Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Natalia Bailey,
00:00:02 a rocket scientist and spacecraft propulsion engineer
00:00:06 previously at MIT and now the founder and CTO
00:00:09 of Axion Systems,
00:00:11 specializing in efficient space propulsion engines
00:00:14 for satellites and spacecraft.
00:00:16 So these are not the engines that get us
00:00:19 from the ground on Earth out to space,
00:00:22 but rather the engines that move us around in space
00:00:25 once we get out there.
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00:00:51 As a side note, let me say something about Natalia’s story.
00:00:54 She has talked about how when she was young,
00:00:57 she would often look up at the stars
00:00:59 and dream of alien intelligences
00:01:01 that one day we could communicate with.
00:01:03 This moment of childlike cosmic curiosity
00:01:06 is at the core of my own interest in space
00:01:09 and extraterrestrial life and in general
00:01:12 in artificial intelligence, science, and engineering.
00:01:15 Amid the meetings and the papers and the career rat race
00:01:19 and all the awards,
00:01:21 let’s not let ourselves lose that childlike wonder.
00:01:24 Sadly, we’re on Earth for only a very short time,
00:01:27 so let’s have fun solving some of the biggest puzzles
00:01:30 in the universe while we’re here.
00:01:32 If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
00:01:34 review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify,
00:01:37 support it on Patreon,
00:01:38 or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
00:01:41 And now, here’s my conversation with Natalia Bailey.
00:01:46 You said that you spent your whole life dreaming about space
00:01:49 and also pondering the big existential question
00:01:52 of whether there is or isn’t intelligent life,
00:01:56 intelligent alien civilizations out there.
00:01:58 So what do you think?
00:02:00 Do you think there’s life out there?
00:02:02 Intelligent life?
00:02:03 Intelligent life, that’s trickier.
00:02:07 I think looking at the likelihood
00:02:11 of a self replicating organism
00:02:15 given how much time the universe has existed
00:02:20 and how many stars with planets,
00:02:23 I think it’s likely that there’s other life.
00:02:27 Intelligent life, I’m hopeful,
00:02:30 I’m a little discouraged that we haven’t yet been in touch.
00:02:34 As I’m hopeful.
00:02:35 Allegedly, I mean, it’s also.
00:02:37 In our dimensions and so on, yeah.
00:02:39 It’s also possible that they have been in touch
00:02:42 and we just haven’t, we’re too dumb to realize
00:02:46 they’re communicating with us.
00:02:47 In whichever, it’s the Carl Sagan idea
00:02:51 that they may be communicating at a time scale
00:02:53 that’s totally different.
00:02:54 Like their signals are in a totally different time scale
00:02:57 or in a totally different kind of medium of communication.
00:03:01 It could be our own, it could be the birth of human beings.
00:03:10 Whatever the magic that makes us who we are,
00:03:13 the collective intelligence thing,
00:03:15 that could be aliens themselves.
00:03:17 That could be the medium of communication.
00:03:19 Like the nature of our consciousness
00:03:21 and intelligence itself is the medium of communication.
00:03:24 And like being able to ask the questions themselves,
00:03:28 I’ve never thought of it that way.
00:03:30 Like actually, yeah, asking the question
00:03:32 whether aliens exist might be the very medium
00:03:34 by which they communicate.
00:03:35 It’s like they send questions.
00:03:38 So some of this like collective emergent behavior
00:03:42 is the signal.
00:03:44 Is the signal, yeah.
00:03:46 So.
00:03:47 That’s interesting, yeah.
00:03:48 Because maybe that’s how we would communicate with,
00:03:50 if you think about it, if we were way, way, way smarter,
00:03:53 like a thousand years from now, we somehow survive,
00:03:56 like how would we actually communicate?
00:03:59 In a way that’s like, if we broadcast the signal,
00:04:05 and then it could somehow like percolate
00:04:07 throughout the universe,
00:04:09 like that signal having an impact on.
00:04:10 Multiverse.
00:04:11 Multiverse, of course, that would have a signal,
00:04:16 an effect on the most possible,
00:04:19 the highest number of possible civilizations.
00:04:21 What would that signal be?
00:04:22 It might not be like sending a few
00:04:24 like stupid little hello world messages.
00:04:28 It might be something more impactful.
00:04:32 It’s almost like impactful in a way
00:04:36 where they don’t have to have the capability to hear it.
00:04:40 It like forces the message to have an impact.
00:04:42 Right.
00:04:43 My train of thought has never gone there,
00:04:46 but I like it.
00:04:47 And also somewhere in there,
00:04:50 I think it’s implied that something travels faster
00:04:53 than the speed of light, which I’m also really hopeful for.
00:04:58 Oh, you’re hopeful.
00:04:59 Are you excited by the possibility
00:05:01 that there’s intelligent life out there?
00:05:03 Sort of, you work on the engineering side of things.
00:05:08 It’s this very kind of focused pursuit
00:05:10 of moving things through space efficiently.
00:05:15 But if you zoom out,
00:05:18 one of the cool things that this enables us to do is find,
00:05:22 get even intelligent life,
00:05:23 just life on Mars or on Europa or something like that.
00:05:28 Does that excite you?
00:05:29 Does that scare you?
00:05:31 Oh, it’s very exciting.
00:05:32 I mean, it’s the whole reason I went into the field
00:05:36 I’m in is to contribute to building the body of knowledge
00:05:42 that we have as a species.
00:05:46 So very exciting.
00:05:47 Do you think there’s life on Mars?
00:05:50 Like no longer, well, already living,
00:05:54 but currently living, but also no longer living,
00:05:57 like that we might be able to find life,
00:05:59 as some people suspect, basic microbial life.
00:06:03 I’m not so sure about in our own solar system.
00:06:07 And I do think it might be hard to untangle
00:06:10 if we somehow contaminated other things as well.
00:06:15 So I’m not sure about this close to home.
00:06:19 That’d be really exciting.
00:06:20 Yes.
00:06:21 Do you think about the Drake equation much of like?
00:06:24 That was what got me into all of this, yeah.
00:06:28 Yeah, because one of the questions is how hard is it
00:06:31 for life to start on a habitable planet?
00:06:34 Like if you have a lot of the basic conditions,
00:06:36 not exactly like Earth, but basic Earth like conditions,
00:06:39 how hard is it for life to start?
00:06:41 And if you find life on Mars or find life on Europa,
00:06:46 that means it’s way easier.
00:06:48 That’s a good thing to confirm
00:06:49 that if you have a habitable planet,
00:06:53 then there’s going to be life.
00:06:55 And that like immediately, that would be super exciting
00:06:58 because that means there’s like trillions of planets
00:07:02 with basic life out there.
00:07:04 Though of all the planets in our solar system,
00:07:07 Earth is clearly the most habitable.
00:07:09 So I would not be discouraged
00:07:12 if we didn’t find it on another planet in our solar system.
00:07:17 True, and again, that life could look very different.
00:07:19 It’s habitable for Earth like life,
00:07:21 but it could be totally different.
00:07:23 I still think that trees are quite possibly
00:07:25 more intelligent than humans,
00:07:27 but their intelligence is carried out over a time scale
00:07:31 that we’re just not able to appreciate.
00:07:33 Like they might be running
00:07:34 the entirety of human civilization,
00:07:36 and we’re just like too dumb to realize
00:07:38 that they’re the smart ones.
00:07:40 Maybe that’s the alien message.
00:07:43 It’s in the trees.
00:07:44 It’s in the trees.
00:07:47 Yeah, it’s not in the monolith in the Utah desert.
00:07:50 It’s in the trees.
00:07:51 Right, yeah.
00:07:52 So let’s go to space exploration.
00:07:55 How do you think we would get humans to Mars?
00:07:57 I think SpaceX and Elon Musk will be the ones
00:08:01 that get the first human setting foot on Mars,
00:08:06 and probably not that long from now
00:08:10 from us having this conversation.
00:08:12 Maybe we’ll inflate his timeline a little bit,
00:08:14 but I tend to believe the goals he sets.
00:08:19 So I think that will happen relatively soon.
00:08:22 As far as when and what it will take
00:08:25 to get humans living there in a more permanent way,
00:08:30 I have a glib answer, which is when we can invent
00:08:34 a time machine to go back to the early Cold War,
00:08:38 and instead of uniting around sending people to the moon,
00:08:43 we pick Mars as the destination.
00:08:45 So really, I say that because there’s nothing
00:08:49 truly scientifically or technologically impossible
00:08:54 about doing that soon.
00:08:57 It’s more politically and financially,
00:09:00 and those are the obstacles, I think, to that.
00:09:04 Well, I wonder of when you colonize
00:09:07 with more than, I say, five people on Mars,
00:09:10 you have to start thinking about the kind of rules
00:09:14 you have on Mars, and just speaking of the Cold War,
00:09:18 who gets to own the land?
00:09:21 You know, you start planting flags,
00:09:23 and you start to make decisions.
00:09:25 And like SpaceX says, it’s probably a little bit trolly,
00:09:30 but they have this nice paragraph in their contracts
00:09:34 where it talks about that human governments on Earth
00:09:41 or Earth governments have no jurisdiction on Mars.
00:09:46 Like the rules, the Martians get to define their own rules.
00:09:50 It sounds very much like the founding fathers
00:09:53 for this country.
00:09:54 That’s the kind of language.
00:09:57 It’s interesting that that’s in there,
00:10:02 and it makes you think perhaps that needs to be leveraged.
00:10:07 Like you have to be very clever about leveraging that
00:10:10 to create a little bit of a Cold War feeling.
00:10:14 It seems like we humans need a little bit of a competition.
00:10:18 Do you think that’s necessary to succeed
00:10:21 and to get the necessary investment,
00:10:25 or can the pure pursuit of science be enough?
00:10:28 No, I think we’re seeing right now
00:10:30 the pure pursuit of science.
00:10:33 I mean, that results in pretty tiny budgets for exploration.
00:10:39 There has to be some disaster impending doom
00:10:43 to get us onto another planet in a permanent way.
00:10:48 I don’t know, financially, I just don’t know
00:10:50 if the private sector can support that,
00:10:55 but I don’t wish that there is some catastrophe
00:10:59 coming our way that spurs us to do that.
00:11:03 Yeah, I’m unsure what the business model is
00:11:05 for colonizing Mars.
00:11:07 Yeah, exactly.
00:11:09 Yeah, like there is for, we’ll talk about satellites.
00:11:11 There’s probably a lot of business models around satellites,
00:11:14 but there’s not enough short term business.
00:11:18 I guess that’s how business works.
00:11:19 Like you should have a path to making money
00:11:23 in like the next 10 years.
00:11:25 Well, and maybe even more broadly,
00:11:29 and looping back to something we said earlier,
00:11:33 I don’t know that getting humans off this planet
00:11:37 and spreading like bacteria
00:11:42 is what we’re supposed to be doing in the first place.
00:11:45 So maybe we can go, but should we?
00:11:49 And I’m probably an unusual person
00:11:54 for thinking that in my industry
00:11:56 because humans want to explore,
00:11:59 but I almost wonder, are we putting unnecessary obstacles?
00:12:03 Like we’re very finicky biological things
00:12:07 in the way of some more robotic or more
00:12:12 silicon based exploration.
00:12:15 And yeah, do we need to colonize and spread?
00:12:19 I’m not sure.
00:12:20 What do you think is the role of AI in space?
00:12:22 Do you, in your work, again, we’ll talk about it,
00:12:25 but do you see more and more of the space vehicles,
00:12:32 spacecraft being run by artificial intelligence systems?
00:12:37 More than just like the flight control,
00:12:39 but like the management?
00:12:41 Yeah, I don’t have a lot of color to the dreams
00:12:43 I have about way in the future in AI,
00:12:46 but I do think that removing,
00:12:51 it’s hard for humans to even make a trip to Mars,
00:12:54 much less go anywhere farther than that.
00:12:58 And I think we’ll have more,
00:13:03 again, I’m probably unusual in having these thoughts,
00:13:05 but perhaps be able to generate more knowledge
00:13:09 and understand more if we stop trying to send humans
00:13:13 and instead, I don’t know if we’re talking about AI
00:13:17 in a truly artificial intelligence way
00:13:20 or AI as we kind of use it today,
00:13:23 but maybe sending a Petri dish or two of like stem cells
00:13:29 and some robotic handlers instead,
00:13:32 if we still need to send our DNA
00:13:34 because we’re really stuck on that,
00:13:36 but if not, maybe not even that Petri dish.
00:13:40 So I see, I think what I’m saying is,
00:13:42 I see a much bigger role in the future
00:13:44 of AI for space exploration.
00:13:47 It’s kind of sad to think that,
00:13:50 I mean, I’m sure we’ll eventually send a spacecraft
00:13:53 with efficient propulsion,
00:13:55 like some of the stuff you work on out
00:13:57 that travels just really far with some robots on it
00:14:00 and with some DNA in a Petri dish,
00:14:05 and then human civilization destroys itself,
00:14:08 and then there’ll just be this floating spacecraft
00:14:11 that eventually gets somewhere or not.
00:14:13 That’s a sad thought, like this lonely spacecraft
00:14:16 just kind of traveling through space
00:14:18 and humans are all dead.
00:14:20 Well, it depends on what the goal is, right?
00:14:27 Another way to look at it is we’ve preserved,
00:14:29 it’s like a little time capsule of knowledge, DNA,
00:14:33 that will outlive us.
00:14:36 Well, that’s beautiful.
00:14:37 Yeah.
00:14:39 It’s how I sleep at night.
00:14:41 So you also mentioned that you wanted to be an astronaut.
00:14:43 Yes.
00:14:45 So even though you said you’re unusual
00:14:47 in thinking like, it’s nice here on Earth,
00:14:50 and then we might want to be sending robots up there,
00:14:53 you wanted to be a human that goes out there.
00:14:57 Would you like to one day travel to Mars?
00:15:01 You know, if it becomes sort of more open
00:15:04 to civilian travel and that kind of thing?
00:15:07 Like are you, like vacation wise,
00:15:09 like if we’re talking vacations,
00:15:12 would you like to vacation on Earth or vacation on Mars?
00:15:15 I wish that I had a better answer, but no.
00:15:20 I wanted to be an astronaut because I,
00:15:23 first of all, I like working in labs and doing experiments.
00:15:28 And I wanted to go to like the coolest lab, the ISS,
00:15:34 and do some experiments there.
00:15:37 That’s being decommissioned, which is sad,
00:15:39 but you know, there will be others, I’m sure.
00:15:43 The ISS is being decommissioned?
00:15:44 Yes, I think by 2025, it’s not going to be in use anymore.
00:15:49 But I think there are other,
00:15:51 there are private companies that are going to be putting up
00:15:54 stations and things.
00:15:55 So it’s primarily like a research lab, essentially.
00:15:57 Yes.
00:15:58 A research lab in space, that’s a cool way to say it.
00:15:59 It’s like the coolest possible research lobby.
00:16:02 That’s where I wanted to go.
00:16:03 And now though, my risk profile has changed a little bit.
00:16:08 I have three little ones and I won’t be in the first
00:16:15 thousand people to go to Mars, let’s put it that way.
00:16:18 Yeah, Earth is kind of nice.
00:16:20 We have our troubles, but overall, it’s pretty nice.
00:16:23 Again, it’s the Netflix.
00:16:25 Okay, let’s talk rockets.
00:16:28 How does a rocket engine work or any kind of engine
00:16:31 that can get us to space or float around in space?
00:16:36 The basic principle is conservation of momentum.
00:16:40 So you throw stuff out the back of the engine
00:16:47 and that pushes the rocket and the spacecraft
00:16:50 in the other direction.
00:16:51 So there are two main types of rocket propulsion.
00:16:57 The one people are more familiar with is chemical
00:17:00 because it’s loud and there’s fire.
00:17:04 And that’s what’s used for launch and is more televised.
00:17:08 So in those types of systems, you usually have a fuel
00:17:12 on an oxidizer and they react and combust
00:17:15 and release stored chemical energy.
00:17:18 And that energy heats the resultant gas
00:17:23 and that’s funneled out the back through a nozzle,
00:17:26 directed out the back and then that momentum exchange
00:17:30 pushes the spacecraft forward.
00:17:32 Is there an interesting difference in liquid
00:17:34 and solid fuel in those contexts?
00:17:36 They’re both lumped in the same.
00:17:38 So chemical just means that the release of energy
00:17:43 from those bonds essentially.
00:17:45 So a solid fuel works the same way.
00:17:48 And the other main category is electric propulsion.
00:17:52 So instead of chemical energy,
00:17:54 you’re using electrical energy,
00:17:56 usually from batteries or solar panels.
00:18:00 And in this case, the stuff you’re pushing out the back
00:18:05 would be charged particles.
00:18:07 So instead of combustion and heat,
00:18:11 you end up with charged particles
00:18:13 and you force them out the back of the spacecraft
00:18:16 using either an electrostatic field or electromagnetic.
00:18:21 But it’s the same momentum exchange
00:18:23 and same idea stuff out the back
00:18:25 and everything else goes forward.
00:18:27 Cool, so those are the big two categories.
00:18:30 What’s the difference maybe in the challenges of each,
00:18:35 in the challenges of each, the use cases of each
00:18:41 and how they’re used today, the physics of each
00:18:45 and where they’re used, all that kind of stuff.
00:18:48 Anything interesting about the two categories
00:18:49 that distinguishes them?
00:18:51 Besides the chemical one being the big sexy flames.
00:18:56 Yeah, fire.
00:18:57 Fire, yeah.
00:18:59 Chemical is very well understood
00:19:02 in its simplest form, it’s like a firework.
00:19:06 So it’s been around since 400 BC or something like that.
00:19:12 So that even the big engines are quite well understood.
00:19:15 I think one of the last gaps there is probably
00:19:23 what exactly are the products of combustion?
00:19:27 Our modeling abilities kind of fall apart there
00:19:32 because it’s hot and gases are moving
00:19:35 and you end up kind of having to venture
00:19:41 into lots of different interdisciplinary fields of science
00:19:46 to try to solve that.
00:19:47 And that’s quite complex, but we have pretty good models
00:19:51 for some of the more like emergent behaviors
00:19:54 of that system anyways.
00:19:55 But that’s I think one of the last unsolved pieces.
00:20:00 And really the kind of what people care about there
00:20:04 is making it more fuel efficient.
00:20:07 So the chemical stuff, you can get a lot
00:20:11 of instantaneous thrusts, but it’s not very fuel efficient.
00:20:15 It’s much more fuel efficient to go
00:20:16 with the electric type of propulsion.
00:20:19 So that’s where people spend a lot of their time
00:20:23 is trying to make that more efficient in terms
00:20:25 of thrust per unit of fuel.
00:20:28 And then there’s always considerations
00:20:31 like heating and cooling.
00:20:33 It’s very hot, which is good if it heats the gases,
00:20:36 but bad if it melts the rocket and things like that.
00:20:40 So there’s always a lot of work on heating
00:20:42 and cooling and the engine cycles and things like that.
00:20:46 And then on electric propulsion,
00:20:48 I find it like much more refreshingly poorly understood.
00:20:56 Lots more mysteries.
00:20:57 Yeah, I think so.
00:20:58 One of the classes I took in college,
00:21:03 we spent 90% of the class on chemical propulsion
00:21:06 and then the last 10% on electric.
00:21:07 And the professor said like,
00:21:09 we only sort of understand how it works,
00:21:12 but it works kind of.
00:21:13 And it’s like, that’s interesting.
00:21:16 Yeah, and even an ion engine,
00:21:20 which is probably one of the most straightforward
00:21:22 because it’s just an electrostatic engine,
00:21:27 but it has this really awesome combination
00:21:29 of like quantum mechanics and material science
00:21:34 and fluid dynamics and electrostatics.
00:21:38 And it’s just very intriguing to me.
00:21:42 First of all, can you actually zoom out even more?
00:21:44 Like, cause you mentioned ion propulsion engine
00:21:47 is a subset of electric.
00:21:51 So like maybe, is there a categories of electric engines
00:21:53 and then we can zoom in on ion propulsion?
00:21:55 Yes, so sure.
00:21:57 There’s the two most kind of conventional types
00:22:01 that have been around since the sixties
00:22:03 are ion engines and hall thrusters.
00:22:06 And ion engines are a little bit simpler
00:22:08 because they don’t use a magnetic field
00:22:11 for generating thrust.
00:22:12 And then there are also some other types of plasma engines,
00:22:20 but that don’t fit into those two categories.
00:22:21 So just kind of other plasma,
00:22:23 like a VASMIR engine, which we could get into.
00:22:28 And then those are probably the main three categories
00:22:32 that would be fun to talk about.
00:22:33 Oh, and then of course, the category of engine
00:22:36 that I work on, which has a lot of similarities
00:22:39 to an ion engine, but could be considered its own class
00:22:42 called a colloid thruster.
00:22:44 Colloid, cool.
00:22:45 Okay, so what is an ion propulsion, I imagine?
00:22:48 Okay, so in an ion engine, you have an ionization chamber
00:22:54 and you inject the propellant into that chamber.
00:22:57 And this is usually a neutral gas like xenon or argon.
00:23:03 So you inject that into the chamber
00:23:05 and you also inject a stream of really high energy electrons
00:23:10 and everything’s just moving around very randomly in there.
00:23:16 And the whole goal is to have one of those electrons
00:23:21 collide with one of those neutral atoms
00:23:24 and turn it into an ion.
00:23:26 So kick off a secondary electron and now you have…
00:23:29 Plasma.
00:23:30 Yes.
00:23:31 Okay.
00:23:31 And now you have a charged xenon or argon ion
00:23:36 and more electrons and so on.
00:23:39 And then some fraction of those ions will happen
00:23:44 to make it to this downstream electric field
00:23:47 that we set up between two grids with holes in them.
00:23:50 And in terms of area, the same amount of those ions
00:23:55 also runs into the walls and lose their charge
00:23:58 and that’s where some of the inefficiencies come in.
00:24:01 But the very lucky few make it to the downstream
00:24:05 and the very lucky few make it to those holes in that grid
00:24:09 and there are two grids actually
00:24:11 and you apply a voltage differential between them
00:24:14 and that sets up an electric field.
00:24:17 And a charged particle in an electric field
00:24:20 creates a force.
00:24:21 And so those ions are accelerated out the back of the engine
00:24:25 and the reaction force is what pushes the spacecraft forward.
00:24:30 If you’re following along and tallying these charges,
00:24:35 now we’ve just sent a positive beam of ions
00:24:39 out the back of the spacecraft and for our purposes here,
00:24:44 the spacecraft is neutral.
00:24:45 So eventually those ions will come back
00:24:48 and hit the spacecraft because it’s a positive beam.
00:24:51 So you also have to have an external cathode producer
00:24:56 of electrons outside the engine
00:24:58 that pumps electrons into that beam and neutralizes that.
00:25:02 So now it’s net neutral everywhere
00:25:03 and it won’t come back to the spacecraft.
00:25:05 So that’s an ion engine.
00:25:07 What temperature are we talking about here?
00:25:09 So in terms of like the chemical based engines,
00:25:13 those are super hot.
00:25:14 You mentioned plasma here.
00:25:16 How hot does this thing get?
00:25:20 I mean, is that an interesting thing to talk about
00:25:22 in a sense that is that an interesting distinction
00:25:25 or is the heat, I mean, it’s all gonna be hot.
00:25:28 No, so it’s important especially
00:25:31 for some of these smaller satellites
00:25:32 people are into launching these days.
00:25:35 So it’s important because you have the plasma
00:25:39 but also those high energy electrons are hot
00:25:42 and if you have a lot of those that are going into the walls
00:25:46 you do have to care about the temperature.
00:25:48 So I’m having trouble remembering off the top of my head.
00:25:52 I think they’re at like a hundred electron volts
00:25:54 in terms of the electron energy
00:25:56 and then I’d have to remember how to convert that
00:25:59 into Kelvin.
00:26:00 Can you stick your hand in it?
00:26:02 Not move the temperature.
00:26:03 Not recommended, yeah.
00:26:05 So what’s a colloid engine?
00:26:07 So the same rocket people that came up with these ideas
00:26:16 for electric propulsion probably in the middle
00:26:19 of last century also realized that there’s one more place
00:26:24 to get charged particles from if you’re going
00:26:28 to be using electric propulsion.
00:26:30 So you can take a gas and you can ionize it
00:26:33 but there are also some liquids particularly ionic liquids
00:26:37 which is what we use that you also can use
00:26:41 as a source of ions and if you have ions
00:26:43 and you put them in a field you generate a force.
00:26:45 So they recognize that but part of being able
00:26:51 to leverage that technique is being able
00:26:53 to kind of manipulate those liquids on a scale
00:26:57 of nanometers or very few microns.
00:27:01 So the diameter of a human hair or something like that
00:27:05 and in the 50s there was no way to do that.
00:27:08 So they wrote about it in some books
00:27:10 and then it kind of died for a little bit
00:27:12 and then with silicon mems, computer processors
00:27:17 and when foundry started becoming more ubiquitous
00:27:21 and my advisor started at MIT kind of put those ideas
00:27:28 back together and was like, hey actually there’s now a way
00:27:31 to build this and bring this other technique to life.
00:27:36 And so the way that you actually get the ions
00:27:40 out of those liquids is you put the liquid
00:27:43 in again a strong electric field
00:27:47 and the electric field stresses the liquid
00:27:50 and you keep increasing the field
00:27:51 and eventually the liquid will assume a conical shape.
00:27:57 It’s when the electric field pressure that’s pulling on it
00:28:01 exactly balances the liquid’s own restoring force
00:28:04 which is its surface tension.
00:28:06 So you have this balance and the liquid assumes a cone
00:28:10 when it’s perfectly balanced like that
00:28:12 and at the tip of a cone the radius of curvature
00:28:16 goes to zero right at the tip
00:28:18 and the electric field right at the tip of a sharp object
00:28:24 would go to infinity because it goes as one over the radius
00:28:31 and one over the radius squared
00:28:33 and instead of the electric field going to infinity
00:28:37 and maybe like generating a wormhole or something,
00:28:40 a jet of ions instead starts issuing
00:28:44 from the tip of that liquid.
00:28:46 So the field becomes strong enough there
00:28:47 that you can pull ions out of the liquid.
00:28:50 What is the liquid?
00:28:51 We’re talking about, there’s a bunch of different ones.
00:28:54 You can do it with different types of liquids.
00:28:58 It depends on how easily you can free ions
00:29:02 from their neighbors and if it has enough surface tension
00:29:06 so that you can build up a high enough electric field
00:29:09 but what we use are called ionic liquids
00:29:12 and they’re really just positive.
00:29:13 They’re very similar to salts but they happen to be liquid
00:29:17 over a really wide range of temperatures.
00:29:19 This sounds like really cool.
00:29:21 Okay, so how big is the cone we’re talking about?
00:29:25 What’s the size of this cone that generates the ions?
00:29:27 So if you have a cone that’s emitting pure ions,
00:29:33 I can’t remember if it’s the radius or diameter
00:29:35 but that emission is happening from,
00:29:39 of that cone is something like 20 nanometers.
00:29:41 Oh, I was imagining something slightly bigger
00:29:45 but so like this is tiny, tiny.
00:29:49 Hence the only being able to do it recently.
00:29:52 Yeah, that’s right.
00:29:52 So this is all controlled by a computer, I guess.
00:29:55 Like, or like, how do you create a cone
00:30:00 that generates ions at a scale of nanometers exactly?
00:30:04 So the kind of main trick to making this work
00:30:08 is that physically we manufacture hundreds
00:30:12 or thousands of sharp structures and then supply the liquid
00:30:16 to the tips.
00:30:17 So that does a few things.
00:30:20 It makes sure that we know where the ion beams are forming.
00:30:23 So we can put holes in the grid above them
00:30:25 to let them actually leave instead of hitting, right?
00:30:27 Cool.
00:30:29 But it also reduces the actual field we have,
00:30:32 the voltage we have to apply to create that field
00:30:35 because the field will be much stronger
00:30:36 if we can already give the liquid a tip to form on.
00:30:41 And those tips we form have radii of curvature
00:30:46 on the order of probably like single microns.
00:30:50 So we are working at a little bit larger scale
00:30:53 but once we create that support
00:30:55 and the electric field can be focused at that tip,
00:30:57 then the tiny little cone can form on top of that.
00:31:00 So wait, so there’s something in them,
00:31:01 there’s already like a hard material
00:31:04 that like gives you the base for the cone
00:31:07 and then you’re pouring like liquid over it,
00:31:08 whatever the heck. From the bottom, yeah.
00:31:10 It’s porous, so we actually supply it
00:31:12 from the back of the chip and then it wicks.
00:31:13 And then liquid forms on top on that structure.
00:31:17 And then you somehow make it like super sharp, the liquid,
00:31:20 so the ions can leave.
00:31:24 And then we’ve applied that field to get those ions
00:31:28 and that same field then accelerates them.
00:31:31 That’s awesome. And there’s like a bunch of these?
00:31:33 Yeah, I should have brought something.
00:31:37 So we…
00:31:38 You could just pretend that you have some nanometer cones
00:31:41 on a table here.
00:31:42 So actually, you know, kind of about this scale,
00:31:44 we build, we call them thruster chips
00:31:47 and it’s just a convenient form factor
00:31:49 and it’s a square centimeter.
00:31:51 And on each square centimeter today,
00:31:53 we have about 500 of the actual physical,
00:31:56 we call them emitters, those physical cones.
00:32:00 And we’re working on increasing that by a factor of four
00:32:04 in the coming months.
00:32:05 In size or in the density?
00:32:07 In number, in the density, the number of emitters
00:32:10 within the same square centimeter chip.
00:32:12 So that thing, cause I think I’ve seen pictures of you
00:32:14 with like a tiny thing in your hand.
00:32:15 That must be the…
00:32:17 Okay, so that’s an engine.
00:32:19 So that is kind of the ionization chamber
00:32:24 and thrust producing part of it.
00:32:26 What’s not shown, you know, in that picture
00:32:29 is the propellant tank.
00:32:31 So we can keep supplying more and more of the liquid
00:32:34 to those emission sites.
00:32:36 And then we also provide a power electronic system
00:32:40 that talks to the spacecraft
00:32:41 and turns our device on and off.
00:32:43 So that’s the colloid engine.
00:32:45 That’s the core of the colloid engine.
00:32:47 It’s, the way I’ve been talking about it,
00:32:50 it’s more of ion electrospray colloid
00:32:55 tends to mean like liquid droplets coming off of the jet.
00:33:00 But if you make smaller and smaller cones,
00:33:03 you get pure ions.
00:33:04 So we’re kind of like a subset of colloid, yes.
00:33:07 What aspects of this, you said that it’s been full
00:33:10 of mysteries from the physics perspective.
00:33:13 What aspects of this are understood
00:33:15 and what are still full of mystery?
00:33:19 Yeah, recently we’ve been understanding
00:33:24 the kind of instabilities and stable regimes of,
00:33:30 you know, how much liquid do you supply
00:33:32 and what field do you apply?
00:33:34 And why is it flickering on and off?
00:33:37 Or why does it have these weird behaviors?
00:33:39 So that’s, in the past just couple of years,
00:33:41 that’s become much more understood.
00:33:47 I think the two areas that come to mind
00:33:49 as far as not as well understood are
00:33:54 the boundary between, you know, you have,
00:33:58 we actually use kind of big molecular ions.
00:34:03 And if you’re looking at the molecular scale,
00:34:07 you have, you know, some ions that you’ve extracted
00:34:10 and they’re in this electric field.
00:34:12 One ion, you know, it’s a big molecule,
00:34:16 it’s getting energy from the electric field.
00:34:19 And some of that energy is going into the bonds
00:34:21 and making it vibrate and doing weird things to it.
00:34:24 Sometimes it breaks them apart.
00:34:26 And then zooming out to the whole beam,
00:34:30 the beam has some behaviors as this beam of ions.
00:34:34 And there’s a big gap between what are those,
00:34:38 how do you connect those?
00:34:40 And how do we understand that better
00:34:42 so that we can understand the beam performance
00:34:44 of the engine?
00:34:45 Is that a theory question or is it an engineering question?
00:34:48 Theory, definitely.
00:34:50 We’re, Axion is a startup and we’re more in the business
00:34:54 of building and testing and observing and characterizing.
00:34:59 And we’re not really diving much into that theory right now.
00:35:03 Okay, zooming out a little bit on the physics,
00:35:06 apologize for the way too big of a question,
00:35:08 but to you from either, you mentioned Axion is,
00:35:13 you know, more of sort of an engineering endeavor, right?
00:35:16 But from a perspective of physics in general,
00:35:19 science in general, or the side of engineering,
00:35:22 what do you think is the most, to you,
00:35:24 like beautiful and captivating
00:35:26 and inspiring idea in this space?
00:35:30 In this space, and then I’m gonna zoom out
00:35:33 a little bit more, but in this space,
00:35:35 I keep butting up against material science questions.
00:35:41 So I, over the past 10 years,
00:35:45 I feel like every problem or interesting thing
00:35:49 I want to work on, if you dig deep enough,
00:35:52 you end up in material science land,
00:35:55 which I find kind of exciting
00:35:57 and it makes me want to dig in more there.
00:36:00 And I was just, you know, even for our technology,
00:36:06 when we have to move the propellant from the tank
00:36:09 to the tip of the emitters, we rely a lot on capillary action
00:36:12 and you’re getting into wetting and surface energies.
00:36:15 At a scale of like nano scale.
00:36:17 Yeah, I mean, it’s, if you look further, it’s quantum too,
00:36:22 but it all is, you know,
00:36:25 a capillary action at the quantum level.
00:36:27 Yeah, so I would, it all comes back to me to, you know,
00:36:32 material science, there’s so much we don’t understand
00:36:35 at these sizes and I find that inspiring and exciting.
00:36:43 And then more broadly, you know,
00:36:45 I remember when I learned that the same equation
00:36:49 that describes flow over an airfoil
00:36:53 is used to price options, the Black Scholes equation,
00:36:57 and it’s, you know, just a partial differential equation,
00:37:01 but that kind of connectedness of the universe,
00:37:06 you know, I don’t want to use options pricing
00:37:09 and the universe in the same, but you know what I mean,
00:37:11 this connectedness I find really magical.
00:37:15 Yeah, the patterns that mathematics reveals
00:37:17 seems to echo in a bunch of different places.
00:37:20 Yes.
00:37:21 Yeah, there’s just weirdness.
00:37:22 It’s like, it really makes you think,
00:37:25 I think you’re definitely living in a simulation,
00:37:27 like whoever programmed it.
00:37:29 I like that that’s your conclusion.
00:37:30 Is using like shortcuts to program it,
00:37:34 like they didn’t, they’re just copying and pasting some codes
00:37:36 for the different parts.
00:37:38 Yeah, think of something new or just paste from over there.
00:37:41 They won’t notice.
00:37:42 My conclusion from that was I’m gonna go interview
00:37:45 for a finance job, so I had like a little detour.
00:37:49 That’s the backup option.
00:37:51 So in terms of using call it engines,
00:37:56 what’s an interesting difference between a propulsion
00:37:59 of a rocket from earth when you’re standing
00:38:02 on the ground to orbit and then the kind of propulsion
00:38:06 necessary for once you get out to orbit
00:38:08 or to like deep space to move around.
00:38:13 Yes, the reason you can’t use an engine like mine
00:38:18 to get off the ground is, the thrust it generates
00:38:24 is instantaneous thrust is very small,
00:38:27 but if you have the time and can accumulate
00:38:31 that acceleration, you can still reach speeds
00:38:33 that are very interesting for exploration
00:38:37 and even for missions with humans on them.
00:38:41 An interesting direction I think we need to go
00:38:45 as humans exploring space is the power supplies
00:38:51 for electric propulsion are limiting us
00:38:55 in that solar panels are really inefficient
00:38:58 and bulky and batteries.
00:39:01 I don’t know when anybody’s ever gonna improve
00:39:04 battery technology.
00:39:05 I know a lot of people that work on that.
00:39:09 And nuclear power, we could have a lot more powerful
00:39:14 electric propulsion system.
00:39:15 So they would be extremely fuel efficient,
00:39:17 but more instantaneous thrust to do more interesting
00:39:20 missions if we could start launching more nuclear systems.
00:39:25 So like something that’s powered, nuclear powered,
00:39:29 that’s the right way to say it.
00:39:31 Yeah.
00:39:32 But is in a small enough container that could be launched?
00:39:36 Yeah, so I mean, as a world we do launch spacecraft
00:39:42 with nuclear power systems on board,
00:39:45 but size is one consideration.
00:39:47 It hasn’t been a big focus.
00:39:49 So the reactors and the heaters and everything are bulky.
00:39:53 And so they’re really only suitable for some
00:39:56 of the much bigger interplanetary stuff.
00:39:59 So that’s one issue, but then it’s a whole like rat’s nest
00:40:03 of political stuff as well.
00:40:06 I heard, I think Elon described or somebody,
00:40:10 I think it was Elon that described the EV to all
00:40:13 like electrical, vertical takeoff and landing vehicles.
00:40:17 So basically saying rockets, obviously Elon is interested
00:40:21 in electric vehicles, right?
00:40:22 But he said that rockets can’t, in the near term,
00:40:27 it doesn’t make sense for them to be electrical.
00:40:32 What, do you see a world with the rockets that we use
00:40:36 to get into orbit are also electric based?
00:40:39 It’s possible, you can produce the thrust levels you need,
00:40:43 but you need this, a much bigger power supply.
00:40:46 And I think that would be nuclear.
00:40:49 And the only way people have been able to launch them at all
00:40:52 is that they’re in a 100 times redundancy safe mode
00:40:57 while they’re being launched and they’re not turned on
00:40:59 until they’re farther off.
00:41:00 So if you were to actually try to use it on launch,
00:41:04 I think a lot of people would still have an issue with that,
00:41:06 but someday.
00:41:08 It’s an interesting concept, nuclear.
00:41:11 It seems like people, like everybody that works
00:41:13 on nuclear power has shown how safe it is
00:41:16 as a source of energy.
00:41:18 And yet we are, seem to be, I mean, based on the history,
00:41:23 based on the excellent HBO series,
00:41:26 I’m Russian with a Chernobyl.
00:41:28 It seems like we have our risk estimation
00:41:31 about this particular power source is drastically inaccurate,
00:41:35 but that’s a fascinating idea that we would use nuclear
00:41:39 as a source for our vehicles and not just in outer space.
00:41:44 That’s cool.
00:41:45 I’m gonna have to look into that.
00:41:45 That’s super interesting.
00:41:47 Well, just last year, Trump eased up a little bit
00:41:50 on the regulations and NASA and hopefully others
00:41:55 are starting to pick up on the development.
00:41:57 So now is a good time to look into it
00:42:00 because there’s actually some movement.
00:42:02 Is that a hope for you to explore different energy sources
00:42:05 that the entirety of the vehicle uses something
00:42:09 like the entirety of the propulsion systems
00:42:13 for all aspects of the vehicle’s life travel
00:42:16 is the same or electric?
00:42:19 Is it possible for it to be the same?
00:42:20 Like the colloid engine being used for everything?
00:42:24 You could, and you would have to do it in the same way
00:42:27 we do different stages of rockets now
00:42:29 where once you’ve used up an engine or a stage,
00:42:34 you let it go because there’s really no point
00:42:36 in holding onto it.
00:42:37 So I wouldn’t necessarily want to use the same engine
00:42:41 for the whole thing, but the same technology
00:42:42 I think would be interesting.
00:42:45 Okay, so it’s possible.
00:42:46 All right, but in terms of.
00:42:47 Yeah, it comes down to the power source.
00:42:49 The power source, that’s really interesting.
00:42:51 But for the current power sources
00:42:52 and its current use cases, what’s the use case
00:42:55 for electric, like the colloid engine?
00:42:58 Can you talk about where they’re used today?
00:43:01 Sure, so chemical engines are still used quite a bit
00:43:06 once you’re in orbit, but that’s also
00:43:09 where you might choose instead to use an electric system
00:43:12 and what people do with them.
00:43:15 And this includes the ion engines and hall thrusters
00:43:18 and our engine is basically any maneuvering you need to do
00:43:22 once you’re dropped off.
00:43:24 Even if your only goal was to just stay in your orbit
00:43:30 and not move for the life of your mission,
00:43:32 you need propulsion to accomplish that
00:43:34 because the Earth’s gravity field changes
00:43:38 as you go around in orbit and pulls you
00:43:40 out of your little box.
00:43:42 There are other perturbations that can throw you off a bit.
00:43:47 And then most people want to do things
00:43:50 a little bit more interesting like maneuver
00:43:53 to avoid being hit by space debris
00:43:55 or perhaps lower their orbit to take a higher resolution
00:44:00 image of something and then return.
00:44:02 At the end of your mission, you’re supposed
00:44:06 to responsibly get rid of your satellite,
00:44:09 whether that’s burning it up, but if you’re in geo,
00:44:13 you want to push it higher into graveyard orbit.
00:44:17 What’s geo and what’s graveyard?
00:44:19 So low Earth orbit and then geosynchronous orbit
00:44:21 or geostationary orbit.
00:44:23 And there’s a graveyard?
00:44:24 Yeah, so those satellites are at like 40,000 kilometers.
00:44:29 So if they were to try to push their satellites
00:44:33 back down to burn up in the atmosphere,
00:44:35 they would need even more propulsion
00:44:37 than they’ve had for the whole lifetime of their mission.
00:44:40 So instead they push them higher
00:44:42 where it’ll take a million years
00:44:44 for it to naturally deorbit.
00:44:46 So we’re also cluttering that higher bit up as well,
00:44:50 but it’s not as pressing as Leo, which is low Earth orbit
00:44:54 where more of these commercial missions are going now.
00:44:56 Well, so how hard is the collision avoidance problem there?
00:44:59 You said some debris and stuff.
00:45:00 So like how much propulsion is needed?
00:45:03 Like how much is the life of a satellite
00:45:05 is just like a crap trying to avoid
00:45:08 like little things down there?
00:45:09 I think one of the recent rules of thumb I heard
00:45:14 was per year some of these small satellites
00:45:17 are doing like three collision avoidance maneuvers.
00:45:21 So that’s not, yeah, but it’s not zero.
00:45:25 And it takes a lot of planning and people on the ground
00:45:30 and none of that really, I don’t think right now
00:45:34 is autonomous.
00:45:36 Oh, that’s not good.
00:45:37 Yeah, and then we have a lot of folks
00:45:39 taking advantage of Moore’s law and cheaper spacecraft.
00:45:42 So they’re launching them up
00:45:44 without the ability to maneuver themselves.
00:45:46 And they’re like, well, I don’t know, just don’t hit me.
00:45:49 And three times a year that could become affordable
00:45:51 if it gets hit, maybe it won’t be damaged kind of thing,
00:45:56 that kind of logic.
00:45:57 Affordable in that instead of launching one satellite,
00:46:00 they’ll launch 20 small ones.
00:46:02 Yeah, so if one gets taken out, that’s okay.
00:46:05 But the problem is that one good sized satellite
00:46:08 getting hit, that’s like a ballistic event
00:46:11 that turns into 10,000 pieces of debris
00:46:14 that then are the things that go and hit the other satellites.
00:46:17 Yeah.
00:46:18 So do you see a world where, like in your sense,
00:46:22 in your own work and just in the space industry in general,
00:46:25 do you see the people moving towards bigger satellites
00:46:28 or smaller satellites?
00:46:29 Is there going to be a mix?
00:46:31 Like what’s, and what do we talk,
00:46:32 what does it mean for a satellite to be big and small?
00:46:36 What size are we talking about?
00:46:37 So big, the space industry prior to,
00:46:42 I don’t know, 1990, I guess the bulk of,
00:46:45 the majority of satellites were the size of a school bus
00:46:49 and cost a couple billion dollars.
00:46:53 And now our first launches were on satellites
00:47:00 the size of shoe boxes that were built
00:47:01 by high school students.
00:47:03 So that’s a very different,
00:47:05 to give you the two ends of the spectrum.
00:47:07 So big satellites will, I think they’re here to stay,
00:47:12 at least as far as I can see into the future
00:47:15 for things like broadcasting.
00:47:18 You want to be able to broadcast
00:47:21 to as many people as possible.
00:47:25 You also can’t just go to small satellites
00:47:28 and say Moore’s law for things like optics.
00:47:32 So if you have an aperture on your satellite,
00:47:34 that just, that doesn’t follow Moore’s law.
00:47:36 That’s different.
00:47:37 So it’s always going to be the size that it will be,
00:47:40 unless there’s some new physics that comes out
00:47:43 that I’m not aware of.
00:47:44 But if you need a resolution and you’re at an altitude,
00:47:46 that kind of sets your, the size of your telescope.
00:47:50 But because of Moore’s law,
00:47:52 we are able to do a lot more with smaller packages.
00:47:56 And with that comes more affordability
00:48:00 and opening up access to space to more and more people.
00:48:03 Well, what’s the smallest satellite you’ve seen go up there?
00:48:06 Like what are the smallest kind of, you said shoe boxes.
00:48:09 Yeah, so I think the smallest common form factor
00:48:14 can fit a softball inside.
00:48:17 So that’s 10 centimeters on each side.
00:48:21 But then there are some companies working on
00:48:24 fractions of that even.
00:48:26 And they’re doing things like IOT type application.
00:48:30 So it’s very low bandwidth type things,
00:48:34 but they’re finding some niches for those.
00:48:37 Do you mean like there’s a business,
00:48:38 there’s a thing to do with them?
00:48:40 Yes, either.
00:48:41 What do you do with a small satellite like that?
00:48:44 You can track a ship going across the ocean.
00:48:48 Like if you need to, if you’re just pinging something,
00:48:51 you can handle that amount of data
00:48:53 and those latencies and so on.
00:48:56 You have to have propulsion on that.
00:48:57 You have to have a little engine.
00:48:58 No, those are just letting fall out of the sky.
00:49:02 Okay, so what kind of satellite
00:49:06 would you equip a colloid engine on?
00:49:08 Anything that’s bigger than probably about 20 kilograms,
00:49:13 anything that needs to stay up for more than a year
00:49:16 or anything somebody spent more than like 100K to build
00:49:20 are kind of the ways I would think about it.
00:49:21 That’s a lot of use cases.
00:49:23 What’s a small sat?
00:49:26 Like what category?
00:49:26 Small sat is actually very big.
00:49:28 I think it’s like 700 kilograms,
00:49:31 or I keep hitting my microphone,
00:49:33 maybe 1,000 kilograms down to 200 kilograms.
00:49:40 People have their own kind of definitions
00:49:42 of how they break them up,
00:49:43 but small sat is still quite large.
00:49:46 And then it’s kind of also applied as a blanket term
00:49:49 for anything that’s not a school bus size satellite.
00:49:52 So we need to get our jargon straight in the industry.
00:49:56 So do you see a possible future where,
00:50:00 you know, there’s a few thousand satellites up there now,
00:50:02 a couple of thousand of them functioning.
00:50:05 Do you see a future where there’s like millions
00:50:07 of satellites up in orbit?
00:50:09 Or forget millions, tens of thousands,
00:50:13 which just seems like where the natural trajectory
00:50:16 of the way things are going now is going.
00:50:20 Tens of thousands, yes.
00:50:22 The two buckets of applications,
00:50:26 one is imaging and the other is communication.
00:50:30 So imaging, I think that will plateau
00:50:35 because one satellite or one constellation
00:50:39 can take an image or a video
00:50:40 and sell it to, you know, infinity customers.
00:50:44 But if you’re providing communications
00:50:47 like broadband internet or satellite cell
00:50:51 or something like that, satellite phone,
00:50:54 you know, you’re limited by your transponders and so on.
00:50:58 So to serve more people, you actually need more satellites
00:51:02 and perhaps at the rate, you know, our data consumption
00:51:06 and things are going these days.
00:51:08 Yeah, I can see tens of thousands of satellites.
00:51:12 Can I ask you a ridiculous question?
00:51:14 Yes.
00:51:15 So I’ve recently watched this documentary on Netflix
00:51:18 about flat earthers, you know,
00:51:23 the people that believe in a flat earth.
00:51:25 As somebody who develops propulsion systems
00:51:30 for satellites and for spacecraft,
00:51:33 what’s, do you use the most convincing evidence
00:51:37 that the earth is round?
00:51:40 Probably some of the photos taken from the moon.
00:51:48 Photos from the moon?
00:51:49 Okay, so it’s not from the satellite space.
00:51:52 Yeah, I think seeing that perspective,
00:51:57 maybe I’m just, I’m answering too personally
00:52:00 because I really love those photos.
00:52:03 Because they’re beautiful, yeah.
00:52:04 I really like the ones that show the moon
00:52:06 and the lunar lander and they’re taken
00:52:09 a little bit farther back.
00:52:10 So you see earth and first you’re like, wow, that’s tiny
00:52:14 and we’re insignificant and that’s kind of sad.
00:52:17 But then you see this really cool thing
00:52:19 that we landed on another planetary body
00:52:23 and you’re like, oh, okay.
00:52:24 Can you actually see earth?
00:52:26 I don’t know if I remember this.
00:52:27 Yeah, I’ll send you that picture.
00:52:29 Because I love the pictures or videos
00:52:31 of just earth from orbit and so on.
00:52:34 Right, yeah.
00:52:34 Just like those, that’s really beautiful.
00:52:36 That’s like a perspective shifter.
00:52:38 That’s the pale blue dot, right?
00:52:39 It probably appears tiny.
00:52:41 Yeah, and just that juxtaposition of the insignificance,
00:52:46 but we built this, really cool thing.
00:52:49 And I just love that, yeah.
00:52:50 Oh, that’d be cool.
00:52:51 I can’t, I personally love the idea
00:52:53 of humans stepping on Mars.
00:52:54 I’m such a sucker for the romantic notion of that
00:52:57 and being able to take pictures from Mars next.
00:53:01 So you would go?
00:53:03 I, yeah, I would be, what did you say?
00:53:08 You said you wouldn’t be the first one.
00:53:09 Not in the first 1,000.
00:53:10 1,000, which it’s funny because to me,
00:53:14 that’s brave to be in the first million.
00:53:17 I think when the Declaration of Independence
00:53:21 was signed in the United States,
00:53:22 that was like two million people.
00:53:25 So I would like to show up
00:53:27 when they’re signing those documents.
00:53:29 Okay.
00:53:30 So maybe the two million.
00:53:31 Oh, that’s an interesting way to think about it.
00:53:32 Because like then we’re like participating
00:53:35 in citizenry and defining the direction.
00:53:38 So it’s not the technical risk.
00:53:41 You just don’t wanna show up somewhere
00:53:43 that’s like America before.
00:53:46 Yeah, because I, from a psychological perspective,
00:53:51 it’s just gonna be a stressful mess
00:53:54 as people have studied, right?
00:53:56 It’s like, it’s people, most likely the process
00:54:02 of colonization like looks like basically a prison.
00:54:07 Like you’re in a very tight and closed space with people.
00:54:10 And it’s just a really stressful environment.
00:54:13 How do you select the kind of people that will go
00:54:15 and then there’ll be drama.
00:54:16 There’s always drama.
00:54:17 And I just wanna show up when there’s some rules.
00:54:21 But I mean, you know, it depends.
00:54:22 So I’m not worried about the health
00:54:24 and the technical difficulties.
00:54:26 I’m more worried about the psychological difficulties.
00:54:29 And also just not being able to tweet.
00:54:31 Like what are you gonna, how are you talking?
00:54:33 There’s no Netflix.
00:54:34 So yeah, maybe not in the first million,
00:54:37 but the first 100,000.
00:54:39 It’s exciting to define the direction of a new,
00:54:42 like how often do we not just have a revolution
00:54:46 to redefine our government,
00:54:48 as smaller countries are still doing to this day,
00:54:51 but literally start over from scratch.
00:54:54 There’s just our financial system.
00:54:56 It could be like based on cryptocurrency,
00:54:59 you could think about like how democracy,
00:55:02 we have now the technology that can enable pure democracy,
00:55:06 for example, if we choose to do that,
00:55:09 as opposed to representative democracy,
00:55:11 all those kinds of things.
00:55:12 So we talked about two different forms of propulsion,
00:55:16 which are super exciting.
00:55:18 So the chemical based, that’s doing pretty well.
00:55:20 And then the electric based is,
00:55:24 are there types of propulsion
00:55:26 that might sound like science fiction right now,
00:55:29 but are actually within the reach of science
00:55:31 in the next 10, 20, 30, 50 years
00:55:34 that you kind of think about,
00:55:35 or maybe even within the space of even just like,
00:55:39 like even ION engines,
00:55:42 is there like breakthroughs that might 10 X the thing,
00:55:45 like really improve it?
00:55:47 So, you know, the real game changer
00:55:50 would be propellantless propulsion.
00:55:54 And so every couple of years you see a new,
00:55:57 now a startup or a researcher comes up with some contraption
00:56:03 for producing thrust that didn’t require,
00:56:06 you know, we’ve been talking about conservation of momentum,
00:56:08 mass times velocity out the back,
00:56:11 mass times velocity forward.
00:56:13 Yes, exactly.
00:56:14 And you have to, you know, carry that up with you
00:56:18 or find it on an asteroid or harvest it from somewhere
00:56:21 if you didn’t bring it with you.
00:56:22 So not having to do that would be, you know,
00:56:25 one of the ultimate game changers.
00:56:28 And I, you know, unless there are new types of physics,
00:56:35 I don’t know how we do it,
00:56:36 but it comes up often, so it’s something I do think about.
00:56:39 And, you know, the one,
00:56:41 I think it’s called the Casimir effect.
00:56:44 If you can, if you have two plates
00:56:46 and the space between them is on the order of these,
00:56:49 like the wavelength of these ephemeral vacuum particles
00:56:53 that pop into and out of existence or something.
00:56:57 I may be confusing multiple types of propellantless forces,
00:57:01 but that could be real
00:57:06 and could be something that we use eventually.
00:57:10 What would be the power source?
00:57:12 Yeah, the most recent engine like this
00:57:15 that was just debunked this year, I think,
00:57:19 in March or something was called the M drive.
00:57:22 And supposedly you used a power source,
00:57:26 so, you know, batteries or solar panels
00:57:27 to generate microwaves into this resonant cavity.
00:57:32 And people claimed it produced thrust.
00:57:35 So they went straight from this really loose concept
00:57:38 to building a device and testing it.
00:57:40 And they said, we’ve measured thrust
00:57:42 and sure on their thrust balance, they saw thrust
00:57:44 and different researchers built it and tested it
00:57:47 and got the same measurements.
00:57:49 And so it was looking actually pretty good.
00:57:52 No one could explain how it worked,
00:57:53 but what they said was that this inside the cavity,
00:57:59 the microwaves themselves didn’t change,
00:58:01 but the speed of light changed inside the cavity.
00:58:03 So relative to that, you know,
00:58:06 their momentum was conserved.
00:58:09 And I don’t, you know, whatever.
00:58:14 But finally someone, I think at NASA built the device,
00:58:17 tested it, got the same thrust, then unhooked it,
00:58:20 flipped it backwards and turned it on,
00:58:22 but got the same thrust in the same direction again.
00:58:24 And so they’re like, this is just an interaction
00:58:26 with the test setup or, you know,
00:58:28 some of the chamber or something like that.
00:58:30 So forwarded again, but, you know,
00:58:34 it would be so wonderful for everybody
00:58:36 if we could figure out how to do it, but I don’t know.
