The Space Entrepreneur With Marc Bell, Co-Founder Terran Orbital The Long Run Show

Guest:
Marc Bell - Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder
https://terranorbital.com/
Hosted By:
Austin Willson
Michael O'Connor

It's Marc Bell, chairman and CEO of Terran orbital. How are you doing today, Marc? I am doing great. And so thank you for having me. Great to have you we'll first off the bat. I would love to just learn a little bit about Terran, like the name, the stories around it before we jump into too much long-term stuff.

I just want to know about you guys. Terran orbital started, I started in 2013 and I started as a vehicle. To acquire companies that were working in space. I'm a lifelong Trekkie. So there was 10 years old, always fascinated with space, always wanting to go to space. At some point I realized they weren't putting middle-aged overweight Jews into space.

So I decided to go ahead and start buying companies that I could build things to put into space that don't include myself. And it's been a dream come true. It is, we are now building satellites and we're solving problems from space. And we're the guys who helped invent the cube set. So we're all this whole new space revolution that everybody talks about.

It's all our fault. And so all these new startups and everything else, they're all there because of the technology that we created, a company we bought called tie-back because was about. Austin has a question too. It sounds but I right off the bat, the first question I can think of which you touched on already, like the go space revolution since you guys are right in the thick of it, you've started it.

When did this begin? Because we see at least for me, and I think other people in my generation, we see videos of the space shuttles, and that, that kind of felt like the big thing. And then things seem to sleepy for awhile, but it seems like there's been so much going on in the background to make everything that's going on now actually happen.

What's been going on. Two guys, a guy named Dr. Jordan pug Suare who was a college professor and Bob Twiggs called professor about 13 years ago, invented educational demonstrator called the cube set. This was a satellite. You can hold in the Palm of your head. And the point was to demonstrate that you don't need to build big satellites to do big things.

And if you think about it, you mentioned the space shuttle, your iPhone or Android phone that you hold has more computing power than the space shuttle did. And so things have changed dramatically. And so what used to cost a billion dollars to build? You can outdo for 10 million, but that was the only part of the chip sets costs a lot less.

So cubes. Open the door, but you still had to get these things to orbit. Then came along space X and space X made it affordable to go to space. So between us making payload, making the satellite sheep and space X, making the rideshare. A whole revolution was created of small sets. And now that you hear people talking, the government talks about how 50,000 satellites are going to get launched over the next 10 years.

And if you put that in perspective, you may be have like 14,000 thousands of satellites launched over the past few. Wow. Those are some impressive numbers. That's a lot of, that's a lot of stuff flying up into space around us is is that gonna be a problem? That's my one question. The good news is there's a lot of space in space

you have on earth. You have 40% of the planet is covered by land the, of. You have 3.2 billion cars and on a single plane in space, you have 43,000 miles of Y that 40,000 miles of planes. You have a lot of highways, a lot of roads of space that you could travel. And then what times objects tend to hit each other is when it's intentionally done.

When people want to demonstrate how smart they are, that they can create space junk and. And for those of you who are listeners, if you look at the TV show quark from 1977, you'll get a good laugh, but that was a space, garbage truck. And that's what we need today to clean up al