For most, the phrase outer space still conjures Neil Armstrong, the Challenger accident, PBS specials about the Big Bang, and school trips to the planetarium. The idea that someone without aerospace training, an engineering degree, or a military or government background could go raise funding and launch a company that touches on space in some way seems absurd. Or, at least intimidating and unlikely, even for a risk‐tolerant entrepreneurial type. Starting a business is tough enough.

Think about it. What's the word for an ambitious effort to do something big? Moonshot.

If you're an entrepreneur with no prior space experience, you may have qualms about entering the Space Economy. Don't let those concerns prevent you from considering all the possibilities. Nobody spots untapped potential better than entrepreneurs, and founders are flooding in, starting space‐related businesses in record numbers. All this activity is an indication. There may never be as much wide‐open entrepreneurial opportunity again in your lifetime. Consider throwing your hat into orbit.

One Small Step for an Entrepreneur: The Time Is Now

Yes, you need skills, experience, and expertise to start a company—particularly a startup focused on exponential growth—but your background doesn't have to align perfectly to take that first step. Should Larry Page and Sergey Brin have put off founding Google because they hadn't worked at Ask Jeeves for a few years first? Space is new territory for most entrepreneurs, even most technologists. There is too much to be accomplished for every founder to wait until accumulating some arbitrary amount of experience working for, say, a defense contractor.

If you do hail from a space‐related background—avionics, satellite communications, defense—you may only know the Space Economy through the other end of the telescope. The typical engineer at a legacy organization like Boeing or Lockheed Martin spends more time on administrative busywork than nuts‐and‐bolts space tech. From the perspective of someone familiar with those windowless offices and drab cubicles, the idea of starting a business in a WeWork space with a handful of remote peers might seem inconceivable. It's a different world. A venture capital (VC) seed investment wouldn't cover a month of paperclips at a company like Northrop Grumman.

Entrepreneur or engineer, recent grad or career bureaucrat, the Space Economy needs innovative and determined founders willing to try new ideas and aggressively scale the ones that work. Entrepreneurship is the most powerful driver of technological and economic progress, and the Space Economy is an area where rapid progress is currently possible. These amazing possibilities won't be fully realized without many more entrepreneurs shouldering the necessary risks.

Robbie Schingler of Planet Labs sees commercial space as a “new frontier” market, one that “starts from scientific research or government and then, for a variety of reasons—mainly convergence of technologies—opens up a market.” In his view, the last such market was the early Web: “I would encourage thinking about the parallels—how the internet actually turned into a global utility,” he said.

In Chapter 6, we'll learn more about how and why progress in space stalled between the Apollo missions and the arrival of SpaceX. What's extraordinary about that story isn't why things slowed down as much as how rapidly one company brought decades of stasis to a conclusive end. Even today, SpaceX continues to spur progress across the Space Economy.

As I said in Chapter 1, the Space Economy remains an American‐dominated story as of this writing. This makes sense. At its founding, the United States was a bold and intentional experiment in capitalism and self‐governance. America is the ultimate nation‐startup, and it's been a hotbed of entrepreneurship since its own eighteenth‐century IPO. Other countries will keep pace with the United States only to the extent that their governments incentivize and support space‐related entrepreneurship within their own borders.

America cultivates entrepreneurs more effectively than any other nation on Earth. No one can say for sure what the Space Economy will look like in a decade, but it will be entrepreneurs, wherever they live, who lead the way as we collectively ascend the S curve of innovation.

Known Unknowns: The Areas of Greatest Potential

During a 2002 news briefing, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld infamously contrasted “known knowns” with “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” in reference to Iraq's purported stashes of weapons of mass destruction. The Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland might have put the idea a little more clearly. Still, Rumsfeld—whom we'll see again in Chapter 10's discussion of the militarization of space—buried a good point in his statement. There are things we know we don't know. In innovation, these “known unknowns” represent the most direct path to a breakthrough. You can't answer a question you haven't asked.

