Space Economy (Part 1): Opportunities and Challenges

John Stackhouse: [00:00:00] Hi, it’s John here. Welcome to Disruptors and CDL: The Innovation Era, where we explore the transformative ideas and leaders shaping our world. And as always, I’m joined by my co host Sonia Sennik, CEO of Creative Destruction Lab. Sonia, it’s great to be with you today in person.

Sonia Sennik: Yeah, we’re kicking off CDL Space Session #1 for the 2024/25 program year.

And I’m beaming with excitement to talk to you about what’s happening in this industry.

John Stackhouse: I’m not sure that there are any astronauts around. In fact, actually, I see one across the hallway, so check that. But the lab and the broader Rotman School at the University of Toronto is buzzing with space entrepreneurs and innovators.

Sonia Sennik: There are a few astronauts and astronaut hopefuls in our orbit today, John. And we’re looking beyond our atmosphere to the rapidly evolving space economy. Rockets are being launched on a weekly basis and there’s never been a more exciting time to take a look at the major steps we are taking towards making [00:01:00] access to space more affordable and what that means for us here on planet Earth.

John Stackhouse: In fact, there’s so much to talk about when it comes to space that we’re going to devote two episodes to the topic, both recorded here at CDL Space Stream. And our real focus is going to be the economy of space. What are the opportunities out there? And how will space transform every business and every sector down here?

Sonia Sennik: John, living in a world where there are reusable rockets has profoundly transformed the opportunities for innovation. Think about it this way. In the 1970s, the cost to get one kilogram of water to space was about 20,000. Today, it’s closer to 2,000. And if SpaceX’s Starship hits its target of 20 per kilogram, everything changes.

Whether it’s launching new machines, robotics, or satellites to space, or testing healthcare technologies in space.

John Stackhouse: You’ve got a great motto that every company is a space company, and in episode two, we’re going to get to know some of [00:02:00] the most interesting Canadian space companies that are testing all sorts of frontiers.

But first, we’re going to set the stage with where we’re at in space exploration and what opportunities are coming pretty fast at us, especially in the economy. And I can’t think of a better person to do that than Commander Chris Hadfield, who’s our first guest today on the special edition of Disruptors and CDL.

Sonia Sennik: Commander Chris Hadfield, of course, is the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station, and the first Canadian to do a spacewalk. He founded the CDL Space Stream with us in 2018 to start engaging with startups from all over the world who have new ideas that will drive the future of the space economy.

He’s also not so bad at guitar and singing. Commander Hadfield, welcome to the podcast.

John Stackhouse: Good to be talking with you. Chris, it’s great to see you. You took millions of Canadians, I suspect, to space virtually, and you’re still trying to take us to space in very different ways. Maybe you can frame the conversation a bit [00:03:00] for us in terms of what we should be thinking when we think about space today.

Chris Hadfield: I think one of the best ways to get a sense of framing is to look at historical comparators. And so when you invent a new, let’s say, transportation capability, then how does that change the fundamental human condition and how do we all start to incorporate that? We dreamed about flight for hundreds of thousands of years, and then suddenly in 1903 the Wright Brothers created a vehicle where people could start to leave the earth.

And it was a whole foreign idea and almost an inconceivable idea. And when an airplane flew over in 1910, it was a huge local event. It was, you know, the magnificent men and their flying machines and all that other stuff. Now, people hardly think about it. And they were kind of irritated if your plane’s 10 minutes late or if you didn’t know what you know.

type of peanuts you got on board. And so we are in the early stages of a major redefinition of a new mode of transportation. How is it that [00:04:00] we are going to incorporate access to space for our robots, for our virtual presence, but also for our human presence over the next generation? When I was born, no one had flown in space.

All of this has happened in my lifetime. So it’s, it’s incredibly new. And the technology. That gets people safely to space and back is accelerating and accelerating right now, like never before, so that now a private citizen for the price of a luxury car can fly in space and people buy luxury cars all the time, how that’s going to play out, how people are going to incorporate that with the regulatory environment is going to be, and then what the human applications of that are vacations on the moon, vacations on a space station, vacations on Mars.

