21 March 2023
Alumni
Meeting with Pierre Damien Vaujour
Can you tell us about your career as an entrepreneur?
My name is Pierre Damien Vaujour and I’m a graduate of ISAE-SUPAERO (class of 2008). I’ve always been interested in space, which is why I did my training at this institute. I first worked in European and American space agencies (ESA and NASA). When I was at NASA, I had a lot of friends who were in Silicon Valley start-ups, which made me want to join a start-up like everyone else.
At the time, in 2010, there weren’t many start-ups in the space sector, but since 2012 a lot of them have been created, a bit like the new movement known as ‘NewSpace’. I then joined a start-up called SPIRE where there were 6 people, it was quite small. I joined before their Series A funding and stayed for 3 years. In those 3 years, we grew from 6 to 120 employees. We were producing low-cost, high-performance CubeSats.
4 years ago, I decided to create Loft Orbital, with the aim of reusing standard satellites in manufacturing lines. For the first time in history, there were companies making satellites on assembly lines. Instead of making them one by one, they were being made by the hundreds!
The idea was to say to ourselves: couldn’t we take a satellite off the manufacturing line without modifying it and develop all the interface technologies that would allow us to do plug and play? To achieve this, we need to be able to create an interface that allows us to keep the satellite without modifying it and then plug and play the instruments. So internally, we have developed embedded software technologies to communicate with our own hardware.
The idea is to give customers a clear online interface, where they can control their instrument directly without having to know anything about space. To enable people who know absolutely nothing about space to deploy and use instruments in space.
What advice would you give to a young entrepreneur?
You have to make sure that you’re doing it for a good reason and that it’s worthwhile: starting out on an ambitious project. Sometimes it’s more complicated to do something small than to do something big. The advantage of an ambitious project is that we need capital to make it work. It’s easier to raise capital, to have people following you on big projects, rather than on something a bit small where people think “why should I invest if it’s so small? I’m going to take a risk but there won’t necessarily be a return”.
My message would be: Go for it! Don’t be afraid of failure. If you’re young and you’re starting out, you’re bound to fail, but that doesn’t matter, you’ll keep trying until you succeed.