Things are really up in the air for the stock market. And we mean that in the most literal way possible.

Morgan Stanley predicts the Space Economy will be worth more than $1 trillion dollars by 2040. Merrill Lynch is even more optimistic, thinking it will reach $2.7 trillion by 2045.

Whatever the actual number becomes, the key point is that it will likely involve a “t” in its order of magnitude. The space economy will soon become one of the largest and most important new markets that develops in our lifetime.

Once reserved for well-funded government missions, satellites in orbit now enable regional television broadcasting, the GPS used for Smartphone apps, pinpoint imagery used for logistics and government surveillance, and high-speed internet provided for locations.

Each of those opportunities will require an entire subsector as well. Launch providers like SpaceX and Rocket Lab will be needed to place the satellites into orbit. Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Google will store and compute all of the data they collect. Support providers like Redwire will keep the satellites operational and in good condition.

And with the FCC working through a backlog of nearly 40,000 new satellite spectrum applications, the million dollar question becomes how should we invest in the space economy?

Three of our 7investing advisors tackled that question in an exclusive conversation. Simon Erickson, Luke Hallard, and Steve Symington together hosted a livestream discussion last month, sharing insights, key themes, and plenty of space-related puns.

They first talked about defense contractors, such as how companies like Lockheed Martin were embracing collaborations and partnerships to support complex, billion-dollar government contracts. They then set their sights on launch providers, whose reusable rockets are driving down costs and carrying larger and more sophisticated payloads for building constellations. They also discussed consolidation, especially as capital costs are increasing in a rising-rate environment and companies are finding ways to spread fixed cost across a larger number of offerings and income streams.

Steve then described Virgin Galactic’s ambitions for space tourism. Even with its sister company Virgin Orbit recently filing for bankruptcy, Galactic believes space tourism will eventually be an affordable vacation for many potential tourists.

Simon then dug into defense applications, primarily in support of the escalation Russia/Ukraine war. He points to Maxar Technologies $6 billion acquisition by a private equity firm as a sign that M&A deals for mission-critical satellite operators will continue in 2023 and 2024.

Luke chimed in with a few other ‘fun’ space applications, such as 3D printing components for satellite repair or asteroid mining for rare minerals.

The three concluded the conversation by reaffirming their optimism for the space economy. This will take time and patience to play out, but it will also produce incredible returns for investors.

Publicly-traded companies mentioned in this interview include Alphabet, Amazon, Astroscale, Lockheed Martin, Maxar Technologies, Redwire, Rocket Lab, Virgin Galactic, and Virgin Orbit.

Transcript

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (00:01.923)

Okay, good morning everyone. Welcome to kind of an impromptu fun discussion that myself, Luke Hallard and Steve Simonton from 7 Investing are going to have. We’re gonna take a test drive or test flight, I suppose in this case, of our live streaming capabilities. This is going directly to our at 7 Investing Twitter feed. We’re also gonna feature it on our 7 Investing podcast. We appreciate everyone who’s joining as a live audience right now. But we wanted to look into kind of one of the topics

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (00:32.123)

We’re always issuing stock recommendations each and every month, and we kind of look at certain industries and how they’re changing. And one that Luke, Steve, and I are very excited and passionate about is the space economy. This is something that has progressed quite a bit in the last 50 years. It’s now seeing a lot of commercial interest. And of course, with those businesses and private companies taking an interest in outer space, that provides an opportunity for us as investors. So we’re going to take that for a spin. If you do have questions,

Steve Symington (00:56.793)

Thank you.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (01:01.843)

Investing on our Twitter handle will take any of the live questions that we get We’ll also be posting this like we said to the seven investing podcast You can sign up for that at seven investing comm slash email to get these directly delivered to your inbox Where if you are ready to see all of our stock recommendations seven investing comm slash subscribe to start a membership today Gentlemen, I think that I’ve got my homework done. I checked all the boxes of things I need to say at the beginning. Are you are you pumped about the space economy any any initial thoughts before we jump in here?

Steve Symington (01:33.041)

Go ahead, Luke.

Luke (01:34.602)

I would just say, you know, we’re getting together on the podcast. We’re chatting about space. We’re having a bit of a space party. Simon, do you know how you organize a space party?

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (01:42.724)

Ooh, how do you look? I don’t know.

Luke (01:44.742)

You planet.

Steve Symington (01:47.075)

Hahaha

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (01:49.407)

We will be here all day and the puns will continue. Luke, Luke, or Steve, can you top that? Luke had a good pun to kick us off. Anything you got, Steve?

Luke (01:51.522)

Yeah.

Steve Symington (01:57.410)

I’ve got nothing for dad jokes planned. I should have had something. But I was thinking of the actual space economy and how much more difficult it’s gotten from a capital standpoint. That was pivoting to the sad, serious part that’s had some real repercussions in recent months for companies that are strapped for cash.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (02:20.943)

Absolutely. Well, we’ll chat about that in a minute. You know, it kind of a reminder that all three of us have invested real money in the space economy. We all have positions in a lot of these companies that are available for investors. And in fact, Steve, you know, what was it 20 years ago now, Steve was actually working for the Department of Defense as a defense contractor. So he has a pretty unique perspective on satellites as well.

Steve Symington (02:41.850)

Right. We were one of the prime contractors on some, it was feature extraction from satellite and aerial imagery and some contracts that we had in place with, I mean, whatever agency it is, you name it. And LIDAR stuff, early stage LIDAR files that I envy the processing power people have at their disposal today because the things I could do, I spent so much time setting up like

well computing the algorithms for like to share resources across the network on just in retrospect, super weak machines, but they were beastie back then. So today I can’t even imagine what people are doing with it.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (03:23.983)

It’s come a long way in those two decades, Steve. But if we go even farther back in time, let’s look back into July of 1969, right? This is where the first man stepped foot on the moon. Even though none of us was watching that happen live, it was a pretty big deal. It kind of kicked off a space race between the US and Russia. Not just in building the spacecraft, they could get up there, but all the components that were involved with it, the rockets that were actually sending spacecraft out into outer space. And it kind of led to a whole lot of research that was government funded.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (03:54.163)

Here we are and you know in 1998 we had the International Space Station which is kind of a collaborative effort between US, Russia and other countries too but that needed payloads shipped up there. It kind of rockets kept getting better and bringing more and more things to this space station that was orbiting around the earth and that kind of has opened up here in recent years to not just being government funded, not just being government developed but a lot of private enterprises are working on the launch side of this. In addition to that

Steve Symington (04:07.034)

Mm-hmm.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (04:23.743)

doing further and further missions. We’ve seen the Artemis missions now being discussed, where they want to return back to the moon. We actually saw an unmanned craft go up to the moon. We actually put some satellites in orbit around the moon this past year. There’s some exciting stuff in space exploration that’s going on right now. And of course, we know that a lot of the R&D and research that goes into these government-funded missions further finds its way into commercial opportunities, right?

