Steve Kwast
Appearances
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And you gotta get down to about 80 millikalvin. The only known way of cooling something to that level is helium-3. So now think about this. China is mining helium-3 on the moon, which is abundant and could supply the energy needs of the human race for thousands of years, just with what we know is on the moon right now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Not to mention what's on asteroids and anywhere where there's a celestial body that does not have an atmosphere that prevents it from getting through onto the Earth. So we have some helium-3 on Earth, but very little, and that's why it's millions of dollars for just an ounce. But on the moon, you've got enough to fuel the entire human race for thousands of years.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
That's kind of giving you a different... If China can cool their quantum computers with helium-3 before we can, the jig is up. This is part of the power of space, you know, translated into something tangible and operational called quantum. So that's quantum computing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
which would make all secrets null and void, which might not be a bad thing because then only people that don't need to keep secrets are the ones revealed and evil can't hide.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
This is where this technology can be good or it can be bad as long as the human heart is good and the majority of people that dominate these technologies have a good heart and love their God and love other people like God loves them, we have a pathway to the golden age. If only evil people, develop these technologies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Like if Hitler were first for the atomic bomb, we would probably all be speaking German right now and it would be a very different reality. So let's get to the most interesting of the quantum technologies that we've observed. And that is quantum communication.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And so let's say there's a new technology. that makes the way we're building an airplane irrelevant. But it gets no oxygen because the lobbyists will whisper, that's dangerous. Elon Musk has encountered this in spades. When he first started this idea of reusable rockets, people were laughing him off the stage.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Yes. Okay. And this is what I think he was referring to when he talks about time and space. Here's what we observe, and I'll just talk about what we observe in full knowledge that I'm no expert, but I read a lot and I am friends with people that are experts. When we observe quantum communication, not only when you entangle two elements, meaning that this particle is associated with this particle,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
when one moves, the other moves instantaneously, regardless of the distance apart. So that blows out of the water, the speed of light is as fast as you can move. It shows that our universe is connected in ways we cannot see, we do not understand. And there's a trilogy of books out there that you ought to read. One of the most...
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And storytellers like Roddenberry with, you know, the Star Trek, they are good at looking at the trend lines of technology and being able to predict the outcome of what that might mean as engineers and scientists actually develop it. So in the 60s in Star Trek, you had the communicator, which was our current day flip phone.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Okay, they hadn't gone far as a smartphone, but the communicator was pretty darn good for Roddenberry. There is a Chinese fiction writer that wrote a trilogy called The Three-Body Problem. Now, you may have heard about it, but you probably haven't read it because it's three books and they can be pretty dense.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But anybody that is interested in how technology can change fate ought to read those books because this is a man that has studied quantum and has described a future of people that live in other parts of the universe
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
so far away from us that we have no clue they're there, and how their knowledge of quantum allows them to come to us, and they're coming to us because they see something in our Earth and our civilization that is so magical and so beautiful that they want it. and they want it at the price tag of our existence. But it's a story of technology.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
It's a story that describes what quantum can do based on our observations. And so this gets us back to quantum communication where two elements can be intimately connected such that one
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But here's the other part of it that is so fascinating and gets to the time travel. So it's not just that you can communicate that way, but that if the communication is observed by a third party, it will rewrite history and it will never have happened.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Okay, so this is where your audience needs to do their own reading, okay, because I am not an expert, but the experts have documented and proven that quantum communication has certain qualities to it that we don't understand. One of them is the one you just talked about where the vibration of one is identical and simultaneous to the other no matter how far apart they are.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
We don't know why or how, but we know it's true and we know how to manipulate that to communicate, okay? We know how to. Don't understand the connection.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
We don't understand the connection okay, but the other piece of it is that if you Communicate and somebody observes it and you didn't want it to be observed It disappears meaning it never happened and when you go back and you look the evidence does not exist that it ever happened and Say that again? Yeah, I know, I know. It's a mind bender, okay?
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Gwen Shotwell was laughed off the stage in Asia in some of her early speeches about what they were gonna do. As you guys are Buck Rogers, you're in fantasy land. This is not real. And this is just a Ponzi scheme of trying to take people's money and waste it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
If quantum communication, and again, I want to be very careful that I'm not the expert, okay? So you need to read the literature yourself and the peer-reviewed documents on some of the experiments that have taken place with quantum communication. But it literally can rewrite history. If it does not want to be seen, if it does not want it to be discovered, it is not discoverable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And so I say it rewrites history. I don't know how it does that, and I don't think anybody does, but we have observed it, that if it's observed, it disappears, and it's like it never happened. So again, I don't know, but God has created a universe where these things could happen. And like the caveman that sees the first lightning that starts a fire,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
we are on a race to figure out how we can harness this reality of our physical universe. And it could mean that future generations of people come back to us in time travel. It could mean like in the three body problem where the people that are hundreds of millions of light years away can communicate to individuals
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
like you or me, through our brain waves and even our eyeballs and what we can see because of the ability to manipulate at the molecular level across distances that are infinite. Who knows how God has created this universe?
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But for me, it is the evidence of God and how little we know, but that God has given us a brain so powerful that scientists and engineers have figured out that this happens, that it exists. And the only question is, how do we use it to love one another better and to love God better? Because ultimately, that's our only purpose in life, in my view, to glorify God.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
How do we use this knowledge God has given us to glorify God and not let evil people use it as a weapon against good people? This is why we as a nation need to invest in technology. This is why we need to be able to build infrastructure and space less expensively than our competition, because this is about the forever game. This is about the endurance of an economy
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
that can do more capable things at lower price points than our competition. And this is why I focus on water and on infrastructure space that can deliver energy and information. But ultimately, information is the best. If we got rid of every piece of technology,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
It comes back to telling stories and triangulating truth by talking to a lot of people and figuring out who is deceiving you because they're deceived themselves and where the truth lies. Experimenting, critical thinking, teaching our children how to ask questions, how to be suspicious in a healthy way, how to be critical at thinking through logical things. And then if we can do that,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
If we can focus on an interior life that increases our relationship with God and our goodness as a human being, and we can understand how technology is something God has given us as a gift to help bring about more goodness, we can, as a human race, usher in a golden age. Someday somebody will figure out technology that will then make that irrelevant.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Until he proved it, but it took a lot of money to break through And part of the reason is because there were a lot of people getting very rich at building a rocket to go to space and then burning that rocket up and having to build a whole new rocket. So the analogy would be for all of us, imagine buying a car, your favorite car on the lot and driving it until it runs out of gas.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But I'm here to tell you that the industrial age of many of the technologies we celebrate, rightfully so, like the fighter jet or the tank or the ship, are very quickly becoming artifacts of a museum.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
We can't stop building them until we have a firm grasp on the future, but we are not sufficiently investing in some of these future technologies that we can see the beginnings of and that we have a race that's on with other societies that see it. And they are investing billions and we are investing millions. And thank God for President Trump because he is, he is correcting that economic imbalance.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And he's doing it through the brilliance of negotiating and the trade deals and the investment in things that are classified and unclassified, in the declassification of things so the American people can see more of what's going on. There are so many layers of this awakening
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
for the global community that President Trump is ushering in that I just beg that everybody, whether you are, no matter what your geopolitics are or the politics you prescribe to, start reading, start learning because the world is about to change in ways that are more dramatic than the people in 1898 that rode their horse to the field
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
and lit their home with a candle experienced over 100 years, we're gonna experience changes dramatically more consequential in lightning speed, like in the next few decades. So hang on to your hats and start learning, because if you are a citizen that just gets up, has a cup of coffee, goes to work, comes home,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
has dinner with your family and goes to bed and rinses and repeats, and you don't study technology, you don't study history, you don't study culture, you don't study human nature, and you don't study your politicians that are making policy decisions that are inconsistent with your rights and your constitution, then you will not hang on to this republic, just like our founding fathers said.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And that's what you're doing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So keep doing it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Again, we don't know. I mean, we can guess and we can project. And again, some of these...
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
writers some of our storytellers some of our creatives are people that live on the edge of reality more so than you know i i consider myself dumb enough to be happy you know i've got the lobotomy so i can compartmentalize and i can be happy even though a lot of crap is happening in our world okay but there are people these geniuses and many of them are storytellers
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
in Hollywood and other places, they can see more clearly the consequences of these technologies and the stories they write today will be our future of tomorrow. And so it is valuable to read these science fiction writers. And that's why I propose the book, if you want to think about quantum, read The Three-Body Problem.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
If you want to understand AI, there's tons of them out there, but that is much more dumbed down. AI is really stupid. It is just a projection of an algorithm and the values written by the person that programmed it. And it will program itself for future problems, but it's all predicated on the database and what it is looking at to learn.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And if somebody can manipulate what that learning database is, and quantum will be able to do that, it will learn exactly what our enemy wants it to learn, and now your pet will be telling you exactly what you should not do, and you'll do it because you think that pet is your best friend. So AI, again, can be a disaster or it can be a blessing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And then you have to burn it to the ground and you have to go buy a new car to get back home. That is the economic model we were using to go to space.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So I have not had any personal experiences that are like the ones that I've heard from people I love and are the most sober, honest, salt of the earth, non-exaggerating people that were ever built, that walk this planet. but they have experienced things like you're talking about.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And at young ages, at old age, across their lifetime, they have seen multiple manifestations of things they could not explain. And I don't have any explanation. I've experienced a lot of things in aviation at altitudes and in places across the globe that just turned me upside down.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But most of the time it was my inner ear and the fact that your eyeballs are so powerful that I'll be on a tanker refueling over Afghanistan and I'll feel like I'm doing a barrel roll and pulling to my death. And if I do anything about it, I'll be pulling to my death, and I have to let go of the controls, put it on autopilot, and trust the technology, and that's the only way I can save my life.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Because the brain and the mind can be so deceived, so deceived, and we don't even realize it. This gets back to information warfare and how quickly we can be deceived by somebody weaving a narrative in their own self-interest, and we believe it, hook, line, and sinker. So back to unexplained phenomenon. I believe that there are things out there we have seen and cannot explain.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And all it took is one innovator, but the amount of, I can remember in the military as we were supporting him, we were supporting Elon Musk because this was gonna be transformational to the next step of building infrastructure in space to support American interests as this new domain was evolving. In other words, peace through strength.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And I don't know whether it's quantum, that is this peak under the tent, that it is possible someday, once we figure it out, how to time travel, and how people could come and visit us, but also prevent us from having the evidence that they visited us, or some people that may have visited us, and the artifacts of their visit are somewhere, but it is so...
