for space traffic,

each of these orbital highways

has a carrying capacity as well

for safety and sustainability.

- It's really quite shocking when you think about it.

We are racing into this domain

and we don't actually know what it's carrying capacity is.

- With low Earth orbit,

you have satellites that are crossing in space

at 15,000 miles an hour.

The speed at which things happen

and the consequences of a collision are enormously worse.

Nobody cleans up after you in space.

- Let's go back in time

when plastic was invented

and became a significant commodity

in the packaging of goods.

- [Torsten] Everywhere.

- Nobody's thinking, one day we're gonna have

to get this plastic out of the ocean.

We were just throwing away plastic.

- Compared to plastic in the ocean, though,

space junk is a lot faster and more lethal.

You see, at this speed, it will take me an hour

to cross the city.

Satellites do it in a second.

- [Galactic Gal] Everything in orbit is traveling

at the same speed of around 25,000 kilometers an hour.

That's more than four miles per second.

Anything faster would reach escape velocity,

and maybe the moon.

Anything slower would be pulled back by Earth's gravity.

This constant high speed

is the reason why even small objects are lethal.

- Yeah, so even a piece of debris

the size of a Tempe coin

can cause catastrophic damage to a satellite.

- [Galactic Gal] These two satellites

cross paths every 90 minutes,

tens of thousands of times during their operational life.

Even if these two never collide,

there are thousands of other to worry about.

- [Torsten] Astroscale has been on my radar for a while.

This Japanese company

wants to mitigate cascading collisions in orbit.

- We're not gonna pick up all those small pieces.

What we need to do is stop the big pieces

from coming to small pieces.

'Cause even the small pieces are a significant risk,

and that could destroy a satellite

or destroy a space station.

- What we're seeing here, this is kind of scary

to think about something like this

reentering and like maybe hitting a populated area.

We see more and more of these big rocket bodies

that are reentering.

- [Galactic Gal] Objects in low Earth orbit

naturally fall back down after about 20 years

due to small atmospheric drag.

But space stations,

geo satellites or debris in higher orbits

will be in space for a much longer time.

- [Torsten] Some generals don't seem to understand

the gravity of the situation.

In order to show off the fire prowess and accuracy,

they've created even more debris on purpose.

- Space junk from a Russian anti-satellite weapons test

is threatening seven astronauts

aboard the International Space Station.

- In the middle of that test in an immediate aftermath,

we knew that there was a debris cloud

in the vicinity of the International Space Station,

but the data doesn't come in that fast.

And so trying to understand

the immediate danger to the astronauts

was not easy to do.

- [Torsten] And the irony is,

I think there were Russian astronauts at-

- Two of the seven.

Yeah, absolutely.

And of course there's sort of the plausible deniability.

"Oh, they were never in risk."

And the reality is, we didn't know.

- The test has so far generated

over 1,500 pieces of trackable orbital debris

and hundreds of thousands of pieces

of smaller orbital debris

that now threaten the interests of all nations.

- [Torsten] I know that also the US

has done similar tests in the '50s and '60s.

- Sure.

You know, honestly,

the last test that we did, really, was in 1985.

We shot a satellite, and then we said,

"We don't think we're going to do that anymore."

- [Torsten] That all doesn't matter

if China or Russia doesn't comply with any

of what you guys are talking about here today, right?

- So what the Chinese choose to do,

what the Russians do today, that that's on them, all right?

We know that they did the Russian ASAT test, right?

That was completely, completely inappropriate.

- [Torsten] Experts estimate that there are more than

a hundred million pieces that are way too small to detect.

Plus, even for the medium sized objects, we have a problem

because we don't know how they tumble and spin.

- Things move a certain way

mostly due to gravity or curvature of space-time.

But then also, there's everything else

about how the sun is exerting forces

and pressures on objects.

And we are hindered in our ability to predict

where these things are gonna be at some point in the future.

- [Torsten] Okay, to recap,

this garbage grows exponentially and travels fast.

