In this week's Stansberry Investor Hour, Dan welcomes Dave Lashmet back to the show. Dave is the editor of Stansberry Venture Technology, an advisory that takes a "venture capitalist" look at the market. Dave scours the market looking for little-known small-cap companies that are potentially producing the next wonder drug or technology.

Dave kicks things off by discussing the SpaceX IPO. He calls the company a "Tower of Babel," saying the best use case for Starlink is to replace cell phone towers. However, Starlink's satellites can only provide service for up to 1,000 people. In rural areas, this is fine, but larger cities and the surrounding areas would have higher demand. Additionally, Dave says that there's a 10-year gap between Earth-based and space-based communications. Unlike cell phone towers, satellites have to go through additional processes to ensure that they will function properly while they're in orbit. But in the midst of the IPO, Dave says that Alphabet subsidiary Google will be a major winner...

Because of the EchoStar purchase, Google owns a piece of Starlink and SpaceX. So Google will use SpaceX like dump trucks to carry messages. Google has Android in two-thirds of the world's smartphones, where they own the operating system for free in exchange for all the data they get from the smartphone customers, which are probably the top billion buyers in the world... Google also gets Maps and Search on iPhones... What do people want to find and where are they? That's still a pretty rich data stream. And if you're on one of their sites, they can hit you with ads. So Google's a monster... Google can use SpaceX's conduit, but Google can monetize it because they already own everything about the users that they sell ads to.

Next, Dave shares how the SpaceX IPO will result in many folks investing in 401(k)s to be holding shares of the company unintentionally and how that happens. And they'll have an unreasonable percentage of their portfolio owning a stock that isn't gushing cash. Dave then talks about how cameras will be the future of space. Sony's research and development division created a "four-color camera" that operates on the red, green, blue, and shortwave infrared spectrums. Infrared doesn't currently work in any functional capacity for everyday users, but for the companies that build telescopes, the next breakthrough was evident. And this technology can help with "seeing" better than other cameras...

From space, if you look at the world in shortwave infrared, there's no blue, there's no wave, there's no current. There's only black or ship or island. And it is by far the best sensor ever built, put in by far the best telescope ever built... So in a red/green/blue [spectrum] where all three colors make white if you turn the intensity all the way up [and] make black [turning] the intensities all the way down... everything's a zero, unless it's a ship. And then you get a precise picture of the ship... And it sees through cloud and fog and dust.

Finally, Dave breaks down "near space," the region of the atmosphere between the stratosphere and space. It's tricky to station anything there due to the high amount of air resistance and insufficient amount of air that could support the lift needed for wings, so there's little interest in going there. But one company Dave is looking at is developing the "basking shark" capable of enduring in near space. And if the U.S. government wants its "golden dome," it needs to go to this company. And Dave marvels at how space is able to improve many things on Earth that wouldn't be possible otherwise...

Space is incredibly valuable. The ability to make weather satellites actually useful is because we have the ability to reach space. Thirty years ago, weather satellites were horrific, and you never knew what was going to happen. Now we have stunning predictions about three days out, fairly accurate predictions about five days out, and a reasonable shot at seven days out. And our world is better because of that space capability... GPS and weather alone are pretty profound uses of space... [And] ships at sea or planes at sea that run into trouble aren't in trouble because they can get help. So space is lucrative and useful.

Click on the image below to watch the video interview with Dave right now. For the audio version, click "Listen" above.

(Additional past episodes are located here.)

This Week's Guest

Dave Lashmet is the editor of Stansberry Venture Technology, a monthly advisory that takes a "venture capitalist" approach to investing. He was one of the first employees at Stansberry Research back in the early days of the business. His unique insight into new technologies has led to some of the biggest gains in the company's history. Dave has spent 10-plus years teaching and writing about medicine and technology at major research universities. He has also conducted research at some of the most important facilities in North America, including Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Canadian Centers for Disease Control, just to name a few.

Dave returned to Stansberry Research in 2014 after a stint at a consumer-electronics company where he managed a team of experts. His work there took him around the world, delivering presentations in Germany, Taiwan, China, Canada, New York, and Los Angeles. He has even delivered a briefing before a congressional delegation. Dave is also an analyst for Stansberry's Investment Advisory.

Dan Ferris:                 We're going to get spaced-out, today. We're going to learn about investing in space. And we're not going to do it by telling you to buy SpaceX – we're going to tell you the opposite. Our guest today, Dave Lashmet, knows more about investing in space than anyone I know, than anyone I've ever heard of, frankly. Other people might know more about the science – Dave knows more about both the combination of the science and the finance, and which companies are doing the most valuable work in space. And he's going to tell you about a bunch of them today.

He's got a presentation he's working on that'll be out soon. You can learn more about it by going to spacexventure2026.com, and you can sign up for the presentation there. When that presentation comes out, man, take notes.

You'll learn so much about investing in space, because it's a real thing. You don't want to deal with SpaceX, but it's a real thing. spacexventure2026.com. So let's do it, let's talk with our guest, Dave Lashmet. Let's do it right now.

