Space Policy Edition: Lies, damned lies, and space data

Casey Dreier: Hello and welcome to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Casey Dreier, the Chief of Space Policy here at The Planetary Society. Welcome to this month. I usually try to keep these episodes these days relatively independent of external events just to make them more listenable in the future, but I just got back from our 2025 day of action. This is early April when I'm recording this. The day of action for those of you who are unaware is The Planetary Society's big congressional visits day to Washington D.C. and, this year, obviously a lot going on in policy, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of troubles potentially facing NASA and NASA science. 

We had 105 members of The Planetary Society come from all over the country on their own dime, most of them having no direct connection to planetary science, to space exploration. They just love it, right? They're just members of the public. They came to Washington D.C. and they advocated. We did hundreds of meetings in Congress advocating for space science and the values behind exploration and discovery science and all the big things that we care about here at The Planetary Society. Some of them are listeners of this podcast, and I just will say it's always a pleasure and was a pleasure to meet so many motivated and passionate individuals. It's really just a value to me personally, and it's just always inspiring to me and my colleagues here at The Planetary Society to meet our members. 

Something else I want to mention, this week, first week of April here for Planetary Radio, the other show that we do, the weekly show that this is an edition of, we have a special live taping of Planetary Radio and Planetary Radio Space Policy Edition with me in Washington D.C. after the day of action in front of a crowd of nearly 500 people. It was really fun. My colleague, Sarah Al-Ahmed, who's the host of Planetary Radio, did a great job in talking about space science with our guests from APL and Bill Nye, and then I was able to host two sitting members of Congress, Judy Chu, the co-chair of the Planetary Science caucus, and George Whitesides recently elected to California's 27th District and previously had worked at NASA. I'd say maybe one of the very few members of Congress who have that career path. 

That show will be on our main feed in Planetary Radio. I urge you to check that out. It was, again, really fun to do that show and I want to thank Sarah and the Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. and, again, all of the members of The Planetary Society and supporters who came out for the day of action and really just put themselves out there advocating for space. It's just such an exciting and, again, inspiring thing to see. And, again, a pleasure to meet you. Planetary Society members, really neat people. I just love meeting you all. 

Now, this month, going back to our interview, our big picture, I am a data guy, which is always funny. I think I have a bifurcated approach to space that I have a very strong... A lot of you've heard me on this show talking about the importance of the right brain aspect of talking about exploration, the experiential, the feelings, the real reasons that we do space. But man, am I also a left brain data guy and I love counting numbers. I love seeing and measuring and things where things go in terms of NASA's funding and history, again, from a very practical sense. The classic phrase, no bucks, no Buck Rogers, but at the end of the day, dollars can only be spent once and tracking where dollars go tells you the ultimate priorities of any sort of institution about what their values are and how they spend it. Despite rhetoric and frequently discreet and different from what the rhetoric is. Words are free, dollars cost money. 

So, again, I'm a data guy who, again, loves the right brain side as well. And, for this month, I reached out to another data guy, Jack Kuhr, who is the director of research at Payload Space. I'd say one of the great relatively new online newsletters and reporting outfits that cover particularly commercial space business news that I really recommend checking out at payloadspace.com. Jack Kuhr does their data stuff. And, I first noticed the work that he was doing when a few years ago I saw an article from Payload that showed the overall revenue breakdown of SpaceX itself. 

Now, this is notable because SpaceX is a privately held, privately traded company. They have no fiduciary responsibility to share their revenue or publish this stuff publicly because they're not a publicly traded company and they're certainly not a government company and government organization like NASA. So, to be able to talk about this and to put these numbers together was actually quite novel and fascinating and, the way that Jack did this, was by basically collating a bunch of known data, making reasonable assumptions, doing some basic arithmetic, and really getting into the ballpark I'd say, of what the breakdown and the sources of revenue and the number from launches and from cost of rockets, but also from Starlink and other sources of revenue, what SpaceX is working with. 

That kind of stuff is oddly enough, I think, vanishingly rare in this business of space exploration. There is often, I would argue, a disconnect between the ambition and hopes of a lot of people either in space or I'd say even particularly ancillary to space who are interested in these kind of activities and the actual hard data that shows how this will work, either in a financial sense or funding sense or ultimate outcome sense. 

Jack is one of those people who is putting this data out there and not just putting it out there. He is putting it out there in a way that's readable and understandable and engaging which is another, again, I think, critical aspect of how you share this stuff. Jack is going to join me on the show this month to talk about how he sees the role of data in the space business, whether we have a data gap, whether we're data poor or data rich, how we deal with outliers, how we share and connect and present data to help provide a narrative without giving too much overt control over what we want people to see but just putting the data out there for people to make their own conclusions. 

This conversation was great. I really recommend you listen to it but, before that, I'll just make one quick plug. The Planetary Society, this organization that produces this show Planetary Radio and does all the other great outreach site tech development and another projects that we do here at the organization, is a member-based nonprofit. Anyone can become a member. Four bucks a month at planetary.org/join. We don't take government money and we don't have any big corporate aerospace sponsors. That means we're independent. That means we can talk about and focus on things that are truly interesting and exciting to us about space. You hear that in the show all the time. Now is the time to join as a member or donate. This happens to also be the period where we are fundraising for advocacy and policy, my program here at The Planetary Society that enables me and my colleague Jack Coralli to work in Washington DC every single day providing and presenting this perspective of the value of space exploration, the value of space science, of planetary defense, and the search for life, things that are just generally not covered by other organizations. 

I truly believe that The Planetary Society provides a unique role and a unique perspective in the policy arena that, if we don't do it, no one else will. If you like what you hear, if you like what we do, even if you couldn't make it to the day of action this year, consider joining or donating to The Planetary Society at planetary.org/join or planetary.org/donate. And now, Jack Kuhr. Jack Kuhr, thank you for joining me today in this Space Policy Edition.

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Casey Dreier: I will just go right out and say it. Do you think the space industry has a data problem?

Jack Kuhr: I think it has a lot of data. There's a lot of data in this industry. Primarily, still we talk a lot about commercial space, but the government provides a lot of the funding, the contracts, the money in this industry, and they are obligated to be open about that. We do have a lot of space companies that are now publicly traded, so we get quarterly data from that. And honestly, I do think a lot of the non-publicly traded companies like a SpaceX or Blue Origin, smaller businesses, are pretty open with kind of this build in the open concept and are willing to provide information even if it's not required. So, I would say we don't have a data problem, but I think one of my goals, and I would say yours is as well, and that's why I think we probably would get along quite well because we are both two people who are passionate about that, is taking all the data in the industry, compiling it, making it digestible, and being able to actually tell a story from it.

Casey Dreier: That, I think, is a really important point. And, just from my experience when I put together the Apollo spending history, I was almost shocked. I did this a few years ago, so that was 50 years after Apollo landed, and no one had actually done a detailed analysis of it. The data that everyone had been referencing, I traced it back to one publication from the mid-nineteen seventies that was riddled with errors that no one had ever looked at again. For such an important or at least visible industry and activity of government, why do you think there's so few people or efforts to compile and accurately represent this data and present it in a way that people can actively make decisions with?

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. I mean, I think the industry is old, going back to the Apollo days, but it really wasn't until, you could probably start with 2015, but really the 2020s, when it became a commercial industry where there was enough perhaps money flowing in where there can be a space industry publication like Payload or what you guys do at Planetary Society. So, we think it's this huge industry but it's still a burgeoning field that most people don't really know about and most people haven't had the time to really dig through it. I've always been curious, how long did that take you to put together that Apollo massive spreadsheet of funding then-

Casey Dreier: Well, I had to go to NASA's historical archives and get elbow deep in a variety of old boxes and just kind of look through it. I mean, I spent probably a full day at least just seeking out the data and then trying to interpret it and compile it and put it all together and double check and validate where those were. A lot of the data was self-referential and this is what you see, this kind of NASA publishes it somewhere and then people just start referencing that and then they lose the source to that, and then you don't know where this data's coming from anymore. And then, trying to reconcile it with other published sources of it. I mean, it took a couple of months and, again, it took that effort just to go through the archives and frankly, I didn't even know if I'd find anything there. 

And, perhaps one of the most important documents that I found there that I had never seen anywhere else or any congressional archives was just the breakouts of, after Apollo 11, just what NASA spent on not just the entire program, but the data and tracking, the construction of facilities, the overhead, all these things that are really relevant to it, but for some reason were just never carried forward. So, the other thing, I think, from that I learned too was that it's not like NASA itself had a secret collection of this data themselves. I found a memo basically from an effort done internally within NASA 20 years earlier saying, "We have no idea," just basically the same problem that I was having. 

And, I wonder, this kind of goes back, you talk about this industry being relatively new. That's a good point and that it's intersecting with finance and money for the first time beyond just a government program. Do you think that fundamentally changes the relationship in that you worked in finance before working at Payload as a reporter, I imagine they're relative, they want to know this data in order to make wise investments, and is that maybe the shift too, that once private money started really coming into play, there is a more motivation to understand some of these fundamentals and financials?

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. I think that's a really good point because when it's siloed within government, the stakeholders are all taxpayers, but you're not going to have a taxpayer knocking down a door somewhere asking for a detailed break out of the Apollo-

Casey Dreier: Oh, there's one. It's me, but I think I might be the only one.

Jack Kuhr: Exactly. But, when you do have private money in it, there's different motivations. You have the investors who need to know this information to make decisions, but then you just have a different level of interest from the general public. People want to see if a company's succeeding or not, if it's a potential maybe public investment that they'd want to make, or there's just something, and it's maybe a referendum on human psychology or maybe capitalist western human psychology, once you put money in it, people just have more of an interest. But that is-

Casey Dreier: I think, was it Larry Summers who said, "No one ever washes a rental car"?

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. Exactly. So, I can give also, for folks who are listening that haven't heard of Payload or don't really know Payload, Payload is a space media publication that focuses on the business and policy of space. The publication was founded four or five years ago really when commercial space and the SPACs are coming online, and we really started to see a pickup in the space industry. So, if the mainstream media publications or even space publications are covering SpaceX and NASA at 80% of the time, we kind of flip that and cover the startups or the smaller entities at 80% of the time and cover the fundraisers and more nuanced stories in the industry.

Casey Dreier: I just want to jump back to something. This is interesting. You mentioned the SPAC era, the special purpose acquisition company, I'll let you explain what that is, but does that undermine, in a sense, the role of data here? Because a lot of that exuberance, to me at that time, about investing in these companies that literally just would not basically share their long-term revenue strategies or business plans, if I could summarize what a SPAC was, that was almost like a faith-based approach, right? They purposely went through these processes to go public in order not to share data. So, was there lessons you think you learned from that or what do you see from that era about the role of data in these types of decisions in finance and space?

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. Well, they would share their projections-

Casey Dreier: Sure.

