Ask HN: How would you bootstrap a space company?

I&#x27;ve worked in aerospace and have been reading HN for over a decade.<p>Here&#x27;s some adult advice, for both the OP and HN in general.<p>Space is a waste of time unless you&#x27;re a government or a bored billionaire. Objects are too far, and lift is now a commodity.<p>(SpaceX will probably end up shutting down due to lack of lift demand, hence their polluting the sky with micro satellites now.)<p>So if you really want a career in space, go join an existing company or agency.<p>However, there&#x27;s a lot of smaller aviation-related projects that are equally challenging, but more affordable.<p>Examples of recent remarkable aviation advances are:<p>- Robinson Helicopter (world&#x27;s largest-volume mfg)<p>- Williams small jet engines (started in cruise missiles, now certified for civil use)<p>- uAvionix ADS-B tailBeacon (first affordable ADS-B transponder)<p>- Scaled Composites&#x27; projects. The whole reason Rutan used composites was to make wings 10x faster. You can do that too.<p>There&#x27;s room for anybody (who wants to spend their savings) on:<p>- composite mfg. techniques<p>- applying the latest in electronics (without competing with Garmin)<p>- willing to navigate the FAA TSO process<p>- installing ADS-B. It&#x27;s literally a gold rush until 2021.<p>- be like Mike Busch, the world&#x27;s top aviation entrepreneurial mind:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.savvyaviation.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.savvyaviation.com&#x2F;</a>

Start by assuming SpaceX will be successful with Starship and Starlink. That means they drop launch costs to $20&#x2F;kg at scale, find themselves with NASA-level funding from Starlink subscriptions, and start building permanent installations on Mars and the Moon.<p>Figure out something they&#x27;re going to need for those. Musk has said they&#x27;re relying on other companies to provide the infrastructure to actually live on Mars. Be one of those companies. If it&#x27;s something modest but really useful, you don&#x27;t have to be a big company at first.<p>Or, recognize that everybody&#x27;s building lightweight, expensive, super reliable satellites because launch is expensive. Figure out how to build the cheapest possible satellites instead. Your financial constraints will give you a different mindset than people with serious resources.

Look for some NASA&#x2F;US Gov RFPs and open contracts for some low level manufacturing&#x2F;sub-contractor work on their space missions(or sub contract work from prime contractors). Get the necessary certifications. When you do win bids, hire the right people, then provide the services, and money starts coming in. I&#x27;m sure there is a banker or financial institution out there that&#x27;ll hand out funding to someone that actually holds a contract to NASA or a big defense contractor.

As someone who works for a space company that was effectively bootstrapped, there are 2 ways I&#x27;ve seen to do it.<p>1. Government Contracts - this is what my company did. Ground demonstrations to parabola tests to ISS payloads. It&#x27;s a long hard road and has a lot of NASA bureaucracy, but we just won our first 100MM$ contract and only did one raise 7 years after the company was founded.<p>2. Build something a big Aerospace company needs - there&#x27;s a lot of this these days. Company&#x27;s like Gomspace are building tools for cubesats with minimal startup costs. This is the more independent route, but comes with the challenges of convincing a risk averse industry to use something that hasn&#x27;t been tested in the correct environment.

I&#x27;ve kicked this about in my head also, because what geek wouldn&#x27;t love to do it? I&#x27;ve come to the conclusion though that unless one is already a business and engineering genius with the luck of the gods, it&#x27;s a ridiculous dream. With that said, a chap called (Sir) Martin Sweeting started Surrey Satellites in the 80s which went on to revolutionise the satellite industry and was sold partially to SpaceX, and then fully to ESA, so it is possible, but he was already a PhD-level scientist&#x2F;engineer working in the field. Anyway here&#x27;s a few ideas:<p>1. You could look at novel launch methods, i.e. centrifugal, rockoon, light-gas space-gun. On the latter Gerald Bull did reach space but needed a truly enormous gun<p>2. ...but imagine the know-how and resources required to develop a whole system like above that can get something to orbit. And quite apart from building the thing, how are you going to test it without become a lawyer to get the necessary approvals? So perhaps concentrate on one aspect of an example above that is transferrable to other industries. But even then to investigate materials that perform well at high temperatures, for example, it would help to already be a world-leading materials scientist, wouldn&#x27;t it?<p>3. Fabrics. Looking at the latest NASA space suit I refuse to believe there isn&#x27;t scope for improvement, and apart from that I suspect there&#x27;ll be all kinds of novel fabric requirements. Again you might well find what you develop can be sold for earth-bound use<p>4. IP. Could you take an ARM-like approach and be merely an IP licenser? You could for example design modular launch systems and let others build them

