Alex Maleki lives in the future. At the very least, he sees the future long before you or I will experience it.
Maleki is the managing director at Mandala Space Ventures, a Pasadena venture capital company focusing on the space industry. Essentially, they are pitched products, applications and projects that will help further space exploration.
That in itself could be an almost infinite number of ideas. And Maleki sees them first.
As Maleki—who will speak at Innovate Pasadena’s Friday Morning Coffee Meetup—explained in a recent interview, Mandala is one company with a few different missions and iterations.
“The first,” he said, “is a company that starts companies from scratch based on our own research and development efforts.”
“So,” he explained, “We’re looking for companies that are going to be formed that are focused on the new space economy and that ultimately will help humanity down here on earth.”
The company also “onboards” early-stage companies onto the Mandala platform and gives them access to Mandala expertise, a roster of technical consultants and acts as “co-founders” to these teams to help them get to series A and beyond.
Mandala also has an affiliated venture fund called Explorer 1, a traditional venture fund making investments in the new space economy.
Private space exploration, whether with rockets or satellites, has taken off in the last decade, and Maleki, of course, can explain why.
“First of all,” he said, “There is the reduced cost of access to space. It used to cost many millions of dollars to launch things in space and that is, of some magnitude lower.”
Makecki also pointed out that we are seeing “tons” of small satellite cubesats and other small constellations of satellites going into lower orbit and elsewhere, as well as another ton of data that these constellations and satellites are creating.
“With the ability to parse that data and understand it, you’re seeing more and more innovation in space,” Malecki said. “All of these activities together are creating an ecosystem where you’re going to see more new technologies, technologies that were just developed for space that are now being used here on Earth. So it’s a really exciting time to be involved.”
What specifically are we seeing in terms of space innovations? Lots, said Malecki.
“We’re seeing tons of new propulsion devices,” he began. “We’ve seen through Starlink and OneWeb broadband, the Internet being carried to the remote regions of the world through satellite installation. We’re seeing remote sensing.”
“So how do you take stock of what’s happening here on Earth from the vantage point of space, and then make informed actions upon the fact that things like GPS are getting the next generation of technologies associated with them?,” he pondered.
Answering his own query, he said, “We’ve got interesting radar, interesting LiDAR (a detection system which works on the principle of radar, but uses light from a laser ) capabilities. So, there’s tons of really exciting technologies up there.”
And like so many of the world’s greatest space technologies and research venues, Mandala works with a number of companies here in Pasadena.
“Ultimately, Pasadena can become a space corridor for the region,” he posited. “We have 6,500 people at JPL. We have one of the foremost research institutions at Caltech. And so Mandala is really trying to help foster this ecosystem of space activity because we have all the ingredients right here in Pasadena.”
And that bodes well for the future of space exploration, said Malecki.
“I think we’re going to see a record number of launches into space that are going to be carrying all sorts of interesting devices, testing equipment, and new satellites,” he ventured. “There’s going to be interesting new data that’s being created that will inform not only what’s happening in space, but how we can better take care of our planet here on Earth.”
Forecasting further out, Malecki said, “I think the next five or 10 years are really going to change the understanding of what it means to innovate in space because ultimately everything we do in space helps us down here on Earth”.
Friday Morning Coffee Meetup is a weekly speaker series that highlights local innovators and provides an inside look on innovation happening in the city. More information is available here.
