Will Industry Land on the Moon?

Will Industry Land onthe Moon?

NOTE: While this transcript has been reviewed, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript.

Jill

Hi, I'm Jill Wiltfong, Chief Marketing Officer for Corn Fairy, and this is Briefings, our deep dive into topics that corporate leaders need to care about.

The space race of the 1960s marked a sudden frenzy over travel to the moon. Everyone, and I do mean everyone at the time, seemed to have caught space fever. And then a decade later, a most peculiar thing happened. The fever cooled and eventually just faded away.

Cut to our current decade, and the race to the moon has heated right back up, except this time the competitors aren't governments, they're companies. But what kinds of businesses will we see up there? And what kind of leaders will it take to drive business off the planet?

Important questions for leaders to be asking right now because it's projected that by 2050, almost 90 billion dollars will be invested in our nearest celestial neighbor, and cumulative revenue will be a whopping $130 billion. Not bad for extraterrestrial earnings.

So, given that, today let's take a look skywards as we ask: Will industry land on the moon?

Before we start, if you're watching us on YouTube, please be sure to like, subscribe, and leave a comment to let us know your thoughts on this topic.

I'm joined now by Simon Constable, a global economy columnist for Briefings Magazine, who wrote a pretty good piece on this very topic. He spent lots of time speaking with experts and researching just exactly how business will evolve in space.

Simon, thanks for joining me.

Simon C

Thank you for having me, and it's an honor.

Jill

Well, it's funny because we had that expression, 'he sold you the moon,' when we want to say that someone overpromised something, but now it seems you actually can sell the moon.

Simon, it feels like we're living in the future, which is astounding to me. Tell me, how did we get to this moment in time where all of a sudden companies are interested in doing business in space?

Simon C

In the past, it's just been something we look at space or we look at the moon at night or we see other things in the air. But now it's actually happening because we've got a fairly long history of really good tech, the last quarter of a century at least, maybe the last 30 years when we've got there and it gets better and better and better and better.

One of the things that we've seen is that vertical landing rockets are now credible. In the past, if you sent a rocket up and then wanted to bring it back, you'd have to drop part of it off and then a little module would hit the sea, so then you have to build another rocket. Now they come down vertically and safely, and that's really, really good. That's a huge thing. It makes everything cheaper too.

Jill

Elaborate a little bit on the business interest here. What kinds of products and services are companies looking to create in space and and on the moon?

Simon C

The big ones are things like capturing the solar rays and the solar energy from the sun. It doesn't get beaten down in the way that it does when it comes through our atmosphere. That should be able to be caught, and that can be used for data centers on the moon or even floating around the Earth, you know, in the orbits. There's also a lot of meteors out there that have minerals that are precious that we could go and get and capture and then send them down back to Earth.

So there's a lot of things that can be done, and some of that is basically for treating people medically and getting things like retinas, new retinas built for your eyes, that are much better when there's no gravity.

Jill

That's an ad for a fictitious company called Lunar Industries from the movie Moon. When the movie came out in 2009, it was science fiction. Now, perhaps not.

So, Simon, you've talked a bit about the kind of industries that are going into space. Talk to us now about the people. What kinds of people and skill sets will companies be looking for over the next decade as they build out their lunar businesses? And how might these people be different from average job seekers on Earth?

Simon C

They're going to have to be really smart about physics and chemistry and all that sort of stuff. If they're going to be on the moon and be up there, they're going to have to get used to being somewhat lonely up there because it's a long way away and a telephone call is a bit odd and difficult because of the time it takes the waves to go from the Earth to whoever they're talking to to on the moon and back again, and there are big gaps.

I have interviewed people in the space station, the International Space Station, and it took usually about two minutes. However, there's a lot more than just the people going there. We need engineers for making rockets better and better and better and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. We're going to need people who know how to extract minerals from meteors and things like that and, of course, collecting the solar power that we can get, which would make electricity so much more cheaper.

Jill

I do want to mention that not everyone is gung-ho about the moon. One expert you spoke to was actually skeptical about plans to create an economy there. What's the thinking behind the naysayers? Where, where are they coming at this from?

Simon C

Well, when you make something new or do something new in this way, and it is a very new way to do it, you've got to have it proven. So you've got to say, OK, have we sent something up to the moon to do X? OK, yes or no? Or maybe partially or something like that. And a lot of things haven't been fully tested yet.

So I think a lot of the people who are saying, well, great, we've been talking about having moon activity, but we haven't really got very far with it.

Jill

Give us a sense of time and feasibility here. Leave us with a projection, let's say, of twenty years out from now. Do you think we'll have jobs on the moon that might seem as normal as working on an offshore oil platform does today? Is, is that how tangible this, this feels to you?

Simon C

I think a lot of it will happen. And I think a lot of it will be limited to big companies and also if you're sending people up there for tourism for very rich people, and that's fair enough. It always works that way. Something new rich people get first, that's fine, and then it tends to filter down fairly quickly in know in a few decades.

So I think this could really happen, but people are going to have to work really, really, really hard, harder than when you're at school definitely.

Jill

Simon, thank you for coming on. You have, you've sold me on the moon, for sure. I'll go.

