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A detailed interview hit the <a href="http://bt.e-ditionsbyfry.com/publication/?i=168966&p=22" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Space News</a> presses today.

It also happens to be my only newspaper subscription.

They needed to edit out a few paragraphs to get it fit one page. Here is the original submission:

1) You've discussed an interest in traveling in lunar orbit? Why do you want to take that trip?

For the photography! The question causes me pause because I would think most of your readers would dream of going, except for the cost and safety risk. But I believe both of those will plummet in the next decade, to make these dreams manifest. I am motivated by the photographic opportunities and widened perspective that distance can afford. I am therefore not personally interested in suborbital flight, but would expect to spend some time in LEO before heading to the moon. I have flown the Zero-G flights, and am not looking to space for the weightless experience. My dream is to orbit the moon in a low orbit, lower than Apollo X, soaring over the lunar landscape in an extended space walk — seeing so much detail with a good set of lenses, and Earthrises over the rugged horizon with a wing-suit perspective soaring low — rather than landing to be confined to a small region with limited views. I am reminded of Michael Collins’ zen-like trance during his EVA: “This is the best view of the universe that a human has ever had. We are gliding across the world in total silence, with absolute smoothness… I am in the cosmic arena, the place to gain a celestial perspective.” And unlike Apollo, there is no rush. These missions will not require the training or career dedication or luck of catching the right mission assignment before the program ends; rather, the longer we wait, the cheaper and safer it should be, hopefully falling into the comfort zone for many of us.

2) In a talk at NewSpace last year, you mentioned that the cost of access to low-Earth orbit was getting cheaper and might get "ten times cheaper still." What firms or technologies are paving the way for that type of dramatic decrease in the cost of space access?

It’s primarily SpaceX’s effort to make the booster fully and rapidly reusable, with propulsive landing, as seen with their Grasshopper test vehicle. Since the Dragon spacecraft is already reusable, the vast majority of the cost of the rocket could be amortized over many launches. Sir Arthur Clarke identified the critical path when he wrote: “Escaping from Earth will not always be astronomically expensive… This will come… most important of all, through the development of reusable boosters, which can be flown for hundreds of missions, like normal aircraft.” He wrote that in July 1969, as Apollo 11 was on its way to the moon, yet nobody has taken on the challenge with liquid boosters, until now.

For small sats, there are many different efforts underway to provide launch services optimized for that scale, and given the sheer number and diversity of approaches, I assume some of them will succeed. More immediately, the standardization of secondary payload opportunities is a boon to small sats, and we have seen some launches use what I affectionately call “stowaway” pricing, where the marginal cost to add some cubesats is negligible.

3) What business opportunities would be created by that dramatic reduction in the cost of space access?

While all existing markets benefit from lower cost of access, we have been thinking about what new opportunities emerge that would not have been reasonable before, and how might one rethink the entire process flow and product framework for a given capability like Earth observation.

If we start with the assumption that launches will cost well over $100M because the satellites are large and need a whole launch vehicle, then satellite designers need to recoup that minimum cost of entry over many years, and the design exercise inevitably migrates to an expensive satellite with station keeping and space-proven technology choices. The technology age compounds with long design and build cycles and 7 to 10 year operational lives. Without low cost access, concepts like disposable satellites, for testing and then service deployment, would seem absurd.

Compare the Curiosity Rover — which sports a 2 megapixel camera from its 2004 design roots — with NASA’s recent trio of PhoneSats carrying Android smartphones; the symbolic exercise reminds us that the modern smartphone has more computational power and memory than the satellites flying with the traditional development model. These inexpensive low-power electronics and 6-axis accelerometers are the peace dividend of the cell phone wars. If we think of flying this year’s electronics versus the average in service, it’s easy to find a 1000x advantage from Moore’s Law alone. And then there are the benefits of flying low for Earth observation (with less telephoto zoom required) or lower latency communication that one might not exploit when trying to maintain long service lives. Add the benefits of Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Satellites — the “RAIS” analogy to RAID in storage if you will — with advantages in development cycle time and robustness to point failures, and so on.

When you lower the cost of access — directly through reusability or indirectly by shifting to small sats — a boom in application innovation ensues, just like it did with optical fiber paving the way for the Internet and cloud services that followed.