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (04:53.803)

of the stuff that we take for granted was developed out of necessity that was started from government funded projects. And then the last thing that I wanted to do to frame this is the importance of defense in the space industry too. This has been something that very, since the earliest days of the space economy, the most deep pocketed customer has been government funded defense funds, right? The US Defense Department and now Space Force is wanting to make sure that they have sovereign interests in protecting the country with satellites that are constantly doing surveillance.

and other things in communications and other things that support weaponry and military activities that are in outer space. So all of this is kind of a 50-year tenured history of where we’ve been before, but perhaps we want to talk about some of the opportunities that are available for commercial enterprises and for investors today. Luke, I might kick that off by talking about launch providers, because now it’s not just NASA’s spacecraft and NASA’s rockets that are shipping things up into orbit. We’ve seen

kind of the privatization of a lot of the launch industry. Would you like to kick us off and talk a little bit about that opportunity for investors?

Luke (06:02.662)

I suppose I’m wearing the SpaceX t-shirt and they’re really the big name in this space. I would love to be a SpaceX investor. Sadly, it’s still a private company, very hard to get access to that. I think in a very recent funding round, they’re raising money at $137 million valuation. So probably one of the most expensive private companies out there now that Stripe have taken a bit of a haircut. I think this space is really interesting. It’s a

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (06:05.863)

Thank you.

Luke (06:32.882)

right now for investors. And if you just take a look at the economics, the cost of putting a payload into low Earth orbit, the cost of that has fallen through the floor. And that’s just going to open up the economics of putting stuff into space for lots of different reasons that we’ll talk about today. Just to share a couple of numbers on that, it used to be $18,000 US dollars to put one

Luke (07:03.382)

back in sort of pre-2000s, today that’s under $2,000 per kilo. I could almost afford to put myself in space now. That’s expected to get down as low as perhaps $100, $150 per kilogram. So it just makes it much more accessible for even quite small companies to start putting comms, monitoring satellites, all sorts of really interesting stuff, not just the really big, you know, military industrial complex having access to this

new frontier. Very exciting.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (07:36.103)

Can you tell us a little bit about SpaceX’s approach? We know that Elon’s kind of the great disruptor of industry is it seems like, you know, he’s, can you talk about the types of rockets he’s building and then also how people are getting those affordable price points?

Luke (07:49.082)

Yeah, I suppose the big news is Falcon 9. I think they flew their 214th, or maybe the 216th, Falcon 9 mission just last week. And actually, March was the first time SpaceX have launched eight Falcon 9 launches in a single month. So this stuff is happening multiple times a week now. It’s pretty incredible. And typically, they’re using those launches. They’ve got economics really worked out well,

Not only are they servicing NASA and militaries, not just in the US but in other countries as well, but they’ve got their own payload, Starlink, which we can talk about. And the 214th mission at the end of March put another 56 Starlink satellites into space. So they’ve got the economics nailed because if they can’t find a customer, they’ve got their own customer in terms of building space internet effectively with Starlink. I think that’s a really incredible model

Steve Symington (08:36.950)

Thanks for watching!

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (08:50.963)

It’s pretty neat. Like you said, they’ve got their own internal interests. They want to put satellites for communications for Starlink. They’ve already got, I don’t know how many customers it is, but it’s a global operation. We know that a nearby actually uses Starlink down in Australia, but it seems like they have internal interests. But then they’re kind of opening it up for rideshare, right? Where you can put a payload onto a rocket, a Falcon rocket that’s already going to a certain orbital plane. It’s going where Elon wants it to go, where Starlink needs it to go. But if you also want to be in that same area, you want to, obviously, when you’re out in space,

spend as little as you can on fuel because fuel is expensive and heavy to get out there but if you’re kind of in the same neighborhood and you want to get off where the bus is stopping it seems like Starlink is the most economic way to do it.

Steve Symington (09:33.930)

Right.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (09:34.283)

Steve, we’ve also looked at kind of another opportunity in launch, which is dedicated launch. We’re saying that you don’t align with SpaceX’s schedule. The economics is not as important as getting the lowest dollar per kilogram cost. Like Luke mentioned, it was maybe $18,000 for rideshare kilograms several years ago and then down to below $2,000 per kilogram of payload today. By the numbers that I’ve looked at Rocket Lab, you can now do a dedicated launch of

Steve Symington (09:39.133)

Mm-hmm.

Steve Symington (09:42.455)

you

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (10:04.043)

$1.7 million average launch for a 300 kilogram payload, which by my math is a little bit more than $25,000 per kilogram. Now, why would you pay so much more when you could pay a fraction of that today with Elon? Well, the answer is because you can send it exactly where you want to, exactly when you want to. And so if you’re a business that’s got an operation that’s ready to go and time is money for you and you’ve got customers lined up that are ready to start paying you for this, you might not wanna wait.

Steve Symington (10:14.850)

Thanks for watching!

Steve Symington (10:23.171)

Right.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (10:34.143)

months until the right time is for you to serve the region that you want to serve. And so Steve, we’re kind of seeing the development of these smaller satellite launch providers, Rocket Lab being one of them right now.

Steve Symington (10:36.771)

Yeah.

Steve Symington (10:46.390)

Yes. And I think it’s important to note that if you are looking to put a payload into space, your options are fewer now than they were a year ago. And I mean, that’s a good thing for Rocket Lab, obviously, and for SpaceX. But you look at companies like Astra, which had multiple failed launches. And now if you look at the news for Astra, their most recent news is trying to

Steve Symington (11:16.310)

in with a potential reverse split, right? And Virgin Orbit, just how frustrating that whole situation was to kind of watch unfold. I recommended seven investing members sell Virgin Orbit after their failed launch because I realized they couldn’t afford any hiccups after their SPAC listing was undersubscribed and they raised less money than expected. And a lot of these companies are hungry for cash and they’re looking at SpaceX, they’re

Steve Symington (11:46.730)

to raise capital in this environment is just incredible. And I think that’s something that is going to be crucial now that you have less money out there to get and lending standards have tightened. They’re more strict in companies like Virgin Orbit just simply couldn’t raise the cash they needed. So we saw chapter 11 bankruptcy filing from them. So just in recent days, so what 11, 12, 11 cents per share right in there is where they’re trading right now is they figure out how to liquidate things.

