Seattle's Spaceflight Industries flying high

It’s been a whale of a month for Seattle-based space-services company Spaceflight. Since late September the company has purchased a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, announced it will use it to launch a private Israeli mission to the Moon as part of the Lunar XPrize competition, and, most recently, brought a third ground station online to facilitate better communication with the bevy of small satellites it has helped put into space.

Jason Andrews is president and CEO
of Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries.

“We’ve got a little bit going on,” said Spaceflight president and CEO Jason Andrews in something of an understatement. “It’s fun; what we do is really exciting. Anytime you buy a rocket and send it towards the Moon, how can you not love it?”

Andrews said the industry is really taking off.

“There is this sudden, rapid advancement of commercial space—some people call it new space—and it’s really been brought about in the last three or four years due to improvements in technology and access to space,” he said. “You can finally build spacecraft that are the size of a shoebox that actually do something. With what we’ve been able to advance with our Spaceflight launch business, you can actually get those satellites into space.”

Andrews said Spaceflight is aiming to be a comprehensive, full-service company in that effort.

“We’re really trying to address all parts of the value chain by building the satellite components, building the satellites, helping everyone get to space, and now helping them get their data back from space,” he said.

Retrieving the data more quickly and efficiently is why Spaceflight is building a network of ground stations. The new one in Invercargill, New Zealand is the company’s third to go operational, following stations in Tukwila, Wash. and Fairbanks, Alaska. Andrews noted that our mobile telephones work most anywhere we go because the gear is standard and speaks the same technical language. It’s not so for spacecraft, which often use custom equipment. Spaceflight wants to change that.

“What we’re doing is building a series of ground stations over the next three years that uses a standard interface protocol,” Andrews explained. The satellites will use standard radios that can connect to the ground stations easily. “Just like a cell phone data plan, we’ll have a satellite data plan.”

While the ultimate number of stations Spaceflight will build is a bit up in the air, Andrews said they plan to have at least a dozen of them in operation around the globe by 2017.

“They’re strategically located geographically to minimize latency—the time between satellites flying over—and that way we can get customer data back quickly,” he explained. As in most businesses, time is money.

Andrews noted that Spaceflight has launched 80 small satellites to date, and has another 86 penciled in to go up next year. He expects customer demand will continue to increase.

“It’s clearly a revolution, and I think just the beginning of the revolution,” he said.