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XColumn: Five Reasons Why Space Matters (Hint: It's Not Tourism)

Last night, Rocket Lab made a big comeback from its failed launch last May. The Long Beach startup's Electron rocket launched a satellite for the U.S. Space Force, bringing their total to 105.
This capped a busy month for space, with Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos making their space dreams come true in the weeks prior. But with all the attention on the billionaire's exploits, are we missing the bigger picture?
The lack of coverage for Rocket Lab's rebound is just as telling as the fanfare around Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin's flights. Space tourism is distracting us from why we should actually care about space.
The Biggest Space News of the Year
While the public has debated the merits of this month's sub-orbital joyrides, the media missed the biggest aerospace event of the year a month ago, when Hawthorne-based SpaceX launched their Transporter‐2 mission on June 30.
What was so revolutionary about last month's launch? Nothing. And that's partly the point. Launches are becoming routine thanks to reusable launch vehicles.
But the Transporter‐2 mission was significant, because the rideshare mission launched 88 different satellites for customers into orbit, enabling innovation for scores of organizations.
The launch was the first for Santa Barbara startup Umbra, which has developed technology capable of seeing at night and through dense clouds; it has since been added to a joint $950M Air Force contract. The payload also included a competing satellite from Iceye, manufactured in Irvine, and two cubesats from San Diego-based General Atomics to test optical communications between satellites and from satellites to drones.
As a preeminent hub for aerospace, Southern California stands to gain greatly as launches become more frequent and the industry re-emerges from its post-'80s slumber. But other hubs are rapidly catching up.
As a venture capitalist and advisor to space—and other—startups, I've seen the sector evolve into something barely recognizable from the time I started my career as an engineer on the Space Shuttle Main Engine decades ago. Here are five reasons we should care.
1. Space Improves Our Quality of Life
If you looked at your phone this morning to get the weather forecast or check the route to your first meeting, you can thank satellites for the help.
"The blue dot on your phone is possible due to billions of dollars of space infrastructure," says Van Espahbodi, managing partner and co‐founder of Starburst, a company that catalyzes connections in the aerospace industry. "Sure it results in food delivery, dating apps and so many innovations in daily life, but none of this would be possible without the boundaries of exploration into space."
Space isn't just delivering convenience, it's democratizing access to data and technology, too.
"There are four billion people unconnected in this world," says Akash Systems CEO and founder Felix Ejeckam, who aims to expand global access to broadband. "Unless you're still going to run expensive fiber optic cables all over the Earth, you have no choice but to drop internet beams from space."
Programs like OneWeb and SpaceX's Starlink are bringing broadband connectivity to every corner of the globe, and Akash has developed advanced materials that will help reduce the cost and increase speeds of such Internet satellites, aiming to make these services more accessible and ubiquitous.
On the flip side—those times we claim we're "off the grid" from work for a week? Those days might be numbered.
2. Space Lets Us Understand Our World and Adapt to Climate Change
With all this talk of Mars missions as our "Plan B," you might ask, "Why not invest in the planet we have?" The aerospace industry is doing that, too.
Satellites are critical for sensing our world—tracking changes in infrastructure, weather and the environment over time. Satellites can measure the height of entire oceans within an accuracy of about an inch, and NASA's first TROPICS cubesat, launched on Transporter-2, will use microwaves to predict hurricanes.
"Our space endeavors have been instrumental to understanding the extent of climate change on Earth using satellite data from NASA and NOAA," says Jessica Rousset, Deputy director of the Arizona State University Interplanetary Initiative.
Government efforts are complemented by an ever‐expanding collection of private constellations with new capabilities. With these expanding capabilities we can sense new things—and sense them more often. Inexpensive infrared and hyperspectral imaging of crops can help farmers make better decisions and make agriculture more productive and resource‐ efficient. Soon, we'll even be able to see underground, thanks to companies like Lunasonde.
Granted, the carbon emissions from rocket launches can have their own negative impact on the environment. Fortunately, some launch services—including Blue Origin—are shifting to less‐ polluting fuels like hydrogen.
3. Space Enables Things We Could Never Do Before
The unique environment of space unlocks new opportunities in science and industry that would be worthy of science fiction movies.
Companies like Varda plan to set up self‐assembling, automated factories on orbit to manufacture things. Production of semiconductors, protein crystals, polymers, new drugs or optical fibers might benefit from the zero‐gravity, near‐vacuum conditions of space.
Some have proposed setting up 24/7 solar farms in space and beaming the energy down to Earth using lasers or microwaves.
