Jim Cantrell at Vector in 2017, shown in front of
one of his side businesses, fixing and refurbishing race
cars and rare luxury sports cars (located then at Vector).

The tales of rocket startups are often fraught with ups and downs of all kinds, often traveling in circles that no one can ever predict. This is one such tale.

In the mid-2010s there was a rocket startup called Vector, based here in Tucson, founded by a guy named Jim Cantrell. At that time Cantrell pushed the company in the style of Elon Musk, going very public for publicity and to raise investment capital.

He was remarkable successful at both. Unfortunately, his engineers were not as successful at engine building. After years of effort they all realized that their rocket engines were under-powered, and wouldn’t be able to get the rocket into orbit. In 2019 the company’s biggest investor backed out, Cantrell left the company, and new owners took over, hoping to rebuild.

Flash forward to 2021, and Jim Cantrell has reappeared with a new rocket company, Phantom Space, also based in Tucson, raising $5 million in seed capital. In the next four years he obtained a small development contract from NASA, completed another investment round raising around $37 million, and began development of a new orbital rocket, dubbed Daytona. The company also began work on its own small satellite constellation, PhantomCloud (more on this later).

As for Vector, there was little to report during those four years. The only update said the company was buying engines from the rocket engine startup Ursa Major, the same company Phantom was using.

It is now the end of 2025, and the fate of these two companies has once again intertwined, in a most ironic manner. Last week I learned from Jim Cantrell that Vector had closed shop, and that its last remaining assets, some of which Cantrell himself had helped develop when he headed Vector, had been bought by Phantom. This includes several unused rocket stages, the vertical rocket test stands, and a lot of computers, and hardware.

Cantrell himself drove out to California, packed up the stuff, and shipped it back to Tucson. The picture to the right shows one truck with an unused Vector rocket stage sticking out the back.

Meanwhile, Phantom seems quite alive, though as with all startups things are taking far longer than planned. It is not going to launch Daytona in 2023, as first predicted by Cantrell to me in 2022. Nor will they do it in 2026, as Cantrell later predicted in 2024. Now the company hopes to do its first static fire tests in ’26 (using engines built by Ursa Major and Vast’s Launcher engine subsidiary), with a launch targeting the second quarter of 2027. No one should be surprised if the company doesn’t meet these dates either.

The company however appears sound. After raising $37 million in 2024, it is now planning a second round of fund-raising in ’26, aiming to raise $60 million. Both of its launchpads at Cape Canaveral in Florida and Vandenberg in California are under development. At Cape Canaveral that launch site is the landing pad SpaceX presently uses for Falcon 9 landings, and Phantom is negotiating a lease with SpaceX to let it continue to do landings there, as long as they do not conflict with Phantom launches.

And the company is taking a page from SpaceX and developing its own satellite constellation to launch on its own rockets. Unlike Starlink, however, PhantomCloud is not for internet communications, but will be a large constellation of smallsats acting as orbital data centers (ODCs) for cloud computing.

Now, I expect the mention of ODCs will cause the eyes of many of my knowledgeable readers to roll in skepticism. In the past six months practically every satellite, space station, orbital capsule, and rocket company (including Musk) has been raving about this idea: It’s the new hot thing! Put your cloud data centers in orbit rather than on Earth! We can do it for you!

Most of these promises and claims are hogwash, and should be treated with great skepticism. Many are being pushed by people who know little about space, and thus don’t know the complexities of building a satellite. We can be sure most will never get off the ground, or will fail if they do. At this point we don’t even know for sure if the demand for such things really reflects a true market, or a bubble of false enthusiasm.

Jim Cantrell at Phantom in 2022.

What makes Phantom’s constellation different is threefold. First, Cantrell isn’t jumping on the bandwagon here. The bandwagon is trying to catch up with him. He first mentioned this idea to me in 2017, while giving me a tour of Vector. In the interim he obtained patents for the idea, in a manner that will require a lot of the new proposals by others to come to him to get licensing rights.

Second, many of the new ODC proposals involve large satellites. Cantrell’s proposal is aimed at putting up many smallsats distributed in low Earth orbit. SpaceX hopes to do the same thing using Starlink as its base, but I wonder if it might also be need to work out some license issues with Phantom first.

Third, Cantrell is not coming to this project as a novice. He has spent years working on spacecraft, including some planetary probes.

Phantom has been developing this concept now for several years, putting it well ahead of the herd. It is building two demo satellites for launch late in 2026, setting the stage for constellation deployment thereafter. If Daytona develops even close to schedule, the company will be well positioned to not only build its satellites, but eventually launch them. SpaceX has already proved the synergy of that arrangement.

Most importantly, it is also well positioned to put its ODC constellation before anyone else.

All this remains the stuff of dreams, however, except that those dreams do involve real satellites and rockets being built. The dreams will only become reality when they finally get launched. And I have been following Jim Cantrell’s story now for almost a decade, and he still hasn’t launched anything. While we all wish him well, we also must remember that this is rocket science. It ain’t easy, and there are never any guarantees.

Only the future knows what will happen.

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Full disclosure: Jim Cantrell has long been one of the biggest supporters of my work here at Behind the Black. He has also never tried to tell me what to write. If he had I would have returned his donations.