Dave, welcome to the show. It seems you were here only yesterday.

Dave Lashmet:            No, it wasn't yesterday.

Dan Ferris:                 No, several weeks ago.

Dave Lashmet:            [Laughs]

Dan Ferris:                 Anyway, it's always good to see you, and I know that when I see you, you've got something on your mind that is just – that you're dying to tell us. I find today's topic very interesting. We're going to talk mostly about SpaceX, and whatever else is on your mind, by all means. But we have to start with SpaceX, because of the sheer insanity of it, of a $1.75 trillion market cap, and they're talking about offering $75 billion worth of stock. Which that proportion in itself is an interesting part of the story, but biggest IPO, bigger than the Saudi Aramco IPO.

And, you know, if things go a certain way, it'll wind up in 401(k)s after six or eight months, or however long it takes. I assume that your message is, "Please, for the love of god, don't buy this stock when it goes public." [Laughs] I assume that's your basic message, here. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Dave Lashmet:            Well, so I think the company's a "Tower of Babel," which I'm happy to explain. But Nasdaq just changed the rules, so an IPO hits the index in 15 days.

Dan Ferris:                 Oh, 15, nice, wow.

Dave Lashmet:            So, 15 days from IPO, the ETFs are going to have to eat it. They're going to have to eat it. So, as a trade, it's musical chairs. As a company, it's the Tower of Babel.

Dan Ferris:                 All right, so, why is it a Tower of Babel?

Dave Lashmet:            It's a Tower of Babel because it needs more and more and more capex to do less and less and less. So, it's not quite the tragedy of the commons, but it's what we would call a negative network effect. The more people that join Starlink, the less effective Starlink will be.

Dan Ferris:                 Really? The opposite of the network effect.

Dave Lashmet:            Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. So, at any given time, if you only had one ring of satellites around the whole earth, then you'd have one over New York City at one time. Technologically, it's basically a 3.5G tower on the way to being a 4G tower on the way to being a 4.5G tower. By spec, those serve about 1,000 people. So, while one is over New York, it serves 1,000 people. How many people are within 75 miles of New York?

Dan Ferris:                 More than 1,000, I'm just going to say. [Laughs]

Dave Lashmet:            More than 1,000, and then, two minutes later, that same satellite is over open water. And how many cruise ships are 150 miles off New York City? None of them. We're not going on oceangoing voyages to London anymore. So – [crosstalk]

Dan Ferris:                 They still do that, but it's not very frequent.

Dave Lashmet:            Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I was just flying back from Amsterdam and there was an American couple in line complaining about customs and I'm like, "Or you could take the ship for six weeks. Shut up and wait six minutes."

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. [Laughs]

Dave Lashmet:            But fundamentally, the problem with these satellites is that, unless it's a few rural users, per layer of satellite, they can only serve about 1,000 people with decent Internet. So, they've added more and more layers, they're up to, like, 9,600 satellites.

Dan Ferris:                 Wow.

Dave Lashmet:            I wanted to call it a candelabra, but that's way too hoity-toity. And really, it's a capital trap, it's a capital sinkhole. Year after year after year, they pour money into launch and more money into connectivity. They're pouring money evermore to put evermore satellites with evermore capability, but they're not really monetizing it. Like, they lose money every year, some of the money they're losing is because they're trying to launch an AI division while everyone else is trying to launch an AI division, with no history of ever doing anything in AI.

So they're sort of the last fire of the most expensive chips, and then trying to create a business out of it? Good luck with that. Even if that were not so, if you look at what they make in connectivity and what they make in launch, and then add capex, not just their internal year-by-year research and development costs and operating costs, but if you also add the capex for that year, they're underwater, they're underwater, they're underwater, they're underwater, and they're underwater. Like, every year, they throw a bigger pile of capex at both connectivity and launch.

And they're claiming losses in launch, but that's not true, because they carry payloads for profit. They're only losing money because launch is sponsoring connectivity. They're getting a sweetheart for connectivity from their own launch division. So you just have to bundle them together.

Dan Ferris:                 OK, I see. So, in other words, SpaceX and Starlink are inseparable.

Dave Lashmet:            They are inseparable. Because how would you put the satellites up without having your own rocket launch capability?

Dan Ferris:                 Sure, yeah, sure. And you contend that it's just, it simply costs too much to continue launching and putting up payload that you can never, what, you can never generate enough cashflow to justify it, or even to break even, it sounds like.

Dave Lashmet:            Precisely, but over time, it gets more and more. As they aim for the stars, they throw evermore money at the problem. So, Porter, in his new book Warren's Mistake, which I'll hold up – Warren's Mistake, Porter Stansberry – talks about Warren Buffett's investment in a railroad. Well, a railroad has rolling stock, and they have rails that rust, fundamentally. So, you wear out that infrastructure over time and you always have capex. What SpaceX is doing is spending more and more and more on capex, each year. It's an ever-increasing sinkhole.

