How a San Francisco company bootstrapped its way to launching a satellite

The team at Southern Stars, a small software company in San Francisco, had always been interested in space. They make stargazing apps after all. “It’s been a spectator sport for us.

We like to read about NASA landing Curiosity on Mars, but we never thought about it from a participatory angle,” founder Tim DeBenedictis said. They launched a Kickstarter in 2012. For $1 to $10,000, backers could book time on the satellite to take photos and broadcast messages. The campaign raised just over $115,000. DeBenedictis said reaching that number took serious work. He talked to people every day to spread awareness. The campaign’s big break came when Star Trek actor George Takei posted about it on Facebook. DeBenedictis said raising the money was only half the battle. It turns out that communicating with a CubeSat once it is in space is very, very expensive and difficult. Southern Stars figured that NASA had some kind of system in place for small teams to talk to their satellites, but that isn’t at all the case. Everyone builds their own system to communicate.