Jack Kuhr: But, with a SPAC, it's not an IPO, so you don't have a bank underwriting it and really digging in to if these projections are real or not, and, "Let's put institutional money behind that." I have a good example. I wrote an article late last year about Planet and when they went public. At the time, they were talking about commercial revenue being 75% of their business by 2025 so, by now. Well, it turns out the opposite happened. The commercial revenue declined since they went public, and now commercial revenue is only 25% of the business. So, a flip from what they were saying it was going to be at 75%, and that's a big deal. They went public basically on this kind of grand idea that it's not just commercial space, but there's going to be commercial revenue and earth observation. 

And, frankly, it never really came to fruition. Obviously it's growing, but just not the magnitude. It's still a government revenue-derived business, but when these facts went public, they could say what they want and they could project what they want, just as any company that goes public can but if you're forecasting something and talking about the future, it's not data. It's just a hunch, and you're never really held accountable for it. 

So, this article I found really interesting to write because it shows, hey, they actually performed the opposite of what they said when they SPACed and maybe some investors lost some money because they thought there was going to be this big commercial demand boom, but that makes being able to track the data afterwards even more important to be able to tell the story and look back on that SPAC era and say, "Hey, maybe be careful next time you really bet on these big ideas that a company will put forth."

Casey Dreier: Yeah. It's like, be careful about when a company does not give you all the details about its business. I mean, it's just so interesting to me. So, you worked in finance in the aerospace sector. Is that a correct way to characterize that? [inaudible 00:18:30]

Jack Kuhr: Yeah.

Casey Dreier: And so, do you think it's required to make good decisions on the financial side and the analytical side, even internally even within a private financial situation, that you also need to understand something about the domain of space? This is another area that I've wondered about, this idea with SPACs and all these... One of my things that always makes me crazy is the Merrill Lynch or whatever Bank of America claims that space will be a $18 kajillion business and, by the way, we will happily sell you the financial products to get in on this train.

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. Yeah, and they'll say Uber is part of that.

Casey Dreier: Right. Yeah. Anything that has any kind of geolocation trip, and I mean, I think you see where this hype comes from, led by some very visible companies, but at the end of the day, you can have all the data analytics you want in terms of tracking projections and dollars and quant, but if you don't understand that, the space environment is unforgivably harsh or that orbits require you to only... There's a lot of limiting spaces like a fundamentally alien domain and it's so alien that our metaphors don't really do as much help. They almost hinder us in terms of applying things that we've done on earth out into space. Do you think that's part of the problem here? Part of the mismatch is that you can have all the data you want, but unless you have some kind of specific domain knowledge, physics or mechanical engineering or just any sort of or historical kind of engagement with the issue, you can easily be led astray by some of the hype?

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. Definitely. And, the industry is very passionate and the people who are in the industry are very passionate, and I love that. I'm very passionate. I didn't go into space because I didn't care about the stars. I went into space because I do want to see this industry succeed and I want to see human spaceflight succeed in a robust space economy just because I'm interested in it. So, that is everywhere, and you're kind of allowed to get away with having big ideas about the space industry because you kind of need a dream to be here, but you can get led astray if you're not used to that type of talk, and if you're not used to being able to mitigate some of those big statements. 

So, I think you don't need a physics background or engineering background. It's more just time spent in the industry. I've now been a reporter in the industry for three years, and I think I understand the industry pretty well, but there's just a lot of historical context that needs to be understood when I'm writing some of these pieces that it took a little while for me to pick up on. You kind of have to understand that there has been LEO Satcom constellations before Starlink and Iridium is doing okay now, but they went through bankruptcy and Globalstar has had their issues too. So, it's just these things are measured in decades, not six months.

Casey Dreier: Right. Yeah. It's like SpaceX didn't make the first reusable spacecraft. I mean, technically that was the shuttle, but it's a very different application of it that most people have kind of washed that out of the history. I feel that exuberance. I mean, there's a great paper that I actually had the author on this show called Human Spaceflight as Religion by Roger Launius. He was the chief historian of NASA, and that there is kind of this... We feel something very big about this activity that we do and going into space, and a lot of us, myself included, just want this to be true. 

And so, this is where I actually find the data part to be really helpful in tempering my desire for something to be the case. That, not just the understanding some of the dynamics of the requirements of being in orbit means you have to be moving and you can't just park in one place. Or, when they talk about the ultimate high ground of the moon, you can do your math in physics and it's three days and you have to orbit and all this precise stuff or... 

A lot of this stuff just, it helps you understand the limits of what we can do, and it's humbling in a sense, but also I can see why that would be... And, I wonder, again, that's almost why some of the data coalition and analysis and sharing publicly isn't really paid for by anybody until more recently. I think there's people probably internally that do this for a variety of companies, but I can think of few equivalents of your role in the public outreach that it's just accessible to anybody because it almost undermines the dream perhaps. Right? 

So, do you almost feel like there's too much of a faith-based motivation to this field that is kind of like a funny counterpoint to the hard engineering and the hard data that you need to get into the space in the first place? Maybe put it this way-

Jack Kuhr: [inaudible 00:23:38].

Casey Dreier: When you started reporting, when you kind of got into this field, was it distinct from other fields that had studied or engaged with in your role in finance or prior to that?

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. I mean there's a lot of similarities to finance, and I think having a finance background in this new space age is very helpful because I was doing very similar work back in when I was financing private equity acquisitions in aerospace. We're looking at financial statements, we're understanding trends, we're understanding what makes a business good and bad. We're trying to be realistic with readers by laying out problems. If someone's going to talk about orbital refueling, yeah, that's a buzzword, but where's the money coming from? Let's look at what makes us good and bad, how realistic is this? 

And, all of that analysis that I'm able to just naturally think about a business, comes from the finance role, and I think that's important to be just upfront with the readers. I would never poo poo passion in dreams because I too am a dreamer and I really appreciate people who think big and entrepreneurs that think big and maybe set lofty goals for themselves and for their employees, but for someone who's in the industry or following the industry, it is important to understand, maybe look at the data and see where the trends actually are and how something actually is doing versus just hearing about it or telling the story. 

