 Good evening everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. Wrapping up day two of our coverage of HPE Discover 2023 from the Venetian Expo, Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante. We have a special segment up for you next. This is going to be exciting, Dave. Oh yeah, it's blast off. Let's literally blast off. We've got Norm Follett here, Senior Director of Space, Tech and Solutions at HPE and Jared Matthews, Founder and CEO of Astrolab. Norm, take it away, this is a special segment. Yeah, it's a special segment. I'm using my special title for it as well. So first of all, thank you so much for taking the time and working this in. I'm just super, super excited to introduce you to someone who I think is going to change the universe, our CEO of Astrolab, Mr. Jared Matthews. And he is really, he and his organization, we're partnering to take edge computing even further. You know, as you guys know, and particularly you Dave, we've been on the International Space Station now for a few years, the most powerful computer ever to go to space. And we've been doing, you know, edge computing and really revolutionizing what's taking place up there from a computational science perspective. But we want to go further. And we believe that the organization and the team that's going to take us further and is going to allow us to do some pretty exceptional things on the surface of the moon is Jared and his organization in Astrolab. So it's with great excitement that I introduce you guys to him and his organization. And I hope it's a long and interesting relationship both for us and for you. Oh great, well thanks for making it happen Norm. I really appreciate it. You've wrapped this wrap up a couple of times. But I understand you got to go. Yeah, actually I do, and I apologize for that. I just have another commitment, but I thought it was so important that you guys had a chance to learn about Astrolab that I wanted to discuss. Come on, what do you got to do that's more important than the queue? Well, I mean, you know, it has taken me a long time to get on the show. So it's all, leave it. Look, come on, you teasing us. Where are you, what are you doing? I'd rather not say. No, come on, really? Actually, I'm going to go to the sound check for John Fogarty. You guys might be part of that. Ah! Come on, Leonard's got FOMO, big time. He does. Hey, I know it's true, it's true. You know, hey, I was born on the Bayou, so I just got to go for it. Hey, all right, we're going to give you a pass then. I don't blame you. I appreciate it. Be gentle with him. We will. All right. And we hope we see you on stage with John later. Well, it depends on how the sound check goes. Hey, all right. With that, thank you very much. Thanks, Norm. Thanks, Norm. Jira, great to have you. I was telling you before we went live. I have a space industry lineage as well. So anything about space is near and dear to my heart. Talk to us a little bit about Astrolab. You have a great background. JPL, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory from anyone that doesn't know it. SpaceX, what does Astrolab do? Why did you start the company? Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk to you about Astrolab. Yeah, Astrolab is a startup. We were founded three years ago. We're based in Los Angeles. And what we're doing is developing novel planetary robotic systems. I started my career out at JPL. And I ended up being there for 10 years working on a lot of the Mars rovers you may be familiar with, spirit and opportunity and curiosity. I was on the part of the design and testing teams for those as well as the operational teams. And then I moved over to SpaceX to run their spacecraft mechanisms team and develop things like the docking system that Dragon uses to dock to ISS. But the genesis of Astrolab was really started from being at SpaceX and seeing really the development of their Starship lander, which is going to be the biggest rocket ever created. And the opportunity that that represented in terms of what we'll soon be able to do on the moon and then eventually Mars. And so Astrolab is really developing the next link in the transportation network for the solar system. Ah, that's awesome. I'm unbelievable. So a couple of things. The last SpaceX launch where the rocket blew up and it was like the mainstream media was like, ah, big failure, but it wasn't. It was actually like an amazing success. Could you explain that to folks? Sure, yeah. We actually have a booked ride to the moon on Starship for mid 2026. And so because we are a customer of SpaceX I actually had the good fortune of going down to Texas and watching the first attempt to fly Starship. And from my perspective, it was a tremendous success. And having spent seven years at that organization myself, I'm very confident that they're gonna get there. They're trying something that's extremely hard, but they have a really incredible team and deep, deep experience now. And accomplishing really hard goals and have every confidence that they'll get there. So that was a milestone in which they collected a lot of data, obviously. And now they are basically in the process of analyzing that so they can take the next step, right? Yes. And what is that next step? Well, they're obviously gonna try to get to orbit on the next attempt. And that should start a long series of flights that will ultimately lead to our ride