The Future Of Space: Jim Cantrell Of Phantom Space On How Space Travel and The Space Industry Can Improve Our Lives Here On Earth

An Interview With David Leichner

Find something that you are good at. I was always exceptional at understanding how to design, develop, build, and test solutions, so I became a mechanical engineer. It just so happens that those types of skills are essential in building and launching spacecraft and rovers for space missions. But it’s important to understand that there are thousands of jobs in the space industry, and most of them don’t require these skills. That means you can work in the space industry and not have a degree or background in engineering.

The commercial space industry has never been more active. With the privatization of the space industry, led by companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab, billions of dollars are now being poured into pushing the boundaries of space travel. But while this is very exciting and interesting, how exactly will space exploration improve the lives of the vast, vast majority of us who will be remaining on earth? How can space exploration improve our society? In this interview series, we are talking to leaders from the space industry who can talk about the new developments in space travel and space technology, and how these developments can improve all of our lives. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jim Cantrell.

Jim Cantrell is an American entrepreneur, mechanical engineer and road racer. He is the CEO and co-founder of Phantom Space Corporation, a space applications and launch company working to remove access barriers to space.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started in the space industry?

As a kid, cars, and mainly racing cars, were my focus. In fact, the only thing I have ever known for sure that I wanted to do with my life was to race cars. That may sound unrelated to space, but it was the beginning for me.

In addition to cars, I was interested in space and the idea of space travel and was heavily influenced by Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series in the 1970s. As I got older, that fascination stuck with me. Well into my undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering, I had a chance encounter with a poster advertising a NASA-funded design course. You couldn’t just sign up for this course. You had to apply, and if accepted, you would design a Mars rover. I was intrigued and found my way to the professor’s office, where I applied in person. I was intimidated by the professor — a retired Air Force colonel — but the idea of building a car for Mars was one I couldn’t get out of my head. I was accepted into the course and performed exceptionally well in designing most of the chassis and power systems. If I had only had a few more months, I would have developed a prototype in my garage! We entered the design in the national NASA design contest, and we won. The prize was an internship at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, where scientists were building planetary probes. That internship led me to meet other groups from France and the Soviet Union designing missions to Mars and, ultimately, my first professional space industry job at the French Space Agency.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

Today, when you’re working in the space industry and with satellites, it’s a given that you’ll travel to other countries and have partners across the globe. For the most part, world governments are open to these relationships and have adapted to the weird things that sometimes go with the territory. But it wasn’t always like this. In the 90s, I worked on a joint satellite project between Russia and the US Missile Defense Agency. When it was finished, we shipped the satellite to Moscow; from there, our partners at the Moscow Aviation Institute were meant to ship the satellite to Kazakhstan for launch on a Soyuz rocket. But things didn’t go as planned for transport, and that very clearly marked US satellite was discovered on the back of an energy cargo vehicle without proper transport paperwork. As this drama unfolded, our team immediately boarded a flight from Utah. Upon arrival in Moscow, we were greeted by some very professional-looking guys in black suits, who put us in a transport van and, instead of taking us to our hotel, took us to an apartment where they held us for a month on suspected espionage. It took the collective power of then-Utah Senator Jake Garn and Al Gore to get us out of that mess. By the time it was over, we had just four days to get to Kazakhstan and integrate the satellite for launch. That in and of itself was no easy task because the safety pod between the solar panels and the battery had been wired backward. But in the end, we got the job done and the rocket launched with the satellite on it. I’m glad things have changed, for the most part, in foreign relations and that there’s more understanding between countries when it comes to space collaborations. This is undoubtedly one adventure that doesn’t need to be on the menu for today’s space industry professionals.

Ok wonderful. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Can you tell our readers about the most interesting space related projects you are working on now?

These days, my focus is on Phantom Space. We’re seen primarily as a launch company, but we’re more than that. We are indeed a space applications company, and launch is one of the services we provide alongside spacecraft design and construction and constellation launch and deployment. We also work closely with our customers and business partners in imaging and data networks to design, build, and deploy their networks and develop and deploy our own proprietary constellations. We’re well-rounded, which gives the team and me a lot to think about every day, and no two days are ever the same.

How do you think this might change the world?

The most important thing, in my opinion that makes Phantom Space special, and that will make it possible for us to change the world, is that we’re removing access barriers to space.

Our vision is to lower costs for launch services and other space applications services so that entrepreneurs and scientists worldwide can put their ideas into practice. Costs associated with space are prohibitive; if a company can even afford a launch right now, they probably can only afford one, so if anything goes wrong, what happens to their idea?

It’s also essential to make space more accessible to people who aren’t space professionals. Many space industry experts have spent their careers learning the lessons of design, construction, and launch. Someone with an excellent idea for using satellites or satellite data shouldn’t have to become an expert or learn all of the lessons experts have already learned to access space or make a difference. We want to provide ways for entrepreneurs and scientists to create value in the industry and to focus on what they’re good at, rather than having to become rocket scientists on top of being application engineers.

