00:00:08
Speaker 1: Nowadays, everybody's talking about blackouts and the grid and energy and data centers. We don't have enough electricity. The cost is going way up, up up up up, and I'm just thinking to myself, why not put it in space? Hello Future, It's me keV. This is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier the Planet Deserves. The year is twenty twenty six. My name is Kevin Surreally, remember you can listen to all of the latest Hello Future episodes however you get your podcasts and on the iHeartMedia app. And I'm so excited to get to talk to Alex Gilbert again because he really is one of the experts and explaining things when it comes to outer space, but also on regulations. I mean, he was just presenting at the United Nations on commercial space nuclearization. Alex is someone I really trust when it comes to help guiding and understanding these big transformations that we're all watching. We're all inspired as Americans to see Americans going back to the moon and building the cislunar economy and building out infrastructure and permanence between here and the moon and on the Moon and ultimately beyond. He was the first person I just talked with him last week and I said to him, you know, Mars is feeling a little too close. Where are we going next? And he goes, Titan, Saturn's moon Titan. And I said to myself, are we going to land humans on Titan in my lifetime? And he goes, yeah, we are. By the way, if anyone's listening, send me to Titan. I'll go, Alex, welcome back to the program. I want to do a documentary on Titan. I want to manifest that because I think Titan is fascinating. Would you help me if I did that? Oh?
00:01:42
Speaker 2: Absolutely? And great to be back having to always give a chat.
00:01:45
Speaker 1: All right, So you want to put electric power centers in space? Right? Why should I want to do that? And how would that work?
00:01:53
Speaker 2: Yeah? So this sounds like a crazy idea, but this is a crazy idea that it's time has now come. Look the United States, we're actually in one of the better energy situations. Love. Other countries are struggling, and renewables have been awesome in the country. But renewables have limits. And I hate saying the phrase, but solar power doesn't produce power when the sun doesn't shine on Earth. One, we're looking at what's happened with SpaceX and all these other technologies that have made that cost of getting to space cheaper. We can now take a solar power plant, we can put it in space where it is never in shade, and it can produce energy, and we can beam that energy back to or using microwaves or lasers.
00:02:32
Speaker 1: Okay, so that sounds awesome, But I have a million questions now, and I want to start with one. How big is a space power center? It's conjuring up images of Star Trek and star Wars, but what does it actually look like? And be very specific?
00:02:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, So the small ones we're looking at right now for beaving power in space, they're going to be like the size of a large satellite. But if we're really talking about the holy grail here, the big energy opportunity, we are talking about massive solar fields and space that's spread across kilometers and kilometers just massively.
00:03:05
Speaker 1: I have American what do you mean by that? A how big a football field? A stadium?
00:03:09
Speaker 2: Like a stadium. We can put stadiums into space that would produce one to two gigawatts of electricity.
00:03:16
Speaker 1: Okay, so one to two gigawatts of electricity powers? What a city a town.
00:03:20
Speaker 2: What would that power that would power a medium sized city?
00:03:23
Speaker 1: And because it's so Washington, d Yes, what are we calling these space power centers?
00:03:29
Speaker 2: Space based solar power?
00:03:31
Speaker 1: Space based solar power?
00:03:34
Speaker 2: So can well that it's still in its early phrase because it's a bad name. It was a horrible name scientists and innovators. But we're seeing right now there's actually companies that have just started raising venture backed money to develop this in the United States and Europe. There's five or six major companies that are doing this right now that are hoping to have this power online.
00:03:53
Speaker 1: It's a space power grid.
00:03:55
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, that's a better name, space power yep.
00:03:58
Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay, So we've now established you can build one of these, you put them in space. How are we building something in the size of a stadium in space? Or is it like legos where you're sending up pieces and connecting the pieces? I mean, how from an engineering standpoint, how are we doing.
