Decentralized Space Infrastructure: Building the Future of Global Connectivity l KBW2024

[Music] all right good afternoon everybody it is my absolute distinguished pleasure to introduce you to this panel first of all my name is Scott Hasbrook the CTO of spacecoin the folks up here have made an enormous tremendous impact on this world of ours first on my furthest left Dr Michael nyak uh program manager and scientist at DARPA next him is TM o the founder and CEO of glua and the chairman of spacecoin let's give out each of them a warm Round of Applause as I announc them next to Tay is General Wesley Clark four-star general uh formerly uh commanded nato in the uh European union and closest to my left Colonel Sydney gueras former two-time uh space shuttle astronaut and now uh the chairman of a rocket company okay gentlemen thank you for joining us today everybody give him a warm Round of [Applause] Applause let's start with you West uh General Clark so you were a four-star general of the United States Army uh you had an amazing career uh you at the end of your career you uh you were the supreme commander of NATO in the European Union and now you spend your career uh advising high technology business startups so I think as it relates to this panel my introductory question to to you is how has your military experience LED you to Technologies like blockchain and uh democratizing the rest of the world and decentralizing infrastructure and we'd love to hear a few minutes your thoughts on that so I I've seen um conflict zones and I've seen a lot of underprivileged people who can't access modern Communications I saw it in Vietnam when I was there as an infantry company Commander I saw it in the Balkans I've seen it in Latin America I've seen it in Africa and gradually we've built the technology to bring these people in we built mobile telepan then we have satellites now we have the internet but what we haven't done is we haven't connected it effectively to enable people that are in The Boondocks totally unserved by mobile phones by cell towers or anything else to inexpensively access the internet to find market conditions to sell sell their products to find customers for their products or to find what products they should be growing there's about uh two billion people in this state running from Africa all the way through Asia and into Latin America and when you're dealing with a world that has a food crisis that has inflation that has energy problems if you can bring these people into the global system you can solve many of these problems so so that's why I'm in it and uh I'm in it with this great company glowa and a great rocket launch system in viia and we are going to bring these people into the modern economy all right folks you heard it straight from the general thank you thank you sir next Colonel gueras retired United States Air Force test pilot you were the first us-born Hispanic astronaut and you flew on the space shuttle not once but Twice first as pilot and then as commander and you also served on the committee for return to flight from Challenger alongside Richard Fineman and Neil Armstrong so you obviously have an enormous broad experience both Technical and pilotage of spacecraft how has that led you to do what you do today where you're leading a company dedicated to building reliable small launch vehicles in biospace for Technologies like what we're building at spacecoin thank you um yes I did have the chance to uh pilot Columbia and I was the commander of the Endeavor but uh my opinion is probably formed just as strongly by my experience in the accident investigation of the Challenger accident and also I served on the Aerospace safety advisory panel and we made a number of recommendations to NASA that unfortunately weren't considered but um just prior to the to the uh Columbia accident so uh my experience in all of those Endeavors convinced me that uh if we're going to move out into space and make space available to everybody on the planet including the underserved populations the current rocket technology liquid bipropellant engines and solid rocket Motors are not going to provide the levels of safety reliability and the cost performance that we need in order to expand that way so when I left NASA it was in my mind I had the idea that the the answer to this problem was a hybrid rocket engine so for those of you that aren't too familiar with rocket engines a hybrid is essentially a cylinder of solid fuel with a hole in the middle of it that's called a port and through that hole you pump using an injector and a valve your liquid uh oxidizer and then you ignite it so essentially that port or that hole that runs through the middle becomes the combustion chamber for the rocket engine so it's a very very simple rocket engine has about 1,000 fewer moving Parts than a hybrid rocket engine and um when I left uh NASA and Sandia National Labs eventually I became involved with a company that today is via and I've been working with other individuals to build that taking a combination of about six Innovative Technologies that we have patented or patent pending we've been able to make what we call a Vex hybrid rocket engine that performs as well as a liquid by propellant and at the same time costs much less and is more reliable and is safe so that's half the problem being able to get the satellites to orbit at the same time that we were working on this we we realized that miniaturization in electronics and the increase in reliability of electronics would eventually enable small satellites to take the place of what used to be the big satellites the catch is that in order for small satellites to work effectively and do their job for a company and for a user and for underserved populations they need to be in a particular constellation that means they need to be in various orbits and um they can't all be in the same orbit or they won't be able to perform their function they won't have the coverage necessary for either Earth Earth observation or communication or whatever function you're performing with them so in order to put them in the correct orbit you can't put all of them like if you're putting up a constellation of 60 you can't put 60 of them on one rocket and send it up there