The big space rush

Market & Trends

The big space rush

The new frontier is attracting huge investment from venture capitalists from California and all over the world. This investment follows the vision of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to make space journeys more viable and affordable.

$1 billion to finance Jeff Bezos’ space venture, Blue Origin.

It’s California again, a century and a half on, or so. But this time around it’s not gold, but space, that people are rushing to. The global aerospace industry is seeing a renaissance with a start-up boom as space is fast becoming Californian venture capitalists’ new frontier. Francois Chopard, CEO of aerospace accelerator, Starburst Accelerator, recently told CNBC that it’s not only space that is booming, but more the global aerospace sector that is looking for innovative disruptions. Amazon founder and leader Jeff Bezos’ announcement of his plans to sell $1 billion in Amazon stock each year to finance his space venture, Blue Origin, as well as the recent successful launches of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket, are two signals that space is just the next frontier for people who changed the world with the internet revolution a quarter of century ago.

Technological advancement has made it feasible for entrepreneurs with great ideas and technologies to develop satellites with rockets and send them into space. In the last five years, dozens and dozens of space start-ups have blossomed, not only from the U.S. West Coast, but also Europe and Asia. Starburst Accelerator alone, founded in 2012, has since accelerated over 160 start-ups, with a $5 million average funding target. Venture capital is an essential push to help these companies grow up, and an increasing number of deals are happening in Silicon Valley, with more and more investors focused on aviation and aerospace.

The most renowned so far remains Blue Origin, the Bezos’ company with big plans to pioneer the space frontier. Last year, Bezos received the first annual Space Innovation Award from Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin. The event was the first part of a three-year fundraising campaign devised by the ShareSpace Foundation, which will culminate in the summer of 2019 with global activities coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing. Bezos said he has been dreaming of space since the age of five, while watching Neil Armstrong and Aldrin walking on the moon in 1969, and with Blue Origin he is trying to make his dreams happen.

The company’s New Shepard, a fully reusable, vertical-takeoff/vertical-landing system, will fly suborbital space tourism and research missions. It adds to the company’s reusable New Glenn orbital rocket, which is under development, as well as Blue Origin’s powerful BE-3 and BE-4 engines.

Bezos’ vision is to overcome the challenge that today space travel is just too expensive, because we throw the rockets away, instead building reusable rockets, and that is what Blue Origin is dedicated to. His plans are to build a permanent settlement on one of the poles of the moon, where peaks of ‘eternal light’ can provide solar power. Others are looking even further than this, as several private companies are exploring how to fly to Mars, how to create new satellite networks and how to launch orbiting cell towers, as well as making the Moon liveable.

In 2015 alone, the U.S. aerospace industry added more than $144 billion in export sales to the economy, and entrepreneurs are bullish on the prospects of the new space economy.

A PIONEER IN THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY

Prysmian has been a leader in the aerospace cable market since the 1960s when our predecessor, Fileca, provided first generations of aerospace cables to the Concorde programme. Today it continues to build on that heritage, leveraging decades of knowledge and expertise to bring customers the latest in high-quality cable and wiring solutions for civil, military and space aviation applications.
The Group caters for a broad range of requirements, with cable types to reflect the applications in which they are employed, from standardized ranges like DR and MIL-Spec Cables type, to more specific constructions including customised assemblies, data-transmission cables and optical cables. Space-designed Prysmian cables provide resistance to severe mechanical, electrical, chemical, temperature and radiative constraints.
In the space industry, Prysmian is creating the products of the future through its R&D department. We are developing new technologies to meet all possible future aerospace expectations, with world-class solutions such as weight reduction in aluminium-based cables, ease of installation of low-bending radius power feeder cables, performance improvements including higher-voltage capabilities and fire resistance, and higher data transmission levels with optical cables.