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
fearful to the people that might have it that they prevent us from seeing it. So all of those things could be true. I just keep an open and humble mind about the fact, you know, when we talked about quantum, that we now see evidence that we know so little about this universe that any arrogance or pride that says, I know physics or I know technology is a fool rushing in to your own demise.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So I keep an open mind and a humble heart. But in this universe, as we're transitioning from the industrial age to the information age or the digital age or the networked age, whatever you want to call it, it's important for human beings to not believe anything they hear and only half of what they see physically, not a picture, okay? And even then,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Start investing in more time with other human beings and talking to people from different cultures, protecting different cultures to believe different things, eat different food, wear different clothes, celebrate the differences, because as a human race, that is our lifeline.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Talking to one another, discovering people that may be lying to you because they don't have a good heart or they're deceived so dramatically, but triangulating truth, through the human mind, the human heart, and the fact that we are communicating in a way face-to-face you cannot do over Zoom. It is not good enough.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And the more we fall into this trap of not being physically together, the more we lose about the unseen connections we have with one another that God has created, and the more we can be deceived.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But thank you. Appreciate that. And again, I want to come back to you and the fact that for whatever reason, You have invested in probably the most important thing that we need as a human race. And I know that you're probably also bombarded with people trying to influence what you say and what you do and preventing you from telling the truth. or triangulating truth, as I like to say.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And so I just applaud the courage it takes, the willingness to lose some friends but make new ones, and realizing that the real battle in life is the interior battle. Whether it's a marriage or your work in life, our success really rises or falls based on the discipline and the obedience of following God's laws that are carved in our hearts.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And like King Solomon, the wisest man in the world that ever was or ever will be based on what the Bible tells us. And yet he was one of the biggest disasters of a leader because he didn't understand that wisdom wasn't what he should have asked for. It was obedience to God's law. God's law. That's the real secret of success. And it starts with the interior life.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
I thank you for being one of those men that is seeking for that internal truth, both within your own heart and your connection to God, and that we are moral creatures and that, you know, without God and this worldview that there is one God and he has made us as moral creatures that then cascades into our beliefs, that then cascade into our values and into our politics and policies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
I would, the leaders of the Air Force and of Congress would come to me and say, Steve, see, you're wrong. Elon Musk blew up a rocket. And he's a fool and we're not gonna give him any money. But they were listening to lobbyists saying, Elon Musk is a risk. You need us to build your rockets. And the only way to do this safely is to build it, launch it, and then let it burn up in the atmosphere.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Well, we just don't know what God's will is. But what we do know is if we make a good decision, God can work His perfect will through that good decision. If we make a bad decision because we're human and we're imperfect and we're fallible and all of us suffer from attacks from evil, if we are humble and contrite and ask for forgiveness, even for things we don't know we did wrong.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
God can work all things for good to those that love him, and he will work his permissive will around those actions that can sometimes prevent his perfect will.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So that's what allows me to sleep well at night, that even though I am imperfect and I make bad decisions and I am an impediment to God's perfect will and an impediment to his glorification, if I pray every night for his forgiveness and for redemption.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
he will make good on his promise to work his permissive will around my stubbornness, my ego, my arrogance, my pride, and he will still glorify himself and his will on this earth and in heaven despite me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Thank you. God bless. It's been an honor.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And that's the trap of mindset. That's the trap of being stuck in an intellectual rut of how you've done things in the past and not being able to leap to something new because it succeeded for you in the past. So why change? If it's not broken, don't fix it. It goes back to another saying, everybody loves innovation as long as it's been done before. This is why we're stuck.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But there's another side of it that's a little darker. And this gets back to what you do. What you do is you are trying to find truth. And we are living in an age where we are moving from an industrial age to a networked age. And we're like teenagers and we don't have the tools to know what truth is. Look at the AI, look at the lies in the narrative.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Then we get social media that's like, oh great, now we can triangulate truth. We don't have to rely on just one news broadcast. and believe the TV because we found the TV is aligned to us. But now those that understand that information is the most powerful weapon in the human race, that the most lethal weapon is right between your ears.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And if I can influence what's going on between your ears in what you see is true and what reality is, I can shape that so that you act in my best interest, not in your best interest. And so part of what happens here is our government tells us stories about what is true, who's the bad guy, who's the good guy, Here's why your tax money needs to go to this. Here's why we need to have inflation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And we all believe it because we love our country and we don't want to be at war and we don't want insecurity. We want peace, prosperity, and health for us and everybody on the planet. But there are perverse incentives for big companies and governments to weave a tale
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
that deceives the population to perpetuate the wealth, control, and security of a very small group of people that are getting rich on the current methodology. So even though we may have solutions for the energy problem that include nuclear, that include solar power from space, that include helium-3, that include hydrogen, all these clean energy solutions
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
One of the reasons they don't move forward is the bureaucratic and the statutory administrative state that thinks it knows better than you and is getting rich off the lobbyists and the companies and the money into the coffers of the election system to perpetuate the way things were.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
The reason you are so important in this journey, meaning a place people can go and start learning the truth without falling victim to the sound bites that perpetuate a lie, but actually spend time listening to a deeper conversation where the brain learns through stories, is because if we do not innovate, other countries will. And technology does change fate.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Those that learned to harness the fire changed the fate of their own security, prosperity, and health. Those that learned to harness electricity changed their fate for better prosperity, security, and health. and they could secure that future against those that would use fire or electricity as a weapon against you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And as we move into this electromagnetic spectrum domain, this future where the electromagnetic spectrum can do everything we've seen done over the last 30 years, we cut the cable on the phone, we cut the cable on the TV, and soon we'll cut the cable on electricity. that electromagnetic spectrum and what we know about it and how we know how to manipulate it is truly why we need to find truth.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Because if we don't find truth, we continue to be slaves to the people that want us to believe that plugging your phone into the wall is the only way electricity works. and taxation for incrementally innovating for an infrastructure that was built to win the last war, but not investing in things that will win the next war.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
This is the trap of history and this is why no civilization has ever survived. They go on this sine wave of birth and vigor and critical thinking and aggressiveness at economic security and then military might to secure the peace. And then they get lazy and they lose it all and they're vanquished by another civilization.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And this is what the great hope of America is, is that we can turn the tide of human nature that has created that cyclical sine wave of civilizations, and we can start innovating again. Because if we don't, we're dead men walking.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Yeah, no, you're right. It can be a concern because the incentive structure for the current companies that are getting rich on the current technology set are not motivated to change. They're not motivated to take risk. But that can change.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And for example, when I was the commander of Joint Base San Antonio down in Texas, and we started something there called the Electromagnetic Defense Initiative. And the reason I started it is because The warfighting capability of a base is only as good as the feeder veins into that base of energy, transportation, food, water, you know, the essentials of life to fight from that location.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And the energy grid, as you pointed out, is a sieve and is vulnerable and can be taken out with one good marksman and knowing right where to shoot at the transformer. And so we started something to demonstrate to the power companies that one, they could affordably make their power grids resilient to electromagnetic pulse, whether it's manmade or from the sun.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But I also talked to him about what we were doing with the Air Force Research Lab and the X-37 to demonstrate this ability to take the sun's energy in space, convert it to radio waves, beam it down to Earth, and then convert it back into electricity at the point of the rectenna that receives it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Just like you receive broadband from Elon Musk's Starlink, and now you have broadband anywhere on your camper in the middle of the Hindu Kush or the Colorado Rockies. The same is true with electricity. And they actually liked the idea. The CEO level is like, that's great. Saudi Arabia, the oil is eventually not gonna be there. What do they invest in? Solar power from space could be one of them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Nuclear could be one of them. India, the last leadership team of India was about ready to go full bore into solar power from space. So it's not that they aren't willing to see the business case. And if they can see the business case, they'll start maneuvering so that they are going to where the money will be, not where the money was or the money is.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But we also have the fact that many of these CEOs will say, well, until the government gives me a contract to do this for the country, I'm getting rich in the current method and we're not going to take a lot of business risk. It's a two-edged sword. You need visionary leaders in these companies to also be willing to move forward.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Incrementally, to make our power good resilient now so it's not so vulnerable because we're all victims of vulnerability on the electricity. If we don't have it, chaos breaks out. And to start carving a path to new markets and new technologies to deliver things with greater capability at lower cost. And this is, again, going back to space, why space is so important.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
If you don't have companies like Spacebuilt, the one that I started with Dennis Wingo as the key brain that knows how to build space technology for this infrastructure and the capability to build in space that doesn't just run out of gas and become space junk, but is a perpetual business case of construction and logistics in space, The reason we're doing this is because this helps usher in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
If you have leaders that are innovative and that understand the tapestry of politics, of lobbyists, and you can navigate a company like Elon Musk did, and now you can have satellites at a fraction of the cost. You can reduce the cost of satellites 10x and they're reusable. Just like Elon Musk made the cost of launch reduce 10x and they're reusable. It's like aviation to space.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
This is how you break through. And it's generally in America, it's the private sector. This is how we can do it. And this is how you can start convincing companies, the big electric companies, to start moving into the future using all of these other... And space will bring us helium-3 energy. What is helium-3 energy? Yeah, so...
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Helium-3 is an element that doesn't get to Earth very much because our atmosphere and our gravitational field prevent it from landing on the Earth. So an ounce of Helium-3 on the Earth is very, very expensive, and the business case doesn't really close. But on the Moon or on the asteroids, there's a ton of Helium-3.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And so to give you an example of what it means, if we were to mine the Moon for Helium-3, At the current level of electricity use in America, or not in America, in the globe, we could power the energy needs of the human race for thousands of years based on the helium-3 that's on the moon right now. And so the twist there is China is there on the moon, on the far side of the moon.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
We don't know what they're doing because we don't have infrastructure up there to even see what's going on, but we do know they're mining helium-3.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
No, we don't. Because the other side of the moon, most people may not know this, but you only see one side of the moon in the way that it rotates and orbits around the earth. It's a very interesting phenomenon in orbital mechanics. And so unless we have a constellation of satellites flying around the moon that can see and understand what's going on, we're blind.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And that's one reason they're over there. But let me give you a commercial. I'm getting real upset, Steve. I'm getting real upset. So this goes back to a strategy and why I'm in the space business. Because space is the place where if America does not change our strategy and how we're investing in space, we will become victims to others that use space as a way of dominating technology.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
The energy market, but also the information market. So here's an example. About a month ago, Microsoft announced their quantum computing capability, which is just next level and awesome. But they need to cool it down to 80 millicalvin, which basically is almost down to the point where the molecules don't even move. There's really no way to cool it efficiently down to that level.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Hydrogen would only get you down to maybe one Kelvin. You need to go much lower than that. Helium-3 can do it like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So let's take a scenario where China now has enough helium-3 as they're mining it on the moon and bringing it back to Earth to be able to power the entire world for thousands of years, and they are the ones that can actually operationalize quantum because they can cool it down to the temperature it needs to actually operate. Now quantum sensing, quantum communication,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
When you start looking at quantum computing, when you start combining those three quantum capabilities, sensing, computing, communication, and you can affordably cool it down to the levels where it can be operationalized, Now you've broken every code that ever was. I don't care how good your encryption is, they see every secret, every code, everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
From Bitcoin to things like the techniques of blockchain. Forget it, it's all gonna change. And so there's an example of why not being in space with logistics and infrastructure to be able to move, to see, and to operate It can make you vulnerable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Well, you know, it's been quite a while. You know, you can look back. It's been at least two years. And, you know, the problem here is the— in my view, it is that we do not have a sense of how dramatically things will change with these technologies that are in space. We build better satellites than anybody on the planet, okay? We build better fighters, tanks, ships, submarines.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
We build really cool stuff, better than anybody else in the world in many cases. There are exceptions, of course. But What beats good technology is a superior strategy. So China may not, they may be a fast follower where they look a lot like our F-22 in their fighters. They look a lot like Elon Musk's rocket ships.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
They may be a fast follower, but they aren't interested in making better technology. They are building a strategy of logistics and infrastructure in space. that will change the game for the energy and information market on Earth. And we are on a strategy that builds better satellites to do the same things we've done before.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And there are efforts to do these other things, but it's not fueled by the kind of money to operationalize it and really compete. This is why, you know, strategy eats technology for lunch.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Well, we know they're mining. We know they're bringing back, because we can see what they're bringing back. And this is all open source. In open source, you can see some of the things that China's doing. And so we have evidence of some of the things they're doing, but we don't know the extent. And that's part of the problem.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And this goes back to why truth and information is the most important element. Because it's back to Sun Tzu and the art of war. Know thy enemy, know thyself. And if you are deceived in your own arrogance and your own dominance of the past, that what you did in the past is sufficient to win in the future, eventually you're gonna be a dead man.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And if you do not know your enemy well enough, not just on the technical side, but the cultural side, and this is why having been raised in Africa has been very valuable for me, because being raised in a tribe with no American influence, and then coming here at the age of 10, and then being immersed in Los Angeles where my dad was the pastor of a church,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
gave me a lens at this cultural misunderstanding in how we talk past each other. And it's been very valuable, like in the military. The Army talks past the Air Force, talks past the Navy, talks past Special Forces, talks past the Coast Guard. And to be able to see that and help people connect where they're actually talking to one another and listening to one another is key.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But the same is happening here with technologies and China. We, as an American society, tend to just believe our own press and think that our way of thinking is dominant. And it has worked. But if we don't understand China's cultural mindset, we could end up being a victim to it. Now, it's really important here to state two facts. One, the Chinese people are beautiful.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
The Russian people are beautiful. People in every culture are just beautiful people. But whenever you are under a governance rule set that steals away Freedom, steals away freedom of choice, which is something I believe has been planted in the hearts of every human being, and the Bible tells us, and God is clear, free choice, free will. This is how we know whether you're good or bad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
If you have no freedom, I don't know if your heart is good or is bad, because you don't make any choices. You're being forced to make choices. And so when I see systems like communism, socialism, that have a historical precedence rooted in human nature of murdering its own people in order to maintain control and taking away personal freedom.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
This is why we have to be so careful and why what you're doing is at the core of our survival as a nation. Because free will is predicated on understanding truth. you gotta know what's going on in your strategic environment, or again, you're not free.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
You're making a decision that has been shaped in your brain by somebody that's trying to get you to do something in their interest, and you're actually doing something counter to your own self-interest. So in order to understand what China is doing, what Russia is doing, and what is going on in the world, We have to be able to understand truth, and truth has been morphed and mutated.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
In fact, the information domain is now a battle space. We used to believe the TV, and when we found out the TV was lying to us and our government was lying to us, then social media and this new technology came about, and we're like, oh, starting to rush there. How do I triangulate truth here? And now we see that...
