With the pace of technological advancement, who says space settlement is not a possibility? In fact, space exploration, even for recreational purposes, is already happening via space tourism. What does this mean in the near future? Bringing on the show an expert in all things space, Doctor Awesome is with none other than Dr. David Livingston. Dr. Livingston is the founder and host of The Space Show® and the Executive Director of the One Giant Leap Foundation, Inc. (OGLF). In this episode, he rockets us up into the cosmos with discussions on space settlement and its realistic future for us as a human species. He taps into the institutions as well as companies like SpaceX that can either bring the vision forward or back, untangling the complicated dynamics between the state and private corporations. From space-related explorations to medical research to human gravity prescription and everything in between, Dr. Livingston brings out his expertise backed with current and existing studies to enlighten us about the possibilities of human life in space. Is space settlement something we’ll see in our lifetimes? How far along are we in the process? Tune in to quench your space curiosities with this conversation!

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Watch the episode here

 

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The Future Of Space Settlement – A Conversation With Dr. David Livingston

In this episode, I have Dr. David Livingston who is also called Dr. Space. He has hosted thousands of episodes of his own show, The Space Show, where he talks about space and space-related topics. He’s had an opportunity to talk to a lot of amazing people and seen a lot of amazing things. I’m happy to have him. Dr. Livingston, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and The Space Show?

Welcome and thank you very much for this invitation. Space has always been one of my favorite things. If you talk to a lot of people in the space industry, they started when they were five years old with an interest in stars, astronomy, science fiction, or something space-related. I was no exception. I think my first telescope was a Cub Scout telescope that I used in the backyard of my home in Tulsa. We could see craters on the moon with it. We could see the rings of Saturn.

It was a cool era for science fiction. The sci-fi special effects that Harryhausen did in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, the original The Day the Earth Stood Still, From Here To The Moon, and all that were captivating for little kids. I grew up always loving space and always hoping to see a flying saucer. I have always wished that there were aliens and extraterrestrial life out there.

I was wondering if I could be an astronomer someday or in some professional field growing up that is related to space. As I went on through school, I discovered I wasn’t so great in math. Astronomy took a wayside to policy and being good in law and politics. That’s the direction I headed off in school, but I always loved space. I did my doctorate degree. It’s a Doctor of Business Administration. It’s a DBA rather than a PhD. I did it in business.

I went through everything but the dissertation, which sounds familiar to a lot of people. I was going to do a special real estate financing dissertation, and my second son was born with cystic fibrosis. His first couple of years were in and out of UCSF and all sorts of stuff. The treatments back then were not great. The therapies were horrible that you had to do. He kept having a doctor’s prognosis of if he made it to seven, he’d be great or if he made it into his teens, he’d be great. It was on and on.

 

 

I dropped the dissertation to help and take care of the kid. I always believed in the future, Doctor Awesome. I always thought that someday there would be treatments and cures for CF. I said that my job was to preserve his lung values and his health as much as possible because the kid was not going to make his own choices. I’m going to make them for him and hopefully, teach him good habits for the day in which treatments came.

I put all of this on hold, but as he got older, I started thinking more and more about returning to graduate school until I got a letter that said, “You have six months to produce a topic or the accreditation bureaus will kick you out of the program.” I said, “I’m not about to do anything in real estate. I want to do my passion.” One thing that you learn when you’re taking care of a critically ill or a person that has a fatal illness which is CF is that you start to appreciate what interests you in life and the things that are of value importance to you and that make a difference to you. If something makes a difference to you and it’s worth doing, it probably makes a difference for others and maybe even for society at large.

Real estate was a business but it wasn’t my passion, space was. I started looking around for what to do space-related. I heard some radio shows in San Francisco with some professors at Stanford. I called them for ideas and I came up with a lot of help from the Stanford professor about the idea of space tourism. Back in the mid-1990s, it was a giggle factor thing, but there were space advocates and space organizations talking about it.

I thought I could sell my business school, which is a very conservative business school in San Francisco, on a commercial expansion of the space industry to focus on space tourism. With the help of a Boeing advisor and my Stanford advisor, my school approved that dissertation. Now I had to teach myself about it. That took me out of the world of fantasy and sci-fi to reality. I had to find out about rocketry, space, propulsion, and everything that goes into it. I was a Liberal Arts major so I did that by going to a lot of space conferences and interviews and asking a million different questions to be able to write a technically correct, but more or less policy-oriented 500-page dissertation on space tourism.

