Pod Insights Lex Fridman Podcast #157 – Natalya Bailey: Rocket Engines and Electric Spacecraft Propulsion About this episode Natalya Bailey is a rocket propulsion engineer from MIT and now CTO of Accion Systems. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(06:51) – Intelligent life in the universe
(10:52) – Life in our solar system
(12:57) – Humans on Mars
(16:31) – Robots vs human in space exploration
(17:25) – AI in space
(21:30) – How rocket engines work
(26:47) – How ion engines work
(31:10) – How colloid engines work
(40:07) – Material science
(42:57) – Nuclear powered rocket engines
(47:56) – Electric propulsion out in space
(51:23) – Satellites
(56:17) – Photo of Earth from the Moon
(57:55) – Humans on Mars
(1:00:17) – Propulsion without fuel
(1:08:12) – How to build a rocket company
(1:15:10) – SpaceX and commercial spaceflight
(1:19:42) – Advice to startup founders
(1:26:18) – Book recommendations
(1:34:36) – Meaning of life
Transcript 15,321 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Lex Fridman? The following is a conversation with Natalia Bailey, a rocket scientist and spacecraft propulsion engineer, previous at MIT and now the founder and CTO of Axiom Systems, specializing in efficient space propulsion engines for satellites and spacecraft. So these are not the engines that get us from the ground on Earth out to space, but rather the engines that move us around in space once we get out there. Quick mention of our sponsors: Monkpack Low Carb Snacks, Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, Blinkist, an app that summarizes books, and Sun Basket, meal delivery service. So the choice is snacks, caffeine, knowledge, or a delicious meal. Choose wisely, my friends,
0:45 Lex Fridman? and if you wish, click the sponsored links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say something about Natalia's story. She has talked about how when she was young, she would often look up at the stars and dream of alien intelligences that one day we could communicate with. This moment of childlike cosmic curiosity is at the core of my own interest in space and extraterrestrial life, and in general, in artificial intelligence, science, and engineering. Amid the meetings and the papers and the career rat race and all the awards, let's not let ourselves lose that childlike wonder. Sadly, we're on Earth for only a very short time, so let's have fun solving
1:28 Lex Fridman? some of the biggest puzzles in the universe while we're here. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I tried to make these interesting, but I do give you timestamps, so go ahead and skip if you must. But please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It is honestly the best way to support this podcast. This episode is brought to you by Monk Pack Keto Granola Bars that contain just one gram of sugar, two grams of net carbs, and they're only 140 calories.
2:10 Lex Fridman? They're great for anyone following a keto lifestyle, but also the perfect snack for anyone who's trying to cut back on sugar and carbs without sacrificing taste. I'm not sure if everyone who tries to eat keto will feel like I do, but at least for me, low carb has been a huge boost to mental focus and overall energy levels. If you like, you should check out the AMA I did last week where I talk about the benefits of keto had on my life. Try it for yourself and you'll see. And we have a special deal for our listeners. Get 20% off your first purchase of any Monk Pack product by visiting munkpack.com and entering code Lex at checkout. If you don't like it for any reason, they'll refund your money guaranteed.
2:55 Lex Fridman? To get started, just go to munkpack.com. That's M U N K pack.com and select any product, then enter the code Lex at checkout to save 20% off your purchase. This show is also brought to you by Four Sigmatic, the maker of delicious mushroom coffee and plant-based protein. I enjoy both. The coffee has lion's mane mushroom for productivity and chaga mushroom for immune support. The plant-based protein has immune support as well and tastes delicious. Supporting your immune system is one of the best things you can do right now for your health amidst this pandemic. Not only does Four Sigmatic always have 100% money back guarantee, but they're right now
3:39 Lex Fridman? offering big discounts for our listeners if you go to foursigmatic.com/lex. That's foursigmatic.com/lex and get yourself thoroughly over caffeinated, just like me.
3:51 Lex Fridman? If you have to have one addiction in your life, coffee is one of the better ones. This episode is also supported by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things. Blinkist takes the key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down into just 15 minutes that you can read or listen to. I'm a big believer in reading, at least an hour a day. As part of that, I use Blinkist almost every day to try out a book I may otherwise never have a chance to read. And in general, it's a great way to broaden your view of the ideal landscape out there and find books that you may want to read more deeply. With Blinkist, you get unlimited access to read or listen to a massive library of condensed nonfiction books.
4:32 Lex Fridman? I also use Blinkist Shortcast to quickly catch up on podcast episodes I've missed. There are so many podcasts out there and they're so amazing. I love it. Right now Blinkist has a special offer just for the listeners of this one particular podcast. Go to blinkist.com/lex to start your free seven day trial and get 25% off of a Blinkist Premium Membership. That's Blinkist, spelled like blink and then I S T dot com slash lex to get 25% off and a seven day free trial. Blinkist.com/lex. Lex is spelled L E X. This show is also sponsored by Sun Basket.
5:17 Lex Fridman? Sun Basket delivers fresh, healthy, delicious meals straight to your door. As you may know, my diet is pretty minimalistic or minimalist. It's both minimalistic and minimalist. That's fun to say. So it's nice to get some healthy variety into the mix. They make it easy and convenient with everything pre-portioned and ready to prep and cook. You can enjoy a delicious, healthy dinner in as little as 15 minutes. I've enjoyed a lot of meals from their menu that fit my, what they call carb-conscious ways. Some items on the menu that I have written down are black Angus ribeye steak with broccoli and radishes, Italian sausages and vegetable skewers with two romesco's, Mediterranean
6:01 Lex Fridman? lemon chicken with baby broccoli, artichokes and olives. And there's many more delicious ones, even in just the carb-conscious category. Right now, Sun Basket is offering $35 off your order when you go to sunbasket.com/lex and enter promo code Lex at checkout. Again, visit sunbasket.com/lex and use code Lex to get 35 bucks off your order. And now, finally, here's my conversation with Natalia Bailey.
6:51 Lex Fridman? You said that you spent your whole life dreaming about space and also pondering the big existential question of whether there is or isn't intelligent life, intelligent alien civilizations out there. So what do you think? Do you think there's life out there? Intelligent life?
7:08 Speaker 01 Intelligent life? That's trickier. I think looking at, you know, the likelihood of a self-replicating organism, given how much time the universe has existed and how many stars with planets. I think it's likely that there's other life. Intelligent life, I'm hopeful. You know, I'm a little discouraged that we haven't yet been in touch.
7:39 Lex Fridman? Allegedly. I mean,
7:41 Speaker 01 in our dimensions and so on, yeah.
7:44 Lex Fridman? It's also possible that they have been in touch and we just haven't, we're too dumb to realize they're communicating with us. And whichever, it's the, it's this Carl Sagan idea that they may be communicating on a time scale that's totally different. Like their signals are on a totally different time scale or on a, like, a totally different kind of medium of communication. It could be, it could be our own, it could be the birth of like, human beings, like,
8:14 Lex Fridman? That the whatever the magic that makes us who we are, the collective intelligence thing, that could be aliens themselves, that could be the medium of communication. Like, the nature of our consciousness and intelligence itself is the medium of communication.
8:28 Speaker 01 And like, being able to ask the questions themselves, I've never thought of it that way.
8:35 Lex Fridman? Like, actually, yeah, asking the question whether aliens exist might be the very medium by which they communicate. It's like, they they send questions.
8:43 Speaker 01 So some of this, like, collective emergent behavior is is the signal.
8:49 Lex Fridman? Is the signal, yeah. So.
8:51 Speaker 01 Interesting, yeah.
8:53 Lex Fridman? Because maybe that's how we would communicate with, if you think about it, if we were way, way, way smarter, like, a thousand years from now, we somehow survive, like, how would we actually communicate in a way that's like, if we broadcast the signal, you know, and then it could somehow like percolate throughout the universe, like, that signal having an impact.
9:15 Speaker 01 Multiverse.
9:16 Lex Fridman? Multiverse, of course.
9:19 Lex Fridman? That would have a signal, an effect on the most possible, the most, the highest number of possible civilizations, what would that signal be? It might not be like sending a few, like, stupid little hello world messages. It might be something more impactful. What, it's almost like impactful in a way where they don't have to have the capability to hear it. It like forces the message to have an impact.
9:47 Speaker 01 Right. My train of thought has never gone gone there, but I like it. And also, somewhere in there, I think it's implied that something travels faster than the speed of light, which I'm also really hopeful for.
10:02 Lex Fridman? Oh, you're hopeful. Are you excited by the possibility that there's intelligent life out there? Sort of, you work on on the engineering side of things. It's this very kind of focused pursuit of moving things through space efficiently. But, you know, if you zoom out, one of the cool things that this enables us to do is find, forget even intelligent life, just life on Mars or on Europa or something like that. Does that excite you? Does that scare you?
10:36 Speaker 01 Oh, it's very exciting. I mean, it's the whole reason I went into the field I'm in is to contribute to building the body of knowledge that we have as a species. So, very exciting.
10:52 Lex Fridman? Do you think there's life on Mars?
10:55 Lex Fridman? Like, no longer, well, already living, but currently living, but also no longer living, like that we might be able to find life, as some people suspect, basic microbial life?
11:08 Speaker 01 I'm not so sure about in our own solar system, and I do think it might be hard to untangle if we somehow contaminated other things as well.
11:19 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
11:20 Speaker 01 So, I'm not sure about this close to home.
11:23 Lex Fridman? That'd be really exciting.
11:25 Speaker 01 Yes.
11:25 Lex Fridman? Like, do you think about the Drake equation much of like?
11:28 Speaker 01 That was what, yeah, what got me into all of this, yeah.
