Where does the time go? 

Ten years ago this month, Spaceflight Inc. was born from the idea of providing the growing smallsat community with cost-effective rides to space while helping launch vehicle providers better fill their capacity. It was also the year where the world dealt with a devastating tsunami in Japan and Arab Spring protests. We witnessed the royal wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William, the Space Shuttle Discovery make its last docking at the ISS, and Harry Potter rule the big screen. Feeling old yet? Same here.

In looking back, it’s important to reflect on our past as a company — to celebrate our successes and learn from our missteps — in order to continue to innovate and bring new solutions to market. 

It’s fun to recall how we’ve evolved from simply making launch capacity deals to now becoming the leading provider of launch and mission management services on a global scale. While we’ve hit rough patches like any organization, it’s humbling and hugely rewarding to see our team accomplish so many exciting milestones — like launching 300+ spacecraft on 36 missions via 8 different launch vehicles (the vast majority occurring in the last 3 years!), developing OTV solutions to help customers get their spacecraft on orbit when and where they want, along with many “industry firsts” scattered in between. Remember the historic SSO-A and the first rideshare for a lunar lander? Yeah, me too.

Here are a few of our favorite memories from the past 10 years:

We’re looking forward to continuing to shape and revolutionize the industry, providing even more launch and mission management services — for payloads of all sizes, across a wide range of launch vehicles, to the widest variety of orbital destinations. Easy to say, much harder to do. We have a lot of work ahead of us and we couldn’t be more excited to tackle it all.

And for those who we’ve been fortunate enough to work and partner with along the way, we will always be grateful for your support. 

Here’s to the next 10 years! 

Curt