The first day of the International Astronautical Congress has passed, and what initially shocked me the most about the conference has now turned into a different feeling. There are about 3500 delegates at this conference, which was most clear during the opening ceremony. The auditorium for the opening ceremony was absolutely enormous – so large that a person presenting at the front appeared no larger than my thumb held at arm’s length from where I sat near the back. Expansive monitors were required to get a good look at the performances and the speakers.
Someday I’m gonna buy my mama a place like this
I entered the auditorium somewhat early, when about one third of the seats were taken. While I knew the number of delegates attending the conference beforehand, seeing them filter in ahead of the opening ceremony and rapidly fill up all available seats was what truly allowed me to understand the size of the number. Indeed, there were so many that many delegates sat in the aisles – not something OH&S would be too thrilled about!
The opening ceremony was marked by spectacular performances and inspiring speeches. However, each of these paled in comparison to the announcement of a national space agency for Australia by the Honorable Simon Birmingham. A cheer rose at this, its volume and length surpassing those one might hear at the cricket. The sheer joy in the delegates’ surrounded us and, for a moment, bound us together as one.
The judges are set
Afterwards, a break session began, which I spent well collecting colourful brochures from various organisations, such as ArianeSpace and Surrey Satellite Technologies Limited. This was followed by the Heads of Agencies plenary talk, the topic of which was “Business before Science or Science before Business”. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the undoubtedly interesting plenary talk as I had to make time to practice my own presentation, which I gave at the Space Exploration Overview session. My presentation’s topic was on how it was becoming easier for small organisations to send up small spacecraft, such as CubeSats, to explore the solar system. Despite some nerves, I’m happy to say that I absolutely nailed it.
Taofiq presenting his work on CubeSat Exploration of the Solar System
As the day progressed in this manner, my awe at the number of attendees progressed into, as I mentioned earlier, a different feeling. This new feeling was awe at myself and my fellow members of GreenSat. The 3500 delegates of the International Astronautical Congress can be considered 3500 of the most prominent members of the global space industry, and here we were, a small subset of a student projects society among them!
By the end of the day, rather than thinking of 3500 as a large number, I began to think on how tightly this number constrained the size of the global space industry. There are obviously tens, if not hundreds of thousands who are directly involved with the space industry globally, but only 3500 of these came to the IAC. And to think our group makes up 10 of this distinguished 3500! It’s truly incredible that we’re able to be here today.
Welcome back to my series on How to make a space mission! We’re finally at the end of this series. We’ve come a long way since the first part was posted way back in April. Hopefully by the time this blog post goes out, SpaceX will have achieved the second ever first stage reflight of their Falcon 9 rocket. This achievement underlines the point I made in the first post – that accessing space is cheaper and easier than ever, and will only get better with time.
Last time, we talked about how to get funding for a space mission. We finished with a short discussion on credibility. When writing the first blog post, I originally imagined I would be talking about the space engineering skills you would need to design a space mission. While gaining space engineering skills is important, I find that being able to demonstrate that you can get things done is even more crucial. Being able to get things done on the operations side is just as important as the technical side. This is why we’ll be discussing both sets of skills in this blog post under the context of how the reader can gain credibility in the space community.
Credibility is the quality of being trusted and believed in. Source: powercommunication.com
But why do we care about credibility? Let me explain with an example.
When applying for a job, you’re trying to persuade someone that you will create more value for them than they expect to pay you as a salary. In other words, you’re asking them to trust you. If they trust that you can create this value, you’ll go to the next stage of the application process, and you’ll know that you have at least some credibility. For a job application, you’ll prove your credibility by listing your skills, the qualifications you have to prove that you have said skills, and any experience you have in applying your skills. If you want to create a space mission, you’ll need a certain level of credibility as well. And since no one expects you to be able to create an entire space mission with just a uni degree, experience is everything here.
So to do a space mission you need credibility. And to get credibility, you need experience. The question then is: how can you gain experience relevant to making a space mission? I’ve identified a couple of methods that should help. As it turns out, I’m doing all of them myself!
