Thanks for the big response to last week’s issue. A lot of you are really excited about space tech and the nuclear revival. Me too!
Let’s talk space today. Wait until you see the breakthroughs happening right now, and how they intersect with biotech. This stuff should be front-page news.
I'm reading Liftoff, a book about the early days of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. If you want to be inspired, pick up a copy.
Before Musk was a billionaire, he almost went broke. Several times. His closest brush with bankruptcy was due to SpaceX. He personally invested $100 million. Its first three rockets failed, exploding into million-dollar fireworks. Elon had to borrow money to pay rent.
Here’s Musk staring at a pile of twisted metal from a failed launch:
How am I gonna pay rent?
Today, “just” 22 years later, SpaceX is worth $210 billion. It’s the world’s most valuable private company. Last month, it achieved the first-ever private spacewalk. Here’s a SpaceX astronaut gazing down at Earth:
Does it get more inspirational than this?
Imagine a giant floating laboratory, bigger than a football field, zooming around Earth every 90 minutes. That's the International Space Station (ISS). It has flourished into a bustling factory for groundbreaking medical research that can’t be conducted on Earth.
Researchers aboard the ISS successfully 3D printed the first human knee meniscus (!) last year. Redwire (public: RDW), which owns the BioFabrication lab on the ISS, then sent the meniscus back to Earth aboard a SpaceX rocket.
Why do this in space? In a word, microgravity. Try to make a soft, squishy organ like a human liver on earth. It'll collapse under its own weight like a failed soufflé. No problem in space, where everything is near-weightless.
Right now, 250 miles above our heads, innovation specialists at Airbus are growing mini hearts, livers, and kidneys in space.
Need a new liver? In the not-too-distant future, we'll upload your unique cell samples, use them to print a perfect match in space, and then gently ship your new liver back to Earth.
Microgravity is a game changer for drug development too. Drug particles made on Earth often end up like mixed nuts, all different shapes and sizes. In microgravity, drug molecules can be formed like perfectly round marbles.
For cancer patients, this isn't just a fun fact. Better drugs are life-changing. They’re the difference between spending hours hooked up to an IV drip vs. swallowing a space-made pill at home.
Most major pharma companies already make drugs on the ISS. Last year, the floating lab hosted 500 projects. Merck tested Keytruda in space, a cancer immunotherapy that’s now one of the world’s best-selling drugs.
Progress is happening here fast. Startup Varda (private) recently launched the world's first space-based drug factory. Varda’s capsule hitched a ride on a SpaceX rocket, made some pills in orbit, and then parachuted back to Earth.
Notice every story above involves SpaceX. SpaceX has made the new space economy possible by reducing the cost of rocket launches by 98%.
Imagine if every time you flew, the airline had to build a new plane? Flying from London to NYC would cost $1 million. That's how reaching space used to work.
SpaceX changed the game by pioneering reusable rockets that land themselves after launch, ready for the next trip. In 2000, launching something into space cost as much as $73,000/kg. SpaceX slashed this by 98% to $1,200/kg. Musk is targeting $10/kg!
Don’t underestimate the impact of reducing costs. It’s often how new industries are born. Varda, for example, was never a viable business because it would’ve cost $20 million+ to send its 660lb mini drug factory into orbit 20 years ago. SpaceX delivered it into space for less than $2 million.
Imagine all the Vardas that will be built because we can now get to space for cheap. The iPhone gave us Uber, Netflix, and Facebook. What trillion-dollar ideas will cheap space travel spawn?
SpaceX is essentially running a cosmic taxi. It has launched 11 rockets in the past month alone. Booking a trip to orbit is almost as easy as preordering an Uber.
Seriously. Try it. Visit SpaceX's website, type in the weight of your “parcel” and when you want to send it. You’ll get an instant quote. I see the future.
Thanks to SpaceX, more objects reached space in the past two years than in all of previous history. SpaceX accounts for 95%+ of these launches.
Source: Our World in Data
Where’s this all going? Here’s a prediction: Your iPhone 25 will be made on the moon. Don’t laugh.
The “switches” on the chip inside your iPhone are so tiny that 20,000 of them fit on the width of a human hair. They can only be manufactured in an extremely clean environment. A single speck of dust ruins them. Today, we deal with this by building $20 billion factories with state-of-the-art air filtration systems.
Mother Nature provides “clean rooms” for free in space. It's a near-perfect vacuum, no air, no dust. And it's cold, with temperatures dipping as low as -65 degrees. That's great for chips, which generate enough heat to fry an egg when they're working hard.
The moon could become the Silicon Valley of space. Imagine chipmakers setting up shop next to where Neil Armstrong planted the American flag.
One day, we'll look back and laugh that humans had to make everything on Earth.
“We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” That was JFK in 1962. America put a man on the moon seven years later.
Optimism is contagious. It spreads from person to person, lighting up imaginations and firing up ambitions like a chain reaction.
The next time you look up at the night sky, remember you're not just stargazing. You're looking at the factories and workshops of the future. The cure for cancer might take shape up there.
