Multifamily Bootcamp Review 1 and a Lunar South Pole Oxygen Pipeline
A look at a Bigger Pockets bootcamp and Lunar Resources Inc's L-SPoP
Several months ago I was looking for real estate education to purchase. I received an email from Bigger Pockets about the upcoming bootcamps they created. I didn’t know much about these bootcamps so I investigated further. The bootcamps are 10 week courses designed to help investors learn and connect with others. There are multiple different versions of bootcamps. There is rookie, multifamily, BRRRR (Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat), short term rentals and creative financing. Rookie is about people finding there first deal, multifamily is about purchasing large multifamily properties, BRRRR, as the name suggests, is about buying a fixer upper, renting it out, then refinancing your money out. And short term rentals are about AirBnBs. Since my goals were to invest in multifamily, I purchased the multifamily bootcamp and plan to share my experiences with it.
One of the first things they ask you when you sign up is if you are willing to be a team leader for the accountability group. The accountability group is a meeting that you and other students will join and try to hold each other accountable. This could be making sure the home work is done, or seeing if they follow up on any potential deals. I volunteered to be a leader. If you volunteered to be a leader, you are sent instructions of how to manage a group and are sent a link to an unlisted Youtube video explaining how to run it. The main structure of the group are introductions, followed by an inspirational quote. Next is a brief discussion of a tool someone has used that they found helpful. This could be a rental property analysis calculator, a program that helps with taxes, or anything else that can speed up the process of investing. After this, an hour or so of general discussions follows. The topics can be whatever the group wants. My group was focused more on education and letting each person talk about what they are currently working on in real estate. Over the course of the 10 weeks, people kept dropping off. We had around 15 at the start and only around 6 at the end. While that seems sad, the ones who stayed were the ones who contributed the most to the conversation for the entire bootcamp. After the 10th meeting we said goodbye and finished the 10 week course. It turns out that my group was one of the few that remained until the end. A lot of the other groups died because people stopped showing up. I got some good contacts from this group and learned a lot about leading from this. I even got a shirt for volunteering. My rating for the accountability groups is to do it, and if you feel so inclined, lead it.
Lunar South Pole Oxygen Pipeline (L-SPoP)
Humanity dreams of becoming a multiplanetary species. However, before that goal can happen, certain steps need to be taken. Humanity needs to learn how to live off world. The international space station has been a great place to learn how to work in zero gravity. This however, has limits. The next step will be to live on the moon. While humanity has been to the moon before, there has never been a long term base on the moon. In order to make this happen, astronauts on the moon need to be as self sufficient as possible. This means creating what they need using the resources available. In order to spur on development of the technology needed for in-situ resource utilization, NASA has created the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program (NIAC). Here, different technological developments can be funded that are deemed risky or innovative. One company has a radical idea of how to go about using lunar resources. Lunar Resources Inc, plans to build a pipeline on the moon. The south pole has regolith that can be mined for water and turned into rocket fuel or used to keep astronauts alive. However, the north and south poles of the moon are very inhospitable, even when looking at other places on the moon. Most of this is because of the sun not rising for very long, due to the way the moon orbits, similar to Earth’s poles. As a result, astronauts won’t live long term on the poles. This presents the problem of how to transport the materials from the poles to the area the astronauts live in. The use of a pipeline would allow this to occur cheaper then using rovers to slowly transport the materials. The pipe would be 5 km long and would be modular, allowing easy repair. This repair would be done by robots and transport 2 kg of material every hour. There are no plans to build this in the near term, since NIAC funds concepts, but it is interesting to note how NASA is now looking at funding groups who want to build physical structures on the surface of the moon.
Graphic depiction of the Lunar South Pole Oxygen Pipeline, Credits: Peter Curreri
Sources:
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2023/Lunar_South_Pole_Oxygen_Pipeline/