11:33 Lex Fridman? Yeah, because one of the questions is how hard is it for life to start on a habitable planet? Like, if you have a lot of the basic conditions, not exactly like Earth, but basic Earth-like conditions, how hard is it for life to start? And if you find life on Mars or find life on Europa, that means it's way easier. That's a good thing to confirm that if you have a habitable planet, then there's going to be life. And that, like, immediately, that would be super exciting, because that means there's like trillions of planets with basic life out there.
12:09 Speaker 01 Though, of all the planets in our solar system, Earth is clearly the most habitable, so I would not be discouraged if we didn't find it on another planet in our solar system.
12:21 Lex Fridman? True. And again, that life could look very different. It's habitable for Earth-like life, but it could be... Totally different. I still think that trees are quite possibly more intelligent than humans, but their intelligence is carried out over a time scale that we're just not able to appreciate. Like, they might be running the entirety of human civilization, and we're just like too dumb to realize that they're the smart ones.
12:45 Speaker 01 Maybe that's the alien message. It's in the trees.
12:49 Lex Fridman? It's in the trees. Yeah, it's not in the monolith in the Utah desert, it's in the trees.
12:55 Speaker 01 Right, yeah.
12:56 Lex Fridman? So let's go to space exploration. How do you think we'd get humans to Mars?
13:01 Speaker 01 I think SpaceX and Elon Musk will be the ones that get the first human setting foot on Mars, and probably not that long from now, from us having this conversation. You know, maybe we'll inflate his timeline a little bit, but I tend to believe the goals he sets. So I think that will happen relatively soon. As far as, you know, when and what it will take to get humans living there in a more permanent way, you know, I have a glib answer, which is, you know, when we can invent a time machine to go back to the
13:41 Speaker 01 early Cold War, and instead of uniting around sending people to the moon, we pick Mars as the destination. So really, you know, I say that because there's nothing truly scientifically or technologically impossible about doing that soon. It's more, you know, politically and financially, and those are the obstacles, I think, to that.
14:08 Lex Fridman? Well, I wonder, when you colonize with, you know, more than, I say, five people on Mars, you have to start thinking about the kind of, like, rules you have on Mars. And speaking of the Cold War, who gets to own the land? You know, you start planting flags, you start to make decisions. And like SpaceX has this, it's probably a little bit trolly, but they have this nice paragraph in their contracts where it's like, it talks about that like human governments on Earth or Earth governments have no jurisdiction on Mars.
14:51 Lex Fridman? Like the rules, the Martians get to define their own rules. It sounds very much like, like the founding fathers for this country. That's the kind of language. It's interesting that that's, that that's in there and it makes you think perhaps that needs to be leveraged. Like you have to be very clever about leveraging that to, to create a little bit of a Cold War feeling. It seems like we're, we humans need a little bit of a competition. Do you think that's necessary to succeed and to get the necessary investment? Or can the pure pursuit of science be enough?
15:33 Speaker 01 No, I think we're seeing right now the pure pursuit of science. I mean, that results in pretty tiny budgets for exploration. There has to be some disaster impending doom to get us onto another planet in a permanent way. I don't know financially, I just don't know if the private sector can support that. And, but I don't, you know, I don't wish that there is some catastrophe coming our way that, that spurs us to do that.
16:08 Lex Fridman? Yes, I'm unsure what the business model is for colonizing Mars.
16:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
16:13 Lex Fridman? Yeah, like there is for, we'll talk about satellites. There's probably a lot of business models around satellites, but there's not enough short-term business. I guess that's how business works. Like you should have, you should have a path to making money in like the next 10 years.
16:29 Speaker 01 Well, and. Maybe even more broadly and looping back to something we said earlier. I don't know that getting humans off this planet and, you know, spreading like bacteria is what we're supposed to be doing in the first place. So maybe we can go, but should we? And I'm probably an unusual person for thinking that in my industry because humans want to explore. But I almost wonder, you know, are we putting unnecessary obstacles? Like we're very finicky biological things in the way of some more robotic
17:14 Speaker 01 or, you know, more silicon-based exploration. And yeah, do we need to colonize and spread? I'm not sure.
17:25 Lex Fridman? What do you think is the role of AI in space? Do you, in your work, again, we'll talk about it, but do you see more and more of the space vehicles, spacecraft being run by artificial intelligence systems? More than just like the flight control, but like the management?
17:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't have a lot of color to the dreams I have about way in the future and AI. But I do think that removing, you know, it's hard for humans to even make a trip to Mars, much less go anywhere farther than that. And I think we'll have, you know, more. This, again, I'm probably unusual in having these thoughts, but perhaps be able to generate more knowledge and understand more if we stop trying to send humans and instead, you know, I don't know if we're talking about AI in a truly, you know, artificial intelligence way or AI as we kind of use it today.
18:28 Speaker 01 But maybe sending a Petri dish or two of like stem cells and some robotic handlers instead if we still need to send our DNA because we're really stuck on that. But if not, you know, maybe not even that Petri dish. So I see, I think what I'm saying is, you know, I see a much bigger role in the future of AI for space exploration.
18:51 Lex Fridman? It's kind of sad to think that, I mean, I'm sure we'll eventually send a spacecraft. With efficient propulsion, like some of the stuff you work on, out that travels just really far with some robots on it and with some, with some DNA in a Petri dish. And then a human civilization destroys itself. And then there'll just be this floating spacecraft that eventually gets somewhere. Or not, that's a sad thought, like this lonely spacecraft just kind of traveling through space. And humans are all dead.
19:25 Speaker 01 Well, it depends on what the, what the goal is, right? Another way to look at it is we've preserved, it's like a little time capsule of knowledge, DNA, you know, that we've, that will outlive us.
19:41 Lex Fridman? Well, that's beautiful.
19:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:44 Speaker 01 It's how I sleep at night.
19:46 Lex Fridman? So you also mentioned that you wanted to be an astronaut.
19:48 Speaker 01 Yes.
19:50 Lex Fridman? So even though you said you're unusual and thinking like, it's nice here on Earth. And then we might want to be sending robots up there. You wanted to be a human that goes out there. Would you like to one day travel to Mars? You know, if it's, if it becomes sort of more open to civilian travel and that kind of thing. Like, are you, like vacation wise, like if you're talking, if we're talking vacations, would you like to vacation on Earth or vacation on Mars?
20:20 Speaker 01 I wish that I had a better answer, but no. I wanted to be an astronaut because I, first of all, I like working in labs and doing experiments and, I wanted to go to like the coolest lab, the ISS, and do some experiments there. That's being decommissioned, which is sad, but you know, there will be others, I'm sure.
20:48 Lex Fridman? The ISS is being decommissioned?
20:49 Speaker 01 Yes, I think by 2025, it's not going to be in use anymore. But I think there are other, there are private companies that are going to be putting up stations and things.
21:00 Lex Fridman? So it's primarily like a research lab, essentially?
21:02 Speaker 01 Yes.
21:02 Lex Fridman? A research lab in space, that's a cool way to say, it's like the coolest possible research lobby.
21:07 Speaker 01 That's where I wanted to go. And now though my, you know, risk profile has changed a little bit. I have three little ones and I won't.
21:19 Speaker 01 I won't be in the first thousand people to go to Mars, let's put it that way.
21:23 Lex Fridman? Yeah, Earth is kind of nice. We have our troubles, but overall, it's pretty nice. Again, it's the Netflix. Okay, let's talk rockets. How does a rocket engine work, or any kind of engine that can get us to space or float around in space?
21:41 Speaker 01 The basic principle is conservation of momentum, so you throw stuff out the back of the engine and
21:52 Speaker 01 and that pushes the rocket and the spacecraft in the other direction. So there are two main types of rocket propulsion. The one people are more familiar with is chemical because it's loud and there's fire. And that's what's used for launch and is more televised. So in those types of systems, you usually have a fuel on an oxidizer and they react and combust and release stored chemical energy. And that energy heats the resultant gas and that's funneled out the back through a nozzle, directed out the back, and then that momentum exchange pushes the spacecraft forward.
22:37 Lex Fridman? Is there an interesting difference in liquid and solid fuel in those contexts?
22:41 Speaker 01 They're both lumped in the same, so chemical just means that the release of energy from those bonds essentially, so a solid fuel works the same way.
22:54 Speaker 01 And the other main category is electric propulsion, so instead of chemical energy, you're using electrical energy, usually from, you know, batteries or solar panels. And in this case, the stuff you're pushing out the back would be charged particles, so
23:14 Speaker 01 instead of combustion and heat, you end up with charged particles and you force them out the back of the spacecraft using either an electrostatic field or electromagnetic.
23:26 Speaker 01 And, but it's the same momentum exchange and same idea, stuff out the back and everything else goes forward.
23:32 Lex Fridman? Cool. So those are the big two categories. What? What's the difference maybe in like the challenges of each, the use cases of each? And how they're used today, the physics of each? And where they're used, all that kind of stuff? Anything interesting about the two categories that distinguishes them? Besides the the chemical one being the big sexy flames and?
24:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, fire.
24:02 Lex Fridman? Fire, yeah.
