Meet Brian Barnett, CEO and founder of Santa Fe's Solstar Space

May 6—Brian Barnett, CEO and founder of Solstar Space Co., remembers the time when his company's Space Communicator flew on a Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin rocket, New Shepard, in April 2018.

The payload from Solstar, said Barnett, became the first commercial Wi-Fi inside of a spacecraft, and through the service helped send the first commercial tweet from space.

For his company, founded in 2017 and a spinoff from other companies Barnett created in previous years, the payload proved to be a monumental success.

It was also fitting for Barnett, 62, to reach such an achievement in space with his company. In past years, he's started companies focused on satellite communications, was an employee of NASA and, as a kid, dreamed of being an astronaut.

And that payload has also paid off, helping the company get more than a half-dozen contracts both in the public and private sectors.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Question: I want to start off by chatting a bit about you. Where did you get your start? And what have you done since?

Answer: I started my career at NASA. I wanted to be an astronaut, but also I studied business and science in college and I always liked the combination between those two, and so I wanted to get into this area that was beginning to be talked about, which was commercial space, or space business. So, in other words, getting more private activity involved with space exploration. That's really what I set out to do in terms of my education and my work experience.

I wanted to work at NASA first so I could get hardware experience — you know, get experience building payloads and flying them into space. At NASA, I worked on space shuttle middeck experiments. ...

I worked in astronaut training, and so I would work with the astronauts to get them prepared on the ground for the space flights. And I worked in mission operations, while I was training to be a crew interface coordinator, which is the scientist or engineer on the ground that's talking with the astronauts while they're in space. And there was a laboratory called Space Lab, which was like a precursor to the space station, which is basically a laboratory that the astronauts performed experiments in.

I got [a Master of Business Administration] and so I joined KPMG Consulting, and they had a commercial space practice headquartered in D.C. I joined them because we were focused on this idea [of] commercial space and space business. And our customers were NASA and any company that was starting to put up satellites and wanted to put up satellites.

But we also did spaceport business plans, so I left NASA and decided to move to New Mexico in late 1993. I was still with KPMG and I moved to manage a contract we had with Sandia labs, and I also got involved with spaceport planning for the spaceport that became Spaceport America.

I supported Gov. [Gary] Johnson when he was elected to provide advice in terms of supporting a spaceport ... and so we recommended that yes, he should support a spaceport because it's a great place to have a spaceport because of the weather and the fact that we have White Sands Missile Range nearby so that you have cleared airspace to launch through. ...

I then started Satwest in 1999 and I left KPMG because a huge number of commercial satellites were being launched at that time, both communications and remote sensing, and I thought it would be a good time to start a company. And then I spun out Solstar Energy Devices, which developed portable solar chargers to charge up satellite phones because if you need a satellite phone, that means you're in the middle of nowhere, perhaps, without communications or electricity. ...

And then I wanted to get back into the space industry. I mean, like directly from the satellite industry back into supporting NASA or spaceflight. So in about 2009, we started wondering if we could use these commercial satellites that we're using on Earth and then on aircraft, if perhaps we could use those same satellites to communicate on spacecraft.

And so, we won a contract with NASA to investigate this idea. We had our first spaceflight in 2013 to test this idea and we actually flew our payload out of Spaceport America. We had our payload onboard — our satellite communications payload — and the way we demonstrated that is we sent text messages to our device on the rocket above Spaceport America. We worked with physics students at the Bosque School in Albuquerque to do this. They were in their lab at the school and we had a script — they sent text messages to the device after it was launched, and it worked.

We sent the first text messages to a spacecraft ever. We had two more flights with our contract with NASA; we flew twice on a spacecraft owned by Jeff Bezos called Blue Origin and that's where we demonstrated the first commercial Wi-Fi inside of a spacecraft.

Question: I want to make clear that in 2013 when you flew this payload with NASA that it was with your company Satwest and in 2018 with Blue Origin was with Solstar Space.

Answer: Correct. I spun out Solstar Space [from] Solstar Energy Devices. That was just that second company that I had spun out. It's somewhat confusing but we own the Solstar trademark, so then I thought it would be a great name for a space company, too, so then we got the trademark for Solstar Space.

Question: Let's talk about the Lunar Gateway Space Station. What was or is your company's role in that space station's development?

Answer: We won a contract with Northrop Grumman years ago and they're building the main habitation module for the Lunar Gateway Space Station, which is part of the Artemis program from NASA to take us back to the moon permanently. So the lunar gateway will be in orbit around the moon and is the stopping-off point for the astronauts before they go down to the lunar surface. They need Wi-Fi inside of the space station, as well as outside the space station. So we started designing a Wi-Fi access point that can survive in space, basically. So we're still working on that product. ...

Just like me and you — we need Wi-Fi. Same on the moon. ... So the vehicle bringing the astronauts down needs Wi-Fi, the astronaut suits need Wi-Fi. The rovers that are driving around the moon need Wi-Fi. This is not just for people — the Wi-Fi is, in large part, for [Internet of Things] purposes — you have to make everything Wi-Fi enabled. The suits have to be able to connect to the Wi-Fi and the experiments [and] instruments have to be Wi-Fi enabled.

Question: I know outside of your role as a leader of this company that you also play the drums.

Answer: I started playing the drums when I was 8 years old. ...

I was classically trained and so I started studying early and then I played in marching bands, and also started sort of getting into rock bands when I was really young and then kept it up, played the drums in college at the University of Oklahoma, and the marching band there. I kept up my drums and then when I moved here actually I was in a reggae band called No Question — we played in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

Question: Are you still playing in any bands now?

Answer: I'm forming a band called Drums Astro. ...

Last year I had my first performance at a space conference — I gave a lecture about playing the drums in space without gravity in a space station for instance.

And it's pretty interesting because it's kind of becoming a thing — space arts. And so I'm collaborating with some other musicians around the world and hope to start performing as Drums Astro at space conferences around the world. The genre would be like electronic music and trip hop — it's what some people call it.

Question: What keeps you motivated as a CEO?

Answer: I was born with just this incredible amount of drive. And there's nothing that will stop me from pushing forward.

And so you just have to — when you're doing this, you go through so many failures and rejection[s]. I probably tried, I don't know, 50 different things when I started the company to try to figure out something that was going to be able to get into the market. ...

Short-term is good. But also, you know, another thing that I learned along the way is I was taught that you have to become an expert at rejection. You just take the rejection and then you just learn from it, and try not to take it hard and then just keep on trying something else.