The New Space Race with Jeff Thornburg

26:32I just think that's a bad idea. Yeah, I wonder where that might be. Yeah. I could be wrong, but that's just one person's opinion. Yeah, you know, like when a leader of a nation breaks up with a CEO, it can get ugly, you know what I mean? Who gets the cat? Like, you know.

26:52So you want people to be more comfortable with failure because that's how you proceed. Not failure from blunder, but failure from something you had not seen coming. It's a different kind of failure, right? I think people think engineers just know, and therefore when we fail, oh, we're stupid or we're a bad engineer. And they don't understand the art of engineering is designing a system around unknowns and that we don't always know the first time it's going to be successful. Which would include the unknown unknowns. Correct. I think that's the unlock for people to know failure is a good thing because you've now given engineers a gift because now they have all of the information.

27:39So that's why failure is so important to engineering because now you've pushed the design all the way up to the line. You don't have to guess about it anymore. So now you've gone from that initial phase of engineering, of engineering around the margins you don't know, which normally means it's heavier or carries more fuel or less efficient in some way because you're just trying to get it to work. And when you fail it, now you can totally isolate that to what it needs to be. And that's why things like the Falcon 9 first stage land the way they do. Because we failed so many of those as the gag reel has shown over the years.

28:15Yeah, back when you were at SpaceX. Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to start looking at my life differently. I'm just an engineer. All the failures. Who knew? Let me take you somewhere because this comes up, and I want to hear it. I've spoken of it as a scientist, but I want to hear an engineer speak of this. Let's say there's some disaster, NASA disaster, okay? Always somebody digs up an engineer's memo that said you shouldn't launch because this might fail. And then others say, why didn't you pay attention to that? And nobody looks to all the successful launches to dig up the very same letters that say you shouldn't launch because that's going to fail and it doesn't fail.

29:03So how do you square how NASA or any company should respond to the claims that you didn't heed advice when presumably I'm thinking there are memos like that every single launch? So there's a failure in leadership there that I personally believe in, that I operate differently in my organizations over the years and my company now. You're always going to have somebody say, I'm worried about this before you launch or before you field a spacecraft on orbit. And so what I do is we have what's called active risk management, which is a NASA term. But we look at all those risks before we fly. At every organization, there needs to be a person that signs off on the final risk posture for whatever mission you're flying.

29:50And that person, it's okay for them to take risk, but they need to document why they're taking that risk and why it's acceptable. So when I build flight hardware, we do a final risk review before it flies. We look at all of the key risks. And if people feel really strongly that they're worried about something, then I say, I'm taking that risk away from you. You don't have to stress about that anymore. I'm going to say it's okay, and I'm going to justify it because of this. Okay, so now something goes bad. Now the press comes, and they see that memo. They say, why didn't you heed the advice of that memo?

30:25And I had already addressed that in the documentation that said, I thought this was an acceptable risk because of X, Y, and Z, and I know I have to stand by that whether it fails or not. Okay, so now they put you in front of the bereaved relatives. Now you're standing on a jet and the door has blown off mid-flight. How do you get around it? That can never happen. I think there's incompetence and there's acceptable risk documentation. I guess that's what I was getting at. That's a good point. That's a good point. That's it. I make it a point to have acceptable risk documentation. So if the worst happens, I can at least explain myself on why I thought that was okay.

31:08And then I'm also fine saying I was wrong. It's like a pharmaceutical disclaimer. You know, side effects may include. And they're highly unlikely, but they list even the most unlikely of side effects. But they say, you know, hey, listen, the chances of this happening are so slim that this is deemed safe. But there's a very, very slim chance that this could happen. In space, there's never a guarantee. That's the thing. You're no such thing as safe in space. There's no such thing. It's just the risk that you accept. I think companies get into trouble when management takes that authority away from engineering and says, we don't care what you guys think, we're doing this anyway.

