00:00:09
Speaker 1: I am currently broadcasting from Santa Barbara, California, outside of the Vandenberg US Space Force Base, where I have just seen something completely remarkable and groundbreaking for the entire space industry. I got to see the first ever regular private company, this company called City Labs, the first time a private company has ever put a nuclear powered anything really into space. Hello Future, It's me Kevin. This is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier. The planet is Eart, the year is twenty twenty six. My name is Kevin SURREALI remember you can listen to all of the latest Hello Future episodes however you get your podcast. My guest today is the CEO of the company who actually did this. His name is Peter Kabui. He's the CEO of City Labs, and Peter, I can't thank you enough for joining us. It's just a couple of hourgoes. You haven't slept at all, really, but you were there at Vandenberg with this massive historic event for the commercial space nuclear industry. How are you feeling right now?
00:01:13
Speaker 2: Tired and relieved, excited. It's a mixture of all the feelings you can possibly have, but yeah, it was an exciting moment to watch us being able to put this tiny little nuclear cupesat into space. When we watched the Falcon nine go into the clouds and then a little while later they're saying that it's being deployed, and then we started getting some telemetry and it was exciting just to watch.
00:01:38
Speaker 1: And so this was actually my first ever launch that I've ever seen, and so to be able to see like a Falcon nine rocket from SpaceX shoot this thing into the orbit, I mean, and there were like eighty one satellites on board. It was so remarkable to see all of that happen. But talk to a lot of my listeners, they love space, they're passionate about space, but they don't necessarily know what it means. I know that this was really groundbreaking, but why was it so important for the nuclear industry? Why was this the first thing? Like what history was made?
00:02:08
Speaker 2: The United States government, through NASA has launched and Department Manager, they've launched nuclear satellites, go back fifty years to the Voyager missions. You know, they've been doing this for a long time, even as recently as Mars twenty twenty, with a perseverance were over that's been done. But for it to be done by a commercial company that was groundbreaking that was set up through the Presidential Memorandum NSPM twenty where they set it up so that commercial companies would have a pathway to be able to do this. But like anything that's set up, it takes time to navigate for commercial companies to catch up, to understand, to work with the FA to work out all the bugs, and actually see the process to get it done. And say that I've started working the process a few years ago and they had culminated with last night with the launching of this bore satellite.
00:02:57
Speaker 1: What's interesting to me is just seeing your team and watching it with your team last night, you're really struck by just how many people work on these missions and how many jobs are created. I call them space collar jobs, but how many jobs are supported, how many jobs are created from the person in the industry like yourself and others who were there who have been in it for decades, who've been working on this, to the new hire who this is their first job out of college and they're watching a rocket take off into into space. And then you've got the next generation of folks who who are studying and are there, and you've got people your CTO drove across the country with the with the little batteries in his car because he was like, I don't know if I want to put them on the plane. I mean, it really does take a whole team. That's got to mean something to you, as the CEO to as you're watching that rocket, just to see that go up.
00:03:50
Speaker 2: Small teams can do a lot of great things. And stay Dabs is a small team and we've been able to do this. But if you're ready to look at let's say the economy or the greater structure, it's a people in the FAA. I'm I was talking to a garment customer yesterday where we found out who authored the NSBN twenty. That was exciting to hear that there's someone who was thinking about this back in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, drafting these documents to be able to make the catalyst for companies to be able to do this, to do the nuclear launches on their own, and it was it's exciting that it's it's not just a small team here, but many small teams across the United States that are putting together all right.
00:04:28
Speaker 1: So from my perspective, I had to do a lot of crash course learning about why space nuclear is so incredibly important, and it makes a lot of sense because when you look at the Moon, for example, and the lunar economy that is just being built, there's a lot of darkness on the Moon, and because of the darkness on the Moon, you can't have solar energy and you can't have solar power, and so nuclear power is able to last a lot longer. It's able to allow us to have energy in different parts of the Moon to establish the technology and the systems that we're going to need on the Moon to create the base. So it's really interesting though that these batteries are an entritium and give us a chemistry lesson, if you will, dusting off my old high school chemistry lessons. But it's really this is how we're gonna build the Moon economy. I mean, this battery this and folks, if you're not familiar with it, it's literally like a piece of gum that it's the size of a piece of gum that's put on to this payload and it goes up into a satellite and that's the battery. I mean, this isn't like a nuclear warhead going into space. It's literally the size of a piece of gum. So why is it so important for the lunar economy that this be continuing to push forward.
00:05:45
Speaker 2: Well, the lunar night is fourteen earth days and you're right, it's dark the whole time. But it's not just dark, it's really really cold. It's like minus two hundred c. That's colder than liquid nitrogen. Have you ever seen the liquor nitgen When they did a little experiments, they put a banana or flower and you hit it with the hammer, shatters until million pieces. Well, imagine having a rover in there and it's going to break apart pretty quickly unless it's heated. So with tritium or radio hydrogen that we work with, and you're asking about chemistry lesson, hydrogen is the first one to show up on the periodic table, and tritium is a radio is tepe, which is the first radio isotope to show up in the periodic table. And we're working with this basic element isotope and it's been used commercially in exit signs, watch styles of the watchtyle I'm wearing right now as tritium on it. It's great to work with tridium because you can stop the radiation with just a sheet of paper, so it's relatively benign. It's still nuclear. You have to do all the regulatory work make sure it's safe, but it's something that has a precedent to be able to that we've used here on Earth and we've been around it without even noticing. You may have gone to a movie theater, see a faint low on the sign the exosign that's tritium. And to be able to launch it now it's taking this relatively safe RADIOI stop doing all analysis, working with the Sandia National Laboratory to do all the simulations and the fa to be able to get this up there safely and help with heating components on the lunar surface. So what we launched yesterday was tridium BATA will take powerers to be able to have enough electrical power to power systems and power sensors one day on the Moon. But we can also use the tritium metal hydride source that we make to make heaters, and that's where it really makes a difference. Right now, they're launching us I think Blue Ghosts two from Firefly. It's going to land on the Moon and it has like sixty kilograms of batteries. Most of those batteries are going to most of that mass weight is going towards heating that lander too, so that it can survive the lunar night. That could have been done with, like I don't know, some grams of tritium to just heat it up, and all that extra mass could be used for electrical components and to be able to do science observations and experiments. That's wasted space at a million dollars of kilogram to be able to land on the Moon. It's best to just be using tridium.
00:08:14
Speaker 1: And especially I think what I just learned, especially just from watching this, from really seeing the technology, from talking to you, from talking to your team, is that when folks here commercial space nuclear, they should really think of two core functions. Power and heat. Right, those are the two main core functions. The power from a battery capacity in order to power the rovers, power the moon base itself, power the systems on the satellites and whatnot. It's the battery power for the lunar economies and arguably even more than that, the space economy. And then the second component is heat. Because I don't think people realize that just because there's no atmosphere on the Moon. People are just starting to realize the Moon is a destination. It's a piece of geography. You know, my friend doctor Kirby Runy, and he says it's a planet. I go, all right, Kirby, I don't know if I want to go down to that. I don't want to get political. That's my old life. But it's cold up there because there isn't an atmosphere. So these these equipments when they're in the dark. To your point, it's freezing cold on the Moon. And so to be able to have some type of heat that can be up there and generate heat, it has to be nuclear. It's actually quite simple.
00:09:28
Speaker 2: So nuclear power is what we're working on, and for State labs are strategies to work with what's really normal for tradium to do what's natural to provide heat. It's very, very natural, and we'll be able to get you know, thirty watts per kilogram of heat continuously for decades. And that's that's where we're going first. As far as for the tredium beta will take power, we'll be able to by micae watts millow wats of power for disparate sensors across the lunar surface for position navigation, timing, to help lunar landers land. We can have thousands or hundreds of thous of these devices on the lunar surface operating autonomously. If you have a sensor right now in the morning, you just say, okay, we would just want to put a temperature sensor. Well, you can't do it with solar and you can't do it with just batteries. You need to be able to heat that thing. So to have a small sensor, you're gonna need something that's a little different. You're gonna need nuclear micropower, and tredium can also provide the heat that's necessary to survive the lunar night.
00:10:23
Speaker 1: It's fascinating because I think there's really reductive debates happening about and candidly they just I don't think that there's a sophistication in the in the conversation about the topic, because it's so crucial to be able to do this, because folks, I mean, this isn't like again, I just want to reiterate, it's not like you're launching a giant nuclear weapon into space. That's not what we're talking about here. This is the size of a piece of bubblegrum, candidly the size of a quarter. Think of the alternative. Do you know how much oil it would take or energy or gas it would take to shove that up into outer space? It just doesn't logically make sense. And so what happened in Vandenberg that I got to see firsthand was really the future of the space industry, really the future of how we're going to build the system on the Moon eventually to Mars, eventually beyond. And it's fascinating because now we can do it with safe, secure power and heat, and that has been one of the biggest hurdles. I love this and I want to I know you got to run, and I appreciate your time. But I love when I think of the Apollo missions and I think of and I believe we're with Artemis. We're there again. I mean, and I wasn't alive for the Apollo missions, but I hear about it from my parents and from folks who were, and how it really mobilized America and our better sense of purpose, sense of self, of innovation, of imagination. I didn't realize that the Apollo astronauts were actually using some nuclear technology, I mean nuclear has been here during the most iconic moments of US space exploration.
00:11:56
Speaker 2: They were using tridium lights. So just like my watch style here that has tradium, it glows at night or it just glows continuously. They had tradium lights for their ava suits. They had tradium on the hollow capsules. That was part of their main technology that they were using. The difference now is that we need to scale that up and be able to scale up for power, for heat, and the way to do it is to make a commercial to be able to give companies the autonomy within regulatory requirements so they can do safely but be able to innovate within that regulatory framework the NSPM twenty provides, and that allows to scale up because up to now, when the government launches nuclear they do that once every five years or every decade. This lunar economy is going to need a lot more and it's going to need safe, determined scale up and that's what small companies and other companies can provide.
00:12:51
Speaker 1: Peter Kabui, CEO of City Labs, again on the historic first commercial space nuclear launch and to be able to see that broadcasting line from Santa Barbara California outside of Bandenburg US Space for Space. Thank you so much, Peter, and again congratulations to you and the team.
Speaker 1: I am currently broadcasting from Santa Barbara, California, outside of the Vandenberg US Space Force Base, where I have just seen something completely remarkable and groundbreaking for the entire space industry. I got to see the first ever regular private company, this company called City Labs, the first time a private company has ever put a nuclear powered anything really into space. Hello Future, It's me Kevin. This is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier. The planet is Eart, the year is twenty twenty six. My name is Kevin SURREALI remember you can listen to all of the latest Hello Future episodes however you get your podcast. My guest today is the CEO of the company who actually did this. His name is Peter Kabui. He's the CEO of City Labs, and Peter, I can't thank you enough for joining us. It's just a couple of hourgoes. You haven't slept at all, really, but you were there at Vandenberg with this massive historic event for the commercial space nuclear industry. How are you feeling right now?
00:01:13
Speaker 2: Tired and relieved, excited. It's a mixture of all the feelings you can possibly have, but yeah, it was an exciting moment to watch us being able to put this tiny little nuclear cupesat into space. When we watched the Falcon nine go into the clouds and then a little while later they're saying that it's being deployed, and then we started getting some telemetry and it was exciting just to watch.
00:01:38
Speaker 1: And so this was actually my first ever launch that I've ever seen, and so to be able to see like a Falcon nine rocket from SpaceX shoot this thing into the orbit, I mean, and there were like eighty one satellites on board. It was so remarkable to see all of that happen. But talk to a lot of my listeners, they love space, they're passionate about space, but they don't necessarily know what it means. I know that this was really groundbreaking, but why was it so important for the nuclear industry? Why was this the first thing? Like what history was made?
00:02:08
Speaker 2: The United States government, through NASA has launched and Department Manager, they've launched nuclear satellites, go back fifty years to the Voyager missions. You know, they've been doing this for a long time, even as recently as Mars twenty twenty, with a perseverance were over that's been done. But for it to be done by a commercial company that was groundbreaking that was set up through the Presidential Memorandum NSPM twenty where they set it up so that commercial companies would have a pathway to be able to do this. But like anything that's set up, it takes time to navigate for commercial companies to catch up, to understand, to work with the FA to work out all the bugs, and actually see the process to get it done. And say that I've started working the process a few years ago and they had culminated with last night with the launching of this bore satellite.
