Ashi Dissanayake, CEO and Co-Founder of Spaceium, shares insights from building an in-space refueling company without business backgrounds or massive infrastructure. As engineers, Dissanayake and her co-founder faced a persistent challenge in propulsion systems: getting enough power and efficiency to carry meaningful payloads. Conversations with other space companies revealed a universal constraint—missions were limited by fuel, and orbital refueling infrastructure simply did not exist. The team began building for that need, even when refueling was not yet an industry priority.
Lesson 1: Move Fast and Fail Faster
In a frontier like in-space refueling, there is no roadmap. The speed of learning matters most. Failing 10 times in a month creates 10 opportunities to iterate. In sectors where much has not been done before, accelerated learning cycles become the competitive advantage.
Lesson 2: Scrappiness Beats Scale
Advances in off-the-shelf components, shorter mission architectures, and affordable testing capabilities enable progress on lean budgets. Satellites designed to last month’s rather than 15 years dramatically reduce capital intensity, changing who can participate in the space economy.
Lesson 3: Listen to Customers (Even When Investors Aren’t)
Early investors repeatedly said no one would buy fuel in space. Yet potential customers told the team the opposite—one requested 10 metric tons. Spaceium learned to trust the market over initial investor skepticism. After many rejections, they closed an oversubscribed seed round with customers already lined up. Hours spent understanding customer pain points and decision criteria shaped their entire infrastructure.
Lesson 4: Push Through the Doubt
When 100 emails went unanswered, even one “maybe” kept the founders moving forward. Orienting around customer need simplified everything—the team stopped chasing hype and built what people wanted to buy.
Lesson 5: Be Part Of Positive Change
There is a thriving ecosystem of startups tackling real-world challenges closer to Earth. The number of satellites being launched is growing rapidly. Most of those satellites exist to serve Earth-based values such as climate data, wildfire detection, connectivity—creates downstream demand for launches, servicing, and refueling. Most New Space companies are trying to help each other. That is the only way the ecosystem grows.
Lesson 6: Keep Going
Dissanayake’s advice to early-stage founders: talk to customers more than you think necessary. Deeply understanding the problem and who you are solving it for makes everything else—funding, hiring, scaling—more manageable. Stay scrappy, move fast, and iterate relentlessly.
Image Credit: Spaceium – Orbital Refueling Station
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