Space entrepreneur: Why build apps when you can make satellites?

It's a long way from the small town of Tumbarumba, Australia to NASA and space startups, but it's come naturally to Chris Boshuizen.

Growing up in rural New South Wales, Boshuizen has Carl Sagan to thank for his choice of career path. The beloved astronomer's television show Cosmos was the only program Boshuizen was allowed to stay up past his bedtime to watch.

"I figured, if I'm allowed to stay up late and watch a show about space, space must be important," he told Mashable Australia.

Boshuizen, the cofounder and former chief technology officer of Planet Labs, a California-based startup that operates a constellation of Earth-imaging satellites, was in Sydney Monday to share his story at the technology conference, The Sunrise. He had some simple advice for startup founders: "Just build something."

He admitted to being a cynic about apps and social media. "I believe that the real value of startups comes from value creation," he said. "If you use your hands and build something, or you do anything else that creates value for humanity, you'll be socially rewarded for that and your company will be worth something.

"A lot of companies, at their core, are not creating an increase in value."

Finding a career in space

Boshuizen's journey to The Sunrise stage began after he finished his PhD in physics at the University of Sydney and travelled to a space engineering conference in the U.S.

"I fell in love with the whole thing," he said. "There were guys and girls who had been to space camp, who knew astronauts on a first name basis. And here I was, an Australian, from so far away."

The friendships he made at the conference set him on the path to Planet Labs. After taking a gap year and trying to start a consulting business for space services in Australia, he got the call from NASA. "I pulled the plug on my space consultancy business here and flew over with two bags in January 2008," he said.

He worked with NASA in Mountain View, California for around five years designing low cost space missions, before leaving to found Planet Labs with some colleagues, Will Marshall and Robbie Schingler, in 2010.

The pitch then, as it is now, was to launch a constellation of small, cheap satellites that would make a map of the world each day, and to sell that map.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

In his remarks, Boshuizen shared that one of the biggest tests for their business model came in 2014, when a rocket exploded with 26 of their satellites onboard. 

Instead of sending angry emails, investors let the team know the catastrophe actually proved Planet Labs had the right approach. "At Planet, we were building low cost satellites and launching them in large numbers, and on multiple rockets. We didn't launch 100 on one rocket, we launched them on 10 different rockets," he explained. 

"You can build one satellite and it costs a billion dollars -- then you've got a billion dollars at risk. It's like an all or nothing deal ... There was a drop in our capacity, but we didn't lose our single billion dollar satellite."

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Planet Labs has now successfully delivered more than 100 satellites to space and has clients in consumer mapping, agriculture, mining and resources and government. Planet Labs has been contacted for the latest figures.

Although he left Planet Labs in 2015, Boshuizen isn't done with space innovation. He is now "entrepreneur in residence" at Data Collective, a venture capital fund that has invested in Planet Labs.

"We agreed the best thing for me to do was go out and find other companies that could support our ecosystem," he said. "New launch capacity that Planet Labs could use. Companies that had downstream apps that could use our data."

The future of Australia's space industry

While Boshuizen did consider staying and trying to work in Australia's small space industry after finishing university, it was clear it would be a hard slog.

"It was just slow going," he said, referring to his original space consultancy business. "There weren't many clients ... it just didn't have any momentum. As soon as I got to NASA, it was 'go, go, go.'"

Things may finally be changing in his homeland. "Now when I come back here years later, it's really different," he said. "There are Cubesat projects in every university and at least a dozen space startups. That just didn't exist 10 years ago."

In his view, Australia could have a role to play in the future as a rocket launch site, but there would have to be a cost advantage. "Being able to convince customers to ship their satellites here and launch it, it's got to be easier or cheaper than it is in the U.S. or Russia," he said.

Let's hope Australia gets its act together so the next Chris Boshuizen doesn't need to move all the way to California.

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