Deliberate or accidental crashes

can cause cascading effects.

And to make things even worse,

we don't even know where most of it is in time and space.

No matter how much I squint,

I get the remote sense that solutions need to start

with better data.

Some already work on improving situational awareness.

- So at Privateer, it's a platform company

co-founded by myself, Steve Wozniak, and Alex Fielding.

Just like an iPhone is a platform that has apps,

we would love to have people from across humanity

exposed to the data and information

in Privateer's platform.

- [Torsten] Another company, LeoLabs,

is already generating

a billion conjunction alerts per month.

But even with perfect vision,

you still have to maneuver to safety when necessary.

Eutelsat is one of the most important companies

in this field.

We got exclusive access to this mission control center.

With a recent acquisition of OneWeb,

this 40-year-old European company is taking on Starlink.

Eutelsat wants to bridge the digital divide

from multiple orbits.

- So if there is a problem on the satellite,

this ground control system will automatically detect

that there has been a violation of the threshold

and we trigger an alarm.

We are performing manual collision avoidance,

but it's most likely with other satellites

that are uncontrolled in the stationary orbit.

- [Torsten] You said earlier you need to react fast.

Are we 20 hours?

Are we talking seconds?

- No, no, we are talking in real time,

which means immediately.

Immediately.

It's less than every second.

- So you can imagine the resources

that you need to pull through

to have the right people here 24/7,

making sure that they are able to react.

It costs money.

- We don't have the right to make mistakes

because it could be fatal.

- But there's good news.

For starters, bureaucrats and lawyers,

yes, you heard right,

are starting to lay the groundwork.

- Hi, my name is Niklas Hedman,

and I'm now acting director

of the Office for Outer Space Affairs of the United Nations.

If you create space debris,

you can be hit by it yourself.

You see, if you want a long-term investment

to really benefit your company,

then you have to act responsibly.

- 25 years ago, there was no...

It was just NASA, it was just ESA, it was just JAXA,

the few countries that were launching.

Now you'll have a satellite that's built in country A,

it's launched in country B,

it's being insured in country C,

it's getting a license from country D

and it's being managed by country E.

Just the basics of what is up there, it's multinational.

- Space sustainability is fundamental.

We can't get all the amazing benefits of space,

and they are truly amazing.

If space is so congested,

then it's too to be up there, right?

So there's nothing more important to the world

than making sure that space is sustainable to reform now

and for future generations.

So we've put that right at the top

of the priority list for the UK.

- For instance, in 2019, this intergovernmental body

adopted the long-term sustainability guidelines.

It took 10 years to negotiate that instrument.

21 guidelines.

- The Vienna spirit is the idea

that even though things may be tensed

outside the negotiating room,

that you come together and that you compromise

and you do it for the good of the goal,

which is either nuclear safeguards

or the peaceful use of outer space.

- [Torsten] But new space companies like to move fast

and you guys are pretty slow at getting anything done.

No?

- We are slow.

However, there is no other consensus platform

that deals with these issues in the world.

- [Torsten] Meanwhile, the first fuel stations

on the orbital highways already planned and funded.

- So a very large percentage of satellites, well over 50%,

they reached the end of their life

because they ran out of fuel.

Not because their hardware is obsolete

or, you know, something else happened to them.

It's because they simply just ran out of fuel.

- [Torsten] No one would ever leave their car stranded

if it ran out of fuel.

So extending the life of these spacecraft

sounds like a no brainer to me.

There are already test missions

on the way to power up some probes.

- Cars, airplanes, washing machines,

everything is serviced after it gets sold.

Satellites aren't.

Satellites are launched,

and there's no intention to service them.

Once they launch, they're gone.

You're not going to see them again.

That's going to change.

- We are launching our first fuel demonstration mission

to prove out the refueling port

and to prove out the fuel transfer

so that we can start refueling our customers.

