Will Marshall

speaker

244 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Will Marshall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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

There's a big billion-dollar satellite going to space or something, and we're hitching on the side of those with lots of little smaller satellites.

Interesting fact, we've got the record for the most satellites put into space.

We've also got the record for the most blown up going to space.

A common misunderstanding of what happened in the launch sector, a lot of people know that launch costs come down, but for the first more than a decade of launches for SpaceX, they

really brought US launch costs down to be comparable with international launch costs.

Really, the US launch costs have been kept arbitrarily high by a central monopoly because US government satellites had to be launched on US rockets by law from Congress.

So Boeing and Lockheed teamed together to ensure that they had a really expensive rocket because they had to be used because they were the only rocket provider.

But we as a commercial company weren't limited to US rockets.

And we went around the world and like the Indian PSLV, very reliable, at least at the time.

And

It was quite cheap.

SpaceX ultimately got not just to that point, but then brought it down even further, about 4 or 5x further than that.

And that's really, really been a boon, but that wasn't how we first got to space, at least.

That has been a further help.

But remember, even a 4 or 5x reduction in cost, which really helps the whole space industry and has helped spawn it, is less significant purely from an economic standpoint.

than the 100 to 1,000x improvement in cost performance of satellites that are going in.

So in each kilogram that you put up into space, if you can get 100 times more data because you've made the satellite way smaller, then you have won big time, even if the launch cost didn't change one iota.

I actually think it's quite clearly going to happen.

And here's why.

We did a calculation with Google about eight or nine years ago now, looking at all the cost of data centers on the ground, all the cost of data centers in space.

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