I&#x27;d sat that you need to start small if you don&#x27;t want to take on a bunch of investment money. A lot of magazine articles make it sound like anyone with $25k can get a cubesat launched, but it is clearly not that simple.<p>Martin Platt and the AmbaSat project have given me some insight on how much work it takes just to design and get approval for really simple satellites. They post regular updates to their Kickstarter page. I think you can see the updates even if you aren&#x27;t a backer: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kickstarter.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;ambasat&#x2F;ambasat-1-an-educational-space-satellite-kit&#x2F;posts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kickstarter.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;ambasat&#x2F;ambasat-1-an-ed...</a>.<p>Perhaps you should get in touch with some space industry insiders that know the regulatory environment and know what rules can be broken and what can&#x27;t. Then also get in touch with people that have worked on space equipment before, because space is a complicated domain.

1. Use Deep RL to predict stable 3D protein structures that would not normally occur in Nature<p>2. Simulate gravitational dynamics to winnow down candidate crystals that cannot be synthesized in terrestrial conditions because they would collapse under their own weight<p>3. Find novel applications for those proteins such as DNA data storage and computation<p>4. Design a prototype microgravity factory that operates at scale and exploits rapidly falling launch costs<p>5. Convince Big Pharma to invest using the rationale that space is the next big profit driver<p>Best of Luck ;)

Some feedback for HN: repeating the story of PayPal&#x2F;Amazon and saying &quot;you just need lots of money&quot; isn&#x27;t an answer here. That&#x27;s exactly what the author put in the question, they know.<p>Explaining _why_ the question is flawed may be a good answer, but otherwise think about the question and if you don&#x27;t have a good answer, don&#x27;t answer.

Millionaires play golf. Billionaires play space.<p>Step 1. Make billions in something (not space) Step 2. Turn billions into millions with space

1. Find a way to return cubesats from orbit<p>2. Sell your system to anyone who wants to do science where the payload has to come back, but can&#x27;t get onto the ISS &#x2F; wants to experiment in open vacuum not a station.<p>3. Find goods that can only be manufactured in micro-g which are profitable at tiny scale, make them with your returnable cube sats. Made in Space, FOMS, etc are trying to do this but you could iterate faster&#x2F;cheaper on cubes than mucking with ISS bureaucracy.<p>The window to do this is small and might not exist though. Eventually private stations will likely be the better option.

I have thought of this my whole life. Well, since I was 12 years old, so 48 years anyway. I would develop small reaction engines for orbital maneuvering. Make them lightweight and inexpensive and infinitely customizable. Sell them to every rocket company and satellite producer. Make a whole family from hypergolic to plasma to ion thrust. Be really good at it. Establish a 100% reliability record.<p>But, how to bootstrap that? Perhaps write the software for some other reaction engine company? Or create a simulator for orbital maneuvering?

1. Find life outside the solar system.<p>2. Send message to them via the Sun.<p>3. Aliens receive message, determine Earth&#x27;s location and send invading fleet to conquer the planet.<p>4. Discover the fleet via Hubble telescope and warn humanity.<p>5. World focuses attention on humanity&#x27;s survival and diverts funds to spaceship manufacturing and jump starts the next phase of technological innovations.<p>...<p>450. Profit.

Could you share why bootstrapping this business is attractive?<p>I’ve bootstrapped many companies, but I did so because the situation seemed to warrant it (capital requirements, perceived market size, achievable short-term revenue, etc.).<p>If you’re absolutely dead-set on both space and bootstrapping, I’d start by consulting in that field. Get paid while you spot a problem and build a team to moonlight on it.

Develop useful tech for cubesats. Build a demo&#x2F;prototype hardware box and go to a space conference after contacting people in the industry beforehand. Get an &quot;in&quot; with a small startup and work with them to build it on a satellite. Through a partnership with them find others, become a satellite builder. Get experience using the launch market and begin to learn about rockets. At that point, my knowledge runs out - but I think you&#x27;ll need a few hundred million if you want to have a go at developing a rocket yourself, so that&#x27;s how big your cubesat &#x2F; satellite company will have to be.

Figure out a way to make LOX cheaper than anyone else on an industrial scale. I bet LOX production is a pretty sleepy business with few competitors. Use the money selling LOX to bootstrap the space business.

