Although details are sketchy right now,
Wozniak's venture could have something to do with sustainability and space
debris.
All will be revealed at the 2021 AMOS Tech
Conference in Maui, Hawaii that starts Tuesday.
Privateer Space has emerged from the dark and
released a short video on YouTube (barely) explaining what the company aims to
do.
The video description names former iMac
engineer and Ripcord CEO, Alex Fielding, as Privateer Space's co-founder.
It says the company "is working to keep
space safe and accessible to all humankind." One must read between the
lines to understand what that means.
This isn't the first time that Wozniak and
Fielding have collaborated to run a company. Back in 2001, the duo co-founded
Wheels of Zeus (WoZ), a start-up that created GPS location tags that could be
attached to commonly misplaced objects. The company was sold to Zontrak in
2006.
For now, Privateer Space's website doesn't
list contact information and the contact form isn't processing requests.
There's no dearth of ambiguous visionary
statements in Privateer Space's teaser. "Together we'll go far," the
video promises.
The video envisions earthlings as a collective
entity saying, "This isn't a race, it isn't a competition or a game. We
are not one person, one company, one nation. We are one planet."
The race reference is possibly a nod to the
Cold War-era space race.
The company prefers to describe itself as
"unlike the others" in the private space world. The mentions of
climate change, weather calamities, and air pollution indicate that Wozniak's
venture could take an environmentally conscious approach to space (don't they
all say they do?).
Additionally, the space junk problem shows no
signs of abating and the company could have an innovative solution in the
works.
Meanwhile, researchers are contemplating using
lasers to fragment debris and let it burn up in Earth's atmosphere, although
that's an expensive proposition.
SpaceX's partially reusable launch vehicles
appear to be a step in the right direction considering that even flecks of
paint in space can crack spaceship windows.
We'll get to know more at the AMOS Tech
Conference beginning on September 14 in Maui.