So the landscape for companies that are well-funded and have the ability to raise cash and have been able to consistently complete their launches successfully, like SpaceX, what did you say? 200-plus missions that they’ve completed in Rocket Lab has this sterling record as well with what is it, dozens of launches, right? But Virgin Orbit was on their fifth launch and that failed and Astra has failed a couple in a row. I think consistency is key.

Steve Symington (12:47.891)

But I think consolidation is going to be the name of the game over the next couple of years as these companies realize that it’s a lot harder. Space is hard as they say, because of course it is. And some people are annoyed with hearing that, but the companies that do it well and do it consistently, I think are set up well to not only survive, but thrive over the long term. So that should be a fun one to watch after we see this consolidation.

Luke (13:15.502)

Can we just recognize how incredible it is that Rocket Lab are actually in contention as really the only other viable private space launch capability other than SpaceX? SpaceX have been at this for a long time. They’ve had a ton of failed launches, failed landings. Now they’ve got this nailed and they’re being successful almost every time. Somehow Rocket Lab have managed to sort of bootstrap themselves into a very similar position and have, you know, it’s gonna be a while

Steve Symington (13:27.298)

Hmm

Steve Symington (13:37.792)

Yeah.

Luke (13:45.482)

generating earnings for shareholders, but they’re on an incredible trajectory. And SpaceX are able to deliver payloads so cheaply because they’re kind of recovering almost every component now. They’re landing the boosters. Well, Rocket Lab are on that same journey too. They’re recovering key elements of the stuff they put into space, kind of catching things with helicopters. It won’t be long before they’re thinking about how do they land their boosters as well so they can reuse them in the same manner.

Steve Symington (13:47.692)

Mm-hmm.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (14:14.543)

It is really interesting, Luke. You’ve got such a gap between SpaceX, which is the 5,000 pound gorilla in this industry, and then you’ve got the much, much smaller players. Right. Out of the four largest globally, the four entities that have launched the most satellites into outer space have been US government, Chinese government, SpaceX and Rocket Lab. And we just said SpaceX, you know, okay.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (14:44.503)

for a moment. You looked at SpaceX. SpaceX is, what did we say it was? Like $130 billion private valuation or so right now. And then you’ve got Rocket Lab number four on the list, which is right in terms of private companies, right behind SpaceX at a less than $2 billion valuation. It just shows you how big of a gap there is between the funding and like Steve said, this is a really, really tough thing to do. This is not something that the three of us can do in our garage and start launching satellites out in outer space.

Luke (14:51.602)

Thank you.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (15:14.323)

There is some interesting context in this though that 2021, taking 2022 out of the picture because it was a challenging year for the economy, but 2021 actually had the most satellites that were attempted to launch into space, 144 during the year, and the most successful launches of satellites in outer space, 133. Those are the most of all time, all time records in 2021. The previous records

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (15:44.263)

low, but this is kind of an inflection point again, where there’s a renewed interest in putting satellites in this outer space. And this is an opportunity, of course, for the launch providers, like we just mentioned right there. One of the biggest opportunities is in satellite internet. And so let’s segue into this as a commercial opportunity of why are people sending, why are companies sending things in outer space? What are they doing? If you’re not doing something for defense, we mentioned Starlink is providing satellite internet. And I think that telecommunications

Steve Symington (15:59.350)

Thank you.

Steve Symington (16:09.250)

Thanks for watching!

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (16:14.803)

contributed to the satellite economy, the space economy if you will. In fact there’s a new spectrum called V-band. It’s about 50 GHz. If you want to actually transmit anything in this frequency you have to apply for it and the FCC said a couple of years ago, hey if you actually are interested in this spectrum for your own commercial purposes you need to send us an application to tell us why. There’s a huge regulatory process for anything that goes into outer space. You know if you need to decommission the satellite you know make sure it’s not going to interfere with other satellites and so

on and so on. And amazingly, they got over 38,000 new applications for satellites from mostly companies that wanted to use them for telecommunications. 22,000 of those were from Starlink. Starlink continues to iterate and improve the designs of the satellites that it wants to send up with its Falcon rockets. In fact, they’re actually testing out an even larger rocket this month, the Luke, which will be Starship, which will be taking off right here in my home state of

Luke (16:58.827)

you

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (17:14.483)

But Astral Labs, Steve, you mentioned them before, they’ve got an application for 13,000 satellites. One web who is wanting to provide internet for remote areas of the world, they’ve got an application for 6,000 new satellites. And then Amazon’s Project Kuiper for 3,000 satellites to support its web services division. There’s a lot of different launch providers that have an opportunity to serve these. And when you look at Rocket Lab as a whole,

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (17:44.783)

only about 150 total satellites up to this point. And then you’ve got 40,000 almost applications with the FCC. That’s an order of magnitude change that we could see if it’s allowed. This is not just something that’s given, but it’s something that’s gonna have to be figured out. Guys, I think there’s a huge commercial opportunity for the right companies to partake in this division of the space economy that we’re kind of calling satellite internet.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (18:14.548)

Any thoughts on that, Jaguetzi?

Steve Symington (18:15.791)

Yeah, and it’s spreading, I think, faster than we think already on a commercial scale. It was so interesting because if you go to SpaceX’s website and you ask to sign up for Starlink and you put in an address in my town, it’ll say it’s unavailable. But a few kind of persistent people in my town, including some of our good friends just a couple of weeks ago, decided to put in an order anyway.

Steve Symington (18:43.930)

And they sent them the hardware and it set it up and it works beautifully actually So they said it’s it’s no different than the cable internet that they had when they were our neighbors You know a few months ago and and so really really interesting where I think Maybe they’re they’re purposely kind of holding things back because of the the perceived not perceived demand the very real demand That they have for Starlink at this stage. So Yeah, it’s

Steve Symington (19:13.730)

wonder what kind of repercussions that’ll have with standard telecoms. You know, they’ll always be… maybe I should be careful with my wording there because in saying always, but generally the idea is that satellite internet will always be inferior to comparable hardwired like fiber to the home, you know, which is also coming to my town in Missoula, Montana up here.

Steve Symington (19:44.410)

You’d think there’d be, you know, as far as latency goes, as far as throughput for bandwidth goes, you know, how can space-based Internet systems and communications hope to keep pace with hardwired? And I think the answer is that it doesn’t really need to, right? You have two-thirds of the world that is still not connected to the Internet, which is bunkers to me in the United States.

Steve Symington (20:13.450)

It just has internet. It’s almost like this infallible human right. But two-thirds of the world doesn’t have it. And I think these companies, these space companies, are going to make a killing actually providing internet to the majority of the world that doesn’t have it yet. And it’s just a matter of being able to scale it. And for the companies that can consistently launch and expand their satellite networks like SpaceX, just keeping at it. Right?

Steve Symington (20:43.450)

hoping people don’t mind that our sky is dotted with many more fast moving objects at night.

Luke (20:50.502)

going to annoy hobbyist astronomers, but the price of progress, right? I think SpaceX have got nearly 4000 satellites up there now. And that’s just as of the last month or so. And I think they were due to announce at the end of March, I didn’t see the announcement, that they’ve got now complete global maritime coverage. So Steve said, you know, people like our

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (20:50.925)

Go ahead Luke.

Steve Symington (20:54.361)

Yes.

Steve Symington (20:57.650)

Mm-hmm.

Luke (21:20.542)

like antenna for their roof of the house, people are sticking these on boats, they’re putting on aircraft, on their recreational vehicle, you know, suddenly you’ve got pretty, you know, pretty solid internet connection, high bandwidth, low latency for kind of anywhere on the planet. And actually really exciting, I don’t know if they’ve launched it yet, but there’s been a pre-announcement that if you’ve got a T-mobile mobile phone, you don’t need

Steve Symington (21:28.772)

Mm-hmm.

Luke (21:50.782)

through the Starlink network from anywhere on the planet. So that’s incredibly disruptive and just incredibly helpful. If you’re out hiking or if you’re in a remote area, suddenly you perhaps don’t need expensive satellite phone technology. You can do it with your regular phone handset.

Steve Symington (22:08.870)

Yeah, and I used to be a T-Mobile customer and actually switched back to Verizon up here because the coverage was abhorrent and I couldn’t handle it. You’re traveling even within town and there’s big blobs of areas where you just can’t get anything. And I wonder if that’ll help with the standard telecoms who realize like, geez, we should supplement our existing tower networks. And Simon, you know a thing or two about that. I know you follow American Tower

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (22:09.063)

Yeah.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (22:37.143)

Yep.

Steve Symington (22:38.850)

7,000 plus you know towers more in the country you see those cell towers everywhere, but Just ubiquitous coverage and I think you know like you said the price of progress, I don’t mind the Satellites we were camping last summer kids like what’s that? And I was like that’s a line of SpaceX satellites. You know and you see him passing over a couple times a night and Really neat, but Simon

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (23:04.963)

So that’s the key here, Steve, is that, you know, I think the word that we should keep in mind as investors is constellations, right? When we’re talking about low Earth orbit, and maybe let’s step back and kind of talk about how you just mentioned, you know, the American towers of the world, or a lot of the fiber internet, a lot of these things are kind of stationary. They were putting a whole bunch of fiber cable into the ground. Google and others figured out that is really hard to make economical. It works for certain densely populated areas, but you’re not going to be doing that in most of the world that’s not getting internet today. And so the first

Steve Symington (23:10.772)

Alright.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (23:34.843)

things out in geosynchronous orbit, which is way out there, but it’s serving the same location, it’s moving at the same trajectory as the Earth. So if you wanted satellite TV, I was always going to be in my home, I was always going to get it from a certain satellite that was serving this region, and so on. But now we’re going into low Earth orbit, which is kind of like a whole bunch of these satellites moving like a swarm of bees. If you can think around that, going out in orbit across the entire world, but if one of them becomes damaged, if one of the nodes becomes unoperational, it just bounces to

note. And so you don’t disrupt the services. Not a, you know, satellites are expensive to place out there, but it’s not the entire business goes out. You don’t just entirely go out of business, the satellite stops working. And so that’s why you see, what is it, 30,000 applications, I’m sorry, 22,000 new applications, 30,000 total satellites that Starlink wants to place. It’s just kind of adding more and more, and you’re gonna have to be placing a whole lot of satellites at the same time. So the really interesting thing

Steve Symington (24:10.500)

Yeah.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (24:34.823)

maybe just offer a couple of thoughts on this as we close this segment out is, is that it’s not just about placing one satellite for one customer at one time into the orb where you want to. It’s gonna be placing 50 to 70 satellites at a time, up to hopefully several thousands. And all of the large players from Amazon to OneWeb to Starlink to anyone else that wants to place these constellations out there is trying to figure out who’s the right launch provider that can do this, knowing that payloads are expensive and there’s a high degree of failure for at least the providers that are available out there right now.

Project Kuiper with Amazon is going to be very interesting. The United Launch Alliance has been under contract for 92 missions over five years, but has yet to place a successful test mission even into outer space. But they’ve committed $10 billion to that project. We could talk about launch for a couple more hours, but I do want to move on a little bit, Luke, because you’ve got a whole bunch of other commercial opportunities that we mentioned. One of them was space tourism. Steve, I know you know a thing or two about this one too, right? Virgin Galactic has kind of gone out there guns blazing

exciting opportunity. Walk us through what this could look like, either one of you, Steve or Luke.

Steve Symington (25:36.272)

Bye.

