Intro

In late 2022, as I was taking the second of the three graduate-level human spaceflight classes that he teaches at USC, I asked former NASA Astronaut and SpaceX Director of Space Operations Garrett Reisman his perspective on how to become an entrepreneur in the space industry.

I took notes after and wrote down what I remember him mentioning. My exact question to him went something along the lines of:

What typical paths have you seen for entrepreneurs in the space industry?

He had some good observations and perspectives which I think will help anyone entering the space industry who wants to potentially take this path, and I’ll include them in the article below.

Photo of you with Garrett Reisman

Me and Dr. Reisman posing for a picture after my last class with him in Spring 2023!

Disclaimer + Quick Intro on Reisman

Dr. Reisman has been a Professor of Astronautical Engineering at USC since 2018 and is a former Director of Space Operations at SpaceX (2011-2018), where he worked alongside Elon Musk during many of the company's most important early years. Before that, he was a NASA Astronaut from 1998-2011 and spent a total of 107 days in space.

He also made an appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast in 2020, which was super cool and is a great additional resource if you want to hear more from him directly:

(as you'll see in the podcast, he's also one of the funniest astronauts of all time, too!)

His experiences give him some pretty unique insights into how the space industry works, and he's been highly influential for me over the past few years as I've gone through USC's Astronautical Engineering PhD program. USC has been very lucky to have him.

A lot of the engineering advice I've written about on this blog has actually been influenced by things I've learned from him over the years, even when a particular article isn't specifically about him or doesn't explicitly attribute every individual idea to him.

I've had a lot of conversations with him over the years, and the information here - which obviously doesn't imply his endorsement of this article or my own interpretations - is particularly eye-opening if you want to become an entrepreneur in the space industry.

Below, I include a mix of advice I remember from our conversations along with my own more recent research and case studies, which I think show how well a lot of his observations have held up over the nearly four years since we had the initial conversation about space entrepreneurship during his office hours.

NewSpace Experience + Learning

The first major thing that Reisman mentioned he’s commonly seen with successful space entrepreneurs is that they usually have a lot of experience in a NewSpace company and they learn the model of how the company and the broader industry work.

As a quick side-note to the side-note here: I’ve even implemented it in several areas of my life and career to make large strides quickly - comedy is one example.

Imagine trying to be a good comedian: Person A and Person B are both new to comedy and aren’t that good, but they take two completely different approaches to it.

Person A tries to make a comedy set which will be perfect on the FIRST try.

They study every single comedy textbook out there, scour the internet for advice from comedians, and put off performing until they think their set it 100% perfect.

Person B, on the other hand, just dives right into it. They do their first set and get no laughs.

They’re embarrassed, but they learn much quicker, and then they’re able to get some laughs their second time.

They do 10 more sets and most of their jokes bomb, but some actually start working super well and they keep repurposing and doubling down on them.

By the time Person A even attempts their first set, Person B has done 50 - and despite sucking badly for the first 20-30 sets, they’re actually pretty decent at comedy at this point.

Person A, on the other hand, just attempted their first set after Person B just finished their 50th.

After Person B finished to a roaring applause, Person A comes on stage and gets zero laughs.

One person took imperfect action and converged to proficiency and mastery quickly, while the other didn’t.

While this approach might not apply 100% of the time in life, it’s probably a good system to use 90%+ of the time - whether you’re running a company or learning other life skills.

Back to the main article:

Since he mentioned that the SpaceX model translates so well, he mentioned that a lot of ex SpaceX employees join or even start their own startups.

There was a January 2026 article from Forbes - called “From The 'School Of Elon Musk' To Billion-Dollar Startups: Meet SpaceX's Alumni Founders” - which mentioned that SpaceX has at least 141 founder alumni as of the publication, which shows that Reisman was very much right during our conversation at USC 3-½ years earlier!