It all sounds fanciful. So did air vacations one long lifetime ago. So since I was lucky enough to go when we were the first people to fly in space, I wanted people to get a sense of it. What’s it like to live on a space station? What, what’s your day to day? What are [00:05:00] the risks that go along with it? But also what are the beautiful parts of it?

What are the advantages of it? What are the things you see that you could never see any other way? And I really look at all technology that way. There are downsides to it. How does this allow you to see and do things that were otherwise impossible? And Spaceflight’s just a wonderful, visible, visceral version of that technology.

Sonia Sennik: We’ve been working together for many years when you founded the CDL Space Stream with us here in 2018. And I remember the first year that we were getting applications. It was really tough to find companies that were focused on space entrepreneurship. Fast forward six years later, we have more applications for the program than we know what to do with.

I’d be really interested on your reflections, Chris, on just the evolution of the types of technologies you’ve been seeing over the last six years through the stream.

Chris Hadfield: Yeah, it’s still a new thing. People have sort of been raised with the fact that space is a rare and esoteric and a very difficult to access thing, and it’s not normal [00:06:00] in daily lives.

But if you give people just a moment to reflect, going, oh, well, wait a minute. When, I came to this thing today, I was using, My phone in order to navigate for me, and I checked the weather before I left home this morning, and I used the internet, and gosh, it turns out the internet is coming directly from space to my house, and so it’s becoming much more integrated.

And that’s not happening through hoping and through magic, it’s happening because people recognize, hey, if we could, for a reasonable price, put things into orbit around the world, what can we do with that? Or, if there are these things that are already in orbit, what can we do with that information and apply it in a way that becomes a viable business?

And that realization, it’s like a wave that’s been slowly building out in the ocean. And then as it gets closer to shore, the wave gets bigger and more and more people can ride it. And that’s where we are right now in the space stream [00:07:00] is people are recognizing what reusable spaceships have done to the cost of access to space that now suddenly there’s constellations of thousands of things up there.

And we have some amazing applications coming through in space medicine, remote medicine, things like earthquake prediction, but until you make that technological beachhead and then make that part of people’s common understanding and expectation of what’s happening, then no one’s going to spend any time thinking about it.

But we’re at that moment in history, and I think Creative Destruction Lab has been really pressing in recognizing, hey, let’s be on the start of that, and let’s start encouraging these space businesses that have been started here.

Sonia Sennik: I’ve been saying to John, every company is a space company. And one of the examples you gave there of the intersection of healthcare and space, we had a company last year in our Cancer Stream called Encapsulate. They created a tumor on a chip so that you could test treatments and therapeutics, [00:08:00] but they actually partnered with the International Space Station to test their tumor on a chip in microgravity.

And they were able to get tremendous results because the impact of microgravity on the actual tumor and the behavior of the cells was very different. Can you speak a little bit to the opportunity of testing healthcare treatments and therapeutics in space?

Chris Hadfield: Sure. There’s a couple of things. One is just what you just referred to, the straight environment itself.

If you’re trying to grow tissue or human cells or some, some part of the body, gravity is a big omnipresent downer. Yeah. Gravity is a downer as the line of the day. Gravity is an invisible heel grinding us into the ground all the time. And so if you’re trying to build something subtle or delicate, it’s really difficult to do on the surface, you know, on your petri dish. It’s not going to be very three dimensional. And so there’s been considerable success in building three dimensional human cell driven organisms on board the space station and protein crystal growth and that sort of thing because you just [00:09:00] can’t have a perpetually gravity free environment on earth.

So it provides it from a pure physical point of view. And there’s a lot of people thinking about how can we apply that and now that our launch costs are down, can we put up some sort of automated facility up there that creates something that is impossible or extremely difficult to build on Earth?

