Going transplanetary Erika Ilves, co-founder, Transplanetary

Strategy summit, stavanger, Jan 29, 2015

Credit: Bryan Versteeg, spacehabs.com

Something incredible just happened At the edge of the Milky Way.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt

About 28,000 light years from the black hole at the center, there is a system with a single yellow star. Moving around this star at 30 km/second, is a @ny planet with a thin crust a bit like the thin coa@ng on an M&M candy. The candy is wrapped in a super-thin blanket of air. For the last 3 billion years, the planet has been ruled by viruses. There are more viruses on that planet than there are stars in the en@re universe. If you stack them up, youll get 100,000 light yearsroughly the span of the Milky Way galaxy. Over the years, many other kinds of living things evolved on this planet. 99% of them have gone ex@nct. Ex@nc@on is the rule, survival is the excep@on on this liQle green M&M. Fossils trapped inside the planetary rock are the only reminder that these living things ever existed. The projec@on for the future of all living things on this M&M has always been grim: about 1 billion years to go un@l the aging star expands and sterilizes the en@re planet. But now, this gloomy projec@on could be proven wrong! A cosmic instant ago, a new life form emerged on this liQle M&M. It is quite unlike anything else before it. It asks profound ques@ons, does not take no for an answer, writes poetry and complains about wi. Most importantly, it can change the fate of all terrestrial life and mind. It can jailbreak life from the chains of terrestrial gravity and take it to other planets and other solar systems. This may be wrong, but so far it looks like it is the only experiment of its kind in the en@re galaxy. In the next few galac@c seconds, this life form might be deciding the fate of life and mind in this galaxy.

humans. So much potential. So little time.

Just in case you were in doubt, I am talking about humans.

The species is extremely young and has much to learn. Milky Way has been around for almost 14 billion years. In our current form, weve only been around for thousands of years. The galaxy, solar system and even the planet itself pose many threats to our survival. As do our own technologies & animal spirits. Our evolu@onary success is by no means assured.

"Now is the watershed of Cosmic history

Behind us yawn the chasms of the primordial past, when this universe was a dead and silent place; before us rise the broad sunlit uplands of a living cosmos.

In the next few galactic seconds, the fate of the universe will be decided. Life the ultimate experiment will either explode into space and engulf the star-clouds in a fire storm of children, trees, and butterfly wings; or Life will fail, fizzle, and gutter out, leaving the universe shrouded forever in impenetrable blankness, devoid of hope."

Marshall T. Savage

The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps, 1994

But the outline of our mission if we choose to accept it is clear:

We know what we must do.

We know what we must do. Or at least, some of us have been crystal clear about this throughout the years. Steven Hawking and Elon Musk preQy much say it every @me they are interviewed about anything. But they are not alone.

"In the long run, a single-planet species will not survive.

Michael Griffin, NASA administrator

2006

Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaringnot because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds.

Carl Sagan

1994 1994 Carl Sagan, astrophysicist, needs no introduc@on

The long-term survival of humanity, and of the plant and animal life that we cherish on Earth, can best be assured by building colonies dispersed throughout our solar system and beyond.

Gerard oneill

1976 1976 Gerard ONeill, a visionary physicist

"Remember this: once the human race is established on more than one planet and especially, in more than one solar system, there is no way now imaginable to kill off the human race.

Robert A. Heinlein

1961 1961 Robert Heinlein, a visionary sci writer

This is the goal: To make available for life every place where life is possible. To make inhabitable all worlds as yet uninhabitable, and all life purposeful.

Hermann oberth

1957 1957 A German physicist and engineer

"Man must at all costs overcome the Earth's gravity and have, in reserve, the space at least of the Solar System. All kinds of danger wait for him on the Earth. . . . We have said a great deal about the advantages of migration into space, but not all can be said or even imagined.

Konstantin tsiolkovsky

1929 1929 Russian pioneer of the astronau@cs theory

"Perchance, coming generations will not abide the dissolution of the globe, but, availing themselves of future inventions in aerial locomotion, and the navigation of space, the entire race may migrate from the earth, to settle some vacant and more western planet.... It took but little art, a simple application of natural laws, a canoe, a paddle, and a sail of matting, to people the isles of the Pacific, and a little more will people the shining isles of space.

Henry david thoreau

1843 1843 American author and historian If we leave Henry Thoreaus musings alone and start with serious rocket scien@sts: Konstan@n Tsiolkovsky in Tsarist Russia, Robert Goddard in the United States and Herman Oberth in Germany. They got to work in earnest on technological means of going to space about 100 years ago.

so what have we done in a hundred years?

So what have we done in a 100 years?

As of Jan 23, 2015

people in space 547 man years in space123

currently in space 6 Source: worldspaceflight.com

At a rst glance, it does not look half bad weve logged 123 man years, 547 people have been to space, 6 people are orbi@ng this rock this very moment.

As of Jan 23, 2015

Source: worldspaceflight.com

18orbited 12 walked

0 529100-450 km

If you look at how far weve made it o the planet, it is actually a bit depressing. Mars 0, 18 people orbited the Moon, 12 people walked on it. Most people who have been to space, have not gone further up than 450 kman equivalent of a trip between London and Paris. And if you then consider that the last @me we had people bound for the Moon was before I was even born, in 1972 or 43 years ago, then the picture looks preQy depressing.

"The regret on our side is, they used to say years ago, we are reading about you in science class. Now they say, we are reading about you in

history class."

Neil armstrong, july 1999

As the rst man on the Moon, Neil Armstrong pointed out: And he said that in 1999.

Why so little progress?

Its hard.

At least as hard as when our ancestors crawled out of the sea. Its hard enough to ght Earths gravity and get o the planet. Once you get there, its not exactly a tropical paradise. There is no air to breath, radia@on quickly gets lethal, there are no berries to pick or cows to milk. We need to either create our own close loop biological systems or transform our bodiesprobably a combina@on of both.

Its expensive.

apollo

$164 Billion iss

$150 Billion SLS

$30 Billion

Apollo programin 2014 dollars is about $164 billion. ISS has cost about $150 billion to build and operate. SLS, the American heavy lik rocket that is supposed to one day ferry humans to Mars, has a development cost of $30 billion. But then again, we could argue if something as important as the fate of life and mind in our galaxy is at stake, cost should not be our prime preoccupa@on.

We dont care about our extinction All That much.

Turns out, most of us dont actually care about the ex@nc@on of the human species all that much.

Availability bias

The last time I checked, Humans have not gone extinct

Human mind is a beau@ful but imperfect thing. One of the known bugs or cogni@ve biases it seems to exhibit is the so called availability bias. If it hasnt happened in recent history, not available in our lived memorywe tend to not pay much aQen@on to it. The last @me our species came close to ex@nc@on was about 70,000 years ago aker the Toba supervolcanic erup@on. Humans were down to 1,000-10,000 breeding couples. The problem is, not many people are s@ll around from that batch, so that near-ex@nc@on story is not top of mind for most of us.

Its a bit the same logic as in this tweet. We are s@ll here, so we cant go ex@nct. So what do we care about?

We do seem to care about prestige & military dominance.

Image: Kerbal Space Program

What goes up into space to a mere 300 km, can circle the globe in about 92 minutes. As you can imagine it can be quite handy if you want to do an unwanted delivery to an enemy territorywhich is why space-based weapons are generally frowned upon and we have a couple of trea@es outlawing them. This is a picture from a game, Kerbal Space Program, not a real life missile.

The last @me 34,400 people pe@@oned Whitehouse to begin building a Deathstar

here is the response they got. On a serious note, it would be nice if we did not have to ride our military passions into space.

We care about science unless we need the money for something else.

Unfortunately, we think we can do most of the work with these puppies. This is great news for mechanical life, not so much for the regular kinds of kiQens and puppies.

We care about doing more and more With less and less.

On Earth.

So if we found a way to do that with space, we would nd a path that would pay for itself and rely less and less on the militaries and government budgets. Houston, weve got ourselves a hook!

A path that pays for itself is the path that will happen.

You may think what you will about the prot mo@ve, but I genuinely believe that

Enter commercial space. Aka new space.

Enter commercial space, also known as New Space. So lets see where we are at with that.

1,200 satellites $200 billion market

92 launches in 2014 $6 billion market

What are we doing for Earth from space today? We have about 1,200 satellites currently in

orbit around Earth. They are relaying communica@ons, broadcas@ng posi@ons, taking pictures, spying on you. Its about $200B market. Lots of ac@on. Lots of companies working to make them smaller and cheaper, so that we can get swarms of them.

On the ground, we have dozens of rocket and even balloon companies companies ferrying these satellites up. Its a $6B market. The name of the game is: reduce launch costs. Several companies are in the race: from Space X working on reusable rockets to Virgin working on two-stage sub-orbital spaceplanes and Skylon trying to create a single stage to orbit where you could just take o the way you today on the plane.

Weve got a nice liQle con@nuous improvement loop going here. Lots of people are working on making satellites cheaper and gesng up there cheaper.

SPACE internet Real time eyes on earth

High altitude joy rides Anywhere in under 4 hours

So in a few years we will certainly have: Space internet. A few companies have tried

it before. Right now we have Elon Musk backed by Google and Branson working on crea@ng a global swarm of internet satellites, pusng universal internet access within reach.

Real @me eyes on Earth. We have Skybox and Planet Labs hard at work on real-@me Earth observa@on.