00:58:39 That’s an interesting twist on it
00:58:41 because that’s more about efficient travel,
00:58:44 long distance travel, right?
00:58:46 That’s not necessarily about speed.
00:58:49 That’s more about enabling like,
00:58:51 let’s hook that up to the nuclear power supply.
00:58:55 There you go.
00:58:56 Okay.
00:58:57 But still in terms of speed, in terms of trying to,
00:59:01 so there’s recently, already I think been debunked
00:59:06 or close to being debunked, but the signal,
00:59:09 a weird signal from our nearby friends,
00:59:13 nearby exoplanets from Proxima Centauri,
00:59:16 a signal that’s 4.2 light years away.
00:59:22 So, you know, the thought is it’d be kind of cool
00:59:28 if there’s life out there, alien life,
00:59:31 but it’d be really cool if it could fly out there and check.
00:59:34 And so what kind of propulsion,
00:59:37 and do you think about what kind of propulsion
00:59:39 will allow us to travel close to the speed of light
00:59:42 or, you know, half the speed of light,
00:59:43 all those kinds of things that would allow us
00:59:45 to get to Proxima Centauri and have reasonable,
00:59:48 in a lifetime?
00:59:50 You know, there’s the project Breakthrough Starshot.
00:59:54 Yeah.
00:59:55 That’s looking at sending those tiny little chip sets.
00:59:59 They’re like accelerating really fast.
01:00:01 Yeah, using a laser, so launching them
01:00:04 and then while they’re still relatively close to the earth,
01:00:06 you know, blasting them with some,
01:00:09 I forget what, even what power level you needed
01:00:12 to accelerate them fast enough to get there in 20 years.
01:00:15 Super crazy sounding,
01:00:16 but a lot of people say that’s a legitimate,
01:00:19 like it’s crazy sounding, but it can actually pull it off.
01:00:22 Yeah, I love that project
01:00:24 because there are a lot of different aspects.
01:00:26 You know, there’s the laser,
01:00:27 there’s how do you then get enough power
01:00:31 when you’re there to send a signal back.
01:00:33 No part of that project is possible right now,
01:00:35 but I think it’s really exciting.
01:00:38 But do you see like human, like a spacecraft
01:00:42 with a human on it, so it’s like a heavy one,
01:00:45 being like us inventing new propulsion systems entirely.
01:00:49 Like, do you ever see that on the radar
01:00:52 of propulsion systems like that
01:00:54 or are they completely out there in the impossible?
01:00:57 Well, we’re going to quickly leave the realm
01:00:59 of what I can describe with any credibility,
01:01:03 but I think because of special relativity,
01:01:08 if we try to accelerate some mass
01:01:10 close to the speed of light, it becomes infinitely heavy
01:01:15 and then we just don’t,
01:01:17 we’d have to like harness a lot of suns to do that.
01:01:20 Or, you know, it’s just that math doesn’t quite work out,
01:01:25 but, you know, in my child’s, my childlike heart,
01:01:30 I believe that, you know, we’re missing something,
01:01:33 whether it’s, you know, dark matter or other dimensions.
01:01:38 And if you can just have some anti matter
01:01:41 and a black hole and then ride that around
01:01:46 and somehow, you know, turn that into some.
01:01:49 Mess with gravity somehow.
01:01:51 Yeah, I feel like we’re missing lots of things
01:01:55 in this puzzle and that, you know.
01:02:00 I want to heart that puzzle.
01:02:01 Yeah, right.
01:02:02 I can speak with confidence as a descendant of apes
01:02:06 that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing.
01:02:08 Yeah.
01:02:09 So there’s, we’re like really confident,
01:02:12 like physicists are really confident
01:02:14 that we’ve like got most of the picture down,
01:02:17 but it feels like, oh boy,
01:02:20 it feels like that we might not even be getting started
01:02:25 on some of the essential things
01:02:26 that would allow us to engineer systems
01:02:31 that would allow us to travel to space much, much faster.
01:02:36 Yeah, and there’s even things
01:02:38 that are much more commonplace that we can’t explain,
01:02:42 but we’ve started to take for granted,
01:02:44 like quantum tunneling, you know,
01:02:48 just things like, oh, the electron was here
01:02:50 with this energy and now it’s here with this energy
01:02:53 and it’s just tunneling.
01:02:55 But so, you know, we’re missing a lot of the picture.
01:02:58 So yeah, I don’t know, to, you know,
01:03:02 use your same question from earlier,
01:03:03 I don’t know if you and I will see it,
01:03:05 but yeah, someday.
01:03:07 You’re the cofounder of,
01:03:09 just like we’ve been talking about, Axion Systems.
01:03:12 It’s a, would you say a space propulsion company?
01:03:15 Yes.
01:03:16 Broadly speaking.
01:03:18 So how do you, big question,
01:03:22 how do you build a rocket company
01:03:25 from like a propulsion company from one person,
01:03:30 from two people to 10 people plus,
01:03:35 and actually, you know, take it to a successful product?
01:03:41 Yeah, well, I think the early stage is quite,
01:03:46 I’m not supposed to use the word easy
01:03:48 when you work in rocket science,
01:03:49 but straightforward when you’re working on something,
01:03:53 you know, sexy, like an ion engine,
01:03:55 it’s more straightforward to raise money
01:03:58 and get people to come work for you
01:04:00 because the vision’s really exciting.
01:04:02 And actually that’s something I would say
01:04:04 is very important throughout,
01:04:06 is a really exciting vision
01:04:10 because when everything, you know, goes to crap,
01:04:13 you need that to get people
01:04:15 getting themselves out of bed in the morning
01:04:17 and thinking of the higher purpose there.
01:04:20 And, you know, another thing along the way
01:04:24 that I think is key in building any company
01:04:27 is the right early employees
01:04:31 that also have their own networks
01:04:33 and can bring in a lot of people
01:04:36 that, you know, really make the whole greater
01:04:43 than just the sum of the early team.
01:04:46 How do you build that?
01:04:47 Like, how do you find people?
01:04:49 It’s like asking, like, how do you make friends?
01:04:52 But is there, is it luck?
01:04:55 Is there a system?
01:04:57 Like how, in terms of the people you’ve connected with,
01:05:00 the people you built the company with,
01:05:07 is there some thread, some commonality,
01:05:10 some pattern that you find to be,
01:05:13 to hold for what makes a great team?
01:05:15 I think, you know, personally,
01:05:18 a thread for me has been my network
01:05:21 and being able to draw on that a lot,
01:05:25 but also giving back to it as much as possible
01:05:29 in like an unsolicited sort of way,
01:05:32 like making connections between people
01:05:34 that, you know, maybe didn’t ask,
01:05:36 but that I think could be really fruitful.
01:05:39 And even, you know, weirder than that
01:05:42 is just really getting, you know,
01:05:46 having weird, uncomfortable conversations
01:05:49 with people like at a conference
01:05:51 and getting over the small talk quickly
01:05:55 and getting to know them quickly
01:05:56 and having a relationship that stands out
01:05:59 and then being able to call on them later because of that.
01:06:03 And I think that’s been because I’m introverted
01:06:07 and I, you know, want to poke my eyes out
01:06:09 instead of go and do small talk.
01:06:13 And so I huddle in a corner with one person
01:06:16 and, you know, we talk about aliens or things like that.
01:06:19 And so, you know, that’s all to say that,
01:06:23 you know, having a strong network,
01:06:24 I think is really important, but a genuine one.
01:06:28 And let’s see, other ways to build a rocket company,
01:06:31 kind of making sure you’re paying attention
01:06:33 to the sweeping trends of the industry
01:06:35 so everybody just cares about cost
01:06:37 and being able to get out ahead of that
01:06:41 and even more than we ever thought we’d need to
01:06:44 as far as what we needed to price our systems at.
01:06:46 You know, people for,
01:06:50 since the start of the US space industry,
01:06:53 they’ve been paying 20, 25 million in adjusted dollars
01:06:57 for an ion engine.
01:06:58 And seeing that now people are going to want to pay 10K
01:07:03 for an ion engine and just staying out ahead of that
01:07:08 and those kinds of things.
01:07:10 So, you know, being out in the industry
01:07:12 and talking to as many people as possible.
01:07:15 So there’s a drive.
01:07:15 I mean, I suppose SpaceX really pushed that.
01:07:18 Frustrating for me.
01:07:20 So SpaceX really pushed this,
01:07:24 the application of, I guess, capitalism
01:07:26 of driving the price down,
01:07:28 of basically forcing people to ask the question,
01:07:31 can this be done cheaper?
01:07:35 This can lead to like big problems, I would say,
01:07:41 in the following sense.
01:07:43 I see this in the car industry, for example,
01:07:46 that people have,
01:07:49 it’s such a small margin for profit.
01:07:53 Like they’ve driven the cost of everything down so much
01:07:57 that there’s literally no room for innovation
01:07:59 for taking risks.
01:08:01 So like cars, which is funny
01:08:04 because not until Tesla, really,
01:08:07 which is one of the, in a long, long time,
01:08:10 one of the first successful new car companies
01:08:14 that’s constantly innovating,
01:08:16 every other car company is really pouring
01:08:19 in terms of their technological innovation.
01:08:21 They innovate on design and style and so on,
01:08:25 that people fall in love with the look and so on,
01:08:27 but it’s not really innovation.
01:08:29 In terms of the technology in it,
01:08:31 it’s really boringly the same thing,
01:08:33 and they’re really afraid of taking risks.
01:08:35 And that’s a big problem for rocket space, too,
01:08:38 is like if you’re cutting out costs,
01:08:41 you can’t afford to innovate, to try out new things,
01:08:44 and that’s definitely true with ion engines, right?
01:08:51 So how do you compete in this space?
01:08:54 Do you, by the way, see SpaceX as a competitor?
01:08:57 And what do you say in general
01:08:59 about the competition in this space?
01:09:01 Is it really difficult as a business to compete here?
01:09:05 No, I don’t see SpaceX as a competitor,
01:09:09 and I see them as one day, not too long from now,
01:09:12 a customer, hopefully.
01:09:16 I mean, to compete against that,
01:09:18 I think you just have to do things in an unconventional way.
01:09:23 So bringing silicon MEMS manufacturing
01:09:27 to propulsion, NASA doesn’t make ion engines
01:09:30 using a batch mass producible technique.
01:09:34 They have one guy that’s been making their ion engines
01:09:38 for 20 years bespoke pieces of jewelry.
01:09:41 So bringing things to what you’re trying to innovate
01:09:47 to make them, in our case, more cost effective
01:09:51 was really key.
01:09:53 I like the idea of somebody putting out ion engines
01:09:56 on like Etsy.
01:09:57 Yeah, my advisor at MIT would,
01:10:00 the thruster chip I was holding up,
01:10:02 he would wear one as a lapel pin.
01:10:05 But in general, just on the topic of SpaceX,
01:10:09 2020 has seen some difficult things
01:10:12 for human civilization.
01:10:14 And it’s been a lot of, first of all, it’s an election year,
01:10:17 there’s been a lot of drama and division about that.
01:10:20 There’s been riots of all different reasons,
01:10:24 racial division, there’s been obviously a virus
01:10:28 that’s testing the very fabric of our society.
01:10:31 But there’s been really, for me at least,
01:10:34 super positive things, inspiring things,
01:10:36 which is SpaceX and NASA doing the first commercial
01:10:43 human flight, launching humans to space
01:10:47 and did it twice successfully.
