Why Did the Elf Cross the Road?
“To believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man.” – Mahatma Gandhi
If you are driving in Iceland admiring its celestially favored coastal landscape with deeply indented bays and fiords, you notice, as you head toward the inland plateau, that along the perfectly straight road of the highway your automobile and the highway will slowly but surely curve widely for no apparent reason. No danger in the landscape justifies this unexpected curveball thrown into the road.
But this is Iceland. Not my family dinner table. There is a reason for the unusual.
With sufficiently high GDP thanks to industrious organization of its tourism, aluminum smelting and fishing industries, irreligion grows like the ocean’s temperature. More than 30% of Iceland’s warm people identify as “not religious.” However, we are dealing with human beings. When one belief system fades, another enters the driveway. Therefore 6 out of every 10 of these folks believe apparently with conviction that the government should spend significant amounts of highway construction and maintenance monies curving these roads for one purpose solely: to avoid hitting wandering Elves.
I’ll repeat that.
Iceland spends good-old taxpayer money to ensure that its Elf population meets no harm while crossing the road. It modifies the old chicken joke to, “Why did the Elf cross the road?”
Answer: To keep Icelanders from hitting them.
It also begs the question of why people so hearty and smart spend their government’s money like this. I have asked. There is mainly a shrug.
To keep from dissing this fine nation, let’s conclude that each culture has its churlishly Elfish whims and peculiarities.
In my neck of the USA and in places like Europe, Japan, India and China – even Nepal – we spend money to go into space or to serve it with our industrial innovation. While there are millions who see this as about as foolhardy as protecting the Elf population, it is a core belief that building, launching and managing satellites to assist with the logistics for and measurement of maritime cargo, road construction and – as we learned in a spring session of the New York Space Business Roundtable – quantum clock synchronization is anything but foolish. QCS is vital to replace GPS and is of great value to our economy and spirit of endeavor.
Despite a drop in overall venture capital investment the past 36 months, commercial space is experiencing the emergence of a genuine private infrastructure. A “platform” for our deepest urges and possibly our shallowest cravings. As Seinfeld says, “Nothing wrong with it.”
In fact, there are many, many things right with it.
Nations large and small are committing themselves to space-related economic development clusters as part of their national growth and development plans.
Why Did the Grand Duchy Cross the Escape Velocity?
The past few years has seen the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, home to satellite operator giant SES with investments from Promus Ventures and residency by Redwire and dozens of other space infrastructure companies take the lead in strategic moves and bending the road in its favor.
In April 2024, the Luxembourg American Chamber of Commerce in New York brought awareness to the beauty and importance of space infrastructure by doing something it had never done before. It gave its prestigious biennial Business of the Year award to a space company!
The recipient Redwire picked up its award at a splendid black-tie gala dinner at New York’s spectacular Metropolitan Club. Redwire (NYSE: RDW) is a pure play space infrastructure company for the “next generation of space economy.” It does business in Luxembourg because the country, to paraphrase the Duchy’s Crown Prince Guillaume, “gets it.” You don’t have to be big to do BIG things, they say. Space is among the next growth industries in the digital era, and convincing investors such as Promus Ventures to co-invest there has set the stage for the future. Question: why don’t more do this?
Earlier in the day, I represented SSPI by moderating two panels produced by the Luxembourg Space Agency. Investors, start-ups and industry experts participated, and all shouted-out their relationship with Luxembourg.
Redwire’s Luxembourg facility designs and develops robotic arms to support activities in Earth orbit and on the Moon. These include satellite servicing and refueling, payload management, debris capture, in-space manufacturing and resource extraction.
I’m just getting started on what is a long list.
The company has crossed the road without many scratches. It showed marked financial improvement with a 51.9% increase in revenues in 2023.
This is a veteran team, as they say in baseball, with decades of flight heritage and experience. Redwire’s 700 employees work from 14 facilities located throughout the United States and Europe.
It incorporates SSPI’s Better Satellite World notion in much of its work. For example, it is gearing up for a monumental milestone in orbit that will have important implications for human health here on Earth when it completes operations for the BFF-Meniscus-2 investigation, which will use its BioFabrication Facility (BFF) on the International Space Station (ISS) to bioprint a human knee meniscus. This investigation explores how space bioprinting might help treat meniscal injuries, one of the most common orthopedic injuries affecting military service members. It will be the first time a full human knee meniscus is bioprinted in space.
None of this will be easy. NASA budget reductions could create headwinds for large in-orbit civil funding if other investors do not come in. But as Redwire’s CFO, Jonathan Baliff noted in a recent podcast with me, “Tailwinds in smaller experiments with larger terrestrial markets such as Varda’s US$90M funding for pharma-related microgravity work proves the potential for things to be ‘made in space’.”
Does that sound as incredible as an Elf crossing the road? I’ve never heard an Elf cross a road, although to deny the possibility in a time with so many wonders and dimensions unfolding may show a lack of imagination!
Join SSPI every third Wednesday of the month for the New York Space Business Roundtable.
Reprinted with permission from Satellite Executive Briefing Magazine.
Header photo by Trey Ratcliff on Flickr