Jared Isaacman

They'd say we kept astronauts alive continuously.

We've had a continuous heartbeat on the International Space Station for nearly a quarter of a century.

It's a hell of an accomplishment, but you need that orbital economy to pay for everything we want to see in space someday.

It can't be perpetual taxpayer funding.

Whether it's cancer treating drugs, you can use microgravity to create crystal formulations of pharmaceutical compounds to increase the density of the treatment, which might increase the effectiveness.

People talk about 3D printing organs in microgravity.

But none of these things have truly come to fruition yet.

I mean, microgravity.

What can we do there that we can't do as easily here on Earth?

But there's lots of experiments, but nothing that has cracked the code yet on it.

But if we don't figure it out, then it's perpetual taxpayer funding.

And frankly, space, since the beginning of the space program, has always faced the debate of how can we invest so much money here?

NASA's budget, $25 billion a year, whether it's $25 billion or $20 billion, which it may wind up tracking towards.

How can you justify that when people are starving here and people are homeless and health care is bad?

We are always going to be faced with that debate, and it's a good debate to have.

until we kind of crack the code and figure out how to extract more value from being in space than we put into it.

And when you figure that out, whatever it may be, that's when you're in your Star Wars future, man.

That's when you've got multiple space stations and people on the moon and Mars because you're mining helium-3 or printing organs.

Everybody's got a spare kidney in their fridge.

It's like we've got to figure that out at some point or else we're just going to be on the taxpayer pipe for a long time.