Certainly, an entrepreneur can tackle a “known known” by offering an incremental improvement on an existing solution. Even then, however, success isn't as simple as building a better mousetrap. If another company provides a solution—launch, for example—you won't break through by doing the same thing they do a little faster or a little cheaper. Even if you win in a side‐by‐side comparison, most customers won't bother to switch. Whatever the flaws and inefficiencies of the incumbent, most customers will stick with what they know over the upstart. New offerings rarely live up to their initial promise. Why risk switching providers for the chance at a moderate improvement?

Overcoming inertia requires a genuine level‐up, a 10x improvement. At least one key aspect of what you offer—cost, speed, accuracy, and so on—must be so much better in quantitative or qualitative terms that the potential benefits of switching outweigh the real risk you won't deliver.

SpaceX would never have gotten a toehold with a launch service that was 10 percent more efficient or affordable than the Russian alternative. Skepticism about Elon Musk's capacity to deliver on his promises was through the roof from the start. SpaceX had to leapfrog the incumbent with a launch offering that was far cheaper and pricing that was far more transparent. Even then, the company had a rocky trajectory for years. Giant customers like telecoms can be lucrative, but they are also the hardest to win. If you intend to sell to massive, bureaucratic organizations like defense contractors or government agencies, anticipate the need for a long runway.

The alternative to offering a dramatic improvement over the category leader is to pursue a “known unknown.” Professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne call this “blue ocean strategy”: the search for uncontested market space that lacks an established incumbent.¹

Seeking out blue ocean in a market isn't about creating a product no one yet wants and convincing people that they should want it. It's about identifying a pressing problem that lacks a robust solution. A known unknown. One of the fundamental allures of the Space Economy is the sheer quantity of known unknowns, the vast sweep of blue ocean entrepreneurs see in every direction.

Lucy Hoag and Caitlin Curtis saw the potential for Violet Labs because, as hardware engineers working at the cutting edge, they were solving their own problem, a problem the market had yet to address. They also knew enough about the industry and their profession to understand that this was no niche product: “Complex products like spacecraft and satellites are no longer the purview of government and big companies,” Hoag told me. “The work is being democratized among smaller, more nimble companies, and they all need innovative tools to do their work.”

In the Space Economy, there are plenty of known unknowns: technologically feasible things that customers want to be able to do but can't yet with the products and services currently available. As you'll see with many successful entrepreneurs in the Space Economy, noticing an unmet demand like this is often the spark behind the decision to start a company.

A few of the areas currently brimming with potential in the Space Economy include:

• Next‐generation Earth Observation (EO) applications. Companies like SkyWatch have made vast troves of EO data available through application programming interfaces (APIs). Now that all this data is available to software developers, what will they do with it? From monitoring the supply chain to optimizing shipping routes, how can we use the view from above to generate useful insights about life down here?
• Sensor fusion. Satellites offer a persistent, though distant, perspective on any spot on the planet. In exchange for more limited operation time, aerial drones can go in for a closer look. Ground‐based sensors, meanwhile, can not only gather imagery but also measure everything from temperature to salinity to radioactivity, all indefinitely, but only from one spot. Sensor fusion brings these complementary perspectives together for greater insights. In agriculture, combining data from the many different sensors already on a farm is transformative. As Regrow founder Anna Volkova told me, “Tractors have been autonomous for decades—a satellite tells the tractor where it is and where it needs to go. Meanwhile, you have sensors measuring soil moisture, the flow rate in your tanks. Even the cows’ ear tags are connected.” Where else might we leverage fusion? What about a marketplace for drone data? If a mining company wanted a close‐up look at an interesting, remote geographical feature on a satellite image, it could post a request and get live footage taken by a local drone hobbyist. The possibilities are all around us.
• Augmented Reality (AR) applications. Niantic's Pokémon GO is just one app that leverages user location data to offer a customized experience. Startups are experimenting with everything from targeted ads that only appear when you're within walking distance of a particular retail store to smart home features that activate when you approach your house.
• 3D data and development tools. If you've used Google Earth before, you've seen the progress Google has made in transforming two‐dimensional satellite images into roughly accurate three‐dimensional environments. That's just the beginning. More sophisticated digital tools will allow developers to arrange, manipulate, and otherwise process geospatial data in valuable new ways.
• GPS alternatives. GPS is vulnerable to jamming and other malicious attacks. Also, it isn't accurate at the meter level. Other methods of positioning and navigation will complement and enhance GPS, allowing for meter‐level accuracy even in areas where a strong GPS signal is hard to acquire. Newer methods will also add resiliency to this crucial piece of infrastructure. There are several promising avenues being explored here, including using Earth's magnetic field.
• Ocean observation. The oceans, which cover 70 percent of the surface, are too large to monitor comprehensively using traditional methods. HawkEye 360 uses its satellites to locate ships that have deactivated their beacons. Regulators use this data to send drones in for a closer look, helping identify pirates, smuggling vessels, and illegal fishing operations. Moving forward, algorithms will spot patterns in satellite images without human intervention, useful for regulatory purposes and providing valuable intel to the shipping, fishing, and aquaculture industries. There is also potential in Satellite Communications (SatCom) smart buoys that collect and transmit oceanographic data in real‐time or signal nearby vessels to avoid colliding with fishing nets, a problem in ocean fisheries around the world.
• Weather micro‐forecasting. Though modern weather forecasting is well over a century old, it is still a developing science. Meteorologists continue to struggle with macro predictions over short timeframes. Unfortunately, faster supercomputers and smarter algorithms can only do so much to improve accuracy when most of our weather‐sensing infrastructure hasn't been upgraded in decades. Weather can be highly localized. We need more and better data now, particularly about microclimates like the famously cool and moist zone in the San Francisco bay area. You need granular data to make useful predictions. Tomorrow.io provides actionable weather insights to companies ranging from Delta and United to the NFL and National Grid, helping them manage the impact of weather on their flights, football games, and power grids. There are many other potential customers in this space. For example, farmers of high‐value crops like almonds and wine grapes will likely buy accurate weather forecasts about very small areas. Doing this will require new weather sensors and software with a microclimate focus.

Some parts of the Satellites Industry matrix—GPS Infrastructure, for example—boast a rich array of incumbents and upstarts. Others, like SatCom Applications, remain wide open. The matrix is useful partly because it highlights the areas where existing technological capabilities are only lightly explored. Center your thinking on each part of the matrix and consider what might be possible given your expertise, experience, and entrepreneurial inclination.

“The area I really like is Infrastructure,” Dan Ceperley of LeoLabs told me. “There's a gold rush going on. LeoLabs is supplying information to space companies with a very healthy future in front of them. Pay attention to the ones providing foundational services that other companies will build on top of, like launch operators, space situational awareness companies, and satellite operators. The industry is moving from vertically integrated to having all sorts of different service providers, and the shift will make the innovation cycle go even faster. We're going to see winners in the satellite constellation arena, but we're also going to see winners in many supporting services and technologies.”

“This is a once‐in‐a‐lifetime opportunity in the space industry,” Ceperley said. “Whether you're investing, launching a new company, or working on some new technology, it's a great time to jump in. The price of accessing and using space is going down, and you can rely on modern computing technologies to do things at a much larger scale.”

Space Economy Jobs as Entrepreneurial Launchpads

Instead of seeking out problems systematically as described previously, many entrepreneurs stumble onto their ideas in the course of their daily work. This is why curiosity is so important. Become willing to stop in your tracks when you notice something unusual or unexpected—a small problem can sometimes become a big business.

Many startups spring up from within the industries they eventually disrupt. Entrepreneurial employees naturally want to fix the problems they encounter, and large organizations rarely have much appetite for disrupting their own business models with something new. While big companies can be good at incremental improvement, when it comes to what's next, startups take the lead.