I had great help from advisors, although with the doctoral dissertation, they often direct your work to answer their questions even though it’s your dissertation. I had some of that going on with my Stanford professor, but it all worked out in the end. I started speaking at space conferences on some of the findings I had like venture capital interest in space tourism, which back in the late ’90s was zero. I would deliver this message at conferences with graphs, charts, and financial information.

I then got invited to speak at the Cato Institute, which is in Washington DC about one of my favorite conference topics, the barriers to commercial space. I spoke in the spring of 2021 and I loved it. That was much better than speaking at conferences. I had a great audience that asked a lot of questions. I was determined that I wanted to turn my space interest into a public speaking career.

A vanity radio station in Phoenix somehow tracked the Cato Institute talk and asked me to do a conventional business radio talk show on business interests like estate planning, how to buy or sell your house, or something like that. I agreed to do that, thinking it would be a good practice for public speaking. At the time, I got tapes cassette tapes of the talks. It wasn’t this digital world that we live in now. After a month of doing conventional business, I called the producer and I said, “This is a vanity show. I’m paying for it for three months. I’m switching it to space.” They said okay.

It was called Business Without Boundaries. I led with my chief advisor on space tourism, Dr. Patrick Collins, who teaches economics in Japan. He was from the UK. The space show was often running. I was stunned by how much support I got. I’d go to a space conference and everyone wanted to be a guest. Getting early guests came from my collection of people I had met for the most part in my dissertation research. That spread like wildfire.

I read an article on Space News, Space.com, or something like that. I’d contact the PIs or the Principal Investigators and ask them if they wanted to come on and talk about what they were doing. Some of it was planetary exploration. Some of it was rocketry and propulsion. Some of it was astrophysics. It was across the board.

One of the areas I loved was human space medicine for human space life, which is and has always been a real challenge, especially if you get out of the low Earth orbits where we’re protected by the Van Allen belts. It grew. I took it to the Seattle Station and then friends of mine urged me to take it to the internet and get off of the AM radio. In about 2003, I took it to the internet and then it went global as soon as I went with the internet. It went national

Where do you think is the most interest right now? I think there are two things right now that are happening that are creating a lot of buzz. Number one is space tourism because you have these people that are going up into space like celebrities, billionaires, and stuff like that, just like what you were talking about. Number two, there’s a big buzz about us going back to the moon. There are a series of astronauts that are going on late-night talk shows and people are talking about it. What in your view would you feel people are most interested in right now?

Anything that has to do with SpaceX. SpaceX and Elon Musk are so off the chart for inspiration, innovation, and leadership. The Starship, their big rocket which is still pending a launch license from Boca Chica, Texas dominates most discussions. Rather than space tourism, the audience that I’m most familiar with has shifted greatly into space settlement.

For your audience, space settlement means living sustainably, whatever that means, in space either in orbit on something like an O’Neilian colony, which is named after a physicist from Princeton, on the moon, and most of all, on Mars. Anything that has to do with space settlement like human reproduction in space cannot be done. How does it get done? How is it controlled when people start going on long space flights to Mars because they are afraid of deformities and things happening if people get pregnant? We don’t know what will happen in microgravity and a higher radiation environment.

Space settlement means living sustainably in space.

Let’s take it back up for a second. Do you think the space settlement is a realistic future for us as a human species?

I’m a little different than the community. I do say yes in the future, but I think we’re quite away from it. Our technical capabilities are not there yet. Our medical, which you would probably know more about than me, is clearly not there yet. The challenges are real and I also think there is opposition from people who have a different idea of the future, like what we alluded to before the show started.

I think there will be policy and political hurdles to space settlement, but it’s a very important goal and I do think it will happen probably in this century, but I won’t be here to see it. I’m 77 or if I am here to see it, I’ll probably be Looney Tunes and senile. I think it’s crucial for a free society to push out. It’s an indication of freedom and of so much that we value.

What do you think are the biggest detractors? Policy aside, you mentioned the technical issues. What do you think are going to be some of the biggest obstacles for us? Let’s not even say Mars. Let’s say the moon or maybe a Lagrangian point like a space colony that is orbiting Earth. What are some obstacles that you see?

Microgravity is an obstacle. We deal with it in orbit like on the space shuttle or the space station by the astronauts devoting massive amounts of time to incredible amounts of exercise. Their shielded in orbit from radiation because of the Van Allen belts. They are at risk for galactic cosmic ray bursts and things like that, but they can pretty well monitor the sun and tell when they’re going to happen, and get astronauts into shielded areas of the space station for more protection.

