Don’t Just Join the Space Economy. Build It.

If you’re here, chances are you already know something about space. You may be an engineer, a defense or government professional, an entrepreneur, or someone who has spent years close enough to this industry to recognize what is happening.

The commercial space economy is real. The opportunity is real. So is the difficulty of building a company in it.

Space doesn’t behave like a conventional startup market. Sales cycles can be long. Hardware is expensive. Regulation matters. Government customers buy differently from commercial customers. Capital arrives in different forms and at different stages. And sometimes your first customer wants to know whether your technology can survive launch before you’ve figured out how you’re going to finance building it.

Generic startup advice only gets you so far.

We know because we’ve lived it.

Between us, the founders of the Institute for Space Entrepreneurship have launched and operated more than 15 space ventures, raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and employed hundreds of people building real hardware for real customers. We’ve made good decisions, bad decisions, expensive decisions, and a few decisions we’d very much like to have back.

Every lesson in this curriculum was paid for at full price.

ISE exists so you don’t have to learn all of them the same way.

There is something else you should understand about why we’re doing this. We don’t simply want to create graduates. We want to create companies and build an ecosystem around the people creating them.

Companies we can buy from. Companies we can sell to. Companies we can invest in, partner with, launch for, build alongside, and perhaps someday compete with. Space needs a deeper supply chain, more capable founders, better businesses, and a much larger entrepreneurial ecosystem. If you build a successful company, the industry becomes stronger for all of us.

And if you’re joining us now, you’re not simply enrolling in ISE.

You’re joining the Founding Cohort.

That means something to us.

We’re building the Institute while you’re learning with us, and we’re going to humbly ask for your help making it better. We want you to tell us what works, what doesn’t, what’s missing, what deserves more depth, and what the next generation of students should learn that we haven’t thought of yet.

Over time, we hope some members of this Founding Cohort will become much more than students.

We hope you’ll mentor the entrepreneurs who come after you. Participate in collaborative due diligence on companies and technologies emerging from the ISE community. Help us evaluate potential funding opportunities. Share your own expertise with other founders. Introduce customers, suppliers, partners, investors, and talent. Challenge our assumptions. Teach us things we don’t know.

And, most importantly, help us build the Institute itself.

We don’t yet know everything ISE will become. That’s intentional. We have a vision for the Institute, but we also believe the people who join at the beginning should have a voice in shaping what comes next.

The Founding Cohort won’t simply experience ISE. It will help create ISE.

That’s why we’re willing to teach you what we’ve learned, and why we’re equally interested in learning from you.

We’ll show you how to determine whether a market is actually worth pursuing before you spend years pursuing it. How to build a business model around hardware with long development cycles. How to think about regulation before it becomes a crisis. How to raise the right capital at the right time. How to understand an RFP, protect yourself in a teaming agreement, find customers, negotiate contracts, and build an organization capable of delivering what you’ve promised.

This isn’t Space 101. We respect your technical intelligence. We’re not here to explain what a satellite is or give you another tour of orbital mechanics.

We’re here to teach you how to turn what you know into a company.

The curriculum follows roughly the same sequence your company will: find the opportunity, design the business, navigate the regulatory environment, finance it, win customers, and learn how to operate and scale.

And throughout the program, we’ll speak the language of the industry because it’s the language your customers, partners, regulators, employees, and investors will expect you to understand.

Here’s the most important thing we’ve learned:

Building a space company is hard, but the business of building one is learnable.

The very barriers that make this industry difficult to enter can become advantages once you’ve learned how to cross them. You don’t need to know everything today. You need to know which questions to ask, which decisions matter, what evidence you need, and what to do next.

And because you’re here at the beginning, you have another opportunity: to help us build the institution we wish had existed when we started.

You already know how to solve difficult problems.

Now let’s build the companies. And let’s build the Institute that helps launch them.

Build. Fund. Fly.