Space and Defense Innovation Launchpad Podcast - Episode 9

Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to the Space and Defense Innovation Launchpad podcast. I'm Brian Fox and in this series you'll be hearing from different technologists and technology leaders in government, industry and academia about their efforts to implement innovative technologies to impact civilian and defense missions. Together, we will explore multiple aspects of this technical realm, including vehicle propulsion, material science, digital geospatial and sensor technologies. Hello and um, thank you all for joining us in today's Space and Defense Innovation Launchpad podcast. I'm, um, Brian Fox with the University of Tennessee Space Institute utsi. And many thanks for ATARC for hosting today's podcast again. It's, it's been a lot of fun doing this and pivoting from the digital into the, into the space hardware, uh, whether hypersonic propulsion and, and everything else that we're getting on stage here. But speaking of getting on stage, I uh, am really just overjoyed to have an old friend, colleague, uh, join me today. Wes Hirsch, he's with uh, prologis currently. But gosh, this is going back a decade and a half. We, we got to know each other back at nga supporting us transcom almost two decades. Speaking of which, I just had Brian Manheiser on.

Speaker B: Oh, nice.

Speaker A: I don't know who will go live first when this all publishes, but yeah, it's almost like an old, uh, St. Louis NGA Transcom party here.

Speaker B: Nice.

Speaker A: But it's uh, wonderful having you on, Wes. Um, do you mind sharing just a little bit about yourself, your organization, your role there?

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. So, as you mentioned, I work at prologis. Most of your listeners may not know who prologis is. Um, we are the world's largest logistics real estate company. Um, a couple data points I think, that drive this home 1.3 billion square feet across 20 countries. And the one that I really liked, I joined the company a little over a year ago, was that about 3% of all global GDP moves through a Prologis warehouse at 1 point. And if you take services out of GDP, that number jumps to about 10%. So roughly 1 in 10 things that are at your home or office have probably been in a prologis owned warehouse at some point. Um, I sit on the energy and sustainability team, um, and we can talk a bit about that. Like, um, as you mentioned before, like, I, uh, worked in defense and intelligence for a number of years and then sort of had a, a longish transition I guess, uh, where I was sort of migrating from a more defense oriented career to one than energy, which for me wasn't that different. But we can talk about that. That might be a bit counterintuitive but anyway, yeah, so there and then working on um, there's a lot of big customers that rent prologis warehouses. So uh, companies like Amazon, Maersk, um, Walmart, et cetera. And so we, my team specifically tries to help them uh, deploy uh, solar on the buildings that we own, uh, EV charging, battery storage, other on site uh, or on premise generation as we call it. So yeah, that's what I've been doing um, for a while now. It's uh, it's fun. I get to work uh, at the heart of sort of logistics and also thinking about how to more efficiently uh, and more locally power that. Um, before that I was at Amazon for a number of years starting with aws, Amazon Web Services and then Core Amazon. Worked on a couple things there that were interesting and that was actually a little bit. AWS was more in the defense and intelligence realm because it was on um, a uh, national security account when I was at AWS and then did a lot of stuff in sustainability and energy when I was at sort of mothership, Amazon. Um, yeah, before that, did a couple other things, was at Boston Consulting Group for a while, was at Arizona State University for a while in a role that I think in some ways parallels some of the stuff you're doing now at the time called the Global Security Initiative. So that was about how universities can sort of better be better partners and sort of um, uh, helping with the research uh, for uh, global defense and security and national security and defense etc. Um, and then actually it was there too. That's where I did my PhD in sustainability there. Focused on energy. Um, energy security was a big part of that. And again so it wasn't just like a clean cut like I was doing um, you know an intelligence officer work and then went straight into energy. Um, it actually kind of been dual footed or dual saddled or whatever you want to call that uh, for a while. I think I'm doing much more pure energy and sustainability work. Although the last thing I'll say because this is a long intro is that I don't feel like. Let me back up for a minute. There's a convenient narrative I think with my career arc that could be something like, and I'm going to use some broad brush stereotypes here, um, defense sector, war fighter support, national security and now tree hugging hippie doing sustainability and energy. Right. And those seem to be very diametrically opposed. But it's interesting like in my mind like uh, I don't think I'VE ever taken off my intelligence officer hat and especially I've never taken off my geospatial hat. I don't think that'll ever change. So the work I do now, I think very much about what those parallels and ties are. And then with sustainability, what I think about ultimately is existential threat to the human species. And I know it's kind of a heavy way to start a podcast, but I mean to be really clear that's, that's exactly why I went into that space. And it's still something I think about every day uh, as a, as a near term, ah, threat to everyone I guess, including the United States which is obviously a subset of the human species. So yeah, that's me and sort of um, some of the things I've done and sort of the uh, yeah, what I've been working on.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's exciting and uh, for, for the audience. Wes and I just had a, a virtual coffee about a week and a half ago, maybe two weeks ago and we're talking a bit about cloud and how things are evolving that way and space based cloud and, and Wes, you brought up just a fascinating point and I'd like you to highlight it. Um, you're going to express it I think clearer than I would just about how there's this interesting transition in, in commercial tech where, where for fixed costs uh, a tech company, a dot com could develop a platform or a capability and then just kind of make a lot of money from that point on that it was a fixed cost and, and now with AI and it's, it's in the news, there's so much investment around it. But there's something that's significantly changed there that there's more. Uh, the costs are no longer fixed, they're variable and tied to use and that comes into energy and compute cooling, all of that. And people hear about that in the news and they may not be connecting it. Um, yeah, speak a little bit more about that. The.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. So I'll give you, I'll talk a bit about the space angle on this, particularly with um, uh, Amazon's leo, which used to be Project Kuiper and then Starlink. I want to start with three data points here on Earth that I think will, will paint the picture for this and put it in context a bit. So last year at an event at what's called Climate Week that's in New York City, the head of Amazon's real estate worldwide was talking and in the opening of his keynote he made a comment around we, meaning The Amazon real estate used to be in the business of uh, buying real estate. Now we're in the business of securing power. They look at that as a number one consideration for anything in terms of their real estate, which wasn't a surprise to us because literally a week later, uh, the then CEO of Pradajas, which is the company I work for, Hamid, uh, who founded the company, he's now chair of the board. But um, he had a fun onstage quip around, you know, and he'd been in real estate his entire career in commercial real estate. And he said it used to be location, location, location. Now it's location, location, energy. All right, now fast forward to today. Literally today, the day we're recording this. I know this might come out later, uh, but I think that's today is when the Nvidia developer, whatever they're calling their worldwide conference that's going on right now. But there was already something put out about like the five layer cake of sort of what drives the AI chip, et cetera. And the absolute base layer of that cake was energy. Right. You're seeing more and more and more like how these considerations on um, power are not like a, yeah, we have the product or the service or the thing and then it's got to be powered somewhere.

