ianvorbach

Fair point! SpaceX has their site at Boca Chica, but its really only capable of demonstration launches that can thread the needle between Florida and Cuba. Frequently operating rockets need a wider range of orbits you can reach, and so you really need a site on the coasts.

I would say this is more an excellent marketing tool or a way to make space seem more approachable to a broader audience

This is awesome. Back in 2014, Bezos ran an expedition to recover Apollo engines from the Atlantic and restore them too: https://www.bezosexpeditions.com/updates.html

That's a fun idea! I don't see how you would execute that unfortunately though. Hubble wasn't meant to be re-mounted after deployment. Starship wouldn't be able to just gobble Hubble up and have it rattle around in its fairing during re-entry

Gilmour Space comes to mind: https://www.gspacetech.com/

Hopefully sooner rather than later!

Thank you Max, excited to see what you and the Epsilon3 team accomplish next!

Ah, thanks for elaborating! Fair and interesting point. It's true that the work these companies are doing is not pushing the cutting edge of technology readiness, but is instead exploiting the most recent advances in R&D by finding business cases that now are possible. As new materials and science advance in research institutions, startups will then step in to commercialize that tech. So I guess I'm saying we shouldn't necessarily expect YC startups to be at the frontier of R&D

I agree that this was historically the case, but the newest generation of space companies are making a solid case that the financial ROI is a reality and not just a theoretical promise. As the industry matures, government customers are becoming less critical to the success of many of these companies (although gov't will always play a strong role).

Having trouble following. Interested in hearing more if you'd be willing to expand!

Appreciate you sharing!

Plus in educating a new generation of engineers in how to build great space technology in a scrappy way. Really started with SpaceX

Absolutely agree! Infrastructure, data layers, analytics on top of the data. Plus all of the challenges around space situational awareness, traffic management, etc. I wrote a newsletter a few months ago about the needs that arise from these challenges called The Rise of the Satellite Mega Constellation if you're interested in my thoughts on that: https://spacedotbiz.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-satellite...

True! A couple other popular space accelerators that come to mind are the Seraphim/AWS Space Accelerator and Creative Destruction Lab.

Thanks for sharing!

Good point! The companies that were the "new" players 10 years ago are now so well capitalized that they're acquiring the current wave of startups. Astra acquiring Apollo Fusion and SpaceX acquiring Swarm being great examples. We'll probably see a lot more of that in the near future.