carol: welcome to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm carol massar. jason: i'm jason kelly. we are joining you in new york. carol: this week's issue is about the space race. jason: it goes back to money. billionaires are pouring money into the space race.

carol: it does come back to money. our reporter took us to spacex. jason: a woman behind elon musk is making it all happen. max: gwynne shotwell is the coo and president of spacex. she has been one of the people closest to elon musk over the last year and a half. she is one of the people most responsible for turning this into something more than a wild set of dreams to land on mars. jason: where did she come from? max: she is from the midwest, north of chicago. she started at chrysler and moved into the aerospace industry. musk found her when there was not a lot there. it was like, we're going to make cheap rockets and make

spaceflight cheaper and eventually get to mars. gwynne said, we will have to sell some of these rockets. she had to convince nasa and some of the private telecom companies to trust a rocket company that had never launched one. carol: she didn't. she got the meetings with the people that mattered. how? max: she said, you are trying to sell the team. there is this great guy, musk, very smart. more importantly, you are using the small steps to make the case you are going to do something larger. they were very transparent about their progress. they were test-firing engines -- even when they had failures, they said, here is what went

wrong and here is how we think we are going to be up to fix it. carol: into positives rather than negatives. max: absolutely. and they were charging less money. there was an incentive for these satellite companies into the government to take a risk on these guys. musk is saying, we're untested, but if this works, this may save you hundreds of millions of dollars. jason: tell us about her relationship with musk. she's unique in her longevity. also, there is a yin and yang about it. it often falls to her to walk back some of the things he has said, it feels like. max: there has been all these

executive departures at tesla. spacex has been able between stable. even within spacex, gwynne has been a constant. elon musk on one side is this brilliant, volatile, emotional leader. gwynne has probably very high emotional intelligence, there be good at managing people and very positive and probably not swinging as much in certain directions. she is in sales and that is where she came up with the company. she has expanded her purview. she is very good at leading a room and translating the technical stuff into a business model and a story that customers can understand, that employees can understand. and the public can understand.

jason: what inspired the space issue? joel: we were looking up at the sky and the idea came to us. jason: is space the next economic frontier? joel: we are watching all of these businesses open up this vast potential that has never had the opportunity to be tapped. we are talking about on the ground and in orbit, and by looking at mars. jason: what about the personalities devoting an infinite amount of time and resources to this mission? joel: it helps to have billions to play around with, like musk and bezos. bullish projections say this is a trillion dollar industry within the next few decades. carol: you cannot do a space issue without talking about musk and bezos.

billionaires are similar in some ways but also have different strategies. joel: spacex is a remarkable story. tesla gets all the headlines, but spacex is a $20 billion business. gwynne shotwell makes spacex work. amazon is consuming everything, yet he's been methodical with his space company. you watch him and you're like, this is a methodical way of doing business. who knows what happens? jason: next, we speak with one of the engineers behind nasa's mission to bring a space shuttle

to earth. carol: and the columbia mission from 1981. jason: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪ carol: welcome back to

"bloomberg businessweek." jason: you can also find us online. carol: and our mobile app. jason: a plan at the space agency to do something that has never been done before. carol: bring peace of a planet back to earth. dimitra: the caesar mission is a team of people led by steve squires, a professor at cornell, who successfully led the mars rover mission. this is going to travel out to a specific comet, 67p.

>> a well-known comet? dimitra:comets are very important to nasa. it is a top priority. there is a lot of organic material, clues in pristine condition that will give us answers to questions about the beginning of life. jason: what you take away from writing this about how a mission gets put together now? dimitra: i can't speak to 30 or 50 years ago. i think the mars mission is instructive in terms of just telling about steve putting together all the pieces.

he is in competition with another project. a nasa competition, new frontiers, up to $1 billion, a pretty healthy sized budget. the difference today is you are building on everything that came before. there is so much research at your fingertips so you can figure out, if i had this budget cap, how can you create a project that can get out to a comet, cost-effectively and do what i need to do and bring a sample from the surface of that comet back? it is all about the sample. acquiring it and keeping it pristine in the process of acquisition and the process of transporting it back and bringing it back so it was in the same condition it was before. carol: primordial matter.

