Voyager CEO on space death, why Mars matters, and how to fix data centers 500 miles up

“Everyone is in the space industry. They just don’t know it yet,” Dylan Taylor tells Semafor’s Compound Interest The money crunch that has hit AI in recent weeks is coming for the space industry, which shares DNA, investors, and market vibes with artificial intelligence. “If you’re a high-quality, well-run company with a good balance sheet and a good business model, you are very well positioned because everyone’s paying attention,” Dylan Taylor, CEO of Voyager Technologies, said on this week’s episode of Compound Interest. Everyone else is “being cast aside.” Voyager builds space infrastructure for the Pentagon and defense contractors, and is working on a commercial space station, Starlab, to replace the International Space Station when it is retired in 2030. The company is publicly traded, which last month allowed it to raise $400 million on terms roughly in line with a hot convertible-debt market. “Low cost of capital [is] a secret weapon,” Taylor said, “because the first question is, ‘how do you compete with SpaceX?’” Even Elon Musk’s behemoth is feeling the squeeze: It throttled usage of its Grok AI bot this week because, as Musk said in an X post Sunday, it was getting too exp