31:44That's when you've got a problem. That's when you've got a problem. So when you're talking about door hatches blowing off or submarines failing when they shouldn't have been designed the way they were or whatever, that's a failure in leadership. And so I think you're still going to have failures, and I'm just saying let's avoid the failure in leadership piece of that. Not enough attention is given to where the leadership matters versus the engineering declarations of what the risk factors are. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Because people just want to get to the end. Okay, so how about, just since we're here, the Hubble telescope, the mirror has a perfect shape, the secondary mirror has a perfect shape, but they don't play in the sandbox together, and they were not tested together.

32:25So is that leadership? That's a failure in system engineering, in my opinion, Yeah, because you didn't have an adequate test program. How big was system engineering as a thing at the time? We're talking about the late 80s. NASA, this is system engineering haven. That's what it is, you're right. But I don't think system engineering was taught in schools as a branch of engineering until later than it should have. Am I right there? I mean, I've seen evidence in the shuttle program that they had very robust system engineering back in that time frame. Okay, in the 80s. Maybe NASA didn't equivalently apply it all over the different centers and programs, but there is no better price for systems engineering execution than NASA.

33:04So that's a blunder. It's a failure of imagination to be like, should we test these systems before they fly? Wow. All right, one more. Let's go back to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, I think it was, where it never got into orbit because the scientists were using metric and you engineers were still on imperial units of force. I remember you telling me that story. What's up with that? That's hilarious. That's such a classic story and true. What's up with that is we've carried mixed units in the United States for way too long. Oh, don't be blaming the country. All right, blame it. You are the engineering people.

33:46You know you're talking to scientists. You know. Well, here's... You want the scientists to be using pounds and ounces? I'm not going to make excuses. That's right. You better not. But I will tell you why it's happened, in my opinion. Okay. A lot of the engineering tools for spacecraft and launch vehicles were all written in Imperial units. And so they've been very slow, the community at large, to change those tools to a metric standard. Okay. And so engineers get lazy because they want to stay in the units they're comfortable with. Well, did that scenario cause them to make the change, or are they still doing the same thing?

34:25Are they still being dumbass? I think they're still— That's your word. You say it. Are they still being dumbass? I think, Chuck, there's still pockets of dumbassery going on. Oh, that's a Chuckism right there. There we go. It's fantastic. The dumbassitude of the system doesn't— So we've seen in recent months a move to cut costs at NASA. Cut costs in many ways, including the science budget, I think got the biggest cut. And there's some attrition, people leaving and not being replaced, early retirement. And so it seems like we're losing some legacy wisdom with that shift. Could you reflect on what you think might be the future consequences of this?

35:09Absolutely. What comes to my mind, there's two things that I actually worry about now, which is we're watching our scientists walk over to other countries because there's no funding for them here. I have two colleagues, not in astrophysics, but in other physical sciences. They said they got a phone call from France. Yeah. They say, Hello. What are you doing right now? I hear you are being fired. Perhaps we'd like to come to France. and make a baguette rocket. A baguette rocket. Be tasty. That would be funny. Rocking in the shape of a baguette. But like, so you've got the scientists vacating and then you've got NASA engineers and folks that will not be doing the fundamental research.

36:02We've been robbing R &D from the United States for my career has spanned 30 years at this point. I can't talk to all the things that happened before me, but I can talk to all the things that happened in 30 years in my experience. And it was bad when I started my career. It's even worse now, 30 years later. I think current events are going to have ramifications for America as a leader in science and technology for decades to come because of what's happening now. We're plundering our own intellectual treasure is what we're doing. Because you don't know which experiments are going to work. You have to fund a lot of different science and technology areas, hoping that one out of 10 or 15 are going to be winners.

36:43Why don't they know this? I don't know. I guess that's why I'm here. Let's get the word out. You know, you should be on a podcast. I should. I should think about that. Let's work on that.

