Ben Roberts and David Livingston detail microgravity's potential for medical breakthroughs (retinas, drugs) and advanced materials (semiconductors). Commercialization is nascent, supported by NASA grants, but requires long-term investor patience.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 26 September 2025
⏱️ 13 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchel. Gravity. We count on it every day. Sometimes it's a frenemy, |
| 0:12.1 | but usually it keeps us on the ground and moving happily. Microgravity and zero gravity. These are all terms of art. |
| 0:22.7 | David Livingston, Dr. Space, of the space show, my colleague and co-hosts and co-pilot, |
| 0:28.4 | this is Hotel Mars Episode N, and we're very pleased to welcome Ben Roberts, an investor in |
| 0:34.0 | microgravity, and he will define and help us understand what that means. |
| 0:39.2 | And also someone who can comment on where the thinking is about the uses of microgravity, |
| 0:45.3 | never before thought through in medical texts of the 20th century, but here we are in the 21st. |
| 0:51.8 | Ben, a very good evening to you. Thank you. We begin, of course, if you're |
| 0:55.4 | investing in microgravity, what is microgravity? What qualifies? Good evening to you, Ben. |
| 1:01.7 | Good evening. Thank you for having me on the show. It's a real pleasure. So I often call |
| 1:06.8 | the microgravity applications or microgravity ventures is essentially this upcoming |
| 1:13.0 | cohort of companies that are developing applications primarily medical or advanced materials |
| 1:19.5 | that take advantage of the limited effective gravity in orbit to produce these really |
| 1:24.7 | innovative disruptive goods and services for use on Earth. |
| 1:29.1 | So some of the examples of this real fast are there's a company that's doing this very |
| 1:33.6 | delicate layer-by-layer deposition process to put together artificial retinas that could cure |
| 1:38.0 | blindness in tens of millions of people. |
| 1:40.4 | There's companies that are leveraging microgravity to create new formulations of drugs that are just more affected and more stable than the ones we have on Earth. |
| 1:48.8 | And then on the material side, and the list goes on and on that's just a very limited subset. |
| 1:53.7 | And on the material side, there are a number of companies coming online that are taking advantage of the lack of gravity to do incredibly |
| 2:02.0 | advanced material stuff that you can't do on Earth because gravity is always kind of messing with |
| 2:07.3 | high precision mixtures and and things like that. And particularly in semiconductor materials |
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