Cameron Gleeson

Another company which is really fascinating is AST Space Global, which is forming strategic relationships with large telecommunication networks to provide cellular coverage in areas where we don't necessarily have good coverage.

And that's a slightly different technology.

to the one that Starlink's progressed down, but that's a really interesting development for that company.

Beyond that, geospatial mapping.

So if we look at a company called PlanetLab, they are essentially mapping the world in near real time, overlaying AI and providing insights, whether that be to governments, to insurance companies after a disaster, to agriculture, and that company's reached profitability.

So these are real applications.

But what's really enabled this and what's enabled these industries to grow has been the reduction in the cost of rockets and shipping satellites, for example, into space.

And that's really the game changer here.

We can think of rockets really as just the freight industry or the trucking industry.

Yeah, well, you've got to draw a historical parallel somewhere, don't you?

You do.

So, you know, it used to cost like $12,000 per kilogram to ship freight into space back when that was dominated by government, government agencies, defense contractors.

But if we look at SpaceX, they've lowered the cost to around about $2,000 to $4,000 a kilogram with their Falcon rockets.

And their next generation rockets are likely to reduce those costs further, even down to as low as $1 to $200 US per kilogram.

And this is the game changer.

This is really what opens up all sorts of new use cases.

Because the first step to building a space industry is actually getting outside the Earth's atmosphere.

Lowering that cost is enabling businesses to be built.

With that sort of breakthrough.

And there's other names that are leading the way in that front.