37:13Speaking as an academic, if I come up with a great idea and I publish it, and then all my colleagues see it, they can judge it, see if there's a flaw, or use it as a stepstone to reach a next goal. That's the openness that is fundamental to the progress of science. You're in a competitive industry. If you make some discovery, would you be resistant to patent it because then other people would see it? How does intellectual property work in your business? There is a strong desire to hide things that are unique because it becomes intellectual property and IP of the business that can actually add to its value.

37:55So tell me things you're hiding now. So, sure. No, no, no. Remember that warp engine you talked about?

38:07So one of the things as a CEO of a space startup that I think about a lot is integrity. And so to your, kind of what you're scratching out a little bit is, if there was something so great that could benefit humanity, I learned a lot from Paul Allen when I worked for him because one of the things I took - Microsoft Paul Allen. Microsoft Paul Allen. And one of the things I took away from Paul was technology for the benefit of humanity. So that's one of our kind of cultural touchstones at Portal Space Systems. So if we had something so great and so beneficial to humanity, I wouldn't want to hide that.

38:42But that's just my take on integrity. And what does your wife feel about this? Well, we should talk to her about that. It's probably gonna come down to the value and the dollar. I think she'd rather have a husband with integrity than without. It's what I think she'd probably say. That's a great answer. But we don't have enough integrity in the business right now, is a personal observation. Because the push to make money, the push to grow a business and satisfy investors sometimes compromises people's value systems in ways that aren't great. So how could that, because it seems to me like what you're doing is either comes down to this works or it doesn't.

39:27So I'm sure there are people who feel like, well, what do I need integrity for? because it either works or it doesn't. So what difference does it make? Where exactly does a lack of integrity hurt the business and then subsequently - I think lying about the progress of your product. To keep the money coming. That's where I see it the most. I see it. Vaporware. Businesses are trying to drive for that next fundraise, that next investor, and they lie their asses off to get to the next step. Ah, okay. And that's where I see it the most. Vaporware. That's what that is. I don't know what vaporware is.

40:06Well, there's software. Oh, vaporware. There's hardware. Oh. There's wetware. Wetware, yeah. Which is the brain. Right. And then there's vaporware. And vaporware. It's just vapor. There's nothing behind the idea. That is my Uncle Jimmy at a cookout. Vaporware. Yes. I didn't have a name for it until now. So take me back to the billionaire boy's space race. I mean, they're billionaires and they had their cash. How does that work compared with someone who has a brilliant idea and just gets VC money to come in and help them? Yeah, well, with Elon, he had that money from PayPal to start Tesla and SpaceX.

40:46So he had a$100 million head start that most people don't have. Yeah, VCs will come up with$100 million. You can get that. No, I mean, you have to work at it. It doesn't happen that fast. Okay. I mean, normally you still end up going through a process where you're going to raise a pre-seed round of a few million and then a seed of maybe 10 or 20 million. Plus you owe the VC at the end, where if Elon is spending his own money, he just owes himself. You're diluting your business every time you raise money. Yes. And Elon didn't have to do that because it was his own money. It's his own money. Yeah.

41:17So let me ask you, because I'm just fascinated by this whole thing right now. Now, how does a VC know anything about thermonuclear propulsion? I mean, seriously, like I need$30 million. This is where he's got to be a salesman. Yeah. I mean, you know. So when we started the company four years ago, we decided to pursue solar thermal propulsion because it was a stepping stone to get to nuclear propulsion later. But nobody knew what that was or how it could translate into getting you faster movement on orbit. So you're right. The CEO has to be a salesman first, and then you have to start proving that you can build this hardware, and then you start building hardware, you start doing testing, you start showing people.

42:01Plus, you're going to assemble a board of some kind who's looking over your shoulder. I've started to do that now, yeah, with where we are. Oh, he hadn't do that. He didn't need to. Now you made him actually say it publicly. I have a board, but it's a small board. his mom is on the board you're doing so well son that's a good idea that's a good idea Neil I hadn't thought about that that's funny you need some skeptical physicists on your board to know what's possible and what isn't that's true I can always use good skeptics on the board yeah but the investors typically don't know anything about the technology to your question and they hire people that's not unique to space Almost all the high-tech frontier companies, VCs just maybe just like the idea.