00:04:15
Speaker 2: That exactly that we call it in space assembly and potentially manufacturing. And so the initial idea is that we'll send up a couple of these things, we'll make them together in space. But if we're really looking at these very large things, these things that would be able to remind power to cities on Earth. Those are going to be massive, massive facilities that we will probably need astronauts up there as maintenance workers just helping build out those facilities. We'll probably have many deliveries. And I know you and I were talking previously about water on the Moon. Well there's resources on the Moon and on asteroids that we could actually use to create the solar panels, to create the structures that hold it together. We can actually put build these things potentially using space resources in space with no environmental impact on Earth, just meaning as power.
00:05:00
Speaker 1: How many years away are we from that.
00:05:03
Speaker 2: So we actually have just had the first very very very tiny little bit of power beamed to Caltech about a two years ago, and then we now have companies that are doing their first demonstration missions. And right now we're focusing just on putting a solar power plant in space that's pretty big and beaming it in space because that's easiest to demonstrate. But scaling this up is something that, especially if the economics can close on getting super heavy launch vehicles like Starship to really work by twenty forty, we can start having the first of these big utility scale systems and by twenty fifty this could actually be a substantial part of power for many countries around the world.
00:05:38
Speaker 1: Okay, so if we do that, how many would we need?
00:05:41
Speaker 2: It just depends on how it works with the rest of the energy grid. You know, I'm a big nuclear person and relacing a nuclear renaissance in the US right now. When we're looking at terrestrial power, the best solution is a diversity of solutions. It's I hate to say all of the above, but it really is all of the above, because you get resilience by having multiple types of systems. And so if we look at this opportunity for space based solar power, the biggest and most important one might be for remote areas, our island communities that otherwise don't have good access to power. They could have one hundred percent of their power potentially served by this very very soon, within a decade or two.
00:06:16
Speaker 1: So is it orbiting the Earth that something the size of Lincoln Financial Field would not be in lower Earth orbit? Would it or would it be?
00:06:25
Speaker 2: This is the very historical idea was originally about fifty years ago behind this, and the idea was what we call it geosynchronous Earth orbit. Just meaning it follows the same spot on Earth, and so it's far enough away that it orbits at the same rotation of Earth. So if you're looking in the sky, it's not moving, it's staying over that same spot on Earth. It's a really special orbit. But when we're actually looking at modern systems of modern technology, almost any of the Earth orbits might be applicable. We might be able to use them.
00:06:55
Speaker 1: Would I be able to see these with my eye?
00:06:58
Speaker 2: So that is I think, I think the big environmental question here, and I think that if you look at the some of the new ideas coming out, that is definitely possible. And what we have seen is generally a lot more concerns about seeing satellites and large satellites from Earth orbits, and so that is something that I think we could potentially see these, and we could see potentially small rings in space around Earth. There's gonna be a lot of questions about our people, okay with that from a light pollution perspective, but again, it might save us a ton on carbon emissions.
00:07:27
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's fascinating because ultimately, if you're building something the size of a football stadium, an NFL stadium and you're putting it in space, I would imagine that there are going to need to be humans that are inside of that. And now it's really starting to feel like Star Trek. How many humans would have demanded something like that.
00:07:51
Speaker 2: So it just depends on how many of those systems you have. There's definitely people out there that will say that you can just use robots, but you and I have talked a lot about this. Robots are awesome, but humans have a very particular use in space. We're super adaptable. There are things that we can do that it would take billions of dollars.
00:08:06
Speaker 1: Also, there's an economy. I mean it would be at least a dual use system. I mean, you could turn that into a hotel, you could turn that into space tourism. Obviously, there's going to be other functions that this destination does. I mean that could this potentially be a rest stop on the way to the moon.
00:08:24
Speaker 2: So one of my favorite books that got me into space originally was a book from the seventies. It was like Space medic It's about a space hospital and the entire point of the space hospital is to serve the workforce for these space power grids. Literally, they would have enough that you would need maintenance workers that would be up there in space medicine. That is the type of thing that if we actually have this go to scale, it starts becoming a very large part of terrestrial economics. You one hundred percent would want humans up there for a whole bunch of blue collar or space collar type.