One of the big things we’re doing in-house is the creation of a constellation that we call Phantom Cloud, and it’s essentially a data backhaul service. If we have a satellite and it needs to send data back to Earth, we have to wait until it’s over a ground station. If that seems a bit antiquated, that’s because it is. Phantom Cloud will allow satellites to broadcast at any time. There are a few similar projects out there. Still, they’re very proprietary. Again, we want to make space and its assets more accessible, so we want to be backward, forward, and sideways compatible and create a system in which data transfer is ongoing, all day, every day.

What are the three things that most excite you about the space industry today? Why?

The space industry is still in its infancy, so there is a great deal of potential from three fascinating places.

First, there’s an immense amount of private capital flowing into this industry that was once government-dominated. That makes a massive difference in the industry’s operation because private capital is willing to take different, and perhaps more considerable, risks than public projects can do. It’s also more efficient, and I would estimate up to five times more efficient. That means we can get a lot more done in the next few decades with private capital than we could do with public funding. We’ve seen that quite clearly over the past decade alone. That, in turn, means a tremendous amount of opportunity for people to create wealth, new products and applications, and most importantly, find ways to make life better for people here on Earth.

Second is that somebody is finally going to make a go at going to Mars. And I always say that I know who the most famous human being is going to be, and that person is not born yet, but I know who it is. And the answer is the first human being not born on Earth but instead born on the surface of another planet, born on Mars. That day is coming, and maybe, because of the efficiency of private capital, it will come in my lifetime. I’m not interested in going to Mars myself, but I would love to live to see that happen.

Third — and maybe most exciting for me because I’ve been in the industry since space was a novelty — is that space, technology, and data derived from space have all become such a standard part of everyday life. It’s truly here to stay. We didn’t know that in the early 1990s. Just think about the changes that have happened over a few decades. GPS was initially used for weapons targeting and military navigation, and my first GPS device was about the size of a hairdryer with a battery life of an hour or less. But today, there’s GPS in everything, and the chips are so small that you don’t even know they’re there. The fact that space technologies have become ubiquitous makes life richer. The team at Phantom Space has a vision for how we can continue to make data and space more accessible in the immediate and far-off future, which is an excellent thing.

At the same time, it’s a double-edged sword. While the pursuit of space leads to technologies that make our lives richer, it’s easy to become overdependent on these technologies, and they can become something that could be denied. Think about how difficult your day becomes when the internet goes down. And so, we have to think differently; how would we get along without GPS if those satellites went down? To someone like me, who has been around a while, the answer is to pull out an atlas or road map, but how many people today know how to read a road map? The point is that we could become so dependent on the benefits of the space industry that nothing works without it. But I’m confident that someone will someday soon solve that engineering problem.

What are the three things that concern you about the space industry? Can you explain? What can be done to address those concerns?

Because the space industry is still in its infancy, there are all these exciting things happening that we’ve already talked about. Still, there are also risks that the industry and our customers have to consider to stay the course to success over time.

First is something I talk about with some frequency, and that’s the high capitalization costs for space missions. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of good ideas for space-based applications, research, and other projects out there that may never be born or that may never leave the surface of Earth and do what they were meant to do, and it’s all because of the cost of going to space. If we could make going to space cost-effective and accessible — precisely what Phantom Space is working towards right now — we could open up a world of possibilities for scientists and entrepreneurs. But until we get there, we’ll never know what’s possible.

Second, it takes a long time to build space systems. The world watched in awe as NASA’s much-anticipated James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched. But what most people don’t know is that development began on the then-named Next Generation Space Telescope in 1996. We waited 25 years for this telescope to launch. Rockets have often had the same problem. As long as the production of most satellites, spacecraft and other space systems is on a timescale of decades or even half-decades, progress will be slow. SpaceX, of course, showed the world that we can speed up this process exponentially, and Phantom Space is working to further speed up the timescale not only for rockets but also for satellites and other spacecraft.

Finally, the role of government in space missions is of concern because space is not meant to be politicized. Space is for exploration, growth, and discovery. When we add too much government into the mix with space research, the priorities and the opportunities become imbalanced. The priorities of government and commercial industries are different. SpaceX has already proven what happens when commercialization enters space; timescales speed up, opportunities are created and become endless, and there is more freedom to grow and expand. We need more of that.

Can you help articulate to our readers a few of the ways that the space industry can improve the lives of the vast majority of us who will be remaining on earth? How can space exploration improve our society?

The space industry has enormous potential every day to positively impact people’s lives on Earth, and it does, often without us knowing. The space industry isn’t just about spacecraft that zoom off into the deepest reaches of space or rockets that carry people to the International Space Station, the Moon, and someday, other planets. Space is a relatively robust and prosperous industry. If you’re reading this from your mobile phone while lying on your Tempur-pedic mattress, you’re enjoying two advancements born in the space industry, specifically NASA. Later, when you get into your vehicle, you might use satellite technology for GPS navigation, run the radio without advertising, and connect to help in a crash. And these are just three of the hundreds of examples of how the space industry positively impacts life on Earth every day.

