Ask HN: I want my next startup to be in space tech. Where do I start? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I want my next startup to be in space tech. Where do I start?

32 pointspunkpeye40 comments

I am about 2 years away from starting my next startup and I know it has to be something space tech. What are the best books / blogs / Twitter influencers to follow that I should be on top of?

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I don't want to get too lecture-y but if you want to start a business, know what field you want to start it in, but don't even know what you're trying to accomplish, what problems you're trying to solve, how you'll change the market or logistics or whatever, why are you even doing it? How successful do you think an endeavor shoehorned into your desired criteria is going to be?

Twitter influencers? You think you're going to start a successful business by following the right people on twitter?

My advice, find a problem, take the time to understand the problem space very very well, find some novel solution and implement it to the absolute best of your ability. It could be in any space, but if you want to focus on space tech, there are plenty of difficult to solve problems there. Start there, understand the ins and outs of it, find a problem you think you can solve and deliver value by working on it.

I dunno, OP’s approach seems pretty common for serial founders.

The High Frontier is a fun book.

Successfull serial founder or failed serial founder?

Just wanting to get into space tech without any understanding of the topic, the problems and everything is really naive. Some tweets, podcasts or blog articles are not enough to learn about such a highly risk averse and regulated industry. Other commenters have already pointed out why space is a very very very hard industry to be in. You don‘t start that because you like space without a fortune of money to burn on the way.

possibly stupid question: generically, how would you suggest to start actually finding a problem in any industry?

Work in many roles in different parts of different business in the industry for 10-15 years to gain insight into how it works, what makes it valuable and the fundamental challenges it faces.

Go to many conferences to find where the smartest people are and how they are fixing the hardest problems. Meet the important people everyone knows in the industry who can help you navigate it.

Get to the top 1% in one of the skills which is critically important to your industry, so you can grok opportunities before others.

That might get you to the starting point. You can't just google "howto disrupt space".

I created a business by following influencers on Twitter. I realized that some of them were complaining about the same things and created a service to help them.

I know I was lucky, but following these people allowed me to realize there was a niche to serve.

Technical people are often blind to this as they always feel they need to be on top of a field to create a solution.

One man came to Mozart and asked him how to write a symphony. Mozart replied, “You are too young to write a symphony.” The man said, “You were writing symphonies when you were 10 years of age, and I am 21.” Mozart said, “Yes, but I didn’t run around asking people how to do it.”

Classic.

Ah yes, the good old “don’t ask for help from someone who knows more than you cause that makes you fucking stupid” proverb.

I'd see more as "If you aren't asking the right questions, I don't have time to teach you".

In this 'proverb', if the person had come to Mozart with the right questions or had shown he had tried, there is a jumping off point or quick feedback that could be done.

You should ask questions but you should come to the interaction having done research with results from previous attempts especially if they are accomplished (eg: very busy / have other things to do) and they aren't your friend

This really smart guy from my university in Norway started his company in an interesting way. After collaborating with Copenhagen Suborbitals, he identified rocket propellant pumps as a component where there was a growing need for a new product. He then went back to university and studied the possible subjects in fluid dynamics, and did projects with scaled-down testing using the available water lab. They've since built a team and crowd-funded, and now provide several products for the space industry. It seems to be a good example of a methodical and iterative approach to building a space company without large investment.

https://orbitalmachines.no/

That is a really impressive story. Talk about dedication when going back to school for it!

SpaceDotBiz is a newsletter about the space industry that has been interesting to read, with a free tier on Substack. A past article that stood out was a Q&A interview with a space industry journalist who moved on to become an industry analyst (2021): https://spacedotbiz.substack.com/p/caleb-henry

Limitations of the newsletter include its lack of criticism and investigative work, as this looks out-of-scope of its focus. Many of the articles have been friendly interviews with people in the space industry, and the most bearish article about the space industry ("Is The Commercial Space Industry Here to Stay?") concluded on an optimistic note.

Other, more critical sources would be welcome to develop a much more complete picture of the industry. I haven't sought out a specialized source for critical space industry articles, though critical articles do appear occasionally in major newspapers (e.g. the Financial Times and The Economist).

The saying is "too make a small fortune in aviation, start with a large fortune". And space is even more risky, expensive, and failure-prone than aviation.

tbf the difference between commercial aviation and space is that space is where governments have started off by spending a large fortune, and now hand out grants and contracts to prove that fortune can have a real world return.

But ultimately, you have to know how to win those grants, and that's going to be down to working on something the space agency wants people to work on whilst having a team and coalition partners that tick the right boxes. And they tend to be big conglomerates and universities, not trendy founders with big social media following.

Start with Why.

It seems that space tech is an expensive endeavor. Unless you have a very very powerful WHY. It will be hard to get investment.

Survival of the species i guess. Cant believe we still dig holes and fight wars over metal, gold, etc here on earth when there are unlimited resources available in space. The longer we wait the deeper the hole gets. Literally.

Space startups have really taken off over the last decade, thanks to big players like Blue Origin, Space X and Virgin Galactic. There are a lot of other entrants, in what can now genuinely be called an industry, thanks to dedicated startup accelerators like the Founder Institute Space Program.

