Do we need highways for space?

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Time Markers

00:00 – This week00:22 – Guest introduction01:02 – On trying to become an astronaut03:14 – What is D-Orbit?06:15 – The evolving roadmap09:50 – On recycling space assets13:30 – Space, the maturation process15:35 – The evolution of satellites as a commodity17:56 – Where does D-Orbit fit into the changes in NewSpace?21:44 – Space Takes: Vulcan and the Space Force26:36 – Space Takes: The Golden Dome33:04 – Space Takes: China and mega-constellations

Transcript – Luca Rossettini Conversation

David Ariosto – Luca, it is. It is really good to see you again. I think the last time I saw you was in Utah, and you were dressed in a full space suit, and you were sort of traipsing across the what looked like the Martian desert sort of, you know, as part of this Mars Desert Research Station, you know, endeavor there, and you’re staying at the Hab. So it’s good to see you here.

Luca Rossettini – Yeah, was, I think, like, three years ago. It was analog, analog mission. Yeah, nice to see you again. Yeah, yeah. I’m actually honored to be here today.

David Ariosto – Yeah, no, it’s great to have you. I mean, you’ve been, you’ve been up to so much at the orbit. I think maybe a good place to start though, is maybe your sort of origin story, in a way, because you wanted to be an astronaut. You worked at NASA, NASA Ames. You got really close to becoming one in Europe, I think back in 2008 and there’s something like 10,000 candidates, and, you know, just a narrowing down to just these four spots, and it didn’t quite happen. And maybe you can just kind of take the mantle from there and tell me sort of what happened and where that, where that took you.

Luca Rossettini – Yeah, yeah, that that was my, my life goal, right? So I made Olin to become an astronaut, but then, as you said, I got a letter and said, No way. So try it again in the future. But actually in Europe, you have one chance in a life, so you have to figure out what to do of my life. I had two other companies at that time. One was producing drones, but at that time, drones were not cool, so it was long time ago, and the other one, we were producing movie special effects for the movie sector. So completely different topics, not as interested, not as interesting as working in space. I said, Okay, what can I do to get like the knowledge that I need in order to build a company that is capable, sooner or later, to create to give access to space, to space, to people like me. And then I won a full bread scholarship, so I went to us. I went to NASA Ames. And at NASA Ames that that was really peculiar. I was working with Chris Boshuizen and Will Marshall on a on a project about small…

David Ariosto – That’s Planet, essentially

Luca Rossettini – Exactly yes, right before planet was created. And actually, I think that that project that we were working on demonstrated that small satellites could make a big difference in a market that was dominated only by giants and, you know, big satellites. And so when, in 2010 I decided to go back to create the orbit the the folks from planet, they actually created planets. So that was, yeah, 14 years ago. Yeah,

David Ariosto – It almost seems like that NASA Ames class, I say class, but it almost seems that way, right? It just, it. There was just this burgeoning out to me, you had, you know, the outcroppings of planet. You’ve had de orbit, you know, obviously what Pete Worden has done, and he’s at Breakthrough. So, you know, just sort of a lot that happened there. But I think what I find most interesting about this is that you wanted to be an astronaut. It didn’t happen. You had a lot of, sort of the blueprints for how to do it yourself. And so you, instead of sort of flying your own spaceship, you just went out and built your own essentially, or didn’t fly, you didn’t fly NASA spaceship, but you built your own in that, in that sense. And so that might be kind of a good way to get into what D orbit actually is. And so maybe you can, can fill us in here.

Luca Rossettini – Yeah so, well, we are not flying people yet. So, you know, we are not yet. We are not there yet.