24:04 Speaker 01 Chemical is very well understood. You know, in its simplest form, it's like a firework. So it's been around since 400 B.C. or something like that. So that even the big engines are quite well understood. I think, you know, one of the one of the last gaps there is probably
24:28 Speaker 01 what exactly are the products of combustion? Our modeling abilities kind of fall apart there. Because it's hot and gases are moving and you end up kind of, you know, having to venture into
24:48 Speaker 01 lots of different interdisciplinary fields of science to try to solve that. And that's quite complex, but we have pretty good models for some of the more like emergent behaviors of that system anyways. But that's, I think, one of the last
25:03 Speaker 01 unsolved pieces. And really, the the kind of what people care about there is is making it more fuel efficient. So the chemical stuff, you can get a lot of instantaneous thrust, but it's not very fuel efficient. It's much more fuel efficient to go with the electric type of propulsion. So that's where people spend a lot of their time is trying to make that more efficient in terms of thrust per unit of fuel. And then there's always considerations like heating and cooling. It's very hot, which is good if it heats the gases, but, you know, bad if it melts the rocket and and things like that.
25:45 Speaker 01 So there's always a lot of work on heating and cooling and and the engine cycles and things like that. And then on electric propulsion, I find it like much more refreshingly poorly understood.
26:00 Lex Fridman? Lots more mysteries.
26:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think so. One of the classes I took in college spent, we spent 90% of the class on chemical propulsion and then the last 10% on electric. And the professor said like, we only sort of understand how it works, but it works kind of. And it's like, that's, that's interesting. Yeah. And, you know, even an ion engine, which is probably one of the most straightforward because it's, it has just an, it's just an electrostatic engine, but it has this really awesome combination of like quantum mechanics and material science and fluid dynamics and electrostatics and, and it's just very intriguing to me.
26:47 Lex Fridman? First of all, can you actually zoom out even more like, because you mentioned ion propulsion engine is a subset of electric. So like maybe, is there a categories of electric engines? And then we could zoom in on ion propulsion?
27:00 Speaker 01 Yes. So sure, there's the two most kind of conventional types that have been around since the 60s are ion engines and hall thrusters. And ion engines are a little bit simpler because they don't use a magnetic field for generating thrust. And then there are also
27:22 Speaker 01 some other types of plasma engines, but that don't fit into those two categories. So just kind of other plasma, like a vasemir engine, which we could get into. And then those are probably the main three categories that would be fun to talk about. Oh, and then of course, the category of engine that I work on, which is, has a lot of similarities to an ion engine, but could be considered its own class called a colloid thruster.
27:49 Lex Fridman? Colloid. Cool. Okay. So what is an ion propulsion ion engine?
27:53 Speaker 01 Okay. So in an ion engine, you have an ionization chamber.
27:59 Speaker 01 And you inject the propellant into that chamber. And this is usually a neutral gas like xenon or argon. So you inject that into the chamber and you also inject a stream of really hot, high-energy electrons. And everything's just moving around very randomly in there. And the whole goal is to have one of those electrons collide with one of those neutral atoms and turn it into an ion. So kickoff a secondary electron. And now you have
28:34 Lex Fridman? Plasma?
28:34 Speaker 01 Yes.
28:35 Lex Fridman? Okay.
28:36 Speaker 01 And now you have and now you have a charged, you know, xenon or argon ion and more electrons and so on. And then some fraction of those ions will happen to make it to this downstream electric field that we set up between two grids with holes in them. And, you know, in terms of area, the same amount of those ions also makes runs into the walls and lose their charge. And that's where some of the inefficiencies come in. But the very lucky few make it to those holes in that grid. And there are two grids, actually, and you apply a voltage differential between them. And that sets up an electric field.
29:21 Speaker 01 And a charged particle in an electric field creates a force. And so those ions are accelerated out the back of the engine and the reaction force is what pushes the spacecraft forward. If you're, you know, following along and tallying these charges, now we've just sent a positive beam of ions out the back of the spacecraft. And for our purposes here, the spacecraft is neutral. So eventually, those ions will come back and hit the spacecraft because it's a positive beam. So you also have to have an external cathode producer of electrons outside the engine
30:03 Speaker 01 that pumps electrons into that beam and neutralizes that. So now it's net neutral everywhere and it won't come back to the spacecraft. So that's, that's an ion engine.
30:12 Lex Fridman? What temperature are we talking about here? So in terms of like the chemical-based engines, those are super hot. You mentioned plasma here. How hot does this thing get? I mean, is that an interesting thing to talk about in a sense that is that an interesting distinction? Or is the heat, I mean, it's all gonna be hot?
30:33 Speaker 01 No, so it's important, especially for some of these smaller satellites people are into launching these days. So the, it's important because you have the plasma, but also those high-energy electrons are hot. And if you have a lot of those that are going into the walls, you do have to care about the temperature. So I'm having trouble remembering off the top of my head. I think they're at like 100 electron volts in terms of the electron energy. And then I'd have to remember how to convert that into Kelvin.
31:05 Lex Fridman? Can you stick your hand in it?
31:07 Speaker 01 No, not recommended.
31:09 Lex Fridman? Okay. So what's a quoyote engine?
31:12 Speaker 01 So the same rocket people that came up with, with these ideas for electric propulsion, probably in the middle of, of last century, also realized that there's one more place to get charged particles from if you're going to be using electric propulsion. So you can take a gas and you can ionize it. But there are also some liquids, particularly ionic liquids, which is what we use, that you also can use as a source of ions. And if you have ions and you put them in a field, you generate a force. So they recognize that.
31:53 Speaker 01 But part of being able to leverage that technique is being able to kind of manipulate those liquids on a scale of nanometers or, or, you know, very few microns. So, you know, the diameter of a human hair or something like that. And in the 50s, there was no way to do that. So they wrote about it in some books and then it kind of died for a little bit. And then. With silicon MEMS, computer processors, and when foundry started becoming more ubiquitous, and my advisor started at MIT, kind of put those ideas back together and was like, hey,
32:34 Speaker 01 actually, there is now a way to build this and bring this other technique to life. And so the way that you actually get the ions out of those liquids is you put the liquid in a, again, a strong electric field, and the electric field stresses the liquid. And you keep increasing the field, and eventually, the liquid will assume, I'll go this way, a conical shape. It's when the electric field pressure that's pulling on it exactly balances the liquid's own restoring force, which is its surface tension.
33:10 Lex Fridman? Mm-hmm.
33:11 Speaker 01 So you have this balance, and the liquid assumes a cone when it's perfectly balanced like that. And at the tip of a cone, the radius of curvature goes to zero right at the tip. And the radius, sorry, the electric field right at the tip of a sharp object would go to infinity, because it goes as one over the radius, and one over the radius squared. And instead of the electric field going to infinity and maybe like generating a wormhole or something, a jet of ions instead starts issuing from the tip of that liquid. So the field becomes strong enough there that you can pull ions out of the liquid.
33:55 Lex Fridman? What is the liquid? We're talking about, or is it, there's a bunch of different ones?
33:59 Speaker 01 You can do it with different types of liquids. It depends on how easily you can free ions from their neighbors, and if it has enough surface tension so that you can build up a high enough electric field. But what we use are called ionic liquids, and they're really just positive. They're very similar to salts, but they happen to be liquid over a really wide range of temperatures.
34:24 Lex Fridman? This sounds like really cool. Okay. So how big is the, how big is the cone we're talking, what's the size of this cone that generates the ions?
34:32 Speaker 01 So if you have a cone that's emitting pure ions, the, I can't remember if it's the radius or diameter, but that emission is happening from, of that cone is something like 20 nanometers.
34:46 Lex Fridman? Oh.
34:48 Lex Fridman? I was imagining something slightly bigger, but so like this is, so this is tiny, tiny.
34:53 Speaker 01 Yes.
34:54 Lex Fridman? Hence the only being able to do it recently.
34:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's right.
34:57 Lex Fridman? So this is all controlled by a computer, I guess, like, or like, how, how do you control, how do you create a cone that generates ions at a scale of nanometers exactly?
35:08 Speaker 01 So the kind of main trick to making this work is that physically we manufacture hundreds or thousands of sharp structures and then supply the liquid to the tips. So that does a few things. It makes sure that we know where the ion beams are forming, so we can put holes in the grid above them to let them actually leave instead of hitting, right?
35:32 Lex Fridman? Cool.
35:34 Speaker 01 But it also reduces the actual field we have, the voltage we have to apply to create that field because the field will be much stronger if we can already give the liquid a tip to form on. And those tips we form have radii of curvature on the order of probably like single microns. So we are working at a little bit larger scale, but once we create that support and the electric field can be focused at that tip, then the tiny little cone can form.
36:04 Lex Fridman? So wait, so there's something in the, there's an already like a hard material that like gives you the base for the cone? And then you're pouring like liquid over it, whatever.
36:13 Speaker 01 From the bottom, yeah, it's porous, so we actually supply it from the back of the chip and then.
36:18 Lex Fridman? And then liquid forms on top, on that structure.
36:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:21 Lex Fridman? And then you somehow make it like super sharp, the liquid, so the ions can.
36:29 Speaker 01 And then we've applied that field to get those ions and that same field then accelerates them.
36:36 Lex Fridman? That's awesome. And there's like a bunch of these?
36:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, I should have, I should have brought something. So we.
36:43 Lex Fridman? You could just pretend that you have some nanometer cones on.
36:46 Speaker 01 So actually, you know, kind of about this scale, we build, we call them thruster chips and it's just a convenient form factor and it's a square centimeter. And on each square centimeter today, we have about 500 of the actual physical, we call them emitters, those physical cones. And we're working on. Increasing that by a factor of four in the coming months.
37:10 Lex Fridman? In size or in the density?
37:12 Speaker 01 In the density, the number of emitters within the same square centimeter chip.
37:17 Lex Fridman? So that thing, because I think I've seen pictures of you with like a tiny thing in your hand. That must be the, okay, so that's an engine.