Microgravity and radiation are big issues. Food is a big issue. Do you want this space habitat or this space settlement to be perpetually serviced by Earth, or can it become independently sustained? There’s a lot of R&D going into agriculture in space, growing in space, and greenhouses on Mars but not much on the moon. The eyes are all on Mars. In order for an O’Neilian colony to exist, we have to learn how to build massive structures in space, and we have to have a financial program to finance long-term projects that the US doesn’t finance. We’re short-term thinking. How do you finance something that doesn’t have an identifiable return on investment?

Speaking of finance, what commercial industries do you think will come from this kind of movement? I’ve heard that asteroid mining is a natural byproduct. Some of the breakthroughs that have happened in the space race in general have had some trickle-down effects. What do you think is going to be the most lucrative for the space industry?

Many sharp people like Bob Zubrin who’s a Mars aficionado and a nuclear engineer academically believe, and I think that they’re on the right track, that the number one commercial product will be intellectual property. It’s what we learn, how we learn it, and how we can transfer it rather than something tangible. We’re doing phenomenal things with 3D printing in space. There’s no limit to that potential as we’re 3D printing body parts in space in microgravity. There’s a lot of space manufacturing that will surprise us. In five years, we will be thinking and seeing potential products that we didn’t even consider now.

There is a lot of space manufacturing that will surprise us. In five years, we’ll be thinking and seeing potential products that we didn’t even consider.

What 3D printing of body parts is happening? Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Artificial meniscus for knee repairs.

Is that something that’s not able to be done in gravity?

Apparently not. They have just 3D printed new meniscuses and sent them back to Earth for testing. That’s a brand new article that I saw. There are entities that are working on the 3D printing of organs and they can do it much better in the microgravity environment than they can on Earth where everything is tightly held together by gravity.

Whether it pans out or not, it is out there to be seen. None of it is prime time. We’re not going to be able to grab it now. The genetics of the cystic fibrosis gene were discovered because in microgravity, it splits apart and the scientists could look at how it was structured far better than using an electron microscope. They identified the CTR. When this information came back to Earth, Larry Deluca was in Alabama at the time. He was a PI. They put it out into the commercial industry so they got to CF gene. They got all of its mutations from this work.

That work was done on Earth and then they developed targeted genetic treatments which now have all but stopped CF from progressing in people with specific gene mixes. There are a lot of different gene combinations in CF so it’s not across the board, but that’s happening in other illnesses too. With the manufacturing of materials, they’re talking about manufacturing most of the habitat materials on the moon and Mars through 3D printing of lunar material and Martian material.

We’re in such an early stage of manufacturing in space applications. That’s why I say in five years, we won’t even recognize this industry from where we are now. It will play a key role in how we develop and build habitats for the moon in orbit as well as on Mars. There may be something that follows 3D printing that’s even better, but it’s revolutionary in space.

That idea of being able to literally make anything in any location holds so much value for space because you need to make technical instruments and you don’t have access to the same kind of resources that you do here on the planetary side. You mentioned SpaceX as being so popular. What are other companies that are involved in the space industry that are also doing big things? I feel like that’s the only company that I think of. Now that we’ve moved from NASA being the big space driver or the organization that drives us into space, the private industry is doing it like SpaceX.

Nobody compares to SpaceX, not even Blue Origin, which is Jeff Bezos’ company. It’s often a category all of itself, but there are other rocket company competitors that are very successful, but they have a different market niche. Rocket Lab launches smaller rockets, but they’re out of New Zealand and the United States. They’re incredibly successful and they have a small rocket payload getting ready to go to Venus. They’re not a direct competitor to SpaceX. Do you know what Rideshare is?

Yeah.

On space available on a mission, they will fly some scientific, academic, and school missions either for free or for a much lower price. It flies almost as ballast on a rocket or on a ship, but you have to go to where the main payload is going. You don’t get to choose your orbit. For a lower price to your specific orbit, you can use one of these smaller rockets like Rocket Lab and go to the orbital designation that you want, which may make a difference to some of these smaller companies.

They’re very successful. They’re talked about all the time. There are four companies, and I’m drawing a senior moment blind all of the sudden, that are making private space stations. The International Space Station won’t live past 2030 and maybe sooner than that, depending on our relationship with Russia. The US is not replacing it with a government space station. All of this is interesting because the lab on the ISS is a national lab.

We have multiple national labs on Earth like Livermore Lab in Los Alamos. There are quite a few of them. The ISS is classified as a national lab. They are hoping to take space on a private station by one of these commercial companies like Axiom. The National Lab will be a component of the private station, but there’s Axiom, and Blue Origin has a plan for an artificial space station. I forgot what it’s called. It will come back to my memory.