- So the way you've been selling me this is,

you are solving one of the biggest issues

in the space industry,

but what you actually have at the moment

is just a 500 gram little widget.

Isn't it a little bit too much hype?

- No, not at all.

So we have been baselined already in 2022

on four Department of Defense satellites,

and then 91 commercial satellites as well.

So there's already a huge demand for it.

- [Torsten] That's some real customer traction

for this startup right there.

- So today, absolutely zero satellites

that are in geosynchronous orbit have refueling capability.

- [Torsten] But not everyone is convinced.

- In fact, in any orbit,

no satellites have refueling capability.

- [Torsten] Space logistics is an ambitious entity

inside a mega corporation of 90,000 employees.

Welcome to what some call

the military industrial complex, old space.

- Yeah, so Northrop Grumman has quite a long history

in aerospace industry,

especially in space actually providing

some of the key elements landed men on the moon.

- [Announcer] The Eagle has landed.

- Back in the 1960s,

I deorbited dozens of spacecraft,

and I always felt like such a grave digger

every time I was pushing

one of those perfectly good satellites out to service

simply because it ran out of fuel.

But we don't have to do that anymore

with the MEV-1 and MEV-2

that can extend the life of those satellites.

- [Torsten] The big idea, instead of refueling,

why not simply attach as a jet pack

and take over control?

You just mentioned geo,

and I thought all the actions in LEO.

- Yeah, well, geo is where the money is.

And so it's very exciting after 19 years

to be sitting in this control center,

seeing that Intelsat 901 coming up very close on the screen,

full size, being right there in front of us,

knowing that we're now docking to that satellite

and extending the life.

Something we never dreamed of 20 years ago

when we first launched it.

- [Torsten] Is it possible to do this with any satellite?

- So those two key interfacing features,

the liquid apogee engine and the launch adapter ring,

are present on approximately 80%

of all satellites in geosynchronous orbit.

And it should be compatible with nearly all of those.

- [Torsten] Life extension services for satellites

are an important part of space sustainability.

Removing pieces of debris safely

is another even bigger challenge

that needs to be confronted head on.

- Our tagline is the space sweepers, right?

So we like to kind of think about, you know,

in the same way if your car breaks down on the roadside,

you know, you call up the car breakdown service

and they'll come and take it off the highway.

We are looking at doing the same thing with satellites.

- Astroscale's plan is to maneuver

close to defunct satellites and grab them.

With almost $400 million of venture capital,

they might actually be able to pull it off.

If you think about it,

this is the ultimate tragedy of the commons.

Sure, there's exciting technology on the horizon,

but let's be honest.

At the moment,

there are no binding international rules in place

and no punishment for polluters.

We can't even keep the rubbish off of our street

or recycle our consumer electronic devices.

But when small sats

get cheaper and cheaper to make and deploy,

they are also cheaper to replace.

If reuse, reduce, recycle is more expensive

than litter and relaunch,

then are we becoming a space fairing throwaway society?

Probably better to be responsible stewards of near Earth.

- I'd like to think that in 10, 20 years,

we look back and we say,

"Glad we did it just in the nick of time."

(spirited music)

- So I work at NASA Johnson Space Center

and we are what is called the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility.

I am currently the deputy program manager

for the Commercial LEO Development Program here at NASA.

- [Torsten] NASA's grants are the rocket fuel

for the privatization of space.

After the retirement of the ISS,

there will be benefits to becoming a user

rather than an owner of a space station.

- It dries down costs for NASA so we can take those funds

and apply it to exploration.

The exploration of the moon and exploration of Mars,

which is really our main goal.

400 million over the next several years,

that is NASA's investment

in development of these commercial space stations.

And beyond that, we will be procuring services

from these commercial space stations

at the tune of about one and a half billion dollars.

- Three stations are in the running.

We've already met Blue Origin.

They're also designing a mixed use business park

called Orbital Reef for a crew of 10.

Axiom is one of those companies building such a station.

