The Benefits of Humans in Space

On a recent trip to New York, Paris, and London to speak face-to-face with a series of my investors in a technology I’ve helped develop called, Organic Intelligence (O.I.), I spoke to a friend of mine in Toronto who said that it was too bad that I wasn’t also going to Munich, because my itinerary would have matched the words of a fun pop song from 1979, by the group “M”, and I laughed despite my lack of sleep.

As fair warning, I’m going to do something I usually don’t do in my writing and speak a bit about O.I. If you’d like, just skip ahead three paragraphs and you can avoid anything that might be misconstrued as me “pitching” something. It’s not my intention and I certainly don’t want to offend any of my regular readers who come here to enjoy a journey through the background tangents, alleyways, and winding meanderings that I typically explore as I weave together what I hope are interesting thoughts and stories, but I felt it was important.

O.I. is an organic molecular formulation, already approved by many world-governing bodies including those in the E.U., and it dramatically improves crop yields through “speaking to plants” that has the added benefit of improving soil conditions, lowering watering requirements, while also reducing the volume of fertilizers and pesticides needed.

If you’re living pretty much anywhere in the northern hemisphere right now and are breathing in the smoke from the out of control wildfires in Canada that are burning millions upon millions of hectares of trees that serve as the lungs of our planet, and that are also releasing unprecedented amounts of formerly stored greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, then you’re already aware that there’s a global urgency that needs to be addressed, and aside from being able to directly offset food scarcity and the effects of the increased temperature of the climate crisis, there’s the very real potential that O.I. can also help to preventively save large swaths of rain and boreal forests from the effects of drought and forest fires.

I believe it’s a real game changer.

Next up, I would kindly ask that many of you take your fingers off of your keyboards because I can already imagine the scores of messages about to fill my inbox with comments like, “Well, if it wasn’t for people like you flying all over the world, we wouldn’t be in a climate crisis.”

So, to immediately address this issue, first know that I only use planes when necessary, choosing trains, busses, and electric vehicles whenever possible, especially in Europe, and that I offset, even when I don’t travel, through technologies that I know are actually making a real difference to carbon capture, as well as through a forest that I own that’s home to several million trees that’s carefully managed and also offsets the overall emissions of my entire family many times over.

Make no mistake about it, I’m a humanist and a businessperson looking to make a real difference on the planet, but at the same time I’m a conscientious steward regarding my activities, and I strive to make my life zero-emission or significantly better.

So, kindly resist hitting the keys or even pressing the send button, there’s no need as I’m already all over it, and even our communication devices have an impact on energy consumption.

So now, and if we’re all on board, let’s head back to my regularly scheduled writing.

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Paris Night Walks: Reflecting on Technological Evolution

On my first night back in Paris, at around 2 am, as I was feeling the effects of jetlag and walking a path near my home and beside the Voie Georges Pompidou, a few dozen feet away from the Seine river and within eyesight of the Eiffel Tower, I turned my gaze towards the night-time sky. I’m not exactly sure what I was looking for, but space and the stars have always been a touchstone for me.

As many of you no doubt know, Paris is romantically known as the City of Lights, but it first came to get that designation because 356 years ago it was also once the undisputed crime and murder capital of Europe.

Part of the reasons for this was that, as a port city moving vast amounts of cargo and traffic along the Seine, that when the sun went down, the seedier side of humanity’s elements would take to the streets and essentially loot and plunder its citizens until the arrival of morning light when the police and waking masses could once again restore order.

However, when two senior public officials were killed walking the streets at night in 1667, King Louis XIV was forced into action and he created the position of a crime-fighting superhero known as the Criminal Lieutenant of Police. He charged the man he put into the role, Nicolas de La Reynie, with stopping the scourge holding the city hostage and told him to do it by any and all means possible.