So, I don't know what they're doing. The reason I called it a Tower of Babel is because the vast use case for these satellites is to replace cellphones. But cellphone towers are where you want them. Nobody puts a cellphone tower in the middle of the Mojave, because they'll never monetize it. But everybody tries to put, well, these satellites do cross over the Mojave. When they cross over the Mojave, there's no users. And when they hit New York City, there's way too many users.

So they basically have four layers of flying cellphone towers. At any given time, there could be four that you could reach. Well, that's enough Internet for 4,000 people, which is great for rural Utah, and is really bad for New York City, Boston, San Francisco, anywhere that there's lots of users who would want connectivity. So they're never going to beat the towers, they'll never beat the towers. They're also always 10 years behind a tower. And I can explain why.

Dan Ferris:                 Technologically?

Dave Lashmet:            Yeah, because, say, we come out with LTE 4.5G, right? It takes two and a half years to fully build out that network and make sure that it works completely as a network and doesn't have software glitches or hardware glitches, stuff that you don't expect. So, two and a half years after launch, you truly, truly know that it's space-worthy, but it's not space-worthy. Then you have to optimize the electronics so that you want to really use the technology from Year 2.6 to Year 5, which is more efficient in power. Before you commit solar panels and batteries in space, you want the most efficient version.

Then you have to take that chipset and harden it against radiation, because you don't have an atmosphere. That's another two-and-a-half years. And then, you have to have the entire constellation in orbit, before they can continually support users. And this 10-year gap between space communications and communications on the earth has been true for 40 years, and looks like it will be true for the next 10. So, people are talking about putting 5G towers into space in 2030, by the time that we'll be at 6G, right?

Dan Ferris:                 Right, sure.

Dave Lashmet:            So, it's just not, besides the launch risk of stuff blowing up on the launchpad –

Hold on just a second, I have an intruder while I'm on a call. OK, my intruder is controlled.

Besides the fundamental launch risk and the launch costs, you just have to have everything space-worthy before it goes into space. And then you have to build out an entire network.

Dan Ferris:                 I see. So you're always behind, you're spending ever-larger sums of money, it sounds like, and you can't monetize enough to generate enough cashflow to justify it [crosstalk].

Dave Lashmet:            So I have real numbers around this, OK?

Dan Ferris:                 OK, let's hear real numbers.

Dave Lashmet:            So, in 2025, they spent 8 billion in capex on space and connectivity. But they also spent $20 billion buying Spectrum from EchoStar. And that deal was announced in November 2025, but the FCC didn't approve it until May 12th of this year. So now, SpaceX is going to have to justify a $20 billion expense for Spectrum. And if they treat it as an identifiable and tangible asset and say that it has a 10-year life, they make sneak and call it 12, but fundamentally, because they have a low-earth-orbit ("LEO") satellite constellation, not a geostationary – those just don't have the lifetime.

So, five years and five more years is two full constellations going up, crashing, going up again, crashing again. So, $20 billion over 10 years is $2 billion a year. So they spent $8 billion plus $2 billion. Last year, they spent $10 billion in capex. So, last year, they claimed to have made $2 billion in that division, in the connectivity division – well, in 2025, they claimed $4.4 billion in connectivity, but $657 million in losses on launch. So basically, they're in for about a little less than a billion a quarter.

But in 2026, it's gotten worse. They have more losses in launch, so they have to eat, this year, they have to eat more than $10 billion in capex. So, they want to get the EchoStar spectrum, so that you can use direct-to-device from your phone, so that you can call the satellite and use a satellite call, make a satellite phone call instead of a carrier. Which is great for the first 4,000 people in a metropolitan area. After that, it will just completely degrade.

One way we can see this is that they're making less revenue per subscriber in what they get out of Starlink. So, in 2023, they got $99 per Starlink customer per month. Now they're at $66.

Dan Ferris:                 Whoa. Whoa. That's a hit.

Dave Lashmet:            Right. They have more users, they have four times more users, but they're making a third less per user, so the math is bad. So that's why it's a Tower of Babel. They're going to put more and more things up, in order for people to babble, but in the end, they can never win.

Dan Ferris:                 OK, wow, and –

Dave Lashmet:            So then you should ask me who will win.

Dan Ferris:                 OK. [Laughs] Gee, Dave, who will win?

Dave Lashmet:            So, I think that because of the EchoStar purchase, Google owns a piece of Starlink and SpaceX. So, Google will use SpaceX like dump trucks to carry messages. Google has Android in two-thirds of the world's smartphones, where they own the operating system, for free, in exchange for all the data they get from the smartphone customers. Which are probably the top, you know, billion buyers in the world. because they bought smartphones.

And they buy stuff, and they buy electronic stuff, and they buy software stuff, because they're Android users. And we know how much Google makes, so, 2025 free cash flow for Google was 73 billion bucks.

Dan Ferris:                 It's amazing, isn't it?

Dave Lashmet:            Google also gets maps and search on iPhones. You have to be in their app for them to get the data, based on Apple's new rules, but search and maps gives you a lot. What do people want to find and where are they, that's still a pretty rich data stream. And if you're on one of their sites, they can hit you with that. So, Google's a monster. So I think that Google's web also would get emergency backup through satellite, if, say, some large Asian country cut off the Internet cables to Japan, you know, to have a non-cabled version of connectivity through space might be useful to Google, as well.

