Ariel Ekblaw

But we could put solar panels above the atmosphere, above Earth, and

Get raw, unfiltered sunlight, concentrate it so it pierces through the atmosphere better, and basically treat it like a flashlight so you could shine energy on Earth even at night, which would fundamentally solve the storage problem for solar power or the intermittency problem.

Wow.

So really cool infrastructure.

We should be building safely things like this that could, again, leverage this environment of orbit for the benefit of life on Earth.

For the biotech habitat, we think in the next five years there's going to be this race to fill the market gap from the International Space Station being decommissioned.

Oh, yeah.

So we already have a space station in orbit that does a little bit of this, but it's more like one-off research projects.

It's not a high-throughput biofactory.

So I think in five years, we could be able to credibly say that we could do another commercial space station focused around biotechnology and really scale up what the ISS did.

Space-based solar power is a little trickier.

We've known how to do it since the 1970s.

So it's not a science question like fusion.

It's really a question of the funding and the engineering ability to assemble thousands of solar panels in orbit.

So you can imagine, you know, it takes 10 or 15 years, sometimes 20 years on Earth to build a nuclear power plant.

We might similarly take 10 or 15 years to build that infrastructure in orbit and then be able to deliver the clean energy.

So space-based solar power is more of a

middle-term investment, I think.

And I think it's important to remember, luckily, space exploration is still one of the few bipartisan things.

So at least in the U.S., in our political climate, it's really special and we actually really treasure it that we can still get support from both Republicans and Democrats for space.