Before “The Bat-Man” was even a glimmer, a few hundred years later, in the imagination of writer Robert “Bob” Kane and his artistic and ghost-writing cohort, Bill Finger, Paris’ real-life crime fighter set out to literally clean up the streets of a burgeoning metropolis through the implementation of a series of novel initiatives.

First, he established one of the very first clandestinely paid “spy networks” of confidential informants (CI’s) who wore disguises, fake wigs, and even wrote down their secret information using invisible ink.

Next, he installed dozens of fountains all cross the city to increase sanitation and give citizens access to clean drinking water 24/7.

Thirdly, he put into place a law to force all citizens and business owners to have to clean up the streets directly in front of their properties on a daily basis to instil public pride, a sense of ownership, and civic duty.

Lastly, he realized that in order for Paris to be truly safe he’d have to somehow drag it out of the darkness and move it into the light. So he turned to one of the leading technologies of the time – candles.

With the King’s full endorsement, La Reynie had more than 3,000 candle-powered street lanterns built out of metal and glass and then installed on the sides of buildings, protruding out and over the streets where they could safely be kept lit at night and brighten the areas below.

He next commanded that all residents of the city keep candles lit in their front windows, so that crooks would have no ability to break into homes unseen, effectively driving them from the shadows.

By the end of Louis XIV’s reign in 1715, the number of street lamps had increased to more than 5,500. Parisians and the French media praised the King and La Reynie for making the city safe. Then, entirely unexpectedly and as an unimagined bonus, Paris even began to attract masses of visitors who wanted to come to be amazed and dazzled by the brightly lit evening streets in the heart of what was once a dark and dangerous city.

The candle-lit city soon spread the notion of Paris as a flickering, romantic destination, and thus began one of the longest running marketing campaigns ever created.

While the technologies to light its avenues and boulevards over the centuries have changed, it’s reputation as the City of Lights is as alive and well as ever.

Even though I’d spent a lot of time in Paris over the years, and especially prior to the pandemic, I’d always noticed that I’d had trouble even remotely being able to see any of the Milky Way or really anything but a few of the brightest of the stars in the night-time sky.

The light pollution was simply too pervasive.

But on this night, in March of 2023, I noticed something different. Although it was by no means a dazzling display of the heavens like you’d see standing outside of the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, I was positive that I could see a whole bunch of stars that I’d never been able to see before.

And although I wasn’t sure, I had a sense that the Eiffel Tower, while it was still a beacon that shone with dazzling brilliance, also somehow seemed slightly less intrusive.

After I managed to get a couple of hours of sleep and moved more fluidly into Parisian time a few hours later, I stepped outside for a short walk to grab a cup of coffee at a café that I like and I asked a local standing in line next to me about it. 

She told me that in 2013, Paris enacted a light pollution law that required all businesses, shops, and offices to turn off their interior lights one hour after the last employee left a building, and all window and outside street lights to also be turned off by 1:00 am or else the place would be subject to a 750 Euro fine.

She explained that the law was mostly ignored because businesses, and especially those owned by larger corporations, didn’t care about the new regulations or even the fines that it went with it as the advertising that they got from their signs far outweighed any monetary penalty.

But then, in 2020, and during the curfews that came with Covid, something truly French in nature happened. A group of parkour enthusiasts decided to use their gymnastic and wall-scaling abilities to turn off many of the illuminated business signs along the Champs-Élysées on Friday nights in an attempt to raise awareness about light pollution and the effects of wasteful energy consumption.

Amazingly, the media caught on and the attention persuaded many large corporate stores to turn their lights off.

It reminded me that seemingly small actions really can sometimes create meaningful results.

As I drank my coffee and thought about the stars of the night before, my mind wandered off into space, both literally and figuratively.

From Childhood Stargazing to Conquering Space

I’ve always been fascinated by space, ever since I was about 4 years old and my Grandfather first pointed to the smaller stars and larger stars in the night-time skies and would tell me that when we’re born our souls are each represented by the brightness of a single, individual star that we see above us.

He then selected two such stars and said that the slightly larger one was his, because he was lot bigger than me, but that it was also a little dimmer, because he had lived a full life and it was coming to an end.

He then pointed to mine and said that it was strong and bright and brave and close enough to his so that even in the heavens our family was always near.

He then explained that when a person dies, that their spirit rises up to their star and causes it to glow just ever so slightly more brightly, so that the people that have been left behind will always be able to look up and know that they’re never alone and are always loved.

It was a fanciful story, made up for children, and no doubt spread down through the centuries in the Polish culture from which my family originated to help explain the process of life and death, and even though I’ve studied engineering and science, and trust that the future will be guided into a new and greatly improved, technologically enhanced existence, I also have to admit that I take great comfort in occasionally glancing up and seeing my grandfather shining down upon me.

He was an amazing man…

I have to smile because there are really three themes that shape my life and my investments and these have all been borne from the influences that impacted me as a youth or as a very young child in some cases.

Besides my Grandfather, I also had the influence of my keen interest in the stories of science fiction. Here the thoughts and imaginations of the writers and futurists that envisioned grander prospects for humanity, as well as new and amazing products and inventions inspired my belief in innovation.

Dick Tracy, the character from the American comics that was launched in 1931, first popularized the idea of the wrist-watch phone that Steve Jobs’ brought to life through his second incarnation at Apple when he came back to the company in 1997 and turned it around from the brink of bankruptcy to help it become one of the largest companies in the world valued today at almost 3 trillion dollars.

And sure, there might not yet be the flying cars of The Jetson’s fame, but when it comes to three dimensions and transportation, Elon Musk, through his business, The Boring Company, has shown us that the future of transportation might not be up, but may instead be better accomplished by digging down.

Gene Rodenberry and the many offshoots of his initial Star Trek series also had a part, and in one instance played a huge role in the formation of my very first technology-based provisional patent and my involvement in healthcare.

When Sci-Fi Inventions Become Real

In a Next Generation episode of Star Trek called, “Ethics”, the character named Lieutenant Worf, played by the actor Michael Dorn, has an accident in Cargo Bay 3 when a large, heavy container sitting on top of another container causes the lower container to buckle under its weight and they both topple over and violently strike him in the back.

He wakes up in sickbay and can’t understand why restraining inhibitors are being used to hold him down, until he’s then given the news that his spinal chord has been crushed and that he’s paralysed. Despite neurological specialists being called in to assist the ship’s physician, Dr. Beverly Crusher, played by Gates McFadden, they have no solution for his spinal injury as, in Klingon culture, those who are paralysed are simply allowed to die and hence there’s never been any research on the subject.

Long story short, they fix him up using a brain chip that sends information to stimulators below his spinal injury and he’s able to walk again. Of course, it’s Star Trek, so there’s a lot more to it. I’ll let you watch the rest of the episode for yourself if you want to know the whole story.

The thing is though, almost immediately after watching the episode, I started my first patent application for a process I called the “Electrical Spinal Bypass System.”

I was only ever granted a provisional patent, but it eventually morphed into my brain interface project, and then eventually culminated in a series of ideas that came to fruition through my company, Bionik, and the development of the standard of care for neurological recovery.

I’m very proud that my invention has helped tens of thousands of people regain an unprecedented range of motion and other attributes after suffering from serious events like strokes.

It might not have changed the world in the way that an invention like the creation of fusion might one day achieve, but for the people who’ve regained and restored a measure of freedom, mobility, and renewed independence, it’s greatly impacted their lives and I’m grateful to have been able to have contributed.

Today’s Space Commerce

Following my passions in the field of space, I co-founded a company called, Phantom Space,

The company represents what I whole-heartedly believe is the next generation in space commerce because we’re making space more accessible, and developing entirely new markets by lowering costs to access Earth orbit through mass-manufacturing and leveraging mature technologies.

One of my most memorable space adventures was when I was contacted by Mark Russell, a good friend of mine and one of the very first employees at Blue Origin – Jeff Bezos’ space company – and he invited me to go on a parabolic flight that simulated the effects of weightlessness.  

Richard Garriott – the president of the Explorers Club and the first private citizen to go up to the International Space Station, as well as explore both poles, and also to the very depths of the ocean by exploring the Mariana Trench – was the one who organized the trip.

Richard’s being asked a lot of questions recently because of what happened to two members of the 120-year-old professional explorers society who were aboard the OceanGate Expedition’s submersible vessel called, the Titan, that apparently imploded on a deep dive to visit the wreck of the Titanic, killing all five of it’s passengers.

While Richard and Mark have been greatly saddened and impacted by the deaths of Hamish Harding – a long-time friend who they both knew very well – Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who had visited the wreck of the giant ocean liner many times before, as well as the CEO of OceanGate, Stockton Rush – whose company Richard called, “a good friend to the explorer’s society” – he also praised Shahzada and Suleman Dawood for their “desire to explore”. He’s also thanked the enormous efforts of the American and Canadian search parties that attempted a rescue in conditions that put themselves at risk.

No doubt some efforts in exploration and expanding the opportunity for individual human experiences may be curtailed for a while, and as we learn more, more safeguards and precautions may be enacted across a wide swath of experiences, but with exploration there will always be an element of risk.

Ultimately it’s up to each of us to decide what’s acceptable.

The Vomit Comet

So, on December 9^th of 2022, I found myself on a specially modified Boeing 727, taking off from the former Space Shuttle landing strip not too far from Titusville on the “space coast” of Florida for a zero-g parabolic flight.

It was a spectacular adventure, not only for the experience of simulated weightlessness that everyone on board got to feel in 22 second increments as the plane flew its sweeping flight paths for almost 2 hours to allow us to float within the confines of the hold many times over, but also for the incredible group of people that I was privileged to be with.

Prior to the flight, we had asked the pilot if we could specifically do a particular series of sweeps to simulate the gravity on the surface of the moon because of one particular person that we had with us. When he found out who it was, he readily agreed.

The 1/6^th gravity request was so, Charlie Duke, an Apollo 16 astronaut who in 1972 became the youngest and also the 10^th person to have ever walked on the surface of the moon, could get a chance to experience a virtual reality headset that ran a simulation Mark had created of the lunar surface, complete with rovers, recognizable craters, and landscapes from the time Charlie spent there.

To put Charlie’s achievement into perspective, throughout all of human existence and the estimated 117 billion people to have ever lived, breathed and walked on this planet over the course of the last 192,000 years, only 12 people have ever left it and walked on the surface of another celestial body, and he was one of them.

As the plane went through its parabolic flight path, Charlie said that the headset combined with our time in weightlessness created an overall experience so vibrant that it was the first time in a very long time that his memory had been so vividly triggered as to allow him to relive his actual experiences on the moon.

It was an unforgettable moment to see a tear well up in the corner of his eye as he smiled in appreciation.

With the headset now off, we continued our rising and falling flight arcs to simulate other degrees of weightlessness. As we got into the start of our next hour, I found that I really had to focus on a spot on the ceiling when we went into high G to keep any sense of nausea from overwhelming me. That was when I glanced over at 86-year-old Charlie who was just simply sitting there, casually chilling, sort of resting his chin on his hand and bent elbow, waiting for the next round of lack of gravity.

Noticing me checking out his calm, he grinned playfully and said that he’d done this countless times before and in his Apollo training days they’d do it over and over and over again until one of the astronaut candidates puked, and then they’d just keep doing it again and again some more until the person worked it out of their system. Then he patted me on the arm and said that in his estimation I’d be a pro at the whole thing after two or three more peaks and dips.

Whether it was his words or my body acclimating, he was right, and the pure joy of seemingly floating virtually unrestrained through space is one I’ll never forget.

