New report: Entrepreneurial space age began in 2009

Enlarge / Equity investment in the space sector since the dawn of the "Entrepreneurial" space age. (credit: Space Angels)

In July 2009, SpaceX launched its first commercial payload-a 50kg Earth observation satellite for Malaysia-which flew into space aboard a privately developed rocket. According to a new space investment report that will be published Tuesday by the Space Angels, an angel fund and a venture capital fund focused on space, which marked a key inflection point between the "governmental" space age and the "entrepreneurial" space age.

"With that launch, SpaceX significantly lowered the barriers to entry in the space industry," the fund's chief executive, Chad Anderson, writes in the new report. "By vertically integrating, the company was able to drastically reduce the cost to get to orbit. But what deserves at least as much credit is their decision to publish their pricing, which fundamentally changed the way we do business in space. This transparency enabled would-be space entrepreneurs to develop a business plan and raise equity financing based on those cost assumptions."

The Space Angels organization prepares quarterly investment reports but, until this week, has not published them for public consumption. The report breaks down equity investment in the space sector by year, since 2009, in angel, venture capital, corporate and other forms of non-governmental investment.

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