The End of Micro Launchers? The Bold 70% Savings Case for Balloon-Assisted Space Launch

Guest: José Mariano López Urdiales, CEO and Founder of Zero 2 Infinity

The Cosmic Scoop:
In this remarkably candid episode, José Mariano López Urdiales presents a compelling case for why balloon-assisted launches might be the only economically viable solution for small satellite deployment.

Drawing from 15 years of experience with Zero 2 Infinity, José breaks down why conventional micro launchers face fundamental economic challenges, from capital-intensive launch sites to the physics of dense lower atmosphere.

He explains how launching from 25km altitude could eliminate up to 70% of conventional launch costs while offering a refreshingly honest perspective on the challenges of innovating in Europe's space sector and why copying American rocket designs isn't the answer.

Quotable Insights:
1. "Developing a micro launcher traditionally needs a couple hundred million dollars. We believe with a balloon-assisted launcher, it's in the ballpark of 120 million Euro - including four orbital trials."

2. "Nobody explains it like this - they just say 'because we're so innovative' or whatever. I don't know. I'm going to tell you how it really works."

3. "The only kind of micro launcher that can be viable is balloon-based. But nobody's actually developing it - we got to a certain point, but we're lacking funding."

4 "You don't win by copying. That's not how the V2 appeared, and Starship is super interesting because it's very, very different."

Cosmic Timeline (Timestamps):
- [00:00:00] Introduction to Zero 2 Infinity's unique approach
- [00:04:50] Technical discussion of balloon launch altitudes and capabilities
- [00:14:30] Advantages of balloon-assisted launches vs traditional rockets
- [00:27:34] Cost comparison of micro launchers vs balloon technology
- [00:42:09] European space industry challenges and opportunities
- [00:52:54] Space tourism potential and market analysis
- [01:01:14] Challenges with ESA and European space sector
- [01:15:35] Zero 2 Infinity's journey and pivots
- [01:28:04] ESA funding mechanisms and politics
- [01:32:00] Astronomical research possibilities with balloons
- [01:37:46] Personal reflections on entrepreneurship and vision
- [01:42:54] Music recommendation and final thoughts
- [01:44:37] Closing thoughts on finding meaning in life

Choice of Music for the Aspiring Space Traveller's Playlist: Public Service Broadcasting - "Go" - 

Links to Explore:

• Zero 2 Infinity: zero2infinity.space
• Follow José's insights: @JMLU77 on X

This episode challenges conventional wisdom about space access and offers crucial insights for anyone interested in the future of small satellite launches. A must-listen for space industry professionals, investors, and anyone following the transformation of space access.

You can find us on Spotify and Apple Podcast!

Please visit us at SpaceWatch.Global, subscribe to our newsletters. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter!

Transcript

SCP_121_José_Mariano_López_Urdiales

[00:00:00] Jose: Recently the European Space Agency put out some studies

that

some people have been

working on and I feel so embarrassed as a European to see that they're just copy pasting Starship and New

Glenn.

So it's like the, oh, let's put the, grid fins of this one or this, uh,

the, the bottom part

and, and you look like, uh, we're not Chinese, right?

Like, why do we do this? Like, we're falling so low.

[00:00:22] Markus: Hello everyone. This is the Space Cafe Podcast, and I'm Markus. I'd like to take you on a ride today to perhaps try to get a different look or take a different, different look on the space industry, because, uh, We're spoiled, or this is at least what the big players and the media are trying to do, um, to show us the success stories, to show how great and shiny everything is.

But if we take a closer look, um, space is hard. This is nothing new and space is a tough place to get at. And today we're looking at a company that makes no secret out of It trying very hard and struggling now and then, because I mean like, Hey. Everyone is struggling, Elon is struggling, but he just doesn't talk about it in this way.

Um, I'd like to put the light today on Zero to Infinity, a fantastically interesting company trying to get into space using high altitude balloons for the first stage and then once You're in a safe spot, you would launch or they would launch with regular thruster technology into wherever they want to go.

A fantastic, um, concept. They're not the only ones, but they are at the pioneering front of this technology. But they may know, make no secret out of it, how hard it is. To get the funding, how hard it is to convince people that this may be the right thing to do for certain projects. This is not the solution for everything, but for certain projects, it's better than everything else on the market.

So joining me today is the CEO of Zero to Infinity, Jose Mariano Lopez Urdial. Um, a fantastic, charismatic character who very candidly talks about. Not only his company, but his vision, his dream, and how hard it is to make it a reality. And that's exactly what we're What we need, don't we? Open, candid discussions about overcoming obstacles to achieve breakthrough solutions. Because again, space is hard. Jose's journey is nothing short of fascinating, and I am truly excited to share it with you. So let's dive right in today. Welcome to the podcast, to the Space Cafe Podcast.

José, let's go.

[00:03:01] Jose: So is that your house? Are those your

books?

[00:03:04] Markus: Ha ha. It's a good, it looks like a great wallpaper, but it's real. It's it's like it's real book.

But it makes, um, books are make, um, Um, Living Spaces, Even More Alive. So I love books just for the vicinity to be near them.

[00:03:21] Jose: Yeah,

I, I agree. When you step into somewhere and you see books that you own,

it's always, it generates like a, a, a link immediately. It feels welcoming. Yes, it does.

Yeah. Yeah. I

can see that. Um, and I try to

keep that

with my children.

[00:03:41] Markus: you have three kids, so no

time, no time to read, right?

[00:03:45] Jose: Oh, well.

it's 

important that they see me reading.

like it's always been important, so it's, uh,

yeah, there is 

time to read sometimes.

[00:03:56] Markus: What's on your, 

[00:03:57] Jose: But I I 

must confess that I use a lot of

audiobooks now, 

[00:04:00] Markus: Yes, me 

too. 

[00:04:01] Jose: because it's convenient.

[00:04:03] Markus: what's uh, what book is on your nightstand right now?

[00:04:07] Jose: Always with 

Honor, which is a biography of the last leader of the White Russians in the Russian Revolution. 

I'm reading it in English, my Russian is not good enough.

[00:04:20] Markus: Tell me, Jose, you're now based in Spain, right?

[00:04:24] Jose: yes, I'm based in Barcelona.

[00:04:25] Markus: Barcelona, And you're doing something that, to be honest, um, this is now episode 121 and we have never talked about even remotely about such a topic because it's very rare. um, how high can you go with a balloon? Where's the limit?

[00:04:50] Jose: Um,

the, the limit,

you know, the 

higher

you

go, the

bigger the

balloon has to be. For the same payload. And

there's a point 

in

which all the, all the buoyancy that the gas gives you is there to, to lift the balloon itself. So you have no, no suspended mass,

no,

no payload. So there's a limit like that. And of course, if you made thinner materials or stronger thinner materials, you could theoretically go go higher.

The, the limit is around 50 ki, sorry, 50 kilo kilometers. Right. Um, when you get to 50 kilometers, you're basically just lifting the balloon with a token payload of a few kilograms, uh, with a camera or something. Um, so, but that is not very helpful. Like, there is nothing

that happened particularly at 50 

kilometers where

you might want to go there.

The interesting things happen around 20.

20.

around 25 and then around 30, 30, 36 between that range. Very, there's some astronomy missions that may require going to 40, but it's rare. So it really depends on what you want to do up there. Um, and, and going higher than 50,

as 

I said it's not practical

with, with balloons.

[00:06:03] Markus: So tell me, tell me, um, this is fascinating. So you, you say the interesting things happen at starting at 20 and 30.

So what is interesting? so

we all know from airliners, from transatlantic flights, you're at, around 10, 000 meters. So if you double that, um, at 20, 000 meters, what is different? And why is that interesting?

[00:06:28] Jose: So you're, you're now deep into the stratosphere, which means that there is no weather, like there's no disturbance, there's no turbulence. It's like

being on

rails. So you get to a trajectory, you can very, very well predict where you're going. So on the way up, there can be noise, thermals, et

cetera, turbulence, gusts.

Once you get around 20, it's like being on rails, which means that you can predict trajectories extremely well, which is very helpful if you want to cover, for example, an area of interest. Let's say you want to take a picture of an oil spill. So you launch a balloon from a location. And you know that there's going to be some noise, but it's going to spend very little time going up.

And then once it gets to 20, as it drifts there, it's going to have a very, very predictable trajectory. So it's

going to

overfly the target that you want to, let's say, take a picture of. So that's, that's one thing that happens at 20. Another thing that happens at 20 that is very, very interesting is that for most of the planet, the winds are very, very weak.

They're not fast. So you launch, let's say, a balloon in the summer at 20 kilometers altitude in Spain,

it

can't stay for over a day within Spain proper. It won't drift very far away. And the closer you go to the, to the equator, the longer they can stay. So you can have balloons staying over one country for weeks or, or months,

uh,

without, uh, Any maneuvering, just because the winds up there are very weak compared to higher

or lower,

so that that altitude of 20 kilometers is super interesting.

For example, when you want to build a, um, uh, a business case that requires station keeping, for example, you want to monitor for fires. You want to see, have early warning of fires. Well, you don't

want to put your

balloon at 10 kilometers, because it's going to go very far away. It's also going to cause all sorts

of trouble

with the airliners.

As you mentioned, they fly in the same altitude. You want to cross that. But if you put them at, let's say, oh, I can place it at 30 kilometers. So it sees a wider field of view. It sounds attractive. Oh, wider field of view. Yeah. Not so good, because your balloon at 30 or 35 is

gonna 

be drifting

pretty fast, so

you 

will 

not be able

to do station 

[00:08:41] Markus: Why is it, 

[00:08:42] Jose: you can do it

at 20.

[00:08:44] Markus: Why is it drifting at 30, 35?

[00:08:48] Jose: Um, so

it's a,

it's, this is quite complicated, but there's some dynamics of the temperature and the pressures and the airspeed of the atmosphere, and um, So, um, And it so happens to be that, that yeah, around 20, uh, you, you got a local minimum of, of, of, um, of wind speed. But if you go farther

than that,

there is also, there is also something at the lower altitude, there is something interesting also that is that, that, you know, as you go up, the temperature of the air gets colder, but then there's a point in which it starts getting, getting

warmer as you go up.

But that, that is less, less helpful for, and that, that's, that happens. Lower altitudes, but yeah, for practical purposes, if you want to stay over one target as long as possible, you

want to be at but If you want the

view, if you want to

have the incredible view of your blue planet,

the

black sky with the stars and planets and, you know, seeing hundreds of kilometers in every direction, seeing that the Earth is curved and the

thin 

blue layer of

the atmosphere, then

you want 

to

go higher because at 20,

you want

About half of the

sky is going to be black, but

the other half is going to be like deep purple.

and you don't want that, 

like, if you're a

space tourist, you want the view, so you still need to go a little higher.

[00:10:16] Markus: It's really interesting, really interesting. It's sort of the calm before the storm. I mean, like first you have the storm and then you have the island, a calm island, and then you have the storm again. I love that. How long, how long can you stay up there, um, with a balloon? I mean, like, would you have to refill after a certain time?

[00:10:41] Jose: Well, 

the longest that a balloon has stayed, I think it's over a year on those altitudes.

[00:10:48] Markus: Wow.

[00:10:49] Jose: And

it's a question of quality

control of the material and the seams being perfect. Uh, there's a lot of research and development ideas that have not received capital that could increase the stay for, of a balloon up there, uh,

close

to five years. Those things, those things, uh, they don't, they don't really make sense to try them right now. If there is, you know, what happens with balloons

and a lot of

new space sector

is that

there are, Cool ideas out there that require research and development. I couldn't extend capabilities, but Obvious brick and mortar ideas that could have been implemented almost 50 or even more years ago are not being funded.

So why develop something that is very, very advanced and impressive if things that we already know that work are not being funded? So that's an interesting gap there. So, yeah, you could stay over a year. But why would you want to do that? And if you stay a year, you're gonna drift, that's for sure. You're gonna maybe go around the world or

maybe

several times, and that causes all sorts of issues with overflight rights, etc. But

yeah, you could stay very long up there. You don't refill, you just keep your helium

there,

or your hydrogen if you're using that as a lifting gas. You can get into the pros and cons of

both.

For many applications, you just need to get out of the thick soup of air that we have above for a small amount of time.

Like, for example, if you wanted to reach orbit with a balloon assisted launcher, you only need to cross to a certain altitude. And there, the sweet spot is around 25.

That's something that we've looked

at in great detail as well. You know, there Designing a satellite launcher for sea level has some cost and complexity.

If

you go higher, up to 25 kilometers, there is a dramatic reduction

in 

the cost and

complexity of your launcher. Launching it from 30, let's say, or 35. Not much gain, the sweet spot is around 25, uh, for that kind of capability, um, and that has to do with, um, with, again, many, many things about how we build rockets and how we design them, but it, for some of the listeners that may be familiar with the concept, max Q, maximum dynamic pressure.

So, basically, when you launch from 25, you know that maximum dynamic pressure is

not

going to be a parameter in your rocket site. Uh, the, the, the biggest limitation, the, the, the, the moment that most people are worried

about when

they're

launching a

new kind of missile or, or ground based satellite launcher is when they go through max Q,

which is when the

force on, on the rocket is biggest. If that stops being of any requirement, you liberate your design space, and that's, uh, that's, that's the advantage of launching from a high altitude balloon or reaching these

35 kilometers.

It is not like a lot of people say, Oh, but you're saving on propellant. Oh, you have extra energy because you need to.

No, those things are there, but they are, they don't matter. Um, they don't matter at all. You, what matters

is

capital required to get to the first. Set of launches and, um, how

your

ride to orbit is going to be a different one from, from that 

[00:14:30] Markus: So you're, um, so you're taking the

[00:14:33] Jose: I digress.

[00:14:34] Markus: You're taking the first 20, 25 kilometers out of the equation of traditional,

uh, space, um, launching methods. Um, you're taking it out of the equation because you're substituting a traditional launcher, um, with a balloon. And then you're going into the traditionally propelled

[00:14:57] Jose: Yes. And the thing is, those 25 kilometers are associated to maybe 65 to 70 percent

of the real

cost of a launch into

orbit. Why

is that? Um,

imagine,

The spaceport. Okay, you need, you need the spaceport. What is a spaceport? Well, it's a lot of equipment and facilities and also land.

So you

need to have land that is close to the sea. People like

to live

in land close to the sea. They like to have condos and,

And, uh, apartments

and shops and IKEAs and things. So, but you can't have any of those because you need to have

a very, very

long piece of coastline just for you. And how are you going to make enough money launching things into space to compare it with the money that you could get by using that asset in a more,

uh, economically

effective way?

It's unimaginable, unimaginable. So the, the, that's, that's why. That's one of the reasons why, uh, satellite launch is a strategic capability of governments. It's not a commercial

service

because you have an asset there, sitting there, that is not generating negligible, almost any, any money compared to what it could generate in some other way.

And you can say, Oh, you can go and build your launch space somewhere desertic where

there's nothing

on the coast. Well, there are not many coastlines that are, that have nothing. Most of the coastline of the planet are populated. But if you go, if you have to generate

a city in a place that has almost nothing, and we've done this, we know how this works, uh, France did it.

Um, it's very,

it's even more in capital intensive because you need to generate a city with the schools and hospitals and all the things that you need

for the people that

work there in a very remote area. So there is no, the only way to solve for that is to either launch far away from people on property,

or get to a point

where you can have these kind of activities

in the middle of a populated

area.

And we're not

yet there. We don't have the reliability

for that. So when we launch from, um, our balloons launch from a boat, Um, for, for, for the satellite launch line of business, you would launch from a boat or more aptly, uh, floating barge that is stocked

by a boat.

So you, you have just your equipment there in the sea and, um, and you don't need to own all that strip of land.

So, so that's a, that's a huge amount of money that most people don't

pay.

like. Like, SpaceX is not renting the land in Cape Canaveral, like, the government considers that what they do is

of value and they let them use it.

But the moment that the government, and I really don't like

to be dependent on a

government deciding if you have, uh, if you can use this or that, right?

that's

not how commercial space is

going to be

whenever it really becomes, um, truly commercial, which is not yet there, but we're making little baby steps. So, so the, the, the other thing that. that you don't have to do is then the most the most capital intensive part of a satellite launcher um is the engines and within the engines is the turbopump assembly is the thing that sucks propellants

out of

the tanks and pop them to such insane pressures so that they can go inside

the

[00:18:24] Markus: the tank.

[00:18:25] Jose: And that's, uh, very hard

to do and, uh,

requires a lot of skilled engineers and testing and it's, it's, it's really difficult.

You don't need that

if you're launching from 25

kilometers. Because basically, um, the vacuum of space, Which you are very close to. He's sucking the propellants out of the tanks through the engine. 

[00:18:50] Markus: Interesting. 

[00:18:53] Jose: and you say, yeah, yeah, but

you will not get

to the, to the chamber pressures that our friends at SpaceX get, like a hundred

bar,

whatever, a hundred and fifty bar.

Well, uh, the, the number that is relevant for,

for,

for a rocket, for its efficiency, is not actually the chamber pressure, the atmospheres of pressure in the rocket chamber, but that divided by the atmospheric pressure. So, because the atmospheric pressure is one bar, one atmosphere, we always take for granted that there is some divided by

one.

And we say, oh, 100 bar, 150 bar, pushing the limits of what's achievable. Amazing. Well, there's a cheaper way to do that. It's lowering the exit pressure.

If

you lower the exit pressure, the quotient, the ratio

between the two is the

same. Um, and you can reach crazy high numbers by just lowering the exit pressure.

And, and, and

you do that by going up very high.

Because your pressure can be a small fraction of ground, of, of, of ground sea level pressure. And that, that's how you get that, that number high.

And, and you, you,

you suck out the energy of, of your propellants. Um, so there are things like that, uh, that are, that are important.

And

also, uh,

the vibe, you know, going to space traditionally is a very shaky, uh, activities.

You turn on the

engines, sharp wave goes to the ground, comes back up all through the rocket stack with vibrations, noise, also the separations are

violent.

Uh, when you

go through Mach 1, transonic, supersonic, all those phases are a mess.

And, um, that's why satellites

need to be

tortured in tables and

different

things to

see if they're going to make it. And uh, is just not there when you're launching from 25 kilometers. Uh, the sources of

shocks, vibrations,

sounds are mostly gone. Of course, there's still the combustion in the rockets.

But again, that combustion is a lower chamber pressure, so it's,

it

doesn't generate as many vibrations as on a, on a ground level launch.

[00:21:08] Markus: um, you're, you're almost making a body weight. Can you tilt your, um, uh, camera again?

[00:21:14] Jose: Done? 

[00:21:15] Markus: Yeah? perfect. Um, you're almost making, um, Traditional, or almost making Starship and Falcon and whatever sound brute force. And, um, and what you are doing is more the, the elegant way, but it's, it sounds really interesting.

[00:21:34] Jose: I, I, would not

dare to do that. Uh, it is, let, let me explain, um, so There's another, another physical thing that has to do like, like

another

limit, like you may wonder, uh, well, if this is so smart and so good, why don't everybody use it? Like, why wasn't it used since the fifties when the first rock rockets were launched from balloons?

Uh, just before NASA was created between Explorer and Sputnik, between the first American and first Soviet satellite. That's when the Van Allen, the guy of the Van Allen belts was. Having fun launching rockets from balloons. So, so these, these advantages are extremely important, especially for lightweight payloads. Uh, when you want

to

maximize, let's say, um,

the

resolution of a hundred kilogram satellite,

The

resolution of the pictures

that a

hundred kilogram satellite can take is directly, which

correlates

with the surface area of the mirror

that you're putting

on your satellite. So if you put like Planet Lab, like five, like 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter, three unit cube sets,

your

mirror is going to be very tiny.

But if you have a very, very large

mirror,

Uh, it's either very heavy, so it doesn't

fit into the 100 kilograms,

or it's very thin,

you can make a

mirror very thin, but then it's going to shatter to pieces in the launch. So, you can, so, so for things like that, these, um,

very,

very small payloads, this, this way of, of reaching orbit is, is efficient.

But there is also a point at which,

Which

you would have to have a crazy big balloon. And then

it's not practical anymore. And

this this happens fairly quickly. Like I have to say that, um,

what doesn't quite

make sense to reach orbit are micro launchers. And we, we are seeing this, like all the companies that started making a conventional micro

launcher, um,

are either going out of business, moving to

missile defense or ballistic work. Or

just going directly to a larger thing like Rocket Lab with Neutron. And this was completely predictable from the outset because really developing a turbopump or a turbopump solution for a small thing is as expensive as making it for a large one. It's like making a Swiss watch. Like the mechanism of a Swiss watch, if it's a lady's small watch.

Watch or is a gentleman's gigantic thing. It's the same. Okay. The cost of the gold or the materials is

there,

but the engineering to

make the mechanism is

the same. It doesn't, your computer simulations, they don't care. You're launching a hundred kilograms or 10 tons and that, so, so balloons.

[00:24:31] Markus: I mean, they're, they're, they're, uh,

[00:24:32] Jose: There is like

a cutoff

around

a few

hundred kilograms in low earth orbit when balloons stop making a lot of sense.

And the

thing is, when we think of micro launchers, we have to see where they're coming from. They're coming from ballistic missile work. They're coming from the V 2, from the Semyorka in Russia, from all those things. So

Or the, or

the Scud missiles, for example, the famous Scud missiles of Gulf War One, uh, so you add a second stage to the Scud missile, you have a conventional micro launcher of the ones that we have today, and, and those things are designed for, designed for,

for either conventional or nuclear warheads, which

Like if

you've seen one, it's like the most compact object that you can imagine.