So, Google can use SpaceX's conduit, but Google can monetize it, because they already own everything about the users that they sell ads to. The other winner is Apple. So, Apple cut a deal with Amazon, because Amazon's buying Globalstar, which owns two Spectrum chunks, which are imbedded in every iPhone. So right now, your iPhone will have a satellite, if you're out of Wi-Fi range and out of cell range. That's Globalstar's spectrum. Globalstar satellites, Globalstar's ground station.

Apple didn't want to be in the satellite business, but they're letting Amazon buy Globalstar. So, Amazon and Blue Origin will launch satellites for Apple. What Amazon gets out of the deal is the top 250 million users who bought iPhones, in the world, every year. It's probably a 450-million-person network.

Dan Ferris:                 Right, I see where we're going, here. So –

Dave Lashmet:            And if you want to connect, they'll get your GPS data, and Amazon is already a monster. They're already a monster. Their 2024 to 2025 free cash flow was $26 billion. This year, they're spending an extra 26 billion bucks on AI chips, because everybody wants them, so it costs Amazon more to build them up for Amazon Web services. But they still are free cash flow positive, even this year.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. So what we're saying, here, is whether through commerce, Amazon, or advertising, Google, or – and Android and the maps and all the rest of it and –

Dave Lashmet:            Hardware.

Dan Ferris:                 Hardware, thank you – through Apple, the relationship, that's – the thing that creates the moat for each of those three businesses, that's the relationship that allows them to monetize.

Dave Lashmet:            Exactly.

Dan Ferris:                 Starlink and SpaceX don't have any of that. All they have are a satellite and a – [crosstalk]

Dave Lashmet:            They're a dump truck. If you build a new building, the guys who own the dump trucks are not the ones who make the money.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, there you go. I see. Interesting. It's funny, because, God, it just underscores what we already knew about those businesses, Apple and Amazon and Google, and we could certainly name others.

Dave Lashmet:            Can you guess Apple's 2025 free cash flow?

Dan Ferris:                 I should know that off the top of my head and I really don't. Is it $100 billion yet? [Laughs]

Dave Lashmet:            It is. It's $98.77 billion, for 2025.

Dan Ferris:                 It's incredible, isn't it?

Dave Lashmet:            That's free cash.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. It's incredible. It's amazing. These are the most cash-gushing, wide-moat incredible businesses ever created in the history of humanity. It's just unbelievable.

Dave Lashmet:            Yeah, and they're not in business to lose money. And SpaceX, weirdly, is in business to lose money. So, about the only value of the stock is because the ETF has to eat it, and the bigger the IPO price, the more that everyone's 401(k) will be forced to buy it 15 days after IPO. So what's ironic is that no one will buy the stock and everyone will own it.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, float-adjusted, but, yeah. Right. It'll be more just like a $75 billion market cap, instead of a $1.75 trillion [one], because it'll be float-adjusted. But your 401(k) absolutely will be stuffed with as many shares as they need to buy. And then, on the back of that, it'll be Anthropic and OpenAI and other things probably stuffed in there, as well. Good – you know.

Dave Lashmet:            [Laughs] You almost said a bad word, Dan.

Dan Ferris:                 [Laughs] Yeah.

Dave Lashmet:            About the AI stocks.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, yeah. Stuff. Stuff is stuffed in there, that's all I have to say. And if you're a typical 401(k) holder, you are buying this stuff. It's so weird. What a weird world. If somebody had told you that it would turn out this way, when John Bogle invented the first big index fund, you would've said, "Really? Naw, it'll be fine. Most people can't beat the market, so they should just buy the index anyway."

And that's been true for most people, but there's something wrong with stuff, like – it's one thing for all the biggest companies to be the ones we – Apple and Google and Microsoft and even, what are the other, Broadcom, Berkshire Hathaway, Meta, or the other big, you know, Alphabet, of course. It's one thing to wind up having 40% of your money in those, OK? That is one thing. It is another thing entirely to have I don't even know how much – a percent or two or three or five, eventually, into stuff that's, like, mega-cap garbage, basically, right?

Cash-burning, mega-cap garbage, that's – I don't know. I don't know if John Bogle anticipated this [laughs] I guess is what I'm saying. We'll see. We'll see how it all turns out. We certainly have had [crosstalk] –

Dave Lashmet:            Well, it's such a weird transaction fee. People who buy SpaceX at IPO have an opportunity to sell it to the ETFs.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. Like, you're the exit liquidity, yeah.

Dave Lashmet:            But that's all, it's a trade, it's not an investment, and the trade is only if everything works great. How many people really are really good at a random 15-day trade? Nobody. The banks will buy it, because the banks will be the ones to sell it to the ETFs.

Dan Ferris:                 Right, the people like the Goldman Sachses of the world who are mysteriously on the right side of absolutely everything, they will make money on it. And you and I will provide the exit liquidity in our 401(k)s. That is what will happen. That is what often happens, and it's happening here, too. So you like, as a space trade – I want to be clear, you like Alphabet and you like Apple.