As you might imagine from my rocketry hobby and Apollo space artifact collection, I am predisposed to space investment. For 10 years prior to SpaceX, I did not find a single proposal that warranted a meeting with the DFJ partnership; the business case just did not pencil out for venture capital as far as I could tell. Post SpaceX, the entrepreneurial activity is in florid bloom, we are negotiating a third space company investment, and we are seeing interesting opportunities across multiple continents. Every one of the proposals references what I call the “everyday low prices” on the SpaceX website. Imagine how helpful it is for a new entrant when brainstorming a new space business to simply know what their launch costs will be!

4) You mentioned that you've seen many proposals to put up constellations of small satellites for communications or Earth observation, what made Planet Labs stand out?

We look for passionate entrepreneurs with unique ideas to change the world. So it starts with the people. I first met them while launching rockets in the Black Rock Desert with my son, and these NASA scientists came to test fly a Google Android phone as a proto-satellite. We kept in touch as they left NASA and started development in a Silicon Valley garage. Their passion creates an infectious enthusiasm for the future, and their commitment to humanitarian causes and open data distances them from a typical “spy sat” orientation.

Without getting into too much detail about their product roadmap, let me say that they started the design exercise from the radical extreme of the PhoneSat project, and their approach stood out as a unique departure from all that we have seen. While their design is radically different than PhoneSat, their philosophy of using commercial components in agile space development is similar.

This has allowed Planet Labs to design and test five generations of satellites, including two orbital launch successes, before they even decided on a company name. We have never seen a company go so far with just our seed financing. And later this year, they will have at least 28 satellites in orbit, the largest remote sensing constellation ever launched.

What this enables is unprecedented frequency of Earth observation. Existing imaging markets want better frequency and coverage, and if you push it far enough, entirely new markets will arise. Every farmer could have access to the imaging data that rich farmers exploit today; commodity traders might pay more for timely rollups of global crop health; illegal fishing or deforestation could be caught in the act; natural disaster responders would have before and after imagery. With open data, apps developers can come up with all kinds of analytic cloud services from this blanket of big data from above the clouds. The list of use cases goes on, but in the broadest sense, as the founders of Planet Labs like to say, rapid cadence imagery will help us become a sustainable steward of spaceship Earth.

5) What other types of space-related businesses are attracting or are likely to attract VC funding? Asteroid Mining? Space Tourism?

So far, we have seen VC funding of Earth Observation at various scales and we would expect it to extend to the data integrator and apps layer. We have seen angel funding of novel launch vehicles, asteroid mining and space tourism/transport. Some have even found Kickstarter support for small sats.

I am interested in a rethinking of broadband constellations with a similar line of reasoning as we used with remote sensing, but with more complexity in the ground station and market development. Since we prefer businesses that can iterate early with customers on the path to a grand vision, I am also interested in space projects that begin with terrestrial applications, such as synthetic biology (for a Mars sample return with in situ gene sequencing, beaming back the code to instantiate living versions on Earth), microwave energy beaming for UAVs before rockets, even compact fusion.

Some of the projects have attracted a different kind of VC funding – donations! For example, I support the B612 Foundation, which is building a heliocentric satellite to map the NEOs that could pose a threat to the Earth for the next 100 years, and the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at NASA Ames.

6) Are you seeing growing interest among venture capital firms in investing in commercial space startups? Why or why not?

Yes, we have found surprisingly broad interest in Planet Labs and SpaceX, but unfortunately there are many more investors addicted to the sugar buzz of consumer pop tech than the sea change of hard tech. And we find fewer still exploring sectors that have not yet demonstrated success, to boldly go…

7) How is your firm's investment in SpaceX working out compared to the way you initially imagined it would?

Oh my. SpaceX vastly exceeds expectations – financially and inspirationally; it’s truly breathtaking. Cash-flow positive for six years; $4B of contracted revenue; inspiring the nation; and building the technology to make life multi-planetary.

Let me invert the question – who besides Elon Musk could have expected the success that we have seen to date? Who could have had a vision that bold? If I wrote out the short script of the SpaceX story to date, who would have believed it in advance?