HELLO FUTURE - Live from the First Commercial Nuclear Space Launch

Speaker 1 (00:09):
I am currently broadcasting from Santa Barbara, California, outside of
the Vandenberg US Space Force Base, where I have just
seen something completely remarkable and groundbreaking for the entire space industry.
I got to see the first ever regular private company,
this company called City Labs, the first time a private
company has ever put a nuclear powered anything really into space.
Hello Future, It's me Kevin. This is a dispatch from
the Digital Frontier. The planet is Eart, the year is
twenty twenty six. My name is Kevin SURREALI remember you
can listen to all of the latest Hello Future episodes
however you get your podcast. My guest today is the
CEO of the company who actually did this. His name
is Peter Kabui. He's the CEO of City Labs, and Peter,
I can't thank you enough for joining us. It's just
a couple of hourgoes. You haven't slept at all, really,
but you were there at Vandenberg with this massive historic
event for the commercial space nuclear industry. How are you
feeling right now?

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Tired and relieved, excited. It's a mixture of all the
feelings you can possibly have, but yeah, it was an
exciting moment to watch us being able to put this
tiny little nuclear cupesat into space. When we watched the
Falcon nine go into the clouds and then a little
while later they're saying that it's being deployed, and then
we started getting some telemetry and it was exciting just
to watch.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
And so this was actually my first ever launch that
I've ever seen, and so to be able to see
like a Falcon nine rocket from SpaceX shoot this thing
into the orbit, I mean, and there were like eighty
one satellites on board. It was so remarkable to see
all of that happen. But talk to a lot of
my listeners, they love space, they're passionate about space, but
they don't necessarily know what it means. I know that
this was really groundbreaking, but why was it so important
for the nuclear industry? Why was this the first thing?
Like what history was made?

Speaker 2 (02:08):
The United States government, through NASA has launched and Department Manager,
they've launched nuclear satellites, go back fifty years to the
Voyager missions. You know, they've been doing this for a
long time, even as recently as Mars twenty twenty, with
a perseverance were over that's been done. But for it
to be done by a commercial company that was groundbreaking
that was set up through the Presidential Memorandum NSPM twenty
where they set it up so that commercial companies would
have a pathway to be able to do this. But
like anything that's set up, it takes time to navigate
for commercial companies to catch up, to understand, to work
with the FA to work out all the bugs, and
actually see the process to get it done. And say
that I've started working the process a few years ago
and they had culminated with last night with the launching
of this bore satellite.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
What's interesting to me is just seeing your team and
watching it with your team last night, you're really struck
by just how many people work on these missions and
how many jobs are created. I call them space collar jobs,
but how many jobs are supported, how many jobs are
created from the person in the industry like yourself and
others who were there who have been in it for decades,
who've been working on this, to the new hire who
this is their first job out of college and they're
watching a rocket take off into into space. And then
you've got the next generation of folks who who are
studying and are there, and you've got people your CTO
drove across the country with the with the little batteries
in his car because he was like, I don't know
if I want to put them on the plane. I mean,
it really does take a whole team. That's got to
mean something to you, as the CEO to as you're
watching that rocket, just to see that go up.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
Small teams can do a lot of great things. And
stay Dabs is a small team and we've been able
to do this. But if you're ready to look at
let's say the economy or the greater structure, it's a
people in the FAA. I'm I was talking to a
garment customer yesterday where we found out who authored the
NSBN twenty. That was exciting to hear that there's someone
who was thinking about this back in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen,
drafting these documents to be able to make the catalyst
for companies to be able to do this, to do
the nuclear launches on their own, and it was it's
exciting that it's it's not just a small team here,
but many small teams across the United States that are
putting together all right.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
So from my perspective, I had to do a lot
of crash course learning about why space nuclear is so
incredibly important, and it makes a lot of sense because
when you look at the Moon, for example, and the
lunar economy that is just being built, there's a lot
of darkness on the Moon, and because of the darkness
on the Moon, you can't have solar energy and you
can't have solar power, and so nuclear power is able
to last a lot longer. It's able to allow us
to have energy in different parts of the Moon to
establish the technology and the systems that we're going to
need on the Moon to create the base. So it's
really interesting though that these batteries are an entritium and
give us a chemistry lesson, if you will, dusting off
my old high school chemistry lessons. But it's really this
is how we're gonna build the Moon economy. I mean,
this battery this and folks, if you're not familiar with it,
it's literally like a piece of gum that it's the
size of a piece of gum that's put on to
this payload and it goes up into a satellite and
that's the battery. I mean, this isn't like a nuclear
warhead going into space. It's literally the size of a
piece of gum. So why is it so important for
the lunar economy that this be continuing to push forward.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
Well, the lunar night is fourteen earth days and you're right,
it's dark the whole time. But it's not just dark,
it's really really cold. It's like minus two hundred c.
That's colder than liquid nitrogen. Have you ever seen the
liquor nitgen When they did a little experiments, they put
a banana or flower and you hit it with the hammer,
shatters until million pieces. Well, imagine having a rover in
there and it's going to break apart pretty quickly unless
it's heated. So with tritium or radio hydrogen that we
work with, and you're asking about chemistry lesson, hydrogen is
the first one to show up on the periodic table,
and tritium is a radio is tepe, which is the
first radio isotope to show up in the periodic table.
And we're working with this basic element isotope and it's
been used commercially in exit signs, watch styles of the
watchtyle I'm wearing right now as tritium on it. It's
great to work with tridium because you can stop the
radiation with just a sheet of paper, so it's relatively benign.
It's still nuclear. You have to do all the regulatory
work make sure it's safe, but it's something that has
a precedent to be able to that we've used here
on Earth and we've been around it without even noticing.
You may have gone to a movie theater, see a
faint low on the sign the exosign that's tritium. And
to be able to launch it now it's taking this
relatively safe RADIOI stop doing all analysis, working with the
Sandia National Laboratory to do all the simulations and the
fa to be able to get this up there safely
and help with heating components on the lunar surface. So
what we launched yesterday was tridium BATA will take powerers
to be able to have enough electrical power to power
systems and power sensors one day on the Moon. But
we can also use the tritium metal hydride source that
we make to make heaters, and that's where it really
makes a difference. Right now, they're launching us I think
Blue Ghosts two from Firefly. It's going to land on
the Moon and it has like sixty kilograms of batteries.
Most of those batteries are going to most of that
mass weight is going towards heating that lander too, so
that it can survive the lunar night. That could have
been done with, like I don't know, some grams of
tritium to just heat it up, and all that extra
mass could be used for electrical components and to be
able to do science observations and experiments. That's wasted space
at a million dollars of kilogram to be able to
land on the Moon. It's best to just be using tridium.