A bunch of people are working on that. The other is you often invent things on the frontiers of human experience. If everybody’s comfortable and everyone’s got enough food to eat and everybody’s going home satisfied every day, your desire to create something new is minimized. But if you’re out on the edge, then you recognize, man, we’re pushing the capabilities that we have.

And so let’s, let’s really try and understand how we could optimize given that a lot of our constraints are abnormal out here and the space station and space vehicles and the space environment provide that for us as well. It pushes people to rethink it because we’re in this new environment [00:10:00] and necessity becoming the mother of invention.

If you change the necessity because of the environment you’ve gotten into. Then your pace of invention comes up. And so the space station over its last, gosh, 24 years has proven to do that with the thousands of experiments that have happened on board. And there are physiological changes to the human body.

When you take away gravity, it almost mimics a lot of things to do with aging. You get a hardening of the arteries, arteriosclerosis, you get a shrinking of the heart. You get muscle wastage, you get osteoporosis, weakening of the bones. You get a suppression of the human immune system. All those things are happening.

And so it’s sort of the combination of the other two things. Here you are in this weird new environment and weird things are happening and they’re happening because of lack of gravity. You’re also get heavy radiation. And so now let’s use this as sort of a historical test bed to try and better understand how the human body works as an organism.

John Stackhouse: But then also what we can do to improve human health, not just for [00:11:00] astronauts, but for

everybody. Listening to you, Chris, you make the space station sound like Creative Destruction Lab. It’s CDL in orbit. But it also sounds kind of out of reach for a lot of people. Deep science is going on there, as it should, but not really accessible to Main Street.

How do we rethink space generally to connect with? Main Street and the mainstream of our economy and our society.

Chris Hadfield: Yeah, I mean, if you view the International Space Station as a laboratory, which it is primarily, it’s a big laboratory. We’re running like 200 experiments and everything else is just supporting the laboratory.

Well, then it’s sort of like every laboratory. I mean, there are laboratories all across Canada, and most people don’t even know they exist. And they’re doing necessary, interesting, worthwhile work, but people drive by it in their car and they don’t even know it’s there. So you need to look at it a little bit in what is the purpose of that laboratory and what is a measure of success for the [00:12:00] laboratory.

If you look at some of the agricultural research laboratories, of which there are several in Canada, if they are finding a new strain of wheat or, or growing better apples or whatever, then okay. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody needs to know about it on a daily basis. You know, they’re just doing their job.

And there’s a lot of that on the space station as well. And there’s a lot of that at Creative Destruction Lab. It’s a laboratory as the third word in the name says, it’s how do you take a bunch of variables, put them under an unusual set of circumstances to produce something they didn’t use to exist. To answer your question directly, John, if people don’t know something exists, it can never affect their thinking.

It won’t affect their decision making and it won’t allow them to apply their own creative abilities to contribute to it. So even though a laboratory may be functioning well, there is definitely a huge strength in letting people know enough about it that it, sparks a [00:13:00] curiosity and maybe they then want to know not just more about that laboratory, but how to support that laboratory or shoot if there’s really cool research on understanding the earth’s ionosphere, a high upper levels of our atmosphere and how it protects us from the universe.

If we’re doing experiments on the space station, someone might have not realized that, but going, Oh, wow, well, that’s, you know, I love the northern lights and I’m really curious as to how it protects us from meteorites and high energy particles from the sun. And, oh, that’s happening on the space station.

And because you have let people know the type of things this laboratory is doing, then people might say, you know, I was looking what to study in university, or I was looking what to do my undergraduate research thesis on, or I was looking for a book to read in the library this weekend. And so definitely you need to do the core function, and that is keep a safe space station.

And have it function as a laboratory, but there’s definitely an important piece of showing people what it’s doing of the outreach of the demonstration of its [00:14:00] capabilities so that you can not just take advantage of the brains that are working on it right now, but all the brains you can borrow and everybody else that’s thinking about it remotely.