this is the stuff of life and everything we are all made of. dimitra: it is primitive. i think that it has not been tainted so much. at least when we're talking about comets. they have high hopes. the key is, make sure this is not compromised in any way on the journey back. the key is -- you want to ensure it is all about this capsule it will be in and make sure that the land back on earth. jason: to make this mission a success, nasa turned to a robotics company. carol: we sat down with the founder. >> honeybee robotics was founded here in new york city 35 years

ago. in the beginning, we were providing robotics for the u.s. industry. in 1986, after the challenger explosion, we wanted to invest in robotics and this gave me to fulfill the chance of my childhood dream of working for nasa. carol: what kind of robotics? stephen: everyone knows what a robot arm looks like. but the work is at the end of the arm. robot hands, things like that. we know how to manipulate things. sometimes they are not hands, but drills or scrapers. that is what we are famous for. jason: you have a part in potentially what is one of the most ambitious space missions we have seen in our lifetime, the caesar mission. stephen: i am very proud of my involvement.

if selected, caesar will be the fourth new frontiers mission, a billion-dollar mission. the goal is to send a spacecraft to a comment and to take a piece of the comet from the surface and take it home to the utah-based training facility and bring it to a cure ration facility. jason: your job is to get that material out of the comet -- out of the comet. stephen: we are going to develop what reaches out and touches the comet and puts 100 grams of sample onto a return vehicle,

supplied by the space agency, which will take the sample home to earth. carol: there are so many moving parts. you guys are certainly part of it. when you think about the grander mission, what could be the longer-term implications of getting a piece of a comet and analyzing the information, where that leads to? stephen: the science questions this project seeks to address are among the most fundamental. we are trying to answer the questions of our origins. it is possible that earth's water came from comets when the earth was very young. comets have organic material. the stuff of life may have actually come from comets. we are looking at ancestry, the

story of not only the earth, but people and life on earth. that is very important. a company like ours, we reach out and touch a comment. someday we think we will reach out and touch small bodies, bring asteroids home for space mining operations. we will certainly use our projects involvement on a resume to put the rubber to the road with industrial missions. carol: we will find these on asteroids? stephen: we know tons of asteroids have rare earth metals. they will the work many tens of billions of dollars.

they will be worth tens of billions of dollars. they are extremely valuable. carol: when you think of space, you probably think of the shuttle launches from cape canaveral. jason: these are photos that have been under wraps for a long time. they take you right there. clinton: i met john in the spring at a photo festival. he is a fine arts photographer who has spent many years doing lots of different kinds of work. in the 1980's, he was upset with the shuttle launches. >> since he was a kid? clinton: he got himself credentialed to photograph many of these launches. he bought a camera -- he found his position and devoted himself

to doing pictures of the shuttle launches. he was there at the challenger launch that was a devastating day for many. he put all the pictures up in his attic. they stayed there for 30 years. in the last year, he started to revisit them. carol: he had not planned on taking pictures. clinton: right. jason: reading about this was very moving. we have all forgotten how much national pride there was in the space shuttle endeavor. you think about sally ride and all of these monumental moments,

and then the national tragedy in 1986. these photos take us back to that time. clinton: they are a little bit out of our normal real house, but when i saw them, i felt they were a perfect time capsule of the last great space-age. what an interesting way to interact with this more commercial era of space travel. carol: the camera gets close to the action of the launches, but the photographer is several miles away. clinton: john uses a lot of ingenuity, in his fine artwork as well. it is a great combination of wanting to make it happen, and what you get out of the devotion to the shuttle launches. people go crazy for this stuff and he absolutely did. carol: up next, the trump

twitter war with iran. jason: and the $12 billion in farming. carol: this is "bloomberg businessweek." businessweek." ♪ businessweek." ♪ jason: welcome back to