And 21st‐century prospectors have set their sights skyward, with dreams of mining asteroids for precious materials. Last year, Japan hosted the first successful asteroid sample recovery mission, landing their loot in the Australian outback.
Not everyone believes space production will be practical anytime soon, but research in space has already led to discoveries in material science, plasma physics and biology.
The publicly‐funded International Space Station has been a productive early laboratory. Now, space infrastructure developer Axiom Space is working towards a 2024 launch of their initial components for the next generation commercial space station, partially funded by a $140M NASA grant.
4. Space Has Created a Burgeoning New Industry
Space has another very practical benefit; it has created an entirely new sector of the economy. Early governmental funding and discoveries has set the stage for an entirely new ecosystem of startups, suppliers and service companies sustained by private dollars. Morgan Stanley estimates that the global space industry—$350B as of 2016—will expand to over $1 trillion by 2040.
These companies are driving innovation, fueling economic growth, and creating new jobs in an industry where the United States still maintains a manufacturing edge.
Satellites in space means the need for infrastructure, being built now. Orbit Fab, the "Gas Stations in Space" company, launched the world's first satellite fuel tanker on Transporter‐2. They are building a materials supply chain to support a space economy that CEO Daniel Faber predicts will ultimately lead to permanent jobs in orbit. (Full disclosure: I'm an investor.)
"Fuel is now available for purchase and delivery in space," says Faber, "And we don't have to keep throwing away perfectly good satellites when they run out of fuel."
In the past NASA has justified their funding by pointing at thousands of technologies spun out of the space program—memory foam, cochlear implants, freeze dried food, CMOS image sensors and powdered lubricants — to name a few.
"But today, it's almost like the reverse is happening," says Jonathan Fentzke, the newest managing director of the Techstars Space accelerator. Space is driving demand for technology. "Unique challenges on orbit, like petabytes of image data streamed daily or the lack of heat dissipation in a vacuum, means the industry is always looking for new technologies and suppliers to solve their challenges." The June 30 launch of three SAR satellites alone will add 30-40 terabytes of data per day to the cloud.
Which is why his 2021 cohort includes startups like Pixspan, an image compression company with roots in Hollywood, and Thermexit, whose carbon nanomaterials were originally designed for supercomputers. These companies are finding a new thirst for their technologies thanks to the space industry.
5. Space Inspires Discovery
And finally, space still holds a special place by being the final frontier. While there aren't many places left on Earth that haven't appeared in a selfie, endless discoveries await us beyond our atmosphere.
The James Webb Space Telescope
Southern California has a long history of space adventures, including Chuck Yeager's historic sound barrier-busting flight in 1947. From NASA-JPL's Curiosity and Perseverance rovers to SpaceX's dreams of colonizing Mars, we continue to be the epicenter of big-idea space exploration
And our discoveries aren't just for adventure, either. By exploring beyond our planet, we can prepare for interplanetary human settlement, learn about the origins of life or better understand the beginning of the universe.
In El Segundo, Northrop Grumman is assembling the much awaited James Webb Space Telescope, soon headed a million miles away to "L2," a cold, stable perch past the moon. From there it will peer deep into space, providing views of faraway exoplanets and glimpses of light from 13.6 billion years ago, when the earliest stars and galaxies were just forming in the universe.
Our Future in Space is Inevitable
Things have changed for the better in aerospace over the last decade.
Back when I was a young engineer working at Rocketdyne, my work was funded by NASA. I remember how we depended on the largess of government dollars and lived by the whims of public sentiment. Risk and new ideas weren't readily accepted, and failure wasn't an option.
Today, aerospace is more iterative, entrepreneurial, and largely driven by commercial interests. "There's so much money and interest out there, and there is more of a culture of innovation," says Carrie Hernandez, formerly of SpaceX and now CEO and Co‐Founder of Rebel Space Technologies in Long Beach.
And private space investments have never been higher. "In 2021, private capital will invest more money in the space industry than NASA will spend on everything," NASA-JPL physicist and local angel investor Shanti Rao quipped recently on Twitter.
And with a few exceptions, we're exploring at relatively bargain‐basement prices. Reusable rockets, space servicing, robotics and other technologies make space more affordable than ever.
"In the 60s, we went at great expense—often around 4% of GDP. But today, we're doing twenty times more at one‐tenth the price," says a colleague who asked to remain anonymous because he doesn't have permission to speak on behalf of his government employer. "And this time we're not just stopping by to say hello, we're setting up a permanent base."
Private industry is taking the lead, but Southern California needs to keep its eye on the ball. These days space companies can be almost anywhere, and Colorado, Texas and Northern California have become major hubs of space innovation, too.