What I love about a good chart is that it's, one, as objective as you're going to get, and it also allows the reader to come to their own conclusion. When I publish a chart and talk about a chart or a trend, I'll publish a chart and I'm going to break the chart down and contextualize it and offer an analysis of it, but the reader is allowed to be engaged too in reading that chart and maybe having a different interpretation of it, which I find is just a more active way of storytelling.

Casey Dreier: Tell me more about that. That's an aspect that you've done such a great job on Payload research about the visualization of data. What have you learned about this effort, about how you do make that narrative? How do you communicate something to the reader in a way that they can engage with it, but not in a sense of what you were just saying, not lecture them about it or tell them or force them to a certain conclusion? Is this kind of an art you've had to develop over time, or is there a key aspect to making sure that you communicate effectively with data?

Jack Kuhr: I think the chart, just by having a chart itself, will allow the reader to immediately form their own opinions on it. And then, maybe they are questioning more of the things I'm saying because they read the chart in a different way. But there is an art to doing it because, like I mentioned before, a chart should be objective, but the amount of times I've fought with myself over how many footnotes I can put in a chart because things do need to be contextualized and a chart can be a little misleading in it and I kind of have to either explain that as a footnote, but it has to be a very brief footnote or it can be explained through the context and the writing afterwards. 

I'll give an example of this, which is debated in the industry, but Rocket Lab is the second most prolific launcher with Electron, the second most prolific commercial launcher outside of SpaceX and Falcon 9. 

Most of their launches come from New Zealand. They're domiciled in the US, but when I put together, let's say, a chart on global launches from the year, should Rocket Lab launches out of New Zealand be considered New Zealand launches or US launches? And, this is debated throughout the industry, and I am firmly in the, if it's on New Zealand soil, it should be New Zealand considered a New Zealand launch. But this is just something that's debated throughout the industry, which would require a footnote or at least some sort of contextualization. 

Another point with that is, well, let's say Rocket Lab launched Electron, I don't know, 15 times from New Zealand, the Electron's payload capacity to LEO is like, I don't know, 300 kilograms. So, the aggregate amount of mass payload volume you put into orbit is call it, I don't know, 3,000 or 4,000 kilograms, which is the equivalent to a fourth of one Starlink Falcon 9 launch or a Vulcan launch. So, a chart can show Rocket Lab launching X amount of times and looking awesome, but how much payload are they actually putting into orbit? So, those are things that maybe a chart can't exactly explain, but it's good to just explain all the dynamics in the commentary below.

Casey Dreier: Well, and I think that's where having some sort of independent perspective is so important too, that you're able to step back and say, "What's actually useful to know? What's the important part of knowing where something launches from?" In the New Zealand case with Rocket Lab, they're launching from New Zealand, so the impact, the skill set, the infrastructure that's going to be in New Zealand. Calling it a US launch does not help you understand that aspect of it. Payload levels, I mean, yeah, you can talk about what are we trying to communicate? Are we trying to talk about overall capability or mass capability or are we only interested in number of launches and why would we care just about that? 

And, you can see then how having a dearth of other sources of independent or data-driven reporting or analysis can then make it really easy also then to kind of create an alternative narrative and maybe kind of going to some of this over-exuberance we talked about earlier with the SPACs that, unless the context and the industry relatively well, you can use these same tools to create, intentionally or unintentionally, an alternative story, right?

Jack Kuhr: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's the amazing part about charts and also the drawback of charts because those charts can be cropped and they should. They should be cut and shared places but then, without the context of that chart, I'm all for people coming to their own conclusions of it, but it is more helpful when you have some context below.

Casey Dreier: What have you learned about reputation and credibility in this role? Because particularly with Payload establishing as a relatively new organization, and then you, I think, from this perspective and how you're presenting information and we talk about this as quantitative information, we can measure it, we would kind of intuit, "Oh, this will be completely objective. We're just putting the information out," but I think we've just stated that how you present something modifies or can create the narrative about it regardless of you're sharing the same data in various different ways. How do you approach that role of credibility and what drives your thinking in terms of what you're trying to achieve with this?

Jack Kuhr: I mean, I would say getting it right is just super, super important, particularly with your role and my role. I'd rather limit how many articles I publish and really just focus on getting particularly the chart right with being patient and double checking things and quadruple checking things and making sure everything is right, because when you write an article, it happens. You can get stuff wrong and you can issue a correction. With a chart, those things are generally screenshotted and shared pretty fast. 

And then, particularly you mentioned Payload is five years old, but there's not that many space media publications out there, and we've been able to garner our reputation for ourselves where we are a trusted, reliable source, and with that, it means doing our very best to make sure that we are reporting the truth and putting out data that is the truth. And, I take that very, very seriously because, like with your work too, people, at this point in Payloads lifecycle and your work as well, they're going to cite it as the truth, and then that can be cited cited and just make its way around the internet in 24 hours as the truth.

Casey Dreier: Well, again, with my Apollo anecdote that someone did not do a good job 40 years ago and therefore created a completely alternative story to how that program's spending until someone went back to beginning. So, yeah. Yeah. It would be great if people are still citing my work 40 years. I'm not saying that, but the idea of, as you're saying, once it goes out there, people will rely on that and, I think maybe if you care about in a way, having a real commitment to the industry or to the activity of going into space, you want it to be right, even if it doesn't always tell you the most romantic story. You'd rather it be right and allow people to make then good decisions. I think that's always been my argument is, knowing the limitations and challenges of what we do is better because then we can make smarter investments with the resources we do have rather than, again, just kind of going on some misplaced sense of faith of what things quote, unquote, should be, and that doesn't really help anybody in the long run.