Simon C

Cheers, thank you.

Jill

We've looked at what kinds of industries may be landing on the moon. When we return, we'll speak to an aerospace industry expert on the special kinds of leaders needed to drive business into space. So stick around.

BREAK

Jill

And we're back. In the first half of this episode, we discussed a growing interest in industry in space and on the moon. Now we'll dig a little deeper into the kinds of leaders it will take to get us there.

And joining me for that conversation is Mark Sanborn, Cornferry's space industry practice leader. He's at the forefront of the final frontier. Mark, thank you for joining me.

Mark

Yeah, thanks for having me today, Jill. I appreciate it.

Jill

So that last clip featured the iconic moment when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. It seems like we've come a long way since then.

Mark, we asked this earlier, but what, from your perspective, has made industry in space and on the moon seem like such a possibility now versus even a few years ago?

Mark

I think one of the biggest things is just the launch cadence. And that means the the number of rocket ships physically leaving from a lot of different places around the world on a regular, regular basis.

Just I'd say over the last five years that's really accelerated. If you look back ten years, that's really accelerated. So it it is the cost to bring things to outer space that has really come down to allow not just science experiments but a lot of commercial commercially viable things, a lot of people talking about data centers and things like that that you can now put on orbit different satellites that can now connect to your cell phone where that's all brand new brand new technology as well.

Jill

For leaders who might be listening and wondering whether their business needs to start a moon unit, what's your advice on how to go about assessing the right time to kind of dip your toe in in space?

Mark

I think you you stop and you take a look at your product portfolio. I mean, when you ask that question, my mind kind of goes to the gold rush of 1850. You know, you have everybody starting a gold mine and they're gonna all gonna, you know, get product, but who are the people that had the the pixes and shovels? We all heard that analogy.

But I think if you look at a company who's providing some kind of, you know, device that's going go on data centers and the moon or all these satellites that are going up, or you have somewhere in that supply chain, you might be 3D printing somebody something in, you know, on orbit that it's gonna allow you to create like a a lunar rover or something like that rather than having to, you know, put on a rocket ship and launch it up there and and hope that it makes it there in one piece. There's those types of things.

Jill

That's investor and podcaster David Friedberg speaking about the moon's potential for industrial growth, but getting there at all will require visionary leadership, like perhaps we've never seen before.

In connecting with these leaders of companies that are venturing into space, what would you say it is about them that maybe sets them apart from other organizations?

Mark

I think you have a a group of risk takers that are just innately drawn towards the hardest thing that they can think of that maybe a lot of people have told them, like, don't waste your time on that. Like you're not going be able to get it done. And I think you can see where I'm going with this. Like those kind of people are using that as a motivator to prove those people wrong.

I think you you see this phenomenon of people that have built businesses that now have the ability to set capital aside and pursue something that is, you know, very much like a pipe dream if you put it down on paper. I mean, there are companies fifteen years ago that were gonna use like Star Trek like or Star Wars like a like a tractor beam, right? And now it's like, well, you've got laser communications that are pointing things back and forth. You have a lot of things that are the building blocks that are starting to appear that could actually make it happen.

Jill

It does sometimes feel that leaders at big firms have difficulty enacting big visionary change because they're so focused, understandably so, on quarterly results. And and space is more of a long horizon bet, but still you do have advice for public company leaders who want to push the needle a little bit, and it comes down to an ability to articulate how risk is being mitigated.

Talk a little bit about that.

Mark

I think it all does come down to the to the risk because we are talking about some things that are that are further out there that carry, you know, quite a bit more risk than just a iteration on a current product. So I think it comes down to just looking at the entirety of the market and see where things are changing. It's boards having a a technical expert guiding them through, you know, what's the financial risk of not investing?

Jill

Let's end by having you give us the long view. In in the first half we heard that there are people who think the space industry is still a pipe dream. In five years, do you see space ventures still trending upwards?

Mark

I do. I mean I mean I think for for so many reasons. I love the question of like the why and the who, you know, I think that's it's the people that are going continue to propel it forward. I mean and not necessarily just the people who are providing the capital, but it's the people that are are trying to bend the rules of like what's what's even possible.

I think there are going to be continued expansions of like infrastructure in space, you know, they're I think we've been looking at this for fifty years and not just as a country where we're sitting today, but I mean as as a global species.

Jill

Yeah, exciting times ahead. Mark, conversation has been, I would say, quite literally out of this world. So really appreciate you joining us today.

Mark

Thanks for having me.

Jill Wiltfong

The executive producer of Briefings is Jonathan Dahl. Today’s episode was produced by Rupak Bhattacharyya and Zachary Dore, and it was edited by Jaren Henry McRae.

It contains reporting by Russell Pearlman, Ariane Cohen, Peter Lauria, and Meghan Walsh. Our video segment contains original artwork by Fraser Milton, Haley Kennel, Jonathan Pink, and Sasha Kotzek. Our web operations are managed by Ed McLaurin.

Don’t forget to read our magazine—available at newsstands and at kornferry.com/briefings.

That’s it for Korn Ferry Briefings. I’m Jill Wiltfong. See you next time.