Douglas Graham
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Rhae Adams, Vice President of Strategy and Business Development, First Mode, Seattle (47.6° N, 122.3° W)

Rhae Adams is the vice president of strategy and business development at First Mode, a design and development firm for complex systems both on and off planet, where he oversees shaping the company’s vision and projects to generate revenue effectively in First Mode’s target markets. He graduated from Rice University in 2012 with a degree in economics. After graduating, he first worked as a strategy consultant at Accenture and later worked as the director of mining and energy at Planetary Resources before founding First Mode in 2018. Rhae also serves on the board of advisors for Rice’s Eclipse rocket team, where he helps the club’s leadership in several areas, such as creating projects and determining long-term goals.              

In our interview, we discussed Rhae’s professional journey from college to his current position. We also talked about Rhae’s current role at First Mode and the future of the space mining industry. After initially following a pre-medical path during the first part of his college career, Rhae found an interest in economics, which led him to develop important skills that would later help him create financial models for First Mode. Now, Rhae works to ensure that his company’s projects will generate revenue, which involves working with companies, governments, and individuals. These projects focus on developing robotic and mechatronic systems for space and other industries, such as mapping a moon of Jupiter and determining a drilling spot on Mars for research. Additionally, Rhae explained how miniaturization and software improvement are enabling companies like First Mode to put more technology and autonomy into one device, allowing the devices to have more features and be transported at a lower cost. He also elaborated on the challenges of his position, which include explaining complicated concepts such as orbital mechanics to customers and balancing the three-legged stool of finance, technology, and government policy.

An important point Rhae brought up during the interview was the necessity of patience: projects can take a long time to complete, especially in the space industry, so you should expect a lot of hard work before a project’s rewarding completion. You should also be patient about the skills you gain in college courses, which can greatly benefit you down the road in your career in ways you may not imagine when first learning them. While I expected patience to be a key skill in the space industry, I was surprised by the correlation between communicating ideas effectively and a successful space engineering project. According to Rhae, being able to explain technical ideas to those outside technical fields is vital to securing the funding that propels projects forward. He made the point that students looking at the space industry should think about developing their communication skills alongside specialized technical or business skills to be effective professionals in the field.

Ultimately, the most significant lesson I learned from interviewing Rhae was that there is no singular path to working in any specific industry. Instead, Rhae encourages seeking opportunities in the industry or subject area that interests you most, even if the connection between that field and your academic studies isn’t immediately apparent. For instance, Rhae studied economics and had an interest in the space industry, so he found a way to use his knowledge of economics in a space company. I learned from Rhae that you shouldn’t fear jumping into newer or more unknown industries if they are fields in which you have a genuine interest. Instead, reach out for advice from people who know the industry well and find a way to incorporate your skills into that field.

Highlights from the interview

Everyone’s family, community, and life circumstances create an initial role for them in society. What was expected of you, and did you adhere to it or did you stray from it?

As a kid I wanted to be an astronaut or a paleontologist. Then I was steered towards the doctor route. I always enjoyed science and math and engineering while I was in high school. The kind of counsel I was given there, both from friends and family and from teachers, was that being a doctor would be a great fit for that, which was very interesting to me. I’m still very interested in biomedical research and how that relates to space travel.

I started college as a pre-med. Did that for well over two years. Worked in a biomedical lab on campus doing genetic research and did a rotational program over at the hospital and watched my first open heart surgery, passed out cold on the ground. So it didn’t go very well. I wasn’t enjoying my classes as much as I saw a lot of my classmates did. I took organic chemistry and all those kind of weed out classes and was too stubborn to want to be weeded out. But definitely reflected on that a lot and decided that it was not the route for me and that there were other things that were more interesting to me. So I switched into economics, which was a pretty big departure from the math and science heavy coursework I’d been doing. And that was not so much knowing what I wanted to do but wanting to kind of learn the skill sets that would be more broadly applicable than just a very narrow medical focus or a biomedical focus.

After graduation I joined a consulting firm doing strategy and operations work mostly in the oil and gas industry. I always had a passion for space and space exploration and started to see that new types of companies were emerging that weren’t focused on science and discovering the secrets of the universe but were focused on turning a profit and being commercial viable entities. Obviously that’s somewhere where economics and business development skills are very important. So, I was able to leverage those skills to get across and say, hey there’s not a lot of difference between an oil and gas company wanting to be profitable and selling resources on earth as there is to selling resources and extracting them from space. That was my entry point into what has always been a passion for me, which is the privatization and exploration of the solar system.

