Orbitworks and the UAE’s race to space

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1:23Hamdullah Mohib:Hello and welcome to The Entrepreneurs on Monocle Radio, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. On the programme today, we'll hear about the United Arab Emirates' ambition to become one of the ten largest space industries globally.

1:40Andrew Mueller:It's not just soft power that it wants to project that the UAE would like to see. It wants to see itself turn into a knowledge economy in which we contribute to the global development.

1:52Hamdullah Mohib:And later, we'll head to China to explore the growth of coffee culture in Hong Kong. Over the years, there's more and more competition. The entry barrier is relatively lower. I think people's appreciation to coffee is getting a lot better. This is The Entrepreneurs with me, Tom Edwards.

2:19Hamdullah Mohib:You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Now, many people who feature on this show have had a pretty unusual journey to their present position. but even by those standards, our next guest has one of the more extraordinary CVs that we've come across. Between 2015 and 2018, Dr. Hamdullah Mohib was Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States. He then served as Afghan National Security Advisor until 2021, before the Taliban retook power in the country. Today, Dr. Mohib is a key player in the UAE's growing space industry, as CEO of Marlan Space and acting CEO of Orbitworks, which recently signed a major deal with the French space agency CNES.

3:03Hamdullah Mohib:Dr Mohib caught up with Monocle's Andrew Muller from Abu Dhabi's Make It In The Emirates conference, the UAE's flagship platform for industrial transformation. Andrew began by asking Dr Mohib how significant the recent deal with France was for the UAE's space programme.

3:20Andrew Mueller:It's a tremendous moment because we are a new industry. It's a new economy that the UAE wants to build, a commercial space industry. And the French are quite a sophisticated market itself. They have companies like Airbus and Thales that have provided services to the Middle East for a long time, the UAE included. And so for them to rely on a constellation that is built in the UAE and have services is a big endorsement to the technology that we're building here. It means we're building something real. We're not just building technology that can only be used in one region. It means it has global implications.

4:02Andrew Mueller:And that is something that I think proves the point of why we wanted to do this in the first place. We wanted to build technologies that can be exported and not just exported to neighboring countries, but exported to countries like France and hopefully in the future to other European countries in the UK and the US as well.

4:21Hamdullah Mohib:As far as you're able to understand it, what was the appeal of working with the UAE for France, which, as you say, is quite a well-established space power by now?

4:33Andrew Mueller:I think it's basically we understood what they needed. We were able to build it before anyone else did. I think there was a need for a multi-sensor constellation that had AI on board compute. And we decided to take the risk. I think that is where the main opportunity came from. And give them the comfort that what we're building is going to be able to fulfill their needs. And it did take a long time. It took over a year for us to build that capability and that trust. But it came along because also the French recognize that they need partnerships in this region. And they have been a big partner with the UAE on other programs.

5:17Andrew Mueller:Space and acquiring space assets perhaps is new to them, but they have been working with the UAE in other areas. And so we piggybacked on that capability and that relationship that already existed to enter a new market.

5:32Hamdullah Mohib:Well, let's talk a bit about the companies with which you personally are associated. This is Marlon Space and Orbitworks. For listeners for whom these may be new names, how would you sum up what they are offering or what they're doing that other companies aren't in terms of furnishing those capabilities you were talking about?

5:51Andrew Mueller:First of all, Marlon Space is an investment company. It invests in space companies and aerospace companies, which is not new to our market. The only thing that stands out is it only invests in space, in aerospace companies. So that's the main area of differentiation. And it's operating Orbitworks, which it does together with a U.S. company called Loft Orbital. And so it's a joint venture that has enabled us to build Orbitworks. Orbitworks is a satellite manufacturer, and it builds satellites for customers, bespoke satellites for customers. We also have a testing facility, which is also used by some of our other entities in the UAE to test their spacecraft.

6:39Andrew Mueller:Those spacecraft can be rovers, can be other satellites, can be payloads that go on satellites. But we also, at Orbitworks, own our own constellation, the Altair constellation. It's our own constellation in which we invested to offer services. Now, the Altair constellation is a little different than what you normally have in satellites. Normal satellite business is selling imagery. You are an Earth observation satellite. You take an image and you charge per image. What we are doing different is we are fusing multiple sensors. So it's no longer just a camera, an optical camera. You also have a hyperspectral camera and then have a thermal camera along with RF capabilities, which means we can fuse all of those sensors.

7:30Andrew Mueller:Plus onboard compute makes it possible for us to offer services other than just taking an image. So we can offer a subscription, which is how we can. Imagine an app store, but for satellites in which you build an app, you take all the sensors on board, and you talk to your own app, which means it takes away the need for you to own your own satellite. You have all of the controls. You have all of the sovereignty and the needs that you need in your privacy because it's your own application that you talk to. but on another satellite for a period of time, which cuts down the cost of owning a constellation of your own.

