Space isn’t just for millionaires… But they lower the barrier

You’re probably familiar with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX – but what’s the aerospace sector like for startups that aren’t founded by billionaires?

It turns out that many aerospace startups are hitching a ride with the big players. While Blue Origin is for space tourists looking for a zero-gravity experience, SpaceX offers a ride-share option for startups that’s giving them a literal boost they couldn’t afford otherwise.

“Before, you would have to go and build your own full rocket system versus now you can kind of book it like an Uber,” explained Delian Asparouhov, co-founder, chairman and president of Varda Space Industries.

Lowering the barrier for entry to space

“Elon is launching a rocket basically every six and a half days and so if you miss your ride, you can just show up on one a week later. And that’s what lowers the barrier to entry,” added Delian.

While a rocket launch came in a decade ago at about US$100 million, Delian estimated that the average cost for a startup to send a payload – such as satellites or a space tug – into orbit on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is around US$1.9 million.

The SpaceX website states that dedicated ride-share missions start as low as US$275,000. For scale, a 20kg piece of luggage would cost US$300,000.

This is opening up opportunities for a slew of new startups in the space industry.

“In the past five years, you can list a variety of different startups that have been started that don’t have billionaire Elon Musk-type co-founders, and are quite successful: Relativity Space, ABL Space Systems, Impulse Space Propulsion, Hadrian, and Varda, the company that I work at.”

Manufacturing in space

“I think it’s a super exciting time to be working in space where now everyone can actually start a space company,” added the Varda president, whose company manufactures materials in low earth orbit.

“It’s predicated off of work that has been done on both the ISS and Skylab over the past three plus decades, showing that across a wide variety of materials, that there’s a lot of benefit to the unique physics of microgravity that improves the material quality,” added Delian.

The earlier examples of this were the production of clearer fiberoptic cables and defect-free semiconductors. Now, Varda is exploring the development of pharmaceutical drugs in zero gravity.

“I can absolutely guarantee there’s going to be a paediatric patient 10, 12, 15 years from today, whose life is saved because of a drug that was only manufacturable in space,” Delian elaborated.

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Main image of a space rocket with a taxi sign attached: Web Summit