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. No, 100%. It can both attenuate people's passions, but it can also reinforce them in a good way too. It can be like, "Hey. This is actually working and the data's backing it up, and there's a ton of tailwinds here, and it's not just a marketing tool or a sales tool, it's just data that's showing it." So, that's really cool. 

I think another thing is, this is the first question you asked at the beginning of this podcast but, is there enough data in the industry? I think there is a lot of data in the industry, but there's not that many people who are going to take the time to compile it and then put it in a form that's easily digestible because, for you and I, it take it could take a day, it could take a couple of hours, could take a day, it could take a couple of weeks to put together a data set and then put it into one chart and not many other people are going to do it. So, when one person does do it, then that is going to be used as the reputable source of it and then quoted based on that, which is great because we have the privilege of taking all this data and then putting it in a very digestible format that someone can look at or read a three to five minute article and understand what's happening, but we have the responsibility to make sure that is right because the amount of work we put into it will have these kind of moats that other people are not going to try to do themselves. So, there's just going to be less people working on it and putting more emphasis on the work that we've done.

Casey Dreier: Is there a distinction that you've noticed between government reporting of data coming out of the space industry side? Like, for example, I guess I'll lay out, I would assume that publicly supported programs would have more data to work with. So, obviously I work with NASA budget data a ton. They publish a ton of detail every single year in their congressional budgets and even, theoretically, I could send a FOIA request to NASA and ask for more detailed information. Companies unless, I know that there are laws about publicly traded companies but a lot of these space businesses are not yet publicly traded, they, in a sense, get to choose. This is where you can correct me. There's different requirements for data sharing and maybe just fundamentally, a public institution has a responsibility to be open and transparent in what it's doing, whereas you don't have that same responsibility, at least to the public. You have a different fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and other investors, but do you see that represented in the type and consistency and quality of data coming out about government space activities versus private space activities?

Jack Kuhr: I think the data's pretty good. The big players are publicly traded and they are going to have that fiduciary duty to at least historically provide quarterly revenues, margins, talk about how much they're investing in a specific program. I think once you start getting into the forecasting that a company like we talked about these SPACs were doing, then you get into murky territory that government is not going to go into. But, in terms of historical data, I feel pretty good about the space companies. And then, if you're a really small company, if you just got funded, normally it takes three to four years for you to even be revenue generating so there's not even data to really understand or sift through. It's more them just building the product. 

SpaceX is a good example. They're the biggest space business and they are privately traded, but they do put out information. Every couple of months we get information on their Starlink customer account. Online we can see... It's not in a PDF document like you would get with government data, but there is data out there where you can see, and this is how Payload puts together our SpaceX revenue estimates-

Casey Dreier: I was going to bring that up. I mean, one of, I think, your most valuable regular activities you do is you put together these annual revenues for SpaceX but, I mean, that's kind of the essence of the problem though, right? The fact that you have to do this, that they don't just share this themselves, that you have to make a lot of smart guesses about it. And, at the end of the day, it's an estimate. I mean, it's very thoughtfully done, but you're depending on, in a sense, piecing together a bunch of different pieces of data, right? So, without someone to do that, how... I guess that's what I'm going into. The requirements of sharing things, it's almost if they're excited to share it, maybe like with Starlink, they will, but if not, then they probably won't. And, that to me makes it, this goes into a bigger issue of measurement that we record things that we have data for and, how do you seek out things that they don't want to share? So, how do you approach that with a company like SpaceX?

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. So, like you mentioned, we publish our SpaceX revenue estimates and we also publish the builds, and we also publish the assumptions that, at the bottom, we have maybe 2000 words of our thoughts behind it, which I think is super important just to be open with people about how we're building this. And, frankly, every year we get opinions and crowdsourced thoughts on how to make the model better and better, and I think we're able to tune it continuously. They might not put out the information directly, but I feel pretty confident in all the numbers and the breakdown in our estimates and in the chart that we put together and the table we put together because they do publish it somewhere on the internet. It's just all aggregated.

Casey Dreier: Are they required... I mean, your background in finance, help me understand exactly how SpaceX is privately traded and what that means compared to a publicly traded company.

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. Sure. I mean, their investors are... It's private capital. It's not on the stock market easily. The shares don't easily trade hands so, to their investors, to my understanding, they do publish, but they do send out financial data. I've never seen them. I never had access to it. I don't have any proprietary access to that kind of data, but I think they do have a fiduciary duty to keep their investors, so call it, Fidelity's a big investor of theirs, Fidelity up to date on how they're doing. Maybe that's yearly, maybe that's every six months, but that's not for the broader public to see. 

Whereas, if it's publicly traded, then that information is all out there on a quarterly basis for everyone to see. What they do do is they publish publish a year-end Starlink report that allows us to see how many maritime customers they have, how many aviation customers they have, the breakdown of each Starlink sub-segment that they're not going to lie about it. They don't have a fiduciary duty not to lie, but they're not going to lie about it. There's no reason for them to lie about it. So, it's not easily accessible for people to see what a SpaceX revenue would look like but it's part of my job to take that information that's out there, that's scattered throughout the internet, that comes from reputable sources and then compile it all together to create what I deem to be a pretty decent stab at an estimate.

Casey Dreier: We'll be right back with the rest of our Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio after this short break.

