What is Bootcamp?

Bootcamp is a high-energy competition to introduce new people to our community and foster opportunities to solve our greatest challenges. Originally developed as an add-on competition in collaboration with the international NASA’s Space Apps Challenge, Bootcamp is a flexible program that we run either as a traditional in-person hackathon at a single location or as a distributed and remote hackathon with thousands of participants across the globe.

The program is fuelled by our network of experts and partners, and offers participants the chance to form diverse teams and create bold technology and business ideas. Bootcamp is a hackathon, except we support our participants to continue working on top solutions after the event to really bring them to life!

How does it work?

The event lasts 48 hours and starts with a list of challenges for teams to tackle or be inspired by. Optional technical workshops and live interviews with our network experts and leaders help inspire new insights and novel ideas. Diverse teams assemble to pitch and demonstrate solutions and a panel of judges evaluates the competition, looking for ambitious and commercially viable solutions that could become real businesses.

Who should participate? Space needs all types, so anyone with skillsets including but not limited to engineering, marketing, and even ethics. We welcome everyone from students to retired experts.

What is the Ideator?

Ideator is the program behind the most ambitious innovation community in the universe. It’s a meetup program that we run in locations across the globe, with a 16-week program at it’s core designed to take you on a journey from discovering what your life’s mission should be, to testing several ideas to solve great challenges in collaboration with new friends.

It is a weekly event that brings our network together while tooling the next generation of talent with the knowledge, skills and connections they need to build something great.

The Ideator is open to everyone and participation is like being a part of a club. Some compare it to playing an amateur sport where each week you develop and test your skills, meet new people, and push yourself and your team to be great.

How does it work?

It’s a weekly meetup shaped around a 16-week program to take members on a journey from where to search for ideas, to proving you have a way to create a perfect solution to a problem and turning that into a new business that can solve it. Each session is led by a leading expert from our network having a conversation with the room about the weekly topic from the perspective of their experience.

While the Ideator is a perpetually rolling event, by the end of the core program you’ll have tackled several business ideas to have developed the skills needed to take an idea and to build a business around it. You’ll be a part of a community of peers to collaborate with, and a network who can lift you and your team to new heights.

Who should participate: Space needs all types, so anyone with skillsets including but not limited to engineering, marketing, and even ethics. We welcome everyone from students to retired experts.

Duration: 16-weeks – All year

What is the Pre-Accelerator program?

Stage 3 exists to bridge the gap between discovering that you’re onto a valuable project with real potential and turning it into one that is commercially viable. The Pre-Accelerator program is our primary program to do this and is for teams that want to make sure their product or service can benefit those who need it. It’s a program valuable for both for-profit or not-for-profit entities, as long as you’re looking to flip it into a full-time venture.

Pre-Accelerator is a 3-month full-time program, helping teams tackle and understand all the legal and accounting obligations of starting a real business while validating and further developing tech prototypes and even starting to tap into real revenue streams. By the end of the program, you can expect to have a functional and operational business and to continue to be a valued member of our network.

How does it work?

Pre-acelerator is similar to an accelerator in structure, but with a focus on turning a project into a business. It’s for startups that are too early to receive investment or ones that are pre-revenue. We don’t invest any capital in this program, only our time and networks, but we do take a small amount of equity if you’re a for-profit, which is just enough to align the incentives of our mentors and founders.

What is the structure of the program?

Over the duration of the program, we induct a cohort of promising startups that qualify for Stage 3. Stage 3 provides a lot of general administration support like helping you correctly incorporate and operate a company, as well as working with you to understand what your priorities and goals should be over the next 3 months. We provide access to discounted services, access to tech development and qualification facilities, and training and support in securing new contracts and customers whether with other businesses, government departments, or consumers.

Our goal is to ensure that you have a functional and operational business at the end of the program. Your success is our success.

Who should apply? New teams looking to turn their projects into businesses. From garage startups to university and corporate spin-out opportunities.

Duration: 3-months

What is the Accelerator program?

For promising early-stage startups that have created a solid business or have achieved a significant tech demonstration milestone with a credible team to capture an entirely new and lucrative market, we offer our 3-month Accelerator program.

It’s a 3-month mentor-led program, where selected teams receive a pre-seed investment, contributed to by each of our valuable and well-connected mentors and who are dedicated to investing not only their own money but also their time to help you grow the most valuable and successful business you can.

How does it work?

Accelerator is for more mature and sophisticated startups than the Pre-accelerator, and we focus less on the establishment of a new company and all the training and education that comes along with that, and focus much more on accelerating the growth of your business by fine tuning your business parameters, achieving new tech demonstration milestones, and magnifying your revenue.

