Space Startups: An Anthology of Short Stories (Vol I)
After a series of articles addressing rather solemn things such as geopolitical tension, lack of product-market fit, and ECSS standards, maybe it’s s good idea to wrap up the week with some levity.
Having survived nearly a decade around space startups, I have witnessed all kinds of situations across the spectrum; funny, bizarre, tense, and puzzling. I am sharing only a fraction of those here. These are all real stories. The order of appearance is random.
Let’s go.
Artificial Intelligence and Test
Space is the industry of acronyms. Newcomers usually struggle to find their way in the soup of letters that most of the time become a startup’s everyday jargon.
One day, I was minding my own business and a recruitment consultant we had hired came to my desk, asking me questions about a job description for an “Artificial Intelligence” position. I was like, wow, ok, are we there yet? Do we already need AI people? As familiar with riding fads as I was (startups love embracing fashions, and AI has been the hot one for a while after the IoT, big data, and blockchain era) I was really curious about this job ad in particular, so I started to ask the consultant questions about who or why this position was being opened. Turned out, she thought it was AI but in fact, it was an AIT (Assembly, Integration, and Test) position. A missing letter in the Chinese whispers1 led the quest in a totally wrong direction. Luckily we spotted the misunderstanding BEFORE the person was hired; I know of one case where a similar misunderstanding went all the way to hiring the right person for the wrong job.
The Bargain
Years ago, I was the technical responsible for a startup that was rapidly growing. One day, the CFO approached me asking me if we could buy in bulk (40 units if I recall correctly) a certain component from a supplier we had JUST met. Why in bulk? The price was very attractive. Real cheap. I said no because we still didn’t know the supplier enough and we couldn’t even be remotely sure their stuff was a good fit for us. Of course, the bulk of 40 components were duly bought. In time, you realize that most questions coming from CFOs are rather rhetorical questions.
The Chairman
On my first day as a co-founder of a space startup, I realized the utter importance of desks and chairs, as I had suddenly found myself without either. After using a window sill as a desktop while standing for a while, I eyed a chair in the hallway of this coworking space our office was in that had stayed in the same spot for some days. After some hesitation, I stole borrowed it for an indefinite amount of time. Until when? Until I decided to solve the chair scarcity problem by buying THE most uncomfortable chair ever conceived.
After a tour around IKEA, and knowing how much I hate to be there feeling like I am a hamster following their silly arrows, I laid my eyes on an office chair called Millberget which looked ok to me, and it was cheap. Startups like cheap, so win-win. Believe me, that Millberget thing was a silent killer, always trying to push you onto the floor, or giving you the worst back pains possible. Do you think I was deterred by this blatant design flaw? No, I was not. I doubled down. I bought TENS of them, in different batches, even after knowing they were terrible. One thing was for sure, the team got very good at assembling them though, involuntarily proving Wright’s law.
Use Your Illusion I
When it comes to space startups, it’s no news that there’s a lot of bluffing and imagination involved. A good dose of imagination is needed to see products that don’t exist yet (and in some cases will never exist) or to visualize facilities that are only in the eyes of the beholders and misleading 3D renders, and nowhere else.
On one occasion, a delegation from a big company came for a visit. They were concerned about whether we had the proper facilities for integrating a satellite for a potential shared mission. We had in fact secured some new facilities, but they were far from ready. Although I didn’t take part in the tour to see the “facilities” in question, when I saw the contingent coming back from it, I asked one of their senior leaders how the tour had gone, to which he laconically replied: “Well, I had to really use my imagination”.
Fruits as a Service (FaaS)
Years ago, the startup I was working for hired an office manager. We had a total of 6 or 7 people in the company in total at that moment, so our needs for supplies were rather small and manageable. Still, somehow, this new office manager thought we were Microsoft. Unable to even consider the idea of procuring office stuff by just legging it to stores like mortals would do, this office manager came up with a variety of “big company” approaches for replenishing the office goodies, mainly by establishing “partnerships” with supply companies left and right. Grocery stores, office supplies stores, and in particular a fruit supplier whose innovative business model was based on a subscription scheme. By subscribing to their “fruits as a service” thing, a box with fruits would be delivered weekly to your door. Have to say, thanks to that service I learned about fruits I had no clue existed. We were getting tropical, weird-looking stuff we hadn’t seen before in our entire lives and we didn’t even know how to peel and eat. In time, this person left the company, and we were left with this subscription whose details were attached to this manager’s credentials/email, etc. We could not find a way to cancel it. Fruits were accumulating consistently, week after week; some of our colleagues had to take fruits home as they were piling up. The place smelled like rotten bananas.
