On the second day of Seattle Space Week, CEO Andy Lapsa surprised an audience of 300 Washington state space industry pros with an impassioned rant against wealth taxes. Lapsa said that he might not have founded Stoke Space if a wealth tax like California’s proposed billionaire tax had been on the books in Washington state.
The speech received a standing ovation.
A partial transcript follows.
Read the rest of this entry »
Seattle Space Week 2026 is next week, with 20 events planned. Here are the 12 you should check out and why.
All events are free unless otherwise noted.
Seattle Space Week is like a tech festival for the space industry. It’s organized by Space Northwest.
I recently participated in my first Startup Weekend event: the unfortunately-named: Techstars Startup Weekend Seattle: Space Edition.
As someone interested in the commercial space industry, I was so excited for this event, which required us to think like entrepreneurs in the #NewSpace industry.
My personal goal for the event: How can I create a business that increases awareness of space technology and generates revenue for the space industry? And because satellite technology is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the space industry, I focused my attention on a satellite-based business.
If you’re interested in trying out the lean startup philosophy, a Startup Weekend is a great experience, regardless of what industry you want to work in. Here’s some advice from me on how to make it great.
Our eight-person team invented, tested, and iterated a product for the space industry in less than 72 hours. It was an exciting and educational experience!
And I realized that there are a number of tasks you can do ahead of time as a group leader to prepare for the event. If you’ve never done Startup Weekend before, let me assure you it’s harder than you think to do everything in one weekend.
That’s a lot, right? Startup Weekend organizers gave us two tips ahead of time: A) Research your project idea. B) Gather a list of prospective customers so you can pitch your idea.
Both of these tips would be extremely useful and will save you at least 8 hours of work — IF you had a project idea. But I went to Startup Weekend thinking I wouldn’t pitch. I thought I would tag on to someone else’s project. (I was wrong, but that’s a separate story.)
The fact is, there’s a lot you can do to prepare for Startup Weekend even if you’re thinking “I don’t have a startup idea.” Get some of the project management and promotional stuff out of the way so the team can do the real work.
Bonus: create a way to share all the passwords with your team!
You’ll save hours of time if you can do all or most of the above. Which means, unfortunately, you now have hours of work to do before Startup Weekend begins. Get going!
AWS Ground Station, which launched early in 2019, aims to help large organizations start working with satellite data quickly without making enormous capital expenditure investments.
Some number of the roughly 2,000 currently active satellites make their time available for third parties to rent for Earth observation. AWS Ground Station provides the hardware and backhaul so you can collect, transport, and even start processing the data without buying a dish or a server. Amazon’s goal, in my opinion, is to continue to build the value of Amazon Web Services among large organizations by abstracting away some of the IT headaches of obtaining and processing data from satellites.
Amazon thinks AWS Ground Station is a perfect fit for enterprise businesses, academic institutions (who use satellite information for research), as well as government entities. Target use cases for AWS Ground Station include:
However, Amazon’s launch customer for the AWS Ground Station public availability announcement fit none of the use cases above. Instead, it was a New Space company, Spire Global, that announced plans to use AWS Ground Station — to supplement their own satellite data-gathering operations. The choice makes sense. Spire is positioned to understand the value of AWS Ground Station long before any single enterprise might sign on.
Top benefits of contracting a ground station service instead of building your own ground station:
Customers pay by the minute and receive a discounted rate when they reserve in bulk ahead of time. (Scheduled usage of AWS Ground Station enables Amazon to predict demand and merits a hefty discount.)
How long ago did you use a GPS-powered app to find your way somewhere? Google Maps, Citymapper, Lyft, Uber, Zipcar, Lime, Jump, Skip…if you live in a city and get around on your own, chances are you used one of these apps in the last week. So you need satellites to get around town. We need satellites for other purposes, too, like predicting earthquakes and tracking wildfires. But there’s something simple and seemingly innocuous that’s actually threatening your way of life.
It’s orbital debris — space garbage — pieces of metal, paint, and electronics that have sloughed off of satellites and spacecraft over the last 50 years or so. It’s spinning around Earth, alongside mission-critical and business-critical systems that almost everyone in the world depends on. And if we don’t clean it up, orbital debris will cause trillions of dollars of damage to our hard-won space infrastructure.
For humans to continue to innovate on and off-world, we need to commit to maintaining our satellite environment. It’s important that we increase public awareness of the dangers of orbital debris and enable people to take action.
Most people think of hackathons as almost exclusively the domain of coders, programmers, hardware developments, engineers of all stripes, and other types of technologists. Stretching a bit, people can imagine a need for 3D designers, video game artists, quality professionals, and similar. But the fact is that professionals who might be considered working on the business side of technology should attend hackathons too: marketers, account executives, business development professionals, customer success managers, product managers, and more should all consider participating.
And me? I’m a marketing manager at a company unrelated to the space industry, and I don’t code much.
Recently, I participated in the NASA SpaceApps Challenge, a global hackathon and competition where over 29,000 people from 80 countries came together to solve some of humanity’s biggest problems. I joined the NASA SpaceApps Challenge because I love the space industry and believe it is key to unlocking a long-term future for humanity. And I not only joined a great team that did very well at the competition, but I learned a lot and had a fantastic time too. (If you want to learn about that experience, read this post.)
So I believe any business-minded person has something to offer and get out of a hackathon, if you’ve got a bit of passion for the topic.
Read on for my tips — and don’t miss the important tip at the end.
At the hackathon, is it more important for you to:
A) Learn about the topic and have fun
B) Win a prize and get noticed
Your answer changes how you prepare and how you choose a team.
Regardless of your intention for a hackathon, here’s what anyone with a business background can contribute to a successful team: Read the rest of this entry »
Avi Schiffman & team mates demonstrate Debris Hunters at NASA SpaceApps Challenge 2019
The Seattle chapter of the 2019 NASA SpaceApps Challenge was an enormously fun and educational event.
My team, The Debris Hunters, created an educational 3D arcade shooter where players destroy space debris with a variety of tools including laser, harpoons and more. The goal of the project was to increase public awareness of orbital debris and enable them to take action.
The primary problem of orbital debris: bits of metal and paint break off of satellites and spacecraft in orbit and have nowhere to go: they keep spinning around Earth at high velocity and eventually damage our orbital infrastructure and injure astronauts working in orbit. The worst-case scenario of orbital debris is Kessler Syndrome: an unstoppable cascade of orbital collisions that destroy all infrastructure in space — trillions of dollars of investment.
The secondary problem of orbital debris: not enough people know about it, and there’s no international momentum behind controlling it.
That’s why it’s important to find ways to raise awareness of orbital debris and identify paths to remediating the problem. Enter: The Debris Hunters.
Components of the MVPHere are the events I’ll be attending this fall:
9/26/2019: “Space Entrepreneurship: Founder Challenges” in Bellevue, WA – Looking forward to understanding some of the strategic challenges in creating a commercial space company.
10/18/2019: “NASA Space Apps Challenge Seattle” – I will provide marketing support to a group building apps at the hackathon.
11/15/2019: “Techstars Startup Weekend Seattle: Space Edition” — I will participate as chief marketer for one of the concepts at the event.
Hope to meet you there.
The Soviet Union built the first spaceport, Baikonur Cosmodrome, in 1957. In October of that year, Sputnik 1 launched and stayed in orbit for a few months. Since then, about 30 more launch sites were built around the world, and over 1,000 satellites are currently orbiting Earth.
Click through to learn:
