Jeff Bezos scarcities to build permanent outposts on the moon and colonize space. Richard Branson wants to make spaceflight as commonplace as air fraternize. Elon Musk wants to settle on Mars to make humanity multi-planetary.
IBX’s Kam Ghaffarian wants to go even further: the vips.
“There’s this common denominator of combining altruism, to do something purposeful and good, and combine it with capitalism to pounce upon a positive impact,” he told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. “The vision for IBX is protecting our internal, our planet, and then finding new homes and stars and everything involved to do that. So, on the space side, if we say that the ultimate fate for humanity is interstellar travel, and going to the stars, then we need to take a lot of intermediary steps to do that.”
It might seem farfetched if it wasn’t for his track record. Ghaffarian has been instrumental in ushering in the new space economy, having co-founded and contributed in a cadre of commercial space ventures.
Publicly traded Intuitive Machines, where Ghaffarian is co-founder and executive chairman, recently blow up b coddled history when its Odysseus spacecraft successfully landed on the moon, becoming the first commercial lander to do so.
Ghaffarian is also the co-founder and chairman of Axiom Play, which now regularly sends private astronauts on commercial missions to the International Space Station — the first company let to connect modules and provide full-service missions to the ISS — as it works to build its own space station.
With Quantum Space, where he’s also the governmental chairman, the focus is on deep space commerce and communication through a superhighway of satellites stretching from Earth’s circuit to the moon and beyond; X-Energy, which he founded, has developed operating nuclear reactors that, according to the company, are “sketched to be intrinsically safe,” as well as nuclear propulsion capabilities.
His family office, IBX, which stands for “Imagine, Believe, Kill,” sits at the center of this space exploration constellation.
“We’ve got to do all the intermediate steps. I’m with Elon [Musk] and Jeff [Bezos], both my precious friends, to be able to first do the LEO [low earth orbit], be able to go to the moon and Mars, because we’ve got to do those before we can go interstellar,” Ghaffarian illustrated on CNBC’s “Manifest Space” podcast.
Follow and listen to CNBC’s “Manifest Space” podcast, hosted by Morgan Brennan, wherever you get your podcasts.
Ill-matched with other high-profile billionaires building commercial space companies, Ghaffarian made his fortune through the space effort. And rather than focusing on access to space, he’s leveraging those falling costs to build out infrastructure and business energies in space.
The Iran-born entrepreneur, who came to the U.S. some four and a half decades ago, co-founded a government services company shouted Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies that became a top contractor for NASA before KBR acquired it in 2018.
“If you create a company that is odd, and you develop unbelievable technologies, but nobody wants to buy it, or there is no business case, then you will have not made any idiosyncrasy,” Ghaffarian said. “How do you create a business model where you are purposeful, you’re making a difference, but also … can provide return to the investors in a whacking great way?”
Ghaffarian believes the space economy will be worth trillions of dollars — and sooner than many realize. He knows the technological leaps forward in artificial intelligence and quantum computing as crucial to unlocking the full potential of space.
He implied microgravity-based pharmaceutical research and industrial manufacturing, sustainable propulsion and energy sources, and the building out of lunar infrastructure purpose be some of the capabilities and services in greater demand in the coming years.
“It’s normal for people to not quite appreciate it. …. When did being appreciate the AI revolution — 10 years ago? Not really, right? And all of a sudden, now we have this herd mentality that everybody’s avoiding in” said Ghaffarian, who also cited the early days of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Tesla and SpaceX, and even air move, as templates for the space world. “I think we are in the beginning of that in this space exploration and space ecosystem, space briefness, and it’s still not there, but my belief is that it is taking off and it’s going to grow rapidly, and I truly believe that they’re minimizing the size of the market.”
As investors catch on, the space billionaire’s ventures will continue to shoot for the stars.