to the moon in mid-2026. And what's special is that the vehicle is able to put 100 tons down onto the lunar surface. And so it really changes what's possible to do not only in space, but on the moon and eventually Mars. And it changes the economics of it and the scale at which you can do things. And so if you haven't seen our rover on display here yet it's huge, it's the size of an SUV. And the reason for that is it's really sized for the scale of these vehicles that are being developed. And what we're doing is really solving essentially the last mile transportation problem for the lunar surface. Yeah, it sounds like Norm is messing up the PAs. I think so. We shouldn't have let him go. I know they might kick him out. Can you still hear us? Are we okay? He's rocking it. He's still here, it's all right. I'd love to know a little bit more about Astrolab's partnership with HPE. Norm gave us a great introduction to you and talked to us about that because everybody knows the International Space Station. A lot of people know about Supercomputers. What are you guys doing together? And as Norm was saying, we want this to be a long lasting partnership. What are some of your objectives? Well, so we have a fundamental problem on the moon or anyone who wants to operate on the moon in that there's a limited diameter pipe through which data can flow back to Earth. So there's limited bandwidth to get data back to Earth. And certainly for the first five or 10 years of lunar development in the coming decade, the main export from the lunar surface is gonna be data. And where HPE comes in is that, where their edge computing capability is, it's much better to send back refined data than raw data, right? And I liken it to some of our customers who are interested in doing mining on the moon. It makes much more sense to process the lunar regolith locally and extract the high value stuff than to send all the raw material back to Earth. Well, data is no different. You want to send back the insight and not the raw data that you're working with. It's the ultimate edge use case, isn't it? It is? I mean, so it's instructive. So we kind of answered it, but let me ask it directly. Why moon? I'll ask you a question. And then I'll talk about that. How big do you think the moon is? Let's see. Probably, I don't know. Let's say a hundred and... Compare it to like a, I don't know. Compare it to the Earth. Yeah. Maybe 300 moons? Actually, it's quite a bit bigger. I think the best way to visualize it is the surface area of the moon is the same size as Africa. So it's the size of the continent of Africa. Now, imagine if a new continent on Earth just popped up overnight in the Pacific Ocean. And all of a sudden, there was all this new land to explore and to derive value from and resources from. Well, that's essentially happening now because what's happening is NASA and private industry are developing the long-haul transportation network to get us to the moon frequently and cheaply. And so, all of a sudden, we're going to have essentially this new continent to explore and derive value from. And... This is not normally a cube interview, FYI. This is the cube after dark, Dave. Yeah, that might be it. They're going to bad moon rising. Okay. Jira, thank you so much for joining us. This is, like I said, a little unusual. But really awesome what you're doing with Astralab. Very aspirational. Like Dave said, that is the ultimate edge use case. We'll definitely keep our eyes on Astralab, what you guys are doing there with HPE. And we wish you the best of luck. Thank you so much. John Fogarty rocking away. Oh, there we go. Awesome. Wow, amazing. Thank you so much. Okay, so we got the moon. It's got kind of the next frontier, the next continent of exploration, and then as a way station to Mars. Yeah, and it's just like every other expansion of humanity beyond the current horizon, that's always been a huge economic opportunity, right? And I kind of liken it to, it's like we're in 1870 and the railroads are being built to California, you know? It's that level of opportunity. And I'm sure there were people in 1870 saying, why would you build a railroad to California, right? There's nothing out there. It was really hard to fund that back in 1870s. Nobody wanted to fund it. Actually, President Lincoln made it happen, so. Exactly. And now the two richest people on earth are pouring billions of dollars, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, pouring billions of dollars into developing a transportation network for the moon. And NASA is backing up their investment with their own billions of dollars. And so it's soon it will become not only frequent, but economical to send stuff to the moon. Crazy, crazy to even think that, but your analogy about the railroad was fantastic. It gives us that perspective of there's so much yet we don't know. There's so much of value, economic value that we can claim. So we're going to keep our eyes in this space. We're losing it. We're going to wrap. We want to thank you so much for watching our special YouTube after dark segment with a whole sound check going on. All thanks to Norm. We let him go early. You see what happens. We want to thank our guest and for Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. We're going to say good night for now. Join us tomorrow. We have a great lineup of guests for our third and final day of covering HPE Discover 23.