Space: An Opening

Introduction

by Jeannette zu Fürstenberg
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‍Every founder I admire begins with an act of imagination: seeing something that does not yet exist clearly enough to start building it.

To do that, you need an unusual degree of conviction: the ability to see beyond what is currently possible, to persist before there is proof and to persuade others to follow. But the greater the ambition, the more important it becomes to ask not only what can be built, but why it should be built and what kind of future it may help create.

There may be no field where this tension is more visible than space.

For founders building in this domain, the daily reality is brutally concrete: physics, engineering, capital, procurement, manufacturing, regulation and access to launch. Yet the consequences of their work extend far beyond any single company. 

Orbit is already part of the largely invisible infrastructure of life on Earth. It enables navigation and communication, observes a changing planet, connects economies and increasingly shapes how societies protect their security and resilience. Access to space has become less expensive, but remains highly concentrated. Earth observation is becoming decision infrastructure. Satellite communications are redrawing the architecture of global connectivity. New industries are forming around transport, servicing, manufacturing and work in orbit.

The choices made now will therefore matter for decades: who can reach orbit reliably and at scale; who builds and controls the infrastructure there; and on whose terms others can access it.

This is the context for Space: An Opening, our series on the future of commercial and sovereign space. We will examine the practical questions: the bottlenecks, business models and infrastructure layers that founders are working to resolve. But we wanted to begin somewhere more fundamental.

We will examine the practical questions: the bottlenecks, business models and infrastructure layers that founders are working to resolve. But we wanted to begin somewhere more fundamental.

Much of the conversation about space begins with where capital should flow, which technologies will scale and what new markets may emerge. Those questions matter. But they are incomplete without a civilizational framework: an understanding of why humanity continues to look beyond what it knows, what that search reveals about us and how ambition can remain expansive without becoming hubris.

That is why we are beginning with a prologue from Carlo Rovelli, not a philosopher by profession, but a theoretical physicist whose work leads naturally into some of the deepest philosophical questions about space, time, reality and our place in the universe.

Carlo’s work on loop quantum gravity and the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics has reshaped how we understand the nature of reality. His books, including Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and The Order of Time, have been translated into more than forty languages. 

His essay is a gift. It reminds us that the sky does not simply expand our ambitions; it also resizes them. It places us before our limits and smallness.

Wonder allows founders to imagine beyond accepted limits. Humility helps ensure that progress does not become an end in itself. Before we turn to launch capacity, sovereign infrastructure, new business models and the frontier beyond Earth, Carlo asks us to look up and to remember why humanity has always done so.

The further we travel into the cosmos, the closer we may come to understanding our humanity here on Earth.

Out There

By Carlo Rovelli

I was about seventeen, I think. It was night. We were lying on the grass, she and I, on a meadow out on the hills, looking up at the stars. “We are in a starship zipping through the cosmos,” she said, “The sky is a porthole that looks out.” I suddenly realized that this was not a game, or an analogy. We are truly zipping through the cosmos in our tiny starship: the Earth. The night sky is a porthole through which we can every once in a while look out toward the infinity. 

Looking out is always an existential step. It is realizing that what we have seen so far is just an incomplete part of reality. “Out there,” there is always more. More to wonder, more to learn. 

Aristarchus was the first on our tiny starship to realize that what we see out there is truly far, more than twenty centuries ago. He noticed that in a lunar eclipse the shade of the Earth over the moon is a disk a bit larger than the moon itself; this implies that the moon is only a bit smaller than the Earth; and since we see the moon as a very small disk in the sky, all this implies that the moon is far, very far, much farther than any earthly thing. Shortly after, he also realized, with similar arguments, that the sun is even more far away. What we see out of the porthole began to enlarge.   

It has enlarged since, with larger and larger telescopes revealing a space of unfathomable vastness, out there. Numbers are insufficient to give us a sense of the immense vastness that lies out there. The mind balks and trembles in trying to make sense of it, for a scientist even more than for anybody else. And this is marvelous: we have to confront our irrelevance, in the great scheme of things. Our troubles and quarrels in our minuscule garden appear ridiculous.  But that vastness also calls us: we wish to exit our tiny home, fly out there in the immensity. I was twelve when I watched, together with the entire planet, breathless, two men pose their feet on the moon. It felt like the opening of a new era. The kid I was grew up convinced that my destiny was flying through the stars with my own tiny can, free like a pirate. 

The mind balks and trembles in trying to make sense of it, for a scientist even more than for anybody else.

It did not happen. As very often, the future turns out to be very different from what each generation fancies. For over half a century, not even getting back to the moon was in sight. 

Nowadays, again, somebody thinks about exploring the solar system, making money in this way, colonizing Mars. It is a second-hand dream, with respect to the wild interstellar fantasies of my childhood. And even that is seriously questioned by those who have competence. Our planet is comfortable and welcoming, if we do not destroy it further. Out there is cold, brutal, inhospitable. For the moment, somebody is just making lots of money selling dreams—not a novelty: an ancient business indeed. 

What has become ever more clear, however, is that the immense vastness out there is truly out of our reach, and by very far. We will never explore our galaxy, and our galaxy is one among billions of billions. We may take a minuscule step out, but it is going to be less than a drop towards an endless ocean. Rather than firing our hubris, the sky resizes our ambitions, humbles us, puts us in front of our limits, our ignorance, our smallness. 

We are back to that meadow on the hill, looking up, to something that exceeds us even far more than we might conceive. We learn, we go, we do, we get excited, but the immensity overwhelms us. It reminds us that we are grains of dust, dreams of a moment. And it is ok.