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Casey Dreier: Is that, in a sense, a competitive advantage for SpaceX, that they're privately traded rather than publicly traded in that they have a smaller group of people they report to that, in a sense, it's almost like being a club? From my understanding, you have to work hard to find a way to invest in SpaceX, right? And, that probably drives up the perceived value of it. So, I guess, is this unique in this sector or in other sectors? From your knowledge of finance and other areas, is this type of setup for a company, this privately traded approach, is this uncommon or is it common?

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. It really depends on the company. If you look at SpaceX that has pretty much an infinite access to capital because of their success and various other reasons, it's a big benefit to be private. They don't need more capital. Maybe the first couple of years of Starlink, they struggled with getting the thing profitable, or maybe the satellites weren't working or they spent way too much in R&D and CapEx that the public markets and public analysts would be really complaining about, but was probably good for the business as a whole in a longer horizon mindset. So, for companies that don't have an issue, Blue Origin is another example, they have infinite access to capital, being private is great. 

If you're a company like Rocket Lab, which would be a comp, I know we've brought them up a couple of times, they don't have that infinite access to capital so being on the public markets is great for them, and they would probably be slower in the private markets where people are excited about Rocket Lab, they're able to have these offerings and raise capital pretty easily rather than banging on the doors of VCs across the world and trying to cobble together some dollars. They're able to raise capital more easily. It really just depends. I mean, it's more of like, do you have access to capital?

Casey Dreier: Do you think SpaceX is an outlier in the industry? Not just its capability, but we were just talking about access to capital. And, I'll add a second part to that question. Do you think that that outlier, talking about it in data terms, pushes the average expectation in the wrong direction, right? People aren't doing their standard deviations analysis of things or what the median would be. Is SpaceX almost a problem for setting expectations for performance of other companies?

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. I mean, they are an outlier because of Elon, but also because of the tremendous success they've had. And actually, I would say almost all of it is because of the tremendous success. I mean, when they landed their first booster in 2015, so 10 years ago, companies aren't particularly close to doing that, so call it a 10 to 12 to 13 year head start on companies. And also, Starlink is growing really, really fast and way faster than I imagined, way faster than... We talk about how there's an issue in the industry of companies over promising and under delivering. Starlink is almost under promising and over delivering. They are growing so tremendously fast and opening up brand new markets in a way that took a lot of people by surprise, particularly last year when they doubled their customer base in increasing fashion. 

It's good to comp to SpaceX because, we'll take Rocket Lab again, if SpaceX is valued at $350 billion, Rocket Lab can go out to the public markets and say, "Hey, we should be 10% of that value. Just 10%. We just need to get 10% of the revenues of SpaceX, 10% of the launch of SpaceX," and that puts them at a $35 billion market cap. And meanwhile, I don't know what they're trading at now, but they're probably something more like 2% of what SpaceX is valued. So, in that sense, it's good to have a really successful company that investors are backing. 

And then, in the other side of things, it's like, well, you're a rocket company that can only launch two or three times a year or you are not even thinking about reusability yet, or you're a satellite communication company that is getting eaten by Starlink. You just have these really high expectations that a near monopoly like SpaceX is, it just makes it difficult to play and comp to.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. I see an additional issue with that, is that I believe that the policy outcomes then also overweight SpaceX and consider that an average outcome for commercial space partnerships rather than a wild outlier. I think we're running that experiment now with the commercial lunar payload services that the predicate is that, "Oh, well, we'll have at least one or two SpaceX capabilities delivered from this." And, I think most people forget that there were two commercial orbital transportation services contracts awarded and the other one's still going now owned by Northrop Grumman, but that is not setting the space world on fire. You don't have Cygnus and Antares. I don't even know if they have Antares anymore, I think they don't have access to the R181s. And, that could have easily been the outcome of the commercial transportation awards, that you could have had two companies that were just happy to do exactly what they were told to do and nothing more but SpaceX has taken that story and, you can correct me on this, maybe single-handedly almost created the whole industry of commercial space or allowed it to be taken seriously as an investment opportunity.

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. And, it's also dictated how the government approaches procurement. Eclipse is just such a good example because, yeah, these are low cost lunar landers, super low cost, a 100 million bucks for a lunar lander, but what have the results been? We had one, for the astrobotics lander, failed in orbit. You had two intuitive machines that landed sideways, but then you also had one Firefly Blue Ghost Lander that has been really successful.

Casey Dreier: And, it's not just a $100 million for a lander, it's $300 million over five years, I mean, to get to that one single lander purchase, right? So, the government spent $1.5 Billion dollars, which is roughly one probably guaranteed landing on the surface in the classic way. 

And obviously, I mean, there are other reasons why they do this but yeah, I mean, I wonder and I worry sometimes that the application of this type of partnership so widely, that there is real risk here. We really don't know. We have a one data point. I think as data people, we can say one data point, usually you can extrapolate your line in any direction from that one data point, right? And so, do you see that as being a real issue here or, I mean, in a sense too, maybe we had to have a really incomplete data set. This is such a new activity that we're doing, why would we know?

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. I think the approach of low cost, kind of, iterative multiple shots on goal is the right one, even if we have a lot of failures here, and you could tie that back to SpaceX, but it's just the commercial approach to it. And, you have DOGE that is coming in and taking a real whack at a lot of these science programs that's going to do really, really irreparable damage to the industry but I think generally, you can't have SLS launching at $2 billion a launch-

Casey Dreier: Every three years.

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. And, James Webb has done amazing things for understanding of science, but it's a $10 billion project and the DoD and NASA used to procure satellites that were $1 billion dollars for just one exquisite satellite. Even if you have a lot of failures with this kind of more commercial high risk mindset, I do think it is the right approach. I think, just coming from a business standpoint, it helps tremendously with supply chains getting manufacturing ramp if you can say, "Hey. Intuitive machines, you had two that fell over sideways, but you can have a third. Maybe on the third we can actually get it going." And, once you have these programs that are just one and done, and then where do people go after that, it's not really a sustainable model.