There are two others that are competing to build private space stations. Some of them have different orbits. Some of them plan to cater to government customers. Some of them plan to open up markets or the commercial sector. I did a space show with a stem cell researcher at Cedars-Sinai. Right now, Cedars-Sinai is using the Space Station National Lab to send stem cells to space and using microgravity to see if they can’t make those stem cells replace worn-out cardiac tissue.

I said, “What are you going to do when the station goes away?” He said, “We will have more opportunities for medical research in stem cell research and tissue research because to qualify them in the lab is a whole bunch of red tape, national government, this and that. The National Lab, which is commercial, is going to be pay-and-go. We can buy space in the commercial labs for a lot more research projects and others can too.” They’re looking for a research boom with commercial space stations. I mentioned Axiom is the one that they are talking to. Orbital Reef is Blue Origin.

One of the things that I always wondered about was if the radiation is such a negative consequence of being in space. Is there any other way to shield it by going underground, like inside the moon or Mars?

Both the moon and Mars have lava tubes. A lava tube is what it says, but they’re underground and they’re huge. They vary in their depth, but there’s a lot of regolith or Martian soil on top of them. One of the thoughts is that you can live in a lava tube. You can seal off the ends. You can pressurize it. You can’t spin it for artificial gravity. You have the microgravity in there, but you would be shielded from radiation in a lava tube. That’s underground.

Mars’ gravity is half of our gravity, right?

It’s 33% or 34% of our gravity and the Moon is 1/6 of our gravity. We don’t know what gravity humans can do okay with because NASA has never done any test to determine the human gravity prescription. That’s what it’s called. Can humans survive and sustain themselves at 1/6 lunar gravity? Nobody knows although nobody thinks we can. A lot of people like Dr. Zubrin think that we will do fine with Martian gravity, but the truth is we don’t know.

If you’re planning on a settlement that would imply having families, children, pregnancy, and childbirth, what would happen in 34% gravity in fetal development? What would happen in childhood development? These are things that we don’t know. We can create 1G, which is what we have here on Earth, but we have to spin something.

They’ve never done centrifuge tests on the space station. Although it’s always been planned to do. They never got around to having free flyer centrifuges. They have done some rodent centrifuge tests, but they’re not very helpful so far. That is one big thing that is needed. I see lots of lots of talk about it, but I don’t see any plans to do it. Most artificial gravity and gravity studies in space are here on Earth with bed rest studies, and it’s not the same thing. You can’t make lunar or moon or Mars gravity very easily on Earth. We have to have an artificial variable gravity research station in a lower orbit.

I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the upcoming trip to the moon that NASA is planning for. What are your thoughts on that? Their goal is to make this a way station for an eventual trip to Mars.

I hope it happens. A lot of us are a little skeptical.

Will it happen at all?

It will happen at all because of the economics of the United States and the money being spent. One part of the government is delaying SpaceX from testing the rocket that is needed to put the Human Lander on the moon because of the way that NASA is going back to the Moon with SLS and into the gateway, which is an orbiting station around them. The Human Lander takes astronauts from the Gateway down to the surface of Mars. SpaceX won the bid to do it. They can’t do it without Starship being perfected and operational. Blue Origin got approved as a backup, but you can’t see any progress with them on their Human Lander yet.

First of all, we want the budget to continue to include going back to the Moon with Artemis 3 as the first mission that takes humans to the surface of the Moon. We want to stay on the surface, but we don’t like the fact that they stay for a couple of weeks and go back to the Gateway. The space community would like to see a sustainable long-term presence on the moon. I guess that’s going to be an evolution over time.

 

 

Do you even think it will happen at all? They’re into talk shows and presenting as if it’s an inevitability.

I don’t think anything is inevitable anymore, but I’m optimistic that it will happen. They have a lot of international partners in Artemis. There is a lot of pressure to make it happen. When one part of the government does one thing and one part does the other thing, and the key component is not able to perfect their part of the deal, then it’s a slowdown or at least some kind of a delay.

Where is the delay? Are they not allowed to launch the SpaceX rocket? What’s the delay?

It’s a little complicated. When SpaceX did the first demo flight of the Starship and it did not work, there was damage to the pad and all sorts of things. This whole area of Texas where they’re dealing with it is a wildlife preserve. Environmentalists have been trying to stop SpaceX because they say they can’t launch without killing all sorts of species because it’s a wildlife reserve. The opposite side of that is the Kennedy Space Center is a wildlife reserve. I don’t know if you ever watched The Rocket Launcher. I have been down there. Wildlife is flourishing. There are alligators all over the place. They’re on the road. You can’t stop and change a tire without someone riding an alligator watch for you.

I grew up in Florida. I had to see those alligators.