because they won't provide you the coverage they need to go into what we call a right-sized rocket so they might have to go up in six different Rockets instead of one rocket so instead of having a large rocket that carries 60 satellites you want a smaller one that maybe carries a dozen satellites at a time so we designed our rocket to to do that to be a smaller rocket in order to hit the right price point with that type of Rocket you need this Vortex hybrid technology so I believe the future is I think the future is a combination between our companies because we're going to be able to deliver a safe reliable rocket that'll put the customers payloads in this place in this case glua and space telecommunications Inc into the orbits they want on their schedule for a price that is enable going to enable them to hit the price point that the general was talking about so that underserved populations in the world can also have access to the benefits of space thank you for that sir appreciate that okay over to Dr nyak so you currently work at DARPA you have a PhD in planetary Sciences through the air force you served also as an United States Air Force test pilot so we have two test pilots on this stage your work at DARPA has focused on defense space and specifically lunar applications and Cy lunar applications as you think about your career at DARPA and prior of your technical experience both as a pilot and engineer and a scientist I'd like to hear a few minutes of how you think about the challenges and the opportunities and how those Balance in terms of decentralizing space infrastructure sure absolutely um so a big part of uh my work both at DARPA and previously in my career I think has been to be a futurist and a trend analyst and what that means is look at the state state of technology today see where it's going and then Envision a future that's different and then how do we create technology that drags that different future into the present so in other words let's how do we imagine a different future than the one that we have today and then create technology that drags that future into the present so when I think about decentralized infrastructure there's a huge opportunity space Scott that you've touched on uh that new space offers and it's exploding but today that's in one ones and twos right and that's that's what Colonel Gutierrez was also getting at ones and twos what we need to do is get to infrastructure and the way that I think about this is the way that cities Thrive today so I live in Washington DC but if I were to move here to Soul I if I wanted to start a business here I don't have to bring everything with me I can just make a phone call and have power plug in and get power I can you know access the internet pretty easily by just signing a quick contract how do I do that in space where today I have to bring everything with me I have to bring my own power my own data my own coms my own thermal that's not how we get to infrastructure so in terms of you know being a futurist seeing a different future where we have space infrastructure it's easily available and anybody can access it there's certain key Technologies and those are decentralized Technologies by Nature that can drag that uh imagined future into the present it's a fantastic analogy of uh moving somewhere on Earth as it relates to how different it is to say move to space or to move to the moon now over to you T um so you've focused on blockchain you're entire career as an entrepreneur you've founded glua and you're still CEO and now you've started this company with spacecoin you've been focused so much on Emerging Markets you've now uh done two million loans and over two million loans on credit coin which has done enormous work in solving Financial inclusion in uh Africa and recently we've now done so much work in forming critical Partnerships in the government there clearly you have a a a track record of not shying away from hard problems so how does that relate to your thinking and decision-making what an inspiration in deciding to tackle now space so I was unlucky to find a very interesting problem but that is hard to solve but some problems are worth solving despite of being very difficult to solve and the the mission of our company at glua is to create a borderless infrastructure um basically our vision is to connect people um from anywhere and any anything and since internet we we know that people when people get connected they can do amazing things together and since blockchain we learned that people can actually work with each other in a decentralized manner without acquiring trust to work together and that inspired me to uh jump into the blockchain as my career and first with credit coin I was trying to connect people in the developed Market with a lot of capital um to people in Emerging Market which has limited access to Capital but has a huge uh promise of growth and moving on from the first version of credit coin we recently started to work on the next version of the of the credit coin which is basically connecting blockchain to blockchain uh currently our blockchain ecosystem is olated per blockchain um one wallet in ethereum for example cannot uh transfer their funds to wallet in salana because they don't talk to each other um there are Technologies such as Bridges and oracal that go around with this kind of problems but it doesn't really solve the problem directly um the next version of credit coin we worked in um this technology called universal Smart contract um which allows you to not only read information from other blockchains but also write information to other blockchains um moving on on from this web three space and also going back to the the first version of credit coin when we were deploying capital in Africa in emerged Market one of the common problem that we were facing is many of the um underserved underbank people that we wanted to um deploy Capital 2 are also unconnected they have no access to Internet if you're not if you don't have access to Internet there's no way for us to interact with those people so that um I was fortunate to have Scott in my in my team which inspired me to learn about Aerospace and the Cub set and the new the commodation of the um this the industry which