Ready For Take Off

Lynette Tan is blazing a trail in the regional space industry, having put Singapore on the map through her business consultancies, Singapore Space & Technology Limited and Space Faculty.

-  SASHA GONZALES & CHELSIA TAN

The CEO and co-founder tells us more about how she's paving the way for youths to chart their careers in a sector that's estimated to be worth US$1 trillion by 2040.

As a child, Singapore-born Lynette Tan was fascinated with space. At the age of five, she made her first "space rocket" out of an oversized cardboard box that she found at home and spent hours playing in it, envisioning herself travelling through the cosmos and being among the stars.

A career in the space field would have seemed like the next natural step after graduating from university, but after obtaining a Master's in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University in 2003, Lynette realised there was no clear path ahead to break into the industry.

Over the next decade or so, she worked in both the government and private sectors, in roles ranging from centre director at the Singapore Economic Development Board to business development at GlaxoSmithKline in Singapore and Malaysia.

During this time, she also wondered how to create opportunities for herself and others like her, who wanted to be a part of the space economy.

"I thought about how cool it would be to create a roadmap for a career that was 'out-of-this-world', a roadmap towards the ultimate innovation frontier," explains the 43-year-old mother of two.

In 2007, Lynette sought to bring that roadmap to life. She says: "I joined a few other space enthusiasts, who were literally pioneers of the space industry in this part of the world. Back then, there was no space sector to speak of. It was the perfect opportunity to do something brave and bold."