00:02:57
Speaker 1: What's interesting to me is just seeing your team and watching it with your team last night, you're really struck by just how many people work on these missions and how many jobs are created. I call them space collar jobs, but how many jobs are supported, how many jobs are created from the person in the industry like yourself and others who were there who have been in it for decades, who've been working on this, to the new hire who this is their first job out of college and they're watching a rocket take off into into space. And then you've got the next generation of folks who who are studying and are there, and you've got people your CTO drove across the country with the with the little batteries in his car because he was like, I don't know if I want to put them on the plane. I mean, it really does take a whole team. That's got to mean something to you, as the CEO to as you're watching that rocket, just to see that go up.
00:03:50
Speaker 2: Small teams can do a lot of great things. And stay Dabs is a small team and we've been able to do this. But if you're ready to look at let's say the economy or the greater structure, it's a people in the FAA. I'm I was talking to a garment customer yesterday where we found out who authored the NSBN twenty. That was exciting to hear that there's someone who was thinking about this back in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, drafting these documents to be able to make the catalyst for companies to be able to do this, to do the nuclear launches on their own, and it was it's exciting that it's it's not just a small team here, but many small teams across the United States that are putting together all right.
00:04:28
Speaker 1: So from my perspective, I had to do a lot of crash course learning about why space nuclear is so incredibly important, and it makes a lot of sense because when you look at the Moon, for example, and the lunar economy that is just being built, there's a lot of darkness on the Moon, and because of the darkness on the Moon, you can't have solar energy and you can't have solar power, and so nuclear power is able to last a lot longer. It's able to allow us to have energy in different parts of the Moon to establish the technology and the systems that we're going to need on the Moon to create the base. So it's really interesting though that these batteries are an entritium and give us a chemistry lesson, if you will, dusting off my old high school chemistry lessons. But it's really this is how we're gonna build the Moon economy. I mean, this battery this and folks, if you're not familiar with it, it's literally like a piece of gum that it's the size of a piece of gum that's put on to this payload and it goes up into a satellite and that's the battery. I mean, this isn't like a nuclear warhead going into space. It's literally the size of a piece of gum. So why is it so important for the lunar economy that this be continuing to push forward.
00:05:45
Speaker 2: Well, the lunar night is fourteen earth days and you're right, it's dark the whole time. But it's not just dark, it's really really cold. It's like minus two hundred c. That's colder than liquid nitrogen. Have you ever seen the liquor nitgen When they did a little experiments, they put a banana or flower and you hit it with the hammer, shatters until million pieces. Well, imagine having a rover in there and it's going to break apart pretty quickly unless it's heated. So with tritium or radio hydrogen that we work with, and you're asking about chemistry lesson, hydrogen is the first one to show up on the periodic table, and tritium is a radio is tepe, which is the first radio isotope to show up in the periodic table. And we're working with this basic element isotope and it's been used commercially in exit signs, watch styles of the watchtyle I'm wearing right now as tritium on it. It's great to work with tridium because you can stop the radiation with just a sheet of paper, so it's relatively benign. It's still nuclear. You have to do all the regulatory work make sure it's safe, but it's something that has a precedent to be able to that we've used here on Earth and we've been around it without even noticing. You may have gone to a movie theater, see a faint low on the sign the exosign that's tritium. And to be able to launch it now it's taking this relatively safe RADIOI stop doing all analysis, working with the Sandia National Laboratory to do all the simulations and the fa to be able to get this up there safely and help with heating components on the lunar surface. So what we launched yesterday was tridium BATA will take powerers to be able to have enough electrical power to power systems and power sensors one day on the Moon. But we can also use the tritium metal hydride source that we make to make heaters, and that's where it really makes a difference. Right now, they're launching us I think Blue Ghosts two from Firefly. It's going to land on the Moon and it has like sixty kilograms of batteries. Most of those batteries are going to most of that mass weight is going towards heating that lander too, so that it can survive the lunar night. That could have been done with, like I don't know, some grams of tritium to just heat it up, and all that extra mass could be used for electrical components and to be able to do science observations and experiments. That's wasted space at a million dollars of kilogram to be able to land on the Moon. It's best to just be using tridium.
