Books will be written about the commercial space renaissance of the 2010s and the unlikely convergence of smartphone technology with Silicon Valley riches, the cubesat standard and brokers offering excess launch capacity. It was the decade when NASA and the Defense Department turned to SpaceX to reduce launch costs and Jeff Bezos revealed he sells $1 billion in Amazon stock annually to fund Blue Origin. Startups popped up seemingly overnight to raise tens of millions of dollars for communications, data collection, asteroid mining and mostly to build new rockets. Some of the newcomers disappeared as quickly as they emerged. Others exhibited resilience in lean times and expanded their customer base.
展开▼