Speaker A: Think about it later, solve that problem later. Yeah, no, totally.

Speaker B: I don't think you can anymore.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's. I think everybody's sort of doing first principles analysis now whether they want to or not because it's becoming so fundamental to both production stack and the cost stack. So then you think about sort of energy and sustainability. So okay, what does that do with, with you know, small sats in space constellations. Right. If you look at what's happening with data centers and you know, for a while I think there wasn't much of a public backlash, but you're seeing more and more of that some sort of grumblings around is this increasing my electricity prices? What's going on with taking up all this land? Looks uh, like they're consuming a lot of water, et cetera. Um, so there's a lot of interesting things to dig into there. But if you look at then space based platforms are essentially taking computation or the cloud and putting it in space because for one you have unfettered access to solar. Um, so you have near 24,7 continuous non diluted full, there's no clouds in the way. Right. It's full scale solar that can power those platforms entirely and how every satellite platform is powered. So that One kind of is intuitive, it makes sense. But you think about, okay, you don't have these massive power constraints. And I could talk a bit about how real that power constraint is a minute. But the other one's less intuitive is water. Uh, and the reason data centers consume so much water is actually for cooling. Um, and when you're in space, you can take advantage of that in that you can dissipate, uh, thermal energy, uh, from all that compute that you have for free right into space. So now you look at those. Those are the two biggest constraints on data centers right now. Everything else is sort of hardware, right? But then if you look, this is why I brought up this point with Nvidia. Like, even on the hardware stack, the biggest constraint is energy. Um, so those end up becoming critical, uh, in terms of how you do compute and where you do computer. And it inadvertently sort of solves a third, well, in some ways, NIMBYism problem, right? Which is for right or wrong. If increasingly people don't want data centers in their backyard or in their county or whatever that is, um, this solves that problem as well, right? Um, because there's quite a bit of room and space, as you all probably know better than anyone. So that's a, um, I would say not even a feature. Right. Like, I think it's a core driver as to why you start to have that. Now there's a billion other reasons to put those things in space and sort of the advantages you get. But I think that's a fundamental driver that, that isn't always obvious intuitive to put. Oh, God, sorry.

Speaker A: No, that, that geographic and distance point is, is one that's surprising because the NIMBYism is coming up in, in a lot of different real, uh, areas. I, uh, have the, uh, the pleasure to jump between Denver and Huntsville, and it comes up in the newspaper there and it. Minnesota visiting family. And the small town I'm from, I guess they're, they're chewing on, um, whether they want to put a data center in. And this is in a small town about 45 minutes from the Twin Cities, from Minneapolis, St. Paul, right? And that NIMBYism and everybody wondering what's this going to do to our power? That's the power bill, the local power bills. But, you know, are they even considering what does this do for, for cooling, uh, or water usage? But Wes, you brought up, uh, an issue there or an opportunity about being 11 miles from everyone.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah, true. Although I think the LEO orbits might be farther out. But yeah, you are essentially like you're getting that latency sort of locked in for free as well. Um, and if you can do mesh compute again in space like you take advantage of, um, because wherever you're going to, whatever uh, satellites closest to you at that particular point in time may or may not have the compute you need to return your result. Right. But you know, you have hundreds or thousands of others that can be distributed and I think like, I don't work on this side of that, that sort of um, area, but I think you'll have, I would imagine, some sophistication in sort of how you divide up those workloads. Yeah, um, it comes into play. This is another thing about prologis. We're also a data center, uh, developer. We sell all those data centers. But um, I always differentiate too in that if you look at some of the bigger announcements like Meta's announcement of Hyperion, which will be a 5 megawatt or gigawatt, sorry 5 gigawatt which would be 5000 megawatts data center, um, those you can use to do long term sort of computer training, et cetera, you wouldn't necessarily use them for inference. Right. Um, and there was Jigger Shaw, who's a sort of famous in energy circles, put out something on this this morning as well where he was quoting another paper that was recently written and saying like looking at the distributed nature even of the compute infrastructure might be more sort of agile and versatile versus just you know, building multi gigawatt like fewer data centers. And to give you an idea of the scale, we started to touch on this before that 5 gigawatt data center that uh, I think Meta is trying to get online by next couple years if at full capacity, the amount of energy that that will consume or the amount of electricity, I should say, uh, is about enough for 4 million U.S. households. Wow. Yeah, yeah. Households, not people. So that's like I was trying to figure this out. That's like Chicago, Louisiana, Houston and I think Miami combined. And then you could throw in a few more small towns as well. Right. It's just massive. And OpenAI said that they're looking at a 10 gigawatt data center. So those things I think will face significant sort of NIMBY issues. And again, like those communities that are going to host those. Right. That might change the dynamic. We saw Anthropic, I think it was a week ago or two weeks ago, put out a statement saying, hey, we're going to not only pay for the energy, electricity we consume, but all of the substation and grid upgrades and anything associated with bringing on this amount of load online. Um then actually to their credit most of the other hyperscalers uh, I think had put out a statement quickly after that. Right. Saying that they too would be doing that. But again, point being that these are major, major drivers not just for data centers in general, but just uh, the whole IT system of the planet. Right. Like in terms of how that works. So my take.

Speaker A: And then in the defense space, you know, then there's other challenges there that you think about the commercial market and whether folks are riding on Azure or aws, you know, you name the cloud provider or whoever's storing and providing the compute in the cloud for them. And then comes up a little bit I think in commercial about well how far are we. Right. How far are we from Seattle or where, where is this center exactly? And DOD becomes extremely sensitive where uh, we've got folks on a, on a deserted island that need to uh, uh yeah you know, back to our background, get imagery and analyze it. They need connectivity, etc that uh, compute at the edge is kind of the, the buzzword that gets kicked around. Um, and meanwhile moving that to space, then they're only, I don't know, 11, 15, 20 miles away.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Whatever that might be.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Leo translates to be. So that, that's another interesting aspect there where commercial industry is running into a number of things just in the commercial market, um, NIMBYism and ETC. Meanwhile there's some interesting uh, and non commercial related challenges in DoD that end up uh, maybe being served or, or, or uh, provided by, by moving towards something that maybe it's Starlink or maybe it's uh, Kepler Slleo. Right. Or, or whatever the product might be.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I think you know we, we mentioned this before we started to talk about this. The how you concentrate those assets. Right. Is really important. So one thing I found personally sort of fascinating and interesting is uh, both Space Force and DHS agree on this point too which is interesting which is uh, I forget which Space Force report it was about uh, geosynchronous orbits and saying hey, these big giant single point juicy targets in terms of space adversaries potentially um, are a huge critical vulnerability and threat. Right. So again like where I come at this from energy, I'm uh, like there's exact parallels on the energy side whether it's thermal generation, say from coal or gas or nuclear generation. That is a highly concentrated single port target that is really difficult to defend against hypersonic missile capability. Um, for any nation, uh, us included. Right. For other nations I think Even more so. And if you're not successful in defending that, the impact of that is catastrophic. If you had a kinetic attack on a nuclear power plant target, that would destabilize, I think, a region for years. Right. It would take so much to get that back online. And there are some things you can do with redundancies and whatnot, um, but that's just a huge target. If you look at distributed generation, similar to why we're looking at Starlink, this is on the commercial side at least Starlink, Leo, uh, et cetera, uh, it's the exact same philosophy. Right. And again, this is where I always say like I never really took off my intel and defense hat because when I started looking at solar I was like, well, hey, you have these massive arrays pocket, you know, uh, pocked all over the different parts of the landscape, all wired in series, right? Not in parallel. So if you have a ballistic kinetic attack that's going after say solar or wind, you might get some of it, um, be difficult to get all of it. And even then, like if you took out half of the solar field, you just have half the amount of power, um, this.

Speaker A: Whereas if it's a nuclear reactor and you take out a quarter of it, you have a big hole radioactive problem and the whole thing is down. You lost 100% of your power.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you have huge, huge problems. Right. Um, and then you think about like, you know, it takes at best on nuclear especially like 10 plus years to build fresh, right. When you didn't just have one of your sites be bombed, some of those are extending to 15 plus years. Um, whereas solar you're building in one to two years. Um, so you know, look, it's not that I think like everything should go in one direction or the other, but I think about, when we talk about some of these distributed energy resources, like it's important I think to focus on the sustainability point of view and um, especially if compared to thermal generation, like the, you know, the cleaner for the air, uh, pollution that is not now being exacerbated. Um, but just from a pure energy security point of view, I think there's an angle there that I think is often underappreciated.

Speaker A: Yeah, and, and that's fascinating. Even the, you know, getting something up and running, whether you're repairing it, getting back back online, it's very binary. Or waterfall maybe using the.

Speaker B: Waterfall is a good term.

Speaker A: Yes, we're getting that. MBA terms, let's not even talk know nuclear plants, just a coal plant if, if one was uh, taken Out? Yeah, it's, it's out. You've lost 100 of power and then um, you have to wait so long. Whereas if you're, you're putting in panels as they're implemented, screwed in, plugged in, your uh, power starts going up um, being uh, your capacity is repaired in a much more agile way. Yeah 100.

Speaker B: And then adding to that particularly on as battery storage getting is getting uh, so much cheaper similar to the way sort of solar and wind have gone. Uh, and also bigger and more sophisticated. Uh, you get a couple things there as well. Some of it's a bit technical so I'm going to too far. But one is black start capability. Um. Right. So if your power system goes down, how fast can you restart that system? Um, that can be really complicated with traditional thermal generation and uh, certainly for nuclear generation. And uh, then the other one is um, something that's called synthetic inertia. But it's about how quickly batteries uh, are they respond in microseconds like to sort of fluctuations in the grid. Um and so as you're trying to stabilize grids normally it's because you know a whole bunch of people turned uh, on their dryer or whatever and you're trying to stabilize against that. But again putting on a defense and intelligence hat there could be other reasons why like power is being destabilized. Uh, we also know that there's hundreds of attacks against the US grid itself on the cyber side. Right. So there's different threats that we could be looking at and the ability to respond to those um, uh, in sub second time frames is huge. And again just putting on sort of that energy security lens is I think an underappreciated part of uh, the dynamic that those tools are bringing to this.

Speaker A: And Wes, you had some self deprecating, self deprecating humor at the beginning where he went from like well, defense already and now I'm on the, on the hippie side of things but like sure, yeah. Are you seeing that with the experiences in Ukraine that, that's coming up in the news all the time with, with power, energy storage, attacks on infrastructure, et cetera.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Are folks in the sustainability and energy community uh, coming together and using some of those uh, threads or storylines to, to advocate for more resilient uh, infrastructure.

Speaker B: I'll say it like this, less than I had hoped they would. So just to be vocally self critical of my own sort of industry. Right, Yeah. I think you see it quite a bit now when I look on LinkedIn and sort of the people I'm connected to and whatnot. I see it a lot around, uh, the conflict in Iran right now.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Um, uh, and there's a famous quote, I think it was Bill McGibbons that said, um, I'm going to butcher it, but hopefully we'll pull it up later. Was something around, like, you know, there's so many photons that travel however many millions of miles from the sun to the Earth every single day. And it was like. And not a single one of them passed through the Strait of Hormuz. Um, and I'm like, oh, right.

Speaker A: So, yeah, brilliant.

Speaker B: Yeah, right, yeah. And you, you see that a little bit. I think with the sort of energy and sustainability crowd saying, hey, look, your ability to withstand these price shocks, uh, in oil and natural, uh, gas, et cetera, would be massively buffered if you had a decent percentage or even a small chunk can make a big difference of your industrial infrastructure and commercial infrastructure and just sort of residential infrastructure that is converted to things like, but not limited to, uh, solar for sure, in terms of generation, battery storage, for sure, uh, EVs as well, both commercial and passenger vehicles, and even simple things like heat pumps, which, um, are so much more efficient and cheaper actually for new installs. Right. But what that does is it allows you to not absorb the weather, the shock, I think, a little bit better. Um, and the more that you have in terms of transitioning, uh, all these different components, uh, the better you'll see sort of your ability to withstand that with the conflict in Iran. Like two really interesting examples, and these are kind of the obvious ones, are the U.S. and China. Um, the U.S. is mostly, I would say, buffered from the impacts of that shock, although we're certainly seeing it at gas pumps right now. Right. But the US is a net energy exporter now, um, ever since the shale revolution a couple decades ago. And so the US's ability to withstand that, just because of its fossil fuel capacity, is quite, uh, robust. But the other one is China, Uh, and not because they're able to tap into oil reserves. Certainly, um, they're feeling the impact. But China has been producing. China produced more solar panels in the first six months of 2025 than the US produced in its entire history. What's more important about that point is, keep in mind the United States invented the solar cell, right, at Bell Labs in New Jersey and had a, what, 50, 60 year head start, right? They did more in just six months than we've done in our entire history. And then you look and say, well, why are they Doing that. And I don't think, I think sort of climate's probably the fourth or fifth reason they're doing that. Um, in terms of. It's because they're hugging trees. Yeah. It's not because they're hugging trees.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So you look at that and you say, well, okay, uh, one, it only took them about $50 billion to develop that industry. I, um, know that seems like a lot of money to you and I, but in a national budget, that's almost a rounding error. Like pretty close to a rounding error. Right. Um, that's what it took to develop that industrial capacity. And it was interesting. I caught up with um, a, ah, former mentor and colleague of mine who's at Arizona State University, um, Dr. Gary Dirks there. He was formerly the head of uh, bp, British Petroleum, Asia Pacific. So he ran that part of the world for about a decade for bp. While he was there, he was telling me that actually a lot of that grew out of um, the initial desire to make silicon chips. But um, he said, but that, that takes a very high level of sophistication in terms of manufacturing. And the way he tells it, it's sort of interesting, and he was sort of there on the ground during a lot of this time was that uh, it came about because if you couldn't develop high quality wafers for semiconductors, um, most of the same industrial capacity that you built could allow you to produce, uh, solar. Uh, and the reason is because the tolerances and the sort of, um, the sophistication that you need to build that is much lower bar, much lower threshold. It's just a simpler sort of, uh, at a fundamental level it's a simpler product to build. And so they started to build that capacity and then those investments in that industrial capacity, again relatively small. But then you look at the output of uh, you know, I think at some point, probably before the end of this decade, maybe, maybe early into the2030s, if they continue at their pace, China will produce close to a terawatt of solar per year. Um, that amount of solar not only deployed locally, helps them buffet against the. And then you combine that with the electrification of pretty much everything in their economy. Um, the electrification of mini manufacturing, the electrification of commercial transport. So I'm talking class eight, uh, semi trucks, box trucks, et cetera. Um, because now all of your fuel costs have marginal zero cost. Right. Um, and again none of those electrons pass through straight hormones.

Speaker A: Um,

Speaker B: you then can one lower cost of production across your entire national economy. So that's already a big sort of move geopolitically. But again then when you have these shocks, um, you're better able to weather them now. Like you know, if, if this conflict had happened 10 years from now, like I think it would probably be even less of a bother to China right now. I think there's still, you know, there's some things they're contending with. But point being is like there's multiple ways to sort of solve your energy security problem and pretty much maybe Russia. I was trying to think if there's other exceptions, this almost no other country is going to have sort of the, the resources that United States has. We're just, we're blessed. Right? Like it's, it's sort of ridiculous. Like when you look at it, um, and even for the United States it's like, well, right. But you now have the ability to have multiple different ways to address those situations. Right. In terms of um, whether it's for markets or for conflict. Right. Any type of shock that happens to your supply line on the energy side. So long winded way of saying like I think, I don't think that's going to slow down. Um, you already see the response in Europe um, because they kind of went through this already. Was it 2022 with Russian uh, gas price shock. Right. And you see they're like we want to electrify even faster. Um, we want to go into. There's a think tank out of the UK called uh, Ember that coined this term electrotech, um, which is not so much about sustainability or renewable energy but sort of all the things. Right? The heat pumps, the EVs, the batteries, the solar, the wind, all that combines into a system called Electrotech. And you look at the financial implications are already extreme in terms of like how much cheaper it is to provide finished energy services. But on the geopolitical side, um, also huge implications. Right. And each one of these shocks I think pushes those countries faster and faster down that route. So yeah, it ends up being I think an interesting dynamic and one that's you know, sort of important for a number of reasons. So.

Speaker A: Yeah, there is a whole lot there, right?

Speaker B: There's a lot, right? Yeah.

Speaker A: It's reducing, reducing your own vulnerability, whether it's from like a, a uh, weather event that could impact um, infrastructure. It could be an enemy attack. You were talking about hypersonic weapons and, and how do you defend from that? Um, let alone the, the hedging against geopolitical uncertainty. Um, so there's terrific opportunities for the US to, to continue to push for that. There's been. I know it was during the W. Bush administration with really one of the drivers being around energy where I know uh, W at, uh, shared like he's got geothermal in his house there in Texas.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: The idea of like, let's try something different.

Speaker B: Totally. Yeah.

