SpaceTech for a Planet in Balance

Thank you.

Thanks, Georgia. Hi everyone. I'm the founder and managing director of May Saffron. We help companies and funds navigate the region from here in Abu Dhabi. And it's my honor to have on stage and welcome Tees and Praine from New York who are here to share some insights with us on space tech and its societal and business impacts.

Welcome guys. Welcome to Abu Dhabi.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I would just like you to start by telling us um a little bit Pine about SLI and and what you're doing in the space area.

Yeah, of course. Thank you. So uh Provin Vetervel uh SLI we're part of the Libra group. It's a private group that has been in hard assets and leasing and financing for nearly 50 years through many many different asset classes. And SLI is our latest initiative and it's focused entirely on aerospace.

And it's really because we see a big opportunity to transform and to also participate in this exciting sector that's on the verge of exponential growth and is in in sort of very urgent need for financial engineering solutions that we take for granted in many many other sectors. We're not really reinventing the wheel. We're just bringing what we've done very well in many many other sectors and adapting it to the space industry. And Tez, um, can you tell us a bit about Axiom, where you worked and and now Plan Z, what you're doing there?

Yeah, so hi everyone. My name is Tez. I'm the CEO and founder of a company called Plan Z Capital. Think of Plan Z as, you know, plan A isn't working. We don't have a plan B, so let's get to the right answer as quickly as possible.

And like Pine said, um, you know, unlike other industries, space has not been modernized, uh, in terms of finance. And there's a very specific geopolitical history behind it. Uh it goes back to the original Apollo moon um launches in the 60s, the Cold War, the Soviets in the US. Uh and it's a very different space race right now and it just hasn't been treated as a financial asset class or bankable trades. Uh my background um I'm a tech founder from New York.

Uh but the last five years I spent in the space industry. I was CEO of a company called Axiom Space, a large space company in the US and I had the good fortune over the last four years to send four missions to the International Space Station. These are crude missions, 16 astronauts total, four astronauts per mission. Uh we sent uh the UAE astronauts Sultan to the ISS uh at the same time as two Saudi astronauts uh on our second mission. Our third mission was the governments of Italy, Turkey and Sweden.

And the fourth mission this summer was uh the governments of India, Poland and Hungary. So for me coming from the outside and having this kind of impact, which was billions of dollars of revenue, but also bringing countries that had never been in the space economy before to the ultimate stage, the International Space Station, taught me three things. One is demand is far exceeding supply in this market. And I sent humans to space which is arguably the hardest technically and politically but financially speaking it's the smallest part of a very large market here today. And then third it actually is a bankable uh business.

It just isn't treated that way. So I think the opportunities right now over the next five years are enormous

in in what in what areas what commercial opportunities do you see? So, so when you look at space right now, um it's primarily p primarily exploration, primarily driven by governments, government programs, space agencies. I'm not counting defense or telecommunications. If you just look at space agency budgets and spend, it's $140 billion a year. That's sending humans up, which is a small part.

Uh payloads like science and research, um earth observation, and that's a lot of hardware infrastructure. There's a lot of software and data as well. Uh that's the here and now. Very soon you're going to see commercial applications. I think you're hearing a lot about orbital data centers.

Um Google, Microsoft, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Amazon, and many others. Um pharmaceutical drug discovery, uh microgravity, the environment with the absence of gravity creates an opportunity for research to be done, um unlike any other environment we have on Earth. And then advanced materials, the development of materials like like silicon for chips uh but also for materials to be created in space as more infrastructure gets built.

Interesting. So it looks like uh orbit logistics, debris management and life extension will will all ultimately lead to sustainability in space

um and hopefully better commercial outcomes. Uh can you pre talk a bit about that? I think to the generalist space doesn't really seem all that sustainable the energy that's required to get there and also to bring them back. Um can you just identify the areas where this is happening and what that might look like in the future? I think it's happening across the board and really on the first principles because what has been happening and as stage was saying is quite a lot of the launches up to now have been very specialized very bespoke.

A lot of infrastructure that is tailored to a particular need and as a result isn't reusable. you can't improve efficiencies and the industry as a whole across the board is moving more and more towards standardization and also creating an asset class. One of the reasons the financial engineering tools didn't develop up to now is you didn't really have a defined asset class. So all of these things are kind of combining and there's a confluence of events and and you are seeing that infrastructure space infrastructure space digital infrastructure all of that is being seen as something that can serve multiple users multiple operators multiple countries and that's where the efficiencies are really coming in. Yes, there's also a sovereign capability needs, but they are also can be done in a efficient manner if you have the same ecosystem built and copied for different sovereign needs rather than reinventing the wheel each time.

So, how many satellites do you estimate we might have in 10 years time? Yeah, I am definitely going to give a very wide answer and a non-answer, but it I think if you look at what's been uh licensed or filings for launches that have already been made, that's close to 40,000 satellites. So that's not an unreasonable number to expect, but if you look at the kind of things stage is talking about and the potential of how high it can go, you know, you could easily see a scenario where there are 100,000 satellites in orbits. And that's across multiple orbits. It's not just low Earth orbit or middle Earth.

It's we also see the space ecosystem as a complex multi-orbit solution. And like most things in life, there aren't really silver bullet simple answers. This is going to be a complex ecosystem with different assets performing and providing different capabilities.

Okay. And to put that into context, how many satellites are we roughly at today?

We're at closer to 10,000.

Okay. So 4x in 10 years at least. Could be 10x. Could be.

That's pretty significant. Now sustainability isn't just about climate. It's it's about the um ongoing continuation of things. Um and in that context thinking about 40,000 or 100,000 satellites in space, different nations accessing um and operating in space.

