YouSaid · the spoken record

Dr. Moriba Jah

lines on the record: 45
first: 2022-11-09
most recent: 2022-11-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Steph, thank you for giving us a platform and shining a light on this really incredible topic at this really pivotal time. It really means a lot. So thank you very, very much for having us”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we can measure that, we have to get ahead of it now. And the timing is definitely urgent. And the urgency, there are a number of companies that are feeling that urgency in a number of people that are innovating in space that clearly see the urgency. And you can sense it because the conversations with them and the work that they're doing is absolutely critical to this minute in time. But these are all steps that we're on a bigger path and that path is going to, you know, it's going to far surpass our lifetimes.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was weird. It was too early when we did Apollo. Now that we are in a commercial space environment where 80% of the things that went up last year were commercial versus government, that's a flip. Most of my lifetime, the things that went up most years were 80% government and you'd be lucky to find 20% commercial. Now, the dollars haven't shifted yet, right? The government's still outspending the commercial sector because of all of those things, the war machine and intelligence gathering and defense. But that's going to change very, very, very soon. It's bound to because the government's taking rides on commercial rockets now. That's not exactly a total unexpected trend. We'd seen it happening for a while, but the rate has changed. So now you can actually, you know, exponential things are really hard to measure when they're tiny and tiny and tiny. But once the steps get bigger, you can measure them. And we're now in an environment.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely critical. And we can't start on it at the last minute. There's going to be a million baby steps to get that one giant leap. And we have to work on it now.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think it is important that we make a difference and we make an impact. And, you know, there are a lot of things that on planet Earth that are technology projects that I really don't care about. I mean, I'm not the type of person that's going to go start the next Tinder or the next. I'll skip all the other great app examples. Fleeting. And I'm a big believer that Elon oftentimes actually means what he says. Sometimes he doesn't. I mean, I think he's pretty damn funny, but I think sometimes he says exactly what he means and people glance over it because it sounds so crazy. But all of these enabling step zones on the way to Mars and on the way to an interplanetary species, on the way to ultimately a space-fearing civilization.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I'm going through it page by page as an engineer and looking at every trace and every chip that he hand drew on every page for Apple I and Apple II, and then in assembler for Apple Rom and Apple Doss. And then I get to the back of this book that's an engineering PhD manifesto that I don't think you could create today. This should be a part of engineering school curriculum for every kid that wants to go into STEM. At the back of the same book on the same HP graph paper before he started Apple were handwritten song lyrics from the Beatles and Bob Dylan that he had heard on the radio while he was working on Apple I and Apple II. And I thought, man, how, like how can you be the human that did this and be the human that cared enough to write this down and to live by those things?”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing that's interesting, I was helping Waz clean out his garage. This is a true story. You don't think about Waz cleaning out his garage, right? But in his garage, I came across a blue three-ring binder and it was filled with HP graph paper from when he worked at Hillard Packard before they started Apple. And he was moonlighting working on his designs for Apple I and Apple II. And this was a solo endeavor. I mean, this is different from the type of endeavors that we have to do at the scale, right?”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a big believer that you can align good things that you do in the world that can still make money. It doesn't have to be a nonprofit to do good things. I also am a huge believer that if it's a problem I can solve in my lifetime, it's probably not all that interesting, right? Because our lives are so fleeting and so momentary, we should all be working on really, really hard problems. And they are moonshots. If we don't make it the whole way, we still all win. And that's okay. It's inspirational to get to work with Waz. You know, he's a brilliant, lovely, lovely human. We've known each other for a long time, but I will say working between him and getting to work with Steve Jobs back in my time at Apple.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there are so many inspirational people working to do really hard things in space. I just don't see. And don't get me wrong, there's a part of my heart that has to remain a cold, dark capitalist because we must make money. We're not building a nonprofit. We have investors. And those investors want to see a great return.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's terrifying. Why was that not front page news for more than an hour? Why was the tweet more important than that? It really wasn't. So we've got to fix this empathy apathy thing, and then we can get on to accessibility as the focus of the business. And I'm a big believer that accessibility will lead the way because we actually crave that access to move our society and our civilization forward.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's how fragile space is. And you look at that and some of these ASAT tests and attacks and things that we've done in space that we've also, the United States has also done some pretty bad things there. Those things have put human lives in jeopardy in a way that Our lack of empathy has really hurt us. When that ASAT happened, the soundbite within hours of blowing that thing into millions of pieces was situation green, everything's normal. I guarantee you it was not normal for the crew on the space station. And it was no way normal. I mean, it's a terrifying position to tell seven people whose lives are in peril. We don't even know where you should move to be in less risk. We just know you're in grave danger.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They should not be things that space operators have to pay for. They should be things that enable people to do good things while they operate safely in space. And we've already had bad things happen. We've had things happen in space that were nearly catastrophic, that have nearly cost a lot of lives. You know, we're co-sponsored by Omega Watches. So this is not a total shameless plug, but Apollo 13, you got it. This crew that's had a catastrophic failure nearly a mortal failure. You know, young people growing up today doing a STEM education don't think about the tools they had on board. They had to shut everything down to get home. What did they use? They used a wristwatch, a slide rule, and they timed their burn by hand. They had to shut off their systems and time it on a wristwatch.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope not. You know, I really hope that we do the right thing because it's the right thing to do. Our satellite constellation is called Pono, and Pono is like the Hawaiian word for karma. It means to do the right thing or to do the righteous thing. You know, in general, Hawaii is actually a really interesting place to headquarter privateer because there are notions in Hawaiian society and words that are used that don't exist really in English. Hawaiians have a word for stewardship and responsibility that's called Kuliana. That is more than just a word. It's a virtue. It's something that people live their Kuliana, their responsibility. Ideas like Pono and Kuliana and the nature of stewardship and conservatorship, that has to translate to our space environment other than our tax dollars. We don't pay for air traffic control. Space situational awareness and traffic management, domain awareness and traffic control. All these things should be free.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You'll start to see space traffic control be very akin to air traffic control. And today the two things don't even connect, but when you have this many things in space and they do re-enter, quite a lot of them do ultimately re-enter our atmosphere. They don't just totally vaporize. Little pieces come back, sometimes big pieces come back. With the number of objects we're talking about, Murphy's law is hard at work. And the odds are low, but it is possible that space debris will enter and even intersect with air traffic or shipping traffic. And we're not that far from that. That possibility is already there. The probability is low.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It'll be driven by accessibility and the desire for people to access space resources, I think largely self-interested motivation will be to improve life on Earth. And that remains a big part of our mission. Improving life on space doesn't do much for us, at least not in the short term, right? But improving life on Earth from space is very, very important. And we see like-minded companies around us working and like-minded people working on the same set of challenges. I think the first part of our mission's safety. My hope is that this notion of giving away these technologies that we develop to help ensure a safe space environment, a sustainable space environment will encourage usage and ultimately if enforcement does occur, which I think it's bound to occur soon. It has to occur soon.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whizzing around that we can't even see and sense and detect or track. And the number of things that we can see and send and detect and track is exponentially evolving into a giant ring of trash.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Asked New York City hey, one of my favorite cities. There's a trash can on every single street corner, and there's trash littering the streets. So to your point, how do you encourage people to take the thing and just put it in the trash can? It's societal, it's behavioral, it's trained. And the incentive structure isn't there. We all acknowledge that it's trashed, but there's always this notion that someone else will clean it up. And to be really candid, you know, when Watson I started Wheels of Zeus 22 years ago, or 21 years ago, we acknowledge that half of the things in space that we could see, that we could sense and detect were trash. And we used to joke. We'd be the world's first kind of space environmental engineers. We would be the guys, the sanitation engineers on the back of the space trash truck putting satellites into the compactor. We would go do that as our next career. It was a joke at the time, but it resulted in the tragedy of the commons 20 years later because now we've got a million little things.