37:24 Speaker 01 So that is kind of the ionization chamber and thrust producing part of it. What's not shown, you know, in that picture is the propellant tank. So we can keep supplying more and more of the liquid to those emission sites. And then we also provide a power electronic system that talks to the spacecraft and turns our device on and off.
37:48 Lex Fridman? So that's the colloid engine? That's the core of the colloid engine?
37:52 Speaker 01 It's, the way I've been talking about it, it's more of ion electro spray. Colloid tends to mean like a liquid droplets coming off of the jet. But if you make smaller and smaller cones, you get pure ions. So we're kind of like a subset of colloid, yes.
38:12 Lex Fridman? What aspects of this, you said that it's been full of mystery from the physics perspective. What aspects of this are understood and what are still full of mystery?
38:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, recently, we've been understanding the kind of instabilities and, and stable regimes of, you know, how much liquid do you supply and, and what field do you apply? And why is it flickering on and off? Or why does it have these weird behaviors? So that's in the past, just a couple of years, that's become much more understood. I think the two areas that come to mind as far as not as well understood are the boundary between, you know, you have, we, we actually use kind of big molecular ions.
39:07 Speaker 01 And if you're looking at the molecular scale.
39:12 Speaker 01 You have, you know, some ions that you've extracted and they're in this electric field. One ion, you know, it's a big molecule. It's getting energy from the electric field and some of that energy is going into the bonds and making it vibrate and doing weird things to it. Sometimes it breaks them apart. And then zooming out to the whole beam, the beam has some behaviors as this beam of ions. And there's a big gap between what are those, what, how do you connect those? And how do we understand that better so that we can understand the beam performance of the engine?
39:50 Lex Fridman? Is that a theory question or is it an engineering question?
39:53 Speaker 01 Theory, definitely. We're, Accion is a startup and we're more in the business of building and testing and observing and characterizing. And we're not really diving much into that theory right now.
40:07 Lex Fridman? Okay, zooming out a little bit on the physics, apologize for the way too big of a question, but to you from either, you mentioned Accion as, you know, more of sort of an engineering endeavor, right? But from a perspective of physics in general, science in general, or the side of engineering, what do you think is the most, to you, like, beautiful and captivating and inspiring idea in this space?
40:34 Speaker 01 In this space, and then I'm going to zoom out a little bit more, but in this space, I keep budding up against material science questions. So I, over the past 10 years, I feel like every problem or interesting thing I want to work on, if you dig deep enough, you end up in material science land, which I find kind of exciting and it makes me want to dig in more there. And I was just, you know, even for our technology, when we have to move the propellant from the tank to the tip of the emitters, we rely a lot on capillary action and you're getting
41:18 Speaker 01 into wetting and surface energies.
41:20 Lex Fridman? At a scale of like nano.
41:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, it's, if you look further, it's quantum too, but it all is.
41:29 Lex Fridman? Wait, a capillary action at the quantum level?
41:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I would, I, I, it all comes back to me to, you know, material science. There's so much we don't understand at these sizes. And I, I find that inspiring and exciting. And then more broadly, you know, I remember when I learned that the same equation that describes flow over an airfoil is used to price options, the Black-Schulz equation. And it's, you know, just a partial differential equation, but that kind of connectedness of the universe, you know, I don't want to use options pricing and the universe in the same, but you know what I mean?
42:16 Speaker 01 This connectedness I find really magical.
42:20 Lex Fridman? Yeah, the patterns that mathematics reveals seems to echo in a bunch of different places.
42:25 Speaker 01 Yes.
42:25 Lex Fridman? Yeah, there's just weirdness. It's like, it really makes you think, I think, you're definitely living in a simulation, like whoever programmed it.
42:33 Speaker 01 I like that that's your conclusion.
42:35 Lex Fridman? Is using, is using like shortcuts to program it, like they didn't, they're just copying bases and code for the different parts.
42:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, think of something new or just paste from over there.
42:46 Lex Fridman? They won't notice.
42:47 Speaker 01 My conclusion from that was, I'm going to go interview for a finance job. So I had like a little detour.
42:54 Lex Fridman? That's the back, that's the backup option? So in terms of using coiled engines, what's, what's an interesting difference between a propulsion of a rocket from Earth, when you're standing on the ground to orbit? And then the kind of propulsion necessary for once you get out to orbit or to like deep space to, to move around?
43:18 Speaker 01 Yes, the reason you can't use an engine like mine to get off the ground is You know, the thrust it generates is instantaneous thrust is very small. But if you if you have the time and can accumulate that acceleration, you can still reach speeds that are very interesting for exploration and even for missions with humans on them.
43:47 Speaker 01 An interesting direction I think we need to go as as humans exploring space is the power supplies for electric propulsion are are limiting us in that, you know, solar panels are really inefficient and bulky and batteries, I don't know when anybody's ever gonna improve battery technology. I know a lot of people that work on that.
44:13 Speaker 01 And nuclear power, we could have a lot more powerful electric propulsion systems. So they would be extremely fuel efficient, but more instantaneous thrust to do more interesting missions if we could start launching more nuclear systems.
44:29 Lex Fridman? So like something that's powered, nuclear powered, that's the right way to say it.
44:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
44:37 Lex Fridman? But is in a small enough container that could be launched?
44:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I mean, as a world, we do launch spacecraft with nuclear power systems onboard, but size is is one consideration. It hasn't been a big focus. So the the reactors and the heaters and everything are bulky. And so they're really only suitable for some of the much bigger interplanetary stuff. So that's one issue. But then it's a whole like rat's nest of political stuff as well.
45:11 Lex Fridman? I heard, I think Elon described or somebody, but I think I think it was Elon that described the EV to all like electrical vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. So basically saying rockets, obviously Elon is interested in electric vehicles, right? But he said that rockets can't. And in the near term, it doesn't make sense for them to be electrical.
45:36 Lex Fridman? What do you see a world was the rockets that we use to get into orbit are also electric based?
45:44 Speaker 01 It's possible. You can produce the thrust levels you need, but you need this a much bigger power supply. And I think that would be nuclear. And the only way people have been able to launch them at all is that they're in a, you know, 100 times redundancy safe mode while they're being launched and they're not turned on until they're farther off. So if you were to actually try to use it on launch, I think a lot of people would still have an issue with that, but someday.
46:12 Lex Fridman? It's an interesting concept, nuclear. It seems like people, like everybody that works on nuclear power has shown how safe it is as a source of energy.
46:23 Speaker 01 I know, right?
46:24 Lex Fridman? And yet we are seem to be, I mean, based on the history, based on the excellent HBO series, I'm rushing with the Chernobyl. It seems like we have our risk estimation about this particular power source is drastically inaccurate, but that's a fascinating idea that we would use nuclear as a source for our vehicles and not just in outer space. That's cool. I'm going to have to look into that. That's super interesting.
46:51 Speaker 01 Well, just last year, Trump eased up a little bit on the regulations and NASA and hopefully others are starting to pick up on the development. So now is a good time to look into it because there's actually some movement.
47:06 Lex Fridman? Is that a hope for you to explore different energy sources that the entirety of the vehicle uses something like, like the entirety of the propulsion systems for all aspects of the vehicle's life travel is the same or electric? Is it possible for it to be the same? Like the coal oil engine being used for everything?
47:28 Speaker 01 You could, and you would have to do it in the same way we do different stages of rockets now where once you've used up an engine or a stage, you let it go because there's really no point in holding on to it. So I wouldn't necessarily want to use the same engine for the whole thing, but the same technology I think would be interesting.
47:49 Lex Fridman? Okay, so it's possible. All right, but
47:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, comes down to the power source.
47:54 Lex Fridman? The power source. That's really interesting. But for the current power sources and its current use cases, what's the use case for electric? Like, the the the coal light engine, can you talk about where they're used today?
48:06 Speaker 01 Sure. So, chemical engines are still used quite a bit once you're in orbit, but that's also where you might choose instead to use an electric system. And what people do with them, and and this includes, you know, the ion engines and hall thrusters and our engine, is basically any maneuvering you need to do once you're dropped off. There's, even if your only goal was to just stay in your orbit and not move for the life of your mission, you need propulsion to accomplish that because the Earth's gravity field changes as you go around in orbit and pulls you out of your little box. There are other perturbations
48:50 Speaker 01 that that can throw you off a bit. And then, you know, most people want to do things a little bit more interesting, like maneuver to avoid being hit by space debris, or perhaps lower their orbit to take a higher resolution image of something and then return. At the end of your mission, you're supposed to responsibly get rid of your satellite, whether that's burning it up. But if you're in GEO, you want to push it higher into graveyard orbit.
49:22 Lex Fridman? What's GEO? What's?
49:24 Speaker 01 So low Earth orbit, and then geosynchronous orbit, or geostationary orbit.
49:27 Lex Fridman? And there's a graveyard?
49:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, so those satellites are at like 40,000 kilometers. So if they were to try to push their satellites back down to burn up in the atmosphere, they would need, you know, even more propulsion than they've had for the whole lifetime of their mission. So instead, they push them higher, where it'll take, you know, a million years for it to naturally de-orbit. So we're also cluttering that. Higher bit up as well, but it's not as pressing as as LEO, which is low Earth orbit where more of these commercial missions are going now.
50:01 Lex Fridman? Well, so what, how hard is the collision avoidance problem there? You said some debris and stuff, so like, how much propulsion is needed? Like, how much is the life of a satellite is just like, oh crap, trying to avoid like?
50:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think one of the recent, you know, rules of thumb I heard was per year, some of these small satellites are doing like three collision avoidance maneuvers. So that's, that's not, yeah, but it's not zero. And it, yeah, it takes a lot of planning and people on the ground. And, you know, none of that really, I don't think right now is autonomous.
