Invest In Space ✑ [🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀] x 10 With a collection […]

Invest In Space ✑ [🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀] x 10

With a collection of fellow space VCs last night, I noted how investment in the sector has exploded over the past five years. Over 500 different VC firms have recently invested in a space startup — where did it all go?

Well, the category with the most direct competitors is the small-sat launch market. With over 120 competing firms (and growing; now 145 projects), I wondered if any sector in any industry has ever had more venture-backed competitors? We could not think of any. Here’s a list of most of them: https://www.newspace.im/launchers (it’s missing Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch and many billions of invested capital, and for comparison, the current mainstream launch list prices are $1K to $3K per kg to LEO, so these new entrants are forecasting that they will enter the market at a 10-50x cost disadvantage to today’s prices).

Everyone on the panel has invested in a launcher company or two (including myself if we count my 2009 investment in SpaceX and the now-retired Falcon 1. But the master plan there was always that the Falcon 1 would be a stepping stone to the Falcon 9 which used the same engines and obsoleted the Falcon 1 on cost/kg to orbit). I did not hear any theories for why so many competitive companies were collectively funded in this sector, more than any other in history. Or how they could address their 10x cost disadvantage (soon to be 100x when the fully-reusable Starship starts flying). I do see how a couple of them could address a rapid-launch niche for prototyping, constellation maintenance, and warfighting (deploying replacement satellites on short notice) where the customer would sacrifice cost for speed.