The other experience on that day that I’ll always cherish is when Charlie first saw that Frances Northcutt, better known to everyone as “Poppy”, was also on the tarmac getting ready to join us on our flight.

Poppy was one of NASA’s human “computers” – in the days when mechanical computers themselves were analogue and took up vast warehouses full of space as their reel-to-reel systems tried to process vast amounts of information that virtually any of our cell phone apps have the processing power to now do in a matter of seconds – but back then it took a human with serious skills to accomplish.

She was the first woman to work in NASA’s Mission Control, and during the Apollo 8 mission it was she who manually calculated the trajectory needed for the spaceship to return home after it had been captured by the gravity of the moon.

Although Charlie was on a later Apollo mission, it was still Poppy’s calculations that brought him and his crew home, and seeing the two of them meeting and rekindling memories from their experiences from dawn of the space race was truly beyond words.

When Poppy had a few minutes to chat with me and I mentioned how amazing her abilities were and how the realities of the pressures of her position must have been tremendous, she smiled, her eyes twinkled, and she asked if I’d like to know a little secret.

I was beyond eager to listen and simply blown away when she told me that when it came to the Apollo 8 mission – the first manned trip to circle the moon and a precursor to the lunar landing that would take place 7 short months later – that as NASA had moved up the launch date by four months because the CIA had advised them that the Russians were going to launch for the moon a month before they themselves were scheduled to do so, that the ship was already up and heading towards the moon before she had even had the chance to finish the trajectory calculations for its return trip home.

The space race was so intense, especially after America had lost to the Soviet Union when they put Sputnik the world’s first satellite into orbit, and then followed it up with the first dog, Laika, in space, and then further followed that up with the first man to orbit the Earth, Yuri Gagarin, and then putting the first woman into space, Valentina Tereshkova, that there was no way that JFK or the American public would ever let the Russians beat them to the moon – even if it meant that they weren’t entirely sure that the crew of Apollo 8 had better than a 1/3^rd chance of a successful return as even Command Module Pilot, Jim Lovell, later admitted that he privately thought to himself and that was just a bit more pessimistic than the 50% chance that his fellow astronauts Frank Borman and Bill Anders put their odds at.

Phantom also allowed me the opportunity to meet a whole lot of other people within the NASA family such as Walter Cunningham, NASA’s third civilian astronaut after Neil Armstrong and Elliot See, and who was the Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 7 in 1968.

Walt’s life had many incarnations, first as a fighter pilot, then as an astronaut, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and the author of the 1977 book, “The All-American Boys”. Sadly, he passed away in January of this year, but I will always remember speaking to him at his surprise 90^th birthday party when he took a moment to pull me aside and said,

“Michal, I want you to remember one thing: you’re either winning or you’re out.”

His words have helped define my intent and my purpose.

I know that while Phantom is a small step in the commercialization and democratization of space, that the technologies and the insights that we learn and develop will shape the world for the betterment of humanity.

That’s the thing about space, it holds this potential to unlock new realities and provide transformative technologies that can benefit the world in ways still to be imagined and conceived.

Real World Space Exploration Benefits

In fact, the very nature of exploring space, with its seemingly endless difficulties and challenges, has already driven technological advances that have had tremendous impacts right here on Earth and in our daily lives.

By reaching for the stars, we’ve advanced technology in areas such as solar energy, GPS, Google maps, MRI and CAT scans, air purifiers, water filtration processes, and even the advent of the humble Dust Buster. All of these and many more emerged from the research and development required to get us into space and to keep us there.

By the most conservative estimates, for every dollar NASA has spent on getting to space, eight dollars in direct economic activity followed, with many more dollars generated from spinoffs of its innovations.

In 2020, NASA released the results of its first-ever agency-wide economic impact report and in it, it showed that through all of NASA activities, the agency generated more than $64.3 billion in total economic output during the fiscal year 2019, supported more than 312,000 jobs nationwide, and generated an estimated $7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes all across the United States.