It took a little bit of time to get here. It sounds very logical when I explain it now, but it has honestly been a little bit more sporadic than that—or at least at the time it felt that way. It’s still pretty early days in terms of what’s going to happen over the next few decades. For me it’s been pretty exciting to get in early and have that impact at the beginning of what the strategy is going to look like in the long term. Working, asteroid mining, for two years at Planetary Resources was a huge part of that; developing economic models for target selection and resource pricing out in space was just an extraordinary experience, and probably one of the first times that someone sat down and thought about it for a long period of time. Today at First Mode we continue to do work on the asteroid belt but also on Mars, the moon, out beyond the asteroid belt to Europa, and here in industries on Earth, too. There’s a lot of applicability.

When exactly did you envision yourself doing what you’re doing now?

That’s been an evolving thing as well. I was really fortunate to join the team of Planetary Resources and get to know the engineering and scientific staff, most of which were responsible for a lot of the success of the Mars programs. Our chief engineer here and at Planetary was the chief mechanical engineer of Mars Curiosity, which is the big plutonian-powered, SUV-sized rover that’s on the surface today. He has worked on Spirit and Opportunity, which are two of the smaller rovers, all the way back to the first rover, Mars Pathfinder. And getting to know them, and getting to know their skill set, I saw a really big opportunity not just to use that method of engineering in space but for industries here on Earth.

So probably two years into Planetary Resources was really when it started to crystalize to me that the way you design a spacecraft, the way you design a rover to operate on the surface of Mars, that’s actually really similar to how we’re starting to design things here on Earth. The systems get more complex; you need to understand how the sensors on your self-driving car are going to be interacting with the user in a way that an automaker has never had to think about before. But that people designing Mars rovers have been thinking about for a long time because resources are so constrained and the operating environment is so harsh, there’s not any room for there to be a disconnect between your blinker and your battery pack in the back. If that happens, your rover dies, and there’s no one there to fix it. So that idea has really stuck with me as I’ve learned about the space industry and learned how that design in engineering is done. And of course we still use it in that industry, but it does apply a lot of other places.

Did you have anyone who sort of acted as a mentor to you? Who helped cultivate your interests?

Absolutely. There’s been a whole host of people that have helped out along the way. I think at the most basic level, friends and family that have encouraged me to take a lot of risk, to leave the cushy consulting job that was a sure salary and a sure thing and go pursue something that I was really passionate about even when it was as crazy as asteroid mining. I remember calling my parents and being like, “Hey I got this offer at this crazy startup, and they’re mining asteroids.” And you kind of get that look of like, are you joking with me? Like is this a fake job, are you going to work for the CIA, like what’s going on? But they always were supportive and said, “Go give it a shot. You can always return to the more traditional industry, and, you know, why not? You’re young.” And that’s extended to starting a company myself and growing that and figuring out the right way to do that.

I also had great mentors at my first job at Accenture who were able to help me find that passion and say, “Look, you’re not going to get that here. We want you to stay, you’re doing a great job, but we can tell this is what you really love, and why don’t you let me help you find a way to get into that?” And they were really understanding of giving me opportunities inside of Accenture to express some of those interests and ultimately help me secure a job outside of it, and I still call them all the time when I’m dealing with issues and say, “Hey, I would love your advice right now on how to handle this.” I think you do find a lot of those types of people along the way. It takes reinforcement. There’s no one voice that convinced me this is what I should do. It’s the repetition of friends, family, and people that I trusted saying, “Yeah, it’s risky, but you should do it” that ultimately let me kind of feel comfortable doing that.

Great. What do you do in your current position?

It’s really an extension of all of the training working at a consulting firm, really focused on the business strategy and operations side, paired with what I did at Planetary Resources, which was business development. Obviously asteroid mining is something that was going to take decades to do, and we used a lot of venture capital as a way to fund that. People that were willing to put up money up front to place a bet on something risky in the hopes that that paid out in the future. Another way to do that was to find ways to introduce asteroid mining technology into other industries that existed and generate money in the near term to help fund that long-term vision.