An accidental miracle drug
First, we discovered semaglutide treats diabetes.
Then we found the drug, best known as Ozempic, melts fat off waistlines.
In a slew of recent trials, doctors are now discovering this “miracle in a syringe” also:
Treats Alzheimer's
Reduces heart attacks and strokes
Suppresses addiction
Lowers the risk of developing kidney, pancreatic, ovarian, liver, and colorectal cancers.
Why? Scientists don’t know for sure but suspect it has to do with lowering inflammation. Novo Nordisk (public: NVO), its Danish inventor, will sell $20 billion worth of the drug this year. It’s been so extraordinarily successful, it’s saved Denmark from sliding into recession.
Lonsdale: “It's very easy to break the innovation economy.”
American Optimist Joe Lonsdale appeared on CNBC last week pushing back against overzealous bureaucrats. Watch the clip here.
Lonsdale said Eliot Spitzer, former attorney general of New York, nearly crushed PayPal.
“When I was at PayPal… there were multiple times when Spitzer here in New York almost took it out. He came very close to taking it out. If he had succeeded, we wouldn’t have Tesla… LinkedIn… SpaceX.”
Elon Musk funded SpaceX with $100 million of his own cash, which came from selling his founding stake in PayPal.
Let’s call out bureaucrats who try to smother the next wave of world-changing companies in their crib.
Three Mile Island will restart!
You’ve surely heard the news by now.
Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant is the scene of the worst nuclear accident in US history. The partial meltdown did no actual harm to people. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission found “No injuries, deaths or direct health effects were caused by the accident.”
But Three Mile Island did endless harm to humanity because it froze all nuclear innovation for 50 years. Regulators made it virtually impossible to build new nuclear plants after 1979. We’ve closed more nuclear reactors than we’ve opened this century.
Last week, TMI’s owner Constellation Energy announced one of the reactors will be pumping out clean, safe, reliable nuclear energy again by 2028. Constellation will sell 100% of the electricity to Microsoft to power its data centers.
Meanwhile, California just decided to keep its Diablo Canyon plant open. Michigan is restarting several reactors. And I just got back from Abu Dhabi where they opened the world’s newest nuclear reactor.
The artificial intelligence (AI)-powered nuclear renaissance has arrived! More on this next week.
Clairvoyance is cool
Buried in his masterpiece book The Rational Optimist, my friend Matt Ridley made something of a prediction:
“Can you doubt that if NASA had not existed some rich man would by now have spent his fortune on a man-made moon program…”
Bullseye. The idea of private space travel was unfathomable when Matt wrote that in 2010. Today, Musk’s SpaceX is almost singlehandedly opening up a whole new space economy.
One of many things I love about the rational optimist mindset is how accurately it sees the world. This comes from a place of curiosity and humbleness. We know we can’t know the future, so we’re open to possibilities.
Doomer predictions = usually wrong, never in doubt.
Rational Optimists = always in doubt, often right.
Onward and upward!
PS: Hey, you don’t need to wait until the end of the week for great news. Follow us on X for regular updates.
Writer: Stephen McBride: https://x.com/DisruptionHedge
Editor: Dan Steinhart: https://x.com/dan_steinhart
Rational Optimist Society: https://x.com/RationalOptSoc
PPS: Here’s some mail I got after last week’s issue. Keep ′em coming! I read every response.
Thank you for your infectious optimism. My father-in-law had that same optimism along with a wicked Irish sense of humour. He grew up in Cabra, which was a poor working class suburb of Dublin in the 1940s (not sure if it has “gentrified” now). Poverty and a marginal education never held him back and his early circumstances never made him bitter.
He was an inspiration to this fairly privileged Aussie, and reading between the lines, I think you may be cast from the same mold.
I am very much looking forward to my weekly dose of optimism from you and the Society!
–Dennis
Thanks for sending these out, they're fascinating. I'd love to hear about 2 and 3 —nuclear power and space economics. They both sound brilliant.
–Daniel
Thanks for the positive messages backed up by the data. Please write about the space economy next week. There’s plenty of time to come back to the environmental debate. To gain cruising altitude, my bet is the Rational Optimist Society does not need to get dragged into mudslinging environmental debates with pessimistic zealots. Keep up the good work.
–Simon
Please do some writing about graphene and the work of a professor named Tour who has a bunch of start up in Israel. George Gilder has written on the subject.
–Dan
How capitalism and innovation are great for the environment. (I would love to read a topic like this every week, i.e. “How capitalism and innovation are great for ........”)
–B
Don’t swear at the night, light a match. Nuclear power!
–Fernand
Please write about the REALISTIC near term potential breakthroughs in bio-tech. Thanks
–Dan
How about one of America’s biggest problems—Health Care. I’m not sure of the actual statistics but our healthcare is far more expensive and not as good. Maybe starting with tort reform. Then the outrageous cost of prescription drugs especially when they are often developed with government grants. I loved this first piece.
–Doug