They’re in the wildlife reserve where they’re launching big rockets. The fish are abundant and the flora and fauna, so this is a BS argument. After Starship blew up and damaged everything, they filed three environmental lawsuits against the FAA. SpaceX has passed the FAA approval of the technical and engineering changes that they have made to the launch pad in the rocket after the first rocket blew up, but the FAA is now dealing with these three lawsuits.

They are trying to get SpaceX into the lawsuit because the lawsuits are against the FAA saying that they didn’t do a proper environmental thing and this rocket costs all sorts of environmental damage, which is not true. They didn’t find any species killed. Nothing like that happened. Right now, it’s in limbo as to when they are going to get a launch license to resume testing for Starship, which is ready to be tested again. The delay is on these lawsuits in the FAA in getting a launch license. You can’t do anything without a launch license. That’s a criminal law violation.

SpaceX has to get a launch license to test Starship on the second go around. SpaceX’s philosophy is they test and if it breaks, they’re fine. They fix what broke and then they test again. They’re not worried about failure. They learn from their failures and they keep rebuilding and they go forward. That’s their philosophy in testing. Whereas NASA tries to build something so safe and model it that you’ll never see a failure.

That’s one of the reasons why something built by the government is 10 to 15 times more costly than something built by SpaceX. That’s the delay, and SpaceX can’t build the Human Lander until the rocket that’s going to take the Human Lander is operational because they have to make that Human Lander into the rocket. They have to quit making changes in the rocket to make it there.

I think it’ll happen. It’s just tough to significant of a moment. I think that we finally have the interest again.

People want it, for sure. The international partners are making components of it. One of the European space stations has components for Artemis.

It has also become geopolitical. India is launching stuff into space. China is launching stuff into space. American exceptionalism is so important to us that we have to prove that we’re going one step further.

You’re 100% right and it is very important, but probably not so important to a lot of the late-night talk show people that you or others may talk to. We could talk about American exceptionalism because that’s a lot of where the future lies. Space to me is a big key to the future.

Space is a big key to the future.

What do you mean by, “The future of American exceptionalism is the future for us?”

It’s because we lead in innovation, risk-taking, and capital acquisition that is needed. We lead in the ability to get investors to get capital and to fail. This is how you move forward. All of that makes America a very special place to do business to take risks. This is why people want to come here and partner with American companies and with NASA. We need to maintain these characteristics that go into American exceptionalism.

Seldom will somebody break down and say, “These are the components of American exceptionalism,” but they are. They are financing. They have entrepreneurship. They are risk-taking and failing. There are typically regulations that enable regulation rather than regulations that choke. There are typically good government policies that enable and allow this kind of environment to flourish. Sometimes, you have a lot of opposition to what you want to do. Nuclear propulsion, which is sorely needed, is one of those areas where you still get opposition.

I can see that aspect of it and I feel like politically, it’s more important than ever. Do you feel like this is reminiscent of the Space Race in the ‘60s?

At that time, we were trying to win the Cold War.

Rather than having one adversary, we have a lot of different countries that I feel like we’re competing against. In the ’90s, I felt like there was no competition.

Others have caught up with us or nearly caught up with us. It is very important for the United States to continue to be a space leader and to have a presence in these areas. The United States having a presence is like having free access to space for anyone and everyone. That’s not so with China. Typically, you want American values and American laws to prevail in outer space. It’s one of the reasons why we have a Space Force that has a big concern about lunar development.

You don’t want China laws in relationships to prevail on the surface of the Moon. China is aggressive with its economic growth. They’re making great roads and allies in South America and in other places because they give them lots of benefits. They build infrastructure for them. At some point, they have to pay the price but they’re not paying the price now. We want to carry our values into space.

 

 

We’re getting low on time. I want to ask you about probably the most popular thing that everybody is talking about when it comes to space which is aliens. I know that’s something that is on everybody’s mind. How do you feel about aliens?

My show doesn’t do much about them because it’s a hard topic to do factually, unfortunately.

Off the record.

I think there probably is extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe. The work that Professor Avi Loeb doing at Smithsonian Harvard in your area is amazing. He’d be a great guy to have on your show. He’s not per se looking for aliens. He’s looking for the presence of unnatural interstellar objects that have made it to Earth. If they’re unnatural, then that implies an intelligence behind making them.

I think it exists. I think at some levels, there is a government cover-up and that’s because of the technology involved in these crafts like these UAPs that harassed our Navy forces and other militaries. I think some of that is probably real, but not all of it. It’s hard to know because anything with UFOs, UAPs, and aliens, there’s so much junk information out there.

