TechCrunch Space: Disrupt 2024 wrap-up

Hello, and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is a wrap, and I’m more than thrilled by the amazing space industry programming we had on offer this year.

We covered everything from building a dual-use business to orbital re-entry, we caught up with Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck, and heard about the ground station problem from Bridgit Mendler. Below, I hit some of the highlights, but this is just a fraction of the topics we covered onstage, so be sure to head over to TechCrunch.com to catch the full coverage. (Not to mention The Aerospace Corporation’s Future of Space Operations pitch challenge!)

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Former Disney channel star Bridgit Mendler made a splash when she announced that she was co-founding a space startup focused on one the least sexy aspects of the industry: ground stations. We talked about her past career in the entertainment industry and her future path as a space CEO.

“To actually fulfill the benefit of people in the world, you have to invest in unsexy problems, like building a ground network,” Mendler said. “I personally think that’s pretty sexy and fun. It’s absolutely not what most people think of when they think of the space industry. I think they think of rockets, they think of satellites, but they don’t think about ground infrastructure.”

All eyes will be on Rocket Lab early next year, as the company looks to launch its Neutron rocket, the answer to the “medium-launch monopoly” that exists today, as CEO Peter Beck put it onstage. It’s part of the company’s plan to build out an end-to-end space company.

Indeed, launch is far from the only core part of the business: Rocket Lab also builds spacecraft for interplanetary missions, supplies spacecraft components, and more. Part of the purpose of Neutron is to enable repeat launches of Rocket Lab’s own satellites.

“Spacecraft are way easier to build than rockets,” Beck said. “They really are.”

He also talked scaling the space supply chain, with the added anecdote that Sinclair Interplanetary, a spacecraft component business that Rocket Lab bought in 2020, used to produce 150 reaction wheels but now has scaled production to over 2,000 annually.

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