If you already work in or adjacent to the Space Economy, your first and most important task as an aspiring entrepreneur is to keep your eyes open to the unsolved problems around you. Don't seek out the “perfect” idea to pursue. Instead, keep a list of new ones as they crop up and make a habit of exploring them. Above all, seek to confirm the market for any given idea. Solving neat problems is fun, but is this something that somebody, somewhere, would conceivably pay for?

After earning his master's in electrical engineering and a PhD in physics from Duke, Rendered.ai CEO and founder Nathan Kundtz went to work at Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, Washington‐based private equity firm that develops and licenses technological patents.

Kundtz's position gave him the rare opportunity to work closely with an array of scientists and engineers developing new products based on cutting‐edge technologies. When Intellectual Ventures spun out a company called Kymeta, which was based on a new antenna ideal for SatCom applications, Kundtz became its CTO and eventually its CEO.

When Kundtz subsequently founded Rendered.ai in 2019 to develop synthetic sensor data for training and validating artificial intelligence software, Kundtz was already familiar with every stage of founding a business. Between the world‐class technical education, the first‐hand exposure to real‐world innovation, and the leadership roles in tech companies, it's hard to imagine a resume more ideally suited to a Space Economy entrepreneur than the one Kundtz assembled.

Kundtz's story is an excellent example of how exposure to real‐world industry problems spurs valuable startup ideas. Working in the Satellites industry, he had the opportunity to observe the challenges facing application developers who were training AI to interpret vast amounts of data.

“Artificial intelligence algorithms are ultimately driven by the data used to train them,” Kundtz told me. “Recently, the government said they need 50 million images for every object they're trying to identify to achieve 60‐percent‐accurate detection. That becomes very expensive when you think about data collection as well as annotation: having humans come in and tell a computer what's in each image. Also, you still miss rare events and edge cases doing it this way, which is incredibly important to algorithm performance. Eighty percent of the time and expense invested in building these algorithms is dedicated to getting access to data sets.”

These observations sparked the idea of generating artificial data for AI training purposes. This led Kundtz to found Rendered.ai. If he hadn't known that AI training had become an expensive hurdle for application developers, it's unlikely he would have stumbled on this idea another way. As it turned out, synthetic image data has applications across the entire area of AI image analysis, useful everywhere from autonomous driving to medical scanning to weather forecasting.

None of this means that you need a robust industry background to consider founding a company in the Space Economy. Just think carefully about the unique skills and experiences you bring to the table as an entrepreneur, and figure out an approach that will make the best use of them. Know your strengths and lead with them.

The full art of entrepreneurial innovation lies outside the scope of this book. Still, there is no question that you will need to explore different ideas before you zero in on something with the potential to attract investors. Stay flexible and open, even if you feel like you're onto something valuable and urgent. You may need to pivot repeatedly as you feel your way forward to a problem customers will pay you to solve.

This assumes you have at least some exposure to the Space Economy. If you aren't even adjacent to businesses that fall within its scope, start by doing your homework. In the Introduction, I talked about my experience helping Astrobotic develop a market assessment for commercial lunar transportation services. I didn't find that opportunity posted on LinkedIn. I dreamed it up myself and pitched it to the company because I wanted the first‐hand experience they could offer. Astrobotic agreed because they would benefit from what I brought to the table.

To succeed as an entrepreneur in the Space Economy, you need some familiarity with it. When you're just starting out, that means either securing the right job or volunteering your services to get your foot in the door as I did. Luckily, it's much easier to gather that valuable experience today. There are more commercial space companies than ever before, and like any other organization, they need everything from bookkeeping and HR support to online marketing and financial reporting. The advantage of continuing your “old” career as the first step to entrepreneurship is the “all hands on deck” culture in a startup. If you bring your hard‐earned career skills to the table, you may not get to design a satellite on your first day, but you'll discover opportunities to contribute in areas outside your core responsibilities, build experience and learning skills, and spot opportunities along the way.

There's no substitute for time in the trenches. I count my experience at Astrobotic as formative, and I encourage entrepreneurs who lack industry experience to do as I did. Get a job that fits your skill set within the Space Economy. If you don't see it posted on the job boards, pitch it instead.