00:08:53
Speaker 1: Space collar jobs. We call them space collar jobs.
00:08:56
Speaker 2: Space collar jobs just first maintenance workers. But then once you have humans, you need medics, you need all the support services. And then if you are starting to have a lot of things coming to and from the Moon, all of a sudden, the entire idea of a kind of space stations in Earth orbit becomes real.
00:09:12
Speaker 1: I think to the average eye it would look like what a star if this was Yeah, yeah, so I think I think realistically, you know, I wouldn't have a problem with that. I do think that there has to be places on Earth that had like almost like national parks where you can protect you know, no fly zones or no orbit zones if you want to call it that, because I do think it is important that places on Earth that where you protect the sky and the beauty of that. And I do think that the comparison would be to the National Park Service. Part of building the future and embracing and preserving, you know, the resources and our planet is going to require to scale and to build off world. And if we're able to do it here, then we would be able to quit those same systems in Mars or I can't believe I'm going to say this, but Mercury and Venus. Well maybe not if with the Sun with mercury, but definitely for Venus. I mean, why not because there's all of these different resources, and if we're able to establish that, we don't really have to even land humans on any of these other rocks for last lack of a better word, we just have to be able to essentially keep tabs on them.
00:10:29
Speaker 2: Yeah. So this specific technology, space power grids or space solar, we can use it most anywhere in the Inner Solar System. There's actually some good ideas a company out there called Volta that's trying to do it for the Moon. And so when we're talking about fermanly shadowed regions last time, they can potentially provide power to those regions and even though they are not directly in the Sun. Mars is also a big opportunity there. I'm a co author and I actually had a paper several years ago that the first Martian export might be sending these stations back to Earth because they might have to build those stations really good at Mars. They might specialize and then send them back to Earth, and they could easily do that from an energetic perspective. Getting to a deep space, especially Jupiter and beyond, that's certainly when you're going to have to transition over to nuclear, but you probably have some specialized solar type systems.
00:11:15
Speaker 1: Then right now, what is your favorite piece of our solar system?
00:11:18
Speaker 2: Before I let you go ooh oh, that is that is an unfair one. Right now, the one I think about every single day is the Moon.
00:11:27
Speaker 1: Europa or Titan Europa. Okay, same, but now I feel like because NASA's administrator, Jared Isaacman is sending the Europa Clipper and you got the Dragonfly, but they're bullish on Titan, it seems like, yeah.
00:11:41
Speaker 2: So personally I love all the Moon's the same tons of ocean moons. These aren't really ocean moons, and there's about depending on high talent and what we know, there's probably about eight of them in the solar system. So I love all of them. Europa is just exciting because it is an ice ball moon. It's got massive water oceans on it.
00:11:59
Speaker 1: Titan is really it's a giant piece of hail.
00:12:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a giant piece of hail. I think we're going to find life everywhere on the Solar.
00:12:07
Speaker 1: So that's what I think. I wrote this, I think, and it's gonna have huge implications for biomedicine and helping to understand if life can survive in an extreme environment. That could help us unlock yours here. Okay, but Titan is not just a giant ice ball.
00:12:23
Speaker 2: No, So Titan is a carbon It's a methane ice ball effectively, So it is so cold that you have methane lakes, and this is natural gas full natural gas rivers. It has rivers, It has rivers of natural gas. And then it's so cold there that water ice actually is more like a rock. It's more like water rock than ice because it's just so cold.
00:12:46
Speaker 1: And so yeah, but it has land.
00:12:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, Titan.
00:12:49
Speaker 1: I hate to say this because I feel like I'm cheating on Europa. I think that Titan and Europa question is the New Moon versus Mars question.
00:12:56
Speaker 2: Ooh, that's an interesting one to explore.