There’s probably government cover-up. I think the Congressional hearings and the whistleblower are very important. If you’re going to make the case that we have materials from downed unusual aircraft and we have bodies, you have to show them. That’s the end of the line for me because the talk and rhetoric are cheap. You don’t know what the motivation is behind the talk and rhetoric. You don’t know if it’s been edited or manipulated, just like our news now is manipulated.

Let’s talk about something objective then.

I hope they’re real.

The thing that Avi Loeb made a name for himself was the Oumuamua spacecraft. It was a space structure, you could say.

It was a fast-moving object.

How do you feel about that? I look at that as it’s a cigar-shaped object. It accelerated out of the space once it was identified. How do you feel about that?

I don’t know what Oumuamua is. He’s been on my show as a guest many times and he’s coming on again in a couple of weeks about his findings from his undersea expedition off of Papua New Guinea.

Avi Loeb is coming on your show?

Yeah.

Did you ask him about Oumuamua?

Yes, the first time he was on the show.

Does he feel like it’s naturally occurring?

He thinks it’s potentially a natural object, but they found it too late. It moves so fast that the one telescope that could find it which is in Hawaii couldn’t get good pictures of it or anything. From what he could tell and what it was doing in terms of a comet tail or something like that, it didn’t appear to be totally just a natural rock. He suggested that there could be an intelligence design behind it. He was criticized for it. They all jumped all over him. I asked him if he didn’t have tenure, would he have been able to say that? He said, “Probably not.”

I think that any person who weighs in on this subject that’s an academic has the potential to lose credibility because of all of the junk that you’re talking about. If there’s one person who’s saying something truthful, there are probably ten other people saying something that’s not even worth being talked about.

He did find remnants of this object that hit the Pacific Ocean in 2016. The US traffic is incoming with a satellite. That’s why they knew it was so fast, and it was coming from a part of space that suggested interstellar. He wanted to find it. They gave him the tracking path of the satellite from the government satellites. He launched this expedition. The way they looked for it was they assumed that most objects coming in from space were nickel and iron.

If you have a meteorite sitting on your desk like I do, it’s got a lot of nickel and iron in it. The iron is magnetic, so they created a magnetic sled. They worked on an ocean grid like you would in archeology or anything else in this big quad of where they think the satellite hit. They were trying to scoop up magnetic particles. They did pick up lots and lots of sphericals which are little spheres that are remnants of this satellite.

There are a couple of things about it. One is the alloying mixture of aluminum and tungsten is incredibly different from what aluminum and tungsten are made of here on Earth. This is an unusual alloy relationship. Lots of iron very little nickel. It’s very unusual. He said that we need a lot more conclusive evidence to think there’s design behind this. It means something created or built it. It was not just a meteorite litter.

The cautious way is it’s promising but we need a lot more research. We’ve all heard that, but I’ve talked to people who are willing to say what they think on the show. One of them is John Brandenburg who is a Livermore-trained plasma physicist. A lot of people put him on the fringe because of some of his work, but he helped me analyze it. He said, “These are just not alloy relationships that you find on Earth.”

I have bounced that off of other people who have the qualifications to interpret it. They think it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that this is artificial that hit Earth. Avi Loeb is going to go back and look for bigger pieces with a slightly different kind of magnetic sled. I guess he’s looking for funding for that mission, but he says it’s very promising and that it’s interstellar. For sure, they know it’s interstellar because of the speed at which it was going and the way it broke up when it hit the atmosphere and the ocean, but it is promising that it’s not natural.

He won’t give us a conclusion yet, but he wrote another book about extraterrestrial life and he has this Project Galileo. He’s tenured and he’s searching because he has a passion for it, and he’s an honest researcher. He’s a real treasure to that side of the community or the science side of astrophysics. He is way beyond qualified. He has impeccable credentials. I think that’s promising. I personally think that there is extraterrestrial out there in the universe. Has it ever made it to Earth? I don’t know. I know all the stories. I know all the films. I know everything. I would like to believe it. I like to have that confirmed. That’s bucket list number one. It’s that and can we break the life-death barrier and see what’s on the other side while we’re still alive? Those are my top two bucket list ideas in my life.

I think space plays a role for both of those because of the technologies we get from space. The way we engineer products, the software that we’re making, and everything that goes into space that nobody ever thinks about or hears about. Whoever talks about the software or the computer chips? The only time we hear about computer chips is when there’s a shortage of them. The Senate passed the CHIPS Law or whatever it was called. Those chips are enabling us to go into the future now.