David Ariosto – Oh yeah, I use the term fly your own sort of loosely in essence, but…

Luca Rossettini – Yeah, yeah, it’s still work in progress in that sense. But so we have these, these long term vision in which we believe that in order to give access to everybody and help the expansion of the human kind in space, we need to create a logistic infrastructure, interplanetary logistic infrastructure. What we envisage it’s connecting Mars the asteroid belt, Moon and Earth with this infrastructure capable of transporting goods, people, information and energy, right? So that’s what we what we are working on. Of course, we are far to get there, right? So we are not there yet, but what we were able to achieve so far, it’s a full logistics infrastructure around the planet. So. We have 16 cargo vehicles, so spacecraft capable of transporting satellites in orbit right now, 19 successful space missions and more than 180 payloads that we deliver into orbit thanks to this transportation service, every cargo comes with computational capability. So we are connecting our vehicles, one to one to the other, in order to create a space cloud network in orbit to process information and transfer information in way, easier way than what is done today, and it’s not yet in orbit, but we are developing an in orbit service in vehicle, so way bigger, two tons of vehicles with robotic arm. The we are working with the space agency with this and the customer. We announced it last week. It’s a utsar, and the first mission is going to happen in, let’s say, 2028 hopefully you know where you work with the with the agency, the customers are have always the last word, so we will follow them. But that’s that’s going to be kind of a first time for Europe to perform and in orbit service mission.

David Ariosto – You know, I mean, there’s so much to unpack here in terms of what you said. I mean, not only in terms of just the nature of talking about infrastructure building beyond Geo and Leo and cislunar and, you know, quote, unquote lunar economies that are developing with some of these Moon landers, but actually sort of a broader sort of network, so to speak, in terms of Mars, asteroid belt. And, you know, the beginnings of what we’re starting to see here, the low hanging fruit in a lot of this seems to be just the sheer amount of assets that are already up there. I mean, we’ve got 10s of 1000s of satellites already on orbit, or, excuse me, 10s of 1000s planned to be on orbit, and also a lot of space debris. And I wonder if you can kind of speak to that aspect of de orbit, not on terms of sort of clearing space debris, but the sense that there almost seems like there’s a planned obsolescence when it comes to satellites these days, they just they’re not meant to last as long in orbit as they used to, and maybe that’s just because of the nature of, sort of the evolving technology and sort of the lower cost barriers to entry in terms of, terms of getting these things up there. So there’s smaller sets, there’s more of them, and you have to bring them down at a faster clip than than you used to, so that that seems to be where your business is oriented.

Luca Rossettini – Yeah so, so first of all, yeah, you hit a very important topic here, and and, and now I have to dig a little bit more in our strategic roadmap. So I told you where we aim to go in the future, right? So, but then we divide this roadmap into steps. Every step is not a technology, but is a market. And so that means that the future markets need to be enabled by the default, like the previous market and so on. So we went backwards from the vision to today, and what you said, it’s correct in reality. So sustainability was always part of our business. We are a benefit corporation, a certified B Corp, always keeping in mind that without a circular economy, even in space, there will be no business in the future. That’s number one point second. We are not really willing to remove the debris, the debris. I mean, we are talking about the big, big asset that we have there. Why not grabbing the debris, moving them into recycling station, recycle them entirely. Now on Earth, we can recycle everything, pretty much everything. You put a laptop into a machine, and you ended up with all the raw materials divided by by category, right? So now I’m simplifying but, but we have this capability, so it shouldn’t be too complex to transfer these capabilities into orbit, and once you have the raw material, then we can build satellites and space vehicle way bigger than we have now, directly into orbit. As I’m used to say, we don’t build boats in the desert and move them into the sea. We build them on the harbors. So why should we build satellites on earth if we are going to use them in space? So debris is going to become the very first source of raw material and the perfect ingredient for this circular space economy. Actually, I like to call it a spiral, because the more the space sector will grow, the more benefits we are going to generate, not just to the, you know, to the to the users, but with the entire ecosystem. And the second one is going to be later on the the asteroid, with asteroid mining. But we have to do it with like we have to do it in a smart way, not just thinking to go there and mining without thinking about the consequence. So we need to find what is going to be the right technology, the right methodologies. So that’s why we need to learn, step by step, how to get there.

