Above the Clouds: Stories from the Boardroom
Building for the Demand That Hasn't Arrived Yet
There are at least ten companies with real funding and a credible shot at putting thousands of satellites into orbit every year. Every one of those satellites needs a thruster. The entire electric propulsion industry has roughly twenty-seven producers, and as far as Orbital Arc can tell, only SpaceX has ever built more than two hundred in a single year. Jonathan Huffman is the Founder & CEO of Orbital Arc, a Techstars-backed company building ion propulsion on a microchip. Smaller, lighter, more power dense, and produced through semiconductor fabrication, which means the scaling problem that constrains everyone else is already solved. He is a principal investigator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the first chips came back working on the first try. He walks Richard through the technical bet, the market he is building toward, and why the reliability-at-any-cost philosophy that governed satellite design for thirty years no longer applies. Five years out, he wants to be shipping twelve thousand thrusters a year. Also in this one: what a JPL propulsion expert told him about his first pitch, why venture firms keep saying the model looks great but they can't check the math, and the difference between building a great product and building a business.
