Ask HN: How would you bootstrap a space company?

1. Find a way to return cubesats from orbit

2. Sell your system to anyone who wants to do science where the payload has to come back, but can't get onto the ISS / wants to experiment in open vacuum not a station.

3. Find goods that can only be manufactured in micro-g which are profitable at tiny scale, make them with your returnable cube sats. Made in Space, FOMS, etc are trying to do this but you could iterate faster/cheaper on cubes than mucking with ISS bureaucracy.

The window to do this is small and might not exist though. Eventually private stations will likely be the better option.

There are quite a few examples of space companies that meet that definition, have you looked at them?

Here's some different resources that might help you tap into the entrepreneurial space community as well as help get you bootstrap, seed funding for your space business:

- The New Space Conference (https://spacefrontier.org/newspace2019/), which alternates between being based in the Bay Area and Seattle. This conference is a great, accessible way to find out what is going on with startup companies attempting to do interesting things in space.

- The NASA Ames Space Portal (https://www.nasa.gov/ames/partnerships/spaceportal) - A group based at NASA Ames field center in Mountain View that pursues public/private partnerships between NASA and the private sector.

- NASA Frontier Development Lab (FDL) (https://frontierdevelopmentlab.org/) - A two month "research sprint" that takes place in the summer time in Mountain View, bridging machine learning and space science & exploration, as well as the public and private sectors.

- NASA SBIR grants (https://sbir.nasa.gov/) - a great program that helps seed small businesses and solo inventors with seed grants for promising entrepreneurial programs that might help NASA and the general space economy

- NASA NSPIRES (https://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/) - NASA portal page to find out calls for contributors, that also have funding, that can help you get plugged into the space community and also get seed funding.

- NASA Centennial Challenges (https://www.nasa.gov/open/centennial-challenges.html) - X-Prize like competitions that will pay out if you meet their guidelines and win in a particular area, like the Regolith Excavation Challenge which has been held several times, where the team who can best move simulated lunar soil in an automated way wins. The last winning team got 500k, for example, which is a nice purse to help bootstrap a space venture.

- NASA Advanced Innovative Concepts (NIAC) (https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/index.html) - Award program that funds very far-reaching, innovative space programs. These are always incredibly cool programs; here's the awarded NIAC grants for 2019 for example (https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-invests-in-18-potent...)

- Luxembourg Space Agency (https://space-agency.public.lu/en.html) - Luxembourg is a leader in private, mining oriented operations in space, and acts as an angel and seed investor in many, small early entrepreneurial space startups

If you have more questions feel free to reach out to me on twitter at @bradneuberg

It's been said "rocket science is not rocket science".

Elon Musk put reportedly 90 millions his own dollars into Falcon-1. So it was enough a decade ago to spend $90 millions for Kwajalein launch pad, 5 units of Falcon-1, design, transportation, operations.

Should we assume that today that ought to be cheaper - especially if we find a cheaper launch pad and be more lucky with at least first launch? Rocket Lab isn't that successful with it, but shouldn't it be possible at all? A recent new Japanese launcher was lighter than 3 tons.

Now there are more modest companies, which don't put payloads to orbit, yet still qualify as "space business". I'd recall Altius Space Machines and Masten Space. You can add parts manufacturers for cubesats - parts like star trackers reaction wheels, RCSes, communications... They usually start with way less than tens of million dollars.

Why a particular approach should cost a lot? Kistler Aerospace found that buying components for orbital launchers on the market is too expensive to survive, but may be there are other ways?

Look for some NASA/US Gov RFPs and open contracts for some low level manufacturing/sub-contractor work on their space missions(or sub contract work from prime contractors). Get the necessary certifications. When you do win bids, hire the right people, then provide the services, and money starts coming in. I'm sure there is a banker or financial institution out there that'll hand out funding to someone that actually holds a contract to NASA or a big defense contractor.