42:49So one of the things we did at Portal was we started working with the Space Force and the Air Force on small business innovative research contracts so that we could show people that knew things about space, that knew the technology, that investors could then get confidence on that we were on the right track of things. So there's just a lot of steps you've got to take to try to convince people something's real. And I wanted to do that with data as much as salesmanship because I didn't want to be vaporware. Okay. So could you give us an overview on the history of propulsion and how the ideas have landed, what's working, what has underperformed relative to predictions, what has overperformed?

43:37What we do know is that we don't really have flying cars. We have these flying drones, okay? They want to call them flying taxis, but they're helicopter drones, right? So in the old days, there was just simple Goddard liquid propulsion that you can throttle, I guess. It's chemical energy. Yes. We're still using chemical energy. We are. So what's up with that? Well, to get out of Earth's gravity well, you want a lot of thrust. And liquid rocket engines are still the best way to get off the ground and into orbit. Where technology has now started to evolve is once you're in orbit, now what do you do?

44:19I would argue that liquid rocket engines aren't the best way to get you around once you're on orbit. Now, we're still using that to take upper stages, third stages, second stages, to take you to higher orbits and stuff, but that's not the most efficient way to go. And so they started to see this with... So there are these regimes. Yes. There's acceleration regimes, Delta V regimes, that don't call for the same solutions. Correct. There's more solutions available than what we've typically used before. Okay. So the electric propulsion came on the scene a while back. And tell me how that works. So typically you're talking about a hall thruster type system.

44:59So you're creating ions that you're accelerating out the back of an electric motor or engine. Wasn't that an ion engine? It's an ion engine. Okay. Okay. I thought it was something different, but it's not. Electric propulsion ion engines are in the same family. They're very efficient, but they don't have a lot of thrust. So you don't, because you're not creating the acceleration because you don't have a lot of thrust, you don't get anywhere very fast. So satellites said, okay, that's cool. If it takes us weeks or months to get to an orbit where we're selling electrons for broadband internet or TV or whatever, that's fine.

45:34But then our adversaries started developing spacecraft that could move a lot faster with higher thrust. And then they started doing things on orbit that threatened some of our critical infrastructure. And now we have no way to kind of maneuver around that. So there's strategic value to this. maneuverability is a key ingredient of warfare on land sea and air and now space you think so chemical rockets we are removing energy that was built into the molecules that are in the fuel tank that energy gets released yep you have you you expel mass out one end the rocket recoils by going in the opposite direction, Newton's laws.

46:19Yep, accelerate those particles in the thrust chamber as fast as possible. With very high mass, high speed coming out the back. Once you are in place, you now kick out ions, which have very low mass, but high efficiency, and so it'll move you if you're patient. Yes. And so these are two different needs. Yes. Clearly, okay. And now there's a new need, which is we don't have that patience any longer. Right. Got it. Now, what are, I'll say, our adversaries, what are they using for maneuverability on orbit? If you look at what China's done, as they've grown the amount of mass they can throw with their long march launch vehicles, they're just making bigger and bigger spacecraft with bigger and bigger tanks and bigger and bigger thrusters.

47:07So they're brute forcing it. Yes, sir. That's correct. That's what they're doing. And we like to be more elegant. Remember my story about the Russian rocket? Right. This is American. We always want to think about everything. Right. As my wife often tells me, I'm in my head too much. That's very much an American. But you know what? I kind of feel like precision and elegance wins out in the long term if you can get past the short term. And commercially, yes. Yeah. Because you need that elegance to hit a price point that's going to make you both commercially viable and viable for the defense industry as well.