And so doing that was really the basis of being able to do what I do at First Mode, which is make sure that if we’re building a Mars rover, we’re getting paid to do it, and we can get paid enough that we can stick around and continue to build more spacecraft and continue to support the hardware we’ve already built and sent out to the solar system. So it’s definitely not as glamorous as what the engineers get to do. I’m not in the clean room turning wrenches very often. They usually don’t let me too close to the hardware, which is a smart decision. But you know, making sure that we are positioned well and that we are communicating out with the public, with NASA, with private companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, so that they know we exist, they know what we’re capable of doing, and they know that they can trust us to deliver something that is critical to their mission. Because every component in this industry can kill the mission, so you’ve really got to make sure you trust your suppliers and you trust the people on your team. I spend a lot of time dealing with customers and making sure that the engineering team can stay focused on that, and then I’ll handle getting the contracts together, getting all the paperwork in order. There’s a lot of paperwork with NASA as you might imagine. But to me, I love doing that, and I love seeing the engineers get to build some incredible stuff, and, of course, learn a lot through that. I’m still dangerous enough with my engineering classes and math skills that I’ll still get involved every now and then, just out of curiosity.

You mentioned how this is an emerging business and industry. Are there any misconceptions about your job or industry?

I think the excitement of space is a really powerful thing. It is very inspirational to people to think about our place in the solar system, our place in the exploration of the solar system, and what that might mean for the future of our species. It’s one of the few topics where you can take that broad view and put aside some of the more mundane day-to-day things that people focus on and look out into a future that people always assume they won’t be part of, but they know that one day will exist. So they like to hear about the types of work and the missions that we’re doing. They’re excited by the fact that people are working on these types of problems that are fundamental in shaping our view of ourselves and the universe. But that’s not necessarily the day-to-day of what we do.

There’s a lot of practical considerations, and we work a long time on missions and then see the success many years afterwards. We are working on missions today that won’t launch until 2024 and won’t arrive at their destination until 2026 or 2027, which is almost a decade away. So you may very well be working on something late in your career that you’ll retire before it actually arrives in destination, and you can see that the job has been completed successfully. People forget about how long it takes for things to travel in space, how big the distances are. We’re not out on the launch pad everyday getting that awesome feeling of watching something shoot off the planet. It’s awesome when it does, but it’s a lot of hard work for years to get to that point. Space is just so big that it’s tough for people, including ourselves sometimes, to really grasp the magnitude of what we’re doing.

Is there anything from your college years, skills you’ve learned, that’s helping you right now in this position?

Absolutely. The economic side, certainly; my major was instrumental in developing pricing models for resources in space. I mean, there’s very few places where economics as a discipline, as a raw science, can be applied like that. That was one of those areas where we were making trades of economic models against orbital mechanical models, because when you’re picking what asteroid you go to, part of it certainly has to do with the resources there, how valuable are they going to be, but a lot has to do with access. How often can you get out to this object. We can launch to Mars every 26 months, and there is a 10-day window. It’s very much about how things are lining up in the solar system, and you have to put, on top of that, a traditional mine economic model that a mining company might use. So how do you merge those two things together? One which is very business-focused and one which is very engineering- and technology-focused—to make a decision out of the 300,000 known objects, what’s the one you want to go to. So that coursework was very valuable, to the point of pulling back out notes and textbooks from my econ classes to build something sophisticated enough to reflect the complexity. That happens frequently. As do the engineering skills—even though they were in biomedical engineering, having a base in engineering is something I’m dealing with everyday.

It goes back to high school really. The equations for physics in space are pretty simple, really. I mean people say it’s “rocket science,” but rocket science is actually pretty easy science. It gets much more complicated once you get into the surface, and you have to do chemical analysis and design mechanisms that aren’t going to get gunked up by dust or something like that. It does all kind of come back. I never thought I would admit that because everybody would always say, “You’re going to use this someday…” You’re like, “Yeah, okay, I’m sure I will.” But we do use it a fair bit in the science[s]…

That’s cool to know. So could you give me an example of what kinds of projects you guys work on or what has been one of your favorite projects?

We have a combination of robotic systems, or mechatronic systems, like the fusion of mechanical, electrical, and software into what people traditionally think of as a robotic system. We do that for space, and we do that here on Earth as well. My favorite Earth example is in clean technologies. We have super talented engineers that get to think about system-level problems, like how do we clean up the ocean. Like that’s an intractable problem. People pose those types of problems, and there’s no obvious answer. The answer to that is extraordinarily complex. There’s hundreds of moving parts, of organizations, everything has to line up right for something like that to change, but that’s no different than, “Let’s land a man on the moon.” Like, there’s no starting place for that; like, that’s impossible. And it feels like just as much as a problem as how do we combat climate change, how do we clean the ocean, how do we recycle all the resources we have. Those are just as difficult, and we get to spend time using the same approach on those types of issues as well, and that’s just one of the common things you’ll hear of someone that isn’t supportive on the spending on space exploration that we do on a country, “How is that impacting my day-to-day life? Like what do I care about water on Mars? We have real problems here that we need to solve.” And getting to apply those really talented scientists and engineers to think about those problems too is really rewarding to us, because ultimately, we don’t study space because we think we should move there. We’ve explored every planet and moon in the solar system, and we know that Earth is by far the best spot to be. No question. So we view space as a way to make life better on Earth, not as an escapist mentality where we’re just going to go to Mars and live because things here are terrible. That’s kind of like taking your ball and going home. Working those issues is really important.