01:10:50 What is that, did you get to watch that launch?
01:10:54 Did you, what does it make you feel?
01:10:57 Do you think this is first days
01:11:00 for a new era of space exploration?
01:11:05 Yeah, I did watch it.
01:11:06 We played it outside on a big screen at our place.
01:11:09 And I was a little, they kept saying Bob and Doug,
01:11:13 Bob and Doug, and astronauts usually are treated
01:11:19 with a little bit more fanfare.
01:11:20 So it felt very casual, but maybe that was a good,
01:11:24 a good thing, like this is the era
01:11:26 of commercial crewed missions.
01:11:30 It was a little bit more, what is it?
01:11:34 What’s his name?
01:11:34 Chris Hadfield, like playing guitar.
01:11:37 Yeah.
01:11:38 It’s more, it’s a different flavor to it of.
01:11:41 Yeah, exactly.
01:11:42 More like fun, playful, celebrity type.
01:11:46 Yes, exactly.
01:11:47 Astronaut versus the aura of the magical
01:11:51 sort of heroic element of the single human
01:11:55 representing us in space.
01:11:56 Yes, I think that’s all for the better though.
01:12:00 It’s so cool that it’s such a commonplace thing
01:12:02 now that we send.
01:12:04 I can’t believe that sometimes I’ll have to,
01:12:07 you don’t even realize that astronauts are coming
01:12:10 and going all the time, splashing back down.
01:12:13 And it’s just so common now,
01:12:15 but that’s quite magical, I think.
01:12:19 So yes, we did watch that.
01:12:20 I love, love, love that we finally have that capability
01:12:24 again to send people to the space station.
01:12:28 And it’s just really exciting to see the private sector
01:12:32 stepping up to fill in where the government
01:12:34 has pulled back in the US.
01:12:36 And I think pulled back way too soon
01:12:38 as far as exploration and science goes.
01:12:42 Probably pulled back at the right time
01:12:44 for commercial things and getting that started.
01:12:47 But I’m really happy that it’s even possible
01:12:51 to do that with private money and companies.
01:12:55 Do you like the kind of the model of competition
01:12:58 of NASA funding?
01:13:01 I guess that’s how it works,
01:13:02 is like they’re providing quite a bit of money
01:13:04 from the government and then private companies compete
01:13:08 to be the delivery vehicles for whichever
01:13:12 the government missions, like NASA missions.
01:13:17 Yes, I think for this type of mission
01:13:20 is a little bit kind of straddles commercial and science.
01:13:25 So I think it’s good, but I do in general feel
01:13:29 like we’ve pulled back too much on NASA’s role
01:13:34 in the science and exploration part.
01:13:36 And I think our pace is too slow there,
01:13:40 for my liking, I suppose.
01:13:42 What do you mean?
01:13:43 Okay, so did you have, I mean, on the cost thing,
01:13:48 do you feel like NASA was a little too bureaucratic
01:13:52 in a sense, like too slow, too heavy cost wise
01:13:58 in their effort, like when they were running things
01:14:00 purely without any commercial involvement?
01:14:03 So I suppose it’s more that I just want
01:14:06 the government to fund.
01:14:08 I see, yeah.
01:14:09 And maybe NASA’s not the best organization
01:14:12 to do it rapidly.
01:14:15 But I think that, again, depending on the goals,
01:14:20 we’re just kind of at the very starting point
01:14:23 of space exploration and science and understanding.
01:14:28 So we should be spending more money there and not less.
01:14:32 And other countries are starting to spend more and more,
01:14:34 and I think we’ll fall behind because of that.
01:14:38 So you have quite a bit of experience, first of all,
01:14:41 starting a company yourself, but also I saw,
01:14:43 maybe you can correct me, but you have quite a bit
01:14:46 of knowledge of just in general the startup experience
01:14:50 of building companies that you’ve interacted with people.
01:14:54 Is there advice that you can give to somebody,
01:14:59 to a founder or cofounder who wants to launch
01:15:02 and grow a new company and do something big and impactful
01:15:07 in this world?
01:15:08 Yes, I would say, like I mentioned earlier,
01:15:13 but make sure the vision is something that will get you
01:15:19 out of bed in the morning and that you can rally
01:15:23 other people around you to achieve.
01:15:27 Because I see a lot of folks that sort of cared
01:15:31 about something or saw a window of opportunity
01:15:33 to do something, and startups are hard,
01:15:37 and more often than not, just being opportunistic
01:15:42 isn’t going to be enough to make it through
01:15:44 all the really crappy things that are going to happen.
01:15:48 So the vision just helps you psychologically
01:15:51 to carry through the hardships,
01:15:52 for you and the team.
01:15:53 Yeah, you and the team, yeah, exactly.
01:15:56 To kind of younger people interested in getting
01:15:59 into entrepreneurship, I would say stay as close
01:16:02 to first principles and fundamentals as you can
01:16:06 for as long as you can, because really understanding
01:16:11 the problems, if it’s something scientific
01:16:13 or hardware related, or even if it’s not,
01:16:16 but having a deep understanding of the problem
01:16:20 and the customers and what people care about
01:16:22 and how to move something forward is more important
01:16:26 than taking all of the entrepreneurship classes
01:16:30 in undergrad.
01:16:31 So being able to think deeply, yeah.
01:16:33 Yeah, exactly.
01:16:35 Yeah, have you been surprised about how much pivoting
01:16:38 is involved, basically rethinking what you thought
01:16:41 initially would be the right direction to go?
01:16:44 Or is there, if you think deeply enough,
01:16:46 that you can stick in the same direction for long enough?
01:16:50 So our guiding star hasn’t changed at all,
01:16:56 so that’s been pretty consistent,
01:16:57 but within that, we flip flop on so many things
01:17:02 all the time, and to give you one example,
01:17:06 it’s do you stop and build a first product
01:17:10 that’s well suited to maybe a smaller,
01:17:14 less exciting segment of the market,
01:17:16 or do you stay head down and focus on the big swing
01:17:22 and trying to hit it out of the park right away?
01:17:25 And we’ve flip flopped between that,
01:17:27 and there’s not a blanket answer,
01:17:30 and there are a lot of factors, but that’s a hard one.
01:17:33 And I think one other piece for the aspiring founder,
01:17:40 spending a lot of time and effort on the culture
01:17:44 and people piece is so important
01:17:47 and is always an afterthought and something
01:17:52 that I haven’t really seen the founders or executives
01:17:57 or executives at companies purposefully carve out time
01:18:00 and acknowledge that, yes, this is going to take
01:18:04 a lot of my time and resources,
01:18:06 but you see them after the fact trying to repair
01:18:09 the bro culture or whatever else is broken at the company.
01:18:14 And I think that it’s starting to change,
01:18:16 but just to be aware of it from the beginning is important.
01:18:19 Right, I guess it should be part of the vision
01:18:21 of what kind of place you want to create,
01:18:24 or what kind of human beings.
01:18:28 Yeah, exactly, you can’t wait five, 10 years
01:18:31 and then just slap an HR person onto trying to fix it.
01:18:35 It has to be thoughtful from the beginning.
01:18:37 Yeah, don’t get me started on HR people.
01:18:43 Don’t leave HR to HR people, but I’ll just leave it at that.
01:18:46 You didn’t say that, I said it, okay.
01:18:48 Yeah, HR’s actual HR is really important,
01:18:53 is so important, culture is so important.
01:18:58 And then I also was surprised, I thought you could say,
01:19:04 here will be our culture and our values,
01:19:06 and that it was kind of distinct from who I
01:19:08 and my co founder were as people,
01:19:11 and I was like, no, that’s not how that works.
01:19:12 We just kind of ooze out our behaviors
01:19:16 and then the company grows around that.
01:19:18 So you have to do a lot of introspection and self work
01:19:22 to not end up with a shitty culture.
01:19:24 It’s kind of a, it’s a relationship,
01:19:27 but it’s supposed to be a relationship with two people,
01:19:29 it’s a relationship with many people.
01:19:31 Yeah.
01:19:32 And you communicate so much indirectly by who you are.
01:19:35 You have to be, you have to live it, yeah.
01:19:40 As somebody, I think about this a lot
01:19:42 because generally I’m full of love
01:19:45 and all those kinds of things,
01:19:47 but I also get really passionate
01:19:49 and when I see somebody in the context of work, especially,
01:19:54 when I see somebody who I know can do a much better job
01:19:58 and they don’t do a great job, I can lose my shit
01:20:02 in a way that’s like Steve Jobsian.
01:20:06 And you have to think about exactly the right way
01:20:09 to lose your shit if you’re going to, or if at all.
01:20:13 You have to really think through that
01:20:14 because it sends a big signal.
01:20:16 You know, sometimes it’s okay, like if you do it deliberately,
01:20:21 like if you’re going to do it deliberately,
01:20:23 if you’re going to say like,
01:20:24 I’m going to be the kind of person that allows this
01:20:26 and pays the cost of it,
01:20:27 but you can’t just think it’s not gonna have a cost.
01:20:30 Yes, this was like the first thing I worked on
01:20:33 with my leadership coach was how not to just snap at people
01:20:39 when they were being an idiot.
01:20:41 And first I got really good at apologizing.
01:20:46 That was the first step because it was going to take longer
01:20:49 to fix the behavior.
01:20:51 And then she, I’m actually a lot better at it now
01:20:54 and it started with things.
01:20:56 She’s like, every time you walk through a doorway,
01:20:58 think, you know, calm and take breaths before responding.
01:21:03 And there were all sorts of these little things we did
01:21:05 and it was mostly just changing the habit.
01:21:08 Yeah, oh boy, it’s a long road.
01:21:13 Okay, so people love it and we talk about books.
01:21:18 Is there books, maybe three or so technical fiction,
01:21:21 philosophical that had an impact on your life
01:21:24 and you might recommend and for each,
01:21:27 is there an idea or so that you take away from it?
01:21:31 Yes, so I’ve been a voracious reader all my life
01:21:36 and I’m always reading like three or four or five books
01:21:40 at a time and now I use Audible a lot too
01:21:46 and you know, podcasts and things like that.
01:21:50 So I think the first one that stands out to me is 10,
01:21:54 it’s a novel, Tender is the Night by Fitzgerald.
01:21:57 And I read it when I was much younger
01:22:01 but I went back and read it recently and it’s not that good.
01:22:03 So I’m not sure why it has like such an important place
01:22:07 in my literary history but I love Fitzgerald as an author
01:22:13 because he’s very like flowery prose
01:22:17 that I can just picture what he’s saying
01:22:21 but he does it in such a creative way.
01:22:24 I remember that one in particular
01:22:26 because I read a ton as a kid too
01:22:29 but it kind of set me, it was like the beginning of my adult
01:22:33 reading life and getting into classics
01:22:38 and I kind of, I do feel like they seem intimidating maybe
01:22:44 and then I realized that they’re all just like love stories.
01:22:50 So.
01:22:51 Yeah, isn’t everything a love story?
01:22:53 Yeah, it’s really.
01:22:54 At the bottom.
01:22:55 Even, you know, I don’t know.
01:22:57 I was surprised that even like a lot of the Russian authors,
01:23:02 you know, they’re all just love stories.
01:23:04 We’re humans are pretty simple.
