How blockchain can launch more space industry startups into orbit

Lau: It’s great to discuss this intergalactic opportunity, and just to be planted on Earth, we have to let the audience know your accomplishments and your significance in this space. You’ve contributed to some of the largest OSS projects (operations support systems) in the world, that essentially organize our bits and bytes, like Linux, and you’ve also worked on Bitcoin itself in terms of the infrastructure. Now, walk us through what your goals are with SpaceChain.

Garzik: Absolutely. So taking my experience with Linux and open source, it was clear that open systems led to greater individual freedom and that’s really what inspires me here on Earth to do what I do every day and to take that to the next level. Elon Musk, everyone is familiar with him at SpaceX, very radical, controversial, inspiring; a lot of adjectives can be applied to him, but I respect his thinking as an engineer. He often makes the point about how humanity needs a backup plan.

It’s not just about how space is inspirational — which it is. Space inspires developers like myself, students, entrepreneurs everywhere. But it’s also with climate change, with many of the issues that we have, as an engineer, you often hear your I.T. staff saying, ‘back up, back up, back up your files, back up your work.’ We need to back up our species, and part of that is becoming a multi-planet species. Elon is obviously working on the rockets and getting to Mars and kind of the big label things, but as we had the nickname in the Linux world, ‘Network Plumbers.’

That’s the tack that I take to space: we need to wire the solar system for networking. We need to be able to send an email to space stations which are being lofted [to space] more and more every year. We have the International Space Station, and more [missions] are going to be launched next year. We have lunar missions this year and next year. All of this needs basic communications. And as we look forward to some of the Blue Origins and SpaceXs and Chinas and United States of the world, landing on the moon, landing on Mars, there’s also quietly, or maybe not so quietly, a layer of space startups like SpaceChain, like Alba Orbital, like…