Finally, a new office manager came along. They had a brilliant idea: picking up a phone and talking to a human to get it canceled, something we engineers didn’t even think of doing. Funny enough, at the end of my time in this startup, the fruit subscription from the same company had made a glorious comeback. History repeats itself, they say?
Location is Everything
Of course, as startups grow, office quality improves. Better chairs, better desks, better toilet paper2.
In this startup I was working for, we were located in a place that used to be a hospital and had been reconverted into a startup hub. In what you can call very clever city planning, this hospital was located right in front of a cemetery.
We had just upgraded offices from a very small one to a slightly bigger one in a different building within the same compound. The new one was nicer in every way, except for the fact that our windows were now facing directly to the graveyard. I mean, there’s nothing especially wrong with that, but somehow seeing tombstones and crooked crosses every day as you looked out of the window was a constant reminder of the finitude of life, in particular startup life.
Satellites Built in a Catacomb
In this hospital-turned-into-startup-community we were in, at some point, as a space company with decent aspirations we were in need of some space for building satellites. And we couldn’t do this in our small office. So one of the guys running this hospital startup place took us to “the basement” to see some potential space that was available there. This “basement” was literally carved out of stone, it looked like you were walking in some crypts under central Helsinki. It looked scary and dark. It was full of stretchers and abandoned hospital equipment and the “rooms” (just bigger holes carved in stone with a door added) had tiled walls that looked like they could have been used for autopsies or similar. Not very motivating to integrate a satellite in a place that looked like out of the “Saw” franchise.
Caught Redhanded
I have to say I have always enjoyed being alone in the office. In the early days of startups, when it’s only about a few souls around, having the chance to be alone for a full day is rather common. As startups grow, of course, the probability of enjoying yourself while being alone decreases consistently.
There was this particular day when it was only two of us in the office, me and a colleague. This colleague at some point decided that it was time to go home and I thought “Yay, it’s me time”. So I thought: as soon as they head out, I will go to the mini fridge and make my beloved rolls of ham and cheese. As my colleague said the goodbyes and proceeded to leave, I immediately executed my plan, and attacked the fridge. I brough the ham and cheese to my table and started rolling things for the much-awaited feast. Suddenly, my colleague, who had apparently forgotten something, came back after a few minutes. As they opened the door, they looked at me and my table full of cheese and ham, and an uncomfortably long eye contact and long silence took place. They still remind me today about the ham and cheese incident. I regret nothing.
Bad Luck Brian: Follows the Process, Still Screws Up
Deployment in satellites is something you really, really want to happen or you really, really DO NOT want to happen, depending on where you are standing in the project lifecycle.
In some satellite architecture I was involved in a time ago, we had forgotten to add hardware protections to prevent unwanted deployment sequences. You do not want a satellite to randomly deploy appendages (solar panels, antennas, etc) while on the ground and even less while being integrated into the rocket. In this design, deployment was automatic and time-tagged (based on a timer). So we had a great idea: let’s add a dummy file in the onboard computer whose sole existence would mean “do not deploy appendages under any circumstance”. Neat and simple. Then, while the engineers would be working at the launch site, a procedure and a checklist would guide them to an eventual last step which would include removing this critical file before flight.
This is an interesting story that illustrates that sometimes by following the process perfectly well you can still get bitten in the ass by life's nuances.
Once the satellite was launched, and during the first passes, we realized the satellite hadn’t deployed stuff as expected; it did look like the file hadn’t been deleted. And it was the case: the file was happily sitting there.
