 Hey, what's up? John Cristana here. I am here with Rick Ward. Nice to see you, Rick. Nice to see you, man. You're going to be talking about how to be a space entrepreneur and how you can get involved in the space industry, what sort of skills are needed, what sort of experiences are required. There's a revolution going on and there's only one direction of progress and we all know it's going up. Rick run a space company called Orbit's Edge and they do edge computing in space. I'll have Rick talk about it in a little bit, but first off, Rick, thank you so much for being here. Oh, that's a pleasure, man. Cheers, man. Oh, sorry. Unfortunately. We'll get another round. A lot of them are pretty young, you know, like 20s, you know, generally and they're in their 20s and they're looking to find, really find where, what their career is, what to be involved in and everybody knows space, it's not going anywhere. It's not a fad. There's, there's a lot of things that have been coming and going in our lifetimes that are peaking in space, but everyone knows that is not going anywhere and we, and there's just, there's limited amount of space on earth. Yeah. You're not a rocket scientist. No. No, I'm not. Yeah. You drive, you drive a, you drive a cool Tacoma truck. This guy is a rad guy. You're, you're, you're, uh, you weld. Yes. You're not a weld. Yeah. Yeah. My dad taught me that. You, you don't strike me as your average space guy. Strike me as a super down to earth. Try. Yeah. I mean, you're, you're, you're amazingly smart, amazingly like all these things, but I, I think a lot, when a lot of us think of space, we think of billionaires. I'm a marine. I served in the infantry. Yeah. Right. Can I get a big So I was an infantryman for four years. Thank you for your service. Oh yeah. It was, it was actually before all the 9 11 stuff. So I ended up not having to go to combat, but after I got out, I had a hard time finding some sort of a mission in life, like capital M mission. I'd gotten interested in space, but I'd always been interested in space back to, you know, as a kid, but I never really saw it as a real thing that would be realistic for me. A few years after that, I had a really weird random conversation with a guy from a deep space industries, which is an asteroid mining company. How'd you come across him? So this is what I call my gorilla networking, which I've done several times since then. Oh, thank you. I was at a conference called a very sophisticated conference called dragon con in Atlanta. It's about comic books and anime and games and video games and cosplays and stuff like that. Where was it in Atlanta? That's cool. Yeah, they have it later in like comic books or animators. I'm not so much into that. I was doing the science fiction stuff, but they also have a hard science track. And I was actually writing a novel at the time and asteroid mining played a role in that. So I'd been doing a lot of studying on that. And I was in the asteroid in a panel that had to do with asteroid. You were trying to learn and you were going, you were going to the places where the people were. Yes. And you were trying to learn the deep, deep science. Yes. I was wearing a black kilt. I had a Roman Gladius stainless steel stormtrooper armor and a stormtrooper helmet, which of course I had made. I had a shield, a round shield with the Imperial Galactic Empire logo on it. And I met this guy and I said, he had a, he had a white lab code. He had the white crazy hair going and it said deep space industries on the back. And honestly, I did not know that DSI was a real company and I wasn't sure if he was doing a bit or what. I got his business card and through my head I was saying, get his card and get out of there before you say something stupid. I just strike up conversation. You just asked him like, what is this? Yes. So what's DSI? And he's like, Oh, so he told me once I emailed him, we talked on email for a bit. He was going to maybe be starting a branch of deep space industries in Orlando. And what happened? I ended up working for deep space industries for two years. This guy you met in a kilt, you're wearing a stormtrooper outfit. I mean, a lot of folks could think who would take that seriously. Now you're working for one of the biggest or the most important space companies. Let's say one of two asteroid mining companies. Asteroid mining company. Yeah. Oh yeah. Jeff Bezos said the first trillionaire in space is going to be, it's going to be Asteroid. I think that's likely. Basically my thought process was I want to go to the places where the people that I want to meet are going to be. Nice. That was my entire thought process. Nice. And I've done it since. I call it gorilla networking. Learn enough to have some valid stuff. Learn about the company that you're interested in. Know what the heck they do. Try and figure out what kind of skill sets would be useful for that. Then you can go and meet these individuals and have these one-on-one conversations, the series of one-on-one conversations, get a better picture for the lay of the land. Like, so you do this and you do this and you do this and all that kind of puts together a better overall picture of what's going on there. Also, you have to be unafraid to fail. Like, you have to be that way. If you are afraid to mess up and fail, if you stay in the parts that you're already familiar with, you're