Casey Dreier: I see that. Yeah. There's an interesting... I mean, there's no real world test actually doing it and learning from that. I wonder though, if there's a limited domain or specific domains of space where that works. So, to do rapid iteration, in a sense, you have to have a reason to go a lot and you have to have a place that you can go relatively quickly in order to have that feedback cycle. 

And so, obviously, I think quite a bit about this on the science side, could you ever have a rapidly iterative project to land a lander on Europa? It takes seven years to get there. Even with, let's say Starship is working, four years, three years to get there, this may just be limited to types of science that you do like on the moon or at Mars or in Earth orbit but once you get further out, you really start to lose the pathway with that. 

And, the other thing too, this was a topic I wanted to explore just a bit here at the end. You talk about James Webb, which is rightly pointed at as kind of this very troubled somewhat of a boondoggle development but of course now once it's up there and it's working better than perfect, it's just perfectly working, how do you measure... We can measure dollars, we can count them, they're discrete. We can measure jobs, we can measure economic impact. How do we measure knowing the oldest thing that we've ever seen in the universe, or how do we measure peering back into the recombination period of the cosmos? Or, how do we measure the feeling of looking at a picture of some of the nebula that it first sent back? 

That almost becomes an issue too that I worry sometimes, and I do this... It's funny because I am such a data left brain person by nature, but I have the simultaneous... I'm at The Planetary Society because Carl Sagan was preaching to me, that seeing my first rocket launch was my conversion moment. And, I use that very deliberately, that word, that I felt something big change in me seeing that and I worry sometimes that we downplay that there's a deeper aspect and experience side of this because it's not measurable.

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. Something happened over the last five, 10 years in the public eye, and maybe in the political eye too, that separated space from science. And, it's really, really quite sad because that's... Me too. That's why I got... I'm in this industry because I looked up at the stars and wondered what the hell is going on and just dreamt about it. And, that is science, that is an understanding of our existence that is going to need government and institutional support but then, I'm sure you get it too, but from friends and family, it becomes, "Space is a waste of money. Why do we care about space?" It could be because it just became politicized and you have Elon really making it like you love the guy or hate the guy, and that means you love space or you hate space. It can also be, frankly, you just have... How many 20 year olds have seen the stars? I guess it's crazy to think that, but probably-

Casey Dreier: Maybe while they're swiping through Tik Tok or something.

Jack Kuhr: Right. Yeah. And, maybe if they have, it's like once or twice. So, I'm not in the science world. I'm in the industry world, but I find it very disheartening to realize that, that people are not really associating the two as much as they should. And then, it's harder to measure the impact of James Webb when the general public is not associating science with space and NASA.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. This is veering into one of my favorite topics that we probably don't have time to fully explore but I do think I resonate with that very strongly and I believe I would say that that's part of a larger cultural shift towards literal experience and a downplaying of more of a harder to express non-logical, maybe sublime or soulful experience just in all aspects of our culture. And, as part of that, space has to be utilitarian. And, obviously that's going to be driven by, when you're trying to raise money for your commercial space venture, you have to justify it as a way of returning some value to your investors. And so, the whole framing goes to, "What are my extractive abilities? Whether I'm talking about costs of providing a service or mediating a communication, or am I going to bring some valuable something back to earth or use it in space?" And so, it shifts that conversation is that it's not this kind of hallowed ennobling activity, but more, again, this utilitarian, extractive relationship. And, I think we should have that. I think space isn't a national park but, yeah. I think that we've lost in a sense or that we've downplayed that the other aspect of it is that there's still this too. And, part of that I think is because the interplay between the big growth in space and the energy in space has been on this commercial side and not fully embracing that or being able to use it in the right way or allowing missions to cost so much and finding ways to make that work. 

I will say though, data wise, we do see those polling from Pew and others on a regular basis, that when they do ask people, "What should the priorities of NASA be?" always, I mean, consistently every time that they've done this, I think, every two or three years over the last 10 years, it's, "Earth science, planetary defense, and space science," by a lot. And then, at the very bottom it's, "Send humans to Mars and send to the moon." I always like to say that public polling, you just invert the chart and that's your spending chart. 

And so, there is a disconnect too. And I wonder maybe that there's also a data gap in really understanding public opinions about space and, frankly, probably most people don't think too much about it either. But there is, I think, a serious issue, and I wonder finding... And, this is where we look into this data aspect of data's really important, but it can't capture everything. There's no science benefit index that we can quantifiably measure and that's always going to be a challenge in a world where I think it helps to have this type of measurable approach. We can always count dollars. We can't count feelings.

Jack Kuhr: That's a good way of summing this all up because I made an anecdotal statement and then another story was told by your data statement, but you can also ask how that question was phrased and if you only elicited a response because it was asked and whether people are thinking about this independently but, I do appreciate that. I would hope that people are thinking about this and thinking about space as a science domain and being curious about what's out there.

Casey Dreier: I almost worry that... Yeah, because I always say we got to put something on the rockets that everyone's making. And, sure. You make money with things that point down back to earth in space, and we talk about going further out, but you kind of need something to do there. And, even if you want to go and create a settlement on Mars, science gives you something to do and you're probably quite motivated to want to know that so you don't die on Mars. When they discovered that, "Oh, the ground is actually full of a highly reactive perchlorate chemical, that will not make it easy to use in a lot of different ways or certainly to grow things," that you don't want to be the type where you go, "All right. Great. I'm on Mars, I'm going to carry on humanity." What do you do? Do you just stare at the wall the entire time? You need something to give you this broader meaning and purpose. 