David Ariosto – You know that there’s, again, there’s sort of a lot to sort of unpack with that, but when it comes to sort of removing you. Debris, or recycling debris. I think it sort of speaks to sort of the nature of a current conversation that surrounds the International Space Station, which is, as you know, set to retire in 2030 and at the moment, plans are just sort of the crash this down into the sea, into the ocean. And it strikes me like hearing hearing that, and you’re not the only one who said that you have all this decades worth of material up there already potentially being reused. I think, in tandem with that, though, I want to get drill down a little bit more on this obsolescence sensibility, because you have new technologies coming online, certainly quantum technologies coming online. Boeing has got these entanglement experiments that they’re going on. NASA is working on quantum sensing. You know, it just seems like the nature of both tele telecoms and and how satellites operate autonomously, with sort of a growing, sort of AI fuel directive in terms of space acid management is just, we’re kind of facing this, this inflection point now, in the sort of second iteration of new space, sort of 2.0 so to speak.

Luca Rossettini – Yeah. So, so, first of all, so you, you use the name new space, I like to call it, like the devolution of the space economy, right? So, because it’s basically one market we are using a lot from the traditional space, all the quality assurance process and procedures we use the same. I mean, if for 70 years space people work on that, and actually they were successful, we send the men on the moon, and where we have the Rosetta mission, that looks like science fiction, that’s a lot of a lot to learn from them, then we need to transfer into a more commercial mindset vehicles. And then we get to what you were saying, yes, a lot of new technologies. You know, part of our business, what, what we do to so we are, we are considered a sort of the dinosaurs of the the new space, of this evolution of the space economy, and so we have also responsibility. We want to have the ecosystem to grow. And it’s not just for benefit. It’s because if the ecosystem grows, then we grow with the ecosystem as well. So most of these new companies have amazing technologies that can completely change the way we will do business in the future in space. The issue that they are facing is that they they have to test this technology in orbit, and now it’s the biggest bottleneck. But we are, we are a transport like company. We are a logistic company. So why not installing this technology on our space vehicles and test it in orbit? So we tested 60, more than 60 different type of technologies, new computers. We tested laser con, we tested like AI, like systems and chips and radios, antennas, even a drug sets. We tested pretty much everything. And what we see that more and more these technologies are appearing with a very solid business model. You mentioned quantum we have, by the way, we are going to test a quantum payload as well. In the in the following months, we had a laser common board. We are going to do a special, I cannot get, give you the details, special experiments on on laser common orbit for a European constellation. So this is happening. It’s not science fiction. All those companies will have the chance to make a lot of money selling all this device to the 1000s of satellites that are going to populate space in the near future.

David Ariosto – I heard you once described new space as sort of like a teenager that’s fighting with his parents every day, and just sort of like the beginnings of this maturation process and sort of this, this second iteration of new space. Can you? Can you explain that a little bit more?

Luca Rossettini – Yeah, yeah. So it’s, as I said, we learn a lot from the past, but we are different, right? So it’s pretty much like a teenager. So a teenager, a certain point, said, Oh, I’m going to do exactly the opposite what my parents are telling you to do and, but when you grow up, you realize, well, you know, my dad was not so stupid, right? So it was right in a sense, so I agree that I have to behave in certain way, but also I’m right because I found a new way of doing things. So and, and basically the new space started like that. So at the beginning, I do remember the initial concept was, Oh, we don’t care about quality. We just send 100 satellites in orbit, and even if only 50 are going to work, then that’s it, right? Because they are so cheap that we don’t care. In reality, then the community, the ecosystem, understood that no one is giving you money for 100 satellite at once. They give you money for maybe 10 because they want to see if you’re really able to do that, if the technology is working and customers are buying the product. But if you send 10 satellites and only five works, then you don’t have a product to deliver to ground, so customers are not buying and then you are not able to get back to. The investors and say, Look, give me more money for the additional 90 Saturday. So I think the concept didn’t work very well. You need the minimum layer of good quality process, and that’s what you learn from the past, from from your parents. But then you are not using the same technology, and then you are not you are not using the same amount of paperwork that we were using like 20 years ago. You simplify, you look at the software, how the software is built. More and more satellites are becoming software, and then you create something new. Take into consideration the big, big heritage from the past.

David Ariosto – I think that’s such a fascinating point, that satellites becoming more like software, almost like satellites become a commodity. Become a commodity in themselves. Can you elaborate on that in terms like, how you see that that evolution taking place?

