My first full-time job was in the space business. In 1992, I had just earned my master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and moved to a suburb of Philadelphia to work at the Astro Space division of General Electric (now part of Lockheed Martin).

I worked on two satellites – Echostar, and AsiaSat-2. Both were direct broadcast satellites, meaning that they were designed for broadcasting digital television signals from geostationary orbit. Geostationary orbit is a circular path around the earth about 22,000 miles high where a spacecraft appears to stay in the same spot in the sky because it revolves around the earth once every 24 hours.

As an integration and test engineer, I learned everything about the satellites: how they work, how they were designed, how they were built, how they were launched, and how they were operated in-orbit. The technology was fascinating, and I learned everything I could, including taking graduate-level classes in space mission design and orbital mechanics.



But after a few years, I realized that the industry was stagnant. Space technologies were stuck in the 60′s and 70′s, largely developed during the glory days of the Apollo moon program. Engineers and the large defense contractors weren’t ready to try anything new. The prospect of spending most of the next 20 years of my life working my way up through a bureaucracy and filing Engineering Change Notices (ECNs) terrified me - so I pivoted my career trajectory to Silicon Valley, where in the mid-90′s it was clear the Internet was about to change everything. So I left Martin Marietta, and came out to San Francisco in 1996 to surf the Internet wave.

About five years ago I started to look at the space industry again. To my delight, 20 years of semiconductor advances due to Moore’s Law changed everything. Missions that used to require school-bus-sized satellites, could now be performed with toaster-sized satellites. Companies like Planet Labs, which takes pictures of the earth with shoebox-sized spacecraft, were newly possible by leveraging the latest smartphone technologies. A whole series of space-based communications platforms finally make financial sense, when delivered with modern networking silicon.

Oddly, the missing link became launch capacity. Even SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is a huge rocket, and doesn’t make commercial sense for launching these new, micro-sized satellites, unless you piggyback with a bigger payload or bundle together a bunch of microsats. But the problem is, every small satellite maker has different needs. The market for individually launching these “toaster-sized” spacecraft had been overlooked - hence Shasta’s enthusiasm for Vector. As you can read about in this Bloomberg article from earlier today, Vector is building small launch vehicles, that can fit into a standard shipping container, and can launch a microsat into Low Earth Orbit for about $1.5 million per launch. That’s a revolutionary capability and price point.

Vector’s CEO, Jim Cantrell, had heard about my space background and asked a mutual friend, Jana Messerschmidt, for an introduction. I’m glad Jana made that connection! Over the next few months, I met more of Vector’s core team, including John Garvey, Shaun Coleman, and Ken Sunshine. This team is built of a special combination of maverick space industry veterans and young talent. Together with my colleagues at Shasta, we became extremely enthusiastic about the team, and their mission to revolutionize access to space for microsats - and we wanted to be a part of it.

Today, Vector represents Shasta’s third investment in the emerging space industry. We were seed investors in Spire, which is building a constellation of satellites for tracking ships, jets, and weather. Last year, we invested in Accion, a Boston-based company building ultra-high efficiency rockets for in-space propulsion. Vector is the perfect complement to Spire and Accion, and we’re on the lookout for more interesting startups in this category as part of our focus on emerging platforms.