"Opportunities are flourishing today in Space Tech. There's now an increasingly connected ecosystem to support even pre-seed stage aerospace founders - and Founder Institute can increase any aspiring space technology entrepreneur's chances of success, by providing the necessary founder mindset and key network connections" [0]

[0] https://fi.co/insight/founder-institute-space-tech-virtual-2...

I tend to agree with the gist of the comments that say, "If you have to ask, you are not ready." Yet I also hate to gatekeep people, so I'd recommend changing your approach to be less about, "who should I follow?", and more along the lines of: "Who could I contact to start to learn the industry?"

Ultimately, that is your goal - to learn the industry, understand what problems exist, which are solved, and which need help, and find a niche where your talents can fulfill a need. Following people is a tool to reach that goal, but only one tool of many. Seek other ways to achieve the goal and you not only will likely have more success, but your questions will be taken more seriously.

3 things needed to take space to the next level.

1) Habitats (we gotta live)

2) Energy (this will cover fuel, heating, automation, defence)

3) Mining (this gets us the resources to do all the above)

You corner the market in any of those three and you will be set for the imaginable future.

> Habitats (we gotta live)

Why exactly do we need to live in space at all? Can't we send more or less autonomous spacecraft to retrieve the resources, and stay safely here on Earth?

I mean - we extract oil from under the sea without having to move to underwater habitats, don't we?

Maintenance is always done on site. Do you think the workers on oil rigs take a commute to land every night? No, so people are going to need to live in space to solve problems in space.

Maintenance can be done by robots. Unlike on oil platforms, there is no free air in space.

Until a general purpose robot that can do all the things a human can do is developed and can be more cheaply deployed than a human, a human's gonna do it instead.

That is true. But keep in mind two things: first, the robot does not have to be fully autonomous, and second, maintaining a human in space is so expensive that we already have such robots. Just look at Curiosity and its cousins.

I don't think Curiosity and its cousins can tighten down leaky bolts on pipe connections, which is what I think of when the term "maintenance" comes up. The closest we have right now in that vicinity is Spot from Boston Dynamics, and it basically only acts as a universal monitoring tool to go yell at a human to fix things.

I guess what I'm saying is that robots can identify problem points, but at the current time can't actually troubleshoot or resolve those problems. Those are really difficult problems to solve.

I author Orbital Index (https://orbitalindex.com) weekly about the space industry. Hit me up if you want to chat.

I don't think space tech is something that would be easy for a startup, there are a lot of regulations and its a lot of very costly (I assume) hardware needed to get into. I think reading things isn't going to get you immersed or enough context of the problems. So go work at SpaceX or Blue Origin to understand the problem sets and figure out what problem space you want to work on. Along the way you could be meeting future co-founders, etc.

Probably would cheaper and easier to figure out how to be a vendor for space companies; software, ground hardware, construction, etc.

If the future is space and space exploration, we are going to need and have a lot more landing / launch pads with the need to build quickly and manage them cheaply.

Another side could be becoming a vendor of space or rocket equipment (materials, parts, suits, whatever) and focusing on making them better and cheaper. I think there is a lot of room for this since SpaceX is honestly the only big game in town, the rest are kind of jokes in terms of R&D speed.

Most likely customers would be non-SpaceX until you build up enough internal knowledge and products for a single topic where SpaceX will acquire you to integrate into their production pipeline.

Not saying you shouldn't go for space tech, but I know lots of people and some European tech companies who went into space tech. They all had pretty much same kind of experiences:

- Lots of regulations (for launching rockets, operating ground stations etc.)

- Everything is REALLY slow

- Very high risk (your 500k mini satellite may blow up with the rocket during launch)

- Things are very expensive and there are lots of (small and large) hidden/unknown fees that you'll face during the projects

Selenian Boondocks[1] has a great archive of cool ideas (eg [2]) and some of the authors are also founders.

[1] https://selenianboondocks.com/

[2]https://selenianboondocks.com/2022/04/geo-orbital-debris-mit...

Might be obvious but check out Delian Asparouhov, founder of Varda Space Industries. Chris Power, founder of Hadrian. If you look them up in spotify there are many interviews that touch on the space industry. Regarding books:

- I really enjoyed Lift-Off by Eric Berger on the early days of SpaceX.

- Shoot for the Moon is another good read on the Apollo program.

- The Case for Space by Robert Zubrin

- Ignition by John D. Clark for a history of liquid rocket propellants

Godspeed

(Edited formatting)

Not related to books/blogs/tweets, but if you are looking at space tech for 5-10 years from now, it might make sense to pay attention to 3D printing and anything around resource extraction robotics.

Exploiting offworld resources (like Trojan asteroids) will soon be possible with machines we can design, build, and test on Earth.

Scott Manley and Everyday Astronaut are both good follows on Youtube. Fly safe.

You need to find a problem that the industry you want to serve has. And it has to be severe and frequent. Skip the influencers part.

I suggest you start getting your hands on the field by getting a job or do help for free in a space related project.

Why are you exactly two years away? Isn’t that a weird restriction? Why not start now?

Where are you based?

Would like to connect. Email is ed.xr.dw@gmail.com

Check out what former high level SpaceX employees are getting into.

I dont know much about the business of space, but if we want to save our planet we need to start mining and processing ore in space. No need to dig up massive holes or fight resource wars here on earth when there are literally endless resources laying around put there. It is an overwhelming undertaking, to understate the challenge, but one we should take on if we are to survive.

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