As the space industry continues to expand and evolve, Phantom Space and our peers will continue to launch new capabilities, like Phantom Cloud, and the possibilities for new applications will become endless. Connected and autonomous cars are an improving reality today that we only dreamed of two decades ago. Imagine a future where a connected agricultural system communicates with satellites about weather patterns and decides when to water a field or when to start an autonomous tractor. Or the possibility that a connected emergency services system could see a wildfire breaking out in a rural field and immediately notify first responders. These are the types of future applications waiting to be created and launched. That innovation and potential are why Phantom Space is working so hard to remove barriers to accessing space.

My expertise is in product security, so I’m particularly passionate about this question. Recently there were famous cases of hackers breaking into the software running automobiles, for ransomware or for other malicious purposes. Based on your experience, what should space companies do to uncover vulnerabilities in the development process to safeguard their vehicles and aircraft?

People don’t realize it, but cybersecurity is the 900-pound gorilla in the room for the space business. We can’t talk about this in detail because it’s a matter of national security, but this is a genuine concern, and it’s here now. What we can do is talk about prevention. And really, the same lessons apply today as applied thirty years ago. Military satellites have, for decades, included sophisticated encryption — for example, command authentication encryption — to prevent data from being exploited, and that’s still important today, not only for military applications but also for commercial space applications. Proper management and control of satellites, ground stations, and uplinks are also critical for cybersecurity.

The truth is that not all satellites or space application companies currently deploy encryption and data management in a meaningful way. And that is problematic as these applications become more deeply connected to and interwoven into the fabric and backbone of global communications. The best thing we can all do is return to the lessons we learned 30 years ago with both ground and satellite communications and reapply those lessons with vigor. More importantly, there’s a massive opportunity in this industry for cybersecurity as a service, and I believe it will be one of the more prominent industries within the space business within the next 20 years.

What are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career In The Space Industry?

1. Find something that you are passionate about. For me, a lifelong passion for cars led me to win a contest for building a NASA rover, which has since become a lifelong career in the space industry. If I hadn’t loved vehicles so much, who knows if I would have applied to help develop that rover design. If my passion had been something else, I might have walked right past the very opportunity that helped set my course for the future.
2. Find something that you are good at. I was always exceptional at understanding how to design, develop, build, and test solutions, so I became a mechanical engineer. It just so happens that those types of skills are essential in building and launching spacecraft and rovers for space missions. But it’s important to understand that there are thousands of jobs in the space industry, and most of them don’t require these skills. That means you can work in the space industry and not have a degree or background in engineering.
3. Find something that there is a need for. Like every industry, the key to success in the space industry is to solve problems that haven’t already been solved or to find better ways to solve problems that we already know about. We already know how to get to space — in a rocket — so we don’t really need to know how to get to space. But we need to get there faster, more reliably, and at a lower cost. That’s the problem Phantom Space is working to solve right now. You have to ask a lot of questions and pay attention. See where the pain points are and think about what scientists, researchers, and space industry professionals need. Then, give it to us.
4. Get in and build stuff that meets the three criteria. The biggest and best success stories come from combining your skills, passion, and industry needs. I’m an exceptional mechanical engineer who is passionate about building vehicles and space. I know that our way of getting to space needs to be more efficient and affordable. Those three things together are how I hooked up with Elon Musk as a consulting founder for SpaceX many years ago, and it’s the driving force behind my involvement as the CEO of Phantom Space today.
5. Don’t worry about the money. The money happens if you have the three ingredients. Because we’re a capitalist society — and make no mistake, I am a capitalist — we’re all trained to go after the money, grow our fortunes, and give up pursuits that don’t result in making money. But often, really too often, ventures don’t make money because they don’t check one of those first three boxes. Either there’s no real need or not a great enough need, the developer lacks the skills to make a reliable product, or the passion isn’t there. Don’t get me wrong; it still requires determination and time to raise capital, build prototypes, and reach your business goals, but applying passion, skills, and expertise to real industry needs will create a path for success to flow to you.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

If I could inspire a movement, I would work to bring about a liberty movement that encourages and rewards people for taking individual responsibility for themselves and their actions. Moreover, it would promote open-minded thinking about the world’s problems and elevates individual liberty and independence as its highest values. Capitalism has some of these virtues, and I am an ardent capitalist. Yet, there is more to success than the basics of capitalism. My movement would speak to the spirit and state of mind that gives rise to the best of capitalism. And it would celebrate those who create value and good for all of humankind.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

The best way to go on this new journey with Phantom Space is to follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. There’s something new and big constantly happening right now, so our story is rapidly evolving, and we’re going to capture it all via social media.

Thank you so much for the time you spent doing this interview. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success.

About The Interviewer: David Leichner is a veteran of the Israeli high-tech industry with significant experience in the areas of cyber and security, enterprise software and communications. At Cybellum, a leading provider of Product Security Lifecycle Management, David is responsible for creating and executing the marketing strategy and managing the global marketing team that forms the foundation for Cybellum’s product and market penetration. Prior to Cybellum, David was CMO at SQream and VP Sales and Marketing at endpoint protection vendor, Cynet. David is the Chairman of the Friends of Israel and Member of the Board of Trustees of the Jerusalem Technology College. He holds a BA in Information Systems Management and an MBA in International Business from the City University of New York.