It's, it's really compact and hard

and, and sturdy.

So, because also it has to, because it's going on a steep re entry trajectory, so it's going to be suffering crazy g forces and hitting,

so it's an extremely sturdy thing. It's like the opposite of a satellite. A satellite is something that you want it

to be

large and fluffy

and, uh,

you know, having lots of surface area because that's what makes it valuable.

It

generates power, surface,

uh, you know, solar panels, it dissipates heat

with

its radiators, it has resolution, whatever. Any, any meaningful metric of

the satellite

is going to be 2D related. It's going to be related to the surface. Whereas, uh, this offensive weaponry is the opposite. It's like really compact, tiny

thing.

And, and, and, and if the thing has to survive reentry

To attack the factory or or the command and control

center, whatever you want to target, or the

military grouping,

or whatever, um, so it has to survive that, then the requirements for the

reentry are so much

more difficult to meet

than

than launch. that then they don't really care about how violent the

launch is.

And

that is why we launch things in such a violent

way, because they were not

designed for satellites.

NASA

They were designed for warheads and warheads anyway

had to meet

these horrible criteria going down. And so, so that's what, but most people are not aware of that. They just copy paste. Okay, this is how we do it. We just keep doing

that. And, and that,

that's unfortunately how most of the industry is being operating.

Starship, Starship is,

um, so,

so Falcon 1, is 5. 1 is about the limit of the payload into orbit that makes sense with a micro launcher. And of course, it wasn't viable. They had to move on for larger things. So I believe that the only kind of,

um, micro

launcher that can be viable has, is,

is balloon

based. Um, and, but nobody's actually developing.

I mean, we, we got to a certain point where we can talk about that, but, but we are lacking funding, so it's not happening. And,

[00:27:34] Markus: cost ratio to between a micro launcher and a balloon technology?

[00:27:42] Jose: um, so this is.

This uh, a difficult question.

[00:27:49] Markus: Maybe I'm not talking about the finished product. So I'm not yet talking about my

kilogram payload ratio between the two technologies, but also like. Development

and, 

[00:28:03] Jose: So typically to, to develop a micro launcher,

uh, you're gonna

need a couple of hundred million dollars.

Okay,

That's, that's, that's, it's, and this repeats itself. Like, this is what's happened to Rocket Lab and ABL and Astra and all these people. They had to, most of them raised significantly

larger amounts.

So we believe to make a satellite launcher. Using a balloon as a first stage or zero stage, if you will, um, it's in the ballpark of 100 and

120

million euro,

including

four orbital trials and stressing the financial model quite a bit. So it's the less capital intensive way to reach that

point.

But it's not magic.

Like, if I raise 10 million, I'm not going to be able to return it. As much as I, as much as this, like, there are minimum amounts. And this is mostly a cost of

the

team, okay? So, you need a minimum size of team to do things right.

Um, and, that, is,

again, being repeated different times when companies have raised.

You see, Europe is. We are currently trying to make five or six almost identical missiles, like from Germany there's a couple of them, France there's two or three, in Spain there's a

couple or two, and in the UK with Orbex and Skyrora and all this, like everybody's

trying to do

a cut with the second stage,

we know the

economics of that, we have already failed at that, we know the economies of scales when

they apply it.

Um, they're doing this because, because

SpaceX

did first the Falco one, but that's

not how you win. You

win by doing things that

other people don't

know are smart and you

take advantage of

that. You don't do, you don't win by, by coping. That, that's, that's not how the V2

appeared. And,

and, and Starship is super interesting because it's, um,

it's very, very large.

And, you

know, the, the, When you look at our patent for Balloon Assisted Launcher or the little prototype that we've flown and all those things, they don't look like a stick, right? They look, they don't look like a pen because they don't have to. Like when you are above max Q, you

no longer

have to be thin and slender.

[00:30:25] Markus: Yeah.

[00:30:26] Jose: This shape, so you can have a shape that is more compatible with lightweight tankage and also much, much better for re entry and reusability. Uh, you know, what's good to go out is bad to come

back, or

vice versa.

If you

want to go out, you want to be, uh, very heavy

and very compact and

very slender so that the atmosphere doesn't kill you.

If you have to face the atmosphere. If you don't have

to face the atmosphere, you just don't

care about that. You, you just

design something that,

that extracts maximum energy of your propellants, and is more easy to manufacture and reuse,

et cetera, and handle. So, so, to go out, you want to

be thin and slender, but to come back, you want to

be like a parachute. Because things literally come back from space, people come back from space in parachutes. So what's a parachute like? Very large surface, very little mass compared to the

surface, so

ballistics that are going to slow you down.

Or

or, or if you are, uh,

you know, like the belly flop maneuver, they

they come back to, to maximize

it.

You want

to maximize your area against the flow, uh, to come back and slow you down before you burn. So our design of Blue Star, um, has a first stage

that is

a donut. And a donut, when it's coming back from space, looks like a gigantic sphere towards the floor, so it's like very fluffy, so this makes reusability easier and so on.

And, well, there's also a point at which, and this, nobody's exploiting it, and we've done a little bit of work on that, there's a point at which, when you get very, very, very large in mass, like let's say you're launching

50 tons

or something like this into orbit, there's Then you no longer need

to be that

pointy again,

[00:32:19] Markus: Mm-Hmm. 

[00:32:22] Jose: and Then, and then,

because you can, you can think of it

the

other way around, uh, also for things coming from space.

So imagine, imagine you have a grain of, of, of sand,

like, like uh, coming

from space, uh, when you, you are in the forest at night and you see shooting star, that's most likely like a little grain of, of sand coming from space. So that little mass, it's, it's just gonna

burn.

And it does,

and,

but if you imagine something like what killed the dinosaurs, or something that is like a building,

[00:33:00] Markus: Mm-Hmm.

[00:33:01] Jose: Maybe the surface is going to get scratched a little bit, but it's not going to be slowed down significantly. It's going to hit the ground with its kinetic energy,

Uh, or,

or so, so that,

so

there's a

point on which something is very, very big, very

dense and massive, um, coming, coming down the atmosphere doesn't do much.

So

this is also true the other way around. So the, when you get to super heavy launchers. We still make them think in slender, like, like Starship, for, and they have their reasons,

but they

wouldn't have to be, because the, the atmosphere is not that important, and, and

we were

getting there

with the

Energia rocket, the Soviets were getting there, the Energia, you look at the Energia and it's like a fat thing, And, um, and you could look at the Space Shuttle and again, okay, it's also like a fat thing, but there is a point in

which

the extra efficiency of your tankage

and the fact that you don't need

super high base and you don't need this, and it's not going to tilt on the side if it falls wrong, you don't need the

chop. Like

best chop sticks, chop, Chopsticks are no chopsticks.

It's something that lands and it's not going to go on the sides. So

that is actually the way that I anticipate super heavy things will look like once the dust is settled. And once the market, somehow, if there's ever a market, sorts out 

[00:34:32] Markus: But the, 

[00:34:32] Jose: and losers.

[00:34:33] Markus: as, as far as I know, the problem with the chopstick, um, solution was, uh, the weight problem. So they had to get rid of the launching. Um. Parts, uh, the, the landing parts on the Starship

[00:34:48] Jose: landing legs. 

[00:34:48] Markus: The landing legs for weight problems. So this is what I heard and this is why they said, Hey, no landing legs like the Falcons.

So we

need some, something else.

[00:34:58] Jose: But it's also, but you still need, you still like your center of gravity.

I

mean, if you can fall on your side, you need

something. You can

have legs, you can have chopsticks, you need something to make sure of. But imagine something that can't, like the Lunar Lander, okay? The Grumman Lunar

Lander of the Apollo missions.

That can't really fall on its side,

right?

Of course, it has big legs.

[00:35:24] Markus: Yeah. It did. It did in, um, what was it called? For All Mankind. It almost

[00:35:31] Jose: That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. That's

a,

that, that's a great show. That's one of the most accurate, 

[00:35:37] Markus: Fantastic. Wasn't it? 

[00:35:39] Jose: Yeah.

[00:35:41] Markus: Um, uh,

tell me, tell me, he'll say, um, now you're sort of, um, competing against the micro launchers, then what is the upper limit? So I guess you. I mean, like the, the, the answer is up to you, but you're not competing against a starship because we're not, you're not competing against a hundred ton, um, um, payload, um, launcher. so so you're taking everything underneath that. So, or give me a ballpark.

[00:36:13] Jose: So, so Blue Star, which is the system that we first proposed and we introduced, and it's, it's for things that are around 50 to a hundred kilograms. In lower orbit and, and that, that, that is the range of masses that makes sense. For first balloon launcher, there would be a blue star Excel that could do around twice that, but again, it for much heavier payloads, the, that you need to get into designing new kinds of balloons and 

[00:36:41] Markus: Yeah. And they're getting too big. 

[00:36:43] Jose: that.

Exactly. Uh, uh, do we do have a, we, we barely, we almost never talk about this because if people say, Oh, if your company can't even raise enough money to send a couple of people up for first human flight, why would you be talking about a super heavy launcher? Well, It's the same kind of thinking that goes into figuring other ways of doing things can also be applied to

the problem of heavy launch.

Like, there

is not a requirement that you build a micro launcher first to do a heavy launcher second.

Like,

I had um, I had a conversation once with the head of CNES, of the rocket propulsion and part of CNES, some years ago, and I, back then, what we called Super Heavy and Starship was

called the

BFR, for Big Falcon Rocket.

Or you

can change Falcon 

[00:37:34] Markus: Yeah, exactly. This is, I, for the first time I heard it's Falcon. I thought it was the other one that we're cannot pronounce on here.

[00:37:41] Jose: Yeah, yeah. So, so I, I, I had

this conversation

with this guy.

He had just made a wonderful

presentation of how they had so much research and development. They were even looking into antimatter propulsion, okay? Antimatter propulsion. They had done some studies and some people got paid to work on that, uh, out of taxpayer money in France.

Um, so then I say, Oh,

if you, if you look

into antimatter propulsion, you might have, you might just look.

You must have looked at, uh, at

your own BFR, meaning Big French

rocket 

and they

looked

at each other, these

people, and

they were like, no, no,

we don't think that's ever going to happen. We don't think that makes any sense.

that was the level

of

delusion with,

SpaceX, and this is not that long ago. This

is maybe

2018, I think, 2018.

But,

[00:38:34] Markus: but,

[00:38:34] Jose: but yeah, we, I. I

have a design and, and I've worked with, with people in the industry and outside of the industry of how Europe

could

actually make something that

is

more competitive than Starship. It is absolutely possible. I haven't seen anybody talk about this. I, I haven't. I have papers written and everything, but I hesitate

to put

them out.

