Why Does Space Access Matter?

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Most people don’t live, breathe, and dream about space,

but our team certainly does. For Privateers and others like us, space is no longer the next frontier; it’s now. We’re innovating, researching, learning, and understanding more and more everyday to help make space safe and accessible so that we can improve life on Earth for everyone.

While space may at times feel distant and out of reach, almost everyone on Earth engages with, or is positively impacted by, some sort of space-based technology. Over the past few decades, space exploration has led to breakthrough Earth benefits across a number of industries, from climate science, navigation, financial transactions, agriculture, medicine, telecommunications, and beyond. Space is making it possible for us to truly be global citizens in a global economy regardless of geography.

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It's not just about Tang.

*U.S. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin and a container of Tang; Credit: NASA*

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It’s hard to pick a favorite technology or advancement made from space exploration, but there is one that has made all our lives immeasurably easier – GPS! Originating from the Sputnik era, GPS has come a long way, making it into our pockets and onto our wrists. Long gone are the days of paper maps. This brings me to another one of my favorites – the eliminated notion of long-distance communication. News and information travels instantaneously now, and we owe it all to space.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the Fisher Space Pen. Making its debut on the Apollo 7 mission in 1968, the Space Pen uses a sealed and pressurized ink cartridge that allows it to write on almost any surface in any condition. This means you can take notes in space, underwater, and even over grease. At the very least, that’s pretty damn cool.

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U.S. astronaut Walter Cunningham writes with a Fisher Space Pen during the flight of Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo flight and the Space Pen’s first trip to space. The pens have been used on every NASA mission since. Credit: NASA

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Those are just the tip of the innovation iceberg. The advancements that our exploration of space has brought to Earth are plentiful, but they are now so integrated into our lives that they often go unnoticed. And the more time we spend off-planet, the more we discover new ways of leveraging low-gravity environments and space resources to our benefit.

In short, going to space has completely transformed humanity. Not just in terms of our tools and knowledge, but in terms of our understanding of our home planet and ourselves.

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But there's a problem.

While breakthroughs are being made every day in space, things have started to get complicated. Because space launch has become exponentially more reliable and cost-effective (thanks, Elon!) but policy and regulation haven’t kept up. We’re now starting to run into the lack of space traffic management threatening the technology humanity has come to rely on in space.

It’s also landing on sheep in Australia, which… isn’t great.

*Sheep farmers in Australia pose with SpaceX debris found in their fields. Credit: Adriane Reardon/ABC*

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The issue isn’t just space debris, though. That’s the symptom. The root cause is our unsustainable approach to space, whereby each entity that seeks to access space must physically go there to do it. My three-year-old daughter knows something that most of our space community hasn’t yet learned: how to share on orbit resources to avoid duplication and lack of efficiency.

That’s where Privateer comes in.

We’re not a mapping-space-junk company, we’re an empowering-the-future-of-space-sustainability company.

'The Wayfinder platform maps satellites and debris in Earth orbit, and that’s the foundation for making space safe. Add to that our conjunction service, which helps prevent space operators from crashing into one another, and you have a critical safety layer of space operations. But it’s accessibility that will pave the way for the sustainable growth of space exploration and commerce.

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The future of Privateer is providing access to space capabilities for the masses.

With Privateer, the entrepreneurs innovating on the space frontier will be able to bring their experience developing incredible applications on Earth and combine it with the access we provide to space cameras, sensors, and radios with unparalleled capabilities… all for the price of a pizza.

Much like the birth of the personal computer and the internet, it’s simultaneously easy to imagine the advancements this access to space data might bring and also impossible to predict the innovation to come. Our goal isn’t simply to innovate in space, it’s to take the small steps in space infrastructure that enable massive technological leaps right here on Earth.

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Our goal is to help build the future of space for the future of us.

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