A DOVE’S EYE VIEW
At the beginning of 2012, a new startup moved in to the ground floor of the building across from the Clock Tower in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. A cryptic, index-card-size sign appeared to the right of their smoky glass door, which I walked past every morning. “Cosmogia,” it read. An amalgam of cosmos and logia, was my best guess. Cosmos: universe, obviously. Logia: communications of divine origin.
My office was on the floor above them, and a tinted glass atrium penetrated both floors, so I could glimpse what was happening down there near their windows, at a very obtuse angle, especially after dark when their lights were on. It looked like a hardware lab, with unmistakable engineering workbenches and clear, softwall strip curtains—clues that they’d made a low-grade pressurized clean room to purify particulates from the air. This was intriguing; in 2012, serious hardware startups in SoMa were rare.
I first met Robbie Schingler and the Cosmogia team that April, when a burglar got into the building from the roof door, broke a lot of glass, and took a few laptops, and everyone checked on one another to try to figure out what had happened. Schingler told me that his company was making little solar-powered satellites—a type called a CubeSat—that would be deployed as low-cost, secondary payload on rockets. It was outfitting them with parts you could find on $300 smartphones, radically bringing down the cost of these starcraft from as much as $30,000. Today, this type of satellite can be built for as little as $7,500—or less, depending on its configuration.
This would be the moment when anyone with a single SpaceGeek gene in their body would have freaked out and melted in euphoria. I’ve got friends who have that gene, and I’ve got friends at NASA, too, who have