"bloomberg businessweek." carol: you can also listen to us on the radio. jason: and in london on dab digital. so much news coming out of washington this week. we turn to our go-to guy to walk us through the latest and greatest, matthew. >> is one of what is going on in washington centered around -- a lot of what is going on in washington centered around tweets from president trump.

matthew: what we got was a snippet of less than a minute of audio, a little muddled at times, but we do get a clear sense of trump's knowledge of the payments michael coincide he was making to quiet down the playboy playmate stories who allegedly -- trump tweeted the next day, saying, has a lawyer ever recorded a client before go the legal implications of this are murky, given the relationship between a attorney-client -- attorney-client privilege. the biggest takeaway is that this undercuts the trump

campaign. they said he had no knowledge of these payments and did not know what they were talking about. this undercuts that. jason: the president also tweeted in all caps about iran. i am quoting -- never, ever threaten the united states again. it goes on. what did you make of that? matthew: we paid attention to it for about a few hours, and then something else happened. it was as aggressive as a stance as he has taken relative to my round. he was tweeting about north korea, with the fire and fury, the likes of which he has never seen. maybe this was coming out of the

likes of john bolton, the nsa, but we quickly moved on to things around tariffs and all the things that are happening in the trade front right now. carol: on tuesday morning, president trump tweeted, tariff wars are the greatest. as a result, he got into some of the applications for farmers. he is now providing aid for farmers in the united states as a result of this. matthew: farmers are on the front lines of these retaliatory tariffs from china. for the agricultural sector, they like the current situation with trade. it is one of the few parts of the economy that has a surplus. this $12 billion aid package came out of the usda, aimed at farmers, direct transfer payments, the government is

going to try to buy some commodities. they say they will try to extend relationships with other countries. these tariffs are already costing the economy. to fix this, we are putting more money into this. one of the numbers i thought was interesting to compare to the $12 billion, the steel and aluminum tariffs are going to put $9 billion of money into the general fund, paid out by american companies that are going to have to buy imported steel and aluminum. we are putting $12 billion into the pockets of farmers. this is not free trade. republicans were griping. no one on capitol hill seems to like this. trump's tweets seem to be more leveled at fellow republicans.

carol: taylor riggs is here. we wanted to take a bigger look at what is going on in the agricultural sector. taylor: carol, this is such a lousy time for a trade war. you have the agricultural industry really in a slump, with prices falling and supply rising. in blue, the u.s. net farm income, now down to below $60 billion. in white, the bloomberg agricultural sub index, now down to almost a record low. even before these trade tariffs started to heat up, a really tough time for the farmers. carol: thank you. up next, the physics phenomenon that will keep a moon gateway aloft. jason: and jeff bezos with his

own plans for space. carol: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪ phones have made our lives effortless.

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jason: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." carol: a deep dive into the final frontier economy. jason: we are talking about medical breakthroughs happening in space. carol: balloons in the stratosphere -- >> and going to russia to look at space junk. carol: first, we start with peter, who has interviewed a world leading expert on unconventional bull --

unconventional orbit. jason: there may be a new way to travel in space. peter a specialist in exotic orbits -- it is a very narrow speciality, but important. when we think of orbits, we think, this is kind of easy. many other orbits are more complex. nasa is planning to use one of these for a spacecraft that will be positioned on the far side of the moon eventually used for human exploration. carol: we are talking about -- peter: the lunar orbital platform gateway. they are probably going to change it.

the spacecraft -- they had to make a halo around the moon from the perspective of the earth. if they went behind the moon, it would lose contact. they wanted to have it. the only way to do it was to move with the moon, to use the commendation of gravitational forces of the earth and the moon. carol: a sweet spot? peter: this is where it gets really technical. jason: she is with you. peter: the famous mathematician, three of these sweet spots --

they're called the grange points. it is a parking spot in space. you will stay right where you are because of the combination of the gravitational forces acting on the spacecraft. nasa wants to use the parking spaces. kathleen howell advanced the idea by having this orbit around one of these sweet spot. jason: put this in context. we have all of this enthusiasm, all of this money going toward not just getting into space, but space exploration. how does this work?