47:40Yeah, and unlike America, they spend as much money as they want on anything that they want. Well, and China's completely aligned in their military-industrial complex. I mean, there's only one chain of command and one person that makes those decisions. And that's what I want here. That kind of efficiency. He channels Trump. He can't help it. He can't help it. I'm sorry. So is there anything you could testify in Congress today that's reminiscent of what you testified in back in 2015? That would let them know. About our needs. And to let them know. The transition of our needs. What kind of dumbasses they are.

48:20Because they are dumbasses. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. The interesting thing. We can cut that out. Please don't cut that out. And the interesting thing about all of that is that when I testified before Congress in 2015, it was about, why are we sending all this money to Russia and buying their engines when we've got engineers we need to train in the United States and we have commercial companies that can do the job? And that was my argument. And I said, hey, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Starship, Raptor are coming. It's going to be a thing. Fortunately, I was right on all of that. And what I would say today to different committees before Congress is our adversaries are coming for us and we are cutting R &D spending.

49:02We're cutting engineering. We're cutting science. We're cutting all of the things we need to be competitive. We're also spooking immigrants who could have expertise as they've always had. I mean, when I was in graduate school, half of my fellow graduate students were foreign nationals, half of them. And now they're all spooked because they don't know what's going to happen. Yeah, and China's made no bones about they want to be the preeminent superpower in the world. So I don't know why we kind of have our heads in the sand about this. No, it's a head up our ass. Say it right. Okay, sure, head up our ass.

49:34That's a darker place than in the sand. If I was testifying before Congress to your question, I would be hitting those points really hard because we need to be accelerating capabilities that are going to preserve. I want to preserve low earth orbit, mid earth orbit, LEO, cislunar around the moon for commercial opportunities in the future. And so my thesis is, if I don't do my part to protect and defend it with the Department of Defense, there's not going to be a spot to make money commercially in the future. And that's how it's been. So we started sailing wooden ships. The pirates were there. It's going to be no different on orbit.

50:09So what are we going to do about it? Yeah. And so let me describe what I think is going on in space. and you either say I've got it right or modify it as necessary. When people hear Space Force, they say, oh, there's going to be weapons and bombs in space. And it's not really what's happening there. What's happening there is our assets that enable what we think of as modern life and civilization are fundamentally pivoted on what we have orbiting this Earth with the satellites, the GPS especially, our other communication satellites. And so if you have a military, it's not, oh, defend this border, take this hill.

50:50No, it's defend our assets. And our assets are bare ass in space. And an adversary who wanted to take us out, blind us, they would go to our communication satellites and take us out. Just like Independence Day. It was Independence Day. You remembered that. That's right. The aliens came and took out all of our satellites. Leave the world behind on Netflix. Oh, that's another one. That's a great one. Leave the world behind. It was a tech warfare. Do not watch that movie with me, by the way. Oh, no, stop. Oh, I think that'd be fun. No. No? Leave the world behind. That was actually, I think the Obamas were executive producers on that project.

51:27A terrifying movie, actually. It was. Leave the world behind. To your question to me. So did I, would you agree with how I've characterized it? I loved how you characterized it because that's the same message that I try to send when I'm talking to, why should the average citizen care about this? They should care because when they go to the gas pump, it's not going to work because GPS does the timing for the gas pump. When they go to get cash from the ATM, it's not going to work because GPS does the timing for the ATM. We've selectively tied our financial systems to GPS and we did that and we made a choice.

52:00We said, oh, this is cool. Let's do this. This is handy. China did not do that. They have other ways they do timing for their banking and financial assets. My money's in my mattress, so there's no problem. for me. And not just China, but other countries, right? So we made fundamental decisions with our space technology that have made us vulnerable to your point, which is why people should care so much about this problem. And we have battleships and Marines that could do 100 pushups and launch silos. And any country that's smart is not going to attack us on those grounds. It's going to find, you're just going to find a weakness.

