company focused on developing a
curriculum for space-based education,
in Singapore. And Vanessa Clark, the
Australian cofounder and CEO of At-
omos, which is developing an “orbital
transfer vehicle” that puts satellites
into position. (She calls it a “tugboat”
for space.) The tech has caught the
eye of the U.S. government; Clark has
a $2 million contract with NASA and
the Department of Defense.
As these women open their net-
works to me, I’m repeatedly struck by
their commonalities. They dream big
and bold. They think in decades, not
years—you have to, in the space sec-
tor. They are hungry for collabora-
tion, and they invest in one another.
Also: None of them are billionaires,
or financed by billionaires. And,
while they might love to blast off into
the great beyond, for the moment
they are focused on building their
companies right here, on Earth.
SIXTY PLUS years into
the Space Age, its a little
shocking to think that
only about 600 people
have actually left the Earth’s atmo-
sphere—and even more so to realize
that just 69 have been women.
Anousheh Ansari is among that
number. The entrepreneur and CEO
of the XPrize Foundation, a non-
profit that holds global competitions
that push for technological break-
throughs, became the first female
“space tourist” in 2006, when she
paid an undisclosed sum of money
for a seat aboard a trip to the Inter-
national Space Station. It was a pro-
found experience, says Ansari, and
one that made her realize how essen-
tial it is that the future of space flight
become more diverse: “If you make
access to space easy and efficient for
all, there are tons of businesses that
can be created in orbit,” she says. For
that boom to reach its full potential,
women and people of color must be
included, Ansari notes.
While it’s hard to credit space tour-
ism—which starts around $250,000
per person—with “democratizing” the
experience, it has increased the num-
ber of women who can add them-
selves to that tally. In mid-September,
SpaceX launched the world’s first
all-amateur astronaut crew into orbit.
The team successfully completed a
three-day voyage inside a Dragon
capsule, which hurtled around the
Earth at 17,000 miles per hour. The
undertaking was financed by yet
another male billionaire, payments
entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, but the
participants included two women,
geoscientist Sian Proctor and Hayley
Arceneaux, a 29-year-old cancer
survivor who became the youngest
American to go to space.
Government-run space programs
are taking steps toward prioritizing
more diverse astronauts—the U.S.,
for example, is leading the Artemis
Program, an effort to land the first
woman and first person of color onthe Moon by 2025. But their history
isn’t encouraging. In 2019, NASA
was forced to change plans for its
first all-female space walk after the
agency realized that it only had a
suitable space suit for one of the two
women astronauts involved (previ-
ous budget cuts had prompted the
agency to focus on space suits made
for male builds).
The space suit snafu didn’t come
as a surprise to Dava Newman,
director of the MIT Media Lab,
a former deputy administrator of
NASA—and yet another Johnson
connection. She’s known for devel-
oping the BioSuit, a lighter-weight,
“second skin” space suit that allows
astronauts greater range of mo-
tion. It’s also designed for people
shorter than 5 feet 5 inches (such
as Newman), who haven’t fit into
NASA’s previous models, and was
widely tested on women. Bringing a
broader range of people into the field
is essential when it comes to pushing
such innovations forward, she says.
“We have a long way to go—there’s
been little incremental change when
we look at who the workforce is.”YOU’VE PROBABLY never heard
of Asteroid No. 21887. The
7.6- kilometer-wide hunk of
rock is one of millions float-
ing in the main asteroid belt, located
between Mars and Jupiter. It was
discovered by researchers in Arizona
back in 1999. About a decade later,$366 BILLION
A VAST UNIVERSE All told, one recent estimate puts the size of the space industry at a boggling $366 billion in annual
revenue. The largest chunk of this figure belongs to the $271 billion satellite sector, which includes devices powering
navigation, television, and Internet connectivity, as well as all the technology to keep them humming. Space tourism,
while high profile, accounts for a relatively tiny $1.7 billion sliver of the galactic pie.