Tekedia Capital Invests in General Astronautics, Making Robots for Space

Tekedia Capital is excited to announce our investment in General Astronautics, a company building autonomous robotic systems for research and manufacturing in space. The company is developing machine labor for the emerging space economy, enabling production and scientific experimentation in environments where human labor is scarce, expensive, or altogether unavailable.

Why did we make this investment? I will begin with labor economics. Many years ago, in a Harvard Business Review article, I argued that Africa should not build its development strategy around replicating the path that worked for China. My thesis was simple: by the time Africa was ready to compete for large-scale manufacturing relocation, the economics of labor itself would have changed. The assumption that rising wages in China would automatically push factories into Africa ignored a more powerful force: automation.

Long before ChatGPT arrived, I posited that robotics, and artificial intelligence would increasingly allow companies in America and Europe to keep production closer to home. Instead of outsourcing jobs to lower-cost countries, many firms would simply automate those jobs. In other words, the competition would no longer be between workers in different countries; it would increasingly be between human labor and machine labor. Much of that prediction has materialized.

But while automation is transforming work on Earth, the space economy introduces an entirely new challenge. Suppose humanity succeeds in building factories in orbit. A fundamental question emerges: Who will do the work?

On Earth, companies can outsource labor across continents. In space, there are no large labor markets. There are no cities, industrial parks, or populations waiting to be employed. The economics of space manufacturing require something entirely different: machine labor. The workers of the space age will largely be robots.

General Astronautics wants to provide those "workers"; Tekedia Capital likes the scale of the opportunities!

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