I'd love to hear what you mean by taking a different approach and why it's important to do so.

Well, uh, uh, thanks very much.

A great question, Bill.

I mean, in this...

I'd like to respond actually to this, to this 'cause I think it's a really relevant conversation.

So we've spent about 50 million on digital infrastructure at a city region level over the last five years.

And, um, and, and built out, uh, a dark fiber network to about 1,500 endpoints, public sector buildings and other buildings across the, the whole geography of Greater Manchester.

Phil, your thoughts on this.

thanks

very much.

A great question, Bill.

I mean, I'd like to respond, actually, to this because I think it's a really relevant conversation.

So we've spent about $50 million on digital infrastructure at a city-region level over the last five years and built out... a dark fibre network to about 1500 endpoints, public sector buildings and other buildings across the whole geography of Greater Manchester.

And we did that using, being quite creative about how we found funding to do that.

Now, we attracted some money from government to do that.

Phil, your thoughts on this?

What will be an elegant system in ten years?

Yeah.

So I, I believe that the right approach to re-- is, is to reduce the cost of transportation between, uh, the Earth and the Moon, the Moon and the Earth, Earth and Mars.

And the key to that is to understand the nature of the rocket equation, and chemical rocket propulsion obeys the rocket equation, and it makes for extremely expensive costs.

This is why the Mars Sample Return mission, for example, is gonna cost about ten billion dollars to move one kilogram from Mars back to Earth.

It's the rocket equation causing this to happen.

The way to beat that is to develop infrastructure that does not obey the rocket equation, and that's possible if you push off the Earth or you push off the Moon or you push off Mars with a very expensive form of infrastructure, uh, like a mass driver.

Is that doable?

Phil, you start.

Yeah.

It, it is true that it's a, a bit of a repeat.

The reason for that [clears throat] is that the Apollo program was really well optimized from an engineering perspective, right? You know, they, they have to deal with the rocket equation.

They have to, um, put a very large rocket on the pad and have a very small capsule at the moon, um, to make this work, and that's a really good ar-architecture.

Now, I think it's really a failure [clears throat] to repeat, um, the Apollo program sufficiently that is at, that putting the program at risk.

Right now, the, um, the, the use of different commercial providers and allowing the commercial providers to build whatever they want in support of the program is not an optimal architecture.

Does that help? Phil, in your opinion, does that help anybody in the program?

More of this tonight.

Yeah, so I believe that the right approach is to reduce the cost of transportation between the Earth and the Moon, the Moon and the Earth, Earth and Mars.

And the key of that is to understand the nature of the rocket equation.

And chemical rocket propulsion obeys the rocket equation, and it makes for extremely expensive costs.

This is why the Mars sample return mission, for example, is going to cost about $10 billion to move one kilogram from Mars Mars back to Earth.

It's the rocket equation causing this to happen.

The way to beat that is to develop infrastructure that does not obey the rocket equation.