never going to do anything new by definition. You know, a lot of the people I talk to online, you know, I'm teaching them to market products or to send messages or to DM stuff. And part of sales and marketing is, it's a numbers game. You know, it's like talking to girls. You're not going to be perfect doing sales and marketing. Nine out of 10 people at least are going to turn down. And a lot of people are scared of that failure because they take it personally. And you know, it's something I've been struggling with for years to get people to that place of saying, you've got to be fearless. Personally, you know, like, you know, I'm an entrepreneur myself and being able to, you know, it's hard getting started. It's hard going from not, you know, not having any money to pay your page or whatever, you know, when you're getting started and trying to create something from nothing. But I always thought to myself, well, it's tap, I'm tapping keys on a computer. I just have to get the computer. I'm just tapping keys on a computer. I'm in the air conditioner room in a swivelly chair. This is a lot easier than what Kai's my age had to do 100 years ago. I have had that thought so many freaking times in the past couple years. It makes it so much easier because it makes it everything, any problem I have, it's almost laughable. It puts it in perspective. Yeah. But to have a company, you need, you need money or you need customers, you need a product, you need like my business, you need customer support, but you need at least like some mixture of those things. How did you get all the stuff to create Orbit's Edge from that? Okay. So yeah, there was the identified need. Then there's also the convincing somebody else that it actually is a need because the way things are done right now. Somebody else with money or a customer. Yeah. Generally in order to get the money, you have to have the customers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At least have somebody you can point to. Or you have to have people that would say if you build it, I will, I will come. Yeah. So you got to get those. Basically the people you met in the trenches, you were mission focused, you had people that said, yeah, yeah, we will support you. And you're also you had people who said, yeah, we would buy stuff from you. Yes. Because you are doing this every day and people and you built up a good reputation for yourself. Yes. You really shouldn't feel the need to to remake yourself in somebody else's image. Be the best you don't be somebody else. Be the best you don't be somebody else. Be the James Bond version of yourself guys. What is the James Bond version of yourself? At this point, I'd love to get a big hoorah from my boy. And also if you guys and just let me know your comments. But also I want to hear what are the paths from people? What is what is the way to be involved? Does does everybody just need to sell their house, sell all their belongings and move to the space? Right now before this episode ends, come out to the space coast. Look at what you have. Look at the things look at what you have as your as your assets to borrow from Princess Bride. If at least you have a wheelbarrow, then you can you can count that. Maybe I'm in a good location. Maybe I'm in Colorado. Maybe I'm in Southern California where they have the SpaceX stuff. Maybe I'm in Texas, where they have the SpaceX stuff. It's around El Paso, right? That's Brownsville for the for the testing. And then they have Boca Chica for the launches. Maybe those are options. Maybe here. There's also a bit of stuff going on in Wallops Island in Virginia. There's some stuff in Seattle with Blue Origin. And I'm not necessarily saying just look at your geography. If you happen to be close to one of those good points. Look at what sort of things are happening there and look to see which of your skill sets might possibly correlate. Have you been working with AI for the past few years? Hey, maybe that can be useful with somebody. There's lots of stuff that you can do with AI. If you know Python, that is actually pretty darn useful here. Why that in particular? Because it works well for a lot of the small small CubeSats and a lot of those small machines. Robot operating system is another one. ROS is very popular. They use that for a lot of rovers around here. It doesn't work as well with the extreme low powered machines that are going out to Mars and stuff. But we're hoping to change that. We're working to change that. There's a lot of stuff I can point you to to a half a dozen people who started stuff with damn near nothing. There is a guy. He is now one of the go to guys. I can't remember his name or his company, which I really should. I've spoken to him like three times. He has started a space situational awareness service, which basically tracks where satellites are. They're not static. They're moving at 19,000 miles an hour. So it's a matter of where will it be two weeks from next Thursday at 748. If you know all that stuff of the thousands of things that are up there, you can predict when there's a possible problem in the future. He started this with his kids telescope, started taking pictures of the sky, started focusing on the satellites, started using the pictures to calculate trajectories, went from there to he ended up with like a six telescope network. I believe it's more than that now, but they