52:34That's how any war unfolds. Well, and guess what? All those assets up there right now, can they move when they're threatened? Can they defend themselves in any meaningful way? I would argue probably not. And I also heard, and I haven't confirmed this, but I heard, and you would know, that some adversaries will have satellites that'll nestle up next to our satellites and just basically harass them, either with an electromagnetic field or something. And so we then have to move our satellite away from them to maintain operability, but that uses fuel that we otherwise need to station keep. And so that will reduce the lifespan of some of our satellites because of this.

53:21And no, did it fire a weapon at us? No. Did it destroy us? No. It's just - It just cyber bullied us. It's, ooh, yeah. Orbit bullied us. This seems like a very reasonable hypothesis to me. Yeah, I heard that. It was very diplomatic. It's another way to mess. So Space Force is not, let's put bombs in space. Jeff did not answer that question. Let's protect our assets. Did you see what he just did there? What did he say? He was just like, that seems like a very reasonable hypothesis, which is like, oh man, that's exactly what is happening. I was trying to channel my inner Neil. That was good. That's why I had to point it out.

53:57That was excellent. So in your current capacity as CEO of, give me the full name again. Portal Space Systems. Portal Space Systems. You'll have to ask me how about the name of the company at some point. Ask it now. How'd you get Portal Space Systems? I used to watch Rick and Morty with my daughter. Excellent. There it is. And so half of the story is the portal gun from Rick and Rick and Morty because that's what I used to watch with my daughter. You know, Rick and Morty is just back to the future relationship all over again. It's Doc and Marty. Yes, that's right. Rick and Morty, Doc and Marty.

54:28And he's got the same kind of, hey, Morty, come on. That's right, Morty. We got to go. That's the same thing. That's very cool. So tell me what some of the coolest, what's the coolest thing you're working on in your company right now? So Supernova has been like - Supernova. The flagship - You took one of my words. Yes. My people. Well - That's our word, just so you know. Well, I wanted to be close to your people. Yeah. But we kind of have a star theme with our products at the company. You know I'm going to love that. I know you'd love that because I love Cosmos, so I mean - With Supernova, it's about that rapid movement.

55:02And it's supernova because we're using concentrated solar energy. And we've innovated around a heat exchanger. So we don't have to combust any liquid propellants with our system. So like a nuclear... But this is in what, towards what end? This is so I can carry twice as much fuel. And I have a thermal engine cycle where I'm not using combustion. so I can have fewer parts, more efficiency, higher thrust, and twice as much fuel because I'm not carrying an oxidizer so I don't have to burn anything. And I really wanted to do nuclear thermal, but I can't buy a nuclear reactor at Lowe's, and there's not enough of them to buy right now.

55:42We need 10 to 24 gigawatts. Gigawatts. Gigawatts, yeah. You can't get one of those at Lowe's? I want, well, I joke about this all the time because the thermal engine is a lot like Mr. Fusion from the second Back to the Future movie because we use ammonia as our propellant now, but we could use any of them. No, Mr. Fusion was in the first. Okay, yeah, at the end. At the end. At the end, yes. Get you to the second movie. Get to the second, you're right. Yes, get you. You don't, just don't with me here. I like this. I like this battle of the trivia. So the thermal engine's a lot like Mr. Fusion because we can use ammonia, which is our baseline fuel, because it's very storable on orbit, and we have a multi-year life of our spacecraft.

56:26But if I want to start moving out to Mars and I want to use methane, in the future I want to use hydrogen, I want to use other things, I can use other fuels in a thermal engine system. Oh, as a versatility. As versatility because I'm very much a live off the land kind of guy when it comes to space. If we're taking everything with us, we've failed as engineers. That's so cool. You know, could you tell NASA that that's what they should call it instead of in-situ resource utilization? Living off the land. Let's, from now on, NASA, are you watching? L-O-T-L, okay? Living off the land. There you go, NASA.

