Space Is Open for Business: The Industry That Can Transform Humanity

by Robert C. Jacobson

In 2010, former NASA Ames scientists Will Marshall, Robbie Schingler, and Chris Boshuizen created a startup out of garage space at the co-living house in Cupertino known as Rainbow Mansion. The stucco home has attracted bright, space-friendly professionals over the near-decade that it has operated as a shared living space. The garage area, used for ongoing hardware projects, served as the first office for Cosmogia—known today as Planet. While many Earth observation efforts exist today, Planet started as a rare creature. Its founders saw the possibility of leveraging small satellites (also known as “smallsats”) for Earth observation. As Boshuizen recounted in NASA’s 2016 Spinoff publication, NASA Ames Research Center’s director of engineering, Pete Klupar, “had this shtick … where he’d pull out a Government-issued BlackBerry from his pocket and tout how a smartphone has more capabilities than many satellites, as it has a bigger computer and better sensors.” Klupar would proceed to ask the room why satellites cost so much more than a phone—before putting the phone away and continuing with his regular programming. One day, Boshuizen and Marshall interjected: “We said, ‘Pete, don’t put that back in your pocket. We’re going to make that into a satellite.’” The pair soon began leading the NASA PhoneSat project: CubeSats that leveraged cheap smartphone components to take photographs once in orbit. PhoneSats cost under $7,000 to build; the least expensive satellite that NASA had b...