8:11Andrew Mueller:It cuts down on the time it takes to build. And you can also update your application if the needs change. So we're making it easier and we're introducing a new model of satellite services that makes it quite appealing for companies and for organizations. Our other clients are using these services in a completely different way. One of our clients is the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development. Now, the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development has projects in Africa, in South America. They build roads, they build hospitals. Normally, they track their progress by sending inspectors out to see how many kilometers of road was built.

8:51Andrew Mueller:With the services that we are offering, they can not only track how many miles of road was built every day, but they can also see over a longer period of time, let's say a year or two, how that road has impacted that community. Has it improved the economic situation in this so that they can compare their projects across the globe with other projects and start to invest and double down where they have the most impact. So they can run their own application on our constellation, whereas a defense client would run its own application on its client. And both of them live side by side with complete separation and complete privacy, just like we would today on cloud computing.

9:34Andrew Mueller:We're bringing cloud computing type of model to satellite services.

9:38Hamdullah Mohib:We're always interested in talking about the personal stories of the people involved with the companies that speak to us on the entrepreneurs. What was the beginning of your interest in this field? Because, again, to bring listeners up to speed, you had quite the picturesque CV up until this point. You were Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States, national security advisor to the government of Afghanistan before the Taliban retook the country in 2021. Was space always an interest for you while you were working in politics and diplomacy?

10:10Andrew Mueller:It definitely was. So my first interaction with space services was when I was the director of information technologies at the American University of Afghanistan. This is just after the civil war and just after the Taliban rule. We did not have fiber optic cables to run our internet services. And so we relied on satellites to have our basic communication needs met. And then as I shifted to government services, especially in my last role as a national security advisor, our country was at war. We could not go to places. We could not do census. We didn't have services offered in rural areas where there was conflict.

10:50Andrew Mueller:Satellite services helped us identify the number of people in those areas. So that's how we counted people. But it was also understanding the terrain. And even for a country as basic as when it comes to technology as Afghanistan, had a lot of reliance on space. And then when I came to the UAE and as we were building Marlan space, we were thinking about how could we now enhance those capabilities So the idea of development projects being tracked, they were ghost schools in Afghanistan and they were ghost schools because nobody could go and track them. And so with our offer to Abu Dhabi Fund for Development is how do we solve for those real problems?

11:31Andrew Mueller:As someone who has been on the other end of governance and on the other end of technology users, we wanted to build in the DNA of Marlan Space and Orbit Works services that solve real problems. And so the past is as much as part of the journey as the current is.

11:47Hamdullah Mohib:In that context, is it your sense that the government of the United Arab Emirates sees possible soft power applications to a UAE space program as well? The idea that UAE branded spacecraft could be in the heavens solving problems for less fortunate countries on the ground?

12:07Andrew Mueller:Of course, that's the goal of every country where they're offering services and help, let's say, building roads and hospital. That is soft power. But in this case, it's a little bit more than that. What we are building is a knowledge economy. The UAE has relied on oil economy for a long time, and they have had ambitions to move away from that. And they've diversified. The UAE has diversified in many other areas. There is production of steel. There is a lot of agriculture now internally in investments across the globe in technologies and in traditional industries such as tourism, high tech is one of those pillars in which it feels, the UAE feels it needs to make a big impact because these are the ones that are the highest ticket items.

12:55Andrew Mueller:So a satellite service is much more expensive than some of the other services that we could export. So it's not just soft power that it wants to project that the UAE would like to see. It wants to see itself turn into a knowledge economy in which we contribute to the global development. This project, for example, the fact that we are today offering services, export services in space, is a huge leap from its humble beginnings.

13:24Hamdullah Mohib:Do you have any sense or any worry that recent events have derailed any of that? Because obviously, one of the UAE's great selling points to the world was that it is this oasis of stability in a usually volatile region. And the UAE has, through no great fault of its own, been reminded that it's not necessarily entirely immune to the region's difficulties.

13:50Andrew Mueller:Well, I think the events of the last few months has actually proven something that many doubters had over the UAE. And that was, it is a soft place and it cannot defend itself. It will always need, if one incident happened, people would leave. Well, it has proven that despite these tremendous number of attacks coming towards it, it has been able to defend its territory and its population. And I think that has added to the confidence level in the industry, at least I work with. I work with a lot of people who are not Emiratis who have come here to work and their safety is important to me. And then, of course, it's important to our company's survival.

14:31Andrew Mueller:And they have all shown a tremendous amount of confidence seeing how the UAE has responded to. It's not the fact that it got attacked. It's the fact that it was able to contain and respond in ways to protect its territory and the people that live in it.

