Picture people living in outer space, breathing inside helmets, going about their daily activities. What are they wearing? At a cosmic cocktail party, are they drinking champagne? Lee Anderson needed to know.
The Chicago-based fashion designer keeps a sketch pad full of fashion astronauts, as she calls them, in which she explores the idea of what an average person would wear in an otherworldly atmosphere.
It’s the intersection of fashion and space — something the founder of outerwear design company Starkweather has thought about a lot. As the space industry develops, Anderson wants her company to link the creative and scientific sides.
Anderson’s not the only entrepreneur looking toward the stars. From one- to two-person startups to Fortune 500 companies, firms throughout the Chicago area are eyeing outer space as their next market. The city may not end up with a rocket launching pad, for example, but Chicago has a role to play in the uncharted industry, some business leaders say, and companies are eager to start braving the final frontier.
Some have already begun.
Space program veterans Boeing and Caterpillar are continuing work to get their technology into the cosmos. There’s a startup looking to elevate planes into orbit, another company that’s aiming to build infrastructure in space, and at least one local law firm that wants to represent companies like them.
To be sure, the capital-intensive industry is still niche, one expert said, and expectations continue to outpace reality. So far, it has been a playground for billionaires like tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Virgin Group’s Richard Branson, who recently announced that Virgin Galactic plans to take tourists into space by the end of next year.
But overall, the economy of space isn’t science fiction anymore.
The global space economy totaled $329 billion in 2016, up from $323 billion the year prior, according to a report from the Space Foundation, a Colorado-based advocacy organization. That includes NASA and military space spending, hardware manufacturing, telecommunications, broadcasting, and other industries.
“There are people interested in space in all of the industries, like myself in fashion,” said Anderson, who also founded FAAR, short for Fashion + Aerospace, an organization focused on education and building a network between the fashion and aerospace industries. “Even if just those people start to become aware of how they might get their foot in the door, we’ll all be better off.”
Some companies have led the way. Chicago-based Boeing, with the companies it has acquired, has partnered with NASA on human space flight missions for more than 50 years, helped build the International Space Station and does extensive work with satellites. Boeing also is building a new spacecraft to get NASA astronauts to and from the space station, among other projects.
Boeing’s network, space and security business, which includes commercial satellites and spacecraft, brought in $7 billion in revenue in 2016, representing about 5 to 10 percent of the company’s overall business, spokeswoman Kelly Kaplan said.
Caterpillar’s diesel generators powered communications between the Apollo crew and NASA when Neil Armstrong spoke his historic words from the surface of the moon.
More recently, Deerfield-based Cat has engaged with the agency on development of automation and long-range, remote-controlled machines.
For Cat’s customers on earth, that technology can get operators out of dangerous or tiring situations, said Eric Reiners, automation and site technologies program manager. But NASA could one day use it to operate machines on the moon or Mars, he said.
Caterpillar doesn’t break out revenue figures for its autonomous technology, but an executive said in June that there were about 75 autonomous trucks in operation.
“They want to be able to learn to live off the land,” Reiners said. That could mean digging up water or excavating finely crushed rock on the planet’s surface that could be used to create structures.
Of course, there are hurdles.
Space, as “Star Wars” has taught us, can be a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare. In real life, the bureaucracy to surmount is still here on earth.
To launch a rocket, for example, one needs a license from the Federal Aviation Administration. Want to put a transmitter on a satellite? The Federal Communications Commission regulates that. But if satellite is going to transmit over other countries, it could be the International Telecommunication Union’s jurisdiction.
David Hurst sees a business opportunity in all that galactic red tape. His Chicago-based company, Orbital Transports, helps companies navigate the bureaucracy, put the mission together and actually get into space.
“You could think of us as a systems integrator or general contractor,” he said, noting that Orbital Transports also can coordinate elements like space vehicles, people, services and facilities. He expects the first mission he’s assisted will go into space in 2019. But all that is just the first step in Hurst’s plan.
He wants Orbital Transports to eventually develop infrastructure in space — cosmic equivalents to earth’s roads, trains and bridges — to support continuing operations in the first 100 to 200 miles of space, called low-earth orbit, and beyond. That could mean mining ice from the lunar south pole or metals from asteroids near earth, Hurst said, or delivering rocket fuel to spacecraft while they’re in orbit.
“The entire goal is to really develop this infrastructure that will make it possible and in fact easier for people to travel and work and operate in space,” he said.
Celestial operations, however, still sound like a bit of a moonshot to most people. Hurst knows this.
“I start describing things that are happening now and people look at me like, ‘Isn’t this science fiction?’ ” he said.
Though certain space operations remain a ways down the line, it’s far from fiction.
