How government and industry are opening space for business on Government’s Future Frontiers

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Space may seem impossibly vast and distant, but it’s already important to how we do business today. Many business models and services we take for granted today would be impossible without the networks of satellites orbiting the earth at all times. If a business relies on communications technologies, or the global positioning system, or knowing the weather, it relies on space.

Our guests today have had their eyes focused on the stars from opposite sides of the globe. Brett Loubert, a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP, leads the space practice in the United States. Prior to joining Deloitte, he was a program manager and systems engineer at a security and aerospace firm. Jason Bender leads the space practice for Deloitte Australia, where he’s part of the team working to bring Australia’s first mission to the moon to life.

Loubert and Bender discuss the evolution of industry in space and break down how business is benefit from space today and how it may in the future. We also discuss the terrestrial supports we need to make space open for business, and why the lack of hype around satellite launches is actually a good thing: “The best thing that could ever happen for a launch is it to be boring. That means it works. That means it's consistent. That's the greatest news scenario, for launch.”

Tanya Ott: When you look up to the night sky, what do you see?

The moon and a sky full of shimmering stars millions and billions of light years away?

But if you keep looking, you’re likely to see a small light moving across the sky. Then another one. And another.

These are satellites. And while the search for life on other planets or plans to return to the moon or journey on to Mars, or pictures from the far edges of the galaxy, tend to be what we think of when we think of space, those satellites are part of an even bigger story. That’s because right above our heads, a revolution is underway.

Today in Government’s Future Frontiers, we’re talking about a multi-billion-dollar industry, and one on which we’ve come to depend for almost everything we do, every day.

How did we get here? Let’s take a trip back in time to see how human exploration of space has evolved.¹

November 3, 1957: The USSR launches Sputnik 2, a small craft, into orbit. It’s carrying a dog named Laika, which becomes the first living organism to orbit in space.

1958: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is created. We know it as NASA.

April 12, 1961: Yuri Gagarin, aboard the Vostok 1, becomes the first human in space. He makes a single orbit of the Earth before landing safely back on land in Western Russia.

December 1968: The US spacecraft Apollo 8 becomes the first ever human-crewed spacecraft to orbit the Moon and then return to Earth successfully.

July 20, 1969: Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the Moon. Michael Collins remains on board the Apollo 11, orbiting the Moon. An astounding 723 million people watch the landing on television.

1977: Voyagers 1 and 2 launch. Within the next few years, the craft send back images of Jupiter and Saturn.

April 12, 1981: A major breakthrough in space travel—Columbia launches as the first Space Shuttle.

January 1986: Disaster strikes as the Challenger space shuttle explodes just seconds after liftoff.

1990: The space shuttle Discovery launches the Hubble Space Telescope.

1998: The International Space Station is assembled in orbit. The first resident crew moves in two years later.

2003: The space shuttle Columbia breaks up on re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.

While the manned—and unmanned—missions to probe discovered planets in our solar system and look for news planets outside, our lives were being changed.

Satellite launches for communication began to come online commercially rather than just for military use. Soon, television pictures were beaming into homes all over the world, phone calls were made clearer and cheaper, and GPS allowed us to know exactly where we were on the planet.

In fact, as of January 2024, there were 8,377 active satellites in various Earth orbits—that’s according to the satellite tracking website “Orbiting Now.”²

So, while the mention of space may start people thinking of putting a man on Mars or the search for life on other planets, the reality is more mundane—and worth a huge amount of money.

The global space economy was valued at around US$423.8 billion in 2019³ and is forecasted to grow to more than US$1 trillion by 2040.⁴

We’re going to explore that economy and discover what many of the millions of people working away behind the scenes are doing. With an industry so vast, what are the challenges facing those involved in exploring space?

How vital is the safeguarding of the sector and how can space be regulated to everyone’s benefit?

And above all, what should happen to ensure that our—that’s the global our—exploration and operations in space can continue in an optimal way?

Joining me today to discuss the ways that space is being used and how it may be used in the future are Brett Loubert and Jason Bender.

