# Inside NewSpace Startups Life in startups is quite well documented, perhaps somewhat over-documented. There are books, blogs, and some very popular TV series. Startup aphorisms are all over the place in social media—everyone seems to know how to run them, how to scale them, adding their own bit of advice, their own experiences of what works, what doesn’t. Fair, all startups more or less go through similar phases, but in reality, each one is different and unique on its own. No surprise there, the same applies for people—we all go from infancy, to the awkward adolescence and adulthood, although we all—luckily—experience each of these life cycle stages differently. Space startups are a subset of the whole startup universe, yet a unique one. What’s so special about them? Think about a space startup for a moment. They are a handful of people trying to build spaceships, with hair-thin budgets, short runways, and all this, often, without having a customer in sight. There isn’t perhaps another startup type with so many odds against it, just by looking at the challenges they face. In a way, space startups are like salmon. Salmon swim against the river's current the whole way—sometimes up to thousands of kilometres, leaping over obstacles, waterfalls, rapids and dams. These amazing fish can jump two metres high or even higher. And all while skilled predators like bears and eagles wait around every river bend to catch them when they jump out of the water. Just like salmon, many space startups will perish along the way. But a fair lot will make it all the way through, eventually becoming what Nicolas Nassim Taleb calls “[antifragile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility)”—what doesn’t kill them makes them stronger—and eventually reaching orbit. More technically speaking, antifragility is a property of systems in which they increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures.  But before taking an X-ray of space startups, our bias-prone minds need to be duly warned: _survivorship bias_ is a strong bias we repeatedly fall into, which we shall eschew. For each startup that makes it (that specialized media will analyze _ad nauseam_ in absolute hindsight, including all the whys and hows) there are myriads of others who don’t make it and have volumes to speak. In terms of survivability, there is more insight from the salmon who did not make it to the river’s top than those that did, for the former knows what didn’t work—where the bears are lurking—whereas the latter could have been just lucky. Ok, but now to the point. What’s inside a space startup if you crack it open? How can a small bunch of people get to launch something into space? Wasn’t space supposed to be done by the governmental behemoths, with their billion-dollar budgets, their thousands of employees, etc? No. You can get to fly something in space with, say, fewer than 10 people and a six-figure budget. How? The magic tends to revolve around vision, motivation, and industrial loads of hard work, commitment and a big, huge picture mindset. Granted, this sounds like yet another platitude out of a management book. There is no magic—a more pragmatic take revolves around navigating five important factors we shall describe next. The first one is complexity. Designing a satellite is a fairly complex task. If you open the hood of any satellite, what you will see is an intricate network of computers, each one performing a specialized job—command and data handling, attitude control, radio communications, payload control, data processing, etc. Each computer is a world on its own, requiring lots of software. Making sure those “worlds” combine accordingly in order to give a spacecraft its functional entity in a harmonic way requires a good deal of cross-functional and system level analysis such as architecture design, thermal analysis, structural analysis, power generation, physical configuration, and a very long et cetera—there is no way to do space without [Systems Engineering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_engineering). What’s more, all those things are heavily intertwined. The good thing is that it does not require hiring a gray-bearded Systems Engineer you cannot possibly dream of affording. Systems Engineering is a glorified umbrella term for a combination of critical thinking, problem solving, and common sense. Although these factors can grow with experience, there are plenty of young people with a good dose of them. The second one is wheel reinvention (the avoidance of). One of the most important factors in small space startups is the almost evolutionary need to minimize rediscovering that [roundy artifact used to help things move spatially from A to B](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel). The third one: the not-so-glamorous side of building basically anything: supply chain. Supply chain management is sort of an art. It deals with: uncertainty, change, prices, secrecy/proprietary data, volatility, convoluted technical specifications, variants and a ridiculous amount of foresight. Supply chain is almost a surrealistic endeavor when you are small, young, and the underdog. Suppliers tend to pay attention to the big guns—their established customers—and rightly so; who could blame them? Then, the small guys must elbow their way in to source parts and components, at times closing partnerships with other fellow young startups. In this process, some space startups may choose to go vertically integrated or not, there are of all kinds. The former tries to shield itself from supplier volatility (although there will always be a supply chain of some kind), the latter may create an uncomfortable situation if a critically important subsystem is provided by an external entity in which the startup has zero control (and sometimes near-zero trust).  Fourth one, the almost literally million-dollar question: what to sell. Next time you walk past a pizza place, think about how clear the product is for them. They make pizzas, that’s what they sell. Simple as that. Zero ambiguity. They define flavors, toppings, and variants. They make people happy by selling warm, flat, tasty discs with cheese and stuff. It’s so clear that if you go and ask anyone working there what it is that they sell, they will all say the same: we sell pizza—what a silly question to ask. Now, for a visitor randomly entering the office of a space startup and picking up someone from the team and asking: What the hell is this startup selling, the answer may vary depending on who the mysterious visitor should ask. That’s the situation usually at early and not so early stages: an amorphous idea involving space technology does not always automatically map to a product: can be data, can be insight from the data, can be the spacecraft, can be a subsystem, can be a service on top of all that.  And fifth, last, and perhaps the most important thing: everyday life. A space startup is not just a romantic adventure about reaching the stars. Or, it might be, but reaching the stars comes as the culmination of many, many days of routine, disciplined work and routine company operations where people need to share thousands of hours, shoulder to shoulder, overcoming hurdles and finding their way through the job. In short, a space startup is—no surprise there—an actual company which needs to be, well, run. There are operational matters such as talent capture, relocation matters, facility matters, family matters, and of course, team matters. Building healthy teams, that is, teams where learning and making mistakes is part of the job—and more fundamentally, where it is fun to do all that—is a bigger accomplishment than flinging stuff beyond the [Kármán line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line). As someone pointed out to me time ago: > [!cite] > "_Being in a startup feels like licking a 9-volt battery. It provides a unique sensation that's not entirely without charm but also feels uncomfortable, gross and mildly painful_".