Technology

Mikhail Kokorich, the founder of Momentus, a new Y Combinator-backed propulsion technology developer for space flight, hadn&t always dreamed of going to the moon.

A physicist who graduated from Russiatop-ranked Novosibirsk University, Kokorich was a serial entrepreneur in who grew up in Siberia and made his name and his first fortunes in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The heart of Momentus& technology is a new propulsion system that uses water as a propellant instead of chemicals.

Image courtesy Momentus

Using water has several benefits, Kokorich says. One, ita fuel source thatabundant in outer space, and itultimately better and more efficient fuel for flight beyond low earth orbit. &If you move something with a chemical booster stage to the moon. Chemical propulsion is good when you need to have a very high thrust,& according to Kokorich. Once a ship gets beyond gravitypull, water simply works better, he says.

Some companies are trying to guide micro-satellites with technologies like Phase 4 which use ionized gases like Xenon, but according to Kokorich those are more expensive and slower. &When ionized propulsion is used for geostationary satellites to orbit, it takes months,& says Kokorich, using water can half the time.

&We can carry ten tons to geostationary orbit and itmuch faster,& says Kokorich.

The company has already signed an agreement with ECM Space, a European launch services provider, which will provide the initial trip for the companyfirst test of its propulsion system on a micro-satellite — slated for early 2019.

That first product, &Zeal,& has specific impulses of 150 to 180 seconds and power up to 30 watts.

Kokorich started his first business, Dauria, in the mid-90s amid the collapse of the Soviet Union, selling explosives and engineering services to mining companies in Siberia. Kokorich sold that business and went into retail, eventually building a network of stores that sold home goods and housewares across Russia.

That raked in more millions for Kokorich, who then said he diversified into electronics by buying RussiaBestBuy chain out bankruptcy. But space was never far from his mind, and, eventually he returned to it.

&In 2011 I hit my middle-aged crisis,& Korkorich says. &So I founded the first private Russian aerospace company.&

That company, Dauria Aerospace, was initially feted by the government, garnering the entrepreneur a place in Skolkovo, and its inaugural cohort of space companies. In an announcement of the successes the space program had achieved in 2014 Kokorich co-authored a piece with the Russian cosmonaut Sergey Zhukov, who remains the executive director of the networking and aerospace programs at the multi-billion-dollarboondogglestartup incubator.

Utilis detects water leaks underground using satellite imagery.

A few months later Kokorich would be in the U.S. working to back the first of whatnow a triumvirate of startups focused on space.

&With all the problems with Russia in the Western world, I moved to the U.S.,& says Kokorich. Dauria had quickly raised $30 million for its work, but as this Moscow Times article notes, stiff competition from U.S. firms and the sanctions leveled against Russia in the wake of its invasion and annexation of Crimeawere taking their toll on the entrepreneurbusiness. &It was a purely political immigration,& Korkorich says. &I don&t have purely business opportunities, because you have to work with the government [and] because the government would not like me.&

For all of his protestations, Kokorich has maintained several economic ties with partners in Russia. Itthrough an investment firm called Oden Holdings Ltd. that Kokorich took an investment stake in the Canadian company Helios Wire, which was one of his first forays into space entrepreneurship outside of Russia. That company makes cryptographically secured applications for the transmission and reception of data from internet-enabled devices.

The second space company that the co-founder has built since moving to the U.S. is the satellite company Astra Digital, which processes data from satellites to make that information more accessible.

Now, with Momentus, Kokorich is turning to the problem of propulsion. &When transportation costs decrease, many business models emerge& Kokorich says. And Kokorich sees Momentus& propulsion technology driving down the costs of traveling further into space — opening up opportunities for new businesses like asteroid mining and lunar transit.

The Momentus team is already thinking well beyond the initial launch. The companyeyes are on a prize well beyond geostationary orbit.

Indeed, with water as a power source, the company says it will lay the groundwork for future cislunar and interplanetary rides. The company envisions a future where it will power water prospecting and delivery throughout the solar system, solar power stations, in-space manufacturing and space tourism.

When Shonda Rhimes left ABC last August for Netflix, both she and the studio kept a tight lid on their plans. We could only imagine where the twists and turns that her future stories would take us. Well, now we know.

This week, Rhimesproduction company Shondalandand Netflix announced seven projects that she will make for the streaming platform with her production partner Betsy Beers who also made the move to Netflix. The projects tell stories of women of color, talented kids, important and routinely overlooked American history, fancy English relationships and pre-2017 White House doings.

Ellen Paomemoir Reset, published last fall, details her life and career, which includes the gender discrimination lawsuit she brought against her former employer Kleiner Perkins in 2015. Even though she lost the suit, Pao felt the battle was worth it, saying at the time:&If I&ve helped to level the playing field for women and minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it.&She continues to work for inclusion in tech as founder and CEO of Project Include, an organization dedicated to making careers in tech accessible to everyone.