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
liars and storytellers that are trying to get us to believe something that is not true have infiltrated the social media and even the podcast world. So I say we're like teenagers in this information age and we still don't have the tools to triangulate truth quickly enough to be able to not make mistakes and drive ourselves off our own cliff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And so our society is in a very vulnerable place right now. where we're trying to hunt—and this is why you're so valuable, because you are taking the time to talk to multiple people to understand where the truth lies. And it's incredibly important.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Well, this president, President Trump, understands this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And in fact, he understood it in his first term. And this is why he was willing to put up with a ridicule, sarcasm, and humiliation that came with saying, we are going to create a space force. That space force, when we look back 300 years from now, the legislation that President Trump championed to get a Space Force written into law will be the wedge in history that protects America.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Without that, now even though the last four years, the government, the executive branch has not allowed the Space Force to build what it needs to protect us, so they kind of went into idle as soon as President Trump came into office, he's gonna put that into full afterburner. and we're gonna start seeing what the country really needs.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And it goes back to, again, what great warriors of the past have done. And what I'll say is great warriors of the past are peacemakers. President Trump is a peacemaker. When he rebuilds the military, it is not for the purpose of warfare. It is the purpose of peace through strength.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Because if you don't have the credibility and the will to use force against somebody evil that is trying to kill human nature, kill freedom, and this innate God-given important gift of free will, then people will just walk all over you. You have to be unapologetic. And so what you're gonna see now is you're gonna see America start developing something that's really important.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So I'll go back to Alexander the Great. One of the quotes that's most attributed to him, but it actually goes back even further is, in the art of war, amateurs talk about weapons and tactics. So planes, ships, tanks, submarines, satellites. Professionals talk about logistics. Because warfare is not about shock and awe. It's not about a decisive battle.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
That is inconsistent with human nature and culture. Ushering in a peaceful future is about an economic journey where you can outlast your adversary at trying to do something bad. And you strike the fear of God into them that if they do something bad, you're gonna hold them accountable. It is an economic thing. National security is downstream from economics.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And economics is downstream from our values. And values are downstream from our beliefs and our worldview. And we are moral creatures, okay? God made us as moral creatures. So if you have a governance system like communism that does not believe in a God, it will eventually crumble as it tries to control people. But our constitution is so unique in history.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And this is why I'm so excited about being alive at this time and why we should be so happy to be able to usher in a more prosperous, healthy, and secure future where all people on the planet have a chance to live free and with free will. Because we have a constitution rooted in a worldview that there is a God. And he has planted in our hearts certain things that are essential, like free will.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And we have values of loving our God first and our neighbors as God loves us. and then policies and an economy that thrives on this ability for people to act and do and try, the free economy. It's our superpower as an American society based on these values and on this worldview. And then downstream of that is our national security, the tools we build. But it's about the economy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And if we can build an infrastructure and space of logistics that is more affordable than our adversaries, We can defend ourselves and outlast anybody that tries to use space as a weapon against us. And we can usher in peace. That's why I started this company. And that's why space is such a critical, pivotal point in the future that most people don't recognize yet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Yeah. So, again, our current grid, our current power grid is built like a Frankenstein. I mean, it is cobbled together. And, you know, like some of the big transformers take two years to build and they are built as an artisan thing. I mean, it takes two years for artists to put it together.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So I found you, I saw this clip, which I'll get into on X. Energy, the seed corn of all development, all growth, all survival, survival, energy. So energy, transportation, information and manufacturing. These are the things that change humanity, that will change world power. And they are descending upon us in ways that are very unique.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Well, yeah. I mean, many of the components are built in China. And again, this is all open source, but it's even more frightening than that with regard to what China has and what they have built, both in our nuclear power plants and in our power grid. So there's that component of it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But what we did in San Antonio with this cooperation between a private power company, you know, CPS Energy, and the military and the Department of Energy and the Department of Homeland Security is show and prove out on a circuit
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
that if you bring in just the technologies that have been developed in our federally funded research labs like Sandia and Livermore and all of the different places where we invest in technologies, you can apply very inexpensive,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
technologies to your current power grid, even though it's kind of a Frankenstein, to avoid it from being destroyed for two years based on an electromagnetic pulse that goes through it. And there's two sources primarily of an electromagnetic pulse. One is the sun.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Most people may not realize that back in 1859, the only thing we really had that was vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse was a telegraph. But we had a Carrington event, which is basically a sun flare. And so there's a plasma wave that starts coming to the earth. And depending on how the earth is rotating, this one happened to hit as the North American face was hitting the plasma field.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And it melted every telegraph plunger in America as 3,000 volts went through every telegraph line. And so in some of our museums, we have those melted telegraph plungers that reveal how catastrophic it was. And that telegraph plunger system was 100 times more resilient than some of the SCADA systems we have now in our cars and in our electrical grid.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
We are so much more vulnerable than the telegraph. Because the telegraph, you know, is basically just a brass or, you know, a metal thing where you punched it down, and when it made contact, it was sending, you know, a signal through the power line, and you did Morse code, you know, dot, dot, dot, dash, dash, dash. Now our SCADA systems would not survive even the smallest electromagnetic pulse.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So one of those is gonna happen again. I mean, it's just a matter of time. The percentages are high and we haven't had one since 1859. We had a SCARE in 2013. But it ended up not being a significant event. And North America was not part of the plasma wave. But it's going to happen. And the only question is whether we can adapt quickly enough.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So I know I'm down a little rabbit hole here on the power grid. to go to the question you asked, and that is that we can make it resilient to electromagnetic pulses with some of these technologies that are affordable. And as we are demonstrating how affordable it is in San Antonio with this Electromagnetic Defense Initiative, which is now a White House Hallmark program,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Other energy companies are looking at that saying, okay, I can do this now, and I can now protect my grid, and I can market my electricity as being resilient. But there's another piece of this that's really important to note, and we don't have to go into detail on it. But there was an article just the other day on this that I can send you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Some of our other competition in the world have developed these tactical electromagnetic pulse weapons, meaning that a guy with a backpack or a satellite can actually point something at, let's say, a fleet of F-35s on the ramp, and strike a jolt of electricity that can fuse those SCADA systems and those computers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Our dependency on electrons and electricity is very, very vulnerable, except for our nuclear forces, because it's expensive to harden things for that kind of event. So now we have Mother Nature as a potential threat to a very... vulnerable dependency that we have grown because of efficiency.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
We've grown to be very dependent on electricity and it's very vulnerable because we wanted to make it as cheap as possible. And now it could become an existential threat to our society if people use that vulnerability as a place to attack us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
That's why I started the Electromagnetic Defense Initiative because our bases were vulnerable to electricity that was not guaranteed and we couldn't rely on backup generators if we couldn't have transportation for fuel to get it into the gate.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Something like that? Yeah, so there's no question that we are investigating these things. But here's one of the things that gets in the way. We over-classify everything. I mean, in the bureaucracy of our government, a 22-year-old kid that's brand new to the military as a lieutenant can classify something top secret and then takes an act of Congress to get it back down to where it needs to be.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So we are so overclassified and compartmentalized that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is talking about. And so oftentimes what will happen is Congress will ask this same question as we're talking to Congress about this risk to America. They'll say, well, I just talked to this four-star general and they told me that they're working on it. And they are.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But when you take a look at the money, It's like a little experiment up at the Air Force Research Lab that has like $300,000 when China is spending a billion dollars on the very same thing. So the road to operational, the road to commercial, the road to making something that is useful to our economy, It requires money and it takes leadership to innovate.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
This goes back to your innovation question. Why aren't we innovating on some of these things? Well, some of them require the government to actually put its thumb on the scale and they aren't putting enough money on the scale to compete with those that see what it could do and are putting a lot of money on the scale.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
It is, and so all you have to do is take a look at what President Trump is saying and what he is doing. You first of all fix it by providing an opportunity for the American people to see what's going on, this truth telling. What is really going on here? Because again, the people have been lied to about all kinds of things. They've been lied to about the history
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And many of those lies perpetuate these infinite wars we're in that President Trump is trying to stop by revealing the truth. So it starts by triangulating the truth. And this is why I give you such admiration and respect for the fact that you, and the way you evolved into what you're doing right now, is actually hitting at the root.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Because we could build all the technology in the world, but if our people are still lied to about what that technology is gonna be used to do, we just perpetuate the problem. All technology can be used for good or evil, but it can only be used for good if the American people know
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
what's going on and they can hold their politicians accountable for the policies and the decisions that are either consistent with our values and our beliefs that I talked about before, where we do not bring harm to other people, we uplift the human condition, we usher in prosperity, peace and security, not war and violence and instability. And the technologies of our age
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
I think about it like a flashlight. If we do this right, even with quantum, if we can operationalize quantum, or we can operationalize truth discovery in the current model of the internet and of the techniques for communication we have, it's like shining a flashlight on all the dark corners of history and of the world right now where evil can hide. They can enslave people. They can traffic people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But like any domain, if you do not have strength to be able to prevent conflict or strength to be able to...