50:41 Lex Fridman? Oh, that's not good.
50:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, and then we have a lot of folks taking advantage of, you know, Moore's law on cheaper spacecraft. So they're launching them up without the ability to maneuver themselves. And they're like, well, I don't know, just don't hit me.
50:53 Lex Fridman? And three times a year, that could be become affordable if it's like,
50:58 Lex Fridman? if he gets hit, maybe it won't be damaged kind of thing, that kind of logic?
51:02 Speaker 01 Affordable in that instead of launching one satellite, they'll launch, you know, 20 small ones. Yeah, so if one gets taken out, that's okay. But the problem is that, you know, one good sized satellite getting hit, that's like a ballistic event that turns into 10,000 pieces of debris that then are the things that go and hit the other satellites. Yeah.
51:22 Lex Fridman? So do you see a world where, like, in your sense, in your own work and just in the space industry in general, do you see that people are moving towards bigger satellites or smaller satellites? Is there going to be a mix? Like, what's, and what do we talk, what does it mean for a satellite to be big and small?
51:41 Speaker 01 So big, the space industry.
51:44 Speaker 01 Prior to, I don't know, 1990, you know, I guess the bulk of, the majority of satellites were the size of a school bus and cost
51:54 Lex Fridman? Wow.
51:55 Speaker 01 a couple billion dollars. And now, you know, our first launches were on satellites the size of shoeboxes that were built by high school students. So that's a very different, you know, to give you the two ends of the spectrum. Big satellites, well, I think they're here to stay, at least as far as I can see into the future, for things like broadcasting. You want to be able to, you know, broadcast to as many people as possible. There, you also can't just go to small satellites and say Moore's Law for things like optics.
52:36 Speaker 01 So if you have an aperture on your satellite, you know, that just, that doesn't follow Moore's Law, that's, that's different. So it's always going to be the size it will be, you know, unless there's some new physics that comes out that I'm not aware of. But if you need a resolution and you're at an altitude, that kind of sets your, the size of your telescope. But because of Moore's Law, we are able to do a lot more with smaller packages and with that, you know, comes more affordability and opening up access to space to more and more people.
53:08 Lex Fridman? Well, what's the smallest satellite you've seen go up there? Like, what are the smallest kind, you said shoeboxes?
53:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I think, you know, the smallest, the smallest common form factor can fit a softball inside.
53:21 Lex Fridman? Wow.
53:22 Speaker 01 So it's 10 centimeters on each side.
53:25 Lex Fridman? So cool.
53:26 Speaker 01 But then there are some companies working on, you know, fractions of that even. And they're doing things like IOT type application. So it's very low, you know, bandwidth type things, but they're finding some niches for those.
53:42 Lex Fridman? Do you mean like there's a business, there's a thing to do with them?
53:45 Speaker 01 Yes.
53:45 Lex Fridman? Like, what do you do with a small satellite like that?
53:48 Speaker 01 Um, you can, you know, track a ship going across the ocean as like if you need to, if you're just pinging something, you know, you can handle that, that amount of data, um, and those latencies and so on.
54:00 Lex Fridman? You have to have propulsion on that. You have to have a little engine.
54:03 Speaker 01 No, those are just, you know, letting fall out of the sky. Um.
54:07 Lex Fridman? Okay.
54:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
54:09 Lex Fridman? But what, uh, so what kind of satellites would you equip a colloid engine on?
54:13 Speaker 01 Anything that's bigger than probably about 20 kilograms, um, anything that needs to stay up for more than a year or anything somebody spent more than like a hundred K to build are kind of the ways I would think about it.
54:26 Lex Fridman? That's a lot of use cases. What's a, what's a small sat? Like what, what category?
54:31 Speaker 01 Small sat is actually very big. I think it's like 700 kilograms or, I'm hitting my microphone. Um, maybe a thousand kilograms down to 200 kilograms or, uh, people have their own kind of definitions of how they break them up, but small sat is still quite large. And then, um, it's kind of also applied as a blanket term for anything that's not a school bus sized satellite. We need to get our jargon straight in the industry.
55:01 Lex Fridman? So what, uh, do you see, do you see a possible future where, you know, there's a few thousand satellites up there now, a couple of thousand of them functioning. Do you see a future where there's like millions of satellites up, up in orbit? Or forget millions, tens of thousands, which just seems like where the natural trajectory of the way things are going now is going.
55:24 Speaker 01 Tens of thousands, yes. Uh, the two, you know, buckets of applications. One is imaging and the other is communication. Um, so imaging, uh, I think that will plateau because one. Satellite or one constellation can take an image or a video and sell it to, you know, infinity customers. But if you're providing communications like broadband internet or satellite cell or something like that, satellite phone, you know, you're, you're limited by your transponders and, and so on. So to serve more people, you actually need more satellites and, and
56:07 Speaker 01 perhaps at the rate, you know, our data consumption and things that are going these days. Yeah, I can see tens of thousands of satellites.
56:17 Lex Fridman? Can I ask you a ridiculous question?
56:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
56:20 Lex Fridman? So I've recently watched this documentary on Netflix about, uh, flat earthers. That, you know, the people that believe in a flat earth. As some, as somebody who develops propulsion systems for, for satellites and for spacecraft, what's, uh, to use the most convincing evidence that the earth is round?
56:45 Speaker 01 Probably some of the
56:49 Speaker 01 photos taken from the moon.
56:53 Lex Fridman? Photos in the moon?
56:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
56:54 Lex Fridman? So it's not from the, from the satellite space?
56:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think seeing that perspective, I, maybe I'm just, I'm answering too personally because I really love those photos.
57:07 Lex Fridman? They're beautiful, yeah.
57:08 Speaker 01 I really like the ones that show the moon and, um, the lunar lander and they're taken a little bit farther back. So you see earth and first you're like, wow, that's tiny and we're insignificant. And that's kind of sad, but then you see this really cool thing that we landed on another, you know, planetary body. And you're like, oh, okay.
57:29 Lex Fridman? Can you actually see her? I, I don't, I don't know.
57:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'll send you, I'll send you that picture.
57:33 Lex Fridman? Cause I love the pictures or videos of just earth from more from orbit and so on.
57:38 Speaker 01 Right, yeah.
57:39 Lex Fridman? Those, that's really bea-, that's like a perspective shifter. That's the pale blue dot, right? It probably appears tiny.
57:46 Speaker 01 Yeah. And just that, you know, juxtaposition of the insignificance, but
57:51 Lex Fridman? You're another-
57:52 Speaker 01 We built this really cool thing.
57:54 Lex Fridman? Take the picture.
57:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
57:55 Lex Fridman? Oh, that'd be cool. I can't, I personally love the idea of humans stepping on Mars. I'm such a sucker for the romantic notion of that and being able to take pictures from Mars.
58:06 Speaker 01 So you would go?
58:07 Lex Fridman? I
58:10 Lex Fridman? I uh, I would be, what did you say? You said you wouldn't be
58:13 Speaker 01 Not in the first thousand.
58:15 Lex Fridman? Thousand, which it's funny because to me, that's, that's brave to be in the first million. I think when the Declaration of Independence was signed in the United States, there was like two million people. So I would like to show up when they're signing those documents.
58:33 Speaker 01 Okay.
58:34 Lex Fridman? So maybe the two million.
58:35 Speaker 01 Oh, that's an interesting way to think of it.
58:37 Lex Fridman? Cause like, then we're like participating in citizenry and defining the direction.
58:42 Speaker 01 So it's not the technical risk. You just don't want to show up somewhere that's like America before.
58:51 Lex Fridman? Yeah, because it's, I, I, from a psychological perspective, it's just gonna be a stressful mess. As people have studied, right? It's like, it's people, most likely, the process of colonization
59:09 Lex Fridman? like, looks like basically a prison, like you're in a very tight enclosed space with people. And it's just a really stressful environment, you know? How do you select the kind of people that will go? And then there'll be drama. There's always drama. And I just want to show up when there's some rules. But I mean, you know, it depends. So I'm not worried about the health and the technical difficulties. I'm more worried about the psychological difficulties. And also just not being able to tweet, like, what are you gonna, how are you, there's no Netflix, so. Yeah, maybe not in the first million, but the first hundred thousand. It's exciting to define the direction of a new, like, how often do we not just have a revolution to redefine our government?
59:52 Lex Fridman? As you know, smaller countries are still doing to this day. But literally start over from scratch. There's uh, just our financial system, it could be like, based on cryptocurrency. You could think about like, how democracy, you know, we have, we have now the technology that can enable pure democracy, for example, if we choose to do that.
1:00:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:00:14 Lex Fridman? As opposed to representative democracy, all those kinds of things. So we talked about two different forms of propulsion, which are super exciting. So the chemical base, that's doing pretty well. And then the electric base is um,
1:00:29 Lex Fridman? Are there types of propulsion that might sound like science fiction right now, but are actually within the reach of science in the next 10, 20, 30, 50 years that you kind of think about, or maybe even within the space of even just like, like even ion engines? Is there like breakthroughs that might 10x the thing, like really improve it?
1:00:53 Speaker 01 So, you know, the real game changer would be propellantless propulsion. And so every couple of years you see a new, now a startup or a researcher comes up with some contraption for producing thrust that didn't require, you know, we've been talking about conservation of momentum, mass times velocity out the back.
1:01:17 Lex Fridman? There's usually a mass.
1:01:19 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly. And you have to, you know, carry that up with you or find it on an asteroid or harvest it from somewhere if you didn't bring it with you. So not having to do that would be, you know, one of the ultimate game changers. And, and I, you know, unless there are new types of physics, I don't know how we do it, but it comes up often. So it's something I do think about. And, you know, the one, I think it's called the Casimir effect. If you can, if you have two plates and the space between them is on the order of these, like the wavelength of these ephemeral vacuum particles that pop into and out of existence or something.
1:02:03 Speaker 01 I may be confusing multiple types of propellantless forces, but that, that could be real and could be something that, that we use eventually.
1:02:16 Lex Fridman? What would be the power source?
1:02:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, the most recent engine like this that has, was just debunked this year, I think in, in March or something was called the M Drive. And supposedly you, you used a power source, so, you know, batteries or solar panels to generate microwaves into this resonant cavity. And people claimed it produced thrust. So they, they went straight from this really loose concept to building a device and testing it. And they said, we've measured thrust and sure, on their thrust balance, they saw thrust.
1:02:51 Speaker 01 Different researchers built it and tested it and got the same measurements. And so it was looking actually pretty good. No one could explain how it worked, but what they said was that this inside the cavity, the microwaves themselves didn't change, but the speed of light changed inside the cavity. So relative to that, you know, their momentum was conserved. And I don't, you know, whatever. But finally, someone, I think at NASA, built the device, tested it, got the same thrust, then unhooked it, flipped it backwards and turned it on, but got the same thrust in the same direction again. And so they're like, this is just an interaction with the test setup or, you know, some of the chamber or something like that.
1:03:36 Speaker 01 So ported again, but you know, it would, it would be so wonderful for everybody if we could figure out how to do it. But I don't, I don't know.
1:03:44 Lex Fridman? That's an interesting twist on it because that's more about efficient travel, long distance travel, right? That's not necessarily about speed. That's more about enabling like
1:03:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, so hook that up to the nuclear power supply. There you go.
1:04:01 Lex Fridman? Okay. But still, in terms of speed, in terms of trying to, so there's recently, it's already, I think, been debunked or close to being debunked, but the signal, a weird signal from our nearby friends, nearby exoplanets from Proxima Centauri, a signal that's 4.2 light years away. So, you know, the, the thought is, it'd be, it'd be kind of cool if there's life out there, alien life. But it'd be really cool if we could fly out there and check. And so what kind of propulsion? And do you think about what kind of propulsion will allow us to travel close to the speed of light?
1:04:46 Lex Fridman? Or, you know, half the speed of light, all those kinds of things that would allow us to get to Proxima Centauri in a reasonable, in a lifetime?
1:04:55 Speaker 01 You know, there's the project Breakthrough Starshot.
1:04:59 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:05:00 Speaker 01 Um, that's looking at sending those tiny little chipsets.
1:05:04 Lex Fridman? And like accelerating really fast.
1:05:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, using a laser, so launching them and then while they're still relatively close to the earth, you know, blasting them with some, I forget what, even what power level you needed to accelerate them fast enough to get there in 20 years.
1:05:20 Lex Fridman? Super crazy sounding, but a lot of people say that's illegitimate, like it's crazy sounding, but you can actually pull it off.
1:05:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, I love that project because there are a lot of different aspects. You know, there's the laser, there's how do you then get enough power when you're there to send a signal back? No part of that project is possible right now, but I think it's really exciting.
1:05:42 Lex Fridman? Yeah, but do you, uh, do you see like human, uh, like a spacecraft with a human on it? So it's like a heavy one, being like us inventing new propulsion systems entirely. Like, do you ever see that in the, on the radar of propulsion systems like that? Or are they completely out there in the impossible?
1:06:01 Speaker 01 Well, we're going to quickly leave the realm of what I can describe with any credibility. But, um, I think, I think because of special relativity, if we try to accelerate some mass so close to the speed of light, it becomes infinitely heavy. And then we just don't, we'd have to like harness a lot of suns to do that. Or, you know, it's just that, that math doesn't quite work out. But, you know, in, in my child's, my childlike heart, I believe that, you know, we're missing something, whether it's, you know, dark matter or other dimensions.
1:06:43 Speaker 01 And if you can just have some antimatter and a, a black hole and then ride that around and somehow, you know, turn that into some.
1:06:54 Lex Fridman? Mess with gravity somehow.
1:06:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, I, I feel like we're missing lots of things in this puzzle and that, you know.
1:07:04 Lex Fridman? I wonder how that puzzle, yeah, right. Well, I can speak with confidence as a descendant of apes that we don't know what the hell we're doing.
1:07:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:07:14 Lex Fridman? So there's, uh, we're like really confident, like physicists are really confident that we've like got most of the picture down.
1:07:22 Speaker 01 Right.
1:07:22 Lex Fridman? It feels like. Oh, boy. It feels like that we might not even be getting started on some of the essential things that that would allow us to engineer systems that would allow us to travel to space much, much faster.
1:07:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, and there's even things that are much more commonplace that we can't explain, but we've started to take for granted, like quantum tunneling, you know, just things like, oh, the electron was here with this energy and now it's here with this energy and it's just tunneling. But so, you know, we're missing a lot of the picture. So, yeah, I don't know to, you know, use your same question from earlier. I don't know if you and I will see it, but yeah, someday.
1:08:12 Lex Fridman? You are, you're the co-founder, just like we've been talking about, Accion Systems.
1:08:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:08:17 Lex Fridman? It's a, would you say a space propulsion company?
1:08:20 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:08:21 Lex Fridman? Broadly speaking. So, how do you, big question, how do you build a rocket company? From like a propulsion company from one person, from two people to 10 people plus? And actually, you know, take it to a successful product?
1:08:46 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, I think the early stage is quite, I'm not supposed to use the word easy when you work in rocket science, but straightforward. When you're working on something, you know, sexy, like an ion engine, it's more straightforward to raise money and get people to come work for you because the vision's really exciting. And actually, that's something I would say is very important throughout is a really exciting vision because when everything, you know, goes to crap, you need that to get people getting themselves out of bed in the morning and thinking of the higher purpose there. And, you know, another
1:09:27 Speaker 01 thing along the way that I think is key in building any company is the right early employees that also have their own networks and can bring in a lot of people that, you know, really make the This, the whole greater than than just the sum of the early team.
1:09:51 Lex Fridman? And how do you build that? Like, how do you find people? It's like asking like, how do you make friends? But is there, um, is it, uh, is it luck? Is there a system like how in terms of the people you've connected with the, the people, you built the company with?
1:10:12 Lex Fridman? Is there some thread, some commonality, some pattern that you find to be to hold for what makes a great team?
1:10:22 Speaker 01 I think, you know, personally, a thread for me has been my network and being able to draw on that a lot, but also giving back to it as much as possible in like an unsolicited sort of way, like making connections between people that, you know, maybe didn't ask, but that I think could be really fruitful. And even, you know, weirder than that is just really getting, you know, having weird, uncomfortable conversations with people like at a conference and getting over the small talk quickly and getting to know them quickly and
1:11:04 Speaker 01 having a relationship that stands out and then being able to call on them later because of that. And I think that's, it's, that's been because I'm introverted and I, you know, want to poke my eyes out instead of go and do small talk. And so I huddle in a corner with one person and, you know, we talk about aliens or things like that. And so, you know, that's all to say that, you know, having a strong network, I think is really important, but a genuine one. And let's see, other ways to build a rocket company, kind of making sure you're paying attention to the sweeping trends of the industry. So everybody just cares about cost and
1:11:44 Speaker 01 being able to get out ahead of that and even more than we ever thought we'd need to as far as what we needed to price our systems at. You know, people. For, since the start of the, the US space industry, they've been paying 20, 25 million in adjusted dollars for an ion engine and seeing that now people are going to want to pay 10K for an ion engine and just staying out ahead of that and those kinds of things. So, you know, being out in the industry and, and talking to as many people as possible.
1:12:19 Lex Fridman? So there's a drive, I mean, I suppose SpaceX really pushed that.
1:12:23 Speaker 01 Frustrating for me.
1:12:25 Lex Fridman? So SpaceX really pushed this.
1:12:27 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:12:28 Lex Fridman? Uh, the application of, I guess, capitalism of driving the price down of basically forcing people to ask the question, can me, this, can this be done cheaper? This can lead to like big problems, I would say, in the, in the following sense. I see this in the car industry, for example, that people have, it's such a small margin for profit, like they've driven the cost of everything down so much that there's literally no room for innovation, for taking risks. So like cars, which is funny because not until Tesla really, which is one of the, in
1:13:13 Lex Fridman? a long, long time, one of the first successful new car companies that's constantly innovating. Every other car company is really boring in terms of their technological innovation. They innovate on design and style and so on, that you, that people fall in love with the look and so on, but it's not really innovation. The, in terms of the technology, it's really boringly the same thing and they're really afraid of taking risks. And that's a big problem for rocket space too, is like, if you're cutting on costs, you can't afford to innovate, to try out new things and then.
1:13:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
1:13:50 Lex Fridman? That's definitely true with ion engine then, right? So, but what?
1:13:56 Lex Fridman? So how do you compete in this, in this space? Do you, by the way, see SpaceX as a competitor? And what do you say in general about the competition in the space? Is it really difficult as a, as a business to compete here?
1:14:10 Speaker 01 No, I, I don't see SpaceX as a competitor. And I see them as, one day, not too long from now, a customer, hopefully. I mean, to compete against that, I think you just have to do things in an unconventional way. So bringing silicon MEMS manufacturing to propulsion. You know, NASA doesn't make ion engines using a batch mass producible technique. They have, you know, one guy that's been making their ion engines for 20 years, like bespoke pieces of jewelry. So bringing things to what you're trying to innovate to, to make them,
1:14:53 Speaker 01 you know, in our case, more cost effective was, was really key.
1:14:58 Lex Fridman? I like the idea of somebody putting out ion engines on like Etsy.
1:15:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, my advisor at MIT would, you know, the thruster tip I was holding up, he would wear one as a lapel pin.
1:15:10 Lex Fridman? But in general, just on the topic of SpaceX, you know, 2020 has seen some difficult things for our human civilization. And it's been a lot of, first of all, it's an election year. There's been a lot of drama and division about that. There's been riots of all different reasons, racial division. There's been obviously a virus that's testing the very fabric of our society. But there's been really, for me, at least, super positive things, which inspiring things, which is SpaceX and NASA doing the first commercial
1:15:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:15:48 Lex Fridman? human flight, launching humans to space and did it twice successfully. What is that? Did you get to watch that launch? Did you, what does it make you feel? Do you think this is first days for a new era of space exploration?
1:16:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, I did watch it. We played it outside on a big screen at our place.
1:16:14 Lex Fridman? That's awesome.
1:16:15 Speaker 01 I was a little, you know, they kept saying Bob and Doug, Bob and Doug. And, you know, astronauts usually are treated with a little bit more fanfare. So it felt very casual, but maybe that was a good, a good thing. Like, this is the era of commercial crude missions and...
1:16:34 Lex Fridman? It was a little bit more, what is it, what's his name, Chris Hadfield, like, playing guitar.
1:16:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:16:42 Lex Fridman? It's more, it's a different flavor to it of...
1:16:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
1:16:47 Lex Fridman? More like fun, playful, celebrity type...
1:16:50 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly.
1:16:51 Lex Fridman? Astronaut versus the aura of the magical sort of heroic element of the single human representing us in space.
1:17:01 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:17:02 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:17:02 Speaker 01 I think that's all for the better, though. It's so cool that it's such a commonplace thing now that we send... You know, I can't believe that sometimes I'll have to, you know, you don't even realize that astronauts are coming and going all the time, you know, splashing back down. And it's just so common now, but that's quite magical, I think. So, yes, we did watch that. I love, love, love that we finally have that capability again to send people to the space station. And it's just really exciting to see the private sector stepping up to fill in where the government has pulled back in the US. And I think pulled back way too soon as far as exploration and science goes.
1:17:47 Speaker 01 Probably pulled back at the right time for commercial things and getting that started. But I'm really happy that it's even possible to do that with private money and companies.
1:18:00 Lex Fridman? Do you like the kind of the model of competition of NASA funding? I guess that's how it works, is like they're providing quite a bit of money from the government and then private companies compete. To be, to be the delivery vehicles for whichever the government missions like NASA missions.
1:18:22 Speaker 01 Yes, I think for this type of mission is a little bit kind of straddles commercial and, and science. So I think it's good, but I do in general feel like we've pulled back too much on, you know, NASA's role in the science and exploration part. And I think our pace is too slow there, you know, for my liking, I suppose.
1:18:47 Lex Fridman? What do you mean on the scientific, okay, so did you have, I mean, on the cost thing, do you feel like NASA was a little too bureaucratic in a sense, like too slow, too heavy cost wise in their effort, like when they were running things purely without any commercial involvement?
1:19:08 Speaker 01 So I suppose it's more that I just want the government to fund.
1:19:13 Lex Fridman? I see.
1:19:13 Speaker 01 And, and maybe NASA is not the best organization to, to do it rapidly. But I think that, you know, again, depending on the goals, we're just kind of at the very starting point of space exploration and science and, and understanding. So we should be spending more money there and, and not less. And other countries are starting to spend more and more, and I think we'll fall, we'll fall behind because of that.
1:19:42 Lex Fridman? So you have quite a bit of experience, first of all, starting a company yourself, but also I saw, maybe you can correct me, but you have quite, quite a bit of knowledge of, just in general, the startup experience of building companies that you've interacted with people. If, is there, is there advice that you can give to somebody, to a founder, co-founder, who wants to launch and grow a new company and do something big and impactful in this world?
1:20:14 Speaker 01 Yes, I would say, you know, like I mentioned earlier, but make sure
1:20:22 Speaker 01 the vision is something that, you know, will get you out of bed in the morning and, and we'll get, and that you can rally other people around you to, to achieve. Cause I see a lot of folks that sort of cared about something or saw a window of opportunity to do something. And, you know, startups are hard and more often than not, just being opportunistic isn't going to be enough to make it through all the really crappy things that are going to happen.
1:20:53 Lex Fridman? So the vision just helps you psychologically to carry through the hardships for you and the team.
1:20:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, you and the team. Yeah, exactly. To kind of younger people interested in getting into entrepreneurship. I would say, you know, stay as close to like first principles and fundamentals as you can, for as long as you can, because really understanding the problems, you know, if it's something scientific or hardware related, or even if it's not, but having a deep understanding of, of the problem and the customers and what people care about and how to move something forward is more important than taking all of the entrepreneurship classes in undergrad.
1:21:36 Lex Fridman? So being able to think deeply, yeah.
1:21:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
1:21:39 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Well, have you been surprised about how much like pivoting is involved? Like basically rethinking what you thought initially would be the right direction to go? Or is there, if you think deeply enough that you can stick in the same direction for long enough?
1:21:55 Speaker 01 So our, you know, our guiding star hasn't changed at all. So that's been pretty consistent. But we, within that, we flip flop on so many things all the time. And, you know, to give you one example, it's, do you stop and build a first product that's?
1:22:16 Speaker 01 Well suited to maybe a smaller, less exciting segment of the market? Or do you stay head down and focus on, you know, the big swing and trying to hit it out of the park right away? And we've flip flopped between that. And there's not a blanket answer and there are a lot of factors, but that's a hard one. And I think one, one other piece for the aspiring founder. Spending a lot of time and effort on the culture and people piece is so important and is always an afterthought and something that I haven't really seen like the founders
1:23:01 Speaker 01 or executives at companies purposefully carve out time and acknowledge that yes, this is going to take a lot of my time and resources. And then, but you see them after the fact, trying to repair the, you know, bro culture, whatever else is broken at the company. And I think that it's starting to change, but just to be aware of it from the beginning is important.
1:23:24 Lex Fridman? Right. I guess it should be part of the vision of what kind of place you want to create. Or what kind of like human beings?
1:23:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. Like you can't wait five, 10 years and then just slap an HR person onto trying to fix it. Like it has to be thoughtful from the beginning.
1:23:42 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Don't get me started on HR people. Don't leave HR to HR people, but I'll just leave it that you didn't say that. I said it. Okay. Yeah. HR's actual HR is really important. This is so, so important.
1:24:00 Speaker 01 Yes, but so overlooked.
1:24:02 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:24:03 Speaker 01 And then I also was surprised, like I thought you could say, here will be our culture and our values and that it was kind of distinct from who I and my co-founder were as people. And I was like, no, that's not how that works. We just kind of like ooze out our behaviors and then the company grows around that. So you have to do a lot of like introspection and self-work to not end up with a shitty culture.
1:24:29 Lex Fridman? It's kind of a, it's a, it's a relationship, but as opposed to a relationship with two people, it's a relationship with many people.
1:24:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:24:36 Lex Fridman? And you, yeah, you communicate so much indirectly by who you are. You have to be.
1:24:41 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:24:41 Lex Fridman? You have to live it. Yeah.
1:24:45 Lex Fridman? As somebody, I think about this a lot because generally I'm full of love and all those kinds of things. But like, I also get like really passionate and when I see somebody in the context of work especially, when I see somebody who I know can do a much better job and they don't do a great job, I can lose my shit in a way that's like Steve Jobsian. And you have to think about exactly the right way to lose your shit if you're going to, or if at all. You have to really think through that because it sends a big signal. You know, sometimes that's okay, like if you do it deliberately, like if you're going to do it deliberately, if you're going to say like, I'm going to be the kind of person
1:25:30 Lex Fridman? that allows this and pays the cost of it, but you can't just think it's not going to have a cost.
1:25:35 Speaker 01 Yes, this was like the first thing I worked on with my leadership coach was to how not to just snap at people when they were being an idiot. And first, I got really good at apologizing. That was the first step because it was going to take longer to fix the behavior. And then she, I've got, I'm actually a lot better at it now. And it started with things, she's like, every time you walk through a doorway, think, you know, calm and take breaths before responding. And there were all sorts of these little things we did. And it was mostly just changing the habit.
1:26:12 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:26:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:26:14 Lex Fridman? Oh, boy, it's a long road. Okay. So people love it. And we talk about books. Is there books, maybe three or so, technical fiction, philosophical, that had an impact on your life and you might recommend? And for each, is there an idea or so that you take away from it?
1:26:35 Speaker 01 Yes. So I've been a voracious reader all my life and I'm always reading like three or four or five books at a time.
1:26:49 Speaker 01 And now I use Audible a lot, too, and podcasts and things like that. So I think the first one that stands out to me is, it's a novel, Tender is the Night by Fitzgerald. And I read it when I was much younger, but I went back and read it recently. And it's not that good, so I'm not sure why it has such an important place in my literary history. But I love Fitzgerald as an author because he has very flowery prose. That I can just picture what he's saying, but he does it in such a creative way.
1:27:30 Speaker 01 I remember that one in particular because I read a ton as a kid, too. But it kind of set me, it was like the beginning of my adult reading life and getting into classics. And I do feel like they seem intimidating, maybe. And then I realized that they're all just like love stories.