Julia Quinnbest-selling Bridgerton series of novels will jump off the page and onto our screens, because we all need to be flies on the proverbial walls of &the wealthy, sexual, painful, funny and sometimes lonely lives in Londonhigh society marriage mart.& Mmhmm. Scandal writer Chris Van Dusen will be responsible for the adaptation.

&The Warmth of Other Suns,& published in 2010 by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson, tells the story of the African-American migration out of the South between 1916-1970. According to her website, Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,200 people and uncovered archival works over 15 years in order to bring these stories to light. Actor, solo performer, playwright and professor Anna Deavere Smith is signed on to adapt the piece for a viewing audience.

And for some more history, &Pico - Sepulveda& is set in the 1840s when California wasn&t quite California yet. According to Netflix, it will track &the end of an idyllic ear there as American forces threaten brutality and war at the border to claim the breathtaking land for its own.&

&The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House& is a non-fiction tale told by Kate Andersen Brower that details the relationship between White House staffers and First Families in an upstairs/downstairs kind of way. The book was published in the spring of 2016 so, well, you know.

Debbie AllenHot Chocolate Nutcracker, an award-winning reimagining of the Tchaikovsky ballet, will get the documentary treatment by Shondaland and Netflix, behind-the-scenes style.

&Sunshine Scouts& will be a half-hour dark comedy that follows a group of teenage girls who survived an apocalyptic-level disaster while they were at sleep-away camp.

These seven projects join the previously announced adaptation of a New York Magazine article about how Anna Delvey duped people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by posing as a German heiress. Rhimes is set to write this one.

If you want to hear Rhimes talk about her move to Netflix, you&re in luck, because she was the first guest of TechCrunch Mixtape (formerly CTRL+T), my podcast with senior reporter Megan Rose Dickey. Check it out below.

Eventbrite, the 12-year-old, San Francisco-based event-planning company, has filed confidentially for an IPO and plans to go public later this year, according to a new report in the WSJ. The companylead underwriters are Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase - Co., it says.

The offering must seem a long time in coming for Eventbrite founders Julia Hartz; her husband, Kevin Hartz; and the companytechnical cofounder and CTO, Renaud Visage.

Originally created for individuals wanting to host smaller events and private parties, but who faced few few options aside creating Excel spreadsheets — remember, the ticketing world formerly revolved around stadiums and major sporting events — Eventbrite has grown steadily over the years into a corporate giant. It now powers ticketing for millions of events in more than 180 countries, and it has rung up more than $10 billion in cumulative tickets sales since its founding.

According to Forbes, in 2017, Eventbrite processed more than three million tickets per week to events, including conferences and festivals.

Part of the companygrowth has come through acquisitions. Last year, for example, Eventbrite acquired Ticketfly, a ticketing company that focused largely on the live entertainment industry and which had sold to the streaming music company Pandora in 2015 for a reported $335 million but Eventbrite was able to nab last year at the discounted price of$200 million.

Eventbrite has also made a broader international push in recent years, acquiring Ticketea, one of Spainleading ticketing providers, back in April, and acquiring Amsterdam-based Ticketscript back in January of last year. And those deals followed roughly half a dozen others.

Indeed, the company — which has raised roughly $330 over the years, including from Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management, and DAG Ventures — has long been expected to go public, thanks in large part to its momentum, as well as its fairly turnkey and (we&d guess) lucrative business model.

Though we won&t see its numbers until closer to its IPO apparently, Eventbrite makes money off every transaction.For event organizers charging for ticket sales, Eventbritefees vary by package, but one of its most popular packages collects 1 percent of the ticket price and $0.99 per paid ticket, plus another 3 percent for payment processing per transaction. It also sells a &professional package& wherein it collects 2.5 percent of the ticket price and $1.99 per paid ticket, plus a 3 percent payment processing fee per transaction. Last but not least, Eventbrite sells&premium package& with customized pricing.

Eventbrite is led by Julia Hartz, who took over the position of CEO in 2016, roughly six months after husband Kevin stepped down from his chief executive duties owing to a &non-life-threatening medical condition.& Until that point, Julia Hartz had primarily been tasked with overseeing marketing, customer support, sales, and human resources.

Both cofounders appeared earlier this month at theAllen - Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, an event that attracts many of the wealthiest and most powerful people in U.S. media, technology, and sports, and whose attendees are often on the cusp of taking their companies public — if they haven&t already.

When Eventbrite does complete its IPO, Hartz will join a tiny but growing list of female founders to steer their companies onto the public markets. Last October, when the mail-ordering clothing service Stitch Fix went public, its founder and CEO, Katrina Lake, became the first woman to take an internet company public in all of 2017.