NASA's Apollo and Space Shuttle programs were as much a PR effort as they were science expeditions. And those educational efforts have paid dividends by inspiring more public funding for research and development and a whole generation of kids to pursue science and math.
Will Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic succeed at filling this inspirational role? I hope so. But it's time for us to celebrate and support all the entrepreneurs exploring the boundaries of space.
Because it turns out, you don't need to be a billionaire to pursue your space dreams. And with or without public support, the space industry is now inevitable.
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A New Tide of LA Startups Is Tackling the National Childcare Crisis
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
The pandemic exacerbated a problem that has been long bubbling in the U.S.: the childcare crisis.
According to a survey of people in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers conducted by the city’s WiSTEM Los Angeles program and shared exclusively with dot.LA, the pandemic exposed a slew of challenges across STEM fields. The survey—which consisted of 181 respondents from L.A.County and was conducted between March 2021 and 2022— involved respondents across medical fields, technical professions and science industries who shared the pandemic’s effects on their professional or education careers.
The survey found 60% of the respondents, primarily women, were balancing increased caretaking roles with work or school responsibilities. And while caretaking responsibilities grew, 49% of respondents said their workload also increased during the pandemic.
“The pandemic threw a wrench into lots of folks' experiences both professionally and academically,” said Kathryne Cooper, a health tech investor who sits on the advisory board of WiSTEM. “So we need to acknowledge that.”
In the L.A. area, an increasing number of childcare startups are aiming to address this massive challenge that is a growing national crisis. The U.S. has long dealt with a crippling childcare infrastructure plagued by low wages and a labor shortage in preschools and daycares, but the COVID-19 crisis made it worse. During the pandemic, women left the workforce due to the lack of childcare and caretaking resources. By 2021, women made up the lowest percentage of the workforce since 1988, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Despite the pandemic forcing everyone indoors, caretaking duties fell disproportionately on women.
“I almost actually left my job because everything that I looked at was either waitlisted or the costs were so astronomical that it probably made sense for me to stay at home rather than pay someone to actually look after my child,” said Jessica Chang, the CEO of childcare startup WeeCare.
The Marina del Rey-based WeeCare, one of the startups that helps people open their own childcare facilities, announced it raised $12 million in April (to go along with an additional $5 million in bridge funding raised during the pandemic). The company helps people build daycare centers and works with employers to provide access to WeeCare centers and construct child care benefits programs.
Some of these startups strive to boost the number of daycare centers by helping operators with financial costs, licensing fees and scheduling. Wonderschool, a San Francisco-based child care startup, raised $25 million in January and assisted with hundreds of childcare facilities in L.A.-based Playground, which raised $3 million in seed funding last year per PitchBook. Playground acts as an in-house platform for childcare providers to communicate with staff and parents, track attendance, report student behavior and provide automatic invoicing services.
L.A.-based Brella, which launched in 2019, raised $5 million in seed funding in January to create a tech-enabled daycare scheduling platform that could meet the demand of flexible childcare as parents navigate a hybrid work environment, and recently opened a new location in Hollywood. The startup aims to address the labor shortage among childcare workers by paying its workers roughly $25 an hour and offering mental health benefits and career development opportunities for its educators.
“It's this huge disconnect in our society because these are really important people who are doing arguably one of the most important educational jobs,” said Melanie Wolff, co-founder of childcare startup Brella. “They often don't get benefits. They don't have a lot of job security.”
Venture capital funding has poured into the relatively new childcare sector. A slew of parent-tech companies aimed at finding flexible child care and monitoring children saw $1.4 billion worth of venture investments in 2021, according to PitchBook, largely to meet the demands of parents in a pandemic era who have more flexible work commutes and require more tech-enabled solutions.
“I think a lot of it has to do with what employers expect for workers,” said Darby Saxbe, an associate professor of psychology and family relationships expert at USC. “There's still a lot more stigma for men to build their work around caregiving responsibilities–there's a lot of evidence that men are often discouraged from taking paternity leave, even if it's available.”
Childcare benefits are also becoming a more attractive incentive as workers grapple with unorthodox work schedules in a hybrid setting.
“Employers, because of COVID, were having a hard time retaining and recruiting employees,” said Chang. “And they were actually incentivized to actually find a solution to help the employees.”
WeeCare primarily partners with employers of essential workers, like schools, hospitals and grocery stores, and the benefits programs account for the majority of WeeCare’s revenue.
Childcare works are part of a massive labor shortage in caretaker roles that also include nurses, and health aids for the eldery. These workers, which allow women to maintain careers in STEM and other high-paying industries, are vital, according to Saxbe.