High al@tude joy rides: Branson working on high-al@tude joy ridesyou go up briey and experience micro-gravity, can be fununless one of your fellow travellers decides to vomit.

Point-to-point ights. Branson probably wont rest un@l he gets us a ight from London to Sydney in under 4 hours.

Its all wonderful.

But none of this calls for people to live in space or go beyond the geostationary orbit.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt

A question of galactic significance: So, coming back to the fate of life and mind in our galaxy, all this begs a ques@on of galac@c signicance:

What creates value on earth, requires humans in the loop and/or

Pushes us beyond the geostationary orbit?

There is obviously this guy! Its not actually clear that he is human, but we could certainly use some help. So weve got Elon Musk

and a handful of space-based business models.

Space tourism Micro-g research Re-fueling stations

Space mining Space-based solar power Manufacturing in space

Space tourism: So far space tourism has basically been about 6 tourists spending a few days on the Interna@onal Space Sta@on. But one can easily imagine orbital hotels visited by hundreds of tourists a day. That would force us to push the fron@er on human safety in space.

Micro-gravity research: Space has something we dont have on Earth but something could be extremely useful in research micro-gravity. Genes, materials, crystalsall behave dierently in space. This gives biotech, agriculture, and materials companies an opportuni@es to create things with new proper@es. Today, the 6 astronauts on the ISS are Earths ac@ng lab technicians. But once the enormous poten@al held by micro-g research is beQer understood, we could have dozens of labs with scien@sts in orbit. Again, forcing us to push the fron@er on adap@ng biology to a space environment.

Re-fueling sta9ons in space: Today its all disposable rockets and BYOF. Having fuel available in space increases our degrees of freedom, if we need to bring less fuel from Earth, we can bring more useful instrumenta@on, more people, etc. But the business case for liking fuel from Earth is not greatit takes 100 kilos of fuel to lik 1 kilo of fuel, so well be forced to go to places beyond the geosta@onary orbit, with lower gravity, the Moon & asteroids.

Space mining: In stead of liking resources from the Earths surface we could tap into the innite supply of the elements in our solar system. This would force us to go beyond GEO. Unstructured environments->humans in the loop.

Space based solar power: Manufacturing in space: We could be manufacturing most of

the structures we need in space in space. We could also manufacture things that could only be manufactured in micro-g.

Space & market potential maybe infinite

Each one of the companies you saw on the previous page will tell you about the incredible poten@al their par@cular business model holds and if you are willing to accept certain assump@ons, they are right: market poten@al for all these ventures is terricfor some maybe innite

But investor understanding & attention is finite.

So all of us go out and pitch our stories in isola@on from each other, gh@ng for the scarce resource: investor aQen@on.

And we all encounter fairly similar reac@ons. Chris Lewicki from Planetary Resources was just at Davos, had a conversa@on with Fortune journalist at a bar and this is the kind of coverage we get. First of all, most people do need reassurance that asteroid mining or fuel sta@ons in space are not a joke. Then most people then wonder what the market size would begiven that we have a grand total of 6 people up there right now.

These business cases make real sense if funded together.

Its a bit dicult to explain over wine at the bar that all of these business cases only start making amazing sense if they are funded together.

Space tourism Micro-g research

Re-fueling stations

Space mining Space-based solar power

Manufacturing in space

Space mining only makes sense if you have something you want to manufacture in space.

Space-based solar power starts to really make sense if you could manufacture your satellites from space-based resources from lower gravity wells instead of liking it all from Earth.

Its easier to have tourists if you already have a cri@cal mass of people living and working in space.

The mindset that we need to push beyond the GEO is less like space cowboys talking about trillions of dollars of wild west like fron@er

And more of a mindset of space musketeers.

We need to be less like space cowboys And more like space musketeers.

Less space cowboys More like space musketeers.

That was the seed of Transplanetary, a space development company we created as an experimental ground for ecosystem-level thinking and ac@ng.

An ecosystem problem can only be solved by going meta.

We are all used to look at the world through the lens of our pet ideas, the business models we most believe in but solving our shared problem means that we need to go meta, go behind or above all of our individual ideas.

How to make an ecosystem of These Space-based business models investible?

And the most obvious and pressing meta problem we need to solve is how to make the en@re ecosystem of these business models inves@ble. Especially, if you dont have billions of dollars fortune. What could you actually do?

For starters, just bloody explain this whole space thing better.

For starters, we could just bloody explain this whole space thing beQer. We need to get over the no joke factor. Space is not the friendliest of sectors to a newcomerwith all the jargon and oldness and government programs. If we wanted more eyeballs on the sectorwe need both entrepreneurs and investors to understand where we have we been, where are we going, the whole ecosystem, understand the interdependencies and market poten@als

Meta idea #1: Space sector visualization and analytics platform

So in the spirit of thinking big but star@ng small, we were thinking about crea@ng a space sector visualiza@on and analy@cs plaworm. With beau@ful visualiza@ons. Simple language that humans can understand. Instead of focusing on the past, focus on the future. Show everything in the context of where space economy could be by mid-century.