Unlike most Accelerators, our program has been designed from the ground up to provide tailored support to deep-tech and space enabled startups. We also don’t only prepare participants to optimise their startups to raise investment at the conclusion of the program. We do focus on pitching generally, to better communicate the value of your efforts to friends, family and customers as well as investors, but we encourage our participants to first focus on building a strong and operational business first, and to raise capital to amplify your success only as a second consideration.

Our mentors span highly-experienced and well-connected people from the space sector as well as many people less familiar with space but very familiar with commercialisation, building valuable businesses, and getting access to the capital and partners you might need to grow.

What is the structure of the program?

Over 3 months Moonshot and our mentor community will work full time with a cohort of Stage 4 qualified startups who we believe we can help amplify their businesses. Stage 4 contains 50 hours of workshops and discussions on relevant topics and contacts for you to leverage, but the program is largely a mentor-driven one based on goals that we work with you to set and achieve from week to week.

Before the program begins we host a special retreat and induction to help you become closer to the mentors and your new peers, nd to learn how to make the most of the experience. With your friends and family watching, you can think of the program similar to a reality TV competition – it’s an intense 3-month sprint!

Our goal is for you to feel that the Moonshot network is like a super-powerful new co-founder for the duration of the program, to help your startup overcome a huge volume of hurdles in a short period of time, and to significantly level up your startup well beyond where you’d have been able to on your own. Your success is our success, and we also hope that each team member will grow to become a valued and permanent member of the Moonshot community.

Who should apply? Startups with well-rounded dream-team founders with either novel deep-tech above TRL 4 or a new revenue-generating business operating in a space supply chain.

Duration: 3-months

What is Stage 5?

Stage 5 is how we classify startups that are commercially operational or on the verge of a significant full deep-tech deployment. It’s a stage where startups make the tricky transition into a scale-up, where they’re seeking to grow rapidly and are ready to scale their tech and business. It often requires a mindset transition from one of creation to one of growth.

How does it work?

Addressing Stage 5 needs is something Moonshot is working towards. For startups here it requires access to strategic capital and access to special resources facilities and time. Our ambition is to raise our own Stage 5 venture fund, to amplify our capability to connect such sophisticated startups with the capital and resources that they need to address an entire international market.

Currently we work with Stage 5 qualified companies helping them get access to new sources of capital while helping them negotiate new commercial relationships to become more tightly integrated into new supply chains to optimise their growth.

How do I get involved?

If you’re a space startup at a Stage 5 level of maturity and you’d like to be a part of the Moonshot community, become a member of our Nexus. If you contribute to the rising tide, we’ll make sure the rising tide lifts you as well.

If you’d like to find out more about participating in a potential Moonshot-managed venture fund, send us an email.

What is a Moonshot Chapter?

We’re committed to the idea of collaboration and creating a rising tide so that anyone, anywhere can access the resources they need to create a better future. We’re only a small organisation, though, and we know there are a lot of passionate leaders across the world trying to build their own local commercial space communities.

It’s a difficult task and one only fueled by passion – certainly there is no financial reward to sustain it. We’ve put a lot of effort intro streamlining the putting these kinds of communities together. We’ve done and continue to do a lot of the hard work, and we want to share that with you as partners so that it’s much easier for you to build a valuable local community while supercharging it by connecting it with a much larger international network.

We love this idea so much that we’ve even created a full accelerator-type program specifically for community leaders, and we want to provide you with access to use our Stage 1 and 2 materials for free, while supporting you to build a lasting legacy.

How does it work?

We’ll soon announce the next intake of City Directors for our 8-week program. There are limited places, and if you’re successful after expressing your interest we’ll expect you to establish a local not-for-profit entity if you don’t already have one.

We can provide you with branding materials and guidelines if you’d like to fully-leverage the Moonshot brand. You can also decide to brand your association however you like. This is your baby and legacy, and we’re here to help you. All we ask is that your branding at least mentions ‘Powered by Moonshot’.

We believe we won’t be doing our job well if we’re not able to provide you with significant value. It’s easy to set up a website and organise a meetup, but it’s difficult and tiring to build it into something great and self-sustainable. In order to make sure you have the resources you need to do this well our program is designed to help you build a financially sustainable community.

Similarly, we need to make sure our side is self sustainable too so we can keep supporting you and each partner chapter benefits from the efficiency of the network. We take 20% of the revenue of our chapters, which we use exclusively to reinvest in continued operation and growth of the chapter program. This is a not-for-profit initiative, and we believe that together we can build a social enterprise that eliminates most of the pain and struggle in building a valuable community.

Examples on how we reinvest these funds is improving remote infrastructure to better network our chapters, to provide up-to-date and valuable support to our chapters in the form of better community services and programs, and to provide cash-grants to jump-start new or struggling chapters.

How do I get involved?

We’re in the process of redeveloping our processes and infrastructure to best support our chapters, their leaders, and their communities. If you think you have what it takes to be a one of our leaders in your part of the world, please express your interest here.