00:13:00
Speaker 1: That's my hot take because I have to tell you, the more I go down the rabbit hole of Titan, the more excited I get about Titan because of all of the power things that you're talking about. When you hear that there's a moon in Saturn, it's Saturn versus Jupiter. Jupiter has always been one of my favorite planets because I think it's fascinating and I've always wondered if you were on Europa. First of all, what would the sun look like to the human eye. Would you consider Jupiter to be your sun or would you consider the Sun to be the Sun? Does that make sense?
00:13:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question. It actually might feel like kind of both. Yes, the majority of your site comes from the Sun, but both Saturn and Jupiter are just so big that a lot of the light you'd see would actually be reflected from those planets. And so depending on which moon you're on, it could well be a substantial portion of your energy balance on that.
00:13:52
Speaker 1: Planet, which is wild And I think what's cool to me about Saturn is obviously it's Saturn. But if we can crack the code of Titan, that is the Solar systems gas station. Am I right?
00:14:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's literally it's a ton of hydrocarbons and stuff. And look, the one advantage I think Saturn system has is that the Jupiter radiation environment is crazy intense. It's really hard for spacecraft to operate close in, especially with some of the planets that we want to go to there. Saturn I think is also much better candidate for having cloud cities.
00:14:24
Speaker 1: Oh that's fun.
00:14:26
Speaker 2: All right? Did I just blow your mind?
00:14:27
Speaker 1: No? No, no, okay, Because cloud cities, no one ever talks about it because they think that that there's.
00:14:31
Speaker 2: When we could have a cloud city or a cloud research station on Venus and about the same time that we could have the landed station on Mars.
00:14:38
Speaker 1: So when you say a cloud city, what does that mean?
00:14:42
Speaker 2: The best way to really think about it not Saturn and think about Venus. So Venus is very much like Earth. It's got a similar gravity level, but the problem is it's got a ton of.
00:14:51
Speaker 1: Atmosphere and it's hot as hell.
00:14:54
Speaker 2: Because of that atmosphere. That's actually one of the reasons that we know about the greenhouse effect is because we saw Venus and saw that it was all carbon dioxide atmosphere, and it was so much hart It's actually hotterer than mercury because of all that greenhouse effect. Wow, And so the surface of Venus might be the like, might be the closest place to a healthscape in our solar system. It's crazy hot, it's super intense pressure, but there's some altitude bands around fifty kilometers it's like thirty miles in the air where you could actually put a station that is just floating like a big blimp, and it would be the right pressure, it'd be the right gravity. It would be like you're just living up in the clouds. You just need to wear a breather mask because it'd be a little bit caustic to breathe. But you can literally just have a floating research station that navigates the clouds of Venus indefinitely and getting there and landing and doing all that stuff. It would be a challenge, but we can probably figure that out from an engineering perspective.
00:15:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you know what I want to do. We got to start terraforming. We just got to start terraforming the Solar system. I feel like we should just terraform Mars. I think we should terrify. I'm a huge believer in terraforming Mars.
00:15:58
Speaker 2: So I've got someone that you should talk to on this show that is one of the best planetary scientists working on that exact problem.
00:16:05
Speaker 1: Well, I would love to interview them, so stay tuned, every one. Alex Hilbert. I genuinely enjoyed our conversations, my friend, Alex Gilbert. It's been so much fun. I'm so excited to be working with you and alongside and you learn. I learn every time I talk to you. So if folks want to find out more information about you, where should they.
00:16:23
Speaker 2: Go My website rossinantefieldworks dot com Rossinante roc I N A N T E.
00:16:31
Speaker 1: Why'd you name it that?
00:16:33
Speaker 2: It's after don Quixote's horse. It's got a lot of meaning about old workhorses that are made grand by a new adventure, which I think is right for where the space and nuclear sectors are these days.
