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Why The Next Space Station Might Be Inflatable
The International Space Station cost about $100 billion to build and runs another $4 billion a year to operate.
For a long stretch, it absorbed roughly half of NASA's annual budget. Skylab, the first US space station, lasted six years before falling out of the sky.
Carl Sagan thought space stations were a waste of money.
Ronald Reagan thought they were the next clipper ship.
The killer app for space, the thing that finally makes the economics work, has been argued about for fifty years and not yet found.
On this episode of Thinking on Paper, we continue our book club deep dive into Space to Grow by Matthew Weinzierl and Brendan Rousseau, this time on chapter four, Planet, Supply and Demand.
We trace two of the strongest candidates for that elusive killer app: Earth-imaging satellites and commercial space stations. The satellite story runs through Planet, the company three ex-NASA engineers founded to take the multi-billion-dollar government Landsat playbook and rebuild it from laptop batteries, cell phone chips, and parts they bought online, ending up with a constellation of small satellites called Doves that now images the entire surface of the Earth daily and produces 30 terabytes of new imagery every 24 hours.
The space station story runs through ISS, Skylab, Bigelow's inflatable marshmallow modules already attached to the ISS, and NASA's new Commercial LEO Destinations program, which is trying to do for space stations what COTS did for launch.
Along the way: the Le Chatelier principle and why the short-run response to a market shock can mislead us about the long-run, the chicken-and-egg problem of building infrastructure before there's a customer, why a single congressman in 1993 saved the entire space station program, and the chapter's quiet thesis, that the value of space gets unlocked slowly and asymmetrically, and the people who give up early miss the long-run payoff entirely.
Enjoy.
--
Other ways to connect with us:
Listen to every podcast
Follow us on Instagram
Follow us on X
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Read our Substack
Email: [email protected]
--
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) Trailer
(01:35) No Dust Jackets
(02:00) Name Jeremy's Astronaut
(03:52) What Is The Product Market Fit For Space?
(05:26) Satellites And The Le Chatelier Principle
(09:00) Planet's Dove Satellites
(16:38) Satellites For Climate
(18:28) John Lewis
(22:30) Ronald Reagan & Carl Sagan
(26:42) Inflatable ISS Modules
View all episodes
By Mark Fielding and Jeremy GilbertsonThe International Space Station cost about $100 billion to build and runs another $4 billion a year to operate.
For a long stretch, it absorbed roughly half of NASA's annual budget. Skylab, the first US space station, lasted six years before falling out of the sky.
Carl Sagan thought space stations were a waste of money.
Ronald Reagan thought they were the next clipper ship.
The killer app for space, the thing that finally makes the economics work, has been argued about for fifty years and not yet found.
On this episode of Thinking on Paper, we continue our book club deep dive into Space to Grow by Matthew Weinzierl and Brendan Rousseau, this time on chapter four, Planet, Supply and Demand.
We trace two of the strongest candidates for that elusive killer app: Earth-imaging satellites and commercial space stations. The satellite story runs through Planet, the company three ex-NASA engineers founded to take the multi-billion-dollar government Landsat playbook and rebuild it from laptop batteries, cell phone chips, and parts they bought online, ending up with a constellation of small satellites called Doves that now images the entire surface of the Earth daily and produces 30 terabytes of new imagery every 24 hours.
The space station story runs through ISS, Skylab, Bigelow's inflatable marshmallow modules already attached to the ISS, and NASA's new Commercial LEO Destinations program, which is trying to do for space stations what COTS did for launch.
Along the way: the Le Chatelier principle and why the short-run response to a market shock can mislead us about the long-run, the chicken-and-egg problem of building infrastructure before there's a customer, why a single congressman in 1993 saved the entire space station program, and the chapter's quiet thesis, that the value of space gets unlocked slowly and asymmetrically, and the people who give up early miss the long-run payoff entirely.
Enjoy.
--
Other ways to connect with us:
Listen to every podcast
Follow us on Instagram
Follow us on X
Follow Mark on LinkedIn
Follow Jeremy on LinkedIn
Read our Substack
Email: [email protected]
--
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) Trailer
(01:35) No Dust Jackets
(02:00) Name Jeremy's Astronaut
(03:52) What Is The Product Market Fit For Space?
(05:26) Satellites And The Le Chatelier Principle
(09:00) Planet's Dove Satellites
(16:38) Satellites For Climate
(18:28) John Lewis
(22:30) Ronald Reagan & Carl Sagan
(26:42) Inflatable ISS Modules