Dave Lashmet:            Oh, I have plenty of space trades, which is why I'm wearing the Wallops space shirt.

Dan Ferris:                 Oh, right.

Dave Lashmet:            No, I just think, in the connectivity matrix, there'll be two groups. There'll be the Samsung/Android/SpaceX group and there'll be the Amazon/Apple/Globalstar group. And Globalstar will get absorbed by Amazon and will probably change its name, of the space connection, to Globalstar, because it's a cool name. And Amazon will do what Amazon will do, Apple will do what Apple will do, and they'll both make money. Google will make money because it's Google, and SpaceX will just continue to take dump trucks full of hundreds and pour them into a bonfire.

Dan Ferris:                 It's funny how things don't change. SpaceX and Starlink, they're like the fiber-optic layers, man. They're just – they'll lay all the fiber-optic cable, then they'll go bankrupt [laughs] and that'll be the end of it. And then the rest of us will use it.

Dave Lashmet:            Right. Yeah, so I looked up structures, things you can spend capex on. Tottenham Stadium is a new stadium in London [that can hold] 62,000 screaming soccer fans. That opened in 2019. It cost a billion pounds, which is about $1.25 billion, at the time. The Sphere in Las Vegas, have you been there?

Dan Ferris:                 Oh, yeah. Love it.

Dave Lashmet:            $2.3 billion was the actual cost, turned on in 2023. Milan, Italy, just had to support the Olympics – that was about 3 billion euros, or about $4 billion. To build everything that they needed, from better rail hubs to a sledding arena and a hockey stadium. And the Chiefs are going to build a new stadium on the other Kansas City. They're leaving one Kansas City and going to the other Kansas City and building a new stadium. In 2031, that's a $3 billion build.

So, every year, well, in 2025, SpaceX spent as much money as it costs to build Tottenham Stadium, the Sphere, the Chiefs stadium, and every Olympic venue in Milan. And next year, SpaceX will spend more. They're already spending more. And their stuff falls out of the sky in Year 4. These stadiums have about a 30-year life, with reasonable upgrade. SpaceX's stuff only lasts, like, three and a half years, and then it burns up in the atmosphere.

Dan Ferris:                 Wow. [Laughs] Yeah, I've seen their stuff, it goes over my house, you can see the train just going through the sky.

Dave Lashmet:            Yeah, until they separate. When they just launched and they're finding orbit, they're like a long string, but then they'll slowly spread out over the – so that they get equal distribution over the planet.

Dan Ferris:                 Right, and they get higher, too. At that time, they're lower –[crosstalk], yeah.

Dave Lashmet:            Yeah, yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 So, you can see them clear as day. My wife and I did not know about this, and we were outside at 5:00 a.m. or something looking up, some months ago. And I said, "Are you seeing this?" and she said, "Yes. What is it?" We were like, "Hey, man, aliens."

Dave Lashmet:            The space aliens?

Dan Ferris:                 "It's happening." [Laughs]

Dave Lashmet:            Yeah, usually, it's leaving. Half the time, you see them retreating, not coming at you, which is good. They also don't get bigger and brighter, which is also a good sign that it's not trying to murder you.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, yeah. No, we noticed them coming into view and going out of view, so we were, like, "OK, well, go invade Colorado first and then come back and get us later." So... [Laughs]

Dave Lashmet:            I dedicated a building, yesterday, at my house that I just finished, and the last of my workers was here on Saturday. And to finish the last job, I had to pump up the wheelbarrow tire, but I had no idea what pressure it was. And I put 50 pounds PSI into the wheelbarrow tire, which blew up next to my worker. And we were pretty sure that the Russian drones were attacking, but it turned out that I did not read the side of the tire before pumping up the wheelbarrow. But that was my last Russian drone attack moment. Glad you had one, as well, with the overhead satellites.

Dan Ferris:                 Yep. Yeah, just a quick moment of paranoia and then it passed, but – interesting.

Dave Lashmet:            Can we talk future of space?

Dan Ferris:                 Sure.

Dave Lashmet:            So, there's lots of things you can do with space that are cool, that are not just throwing money into the orbit. So essentially, it's everything but trying to compete with cellphone towers. If you're trying to compete with cellphone towers on your own –

Dan Ferris:                 You're cooked, yeah, [crosstalk].

Dave Lashmet:            – with a 10-year time lag, you're probably going to lose. But space for observation is very clever and very fun. So I wrote, a couple months ago, and we're going to put it in a package, around a mistake in the Sony research department. Sony makes five cameras for the new iPhone, three in the back and two in the front. Just with that contract alone, that's 1.25 billion cameras a year.

So, in order to keep making new better cameras and beating out every other company that might want to make a camera that has to be better every year, Sony has scientists that get to do science things. And the smart guys in Tokyo decided to make a four-color camera: red, green, blue, and shortwave infrared. Unfortunately, that's completely fricking useless, because if you assign shortwave to a color, you get psychedelic. You no longer get useful image. because there's no such color.