Steve Symington (25:40.630)

Um, I, I can kick it off. Um, the, the way, you know, we’ve kind of seen a little bit of this work, um, early on is that it’s catering to high net worth individuals. We’ll, we’ll put it kindly, right. Uh, these are, these are folks who don’t mind spending a lot of money, um, for things that they can’t, that other people simply can’t experience. And, and, uh, you know, Virgin Galactic has, uh, I think last I checked, it was

Steve Symington (26:10.650)

there. What’s really, you know, the entire flight process lasts like an hour and 10 minutes, hour and 15 minutes and they get just three, four, five minutes actually in, you know, no gravity. Basically, it’s just past the line they would consider. You know, some people consider space and, you know, flips gives them a good view of Earth. Blue Origin, you

Steve Symington (26:40.710)

project is kind of the same deal. And you’ve seen several launches, including the one with him, where they went up and you get a quick view of Earth and come back down. And there’s lots of options and you even have some very, very, very rich people who end up going up to the space station via SpaceX or something. And you have people paying, what is it, $24 million or something for that. But over time,

The idea is that you’re going to start with projects like this, novelty trips like this that people pay $400,000 a pop or more, in Blue Origin’s case, but Virgin Galactic is $450,000 a ticket now. And I think there are people who will pay it in these early stages. It’s kind of like your early adopters. And that’s kind of, you know, people say, well, that’s not sustainable. How can you possibly scale that? You can’t make money that way.

can. It’s kind of like the people who bought Plasma TVs back in 2006 for $14,000 for a 43-inch flat screen because it was there and they could spend it. Over time, you’re able to scale this. You enjoy those economies of scale. You build more spaceships. You reduce the maintenance cost and frequency of maintenance requirements between flights. You’re able to just do this consistently and scale it up.

Steve Symington (28:10.410)

Eventually, you transition to something that Luke mentioned when I was joking this morning on my kid’s trip to school. A quick low earth orbit hop might make it just a couple minutes instead of 40. They closed the one lane bridge that we used to get to school for a week for repairs, which is hey Montana, right? So I have a 40 minute trip to get the boys to school and back instead of a 10, 12 minute trip. And yes.

Luke (28:25.902)

Thanks for watching!

Steve Symington (28:40.530)

Earth orbit hops on certain planes and make you know intercontinental travel just snappy right and that’s that’s kind of the idea over the long term you can do that and you can do trips where you pop people up to space briefly and take a look and over time you know 15 20 30 years down the line you have space stations that are you know commercial space stations that are in the process

Steve Symington (29:10.870)

for example, that have, they build hardware and solutions for all these space stations, supplies and everything. So lots of different opportunities, I think, will pop up. But this feels so early stage that people dismiss it as a novelty that’s going to go away. And I don’t think that’s going to happen, especially with crazy companies like SpaceX kind of pushing the disruptive innovation side of things.

forward. I think it will be very real a few decades from now. Almost like air travel didn’t used to be a thing, right? And it wasn’t that long ago, you know, you think the Wright brothers actually lived long enough to see the first commercial flight, which is wild to me. When you think back on this, this brief, the brief timeline that things have happened, and I think it’s going to be more real than people realize.

Luke (30:07.062)

I haven’t refreshed my insight on this, but I think we’ve got a pretty famous chap heading into space fairly soon. I think Tom Cruise is off to the ISS in the next couple of years to film a documentary or film a movie. I mean, of course he is because he’s Tom Cruise. He’s probably going to parachute back to earth afterwards, God knows. But that’s really going to drive a lot of attention to this whole area.

Steve Symington (30:20.390)

Yeah.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (30:23.033)

I’m sorry.

Steve Symington (30:24.435)

Yeah.

Steve Symington (30:29.490)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and there’s a lot of speculation too with the Virgin Galactics of the world and Of who’s going to be on their first commercial flights, right and they say they’re on track to begin commercial service With flights. I think what they’re shooting for is about once a month You know sometime in the second quarter They hope to resume or commence their their true commercial service and it will be somewhat infrequent at first but there’s a lot of speculation on the famous people

who have tickets who will be raising awareness in the first place. I know there was Ashton Kutcher, for example, had a Virgin Galactic ticket that after he got married and had a kid, he said, you know what? Maybe I should do this another time and and he gave that one back, but there’s a lot of other famous people I know, you know have these tickets and and will raise awareness like Tom Cruise. I’d be curious because I haven’t heard of that Who or which platform he’s gonna use to get there? Because I think there’s a couple options now

for people to get there.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (31:31.543)

How about it, Luke, are you gonna use space travel to cut down the flight times between continents for vacations? Is this appealing to you?

Steve Symington (31:34.950)

Thanks for watching!

Luke (31:38.702)

I think it’s pretty expensive right now, but I think ARK Invest put like, it’s called Hypersonic Travel basically, you know, getting to near Earth orbit and then coming down. So you could do kind of, you know, New York to London in like minutes, like less than an hour. I think ARK put this at something like a $270 billion industry potentially. If you just look at how much money people spend on kind of private flights, it’s just kind of a step on from that.

Steve Symington (31:47.650)

Thanks for watching!

Steve Symington (32:00.350)

Thanks for watching!

Steve Symington (32:05.050)

Well, yeah, and you look now, it’s like people say, oh, how absurd that people pay $450,000 a pop just to go on a brief space flight with Virgin Galactic. But they’re already spending $7500,000 for certain plane tickets on private air travel, which isn’t a space hop, a hypersonic flight. So it’s not a big jump even now in these early stages without scale from what people are

Steve Symington (32:35.232)

anyway.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (32:36.943)

That’s not going to be everywhere, right? Every plane is not going to suddenly be a spacecraft, but you can certainly see for something like London to Sydney and a two hour trip instead of how many hours a day. I mean, there will be certain flights that might be appealing for the right commercial travelers for something like that.

Luke (32:36.962)

Mind you if I’m… If I’m…

Steve Symington (32:38.757)

No.

Steve Symington (32:44.935)

Yeah.

Steve Symington (32:49.410)

Yeah, I’m not going to fly from a Zula to Seattle, you know, via hypersonic flight. That only takes, you know, spend more time boarding than I do on the flight.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (32:54.909)

It’ll take 12 seconds though, Steve. It’ll be really, really quick.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (33:02.003)

I do want to chat a little bit because you said hypersonic, Luke. I want to talk a little bit about the military applications right now. This is a little bit different than the things we’ve talked about before, but there is a lot of interest in private companies that are operating satellites for military purposes, right? And one of the biggest being surveillance. Of course, there’s heightened geopolitical risks right now. There’s Eastern European conflict, you know, with Russian Ukraine going on. And this is really kind of prompted a lot more interest in tracking

missiles. And this is kind of the thing that everyone wants to know, you know, is this going to escalate? And if it does, we need to be prepared. And so this is why you’ve seen a lot of people, a lot of headlines, a lot of analysts referring to kind of the remilitarization of space. It’s been escalated this past year. You’ve seen the National Reconnaissance Office, the NRO of the United States now, putting money into getting satellites as quickly as possible to really get