But it's absolutely possible. I mean, it doesn't look like anything like what people are proposing. Like recently the European Space Agency put out some studies

that

some people have been

working on and I feel so embarrassed as a European to see that they're just copy pasting Starship and New

Glenn.

So it's like the, oh, let's put the, the grid fins of this one or this, uh,

the, the bottom part

and, and you look like, uh, we're not Chinese, right?

Like, why do we do this? Like, we're falling so low.

Bitter. A lot of very talented

designers in Europe, not just ourselves, that have effective ideas of things that make sense.

I'll

just

say one,

one, one of the many ways that this can be done.

You

see, we build ships in Europe. We still build ships in Galicia, in Spain,

they're wonderful

places.

And so this kind of ship metal work,

and

working with steel and those kinds of things in plates, the, the, the manufacturing capabilities

is already in

place and it's been used, for example, for electric

windmills.

So, and if you build that in a shipyard, you can take it very easily to a launch site through the sea, okay?

So, we have a capability, they need work.

let's put two and two

together. And that's just one example, one specific, very visible thing, which is the tankage. But there are other things

like that,

that we have capabilities

that the

USA doesn't have, that we could apply to make very, very cost effective, uh, heavy launch systems.

You know, I worked on the Ariane 5 launcher,

on a modern version of it back in 2001 and 2002. I lived

in Paris and I worked in Les Mureaux, where

they assembled

these things, put them

together, the cryogenic tanks.

And back then, Europe had like 65 percent of the commercial launch share, like,

we were

killing it.

We

had

by more than half of the

commercial market

of satellite launch.

of,

And those fundamentals that made a Europe, uh, be the leader. Are still there. The cost, the geopolitics, the ip, all the, the, the,

the, universities,

the fundamentals are still there. The

had, had it not been like,

had SpaceX

not succeeded. We would still have 80 percent

of

the, or something like that, 70 percent of launch capability, and it wouldn't be hard to catch up, like, when I was working there, there were people with ideas of reusability, etc.,

um,

even right now, so. Uh, but, but unfortunately, Europe is deciding to fund,

uh, the

continuity of, uh, of, of things and of solace, of solace sense. But, but that's, um, that's a political decision.

Like

it could, it could be reversed.

[00:42:09] Markus: Do you think, um, that, I, I completely agree with you. Completely agree. Um, do you think that, um, as, uh, von der Leyen proposed a, a CERN for artificial intelligence in Europe, is this, um, is this maybe a first step toward what you are envisioning when it comes to European. Self conscious boldness in, in developing or in taking their technological, uh, leadership into their own hands.

[00:42:46] Jose: Well, 

[00:42:47] Markus: I wouldn't say, um, I, I pretty deep. Uh, 

[00:42:49] Jose: it sounds good. I, I, it sounds good.

I'm, I'm afraid that

Most of what I see coming out of the European Commission is headlines and, um, um, the, I believe that the, the maladies of Europe are more related to financial considerations than, so having as like a CERN like thing for artificial intelligence,

maybe,

but how do you measure if it's good or not?

Um,

I, you know, having. Being a little bit familiar with the, with the R& D side of things in the other side of the Atlantic, I, I, I, I studied for a couple of years at MIT and got, got grants from there. So, there, it really, the Pentagon is what's driving innovation there, historically. Okay, there's a lot of waste and et cetera, maybe it's gonna get sorted out with Dodge, but we don't have anything like that here.

in, in

Europe. We, we, we completely like that. Um, so for the Pentagon, there are some metrics like, oh, your battery is less heavy and carries more energy. The soldier can walk fast, further. I mean, there are things that you can, uh, measure against. Uh, we don't, I don't see those, um, in the things like for, Framework programs or Horizon or all that.

It's just okay. You give some money, figure it out,

we'll see.

There is no end user. Uh, there, there, um, but there could be.

there. We, we could do things, um, because

we have such huge demand. Our market is, is, is bigger.

Our population

is larger. The amount of

people that are,

uh, smart of that population

is, is

larger.

Still, uh, here in Europe than, than in, than in North America.

So

we could, of course, we could be, um,

Uh, doing great

things. But what I see

is that

the application of capital, both private and, and, and, and public budgets, uh, doesn't

go to things that

can give us an edge. So either it goes to very conservative or obsolete things, or it goes to the European copy of what America is doing, uh, or things like that.

There is,

uh, whereas

in places like China that seem to be more sovereign, uh, they

do apply things,

like, like the great graduates of China, they

stay Chinese. They no longer need to come

here or to America. They, they stay there because their opportunities

are there. I, I lectured at the UPC,

the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, lectured, lectured a few years.

And my most brilliant students are overwhelmingly

Overwhelmingly

American now, okay, because they saw the writing on the world and they were like, okay, yeah, here I can have great ideas, I can be

super hardworking,

um, um, There are no companies here that can thrive where I can have a career and do meaningful stuff. Because the companies that get funding are boring

and the

companies that are not boring don't get funding. So they just go

to America

and they end up working at

SpaceX or

JBL or places like that. And what's interesting is they can't come back legally. Because, uh, America makes it illegal for high end professionals to leave because of what they call ITAR, International Trafficking Arms Regulations.

So, um, the brain drain is permanent. The

brain,

so, so the, the brains that go from Europe,

to America,

in any, I mean, if you're just making user interfaces for apps, then it doesn't matter. You can come back. Nobody's going to care. But if you're doing anything cutting edge, quantum computing, AI, advanced, really serious AI, or rocket propulsion, or guidance of things that fly higher than airplanes or things like that, I'm sorry.

If you go to America, it's a one way train. You can't come back legally. I mean.

This

is, this is something that is selectively enforced. Okay. So yeah, you can say, Oh, but some people came back to China. Some people came back

to Europe. Well,

until they want to charge you.

So, uh, so it's selectively enforced. So we, we should do a better job at generating professional opportunities here, real ones, not just lines.

Um, so, so

that the brain pool that we have here stays and creates value here.

And I, I think, 

[00:47:20] Markus: now go so go ahead. No, I, I think there is a little, at least on X, which is becoming a bit like the, the public square, I think there is a little bit of a higher sensibility to these things, at least in the younger generations here in Europe, like, hey, why are we not

[00:47:35] Jose: catching up?

Um, I, I see a little bit of a change that I didn't see, let's say

in 2009

when I founded Zero to Infinity at all, like, So that, that might be a positive thing. But, but the, the change, the change, uh,

needs

to be quite, quite significant. Do you need, um, I mean, like, um, this is highly problematic what I'm saying right now, but

[00:48:05] Markus: do we need someone like, um, um, someone who sweeps through Europe, like what Donald Trump now wants Elon Musk to do with, um, the American governmental structure is sweeping through those structures. I'm, I'm not advocating for it because I, I personally think you cannot take Um, market logic and applied to governmental structures.

This, this shouldn't happen. The, the basic idea is.

Interesting. 

[00:48:42] Jose: Mm-Hmm,

[00:48:42] Markus: Maybe I'm, I'm just wanting to put that up for debate with you. Would we need someone sweeping through Europe and decluttering our structures and minds? Maybe

[00:48:56] Jose: so let, let me put it this way. You either do it yourself or they're gonna do it to you. Uh,

so

either

Europe

gets its act

together or,

or han over

or, or, or Han

overlords from China will do it for us. Like I.

And

tomorrow I have a meeting with, with a big Chinese, um, conglomerate, okay? And we're

gonna be talking about this and the, the infinity here, of

zero to infinity,

it's also a number eight, as deference to what's been historically the main power.

in humanity, which has been China. It's, it's a very strange exception

that,

you know, since the century of humiliation up to now, like, they're catching up again. But for most of civilized history, China has been the leading civilization, not,

not Europe. Uh, I,

I'm, I'm rooting for us, but I also recognize how they are important,

extremely important.

And

And the thing is, the Chinese want

a Europe that

works. They don't want Zimbabwe in Europe,

They do not. For aesthetic purposes.

Because they come

here and they want to shop in Champs Élysées and they want to visit our historic buildings because they value them and they think our culture

is really

cool and our kings and our stuff.

So they are gonna keep that alive. The question is if they will Um, so we either get our act together ourselves or they will just keep it

alive

like when we go

to the

US and we visit the reservations of the Indians,

uh, you

know, the, uh, and they, so we don't know if we have casinos or not, but like

they, they really, they, they really

don't have any, uh, qualms about this.

Like

they want to,

that they want that there are still continental philosophers like your

wife, you know.

Like, they value that. They want to have Europe still making those kind of thoughts. So, uh, but this is not something that Europe itself has

been allowed to value

for the longest time. Um, so, so that I, I think there is, there is, there

are only

two ways in which Europe, uh, gets its act together.

Internally, with somebody sweeping and solving things, but in a positive way, not just cutting, not just caring, but, you know, or, or they do it to you, and, um,

and I

think the Chinese, uh, would know exactly what to do here,

[00:51:40] Markus: Why, why are you still in Europe?

[00:51:44] Jose: um, because Okay, Because, uh, well, I have three kids here,

okay, uh, so I want to be next to them, that's very, very important,

personal reasons,

also, I, I like the way we do things,

I think, and I'm

I'm, optimistic about our, about, about us, also, so.

for me to start

my company in America, I would have to start

with uh, five

to

ten times bigger chunk of money, uh, because the initial costs are higher.

[00:52:16] Markus: But the, so are the returns. 

[00:52:20] Jose: yeah, it's true, but the fundamentals are good here. You see, uh, labor costs are low, regulation is actually not as bad as people think. Um. Also for, you see, I've always thought that human, and this is something we haven't spoken much, but it's really important.

I think

the human part of the space experience is important.

I want to take people up where the sky is black. I want to take people where the sky is black and they can see that we come from a blue planet that is not flat earth.

And,

um,

[00:52:53] Markus: You're paid

[00:52:54] Jose: and to

do,

sorry? 

[00:52:58] Markus: You're Yeah, I'm back. Yeah. That's right. If, if like, yeah, I get that a lot that, that somebody

[00:53:06] Jose: is paying me

to have an opinion.

Yeah. I, I, but I never got the checks, you know, I, I only get cookies when I go on a website, but anyway, so, um, what, what I was saying is that, uh, Europe for space tourism

and for

ultra high end engineering has done A lot of positive

fundamentals. Let's say, for example, tourism. So space tourism, what is that associated with?

Well, extra high end experiences. So that's

um, like,

a very high end stereo system or a very high end car with incredible engineering, minute attention to detail, like, or a handbag that is made from plastic. Certain leather that is done in a certain way, so it's luxury, and the luxury is European. Uh, most people don't know that here in Europe, but everybody outside knows

it.

like If you ask a Chinese that is

a wealthy

family or whatever, successful

entrepreneur there,

okay, what's the brand of handbag that you're gonna buy to your daughter, your wife, like, it's gonna be a European brand.

If you ask them,

oh, you want a super high

end stereo system, it's gonna be a European brand. Some that most people don't know. It's not American, it's not, it's not Chinese even. It's not, Japan has

a few

high end things, and this is, this is because we have kept continuity

with

our, um,

past

of royalty and aristocracy and all those things.

They value this a lot, even

the members

of the Chinese Communist Party. Like, they say, oh, Hermes, they used to make, like, you know, uh, Talk, you know, for riding horses in the nobility in France. Oh, that's really important for them. Extremely important. So, so the storytelling of luxury, the attention to detail, all those things are here.

They're not in America at all.

Like,

what made America very, very important was democratizing things. Was like, okay, the Model T, you can work on the car and you can drive the car, uh, that

you, you can buy

a car if you can manufacture it.

That, that

dynamic.

Well, I'm sorry,

but we're not yet there in the space sector, and that was America in the 1950s, doesn't look at all like

America now.

So, but, but we're still making luxury things, like most of the luxury market is European and

space tourism

is a luxury. You don't have to do it. It's 10, 000 times more expensive than an alternative vacation that you can still do. And things that are 10, 000 times or a thousand times more expensive than the, the cheapest option are only made in Europe.

So it's an anomaly that, and that happens in America, and actually when you look at it, like, who has sold the most tickets? They're not the most successful, they'll probably be delisted very soon, but Virgin Galactic is the one that has sold the most 

[00:56:01] Markus: Interesting. 

[00:56:02] Jose: And, uh, what is it associated with? Sir Richard Branson, Sir Old World.

If you had had a space touring company marketing the same design, same vehicle, but it was called JetBlue Galactic or Southwest Airlines Galactic, nobody puts any money. They don't sell a ticket. Okay? So, it's Europe where it happens. The first space tour is

called Lift it up

from Asia, from Kazakhstan, but it was, uh, Russian,

excuse

me, European design.

And so,

A lot of the initial team of SpaceX building the Dragon and the Falcon 1 are Italian, a bunch of Germans. Musk, he's African, okay, but he looks European. I'm sorry. Like, uh, I, uh, you look at, I don't, I don't, you don't have to do too anything on me. So, this is where these things come from and it does make sense to think

that they will

happen here.

Also, and about space

tourism, if you're not doing orbital, if

you're doing orbital, you go around the Earth. So you see everything, that's great, but if you're doing suborbital where you're going up, staying either a few minutes, as

you would

on a rocket, or a few hours, as you would do

on a balloon,

hours is better than minutes,

uh, you only see one area, you only see a cone underneath you, okay?

So you want that area to be as diverse and cool as possible, and also not cloudy. This is something very, very important for scaling space tourism. Uh, if you, if you want people to fly and they go and they say, Oh, I just saw desert or I just saw the most boring landscape, or I just saw green, uh, coastline and blue.

Uh, well, what is the area astronauts say is more diverse when they fly into orbit? It's the Strait of Gibraltar.

That's

where we fly because

you got

Africa and Europe, just like. Humans, uh, or hominids

left Africa

into the rest

of the world, uh, you are leaving your planet to the unknown of space. And that's highly symbolic.

And seeing the Strait of Gibraltar works really well on a mind level like that. I mean, it's not like you see 2001 and the first scene. You have the hominids and then it jumps to the moon. Like these things are extremely important in the mind of the space tourism customer. So, so you see also the Atlantic, the Mediterranean,

desert

areas in Almeria and in Africa.

You see the Atlas and Sierra Nevada, and you

see swamp

areas like Doñana and forests. So it's a little bit of everything there.

a

little bit of everything. Also,

it's almost never cloudy. That's why people go to Marbella.

It has the kind of, uh, amenities

that you

need for to hang out with individuals. Like if you go to New Mexico to fly with Virgin Galactic, there is nothing else to do.

You can do the Breaking Bad tour, but there is no wonderful things to visit. So, so Spain has everything. Spain is the second most visited nation

in the world, and

it's probably the number one for the segment of who to hang out

with Individuals.

We have people from,

From the Gulf

States, to Latin American, wealthy people, to Northern Europeans, to

Eastern

European, you name it,

they all come here.

So we might as well offer them these kind of flights. It's much better than making them go to somewhere boring like Florida, where you just see green and the sea. And the weather is often is really bad and that's all you see. Doesn't make any sense. Um,

but

yeah, so, so I'm, I'm bullish about, about

Spain and

about Europe.

Of course, I have Plan B, Plan C and et cetera. But, but I, I think, I, I think once, uh, once we

find the

right, the right investors that can respond to these things, um, It's, it's going to work and maybe, maybe it's not me, but somebody is going to make it big

here in

space tourism. and, once, sorry, let me finish that.

Once you have a club of space tourists,

once

you have a few hundred people that can afford something like this, and they've

had the

most incredible experience that money can buy with you, what can you not fund? Um, so

it

does make sense to do that step first.

Also, it's less capital intensive,

let's say, the launch.

[01:00:36] Markus: Tell me, um, uh, Jose, when are you ready to take those tourists into? Into that perfect overview place.

[01:00:49] Jose: You see, it's taken me 15 years. To get where we are with

the company,

it may take me another 15 to get there. Or it may never happen. Maybe nobody will do it.

Like the only

capsule that could take a human properly, uh, up there was the Red Bull project, the Red Bull Stratos project with Felix von Gartner.

Yeah, nobody else has done

it again. 

[01:01:14] Markus: Well, the Google guy did, 

[01:01:17] Jose: it wasn't

a capsule, it

was just a space suit. Uh, so I'm saying a capsule where there's, uh, you could feed people. Uh, recently Space Perspective did a launch.

of a really

nice, uh, prototype. I don't, they didn't release much information, so it's hard to tell,

uh, but

maybe that

was a pressurized

capsule.

So they joined us.

We at Zero2Infinity,

we flew our first pressurized capsule in 2010, one year after funding the company, with

only 200, 000 Euro of investment. No, sorry,

280, 000. And we've flown three Breslau's capsule. One is, you can visit it in the Museum of Mobility in Zaragoza, Spain. It's hung in there from the ceiling, but we

haven't flown humans because we don't have the funding to do it.

And it's crazy how this stuff

gets

funded. That doesn't make any sense. But, uh, so we are open to that and that's, that's

been the limiting factor,

you know, obtaining

enough funding to

safely

take

a person or a couple of people up there, uh, because the capsule is half, half built, but

yeah,

[01:02:19] Markus: where's the problem? I mean, like from my lay person's perspective, I seem it, I think it's rather trivial. You, You have a balloon, you have a capsule and, and you follow the laws of physics.

So it's as opposed to having those turbo pump, um,

uh, 

[01:02:39] Jose: rockets or things like that. Yeah, of 

course, of launcher challenges. So what is the problem and why are investors not knocking on your door on a regular

Um, uh, I've scared investors by talking about too many things. And this is a great example. I've been talking from how you can do super heavy launch in a more efficient way of manufacturing in

a cheaper way in

Europe, to taking people up

for the view.

So investors typically like single minded people that only have one thing in mind. They say that they like visionary

people that have a variety, that's

not true. Like, they jump on that, like,

they don't

like visionary people like that. They like people that are, I'm gonna just do one thing, I'm laser focused on that. And, so I, I have the, the

problem that I'm

all over the place when I

talk and I talk about lots of

things.

Of course, in the execution, I have shown that I

can be laser focused

because we are, as I said,

we've flown

three pressurized prototypes. We have

flown a

rocket from a balloon.

No other

company has done it from high altitude, ever, as a company.

Uh,

There's a bunch of firsts that we've

done with

extremely little resources.

Very, very little resources, a lot less than what it takes to make a PowerPoint for ESA. Um, so, in my experience, the investment community follows trends, and they have gigantic biases. So,

we don't They don't quite

fit those biases. The

things that we say

is counterintuitive, often. The biases are like, oh, things happen

in America

first, and then they get copied in Europe.

And they can't

imagine that, hey, maybe somebody from Europe actually came up with

the idea

first, and not the other way around.

Um,

That breaks some people's brains.

Um,

Investors Look, I, I had not made anybody rich before, like this was

my first

startup and I don't intend to make a second. I mean, I don't intend to, I'm not a serial entrepreneur.

I just know a little bit about these things

And

because in part because my dad is an

astronomer and I grew

up exposed to aerospace engineering ways of doing things from around the world and that I got lucky in that, in that sense. But, uh, yeah, the, the investment.

Investors, I

don't, I don't understand them very well. I don't even understand the ones that invested in my company. Like, we have 40 investors, including VCs and business angels, very smart people, people that have taken companies public. I don't really know when they invested, okay?

Um, for example, the VCs, I know.

The

VCs invested because one of their LPs, one of the people that actually invest in the VC fund,

Because

the VCs are not investing their own monies, they are

investing other

people's money, okay? So, if in a couple of cases we had LPs, that's the investors

in the

fund, investing in Zero to Infinity because they like what

we were doing,

as individuals, they

were investing, and

because they had invested in the

fund, they made it

embarrassing for the fund not to invest themselves.

So we know that the fund invested because of out of embarrassment. Um, I don't know, um, 

[01:05:56] Markus: But don't investors, Jose, don't investors, once they smell profit, um, don't they come on board, no questions

attached? I mean, like, especially in the United States, if they have a very, uh, They're very sensitive when it comes to profit. Um, and, and if yours is, where's the problem?

[01:06:20] Jose: Uh, well, to obtain profit, let's say, from flying tourists, you first need to certify the capsule. So you need to get

to some

huddles and do a bunch of test flights

and build

some things

that require

a minimum amount of team. So you need a bunch of money and then you can make profits. And of course the market is there because people are paying a lot of money per minute on Black Sky View.

When you look at

Virgin

Galactic, 450, 000 for 4 minutes. So, over

100, 000, no 450, 000 for 4 minutes of Black Sky View. Four minutes. Blue Origin, five minutes. The price

with Blue Origin

is even higher because they do fly and the spaceship comes back in one piece. Um, so, so Virgin, so, so Blue Origin, the price is, is secret.

You have to go into an auction

and bid on

the auction and typically it

could be five million to

twelve million for five minutes. So one million per minute. This is the rate. Of course, we can do for a lot

less money, okay, for tens of

thousands per person,

uh, several

hours of you, okay?

So,

of course, it's completely, uh, different order of money to cost, but the investors,

look,

We've been super successful at convincing

people that they can

fundraise with our ideas and just try to do it themselves.

So we had a bunch of cases from a supplier in America that signed a non disclosure agreement with us, but then tried to do it themselves.

to

people that here in Spain that have signed a fundraising mandate with us, and when they see the funds coming, they're Instead of keeping their commission, they keep the whole chunk and

they tell

their investors, Oh, yeah, sign this,

send the

money to this account.