Sonia Sennik: Maybe I can ask you a bit about something we can all see, which is the moon. With the advancement of robotics and surveillance and communications, we’ve been able to see more of the moon, but we’ve still only seen a very tiny bit. How important is the moon economy as part of the space economy going to be in the next five to 10 years?

Chris Hadfield: The moon is hugely important in human culture. It’s where our months came from. It’s part of our vernacular. It’s part of werewolves and all kinds of stuff, right? And it’s omnipresent in the night sky. And when there’s a Lunar eclipse or a solar eclipse, it’s huge and Stonehenge and all the rest of it.

You know, the moon and the sun are hugely important, but it was theoretical. It was unattainable until not very long ago. You know, when I was a kid, very first robots went there and then people started going there, [00:15:00] but it was still extremely difficult to get to. But now, because of 50 or 60 years of progress, our rocket ships are a lot better and simpler, and therefore, when something’s simpler and safer, it becomes much cheaper.

Suddenly, access to the moon is no longer an extremely rare event of a superpower, but it’s going to be like a place that people can go. You know, like Antarctica. Almost impossible to get to 110 years ago, and now thousands of people live there. The moon is different than most people imagine. If you were to peel it, like an onion or an apple, and lay the peeled moon out on the world, it’d be bigger than Africa, which is a huge continent.

It kind of gets destroyed by how we draw maps, but it’s huge. So, it’s as if we suddenly not just discovered an enormous new continent on earth, but now we can get there. And the really peculiar thing about the moon that is brand new in human history is it has no life. [00:16:00] There is no biosphere. There is no biome.

There’s no life to disrupt. The moon is a pure geological resource. It’s just four and a half billion years of the evolution of rock and chemicals and untapped geology. And we have literally just scratched the surface in a few places. We really don’t know. We’ve discovered vast reserves of water on the moon in the last 10 or 15 years on the order of 400 billion liters of water in the permanently shaded parts of the moon.

And so we’re trying to figure out what to do with this new capability. If you suddenly discovered something bigger than Africa, where you don’t disrupt any life, and you don’t really know what’s there, exploration and surveying is obviously the next thing to do. That’s what’s going on. Combination of people and machines.

Doing the surveying. And there are some things that machines do way better than people, but most of the surveying we do on earth, [00:17:00] we look at all the data and then when we really want to understand it, we send some people there to go look and that’s where we are with the moon, we’re going to do a whole bunch of robotic stuff.

And then we’re going to send some people there to go look, and perhaps as a parallel to Antarctica as well, initially, we just sent the boldest of explorers and a lot of them died trying to just get there or stay there. Shackleton or Scott or whomever, but as the technology got better, as we admitted steamships, and then airplanes became safer and safer and more and more people, and then people could start to live there and then start to winter over at the South Pole, one of the least hospitable places on earth.

And that’s common now. We all just sort of accept: “oh yeah, people live at the South Pole.” Of course they do. That’s what’s happening on the moon right now. A fascinating scientific place, a poorly understood and enormous mineralogical and geological resource, and a place that people can now start to go live and stay.

We’re at that moment in history and it’s being enabled by creative technology, but also a sort of an innate unquenchable human [00:18:00] curiosity. And the opportunity that comes when you cross those two things over.

John Stackhouse: We’ve been talking about how we can use space to disrupt ourselves, creatively, constructively. How can Canada take advantage of that? What do we have? What should we have to play a leading role in this next gen?

Chris Hadfield: If you look at how space travel is going to unfold, every milligram that got to space has been sacred up until now because the rocket technology was so primitive.

There was a sort of an unattainability of it just driven by the fact of how complex and therefore how dangerous and expensive it was to get to space. But what’s happening now is the cost of access to space is radically dropping because of improvements in rocket technology and miniaturization of computers and 3D positioning through GPS satellites and all the rest of that.

They’re all feeding together. So if we can now get to space more cheaply, [00:19:00] then what does that open up for us as a species and as a planet? And what subset of that might Canada be able to take advantage of? And we’ve been asking ourselves that question since right after Sputnik in 1957, when the Soviets launched the very first satellite during the international geophysical year, some smart forward thinking Canadians said, wow, we can put Satellites in space.