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (34:02.303)

And the Defense Department is backing this. But this is a less price-sensitive customer, more of a demanding, it has to be quick and it has to be perfect to the specifications that are out there. And so it’s kind of a blend of the launch providers, like we talked about before, of who can get up there in a couple of weeks versus six months or a year. But then also, who’s got the data and who can interpret and do the communications of the satellites for a very highly demanding government

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (34:31.643)

this. The reason I bring all of this up is Maxar Technologies was one of those companies that got acquired, right? It was six billion dollars back in, I believe it was December, but they got bought out by a private equity company that paid 120% premium to the equity valuation, right? It was 120% pop or so for a company that was running operations from a satellite that it was using for the government. This feels to me, gentlemen, a lot like the cybersecurity industry.

that we’re using to protect the internet. You’re not going to get fired for replacing CrowdStrike. There’s mission critical things. You have to secure the perimeter of a government organization that needs to keep out bad guys and harmful actors that might breach these systems that are super high in security needs. And then, of course, the largest of enterprises that are moving workloads to the cloud need the same things for cybersecurity protection. If you’ve got something that is important and is a national concern that’s out

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (35:32.103)

you’ve got to protect it. And of course there are a lot of satellite operations that are operating in that world. These are hundreds of millions of dollar contracts. These are companies that are worth several billions of dollars in valuations right now. I personally believe we are not done in seeing consolidation and acquisitions in this space as there’s a lot of companies out there that are operating satellites. They launched them up there. They’ve got the comms, they’ve got the data, they’ve got the contracts. I think we’re gonna be seeing a couple more of those consolidate and get bought out in the next couple of years.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (36:01.603)

This is your field. What do you think about this one?

Steve Symington (36:04.632)

Sorry, you were glitching out for me there and I kind of missed that last part.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (36:08.904)

Just that I think there’s going to be more consolidation of operators, of satellites that are used for defense purposes. And just do you have any thoughts about this one?

Steve Symington (36:12.492)

Right.

Steve Symington (36:14.770)

Yes, there. Okay. That consolidation for defense, I think we’re already seeing that. And I think, not necessarily via mergers and acquisitions, but via options that go bankrupt on the defense side. And it’s a very difficult space for a lot of these companies to handle in an environment where

Steve Symington (36:45.010)

tend to be lumpy in the sense that they come in big chunks with milestones attached and can be somewhat inconsistent based on the defense budgets and how they’re allocated and whether you can actually win these contracts and whether you’re a prime contractor or a subcontractor. And you have companies like Virgin Orbit, for example, which lauded in its pre-SPAC presentations

Steve Symington (37:15.150)

as sort of an enviable option for governments for defense purposes. So you had a satellite taken down by an enemy, we can launch it, you know, on short notice from any airport and get it back up there and well that’s not gonna be an option anymore. And that was part of the the interesting application for companies like Virgin Orb is that, you know, they were hoping to be able to designate any, you know, any place with a runway because they’re dropping

Steve Symington (37:44.650)

launches in a normal fashion rather than upright. And it’s, I think capital is the most crucial thing right now for a lot of these companies because they’re unprofitable. And unless they can actually win contracts to keep them afloat along the way, it’s difficult to be able to support their operations in the meantime. And I think a lot of that, the onus is going to fall on established operators like Rocket Lab and SpaceX to be able to supply this kind

stuff. But you also have, you know, your sort of perennial prime contractors, your Raytheons and your Northrop Grummans. And, you know, they’re going to be participating in these contracts, you know, and the launch Alliance and such. But it’s capitalist is king, I think, in this industry, because it’s a capital intensive environment. And, you know, they will, to a certain extent,

Steve Symington (38:44.690)

to run these defense operations. It’s in their best interest to keep these companies afloat. But in some of the smaller cases, I think it’s inevitable that we see more failure over time and consolidation towards the larger operators.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (39:00.543)

So I want to double click on that because I completely agree, Steve. You mentioned American Tower earlier, right? This is the operator that’s providing cell service, right? You’re AT&T, you’re Verizon in the US, you’re the large telecom companies internationally, you’re using them for the towers where you’re putting your routers in place and you’re connecting cell phones to them, right? So Verizon and AT&T don’t own those towers. They hire American Tower to go build them, to put the infrastructure in place because it’s super capital intensive, like you just mentioned, right?

Steve Symington (39:10.371)

Yep.

Steve Symington (39:27.150)

Mm-hmm.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (39:30.983)

right now. Google has got Google Earth, you know, it had satellites but then that division which was called SkySat Labs, they sold it off to Planet Labs because they wanted them to operate it, they wanted them to do all the communications, all the infrastructure stuff, all the permitting, anything you had to for the satellites, it was too expensive to deal with all that. And so you start seeing these consolidations of operations for the infrastructure that someone wants to use for something else. Seems like the same thing’s happening in space economy.

Luke (39:38.727)

you

Steve Symington (39:47.814)

Yeah.

Steve Symington (39:55.970)

Yeah, and not just with launch either, but, you know, defense purposes for imagery. We saw consolidation in the last 10 years of several of the imagery providers that I used to visit down in, you know, the Denver and Colorado Springs area, your digital globes and, you know, you saw a lot of mergers and acquisitions in that case because they realized that operating distinct satellites is difficult and capital intensive.

Steve Symington (40:25.950)

You know lucrative, but it’s also going to be something where you see kind of more software intensive kind of cyber security battles in space. Sounds super futuristic, but that sort of thing was already happening with SpaceX and Starlink and their engineers with Starlink supporting Ukraine for the whole Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And they’re providing Starlink satellites.

Steve Symington (40:56.050)

constantly battling with denial of service attacks and trying to keep ahead of really enemy communications and enemy software engineers who were battling to bring down those networks. And that’s going to be a big piece is companies that have an innovative, massive group of software engineers who can step in will be able to actually win in those battles as well. So

Steve Symington (41:26.150)

a an even bigger thing and consistent launch again because you will have satellites brought down you know you’re gonna have you know intercontinental missiles that you know can step into space and and you know you’ve seen I believe China actually had a couple tests bringing down satellites of their own and you know they will they’ll do this under the guise of normal maintenance or you know you know we needed to take this down but you know two birds one stone right

cases and they’re figuring out how to take down certain constellations if need be. And it’s going to be interesting to watch as well because you need to also do that somewhat safely, you know, not take down a satellite constellation over the continental United States and put people’s lives at risk because of falling space debris that doesn’t burn up on reentry. But

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (42:19.623)

Well, not just that. I mean, you said lucrative. So, Luke, let’s talk another lucrative opportunity. I told you the puns weren’t done, guys. I told you I was going to keep up coming with more of them. But Luke, you mentioned that in orbit servicing was kind of an industry we don’t think a lot about, but it’s going to be required, right? I just visited NASA this past month, and you can see even just small pieces of debris, plastics that are floating around that collide with other satellites can look like bullet holes and pierce through metal casings. I mean,

Steve Symington (42:26.410)

Nice.