There are new opportunities for companies to jump into the space economy, said Micah Walter-Range, director of research and analysis at the Space Foundation. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, are looking to do research in space, manufacturers are forming partnerships, and logistics brands are aiming to provide support.
“We finally reached a point where because of technology changes and technology just becoming more accessible and widespread, it has brought down the costs tremendously,” he said. “People are saying, ‘What can we do with technology that is good enough and apply that?’ “
Unsurprisingly, NASA helped point private companies toward space. With the space shuttle set to retire, it launched the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program in the mid-2000s to find companies that could take over some operations in low-earth orbit.
Through that program, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and aerospace manufacturer Orbital ATK started providing commercial cargo launch services for the International Space Station. NASA has used commercial companies as contractors since it was founded in the 1950s, but these relationships are different.
SpaceX and Orbital ATK started as NASA’s partners, and then NASA became the customer, according to the space agency’s website. SpaceX’s Dragon was the first commercial vehicle to fly cargo to the space station under a commercial contract with NASA in 2012, followed by Orbital ATK’s Cygnus spacecraft in 2014.
Space travel has been expensive in the past, said Hurst, who is also president and treasurer of NewSpace Chicago, a community of professionals interested in space. But SpaceX has reduced the price, partly because it offers services for a fee and through the advent of reusable spacecraft.
“The goal is to build a launch vehicle and reuse it as many times as possible and that will drastically reduce the cost of going to space,” Hurst said. “As that happens, we will see new opportunities and new applications and new companies being created to take advantage of that.”
Blue Origin, Bezos’ space company, also is working on reusable rockets.
The attention companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic attract prompts others to take a look at their own earthbound products and consider cosmic applications, Chicago-based lawyer Charles L. Mudd Jr. said.
In August, Mudd’s firm launched a practice area in space law to assist companies looking beyond Earth. Traditional areas of law such as intellectual property, contract negotiation and regulatory compliance could apply, Mudd said. There could be mergers and acquisitions down the line.
The practice area is in its infancy, and Mudd declined to comment on the number of clients employing the firm’s space law services. But with a focus on startups and intellectual property law, among other areas, Mudd said he’s positioning his firm to help companies grow the industry.
“It’s consistent with our theme,” he said. “I’ve always wanted the firm to be at the cutting edge of developing law.”
To be sure, the commercial outer space industry is still “a very, very niche area,” said Mohan Sawhney, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. A company claiming to dabble in space could be doing so as a marketing stunt, he said.
It has taken the better part of two decades for companies backed by entrepreneurial billionaires to really get off the ground, Sawhney said. And it’s not a coincidence that multiple billionaires are involved in the industry.
“It needs a lot of investment, and it needs a lot of patience and a lot of risk,” he said.
New industries, especially those that require a great amount of infrastructure and capital, start small and take time to ramp up, Sawhney said. Expectations for those industries evolve much faster.
“Outer space and that whole business is still at an early stage where expectations are ahead of reality,” he said.
But the intersection of hype and reality is getting closer, Sawhney said. Last year was the first time he saw some of his business graduate students aiming to work at space tech companies.
Vice President Mike Pence also has expressed support, recently promising to foster stronger partnerships between industry and government agencies to make space more accessible.
Most of these companies are in it for the long haul. They’re taking steps now to get their operations into orbit later.
Longtime professional pilot and aviation entrepreneur Dave Koch launched a company called AirChicago that plans to operate charter executive jets out of Chicago-area airports like Chicago Executive Airport in Wheeling.
Koch plans to build the network worldwide and eventually start using hypersonic jets, aircraft in development that theoretically could get a customer from Chicago to Beijing in about two hours, he said.
“Those same airliners can get into low-earth orbit,” he said. “You just have to fly a little faster.”
Koch aims to keep prices for tickets on those flights similar to first-class fares. From there, space opens up for routine use, he said.
Anderson’s Starkweather is another example. The fashion company, which sells most of its products through trunk shows and custom orders, focuses on outerwear for urban environments. But Anderson and her New York-based partner’s approach is one that could apply to space-wear design.
“You design for what you want it to look like, then you find the technology and functional components to make it possible,” she said.
A long-term personal goal is designing spacesuits, Anderson said. Hence the sketch pad, full of far-flung musings.
There’s the Blackhawks fan in space, foam finger and all; the cocktail party attendee with a straw leading from her champagne flute up into her spherical helmet; and the fashionista in a gown, her bracelet shining through the protective sheer membrane that envelops her.
“It’s kind of ridiculous to be making these drawings,” Anderson said, sorting through the sketches. “(But) we have no idea what it’s going to be like, so why not?”
Twitter @AllyMarotti