00:16:44
Speaker 1: That's awesome. That's a great thing. All right, guys, thanks for listening. Be sure to check out the latest episodes of Hello Future however you get your podcasts and of course on the iHeartMedia app. Have a great tomorrow. Today,
Speaker 1: Nowadays, everybody's talking about blackouts and the grid and energy and data centers. We don't have enough electricity. The cost is going way up, up up up up, and I'm just thinking to myself, why not put it in space? Hello Future, It's me keV. This is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier the Planet Deserves. The year is twenty twenty six. My name is Kevin Surreally, remember you can listen to all of the latest Hello Future episodes however you get your podcasts and on the iHeartMedia app. And I'm so excited to get to talk to Alex Gilbert again because he really is one of the experts and explaining things when it comes to outer space, but also on regulations. I mean, he was just presenting at the United Nations on commercial space nuclearization. Alex is someone I really trust when it comes to help guiding and understanding these big transformations that we're all watching. We're all inspired as Americans to see Americans going back to the moon and building the cislunar economy and building out infrastructure and permanence between here and the moon and on the Moon and ultimately beyond. He was the first person I just talked with him last week and I said to him, you know, Mars is feeling a little too close. Where are we going next? And he goes, Titan, Saturn's moon Titan. And I said to myself, are we going to land humans on Titan in my lifetime? And he goes, yeah, we are. By the way, if anyone's listening, send me to Titan. I'll go, Alex, welcome back to the program. I want to do a documentary on Titan. I want to manifest that because I think Titan is fascinating. Would you help me if I did that? Oh?
00:01:42
Speaker 2: Absolutely? And great to be back having to always give a chat.
00:01:45
Speaker 1: All right, So you want to put electric power centers in space? Right? Why should I want to do that? And how would that work?
00:01:53
Speaker 2: Yeah? So this sounds like a crazy idea, but this is a crazy idea that it's time has now come. Look the United States, we're actually in one of the better energy situations. Love. Other countries are struggling, and renewables have been awesome in the country. But renewables have limits. And I hate saying the phrase, but solar power doesn't produce power when the sun doesn't shine on Earth. One, we're looking at what's happened with SpaceX and all these other technologies that have made that cost of getting to space cheaper. We can now take a solar power plant, we can put it in space where it is never in shade, and it can produce energy, and we can beam that energy back to or using microwaves or lasers.
00:02:32
Speaker 1: Okay, so that sounds awesome, But I have a million questions now, and I want to start with one. How big is a space power center? It's conjuring up images of Star Trek and star Wars, but what does it actually look like? And be very specific?
00:02:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, So the small ones we're looking at right now for beaving power in space, they're going to be like the size of a large satellite. But if we're really talking about the holy grail here, the big energy opportunity, we are talking about massive solar fields and space that's spread across kilometers and kilometers just massively.
00:03:05
Speaker 1: I have American what do you mean by that? A how big a football field? A stadium?
00:03:09
Speaker 2: Like a stadium. We can put stadiums into space that would produce one to two gigawatts of electricity.
00:03:16
Speaker 1: Okay, so one to two gigawatts of electricity powers? What a city a town.
00:03:20
Speaker 2: What would that power that would power a medium sized city?
00:03:23
Speaker 1: And because it's so Washington, d Yes, what are we calling these space power centers?
00:03:29
Speaker 2: Space based solar power?
00:03:31
Speaker 1: Space based solar power?
00:03:34
Speaker 2: So can well that it's still in its early phrase because it's a bad name. It was a horrible name scientists and innovators. But we're seeing right now there's actually companies that have just started raising venture backed money to develop this in the United States and Europe. There's five or six major companies that are doing this right now that are hoping to have this power online.
00:03:53
Speaker 1: It's a space power grid.
00:03:55
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, that's a better name, space power yep.
00:03:58
Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay, So we've now established you can build one of these, you put them in space. How are we building something in the size of a stadium in space? Or is it like legos where you're sending up pieces and connecting the pieces? I mean, how from an engineering standpoint, how are we doing.