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
They can launder money. Corruption can thrive in the dark corners. But if we believe there are more people on the planet that are good and would rather love their neighbor than kill their neighbor, We can gang up on this small number of evil people that are prioritizing their own control, their own money, and their own security by enslaving others.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And this is why it's personal for me because I got to see this in Africa and the tribe I grew up in. The African continent has been enslaved and the hero system has been crushed and crippled. And it continues to be crippled as tyrants and despots keep the people of Africa enslaved with a lack of information, with weaponizing the economy, both electricity, food, and water.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And the moment we can provide a device for people in my tribe to be able to see the truth that's going on around them and bypass those that control the information systems, they can now start organizing and throwing off these shackles of slavery.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But I would tell you my study of history and technology and human nature and this lens I have been blessed with by growing up in one culture without Western influence and then coming to a culture in Los Angeles of not only Western prosperity, but also the corruption of the gangs and the drugs and all the other things that were in the underbelly of that LA society that I went into.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
I will tell you that we truly do have the potential of throwing this off and that the good people of this world have access to truth. and they can organize and throw this corruption into the prisons or into the trash heap of history. It will never go away totally, because there will always be evil people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But this is why I say it is so damn exciting to be alive today, because we are in the middle of an epic change. And most epic changes are riddled with violence and destruction, like going from the kingdoms and the serfdoms into the industrial age. And the industrial age and World War I and World War II into the information age.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
We have a leader in President Trump that is trying to usher in a change where the American people are not lied to anymore by people that want to maintain control.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
that we revive the economy to build a golden age, truly by unleashing these innovations that have been snuffed out and quenched and thrown a blanket on because of the military-industrial-congressional complex of lobbyists lying to congressional members and congressional members fearful of their political future, taking money into their coffers of election and ignoring the technology because they're not willing to stand up to their people and say there's a better way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
we can shine a light on all this corruption and it's amazing how the spirit of innovation and renewal and revival and uh and and uh and even forgiveness uh can be ushered in with information that's in the pocket of every human being on the planet i love that you know i was just i don't want to mention his name or his company but i was just um
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
and can do devastating things to everybody else in the area.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So this is, you know, it's a great point. And it reveals the fact that culture is stronger. You know, culture eats technology and strategy for lunch, meaning it's the fear, it's the change that most people are not willing to adapt to until they see a reason. But with AI, it's also the fear of the unknown. All new technologies have seemed like magic to people and they fear them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
If if if I if we were sitting here in 1898 and you went to work on your horse and you fueled you know You lit your house with a candle and you heated your home with a wood-burning stove and I told you that in less than a hundred years There'd be two cars in every garage an automobile hadn't really, you know, you know, it hadn't become mainstream we'd be flying to places on the planet and you know in hours and
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But it's no different than any other human activity moving into a new domain.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
not months or years, and we'd have a man on the moon, and you'd have a computer in your pocket, and they'd say, what is a computer? They would have thought that it was magic, or it was witchcraft, or worse. And the same is true in the human psyche. So these cultural journeys are hard, but there's always an element of truth in these fears.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And the element of truth is that they are worried that AI will not be moral. And in some ways they're correct. Meaning there are two things that any expert will tell you about AI. And that is one, they can never foresee any time that it will be truly creative or visionary. that these are things unique that God has given to the human brain that is the most super computer ever built.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And that all AI is just, it looks creative and it looks visionary because it's so damn fast and it can gobble up so much information so quickly. but it is not truly creative. And you can prove that as you use AI more and more.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And I encourage people to use AI because they'll start recognizing what AI looks like and they'll be able to, the human brain and the natural intuition and spidey senses we have as human beings is so far beyond the technology that you don't have to fear it. And the more we use it, the less we'll be afraid of it. And the less we will allow ourselves to trust it in places we shouldn't trust it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But the reason why he's right, your friend, is because a human being can have access to that environment, the context of what's going on with that ship or that plane or that satellite.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
without having to physically be there and shackle it with all the human life support requirements that make it too slow, too expensive, too heavy, all the things that don't make it faster, stronger, smarter than the adversary and affordability where you can sustain operations longer than your competition.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
you can still be there with a human moral mind for the context of what's happening, for decisions that are based on morality. Now, you can program your values into the AI. I encourage people to take Grok or whatever version you want and tell it, okay, here are my values. I want everything you provide me to be based on these values.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
of the respect for human life, the respect for cultural uniqueness, anything you want to put in there, the 10 commandments. But even that, the more you use it, the more AI will start confirming your biases.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Right. And if we were all angels and nobody was weaponizing space, that would be true. But just because we have a 1967 Outer Space Treaty that states those very words, we have... great powers that are doing things in space that are going to threaten America and other countries as well. So we have to be open-eyed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
You know, the thing that strikes me is I am talking with people that use AI a lot, and they'll say, Steve, you know, my AI is telling me that I am now 99.9% correct on my opinion that this is true. And in places where I have unique knowledge on that opinion, I'll tell them, I can tell you 100% that you're wrong, but the AI is gonna try to align with you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
It's programming itself to be your pet and to tell you what you wanna hear if you have not specifically programmed it to tell you what you need to hear, not what you wanna hear. So it is such a dangerous environment that requires critical thinking. And AI is only one piece of this triangulation of truth. The most important piece is human contact, talking with another human being.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And even that is imperfect because if I am meeting with somebody and they are lying to me out of their heart, It oftentimes takes time with that person to start discovering that they are actually lying to me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But you can do that too if you are a critical thinker and you're good at asking the right questions and that your critical thinking has a natural intellectual curiosity and suspicion that people can lie to you believing that lie because of the self-deception. Mm-hmm.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So this gets back to the other qualities of character that are essential as we are in this epic change of an industrial age to a networked age, where space is going to be the dominant environment. It will be an economy bigger than air, land, and sea combined. And we can get to why I believe that will be true in a moment, but it comes down to affordability and infrastructure and a networked effect.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But it is essential for us to force the physical contact with people of conversation. This is why your podcast is so important. Because a snippet or even a clip from the Hillsdale speech is not enough to really talk about these technologies, what they mean. Like getting anywhere on the planet in less than an hour. I want to tell you why that happens, how that happens, because it will demystify it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
It's not teleporting like you see it. Can I make a guess?
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
That sounds good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And then we can talk about why the AI conversation is also going back to the root of triangulating truth and how we as human beings keep our hand on the Bible of truth, and it's about human contact. And so we can survive this dangerous time where people believe AI and AI can take us off the cliff because it can be deceived and it can be nothing more than a perpetuation of our biases.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
It would be like discovering an ocean and saying, we're not going to have any fighting on the ocean. And then we don't build a Navy and everybody else does. And we're the only victims of it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And it's the old saying, crap in, crap out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
It's a good question, though, because we want peace, and we want a future that trends with less violence. But the way to do that is not to ignore a new domain and new technologies. The way to do that is to usher in peace through strength that is consistent with human nature and history and culture.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Well, the Earth's rotation does play a part in how much time it takes, but think of it like a fish in the water. If you're a fish swimming in the ocean, you can go a certain velocity, and that's your life. That's all you know. But if you could elevate into the air and go, you would be like, this is impossible how quickly I can move. The air is also a medium like the water. It's just less dense.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But those air molecules are real. We just can't see them. And when you get up into the edge of space, the higher you go, the fewer molecules. So imagine the globe and imagine getting into a rocket ship and going up. You don't even have to go all the way to space.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
You go up a certain altitude and there are so few molecules of air that now as you turn and start going around the earth, you can move at Mach 20. At speeds that you can't even fathom if you're a fish in the water. because there are no molecules of air to create the heat or slow you down, the friction that slows you down, because the water is friction, the air is friction.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
We know that as reentry and the heat shields from a spacecraft coming back into the Earth's atmosphere. And so this has been demonstrated. We did this in the early 90s as President Reagan was developing Star Wars technology. We proved this out back then, and it's one of the foundations of why Elon Musk knew that reusability was actually something you could do, and he was going to commercialize it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
we demonstrated. And so what happens is, let's go from here, where we're at in Nashville, to Singapore. It only takes about six or seven minutes to get up to the place where there's almost no molecules of air. You turn, and at Mach 20, it only takes you 10, 15 minutes to get over Singapore. And then you decelerate and come back down in seven minutes, and you're there in less than an hour.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
You can do it. And so it's nothing more than just physics and the reality that we have the technology to have reusable rockets that go up, go across, and come back down.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
We've done it. not with humans in the craft, but Elon Musk is gonna do this. In fact, it's actually a number of years ago, he put out a video of what his Starship will do as a transportation vehicle. And one of the fun parts of my job was connecting dots. So I had Gwen Shotwell sit down with the four star in charge of transportation command,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Right. Well, like all new technologies, it is those countries that have the resources and the will to develop capabilities. Every country that is paying attention to these trends of technology and change are investing in space. If they don't have the money or the will, they aren't, but those are very few and far between.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
for America and talk about this so that now you could put 100 tons of people and equipment anywhere on the planet in less than an hour. and sustain it with reusable rockets that can go and do that all day long.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Think about what that means for the logistics of power projection in America, where if some country is in trouble or somebody is in trouble, you can get masses of amounts of stuff to them in reasonable amounts of time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Well, it goes back to the cultural piece. People will look at something and say, sounds great, but it's not my job. Let industry build it, and then I'll figure it out. There's a lot of fear in leaders doing things the way things have always been done.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
The bureaucratic risk you take is just one piece of it, where you have to actually be willing to know the law, know the regulations, and be able to operate within your authority and responsibility to innovate. But there's another thing that goes on, and I have personal experience on this, and it's the sense of belonging. I mean, we are creatures that belong to one another.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
We are moral creatures that belong to God and we belong to one another. That's why we have tribes, like the tribe I grew up in, and our loyalties to our sports team, to your unit. We would live and die for our sense of belonging. And if the sense of survival were more powerful than the sense of belonging—
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Nobody would jump on a hand grenade in a foxhole for their brothers, but they do because they feel that sense of belonging so powerfully that I would die for you. And we do it in the military all the time. And it is a beautiful thing, and it's what God gave us, a sense of belonging. But even something good like that can be used by Satan for bad. But it also can be a trap.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So if I'm a fighter pilot, and I am in the Air Force, and I say that the strategic investment is to not have a person in the cockpit of a machine that doesn't have enough gas or enough weapons to go the distance and get the job done.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
That we should invest in machines that don't have a human being in it, connected with sufficient awareness so that a human being can make the decision, if it's a moral decision, And now I have been ostracized from the entire tribe I belong to of fighter pilots that are celebrating the heritage of scarf around their neck. But it happens all the time in World War II, the beginning of World War II.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
It's a great story in a book called Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers, which is the oxymoron title. But it describes why we don't innovate and the cultural reasons why we don't innovate it. Back to one of your central questions. The horse on the battlefield was the key element of rapid maneuver. before World War II.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Even though people like Churchill and others had been screaming for mechanization for years, it was very slow in coming and it was not, it was a little trickle of money, not big money like the Germans did for Blitzkrieg. And so as they studied, And so every army officer was required to have equestrian lessons.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
You had to know how to manage horses and deal with horses in the military because that was the big thing. And when the question was asked, how are you going to beat the tanks of Blitzkrieg? They did the studies and one of my favorite studies that shows how hard it is for us to change and how hard it is to give up our tribal allegiances to the way we've always done it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But as I talk to leaders in countries around the world, they understand the power of space. It would be like a country not having an air force, and everybody else does, or not having a navy, or not having an army. It doesn't mean these things are built to perpetuate wars. We want them to be there to prevent wars.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
On the horseback as a soldier or in a cockpit of a fighter aircraft as a fighter pilot or on the deck of a battleship as a Navy captain. We can be so biased and so stuck in a mindset. We can make any study say anything we want, really, if we're that biased and that deceptive.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So the report that's one of my favorites that is chronicled in this book is the report that basically came back and all the psychologists and all the experts said, if you take the horse off the battlefield, the IQ of the soldier will plummet. that the horse is essential and it should be our main strategic effort to beat mechanization.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And it went further to say the way we solve it is we put the horses in trailers and carry them to the front line and then they will be fresh and they will be able to outmaneuver the tanks and kill them from behind. And they used evidence like the tank can't get through trees or it can't get over tough mountains and the horse can. So there's always evidence that can confirm your bias.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But General Marshall was smart enough and had the power of the presidency and FDR behind him, where when General Herr, the H-E-R-R, the two-star in charge of the cavalry at the time, presented this report that said the way to win against Blitzkrieg is to have a better horse and more stuff on the horse and using the horse in a better way, incremental innovation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
General Marshall essentially started investing more heavily in mechanization. But even the mechanization was tough. They turned to Knutson, who was the most brilliant industrialist of the age, working with Ford and Chrysler and some of the big mechanization. He was just a brilliant man. And he went to the Army. He was hired to help us mechanize. He went to the Army and said, what do you need?
