It's kinda funny how strategy and tactics can cross over between totally unrelated businesses.
We've taken a pretty similar approach to keeping companies honest. What we realized was that in niche markets, trust drives transactions and people are often aware that burning relationships for short-term gain has a drastic impact on lifetime value, especially if there are strong network effects.
Fortunately, we've only had to threaten to use the contractual stick a handful of times, and in each case, the mere appearance of the stick in the conversation served to recalibrate things, bringing the dialogue back to the fair center.
The cold start problem is real and one that really took us a lot of time and effort. The time spent to understand the mechanics of our marketplace manually paid itself back later on, when we realized that it helped us understand churn, and specifically how to mitigate it.
Back in 2015, I was part of an EU Marie Curie ITN network called Stardust [1] working on something similar.
We utilized robotic arms and a novel non-contact, detumbling technology (using eddy currents) to approach and remove Ariane rocket bodies [2].
It was a fascinating project and I subsequently worked on investigating mission analysis approaches to compute multi-target rendezvous sequences, specifically assessing the impact of orbital perturbations on the use of semi-analytical transfer leg design algorithms [3].
You might be interested in the follow-up to the Stardust network, dubbed Stardust-R [4]. Happy to connect you with any of the organizations involved if it's helpful.
It was the frustration of trying to manually deal with collecting information for component, subsystem, and system trade studies that led to me wondering if an 'amazon for space' [5] wouldn't help engineers focus on the really hard engineering instead of Googling :) [shameless plug]
Would love to learn more about your Droid platform if you're interested in chatting!
Congrats! Great to see YC supporting more software companies that are working towards finally bringing the "boring" parts of the sector into the 21st century.
If you're interested in exploring the idea of supply chain integration, I'd love to chat. We're an ESA-backed, online marketplace for the space sector [1], and we've built a few integrations already to bring tools and data together for engineers.
Sure, would love to chat. That sounds like a great opportunity for collaboration. Can you fill out the form at https://epsilon3.io/contact and we'll follow up with you?
LIDAR has interesting space applications for Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC).
For instance, I worked on the design of a mission concept for multi-target Active Debris Removal [1], for which flash LIDAR was an important part of the GNC package, in addition to stereo visual cameras, and various other sensors. For non-cooperative targets, LIDAR is a pretty important technology, due to possible varying lighting conditions.
LIDAR has been used for close proximity GNC for the International Space Station too [2].
Compact, low-power flash LIDAR will open up a slew of applications like on-orbit satellite servicing and refuelling.
Eric Berger has a lot of really great stories about what's going on in the space industry. Smallsats have been the story of the sector for going on two decades now.
I've got a background in both space engineering and planetary science. One of the most exciting things that I see happening over the coming decade is commoditization of planetary probes. There's so much more of the Solar System that we still have to explore and the traditional flagship missions just don't give us enough access.
The best way to think of how smallsats augment our space science and exploration capability is in terms of the marginal value over traditional missions. For planetary science, the cost per bit of science data can drastically be reduced through the use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components.
There are a number of private companies looking to leveraging smallsats to deliver all-in planetary science missions, like Xplore [1].
As a space engineer, access to suppliers was really a major hurdle towards finding the optimal cost and risk sweet spot. If you're interested, we've published a series of articles shedding light on different products & services available on the market [2]. We've now got 1000s of space engineers every month from all over the world using these articles to drive better sourcing.
Better sourcing will ultimately lead to better missions, and drive the smallsat revolution towards completely remaking the way we think of both space science and exploration.
The satellite ground station market is quite dynamic at the moment. As the data generated on-orbit continues to grow, the need for robust ground infrastructure becomes that much more important.
Ground-Station-as-a-Service (GSaaS) is something that AWS stepped into given the fact that AWS is used quite extensively for the data processing chain, so it was a logical play for them to verticalize. AWS partnered with Lockheed to build out the hardware network [1][2].
They've got some decent competition in the market. We published a round-up article of ground station providers a while back [3].
The move to higher frequencies is changing the market substantially. This year, a number of optical ground stations were supposed to be deployed, given growth of satellite terminals [4]. We'll have to see with the virus what actually ends up happening.
The optical comms market is quite dynamic at the moment, There are a number of ground stations being deployed around the world, in addition to terminals for satellites being brought to market for ground communication and inter-satellite links (ISL).
We've taken a pretty similar approach to keeping companies honest. What we realized was that in niche markets, trust drives transactions and people are often aware that burning relationships for short-term gain has a drastic impact on lifetime value, especially if there are strong network effects.
Fortunately, we've only had to threaten to use the contractual stick a handful of times, and in each case, the mere appearance of the stick in the conversation served to recalibrate things, bringing the dialogue back to the fair center.
The cold start problem is real and one that really took us a lot of time and effort. The time spent to understand the mechanics of our marketplace manually paid itself back later on, when we realized that it helped us understand churn, and specifically how to mitigate it.
Enjoy the read!