I want to go back to one more thing about SpaceX. Again, SpaceX is really, I think the core of a lot of... It's probably why, in a certain sense, Payload exists, that you're downstream of the fact that they've helped create this larger capability and industry and then you have all these other ambitious companies coming up. I'll plug that you did and are doing a really great series. You went to Starbase down in Texas. You're kind of following the impact of the community, what it's like to be down there, and it must be probably quite energetic and exciting. 

How do you, yourself, again, try to use... Has data been helpful to kind of temper how you've been feeling about that? Or, has it only validated it? And, I'll throw this in here. Last year you were saying you expected Starship to be fully operational, reaching orbit by the end of the year, and now we've seen two rapid, unscheduled disassemblies of the rocket. Has that changed how you're approaching it or was that a moment where the data helped you recontextualize your expectations? Or, do you still see something very fundamental both in your reporting and in your data that you have as a company?

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. So, this series that you're referring to was a six-month project of really understanding the city that SpaceX and Starbase is in, and mainly the people of the city. It was a story about people and jobs that are difficult and are on the frontier and that require risk taking and that is just a theme that I love, whether it was SpaceX or I was down there, and it's a huge commercial shrimping hub. Brownsville is a city that's 97% Hispanic so you think about people who are working on the frontier and trying to start a new life for themselves. 

So, that ties in with passion and dreaming, which I love. And, I think that everybody should have these dreams and you have to be careful because you don't want to go on an earnings call and say a dream that's going to make people invest money in something that doesn't exist but, internally, and when you're trying to find a pursuit in the world, I think thinking big and dreaming is great. And then, you're also opening yourself up to criticism and if SpaceX is coming into a community, how do people react to it and why do people react to it? 

So, that was kind of on the ground, long form journalism. When I look at the data behind Starship, yeah, they have a string of successful launches and the last two have been... It's okay to have one blow up, but to have two, back to back, at similar times is a setback for them. It doesn't change how I view their operational status, because what I would consider operational is when they're deploying their Starlink satellites, which they're-

Casey Dreier: And that's the financial... That's the lifeblood of the company [inaudible 01:03:56].

Jack Kuhr: Exactly. Right. At this point, we're going to soon get to a point where they might just retire Falcon 9 and customer launches that are not Starlink because it will eventually make up such a small amount of the revenue. Right now, it already does, but eventually it'll be minuscule. It could be 10% of the revenue. I don't think they will because I think they are good-

Casey Dreier: Could be their loss leader is launching NASA missions or-

Jack Kuhr: I think they are good actors in the industry. And, you mentioned they opened up the startup world. It was really these transporter ride share missions that opened up commercial space and they're running these missions at a break even. It's not a huge moneymaker for them. Maybe they make some money but Starship is not operational but we recently got data from some filing where it said how much SpaceX is investing in Starbase and Starship each year, which I don't want to quote the number because I want to be right on it so you can continue to track the program from a monetary dollar and data perspective, but you can also see these gigantic blow ups that are clear setbacks that will set back orbital refueling and HLS that you can use both the data in that and also the broader storytelling to paint a picture of what SpaceX is doing with Starship.

Casey Dreier: So, you would say, yeah, setbacks more than some fundamental issue that you-

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. No, I'm definitely not worried about this being a fundamental issue. I think the next big question is whether they can land successfully, if their heat shield on the second stage Starship can work well enough to be able to catch it consistently back at the launch pad. That's going to be the big existential question of it. I'm worried because I never want to see two big kabooms. That's just bad and not great for just the public safety and public perception. But, in terms of the program, it's eventually going to get done. 

By the way, what is it right now, we're in 2025. Originally, when SpaceX won the HLS contract, they were supposed to be landing crew, I believe, on the moon by now. So, we talk about them being this hyperactive, amazingly fast, rapid iteration program, but we can chart that out and show that they are delayed by three or four years from what the taxpayer dollars originally banked on.

Casey Dreier: I'm old enough to remember how long Falcon Heavy took to become operational, right? I was there I think in 2013 when they were talking about it launching in 2015. I forget exactly but, yeah. It's not uncharacteristic. And, again, rocket blowups are a countable thing so I look forward to your charts on this. Jack Kuhr, thank you so much for your insight and all the work that you do at Payload research. How can people find you?

Jack Kuhr: Yeah. You can just... My name is Jack, last name, K-U-H-R on LinkedIn and Twitter. My writing is also available on payloadspace.com. But, Casey, this has been awesome to chat and love to do this again.

Casey Dreier: Absolutely. Plenty to talk about and lots of more interesting data to sort through. We've reached the end of this month's episode of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, but we will be back next month with more discussions on the politics and philosophies and ideas that power space science and exploration. Help others, in the meantime, learn more about space policy and The Planetary Society by leaving a review and rating this show on platforms like Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to this show. Your input and interactions really help us be discovered by other curious minds and that will help them find their place in space through Planetary Radio. 

You can also send us, including me, your thoughts and questions at [email protected] or, if you're a Planetary Society member, and I hope you are, leave me a comment in the Planetary Radio space in our online member community. Mark Hilverda and Rae Paoletta are our associate producers of the show. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor. Me, Casey Dreier and Merc Boyan, my colleague, composed and performed our Space Policy Edition theme. The Space Policy Edition is a production of The Planetary Society, an independent nonprofit space outreach organization based in Pasadena, California. We are membership based and anybody, even you, can become a member. They start at just $4 a month. That's nothing these days. Find out more at planetary.org/join. Until next month, ad astra.