Financing the Race to Space (Papazian 2025) - Weekend Book Review

English Podcast starts at 00:00:00Bengali Podcast Starts at 00:15:52Hindi Podcast Starts at 00:29:58German Podcast Starts at 00:44:52ReferencePapazian, A. V. (2025). Financing the Race to Space: How to Value, Invest, and Explore the Universe. Palgrave Macmillan Cham. 260 pp. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-73102-0Youtube channel link https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcherConnect on linkedinhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mayukhpsm/Welcome to Revise and Resubmit and to a fresh episode of “Weekend Book Review” 📚✨ Today, are celebrating a book that quite literally wants to rewrite how we fund the future of our species:“Financing the Race to Space: How to Value, Invest, and Explore the Universe” by Armen V. Papazian 🚀💸This is not your usual space book filled only with rockets and shiny satellites. This one asks a far scarier, far braver question: what if the biggest barrier to space is not technology, but our imagination of money itself? 🧠💰Papazian is not just throwing ideas at the sky. He is a financial economist with a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and he has been steadily building a new language for value and money. You might know him from “The Space Value of Money” (2022) and “Hardwiring Sustainability into Financial Mathematics” (2023). With this latest book, published in hardcover on 12 January 2025 by Palgrave Macmillan Cham, he takes that journey to its boldest frontier yet: how to actually finance humanity’s expansion into space while fixing what is broken here on Earth 🌍✨.In this episode, we’ll walk you through how the book tears into our debt based, risk obsessed, time centric, and basically spaceless financial system, and why Papazian thinks it is fundamentally unfit for the cosmic job ahead. We will explore his provocative ideas like Public Capitalisation Notes (PCNs) and “Value Easing” as tools for central banks to fund high value projects such as education reform and space programs without drowning everything in more debt 🧾➡️🌌.Along the way, we will see why he argues that the so called “space economy” is still depressingly Earth centric, and why we need to redefine space as our entire physical context of matter, with “outer space” as just one shimmering slice of it. The real villain here, he says, is not gravity. It is human mediocrity and a cramped financial imagination. And honestly, as I read, I kept asking myself: are we really going to let our old spreadsheets decide how far humanity can go? 📉🚫🌠So in this Weekend Book Review, we are not just reviewing a book. We are testing a thesis: that changing how we value things may be the only way to change how far we dare to go. Thank you, Armen V. Papazian, and thank you to Palgrave Macmillan Cham, for putting this kind of big, unruly thinking out into the world 🙏📖.If you enjoy deep dives like this, where finance, policy, and the cosmos collide, please subscribe to the “Revise and Resubmit” podcast on Spotify 🎧 and check out our YouTube channel “Weekend Researcher” 📺. You can also find this podcast on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcast so you can listen wherever you like to think big.Now, as we dive in, ask yourself: what would you dare to build if money were designed for the universe instead of just for this one small planet? 🌍✨🚀