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00:00This is a story about making money 22,000 miles up,
00:04meeting a commercial need for tens of thousands of satellites to be launched by 2030.
00:08There is a race on to get all those satellites into orbit,
00:12but also a race with China,
00:14which has already built a range of satellite ground stations in Latin America,
00:18something that's gotten the attention of the U.S. government.
00:32So it's about 45 minutes on a helicopter flight.
00:35It's probably about four or five hours driving.
00:38In the western part of the Dominican Republic, on the border with Haiti,
00:41lies Pedernales, a quiet coastal province that will soon be home to the country's first spaceport
00:48and what is slated to be the first U.S.-owned commercial spaceport in Latin America.
00:53If they were to identify this region as ideal for commercial space,
00:58it would be essentially the Straits of Hormuz for space.
01:01When we talk about the Straits of Hormuz,
01:04we think of all that oil and fertilizer and aluminum trying to get through a narrow sea channel.
01:09When it comes to space, it's satellites,
01:12and the choke point isn't the sea passage,
01:15but launch pads that we simply don't have enough of.
01:18How many pads are you going to have here?
01:19Four.
01:20Four pads here?
01:21Yeah.
01:21Burton Catledge is a former Air Force colonel
01:24who founded aerospace company Launch on Demand in 2018.
01:27The amount of support that they came back with was amazing.
01:31He's now developing a $600 million commercial spaceport in this remote part of the Dominican Republic.
01:37The ecosystem at Cape Canaveral more or less has grown out of ad hoc.
01:42It was not necessarily built with the idea for the commercial space industry.
01:47The entire market has changed.
01:49The space industry is something on the order.
01:51The last time I checked, it was like $650 billion.
01:54It's supposed to be over a trillion by 2030, maybe a trillion and a half,
02:00and some people are even saying that's pretty low.
02:02To relieve the bottleneck in launching the growing number of satellites we need,
02:06the U.S. has to have more spaceports,
02:09creating a business opportunity for companies like Launch on Demand.
02:13Right now, there are over a dozen U.S. spaceports across the country,
02:16and just one internationally, Rocket Lab's launch site in New Zealand.
02:22I think the United States, from the space economy perspective,
02:24is in a position of extreme opportunity, and they are in a growth phase.
02:29Ryan Brukhart is a senior partner at McKinsey,
02:31who focuses on global aerospace, defense, and space companies.
02:36I think the infrastructure in the U.S. is becoming a bit stretched, right?
02:39If you look at our launch sites, we're launching, you know, every day
02:42or a couple times a day from some of these launch sites.
02:45There's a huge backlog of, you know, U.S. companies looking to launch things into space
02:49and to be able to accomplish their mission and get the return that their investors are looking for.
02:54Right now, I've heard that it's about a three-year waiting list to get a satellite on orbit.
03:00What accounts for that demand ramping up so dramatically,
03:02and do you expect it's going to continue to increase that much?
03:06Well, in order to have global coverage of the entire Earth,
03:09you have to have a lot of satellites.
03:10Right now, there's about 14,000 satellites in orbit.
03:15The FCC tracks all the number of satellites that are going to be submitted,
03:18and they're looking at over 100,000 satellites by 2030.
03:22So if we've got 14,000 satellites, and it's 2026 already,
03:26and we have to launch 100,000 satellites by 2030,
03:30that's a lot of launches that have to happen between now and then.
03:33That may explain the need for more launch sites, but where?
03:37The goal for a rocket is to get to space in the most efficient and effective way possible.
03:42And engineers spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to finesse what does that efficiency look like.
03:48But it eventually comes down to two things.
03:51How much fuel can I put on the rocket, and how much mass can I put on top of the
03:55lift?
03:55So they're always playing with that equation.
03:57Well, the geography has an important part in here.
04:02Because in order to achieve escape velocity, a rocket has to achieve 17,500 miles per hour.
04:08And the Earth, closer to the equator, spins faster than it does at the poles.
04:13What that translates into is you could put more satellites up with less of a smaller rocket.
04:20And so the goal of most spaceports is to try and get as close to the equator as possible.
04:26But why does it take me to Dominican Republic?
04:28So what we ended up doing about three years ago was doing a technical feasibility study.
04:33We looked at everything we could possibly look at.
04:35But as we did our analysis, it started shifting to paired analysis, which has a relatively low population.
04:42And because it's on the coastline, and because people don't live in the water,
04:46we have almost a straight shot to orbit without hazarding the public.
04:51So if something goes wrong, it goes in the ocean.
04:52That's right.
04:53So that's why a lot of our spaceports are built next to the coast.
04:56It's not necessarily because of the water.
04:58It's because of the low population.
04:59It's not really about whether the rocket explodes or whether the rocket gets to orbit.
05:04It's all about public safety.
05:05Safety is no small concern in the new space race,
05:08as we saw just last month when Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rocket test blew up in spectacular fashion.
05:14And lift up.
05:15Along with the expected trillion-dollar IPO of Elon Musk's SpaceX,
05:19it's a reminder of just how public the failures and successes can be in this business,
05:24and how big the players are.
05:26The pad will be two miles to the coast.
05:28That's one reason that Burton would rather work with them than against them.