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
The technology is on the engineering benches today, but most Americans and most in Congress have not had time to really look deeply at what's going on here. But I've had the benefit of 33 years of studying and becoming friends with these engineers and these scientists. This technology
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And the Army didn't know. That's how stuck we can get in the tribalism and the heritage. So how would it feel for you to be ostracized from all the people that you feel a belonging to? It's very lonely, and in fact, it is devastating. But this is what innovators put up with. I mean, they'd say it's lonely at the top. It's a component of that, but innovation also has that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
It is, you are ostracized from those, how dare you? You are a traitor to the fighter pilot community if you don't think a fighter aircraft is the solution.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And so, you know, you have India, China, Russia, America, Japan, you know, you just go down the list of nations that are investing in space. And it's not a bad thing. This is about evolving because of what space will be able to do to uplift the human condition.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Well, you're doing the same thing, but it goes back to there's nothing new under the sun and everything is rooted in human nature. So if you understand human nature and culture and history and the lessons that have happened, as long as the history is true, that's another thing you have to work for, you can navigate a better future.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But it requires this intellectual curiosity and aggressive learning where... you actually put in the time to study your history. And you triangulate truth with that too. You read history books written from different people in different perches around the world, different cultures around the world, to try to get after the bias that is written by the victors.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Because the victors always write it making themselves look like they are the heroes of the world, when in reality they may not have been totally. And you have to be honest with yourself about not wanting to be the hero of the story. Truth is the hero of the story.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Well, the first thing is to – be humble enough to anchor yourself in the fact that the only person that matters is God. And if you don't have that, if you aren't grounded in the fact that you are moral, ethical, legal, honest, and God is your judge, And you can't lie to God. You can't deceive God.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And then you surround yourself with people that keep you honest and keep you humble, where it's not about you. It's about God's will. It's about glorifying God, ultimately. That's that moral center where our worldview is that there is a God and that God loves us. And he asks us to love one another as much as he loves us. So if you have that as a grounding, you can weather all of this stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
When I was at the senior level of command and supporting the Space Force as an astronautical engineer and through my whole life watching this technology emerge and able to see the consequences of what this was gonna mean for the art of peace, to have strength, to prevail for American interests as the economy of space starts emerging,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
and then being considered a traitor because what is a fighter pilot doing talking about space? And the Air Force did not, just like the Army did not want an independent Air Force for the same reasons why the Air Force did not want a Space Force. And so I was not welcome. And that's okay. That is the cost of innovation. And if you're not grounded in God, Look at Job in the Bible.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But if we don't pay attention to it and design it with the wisdom of what we have learned about how humans evolved into a new domain, we will repeat the sins of the past. This is about understanding ourselves, understanding human nature, understanding technology and culture, and then ushering in a geopolitical evolution of nations that all benefit from what space will do for our economies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Even his family and his friends abandoned him, and all he had was God. And oftentimes people, Job was like, why are you doing this, God? And it was, he couldn't see this, but it was because an entire generation that was gonna come after Job could see that as long as you cling to God, You can weather anything. You cannot torture me. You cannot do anything to me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
You can never steal away my sense of value and worth for God. And I do this, though. I could just shut up and be quiet and go along to get along or just not be a part of the fray. But I truly believe that if the spirit of fighting for God's will is in us, God will usher in a new age. He will forgive us. Because God wants more people going to heaven.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And if we are so corrupt as a human race that the game is up, then God will come home again and it'll be over, okay? But if we can usher in a better future...
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
golden age and i believe it's biblical i think it's prophetic uh more people will be in heaven because more people will be born and will be uh prosperous healthy and secure and we have the creative god has given us the brains to create our future to build it we don't have to be victims of other people building it and this constitution that america has is the best hope of humanity and
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
With my relationships across the globe, from my time in the military and the foreign countries that I became friends with, and my cultural understanding having been raised in a different country, all the other countries of the world are just looking at America going, I hope President Trump succeeds, because if he doesn't succeed, we're all screwed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Well, I think the first person that will operationalize that is Elon Musk. He's furthest ahead. And now it's taken a number of years, and now with President Trump and the White House, where permission will be given for the military to actually take these next steps.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
um and uh you're gonna you're gonna see that get operationalized so um i would say in the next few years we will probably start with just equipment where elon musk will be able to deliver a hundred tons of equipment anywhere on the planet in less than an hour for the military to maintain the presence of peace, the power of diplomacy through the fact that we can do something.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And when you can maneuver like that with that kind of speed, agility, and affordability will come, but affordability, meaning that he's brought the cost of that kind of flight down 10x and he can reuse it, it's a game changer. How can another country compete with America being able to bring 100 tons as often as they want anywhere on the planet in less than an hour?
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Well, so China is probably the fastest follower, but they aren't anywhere close. Elon Musk knows, like I know in my company, Spacebuilt, speed is the only protection. Patents, you know, that just gives you the legal right to sue somebody if they try to do something on your front yard. or with your patent, but that is so easy to bypass. All you have to do is change one ingredient.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
You patent a recipe for cookies, and somebody adds an extra ounce of butter, and now you can't sue them, even though it may taste the same. So China is probably the fastest follower, but Elon Musk is the true innovator.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Just the cyber espionage alone. They don't even have to have a person. But they do it through multiple means. They'll have people on the board of advisors, board of directors. They'll buy their way into companies with a lot of money through proxies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So they'll give a bunch of money to some American retired general that then says, hey, I'll invest in your company, which might be a startup on AI companies. And then they're on the board and they have access to the information and the money flows and the information flows back. That's one way of doing it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Cyberestimation, where many of these companies do not have the kind of cyber hygiene and cyber techniques to be able to prevent somebody from getting in the back doors. Oftentimes the equipment they have has chips that were built in China and the back doors are built in and nobody knows that it's a sieve out. So there's a thousand ways of this industrial espionage getting back to China.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So let's talk about culture, though, because this industrial espionage and China being a fast follower has a cultural component to it. And I'll just talk to two of them. And this gets back to the fact that we have to understand the cultures. Understand your enemy, understand yourself. And in a thousand years, you will not lose a battle.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
China, the people of China are as smart as anybody else on the planet. And the cavemen, you know, we're as smart as we are. I mean, the human brain and the intelligence has not changed. Building on the knowledge of the past is what's changed, and that's why this attribute of being an aggressive learner really makes you very powerful if you can absorb all this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And AI will accentuate that, where now I can devour through 100 books to get the essence instead of spending all the hours reading them. So these tools of technology are going to increase the exponential nature of innovation. But back to fast followers in China. If China did not have a communist ideology, that picks winners and losers and does not allow the free market to operate.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Where the free market is like a garden. You plant 100 seeds and only one will blossom. The other 99 will fail, but that one that blossoms pays for all the 99 that fail. That's the mathematics of innovation. Or a VC, an investor. They'll put out 100 investments, small investments, And two will pop, but those two will pay for all the others. SpaceX in the early days, look what it's done. Google.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Well, I would reframe the question and say that we need to pay attention to the technologies that are being developed and what they could do. Because every technology can be used for good or for bad. And you need to be able to play in that environment if somebody were to do something bad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And I have personal knowledge. I worked in the White House in the 90s. And I won't mention the name, but one of the people in the White House had invested in Google in the early days. And just incredible wealth. But they had invested in a hundred different companies and that one popped, all the others failed, but it didn't matter.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So China's communist ideology suffocates the free market from letting the results decide who wins and who loses, and let the customer decide based on the definition of innovation. Is it novel, meaning it's different, new, and is it useful? And so China will forever be compromised at its ability to innovate in the subordination that is created by the Communist Party.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Because if you're a leader in a company and you go in a direction that's not consistent with the talking points of the Communist Party, you're done. And you won't get a loan for the good house. Your kids won't go to the good schools. You can't shop in the good markets.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
I mean, the social scoring and the technology to imprison and enslave people, to talk the talk and to do exactly what the Communist Party wants you to do, the lack of freedom and free will is... paralyzing to innovation. So it's not that they don't have innovative people. Those innovative people are not allowed to try and fail. The second one though is over time, China, even their language,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
inhibits innovation. I'm not an expert in their language, but I have dear friends that are experts in their language and have lived there their whole life, but they're American. They grew up in America and have lived there as adults studying the language and the culture. And even their language inhibits innovation and the willingness to step out. In America, it is just the opposite.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
We are mavericks. We are pioneers. We are innovators. We are risk takers. And we are the envy of the world.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
You don't see it if you just live in America, but boy, I tell you, one of the blessings of my life, when I was the general officer working on the joint staff for the chairman in charge of policy and strategy to Russia, Europe, and NATO, I got to travel and visit so many countries, both in NATO, Russia, and Africa and the Middle East, because Afghanistan was in the middle of its aggressiveness. And
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
They fear us, they hate us, and they are jealous of us all at the same time. They're jealous of us because they are not allowed to do what they see us doing and they wish they could.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But most people that are born around the world are born into a system where there is a glass ceiling, whether it's their socioeconomic status, their political status, their social status, the caste system that get built in, or in Africa, where I grew up, where a youngster looks around and says, There is no way I can be a hero in this condition.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
I mean, and so they all want to leave and they want to go to the US or they want to go to Europe. And fewer and fewer now want to go to Europe because they see the suffocation of Europe and the policies that are killing innovation. And there are some good stories about how much they fear us. One of them, and I'll keep this short, because it could be a long story, but the essence is this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
You know, one of the simple statements of somebody in my position as a national security professional is be prepared for the unexpected.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
I was in Russia. We were trying to convince the leadership of Russia, okay? This was when Yeltsin was in charge, and Makarov was the equivalent of, General Makarov was the equivalent of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And we were trying to convince them that our missiles, the Aegis Ashore, Aegis at Sea, this is the SM-3 missile that was primarily on Navy ships, and we were looking at putting it in Poland, designed primarily to defend America from Iran and missiles coming to America from Iran.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Russia was dead afraid of that because they were afraid it was gonna threaten their ICBMs and their nuclear deterrent posture. And our mission was to convince them that it was not a threat.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
All of the velocities and all of the physics of proving to them that whether it's at sea or on shore, this cannot threaten your nuclear deterrent posture with America, which would be destabilizing, and rightfully so. And after literally days and weeks of arguing and face-to-face, you know, General Makarov slapped the table at one point and stood up and went on a 20-minute tirade.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And his interpreter, a young 20-something kid scared out of his wits that there was yelling going on with state leaders in a very, very serious conversation, just basically said, you Americans don't understand. We put Sputnik into space in 1957 and you Americans went apeshit and put a man on the moon. You can do anything you put your mind to.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So as I watch, for example, another country developing solar power from space, which is the technology of capturing the sun's intense energy in space, where there's no night and day, there's no weather to get in the way of the sun, and then transforming that into a radio wave and beaming it to Earth to be able to turn it back into electricity on the Earth, which is one of the things I talked about in that Hillsdale speech,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
You turn to your industrial base and your innovators and those missiles will kill all of our intercontinental ballistic missiles the moment you tell your industrial base to solve that problem. So we don't give a shit what you say or promise until we get a signed document from President Obama that you will never, Threaten our ICBMs. We have nothing to talk about, so stop wasting our time. Wow. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And the subtext from the general officers at my level, not the chairman or the vice president or the president's level, was... I wish we had that kind of industrial base. Now, the Russians have some of the greatest innovative minds on the planet. There's something about the culture of Russia, and I know what it is.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Culturally, it's that the Russian youth are forced to fight one another and take risk and be in situations where it's life or death. They use nature, they use fighting, the martial arts, and they celebrate the fact that they put their kids through the crucible. Doesn't mean they don't love them, but they know life is hard, and it's harder when you're stupid, lazy, or weak.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And so their innovators are just killer. They were the ones that created stealth and then we operationalized it. They are doing things in space with hypersonic missiles in the mesosphere that make us look at it and go, holy shit, that is amazing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Yeah, but those scientists and engineers are jealous of us because the system does not allow them to innovate like America innovates, as quickly as an American can innovate. But America is at risk because there's a military industrial complex. And back to your first question, why are these technologies not coming to the market?
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
It's because we are becoming our own worst enemy at this superpower we have in our culture, and our mindset of being the innovators, self-sufficient mavericks that are willing to take risk and allowed to take risk. And now the government says, no, I know better and you gotta be safe. You gotta put safety over innovation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Now we wanna be safe, but I'm here to tell you the two shuttle disasters, when you read the safety reports on that, the reason it happened is because we were trying to be too safe. It's a dilemma.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
It is sometimes hard for people to understand, but I challenge you to read the books on the history of both disasters of the space shuttle, and you'll find the root cause of those disasters is that NASA had adapted to a culture where safety was more important than effectiveness. And that's part of why we do not see innovation here now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So forgive me for making that final point on why we are the envy of the world, why the world is looking to us, and why they are so energized about what President Trump is saying. Even what he said in Saudi Arabia yesterday.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
If you haven't seen that speech, you need to see that speech because he not only talks to the innovation, he talks to the peace that is possible if we actually start talking to one another. even with Iran.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And all these knots we are tied into geopolitically goes back to innovation, culture, technology, and America being willing to take the risk to be bold and usher in a golden age of peace instead of perpetuating decades of war and industrial age grinding to a halt of innovations that can uplift the human condition. We are all slaves to a global cabal, if you will,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
of a small number of people getting rich and powerful and controlling at the cost of innovation and the enslavement of people that should be free.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Yeah, so Russia is innovating. And what they're doing is they are looking at what America has done, where we have elegant satellites and we are doing amazing things to look down on the Earth and help the operations that are going on on the Earth. And they are looking at the cost differential where we can invest so much more in our military strength than they can.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
that can be used for peaceful purposes. I mean, that can be used to immediately send electricity to the tribe I grew up in Africa that has no power plant, no power lines, nothing, because the topography is so aggressive. The transportation modalities are so insufficient that nobody would have the affordable business case to build them the electricity they need. But one satellite
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So they have developed these mesospheric supersonic weapons. So basically they can launch from space or from the land something that can maneuver at Mach speeds in the area where there's almost no air. And it is designed to be able to get through our defenses and kill anything they want to kill within minutes.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So if they see a ship they don't like there, they could kill it and it maneuvers so fast. And our systems are designed to kill other things that are more predictable, like a parabolic curve, not something that moves at those speeds and can maneuver. And so we have to counter that now, okay?
