Less than 4 months ago we at MoonshotX laid the initial foundations for what is now known as the Gemini Space Entrepreneurship Incubator. Working with the top performing teams from the Australian NASA Space Apps Challenge events, we wanted to motivate the high-performing hackathon participants to demonstrate the start of a business model along with their proposed solution and to make sure they were keen to develop their solution beyond the 48 hours of the event.
What resulted was 24 people across 6 cities coming together once per week to talk with mentors and listen to the experiences of special guests, from successful space entrepreneurs to angel investors. The aim: to teach and motivate people to practice turning an idea into a successful business model that is considered investor ready.
We recently completed this 12 week pilot program. With a cohort of participants who never asked to participate in the program, who built their idea as a part of a 48 hour challenge, who generally didn’t know each other prior to the hackathon, and who were restricted to only the satellite data analytics challenges set by NASA in 2017, we were pleasantly surprised by the program’s success, especially the enthusiastic engagement of our participating teams!
In October this year we will be expanding the Gemini program to 15 cities across Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, the US, and Canada. We have extended the program to last 6 months, with 16 core sessions, and a full 18 months of post-incubator support and engagement with an aim to foster the growth of productive space entrepreneurship communities within cities, around their local regions, and around the globe.
On Tuesday this week I’ll be starting an epic journey travelling to 10 cities in 30 days across the US and Canada, as my team and I pull together the final pieces we need to run our international roadshow events and to meet with the future generation of global space industry leaders.
In the past month we have run events in Perth, Singapore and Sydney — with a sold out Melbourne event tonight. We have met around 120 amazing people so far and discussed with them the communities we’re building, the program we’re offering, and the opportunities for New Space founders.
Ultimately, we’re seeking to accelerate the creation of new and disruptive supply chains that leverage space technology and might impact adjacent industries to space such as agriculture, mining, tourism and education.
Over the next month we will be visiting the following cities. We hope you’ll spread the word and I hope to have a chat with you when I get there! Click on your city below to see the event page.
San Francisco — August 24
Los Angeles — September 2
San Diego — September 3
Toronto and Waterloo — September 5
Boston — September 7
New York — September 12
Boulder — September 15
Adelaide — September 26
Brisbane — TBA
Auckland — TBA
Houston — Postponed due to Hurricane Harvey
Melbourne (Florida) — Postponed due to Hurricane Irma
If you live in any of these locations we would love to meet and chat with you! We are still locking down the location and venue partners for some cities, but we are committed to visiting so register your attendance in advance and we’ll let you know the final details as soon as possible!
Troy McCann
During university, where he studied computer science and electrical engineering, Troy mixed his passions for technology and entrepreneurship through multiple engineering-heavy businesses. Using his experiences in commercialising deep research and the space industry, Troy began to develop a framework for supporting the growth of commercial solutions to humanity’s most difficult challenges while assembling a community around it, forming the basis for Moonshot.
Troy was ranked the 4th most influential new space business leader of the industry in the NewSpace People Global Ranking Report for 2019.