They hired this guy to make it commercially viable.

I'm, sorry, you have a fly.

Yeah, it's...

Got it.

- Very nice.

- [Torsten] One shot.

We don't fool around here.

- I'm not a rocket scientist and I'm not a billionaire yet.

I got my start in technology, software technology.

I was a startup founder for 10 years,

three different companies, web and mobile apps.

And then I was working at Google for many years.

And Axiom Space was my first angel investment.

So in a few years, you'll see our first module dock.

It's a habitat.

Few months after that, the second module will dock.

Also a habitat.

Then our lab, our Earth observatory,

and then our power tower.

(spirited music)

- We're building the replacement

to the International Space Station called Star Lab.

And that really validated, I think, our model,

which is to acquire great companies,

invest in technologies, and demonstrate our ability

to build infrastructure and space.

- [Torsten] The European Space Agency and Airbus,

the world's largest manufacturer of airplanes,

have joined as partners.

Airbus is also a defense and space prime contractor.

Starlab will be half the size of the ISS,

but will fit nicely into a single Starship rocket.

Northrop Grumman will also provide cargo supply.

NASA might have provided the initial funding,

but surely won't be the only customer

on these private space stations.

The market is expanding.

- So I think there's now 60 plus

space agencies in the world.

Pretty much every major country has one.

And they're starting to be well funded and well supported.

And yeah, it's a renaissance for those space agencies.

But we're still scoping out our designs.

I think we'll be,

you know, in the single billions, certainly.

It's hard for me to say for sure,

but it's gonna be several orders of magnitude less expensive

than the International Space Station.

- [Torsten] Still, financing these projects

will be a massive lift.

Axiom's latest investment round transcended borders

and included capital from a Saudi bank

and a South Korean healthcare company.

- Axiom will be a trillion dollar company.

How?

I'll tell you the same answer I gave my board

three weeks into my job.

I don't know, but I'm certain we're gonna figure it out.

- Clearly, there's a gold rush happening right now.

Maybe someone is already building a space hotel

like the one I read about as a kid.

(gentle music)

- Well, we signed a partnership with Hilton.

And as you reimagine human habitation in space,

why not go to a habitation expert?

So that's one strength that Hilton brings to the table.

- [Torsten] I don't know how many stars this hotel will have

in the Hitchhiker's guide,

but I'll take the penthouses with the views please.

- Second strength is they're spending a lot of money

researching things like anti-microbial technology.

- [Torsten] Finally, some peace and quiet, a real getaway.

In the space elevator,

I imagine how my stay would be like.

For once, I'll hit the gym before sunrise,

and finally, will improve my bench press.

Here, I'll even weigh less.

- And it's also a brand that everyone knows.

And I think it lends credibility

to the fact that this is happening.

- [Torsten] I'll have my Ecuadorian coffee

just over the equator

and eat my yogurt while spying on the Great Wall of China.

Oh, it's full of stars.

- Well, it's gonna be expensive,

I hate to break it to you, Torsten.

It's not gonna be...

It's not gonna be cheap.

- It's definitely going here.

When you're hungry,

there is no bigger food desert than space.

A place where you cannot waste anything.

So how can humans live here sustainably?

Paris-based, Interstellar Lab,

won the NASA Deep Space Food Challenge

for their modular system Nucleus.

Just add water.

- So we are using actually the CO2

that is produced by mushroom to feed the plants.

The plants are producing oxygen that goes into the insects

and the mushroom box.

And we use that inedible part of the plants

to feed the insects,

which create the substrate for the mushroom.

So it's kind of a small ecosystem

just divided in different box

but trying to close the loop.

- [Torsten] It turns out

that you need about 55 square meters

to sustain one human for one year with food and oxygen.

Welcome to Barbara's (indistinct).

Personally, I'm still undecided

about drinking recycled urine and eating crickets.

A bit hard to swallow, but I'm certainly a big fan

of building a space business

by first selling to terrestrial clients.