14:48Hamdullah Mohib:But that said, has there been any, I guess, change in the tone of conversation around the space program, particularly in recent weeks, that it's going to need to play a greater role in the UAE's future defence?

15:00Andrew Mueller:I think the conflict is definitely going to, will be changing the outlook of how this entire region sees itself and how it starts to look into building capabilities so that it can better prepare and defend itself. Space services are one of those areas where we need to have more capabilities in order to not be surprised. And companies that previously provide services prioritize their own governments. So they're not necessarily providing services to a country that's currently under attack, but their own governments, because they're more important to, they're more important clients to them. Having your own capability where it cannot be cut off is even more important to have today than it ever was before.

15:48Hamdullah Mohib:I also wanted to ask a bit about that regional picture, because obviously there's been huge investments made in space by Saudi Arabia and Oman as well. Do you perceive the makings there of what we might have thought of during the Cold War as a space race, or is it more cooperative and collaborative than that?

16:07Andrew Mueller:I think in any high-tech industry, it's impossible for one country or one region to completely dominate. So there has to be collaboration. I think sovereignty in this case is more by collaboration. We will never be able to have complete vertical integration of space assets, space services. It's about building the right type of partnership so that we can be a significant partner and a contributor. This is why we built Orbitworks as a joint venture. This joint venture is between a U.S. company and an Emirati company. But this U.S. company, Loft Orbital, also has a base in France, which became critical for us to use for the services that we offer that government.

16:51Andrew Mueller:And also to secure the supply chain. It's not just building a facility is not enough. We have to build the partnerships to be able to secure all the different parts that go into a sophisticated and complex machine, such as a satellite. And so I think as this region starts to look at space as an important element, it's not so much of competing over the same things, but it's more of complementary capabilities. So Oman, for example, has a coastline that's more amenable to launching rockets from than perhaps Saudi Arabia or the UAE would be. And in the same way, the UAE has the infrastructure to attract talent.

17:34Andrew Mueller:We have schools. It's easy to live and has a great life. So it's easier to attract talent. So capabilities, other capabilities could be built here. I would say if we were to build an ecosystem for space assets, it would have to be more collaborative. I personally believe that a rising tide lifts all boats. And I think we have to work with all of our partners in the region to try to build these capabilities. Because if we try to do it all by ourselves, we will never be able to succeed in the same way as if we work collaboratively.

18:10Hamdullah Mohib:How much more needs to go into that aspect you mentioned, though, of building the infrastructure that attracts talent? Because there is talk of an actual satellite manufacturing base in Abu Dhabi, which is obviously going to be a fairly substantial production. What does that require in terms of just the room you need, the funding and the personnel?

18:32Andrew Mueller:So we had to make quite a lot of difficult decisions. We're literally building spacecraft. This is rocket science as we speak. And so it's not an easy task that we're undertaking. But we also had to make some difficult decisions about where we're going to put this facility. We put it somewhere in between Abu Dhabi and Dubai. And that was a very critical decision because depending on the age and the kind of lifestyle people have, they prefer to live in Dubai or in Abu Dhabi. If you are a family, you have kids, you want to live in Abu Dhabi, which is a much safer, an easier place for kids to be raised.

19:08Andrew Mueller:But if you are young and want to live life on the edge, there is Dubai. And so we had to make it equidistant for them, for us to be able to attract the talent. And that's something we offer. We tell them. We attract people from East and West. Everybody calls with different culture, with different type of living expectations. And so we can offer them all. We are right in the middle where however life you choose. And we get asked quite a lot of questions before people decide to come and work with us. And some of those are, I have kids and I would like such and such school. I would like them to, they may be French and say, I would like them to go to a French school.

19:48Andrew Mueller:And we can tell them, in fact, there is one and here is the location. And if you worked here, here is how long it will take you to drop your kids off in the morning before you come to work. So this infrastructure is extremely important. They ask us questions about banking. Can I bank? Is it safe for me to keep my money in a bank? How do I operate? Can I transfer money? So some of these people who have never been to our region, they don't know what it's like. They've heard in the news that it's the Middle East. And so to them, they lump up the entire region into one. It's difficult for them to separate it, especially if they've never traveled here.

20:26Andrew Mueller:And so when I say the infrastructure, I mean all of that infrastructure. That infrastructure means schools. That infrastructure means sporting facilities. That infrastructure means people have hobbies, arts. All of that already pre-exists. They have banking. They have travel arrangements that can make it possible for them to live here. And then we ask them the difficult task to say, come and now let's build satellites. But if we didn't have all of the other infrastructure, it would be really difficult to then ask them of this tremendous task. So I think any nation that wants to build needs to think about all of that.