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's going to come down to enforcement. I mean, unfortunately, there is the carrot, which is we all get to participate together. And I am a big believer that that carrot and that reward and that incentive is really huge and that will encourage people's behavior to do the right thing if we can enable that without making it more punitive for them to do the right thing. It has to be just as easy to recycle your things. it is to throw it out your car window while you're driving. And this is something that is also societal and its behavior related in nature, right? I married a therapist. It doesn't show at all. You know, if you travel to Tokyo, you don't see trash cans on every street corner because there's a societal notion that you are responsible for taking care of your garbage. You're not going to toss it on the street. Like, I mean, I can't even imagine what it would be like to throw some trash in the street of Tokyo. Now, in contrast,”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was also outdated by the time I got it that we need to change that for space so that somebody in the third world has the same access and the same capability as somebody in the first world without a penalty and without additional friction or cost, it needs to be open and accessible. That's the thing that was missing from going from the ocean to the stars. You know, you can build a boat in your backyard and toss it in the ocean if you want, right? We all watched Moana. I've got a three-year-old is what you do. We haven't seen humankind yet, maybe until now, be able to do that travel to the stars the way that we can do that on the ocean, but it is coming very, very, very soon and very affordably, and it will change our lives forever indefinitely.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are different. We're all trying to work on a problem for humanity. I don't think if you talk to four or five companies that are in the SSA bucket and you ask them, who's your competitors, we're actually all friends, right? It's a much more inclusive environment than people would give it credit for because we're trying to do some good things. There are people outside that spectrum that are off in the gray area that don't have that view. But I think for the most part we do and accessibility is going to be the gateway drug to encourage us all to see our humanity from a different perspective and a perspective that you don't have to travel there to get the perspective, right? Like, I mean, when I was a kid, I mean, our family was very broke. And I would say like the world book encyclopedia was the version of Google that we had. And we were missing some volumes, unfortunately, which is why I'm so poorly versed on biology. But, you know, there's certain parts of the encyclopedia I missed by accident.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the problem is people have not yet realized that space will be likely to govern their actions if we don't actually participate. So it has to be participatory in nature. If privateer fails, we all fail because the technology we're bringing to market, we're doing it in a way that is truly cooperative and is designed to encourage participation. So we're not becoming the gatekeeper to space. We're becoming the enabler to space. And we're not competing directly. So if you look at this marketplace that some people would put privateer in the bucket of space situational awareness and domain awareness and traffic management, I would argue it's not a market because the commercial companies that are there, they don't make giant amounts of money. They are not the mega successful companies that you would think of. And we are much more like than we.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“New levels, you know, even the messages that we delivered onto the lunar surface were from like 50 plus countries that did not get along with each other, but those world leaders left similar messages about our humanness and the nature of that so that if it were ever seen and someone ever interpreted it, they would know that our motivations were really good and really interconnected. Space right now, that message got lost along the capitalist route to monetize space. If privateer fails, it's because humanity failed to recognize space as a frontier for all of us. And instead continued to put it in this little compartment that's for billionaires and very, very special people who have tons of resources, and that makes them special somehow. I don't know how, but I guess it does. And that means it's only for them.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Morb actually hit it right on the head. It's a lack of empathy because apathy is really the enemy of empathy and we have created an environment in space where people really don't give a shit. It's going to sound like I'm picking on somebody. I'm not picking on anybody. But when you're a billionaire and you put on a cowboy hat and you go up on a rocket, that doesn't feel like all of us could do it. It doesn't feel like our own personal journey is tied to their journey. When the Apollo 11 astronauts touched down on the surface of the moon, or at least when two of them did, their messages to humanity, while the entire world watched, and, you know, I'm too young to have watched it live, but I've certainly watched the recording because the message from the astronauts were not just to their families and to all humanity, but they were messages of peace. They were messages of love. They were messages of understanding. They were messages of hopefulness. They were messages of what was going to come in the future that this new frontier was going to enable humankind to read.