Brett leads Deloitte Space in the United States, which helps government and commercial clients with current and future opportunities in the space industry. Jason is head of Innovation and Space lead at Deloitte Australia

The world has achieved a lot in a relatively short period of time as a result if the technology developed. Brett and Jason, I’d love to hear from you both as to why the space industry is so important.

Brett Loubert: There [are] a lot of things that happen in space, like you just mentioned, that are highly complex. They’re inspirational. What I find most inspirational is how much people interact with space in their everyday lives.

An example I love to use is the GPS constellation—the blue dot on your phone that provides you a way to get to the coffee shop, timing of the transaction that you’re using with your credit card in the coffee shop, and [an] understanding [of] where the coffee shop is. We interact with that service every single day. That’s a service that was built, launched, operated, and delivered to you on behalf of the United States government.

Another one that we use all the time is weather. That is a complex series of both things here on the ground [and] satellites that are observing and generating data in space, which we can use to parse through, create models [using] technologies like AIML [artificial intelligence markup language], and create those forecasts that you use in your 10-day forecast, or even more complex things around larger weather events like hurricanes [and]  tornadoes. I think we're all, at least on the eastern side of the United States, very used to the hurricane models, and we have about nine or 10 of them that we use right now, providing extrapolation based on historical data that in many cases is derived from space.

Ott: So, we’re talking about the blue dot on the phone, tracking changes on Earth through space. There’s also communications, there’s military, just a whole constellation of things that we use space for.

Loubert: That’s right. Airline industries, cruise industries, shipping industries, [all] use satellites for things like communication and tracking and knowing [their] locations. So, on the communication side, we’re seeing what’s now emerging [as an] explosion of bandwidth, being delivered from low Earth orbit.

Those high-bandwidth communications constellations are allowing for some existing use cases to get better and some really new and emerging use cases in terms of mobility, Internet of Things, tracking of information at the edge—and then also allowing you to stream movies on an airplane, something that we all enjoy when we travel. I’m really excited about the space industry being able to provide a more robust capability there over time.

Ott: Jason, give us your perspective of the space industry. Why is it so important and how?

Jason Bender: It’s really about the applied science and how we use that new knowledge and capability down here on Earth. A lot of the advancements in life science and health care, medical drug discovery, more advanced manufacturing techniques, allow us to get the benefit of those things. A few years ago, the United Kingdom government did a report that identified that US$360 billion of economic activity in the United Kingdom was underpinned by space-based capability and technology.⁵ Without space, we would really start to feel it.

Ott: So, let's take a deeper dive into some of that, starting with the fundamentals. How do we get the hardware up there into space to do the things that we do?

Loubert: Yeah, you have to launch. Think of launch as the supply chain to space.

I remember growing up, launch was a really big deal. In my elementary school, they would wheel a TV into the cafeteria and set us all down [and] we would watch the shuttle launch. Now, there are companies that are launching almost 100 times a year. You’re able to see a launch if you go down to Cape Canaveral these days, pretty reliably. And there’s a lot more [of what] we call mass to orbit. The amount of stuff that we’re getting from the Earth to the space has gone up, and the cost to get that has gone down significantly.

The big driver behind that is largely around what we call reusable launch. For space, a rocket used to be used one time. Think about building a plane and throwing it away every single time you got off the plane. That would be almost unheard of. The way you bring that [cost] down is you use the plane many, many times. Think about launch the same way as we’ve gone closer and further into the reusable rocket area. You’re seeing companies that can increase launch cadence and really lower the cost of mass to orbit.

Bender: It’s really exciting—the frequency of launch that you mentioned there—if we include the international launches as well—211 launches last year alone from 223 launch attempts.⁶ We’re starting to increase that frequency and lower the cost of getting mass or material into space, whether [that’s] the things that we’ve already built or things that will construct in the future in space, getting the raw materials up there and making these structures and habitats up there.

Currently it's about US$1,000 to US$2,000 per kilogram to get mass into space.⁷ And if you think about what we can take to space, both in terms of people [and] also in terms of materials science, habitat stations, that allow us to make more in space travel further and explore the universe.

