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Hi, and welcome to the A16Z podcast.

This episode of the podcast is all about space, specifically space innovation and how

that's playing out right now from launching rockets to small satellites to imaging terrain

to telecommunications.

Moderated by A16Z general partner Martine Casado, the discussion includes people that have either started

companies in space or been in space themselves. Steve Smith, NASA astronaut, then NASA diplomat,

John Gedmark, CEO and co-founder of Astronis, and Dan Birkenstock, co-founder of Skybox imaging.

This discussion was recorded as part of our summit event in November 2017.

Steven, so you probably have the longest view of the industry. 30 years ago, he actually

wrote a paper on this about like the actual challenges in space. So I'd love for you to talk about

like the challenges that have been overcome to bring us to now and what you see kind of the current

challenges are for technology in

space i wrote a paper for the congressional science committee and it was called the commercialization

of space current barriers and suggestions for removal of those barriers i'll break the space commercialization

commercial space industries down into kind of three parts there There's the rockets, there's the satellites,

and then there's doing business in space. In that report that I did 30 years ago, the single

biggest barrier by far across all the surveys of all the different space corporations, the

biggest obstacle to commercialization was the expense to get to space. In the old days, there were three or four rocket vendors in the United States. They made really big rockets. They always launched them from the same place. On those rockets were really big satellites. And the technology progress that they were making every year was very slow. That has now completely changed, especially in about the last six, seven years.

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