Steve Symington (42:31.550)

Thanks for watching!

Steve Symington (42:49.350)

Thank you.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (42:49.723)

Stuff like this is underappreciated. It seems like there’s a lot of requirement for a sub-industry that just takes care of these expensive satellites you’re putting in outer space out there.

Luke (42:58.202)

Yeah, and I don’t think we have a good solution to that today. You’re like there’s tens of thousands of satellites and that’s going to 10 X over the coming years. It just takes two of those to collide because they’re not being monitored properly or operated by different agencies. Perhaps suddenly you could end up with this cascade of hypersonic fragments. And it’s a real kind of doomsday scenario for our kind of communications capability.

Luke (43:28.142)

for space debris removal. I think one Astroscale, might be a UK company, actually. I’m not too sure. They’re actually doing active missions right now to try and de-orbit smaller payloads and satellites and things like that. And they’ve got a device that can, in theory, connect to a satellite that wasn’t designed to have something docking with it, so it can throw it out of orbit at a safe time. So it kind of burns up and then drops

And there’s a bunch of companies, including big companies like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, looking at exactly the space. Because the more stuff we put up, well, we need to be able to sort of de-orbit it safely, just to kind of keep the highways clear, as it were.

Steve Symington (44:16.350)

There is, I think, more than we realize going on to that end, by the way. That’s something that Redwire actually specializes in is in-space manufacturing and in-space repair and reconstitution of satellite assets. They actually have lots of interesting solutions to allow people to do just that.

Steve Symington (44:45.590)

more than half a dozen acquisitions over the last several years of smaller businesses and we’re seeing consolidate but yeah there’s a lot of sort of little-known companies underappreciated businesses that are allocating a lot of resources toward in-space manufacturing repair of constellation satellites and reconstitution so definitely something that they’ve thought of that are actively working on and you’ll see a lot more of but again at this stage not

super economical, but it’s something that’s going to need to happen. And I think as we have more of those applications for thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands of new satellites coming into play, you’re going to see a spike in demand for these kinds of services that companies like Redwire, RDW is that ticker, provides as far as you know in-orbit repair and manufacturing capabilities.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (45:43.923)

How do they do it? Is it robotics, Steve? Do they send robots that, you know, have got fuel and then they kind of attach and do everything they need to?

Steve Symington (45:48.930)

There is some of that, but it really depends on the satellite. And, you know, they’ve got some really neat videos about, like in space manufacturing and in space construction, where they can actually send up, you know, a station or a larger satellite in multiple pieces and actually construct it while in orbit. So yeah, a lot of robotics involved and, you know, some of the stuff that they, they sort of keep low key on the defense side, of course. But, yeah.

Steve Symington (46:19.852)

It’s pretty slick. The more you kind of dig into it, you can find yourself in that rabbit hole for a solid day if you really want to.

Luke (46:27.582)

I guess that must be a really interesting application for 3D printing, right, because if you’ve got like a bunch of flexible raw materials and you’ve got the right kind of printing capability, you can kind of build anything you need in orbit.

Steve Symington (46:34.214)

Right.

Steve Symington (46:40.010)

Yeah, and I mean, everything from, you know, 3D printers, you know, from plastic to metal to food, you know, and that’s something that I was writing about a decade ago where they have 3D printers that are designed for space applications that’ll mix oils with powders and selectively apply heat. And it’s almost like a space-based MRE and, you know, something that can actually feed an astronaut with nutrients. And yeah, there’s a lot to it.

I think that’s actually one of the things that companies like SpaceX with hundreds of successful launches are sort of accelerating, is that a lot of this technology existed on a small scale. They said, look what we can do, but who’s going to use it right now, except a few government agencies and everything. And I think once space travel demand picks up and missions like this that move forward,

Steve Symington (47:40.030)

I want to say necessity is the mother of invention, right? And you’re going to, when the scale of a problem becomes great enough, you never underestimate human ingenuity to provide an economical solution to it. And I think over the next several years, we’re going to see lots of really interesting solutions come out of the rise of the space economy.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (48:05.183)

I want to talk about a couple more fun applications. I say fun because they might be a little bit farther out, sound more like sci-fi, but they are on our radar, more pun intended there. And I wanted to recap some of the conversations and the companies that we mentioned in the discussion previously. Before we do that really quickly, I do want to make sure we get in our sponsored read from our sponsor for this podcast, which is Stocks Current. Stocks Current is your investment companion and guide that’s helping individual investors on their investment journey.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (48:35.143)

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Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (49:08.225)

Their membership comes with a 30 day, 100% money back guarantee. Luke, let’s go on and talk about a couple more that sound kind of fun. You mentioned lunar exploration and mining and also asteroid mining. This sounds like something that might be in an Isaac Asimov book, but this is something that’s got some pretty significant commercial potential, right?

Luke (49:30.402)

It really does. But I mean, let’s caveat this. This is basically science fiction today, right? This is decades out before it’s at any kind of scale. But if we just think about, like what are the things inhibiting like the growth of humanity and like our advancing as a species, right? We’re on the cusp of one of them right now with AI. We’re probably not more than 10 or 20 years away from limitless sustainable energy. We can kind of crack fusion.