Not all companies can be bootstrapped, and even more shouldnt be. How would you bootstrap an oil refinery or a floating casino? I mean, maybe you could, but why not just become a person capable of taking the shortest route to your goal?<p>Often, the reason you cant bootstrap companies is because opportunities are time-sensitive and your competition isnt bootstrapping. Imagine trying to bootstrap an Uber competitor in Uber&#x27;s market at the same time as Uber. Even if somehow you could in the absence of Uber, Uber would destroy you.

Start a transformative web-commerce company, then transform it into the premier cloud-hosting company. Sell some shares. Pay a lot of good people to help you.<p>Seriously. Bezos is the only major player to be playing only with his own money. I think everyone else (SpaceX, ULA, Virgin, etc.) all have substantial external investment.<p>Space is expensive to get to. In general, you&#x27;re going to need to pool a lot of capital and human effort.<p>If starting small is a goal, finding great Cubesat applications seems like a good place to start (but you&#x27;ll need enough money to get to orbit). It looks like there is a lot of competition, though.

The &quot;spaceness,&quot; of the business needs definition. Maybe you build drones to defend asteroid mining claims and equipment, stealth communications for space prospecting, cryptographically sovereign networks for space supply chains, low gravity weapons and anti-piracy defences, solar sails, a navigation scheme and commercial beacon network, etc.<p>The nearest term use case for commercial space tech is going to be regulatory arbitrage, so if you can deliver content and secure a physical space jurisdiction for a legal system, it will be the new off shore.

You... don’t? There is a reason that Elon etc are the ones with bootstrapped space companies and very few others.

Learn how to use mission planning software, for instance:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;smallsat-institute&#x2F;space-mission-design-tools" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;smallsat-institute&#x2F;space-mission-design...</a><p>with this you can help people spin tales of space project such as: &quot;to build a sunshade, is it worth mining the moon?&quot; Does it make sense to build the &quot;Lunar Gateway?&quot; Could lunar oxygen be delivered to LEO and HEO in order to retank SpaceX Starships?<p>Pick up the tools to answer questions like that.

No one has suggested this so far, strangely enough: start with content. Aim to become <i>the place</i> for excellent news, interviews, videos, etc. about anything space related. Or, go a fictional route - if George Lucas &#x2F; Lucas Films wanted to get into actual, real space travel or space products, he&#x27;s in an excellent position to do so. The brand is related and they&#x27;ve got billions to spend. I would bet that this happens sometime in the next ±100 years - imagine Disney having a Star Wars theme park in space. And you certainly don&#x27;t need to be as successful as Lucas to build a fictional brand around space - even a smaller company could make space products if it has an audience.<p>How to start from scratch: build up an audience, relationships with industry members, and an overall familiarity with the marketplace and potential opportunities. Develop a product, sell it to your audience, hire smart people, rinse and repeat. Your starting costs are basically zero, assuming you know how to write&#x2F;create content.

It&#x27;s been said &quot;rocket science is not rocket science&quot;.<p>Elon Musk put reportedly 90 millions his own dollars into Falcon-1. So it was enough a decade ago to spend $90 millions for Kwajalein launch pad, 5 units of Falcon-1, design, transportation, operations.<p>Should we assume that today that ought to be cheaper - especially if we find a cheaper launch pad and be more lucky with at least first launch? Rocket Lab isn&#x27;t that successful with it, but shouldn&#x27;t it be possible at all? A recent new Japanese launcher was lighter than 3 tons.<p>Now there are more modest companies, which don&#x27;t put payloads to orbit, yet still qualify as &quot;space business&quot;. I&#x27;d recall Altius Space Machines and Masten Space. You can add parts manufacturers for cubesats - parts like star trackers reaction wheels, RCSes, communications... They usually start with way less than tens of million dollars.<p>Why a particular approach should cost a lot? Kistler Aerospace found that buying components for orbital launchers on the market is too expensive to survive, but may be there are other ways?

NOTE: The below suggestion is assuming Starship pans out and launch costs drop dramatically.<p>The way I see it, there are 3 (overlapping?) ways of making money in space:<p>1) put something up there (like a satellite) 2) take something down (asteroid mining, space based manufacturing, etc) 3) do something in space you can only do there<p>Here&#x27;s an idea that falls into category 3 that I&#x27;ve been kicking around - space based entertainment. Maybe design a new sport that&#x27;s only playable in space (or start with a currently popular one and extend it with space-only dynamics).<p>You would definitely need some significant capital and it&#x27;ll be several years before you could actually put some athletes in space. But assuming launch costs are cheap enough and human transport is reliable, I don&#x27;t think it would require speculative new technologies. Possibly the biggest technical gap would be in building large enough structures for the sport. The work of Bigelow Areospace or Nanoracks seems to be going in the right direction.