Dan Ferris:                 Not that we can see, right?

Dave Lashmet:            Right. So, someday, maybe some AI might make sense of that, but for now, it's a really dumb idea. As a product, it was a fail. As a research project, it was really fun and they fundamentally reinvented a way to look at shortwave infrared.

Dan Ferris:                 Cool.

Dave Lashmet:            Which is used for high-speed apple examinations of actual fruit apples, to make sure they're not bruised under the skin. So that you don't want to put them on the supermarket shelf if they're all busted up and they're going to rot out. But it's not that big of a market. But they are so good at the back part of a cellphone camera, because they make 1.25 billion a year, that they have the best software and they have the best hardware. And so, they accidentally built the best shortwave infrared camera ever made. Teledyne was so impressed that they quit making shortwave infrared cameras and they just used the Sony mistake camera.

Dan Ferris:                 That's wild. I love that. I love the "we made a mistake and it turned into a brilliant thing." I love that story.

Dave Lashmet:            So what Teledyne did is give it to L3Harris had bought up Kodak's satellite division, and Kodak makes eyes in the sky for the three-letter agencies. They've done it for a long time, because they're camera people, right? So Kodak's really good at making telescopes and they have a massive brain trust, 1,500 people in Rochester, New York, who just make satellite cameras. That they've continuously employed, because they're that good, OK?

Dan Ferris:                 Wow. Is that the largest concentration of satellite – [crosstalk]?

Dave Lashmet:            Oh, yeah, by far. And Teledyne's also there. So there's a couple universities, RPI and Rochester has its own university, as well, Rensselaer Polytechnic, plus, Rochester. So there's universities, labs, plus, Teledyne, plus, Kodak, which is now L3Harris. It's like 3,500 people, just to do design and construction. So, a little company bought that telescope and put shortwave infrared into space. Shortwave infrared in space is so completely badass that it's unfathomably good. And unfathomable is a really fun word, because shortwave infrared sees no fathoms.

If you hold up a glass of water, a clear glass of water, shortwave infrared does not go through that. Water, even a glass of water, is black to shortwave infrared. So, from space, if you look at the world in shortwave infrared, there's no blue, there's no wave, there's no currents. There's only black. Or ship. Or island. And it is by far the best sensor ever built, put in, by far, the best telescope ever built.

Dan Ferris:                 That's so cool. So it senses things because everything around it is not there. That is awesome.

Dave Lashmet:            Yeah, so, in a red-green-blue where all three colors make white, if you turn the intensity all the way up, to make black, the intensity is all the way down. So, red 00000000, 10 bits of 0. Same for green, same for blue. Everything's a 0, unless it's a ship. And then you get a precise picture of the ship, perfectly everywhere. Shortwave infrared has two other cool capabilities. One capability is that it sees through cloud and fog and dust, because the shortwave infrared doesn't refract like a rainbow. It'll ricochet, but it won't refract.

Dan Ferris:                 So, not through water, but through clouds.

Dave Lashmet:            Right. When it nicks a water droplet, it keeps going. Whereas, when visible light hits a water droplet, it breaks left and then rainbows. So it sees through cloud, it sees through fog, it also sees through dust, because something weird about particle storm, particle size, so you can look through a dust storm, which is useful for desert observations, and you don't – there's no obstruction. So, nothing can hide in the day, you can't start an attack through fog, it's all completely visible.

The other thing that's cool is that, during the daytime, sunlight irradiates water vapor and oxygen vapor in the atmosphere, and that glows till about midnight, as the ozone becomes water, but it also releases an electrical charge, which glows in the shortwave infrared. So, darkness is not darkness to shortwave infrared, till about midnight. The fact that the sun was up during the day gives visible light, just not in something you can see. So those satellites work from dawn to midnight, every day, and they see through cloud and they see through sand and they see through fog.

And they see every ship at sea. [Laughs] So, it's just a really cool space – [crosstalk]

Dan Ferris:                 And, basically, you're telling me you found the company that now owns this technology.

Dave Lashmet:            Yeah, yeah, they own the satellite slots, they own the actual satellites, and they're putting up more and more and more of them. And somebody tried to buy them in 2020, and in exchange, the company who tried to buy them is called Intelsat, which was one of the first largest satellite companies. But in exchange, Intelsat offered ground stations. So, Intelsat's been around for 25 years and has ground stations all over the place, including about halfway between my house and your house. There's a massive complex of ground stations that Intelsat owns.

So this little company gets access to those satellites' ground stations. The data hits Amazon Web Services ("AWS"), and their massive, massive, massive cluster of chips has to find 0 versus any value at all, everywhere, all at once, because black is 0. So, they put up the satellites, but Amazon Web Services does the math.

Dan Ferris:                 OK, oh, I see, so they're using the compute of AWS to do this.

Dave Lashmet:            Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 Wow. So, this is just one space stock that you've got.

Dave Lashmet:            Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 This is just one.

