Space economy benefits everyone

The space economy benefits people daily, often without them realizing it, says Kevin O’Connell, Trump’s former Director of Space Commerce.

Transcript

00:00Space exploration sounds a lot sexier than space commerce as an expression.

00:05Does it need to be rebranded? I think I think they're both I think they're both

00:08sexy actually I you know I'm excited about the economic aspects of space

00:13that's one of the things that I've paid a lot of attention to in my career. I

00:16remember writing about remote sensing markets in the late 90s and getting a

00:21lot of hate mail that said this is not this is only about governments this is

00:25not about well that's still a market but and so I think the economic aspects are

00:29important really because we're benefiting in so many ways here on earth

00:33I mean one of the challenges we have in the space business is that most people

00:38don't know that when they go to their cell phone you know half the

00:41applications on their cell phone really are somehow plugged into space the

00:46precise timing signal communications other things like that and so the extent

00:52to which we're leveraging space 10 20 30 more times a day is really incredible

00:58we have to have people understand that they're benefiting in that way the

01:02exploration piece is critically important for human understanding and

01:05understanding what's going on in the universe but so I think they're equally

01:09sexy in that context