MOUNTAIN VIEW — The next big thing in space exploration might not come from a shiny NASA research facility. Instead, it may spring from an abandoned gas station or a converted McDonald’s in the heart of Silicon Valley’s growing space startup scene.
Bay Area companies are commercializing the space industry, with ambitions as lofty as the cruising altitude of the International Space Station. They range from Deep Space Industries, which plans to mine asteroids, to Made In Space, which is working on in-space manufacturing, to Planet Labs, which aims to take daily photographs of everywhere on Earth.
Just as in other technology sectors, Silicon Valley is leading the space startup boom. At least a dozen space companies have popped up in the Bay Area over the past few years, with a concentration taking over empty buildings on Mountain View’s Moffett Field.
“There’s a critical mass here in Silicon Valley,” said Sean Casey, managing director of the Silicon Valley Space Center, a space startup accelerator. He says companies flock to the area not only for tech connections, but also because investors here are known for a big appetite for risk.
Last year was a record year for space funding nationwide, with more than 50 venture capital firms pouring $1.8 billion into space startups, according to a recent study by The Tauri Group. Corporations are contributing, too, with Google last year investing $900 million in Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and a group including Coca-Cola Co., Airbus Group and Virgin Group funneling $500 million into Virginia-based satellite company OneWeb.
“For the first time, you’re seeing people that are investors feeling like they need exposure to this scene,” said Peter Hébert, co-founder and managing partner of Menlo Park’s Lux Capital, which has several space companies in its portfolio. “They want to at least dip their toes in.”
The industry ignited a few years ago with the development of tiny satellites called CubeSats. Where once engineers spent hundreds of millions of dollars to launch satellites the size of compact cars, they now can launch shoebox-sized satellites for a fraction of the cost. Entrepreneurs jumped at the opportunity, founding companies such as Moffett Field’s Astro Digital and San Francisco’s Planet Labs and Spire Global to make satellites that snap pictures of Earth from space or use GPS technology to track weather patterns. The U.S. launched 141 CubeSats between 2003 and 2014, according to an October NASA newsletter. Now the small satellites’ popularity has inspired a second wave of startups that are building off that technology.
Deep Space Industries, based in Moffett Field, is striving to make a small satellite strong enough to withstand the harsh conditions of space beyond Earth’s orbit. The company wants to send its satellites into deep space on prospecting missions, with the goal of eventually setting up mining operations on nearby asteroids. The first resource mined will be frozen water, which is abundant on asteroids, said Meagan Crawford, vice president of strategic communications. That water could refuel rocket engines midflight — either as water or broken down into liquid hydrogen and oxygen — or astronauts could use it to support human life on the space station.
Made In Space, also based in Moffett Field, is working on technology that would allow humans to manufacture tools, equipment and, eventually, large structures in space. The company will launch its first commercial zero-gravity 3-D printer to the space station this month, said business development engineer Brad Kohlenberg. In-space manufacturing would be a boon for astronauts, Kohlenberg said, because it would mean they would have to launch fewer items from Earth. Made In Space also is experimenting with 3-D printing using moon dirt as an economical way to make use of the materials available in space.
Moffett has become a hotbed of space and high-tech activity — NASA operates its Ames Research Center on the property, Google leases three hangars there, and it’s home to think tank and startup accelerator Singularity University.
Commissioned as a naval air base in 1933, Moffett’s first role was to house the dirigible the USS Macon. NASA (then called NACA) opened its research center there in 1939, using wind tunnels on the site to develop high-speed airplane and spacecraft technology still in use today. The military base closed in 1994 and was turned over to NASA, and many of the buildings fell into disrepair. Google took over the site last year, promising to restore the deteriorating aircraft hangars.
Pull up to the McDonald’s for a hamburger, and you’ll be greeted by Skycorp founder Dennis Wingo, who is using the abandoned fast-food joint for his moon-imaging project. Nearby, Astro Digital’s lab, at the site of an old gas station and car repair garage, is a bizarre mashup of Space Age tech and quintessential startup culture — there are foosball and pingpong tables in the converted garage, but there’s also a “clean room,” and engineers drink from special anti-static coffee mugs.
Astro Digital is one of several Bay Area companies that make imaging satellites with the potential to photograph everywhere on Earth from space, and to update those images constantly. That technology has opened up opportunities for other startups, such as Palo Alto-based Orbital Insight, which is figuring out how to use and profit from this new wealth of data.
Founder and CEO James Crawford said those images can be used to measure the “overall economic pulse of the Earth.”
Orbital Insight can calculate how much oil is in the world, for example. Oil is stored in tanks with floating lids, and as the levels drop, the lids cast lower shadows, which Orbital Insight can detect. The startup also counted cars parked near Levi’s Stadium during Super Bowl 50 last month to hone its software.
Alternatively, the information can be used for humanitarian purposes. Orbital Insight is working with the World Bank on a project that seeks to determine the economic health of a region from space. The company is comparing its data from Sri Lanka to the World Bank’s poverty information from the region, hoping to find a correlation between something visible — the number of buildings or the health of crops in the region, for example — and poverty levels.
In Hébert’s opinion, there are endless additional possibilities for this real-time data.
“We’re just in the first inning,” Hébert said, “of what’s going to be a very long period of growth in this industry.”
