Amazon started out as strictly an on-line book retailer that was purely a user of Internet services. It has since become one of the half-dozen largest retailers of pretty much everything and also has a subsidiary that owns a substantial fraction of the Internet’s total computing infrastructure. When Bezos builds his Kuiper network of LEO comsats, Amazon will own a significant chunk of the Internet’s total backbone hardware infrastructure and bandwidth as well. Then there’s the nascent Amazon delivery drone “air force” which will incrementally disintermediate conventional logistics companies as well as national postal services. Bezos may be a rival of Elon Musk’s, but the two men seem to see very much eye-to-eye anent the virtues of vertical integration as a business strategy.

A somewhat similar though differently approached but certainly more verbose perspective on it is the first (freely available) chapter of “Birth of Plenty.” An economic history view. I read it once a year to feel good. It’s for a long, rainy night.

http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/404/CH1.HTM

While we’re talking about India’s launch business, here’s my story (rare opportunity). I was taking care of launch issues for one of the GLXP teams and in 2015 I tried to talk to Antrix, ISRO’s commercial outlet. Their website was an outdated and broken mess, my emails couldn’t produce a reaction, and it was real work to get their phone number. Timezone differences and all that, I called them in the middle of my night during their office hours, which were like 8-10am India time. One day I succeeded. Connection quality was terrible. Couldn’t understand each other. After five minutes he hang up on me and I never reached anybody again. Other countries were more approachable, so business didn’t go to India. Today I could book a slot on a PSLV with one of the rideshare companies, so at least that’s possible.

This is an area that Silicon Valley focuses on, where the space business is concerned. Rather than just having hardware in orbit, some companies offer the service of mining information out of the data that comes from other companies’s satellites.

Half a decade or so ago, I went to a panel presentation that included the founder of Moon Express. He compared the space industry to the internet. With the internet, there are some companies that own the hardware that moves the information, but there are many more companies that use the internet hardware in order to perform their own service. Amazon.com is one example, in which they have some local computer hardware that interacts with the internet, but their business model is similar to a catalog mail order business.

NanoRacks started this way, with only the hardware needed to hold its customers’s experiments to orbit and aboard the ISS. NanoRacks provided the service of interacting with the NASA bureaucracy for small companies and universities that did not speak NASA-ese or would clash with the NASA culture.

Another approach in the US is incubators, where start up companies get help.

Luxembourg is serious about helping companies get started in space, there. They offer financial assistance, even to companies based outside of the country but do some business there.

NASA also forms partnerships with companies, which seem to provide more than just knowledge. I’m not sure what a partnership consists of, but I suspect that part of the “price” to the company is that knowledge also flows to NASA to become additional public domain knowledge.

I think this may be a difference of cultures, where India’s culture — especially its 20th century dabble into socialism — makes the government an entity that is more controlling of its people and industry than in the United States. Late in the previous century, India made a move toward free markets, hopefully with an emphasis on ‘freedom.’

Perhaps ISRO sees that as a feature.