How Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are ushering in a new era of space startups

In early February, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the planet’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, dropped the bombshell announcement that he would be stepping down as CEO to free up more time for his other passions. Though Bezos listed a few targets for his creativity and energy— The Washington Post and philanthropy through the Bezos Earth Fund and Bezos Day One Fund—one of the highest-potential areas is his renewed commitment and focus on his suborbital spaceflight project, Blue Origin. Before space became a frontier for innovation and development for privately held companies, opportunities were limited to nation states and the private defense contractors who supported them. In recent years, however, billionaires such as Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson have lowered the barrier to entry. Since the launch of its first rocket, Falcon 1, in September of 2008, Musk’s commercial space transportation company SpaceX has gradually but significantly reduced the cost and complexity of innovation beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. With Bezos’s announcement, many in the space sector are excited by the prospect of those barriers being lowered even further, creating a new wave of innovation in its wake. “What I want to achieve with Blue Origin is to build the heavy-lifting infrastructure that allows for the kind of dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion of thousands of companies in space that I have witnessed over the last 21 years on the internet,” Bezos said during the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in 2016. During the event, Bezos explained how the creation of Amazon was only possible thanks to the billions of dollars spent on critical infrastructure—such as the postal service, electronic payment systems, and the internet itself—in the decades prior. “On the internet today, two kids in their dorm room can reinvent an industry, because the heavy-lifting infrastructure is in place for that,” he continued. “Two kids in their dorm room can’t do anything interesting in space. . . . I’m using my Amazon winnings to do a new piece of heavy-lifting infrastructure, which is low-cost access to space.” In the less than 20 years since the launch of SpaceX’s first rocket, space has gone from a domain reserved for nation states and the world’s wealthiest individuals to everyday innovators and entrepreneurs. Today, building a space startup isn’t rocket science. Related: Jeff Bezos: Blue Origin ‘is the most important work I’m doing’ The next frontier for entrepreneurship According to the latest Space Investment Quarterly report published by Space Capital, the fourth quarter of 2020 saw a record $5.7 billion invested into 80 space-related companies, bringing the year’s total capital investments in space innovation to more than $25 billion. Overall, more than $177 billion of equity investments have been made in 1,343 individual companies in the space economy over the past 10 years. “It’s kind of crazy how quickly things have picked up; 10 years ago when SpaceX launched their first customer they removed the barriers to entry, and we’ve seen all this innovation and capital flood in,” says Chad Anderson, the managing partner of Space Capital. “We’re on an exponential curve here Read More …

Google wants you to help capture Street View’s next 10 million miles

In the very near future you’ll be seeing photos shot on smartphones woven into Google Maps’ Street View. Until now, the street-level imagery in Street View has been shot mainly by expensive cameras mounted to the top of vehicles deployed by Google itself. Now some of that job will be outsourced to Android phone users who will use the Street View app to upload their own photos of streets and places. Google says that this will not only allow Street View to keep its imagery of changing neighborhoods more current but also extend its gaze to places it’s never been before, such as streets and roads in rural areas and in developing countries. To weave the user images into a continuous flow, Street View-style, Google says it’ll call on the same software it uses to stitch together the street-level imagery shot by its own car-cams. The software also blurs faces and license plates and places images in the appropriate place on Google Maps. If users capture business storefronts, those can be added to Google Maps along with their name and address, Google Maps product manager Stafford Marquardt tells me. The owner of the business might later come along and claim the listing and perhaps add more information, such as hours of operation, website, and phone number. Previously, Google allowed users in some places to submit Street View imagery shot using rotating cameras mounted to their own vehicles. (Yes, people really do this .) And users have been able to submit single-place photos that are viewable within Maps. But now is the first time Google will accept Street View images shot on smartphones. To submit imagery, you’ll need an Android phone that supports Google’s ARCore augmented reality framework , Marquardt says. The ARCore integration allows a phone to send data from its various sensors—such as the accelerometer and gyroscope—along with the Street View images to help orient them correctly within a place on the map. Google says it will gradually roll out the ability to capture and upload images through the Street View map. It’s already made the feature available to a small percentage of Maps app users in Austin and Toronto and is turning it on for users in New York City Thursday. The camerawork of these contributors will gradually become visible within the Street View app and within Maps on the desktop. Read More …