Interviewee
Yoav Landsman, Founder and CEO of Moonscape, the new startup focused on providing information from the lunar service. He graduated from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, with a B.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering in 2002. And started his company in 2020.
Transcript
Yoav Landsman: So my name is Yoav Landsman. I worked for many years in the space industry. I started, actually most of my career was in Israel. I worked for 20 years, a bit more than 20 years in the space industry. I'm an aerospace engineer. I started working in the Israeli aerospace industry, which is a main contractor for most, if not all of the space things that are built and designed in Israel and also operated and, and even launched.
So, I worked on systems engineering and operations of communication satellites, and after 11 years I decided to quit. I feel that I'm a bit bored . It's more of the same with every project, even though I just started a brand new, big satellite project, but I decided to do other things during my work there. I studied planetary sciences for my master's degree and I wanted to start a PhD in, in this field in physics.
But so, so I quitted and in the meantime I gave lectures and I talked a lot about space and got interviewed a lot because this is something, something that I like to do, and I get the feeling that people really want to know more. I was out of the company for less than a year before another company came to me and proposed a job. That company was Space hill, it's actually a nonprofit. And they started a lunar mission, a mission to the moon, to land on a moon. It's part of the Google lunar xprize competition back in 2013.
So I joined as a senior systems engineer, and later I was the deputy mission director of that mission, which launched at the beginning of 2019. And then I decided that what I'm going to do is to start my own enterprise, my own company as an entrepreneur. This was something a bit new to me, but I found partners and a lot of help with them, my friends from, from the ICU. And I started working on that project. At first it was supposed to be a new lender for the moon because I had, I still have a lot of ideas how to make it more reliable and more affordable, but at some point I decided that this is not the right direction for me. There's a lot of companies that are already working on such vehicles and I'm going to arrive too late for that. And because I start with actually nothing I, I can't have the IP of, of my previous missions, of course.
And also I realized that funding of such a project is extremely difficult because you measure success by successful landing on the surface. Your payloads will be other missions that will need to get to the moon safe for start and, and to lend safely on the moon. I can say from my firsthand experience, that is, it's very difficult. So I decided to pivot into something a bit different, which will be hopefully easier to fund. And that is a constellation of satellites around the Moon to provide data from the moon back to earth, especially observation, but not necessarily just observation. I call it remote sensing in general and to provide that data for stakeholders here on earth, whether they are.
Elisa Muñoz: So you mentioned how hard it was to get investors at the beginning when you first had your first idea.
Yoav Landsman: It is still difficult. It still is difficult.
And also I realized that funding of such a project is extremely difficult because you measure success by successful landing on the surface. There’s a lot of work to be done.
Elisa Muñoz: Exactly. So do you have any learnings that you can share with us about talking with investors?
Yoav Landsman: Well, I'll start with the lesson that I first got from it is that the location of, or of the startup is very, very important. You need to, to start where people are, people can understand what you're talking about. And at that time, I decided not to start that in Israel, but to move to, to Europe and eventually to Luxembourg because I, I found out that the, the ecosystem in Israel, even though it's very, very, it's very good for startups in general, but a space startup is not like other startups. You can't compare it to a mobile app startup, for example. You will not have an MVP UN until you launch. And you can't really, basically, I would ask my investors to be much more patient and start with much higher risk, like giving me more money basically. So, it's something different. You need different people, you need different understandings and, and here in Luxembourg, I really, I, I feel that I don't need to, to explain it. People already understand. They are very focused on, on lunar resources, on the moon.
They already understand several of the problems that I'm talking about. I don't need to convince them that these problems are real. So it's a good start. Unfortunately, I'm not funded yet. So it's, it's a walk in process. And in the meantime I'm also consulting to other companies that work on different types of lunar programs. So there's a lot of, a lot of activity here and, and in the world in general in that, in that field. So yeah, there's a lot to be done.
Elisa Muñoz: During the foundation phase, who do you think your clients might be? I don't know, maybe mining companies or the government?
Yoav Landsman: Both. I think it's easy to point at the government because they already have projects for the moon, but now there are more than 200 missions planned for the moon right now for this decade.
So with that amount of missions, even if just some of them will need such services, it would be worthwhile for me. In fact, observation is, if you can call it an infrastructure that needs to be established and it's like other infrastructure that we, we understand as well, like transportation for example. We need transportation in order to get to places and do stuff in general, even on earth. So there's a lot of talking right now about transportation to the moon because we, we kind of achieved transportation to, to space in general, right? It's, it's easy, sort of saying it's, it's easy to get space right now. It wasn't that it wasn't the same at all 10 years ago or 15 years ago. Now we have a lot of opportunities and a lot of services to provide that. And there will be more in the future to the moon is a different story. Currently you don't have anyone that's going to the moon. If you need to get your mission to the moon, you need to launch it into earth orbit and use your own fuel to get to the moon.
Elisa Muñoz: And that leads me to my last question. What would you say are the next steps for Moonscape?
Yoav Landsman: Well, to get funded, people ask me usually what are the main challenges because there's a lot of challenges, how to, to communicate with the earth in such distances and how to do that with the bandwidth that you need. If you want to deliver video files for example. It's, it's, it's a real challenge and there are many others, but the main challenge is funding because if we have unlimited funding, of course we can, we can send a large spacecraft that can do everything on the same vehicle, obviously it's impossible. So, we need to find the sweet spot between all the requirements and, and figure out how to do that in an effective way.
Elisa Muñoz: So thank you so much Yoav for being here, and for taking the time for an interview.
Yoav Landsman: I appreciate that. Thank you very much.
