Voyager Space
Assembly Line
How to Build a Space Station
Nanoracks has grown from facilitating science research on the International Space Station to building a commercial space station of its own.
Our business strategy has been to understand what people want to do and find solutions to the bottlenecks that are keeping them from doing it. Customers want to do experiments; they don’t want to master NASA paperwork or learn to build a payload. They want the data from their Cubesat; they don’t want to figure out the details of deploying it.
We were one of the pioneers in having a commercial-services offering for space experiments—what’s called an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract—that made it simpler for federal agencies to use our services. We got good enough at doing the bureaucratic paperwork and the safety processes that groups at NASA used (and continue to use) our services to conduct experiments and other activities on the space station. NASA found we could get stuff through their system faster than NASA could itself.