- What we're doing now

is we're working with very big natural ingredients company,

cosmetic company, food companies as well.

And we're growing rare species or endangered species

or species that traditionally are not growing,

you know, where you live inside the bubble.

And so we are helping actually the food industry

and natural ingredient industry

growing plants in a more sustainable way

because we use less water,

because we scrub CO2,

because it's a sealed bubble

and it was designed

with this space constrained engineering approach

where you need to minimize the input

and maximize the output.

- There was a technique that was developed

for freeze drying food,

which is actually the same technique we use now

for food onboard the ISS.

But it's a technique that we use on Earth too.

So that is a direct spinoff from,

you know, having to solve that problem

for the Apollo astronaut.

- [Torsten] It's doubtful that the Cold War taxpayers

beating the Soviets to the moon

ever thought that their grandkids would use space race tech

to feed their families today.

- The International Space Station

is a beacon of international collaboration.

And we have many nations, you know,

who send their astronauts.

They eat together, they work together.

We have many nations who send their experiments.

School children send experiments

to the International Space Station

for astronauts to conduct research for them.

And this spans the globe.

- [Torsten] To fact check this,

I went down under to Australia

- And the high school sends us a team of their students,

about six students,

and those students work with our university students

who are mentors to them.

They have to research what they think

would be an important microgravity related experiment.

And they research that,

they design their own experiment, they test it here,

and then they fly it to the International Space Station.

- Last year, they decided to send yogurt to space

because probiotics are incredibly important for your gut.

Gut health in space is incredibly important

and not well understood yet.

So they hit several nails on the head with their idea.

- So I think we were just putting milk samples

in an incubator,

and then milk with yogurt and milk with probiotics.

And we were seeing like the bacterial strains

that would like develop over time with different dilutions.

So from one tenth to one billionth?

- Yeah. - Yeah, I think so.

So we're gonna open up some of the vials

that have actually been to space

and we're gonna see like the bacterial strains there.

- [Torsten] My high school didn't catapult students

into a career in science quite like this.

- We actually just signed six agreements

with Latin American countries.

Everything from Mexico to Columbia, even Costa Rica.

So you have all these emerging countries

that wanna have a space agency.

They want to have national identity around space.

They see it as a way to inspire students in STEM education.

- [Torsten] But how does this relate

to entirely new industries emerging?

- We can't say exactly,

well, what's gonna be the next billion dollar industry?

Actually I can.

It's gonna be pharmaceuticals in space.

- [Torsten] Pharma giant, Merck,

known as MSD outside North America,

was founded at the end of the 19th century.

Merck has been able to develop

more pure formulations on orbit.

- Well, microgravity, the particles remain suspended,

and therefore can grow more perfect in all three dimensions.

- [Torsten] Which could help improve cancer treatments.

- I think that these companies miss the opportunities

in research and development.

Particle engineering, stem cell growth.

There's organs grown in space.

- Sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi novel.

But why make anything in space in the first place

if the rockets are getting elongated

and the shipping costs are falling?

Well, here's an example.

The European Space Agency needs very powerful antenna,

and those need to be way longer

than even the biggest pod bay doors are wide.

In the past, complicated folding mechanisms were needed.

A little like an umbrella.

- Your spacecraft is sitting nicely, so to speak,

in a microgravity environment.

So it doesn't need to be as strong

as what you would build on Earth.

So your structures can be lighter.

- What if we could make materials up in space

that would be impossible to produce back here on Earth?

- For example, optical fibers with less defects

than what you would get on Earth.

Semiconductor materials with less defects,

metallic alloys, even superalloys,

the kind of alloys we use in airplane engines, ceramics.

- [Speaker] People say,

"Well, there's not gonna be enough demand

to meet the launch capacity."

And I reject that.

I think capacity creates demand.

- Build it and they will come.

- Yes.