Communication
Producing regular high quality content of any sort, such as video blogging, is a great way to get your name out there as a person who knows things, thus improving your credibility. Source: socialmatter.net
The advent of social media means that it is now easier than ever to publish your creations and see them distributed to thousands or millions of people. This represents an enormous opportunity to establish yourself as an expert, or at least as a credible person, in the field of your interest. Blogging, podcasting, and video blogging (vlogging) are all valid avenues for this. All you need to do is to find something sort of interesting, and talk about it. The key here isn’t to create the greatest post of all time and hope a million people view it, but rather to steadily create a stream of good content that will slowly see you gain followers over time.
An alternative for the more technically minded is to attempt to create journal papers and conference presentations. Both journal papers and conference presentations are fantastic ways of communicating with large communities of very credible researchers, and getting feedback on your ideas. While the idea of producing these can be intimidating, I find that it’s easier than one would think. For undergraduate students out there, search up the academics in your school and identify one or more that share your research interests. For UNSW students, I highly recommend approaching our Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research. All you have to do then is shoot them an email and see if they need help with anything, or if they’re willing to take on your own suggested topic. It was by working with ACSER while waiting on my graduation that I was able to produce 2 conference presentations at the Australian Space Research Conference. In turn, this gave me enough credibility that I was accepted into their PhD program, where I’m now figuring out how small spacecraft will navigate in deep space.
Not only will communicating with the general public slowly give you credibility, it will also help you develop your communication skills. I regularly hear companies bemoaning the state of graduates nowadays, who are very technically skilled, but unable to communicate what they know. You can gain a significant boost over your peers by practising your communication skills.
Run or build something
Gaining experience is a key step in gaining credibility, and the best way to gain this experience is to work on something of your own making. While experience working for projects belonging to others will be valuable, you will learn the most and the fastest from being responsible for a project from inception to completion. Ultimately, this is BLUEsat’s reason for existing. A few UNSW students wanted to learn how to put together a space mission, and they learned by going ahead and doing it.
Indeed, BLUEsat is now working on a framework for formalising this learning process. We have assembled a list of skills that a member of BLUEsat could theoretically gain during their time here, and have assigned members of BLUEsat to look after members of their respective disciplines. These discipline based groups are based around the Agile Tribes framework for structuring a company, and are thus called Chapters. Our goal is for members of BLUEsat to complete projects and then approach the Chapter Master of the relevant discipline. The Chapter Master will make a record that the BLUEsat member has completed their project, as well as a record of the skills they have gained. On graduation, the BLUEsat member will leave UNSW with a record of their accomplishments – a significant boost to their credibility for any employers they approach!
I highly recommend getting into 3D printing and hobby electronics. I recommend software such as Autodesk Fusion 360, which is free for students to use and easy to learn. UNSW students can make use of the Michael Crouch Innovation Centre, which provide free to use 3D printers and regular workshops on 3D printing and hobby electronics. Arduino and Raspberry Pi are excellent hobby electronics platforms for which significant resources are available to learn and build amazing products of professional quality. For non-engineers, just go out there and run something. Join a society, start a non-profit, sell watermelons, just go out there and get something going, even if you’re not confident you can do it. You’ll be amazed how much you’ll change.
Now, obviously I have an ulterior motive in telling you to run or build something. I want readers to join BLUEsat after all! But even if you’re not interested in BLUEsat, find some sort of problem you’d like to solve, no matter how small, and go out there and build some solutions! Even if you don’t succeed, you will have turned yourself into a more credible person for having tried.
That’s all for my series on How to build a space mission. Hopefully you’ve come out of this series with some new ideas for space, and some new ideas for yourself! Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you at BLUEsat. Remember, we meet on Saturdays between 10:30am and 5pm in room 419 of Electrical Engineering (G17) and we’d love to have you on board now that exams are finished.
Now, ideas are great, but execution of an idea is what creates success. A bad idea with great execution will always beat a great idea with terrible execution. But to execute on an idea, you need two resources: time and money. While the focus of this blog post will be how to get money to fund your space mission idea, it is worth remembering that money can buy time in the form of partners, subordinates, and contractors.
Whether or not it’s the root of all evil, money remains a useful way to get things done. Source: centonomy.com
Before we get into the meat of funding sources and how to get them, we first need to discuss how you will execute your space mission idea. Generally, you will fall into one of the three below:
Amateur
This refers to a space mission that you plan to execute without payment and without expecting outcomes for anyone other than yourself. Developing an amateur space mission can be considered a hobby, like amateur radio.
Research
A research space mission plans to produce outcomes that expand the sphere of human knowledge. This can be done by individuals, but is most often done through research institutions, such as universities and companies.
Commercial
A commercial entity conducting a space mission is expected at some point to generate revenue greater than the costs incurred. Our previous example of taking images of cars from space and selling them to the government would fall under this category.
At BLUEsat, we fall under the Amateur and Research categories. This means that there are avenues of funding that we cannot follow that a commercial entity can. On the other hand, this gives us the ability to be less strict with our resources and bring in students that a company might not hire and turn them into space engineers by the time they finish. There are pros and cons to whichever category or categories you choose to fall under, so make sure you think carefully about yourself and your ideas and choose wisely!
Once you have made your choice/s, you can consider the following funding opportunities. Note that my list is not exhaustive. There are likely other opportunities out there. Nonetheless, I hope the following is informative. The list of funding sources I have considered are:
Yourself – applicable to all three categories
Sponsorship – applicable to amateur and research
Grants – applicable to research and commercial
Investment – applicable to commercial
Bootstrapping – applicable to commercial
Now let’s discuss these funding sources in a little more detail.
Self Funding
Self funding is simultaneously the easiest and hardest funding method we’ll discuss today. It’s simple because it has the least administrative barriers out of all the other funding methods. If you want to spend your own money on items related to your space mission idea, all you have to do is open your wallet. There’s no one else to tell you what to do, and no one is going to expect you to produce funding request forms or documentation. You’re accountable to no one but yourself.
But that self-accountability makes it hard as well. After all, this is your money that you worked hard to get. Every dollar of your money that you spend on a space mission is a dollar less that could go to credit card repayments, to that trip to Europe you’ve been saving up for, or even to a smashed avo on toast you wanted for lunch. Surely you should keep your savings invested wisely in a bank or a safe fund, and not waste it on frivolous things like a space mission. Wait, frivolous? Is spending money on achieving your dreams really that frivolous?
These are difficult questions that you’ll have to ask of yourself if the time comes when you might have to invest some money in a space mission or other activity or venture. The difficulty of these questions makes it clear why getting money from others is so difficult. They’re asking themselves these exact same questions!
Sponsorship
When we think of sponsors, the sports-minded among us think of sports events and TV shows with announcements saying: “This program is proudly brought to you by this company and that company.” This essentially makes sponsorship the provision of money or resources in exchange for advertisement of the sponsor. The sponsor may also be able to derive other benefits from the relationship. Sponsorship works best with highly visible activities that are followed by the demographic groups sponsors are interested in. And as it just so happens, space activities almost never fail to generate significant public interest!
BLUEsat’s biggest sponsor is UNSW Engineering. In return for their monetary and in kind support, BLUEsat performs regular outreach events to appeal to the next generation of UNSW students, conducts high visibility activities (such as balloon launches and rover competitions) that produce positive PR for UNSW, and gives UNSW students an incredible educational experience they can’t get anywhere else.
Getting sponsorship is a difficult process, but the rewards are obvious. You need to develop your space mission idea to a high level of detail. You must then be able to communicate to potential sponsors what exactly you will need, and what benefits they will receive in return. There isn’t any real formalised process for getting sponsorship, so just pick up the phone and start calling!
Grants
The line separating grants and sponsorship is not completely clear to me, personally. If I had to guess, I would say that unlike sponsorships, grants are provided without the grant provider expecting a direct return. The grant provider will likely stipulate how the money should be spent, however. The grant provider will typically want the grants they provide to go to activities that they believe society will benefit from.
An example of this is the grant BLUEsat received under the Science and Engineering Student Competition Sponsorship Program from the NSW Government to participate in the 2016 European Rover Competition (ERC). While the NSW Government did not directly benefit from this, they understand that encouraging BLUEsat’s participation in competitions like the ERC helps produce skilled engineers and future tax payers capable of contributing to the industries of tomorrow.