But the engineer swore he had deleted the file. And he was not lying. The engineer correctly followed the procedure, deleted the file, and proceeded to turn off the satellite right after that. His only mistake was to be perhaps a bit too trigger-happy turning the bird off after removing the file, out of cautiousness I assume. In the way file systems work, when you delete a file, the data blocks that compose the file aren't immediately erased. Depending on the file system, deleting a file involves many things, including removing directory entries, updating allocation tables or “inodes”, and possibly journaling the change to ensure consistency. All this takes time. If you turn off the computer right after file deletion, it might be the file system does not in fact manage to run the whole process to delete the file completely, so the next time the computer is on, the file will be there. And it was there. The solution? A quick and dirty rm command during a pass and all deployments took place smoothly. NewSpace style.
Ok Panic!
Years ago, the startup I was part of was in its very early stages and, like many other startups, it was struggling to secure funding. We were going from rejection to rejection, and a bad feeling started to creep me. Are we going belly up after all? As all this was going on in my mind, one day, while being alone in our small office, I felt my heart doing some weird beats, some palpitations and I felt my sight was getting blurred. I thought: heart attack. This is it. So enjoying your day alone in the office has some drawbacks after all. In a bit of a panic, I took my jacket and promptly left for some private clinic that was almost next door. I was quite dramatic when I talked to the lady at the reception describing what I thought was an impending death, but the lady, who had probably seen things before, did not immediately buy my sense of danger so she gave me a number to queue for a general check. Finally, and while I remained in an undead state, some nurse called me and ran some basic examination on me. Does your arm hurt? No. Does your jaw hurt? No. Most of his questions were a no from me. He took an EKG. Looked fine. A few days later, more examinations followed. Nothing. Hypochondriac much? Startups are not for the faint of heart.
The Ghost
A very startup thing is to gather “advisors” in a sort of troupe that is supposed to give you legitimacy because of their big names and connections. At some point, the startup I was part of did this trick and brought someone with supposedly a big name. This person fast tracked directly into our slide decks and even into our website, even before I even had the chance to talk to him. In fact, practically no one ever talked with him at all. It became some sort of a friendly ghost in all our material. This was before the AI fashion, otherwise, I would have thought he was not a real person and only a hologram or the result of some generative algorithm.
The Spitter
Quite a long time ago, the CEO of a software company that made a tool we needed to use came for a visit. The person, a man in his mid-50s, started to cough as soon as he came through the door. This was pre-COVID times, so it was not such a big deal. Anyway, the cough wouldn’t stop, it was quite a bad coughing attack. Then, someone had the sensible idea of offering him a glass of water to ease the cough. As we were already sitting in the meeting room, the man accepted the glass of water, but he was a bit in a hurry to take a sip while the coughing was still full on. The result? He coughed with a mouth full of water, spraying everybody across the table, me included. He was very sorry of course, as we were drying our dripping faces, clothes, and table. Then, he proceeded to run a demo of his product.
Did any of this prevent us from buying his software? Of course it didn’t. We bought it, even after the guy literally spat on our faces. If that’s not the power of having a great product, then what is?
ESD Dictator
At some point, the discipline inside the integration room in a startup I was working for had started to get a bit lax. It happens. To put engineers a little bit back on track, a colleague of mine had the good-spirited although debatable idea of sticking a photo of a notorious Austrian dictator with a tiny mustache and mediocre painting skills right at the door, with some legend reminding people about ESD and cleanness discipline and the consequences of not following the guidelines. Understandably, the choice created quite some backlash and had to be removed.
Human ATM
During my very early days in my first adventure living abroad, it took me forever to get through the basics of the relocation process like getting a bank account or finding an apartment because of all the paperwork involved in the process (tax ID, social security number, etc). I was trapped in some bureaucratic loop. As I was already incurring quite some expenses while I as settling down in Finland, the cash in my Argentinian bank account started to run out. Alarmed, I went to the CFO of the startup I had just joined and asked if he could give me some cash in advance (I meant physical money notes, also because I had no bank account, remember). Right after my request, his European, highly banked brain short-circuited and he started to stress about how could that be explained to the accountant. Anyway, he still showed the will to solve my problem, and eventually, we met in a dark corner in central Helsinki, where he opened his coat and passed me an envelope with some hundred euros in the shadiest way possible. From a distance, it absolutely looked like I was buying some meth.