Space is simply a never-ending impetus for innovation.

The Road Ahead in Space

The fact is, you can’t walk into a Home Depot and pull a lunar rover off of the shelf in the lawn mower section. So NASA has had to invent concepts, software, material, and equipment from scratch to accomplish its missions for more than 50 years.

Commercialisations of NASA ingenuity are significant and often lead to much bigger things than original designs entailed. Every year, the agency develops 1,600 to 1,800 new technologies. About one-third of its software is made available, free-of-charge to the public because the federal government doesn’t hold copyright. For hardware, NASA licenses out patents to people who want to use them for about $2,500 to $25,000 upfront.

This all stems from an act of Congress from when they first created the space program in 1958. To show people that space had real-world, earth-based applications, lawmakers required it to develop technology that would also benefit people on the ground. This led to a slew of innovations in everyday life that many people might not even know started with NASA.

I’m not talking about Space Pens, Velcro, and the powdered orange drink known as Tang, because, and just to stop the urban legends from spreading, the astronaut program and the agency didn’t invent any of them, but NASA did implement their use in sometimes totally new and novel ways.

I’m talking about the original inventions that are still at the core of much of what they do.

For example, as we ourselves look to move large farms into the hearts of major urban centres through the implementation of vertical farming, did you ever consider that whole the process was originally developed by NASA, and that the space agency is still deeply involved in all kinds of farming innovations?

Or how about that during the height of the pandemic, when it came to ventilators, NASA, in just 37 days, successfully developed a prototype ventilator called, VITAL, to be used in the treatment of Covid-19 patients and, after securing an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, made the design available to select manufacturers free of charge.

The next time you see or hear fire trucks speeding down the road, keep in mind that NASA has greatly impacted the lives of fire-fighters through the advent of fireproof suits, lightweight composite air tanks, scratch resistant face shields, and even a portable device that can detect a human heartbeat under 20 feet of rubble, even at exceptionally noisy rescue sites.

It all comes down to a simple matter of equal parts necessity and inspiration.

Space exploration symbolizes our species’ intellectual and technological maturity, and it’s an expression of our endless curiosity. By exploring space, we unite the human race and lift ourselves up to new levels of understanding of our place in the universe and about our existence.

But it’s not just the technologies that make a difference.

Earthrise

Apollo 8, although it accomplished a great deal, will most likely be remembered for one moment that was never intended or even planned.

While all of the energies of the entirety of the space agency, mission control, and indeed the entire crew were focused on the moon, it wasn’t until the capsule turned around and Bill Anders looked over his shoulder and back through a small window towards Earth, that he saw something never before seen by human eyes, and then he quickly grabbed his camera to capture a photograph that will forever be remembered throughout all of human history – Earthrise.

It is through this image, and for the very first time ever, that every one of us could see the beauty and fragility of our planet framed against the black void of space.

Anders said,

“I think it’s ironic that we went all the way to the moon, to explore the moon, and what we really discovered was the Earth.”

As I see it, maybe nations, religions, ethnicities, and humanity would fight each other less and work together more if every single one of us was encouraged to spend some sitting and staring at Earthrise in quiet contemplation until the realization took shape that we’re all passengers on a one-of-a-kind spaceship, forever locked in a life-or-death dependency with each other – as though we were five people trapped on a small lifeboat with limited resources and lost in the middle of the Atlantic – because in many ways when you look at Earthrise you realize that as Earth floats through the vast blackness of space, that we are absolutely alone, able to depend on no one but ourselves.

This is what we learn from going into space.

This is what drives my belief in a better tomorrow.

This is what gives me hope, and the expectation for a better future for all of us…

– Written by a human.

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Michal Prywata: Inventor, entrepreneur, and multidisciplinary engineer with a focus on frontier technologies. Founder of ventures in healthcare, agriculture, space, and AI. On a relentless quest to solve complex problems and extend the boundaries of human potential.