57:02That is way more marketable than in-situ resource utilization. Yeah. I-S-R-U. That's a big branch of NASA. It is. Yeah. We're coming from Europe. There's a cool company down in Florida. I'll give them a shout out. They're called Admin, and they are an additive manufacturing company. Oh, Admin. Cool. That's what they work with on all the space people that they work with. Right, because if I'm going to Mars, I won't think of all the things I need to live, but I want a print machine that can print any tool I need once I'm there. But anyway, so with Supernova, it's about propulsion, but it's about payload flexibility.

57:37So what that means is software definable power, which means you have a payload, you have a camera, you have a robot arm, you have whatever you want to do, whatever mission. It's like a Lego brick onto the front of the payload deck. Perform your mission. I'm selling, I'll get you there as fast as you need to be. And I'll give you a platform that's very versatile over multiple years. Not to stupidly simplify it, but are you saying you have a warehouse and I have a need? And I say, I want to put this object on Mars and do some things. And you say, yeah, get two rockets from aisle A and two boosters from aisle B.

58:15and then we assemble what it is that will serve my needs? Well, from a spacecraft standpoint, yes. Okay. So I am going to build you the spacecraft and whatever you need on that spacecraft to perform a mission, whether that's a camera or a telescope or whatever, I can supply power and data to that. That is engineering heaven right there. That's wild. Because that's one of the biggest problems with satellites right now is everything's bespoke. So you want to have a telecom satellite. Oh, I'm going to build the whole thing, including the telecom payload. And that's way more expensive. Yeah. The one-off.

58:48It's a one-off. And if your customers don't show up and want it, then your business fails. I can't predict everything the customer needs, so I didn't want to try. I just wanted to give them a spacecraft that could meet all their needs. Wow. Okay, so when are we having warp drives? And how do we get in on the ground floor of your company? Let's talk afterwards. Talk on the side. We're going to make that happen. What's on our doorstep? What remains only in the dream states of engineers? I think two things. If I was king of American engineering for a day, for space, I'd accelerate AI and machine learning and get more robots and AI out there doing the heavy lifting for us.

59:37It's called Skynet. I get that. But I think you could... Accelerate AI and make more robots. I'd make more robots. You need a different starting phrase. But let me tell you why I said that. We spend so much time and money trying to keep humans alive that it slows our pace of exploration on orbit. It slows everything. So let's get AI and ML out there on spacecraft exploring the solar system and teaching us what we don't know yet. ML, machine learning. Yes, machine learning. So that then we can engineer the systems that keep people alive and get it right the first time. And we can get more exploration done faster because we're not spending all this money to keep people alive right now.

1:00:17Let's go learn what we need to learn to keep people alive. You better not name the robots because then people will feel for them. And if you don't bring them back, that meant you killed a robot. I'm okay with that. Yeah, I haven't made up my mind. I'm just saying, there's a whole ethical frontier there about feelings for things that have feelings. There's actually an ethical society that has come up around the treatment of robots. Treatment of robots. I guess I would tell those people, it's easier for me to keep your robot alive than a human alive in space. That's worse. You got my vote with that one.

1:00:52There you go. There you go. And then on the propulsion side, I think what we're learning in quantum physics, this is where I'm going to carefully delve into your universe for a hot second. I am not the expert in quantum physics, but I do read a lot because I'm super interested in what we're learning there. but I think there's elements of the quantum world that are going to unlock propulsion technologies that might look similar to a warp drive but I think we need to unlock some more understanding of the quantum universe to do that. I think that's going to be the linchpin in giving us sci-fi geeks the warp drive we want.

1:01:30So a quantum FFRDC would be a cool thing. That would be an awesome thing. Right, it's just everything quantum. And you could probably get that funded because there's a lot of defense applications for quantum as well. Right, right, right. Okay, so give me an actual date where we're going to have a warp drive so I can put that on my calendar. We know when the warp drive gets invented. It's 2063. Correct. And Star Trek. Right. So those are your marching orders. Okay. Okay. I think we can do that. You got 40 years. We're moving fast in quantum. It's via the quantum. Via the quantum. Okay. I think that's our best path right now.