And it's a

company that

just met, they made last

week

with 3000

euro capital,

no IP, nothing, and just a website. And the investors, of course, uh, uh, just sign and invest there because they, so, so with, and of course these people are being taken into court and it's a, it's a big scandal here. Um, So, so we've

managed to convince people that our ideas are good, but at the same time we've managed

to convince

people that it won't be us that get the funding to get them done.

[01:08:53] Markus: Gotcha. Yeah, totally understand. Um,

so if money 

[01:08:57] Jose: could switch, this could switch any time,

you

know. I, I, I, most people would have given up, but I'm, I'm still optimistic, yeah, 

[01:09:04] Markus: If money weren't the issue, where is the technology at the moment? How far are you?

[01:09:12] Jose: Yeah, the, the technology to fly, To both to fly people on balloons commercially to the edge of space where they can have this view has existed for for a long time. So we don't need to do any research and development. It's a brick

and mortar plan.

Money

hits the account in two years

we're flying. Tourists.

And in one year we're flying professionals, because there's an intermediate mark there. We want to fly the first Moroccan, the first Algerian, the first Palestinian, the

first uh,

Palestinian Israeli joint flight, the first North Korean, South Korean joint flight. There are so many low hanging fruits of firsts that are going to be historical.

You know, the overview effect is important for you, but also for the group that you represent. The first Spanish woman, we've had a

couple of

Spanish men. No Spanish woman has had the overview effect, has flown up there. We want to be the first doing that. Germany has like 11 male astronauts and no female astronauts so far.

It's insane.

We want

to make that. Make that equal. Okay. So there's, and those are professional flights. Those are flights for research, development, outreach,

and

those are, those we can do in one year from funds

being available. So

it's really, and, but the thing is, it's been the case since 2012.

Like

if in 2012,

we got the, after we flew a

half size prototype, the one that is in the museum, if back then we had had,

So, if we

don't get appropriate

funding,

the company would start flying tourists in 2014, we would have several bases around the world, and the company would already be doing

a lot bigger

things.

You see, we're not called 0

to 20

kilometers or 0 to 36 kilometers, we're called 0 to infinity, because

we believe there's a long way

of things to do up there that can make economic sense, but we've got to go step by step.

[01:11:10] Markus: So what have you done in the past 10 years? You said you could have been ready. What has happened ever since?

[01:11:19] Jose: Oh, well, so, eh, we, many

things,

but For example, in 2014, we decided to switch to mostly talking about satellite launch. And

even

because we, we saw that since 2012, that we flew the half size vehicle to 2014, we hadn't raised

any money,

uh, so we couldn't get to

flying humans. And then Virgin Galactic had a terrible accident when one pilot died, the other got severely uh, injured, and that completely dried up the market for us to fundraise.

And it

didn't matter that we were telling them precisely we

are doing something safe.

The risks of of a rocket are the rocket blowing up or reentry. We don't have a high

speed reentry. We don't have a rocket

This

gentle.

the investment community couldn't care less like it was like, no, no, no, you

need to talk about

something else.

We and, and because.

We

had worked and had some preliminary designs,

et cetera,

on the satellite launcher,

we

pivoted, that's the VC community likes to say, so we pivoted to satellite launch,

but the

reality is that

um,

to do the satellite launcher we had to raise a much, much, much

larger amount of money.

And I, that is an amount of money that I wanted to raise from the network of having

flown a bunch

of space tourists that are influential individuals that can make a few phone calls and

you can, and you can

raise it,

you know, but

we, we took that decision and, and uh, We were even less successful fundraising with, with a satellite launcher, we raised a few hundred thousand and, and I, and we built a little rocket that we flew from a balloon, we built the first 3D printed

metal rocket engine

in Europe, and we thought,

oh, we're

doing some flashy

things, we

can show investors that we did those things.

Flashy new things with very little money so they can extrapolate and

say, Oh, there

is more money. How far can you go? But none of those things had any impact at all. And then, um, the company has been, to be completely honest, we've been in almost in hibernation for, since

COVID.

Um,

we're looking,

we have a pipeline of things we can fly.

Uh, also.

We,

we pivoted back also to, to what, okay, can we monetize our capabilities? The things that we have already proven

to the world

that we can do. Okay, we can fly something that weighs

a hundred

kilograms, a couple of hundred

kilograms on a balloon that we can

get it back. So are there customers for this?

Yes, there are

a

few. So for example, Airbus has been a customer and we, we've flown many payloads for them. Uh, Dallas, um,

the

Singaporean Ministry of Defense.

We have

a bunch of customers like this.

The problem is

those customers are lumpy. For a long time they don't hire you, and then they hire you for a little test, and then,

again, nothing, and

your capabilities, you need to

have them ready.

It's not a market like tourists. Okay, we know there's hundreds of thousands of people that can

afford it and that would like to do it,

and we just, you know, Tapping to that existing large market, uh, flying things on a balloon for testing, not so large. Like I'm gonna be working with, uh, hopefully soon with, uh,

with, um,

doing some astronomy for the, for the Spanish, uh, there's a Spanish Institute of Astronomy in the Canary Islands and they,

they have

some

payloads that they want to test.

So that will probably be our next flight. But I didn't start a

company to fly

little telescopes or spy cameras or things like that, because that is not venture scalable.

That is

something you can do, but

it doesn't grow like,

like, uh, that dedicated satellite launcher or like space tourism or other such things. So

a

lot of this time

has been

just, uh, having conversations with investors for nothing,

uh, that

teaches nothing.

[01:15:35] Markus: I love Hopefully they teach

[01:15:37] Jose: something to investors,

but 

[01:15:39] Markus: love your openness and, um, how you're very openly talking about the reality, um, that many are facing and, 

[01:15:49] Jose: a hundred percent and, and,

and this is

something that

I don't understand. Um, I, I think Elon Musk is the only one that really talks like this. I don't want to compare myself with him in any way, but I see all these companies that are, talking to the media with a like,

yeah, we're

going to fly tourists next month or we're going to do this.

And

like,

I know that their banks are calling them because the

loans are not being paid,

Their employees are not being paid. Uh, their, their suppliers are crazy. Their employees are asking me for a job. And I'm like, sorry, I can't even pay what I have, but I wish I could.

like,

there

is so much nonsense.

And this is, this is, uh, the influx of the Silicon Valley style, like, there's this show, Silicon Valley, that is very good, I haven't watched it all, but I've seen some episodes, and it reflects

very well

how you have to hype it

and fake it until you make it, and

all this nonsense.

Well, that is, yeah, that doesn't work with our space It

shouldn't work. And like, you have to admit when you make mistakes, you have to admit what things cost, because

If you don't,

then reality comes

and bites

you in the ass. And, and,

uh, and I'm, I'm, I'm sorry that, that,

yeah, I'm, I'm, what I can promise to investors is I'm going to be transparent.

Uh, I'm going to, I'm not going to tell them, yes,

1 million

in the account because we need two and a half. And

with one, we can just

Doing and whistle in and 

out. But start, maybe then start with a Laika or another animal as the

we, we, we,

let

me tell you about this. Um, we flew robots. Okay. Robots are the new Leica.

and that

was my idea. My idea, you see, uh, because I'm, I'm,

pretty

familiar with, How humans started flying things

on balloons and

also rockets and there were experiments with rats and different things and turtles and things like that.

So I bought a mouse, okay,

the company bought a mouse

and in 2010

2010 or so,

when we were going to do our first pressurized prototype and it could have had a mouse inside it.

uh, a alive, but my team

came back to me and said, you're crazy, this is, okay, that's how things were done in the last century. We're in the 21st century, you don't do that.

You put sensors, whatever. So, and, and they said,

so I said,

I'm going to talk to

more savvy people. And everybody said the same thing. You know, uh, there was a guy called Bob Bigelow, who is pretty fascinating, you

should get him on

the podcast, if you

haven't done

it yet. Uh, so Bob Bigelow has flown

a couple of

modules of his space station, you

know. into orbit.

And

the second flight had cockroaches, and because cockroaches breathe, they generate CO2, you wanna see, they're a

good

model, and usually nobody cares about the life of cockroaches. We walk on them, we

have to,

by law, kill them

in restaurants

and places like that, so why would, so it didn't work out very well.

Okay, people were first saying that it was cruel, it was animal testing, and then they were saying, Oh, Bigelow Space Hotels will have cockroaches. Nobody wants to go to

a hotel with

cockroaches. So it didn't work out at all. So, so

the mouse that we bought

lived a happy life, was our pet, we never flew him, died of old age, and this is the way.

Okay, so, Um, we've flown robots

and there's

a cute robot that there's a video of when we flew the microbloom 2. 0 with a cute

robot inside

the capsule and everything. And now there are humanoid robots full size and I completely envision flying some of 

[01:19:34] Markus: Yeah, but you 

[01:19:35] Jose: Maybe Unitrix, but but Jose, you should hurry up because robots are starting to develop AGI now, um, and starting to get conscious. And then you, your team will tell you again, not to send the robot.

That's a, that's a good point. We, we indeed have to hurry up. Um, and yeah, robots have rights and feelings too. Um.

Yeah, we even looked into flying

bacteria, because I was obsessed with

generating the

similar CO2 and water vapor and heat signature of a human,

but in the end we looked into Cool.

Beer. So I settle down on bacteria from beer yeast.

Yeah.

but you need a

gigantic tank to, to compare

to humans. So the tank with the water just waits a lot more. So it, there, there is no, we

are extremely

efficient, uh, in our, uh, as, as, um, uh, bioreactors. . 

[01:20:36] Markus: Yeah. Tell me, Jose, who wants in the industry, like, um, because you were all, you were offering space tourism, but you were also offering near space research on those platforms.

So who in. in research is looking for the, those places is looking for the 20 to 50 kilometer range.

[01:20:58] Jose: A astronomers. Um,

you see, I'm, I'm

gonna drop something controversial

here, but, um, you know the Hubble Space 

Telescope, right? So. do you think that was built?

[01:21:18] Markus: In order to produce fantastic images, um, of the universe.

[01:21:25] Jose: No, that

was built

for profit for Lockheed, uh, Lockheed Martin. 

[01:21:29] Markus: No. 

What? think it was Lockheed Martin. Yes. So look, um,

[01:21:34] Jose: the

the Soviet Union had shipyards

and they built

very big submarines and the Americans wanted.

images of

those shipyards. So they had to figure out how to,

um,

launch, um,

telescopes

that were big enough to see the details that they needed to see in those shipyards and other, uh, they needed to see also

the, yeah, in mostly the The military

industrial complex of the Soviet Union.

They wanted pictures So they generated a bunch of spy satellites, uh, one

of which was

called the

Keyhole,

uh, which was very big. And, um, and it was what drove the requirements for the shuttle

bay.

So the shuttle, the space shuttle, is made so they can fit a keyhole 

inside. ended up being launched on something else.

And I know about this from, from, from my, from my dad, okay? Indirectly. So I

remember that they

launched the, the, the Hubble and I, and I was like, oh, they're launching this for you, for people like you, for the astronomers. And he's like, no. So there's a company that makes them, makes the spy satellites and makes

billions

each, and they figured out, oh, we might as well sell an extra one to the government.

Instead of saying

DoD, the U. S. Air Force, whatever, it's gonna say

NASA, or National, it's a National Reconnaissance, um,

NRO, whatever. So, so, oh, we, we sell one for, for civilian purposes. Instead of looking down, It can look up,

[01:23:10] Markus: That's

[01:23:10] Jose: and that's where Hubble comes from. That's where the Hubble comes from, okay?

And they

didn't even change the optics properly, and they, that was, uh, and that's wonderful for the maker because they

get an

extra contract.

To go and

put

glasses

on it.

That's how the taxpayer is

being

mistreated by the outer space sector. So

now, going

back to your original question about who wants to fly things on balloons for science. Well, just like our human eyes see black, and it doesn't get blacker if you fly higher, you don't need to be in low Earth orbit to look at the universe.

In the visible spectrum,

you

can look at it from

40 kilometers

just fine, or 36,

and,

uh,

the,

the limiting factors for Hubble is not the air, of course, because there's not much, but it's the day night cycle, and the, the, the problems of getting hot and getting warm and getting

hot and getting

warm, and that, well, at high altitude, on the South Pole, you're very cold in the winter, in the south winter.

And that's great to

be cold. You want to be as cold as you can, if you want to measure photons. So, for a tiny fraction of the cost of Hubble, we could be flying telescopes on the North and South Poles in the winter. That could be gigantic, hanging from balloons. pro, and we

would already know if there are other civilizations on exoplanets decades for

the diffraction of the cost of Hubble.

like the

way we do astronomy, it's not because it's the best for the astronomers. It's what makes profit

to the companies

that sell stuff to the governments and blah, blah, blah. So we You can do astronomy with high

altitude balloons

in an incredibly more cost effective way than in low Earth orbit.

[01:25:23] Markus: So do you, do you talk, do you talk to ESA about stuff like that?

[01:25:27] Jose: No, uh,

let's

talk about ESA for a second. My first employer was ESA. I was

working with a wonderful boss who is the

first non American to fly on the shuttle. Incredibly

cool dude, German guy, Ulf Merble,

Dr. Ulf Merble. So it was, it was a wonderful privilege to work there with ESA. So many talented people and with such a cool boss, like, and I got to do parabolic zero gravity flights at

the end

of my time there, so

I,

it's great to work at ESA, but ESA really is awesome.

I mean, it was

for me,

but isa,

the, you need to ask

always yourself, whose benefit? Who's the customer? Who's the customer of ISA is? Of course, it's not the taxpayer in the member states, it's the national delegations.

Those

are the ones that approve the budgets, the national delegations

of each

estate. So.

So.

Like you can't, it doesn't matter if I convince, uh, Ash Baha, the, the head of ISA about anything because he has no power. Because the power is in the, in the customers, the,

the ones that

pay the, the bills, which are the national delegations and the national delegations, they themselves

answer

to the politicians

of the member

states, which they themselves answer to

the.

People that can

put

the politicians in

hot water,

which are typically the industrialists that can say if you don't, if you don't keep sending me 40 million euro a year, I'm going to have to cut and I'm going to have to lay down,

lay

off people and it's going to look bad. That is the driving force, not to lay off people in the member states.

Anything else. So, of course, I can explain to ESA how we can identify exoplanets and see they have habitable atmospheres with a coronagraph in the South Pole on a balloon, and the individuals at ESA are going to love it, and they're going to say, I wish,

I wish

I could do this, just

like the venture capital

people in La Caixa, you know. One of my VCs, they loved it that they got to invest in my company and they could be in my

meetings and they really

loved what we were doing. But

what made it possible for them to do

it was that the LP, that their stakeholder, made it embarrassing for the entity not to do it. So,

um,

convincing the people at NASA or a

place like,

or ESA or these kinds of things

is

not very helpful because they don't have any power.

[01:28:04] Markus: mm

[01:28:05] Jose: Okay,

so,

[01:28:09] Markus: that's,

interesting. that's you, you have 

[01:28:11] Jose: not really how it works.

[01:28:13] Markus: you have like distributed authority, so you ha don't have like the central figure, uh, as you mentioned at isa. So you have a distributed system of authority with without, with. So who would you call if you wanted that money? And that gets I'm, I'm, yeah, I, I'm going to tell you what has worked for

[01:28:35] Jose: me.

Zero to Infinity has received 45, 000 euro of ESA money. How did that happen? OHB, O H B, is

a very

large, uh, company in Germany, very successful. I was trying to convince the leadership team of OHAB, including Marco Fuchs, about the beauty of

developing a balloon assisted launcher. It wasn't just

elegant, it also was different from what other people were doing,

and

specifically for Germany, it wasn't offensive. And Germany was the cradle of offensive rocketry.

And, uh,

now it's making ICBMs again,

with

ISAR and RFA. And some people are

getting

very upset about that,

okay? And, but if we build

something that is not an ICBM,

then it doesn't get those kinds of

problems, Okay? And Marko Fuchs got it. He got it. He could see how that is good

feeling. dads.

who passed away, Vision. But his team had the pet project of building RFA, you know, Rocket Factory Export. And, um, and they had been fantasizing about this and they had been thinking of who they were going to hire. And, and

they didn't

like

the

fact that some unknown Spanish dude was coming here with a, an Austrian and a

French man and a

Greek guy trying to persuade everybody of doing things a different way.

So in the end, what happened was that Um, there was

something called the Micro

Launcher Study that was commissioned by ESA, and this put some money in some countries, the countries that were paying themselves for the Micro Launcher Study,

the

biggest chunk went to, I think the biggest chunk went to Germany, to OHV, and then in Germany, they Uh, OHB gave us 45, 000, gave that

source system another 40

something, and then, uh, internally to, to the empty outer space people, uh, the money to do the first, uh, uh, mission design for what became RFA.

Okay. Uh, so, uh, We could get money because

there was a

big player, Marko Fuchs and his team at OJB, that say we are

going to give you

some of these because we are still considering you. The moment that they dropped Dassault and us, they just concentrated on the thing, we

stopped getting

money. But we had to create a subsidiary in Munich, it's still out there, it's a drone, no people inside, but it still exists.

Zero

to Infinity Deutschland GmbH. Sitting, sitting there in Munich with doing nothing. So that's how

we got money

from ESA. Um, we were told in a number

of, 

[01:31:36] Markus: mm hmm. 

[01:31:37] Jose: through

an industry partner that could make the phone calls in Germany to make it embarrassing for Germany.

So we didn't have a partner like that

in Spain. And when you look at who gets funding, it's always something like that. Of course, nobody explains it like this. They say because we're so innovative or whatever, I don't know. And I'm going to

tell you

another story with ESA. And this is something that never, it's never been explained in public. You know,

do you remember

ExoMars?

[01:32:03] Markus: course,

[01:32:05] Jose: So, it had a lander called Schiaparelli, I think, yeah, that crashed on Mars. So, my father had the instruments on ExoMars, on the orbiter, not

on the lander,

And I was following very, very closely the mission, because I, of course, I like interplanetary missions. That's what my dad does, and it's very cool. It's one of the coolest things that we do, uh, in humanity, to explore other celestial bodies with.

Uh, so.

So

I, and I, and I was very familiar with Hogans

Hogan is

for, Hogans was a pro that landed on Titan, which is a moon of Saturn. I was there at the launch on the, on the launch pad in, in Ken Space Center with my dad

and

and this wonderful team of Hoens and Cassini scientists from all around the world.

So.

So Huygens landed on

Titan. And how did they test Huygens? They tested on Earth on a balloon.

Okay.

And that was launched from Spain.

And my dad was involved with that.

So, so I had some exposure to when you want to land

on some

planetary body and you have some complicated thing with parachutes and sensors and

stuff that

needs to work, you want to test Do the closest that

you can.

And landing on Mars is very similar to be to falling through the atmosphere at 30 kilometers of altitude, because

about

that altitude is the density of the air and the temperature of the air on Earth

is similar to what

you face on the atmosphere on Mars. So it. does make a lot of sense

to test

these things on, on, on the earth first, both

to test

the software and the hardware and the mechanisms and the, you know, the thermal stuff, all those things. So I knew that ExoMars had parachutes

and was supposed to land.

And so I did. So I find out who

was the

mission manager

for this one. It was a Canadian dude with lots

of rings in his hands. And I bought myself

a ticket and went

to meet him in Esteg. And he said, look, we're the only company, space agencies, like a French space agency, but we're the only company in Europe that has flown and recovered heavy high altitude balloon payloads.

We would love to test the mock

up of

the thing, um, and with the, with the parachutes and everything. And he said, Oh no, we are doing this in Romania

and we're doing this

with

uh, these guys of ARCA. And I say, why are you doing that with them? What's their track record? Have they ever done something like this?

No, but, um, the

I say,

Romania is not even a a, a state. What is this all about? Oh, but they signed some sort of agreement to get close and one of the conditions was that the contract had to go to their friends at ARCA. And I said, okay, you give their contract, whatever. Just let us do 

[01:35:01] Markus: Mm-Hmm. 

[01:35:02] Jose: You don't even have

to pay us.

[01:35:04] Markus: Mm-Hmm. . 

[01:35:05] Jose: We'll do it for free. To do it properly it's half a million euro. That's what doing it

really, really well,

costs.

I'm willing, out

of the goodness of my heart, because I want to work with ESA, because I lived here in Esteg. I used to go to the Tanning beds. Oh, they removed them, but they had tanning beds at Estec for free for the staff.

I used

to swim there. I didn't play golf in the ninth course because

I never played golf in my life. But, but they, they, some people did

play golf in Estec in the ninth. So I have fond memories.

The

food was great. I would like to start working with you guys. And they said, no, we don't have a mechanism for this.

We don't have a mechanism to give you the things so you'd fly it on your own, on your own dime. And then I went to the Spanish delegation, CDDI, you know, and said, Please, let me fly this so it doesn't crash on Mars,

because I don't want it to

crash. And I want to say that I was part of Mars And how are we

going to

do it?

That's not your problem, but I'll explain. We have other customers. They have their payload. We buy a bigger balloon, we put

a

little bit more helium, and we do a tandem launch. So one mission does

its thing, and

the other mission is a drop test. And

it's doable,

like you

put some

paracutors, it's

not very complicated. We can do

these things. And Spain was giving over 40 million for this mission, and I was just, first I was asking for half, then I was like, I'll do it for free.