Ott: I wanted to circle back around, Brett, on your observation about how we used to get really, really excited about launches. I grew up in Florida. Every launch, everything that happened down there, we’d be in the library watching it. But now that we have so many launches happening, they don’t seem to get quite as much attention. And I’m wondering if we are losing that mystery and passion because it's becoming more regular.

Loubert: The best thing that could ever happen for a launch is it to be boring. That means, it works. That means, it’s consistent. That’s the greatest news scenario, for launch.

With that said, as a human being, it’s almost impossible not to be inspired by launch every single time. The engineering, the actual rocket science that goes into to the launch is not lost on anybody. It’s phenomenal. And if you think about all the things that have to happen to get that piece of equipment from a factory somewhere to a launchpad up into space and have it operating, and for it to be something that happens 75 times a year, that’s pretty powerful.

Bender: We’re starting to see a much broader spread of the people that are applying space capabilities and technology to traditional businesses, industries, and problems—on the human scale. I see a lot of people getting really excited about how they can use information and observation from space towards climate change—more than 50% of the essential climate variables can only be measured or observed from space. So, as we try to work towards net zero, you don’t need to be aspiring to launch your own assets into to space, but you can use the capability technology to drive significant change and achieve your business outcomes down here on Earth.

Ott: We already mentioned that the space industry—launching and operating things in space—is worth more than US$400 billion now and is projected to grow to US$1 trillion in the next 15 years. But is that the whole story?

Bender: We like to say that for every dollar invested in space, there’s US$10 of economic return. It’s just that it’s filed in mining, agriculture, life science and health care, financial services, and these other elements of the economy.

Ott: How does the value chain break down?

Loubert: We like to think about this in in three areas.

The first area would be upstream services. This is everything, from the research and development, the engineering, the test, everything you need to do to build something that’s going to go to space. I think hardware rockets, satellites, structures—to Jason's earlier point—all the things that have to be done to make sure that something can actually go up to space.

From there, things have to be launched into space and operated. So, we’ll bucket those into what we call midstream services. Those operations include a significant amount of ground infrastructure. Space itself is sort of the tip of the iceberg. Think about all the things that are happening there [that] have to be operated remotely from data centers, buildings with people [who] can actually fly the objects that are orbiting the Earth and protect them. So, cybersecurity, and the protection of those assets from the ground, is critically important as well, especially for government applications and increasingly for commercial ones.

Then the last category would be [what] we call downstream services: All of the things that are derived from space. Precision navigation and timing, that’s the “How do I get from my house to the coffee shop and make that credit card transaction.” There’s communication services that are derived from space. Earth observation, remote sensing. How do we catalog our data? How do we take pictures of the Earth? How do we make measurements from space? How do we deliver data from space back down to Earth?

And increasingly, what we’re seeing are these net-new use cases of things like in the biotech industry, where we have companies that are printing knee cartilage in space⁸ or a retina in space.⁹ So these new platforms that are going up and lab environments that are going to provide the ability to do research and even, down the road, large-scale manufacturing of human organs, pharmaceuticals, different structures, different materials that we can use for here on Earth or in space. And that opens up a whole new set of value chains for what those kinds of capabilities could provide down the road.

And there’s the space tourism and the people side of space. People want to interact with space, want to go to space, want to reside in space, and eventually people will work in space, in a much longer time frame.

Ott: So, this is ubiquitous, right? It feels like there’s this invisible workforce that’s busy toiling away to ensure that everything that we rely on functions. Jason, as the industry is truly global, how collaborative is the space industry?

Bender: One of the wonderful things I like about space is that that no one can really get there on their own. It requires people, organizations, and nations to collaborate to achieve really meaningful outcomes in space.

There’s a lot of collaboration between nations around science and discovery and advancement in new sensor technology that occurs. There’s a lot of collaboration around constellations of satellites that are used for communications [or] weather-related data.

