Isaiah Taylor

One is solar panels, if you're at the level of planet Earth, work great because you have a lot of sunlight and you don't have any shadow and you can get a lot of power.

As you move away from Earth, move away from the sun, solar irradiance becomes weaker and weaker, right?

So if you want to push a vessel out to the edges of the solar system or out to some of the further planets, you need nuclear.

You have to have nuclear.

The sun's not going to power you that far.

So nuclear for in-space transit is very interesting.

We don't think about in-space transit quite as much yet.

Maybe we will someday, but there's a lot of smart people working on that.

What I'm more interested in is making power on Mars.

So we want to go to Mars.

I think a lot of people in my generation are very excited about Mars.

We talked a little bit about this before with the frontier, right?

Americans are always looking for a frontier.

And I think a lot of people in my generation see Mars as that frontier, and it's very exciting.

But one of the first things that Mars needs is power, need a lot of power.

And it's not just for the local generation.

It's not just to make electricity to turn on the lights and operate the AC on a Mars base.

It's also to get fuel to come back to Earth, right?

So when the first starships land, these are Methalox starships, right?

So that means they have liquid methane and liquid oxygen burning in the Raptor engines.