I work at ispace, we are mentioned in the article. We have 150+ people, 3 offices (Japan, USA and Luxembourg) and a handful of projects. It's commercial but the

I work at ispace, we are mentioned in the article. We have 150+ people, 3 offices (Japan, USA and Luxembourg) and a handful of projects. It's commercial but the larger contracts in the industry are still from space agencies. And it was always like that. NASA doesn't make a lot in house but always contracts companies. There's just a willingness to let new companies try now. That's the "commercial" part and aside from telecom, it may be a while until we see fully commercial missions. Because of this the field is better now, because NASA and to some extent other space agencies are actually offering contracts to several low-cost missions, with the expectation that some fail and some succeed, with lower cost overall to a typical project with a ton of paperwork. The extent to which they actually reduce paperwork in practice varies. The overhead of GLXP was probably pretty huge even when they reduced the number of teams, plus reputation risk of google being associated with people running around telling investors they were "selected by google to fly to the moon." I haven't written this up anywhere, maybe someday.