Speaker A: Are there any other, uh, initiatives underway, Wes, that you know of, whether it's coming from the government, uh, maybe federal or at state levels, um, or uh, from commercial industry to. Yeah, there's a couple things for something different.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's a couple things I think are interesting for sure in terms of technologies and sort of pushes. So you mentioned one. Geothermal is really interesting. Uh, both sort of continuous geothermal power. And then also we've been looking a lot more lately at what's uh, known as a geothermal heat pump. And the basics of this are they have these already sort of in these horizontal systems. You can actually do them vertically as well. Where you say, well, if you have the interior of some building envelope, whether it's a house or a, ah, you know, a million, uh, sorry, a million square foot warehouse. Right. Um, what you're essentially doing is you're saying that the air has some temperature outside and it's either too hot or too cold than what you want the air inside to be. But the Earth, depending on where you're at, like the physical lithosphere, the crust of the Earth, um, once, you know, if you're high up, not close to the magma, um, stays at a constant temperature, it's roughly 50 to 60 degrees, uh, Fahrenheit, um, depending on where you are. Um, so what is that? And so it's like 15 to 18, I think, Celsius. So.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: Um, you can do a. Basically, uh, a heat exchange. Right. So if the air that's inside the thermal envelope that you have is too hot, you run it into the Earth. So the earth starts to absorb some of that heat and send you back cooler air. And. And then you still add H Vac on top of that, but you can pump it into the building. Same thing in reverse. If the air's too cold, you run it into the Earth so it can capture some of that heat from the earth and then pump it back. So, um, that technology I think is really interesting. Um, there's a couple cool players there like companies like Bedrock and a few others, um, on the geothermal energy side. So just taking, you know, drilling down to where it's really hot and then converting that to steam and then using that to, to generate electricity, I think is interesting. Um, I have a love hate relationship with small medium nuclear reactors I would say in that um, actually I don't have a hate relationship this one, this is just me personally. Um, this is not, I'm not representing anybody with what I'm about to say. One of the things I find so bizarre about the conversation around these is that we talk about those as if they exist. Uh, we say oh well small meter nuclear reactors are so efficient and they're so cost effective and you can put them like they don't exist just to be clear, like they might exist and there's some R and D around those. Um, we don't have successful commercial deployments of those. Right. And someone may prove me wrong and say ah, there's like one that just happened or whatever. But uh, let's say at scale right now if they do great, like that's awesome. Um we can produce lots of clean power. Um, you know, and they're much smaller than the point I was making from uh, an energy security point of view from ballistics, like know easier to defend smaller etc, you can hide them, you can do all kinds of stuff.

Speaker A: Right. You can move them around in the defense community the idea of counter uh, drone requiring lasers and yeah gosh, deployable small nuclear reactors. But as you're describing right now, that's an idea, not, not a tangible.

Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. And yeah, my guess is there's enough sort of excitement right or wrong around that technology that we will probably inevitably figure it out. Right. Like so I'm hopeful on that. Um, but, but honestly the thing I think about all the time is

Speaker A: your

Speaker B: sort of opportunity cost. Both like that you pay in cash as, as nations let's say and also just mentally to be really clear, we have from a sustainability point of view. Right. Like so if you're talking about like hey you need to keep uh, the earth from heating over 1.5 degrees which it looks like we're going to pass that target pretty soon or minimize how much over you do of that and that has to do with how much carbon you're putting and carbon equivalent that you're putting into the atmosphere. We have all the technology we need today to solve that problem easily. We have all the technology we need today right now. We actually have had it for more than 20 years. Um, you could argue that battery tech and solar tech and wind tech have gotten cheaper which is good. And certainly heat pumps have helped uh in terms of the advances that have been made in those. Um, but as far as core technology, no miracles are needed whatsoever. Uh, there's a professor at Stanford who's sort of famous for this. I think he's written a couple books on it. His name's Mark Jacobson. In the title is no Miracles needed. Um, he's 100% correct on this point. Um, and I think it's something that we forget about a lot because you see these giant problems. And then we talked about the security angles and space angles and all the different things that are going on. And I think at one point, like a minute ago, you paused and was like, wow, okay, there's a lot to unpack there. Right? It's a lot to wrap your head around, 100%. Right. Like, I mean, I work in the space every day, but I. I don't feel like I even can wrap my head around a small corner of it. But what I do know is, like, 100% of the technologies we need already exist today commercially at scale, price competitive. Like, it's all there. Now. The question is often like, well, why can't we just flip a switch and instantly convert? And there's a lot of reasons, right? Inertia, m. Vested interest, um, supply chains, uh, geopolitical considerations. You know, the list goes on and on and on. All those are solvable problems, though, to be clear. So that's why, like, generally, like, I'm. I'm. I think I'm naturally optimistic or naturally an optimist. And. And on this issue, I am as well. Um, but yeah, just to reiterate, like, that tech exists now. Does that mean, like, I want people to stop doing R D on SMRs? No, like, we should 100% be doing that. Um, we should 100% be doing R and D on new, new, advanced geothermal. We should 100% be doing, you know, different things that might bring additional tools online. But I think it's hard.

Speaker A: Different tools are required to solve different problems.

Speaker B: Oh, totally.

Speaker A: A solar panel is not going to work in every.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Ah, to solve 100 or every problem. Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah. I think. And I think, like, the. The thing that's hard to hold in your head and you have to, like, assume some level of sophistication of your audience, which I'd assume for your audience for sure. Right. Is you can hold in your head that, like, we can pursue R D for some of these, um, you know, future bets on. On what might work and not let that, ah, not let that slow us down on the things that we know work, um, and keep driving on that. Because I think when it's a complicated thing and you think like, well, maybe A miracle will come along and solve it. Right. That's the easy answer. Um, and it's just not the correct one. Right. Um, if we wait for that, like, even if a miracle did come along, it'd likely be too late. So, um, and on the point of solar, always.