A Satellite in The Parking Lot
In some satellite mission eons ago, we were facing some issues with the GPS while we were integrating the bird. We were not able to get GPS locks. After exhausting most of the debugging paths to solve the problem, we decided to take the satellite out to the parking lot to have full sky visibility and try to sort the problem once and for all. We proceeded to wrap the satellite in some ESD plastic and out we went. Surely it looked somewhat funny from a distance, having this gizmo there on a table with lots of laptops around, measurement equipment, and cables galore. At some point, some random guy who happened to be walking by stopped and asked what we were doing. We told him the truth, of course; we were testing a satellite. He did not believe us at all and proceeded to back off in total disbelief like that Homer Simpson meme disappearing in the bushes.
The Roomba Moment
A certain project I was part of was in the middle of a spending spree. We were going way over budget and money was bleeding fast. We were buying tools and special equipment we surely needed, and every purchase was worth tens of thousands. But the spending party came to a sudden stop when someone crossed the line and decided to buy… a Roomba3. Nothing else than the good-ole Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (also known as Bike-Shedding Effect)
People and organizations tend to give disproportionate attention to trivial or minor issues, while major, complex issues are often glossed over because they’re too complicated or intimidating to scrutinize.
This is rather simple to explain: it happens because small, understandable expenses feel within everyone's expertise, so people overanalyze them. Large expenses might be too complex or abstract, so people assume someone else has done the due diligence.
Every project has its Roomba moment.
The Corporate Sandwich
Startup life at the early stages is not always as glamorous as the press releases and LinkedIn posts want us to believe. Ages ago, I was visiting a company we were doing a joint project with. We were building one part of a satellite mission, they were building a complementary part. After some technical exchange at their premises, it was time to go for lunch. I was hungry, and as we were walking out and talking, I was trying to dilucidate where they were taking us to eat. After a short walk, we entered a mall and they took us to, well, Subway. I mean, I was more than happy with the footlong I got for free, so no complaints there, but somehow I had something else in mind.
This company today is valued in billions, so I guess they might have upgraded a bit the lunch approach with their visitors.
DD to Rule Them All
In a satellite mission many years ago, we were running Linux on the onboard computer. Once in orbit, somehow the board was failing to boot every now and then. We were puzzled. It looked quite random and hard to reproduce/analyze. After some deep debugging, we realized the problem was in the bootloader. The solution? Newspace, baby: we did something that classic space gray-beards would have a heart attack by even thinking of: sending a new bootloader binary and overwriting the existing one. For this, we used dd4, a Linux command that you would think thrice about using even on your laptop sitting comfortably on the ground. Worry not, it worked like a charm. Again, NewSpace is not for the faint of heart.
Donuts in the Desert
It’s summer in the US, and I am in the Mojave desert to witness a suborbital test launch from an early-stage company we had some sort of launch agreement with and who had the ambition to become the next SpaceX although they eventually went bankrupt. Shit happens.
I went there with a colleague. We rented a car and we drove from a small town called California City to the place where the test launch would take place. On the way there, right before arriving, this colleague of mine turned to me and said: “Hey, when we are there, let’s be professional”. I was like, sure, I mean, I was planning to be professional anyway but yeah let’s be professional. Anyway, the day went by, the “launcher” (a small sounding rocket in reality) went up and down unremarkably, and as we finally started our drive back to our hotel in California City for a well-deserved rest after a pretty bizarre day I will explain further ahead in some other stories, this colleague of mine who was again behind the wheel says with a mischievous expression in his face: hey, let’s make some donuts with the car. So off he goes, stepping on the gas and manipulating the parking brake as we start to go in diabolical circles in the sand in our rental Ford Fiesta, creating a chaotic cloud of dust in the process. As I was grabbing myself to whatever I could while the centrifugal force was trying to yeet me out of the car, the whole scene looked like in the movie “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” from 1987 when Steve Martin looks at John Candy dressed as the devil as they drive between two 18-wheelers, I thought: weren’t we supposed to be professional?
A Snake That Wants to Chase You
Upon our arrival at the launch facilities in the Mojave desert, a sign received us with a careful description of all the dangers that were awaiting us and the horrendous ways we could die there:
There was this man—who I think was enjoying teasing these two rookie foreigners afraid of everything—who told us: “Hey, be careful when you go to the toilet because there is this snake that likes to hide under the urinals and it actually chases you even if you don’t bother it”. Shit.
