Privatized Deep Space Exploration

Welcome to the unDavos Summit - A community-organized series of interactive panels, talks, and networking taking place in Davos, Switzerland - and online - in parallel to the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 20-24 Jan 2025. Our mission is threefold:  
• Democratizing Davos: We open the doors to diverse voices and ideas, breaking down traditional barriers to participation.  
• Humanizing Davos: We foster genuine, relationship-driven connections that go beyond transactional networking.  
• Bringing Action to Davos: We turn meaningful discussions into tangible, real-world solutions.  

Join us for an enlightening panel discussion on "Privatized Deep Space Exploration." This session addresses the revolutionary advancements led by private enterprises in the realm of deep space exploration, where innovation meets investment and policy. Be prepared to dive into the emerging opportunities and challenges that arise as private initiatives expand humanity’s reach beyond Earth, shaping new avenues for commercial ventures, science, and collaboration in the cosmos.

Featured Speakers:  

Halvor Bakke-Veiby  
Co-Founder, Riften Labs  
Halvor is a rocket engineer and co-founder of the space debris cleanup startup Solstorm. He has also co-founded Cauldron, the world’s fastest decentralized exchange, and launched Moria MUSD, a crypto-collateralized stablecoin aimed at empowering financial access worldwide.

Matthias Spott  

Founder, Investor, and Advisor, NewSpace Entrepreneur 
Matthias has been a pioneer in Europe’s NewSpace movement and brings nearly 20 years of experience in aerospace, defense, and security. His ventures focus on creating sustainable satellite connectivity solutions and establishing investment platforms for early-stage space startups, with a vision of merging space and non-space industries.

Don’t miss this chance to gain actionable insights on the future of privatized space exploration and the technologies driving this next frontier.

For unDavos 2026 Sponsorship & Partnerships: 
Exclusive collaboration opportunities: Contact Mark here: https://bit.ly/417TrB9 

Or catch the full podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0vBWU_Jue8
and browse all podcast episodes here: https://undavos.buzzsprout.com/  

Join the Conversation:  
Love this content? Like, comment, and share.  

Transcript

Privatized Deep Space Exploration - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0vBWU_Jue8

Transcript:
(00:01) [Music] good so uh guys we will now jump into the uh second part of uh of this uh session and we will talk about privatized deep space exploration I'm joined by uh Matias Matias put please uh join me here thank you uh so guys um Matias he uh I uh shortly talked a bit about his background uh in the start he is uh one of Europe's first newspace entrepreneurs uh after almost 20 years in traditional Aerospace defense and security industry he disrupted himself and in 2014 he went to Silicon Valley to learn more about the upcoming new space
(00:53) movement and uh as a result he founded several new space companies to implement a European Mega constellation for satellites uh satellite based industrial Broadband connectivity Solutions currently he is establishing uh among others Polaris space Ventures as an investment platform to engage in early stage new space startups and leverage his expertise to support Founders this makes me very happy because I am a Founder so um uh just recently he founded Leo Le economy holding to establish an ecosystem to bring space space and
(01:30) non-space industries together and build a space as a service company Matias is driven by his broader Vision to develop New Economic perspectives by leveraging Deep Tech to master societal challenges um CMAs thank you so much for for joining us um a very cool thing uh that happened uh quite in recent years I think it was the uh UAE Mission to Mars and having the first uh weather uh monitoring satellite on Mars um what have been some of the some of the cool uh kind of deep deep space private uh missions you have seen
(02:11) over the past years well first of all thank you very much for having me on this panel uh a little bit on short notice right so I'm very happy to be here and and uh talk to you and and speak with you in in the audience and uh I mean deep space exploration is of course getting more and more attention in the private sector as well but I think it's still not the main focus I would say because if it's driven by private companies it's very much driven by private money of course and the returns for deep space exploration missions is of course far
(02:47) far in the future so what I observe and which is also my main focus is on low earth orbit and lunar um because this is where we see Commercial Business coming up and we can deep Di little bit on this however of course we do see the mass getting more and more into the focus namely driven by Elon Musk and now Donald Trump I mean I don't know who has listened to the U inauguration speech I mean he mentioned space as one of the top priorities and he mentioned explicitly mass and there was this little video showing how happy Elon was
(03:20) about that um and and and I mean he's driven by that and of course around that you see companies coming up but from a pure investment point of view I would challenge you know how this really comes and a personal opinion on that as well I think let's make use of space as a mean to make planet Earth a better place and help planet Earth um mastering challenges because terraforming mass is probably more ambitious than even today still try to change the climate on on on planet Earth yeah I uh I totally agree there's uh