01:23:05 There’s not much to worry, there’s not much to work with.
01:23:08 So I think maybe that was it.
01:23:09 It made like that whole world less intimidating to me
01:23:12 and cemented my love for reading.
01:23:17 People should have just approached the classics
01:23:18 like there’s probably a love story in here.
01:23:20 Chick flicks, yeah.
01:23:21 So somehow it boils down to a chick flick.
01:23:24 So just relax and enjoy the ride.
01:23:27 And then.
01:23:28 So what else?
01:23:30 Changing gears quite a bit.
01:23:33 The Beginning of Infinity, do you know it?
01:23:35 By David Deutsch.
01:23:37 So he’s a physicist at Cambridge or Oxford.
01:23:41 And so I was introduced like more formally
01:23:45 to a lot of the ideas, like a lot of the things
01:23:47 we’ve talked about, he has a lot more like formalism
01:23:52 and physics rigor around.
01:23:55 And so I got introduced to, you know, more like jargon
01:23:59 of how to think about some of these ideas,
01:24:02 you know, like memes and, you know, DNA as ultimate meme,
01:24:10 the concept of infinity and objective beauty.
01:24:16 But he has a really strong grounding in physics.
01:24:19 And then.
01:24:20 There’s a rigorous way of talking about these like big.
01:24:22 Yeah.
01:24:23 So that was very mind opening to me to read that.
01:24:28 But it also, I think it’s probably part of why
01:24:30 I ended up marrying my husband is related to that book.
01:24:33 And then I’ve had some other really great connections
01:24:36 with people because I had read it and so had they.
01:24:40 I like how you turned that, even that book
01:24:43 into a love story.
01:24:44 I did, oh no.
01:24:45 Somehow.
01:24:46 No, it’s good, it’s good.
01:24:47 Your robot has a heart.
01:24:49 Exactly.
01:24:50 And okay, the third series is, it’s just, it’s Harry Potter.
01:24:57 Of course, which somehow connects to,
01:24:59 I haven’t read Harry Potter.
01:25:01 I’m really sorry.
01:25:01 Oh no.
01:25:02 Forgive me, forgive me.
01:25:05 But I’ve read Tolkien, but just Harry Potter,
01:25:08 just haven’t gotten to it.
01:25:09 But your company name is somehow I think
01:25:12 connected to Harry Potter, right?
01:25:13 Yes.
01:25:14 I think I heard this.
01:25:15 My, I always feel like I have to justify my fandom.
01:25:22 The first three books came out when I was 10.
01:25:25 So I went along this journey with Harry, age wise.
01:25:28 And I read them all like nine or 10 times, all seven books.
01:25:34 And I think anything that just keeps you reading
01:25:39 is what’s important.
01:25:41 And I have lulls where I don’t feel like reading anything.
01:25:44 So I’ll reread a Harry Potter or a trashy detective novel
01:25:50 or something, and I don’t really care.
01:25:52 And that’s why I mentioned Harry Potter
01:25:55 because whatever just keeps me reading,
01:25:58 I think is important.
01:25:59 And it was a big part of my life growing up.
01:26:02 And then yes, Axion, the official story of the naming
01:26:09 of the company is that Axion is like a concatenation
01:26:12 of accelerate and ion.
01:26:15 But it actually came from accio, the summoning charm.
01:26:18 And then we just added an N and it was perfect.
01:26:22 What’s the summoning charm?
01:26:23 It’s one of the spells in Harry Potter.
01:26:25 Yeah, probably most notably Harry uses it
01:26:31 to summon his broomstick out of his dorm room
01:26:35 when he’s battling a dragon somewhere else.
01:26:37 So he says the spell and the broomstick comes to him.
01:26:40 So summoning in that way.
01:26:43 Okay, there we go.
01:26:44 This is brilliant.
01:26:45 So the big thing is that it’s something
01:26:48 that you’ve carry with, it’s like your safe place
01:26:52 you return to something like the Harry Potter.
01:26:55 That, I reread them still, whatever keeps me reading
01:26:59 I think is the most important thing.
01:27:02 Okay, I got it.
01:27:03 So I’m actually the same way in terms of the habit of it.
01:27:07 It’s important to just keep reading.
01:27:12 But I have found myself struggling a little bit too
01:27:16 because I listen to a lot of audio books now.
01:27:19 I’ve struggled to then switch back to reading seriously.
01:27:26 It’s just I read so many papers,
01:27:27 I read so many other things.
01:27:28 It feels like if I’m gonna sit down
01:27:30 and have the time to actually focus on the reading
01:27:33 I should be reading like blog posts or papers
01:27:36 or more condensed kind of things.
01:27:38 But there’s a huge value to just reading long form still.
01:27:42 Yeah, and my husband was never that into fiction
01:27:47 but then someone told him or he heard,
01:27:51 you learn a lot of empathy through reading fiction.
01:27:55 So you could think of it that way.
01:27:56 Well, yeah, that’s kind of what, yeah, yeah.
01:27:58 And it’s also fiction is a nice,
01:28:01 unlike not less so with nonfiction is a chance to travel.
01:28:06 I see it as kind of traveling.
01:28:08 As you go to this other world and it’s nice
01:28:11 because it’s like much more efficient.
01:28:12 You don’t have to get on a plane,
01:28:14 and you get to meet all kinds of new people.
01:28:17 It’s like people say they love traveling
01:28:19 and I say I love traveling too.
01:28:21 I just, yeah, read fiction.
01:28:23 I told my three year old that that was why we read so much
01:28:29 because we see the places in our mind
01:28:32 and I’m like, it’s basically like we’re watching a movie.
01:28:36 That’s how it feels.
01:28:37 And she’s like, I prefer watching Frozen with popcorn,
01:28:39 was her response that.
01:28:41 Okay, well, you’re three.
01:28:43 That’s a good point.
01:28:45 But yeah, there’s some power to the imagination, right?
01:28:47 That’s not just like watching a movie
01:28:49 because something about our imagination
01:28:53 because it’s the words in the world that’s painted
01:28:56 somehow mixing in with our own understanding
01:29:00 of our own hopes and dreams, our fears.
01:29:02 It like mixes up in there
01:29:03 and the way we can build up that world from just the page.
01:29:07 Yeah, you’re really creating the world
01:29:10 just with the prompts from the book, right?
01:29:13 Yeah, that’s different than watching a movie.
01:29:15 Yeah, which is why it hurts sometimes
01:29:17 to watch the movie version
01:29:19 and then you’re like, that’s not at all how I imagined it.
01:29:23 Well, we kind of brought this up in terms of
01:29:29 depending on what the goals are.
01:29:31 Let me ask the big, you’re friends with Manolis,
01:29:35 he’s obsessed with this question.
01:29:36 So let me ask the big ridiculous question
01:29:38 about the meaning of life.
01:29:41 Do you ever think about this one?
01:29:44 Do you ever ponder the reason we’re here?
01:29:49 Descends as the vapes on this spinning ball
01:29:52 in the middle of nowhere?
01:29:54 Yeah, I don’t think one ends up
01:29:57 in the field of space propulsion
01:29:59 without thinking of these existential questions.
01:30:04 Yeah, all the time.
01:30:05 Or builds a business.
01:30:07 Yeah, I know, right?
01:30:09 Yeah, we’ve touched on a lot of the different pieces
01:30:12 of this, I think.
01:30:13 So I have a bunch of thoughts.
01:30:18 I do think that the goal isn’t,
01:30:23 the meaning isn’t anymore just to be like a Petri dish
01:30:28 of bacteria that reproduces
01:30:31 and where survival and reproduction are the main objectives.
01:30:36 And maybe it’s because now we’re able to answer these,
01:30:40 ask those questions.
01:30:42 That’s maybe the turning point.
01:30:45 And instead, I think it’s really the pursuit
01:30:49 and generation of knowledge.
01:30:52 And so if we’re taken out by an asteroid or something,
01:30:56 I think that it will have been a meaningful endeavor
01:31:03 if somehow our knowledge about the universe
01:31:06 is preserved somehow and the next civilization
01:31:12 isn’t starting over again.
01:31:16 So that’s, I always, yeah, I resonate with that.
01:31:21 I always loved the mission of Google from the early days
01:31:25 of making the world’s sort of information
01:31:28 and knowledge searchable.
01:31:30 I always loved that idea.
01:31:31 I always loved, I was donated as people should to Wikipedia.
01:31:37 I just love Wikipedia.
01:31:38 I feel like it’s the, that’s one of the greatest
01:31:43 accomplishments of just a humanity of us together,
01:31:46 especially Wikipedia and this opens like
01:31:48 in this open community way,
01:31:50 putting together different knowledge is like,
01:31:52 on everything we’ve talked about today,
01:31:53 I’m sure there’s a Wikipedia page about ion engines
01:31:57 and I’m sure it’s pretty good.
01:31:59 Like, it’s, I don’t know, that’s incredible.
01:32:02 And obviously that can be preserved pretty efficiently,
01:32:05 at least Wikipedia.
01:32:06 I don’t know, you’ll be like, human civilization
01:32:09 is all like burning up in flames
01:32:11 as there’s this one USB drive slowly traveling out.
01:32:14 Yeah, I know, exactly.
01:32:15 With Wikipedia on it.
01:32:16 Yep.
01:32:17 That’s on, from the beginning of our chat,
01:32:20 that one lonely spacecraft.
01:32:22 It just needs Wikipedia.
01:32:24 And then it will have been a civilization well spent.
01:32:28 So pushing that knowledge along.
01:32:30 Yeah.
01:32:31 Through like one little discovery at a time
01:32:35 is one of, is a core aspect to the meaning of it all.
01:32:39 Yes, and I also, I haven’t yet figured out
01:32:42 what the connection, you know, an explanation
01:32:46 I’m happy with yet for how it’s connected,
01:32:48 but evolving beyond just the survival piece too,
01:32:55 I think like we touched on the emotional aspect,
01:32:59 something in there about cooperation and, you know, love.
01:33:04 And so I, in my day to day that just boils down to,
01:33:08 you know, the pursuit of knowledge
01:33:11 or improving the human condition and being kind.
01:33:16 Love and knowledge.
01:33:18 Yeah, exactly.
01:33:19 So I’m pretty at peace with that as the meaning right now.
01:33:23 Makes sense to me.
01:33:24 While you work on spacecraft propulsion.
01:33:27 Yes, exactly.
01:33:29 Like literal rocket science.
01:33:32 Natalia, this is an amazing conversation.
01:33:34 You work on such an exciting engineering field.
01:33:36 And I think this is like what 20th, 21st century
01:33:40 will be remembered for is space exploration.
01:33:43 So this is super exciting space that you’re working on.
01:33:46 So, and thank you so much
01:33:48 for spending your time with me today.
01:33:50 Thanks for having me.
01:33:51 This was fun.
01:33:53 Thanks for listening to this conversation
01:33:55 with Natalia Bailey.
01:33:56 And thank you to our sponsors,
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01:34:03 an app that summarizes books,
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01:34:08 So the choice is snacks, caffeine, knowledge,
01:34:11 or a delicious meal.
01:34:13 Choose wisely, my friends.
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01:34:20 And now let me leave you with some words
01:34:22 from Carl Sagan.
01:34:24 All civilizations become either space faring or extinct.
01:34:28 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.