00:08:14
Speaker 1: And especially I think what I just learned, especially just from watching this, from really seeing the technology, from talking to you, from talking to your team, is that when folks here commercial space nuclear, they should really think of two core functions. Power and heat. Right, those are the two main core functions. The power from a battery capacity in order to power the rovers, power the moon base itself, power the systems on the satellites and whatnot. It's the battery power for the lunar economies and arguably even more than that, the space economy. And then the second component is heat. Because I don't think people realize that just because there's no atmosphere on the Moon. People are just starting to realize the Moon is a destination. It's a piece of geography. You know, my friend doctor Kirby Runy, and he says it's a planet. I go, all right, Kirby, I don't know if I want to go down to that. I don't want to get political. That's my old life. But it's cold up there because there isn't an atmosphere. So these these equipments when they're in the dark. To your point, it's freezing cold on the Moon. And so to be able to have some type of heat that can be up there and generate heat, it has to be nuclear. It's actually quite simple.
00:09:28
Speaker 2: So nuclear power is what we're working on, and for State labs are strategies to work with what's really normal for tradium to do what's natural to provide heat. It's very, very natural, and we'll be able to get you know, thirty watts per kilogram of heat continuously for decades. And that's that's where we're going first. As far as for the tredium beta will take power, we'll be able to by micae watts millow wats of power for disparate sensors across the lunar surface for position navigation, timing, to help lunar landers land. We can have thousands or hundreds of thous of these devices on the lunar surface operating autonomously. If you have a sensor right now in the morning, you just say, okay, we would just want to put a temperature sensor. Well, you can't do it with solar and you can't do it with just batteries. You need to be able to heat that thing. So to have a small sensor, you're gonna need something that's a little different. You're gonna need nuclear micropower, and tredium can also provide the heat that's necessary to survive the lunar night.
00:10:23
Speaker 1: It's fascinating because I think there's really reductive debates happening about and candidly they just I don't think that there's a sophistication in the in the conversation about the topic, because it's so crucial to be able to do this, because folks, I mean, this isn't like again, I just want to reiterate, it's not like you're launching a giant nuclear weapon into space. That's not what we're talking about here. This is the size of a piece of bubblegrum, candidly the size of a quarter. Think of the alternative. Do you know how much oil it would take or energy or gas it would take to shove that up into outer space? It just doesn't logically make sense. And so what happened in Vandenberg that I got to see firsthand was really the future of the space industry, really the future of how we're going to build the system on the Moon eventually to Mars, eventually beyond. And it's fascinating because now we can do it with safe, secure power and heat, and that has been one of the biggest hurdles. I love this and I want to I know you got to run, and I appreciate your time. But I love when I think of the Apollo missions and I think of and I believe we're with Artemis. We're there again. I mean, and I wasn't alive for the Apollo missions, but I hear about it from my parents and from folks who were, and how it really mobilized America and our better sense of purpose, sense of self, of innovation, of imagination. I didn't realize that the Apollo astronauts were actually using some nuclear technology, I mean nuclear has been here during the most iconic moments of US space exploration.
00:11:56
Speaker 2: They were using tridium lights. So just like my watch style here that has tradium, it glows at night or it just glows continuously. They had tradium lights for their ava suits. They had tradium on the hollow capsules. That was part of their main technology that they were using. The difference now is that we need to scale that up and be able to scale up for power, for heat, and the way to do it is to make a commercial to be able to give companies the autonomy within regulatory requirements so they can do safely but be able to innovate within that regulatory framework the NSPM twenty provides, and that allows to scale up because up to now, when the government launches nuclear they do that once every five years or every decade. This lunar economy is going to need a lot more and it's going to need safe, determined scale up and that's what small companies and other companies can provide.
00:12:51
Speaker 1: Peter Kabui, CEO of City Labs, again on the historic first commercial space nuclear launch and to be able to see that broadcasting line from Santa Barbara California outside of Bandenburg US Space for Space. Thank you so much, Peter, and again congratulations to you and the team.