Speaker 1 (08:14):
And especially I think what I just learned, especially just
from watching this, from really seeing the technology, from talking
to you, from talking to your team, is that when
folks here commercial space nuclear, they should really think of
two core functions. Power and heat. Right, those are the
two main core functions. The power from a battery capacity
in order to power the rovers, power the moon base itself,
power the systems on the satellites and whatnot. It's the
battery power for the lunar economies and arguably even more
than that, the space economy. And then the second component
is heat. Because I don't think people realize that just
because there's no atmosphere on the Moon. People are just
starting to realize the Moon is a destination. It's a
piece of geography. You know, my friend doctor Kirby Runy,
and he says it's a planet. I go, all right, Kirby,
I don't know if I want to go down to that.
I don't want to get political. That's my old life.
But it's cold up there because there isn't an atmosphere.
So these these equipments when they're in the dark. To
your point, it's freezing cold on the Moon. And so
to be able to have some type of heat that
can be up there and generate heat, it has to
be nuclear. It's actually quite simple.

Speaker 2 (09:28):
So nuclear power is what we're working on, and for
State labs are strategies to work with what's really normal
for tradium to do what's natural to provide heat. It's very,
very natural, and we'll be able to get you know,
thirty watts per kilogram of heat continuously for decades. And
that's that's where we're going first. As far as for
the tredium beta will take power, we'll be able to
by micae watts millow wats of power for disparate sensors
across the lunar surface for position navigation, timing, to help
lunar landers land. We can have thousands or hundreds of
thous of these devices on the lunar surface operating autonomously.
If you have a sensor right now in the morning,
you just say, okay, we would just want to put
a temperature sensor. Well, you can't do it with solar
and you can't do it with just batteries. You need
to be able to heat that thing. So to have
a small sensor, you're gonna need something that's a little different.
You're gonna need nuclear micropower, and tredium can also provide
the heat that's necessary to survive the lunar night.

Speaker 1 (10:23):
It's fascinating because I think there's really reductive debates happening
about and candidly they just I don't think that there's
a sophistication in the in the conversation about the topic,
because it's so crucial to be able to do this,
because folks, I mean, this isn't like again, I just
want to reiterate, it's not like you're launching a giant
nuclear weapon into space. That's not what we're talking about here.
This is the size of a piece of bubblegrum, candidly
the size of a quarter. Think of the alternative. Do
you know how much oil it would take or energy
or gas it would take to shove that up into
outer space? It just doesn't logically make sense. And so
what happened in Vandenberg that I got to see firsthand
was really the future of the space industry, really the
future of how we're going to build the system on
the Moon eventually to Mars, eventually beyond. And it's fascinating
because now we can do it with safe, secure power
and heat, and that has been one of the biggest hurdles.
I love this and I want to I know you
got to run, and I appreciate your time. But I
love when I think of the Apollo missions and I
think of and I believe we're with Artemis. We're there again.
I mean, and I wasn't alive for the Apollo missions,
but I hear about it from my parents and from
folks who were, and how it really mobilized America and
our better sense of purpose, sense of self, of innovation,
of imagination. I didn't realize that the Apollo astronauts were
actually using some nuclear technology, I mean nuclear has been
here during the most iconic moments of US space exploration.

Speaker 2 (11:56):
They were using tridium lights. So just like my watch
style here that has tradium, it glows at night or
it just glows continuously. They had tradium lights for their
ava suits. They had tradium on the hollow capsules. That
was part of their main technology that they were using.
The difference now is that we need to scale that
up and be able to scale up for power, for heat,
and the way to do it is to make a
commercial to be able to give companies the autonomy within
regulatory requirements so they can do safely but be able
to innovate within that regulatory framework the NSPM twenty provides,
and that allows to scale up because up to now,
when the government launches nuclear they do that once every
five years or every decade. This lunar economy is going
to need a lot more and it's going to need safe,
determined scale up and that's what small companies and other
companies can provide.

Speaker 1 (12:51):
Peter Kabui, CEO of City Labs, again on the historic
first commercial space nuclear launch and to be able to
see that broadcasting line from Santa Barbara California outside of
Bandenburg US Space for Space. Thank you so much, Peter,
and again congratulations to you and the team.