Well, let’s look at some Canadian problems and try and use our best technology and build something that will take advantage of that. And so we built a little research satellite to look at Northern lights and upper atmosphere and telecommunications, the ionosphere. It’s called Alouette, third country on earth and space.

And then we thought we’re a huge country with a small population. We could use the high ground to communicate with each other. And so. We built telecommunications satellites in the 60s and early 70s that led the world in telecommunications. So it was taking advantage of a new technological capability and serving a Canadian purpose.

And then we thought, what if we could radar map our whole country? [00:20:00] I mean, think about David Thompson, you know, a couple hundred years ago, trying to map all of Canada. One guy with a compass and a piece of paper, and he did amazing things. But we can map more of Canada in eight minutes from space than he did in a lifetime, just because of the high ground and the improvements of technology.

And so putting up a radar mapping satellite is another area that Canada led with Radarsat and then the subsequent constellations. But then when people go and we’ve been living in space now on the space station for almost a quarter century, what technologies do we need and what can Canada provide? We thought early on, let’s build robots, robotics, and we’ve been the world leader in space robotics, especially for human applications since the space shuttle first flew in the early 1980s.

Canadarm1, Canadarm2, and now Canadarm3 for going to the moon. That’s also a Canadian proven space technology. And then we have done a lot of the world leading [00:21:00] work in aerospace medicine. Canada invented the G suit. Canadian researchers have done so much of the work to make human flight safer and better understood.

And pushing back what all the rules should be on how we can make flight safe for people that spend a lot of time flying airplanes. And so extending our aerospace medicine expertise into space. And we’re doing that with the deep space medical challenge and things like that. And so I think we can extrapolate all of those into the future.

And part of what we look at Creative Destruction Lab is obviously bringing in all the leading technologies of the world. But as a Canadian, I’m extremely parochial and interested in what Canadian inventors and ideas have come up with And what of those ideas can either build on the previous Canadian technologies or are trying to step into an area that we’ve never been into before that will serve the global space community, but will serve the Canadian economy and Canadian needs at the same time.

John Stackhouse: You’re not only one of the most knowledgeable people I know [00:22:00] about all sorts of things, but one of the most curious. You’re constantly learning, which is inspiring. I’m curious what you’ve learned recently about space that can maybe inspire all of us.

Chris Hadfield: Some of the great big questions in space are the ones that I’m most intrigued by.

Obviously, what happened 14 billion years ago? We know there was something cataclysmic happened. We call it the Big Bang because we have the remnants of an explosion that happened 14 billion years ago. There’s all sorts of evidence for that. Nobody knows what happened before the Big Bang. We don’t understand what drove it.

But that’s quite intriguing to try and understand the very fundamental nature of the history of life and everything that went before it. And with the greatest telescopes that we’ve just built, that Canada has been part of, like the James Webb Telescope, we are now directly seeing early stars and galaxies from first generation after the big bang from over 13 billion years ago we can see the light from those [00:23:00] galaxies so we’re getting closer and closer to truly understanding the very origins of everything that we know on board the international space station with the alpha magnetic spectrometer a great big combine magnets and sensors it samples not just little atoms, but the things that make up atoms, sub atomic particles to try and understand how does matter work?

What is dark energy and dark matter? If you look inside an atom, there’s all those little things, the muons and the leptons and the bosons and things, which we’ve given names to, but we really don’t understand. And we’re starting to figure that out. What is the combined actual physics model that allows the universe to exist?

And we don’t know where gravity comes from. We can measure gravity, but we don’t have any way to manipulate gravity. And we’re not even sure that you can. But we didn’t even discover the electron until just over a hundred years ago, 120 years ago. And think how manipulating electrons [00:24:00] has radically changed life of being able to control electricity.

And maybe it’s impossible with something like gravity, but it used to be impossible with electricity. And so to me, pushing the very edges of what we understand that has allowed us to thrive as a species and really significantly in the last few hundred years to improve the quality of life of humanity, like 000 year history, we need to be responsible about it.

