Just 20 years ago the dream of starting a space company could not have become a reality unless you had significant capital and access to government programs. Mark Sirangelo, one of the founders of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, along with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, joins us to discuss how the space industry is becoming far more accessible and how you can start your very own space company.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

James Di Virgilio: 0:39

Welcome to a special edition of Radio Cade. I'm your host, James Di Virgilio. And today we're going to explore what sort of space company we might want to start, which kind of venture would you get into? What would be the wise thing to do? And how complicated is this? My guest today is Mark Sirangelo. He is one of the pioneers of commercial space flight, the commercial space industry, and someone who has a wealth of knowledge and depth of expertise, not only in space, but a wide variety of entrepreneurial ventures and projects. Mark, thanks for being with us today.

Mark Sirangelo: 1:10

Well, thank you, James. I'm excited to talk a little bit about one of my favorite topics here and talk a little bit about the future and how people who might be looking at space might look at it.

James Di Virgilio: 1:20

Now let's revisit the past here you were in fact, one of the pioneers of commercial space flight . So non-government oriented space flight , private space flight. What was the genesis for that? And what did that look like in those days?

Mark Sirangelo: 1:33

I'd be happy to go back a bit. And it's funny because in going retrospective, you sometimes think it's decades, but it really wasn't. Most of what is now known as the commercial space flight industry largely started in the early 2000s. And in my case, 2004, when I took over a small little company called SpaceDev, that was based in San Diego. But about that time, it was interesting for me and a number of others who sort of created the foundation of this industry. We all seem to a number of us and I'm speaking of Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Paul Allen, and a number of other people all from different directions started to look at the space industry and say that as an industry, it had not been disrupted in any really significant way for quite a long time. Really the only bellwether entrepreneurial company was a company called Orbital Sciences that was started by Dave Thompson. Who spun out of graduate school with an idea and a project that turned into a very significant company. But beyond that and a few others there , it was really not a sector in space for the most part was dominated by legacy companies, very large companies. And I think there was a convergence of people who had experience in disrupting other industries or who involved in the tech growth industry of the nineties and the early two thousands who looked at space and said, this seemed to be in an area which has a fascination to it. And that's not a small part of why people get engaged, but had not been really refreshed for many, many years and decades, even. And from different perspectives. All within a couple of years, we approach various problems in space and said, how coul