peter: propulsion is a key point. if you have to constantly be using your thrusters to stay at a certain vantage point from the moon, you will run out of propellant pretty soon. kathleen howell's orbit was a near-retro halo orbit. because it is near one of these sweet-spots, it requires very little station-keeping. they have these xenon thrusters which are totally cool. carol: you doing ok? jason: i am barely hanging on. peter: you use a busy on after a wild, but if you are in the sweet spot, the spacecraft can stay where it is longer and you save money. jason: up next, making tiny engines in boston. carol: why the world economy needs a gps backup plan.

jason: and the search for the next cancer drug in space. carol: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

jason: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." carol: you can also find us online. jason: and on her mobile app. we have a rocket scientist. carol: her company is helping to move around things in space and with the congestion in the app store. jason: let's hear what our reporter had to say. >> a 31-year-old rocket scientist has a very cool

startup that is possibly going to change the economics of space exploration entirely. carol: a big statement. kyle: there is a space race 2.0 right now. with personal computers, everything got smaller and more efficient. rockets and satellites, tons of this stuff was being sent up there. a lot of this stuff is going up there. a lot of it is tiny and a lot of it cannot move around up there. carol: mostly satellites. kyle: they are doing a lot of whether studies and climate change studies, a of data for

investors. carol: what can they do with it? kyle: whatever they want. what is being created is a tiny, super efficient engine that six to the side of these things and can kind of screwed around. some of these things are going to hit each other. you want to avoid that. but they can get two different places and be more versatile. it makes this competition shall around the earth more valuable. jason: how did she come up with this? kyle: she was an error space engineer and went to m.i.t. -- aerospace engineer and went to m.i.t. she is a very subtle thinker, and this was overlooked by nasa and telling -- boeing.

carol: this is an ion? >> liquid salt. it is really stable and safe. someone is sending up a $60 million rocket isn't too worried about what's onboard. nasa has satellites, but does it with heavy stuff. this is a simple solution. jason: you start to have this intersection where -- there's a scene in the story where she is making this presentation, jeff bezos in the front row. she has this dry presentation style, which he is literally and figuratively in the room with these guys.

kyle: this could be one of the killer apps. she is presenting an idea a lot of these guys overlooked. she is a very thoughtful, very different person. this was a huge moment for her. carol: what she is doing makes a satellite more valuable. kyle: there will be more investors because of her on the medium-sized spectrum of backspace. >> networks needed to keep computer systems running are shockingly vulnerable. jason: the world needs a gps backup plan. carol: we got more on this story from our editor. kyle: $2 billion.

moore, since the u.s. military that runs the satellite network opened it up to the public in 2000. jason: how do they unlock the system? people go in and start developing this? kyle: the most critical part of gps at this point, it is not the effect you can use to find this at four in the morning -- the most mission critical part of the satellite network is the signals it sends out constantly that are checked by most of the gps receivers in the world. they help keep the world computer systems running.

they are always reduction up against one another to make share they are precisely, to the nanosecond, lighting up. when they don't, the computer systems can go haywire. carol: so everything things off of this? kyle: yes. jason: what happens when someone with a bad intention do something to this system on purpose? kyle: the system is tough to mess with. though hostile powers can destroy satellites with icbms from earth. once the signal leaves the satellite, they can be messed with and all kinds of ways. carol: what happens with jamming and spoofing?

this is worrisome. jeff: you are sending false signals to the satellite receivers. there is the capability to send drones or other aircraft in the wrong direction. jason: some of the most optimistic folks about space are big pharma companies. carol: why the big companies here on earth like doing research in space. >> drugmakers like amgen and novartis have been doing experiments in microgravity that exists on the international space station.

they have been doing this back to the shuttle era and the 1990's. they can pick up the huge variable in the equation, which can impact different processes, play with extreme temperatures, other differences like radiation. there are certain things going on that they are trying to harness on the international space station to see if this is doing this, maybe become replicate this honor. carol: help me get my head around this. is it just kind of cool? what is it about that environment for testing medication? jason: why does gravity matter? cynthia: on earth, sediment. things experiments might drift to the bottom. without gravity, the particles might be more evenly distributed.

