Rocket Boom in the Desert

“NewSpace” companies are launching in the Mojave, and the technology is becoming more accessible. Could do-it-yourself space travel become a reality someday?

- Jennifer Alsever

INSIDE A SERIES OF NONDESCRIPT buildings in the driest desert in North America, an entrepreneurial enclave is chasing the next frontier of commerce. Explosions are routine. The science is complex. Brain power and ambition are high, as is danger. This cluster of 17 young companies at the Mojave Air and Space Port, 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles, is shooting for the moon—and beyond.

The startups there are building the components, engines, materials, and rockets that are dispatching a new generation of cellphone-size satellites and more into space. These so-called NewSpace companies have sprung up around a former military base in the California desert. The remoteness of Mojave and the permissive attitude towards, say, detonation and flames—the airport’s slogan: We eat explosions for breakfast—make it the ideal location for companies aiming to reach the heavens.

“Mojave is the Silicon Valley of space exploration,” says Mark Bünger, who follows the sector at Lux Research. Mojave isn’t alone, as galactic entrepreneurship is also burgeoning in Seattle, Tucson, and Silicon Valley itself. Says Sunil Nagaraj of Bessemer Ventures: “2017 will be the year that NewSpace startups will hit their stride.”

It used to be that space projects were so daunting and expensive that only governments and their massive corporate partners could take them on. Then, in the past decade or so, a cadre of billionaires—think Elon Musk, JeffBezos, and Richard Branson—entered the arena with what first seemed like eccentric pet projects. Today, in the wake of their successes, there’s a third generation: minnows that service those private companies and leverage the growing economies of scale such that a startup without extraordinary resources can now contemplate a voyage to another planet.