To pull of this together is quite work intensive, so we were stealing @me here and there, working on the project in bits and pieceswhen @me permiQedUn@l

Weve had a close encounter of the Third Kind, uQerly unrelated to the business of space. We were aQending a 21st century Medicine forum in London. And thats where we meet the team from Deep Knowledge Ventures.

Deep Knowledge Ventures, had previously made news by appoin@ng an AI to its investment board.

We had lunch and got the backstory: Driven by their desire to make sense of investment opportuni@es in biotech, regenera@ve medicine and longevity, they build a machine learning system, called VITAL. It was so good, they appointed VITAL to the funds investment board.

VITALs SIBLING for Space was conceived over lunch. We named him spock*.

*Space program on ontologically computed knowledge

It takes time to train your AI

Space jargon 2,000 space entities 900,000 people All space related patents Hundreds of sources Asking the right questions Predictive algorithms

SPOCK, maybe a machine but it takes about 9 months to gestate. The teaching of the machine then began in earnest a couple of months ago and is going to take a few more. When we are done, SPOCK will have mastered space volcabulary.

Meta idea #1: version 2.0 Mission control for humanitys expansion off Earth,

Manned by spock

In the process, our ideas of how we think about this plaworm have evolved, too. Given that weve amassed an enormous live data base on the space sector, we decided that we could put the data and visualiza@ons that we are developing could be of use to a wider audience space enthusiasts, commercial space community and space agencies. So weve come to think of our rst step as a mission control for humanitys expansion o Earth.

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Greetings, I am SPOCK. I man this Mission Control for

human civilizations expansion into space. What do you want to do?

[Describe all the dierent things that users will be able to do.]

July 2015

We expect to launch in July 2015.

Ecosystem-level solutionS

3 meta ideas

MISSION CONTROL

Web intelligence platform for space investors, analysts and enthusiasts giving a real-time overview of the global space

ecosystem, incl. predictions of future space milestones,

visualization of future markets and investment recommendations.

MARKETPLACE

3rd party B2B global marketplace for space systems, sub-systems and components (Amazon 3rd party marketplace for space).

Could evolve into a platform for sharing and manufacturing high-volume aerospace components and sub-systems (Amazon 3D

printing shop for space)

SPACE DEVELOPMENT

BANK A global facility designed to fund the currently unfundable space infrastructure projects. Modelled on the concept of development banking but applied to the sector, not developing world nations. (EBRD for space)

Visualize space markets Create new funding mechanisms Drive out costs

Mission control is just our rst baby step. Once SPOCK has goQen a hang of the sector and can answer free form ques@ons about its past, present and futurewe will build a global space marketplace, think of it as Amazon 3rd party marketplace for space. The idea here is to create price transparency and help drive down the costs. Our meta idea #3 is to create a space development bank to enable the buildout of space infrastructure. I wont go into detail about these meta-ideas because they are s@ll half-baked. At the moment, we are 100% focused on our Mission Control.

We will pivot but will not let go of the bone.

The details maQer less at this point because I am sure we will pivot, but the thing that wont change is: we wont let go of the bone.

Space settlement

The bone is space seQlement. The reason why we cant aord to let go of it is because the future of life and intelligence in our galaxy is at stake here. So, its not something we can hold lightly.

Find a WAY to go transplanetary That pays for itself.

To sum up, Transplanetary is a meta-idea. The goal is to nd a path to go Transplanetary that pays for itselfand our focus is on enabling the ecosystem as a whole, rather than promo@ng any given company.

Sweet dreams are made of these:

Id like to nish o with visions that keep us going:

Credit: NASA

Breaking life and minds free from the chains of Earths gravity

Credit: Bryan Versteeg, spacehabs.com

Building habitats in free space

Credit: ESA

Mining communi@es on the Moon

Ci@es on Mars

Maybe one day holding the Olympic Games on Mars

So that one day

"When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system." Laurel clark

Personally, I am hell-bent on making sure that most people in this room live long enough to see this quote to ring true for most humans: [read quote]

Because of us, landscapes of radiation blasted waste, will be miraculously transmuted: Slag will become soil, grass will sprout, flowers will bloom, and forests will spring up in once sterile places. Ice, hard as iron, will melt and trickle into pools where starfish, anemones, and seashells dwella whole frozen universe will thaw and transmogrify, from howling desolation to blossoming paradise.

Marshall T. Savage

The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps, 1994

And one day we will get to this:

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt

If we succeed, this incredible liQle fragile experiment at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy could prove to be not a short-lived one-o, but the beginning of something very exci@ng.

transplanetary.com @transplanetary