00:00Carol Haswell is a professor of astrophysics at the Open University.
00:04Great to have you on Global Business Studio.
00:06Now, Landspace joins only SpaceX and Blue Origin as private companies to land an orbital class booster.
00:14How consequential is that milestone?
00:17Well, it's a huge milestone, obviously.
00:20There's a huge difference between being able to do something and not being able to do something.
00:26And this is the first company outside the U.S. that has been able to do this and only the
00:33fourth organization to do it.
00:35So the Chinese Space Agency has done it.
00:38SpaceX and Blue Origin have done it.
00:42And this is the third company to do it.
00:45So China, in a sense, is in the lead because it has a government organization and a private sector organization
00:53able to do this.
00:54And it means they're completely in the game.
00:56I wanted to ask you about that because having that state-backed and a private company pulling this off,
01:01you know, what do you think having two paths to that same breakthrough tells us about the way that China's
01:07building its space sector?
01:09Well, clearly, they've made enormous progress very, very quickly.
01:14And I think China clearly is very organized.
01:18And when it decides to do something, it does it very effectively.
01:22So it was only, I think, 12 years ago that the Chinese state allowed private capital to invest in the
01:32space sector
01:32and to go from sort of nothing 12 years ago to this really very impressive technical achievement today is really,
01:41you know,
01:42something that I think everybody should take notice of.
01:45Now, the global reusable rocket market is projected to nearly triple by 2034.
01:52Where does that growth actually come from?
01:54Is it satellites?
01:56Is it government?
01:57Is it something else?
01:59Well, when I saw that figure, I thought that sounded like rather a low estimate, actually.
02:06Because when you think about, you know, the cost of launching a satellite currently, you know,
02:14we've only just started having these reusable rockets.
02:17So it's clearly going to get a lot cheaper.
02:20And I think most of the launches will be for satellites.
02:25But satellites can be used for an enormous variety of purposes.
02:29So they can be used for Earth observation to monitor climate change and help us to mitigate climate change.
02:36And that's obviously something that's really, really important.
02:40They can be used to see what's going on in the ground in other contexts to allow us, for example,
02:46in agriculture,
02:47to make the best use of limited resources so that we can grow more food.
02:52They're obviously useful in combat situations to see what's actually going on.
02:59So there's a huge amount of things that just Earth observation can do for us.
03:04Because they're also used for communication.
03:07And I think communications from space is probably going to be a big growth sector.
03:12And then there's the idea of building data centers in space.
03:16And if you do that, you don't need to take energy from the Earth.
03:22And you don't need to cool the data centers because the cooling problem is solved in space.
03:28And if you've got solar panels, then you can power your data center in space.
03:33And certainly SpaceX have said they want to build a moon base and they want to go to Mars.
03:40So there's a lot of things that people want to do.
03:43And if this gets cheaper, I think it's likely to be more than a factor of three.
03:48Now, as you've mentioned it, SpaceX still really dominates the market by a huge margin.
03:54What would it really take for a company like Landspace to become a real commercial rival, not just a symbolic
04:01one?
04:02Well, that's kind of like a question I saw.
04:06I think Brian Cloughby asked once about what do you need to do to win a football game?
04:11And he said, well, clearly we need to score some goals.
04:15And I think, you know, obviously what they need to do is to repeat today's success and do that routinely.
04:21And that, you know, involves a lot of determination, but it also involves technical skill, having the resources of various
04:30kinds and having the financial backing.
04:32And perhaps most importantly, you need stability to be able to do that sort of work.
04:39So, yeah, I hope I hope we do have a stable situation where all of these companies that are trying
04:46to do this can flourish and thrive.
04:48And we can have lots of exciting things going on in space and space exploration.
04:55Carol Housewell, it's been out of this world talking to you.
04:57Thank you very much.
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