Uh how how do we regulate and and manage um interference navigation and prevent disruptions from affecting earth in that regard?

Sure. I think uh the first thing that we want to do is also create the context. 100,000 satellites sounds like a lot and also when you're starting at a 10,000 base 10x growth seems like a lot. And this is a Google answer so correct me if this isn't accurate but there are 240,000 registered vehicles just in the city of Abu Dhabi. So you're talking about half of that, less than half of that across the entire surface area of not just the globe but actually the expanded geometry of that.

You know the the surface area expands exponentially as you go further out and we're also talking again about multiple orbits. So there is a immense v space is vast and 100,000 is not a lot to fill up. I think when you see a graph with lots of dots on it, it's looks very crowded, but the reality is space is not crowded from a physical perspective and the physics of it. The problems are all the points you noted. It's about coordination.

It's about ensuring there's no interference. It's about making sure everybody's playing to the same rules. And here, a lot of that work has already been done. The treaties that rule the space ecosystem are the IMO regulations. The maritime regulations that have been around for 100 years plus.

The law of the seas apply. Uh the international telecommunications union has been doing the licensing and spectrum allocation for space assets for a long time and the rules are very clear on who has the rights of use of the orbit of the slot and the spectrum and these rules have been tested and applied. So the framework is there. the coordination is there and it's just a question of making sure this continues to work as the scales up exponentially. So, it's really a coordination and regulation problem than a physics or engineering problem.

Yeah. Interesting. Um, who here wants to go to space? Can you put your hands up?

Fairfield.

Oh, yeah. Sorry. Sure.

Right. So, what would you say? 20% of people here.

Yeah. 25%.

25. Okay. Um, how does that stack up with your with your data that you

Yeah. So, you know, I joined the space industry 5 years ago. Um, I I remember the first moment in my life when I realized I was going to be obsessed with space and it was when I was 3 years old. My parents took me to Kennedy Space Center um in in in Florida. And I it clicked.

Uh, my father told me they built spaceships in that building. And my mind, my heart, my soul exploded. And I knew it was the only thing I was going to think about for the rest of my life. But it was science fiction. It was daydreams.

Never did anything with it. About five years ago, I changed my mindset. I said, you know, I'm going to start investing. I'm going to start getting involved. And again, I had the good fortune of um leading the commercialization of the industry.

I've asked thousands of people. I go to conferences like this. And I ask people, would you go to space? And for the people who raised their hands, I'm going to ask one more time just in case people weren't paying attention. And I'll I'll set the context.

If I had a helicopter outside right now to take us to a launchpad and we could go right now to the International Space Station or just a joy ride around the Earth and come back, how many of you would come with me?

Okay. So, that that's a little more.

I saw that much better than I did. Yeah.

But the key takeaway is not that it's a third of people.

The key takeaway is how quickly their hands went up.

Yeah.

Nobody thought about should I go ask my wife, right? Nobody thought um is it dangerous? Nobody thought how much is it going to cost me.

You raised your hand before your heart skipped uh before before it hit its next beat. I'm convinced that there's a genetic marker. There's a wiring for some of us like how bees go from flower to flower. We just know we're meant to go from planet to planet. We're supposed to explore where we came from, where we're going.

Who knows? It doesn't matter. We just do it. So what I've noticed is that when you talk about sustainability, there's a lot of debate from the other third which says why are we spending money up there when we have so many problems here. Space doesn't sound so sustainable when we have to use so much energy to get up there.

Space doesn't sound so so sustainable when we have all this debris. But the key to sustainability is two things, right? Maintaining it forever. So financial business models that make sense without destroying our planet in the process. Yeah.

And what I think people miss sometimes is space and earth are not mutually exclusive. A big point of sustainability is that we will be moving a lot of the problematic energy consuming um efforts we do on Earth off planet. So data centers going up there is not simply about data centers being lifted from here and going up but there's actually an energy crisis.

Absolutely. So going up there and also producing uh uh drugs and doing other things up there actually lets us preserve our planet and life here better.

All right. So just to finish, we're going to finish with four fast questions, right?

Try and give me one or two word answers if you can.

What is the most underrated space technology shaping sustainability?

Prev.

I'm going to go with uh orbital transfer vehicles. I think people are not appreciating how much efficiency they can bring on the launch side which is your point about the energy needed to launch to space.

Okay. And T

I I I would say the same concept of taking energy consuming problematic industries on Earth that we've learned a lot about and just moving them off our planet.

Okay. What earth sector will be transformed first by space innovation?

It's going to be telecommunications. It's just going to be that. Yeah,

I'll give a little more philosophical answer. Um, hope,

inspiration, students seeing their their people, their projects, their entrepreneurs getting off planet. We're seeing it in the region significantly. Um, and I just think it's going to accelerate innovation like we've never seen it.

All right. And what keeps you up at night, Pain? Debreeze, regulation, or launch costs?

None of those. My three kids. Sorry.

Yeah. None of those really. They don't keep us out at up at night. I think they're solvable problems. They're not intractable.

What keeps you up in in in space tech? Anything?

It's really just excitement is what's keeping us awake. It's not problems. Yeah.

What an answer.

Yeah. My answer is exactly the same. None of those things wake me up in the middle of the night. It's my one child, so I can't even imagine with three. Um, and then what keeps me up at night is excitement.

Okay. And space will make Earth more sustainable by

transferring the energy needs,

okay,

into space.

Space will make Earth more sustainable by transforming our planet into the garden it was meant to be

instead of the mine we've turned it into.

Okay. Well, thank you guys. Thanks everyone. Who knows, maybe maybe one one day we'll be doing this panel up in space at ADFW.

Thank you. Thank you.