TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER: How to get ahead in the NewSpace Economy

This is the story of Wyvern, the youngest startup featured in our series, and its four students/co-founders' ambitious plan for delivering low-cost, high-quality satellite imagery that will make the world a safer, cleaner, healthier place. It's also a tribute to the people and organizations who helped the Wyvern team blast off: the University of Alberta and its student-led AlbertaSat program, and Canada's tech incubator, Creative Destruction Lab.

This is the story of a twenty-something physicist who trades a promising academic career for a huge but risky opportunity in the early days of NewSpace, way way back in 2016...Alexander Reissner was already heading up a research team in Austria, and he was gaining prominence in the international research community, when his lightbulb moment came along and pointed him in a radically different direction. Enpulsion, his NewSpace startup, designs and mass-produces propulsion systems for small satellites. In the space industry of 2016, this approach, and even this market, was virtually non-existent. Today the smallsat market is exploding, Enpulsion is thriving, and its leader's future is looking brighter than ever. Welcome to the NewSpace economy!

Where better to compare "Old Space" and "New Space" than Silicon Valley, where both have deep roots and a significant presence today. And who better to compare them than someone who's spent an entire career in the valley and worked in each camp? Negar Feher is that person. After working for fifteen years with the Big Boys, in 2019 she moved over to a tiny little startup called Momentus, just a few miles down the road, yet worlds apart, from her old job and the life she once knew...

Think of this as a "making of" story – the ups and downs and twists and turns of building one of Canada's hottest NewSpace startups from the ground up. Way up. Told here by its co-founder and CEO, James Slifierz: software developer, entrepreneur, mentor, thought leader, and raconteur extraordinaire...

At some point as you're listening to ispace's Lynn Zoenen calmly and clearly elucidating their plan for creating a new economy on the moon, suddenly it hits you: This is real. This is not Tomorrowland. This is not way way out there in the future – it's going to happen starting next year.The other great thing about this story is that it shifts the spotlight, for a moment at least, from the bold adventurers - the scientists, engineers, astronauts, empire builders - back to the people, like Lynn, who work quietly behind the scenes and play a huge role in making these ambitious projects happen.

Luck happens, they say, at the intersection of preparedness and opportunity, and these two young entrepreneurs had lots of each. What drove them was their passion for NewSpace and their dream of building their own space business. What got them there was their teamwork, their focus, and a lot of long, hard hours. Meet Sven Przywarra and Daniel Seidel, co-founders of Berlin-based LiveEO, a two-year-old earth observation startup that's grown and expanded faster than a speeding satellite.

His career in space began at age seven, with his first rocket kit, and he's never looked back. Today he is a full-time propulsion engineer, part-time amateur rocketeer and 24/7 NewSpace evangelist. His name is Adam Trumpour and he's on a mission: building Canada's first national rocket competition, mentoring a new generation of space leaders, and promoting his vision for a made-in-Canada launch industry. He's doing all this because he loves flying rockets and because he's hoping that our own Generation Rocket won't have to leave the country to find work. In other words, he's the kind of advocate every aspiring space-faring nation needs.

Writer-producer Larry Hicock introduces the series and some of the business and tech leaders featured in Season One.