It drives everything. It drives technological progress for all the different industries. I had an episode with Kevin Murphy who’s the Chief Data Scientists for NASA. Even with the data and the way they manipulate it, there are downstream effects from evaluating deforestation and our own Earth in different ways. I think that if we continue to progress forward, there’s going to be a lot of technological innovations that make it down to our everyday life. It’s like GPS or any of the other things like Velcro.

 

 

Tempur-Pedic mattress started out as a memory foam that was on the first few space missions. They’re all interesting things that were created to solve the problem of getting us to space. I’m excited to see what the future holds. We’re getting to the end of our time. I didn’t want to ask you the three questions that I normally ask all my guests.

We didn’t have the opportunity to go and ask them. What is your inspiration when you talk about space? When you’re talking about space, you talk about science fiction, you talk about your son and all of the issues with his health. If you were to nail one inspiration for what makes you do the things that you do, what would you say that would be?

First of all, I’m an unusually big thinker. I specialize in connecting dots like that little game kids play. I like to connect the dots and do what off. I have a million questions. I was at a dinner party and we were talking about something. I said, “Have you ever wondered where your consciousness goes when you’re put to sleep for surgery?” I was out for seven hours on an A-fib surgery and nobody could tell me where my consciousness went. I lost seven hours of my life.

I’ve talked to doctors and they say that the chemical suppresses it. I think that’s BS. I need an answer. What’s up there that makes me a human go for seven hours? I asked a lot of questions. What inspires me is the path to being able to answer these questions. Others have other questions that are even probably more important to go through space.

You have to be forward-thinking. It’s like if you’re going to Mars, you have to know where Mars is going to be 3 or 4 few years from when you launched your rocket to get there. When we did planetary missions to Saturn and Jupiter, we had to know where Saturn and Jupiter were 12, 14, and 15 years from the launch date. That was done with technology that was already ten years old.

Space requires us to look into the future. When you look into the future, no matter what your discipline is, be it medicine or trying to come up with solutions for homeless people, mental illness, or any of the things that plague us, you have a better shot of coming up with solutions and paths to solutions than if you have a third-dimensional view of the world, and you don’t do any stargazing.

 

 

That’s inspiring to me that the solutions to all of what ails us are going through space. The space part is critical to me. I’ve got two kids and I want them to live in a great world. I don’t want them to live in a country that has less opportunity and less freedom than I had growing up when I was a kid born in 1946. They’re on the path to having less opportunity and less freedom. It disturbs me that our political leaders are not big thinkers. They’re prisoners of a budget and an ideology.

I don’t know how to reach them, but the only tool I have is to talk the way I’m talking to you and to people on the Space Show and try to show people that you can be a big thinker and that it’s worth the investment in labor, capital, taxes, and investments, but it’s all got to be done in a grounded reality-efficient economic way. You can’t just blow it and think you’re going to get a great result.

Serendipity happens, but you don’t write business plans based on serendipity. You don’t make policies based on serendipity. I’m inspired by space because it allows me to see a future that I want for my kids and grandkids and for the remainder of my life. I’d like for people around the world rather than fighting stupid ass wars by backward ideologies. That’s a big issue for me. That’s why space to me is such a thrill and such a turn-on.

Speaking of space, that brings me to my second question. What are you most excited about coming down the pipeline that you want to happen? Is it the moon mission? Is it SpaceX being able to get their rocket up? What is coming down that you’re excited about?

I would like to see space settlement start because in order for settlement to start, you’ve got to do A, B, C, D, E, F, and G first. That includes SpaceX and figuring out how to live, play, and work on the moon. That includes how to handle propulsion problems and some of the human-in-space medical issues that we’ve alluded to. You don’t just get on a Starship and fly to Mars. You have to do the work, the planning, building, and the tech development to get you on that Starship to fly to Mars.

For space settlement to really start, you’ve got to do ABCDEF and G first. It is a big-picture outcome that involves everything in between to get that to happen.

If we’re able to initiate space settlement, that means we’re making great progress on all these beginning and intermediate levels that are so experienced. They’re so important. Space settlement is a big-picture outcome that involves everything in between to get that to happen. That is near-term enough for me to be excited about even though I may not live to see it, but it’s close enough in reality and plausibility that I can easily grasp it and realize that if we’re doing it, we’ve done all of this over here.

The last question is if we’re talking about space settlement not being achievable in the next 20 to 25 years or so, what is something that in the next ten years that you wish that they see happening? Where do you see the future of space ten years from now?

We will be with a permanent presence on the moon. I think that’s highly plausible. I would like to see propulsion technology advance to nuclear electric propulsion in space because that makes it much safer to put humans on Mars. Instead of taking 8 or 9 months to get there and being bombarded with radiation on that journey and microgravity, you get there in two and a half months.