Dave Lashmet:            Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 OK. You got another one? Do I dare ask? I'm loving this. I can't wait – [crosstalk]

Dave Lashmet:            Yeah, so, one of the other ones, we're calling it a bonus report, is about near space.

Dan Ferris:                 Near space.

Dave Lashmet:            So, near space has a technical term called the mesosphere – it's between the stratosphere and space. So, LEO is higher than that, but in the upper-upper atmosphere.

Dan Ferris:                 [Crosstalk]

Dave Lashmet:            Basically, between 50 and 100 miles up, everything's weird. Everything's weird because there's a lot of atmosphere. It will completely degrade your orbit, because there's so much air resistance, but there's not enough air to support a wing.

Dan Ferris:                 Ah, OK.

Dave Lashmet:            So, one company has the U.S. contract for near space, the European contract for near space, and the NATO contract for near space. One company has all three. So what they did is design a "shark," a basking shark, and the basking shark has little fins and a huge mouth, right? A basking shark is like a whale shark, except, it has a pointier nose. So it has a pointy nose, a huge mouth, it eats oxygen, that drives its engine, and then its fins can steer.

So it's a fully-maneuverable orbiting spacecraft in near space, and you'd think everybody would want to go there, but no one has gone there. All three contracts to explore are owned by the same company. And, you know, that's all very nice and good, but who really cares? So you can ask me who really cares.

Dan Ferris:                 Gee, Dave, who really cares?

Dave Lashmet:            The Golden Dome. If you want to build a golden dome across the United States, you have to control against near space and you also have to – if you're in near space, you can kill anything else in near space, if you have a shark up there. Plus, you can kill any aircraft or hypersonic, because you're way faster than any hypersonic. And you can't be shot down from the earth, because you can steer. You don't have a known trajectory, you can change your trajectory all the time, because it's low enough to have aerodynamics, but it's high enough to be in orbit. [Laughs]

It's crazy. It's a really cool play. And it's a monopoly. So, it was an interesting scientific monopoly when we picked it, and then Golden Dome came out. Golden Dome is supposed to cost in the trillions of dollars to build a ballistic shield over the United States continental.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, well, I don't know how far along anybody is on spending a dime on Golden Dome, but I love – [crosstalk]

Dave Lashmet:            It's in the budget.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. I love the sound of what this company does, and the fact that they're the only one doing it, of course. It's funny. I always – I'm not a high-tech person, at all. This type of research is not my thing. So, I guess it makes a lot of sense that, of all the people I interview, you're the one who I'm always coming away going, "Oh, man, I need to own that stock," [laughter] because you're all I know about it. What you tell me is all I know, and you tell a pretty good yarn.

Dave Lashmet:            [Crossatkl], thanks.

Dan Ferris:                 So, yeah, so you've got other – and these two are not – you don't have to give us 10 space stocks, but I assume you – it sounds like you have more than two, back there in your [crosstalk].

Dave Lashmet:            Yeah, so I went to this place, which is Wallops – it's a forgotten military base that was used in World War II. I think that George Bush Sr. learned how to fly there, before he went off in carriers in World War II. And it had been, like, a forgotten base that the navy owned, and they resurrected it as a Department of Defense NASA launch site. And they invited a little company to use a couple of launchpads that the government paid for. It's so that they're not dependent on SpaceX.

The government is trying to insulate itself against SpaceX, so they're building launch sites, protecting the launch sites, and inviting people inside the wire who have launch capability. So the one little company I went to see, last week, has a launch site on a U.S. base that's Vandenburg in California and it's not Cape Canaveral in Florida. It's off the Virginia coast, an island off the Virginia coast. It's right next to Chincoteague, where the ponies run, Wallops Island.

And this company has rockets that launch from Wallops. And they also just put a moon lander on the moon, without failing. Another company, who I'm not recommending, is called Intuitive Machines. And they put a lunar lander all the way on the moon and then broke it. And what they said was, Intuitive Machines said, "Hey, that was a 98% success," which is kind of like saying Abraham Lincoln's trip to the Ford Theater was a 98% effective success. He made it all the way to the theater, the coach drivers can be extremely happy about what happened.

Secret Service can go, "We made it to the theater on time." Yeah, you did, but then it was a disaster. So, after that disaster, Intuitive Machines launched another lunar lander, which made it all the way to the moon and failed again. [Laughs] So, I'm not recommending Intuitive Machines. I'm recommending the company that built a robotic lunar lander, landed it on the moon, and it stayed up for all 14 days of daylight. And then the moon goes through 14 days of darkness, because it's tethered to the earth's spin.

And, "month" means "moon." That's what our month means, one cycle of the moon. So, the moon, any given face of the moon has 14 days of sunlight and then 14 days of darkness. So their first lunar lander landed and stayed up for 14 days. OK, you don't know this answer, I know you don't know. What is the temperature change on the moon, from the sunny side to when darkness falls, in Fahrenheit?

Dan Ferris:                 No idea.

Dave Lashmet:            Five hundred degrees.

Dan Ferris:                 Whoa.

Dave Lashmet:            So it's 230 degrees during the day and negative-270 at night.