But in this case, it really is true, Torsten,

because the limiting factor has been

essentially getting projects through the NASA system,

astronaut time, and space manufacturing,

biopharma research, ag tech,

these are all leading edge research projects and programs

that just need habitat.

They need more space.

- [Torsten] Before central bankers could just print money

out of thin air,

whoever controlled the gold mines would rule the lands.

History is full of stories

about explorers extending frontiers

and extracting wealth from new continents.

So perhaps it's time to revisit a far out idea.

Recently, NASA and Japan's JAXA

have demonstrated the ability

to navigate to and land on asteroids.

Today I'm traveling light.

My little bird is taking me

to a Californian company hunting for treasure.

- The amount of platinum group metals out there

is in the trillions of dollars.

And that's just for a couple of asteroids, right?

And we have millions of asteroids out there.

So this is a lab prototype

of what we aim to build for space.

The vapors are ionized,

so they're positively charged and they get accelerated.

So AstroForge is building a vehicle that's gonna go out

and extract material from asteroids,

refine the material,

and bring that refined material back to Earth.

If this is successful, platinum will be as common

as aluminum or iron or nickel.

It would be a very common metal, right?

- How certain are you that this survives launch

and the vibration, the speed and the radiation?

To be clear, AstroForge is currently ridesharing

a small experimental payload

with our friends from Exolaunch.

These first tests are to demonstrate

that refining platinum and microgravity could work.

Two year long robotic roundtrip missions

are in the business plan by the end of the decade.

- When we were doing Y Combinator,

we had a myriad of investors wanting to invest

and throw money at the company.

- [Torsten] See, nothing is truly scarce in this universe,

but you disapprove of galactic gold diggers?

Personally I find parachuting

in platinum from outer space pretty cyberpunk

and much more palatable than obtaining it from rogue nations

or by children slaving in underground mines.

Yep.

Yet again, we're touching on geopolitical matters.

Some of these companies are now so huge

and the billionaire founders behind them are so rich.

Do governments still matter

or is it all about commercial space?

- I mean, as a government employee,

I definitely have to say the governments are still

very much involved in kind of all aspects of this.

And an interesting aspect of the outer space treaty,

which is really the foundational document

for international space law,

is that it states that governments are responsible

for the activities of their nationals in space.

- [Torsten] Apparently, SpaceX does not want

to commit to these rules

when it comes to the free people of Mars.

If the planet's aligned, we'll cover that in our sequel.

But let's not forget that it's not a pale blue flag

for all mankind on the moon.

The American Eagle had landed.

- When Columbus crossed the Atlantic,

he was sent by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand.

There was some private investment in there,

but the motivation was geopolitical.

Okay?

And by the way, Queen Isabella didn't say,

"Oh, Chris, you know, when you come back

give us a slideshow of the, you know, the plants

and the terrain."

No, it's like, "Here's a satchel of flags.

Plant them wherever you go."

- China and Russia are very active in space.

The United States is very active in space.

A lot of countries are.

And I think the important thing

is that nations that are active in space behave responsibly,

they behave sustainably.

- You know, for US-based companies in general,

China's completely off limits,

really, for regulatory reasons.

What I see happening, Torsten,

is we're gonna have two different space economies.

We're gonna have a Western, US-led space economy,

and then you'll have a Chinese-led space economy.

And I think those will be quite distinct

and I don't see a lot of overlap there.

- Hi.

Torsten, nice to meet you.

- I think there's a historical perspective to be had here

because the way the Chinese understand

the history of the 18th, 19th, 20th century

is that China did not stand their ground

on the geopolitical scene.

And so it was the Western powers

that sort of established the way the world works today.

- [Torsten] John has lived in the region

for half of his life

and is an expert on the Chinese space economy.

- There was an interesting poll a couple of years ago.

They basically asked the young population in the UK,

in the US, and in China,

what would you like to do when you grow up?

And the answer in China was being a taikonaut

be an astronaut.

- China take three.

