Steve Kwast
speaker
426 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Steve Kwast’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You build a satellite on the planet, you have to build it bulletproof, which is like 60% of the cost, because it has to be able to be folded into a tight little ball that fits into the top of a rocket, and it's an incredibly violent ride to space. The vibrations and the g-forces would break apart anything that's not bulletproof, okay? So that takes a lot of money and time. Then in seven minutes,
That satellite is in space, in this beautiful sanctity of space where there's nothing to get in its way. And then it has to unfold like an origami. But if any of those explosive bolts or pulleys or levers go bad or don't unfold properly because of the violent ride to space, it's a total loss. And that's a total loss of like $350 million to $500 million for a satellite.
And then, adding to that, when you run out of gas, it becomes space junk, meaning now you gotta build a whole new satellite in the old model. What Spacebuilt does is we, think of it like a Lego box. Instead of building a delicate Lego ship, then putting it on the handlebars of your bike and going over a rocky road to your destination,
or building a ship in Kansas and dragging it across the Appalachian Mountains to put it in the ocean, you build the ship in the ocean. Or you take the Lego blocks up to space and you snap them together in space assembly and manufacturing. So all those Lego blocks now are resilient. You drop a box of Legos on the floor and none of them break because there's no coupling loads.
and you can snap it together and you're just fine. Same is true with space. We can load all these Lego parts in any rocket, send it up to space, snap them together using robotics and laser communication so our engineers on the ground can see and operate just like a surgeon can do surgery from LA to New York because of fiber optic cables. Laser communication is like fiber optic cables on steroids.
And now you can build satellites for cheaper, okay? You don't have to spend all the money to make them bulletproof. You can build them bigger, and with big aperture and big power, now you can get big return on investment.
And when you need to put in a new computer, you just slide out the old computer board, slide in a new one with those robotic mechanics that are servicing the satellites, and you can upgrade indefinitely in this beautiful sanctity of space.
So to get to your question about solar power from space, and again, I can put you in touch with people that have been working this for decades because it has been known that we could do this. The physics have been known. And now we're at a place where it's been demonstrated.
The X-37, the Air Force space plane that used to be secret, that's not secret anymore, it's been doing experiments showing what I'm going to describe right now. And what you do is that the intensity of that sun's power, you build a solar array that can absorb that sun's power, and then you translate it into a radio wave,
and then you beam that radio wave down to Earth, and it's received by what's called a rectenna, and then you turn it back into electricity, and you're done. I mean, it's that simple. But because it's a radio wave, it is not diminished by the weather, okay? Or the atmosphere, or the gravitational field, or any of the things that can sometimes prevent energy from getting to the Earth.
So solar, and this is the other piece of it, the demonstrations that we see are at efficiency levels that we are not used to right now. Any electricity that you're getting right now, whether it's created by wind energy, solar energy, nuclear energy, fossil fuel energy, wave energy, you name it, the technique for delivering the electricity that's powering these lights right now.
And you're lucky to get in the high 20s, low 30s of efficiency. Meaning by the time you create the energy at a power plant and you bring it across the power lines and you bring it into your house, the heat dissipation and the efficiency loss, you're barely getting to 20%, okay, or 30% at best. Solar panels, the same way. They're low efficiency, but you know, we make it work.
Solar panels are problematic too, and so is wind because it's not always windy. You know, President Trump talks about this all the time. And there's day and night and weather. So if you're up in Alaska, solar panels don't work when it's dark, you know, half the year. So the forms of energy we're going to see coming in are going to be – a tapestry of all of these things.
It's gonna be helium-3 when we start mining the asteroids in the moon for helium-3 that is such an efficient and effective clean energy way of producing a massive amount of energy for Earth. Hydrogen, even though hydrogen can be dangerous, There are ways of controlling it.
Nuclear is on a path to where the odds of this chair going off high order are larger percentage-wise than those nuclear reactors going off high order, these modular small nuclear reactors that can power a city, okay, or a home, or a cluster of homes, anywhere on the planet. But 20% efficiency in the current method of delivery of energy
The experiments in space are showing the promise of initial efficiency levels of 80% efficiency. By taking the energy of the sun and transforming it into a radio wave, the radio wave coming down to Earth, safe for humans, received into a rectenna and then transferred back into electricity, you're receiving it at 80% efficiency. So now you're talking about an immediate jump of 60% efficiency.
So now you're talking about what you see with computers, where back in the day, computers would fit on the third floor of a skyscraper and be millions of dollars. And now in everybody's pocket, is a computer that for 500 to 800 bucks that blows away anything that was 50 years ago.
This journey of more capability at lower cost is gonna come to a market near you, a theater near you in the form of electricity. And it's gonna transform. And now people in Central Africa can afford electricity and they can afford information that is not blocked by anybody if we can figure out how to triangulate truth. Back to what you do.
Triangulating truth, all of this is meaningless if we as human beings can't figure out what is true.
A rectenna. It's like an antenna, but it's basically for radio waves to be absorbed and then turned back into electricity.
Showing 261–280 of 426 · page 14 of 22
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