Accelerating Space Conference 2008 - Second Session

Space Angels Network

Dr. Burton Lee spoke of seed-stage venture finance with a market overview and some investment strategies. Identified the major chronic structural gap for NewSpace firms as seed and early stage funding. Estimates that there are a total of 230,000 independent angel investors in the US of which ~100 are funding space startups. Claimed that there were only ~$10 million in angel NewSpace investments. (This must exclude Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen and Robert Bigelow investing in their respective ventures?)

Dr. Lee founded the Space Angels Network to aggregate individual angel investors with vetted startups. Space Angels is primarily looking for deals with Space-IT convergent firms, with Space-Aviation convergent firms (including NewSpace) as as secondary higher-risk category.

For the next 5 years he expects deals with startups engaged in ISS resupply, suborbital space tourism and remote sensing; from 5-10 years out he predicts that global point-to-point suborbital delivery and operationally responsive space startups will be more viable. Space Angels Network first round of activity in December 2007 included work with Assured Power (Dennis Wingo), Rocketplane Global and UP Aerospace.

Space Angels Network planned exit strategy for each deal is to either pass along a viable space firm to a mature venture capital enterprise or have the startup merge with a larger corporation. In general, for Q&A, Dr. Lee acted as the realist during moments of freewheeling conference discussion.

Posted 01/27/08 | 07:32:51 by JKavanagh | Filed under: NewSpace Industry

Comments

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it's NOT so strange tha VCs invest so little amount of money in the new.space field, since...

- the new.space companies are just a few to-day

- only a few of them (like SpaceX) are true professional companies, while, the others are at the word/photoshop or (max) hobby/garage level

- the possible market for new.space and COTS hardware services is small if compared with the business of the old/big aerospace companies and the funds of space agencies

- the new.space market may grow only in the VERY LONG TERM (2015-up) and only if new markets will start (like the space tourism)

- the REAL costs of the new.space hardware and services are unknown and could be higher than those proposed by China, Russia and India

- last, all new.space and COTS business are/will be a DUPLICATION of existing and future hardware and services (with low or NO innovations) as explained in my "What's wrong in COTS" article:

http://www.ghostnasa.com/po...

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Posted by gm at 01/27/08 17:20:33

Contrary to your comments, most industries are able to significantly reduce costs by mass production and streamlining existing known hardware and services.

Take something that currently works and enhance it, you don't throw it away and replace with something costly and innovative.

Look at the evolution of airplanes, cars, tvs, computers, etc.; they'll all tell you the same story. Periodic spikes in advancement, but in general a slow progression building off of prior work.

Posted by Val deVir at 01/31/08 19:35:43

you're right on benefits of mass production, but, unfortunately, it doesn't apply on rockets that are built in dozens units, not thousands or millions like airplanes, cars, tvs, computers, etc.

Posted by gm at 01/31/08 20:14:12

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