00:04:15
Speaker 2: That exactly that we call it in space assembly and potentially manufacturing. And so the initial idea is that we'll send up a couple of these things, we'll make them together in space. But if we're really looking at these very large things, these things that would be able to remind power to cities on Earth. Those are going to be massive, massive facilities that we will probably need astronauts up there as maintenance workers just helping build out those facilities. We'll probably have many deliveries. And I know you and I were talking previously about water on the Moon. Well there's resources on the Moon and on asteroids that we could actually use to create the solar panels, to create the structures that hold it together. We can actually put build these things potentially using space resources in space with no environmental impact on Earth, just meaning as power.
00:05:00
Speaker 1: How many years away are we from that.
00:05:03
Speaker 2: So we actually have just had the first very very very tiny little bit of power beamed to Caltech about a two years ago, and then we now have companies that are doing their first demonstration missions. And right now we're focusing just on putting a solar power plant in space that's pretty big and beaming it in space because that's easiest to demonstrate. But scaling this up is something that, especially if the economics can close on getting super heavy launch vehicles like Starship to really work by twenty forty, we can start having the first of these big utility scale systems and by twenty fifty this could actually be a substantial part of power for many countries around the world.
00:05:38
Speaker 1: Okay, so if we do that, how many would we need?
00:05:41
Speaker 2: It just depends on how it works with the rest of the energy grid. You know, I'm a big nuclear person and relacing a nuclear renaissance in the US right now. When we're looking at terrestrial power, the best solution is a diversity of solutions. It's I hate to say all of the above, but it really is all of the above, because you get resilience by having multiple types of systems. And so if we look at this opportunity for space based solar power, the biggest and most important one might be for remote areas, our island communities that otherwise don't have good access to power. They could have one hundred percent of their power potentially served by this very very soon, within a decade or two.
00:06:16
Speaker 1: So is it orbiting the Earth that something the size of Lincoln Financial Field would not be in lower Earth orbit? Would it or would it be?
00:06:25
Speaker 2: This is the very historical idea was originally about fifty years ago behind this, and the idea was what we call it geosynchronous Earth orbit. Just meaning it follows the same spot on Earth, and so it's far enough away that it orbits at the same rotation of Earth. So if you're looking in the sky, it's not moving, it's staying over that same spot on Earth. It's a really special orbit. But when we're actually looking at modern systems of modern technology, almost any of the Earth orbits might be applicable. We might be able to use them.
00:06:55
Speaker 1: Would I be able to see these with my eye?
00:06:58
Speaker 2: So that is I think, I think the big environmental question here, and I think that if you look at the some of the new ideas coming out, that is definitely possible. And what we have seen is generally a lot more concerns about seeing satellites and large satellites from Earth orbits, and so that is something that I think we could potentially see these, and we could see potentially small rings in space around Earth. There's gonna be a lot of questions about our people, okay with that from a light pollution perspective, but again, it might save us a ton on carbon emissions.
00:07:27
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's fascinating because ultimately, if you're building something the size of a football stadium, an NFL stadium and you're putting it in space, I would imagine that there are going to need to be humans that are inside of that. And now it's really starting to feel like Star Trek. How many humans would have demanded something like that.
00:07:51
Speaker 2: So it just depends on how many of those systems you have. There's definitely people out there that will say that you can just use robots, but you and I have talked a lot about this. Robots are awesome, but humans have a very particular use in space. We're super adaptable. There are things that we can do that it would take billions of dollars.
00:08:06
Speaker 1: Also, there's an economy. I mean it would be at least a dual use system. I mean, you could turn that into a hotel, you could turn that into space tourism. Obviously, there's going to be other functions that this destination does. I mean that could this potentially be a rest stop on the way to the moon.
00:08:24
Speaker 2: So one of my favorite books that got me into space originally was a book from the seventies. It was like Space medic It's about a space hospital and the entire point of the space hospital is to serve the workforce for these space power grids. Literally, they would have enough that you would need maintenance workers that would be up there in space medicine. That is the type of thing that if we actually have this go to scale, it starts becoming a very large part of terrestrial economics. You one hundred percent would want humans up there for a whole bunch of blue collar or space collar type.