BLUEsat’s attendance of the 2016 European Rover Competition was supported by a grant from the NSW Government.
Application to grants will typically involve a formalised process of filling out forms and producing justifications for how the grant money will be spent. Grants are typically awarded on a competitive basis, so if you’re interested in a grant, make sure your application is top notch by developing your space mission idea as much as you can.
Investment
Angel investors can help entrepreneurs execute on their business ideas by providing seed funding. Source: entrepreneur.com
Investment is a funding source that is only really available for commercial entities. Groups invest in companies because they anticipate the value of their investment rising (capital growth) and/or income from profits (dividends). If your space mission idea is not intended to produce revenue down the line that is greater than the expenditure required to start, then you cannot qualify for investment. While there are many loss-making companies that receive significant investment (Twitter, Uber, Tesla), they are able to continue receiving investment because they have convinced investors that they will experience significant capital growth and will produce dividends in the future.
Investment money is most often provided in exchange for a portion of a company (equity). For example, suppose Company X has managed to persuade investors that they have a shot at great success down the road. Investors will assess Company X’s records and business plans and ultimately decide to provide an appropriate sum of money in return for a sizeable portion of the business. In the seed investment round, when a business is just starting out, 20-30% of equity is usually exchange for anywhere between a few hundred thousand dollars to millions of dollars, depending on the perceived potential of the business model and the team running it.
Just like all the other funding sources, investment isn’t easy to get! While a well developed idea is all you’ll need for the previous funding sources, for investment you must show that there are customers waiting to pay for the solution your space mission is selling. This can be in the form of letters of interest, letters of intent, or some other official documentation. Applying to space friendly accelerator programs, such as MoonshotX, the Founder Institute, or UNSW’s own Textbook Ventures can help as well. But the best proof of all is getting customers to actually pay! Which brings us to…
Bootstrapping
Bootstrapping is an odd phrase, originally referring to the impossibility of raising your entire body into the air by pulling on the straps of your boots. Nowadays it is used to refer to companies that have not taken significant outside investment and have only used revenue from selling products or services to grow. A bootstrapped business is funded entirely by customers. The humble lemonade stall is a common example of a bootstrapped business.
It goes without saying that only a commercial space mission has the potential to bootstrap. And considering the significant costs involved in affording space hardware and launching it to space even with the CubeSat revolution, bootstrapping a space mission is incredibly challenging. After all, a commercial space mission must be in space to create revenue. But without revenue, a space mission cannot be bootstrapped to space! While bootstrapping has its place, it clearly cannot often substitute the initial funding required to get things going. However, a space business that can be bootstrapped is more likely to receive investment. Quite a catch-22!
We now have an idea of what the sources of funding for a space mission are. Now we just need to go and get them! Polish your ideas with as much detail as you can furnish, and start probing! Ask everyone who you believe might be relevant for advice, resources, or money. After all, you never get what you don’t ask for.
However, as you progress in your efforts, you will be met with frustration as people ignore you or turn you down for no good reason. How is it that the Elon Musks of the world can offer up an idea and immediately have investors lining up behind them? What do they have that you don’t? My answer to this is that they have experience, knowledge, and connections that you and I can barely dream of. If summed up in one word, I would say that they have credibility.
Join me in Part 4, where we’ll discuss strategies for how you can go about gaining credibility in your field.
Welcome back to my series on How to make a space mission! Last time we talked about how doing space activities has never been easier. CubeSats are making spacecraft cheaper and easier to make. Companies like Spaceflight and Nanoracks are making launch opportunities easier to access. And companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab are reducing the costs of launch. As happened with the internet, opportunities for science and business are appearing in areas no one could have reasonably expected. For example, who would have expected people to pay to have their ashes put in space? That’s why this is the time to be thinking of ideas for space missions.
Here’s how I try to come up with ideas:
Identify a problem;
Understand the problem;
Establish possible solutions; and
Find best solution.
As simple as they may sound, these steps are sufficient to build a really strong idea for a space mission. That said, this is by no means an easy process. The more time you put in these steps, the stronger your idea will be. Even if your idea turns out to be unfeasible right now, it just might be achievable in a few short years. And if it doesn’t turn out to be feasible? That’s failure, right? It is failure, but under the fail-fast approach, failing early when you’re in this brainstorming phase is best. You don’t want to spend months or years developing software or hardware, only to find out that it’s not possible or that no one’s interested in it!