Whatever you do, don't fall for Silicon Valley's breathless hype about college dropouts building the future in their garages. Nobody sees more entrepreneurs on their way up than someone in my position, and I can tell you that they all come to the table with some amount of experience and expertise. They know the territory and they have skills, even if the road ahead poses unfamiliar challenges. The brilliant newbie turned industry titan is pure media myth‐making. Even if you have no long‐term interest in a conventional career in the Space Economy, one of the tested paths to successful entrepreneurship in any industry has always been to spend time as an employee within that industry.

Job experience will expose you to the known unknowns. It will also offer lessons in everything from hiring and managing to marketing and selling, all while earning a salary. An MBA can be useful, but nothing will teach you the fundamentals of running a business faster than watching somebody else fail at the basics. Once you feel confident you can handle a business better than your boss, go prove it.

If this path to entrepreneurship appeals to you, Chapter 8 will tell you how to build a career in the Space Economy, from establishing a professional network to working your way up the ladder. When you consider the fact that nearly every successful entrepreneur in tech started out with related career experience, this approach seems like the safest bet.

As a group, of course, aspiring entrepreneurs are not known for their patience. With the Space Economy making news daily, it may feel unbearable to consider spending years working on someone else's dream during a period of such extraordinary growth and opportunity. If that's true for you, there are still things you can do to mitigate the risks of entrepreneurship and maximize your odds of success.

Learning the Landscape

Forget the idea of mission control rooms with giant screens and rows of flashing buttons. Most of the real work in the Space Economy takes place at a laptop or around a conference table. Outside of the Infrastructure layer, your workspace probably won't be situated next to a giant hangar or launch site either. If anything, remote work is even more prevalent in the Space Economy than elsewhere.

As a founder, there's no need to look like John Glenn or Neil Armstrong, either. While there are real diversity hurdles to be overcome—just as in the tech industry as a whole—the “right stuff” in the Space Economy has very little to do with the college you attended, let alone your native language, accent, or the color of your skin.

One exciting aspect of any new market is the potential for social mobility. In 1996, no one could claim five generations of distinguished web developers in their family lineage. If you haven't felt welcome in other industries for whatever reason, know that the Space Economy is relatively open and inclusive.

Outer space is highly regulated but, like any area of white‐hot innovation, those regulations can't keep pace with the rate of technological change. As we've seen with industry disruptors like Uber, one of the keys to scale is figuring out where the regulations are fuzzy and then pushing hard and fast on those areas before regulatory bodies, trade groups, industry watchdogs, and other elements formulate an effective defense. (Of course, it's possible to push too long and too hard, with serious consequences, also as seen with Uber.)

Disrupting a highly regulated environment requires staying abreast of the landscape. In the case of LeoLabs and space domain awareness, the U.S. Department of Defense was already providing tracking and collision‐warning services: “If a piece of large debris was likely to go close to a satellite within the next week or so, they would send out a notice,” founder Dan Ceperley told me. “In 2009, when there was a large collision between a U.S. commercial satellite and a defunct Russian satellite, the U.S. government was probably the only organization in the world with the sensors and services to identify potential collisions.”

It's hard to compete with free. However, with the number of satellites increasing exponentially, the Department of Defense was looking to leave the space traffic management business altogether. LeoLabs seized the opportunity: “We are taking the load, with over 60 percent of all active satellites in LEO using our collision avoidance service,” Ceperley said. “Nobody else has developed the scalable architecture necessary to address this.”

Government agencies operate very differently than private companies. For startups, these agencies can be customers, competitors, or both. As an entrepreneur in the Space Economy, you must navigate this with “legislative finesse,” according to Dan McCleese of Muon Space. “It's hard to break in,” he told me. “Many commercial data sets fail to find footing because government agencies and other organizations already offer similar sets for free.” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), for example, makes its weather‐forecasting information available for general use. If you're looking to develop your own meteorological sensor, for example, the question becomes, what data is still needed in the commercial market that is also technologically feasible to collect?