These satellites traverse around the Earth 16 times a day. [For example], a lot of Japanese satellites are not over Japan all day. They’re traveling the rest of the globe [and] they’re collecting valuable information about weather movements and other observations that can be shared with other nations. Here in Australia, we benefit from this significantly in disaster response. When we have a bushfire, we will call on help from other nations’ satellites to advise first responders where to go. So, I think the collaboration element that is key.

Loubert: Everything that orbits the Earth orbits the entire Earth. It does not care about a border. A satellite that’s out of range of a ground station over the United States a lot of times is perfectly in range of Australia. So, Jason and I have no way to not work together in a lot of ways to do that cross-country collaboration in terms of data delivery [or] downlink.

There [are] a lot of agreements we’re seeing now formally between space agencies within different nations: the United States and India, as an example, or the United States and Japan. That collaboration is really about efficiency. It’s about shared resources. It’s about enabling each other. And probably a lot about geopolitical tensions and conflict at the same time. It’s kind of why space exists the way it [does] today.

Now, there’s a lot more commercial investment and private use cases, commercial companies that have stood up in collaboration. [With] the global footprint that they have, they have to think globally. If you have a communication satellite that orbits the Earth, you’re missing out on a lot of potential revenue and user base if you're only thinking about the country that it was launched from.

Ott: So, you’re talking about that collaboration. And I’m wondering if some nations with a smaller space industry [can] piggyback on larger nations to launch. Would one nation’s satellites be launching on rockets owned by another nation? Is that how that works?

Bender: It’s very common to launch from another location, particularly if that location has favorable trajectories or angles of inclination to get into the orbit that you want to end up with. Having your own launch site can be very beneficial, but it is a very complex thing to do. And so, being able to leverage the launch capability of other nations is a great advantage too.

Ott: So, what needs to happen in the future to ensure that this kind of collaboration continues?

Bender: Collaboration will continue because it is a necessary thing.

Space is expensive. It’s often beyond single nations to achieve all of the services and benefits that they want from space, so it’s important to look at how can they collaborate together. What can they contribute to the global space industry or the global space economy, in terms of additional insight, capability, or data that can be used in a global context?

Loubert: There are emerging conversations about cost. India just landed on the moon for a fraction of the cost of what the United States had done.¹⁰ There’s a lot of discussion I’m hearing now around, well, should we be outsourcing some elements of our space programs to someone who can do it faster, cheaper? So, if a company in the United States, let’s say, launches a platform into low Earth orbit, and says you can lease that like you can lease office space, a country in South America might say, do I want to develop, build, and nurture or foster and manage a space program, or do I want to use a capability that’s already there and I can get to at a fraction of the cost?

Ott: What else has had a big impact on the evolution of business in space?

Bender: I think part of the game-change occurred when government said, instead of being responsible for the design, construction, build, [and] launch of vehicles, that they would outsource transportation from Earth into space and set a price that they were willing to pay and put that out to entrepreneurs to develop [the] new capability. I think that was the start of the, the process. I think we’ve had some very successful, launches and there’s an increasing amount of development capability going into that, but it will fundamentally change the price of getting to space and making now that it's more accessible. People are starting to explore new business models that weren’t viable before. And so, they’re really seeing that tipping point occur.

These heavy-lift vehicles, the reason that they’re a game-changer is [because] they lower the cost of access to space. It’s much easier to hitch a ride or to take your payload, your space station, your asset, your satellite, and put it on something at a much lower price point. So that’s fundamentally changed the game.

Loubert: I like to think of that like the cargo ship, with all those containers on it. [It’s] significantly cheaper than if you had 2,000 small boats going back and forth between China and the United States for goods you’re buying on your favorite e-commerce site and delivered to your door.

Ott: It’s much easier to launch things into space now … but that may have precipitated another issue. Increasingly, there have been reports of the growing problem of space junk clogging up orbits. Let’s hear from Professor Hugh Lewis from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. Hugh is professor of astronautics and has been working in the area of space debris for 20 years.

Hugh Lewis: The biggest objects will be the upper stages of the rockets that we use to deliver the satellites. We talk about the whole satellites themselves—some of those are enormous. They’re the size of trucks; they’re huge, both in terms of their mass and in terms of their size.