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The cosmonauts from Ross Cosmos that were aboard the space station at the time, they had no damn idea. Their government was going to blow up an asset and put them and the world in peril. They did, they certainly wouldn't have And I can only imagine being their crewmates going, dude, WTF. And I'm sure they were like, didn't know, right? And I'm sure had absolutely no input on the actions of politics and posturing and warfighting and all those bad behaviors that we, you know, as Moriba said, there's a lot of, there's 25 shades of space. Let's put it that way.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was a beautiful transparent. No one has to guess what your own self-intent is because you published your own personal user manual. Anyone that would like to interact with you knows what your values and some of your goals are that you actually connect with so that other people can interact with that too. It was beautiful that you were willing to be that transparent. Oh, thank you. There is no space user manual. And there's no country to find user manual for space. Interpretation of the current actions can come with a lens that are not the people that actually go on orbit. It's the people that direct the people on orbit. I'm not supposed to say on this podcast anything that sounds or rhymes with Prussia, but when we had an ASAP attack last year in November, And I probably shouldn't even go here.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't totally work that way. I think there's also my two sense here is that the history of space, most of the people who went to space were scientists and researchers and people who had very, very, very good intent because you don't really send war fighters and politicians to space. You send people to go do research and most of that research is focused on the betterment of humankind or had been one small step, right? The problem is getting to the giant leap. And we did the one small step. We've probably even done two and three small steps, but we haven't gotten to the giant leap. And right now, those middle steps include a lot of contentious behavior between a lot of people with their own self-motivations and interests. Steph, I remember when you put out the personal user manual.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone wanted to share in space and wanted to do what we were doing, we wouldn't have to launch any of our own satellites. We could just ask them, why don't you just give us access to your stuff and we'll give access to the entire community?”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out of it. These are global services that we as humans need so we can keep space accessible so that someday we can utilize space better to cure planet Earth and some of the ails that we have caused on it and also so that we can become a space-fearing civilization, which might be kind of Mission two, but you got to do the first thing. And as Moriba said, we've done all this damage to the land, to our atmosphere here, to our oceans. I'm an optimist, right? I believe that if you did that damage one step at a time, you can undo the damage one step at a time. But we have to call that right now and say this is the moment. This is the moment where we can undo that damage before it scales so exponentially that it'll be much, much harder to undo.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eons orbit, and it's a pretty good orbit to be in. So I think that it's not a hard pitch to get space operators to contribute. When we are living at the transitional point of space situational awareness and domain awareness and traffic management and ultimately traffic control, becoming services that actually should be provided by governments that have traditionally only been provided by private industry. I mean, imagine that getting on a passenger jet thing and getting told when you board the plane, air traffic control needs 10 bucks, so we don't hit another plane while we're in flight. That's actually what's happened in the space world for over 20 years is you've had to pay bespoke companies to keep you from bumping into one another. And that is like a mafia tactic. So we think disrupting that and using these data from a variety of operators, they're tired of being extorted, right? They've been writing checks for a long time without getting a lot of benefit.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's more mutual benefit than it is quid pro quo because what we're basically saying is contribution results in capability. If you contribute your state vectors and telemetry and you share with us where your vehicles are in space, we share with you the capability to make sure that we all have eyes on those things and that we can all observe them better and we can operate more efficiently and more safely in space. And that benefits the entire community because we can't put our own assets up in an environment that's unknown. The risk is too high. And the risk to space operators operating, as Morba said, Elon does have kind of his own orbit right now.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the reason for that is it should make a ton of sense. There has been a history and space of companies serving this community that look like extortionists. They look like the mafia. Give me a dollar and your satellite won't crash in space. You know, give me a dollar and I'll make sure that my exquisite observation keeps you from getting into trouble. Those days have to come to an end really fast, and we aim to democratize the space situational awareness market by bringing these tools to humankind for free, by enabling and empowering the communities so that we have a single source of truth and knowledge, and we're not aiming to own it. We're aiming to enable it and foster it and be good stewards of our space environment. The other part of this is accessibility, and for that we're putting up a constellation of our own satellites, which I hope doesn't sound too hypocritical.