The advantage of a private company is that it can go precisely where the opportunity is without sweating larger administrative priorities. “NASA,” McCleese said, “chooses to address climate indicators in each of the major categories such as ocean science, land, or atmosphere. In doing so, it sprinkles money around. Support does go to good science, but it's challenging to say, ‘This must be next.’” In contrast, industry faces no such requirement. Instead, companies can focus on the “fuzzy” question of who the user might be, who might ultimately pay for the data.

“Let's say you had a silver‐bullet climate measurement,” McCleese said. “Who are the users? Is the modeling community prepared to begin paying for data, which they largely don't do now? If so, where will they get the funds to do that? Oil and gas is one area where the demand for commercial data appears to be real. Clearly, there are resources there to fund data capture and analysis. In natural gas, EO data drives cost savings. If a gas company can identify a methane leak, for example, it can recover money by fixing it. The same is true for the plastics industry, where there are regulation‐driven constraints on manufacturing emissions and more regulatory limits likely to come. Now there's some motivation for data purchasing.”

If you want to break in, adopt McCleese's way of thinking. To succeed as an entrepreneur in the Space Economy, according to Muon's Jonny Dyer, it's crucial to “understand the interaction of commercial market forces and government policy and regulation.” Ignore the larger landscape at your peril.

The Ground Is Constantly Changing

We're exiting the Wild West stage of the Space Economy. Regulations are tightening up. As you recall, chaos once reigned in ride‐sharing, much to the benefit of rule‐flouting Uber. Now that Uber is dominant, the regulatory environment is much more strict. Space is following the same pattern.

There's a positive side to intense government scrutiny. As private companies widen the horizon of possibilities, more government money becomes available to fund promising ideas. In fact, government is where many entrepreneurs get the first dollars they need to create the prototypes necessary to pitch private investors, as we'll see in the next chapter.

For all the libertarian spin around commercial spaceflight and the myth‐making around Elon Musk, Musk himself was happy to admit the importance of government support in getting SpaceX off the ground.

“I would like to start off by saying what a tremendous honor it has been to work with NASA,” Musk said at a 2012 press conference after the successful launch of SpaceX's Dragon capsule, “and to acknowledge the fact that we could not have started SpaceX, nor could we have reached this point, without the help of NASA.”² In its first decade, SpaceX depended heavily on progress payments on NASA contracts to continue its operations. SpaceX, like many other companies in the Space Economy, is the fruit of a public‐private partnership, a collaboration between business and government. This model will remain important well into the future.

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The Space Economy offers the aspiring entrepreneur world‐shaking potential in any direction you might look. You'll find no desperate picking over of small ideas and minor improvements here. Startups are chasing huge, impactful outcomes that, if successful, will improve life on this planet for millions and even billions of people.

This is why the most talented people in the world are turning away from opportunities in lucrative areas like investment banking and consumer software to join our ranks. World‐class talent responds to a challenge. There are few challenges as invigorating as ones like mitigating climate change, feeding the hungry billions in developing nations, or giving people trapped in repressive regimes internet access.

“I really wanted to make a sustainable impact,” Regrow's Anna Volkova told me. “I wanted to look into the eyes of my kids and say, ‘Mom has done something to make the world more sustainable so that you can live in it and your kids can live in it.’ When people think of rocket scientists, they think we dream about going to Mars. Regrow might one day have a module for growing potatoes there, but my vision is to fix what's happening here first.”

In 1968, Apollo 8 sent back the legendary “Earthrise” photo of Earth taken from the Moon. This powerful image helped spark the environmental movement. What we do in outer space profoundly matters to humanity in ways that many other lucrative commercial activities do not. Think about this as you consider where to direct your own entrepreneurial ambitions.

If starting a company in the Space Economy appeals to you, you're probably wondering where to begin. In the next chapter, we'll take a look at what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur here, where to start your journey, and what to do once your company is off the ground.