In 2002—the year Elon Musk founded SpaceX—the notion of a space startup was far-fetched at best, a doomed wild goose chase at worst.
Now, SpaceX is a public company with a trillion-plus market cap that just reported its first earnings. And there’s a whole new generation of founders looking to build out a space economy that once seemed like science fiction, like Impulse Space’s Tom Mueller, Apex’s Ian Cinnamon, and Northwood Space’s Bridgit Mendler.
Mendler—a Harvard and MIT grad who cofounded Northwood in 2022—draws attention for her childhood as a Disney Channel star. But she’s chasing one of the most granular (and most vital) space economy problems: How do we move more data reliably between satellites in space and Earth—without the process getting absurdly expensive? Fortune connected with Mendler this week, as she offered clear-eyed best and worst-case scenarios for space startups like hers.
The bull case: Startups actually can execute on the commercial demand she’s seeing clearly. (Northwood’s current customers include the Space Development Agency and a division of the U.S. Space Force.)
“The best case scenario is that folks are able to execute and deliver,” said Mendler. “Everything a space operator says they can do, they can do. If companies can technically execute, we know the budgets on the government side are growing, market demand on the commercial side is growing, and you only need to look at Starlink to know demand is there on the consumer side.”