1:02:07All right, because if you, you know, even in Back to the Future Part II, they predicted that the Cubs would win the World Series. And they did. And they did, yes. Yeah. Even a broken clock is... It's true. What did they say? A blind sow finds an acorn every once in a while. There you go. But I think that with warp drive, it's not about this propulsive thing that we're all mentally geared to. It's how do we leverage quantum to manipulate the fabric of space-time. So quantize gravity and things of that nature. You have to really, you're going to have to figure out how to fold space-time. You need a new understanding of the fabric of the space-time continuum.

1:02:44Manipulate that, it's not even about propulsion. Propulsion, yeah. That's right. Right. That's Thornburg's theory anyway, for whatever that's worth. Oh, okay. So Jeff, we got to land this plane. But Chuck, do you have any last questions for the man? Yeah, I'm just interested. Like, what would be the ultimate achievement in commercial space travel or the Holy Grail? What is it that everybody wants? I'm going to tell you what I want, and then we'll go to him. Go ahead. I want to go suborbital between any two points on Earth so that I'm 45 minutes, I'm no more than 45 minutes away from lunch in Tokyo and then fly back.

1:03:19Wow. So that would require rockets, not planes. Yeah. Because orbit is 90 minutes. Right. So if you suborbital, you're half of that. You just go the other way, whatever. You can go anywhere in the world. And I think about that every time I go to Washington. I go to Washington for a lunch meeting and then come back and I'm home for dinner. and if you told that to our founding fathers get the horse ready. Martha, we gotta. That would be an impossibility of them. they'd be like that too. So, pick that up. What awaits us? For me, my holy grail is that humans can go to any orbit between here and the moon or the moon and it isn't a significant emotional event.

1:04:00That's wild. It's just a standard way of life. Go to the moon, I'll see you on Tuesday. exactly. That's wild. That's what you want. That's what I want. in my lifetime. Cislunar space becomes our backyard, not even worthy of comment. Correct. Look at that. That's very cool. It's like saying, I'm going to Poughkeepsie. I'm going to the moon. It's all the same. It's all the same. All the same. That's a worthy goal. I like that. So let me perhaps offer a cosmic perspective on this. I'm a scientist. I think science-y things about the world. And at no time am I asking, how would one accomplish this?

1:04:44How would one build it? How would one pay for it? How much ingenuity does it require? Do I have to invent something that has never before existed just to solve the problem I have posed? I don't really have to think about that. And we have this community of engineers that walk among us who live for that. They live for it. You know what else they live for? Constraints on what it is they need to do. That was the most impressive feature of how engineers function. The last thing an engineer wants to hear is, here, go build this. There's no time frame. There's no money limit. and there's no constraints.

1:05:33They're going to be staring at their navel to not knowing what to do. But if I say, I got three months, I got$2 million, these are the specs, and this is the requirements, go. Their ingenuity derives from figuring stuff out within those constraints. That's how we make discoveries, not scientific discoveries, discoveries about how stuff works. around us, that so many of us, myself included, take for granted. So, there is no future of civilization without happy engineers. Engineers that are given problems to solve. And maybe it's up to the rest of us to give them the kinds of problems we need solved.

1:06:23Energy, housing, climate. Scientists can't solve those problems. We can characterize them, but we need engineers to step in the ring. And this is an appeal, I suppose, to a few. Not everyone can be an engineer. We don't want that. Engineers don't even want that. But engineers as a demographic of society that'll lead us into the future, there is no civilization without them. And for me, that is a cosmic perspective. Chuck thanks thanks for being here always a pleasure and Jeff Thornburg thanks for being on StarTalk my pleasure coming all this way for us absolutely this has been another installment of StarTalk Neil deGrasse Tyson your personal astrophysicist bidding you to keep looking up