I think my favorite mission that we’re working on now is called Europa Clipper. Europa is a moon of Jupiter. What’s really interesting about it is that it has a warm saltwater ocean underneath an icy crust. Everywhere on Earth that we’ve found warm saltwater oceans, we’ve found life. So the theory is that because of these similar properties, and the planet itself is actually kept warm by the radiation coming from Jupiter because it’s so far away from the sun, that Europa is one of the best candidates for finding life in the solar system. Europa Clipper is a flyby mission. It’s a satellite, it won’t land on the surface, but it’ll study Europa in detail for the first time and start to make measurements from orbit to say hey, does it look like there might be life here? And, more importantly, how can we map Europa and find the right landing spot in the future to put a mission called Europa Lander on the surface and actually drill into the ice and detect for signs of life. That would fundamentally change our understanding of not just life in our solar system but life as we know it, potentially. The most likely outcome is that we won’t find anything, and we’ll keep looking. But we might find life. And it might look a lot like ours, or it might look totally different, and both of those would be really really interesting in our understanding of the solar system and how prevalent life might be. We want to work on the issues here; we want to work on those big issue[s] of “Are we alone in the universe?” We don’t know. Let’s go find out. We have some ideas that are scientifically accurate, in terms of the feasibility, so it’s really great for us to be part of that mission and be supporting NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab.

To tackle such big problems like this you obviously need a really diverse array of people in your team, professionals. Could you tell me a bit more about your team dynamic and what your company culture is like?

You’re totally right, you need a really multidisciplinary team to tackle these types of problems. Landing on the surface of another planet is not a mechanical problem, it’s not an electrical problem, it’s not a thermal problem; it’s all of them. So you need—the glue that holds it all together is what’s so critical in space. We call that systems engineering, which is just a branch of engineering that makes sure that something the electric team is doing doesn’t interfere with something the mechanical team is doing, doesn’t interfere with something that the instrument team is doing. And having a very coordinated way of solving and negotiating between those team members so that the system can operate in its entirety and interact with the environment in a good way. So we first and foremost look for good systems thinkers, for people that aren’t just thinking about “what’s the little piece that I have to do” but are thinking “what are the changes that I make—what are they going to do to this person’s job over here? What are they going to do to the wheel, the mobility system, if I make a change to the weight of the way the drill is positioned? Am I going to tilt the whole rover over if I add an extra kilogram or is that okay?” So everyone has very strong engineering and technical backgrounds, but everybody has to be able to think at the system level in addition to their individual discipline.

Obviously, we’re a bunch of sci-fi nerds. I think the biggest debate in the office is Star Trek or Star Wars. There are wrong answers, by the way. Star Trek is definitely better.

Being out in Seattle was really important to us. It’s a little bit more laid back, has a really strong and rich history in aerospace with Boeing being here—all the way now to Blue Origin being here, which is Jeff Bezos’s private rocket company. As well as a whole ecosystem of other folks. Just a whole lot of technology. So we see the value that other industries [bring], just like we can provide insight to other industries from the perspective of space. It goes in both directions. We hire people out of automotive, we hire people out of the semiconductor industry, we hire people out of oil and gas and mining. All those perspectives are important and lead to innovation in terms of space. It definitely flows both ways. There’s not a background we look for necessarily; we actually like the more interesting backgrounds where maybe this person did this for a few years and then they went over and did something else entirely different because we never quite know the types of problems. We have a lot of unexpected problems that come up all the time that you need people that can react appropriately and think in different environments.

How are science and technology reshaping the work you do, and what changes do you foresee in your specific area from that technology?

