Cosmo Bee

Dongha Park, CEO of Cosmo Bee

 

Dongha Park, CEO of Cosmo Bee | Changes in transportation have transformed people’s lives. The Age of Exploration in the early 15th century was made possible by advances in navigation, which developed rapidly through the use of navigational instruments such as the compass and quadrant, as well as advances in ocean-going ship technologies such as carracks and caravels. Europeans subsequently began conducting maritime trade across the world in earnest, accumulating unprecedented wealth. This naturally led to the development of commerce and finance. The most representative example was the joint-stock company system. Recruiting sailors and building and operating merchant ships required a large amount of capital. At the time, however, ocean voyages involved overcoming numerous risks, including shipwrecks, disease and plunder. The joint-stock company system emerged as a means of spreading these risks while raising large amounts of capital by selling ownership of a company to multiple investors in the form of “shares.”

 

The country that made the most effective use of the joint-stock company system was Britain. Although Britain entered the Age of Exploration relatively late, it began expanding across the oceans in earnest with the establishment of the East India Company in 1600. Having secured the vast colonies of America and India, Britain began accumulating enormous wealth. Against this economic background, Britain was able to continue investing in the new idea of industrialization, and the Industrial Revolution ultimately began there in the 18th century. The steam engine commercialized by James Watt in 1776 began to be used not only in coal mines and factories but also as a source of power for transportation. Steamships and steam locomotives dramatically increased the speed of logistics, making it possible to deliver newly mass-produced goods to consumers more quickly.

 

The development of the internal combustion engine and the emergence of the automobile in the 19th century transformed society once again. By the 20th century, people were rapidly reshaping industrial and urban structures using automobiles and trains traveling at 100 km/h. Transportation across the sea, however, still relied on ships traveling at 50 km/h. Jet-engine technology, developed independently by Whittle in Britain and von Ohain in Germany in 1937, was soon applied to aircraft. The first aircraft powered by a jet engine appeared in 1939.

 

Jet-powered flight technology advanced rapidly during World War II, and technologies used in military transport aircraft naturally carried over into civilian airliners. As a result, we can now transport people and goods rapidly across national borders, and commercial aviation technology has become a foundation of the era of globalization. During World War II, while the jet engine was being developed, another form of transportation was also under development in Nazi Germany. Wernher von Braun advanced existing rocket technology to develop the V-2 rocket, or missile. After the war, the United States and the Soviet Union brought the new weapon and its engineers to their respective countries. During the Cold War of the 1950s, rockets began to be used in earnest in the space race. The space race reached its peak in 1969, when Apollo 11 landed humans on the Moon. The Space Age, which had been expected to blossom spectacularly, lost momentum and subsided as the Cold War ended because of its enormous costs. In the meantime, major projects such as the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station continued, allowing technology to accumulate gradually, but space travel remained a distant prospect.

 

Over time, the space industry reached a turning point in 2002 because of a young entrepreneur who believed humanity had to venture into space. In 2008, Elon Musk faced the threat of bankruptcy after Falcon 1, his first space launch vehicle, failed three consecutive times. He pulled together all the money he could and succeeded on the fourth launch, securing a $1.6 billion cargo transportation contract with NASA. In December 2015, SpaceX achieved the world’s first successful reuse of a rocket with the Falcon 9, opening a new chapter for the space industry. Conventional rockets were like airplanes that were discarded after reaching their destinations. For any vehicle to become a practical means of transportation, it must be reusable. In other words, the arrival of reusable rockets marked the point at which space began to enter the realm of full-scale private industry.

 

Having secured the technology to travel to space more frequently, SpaceX began devising a business model that could take advantage of it: placing more than 20,000 communications satellites in low Earth orbit to create a world in which communications would be available anywhere on Earth. By continuously creating demand for satellite launches, SpaceX increased the number of rocket launches. It also established a revenue model through the Starlink satellites it placed in orbit. By July 2026, more than 10,000 Starlink satellites were orbiting Earth. The previous month, SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq market and declared its full-scale transformation into a space AI company. AI companies such as Google, NVIDIA and OpenAI are preparing space-based data centers.

 

Asking whether space-based data centers are technologically and economically feasible is an entirely valid and reasonable question. What we must pay attention to, however, is that we are entering a new period of change in which the boundary between space and Earth is becoming increasingly blurred and the two are beginning to merge. We will use AI by exchanging data with space-based data centers through communications satellites. In other words, the infrastructure for AI and ICT, the core industries of the future, will be built and operated in space. The greatest difference between space and Earth is that infrastructure built in space serves the entire world. Because satellites do not remain in one place, a satellite deployed in orbit can provide the same service worldwide. A company that dominates space will become a company that dominates the world. Korea is also entering this competition in earnest by announcing a strategy to foster its aerospace industry.

 

Korea must pay even greater attention to the current revolution in space technology because its core industries are closely connected to space. Korea has many technologies and companies essential to space infrastructure in fields such as semiconductors, batteries, 6G communications and robotics. Through history, we can see that humanity’s next transformation will take place in space. Advances in navigation and aviation came with great risks and sacrifices. Yet only those who took on challenges despite their fears were able to change the world and alter the course of history. Now it is our turn. I hope that the company that changes the world in the Space Age will emerge from Korea.

 

 

Original article : [Expert Column] Why We Need to Pay Attention to Space Now