And then the space environment is particularly harsh. Ultraviolet light, for example—we understand what ultraviolet light does to—for example—black bin bags, makes them brittle and they flake and so on. The same thing happens to the surfaces of spacecraft in orbit. Microscopic particles come away from the spacecraft.

Sometimes [larger] objects get hit by something and that produces small fragments as well. Sometimes, we release objects into the environment deliberately: Lens covers on optical sensors, explosive bolts, and tapes and tethers and things can all be released into the environment. We've heard stories about astronauts accidentally dropping things, for example. So, we have this scale all the way from the very large stuff all the way down to the fine particulate stuff that is in orbit—but it's all been delivered by space activity.

We’re probably tracking around about 35,000 objects in orbit that are trackable—about the size of a fist or larger. And space is just immense. The volume that space represents in Earth orbits is just huge. You could easily argue that there’s sufficient volume, sufficient space, as it were, for these things to occupy. [But] these events, these collisions, these impacts still occur. And that’s the threat that we’ve got.

And if I was to look at the small objects, a million objects at the size of a centimeter—the size of your thumbnail—that could lead to the loss of a mission. 

They're really vital, the systems that are in orbit. Knowing that they're vulnerable to objects that we've left behind in orbit means we have to take that threat quite seriously. The scale of the problem is such that space missions that are launched today, in their operational lifetime, they're probably going to be hit by something.

The most likely scenario—the kind of events we’re talking about—[are] objects that are a few millimeters in size hitting a spacecraft, maybe on its solar array, and maybe there’s a slight loss in power for that spacecraft.

Then we have these quite rare events where we see larger things hitting spacecraft and by large [I mean more than a few] centimeters in size.

And then we see these incredibly rare events, accidental collisions between whole objects, whole satellites in space. That is catastrophic, not just in terms of the mission, but in terms of the environment. [Those collisions] produce thousands of fragments. And those fragments can go on and threaten other things.

Ott: And where are those threats of collision most likely to happen?

Lewis: There are layers in terms of space debris, altitudes where we see much more debris than in other places. In low Earth orbit, for example, there’s a kind of a peak of debris that sits around about 800 kilometers of altitude. It’s the highest density of space debris that we would see anywhere in Earth orbits.

And then it kind of drops off a little bit, as we go into what we call medium Earth orbit. This is the region between 2000 kilometers and up to the geostationary orbit at about 36,000 kilometers. We’ve got abandoned rocket bodies and old derelict spacecraft there, but not many.

Then, you hit the geostationary ring and there are some abandoned spacecraft, and they probably have some fragments there as well. And then there’s a graveyard orbit that sits just above that, as well. But if I was to tell you that we’ve had space debris problems around other planets in the solar system, that probably tells you how far our influences extended already.

There have been avoidance maneuvers that have been performed around Mars, for example, to avoid potential collisions [from] taking place.

Ott: Professor Hugh Lewis from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.

So, Jason, as we’ve heard, cleaning up this space junk is not going to be a simple task.

Bender: No, but there are a number of programs in place at the moment to look at how we address space junk. And one of those is thinking about the usage of these assets before they go to space.

There [are] a number of technologies that are looking at connecting or docking with or scooping up debris that’s there, creating enough critical mass for that to start to de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. I think the other thing is really about further sustainment.

In Australia, one of our large telecommunications providers has a large geostationary satellite in orbit. It’s doing a great job. It’s been communicating for more than 20 years. The technology still works. It’s just running out of fuel to maintain that orbit 35,000 kilometers away from the Earth. So, I think next year, or later this year, they’re going to launch a small spacecraft which is going to dock with this satellite and use its thrust to provide an additional six years of life for the satellite. And then at the end of that period, [they’ll] position it further away so that it won’t fall back down to earth.

Loubert: Don’t worry about space debris right now. It is a problem that we need to think about, a problem that can get much, much, much worse very quickly if we don’t manage it properly. I don’t want people to think, “If we don’t solve, we’re going to collectively not be able to be a spacefaring species.”

