00:00 Speaker A
For more on what a potential SpaceX IPO means for other space companies looking to go public, as well as a general landscape for next year, I’m joined here on the set by Chad Anderson, founder and CEO of Space Capital. He is also the author of The Space Economy. I’m glad to see you.
00:15 Chad Anderson
Yes, great to be here.
00:16 Speaker A
So I’m so curious about SpaceX and I like if they’re sucking the air out of the room for other types of space investments or creating more of a halo effect for space investments.
00:30 Chad Anderson
I think it’s definitely the scale. Hmm, this is really exciting news. It’s still uncertain, but we’ll see what happens. But if they do, I mean, that’s it, I think that’s going to set a new benchmark. It will change the price of a lot of assets across the category. I think it will show what can be done. And I think it will trigger a wave of new listings. So that could be really interesting. And then, from our perspective, as private market investors in early stage companies, we’re very excited to see what happens when these founders get liquidity, who have stock options and stock options and continue now and are freed from the shackles of working at big companies, they can go and, you know, think about what they want to do, start their own thing. So we expect this will increase the SpaceX mafia. I mean, a few years ago, you know, we’re tracking 45 companies or something like SpaceX graduates that have gone on and founded new companies. Now it’s, I don’t know, closer to 200 and we’ll see what happens with this liquidity event. But for us, I mean, this is SpaceX is the Apex player. I’m 10 years ahead of anyone else. They set the bar all along. Uh, now this kind of moment, um, we’ll see what happens, but it could really catalyze a lot of activity.
01:46 Speaker A
I mean, on the other hand, if they’re so far ahead of everyone else, and then their numbers are public, it means that some of the other players, especially in the public markets, whose numbers are also public, are at a disadvantage if they’re not in the same place as SpaceX.
02:08 Chad Anderson
Hmm, well, that’s a really interesting point. So I think SpaceX has stayed private for so long and they’ve been so in demand. Uh, uh, this is the hottest stock in the private markets. Everyone is fighting to get access to SpaceX. Um and I think it’s really quite difficult, um, when you have so much interest and so many investors, um, to keep things quiet. So, you know, you see throughout the news there’s a lot of information that’s out there
02:42 Speaker A
Correct.
02:42 Chad Anderson
about how their performance looks, right? So it’s not, so that kind of cat is already out of the bag.
02:47 Speaker A
So it wouldn’t necessarily change the dynamic.
02:49 Chad Anderson
Yes, I think so. And so you see what the numbers are, you know, 13 last year, 15 this year. You start thinking like growth is not parabolic, in uh uh, their growth is not parabolic. They, but they’re cash flow positive and they’ve bought back shares, right? So I think what that would do is give them kind of a big infusion of cash to go after some of their long-term missions to get to Mars, build data centers in orbit, fund that and really have a big infusion of cash to speed things up and go faster.
03:26 Speaker A
Um and one of those is also what Starship is one of the projects he’s working on. So how important is this and what is the timeline for something like this?
03:38 Chad Anderson
Super important. So the Starship is a massive next generation vehicle. I’ve never had anything this size. So if 2025 was the year of release frequency, we were basically, we started releasing, we released almost every day, a release a day, right? And that release cadence is increasing. 2026 will be about the table. Um Starship is a massive vehicle. It will be fully reusable, meaning both the rocket’s first stage and second stage can land and be fueled, stacked and launched again. More like operational commercial airlines, which is really exciting because it’s going to promise to provide another step change in the order of magnitude, further reduction in launch cost, which is really going to do a lot again, with the halo effect, you know, comment to really drive growth in this category. Um, but at the same time, that vehicle is needed to launch these next-generation Starlink satellites, the V3 satellites that they’ve already designed and are just waiting for a vehicle that can carry them. Their data centers in orbit that they’re talking about now in connection with this potential IPO, they require the Starship to be able to launch these things, right? So that’s a pillar. It’s critical to their strategy, and it’s also critical to taking the space economy to the next level.
05:22 Speaker A
Another thing you’re keeping a close eye on next year is what? geo-intelligence and defense. These are kind of themes from space. So what should we be looking at there?
05:33 Chad Anderson
Yeah, I’m kind of just thinking about the convergence of AI and space as a whole, right? So we talked a little bit about orbital data centers. Everyone seems to be talking about it now. Um Starship is and and Blue Origin’s next-generation vehicles will allow us to launch new infrastructure that, you know, we couldn’t do before, like orbital data centers and things. So it’s very interesting from an AI point of view. And also in terms of, you know, geospatial intelligence. So if GPS is the dot on the map, geospatial intelligence is the map. This is digital information layered on top of the physical world. A lot of that comes from global intelligence comes from satellites, and different kinds of sensors that feed into this rich, really robust data set about what’s happening on the surface of our planet. There is too much data for people to sift through. So AI came along at the right time to basically help us analyze that and understand that, get useful information out of that. And this is a huge growth area. We see what we call world patterns. So everyone is familiar with LLMs and what’s going on there, but they’re not very good at helping us understand and navigate the physical world. So there’s a lot of work going on now in geospatial embedding, basically embedding data to have the right geospatial information, coordinates, positioning data, rich data layers to basically help you now use AI to understand the physical world, right? Not just the language. So this is a huge area of opportunity. Much demand is driven by the defense and intelligence communities, but there are also massive consumer and enterprise applications.
07:02 Speaker A
Very cool. Okay, Chad, we have to leave it there. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.