Governments with space programmes will fund lots of research-type projects as well as purchase goods and services they actually use.<p>But if you&#x27;d best pick something you can do for the million or two they might give you like niche software or analysing EO data or space imagery or lightweight materials rather than hope to launch a cubesat constellation or get to Mars.

Realistically you don’t, but...<p>You’re definitely not building hardware without much money. Maybe you can build software? Spend a lot of time talking to companies that already operate in the space industry, find some unmet software need that you can somehow build a software solution for (better than the thousands of other software engineers who have already worked in the field for decades) and sell it to them.<p>For instance, maybe you figure out a better way to write satellite management software. And then you sell that for a while (tricky, you’ve got very few possible customers and they’re all quite capable of copying what you’ve done if it’s so great) and eventually you get to the point where you start launching your own satellites.<p>I’m not saying there’s a reasonable business model in there; but if there’s a reasonable business model somewhere it’s likely to look something like that.

Move to Glasgow (like Spire did). It&#x27;s got a bunch of companies making cube sats &amp; cube sat software &amp; satellite data analysis.<p>Clyde Space will sell the bits to make a cubesat or even build it for you. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aac-clyde.space&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aac-clyde.space&#x2F;</a><p>Alba Orbital do the same thing at a smaller (&amp; cheaper form factor): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.albaorbital.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.albaorbital.com&#x2F;</a><p>Add a sensor that you can sell the data from. Make a deal to sell the data. Use the money &#x2F; guarantee of the deal to raise money to fund the satellite development and launch.

Here&#x27;s some different resources that might help you tap into the entrepreneurial space community as well as help get you bootstrap, seed funding for your space business:<p>- The New Space Conference (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spacefrontier.org&#x2F;newspace2019&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spacefrontier.org&#x2F;newspace2019&#x2F;</a>), which alternates between being based in the Bay Area and Seattle. This conference is a great, accessible way to find out what is going on with startup companies attempting to do interesting things in space.<p>- The NASA Ames Space Portal (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;ames&#x2F;partnerships&#x2F;spaceportal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;ames&#x2F;partnerships&#x2F;spaceportal</a>) - A group based at NASA Ames field center in Mountain View that pursues public&#x2F;private partnerships between NASA and the private sector.<p>- NASA Frontier Development Lab (FDL) (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;frontierdevelopmentlab.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;frontierdevelopmentlab.org&#x2F;</a>) - A two month &quot;research sprint&quot; that takes place in the summer time in Mountain View, bridging machine learning and space science &amp; exploration, as well as the public and private sectors.<p>- NASA SBIR grants (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sbir.nasa.gov&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sbir.nasa.gov&#x2F;</a>) - a great program that helps seed small businesses and solo inventors with seed grants for promising entrepreneurial programs that might help NASA and the general space economy<p>- NASA NSPIRES (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nspires.nasaprs.com&#x2F;external&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nspires.nasaprs.com&#x2F;external&#x2F;</a>) - NASA portal page to find out calls for contributors, that also have funding, that can help you get plugged into the space community and also get seed funding.<p>- NASA Centennial Challenges (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;open&#x2F;centennial-challenges.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;open&#x2F;centennial-challenges.html</a>) - X-Prize like competitions that will pay out if you meet their guidelines and win in a particular area, like the Regolith Excavation Challenge which has been held several times, where the team who can best move simulated lunar soil in an automated way wins. The last winning team got 500k, for example, which is a nice purse to help bootstrap a space venture.<p>- NASA Advanced Innovative Concepts (NIAC) (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;directorates&#x2F;spacetech&#x2F;niac&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;directorates&#x2F;spacetech&#x2F;niac&#x2F;index.html</a>) - Award program that funds very far-reaching, innovative space programs. These are always incredibly cool programs; here&#x27;s the awarded NIAC grants for 2019 for example (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;press-release&#x2F;nasa-invests-in-18-potentially-revolutionary-space-tech-concepts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;press-release&#x2F;nasa-invests-in-18-potent...</a>)<p>- Luxembourg Space Agency (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;space-agency.public.lu&#x2F;en.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;space-agency.public.lu&#x2F;en.html</a>) - Luxembourg is a leader in private, mining oriented operations in space, and acts as an angel and seed investor in many, small early entrepreneurial space startups<p>If you have more questions feel free to reach out to me on twitter at @bradneuberg

