Luxembourg's Bet On Space Industry Shows Early Signs Of SuccessForbes
David Schrieberg, Contributor Nov 19, 2017 @ 01:51 PM
Given that scale is the 21st-century Holy Grail for startups, especially in technology, Platzer's sentiment explains why more people are now paying attention to the space economy.
Public-private partnerships are emerging as the flight path along which space businesses can rocket into the future.
What a space mining settlement could look like one day Image: Bryan Versteeg/Deep Space IndustriesLuxembourg's space-besotted Economy Ministry had projected 200 attendees at the New Space Europe conference it co-sponsored last week and calculated in part to showcase the country's rising international profile in an increasingly hot new industry.
Officials were happily surprised when twice that number registered. Unusually, the majority of registrants actually showed, packing the conference center for a multi-disciplinary exploration of the potential for trillions of dollars in revenue and an eventual transformation of life as we know it.
"It was quite a unique event in Europe!" one Luxembourg space official enthused. "Never saw such lineup of speakers!"
Over two days of sessions with titles like "The Road to Mars," "Shooting for the Moon," "The Venture Capital Model in Space" and "What Keeps a New Space CEO Awake at Night?" an often standing-room-only hall of suit-and-tie businessmen, power-dressed women and jeans-clad entrepreneurs mingled, compared notes and reveled in the reality that what not long ago was science fiction is moving into science fact, industry and entrepreneurial heaven with what seems light-year speed.
Peter Platzer, Spire CEO and co-founder Photo: Spire"What makes space so attractive both for entrepreneurs and investors is it carries the opportunity for completely transformational scale," Peter Platzer, CEO of Spire, which he co-founded in 2012 to provide satellite-powered data from anywhere on Earth.
Facebook, Google and Apple reach only 10-15% of the world's population, Platzer said. "Spire wants to impact 10 billion people in 10 years."
Given that scale is the 21st-century Holy Grail for startups, especially in technology, Platzer's sentiment explains why more people are now paying attention to the space economy.
Many of the speakers at the conference co-sponsored with the Luxembourg government by the Arlington, Virginia, based non-profit Space Frontier Foundation and Spire, were singing songs of praise for the host country - Laurent Schummer, a partner at the Luxembourg law firm of Arendt & Medernach, among them.
"Luxembourg offers a whole ecosystem and expertise for raising capital and the legal framework operators need, with a government offering the whole infrastructure," he told the attendees. "All major players know Luxembourg as a secure place. All our clients in startup and on the space scene need money and we can help with that."
It also helps that the Luxembourg government has set aside €200 million and potentially more to invest in companies that want to join the space race in exchange for their presence in one form or another in the Grand Duchy. Spire, for example, announced last week that it will open an office in Luxembourg whose government, in turn, is participating in its $70 million series C round closing this month.
Public-private partnerships are emerging as the flight path along which space businesses can rocket into the future. Government agencies in a growing number of countries - NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) among them - are offering financing vehicles to companies that bring private money to the table.
Gwynne Shotwell at a Forbes Women's Summit earlier this year in New York Photo: Dia Dipasupil/Getty ImagesGwynne Shotwell, COO of Elon Musk's SpaceX, which earlier this year launched a satellite into space for Luxembourg's SES, the largest satellite company in the world and itself born of a public-private partnership, credited that model with getting her company off the ground.
"Public-private partnership is how we developed capability," she said. noting that hundreds of millions of dollars from NASA convinced private investors to pony up twice as much. “That $406 million (in NASA funding) had to be some of the best investment money that NASA and the U.S. government have spent."
The ESA, for its part, supports 140 startups each year, and is on the prowl for more. Frank Salzgeber, ESA's Head of Technology Transfer and Business Incubation, said 88% of their startups are still alive - a figure he paradoxically lamented as too high because it indicates his agency isn't taking enough risks.
"This is why we need startups," he said. "They have little fear and no respect.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidschrieberg1/2017/11/19/luxembourgs-bet-on-space-industry-shows-early-signs-of-success/#33163d516114