Dan Ferris:                 Whoa.

Dave Lashmet:            And it takes about four hours to cross 500 degrees of change.

Dan Ferris:                 Whoa, Jesus.

Dave Lashmet:            When everything snaps, everything that you built snaps. So, the next time this company launches a lunar lander, they're launching it with a satellite to orbit the moon. It's doing something called a halo orbit, which drops directly below the moon and goes directly above the moon in an elliptical orbit. That satellite is all solar panels and batteries and one laser, and when it gets close to the moon, it fires its laser at the lunar lander during nighttime and keeps it alive. It recharges the solar panels with lasers.

Dan Ferris:                 That's cool.

Dave Lashmet:            Yeah, it's only a couple months out from launching, so, this satellite will allow, essentially, nighttime and daytime operations of robots on the moon.

Dan Ferris:                 That's wild, man. God, Dave, I'm so glad we had you on, today. [Laughs] It's so cool. I need to find out. I am going to find out all these stocks. I can't wait till all the reports come out, can't wait to learn more.

Dave Lashmet:            Yeah, you're an insider, you get to see them early, but everybody else has to pay. [Laughter]

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, well, that's right, and I always, in a case like this, I always wait for the rest of the world to find out about it, and then – [crosstalk]

Dave Lashmet:            It's totally fair, yeah, and why is this not free? Uh, because I had to fly to Virginia? Guess what, that was not free. The airline did not give me a free ticket so that you could get this stuff for free.

Dan Ferris:                 And if the value of this isn't apparent already, by now at the end of the podcast, like, it never will be. [Laughs] I can't imagine somebody listening to this and saying, "Why isn't it free?" but I guess it is what it is.

Dave Lashmet:            I'm not paid to promote these companies and I'm not paid to promote SpaceX, as you could probably tell.

Dan Ferris:                 Oh, yeah, [laughs] yeah, [crosstalk] pretty much tell.

Dave Lashmet:            I picked these because I think that they're worthwhile in the future. And I think it's really funny that the U.S. government is building up an island to protect itself from Elon Musk. [Laughs]

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, that's wild, it's wild.

Dave Lashmet:            It's like a secret lair [crosstalk] secret lair that SpaceX cannot go, where we have our own independent launch capability.

Dan Ferris:                 That's crazy.

Dave Lashmet:            Yeah, it's got one of these –

Dan Ferris:                 Right. All right, so the presentation that Dave is going to put out, you can learn more about it, it's spacexventure2026.com. And you can sign up, see the presentation, and depending on whether you choose to subscribe or not, you can get all the reports and find out what all these incredible stocks are.

Dave, thank you for being here. It's time for our final question and same question for every guest, no matter what the topic, even if it's a nonfinancial topic, it's for our listeners' benefit. If you could leave them with a single thought, today, what would it be?

Dave Lashmet:            Space is incredibly valuable. The ability to make weather satellites actually useful is because we have the ability to reach space. So, 30 years ago, weather satellites were horrific and you never knew what was going to happen. Now, we have stunning predictions about three days out, fairly accurate predictions about five days out, and a reasonable shot at seven days out. And our world is better because of that space capability.

I know that my daughters cannot read maps. They don't have to, because of GPS. And, you know, just GPS and weather alone are pretty profound uses of space. And another really great use of space is SOS, you know, ships at sea or planes at sea that run into trouble aren't in trouble, because they can get help. So, space is lucrative and space is useful. So, good space companies help all of us.

Dan Ferris:                 That's amazing. Space is valuable. That's the takeaway, that's great. Thanks for that, Dave, and thanks again for being here, man, I learned so much.

Dave Lashmet:            Thank you, Dan.

Dan Ferris:                 Man, I love talking with my old friend, Dave Lashmet. He and I have been around Stansberry longer than anybody. He was actually hired before me, but he left the company for ten years and came back, so, I like to tell people that I've been at Stansberry longer than everybody. Technically speaking, though, Dave started before me, and so we've known each other many, many, many years, and I continue to be impressed with his technical knowledge. You know, when it comes to things like space and pharmaceuticals, we had that conversation, recently, on the podcast, it's pretty incredible what you learn from Dave Lashmet.

And I've learned a lot from him over the years, and I know you have, too. If you've been listening to the podcast for any number of years, Dave's been on a bunch of times, and if you took good notes, you got a master class in whatever topic he was discussing. And today, we got the Dave Lashmet master class in space. And I will add one thing, I've never done this before, I will add one thing to Dave's takeaway. He said, "Space is valuable," and then he developed on that idea, for his answer to the final question.

I would add one thing. Space is investable, I would say, space is investable. And of all the people I've ever met in my life, the one guy who knows how to invest in it is Dave Lashmet. So, wow, that was a fun interview and a fun episode of Stansberry Investor Hour. I hope you enjoyed it and really learned as much from it as I did. Please hit like, hit subscribe, and sign up for our free daily e-mail.

Announcer:                 Opinions expressed on this program are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Stansberry Research, its parent company, or affiliates.

[End of Audio]