“Women can advance in the workplace,” Saxbe said. “But if there's no support at home and there is no one who is helping take care of kids and elderly people, women can't just advance in a vacuum.”
- The Wana Family Childcare Network is Booming - dot.LA ›
- Childcare Providers Get a Lifeline From LA Startup WeeCare ›
- Childcare Center Brella Raises $5 Million, New LA Locations - dot.LA ›
- WeeCare Raises $17 Million As Childcare Startups Boom - dot.LA ›
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
MaC Venture Capital Raises $203M for Its Second Fund
Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
While venture capital funding has taken a hit this year, that hasn’t stopped MaC Venture Capital from raising $203 million for its second fund.
The Los Angeles-based, Black-led VC firm said Monday that it had surpassed its initial $200 million goal for the fund, which dot.LA reported in January, over the span of seven months. MaC said it expects to invest the capital in up to 50 mostly seed-stage startups while remaining “sector-agnostic.”
“We love seed-stage companies because that’s where most of the value is created,” MaC managing general partner Marlon Nichols told dot.LA. While the firm has invested in local ventures like NFT gaming platform Artie, space startup Epsilon3 and autonomous sensor company Spartan Radar, Nichols said MaC—whose portfolio companies span from Seattle to Nairobi—would continue to eye ventures across the rest of the country and world.
“Talent is ubiquitous; access to capital is not,” Nichols noted. “What they’re building needs to matter; we’ve got to believe that this group of founders is the best team building in the space, period.”
Launched in 2019, MaC is led by four founding partners: VC veteran Nichols, former Washington, D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, and former William Morris Endeavor talent agents Charles D. King and Michael Palank. Nichols described the team’s collective background in government, consulting, media, entertainment and talent management as its “superpower.”
In a venture capital industry where few people of color are decision-makers, MaC Venture Capital has looked to wield its influence to provide opportunities for founders of color. The firm says 69% of its portfolio companies were started by BIPOC founders and 36% are led by women, while MaC has also diversified its own ranks by adding female partners Zhenni Liu and Haley Farnsworth.
MaC’s second investment fund nearly doubled the size of the firm’s $110 million first fund, which it closed in March 2021. The new fund’s repeat institutional investors include Goldman Sachs, ICG Advisors, StepStone, the University of Michigan, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, while the likes of Illumen Capital and the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois also pitched in as new investors.
“It’s a great combination of having affirmation from people who have been with us from the beginning and new people coming in that want to be a part of it,” Fenty told dot.LA.
- Can MaC VC Help Solve Tech's Whiteness Problem? - dot.LA ›
- MaC Venture Capital's Marlon Nichols on 'Diversity Theater' - dot.LA ›
- MaC Venture Capital Eyes $200 Million For Its Second Fund - dot.LA ›
Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
California Debates Data Privacy as SCOTUS Allows Abortion Bans
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
The United States Supreme Court called a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks constitutional on Friday, overturning the country’s founding abortion rights decision Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court also upheld that there cannot be any restriction on how far into a pregnancy abortion can be banned.
When Politico first broke the news months before SCOTUS’s final ruling, a slew of bills entered Congress to protect data privacy and prevent the sale of data, which can be triangulated to see if a person has had an abortion or if they are seeking an abortion and have historically been used by antiabortion individuals who would collect this information during their free time.
Democratic lawmakers led by Congresswoman Anna Eshoo called on Google to stop collecting location data. The chair of the Federal Trade Commission has long voiced plans for the agency to prevent data collection. A week after the news, California Assembly passed A.B. 2091, a law that would prevent insurance companies and medical providers from sharing information in abortion-related cases (the state Senate is scheduled to deliberate on it in five days).
These scattered bills attempt to do what health privacy laws do not. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, was established in 1996 when the Internet was still young and most people carried flip phones. The act declared health institutions were not allowed to share or disclose patients’ health information. Google, Apple and a slew of fertility and health apps are not covered under HIPAA, and fertility app data can be subpoenaed by law enforcement.
California’s Confidentiality of Medical Information Act (or CMIA), goes further than HIPAA by encompassing apps that store medical information under the broader umbrella of health institutions that include insurance companies and medical providers. And several how-tos on protecting data privacy during Roe v. Wade have been published in the hours of the announcement.
But reproductive rights organizations say data privacy alone cannot fix the problem. According to reproductive health policy think tank Guttmacher Institute, the closest state with abortion access to 1.3 million out-of-state women of reproductive age is California. One report from the UCLA Center on Reproductive Health, Law and Policy estimates as many as 9,400 people will travel to Los Angeles County every year to get abortions, and that number will grow as more states criminalize abortions.
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.