Luca Rossettini – Yeah, so more nowadays. I have to say my satellites are basically software with some hardware attached. I can reconfigure the mission in orbit anytime I can move my satellites where I want, and decide at the very last minute that even change if I ever like typically it happens when customers want to test a technology that it’s like at the first time, so they don’t really know what’s going to end it up with. So they change the mission profile like every time, every time. So we have to be capable of doing that. But this gives me the capabilities of having a modular satellite in which software is the most important part and the hardware it’s going to be get done. And more and more this is going to happen, because in the future, we will need even to like switch components and capabilities in terms of hardware maintaining the core of the satellites. So I see this as a normal evolution of how we manufacture the satellites. Of course, you need the hardware, you need the thrusters, you need the chips you need, you know, the metal parts. But consider when we are going to manufacture satellites in orbit, most of the parts that we put into a satellite today, we will likely not put them like together, because we don’t need that. We need to resist the launch, like the launch impact on the on the structure and the loads and so on. But once you are in orbit, why do you need that? In theory, you can just have some, let’s say, some subsystem floating around and communicating to each other, right? So then, of course, you don’t want to do that, but the concept is that modularity, it’s going to become key, thanks also to the fact that the launch cost, it’s going to go down even more down now with starship and so like using iron instead of aluminum. It’s going to be okay, even in space now, it’s kind, you know, if you talk about iron in the space industry, they look at you, oh, what are you saying? It’s, it’s a very stupid idea, but in the future, it’s just, it’s not important anymore, anymore, yeah.

David Ariosto – You know, I think also what de orbit? What’s so interesting about deorbit is this is an Italian based company, but it’s also got subsidiaries in the US and, you know, sort of, it’s got truly kind of a global reach in this sense. And in some ways, that’s part and parcel of the space industry itself. It’s sort of a more global in nature. But there are also, like, there are also some things happening in Europe right now that are just interesting with, with regard to space. And, you know, there’s this, you know, recent unveiling of the rearm Europe plan. There’s this, you know, 10 billion plus multi orbit broadband initiative. There’s just, there’s just a lot of new, either geopolitical impetus first, for some of this, or just a lot of new interest in commercial space in a way that we just haven’t seen in the past. So it almost strikes me that de orbits positioned in this in kind of a unique way. Because you say you’re a dinosaur in this, this space, you’ve been around 10 years or so, but it’s still new space here, and so this is still, you know, sort of the galvanizing moments of this next iteration of of how commercial companies operate in cosmos. And I’m just curious, where does the orbit fit into to all these changes?

Luca Rossettini – Yeah. So, so we operate, actually, along like three different domains. So the we started as a purely commercial company. For long time, 80 90% of our customers were purely commercial companies. So completely global. The commercial market is global market. We have customers in four continents, and that’s it, right? So you you can talk with like south of America, Australia, Europe, US, very easily. Then you go into the institutional market. That is very important now, because the so called new space is still young and weak, so it needs a lot of support from the institutional market. But the institutional market is regional, so it means that you have to be there in that region in order to have access to the institutional contracts. And then there is a third layer. That’s what you. I’m mentioning, more and more the defense will enter into the into the game. Unfortunately, we are living in a moment in which we never had such a big number of wars on the planet. This is creating a lot of tension and bigger budget for the defense the capacity of the typical defense industry, it’s not sufficient to fulfill the budget, but there is a domain that is space, that is basically virgin, right? So almost verging that’s where a lot of effort of the defense is going to be also, because the War of the future will be fighted in like through intelligence. So we are not going to destroy satellites. We are going to understand what’s going on, and that’s that’s positive. I mean, in a negative scenario, it’s a positive aspect, but that means a lot of money that is flowing into that sector. But the defense. So if institutions are regional, defense is national, so you have to learn, and you have to work with them to understand how to work together, and considering that on the long run, the commercial market will prevail anyway on the long run. But how can we work together today to fulfill our commitment to the customers today and creating the market of tomorrow? That’s what we need to do. And it’s not just the orbit. We need to work with our customers, with institutions, with the Defense Agency and all the other companies, and we have to be so there are no competitors. They are like partners, because otherwise there will be no space in the future.

David Ariosto – Luca Rossettini, the founder of D-Orbit, thank you so much for joining us.

Luca Rossettini – Thank you, my pleasure. Thank you.