Luke (50:00.522)

sort of the next one is really limitless resources. So, you know, we are, we’re sort of short of rare earth minerals and metals, which we’re using to build batteries and things, or they’re hard to get to. In space, you know, we potentially have not just on the moon, which is like rich in water, ice, helium-3, we’ve got asteroids, which are just kind of enormous kilotons of platinum and other,

Luke (50:30.462)

back to red wire and repairing stuff in orbit. Well, if we’ve got 3D printers, even if it’s $130 per kilogram to lift something from the surface of the Earth, if we’ve got the ability to actually do asteroid prospecting and mining, we don’t need to spend money lifting stuff up from the planet. It’s out there already. Let’s just capture it and start making use of it and using advanced manufacturing techniques

build our orbital infrastructure, build moon bases, build staging posts on Mars and go to the next stage of the species. I did say this was super sci-fi, so I’m going to end my caveat there, but it’s really exciting stuff I think.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (51:15.046)

I love it.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (51:18.343)

Steve, what do you think? I mean, I know that it was a Peter Diamandis that was really looking at asteroid money. Saw that, you know, multi-trillion dollar opportunity, obviously gonna take a long time to figure it out, but the money’s there if they can figure it, get it to work.

Steve Symington (51:31.370)

Right. It feels so far off that I haven’t given it a lot of thought as far as the actual economics. But I mean, I think of what’s the movie Armageddon where they’re trying to blow up the asteroid before it reaches Earth. I think back, it’s like, yeah, that feels pretty sci-fi. But what has the problem become when you’re bringing back materials like platinum and decreasing or

Steve Symington (52:01.330)

available platinum stores on earth. But yeah, I don’t know. That’s something that I think it’s worth watching, but that’s probably going to take decades before we’re really able to get there. But maybe we’ll look back on this podcast and say, hey, we were talking about that 15 years ago and you see something that happens now, but obviously worth watching.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (52:25.703)

It really is kind of neat. I was chatting a couple of months ago with Michael Walter Range, who’s from Calais Partners, spent a career in the space industry. And he says there are actually job titles, full time employees right now, who have got job titles like interplanetary exploration or planetary defense of what would happen if we meet another species, what is our response going to be, how are you going to conduct the operations that are out there. I mean, it’s actually happening. It does sound sci-fi, but there are

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (52:55.483)

figuring these things out. And certainly commercial opportunities that are in markets that begin with the letter T, for trillion, have got significant implications. Before we do a recap, any final thoughts, anything we haven’t touched on that you wanted to get in here before we wrap up the podcast? Luke, I’ll go with you first.

Luke (53:10.782)

It is just such a fantastic area and it’s incredible to be alive at this time. I’ve been a science fiction fan for my whole life really. And now to see some of this stuff coming off the page and actually, you know, taking place. I’m it’s in my bucket list to come and see a SpaceX launch and landing. So I might come visit you in Texas sometime in the next year or so, Simon. And it sounds like I can pick my dates now because they’re landing stuff almost multiple times a week.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (53:33.243)

Thanks for watching!

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (53:38.584)

Late April, Brownsville for the Starship. Come on over, Luke. We’ll find a place and we’ll watch it take off. It sounds fun. Steve, what do you think? Any final thoughts on space economy?

Steve Symington (53:48.190)

I just think it’s worth reiterating that even though we’re very early stage, there will be maybe because we’re very early stage, there will be more failures. There will be lots of consolidation. There’s going to be mergers and acquisitions, especially as long as capital remains restrictive, the ability to raise capital. But there will also be extraordinary successes. And I think SpaceX is going to be one of those. My goodness. What would happen if Elon decides to take that one?

public, it would be wild. But I think the strong will survive and people who have the wherewithal to step in at the right time will make a lot of money in the process and will obviously be continuing to watch opportunities for retail investors to kind of take advantage of this in the meantime. But yeah, it’s going to be a fun one to watch over the next 5, 10, 15 years.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (54:47.923)

Absolutely. Now, one more fun question before we wrap this up is let’s say that January 1st, 2024, SpaceX is going to spin off into, I’m sorry, not spin off, all of SpaceX will go public at a $200 billion valuation. So it’s got to be a premium from where we are right now, Luke. Are you buying shares at the IPO at $200 billion of SpaceX?

Luke (55:12.142)

So I had a conversation with my buddy Albert a couple of years ago, and it was, if you were forced to go all in your entire portfolio on one company, which would it be? And my answer was SpaceX. It’s the only thing out there where I think I’m happy to stick the whole night on the line and let’s see what happens.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (55:30.183)

That’d be one heck of an IPO. Steve, are you buying shares at 200 billion?

Steve Symington (55:34.910)

Can I get in at IPO pricing or do I have to buy after the first day pop? Because that’s what’s going to happen. Heck yeah. Then, uh, absolutely. Um, yeah, I’m, I’m, I’m going to be averaging in, but, uh, I think it would be a pretty wild, wild pop to see what happens. And, and, uh, you know, I think the valuation, uh, is working on justifying itself. So, um, yeah, I don’t think people should be surprised if we see a hundred billion dollar valuation if and when it actually comes public because it’s raising money at those levels and it’s only continuing to scale so what a what a crazy business

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (56:16.783)

Absolutely. Well, certainly a crazy industry too. It’s one like we mentioned, it’s got a lot of risks, but that shouldn’t also disguise that it’s got huge opportunities as we mentioned on this podcast today. I thank you, Luke Hallard. Thank you, Steve Simonton, our seven investing lead advisors where every month we are recommending publicly traded stock opportunities, several of which, and several of our actual recommendations are also in the space economy. Recapping a couple of the companies we mentioned here on today’s podcast, we did mention Rocket Lab, we mentioned Amazon,

Amazon, we mentioned Virgin Galactic, we mentioned Redwire, and we mentioned Astroscale. These are all publicly traded opportunities. I believe Astroscale is a UK-based publicly traded loop. Correct me if I’m wrong on that one.

Luke (56:59.342)

Sure.

Steve Symington (57:01.172)

Astra spaces, Astra spaces publicly traded, but yeah, they’re, they’re struggling to maintain their NASDAQ listing at this point too. And Virgin Orbit also was another mention there, but I do not recommend buying that, by the way.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (57:16.263)

Yeah, perfect. Want to throw out a couple of publicly traded ideas out there for investors. Of course, do your own diligence, but we do a lot of great research here at 7 Investing. And again, that’s 7investing.com slash subscribe, if you’d like to check our service out. If you sign up today, we’re doing a limited promotion right now that you’ll get the first month of starter membership for absolutely free. So we encourage you to check that out. My name is Simon Erickson. Really appreciate your time here today. Thanks for tuning into our podcast and live stream on the space economy with myself, Luke and Steve.

Simon Erickson 7 Innovator (57:46.343)

forward to seeing our future podcasts and we hope that you have a wonderful day. We’re here to empower you to invest in your future. We are 7 Investing.