Virtual reality firm shoots for the stars
Startup hopes that the sky will be no limit for its dreams
One San Francisco startup’s vision of virtual reality is out of this world. Literally.
SpaceVR plans to launch a foot-long satellite equipped with virtual reality cameras to give Earthlings a view of the planet that few humans have experienced.
“Our long-term vision is live virtual reality space tourism,” said Chief Technology Officer Blaze Sanders, who grew up longing to be an astronaut. “So you’ll really feel like you have a part in space exploration.”
The four-employee company took a step toward launch this month when it signed a deal with NanoRacks, a Houston-area company that handles the logistics of launching payloads aboard private-company rockets like SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
SpaceVR calls its satellite Overview 1. It’s scheduled for launch in June, although that date is subject to many variables.
The startup plans to offer two one-minute recorded virtual reality space videos per week, for a $35-per-year subscription. SpaceVR is designing its future satellites to beam live VR, with the views controllable by users on the ground.
Those videos would be the first of their kind from space and would be different from standard flat satellite images, since virtual reality provides a 360-degree immersive view. It’s more than a video, in other words — it’s an experience. Using a virtual reality headset, from the rudimentary Google Cardboard up to a higherquality and more expensive HTC Vive, subscribers could feel like they are floating in space.
“We want every person on Earth to visually experience the overview effect, which is what happens when you look down at your home planet for the first time and see how small your problems really are,” said Sanders, 29. “Just let them relax, let them enjoy the beauty of the Earth.”
SpaceVR is one of a growing number of commercial space startups developing and launching small satellites weighing 22 pounds or less. About 48 percent of the 262 spacecraft launched in 2015 were these so-called nano-satellites, or CubeSats, according to a report by the Space Foundation, a Colorado commercial space educational group.
SpaceVR raised $113,000 in a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in October. In April, it raised $1.25 million in a seed round led by China’s Shanda Group.
But Dick Rocket, an analyst who tracks about 1,000 commercial space firms, remained skeptical that SpaceVR’s inexperienced team can expand the business to become profitable.
“They are what we call a new space startup in dia-
pers — they have not been around for long,” said Rocket, CEO of NewSpace Global, a Cape Canaveral space industry analytics firm. “This industry is very good at chewing up new space companies in diapers and spitting them right out.”
He noted that the “jury is still out” about whether companies that provide satellite images of Earth, such as UrtheCast of Vancouver, British Columbia, can bring home sustainable revenues.
SpaceVR is “filling an interesting niche,” Rocket said. But building the company to handle a global marketplace, including a fleet of satellites and a larger sales team, “requires raising capital and I’m not convinced they can in this climate,” he said.
However, George Jijiashvili, a virtual reality analyst for CCS Insight, said SpaceVR has a chance because overall interest in VR is rising.
“While gaming is intrinsically linked to virtual reality, VR uses in other areas such as tourism, training, advertising, entertainment and education is something that we will see more of in the upcoming years,” Jijiashvili said in an email. “A large variety of high-quality VR content will be the key driver of interest in this new medium, and initiatives such as the SpaceVR satellite will contribute to this.”
SpaceVR CEO Ryan Holmes, 25, founded the company in January 2015 after watching the short documentary “Overview.” Holmes said he was inspired by astronauts in the film describing how “a lot of the things we fight about” seemed so trivial once they saw the entire planet from space.
“They started to think about things differently, they thought much more long-term,” Holmes said. “And if we could somehow allow everyone that perspective, the whole world would be a different place.”
Holmes’ original idea was for a VR camera installed aboard the International Space Station, but he later realized the full overview effect needed to come from a free-standing satellite, which would have a more unobstructed view of space.
Inside the company’s combination office-apartment on the 21st floor of a high-rise overlooking downtown San Francisco, Holmes, Sanders and lead engineer Varun Vruddula are designing the 8-pound, solar-powered satellite, which they expect will last only about six months before tumbling back toward Earth and burning up in the atmosphere.
So they are already designing next-generation models that can beam live images and be controlled by viewers on the ground. The company plans to charge about $100 a year to subscribe to those more interactive satellites, and hopes to have about 4,300 subscribers by the end of 2017.
The satellites aren’t cheap. Sanders said the aluminum-bodied craft cost about $300,000 to build, including cameras, solar panels and 3-D printed radiation shielding, and will cost another $250,000 to launch.
The craft will be sent into orbit by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is also launching a satellite for Facebook next weekend. The Overview 1 will initially be delivered to the International Space Station, then sent into orbit using a system developed by NanoRacks.
Ron Goedendorp, NanoRacks vice president of space opportunities, said his firm helps companies sort through various layers of government regulatory and logistical hurdles for space-bound nano-satellites and scientific experiments.
But the SpaceVR idea “is just one of the coolest things,” Goedendorp said. “I picture my 89year-old father putting on one of these (VR headsets) and going places he never imagined in his lifetime from the comfort of his chair.”