How big is your company/team now, and what are you building? Is it commercial?
What did the field feel like back then as opposed to now? Has the new commercial space race breathed new life into the field? Has it made it more competitive? Given new opportunities for funding?
It's a shame Google shuttered, but it makes sense given the overhead. Still wish they could have performed minimal maintenance and left it untouched, but I suppose there was a period when it looked like none of this would pan out at all.
I'd totally read a blog post if you have this written up somewhere. It's so interesting.
I work at ispace, we are mentioned in the article. We have 150+ people, 3 offices (Japan, USA and Luxembourg) and a handful of projects. It's commercial but the larger contracts in the industry are still from space agencies. And it was always like that. NASA doesn't make a lot in house but always contracts companies. There's just a willingness to let new companies try now. That's the "commercial" part and aside from telecom, it may be a while until we see fully commercial missions.
Because of this the field is better now, because NASA and to some extent other space agencies are actually offering contracts to several low-cost missions, with the expectation that some fail and some succeed, with lower cost overall to a typical project with a ton of paperwork. The extent to which they actually reduce paperwork in practice varies.
The overhead of GLXP was probably pretty huge even when they reduced the number of teams, plus reputation risk of google being associated with people running around telling investors they were "selected by google to fly to the moon."
I haven't written this up anywhere, maybe someday.
How big is your company/team now, and what are you building? Is it commercial?
What did the field feel like back then as opposed to now? Has the new commercial space race breathed new life into the field? Has it made it more competitive? Given new opportunities for funding?
It's a shame Google shuttered, but it makes sense given the overhead. Still wish they could have performed minimal maintenance and left it untouched, but I suppose there was a period when it looked like none of this would pan out at all.
I'd totally read a blog post if you have this written up somewhere. It's so interesting.