Meanwhile, the kids in the West

dream of becoming influencers on Instagram

or professional TikTokers.

Perhaps it's no wonder that China's the clear number two

in the modern space race.

- The Guo Wang Constellation announced last year,

we're talking about almost 13,000 satellites,

and that's comparable to the super constellations

that we have in the US,

which, you know, Starlink, OneWeb, Kuiper.

It's the similar order of magnitude.

- But here's the twist,

the private space entrepreneurs in Communist China

are jealous of their capitalist counterparts in America

because they are not getting those juicy government grants.

- You don't see any of those subsystems, at least,

for the time being, being subcontracted, being outsourced

to these private companies, these commercial companies.

So that is one big difference,

and that is a significant difference

that enabled SpaceX to survive and to grow

in the late 2000s.

- So it's time to ask

just how much of the space renaissance

is really the achievement of free enterprise

if most of the revenue still comes from Uncle Sam.

Maybe commercial space

doesn't necessarily mean private demand.

- When Elon Musk first sent cargo to the Space Station,

there were headlines.

New air private industry is gonna lead the way.

(crowd cheering)

No, they're not.

Taking cargo to the space station,

NASA has been doing that for 20 years.

- So it's not a dirty secret that governments

are the primary revenue source.

The whole reason this new space industry is coming up

is 'cause the government wants the private sector to do it

'cause the private sector can do it faster.

The private sector can iterate and experiment

and find these other markets.

- It's an interesting, fun future,

a little bit of a Wild West right now.

- [Torsten] The Wild West always reminds me

of the historic gold rushes in California, Australia,

or soon, in asteroid near you.

The upside of fresh capital is new jobs globally.

- We have 40 startups in our accelerator program.

More than half of them come from other countries.

There are close to 2,000 jobs created in Singapore.

They're high value adding jobs

in a very, very niche and competitive,

but very exciting industry.

- So we're at the front end of a very steep slope.

I mentioned earlier, 700 employees at Firefly.

Well, we've estimated that in the next 10 years,

we're gonna need 10 times as many employees in space

than currently work there today.

In this industry, not even the sky is the limit.

- 16 and a half billion pounds of income,

47,000 jobs.

So it's phenomenally highly skilled jobs.

But here's the thing,

I think sometimes people think space and think,

"Oh, that's only for the astronauts."

"That's only for the astrophysicist."

We could not be further from the truth.

We need the designers, the artists,

the human resources professional, the engineers.

- A filmmaker, whether it's a diplomat,

whether it's an engineer,

whether it's a space station manager

or an artist or a botanist.

- We've got designers, we've got architects,

we've got even mechanics

who want to build fuel stations in space.

We've got bankers interested.

We've got fashion designers interested.

- One of the reasons that I chose

this area to focus on and to fund

is the idea that space from the beginning of time

has been our source of inspiration.

You know, we've looked to the heavens.

Working together, you know,

space can help us find that ground of connectedness

that we all have, and hopefully bring out our better angels.

(gentle music)

- Dinosaurs found out the hard way

that if you don't have a space program, you may go extinct.

I'm meeting the guy who's building life ship,

a company that wants to preserve humanity's DNA.

It's fitting that we are here in the ocean where life began.

- Yeah, where life began, and then came out onto land.

Gaia and Earth wants to reproduce.

And so with LifeShip, what we're doing

is we're assembling the genetic code of Earth and humanity

to send to space and to send to stars.

So we created a consumer product.

Customer registers online

and they build out their profile of who they are.

For people to send their DNA to space,

kind of like a digital twin backup of yourself.

There's a guide with a number of facts on the mission

and how it gets to the moon.

A boarding pass to the moon.

And then there's a saliva swab that you do a sample

and then put it back in this envelope

and mail it back for the LifeShip mission.

- [Torsten] The DNA isn't sequenced.

It's extracted and encased in polymer,

then sealed in a capsule that protects it from radiation.

- It's someone like a Noah's Ark to the stars.

This is a record of Earth today

that future generations could get

and bring back species that are no longer here.

- Yeah, in a way, your company and the kit

is sort of like the smallest, cheapest consumer product,

the most easy to grasp idea

that I've seen in my whole journey.

Very, very cool story.

Together with many other precious species,

Sheldon's genetic code is aboard Ben's LifeShip,

which is mounted on a Firefly Moon Lander,

which is powered by Rocket Lab made solar panels

and launched on a SpaceX rocket on a private mission

primarily financed by a new commercial NASA program,

bringing us back full circle.

Millions love space and follow every rocket launch life.

I ask you, which other industry

captures our collective imagination like that?

Space has always had a different kind of ROI,

return on inspiration.

- It's hard to understand today

a sort of multi-year slow motion race

that captivated the entire planet.

And first, we were losing and we were behind the Soviets.

Then we were winning.

The imagery was beautiful,

seeing people floating in space for the first time.

So it's easy to be captivated as a young kid.

I was three or four years old, literally.

And I was fascinated by the "Star Trek" ecosystem.

- I think the first time that I really like got into space

was when I was a kid, I like read a lot of space books.

- You know, I was born in Trinidad and Tobago.

And as a little girl,

I was really excited and really good at math and science.

- My parents took me to Kennedy Space Center in Florida

and I saw that gigantic building.

And my dad said, "That's where they make rockets."

And it was as if my mind, my heart, and my soul

exploded at the same time.

And you don't forget moments like that in your life.

- Ever since I was very young,

maybe, you know, nine or 10,

I was actually lying in the back of my dad's pickup truck

in rural Georgia looking up at the stars.

- And to see a young child in the next generation growing up

knowing that not even the sky is a limit,

what a gift to be able to provide to her.

- When I was a kid,

I was dreaming of becoming multi-planetary.

So making drawings of domes

and structures on all the planet

full of plants and flowers.

- For me, I have always had really big dreams.

And as a child, it's easy to say,

"I wanna go to space,"

"I wanna be president,"

"I wanna be a CEO."

- [Torsten] And her journey started at McDonald's.

See, what I learned making this documentary

is that it's not the billionaires against the rest of us.

- Thanks to Humanity, we're here.

- It's not about public versus private initiatives.

This is all about those

who are effectively accelerating us into the future.

Our story always has and always will be written

by those who imagine any new space as a blank canvas.

However, their lofty dreams

still need to be tethered to the hard realities

on the ground below, like cash.

Space businesses are still, well, businesses.

So many startups will crash and burn,

but some will be making a galactic profit.

- Pass that off to private enterprise

'cause they'll figure out how to do it cheaper

'cause that's kind of what they do.

That's...

That's why they exist.

To make a buck.

- Now I'm returning to 42 HQ, having seem early,

but thriving markets and real customer traction.

And this is the end.

Take four.

So let's just imagine for a sec

our next giant leap of this rock.

Perhaps then, humans way in the future,

those spacefaring homosapiens,

who for sure will be force of gravity defying,

and Elon edifying,

habitat's finding and shiny asteroids mining.

These supreme beings of all shapes and sizings

may be even blindened with a trillion dollar spaceships

and their microgravity bread protein dips.

Yes, those future homosapiens, ha, homospaciens,

will look back at us ancestors and be thanking us.

Not just the four or five famous dudes.

No.

The rest of us,

the best of us who possess the mental fortitude

from our high school kids science fairs

to boomers boosted into cislunar nursing cares.

Our climate defenders and metal benders,

the bureaucrats, plutocrats, diplomats, copycats,

the engineers and marketeers,

the musketeers and pioneers,

the privateers and financiers.

We are not mere passengers here on spaceship Earth.

For what it's worth, me and you, we're all crew

because the science girls and rocket fellas

have no time to kill to see their dreams fulfilled.

Today is day one,

and it's time to build.

(inspirational music)

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music continues)

(upbeat music continues)