How 4
Students Got a
Satellite Startup Off the
Ground and
0 Million From Google
Nearly seven years before Google agreed to buy his company Skybox for
0 Million in cash, Dan Berkenstock had his eyes on a more modest goal: winning a $20
Million prize in a
Google competition.
In late 2007,
Google an**unced the
Lunar X Prize, which promised $20
Million or more to the first privately funded teams that could land a rover on the moon, take some high-resolution pictures and videos and transmit them back to earth. The lofty goal of the competition was to
reignite the space race for a new generation of engineers and entrepreneurs
Berkenstock, then three years into a PhD engineering program at Stanford, worked to assemble a group of
Students and investors to beat out the competition. "They spent about a year on it getting everything lined up," Juan Alonso, an associate professor of aeronautics at Stanford who became his academic advisor for a time, recalled to
Mashable. "Dan always had a very entrepreneurial spirit to him. I remember him being very entrepreneurial, well put together and **t afraid to take risks."
Read more...
More about
Google,
Startups,
Satellite Imagery, and
Business