I’d say, huge driver is in terms of miniaturization. The amount of science and power you can pack into a small package these days is totally incredible. All the way down to the phones that we all carry in our pocket to instruments that we can package into a spacecraft where volume and mass are super constrained, and you have to fit into the very top of a nose kind of rocket, and you have to shaken to death for eight minutes just to get up into orbit and then survive entry, descent, landing into Mars’s atmosphere. All of that is really hard, and the more instrumentation you can put onto one rover, the less you have to do that and the more science you can do once you arrive—or the more commercial activity. As we think about sending people farther and farther, you want to send as many people as possible with as many diverse backgrounds as you can so they can all have kind of a unique perspective. So miniaturization has been huge in the space industry.

You see it in the first CubeSat sent to deep space, which is just a name for a smaller shoebox-sized satellite versus something that’s the size of a car, called MarCO—was sent to Mars during the last Hohmann transfer window as part of the InSight mission. The InSight mission is studying the interior composition of Mars and, alongside of it, had this kind of shoebox size thing that communicated as the InSight mission was descending into Martian atmosphere. Which is really just a testament to how far things have come, where something the size of a shoebox now does something the size of a car used to have to do. I think that trend is going to continue. We’re going to continue to see more powerful missions go for smaller…which just equals less cost. The smaller you are, the less you have to pay to launch. So that’s been really important.

Obviously, software and autonomy has just gotten leaps and bounds more capable in the past few years. When you’re doing a robotic surface mission, that’s obviously of importance. Robotic mission versus a human mission costs about a fourth the cost. It costs a lot of money to keep humans alive in space, so when you can do robotic exploration, that’s always the preference from a cost perspective. As those systems continue to advance as well, you see a lot of piling in—and that’s a lot of SpaceX’s success is bringing outside autonomy into their first stage and allowing them to land it and reuse it, which has been so instrumental in dropping the costs of access to space, too. Those are two off the top of my head; I’m sure there are ones that are going to surprise us in ways that we don’t understand. It’s already just incredible what types of over-the-air updates you can do, from here to stuff that we’ve got on Mars. I don’t know if a lot of people know this—when the rovers are launched from Earth, it takes about eight months to get from Earth to the surface of Mars. When they launch, the software’s not done because the software is the last thing that can be updated remotely. The rover is in motion to Mars and doesn’t yet have all the software it needs to land successfully. So the software team is continually updating as it gets further and further away, and when it lands, it’s just barely capable. It might take a picture and say, “Okay, I need to send this home because I don’t know what to do with it.” And then NASA will sit there and look at it and say, “Okay, we want to go drill that rock.” So they say, “Drive a few feet forward, rover.” Rover drives forward, takes another picture, sends it home. It’s eight minutes light-time back—it’s eight minutes light-time coming back from Earth with a response. They do this over and over and over again and finally the drill extend[s]; they’ll reposition it another 16 minutes, another 16 minutes, and finally drill into the surface. By the time these rovers have been operating for a few years, it’ll send back a photo and NASA will say, “go drill that rock,” and the rover will know how to do all of that without any back and forth between Earth. And that’s because they’re constantly sitting there and updating the software, which is just so incredible.

It’s pretty cool. What issues do you see facing your industry?