00:08:53
Speaker 1: Space collar jobs. We call them space collar jobs.
00:08:56
Speaker 2: Space collar jobs just first maintenance workers. But then once you have humans, you need medics, you need all the support services. And then if you are starting to have a lot of things coming to and from the Moon, all of a sudden, the entire idea of a kind of space stations in Earth orbit becomes real.
00:09:12
Speaker 1: I think to the average eye it would look like what a star if this was Yeah, yeah, so I think I think realistically, you know, I wouldn't have a problem with that. I do think that there has to be places on Earth that had like almost like national parks where you can protect you know, no fly zones or no orbit zones if you want to call it that, because I do think it is important that places on Earth that where you protect the sky and the beauty of that. And I do think that the comparison would be to the National Park Service. Part of building the future and embracing and preserving, you know, the resources and our planet is going to require to scale and to build off world. And if we're able to do it here, then we would be able to quit those same systems in Mars or I can't believe I'm going to say this, but Mercury and Venus. Well maybe not if with the Sun with mercury, but definitely for Venus. I mean, why not because there's all of these different resources, and if we're able to establish that, we don't really have to even land humans on any of these other rocks for last lack of a better word, we just have to be able to essentially keep tabs on them.
00:10:29
Speaker 2: Yeah. So this specific technology, space power grids or space solar, we can use it most anywhere in the Inner Solar System. There's actually some good ideas a company out there called Volta that's trying to do it for the Moon. And so when we're talking about fermanly shadowed regions last time, they can potentially provide power to those regions and even though they are not directly in the Sun. Mars is also a big opportunity there. I'm a co author and I actually had a paper several years ago that the first Martian export might be sending these stations back to Earth because they might have to build those stations really good at Mars. They might specialize and then send them back to Earth, and they could easily do that from an energetic perspective. Getting to a deep space, especially Jupiter and beyond, that's certainly when you're going to have to transition over to nuclear, but you probably have some specialized solar type systems.
00:11:15
Speaker 1: Then right now, what is your favorite piece of our solar system?
00:11:18
Speaker 2: Before I let you go ooh oh, that is that is an unfair one. Right now, the one I think about every single day is the Moon.
00:11:27
Speaker 1: Europa or Titan Europa. Okay, same, but now I feel like because NASA's administrator, Jared Isaacman is sending the Europa Clipper and you got the Dragonfly, but they're bullish on Titan, it seems like, yeah.
00:11:41
Speaker 2: So personally I love all the Moon's the same tons of ocean moons. These aren't really ocean moons, and there's about depending on high talent and what we know, there's probably about eight of them in the solar system. So I love all of them. Europa is just exciting because it is an ice ball moon. It's got massive water oceans on it.
00:11:59
Speaker 1: Titan is really it's a giant piece of hail.
00:12:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a giant piece of hail. I think we're going to find life everywhere on the Solar.
00:12:07
Speaker 1: So that's what I think. I wrote this, I think, and it's gonna have huge implications for biomedicine and helping to understand if life can survive in an extreme environment. That could help us unlock yours here. Okay, but Titan is not just a giant ice ball.
00:12:23
Speaker 2: No, So Titan is a carbon It's a methane ice ball effectively, So it is so cold that you have methane lakes, and this is natural gas full natural gas rivers. It has rivers, It has rivers of natural gas. And then it's so cold there that water ice actually is more like a rock. It's more like water rock than ice because it's just so cold.
00:12:46
Speaker 1: And so yeah, but it has land.
00:12:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, Titan.
00:12:49
Speaker 1: I hate to say this because I feel like I'm cheating on Europa. I think that Titan and Europa question is the New Moon versus Mars question.
00:12:56
Speaker 2: Ooh, that's an interesting one to explore.