05:31You are, though, competitive with SpaceX, right?
05:34Most of the feedback that we have gotten from all the commercial operators
05:37is they would like the ground infrastructure to be more responsive,
05:41to be more not like we launch on this day, we launch on readiness.
05:45And right now, the infrastructure and the processes are not designed that way.
05:50So right now, statutorily, the Office of Commercial Space has six months to review it
05:57and give you a decision.
05:58We're going to give you a license in 45 days.
06:01That's very attractive.
06:02We don't look at ourselves as competitors to the rocket customers.
06:06We look at us as enablers.
06:07What's the attraction for investors,
06:09and what's been your experience so far on people stepping up?
06:12There is a large appetite right now for space.
06:15This is kind of like the early, you know, early Internet age, if you will.
06:19The problem is there's not very many investment opportunities
06:23or good investment opportunities to get into space.
06:25The first phase of the spaceport is going to be about $600 million of investment.
06:30And the response that we've gotten has been really quite significant.
06:35As launch on demand prepares to break ground later this year,
06:38a larger race is already underway in Latin America.
06:42Space infrastructure has become a new front in the U.S.-China rivalry.
06:47China is aggressively making investments in our hemisphere,
06:53particularly in Latin and South America.
06:55Also, partnerships that they have made with Caribbean nations
07:00to have aerospace applications, satellite demonstrations,
07:06civilian applications, also with military application components to it.
07:12A recent report from the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party
07:15warned about China's growing space footprint in the region,
07:19including more than 10 satellite tracking stations.
07:23Congresswoman Haley Stevens of Michigan is a member of the committee.
07:26This is a call to double down on the way our system works.
07:31And so we don't want to be ceding ground to China.
07:33We don't want to see them continuing to eat our lunch with our neighbors.
07:40And we can win this race.
07:44I guess you could look at it as a marathon or maybe an ultramarathon,
07:47but I don't see an end here.
07:48There is not a clear finish line.
07:50Carrie Bingen is a director of CSIS's Aerospace Security Project.
07:55Well, I thought what was really interesting in the decades that we were competing against the Soviet Union,
08:00so much of what was happening in space, it was fueled by government.
08:04I think what you're seeing now, which really sets this current era apart,
08:08is so much of what's happening in space is commercial.
08:11Over 80% of the satellites on orbit today are commercial systems.
08:15A lot from the United States, SpaceX, Starlink,
08:19but many other countries are now players in space.
08:22The technology is much more distributed across the globe.
08:26Launch costs are a lot cheaper,
08:28so any country or even entity can put something in orbit.
08:31And much of that is now fueled by private capital, not just taxpayer dollars.
08:37China has ambitions to be the world's space power.
08:42Their presence and their capabilities in Latin America are part of that strategy.
08:48They want access. They want influence.
08:50They want to be able to band together with these countries in bodies like the United Nations
08:55to start shaping where the standards are.
08:59We started this program well before people realized that China was, you know,
09:04very interested in taking over real estate in Latin America.
09:07As we have gotten the Trump administration and President Abendaner's administration together,
09:14they are aligned on what has been called, you know, the pivot to the Western Hemisphere.
09:19So I would call the spaceport more of an artifact of the decision to pivot to the Western Hemisphere
09:27rather than, you know, anything else.
09:29And we emphasize this is run by a U.S. company that is designed to be commercial,
09:35that is complementary, not competitive, with the spaceports in the United States.
09:40And we work very, very hard to make sure that they understand we're a friend, not a foe.
09:45And so, so much so that when we have talked to the President Abendaner,
09:50we said, we want to adopt the U.S. safety standards for launch and re-entry.
09:56And he agreed.
09:58And so if you're a customer that launches from the United States,
10:01the standard will be the same if you launch from the Dominican Republic.
10:04We have holes.
10:05We never thought that missiles would be launched across the Southern Hemisphere,
10:09so we did not put a lot of radars down in South America or in Africa, for example.
10:14But we're realizing we need to have coverage of everything that's happening in orbit.
10:21We're seeing China, we're seeing Russia maneuver satellites much more frequently.
10:26Are they benign or do they have a hidden weapon?
10:30We don't know, but we know that they're testing these kind of capabilities.
10:33And so you need to be able to monitor that.
10:34Are there restrictions on who can use your spaceport?
10:37We want to stay in line with U.S. foreign policy.
10:43And what do I mean by that?
10:45So even though I'm a U.S. company operating in Dominican Republic,
10:48I need to make sure that my host country, the U.S. in this case, is aligned with what I'm
10:53doing.
10:54So if I sort of, you know, went kind of off the beaten path,
10:59I would essentially be cutting myself up from the largest commercial market in the world,
11:03which doesn't make much sense.
11:05Launch on Demand's being aligned with the U.S. government on the geopolitics of space infrastructure
11:10in Latin America is important to Catledge.
11:13But make no mistake, at its heart, this U.S. spaceport company is a business,
11:18one that Catledge believes will be a good one.
11:21So we estimate that by about the 10-year point after we hit full operations,
11:25we'll be generating about $8 billion.
11:27And so this will be the first private revenue-generating spaceport in the world.
11:32And the reason why is because we're leveraging all the technology that's been invented.
11:37We're bringing that here.