Space Business Podcast #110 - Jaret Matthews, Astrolab: Planetary Rovers

Space Business Podcast

Our guest this week is building a lunar rover. Jaret Matthews is the CEO & Founder of Astrolab, based in Hawthorne, CA. He was previously at SpaceX and also at JPL, where he worked on Mars rovers. Come join us to hear all about planetary rovers! https://astrolab.space/

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Timestamps:

0:00 Intro
2:21 Elevator Pitch
3:11 "Last Mile" on the Moon
5:27 Flex rover in the context of other rovers
9:10 Payloads
11:30 Scaling challenges
13:46 Autonomy
15:33 "Off-road" capability
19:23 Vehicle specs
22:23 Vehicle lifetime and surviving on the Moon
29:34 Spare parts
33:06 Infrastructure
34:22 Main use cases
38:27 Vision for mobility landscape on the Moon
41:37 The motivation behind Astrolab
46:46 What else is interesting in the space sector
48:15 What could be the "first killer app" for the Moon?
50:07 Sci-Fi