00:13:00
Speaker 1: That's my hot take because I have to tell you, the more I go down the rabbit hole of Titan, the more excited I get about Titan because of all of the power things that you're talking about. When you hear that there's a moon in Saturn, it's Saturn versus Jupiter. Jupiter has always been one of my favorite planets because I think it's fascinating and I've always wondered if you were on Europa. First of all, what would the sun look like to the human eye. Would you consider Jupiter to be your sun or would you consider the Sun to be the Sun? Does that make sense?
00:13:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question. It actually might feel like kind of both. Yes, the majority of your site comes from the Sun, but both Saturn and Jupiter are just so big that a lot of the light you'd see would actually be reflected from those planets. And so depending on which moon you're on, it could well be a substantial portion of your energy balance on that.
00:13:52
Speaker 1: Planet, which is wild And I think what's cool to me about Saturn is obviously it's Saturn. But if we can crack the code of Titan, that is the Solar systems gas station. Am I right?
00:14:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's literally it's a ton of hydrocarbons and stuff. And look, the one advantage I think Saturn system has is that the Jupiter radiation environment is crazy intense. It's really hard for spacecraft to operate close in, especially with some of the planets that we want to go to there. Saturn I think is also much better candidate for having cloud cities.
00:14:24
Speaker 1: Oh that's fun.
00:14:26
Speaker 2: All right? Did I just blow your mind?
00:14:27
Speaker 1: No? No, no, okay, Because cloud cities, no one ever talks about it because they think that that there's.
00:14:31
Speaker 2: When we could have a cloud city or a cloud research station on Venus and about the same time that we could have the landed station on Mars.
00:14:38
Speaker 1: So when you say a cloud city, what does that mean?
00:14:42
Speaker 2: The best way to really think about it not Saturn and think about Venus. So Venus is very much like Earth. It's got a similar gravity level, but the problem is it's got a ton of.
00:14:51
Speaker 1: Atmosphere and it's hot as hell.
00:14:54
Speaker 2: Because of that atmosphere. That's actually one of the reasons that we know about the greenhouse effect is because we saw Venus and saw that it was all carbon dioxide atmosphere, and it was so much hart It's actually hotterer than mercury because of all that greenhouse effect. Wow, And so the surface of Venus might be the like, might be the closest place to a healthscape in our solar system. It's crazy hot, it's super intense pressure, but there's some altitude bands around fifty kilometers it's like thirty miles in the air where you could actually put a station that is just floating like a big blimp, and it would be the right pressure, it'd be the right gravity. It would be like you're just living up in the clouds. You just need to wear a breather mask because it'd be a little bit caustic to breathe. But you can literally just have a floating research station that navigates the clouds of Venus indefinitely and getting there and landing and doing all that stuff. It would be a challenge, but we can probably figure that out from an engineering perspective.
00:15:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you know what I want to do. We got to start terraforming. We just got to start terraforming the Solar system. I feel like we should just terraform Mars. I think we should terrify. I'm a huge believer in terraforming Mars.
00:15:58
Speaker 2: So I've got someone that you should talk to on this show that is one of the best planetary scientists working on that exact problem.
00:16:05
Speaker 1: Well, I would love to interview them, so stay tuned, every one. Alex Hilbert. I genuinely enjoyed our conversations, my friend, Alex Gilbert. It's been so much fun. I'm so excited to be working with you and alongside and you learn. I learn every time I talk to you. So if folks want to find out more information about you, where should they.
00:16:23
Speaker 2: Go My website rossinantefieldworks dot com Rossinante roc I N A N T E.
00:16:31
Speaker 1: Why'd you name it that?
00:16:33
Speaker 2: It's after don Quixote's horse. It's got a lot of meaning about old workhorses that are made grand by a new adventure, which I think is right for where the space and nuclear sectors are these days.
00:16:44
Speaker 1: That's awesome. That's a great thing. All right, guys, thanks for listening. Be sure to check out the latest episodes of Hello Future however you get your podcasts and of course on the iHeartMedia app. Have a great tomorrow. Today,