Let’s dive in.
1) Identifying a problem
Wait a minute, why are we talking about problems? Why aren’t we talking about ideas and solutions? Well, it turns out that engineers, scientists, and startup founders all agree that the problem is the first thing that needs to be identified when trying to build something. It is the first step in the engineering design process, the scientific method, and in the lean startup approach. The engineering design process is shown below. Being an engineer, it is the process I’m most familiar with.
The engineering design process. Source: www.sciencebuddies.org
Figuring out the problem you’re trying to solve is probably the most important step. People with money are incredibly stingy folks, whether they be investors, grant providers, or otherwise. They won’t care about your solution, no matter how cool or amazing it is if you can’t persuade them that the problem you’re solving is important.
Fortunately (or unfortunately), problems aren’t hard to come by. You can read about problems all day on the internet, often in news articles and blogs. Simply asking someone about their day might be enough for you to hear three or four problems. And since you, the reader, are part of several demographics, your problems might well be problems worth solving.
2) Understanding the problem
This step is where I would try to understand what it is that the problem needs. In engineering, we call this step the “Specify Requirements” step. Simultaneously, I aim to determine whether this problem is one that can be theoretically solved within the limits of natural laws and the resources we are capable of gathering. For example, no matter how much various groups might demand faster than light travel, we simply do not have any techniques to make a warp drive or hyperdrive! A more grounded example might be something like the following.
The government has found a need to track individual cars for what they assure you are perfectly non-dystopian reasons. To do this, we require a telescope in space capable of seeing objects in the size range 1m or smaller. This is our requirement. Simple right?
Now, assuming our space telescope is at a 500km altitude and it needs to be able to resolve objects of 1m size, we can do a bit of trigonometry to show that this comes to an angular size of 0.4 arcseconds (or 0.0001 degrees). Due to something called the diffraction limit, there is a limit to how small of an object a telescope can see. The rule can be generalised as: the bigger the telescope, the smaller the things it can see. We can see this relationship below.
The relationship between telescope diameter (vertical column) and angular resolution (horizontal column). Source: en.wikipedia.org
Assuming the government wants us to take pictures of cars in visible light, this means that for a resolution of 0.4 arcsecs we need a telescope 16 inches (41cm) in diameter. Considering CubeSats are generally made of 10cm cubes, fitting such a large telescope into a CubeSat would be quite a tall order! This lets us rule out this idea for CubeSats. That said, a larger satellite could quite easily take images of sufficient resolution.
This step is a hard one, and will require significant research and review of scientific and commercial principles to get through. But again, the more time you spend here, the stronger your case!
3) & 4) Establishing possible solutions and picking the best one
Now we finally move into the design phase! These two steps are where things can get reeeeally complicated very quickly. Coming up with solutions may require some serious imagination and creativity. Picking the best solution is harder still, and may require some serious engineering chops and commercial considerations. As such, I won’t go into very much depth for these steps in this blog post.
While understanding the problem in the previous step, a number of solutions hopefully came to mind already. Indeed, we already considered one possible solution: 40cm telescope satellites at a 500km altitude. But what about other solutions? Why not just have a few drones flying around to take pictures? How about a plane? Or high altitude balloons? Considering my bias towards space, you can guess which solution I would pick! Here’s the justification:
A well made satellite will produce images for years and years at a time with a single investment. The other solutions require regularly purchasing flights, fuel, or balloons.
The satellite can take images of almost any place in the world without any additional investment, allowing you to make your business global as soon as your satellite launches. In comparison, the other solutions can only take images locally.
There are more issues that I haven’t covered. Nor have I produced any proof for the above statements. The reason for this is simple – I’m only writing a blog post, not proposing an actual mission! In the course of your own efforts, you will need to produce numbers through engineering and market analysis to back your assertions. These will be covered in Part 4 of this series.
So we didn’t go into very much depth at all! “Where is the space engineering?” you may ask. What was the point of all this? Well, my dear space-loving reader, it turns out that if you’ve done these steps to a reasonable level of detail, you’ve qualified yourself to take the next step – raising funds!
At BLUEsat, we’re in the midst of developing our own space mission. We’ve named it GreenSat. Creative, right? It’s to be a platform for agricultural and biological experiments in space, with the goal of enabling agriculture in space. Right now, we’re working on step 3 and heading towards step 4. We’ll be taking our work to the International Astronautical Congress, where we will present our ideas to an international audience. Through this, we’ll hopefully be able to get GreenSat funded and launched.
Join me in Part 3 where we’ll discuss the various avenues that now exist to raise money for space missions!
Did you want to be an astronaut growing up? Were your lofty ambitions brought down as you got older?
I’m here today to tell you to aim high once again – to aim for space. Maybe not as high as actually personally going to space, but you can get pretty close thanks to advancements in miniature spacecraft. It has never been easier to send something you built yourself to space. While it’s still a lot of work, the rewards are incredible.
In recent years, increasing numbers of small satellites have been launched by people and organisations that historically had no ability to reach space. The most common architecture for these small satellites are known as CubeSats. These CubeSats are built with commercial off-the-shelf parts and can be developed by individuals or small teams in the space of a few years. They are launched into space by hitchhiking on the backs of larger satellites. These advances mean that CubeSats have become as much as 1000 times cheaper than traditional satellites. This cost decrease has enabled the rise and growth of NewSpace startups such as Planet, which has grown to a valuation of over a billion dollars in five years.
The first pair of Planet’s Dove CubeSats being deployed from the International Space Station.
Here’s what you’ll need to get started on developing your own CubeSat mission:
An idea;
Some money; and
A few skills.
It doesn’t sound like much, does it? Let’s go into a bit more depth.
The Idea
The idea you come up will be what your bit of space hardware will do once it’s up there, or in other words, its mission. Satellites are the invisible MVPs of today’s world, taking care of weather forecasts, global navigation, communications and much more. If you want to send some hardware up there in the form of a satellite or otherwise, you will first need to find a problem to solve with it.
There are over 2000 operational satellites in space today, all doing their part for us. However, the small satellites and hosted payloads you or I can send up will not be doing the same work as the bigger billion dollar satellites. I mention this because the key to finding and building on a good idea isn’t sitting around and thinking really hard. To build a solid idea, you will have to read widely, speak to the people whose problem you’re looking to solve, and to listen carefully to their feedback.
Money
While money isn’t as big an issue nowadays as it once was thanks to the NewSpace revolution, reaching space is still an expensive ordeal. You will most likely need hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for construction, testing, launch, and operations.
Now, there is a way to reverse this problem entirely, and instead make money from your space mission. The way to do this is to go back to your idea and to ask: Is this something people would pay for? Am I tackling a big enough pain point for people? While this is not the traditional way, you and I are even less likely to find success begging NASA or ESA for money.
Skills
Now here is where we at BLUEsat come in! As engineers with few ideas and little money, skills are where we try to excel.
Some serious engineering ability is still needed nowadays to reach space. But with open source architectures and modular off-the-shelf parts becoming more readily available, the level of knowledge needed has dropped considerably. A bit of background on the basics of spacecraft engineering, electrical engineering and coding is all you’ll need to get started. Learning the rest will happen automatically as you design and build.
This is more or less how BLUEsat approaches spacecraft engineering. Students joining BLUEsat aren’t equipped with encyclopedic knowledge of how spacecraft are built and how they work. We simply teach our members the basics, install some software for them and point them towards some problem that we would like to solve. Every one of our senior members has started from such humble origins and slowly googled and built their way to greater understanding.
Members of BLUEsat’s ground station team messing about with RF electronics.
So why am I telling you this?
At BLUEsat, our Orbital Systems Division is hard at work on a number of projects. We have recently put together a team to work on developing a mission for our own CubeSat, and we need your help. No matter your year or degree, we will gladly take you in and help build your space engineering capabilities. We meet at Electrical Engineering (G17) room 419 every Saturday between 10:30AM and 5PM. Feel free to pop in and say hi.
I’ll see you folks in Part 2, where we talk a little more about how to come up with space mission ideas.
