Chris Hadfield

And then you become really...

financially viable.

It doesn't take an enormous organization just to get to space.

And that's coming quickly with SpaceX's new Starship.

It's a monster of a rocket and a very complex thing to do.

But if you watch their last flight, their 11th test flight, they had remarkable success.

Both pieces safely made it back.

They're pushing the edges of the

uh economical savings in in complexity but it won't be very long before you see a starship launch either from texas or florida the first stage come back and get grabbed and then the orbital stage get up do what it's doing in space and then come back and get grabbed stack them up fill them up with fuel and use them again that's coming quite rapidly

That's going to drop the cost even more.

And so to me, access is everything.

As soon as we can make it safe and simple and as inexpensive as possible for things to get to space, that's when the Earth orbit and Earth moon economies will really take off.

Well, civilizations rise and fall all the time.

Some of them last a long time.

The Roman Empire.

If you look at China, they've been an anomaly in human history, although they've had all of their ebbs and flows.

They've been kind of a discrete geopolitical unit for thousands and thousands of years in that part of the world.

And

that adds a sense of urgency to what's going on.

Because you don't have to look very far back in history to whatever the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, or Egypt had that zenith of civilization and then collapsed, or all the ones that came before that.