The final frontier is here for everyone to explore…
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For 2023 Nick is writing a series of articles on Frontier Technologies others call #DeepTech, his firm is co-investing in. Starting with the biggest frontier of them all — #SPACE.
Welcome to the new Space Race!
There is no doubt our imaginations were captured in the 1960s as ‘mankind’ sought to venture off-world and land on the moon. Driven by the ‘cold war’ era space became a show of strength and a demonstration of capability that drove the US and USSR to compete. As with many wars innovation can leap forward and engineering time is compressed as all resources are focused on fewer things.
The era of Star Trek in the 60’s and 70’s further captured our spirit “to boldy go”, gave us a sneak peak of our future onboard the Enterprise, a world of tri-corders, communicators, holo-decks and lasers, all used everyday today. So here we are again, but this time the Space Race is driven by private enterprise, private capital that has to a lesser extent embarrassed government (NASA) and forced them to rekindled their enthusiasm to give space another try. Blue Origin, Space X and numerous other billionaire privateers have shown us a new way to the stars.
It is a big universe, a cold, vast and harsh environment, made up of primary elements the most abundant being hydrogen, that has the potential for humanity to get more energy out than is put in. Of course the reasons we strive to become an interplanetary species, a Type II civilisation is debatable. The acceleration of the destruction of planet earth, a lack of available key minerals and resources to be used in the next wave of technologies and of course human greed. There are seemingly big profits to made in space but what are the opportunities and risks
So let me break it down for you from space.
Access:
Access to space is difficult at best because of several factors, earth’s gravity is the biggest. Human evolution has developed over 4 billion years in an envelope of ‘gravity’ that defined in many ways how species evolved — including us; around which the Newtonian laws if physics, chemistry and biology are bound. Breaking free of earth’s gravity and how to isolate and stops the effects of gravity is one of the challenges…