Bootstrapping is a marathon, not a sprint. Bootstrapping is kind of like stacking bricks, except you mught be making each brick too.<p>Sometimes you have to build the first thing to get to the second thing.<p>Before developing hardware, I&#x27;d see if there&#x27;s a lucrative software based problem in this area that could be bootstrapped to generate revenue to fund the next project.<p>In a way SpaceX is doing their equivalent of this by building Starlink to generate ongoing monthly revenue that conceivably could be directed elsewhere.

I have this mental model that I borrowed from the space industry. Just like how SSTO (Single-stage to orbit) is extraordinarily hard, although not impossible, I&#x27;ve always held the opinion that bootstrapping a startup in hard tech is similarly hard but not quite impossible.<p>An less riskier approach IMO, would be the multi-stage approach, by solving a series of less capital intensive problems and progressively solving harder and harder problems while accumulating capital for the ultimate goal.

Build software that improves some clunky or inefficient process common in the space industry, then sell it to the space industry. Voila, you now run a bootstrapped space company :)

Unless you&#x27;re bringing a big industry name with you as cofounder, it&#x27;s simply not possible.<p>Just to get certified to do any work as a subcontractor would be in the $XXX,XXX range.

Space based solar like CassioPeia is an interesting format. Designed in a way that you can start with a smaller scale model to prove the concept and then work upwards.

Find country that need (but does not have yet) ICBM capabilities and pitch them that you can build rocket for them. They will provide all funding you will ever need.

First, start something massive and unrelated to space, like a paypal. Then ride your dividends straight into your burn rate, securing idealistic investor money to go into the furnace along the way.<p>Seriously, that’s the playbook for what you suggest. The only playbook. Anything else in these threads is going to be baseless presumption; if it were as the commenters said, they’d themselves be doing it and not sharing it online.

If you really want to bootstrap it, start with toy&#x2F;hobby rockets and drones and slowly work up. Alter the services you offer as you go eg: aerial photography, weather monitoring, engines etc etc till eventually you&#x27;re launching small sattelites and stuff<p>It&#x27;s the kind of thing that&#x27;d probably take decades before you were realistically even beginning to look at space though

Maybe useful- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbesindia.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;startups&#x2F;we-are-seeing-isro-employees-quit-and-start-ventures-narayan-prasad&#x2F;55187&#x2F;1" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbesindia.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;startups&#x2F;we-are-seeing-is...</a>

I went to a Elon Musk&#x27;s talk. He said he wouldn&#x27;t have started spacex and tesla if he hadn&#x27;t had the initial capital he gained through paypal.<p>I want to start a robotics company and I guess I would start by selling robotic toys and kits.

Start and then sell a financial services company. Then build the space company.

You could look at developing something that would make being in space more habitable for humans. Better spacesuits, better equipment. Maybe something in the cryostasis..eh..space?

Why not wait until people are out there already and sell shovels

Start a non-space company, grow wildly successful, and use the substantial financial resources from that to fund your space company. Space is a capital-intensive industry. You cannot compete with those who can leapfrog you with one investment round or bond issue.<p>Presuming you don&#x27;t want to do that, or to become a primary launch provider, start by networking with people already in the industry. Move to space hot spots like Cape Canaveral, Huntsville, Houston, or Los Angeles, and start stalking insiders.

There&#x27;s a reason most of these comments are saying this is impossible.<p>First you need some actual technical knowledge, like PhD level knowledge of some slightly innovative new space tech. I like to think one of the big boys in space money will be asteroid mining. So present a detailed and well researched pitch to some investor about how you would go about using a company to RnD this endeavour. Hopefully, they give you a lot of money.<p>But you said you want little external funding, so, yeah, not going to happen.

Define space company. You want to launch things? Hitch a ride on OP (other people&#x27;s) rockets?

If anyone tries this, drop me an email. I’d love to get involved in any capacity.

1. Partner with Elon Musk 2. Use partner&#x27;s capital and experience 3. Profit

How do you make money with Satellites?

Start an e-commerce company from the scratch, grow it, make it automated, then use revenue to bootstrap your space company.

Cubesats?

Satellites on a chip.

How does anybody bootstrap anything these days? Marketing and kickstarter!

1. Make a PayPal 2. Space time