1:27:55 Speaker 01 So.
1:27:56 Lex Fridman? Yeah, isn't everything love stories?
1:27:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:27:59 Lex Fridman? At the bottom.
1:28:00 Speaker 01 Even, you know, I don't know. I was surprised that even like a lot of the Russian authors, you know, they're all just love stories.
1:28:09 Lex Fridman? Work humans are pretty simple. There's not much to worry, there's not much to work with, so.
1:28:13 Speaker 01 So I think maybe that was it. It made that whole world less intimidating to me and cemented my love for reading.
1:28:21 Lex Fridman? People should have just approached the classics like, there's probably a love story in here.
1:28:25 Speaker 01 Chick flicks, yeah.
1:28:27 Lex Fridman? So somehow it boils down to a chick flick. So just relax and enjoy the ride.
1:28:32 Speaker 01 And then.
1:28:33 Lex Fridman? So what else?
1:28:35 Speaker 01 Changing gears quite a bit, The Beginning of Infinity, do you know it? By David Deutsch. So he's a physicist at Cambridge or Oxford. And so I was introduced more formally to a lot of the ideas, like a lot of the things we've talked about. He has a lot more like formalism and physics rigor around. And so I got introduced to more like jargon of how to think about some of these ideas.
1:29:07 Speaker 01 You know, like memes and DNA as ultimate meme.
1:29:14 Speaker 01 The concept of infinity and objective beauty. But he has a really strong grounding in physics.
1:29:24 Lex Fridman? So he has a rigorous way of talking about these like big.
1:29:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, so that was very mind opening to me to read that. But it also, I think, is probably part of why I ended up marrying my husband is related to that book. And then I've had some other really great connections with people because I had read it and so had they.
1:29:44 Lex Fridman? I like how you turn that, even that book into a love story.
1:29:48 Speaker 01 I did, oh no. No, it's good, it's good. Your robot has a heart.
1:29:53 Lex Fridman? Exactly.
1:29:55 Speaker 01 And, okay, the third series is, it's just, it's Harry Potter.
1:30:02 Lex Fridman? Of course, which somehow connects to, I haven't read Harry Potter. I'm really sorry.
1:30:06 Speaker 01 Oh, no.
1:30:07 Lex Fridman? Forgive me, forgive me. But I've read Tolkien, but just Harry Potter, just haven't gotten to it. But your company name, Miss Mo, I think, connects to Harry Potter, right? I think I heard this.
1:30:20 Speaker 01 My, I always feel like I have to justify my fandom. The first three books came out when I was 10, so I went along this journey with Harry age wise. And I read them all like nine or 10 times, all seven books. And I think anything that just keeps you reading is, is what's important. And, you know, there, I have lulls where I don't feel like reading anything. So I'll reread a Harry Potter or a, you know, trashy detective novel or something. And, and I don't really care. And that's why I mentioned Harry Potter, because it, you know, whatever just keeps me reading, I think, is important.
1:31:04 Speaker 01 And it was a big part of my life growing up. And then, yes, Axiom, the official story of the naming of the company is that Axiom is like a concatenation of accelerate and ion. But it actually came from Accio, the summoning charm. And then we just added an N and it was perfect.
1:31:27 Lex Fridman? What's the summoning charm? That's one of the spells?
1:31:30 Speaker 01 Yeah. Probably most notably, Harry uses it to summon his broomstick out of his dorm room when he's battling a dragon somewhere else. So he says the spell and the broomstick comes to him. So summoning in that way. Okay, there we go.
1:31:49 Lex Fridman? This is brilliant. So the, the, the big thing is that it's something that you've carry with. It's like your, it's your safe place you return to. Something like the Harry Potter.
1:32:00 Speaker 01 That, you know, I reread them still. Whatever keeps me reading, I think, is, is the most important thing.
1:32:07 Lex Fridman? Okay, I got it. So.
1:32:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:32:09 Lex Fridman? I'm actually the same way in terms of the habit of it. It's important. It's important to just keep, keep, keep reading. But I have found myself struggling a little bit to, because I listen to a lot of audiobooks now. I've struggled to then switch back to reading seriously.
1:32:30 Lex Fridman? It's just, I read so many papers, read so many other things. It feels like if I'm going to sit down and have the time to actually focus on the reading, I should be reading like blog posts or papers or more condensed kind of things.
1:32:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:32:43 Lex Fridman? But there, there's a huge value to just reading long form still.
1:32:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, and, you know, my husband was never that into fiction, but then someone told him or he heard, you know, you learn a lot of empathy through reading fiction. So you could think of it that way.
1:33:01 Lex Fridman? Well, yeah, that's kind of what, yeah, yeah. And it's also fiction is a nice, unlike not, less so with nonfiction, is a chance to travel. I see it as kind of traveling.
1:33:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:33:13 Lex Fridman? As you go to this other world and it's, it's nice because it's like much more efficient. You don't have to get on a plane, you don't have to. And you get to meet all kinds of new people. It's like people say they love traveling. And I say I love traveling too. I just, yeah, read fiction.
1:33:27 Speaker 01 I told my, um, three year old that that was why we read so much because we, you know, see the places in our mind. And I'm like, it's basically like, we're watching a movie. You know, that's how it feels. And she's like, I prefer watching Frozen with popcorn. Was her response to that. Okay, well, you're three.
1:33:48 Lex Fridman? It's a good point. But yeah, there's some power to the imagination, right? That's, it's not just like watching a movie because some, something about my imagination, because it's, it's the words in the world that's painted somehow mixing in with our own understanding of our own hopes and dreams, our fears. It like mixes up in there in the way we can build up that world from just the page.
1:34:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, you're, you're really creating the world just with the like prompts from the book, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's different than watching a movie.
1:34:20 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Which is why it hurts sometimes to watch the movie version. And then you're like, that's not at all how I imagined it. Well, we kind of brought this up in terms of, uh, the, depending on what the goals are. Let me ask the big, uh, you're, you're friends with Manolis. He's obsessed with this question. So let me ask the big ridiculous question about the meaning of life. Uh, do you have, uh, you ever think about this one? Do you ever, uh, ponder the, the reason we're here? Is the sense of apes on this spinning ball in the middle of nowhere?
1:34:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't, I don't think one ends up in the field of space propulsion without thinking of these existential questions. Uh, yeah, all the time.
1:35:10 Lex Fridman? Or build a business.
1:35:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, I know. Um, yeah, we've touched on a lot of the different pieces of this, I think. So I, I have a bunch of thoughts. Um, I do think that, you know, the goal isn't the meaning.
1:35:30 Speaker 01 Isn't anymore just to be like a Petri dish of bacteria that reproduces and, you know, where survival and reproduction are the main objectives. And maybe it's because now we're able to answer these, ask those questions. That's maybe the turning point. And instead, I think it's really the pursuit and generation of knowledge. And, and so if, if we're taken out by an asteroid or something, I think that it will have been a, you know, meaningful endeavor if somehow our knowledge about the universe
1:36:11 Lex Fridman? Preserved.
1:36:12 Speaker 01 Is preserved somehow. And the next civilization isn't starting over again.
1:36:21 Lex Fridman? So that, that's, that's, I always, yeah, I resonate with that. That I always loved the mission of Google from the early days of making the world's sort of information and knowledge searchable. I always loved that idea. I always loved, I was donated, as people should, to Wikipedia. I just love Wikipedia. I feel like it's the, it, that's one of the greatest accomplishments of just a humanity of us together, especially Wikipedia. And this opens, like, in this open community way, putting together different knowledge. Just like, on everything we've talked about today, I'm sure there's a Wikipedia page about ion engines. And I'm sure it's pretty good.
1:37:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:37:04 Lex Fridman? Like, it's, I don't know, that's, that's incredible. And obviously, that can be preserved pretty efficiently, at least Wikipedia. I don't use, it'll be like, the human civilization is all like burning up in flames as there's this one USB drive slowly traveling out.
1:37:19 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:37:20 Lex Fridman? With Wikipedia on it.
1:37:21 Speaker 01 Yep. That's on, from the beginning of our chat, that one lonely spacecraft, it just means Wikipedia. And then it will have been a civilization well spent.
1:37:33 Lex Fridman? So pushing that knowledge along
1:37:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:37:36 Lex Fridman? Through like one little discovery at a time is, is one of, is a core aspect to the meaning of it, of it all.
1:37:43 Speaker 01 Yes. And I also, I haven't yet figured out what the connection, you know, and explanation I'm happy with yet for how it's connected, but.
1:37:56 Speaker 01 Evolving beyond just the survival piece too. I think like we touched on the emotional aspect, something in there about cooperation and you know, love. And so I, in my day to day, that just boils down to, you know, the pursuit of knowledge or improving the human condition and being kind.
1:38:21 Lex Fridman? Love and knowledge.
1:38:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. So I'm pretty at peace with that as the meaning right now. Makes sense to me.
1:38:29 Lex Fridman? While you work on spacecraft propulsion.
1:38:32 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly.
1:38:34 Lex Fridman? Like literal rocket science. Natalia, this is amazing conversation. You work on such an exciting engineering field and I think this is like what 20th, 21st century will be remembered for is space exploration. So this is super exciting space that you're working on. And thank you so much for spending your time with me today.
1:38:55 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me. This was fun.
1:38:58 Lex Fridman? Thanks for listening to this conversation with Natalia Bailey. And thank you to our sponsors. Monk Pack Low Carb Snacks, Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, Blinkist, an app that summarizes books, and Sun Basket, meal delivery service. So the choice is snacks, caffeine, knowledge, or delicious meal. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
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