There’s a lot of conversation now about sustainability in the industry. It is messy to launch rockets from a carbon standpoint. There’s also conversation now about how we can de-orbit satellites, but what happens to the nasty propellant that’s now sitting in the upper atmosphere of the Earth? These debates are very healthy for us as a species. They’re very healthy for the industry to make sure that we’re handling what is a very precious resource in space well and appropriately and thinking about all the different ways that we can do things right in there. But I also like to make sure that people understand that there are many other things that we can tackle around space that are urgent. Space debris itself is something that needs attention. But it is maybe not as urgent as something that we need to be concerned as a species right now about it being cataclysmic.

Ott: While it’s good to know we’re unlikely to encounter anything cataclysmic as a species due to space junk, it may be catastrophic to the organizations that sent up a satellite that gets hit. In fact, that’s something Professor Lewis mentioned.

Lewis: We have a problem in low Earth orbit—altitudes below 2000 kilometers—because there aren’t that many satellites that are insured.

And it’s in part because the environment there is much more hazardous with respect to space debris. So, insurers probably take a long, hard look at that and question whether it’s a sensible prospect, but also because the low Earth orbit now has become the realm of industry and commercial enterprises and so on. We’re in this era of cheap, disposable types of satellites. You probably wouldn’t insure those because it’s quite easy nowadays to be able to just replace them.

Ott: Space insurance isn’t something I’d considered. What would happen if there was a fender bender at 2,000 kilometers straight up?

Donna Lawler: If, for example, I’m flying my satellite in space, and I’m Australian, and I make some kind of mistake, and I crash into your satellite, and you’re from the United Kingdom, it could be that the UK government is going to need to get on the phone quickly to the Australian government, and they might end up making a claim for that lost satellite. And that’s something that doesn’t apply in any other realm.

Ott: That’s Donna Lawler, a co-founder and principal at Azimuth Advisory and member of the International Institute of Space Lawyers. I asked her how we can legislate and regulate activities and behavior in space, with so many stakeholders involved?

Lawler: There are certain people that like to say that space is the wild, wild West. They like to believe that there are no rules, but in fact, there’s a lot of law that applies to what we do in space, at the international level, the national level, and also at the contractual level.

Starting with the international level, there are five major space international treaties. Some of them are very, very widely signed and ratified by almost all spacefaring nations.

The international treaties [start] with what we call the Magna Carta of space law, the Outer Space Treaty, which was signed in 1967—negotiated, incredibly, during the Cold War period when you [would] think that Russia and the United States would not be agreeing on anything. In fact, they realized they needed to cooperate in space.

So now, I think, more than 180 countries also have signed the Outer Space Treaty. And that deals with things like the very nature of space.

Each country that is a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty is obliged to supervise [and] authorize their nationals when they perform activities.

And then lastly, and this is key to what drives a lot of the commercial environment, if there is some kind of accident in space, there is a liability regime.

The miniaturization of satellites has led to an exponential growth in private business, so of course there is a need to develop and evolve all of these laws. There are procedures going on all the time in the United Nations, but I don’t think we’re going to have any new treaties any time soon. So, it has become up to international negotiations, negotiating principles and norms of behavior and rules and guidelines at a national level. We really need to have responsible regulation of national activities to make sure that no one allows their citizens to behave irresponsibly in space with things like space debris, having wobbly bits of your satellites that drop off and crash into other people's satellites, or things like that.

There are some areas that just do not yet have a solution. Do we have traffic rules for outer space? What happens if your satellite is heading toward mine and mine's heading toward yours, too? Do we go to the left or to the right? There is no up or down. There is no protocol on that yet, although there are a lot of people working on it and trying to develop it.

Another example is the mega constellations—those smallish satellites up there to provide communications. They might be quite good if you’re using that for your communications, but if you want it as someone else who wants to use that orbit, it’s starting to get very crowded, and the risk of collision is going up. So, a lot of challenges still to deal with. But don’t let anyone ever tell you that space is the wild, wild West and that it’s unregulated. It’s highly regulated.

So, once again, if I just irresponsibly dumped my satellite, and it had been a satellite that was authorized by the Australian Space Agency, the Australian Space Agency would be having a word with me about what I’m going to be doing about that.