There’s definitely challenges. I’ll talk about the business side first, just cause that’s what I understand. People are still very much trying to figure out what business models work in space. People think of space as an industry, but really it’s just a location. You wouldn’t look at a company that goes out and catches fish and then brings them back in and sells the fish and say, “They’re an ocean company.” You’d say, “No, they’re a fishing company.” They go out, they get this thing, they transact, it’s a known model. Well, space is really the same thing at the end of the day. There’ll be tourism, there’ll be industry, there’ll be medicine, there’ll be everything that we do here—you’re just doing it in a new location. That switch is starting to happen, but there aren’t necessarily all the winners picked yet. People talk about space tourism, but is it going to be Bigelow? Is it going to be Blue Origin? Is it going to be Virgin Galactic? We don’t know yet. All are strong contenders, and there are going to be entrants that we don’t even know about yet that will have a huge impact. But there’s still people trying and failing, which is great. That’s kind of the whole ethos of what’s made Silicon Valley so successful, just the rapid iteration of ideas. You see that in space, but it’s also a challenge because investors don’t know where is the best spot to invest their capital. Engineers and new entrants to the market don’t know what idea is necessarily the best one. It’s all technically nuanced. You can’t gloss over the technology when it comes to space. Like, you can’t give a presentation on asteroid mining without some education about orbital mechanics—and, to an investor, that’s tough. They’re used to getting Angry Birds pitched to them, which is pretty easy to understand: make game, sell on iPhone, got it. They know how they’re going to make money. But when I have to walk into a meeting and I have to explain the basics of orbital mechanics to you before we can even have a conversation about how you’re going to make money, that’s a challenge. That’s a lot of education that needs to happen on something that is extraordinary, technically critical to success. So I see that as a challenge, a big gap in general understanding of the risks in space and how to articulate those to people that want to invest in space. Technically, it’s the real challenge, I’d say of space in general, is what we call the three-legged stool problem. You have the finance and the fundings I just spoke about, you have the technical and engineering, and you have actually the government policy side. That’s hugely critical component of success in the industry. Most of the successful space programs are federally funded. Even SpaceX, with commercial crew and commercial delivery to the space station, those are all covered in contracts, and they dictate a lot of where the big funding goes and what missions get selected, certainly from a science perspective. If all three of those things aren’t growing at the same rate, you tip over. You can’t sit on a stool with two legs. The technical challenges aren’t as known, but they do have to develop alongside the funding and the policy side. And that’s really the challenge, is getting all three of those things to happen simultaneously. They do in some areas; launch area has just seen a huge revitalization with all these small launchers. You’ve got Rocket Lab, you’ve got Firefly, you’ve got Virgin Orbit, and then you’ve got the big players like SpaceX and Blue Origin that are disrupting what has been a monopoly at the United Launch Alliance, which is a Boeing and Lockheed joint venture forever. So it’s occurring at some places but not everywhere, and it’ll happen at different rates and be driven by different factors, and not knowing what those necessarily are can be a challenge.

We have made lot of investment in Martian exploration in the US in general, and the current administration is really interested in going back to the moon. That’s fantastic, but these missions take a long time to put together, so if we shift our focus to the moon, and sending things to the moon, all of those missions won’t be ready until 2022 and 2023, but if we get three years into that and change our minds again, you cancel all those missions, you wasted a lot of money and time and resources. It can be hard when space [is] politicize[d], because it just takes a lot of time and energy to develop the parts that are required, and the hope is to get response enough that those types of fluctuations don’t matter as much to the industry, and they can support faster missions and, you know, cheaper missions and do more of them. That’s all good, but we’re not there yet. So different direction from NASA and different governments can be a challenge, too.

Did anything I ask spark anything else you might want to mention or is there anything else you want to talk about?

I think in general, Rice, being in Houston…there’s this whole heritage around space exploration, certainly with Kennedy’s speech at the Rice stadium, and the history of moon exploration, Johnson Space Center being there. There’s a lot more opportunity than folks probably think. It wasn’t something I really recognized at the time. Rice has a rocket club: Rice Eclipse. Which is amazing. We’ve been involved with them. They’ve got students of all backgrounds helping them to develop a hybrid rocket engine. There’s opportunities on campus, there’s opportunities outside of campus. NanoRacks is a great Houston[-based] “New Space” company that helps to standardize people’s payloads and put them out the side of the space station so that you can do low-cost experimentation in orbit. Any Rice alum—always happy to help out any way we can. There’s a growing network of us in the space industry, not just myself, certainly, and we’re always excited to help to, you know, hopefully, hire lots of Rice students, have interns, do all of that, and help to nurture that interest because I just think it’s going to be so transformational over the next few decades. While people today feel like they have no connection to space, which is already not exactly true. If you use GPS, and you use your phone’s maps, you’re relying on satellites already. But that flip is really going to switch in the near term, and when that happens, space isn’t going to be this romanticized thing that we send these exquisite robots to. It’s like—absolutely most of the students at Rice today, if they want to go to space, it won’t be cheap, but it won’t be that expensive. It’s not going to be the price of a house. Like, that’s totally within the realm of the next few decades. So I think people, at some point, will stop thinking of it as something that’s not connected to their lives, and the more people we have solving the technical challenges, solving the policy challenges, and solving the finance challenges, the faster it’ll happen. I know it’s the secret reason why I’m so excited about it. I want to fly by Jupiter. And I want to make sure that happens as fast as possible, so I’m going to try to help. And I think a lot of people have similar…I’m not sure what the right word is, but I think Sagan was famous for saying that exploration was always in our genes and that this kind of natural human tendency to want to explore new places…I think that’s really true. People are excited by stories of exploration here on Earth in the early days. It’s certainly more challenging to explore in space, but I think we’re up for the challenge, and I think it’s obviously just a natural fit to some of those human emotions. Yeah, myself, anyone else—get involved. We’ll find a way to make it happen.