Speaker A: Well, I just read a quote from Walt Disney. It was essentially paraphrasing, here, stop talking and start doing out.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.

Speaker A: Delivering on a thing with what you have.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, 100%. And on the solar thing, it's interesting. You're right. The solar won't work in all scenarios in all places. Although I will say plants grow almost everywhere on Earth. Right, right. Um, they're exclusively solar driven. One of the things I always find fascinating in, in the sort of solar space, you may hear terms thrown around around like, oh, solar panels are only. I'm, um, using air quotes for the people listening are only, uh, what are we at? 25% efficient. And I'm like, okay, that's interesting. That's 25% efficient against, like, some quantum, uh, mechanical theoretical max of like, perfect energy conversion. Keep in mind, plants are less than 1% efficient. Uh, so solar that we have on the commercial market today is 25. At least 25 times better than plants, which have dominated the Earth for 2.5 billion years.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: The most dominant species, or not species. The animal kingdom or animal kingdom. Sorry, the most. Let me get my biology straight. Somebody in biology is getting furious with me right now. They're the most dominant life form in the history of the planet, as far as we know the history of the universe. Right. Fueled by one source. Solar. Yeah, that's it.

Speaker A: Efficient.

Speaker B: 1% efficient. Yeah, actually slightly less than 1% efficient. And, you know, we're at, you know, through being scrappy since 1940. I'm, um, gonna get the wrong quote. 46. I think it's Bell Labs for solar cell in the 40s. Let's say we've hit now 25 times that. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, so I'm pretty bullish on solar, even amongst all the other sort of clean, um, solutions that are out there, um, just because of the distributed nature. And then the last thing I'll say about this, so I don't bore your audience too much, I think the, the quote I've seen before is, uh, speaking of space, it's about eight minutes worth of solar. So about eight minutes worth of the solar radiation that hits Earth through the clouds would, uh, power the Earth for a full year. All human activity on Earth. Um, I did a bit of a Deeper dive on that. My dissertation when I was still a grad student. I won't go into that. But even if you look at locally and you take into account clouds and population center densities, etc. You could power all human activity a thousand times over. Like, it's not even close. Right. There's, there's just, I mean, you know, we're orbiting around a stellar furnace that's a million times the volume of Earth. Right. Like it's just there. There's plenty of solar. There's a lot. Now, like, do you want other stuff? Yeah, absolutely. Right. Um, you want a mix of different things, but I think solar will continue to be the dominant form of energy.

Speaker A: Tie it back into kind of the defense and maybe a bit of the space thing. What's interesting there is, you know, like my experience in the army in Iraq. The amount of time, uh, and energy, uh, but you know, planning, organizational energy and literal energy driving fuel, uh, trucks up and down MSR Tampa, you know, uh, yeah, energy drives. And this goes back to Napoleon, right. An army crawls on its belly, um, and the ability to push, uh, capability forward, um, or as we were talking about with like LEO or starlink. Right. The idea or forward, you know, and then offset those, those costs, uh, in every way or any way that they're measured. Um, and commercial industries starting to maybe look at that because of challenges they're running into with compute store energy bills, um, variable costs that used to be fixed in, in the past and it's, it's hitting their bottom line. Yeah. Anything else you'd like to say that way?

Speaker B: So I've seen different numbers quoted on this, but I think it's safe to say at least 30% of all fossil fuels that are consumed on the planet are to move other fossil fuels around. So like, I know we both used

Speaker A: to work and folks that are listening in, in uniform or were in uniform can probably shake their head like uh, when I was on the Mount Whitney at 6 Fleet, a big tanker ship coming alongside to refuel the Mount Whitney, you know.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's wild, right? I m mean, yeah, because we used to both work at transcomp, so I know we've, we've dug into this sort of intimately. Right. Um, and by the way, like that, I want to be sort of thoughtful here the.

Speaker A: Oh, absolutely.