It’s up to each country to regulate and authorize and supervise their citizens, and then enforce the law, if need be.

Ott: That’s space lawyer Donna Lawler. So, Brett, what ramifications for life on the ground, so to speak, does what is happening in the heavens have in terms of global agreements?

Loubert: This will require, I think, human beings to work together in a way that we don’t always on Earth. It needs to be a way that we can think about the integration and collaboration of private investment and not just nation states, but how companies operate effectively in space.

What does property look like on the moon? Does anybody own anything on the moon? What about the valuable parts of the moon that are always illuminated or have resources like water ice? How are we going to regulate all that? What if a private company makes it there before a nation state? If two companies want to be in the same place, all of that is going to require a lot of collaboration and a lot of good dialog [among] international bodies, international law, and people. And I wonder how many people will take that on as a career? How are we get to the to the bottom of some of those really thorny issues?

It’s no surprise that if you want to operate well in the space industry, you need very smart people on the engineering side that can build these platforms, test them, think about them, model them, understand what happened, and quickly react. But the speed at which those people are able to operate matters a lot, too. 

As you start moving to a more commercial model for space more than a government model, you inherently have that opportunity for capitalism and profit and growth, which in many cases will drive innovation and, and push the envelope. But the government is still a major, if not the most prominent, funder of things that are happening in space and has done the most when it comes to pushing the envelope of things that we do, as a civilization, to go to be interstellar or go to Mars or have a helicopter on Mars. And all those things happened with a government organization setting the direction and funding.

Ott: So, in the little time that we have left here, look ahead 50 years. What sort of space industry do you think will have?

Bender: I think in 50 years, we'll clearly have a vibrant space industry that’s occurring both here traditionally but also off-world. I think there’s an entire series of activities, both economic and science discovery operations, that will occur off-world, particularly in low Earth orbit.

We’re going to have people living, working. We’ll have manufacturing, transportation, all of the logistics that go with that, occurring off-world that will hopefully be allowing us to discover further into our solar system, into the known universe, travel to Mars and beyond. Space-based power is another thing. Large solar arrays in space beaming directly that power back to Earth [will] hopefully help us improve our agriculture, feed the world better, [and] more efficiently. And we’ll recognize what we can do together as a planet.

Loubert: I don’t know that we even know what we can do once we can get a significant amount of material from Earth to space in terms of building structures, fuel depots, fundamentally changing the way that we design satellites or space stations or platforms that can support human life or manufacturing. All those use cases are ones that we haven’t even explored.

The other [idea] that’s personally fascinating to me is point-to-point launch—moving cargo and potentially even people from different parts of the Earth in less than an hour, to go from one part of the Earth to a significantly further part of the Earth by using some of these heavy-lift capabilities. Maybe it's the next big way to haul cargo from place to place. Or if you’re in the military or if you’re doing humanitarian disaster response, how do you get a large amount of material to a place very quickly?

I think [space] will be integral to what we do, every single day and whatever 50 years from now from looks like we'll be even more reliant on space and what we can derive from space. From the business side, we talk all the time about what it means for companies in 50 years. If you are going to build that moon hotel, should it be a hotel [or a] company building or [will it be] a construction company from here on Earth that builds that? [We] have to maybe shift our mindset. Or if you’re a biotech company, are you manufacturing then a cure for cancer or a drug that helps with a rare disease on orbit. So, it will be other industries that are leveraging space in ways that we probably don’t think about here today, here on Earth.

Ott: Thank you to my two guests today, Brett Loubert and Jason Bender from Deloitte. We also heard from Professor Hugh Lewis from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, and Donna Lawler, space lawyer out of Australia.

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Next episode, we’ll be talking about the infrastructure we use right here on earth. What constitutes essential infrastructure now? Is it just roads and bridges and sewages systems, or is it super-fast Wi-Fi available to all? How do we future-proof infrastructure so it can hold up to the demands of climate change and the rigors of evolving technology? And how can we do all of this while ensuring everyone benefits equally?

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