When you get a new toy, you tend to play with the new toy too much. The new toy becomes part of your normal and you build a system around it. The new technologies, the industrial revolution, we’ve reaped the benefits of it. Huge increase in population quality. We now need to make that sustainable. So how do we push all of our technologies so that we can understand how all this works together so that we can make 10 billion, make that sustainable [00:25:00] for the entire planet with a good quality of life.

Yeah. And to me, so many of the things we’re working on, whether it’s at Creative Destruction Lab or generically as a species, that’s what I’m most curious about. And how can I, with my particular set of experiences and ideas, how can I be part of a team of people that are doing that? And to me, that’s one of the greatest draws of organizations like Creative Destruction Lab and the people that it attracts.

Because it’s a bunch of folks trying to work on those great big problems with curious minds, but also with the drive and the unquenchable desire to get to those answers and incorporate them into our new normal. To me, that’s the most exciting thing going on in the world, and I’m super happy to be part of that.

John Stackhouse: I love it. I’ve got chills going up my spine. But I think what I’m taking away is that if you’re curious, there is no final frontier, even in space.

Chris Hadfield: Oh, no, curiosity is, here’s an interesting thing I read recently, we have taught, uh, some of the higher apes to do sign language, [00:26:00] and they’ve learned, some of the brighter ones, they’ve learned like 200 words, but they’ve never asked a question, and I found that really interesting.

They have an existential existence, and they’ve never had sort of a philosophical question. And I think that’s what truly separates us is our curiosity and our recognition that I want to take care of my hierarchical needs and I need to be fed and you know, all those things. But what really gives me not only a different advantage and perspective, but what really drives us and gives me satisfaction.

is my ability to imagine and therefore my ability to be curious and to try and understand things even better than we’ve understood them so far. That’s what gets me up every morning. I’m just burning with curiosity. How does everything work and how can I maybe help contribute to us all understanding it better?

Sonia Sennik: So imagination and curiosity is the uniquely human compass.

Chris Hadfield: It’s definitely what floats our boat. Whether it always gives us a direction, I don’t know. [00:27:00] But when I’m talking to a new person, as soon as I can get to our shared mutual curiosity about things, to me, that’s where the conversation always deepens.

The things we already understand, that’s just the platform that you’re standing on. But the stuff you’re looking at and wondering about, that’s the very essence of joyful discovery and recognition and progress forwards. And so, yeah, I think curiosity and wonder. Are the most childlike and also the absolutely most necessary of the human traits.

John Stackhouse: Chris, thank you for the conversation. Thank you for your curiosity. Never, never let it go.

Chris Hadfield: Great. Well, I was wondering what you were going to ask me about. Good to talk to you both.

Sonia Sennik: Thanks, Chris.

John Stackhouse: That was an extraordinary conversation. Sonia, what was one of the big takeaways for you?

Sonia Sennik: The biggest takeaway for me was just how much we have to learn about the moon and how important it’s going to be in this next phase of space exploration.

And the way Commander Hadfield framed it as, you know, imagine if you discovered a [00:28:00] new continent with no pre-existing biosphere or life to disrupt, but incredible resources. And to think that we’ve only explored a sliver of it? There’s just so much for us to learn.

John Stackhouse: I was reminded how the Big Bang is not a theory.

We know a lot about it and we’re learning lots and lots more and we’re getting close to answering some of those truly existential questions, which for us as a species driven by curiosity is so animating.

Sonia Sennik: And here on planet Earth, we have so many imaginative creators building new technologies for the next generation of space and the space economy. We’re going to meet two of them in part two. So get your space suits and set your phasers to fun. We’ll see you next time.

John Stackhouse: So join us for part two of our special series on space, the next frontier of innovation. I’m John Stackhouse.

Sonia Sennik: And I’m Sonia Sennik.

John Stackhouse: And this is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. Talk to you [00:29:00] soon.

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