Before he founded SpaceX to colonize Mars, Elon Musk turned to long-time aerospace veteran Jim Cantrell in 2001 for advice. The rocket-building bug hadn’t bit Musk yet, but the tech prodigy still wanted to make a grand gesture to get NASA and the rest of the world talking about Mars. Musk had settled upon the idea of sending mice to Mars and back, having them procreate along the way. With about $20 million to burn, Musk sought to buy three old Russian ICBMs and retrofit them as launch vehicles.

It was a crazy plan. But Cantrell, who had worked with the Soviet and then the Russian space program for more than two decades, agreed to help smooth negotiations with the Russians. The scheme fell apart, of course, but that failure led Musk to the epiphany that he should build his own rockets, and he founded SpaceX in June 2002. Cantrell said at the time that the only foreseeable money-making pathway was big payloads: multiton communications and national security satellites. “In those days, you’d look at the market, and the only rational decision you could make was to start small and grow the size of the vehicle,” Cantrell said.

Cantrell left SpaceX in 2002, seeing the venture as too risky and unlikely to turn a profit. (It succeeded, he said, because Musk could not conceive of failure). However, even as SpaceX has become a dominant player in the large satellite launch industry, the small satellite industry has grown rapidly. The miniaturization of communications and imaging satellites has led to a new generation of rocket companies, such as Firefly Space Systems and Rocket Lab, which have built smaller launchers. Their rockets will generally heft payloads larger than 100kg into Sun-synchronous orbits 500km or higher.

Even with the rise of cubesats and other smaller technologies, payloads have continued to shrink. Over the last decade, Cantrell has watched this trend, seeing an opportunity to jump back into the launch business with a nano-satellite rocket. In late 2015, he called John Garvey, whose company Garvey Spacecraft Corporation had been working on such a rocket, and together they decided to found a new company called Vector. The company is developing a rocket with a reusable first stage that can deliver up to 25kg to a 400km Sun-synchronous orbit. Because of the groundwork already done by Garvey, Cantrell said Vector could begin orbital flights in 2018.

Cantrell will formally announce the company’s plans later today at the Space 2.0 Conference in Silicon Valley. He will also say Vector, based in Tucson, Arizona, has raised more than $1 million in angel funding to support further development.

The company’s philosophy is pretty simple. Some recent industry reports have suggested that satellites weighing 50kg or less will comprise about 75 percent of all satellites launched by 2020. Today, these smaller payloads typically “share” rides to space on larger rockets and cannot count on a launch date. Instead of being treated as excess cargo, Vector intends to offer these small satellites the capability to launch within three months of demand into any desired orbit from Kodiak Launch Complex in Alaska or Cape Canaveral in Florida. Launch costs will range from $2 million to $3 million.

Through its association with Garvey, Vector has conducted about 30 suborbital flights of the first stage of its 12-meter rocket, which runs on special hydrocarbon fuel. The first stage is powered by three engines, each with 5,000 pounds of thrust. It is designed to be recoverable via a parachute system.

Cantrell said the company will also focus on “platform development,” which means it plans to offer customers full-service development, from incorporating a particular technology into a satellite, launching it, and designing the space systems to deploying it in orbit. “We’re not sure what that will exactly look like,” he said. “But the goal is to make it easier for innovators and entrepreneurs to get their ideas into space.”

Cantrell said his experiences in Silicon Valley and the aerospace industry leads him to believe that lowering the barrier of entry into space will unleash innovation. It is a lot easier to convince a venture capitalist to invest a few million dollars into an idea versus $10 million, $50 million, or more required for small satellite launchers or ride-along vehicles. “We want to give those guys a platform so they can continue to innovate without having to worry about a launch,” Cantrell said. “To me, this is potentially the most interesting part of the aerospace market. The sheer numbers of satellites in this size range are high, and this is probably where the real innovation is going to come.”

After 15 years, Cantrell is happy to leave the big stuff, the heavy payloads, dreams of Mars, and eventually the much ballyhooed BFR—Big F***ing Rocket—to Musk. He’s content to go after the small stuff.