also, things move more slowly in space. scientists that are astronauts on the space station actively manage these experiments. on space they can pull the sediment out and make a cleaner experiment. it is about early-stage research and through this, they can do things better. i am writing about small biotech doing safety studies on their drugs. it is about using these extreme environments to modify the early stages in the science. carol: talk to us about these experiments.

cynthia: a couple is studying endothelial cells. these cells in a healthy body would normally not be growing. in the case of cancer, they are going to see cancer in the blood. the wife's hypothesis is that the endothelia cells don't grow in space. she wants to make sure her drug does not impact the healthy cells. she won a contest in massachusetts and her work is being supported. there are all kinds of other things going on from that in terms of creating that environment in the space station for her to do the work.

jason: up next, the company that claims to have unraveled all the industries of the stratosphere. carol: and the second life of fallen space metals in russia. jason: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

carol: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." jason: you can also listen to us on the radio. carol: and in london on dab digital. we have a pretty cool story. jason: this is a high-altitude company. they think their weather balloons can ultimately predict it and maybe even take tourists into space. carol: we talked to our reporters. >> we are able to send all kinds of things to the edge of space, from communications, really awesome weather applications.

really we are focused on the whole communications aspect of the company right now. carol: our producer is going to want to show the video. this was your first page load you guys sent up into the atmosphere. as a result, i think it gave you money to do a lot more research and development and to what you are doing. >> we have been able to have paying customers on all of our research and development lights. we have a great sponsorship. it has helped us to support this year moving forward. >> it was also really find it. jason: i can only imagine. there is so much talk these days about the billionaire space race and rocket launches. this is a different approach.

both in terms of the science and the experience for the people who were actually going to do this. why this format? >> we are talking about balloons that have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. >> that is right. but we are talking about 21st century balloons that can flow to the very top of the atmosphere. they are completely underutilized right now, so underutilized they are able to develop a whole new economy in the stratosphere, which is really exciting for us. we are really launching into this new business, the business of being able to stay over a specific location of interest for an extended time.

our technology can do that. rocket flight, it has lots of energy and you are fighting gravity. this uses gravity. >> as the daughter of a rocket scientist, how do you navigate with the balloons? you talk about solar energy. get into some of the details about how this actually works. >> we call them straddle-lites. the wind layers in the stratosphere are stratefied. they often tend to go into different directions. by navigating between these

layers of wind and in between the layers of wind, this goes from one place to another in a way no one thought possible. the very large balloons that hang out in the stratosphere use that energy to compress air to go down. there is a melding of different technologies to make this happen, which is why it has not happened before. jason: russia has always been a powerful force in the space race, but now there is an expected industry coming up. carol: people are turning space junk into everyday necessities. jason: our reporter rings us more. clinton: this area in northern russia, a lot of space junk falls out of the sky and into the ocean.

there is a community of people, sort of remaking this to whatever fits their needs. carol: that is what is wild. some of this scrap metal, rockets rubbish, have valuable components. jason: and gold. >> it is a very remote location, hard to find. >> it does make you think as we enter this accelerated air a of commercial space travel, this is what is happening now, in a

remote part of the world. will we be headed for a world in which we have rocket mementos in our own backyard? carol: from what i understand, there has been the swapping of this material? there's this weird economy that has been created. >> a space ecosystem, really fascinating. clinton: he made two trips a little over a year. but they are not officially allowed to be tracking in this stuff. he had to sneak into private zones to get to it.

this was really just a determination. carol: "bloomberg businessweek." is available on newsstands now. my dad was a rocket scientist involved with early space exploration. i loved reading this issue. but i loved the possible mission to grab a piece of a comet and understand the pristine material that will tell us more about life on earth. jason: i love that we got to talk to one of the guys involved in that. he was amazing. carol: i don't think we realize how much is going on when it comes to space exploration. jason: i loved the stories of stories of the balloons. a different final frontier. more bloomberg television starts right now. ♪

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