Anticipation
Sorry, I've been busy launching a satellite into space.
When I joined Astranis in 2019, we were a Series A hardware startup that, objectively, didn’t have all that much hardware to its name.
This meant that I had to take the engineers on faith. They promised that our 1:1 scale model, which featured a literal exercise ball as a fuel tank, would someday turn into a real spacecraft. They seemed smart, experienced, and kind, so I believed them. And they were telling the truth.
We’re doing it. We’re about to launch a satellite into outer space.
Even a normal product launch is a big deal: you break out the champagne, click the button, and release your software. But our launch is literal. Our company has been building a single, physical object, by hand, and we’re about to strap it a rocket and blast it 22,000 miles away from Earth.
I still have a hard time imagining what I’ll be thinking and feeling once the Falcon Heavy lifts off the pad. Excitement, terror, joy, pride, even loss will all be there to some extent, I’m sure, but if I were a betting man I’d put my money on anticipation playing the starring role. Anticipation for what’s still to come.
This isn’t Astranis’s grand finale, it’s our opening act.
We’ve been through a lot to get to where we are now. There have been some very high highs and some very low lows — but at the end of the day, only one thing matters: we’ve kept the dream alive. We have all of our goals ahead of us. And it’s time to show the world what we can do.
LFG.
I’m sorry for not posting more regularly. But I’ll make it up to you as soon as we get this thing in the sky. For now, here’s what we’ve been up to: