Travis Beals

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103 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 24 Jul

Travis Beals’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Freakonomics Radio · 682. Should A.I. Move to Space? · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

You can't see the satellites because there's such a tiny percentage of the total area, the total volume there.

Or potentially you need maybe still a decent number of rockets, but you need to reuse them a lot.

And reuse of rockets is a great way to make rockets cheaper, right?

That's how you can get a lot of launches with a reasonable number of rockets.

In the draft paper that we put out, we talk about $200 a kilogram as being an important milestone.

I mean, that's not the only thing that you have to make progress on by far, but that's a good sort of milestone to think about.

What are the launch costs right now?

They're quite a bit more than that, but they've been coming down at a really impressive pace, right?

So this is, in some sense, it's not about where things are today.

It's about skating to where the puck is going.

Here's Travis Beals again.

We want to launch two satellites, and the reason for that is one of the things we want to test is an optical link between the two satellites so that we can run a compute workload that involves multiple satellites, because that's one of the important aspects of the system.

So we want to test out the simplest possible version of that.

And in order to do that, you need two satellites because you need both endpoints.

There's a couple other things we want to test as well.

One is just making sure all the thermal solutions behave the same way in space that we expected them to, that we tested in the lab.

And then another aspect of this is tolerance to the radiation environment in space.

So that's something else we also tested on Earth, but...

You know, doing things in space is never exactly the same as trying to test things out in a lab on Earth.

Doing things in space is where Will Marshall comes in.

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