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Because this is the tit for tat of competitive advantage, both in business and in warfare, where if your enemy develops something that's really cool that you can't afford, you find something that cuts its feet out from under it at a fraction of the cost. That's what they've done.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Yeah, they've done it. It's in the news. About a year ago, I think, is when they launched the first one that was a shot across the bow for America. What the hell are we doing? Wow. And again, you know, President Trump knows these things and he you know, so thank God he is back in because again in in the last administration these innovations were in idle and Now they're an afterburner
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And this is our superpower. He won't talk about it, but God help the country that puts him to the test because you even listened to a speech yesterday. And those of us that know are so grateful that our country has a defender that's not afraid to be strong.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Well, we will be constructing satellites in space. Uh, right now we are at the stage where we have the modular elements that are qualified. We, uh, you know, we, we have, um, uh, missions that have gone to the international space station are going to the international space station. We have equipment that has gone to the moon a couple of months ago, uh, supercomputer or computational capability.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Yeah, but again, this goes back to a man I think you ought to have on this show. His name is Dennis Wingo, and he is one of these rare engineers that is not only brilliant in his own right as an engineer, but he can see, most engineers are fairly siloed, and they are the PhD world expert at a deep silo of knowledge.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
his unique gift is to be able to be deep on multiple silos and then see across, a holistic, systemic look. So when he presents a design for a solution, he is solving problems across engineering disciplines that any other engineer in those disciplines do not see, the integration and the problems that will emerge in the future.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And so one of his reputations for all of us in the military that were watching, and one of my jobs in the military was called the Director of Requirements. And my job was essentially for all combat air forces to include communication at the time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
My job was to look at the engineering benches of America and all these innovative technologies that are percolating in little benches and corners of engineering brilliance and bring them to the warfighter as fast as possible. This is where I discovered Dennis Wingo. And his reputation is everything he builds in space works.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So for example, that computer that he built for the moon that is on the south pole of the moon right now, it was only designed, the specs that they wanted were designed to, you know, like you know, 20 degrees Celsius positive minus 20 degrees Celsius. Even though the environment of the moon is, you know, if you're facing the sun, it's about 450 degrees Celsius.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And if you're facing deep space on the backside of that, if you turn around, you're experiencing negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit. So the thermal environment of space is so aggressive. And then there's the radiation environment where the radiation will just obliterate a computer. if it's not designed to withstand that kind of environment.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
could deliver electricity to that spot and a thousand other spots. But let's say if one of our competitors develops that infrastructure in space and they use that to uplift the human condition by providing electricity to people who don't have it, in a millisecond, they could turn it into a directed energy weapon to destroy the people. at that location. So let me give an analogy of air power.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And there was a problem where the lunar lander that was designed by another company fell over on its side, and you can read about it if you want, but our computers still worked even without the heater that keeps it warm in the cold side and the shielding that keeps it cool in the hot side. It demonstrated that this guy knows how to build things that work in space. That's his reputation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And you ought to have him on this show because he will give you, because he's not just a technologist, he's also a historian. And he understands the geopolitics of technology and how technology changes fate. And he knows his history. His great-grandfather, and again, you'll have to ask him for the perfect story, but was in the railroads.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And even the gauge of the railroad, the innovation of the railroads, his family has been part of innovation for generations. So he comes by it honestly, one of the most fascinating minds.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And so when we got out of the military, a number of us dedicated ourselves that we would start a company with this guy and we would help this because America needs this technology and space to defend American interests. because if we don't have it, we will be victims. What China is building is an infrastructure in space that will be able to see and kill anything that flies above the trees.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And we need to build the same capability so that space is peaceful. and that there's a deterrence where China knows that if they behave irresponsibly in space, whether it's creating space junk or a directed energy weapon that paralyzes a portion of our economy at the time of their choosing,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
that they can't get away with that because we're up there with them with better or equal technology and that there is a balance of power. Right now, we're on a track where we build better satellites, but they're building a superior strategy. And all the money in the world cannot solve a disconnect in strategy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Yeah, so what we're doing on the moon is part of what America is trying to do, and that is take the steps to build an economy in space. So one of the steps is a permanent presence in space that's more than just astronauts on the International Space Station. And this is about resources in space. It's about the asteroids, mining the asteroids. It's about exploration.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
most people don't realize how much The 1960s and going to the moon uplifted the human condition. The technologies and the innovation that happen when people are gathered around a goal, like going to the moon in the 60s, that transforms so much of our economy, of the things that benefit people on the Earth. So going to space is not about being in space.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And a lot of people will criticize and say, why do you spend all this money on space? Let's just solve the problems on Earth. It may be counterintuitive, but the human mind and the human experience, if you are not moving forward and exploring and learning and discovering, you are falling backwards.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Or putting a finer point on it, if you're a civilization like America that is not moving forward, exploring, pushing the boundaries and the limits of discovery and pioneering, You will fall behind other countries that are doing the same. China understands this. Every historian understands this. Every psychologist understands it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But it's hard if the American people do not realize that there's a purpose behind this. And the purpose is their betterment. The purpose is their freedom and their prosperity, their security, their health, their free will. So China is moving forward with exploration and with the ability to build an infrastructure to be able to bring value to their country.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Just the power in space that they're investing in, not only the solar power that we talked about, beaming it to the earth, but also nuclear power and their plans to have a nuclear power plant in space in the coming years. If they can tap into the telecommunication market globally and the energy market globally, trillions of dollars flow into the Chinese economy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
It's part of their Belt and Road Initiative. But if you read Chinese literature, doctrine, vision, and their speeches of their leadership, it is a clear statement. Space is their national vision. And they plan on bringing in the Middle Kingdom, by dominating the economy that space brings to them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And you might say, well, space economy, you got a satellite, you got a cell phone that now can talk to the satellite. How can that make them the dominant economy of the world?
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And it's because space with one build of an infrastructure can tap into every person on the planet versus a linear model where you build one power plant and now you're limited to the capital investment of power lines and then the fact that those power lines are vulnerable. There is a tremendous amount of cost in a linear system of delivery of goods and services versus a networked method.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
If you read the literature after 1903 when the Wright brothers invented the airplane, it was like our Federalist Papers where there were some good arguments about the fact that it is immoral to develop an airplane because you could drop a bomb on somebody's head. And others saying it is moral to develop an airplane because you can transport a sick person to the hospital and save their life.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And I'll give you a perfect example. And it's the mail system, okay? Before the internet, if I wanted to mail out 100 letters, I'd have to buy 100 stamps and then send them out. And that's costly. Now with a networked approach, I can type one email, send it to 100 people, and it is a fraction of the cost. Pretty much just the electricity and the service I purchase.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Okay, that's the difference between. And so now in America, for example, we have over one million cell towers. But you still only get one bar in West Texas or zero bars. And if you're in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, you have no capability. It would just take a few, a handful of satellites in geosynchronous orbit over America, and you have 5G and five bars everywhere.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So now, the difference in cost. And it's about the price point. This is about the fact that everything that is national security is upstream of the economy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And if you can build an infrastructure of reusable satellites that you build in space where you can build them as big as you want, you can upgrade, modernize, and recapitalize them at pennies on the dollar so that every new innovation, whether it's quantum coming online or a new supercomputer, you just unplug the old computer, unplug the new one in, now you can invest in a very low-cost infrastructure that taps into trillions of dollars worth of revenue.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
versus building a power plant in every village in Africa and power lines to every hut. You can see the power of the networked effect of space and why it's going to be so powerful.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Yeah, so again, I'll let the experts talk to it, but again, being a generalist and talking to the experts at length and being in a company that's going to build the infrastructure for this technology to be delivered, I can give you the simple answer, and that is that the first thing is that the current way we build a satellite in America is like how we used to build rockets before Elon Musk came along.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
can be built today with technology that is not developmental to deliver any human being from any place on planet Earth to any other place in less than an hour, to deliver Wi-Fi from space where you never need a cell tower to connect, to deliver energy from space where you never have to plug your phone in, and it trickle charges, and you can use that energy over time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
You build a satellite on the planet, you have to build it bulletproof, which is like 60% of the cost, because it has to be able to be folded into a tight little ball that fits into the top of a rocket, and it's an incredibly violent ride to space. The vibrations and the g-forces would break apart anything that's not bulletproof, okay? So that takes a lot of money and time. Then in seven minutes,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
That satellite is in space, in this beautiful sanctity of space where there's nothing to get in its way. And then it has to unfold like an origami. But if any of those explosive bolts or pulleys or levers go bad or don't unfold properly because of the violent ride to space, it's a total loss. And that's a total loss of like $350 million to $500 million for a satellite.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And then, adding to that, when you run out of gas, it becomes space junk, meaning now you gotta build a whole new satellite in the old model. What Spacebuilt does is we, think of it like a Lego box. Instead of building a delicate Lego ship, then putting it on the handlebars of your bike and going over a rocky road to your destination,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And back and forth. Just like the Federalist Papers argued, should America have a Navy or not have a Navy? And it wasn't a no-brainer. It was a real argument that a Navy is too expensive. Why would we spend money on a Navy? Because your survival depends on it. If somebody who is not your friend decides to use it as a weapon against you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
or building a ship in Kansas and dragging it across the Appalachian Mountains to put it in the ocean, you build the ship in the ocean. Or you take the Lego blocks up to space and you snap them together in space assembly and manufacturing. So all those Lego blocks now are resilient. You drop a box of Legos on the floor and none of them break because there's no coupling loads.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
and you can snap it together and you're just fine. Same is true with space. We can load all these Lego parts in any rocket, send it up to space, snap them together using robotics and laser communication so our engineers on the ground can see and operate just like a surgeon can do surgery from LA to New York because of fiber optic cables. Laser communication is like fiber optic cables on steroids.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And now you can build satellites for cheaper, okay? You don't have to spend all the money to make them bulletproof. You can build them bigger, and with big aperture and big power, now you can get big return on investment.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And when you need to put in a new computer, you just slide out the old computer board, slide in a new one with those robotic mechanics that are servicing the satellites, and you can upgrade indefinitely in this beautiful sanctity of space.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So to get to your question about solar power from space, and again, I can put you in touch with people that have been working this for decades because it has been known that we could do this. The physics have been known. And now we're at a place where it's been demonstrated.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
The X-37, the Air Force space plane that used to be secret, that's not secret anymore, it's been doing experiments showing what I'm going to describe right now. And what you do is that the intensity of that sun's power, you build a solar array that can absorb that sun's power, and then you translate it into a radio wave,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
and then you beam that radio wave down to Earth, and it's received by what's called a rectenna, and then you turn it back into electricity, and you're done. I mean, it's that simple. But because it's a radio wave, it is not diminished by the weather, okay? Or the atmosphere, or the gravitational field, or any of the things that can sometimes prevent energy from getting to the Earth.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So solar, and this is the other piece of it, the demonstrations that we see are at efficiency levels that we are not used to right now. Any electricity that you're getting right now, whether it's created by wind energy, solar energy, nuclear energy, fossil fuel energy, wave energy, you name it, the technique for delivering the electricity that's powering these lights right now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And you're lucky to get in the high 20s, low 30s of efficiency. Meaning by the time you create the energy at a power plant and you bring it across the power lines and you bring it into your house, the heat dissipation and the efficiency loss, you're barely getting to 20%, okay, or 30% at best. Solar panels, the same way. They're low efficiency, but you know, we make it work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Solar panels are problematic too, and so is wind because it's not always windy. You know, President Trump talks about this all the time. And there's day and night and weather. So if you're up in Alaska, solar panels don't work when it's dark, you know, half the year. So the forms of energy we're going to see coming in are going to be – a tapestry of all of these things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So this goes back to why I have found what I consider to be the most brilliant engineer that many of us in the military have been watching for decades, and I joined him to start this company, Spacebuilt. It's an infrastructure and a logistics company, because the nation that dominates space will be like those small nations back in the day, like Spain, Portugal, or England.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
It's gonna be helium-3 when we start mining the asteroids in the moon for helium-3 that is such an efficient and effective clean energy way of producing a massive amount of energy for Earth. Hydrogen, even though hydrogen can be dangerous, There are ways of controlling it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Nuclear is on a path to where the odds of this chair going off high order are larger percentage-wise than those nuclear reactors going off high order, these modular small nuclear reactors that can power a city, okay, or a home, or a cluster of homes, anywhere on the planet. But 20% efficiency in the current method of delivery of energy
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
The experiments in space are showing the promise of initial efficiency levels of 80% efficiency. By taking the energy of the sun and transforming it into a radio wave, the radio wave coming down to Earth, safe for humans, received into a rectenna and then transferred back into electricity, you're receiving it at 80% efficiency. So now you're talking about an immediate jump of 60% efficiency.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So now you're talking about what you see with computers, where back in the day, computers would fit on the third floor of a skyscraper and be millions of dollars. And now in everybody's pocket, is a computer that for 500 to 800 bucks that blows away anything that was 50 years ago.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
This journey of more capability at lower cost is gonna come to a market near you, a theater near you in the form of electricity. And it's gonna transform. And now people in Central Africa can afford electricity and they can afford information that is not blocked by anybody if we can figure out how to triangulate truth. Back to what you do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Triangulating truth, all of this is meaningless if we as human beings can't figure out what is true.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
A rectenna. It's like an antenna, but it's basically for radio waves to be absorbed and then turned back into electricity.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So again, this will come in stages, and this is where there is more to the story. And I'll talk about Edison and Tesla in a minute on this question. So in the early days, if I had to guess, and again, you don't want to guess on these things because you want the free market to make these decisions. You want the innovators that actually build the stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
All they had to do is invest in a dominant technology of shipbuilding and deep-sea navigation, and they dominated the global economy, dominated for a hell of a long time. Space is gonna be the same way. So when you ask me, which countries do you look at? It's not about the country or even how much money they have. It's about how they develop the technology.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So in space built, we're building the infrastructure to be able to build things large enough to accept that sun energy and then translate it into a radio wave, beam it down to Earth. We aren't going to build that. We're going to put it together. We are the construction company. You're the logistics.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
We are the logistics and infrastructure company that can build anything in space because the things we build are modular and can be reused. Never space junk again. Right. And really, our marketing now is there are companies that are satellite operators that want to buy a satellite to perpetuate the market of satellite TV, satellite radio. And all their satellites are coming due.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
They built them 15 years ago, and they're all running out of gas, and so they're all becoming space junk. So they have a choice.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
They can either build another satellite just like that for half a billion dollars that will become space junk in 15 years from now, or the technology on it will become irrelevant in five years if we invent a new computer board, or they can buy our fleet of satellites where that computer board can be upgraded, and when it runs out of gas, you just refuel it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So now back to your question about how solar power from space will evolve. I don't know. But here's what I would predict. And again, predicting is dangerous business, and so I don't want to do it. But what we know we could do right now
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
if we can build in space affordably, based on the model of this company and why this company exists, is we could have solar power transmitted into radio waves beamed down to a rectenna that's right by a power plant and ported into the power lines so that we still are seeing a return on investment in the current structure.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And the current structure is a power plant with all these power lines that are very expensive. Some are underground, some are above ground. But if the American people could look at how much money taxpayers and private companies put into the power grid and the delivery of electricity, it is astounding.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Water's the same way, and we can get into that because I was the president of Genesis Systems, which is a water generator company, but pulling water out of the air affordably. So now you can have a water generator, like an air conditioner, any spot on the planet without the need for electricity, solar power alone. We can get to the water, but back to electricity.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
What I think will happen in the first days of solar power from space is, A power company will have a big power plant that is a huge investment. They haven't seen the full return on investment of that coal power plant or nuclear power plant and all the power lines that go to all the homes that that power plant serves.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But they'll put up a rectenna because the cost will be low enough that they can invest in that and say, okay, here's another source of power in case the power plant goes down and we will port that electricity into the power lines But eventually, what we may see is what was revealed when Edison and Tesla were first delivering electricity to the human race.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And you touched on this earlier in our conversation where you said, well, the Rockefellers, the way to monetize or to be able to monitor how much electricity you're using and getting money from you was a dial that was run by the electrical wire that was going through it. And I could come and read the meter at your house and say, you owe me a hundred bucks because how much electricity you used.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
They, back in the day, didn't know how to monetize radio waves. Well, we know how to monetize them now. You know, your cell phone. We know exactly how much data you use, and I know exactly how much to charge you for it. Or your satellite TV. Or your, you know, your Starlink antenna getting broadband from Elon Musk's constellation. So we know how to monetize radio waves. That's a no-brainer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But when Edison and Tesla were doing their little competition, Edison won out initially because it was easy to monetize his. Tesla was, I think, the superior thinker, and AC power and DC power are thanks to Edison and Tesla, okay? But there was something else Tesla did that looked like magic that did not get put into play, and it was the beaming of power, okay?
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So a country as small as New Zealand, which is a very aggressive space country. I mean, Rocket Lab started out of New Zealand. And they could dominate the global economy. What is Rocket Lab? Rocket Lab is a company that was started in New Zealand. Its American headquarters is in Long Beach, California. And they build rockets. to go to space, like Elon Musk does, reusable rockets.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
What is interesting about this is that it didn't get put into play because, again, Edison was a better marketer and it was easy to monetize his invention. And we're still stuck in that paradigm. But it's a paradigm of low efficiency. It's a paradigm of danger.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
We still put little baby plugs in our electrical outlets because if you stick your finger in that thing or you stick a knife into it, you're gonna die. and that ain't good, and it's right there. The bathtub and the blow dryer, you're gonna die. That's not good. But we live with it because that's what we came in, and that's what everybody, it's back to innovation. Why haven't we innovated?
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But what's interesting about what Tesla did with beaming energy is a lot of that literature went into the hands of the Trump family. President Trump talks about this, okay? And so we've now proven, Tesla's original experiments on beaming energy using the Air Force Research Lab and the X-37, beaming solar power from the sun down to a rectenna on Earth.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
The Navy is also pursuing this, and there's a lot of companies pursuing it, more so than you might know. and many countries pursuing it because they see the promise of a high efficiency of delivery of electricity that will usher in a portion of the new energy market and deliver it to any person on the planet, no matter where they live.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
How is this not a bigger discussion? Because of the price of entry in the past. But it's what Jeff Bezos has said in the past. If we do this right with space, we can turn the earth into the park and all heavy industry is off earth. And we can... God gave us a universe of minerals and resources that are the same as exist on the planet in the form of asteroids and celestial bodies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
They're all within reach of the earth right now. And so one of the reasons we haven't done it is one, the price point was too high, okay? So you needed a government that was actually willing to invest in it. But now those price points are coming down.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And why Spacebuilt, this company, is here is because we can bring the price of construction in space down 10x, and that will start opening up business cases for all of these technologies to be able to benefit mankind on Earth and do these things. But it's not just electricity for these data centers, for example. It's water. When a data center goes to some place, it needs water to cool.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
because the heat is what kills those data centers more so than anything else. And it needs electricity to power it, and it needs water to cool it. And they're stealing from the drinking water that is insufficient in these places already. So this is one reason Genesis Systems, the first company I was part of when I first got out of the military, and Spacebuilt, the second company, are linked.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Because water and energy, are what bring prosperity, health, and security to all people on the planet. And if we can tap into the unlimited source of water in the atmosphere, how much water is in the atmosphere, and the hydraulic cycle where the more water you pull out of the air, the quicker the water is evaporated out of the ocean, the engine of our water system.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And the perfect sustainability of our water cycle gives us an infinite source of water where we don't have to pollute our wells, our aquifers, and you can have an abundant source of clean water. And when you have clean water in Africa, and where I grew up, clean water was the most important problem. 50% of the deaths and illnesses across the globe are a result of dirty water or bad water.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And even in places like India, where the kids are forced to bathe in dirty rivers and drink dirty water, they have health issues their entire life that make them sick and ill and suffer until the day they die. The life expectancy where I grew up is in the 30s, the low 30s, even today. And that's why we had to come home so early. My father was so ill with malaria and malaria and dysentery.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So it's an example, though, of the fact that you don't have to be a big country. You have to have the right idea.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And I think the only reason I didn't have a lot of those things is because they started going over to Africa when I was four months old. And I think my immune system was built there and why I don't get sick, I think.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But it goes back to the fact that if you can bring clean water and affordable energy to anybody on the planet without the need for a water system that drills into the ground and depletes an aquifer, or the aquifer gets polluted by these forever chemicals,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
If you can have a source that draws fresh, clean water from the air anywhere on the planet, and you have energy for people and information for them to build their own economy and throw off the shackles of tyranny and slavery, you have ushered in the golden age. And that's what President Trump is allowing us to do now. And these innovations are gonna change the world.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Well, here's the reason it hasn't been done before is because the energy, the laws of thermodynamics don't change. And using like an air conditioning system or a condenser or a dehumidifier as a method, it's like five gallons of diesel for one gallon of water. So the efficiency is not there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But what we did at Genesis Systems, what these brilliant engineers did is they found a way of tricking Mother Nature. where they used a liquid desiccant to be able to make the liquid desiccant so attractive to water in the air that all you do is have to have a very light fan blowing water over a sieve that's filled with this liquid. And the sieve is like a sponge.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Okay, this water, or the liquid desiccant is like a sponge. Imagine there's one gallon of liquid in this sieve, and the air flows over it. That liquid will swell up to 100 gallons. 99 of the gallons of that liquid is pure water. Then you move it into another batch, and you change the thermal characteristics of the liquid, and that's where the proprietary and...
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
trade secrets and intellectual property come in. You change the thermal properties of that liquid, and now the liquid wants to give up the water. And so it takes very little energy to absorb the water and then release the water. And so it's in this batch cycle like an engine.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
It's swelling up to 100 gallons, getting rid of 100 gallons, swelling up to 100 gallons, getting rid of, and then now you benefit from water. And it scales. So the city of Tampa, for example, as I was transitioning from that company, which by the way, that system of water management is what we're gonna use in space habitats.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And we can talk about, again, these companies are connected, not only for the benefit of the human condition of water and electricity and energy, and information, but also for human space flight and human habitats in space, and we'll get to that in a second. But now the city of Tampa was partnering with Genesis Systems to build a 30 million gallon a day
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So now you don't have to do desal, you know, the desal is taking ocean water and turning it into drinking water, but then the heavy metals and the brine that come out of the ocean were killing the Tampa Bay, you know, and killing, you know, it is just not sustainable. It's not good for the economy. And the stuff that you put into the landfills will kill the landfill for a thousand years.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So we have to be good stewards of this planet, and we have to figure out a way of getting water to people that need water, clean, fresh water, globally, scale it, but it has to be affordable. The energy equation has to be affordable. So the coupling of this water system, which is already affordable based on the technique of not using dehumidification or air conditioning,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
but rather a liquid desiccant that's like this sponge that can work for you, obeying the laws of physics and laws of thermodynamics, but also giving you clean water using a solar panel or affordable at scale, however much you need. In fact, it's on Amazon even right now. You can order one for your house that looks like an air conditioner and gives you clean water for your house.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
You can get one on Amazon? Yeah, go take a look. They're still expensive, and they're still in the beta phase, but it's an example of innovation that is now breaking through, but only because the founder, David Stuckenberg, is one of these mighty men of our age that is not dissuaded by anything, and he's a bona fide genius on every front.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And it takes people like Dennis Wingo, the chief technology officer of our company, doing this stuff in space, and a guy like David Stuckenberg breaking through. But here's how the system prevents innovation. Elon Musk wanted to buy that water system to get the water out of the humid air of Boca Chico in southern Texas to cool his launch pad because of all that concrete.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
You remember how the first launch destroyed all that concrete and he needed literally tons of water for every launch. But there isn't sufficient water and the ocean water wasn't going to work because of the toxicity and the salt and just all the corrosion. So he wanted to buy a Genesis Systems and build up a million gallons for each launch. And the state of Texas said, forbidden. Why?