Well,

the freaking thing crashed on Mars, because it was never tested.

What happened to the 800, 000

euro that

went to the Romanians?

They left the

country and they, uh, they moved to the U.

S. They, they just run with the money. Of course,

I

have many good Romanian friends. Not all Romania

is like

that at all. This is, I don't want to, they, it's very interesting what's happening there electorally also, uh, recently. Uh, but, uh, Uh, there's incredibly talented Romanian folks and those

were not the ones

that got the money.

Okay, so they moved to New Mexico and now they live in New Mexico, they even got to prison there, there was

a fraud case.

it's a long story with ARCA.

[01:37:28] Markus: Tell

me, uh, tell me 

[01:37:30] Jose: that's what happened with

with, with, uh, ESA, you

know? And of course, no journalist wants to talk about this.

[01:37:37] Markus: Do Because they say that it was a software error. Come on. You catch software errors when you do testing.

[01:37:45] Jose: If you don't test, you don't catch

them.

[01:37:46] Markus: Tell me, Jose, um, a personal question. Do you feel disillusioned?

[01:37:54] Jose: Not at all. Not at all.

That might be the impression, like, you say, oh, you're so jaded, you've had through.

Um, no.

Um, I feel The same passion to do things right. I want to learn a living based reality. I don't want to live in some fantasy and some hype. So I, I'm here, you know, and I'm as passionate as ever.

I'm just, I, I just want to learn from my mistakes and not necessarily step on the same stone twice, you know? And, uh, and if I can help other entrepreneurs or

other people, uh, get, you know, get

a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a,

a, a, a,

a a, a, get a

more

truthful, uh,

perception of, of reality and space.

I'm, I'm all for that. I've done it for my students. I've done it for my employees. Some of them have become extremely successful entrepreneurs on their own after they left the company. So, so I,

and I, and I

want

to strike

conversations because there haven't been

any,

because here in Europe, there's no conversation.

It's like,

Uh, We used to

do things

that were

very cool and now we just buy services from the us. That's, that's

kind of what

it is like that, that that's not the Europe IIII want

for my

kids. Absolutely. No. So, no, I'm, I, I, I feel.

I get up energized

to stuff

[01:39:19] Markus: to get things done uh, to get

[01:39:21] Jose: things done

because what I do is meaningful.

[01:39:24] Markus: because they, if the call came, um, right now, um, and someone offered you, um, a place, a spot on a spacecraft that's going into, into orbit with a tra on a tra no. I mean, like even, um, software, someone offered you some money to put up one of your balloons and then launch from the balloon to go. Toward the moon or even further.

Would you go as a person? 

[01:39:52] Jose: If it has windows, yes. Not if it has no

windows. But you would go.

Yeah, yeah. Uh, I mean, I mean, I would have to check the reliability and so on, you know, but, 

[01:40:08] Markus: kids, if your kids agree? 

[01:40:12] Jose: yeah, I, look, I really want to show the. that we live on a planet, to all sorts of people, to

my

kids, like there was a guy, there's a guy, you can't interview him because he's dead, but I exchanged some emails

with him.

I don't know him, his name was Odoin Dolfus, so he's a Frenchman, incredible astronomer, and he built himself a capsule to go higher than any plane in Europe,

to point

instruments to Venus and Mars and figure out things like why Mars is red.

that

there is water ice on the poles of

Mars,

there's water vapor in the atmosphere

of Venus,

and he

did that from

Europe, and from France. Everybody says, Oh, France, you can't do nothing, 35 hour week, whatever. Well, in their spirit, they have, they have that in their blood, they have that in their culture, they will do it again, just like

Oduando Fos did it.

And I remember when I started the company, I said, Ah, I would have loved him to go back in a more comfortable cabin to see this same view that he had. And you should

put it in the footnotes,

uh, if there are any of the call. Um, you see that there are incredible pictures of, of his capsule. Instead of having a big balloon like the Soviets

or the

Polish or the Swiss were doing back then, uh, he had a bunch of little balloons, 

[01:41:34] Markus: hmm. Mm hmm. 

[01:41:36] Jose: like

in the

movie Up.

[01:41:37] Markus: Yes.

[01:41:38] Jose: And,

and, uh, so, those kinds of things used to happen here

and they should happen again.

[01:41:45] Markus: Absolutely. I was asking, um, that question about going into space, because this is one of the questions I keep asking each of my My guests

in on the show, because if you go further out, um, things are exciting, but they soon wear off and can get boring if you're traveling for seven months to Mars, for example. So my, my question to

you would be, what's the one piece of music you would want to. Put on a playlist to entertain you throughout that boring journey, the one piece. And we do have a playlist for the aspiring

space traveler on Spotify. And now you

get to to add your contribution and it doesn't have to. So you don't have to think about space. It doesn't necessarily relate to space. So whatever music entertains you,

[01:42:40] Jose: Um, it's, it's gonna, it's gonna

be related.

you know. It's a, it's a band that I saw just yesterday on a concert.

The

band is called Public Service Broadcasting. Are you familiar with them?

[01:42:54] Markus: Progressive rock music?

[01:42:56] Jose: no, no.

So, so the, the, the song, I think is the best space theme song ever. And I actually tweeted about this today. If you go to JMLU77, you'll find my tweet with the video with a, so the song is called Go.

So what they

did was they took the recordings from Mission Control on Apollo 11,

and they

made a song out of that.

So you see, you hear FIDO, Go, Guidance,

Go. and turned that Go. And

so, so the,

and they turn that into a song

and it's incredible. And these guys, they make, um, albums that have a theme. So it could be the conquest of space. So they also have a very funky song that is called Gagarin. And, and it's, it's amazing. It's like, you can't stop moving.

So, so these guys are not very well known. They're British. But

the latest

album is about Amelia Earhart's flight, it's called The Last Flight, and it's so poetic and so evocative. They're great. So I would, I would include Go in my, in the playlist for sure, by Public Service Broadcasting.

[01:44:02] Markus: will totally put that up. Um, thank you so much for that. Um, my last question to you, Jose, um, this place is A coffee place. It's called the Space Cafe Podcast. And in coffee

places, you now and then have yourself an espresso to energize yourself when you are tired. Now I challenge you to share an espresso for the mind with me and the audiences.

Something that energizes our minds. Whatever kind of thought you deem appropriate for that.

[01:44:37] Jose: Find what makes life not pointless. Like a lot of people sometimes struggle in the world of today with the meaning of their lives

or,

so figure out what makes life not pointless. Whatever that is to you.

[01:44:58] Markus: Love it.

[01:44:58] Jose: And, and, and you can extract unlimited energy from that.

[01:45:04] Markus: Yeah, fantastic.

[01:45:07] Jose: Isn't that what religions were all about?

[01:45:12] Markus: Fantastic. Jose, thank you so much for taking the time. This was, this was really, really interesting.

[01:45:21] Jose: Thank you. Likewise. Enjoy it.

it.

[01:45:24] Markus: And that is a wrap, my friends. Thank you for tuning in. If this episode was as inspiring to you as it was to me recording it, consider sharing it with someone you feel like is A nerd just like you, or you feel like a person who would appreciate this kind of inspiration that you're taking inspiration from.

Maybe it could be a nice gift for the holiday season in full swing at the moment. And if there's still a little time left, I know I'm repeating myself, but again, this is Would help quite a bit to make this show or help this show grow into where we all wanted to grow into a huge place, or one of the places for profound discussion about one of the most fascinating endeavors you and humanity has ever undertaken.

So if you feel like. If you have 10 seconds or so, consider giving us a rating on whatever platform you're on, you're listening to this one, or even a review. We would highly appreciate that. Until next time, my friends, stay inspired and keep reaching for the stars and stay curious above all. This is Markus, signing off from the Space Cafe Podcast.

Bye bye.

Hello, everyone. This is the Space Cafe Podcast, and I'm Markus. So as we know, the space industry thrives on its success stories, records shattered wherever you look and missions accomplished and whatnot. But reality, as we know, is not always like this. And this is what we're Looking, but reality is, but sometimes it seems like this is a little.

Hello everyone. This is the Space Cafe Podcast, and I'm Markus. I'd like to take you on a ride today to perhaps try to get a different look or take a different, different look on the space industry, because, uh, We're spoiled, or this is at least what the big players and the media are trying to do, um, to show us the success stories, to show how great and shiny everything is.

But if we take a closer look, um, space is hard. This is nothing new and space is a tough place to get at. And today we're looking at a company that makes no secret out of It trying very hard and struggling now and then, because I mean like, Hey. Everyone is struggling, Elon is struggling, but he just doesn't talk about it in this way.

Um, I'd like to put the light today on Zero to Infinity, a fantastically interesting company trying to get into space using high altitude balloons for the first stage and then once You're in a safe spot, you would launch or they would launch with regular thruster technology into wherever they want to go.

A fantastic, um, concept. They're not the only ones, but they are at the pioneering front of this technology. But they may know, make no secret out of it, how hard it is. To get the funding, how hard it is to convince people that this may be the right thing to do for certain projects. This is not the solution for everything, but for certain projects, it's better than everything else on the market.

So. Welcome, um, Jose Urdiales.

So joining me today is the CEO of Zero to Infinity, Jose Mariano Lopez Urdial. Um, a fantastic, charismatic character who very candidly talks about. Not only his company, but his vision, his dream, and how hard it is to make it a reality. And this is, in my opinion, exactly what we all need. We want to learn from people.

We want to hear and appreciate. We want to learn from people.

We want to learn from people and we want to truly understand how others overcome challenges. And this episode today, my friends, is a perfect example of,

and that's exactly what we're What we need, don't we? Open, candid discussions about overcoming obstacles to achieve breakthrough solutions. Because again, space is hard. Jose's journey is nothing short of fascinating, and I am truly excited to share it with you. So let's dive right in today. Welcome to the podcast, to the Space Cafe Podcast.

José, let's go.

And that is a wrap, my friends. Thank you for tuning in. If this episode was as inspiring to you as it was to me recording it, consider sharing it with someone you feel like is A nerd just like you, or you feel like a person who would appreciate this kind of inspiration that you're taking inspiration from.

Maybe it could be a nice gift for the holiday season in full swing at the moment. And if there's still a little time left, I know I'm repeating myself, but again, this is Would help quite a bit to make this show or help this show grow into where we all wanted to grow into a huge place, or one of the places for profound discussion about one of the most fascinating endeavors you and humanity has ever undertaken.

So if you feel like. If you have 10 seconds or so, consider giving us a rating on whatever platform you're on, you're listening to this one, or even a review. We would highly appreciate that. Until next time, my friends, stay inspired and keep reaching for the stars and stay curious above all. This is Markus, signing off from the Space Cafe Podcast.

Bye bye.