The article was also several months before SpaceX IPO’d, and there’s also a lot of anticipation that the massive wealth creation event from their recent IPO might create another massive wave of former SpaceX founders.

An Internship Is Probably Not Sufficient… + Commitment is Necessary

Eager to want to start my own company as soon as possible, I asked Dr. Reisman if a single internship at SpaceX would suffice.

He mentioned that while an internship there would be very helpful, a few YEARS of experience and a hard commitment to that would probably be truly necessary in order to be accomplished at this and succeed in this.

For me, I personally think that the commitment part that he mentioned was a huge insight - and that it definitely applies if you want to have a successful career. It also sort of reminds me of the Steven He quote about hyper-successful people which is that “you have to be obsessed” on one thing (for a long period of time) essentially.

Reisman also mentioned that there’s plenty of good NewSpace companies out there these days - SpaceX isn’t the only game in town anymore, and there’s a ton of other places where you could get similar experience and skill-building to what he’s describing here.

How To Pitch To VCs

Since space is a very capital-intensive business, the vast majority of startups today will have to raise money from Ventura Capitalists (VCs) or VC Funds (e.g. y-combinator, a16z, sequoia, etc.).

Reisman mentioned that because of this, if you want to start your own company and raise money, “you need to be able to talk about what you did really good at” when you were at SpaceX (or space company X, Y, or Z) and then use that to explain how you’ll “be very good at another thing” when you get into the startup world.

You need to be able to convince the VCs that you (and potentially your team that you bring with you or hire) really know what you’re talking about - especially when we had this chat in September 2022 since back then, the VC funding was so much more dry compared to even a year before in 2021 when virtually any new idea would get funding.

You Have To Pick a Very, Very Niche Thing

While I should’ve asked for examples, Reisman mentioned that when creating a startup in the space industry:

You should almost always pick a very, very specific niche

So for example, when starting out, you usually can’t decide to start an end-to-end space company or even try something very large like rockets (w/Relativity being an exception).

Usually, the most successful startups will pick something very niche, with some recent examples being:

(quick side note: the summaries above are my best interpretation based on research, and occasionally, some of the details might be slightly wrong or imprecise)

While you can make your own conclusions and observations out of these, one of the things that stood out most to me from all of these examples was the following:

It seems like most of these space founders were working (very hard) in industry, found a significant bottleneck, and then went off to start their own company to solve that bottleneck.

(I might be simplifying things, but this seems to be the general path, similar to what Reisman said).

Another interesting observation I saw is that several of the founders actually dropped out of their graduate programs to either pursue their startup (or to prioritize industry experience first, then eventually create their startup).

For example, Max Benassi of Apex Space dropped out of his MBA from USC to pursue Apex Full-time, and Arbor founder Brad Hartwig (USC Astronautical Eng BS Alum) dropped out of his Master’s in Energy and Climate Engineering from Berkeley to run Arbor full-time.

For me, this is personally very comforting since I’m currently undertaking the journey of dropping out of my PhD (or at least taking a “very extended leave of absence”).

Not to cherrypick examples, but it’s very comforting to see that you can still see success after either pivoting or dropping out, and also that most didn’t even have a PhD and instead prioritized NewSpace industry experience as I will now (although I’d argue that many of the non-PhD USC experiences and talks I’ve been a part of have still been very valuable - I was just reaching the point of diminishing returns when I dropped out in Dec 2025).

Reisman’s Warning About PhDs in NewSpace

As a good segue from my previous point about PhDs, something else Reisman also warmed me about several times throughout the years (seperate from this September 2022 space entrepreneurship conversation) is that - while there isn’t any definite rule - many of these companies (e.g. SpaceX, etc.) might even sometimes look at PhDs as a bad thing.

(obviously there’s exceptions to this, like if you’re a PhD in Optics and SpaceX happens to need an optics expert for one of the eye lenses they’re making on Crew Dragon, or you’re a PhD in some other very specific specialty that they need, they might need you).