(03:59) this miscon perception from uh some from some people that uh the goal of space is to leave leave Earth but uh but this this was never the goal and this is not the goal of of musk or Bezos or or any of these other uh High Capital individuals engaging in the in the space industry Earth is Paradise right we are H the human race is like a cookie cut out from a cookie cutter perfectly fitting and the cookie cutter is planet Earth uh um but yeah I agree about this I mean what's the ROI of of colonizing and and terraforming Mars it's like so
(04:37) far in the future um but uh there are kind of two opposing philosophies in in uh going out there and colonizing other planets it's the direct to Mars way which is what musk is uh proposing this is just you travel from Earth and kind of directly to Mars you send up the Rockets you leave them for a bit in lowth orbit you refill them and then you send them to Mars and the opposing philosophy it's what NASA is actually laying out for for the coming tens of years it is to use the moon as a gas station and and here we have lots of
(05:19) business opportunities actually um and NASA have put up several fully privatized missions to the Moon last year we saw a great deal of them some I would say great success uh varying degrees of kind of mission completion but uh but yeah what what are some of the of the interesting business opportunities you see on on the lunar economy well I mean first of all getting there and returning I mean it's not easy I mean even if we mastered already like 55 years ago with 11 and we have seen private missions being successful we
(05:57) have also seen other private missions not being successful successful so landing on moon is still something so you have to travel there you have to Land once you're on planet Moon you really then need to move around so you need U Move uh Rovers that can move uh and and basically exploit Moon and and understand it much better um and then of course finding raw materials and start building infrastructures there habitats facilities but this also takes some time but this is the interesting part basically we have to build the same kind
(06:33) of infrastructure we all know on Earth it's it's communication it is uh moving people around supplying people make them travel there back and forth so it's an entire ecosystem this is uh going to be established there going forward and the reason why is indeed NASA wants to use Moon as a as a springboard for deep space exploration because it's much easier to start from there rather than from Earth because what space still very expensive are the first let's say 10 km to overcome gravity once you're out there it's much easier if you have the
(07:08) the fuel there it's it's also just just nice to to start from from there yeah I I agree I of course I I support the uh the kind of musk musk's notion of uh let's just do it let's just go directly to Mars but but uh I mean Earth Earth is a gravitational well and the Moon is such a better place to have as a permanent base and and I'm I'm truly happy about uh the Ambitions plans laid out by by the United States government and by the emis program as a whole um if I jump in there it would be interesting to see now I mean we all know that Elon
(07:50) is personally driven by going to Mars uh we know that probably the new Administration uh is not so much in taking care of conflicts of interest and now with must also being the department of government efficiency and they skipped basically Moon side note I mean Space X as part of the emis program is responsible for the human lender system based on Starship they are facing delays so maybe skipping Moon because it's not of interest and going straight to Mars could be also kind of distraction from their own challenges so we will have to
(08:22) see what is going to happen to emis to be honest I don't know hopefully it stays because for me this is also a great example for international collaboration which we all hope will continue but let's see what the department of government efficiency SpaceX and and the president is going to do yeah um I mean uh many things have been said about the Artemis program the uh SLS it's kind of over budget it's two two billion US uh pop right now uh it's become kind of a laughing stock in the in the space industry but uh we must not
(08:55) forget that we need actually government actors in the space industry everything is actually driven by government actors and we can't have a purely Roi based uh privatized ecosystem actually because uh some things are too important actually and uh and in my opinion colonizing Moon colonizing Mars Venus uh the outer moons this is a kind of a it's a superhuman goal right is for for all of humanity it's just too important to not have some kind of strict government actors going in and saying that we are going to the
(09:30) moon or we are going to Mars um but I want to talk a bit more about the moon so the uh kind of power of having a having a kind of a gas station on the moon it's that um obviously the gravitational well it's much easier to launch the escape Velocity on the moon it's so much lower than on Earth you don't have an atmosphere you have to fight fight against when you when you uh travel of uh of the planetary body but uh also the moon has ice it has H2O ice and why is this good many people are surprised when they hear that uh H2O is
(10:11) actually the second most abundant molecule in the in the universe uh well ice can be used for several things the most efficient rockets in the world they actually run on hydrogen and oxygen uh all Rockets are mainly composed of an oxidizer and then a bit of fuel uh so if we can use rocket engines that uh have as their oxidizer pure oxygen and as their Rocket Fuel pure hydrogen the Moon is a literal gas station but of course we need infrastructure we need robotic infrastructure we need human resources up there to extract the water ice and uh
(10:56) then split it into uh into pure uh pure hydrogen and C oxygen and this is why there's a lot of good business opportunities creating infrastructure communication power grid on the moon right now because yes NASA have said as their goal to put boots on the moon to have two humans one female one male on the moon and uh this is kind of a side quest from the main mission of timis which is to help private companies put together infrastructure power grids have lunar robotics vehicles that can go around do reconnaissance and uh find
(11:36) good uh lava caves so when when when uh young entrepreneurs in Norway come to me and say that H do you can you give me some uh some Alpha what's the market like I want to go into the space sector I want to work with it I always say go to the Moon see what's needed on the Moon I mean uh communication internet for for robotics um and yeah I'm uh I'm super bullish on the moon uh so um I really don't want timis to kind of Be sidelined by by this Mars stuff and and I think NASA um they have worked through so many
(12:18) administrations and so much turmoil and Wars so I I'm I'm quite bullish in in their stead fastin uh to continue building on the moon uh I don't know any comments well let's hope for it I I'm definitely on the same page as you are um because moon is the natural next thing to go to it's not Mars as I said but also with the administration n Administration we will see I mean they also get a new hat which is very who is very much in line with the new Administration and Elon Musk so let's see what that really brings at the end
(12:51) um but I agree I mean the Moon is is definitely something we should uh explore further but we should not forget about lower orbit as well there's huge potential in there as well in terms of commercialization yeah and and in lowth orbit I think we will uh basically see a winding down of uh of government uh satellites and and have a purely privat made satellite Fleet actually um I also uh been working in lower orbit uh there's little space debris to pick up uh in uh the deep space um but this this is one of my favorite subjects and uh
(13:29) talking about low earth orbit um there is a big actor obviously star link but we also have the Kyper project and several other actors uh I mean um you can just look around on Earth and half of your POV will be the sky and this slim line of the Horizon this is where we can uh receive internet information and I mean signals for anything else so uh having internet in the sky it's uh it's um great invention for Humanity also mostly for developing countries actually um Matas what what do you think the uh future of this Mega constellation
(14:11) uh kind of ecosystem we will look like we saw from the stall link generation one being more than one metric ton uh to generation 2 which is around 200 kilos so we saw actually some minor some some minorization what do you think will will uh will happen when when we move a couple years in the future well I mean if I may uh let's let's put this all a little bit in context I mean first of all just looking in the audience I wonder how many are really from the space business how many are not maybe you can raise your hand
(14:44) saying uh who's space and who's non-space so the majority is non-space I would say right um and I usually uh tend to ask in in in Keynotes or panels uh with an audience like that who has relation with space and all the non-space people usually don't show up right and um the same time I'm asking who has got a smartphone and of course everybody's pointing up and uh I think this is it starts with this we all need to make ourselves aware that space is already in our daily lives everywhere anytime I mean your smartphone won't work you couldn't
(15:22) navigate you couldn't get the weather forecast you couldn't do your financial transaction uh you couldn't couldn't communicate right I mean it's all backed space infrastructure um and and this is so important to always keep in mind and it's not on an individual level I mean I would even say on an Enterprise level this is even more important there is this example and I'm I'm slowly heading into the staling question um when the Ukraine war started the first thing was that a communication satellite geostationary satellite was hacked and
(15:53) and and and cyber attacked um and well the military expert knew then now The Invasion starts uh but the collateral damage was that Germany couldn't reach like 5,000 wind turbines because they were also connected to this satellite and imagine I mean Germany is building an energy transition on renewable energies wind turbines among that and they under one satellite that can easily be switched off and you can't control your wind turbines for five uh 5,000 units for a few days I mean this is not impossible I don't know how many of the
(16:28) energy suppliers were really really aware of the fact that this is a single source of failure there so the awareness where space is in in the non-space world needs to be uh much more elaborated because we are building more and more infrastructure up there um be it communication be it Earth's observation navigation still is a pure government game um but let's see when we will have maybe private navigation constellations as well so yes the trend is definitely going into the mega constellation world and that was my first company uh also
(17:02) doing a satellite communication consolation uh the fun fact is we were 10 days ahead of Elon Musk and making the regulatory filings for the operation of it unfortunately we are Europeans and had very difficult times to raise the necessary funds so we a bit delayed but still around and working on it um and we need to be very careful that we don't leave this critical infrastructure in the hands of single individuals and they don't want to call the name again but suddenly things change completely and we have a critical infrastructure
(17:35) controlled by by individuals which is so critical also for government applications and and we need to find ways how we are managing this um and um I think the European approach would be probably a bit different than the approach of billionaires or autocrats and we need to be very careful that there is a a great balance somehow and at the end um when and investors ask me about all this for the biggest risk I do see and then we are coming to your topic right I mean this is more and more satellites are creating more and more
(18:09) debris and we have to be very careful that we are not kind of uh doing things we wouldn't do on planet Earth any longer like throwing old refrigerators or car into the rivers because it's environmental not a good idea so let's not do this in space and we are actually kind of doing this still because it's still the wild west I mean we are working on regulatory regime from the 960s slowly and and a little bit updated and it's not matching at all the situation we having there and we should not leave this to individuals to to
(18:39) Really uh drive this it needs to be done more smartly yeah I agree and and we need some some level of government intervention on this part it's it's um it's like the tragedy of the commons like the oceans and the air uh when everybody owns it nobody owns it right your own garden in your own house it's it's easy to know whose job it is to maintain and keep keep a nice flowers and a nice Garden because it's your property but in the Commons like in the air on sea and in space nobody owns it or everybody owns it but nobody has the
(19:17) direct responsibility and and for for lowth orbit assets these are traveling 27,000 km an hour around the earth and this what makes space debris actually dangerous for a possible cascading uh effect this called the Kesler syndrome where you reach a critical point where you have so many individual objects orbiting the Earth that the probability of new collisions coming becomes so high that this will just uh become a runaway cascading effect to the point where I don't know if everybody here have seen the movie Wall E a w it's my favorite
(20:00) movie it's such a great film and there you can see uh kind of dystopian view on human future where everybody's overweight and they just have uh turned Earth into a big pile of trash and when they have this Exodus Mission and they they travel out of Earth orbit they finally uh travel kind of through uh this big fog of uh of satellites I can tell you this is not how uh it will look because the satellites they will they will travel uh hypersonically so it's the dangers of cascading uh space debris and and the kastler syndrome is actually
(20:38) that the Earth will just have this grid and fog surrounding it with billions and billions of pieces um which will uh destroy every single Earth observation communication broadband internet satellites and and actually trap Humanity on Earth for 500 to A Thousand Years but luckily this will not happen uh because we uh humans have learned to uh pick up our trash and take a bit of responsibility and I mean uh what goes up will come down uh everything we send into L orbit will eventually deorbit by themselves it's
(21:18) just a question of when and uh two years ago the uh United States government came out with a list of the top 50 most critical uh objects in lowth orbit right now which uh it's basically only um called War era Legacy governmental satellites from the Soviet and US Government but but these are the these 50 uh 50 objects uh they have a medium weight of uh 9 and a half metric tons so it's and they're big as trucks as uh as they could fill this whole room some of them uh and and um these are the number one uh mission for everyone working in
(22:04) the space debris mitigation sector to remove and actually deorbit uh out of uh out of uh lowth orbit I mean as long as the uh pieces are that big I mean there are ways to grab them and then take them down I think I'm more concerned about these little pieces one cmet so because they're traveling at the same speed and they have a high energy level of course and if they're hitting a space infrastructure this is called causing damage and and to collect these little pieces is much more challenge I mean as long as a satellite or a structure is
(22:36) still intact you can can grab it and take it down but these little things I'm always dreaming of a vacuum cleaner but unfortunately vacuum doesn't work in vacuum so we have to find something else right but if you could just suck in these little things that would be great yeah uh I agree these these uh bigger objects they are so manageable and um I mean uh one big object can turn into 10 uh smaller objects which can turn into 100 and a million objects but uh these are definitely more manageable the it's the small pieces of debris that
(23:13) uh that are actually the the most frightening and we have seen some uh examples even recently of solar panels being damaged smaller satellites being damaged and when uh researching at University we uh visited at some point uh The Finnish Alvar Alto University and the very talented pekan Hunan this is the guy who invented electrodynamic tethers for the Private Industry and and electrodynamic space sales um super super talented guy and uh he uh helped us calculate actually the probability of uh an electrodynamic tether being
(23:54) snapped by just a micro meteorite which which acts pretty simil similarly in lth orbit to these small specs of space debris and it was actually almost 1% Collision chance per orbit and and objects orbit many times per day so these are these are extreme uh these are extreme numbers actually but yes um I mean when the regulation uh came in this October of 2024 uh to actually amend every single uh space mission to be deorbited five years after end of mission I was very very happy and uh everyone working in the sustainable space Council um we
(24:38) celebrated uh really really great that day uh and it was a great day for Humanity and for sustainability in in space and uh yeah like we said earlier um private companies are pretty bad at picking up their own uh debris and their own trash actually so here like long-term uh deep space missions we need kind of a stable actor with with tax funds who can just set the standard and uh either if this is in kind of a a fund where every Mission pays uh a percentage of their total cost into a fund which then can go to fund missions removing
(25:20) said Satellites after end of mission uh we will uh we will uh have to see actually and I think this is even more important when we see more humans also working in low Earth's orbit because so far we are just talking about Mega constellation satellites that are very critical already today and will become even more critical but we will see more space stations with people working there and and you might ask why but microgravity offers uh uh great opportunities to produce better products be it from biof farer um Electronics
(25:54) semiconductors uh because of zero gravity so we will see and then this is all being prepared now um space stations where humans will live and work but we will also see fully automated space stations and um we also should not underestimate the gamechanging aspect of Starship the big heavy um the big  rocket from space X which can transport like 100 tons and dimensions of like 36 M by 9 M these are dimensions where you can really put industrial infrastructures up into microgravity and we will see this happening the next five
(26:30) to 10 years and I was so surprised because I'm also a big believer in big numbers and in the low earth orbit and lunar economy and how many people might live and work there but I attended a conference end of last year in lpoa on the space economy and someone from the beverage and convenience food industry shared their view on how many people live and work in Space by 2040 and even I was very much surprised and they are assuming like a million people by 2040 this is 15 years from now um whether we believe it or not I mean even it would
(27:05) be 10% we would talk about 100,000 people I mean we want to protect them we don't want to kill them by space debris right and with all the other challenges like um supplying them with food and drinks and you know with everything they need for their daily lives not talking about what they need to get their work done this is a whole industry that's going to be set up in lower orbit and and for uh for Moon and also for Mars the the end game and the end goal is obviously to have a s self sustaining civilization and to actually be able to
(27:41) grow food uh extract H2O and uh and the water from uh from the soil so um going back to L orbit and uh and private space stations how how will uh I mean we've seen uh some uh early work on this for for almost 10 years now what do you think the uh the kind of first private space station will will look like well there are few companies around uh right I mean there's uh one company axium space in the US that is building a station that docks first to ISS the existing International Space Station uh which I think is a very smart move
(28:23) because you are at the beginning using still the shared infrastructure of the international space station build your own station and then decouple when ISS comes to end of life by the end of the decade they just recently accelerated the program because of the international uh space station also you know having Russians on board and with the Western World with the other partn it's a kind of a tricky situation these days so um this is one of the probably very promising approaches but we also see other companies like starb or vast
(28:59) they're doing free flyers from the get-go and this offers the advantage that you already can go into other dimensions I mean axum very much is still focused on on the typical ISS kind of dimensions of the modules also the way they want to ship it because they would still use the Falcon 9 heavy uh while the other bet on on Starship and can actually bring other space stations up and and the fun fact is again here with this sheia size of sty ship and and and the weight they can transport space stations of the future will be maybe
(29:34) built on shipyards because you don't have to build them like lightweight and very let's say fragile structures you can just weld steel because 100 tons is a lot you you could bring up which offers again new opportunities for established Industries on Earth to become part of the uh Space Race but it will also show what is possible in terms of dimensions in terms of uh weight and by the way a steel structure would be much better protected against space debris at least the small pieces than uh the very U fragile other structures we have today
(30:08) yeah um we had we had a a great great uh kind of old space and new space actor Bigalow Aerospace they did some pioneering work on uh inflatable space stations and inflatable space station infrastructure Unfortunately they went bankrupt uh one year ago and uh but but I'm sure we will see someone kind of taking over that uh that part of the technological landscape in in space stations uh we have a pretty good uh kind of outlook on what we are doing what we're doing in America and in Europe and in the in the rest of the
(30:47) world but uh China has a space station actually the tiangong space station it's operating right now and as far as I know there there are actually euts on board right now and this is something that uh scares many people in uh both space defense and and in uh governmental space agencies because we know so little of it we can see footage that they uh broadcast down to earth we can see that they have a fully functioning highly technological space station the ISS is obviously becoming older and older it was planned for decommission actually
(31:25) already now but will be extended to 203 30 um what do you think the the Chinese kind of long-term goal is in in space I don't know either I don't have the crystal ball but let's assume that's very ambitious right I mean why shouldn't they I mean they have Ambitions on planet Earth uh so I guess every lead nation in the world U has to be in space and will do significant things there uh I mean that's why president Trump also mentioned that in his inauguration speech um and again coming from Europe that's that's very important for us I
(32:05) mean this is a wakeup call to also be clearly committed to what's going on in space for all the reasons and um I think what we also should not be naive about is and I didn't join the panel for for space defense because I was committed on another um thing but both topics go so much together I mean if we have critical infrastructure even if it's private commercial it is a critical infrastructure and uh there are already capabilities today to um destroy these infrastructures so we will see even Space Warfare at some point we should
(32:42) not be naive of course human beings will do the same things as they do on earth right I mean so we also need to think about how to protect our assets how to defend ourselves and uh how to make sure that we have international standards that are not only written on paper but which also can be enforced but just looking at how difficult it is let's say for the United Nations today on Earth to enforce things uh one even don't want to think about how this will be in outer space right so a lot of challenges coming around and
(33:15) all lead Nations who are present in space be it in lower Orbit on the moon or outter space deep space uh this is with the ambition of of course Innovation research and development commercial ation but also national interests I would say and on the topic of commercialization um we we spoke a bit earlier uh about the kind of uh private Capital uh ecosystem in Europe Contra the United States how how would you uh describe the kind of uh space investment side uh in Europe right now and compared to the United States well that's that's
(33:55) very tricky and for me it starts with uh a government making space a top priority I mean that's that's just words right words you are really committed to but this makes a big difference and not see space as a nice thing to have um so governments need to be very much aware of the Strategic relevance it starts with that second I'm not a big fan uh of of Grants and and Public Funding in the sense of just pushing Technologies I'm I'm a bigger fan of governments being involved as anchor customers and again here we should not forget that um the US
(34:38) and SpaceX only could be that successful because of the dod government contract SpaceX had in the early days and still has uh which then allows um also private Capital to come because suddenly your company becomes investable so the government as anchor customer is very critical and the advantage for governments is you're only paying if you receive a product or a service right you're not fund something without knowing what will be the outcome but when you get a product or a service delivered uh which is great in a
(35:11) way when we talk about private money I mean of course the levels in the US are totally different from what we're doing in in in Europe we have some nice examples um yes um but we need more because we are basically in all areas that are of relevance and and have a great variety of of of startups and and and young companies and for example my own focus when I'm investing is indeed very much on Europe um because I I think we need to collect these companies when and build a strong base here as well it's it's about
(35:47) sovereignity we want to be a player here as well but we are struggling every day in fundraising and nowadays even funds come and say yeah you know um we would do the next round with you maybe up to series a but we have no idea who is supporting you in series B if you're not going abroad so we are not in doing series a or preed or seed because we have no vision so you as a startup has to work very early on internationally but then the Temptation is pretty big that you are leaving your country too soon and in particular when it a lot of
(36:22) money is involved even more a challenge we have seen the last years it's getting better slowly is the fact that still a lot of funds don't like dual use not even talking about defense Tech which I only question because what is more ESG from a western perspective to protect Democratic Values um than doing it right I mean why is space why is dual use something which you put into the very dirty corners of where you don't want to make investments right I didn't really get this uh again it's getting better and better but this is really
(37:01) important and at the same time and this is where I work very hard with my uh portfolio companies is make sure you get customers very early on um and there's one great example I'm invested in a company that is building space planes so horizontally taking off and Landing um space planes it's let's say the future for me compared to Rocket which launchs virtually vertically and and and bring things up to space but not down and they have subskill demonstrators and subskill demonstrators could be drones and and this is already a product you can
(37:37) Implement into the market and create customer attration and a startup learns very early on that there is a uh a customer to serve I mean the first generation of space Tech startups they were very Tech driven um they needed hundreds of million to develop that Tech and build their infrastructure before even doing anything with it and I think that's not the way to go uh so we need more healthy companies in that regard so there are quite a few challenges but if you master them you will be able to build something but yes we have to be
(38:08) bold enough also in Europe to to go big I I totally agree we we need to be uh we need to be bold in Europe in a in a similar sense that the Americans are and and I also highly agree on the point of uh having government grants uh this is such a perverted way of of turning space uh in industry and and real good commercial companies into some uh just uh basically a paper machine that just creates papers and and documentation for how I mean how our rocket engine is ESG friendly I mean and and in Norway the the public sector is ex extremely
(38:47) dominating uh to the point where since our Inception we have been asked when we will move to Texas basically uh but and but would we have steered away from these uh government grants and uh just to not dilute our mission and and have our super talented rocket Engineers sit on a computer and fill out forms on how how uh our Tech is uh ESG compatible actually so I I always tell people uh when they ask me about this also uh steer away it's a trap it's a Honey Trap it seems lucrative and this is also even for some
(39:28) uh kind of transgovernmental agencies in the space sector it's also yields for them um it's a waste of time this just my personal opinion it's um it delays and it turns your brain from solving real problems with the technology you're developing to solving the problem of writing a ESG report which is not the rocket engineer job at all so yeah I agree about this um and we are seeing like uh turning in into the kind of private investment side of the European markets we are seeing more and more great companies in in Norway uh the
(40:07) andoya space port is uh is the first Launchpad is actually completed and we we're seeing a couple more being built and you said earlier it's about sovereignity and uh up until now the only space port in Europe or the only European space port have been in French Guana so we have shipped Rockets every single Aran rocket to uh South America from Europe to launch it and and this this is for reasons that you need a big body of water you can't launch stuff from uh from Theos because uh it's cities all around and uh if you have a
(40:49) mission failure you risk uh actually rocket Parts uh Landing down on uh and and potentially hurting humans on the ground we see countries that have a kind of a liberal uh uh kind of a liberal way of doing this the the Chinese they they obviously launch rockets on a on a very frequent uh scale and they um give zero  about uh rocket Parts Landing down on on Villages um but having a European space port in Europe is is important for this very reason sovereignity and for me as a Norwegian citizen I would obviously want there to
(41:31) be Norwegian made rockets on our Spaceport but uh luckily we have super talented firms in uh mostly in Germany actually two big firms in Germany that are creating rockets and they are very very talented and they have kind of uh at least for one of them taken this kind of Silicon Valley approach where they have some of the employees in the US they have an entity there they race capital from from Big nonn Venture actors and they uh they go fast my um the guy who taught me rocket science he he told me early on that uh
(42:10) he said halver you know there's two ways to to build Rockets it's the French way and it's the American way and uh the French way is you work theoretically over years and years and you plan out your concept and you do simulations on the computer and then when you've worked for 10 15 maybe 20 years you make the rocket and you test it uh and maybe it works and maybe it don't so very very careful considerate slow uh development process the American way is uh you create the uh an MVP you create uh 10 different rockets and you
(42:49) max out every single stat on them till uh some of them explode and you just turn it to Max Capacity and you see okay uh this one didn't work that one worked Let's uh continually build on this and yes this results in uh more explosions but also more Innovation and uh we chose the the American way uh in in our firm so uh how do you how do you see the differences um culturally how people run their companies in the in the United States Contra Contra the European uh European companies you have in your portfolio for example
(43:28) we also go for the American way um and uh it was not an explosion right it was a rapid unexpected rapid disassembly right and we learned a lot no but I think if you don't fail um you probably didn't move aggressive enough to move boundaries so I think this is something which also describes this American approach and we as Europeans have to really learn because we don't like that failure is not an option and in particular if you're coming from the space industry this is a big thing and just you know on the recent Starship
(44:02) launch it was so interesting to see the headlines particularly the German newspapers were like again a failure for Elon masach well the international press was much more positive and they should be because at the end it will succeed it will come right it's about learning learning learning fast fail fast learn and adapt and get better and uh this is for example again in the space company exactly what we are doing there with the subskill demonstrators I mean they started like little devices now they're getting bigger and bigger you moving
(44:35) boundaries every time you have your next generation of prototype and then it's not this zero or one thing then you're moving boundaries every time you're learning you're improving you're getting better and better and a better and reliable um system at the end but it's not in the DNA of us Europeans so we have to learn that uh but we have to learn otherwise we won't survive yeah I agree we need to adopt this uh kind of more Cowboy mentality actually uh but in a European way but but yes we need to kind of steer away from from the
(45:06) classical French way of of doing rocket engineering I think and and this goes for for every single uh Vector in in the space industry um so um guys if you have any questions uh feel free to just raise your hand and uh and we'll answer as uh good as we can are there anyone sir 97 Alexander duin was a Russian uhbe they say is one of the mo the most important advisor of of Putin he wrote a book about uh geopolitics and space is the outmost geopolitical battlefield right now uh I work in a climate uh climate Tech and we are looking for
(45:51) space solutions for monitoring uh climate change biodivers assets so I want I want to more to hear a little bit more on on the defense side but on the Strategic because most of the geopolitic uh Powers today they were Consolidated through mapping the most strategical uh geographical places on Earth but now we are talking about space which is a general ground let's say that so who who steps their first and settle their their technology is going to rule the world so it's not just okay let's join the hands and build something in
(46:28) common like you said human beings they are predictable because of its nature and sometimes they can be quite dangerous so how do you see this geopolitical aspect no I mean you're absolutely right and I don't know this author but I know Tim Marshall for example who published quite a few books on on geopolitics and I think in book number four uh space at least got a chapter book number five was entirely dedicated to geopolitics in space Tim Marshall and um so you are absolutely right and and the challenge is you don't have any um uh boundaries
(47:08) Frontiers in in um in in space right I mean you have no borders um even if some people challenge Integrity of borders on planet Earth I mean if you don't have borders how do you want to you know protect them how do you want to challenge them and yes we do see exactly what you're calling the wi West right I mean who is first takes the the stake takes the claim right and uh it's getting more and more difficult for others um so yes it is a geopolitical game even more but was your question only to the geopolitical side or also to
(47:41) your startup and and the climate uh mon absolutely I mean um this is one of the very first applications uh of space based infrastructures Earth observation to Monitor and manage climate change and all the different examples right I mean it starts with weather it starts with uh um drought it start with flooding it starts with you know wildfires basically you can control everything at a very higher visit rate thanks to the mega constellations we also seeing now in the earth observation field and now even with AI on top of it you get really a
(48:31) great database and quite an intelligent system in order to do that and I think that's also an very important argument always for doing space because not for the sake of space but space is supporting all 17 sustainable development goals yeah last question yeah thank you Matas for this uh nice presentation and 20 20 25 years ago uh the European Space Agency seem to be a competitor of of Nas of the Americans in Rockets uh now it seems like it's about Russia and the US and Europe is lagging behind as you are saying and all these
(49:16) developments of collaboration between private and public in the US looks like it really is making a difference and how optimistic are and and you are very brave on having this private initiative okay but how optimistic are you that the Europeans are going to react and to be really a serious player in the next 20 years do we have the country's Administration really sensitive to to this to this matter to make this a reality or how optimistic are are you really well um I'm an optimist otherwise I couldn't work as entrepreneur and
(50:02) investor but I'm a realistic Optimist and sometimes I'm asking myself if I need to send The Optimist in me on vacation and and the realist in me has to be uh the more dominating part for a while and um yeah I agree I mean what was going on I think NASA at some point decided very clearly we are no longer interested in everything that happens between Earth and Moon we only are starting at Moon again because of the obvious reasons we discussed as a springboard for going into deep space we only help private companies in
(50:38) commercializing low earth orbit in Luna that was a clear mission of NASA Issa with very limited budgets still tried to play everywhere um so there was not enough money for anything to be very strong in and that's ultimately led into what the uh Isa chief um Josef ashbaker said is the European launcher crisis and even today Aran 6 far too late far too expensive um not really operational at this point still um we don't have it and and and and even the micr launcher companies they are not launching yet um we need to get there at some point but
(51:18) the question is do we actually still have an opportunity on the launcher side to become competitive if it's about government orders it might work because there sometimes National Security interests why you want to launch with a sovereign launcher and then price doesn't really play the role but all commercial missions I mean SpaceX will take them all because they go in with every price they are very competitive on everything again that's why I was optimistically investing in a space plane company because you are going to the next
(51:52) technical scurve I think the launcher the vertical launcher game is over for Europe we might see some Niche players that might be even commercially successful but this is not the dominating part so with that being said we need to be very ambitious on not just copying Space X and being 20 years late we need to be very ambitious on what's beyond micr launches and satellite constellations and this is Conquering low Earth's orbit and going to the Moon yes we have to be very focused what we're doing and I think the next four
(52:28) years are very decisive because the US now with the new Administration will really push very hard they will do everything and they will move boundaries and Europe has four years left and as you can imagine I I am observing that very closely you are very brave congrat good luck congratulations thank you I need your help I mean help me yes Kudos um I agree the future belongs to the optimists um and uh with that we will um actually end our session here I would uh like to thank Matias a lot uh thank you for joining this and thank you guys
(53:14) for coming uh I will be here the rest of the day I'm available to answer any question and and have a talk and uh thank you so much [Music]