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're doing two things in two very broad categories. We're focused on space safety and accessibility, and we think that they're totally interconnected, right? And part of that is what you actually kind of alluded to and touched on, which is that my three-year-old daughter knows how to share better than we know how to share in space. Like Moriba said, how many more cameras do we need to overfly right now? It's great that we have them. It's great that we can provide the capability. It's kind of sad that we don't do a very good job sharing. You don't need 50 cameras over flying a region if you know how to actually effectively utilize one asset. So privateers focused on safety through things like Wayfinder and our conjunction software that helps people not crash in space. And we're doing that in a really open way to the community that encourages interaction and involvement amongst kind of space operators so that we coordinate and we cooperate in space.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How we manage it. We don't have those regulations in place yet. So the space rush is going to continue, especially when you have launch costs, like you said earlier, like 5,000 bucks a kilo. I can put a satellite in space for less than I could pay our attorneys to do the paperwork. Let's think about that. That's crazy.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“22 years. It's still about 30 GPS satellites that give us the better United States assets. I'm not counting blown assets. These are the things that we use as United States assets that enable our GPS systems. Don't get me wrong, there's other things that enhance GPS. There's other things that give you other capability to triangulate, but there's no other global system like that available to us as the masses on Earth. At 95% uptime, you lose one satellite, you're in trouble. You'll lose two, you're in a little bit more trouble. You lose multiples that are in the same area, you're in a lot of trouble. I mean, people say three, but it's closer to four to get an actual positional fix. So these are services and systems are somewhat fragile. In the lowered orbit, things are flying over our heads much faster, and they're much less certain because we have less observations on them less often. That makes things an environment where we have to be much more mindful of.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, when Waz and I started Wheels of Zeus 22 years ago, which tells you how old I am, there's dust coming off me. This is actually a black jacket. This is my dust. When we started Wheels 22 years ago, we had 2,000 satellites on orbit and half of them were dead. They were already pieces of trash. And we were building GPS locators that were similar to Apple tags 20 years too early. We ended up building a business that serviced a customer that was not those of us that use like Apple text to track things or tile or whatever. The reason I tell the story is that 22 years ago we had about 30 GPS satellites and we had an SLA for GPS that was like 95%. Let's put that in perspective. If your power company at home only gave you an SLA at 95%, you would really hate your power company, right? Your power company gives you an SLA that's like 99.9% uptime. And that's still not great, but it's pretty good. We haven't really grown that constellation.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, this is one of those areas where, to put this in perspective, if you took a shell of the earth and you said from like 250 kilometers to a thousand kilometers up, we placed objects in a little 10 kilometer bubbles. How many of those bubbles can we stack between 250 and a thousand around Earth? It's about 110 million. To put that in perspective, the auto industry on Earth did about eighty million cars last year alone. So one year's space vehicle production when we were at ramp that we are, like similar to the auto industry, would completely exhaust that spacing in near Earth space to the point that we couldn't put anything else up if we didn't have the precision and the ability to maneuver and the traffic management and control and all of the underpinning infrastructure, which today is largely missing. If we don't fix that, we would be capacity constrained.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. So it's only a matter of time. Will realize and their shareholders realize, oh wow, we just, you know, we just got disrupted by something flying above our head that we have absolutely no control or even taxation on.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a way that no one actually controls or truly governs or enforces. So that means once your vehicle's in space, if it provides a service to us on terrestrial Earth, it's actually operating more efficiently, more cheaply than if the asset was on the ground and regulated by a single state or nation state country. This is something that is going to change our lives fundamentally forever because the terrestrial companies that have services that could be operated from space by choosing to strip mine space, by using that space unwisely and unsustainably, they're actually taking advantage of the fact that the regulation and the enforcement doesn't exist, and they're doing it at a time that I'm not saying that they'll be grandfathered in forever, but they're certainly taking advantage of it now and they're doing it without any recourse. Once a new frontier opens up, and I'm not saying space is the final frontier, but it is the frontier of our library.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What Morbassett is right on the money, right? And money is part of the issue because we're really strip mining space. And I think what the average person, I mean, I would put myself in the average person bucket. What most of us are not really aware of is that there's no property tax in space. So once you're there, once you pay that cost to launch, once you pay the regulatory cost to be able to be there, like Morava said, this is international space law, which it's similar to flying an American flag off the back of your boat, right? You represent the United States when you leave that port and you leave your country. You are not exactly asset owned by the U.S. government, but you're representing the United States wherever you go. The same thing's true for people operating in space, and that is changing the nature of how people play those rules and where they're domiciled. And I don't think the average person's realized yet that by strip mining space, what we're really doing is we're occupying space.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of the problem is enforcement. Like, if you stick a speed limit sign up that says 65 miles an hour and we're all doing 120 and there's no cops, then don't get me wrong, I don't want to be a traffic cop of space, you may not follow the speed limit sign. It might look more like a good suggestion. And in space, you know, I kind of think people just cross their fingers, put them behind their back and sign the Space Act intrudy and just went on about life and said, who's going to call me on it? Because there is no way.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like the International Space Act and treaties. I mean, we all sign this thing when we go to space, when we put a satellite up, we all sign this. And it includes things like not weaponizing space, not doing generally bad things in space, not doing bad things to each other in space. And yet, you know, Moorebook proved this definitively with his work that he did at UT Austin with IBM on a project called Arcade, where they looked at how many objects in space are in or out of compliance with the Space Act and treaties. And the number out of compliance is over 40% of those registered objects are out of compliance.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“then whatever cracked your car windshield is probably not a rock. So these are challenges we're also working around, which is the evolution of space policy and the Space Act and treaties evolving. These things were based in maritime law. And I guess that kind of made sense for the time because we needed a framework for how we interoperate in space. But that is actually creating the challenge because we don't have even the simplest notions of like right of way. You're in space. You're going to come very close to colliding with someone else's object, whether it's dead or alive. Who's got the right away? Well, I mean, obviously if it's dead, you better move. But if you're both active, who's got the right of way? These are very simple constructs on the ground. You wouldn't get in your car and not know that. But in space, we're operating in the blind. We don't have these rules fully defined as a community, and yet we keep launching more and more things without solving those.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean there's a lot of collisions, and there's some that we actually can see and we can clearly identify that was caused by debris or even in the case of a satellite hitting an active satellite or vice versa or two objects in New York space colliding. It happens a lot more than we would like to think. And there's also reasons why we don't talk about it as a community, why we don't just openly talk about our problems in the space community the way that we would in other academic communities or places where we're more data driven. And some of that actually surrounds liability and risk. As an example, many insurance policies in space on the writers exclude space debris from a covered loss. I'm not saying that people do it. I'm probably implying it, but if your insurance policy said we don't cover things hitting your car wind.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's going on with spaceflight? The first challenge is you have to be able to see everything so that we can put together a plan on how to solve for that. And astrograph. Wayfinder, these are tools to help Enlighten the world and kind of bring attention to the problem first so that we can all align on what the best solutions are for cleaning up space, which is kind of one side of Privateer's mission of making space safe and accessible for humankind.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, we're talking about over a million pieces of debris that are smaller than a centimeter, but the only thing we can really see from ground-based radar is stuff that's bigger than the size of a softball. So when Morba says there's these 26,000 things or whatever that number is precisely, those are things the size of a softball doing roughly $18,000 an hour. And, you know, MV squared still MV squared. It's a real problem because the little pieces of debris, the things you can't see can really hurt you. In space Wouldn't get on a passenger jet if you got told when you boarded the plane. There's a million little bullets flying around. This is going to make your life potentially very miserable. We just don't know. Hope you make it like.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · The Data Highway Above with Privateer’s Steve Wozniak, Alex Fielding, and Dr. Moriba Jah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source