Is There Anyone ELSE Up There?
by Lou Zacharilla
A man walking along a cliff feels the ground give way beneath him. He manages to clutch at a root extending from the face of the cliff, which saves him from falling 1,200 feet onto jagged rocks in the surf below. But as he hangs, on he cannot climb back up. He shouts, “Is anyone up there!?”
A voice fills the sky! “Have faith. If you have faith you can let go and you will fall light as a feather, landing unhurt on the rocks below.” He looks down at the rocks and crashing surf, thinks about it, looks back up and shouts, “Is there anyone ELSE up there?”
You can interpret that a lot of ways, especially when you factor in the puns from the space and satellite industry. It is the question we asked when we were planning the first Astropreneurship Day in New York, which took place on November 1st. We were specially thinking about all of the players who have started to emerge in Upstate New York.
Those New Yorkers who live in the five boroughs of the City tend to refer to other parts of the state as “upstate” or “up there.” Up there is a cluster of once great post-industrial cities, such as Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse. Relative to Manhattan and Brooklyn, they are geographically “up there.” And most New Yorkers know little about them. The joke is that there are but two seasons in Upstate New York: winter and the Fourth of July. It ain’t necessarily so. Summers and Autumns are splendid, and the universities in that part of the state bring the light of science to thousands from around the globe daily. Each has engineering programs that are among the best in North America. And the lacrosse teams kick ass!
The region would seem to be a perfect place for a new space commercialization ecosystem. And it is. Groups like the New York Space Alliance and Ithaca’s Cornell University and the University of Buffalo have active programs that are beginning to nurture talent There you find people like former NASA Chief Technologist Mason Peck, who are teaching, ramping up startups and mentoring the community and region as it inches toward a new era.
The new era is best represented by the super team of Adam Maher and Derek Edinger, two former SSPI Promise Award winners, who left Space Systems Loral to start their own business up there in Ithaca. Ursa Space https://www.ursaspace.com/ has been the pride of entrepreneurial space ventures “up there.” Successful rounds of financing have given early proof of concept to their exceptional geospatial analytics model.
Ursa Space is not alone there. There are others. Marrying them to the venture capital sector in New York City did not seem to be a hard lift. Add to this the momentum from a new feeling among economic development officials about the future potential of space to create jobs and you have got yourself an astropreneurial moment.
Thanks to the work of groups like NYSA, New York Economic Development Corporation and the Intelligent Community Forum, the idea that space businesses can trigger prosperity, which is a foundation for economic and social stability seems logical. Why not? The big boys are all over this concept. ULA, Blue Origin and others are proclaiming a poetic sounding “CIS Lunar Economy” to be shining down on us. Call it economic growth in the time of “Moonstruck.” What it really is, we think, is another age of discovery and exploration. Think NASA in the ‘60’s and Columbus in the ‘90s – Christopher Columbus in 1492 that is.
So SSPI, with the support of Hogan Lovells put together an event that brought together the players of this rich New York ecosystem. SoftBank, RRE Ventures and legendary industry brains like Hoyt Davidson and Armand Musey were gathered for a day of dialogue on what astropreneurship in New York might be.
In true SSPI fashion, three companies who represent the best of what is “up there” were given awards:
- GLADOS (Glint Analyzing Data Observation Satellite), the first satellite designed and built by a team at the University of Buffalo’s Nanosatellite Laboratory. http://ubnl.space/ A succession of graduate & undergraduate student teams have worked for over five years, on behalf of the USA Air Force Research Lab, NASA and Moog, to develop a new satellite, from conception to launch next year, on a cubesat. Its mission will be to study light data and to classify space debris from “glint events.” Waste management gets a new image!
- Ragnarok Industries, the best new business in Williamsburg, Brooklyn – a hotbed for tech startups – built a nanosat company to deliver polar broadband service via its Hiemdallr satellite. http://www.ragnarokindustries.com/working/ The project is being watched closely by the engineering community for its special design electrical propulsion (non-volatile and non-energetic) as it plans for propulsion toward lunar orbit.
- Will Porteous, General Partner & COO, RRE Ventures. RRE is a New York-based venture capital firm. RRE has a reputation for embracing independent perspectives. Will and his team at RRE Ventures have invested in a range of high risk ventures that cover the entire ecosystem of our industry. You will recognize some in their portfolio, such as Spire, Spaceflight and the aforementioned Ursa Space. These have become category defining ventures, which stimulate investment from others and build confidence among entrepreneurs and the cities in which they work. These are ventures that have changed the way people think about satellites and space.
So on November 1 things really were looking up in the Empire State, a place that is logically the next home many new industries of discovery. Will it happen overnight? Probably not. But….have faith.
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Lou Zacharilla is the Director of Innovation and Development of the Space and Satellite Professionals International (SSPI). He can be reached at: LZacharilla@sspi.org. For more information about SSPI go to: www.sspi.org and www.bettersatelliteworld.com. To listen to Lou’s podcast go to: https://www.sspi.org/cpages/podcast
