Artemyev, who lives in London like his partner Yevgeny Chichvarkin, is involved in buying cryptocurrency, investing in biohacking, and colonizing the Moon. In the interview, he explained why suborbital flights could be cheaper than regular air travel.
Space as Transport
According to Artemyev, he has a ticket for a suborbital flight from Virgin Galactic, thanks to which he met Richard Branson. 'It's not space, really. I mean, it is space, but it's not acceleration to orbital speed, it's ballistic. There's less load—like tossing a pebble, it flies into space and falls back,' he said. The entrepreneur claimed that a flight from London to Australia via space would be cheaper than by air: 'If I fly from here to Australia via space, it's 100-200-300 km climbing in a spiral into the stratosphere and 100 km descending over Sydney, and the rest of the time—through space, where there's no air and no friction. It's cheaper that way.' He suggested that the first flights carrying 20–30 people from London to Sydney in three to four hours would appear in about 20 years.
Lunar Investments
Artemyev said he invested in a funding round of Moon Express, a company that participated in the Google Lunar XPRIZE for the first private moon landing. According to him, Google stopped extending the prize because US President Donald Trump announced that NASA's budget would now be almost half devoted to creating a colony on the Moon. '$30 million from Google versus a $20 billion NASA budget—that's nothing,' he said. The entrepreneur also said that together with Navin he invested $5 million in Moonshot, a company engaged in mining on the Moon. He explained his interest in the Moon by the fact that water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen using solar panels, which are cheaper to store in space, and that on the Moon there's no need to dig—the entire periodic table falls there. According to him, there is already a serious order for a large amount of water in Earth orbit or at the Lagrange point to be converted into rocket fuel.
Cryptocurrencies and Biohacking
Artemyev claimed that cryptocurrencies have already found use in countries with hyperinflation, such as Venezuela. He predicted they would occupy 1–2% of the money market, and that 'states will disappear, empires will disappear,' and people will live in small entities. In the field of biohacking, he mentioned the startup Retrotope, founded by chemist Mikhail Shchepinov, which has filed an FDA application for the final stage of trials of a drug for damage caused by trans fats. According to him, there is already a child on whom the drug has had an obviously positive effect for a year.
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