I think if we can get nuclear propulsion going when we had it earlier on and President Nixon canceled it, then that’s a huge step forward. It opens up our solar system for us. It doesn’t open up the universe because of light speed. Our closest neighbors are twelve lightyears away. Nuclear propulsion is not enough to make a dent in light-speed travel faster than light travel, but it helps us in our solar system. It also helps us to the asteroids. It helps us to be able to develop resource utilization on an asteroid.

We can’t even begin to develop that until we know how to work on an asteroid because they don’t have gravity. All of our mining equipment is based on gravity. What equipment are we going to use to mine an asteroid? How are we going to process it? We don’t have that idea. What equipment are you going to take on a trip to an asteroid? Remember, mass is very costly to launch on a rocket even at SpaceX prices.

What equipment are we going to attempt to 3D print on an asteroid, where you don’t have gravity holding your big Caterpillar down on the ground because that leverage is how the equipment works? There are lots and lots of questions and potential. We need to accomplish the foundation ingredients to make all of this happen. To me, if space settlement doesn’t happen in my lifetime, I want to see us moving in that direction. I want to see us building the proper foundation and the proper big picture thinking of not losing sight of the goals to get us there.

I’m very optimistic that we can do that, but I’m very concerned as the younger generation is about changes in our ability to be free, take risks, and direct capital the way we want to direct it. Also, to afford capital. High interest rates are not what we want to do. All sorts of things that now, if one looks out the window, are a threat to the future but I’m hoping.

I’m optimistic about that because for decades or for a long time before SpaceX and Blue Origin came along, there was nothing. There is a lot to be worried about but there’s a lot more to be optimistic about. One of those things that we talked about is space settlement. I think it needs that optimism. We need to handle it as much as we can.

We need the entrepreneurs. We need more than just Elon Musk who is an incredible big-picture thinker and innovator, but we need the entrepreneurs. We need the innovation. We need to dream. We need people that can dream but they can also turn that dream into reality. All of us dream, but not all of us can make the dream happen. We need to enable and flourish the development of the people who can dream big and make those dreams happen. That’s the important component. They have to be able to turn a dream into reality. Everyone on the planet can dream, but not everyone can make a dream come true.

We need to enable and flourish the development of the people who can dream big and make those dreams happen.

Thank you so much for speaking with us, David. For those of you who want to see David even more, check out The Space Show. If you want to see me even more, hit the like and subscribe button. I would love to have you guys following me on a regular basis. For the regular audience, I will see you again very soon in the future. Thank you, everybody. Have a good day.

Thank you.

 

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About Dr. David Livingston

Dr. David Livingston is the founder and host of The Space Show® (www.thespaceshow.com), a live broadcast internet radio space educational talk show program.. In the 22 plus years and more than 4,000 live radio interviews, The Space Show has been a U.S. and global leader for space development and education as a live broadcast talk radio program focused exclusively on space commerce, tourism, exploration, science, policy – domestic & international, economics, development, national security space, new and innovative technology, and much more to help enable our growing space-fairing economy and society. Dr. Livingston is also the Executive Director of the One Giant Leap Foundation, Inc. (OGLF), the 501(C)3 that controls The Space Show and strives to promote space education.

Dr. Livingston was an Adjunct Professor of Space Studies in the Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences at the University of North Dakota where he taught graduate classes on commercial space for more than a decade. Livingston has a BA in Political Science, an MBA specializing in International Business Management & Economics, and a Doctor in Business Administration (DBA) degree. His 2001 DBA dissertation was titled Outer Space Commerce: Its History and Prospects. Dr. Livingston did his graduate and post graduate work at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, CA while his undergraduate studies were at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Livingston is a frequent speaker at space conferences and has published more than 50 papers including chapters in books and peer reviewed works. For example, he authored the Space Tourism chapter in the Space Encyclopedia and co-authored three business and financial chapters in the New SMAD Textbook, Space Mission Engineering: The New SMAD published by Dr. Jim Wertz. David has lectured at several universities and has been a guest on many national and international radio and TV programs in the U.S. and throughout Europe. In addition, he co-hosts a weekly podcast radio segment, Hotel Mars, which airs on the CBS Eye On The World podcast with John Batchelor and his nationally syndicated radio program. 

Lastly, Dr. Livingston is frequently interviewed by authors writing books on space development, commerce, and policy. When not teaching, broadcasting, writing, or just playing, Livingston consults with those working to establish a commercial space ventures, media, and policy. He also makes time for his family and Pepper, his Siberian Husky who is the unofficial Space Show mascot and featured on The Space Show website. Livingston is finishing up his book about The Space Show from 2001 to present day.