allowed our company to explore the possibility of deploying um Cube SAS to create a consolation and provide a decentralized um connectivity to people who were before for unconnected thank you for that I think actually hearing from all three of you sequentially in that way you can kind of really draw the trend line and put it together reliable small launch vehicles uh the challenges faced in emerging democracies and Emerging Markets uh the challenges fa with with um connectivity in these markets uh and then finally just the challenge of space as an environment itself this next question I'd like to open up to all four of you uh feel free to take it at what whatever order you'd like but uh the Internet it's one of the most profound human inventions uh I'd argue probably since the printing press the internet started mostly as a decentralized infrastructure I mean I remember back in the 90s it was dialup you had local internet service providers today it's become very highly centralized uh there's a lot of government control there's three billion people estimated that have censored versions of the internet along with a three billion disconnected how do you all here on the stage think about this in terms of uh what are the the potential economic impacts of red decentralizing the internet and going Beyond decentralization how it used to be and how does everything we just talked about reverse this trend of centralization of Global Communication infrastructure okay I'll go first go for it look uh we're in an environment globally today where there is increasing distrust of governments now whether that's right or wrong we could de that but it's simply a fact that one of the impacts of social media has been to spread information and people get good information they get bad information and there are some groups and countries who deliberately try to discredit governments and their actions so what blockchain does is it provides an anchor point of trust that's the essence of blockchain and so when you decentralize the internet from one country to another and remember we're talking about a constellation of satellites worldwide we're talking about two three billion people potentially who would have to go through their local government their local phone company or whatever to be able to find market conditions or do the get an education or do the other things now we're talking about they've got an anchor Anor point of trust that cuts across the uh distrust of governments communities corruption Etc that's the whole theory of blockchain now does that mean governments don't have a role of course not but what it means is that while governments are worried about permits for fiber optic cable and other things and licenses for spectrum you've got overhead this incredibly flexible platform that can connect to the remotest area of South Sudan and help the woman who's there growing casava for her family understand what the price is of casava in Juba and put more casava in the ground and sell it at a reasonable price make a profit on it and help alleviate Global hunger that's the simple simplest way to explain what this is I think Scott that that's a really rather profound use case Dr Nike yeah absolutely that's a great setup and so now taking blockchain into space uh which is which is what you're trying to do I think that's a great why does decentralization matter there my perspective on it uh comes from a national security point of view I've done R&D and National Security for most of my career but National Security most importantly is about preventing conflict and so if I think about centralized Comm nodes in space I think that any adversary would view that as an advantage right the re any conflict arises I and is started because there's the potential for Advantage so while there are centralized Comm nodes in space there's the potential for Advantage when there are decentralized com nodes as the general mentioned there's hundreds of thousands of satellites or you know even hundreds of satellites then there's very little advantage to starting any uh conflict in space and so from a national security perspective I think it benefits all of us it benefits the whole world if we get to a place where there's just no point in conflict and that's what I think decentralized space infrastructure can do that that's that's a that's a very profound comment and I and I hope that we're able to reduce conflict through through that uh the thing that I really think about are out in all those underserved areas the tremendous talent that is being wasted I I thought about the you know the Middle Ages when there were many talented individuals who couldn't make a contribution because they didn't have the backing of a king or the backing of the church or the backing of somebody with money so that they could actually do some re research and do a do make a contribution I'm hoping that by expanding the internet and connecting these people there are a lot of talented individuals there whose talents are being wasted for the world and also for their societies so I'm hoping we can bring them in and they can make the contributions that they really should be making that's what I'm excited about T any final thoughts um as a business person um my thoughts about giving more options in the market so the the case I think about when I think about space coin is uh when people have no option but sticking with one or two Telos in the market then people get taken advantage of for example um before the 3G was popular and the WhatsApp or like Messengers are popular U people are paying a very expensive fees to send SMS to each other um and that accumulated that it scared people from accessing the internet also because why because they had to pay too many dollars for reading simple news articles um by giving people more options uh providing decentralized version of Internet that can enable multiple internet service providers so that people have options and choose what kind of service they want to get thank you for that and thank you all for your time if you're interested in coming to build or invest in the future of global connectivity with us our booth is right outside I'll see you in the void all right thanks guys all right all right good Stu