Speaker B: So let me. I'm. I'm going to pull back for just a minute so I'll talk a lot about fossil fuels and you think, wow, okay, yeah, that's a sustainability guy. Whatever. Right. To be really clear, in the mid-1800s, after the discovery of coal to today. Right. The one way that we have known to produce energy was the same way we were producing energy before the 1850s, which was to burn things. Um, that is consistently for, we think, close to, what's the latest estimates, 500,300 to 400,000 years. That's how humans have harnessed energy on the planet from 1850 on after the coal boom, and then eventually petroleum, uh, and gas, um, methane that derived from that, um, that we did that the same way we burned things. Right. Um, the benefits from doing that, I know we talk about the consequences, right, in terms of atmospheric pollution, but the benefits of that. Between 1850 and now, life expectancy has doubled. The population has gone from a little over a billion where 80 to 90% of people lived in poverty to 8 billion now, where 10% live in the same level of poverty. Actually less than that. And that's all directly, uh, no pun intended. But my opinion, fueled by, uh, that energy explosion, uh, okay, great. It's gotten us really far and probably will still be part of our lives, at least for as long as you and I are alive. But then when you start thinking about how much of our economy and our national security and whatever we've built around, uh, these locked in, uh, sort of catches that come with, or albatross that comes with that. Right. Um, is staggering. So, you know, we talked about roughly 30%, perhaps more of all fossil fuels are just to power moving other fossil fuels around the Earth, particularly in naval, uh, and tankers. Um, the US military, as an example, or US DoD, I should say, is one of the largest consumers, I think the largest single point consumer of petroleum on the planet. So looking this, uh, up 4 billion gallons a year, uh, is roughly now, this is actually down a little bit, um, from after, um, operations in Afghanistan and Iraq ended, um, but still quite significant. That would be enough to drive a car around the Earth four and a half million times. Or I had to calculate this. It's about 60 round trips to the sun and back. Right. In a single year. So the amount of petroleum fuel that it takes to keep those supply lines, that is the U.S. doD, uh, functioning is massive. And so when I look at that, again, because I'm more of an optimist, I don't think so much about. Well, you have to figure out how to eliminate that, that 4 billion gallons a year. Um, what I see is that's an opportunity to have probably not the whole 4 billion gallons, right. But much more operational uh, efficiency and reach, uh, for much less input cost and then on top of that, uh, with much less vulnerability in the supply chain that follows behind you, even if you're the United States. Right. Oh, yeah, And I think that part is, that part is huge. And again, it's a bit nerdy I think, to talk about logistics and supply chains and whatnot if you're with the wrong audience. Right. But that's. To your point, that's what wins or loses wars. Right. It's, it's massive. Uh, and so, yeah, I think the way I think about that is again, I've never taken off my intel or defense hat where I'm like, yeah, these are, these are huge ways that you can make, at least for the, for the United States and our national security, you can make us a lot more secure, a lot more efficient, a lot more capable, uh, in our operational reach, um, uh, through being able to at least diversify more and more. And by the way, it's not that they're not like there, there's been a long history of really particularly like in a lot of the Ford deployed, uh, units and the Marines and others where they're saying, yeah, hey, sunshine's fall on the earth, everywhere, wherever we're going. So, you know, we can use that to our advantage from a tactical perspective. I think like that will continue to be the case probably at a more strategic level as well.

Speaker A: Oh yeah. And at the tactical. They see it, it's. Yep. It's one less patrol that has to guard a, A, uh, fuel convoy folks. Literally or figuratively in the trenches. See it, uh, see it pretty clearly. Wes, in, in closing, anything else you'd like to share with the audience?

Speaker B: Wow. No, I think we covered it.

Speaker A: Yeah, we got to like tie together space, power, sustainability, logistics. I think we covered our collective career, uh, background there.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I'll be interested. For the, for the listeners, uh, like what questions they have and also what they're thinking about in terms. I know this is not a live call in show, but if it was, uh, maybe, maybe there's a way to, for them to comment.

Speaker A: Yeah. When this hits, uh, LinkedIn, you know, we can uh.

Speaker B: Oh, perfect.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: I think it'd be good to. I always love seeing stories about how other people are thinking about this, particularly from the operational level. Um, again, time back to where we're currently. Like that's really important because it gives us sort of some operational autonomy. Right. But I think like this is a theme now. I don't think prologis spends a lot of time thinking about ballistic defense, um, as would be expected. Right. But, um, I think for a lot of the people that are in your audience, right. They, I imagine they do spend a bit more time thinking about that and from a space based angle, but also from a national sort of security, uh, angle, etc. Um, I'm really fascinated to see like where uh, we think there's additional opportunity for some of this stuff. So.

Speaker A: Well, we'll stir uh, the pot and continue that conversation as the this goes live and we'll continue that on LinkedIn. But Wes, it was wonderful having you on and thanks for being on today and for everyone listening in. Thank you all for joining us. Um, I really hope you enjoyed the podcast. As Wes mentioned. Uh, I would too. This was pretty nerdy, but it always is because we're leaning in on the space. It is, it is fun. It is fun. Uh, we're always interested in hearing from technologists, technology leaders in government, academia and industry. Um, so if you'd like to share how you're driving innovation and modernizing outcomes for the US space mission, please reach out to me at bfox24tsi.edu. Again, that's B. Fox, as in Brian Fox, B. Fox 24tsi.edu. And Wes, thanks again for joining us today. Really appreciate it.

Speaker B: Yeah, awesome. Thanks, Brian.

Speaker A: Thank you all for listening to today's episode of the Space and Defense Innovation Launchpad podcast. Don't hesitate to reach out if you'd like to be a part of a future podcast. We'd love to hear from you. We hope you enjoy today's discussion, so please don't forget to like, follow and subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes. We'll see you next time on the Space and Defense Innovation Launchpad podcast.