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
They couldn't figure out how to tax the water. Are you shitting me? Because the air belongs to the government. This is the major problem we have right now, which infests innovation, it infests truth that you're trying to tell, and it is the administrative state that thinks it knows better, and it will basically forbid somebody from saying something they don't want them to say.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
our rights to free speech. They will prevent you from building something if they haven't figured out how to tax it, or they don't understand the technology and they won't even let you innovate. So the journey for innovators to actually break out, not to mention that the municipalities, their main source of wealth is the taxation of electricity, the taxation of water. water and electricity.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Imagine now you can decouple from the municipalities the revenue of water. Now, there has to be some taxation because if you, like the water generator, you generate, let's say, 200 gallons a day for your home. But that water has to go down a drain after you're done showering or flushing the toilet. So you need to pay for that infrastructure of the drains and then the cleaning of that water.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So there still has to be some taxation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Sure. There you go. But this is why, because Elon Musk was not going to put it down the drain. He was going to reuse that water every launch. But they were like, how do we tax it? And so it was going to take them 10 years and studies to figure out what this was.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And I know that's... Yeah, yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Yeah. But, you know, the trick to these journeys of getting around the bureaucracy and the administrative state that grows so big that it now thinks it's smarter than you and it has the right to tell you what you can do, what you cannot do, this form of slavery, which is not only in the form of what you can say and what you can do, but also in the form of taxation. and in the form of inflation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
The fact that we get taxed on our land every single year. So I bought my land and then I get taxed on it every year. Clearly I don't own that land because if I don't pay those taxes, the government comes and takes the land away. I get taxed on my car every year, depending on your state. You have to pay a tax based on the value of the car that you already paid for and pay taxes on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
A form of slavery, a form of taxation without representation. And we all just kind of go along.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
when we don't need to. So on many levels, innovators need to build and understand the bureaucratic state, the administrative state, and whether it's marketing in the taxation so the government gets their slice, but also baking into it a method where it uplifts the current infrastructure. So for example, the city of Tampa,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
being willing and looking at this and saying, we can't afford a desal plant, one, because it's too expensive and our people can't afford the cost, but two, it's polluting our landfills and it's destroying our Tampa Bay. So they wanna get away from something that is not sustainable and is bad for the environment. And they're willing to invest in a new technology that will dovetail in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So you build one that's small and eventually build one that supplies all your water needs. and then everybody's happy, but you gotta do it slowly and you need to partner with these institutions that are doing good things. But we shouldn't be giving the government a further taxation without representation just because they are Big Brother trying to tell us exactly how to suck the egg.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
We have to be Americans where we are independent and we are self-sufficient and we have certain rights that God has given us that are enshrined in our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. And people need to start by knowing that and investing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
They can invest in these kind of technologies that cut the cord from the administrative state, that allow us to live free and independent anywhere on the planet. Now we can start spreading out. You fly over the states and you look at all this desolate area. Why is it desolate? Because there's no water.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
If we can produce water anywhere and produce electricity anywhere without the need for terrestrial infrastructure or depleting an aquifer, right now we're about ready to deplete the aquifers in Central America and the breadbasket of the world because we are siphoning that water out at 10 times the rate Mother Nature puts it back in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Mother Nature puts it back in in the measuring in hundreds and thousands of years. and we're drying it out in tens of years. So that chicken is gonna come back to roost as well if we don't figure out the water system. So water, electricity, information are the groundwork of prosperity, health, and security. It's economic, which is downstream of security.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And space is gonna be the thing that enables the human race to truly usher in a new economy that turns to the heavens for our resources. I mean, that's a God thing. where God gave us brains and for the existence of all humanity, we have turned down and in for our solutions. And now we can turn out and up and look to God and the heavens for our resources and then the earth turns into a park.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
where we don't have to mine and scar the surface of the Earth. We don't have to have power lines that make an ugly skyline. We don't have to pollute our water. And we can let Mother Nature get back to its beautiful, perfect sustainability in our groundwater, in our environment, in the air. I mean, what a beautiful future.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And it's accessible to people in Central Africa that currently are crucified and enslaved. People in Central Asia, I mean, look at Micronesia and Indonesia and Malaysia. It may rain a lot, but the way the rain runs off, there's not enough water for the people that live in the highlands of those islands.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
It's a great question, and it goes to a deeper conversation that would be fun to unpack even in our time together today. And it's rooted in human nature, but I suppose the most iconic description of why was from President Eisenhower as he was leaving office, where he said, beware of the military-industrial complex. Now, in his private conversations, you know, the Congress was a part of that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And it is a travesty, the devastation of the human suffering that is created by a lack of adequate water. and all of it can be delivered through a bright mind and innovators that usher it in, and then government getting out of the way. That is the biggest problem with the American government.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
It gets in the way, and it does so because it thinks it's smarter and entitled to govern us in ways our Constitution never envisioned, and they hide behind safety, they hide behind sustainability, they hide behind health and equity, inclusion, diversity. It's all a ruse for government to have more control and more power and they divide us and they accuse us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And those are the calling cards of Satan right there. Accusation, division. We belong to each other and we are more in common with every culture on the planet and within America than we are different. And we need to start celebrating our commonality and celebrating our differences. and not fighting about it and letting people tell us we should hate you because you're a different color.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
We should hate you because you think differently. Just not true.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Well, for a couple of reasons. One is that it is actually a very efficient way of creating high intensity energy, a nuclear power plant. And it's actually probably a shorter journey because with the kind of lift weight
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
that Elon Musk is gonna be able to provide in that Starship that China is fast following, they will probably be able to deliver a nuclear power plant into space, because the technology of making them small and relatively lightweight is already here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
I mean, it's literally probably a year or two from being commercialized, where you'll see a nuclear power plant actually powering a town in Central America or in Central America, some state in America as a test case. And this is smart for China. They're doing it all.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Solar power from space is going to require building in space larger structures that can fit into the small tip of a rocket and assembling it in space. So this is why our company is so promising, is that when we can build large structures in space, then solar power becomes a business case that can close. But nuclear may be there first. Helium-3 might be there first, okay?
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But we need all of these pathways to be followed. All of these ideas that I've just described are, are just a handful of what will be part of the tapestry of energy in the future. And there will be others as well that you hear talked about, but have not yet come to operational capability. For example, there are some energy ideas that show promise, but it's for very low intensity energy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And we kind of use it already for like some of these Voyagers that go out to Jupiter and beyond. You wonder how they've been powered for 50, 60 years. And it's because it's a form of power that is very promising, but it's just a trickle of power. But that's how you could be powering devices like our cell phones.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Our cell phones are specifically designed for high-intensity power, where you've got to plug it into the wall, or when you go to the airport, you see everybody running for the power outlet because their phones are out of juice. It's hilarious. But they only require that because they're built to require that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
There are ways of building a piece of technology that requires such low energy to still give you the information you need without having to be a slave to an outlet. Man. But that takes time because the investment in all of this technology that is in the pocket of every person takes time to evolve and then move into a marketplace that's new. Because you first need that new source of energy,
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And then people start buying different devices.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And that's dangerous.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Yeah. So that's why, you know, for both of these companies, Genesis Systems and Spacebuilt, we've been in stealth mode until we felt like we were strong enough to come out because the attacks. And the biggest risk is our government.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
That is the biggest risk. These companies will adapt to it, and they will buy it and invest in it if they see that it gives them a future revenue stream. But the government will say, we're going to shut you down and do a study for 10 years. as other countries beat you to the punch.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And so I, you know, the military industrial congressional complex. And, you know, it's human. I say it's rooted in human nature because very good people can have good intentions. And I'll describe it like this. We have a problem as a nation, and we need airplanes. So we build an airplane, and it's the solution. And then everybody celebrates that solution.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
It can be applied to cars, to houses.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Yeah, so what I think he's referring to is quantum. So let's spend a couple of minutes on quantum because it's a fascinating topic. And I'll start by telling you what I think is the ultimate outcome of quantum for me. It is the evidence of God. And it's the evidence of the fact that we totally misunderstand and do not know even the beginnings of the complexity of the universe we live in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
that God has created us with such infinite complexity connected with the universe and our interior life, our relationship with God and with one another, that we are, again, we're like children crawling around, not even being aware of the world we're in. Einstein was right when he said, this theory of relativity that I'm giving you is wrong.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
but it's the best I can do in my lifetime to at least explain a small sliver of what we observe in reality, but it's totally wrong. and we know that now. So having said that, for me, this is the evidence of God, and it may explain a lot of the things that people see that they can't explain, okay?
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And I'll just describe, in fact, something everybody can read if they want to be aggressive about learning about quantum. Read about quantum computing. Read about quantum sensing. Read about quantum communication. And here's what we observe. We don't know why this happens, and we don't know how it happens.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Just think of a caveman, the first caveman that observed fire that started from a lightning bolt. He didn't know how it happened, he didn't know why it happened, but he knew it happened. And he knew that there was something dangerous about that because it burned up the tree, but it gave him heat. And he was fascinated. How can I use this to make my life better? And look where we've come, okay?
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
That's the stage we're at with quantum. It's like we have just seen a lightning bolt start a fire. And we can observe what's happening and some of the effects of that, but we have no clue why or how. So let's start with quantum sensing. Quantum sensing, and then we'll go to quantum computing, and then we'll go to quantum communication.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Quantum sensing is capable of detecting anything that moves on the Earth. And again, this is why space and quantum are gonna be such a powerful mixture of technologies that will change fate. and why we need to be leaders in this to defend our values. Because ultimately, all of this competition with China, Russia, anybody else is about who can protect their values.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
I don't wanna change China's values if they wanna do what they're doing, but I wanna sure as hell protect our values. So here it is with quantum sensing. Imagine now with the right quantum sensing, You can see and understand the precise velocity position of anything that moves down to a net or less Okay, so you can understand exactly what's going on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
And then there are companies that build that solution in every state. And they have congressional caucuses that support that solution. And then they have lobbyists that those companies hire to be in the halls of Congress whispering in the ears of the politicians that this is the only way. This is the way you go forward. Incrementally innovate in this solution.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
Okay, and you can do it with with incredibly low energy levels and low cost and This is why the ultimate strategic high ground of space is going to be so important in defending our values, defending our sovereignty, defending our culture, and defending our economy. So that's sensing. Let's talk about communication. Or let's talk about computation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
So I talked about, well, Microsoft making an announcement a couple months ago about their quantum computer. And it may have been in the breakfast or the earlier time that I mentioned this, if I haven't mentioned it with you. So they announced where they're at with quantum, and it is astounding.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
because they will be able to crack every code and every blockchain, everything we have ever invented to keep any secret. They will be able to know it almost immediately. And so there are no secrets. And yet the people that have this quantum capability can have the Fort Knox of security.
Shawn Ryan Show
#202 Steve Kwast – How China is Mining the Moon and Weaponizing Space
But for that quantum computation that can do all of this and turn AI into a super tool for humanity, you need to cool that quantum computer down to much less than one Kelvin, which is almost to the point where molecules no longer move at all, absolute zero. The best we can do right now with any form of efficiency is a hydrogen cooling technique, but that only gets you down to about one Kelvin.