He mentioned that many people at SpaceX actually even think that PhDs are bad.

For example, he can count on his own hand the number of PhDs (besides himself) who were at SpaceX when he was there from 2011-2018.

He gave the optical PhD guy example that they needed for a Crew Dragon eye piece which I mentioned above, but besides that, PhDs were pretty sparse there.

In his view, they often look at any degree after a bachelors - and sometimes even a masters degree - as bad, since the bachelors gives you the fundamentals you need, then SpaceX will take you and train you from there in the way they want to mold you.

Moreover, he also said that many people with PhDs are often typecast, and not in a good way.

As a personal note - I saw this last point starting to happen with my own PhD, where not only did I have to switch topics 3 times, but I also was in a bad topic each of those three times, so I got zero interviews over the first four years of grad school - ZERO!

I was totally typecast in the “Spacecraft Contamination / Plasma Physics” type of role, and I was honestly terrified of being trapped in that forever, so I asked all professors I knew and all of my friends at these space companies advice for both getting into the companies and breaking into GNC, and luckily I broke the typecast by landing a coveted Blue Origin GNC Intern role.

Obviously there's the common advice that "PhD topic dosn't matter" - and I've seen it both ways. People have done a PhD topic in one thing and been able to pivot, but I've also seen others get typecast or trapped, and the latter was too strong a possibility 4 years in that I felt like I couldn't risk it. Plus, these days, there's often life-changing lucrative stock options and salary and so on in industry, too.

Since landing my Blue GNC role, as I’ve mentioned in countless other recent articles, I’ve been lucky enough to interview with 20+ different companies for GNC roles in the last year or so since earning the internship after getting zero interviews for anything over the prior four years.

Lastly, on PhDs, I remember another discussion I had with Reisman - possibly a year or so before this - where I mentioned that I’d just blown up to 50,000+ followers on social media (Instagram) and asked whether a PhD would be worth it as extra credibility for someone pursuing a social media career AND/OR what the implications may be if I dropped out to pursue that full-time.

Obviously he doesn’t know the exact answer, but something he mentioned to consider is that for business and entrepreneurship in general, PhDs aren’t required - and another key point was that engineering skills in general are “perishable” as well.

Since these skills are perishable, if I went off and became a full-time content creator for a couple of years for example, I wouldn’t be able to just come back 2 years from now and be at the same skill level and remember all the math, orbital mechanics, GNC, other concepts etc.

Technical skills are perishable, and are something where you either "use it or lose it" over time.

This last tangent wasn’t as directly related to the entire PhD discussion but brought up the insightful point about skills being "perishable" which applies to a lot of situations.

Vertical Integration

Another quick observation that I want to make here is that traditionally, aerospace companies relied on outsourcing for many aspects of the manufacturing process, which results in a lot of severe bottlenecks due to supply chain time issues (I cannot emphasize this enough), and it cost a lot of money since each contractor/vendor usually wants to take their fair share of profits.

Contrast that with more recent trends, where most NewSpace companies LOVE vertical integration and making everything in house since it’s both so much faster and cheaper than outsourcing everything and having vulnerabilities, and since it eliminates most of the high costs throughout the supply chain.

As companies either pursue new ventures (and manufacturing processes) or as companies make the switch from outsourcing to suppliers and vendors to vertical integration, there will be a lot of opportunities to improve things along that integration process.

We saw that with the vast majority of these companies - Reisman’s advice essentially boils down to that you usually need to 1) work in these companies for a few years, then 2) find and pick a very, very niche thing.

Most of these founders did exactly that - they spent years in the space industry, found some sort of hyper-niche bottleneck along the supply chain, saw a way that things could be better, and spun off a company to go solve that problem.

Some of the other founders took advantage of entirely new markets that were opening up due to the lower cost to orbit (e.g. Impulse, Varda, K2, etc.), and those are also valid paths to take!