It was 50 degrees Celsius there, which was by far the highest temperature I’d experienced in my life, so I was reasonably worried about having a heat stroke. There was a fridge with tons of bottles of water, so I drank profusely to stay hydrated as the sign above was recommending. Of course, physiological urgencies kicked in after all this water ingesting, so I had to go pee-pee. I entered the premises on my tiptoes, and I have never urinated in my life with such an impending sense of danger and paranoia.
Redundancy
Speaking of paranoia, the Mojave adventure included all the ITAR5 paranoia you can imagine encircling me and my colleague due to the fact we were not Americans and there was a rocket involved in all this, which was classified as a “weapon system” in the words of one of the guys from this company, although it looked more like a midly-expensive firework. To control the access and the movement of personnel around the facilities, there were badges involved of course. I could spot three kinds of badges: some with green dots (full, unrestricted access), some with blue dots (restricted access), and the ones I and my colleague were wearing with red dots (Meaning maximum alert, they are foreigners, do not give access to anything and escort them at all times except when they go to pee because the snake that runs the toilets will keep an eye on them). Fair enough. Still, our badges had TWO red dots, whereas all the other badges had only one dot, either green or blue. Of course, I had to ask: why are our badges showcasing two red dots, mister? The answer was priceless: for redundancy, in case one dot would fall or something. Here’s a photo of the badge I still keep as memorabilia:
ITAR Stickers and Soldering
At some point, this launch charade needed the obligatory PR boost, so we were supposed to place stickers with our company logo on this sounding rocket for the usual social media clout. So the time came when we had to ask some guy at this company to, well, put the stickers on the damn thing. There we went with our beautiful stickers in hand. First, the guy told us to approach the rocket “from the front” and not from the back, so we wouldn’t be able to see “the engine” (believe me, it looked not that different from those Mentos & Coca Cola rockets). Second, before we could suggest a location for the stickers, the guy had to bring someone else as a “witness” to prove that no critical technology was being transferred while we were putting the goddamn stickers.
On some other occasion, I was bored as hell waiting for this launch to finally happen, so out of boredom I approached some other guy who was soldering the power cables from the rocket bus that would power the computer that we were flying on that test launch. He was soldering TWO MISERABLE CABLES, you know, positive (red cable) to positive, negative (black cable) to negative. He politely asked me to leave the scene because the whole situation could be interpreted, under ITAR, as a transfer of technology.
Schrödinger Dad
Years ago, I was involved in a project where we had this other company as a customer. This company was located in some other country and we were all speaking in English but there were many thick accents involved from both sides. There was a period of holidays coming in this said company’s country of origin, so one of their project leaders shared with us that he was planning to go to his hometown to visit his dad who had been THERE for 30 years or DEAD for 30 years. None of us was entirely sure what he actually said due to the thick accent involved. Unable to react appropriately due to the potential sensibility of the matter, we just chose to stay silent and let the topic just change into something else. To this day, this guy’s dad is both THERE and DEAD, in a superposition of states. We would rather not observe this and let the man’s wavefunction collapse for the worst.
Airport Cinderella
Fun fact: I have never traveled business, let alone first class. I am a proud Economy traveler. Don’t call ME cheap, call cheap all the startups I’ve been involved in who didn’t invest in my traveling comfort. Additionally, I am not the fondest of traveling (I love flying, but I dread all the hassle AROUND flying, and I hope someone someday will fix the experience of traveling end to end). This means that I am not a strong collector of miles or anything like that, so when I’m in airports, I am mostly in the regular non-VIP areas, just chilling.
There was this time I was traveling to another continent, and I was flying with the CEO of the startup I was working for. CEOs travel quite a lot so they tend to enjoy the benefits of mileage and whatnot. So, because I was with him during this trip, I somehow managed to get access to all the VIP areas he had access to as we were going. I was so mesmerized by the limitless food, the superb olives, cheese, Spanish jamón, and the free drinks. The comfy seats. The desserts. I honestly felt like just calling off my trip and staying there at the VIP lounge. Sleep there. Live there forever. But no, just like Cinderella, at some point the spell was gone and we had to board our flight, so there I went back to the Economy section with my plastic cutlery, the broken earphones, the smelly blankets, and the aluminum-served chicken or pasta. CEO went to business of course. As John Lennon sings: a working-class hero is something to be. PS: at my peak of traveling, once I flew Economy Plus, where I got a tiny toothpaste tube and a pair of branded socks and I was the happiest man alive.
Export Control
In this startup I was working for, at some point we received an expensive subsystem from another continent. Several hundreds of thousands of euros worth of electronics and specialized stuff for a satellite. Because shit happens, the equipment failed during integration and testing and had to be sent back to the manufacturer for some repair. So, someone repackaged the thing and left it on the desk of the person who was at that point shipping stuff back and forth (don’t think of a procurement person; those tend to come along at later stages in startups. This was an office manager who did shipping on top of the other many hats she wore). Lacking all context about that mysterious box that had been left on her desk, this person proceeded to ship it back to the manufacturer as requested. The shipping process required adding the estimated value of the goods, and again by lacking all context, she put some symbolic number: 1 euro or something like that.
Of course, people at customs had a lot of questions when they saw an item coming into the country being valued at half a million, and leaving the country being valued at 1 euro. Many questions were asked, and we were on the verge of having to pay a ton of money in taxes and penalties. Phew.
Spreadsheet Canvas
Some people claim that you can do anything with Excel. I’ve been historically hesitant to believe this until I saw something I wish I had never seen: block diagrams drawn in Excel. And I am not referring here to inserting shapes like squares or lines as you can easily do in Excel. No, that would be still ugly but somehow tolerable. I mean using cells AS GODDAMN PIXELS and drawing boxes and shapes with shades and even with 3D perspectives, by manually coloring cells. I was once in a project where this was a common practice with some of the people involved, and I feel I have never been the same person since then6.
Let’s Get Physiological
In the early beginnings of startups, there isn’t such thing as Human Resources or anything like that. You are as alone as can be and there is literally zero structure to support your needs. It’s about survival of the fittest. Then, as startups grow, there is more and more attention to employees’ well-being and thinks like that.
Years ago, Google had launched its Project Aristotle, which sought to research the “recipe” for successful teams. Project Aristotle’s work introduced the idea of “psychological safety”, which more or less meant that the team members would feel safe expressing divergent opinions to their colleagues to find better ways to navigate roadblocks and barriers.
As the startup I was working on was ramping up its HR game, a coworker of mine wanted to ride a bit this wave of awareness about team effectiveness and well-being, so he prepared a presentation to highlight the importance of all these concepts, although instead of using the term “psychological“ he used “physiological“. Maybe an autocorrect artifact? We will never know. I found his slide profoundly relatable, as I would have really appreciated some physiological safety back in the Mojave desert.
The Smell of Fresh Frozen Pizza
This startup had a policy of free dinner for employees, and it was great. We would have a constant flow of Dr Oetker’s frozen pizzas and Thai Cubes. I can still smell both by just invoking the memory. In roughly two years, I basically ate either frozen pizza or a Thai Cube every single evening, at least 6 days per week. I overdosed on those, wonder how many years of my life expectancy I let go. There was a period of my life where I would feel nauseous thinking of them, but I managed to make amends with frozen pizza (you can’t get mad at pizza and pizza is always pizza). But Thai Cubes? I can’t even look at those anymore.
I’m unsure what this game is called in these politically correct times
Two-layer toilet paper is only for unicorns.
I thought I should share with you the fact that iRobot (Roomba’s manufacturer) has developed a feature in their vacuum cleaners to avoid “poopastrophies”; yes that’s an actual word. Wanna know more? See https://www.irobot.com/en_US/pet-promise.html
According to some sources, dd stands for “disk destroyer”
ITAR stands for the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. It's a set of U.S. government rules that control the export and import of defense-related articles, services, and technical data listed on the United States Munitions List (USML). The goal is to protect national security by ensuring that sensitive military technologies and information don't fall into the hands of foreign nationals or adversaries. Companies and individuals who deal with these items need to comply with ITAR, which includes restrictions on sharing technical details and requires proper licensing for exports. Violations can lead to heavy fines or legal penalties.
It seems there’s a thing called Excel Pixel Art for those interested