these were hobbyist level telescopes. These were not like crazy expensive telescopes. This was him and some buddies initially. And it turns into now he's got a business and he actually makes money off of it. That is a niche, man. Find a niche. Like I enjoy taking outside every night. I sit out there and I watch the satellite every now and then. I'll see. Yeah, me too. I enjoy that. So find a niche, find a niche, find a problem. That that is actually wasn't even a problem. That was just kind of like, I wonder where all the satellites are like, I wonder when the next one's coming around. What I'm hearing is some skills are very important. I'm hearing AI, machine learning type things. And you know, there's Microsoft and Google and Amazon, all of their machine learning languages, TensorFlow, etc. These sound pretty important when you're out in space because these things are going to have to think for themselves. I'm also hearing robotics. Oh, I'm here. I'm hearing robotics is super cool. And I remember growing up playing with those Lego things. You try to get the thing that you try to get it to do the stuff you want. And then I'm also hearing a really interesting kind of thing. Super low powered computing stuff with Python and Python is particularly useful for CubeSats because a lot of the CubeSats are basically a cell phone. So if you can find a way to make super low powered computing do something useful in space, like maybe you figure out something with sensors and low powered computing and you do something useful, you have, you know, potentially even a company. And there's still a lot of people who are doing test articles on a balloon. They're doing, they're putting this on a balloon and sending it up there. You can get to nearly space for a few hundred bucks. Rocketry clubs, astronomy clubs, just subreddits. What's your favorite subreddit? I kind of like SpaceX master rays because it's funny. They have a lot of memes. Like they mean that's it. No to sell. I was trying to come up with a better reason for liking it. No, no, no. It makes sense. Okay. I would follow some YouTubers like while I'm working, while I'm actually doing like if I've been doing hardware for the past two months, been building for the past two months. I do like everyday astronaut, engineering every day. It helps me keep up with current events. It helps me see what's going on in other sectors. It's a good way to build a working knowledge of things. It's a good way to learn some of the lingo if you don't. Good grief. One of the ones I like to follow is a couple names. I'll never say her name right. Zishuan and Sebastian. They're a couple and he's Austrian and she's Chinese. They're not fans of the CCP and they're also rabid SpaceX fanboys. Now I have an idea of what the landscape looks like. With that, I can maybe see where I could be the puzzle piece. You start drawing those connections. You start meeting people at astronomy clubs, rocketry clubs. You start going out. You start being on SpaceX master race subreddit. You start listening to everyday astronaut and some of these things. Over time, if you're doing this every week or every day you're listening to these podcasts, you start because I believe everybody's smart. People just don't have the right inputs all the time and you start figuring out those things. I want to go also on LinkedIn. I cannot say this strongly enough. You're chatting with people on LinkedIn. You're looking at the news feed or you're just a feed. Quick questions so we can go. Jack Bezos or Elon Musk? I like Bezos' philosophy better in terms of going to space for the betterment of Earth and I feel that... At Astra? At Astra Protera. Protera. I feel that there is more possibility in building O'Neill cylinders and spinning habitats and habitats outside of the Earth. Why? You think people want to live in space or you just think that people want to like keep having babies and like... For sure. We are actually the globe. The entire planet is heading to a population crisis and it's not what people think it is. The population crisis we're going to have in the next 20 years is too small a population to do all the things we want to do. You think it's going to shrink? It is already shrinking. Why? Urban centers. Urban centers. Social media. Virtual realities. PR. Media. Also waiting longer to have your kids and make these things happen and you don't. So we go to space. Yes thank you so much for watching. Please let me know. Put your comments down down below. Check out Orbit's Edge. Where do people connect with you if they want to know more about what you do or Orbit's Edge or you or whatever. What's the best way for people? Orbit's Edge.com is our website. We also have a LinkedIn presence. Orbit's Edge and Twitter. Follow on LinkedIn. Follow on Twitter. I don't know what to say man. Dude thank you so much. It's been fun talking to you man. It's lots of different topics. Lots of different topics. We've been all over the place. I want to be a space cowboy you know. I'm just happy to be talking to one. Jeff Bezos is the space cowboy for sure. He's got the hat. I've seen some pictures. He is also bald. A lot of bald. What is that? Aerodynamics. It's all about aerodynamics. You gotta be sleek. Well thank you guys so much. Have a good one. And we have some more videos coming in this series. I'll bring you in on them soon. Have a good one. Bye.